Remember the bizarre case of Bill Sparkman, the census worker found hanging from a tree in Kentucky with the letters FED scrawled on his chest?  Remember the media frenzy about crazy Southerners and their hatred of the federal government?  At the time, I cautioned against jumping to conclusions, saying there could be any number of explanations.  I also agreed with Andrew Sullivan that suicide was unlikely given what we then knew about Sparkman.

Well, it turns out, the unlikely explanation was the right one.

A Kentucky census worker found naked, bound with duct tape and hanging from a tree with “fed” scrawled on his chest killed himself but staged his death to make it look like a homicide, authorities said Tuesday.

Bill Sparkman, 51, was found strangled Sept. 12 with a rope around his neck near a cemetery in a heavily wooded area of the Daniel Boone National Forest in southeastern Kentucky. Authorities said his wrists were loosely bound, his glasses were taped to his head and he was gagged.

Kentucky State Police Capt. Lisa Rudzinski said an analysis found that “fed” was written “from the bottom up.” He was touching the ground, and to survive “all Mr. Sparkman had to do at any time was stand up,” she said. Authorities said Sparkman was not under the influence of any drugs or alcohol at the time of his death. His clothes were found in the bed of his nearby pickup. “Our investigation, based on evidence and witness testimony, has concluded that Mr. Sparkman died during an intentional, self-inflicted act that was staged to appear as a homicide,” Rudzinski said.

[...]

Authorities said Sparkman alone manipulated the suicide scene, which was so elaborate that a man who discovered the body was convinced Sparkman was murdered.

Rudzinski said Sparkman “told a credible witness that he planned to commit suicide and provided details on how and when.” Authorities wouldn’t say who Sparkman told of his plan, but said Sparkman talked about it a week before his suicide and the person did not take him seriously. He told the person he believed his lymphoma, which he had previously been treated for, had recurred, police said.

Sparkman also had recently taken out two accidental life insurance policies totaling $600,000 that would not pay out for suicide, authorities said. One policy was taken out in late 2008; the other in May. If Sparkman had been killed on the job, his family also would have been be eligible for up to $10,000 in death gratuity payments from the government.

Michelle Malkin wonders, “When will the Left retract the Kentucky census worker case smear against conservatives?”  Stacy McCain piles on:

Bill Sparkman committed suicide. So much for “Southern populist terrorism” — and the credibility of Andrew Sullivan. So much for “Send the body to Glenn Beck” — and the credibility of Rick Ungar.

But at least some on the Left are quickly getting the word out.  Zachary Roth at TPM writes, “Sparkman deliberately played on rural Kentucky’s reputation as a hotbed of anti-government sentiment to create the impression that he had been murdered because of his job.”  TLOOG’s Mark Thompson adds,

After all the speculation that the death of a census worker was fueled by anti-government extremismand how the Tea Party movement (whatever its faults) was a vanguard for a violent anti-government uprising, it now appears that the killing was a suicide made to look like a homicide so the man’s family could collect a substantial life insurance payout.  This is a saddening portrait of a deeply troubled man in deeply troubled times. It is not, however, evidence that anti-government activists are uniquely violent.

When information is scant, we tend to fill in the gaps based on our prejudices about how the world works.  On the whole, it’s a completely reasonable thing to do.  Indeed, the nature of wisdom is the ability to extrapolate from what we’ve learned.   But sometimes jumping to conclusions bites you in the ass.

Story links: memeorandum

A rather bizarre column by Jeff Jacoby is drawing some blogospheric attention.

YOU’RE A sensible, principled conservative. You want America to be a land of boundless opportunity and freedom, where people are treated as individuals and judged on their merits. You reject the divisive identity politics of the left – what matters most about any of us, you would insist, is not race or class or ethnic origins: it is personal character and achievement. There are few things about contemporary politics you deplore more than the demonizing or scapegoating of entire groups (“white males,’’ “the rich,’’ “the Christian right,’’ “gun owners’’), as though every member of the group is interchangeable and indistinguishable, wholly defined by a single disparaging label.

True.

But let someone mention “illegal immigrants,’’ and your principles fly out the window.

No, not me.

So when Governor Deval Patrick recommends allowing young illegal immigrants – residents of Massachusetts who have graduated from high school – to attend a public college and pay in-state tuition, you flip out. This is outrageous, you protest. It rewards people who broke the rules. It’s unfair to the taxpayers who subsidize public higher education. Why should an illegal immigrant get a valuable tuition break that Massachusetts wouldn’t give to a kid from Maine or New Hampshire?

You vigorously agree with Charlie Baker, a Republican candidate for governor. “If you’re illegally here, you’re illegally here,’’ Baker said last week. “The notion that we should treat illegal immigrants with the same benefits and opportunities that legal immigrants and legal citizens have doesn’t make any sense to me.’’

It is dispiriting to see Baker, a man of considerable intellectual heft, stoop to such shallow sloganeering. It is even more dispiriting to see conservatives assail immigrants instead of the insane immigration system that gave most of them no legal way to enter the United States.  On the whole, illegal immigrants are just the sort of newcomers Americans should embrace: self-motivated risk-takers, strivers determined to improve themselves, hard-working men and women willing to take the meanest jobs if it will give them a shot at building their own American dream. Why would we want to punish them? Why would we want to punish their kids?

But these aren’t mutually exclusive.  I simultaneously agree with Jacoby that our immigration system is broken, that accepting and assimilating more of them is on the whole a good thing, and that it makes sense to educate assimilated immigrants and yet believe that we ought to enforce our laws.  The fact that we can’t or won’t enforce our immigration policy is a good reason to change it — not a reason to pretend the laws don’t exist.

