Ceteris Paribus

On Bush hatred and Obama euphoria...

Peter Berkowitz writes:

Bush hatred and Obama euphoria are particularly toxic because they thrive in and have been promoted by the news media, whose professional responsibility, it has long been thought, is to gather the facts and analyze their significance, and by the academy, whose scholarly training, it is commonly assumed, reflects an aptitude for and dedication to systematic study and impartial inquiry.

From the avalanche of vehement and ignorant attacks on Bush v. Gore and the oft-made and oft-refuted allegation that the Bush administration lied about WMD in Iraq, to the remarkable lack of interest in Mr. Obama's career in Illinois politics and the determined indifference to his wrongness about the surge, wide swaths of the media and the academy have concentrated on stoking passions rather than appealing to reason.

Some will speculate that the outbreak of hatred and euphoria in our politics is the result of the transformation of left-liberalism into a religion, its promulgation as dogma by our universities, and students' absorption of their professors' lesson of immoderation. This is unfair to religion.

At least it's unfair to those forms of biblical faith that teach that God's ways are hidden and mysterious, that all human beings are both deserving of respect and inherently flawed, and that it is idolatry to invest things of this world -- certainly the goods that can be achieved through politics -- with absolute value. Through these teachings, biblical faith encourages skepticism about grand claims to moral and political authority and an appreciation of the limits of one's knowledge, both of which well serve liberal democracy.

In contrast, by assembling and maintaining faculties that think alike about politics and think alike that the university curriculum must instill correct political opinions, our universities cultivate intellectual conformity and discourage the exercise of reason in public life. It is not that our universities invest the fundamental principles of liberalism with religious meaning -- after all the Declaration of Independence identifies a religious root of our freedom and equality. Rather, they infuse a certain progressive interpretation of our freedom and equality with sacred significance, zealously requiring not only outward obedience to its policy dictates but inner persuasion of the heart and mind. This transforms dissenters into apostates or heretics, and leaders into redeemers.

In other words, political correctness run amuck.

Is Tom Daschle indispensible to HHS?

That's some gravy train in Washington:

Tom Daschle, President Barack Obama's nominee for the secretary of Health and Human Services, paid around $100,000 in back taxes after his nomination to pay for a car and driver he was supplied but did not report as income...
[...]
Daschle was supplied a luxury car and driver by InterMedia Advisors, LLP, an investment firm...Mr. Daschle served as chairman of the firm's executive advisory board. He told committee staff he had grown used to having a car and driver as majority leader and did not think to report the perk on his taxes...

He did not think...

It must be contageous. There's a lot of that going around in Washington.

He did not think he would get caught NOT paying the taxes on his perk.

UPDATE (1/31/09): It appears that "around $100,000" means "more than $128,000 in [back] taxes" plus $12,000 in interest and penalties. Furthermore, "his accountant discovered the error regarding the luxury car service and reported it to the committee after his vetting was completed."

Read that again: after his vetting was completed. That's some vetting process used by Team Obama.

And Daschle has yet to pay Medicare taxes on the now reported $255,000 car service perk.

Taxes are, apparently, for the little people to pay.

UPDATE (2/2/09): Forget the tax issue for a moment...Daschle is not a lawyer, but he was paid $2 million over two years in the employ of a law firm; a law firm registered as a health care lobbyist, but Daschle is not a lobbyist. Isn't this explanation just a little too cute? We don't let teenagers get away with such twisted logic and pretzel-like explanations. If a Republican tried that, they'd be laughed off the stage.

And the very same sort of folks (Daschle) that want publicly-traded companies to expense the compensation cost of stock options awarded to employees, now report that "the value of some assets was 'not readily ascertainable,' including...stock options granted to him by the commercial real estate firm CB Richard Ellis..." Daschle doesn't appear to have been a director or employee of CB Richard Ellis, but the chairman of CB Richard Ellis is Richard Blum, Sen Diane Feinstein's husband.

For the record, all financial assets can have their value readily determined--such determinations are done all the time. This explanation is a complete dodge.

Quote of the day...

The Democrat's agenda regarding the so-called "stimulus" bill: "a massively wasteful, reckless, profligate, slovenly, higgledy-piggledy mess of interest group troughs and technocratic fantasies devoid of any economic thinking or sense of proportion."

