For eight years, I valued principle over partisanship and castigated the Bush administration, for among other transgressions, fiscal recklessness. Now that Obama is president, there don't seem to be any liberals willing to take Dear Leader to task for the shortcomings they so viciously attacked George W. Bush for. If you thought it was irresponsible (and it was) for Bush to run up a $1 trillion dollar deficit, why wouldn't it horrify you that Obama is proposing a $1.75 trillion dollar deficit--which will certainly surpass the $2 trillion mark after off-budget emergency spending and other unforeseen circumstances? "Honest liberal" shouldn't be an oxymoron.
Channeling FlynnFiles, Fidelity Investments Chairman Edward Johnson wrote to shareholders, "We can only hope that the government's cure doesn't further sicken the patient." The 28th wealthiest American explained, "During the '30s, Congress--with guidance from the president and the same kind of good intentions--shifted the country's cash flow away from productive businesses to government make-work projects, which most likely prolonged the Great Depression." Johnson even compared George Bush to Herbert Hoover and Barack Obama to Franklin Roosevelt, viewing the instrusions into the economy by each negatively. I watched Nevada Senator John Ensign on Hardball articulately and intelligently explain the New Deal's failure to rescue America from the Great Depression to an aghast Chris Matthews, who reacted much the way a seminarian would if you had told him David Fricke is the real savior. As encouraging is this brilliant piece of guerilla theater (The giant chicken is rumored to comment at FlynnFiles) courtesy of Right.org. Watch it, if only for the spectacle of these brash activists showering Treasury Secretary Tim Geitner with cash as if he were a stripper. Take heart. We are not alone. There are people out there who get it.
Atop the monstrous stimulus package, last Fall's TARP legislation, and the cost of two wars, Obama wants yet another banker bailout. In His speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night, Obama recycled the same arguments used for the Fall banker bailout: "[T]his plan will require significant resources from the federal government--and yes, probably more than we've already set aside. But while the cost of action will be great, I can assure you that the cost of inaction will be far greater, for it could result in an economy that sputters along for not months or years, but perhaps a decade." Every failed action is cause for more action--that's the self-perpetuating nature of big-government in a nutshell. Maybe I'm just a worry wart. Dear Leader assures: "It's not about helping banks--it's about helping people."
"Sometimes the man who looks the happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light. The seal-barker, the laugh-shouter, half the time he's covering up. He's had his fun and he's guilty. And men do love sin, Will, oh how they love it, never doubt it, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and smells. Times come when troughs, not tables, suit our appetites. Hear a man too loudly praising others, and look to wonder if he didn't just get up from the sty. On the other hand, that unhappy, pale, put-upon man walking by, who looks all guilt and sin, why, often that's your good man with a capital G, Will. For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it and sometimes break in two. I've known a few. You work twice as hard to be a farmer as to be his hog."
--Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes, 1962
President Obama speaks to a joint session of Congress this evening. If you can't wait that long to hear from Dear Leader, or to see the distinguished government officials gathered to hear Him in the Capitol, I took the trouble of inventing a time machine and retrieving a video of the speech from the future for your inspection in the present. Watch it here for insight into the real state of our union.
Though seeing Sean Penn deliver a "best actor" Academy Awards acceptance speech that was more taunt against political enemies than expression of gratitude toward industry friends made me click off, reading Ben Shapiro's transcription of Penn's graceless tirade clicked on a few neurons. "I think it is a good time for those who voted against gay marriage to contemplate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes. We need to have equal rights for everyone." Contra Sean Penn, and speaking as a Massachusettsan and not a Californian, I think it is a good time for those who imposed gay marriage to contemplate their great shame and the shame in their grandparents' eyes. Liberals, perhaps out of contempt for what has come before or an agnosticism in the afterlife, don't care or think about how they appear to the past. The imaginary future, where Sean Penn's every view is conventional wisdom, instead serves as the anchor of their morality.
