Political Humor Alert

I'm embarrassed. A Google search turns up something like 882,000 hits for the following but I just saw it for the first time. What is it? Calling the coming election "NOvember." That is, using the election to vote "NO" on what's been happening in Washington.

I found it on Lucianne.com.

A Thought on School Reform

This article from Newsweek, reprinted in RealClearPolitics, about school reform has me thinking politically incorrect thoughts on the topic. The article goes through all the standard "cures" of smaller classes and better teachers, and refreshingly, finds them wanting.

I spent a lifetime as a management professor and one of the things I absorbed from that body of lore is the idea that the quality of raw materials input strongly influences the quality of manufactured output. You cannot manufacture fine furniture from scrap wood. Colloquially, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

I think there is little evidence that our K-12 teachers are worse than they were 50 years ago. And class sizes then were large, too. The one variable within which there has arguably been the most change is the pupils, not genetically, but environmentally and culturally.

The ways most children are raised today are substantially different from the way they were raised 50 years ago. Or they come from subcultures with less positive attitudes toward education. Or both. In other words, perhaps the public school system is dealing with a higher proportion of "sow's ears" than they once did.

It seems reasonable to me that, if we are serious about improving public school education, we should investigate the impact of various student input variables, however politically incorrect such investigations may be.

Russian Drivers as Moles

A nest of Russian sleeper spies were recently rounded up in the U.S. and sent home. Meanwhile Time reports that there are perhaps hundreds of Russians driving long-haul trucks in the U.S.

Suppose, as I do, that Time's story is correct. The job of long-haul truck driver could be an excellent cover for a sleeper agent or mole.

Truck drivers go everywhere, see everything, can take photos with their cell phones, and communicate with other drivers by CB radio and at truck stops, sometimes in Russian. They would be nearly impossible for the FBI to surveil.

Because Time says there are plenty of Russians already driving here, there would be no need to coach the sleeper agent in perfect colloquial American English. Heavily accented English would be acceptable.

I understand that we aren't very worried about Russian spies nowadays. However, it seems Russia still wants to spend the money to send them.

Krugman, Friedman Down on Obama

See this article in Mediaite which reports what uber-liberal columnists Paul Krugman and Tom Friedman said on the This Week panel of ABC News. Both beat up on the Obama administration. Krugman says:

Obama has had no vision. He has not articulated a philosophy. What is Obama’s philosophy of government? He wobbles between sounding kind of like a liberal. Then he says, well, the conservatives have some points, too. He concedes the message.

Then Friedman says:

Obama completely over-read his mandate when he came in. (snip) I personally — just as a reporter, a columnist in Washington — have never seen a worse communicating administration, just at the basic, technical level....

You expect your enemies to come at you; it hurts a lot when your supposed friends do it too.

Colorful Writing

Do you remember the spotted owl? I was reading an otherwise decent but uneventful McClatchy article about their continued decline. There I ran across a single paragraph of really pleasant descriptive writing, not a usual find in journo prose. Here it is:

The owl remains an iconic symbol in a region where once loggers in steel-spiked, high-topped caulk boots felled 200-year-old or even older trees and loaded them on trucks that compression-braked down twisty mountain roads to mills redolent with the smell of fresh sawdust and smoke from burning timber scraps.

Author Les Blumenthal has a more-than-passing knowledge of logging and truck-driving. Environmentalists killed the tepee burner a long time ago. That description takes me back four decades to when I was a doctoral student in the Pacific Northwest.

The Good Ol' Boy Defended

Alan Simpson suggested the government not pay for those medical problems of veterans that are not connected with their service. The Veterans of Foreign Wars organization responded that it "believes in fiscal responsibility, but veterans' programs are sacrosanct."

Columnist Dana Milbank, defending Alan Simpson's earthy remarks about our government's irrationality, responded in the Washington Post as follows:

If vets are sacrosanct, Social Security is sacrosanct, low taxes are sacrosanct and everything else is sacrosanct, we'll have a whole herd of sacred cows and an economy like Greece's.

The VFW quote is also from the Milbank column.

Rasmussen: Obama at Record Low

Rasmussen Reports does a daily Presidential Tracking Poll; here is what Scott R. finds for today, Sunday, September 5, 2010. His poll shows:

That 24% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-seven percent (47%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -23. That’s the highest level of Strong Disapproval and the lowest Approval Index daily rating yet recorded for this president.

The Strongly Approve percentage is steady as a rock at around a quarter of likely voters. The Strongly Disapprove percentage varies but now is close to half of likely voters.

Democrats running for Congress will be saying "Barack who? Never heard of him." Ditto when asked about Nancy and Harry, who are equally unpopular.

