News on the Blog

Having invested in pMachine, a real blogging engine with a lot of great features, I'm working on moving the whole blog over to proprietary servers and making it far more powerful and interractive.

The new blog is up and running well now. If the script works you should be automatically forwarded there. If not, click on - www.diablog.us

Hope to see you there.

Dave

The Turning Point

We're about to enter one of the most exciting periods in the history of our nation. Having won a significant victory in this election, President Bush has a reshuffling of his cabinet on the table. Some appointees are tired out and some have become liabilities, and Bush has a chance to set a new tone for the next four years and also lay the groundwork for the election of 2008. Who he picks to fill these slots and which jobs he gives to which people will tell us a great deal about Bush, his true allegiances and the future of the Republican Party. In addition, Bush's new cabinet choices will be a test of how real the neocon conspiracy which so many liberals talk about really is.

Powell, Ridge and Ashcroft are likely to be leaving and a few others may as well - quite possibly even Rumsfeld. There's a large field of interested applicants for their jobs and we all need to watch Bush's choices very easily because they will tell us an awful lot. Among the contenders are Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Bernie Kerik, Condoleeza Rice, John Danforth, Fred Thompson, John Warner, Jeb Bush and a variety of lesser figures. Some of these job seekers are likely presidential or vice presidential candidates in the next election and what Bush does with them will tell us who he wants to succeed him.

Giuliani is the key figure. He worked really, really hard for Bush in the last election so he deserves and will almost certainly get some job. But Giuliani is about as liberal a Republican as you can find, at least on social issues. He's totally out of step with the neocons, but of course, that also makes him one of the most appealing Republicans to the general population. The jobs he's best qualified for are Attorney General and Director of Homeland Security, both of which are likely to be available. Which job he gets will say everything about the Bush administration and the neocons. If they put him in as Director of Homeland Security that's the worst sign. That means they don't really trust him and don't want to advance his career. It's a position which can be made a scapegoat if there's another terrorist attack and it's mostly an administrative job with limited public exposure. If the neocons are the extremists many claim them to be then this would be where they put him. He's best qualified to be Attorney General and this is the most logical place to put him. It's an important position with a high public profile, but doesn't appear to be a promise of future advancement. It's a position from which he could run for president, but doesn't give him the absolute endorsement of the current administration. This position would say positive things about the neocons, since it has a lot of influence over social policy. If Giuliani gets Secretary of State that's a full-out endorsement for the presidency in 2008. Because he's not terribly well qualified it's a way for him to get foreign policy experience, and it's the most public and most prominent position available. If Giuliani is Secretary of State two months from now then he's our next Repugblican president, because that's the best way to give him an edge running against Hillary Clinton who's the almost certain Democratic candidate. This would be a brilliant move by the administration and would definitively prove that they are devoted to the good of the country and their party more than the neocon agenda.

McCain is an interesting figure in the whole mix. He's the second best contender for the Republican nomination in 2008, but he's less popular with the administration than Giuliani is and didn't work as hard for Bush in the election. The logical choice for him is Secretary of Defense. If he gets this slot then he's in position to run for president if he does a good job, or could take a fall for the administration and no one there would cry over him. He's a viable choice for Homeland Security and unlikely for Secretary of State or Attorney General. If they give a good slot to Giuliani they ought to give a job to McCain as well, and it ought to be a lesser position. If they really hate him they'll offer him Homeland Security. If they want to let him hang himself it will be Secretary of Defense, though that might be a launching point for his presidential campaign.

Condoleeza Rice is the potential wildcard. She's a long shot for the presidency in 2008 but number one on the Vice Presidential candidate list. They need to put her in a more prominent position because she deserves it and because she's a black woman. And she's very competent. The logical choice for her would be Secretary of State, but Homeland Security and Defense would be viable as well. She's the only major figure who wouldn't be taking a major hit if she got Homeland Security, and although she's got military expertise her lack of actual military service counts against her for Secretary of Defense. What she gets says nothing about the neocon agenda, but it says alot about Republican plans for 2008. The more prominent she is the more worried they are about Hillary.

Danforth and Warner are the easy fallback figures for the administration and they're compatible with the neocons. If they get prominent positions - likely Attorney General and Secretary of Defense respectively, then that's a sign the neocons are going against pragmatism and towards ideology in their choices. That's a bad sign for the Republican party in 2008 and probably not great for the next 4 years in America either. Jeb Bush is another wild card who has probably earned a slot for winning Florida for his brother, but isn't terribly well qualified for anything, so his likely job would be down the list, like Housing or Education. Fred Thompson is another long shot who really deserves an administration job and would make an excellent VP choice for 2008 because he's from the south and very personable. He's qualified for Attorney General, but it would be a bit of a surprise to see him there.

Here's the line-up I'd like to see:

Secretary of State: Rudy Giuliani
Attorney General: Fred Thompson
Secretary of Defense: John McCain
Director of Homeland Security: Condoleeza Rice (or staying as Nat Sec Advisor)
Secretary of Housing: Jeb Bush
Surgeon General: Ron Paul (just for fun)
Republican Ticket in 2008: Giuliani/Rice (winning)

Here's the line-up I expect to see:

Secretary of State: Condoleeza Rice
Attorney General: Rudy Giuliani
Secretary of Defense: John Warner
Director of Homeland Security: Bernie Kerik
Secretary of Housing: Jeb Bush
Secretary of Something Unimportant: John McCain
Republican Line-Up in 2008: A Mystery

Here's the neocon lineup we need to worry about:

Secretary of State: Condoleeza Rice
Attorney General: John Danforth
Secretary of Defense: Donald Rumsfeld
Director of Homeland Security: Rudy Giuliani
Secretary of Whatever: Jeb Bush
Nothing: John McCain
Republican Line-Up in 2008: Something bizarre and scary

So there you have it. As a side note I have to mention that after researching the bios of the candidates and seeing their pictures Danforth is the youngest looking 68 year old I've ever seen and Thompson is one of the oldest looking 62 year olds I've ever seen. At 60 Giuliani is also much younger than I realized, which means he has more political life in him than I had feared, though he does have past health issues, which is always a problem for a presidential candidate.

In my opinion, moving Giuliani to a prominent position in the administration is essential if the Republicans want to stop Hillary Clinton in 2008, and a ticket of Giuliani/Rice in 2008 would be truly formidable. So we'll see if Bush and his advisors have enough common sense to override ideology and make the right appointments.

Dave

Why Johnny Can't Add

It may be government schools, or it might be because they tend to favor logic over emotion, but I've noticed recently that liberals as a group seem not to be able to do basic math. Here are three examples.

While wandering around other blogs I recently visited a frothy, sarcastic liberal blog called Jesus' General where there was a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth and the remarkable assertion that the Republicans had tried to keep 'brown' (their term for ethnic voters) out of the polls by various means. Here's where their math fails. In every election since the Reagan administration the Republican party has seen modest gains in the ethnic vote among both blacks and hispanics, but especially among hispanics. They have gone from getting tiny percentages of these groups to actually winning the hispanic vote in many states in the recently concluded election. This is a clear, observable and inevitable trend and it's accelerating. In 2000 Bush had the largest increase in the ethnic vote of any Republican candidate. In the 2004 election initial figures show an even larger increase, gaining just over 10% among hispanics and just under 10% among blacks. This isn't surprising, as Bush has more hispanics and blacks in his administration than any previous president, many of them in very prominent positions, and despite the slurs of the left the Republican party is ethnically blind in a way which is very attractive to upwardly mobile minority members. Believe me, Republican campaign strategists are very aware of this. What this means is that not only would the Republicans not want to discourage ethnic voting, but sensibly they ought to want to encourage it. This is an area where they are gaining new voters and the democrats are losing them. That means that when minorities vote as a group the Republicans are gaining voters they didn't have in the previous election. With a minority voting population around 40% that 10% shift is enough to win a close election with breathing room. Hey, it's about 4% which is about what Bush won by. Do the math.