Last week, the Washington Post revealed that Lyndon Johnson instructed the FBI to investigate aide Jack Valenti's sex life. It's just that they didn't spin it that way. Read my American Spectator piece to understand why, from Woodrow Wilson to Harry Truman to John Kennedy, you can't blame liberal presidents for civil liberties abuses. The devil made them do it.
"You commie, homo-lovin' sons of guns," began Sean Penn's acceptance speech for his best actor Oscar. It got worse from there. Andrew Breitbart has invited me to post on his Big Hollywood site--just in time for Oscar night and its fallout. My inaugural post ponders how Gus Van Sant could have made a film about Harvey Milk without casting a "Jim Jones" role. As I detailed at length in my much-trafficked November article on the Peoples Temple murder-suicides, and discuss in abreviated form at Big Hollywood, Harvey Milk and the San Francisco Left allowed Jim Jones to conduct his criminal enterprise in San Francisco with impunity as payback for his ability to supply campaign volunteers on cue. It's a strange world where merely being homosexual, and subscribing to a few fashionable leftish beliefs, can erase a shameful supporting role enabling the mass murderer of 914 people.
"Though the nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards," attorney general Eric Holder announced in a speech. "[A]verage Americans simply do not talk enough with each other about race." "It's so true." Richard Spencer pricelessly responds, "Throughout my years of formal education, I haven't heard much about 'race' or 'racism' and its effects on American society. It's always seemed that the whole educational and governmental elite just wanted to ignore the subject entirely. One would think that in a country this size, with our great wealth and resources, we'd have full academic departments dedicated to the study race, as well as student-orientation sessions and wings of the university bureaucracy. A nation that was willing to talk about matters racial would probably be willing to spend billions on government programs dedicated to equalizing outcomes in employment, admissions, and test taking."
I have long thought the European Union a softer, modern-day inheritor of the Soviet Union, and other fallen empires of the old continent, in its need to dictate across borders. It's good to see that someone with quite a bit more influence shares my view. "Not so long ago, in our part of Europe we lived in a political system that permitted no alternatives and therefore also no parliamentary opposition," Vaclav Klaus, the courageous president of the Czech Republic, told the EU parliament today. "We learned the bitter lesson that with no opposition, there is no freedom." In their ambitions to rule the continent, France and Germany have traded soldiers for bureaucrats with great success.
Ever have a Finn DeTrolio-Vito Spatafore moment? Driving on my street, which includes a forest-lined stretch devoid of houses, a family member glimpsed a shirtless man--it was about 30 degrees at the time--and another shadowy gentleman engaging in illicit activities in a parked automobile. My neighborhood, which is on the affluent side (I stills keeps it reals dou), has become a spot for such rendezvous. Other gentlemen can be seen, as Mick Jagger put it, waiting on a friend. When I first moved into the neighborhood, one man eyeballed me the way Michael Moore looks at a box of chocolate eclairs. I'm torn about what, if anything, to do. On the one hand, I don't want perverts, who often have vices atop vices, partaking in public sex on my street. On the other hand, my suspicion is that many of these men are probably closeted homosexuals indulging a weakness in the most accessible venue available to them. Getting busted by the cops in flagrante could ruin jobs, marriages, reputations, etc. The punishment, even if there isn't one meted out by the courts, would far exceed the crime. So, should I call the vice squad on the partakers of vicious activity, just look away, or might there be a creative solution that I am overlooking?
"Give them billions of taxdollars," I warned in November, "and in a few years they'll just need another transfusion." A few years? Try a few months. Washington's bailout of Chrsler and General Motors didn't work. How do I know? It's less than three months since the initial $34 billion bailout, and the automakers are asking for more, more, more. The original bailout was contingent on a corporate plan for solvency. The plans submitted demand another bailout, which is their idea of solvency. One sympathizes with a hungry Oliver Twist when he petitions his workmaster, "I want some more." GM and Chrysler's pleas for more somehow fail to elicit such feeling.