From Man of Year to Mr. Unpopular

Time magazine selects an annual person of the year. In 2008 that person was Barack Hussein Obama, who had been elected President but not yet taken office. Here we are some 21 months later and Time has an article entitled "How Barack Obama Became Mr. Unpopular."

Is this some kind of record, going from person of the year to Mr. Unpopular in less than 2 years? I suspect the only person who came close was Jimmy Carter, and it took him a few more months.

This is what happens to a President with training wheels. We've had several of them in recent decades.

Why Wars Last Too Long

Professor Stephen M. Walt, of Harvard University, has written a non-technical article for Foreign Policy with the intriguing title: "Top 10 Reasons Why Wars Last Too Long." I think his reasons are mostly accurate, and he buttresses them with examples from recent history. Here are a couple of his reasons:

1. Political leaders get trapped by their own beliefs.
5. The people who got you into the war aren't the ones who can get you out.

As you'd expect, national pride and the military's dislike of losing get mentioned, too. I believe some of Walt's ten reasons are really restatements of others, but his article is still worth your time and effort.

Robinson: We're "Spoiled Brats"

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson decides that the American public are acting like spoiled brats. He infers this from their telling pollsters that they will vote for the Republicans whom they say they like even less than the Democrats.

Mr. Robinson, listen up. The only practical way to show a party in power that you do not, underscore do not, approve of what they have been doing is to vote them out of power. One is reminded of the old story about the fellow who hits a mule on the head with a 2x4 to get its attention. You get a politician's attention by electing his opponent.

This election is not about the Republicans, which is why they don't need to have a proposed program of things they will do if elected. Everybody knows they cannot do a whole lot since the President will veto whatever they pass. What they will be able to do is to defund the Obama programs, more-or-less bringing them to a halt.

This election is a referendum on the Democrats who have, for the last 2 years, controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress. What the people are telling pollsters, Mr. Robinson, is that they don't like what the Dems have been doing and are prepared to vote "NO."

In our system of two party government, the way you do that is to vote for the other guy. This is particularly true since recent polls have shown that same public trusts the Republicans more than the Democrats on ten key issues.

Seven Careers?

The Wall Street Journal has a recurring column I like called The Numbers Guy, by Carl Bialik. He debunks various pieces of conventional wisdom and urban legends based on fallacious arithmetic/mathematics. This week his column deals with the "seven careers in a lifetime" idea.

It seems to me the real issue is whether one speaks of careers or employers. Take me, for example. In addition to college teaching I have held four distinct non-teaching jobs since earning my baccalaureate degree. On the other hand, if you count every employer for whom I've done college teaching, there have been 10 of those, part- and full-time.

Have I had 14 careers or only five? I believe Bialik's column confuses these two issues. I think of myself as having spent most of my life in one career - college teaching - and most of that time for one university. Go see his column and make up your own mind.

A Good Ol' Boy

Alan Simpson was Republican Senator from Wyoming for many years, and is now co-chair of the President's fiscal responsibility commission. He has a history of saying what he thinks, and letting the buffalo chips fall where they may.

For example, years ago I heard him tell a TV interviewer that the Wyoming view of gun control was keeping one's gun pointed steadily at whatever one intends to shoot. While not politically correct, it was an accurate depiction of Wyoming attitudes.

Now he has sent an email describing Social Security as "like a milk cow with 310 million tits." As you can imagine, city people went ballistic upon hearing this rural metaphor.

As this Washington Post editorial notes, there were demands for his removal, demands which the White House wisely refused. The Post actually comes to Simpson's defense, after chiding him gently for intemperance. They say:

His fundamental point is correct: Social Security is not on a sustainable footing.

Social Security is a future train wreck we can anticipate far enough in advance to avoid, if only we can find the political will to do so. Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the commission's other co-chair will have a tough job to find a solution minimally palatable to both parties.

Cook: Senate in Play

Charlie Cook is the most respected predictor of U.S. political outcomes currently practicing that arcane art. In his column for this week's National Journal, The Cook Report declares that while the GOP taking control of the Senate is still "fairly unlikely," it is no longer highly unlikely.

Cook provides a description of wave elections, elections where nearly everything up for grabs goes to one party. He suspects that 2010 looks much like one of these. Cook suggests that things are getting better for the GOP, worse for the Dems.

The Beeb Admits Leftwing Bias

BBC Director General Mark Thompson, in an interview with the U.K.'s New Statesman, admitted that the organization has leaned left:

In the BBC I joined 30 years ago, there was, in much of current affairs, in terms of people's personal politics, which were quite vocal, a massive bias to the left. The organisation did struggle then with impartiality. And journalistically, staff were quite mystified by the early years of Thatcher. Now it is a completely different generation.

Maybe he just doesn't see the bias anymore.

