Travel Note

COTTonLINE goes dead tomorrow for about five days, while we cruise back to "the big island." That is what the DrsC whimsically call the U.S. mainland.

Keep a weather eye on unfolding events in North Africa and the Middle East. Our condolences to the nice people of New Zealand, especially our friend Peter Dowling.

As we are often reminded, we all live in interesting times.

Klein on Public Unions

Joe Klein writes for Time and normally he is too far to the left for my taste. Here he writes about public unions and does a surprisingly balanced job. No, he doesn't want to do away with public unions. However he does see they have engaged in excesses and abuses. You may want to give his article a look.

What Klein forgets is that public jobs like school bus driver shouldn't be full-time, unionized career positions. Such jobs should be part-time, supplementary employment. What do I mean? I mean the sort of job graduate students do in return for support, or moms do while their kids are at school.

Travel Blogging

If you've wondered why nothing was posted for several days, it was because I was traveling. Actually I was cruising from San Pedro to Hilo, and experiencing somewhat rough water for much of the crossing.

We spent all day yesterday in Honolulu moored by the Aloha Tower. We're in Kauai today, sitting alongside in Nawiliwili Bay. Tomorrow is Lahaina, Maui, a tender port. Then we head back to San Pedro, making a brief stop at Ensenada to make the cruise "legal" vis-a-vis the Jones Act. Google the Jones Act if that reference puzzles you.

Weather in the islands is nice, we've hardly been rained on at all. Sure, it is warm and humid, that is to be expected here any time of year. The DrsC have been to Hawaii several times, probably more than 10 - it is easy and cheap if you live in CA as we did for most of our careers.

There isn't much new left to visit so we just enjoy the weather and scenery and "being here." Hawaii is a great "being here" place.

Aloha, gentle reader.

Home, Sweet Home

The Gallup polling organization reports on the President's declining popularity, it has declined in all 50 states. My favorite line concerns my adoptive home state of Wyoming, here it is:

Obama's lowest average state approval rating in 2010 was 28% in Wyoming.

That's my favorite line but not necessarily the most important information contained in the poll. I believe the most important line may be this:

Obama's overall average approval rating in 2010 was 47%, down 11 percentage points from the 58% he recorded in his first calendar year in office.

The author, Frank Newport, also makes some guesses about where the hardest campaigning will happen in 2012. This is a very good article, worth your time and energies.

Milbank: Obama Kicks Can Again

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank is inclined to be pro-Obama, both he and WaPo lean left. That makes his summary of the roll-out of the president's budget all the more damning, it's entitled: "In his new budget, Obama kicks the can one more time."

Milbank makes fun of the Obama budget people and their stumbling defense of the president's lame budget. He quotes just about everybody in Washington saying "we can't kick the can down the road again." Kicking that old can is exactly what the new budget does: it contains no hope and no change.

Neither party wants to propose the really painful, necessary cuts. They know the other party will instantly jump on them for being brutal and heartless.

Can you say "catch 22?" One has to wonder if there is a way out of this mess short of the kind of disaster Greece found itself in?

No Gender Bias in Science

Two Cornell scholars have done a serious job of looking for gender bias in science and they find none. A summary of their findings is here in National Review Online, the actual research can be read here in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

What do they conclude explains the underrepresentation of women in science?

Ceci and Williams demonstrate that the real problem most women scientists confront is the challenge of combining motherhood with a high-powered science career. This issue, they say, will never be solved by the “misplaced focus on discrimination.”

Governor Christie

New Jersey's Governor Chris Christie is attracting a lot of interest among Republicans, much of it for his combative style vis-a-vis the teachers' unions in his state. Here is a Politico article which gives him a chance to have his say about things in his state, and beyond.

Christie may be in his career about where Reagan was as governor of California. That makes him someone to watch. Full disclosure, I could possibly be a distant relative of Governor Christie.

Everybody Dies

Every now and then I'll read an article like this one in The Scotsman about this or that factor making one more likely to die. Such articles almost make me laugh. Let's be clear, everybody dies.

