Victor Davis Hanson: Higher taxes are part of restoring American greatness

At National Review, Victor Davis Hanson warns against those who see America in decline. Things could easily  get better, quickly, he says, and offers up a list of reasons why. And one of those reasons is rather extraordinary:

We are soon to revert to the Clinton income-tax rates last used in 2000, when we ran budget surpluses. If likewise we were to cut the budget, or just hold federal spending to the rate of inflation, America would soon run surpluses as it did a decade ago. For all our problems, the United States is still the largest economy in the world, its 300 million residents producing more goods and services than the more than 1 billion in either China or India.

But... but... conservatives at National Review and elsewhere have been stomping their feet for the last 18 months about the restoration of Clinton-era marginal tax rates! Along with spending on TARP, the stimulus bill and health care bill, letting Bush-era tax cuts expire has been a central tenet of the Tea Party/conservative case that President Obama is spreading creeping socialism across this once-great land! The tax increases, in other words, are supposedly one reason for the sense of American decline.

Realistically, though, getting deficits and debts under control will take some combination of higher taxes and reined-in spending. Republicans generally offer only the second of that equation -- and then usually (but not only) rhetorically. (It can be argued Democrats have precisely the opposite problem.) Victor Hanson Davis -- in a rare non-Dowdian moment -- actually seems somewhat realistic today. Does he know what he just did? Do National Review's editors?

AP Stylebook, Feministing and the language of illegal immigration

I'm on record saying that the Arizona immigrant-profiling law is wrong, and I've used my forum with Scripps Howard to argue that America would be better off with a sensible immigration policy that allows vastly more guest workers and other entrants into the United States legally. I think my lefty bona fides are established on the topic.

But this Feministing blog post blasting AP Stylebook -- which guides the language standards in many, if not most, newsrooms through the country -- is just so much tedious sanctimony that I can barely stand it. Let's quote at length:

Screw you AP Style Book.

The AP Style Book is a resource for journalists on language, spelling, pronunciation and proper word usage. I'm not clear how the AP Style Book makes decisions, but it is widely regarded and highly used by journalists.

This explains why most of the mainstream media still uses the term "illegal immigrant." I find the term offensive and disrespectful, as do most immigration activists. People are not illegal, actions are. The advocate community uses the term "undocumented immigrant" which the Stylebook clearly disagrees with.

Thankfully, they don't advocate using the term "alien." But illegal needs to go.

But it's not the sensibilities of the "advocate community" that AP should worry about serving: It's the readers. And while Feministing makes the case that "undocumented immigrant" is somehow more accurate than "illegal immigrant," Feministing is ... wrong.

I get it: There's a desire to use language to create dignity for people by separating humanity's inherent characteristics from the conditions that afflict them and the actions they take. So there's no more "disabled person." It's now "person with disabilities." The emphasis is on personhood. And that's nice. Laudable. But it does clutter the language: Two words become three. (Similarly, I know from painful experience that there's any number of neutered-but-nice terms for "homeless people.") Pile up enough similar examples, and over time, the cluttering of language tends to obscure more than it reveals. 

Which is the case with Feministing's snit: "Undocumented" reduces the issues at play to nothing more than a paperwork problem. (And it's not necessarily more accurate as shorthand; surely many if not most of these folks have, say, birth certificates or driver's licenses or whatnot in their home countries. What kind of documentation are we talking about?) "Illegal" more immediately conveys the sum and substance of the controversy -- and references to illegal immigration are almost always a reference to the controversy -- many people (and their American employers) have chosen to break the laws of this country by crossing the borders to work here. I think those laws should change; I don't think playing games with the language is the way to do it.

As I suggested, any kind of shorthand -- whether it's "undocumented immigrant" or "illegal immigrant" -- is always going to be overly reductive and, in the end, at least somewhat imprecise. Some shorthand phrases, though, are more imprecise and convey less information than others. And those phrases should generally be avoided.

Innocence, justice, and Antonin Scalia: Why I'm rooting for Elena Kagan

Radley Balko notes that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is refusing to hear the habeas corpus petition of a man who has established his innocence in the sex crimes for which he was convicted. Why the rejection? Because the dude filed his petition after the deadline.

