Category Archives: View

View 708 Monday, January 09, 2012

We did a TWIT yesterday, which you might find interesting. Everyone but me is off to CES. I’m staying behind to try to get some work done.

<http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-tech/335>

More later.

View 708 Saturday, January 07, 2012

It’s late and I have sort of taken the weekend off, but I did watch the Republican debate in New Hampshire.

Nothing spectacular; George Stephanopoulos performed as expected, interrupting the candidates and badgering them as they attempted to answer hostile questions, and in general trying to get them to bash each other and not the Democrats. Newt was less testy than I had expected; apparently he has thought about giving vent to pure negativism, and Romney’s defense, that he is a capitalist and capitalism is supposedly the conservative side of the debate with the President, is so manifestly true that it seems to have chilled some of Newt’s ardor. I do not like to hear the Republican candidates bash each other; I would rather see them compete by talking about what they would do. Some did.

Ron Paul was consistent.

Michelle Bachman was missed.

View 708 Thursday, January 05, 2012

Making recess appointments when Congress is not in recess – the Constitution is very clear on that, neither House can recess for more than three days without consent of the other:

Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.

The House has not consented to an adjournment of the Senate. The Senate remains in session, and recess appointments, allowed in the Constitution because at one time the Congress was recessed for months and Offices had to be filled, are not appropriate, customary, or constitutional. Mr. Obama has demonstrated his respect for custom, tradition, and the Constitution he is sworn to uphold and defend.

Newt Gingrich continues his campaign against Romney; indeed, it looks as if Newt’s sole purpose now is to see that Romney will not be nominated. Negative advertising in the primaries is effective only if knocking off your major opponent will bring in more support for you (it also makes it much harder to win in the general election because the enthusiasts of the candidate you destroyed are unlikely to rally around you for the ground game that wins elections). In Mr. Gingrich’s present situation there are plenty of other attractive candidates to take up the non-Romney slack, and in the event of a Romney failure the Romney third of Republican primary voters are likely to rally to anyone but Gingrich.

A President must try to unify both his party and his country. It is not possible to win the 2012 election without attacking Obama. That will make it hard to unify the nation to begin with.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/pro-gingrich-group-posts-anti-romney-ad-featuring-mccain/

This ad was put up by a pro-Gingrich Super-PAC; in theory it was not approved by Gingrich himself or his campaign staff, and Newt is not required to comment on it. After McCain’s endorsement of Romney it was clear that Romney is the preferred candidate of what is commonly called the Republican Establishment or what I have for years called The Country Club Republicans, linear descendants of the Rockefeller Republicans who sat on their hands during the Goldwater election of 1964, and did their best to purge the Party of the Goldwater Republicans; as Bush I worked to fire every Reagan staffer at the White House, and his agents worked their way down through the party structure. The result has been an overturn of the way parties function. When I was a professor of political science I could truthfully say that the United States was, in effect, governed by a few hundred thousand self-selected volunteers who worked through from Precinct leader up. Since that time money and media have become the most important factors to parties; the Democrats rely on union members and hired campaign workers. Republicans continued to employ volunteer precinct workers for the ground game – getting the voters to the polls on election day, but over time they seem to have given that up. To some extent that has fallen to enthusiasts – the Religious Right, Tea Party – but it is not as well organized as the Democratic union-based machines.

But that’s another essay. I will say that a well constructed ground game organization can be decisive, and there is still time to build one; but the essence of the old party structure was that one supported the ticket, and got out the vote for the ticket, even if your favorite candidate was not the nominee. The Country Club Republicans relied on that kind of party loyalty to get conservative enthusiasts working for them, but they always found a good reason to abandon non-establishment Republicans, and over time the party system decayed.

With the Democrats the structure is so in thrall to unions that working your way to a decisive position in the Party starting at the precinct level seldom happens now.

But that’s for another essay.

Apparently Newt has decided to take down Romney with little regard to consequences. It’s easy to understand that attitude. It’s harder to approve it. This nation is in big trouble, and we ought to be reserving our resources and ammunition for the defeat of Obama. I continue to believe that Newt was correct when he said it would be better for the nation for any of the Republicans to be elected against Obama. But then I was a Goldwater and then Reagan Republican, and that was before Gingrich left the office of Speaker. After that came Big Government “Conservatism”. We’ve been through that discussion before. There are things Government must do, such as supporting technology development particularly military technology, and some of them can be Big; but government spending for the general purpose of doing good is neither constitutional nor effective and is almost always counterproductive. The Soviet Union pretty well demonstrated that. It began with the Five Year Plan, a supposedly rational allocation of national resources by the smartest people in the world. It ended with “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us for it.” But we’ve gone through that before.

I wish the Republicans, including Mr. Gingrich, would devote their resources to building grass roots organizations capable of supporting a real ground game in November. That would win; and dif such an organization was once more allowed to have its rightful influence on the nomination of candidates from city and state office up, the result would be beneficial for the Republic.

Mr Obama is appointing officers without the advice and consent of the Senate. Now consider this

http://www.infowars.com/dhs-officers-armed-with-semiautomatics-set-up-unannounced-id-checkpoint/ 

View 708 Wednesday, January 04, 2012

The Iowa Caucuses

Harry Erwin, Ph.D., RIP

What does it all mean?