I also recently had a little dialog with the fellow who runs a hardcore leftist blog called The Old Hippie. We were mostly discussing unemployment and he kept ranting at me "do the research" and pointing me to sites run by bizarre socialist loonies and semi-literate Bush-bashers, none of whom seemed to be the kind of primary sources one actually uses for research. Remember, I'm an economic historian by training, so I know the difference between research and opinion and also know how to do basic math. So when he claimed that Bush had presided over the worst 4 years of job loss since Hoover and that the percentage job loss in the last 4 years was even higher than in Hoover's administration, even if the total numbe wasn't, I had to destroy him with math. I went to one of my favorite sources, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which keeps unemployment records and other useful employment related data going back about 100 years. I've already previously used BLS stats to point out that unemployment under Bush has been well below average for the last 30 years. In response to the Hippie's claim I can now inform you that good stats and good math inform us that not only has Bush not lost more jobs than Hoover, but he's had less unemployment growth than most presidents since the depression, including his father, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. As for the claim that we lost a higher percentage of jobs in the past 4 years than in the Hoover administration, it's just laughable. 14% of the population lost their jobs under Hoover compared to 1.7% under Bush. Only with liberal math could 1.7% be higher than 14%. BTW, the Hippie stopped emailing me after being confronted with actual research.

Finally, the most timely example is the recent period of electoral limbo while John Kerry tried to figure out how you could count 135,000 provisional ballots - which would presumably not be 100% for Kerry - and gain 136,000 votes to turn around the election in Ohio. That this took them over night and that they were considering taking even longer tells you everything you need to know about Liberal math. The details tell you even more about their mathematical ineptitude. Apparently the reason they clung to this fantasy for so long was that despite the fact that election officials in Ohio had told them they had a near exact count on the provisional ballots, the Kerry campaign was basing their hopes on the theory that there were many more provisional ballots because they had calculated a total of 250,000 by taking provisional ballots from one district and extrapolating from that number to find a total for the entire state, which they did by just multiplying the count for that district by the total number of voting districts without regard to the relative population of the districts. That's just bad procedure and you can't get good results from bad math and bad methods. Of course, even with that many ballots Kerry would have needed almost 90% of the votes to cover his 135,000 vote deficit, an outcome so improbable it should have never even been considered.

In all three of these examples, the liberals appear to have reached their conclusions based on the outcome they wanted really badly or expected because of their preconceptions, without actually doing the math which would point out how abyssmally wrong they are. The problem for liberals is that you can't browbeat or intimidate or frighten a number into agreeing with you. Numbers just sit there and are right and wrong, and there's really only one way to run a formula and get the right answer no matter how emotional you are about it.

Dave

Rule or Ruin

So, the actual election is over, and Bush has clearly won by a margin which is small, but comfortable enough to avoid the contention of last election. Or so it would seem...

However, the hubris that drives John Kerry makes him unwilling to concede the election and willing to drag it out for as much as two weeks over the miscellaneous votes in Ohio. This despite the fact that it is a near mathematical impossibility for the provisional and absentee ballots to bring him in ahead of Bush even if he got almost every single vote on those ballots - very unlikely just on the basis of probability alone and even more unlikely given that many are military ballots which will go overwhelmingly to Bush.

What this tells me is that Kerry doesn't care about the people or the welfare of the country. His ego and lust for power must be fed no matter what the expense and no matter what the damage he does to the nation, to the electoral process and to his own party's reputation. This doesn't really surprise me at all, but then this is largely why I couldn't vote for the fatuous toad.

Dave

Dancing in the Streets

It's election day. Anything could happen. Let's assume the worst and the election is so close that it could go either way with a court ruling or the vote of a few legislators. What happens when the result of that is another legal but marginal victory for Bush?

Based on the rhetoric, the attitudes and the inflamed emotions of democrats, is it unrealistic to prepare for widespread rioting and civil unrest? Neolibs may hate war, but they don't necessarily hate violence, so long as it's directed against the United States or 'The Man' or the person on whom they've focused all their fear and loony paranoid fantasies for four years. They're depserate for a win because in many ways this election is a final referrendum on their entire political philosophy. If they win liberal socialism lives on. If they lose it goes onto the dustheap of history along with its old pal communism.

We've already seen some signs of the desperation. The massive get out the vote effort, the increasingly shrill tone of the rhetoric, the forged documents, the rumor campaigns, the pure scare tactics and today the massive efforts at election fraud from college students voting twice in New Hampshire to bogus ballots in Pennsylvania to vanishing poll locations and electioneering by officials right here in Texas. They're pulling out all the stops and taking advantage of the fact that the republicans have at least some scruples and don't like to get their hands dirty. Republicans prefer to buy elections. Democrats like to steal them.

But what if it doesn't work. For the mass of democrat extremists this seems to be a make or break election. They either win now or they give up on the political process, blame it all on a conspiracy and claim the system disenfranchised them. The next step is rioting in the streets, looting and burning down schools and libraries. These are people who are ruled by fear. They want to capitulate to terrorists and the UN and every bully on the block because they're afraid to take a stand for anything. They like to pass the buck and pass the blame. Responsibility is an dikrty word and they've been too long without a government mommy putting the teat in their mouths. They're on the brink, and I'm afraid that once the election is over and their lawyers can't steal it back for them, they're going to crack and explode in violence all over the nation.

At base the extreme Neolibs really aren't very mature people. Their view of the world is childlike. They see it as full of mysteries and secrets and generally hostile - something too complex for them to understand and therefore only to be feared. They're like kids who see a glittery ball and that's all they want and all they can think of. If someone takes that ball away a tantrum is inevitable.

I think that if Bush wins the election a certain amount of violence is inevitable - some rioting on college campuses, a few beatings, some looting - but there may be even larger ripples. I could see it leading to a split in the democrat party when the liberals who failed to get Kerry elected and become the target for blame from the Neolib extremists and the two groups go their separate ways. I had always thought this would happen in the Republican party first, but with this election I see more volatility and fear among the liberals.

I think the republican response to a loss would be much different. Republicans aren't driven as much by fear, the party is more accepting of diversity and certainly more flexible. With a loss their may be some lawsuits and a lot of angry rhetoric, but there won't be riots of entrepreneurs and suited executives in the streets. They're the people who do the work to keep the country going and their natural response will be to get to work on figuring out why they lost and making sure it doesn't happen next time. Plus, by all counts they'll still be running the country from the house and senate and most of the governors mansions, so it's much less of a last hope for them.

Dave

The Company They Keep

It's not a big observation, but over the weekend, while keeping tabs on the campaign, something struck me.

Bush's rabid opponents paint him as an extremist with views that are out of the main stream. They say he's driving a wedge between the parties and some sort of neocon ideologue. After all, the democrats are supposed to be the party of inclusion, right? They're the 'big tent' party where everyone is welcome, right?

Well, that's not the case if you judge by how the campaigns have been going. Bush has surrounded himself with happy, supportive moderates of substantial stature. These are people who don't agree with him at all on certain key issues, but who still believe he's the better leader for the country. They aren't just paying lip service, they're out there day after day making speech upon speech with considerable enthusiasm. You have to take Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain pretty seriously. They're the leading lights of moderate politics in America today and they're 100% behind Bush. As for big tents, Bush has prominent moderates crossing party lines and supporting him, like Zell Miller and Ed Koch. They're democrats, but they put the good of the country ahead of slavish party loyalty.

As for Kerry, who has he got out campaigning for him? Well, mostly hired flacks and other ultra liberals. The big names of his party are significantly absent. They don't want to be tainted with the brush of ultraliberalism. He did manage to get Bill Clinton to come out for a couple of appearances, but Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton and other semi-moderate democrats are pointedly staying home. The best he can do is some appearances by the increasingly crazed and anti-American Jimmy Carter. And his tent certainly doesn't include any Republicans. Even the anti-war and Bush-hating Republicans are staying as far away from him as possible. Kerry's tent just keeps getting smaller, filled with nothng but bomb-throwing ultraleft diehards and paid-off yesmen.

When you want to throw around claims of extremism and exclusion, just look at who supports each of the candidates. The spectrum supporting Bush is truly broad. Kerry's supporters are hard core, but that core rests far away from the middle of the road. Perhaps the truly scary implication is what this will mean if Kerry wins, because then the forces of extremism and socialism will have the key to the doors of the executive branch. Not something to look forward to.

Dave

Help is on the way!

In these last days of the presidential campaign, John Kerry has taken to wrapping up his speeches with the rousing catch-phrase "Help is on the way!" This choice of slogans suggests that Kerry is either completely out of touch with reality or drinking too deeply from the well of his own rhetoric and actually believing some of the silliness in his position papers.

Consider what exactly John Kerry is going to save us from.

Is it the perils of unemployment? Unlikely with historically low unemployment sitting at 5.4 percent, 1.4 points lower than the average for the last 30 years. Kerry talks about how Bush lost us 1.9 million jobs, but the truth is that while we may have lost that many jobs in the industrial sector we've gained substantially more than that in other areas and have an overall net gain in employment over the last 4 years.