Jacoby cherry picks a particularly hard case:

A couple from Brazil, seeking a better life for themselves and their 2-month-old daughter, enter the United States unlawfully. They settle in Massachusetts, where 18 years later the girl graduates from a public high school, as assimilated and acculturated an American as her classmates in every respect – except that they are US citizens, and she, by virtue of a decision made when she was a baby, is not. Her classmates can attend the University of Massachusetts, paying $9,704 a year in tuition, the price tag for Massachusetts residents. She can attend only if she pays the out-of-state rate of $22,157; if that’s more than she can afford, she’s out of luck.

This has to be unrepresentative.  What percentage of illegal immigrant children of college age have been residents of the state for eighteen years?

On the other hand, Jacoby has a point about irrationality among conservatives on the issue.

An unsigned piece at Stop the ACLU retorts, “what Jeff is missing is that the people looking for a better life entered the country illegally. Why should we excuse that behavior? We shouldn’t embrace that behavior just so they can build the American dream.” Jacoby doesn’t “miss” that; he argues that the system essentially doesn’t allow these people a legal means of immigration and that millions of them are already here.

Still, the reaction is understandable: These people are here illegally. Granted, in most cases, it was their parents who broke our laws, merely bringing their kids along for the ride. And some percentage of the kids are for all intents and purposes Americans, having grown up here and having no memories of “home.”

But it does seem perverse to reward their parents for flouting the law. Those who are trying to get in legally are waiting years and foregoing this opportunity for their children, after all.  Openly declaring a policy that “once here, you’re here” both makes those who play by the rules suckers and ensures fewer will play by the rules.

Clifton B of Another Black Conservative argues that we can’t afford it. “What Jeff Jacoby (like so many in Washington) has forgotten is that America is $12 trillion dollars in the hole. Half of every dollar we spend is borrowed money. Money that must be paid back by a generation that is too young to vote their objections or accept the responsibility. Sure it would be nice not to punish the children of illegal immigrants for the parents’ lawbreaking. However the stark reality is that for us to be generous the way Jacoby suggests, requires us to be cruel to our very own children by robbing their futures to pay for our current mistakes.”  A similar argument is made at 24Ahead.

That just doesn’t make sense. Either the in-state rate is a worthwhile investment in the future of Massachusetts residents or it isn’t. Adding in a relative handful of students isn’t going to break the bank.

The latter goes on to make a more compelling argument:

[C]ollege resources and discounts are a finite resource: just like in a game of musical chairs, there are only so many to go around. Any illegal alien who gets a “chair” (education slot or discount) means that a U.S. citizen will have to “stand” (not be able to go to college or not be able to afford it). If any of “400-600 additional students” that Mass can admit are illegal aliens, that means that U.S. citizens could have gotten those slots/discounts but lost out. Mass voters are in effect valuing foreign citizens higher than their fellow U.S. citizens, turning their back on U.S. citizens in order to help foreign citizens.

The problem with that, though, is that there’s no such thing as “citizenship” at the state level — only residency.  It’s arguable than an 18-year Massachusetts resident with illegal immigrant parents are more entitled to in-state resident tuition rates than her cohorts who are American citizens whose parents moved to Massachusetts two years ago and have hardly paid anything into the state treasury.

But, surely, it makes no sense to declare a policy that those who are here in violation of our laws should be able to bring that fact to the attention of the government and thereby be rewarded.

Correction:  I originally misread Jacoby’s example as saying the parents in question had subsequently attained US citizenship.  I’ve rewritten two paragraphs that referenced that erroneous fact, as they confuse the issue needlessly.

While a majority still supports criminalization, more Americans than ever think marijuana should be legal, according the latest Gallup survey. Lydia Saad (a family friend) provides the analysis:

Gallup’s October Crime poll finds 44% of Americans in favor of making marijuana legal and 54% opposed. U.S. public support for legalizing marijuana was fixed in the 25% range from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, but acceptance jumped to 31% in 2000 and has continued to grow throughout this decade.

The question wording is interesting here.  It would be cleaner and less confusing to ask “Do you think the use of marijuana should be illegal?”  But, since marijuana use is and has been illegal, one can understand the negative wording.  Also, they’ve been asking the question the same way over time, which at least allows untainted comparison over time.  We’ve seen a thirty point drop in the number thinking it should be illegal over the past 40 years and a 32 point rise in those thinking it should be legal.  And, allowing for a +/-3 margin of error, the trend has been rather steady.

Saad continues:

The highest level of support for decriminalizing the use of marijuana today is seen with self-described liberals, among whom 78% are in favor. In contrast, 72% of conservatives are opposed. Moderates are about evenly divided on whether the use of marijuana should be legal, although they tilt against it (51% vs. 46%). Somewhat milder differences are seen according to political party, mainly because of the tempered support of Democrats relative to that of liberals. However, a solid 70% of Republicans — similar to the rate seen among conservatives — are opposed.

Essentially, virtually all Republicans self-identify as “conservative” whereas many Democrats think of themselves as “moderate” or even “conservative.”  While this is partly a function of the greater size and therefore diversity of the Democratic coalition at the moment, it’s also the power of branding.   Liberal has been a dirty word for decades, despite views considered ultra liberal in my boyhood now being moderate, if not conservative.

Saad adds:

Public mores on legalization of marijuana have been changing this decade, and are now at their most tolerant in at least 40 years. If public support were to continue growing at a rate of 1% to 2% per year, as it has since 2000, the majority of Americans could favor legalization of the drug in as little as four years.

