(your links should be added immediately – though you won’t see them until your next refresh)

In the meantime, Fiorina and her wonderfully insane ad team have produced a follow-up, though sadly not a sequel, to “Demon Sheep,” this time completely focused on Carly vs Senator Ma’am, the latter rendered as a Zardoz-like hot air media balloon monster:

I think it’s clear by now that Obama does not wish to make a confrontation with Iran part of his presidency. As I’ve written before, this means that Israeli security fears become a major problem for the administration: surely Obama realizes that one of his most important jobs is therefore preventing the Israelis from attacking.

How does one do that? Typically, the way the United States has alleviated Israeli security concerns is by affirming the closeness of the strategic relationship. But doing this on the Iran issue doesn’t work, for two reasons: 1) it would undermine Obama’s mission to the Arab world, which requires pushing the Israelis away; 2) and in the context of a nuclear Iran, it doesn’t really matter how close the U.S. and Israel are. The Israeli fear of the Iranian bomb is that one nuke would destroy the Jewish state, and that even in the absence of such a strike, Israel would be confronted with an emboldened Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas axis, more wars, constant (and credible) threats of annihilation, and over time would experience the psychological, demographic, and economic attrition of the country.

When we follow this logic chain to its conclusion, we find that Obama’s only option for restraining an Israeli attack is the one that we’re seeing unfold before our eyes: a U.S. effort to methodically weaken the relationship; provoke crises; consume the Netanyahu government with managing this deterioration; and most important, create an ambiance of unpredictability by making the Israelis fear that an attack on Iran would not just be met with American disapproval but also a veto and perhaps active resistance.

Noah Pollak – Contentions – “Re: Re: A New Low”

Michael Ramirez Cartoon.

[E]even if ObamaCare passes, Democrats and President Obama will lose. Republicans have already vowed to make November a referendum on this bill and, by all auguries, Democrats are going to lose big time. The loss of one election if the larger cause succeeds wouldn’t be a big deal. But this bill has little legitimacy and for years might be tied up in constitutional challenges against its individual mandate provision–not to mention the provisions that turn insurance companies into public utilities without due process. ObamaCare could well become President Obama’s Iraq. Worst of all from the standpoint of his personal life story, it will exacerbate the crisis of the entitlement state, requiring someone else to step forward and clean up the fiscal mess he is creating.

Ironically, Obama is not only sowing the seeds for the destruction of his own legacy–but also for the creation of someone else’s.

Wrong Bill At The Wrong Time – Forbes.com.

That tradition includes some things that have become accepted, largely uncontroversial features of American politics and culture – such as voting rights for women, the direct popular election of senators, and popular primary voting for party nominees. The tradition includes other things that most progressives would rather we all forget was their work – national income taxes, say, or prohibition of alcohol sale and consumption. And the tradition also includes immense political and economic commitments – like Medicare, Social Security, and the vast regulatory bodies of the state – that are a constant source of dispute and disagreement even among those who support their aims unreservedly.

But it’s not just or even mainly such measures – measure after measure after measure, good, bad, and indifferent, the vast majority expanding government at the expense of private initiative and investment – that progressives want to recall.  They also want to associate themselves, ahead of anyone else, with the good old very popular, very American idea of progress.

They want us to believe that they stand for progress, because they know that their fellow Americans believe in progress.  The know that America is the true home of progress, and America has welcomed and has given birth to more social, technological, economic, and political progress than any other country.

That, I believe, is what the great progressive Ronald Wilson Reagan had in mind whenever he spoke with his inimitable optimism about the American future.  It’s what made him able, in his last major political address, to respond to the Democrats’ empty calls for “change” by declaring to his fellow Republicans, “We are the change!”

I heard a gasp or two when I described the Gipper as a great progressive.  I’m not referring to President Reagan’s early years as a Democrat and a union leader, or to his admiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for whose importance most progressives wouldn’t consider a new face on Mount Rushmore grand enough – if they could, they’d carve up his own mountain for him.

Nor am I referring to President Reagan’s occasional dalliances with impure conservatism.

I’m referring to what Ronald Reagan recognized long before most people of his day, and what he meant when he told the nation 30 years ago, upon being inaugurated for his first term, “Government is the problem.” 

Actually what he said was this, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Ronald Reagan didn’t pretend that there was no crisis in his day, or that he didn’t see any evidence of crisis, or that government is never the solution to problems.  His words rely on the opposite assumption, though we can leave it to scholars and historians to explain which crises Reagan believed government could solve.