Perhaps he plans to save us from the dangers of terrorism. That should be easy to do anyway, since the war in Iraq has already drawn most of the terrorists to that battle and resulted in no major terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11. Not sure what Kerry could to to improve on that situation. Perhaps pull us out of Iraq so the terrorists have more time and freedom to figure out ways to bring their fight to US soil.

Maybe Kerry wants to save us from a depressed economy. I know I'm suffering pretty hard with my stock portfolio up almost 30% overall in the past year and interest rates still remarkably low. The only weak point in the economy is the high gas prices and resulting inflation, and I can't begin to imagine how Kerry can fix that and neither can he judging from his utter lack of specific proposals to deal with the problem and his plans to cut back on domestic oil production.

I guess he could be planning to save us from the bloated deficit with his multi-trillion dollar national health insurance program. He might at least get some mileage there since big numbers scare people and most of them don't realize that the current deficit is relatively low in proportion to the Gross Domestic Product and that the GDP is growing at an extraordinary rate. Yes, Bush has spent a lot more than we'd like on all sorts of programs, but because of the rate at which the GDP is growing the proportional growth in tax revenues will eventually offset the growth in the deficit. This is the same phenomenon which erased Clinton's deficit spending with no effort on his part.

I know he wants to protect us from difficult decision making situations. The stress is just too much for us. He wants to make sure that our money continues to go to Social Security where it earns no meaningful return and insures us a pathetic living as paupers when we retire - assuming it even still exists at that point. We certainly can't be trusted to manage and invest even a portion of that money so that we've got something meaningful to fall back on in retirement.

But thank god that help is on the way. Kerry's bringing it with one government hand in our pockets and the other force feeding us what it thinks we need. Personally I'd much prefer that he leave me the hell alone and let me help myself. At least that way I know someone who has my actual interests at heart will be on the job.

Dave

How to Pick a President

On the very eve of the election which some are overdramatizing as "the most important election of our times", I have to reflect on why i find myself willing to support Bush with all of his imperfections and unable to warm to Kerry at all.

In a general way I feel that I hold to a fairly liberal perspective on social issues and am more conservative on fiscal issues. That's the position of an old-style, Teddy Roosevelt Republican, and to some extent the Libertarian position as well. Based on that I had assumed that I'd agree with John Kerry on most of the social issues and agree with Bush mainly on economic issues.

So, I decided to compare my positions on the issues with those of the two major party candidates as stated on their websites and in position papers and speeches - I also threw in Michael Badnarik's positions as well just for fun. Here are the results:

                               Bush       Kerry     Badnarik  Me

School Choice                  For        Against   For       For

Comprehensive Tax Cuts         For        Against   For       For

Gun Waiting Period             Against    For       Against   Against

Privatize Social Security      For        Against   For       For

War in Iraq                    For        Against*  Against   For

Patriot Act                    For        For*      Against   Against

National Health Care           Against    For       Against   Against

US Troops Under UN Command     Against    For       Against   Against

Kyoto Accords                  Against    For       Against   Against

Oil Drilling in Alaska         For        Against   For       For

Partial Birth Abortion         Against    For       For       Against

Stem Cell Research             Against    For       For       For

Prayer in Schools              For        Against   Against   Against

Gay Marriage Ban               For        Against   Against   Against

Hate Crimes Law                Against    For       Against   Against

Increase Minimum Wage          Against    For       Against   Against

(* on these issues Kerry has taken positions both for and against, so I chose the position his record seems to suggest he actually holds)

As I see it these are the 14 issues which are either most important or at least of concern to the most people in America. Naturally my positions on the issues are the only ones which any rational, pragmatic person could hold.

I was surprised to find that on all but three of the issues I was basically in agreement with Bush. Naturally, those were all social issues. I was also surprised to find Kerry on the absolute wrong side of so many social issues. Even on one where I sort of agree with him he's somewhat off base. He's all out for gay marriage, I'm in favor of leaving it up to the states. That's not exactly the same position, though we both oppose a federal ban.

When looked at as a group Kerry's positions form a pretty coherent whole. If it takes power away from the people and gives it to government he's all for it. Groups and numbers mean more to him than individuals, and he's willing to weaken the nation to serve his agenda. Bush may have some questionable, downright creepy positions (like supporting the Patriot Act), but more often than not he's on the right track, even when it's for the wrong reasons. On the whole he's at least trying to empower individuals more than government, even if he hasn't been terribly successful at it so far. Badnarik's even closer, of course, but still off on a couple of issues - especially the entrenched Libertarian isolationist/pacifist position.

So, Kerry does actually have positions, despite accusations that he's a waffler. The problem is that his positions on most issues, especially the important ones, are just unacceptable. Bush is weak on performance, but his heart is mostly in the right place. Given that, I really have to vote for Bush because he at least offers some hope, while even Kerry's as yet unfulfilled promises are promises of tyrrany and oppression. If Bush does what he promises the country will benefit. If Kerry gets into office and is at all successful it will be a disaster.

Really sort of a simple choice.

Dave

Be an Informed Voter

Anyone who goes to the polls and votes without knowing what the candidates believe in is doing a disservice to their country and their community. Sometimes it's hard - well, it's always remarkably difficult - to figure out where candidates actually stand on the issue just from listening to them speak or debate or from their ads on TV. Half of what they say is confusing or contradictory and half the issues you may care about are never even mentioned.

This means that responsible voters need to go out and seek the information they need to make a meaningful choice. One quick and effective way to do that is to look at issue questionaires and ratings from organizations which have queried the candidates on key issues and tabulated the answers. You don't have to agree with the group which asked the questions to benefit from the answers. In fact, sometimes looking at the questions and answers from groups you're opposed to is particularly enlightening.

One nice, easy to access set of issue ratings can be found on the Free Market Foundation's website. They may have questionable allegiances and dubious positions and be rather humorously misnamed, but they do ask the basic questions of all the candidates from local to national races and seem to have gotten a surprisingly high level of response. If you plan to vote - and you'd better - scanning through these ratings can help clarify things for you and rapidly get you basic information especially on those down-ballot races where you've never heard of the candidates. You might also find out some surprising things about what candidates you thought you agreed with actually believe.

The issue questionaire results are at: http://www.freemarket.org/

dave

Liberty Under Attack

If the Patriot Act scared you - and it should have - the same folks who brought you warrantless searches and monitoring all of your phone and data transmissions have another one up their sleeves.

Right now the Senate is considering H.R. 10 which includes provisions for a national ID card (section 2173) and a centralized database (section 3052) in which the government will keep track of all your health, financial and personal information, including such things as your HIV status and how many guns you own. Ultimately it would be a single, centralized repository for all of the information collected by every state and local government entity and many private organizations. So a bureaucrat could easily go through and know an awful lot of personal stuff about you, just in case they felt like putting everyone with HIV in quarantine camps or taking away every gun in every private home in America.

This bill is so bad that Eagle Forum and the ACLU which are on the opposite sides of almost every issue are both opposing it. Apparently both the far right wing and the far left wing agree that privacy is important, not to mention being guaranteed in the constitution.

I urge everyone to send a letter to their representatives, both in the house and the senate to urge them to vote against this dangerous legislation.

A group called The Liberty committee has provided a useful form to send a letter to the appropriate people. To access it just CLICK HERE

You can also phone your representative at their local offices or in Washington. You can get their numbers from their websites which are all linked to from http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.shtml That same site also has an emailing page where you can email any member of congress. The Senate has a similar page at http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm. You can even go direct to House Majority Leader Tom Delay and encourage him to step in and stop this bill. You can call him at 202-225-4000 or send a fax to 202-225-5117. He can also be emailed from http://www.majorityleader.gov/CONTACT.ASP?a=form

It's up to you to take action. They're likely to vote on this in the coming week if it gets out of joint committee, so you need to act now.

When fear and complacency make you surrender your freedoms to the government the enemies of liberty win their greatest victory.

Dave

For Your Amusement...

Most of you are probably coming to this site using the address www.wakeupzombies.com, but apparently I have a compulsive desire to register domain names while there are still some left. So if you like a slightly different look, try some of these:

www.torchofliberty.com
www.elitistpig.com
www.commonsenseaustin.com
www.freenation.us

I'm an inveterate fiddler and I'm not entirely satisfied with any of the domain names I've gotten for this blog so far. I'd like something short and appropriate, but everything catchy seems to have been taken. Eventually I may come up with something as catchy as Instapundit, but until then at least I have plenty of near-great choices to work with.

