Yes, College Is Overrated! But So Is . . .

McNewspaper today asks the nonmusical question, Is College Overrated? The answer comes from an honest high school teacher, one Patrick Welsh, whose answer is yes.

Welsh notes the obvious, which rightly ought to be noted. Many students who go to college these days are ill prepared, having failed to attain the skills needed for higher learning in high school. And many of the jobs that college students will one day hold require preparation different from what they'll receive in college, including technical training in such things as plumbing, electricity, HVAC, and the like.

Working in the middle of this noncontroversy, SWNID affirms these self-evident truths. The push to provide wider access to higher education is utterly laudable but rife with pitfalls. Yes, students from families that have never attended college deserve the opportunity to do so. Yes, nearly everyone can potentially benefit from higher education. But those students who aren't prepared or motivated for college ought not be induced to attempt it prematurely. The twenty-first century career path has many forks, allowing anyone--from late adolescent to senior adult--to get new education for any worthwhile purpose. Letting people in on that secret and then letting them decide how to act on it is surely a better plan than indoctrinating adolescents with the college-or-failure false choice.

But we'll also push back on a response to observations like Welsh's. SWNID is personally tired of the hackneyed refrain that college doesn't prepare people for the ominous Real World. We hear this from a loud minority of folks in the Christian religious sphere, who complain that their own or someone else's ministerial education was bad training for actual ministry. And we think it's bunk.

Here's why. College education means listening, reading, writing, problem solving, thinking, evaluating, planning. Those are the very things that folks do in responsible, real-life occupations.

The stuff folks read, think about and write about in college are real-life situations, whether in the present (social and behavioral sciences), the past (history), imagined but realistic worlds (fiction). the natural world (sciences), or what can be generalized about all of them (philosophy, theology). Oddly enough, the only major academic discipline that we can name that doesn't connect to the Real World directly is mathematics, and who is complaining that math's very important indirect connection to the real world is irrelevant?

Significantly enough, our own little academic discipline, biblical studies, tidily combines just about all the kinds of thinking noted above, making it truly the queen of the sciences and the Ultimate Study of the Real World. Argue with that proposition at your peril, gentle readers!

So since when is learning about and practicing thinking about real life a bad preparation for real life? Yes, some courses taught by some profs are disconnected, but those are failures and largely, we insist, the exceptions. We can say that because over time people who consume the educational product stop choosing disconnected stuff, which in turn becomes extinct. Darwin was right about that.

But, says the naysayer, everything important that I (the standard by which all things are judged) learned was stuff that I learned outside of college. We challenge that on a couple of fronts. One is "everything." That's an exaggeration of the kind that one who paid attention in college would know not to make. The other is whether the naysayer would have been as able to learn outside of college if the naysayer had not learned at least a little bit in college. Granted that learning the lessons of higher ed isn't confined to higher ed, we ask whether anyone who wants to learn those lessons will be better off for having done it my way exclusively.

So, we gently ask that folks who reflect on the higher-ed landscape kindly limit their use of the following tropes:

• IHEs are run by people who don't know the real world. Yes, many academics live in the ivory tower. But take a close look and you'll note that the rule of the game is survival of the fittest, and fitness means saying something that lots of people care about over time. A few in higher ed get rewarded for being obtuse; most who get rewarded did something real to get their rewards.
• IHEs are mired in theory, not practice. Yes, practice is not well learned in the classroom. But practice is not well learned apart from theory. The best IHEs force a blend, and the trends are all toward extramural experiences--service learning, internships, co-ops, field research--that deliberately engage the actual stuff in practice.
• IHEs are mired in the past. Yes, if you're recalling what you studied when you were in college versus what you're experiencing now. But check your IHE: we bet they've moved on as well. Good IHEs don't go in much for fads: that's the manifestation of their critical-thinking mandate. But they do go in for research, which keeps taking them to new places. For every prof who paddles around in shallow trends, there are several curmudgeons who stay in the timelessly deep end of the pool, which remains perpetually current.
  
• IHEs are too expensive for what they produce. Now, we think you might have an argument there. Just be careful in how it's applied. It's not the producers who have demanded ever more comfortable learning environments, living arrangements, and recreational opportunities. It's not the producers who have demanded access at all places and times imaginable. It's not the producers who have demanded services for every imaginable deficiency that students bring with them. And it's not the producers who have subsidized the arrangements with grants and loans that have driven up demand so that prices inevitably go up (see "economics, behavioral science of"). They've simply cooperated for their own self-interest. The key in this case is for the student to be thoughtful about what she actually needs--admittedly a hard task when the student needs the education to develop the critical and reflective skills necessary to answer that question well.
• The most successful people didn't get college degrees. See Gates, William, et al. Sure, that works fine if you're a genius. For the less exceptional, we have colleges.
  

Higher ed is rather like Mark Twain's father: underappreciated at one stage of life, granted grudging appreciation later. It's about as overrated as the storied School of Hard Knocks. Compare, reflect and learn, class.

Inside the Acute Mind of Mitch

Nerdy Mitch Daniels increasingly looks like a major player on the national political stage. His interview at the self-consciously nerdy Five Books shows why.

On a national political stage where politicians of all stripes seem to be taking their lines one by one from a (tele)prompter, Daniels articulates a coherent political philosophy. Better still, he demonstrates how the philosophy gets translated into action, as in reducing the number of state employees in Indiana to the same level as in 1979.

For those who wonder and lack the initiative to click on the link, Daniels's five books include Hayek and Friedman, the wizards who devised the elixir that will restore vigor to our moribund Republic.

We urge Daniels to ditch his comb-over for a cool crewcut and get visible for 2012. In the SWNIDish view, any combination of Daniels, Chris Christie and Paul Ryan has the potential to bring another blessed Morning in America.

Ignorant Politics of Envy on a Rampage

Attention to the chattering classes these days leads to one and only one conclusion: the left is speaking with one voice to raise taxes and government spending even more than they have been raised already.

We are hearing once again in wholesale quantities about income inequality, i.e. the alleged problem that the incomes of the wealthiest have been growing faster than the incomes of the less wealthy. The proffered solution to such is, of course, to tax the wealthiest and spend the receipts to benefit the less wealthy, thereby addressing the inequity and all its injuriousness.

Noisiest in this direction is, predictably, The Nation, whose unapologetic socialism always invites such assertions. Their publication on the brink of insolvency itself, the reddish editors presently offer a symposium on the subject of redressing income inequality with higher taxes. That is, it's a symposium with but one point of view.

These days, however, such stuff isn't passing muster with many of its natural adherents. WaPo's Ruth Marcus, whose liberal credentials are utterly intact, today loudly objects to such cries for soaking the rich. Her notion is true: that tax receipts from rich folk, even if rates are raised to the stratosphere, won't touch the present fiscal crisis of profligate spending. The arithmetic is simple enough.

But Marcus doesn't depart from her lefty moorings, because she misses the real points. These are three, largely related to each other:

• It is a matter of indifference to the welfare of the less well off if the more well off are doing lots better, if at the same time the lot of the less well off is also improving. Marcus notes that the prosperity of our Republic's lower earners has improved in the last few decades at roughly the same rate it did in the "golden era" of the 1940s through 1960s. What's different is that more recently, the income of the tippy-tops has exploded. How Bill Gates or George Soros' billions are a drag on the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of the plumber or school teacher is unfathomable, unless we indulge the human penchant for envy.
• The wealth of the wealthy doesn't sit idle in their bank accounts. It becomes the capital that finances new enterprises and fuels existing ones, the stuff by which ideas become realities, creating jobs and wealth. For the middle and bottom to do better, money has to be invested. That's what happens to the money made by the top earners, whether they invest directly, consume, or simply bank the dough. Taxing Richie Rich doesn't put his money in the hands of the Lumpenproletariat better than leaving him alone. Taxes simply put the decisions in the hands of politicians rather than industrialists, bankers and others whose eye is on productivity instead of the next election. If you want the middle and bottom to do well, then, it's best to let the top keep more of its money, not less.
  
• Time and again, tax revenues increase when marginal tax rates drop. When folks with dough are freed from concentrating on avoiding taxes, they invest in ways that earn them more money, which even at lower tax rates yields bigger tax revenues.

In sum, taxing the rich to solve our fiscal crisis is utterly counter-productive in every way. It doesn't benefit the less well off. In fact, it makes it more likely that they'll stay less well off, as taxes stifle economic growth. And it makes it more likely that their government will be less solvent than it is presently, a most sobering prospect.

Note well that all this is merely the details of the second SWNIDish aphorism: Socialism impoverishes.

Note also that when thoughtful pundits decry "static" estimates of the effects of tax increases or tax cuts, they decry the way such estimates ignore the effects of taxes on economic behavior, as we've been noting them. Yelling that the Bush tax cuts "cost" the gummit eleventy trillions normally involves just such antimathematical reasoning, which should've died around the time of Newton.

