Gods of the Copybook Headings

Whigs and Tories

Or libertarians and conservatives. Daniel Hannan splits the difference:

Set aside a couple of slightly recherché issues, such as drugs. On the biggies – school choice, Euroscepticism, tax cuts, welfare reform – we all agree. And the reason we agree is that the current state of Britain is so far removed from what either a conservative or a libertarian wants that any disagreements can be comfortably postponed. It’s as though you were driving from London to two adjoining streets in Aberdeen: almost the whole route would be identical. As my old history tutor used to observe, the differences between Tory and Whig can safely be deferred to after the grave.

Hannan makes a very important point. Even once an idea has achieved a critical mass in the culture, it usually requires a broad tent political party to implement. The sort of freedom that libertarians and classical liberals are seeking is far removed from the modern political consensus. In this they do share common ground with conservatives. Yet the differences, even at this stage, do matter. In planning how to decontrol, you need to prioritize. 

One of the first things a libertarian / classical liberal government would do is end the Drug War. In terms of the sheer wastage of life, liberty and property, there are few things that quite rival the Drug War. It is also the one major reform that would incur the lowest immediate social cost. As the experience of Portugal strongly suggests, ending the Drug War will have very few, if any notable negative side effects. Scrapping the welfare state immediately, on the other hand, would impose an enormous cost on its dependants. In the long run they are better off as independent members of society, or as wards of private charity. A humane approach to social policy reform would, however, allow time for adaptation and adjustment. 

Scenes from the Gallery - Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Secret Agent Coin

Beyond satire:

Espionage warnings from the U.S. Defence Department caused an international sensation a few years ago over reports of mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters, until they were debunked.

The culprit turned out to be a commemorative quarter in Canada. But at the height of the mystery, senior Pentagon officials speculated whether Canadians were involved in the spy caper.

“I don't think it is an issue of the Canadians being the bad guys,” the Pentagon's counterintelligence chief wrote in an exchange of e-mails obtained this week by The Associated Press, “but then again, who knows.”

Yes. No doubt millions of Americans cower in fear as to what horrors the Canadian government might throw down upon them. 

What suspicious contractors believed to be “nanotechnology” on the coins actually was a protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy's red colour from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada's 117,000 war dead.

To our American readers, the poppy is a national symbol of remembrance for our war dead. It is used through out the Commonwealth, and was inspired by a poem written by the Canadian Army medic, Lt. Col. John McCrae. It is one of those small, but vital, cultural markers that separate Canada from the United States. When Canadians cross the border, and vice versa, there is a kind of weird familiarity. The same, but not the same. Superficially, the stores and brand names are mostly different - there is no Macy's or Target in Canada, and Tim Horton's has failed time and again to break into the US Market. The Holiday's are different, yet ever so slightly in name.

It's as if someone decided to reinvent the United States, while trying not to infringe on copyright laws. Then you find something like the Poppy. A link to a very different history. John McCrae was the quintessentially Edwardian Canadian. Monarchist and imperialist, his poem is not a pacifist lament, but a righteous call to arms. Canada entered both World Wars long before the United States. Their impact was far more profound here. It's somewhat amusing that confronted with a poppy quarter, very similar in size and weight to an American quarter, some of our American friends would imagine very silly things. It is, after all, something familiar yet very different. 

Tuesday Night - Richard III

“Ottomania”

Everything old is new again:

But in September, at his funeral in the garden of the majestic Sultanahmet Mosque here, thousands of mourners came to pay their respects, including government officials and celebrities. Some even kissed the hands of surviving dynasty members, who appeared shocked at the adulation.

The show of reverence for the man who might have been sultan, historians said, was a seminal moment in the rehabilitation of the Ottoman Empire, long demonized by some in the modern, secular Turkish Republic created by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923. During Ataturk’s rule, the empire was remembered mainly for its decadence and its humiliating defeat and partition by the Allied armies in World War I.

Mr. Osman’s send-off was just the latest manifestation of what sociologists call “Ottomania,” a harking back to an era marked by conquest and cultural splendor during which sultans ruled an empire stretching from the Balkans to the Indian Ocean and claimed the spiritual leadership of the Muslim world.

