Does the Press EVER Get Tired of Being Manipulated?

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can't be bothered.

I've noticed that the press coverage of Israel’s retaliation on Hamas has followed the usual pattern: reportage of how this is one of the “bloodiest assaults in decades,” how many bombs were dropped, how many Palestinians have been killed and wounded, how many civilian casualties Palestinian officials claim there have been, quotes from bereaved Palestinians, pictures of the damage in Gaza. Almost as an afterthought, it’s mentioned that the assault began after militants launched 300 rockets into Israel in one week, and that they’ve launched over 3,000 rockets into Israel in the last year.

Were those 3,000 rockets aimed at Israeli military targets? Of course not. They were fired blindly into Israel in the hopes of killing as many Israeli civilians and causing as much damage as possible. And in case you haven’t figured it out yet, Hamas doesn’t care how many civilian casualties they suffer in return. The more the better, because they can use the press coverage to stoke more hatred of Israel. That’s why they locate their rocket batteries in civilian neighborhoods, and turn mosques into ammunition dumps and command centers.

This paragraph from the December 28 Associated Press article is typical:

“The unprecedented assault sparked protests and condemnations throughout the Arab world, and many of Israel’s Western allies urged restraint, though the U.S. blamed Hamas for the fighting.”

See? Once again the U.S. is out of step with the rest of the world – blaming Hamas when everyone else is either urging restraint or howling for more Israeli blood. How dare the Israelis defend themselves by taking such unprecedented action?

Where is the coverage of the damage those 3,000 rockets inflicted on Israel? Where are the pictures of damaged buildings and wounded and grieving Israelis? Why is this only news when Israel gets tired of it and strikes back? And why can’t the press call a terrorist a terrorist instead of a “militant.” Can they honestly not see the bias here? Are they really so clueless that they don’t see how they’re being manipulated? Or do they just not care? Either way, it disgusts me.

Thanks for listening.

Another Trip to the Perspective Store

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can’t be bothered.

Public opinion polling over the last several months has revealed an interesting paradox: By large majorities, Americans apparently believe that the state of the country is terrible. However, by large majorities, they also describe their own status as satisfying and optimistic. As recently as October, a Pew Research poll showed that 88% of Republicans and 77% of Democrats said they were either “very happy” or “pretty happy” with their lives. This is at a time when, according to Gallup, 78% of Americans are negative about the state of the U.S. economy, and the percentage of Americans who say that an economic depression in the next two years is “very likely” has grown to 35%. I find that astounding.

Is it possible that the incessant media drumbeat of negative news is responsible for this contradiction? It’s obvious that most media outlets try to cast their new stories in superlative terms: the biggest since, the worst since, the most since, the lowest since, etc., etc. And sometimes this tendency is taken to ridiculous extremes. So as I’ve watched the continuing breathless coverage of the current recession, I have once again been driven to look for some perspective.

Most people alive today have never lived through an economic depression, and therefore have no idea what one is really like. In 1930, the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) shrank by 8.6%. In 1931, GDP fell by another 6.4%. In 1932, it shrank by a full 13%. National unemployment was at 25%, and wages for those still employed fell by 42%. The unemployment rate stayed in double digits until 1941, when we were pulled out of the depression, not by brilliant government programs, but by World War II.

As for 2008 – after posting 1% GDP growth in Q1 and almost 3% growth in Q2, Q3 GDP declined by…are you ready for this?...one-half of one percent – which was, of course, reported as “the biggest decline since 2001.” The national unemployment rate last month was 6.7%. Certainly there are places in the country where the unemployment rate is much higher – Flint, MI, for example, is nearly at 11%. But there are also many places where it is much lower. Here in Seattle it’s lower than the national average - about 5.5%. And remember that many economists still consider anything under 5% to be “full employment.”

Here is a graph of the unemployment rate over the last 50 years, courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

As you can see, we spent most of the period from 1975 through 1986 with a higher national unemployment rate than we have right now.

I know that’s not much comfort if you are one of the unemployed. And I know that people are hurting, and I don’t seek to minimize their pain. But despite what you may hear or read, what we’re going through now isn’t even close to depression-level badness. Not. Even. Close. We’ve come through much worst times than these, and we’ll survive this downturn, too. And we’ll do it the way we always have: by ordinary Americans coming together, helping each other out, and getting up every morning and doing what needs to be done.

Thanks for listening.

A Tale of Two Studies

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can’t be bothered.

In mid-2005, a non-partisan organization called the Bay Area Center for Voting Research in Berkeley, CA, released a ranking of America’s most liberal and most conservative cities. That list was documented in our very own Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which was bemoaning the fact that Seattle ranked way down at 16th place on the most-liberal list.

Meanwhile, a few months ago, the FBI released its crime statistics for 2007, covering almost 8,700 cities across the country. You can download this in Excel format HERE. That format is pretty handy, because Excel makes it easy to sort and massage the numbers. One number that is useful for comparison purposes – and easy to calculate once I had the spreadsheet – is the “violent crime rate,” usually expressed as the number of violent crimes per 100,000 people. By “violent crimes,” the FBI means murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

Out of curiosity, I sorted the FBI’s list by the violent crime rate, and compared it to the 2005 list of America’s most liberal cities. Of the 40 cities with the worst violent crime rate, 19 were also among the 40 most liberal cities in the 2005 study. Only one was among the 40 most conservative cities.

"Liberal" and "Democrat" go together like "round" and "circle," and, sure enough, it turns out that most of the cities on the most-liberal list have been governed by Democrats for literally decades: Detroit hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1962; St. Louis since 1949; Oakland since 1966; Atlanta since 1962; Philadelphia since 1952; Washington, D.C., since 1965; New Orleans for nearly a century!

And before you tell me that poverty is a more significant indicator of violent crime, let me also point out that only 18 of the 40 worst cities were above the national average in percentage of people below the poverty level in 2007. Only four of the ten worst were above the national average.

But here’s an interesting point to consider: Jason Alderman, a director of the Center for Voting Research, was quoted in the PI article as saying, “The list [of most liberal cities] is dominated by cities that have strong and proud and long-standing African American populations,” which, the PI pointed out, “tend to vote overwhelmingly for liberal candidates.”

So…my question today is: Why? Why, when black Americans suffer disproportionately as victims of violent crime, poverty, and unemployment, do you continue to elect local politicians from a party whose track record – over decades – demonstrates clearly that they’re not making things any better for you? And how can clear-thinking Americans seriously believe that the Democrats stand the best chance of solving our current problems and getting the country going in the right direction after looking at their track record in the cities where their power has been entrenched the longest?

Thanks for listening.

Reflections on Christmas Morning

He did not come in glory when He first came to earth,
And most' the world ignored His humble birth,
But the heavens were singing in celestial harmony,
And a star guided some souls to their knees...
Those with ears to hear and eyes to see.

And the miracles followed, but the skeptics believed
They were lies spread by those who'd been deceived.
With an appetite for power, they mocked everything He said,
While the ones truly hungering He fed...
Those who hungered after righteousness He fed.

And the light that He gave
Was to lift and to save.
And the burdens that He came to bear
Are the ones we can't carry, and need to share.

I give thanks for His sweetness, I have faith in His power,
And I know He'll strive with me every hour,
For He suffered in darkness, kneeling in Gethsemane,
So the light of His love could shine on me...
So the light of His love could shine through me...

- excerpt from Arise, Shine Forth by Michael McLean,
who I am proud to call my friend and brother in Christ,
as performed in his masterpiece, The Forgotten Carols

For more perspective on the true meaning of Christmas, I strongly recommend:
http://www.reflectionsofchrist.org/.

Oh, and thanks for listening. Merry Christmas.

Surprise, Surprise, Surprise

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking on behalf of those who just can’t be bothered.

The irony is just delicious. You couldn’t make up stuff like this if you tried: The news moved over the wire a week or so ago that some of the anti-war groups are getting concerned about President-elect Obama’s plans for his cabinet and national security team. To quote Paul Richter of http://www.allvoices.com/, “The activists – key members of the coalition that propelled Obama to the White House – fear he is drifting from the anti-war moorings of his once-longshot presidential candidacy.”

Kevin Martin, the Executive Director of the group Peace Action, is quoted as saying, “So, in the short term, we’re going to be disappointed. They may turn out to be all pro-war, or at least people who were pro-war in the beginning.” And this is the quote I just love: “There’s so much Obama hero worship, we’re having to walk this line where we can’t directly criticize him.” (Gee, you just noticed that?)

Well, Kevin, let me share with you one of my favorite Obama quotes, and one that we will all have plenty of occasions to ponder over the next four years. I’ve shared this in previous posts, but I think it’s appropriate to emphasize it once again. It’s from Audacity of Hope: “I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.” Looks like you did some of that projecting, and it was your turn to be disappointed.