So what explains the outcry of the left to raise taxes on the rich? It could be ignorance of macroeconomics. But these days, such ignorance must be willful. If you claim to care about the poor and fail to learn the most fundamental notions of the economics that explain poverty, your failure is culpable.

We think this nonsense has to do with what really motivates some on the left. It's not the welfare of the less well off. It's resentment against the prosperity that leftists see as morally and intellectually inferior to themselves. They'd rather have a world that punishes the rich than one that lifts the poor.

Note well that simply reducing tax rates is not the solution to all the ills of poverty. Deliberately pursuing ways to enhance the productivity of the bottom 20% of earners is laudable goal over the long term. That's why SWNID affirms informed efforts to break the so-called cycle of poverty, and "informed" means with a understanding of the issues unclouded by ideological a prioris and a grim grasp of the limitations of all such efforts.

But if you want to keep the poor unproductive and so make them poorer, tax the rich. Which is exactly what the self-styled advocates of the poor are insisting we do.

First Ever: SWNID Agrees with Sherrod Brown Vote

SWNID finds Senator Sherrod Brown (D-SEIU) among the most vapid and cynical of his vapid and cynical political tribe.

We therefore note with some surprise that he is casting a vote for which we heartily agree: Joey Votto for National League All-Star.

We do, however, wonder why Sen. Brown finds it necessary to appear personally at Great American Ball Park to do so. Surely as a politician he knows that absentee votes and multiple votes are more potent than in-person votes, the very thing that MLB's online-voting provision enables. Does the cynical Senator believe the local electorate so shallow as to support him for his spectacle of support for the highly deserving Reds' first baseman?

Still, what can one expect from a man who orders his suits rumpled at the dry cleaner?

It's So Hard to Get Good Domestic Help These Days

George Washington University, often our Republic's most expensive, in the upcoming academic year is dropping maid service for first-year* students. New students will now have to vacuum their own rooms and clean their own private bathrooms, if such things matter to them.

GW insists that the move isn't economic. Rather, it's based on the conclusion that their housekeeping staff can't fulfill their duties if this duty is included. Still, GW pledges to hold the line on housing costs for the coming academic year to reflect the loss of service.

With all the economic and social insight of an undergraduate, one student is quoted with the complaint that a place charging $54k a year ought to be able to provide a decent housekeeper. We'd love to compare this student's political and social idealism as expressed in the student's application essays to this highly enlightened, sensitive comment.

All this causes us to celebrate the enormous diversity of American higher ed. We have IHEs that do basic housekeeping for the dear children. We have IHEs that require students to work every day on a ranch. We have IHEs that charge several arms and legs. We have IHEs that charge a mere bag of shells. We have IHEs that overtly indoctrinate in one or the other of every imaginable ideological direction, and IHEs that purport to remain objective.

Hail the American Educational Experiment! George Washington himself would be proud.

Excuse us--Jeeves, please warm up the Bentley and bring it around. We'll be leaving for the club in twenty minutes.

______________
*For those with better things to do than follow trends in higher ed, we note that "first-year" has replaced the gender-specific "freshmen" as the preferred moniker for the unwashed hordes who arrive on our nation's campuses as new students at the end of each summer.

Prothero on Religions, Or When the Interviewer Doesn't Listen

Huffington Post religion writer Nicole Neroulias offers a pretty good interview with Stephen Prothero, Boston University professor and author of the significant book, God Is Not One, which aims to expose the public to the huge differences among world religions.

We commend the article for emphasizing what those of us who study one religion know very well: "religion" is not a unitary concept, let alone "god."

Prothero points such things out very, very nicely. Some religions don't have gods. Some have one, some many. They're not all about ethics or even mostly about ethics. Most endorse compassion, but for reasons so varied and with outcomes so varied as to marginalize the significance of the similarity as presently construed. Thus, reducing all religions to a common denominator--as does the stylish, modern discipline of religious studies--is wildly misleading.

We also like Prothero's indictment of the intellectual dishonesty of atheism and his functional description of most atheists as simply rejecting the (usually Christian or Jewish) religion of their parents. Spot on.

Note as well Ms. Neroulias's ridiculous prologue to her interview, which offers only the blandest of categorical denials of Prothero's thesis, offering no evidence to the contrary. Of course, she writes for a left-wing web site, so proving her views has never been important to her professional advancement.

Props to Prothero for offering balance to the discussion. With all the world discussing similarities, someone needs to discuss differences. Long live the difference!

Trivia Quiz: Identify "Ixtoc I"

Give up?

Ixtoc I was an oil rig off the coast of Mexico in the eponymous Gulf Thereof. In 1979-80, it blew and spewed what has been until this point the largest amount of oil ever released into the Gulf in a single event.

And it may still be the biggest ever. No one knows for sure how much goo the BP spill is spilling, but the high-end estimates would only in the next few days put the total above the Ixtoc I spill.

So, why have you and we never heard of Ixtoc I, while we've heard of Exxon Valdiz and Santa Barbara and such? Well, silly, Ixtoc I affected Mexico, so it doesn't matter.

This phenomenon is utterly common and predictable, of course. Influential people, meaning rich people, object to environmental impact that is nearby. They're oblivious to the same when it is far away.

So it's fine to drill in the Middle East but not in the USA. The biggest spill ever was in the Persian Gulf, by the way, where our former friend Saddam deliberately dumped a half billion gallons during the 1991 war.

Closer to home this NIMBY phenomenon works as well. It's fine to drill off the coast of benighted Southern states, but not off the prestigious Atlantic or Pacific coastlines, where the movers and shakers move and shake.

We'll opine that the worst of this is that there's been no public discussion of the effect of these previous spills on the ecosystems of their regions or significant citation of lessons learned from such episodes (see only the forward-looking remark of a Coast Guard Commander cited at the end of the article linked above). There's only hand-wringing and favor-begging and political posing by political poseurs. We'd rather blame and profit than learn and solve.

Why This Race Is Close

Ohio's gubernatorial race is amazingly close, with alternative polls providing alternative views as to which candidate, incumbent Ted Strickland or challenger John Kasich, leads.

On the one hand, this is no surprise, given Ohio's recent political history. On the other hand, it's a big surprise when one considers the national anti-incumbent mood, the unpopularity of every nationally visible Democrat, Strickland's own rapidly-rising disapproval numbers, and the miserable economic conditions in Ohio, all of which should have the colorless and clueless Strickland deep in the 30-percents.

What keeps afloat the man most famous for awkward nodding while Hillary Clinton derided BHO's lack of experience?

We figure two things, one of which may make the difference in November.

The economic and political landscape of Ohio continues to be polluted with the outsized influence of labor unions committed to the kind of economic inefficiency that retards the state's economic prosperity. That these groups are powerful in Ohio and hugely active politically, especially since 2006, is no big secret. Ohio's old manufacturing areas don't know it, but these unions are now playing on their historic loyalty to push for a new unionized economy, focused on government jobs of the kind that now comprise the majority of those held by union-represented workers. Unions are the paymasters of Democrats, especially in Ohio.

We happen to think that the non-union strongholds of Ohio--Columbus, Cincinnati, and rural areas--can offset union bastions like Cleveland, Toledo, Dayton, and Akron-Canton-Massillon, just as they have in the past. Strickland's distinct edge comes from elsewhere.

Two weeks ago the National Rifle Association endorsed Democrat Ted Strickland. Those with an ear to the ground in Ohio weren't surprised: the NRA has been badmouthing John Kasich for years, thanks to his willingness in Congress to vote in favor of certain bills supported by the NRA. Strickland, who rose through the ranks in an utterly rural congressional district, has cultivated a 100% rating from the gun guys.

And Ohio's gun enthusiasts are listening. We are well acquainted with an Ohio family, utterly devoted to Tea Party dogma, but utterly opposed to Kasich precisely because he is "opposed to the Second Amendment." We're not sure how peoople with more firearms in their house than the SWNIDs have tablespoons believes that the right to keep and bear arms is threatened, but we've never credited people for much rationality where their fears are concerned.

So if in two years Ohioans are still watching the governor insist that higher taxes are the best way to ensure the state's economic growth, you'll know who to thank.

I Don't Micromanage

No one ever does, by her own description. Yet everyone complains of being micromanaged. How so?

The PA state legislature is giving us yet another example. Included in the fine print of a recent law governing its state university system is a requirement that professors choose as textbooks the least expensive, educationally sound book available.

Right! Thanks for that good advice, Madam Legislator! There's $5 difference between this book and another one, so we're legally obligated to select the cheaper one, as long as it's "educationally sound," whatever standard that implies to whoever is in charge of applying such standards.