Dave

Selling Your Issue to the Highest Bidder

Just got news of a unique and amusing political/fundraising effort which I had to share.

Some of you may be aware of the outrageous plans here in Austin - as well other Texas cities - to take already existing, already paid for roads and turn them into toll roads. The plan for Austin is particularly rapacious. They plan to basically take all of our major highways running every direction and turn them into toll roads, making it impossible to go anywhere of any distance without paying a toll.

This plan serves two of our most powerful special interests which are normally on opposite sides of most issues. On the one hand it means 2.2 billion dollars for builders and developers and on the other it pleases the huge anti-growth lobby in Austin who have the pipe dream that it will get everyone out of their cars, onto bikes or into public transport, as well as providing money for their demented fantasy of commuter rail projects. This lets the local politicos take their fill of graft with one hand while stroking their hardcore constituents with the other.

There's a lot of opposition to this from the sensible minority in Austin - it's hard to whirl a cat here and hit anyone with common sense - and the most amusing outlet of this which I've seen to date takes the form of an ebay auction. A unique way to publicize an issue and raise money at the same time. For a brief moment of amusement at local politics take a look at: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=4150&item=2280280577 and place a bid if you feel inspired.

Dave

Sign for the Times


As promised I did a redesign of the Michael Badnarik presidential campaign poster. Not all that exciting, but much more appealing than the version you may have seen on the streets. You can actually read it from more than a few feet away and it looks clearer and more attractive - in my opinion anyway. I especially think that the stylized torch on the 'I' in Badnarik is an improvement over the very crude and busy liberty statue graphic (see the article to the right titled "Badnarik for President..." for the official sign design and my original complaints about it).

If you want to support the campaign and like this sign better than the original, feel free to print it out and paste it up anywhere you like. For printing use the larger version located HERE . With modern printer technology or a trip to Kinkos you can make nice big versions from this graphic which is high enough resolution to be blown up quite a bit.

I'm not absolutely sure of the legal restrictions, but I believe that if you reproduce this sign as I've prepared it and fill in your name in the provided blank both you and the campaign are completely covered.

And vote for Badnarik. Even if he's stuck with the dogmatic Libertarian opposition to the Iraq War he's still better than Bush on almost every other issue and better than Kerry on every possible issue.

Dave

When in Doubt, Go to the Source

When I was in graduate school one thing they hammered into me that actually made sense was that if you want to build a viable thesis you should look to primary sources for your supporting data. That means don't go look it up in a book about the subject, but instead go and find the original documents relating to the subject you are studying and analyze them yourself.

The same principle applies in politics. When you're faced with a difficult issue, don't make your decisions based on what the media or your uncle or some website is telling you. Try to go straight to the source. This may mean filtering through the accessible information sources to find the nuggets of pure fact buried in their stories. Doing this requires a well developed ability to tell real fact from half-truths or selected facts or clever distortions. It may mean going beyond those common news sources and looking for where they get their information and looking at that information in its raw form.

Doing this allows you to form your own opinion, and when challenged you can point to factual sources rather than saying Bill O'Reilly told me this or I read it in the New York Times. It also means that by the time you're done you're likely to understand the issues which concern you a lot better than others around you. Think about it this way. If your house were broken into and you went to court over it, would you call an eyewitness to identify the burglar or call an expert on burglary to explain why burglary is bad?

For example, if you're concerned about the war in Iraq and what it's doing to our soldiers and to the people of Iraq, why rely on what the media or the president or anyone else is telling you? One of our accomplishments in Iraq is that we have the internet up and running there, both for Iraqi citizens and for US Soldiers. Rather than letting Peter Jennings or Sean Hannity tell you how the people of Iraq feel about America or how the soldiers feel about their role in the war, you can go direct to the source and find out for yourself. An excellent resource for this is the web network Blogs of War, which links together sites related to the war from miltary families to serving soldiers to Iraqi expatriats to Iraqis on the ground in Baghdad and elsewhere. It's a mixed bag, but a great way to gain insight into the war which is a lot fresher and more reliable than you'll get from the idiot box. I particularly recommend some of the Iraqi sites like The Messopotamian.


Dave

Voices from Fantasyland

As I do every week, I picked up a copy of the Austin Chronicle yesterday and sat down for a scary journey through the paranoid fantasies and hate-filled ravings of the ultra left. For those of you not from Austin and not familiar with the Chronicle, it's a very popular holdover from the 60s, an underground newspaper gone legit and become one of the cornerstones of the liberal mainstream in a city dominated by 60s relics and neoliberal cause monkeys. It has a huge circulation and probably does as much to legitimize leftwing lunacy as any publication in the US.

Anyone who cares about this country ought to read the Chronicle or a publication like it to get a handle on just how crazy and mired in utter fantasy the far left really is. Every week the Chronicle offers up at least a couple of articles that contain opinions which you wouldn't believe that an educated person could become deluded enough hold much less trumpet proudly in print.

In the past I've had some fun pointing out specific glaring untruths and delusional rants in the Chronicle, but while there were some real howlers in this issue the thing which struck me was one point which I encountered in two articles and in a cartoon of all places. The theme echoing through those grimy pages was astonishment and joy at the fact that some parts of the anti-Bush message were getting out despite the clear right-wing bias of the mainstream media. When I first saw this opinion in a cartoon I thought it might be some sort of clever irony. When I saw it expressed in two articles as well, I knew that the chronicle staff had taken a light-rail trainride through loony land.

Apparently this opinion is held by a lot of people on the far, far left. They seem to believe that the newspapers and television networks are dominated by conservatives who want to keep the "truth" away from the people and are part of some giant conspiratorial coverup and in league with the Bush administration to stop John Kerry from becoming president. The only way you could hold this opinion would be either by never reading a newspaper or watching television news, or by having your own belief set so far to the left that traditional democrats and moderate left wingers are almost indistinguishable from neocons in your eyes. In recent weeks the major news networks have become so outspokenly hostile to Bush and so openly left wing that anyone who could watch them and think they had a right wing bias could only be clinically insane.

That this attitude - really this insanity - exists in the far left is very significant, because these are people who support John Kerry because of who John Kerry is, not just mainstream liberals who have an unreasoning hatred of Bush and support Kerry because he's running against Bush. These people are the engine driving the most aggressive activism on the left, and they drag the unsuspecting moderate liberals along with them for the ride. These are the sowers of madness, the folks who think Michael Moore sold out to Hollywood and that people are crossing the border into Canada to take advantage of their socialized health care, not just their articicially low drug prices.

So, these are the people to fear, and they have a voice and that voice has an outlet in print. Everyone should read the Austin Chronicle, because it's an education in just how far wrong liberalism can go. If people this crazy and out of touch with reality honestly think of John Kerry as one of them, then anyone who retains a touch of sanity should think very hard about picking Kerry as their representative in the White House.

Dave

Even a Stopped Clock...

I know our raving liberal visitors will find this hard to believe, but after viewing the last two debates I've realized that John Kerry is dead right on at least one issue. Since his positions seem almost random and change every few days I guess it's not surprising that he should get something right, even if it's by accident, but it was still a pleasant surprise.

When the issue of religious faith and abortion came up my first reaction was "wow, he admits to being a catholic yet the ultra-reactionary walking corpse in Rome hasn't excommunicated him", but my second reaction was surprise, because after stating his completely insincere religious allegiance he said something remarkably sensible. Rather than saying that he supports abortion because women have the right to control their own bodies or one of the standard liberal takes on the issue, he took the very appealing position that regardless of his personal religious beliefs it's not the job of the government to legislate issues of personal morality or faith.

This is rather out of step with the general democrat effort to meddle as much as possible in peoples personal lives and I don't think it signals a general libertarian trend for Kerry, but it was a bit more sensible than I expected from him. It's the right stand to take on abortion, because science is anything but definite on where life begins and while sensible people may form a consensus on a particular point from conception on, any absolute determination is a matter of faith more than science.

Ultimately issues like abortion, birth control, sexual orientation and other aspects of individual morality and behavior are personal decisions, not the proper domain of government, and they should be left up to individuals, or at the very least to the individual states. This certainly should never be the realm of the federal government.

So Kerry proves the old maxim that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Too bad about the other 22 hours.

Dave

Are You a Neocon?

