No Public Schools for the Obamas

I certainly don't blame them for making that decision, since it's what I or anyone else in their situation would do, but it seems to highlight the disingenousness of his opposition to vouchers. From the WSJ:

Michelle and Barack Obama have settled on a Washington, D.C., school for their daughters, and you will not be surprised to learn it is not a public institution. Malia, age 10, and seven-year-old Sasha will attend the Sidwell Friends School, the private academy that educates the children of much of Washington's elite...

Mr. Obama says he opposes such vouchers, because "although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you're going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom." The example of his own children refutes that: The current system offers plenty of choice to kids "at the top" while abandoning those at the bottom.

McCain's Campaign

There never seemed any "there" there, that is in the McCain campaign. Ramesh Ponnuru in National Review examines:

The type of campaign McCain ran eliminated whatever chance he may have had left. Liberals spent the fall pretending that it was the nastiest campaign ever, in part to justify their own abandonment of the senator, over whom they had previously fawned, for Obama. Almost all of the McCain campaign’s attacks on Obama were fair game, as were a few it did not make. (If McCain thought that keeping silent about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright would protect him from charges of racism, he rather badly misjudged.) But the campaign lacked substance, particularly on domestic policy, which neither McCain nor his running mate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, seemed particularly interested in or knowledgeable about.

While McCain’s campaign rarely stuck to any message for very long, federal spending was a policy issue about which McCain did get passionate. His central economic message for most of the campaign was that he could be trusted to control spending. Most voters would like the federal government to spend less in general (while favoring spending more on nearly every specific program any politician proposes). But spending cuts will not lead to any direct improvement in middle-class Americans’ well-being, and McCain never even bothered to argue that it would help them in the long run.

Much of the time McCain made an even narrower argument: He would eliminate earmarks from the federal budget. A lot of conservatives have come to hate earmarks in principle. Their elimination is not, however, a major priority of most voters.

For the most part, McCain adopted the most unimaginative possible Republican agenda on taxes: Keep the Bush tax cuts, and throw in a reduction in corporate tax rates too. There was not much for the middle class there, especially since the Democrats had already pledged to keep Bush’s middle-class tax cuts. McCain gave Obama the opportunity to present himself as a tax reformer for the middle class.

When McCain had proposals that could appeal to middle-class voters, he never made anything of them. His health-care plan would have made insurance more affordable, increased coverage, and given individuals more control and, especially, the ability to take their insurance with them from job to job rather than depending on their employers. But McCain rarely explained the plan’s benefits or defended it against Obama’s many misleading attack ads. In the middle of the fall campaign, the senator’s aides made major changes to the plan, as though to emphasize how lightly they took the whole issue. His tax plan would have increased the tax exemption for children. But neither McCain nor his aides presented his proposals as a program to help the middle class, and indeed McCain repeatedly bungled his descriptions of the tax exemption. The McCain campaign wasted the months between the effective end of the Republican primaries and the end of the Democratic ones. What if McCain had spent that time establishing himself as someone who would fight for reforms to benefit the middle class? Had McCain run on a middle-class tax reform, for example, he would have simultaneously separated himself from Bush on economic policy, addressed his party’s longstanding weakness on domestic issues, and made more voters feel that he sympathized with their concerns...

McCain’s campaign disproved Thomas Frank’s [author of "What's the Matter with Kansas?"] thesis. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush succeeded by appealing both to voters’ values and to their interests. If the median voter had seen McCain as a protector of her interests, it would have been easier to get her to see Obama as out of the mainstream. On their own, however, these attacks [Ayers, Wright] were not capable of winning an election.

When the financial crisis hit, McCain carried a triple burden: He was in the incumbent’s party, his economic platform strongly resembled the incumbent’s, and he had done nothing to make middle-class voters consider him an answer to their anxieties. He then briefly suspended his campaign and tried to cancel the first presidential debate while he went to Washington to work on a financial-rescue bill. It was an act of considerable folly. McCain had no particular economic expertise, and there was no reason to think he would be able to deliver a deal. He reinforced his image as an erratic showboat at the worst possible time.

Some conservatives have suggested that McCain should instead have voted against the financial-rescue bill, taking up the populist cause against Wall Street bailouts. That course of action would have separated McCain from Bush pretty dramatically, but it might also have looked reckless, particularly if McCain had sunk the bill and the markets had nosedived. McCain was never going to take this advice in any case. He had made a second career out of bucking his party in favor of conventional wisdom; he was not about to buck both.