Many people have stated that we “don’t know who Obama is.” I disagree. The mainstream media certainly didn’t go out of their way to tell us, but if we’ve paid attention, we actually know a lot about who he is. We know where he came from, and the forces that shaped him. We know he was a student of Saul Alinsky – the radical “father” of community organizing. We know who his friends and associates were. We know that, by his voting record, he was the most liberal Senator in the United States Senate – he was to the left of Hillary Clinton, Barbara Boxer, and even Ted Kennedy. We know that he believes in raising taxes on the wealthy and giving some of that money to lower income folks – and that is income redistribution no matter how much he tries to deny it. We know he believes in unrestricted abortion rights. We know that he believes in bigger government.

What we don’t know is how he will govern, because he has no track record by which to judge his governing style. Nobody knows. Not me, not Kevin Martin, not you. That’s why so many of us were nervous about seeing so many people vote for the nebulous values of “hope and change” – because hope is not a strategy, and change is not always for the better. But Obama just may be smart enough to understand that to be successful, he has to govern from the center, which, by the way, means that a lot of the people on the far left who helped elect him are going to end up feeling like Kevin Martin.

And, believe it or not, even though I didn’t vote for Obama, I do want him to be successful, because if he isn’t, it will be a disaster for the nation. I will speak out against policies that I think are bad ideas, and I will attempt to present rational arguments to support my viewpoint. But unlike many at the other end of the political spectrum – who would rather see America lose a war that would place our nation in grave danger than see George W. Bush get credit for the victory – I will not root for Obama’s failure. But I also won’t forget that quote…and you shouldn’t either.

Thanks for listening.

A Moral Slippery Slope

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can’t be bothered.

Well, Washington State has hit the national news, thanks to the PC-driven decision to allow an atheist-designed placard to be included in Olympia’s Christmas Holiday display. The placard reads, “There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.” Ebenezer Scrooge would be proud. (“Christmas! Bah! Humbug!”) Now the fact is that this placard is as much a statement of faith as John 3:16, because this is not an issue that can be settled through the scientific method. But it does make me want to ask a few questions.

Perhaps I’m just one of those whose minds are enslaved, but it seems to me that if there is no objective, absolute standard of good and bad, right and wrong, the ultimate destination at the end of this train of thought is pretty disturbing. For example, how do you justify to your children what they “shouldn’t” do? Because you said so? Because you’re bigger and stronger than they are? What happens, then, when they finally become bigger and stronger than you? Do you appeal instead to the standards of the society we live in – the rules we’ve agreed upon that allow us to live together in peace?

But if “right” and “wrong” is solely determined by societal consensus as expressed in the laws we pass, there’s another problem: not all societies agree. Some, for example, believe that women are nothing more than property and forbid them from leaving their homes without being accompanied by a male relative, that amputation is an appropriate punishment for thievery and stoning for adultery, that it’s perfectly all right to kill people who won’t accept their point of view, and furthermore that their duty is to impose their society on everyone until it controls the entire globe – by force if necessary. In the absence of absolute standards, who is to say our society is “superior” to that one, or any other. How can you even mount a basic argument for the dignity of man without any justification for why man “should” be entitled to any?

How then do you judge between societies? It's all well and good to say that societies "should" win or lose in the arena of ideas, and that the "best" society is the one whose ideas appeal to the greatest number of people, but...says who? Why should that be the standard of judgment? What if the majority opinion-holders are not the strongest? Why should their opinions win out over those who are stronger? Why not simply say that the society with the strongest military is the best - since we obviously have societies in our world that are not content with competing in the arena of ideas and believe that they have a duty to advance their society by any means possible?

If a society is bent on bringing the entire world under its control, and has the military might to do so, why shouldn’t it? How can anyone say it’s “wrong” for them to attempt it, if there is no absolute standard of what “wrong” is? Ultimately every value judgment can be rebutted with, “Says who?” and at the bottom of this slippery slope of moral relativism is the law of the jungle…and I don’t see how you can avoid ending up there if you’re intellectually honest. Because an appeal to any kind of objective standard, as opposed to the subjective consensus of some group of people, puts you unavoidably on my side of the argument.

It seems to me that the logical survival strategy for a truly atheistic society would be to amass as much military might as possible, always be watching for other societies that may pose a threat, and squash them like bugs before they’re able to mount one. (Hmmm… sounds a lot like the philosophy of the old Soviet Union.) Of course, one of the great ironies of our world is that the same people who refuse to recognize any absolute moral authority in their own lives seem to also be the ones who refuse to make value judgments between societies, and who – contrary to all available evidence – adhere to the “if we’ll just be nice to them, they’ll be nice to us” approach to foreign policy. This intellectual inconsistency seems to me to be disingenuous at best, and just plain dumb at worst.

A lot of people simply want to be able to do what they want to do and not have anyone else make moral judgments about their behavior. I get that. But for Christ’s sake, people (and I mean that literally), at least be honest with yourselves about your motives. Because, by your own way of thinking, why shouldn’t you be judged and criticized by other people? What gives you the “right” not to be? It isn’t “fair?” Says who?

I’ll take a message of hope and “glad tidings of great joy” over that world view any day. And I thank God every day of my life that I am privileged to live in a society whose founders were wise enough to understand where the basic rights of mankind come from: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” That is the world view that set this nation apart from any other that had ever existed on the face of the planet and that led to its greatness.

Thanks for listening.

Looking Glass Politics

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can’t be bothered.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Thus spoke Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler’s propaganda minister. “Propaganda” is defined as “information, idea, or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc.” Going strictly by this definition, propaganda is not necessarily false, and not necessarily a bad thing. It has, however, come to have a negative connotation because of all the ways it has been used for harm, or used to manipulate opinion for the purposes of gaining power.

The extreme liberals in the Democrat party have become masters of the big lie. Example: aided and abetted by the media, which has been happy to just repeat the accusations without any actual attempt to do any critical journalism, they have managed to make large numbers of Americans believe that George Bush lied and manipulated intelligence reports in order to go to war in Iraq. Never mind that there isn’t a shred of evidence to support that charge. (If there was, we would have seen impeachment hearings years ago.) Never mind that the Democrats in Congress who were pushing the big lie had direct access to the same intelligence reports. (Some even sat on Congressional intelligence committees.) Never mind that many of them were on record, as far back as the Clinton administration, talking about what a danger Saddam Hussein was. Never mind that the national intelligence agencies of all of our allies – even some who weren’t willing to go to war – all agreed on the issue of WMDs. The story line was, “Bush lied,” and now hundreds of thousands of Americans believe it.

But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. After January 20, you are going to see a parade of legislation that will make you think you’ve gone through the looking glass with Alice:

• Organized labor will expect Congress to pass a bill that was blocked in the Senate in 2007. This bill would eliminate the right of employees to cast a secret ballot in an election to determine whether to certify unionization of their workplace. Instead, the union would automatically be certified as soon as it collected a majority of signed authorization cards. Employee decisions on unionization would be made publicly in front of union organizers and fellow workers as they decided whether or not to sign an authorization card. This bill is called the “Employee Free Choice Act.”
• Democrats will attempt to destroy conservative talk radio through legislation that would require a radio station to give equal air time to opposing points of view, rather than allowing the free market to determine what people want to listen to. So, for every three hours of, say, Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, a station would have to broadcast three hours of someone like Al Franken, who was such a commercial failure on talk radio that he decided to run for Congress instead. It’s a given that any radio station that attempted to follow that format would go broke, because as we’ve already seen with the dismal failure of Air America, liberal talk radio simply isn’t commercially viable. So the theory is that radio stations would shift in mass back to news or music rather than continue in a talk show format. But that’s OK with the Democrats, because it would get Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity off the air, and that’s their main objective. This legislation is known as “The Fairness Doctrine.”

Hopefully, the remaining Republicans in the Senate will stand firm against this kind of deception. If not, we have only ourselves to blame. In my experience, when all the votes have been counted, the American public pretty much gets the government it deserves.

Thanks for listening.

P.S.: If you're concerned about the so-called Fairness Doctrine, you can add your name on an on-line petition drive at: http://www.mrcaction.org/r.asp?u=13257&RID=16271511

While I'm On the Subject...

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can’t be bothered.

Yesterday’s post had to do with the reaction of many gay activists to the passage of California’s Proposition 8. As long as I’m dealing with the subject, I may as well go way out on a limb and state my own view of the issue.

Here is the central question as I see it, all moral and religious arguments aside: Does a society have the right to grant special status to social structures that are in that society’s best interests? I believe that it does, and it appears that a majority of Americans agree with me.

