Down With the Government! Now Give Me My Check!

"The government’s main function these days is writing checks to old people. These checks allow people to retire and pursue avocations such as going to Tea Party rallies."
Michael Kinsley, "My Country Tis of Me," The Atlantic

New Improved Supreme Court Justice Robes

Created by John Coby over at Bay Area Houston.

Taxonomy of Conservatives

Waggish has determined six categories of conservative, three classic conservative types, and three degenerate types. The utility of his categories is limited. He writes,

Since "conservatism" has had such bizarre associations in the United States for a long time now, I thought I'd give brief accounts of the three breeds that I most often think of in connection with the classical sense of conservative (that is, the sense that still has something to do with the meaning of the word).

With that caveat, though, I think these are pretty good ways to think about conservatives--and funny (if you like your laffs extra-dry). I'd like (but dread) the same taxonomical look at liberals.

Stupids

Cartoon by Marc Murphy. (Hat tip to Crooks and Liars.)

Father of Killer of Cyclists Opposed Cycle Safety Bill

memorial to a cyclist killed by a hit-and-run driver in Contra Costa County, CA

Remember when I wrote of the fear I have of drivers who seem to hate bicyclists? Who seem to resent that we share the road with them? Here is a sterling example of this freakishly common sort of sociopath.

The father of a driver accused of killing two bicyclists last summer recently urged Gov. Rick Perry to veto a bill that generally would have required motorists to give vulnerable road users more space when passing them.

Cyclists believe it was in poor taste for Kenneth Bain to take a position. So do family members of Meredith Hatch, who was killed instantly when Bain's son hit her and another biker after a late-night party, according to police reports.

Perry vetoed SB 488, the so-called “safe passing” bill, six weeks ago. The bill would have required motorists to give cyclists and other vulnerable road users, including pedestrians, runners, motorcyclists, construction and maintenance workers at least 3 feet clearance when they pass, or at least 6 feet for commercial vehicles. [Gary Scharrer, The Houston Chronicle, hat tip Scott Gilbert.]

Bike hatred appears to be genetic. Bonus!

In an e-mail message to the governor, Bain, a certified public accountant and former Duncanville City Council member, urged Perry to veto the bill. Bain's position: “Roads are for vehicles, not slow bikes.”

“You will have radical bikers taking license numbers of cars and reporting them because they thought they passed too close,” he wrote in the e-mail that was recently released as part of a public information request. “Let the bill die.”

And let cyclist die. Or just kill them, like junior did.

I don't know who is sicker--the cyclist-murdering son, the cyclist-hating dad, or Rick Perry.

(Read the article's comments for more cyclist hatred.)

NPR Utters the Word Torture

I forgot to blog about this when I heard it, but as I was driving to work Thursday morning, I was flabbergasted to hear NPR Morning Edition refer to the treatment of a Guantanamo Bay detainee as torture.

A federal judge hears arguments later today on whether a young Guantanamo Bay detainee will go home to Afghanistan or face prosecution in the united states. The detainee was accused of injuring Americans by throwing a grenade in Afganistan seven years ago. NPR's Ari Schapiro reports:

There have been many twists and turns in the story of Mohammad Jawad. He may have been as young as 12 when Americans picked him up in 2002. He confessed under torture, and a court later threw out those statements. [...] (Transcribed from the NPR website.)

Previously, NPR had been reluctant to call things like hanging guys from the ceiling by the wrists for days at a time, waterboarding, etc., torture. Once while I was listening to NPR, the reporter went through so many infelicitous and deceptive verbal gymnastics to avoid saying the word "torture" in reference to actual torture that I wrote them an angry letter--something I very rarely do. Their politically-cowardly reticence has been a big issue. See here, here, here, and here.

So I am pleasantly surprised to hear them, in this case, bluntly call a spade a spade.

Ah 2003, When We Were Young and Invincible

Here's some nostalgic bellicose hubris for you! (Hat tip: Obsidian Wings.)

If I Were a Uighur, I'd Riot Too

This poster is from James Fallow's blog.

Here's the significance of the sign: It's an advertisement for restaurant staff at the hotel, in roles from cooks to supervisors. Kashgar, of course, is a historic trading town on the extreme western frontier of China, much closer to Lahore, Kabul, and New Delhi than to Beijing. The original population there would be of Uighur or other Turkic ethnicity, rather than Han Chinese. But the last line of the advertisement says, "This offer is for Han Chinese (汉族) only, ages 18-30."

Apparently this kind of discrimination--often petty and small in individual examples--is very common in Western China. In a follow-up post, Fallows shared some responses he got from Han Chinese, which were amazingly paternalistic yet showed no consciousness of that paternalism.

