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Friday, January 13, 2006Time for a Change from Capitol Hill Over at The Truth Laid Bear, there's a nice statement about Porkbusting and the Majority Leader race, whose sentiments I in the main share and affirm. Read the post and count me one of the undersigners.Business as Usual The statement: An Appeal from Center-Right Bloggers We are bloggers with boatloads of opinions, and none of us come close to agreeing with any other one of us all of the time. But we do agree on this: The new leadership in the House of Representatives needs to be thoroughly and transparently free of the taint of the Jack Abramoff scandals, and beyond that, of undue influence of K Street. We are not naive about lobbying, and we know it can and has in fact advanced crucial issues and has often served to inform rather than simply influence Members. But we are certain that the public is disgusted with excess and with privilege. We hope the Hastert-Dreier effort leads to sweeping reforms including the end of subsidized travel and other obvious influence operations. Just as importantly, we call for major changes to increase openness, transparency and accountability in Congressional operations and in the appropriations process. As for the Republican leadership elections, we hope to see more candidates who will support these goals, and we therefore welcome the entry of Congressman John Shadegg to the race for Majority Leader. We hope every Congressman who is committed to ethical and transparent conduct supports a reform agenda and a reform candidate. And we hope all would-be members of the leadership make themselves available to new media to answer questions now and on a regular basis in the future.
N.Z. Bear, The Truth Laid Bear 
posted by gbarto at 11:51 AM Tuesday, January 10, 2006Constitutional officers running the government? Heaven forfend!Michael Barone has thoughts on the NYT's attitudes about democracy. Of course it's unsurprising that the NYT sniffs at a people's government. Reading their pages, one gets the impression we shouldn't be able to run our own houses, businesses or clubs without consulting their preferred mandarins, so why should we be entrusted to select something as important as the government.
posted by gbarto at 10:37 PM Monday, January 09, 2006On the Majority Leader race:Boehner's letter is a bit touchy-feely but hits the right notes. Blunt's hits some notes that sound vaguely practical, but as a libertarian I don't necessarily want the government to be more efficient - just smaller. That is, don't lower my taxes by making the government work better. Lower them by making it do less. The worrying thing in Boehner's letter is that he wants to work with colleagues to find a vision for the GOP. I thought the one we had in '94 was just dandy and wouldn't have crossed them off my list of organizations to support if they'd stuck to it. And I'm not too sure how I'd feel about the collective vision of the current house. They need a leader to smack some sense into them, not an organizer to help them reach consensus on a vision. The worrying thing with Blunt is he's a little too clear on what he wants to do, instead of an overarching vision for where to take the conference. Current judgment: Blunt, by a whisper, but mainly because his name sounds better. This judgment is subject to change.
posted by gbarto at 1:02 PM Sunday, January 08, 2006Why the West will win the War on Terror...and Islam will be gutted." Lileks and Steyn are fretting over the future of Western Civilization. They needn't. Steyn and Lileks are both noting a lack of civilizational will. They worry that our numbers are shrinking and our confidence in our culture are declining, paving the way for Islam's conquest. But we have something in our favor: For Islamic culture to survive and prosper, its people must believe - believe in its truth, its tenets, its rationale. And they must act on it. For Western Civilization to continue, its people must simply keep doing what they're doing. The biggest problem folks like Lileks and Steyn run into is to believe that our governments and editorial pages are there other than for our amusement. But the person who said that Washington is Hollywood for ugly people hit the nail on the head. Like Hollywood, Washington is a culture whose people produce little of concrete value but leave us ever and always with something new to talk about. And don't get me started on Paris... I went to the supermarket last night. The headline on US magazine offered diets of such luminaries as Lindsey Lohan. The headline on Star magazine announced that Ms. Lohan has revealed she suffers from bulimia. Both tabloids appeared to be selling in equal measure. And I'm betting they're purchased by the same people. One pictures the unfolding of a reading session with two tabloid lovers: "Hey, it says here that Lindsey Lohan loses weight by going to the bathroom immediately after she eats." "Wait, this article says that's bulimia." "Is that a bad thing?" "I think so. It says she's in therapy for it." "Oh, well what diet is Britney using, then? Can you believe, just had her kid and she's already in a size 2 again!" The conversation is shallow and meaningless. The people reading it aren't actually going to try Lindsey or Britney's dieting tips, because they're reading to go "wow," not to learn. Just as half the blogosphere writes principally because it's fun to contemplate the possibility of thousands of people watching you shoot your mouth off. And that, friends, is Western Civilization today. Understand, I'm not condemning. Western Civilization is fun. It frees people to do whatever they like with their lives. If you want to be a transgendered, tatooed and pierced circus clown who's offended that family audiences don't like your act, that's cool. If you want to be a traditional homemaker who cashed in the kids' circus tickets after you read in the paper about the transgendered, tatooed and pierced circus clown, that's fine too. And if you want to invent a software system that universalizes small-scale processing, unleasing a small business revolution and setting the stage for a world where computer literate individuals create a new and burgeoning international community, even then you'll only be investigated by the Justice Department for a few years. The West, you see, allows it all. And that's why Islam as we know it is already on its deathbed. When a man named Jesus of Nazareth started suggesting that men were more than tools of kings, that they had their own particular value and a role to play in deciding their own fates, he touched off a revolution. It was such a powerful idea that it eventually even clobbered the Catholic church that had been founded in his name. Then it took out the kings. And we wound up with various forms of pluralistic democracy. If you look at the way history has unfolded, even Western Civilization hasn't been able to withstand the force of Western Civilization. New mututations of it keep killing off the old ones. Does anyone think Islam has a chance? There was a time when some fretted about the Soviets the way others today fret about the Islamists. But the Islamists - and traditional Islam, even - are facing a far fiercer enemy than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, never mind Jacques Chirac. They are up against a civilization that has obliterated every civilization it ever encountered, leaving behind only funny hats and amusing rituals for the entertainment of the dominant Western culture. The time is coming when the primary purpose of the faithful in the more resplendent mosques will be to add to the local color for Western tourists snapping photographs for their albums but unable to capture in any sense the idea of people who still believe in something. The time is coming when even the Germans will start celebrating as martyrs the young girls whose families murder them for "honor," not because they discover the will to stand up to teeming throngs of Muslims, but because those teeming throngs prove to lack the will to stand up to the lure of television. Want to solve the problem in Paris? Bomb the bad sectors with Gameboys and instructions in Arabic. At first, you'll get a lot of Gameboys destroyed by angry young men who won't be lured. But... drop a thousand each time. In the first bonfire, you'll get 950, in the second 800. In a year, the church elders will be shaving their beards and sneaking into electronics stores to get Gameboys for their bonfires while hoping no one notices their children at the back trying to steal a Porsche to get to the next level of Grand Theft Auto. Burning cars will be passé, because it will require leaving the house for something other than the next game cartridge, DVD to watch or bit of fast food that can be picked up and brought home before Friends comes on. Ironically, the television show that forecast so many and so much better things for some distant world gave us the one true message of Western civilization, and in a most unlikely context: In the face of the God-given rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness... Resistance is useless. You will be assimilated.
posted by gbarto at 12:00 PM |
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