Blogito, Ergo Sum - 4 May 2009

I guess I missed Maureen Dowd yesterday, a partisan who still can’t accept the reality of what happened during the previous eight years:

Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, tried to put the best face on it, noting, “This will make it easier for G.O.P. candidates in 2010 to ask to be elected to help restore some checks and balances in Washington.”

This is quite touching, given that the start of the 21st century will be remembered as the harrowing era when an arrogant Republican administration did its best to undermine checks and balances. (Maybe when your reign begins with Bush v. Gore, a Supreme heist that kissed off checks and balances, you feel no need to follow the founding fathers’ lead.)

Aside from the fact that Clinton/Gore had had 8 years to create the Supreme Court that they wanted and those jurists were the ones who made the decision, it was Gore’s lawsuit which got it before them in the first place. No matter which side loses in court the loser always complain that they were robbed by the judge or judges. Even Supreme Court decisions are declared wrong by everyone from cabbies to columnists when it doesn’t turn out in their favor, and they are particularly irked when the Justices cite the Constitution, although under all other circumstances they think the Equal Protection Clause is peachy keen.

Just to prove to the world how bad the burglary was every liberal newspaper in the nation made its own version of a recount, desperate to prove that Gore actually won in Florida, which would not have been necessary if he had only won his home state of Tennessee, presumably the citizens who knew him better than Floridians did. Alas, it was not to be...despite their anguished howls, the recounts turned out to show Bush was the winner anyhow. Even the New York Times finally gritted its teeth and admitted that, although I guess Maureen missed that issue. If it wasn’t one of the days her column appeared then she probably did.

The other thing the Democrats seem pathologically unwilling to acknowledge is that the last two years of rapid decline have taken place while they held control of not just one but BOTH houses of Congress. Thus you see the unintentional humor in humorist Dowd’s depiction of a Bush administration raging unchecked and imbalanced while the economy plunged. They would have had a much better argument if they had lost in 2006, and even perhaps if they hadn’t chortled so loudly and so gleefully when they won.

MoDo and the Dems wish history had not recorded the results of the votes on the proposals Bush put in the lap of Congress for decision, from “No Child Left Behind” to the war in Iraq. They like to cherish the illusion that Bush made the decision to rush to war in Iraq and did so entirely on his own and too quickly for them to react.

But time and again the Democrats were presented with their opportunity to check and balance the proposals of the Bush administration, and time and again they elected to vote ‘yes’. In perhaps this year’s greatest excuse of them all, even better than claiming to have been fooled by a moron (who is possibly even an idiot) and finer than saying if only you had read the intelligence report before you voted you would have voted differently, is Pelosi’s explanation that of course she knew that the CIA intended to torture but found no reason to speak out because they hadn’t actually done it yes, at least not as far as she knew. We know she was awake during that briefing, too, because she is unable to close her eyes,

But the story line promoted by Ms Dowd is that the Bush Boys stole the election and then proceeded to do whatever they wanted. The Democrats were helpless...helpless, do you hear? And thus they are to be held blameless.

What’s that? Didn’t they declare Bush to be a lame duck immediately after his unwelcome reelection in 2004? Ah, well, yes they did. Lame ducks are called such because they no longer have any ability to exert political influence and thus can be safely ignored. Huh, what did you say? Didn’t the Democrats happily declare him to be totally impotent as far as they were concerned after the elections in 2006? Ah, yes, I believe that they did. What are you muttering about now? Didn’t they chortle that his rock-bottom approval rating meant he might as well go home to Crawford and chop brush for all the effect he would have in politics any more.

Hey, stop...give me a break! I know the next thing you are going to ask me is how a dumb blogger can know all of these things when a prize-winning columnist like Maureen has managed to remain clueless. No, I am absolutely not going to say anything about her that includes the term ‘redhead’ or ‘woman’.

It’s difficult to understand how much Obama understands about businesses and taxes sometimes:

Mr. Obama raised the idea frequently during his presidential campaign. In a speech to Congress in February, as he outlined his priorities for the year, he pledged to make the tax code more equitable by “finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.”

The White House said that Mr. Obama would seek to crack down on overseas tax havens in an attempt to “close the international tax gap.” The president is aiming to take away the competitive advantage for companies that invest and create jobs overseas, working to replace their tax advantages with incentives to produce jobs in the U.S.

As one of the NYT’s none-too-bright columnists observed the other day when she claimed that you could, too, herd cats by tempting them with some mackerel, someone doesn’t seem to understand the difference between pushing and leading, or what ‘incentives’ are.

