James Gattuso has a very good piece on the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine, like most regulation, serves to provide new tools for government to serve its own interests. Both Nixon and Kennedy used it to cow opponents in the bad old days, by making controversial speech expensive at best and punishable at worst. Give it a read.
Michael Totten is in Lebanon and reporting from the Hezbollah-occupied areas in the South. You will learn a lot more from him than you will from just about any other source. Required reading.
Drudge links to this piece in the Financial Times about spending on the 2006 election cycle. Some might have a knee-jerk reaction to this, saying that somehow it represents too much money in politics.
Like many folks, I believe that money is speech. And, when that much money is spent, you know that most of it is going to communications of some sort. I think that's great, and is a measure of the importance and national interest in the election.
Of course it's messy, it's ugly, it is self-interested and thoroughly American. But I have to wonder: is it enough?
To put it in perspective, have a look at other things Americans spend money on each year:
Salty snacks: $22b (here)
Pet food: $14.5b (here)
Video games: $10.5b (here)
Sandwich spreads: $3b (here)
By contrast, we as a country spend $2.6b every two years to elect the leaders of the free world. That's about $9 per American, over a two year period, or $4.50 a year. If you spent less than that on lunch today, it's on me.
Now, part of me understands that the reason that politicians spend to be elected is that they expect the spoils -- power, more money -- to be worth the investment. And on that level, it's a sad state of affairs.
But the larger picture is one of a free market of ideas. The alternative to this sort of free spending is a government that controls it. As such, the government effectively decides what can be said about government.
That's great for incumbents, but not for change.
[Nerd stuff, but with political interest]
I read this article in the Examiner about "conceding" key parts of the Web to "the left":
At various blogging conferences since, I have had the opportunity to observe many of these bright minds strategizing on how to best leverage the emerging world of blogs and other “social networking” services known as “Web 2.0” to advance their liberal political agenda and win elections.
Their common refrain: “We need to own the Internet the way the right owns talk radio.”
[...]
Don’t think it matters? Consider that, according to USA Today, 98 percent of the money donated to political parties by Google employees — “Google Millionaires” — went to Democrats.
But it’s not just Google’s media and financial muscle that benefits the left. Liberals run the leading blog search engine — Technorati. They run the leading blog software manufacturer — Six Apart. They invented two of the most important blogging technologies — Podcasting and RSS. The list goes on and on.
It may not matter who manufacturers your radio since all points on the dial are equally accessible and the choice is tiny compared to the number of Web sites, but on the Internet, where popularity is often directly proportional to technological acumen and popularity, once achieved, breeds more popularity, who builds what means everything.
Here's the thing: the above-mentioned companies have come out in favor of net neutrality regulations (here, here, here). Their ostensible motivation is to preserve equality of access for all creators of content.
In light of YouTube's actions, one must wonder if they really believe this. After all, Google/YouTube is a major part of the Internet's infrastructure at this point, from any user's perspective. They have over 50% share of Web searches, which is the primary entry point for most users. To appear or not appear on these sites will de facto determine who can reach your content for a wide swath of the Internet.
Let's watch to see how dearly they cling to this "neutrality" concept when it comes to their own piece of Internet real estate. After all, it's easy to advocate unlimited and non-discriminatory use of others' property. But one's own house? Come now...
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Sorry if this seems a bit cagey. I expect every firm to act in its own self-interest. For a company like Google, net neutrality is simply an Incumbency Protection Act. It is their way of ensuring that the market does not change too quickly or to their disadvantage.
Their primary sin is in attempting to use the state to advance that goal, in the form of neutrality laws that apply to other companies.
Their secondary sin is dishonesty. When a celebrity declares that "it's not about the money", it's probably about the money. When Google declares that "it's about equality", they are advocating enforced equality for others, while preserving advantages for themselves. Some animals are more equal than others, after all.
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Back to the original point about lefty dominance in the infrastructure of the new media:
I must admit that I worry about these things from time to time, but my usual conclusion is that it doesn't matter too much so long as the market remains unregulated.
I could see a situation where it's a bit frustrating, as in the YouTube example linked at top. Of course lefties -- and righties, and anyone of quasi-religious certainty --will use whatever advantage they can when they know they are right.
But I am not outraged in any ideological sense for two reasons.
First, it's within the realm of defensible (read: legal) free speech when YouTube decides to censor content. You read that right. Free speech means that any entity decides what it will and won't say. YouTube is under no compulsion to carry or not carry any video, by whatever standards it chooses.
As a matter of credibility, however, of course they shouldn't censor video simply because it might offend. They hurt their brand and limit their audience. But they are entirely within their rights to make such mistakes.
The second reason I am not concerned is that money and votes still talk. Even with overwhelming dominance of liberal points of view in the major newsrooms, Republicans and Democrats each still hover around the 50% mark.
The Googles and YouTubes of the world can try to shut down certain voices, but they will do so at their own peril. If they were to make a habit of alienating half of their potential audience, they open up an opportunity for a competitor.