Balko:

By the panel’s reckoning, adherence to an arbitrary deadline created by legislators is a higher value than not continuing to imprison people we know to be innocent.

The circuit court's decision is horrifying -- but its logic isn't that surprising. Why? Because that's the exact same logic that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has used. Remember this?

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is "actually" innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged "actual innocence" is constitutionally cognizable.

And this is why I'd rather see Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor or any other "empathetic" judge on the court than some Scalia wannabes who are faithful to a very narrow interpretation of the Constitution. Fidelity to the law is important; fidelity to justice, while perhaps more abstract, is also important. Antonin Scalia's jurisprudence is one that easily lets people be executed or rot in jail for crimes they didn't commit. And Republicans regularly name him the justice they love most. Horrifying.

Republicans would rather be Cobra Kai than turn up the thermostat

In perhaps the clearest-ever expression of the Republican id, Victorino Matus responds with disgust to a scene in the new "Karate Kid" movie that features Jackie Chan urging apartment tenants to only heat water for a shower when they're about to take a shower -- instead of having hot water constantly on demand. Chan's line: "Put in a (hot water) switch and save the planet.)

Matus' response:

It's enough to make you want to join the Cobra Kai, show no mercy, and put 'em in a body bag.

I've said before that one reason I knew that torture is bad is because during the 1980s, "Rambo" showed it being done by Communist Russians and Vietnamese. I know Matus is joking here -- kind of -- but it does seem as though Republicans are journeying to the dark side by embracing every villain and villainous deed from the most popular movies of the Reagan Decade. At this rate, the GOP will soon be defending its foreign policy ideas by invoking "diplomatic immunity."

Dear Citizens United: What does "Stop Iran Now" mean?

I bet you can't guess which 20th century historical analogy is used in this Citizens United ad urging President Obama to "Stop Iran Now."

Oh wait. I bet you can.



Put aside the self-parodying hilarity of the right's ability to see every single foreign policy challenge as 1938 revisited. Here's a question for Citizens United:

What the heck does "Stop Iran Now" mean?

I've got a guess. It probably doesn't -- judging from the D-Day footage used in the ad above -- involve sanctions and diplomacy. It probably involves bombs and destruction and, well, war.

But try as I might, I can't find any statement on the Citizens United site -- or on any of the StopIranNow.com feeds -- that suggests explicitly calls for a precise course of action. There's nothing at the StopIranNow.com site, as of this writing, except this video.

Why so coy?

Such vague apparent but plausibly denied warmongering leaves me believe one of two possibilities: The "Stop Iran Now" folks don't have the courage of their convictions, which is why they remain somewhat murky. Or the ad isn't really about Iran at all -- it's purely about trying to make the president look weak and, well, Neville Chamberlainish. It's aggressive passive aggression, but despite being promoted by outlets like The Weekly Standard -- or maybe because of that -- it shouldn't be taken seriously as anything ther than politics.

Hello, Paro: I for one, welcome our new robot caregiver overlords

The New York Times has a fascinating story today about how robots are increasingly being used for caregiver functions -- "Paro," a robot critter that looks like a baby seal, is used to provide comfort and friendship to the elderly in nursing homes -- and raises an interesting ethical dilemma:

Some social critics see the use of robots with such patients as a sign of the low status of the elderly, especially those with dementia. As the technology improves, argues Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it will only grow more tempting to substitute Paro and its ilk for a family member, friend — or actual pet — in an ever-widening number of situations.

“Paro is the beginning,” she said. “It’s allowing us to say, ‘A robot makes sense in this situation.’ But does it really? And then what? What about a robot that reads to your kid? A robot you tell your troubles to? Who among us will eventually be deserving enough to deserve people?”

What's fascinating about Paro, to me, is that the rise of technology has increasingly made our world less organic -- most of us are, of course, sealed up in air-conditioned bubbles for the vast majority of our lives, cut off from the realm of, well, experience. But as Paro demonstrates, the aim of much technological research is to duplicate (using circuitry) that which already exists in the realm of flesh, blood and bone.