The federal government is a lot like the mafia. It lends out a few bucks to a businessman in trouble, and the next thing the businessman knows, his business is his ostensible benefactor's. This is the direction, full nationalization of troubled banks, that Democrats and a few Republicans advocate. The lesson? Maxine Waters, or Phil Leotardo, hanging about your establishment has the tendency to scare away customers. If you want to stay in business, keep the government, and the mafia, out of your business.
Barack Obama has signed his misnamed stimulus package. The $787 billion bill is actually a depressant package. It doesn't create wealth, it merely redistributes it. The wealth it takes comes mostly from wealth producers. The wealth it distributes goes in large part to the un- and underemployed. In other words, it rewards the problem and hampers the solution. The package is more sedative than stimulus.
Edge Shaving Gel has a series of online videos detailing my morning routine here. An actor plays me in the dramatization. The three models who daily invade my bathroom play themselves. Not since Miller Lite made a commercial based on a fight that I had witnessed over lunch have I felt so exploited.
For solar skeptics doubting the sun's power to affect the weather here on earth--choosing to believe, instead, that Big Macs and Aquanet are responsible for mercury spikes--consider that the sun is 93 million miles away and can still burn you to death. The sun is so bright it can blind you. And then there is its mighty sonic fury. That's right, atop its other superpowers, the sun is extremely loud. Even if Yngwie Malmsteen forced you to use his Marshall Stacks as headphones, it wouldn't be as loud as the sun. Even if, on an expedition to seek an audience with the Emperor of the Solarians, you were equipped with potent suntan lotion shielding you completely from the orb's rays, the sonic blast would still kill you. Even if you unleashed the entire nuclear arsenal on planet earth, its racket wouldn't be as decibel shattering as the sun's (and you'd have no planet on which to live). It's the sun's solar system. We just live in it.
Check out this map put out by the National Climatic Data Center. The eastern three-fourths of the contiguous United States appear much colder than normal over the last year. Had the last twelve months produced a map with inverse results--hotter than normal temperatures--the congregants of the Church of Global Warming would no doubt divine it as confirmation of their religion's prophecy. Absent the politicized debate over climate change, an unusually cold year in and of itself just means an unusually cold year. But according to Al Gore and other high priests of global warming, the earth is supposedly heating up. If you buy into this idea that the perimeters of "normal" temperatures have shifted, then an unusually cold year by traditional standards is no longer considered an outlier but an impossibility. Put another way, the inconvenient thermometer is far more inconvenient for global-warming zealots than it is for global-warming agnostics. An unusually hot year would not convert an agnostic to the Church of Global Warming because under normal conditions there are unusually hot and cold years. An unusually cold year, on the other hand, should prove devastating to the Church of Global Warming because such an event invalidates the idea that man's behavior has singularly boosted the average temperature. If you believed in global warming, then an unusually cold year under the new normal would be what would have been considered an average year under the old normal. If man made it hotter than usual, explain why it's suddenly colder than normal? Might the culprit be more or less the same in both instances? The fiery ball around which we revolve effects the weather more than styrofoam cups or SUVs.
C-SPAN asked historians to rank the presidents on leadership. The results said more about historians than the presidents. Pauline Maier? Robert Dallek? Stephen B. Oates? If Obama had been on the list, these characters might have ranked him one before day one. As demonstrated by my Deep Blue Campuses, employees at top colleges overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates. This applies, I suspect, not just to liberals present but to their forerunners as well. If not, why is failed president Woodrow Wilson ahead of Ronald Wilson Reagan? Why do the partisans of big government--the Roosevelts, Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman--dominate the top ten? Why do friends of liberty such as Calvin Coolidge, Grover Cleveland, and Warren Harding dwell below the presidential Mendoza line?
An EU representative in Venezuela dared state the obvious: Hugo Chavez is a dictator. In respone, Chavez ordered intelligence commandos to abduct the envoy from his hotel room and eject him from the country. That settles it then. Chavez is not a dictator. Really he isn't.