Legislators want to do something in response to parents who have written to them demanding that they do something about the ridiculous cost of textbooks. Legislators, by nature pleasers, make a law, by definition what they do.

The result is a dog's breakfast of rules that can't be defined and enforced but will make for more dissatisfaction and probably legal action down the road. No longer a republic of citizens, we prefer to be a bureaucracy of rulemakers, clerks and clients.

We will try to restrain our Schadenfreude that protests now arise from the state university community, commonly so devoted to the idea of better and better regulation of economic choices.

Why Religion Is Not Inherently Delusional

Antitheist celebrity author Richard Dawkins fashions theism a delusion and famously remarked that Antony Flew's adoption of theistic belief must be the consequence of dementia.

Psychologist Matt Rosano offers a nice response, noted in Science and Religion Today, under the title Why Religion Is Not Inherently Delusional.

We like his tidy comparison between religions that exist in community and delusions that are held by individuals.

We Blame Global Warming Redux

The allegation that St. Al Gore is a horn-dog must be judged unsubstantiated at this point.

But it also appears to be unremarkable. No one at this stage is surprised that the tortured Mr. Gore, addicted to public acclaim to medicate his feelings of failure in relation to his late father, might also be addicted to panky of the hanky variety.

Like a vuvuzela, we again sound a single note on stories of this kind:

Because Gore is a Democrat, no one is especially disturbed by stories of sexcapades. If he were a Republican, he'd be in the stocks in the public square, pelted with overripe cabbages.

This is as it should be. Rs at least claim to have standards and so should be held to them. Ds are proud to be unburdened by such.

Left tarnished in such affairs is the Democratic Party's insistence that it is the advocate for the rights and needs of women, though at this stage the only people who can be blamed for the ongoing existence of such a claim are partisan feminists so marginalized in the body politic as to be beneath negligible. Since an unsolicited tongue-kiss is no impediment to a politician's delivering favors to clients, such distasteful behavior is greeted with profound apathy by those inclined to support Andrew Jackson's patronage machine.

Standing Tall for the Faith

Manute Bol died too young.

He died in large part because he contracted a miserable skin disease while doing relief work in his native Sudan.

Previously he had marketed his post-NBA persona in clownish fashion--to finance his relief work.

Previously he had spent his NBA fortune--to finance his relief work.

Minute Bol believed that Jesus of Nazareth s God incarnate who died willingly for the sake of undeserving people. Hence, his own highly counter-instinctive life and death.

Read about it in WSJ's weekly "Houses of Worship" column.

Generals, Presidents, Packs of Dogs, Evil Geniuses

BHO's acceptance of Gen. McChrystal's resignation is, of course, big news, being compared to the classic presidential dressings-down of noisy, wayward generals. We offer a couple of noisy, wayward observations in response.

First, to McChrystal's behavior.

Some folks have compared McChrystal to MacArthur or McClellan.* We think that comparison is rather less than precise. Nothing in the Rolling Stone piece constitutes a criticism of BHO's strategy (which was, after all, McChrystal's strategy), and the worst that was said about his person was that he appeared uncomfortable in conference with generals. McChrystal's infamous predecessors, on the other hand, publicly blamed their Commander-in-Chief for mishandling a war. Big difference there.

We think McChrystal and his staff are better compared to a pack of dogs. Domesticated dogs that are docile and well behaved when alone will do all kinds of mischief if they join up with three or four other dogs and run free. Likewise, thoughtful, polite individuals will often "let their hair down," which is to say they will say almost anything, when in the company of a band of likeminded people whom they expect to share their impolite sentiments and even laugh at the same.

That's what McChrystal and entourage did. And stupidly, they did it in the company of a reporter. From Rolling Stone. That's how powerful this impulse can be.

On the side, the Stone reporter deserves praise for insinuating himself into after-hours bull sessions of senior military personnel. That's an amazing feat. We should put this guy on Bin Laden's trail.

Further on McChrystal, we understand that among his professional associates he was known for a contemptuous attitude toward civilians. Whether this is the case or not, we note a tendency of many professionals to disparage folks outside their profession. Such behavior strikes us as compensation. We have special scorn for members of our profession, the clergy, who act as if their calling is somehow exalted in a way that gives license to cavalier denigration of laypeople. It is unseemly in the extreme for proclaimers of the crucified Christ to puff themselves up by praising the preaching profession profusely while perpetually pillorying parishoners.

On this point, BHO is condemned as well. His blue-ribbon commission to examine the Gulf oil spill, as has been widely reported, includes all kinds of environmental advocates but not one person the least bit conversant with the actual technology of oil drilling. If this does not demonstrate a kind of ideologically reinforced professional tribalism, we don't know what does. Oh, and don't miss the reappearance of the "open minded, as long as . . ." trope, as BHO proclaims he'll listen to suggestions on managing the spill and regulating the industry from any political party, as long as the suggestion deals comprehensively with the problem and assures us that such disasters will never happen again.

On to BHO's response to McChrystal. Already the paranoid congregants of the conservative wing are imagining that BHO appointed David Petraeus to the Afghan command deliberately so that, overburdened with simultaneous Centcom command and saddled with a totally unreasonable pledge of withdrawal in thirteen months, Petraeus will fail, discrediting himself, the military and the war effort and thereby assuring for a generation that our Republic will run its armed forces as John Murtha intended--as a federal jobs program without the threat of mobilization, as in Vietnam's aftermath. Such scenarios are nonsense, demonstrated so by the length of the sentence that describes the notion.

Well, say the alarmed, are you sure that isn't the case? The answer is yes, SWNID by definition is sure. But we offer reasons:

• Right now, BHO needs some level of success in Afghanistan, and he'll continue to need it past November. He knows enough to remember what happened to his hero, Lyndon Johnson, through mishandling of a war.
• BHO deserves credit for making a smart choice in Petraeus, who is probably the last American with the public's confidence.
• Petraeus deserves credit too. He didn't get where he is without learning how to delegate. Centcom and Afghanistan operations will be in his hands at the top, but he'll figure out how to do two jobs with the people who report to him.
• BHO is by no means enough of a genius to be as clever an as the allegation alleges. We urge the more rabid supporters of conservatism not to vacillate wildly between ascribing clueless idiocy and mendacious brilliance to Mr. Obama.

In that regard, we give BHO some credit for learning on the job. It took him the better part of a year to decide what to do in Afghanistan, after having campaigned for two years insisting that the Afghan war had been shamefully neglected. On this matter, he shortened the window of military decision to two days. That's a signal accomplishment, even if he really had no choice at all.

For a substantial thought on McChrystal, Petraeus, Afghanistan and even Obama, we recommend the sublime Max Boot.

________________
*We have yet to see a discussion, in light of this historical sample, of Scottish heritage as an explanation of anger-management issues.

Related, Untold Stories

Fact: While the recession has trimmed payrolls in the private sector, government employment--measured by number employed and wages paid--has remained steady or increased.

Fact: Over the last decades, as private-sector salaries and wages have at best grown slowly, government jobs have paid better and better, so that now government jobs consistently pay more than comparable private-sector jobs.

Fact: These developments are largely the consequence of the stewardship of our Republic's public-sector employee unions, the SEIU, AFSCME, NEA and AFT most prominently.

Fact: Unions representing public employees gave hundreds of millions to elect BHO in 2008.

Fact: Federal anti-recession stimulus funds have been largely directed to maintaining the employment and remuneration of public-sector employees, and BHO wants more of the same.

Fact: Innumerable states and municipalities are going broke paying for lavish pensions granted to retired public employees, many of whom are young enough to take new jobs as public employees while receiving their pensions.

Fact: Polls show that voters are figuring all this out. To wit, Rs lead or are even with Ds in the governor's races of all the big states electing governors this year, with the exception of New York, where Andrew Cuomo (D-Shapeshifting) is running on a platform proclaiming that government, meaning state government bloated with massive costs for its employees and pensioners.

To read more: check out the ever-relevant Michael Barone.

Moral: All the misgivings once offered against the unionization of public employees are now manifesting themselves in actual experience, as is the wisdom of the proverb that one can often have anything one wants but never everything that one wants.

We Blame Global Warming

We've been restrained on the announcement that the Gores are splitting. As the drama unfolds, we now have a tabloid's allegation of adultery and a categorical denial of the same. Whatever.

Now time for the insightful comment. The Gores' behavior as a couple in the 2000 campaign was dreadfully embarrassing. Thought to be proving his machismo and his superiority to Slick Willie, Al, with Tipper's apparent consent, elevated PDA to a campaign tactic more prominent than impatient, condescending sighing during televised debates.

