TUESDAY Vegas, baby. My wife and I are here to speak to the Western Petroleum Marketers Association. These are people who own chains of gas stations and convenience stores all over the western USA. Also present are the men and women who supply fuel pumps, signs, food, immense, glittering gasoline transport trucks—works of art, really. The event is at the Mirage, a wonderful hotel. Last night, I wandered around the exhibit hall for quite some time and found myself in front of a display of Noble Roman’s Pizza. I took two pieces. Rarely if ever have I tasted anything so good. “Hunger is the best sauce,” as the Latin saying goes, and I was starving. Still, that was amazingly good pizza. I had just flown in, along with my bride of some 44 years, and the last food I had was yummy pistachios that morning after speaking to the pistachio growers in San Diego. Wifey and I had stayed at the Manchester Hyatt in San Diego right on the harbor, facing an immense aircraft carrier and many pleasure craft. That was some astonishing view. Anyway, this morning, the day after the pistachio growers and the aircraft carrier, I had to awaken at 6 a.m., very early for me, make many notes on my speech, then go down to the breakfast with the directors of the Western Petroleum Marketers Association. Their wives were in the room as well. I went up to each person in the room, introduced myself, asked where they were from and how business was, and enjoyed it all thoroughly. I am a born meeter and greeter. I think I have told you how George Corley Wallace, as a four year old, would meet visitors to his childhood hometown, Clio, Alabama, at the train station. If I have this right, he would come up to them and say, “I’m George Wallace, Junior, and if I can do anything for you while you’re here in Clio, just let me know.” I could easily imagine doing that right now. My son is also amazingly good at that kind of interaction. He learned it from me and at Cardigan Mountain School (one of the finest institutions of learning on this earth)—how to greet men and women politely—and it stayed with him. I, your humble servant, spoke to about 400 people and had a great time with them. Really, the ordinary citizen, especially the ordinary small town citizen and businessman in this country, is just the salt of the earth. They are outgoing, cheerful, and warm. The gas station and convenience store businesses are apparently doing not just well in the western U.S. but very well indeed. There are a lot of small businesses in this country that are flourishing. These people have three generations working in the business at once, just as the pistachio farmers do. It’s a great business. Why get out of it? I wish I had a family business to pass on to my son, but in a way I do. He could help me with research on my books. Maybe I will try to get him to do that. (“Good luck, Pop.”) Anyway, after the speech, I was breathtakingly tired, so I went back to my room and slept. I made a mistake about the time of the flight and got up way earlier than I needed to. Like a dope, I made my wife pack and we had a long time to vamp before the airplane boarded. I felt extremely tired and I felt very, very stupid. We sat in some comfy chairs at the United Club at McCarran though and soon I was asleep. Listening to “Idiot Wind,” Bob Dylan’s masterful rant about the horrors of gossip and malice. It’s extremely apropos for my life right now because just a few days ago, someone was telling me what a bad person I am and how I wasn’t the kind of “choir boy” Republican that I told people I was. That actually made me laugh. As I have told my beloved Spectator readers over and over again, I make no claim at all to being a good person. A wildly generous person—yes. To the point of suicide. But a good, non-sinful person? Not in the slightest little bit. I am a 24-karat, wretched sinner. I have committed so many sinful acts it is impossible to even keep count for a few days. There is almost no sin I have not committed. But I do claim this little bit of light: I have confessed my sins and asked God for His blessings and forgiveness. And I do believe He will forgive me if I confess and acknowledge Him. But as to my claiming to be a particularly good person? Never. Not in a million years. The flight home was uneventful. I slept like a baby. THURSDAY I think I told you that I recently bought The World at War , the superb documentary about World War II narrated by Laurence Olivier, the man with the best voice on this planet—now gone, of course. (He also was married to Vivien Leigh, probably as good an actor as there has ever been. What a marriage that must have been. Two mad people together, both exploding with talent and ambition.) Tonight I watched an hour of the documentary about Genocide. It started out with the origins of racist thought and then the origins of the SS, Hitler’s killing machine for Jews and many others. Olivier made it clear that the basis of “thought” for the notion of killing whole populations of those deemed to be below Aryan status was a “neo-Darwinist” concept—i.e., that nature will eventually eliminate a competing, weaker species, so why not give nature a hand? That was Darwin’s precise idea and, as Himmler understood it, along with his boss, Hitler, the people who were parasites on the Herrenvolk were mostly the Jews. So, they had to be killed. It’s fascinating to me that The World at War says that the Genocide was a neo-Darwinist idea. Now that the neo-Darwinists have a stranglehold on all intellectual activity in the Western world, that kind of statement would be strictly verboten. The scenes of the murders, the starvation, the tortures of the Jews were just unbearably awful. Be-yond imagining. But, of course, they happened. Some of it—a lot of it—was happening in my lifetime. The narration by survivors of what went on in the ghettoes and at the crematoria and—God help us—in the gas chambers themselves are simply beyond endurance. If you want to see what happens when man says that man is God and that science will tell man how to deal with his fellow