Placing Blame

The sad shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona is another fallout of one of the least attractive aspects of the 1960s. I speak of the dismantling of the nation's system of mental hospitals.

Let's remember who was at fault: it was an ugly collaboration of the left and right. The left said people had a right to be insane, that it was a natural condition and shouldn't be a cause for incarceration. The right said look at all the money we could save by shutting down these large, costly facilities that warehouse the incurably insane.

Together they closed down the places where the Jared Loughners of this world could be treated and more importantly, we could be kept safe from them. It appears Loughner is another sad case like the shooting at Virginia Tech by Seung-Hui Cho.

As a result of closing mental hospitals we have the insane living on the streets, under bridges and sometimes on college campuses. From time to time one acquires a weapon and does awful things. The fault is ours for letting it happen.

California Going Backwards

Townhall columnist Austin Hill writes of his memories of California when Jerry Brown was Governor the first time: the passage of the famous Proposition 13 limiting property taxes, and Governor Brown's reaction to that proposition then and now. His recollections match mine, I too grew up in the state.

We at COTTonLINE hoped Brown would see the need for change, and move in a helpful direction ala Nixon in China. I guess that was like hoping your average house cat would take up swimming. As Hill reports, it appears Jerry Brown is headed in the direction of creating an unstoppable pressure for increasing property taxes.

My understanding is that his plan may work as follows: when Prop 13 was passed, the state took over funding - out of income and sales tax revenues - a number of functions previously funded by its counties out of property tax revenues. Now a broke state government will stop paying for these functions and dump them back on the shoulders of county governments.

Burdened county governments will do some combination of cutting services and demanding to be allowed to raise property taxes. Faced with diminished services and local pressure, Brown suspects California voters will agree to abrogating some aspects of Proposition 13 so that counties can raise property taxes.

The ugly political undertow in all of this is that most California voters who do not own property vote Democrat. I understand that renters pay property tax indirectly, and that rents are likely to rise. But rising rents are blamed on landlords, rarely on the rising taxes that those landlords pay. County supervisors in California do not run with a party label. When they press the voters for rolling back popular Prop. 13, it will not create bad vibes for the Democrats.

Icy Humor

Andrew Malcolm, writing for the Los Angeles Times, does a real job on our President. This is the place to go for a laugh at Obama's expense.

Malcolm begins with the data floating around about the drop in the number of self-identifying Democrats. Then he makes fun of Obama's explanation for the election results:

The real reason for his political "shellacking" in the Nov. 2 midterm elections, the president explains, is that he did not have a chance to adequately explain administration policies during the 172 trips he took on Air Force One and the 196 trips he took aboard the Marine One helicopter during the 365 days of 2010. The president plans to get out more this year, aides say.

White Flight

Ronald Brownstein, writing in National Journal, reports that the 2010 election saw record numbers of whites voting Republican. Meanwhile Gallup reports finding essentially the same results in their recent polling.

You can spin this finding in several very different ways. Way one: The Democrats have done little to attract white voters, and instead showed a strong bias in favor of minorities. Way two: The Republicans have done little to attract minority voters, and instead showed a strong bias in favor of whites. Way three: Party platforms and ideologies appeal to different groups, it's daddy party vs. mommy party. Way four: Ethnic cleansing in the Democrat Party is driving out the whites (I hope I'm joking). Way five: Minorities don't want to be in a party with lots of whites. Etcetera.

Film Review

A couple of nights ago the other DrC and I watched a film we'd checked out of the local branch of the library. The film, The Other Boleyn Girl, involves the loves of the young Henry VIII.

It stars Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson as Anne and Mary Boleyn, the nieces of a very ambitious and conniving Duke. Henry is played by Eric Bana and it is a young, fit Henry that we see, not the image of Henry normally portrayed.

I frankly had never heard of Mary Boleyn, who if the film is at all accurate, may have borne Henry's only living, albeit illegitimate, son. The film is told mostly from Mary's point of view.

Sister Anne's claims to fame are three: Henry so wanted to marry her that he broke England's bonds with the Roman Catholic church and created the Church of England, she was mother to Queen Elizabeth I, and she was the first queen to be executed - for supposed adultery. Those are substantial accomplishments, although perhaps she would have rather skipped the third.

