The issues and implications of START

Great stuff from the scrupulously nonpartisan intelligence consultants Stratfor on START and the issues of nuclear proliferation/disarmament/defense. Read the whole thing, but there's a particular point I wanted to highlight:

The number of weapons may affect budgetary considerations and theoretical targeting metrics, but the danger of nuclear war does not derive from the number of weapons but from the political relationship between nations.

This cannot be overstated. Nuclear war will not be one iota less likely if the US massively disarms. It will, on the other hand, be at maximum likelihood if it completely or near completely disarms, or if rogue nations gain nuclear power of their own. The idea that nuclear arms reduction has any effect on the possibility of nuclear war is anachronistic at best; more accurate adjectives would include childlike, unserious.

Continuing on that theme:

New START is therefore as archaic as the Treaty of Versailles. It neither increases nor decreases security. It addresses a security issue that last had meaning more than 20 years ago in a different geopolitical universe. If a case can be made for reducing nuclear weapons, it must be made in the current geopolitical situation. Arguing for strategic arms reduction may have merit, but trying to express it in the context of an archaic treaty makes little sense.

Quick hits 4/22

Notes from my reading:

Larry Elder, from a column on big government economics:

An economics professor asked his class which of these two scenarios the students preferred. First scenario: Japan grows at an annual rate of 7 percent, and the Unites States grows at 4 percent. Second scenario: Japan and the United States both grow at 3 percent. Overwhelmingly, the students chose the second option. In other words, the students accepted their own lower domestic growth rather than allow Japan — a friendly nation — to outpace us. In exchange for "equality," they chose an otherwise lower standard of living. They, at least, acknowledged the existence — and accepted the price — of the trade-off. If people understood the damage done when government takes from A and gives to B, how many would sign on?

It is stunning and sad that these students have become so brainwashed by Marxist rhetoric that they would explicitly choose making everybody poorer for the sake of a Utopian fantasy. That is exactly the position that big government advocates advance, but at least many (most?) of them are ignorant that such a trade-off exists.

Elder recognizes this:

Collectivism is a bargain that most people — if they knew the real price tag — would reject. These trade-offs include lower productivity, diminished initiative, fewer jobs, rewarding reckless behavior and poor choices, a lower-than-otherwise standard of living, less economic freedom, greater government dependency, and fewer resources to spend on national security and to secure our borders.

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Michael Barone, from a column on increasing Wall Street regulation and its beneficiaries:

Little wonder that Goldman Sachs likes the idea. It will be able to borrow at lower cost than small competitors and will be assured that its large counterparties will qualify for government bailouts. Big firms tend to favor regulation because it insulates them from competition and protects them against loss. […]

In the 2008 campaign cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics' opensecrets.org website, Goldman Sachs personnel contributed $4.5 million to Democrats and just $1.5 million to Republicans.

Add in three other big Wall Street firms — Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup — and the total take was $12.7 million to Democrats and $6.7 million to Republicans. The image of Wall Streeters as solid Republicans is as dead as J. P. Morgan himself.

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With a (massively regressive, it should be noted) Value Added Tax push coming after the elections are safely over, it’s worth looking at their rate history elsewhere. Canada has actually lowered their VAT from the original 7% to 5%, but every other nation has later increased the rate (source: The Wall Street Journal):

Denmark 9-25%
France 13.6-19.6
Germany 10-19
Italy 12-20
Japan 3-5
Spain 12-16
Sweden 17.7-25
Switzerland 6.5-7.6
United Kingdom 8-17.5

Ahh, but maybe they reduced their income tax rates? Not so much.

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Jay Nordlinger on our tax code:

The tax code pits Americans against one another. It pits homeowners against renters, married people against unmarried people, people with children against people without children, people with children going to college against people with children going into trades — and on and on. The tax code is packed with social policy, and bias. That’s one reason I say, a pox on it.

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More Nordlinger:

I offer you good news out of Havana: “A surprisingly small crowd sweated and sang along to performances by Cuban rock, folk and salsa stars Saturday, at what the communist government billed as a politically important ‘concert for the homeland.’”

The article continued, “Organizers had said the show would be headlined by Cuba’s most famous folk singer, Silvio Rodriguez. But instead the pro-Castro government activist made fans wait for an hour in unrelenting afternoon sun before he took the stage, read a letter defending the single-party communist system — and then left without performing.”

Doesn’t that warm your heart?

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From another Nordlinger column:

President Obama has another pick coming up. If I were able to question him, I might ask something like, “When you were in the Senate, you voted against both John Roberts and Samuel Alito. You said they were qualified in traditional ways, but they were conservative — therefore, in your eyes, they were unfit to serve on the Supreme Court. By your standard, should Republican senators vote against your nominees because they’re liberal?”

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Finally, Charles Krauthammer on the fatuousness of US nuclear policy:

[T]he Washington summit was part of a larger misdirection play — Obama’s “nuclear spring.” Last week, a START treaty, redolent of precisely the kind of Cold War obsolescence Obama routinely decries. The number of warheads in Russia’s aging and decaying nuclear stockpile is an irrelevancy now that the existential U.S.-Soviet struggle is over. One major achievement of the treaty, from the point of view of Russian president Dmitri Medvedev, is that it could freeze deployment of U.S. missile defenses — thus constraining the single greatest anti-nuclear breakthrough of our time.