Perhaps true.  But here’s the thing: A sizable percentage of those who will privately tell a pollster that they think marijuana should be legal would be unwilling to make that statement publicly, owing to pressure from their church group, social circle, and so forth.  Conversely, those who favor criminalization are likely to be quite vocal and highly organized. We’ll need more than a slight majority supporting decriminalization to actually achieve it.

Regarding the TARP program, Matthew Yglesias makes a comment about conservatives that really isn’t fair:

But Romney aside, it’s striking to see the number of conservatives who’ve decided that an initiative proposed by George W. Bush and Hank Paulson and endorsed by the GOP congressional leadership was and is secretly some socialist plot. Similarly with the idea that Ben Bernanke, former Bush administration official, is running some sort of rogue left-wing operation at the Fed.

You know, October 2008 wasn’t that long ago and I remember that the biggest obstacles to TARP’s passage were the left-wing Democrats (Schumer and Dodd, particularly–I remember being absolutely stunned that Chuck Schumer met a government proposal that he didn’t like, and managed to ask pertinent questions of Paulson without grandstanding) and, of course, the most conservative GOP members of the House, who absolutely revolted over TARP. Sure, there weren’t huge protests against President Bush or anything, but TARP was pretty much always opposed by the mainstream conservative base.

I really do wish that Yglesias was back at The Atlantic–much of his content hasn’t changed since he moved over to ThinkProgress, but his analysis of the political facts on the ground (vs. policy discussion) has been lacking since his move.

A meme is developing among a handful of Progressive blogs, with Media Matters, Hullabaloo, Discourse.net, and Brad Blog all complaining that the Washington Post and NYT gave A1 treatment yesterday to the 9/12 protests while relegating anti-war marches in 2002 and 2005 to the inside pages.    Steve Benen follows up and observes,

There are competing angles to explain something like this, and some can make a compelling case that the media just overcompensates — outlets are so afraid of being accused of “liberal bias,” they go out of their way to promote one side’s concerns over the other.

But I still think it gets back to the fact that D.C. is just “wired” for Republicans. Anti-war protestors, the thinking goes, were liberal hippies out of step with the mainstream. After all, there was a Republican president and Republican House in 2002, and polls showed reasonably strong support for the war in Iraq. Why pretend the liberal protestors are important?

In contrast, seven years later, Tea Baggers have to be considered a major political movement. There’s a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress in 2009, and polls show reasonably strong support for the administration’s economic agenda, but the right-wing cries can’t be relegated to a few throw-away paragraphs in the Metro section.

My snarky reaction is that groups on the left have been staging protest rallies about every other weekend since the 1960s, making it a dog bites man story.  Conservatives marching on Washington is at least novel.  Beyond the snark, there’s actually a bit of truth to that:  Given that there were numerous anti-war rallies, they did become old hat after awhile.  And they were being compared to the much more massive anti-Vietnam rallies of the 1960s and seemed tepid by comparison.

My secondary reaction is to wonder whether we’re comparing apples to apples here.  The above posts are all self-referencing, giving very little factual information. When were the other rallies held? What else was going on?  They don’t say.

The 9/12 rally was held on a Saturday, meaning print coverage was going to be on Sunday — typically a soft news day.  Were the other rallies held on Saturday?  Further, the 9/12 protesters lucked out and nothing much happened to knock it inside.  Maybe Iraq War protests were knocked off the front pages by, say, developments in Iraq itself?

Amusingly, Tim Graham at NewsBusters is complaining that the liberal Washington Post buried the 9/12 story on its website and that the story contained a lot of editorializing that suggested the protesters did not represent mainstream opinion.

UPDATE:  Several readers assure me that the anti-war rallies in question happened on weekends. Which stands to reason, since weekends are the easiest time to stage rallies.  But that hardly settles the issue.  Here, according to Wikipedia, are the protests against the Iraq War:

• 2 Prior to the invasion of Iraq
  • 2.1 September 2002
  • 2.2 October 2002
  • 2.3 November 2002
  • 2.4 January 2003
  • 2.5 February 2003
  • 2.6 March 2003
• 3 Invasion to the fall of Baghdad
  • 3.1 March 20, 2003
  • 3.2 March 21, 2003
  • 3.3 March 22–23, 2003
  • 3.4 March 24, 2003
  • 3.5 March 25, 2003
  • 3.6 March 27, 2003
  • 3.7 March 28, 2003
  • 3.8 March 29, 2003
  • 3.9 March 30, 2003
  • 3.10 April 7, 2003
• 4 After the fall of Baghdad
  • 4.1 April 12, 2003
  • 4.2 October 25, 2003
  • 4.3 June 4, 2004
  • 4.4 June 5, 2004
  • 4.5 June 27, 2004
  • 4.6 August 29, 2004
  • 4.7 October 2, 2004
  • 4.8 October 17, 2004
  • 4.9 November 30, 2004
  • 4.10 January 20, 2005
  • 4.11 March 19, 2005
  • 4.12 June 21, 2005
  • 4.13 August 6, 2005 to August 31, 2005
  • 4.14 September 24, 2005
  • 4.15 November 4–5, 2005
  • 4.16 March 18 – March 20, 2006
  • 4.17 April 1, 2006
  • 4.18 April 29, 2006
  • 4.19 May 22–31, 2006
  • 4.20 August 9, 2006
  • 4.21 September 21, 2006
  • 4.22 September 23, 2006
  • 4.23 October 5, 2006
  • 4.24 November 3, 2006
  • 4.25 January 4, 2007
  • 4.26 January 10–11, 2007
  • 4.27 January 27, 2007
  • 4.28 March 11, 2007
  • 4.29 March 16, 2007
  • 4.30 March 17, 2007
  • 4.31 May 21, 2007
  • 4.32 September 15, 2007
  • 4.33 September 29, 2007
  • 4.34 March 19, 2008
  • 4.35 March 21, 2009
  • 4.36 April 4, 2009

That’s a flippin’ lot of protests!  Granted, the list covers even relatively minor gatherings and some that took place overseas.