Who was not reminded in those days in high school and college when the somewhat socially awkward guys constantly displayed their animal magnetism with their significant other? Shouts of "get a room" resonated across the Democratic National Convention's floor as Mr. and Mrs. Nominee staged a Big, Wet One. Even the Reagans, never ashamed to publicize their devotion to each other, didn't do the quadralabial click in public.

They call it compensation, and in our view it happens a lot. This was yet another sad instance. It doesn't surprise us at all that a couple "so much in love" has now split up. Love is not boastful, proud, rude or self seeking, or so we heard once.

Politicians of the future, when asking yourselves how to behave in public with your conjugal partner, ask the question that always leads to a wise conclusion: What would Calvin Coolidge do?

Obama's Oblong Oval Office Oration

We didn't watch the Presidential Address last night. Did you?

We have caught some excerpts.

We wonder what powers our Republic's President has to order a corporation to create an escrow account administered by a third party. We wonder also what powers our Republic's President has to assign liability for a presidential action--ordering a moratorium on offshore drilling--to a private corporation.

We understood the President to be deeply concerned about due process for terrorist suspects. We suppose we should be heartened that corporations--which by current dogma are not people and so have no rights--are bereft of due-process consideration. An act of war can be criminally prosecuted. A negligence tort is a casus belli. It's so wonderful to have a constitutional law professor in charge of the world.

If someone wanted to write a speech that would subtly reinforce the notion that BHO is at once grandiose in his self-evaluation and clueless about actual issues, we think this speech was probably unsurpassable.

Even Chris "Tingle Up My Leg" Matthews thought this was a stinker. Comparisons to Carter are now taking hold.

Or banana-republic strongmen: see the irrepressible Ben Stein's exceptionally restrained essay offering such.

Gaza Convoy: Israel Must Be Perfect

Here's a video, clearly produced with a bias toward Israel but nevertheless offering as vivid a summary as one can imagine as to why Israeli commandos used lethal force after boarding the ships of the so-called Gaza relief convoy.



If even some of this is correct, it reinforces something we've thought for awhile.

Much global reaction to Israel is grounded in old-fashioned antisemitism. Some of it is grounded in fatigue over the intransigence of Middle Eastern conflict. Some is pure contrarianism: the desire to take the side opposite that of one's peers.

But somewhere in the middle of all this is the belief that Israel can somehow preserve its life and limb while at the same time placating its fanatical Islamic opponents if it simply acts with optimal wisdom and discretion. How many pundits after the raid affirmed that Israel ought to monitor shipments into Gaza but carped that the Netanyahu government simply was going too far in doing that?

We think in this respect the Israelis are in large part the victims of their own success. From the Six Day War to the Yom Kippur War to the Entebbe Raid to the airstrike on Saddam's nuclear facility, Israeli intelligence and military forces established an impressive record, much to the relief of the world's democracies who stood on the sidelines while totalitarian regimes did what such regimes do.

Now, to do anything less than picture perfect is for Israel to fail.

We note that Ted Williams struck out 709 times in his major league career.

The Embarrassment-a-Minute Campaign of Rand Paul

So what does the latest mala-Paul-ism say about KY GOP Senate candidate Rand Paul? That he's every bit the quixotic, individualist rebel that we would expect him to be.

For those who rely entirely on SWNID not just to interpret the news but also to report it: Dr. Paul has not been certified by the American Board of Ophthalmology, the nationally recognized certifier of eye doctors which certifies over 95% of the nation's ophthalmologists, in over a decade. In protest of that organization's post-1992 policy to require recertification of doctors joining after 1992 but grandfathering in those who received lifetime certification under the pre-1992 rules, Paul formed his own organization to certify eye specialists. He's the prez, his wife is the vice prez, and his wife's father is the secretary.

Paul says that his opponent's raising this issue is an attack on Paul's ability to earn a living.

There's the report. Here's the interpretation.

We figure that this has nothing to do with Paul's ability as an eye doctor. He had no record of problems with the ABO before he formed a rival organization, and he's OK with the KY medical board, so that much is probably enough to indicate to voters that he's not a quack. If he were a bad doctor, he'd have a record of litigation that would already be thoroughly exploited by his political opponents, for they are many.

What he is, however, is, like his father, impressed with his individuality and principled propriety. He didn't respond to an ABO policy with which he disagreed by staying engaged with the organization to change it. He just left and set up a rival organization, one that probably counts as members about as many people as one could get at a typical Libertarian Party fundraiser. For Paul, it's more important to take what he fancies a strong personal stand than to actually change something that exists.

SWNID lives in a world parallel to Paul's, as far as certification goes. Accreditation for IHEs is akin to certification for docs: voluntary organizations of practitioners band together to establish and enforce standards of mutual accountability. Because such ventures are voluntary and cooperative, not all agree to the standards and practices. Some disagree because they know they could never meet the standards; others, out of what seems to be principled--the suspicion that the organization has become misguided.

So in higher ed there exist IHEs that do not seek accreditation. Many gravitate to nonstandard accrediting agencies (called "nonstandard" because they aren't widely recognized, though by coincidence many have extremely lax standards). These are largely the institutions that don't measure up. Others declare their principled intention not to seek accreditation, to avoid the interference and entanglements that they allege such relationships produce.

As a practitioner of higher education, SWNID eschews such isolationism. Presently we can't name a recognized accreditor whose standards are unreasonable or whose pattern of practice interferes with an institution's pursuit of its mission, though we might someday modify that judgment. To the very limited degree that such conditions do or might exist, we believe it more important to belong to the organization and thereby influence its direction than refuse the association in order to posture as particularly possessing personal purity. That's why we routinely warn students not to pursue degrees from unaccredited institutions while quietly urging those who on historic principle eschew accreditation to reevaluate based on the facts and opportunities.

Paul is almost certainly of the postured-principled type, not the hiding-inadequacy type. The issue isn't that he's incompetent; it's that he's full of himself.

So here's what KY voters can expect of Senator Paul: lots of individual declaiming about things that no one else cares about, lots of votes against measures supported by 90-plus Senators, lots of talk about introducing measures that won't even be considered by committees, let alone get voted on (e.g., gold standard and dissolution of the Fed), not one bit of significant legislation co-sponsored, let alone written and shepherded through the deliberately arduous process once celebrated by Schoolhouse Rock in the Dave Frishberg classic "I'm Just a Bill."

In sum, they'll get a Senator who will exceed Jim Bunning for irrelevance. And, it should be noted, Bunning did agree to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame without protesting the questionable standards of that organization that has honored so few shortstops.

But, as the informercials say, there's more. This episode also reveals that Paul has an exceptionally thin skin, resembling BHO in that inglorious respect. So someone calls attention to the fact that he has irregular certification in his profession, and Paul calls it an attack on his ability to earn a living (something to which he seems to be insecurely devoted, as he has pre-announced his intention to stay busy as a practitioner while representing his state in the Senate). Hyperbole is hardly the most effective way to respond publicly to something that is personal, and this is hardly personal at all. It's as if Paul is assuming that his patients wouldn't know the significance of certification were Evil Democrats not drawing attention to it. Again, it's all about him, in that odd combination of libertarianism and narcissism typified by someone else named Rand.

Yes, we know that Paul is strong on fiscal sanity, a most needed perspective these days. The problem is that his political modus operandi is more likely to marginalize fiscal restraint than to promote it. He and his dad may be good at getting elected, but they're demonstrably terrible at influencing governance. Idiosyncrasy is highly counterproductive in the social drama we call politics. Posers don't change reality because they don't deal in it. But they look marvelous while being irrelevant.

Sure-to-Be-Over-Interpreted Local Event

For several years, one of the most frequent search-engine searches leading to SWNID has been an image search for the ginormous Jesus statue at Greater Cincinnati's Solid Rock Church.

Now that image search will assume historical significance. A portentous lightning strike last night ignited the statue, made to last with materials including styrofoam and fiberglass. Today, nothing remains except the steel skeleton. (Click picture for full view: our HTML skilz do not extend to formatting this graphic properly.)



For gentle readers who are also pyros, here's what seems to be the most graphic video of the event:



We refuse to speculate on the significance of this ominous episode, all such speculation sure to follow paths so well worn as to exceed description as hackneyed.

Instead, we offer a prediction: Darlene Bishop, whose surname roughly describes her role as co-pastor of Solid Rock, will begin raising money for a replacement statue, even more outsided and tasteless than the last, immediately.

ObamaCare's Already-Roosting Chickens Squawk, "We Told You So"

BHO: If you like your present healthcare plan, you'll get to keep it.

IBD:

Internal White House documents reveal that 51% of employers may have to relinquish their current health care coverage by 2013 due to ObamaCare. That numbers soars to 66% for small-business employers.

The documents — product of a joint project of the Labor Department, the Health and Human Services Department and the IRS — examine the effects new regulations would have on existing, or “grandfathered,” employer-based health care plans.