The left wing resistance to missile defense has never made any sense to me. I'm sure some of it was the anti-American, pro-Soviet worldview that infected the political left of the 80's, but shouldn't that silliness have been relegated to the dustbin of history as well? Is raw hatred for the US still driving opinion this issue?

Just bizarre.

"President Pantywaist"

It can't be a good sign if even Euros are starting to notice your spinelessness:

Obama has done more to restore Russia’s hegemonial potential in Eastern and Central Europe than even Vladimir Putin. . . . If the word is out that America is in retreat, it will soon find it has no friends.

Obama's approval ratings are sinking here, but through the roof with our enemies!

The world's first response

The first reaction from one of our enemies is, predictably, to test Obama to see if he will give in to intimidation:

Russia will deploy missiles near NATO member Poland in response to U.S. missile defense plans, President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday

Expect more of this kind of thing, although even I'm surprised that it only took a few hours to start.

Scoreboard, etc.

With the arrival of another September 11, it’s worth noting (for those of you scoring at home, or even those of you who are by yourselves) that since Islamic terrorists launched their war against America:

Bush 7, Islamic Terrorists 0.

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It’s also worth noting on this day to note the reaction of then State Senator Obama to the events of that day. In an editorial in the Hyde Park (Chicago) Herlald on 9/19/01, the future Democrat presidential candidate uttered some gems.

In addition to cleaning up airport security and intelligence, we "must also engage . . . in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness."

Funny, by about 9am Central time that day I understood perfectly the source of such madness: evil. It’s not like it took a rocket scientist to deduce.

For Obama at the time the madness "grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair."

Given that the 9/11 perpetrators were extremely well-educated, wealthy and not only not in despair but instead in ecstasy at the opportunity to murder thousands of Americans, that’s stunning in its ignorance. Terrorists from the host of Obama’s first fundraiser (Bill Ayers) to the spiritual leader of the 9/11 attacks (Osama bin Laden) have consistently fit the exact opposite profile of the one he imagined here.

And of course, "We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad.”

As if in modern warfare this was not already the case. America has and continues to be willing to sacrifice its own soldiers in order to avoid civilian casualty.

“We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent."

File this one under even a blind squirrel finds an acorn. While the expectations of hate crimes perpetrated by Americans turned out to be (shocker, I know) massively overblown, it was still laudable for him to speak out against it. This served as the ninth inning dribbler that kept him from an otherwise all-strikeout day.

But history will show that he got the fundamental question we have faced since the end of the Cold War completely wrong, an error in judgment that is unacceptable for a potential president.

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Having noted that, I have to give equal time to a couple of things he got absolutely right in his interesting interview with Bill O’Reilly.

First, he came out unequivocally in favor of nuclear reactor construction, significant in that it has been taboo on the left and flies directly in the face of the desires of environmental special interest groups. It’s an energy position that is so sensible that it should be near unanimous, yes, but embracing it still took a lot of courage and he is to be commended for it, assuming he doesn’t back away from it.

Second, he came out strongly in favor of missile shields in Poland. Again, this should be wholly uncontroversial in this country; Putin’s silly rhetoric to the contrary, this is a purely defensive action and one that should be pursued at home as well as anywhere we have a threatened ally. And again, he deserves a ton of credit for taking on an entrenched special interest group, in this case the anti-American and antiwar left. They have always been adamant in their opposition to R&D and implementation of systems protecting the US and its allies from incoming missiles, and for him to oppose them is very courageous, again assuming he sticks to it.

As an addendum, Obama also pledged not to raise capital gains taxes to any higher than 20%, but I doubt his sincerity on that one, and even if true it’s kind of like giving praise to a thief who steals only half of your money instead of all of it – he’s still a thief.

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John Hinderaker on the ever more bizarre attacks on Palin by the media and elected Democrats:

The Democrats in Congress and the press see the election slipping away from them. Their reaction is much like that of a toddler who screams, holds his breath until he turns blue, and generally threatens to wreak havoc if he doesn't get his way.

She’s a pig, she’s Pontius Pilate, her only qualification is not having had an abortion…it is as if the party is consciously trying to alienate the sane portion of the electorate. Can the far left blogs have gained that much influence, really? You would think not, but when a presidential candidate and other high ranking party officials are starting to sound like the comment threads on the Daily Kos…it’s just incomprehensible.

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This is what it must have felt like to have drafted Tom Brady in the first round of a fantasy football draft.

Being ahead of the curve, etc.

First, some housecleaning:

Yesterday’s free play (taken down for contractual reasons) was a loser, in a game with almost no offense from either team – half of what we expected.

Overall, it was a good but not great day, in the limited manner that we normally adhere to in a week 1.