man, you cannot do better than to watch this documentary. The World at War —available from Amazon. TUESDAY I am back in Rancho Mirage. I have had a terrible cold and bronchitis now for a few days and I am limping through the day, day by day. But, I am just reeling from what I have seen on The World at War . I know I am like a broken record about this, but how can we ever even start to thank the men who fought at Bastogne and Monte Cas-sino and Remagen and Zeitlen (where my father-in-law did the heroic acts that earned him the Silver Star)? How can we ever repay the men who died on the Bataan Death March or in Japanese prison camps or on Iwo Jima or the Battles of Vella Lavella or the flyers who flew over Berlin or over the hump in Burma? How can we repay the wives and widows and children? How can we ever thank them enough? With every breath we take, there should be prayers on our lips and in our hearts for the men and women who wear the uniform. Meanwhile, what the heck is happening in Afghanistan? That’s turning out to be a true disaster. Yes, it’s time to get out, but how do we get out? Afghanistan is landlocked. Pakistan is on one side and Iran on the other. The only way out is through the north and I am not sure how much they like us. What a time to be even thinking of cutting the military budget. Are the people at the White House insane? No, I am sure not. They are just trying to do their best as they see it, but they are still way off the beam. This is a dangerous world. It is not time to cut the military budget. Again, back to that woman who was telling me what a horrible person I am (she gets paid for doing that, by the way)…In the room with me was a “mediator” who was a human miracle. His parents were Holocaust survivors. His mother, as a Jewish child in Poland, had to hide in a closet for five years. His father hid in a forest. Now, he travels the world skiing and doing Ecuadorean river kayaking while not mediating. All thanks to America and to his hero parents and to the heroes who beat the Nazis. Human beings are amazing creatures—capable of the best and the worst. This country mostly has the ones who are capable of the best. Let us thank God. Every breath we take of American air is a miracle. Speaking of which, here is a perfect Ben Stein hour. I lay down by my fireplace, under my electric blanket, with my heating pad on my stomach. I put Mozart’s Requiem and Laudate Dominum on my CD player. I listened. I smelled the cut grass outside. I heard faintly the sounds of jets flying into Palm Springs International Airport. I slept. I got up and put on the radio. KDGL-FM, “The Eagle” out here in the desert, was playing, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and I thought of Yale in 1970—”bliss it was in that day to be alive but to be young was very heaven”—and I was happy.
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At War and at Peace
Social conservatives who may be dispirited by Sen. Rick Santorum’s withdrawal from the GOP primary race need to stop and appreciate the opportunity that remains. They especially need to consider the extent to which Gov. Mitt Romney’s seemingly narrow economic focus could in fact undermine much of the liberal cultural agenda. Consider how the fiscal reform of many states and localities (which do not have Washington’s luxury of printing money) has already advanced policies long favored by social conservatives. Louisiana, for example, has attracted national attention for adopting legislation that would make an estimated 380,000 poor and minority children eligible for private and parochial school scholarships. The rationale for this reform may be economic — at $4,500, the average scholarship in a New Orleans pilot program costs roughly half the state’s current per pupil expenditure — but the policy outcome, combined with recent voucher victories in Virginia, Florida, and Indiana, represents an enormous victory for the Right side of the culture war. Even in states that continue to resist breaking up the expensive public school monopoly on K-12 education, the need for fiscal discipline has resulted in less money for sex education, gay rights advocacy, drug education programs, and other curriculum add-ons typically opposed by social conservatives. When it comes to higher education, limited state budgets have resulted in tuition increases at public college and universities. These increases, in turn, have rebalanced the undergraduate enrollment away from majors dominated by liberal faculty — sociology, gender studies, environmental science — and toward more practical, ideologically neutral subjects, such as finance, engineering, and computer science. In a complete reversal from the early 1970s, according to John Agresto, former president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, business administration, health care, and teacher preparation now account for more than a third of all undergraduate majors. The fiscal pressure on states and counties has also forced politicians to push responsibly for mental health care, juvenile rehabilitation, and other social services down to the local level of towns and cities, which themselves are broke. This has opened the way for churches and religious cooperatives, such as food banks, counseling centers, nursing facilities, employment programs, and homeless shelters, to play a much greater role in the lives of their communities. The Big Reach Center of Hope, a non-profit ministry of Ohio’s Greenford Christian Church which serves 70,000 people in five counties, is just one of an estimated 5,000 low-cost grocery and dry goods suppliers that, with contributions from chains like Wal-Mart, are picking up the government slack. Dr. Warren Bird, Director of Research and Intellectual Capital at the Leadership Network, says that churches “all over the country, are literally adopting (run-down) public schools,” quietly re-building their libraries, fixing their gyms, contributing supplies, and even putting down carpeting. At the same time that state and municipal budget cutting has elevated the grass