BHO: Projected savings on Medicare will help to pay for ObamaCare.

NYT:

President Obama called Saturday for Congress to avert a planned 21 percent pay cut for doctors who see Medicare patients, saying the move, which would cost taxpayers billions of dollars, is necessary to insure the health of older Americans. . . .

With Medicare costs — and the federal deficit — spiraling out of control, how to fix that formula became one of the most contentious questions of last year’s health debate, but the fix did not get incorporated into the landmark health overhaul that Mr. Obama signed into law. The president acknowledged that putting the question off again by simply restoring doctors’ pay for another year is not the answer.

Put differently: not as advertised, but definitely as predicted.

Latest and Best Step to Reduce Fossil-Fuel Dependency

The impressive Megabus now announces the opening of a new hub in the City of Brotherly Love. The highly nimble, highly successful interstate bus company is obviously succeeding in its goal to get people who would otherwise drive to park their cars and enjoy express bus service on a double-decker with WiFi, movies, music and comfort.

We meanwhile update our previous reviews by stating that we now have significant anecdotal testimony from experienced riders that Megabus is offering excellent, even improving service that delights its customers. We affirm our warm recommendation of this service to any and all who consider it.

And we figure that this thoughtful deployment of existing technology is just what we need to continue the trend toward efficiency in the usage of fossil fuels, those substances the use of which seems so to trouble so many earnest folk. Enjoy your windmills, your solar cells, your plug-in cars, your ethanol subsidies. We'll take the bus.

Update on Deep Water Drilling

The estimable Robert Samuelson has offered the best view of the BP oil spill that we've seen to date. In it he notes:

• Offshore drilling had an impressive record of success and safety prior to this event. This includes so-called deep-water drilling.
  
• The 5000-foot depth of the BP Deepwater Horizon well was deep but hardly the deepest around.
• The well's failure fits well the usual human pattern of complacency bred by success.

We therefore offer that if BHO wants, we'll rewrite his speech to reflect this reality. Deep-water drilling is presently less of a pioneering effort than we had understood (along with a lot of media, we suspect). We think that the consequences are largely the same: not to demand that government, thought to be good, provide "expertise" to overcome corporate evil but instead to assess negligence and liability and then move forward with informed caution tempering soberly realistic calculation of the risks and benefits.

For that reason, we applaud loudly the President's lifting of his moratorium on offshore drilling. We sincerely hope that this means the crisis will "go to waste" for those who want to use it to "transform our oil-based economy."

What We Said: "Progressives" Are Out of Touch

If it weren't for complaining that the political left regularly exercises what appears to be willful ignorance of economic reality, we'd have little to blog about.

In today's WSJ, George Mason University economist Daniel Klein codifies as much. Klein summarizes results of a recent survey to assess the grasp of economics found among different political groups. Asked eight questions reflecting basic economics, self-described adherents to various political ideologies missed the following numbers of questions, on average:

Very conservative, 1.30; Libertarian, 1.38; Conservative, 1.67; Moderate, 3.67; Liberal, 4.69; Progressive/very liberal, 5.26.

N.B. that the questions were given on a five-point Likert scale, and three of five responses were scored correct for each answer. That means that the left did worse than random guessing. It also means that noble, principled Moderates (read: confused and indifferent) are only slightly worse than random guessers.

Go ahead, Lefties: carp about the nature of the questions or the validity of the survey. The rest of us will try to get on with dealing with the grim reality.

Stephen Hawking and the Limits of Genius

There's no doubt that Stephen Hawking is a brilliant physicist. We express SWNIDish doubt that he knows what he's talking about when he moves outside his area of expertise.

Science and Religion Today notes Hawkings's recent remarks to senior mediababe Diane Sawyer on ABC World News (motto: watched in seniors communities throughout America's heartland):

There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.

Ah, lots of nuance in that characterization! We'll note that (a) religion is too broad a category to characterize simply, as it comprises mutually exclusive faith systems; (b) various "religions" have varying degrees of reliance on authority; (c) the religion to which we adhere--and the only one we think worth defending--has a rather multifaceted basis and a complex relationship to bald "authority"; (d) the scientific community has its own embarrassing reliance on authority, reflected in our willingness to listen to a physicist's ideas about religion; (e) both the Christian (there, we said it out loud) and scientific communities self correct through the use of observation and reason over time.

But there's more! Hawking continues:

What could define God [is thinking of God] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God. They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible.

We urge that if from this remark certain words are changed or omitted, the conclusion, "seems most impossible," becomes "seems most intriguing/coherent/awe-inducing." The changes are:

• "made": change to "understood" or "conceptualized"; there's no reason to assert that all "religion" (again, too broad a category) is entirely of human creation, even if one wants to do the same for glorious "science," and with similar discounting of the validity of conclusions.
• "human-like": change to "personal," so as to eliminate all the problematic aspects of humanity and open the possibility that human personhood is a reflection of the divine and not vice versa (in passing we ask Dr. Hawking whether he is fully content that his self-awareness as a person is sufficiently explained as the consequence of natural selection).
• "accidental": change to "distinctly self-aware," stressing the observable outcome and not assuming the nature of origin, which is the very thing being debated.
  

So in the end, a big universe with a tiny speck populated with several billions of self-aware and self-destructive human beings on a diverse but complementary quest for truth, love, justice and beauty is amazingly and remarkably explained on the hypothesis of their purposeful creation by a being with a will who is the embodiment of the object of their quest.

"To the Source": Babies, Like Other Humans, Are Natural Hypocrites

Guess what? Babies, shown simple puppet plays depicting good and evil, gravitate to the good puppets. Toddlers, shown the same plays, often try to punish the bad puppets.

The indispensable ToTheSource reports on research demonstrating this outcome, strongly suggesting an inherent moral sense in our youngsters--and ourselves.

Meanwhile, parents continue to observe that their children are profoundly selfish. The same child who wants to punish the bad puppet also acts like the bad puppet at least some of the time.

That, gentle readers, is the human condition in a nutshell: aspiring to the good but failing miserably to achieve it much of the time. Thus also the Christian Scriptures describe the human experience from the first chapters to the last.

This is why we affirm all who declare the church full of hypocrites. All humans are hypocrites, including especially those who proclaim themselves bad to avoid the charge of hypocrisy for failing to be good, as these hypocritically deny their occasional impulses, sometimes acted upon, for the good. Churches are full of hypocrites because if they're full of anything, they're full of humans.

Apply these truths generously all around.

Another Presidential Address We'll Never Hear

My fellow Americans:

I speak to you tonight about the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. As your President, I want to explain as clearly as I can why this spill happened, why it has proved so difficult to contain, and how this event must shape our future energy policies and approach to government and private enterprise.

First, why did the spill happen? Some have argued that BP and other oil companies are too greedy for profit and so take unconscionable risks with the safety of our environment. Those critics fail to realize the enormous liability that BP will now suffer for the damage it has done to the economy of the Gulf. Anyone who has followed BP's stock price since the spill knows that BP would have done everything it could to prevent an event like this, had BP known exactly how to do that. Oil companies know that they will pay out ruinous damages for events like these. That threat to their profits is the most powerful motivation available to restrain the foolishness that greed can engender.

Some have argued that the well was in water too deep for drilling to be practical. Those people have a point: we have many places we can drill that are much less likely to create an environmental hazard like this. That's why I am issuing an executive order to open drilling on the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts and in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge. Those fields offer much easier, safer drilling with less possibility of environmental impact. Perhaps such drilling will allow us to be more careful about drilling in deep water opposite states that are supportive of the oil industry.

However, the truth is that we have a national interest in deep-water drilling. If we are not to rely entirely on dictatorships for our supply of oil, we need enhanced domestic supply. But how can we drill in deep waters when the risks to the environment are so high?

The answer is that we must learn how to drill more effectively, just as we must learn how to manage oil spills more effectively. In this respect, oil drilling is just like every other human endeavor: we learn by trial and error.

Even now, while oil continues to spill into the Gulf, we know more about how to respond to such spills than we knew before this disaster happened. We are learning from this episode just as we learned better techniques for extinguishing oil well fires after Saddam Hussein left Kuwait's oil fields ablaze in his retreat in the first Gulf War. We are learning just as we did with Exxon Valdiz spill or the iconic Santa Barbara oil spill. We are learning just as we did after the two horrible Space Shuttle disasters, just as we did after Pearl Harbor and Bull Run and Bunker Hill, just as humankind consistently learns by making mistakes.

Some say that we don't need to learn anything from this episode except that oil is bad for us. They insist that we must move as quickly as possible from a fossil-fuel economy to a green-energy economy. But I must warn that green energy is not so green. Oil drilling alters the but a tiny fraction of the earth's surface, while green technologies--solar, wind, biofuels, and the like--will require millions of acres to produce what a few oil wells can offer. We will continue to support research into the development of alternative energy sources and to encourage energy conservation with tax incentives, building codes and the like. But let's be honest: fifty years from now, we will still be relying significantly on fossil fuels.