What does that have to do with gay marriage? Simply this: Many studies have concluded that the best of all possible environments for raising a child is a traditional family, with both a father and a mother who actively participate in loving and raising the child. Are there obvious exceptions? Of course there are. Some heterosexual couples are terrible parents, and it wouldn’t be difficult to come up with an example of a same-sex couple and a heterosexual couple where the same-sex couple would be the better parents. In addition, some marriages break up (as do some civil unions), and children are harmed in the process and/or end up in a single-parent household. But in general, the best environment for raising a child is a traditional family.

Clearly, there are few (if any) things more vital to the future of any society than the well-being of that society’s children. So it follows that it is in society’s best interests to encourage the family structure that has proven to be the best environment for healthy child-development. Hence the special status granted to traditional marriage.

Gay activists want society’s blessing on the concept that same-sex relationships are in every way equivalent to heterosexual relationships. But they aren't. There is one thing that a same-sex relationship cannot do, and that is provide a mother/father bonded pair for the raising of children. And that is why, personally, while I support the concept that same-sex couples – or any “civil union” partnership, for that matter, including, say, one between elderly siblings – should have the same rights in regard to dependent coverage on health insurance policies, hospital visitation rights, inheritance rights, etc., I also believe that there is something special about a traditional marriage that sets it apart from any other kind of partnership and makes it worthy of special recognition.

So far, the majority of our society appears to agree with this position, judging from the fact that every time the issue has ever been subjected to a vote of the people, traditional marriage has won. If society as a whole changes its mind on the issue, and expresses that change at the ballot box, so be it. In the meantime, society should continue to have the right to encourage the social structures it believes to be in its best interests.

Thanks for listening.

Who Are the Real Haters Here?

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can’t be bothered.

In this morning’s paper, the following article headline in the Everett Herald caught my eye: “Gay activists plan boycott of skiing, festivals in Utah.” The article opened with the following sentence: “Utah’s growing tourism industry and the star-studded Sundance Film Festival are being targeted for a boycott by bloggers, gay rights activists and others seeking to punish the Mormon church for its aggressive promotion of California’s ban on gay marriage.” John Aravosis, who is described as a “blogger and gay rights activist,” is quoted as saying, “At this point, honestly, we’re going to destroy the Utah brand. It is a hate state.”

(Note to John Aravosis: There are a lot of non-Mormons in Utah. In 2004, roughly 62% of the population consisted of church members, although, according to Professor Tim Heaton of BYU, between one-third and one-half of those people are not active in the faith. That would imply that the majority of Utahns are not active members of the LDS Church.)

Now the facts are that, according to polling data, the majority of whites in California voted against Proposition 8. On the other hand, African-Americans, who turned out in record numbers to vote for Barak Obama, overwhelmingly favored Proposition 8 (69% Yes). Arguably, had that not been the case, the measure would have failed. So why go after the Mormons? Could it be because they actually had the audacity to publicly oppose gay marriage on moral grounds?

Here is the real story of Proposition 8, according to an exit poll done by Edison Media Research:

• 64% of Catholics voted yes (without regard to race)
• 65% of Protestants voted yes
• 84% of weekly churchgoers voted yes
• 54% of occasional churchgoers voted no
• 83% of people who have never been to church voted no
• 90% of non-religious voted no

Seems pretty obvious to me that there is a high correlation between people of faith and people who want to preserve the traditional definition of marriage, even in the State of California. I think it’s fair to conclude that it’s a moral issue with most of them. And if there’s one thing that liberals in general, and gays in particular, cannot stand, it’s people who make moral judgments about behavior. It is axiomatic with them that there is no absolute standard of right and wrong.

But the LDS Church, which considers the sanctity of the traditional family unit to be a cornerstone of its faith, urged its members to support Proposition 8, and its members responded. By their own statistics, LDS Church members make up approximately 2% of the population of the State of California. (Bear in mind that’s what the church membership records show, although, just as in Utah, it’s likely that some portion of that number are not active in the faith.) Their financial contributions to the campaign, however, were disproportionately higher – a lot higher – than their population. Now it must be stressed that these contributions came from church members individually, not from the church itself, and that they have every right to do whatever they want to do with their money, within the constraints of whatever election laws may apply. But by so doing, they made themselves an easy target.

In the days before the election, the opponents of Proposition 8 ran one of the most despicable television ads I have ever seen, and I’ve seen some pretty disgusting ones. If you’re curious, you can probably still find it on YouTube. It shows two young men, who are obviously intended to portray Mormon missionaries, knocking at the door of a married lesbian couple's home. When they answer the door, one young man says, “Hi, we’re from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” His partner adds, “We’re here to take away your rights.” The two then force their way into the home, take the wedding bands from the women’s fingers, and go through the place, rummaging through drawers and personal effects until they find their marriage license, which they then tear in half. The text overlay as the two are leaving the house, congratulating one another on how easy it was and wondering what they should ban next, says, “Say NO to a Church taking over your government.”

Two days after the election, more than a thousand protesters (according to an LA Times article) gathered at the LDS Temple in Westwood, CA. Carrying signs that said things like “End Hate,” they screamed epithets at the half-dozen or so men who were visible through the gates. Apparently they couldn't see the irony of their actions.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will state for the record that I am not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, but I am proud to claim many of them as my close friends, and I’ve been married to one for 23 years. Like any group of human beings, they are imperfect. If you look hard enough, you will find those whose lives are not consistent with their stated beliefs. This is a trait they share with most of mankind. But I can state unequivocally that they are not “haters,” unless by “hater” you mean “people who believe there is an absolute standard of right and wrong, are not willing to concede that all systems of belief are morally equal, and are willing to put their money where their faith is.”

Apparently, for many gay activists, that is their definition of “hater,” and “haters” must be destroyed – along with the entire State of Utah. Which begs the obvious question: Who are the real haters here?

Thanks for listening.

P.S.: To my LDS friends: “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.” – Matthew 5:11 & 12.

The Times They Are A-Changing

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can’t be bothered.

“I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.” Thus wrote President-elect Barak Obama in Audacity of Hope.

Two days ago, we witnessed the truth of the first sentence, as people of “vastly different political stripes” came together to elect the most liberal, least experienced, and least known President in the history of the nation. Over the next four years, we will discover how true the second sentence is.

The post-mortem of this election will go on for months, if not years. Volumes will be written about why Obama won and why McCain lost – which voting blocs went which way and why, what campaign mistakes were made by the losing side, and what brilliant strategies contributed to the win. There is no question that Obama ran a brilliant campaign. He is, without a doubt, the most charismatic speaker to hit the political scene in a very long time. He can talk about “hope,” and “change,” and “yes, we can,” and “we can get there,” and create an enormous amount of enthusiasm in his audience without ever specifying exactly what we’re hoping for, what we’re going to change and how, what it is that we can do, and where it is that we’re going.

In this year of the perfect political storm, with the economic meltdown being the final, insurmountable wave that sank the Republican ship, a sufficiently large number of people simply didn’t care about those questions. It was enough that he was handsome, articulate, and charismatic. It was enough that he was different from anyone else in the race. They were like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland who sometimes believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Of course he could attend Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church for twenty years, but not know about his radical anti-American views. Of course he can lower taxes on all but the wealthiest 5%, introduce billions in new government programs, and reduce the federal deficit at the same time. Of course we can achieve energy independence without increasing our own domestic oil production. "Yes, we can!"

None of it mattered in the end. The press was all too happy to let him skate on the inherent contradictions of his message, and those who had already made an emotional decision to support the young, handsome, charismatic, articulate Senator who made them feel good when he spoke simply weren’t interested in digging out the facts for themselves. They rejected the known quantity of John McCain for the "blank screen" of Barak Obama on which they could project their desire that he would somehow magically make things all better. Talk about an audacity of hope!

So now, we will find out the hard way just what kind of President he will be. I've often said that once the ballots are all counted, the American people pretty much get the government they deserve. Thankfully, it looks like the Democrats will not have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, so there will still be a need for compromise in the Obama administration. If Obama is smart enough to surround himself with smart, experienced people – people who will explain to him that America must be governed from the center, not from either political extreme – and if he listens to them, he may have a successful presidency. I hope he is successful, because, for better or for worse, he’s now my President, and for the sake of the country I have to wish him success – because an unsuccessful presidency could cause enormous damage that could take a generation or more to undo.

Thanks for listening.

Nice Guys Finish Last

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can’t be bothered.

It’s the day before the big election, and I’ve reluctantly concluded that Barak Obama will win tomorrow’s election. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am. Big money and big media have succeeded in selling the American electorate on the most liberal candidate to run for the Presidency in my lifetime. However, I do not believe that the Democrats will achieve a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, which means that Obama’s agenda will not be totally unchecked.

