9/11 Commission
While it would be important to really find out what mistakes were made prior to 9/11, and how to fix them, it is very clear to me that the current commission is a joke. Having it so soon was is bad enough, but having it in an election year makes it worst than useless. Like the early commissions on Pearl Harbor, it is doing much more harm than good.
While I have great respect for Lee Hamilton, and do believe he is trying hard to do an honest job and get at the real problems, having more partisans such as Bob Kerry and especially Richard Ben-Veniste on the commission doom it into becoming little more than a election year partisan exercise. This is even more so with the political activists clapping and cheering in the audience when someone makes a point they like.
For example, what was Bob Kerry doing making a political statement on the current war in Iraq, during a hearing about what happened before 9/11. Then later complains that he did not have enough time.
Problems with Success
Imagine a conservative sponsored bill is before Congress. Liberals denounce it as they do most such bills as hurting the poor. Liberal groups claim it will push millions into poverty, it will hurt millions of children, it will make those who are poor even poorer. Liberal think tanks publish “studies” showing 2.6 million people (1.1 million children) will be forced into poverty if the bill is passed. In short the same standard class warfare rhetoric we normally get about how Republican only care about the rich and seek to hurt the poor.
Imagine the bill passes, and after many years the results are clear. Not only were the liberal claims wrong, they were the opposite of reality. Poverty dropped instead of increased. When the law expires and needs to be renewed, do the democrats admit their mistake, and support the bill?
As you might guess this is not a hypothetical. The bill is the Welfare Reform bill. The claims about it are real, as are the results. In fact poverty among Black children, which had climbed from 40 to 45% from 1970s to the mid 1990s fell drastically to 39.8%, a record low as a result of the bill. And these results have continued despite the recession debunking earlier liberal excuses that it was only a result of the strong economy.
Yet despite this success, liberals are putting their agenda ahead of reality and are still trying to block its renewal and/or weaken it key provisions. The bill expired in 2002, and has yet to be renewed.
This is all summed up in the wsj today. “Race to the Top” pg A8. (On the paid site)
https://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108087696840172617,00.html?mod=opinion
Summer Reading List
I though I would share my summer reading list,
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos – Latest scientific views on the make up of reality.
Guillermo Gonzalez, Jay Richards, The Privileged Planet – Argues against the Copernican Principle – the idea that there is nothing special about Earth or its place in the universe.
Tom Holland, Rubicon – discusses the fall of the Roman Republic starting 100 B.C. and going up the beginning of the reign of Augustus Caesar.
I have already started The Fabric of the Cosmos and it is very interesting. I really like the way Greene explains things. For example I knew about the speed of light being the ultimate speed limit and I knew this was tied to time in that as you travel faster, time slows down. But I never realize exactly how these were directly related before. The speed limit is not just on traveling through space, but is on traveling through space-time. And it is not really a limit but rather is a fixed speed of your combined movement through both space and time. When you are not moving through space all of your movement is through time. In order to move faster through space you must trade off some of your ability to move through time, resulting in your moving through time slower. Photons, which travel through space at the speed of light use up all of there motion through space, and do not travel through time at all.
He also points out some of the simple but perplexing experiments that have vexed physicists for centuries. For example, if you tie a bucket filled with water on a string and twist the string; when you release it the bucket will spin around, the water will also begin to spin. But why does this happen and what does this say about whether or not space is a thing that actually exist? (physicists have gone back and forth on the existence of space).
How does it add up?
If you total up all the proposals that Kerry has promised in his campaign it come to 1.7 trillion in new spending over the next 10 year, most of this is in proposals he says he will push through in the first 100 days.(His health care proposal alone is projected to cost $900 billion) He claims he will do this by repealing the Bush tax cuts for those making over $200,000, plus a series of other tax increases for “the rich.” This would raise around $700 billion over ten years. This leaves him $1 trillion dollars in the hole. And this is all assuming that his new projects are limited to their projected costs, whereas the history of such programs is that they almost always end up costing much more than projected.
On top of all this he claims he will cut the budget deficit in half during his first term, although since Bush’s current budget already projects to do this, it is a neutral proposal except that does limit his options as to how he will make up the difference. He has also talk some about “Middle Class” tax cuts but it is not clear exactly what he means or what impact they would have.
So just where should we assume that Kerry is not being truthful
1) On spending
2) On taxes
3) On the deficit,
4) All the above.
Coverage of Polls
One of the things I have always found interesting in this stage of Presidential campaigns is how when the democrat is ahead in the polls we hear about the polls all the time, but when the Republican is gaining, or ahead in the polls, suddenly the polls don’t seem to be all that news worthy any more.
A few weeks ago Kerry was ahead in the polls and it seemed that every night in there was reports about Kerry’s lead. But then suddenly Bush began his campaign and Kerry had a few bad weeks, and news about polls virtually disappeared. From side comments I have heard and reports on talk radio the Polls now show that Bush is now tied with Kerry or ahead, depending on the polls.
No doubt as the campaigns go up and down (i.e. Kerry regains a lead) prominent coverage of the polls will return