Turkle's question -- who will deserve people? -- raises another. Why not people? Why not pets? Why spend $1,000 on a fake baby seal when there's somebody's grandson who could come in for free?

Deborah Solomon and George Schultz

Here, finally, is the problem with Deborah Solomon's Sunday interviews: I always learn more about what's going on in Deborah Solomon's head than I ever do about the person she's interviewing. In her continuing attempts to provoke, wheedle and generally make an interview subject uncomfortable, Solomon has done far more to reveal her inner workings than to show us anything new about the often-familiar people she interviews.

So it goes this week in her interview with former Secretary of State George P. Schultz. We learn that Ms. Solomon is still very, very angry about the U.S. invasion of Iraq. I don't blame her. But: She doesn't do much of a job in this interview in laying the groundwork for her apparent belief that Schultz -- motivated by his job with the Bechtel Group -- was a mover and shaker behind the scenes, prompting America to invade. Instead, her eight questions on the topic are a series of j'accuse! that culminates in the following exchange:

It’s been seven years since we invaded Iraq, and there is so much sorrow in the world. I don’t see things getting a lot better.

You ought to come out to California. We have problems out here; but the sun is shining, and it’s pleasant here on the Stanford campus.

Having paid attention to Solomon's work, I can tell you what she cares about: Art, feminism, money -- in the last month, only one interview didn't involve questions about cash -- and, generally, the liberal side of most political questions. What I can't tell you is a single memorable fact I've ever learned about the people she interviews. This is almost performance art -- it's the questioner who reveals everything! -- but it's kind of lousy journalism.

Ben and Joel Podcast: Lyle Denniston and the Supreme Court

Lyle Denniston has been covering the Supreme Court for a half-century -- first as a newspaperman in Baltimore and Boston, and now for the invaluable SCOTUSblog. He joins the podcast this week to give an overview of the Supreme Court's term, a look at the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings, and a preview of what hot topics the court will be wrestling with next.


Click here to play the podcast.

Scientific proof that Kathleen Parker's sexism is dumb

Via Andrew Sullivan, linguist Mark Lieberman gets into the Kathleen Parker "Obama is a woman" column that got me so irritated yesterday. Parker suggested that the number of "passive voice" sentence constructions during his big oil speech were proof that he lacked a certain "rhetorical testosterone."

Lieberman makes an observation similar to one I made:

The first thing to say is that there isn't the slightest evidence that passive-voice constructions are "feminine".

Right. But if Parker does want to play that game, well, there's some unsettling evidence:

Women don't use the passive voice more than men, and among male writers, number of passive-voice constructions doesn't appear to have any relationship at all to real or perceived manliness. The "passive is girly" prejudice seems to be purely due to the connotations of (other senses of) the term passive, misinterpreted by people who in any case mostly wouldn't recognize the grammatical passive voice if it bit them on the leg. ...

But I did just make a quick analysis of president George W. Bush's post-Katrina address to the nation. I count 142 sentences, 25 of which contained one or more passive-voice tensed verb constructions. That's 17.6%. Doing the same thing with Barack Obama's post-oil-spill address, I count 135 sentences, 15 of which contain one or more passive-voice tensed verb constructions. That's 11.1%.

I don't think Kathleen Parker will get another Pulitzer Prize for this column.

And in any case, it's worth noting that even if Barack Obama has a "feminine" communication style, that doesn't make him a bad leader. That was the point of Parker's column -- an insult both the the president's manhood and, well, to women.

Elena Kagan, John Roberts and the "balls and strikes" theory of the judiciary

Ben Boychuk and I discuss the role of the Supreme Court in this week's column for Scripps Howard. My take:

John Roberts' "balls and strikes" analogy is appealing, but it also has very little to do with how the Supreme Court works, or its role in American life.

The Supreme Court, after all, only takes the hard cases -- the ones where questions of Constitutional law are still unsettled. The easy questions -- the ones where the bright lines of the law make it relatively simple to determine the "right" results of cases -- are left to the lower courts.

