Viguerie Speaks

Richard Viguerie, famous proponent of political direct mail, concludes about the future of the GOP:

Moving left would please Democrats, The New York Times and others with vested interests against smaller and constitutional government -- which is why that is against the best interests of the people.

Republicans should realize that when their political opponents and enemies want them to position themselves to the left, it's in their opponents' best interests -- not theirs.

Makes sense to me.

Quote of the Day III

Victor Davis Hanson, writing for the National Review, about the Democrats' odd coalition:

The nexus between those who don’t pay taxes and those who have so much money that they don’t worry about taxes.

That is a nice turn of phrase. Most of us are somewhere in between the poor and the super-rich.

Quote of the Day II

President Barack Obama, speaking at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner about his relationship with the press:

Most of you covered me; all of you voted for me. Apologies to the Fox table.

It's not clear whether (a) the One meant Fox wasn't included in "all of you," or (b) he was outing the Fox folks as secret O supporters.
The article cited is from The Washington Post.

Arias: It's Our Fault

Oscar Arias, President of Costa Rica, said some amazing things at the Summit of the Americas (text here). This was the same meeting where thugs like Chavez and Morales were trashing the U.S. as our new President sat calmly listening.

Arias said most of Latin America's troubles are their own fault. That Latin America started out with the same advantages as Canada and the U.S. but accomplished dramatically less with them. Let me share with you some samples from his speech:

Fifty years ago, Mexico was richer than Portugal. In 1950, a country such as Brazil had a higher per capita income than that of South Korea. Sixty years ago, Honduras had more riches per capita than Singapore, and today Singapore – in something like 35 or 40 years – is a country with $40,000 annual income per person. Well, we Latin Americans did something wrong.

He concludes:

In 1950 each American citizen was four times richer than a Latin American citizen. Today, an American citizen is 10, 15 or 20 times richer than a Latin American. That is not the fault of the United States, it’s our fault.

Yes, the countries of Latin America are responsible for their outcomes. Maybe this can be attributed to the legacy of Iberian (Spanish and Portuguese) colonial culture as opposed to the British colonial culture which became the basis for Canada and the United States. Culture matters, and (warning: non-PC thought ahead) not all cultures are equally useful at achieving societal economic success.

Go read the entire, short text of President Arias' remarks; he gets it.

Quote of the Day

The entertaining Mark Steyn, writing for the Orange County Register, on the future of the Republican Party:

When the going gets tough, you don't, as Gen. Powell advises, "move toward the center." You move the center toward you, as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did.

I do like his style: "Move the center toward you."

I Was First

Victor Davis Hanson, who writes for the National Review Online, has used the Joseph Welch "Have you no sense of decency" phrase in a blog posting about Nancy Pelosi. I want the record to show I used it in that context before he did. My Pelosi posting using that phrase was at 12:30 a.m. on 05/08/09 and his was almost nine hours later at 9:22 a.m. on 05/08/09.

I am certain we came up with this formulation independently.

Pelosi Truth Deficit

We joke about politicians lying anytime their lips are moving. Even so, there should be some sort of penalty for bald-faced fibbing.

Assuming the document described here is legitimate and accurate, it would appear the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi straight out lied about what she knew (about waterboarding) and when she knew it. Someone in the public eye needs to stand up, point a finger, and ask in the famous words of Joseph Welch, "Have you left no sense of decency?"

Nobody bothers to ask this question because the answer is sadly self-evident.

Quote of the Day

Grant Ellis, writing in the American Thinker,

Without an effective strategy against modern leftist political terrorism, America is doomed to a fate called France.

Zut alors! That is a nice turn of phrase.

$5 Per Gallon Gas

President Obama has been pushing auto companies to build cars that get very good fuel mileage. He has been doing this in spite of knowing, as he must, that Americans don't like to drive little, high mileage cars.

Articles, like this one from The Wall Street Journal, often make reference to our widespread dislike for European-style minicars with the comment that they only sell here when gas prices are high. The Journal says:

Unless gasoline prices go to $5 a gallon, Mr. Marchionne (head of Fiat) certainly is not so foolish to believe making and selling teensy eurocars in the U.S. is anybody's route to salvation.

As I read that I had a really unpleasant epiphany. What if Obama is pushing minicars because he plans to double the price of gasoline by imposing really high taxes. By pushing the price of gasoline up to around $5/gallon he can create a continuing interest in little, fuel-efficient cars. At the same time, he can raise enormous tax revenue to help fund universal health care.