According to the exit polls, voters whose top issue was the economy went for Obama over McCain by 9 percentage points. Worse, 60 percent of voters concluded that McCain was not in touch with people like them — and 79 percent of those people voted against him. Those voters alone put Obama very close to victory: He had to win over a mere 6 percent of the voters who considered McCain “in touch.”

Governor Palin’s vice-presidential candidacy ended up conforming to every bad pattern the McCain campaign had set. Once again there was no follow-through. If her selection made any sense, it was as a way of underscoring that McCain was a fresh-thinking reformer willing to take on his own party when appropriate, as she had done. After the selection, however, no further attempts were made to develop that theme, and Palin was placed in the traditional veep-candidate role of attack dog, specializing in cultural attacks on the elitist Democrats. She was not the first, second, or third most important reason McCain’s campaign failed, but she illustrated those reasons.

Because McCain’s campaign was so weak on the issues, he would have had no mandate if he had won. He would have been elected not to be an inexperienced coddler of radicals.

Will Obamas Spread Their Wealth? (i.e. Their Children?)

Interesting test will be whether the Obamas choose to share their wealth, that is their intelligent and gifted daughters, with the D.C. public school system. Or will they let the "rich schools get richer" by sending them to private schools?

Week in Reviewership

Well, as a week it was one. That much I can say. The sun officially checked out and winter came in screaming like a lunatic: “Yes, yes, I can see you’re here. Welcome!” But the winterly embrace was a bit too effusive for my taste.

I found that huge windowic privacy in the cafeteria after-hours and punched up the Kindle and “read long” from a Cardinal Ratzinger speech given in ’85 predicting a global meltdown based on an ethical breakdown. Followed by a long talk given by Cardinal Stafford on the fight against the culture of death that concluded with a moving rendition of Christ.

The Amazon Kindle seems a sort of magic, a personal genie serving up of whatever tasty prose or poetry I might want. I still dream of those cast-iron seats in the sun that perch along a frequent lunchtime walk and which call out: “sit in me and read awhile!”. The spot exudes a Parisian Left Bank hoariness.

I am scrupulous about Kindle housekeeping in the form of reading the short clips from blogs and links first such that sometimes don’t have time for what I’d originally planned to read. Today I’d had visions of Bill Buckley dancing in my head. I was looking forward to reading something whimsical and witty and light-hearted on this cold November day, specifically his anthology of responses to letters titled “Cancel Your Own G-D Subscription”. I’ve a hankering now and then for the resoluteness of a Buckley or a Kathy Shaidle or a Florence King. They are “comfort food” for the conservative. The other is always an attraction and though the aforementioned are similar to me politically they are my opposites in their confidence and lack of self-reproach.

In the café I fell into that all-too-rare delirium of noticing my surroundings. The bright effusion of Ohio State flags festively draping the cafeteria denote the local equivalent of Christmas, aka “Michigan weekend”. The workers go about their laborious tasks even now that the cafe is closed. I see a cashier pushing a cart topped high with bottles of soft drinks. She is the most interesting cashier to me mostly because she is the least interesting. She seems the most simple, always robotically smiling and saying the same thing, “how are you doing today?”. It would seem to me no one could ever find fault with her, and I do admit part of my curiosity is that once I believe she was wearing a scapular. I see her daily yet she’s as foreign as the most obscure laborer in distant China. There’s a sense of satisfaction in her work that isn’t present in the other workers. You get the impression she thinks this is a good gig.

Not too long after she’s walking out of the cafe wearing a huge novelty hat of some sort presumably because it’s Michigan weekend. It's like Mardi Gras North.

Two other workers, not cashiers but workers cleaning the tables, are carrying on a very loud, though interesting, conversation:

“I want to be buried in a pet cemetery.”

”No you don’t!”

“I want to be buried next to the dogs and kitties.”

“No you want to be buried in a people’s cemetery, not in an animal cemetery. Your mother would want you to be buried in a people’s cemetery!”

Her interlocutor remained unconvinced.

TV & Politics

For good or ill, we’re in heavy TV rotation with the advent of cold weather. “My Own Worst Enemy” stands heads above any other show on television these days imo. Not that we can know what we’re missing; our universe of reviewed shows is miniscule. But to find one we really like is pretty shocking. We watch “My Name is Earl” out of habit though I could take or leave it. “The Office” is intermittedly brilliant. I especially liked the episode of Michael Scott’s failed love affair. His HR gal was leaving town and by the end he was singing the blues, literally. “Chuck” is also good although, like Earl, it’s a bit soft-porny.