We've had some visitors recently who have expressed the amusing opinion that I'm a 'neocon', apparently based on the theory that anyone who doesn't think Bush is a complete disaster and who thinks that America ought to retain some level of sovereignty subscribes to the whole littany of loony Neoconservative dogma.

Neoconservatism is a belief in an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy, US sole-superpower domination of world trade and politics and a judeo-christian based policy on a variety of domestic issues. Putting me in that category is pretty laughable, given my opposition to almost everything Neoconservatives believe in, but Neocon has become a swear word among liberals and they love to try to pin it on anyone they don't understand or find threatening.

I'm going to write more on the nature of Neoconservatism eventually, but in the meantime I think you might be entertained by taking a test to see if you might be a dreaded Neocon yourself. The Christian Science Monitor often comes up with some very clever items, despite their religious lunacy, and although their Neocon Quiz is limited to just foreign policy, it's quite enlightening.

You can test your Neocon leanings by going to: CSM Neocon Quiz

Any guesses where your humble bloghost ranked?

The Politics of Driving

Driving around Austin - and I have to drive way too much every day - it seems like everyone has a bumper sticker making some statment from the back of their car. The city is remarkably polarized and full of outspoken folks involved in state government and the university. Everyone has an agenda to flog and they're willing to say it on their bumper.

This has created a great opportunity to observe the relationship between political convictions and driving style. When you see drivers exhibiting certain sorts of behavior you can bet on seeing the matching bumper sticker. Based on this, you can now protect yourself by knowing what to expect based on what you see on the bumpers of the cars around you.

In general politically conservative drivers tend to be lumbering and somewhat overbearing, while liberal drivers are usually timid and indecisive. In my experience the liberals are more annoying and more dangerous, while the conservatives are predictable and slow to react - which I generally prefer in the drivers around me.

When I'm out on the highway all that matters is that I get where I'm going as quickly as possible. Austin traffic is a nightmare, and living some miles from town in my fortified compound, I need every break I can get to speed up my all too frequent trips into town. In this pursuit, the quality of the drivers around me makes a big difference, as what they do can slow me down or even put me in danger, so I keep a close eye on their behavior patterns.

I'm not too worried about the republican sporting a 'W' sticker who's lumbering along in his SUV in the middle lane. It's easy to avoid them, zip around them and get where I want to go. What does scare me is the timid driver who drives at slow speed in the left lane of the highway flashing a random turn signal and sporting a Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker. They're clearly out of their depth, somewhat terrified, and liable to make an unpredictable move in any direction.

In general it's the liberal drivers who seem to be the threat, and they break down into three groups.

The least dangerous are the ones who sport one or two bumper stickers with a clear message. The driver with a single 'No W' bumper sticker is generally a serious, decisive liberal whose only a threat if the hybrid engine on his riceburner gives out.

The most common group are those sporting somewhat less aggressive stickers or ones with more complex messages. They're the ones who are likely to be driving slow in the fast lane, fast in the slow lane, missing their turns and braking suddenly for no reason. They've got stuff on their minds, are a bit frightened by just being on a road dominated by republicans in SUVs, and likely to bolt. When I see someone on the highway with a Bush/Kerry sticker and a "Texas Democrat" sticker I'm not too worried but keep an eye on them. If they've added an issue sticker then they're more of a threat, proportional to the craziness of their sticker.

The ones that really scare me are driving a 1980 VW Golf with the back completely covered with issue stickers, many of them contradictory, incredibly obscure and hideously out of date. You don't usually see these on the highway. They're terrified of highway driving. They may even think that highways are evil since they enable the big polluters like 18-wheelers and SUVs. These drivers are actually at their most dangerous in parking lots and on small streets where they are most often found. They're the ones who start to come out of parking spots, stop when they see you approaching, wait half in and half out of their spots, and then wave you around them, at which point they surge uncontrollably out of the space and ram you in the side. They're so terrified by other vehicles, so sure that the world is out to get them that they can't make a decision or think ahead for more than a few seconds. They're unpredictable, desperate and irrational, and that makes them a hazard to everyone.

I'm still trying to figure out what Wiccan and rock band supporter stickers mean about the drivers of those cars, but for now, when you see the car with "Free Tibet", "Kucinich 2004" and "Visualize World Peace" on the back, take cover.

The Truth They Dare Not Speak

Bush and his minions are reluctantly admitting there were no WMDs in Iraq, and everyone is jumping on it and they're on the defensive and it's a big media issue. To those with some common sense it's just as meaningless now that they admit it as it was when they claimed it in the first place. WMDs were a nice selling point, but with a tyrant like Saddam we shouldn't really need an excuse to impose regime change and free the oppressed people of Iraq.

Given the reality of global politics and the reality of the Bush administration's foreign policy, they really did need a compelling reason to go into Iraq. If it wasn't WMDs - and even if the administration believed they were there, they were never really their primary interest - then what was the reason? The nattering nitwits on the left will rave on that it was all for oil, an argument which even a child who has read a few newspapers would laugh at. We don't need Iraq to get oil, and oil was already coming out of Iraq anyway under the disastrous and corrups oil for food program, plus we're not profitting as a nation from Iraqi oil now that the war is over, nor are our businesses, at least not any more than any one else is. That argument is just silly.

Yet there is a real and compelling reason for going into Iraq and the beauty of it, the reason why Bush has had to defend the WMD claim to the death and walk with tiptoes around exactly what we're doing there and why it's absolutely worth going into Iraq, is a reason which no one who understands or is in a position of power can even dare to speak aloud. The true reason we're in Iraq is so important and so dangerous and such a high stakes play that it could inflame a world war if Bush came right out and stated it.

To see what they're not saying all you have to do is look at a map and remember the last 20 years of history in the Middle East. While you look at the map, consider which two countries we have invaded in the 3 years since the 9/11 attack. What do Iraq and Afghanistan have in common? Only one thing unites them. Afghanistan borders Iran to the east and Iraq borders Iran to the west. By invading those two countries and establishing a military presence in each of them, we have effectively surrounded Iran. Going back to 1980 and looking at the problems in the Middle East, what country comes up again and again as a source of terrorism, as the single most powerful nation antagonistic to the US and the most potentially dangerous nation to our interests in that part of the world? Which country has the largest and most modern army? Which country is an anti-American theocracy run by implacable ideologues? Which country has agents operating against secular governments from India to Egypt? Which country is developing its own Nuclear Bomb (a real WMD)? Which country is sending all the terrorists into Iraq to fight back against our army? The answer to all of those questions is Iran. It's probably the most dangerous nation in the world right now, including North Korea and it's absolutely set on the destruction of the US.

Iran is a tough nut to crack. We don't want to invade Iran. We want to neutralize it, place pressure on it and bring it to under control. How do we do that without invading? We take over the two screwed up but easy to conquer countries bordering it, move troops and cooperative governments in and surround Iran with enemies. That's the truth Bush dare not speak and the real reason we invaded Iraq. Iran is the heart of islamic extremism and Iraq is the key to neutralizing Iran. Don't expect to hear that in a debate, but when you listen to Bush remember that this is the truth which he can never speak and which we have to understand and know that he has in mind throughout his dangerous ventures in the Middle East.

Badnarik for President ... of Mexico?

As a long-time libertarian activist and a supporter (at least in principle) of Michael Badnarik's campaign for President, it pleased me to see that he has signs up all over Austin. But, like what I would guess are many others, I'm quite bewildered by his choice of signage.

The color choice is good - white on a dark blue background is always a winner. His name is clear right there at the top, so that's good too. But after that the signs become rather mystifying. There's a tiny word you can't see below Badnarik and then the next word which really stands out is the Spanish word 'Campagna', which I always thought referred to a rural region or a field, but now in context I'm having to guess means something else like 'is running for President of Mexico'. Since it's the only word besides Badnarik which is large enough to read and it has the central position on the sign, it's got to be important, right?

On seeing this sign, and for the next few dozen times I saw it, I assumed that this was a sign made up to appeal to the hispanic population and that the message "Badnarik Campagna" would have some special meaning to them. I felt somewhat slighted, as I would have liked to see a sign in English, but then I went on and did some more research.