Incredibly, I don’t think that most people who are voting for Obama really understand what he stands for. And it isn’t because he didn’t tell us – it’s that it wasn’t widely reported by the media, and because people didn’t want to hear it. I predict that buyer’s remorse will set in fairly quickly when people see what his agenda really is, and that he will not be elected to a second term.

Still, unless the Senate’s Republican minority finds the cojones to stand up for their values, great damage can be done in the next four years, particularly in the nation’s judiciary, and especially in the two (at least) Supreme Court positions that Obama will get to fill in the next four years. Therein lies the greatest danger to our freedoms.

The most tragic thing to us conservatives is that John McCain could have won this, but he chose not to go after Obama where he was most vulnerable until it was too late. Certainly his campaign advisors have to bear a large portion of the blame, but ultimately the blame has to fall on McCain himself. Personally, I believe that McCain was too much of a nice guy to win this election.

John McCain still adheres to the “old school” of Senate behavior: the one where personal honor is important, and personal attacks are beneath you. Where respect is shown to your opponent, no matter who your opponent is or how radical his views. I believe that he would rather lose an election than violate those principles of behavior he believes in…and I believe that, given what he’s been through in his life, he doesn’t view a lost election as the worst thing that could happen to him.

The Democrats, on the other hand, care about power, and don’t care what they have to do to achieve and retain it. They will maintain that black is white and up is down, if that’s what it takes to get back in power. They would rather lose in Iraq and see that country in chaos than see George W. Bush get credit for anything. We’ve seen that pattern of behavior time and time again over the last few years from Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, John Murtha, Ted Kennedy, and the other usual suspects.

I happen to agree with Bill O’Reilly when he said that McCain should have said, “Look, I’m going to appoint Rudy Giuliani as Attorney General, and Mitt Romney as Treasury Secretary, if they’ll accept the positions, and I’m going to go after every CEO and every government official that was responsible for this economic chaos. If you elect me, I will go after the people that caused this, and I will hold them accountable for their actions.” Had he done that, he probably would have won. Had he gone after Obama’s judgment for his relationships with Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayres, Tony Rezko, and others, much earlier on in the campaign, it could have made a difference.

There are so many things that McCain could have done, but didn’t do, that could have made the difference in the election. It’s nearly inexplicable that he didn’t do any of them. I’m sure that there will be many post-mortem books written about where McCain went wrong. Perhaps there will be some lessons learned that will make a difference in 2012. But this time around, the nice guy is going to finish – well, not last…that honor will go to one of the fringe candidates that our country still allows to be on the ballot – but not first either, and that the only place that counts.

Thanks for listening.

The Passing of (Another) American Hero

Greetings from the Left Coast!

Almost a year ago, in early November of 2007, I wrote about the passing of Retired Brigadier General Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay on August 6, 1945, when it dropped a uranium bomb on Hiroshima. I called him an American hero. About a week ago, I learned of the passing of another American hero. This one lived a few doors down from me for several years, and yet I never really knew the story that lay behind the automobile license plate that said, “Pearl Harbor Survivor.” To me, he was a nice old man (a few decades older than me, anyway) in flannel shirts and tan slacks. I knew him as a retired carpet layer – an occupation he amazingly continued in until the age of seventy-two. But Ralph Verne Nichols was there at the beginning of what Paul Tibbets helped to end.

What I now know came to me through his son, Chief Petty Officer Russ Nichols, who at the time of this writing is stationed at Naval Station Bremerton, Washington. Russ was kind enough to share a few pages of his father’s journal, in which Verne described firsthand what he saw and felt on that December morning nearly sixty-seven years ago.

After graduating from USC with a Bachelor of Science degree and a Doctorate of Law (Verne was a bright young man – he had been valedictorian of his high school graduating class as well), he joined the Navy. He arrived in Pearl Harbor in late November, 1941, aboard the battleship U.S.S. California. Upon arrival, he was supposed to transfer to the U.S.S. Enterprise, but she was still at sea.

Students of World War II will recall that Pearl’s aircraft carriers were out on maneuvers, and were delayed by a storm, which is why they were not in port on the morning of December 7. Had it not been for that storm, and had they been in port, the outcome of the war in the Pacific could have been quite different. Admiral Nagumo held back his final wave of attack aircraft because he didn’t know where the American carriers were, and wanted to keep his aircraft in reserve to protect his own fleet in case they were discovered. The attack mission they didn’t fly was supposed to put Pearl Harbor’s shipyards out of commission. But because the mission didn’t fly, the shipyards survived, and several hundred American heroes working around the clock were able to get severely damaged ships back in action – all because a storm delayed the return of America’s carrier fleet.

But since the Enterprise wasn’t around, Verne’s orders were changed, and he transferred to the U.S.S. Curtiss, a seaplane tender. The Curtiss normally berthed just ahead of all the battleships on battleship row, but on the night of December 6, she was returning from a day at sea towing targets for American planes, and the recognition signals had been changed while she was away. In the resulting confusion, she ended up moored at Pearl City just behind the battleship U.S.S. Utah, a little farther away from the main action.

Here’s what happened the next morning, in his own words:

“I had just finished my sunny-side up eggs and was looking out our bomb bay doors when I saw a series of explosions from Ford Island and then as the sound reached me came the explosions. I was absolutely spell-bound and horrified as I saw the explosions ripping apart hangers and blowing up planes and gasoline. In just a few moments the general quarters alarm was sounded. My general quarters station was in the radio shack which was the highest point top-side near where the Captain and Navigator were located. As green as I was I knew we were being attacked and as I went up the last steel ladder before reaching the radio shack I could see the Japanese zeros with their bullets ricocheting off our steel bulkheads. Everyone was so caught off guard that at first no one was found who had the key to the ammunition locker but soon someone took a steel bar and forced the lock. A little later our 50 caliber machine guns went into action. Then suddenly there was a salvo from our forward five inch guns. We found out almost immediately that we had hit one of the midget Japanese submarines that had found its way thru the nets into the harbor. They had fired a torpedo just missing our ship. We were all stunned as we saw the effects of the initial phase of the sneak attack, as all the battleships alongside battleship row had been hit and were burning fiercely. Our communications line with the transmitter room aboard ship became inoperative and Chief Petty Officer Stout signaled me silently to take them a message. I had just delivered the message when an explosion ripped through the transmitter room and I was hurled back against the bulkhead. A 500 pound bomb (delayed action) had just gone down thru three decks and had exploded next to the compartment where the transmitter room was located. One of the men in the transmitter room, whom I had only known about two weeks, ran with one foot cleaved off by a falling transmitter to the main deck aft seeking medical aid. During the confusion that followed he died from loss of blood before anyone could help him. I dazedly made my way back to the radio shack amid all the smoke, confusion and strafing bullets. I had no sooner dogged the door when another loud explosion rocked the ship. At first we thought it was another bomb but soon the Captain was on the loud speaker and said: “A Japanese plane has just struck amidships.” Evidently this was one of the Japanese kami-kaze planes and he took many of my shipmates with him. The wreckage was about 40 feet from the radio shack.”

The bomb that bounced Verne off the bulkhead had exploded between the 150,000 gallons of aviation gas they had aboard, and their two ammunition holds. Had the bomb exploded a little bit to one side or the other, I suspect that Verne's story would have ended there, and you wouldn’t be reading this right now. Verne’s journal doesn’t go into much detail about his back injury – he does say that it gave him intermittent trouble all the time he was in the service, and concedes that “to this day it hurts where I was blown against the bulkhead.” The fact is that it made it very painful and difficult for him to sit for any length of time. So, in case you were wondering why a guy with a law degree was laying carpet – that’s why. It would have been too painful to try to sit in a courtroom, so he went back to the career that had paid for his college education.

Like countless soldiers and sailors before and since, Verne made a deal with God that December morning: “if he would see me thru this holocaust that I would try my best for the remainder of my life to serve him.” No one on this earth keeps a record of how many who make that deal actually keep their end of the bargain. Verne kept his - that was obvious to anyone who knew him at all. And that in itself may tell you all you really need to know about what kind of man he was.

After receiving an Honorable Discharge at the end of the war, Verne did what most veterans did: he came home, and raised a family. I never heard him talk about what he had seen and experienced. I’ve noticed that most men who have gone through what Verne went through tend not to talk much about it. When he passed away on October 9 at the age of 90, he had helped to raise seven children, who had raised twenty-four grandchildren, who were busy raising twenty-six great-grandchildren. Not many of us will get to see that many of our descendants, and I’m sure he considered himself blessed. And if you had asked him, I believe he would have told you that his family was more important than anything he did in the war.

According to an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, cited by Tom Bevan in his blog post at Real Clear Politics two years ago on the 65th anniversary of the attack, there were at that time only 5,000 remaining of the 70,000 sailors and soldiers who were stationed at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. There are fewer every day. One day soon, they will all be gone, and we will all be the poorer for their passing.