The sentiment is a familiar one to old Publius: "Back in the good ol' days, when our lot ruled the world." The past was never as good as you remember it.

Pelin Batu, co-host of a popular television history program, argued that the glorification of the Ottoman era by a government with roots in political Islam reflected a revolt against the secular cultural revolution undertaken by Ataturk, who outlawed the wearing of Islamic head scarves in state institutions and abolished the Ottoman-era caliphate.

“Ottomania is a form of Islamic empowerment for a new Muslim religious bourgeoisie who are reacting against Ataturk’s attempt to relegate religion and Islam to the sidelines,” she said.

Mustafa Kemal was a Turkish response, albeit a rather delayed one, to the eighteenth century ideal of the Enlightened Despot. Confronted with societies ruled by absolute monarchs, holding sway over superstitious and semi-feudal populaces, the hope of many Enlightenment reformers lay with convincing Europe's hereditary tyrants to modernize their societies. While some implemented cosmetic reforms, others, notably Joseph II of Austria, sincerely wished to modernize their societies, introducing a significant element of rational discourse and individual liberty.

As notable as their ambitions, so were the failures of the Enlightened Despots. The failure was not comprehensive. Modern liberal democratic Europe can trace its origins to the efforts of these far-sighted tyrants. In the end their success, as that of Ataturk, was mitigated. The problem of Enlightened Despotism isn't the despot, but the people. What if they do not want to be free and modern? What if they prefer superstition, ignorance and tyranny, which they know well and understand? 

Joseph II was bitterly opposed by his own peasantry, whom he was trying to liberated from the vestiges of feudalism. On his tomb the Great Hapsburg had written: "Here lies Joseph II, who failed in all he undertook." Ataturk was more successful. He is today honoured as the founder of the modern Turkish Republic. Yet the European style modernity he brought was never completely embraced by the Turkish people. Thus the nostalgia for its pre-westernized past.

Scenes from the Gallery - Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Disgraceful

It's not often that you see a man wearing a tartan kilt in Toronto these days. Even less likely are you to find an elected member of the provincial legislature of Ontario doing so. It's a little odd and, of course, very unmulticultural. Multiculturalism, as you'll recall, celebrates all cultures equally, except for the cultures of the British Isles. I digress. The would-be Highland warrior was Bill Murdoch, MPP for Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound. He just needed his claymore, and the pipes a blowin', and the scene would have been Walter Scott perfect. 

The scene, however, was the floor of the provincial legislature at Queen's Park. The honourable member for Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound had just called the Premier of Ontario a "liar." Now Dalton McGuinty gets called a liar about as often as a Toronto driver hits a pothole. One of the hazards of life at the top. More of a hazard for this premier, as his record of broken promises is longer than average. Calling someone a liar, no matter how much evidence you have to support that claim, is considered unparliamentary language. One of those mannerism we acquired from the British. Generally the Red Star, the respectable left-wing paper of record, isn't too keen on stuff we inherited from the British. Things like kilts, individual rights and that old woman whose face is still on the money. 

Propriety is so old fashioned. Unless, of course, the misbehaviour is that of right-wing politicians. In that case the scribblers for the Star become the very embodiment of the Victorian dowager and soap box preacher. The occasion of Mr Murdoch misbehaviour was the refusal of the McGuinty government to hold hearings, outside of Toronto, on the new Harmonized Sales Tax. Things escalated. Things were said. Randy Hillier - last seen contending for the Ontario PC leadership - joined in. Next thing you knew Randy and Bill were staging a two day sit in. The rest of the Tory caucus joined in albeit briefly. The more prim members had an oddly strained look on their face. Had Bill and Randy brought out some moonshine and started belting out "Sweet Home Alabama," the old Red Tory diehards could not have been more uncomfortable. The hicks were at it again. Politics is theatre. Protest means, sometimes, breaking the rules. Nature of the game. The federal Liberals used to get up to all sorts of antics - Remember the Rat Pack? - back in the Mulroney days. Then it was just part of the game. The wave of indignation at Bill and Randy's Excellent Adventure, however, achieved apotheosis with this column from the Star's Jim Coyle:

Heir, as he is, to the legacy of former premier Mike Harris, it's unsettling to many to imagine what a Tim Hudak Ontario might look like – especially since a Hudak PC caucus looks like something right out of Trailer Park Boys, an outfit where yahoos rule and where rules, when inconvenient, are to be defied and mocked.