While an Anglophile, I didn't expect to enjoy the film. I was pleasantly surprised.

First Causes

It is important to understand why people do, or do not do, what society would have them do. In the last 20 years great things have been accomplished in the large cities of this country. What has happened is a large reduction in both crime and life-long reliance on welfare.

These accomplishments are based on overthrowing liberal notions of what causes these social pathologies and adopting instead conservative notions of causation. An article by Heather MacDonald in City Journal lays all of this out in fine fashion, she calls it "restoring the social contract."

Quote of the Day

William Pentland, writing for Forbes, about pollution problems with electric cars:

For countries with dirty power supplies – like India and China – widespread adoption of electric vehicles could lead to more – not less – CO2 emissions compared to widespread adoption of gasoline based vehicles.

That could also happen here in the U.S., where most of the power in large parts of the country is generated by coal-fired plants.

A Silly Arrangement

This CBS News Money Watch article says people who have reverse mortgages must pay property taxes and homeowner's insurance. Failure to do so results in loss of home, income stream, etc.

If this is true, and I have no reason to believe it is not, one very basic question arises. Why aren't reverse mortgages set up to pay the taxes and insurance first and send the homeowners the balance as their remittance? An arrangement like this is so logical that anything else seems almost criminal.

Quote of the Day

Janet Daley, writing for The Telegraph (U.K.), about former Speaker Nancy Pelosi handing over the Speaker's gavel to John Boehner:

She really is a piece of work: unrepentant and self-congratulatory to the end, even in the face of overwhelming repudiation by the voters.

Well said. That's our Nancy.

Black Ops Rising

Max Boot (mental image of a hip boot) writes for RealClearWorld that covert action is once again on the rise. He provides a mostly reasonable one-page history of the ups and downs of the last half-century's black operations.

Recently, he alleges, our covert operators have had a quiet hand in several governmental overthrows, the Stuxnet corruption of the Iranian nuclear program's computers, and the bombings of Iranian nuclear scientists.

In his black ops history, Boot somehow completely leaves out the role of covert warfare in Southeast Asia. Covert action was the basis for the film Apocalypse Now and the reason we have Hmong immigrants in the U.S.

No Surprise

The first rule to follow upon finding yourself in a hole is to stop digging.

This quote is variously attributed to Will Rogers and/or Denis Healey.

We build infrastructure projects in Afghanistan - roads, canals, schools - and the locals don't maintain them. That is the essence of this Washington Post story. My question is why someone thought this was news?

If these projects were things the Afghans wanted or valued, they would have built them without our help. The deterioration is proof that we've been giving them things they don't especially want or care about.

If Afghans don't take care of projects, we should stop providing them. That much seems obvious.

FFOTUS

For those of you who are acronymically challenged, that stands for Frequent Flyer of the United States. It is just possible our President and his staff flew more miles last year than any American who doesn't work as aircrew.

This Los Angeles Times article says he took Air Force One up 172 times, although it is possible some round trips are counted as "2" times, one in each direction. The article reports that the Air Force estimates the costs at $181,757 per flight hour. The article has stats for overseas and domestic business trips, and vacation trips too.

I wish I had a 747 at my disposal, the costs of which were paid by the public. As Mel Brooks said, "It's nice to be king."

Retrospective Film Review

The other DrC and I viewed Casablanca last night, for the nth time. The other DrC doesn't see why people rave over Ingrid Bergman's beauty, a view I don't share. It is a heck of a film in an exotic setting, about which more later, with intrigue, romance, name actors, and a fast pace. Those are the positives.

The negatives? Their back-lot version of French colonial Casablanca doesn't look much like today's Casablanca. Of course 1942 Hollywood didn't look much like today's Hollywood, either.

Another negative, and a more substantial one, is the left-wing bias in the dialog and script. Bogie's character, Rick, is described as having run guns to the Ethiopians and fought on the side of the left-wing loyalists in Spain. The Paul Henried character, Victor Lazlo, is pretty clearly a lefty too. You could conclude that Rick had become a neo-con, a lefty who had been mugged by reality. That is, until Lazlo pulls him back into "the cause."