Last Friday, October 17, 2008, one of them was laid to rest at Floral Hills Cemetery, Lynnwood, Washington. I was not in attendance, but my wife led the music at his memorial service, so I got her firsthand report. Aside from his substantial family, there were not a lot of others there…but when you’re 90 years old, you tend not to have much of a peer group left, and he had spent the last fifteen years of his life living in Southern California. Still, one can’t help but feel that, by rights, the world should have taken greater note of the passing of another hero.

Some have called them America's "greatest generation." Certainly they were a great generation. But there have been many, and, God willing, there will be many more. What Verne's generation did, after saving the Free World, was to make sure that the next generation carried the seeds of its own greatness, which it could then pass on to the generation after that - so that when the time arose for great deeds again, as it inevitably does, there will again be those who can and will rise to the occasion. Look around yourself today, and you'll see them.

So I’d like to thank Chief Petty Officer Russ Nichols, United States Navy, for sharing such an intimate glimpse into his father’s life, and I’d like to thank Russ for his own service to our country. And I would like to thank Verne Nichols not just for his Naval service, but for something even more significant: I’d like to thank him for the example he set, over the last six decades and change, for his seven children, and twenty-four grandchildren, and twenty-six great-grandchildren, and for anyone else who was paying attention. And I’d like to say that I’m sincerely sorry that I didn’t take the time to get to know him better when I had the chance.

Thanks for listening.

Potpourri

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can’t be bothered.

This is tax day for those of us who filed an extension back in April. As I write out the check and address the envelope, I can’t help but think of Senator Obama’s promise that he only wants to raise taxes on the top 5% of Americans – the rest of us will get a tax cut, and that’s only fair…isn’t it? Yes, class warfare is alive and well in America, and the Democrats love to fan the flames. Of course the whole thing is bogus. There are any number of good articles out there that debunk the claim that Obama will give tax cuts to 95% of us. If you care to look for them, you’ll find them. I don’t have the energy to recap them all here. Not after writing the check I have to write.

Of course, now that I’ve filed, in a few more months I’ll get my $1,200 “stimulus” check. In fact, if the Democrats get their way, there may be even more “stimulus” money coming back to me. What I’d really like to know, though, is how much it cost the government to take my money in, and then process a check back to me. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to just let me keep more of it in the first place?

And when did the New York Times jump the shark? Its reportage has become so predictable, it has become such a caricature of itself, that I think it’s clear that it has. It’s only a question of how far back we have to go to find the moment. Speaking of predictable reportage, how about this: The NYT review of the movie American Carol, which is a satire of Michael Moore’s movies, says that “Cheap shots and mean spirits abound,” and that the movie contains “satirical bigotry.” On the other hand, Bill Maher’s new movie, Religulous, which is guaranteed to offend just about any person of faith, is “extremely funny in a similarly [referring to the movie Borat by the same director] irreverent, offhanded way.” But, after all, “The majority of Americans…embrace some form of blind faith,” so "The majority of his subjects are easy targets."

This attitude is nothing new, of course, nor is it confined to the New York Times. Frankly, the last straw that caused me to cancel my subscription to the Seattle Times was the blatantly anti-religious bias that was evident in the way the paper covered The Passion of the Christ compared to The Last Temptation of Christ.

But that’s OK…the beauty of a free market is that people get to vote with their pocketbooks, and newspapers like the New York Times are losing circulation like crazy: down 3.8% in the 6 months ending this past March. Of course, it would never occur to them that their editorial bias has anything to do with declining circulation. They’re convinced that they are on the side of the angels, and they’re being victimized by alternative media like the Internet.

Oh, and did you hear the news about the new porn flick that stars a Barak Obama look-alike? HA! Who am I kidding? Nobody could get away with making a movie like that – howls of outrage would ring from sea to shining sea, they would be castigated by every news outlet in the world, they would be called racist, they would probably be sued by somebody like moveon.org, we’d never hear the end of it! It would be a national and international outrage! No, Larry Flynt’s porn movie, which reportedly has already been shot, stars a Sarah Palin look-alike! And we all know that’s just all in good fun. Why, it’s in the fine old American tradition of political satire, and who could possibly object to that? Double standard? What double standard?

Thanks for listening.

Enough With the Timelines!

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can’t be bothered.

Today, it’s thought-experiment time. Imagine this scene: It’s halftime at the Seahawks game. It’s a close game – the Seahawks got off to a slow start, but they now appear to be firmly in control and have a small lead. Just before the second half kickoff, Mike Holmgren announces that, come 4:00, whether the game is over or not, the team is going to hit the showers. He doesn’t think the fans have the patience to stay in the stands any longer, it just costs too darned much to keep the lights on in the stadium, and, besides, the players need to get home to their families.

Can you imagine the outcry? Yet this is exactly the strategy Barak Obama wants to follow in Iraq. We heard it again from Joe Biden in the VP debate: President Obama will have all our combat troops out of Iraq in 16 months.

This should be intuitively obvious, but apparently it isn’t, so I’ll say it anyway: it is stupid, and unforgivably irresponsible, to tell your enemy when you’re planning to quit fighting. So either they’re lying about the 16 month timeline, or they’re stupid and irresponsible. Either way, it’s a problem.

Even if – and I’m not saying this is the case – you believe your ally isn’t stepping up, and you need to give them a deadline so they’ll get serious about accepting responsibility for their own security, you do that in private. You don’t publicize it to the world (which, by definition, includes your enemies), and you don’t formalize it in legislation. Twist all the arms you want behind the scenes, but when you’re in the middle of a war, the only acceptable outcome is victory, and the only acceptable message to send to your enemy is that you won’t stop until you’ve achieved it.

I don’t care whether you think we should be there in the first place. I don’t care whether you think that the intelligence was manipulated to convince us to go to war. It’s pointless to debate that anymore, because it doesn’t matter at this point! We’re there. What matters is to win – and, yes, I can define what winning means. Winning means getting Iraq to the point where their elected government is in firm control of their own armed forces and police, and is capable of using the armed forces and police to protect their own borders and their own people. It means having a free, stable, and independent Iraq that continues to be our ally in the war on terror.

And, yes, we can get there. We are getting there. General Petraeus has done a brilliant job in turning the situation around. All it takes now is not quitting.

Thanks for listening.

Words Mean Something

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can’t be bothered.

A couple of weeks ago, in my local newspaper, I spotted an AP story headlined, “Obama criticizes Palin on earmarks.” In that story, Senator Obama is quoted as saying: “Come on! I mean, words mean something, you can’t just make stuff up.”

After I picked myself up off the floor and cleaned up the coffee I had just spewed all over my breakfast table, I started thinking about this. And after having the phrase rattling around in my head for a couple of weeks, I’m compelled to ask the good senator a couple of questions:

In 2004, right after you were elected to the United States Senate, you said, “I can unequivocally say I will not be running for national office in four years, and my entire focus is making sure that I’m the best possible senator on behalf of the people of Illinois.” Did those words mean something?

Four days later, a reporter asked why you had “ruled out” a 2008 run for the Presidency. You replied, “I am a believer in knowing what you’re doing when you apply for a job…and I think that if I were to seriously consider running on a national ticket, I would essentially have to start now, before having served a day in the Senate. There might be some people who are comfortable with doing that, but I’m not one of those people.” Did those words mean something?

In January of 2007, you told Larry King, “I’m a big believer in public financing of campaigns.” In November of 2007, you told the Midwest Democracy Network, “If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.” In April, 2008, you told FOX News that you would be “very interested in pursuing public financing, because I think not every candidate is going to be able to do what I’ve done in this campaign and I think it’s important to think about future campaigns.” Did any of those words mean something?

In March, 2008, you said of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother…” What, exactly, did those words mean?

Those 130 times that you voted “present” instead of “yea” or “nay” in the Illinois State Senate – on bills like the one that wanted to prevent adult book/video stores and strip clubs from being within 1,000 feet of schools and churches, or the one that wanted to prosecute students as adults if they fire guns on school grounds, or that much-discussed bill that had to do with partial-birth abortion – what, exactly did that word mean?

I guess that words mean something only as long as they’re not your words. Although I did find some words that I'm sure do mean something. They're from your book Audacity of Hope where you said, "I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them." Over the next few months, we'll all get to see what those words mean.

Thanks for listening. No, not you, Barak, because I know you’re not.

Let's Play Rhetorical Question!

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those out there who just can’t be bothered.

The problem with most discussions on the economy is what software engineers call the “M.E.G.O.” factor – which stands for “My Eyes Glaze Over.” So today’s episode of Rhetorical Question will focus on some basic economic concepts in a fun and informative fashion in the hope that we can impart some nuggets of wisdom while avoiding the “M.E.G.O.” factor. Ready? Here we go:

Q: Where do jobs come from?