Here in the U.S., it seems that most reaction to the Uighur riots have been of two stripes. One is the basic anti-Chinese reaction. China is ruled by tyrants who desire complete control and 1) treated the Uighurs intolerably bad so that tensions were so high that a riot was the likely outcome, and 2) responded with the heavy hand of state violence. The people who react thus to these events, if they see discrimination involved, see it as religious discrimination. The officially athiest Communist Party discriminates against practicing Muslims like the Uighurs. (And this is obviously true--but as the sign above suggests, not the whole story.)

The second reaction has been less common, and comes mainly from anti-Muslim bigots. Basically, it posits that the Uighurs who rioted are just a bunch of blood-thirsty fanatics. You don't see this expressed as bluntly as in the post linked to here very often, but you can see it reflected in the panic at the thought that the Uighurs we held in Guantanamo might be released into the U.S.

But I think what Fallows demonstrates is that the riots were in essence race riots. The Uighurs are an oppressed ethnic minority. To be sure, their resistence to Chinese racism is colored by their religious differences and by nationalism, but that happens a lot when oppressed ethnicities fight back. It happened here. But the point is, what the Uighurs are experiencing, and what they are responding to, is racism.

The Presidents of France and the USA Are In Agreement

Legione de Tintin

Il Capo Squadra Balilla (cover for Fascist youth handbook), by Zeda, 1935 Italy

This image is from Italian Art Deco: Graphic Design Between the Wars edited by Steven Heller and Louise Fili. Hat tip to Journey Around My Skull.

Dr. Seuss vs. Hitler

The Holocaust Museum has a display of Dr. Seuss political cartoons which isn't very good--it doesn't have an originals, and doesn't even really show all that many of the cartoons he drew for P.M. (That said, a concurrent exhibition, A One-Man Army: The Art of Arthur Szyk is well-worth seeing. It has both originals and printed copies of the Szyk's work, so you can see the context for the pieces.)

But thanks to Radosh.net, I've found a place where online where you can see all of Seuss's political cartoons.



The anti-Lindbergh cartoons are vicious! We tend to forget this unsavory aspect of the aviation pioneer these days.



Heh--this reminds me of many kneejerk reactions to Obama.



More on Lindbergh.



After the Japanese attacked, Seuss's battles with the isolationists, America-firsters, and Lindbergh abruptly end. Those people are history and the job now is to keep America fighting.







Sadly, Seuss swallowed the lie that Japanese Americans were potential traitors--thinking that lead directly to concentration camps for a people based solely on their national ancestry.



Seuss was aware that the rest of the world was depending on the U.S.--it wasn't just about us.



Hey, this looks familiar!



About half of Seuss's cartoons were aimed at getting Americans at home to act in ways that supported Americans fighting abroad.


This is as stirring a defense of freedom of speech as any I've seen!





Seuss was also a bit of a scold.



But he was capable of celebrating when things went right (for a change).



He did several cartoons opposing Jim Crow hiring practices in war industries.



Happy Independence Day!

The Best Michael Jackson Tribute

(Hat Tip the Daily Dish)

Voting Fraud in Harris County?

This is a pretty powerful piece of YouTubery. Question: who created it?



Hat tip Kuff. This is related to the issues swirling around unelected county tax assessor Leo Vasquez and his employee in that office, Ed Johnson, who also is a campaign consultant for Republican candidates through a firm called Campaign Data Systems (CDS) -- co-owned by Bohac. No one has demonstrated that Johnson has done anything wrong, but the stink of conflict of interest is overpowering. If you want to rig a vote, this is how you do it--by running the vote. That's why the famous vote-stealers in history have been urban and county machines that were already in power and that controlled the ballot boxes. This is why ACORN is such a weak candidate for serious voter fraud--they don't have the power to commit effective fraud.

Nice poster! (Hat tip Crooks and Liars.) The artist is Faviana Rodriguez. She has a cool style--almost a combination of Kozik rock and roll posters and Cuban political posters.

Terror Attack in Kansas

This appears to be the first act of terrorism committed in the U.S. since the beginning of the Obama administration.

A suspect in this morning's fatal shooting of George Tiller is in custody in Johnson County.

Tiller, 67, was shot just after 10 a.m. in the lobby of Reformation Lutheran Church at 7601 E. 13th, where he was a member of the congregation.

Tiller was serving as an usher at the church, one of six ushers listed in the church bulletin. He was handing out bulletins to people going into the sanctuary minutes before being shot.

[...]

Tiller has long been a focal point of protest by abortion opponents because his clinic, Women's Health Care Services at 5107 E. Kellogg, is one of the few in the country where late-term abortions are performed.

