We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Well, I am off to bed and despite my interest in politics, have not really the desire to wait up to see what happens in the U.S. Congressional races. My hunch is that by the time I wake up here in London, the Democrats will have taken the House and the Republicans might just hang on to the Senate, but it will be a very close call. I sympathise with the argument, put by various libertarians and small-government Republican supporters, that Bush needs what we Brits call a mighty kick in the bollocks for a number of bad moves, such as the explosive growth of spending on non-defense items, tariffs, the Patriot Act, growing interference in people’s private lives, etc, etc. I can see why many voters, even hawkish ones, have become bitterly angry over the mess in Iraq and wondered whether the Coalition should have heeded the voices of caution and pursued a containment/deterrence line rather than pre-emption. (I backed the ouster of Saddam pretty much from the start but have had my doubts about how the power vacuum might get filled without a sufficiently strong effort to help rebuild the country). The Republicans might, just might learn a valuable lesson: they have had power in Congress since 1994 and more recently, the White House. People do not tend to vote for centre-right parties in order to see a big rise in the size and power of the state. Maybe someone should send Bush a copy of Barry Goldwater’s old classic, The Conscience of a Conservative.
My main worry, drawn from the experience of Britain’s Conservative Party, is that a defeat for the Republicans may not lead to the sort of questioning of the Big Government philosophy known as “Compassionate Conservatism” as championed by Bush in recent years. We have seen how David Cameron has sought to meld the Tories into a pale imitation of NuLabour, in some ways trying to outdo Blair in the spending and taxation stakes. For all the talk that American politics is deeply polarised, perhaps the real truth is that the choices in front of the electorate are not distinct enough.
In case you want to scare off a mugger, why not buy some of these and put them on your coat? Tastes may vary.
Nancy Pelosi was on fine form on Friday – denouncing the people who made certain documents (now withdrawn) available on a United States government website.
As the New York Times (and, surprise surprise, a United Nations agency) reported the story it was all about wicked Republicans publishing documents that could help people build atomic bombs. Of course, what Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the left really objected to was that the documents came from the government of Saddam Hussain and show that he WAS planning to build atomic bombs right up to the invasion of Iraq (information the left has been trying to sit on for years).
The Economist (a journal that has often been very critical of President Bush and other Republicans) also published an interesting article (subscription required) on Nancy Pelosi in its present issue.
It is well know that Nancy Pelosi represents (and reflects) the extreme left San Francisco area, but her money raising activities (at least one hundred million Dollars over the last few years) are less well known, as is her history.
It is not just that Nancy Pelosi’s father was a leftist Congressman and then Mayor of the corrupt city of Baltimore (no one can help who their father is), it is the fact that Nancy Pelosi personally “kept the book” for him – i.e. the record of favours received and delivered. I do not know how the lady can keep a straight face when she talks about the “culture of corruption” in Washington DC Nancy Pelosi has been involved in corruption her whole life – but I doubt that one voter in ten knows this.
The Republicans are at least partly to blame for people not knowing what they are getting. I can guess the sort of talk that justifies just making token attacks rather than full attacks – “Nancy Pelosi is a women, we can not attack her all out as we would look like beasts” and “we can not say what Nancy Pelosi is as it would look like an ethnic slur and we do not want to upset Italian-American voters”.
So the ‘attack dog’ Republicans (or at least the Republican leadership) do not really fight – and thus help give the United States a Speaker Pelosi.
Another point that the Economist article makes is the iron discipline that Nancy Pelosi has imposed on the Democratic party. Whoever the voters think they are being presented with (“the Democrat is very nice and they went to Iraq”) the fact remains that these people will vote the big government way that Nancy Pelosi tells them to (the Republicans may have been soft on spending, but the Democrats want to spend hundreds of billions more – and it is a similar story on regulations).
Almost needless to say, the Democratic party leadership supports Nancy Pelosi – including the people set to head the key committees in the House. Barney Frank is already boasting (for example to the British Financial Times newspaper) of the world government financial services regulator he intends to help create.
There will also be lots of ‘investigations’ – designed to tie the Administration up in knots (in order to bash Bush) and, thus, lose the war (both in Iraq, and in Afghanistan – and everywhere else).
Radical Islam (of both Shia and Sunni types) will win and moderate Muslims (and the West) will lose.
I very much doubt that Nancy Pelosi actually wants this result, but she does not really care – at least not enough for the Democrats not to do it anyway.
Via NewsMax: the troops respond to John Kerry’s ‘joke’.
 Photo: US soldiers, via News Max.