According to this government source, we use 390 million gallons of gasoline per day. A tax of $2.50 per gallon would bring the government roughly a billion dollars per day at current consumption levels. Even if consumption was cut in half, we would still be talking about nearly $200 billion. That would pay for a lot of doctor's visits, a lot of prescriptions. This would represent another bold step in the Europeanization of our United States.

Journalism's Decline

Debra J. Saunders writes a thoughtful column for Creator's Syndicate, about the decline of the news business. She reaches many of the same conclusions we've reached here at COTTonLINE. She finishes up:

There are days I wonder if newspaper and network news execs cannot change by broadening their ideological diversity — even to save themselves. They'll keep telling themselves that they are unbiased — up until the end.

Amen, sister.

Quote of the Day

Rich Lowry, writing in The New York Post, about Arlen Specter:

Specter joined the Republican Party in the '60s for opportunistic reasons, and he left it last week for opportunistic reasons.

'Nuff said. Those are the bookends of Arlen Specter's career.

Silly Enemies List

Every now and then our British "cousins" across the pond do something silly. Have you seen this article about the United Kingdom banning 16 people from entering, one of them being radio talk host Michael Savage?

What isn't clear is whether any or all of them had applied for entry, my guess is none of them. Reportedly two of the people on the list are currently in prison; it is hard to imagine either of them showing up at Heathrow anytime soon with passport in hand.

Can you picture how much envy this will engender among the other talk hosts of the right? I can imagine Sean, Rush and others saying, maybe privately, maybe on air, "Dang, why didn't I get included in their list of 'dangerous' individuals? That is great publicity."

I suspect in this great (and diverse) land of ours there are individuals with much more extreme views than Michael Savage. Where are our skinhead leaders, our animal rights extremists, our Weather Underground alumni, our black nationalists including Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright, our ACORN nuts? Our Obama-is-too-moderate moonbats who dream of waterboarding Dick Cheney?

The U.S. has no monopoly on badasses. How did Iranian leader Ahmadinejad, who advocates the elimination of an entire nation, get left off the list? The leaders of the genocide in Darfur? The leaders of violent, drug-involved FARC and Shining Path? The leaders of China, who oppress Tibet? The leaders of the Naxalites in India? The Taliban?

You get the point. Once you start a list like this who you include (and omit) says more about you than about the people on the list. The Brits' list says of them "we're a bit dotty."

More on Multiculturalism

On the 29th of April we wrote about the failure of multiculturalism in Canada. Here is a Times article about the failure of multiculturalism in Britain, specifically in Brixton which is a London neighborhood.

The voluntary segregation in a nominally integrated environment that he describes in Brixton is exactly what I have observed for decades in universities. Universities have made every effort to create a multicultural student group, to the point of setting up (off-the-record) racial quotas with quite different admission standards for each.

Oddly enough, once on campus the heterogeneous student group segregates itself when in those settings where the composition of groups is within student control. In class and other official university settings, students are integrated. Out of class, in the student union or in off-campus housing arranged by the students, resegregation is pretty much the name of the game.

I would walk into a student union (fancy name for cafeteria and recreation building) and see students grouped around tables. Here I see a table of African-American students, there a table of Asian-American students, maybe a table of Hispanic-American students, dotted among several tables of European-Americans (aka "whites").

Dormitories are university-controlled and thus integrated. However, typically when "dormies" form voluntary groups to look for off-campus housing together - rent an apartment or house - those groups are mostly segregated.

My conclusion: the appearance of multiculturalism can be coerced, but true voluntary multiculturalism is probably quite rare.

Pity the Poor Chicken

The Los Angeles Times reports this is International Respect for Chickens Month. Good luck to the poor darned chickens. They are useful in almost as many ways as Al Capp's famous shmoo.

The other DrC and I have observed in our travels around the world that whereas McDonald's is the leading fast food outlet here in the States, it feels like KFC gives McD a very good run for the money overseas. We've seen many KFC in Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, Central and South America.

You might ask "Why?" We answer: the chicken is nobodies sacred bird, nor is it anybodies taboo flesh. And, of course it is cheaper to raise than beef, pork, or lamb. The only people on the planet who don't eat chicken are vegetarians, and only India has a substantial vegetarian population. So...this planet is a tough place to be a chicken.

