The Only Republican in San Francisco

A dream about Michael Totten

For reasons I can't imagine, last night I had a dreamt that I got into a cab driven by Michael Totten. True. And weird.

Today he has a new post up about Lebanon. He's spent a lot of time there and always has an interesting and personal perspective. He wants to head back, too, so allow me to repeat that you need better sources, and better sources need you.

A quick note from Lebanon

I am of Lebanese descent (50%, Mom's side). I haven't had much to say on the blog lately, which for some is a blessing. My Mom dropped a note to an uncle of mine in Beirut, thought I would share it with you. I've [bracketed out] the identifying information. Note my uncle's last sentiment.

07/24/2006 03:19 PM

To:        [mom's email]         cc:                Subject:        RE: Hello and how are you (this is [mom's name])

Hi [mom's name],
Thank you for the email.
I speak every day with my mother and [cousin]. I usually call them around 1pm our time
Send me your phone number ( or mobile number) and I will let you conference with them.
Everybody is safe in the Christian areas and they have electricity, water ,money,food,medicine..
So do not worry. Most of them are in Faraya enjoying the mountain in the summer.
What is happening is a very good thing for Lebanon. They will get us rid of the thugs and we will rebuild a better country.
Take care
[uncle]


-----Original Message-----
From: [mom's email]
Sent: Monday, July 24, 2006 1:55 PM
To: [uncle's email]
Subject: Hello and how are you (this is [mom's name])


Hi [uncle's name]
  Just thought I'd say hello and see how you're feeling today.  I hope that each day you're doing better. 
   Of course, we're all wondering how the family is in Beirut, especially Aunt [] and Aunt []?  Are they still in Beirut or have they gone to Fariya also?  And what about Aunt [] - is she safe?  I was wondering if [cousin] is still in Moukhtara as I imagine it would be difficult for him to return to Beirut unless he went up to Niha and down the 'back' way.  What did you say was wrong with him - did he have an accident of some kind?
    Every day the news seems to be worse and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight.  What about [cousin]? 
    I know this e.mail is full of questions but we're all very worried about everyone there so please let me know what you hear. 
    Take care of yourself and if you talk to them in Beirut, give them our love and hope that they are ok. 
    Keep in touch.....love, [mom's name] 

Dems make an offer I can’t refuse

This is something I can support the Dems on:

Democrats vow to block pay raises until minimum wage increased

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Democrats ratcheted up their election-year push for an increase in the federal minimum wage Tuesday by promising to block a congressional pay hike unless some of the lowest-paid hourly workers get their first raise in nearly a decade.

I think that is an excellent form of gridlock. It’s the best of both worlds: no pay raises for Congress and no job-killing minimum wage hike. Brilliant.

Honest Republicans should simply say “Yes, we accept your terms.”

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OK, let me explain. By phrasing it as above — “the lowest-paid hourly workers get their first raise in nearly a decade” — one might imagine that a higher minimum wage benefits the poor. Sorry, it simply makes labor more expensive and therefore employers buy less of it. That means fewer people hired, and those who are not hired also happen to be at the bottom of the economic ladder.

As Friedman explains, increasing the minimum wage does not benefit the poor. It just ensures that fewer poor people get jobs.

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Greg Mankiw asks Who earns the minimum wage?. Hint: probably not who you assume.

Liberals arguing for the draft, again

You may recall at the tail end of the 2004 election that Rock the Vote floated the scare tactic that the Republicans might reinstate the draft. Never mind that no one on either side advocated such a thing. The Republicans are all about war and coercive government. Right?

Well, students of history will realize that the draft has generally been a liberal proposition. The argument is, in a volunteer army, only those with the fewest opportunities will consider the armed services. Thus, poor people end up on the front lines while the more privileged don’t need to consider it.

(What is stereotypically liberal about this is the inability to imagine the legitimate free will of another person, if that other person makes a choice that one finds inconceivable.)

Well, here we go again:

If we feared our children were next up to be gutted like fish, we might be less likely to shake our heads at crazy antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan. If turning 18 meant your kid's boots on the ground, a resolution to pull troops out of Iraq by a certain date might grab more than six votes in the US Senate. [...]