Speaking of soft porn, news of potential Obama cabinent appointments appears to be soft porn to the beltway political junkies. What is this obsession with the Hillcat getting the Sec of State job? Who cares? I mean it sounds like a one day story of mild interest along the lines of “hmm…I wonder why Obama would okay her for a cabinent job when he wouldn’t for VP?”. It’s turned into something ridiculously overblown. The State Dept is a huge bureaucratic organization that will function pretty much the same under the Hillcat or whoever. My impression is that the Department serves primarily a diplomatic purpose but diplomatically the President sets the tone and can’t be much altered by the Sec of State. (See Powell under Bush.) Anti-Americanism occurred way before the Bush administration and it doesn't take a psychic to predict it will continue during & after the sainted Obama administration. To a big extent it doesn’t matter who you have as chief diplomat. But then for liberals hope in earthly princes (or princesses) springs eternal.

Embroidered in Red

Powerfully moving analogy of Christ's nuptial love for us: do we believe it? From Cardinal Stafford:

Over the next few years, Gethsemane will not be a marginal garden to us. A model, I suggest, is medieval. With an anonymous author, our restless minds search in a dark valley during this exhausting year. With him as our guide, we find a bleeding man on a hill sitting under a tree “in huge sorrow”. It is Christ, the Bridegroom of the Church and of mankind.

Thirdly, we listen to the words of Christ as narrated by our mediaeval ancestor. Jesus pointing to his gloved hands says that these gloves were given him when he sought his Bride. They are not white but red, embroidered with blood. He says that his spouse brought them and they will not come off. Fourthly, we focus our attention on the constantly repeated refrain of the Bridegroom and the reason for his “huge sorrow”, “Quia amore langueo - Because I am sick for love”. And finally, we find that before this vision of the wounded young man, our frustration and tears become one with his “huge sorrow” and we make his love for the unfaithful Bride whom he seeks and never fails, our own. I will close with a citation of this spousal model. It serves as a measure of what we need to recapture for the whole Church in 2008:

Upon this hil Y fond a tree,
Undir the tree a man sittynge,
From heed to foot woundid was he,
His herte blood Y sigh bledinge:
A semeli man to ben a king, (handsome enough to be a king)
A graciouse face to loken unto;
I askide whi he had peynynge, (suffering)
He seide, “Quia amore langueo. (Because I am sick for love).

I am Truelove that fals was nevere.
My sistyr, Mannis Soule, Y loved hir thus.
Bicause we wolde in no wise discevere, (because in no way would we part company)
I lefte my kyngdom glorious.
I purveide for hir a paleis precious; (prepared, a palace)
Sche fleyth; Y folowe. Y soughte hir so,
I suffride this peyne piteuous,
Quia amore langueo.

In the autumn of 2008 we must begin anew with that sentiment of our medieval brother. Quia amore langueo. With Jesus we are sick because of love toward those with whom we are so tragically and unavoidably at variance. The reader has now become one with the narrator who is addressed in line one as “Dear Soul”. As Humanae Vitae with the whole Catholic tradition teaches, we are to “be true with body and soul”.

Nice "Punishment" If You Can Get It

Government sees you when you're sleeping,
It knows when you're awake...

Helen Jones-Kelley, who I hope isn't doing record searches on Ohio bloggers who cross her, has survived with her job intact despite seeking dirt on Joe the Plumber after he became briefly famous.

The discipline was a bit of a laugher if you can afford it - a month vacation without pay. She evidentally can afford it because she donated five thousand dollars to Obama last July. That ain't chump change.

From Catholic Apologist Dave Armstrong

15 E-books for $25!

Even Before the '87 Stock Crash...

...Bloomberg.com reports that then Cardinal Ratzinger predicted a global collapse:

German-born Ratzinger in 1985 presented a paper entitled ``Market Economy and Ethics'' at a Rome event dedicated to the Church and the economy. The future pope said a decline in ethics ``can actually cause the laws of the market to collapse.''

Here's the full text of Cdl Ratzinger's article (via American Papist). (Haven't read that yet but look forward to doing so soon.)

Put not your trust in market timers (*cough* *cough* Bob Brinker!). It's not that I'm upset about Brinker being wrong so much as my own gullibility. I thought that the unpredictability of the markets was mostly linked to a possible massive terrorist attack of some sort, rather than a slip in ethics. (What's ironic is part of this slip of ethics was trying to get people who couldn't afford a house into houses. The road to hell is paved with good intentions & all.)

The problem with markets so globalized and interconnected is that it would seem to requires a high-wire act in terms of ethics. A few bad cooks will spoil the broth since the whole thing is based mostly on trust.

It's All Good Until Somebody Gets Hurt ...and someone did

Well the worst possible scenerio came out of our post-Engagement poll meeting: more meetings.