I have no idea which protests the posters linked in the opener are complaining about, let alone images of the front pages of the Washington Post and NYT on those days.  Most of the protests in 2002 in fact did take place during the week.   Only two were on Saturday, the September 29 event that attracted “roughly 5000″ demonstrators and a huge demonstration on October 26.

Since the latter appears to be the only significant domestic protest from that year, I’ll assume it’s the one being complained about.  I don’t have a copy of the WaPo or NYT from that day but have ascertained that there was a feature in the Sunday WaPo headlined “Antiwar Protest Largest Since ’60s” but I don’t know on what page it appeared.

What else happened that day?   I was able to find a listing of stories that appeared in the Saturday and Sunday editions.  As it turns out, the competing stories were actually much, much bigger than I’d have guessed.

The DC sniper’s rampage had just been ended, with his arrest of October 24, generating dozens of stories covering every detail and nuance.  Believe me, having just moved to the DC area two months prior, I can attest that that story was occupying the minds of those of us living in the DC area.

Oh, and another story took place that likely dominated the Sunday edition and that the Left couldn’t possibly object to having been covered on the front pages:  Senator Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash.  (Oddly, that happened the morning of Friday the 25th but it looks to have been covered in the edition of Sunday the 27th.  The archived WaPo version isn’t showing up for me in Google but two reprints of it, both dated 10/27, do. Regardless, it was a huge story with ripple effects that went on for weeks. )

I don’t have time to comb the stacks to figure out what 2004 protest was minimized.  But, again, looking at the list above, I’m guessing that protest stories had become decidedly less interesting by that point.

When Republicans controlled the presidency and had strong majorities in the House and Senate, I often read calls from bloggers on my side of the aisle for purging the RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) from the ranks.  After all, the likes of Arlen Specter and  Lincoln Chaffee were a giant pain in the butt and always seemed to be in cohoots with the Democrats to craft a “compromise” bill that we weren’t going to like.   Why not get rid of these clowns and just work with the True Believers?

Well, by and by, it happened.  Most of the Republicans in the Northeast lost.  A couple of them became Democrats.

And now the Democrats control the presidency and have strong majorities in the House and Senate.  And, lo and behold, bloggers on their side of the aisle are saying the same thing.   Digby, responding to Charlie Cook’s claim that the Dems could lose 20 seats in the House in 2010, mostly among the so-called Blue Dogs:

I would love to hear anyone tell me why I shouldn’t be cheering for that outcome.

Cook said it would “reflect on” the president, but from my perspective it would reflect well on him. And if it happens because he rammed through meaningful health care reform instead of some watered down bucket of warm spit and the administration managed to get unemployment down, I think he will very likely have Morning in America in 2012.

To hell with Rahm and his appease the Blue Dogs at all costs strategy. What good is it if the president fails in 2012? If Cook is right and the Dems maintain their majority while losing a bunch of these reactionary wingnuts, I couldn’t be happier. And the Democrat should be happy too because it means they can pass successful legislation for a change.

Now, I encourage the Democrats to pursue this strategy.  I really do.  But instead of “winning by losing” they would simply be “losing by losing.”

Blue Dog Democrats are mostly Southern Democrats.  They’re moderate on the social issues and moderately hawkish on fiscal issues, making them liberals back home, conservatives in the Democratic Caucus, and “wingnuts” to the Netroots.  If they lose, they’ll be replaced by Southern Republicans who will naturally be to their right.

The Blue Dogs disagree with Obama on some issues but they wish him well and will vote with him when they can.  Almost all of them will campaign for him back home in places like North Carolina and Virginia and Florida, where he won narrowly last time even though Republicans have generally carried them.   Their replacements would disagree with Obama on more issues and hope he fails politically so that their party can take back the White House in 2012.

The only way that addition by subtraction works for a party is in the leadership.  A key committee chairman who opposes the party’s agenda can be more trouble than he’s worth.  For example, I opposed having Arlen Specter chair the judiciary committee, given how important the courts are to both party’s agenda.  (I would have given him a chairmanship of similar prestige where his views were more in line with the GOP’s mainstream.)  But taking away occasional supporters and replacing them with dedicated opponents is not a winning strategy.

Two blogging conventions, Netroots Nation (the successor to Daily Kos) and RightOnline, are being held in Pittsburgh this week.  As Timothy McNulty reports for the Post-Gazette, they’re different in ways other than politics.

The RightOnline conference starting tomorrow morning at the Sheraton Station Square will have about a quarter of the 2,000 attendees at the liberal conference in the convention center, and only about 20 speakers to the 400 at Netroots. Liberals are throwing multiple parties at the Warhol and a gay-lesbian kiss-in. Conservatives end Friday night with a film criticizing Al Gore.

What, no conservative homosexual kiss-in?! Shocking!

Matt Yglesias says it’s the demographics, stupid:

The over-60 demographic is a hotbed of conservative sentiments, but it’s also very disinclined to go online. The stereotype of progressive bloggers and blog readers as “young” tends to be wildly overstated, but what is true is that the online universe contains relatively few senior citizens, and the current version of the conservative coalition contains quite a lot of seniors.

But conservative bloggers aren’t seniors, so that doesn’t explain it.  Demographics do matter, however. The Netroots do skew younger and their most prominent bloggers tend to have institutional affiliations or be full-time bloggers.  Most of the top conservative bloggers still have day jobs that don’t involve blogging.