A news release posted on Rangel's website noted, ``Right now, the only people being asked to sacrifice in any way are those men and women who, with limited options, chose military service and now find themselves in harm's way in Iraq. A draft would ensure that every economic group would have to do their share and not allow some to stay behind while other people's children do the fighting." [...]

During the Vietnam conflict, the draft sent hundreds of thousands of protesters to the streets. When war is not an abstraction but a personal, involuntary destination, the blanket rationale of war -- defending liberty -- receives tougher scrutiny. Then, politicians have to answer to every American family, not only to those whose loved ones volunteered for military service.

Either this war is worth every citizen's effort, or it's not worth any soldier's life.

In other words, more people should be put in harm’s way against their will, for the sake of emotional impact. What a horrific argument, and one hopes she offers it as reductio ad absurdum, though I suspect not. It requires a particular violence of mind to describe recently deceased soldiers as “gutted like fish”.

The writer likes the idea of governmental coercion so that we might relive Vietnam. There is nothing pacifist in her tone, or her logic.

It’s been said many times that our current press corps considers Vietnam a highpoint of their profession, even if it was a low point for the country. Yet Vietnam was not a journalistic breakthrough because the reporters of the time were trying to recreate a war from 30 years earlier. In doing precisely this, our current crop of reporters finds itself hamstrung by a perverse nostalgia.

Madman Boogabooga

...is the language that Howard Dean speaks, according to (marry me!) Peggy Noonan.

Her essential point is that both parties have lost touch with, or respect for, their bases. As usual, however bad the Republicans are the Dems manage to do worse. As if that were possible!

It has occurred to me that both parties increasingly dislike their bases, but for different reasons and to different degrees. By both parties I mean the leaders and representatives of the Democrats and Republicans in Washington. I believe I correctly observe that they feel an increasing intellectual estrangement from and impatience with the activists who people their base of support. And this is something new. [...]

Here is my read on a lot of Democratic senators: They think they know more than their base and they think they're more--how to put it?--stable in their view of the world than their base. In their hearts, in fact, they don't really like their base. (They like--they love--the old base: old union guys who drink Schlitz and voted for FDR and JFK. But today those old union guys are mostly dead, dying or Republican.)

Democratic leaders in Washington are in a worse position than Republican leaders in Washington. Neither likes their base, really, and both think they are smarter. But the Democrats think, deep down, that their base is barking mad. The Republicans don't. They just think their base is a bore.

The lesson here is that, regardless of who's in charge, big government breeds arrogance which breeds even bigger government.

The evolving libertarian

So, as I wandered in to Vloggercon last week, I was met by my hosts who asked, “So you’re here representing the Republican side?”, to which I responded, “Well, I am more of a libertarian really”. Their unexpected response was “Sure, we all are”.

It seems like that’s what all the cool kids are calling themselves these days, and the term has become something of a catch-all. Many serious people are loathe to identify themselves with the baggage of the major parties, and prefer to transcend it by implying that they are more sincere in their pursuit of individual freedoms. “Libertarian” seems to be just the ticket.

What’s going on here? I think we are discovering that the left-right spectrum is a bit of a fallacy in modern politics. After all, traditional Democrats see themselves as fighting for individual rights on the social side, while arguing for more restrictions on the economic side. Conversely, traditional Republicans argue for greater economic freedoms while showing a greater willingness to impose social restrictions.

(Personally, I don’t think we can separate the two so easily.)

A couple of weeks ago I was accused by Ali of moving to the “left” as my distrust of government grows. Add this to my conversation with Charles Hope — a much more studied libertarian than I — and I’ve come to realize that left-to-right is a meaningless continuum. A more enlightening and durable one is statist (pro-government collectivism) vs individualist (preferring ad hoc, self-organizing systems).

Recently, Markos Moulitsas came out with something of a manifesto for a new breed of left-libertarian. In it, he posits that libertarians should apply their mistrust not only to governments, but also to corporations. Thus, traditional lefties can persist in their usual instincts — capitalism is bad — while laying claim to the idea of fighting for individual freedoms.

There is some intellectual precedent for this, but all I can say is, bunk. (A Kossack agrees, but for reasons entirely opposite mine).

If Kos’ goal is to reduce the power of corporations, how do we do so? The only organization that has the power to do it is the state. If corporations are to be penned in, the only way to do this is to increase the power of the state, and that is hardly a libertarian position.

