Heh...

Instapundit links to an old video about the Chuck Hagel nomination (" Is The Hagel Nomination Kaput?") with the comment that "we sure aren't hearing much about him lately."

Just a guess, but I suspect that it's because he was confirmed two weeks ago.

Oops...

The "ouch" quote of the day

Glenn Reynolds on Barack Obama's self-awarded "incomplete" on the economy:

I guess that’s because some people still have jobs...

Well, yeah...

Glenn Reynolds:

Let me be clear: All you people who were playing the have-you-no-decency card under Bush, but who aren’t screaming just as loud now — which is pretty much all of you people who were playing the have-you-no-decency card under Bush — were and are miserable lying hacks. And I thank Obama for making that perfectly clear, at least.

Well, yes...

Glenn Reynolds: "But what’s really juvenile is expecting that an inexperienced former community organizer could successfully execute the office of President of the United States..."

"Can't be...won't be..."

Glenn Reynolds:

Debts that cannot be paid, won’t be. Commitments that cannot be honored, won’t be. Guarantees that can’t be followed through on, won’t be.

It cannot be said often enough. If there's not enough money to pay for everything, something won't get paid. There is no "money tree" on which grows the wealth that will pay for the public union pensions and health care, for Social Security and Medicare. When the money runs out, which it will if the spending trajectories aren't changed, people aren't going to get paid, regardless of what commitments have been made, regardless of what obligations have been agreed to.

In his excellent Economics course for the Teaching Company (which I cannot recommend highly enough), Professor Timothy Taylor, in the first lecture, describes economists as "people who insist on taking trade-offs seriously." When I look at the world, and, in particular, at the points of view of all of my "progressive" friends, what I see is a refusal to even recognize many of the trade-offs that they want to make. In their utopian view, you can have high minimum wages, high spending on education, and welfare, health care for everyone, social security and medicare, strong unions and still have a thriving, active, high growth private sector economy to fund all of it. You can have stringent environmental laws to the point where you even regulate the carbon dioxide that we all exhale, you can outlaw nuclear power and coal-burning and imported oil and still have hospitals and lights and ambulances. You can promote multi-culturalism, sexual promiscuity, gay marriage, tax incentives that discourage men from marrying and supporting children, disparage American culture and capitalism, and still have a stable, wealthy and productive civil society.

Well, the world does not work that way.

I wonder who dressed him...

Has MSNBC fallen out of love with Obama? There's been some chortling in various places about the first shot in this MSNBC photoblog (Instapundit: "Serious government officials for serious times") but I think that this one is more interesting:

Hmm....  Something doesn't look just right to me.

Great staff work there, guys...



Can you imagine how the media would have reacted had George Bush or Sarah Palin gone out in public with a misbuttoned jacket?  Ok, that's trite and tedious, but does that make it any less true or relevant?

"Progressives can't get past the knowledge problem"

I high recommend this Washington Examiner piece.

Glenn Reynolds:

Economist Friedrich Hayek explained in 1945 why centrally controlled "command economies" were doomed to waste, inefficiency, and collapse: Insufficient knowledge. He won a Nobel Prize. But it turns out he was righter than he knew.

In his "The Use of Knowledge In Society," Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants and needs exists in no single place in any economy. The economy is simply too large and complicated for such information to be gathered together.

Any economic planner who attempts to do so will wind up hopelessly uninformed and behind the times, reacting to economic changes in a clumsy, too-late fashion and then being forced to react again to fix the problems that the previous mistakes created, leading to new problems, and so on.

Market mechanisms, like pricing, do a better job than planners because they incorporate what everyone knows indirectly through signals like price, without central planning.

An excellent short summary of the knowledge problem, which is one of the practical (as opposed to philosophical) reasons to be wary (or worse) of big government programs.

Spirituality vs. Religion

Perceptive comment from Instapundit on a NY Times story.

YOUNG VOTERS WANT SPIRITUALITY, BUT NOT NECESSARILY RELIGION. Well, that’s because religion often tells you to do things you don’t want to do, or to refrain from doing things you want to do, while spirituality is usually more . . . flexible.

Instapundit was on fire last night

For a barrel of links and commentary on the State of the Union, check out this Instapundit post...

Horrifying.

Just horrifying:

A car crash victim diagnosed as being in a coma for the past 23 years has been conscious the whole time. Rom Houben was paralysed but had no way of letting doctors know that he could hear every word they were saying. 'I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,' said Mr Houben, now 46, who doctors thought was in a persistent vegatative state.
...
His case has only just been revealed in a scientific paper released by the man who 'saved' him, top neurological expert Dr Steven Laureys. 'Medical advances caught up with him,' said Dr Laureys, who believes there may be many similar cases of false comas around the world.

It's hard to conceive of living through that.