A free market has a way of working those things out. It's only when the market is not free (a la McCain-Feingold, eminent domain and net neutrality) that we should worry.
h/t Instapundit
The US economy has been an unprecedented success over the last several years, and new data further supports it.
First, tax revenues are increasing at a staggering rate:
The main cause of the deficit decline -- 90% of it, says White House budget director Rob Portman -- is a tidal wave of tax revenue. Tax collections have increased by $521 billion in the last two fiscal years, the largest two-year revenue increase -- even after adjusting for inflation -- in American history. [...]
As for the budget deficit, at $260 billion it is now about 2% of our $13 trillion economy, well below the 2.7% average of the last 40 years. [...] Not too shabby given that we're waging a war on terrorism and Congress spent $50 billion last year on Hurricane Katrina clean-up. [...]
If you're surprised to hear that, it's probably because inside Washington this is treated as the only secret no one wants to print.
Hat tip Kudlow.
What's nice about that scenario is that both liberals and conservatives can be happy. Liberals because government revenues are increasing. Conservatives because the wealth of citizens is increasing while they pay a smaller percentage of that wealth to gov't.
Meanwhile, employment numbers have been revised to a substantial improvement.
The US unemployment rate fell in September and previous jobs numbers were revised sharply higher according to official data released on Friday, suggesting the US labour market is tighter than previously thought. [...]
The US unemployment rate dropped to 4.6 per cent from 4.7 per cent in August, while hourly wages rose by 0.2 per cent, bringing the year-on-year increase to 4.0 per cent.
Just 51,000 jobs were added to non-farm payrolls in September, well short of analyst estimates of around 125,000. But revisions to the previous two months added an extra 61,000 jobs. Meanwhile, the government lifted its estimate of non-farm employment in the year to March by 810,000, or 0.6 per cent of the total.
That's 810K previously unnoticed jobs. As I've implied previously, the most important measure of economic success is continued wealth creation, and the single best reflection of this is job creation.
Larry Kudlow, Glenn Reynolds and the WSJ agree that it's incredibly strange this news is not being widely celebrated. The problem, of course, is that in an election season this data might been seen as helping Republicans.
Happily, I have a solution to this PR problem: have economists start sending lewd messages to teenagers!
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Update 9 Oct: WSJ has more on those newly discovered 810,000 jobs. Even though I am a poo-pooher of wage statistics as a measure of economic success, even the Krugmans of the world no longer have a complaint:
[...] the news here is that the U.S. has a very tight labor market -- which is now translating into significant wage gains. Over the past 12 months wages have climbed by 4%, which is the biggest gain since 2001 and which economist Brian Wesbury points out is higher than the 3.3% average annual wage growth of the last 25 years.
Wages up, jobs up, wealth up. Damn those supply-siders.
And, Glenn steals my joke.
Notice the subtle difference in headlining the same story. In the CNN domestic edition, Ahmadinejad thinks the UN is the problem:
But in CNN's International edition, somehow it becomes the United States that is the problem:
I imagine this is more in line with that audience's expectations? Both headlines link to the same story (here). For CNN, it's all about having your red states and eating them too.
I suppose there is not much we can do about certain folks' cynicism about terror events such as the current one. As soon as I heard about it last night, I wondered how long it would be before someone questioned the timing. (This morning, the first I came across was Josh Marshall.)
But I wonder -- when exactly could something like this happen without the timing being questioned?
July & August: campaigns & primariesSeptember: 9/11 anniversaryOctober & November: mid-term campaign & electionsDecember & January: State of the Union coming up...and into 2007...
And of course, there are the perennials such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, in its myriad forms, Iraq, North Korea, G8, every kind of scandal. Even if we limit ourselves to the Middle East, we could have questioned the timing at any point in the last 2000 years, no?
I guess I have come to question the timing of those questioning the timing...
Hi friends, trust you had a good break. I was away with family and will have a post on my brown-skinned immigrant ancestors, and how they became Americans.
For now, check out this extraordinary Hitchens piece on anti-Americanism and polling.
I’ve come to realize that “polls” — like government itself — are too often a lefty misinformation tool. A sweeping generalization of course, and perhaps I am late to this realization. (And, usual disclaimer, Republicans are not without sin here either.)
After the dead-wrong pre-election Kerry polling, this came into fine focus for me. It’s given me an even stronger appreciation for free markets. As I’ve mentioned before, when people vote with their feet and their money, the vote “America” (think immigration), or at least the American way (economic liberalization). Only in the abstract does anti-Americanism mean anything.
If you ever wonder why elites fear free markets so much, here’s why: their academic view of the world falls to pieces, as does the privilege that goes with it.
The other night I was watching Al Gore on Letterman talking about global warming and promoting his movie. I am an admitted skeptic on the subject, and honestly don’t know what to believe. I do know that many people are accepting the existence of global warming for reasons that are less than scientific.