This week, Hudak did himself considerable harm. He let his party be defined by its least credible and most ridiculous MPPs – bumptious contrarian Bill Murdoch from Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, and renegade libertarian from eastern Ontario, Randy Hillier.

Sniff. Mr Coyle smells the peasantry. 

Given the wide support already on the record for tax harmonization from Ontario PCs, the caucus's outrage about the Liberal government's proposed harmonized sales tax has always been opportunistic and contrived. This week, it bordered on the obscene.

"Wide support," where exactly? Among the legislature, certainly, because there is a Liberal majority government and MPPs obey the Whip like trained seals. Both opposition parties are against the HST. There is a groundswell of public opposition to what is, rightly, seen as a tax grab. 

It's no great victory for Hudak that his PC party now wears the flushed and foolish faces of Bill Murdoch and Randy Hillier.

They were faces of raving irrationality that any woman abused by her mate would recognize. They were faces of incoherent fulminating that any child terrified by a drunken father would know. They were the faces of inane intransigence with which most beat cops are wearily familiar.

Having tired of outright smears, Mr Coyle drifts comfortably into innuendo. Now, of course, he is NOT saying that Mr Hillier is a wife beating drunk. Nor is he saying that Bill and Randy are petty criminals being taken down by the cops on a late Saturday night. No, that sort of thing would be libel. Something even the Star's formidable legal department would advise for a quiet settlement, and quick and grovelling retraction on page three. It was not enough to say that Hillier and Murdoch behaved inappropriately. It was not enough to say they were acting like children. No, Mr Coyle had to sling mud at people he disagrees with. I bet there have been times in Mr Coyle's life, as with all of us, when he has been very angry. When our faces were those of "raving irrationality that any woman abused by her mate would recognize." That does not make us wife beaters, drunks or criminals. We are human. Politics and histrionics are synonyms. Coyle has been covering the game long enough to know that. His outrage is pure artifice. It is mud slung down from the Press Gallery. Jim Coyle is the real disgrace, even to so contemptible a paper as the Toronto Star. 

UPDATE - After composing the above, I had the distinct displeasure of coming upon another Jim Coyle column on this issue. Among his more fantastical claims, Coyle argues that the Ontario PC Party has lost credibility on Caledonia because of Hillier and Murdoch's protest. The party has lost credibility on Caledonia, for refusing to demand the Premier call in the Army and remove the occupiers, the OPP having failed abysmally in its job of protecting private property. 

Coyle's twisted logic is that because Hillier and Murdoch violated parliamentary procedure, they cannot now demand the removal of the occupiers from Caledonia. Go read for yourself. The moral equivalence is simply appalling. Hiller and Murdoch staged a two day sit in of the legislature. They are elected MPPs, they have a right to be at Queen's Park. They did not destroy any property, private or state owned. The Caledonia occupation long ago passed from civic disobedience into plain old fashioned theft. 

Monday Night - Lion in Winter

Sex and the Single Socialist

Jeff Perren has an idea. Now just wait and give it a chance. It's very egalitarian:

You: "Fine. Tell you what. Since quality sex is as vital to human well being as money or medical care, let's establish a National Bureau of Prostitution, with a branch in every town in America."

Progressive: "What? That's ridiculous. Get serious."

You: "I am serious. There are a lot of lonely, ugly, poor guys (and gals — let's not be sexist) out there who aren't getting any. Or, what they do get is below acceptable quality. [If pressed on the standard of 'acceptable' be very vague.] We need to improve their 'access' to quality quim.

"So, I propose we establish a tax to pay for prostitutes for them. Better still, since there aren't enough good looking hookers to go around, let's require some Hollywood babes to participate. 'Voluntarily', of course, unless they want to pay a fine or go to jail.