It is not just in the UK that the steady drum beat of the state encroaching on ancient liberties can be heard. There is some good discussion on 10 Zen Monkeys regarding the horrendous Military Commissions Act in the USA. However I do find the lack of concern about the effects on non-US subjects a bit disconcerting given the propensity of American courts to try and apply their laws extra-territorially.
Naturally these laws have been sold as only applying to The Bad Guys… just as RICO was sold as just being a tool to go after organised crime and yet it ended up being used again anti-abortion activists. Regardless of what the politicians say when they are selling a prospective law, once enacted, legislation gets used against anyone it can be used against, not just the targets intended at the time the laws is passed.
I must say that anyone without a US passport who is politically active and less than flattering about US government’s policies should serious reconsider taking that holiday in Florida or going to visit American friends.
And the reason? Simple, the USA has banned Vegemite! I expect to see RAAF strikes on US targets by late this evening and Aussie SAS teams boarding US shipping and dumping cargoes of Skippy Peanut Butter into the sea.
More seriously, it is just preposterous that the state interferes in the most picayune aspects of life. Next time I am in the US I intend to smuggle a jar in disguised as Marmite and smear it over the door handles of the first US federal government building to see.
There has been a lot of loose talk that it does not much matter if the Democrats take the House of Representatives, the Senate or both.
“President Bush will still have the veto” and/or “the Democrats will not want to raise taxes, or do other bad things, because this will ruin their chances in 2008”.
This talk assumes that President Bush will somehow turn into Captain Veto if the Democrats win – an assumption for which there is no evidence in George Bush’s record. It also ignores the fact that many of the tax rate cuts that have been made are temporary – i.e. unless there is a vote to make the cuts permanent taxes will go up automatically.
Such hopeful talk also ignores the power of the media and of academia: The Democrats are already talking about increasing taxes on ‘the rich’ and the media and academia will present any tax increase as ‘only’ a tax increase on the rich.
The Democrats also have planned a set of new regulations (for example regulations designed to make unions stronger – and thus undermine American industry and increase unemployment). The media will present all such regulations as ‘fair and just’ and academics (such as the ‘economist’ Paul Krugman) will rush to agree – just as they will rush to justify any tax increase.
People who think that “well the Republicans have not been much good, and the Democrats will not be able to do much harm – so it does not matter if they take Congress” are deluding themselves.
Even the ‘likely voter’ defense may not save the Republicans. As many people are fired up to vote by the state of the war in Iraq, and many conservative and libertarian minded people are upset with Republican failure to control government spending (although nonmilitary spending growth has been much lower than it has been in Britain).
With the elections only a couple of weeks away America may well be sleep walking over a cliff.
I knew early on I would not find ‘Death of a President‘ to my tastes, and now that I have heard the plot summary I know it for a certainty. Since most major US film outlets are not running it, I will spoil the plot for you for the movie few of you would have bothered to go see any way.
The black guy did it.
Yes, you heard right. The BBC decided to make the movie villain a black father who had lost his son in the Iraq War. Apparently most of the movie is about a rush to judgement of an innocent Arab-American.
The plot is wrong on so many levels I hardly know where to start. First, the BBC just does not get it. ‘Black Americans’ are Americans first and melanin enhanced second. They are as patriotic as any other Americans and perhaps more so.
What would be a realistic plot? If I were writing such a script, I would make the killer a Cindy Sheehan follower. There are loads of serious nutcases around – you can find hundreds of them on certain web sites – who no doubt day dream about doing something like this. The attempt on President Ford and the wounding of President Reagan were both done by fruitcakes. It is almost certain the biggest threat to George Bush would similarly be a nut. It is of course possible a nutjob presidential assassin wannabe could be black… but it would be a first in US history.
I think the people who created this movie are simply detestable.
Correction: It was not a BBC production. It was done by Gabriel Range and is to be or was shown on UTV Channel 4 in the UK as part of a series on the effects of the War on Terror
I can see why people have their doubts about celebrities-turned-politicians, but my goodness, it is hard to resist the appeal of someone as funny, and as sharp as Kinky Friedman (I love Americans’ names). Jesse Walker has a brief look at his campaign to be governor of the Lone Star State. He concludes that Friedman will do Texan voters a favour by annoying the usual political parties. My main doubt would be his ability as a manager, but then frankly how much worse could he be than a professional politician who has probably not done a hard day’s honest toil since leaving college?
He may not get to the governor’s mansion in Austin, but boy, the election will be fun to watch.