New Ice Age Feared

National Geographic News reports that the sun is more quiet than it has been in one hundred (100) years, "quiet" in the sense of producing no solar storms. That much is fact. There is also speculation that this could lead to another ice age, of unknown length. They note:

The coldest period of the Little Ice Age, between 1645 and 1715, has been linked to a deep dip in solar storms known as the Maunder Minimum.

Here at COTTonLINE we earlier noted the resemblance of current events to the earlier Maunder Minimum. It is odd how little our current situation resembles global warming; you might want to buy a really good parka.

European Travelers' Guide

If European travel is in your near future, check out this Reuters article about survey results of the best and worst of European major cities. For example, London is the dirtiest, but has the best free things to go see and do, Paris has the best food but is the least friendly - no surprises there. Copenhagen is cleanest, and Brussels is most boring, with Zurich as runner-up. Barcelona has the best architecture, Warsaw has the worst. There is more, go see the article.

I find it interesting that the only major German-speaking city mentioned in the article is Zurich, and that for being quite boring. Surely Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt or Munich would be a most or least something? Perhaps the German cities are not extreme, being "sort of interesting" or "moderately expensive?" Or perhaps the unnamed author of the piece looks at a map of Europe and for whatever reason doesn't imagine traveling to the German speaking countries.

MSM Errors of Omission

Do yourself a favor, read this column by Canadian Andrew Smith, who lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and writes for The Chronicle Herald of Halifax, Nova Scotia. He lists twelve Obama Administration screw-ups that the adulatory mainstream media of both countries have found too distasteful to much mention. Here is a sample:

•Obama abandoned his campaign promise to reform earmarks, signing the omnibus bill which contained 8,816 of them.

I haven't checked out all of his allegations, but they make interesting reading. As regular readers of COTTonLINE know, I do agree with his ultimate conclusion:

There’s a lesson there, though Fox News will be just as well pleased if the impeccably "mainstream" news business remains clueless about it. (snip) And they wonder why the news business has come on hard times.

Hat tip to Lucianne.com for the citation.

Popularity Sags

Less than two weeks ago, on April 21 we wrote that the Rasmussen Presidential Approval Index had dropped to a new low of +2. Today it has dropped to a lower low of +1 since the percentage of voters who Strongly Approve (33%) minus the percentage who Strongly Disapprove (32%) equals the Presidential Approval Index of +1, a new low for President Obama. Here is the relevant Rasmussen Report.

One wonders just how soon this indicator will drop into negative territory? Almost certainly by the end of the second hundred days; that gives us something to which to look forward.

The Republican Future

Noemie Emery writes a very interesting piece on the future direction for the Republican Party, for The Weekly Standard. The point she makes is that the conservative movement and the Republican Party are not one and the same.

Rather, Emery observes that operating in a two party system, the Republican Party is a center-right party which includes, or should, everybody to the right of center in U.S. politics. She holds that while the conservative movement can be as pure and exclusionary as it chooses, the Republican Party should not. Its big tent should include everyone whose views don't fit comfortably in the Democrat Party. That is:

The Republican party is the vehicle for the center-right of the American polity, a group that includes the conservative movement, but is not quite of it, and includes many people who touch the conservative movement with different degrees of intensity, or only lightly, or on only a limited number of points.

I relate to Emery's party model. I agree with the GOP on tough defense and foreign policy, limited government and spending, lower taxes, and tough law enforcement. On the other hand, I agree with the Dems on abortion, secularization of government and the need for government regulation of the marketplace. At this point in our history, I don't think either party represents me on immigration. Both seem to favor amnesty for illegals.

I end up mostly voting GOP because I think defense is the most important thing government does. In other words, I touch the conservative movement in some places, not in others. On balance I'm a Republican, but not entirely a movement conservative.

Understanding Pakistan

On matters military, Ralph Peters who writes for the New York Post is always worth reading. See what Peters has to say about the reluctance shown by the Pakistani army to take on the Taliban within their country. We're asking the Pakistanis to undertake a civil war:

For a big part of the answer, look to our own history. Along the Indus River, 2009 looks worrisomely like 1861 did on the Potomac.

See his example of Col. Robert E. Lee who, when the chips were down, decided to fight on the side of his relatives, friends and neighbors instead of for the nation he had honorably served for decades. If you would understand the dilemma we force Pakistan to face, read Peters.