An additional explanation is offered in McNulty’s piece:

“The problem by and large remains that on the right, the focus still tends to be on punditry as opposed to activism,” said Erick Erickson, the editor of RedState, and a speaker at RightOnline on Saturday. “It has been focused on bloggers trying to be the next Rush Limbaugh or the next columnist, not on urging readers to call members of Congress or go to tea parties.”

Beyond that, as Chris Bowers and others have argued for years, liberals have tended to be more communal online whereas conservatives have tended to be individualistic.  I, for one, can’t imagine traveling to Pittsburgh to talk about blogging for several days.

Photo by Flickr user Neeta Lind under Creative Commons license.

Mike Rappaport “hates” David Brooks and finds him “a despicable character.”  Why?  He lets John Hinderaker explain:

Brooks . . . knows where his bread is buttered. He makes his living as a “conservative” who can reliably be counted on to sell out conservatives and Republicans at every opportunity.

In this instance, Hinderaker is reacting to Brooks’ characterization of Sarah Palin’s “death panel” hyperbole as “crazy.”

What’s the evidence that Brooks thinks Palin’s straw man is actually solid argumentation?  He doesn’t say. Presumably, Hinderaker (and apparently Rappaport) think it’s something that all good conservatives believe and that, since Brooks represents himself as a conservative, he must believe it, too, but be lying about it.  (That neither Hinderaker or Rappaport think Brooks is really a conservative, let alone a good one, is immaterial, apparently, in their psychoanalysis.)

I see much the same venom from the other side of the aisle toward David Broder.  Even though Broder doesn’t even pretend to be a progressive activist, “Broderism” is a slur word to denounce columnists who take the stance that conservatives sometimes have good points.

It’s as if True Believers presume that everyone else is like them.  It’s fine to be a True Believer on the other side but 90 percent friends are heretics who must be burned at the stake.  It’s simply inconceivable that someone who is generally conservative, as Brooks is, might simply have a different cultural background and not share some of the assumptions of the dominant Social Conservative wing of the movement.  Nor, apparently, does it occur to people for whom Inside the Beltway and elite are slurs that there actually is such as thing as Inside the Beltway elite thinking.

Hinderaker’s assessment is particularly bizarre, too, in its misapprehension of the punditry game — particularly coming from one who plays it so well.  Brooks and Broder are at a decided disadvantage precisely because of their moderation.  While “Crossfire” was canceled some time back, the style it pioneered is the predominant one in the industry.  Charlie Rose-style or Jim Lehrer-style conversation is a fringe relegated to public television; the money is in being the next Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann.

David Frum frets that conservatives might be in for a Pyrrhic victory in the health care fight if they define winning as “beat back the president’s proposals, defeat the House bill, stand back and wait for 1994 to repeat itself.”

[W]e’ll still have the present healthcare system. Meaning that we’ll have (1) flat-lining wages, (2) exploding Medicaid and Medicare costs and thus immense pressure for future tax increases, (3) small businesses and self-employed individuals priced out of the insurance market, and (4) a lot of uninsured or underinsured people imposing costs on hospitals and local governments.

We’ll have entrenched and perpetuated some of the most irrational features of a hugely costly and under-performing system, at the expense of entrepreneurs and risk-takers, exactly the people the Republican party exists to champion.

That’s essentially the argument Dave Schuler’s been making for months.  And it’s right as far as it goes:  We’re not talking about a free market system that’s functioning superbly and needs only to be saved from the depredations of socialism; large parts of the system are already on the federal budget and the trends are unsustainable.

So, what does Frum propose conservatives do? Well, nothing in that post.  Fortunately, he follows it up with this a rather detailed set of bullet points which he says is “non-exhaustive.”  Allowing the self-insured to buy insurance with untaxed dollars, support for private co-ops, a government rating system, outlawing certain insurance company bad practices, moving away from employer-financed insurance, tort and malpractice reform, and so on.   He then concludes:

We should of course fight against any so-called public option. Direct government provision ought to be the conservative red-line; No deal at all is preferable to a deal that includes a bigger government entry into the insurance business.

Which, ironically, is the Republican position that he’s complaining about!

Reality check:  We have a Democratic president with overwhelming Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate. There is no way — zip, zero, zilch, nada — for Republicans to pass tort reform or any number of other programs that they might prefer.  The time for that was in 2001 when they had the presidency and both Houses of Congress.

All the Republicans can really do is throw sand in the gears and try to prevent creation of a massive new government entitlement program.  If public option becomes reality, not only will it be permanent but it will likely become increasingly less optional.

Tactically, the only way to achieve that is to attack the weakest parts of the Democratic plan so as to put pressure on Democrats in more conservative states and districts to break from the pack and vote against the package.  That’s not done by wonkish talk about fantasy alternatives but rather by making Obamacare the target.

And, lo and behold, it seems to actually be working.

Frum’s approach, by contrast, would make it much more likely that conservatives lose the big fight on public option.  It concedes that what we have now isn’t working and that the government must step in and do something.  Given who’s in charge, that something would not look much like Frum’s list.

Andrew Sullivan thinks Republicans hate the cash-for-clunkers program, wherein the government gives people up to $4500 of taxpayer money to trade in their cars for newer ones that get slightly better gas mileage, out of “emotional reaction to the end of the far right’s dominance of American discourse.”

[C]ash-for-clunkers is one example of the government actually doing something right, helpful and popular. It’s the kind of pragmatic experimentation that FDR tried repeatedly. So you have a practical, targeted measure that seems to have helped abate a deeper recession in the auto industry, and the right is obsessed with the ideological abstraction of “government.”