None of us want to die young, and the older we are the older we think "young" might be. So let's suppose you fend off heart attack and stroke, and dodge the early cancer bullet. That buys you a few more years.

On the other hand, if you live long enough your mind rots: you get Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or senile dementia. And your chance of getting cancer only goes up with the years. Plus your hearing goes to hell and blindness from macular degeneration looms.

If you manage to be too healthy to avoid heart attack and stroke, you get a lingering, messy, and possibly painful death - what a treat! COTTonLINE is morbid tonight.

As philosopher Kenny Rogers says in The Gambler "the best you can hope for is to die in your sleep." Implicit in that lyric is not to wait too long to do it.

Not a Weak Field

You will see commentary like this concerning the GOP having a weak field of presidential candidates for 2012. People see a field with no obvious front-runner and mistake it for a weak group of candidates.

The field includes at least four successful governors, during a period when being a successful governor isn't easy: Pawlenty, Daniels, Barbour and Christie. Add to that Senator John Thune and you've got five substantial candidates.

Notice that I've left out bomb-throwers like Newt and Sarah, and others like Trump, Huckabee and Giuliani. They are fun to listen to but probably not widely viewed as presidential.

Even if you take Christie at his word that he doesn't see himself going for it, and set aside Barbour for his, to some, excessive Southernness, you've still got three strong candidates. Plus add to the list wild cards like Jeb Bush, another successful governor.

People are mistaking for a weak field a flock of candidates with no clear leader. Never fear, a leader will emerge.

Wrong Focus

Here is an article from The Wall Street Journal concerning battles with public employee unions over wage and benefit cuts. I believe this to be a case of misplaced energies. What really needs to be done is rolling back the rights of public employees to unionize and bargain over wages, benefits and working conditions.

This right hasn't always existed; for most of our history public workers were not permitted to form unions. Most sources suggest permission began in 1958 with Mayor Robert Wagner of New York City, spread throughout the states, and was extended to federal workers by JFK in 1962.

This history suggests state governments should be able to roll back unionization rights for public workers state by state, until only blue states are left with it. Getting to the point where we can deny bargaining rights to federal workers would require a GOP majority of both houses of Congress plus a president all willing to go along.

This situation has only existed during four years since the end of World War II - the middle four of George W. Bush's eight years. In other words, it is a desirable condition but one not easy to achieve nor one that has often existed in recent times. And, it should be noted, during that four year period the votes existed but not the will or interest, unfortunately.

Quote of the Day

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, speaking at the CPAC conference, the text of which is repeated in its entirety in The Daily Caller:

We face an enemy, lethal to liberty, and even more implacable than those America has defeated before. (snip) I refer, of course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence. It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink.

The "new Red Menace," referring to red ink, debt, the deficit - that is great imagery.

Sarkozy Agrees

On Wednesday we wrote about European leaders condemning multiculturalism. We identified Angela Merkel and David Cameron as having done so.

Now here is a story from Agence France-Presse indicating that French President Nicolas Sarkozy has likewise rejected multiculturalism. He argues that immigrants to France should become French.

Merkel, Cameron and Sarkozy are "the big three" in Europe. The article also indicates similar comments have been made by prominent Australians and Spaniards.

When do you suppose any important American will have sufficient courage to criticize multiculturalism?

Cutting Government Jobs

I was reading a Washington Monthly article which suggests that the public is probably ambivalent about deep cuts in federal spending. Cutting government budgets means laying off government workers, no surprises there.

Surveys show most government employees vote Democratic. For a Republican congress to cut funding for government programs is a way to make a group of not-poor Democrats take the hit.

We often write about unintended consequences that are bad. Cutting government workers has unintended consequences that are good, a kind of virtuous circle.

Whither Egypt?

Mubarak has resigned and gone off to his retirement home, turning the government over to the Egyptian military. At this point you hear pundits waxing rhapsodic about the thirst for democracy this event represents. An example of this was in last night's Shields and Brooks segment on the PBS News Hour.