Unimpeachable collectivist logic. The problem with arguing from logical extremes is that someone might call your bluff. You see this sort of thing is actually done in the Netherlands. The government pays hookers to "service" the mentally ill. The modern world. One step ahead of the satirists.

Scenes from the Gallery - Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

"Medtario"

Kelly McParland introduces a new word to the Canadian lexicon:

The Fraser Institute issued a study last week reporting that Ontario's government will spend more than half its revenue on health care next year. New Brunswick will follow soon after, and four more provinces will pass the 50% mark in the next 20 years. The Institute favours privatized medicine and would like to see Canada adopt private-sector solutions to the problem of runaway costs. It would seem, though, that once a province is spending the majority of its money on one service, it takes on many of the aspects of a private operation, but without the choice, quality or efficiency. 

In other words, Ontario has a state controlled health care system, with a provincial government attached. This is, oddly, a hopeful sign. When common sense and reason cannot persuade people, sometimes disaster can. There is little point in rehashing the pros and cons of Medicare. It is a command economy version of health care. Like every command economy in history, it's a ticking time bomb. Sooner or later it will either implode or be replaced. The whole premise of socialized Medicare is that the laws of economics do not apply to one particular sector of the economy, health care. Like a parallel universe where gravity only works within a legally defined area. 

The general public is kept loyal, or at least not too discontented, by fear of the alternative. The Soviets did this too. Images of the alleged Dickensian nightmare that is the United States. If you think things are bad here, comrade, they're much worse in America. The nightmares are a reality in America, as they are here. Crude caricatures of the American system - which seems to be the only alternative we are allowed to discuss - mask its complex reality. The anecdotes, the pious homilies to the memory of Tommy Douglas, the cries of Canadian identity as waiting list, are not the point. Medicare is a cult. Its adherents, willing or not, are not interested in facts and logic. The Fraser Institute has been valiantly denouncing Medicare for three and a half decades. The Canadian Right, to varying degrees, has been critical for just as long. The task is harder than trying to tell people their God is dead. We are trying to tell them their God is the Devil. Until the Medicare Moloch gets ready to consume them completely, it's a call they are unlikely to heed. 

Friday Night - Singing

Missing Hu

Absence makes the tyrant's heart grow fonder:

In Beijing for the first time to meet with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Harper was reminded that a Canadian prime minister had not visited in five years.

"Five years is too long a time for China-Canada relations and that's why there are comments in the media that your visit is one that should have taken place earlier," Wen said.

Harper also said he would like see Chinese leaders come to Canada more frequently. "I think on both sides, more regular visits would make sense," he said.

In an earlier meeting, Chinese President Hu Jintao also pointed out twice that it was Harper's first visit. Harper said it has been five years since a Chinese leader visited Canada.

[…]

Relations between Canada and China have been cool in recent years as Harper has pressed the Chinese government to improve its record on human rights.

In their joint communiqué, the leaders pledged to keep discussing human rights, trade and investment, and to co-operate on "green" technology.

There are three emerging schools of thought on the Chinese rebuke. The "Inscrutable Chinese" theory holds that we need some crack Mandarin experts to decipher what Hu and Wen really meant. Could have been just a friendly hello, hope to see you more often. Officially that was the PM's attitude. He replied that Politburo Politicos should be spending more time in Canada. We could all use a little more Red in our lives, couldn't we?

The theory adopted by HM Loyal Opposition is that Stephen Harper has been delivered a stinging rebuke, a powerful signal that the Middle Kingdom is not please with us. Our lack of attendance at the Court of the ChiCom Commissars has endangered the future of Canada. Cosmic forces might be unleashed upon we lowly Canadians for King Stephen's failure to kowtow. Andrew Coyne has - correctly - derided this reaction as cowardice.

The third theory holds that it really doesn't matter all that much what the Good Comrades said. China, for all its remarkable liberalization in recent decades, is still an authoritarian state. Minding your manners with thieves and murderers is optional. The Reds are not amused that the Prime Minister has disavowed the craven approach of his immediate predecessors. International affairs is not governed by the laws of the angels. Even free governments must come to terms with the devils incarnate. The leaders of the American Revolution accepted, indeed aggressively sought, the help of the French Crown in gaining their independence. In modern terms, the French government was a far great human rights violator than Lord North's Ministry. You do what you have to survive. That doesn't mean you have to pretend to like those you deal with.