What conservatives have to do, in my view, is not demonize government, but to champion limited government. If government can do tangible practical things that help everyone, while balancing its budget, it’s doing what conservatives think it should. Smart, practical initiatives that address problems that the private sector has failed at: what else is government for? The rest is ideology – and it seems to be all the Republicans have left.

My word, how can one simultaneously champion limited government and defend this program?!

Of course it’s popular. As Dave Schuler notes, “Free money always is.” The problem is that “this money isn’t free, the program doesn’t help the environment, it doesn’t necessarily help U. S. automakers, it isn’t targeted at people in need, and it doesn’t help the economy.”

But isn’t the auto industry failing? And didn’t people rush out to buy new cars with this nifty, FDR-style innovatively awesome program of just the type Michael Oakeshott would have loved?  Edmunds CEO Jeremy Anwyl thinks not:

As we noted earlier in July, over 100,000 buyers had put their purchase on hold waiting for the Cash for Clunkers to launch. Is it any wonder that showrooms filled and the government servers crashed when this backlog of buyers rushed to finalize their purchase?

Secondly, last week we published an analysis showing that in any given month 60,000 to 70,000 “clunkerlike” deals happen with no government program in place. In other words, the 200,000-plus deals the government was originally prepared to fund were barely above the “natural” clunker trade-in rate.

So, the program was destined to sell out quickly. As word of this spread around the Internet, any consumer with any interest at all, rushed into their local dealership so as to not be left out.

Clearly, the sales frenzy of last week was inevitable. In fact, students of economic theory will quickly recognize the dynamics of a classic shortage. We have taken three to four months of normal activity and caused them to occur over a few days, as consumers rushed to not miss out.

Stan Collender worries that we’ve essentially created a new entitlement, with people conditioned to demand money from the government as incentive to take actions they were likely to take anyway.

The cynics at WSJ pile on:

The subsidy won’t add to net national wealth, since it merely transfers money to one taxpayer’s pocket from someone else’s, and merely pays that taxpayer to destroy a perfectly serviceable asset in return for something he might have bought anyway. By this logic, everyone should burn the sofa and dining room set and refurnish the homestead every couple of years.

Why not, they wonder, offer $4500 subsidies for everything?

Clearly, we spoilsports need an attitude adjustment to Washington’s new economics. And since money is no object, let’s give everyone a $4,500 voucher for other consumer goods. Let’s have taxpayers subsidize the purchase of kitchen appliances, women’s clothing, the latest Big Bertha driver—our Taylor-made is certainly a clunker—and new fishing boats. These are hardly less deserving of subsidies than cars, and as long as everyone thinks we can conjure wealth out of $4,500 giveaways, let’s go all the way.

Piggybacking on WSJ’s point, it strikes me that the “clunkers” aspect of this arrangement is morally dubious.  Glenn Reynolds‘ 2004 Mazda RX-8 is a clunker that, were he so inclined, he would be eligible to trade to the government (indirectly) for $4500.  It would then be scrapped.  Doesn’t this remove a perfectly good used car from the market that some person of modest means could otherwise have purchased, either upgrading from an older, less reliable vehicle or none at all?  And doesn’t doing that mean the price of other used cars will increase accordingly?

Dan Miller laments that “the right has basically abdicated its role in the conversation” on health care reform.

Health care has been THE liberal project for literally decades; entire careers (not to mention presidencies) have been built around it.  There’s a vast policy apparatus on the progressive side of the aisle built around health care, with industrious wonks digging into every nook and cranny.  Meanwhile, the right has…nothing.  To the best of my knowledge, the right has never instituted any major policy shift in health care (with the exception of Medicare Part D, although even that came about substantially because of pressure from the left and with the help of liberal Senators).  The right, speaking broadly, doesn’t see a problem with the current state of affairs in the health care system; it’s just not a subject that excites them.  If there was a way they could continue the status quo while solving the problems of cost growth, I think most conservatives would gladly take it.

Well . . . yeah.

There’s not a large conservative apparatus around health care policy because conservatives, fundamentally, don’t think providing health care is a legitimate function of government.  Defending the status quo simply doesn’t require a lot of infrastructure.

Kevin Drum does a very sound job of explaining why even “status quo, give or take” doesn’t have a significant conservative wonk base.  His post defies excerpting but, suffice it to say, once you get beyond subsidizing defined groups (the poor, the elderly, veterans) there’s no tinkering to be done — massive government regulation is inevitable.  You know what conservatives hate?  If you guessed “massive government regulation,” you get a gold star.

The upshot, then, is that conservatives tend to approach the debate from first principles whereas liberals are pushing their favored implementation plan.  The latter requires far more detailed knowledge.

Mark Tapcott hath a point:

[I]n a Beltway Confidential post Tuesday, I asked what is the difference between folks on the Right calling the eight Republican House members who voted for Obama-Waxman-Markey the “cap-and-traitors,” and the infamous “General Betrayus” ad bought by the Left’s Moveon.org in The New York Times.

In no time at all, comments variously described your humble servant as a “moron,” a spreader of “piffle,” a “clueless knave or a fool,” and “a boil on journalists’ butts,” among much else. A few folks offered reasonable contrary arguments, but the clear verdict of most was that I am either incredibly stupid, or I’ve ingested an overdose of MSM fairy dust.

[...]

The fundamental problem here is that substituting personal invective for logic and fact points to the disappearance of a key aspect of republican virtue – putting the pursuit of truth in public debate before self-aggrandizement, also known as moderation or temperance.