Reagan also didn’t pretend that his political opponents lacked good intentions, that they didn’t want to solve the crisis.  What he realized, and in fact had long understood, and what he explained to the nation upon assuming the presidency, was that to progress - to venture unshackled into the future by “the problem,” which was actually a great complex of problems – we needed more than anything else for government to get out of the way.

Today, one decade into the 21st Century, more than 100 years since politicians in both parties and new parties first started marching under the banner of Progress,  we have every right, we need perhaps even more than Reagan did, to ask this question:  Where and what is the real source of progress?  Who, today, deserves to be considered “progressive”? Who really is ready, who really has the courage, imagination, and foresight, to embrace the future?  Who are the real progressives?

NEXT: On the Constitutionalist Response

In politics, left-wing, leftist and the Left are generally used to describe support for social change with a view towards creating a more egalitarian society.[1][2] The terms Left and Right were coined during the French Revolution, referring to the seating arrangement in parliament; those who sat on the left generally supported the radical changes of the revolution, including the creation of a republic and secularization.[3] The concept of a political Left became more prominent after the June Days Uprising of 1848.

The term was applied to a number of revolutionary movements in Europe, especially socialism, anarchism[4] and communism. The term is also used to describe social democracy.[5] Roderick Long, an anarcho-capitalist professor, summarises left-wing politics as “concerns for worker empowerment, worry about plutocracy, concerns about feminism and various kinds of social equality”.[6]

Left-wing politics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So there you have it – born in revolution and radicalism, behind the great political alternatives, cooling into mere social democracy, and finally, in the words of something called an “anarcho-capitalist professor,” devolving into a set of “concerns” and an element of “worry” associated with a special interest issue agenda.  It’s like the scene in Casablanca, when the assorted freedom-lovers sing their hearts out against the Nazis, except it’s “La Marseillaise” vs the Spongebob Squarepants theme song, and Spongebob wins.

How far the lowly have fallen…

This article from Newsweek is one of those things.  Hat tip, with flourish:  Hot Air.

I can’t stand it.  So I’ll just commence with the block quoting. Our heroes are being asked to shop where both “green” and “less-green” products are on offer, and then, in a separate action, split $6 two ways.

Volunteers [in the Toronto University study] who saw lots of green products proposed more generous splits than those who saw conventional ones, by $2.12 to $1.59—one third more. That reflects the well-established priming effect, in which subtle cues shape our behavior (if we see pictures of upscale restaurants, we tend to improve our table manners; seeing Apple’s logo makes people more creative, at least in lab experiments). Simply seeing green products, which symbolize high ethical standards and selflessness, causes people to unconsciously adjust their behavior to be more ethical and generous, in this case by sharing more money.

But there’s a rather substantial catch.

Buying green products [my emphasis]—some of the volunteers were given $25 to spend in the green store, while others were given $25 to spend in the conventional store—had an entirely different effect. Volunteers who bought up to $25 worth of ecofriendly stuff from the green store shared less money ($1.76) than those who purchased from the conventional store ($2.18). (Just to be clear, the volunteers were not given a choice about which online store to patronize.) For the green buyers, altruism in the dictator game decreased. More alarming, when the green buyers were then given a chance to cheat on a computer game, and lie about it to the scientists in order to win more money—basically, to steal—they did. Buyers of conventional products did not. And in an honor system in which they took money from an envelope to pay themselves their winnings, the green buyers stole six times more than the conventional buyers did.

Can you beat it?  Could you, if you were handed a stick for free? The study’s authors opine as follows:

“In line with the halo associated with green consumerism…people act more altruistically after mere exposure to green products,” Mazar and Zhong write in their upcoming paper. But they “act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products than after purchasing conventional products.” Or, as Mazar put it to me, “we are more likely to transgress morally after we have bought ourselves some moral offsets” (analogous to carbon offsets: buy enough so you can drive that Hummer). It was especially striking that the moral balancing occurred in an area of life—being generous with money, cheating on a computer game—that has nothing to do with green behavior. “This suggests that if we want to change people’s behavior for the better, we have to be sure it doesn’t backfire,” says Mazar—starting, perhaps, by eliminating the halo of self-congratulatory, smug virtuousness that surrounds green behavior.

Those studies.  I tell you.  What a kick.  But here’s the main point to keep in mind, which Newsweek writer Sharon Begley doesn’t even mention.  The important artificiality of the whole study isn’t that the amounts of money were small, it’s that they were simply handed to the participants.  No one was making decisions about money he had had to earn.  I’m willing to bet some of my own money that when people are using money they had to earn, outcomes are somewhat different.