But it's the Supreme Court's job to draw the bright lines. It must do so within the parameters of the Constitution, of course, but the job is still largely one of interpretation.

"The Constitution is a pantheon of values, and a lot of hard cases are hard because the Constitution gives no simple rule of decision for the cases in which one of the values is truly at odds with another," retired Justice David Souter said in a recent commencement speech.

"Judges have to choose between the good things that the Constitution approves, and when they do, they have to choose, not on the basis of measurement, but of meaning."

Elena Kagan this week said, "it ought to be Congress and the president that do the policy-making. And the courts ought to respect and ought to defer to that." That should comfort conservatives worried about "activist judging." The Supreme Court, however, has a difficult job.

Simple analogies don't make it any simpler.

Kathleen Parker: Obama is just like a woman. Not in a good way

Seems like it was just last week that Kathleen Parker was complaining that conservative women can be feminists too, darnit! Since then, of course, she's agreed to host a TV show with America's most famous patron of prostitutes. And today she offers up the theory that President Obama is a bit of a girl.

I say this in the nicest possible way.

Well, sure. She just doesn't mean it in the nicest possible way, though she tries like the dickens to act like she's not being, well, terribly sexist.

Generally speaking, men and women communicate differently. Women tend to be coalition builders rather than mavericks (with the occasional rogue exception). While men seek ways to measure themselves against others, for reasons requiring no elaboration, women form circles and talk it out.

Well, that doesn't sound so bad does it? But that's not really what Parker's getting at. Obama's not like a woman because he talks things out. He's like a woman because he's ... passive.

His lack of immediate, commanding action was perceived as a lack of leadership because, well, it was. When he finally addressed the nation on day 56 (!) of the crisis, Obama's speech featured 13 percent passive-voice constructions, the highest level measured in any major presidential address this century, according to the Global Language Monitor, which tracks and analyzes language.

The masculine-coded context of the Oval Office poses special challenges, further exacerbated by a crisis that demands decisive action. It would appear that Obama tests Campbell's argument that "nothing prevents" men from appropriating women's style without negative consequences.

But being a "coalition builder" isn't really the same thing as being "passive." And Parker makes no attempt to show that it is. She'll get no argument from me that Barack Obama has failed to demonstrate better leadership in handling the gulf spill. But Parker has taken generalizations about the way men and women communicate, then fashioned her argument about Obama's "femaleness" based on evidence that has nothing to do with those generalizations.

The upshot is that she insults both the president and women without a good basis for doing so. I'll never say that conservative women can't be feminist. But Kathleen Parker hasn't really shown us how that's possible.

A brief thought about Al Gore's alleged sex assault

Byron York prints plenty of disturbing details from the police complaint against Al Gore, but this is the one I find most infuriating:

Finally she got away. Later, she talked to friends, liberals like herself, who advised against telling police. One asked her "to just suck it up; otherwise, the world's going to be destroyed from global warming."

To that "friend" let me offer up a piece of advice: Go to hell.

Snarky folks at The Corner are treating this revelation as being run-of-the-mill Democratic politics, but honestly the problem here -- as is often the case -- is of power generally. You can see an almost carbon-copy dynamic at play when people angrily defend the Catholic Church against accusations of widespread child molestation. Victims are urged to hush up, to go away, because their truth threatens The Mission of whichever person or movement or institution is involved.

And while it's often true that sacrifices must be made in order to advance a worthy cause, you can easily tell the difference in the worthiness of those sacrifices by asking one simple question: Is the dignity of the individual who made the sacrifice enhanced by that sacrifice? Or is it diminished?

If the answer is the latter -- if a woman is obliged to be silent about a sexual assault -- than the person, or movement, or institution is almost certainly unworthy of the sacrifice. I don't want the allegations against Al Gore to be true -- but that's mostly because I don't want the woman in question to have been victimized. Shame on her supposed friends for valuing her dignity so cheaply.