This is my answer to those who argue that federal regulation failed to prevent this spill because regulation was too lax. But let's remember that government regulators are not omniscient. They only know what the present state of knowledge is, and seldom do they know it better than those who work in the industry or who train its engineers in our universities. For those who complain about the close relationship between industry and regulators, I ask what they offer as an alternative. Only experts in the technology of an industry can regulate it. The only source of experts is the industry itself. Do we want our best and brightest engineers working for Washington or working to get the oil out of the ground effectively? Obviously we need a blend of both, and that's exactly what our "revolving door" between government and industry provides.

But still, these experts are human. They make mistakes--out of ignorance, sometimes out of carelessness, sometimes out of mendacity. We will investigate carefully this disaster's causes carefully, not to scapegoat but first to learn how to avoid such events in the future and second to hold to account those whose negligence, if indeed any were negligent, makes them civilly liable or criminally culpable.

But we won't redress some imagined "out of control" industry with more burdensome federal regulation. We may call government employees "public servants," but they are just as fallible as those in private industry--and just as inclined to the pride and selfishness that lead to bad decisions even about those things that we do understand. Anyone who's filled out a tax form understands what I mean.

So in sum, we will not back down from our goal to increase America's domestic oil production. In fact, we are doubling down on that commitment. Further, we are committed to learning everything that we can from this awful event so that in the future mistakes like this will be less likely and less costly. But we will not let this setback deter us from what is right and sensible for our country's future.

Allow me to make a comparison to another recent event. Wednesday night Detroit Tiger Armando Galarraga pitched a perfect game. That is, it would have been a perfect game had umpire Jim Joyce not blown the call of the final out. Joyce himself has admitted the mistake, and Major League Baseball may yet allow Galarraga's feat to enter the record books.

What do we do with a mistake like Joyce's? Should baseball eliminate umpires? Should all calls be reviewed by instant replay, or just those that affect things that go in the record books? We can debate those questions, but it's clear that Major League Baseball and Jim Joyce both have a tremendous opportunity to learn from this event, a one-of-a-kind event to be sure, but one that can inform many more common events that happen on the field.

That's exactly the way we must view the Gulf oil spill. This is a disaster far worse than a blown call in baseball. But it need not--indeed it cannot--deter us from exploring the seas for oil. When this is over, and it will be over soon, we'll know far more about deep-sea drilling and oil-spill management than we did when we began. And we will be able to move forward with more confidence, not less.

Chris Christie Talks the Talk

As Rand Paul makes conservatives and Republicans look like out-of-touch ideologues, Chris Christie is saying what we've been thinking for a long, long time. Here's an account of an exchange from a public appearance of Christie's:

Governor Christie on Tuesday told a borough teacher to find another job if she did not feel she was compensated enough as he defended his state budget cuts and promoted a plan to cap annual growth in property tax collections. . . .

Borough teacher Rita Wilson, a Kearny resident, argued that if she were paid $3 an hour for the 30 children in her class, she’d be earning $83,000, and she makes nothing near that.

"You’re getting more than that if you include the cost of your benefits," Christie interrupted.

When Wilson, who has a master’s degree, said she was not being compensated for her education and experience, Christie said:

"Well, you know then that you don’t have to do it." Some in the audience applauded.

Christie said he would not have had to impose cuts to education if the teachers union had agreed to his call for a one-year salary freeze and a 1.5 percent increase in employee benefit contributions.

"Your union said that is the greatest assault on public education in the history of the state," Christie said. "That’s why the union has no credibility, stupid statements like that."

Wow! No esoteric appeals to out-of-touch constitutional theories, no messing around with stuff that folks don't get, just to-the-point declarations of obvious fact.

How soon can we run this guy on a national ticket?

Streetcar Named Expire

Cincinnati has demonstrated some sense.

Two thirds of those polled by our local newspaper voice disapproval of plans to spend gazillions for a streetcar that will carry inebriated UC students to a wider variety of bars than they can presently reach on foot.

Cincinnati's public transportation problem is not that it lacks public transportation modes. It's that it lacks the density of population and concentration of jobs to support a robust public transportation network.

And for a city that, like most, can't afford the princely and princessly pensions it promised to its civil servants, spending large numbers of dollars for that most inflexible of public transportation modes hardly seems timely.

The Saving Grace in the War on Terror

Fox News reports that a key al Qaida figure has blown himself up "messing with a bomb." This comes after the various comical failures of plots to destroy airliners, Manhattan tourists and such.

Say what you will about the competency (previous administration) or focus (present administration) of government to fight terrorism, what protects the public best from terrorism is the unshakable truth that terrorists is stupid.

Local Pundit Gets Local Airtime

In the world of local news, being available before the deadline can get you on the air.

More on Paul's Confusion

Esteemed political thinker Rand Paul says that BHO's criticism of British Petroleum sounds "really un-American."

Paul is aligned with a group that calls itself the Tea Party, honoring an event in American history in which Colonial patriots boarded a ship in Boston Harbor and threw its cargo of tea into the water, protesting the French government's imposition of taxes on its American colonies without those colonies citizens being represented in the French Parliament.

Meanwhile, the Americans and the British have always been BFFs.

We promise not make this blog's subject matter all Paul. That would be appalling. But we are hard pressed to resist making obvious jokes when the man supplies a straight line a day.

Why Rs Must Prevail in November 2010

The American Spectator's Jay Homnick, analyzing the awful relationship between the Chief Executive and the Congress and the press, explains why the electoral tide is turning and must complete its turn in November:

The press overplayed its hand. It has thoroughly abdicated its role in questioning government when Democrats are in office. The same press crew that challenged Bush on the economy when there was 4.6% unemployment now reports as wonderful the fact that unemployment when [sic] up from 9.7 to 9.9 in April. This proves more people are optimistic enough about the future to re-enter the job market! Imagine if we hit 11 or 12, we will have to send a ticker-tape parade down Wall Street.

This tells the independent voter there is no longer a contest between Democrat and Republican. There is a contest between charismatic leaders surrounded by naïve sycophants versus practical leaders surrounded by skeptical interrogators. The independent has to vote Republican not because he buys the ideology but merely because he thinks it healthy to have a guy who is challenged rather than venerated.

Those last two sentences constitute today's memory verse for gentle readers, so we repeat them: "There is a contest between charismatic leaders surrounded by naïve sycophants versus practical leaders surrounded by skeptical interrogators. The independent has to vote Republican not because he buys the ideology but merely because he thinks it healthy to have a guy who is challenged rather than venerated. "

As SWNID says often: words to live by.

Paulism Meltdown Sets Political Record

We console our libertarian gentle readers with those most comforting of words: we told you so.

Rand Paul was triumphant in victory on Tuesday. On Thursday, he handed his opponents victory in November.

There are certain things in politics that one simply doesn't do. One is question the legality or applicability of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964. Once upon a time, one could have interesting discussions in public about whether such acts should extend to the regulation of private, commercial transactions. Those discussions are now widely regarded as disturbing--as those who want to hold them are widely regarded as disturbed.

Hey, once upon a time you could have interesting public discussions about slavery and property rights and restitution to slaveowners for emancipation. Try that one on for size sometime soon.

Rand Paul is officially a real-life Borat-from-Bowling-Green. Except no one's laughing. Maybe it's the lack of an interesting accent.

We anticipate the defiant rejoinder: Paul will still win in November. Fair enough. But if he does, Republicans are nationally stuck with the label "racist" for at least another generation, condemning them to a demographic disadvantage that will paralyze political discourse and condemn the Republic to social-democratic stagnation.

The GOP lost yesterday, and they'll need to work extra hard and fast and smart to limit the damage to one Senate election. We say it's time to defenestrate Paul, risk alienating Paulites for a season, let the Ds have the tainted KY seat, and go national with redoubled efforts to retool as a Contract-for-America-style smaller-government, freer-enterprise party pronto. Starting with a purge of the old-hand leadership for some insurgents (there are loads of keen minds in the party's second string--Ryan, Cantor, Daniels, Christie, Thune--all with curb appeal that shames the McConnells and Boehners of this world who can't think their way through the present opportunities) certainly commends itself. An announcement Monday after a round of condemnations of Paulism on the Sunday talk shows would be most excellent.

We quote the eminent social philosopher Forrest Gump, or his momma, to be precise: "Stupid is as stupid does."

Taking Bill Maher to Church

Faith is not the enemy of thought. The lazy and unethical way many of us have been taught to practice religion is.