In the artificial situation created for the study, no psychological tug was stronger than that of Green Sanctimony.  But it’s amazing how your perspective changes when what you’re slinging around is not other people’s money, but your own.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

In the first few decades of our country’s existence, talk of secession and the nullification of federal laws were thrown around pretty freely—the former by the more “conservative” New England, Federalist states following the “outrage” of Jefferson’s election, the latter by the Southern States in particular in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts passed under the Adams Administration. After the Civil War, such talk became taboo. During the 1930s and 40s, respectable liberals and progressives could speak warmly of the USSR as a likeminded, forward looking country and an ally—following the HUAC hearings, McCarthy, the Soviet atom bomb and the Korean War, a consensus rapidly hardened regarding the enmity of the USSR, and consensus that was only tentatively broached in the 1970s and 80s by Democrat party politicians. I don’t say anything about the validity of any of the opinions in question—I simply want to make a point regarding how the rules of the game, of any game, get established: people learn through events which forms of competition threaten to escalate beyond anyone’s control and—if they are lucky—develop a set of rules, explicit and tacit, to defer that possibility. The process is not necessarily rational—threat assessments in real time rarely possess the academic virtues of dispassion, reasoned dialogue, and a careful examination of all evidence and options—and often causes significant collateral damage. But we have not yet developed a better way of identifying and warding off the most threatening of the divisions and conflicts that are found in any community.

I say all this to introduce my argument that the rules that governed American political culture during the liberal or progressive ascendancy of 1933-1980 and have been fraying ever since, especially once the social glue provided by the bi-polar nuclear stand-off between opposing social systems evaporated, are no longer in place. The most obvious example of this is the precipitous decline of the major media outlets—the 3 major TV networks, and the news industry organized around the AP and the NY Times and Washington Post—as arbiters of the distinction between “mainstream” and “fringe” opinion. Old habits are hard to break, and the Bush Administration seemed unduly concerned with the Times’ portrayals of the Iraq War, as if losing the Times might mean, as LBJ said of Cronkite, losing Middle America. But we are at a point where, not only does FOX News easily outpace its competitors in the ratings, but alternative news outlets (a description that once could only be imagined to apply to leftist papers and journals) like Pajamas Media, Hot Air, and the emergent Breitbart Empire treat the “MSM” with every bit of disrespect the latter has arrogated for itself in its dealings with all political figures but especially those it despises. There was a time when the media could essentially place an embargo on certain stories, or make sure other stories dominated the news for days, weeks or months; this meant that any public actor had to play by the media’s rules, to keep them in the loop and accept their line of questioning, but it also meant that the media had to follow the rules itself, including not breaking certain confidences, not crossing certain lines involving national security but also the prerogatives of especially powerful players, and so on. Nor was the American public a manipulated bit player in all this—they had to be supplied with a constant ration of economic prosperity, social stability and national security and pride for the game to continue.

Obviously I have my own views about who first began to break the old rules and why—who, for example, first began to refer to the President of the other party regularly, and with regard to the gravest of matters, as a “liar”; who, in conjunction with the media, first turned agencies like the CIA and State Department into sources of an alternative narrative subversive of the administration’s policies; who regularly calls into question the very legitimacy of one’s critics, and so on—not to mention the deeper roots of their collapse in social conflicts reaching back into the 1960s, the loss of a clear antagonist in the Soviet Union and the end of the post-War bases of economic growth and security (for starters). But by now everyone is breaking the old rules of civility and deference to governmental, media and academic institutions and, most importantly, I am very glad to see them go.

New rules will have to emerge, though, at least if we are to survive as a country, and very specific kinds of rules if we are to survive as a free country. The new rules will be crafted in the usual way, indeed the only way, through ongoing interaction, compromises tacit and explicit, shared fears of commonly perceived “brinks” and “slippery slopes,” and so on. But the development of new rules depends a lot upon who goes first in testing out the new terrain, and it is possible to explore possible consequences of various innovations. It seems to me that conservatives and libertarians have an advantage now over the left—the left was at its most inventive and creative when it had a series of overt restrictions to resist: racial and gender exclusions, and the draft during the Vietnam War. Since those kinds of restrictions are no longer an issue, the left has entered the establishment, has begun imposing restrictions upon others and has become tedious. Anything the left manages to impose, though—regarding the environment, health and safety rules, health care, etc.—will be so complex and require so much contentious and ambiguous interaction between government and citizen that it will provide inexhaustible opportunities for resistance, subversion, mockery, civil disobedience and so on. But there will be plenty of changes and opportunities that many of us will, and probably should, be very ambivalent about.

