I’ve started a new blog. You can find it at http://www.facingthehardtruths.com
From http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/new-poll-the-supreme-court-and-the-health-care-law/
There was greater Republican opposition to the law than Democratic support. About two-thirds of Republicans in the recent survey said the entire law should be overturned, while 43 percent of Democrats said all of the law should be upheld.
More than 70 percent of independent voters said they wanted to see some or all of the law struck down, with a majority saying they hoped to see the whole law overturned. Twenty-two percent of independents said they hoped the entire law would survive.
Responses varied by education, too. Nearly a third of respondents with a college education said they would like to see the law upheld, compared with about 20 percent of those without a college degree.
In English: Everyone hates the healthcare law. It doesn’t matter the party affiliation, or the education level, a majority want it gone.
Btw, the raw data isn’t shown, so we can’t look at men vs. women, or whites vs. blacks vs. others.
I don’t have anything to say about Paul Krugman’s idiotic 9/11 piece in the New York Treason, except that it’s what you’d expect from the“sad and irrelevant little man,” as Glenn Reynolds aptly describes him. But this part of Reynolds’s post, added later, is worth quoting in full:
UPDATE: A reader emails:
Dear Prof. Reynolds,
I really began to follow your blog on Sept 11, when most other websites were down due to traffic. Looking back ten years, I think it would be true to say that I have never experienced a historical event that has been more whitewashed, and this is almost frightening. There’s the obvious airbrushing of the falling victims, any body-parts or blood, the people cheering in the Middle East, etc. But there’s also the invention of a “we were all united and then Bush ruined it” idea. This is nonsense. The professional and academic left immediately started with “the chickens have come home to roost,” “it’s our fault for supporting Israel, etc.”
On Sept 11, just after the second tower fell, I was walking across campus with one of my colleagues. This was at the point when we thought there were 50,000 people dead. Her very first comment was, and I am not making this up or exaggerating it: “I am most worried about our muslim students.” Most worried. Not a word for the dead, not a word for the suffering, not a word for students who might have lost loved ones, but a concern verging on panic about the utterly idiotic idea that a bunch of students on a small liberal arts campus in New England were about to persecute the four muslim students in their midst. Political ideology trumped human decency, and elaborate fantasies of deranged redneck muslim-haters were concocted out of thin air. People were demonstrating on my campus against a war in Afghanistan even before Bush issued the ultimatum: there was never support for that war among the professional or academic left.
Another thing that has been airbrushed is that the country (and especially the political class) didn’t immediately support Bush. His handling of the crisis seemed inept at the very beginning, and I know that I had a sinking feeling that he would do exactly what had been done with every other attack: stern words, sanctions, some UN investigating committee which would take years. And the left wasn’t exactly giving Bush a break. Mary McGrory (in a column that I think has been memory-holed for its amazing stupidity) actually proposed that Bush make Gore co-president, because we needed a “national unity” government. It wasn’t until Bush said “and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon,” that I could start to hope that maybe something could be done. The country wanted action taken: most of the political class really did not, but they were pushed along by the public.
Maybe I’m naive, but I never thought I’d see the history of an event that billions of people saw be re-written in less than a decade. My[,] Orwell had a pretty keen eye for the future.
[if you use this, please don’t use my name, but if you want an identifier, maybe “A Professor at a small Liberal Arts College in New England”].
Megan McAedle
posts:
As the Solyndra story has unfolded, there have been a lot of blog posts and columns written about the “real scandal” of the situation. The “real scandal”, it turns out, encompasses everything from the GOP attempting to make political hay out of a vital environmental program, to the fact that the government was wasting all this money on the chimera of “green jobs”.
I too, have had my candidate for the “real scandal”–the poor decision making that seemed to have surrounded the loan, especially in its later stages, as DOE threw good money after bad.
But these days, the real scandal is starting to look like . . . real scandal. Contrary to earlier White House denials, we recently found out that major Obama fundraiser George Kaiser does indeed seem to have discussed Solyndra with members of the administration (In fairness, it was after the loan had closed. However, given that there were ongoing approvals required for disbursements, and later, for modifications in the loan, this is not very comforting.)