A: I'll assume for this discussion that you’re asking about private-sector jobs. Because, after all, if it wasn’t for the private sector, there wouldn’t be any tax revenue to pay for public sector jobs. So the answer is that private-sector jobs are created when (1) businesses are formed, or (2) when businesses grow.

Q: How do new businesses get started?

A: Suppose you have an idea for a new widget. You’re convinced that this is the greatest innovation since pre-sliced bread, so you decide to quit your job and build it in your garage. You’ve just created a new business…but very soon you’re going to discover several things:

1. You no longer have a job (you quit it, remember?). That means until you get some widgets to sell, you’re going to have to support yourself from your savings, or take out another mortgage on your house, or run up your credit cards, or borrow money from someone, or all of the above.
2. In the beginning, most of the money you get from selling your widgets will go into the production of more widgets. It will take longer than you expected before you will actually be able to pay yourself as much as you were making in the job you quit and still fund the business of making more widgets. Meanwhile, if you borrowed money, the people you borrowed it from are going to expect you to pay it back. With interest.
3. You’re also going to discover that you’re working harder, and longer hours, than you ever have before in your life, while you’re still making less money. Some people, when they realize this, say, “to hell with this!” and go back to working for someone else. That’s one reason why so many new businesses fail.
4. You may find someone who is willing to fund your business in exchange for part ownership. This might seem attractive, or even necessary to survival. But it also means that you’re going to have to share the profits of your widget business, and when Amalgamated Widgets, Inc., finally realizes that your widgets are better than theirs and buys your business, a big chunk of that money is going to go to the person who put up the money. So, if at all possible, you’ll probably keep busting your backside to build your business without giving up any ownership.
5. If you’re lucky, or really good, or both, you will eventually get to the point where you can hire other people to do most of the hard work and still take out enough money to live comfortably yourself. You’re now creating jobs. And, by the way, small businesses create far more jobs in this country than big corporations do.

Q: What causes a business to grow and hire more people?

A: A business will hire more people when there is so much demand for its products and/or services that it cannot fulfill that demand without hiring more people. If the business can make more money without hiring more people, it will. In fact, if the business can make more money with fewer people, it will. To put it another way, businesses will only hire more people when hiring more people will lead to the business making more money.

Q: My God! Isn’t that greedy and cold-hearted?

A: Didn’t you read through the thought experiment above? If we’re talking about your widget business, would you hire people if it wouldn’t result in making you more money? Why should you? And why should anyone else have the right to tell you that you have to? In fact, when you hire your first employee, you will probably make less money until the business has ramped up enough as a result of the new hire to cover paying two people. And as you continue to grow, you’ll wrestle with that trade-off every single time you make a hiring decision!

Q: OK, OK, I can see that point if we’re talking about a small businessperson in his garage. But what about the big corporations?

A: What about the big corporations? First of all, most of them are publicly held. That means that ownership, in the form of shares of stock, are freely bought and sold on one of the many stock exchanges in the world. Typically, the shareholders elect a Board of Directors, and the Directors hire (and fire) the top executives of the corporation and decide how much they get paid. And when I say “shareholders,” I’m not talking about the fat-cat investors of a century ago. Today, thousands upon thousands of Americans have their own stock portfolios, and many thousands of others own stock indirectly through pension plans, mutual funds, 401k retirement accounts, etc., etc. So, unless you know absolutely no one who falls into any of these categories, these shareholders, even of the much-reviled “Big Oil Companies,” are your friends and neighbors…and maybe even you yourself. In fact, I recall years ago working for a mid-sized company that was not publicly held, and that strenuously resisted going public because the company president did not want to have to be accountable to “the little old lady in tennis shoes,” as he so picturesquely put it.

A publicly held corporation has one primary goal: to maximize the monetary return to the shareholders. Some companies do that by paying dividends. That means that, at the end of the year, the Board of Directors decides that some portion of the net profit of the company is going to be paid directly to the shareholders in cash – equally divided according to the number of shares each shareholder owns. In other cases, particularly in fast-growing companies, the shareholders expect to make their money by selling their shares at some point in the future for more than they paid for them. This is called a "capital gain."

Corporate executives have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. If a company does things that cause financial harm to that little old lady in tennis shoes, the corporate executives can go to jail. In fact, we’ve passed laws in the last few years that make it far easier than it used to be to criminally prosecute executives for a breach of their fiduciary responsibilities. And you can’t have it both ways: you can’t tell companies that you’re going to send their executives to jail if they don’t look after the best interests of their shareholders, and then in the next breath tell them that their companies are making too much money!

Q: Well, why shouldn’t we at least tax the heck out of these big corporations that are making so much money?

A: If you raise corporate income taxes, will the company end up with more income, or less income?

Q: Less income, I suppose…so what?

A: If a company has less income, are they likely to hire more people or fewer people? (Hint: the answer is “fewer.”) And if the income gets reduced to the point where the shareholders are no longer happy with their return, what’s the likelihood that the company may actually cut jobs in order to get the financials back in shape? (Hint: the answer is “almost a certainty.”) Not to mention the fact that the stock would become less attractive to investors, so the company will have more difficulty raising money to fund any kind of business expansion.

Q: OK, fine! Can we at least raise the capital gains tax?

A: If you tax a particular behavior, will you get more of it, or less of it? (Hint: the answer is “less.”) So it follows that if you raise taxes on investment, you will get less investment. People who have money to invest will look for other things to do with it that will get them a better return. That means less money is available to fund start-up garage-based widget manufacturing companies. That means less money is available to fund more ambitious start-up companies like, say, biotech firms that think they may be able to make the next big cancer-fighting breakthrough. That means less money going into the stock market, which means companies have a more difficult time raising capital, which means less growth. Any way you slice it, it means fewer jobs.

Q: So you're saying it wouldn’t necessarily be smart to elect a President who is committed to raising corporate income taxes and nearly doubling the capital gains tax?

A: Congratulations - we have a winner!

Thanks for playing Rhetorical Question.

Seven Years Ago Today...

…over 3,000 Americans lost their lives in the worst terrorist attacks ever to take place on U.S. soil. I’ll bet that you can remember exactly where you were when you heard the news. I know I can – it’s one of those events that burn themselves into your memory. I’ll never forget it, just as I’ll never forget hearing the news of the Challenger explosion, or the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated.

Take a deep breath, and think back to that day, and how you felt. Think about the climate of fear in the ensuing weeks, as we all waited for the proverbial “other shoe to drop,” sure that there would be additional attacks. Think about how the fear was escalated by the appearance of anthrax powder sent anonymously through the mail. No one knew then that it was, apparently, a case of domestic terrorism – we all believed that it was one more piece of evidence that our nation was under attack by ruthless murderers who hid in the shadows and struck unexpectedly, killing for the sake of killing and for the disruption it caused. Because, in fact, we were.

A lot of revisionist history has been written in the last seven years – but if you were old enough to know what was going on back then, I want you to remember how it all felt. Everyone – everyone – believed that we would be struck again, and soon, and that the possibility of attack with weapons of mass destruction was very, very real.

Imagine now that you were the President of the United States, and that, as the chief executive officer of the country and the commander-in-chief of its military forces, it was your job to try to keep the country safe. What would you have done?

George W. Bush decided that, as a nation, we could no longer afford to stay with our traditional policy of striking back only when we were attacked. He was not willing to risk the possibility that the next attack might kill tens of thousands of Americans by slipping chemical or biological weapons into a municipal water supply, or that America could lose an entire city if the terrorists got their hands on a nuclear weapon. Instead, he made a fundamental decision to change our foreign policy. He declared war on the terrorists, and stated that we were going to go after them.

He has been greatly criticized for making that decision. Many of the nations around the world, who were quick to offer sympathy and condolences to “America the Victim,” were suddenly outraged when we decided that we would no longer be a victim, but would stand up and fight back. There were many reasons for this change of heart. In some cases, it was because our “allies” were literally on the take – remember the Oil for Food scandal? – but I personally believe that much of the outrage arose from embarrassment because we were doing what they were afraid to do. It’s human nature to be angry at someone who makes you look bad.

The Democrats bang the drum over and over and over and over about the “failed policies” of this administration. But have you noticed that they never actually articulate what those failed policies are or exactly why they are failures? Could someone please explain to me what they are? Because he has not failed at the most important task that he set for himself seven years ago: we haven’t been attacked again. And I don’t think it’s because the terrorists don’t want to attack us anymore, do you? We keep hearing about how the President’s policies are creating more terrorists, and making America less safe – yet we haven’t been attacked again these seven years. And it isn't because they aren't trying.