He's a little bit country--and a little bit rock n roll. At 24, she's an over-the-hill pop princess. Ryan Adams makes Morrissey seem like a member of Up With People. Mandy Moore scored a bubble-gum pop hit with the appropriately titled "Candy" and starred in "A Walk to Remember," which Wikipedia describes as a "romance between a minister's daughter and an unruly teenager" (Wow, has that ever been done before?). They are engaged to be married, which proves the dictum that opposites attract. In honor of their unusual union (perhaps Massachusetts or Vermont will allow them to marry), I've compiled a list of Mandy Moore and Ryan Adams's ten greatest songs. Enjoy:
10. Ryan Adams When the Stars Go Blue
9. Ryan Adams Cobwebs
8. Ryan Adams Nuclear
7. Ryan Adams So Alive
6. Ryan Adams New York, New York
5. Ryan Adams Harder Now That It's Over
4. Ryan Adams Rock N Roll
3. Ryan Adams Dear Chicago
2. Ryan Adams Crossed Out Name
1. Ryan Adams Come Pick Me Up
I haven't been following the controversy provoked by Sam Tanenhaus's "Conservatism Is Dead" article too closely until now. This is not because of its author. Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers is one of the most enjoyable books that I have read in the last ten years. It's because I read this article when George Packer wrote it in The New Yorker last year. The conservative obituary is the favorite article for liberals writing about conservatives to write. The theme's staying power is its invalidation.
As is the case with the liberal-penned obits that preceded, Tanenhaus's advice to conservatives would be great for liberalism but bad for conservatism. If only conservatism were another version of liberalism.... is the translated gist. Tanenhaus's point about conservatives perversely embracing ideology barked up the right tree, until it became clear that he conflates acceptance of liberal policies with a rejection of ideology.
At times, the post-mortem is wholly askance from reality: "After George W. Bush's two terms, conservatives must reckon with the consequences of a presidency that failed, in large part, because of its fervent commitment to movement ideology: the aggressively unilateralist foreign policy; the blind faith in a deregulated, Wall Street-centric market; the harshly punitive 'culture war' waged against liberal 'elites.'" The irony here is that if only Bush had believed in deregulation or the market, rather than intervention and statism, conservatives wouldn't be in such a mess. One supposes that Napoleon spoke of the war waged against him too, so a New York Times Book Review editor speaking of conservatives waging a culture war against his kind is amusing. The foreign-policy criticism may be the most revealing. It's not an aggressive foreign policy that Tanenhaus decries. It's an "aggressively unilaterlist foreign policy." Hmmm. Should we have invaded Iraq alongside Swedes, Belgians, and Frenchmen, this muscular-foreign-policy-with-friends attitude seems to say, then Iraqis would now behave as Swedes, Belgians, and Frenchmen rather than as Iraqis.
My own take is that the conservative movement--Bricker Amendment, Young Americans for Freedom, Who Promoted Peress?, Impeach Earl Warren, In Your Heart You Know He's Right, Stop ERA, Stop the Panama Canal Treaty, Standing Athwart History Yelling Stop, and all that--is dead. What would Robert Taft think of the Bush Doctrine and Barry Goldwater make of big-government conservatism? The conservative movement is dead because some of the issues that initially motivated it, like the Cold War, are moot. It's also dead, in large part, because the institutions and people most closely associated with it have been corrupted and coopted by the Republican Party.
Conservatism, on the other hand, is alive and relevant. Limited government, low taxation, personal responsibility, and a strong national defense employed only for the furtherance of America's just interests--the ideas and principles that initially animated and motivated the conservative movement--are good medicine for a sick America. They may work as adrenaline for dead conservative movement, too. If conservatism really were dead, why would Tanenhaus write an article offering conservatives unsolicited advice? Conservatism is dead like Jason, Freddy, and Frankenstein. This is the nightmare of every reader of the New York Times Book Review.
