Against mandates

John Schwenkler elaborates (bold mine):

...in a politically uncorrupted world, none of this would be an issue: health insurance is a public good, and as such it makes a good deal of sense to require individuals to buy in to the risk pool from which they’re ultimately going to benefit. In practice, though, mandates mean a lot more than this; they’re not just about the requirement to purchase some health insurance, but rather to buy at least a particular amount of it, and that amount is determined by the very same politicians whose commitment to the agenda of the health care lobby opponents of “free market” systems generally decry. This does not have the effect of making health care cheaper, since it eliminates the possibility of offering low-cost plans that incentivize good health and individual responsibility, and instead pushes citizens into exactly the sorts of plans that encourage unnecessary consumption of health care and thereby keep prices unnaturally high. As I’ve said before, short of government rationing (which of course is subject to regulatory capture in its own right) the most natural way to make health care more affordable is to make less of it free, which is exactly the opposite of what a system of strict mandates is going to tend to do.

World War II: unnecessary?

Photo: U.S. Army troops wade ashore on Omaha Beach during the Normandy landings, 6 June 1944

So it is argued at TAC:

Had Britain not given a war guarantee to Poland in March 1939, then declared war on September 3, bringing in South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United States, a German-Polish war might never have become a six-year world war in which fifty million would perish.

Thus did the British government, in panic over a false report about a German invasion of Poland that was neither planned nor prepared, give a war guarantee to a dictatorship it did not trust, in a part of Europe where it had no vital interests, committing itself to a war it could not win.

A false report? Here's what I could gather from Wikipedia:

There is some debate towards the claim that Poland had, in 1933, tried to get France to join it in preventive attack after Nazis won in Germany^[2] Tensions had existed between Poland and Germany for some time in regards to the Free City of Danzig and the Polish Corridor. This had been settled in 1934 by a non-aggression pact but in spring of 1939, tensions rose again. Finally, after issuing several proposals, Germany declared that diplomatic measures had been exhausted, and shortly after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had been signed, invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Britain and France had previously warned that they would honor their alliances to Poland and issued an ultimatum to Germany: withdraw or war would be declared. Germany declined, and what became World War II was declared by the British and French, without entering the war effectively. The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east on September 17.

So folks at TAC believe that the Polish dictatorship should have been left to its own devices against Hitler and the Soviet Union in mid 1939? What would have happened next? Would the rest of Europe would have been safe? For how long?

Let's review more of what happened:

In March 1938 Germany annexed Austria, again provoking little response from other European powers.^[27] Encouraged, Hitler began pressing German claims on the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia with a predominantly ethnic German population; France and Britain conceded this territory to him, against the wishes of the Czechoslovak government, in exchange for a promise of no further territorial demands.^[28] However, soon after that, Germany and Italy forced Czechoslovakia to cede additional territory to Hungary and Poland. In March 1939 Germany invaded the rump of Czechoslovakia and subsequently split it into the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the pro-German Slovak Republic.

Alarmed, and with Hitler making further demands on Danzig, France and Britain guaranteed their support for Polish independence; when Italy conquered Albania in April 1939, the same guarantee was extended to Romania and Greece.^[29] Shortly after the Franco-British pledge to Poland, Germany and Italy formalized their own alliance with the Pact of Steel.^[30]

In August 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact.^[31] This treaty included a secret protocol to split Poland and Eastern Europe into separate spheres of influence.^[32]

On September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler launched his invasion of Poland and World War II broke out. France, Britain, and the countries of the Commonwealth declared war on Germany but provided little military support to Poland other than a small French attack into the Saarland.^[33] On September 17, 1939, after signing an armistice with Japan, the Soviets launched their own invasion of Poland.^[34] By early October, the campaign ended with division of Poland among Germany, the Soviet Union, Lithuania and Slovakia,^[35] although officially Poland never surrendered.

At the same time as the battle in Poland, Japan launched its first attack against Changsha, a strategically important Chinese city, but was repulsed by early October.^[36]

Following the invasion of Poland, the Soviet Union began moving troops into the Baltic States. Finnish resistance to similar pressure by the Soviet Union in late November led to the four-month Winter War, ending with Finnish concessions.^[37] France and the United Kingdom, treating the Soviet attack on Finland as tantamount to entering the war on the side of the Germans, responded to the Soviet invasion by supporting its expulsion from the League of Nations. Though China had the authority to veto such an action, it was unwilling to alienate itself from either the Western powers or the Soviet Union and instead abstained. The Soviet Union was displeased by this course of action and as a result suspended all military aid to China.^[38] By June 1940, the Soviet Armed Forces completed the occupation of the Baltic States.^[39]

In Western Europe, British troops deployed to the Continent, but neither Germany nor the Allies launched direct attacks on the other. The Soviet Union and Germany entered a trade pact in February of 1940, pursuant to which the Soviets received German military and industrial equipment in exchange for supplying raw materials to Germany to help circumvent a British blockade.^[40] In April, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway to secure shipments of iron-ore from Sweden which the allies would try to disrupt. Denmark immediately capitulated, and despite Allied support, Norway was conquered within two months.^[41] British discontent over the Norwegian campaign led to the replacement of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain by Winston Churchill on May 10, 1940.^[42]

I don't see how you can stop this train by being more appeasing of Nazi Germany and letting them split Poland with the USSR unopposed.