--Yuval Levin

Bad links...

...have been fixed. Details, details!!

A trillion dollars is a terrible thing to waste.

Jim Manzi has analyzed HR-1, the House version of the Obama administration's generational theft and wealth transfer bill. The estimated cost of the proposal is $816 billion over ten years, composed of $604 billion of "new" spending, and $212 billion in tax reductions. This proposal will require the government to borrow monies it does not have, so it can spend monies the taxpayer does not have, the debt service of which will cost in excess of $300 billion. This is on top of the estimated $1.2 trillion (yes, with a "t") fiscal deficit for 2009. That’s a lot of Benjamins.

Only about 1/7^th of the outlays occur in the current fiscal year.  Substantially more of the outlays occur in 2012 or later than occur in 2009.  How is this stimulus spending?
[...]
So, if this is a “normal” length recession, the spending bill will have the classic problem that fiscal stimulus does—namely, it comes too late to do much good, but right on time to help stoke inflation and mis-allocation of resources that are suddenly in high demand as the economy enters a recovery. 
[...]
Of course, these tax cuts weren’t exactly developed with a copy of Hayek in one hand and a calculator in the other. They are mostly a combination of disguised redistribution, social welfare and environmental spending disguised as tax credits, and the kind of rigged changes to investment expensing that have made the U.S. corporate tax the shining model of effectiveness and fairness that it is today.
[...]
Next, consider how the $604 billion of outlays would be spent.
[...]
Here are all the items that I saw them identify as individual programs with more than $10 billion of projected outlays, in the order that they call them out:

$20.0 billion to increase the maximum benefit under the Supplemental Nutrition Assurance Program (i.e., Food Stamps)

$18.5 billion for energy efficiency and renewable energy programs

$20.4 billion for programs administered by the Department of health and Human  Services

$20.0 billion to renovate elementary and secondary schools

$17.6 billion for Pell grants and other student financial assistance at post-secondary institutions

$29.1 billion for other elementary and secondary educational programs

$30.0 billion for highway construction

$13.1 billion for other transportation programs

$11.2 billion for housing assistance programs administered by HUD

$19.5 billion (minimum, could be higher, as per Title XIII) for education grants to states

$27.1 billion for increase unemployment benefits

$13.3 billion to increase health insurance for unemployed workers

$11.1 billion for “Other Unemployment Compensation”

$20.2 billion for Medicaid and Medicare incentive payments to encourage providers to improve healthcare IT

What does this sound like to you? It sounds to me like a wish list for the left wing of the Democratic Party.

And several illustrative graphs. Read it in its entirety.

Title IX: It's not just for sports anymore...

New York Times science reporter Natalie Angier, apparently, believes in affirmative action (proportional representation) for women in science. The Manhattan Institute's Heather MacDonald deploys logic, and her droll sense of humor, to skewer Angier.

Gender-insensitive TV shows are just the start of the barriers blocking girls’ entry to the empyrean of pure science. There’s also the father of modern physics himself. What self-respecting girl wants to look like Albert Einstein? “As long as we’re making geek [culture] chic” under our new, science-friendly president, Angier suggests, “let’s lose the Einstein ’do and moustache.” We’re in whiplash territory here. For years, we have been told that the patriarchy brainwashes women into excessive concern with appearance. Now, however, it turns out that girls with an innate knack for science could be turned away from their calling just because the Über Role Model is frumpy. If Einstein had looked like Tom Cruise or Angelina Jolie, apparently, girls would be clamoring to participate in the Math Olympiad and earning their proportionate share of physics Ph.D.s.

Which is it? Are women “strong”? Or can they be crushed by fears of a permanent bad hair day and inspired by something as superficial as Hollywood fashion?

Read the whole thing.

The "Hope and Change" President

WASHINGTON — The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat. “He’s from Hawaii, O.K.?” said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. “He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.

Is this is the same President that said, "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times. . . and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK"?

UPDATE (1/30/09): Is this the same President, a day later, that said, "My children's school was canceled today...because of what? Some ice? . . . We're going to have to apply some flinty Chicago toughness to this town." While Obama basks indoors, in the warmth of a greenhouse, he berates others for their lack of toughness regarding cold and ice. Is that "do as I say, not as I do" hypocrisy, or just a tin-ear?