Professor Reynolds notes a commenter at Althouse's blog saying "Lucky that they weren’t more ‘compassionate’ and didn’t try to starve and dehydrate him to death." Given the negative attention he paid to the Republicans over the Terry Schiavo situation, and the importance he placed on it as a negative for Republicans in the run-up to, and aftermath of, the 2006 congressional elections, one wonders if a little more commentary might be appropriate here.

"skin in the game"

Some truths are self-evident...

Instapundit:

Everyone who votes should pay something — and that something should rise when spending does. Skin in the game . . . .

The Democrats aren't interested in that, of course. They draw power from net consumers of tax dollars, and people who aren't paying taxes aren't going to respond to a tax cuts message.

Situational awareness

Instapundit with the LOL line of the week...

“Word on the street is that the Left, the ‘equal pay, pro-women’ left, is desperately searching for lewd photos of Hannah Giles.”

Of course they are. And if they found them that would totally discredit her . . . prostitute impersonation.

Instapundit on Carter

Professor Reynolds doesn't think much of former President Carter: "He’s a foul old man, and a disgrace to the office he once held."

Of course, he was a disgrace to the office while he held it, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that he's a disgrace to it now...

Ya think?

"Maybe that the "torture" debate is a political tool, and otherwise unserious?"

"the cheap-shot tendencies of a hopelessly partisan press"

Fantastic point from Glenn Reynolds on the David Shuster ambush story.

it's a trap that, in its nature, underscores how historically low casualties are in this war. You wouldn't have heard that question in World War II, not only because the press would have been ashamed to ask it, but because casualties then were such that nobody could possibly keep track. That it can be asked in this war demonstrates not only the cheap-shot tendencies of a hopelessly partisan press, but also the small scale of the actual warfare.

why has al Qaeda turned to killing "innocent Muslims"?

Instapundit linked to a fantastic piece from TigerHawk about Al Quaeda and the "Arab Street." And it underscores, once again, how important it is that we win in Iraq, and how damaging the Democratic policy of "whatever hurts Bush is a good thing and whatever helps him is bad" has been, and continues to be, to the security of the region.

...why has al Qaeda turned to killing "innocent Muslims"? ... The best answer, or at least the answer that will best withstand the scrutiny of history, is that the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, wittingly or not, put al Qaeda in an almost impossible position. We invaded and occupied a country in the heart of the Arab Middle East. If al Qaeda had railed against the mere presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, the invasion and occupation of Mesopotamia was both intolerable -- al Qaeda's image and self-image could not suffer such a grave indignity -- and a tempting opportunity to humiliate the only remaining "superpower." Al Qaeda had to declare its objective to be the defeat of the United States in Iraq. (This is, by the way, why the characterization of the eventual withdrawal of American troops from Iraq is of strategic importance in and of itself, but that is the subject of another post.)

Of course, Al Qaeda clearly believed that it could drive the United States from Iraq just as Osama bin Laden believed that we would not have the stomach to invade Afghanistan, or that he and his mujahideen could push Saddam's armies out of Kuwait without the help of the Americans. Unfortunately, the army and Marines of the United States and its allies proved to be much harder targets than al Qaeda imagined, and George W. Bush and Tony Blair were more able to withstand domestic political opposition than just about anybody expected they would be. Soon, it became clear that al Qaeda would not be able to drive the Coalition from Iraq no matter how many Sunni Ba'athists it recruited.

...

It remains to be seen whether, when the dust literally and figuratively settles, al Qaeda will have succeeded either in rendering Iraq ungovernable under Western norms or in persuading a sufficient number of Americans that we have "lost." It is clear, though, that however much the Arab world may hate the United States for bringing the war into its midst, it is increasingly lining up against al Qaeda in the waging of that war. In the fullness of time history will reveal that the polarization of the Arab and Muslim world against al Qaeda is essential for victory against the transnational jihad, and that it was the direct result of the forward foreign policy of Bush and Blair.

Read the whole thing...

We've done it before - will we do it again?

Glenn Reynolds quotes J.D. Johannes as asking, "is it possible to win a war on the ground, and lose it in Congress?"

Well, we've done it before.

Several years ago, Lewis Sorley provided an antidote to the conventional wisdom, a remarkable book entitled A Better War. Building on his excellent biographies of Army generals Creighton Abrams and Harold Johnson, Sorley examined the largely neglected later years of the conflict and concluded that the war in Vietnam "was being won on the ground even as it was being lost at the peace table and in the U.S. Congress."

I've been pretty contemptuous of the whole "Iraq = Vietnam" meme, but there sure are similarities...

Test scores and drinking age - a legitimate link?

Radley Balko thinks, and Glenn Reynolds agrees, that the US national drinking age should be lowered. One of the points raised was this:

If the research on brain development is true, the U.S. seems to be the only country to have caught on to it.

Oddly enough, high school students in much of the rest of the developed world — where lower drinking ages and laxer enforcement reign — do considerably better than U.S. students on standardized tests.

I'm not going to debate the drinking age right now, but I do think that there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the test score comparisons, skeptical enough that it smacks of dishonesty to include that in the debate.