(Psst: Kos is moving to the center, by the way. His audience notwithstanding, he’s a political animal before all else, and therefore cares more about winning than ideology.)

As I’ve said before, however powerful you believe a particular corporation to be, they are much more accountable than government. After all, the government only needs to please 51% of its customers every 4 years or so. A business that performs at that level ceases to exists.

Both types of organization need your money, but only one can force it from you. Understanding the difference is quintessentially libertarian, IMHO.

In any case, expect more people on the left to start calling themselves libertarians, and for people on the right to call themselves classical liberals. It is a fun semantic game, enlightening on a certain level, but it is a poor substitute for articulating a real point of view.

Zarqawi

I am not a violent man, but I have to admit upon reading this I thought, “die motherf***er”. I am not sure I’ve ever thought that in my life...think about how many lives this person has taken. I think this is the end of Al Qaeda in Iraq, but of course we’ve wished that before. It is not the end of the ideology, of course.

Glenn Reynolds has the best roundup. If you want to hear what Iraqis think, check out Iraq the Model.

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Meanwhile, with this story on their front page, let’s have a look at what the readers of the NY Times are emailing:

Yup, Teflon pans and Netflix. To be fair, the Times is focused on the issue, even if their readers are not.

Barone on the California election

As always, Michael Barone has the best analysis on the California congressional special election down in San Diego county.

Dems too often conflate Republican failure for a victory of their own. Barone points out that the Dems essentially broke even compared to the 2004 election. Republicans did lose ground, so of course we should watch and learn.

There also seemed to be an anti-tax message coming from the voters, as they defeated for Prop 81 (public library funding) and Prop 82 (Reiner's pre-school initiative). Both were examples of good intentions, bad finance and government expansion. Even liberal Californians seemed to agree.

If not America, then who?

... asks the Times of London. It is an inspiring piece and long overdue. Let’s hope the elites on both sides of the pond give it some thought. Key bits:

Smugness is one of Europe’s great contemporary exports. We may all think that we know America, its music, its culture, its self-confident exceptionalism. We tend to forget that Americans fight only with extreme reluctance. We overlook their penchant for agonised self-criticism; everything bad we know about the US, we know because Americans inexhaustibly rehearse their society’s shortcomings. There has never been greater transparency [...] and there has never been more open debate about the country’s virtues and vices [...]

Were it to become politically impossible for a president to keep America’s forces engaged from its shores, then the backbone of international security would be broken. America-bashing may be a popular sport, but its adherents prefer not to contemplate its consequences.

I am not a religious man but...amen. I recently spent a couple of weeks in London, largely drunk (when in Rome, etc). I didn’t experience any anti-Americanism. Had the conversation turned to politics, I might have gotten an earful, who knows.

But anti-Americanism, more than anything, is a tool for the elites in furthering their own political goals and covering their own asses. It should not be mistaken for a serious appraisal of the world.

Amir Taheri on the emerging Iraq

Amir Taheri expands on an article that first appeared in the WSJ, on the messy birth that is occurring in Iraq. It is an excellent accounting of the successes that you are not hearing about — large numbers of people immigrating back into the country, and a growing free press.

More importantly, it includes a clear description of exactly why our current press is so gullible.

The enemies of the new Iraq have succeeded in ruining the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis, but over the past three years they have advanced their overarching goals, such as they are, very little. Instead, they have been militarily contained and politically defeated again and again, and the beneficiary has been Iraqi democracy. [...]

The Baathists and jihadists, their prior efforts to derail Iraqi democracy having come to naught, have now pinned their hopes on creating enough chaos and death to persuade Washington of the futility of its endeavors.

Terrorism is a media war. Terrorist acts in Iraq, and in most places, are militarily insignificant. They don’t succeed in capturing land or governments, and they don’t degrade their enemy’s fighting capacity.

Rather, suicide bombs are political weapons. In the case of Iraq, the target is the American citizen, and more specifically, the American left. The only way that we lose in Iraq is to lose the will to fight. When a war criminal blows up a market, the goal is outrage and despair. And, too often, the Western left (lead by the mainstream press) gives them exactly what they want.

If you’d like to understand the stakes, read Taheri’s piece all the way through, it’s worth it.