Critics of Harper's criticism of the Chinese Reds cite the concept of face. A still surprisingly traditional culture, the Chinese place a high premium on "face." This is the polite term for street cred. Harper not keeping his mouth shut on human rights violations threatens the regime with losing "face." If we all just pretend that horrible things are not happening, then everyone will be happier. Pretending a bully isn't bully goes beyond simple toleration, or limited co-operation, it concedes the moral high ground, to little practical end. Virtually all western leaders mouth criticism of China's human rights records. It is diplomatic static which the Reds ignore. Harper has become something of an irritant because he is louder about it than others, and failed to visit more promptly. Some might be left wondering why Hu and Co. care so much. After all, in terms of population and GDP, Canada is a drop in the Chinese bucket. 

True. But money and resources are not what China is after in dealing with Canada, not the primary reason anyway. The Reds have built up an extensive network of client states in Africa and the Indian Ocean basin. If Alberta will not supply them oil, Angola or Nigeria will. Easier to do business with reasonable chaps in Calgary, but if needs must less stable governments can be dealt with. No, the great importance of Canada is our prestige. We are a small and relatively young country, but we are among the world's oldest and most stable liberal democracies. China is well aware of its dubious moral status at home and abroad. There is great value, then, in having the frequent presence and smiling face - or a Harperesque approximation of a smile - of the leader of the nicest major economy in the world. 

Senate Amends Marijuana Bill

A sober second thought? 

A committee of the Liberal-dominated Senate has amended a law-and-order bill, eliminating an element that would automatically jail marijuana growers for at least six months if they're caught with as few as five plants.

[...]

[Justice Minister] Nicholson called on Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff to "lean on these people" in the Senate and urge them to pass the bill in its original form.

Let's hope Liberal Senators are not as weak willed as their alleged leader.

Buggy Whip Sales Down in Fourth Quarter

I think they need a new business model too.

With one-third of American TV households now equipped with DVRs like TiVo, the 10 p.m. hour is emerging as a popular time for people to catch up on what they missed earlier in the evening, or earlier in the week.

Here's some math: NBC has lost an average of 1.8 household ratings points at the 10 p.m. hour compared to fall 2008, according to the Nielsen Co. At the same time, DVR usage—which is also measured by Nielsen—is up by 1.4 points in that hour.

"The DVR phenomenon is a little bit higher than we thought," said David Poltrack, CBS' chief research executive.

In other words, appointment television is dead, so why bother with it? Networks are really just marketing agencies for other people's products. A well designed website is also much cheaper than a physical broadcast network. Admitting the truth about what NBC, ABC and CBS actually do would, however, undermine the myth that they "capture" audience share. Either a viewer sees our product or someone else's. The DVR and internet has rendered this view obsolete.

Scenes from the Gallery - Jean-Leon Gerome

Roll Your Own Nanny State

Amazingly, this post has nothing to do with pot.

No sooner had President Obama signed the new children’s health insurance law last spring than the industry pried open a lucrative escape from the 20-fold tax increase levied on roll-your-own cigarettes to help support the program.

Companies simply remarketed roll-your-own as “pipe tobacco,” which is taxed at one-tenth the rate and is not subject to any definitive distinction under the law. The result is that roll-your-own companies, while a small part of the cigarette industry, quintupled their output of pipe tobacco in just five months to 1.7 million pounds — enough to roll 42 million packs of cigarettes.

The author then demands that President Obama close this "loophole." For the statist, life is the loophole. The government taxes cigarettes at sky high rates, combining the twin desires of the state to both line its pockets and treat adult citizens as wayward children. People, who as economists keep reminding us, respond to incentives found a "loop hole," i.e. changed their behaviour in a perfectly rational manner. 

Rolling your own cigarettes was widely popular before the introduction of machine rolling. Until recent years only hobbyists, and some elderly holdouts, rolled their own. Faced with a huge disparity in tax rates, many went back to buying the specialized tobacco paper and leaves. The law is a blunt instrument, even for the statist. What the anti-tobacco lobby really, desperately, wants is a complete ban on tobacco consumption, in whatever form. 