The TAC piece says:

..Hitler never wanted war with Britain. Hitler wanted absolute power in Germany. Hitler wanted to overturn the Versailles Treaty. Hitler wanted to restore lands to Germany. Hitler wanted to enlarge the German empire to the east. Hitler wanted to cleanse Germany of Jews. Hitler wanted to destroy Bolshevism. Hitler wanted Germany to achieve economic self-sufficiency in Europe. Hitler wanted to go down in history as “the greatest German of them all.” But Hitler never wanted war with Britain. To Hitler: “Great Britain was Germany’s natural ally and the nation and empire he most admired. He did not covet British colonies. He did not want or seek a fleet to rival the Royal Navy. He did not wish to bring down the British Empire. He was prepared to appease Britain to make her a friend of Germany.”

..Hitler was not a threat to the United States. The German Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain to the Royal Air Force; the German Navy was no match for Britain’s Royal Navy (”The Navy – what need have we of that?,” said Hitler in 1936). At the start of the war, Germany had only two battleships. The Bismarck had not been built yet – and it would be sunk on its maiden voyage. There were no troopships, landing barges, or transports for tanks and artillery. If Hitler could not cross the English Channel and conquer Great Britain, how could he possibly have been a threat to America? Buchanan dismisses Germany’s supposed plans “to build a massive surface fleet, develop a trans-atlantic bomber, and procure naval bases” as “comic-book history.” The historical truth is that “there are no known German plans to acquire the thousand ships needed to convey and convoy such an army and its artillery, tanks, planes, guns, munitions, equipment, fuel, and food across the Atlantic.” And as Buchanan points out about German bombers: “A trip over the Atlantic and back would require twenty hours of flying to drop a five-ton load on New York.” And if even today the U.S. Air Force doesn’t have a bomber that can fly round trip from the Midwest to Germany without refueling, how could German bombers in the 1940s have possibly bombed the United States and returned to Germany when air-to-air fueling had not yet been invented?

Right--so is TAC ok with not stopping the train? As long as Britain and the US were safe, we shouldn't intervene? TAC would tolerate Germany and the USSR controlling the rest of Europe—or at least Eastern Europe—and effectively say "c'est la vie, we're being good non-interventionists!".

Hmm. Perhaps in this scenario Germany would have split Eastern Europe with the USSR and then had its own protracted conflict with the Soviets. I'm not sure what Italy would have done, absent the Pact of Steel. Assuming Japan went forward with Pearl Harbor, the War in the Pacific would still have happened. But maybe TAC thinks that in this scenario Japan would somehow have been content to rule China and other Pacific lands.

I do take TAC's points about Germany being no threat to Britain and the US in 1939, but I think they've got a lot more explaining to do if they want us to believe that leaving Poland to its own devices would have saved lives and prevented the war from escalating as far as it did.

Against Pat Buchanan

Buchanan mocks Sotomayor:

[Sotomayor] went to Princeton. She graduated first in her class it said. But she herself said she read, basically classic children’s books to read and learn the language and she read basic English grammars and she got help from tutors. I think that, I mean if you’re, frankly if you’re in college and you’re working on Pinocchio or on the troll under the bridge, I don’t think that’s college work.

Yglesias responds:

Learning a foreign language, if you’ve ever tried, is really hard. Meanwhile, it’s clearly also important for people living in the United States of America to do their best to learn to speak and read standard American English. But this takes hard work. Sonia Sotomayor, like many Americans, was born into a Spanish-dominant family. But she worked hard, learned English, went to Princeton, then Yale Law School, then had a successful career as a lawyer, as a District Court judge, as an Appeals Court judge, and now as a [nominee for] Justice of the Supreme Court. This is, as I’ve said before, a good inspirational story that parents are going to tell their kids to encourage them to work hard in school.

Unless, that is, you’re Pat Buchanan in which case you take a cute story about Sotomayor spending her summers re-reading classic children’s books she hadn’t had a chance to read as a kid and turn it into a pretext to mock her:

[..] normally Buchanan claims that Hispanics need to work harder to learn English. But faced with an actual example of someone working to learn English, he has nothing but scorn and spite.