One phrase which struck me was when Gore declared “The scientific debate is over”, motioning his hands like an umpire calling “safe”. What a strange and manipulative thing to say -- this little rhetorical catch-phrase is intended to tell his audience not to consider any ideas but the ones he is promoting. Hardly the words of a critical thinker, and hardly an invitation for people to do their own research and form their own opinions. It is pure dogma.
Richard Lindzen, who is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, heard Gore repeat his catch-phrase on another show and begs to differ:
What exactly is this debate that Mr. Gore is referring to? Is there really a scientific community that is debating all these issues and then somehow agreeing in unison? Far from such a thing being over, it has never been clear to me what this "debate" actually is in the first place. [...]
A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998. [...]
So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points.
First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists -- especially those outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.
Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce -- if we're lucky.
Put simply, to the extent that our discussion is scientific, the debate is quite serious and ongoing. Only when we leave the realm of science can we declare the debate over.
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Believers in global warming make the point that, even if we don’t know all the science, shouldn’t we act now, considering the potential consequences? Fine, but they often overlook an important question: what about the poorest parts of the world?
The problem is one of poverty and prosperity. We are rich in this country and we are among the most energy-efficient in the world, when measured by carbon production per $ of GDP. (Our numbers would be improved with more nuclear.)
As other countries of the world increase their wealth (especially China and India), we should expect their energy use to rise proportionately. If we are to try to control global warming by changing our ways, we may be asking people to limit their prosperity, since wealth is the most fundamental driver of energy use and carbon production.
It is unlikely that rich Westerners will give up much prosperity. Of course there are things we can do, and I am excited about them (plug-in hybrids, E85, nuclear). But these changes will dovetail into our economy, if we decide we want them. We can afford it, and we might even improve our prosperity in the long term.
It is the countries and the people who are building towards prosperity that will be asked to give up the most. India and China are highly polluting and they are just beginning to move up the prosperity scale. Keep in mind that the US economy is over 5x as large as China’s, with only 1/4 of their population. They have a long way to go and a lot of big plans.
Global warming advocates have precisely no intention of reducing their own standards of living, and offer little evaluation of cost-benefit for those whose standards will be reduced.
This why it is so dangerous to blindly sign on to global warming alarmism. If we pass bad laws based on incomplete science, we are asking a lot of poor people around the world to stay poor. We self-congratulating Westerners will never see them, but in our hearts will know we are “good people” for having “saved the planet”.
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Look, I understand that if Gore’s predictions are true then it is a problem for all of us. I am all for new, efficient technologies as I mentioned above. But we must do a serious, scientific cost-benefit:
These are not yes-or-no questions, but matters of degree. As uncomfortable as it might be, we must measure the cost of environmental degradation vs. the benefits of new prosperity. Are we willing accept half a degree of global warming to lift 100,000,000 million people out of poverty? What is the right trade-off?
In fact, we make these sorts of evaluations every day.
Here is a simple analogy: a family of four lives on the outskirts of the Brazilian rainforest, in a mud hut. If they were to clear and farm an acre of land, they could afford a better home, an outhouse, more food and medicine and mosquito netting. They might be able to vaccinate their children and send them to school. These children, in turn, grow up to be teachers and nurses.
If we are going to save an acre of rainforest, are we also willing to commit a family to a life of relative misery? After all, as you read this, the land you are sitting on was (probably) once forested. It was cleared for your benefit, and even if you didn’t ask for it, you accept it as part of your standard of living.
By our actions, we do believe that there is an acceptable trade-off between environment and standard of living. Now we need to do the hard work of deciding whether others are allowed to make the same calculation.
I think the debate is not over...
I’ve said a few times that terrorism is primarily a media war. I am certainly not the first to point this out, but its truth has become more and more evident. Our press is either extraordinarily gullible or actively hoping for bad things to happen. (Witness the New York Times’ 30 (imagined) beheaded bodies or the work of Bilal “photo op” Hussein.)
Today I read this stunning piece in the Washington Post.
More ink equals more blood, claim two economists who say that newspaper coverage of terrorist incidents leads directly to more attacks. [...]
"Both the media and terrorists benefit from terrorist incidents," their study contends. Terrorists get free publicity for themselves and their cause. The media, meanwhile, make money "as reports of terror attacks increase newspaper sales and the number of television viewers."
The researchers counted direct references to terrorism between 1998 and 2005 in the New York Times and Neue Zuercher Zeitung, a respected Swiss newspaper. They also collected data on terrorist attacks around the world during that period. Using a statistical procedure called the Granger Causality Test, they attempted to determine whether more coverage directly led to more attacks.
The results, they said, were unequivocal: Coverage caused more attacks, and attacks caused more coverage -- a mutually beneficial spiral of death that they say has increased because of a heightened interest in terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001. [emphasis mine]
Add this to Zarqawi’s media analysis:
Based on the above points, it became necessary that these matters should be treated one by one:
1. To improve the image of the resistance in society, increase the number of supporters who are refusing occupation and show the clash of interest between society and the occupation and its collaborators. To use the media for spreading an effective and creative image of the resistance. [emphasis mine]
Media’s response? You betcha!