It also signifies the continuing corruption of public language. Contrary to the deconstructionists among us, language is crucially important in a republic because it enables rational consideration of alternatives. Dismissing a proposal out of hand because it comes from a “moron” denies the possibility of logical argumentation and poisons the reasonable discourse required for a republic to function peacefully.

[...]

Usually with Reagan it was “our opponents,” or “the other side.” He was always a gracious speaker and a superb debater, quick to refute specious arguments or personal attacks with facts and logic. Reagan was tough, but he was a gentleman and an honorable adversary.

Reagan steadfastly avoided using personal opprobrium as a substitute for facts and reason because he refused to demean himself or his cause by diving into the gutter with others who were all too eager to hurl themselves and others there.

It’s not uncommon these days to hear suggestions that Reagan is no longer relevant. But his example of extending courtesy and respect to opponents – including those who don’t deserve it – is relevant for all time because it’s the right thing to do.

Mark’s piece may well overstate the degree to which the right has been more honorable in its debating tactics over the years than the left.  There’s certainly been a long history of coded language implying that the other side is less loyal to the country, less moral, less likely to have good personal hygiene, and so forth.  Then again, maybe having the decency to couch such charges in code words is a mark of civility.

Regardless, Mark’s quite right that respectful debate is both good for the republic and good manners.  I’d like to see more of it.

Photo:  US News

As President Obama settles into his fifth month in office, his personal popularity remains high but his job approval is slipping drastically, according to a new NYT/CBS News poll.

A substantial majority of Americans say President Obama has not developed a strategy to deal with the budget deficit, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, which also found that support for his plans to overhaul health care, rescue the auto industry and close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, falls well below his job approval ratings.

A distinct gulf exists between Mr. Obama’s overall standing and how some of his key initiatives are viewed, with fewer than half of Americans saying they approve of how he has handled health care and the effort to save General Motors and Chrysler. A majority of people said his policies have had either no effect yet on improving the economy or had made it worse, underscoring how his political strength still rests on faith in his leadership rather than concrete results.

As Mr. Obama finishes his fifth month in office and assumes greater ownership of the problems he inherited, Americans are alarmed by the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been doled out to boost the economy. A majority said the government should instead focus on reducing the federal deficit.

But with a job approval rating of 63 percent, Mr. Obama has the backing of Democrats and independents alike, a standing that many presidents would envy and try to use to build support for their policies. His rating has fallen to 23 percent among Republicans, from 44 percent in February, a sign that bridging the partisan divide may remain an unaccomplished goal.

Compared to President Bush’s abysmal numbers, these numbers are quite good.  And, certainly, he inherited some extraordinary challenges, what with arguably the worst economy in decades and two ongoing wars.

Still, we’re finally witnessing something I predicted would happen during the Democratic primaries but did not.  Obama has been unrivaled in being all things to all people.   He managed to get the staunchly liberal base of his party on board while also gaining the support of libertarians like Megan McArdle and conservatives like Andrew Sullivan.

Now, though, he can no longer issue carefully crafted statements that people inclined to like him can imagine are exactly their preferred policies.  Instead, he has to make actual policy choices.  Inevitably — no matter how fantastic any group might think each decision is — this makes enemies.

Fiscally conservative types are aghast at the enormity of the bailout and the unprecedented intervention in the economy, such as the GM and Chrysler takeovers.  Meanwhile, the netroots are disappointed with Obama’s relative moderation on the social issues, like gay marriage.

The gaps on the “Views of the President” part of the poll and the “Views of the [Specific Issue]” would seem to indicate that there’s a lot more room for Obama’s support to soften.  A whopping 57 percent think he’s doing well on the economy, for example, yet only 41 percent think he’s doing the right thing on the budget and only 30 percent think he’s got a clear plan.  Something has to give, eventually, and I’d lay my bets on the 57.

Similarly, Obama has only 44 percent approval on health care.  I strongly suspect that this number will plummet, not increase, once he’s actually worked out a deal.  The left will be outraged that a Democratic president and Democratic Congress didn’t move us much closer to Single Payer.  The right — and my guess, the moderates, too — will think we’ve gone too far towards socialized medicine.   That’s just the nature of making hard decisions on divisive issues.

None of this is a prediction on the 2012 election, by the way.  Obama is an outstanding campaigner and is likely to be personally popular three and a half years from now.  And there’s no sign at all that the Republicans have revitalized their message and have a strong candidate ready to carry it.   Unless those things happen, Obama could get reelected with a 45 percent approval rating.

UPDATE: The new NBC/WSJ poll is out and it shows similar trends.

Nearly seven in 10 have serious reservations about the federal government’s ownership stake in General Motors. Almost 60 percent say that President Obama and Congress should worry more about keeping the deficit down — even if that means it will take longer for the economy to recover. And fewer than half of Americans have confidence in the president’s policies to improve the economy.

Obama remains a popular figure in the poll. But these numbers on the deficit and the government’s intervention seem to mark a new period for the administration, as the public moves from welcoming his inauguration and first days in office to examining his initial actions as president.

[...]

The drop mainly comes from independents, who backed Obama by 60 percent to 31 percent in April, but approve of him now by a 46-44 clip.

These trends are also interesting and conform to what I’d have guessed:

26 percent view Dick Cheney favorably, which is up eight points from April

24 percent view Nancy Pelosi favorably, which is down seven points from April

25 percent hold a favorable view of the Republican Party, which is an all-time low for it in the poll

45 percent hold a favorable view of the Democratic Party.

There’s been much back-and-forth since Wednesday’s tragic shooting of a guard at the Holocaust Musuem about the rise of right wing extremists and the need for the federal government to treat them as a threat.  Inevitably, we’re seeing the perennial “their extremists are worse than our extremists” debate.  Oddly, we’re even seeing some “No, he’s actually a Left-wing extremist!” arguments.