roots profile of organized religion, it has also reduced or eliminated the number of politically correct commissions on human rights, the arts, day care, education, and family welfare, which have long operated as taxpayer-funded propagandists for secular causes. In very blue Connecticut, first term Gov. Daniel Malloy (D) has recently proposed eliminating 25 state boards to help balance the books. Even the successful 2011 effort in Rhode Island and six other states to control runaway pension costs, turning defined benefit programs into self-administered 401-Ks, represents a victory of sorts for social conservatism. Any policy that makes a public employee personally responsible for the size of his post-retirement nest egg cannot help but increase his sympathy for the kind of civil, moral, and educational values that support a healthy, growth-oriented economy. Spokespersons for government unions, such as Doug Pratt of the Michigan Education Association, may lament the prospect of public workers investing their own retirement dollars instead of depending on “a pension system back up by structure and employers.” Yet the maturity and judgment required to run a 401-K can only be welcomed by social conservatives as a positive development. The election of a fiscal reformer president next November would guarantee at the very least that blue state politicians will not be able to escape current financial pressures by borrowing from the national treasury. Beyond that, Governor Romney’s clear desire to trim discretionary spending means that the kind of socially conservative fiscal reforms advancing through the states will finally surface at the federal level. Subsidies for Planned Parenthood, the Public Broadcasting Service, and other culturally liberal groups would become the new endangered species. The almost certain nomination of Mitt Romney as the GOP standard bearer provides social conservatives with an historic opportunity to advance their agenda, not in grueling culture war battles unfairly framed by hostile media outlets, but by simply endorsing what most level-headed economists believe will revive our sluggish economy. Enact the fiscally sound policies that by their nature promote accountability, personal responsibility, and self-reliance; and the country will be more open to the rest of the argument. [1] Dr. Andrews is the Senior Policy Scholar at the Yankee Institute in Hartford, Connecticut.
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Fix the Economy and Conservative Values Will Follow
RedState Morning Briefing April 9, 2012 Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge. Happy Birthday, Gretchen. 1. From Hope to Hopelessness: Obama’s Economy Has 88 Million “Not In Labor Force” 2. Democratic National Convention to be lobbyist/corporate funded, after all. 3. Fracking is Blamed for … Well, Everything, Really. 4. Katie Pavlich Takes on Fast and Furious ———————————————————————- 1. From Hope to Hopelessness: Obama’s Economy Has 88 Million “Not In Labor Force” After Friday’s jobs numbers came out (the economy added 120,000 jobs) Labor Secretary Hilda Solis promptly proclaimed: “That’s a noteworthy achievement.” In fact, for the man who campaigned on the message of “hope” in 2008, the 120,000 jobs added is much fewer (about half) than expected and the edging down of the unemployment to 8.2% is not from job creation but from hopelessness. There are now 88 million American who are “Not In Labor Force.” Please click here for the rest of the post. 2. Democratic National Convention to be lobbyist/corporate funded, after all. And anybody who tells you that you can get money out of politics is either deluded, lying, or possibly both. Exhibit A: the upcoming Democratic convention in Charlotte, NC. The Democrats piously declared that of course no dirty, dirty corporate/lobbyist money would be allowed to be spent on putting the convention together. And everybody cheered… only, it’s now 2012 and there’s potentially a looming shortfall in fundraising. And lo! – here are some lobbyist and corporate donors. Sure, they can’t contribute… under the old rules. But rules are flexible things, are they not? A corporation can’t contribute directly. But it’s all right for their executives to write large personal checks, or contribute the equivalent in goods and/or services, or launder it through a corporate charity. As for lobbyists… well. The DNC likes to see its friends happy – friends being defined as ‘people who bundle together a lot of personal contributions and/or corporate in-kind donations’ – and if VIP access and nice hotel rooms make friends happy, then that warm, happy feeling would be its own reward, yes? Please click here for the rest of the post. 3. Fracking is Blamed for … Well, Everything, Really. Blaming natural phenomena on fracking is this year’s fad, reminiscent of the mood ring, the pet rock or Anthropogenic Global Warming. Item 1. Vice-President of the United States Joe Biden may not know what hydrofracking is, but he does know that it sounds plenty scary. Please click here for the rest of the post. 4. Katie Pavlich Takes on Fast and Furious Our sister company Regnery Publishing (we’re both owned by Eagle Publishing, Inc.) sent me a new book to read. I am really bad these days about not reading all the books I get in — sometimes up to a dozen a week from various publishers and authors. But this one caught my eye. Katie Pavlich, Townhall’s News Editor, has a book out entitled Fast And Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-Up. I think the media has spent more time doctoring 911 calls in the Trayvon Martin matter than focusing on what has happened along the border with Mexico. There has been some coverage and it probably would not have come to light except for CBS News’s initial reporting, but the scandal — and it is a scandal — has mostly flown under the radar. In fact, the whole war on our Southern border, the kidnappings and killings spilling over into our country, etc. really have not made major, sustained national news. Please click here for the rest of the post.