Meanwhile, Hoover’s Peter Schweizer’s new book claims that 80% of the loans in the DOE program that Solyndra tapped went to companies owned or run by Obama backers. Of course, one would expect that most “green energy” types would be enthusiastic Democrats. Still, the thing has a certain whiff about it.
Then today we learn that Solyndra, which was originally going to announce layoffs in late October 2010, held off on the announcement until November 3rd (aka election day). And they seem to have done so at the behest of the White House.
I think the very least you can say is that the political side became inappropriately entangled with the technocratic side of this loan. It undermines one’s faith in both the program, and the administration.
Obviously, this is not the worst thing that any president has ever done, or even in the top 100. But it’s not a good thing. And the people who support these sorts of technocratic subsidies should be the first people, not the last, to decry the actions which have tainted the program.
YOU HAD “FAITH” IN THE ADMINISTRATION AND THE PROGRAM?!?!?! YOU THOUGHT THE THE “ACTIONS WHICH HAVE TAINTED THE PROGRAM” WEREN’T THE MAIN POINT OF IT ALL?!?!?!?! I’m boggled.
Someone needs to check whether the formerly sharp Miss McArdle was dropped on her head in 2008. Or maybe kidnapped by space aliens and replaced by a clone.
But at the level of public policy and moral leadership, as a generation we have largely failed. The Boomer Progressive Establishment in particular has been a huge disappointment to itself and to the country. The political class slumbered as the entitlement and pension crisis grew to ominous dimensions. Boomer financial leadership was selfish and shortsighted, by and large. Boomer CEOs accelerated the trend toward unlimited greed among corporate elites, and Boomer members of corporate boards sit by and let it happen. Boomer academics created a profoundly dysfunctional system that systemically shovels resources upward from students and adjuncts to overpaid administrators and professors who by and large have not, to say the least, done an outstanding job of transmitting the cultural heritage of the past to future generations. Boomer Hollywood execs created an amoral morass of sludge — and maybe I’m missing something, but nobody spends a lot of time talking about the towering cultural accomplishments of the world historical art geniuses of the Boomer years. Boomer greens enthusiastically bet their movement on the truly idiotic drive for a global carbon treaty; they are now grieving over their failure to make any measurable progress after decades spent and hundreds of millions of dollars thrown away. On the Boomer watch the American family and the American middle class entered major crises; by the time the Boomers have finished with it the health system will be an unaffordable and dysfunctional tangle — perhaps the most complicated, expensive and poorly designed such system in the history of the world.
All of this was done by a generation that never lost its confidence that it was smarter, better educated and more idealistic than its Depression-surviving, World War-winning, segregation-ending, prosperity-building parents. We didn’t need their stinking faith, their stinking morals, or their pathetically conformist codes of moral behavior. We were better than that; after all, we grokked Jefferson Airplane, achieved nirvana on LSD and had a spiritual wealth and sensitivity that our boorish bourgeois forbears could not grasp. They might be doers, builders and achievers — but we Boomers grooved, man, we had sex in the park, we grew our hair long, and we listened to sexy musical lyrics about drugs that those pathetic old losers could not even understand.
What the Boomers as a generation missed (there were, of course and thankfully, many honorable individual exceptions) was the core set of values that every generation must discover to make a successful transition to real adulthood: maturity. Collectively the Boomers continued to follow ideals they associated with youth and individualism: fulfillment and “creativity” rather than endurance and commitment. Boomer spouses dropped families because relationships with spouses or children or mortgage payments no longer “fulfilled” them; Boomer society tolerated the most selfish and immature behavior in its public and cultural leaders out of the classically youthful and immature belief that intolerance and hypocrisy are greater sins than the dereliction of duty. That the greatest and most effective political leader the Baby Boom produced was William Jefferson Clinton tells you all you need to know.
Read it
all.
If you’re a man who has sex with animals, you should wear a condom. See here for details (it’s near the bottom, appropriately enough).