Rather than rehash the particulars of the debate, I’ll skip ahead to the most sensible posts I’ve seen on the matter (which, conveniently, already have much of the back story).

Jon Henke:

The ongoing efforts to conflate the Tiller and Holocaust Museum murderers with the Right, conservatives or Republicans – or to imply that criticism of government is responsible for these murders – is absurd and offensive.  Would the critics change their political views if it turned out that one of the killers was a left wing militant?   No.

[...]

Let’s conclude with two central ironies:

• The Left strenuously objects to connecting President Obama to socialists and William Ayers; meanwhile, they want to lump all conservatives in with militant radicals.

• Meanwhile, as Doug Mataconis points out, “Conservatives who object to being tied to Von Brunn were eagerly associating Obama with Ayers and Wright.”

Rick Moran:

Conservatives trying to make the case that the Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn is some kind of liberal or leftist sympathizer are tilting at windmills:

[...]

I will freely grant this this guy is a man of the extreme right. To posit the notion, as many on the left have been doing the last few days, that this guy has any connection whatsoever either in his philosophy or ideology with mainstream conservatism is ludicrous. It is equally fanciful to blame “right wing hate speech” emanating supposedly from mainstream conservative media outlets for this guy’s actions. The idea that von Brunn needed any motivation at all beyond his sick, twisted, personal extremist ideology and whatever demons possessed him ignores reality – about what we’ve come to expect from the “reality based community.”

By the same token, desperately seeking a way to disown von Brunn because the left has seen fit to smear all conservatives with his racist, anti-Semitic stench is equally ludicrous. We don’t have to disown him. It is self evident to any rational, semi-fair minded person that this guy had as much to do with mainstream politics as a member of the Black Panther party or some other far out, whacko leftist group.

Jesse Walker:

So the Department of Homeland Security, a bloated and dysfunctional agency that shouldn’t exist in the first place, should spend its time tracking the possibility that a criminal kook with no co-conspirators will decide to shoot a doctor or a security guard? From preventing another 9/11 to preventing unorganized shootings: Talk about mission creep. Yes, these murders are terrorism, but they’re the sort of terrorism that can be contained by the average small-town police force. If you try to blow them up into a grand pattern that threatens ordinary Americans, you’re no different from the C-level conservative pundits who treat every politically motivated crime by a Muslim as evidence of a broad Islamic threat to ordinary Americans’ well-being.

[...]

The effect isn’t to make right-wing terror attacks less likely. It’s to make it easier to smear nonviolent, noncriminal figures on the right, just as the most substantial effect of a red scare was to make it easier to smear nonviolent, noncriminal figures on the left. The fact that communist spies really existed didn’t justify Joseph McCarthy’s antics, and the fact that armed extremists really exist doesn’t justify the Department of Homeland Security’s report.

The Tiller shooter and Holocaust museum shooter were right-wing fanatics.  Ted Kaczynski was a left-wing fanatic.  The key part of those description isn’t their political belief system but fanatic(s). It’s rather like the never-ending debate as to whether Josef Stalin was a left winger and Adolf Hitler a right winger.  Once you’ve reached the point where you’re willing to commit criminal violence in support of your cause, your’re no longer in the company of people who merely debate issues and try to legally influence public policy outcomes.

There are various ways to represent this but these diagrams from Conservative Resources capture it nicely:

I prefer to think of ideology as a circle, rather than a line.  Left and Right have meaning but, as one gets to the extremes on either side — depicted as anarchism in the top chart and “Everyone Against Everyone” in the second — the views converge.

I actually prefer the bottom figure best in that it groups authoritarian states — Communism, Theocracy, and Fascism — very tightly and depicts, for example, Socialism and Libertarianism are near opposites.  Additionally, it contrasts all governmental/ideological forms with Anarchy, or the absence of government.  Those who murder to carry out their political agenda are in that category; their particular ideas otherwise don’t much matter.

Finally, I should note that racism is neither right-wing nor left-wing (nor, for that matter, is it centrist or anarchist).  It exists at all points on the spectrum and isn’t a political ideology at all.  Von Brunn’s hatred of Jews isn’t what makes him a right-winger but rather his views on politics.

Gays looking to get the Supreme Court’s help in being allowed to openly serve in the military have been rebuffed.

The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a challenge to the Pentagon policy forbidding gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, granting a request by the Obama administration.  The court said it will not hear an appeal from former Army Capt. James Pietrangelo II, who was dismissed under the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

[...]

In court papers, the administration said the appeals court ruled correctly in this case when it found that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is “rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in military discipline and cohesion.”

During last year’s campaign, President Barack Obama indicated he supported the eventual repeal of the policy, but he has made no specific move to do so since taking office in January. Meanwhile, the White House has said it won’t stop gays and lesbians from being dismissed from the military.

@anamariecox is miffed but this is hardly surprising.  It has been settled law for generations that the military has a “good order and discipline” interest that allows it to do things that other government entities can’t.  The homosexual exclusion policy has been tested time and again and been deemed consistent with that goal.  There was no basis for taking this case and ruling differently.

Ultimately, this is a policy decision that Congress will make.  Given the trendlines on this, it’s only a matter of time.  For example, a Gallup poll released June 5th:

The movement in favor of gays serving has been positive among all demographics, with more than two-thirds overal and even a sizable majority of self-identified conservatives in favor.    No group gave less than 58 percent approval.

President Obama has clearly decided not to make Bill Clinton’s mistake of sparking a distrating controversy by tackling this early.  With an economic crisis and two wars to deal with, that’s wise if not particularly courageous.