There are those who believe that if we would just be nice to the terrorists, they wouldn’t hate us anymore. There are those who believe that we should negotiate, without preconditions, with nations who support and advocate terrorism, and who praise those who practice it. There are those who believe that terrorist acts are basically criminal actions and should be left to the police and the court systems. There are those who believe that heinous murderers should be accorded the same protections granted to soldiers who are fighting in the uniforms of their countries. Who believe that they should be brought into the country and granted the same Constitutional rights as American citizens. There are those who believe that everything should be left in the hands of the United Nations (perhaps the most laughable idea of all), and that America should never take any unilateral military action.

Ross Perot is famously quoted as saying, in the aftermath of his departure from GM’s Board of Directors, “At General Motors, when they see a snake the first thing they do is form a committee on snakes. At EDS, when we see a snake, we kill it.” That sounds a lot like the debate over what to do about terrorism. Maybe Ross’ viewpoint is due to the fact that he’s another one of those Texas “cowboys,” but it sure sounds like common sense to me.

People who murder innocents for political gain, who coerce women and even the mentally handicapped to wrap themselves in explosives and blow themselves up in public places, who decapitate journalists and film the process, and who torture people who are unlucky enough to be captured rather than killed, are not “insurgents,” they are not “freedom fighters,” they are not even “enemy combatants.” They are the scum of the earth. They are the snakes. They deserve no mercy and no quarter. Like a cancer, they need to be excised from the rest of the civilized world.

Very bright people differ on how likely another terrorist attack is. Matthew Bunn of Harvard presented a mathematical model, published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, that estimates the probability of a nuclear terrorist attack in the next decade to be 29%. Others, such as Graham Allison, the founding dean of Harvard’s modern John F. Kennedy School of Government and author of Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, have argued that the chances are as high as 50%. Can you imagine the effect on our nation – not just of having a city wiped off the map with potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of casualties, but of the ensuing economic and social upheaval that would follow? You think the economic effect of 9/11 was bad?

It’s easy to be a proverbial “armchair quarterback.” It’s easy to criticize someone else’s decisions when the weight of responsibility is not on your shoulders. But I have to ask: if the probability is a mere fraction of what Matthew Bunn or Graham Allison advocate, if it’s just one in ten, or even one in a hundred, of losing an entire city to a terrorist attack in the next ten years, who do you want in charge? The people who want to talk to the snakes and convince them that we’re really nice people so they should be nice to us too? Or the people who want to find the snakes and kill them?

I will never forget where I was, what I was doing, and how I felt seven years ago today. And, God help me, but I don’t think I have it in me to ever forgive either. So, “W,” between now and next January, keep killing those snakes while those of us who have some common sense keep trying to elect someone who feels the same way about them to take over the job.

Thanks for listening.

Double Standard? What Double Standard?

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can’t be bothered.

Once again, the morning newspaper has left me shaking my head. Not really in disbelief, because I’ve seen too much bias in recent years to be particularly surprised at anything I read – it’s more of a “how can they be so blind to what they’re saying” head shake.

The headline, from the Associated Press, was “Palin disclosures put campaign on defensive.” It was all about how the disclosure that Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old unmarried daughter was pregnant was “the latest in a string of disclosures that left the John McCain campaign defending his choice and the thoroughness of the background check of the little-known Alaska governor.”

What were the other disclosures? Well, it seems that she dismissed Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan after she was elected governor in 2006. Not surprisingly, Mr. Monegan wasn’t happy about losing his job. He speculated to a reporter from KTUU in Anchorage that he thought he probably had been dismissed because he resisted pressure from “Palin’s staff and husband” to fire a state trooper who was involved in a “bitter custody battle” with Sarah Palin’s sister after a 2005 divorce. Now, mind you, Palin’s ex-brother-in-law had allegedly fired a Taser at his young stepson and threatened to kill his father-in-law. It is not unreasonable to think that maybe, just maybe, a person who would do those things shouldn’t be carrying around a gun and a badge if the allegations are true. It’s also worth noting that the custody case, and many of the complaints filed against the trooper by Sarah Palin and her husband, predate her election to the governor’s office – when she was still a private citizen.

The result is that the Alaska State Legislature has appointed an investigator to look into the allegations. Sarah Palin’s response to the investigation, if I may be so bold as to paraphrase, was, “Bring it on!” McCain’s campaign has stated publicly that they were aware of the investigation, had looked into it themselves, and were convinced that there was nothing of substance there.

Oh, and the other disturbing disclosure was that Sarah Palin’s husband was arrested for drunken driving 20 years ago. No, I’m not joking. I don’t think they were even married at the time.

So the personal attacks begin. Oh, that’s not the way they’re spinning it – the spin is that the story isn’t about Palin, per se, but about what it tells us about the vetting process (or lack thereof) of the McCain campaign. Bullfeathers. I believe that fair-minded Americans will see this for exactly what it is: a blatant attempt to attack and discredit Sarah Palin. And we will see the attacks increase and escalate, because Sarah Palin represents a huge danger to the Obama campaign, simply because she’s conservative, she’s popular (her approval rating in Alaska is 80%), and she’s a woman.

But if you want to talk about the vetting process, let me just mention that the Democrat Party just nominated a Presidential candidate who:

• Spent 20 years sitting in the congregation of a pastor who is on record as spewing absolutely outrageous and hateful lies about his country, and about white folk, among other things. We’re asked to believe that Obama didn’t actually hear any of those particular sermons, and didn't know what was being said.
• Served on a board of directors with, gave speeches with, and has repeatedly been a guest in the home of unrepentant “radical activist” (read “domestic terrorist”) William Ayres. (He held a 1995 campaign event at Ayres' house, and Ayres and his wife, former terrorist Bernardine Dohrn, were contributors to one of his campaigns.) Mr. Ayres was a member of the Weather Underground in the 1960s and 1970s, and admitted to participating in the bombings of the New York police headquarters in 1970, the U.S. Capitol Building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972, although he was never charged or convicted. And before you start telling me that this is ancient history, let me stress that it is the “unrepentant” part that has us conservatives a little twisted up. As recently as September 11, 2001, the New York Times quoted Ayres as saying that he found “a certain eloquence in bombs," and that he didn't "regret setting the bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Furthermore, he believes that America "is not a just and fair and decent place," and his response to the suggestion that America is a great country is that "it makes me want to puke."
• Has been involved in questionable real estate deals with indicted Chicago real estate developer Tony Rezko.

I could go on, but I think that’s plenty for now. Might I suggest that there’s something wrong with the vetting process of the entire Democrat Party? And with media outlets who are just fine with that, but who dig up the fact that Sarah Palin’s husband had a DUI 20 years ago?

The more I read the newspapers and listen to the “alphabet networks” in this country, the more convinced I am that the only reasonable explanation is the one Bernard Goldberg advances in his book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. (An excellent book, and one that is definitely on the Leftcoast Blues recommended reading list.) As amazing as it may seem, Goldberg is convinced that his former colleagues honestly believe that they represent mainstream American thought. They spend all their time hanging out with people who think the same way they do, going to the same parties, and reading each other’s work. Their belief system is never seriously challenged, because they simply never interact with anyone who doesn’t share it. Consequently, they really don’t believe that they are biased at all – they truly believe that they are moderate in their political thinking, and don’t understand why people accuse them of being otherwise.

They just don’t get it. Unfortunately for them, we do. Which is why newspaper readership continues to decline across the country, and why the major network news shows continue to struggle to maintain their ratings. But by all means, keep up the attacks - they'll do more to help elect McCain and Palin than any positive news coverage could ever do!

Thanks for listening.

Knowing What He Knows Now...He'd Still Prefer to Lose

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at LeftCoastBlues do the heavy thinking on behalf of those who just can’t be bothered.

Everyone who hasn’t been living in a cave for the last week or so knows that Barak Obama has finally decided that maybe he should actually go see this Iraq place that he’s been promising to pull us out of. The press has, of course, been covering his every move. But this morning, as I was reading the morning newspaper, I saw a quote that just about made me spew my morning latte across the breakfast table.

As Obama’s visit to Iraq wrapped up, ABC’s Terry Moran asked, “If you had to do it over again, knowing what you know now, would you support the surge?” Obama immediately answered, “No,” then stuttered a little, then observed that these kind of hypothetical questions were “very difficult.” Well, yeah – because you’ve either got to admit that you were wrong, or say something astoundingly stupid. He opted for the latter.