Lies, damned lies and the Daily Kos poll

Back in February, when Daily Kos released a poll showing that nearly a quarter of all Republicans believe their state should secede from the Union, I scoffed:

I’m no expert on polling, but: nearly a quarter of Republicans think their state should secede from the Union?* Really? Something doesn’t add up here. It makes for a rather convenient narrative from a liberal-Democratic point of view, but is it actually true? Sorry, but I can’t imagine that it is. And if that’s not true, then the rest of the poll results are questionable, to say the least. I’d like to believe the GOP is this crazy, but I don’t.

Turns out I was right:

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas announced today he will file a lawsuit against MD-based pollster Research 2000, alleging that polls Research 2000 was conducting for the liberal blog were fabricated.

Moulitsas today published a report by three readers he describes as "statistics wizards" that he says shows "quite convincingly" that Research 2000 was manufacturing the results of weekly national polls.

"Based on the report of the statisticians, it's clear that we did not get what we paid for," Moulitsas wrote on his website today.

"We were defrauded by Research 2000, and while we don't know if some or all of the data was fabricated or manipulated beyond recognition, we know we can't trust it. Meanwhile, Research 2000 has refused to offer any explanation."

As I said in February: Beware polls that too neatly confirm your biases. I knew that. It's too bad that Kos didn't.

Those out-of-touch elitists at the New York Times don't know a 'Blazing Saddles' reference when they hear one

In a story about RNC chief Michael Steele's visit to San Francisco, reporter Jesse McKinley offered up this quote-and-observation about Steele:

And, of course, he quoted Cole Porter. Sort of.

“It’s time to let you do that voodoo that you do very, very well,” he said.

It's true that those lyrics originated in the Cole Porter song "You Do Something To Me." But seriously: Almost every American male under the age of, oh, 50, probably knows the line a little better from this.

One more thought about the Weekly Standard piece about Tea Parties

One has to give credit to Matthew Continetti for appraising Glenn Beck's ideas thusly:

This is nonsense. Whatever you think of Theodore Roosevelt, he was not Lenin. Woodrow Wilson was not Stalin. The philosophical foundations of progressivism may be wrong. The policies that progressivism generates may be counterproductive. Its view of the Constitution may betray the Founders’. Nevertheless, progressivism is a distinctly American tradition that partly came into being as a way to prevent ideologies like communism and fascism from taking root in the United States. And not even the stupidest American liberal shares the morality of the totalitarian monsters whom Beck analogizes to American politics so flippantly.

Maybe there's hope for rational civic dialogue, yet.

Tea Partiers look just like America. Except they're richer.

Matthew Continetti's piece about the Tea Party movement replays -- like so many similar pieces before it -- Rick Santelli's famous CNBC rant from 2009. But this quote leaped out at me like it hadn't before:

In Santelli’s opinion, American elites had neglected the people surrounding him, the commodities traders who made up “a pretty good statistical cross-section of America, the silent majority.

We already know that Tea Partiers are wealthier than most Americans, but it's worth pointing out that the median income for a commodities trader in 2008 was $68,680. The median household income nationally the same year was $52,029.

Now: $68,000 a year doesn't put silver spoons in your mouth. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with having a good income. But the Tea Partiers aren't a "good statistical cross-section of America" -- and the commodities traders who surrounded Santelli that day aren't either. Let's not pretend otherwise.

The myth of liberals hating Sarah Palin's motherhood

At the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker repeats a bit of business that I see often on the right, but have never seen much evidence for:

The reason Palin so upsets the pro-choice brigade is because she seems so content with her lot and her brood. One can find other reasons to think Palin shouldn't be president, but being a pro-life woman shouldn't be one of them.

The idea is that Sarah Palin's fecundity -- particularly with regards to Trig, her special needs child -- is part of what makes her an object of particular scorn on the left. But -- the fevered speculations of Andrew Sullivan aside -- where's the evidence for this charge? I've never seen anybody say: "I'd like Sarah Palin ... but damnit, she's given birth waaaaay too often." I think conservatives have convinced themselves that the liberal contempt for Palin is born out of hoity toity cultural snobbishness. But it's not.

Guess what? Liberals have kids too. Maybe not as often as conservatives. But still.