That's from the Kansas City Star's Jason Whitlock, who offers this worthwhile bromide near the end of his verbal dismembering of political ranter Bill Maher, always a purveyor of opinion but now mostly a purveyor of doctrinaire antireligious opinion.

Whitlock, a liberal and fan of Maher's, nicely notes that labeling all religious belief delusional is more delusional than most religious belief.

Note well Whitlock's litany of moral accomplishments of religious people. Then note that in theswe stories of accomplishment the religion in question is almost universally the one with an incarnate god who willingly dies and rises for the sake of undeserving people.

That's the other thing that needs to be said to Mr. Maher and others. The burning question is not the place of "religion" in the world. It's really the place of Christianity in the world. Bad versions of Christianity bear a more-than-superficial resemblance to various religious and irreligious phenomena, all of them bad too. Christianity that's properly Christian bears little resemblance to anything else--in what makes it properly Christian.

The Nation: Socialism Another Casualty of the Recession

Q: What's black and white and red all over? A: The Nation.

Now here's proof that the Great Recession is an extreme right-wing plot to destroy the left and so take over the world for fascism. The Politico reports that venerable lefty rag The Nation is in desperate financial straits, even enlisting journalists to send fundraising letters for help in offsetting its million-dollar deficit.

Our last experience with The Nation in print was while riding the CTA's 22 bus north on Clark Street through the city's tonier residential districts to our cheap, obscure hotel in a more modest quarter. There we watched a well-turned out, genteel, elderly lady turn its pulp pages--laden with graphics strongly reminiscent of so-called "socialist realism" but notably unburdened with advertising, save appeals from the ACLU and The Nation itself for charitable gifts, including especially estate gifts. We recall thinking that the fine lady's gloves certainly cost more than several years' subscription to her reading material, while her hat and coat would certainly exceed the value of certain autos in the SWNIDish fleet.

Doubtless the subscriber whom we saw decamp from the bus near a Lincoln Park high-rise condo building could fund the journal's seven-figure deficit without much trouble. Whether relying on the charity of the top 1% indefinitely is a feasible business plan for an avowedly socialist publication is still questionable.

What These Off-Elections Mean

Fact: many elections presently are resulting in upsets.

Interpretation: Some call it an "anti-incumbent" mood. Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics calls it an "anti-establishment" mood. And the problem for Democrats is that currently the establishment is theirs.

We think that's about right as a measure of what's up. It's not incumbents per se that rile people; it's business as usual. This hypothesis has the virtue of specificity and demonstrates enormous explanatory power, accounting for more electoral results than mere anti-incumbency.

We long for the day when the mood will be "anti-stupidity," but that isn't coming to a Republic near us any time soon.

In the meantime, we hope that those who run with a pledge to do things differently will do them differently in a reasonably smart way. That means leaving alone what works. That means relying on historical and empirical observation at least as much as ideology. That also means doing things that matter, not just things that look good. That also means not staking out politically impossible goals to which they can cling for decades as they are re-elected by quixotic, naive, isolated constituencies (yes, we are referencing the perversity of Paulism again, with its paleolithic rants about balanced-budget amendments and the gold standard and isolationism).

Two Kinds of Political Liars

Republican Congressman Mark Souder resigned after admitting an extramarital affair. As we have observed before, Rs who cheat have to resign. Those who don't end up as pathetic lame-duck laughingstocks (see Sanford, Mark).

Meanwhile, Democrat Richard Blumenthal has been habitually "misstating" his military record, clearly implying service in Vietnam though he was only a stateside reservist. He remains a candidate and shows no signs of dropping out. This, of course, makes him something like the unnatural love child of John Kerry and John Edwards.

We say yet again: all politicians are dogs, yet one party's dogs are rather more dependable than the other's. With all its failings, the GOP at least likes to pretend it has standards. Since there are only two viable choices, and since political choices are always between evils, we choose the Party of the Lesser Evil.

The Question of the Evening

Q: Because Arlen Specter is now a lame duck, cut loose from any loyalty to his party, whose standard he will not bear again, or any responsibility to his constituents, who will never see his name again on a ballot, how will he behave in the Senate?

A: As he has always done, without any loyalty to his party (either one of them) or any responsibility to his constituents.

KY GOP: Epic Fail

On the 150th anniversary of the Republican Party's nomination of Abraham Lincoln as its candidate for President of our Union, the Republican voters of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, one of the slave states that the cagey Lincoln managed to keep in the Union throughout the Civil War, are poised to nominate as their candidate for the Senate the son of arguably the most politically marginalized member of the House of Representatives and the self-rechristened namesake of arguably the worst novelist and political theorist of the previous century.

Rand Paul's nomination probably gives the Dems their only shot at gaining a seat in the Senate this year, assuring Harry Reid's successor marginally more support for his party's program of bleeding the electorate with taxes, spending, borrowing and inflation until every citizen has become a client.

So a generation from now we can expect a nutjob named for L. Ron Hubbard to be appointed Prefect of the Appalachian Protectorate.

Our recommendation to the GOP after today's big primaries: remove Mitch McConnell as minority leader in the Senate and John Boehner from the corresponding position in the House, replacing them with John Thune and Eric Cantor or Paul Ryan respectively. If the Establishment guys can't run the party well enough to articulate a rationally conservative position to appeal to a deep-red state like Kentucky, then it's time to make way for a generation that can.

_______________
*Paul's statement that he's a fan of Ayn Rand but just accidentally stumbled from "Randall" to "Randy" to "Rand" achieves the same score on the SWNIDish Credibility Meter as such famous political statements of autobiography as "I am not a crook," and "I didn't inhale." His statement dismissing Rand's estrangement from the great Austrian economists as a personal tiff is akin to calling World War I a minor misunderstanding among the cousins who ruled Europe. His statement that he embraces novels of both Rand and Dostoyevski testifies to the kind of artistic taste that equates Thomas Kincaid with Rembrandt and Kenny G with Charlie Parker. We vainly recommend exile for all such Philistines.

Unemployed Ministers: WSJ's Pastoral Perspective

Today's WSJ offers some observations about unemployment among the clergy classes. We consider the article interesting because of its subject, not its execution. But it certainly provides a starting point for opinionated discussion of the topic of careers in ministry, which we SWNIDishly consider to be massively misunderstood by most in the church, including many who are so employed.

So, gentle readers, we invite you to read and think, and you may discuss in the comments if it suits you to do so.

What a New Jersey Conservative Looks Like

Chris Christie updates Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Jersey style:




Except it isn't Washington. Yet.

Is Christie a prospect for the national political stage?

BHO Threatens to Veto Own Plan. SWNID Wonders Why.

The Obama has threatened to veto his own healthcare plan.

Thanks to "unexpected" costs, BHO now says he'll veto upcoming healthcare spending bills because they spend too much. He magisterially demands that Congress find offsetting spending cuts to compensate. How noble!

Meanwhile, 14-term West Virginia Democratic Congressman Alan Mollohan was trounced in a primary by an opponent rabidly critical of the incumbent's support for ObamaCare. How irksome!

The coincidence of these developments is obviously coincidental. Purely.

Liberty Lessons: Best to Be SWNIDishly Modest

Liberty University (motto: "maybe in 50 years we'll outlive the legacy of our founder") has another potential scandal brewing.

This one concerns whether the dean of its seminary, Ergun Caner, really has the dramatic personal testimony that he has claimed.

Caner apparently autobigraphically narrates a birth in Turkey and a conversion to Christianity in his teens.

Bloggers have discovered legal records indicating a birth in Sweden to parents who emigrated to Our Republic when Caner was four. A subsequent divorce left his Muslim father without custody and, presumably, without significant religious influence. So how much of a conversion Caner's was is at least subject to debate.

SWNIDish wisdom on this subject is simple: when exaggerating one's autobiography, one should exaggerate toward either modesty or self-deprecating humor. Even if your historic heroics are genuinely historical, making them your primary personal narrative simply obligates you to repeat the heroics, something that few can do. So why not be the first to ridicule yourself, thereby saving yourself the shame of hearing someone else do it?

We're sure that this advice is expressed somewhere in Proverbs.

In Global Evangelism, Nothing Is Forever Except the Gospel

We heard it through the grapevine of our global mission contacts. Now you can read about it in Christianity Today. Recently tolerant of Christian mission activity, Morocco has now expelled dozens of Christian workers.

This development is sad for the missionaries and for Morocco. But it is not surprising. Moderation is not an easy path for the governments of predominantly Muslim countries. And historically
Christian missionaries have consistently been the objects of official scorn, as the powerful resent those who assert the authority of a higher power.

It Pays to Serve Jesus, At Least More than Social Work

Making the rounds is a Yahoo Hot Jobs posting of the ten worst-paying college degrees.

Third worst is theology. Second is elementary education. First is social work.