There are some thoughtful takes on Tanenhaus's piece at the University Bookman. Jim Antle's response to Tannenhaus's piece on the American Spectator blog, methinks, is the best thus far. He identifies three areas that support Tanenhaus's general gripes about conservatives: 1. "Something valuable was lost in the transition from Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet to Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity." 2. "As Republican politicians have done progressively less for various conservative groups, like social conservatives, they've gotten louder in their insistences that they are people just like them red state folks.... I like Sarah Palin, but the Republican establishment marketed her in a way that was intended to manipulate conservatives, not heed them." 3. "There are ideological conservatives who don't have a conservative temperament."
Perhaps inspired by the success of the dog-mess sandwich, a group of Hindu extremists plans to mass-market a cow urine soft drink. "Don't worry, it won't smell like urine and will be tasty too," insisted Om Prakash to the London Times. "[I]t's going to be very healthy. It won't be like carbonated drinks and would be devoid of any toxins." I hate to break the news to Mr. Prakash, but you're a day late and a dollar short. Hindu bottled cow piss is a pale imitation of Western libation inovation. Like millions of other Westerners, I down a can of a bovine-based piss drink every day. It's called Yellow Red Bull. On weekends, I add vodka.
Yesterday's Fort Myers, Florida town-hall meeting--more revival meeting than political event--represents all that's disturbing about Barack Obama and what he brings out in his drones. Beatlemania for a political leader isn't a good thing. Just ask the Germans. I implore you to watch this video, which demonstrates the results of the cult of personality that the president has cultivated.
"Who, then, are ideologists? They are people needy of purpose in life, not in a mundane sense (earning enough to eat or to pay the mortgage, for example) but in the sense of transcendence of the personal, of reassurance that there is something more to existence than existence itself. The desire for transcendence does not occur to many people struggling for a livelihood. Avoiding material failure gives quite sufficient meaning to their lives. By contrast, ideologists have few fears about finding their daily bread. Their difficulty with life is less concrete. Their security gives them the leisure, their education the need, and no doubt their temperament the inclination, to find something above and beyond the flux of daily life."
--Theodore Dalrymple, "The Persistence of Ideology," 2009
Conservatives aren't as skilled at reading books out loud as their liberal counterparts. Don't believe me? Just ask the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, or better yet, read my article at the American Spectator noting that before Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth won a Grammy on Sunday, Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Franken, Christopher Reeve, and Jane Fonda took home "spoken word" Grammys, too.
The old New Deal says, "You have nothing to fear but fear itself." The new New Deal says, "Be afraid. Be very afraid." People "can't pay their bills" and have "stopped spending money." Americans have "no idea what to do or who to turn to," and their "lives have been turned upside-down." A "failure to act will only deepen this crisis" and produce "deficits that could turn a crisis into a catastrophe." Did I mention that this is the "most profound economic emergency since the Great Depression"? "[A]ct without delay." "It is only government that can break the vicious cycle, where lost jobs lead to people spending less money, which leads to even more layoffs." My name is Barack Obama, and I scare people for a living.
City Journal features a a top-notch article by Theodore Dalrymple on the persistence of ideology in the post-End of Ideology world. He finds parallels between the Communist ideology on the outs, and the Islamist ideology that replaced it as a challenge to the West. Both ideologies justify violence against the ruling class, entrust a vanguard rather than the people to do the people's will, and promise a withering away of the state should they succeed. If only Islamists were the only fanatics offering a one-stop-shopping panacea. "Feminists continued to see every human problem as a manifestation of patriarchy, civil rights activists as a manifestation of racism, homosexual-rights activists as a manifestation of homophobia, anti-globalists as a manifestation of globalization, and radical libertarians as a manifestation of state regulation," Dalrymple writes. "How delightful to have a key to all the miseries, both personal and societal, and to know personal happiness through the single-minded pursuit of an end for the whole of humanity!"