After going to badnarik.org I figured out that the signs aren't actually in Spanish. It turns out that Richard Campagna is Badnarik's pick to run with him for Vice President, so I don't have to head off to Mexico to vote Libertarian. What the sign actually says is:

Michael (too small to read)
Badnarik (nice and big)
Richard (too small to read)
Campagna (almost as big as Badnarik and in the middle of the sign)
Libertarian for President (also too small to read)
plus it has a toll free number and a web address to make it even more crowded

At least my linguistic issues were cleared up by this, but now it becomes a design issue. Why is Campagna just as big on the sign as Badnarik and in the more prominent central position? Why is everything else on the sign so small you can't read it from more than a few feet away? I guess it got me thinking about the sign, but it didn't exactly create a favorable impression. From a distance all you see is the two last names and no indication of what they're doing on the sign. From close up there's further confusion because there's no differentiation between the presidential and vice-presidential candidates. If there's so much information to put on the sign that the first names and the 'Libertarian for President' line have to be made too small to read, then there's too much information on the sign. I wouldn't want to be rude, but Campagna needs to be cut from the sign, and they need to drop Badnarik's first name and maybe go with a bolder, sans-serif typeface. A simple, clear 'Badnarik, Libertarian for President' would do the job - maybe throw the web address on large enough to read too. Sadly, a website is far more relevant than a VP candidate. Clear and simple is always better in these things.

Give me a day or two and I'll follow up with my own design for the sign. Who knows, maybe someone is paying attention.

Dumbing Down the Electorate

With this election, fired up by the perceived injustice of Gore's loss in 2000, the happy minions of elite special intertests are making an unprecedented effort to 'get out the vote'. This is manifested in the media and even on your local streetcorners and at your front door by college students carrying clip boards with voter registration cards, by celebrities all over the talk circuit, by PSAs every few minutes and by special 'rock the vote' functions on the music networks. This is all presented as a great, altruistic, non-partisan effort to get more people to vote so that they'll become part of the political process. This is a good thing, right?

Consider why people don't vote for a second. Most people who don't vote aren't terribly politically oriented and are therefore not likely to have made themselves particularly politically knowlegable. If they can't bring themselves to make even the minimal effort to register, how much time are they likely to spend researching and informing themselves on the candidates or the issues? Most likely the only opinion they have is some vague alliegiance formed by something they heard on TV or some friend's comment, an irrational inclination towards a particular candidate, or the fact that their grandfather voted for Franklin Roosevelt.

People who really care about politics and who know about political issues are already registered and are self-motivated to vote. They may hold to all sorts of different positions, but they have usually given at least a little more than a casual thought to the issues and the process of voting. They have a sense of responsibility to the republic which people who aren't even registered to vote clearly lack.

In general, it is certainly desirable to get more people involved in the political process, but getting people to come out and vote is not the same thing as preparing them to make informed decisions in the voting booth. Just putting a ballot in the hands of an apathetic fool who has no real commitment to the process and no understanding of issues or what the candidates stand for is essentially a means of diluting the voter base and flooding the polls with tractable, ignorant sheep who will vote with the prevailing wind from the media or other even more questionable sources.

Of course, the biggest group of unregistered voters are those who have recently turned 18, a group who by and large are abyssmally uninformed, not yet free of the indoctrination of government schools, and completely unaware of the importance of the electoral process. MTV makes voting sound fun! Ashton Kutcher and the members of Yellowcard think we should vote! Ooh boy, let's go elect someone! No one is more tractable, more gullible or more easily swayed than an 18 year old with a voter registration card. If they see their celebrity idol telling them to register and vote, they do it. If they later see them on a talkshow or in an entertainment magazine telling them who to vote for then they do that too.

Desptie the non-partisan trappings of these 'get out the vote' efforts their real objective is transparent - get uninformed people who are easily swayed and wouldn't normally vote into the polls and direct them to vote for left wing candidates and causes. You don't see voter registration efforts targeting overworked executives and small business owners who may not have the time to get down to the polls and vote. You don't see them going after upwardly mobile, highly-educated immgrant groups. And you certainly don't see them yearning to recruit members of the military for whom voting can be awfully inconvenient. Their targets are young, ignorant and generally inexperienced with the real world - the kind of people who are heavily influenced by the media and are naive enough to swallow the sweet-tasting lies of liberalism and lack the experience or inclination to question the philosophy they are being spoon-fed.

So, when you see a 'get out the vote' PSA remember whose vote they're trying to get out and do what you can to counteract the dumbing down of the electorate. Explain the issues to a handy teenager. Encourage local entrepreneurs to take time off work to go and vote. Remind people that in a democracy majority rule can be disastrous if the country is ruled by a majority of fools and dupes - the majority liberal special interests are desperate to bring to the polls this November.

Surfing Wirelessly in the Boonies!


As I type this I'm sitting in the Cafe 290 in Manor Texas of all places, having had a fine chopped steak and a milkshake, wondering at the miracle of technology. Manor, which can't seem to get itself a grovery store or a public playground and which is still reeling from a fire which burnt the town down in 1954 has free wireless internet in its best known
feeding establishment.

As a Manorite myself I have had to deal with the nightmare of trying to get internet in rural Texas. The cable company wasn't interested, the phone company can barely provide a line I can talk on, and satellite is a joke. I had to get together with a neighbor and put in a T1 to get internet to our neighborhood because cheaper, more consumer-oriented options just weren't available.

We distribute our T1 wirelessly, and apparently we're not the only people to have that idea. A WISP out of Austin called waveforward.com has brought free internet to downtown Manor, and apparently it's already a hit. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, since Austin is the most wired city in America and it's only 20 miles away, but what kind of twisted genius thought that Manor was the next place to debut the power of wireless internet?

It's a good development, but leaves me a bit bemused. There are so many more mundane things which Manor seems to be unable to acquire, yet in this one, esoteric technological area we're ahead of the curve. Go figure.

Do the Iraqis Deserve to be Free?

From: http://shrillblog.blogspot.com/2004/09/wall-street-journal-reporter-farnaz.html#comments
"I asked a 28-year-old engineer if he and his family would participate  in the Iraqi elections since it was the first time Iraqis could to  some degree elect a leadership. His response summed it all: "Go and vote and risk being blown into pieces or followed by the insurgents and murdered for cooperating with the Americans? For what? To practice democracy? Are you joking?"

This sad comment made me reflect on the risks that the people of what's now the United States faced when fighting for their own freedom to participate in self-government. Like the Iraqis we faced a choice between submission to tyrrany and facing danger to win our freedom. Unlike the Iraqis we had little help (well the French made a token appearance) and little guidance and no history of past revolutionary successes to encourage us. Yet with massive US support and a history of free governments around the world to look to for examples, many Iraqis would rather not be bothered to fight for their own freedom. They'd rather submit to the tyrrany of mullahs, the threat of persecution, the terror of bombs and the intimidation of gangsters than take a little risk for a life of freedom.

When America fought back against English oppression the rebels faced the same dangers citizens of Iraq face today. They risked their lives because they believed that the rewards of freedom were worth any risk, even if they were only enjoyed by their orphaned children. Liberty meant something to them and they wanted it enough to die for it. If the Iraqis aren't willing to take a little risk with the US army holding their hands and watching their backs, then perhaps they deserve the future of oppression which their complacency and cowardice earns them.

In this world those without principles or convictions beyond saving their own skin are the weak prey of predators with principles they will fight and die for no matter how abhorent they may be. I may hate the terrorists, but I still respect them more than the common citizens whose innaction allows free reign to terrorist abuse. Until the people embrace freedom as a principle as sacred to them as religious bigotry, nationalism and the lust for power are to the forces of terror, they will live degraded lives of violence and horror with nothing better to look forward to.

If you won't fight for the freedom you ought to be entitled to you end up with all the oppression you deserve.

The Gas Pump Ate My Wallet!

You may have noticed that gas prices are at 'historic' high levels. What that means is that they're super high compared to what we've gotten used to, but not quite as high as they were under Jimmy Carter when prices are adjusted for inflation. Everyone's moaning and whining about how much they're paying. Right now it's an average of an extra $500 per vehicle per year, and that's a shock. It's counterracted the Bush tax cut, it's breaking the back of the working man, it's going to lead to runaway inflation, and so on.

Here's the truth. Gas prices have been artificially low in the US for decades. It's been great for the auto industry and it has helped keep other consumer prices down, but it's also built up hugely false expectations, led to dangerous complacency in a number of industries devastated our balance of trade and cost us a good measure of our economic independence. People in every other country around the world are paying more than twice what we pay for gas and they find a way to live with it. Right now we only see the short term cost, but maybe it's time to look at the long term benefits of higher gas prices and really embrace reality and encourage them to go even higher.