Let’s recap for a moment, in case you’ve forgotten the time line:

• In January, 2007, the United States Senate unanimously confirmed General David Petraeus as the new Commander of the Multi-National Force in Iraq. Barak Obama was one of those who voted in favor of his confirmation. During those hearings, General Petraeus spoke very candidly about the planned troop surge and about the resources he was going to need to actually accomplish the job he had taken on – with the blessing of Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Ted Kennedy, and Joe Biden, among others.
• The ink was barely dry on General Petraeus’ official orders when the Democrats began opposing the surge. Obama stated, on MSNBC (January 10, 2007), “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”
• In March, April, and May of 2007 the Democrats told us repeatedly that the surge had failed – even though it wouldn’t reach its full strength until sometime in July. Harry Reid went so far as to say publicly that the war was lost.
• In July, 2007, just as the surge was finally reaching full strength, Obama stated on the Today show, “My assessment is that the surge has not worked and we will not see a different report eight weeks from now.” A few days later, campaigning in New Hampshire, he said, “Here’s what we know. The surge has not worked.”
• By last September, it was obvious that the surge was working, and we were making serious progress in Iraq. As time drew near for General Petraeus’ September briefing to Congress, Democrats started desperately trying to spin the situation, culminating in Senator Dick Durbin’s mind-boggling statement, “By carefully manipulating the statistics, the Bush-Petraeus report will try to persuade us that the violence in Iraq is decreasing and thus the surge is working. Even if the figures were right, the conclusion is wrong.” (Italics added.)
• November, 2007 – two months after General Petraeus told Congress that the surge was working, Obama again stated that the surge was actually making the situation in Iraq worse.
• Today, July 22, 2008, it is crystal clear to anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty that the surge has worked. Al Qaeda is on the run. The Iraqi people finally feel secure enough to cooperate with coalition forces, and that’s made all the difference in the world. The Iraqi army is stepping up. The troops are starting to come home. The Iraqi government is feeling secure enough to actually play a little hardball with the US in terms of what kind of long term deal we should have there. By the way, Obama’s campaign team re-worked his Web site last weekend to remove his criticism of the surge. His new plan for Iraq, while still critical of the Bush Administration’s approach, really doesn’t sound that different from it. Despite his continued reference to a 16-month timeline, his plan now states that “The removal of our troops will be responsible and phased, directed by military commanders on the ground and done in consultation with the Iraqi government…a residual force will remain in Iraq and in the region to conduct targeted counter-terrorism missions against al Qaeda in Iraq and to protect American diplomatic and civilian personnel.” (Italics added.) That, I suppose, is just another example of "change you can believe in."

I’m frankly having trouble figuring out if Obama really knows where he stands. He has said repeatedly that he would listen to his “commanders on the ground.” Yet while he acknowledged today that “There’s no doubt that General Petraeus does not want a timetable…I think he wants maximum flexibility to be able to do what he believes needs to be done inside of Iraq,” he also said (again with the characteristic stammering that seems to occur whenever someone bumps him off his script) that deferring to whatever the commanders on the ground say would not be doing his job as commander in chief. Now, personally, when we’re in the middle of a war, if we have a commander in chief who has never served in the military, let alone led troops in combat, I hope to God that he does listen to and follow the advice of his commanders on the ground. Who else should he be taking advice from? Nancy Pelosi?

As we grow nearer to the Presidential election, the Democrats are faced with their biggest foreign policy nightmare: President Bush’s plan is working, and we are winning the war in Iraq. They don’t know what to do about it, so they’re hoping that the economy gets worse so that people will be focused on that instead of remembering that for the last five or six years, the Democrat party has been doing everything it possibly could to get us to declare defeat and go home when it is now obvious to any fair-minded person that the war was indeed winnable…because we’re winning it. Which has to make you wonder how much sooner we could have reached this place if we’d had the support of both political parties all along.

But as you prepare to cast your vote, just remember – even knowing what he knows now, Barak Obama would still have opposed what we now know was a winning strategy. I’m having a tough time understanding how that’s different from saying that he’d rather we had lost.

Thanks for listening.

We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is Us!

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at LeftCoastBlues do the heavy thinking for those who just can’t be bothered.

In my last post, I presented my case that the current sky-high gas prices aren’t the fault of the oil companies, and aren’t the fault of the speculators, and promised to tell you whose fault it is. Then I promptly left town for a week. Then it took me a week to find my desk again when I returned. But here we are, ready to reveal the big secret.

Ready? Got a mirror handy? Go look in the mirror, and you’ll see whose fault it is. Yep, it’s our fault…but maybe not for the reasons you think. It’s not our fault because we didn’t conserve enough. It’s not our fault because we insisted on driving our SUVs, or didn’t take public transportation frequently enough. No, it’s our fault for believing our politicians when they tell us that there is such a thing as a free lunch, and then not holding them accountable when it becomes obvious that they’ve lied to us.

We are the only industrialized nation on the planet that has voluntarily placed a large percentage of our own natural energy resources off-limits. For the last ten years or so, we’ve bought the idea that we didn’t need to increase our own domestic oil production, and we didn’t need to build more refineries, and somehow things would magically work out with those alternative energy sources we’ve been pursuing.

What has it got us? Well, $5/gallon gasoline, for one thing. Far greater dependence on imported oil, for another. Oh, and the price of corn is now going through the roof, because so much of it is being consumed to make ethanol. Guess what that does to food prices? Like a good steak now and then? Ever hear the phrase “corn-fed beef?” Ever read the ingredients label on the stuff you eat every day and see how many items contain corn syrup or some other corn-derived product? Not to mention your morning corn flakes. Just be thankful that corn tortillas aren’t your primary staple, like they are for a lot of people in the world who are now finding it difficult to buy enough corn to make them. Yep, the Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.

In April of 2006, when the price of oil was around $70/barrel, Nancy Pelosi issued a press release that said, “Democrats have a plan to lower gas prices…Our plan would empower the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on price gouging to help bring down skyrocketing gas prices, increase production of alternative fuels, and rescind the billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies, tax breaks, and royalty relief given to big oil and gas companies.”

You can read the full press release at http://www.house.gov/pelosi/press/releases/April06/GasPrices.html. I would encourage you to do just that, and think hard about what you’re reading. Back when that press release was issued, gas prices had soared to a national average of $2.90/gallon. And Nancy Pelosi could tell you exactly why: It was the fault of the evil George Bush and the “Republican Rubber Stamp Congress,” who continued to give subsidies to the evil oil companies, who were reaping “gigantic profits” and paying their executives “astronomical compensation.” It was “just the latest example of the wealthy few benefiting at the expense of hard-working Americans under the Bush Administration.” But the Democrats had a plan. If we would just put them in power, they would bring down the skyrocketing gas prices.

That fall, the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress. How did that work out? Well, the price of oil has roughly doubled on the world market, and $2.90/gallon now looks like the good old days. What happened to the plan? Guess cracking down on price gouging and increasing production of alternative fuels didn’t quite work the way it was intended. And, of course, according to Nancy Pelosi, it’s still the fault of the evil George Bush and the evil oil companies. One thing is for certain, according to the Democrats: we can’t “drill our way out” of our current situation, because any new oil fields we found would take at least ten years to bring on line. Frankly, that tells me two things: (1) we should have started drilling ten years ago, and the people who prevented us from doing that should be thrown the heck out of office, and (2) we’ll be in a worse mess ten years from now if we don’t start drilling today.

Yet, despite their abject failure to do anything constructive that would actually have a positive effect on energy prices, we now have Democrats in Congress talking seriously about nationalizing the oil industry! Why, in the name of all that’s rational, would we want the government running the oil industry? Because they did so well with Amtrak and the Postal Service? You’ve got to be kidding me…but they’re not – they’re as serious as a heart attack.

A recent Rasmussen poll taken earlier this month found that Congress’ approval rating stood at 9%. That’s the lowest approval rating ever. President Bush’s approval rating – which the media delights in telling us is abysmal – is three times higher. Yet, if historical trends hold true, this fall 80 - 90% of the sitting members of the House and Senate who seek re-election will be re-elected – and that’s what amazes me.

Psychologists use the term “cognitive dissonance” to describe the stress caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. There must be a lot of cognitive dissonance going around if Congress as a whole has a 9% approval rating, yet individual members of Congress have about a 90% chance of being re-elected.

Folks, it’s time to stop measuring the performance of our Senators and Representatives by how many “earmarks” they can successfully bury in legislation that will bring us our share of the pork, and start holding them accountable for what they actually do about important issues. Because at the end of the day – and I’m speaking specifically of the first Tuesday in November here – the American people pretty much end up with the government they deserve.

In the immortal words of Walt Kelly (the creator of Pogo): “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Thanks for listening.

P.S.: Interestingly enough, the price of oil has actually declined more than $10/barrel over the last week. Why? Well, it wasn’t because of anything that Nancy Pelosi – or anyone else in Congress – did. It declined because of concerns that slowing economic growth in the United States, and reduced consumption because of high prices, would reduce future demand for oil. And when demand drops, assuming that supply stays constant, prices fall. That, as we stated previously, is the way a free market works.