There are lots of reasons I dislike Sarah Palin's presence in public life, but her motherhood choices have no bearing on them. There's her aura of perpetual grievance. There was her manifest lack of preparation for the job she sought at John McCain's side in 2008. There's her origin of the "death panels" myth during the health care debate -- which revealed her to be either deeply misinformed or incredibly cynical. I could go on ... but honestly, I don't need to. It's going to be a weird universe the day I ever cast a vote for Sarah Palin.

Like I said, her motherhood has no bearing on my dislike of Palin. Except in one sense: I kind of dislike how she and some conservatives think her motherhood is a reason liberals don't like her. That's kind of irritating.

The Weekly Standard doesn't think BP loves oil nearly enough.

If you read this Weekly Standard article, you might think it a shocking expose -- shocking, because it's in the Weekly Standard -- of BP's longstanding laxness with regards to safety issues. But what develops is something else entirely: An exercise in schadenfreude that a company that tried so hard to brand itself as "green" has enmeshed itself in one of history's more notorious environmental disasters.

The game is given away when describing Oberon Houston, an engineer who left the company a few years back after narrowly avoiding death on a BP rig. Andrew Wilson's article presents a litany of safety-related reasons for Houston's departure, but tacks this on:

And finally, he told me over the course of several interviews, he was distressed by an abundance of rhetoric—coming from the CEO—about BP going “beyond petroleum” and joining the environmental activists in campaigning for reduced carbon emissions. “To me and everyone I knew, it didn’t make any sense. We were a petroleum company. That wasn’t going to change any time soon, and it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of, either. All the talk about windmills and solar power was just PR and a lot of nonsense.”

In short, Houston no longer trusted the company to do the right thing.

The article hints that BP's "greenwashing" campaign is linked to its atrocious safety practices, but never really makes the case. (And couldn't, unless BP's PR department ran the company's maintenance operations.) Instead, what the piece reveals is the extent to which "oil now! oil forever!" might be more deeply embedded in conservative ideology than actual free-market capitalism. It seems not to matter that BP undertook its environmentally friendly push in order to sell more oil; all that matters -- and is worthy of contempt -- is that BP paid any deference at all, even rhetorically, to the environmental movement. That is the sin that cannot be forgiven. At least, not now that BP's sins can be hung on a Democratic president.

Late in the piece, Wilson mocks BP for paying scientists at Berkeley to research energy alternatives:

Thanks to BP sponsorship, 300 researchers in white lab coats at Berkeley are busily searching for ways to make green fuels that will reduce our dependence on oil. In 2007, BP set up the Energy Biosciences Institute, saying it would spend $500 million over the next ten years to support research into plant-based fuels at Berkeley and two other universities. This is the largest corporate donation ever for university research.

Broken down, though, that amounts to $12.5 million per quarter over the next 10 years -- barely a dent in the company's earnings. Even then, it doesn't seem to occur to Wilson that an energy company might consider the cost a prudent bit of R&D -- if not for a post-oil future, then at least to cater to the segment of the market that would rather avoid oil.

Like I said, though, market considerations don't really matter here. Any acknowledgement that massive oil consumption might have a downside, or that alternative energy sources might even be possible or even necessary, is heresy. Conservatives pride themselves on their realism about oil: It's cheap and it's available and we're not going to abandon it because of those qualities. There's something to that argument. But the contempt for BP -- as revealed in the Weekly Standard -- reveals that there's more than admirable realism at work here. It's calcified, closed-minded ideology.

The Nook and Kindle drop below $200

So sayeth the New York Times. And that sounds like great news -- I have the Kindle and Nook apps for both my iPhone and my netbook; I'd really love to own a dedicated e-reader. On the other hand: If the price is coming down this much, this quickly, does that mean dedicated e-readers are about to become extinct? Choices, choices.

Who knew there was an Afghan warlord named Milo Minderbinder?

Washington Post:

The U.S. military is funding a massive protection racket in Afghanistan, indirectly paying tens of millions of dollars to warlords, corrupt public officials and the Taliban to ensure safe passage of its supply convoys throughout the country, according to congressional investigators.

It's really not a good day for Afghan war supporters.