SWNID is interested for many reasons. One is that surveys of pay in higher ed show that professors of education and social work do better than professors of theology and religious vocations. If the yahoos at Yahoo are right (and something makes me trust the professionalism of the College and University Professionals Association more than the folks who work for a company that also lists the Ten Worst Fashion Mistakes at the Oscars), then there is systemic injustice in the pay of Bible college and seminary faculty (making a number of SWNIDish colleagues right). Generally, pay in higher ed tracks at about 80% of pay for the equivalent profession (if there is one) in the allegedly Real World.

Another is that the list as a whole represents just about the entire range of stuff that either is or prospectively might be part of the curriculum of the SWNIDish IHE. Thus, when students report that their degree lacks value, we suspect that they are responding in strictly pecuniary terms. Meanwhile, our place of business adheres to a strict No Pay for Performance mandate.

Another is the fact that though these salaries are relatively low, no one is likely to starve if her means were at the mean for these debased vocations. Just how much it takes to be happy is an excellent question to ask in a time and place in which the poor are disproportionately overweight and the number of registered vehicles exceeds the number of licensed drivers. We are personally tired of people who fear ministry and other helping professions because of bad pay, or more specifically who demand that their children pursue something other than a helping profession so that they can join the upwardly mobile subcategories of the middle class.

Another is that despite the low pay, an enormous number of folk aspire to enter these professions. We include theology, as dire predictions of a shortage of qualified ministers seems never to materialize, and churches with openings that pay a decent wage and don't promise endless conflict are routinely swarmed with applications.

Finally, we surmise that one Joel Osteen was not included in the survey, as his massive income would have shot the mean up to the level of Fortune-500 CEO. And if more pastors followed his advice, we'd all be richer than Mr. Teeth himself. This, of course, assumes that what The Reverend Mr. Osteen does falls somehow within the boundaries of "theology."

Mullah Omar Captured: First Reports, Deeply Hoped True

One of contrarian journalist Andrew Breitbart's minions today reports that Taliban sultan Mullah Omar is in the hands of the good guys.

Let's hope so. We don't even care that feckless Democrats will take credit for what was going to happen sooner or later. We don't even care that feckless Republicans will claim that he's been Mirandized and is represented by Johnny Cochran.

Another European Thing Our Republic Probably Doesn't Want

Today the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is in a pickle. Without a single party winning a majority of seats in Parliament, and even though the leading third party actually declined in the most recent election, it now awaits one or the other of the two major parties to make a deal with number three to form a coalition.

And it looks like the coalition will be formed by the party that lost the most seats and now stands in second place.

For those who thought that the 2000 US Presidential election was a travesty that nearly destroyed democracy, such stories of parliamentary systems are instructive.

All democracies are limited by the reality that views change, coalitions shift, majorities are usually narrow, and stupid is stupid even if the majority says otherwise. When elections are especially divided and narrow, their outcomes must be decided by rule of law settled prior to the election. That's not to ensure that "democracy" prevails but that the losers agree that they lost even if they lost very narrowly.

In this country, we've agreed to abide by the rules of the Constitution, including the Electoral College with all its mathematical absurdities. In parliamentary systems, voters' divided choices can be remixed by politicians cutting deals for coalitions, but all still per rules agreed upon in advance. It is precisely that social contract to which all agree--to abide by the election's outcome, no matter how close--that makes decent government possible over generations.

The Kagan Nomination

Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supremes will doubtless occupy the attention of the chattering classes for much of the summer. Predicted discussion: her views on abortion, how liberal she is really, whether it matters that there's another woman on the court, the fact that there will be no "Protestants" on the court, whether she prefers the company of women over men and whether that ought to matter.

And we'll hear about her age. At 50 and given the apparently rejuvenatory properties of Supreme Court membership, Kagan could serve for forty years.

That's why we are ready to discuss something else: a constitutional amendment that will establish the number of justices on the court and limit their terms to 16 years.

The first move is to prevent what nearly happened under FDR--the stacking of the court by a powerful POTUS with a compliant Senate. The second is to prevent POTUSes appointing ever-younger candidates to serve ever-longer terms, extending the Presidential potency well beyond its natural and constitutional limits.

We imagine an amendment that would retire current justices over the next eighteen years, in order of their appointment, at a rate of one every two years. Thereafter, terms would be set, appointments would occur in a reasonable sequence, and any justice unable to fulfill a term would be replaced only for the duration of that term.

Thus would all POTUSes appoint two justices, none to be more influential by length of tenure than any other. Thus would the Supremes morph slowly but surely along the lines of the body politic as a whole.

We think this is a spiffy idea that will not be adopted, largely because the present body politic lacks the patience to endure the Constitutional amendment process.

Bergner: American Exceptionalism Means Saying No to a European-Style Welfare State

We break our long blogging silence, having been bored with current events, to call our now-listless gentle readers' attention to Jeffrey Bergner's extensive and important article in the Weekly Standard discussing American exceptionalism and the lust for a European-style welfare state.

The article is long and challenging for those who think of USA Today as serious journalism but should be digestible for our gentle readers. In sum, Bergner argues that Europe and our Republic historically have different views of government because we have different experiences, this Republic's having been formed largely to reject Europe's history of governance with something that could overcome Europe's failures.

As usual, we offer a few quotations in hopes of inducing a full reading:

Americans achieved a distinctive political system and saw European politics as more to be pitied than envied. So deep was this strain that it would not occur to any serious American for a full century afterward to borrow from Europe’s politics. . . .

Madison argued, in effect, that the equality of Americans lay essentially in their equal freedom, not in their social characteristics. In this way, the American innovations of union, liberty, and diversity would all work to reinforce one another in a new political system embodied in a government with limited powers. . . .

Tocqueville was of course well aware that aristocracy and social stratification continued to exist in Europe in the early 19th century. But he argued that the intellectual and social battle for the future had already been won and that the ideal of equality was the victor. In this, as always, he was prescient. He argued that Europeans were accustomed to being controlled by their governments and had been for centuries. As the ideal of equality drove out monarchies and aristocracies, one type of centralized control was substituted for another. Monarchies and principalities gave way to the centrally administered state. . . .

Europe is further down the course of self-created entitlements than the United States (though we have gained ground in the last 18 months). As ever new entitlements are provided, ever more taxes are levied; ever more taxes diminish the productivity and creativity of the people; the goals and ends of the populace become ever narrower, until finally even rearing a replacement generation is too great a burden, threatening people’s comfort; and ever more money is borrowed from ever fewer lenders. This is unsustainable, and the fact that it has not yet come to its unhappy conclusion is no reason to emulate it. European politics is a slow engine of self-destruction. The question is not whether, but when, it will collapse. And when it does, the result is likely to be a more rigid and meaner despotism than the soft despotism of today. . . .

The only corrective to a too great love of equality is a tempering dose of liberty, that is, a degree of prudence about what the central government should and should not do. The only corrective to bankruptcy short of centrally mandated rationing is restraint of the role of government. In all of this, America still seems a better model for Europe than vice versa. . . .

Europe has solved none of the fundamental political concerns that have animated American politics since the founding: union; limited government as the expression of a balance between equality and liberty; and diversity. It would be folly for the United States to emulate Europe’s political model. If, as seems likely, no serious U.S. statesman would trade America’s problems for Europe’s, why then emulate its politics?

Well, that should be enough. But we can't resist a little more:

The political left in the United States seizes on one thread out of the complex American political fabric—equality—and emphasizes it to the exclusion of all else. The left displays scant concern about using the federal government to force equality of condition; it displays even less concern for prudence in what it asks the government to do; and of late it displays virtually no concern at all for fiscal responsibility and the welfare of future generations. It chafes under constitutional and procedural restrictions on its ability to advance its agenda. And it seeks to stifle the free expression of religious and dissenting views in the public square.

The American left has turned its back on the incomparably rich and sophisticated political tradition that has been bequeathed to us. The narrative of the left has this great tactical virtue: It is simple, even simple-minded, in its conception, lacking the slightest nuance. Perhaps this accounts for the left’s singularly empty rhetoric; beneath its ad hominem attacks, faux emoting, and tactical calculation, its intellectual architecture could not support a feather.

And finally:

American exceptionalism is not, as the left caricatures it, some preemptive right to run the world. To the contrary, it is the practice of a politics that addresses fundamental problems in a specific way, namely, a way consistent with union, with a balance between liberty and equality expressed through limited government, and with a decent respect for diversity. If there is another nation that approaches the fundamental choices of politics in this rich way—as opposed to simple, majoritarian egalitarianism—I am unaware of it. President Obama expressed his true contempt for American exceptionalism when he said, “I believe in American exceptionalism—just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” A more shallow, cynical misunderstanding of American exceptionalism is hard to imagine.

Indeed. Some ideas have been tried enough not to be tried again.