You don’t attract overseas businesses back home by CLOSING the international tax gap but by widening it...only in your favor, not theirs. Corporations who must compete internationally do so by moving to the lowest-cost location. Obama can do whatever he wants about domestic American corporations, but all this plan is likely to do in the case of any sensible corporation is eliminate domestic American ownership completely.

You can’t herd cats, but you can entice them to go wherever it is you want them to go. You can herd cattle, true enough, but first you have to transform the cats into cattle before they can be herded, and it’s a really good idea to decide if that’s what you actually want to have them become.

In his speech on Monday, the president will call for an end to that practice, as well as seeking to close the loopholes that allow companies and individuals to legally avoid paying billions in taxes through hidden accounts.

The White House said that Mr. Obama also will call for a crackdown on the abuse of tax havens by wealthy individuals. Officials said the president will propose making it more difficult for financial institutions and wealthy Americans to evade their taxes.

You cannot evade taxes legally, so what are we talking about here? Avoiding paying taxes is legal as well as sensible, but evading taxes through the use of hidden accounts is not.

Ditto. Deferring taxes is legal since they will be paid eventually. Inflating numbers is not.

I rather get the impression that Obama is more into herding than enticing and would prefer cattle to cats.

Jack was an amateur economist of broad reading, convinced he knew exactly the way the world works. National wealth depends on productivity, which depends on low tax rates that reward work, enterprise and investment. ... Even in Jack's absence, we know precisely what he would say: You can't divide wealth you don't create. Don't punish the rich, enable everyone to become rich. Value the dreams and contributions of immigrants. Be a happy warrior, not an angry one. And let me tell you about the gold standard.

By theological questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” and “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?”

The fact that science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation can not ask — never mind answer — such questions should not be held against them, for that is not what they do.

And, conversely, the fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for explaining how the material world works should not be held against them, either, for that is not what they do. When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”

Eagleton likes this turn of speech, and he has recourse to it often when making the same point: “[B]elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world . . . is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.” Running for a bus is a focused empirical act and the steps you take are instrumental to its end. The positions one assumes in ballet have no such end; they are after something else, and that something doesn’t yield to the usual forms of measurement. Religion, Eagleton is saying, is like ballet (and Chekhov); it’s after something else.

In my opinion that is a very cogent explanation. I like much of what Hitchens writes, but he branches into a strange logical stream when he says that given the emergence of the telescope and the microscope religion no longer offers an explanation of anything important. I cannot see any connection at all. As the man points out, telescopes and microscopes are all about ‘how’ and religion is about ‘why?’ And Christianity is merely one flavor of religion, after all.

We began by passing a Recovery Act that has already saved or created over 150,000 jobs and provided a tax cut to 95 percent of all working families. We passed a law to provide and protect health insurance for 11 million American children whose parents work full time. And we launched a housing plan that has already contributed to a spike in the number of homeowners who are refinancing their mortgages, which is the equivalent of another tax cut.

We are seeing more innovative use of language from Obama than we’ve ever seen before. As Hot Air points out, since mortgage interest is tax deductible, paying less mortgage interest will actually make your taxes go up.

And if Obama mandates smaller cars with better gas mileage will the reduced amount you pay for gasoline be the equivalent of another tax cut?

Here's a fascinating piece on current demographic trends by Martin Walker in The Wilson Quarterly. ...

The decline of Muslim birthrates is a global phenomenon...[R]ecent UN data suggest that Arab birthrates are falling fast, and that the number of births among women under the age of 20 is dropping even more sharply. Only two Arab countries still have high fertility rates: Yemen and the Palestinian territories.

In some Muslim countries—Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Lebanon—fertility rates have already fallen to near-European levels. Algeria and Morocco, each with a fertility rate of 2.4, are both dropping fast toward such levels. Turkey is experiencing a similar trend.

Revisions made in the 2008 version of the UN’s World Population Prospects Report make it clear that this decline is not simply a Middle Eastern phenomenon. The report suggests that in Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population, the fertility rate for the years 2010–15 will drop to 2.02, a shade below replacement level. The same UN assessment sees declines in Bangladesh (to 2.2) and Malaysia (2.35) in the same period. By 2050, even Pakistan is expected to reach a replacement-level fertility rate.

Iran is experiencing what may be one of the most dramatic demographic shifts in human history. Thirty years ago, after the shah had been driven into exile and the Islamic Republic was being established, the fertility rate was 6.5. By the turn of the century, it had dropped to 2.2. Today, at 1.7, it has collapsed to European levels.