The rationale is that tobacco consumption costs the health care system a vast fortune. Alright, why not behave as a private insurance company would and charge a premium to adjust for the added risk? Even in a completely private health care market, the tobacco prohibitionists would still be seeking to tax and control the evil weed. The conceit of the busybody, married with the iron fist of the state, knows few bounds.

Thursday Night - Bob Hope at the Oscars

Public Pricing

Your tax dollars at work:

The cost-effectiveness of Public Works projects can’t be directly compared with the private sector partly because construction firms jack up their prices when dealing with the federal government, says a new report.

"Private sector companies, who build our projects, are intimidated by our processes and controls and account for their perceived extra efforts in dealing with these through increased construction and management fees," says an internal document.

"They also understand that during design and construction phases we will not go bankrupt and that while payments may be slow, they are essentially guaranteed, regardless of cost overruns to the initial budget."

Bankrupt no, not exactly. One of these days they might get worthless pieces of script as payment, but not actual bankruptcy.

Scenes from the Gallery - Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

The Financial Crisis Redux

And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire 

In January, Mike Rowland was so broke that he had to raid his retirement savings to move here from Boston.

A week ago, he and a couple of buddies bought a two-unit apartment building for nearly a million dollars. They had only a little cash to bring to the table but, with the federal government insuring the transaction, a large down payment was not necessary.

“It was kind of crazy we could get this big a loan,” said Mr. Rowland, 27. “If a government official came out here, I would slap him a high-five.”

In its efforts to prop up a shattered housing market, the government is greatly extending its traditional support of real estate, including guaranteeing the mortgages of middle-class and even upper-class buyers against default.

So let's revive the economy, by repeating the same mistakes that created the crisis: cheap money and loose lending standards. On a completely unrelated topic, here is the current spot price for gold.

Wednesday Night - Roasting Reagan

Polk Dance

Manifestly so.

His triumphant record once led historians to call Polk’s presidency an impressive success. In the post-Vietnam era, however, he has come under heavy fire for his greatest feat — winning the war with Mexico and acquiring the territory that now comprises the states of California, Nevada and Utah, as well as parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming. Sometimes reviving the old arguments of Polk’s political foes, contemporary historians describe the war as a shameful act of imperialist plunder, ginned up by the president himself, with the not-so-hidden intention of spreading slavery into new lands. Inside the academy, Polk is not a nobody; he is a cunning champion of slaveholding Manifest Destiny.

I'm inclined to the position of the Polk-Haters on the question of the Mexican-American War, with these caveats: Mexico was then, and for most of its history, a dictatorship, such regimes have no moral right to exist. Any free country has a moral right to overthrow, conquer or annex such countries. Whether such a policy is wise depends on the context. Conquering a territory to help entrench slavery is not, obviously a morally valid goal of any government. 

The moral arguments are, perhaps, beside the point. The Southwest was going to become American, whatever the actions of the American government. The rationale for the Mexican-American War rested on border disputes the US inherited from the recently annexed Republic of Texas. The history of Texas is suggestive of what might have happened in the rest of the Southwest. A group of American settlers revolted against the corrupt rule of Santa Anna. Failing to gain immediate admission into the Union, they set up their own country, for near a decade, a state which received the diplomatic recognition of Britain and France. The same process would have likely repeated itself in Arizona, New Mexico and California.

American settlers found their way into Canada too, much as they had drifted into Mexican controlled lands at about the same time. A significant element of William Lyon Mackenzie's would be rebel army was American. Just over a decade after WLM marched down Yonge Street, Canada had essentially representative institutions, what Canadians of that generation called responsible government. Something like that would never have happened in Mexico. American annexationists of Polk's time often talked of "liberating" Canada from British tyranny. It never happened, in part because the American government feared the Royal Navy, in part because Canadians, even those of American decent, had no interest in joining.