I was mildly amused to see that there is a book published in the USA called ‘Why mommy is a democrat’.
Presumably it teaches children that just as ‘Mommy’ looks after Junior and makes him share his toys with the kid next door, if the kid next door refuses to share his toys with Junior, Junior should threaten to lock him in the attic and take the toys he wants by force… just like the nice Democrats use the threat of jail for people who do not ‘share their toys’ like they are told.
Just a guess.
Am I the only person not to be surprised by the news that the US government’s extensive jihad against onine gambling has now culminated in outright prohibition?
The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (which now only requires President Bush’s signature to become law) actually outlaws credit card payments or funds transfers from US citizens to ‘illegal’ internet gambling sites and also gives the US authorities draconian powers to extradite non-US citizens suspected of accepting or handling such payments from anywhere in the world.
Online gaming shares have plummeted as a result.
Of course, there are laudable moral reasons for these actions:
Senator Kyl has described online gambling as a unique threat, where “players can gamble 24 hours a day from the comfort of their home; children may play without sufficient age verification; betting with a credit card can undercut a player’s perception of the value of cash, leading to possible addiction and, in turn, to bankruptcy, crime, and suicide; and there is no enforcement commission, such as those that exist in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, to protect consumers from excessive losses or fraud.”
Or perhaps not. More likely is that this is good, old-fashioned protectionism dressed up in save-the-children type rubrics. The real problem is the British and European online gambling sites were rapidly eroding the profits of American casinos and I expect that the cost of buying a couple of senators is a mere trifle in comparison to the potential losses that this foreign ‘immoral’ gambling was destined to inflict.
I expect that the man behind the man behind the man will turn out to be some guy whose middle name is “the”.
In response of Dale Amon’s posts (Why I am voting for Republicans this year), I made the comment that if the Republican candidate for Governor was another Taft family person (or a friend of these statists – however good Robert Taft may have been before his death in 1953) then it would be better to vote Libertarian for Governor (even though it would let the tax-and-spend Democrats in) – in order to send the tax-and-spend Ohio Republican party a message.
I had not even bothered to check to see who the Republican candidate for Governor of Ohio was (in spite of being from Kettering England – the ‘sister city’ of Kettering Ohio).
The candidate is Ken Blackwell – an African American who has been a harsh critic, for many years, of the tax and spend policies that have turned Ohio into the third highest taxed State in the nation. Mr Blackwell favours tax reduction and strict control of government spending.
I would like to apologize for my ignorance.
“Undermine human dignity” – this is the sort of language that the Geneva Convention is written in. Very noble to want to stop such things no doubt, but what do the words actually mean? Is it undermining human dignity to make enemy captives dress in prison uniforms? Some of the IRA prisoners in Ulster certainly thought so – and starved themselves to death to make their point.
How about being questioned by a women – Islamic prisoners may well hold that to be undermining their dignity. What is a tough interrogation and what is torture? Should the line be left vague (perhaps to be decided by some international “court” hearing a case against American interrogators later) or should the line be set down clearly in law in advance?
If the line should be explained, in law, in advance – what words should be used? President Bush suggests using the words already used in the anti-torture statute passed by Congress last year. Those words were thought up by Senator John McCain and the opposition to using these words (indeed any words) to define what the vague Geneva Convention means is being led by – Senator John McCain.
The above is what is going in Washington DC in relation to the Geneva Convention. But you are not likely to see such a report on any British television station, or hear on any British radio station or read it in any British newspaper (no matter how ‘conservative’), as far as the British media are concerned President Bush is a beast (as well as a moron) who wants to torture people and hates the Geneva Convention, and Senator McCain is a saint.
As for the arguments of Senator McCain and company – they are uniformly worthless.
“President Bush wants to modify the Geneva Convention” – no he does not, he wants to define what its vague words mean in terms of law.
“The United States does not define treaties in terms of its laws” – wrong, it has done so many times.
“The world will hate us if we do this” – the “world” (i.e. the leftist establishment) has hated the United States since President Truman decided to be Joe Stalin’s door mat. And this is not going to change – no matter what the United States does or does not do.
“If we do this American prisoners will be treated badly by their captors” – American prisoners will be tortured and killed regardless of whether Islamic terrorists are put into orange jumpsuits or whatever else is done. The idea that by being nice to the Islamic terrorists (or whoever) they will be influenced to be nice to Americans is crap.
If Americans do not wish to be tortured or killed they had better avoid being captured, nothing that America does or does not do will influence their treatment in any way.
Of course, you are not likely to see, hear or read this in the British media either.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