I honestly didn't see it coming though surely I should have since meetings are outward signs of inward grace, er, at least that's what our leaders think. There's no problem that can't be lasso'd into submission via more meetings, so defacto the low engagement surveys guaranteed more meetings.

The group democratically chose two of the questions to work on via a non-secret ballot. The floor was then opened as to how to combat those particular items. Fatefully, someone mentioned the 'm' word - someone said that he thought a monthly meeting would help. The connection seemed remarkably tenuous to me since the task was to improve our score by maximizing the opportunity to do what we do best. (Of course it's not tenuous if what we do best is meetings.)

But it was such a beautifully concrete thing that our leader snapped it up and wrote it down as gospel. Who wouldn't be impressed by something as solid as a monthly meeting? I suggested it be held at a local bar, or "Conference Room F" as a co-worker calls it. I don't think that's going to happen since our leader happens to be a Mormon (not that there's anything wrong with that) and I don't think they go to bars.

On Travel...

Steven Riddle mentions a familiar downside of globalization, that of the robbing the world of its heterogeneity. In a way, travel is the opposite of money and not just because the former burns a lot of the latter. With the time value of money, dollars saved now and invested are worth a lot more in the future. With travel, travel done in the future will be worth less in terms of novelty. But then that's been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years now and is partially due to man's success combined with a finite planet: there are no unexplored lands left.

Tote the Note

This paragraph, concerning a street in South St. Louis --

For many years, Carondelet was nicknamed "Vide Poche" or "Empty Pocket." The source of the nickname is obscure. Some say it was because Carondelet inhabitants were not very ambitious, others say it was coined by more affluent St. Louisans who looked down on residents of the settlement to their south and at least one historian says it is derived from the fact that the Creoles of Carondelet were so skilled at gambling, they sent visiting St. Louisan home with "empty pockets."

-- reminds me of the old Joe Diffie song:

If the Devil danced in Empty Pockets, he'd have a ball in mine.
With a nine foot grand, a ten piece band and a twelve girl chorus line.
I'd raise some loot in a three piece suit, give 'em one dance for a dime,
If the Devil danced in Empty Pockets, he'd have a ball in mine.

Well he said friend it ain't the end let's see what I can do.
If you own a home, I've got a loan, tailor made for you.
Then above the racket a voice in my jacket said, "I'll tote the note."
The devil made me do it, talked me in to it, and that was all she wrote.

Mark Steyn & Alexander Tyler Quote

In the late-18th century, the Scottish historian Alexander Tyler wrote:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

But I've always wondered why, if he was right, it hasn't happened already in America. Two-hundred plus years is not long in the grand sweep of history, so you might say there is a tipping point and we simply haven't reached it yet. Mark Steyn writes:

"The president-elect’s so-called tax cut, will absolve 48 percent of Americans from paying any federal tax at all. Just under half the population will be on the dole. By 2012 it will be more than half. This will be an electorate where the majority will be able to vote itself more lollipops from the minority still dumb enough to prioritize self-reliance, dynamism and innovation over the cocoon of the nanny state….That will be the death of the American idea."

Didn't Anticipate a Perfect Storm

In the quest for big government with low taxes, most of us seem to want not "either/or" but "both/and". In practice, this means tax cuts are not usually accompanied by spending cuts, nor spending increases with tax increases.

But not all government spending is the same, just as not all drugs are the same. Some are good drugs and some are harmful. Some are powerfully addictive, some are not. Military spending, for example, is not addictive. We saw a tremendous decrease after the Cold War ended, just as we saw after the First World War and after WWII. Spending for the poor is also not addictive. We saw a decrease in that too in the welfare reform.

But there is addictive, 'third rail' spending: that is entitlements. Social Security and Medicare are programs that continually expand in terms of the percentage of the federal budget simply because they are middle class programs. And the middle class is where the votes are. Meaning once you start them, you're married to them forever.

So the implicit Bush Administration strategy seemed to be to "starve the beast" by reducing tax rates (which arguably actually increased revenues) while at the same time spending more and more on non-addictive spending programs like Bridges to Nowhere, the Iraq War, earmarks and aid to Africa. The theory might be that if you spend enough money and shrink the revenues, you can starve entitlement programs. Because, in the end, it's entitlement programs that could bankrupt the government (or at least lead to rampant inflation via printing new money).

But something happened on the way to the forum. That theory completely overlooks that you could have a perfect storm. You could have a financial economy requiring a massive Dopamine injection such that the entitlement programs starts to look minor by comparison. You could kill the goose that lays the golden entitlement program eggs, that is the job market.