At any rate, these are some of the main areas for disintegration of the old rules possible construction of new ones that occur to me:

*sovereignty is becoming increasingly permeable, to the point where the received (from the post-WWII political culture) maxim that all differences are to be left behind at the water’s edge will become, if it has not already, meaningless. If John Fonte is right (and I think he is) a substantial portion of our academic, political, legal and media elites are “transnational progressives,” which means that their loyalty lies more in the creation of a new international order based upon an international law and international human rights law that supersedes national sovereignty. Still, does that make them “traitors”? It would be hard to make the case stick—not only would they contend that such a new international legal order would benefit the U.S., but they could ground much of their program in creative readings of the Constitution, U.S. law and various treaties we have signed onto. Beyond this, it is easy to imagine all kinds of private free-lancing in global politics—powerful groups of citizens who band together to, say, support Taiwanese nationalists and democrats precisely when the U.S. government is trying to sell them out to ease relations with Beijing; Christians who support Christian minorities in Muslim countries in ways that deliberately create international incidents that it would be very difficult for the U.S. government to ignore; increasingly explicit interference in elections in other countries and the welcoming of such interference in our own. I’m surprised we haven’t seen a lot of these kinds of developments already. Patriotism might become less a defense of the US as a separate entity and more a kind of “package” that sees the US as part of an ensemble of international relations—disputes will be over which package or ensemble to endorse.

*as faith in the government’s most minimal competence in fulfilling any of the tasks of national economic management (more and more of which it continues to arrogate to itself)—financial regulation, tax policy, energy policy, currency manipulation, etc.—continues in its catastrophic decline, won’t pressure build to create little islands of economic “secession,” and to have those islands turned into explicitly granted exemptions—whether through legislative actions or by trying to turn the courts into the agents of a rather radical form of economic freedom that they were before the New Deal? Is it so hard to imagine systems of exchange, otherwise completely legitimate, carried out online, that simply refuse to account for themselves—to fill out tax forms, to adhere to labor laws, safety codes and so on, perhaps even using a different, private currency—and, furthermore, do this explicitly, soliciting customers who accept the risks involved in such “free trade zones.” Will the government make mass arrests of otherwise law-abiding citizens? And will the majority of Americans accept that, or become radicalized themselves? Might we not see negotiations between these free zones and the ever Bigger Government—and, in that case, what kinds of rules of engagement would take shape between those in the free zones and those in the increasingly socialist zones?

*we are already well on the way towards thorough media compartmentalization, where we live in completely separate media and cultural worlds, where what is happening—where what is urgent and precedent setting—for one part of the population doesn’t exist for the other. The scandals surrounding ACORN and “Climategate” are excellent examples of this phenomenon. There is still, and there will probably continue to be, considerable leakage between these cultural containers—in the end, the MSM did have to deal with these scandals, however obliquely. But there will be plenty of things that won’t leak, and even the things that do will be dramatically different events for different sections of the population. Lots of translators and quasi-anthropologists will come along to bring us news of the other side, but what will be the rules guiding the translations, and the translations of the translations?

*finally, I think we are heading to the point where political parties will no longer serve their traditional function of uniting money, different interests, and some popularized political philosophy into potentially governing coalitions. Rather, they are becoming more like bobbing corks on a sea of special interests and independently controlled money, and will be disciplined more and more by the threat of runs by candidates either from other parties or riding some populist wave of the moment. There is already very little if any party loyalty—everyone sees parties in solely instrumental terms. Under the old rules, The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, CBS and NBC told us what the leading Republicans and Democrats had to say about the “issues of the day” and if you tuned in you were well informed. Now, following that recipe would leave you utterly clueless. Political campaigns will be governed by grand strategies without any generals—groups on the margins, left and right, will threaten to support third and fourth and fifth candidates, to discipline the candidate of the “major” party closest to you, to poach votes from marginal candidates on the other side, to lay the groundwork for a future takeover and who knows what else; independent groups will latch (or leech) onto campaigns, using them to promote messages at odds with those the candidates themselves wish to portray, and so on.

Any of the aforementioned developments can lead to civil war or societal breakdown; any of them could lead to a more creative, engaged and cooperative citizenry, depending largely on who goes first in laying down prospective rules.