(Source: The Wichita Eagle)

Perhaps if we had tortured some anti-abortion activists, this assassination could have been prevented. Isn't that what Cheney recommends?

Libertarian Paradise

Ha ha . Got this from Bay Area Houston, a Texas political blog that delights in showing how deregulated industries in Texas (like insurance and power) curiously end up costing consumers more than when they were regulated. Funny, that.

Powerlines In Houston Should be Buried

Wouldn't the sky look lovely without those powerlines?

I was astonished to read about this report:

Burying the more than 6,500 miles of above-ground Texas electricity transmission lines near the Gulf Coast would cost some $33 billion but would not be a cost-effective solution, according to a report commissioned by the state’s utility commission.

The report by Quanta Technology released this week said the huge expenditure to bury the lines within a 50-mile radius of the coastline would likely only cut utility storm restoration costs by $27 million a year. The report was ordered by the Texas Public Utility Commission in late 2008 in the wake of Hurricane Ike’s extensive damage.

Fifteen storms struck Texas from 1998 to 2008, requiring about $1.8 billion in restoration costs, or $180 million annually, the report said. About 80 percent of the costs were attributed to the distribution system and 20 percent attributed to transmission.

Ok, if this article is correct, they are comparing the cost of burying power lines to the cost of restoration of those lines after they have been damaged by wind, falling tree limbs, lightning, etc. By that measure, it is obviously uneconomical for the power companies to do it.

But that is an insane way to measure something like this. The cost of downed powerlines is not merely born by the power companies! It's born by the businesses and homes that have to go without power for some period of time. And the cost of preparing for that risk (from buying candles and flashlights and wind-up radios to continual backing up of data). How much work time was lost because of Ike? That must have cost Houston area businesses millions if not billions. The company I worked for was closed for a couple of days. Many were closed for much longer times. This lost economic activity might be the biggest single cost associated with power outages.

To appropriately price this out, they should have accounted for that.

In addition, there is a lot of routine maintenance that must be done to prevent wind-related damage. Crews are always driving around trimming trees near powerlines, whether there is an outage or not. You have to count removing that cost as a benefit as well. Not only that, when there is a power outage, the power companies suffer lost revenues. Were those lost revenues counted in Quanta's model?

Furthermore, overhead powerlines have costs associated with them totally unrelated to the cost of repairing them after outages. Obviously putting up powerlines has a cost. Those poles aren't free. For powerlines that already exist, that is s sunk cost. But there is a replacement cost--those poles don't last forever--and in new developments, the cost of installing powerlines must be included. Also, it is illegal to plant trees a certain distance from powerlines. This limits property rights and limits shade in Houston--one of the hottest cities in the U.S. It's hard to say what this costs us, but it does have a cost. Likewise, overhead powerlines are ugly. Ugly has a cost that is hard to quantify, but it does exist. A more beautiful city is a city that is that much more liveable and desireable and competitive.

Given all this, and given the fact that the freaking federal government is trying its best to give infrastructure money away, I think we should ignore that foolish report, get some stimulus money, hire some unemployed construction workers, and start burying our goddamn power lines (and phone and cable lines).

(By the way, thanks to the Houston Business Journal for reporting this. I couldn't find anything in the Houston Chronicle about it! Did they drop the ball?)

I Bet Bush Kicked Ass at Dodgeball as a Boy

No More Politics

Even though there will be important run-offs in Georgia and Minnesota, I declare politics to be officially over.

The Circularity of History

During the past few months, some of the most interesting political writing has come from conservatives. Not the hate-mongers, swift-boaters, and conspiracy theorists, but from writers who tend to be a little more philosophical. They are also writers who tend to be pretty discouraged by where the conservative movement went under Bush, and recognize that Obama was probably going to win (and in some cases even welcome it). A lot of these guys found their home in The American Conservative, the magazine run by that old racist paleocon Pat Buchanan. But what Buchanan has done is pretty much open his magazine to the dissidents and iconoclasts within the conservative movement, and it has made for some interesting reading. That's where I found the remarkable piece by Francis Fukuyama that I quoted a few days ago.

Other thoughtful conservative writers I like to read (even if I very often disagree with them) are Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher. Anyway, this has all been a lead in to a little blog post by Dreher that I thought was quite clever (if not really profound):

1. The modern conservative movement began with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race. The modern conservative movement ends with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. John McCain -- who took Goldwater's Senate seat upon his retirement -- in the 2008 presidential race.

2. Modern liberalism began its implosion with riots in Chicago's Grant Park at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Tonight, modern liberalism is reborn at Chicago's Grant Park, where a black Chicago Democrat will celebrate winning the presidency.

Interesting, huh?