I think Greenspan saw that this whole house of cards was tumbling and that's why he got out of the Fed Reserve job just before the storm. The simultaneous failure of the Big Three automakers with banks and other financial institutions makes for a witch's brew of gloom and I wonder if the $25B proposed to the automakers seems to be only enough to get by for six months in the hope of the recession being over by then. If you can delay the automakers inevitable bankruptcy till a more favorable time economically, then some of the out-of-work auto workers may be able to find jobs elsewhere. The timing of this sucks, but it was bound to happen in precisely this way because the Big Three were sick even before the economy got sick, so it's no suprise at all that they're puking now.

Of course this post is likely way too pessimistic and 'chicken little'. Economists predict what is coming will be a nasty recession but not a depression and that we will get through it.

Semi-Fiction for a Hump Day

Into each life a few business meetings must fall, and today they fell on me. (Which reminds me of Hemingway's famous line: "Ask not for whom the meeting bell tolls, it tolls for thee." (That may be a paraphrase.))

The latest corporate fad is to fuss over "engagement", which I think is a synonym for enthusiasm. The cynical view, one that I don't necessarily subscribe to of course, is that engaged workers will work more unpaid overtime. This is what we in business world call a win-win.

The big picture is that engagement scores have fallen perilously in recent years and so the response has been more engagement meetings, resulting in ever lowering engagement. It's sort of what's happening in the financial markets; a vicious cycle that's hard to escape. I'm hoping that our company's Fed will arrange a sudden drop in engagement meetings which will raise the level of engagement scores such to pull us out of this trough.

This meeting in particular began with what I could only assume was a trick question: "What do you like to be called?"

We went around the room and there were fine epistolary expositions, such as how Philip did not like to be called Phil and how that indicated to him a false familiarity as if someone was pretending that they knew him better than they did.

I could see it wasn't a trick question.

Since we all knew each other and what we liked to be called, I stated what I don't like to be called, that is late for dinner. Sure you groan, but consider the environment. In a comedy-free environment, the groaner is king! One of my co-workers helpfully provided a finger roll along the desk as a "ba-dump!".

The next question was if we could be a tree, what would it be?

Actually I don't remember what the next question was, but afterwards much discussion ensued on the company doing our engagement scores and how high scores on their questions track those of high-performing teams. I inquired about the engagement score of the polling company. I was told that the person presenting the information appeared to be highly engaged. I suggested that could be the cocaine talking.

The next question asked us to consider the best co-worker we know and list some of the attributes of that person. Now it just so happens that last week a co-worker had brought me four different kinds of beers that he wanted me to try. Now that's my kind of co-worker! Am I blessed or what? And what's more, he refused any and all offers of payment. (One was a "bourbon beer" if you can believe it, with a very strong taste. Another was Sam Adams' Winter Brew, and one a good porter -- but I digress. My bosses' boss happened to see the brews in my cubical and asked if I had a bottle-opener. I said I didn't which was a good thing else I might be tempted to drink one!) (joke!)

The next talking point from the meeting leader was how people are not rational. I bit my tongue in order to avoid saying, "yeah, look at the results of the election!". He emphasized the Orwellian-sounding truth that "feelings are facts". I wanted to trot out that old chestnut from John Henry Newman about how men are governed by their sympathies and not by argument. I also wanted to ask if this wasn't a good thing in some way, since wouldn't we be robots like Spock if not? At the very least the world would be far less surprising if we were all as smart and rational as Tom of Disputations. Not that I'm accusing him of being Spock. Besides being far more likable, he's very irrational when it comes to the sports teams he roots for.

Our leader confessed a recent car purchase made not because of any rigorous analysis but because he felt comfortable at the dealership and he liked the cut of the car's jib. Since he happens to be Mormon, there was the sense that perhaps there's a little tiny bit of lack of rationality involved there too but I'm not sure if it's charitable to think that so don't quote me. (We'll edit this out in later editions, so if you're reading this you're reading a very fresh copy.)

A co-worker perused the handout of the engagement questions and mentioned that some were what he called "control questions". I immediately thought he meant those questions they ask you on lie detector tests that are really easy, like "you live at such-and-such avenue". Were there some questions on the engagement survey that were deviously intended to discern your truthfulness on the other questions? But no he meant that some questions have a binary answer - 'yes' or 'no' - despite the fact that you rate it on a scale of 1-5 where 5 is strongly agree and 1 is strongly disagree.

I thought he might be overthinking things just a bit but I was nevertheless impressed by the cognitive skills he demonstrated in a meeting in which others were just trying to stay awake...