The 49th parallel divides two different ideas of freedom, but two recognizable free nations. The Southwest was lost to Mexico, ultimately, not because of American imperialism - why didn't Polk simply seize the whole of Mexico, which he easily could have done? - but because of American freedom. The irony of the "theft" of the Southwest is that millions of Mexicans now live there illegally. Better to be an outcast in the land of the imperialists, than the citizen of a country recovering from nearly two centuries of tyranny.

Scenes from the Gallery - Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Rethinking Law and Order

Right, Left and Libertarian on "overcriminalization."

In an interview at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group where he is a fellow, Mr. Meese said the “liberal ideas of extending the power of the state” were to blame for an out-of-control criminal justice system. “Our tradition has always been,” he said, “to construe criminal laws narrowly to protect people from the power of the state.”

There are, the foundation says, more than 4,400 criminal offenses in the federal code, many of them lacking a requirement that prosecutors prove traditional kinds of criminal intent.

“It’s a violation of federal law to give a false weather report,” Mr. Meese said. “People get put in jail for importing lobsters.”

Such so-called overcriminalization is at the heart of the conservative critique of crime policy. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce made the point in a recent friend-of-the-court brief about a federal law often used to prosecute corporate executives and politicians. The law, which makes it a crime for officials to defraud their employers of “honest services,” is, the brief said, both “unintelligible” and “used to target a staggeringly broad swath of behavior.”

Now, if Mr Meese were consistent he'd be calling for an end to the War on Drugs, which has criminalized whole sections of the American poor. Their real crime has been offending middle class sensibilities. 

Tuesday Night - Sinatra

Man-God

A new film, from a Russian director:

The Americans do show up, as they must, and hustle Hirohito off to meet General MacArthur (Robert Dawson), who, over the course of two sustained meetings, amicably entertains and gently intimidates the emperor amid oblique references to his plans for the American occupation. Working from Yury Arabov’s brilliantly distilled and elliptical screenplay, Mr. Sokurov moves in and around the two men, his camera shuttling between the twinned foreign landscapes of MacArthur’s gently amused face and Hirohito’s implacable mask. After their first meeting ends, Hirohito walks away from the general, only to pause awkwardly in front of the shut door: the god, you realize, has never had to open a door himself, a moment of pathetic comedy that forecasts a far more profound threshold-crossing: his renunciation of his divinity.

Scenes from the Gallery - Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

The Stupid Party

Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative. 

J.S. Mill

Since Mill's day, the mid-19th century, Anglo-American conservatives have carried the label of being the "stupid party." They earned that epithet by opposing the great liberal reforms of the early 19th century; expansion of the electorate, abolition of slavery and free trade to name the bigger issues of the day. The liberal - the Victorian sort anyway - seemed to have the inside track on history. The Tories were fighting a rearguard action, an ultimately futile one against "progress." Who could oppose "progress?" Only the very stupid. Mill was somewhat more generous. He understood that free societies needed a party of reform and one of stability. Having a mature voice saying "slow down a bit," wasn't a bad idea. The presumption, however, was that the mature voice agreed with the ultimate ends of the hot head on the other side of the aisle, the disagreement was on the speed and application of the liberal ideal. 

This didn't matter all that much when liberals were still liberals. advocates of individual liberty. In the early twentieth century the meaning of the name changed, without too many people noticing. Over the span of a generation "progress" went from being government getting out of people's lives, to getting back in. The human attachment to labels meant that few questioned the inevitability of "progress," no matter where it was headed. The prestige of the name liberal, as standing for human freedom and tolerance, still lingers, albeit undeservedly. Conversely so does the label of the "stupid party" on conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. 

The bitter irony is that many conservatives have adopted the epithet as a badge of honour, much as the word Tory was once one of abuse. They now parade their anti-intellectuality. Thus the spectacle of the British Conservative Party, headed by Oxbridge graduates, devoutly eschewing any coherent philosophy of government. Two decades ago Mrs Thatcher surrounded herself with some of the leading public policy thinkers of the day. She succeeded, in part, because of her modest background and direct speaking style downplayed any hints of "egghead." The vulgarization of British popular culture has only accelerated since then. Davy Cameron feels the difference and has responded accordingly. 

Monday Night - Rocketman