I say mistaking a revolution for democracy is nonsense. All we can say for sure at this point is that many of the Egyptian people sure-as-heck didn't want Hosni Mubarak to continue in office.

Tonight those same people seem delighted with the military in control, and military governments are rarely bottom-up democratic. A more accurate description would be top-down autocratic.

Will Egypt end up a Western-style democracy? Maybe so, but the odds are against it. We will have to wait and see. The outcome is up to the Egyptians, not up to us.

Weird Science 3.0

Few Americans still heat their homes with coal, which it turns out is a good thing. This article on the United Press International website reports research that children raised in homes where coal is the primary fuel for cooking and heating are significantly shorter.

Oddly enough, the use of wood for heat and cooking does not have this effect. So all the rural folks with wood stoves, like the one in my living room, can keep on using them without compromising their children's health.

Spengler on Egypt

David P. Goldman writes as Spengler for the Asia Times of Hong Kong. Here he focuses on the miserable economic conditions in Egypt and the extent to which they interact with a world shortage of wheat, especially in China. He sees it as a motive for the revolution happening there.

For pundits, pessimism is always the preferable pose. Spengler would have you believe we were mere months away from world-wide starvation among the poor. Who knows, maybe he is right?

We live in interesting times....

California's Problems

Much is written about the problems faced by trend-setting California. Here Victor Davis Hanson, writing for Townhall.com, comes up with the most comprehensive CA "balance sheet" I've yet seen. He itemizes the state's assets and liabilities, with emphasis on the former. For those of us who care about the Golden State, it is a good read. His conclusion is particularly apt:

The state's problems involve a larger "California philosophy" that is relatively new in its history, one that now curbs production but not consumption, and worries more about passing laws than how to pay for them.

Gallup: Deficit Not POTUS's Strength

Gallup finds nearly 70% of Americans disapprove of President Obama's handling of the federal deficit. Only 27% approve of his actions vis-a-vis the deficit. It is by far his worst rating, and it is one of the nation's most serious problems.

Majorities also disapprove of his handling of the economy, healthcare policy, and taxes. His strongest ratings are in foreign policy and there he is just barely ahead.

Egypt's Future

Every pundit with a keyboard is having a say about Egypt. Like as not, most will be quite wrong about how the current upheaval will eventually turn out. For a balanced, sensible treatment of the situation in Egypt, see this article in National Review Online by Andrew C. McCarthy.

The Egypt I saw when visiting there very much paralleled McCarthy's description of the country. Most Egyptians seemed to be getting along with their lives. Yes, the country is poor but has much more middle class than anyone in the West imagines.

Cairo's drivers are undisciplined and its traffic jams are legendary. Few of us know that the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, west of Alexandria, is wall-to-wall vacation condos for 40 miles or more. Visit here in winter and the area is a modern ghost town, thousands of newish buildings with nobody around. In summer the cool breezes off the Med draw hundreds of thousands of people escaping Egypt's blistering heat.

My bottom line is that Egypt is complicated, there are many different strands of public opinion at work. McCarthy's notion that it may go the way of modern Turkey makes sense.

About the Economy

Recently the other DrC tried to make reservations in Yellowstone National Park for two rooms for three nights in July. We will have guests who want to spend two full days seeing the park, two days being the absolute minimum for a quick look at most of Yellowstone.

Six months in advance the only place in the park she could find the rooms was at Grant Village, one of the less attractive locations. That tells me the economy isn't doing too badly. Many people feel sufficiently secure in their economic status to have already made their summer travel reservations.

To be sure, perhaps as many as 20% of Americans are in some kind of economic bind. We tend to forget that the glass is 80% full, most Americans are living more-or-less as well as they did five years ago.

For that 80% their house is worth less, but they've gotten over that downward swoop. It appears they have enough money to buy high priced gasoline to drive the family car to northwestern Wyoming to see the critters and the geysers. Plenty of them don't plan to stay in a tent either.

Yellowstone is beautiful, they'll get their money's worth.