The cause is never explained and you are encouraged to view it as simply anti-Nazi, except that by the time the film was made in 1942 the German invasion of Russia had already occurred. It is relatively clear that "the cause" was in fact Communism which, after a flirtation with the Nazis during the two years of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, became anti-Nazi as well.

Films like this probably triggered Sen. McCarthy's Communist-hunt through Hollywood. Casablanca and films like it show there was "smoke" and his search for "fire" was not irrational.

It is still a lot of fun, with a lot of great lines, some humor, and a sad love story in a time of war.

Political Humor Alert

James Delingpole, writing in The Telegraph (U.K.) about his new book 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy:

Q. Why did God give liberals annoying, whiny voices?
A. So that even the blind could hate them.

Statistical Science Staggers

I just read a New Yorker article by Jonah Lehrer about the scientific method and problems that keep occurring with drugs, treatments, and social science findings, all such based on things happening at frequencies greater than what would be predicted by chance. To say that I'm gobsmacked is no exaggeration.

This article isn't about politics or foreign affairs or even about interesting and unusual scientific findings - the usual grist of this blog. As such it may not be of interest to most of our readers. I can only say it was of serious interest to me, dealing with questions of the relevance and trustworthiness of the very methodology upon which most of the social science I spent a career doing was based.

At the very least this article and the collection of findings it reflects suggest the need for systematic large-scale replications of all the important findings in pharma and social science. It also suggests the need for a willingness to seek, publish, and invite criticism of tests that find negative results.

Advice for Obama

Economist Gregory Mankiw writes a column of economic advice for President Obama in The New York Times in the form of a letter. The President could do much worse than follow this advice. For example:

Republicans are not terrorists. They are not the enemy. Like you, they love their country, and they want what is best for the American people. They just have a different judgment about what that is.

This article is worth your time.

Barone on Income Inequality

Michael Barone has an article for The Washington Examiner on why income inequality doesn't bother most of us, and who it may bother. He begins:

Income inequality has been increasing, according to standard statistics. Yet most Americans do not seem very perturbed by it.

Talking about our federal tax rates, Barone observes:

Current tax rates mean that the top 1 percent of earners account for 40 percent of federal income tax revenue.

In other words, in a nation of 308 million people, less than three million people pay four out of every ten income tax dollars. How do most of us feel?

I suspect that most Americans would be thrilled to get a 13th month of pay. But they're not seething with envy at those who are better off.

Barone concludes about who does most of the resenting:

One example is the cartoonist and author Garry Trudeau, a college classmate of George W. Bush, who has been spewing contempt for the Bushes for 40-some years. The strongest class envy in America, it turns out, may be the resentment of those who were one club above you at Yale.

I know of people who own Learjets and the like, but I'm not worried that I don't own one. I think Barone has it right, see what you think.

Political (and Other) Humor

Dave Barry has written his humorous review of 2010, which appears here in The Washington Post. Unless you are BP, Toyota, a Yankees fan, or President Obama, go have a laugh while reading it.

Warning: this is no short article.

Foreign Policy Challenges

A Brit lists what he sees as President Obama's top 10 foreign policy challenges, you'll find them here in The Telegraph. Most of us could have written this article and come up with more or less the same list.

It saddens me he didn't include in his list something from Latin America, either the drug wars in Mexico/Guatemala or the descent of Venezuela into dictatorship. Unfortunately, it is typical that American presidents give low priority to our hemisphere.

Palin and Class

Nate Silver has done a thoughtful, relatively even-handed treatment of Sarah Palin's chances at the Republican nomination for 2012. You'll find it here in The New York Times.

I think his analysis of her strengths and weaknesses is close to the mark. If he misses anything, it is not being explicit in discussing the social class issues in the divided reaction of Republicans to her.

Upper class Republicans like David Brooks and Peggy Noonan can't stand Palin, she appeals to what we once called "Reagan Democrats." Some of those who oppose her might find Obama more "class compatible" than they find Palin "ideology compatible" and either stay home or vote Dem.

I can imagine Sarah Palin becoming a U.S. version of Evita Peron, they share a number of characteristics.