The Iowa Caucuses are done, and about 100,000 Midwesterners out of the 300 million inhabitants of this Republic have spoken, although not with a clear voice. They have reduced the Republican candidate field from seven to five, and for a few minutes last night it looked as if it might be four: Rick Perry was certainly having misgivings when he saw his rather dismal results (10%, 5^th place to Gingrich’s 4^th), but this morning he made it clear that he is still in the race.

The clear winner was Santorum, who made a decidedly Presidential speech at midnight while the final numerical results were still uncertain. It turns out that the actual numerical winner, by under ten votes, was Mitt Romney, but Santorum’s ascension to the post of “Not Romney” stood out, and of course put the bullseye on his back. The attacks on Santorum as a “Big Government Conservative” have now begun.

I certainly heard nothing in Santorum’s speech that remotely reflected a preference for Big Government; indeed I heard him say that the first thing to do is examine every single federal program and determine whether this is worth borrowing money from China to continue at this time, and if it is not, eliminating it. Since that is precisely what I would do were I suddenly given the authority, and it is certainly not the act of someone who prefers government for government’s sake, I fail to see how it means “Big Government Conservative.”

What do we mean by Big Government Conservative anyway? It is, after all, a contradiction in terms. It might fairly have been applied to some of the hare brained schemes – mostly compromises and reaching across the aisle to Democrats – from the post-Gingrich days of Republican majorities; to the Americans With Disabilities Act; to No Child Left Behind; indeed to any number of compromise schemes; but on examination it is difficult to find anything Conservative about those schemes.

In the United States, Conservative means a dedication to the original Constitution of 1787; States Rights; transparency and subsidiarity as discussed by Jane Jacobs but those terms have often been usurped; and the general notion that a free people don’t need a nanny state. It also implies conceding a certain degree of local power in social matters. It does not mean anarchy and weak government. No conservative I know favors weak government. We do favor limited government and restriction of the scope of government, but that is nowhere near the same thing. Weak government and anarchy are a curse, and a temptation to tyranny. Good government is a blessing.

Conservatives differ from libertarians in degrees. Unlike most libertarians I would concede to local governments powers that I would not grant to national government, and were it in my power, I would forbid to states. I would concede local governments powers that I would strongly argue against their using anywhere I lived, and which would probably cause me to flee their jurisdiction; which is to say, I believe in the notion that governments derive their just powers from consent of the governed, and the more localized the powers, the more likely it is that those who live under that government consent to it – even if they are consenting to something I don’t care for or consider absurd. My favorite example is the Blue Bellybutton cult, which decrees that all those who go out in public on a Wednesday evening must display their loyalty by exposing their blue-painted belly button. I find that ridiculous, but if there were a town where the local inhabitants elected and installed the cult, I would either stop going out in public on a Wednesday or move to the next township. I admit that is probably an extreme example, and like most hypothetical situations might not accurately reflect what I would really do under the circumstances; still, it illustrates my point. I am prepared to have my books Banned in Boston although I would prefer they were not; I am not prepared to have the Congress ban my books throughout the United States.

On the other hand, there are actions that only government can take. In the past there were institutions that looked ahead for later generations. Monarchies, landed aristocracies, the Church and various holy orders began projects whose fruition their founders did not expect to see. Today the only institutions that can afford to invest for long term payoffs of benefit to all but unlikely of profit are governments. I have discussed this at length in the past. I do not withdraw that opinion.

Conservatives are not anarchists.

Another consequence of the Iowa Caucuses is unfortunate: as of now Mr. Gingrich, stung by the ugly anti-Gingrich ads paid for by the Romney PACS, seems to have revised his goal: from running for President, he has now become an instrument of vengeance against Romney. This is worse than unfortunate, and I wish he’d stop that. It will do neither him nor the Republic much good. Newt’s change of objectives may be responsible for Parry’s reconsidering his run: if Newt will pound on Romney, there is room for another Not-Romney, even though Parry got fewer Iowa votes than Newt.

Newt can certainly damage Romney, and indeed Romney’s acceptance of McCain’s endorsement moves Romney further into the clutches of the Establishment Republicans and the originators of the notion of “Big Government Conservative” schemes. That has to be good for Santorum, who surely sees that Ron Paul wasn’t that distant a third in this election. Santorum is now the leading Not-Romney. And the beat goes on.

I remain of the opinion I have had for weeks, and which Newt publicly espoused until last night: the election is vital, and the nation deserves better than Obama; and all of the viable Republican candidates are to be preferred to the current President. We can’t take four more years of this.

It’s a long time until November.

Harry Erwin, RIP

I learned late last night that my long time friend and correspondent Harry Erwin has died. I don’t know details, and it was certainly unexpected. Harry wrote the weekly “Letter from England” that I published in Chaos Manor Mail for years, and many readers looked forward to it; Harry had a knack for finding a ready summary of both trends and the bizarre in reported incidents. I am going to miss that.

He was a scientist, He thought clearly about education and education improvements and impediments. He enjoyed life, and took frequent trips. I had never met him, but I was looking forward to some opportunity for that to take place. We had corresponded for a long time about many things, mostly in agreement but when we were not it was worth paying attention to why. He enjoyed rational discussion.

He was a practicing Christian and churchman. I will very much miss him.

Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

http://world.std.com/~herwin/

http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/beacon-di/staffprofiles/drharryerwin/