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Morning Briefing for April 9, 2012
From the diaries. . . Rick Santorum makes an excellent point that “ past performance really does indicate future results .” I completely agree—but not just “in Mitt Romney’s case.” Rick Santorum became the third-highest ranking Republican in the Senate in 2001 at a time when Republicans inherited balanced budgets, surpluses, and conservative, pro-life majorities. Senator Santorum and his big spending GOP allies proceeded to squander this inheritance. The leadership of the Rick Santorum Republicans proved disastrous: The Rick Santorum Republicans never passed a single balanced budget, after inheriting balanced budgets and record surpluses. They racked up $1.7 trillion in deficits and increased the average number of earmarks by almost 500 percent. The Senator even voted for the Bridge to Nowhere. The Rick Santorum Republicans increased the national debt by 12 percent and voted to raise the debt ceiling five times to accommodate it—even while dealing with a president of their own party. The Senator voted with Democrats and Big Labor to defeat the National Right to Work Act of 1995. He justifies this vote saying he was representing Pennsylvania where forced unionization is the law but today, PA Senator Toomey is cosponsoring nearly identical legislation. The Senator voted with Democrats and Big Labor — repeatedly — to protect Davis-Bacon legislation, an old law on the books that requires the federal government to pay more to its contractors. He was so wedded to big labor that he even voted against waiving Davis-Bacon in times of emergency. By voting to protect Davis-Bacon, the Senator cost taxpayers many millions in higher taxes, deficits, and national debt. The Senator sponsored the “Santorum Amendment” to raise the Minimum Wage 21.4%. He supported Ted Kennedy’s proposed hike in the Minimum Wage. And, in a 2006 campaign commercial, he bragged about his support for a higher Minimum Wage. The Rick Santorum Republicans abandoned their principles, resulting in the worst electoral defeat for Republicans since Watergate and the loss of GOP Congressional majorities in both the House and Senate. This left Congress in the hands of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. And in destroying the Republican brand of balanced budgets and spending control, the Rick Santorum Republican failure gave us Barack Obama in 2008. This is not a record of leadership to be proud of, and in 2006 it resulted in a catastrophic 18-point defeat. I fear it would do so again in the fall of 2012 if he were the nominee. Unlike Senator Santorum, I did not go to Washington seeing politics as a “team sport.” Instead, I set out to change the game, and was willing to fight the forces of the establishment within the Republican Party to do so. The result was the first GOP majority in 40 years and the largest increase in pro-life votes in House of Representatives history. When I was Speaker, we balanced the budget for the first time since the 1920s — and it stayed balanced for four straight years. We reformed welfare, lifting millions of Americans from poverty. We passed the biggest capital gains tax cut in history, helping create 11 million jobs. And we did it all while paying down the national debt by $400 billion. If you agree with Senator Santorum that “past performance really does indicate future results,” it means there’s only one candidate in this race who can offer the change our country desperately needs.
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Yes, Past Performance Does Indicate Future Results
Now that’s a scary thought, Oprah Winfrey having that much influence on the President of the United States. Via Politico: President Obama on Friday thanked his “good friend” Oprah Winfrey for being an early endorser who got Americans to support him, just as they buy the books and skin cream she recommends. At a fundraiser
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Obama Slobbers Uncontrollably Over “Good Friend” Oprah, She Helps “Keep Our Focus On The Big Picture”…