Yes, lower gas prices do save us gas money and let us drive bigger and more expensive cars. They also reduce the prices of most consumer goods which are distributed nationwide by truck. Here's what low gas prices have also done. They've destroyed our domestic oil industry by making it unprofitable to exploit the massive oil resources here in the US. They've destroyed the railroad industry because they make trucking goods cheap enough that trucks can outperform railroads which are by nature a more cost effective and efficient means of transporting goods. They've encouraged stagnation in the auto industry. Better, more efficient engines have been designed, but because gas prices are so low the market demand for them is low, so they aren't being produced with much enthusiasm. As a side effect of this, low gas prices contribute to higher levels of pollution. They increase the tax burden for everyone because high levels of traffic increase maintenance cost for highways. They've encouraged urban sprawl, made urban mass transport impractical and expensive, put us at the economic mercy of terrorist nations in the Middle East, and the list goes on and on. They've even been a large factor in the decline of small farmers because with cheap trucking it's easier to bring in produce from outside of the country or from huge agrobusinesses than to buy from small local producers. Low gas prices are at the root of many of the economic problems we face today.

Yes, high gas prices hit us hard in the wallet. But what's the natural response to an unexpected expense? You look for ways to economize. You don't like paying so much for gas for your Hummer? Go out and buy a smaller car. Go out and buy an electric car. Go out and buy a hybrid car. You might even take a look at public transportation. Did you know that a company called UQM has developed a hybrid engine for your Hummer? But because gas prices have been so low it hadn't been planning to make it available to the public. Higher gas prices change that. Higher gas prices mean that you might soon be able to buy a Hummer which gets better gas mileage than a mid-size sedan does now. Several companies have viable electric cars ready to go to market as well. They've just held off from major distribution because they couldn't compete with regular cars because gas prices have been so low.

With higher gas prices we can reopen our oil fields, cut our trade imbalance, revive the failing railroad industry, give the lazy car companies a kick the right direction and even give small farmers a shot in the arm as regional produce distribution becomes more economically attractive than nationwide trucking of produce. That might even lead to an end for farm subsidies. Every additional cent you pay for gas is an investment in strengthening our economy, improving our environment and making our nation stronger. Plus, higher gas prices mean lower taxes. Fewer drivers and smaller cars reduces wear on the highways. Subsidies and bailouts to railroads, urban transport systems and farmers will become a thing of the past if gas prices go high enough.

Realistically, gas prices around $2 a gallon aren't high enough to cause all these changes quickly. But they're a step on the way to the key breaking point of $3 per gallon. What we really need on top of this increase in gas prices is a whopping big federal gas tax. Don't expect to see such a move from the Bush administration, but a $1 a gallon tax on gas would push the price high enough to bring about immediate change, plus it would put enough revenue into the federal coffers that they could balance the budget and pay for the War in Iraq and maybe even lower our taxes at the same time. Another quarter or so in state taxes would solve state budget problems just as quickly. Conservatively, with a $1 tax on each gallon of gas we'd be looking at over $200 Billion in added revenue for the federal government per year. That's enough money to solve a lot of problems. Here in the State of Texas a quarter a gallon would be at least $4.5 billion for the state each year. That's more than we need to solve our education funding problems.

So, embrace higher gas prices. Write your congressman, write your governor, write the president. Tell them you're ready to see gas at $3 a gallon and the sooner the better. Pay more for gas, stick it to the Arabs and see our economy boom.

What Unemployment?

Apparently one of the big issues the democrats plan to raise in the upcoming presidential election is the George Bush's failure to hold down unemployment, the flight of jobs overseas and the grim prospects for the job market in America during the next few years, presumably a crisis which only a democrat can deal with effectively. If that's their best campaign strategy they're going to be seriously embarassed in November, since the real facts on unemployment are easy for anyone to figure out, and the future of America's job market, while troubling in some ways - bears no resemblance to their dire predictions.

Despite the frantic complaints of the left, soppy Michael Moore films do not make an unemployment problem in America a reality. The numbers speak for themselves. The current rate of unemployment (at the end of February) is 5.6 percent. By no measure could that be considered high unemployment. That's historically low unemployment. The average level of unemployment for the last 30 years is 6.8 percent, so the current unemployment level is about 18% lower than average. High unemployment is numbers like the 9.7% unemployment of the early years of the Reagan administration when there really was a recession. When unemployment gets that high you can genuinely complain about people being out of work.

The lowest unemployment ever gets in the US is about 4%. It's really almost impossible for it to go much lower than that because of the chronic unemployed, people who are either incapable or unwilling to keep a job or seek a job. Any unemployment over that 4% is made up of people who are genuinely unemployed, looking for work, or between jobs. Currently that's about 1.6% of the working population, which means about 3 million people. Unemployment has been historically trending upwards in the last decade or so, because of the growth of the element of the population which changes jobs frequently. In some parts of the country people average less than 9 months at their jobs because they get hired away by another company at a better salary or in a better location. Increasingly, this group who are between jobs for at most a month or two make up the majority of those enemployed who are not part of the chronically unemployed 4%.

The reality is that if you want a job in the US right now, not only is a job available, but you probably have a choice of desirable jobs at a respectable salary. Take a look at the employment section in your local paper. Why are all those job listings there? Ask the Human Resources managers at large companies, at temp agencies or with government offices. They have good jobs at respectable salaries which go listed and unfilled for months at a time. There are certain areas in our economy which cannot find qualified people to do the jobs they are desperate to fill, and I'm not just talking about fast food restaurants. There is a shortage of competent white colar clerical workers in many parts of the country, a desperate shortage of nurses, and great demand in other areas as well. Companies are offering hiring incentives, training programs and taking other desperate measures to try to find workers with the skills they need in almost every sector of the economy.

These facts leave us asking why exactly all these unemployed people the democrats keep talking about don't have a job. The true situation for those who seem to be unemployed for more than a month or two and are actually looking for a job is that they are trained in specialized skills and are unwilling because of pride or unrealistic expectations to take a job which doesn't fit their exact field of expertise. This is an issue for the democrats because a lot of those people are union workers who have lost jobs in heavy industry and are unwilling to look for jobs in other fields even if the pay is roughly equivalent. They are encouraged in this by their unions, which help them file unemployment, give them limited support and resources while they are unemployed and hold out the hope that the union will eventually get them their old job or its equivalent back. What the unions would never admit to them is that our economy and our job market are changing, and that those union workers might have to face up to the reality that their old job doesn't exist and is never coming back. There are still plenty of good jobs out there for them, but they're not the same jobs. They need to bite the bullet and look for work in a new field, even if that requires some additional training, moving to a different part of the country, or changing their lifestyle just a little.

If you really want a job. If you have a family to support. If you feel any sense of responsibility to society. You'll go out and get a job. The jobs are there if you're willing to take them. There's no reason for anyone who wants to work to be unemployed for even a few days. Anyone with a high-school education and some work experience can get at least some sort of job paying well over minimum wage while looking for something more to their taste. If you lost your auto plant job in Flint Michigan, pack your bags, get in your Suburban and get your butt down to the sun belt and work in construction until something better comes along. All it takes is common sense and enough self-respect not to want to live off government handouts.

If the democrats are foolish enough to raise unemployment as an issue in the election and somehow get people to overlook the true statistics, then what do they offer us as an alternative? Kerry, Clinton and their friends would like to have more government control over wages and hiring and firing practices, forcing companies to extend more benefits and keep people employed even when they don't need them. They'd like to adopt a socialized European model with more support for the unemployed, support which encourages those who don't have jobs to stay out of work and not look overly hard for new jobs. The result is that in European countries the unemployment rates are enormously higher than they are here in America, even more jobs go unfilled, more workers have to be imported from outside, more jobs have to be outsourced, and the tax burden on those who do work is enormous. France has 17% unemployment. Germany has unemployment over 25%. Are those the kinds of unemployment numbers the democrats would like to see in the US? In those countries people have learned that if you don't work the government will support you, and for some it's easier to not work and go on the dole than it is to find a job and have all your income taxed away to pay for those who'd rather not work. That really doesn't sound like a better scenario than our current rather low level of unemployment.

You've been Tetted!

Forgive the flippant title, but recent events in Spain have put me in mind of the idiotic MTV show Punk'd where pseudo-celebrities are victimized by practical jokes and then made fun of when they overreact. In this case, however, nations are the wide-eyed victims and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists are the merry pranksters. Though they may live in caves and have a medieval outlook on life, Al Quaeda is savvy enough to learn from history, and in this instance they have looked to the best teachers on how to make fools of the governments of western nations, the Vietnamese.