I think the most unfortunate thing about The American Conservative (which Buchanan co-founded) as well as paleoconservatism in general is its association with Mr. Buchanan's classless racism (including antisemitism).

Ordinarily bad apples won't hurt the whole too much—you can find plenty of prominent rotten lefties and movement conservatives with similarly disturbing views or lack of class. See Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann, Michael Moore, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michele Bachmann, Michele Malkin, et. al.—they get called for it regularly.

But paleocon-ish numbers are few, so Pat Buchanan's prominence creates a disproportionate image problem for the related ideas of figures like Andrew Sullivan, Daniel Larison, and Ron Paul.

So I cringe whenever I see Buchanan's name mentioned—paleoconservatism would be much better off if he'd shut the hell up.

Untethered.he.is

Dennis Dale goes off the rocker:

The single most distressing result of Barack Obama's election is not the looting of your grandchildren's economic prospects to pay for the new administration’s Great Lurch Forward into insolvency. It isn’t the accompanying loss of liberty. Nor is it the mass decampment of “anti-war” leftists now silent or openly supporting the escalation of the war in Afghanistan (so that’s what they mean by “MoveOn”). No; it’s the ascendance of shameless kitschmeister Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas, whose “Yes We Can” video on behalf of the Obama campaign took the cliched political cant that is rap’s tertiary stock-in-trade (after gangsterism and narcissism) to surreal and sinister levels, putting it directly in the service of power. The natural process of his passing down through the Dante-esque circles of celebreality television obscurity is now delayed by at least four years.

That distressing? ...



I must admit I still enjoy it in the context of so many Americans longing to fix the mess Bush made of things—and thinking Clinton-McCain-Palin weren't up to the job.

As for Will.I.Am's 'ascendance', I haven't seen much to get worked up about. His sequel was incredibly bad.

Causes of piracy, and the Right's disproportionate response

In part it's because there is no functioning central government in Somalia.  But also:

A Swiss firm called Achair Partners, and an Italian waste company called Achair Partners, made a deal with Ali Mahdi, that they were to dump containers of waste material in Somali waters. These European companies were said to be paying Warlords about $3 a ton, whereas to properly dispose of waste in Europe costs about $1000 a ton.

In 2004, after a tsunami washed ashore several leaking containers, thousand of locals in the Puntland region of Somalia started to complain of severe and previously unreported ailments, such as abdominal bleeding, skin melting off and a lot of immediate cancer-like symptoms. Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environmental Program, says that the containers had many different kinds of waste, including "Uranium, radioactive waste, lead, Cadmium, Mercury and chemical waste." But this wasn't just a passing evil from one or two groups taking advantage of our unprotected waters. The UN envoy for Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, says that the practice still continues to this day. It was months after those initial reports that local fishermen mobilized themselves, along with street militias, to go into the waters and deter the Westerners from having a free pass at completely destroying Somalia's aquatic life. Now years later, the deterring has become less noble, and the ex-fishermen with their militias have begun to develop a taste for ransom at sea. This form of piracy is now a major contributor to the Somali economy, especially in the very region that private toxic waste companies first began to burry our nation's death trap.

Now Somalia has upped the world's pirate attacks by over 21 percent in one year, and while NATO and the EU are both sending forces to the Somali coast to try and slow down the attacks, Black Water and all kinds of private security firms are intent on cashing in. But while Europeans are well in their right to protect their trade interest in the region, our pirates were the only deterrent we had from an externally imposed environmental disaster. No one can say for sure that some of the ships they are now holding for ransom were not involved in illegal activity in our waters. The truth is, if you ask any Somali, if getting rid of the pirates only means the continuous rape of our coast by unmonitored Western Vessels, and the producing of a new cancerous generation, we would all fly our pirate flags high.

What's the Right's response to this? You guessed it:

To end Somali piracy, disproportionate measures against the shore should be taken—for every one pirate assault, a lethal air assault should immediately follow.

The absurdity! AmCon is exasperated:

A lethal air assault on what? [He] knows there isn’t a nice isolated buccaneer cove with a bar marked “Pirate Shack–Bomb Here.” He would kill women and in children in retaliation for what a gang of street-criminals-on-the-waves gets up to. Hanson is the Ward Churchill of the neocons: civilian deaths mean nothing in themselves to him, they’re just fuel for his power fantasies — sinners on the wrong side of progress.

Aren't you glad we don't have a similarly war-crazed nut like McCain in the White House?

Update: I'm again reminded of a scene from episode 3 of The West Wing:

PRESIDENT BARTLET
[pause] Did you know that two thousand years ago a Roman citizen could walk across the face of the known world free of the fear of molestation? He could walk across the earth unharmed, cloaked only in the words Civis Romanis. I am a Roman citizen. So great was the retribution of Rome, universally understood as certain, should any harm befall even one of its citizens.