Kellogg's has dropped uber-Olympian Michael Phelps as a pitchman in the wake of a candid-camera snap of the swimmer taking a hit of marijuana from a bong. Kellogg's loss is the Mendocino County Chamber of Commerce's gain. This article by Doug Bandow got me to thinking. I doubt Michael Phelps eats Frosted Flakes, particularly after witnessing the swimmer devour that high-caloric breakfast while Anderson Cooper interviewed him. A superimposed Phelps appeared alongside Tony the Tiger on a box of Frosted Flakes, but I have yet to see evidence of Phelps actually eating the cereal. We do know, on the other hand, that Michael Phelps smokes pot. There is an undoctored photo of him doing his best imitation of Tommy Chong to prove it. Here's my modest proposal: If Frosted Flakes can connect their sugary digestables to Olympic greatness, might the marijuana industry, with about the same degree of credibility, imply similar miraculous results from using its product? The cannabis industry might also enlist Presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton; musicians Paul McCartney, Bing Crosby, and Louis Armstrong; and highbrains Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Sagan, and Pablo Picasso. Smoke pot and you will become president, go platinum, or host the most watched show in the history of PBS. Is that any more deceptive than eat candy for breakfast and you will become an Olympic champion?
I don't have an iPod, or even a Walkman for that matter. A few years ago, somebody stole my iRiver at the gym. It's more complicated than that. I carelessly left it at the treadmill. A member turned it in. When I gleefully went to retrieve it, thinking that I had dodged a bullet, one of the trainer's admitted that the device had been stolen from behind the front desk. Booyah! If I did own an iPod, the choice tunes below are what I would be playing. In particular, Ryan Adams's Crossed-Out Name, which, in a fit of insanity, I listened to more than twenty times one day last week. Here's what I'll be listening to this weekend:
Ryan Adams--Crossed Out Name
Kings of Leon--Fans
Belle and Sebastian--Expectations
Arcade Fire--No Cars Go
The English Beat--Save It for Later
What will you be listening to this weekend?
The Left believes the Left, and not the market, should determine compensation, value, pay. A grape picker gets $5 an hour? That's too little! A CEO making $5 million a year? That's too much! The employer and the employee can't make rational decisions on their own. Only the rational Left is equipped to make those decisions for them.
The Left is obsessed with other people's money. Just don't dare touch theirs. If they know what's best regarding your money, then certainly you should expect them to believe they know what's best about their own money, too. Just ask tax cheat Tom Daschle.
In addition to minimum-wage laws and onerous taxation rates for high earners, the Left has unveiled a plan to cap at $500,000 the compensation for CEOs of the failed companies they advocated subsidizing. The crime is not that these CEOs get paid too much, but that socialists in Congress took tax money to subsidize the pay of failed corporation heads in the first place. Had my plan been adopted, instead of the socialists' plan, many of these CEOs would now be out of work. Their companies, too inefficient to compete in a free market, would have gone out of business. That's too simple for a Left that's got it all figured out, so in addition to picking and choosing which companies to bail out, the Left wants to decide how much selected individuals working for those companies get paid annually.
Personally, I think $300,000 for a university's diversity commissar and $169,000 for a senator averse to showing up for work is way too high. But it might be hubristic of me to offer an arbitrary figure of what their ideal salaries should be. How would I know? The Left has no such compunction. They know best. And with regard to pay, it's no coincidence that the optimal salary for a bailout CEO is only slightly higher than the actual pay of the CEO of the federal government. How dare they make more money than the Chosen One?
For the Left, everybody makes too much money who makes more than them. Everybody makes too little money who makes less than them. The psychological claims envy and pity have over the Left would be harmless if leftists had no claims over the rest of us.
Republican Senator Judd Gregg once voted to abolish the department of commerce, which makes him eminently qualified to lead the agency (Custer-style) in my book. Unfortunately, now that Barack Obama has plucked the second-generation New Hampshire baby-kisser out of the senate to run the commerce department, born-again Obamaite Gregg is a little too enthusiastic about the disposable department. For his reversal, I rechristen him: Gregg Judd. Judd Gregg, bureaucracy killer, I can deal with. Gregg Judd, bureaucrat, is another person entirely.
Except this one, which is worth a dozen or so. What words does this picture evoke?