Most readers may have forgotten all about the Tet Offensive, but back in the Spring of 1968 during the height of the US presidential campaign, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong decided they didn't like the war escalation policies of Lyndon Johnson, so they launched a massive offensive on Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. They expended more military resources than they could afford, took enormous casualties, but they managed to capture 39 out of 44 provincial capitals in South Vietnam and made it look - at least for a week or two - as if the US was on the verge of losing the Vietnam war. All that terriotry was taken back in short order and tactically the NVA and the VC were in a worse position than they had been before the Tet Offensive, but it was an enormous political victory. It made Johnson look like he was failing in the war, and gave a huge boost to democrat candidates challenging him in the primary. So much so that Johnson eventually dropped out of the election rather than face a humiliating defeat. The Vietnamese were politically sharp and knew how fickle American voters could be, so they struck at our soft underbelly, our fear of defeat and embarassment, and through violence tthey changed the course of an American election. Al Quada leaders are no dummies . Many of them were educated in western universities. And what one terroristic regime can do another can duplicate, and so they have done this week in Spain with absolutely brilliance. With the explosion of a few bombs and the loss of a few hundred lives the terrorists managed to topple the moderate, pro-US government of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and bring about the victory of Socialist Party candidate Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero who appears eager to appease the terrorists in any way he can. .

Have no doubt this was a clear victory won by terrorism over the lives of the free people of Spain. Aznar was ahead by a significant margin in the polls and had substantial support from the public, including support for his participation in the efforts to pacify and rebuild Iraq. Spain was America's staunchest ally in this effort, and no doubt that is why they were targeted. As soon as the bombs went off in the Madrid subway all of that began to change. The heretofore brave Spanish people encountered the direct effects of terrorism on a large scale for the first time, and they broke and ran to the arms of socialist demagogues who offered to let them trade some of their freedom for an illusion of safety by bending over backwards to appease the terrorists. Once the election was over Zapatero's first actions were to declare that he was going to withdraw from the coalition in Iraq, striking exactly the blow against America the terrorists wanted. Spain, like France and Germany lost its backbone and in the face of threats decided it was easier to let themselves be ruled by terrorists and their allies than to make hard decisions, risk lives and do the right thing. For them the price of freedom was too high.

This stunning terrorist victory carries with it some frightening implications. Now that Al Quaeda knows that Tetting the weaker coalition nations will work, there's nothing to stop them from trying this tactic again and again. It's election season here in America. John Kerry's campaign seems to offer every incentive to the terrorists to use this tactic against the United States. A well timed blow against the US in the early fall could do the Tet trick again, scaring the voters into devaluing their liberty the way the Spanish did and voting in Kerry and the appeasers, giving the terrorists another victory and effectively putting the US under their thumb through their willing socialist surrogates in the democratic party. .

It's a sobering scenario, but one which I have some hope might backfire. Remember, while the Tet Offensive itself was a short-term political victory, not everyone in America fell for it, and the result of nominating a weak democrat candidate was a Republican victory in the general election. With a Tet strategy there's always the possibility of a backlash, that it will get the people of the target country so pissed off that they grow a backbone and strike out for revenge. This is more likely to happen in countries which have been tested this way in the past. A country like Poland which has already gone through its share of hardship and oppression is unlikely to let terrorists drive it back into a state of subjugation. We can hope that with the lesson of Tet so many years ago and the more recent events of 9/11 the US has also learned the lesson that appeasing the terrorists is never worth the sacrifice, so that when they strike against us our response will be to strike back twice as hard, not to take the Spannish route and and turn to those who are so willing to take away our sovereignty and pay us back with a false sense of security.

The Universal Living Wage Fraud

Around Austin we've been hearing a lot lately about how important it is to have a so-called Universal Living Wage. This is part of a nationwide campaign which is using Austin as a test-market for an effort to get local governments to establish minimum wages within their jurisdictions which exceed the federally mandated minimum of $5.15 an hour.

The theory behind this movement is that the federal minimum wage is too low for anyone to actually live on in many parts of the country, and that a large segment of the population is suffering because of low wages which make it impossible for them to afford basic necessities like food and housing. But is this basic premise correct, and can those pushing this idea even get their math right?

Let's set aside for the time being the questions of whether we should even have a minimum wage and of whether municipal or regional governments ought to be in the business of dictating wages to businesses, and look at the basic flaws in the reasoning behind the Universal Living Wage movement.

If you visit the Universal Living Wage website they give a rundown of the formula for figuring out what the ULW should be in an area, based on rents in that area and the HUD standard that 30% of a person's income should go to housing. For Austin it comes up with a result of about $10.60 an hour, more than double the federal minimum wage. It's a lovely formula, except for the fact that it is based on a completely flawed assumption - really a collection of faulty assumptions.

The underlying conceptual error is that they seem to believe that the minimum wage is all that a large portion of the work force will ever be paid, and that a minimum wage job should provide a good living without requiring any sacrifice from the worker. They assume that the minimum wage is the standard in the workforce - all workers are ever going to earn - rather than an entry-level wage which requires some sacrifice from workers who will likely be motivated to move on to better paying jobs in the future.

This skewed perspective leads to huge errors in how they model the wage requirements of workers. The gigantic, glaring false assumption is that all minimum wage workers live by themselves in an efficiency apartment or larger accomodations, paying exactly the average price in the marketplace. They assume that minimum wage workers are not married, do not live with their family, and can't possibly find ways to reduce their overhead by sharing living space or moving into a less desirable neighborhood.

What they fail to do in looking at their formulas is what actual minimum wage workers have to do - work backwards from their salary to figure out what they earn and what they need to do to live on that salary. Just sticking with the issue of rent on which the ULW formula is based, it's easy to show how a worker can live on minimum wage. His wages are $5.15 an hour, so that's $893 a month. He gets 30% of that, or $268 to spend on rent, based on the HUD formula. According to the statistics used by the ULW folks, that's not enough to rent an apartment - but wait, it's just about right to pay half the rent on an efficiency apartment. So your minimum wage worker has to have a roommate - just like college students and families, they have to save money by sharing living space. That's not a hardship, that's the standard way of life for most of the people in America. In fact, if he goes in with three friends to rent a two bedroom apartment and share rooms, they can bring their rent in well under that $268 a month - not to mention saving on food expenses, travel and other overhead by sharing resources. The combined income of four minimum wage workers is $3572 a month. That's $42,864 a year. If that were the income of a family of four no one would say they were about to be tossed on the street - they might not be rich, but they could certainly live decently.

The next flaw is that in their formula they use the average housing costs for the Austin area. The same skewed perspective applies here. They assume that minimum wage workers will not try to economize and live in less expensive housing. Rather than paying $550 or so to live in a nice new efficiency in north Austin, a smart minimum wage worker is likely to live east of IH35 and maybe somewhat south, easily saving 20% on his rent and bringing it down to $440 or so. Add in the roommate factor and the minimum wage worker ends up spending well under the recommended 30% of his income on housing.

Here's the ironic part. Just with these two economizing measures - standard for a huge portion of the population - the minimum wage worker can probably bring his rent down to about $175 a month. Based on the HUD standard, that suggests that the Universal Living Wage should actually be about $3.36 an hour. Not that I'm suggesting lowering the minimum wage. I don't really think much of the HUD standard. To live decently, even on a budget, you ought to be able to keep housing costs well under 30% of your income. But as I've demonstrated, that has very little to do with the minimum wage. I'm really not sure there's any need to have a minimum wage at all.

The reality of working in the Austin area is that only a very small portion of the workforce is paid the minimum wage. Because of low unemployment and the demand for workers in low-skill jobs, most starting wages are actually higher than the minimum wage or are linked to rapid wage increases to a level around $6-$7 an hour, with the possibility of further advancement, or are specifically targeted at segments of the workforce - like teenagers - who have much lower overhead. Even if the federally mandated minimum wage were lowered or done away with, the marketplace would set a starting wage at or higher than $5.15 an hour.

What the ULW folks need to realize is that a minimum wage job is not a career. It's a starting point, but if it's all you can earn, then you should expect to economize and reduce your expenses while you look for a way to earn a better income. Setting an artificially high base wage will put small businesses at risk, hurt the economy and ultimately put people out of work. Let the market set the wages and let the workers make sensible efforts to economize. Our economy and society will go forward towards prosperity and increased opportunity for all.