Where was Morris' protection, or anyone else on that plane? Where is the retribution for the families and where is the warning to the rest of the world that Americans shall walk this earth unharmed, lest the clenched fist of the most mighty military force in the history of mankind comes crashing down on your house!? In other words, Leo, what the hell are we doing here?

CHIEF OF STAFF LEO
We are behaving the way a superpower ought to behave.

BARTLET
Well our behavior has produced some pretty crappy results. In fact, I'm not a hundred percent sure it hasn't induced them.

LEO
What are you talking about?

BARTLET
I'm talking about two hundred and eight-six American marines in Beirut, I'm talking about Somalia, I'm talking about Nairobi.

LEO
And you think ratching up the body count's gonna act as a deterrent?

BARTLET
You're damn right.

LEO
Then you are just as dumb as these guys who think that capital punishment is going to be a deterrent for drug kingpins. As if drug kingpins didn't live their day to day lives under the possibility of execution. And their executions are a lot less dainty than ours and tend to take place without the bother and expense of due process. So my friend, if you want to start using American military strength as the arm of the Lord, you can do that, we're the only superpower left. You can conquer the world, like Charlemenge, but you better be prepared to kill everyone and you better start with me cause I will raise up an army against you and I will beat you!

BARTLET
He had a ten-day-old baby at home.

LEO
I know.

BARTLET
We are doing nothing. They dest...

LEO
We are not doing nothing. Four high rated military targets.

BARTLET
And this is good?

LEO
Of course it's not good, there is no good. It's what there is. It's how you behave if you're the most powerful nation in the world. It's proportional, it's reasonable, it's responsible, it's merciful. It's not nothing, four high rated military targets.

BARTLET
Which they'll rebuild again in six months.

LEO
So we'll blow 'em up again in six months! We're getting really good at it. [beat] It's what our fathers taught us.

Sanity at CPAC?

There is some -- sort of:

Tucker Carlson attempts to convince the audience at CPAC that the New York Times actually cares about the accuracy of its news, but the audience isn't buying it and regularly interrupts him with boos and jeers.

He also says that the conservative movement needs its own news gathering organizations who will create news that reflects its values and wishes there were twenty-five outlets like the Fox News Channel:

Twenty-five Fox Newses? Could this nation survive the hysteria?

Meanwhile FiveThirtyEight's Sean Quinn attended CPAC and rambles a bit trying to understand what makes people Republicans.

Update: Leave it to The American Conservative to have the most interesting CPAC post yet

36 years of failure

The American Conservative:

At 36 years old, the pro-life movement is still energetic and indignant--and trapped. Every year of Republican rule has increased the suspicion that pro-lifers are the GOP's useful idiots. Planned Parenthood still received federal dollars, and Congress never stripped courts of their ability to overturn parental notification and conscience laws. A human life amendment was ditched for Social Security reform. And just one year of unified Democratic rule in the federal government may undo a generation of small victories for the movement's incrementalists at all levels. In desperation, pro-lifers may turn en masse to the "Personhood Now" strategy in an effort to impose a "culture of life" that the movement hasn't built consensus for in the opinions or lifestyles of its fellow citizens.

Personally I have no doubt they are the GOP's useful idiots. And here's Personhood U.S.A.'s about us page:

"What can we do to help?" This is the first question Personhood USA asks local pro-life groups as we seek to be a blessing to all those working to protect pre-born humans.

Personhood U.S.A. is led by Christian ministers Keith Mason and Cal Zastrow (and their families) who are missionaries to preborn children. They have had experience in coordinating legislation, lobbying, starting grassroots efforts, leading local and statewide political campaigns, and leading successful ballot-access petition drives. They led the first successful "personhood amendment" ballot-access petition drive in U.S. history in 2008 (Colorado). They also lead and participate in peaceful pro-life activism, evangelism, and ministry outside of places where preborn babies get murdered.

Personhood USA is committed to:

• Protecting every child by love and by law.


• Moving churches and the culture to make the dehumanization and murdering of pre-born children unthinkable.


• Build coalitions and organizations or local, State, National and International pro-life individuals and organizations that will work together on personhood legislation/ amendments.


• Honor the Lord Jesus Christ with our lives and actions

The Colorado Personhood Ammendment would have changed the state constitution to read:

THE TERMS "PERSON" OR "PERSONS" SHALL INCLUDE ANY HUMAN BEING FROM THE MOMENT OF FERTILIZATION.

It failed by 73% to 27%.

Maybe they should try the word "conception" -- it sounds less artificial. But how are they going to double the number of people who believe this, particularly if their mission to do so is rooted in theology? I mean..."missionaries to preborn children" ? Come on.