Fifty years ago today, paperboy Don McLean delivered "bad news on the door step." Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa on February 3, 1959. It would never be the same again. Before Jimi Hendrix, or Sid Vicious, or Kurt Cobain, '50s teenagers experienced it first with Buddy Holly. Read my article @ the American Spectator that explores the history and meaning of this giant cultural demarcation point.
The Boston Herald reports that the photogenic lesbian pair--Herbert Garrison and Mr. Slave just wouldn't have worked as posterchildren--that sued Massachusetts into declaring select homosexual couplings "marriages" has filed for divorce. Though not exactly Jane Roe coming out against abortion, and several years in the making, the pair's abreviated union is a bit of a public relations setback. Given that their "marriage" only lasted a couple of years, might some judge issue an annulment on gay marriage in general and not just their suspicious "marriage" in particular? Should either desire to convert from Unitarianism to, say, Catholicism, a divorce-proceedings claim that they were forced into the marriage for reasons other than love--To make a political point?--might be enough to void the nuptials and preserve the possibility of a church wedding down the road. What do you say ladies?
The situation calls for a principled opposition. Some Republican leaders offer a me-too approach. This tact accepts President Obama's premises, e.g., that America needs a massive federal spending blitz to stimulate the economy, but quibbles over the pricetag. Florida Senator Mel Martinez has devised a $700 billion stimulus package. The bulk of it is comprised of tax cuts (which these days has come to encompass rebates to people who don't pay federal taxes), but it also includes about $300 billion in federal spending. The federal government needs to imitate the taxpayers who feed it by tightening its belt. After a wild federal spending binge that included the most expensive piece of legislation in world history, the economy has gotten worse, not better. Now Republicans such as Senator Martinez want to administer more of the medicine that made America sick in the first place. They will harm the American economy, and their party, should they suceed. When offered Democrat and Democrat-lite, the American people will opt for the real thing over a pale imitator every time.
A 100-yard pick six, a safety, a dramatic comeback answered by a dramatic last-minute touchdown--what more could you ask for? A few thoughts on the event. Kurt Warner has played in three of the greatest Super Bowls. His teams scored 63, his opponents 63. The Pittsburgh Steelers now are the sole claimants to the best franchise of the Super Bowl era with six Lombardi Trophies. The Boss is the boss live, but his song selection was predictable--so much so that I called three of four. The on-field crowd consisted of legitimate Springsteen fans and not the coached, robotically-bouncing, rent-an-audience that I've come to expect at award shows and halftime shows. Jennifer Hudsom gave a Houstonian performance of the National Anthem in the very city where Whitney Houston set standard eighteen years ago. Sure, Houston's rendition had the backdrop of the Gulf War going for it. But what could be more inspiring than Hudson belting out the Star-Spangled Banner after the horrible crimes inflicted upon her family? The Doritos ad, in which a too-happy gentleman insists his snow globe is really a magic ball and then proves it to his skeptical co-worker by hurling it through a vending machine's window to get free Doritos, was my favorite ad. In my youth, Super Bowl was synonymous with mismatch. The game has really become the game in the last decade. Rams-Titans, Patriots-Rams, Patriots-Panthers, Patriots-Eagles, Giants-Patriots, and Steelers-Cardinals--six of the last ten games--were all in question until the final seconds of play. They don't call it the Super Bowl for nothing.
UPDATE: Homer J. Fong is the winner of the Super Bowl pool, correctly picking the Cards to cover, the game to go over, and coming within two points of the total. Congratulations Homer!
Olympic champion Michael Phelps isn't the first 23-year-old to smoke pot in a dormitory room. He apologized, but he needn't have. The lowlife who took the picture? He owes Phelps an apology. He is indecent, and society is indecent for rewarding his candid-camera intrusion upon Mr. Phelps with money and attention. Congressman Peter King's legislation to force cell-phone manufacturers to ensure camera-phones click upon taking a picture addresses a serious problem--the lack of a private sphere in a technologically-advanced society--but does so with a misdirected faith in governmrnt to solve it and do so in a heavy-handed manner.