Kotkin: Vanishing Upward Mobility

Demographer Joel Kotkin has written an interesting article for The American concerning the declining role of cities in upward mobility. His basic point is that while cities have historically been incubators of economic and social upward mobility, he believes this to no longer be true.

He talks about London, New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Tokyo. I suspect some of what he bemoans is in fact the suburbanization taking place in many cities, certainly in Los Angeles, and probably in New York.

Much suburbanization in the U.S. was caused by legal action which drove the middle class out of city neighborhoods to independent suburbs with "better schools." What is left in U.S. cities are the wealthy, who are unconcerned with public school quality, and the poor, whose children populate the urban public schools.

A factor limiting upward mobility for the poor is that good jobs for those with limited education and/or language skills have become scarce in developed countries. The U.S. has exported many of its upward mobility jobs to China and elsewhere in the developing world. Millions of Chinese from rural areas have come to the cities to work in factories to produce the world's "stuff." These rural Chinese experience upward mobility, the upward mobility that once existed in the U.S. and Europe.

What we have left in the U.S. are unskilled jobs that pay too little to generate upward mobility. Unskilled people here make hotel beds, wash dishes, drive buses and taxis, mow lawns, wait tables, flip burgers - jobs that cannot be exported. They are also jobs that do not pay enough to boost their occupants onto the upward mobility escalator.

Liberal Feminists Defend Palin

It had to happen. If you beat up on a woman in public life long enough, even if that woman is Sarah Palin, folks will eventually come to her defense. When those defenders are liberal feminists, who have spent the last two years publicly hating Sarah Palin, it becomes a woman bites dog story.

Vanity Fair ran a recent piece which trashed Gov. Palin; those with strong stomachs can see it here. In response, several liberal feminists have come to her defense. Their responses are summarized in a National Review article by Katrina Trinko. Basically, their defense is that Palin is doing exactly what male politicians do but is catching flak because she is a woman. That is a fair rejoinder.

Here at COTTonLINE we are among those who see Gov. Palin as an attractive, charismatic voice for conservatism, much as then-Senator Obama was an attractive, charismatic voice for liberalism. On the other hand, we are not yet convinced that she is qualified to be President, as we were not convinced that Senator Obama was so qualified.

We have learned the hard way that Obama was, as suspected, unqualified. We aren't anxious to have the same experience with Palin. There is plenty of time between now and 2012 for her to demonstrate qualifications. Like you, we will be watching and learning about a field of possible candidates, including Gov. Palin.

The Crystal Ball Prognosticates

Dr. Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia Center for Politics has an annual prediction he calls the Crystal Ball. He has been quite accurate over the past 10 years.

Sabato's article for RealClearPolitics summarizes where he believes the races stand exactly two months before the midterm elections on November 2. The article is long, detailed and comprehensive.

Sabato doesn't speak about every last House race, but covers all the governors, all the senators, and deals with the House races in the aggregate. This column is for the real politics wonk, not for those with casual interest. That said, it is a good read, but this year Dems won't enjoy it much.

Caddell: Dems Blowing It

Robert Costa has a National Review interview with Democratic operative Patrick Caddell that you really do need to read. Caddell takes a very dim view of the state of his party and the functioning of the Obama White House. For example, he says this about the health care bill:

The Democrats had a chance to do this right — most people supported aspects of reform — but because of the way it was passed, as a crime against democracy, the country has simply not accepted it. The lies, the browbeating, the ‘deem and pass’ — all of it was a suicide mission.

"A crime against democracy," that is just a sample of this really amazing interview, Caddell doesn't mince words.

Quote of the Day

Gloria Borger, of CNN, writing about President Obama's speech marking the end of combat operations in Iraq:

Bush's surge strategy worked. The world can argue over why it worked, but one thing is clear: Obama opposed the surge. And now he's employing one in Afghanistan.

Borger goes on to ask whether, following a disastrous 2010 midterm election, Barack Obama will morph into a clone of Bill Clinton, or of Jimmy Carter. About this outcome Borger makes no predictions, odd for an Obama supporter to do.

My guess is Borger fears Obama will become another Carter, something COTTonLINE has suspected for over a year. Her entire column is worth your time.

Economic Advisers Clueless

For the past 20 months Dr. Christina Romer has been chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Dr. Romer is now leaving the Council to return to her faculty post at U.C., Berkeley. She gave what she termed a "valedictory" speech to the National Press Club.

Dana Milbank, who writes for the Washington Post, has a bleak article concerning her talk. Milbank summarizes Romer's content as follows:

She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be. She still doesn't understand exactly why it was so bad. The response to the collapse was inadequate. And she doesn't have much of an idea about how to fix things.

If this is the quality of advice our President is getting, no wonder it feels like we're in a double-dip recession. And if Milbank summarizes Romer's talk accurately, she should be ashamed to return to Berkeley, and Berkeley should be reluctant to let her.