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McCain was famously visionary on the Iraq surge, but don’t overlook his prescience on Russia, either. This passage is from a speech he gave at Arizona State University in 1999:

"The mindless slaughter [in Chechnya] is being conducted by a Russian military that seeks to reassert itself not only in the former Soviet Union but also to extend its reach throughout what used to be the former Soviet Union in an attempt to fold back into the Russian empire those countries that have broken away from it, most notably Georgia."

He certainly gets some things wrong, but foreign policy issues are seldom among them.

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Plano High School kids pull off a great prank.

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Can it just be a coincidence that the stadium (Invesco in Denver) in which Obama gave his acceptance speech opened on September 10, 2001?

How appropriate.

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Was Obama’s declaration that he doesn’t want his daughters “punished with a baby” if they “make a mistake” a slip of the tongue or his true feelings?

It is odd to hear any Democrat call underage and/or premarital sex a mistake, that much is certain. Characterizing a baby as punishment may be par for the course on the hard left, but to hear it from a presidential candidate is disturbing, to say the least. Given that he has voted not to allow babies that survive attempted abortions to live, that may very well be from the heart, although it still seems to us like a pretty serious gaffe.

That the Palin family sees their daughter’s pregnancy as a blessing and not punishment stands as a stark contrast between the two young politicians and the movements they represent.

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Also from the Dem convention, Rev. Albert Gore gave a speech which included “We are facing a planetary emergency which, if not solved, will really hurt my portfolio.”

Okay, I made up the last part, the quote was really “We are facing a planetary emergency which, if not solved, would exceed anything we’ve ever experienced in the history of humankind.” And it was followed not long after by “Americans are tired of appeals based on fear.”

I know he’s not man enough to acknowledge it publicly, what I wonder is if he even realized the self-immolation.

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As debate season approaches, you have to wonder if questions will come directly from Democrat campaigns, as they famously did in a Republican You Tube debate last fall.

You would think that the spectacular failure of the media’s anti-Palin offensive would serve as a lesson, but you would also have thought that CBS getting caught openly campaigning for John Kerry in 2004 by using fake documents to drum up fake anti-Bush allegations would have taught the elite media a lesson as well.

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Does week 1 matter? In the last 30 years, nearly 53% of teams that won their first game reached the playoffs. Only 23% of teams that lost made the postseason.

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A Jay Nordlinger correspondent (fifth item) has a simple but brilliant idea on increasing the availability of fuel-efficient vehicles while, at the same time, saving the US auto industry.

What’s killing GM and Ford right now is the inability to provide highly fuel-efficient vehicles. Both Ford and GM make a lot of very fuel-efficient vehicles in Europe — but, thanks to differences in regulations, it takes a lot of cost and time to modify European designs to bring them to the U.S. This makes no sense at all. Europe is a sophisticated region and their vehicle regulations are roughly equivalent to our own as far as safety and other things go.

I see no reason that we can’t simply have a waiver that says U.S. companies can import any model that meets European standards and sell it in the U.S. We should just recognize their regulations. […]

[This is] a no-cost solution that involves no corporate welfare, enhances trade and consumer choices, reduces fuel consumption, and makes Ford and GM fully competitive in fuel-efficient cars almost immediately. There’s no downside to this except some bureaucrat somewhere would have to accept the regulations promulgated by some other bureaucrat somewhere else.

I can think of another downside: it pits the interests of the American people against the interests of the UAW (I am assuming that the European cars are built in European factories, which is suggested by the use of the word “import” above). And in the current congressional climate, which seems extremely likely to remain after this fall’s elections, the interests of a major labor union will always trump the interests of the people. 100% of the time.

But it is still an interesting argument, and one with which politicians and organizations who are serious about cutting energy usage and reviving the US auto industry should be fully on board.

Somebody call Webster, etc.

Did Obama seriously say that Clarence Thomas did not have enough experience to serve on the Supreme Court? Wow. We need some new words, irony and chutzpah are no longer sufficient for some situations.

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Kirk Mitchell has an idea of where to house current Guantanamo prisoners in the wake of Boumediene: “a minimum security facility should be established in Washington D.C., equidistant between the Capitol and the Supreme Court Building."

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Another baseball tidbit, this one courtesy of Clem Comly.

Five players have played for both World Series teams during the season:

Jack Kramer, 1951 Giants and Yankees
Johnny Schmitz, 1952 Dodgers and Yankees
Sid Monge, 1984 Padres and Tigers
Lonnie Smith, 1985 Cardinals and Royals
Jim Bruske, 1998 Padres and Yankees

Only Smith actually appeared in the Series in question.

If this kind of research interests you, you might want to look into joining SABR. Disclosure: I was a longtime moderator of and now train and supervise current moderators of the research e-mail list, but I have no financial stake in recommending the organization.

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Jack Kelly echoes my observation (first item) on antiwar hypocrisy:

Did you see the huge crowd outside the Russian Embassy protesting the war in Georgia?

Neither did I. Now that we have a genuine war of aggression, the silence on the Left is deafening. […]

It is scandalous to liberals that terrorists at Gitmo don't have easy access to lawyers, but most don't care how many Georgians the Russians kill.

Vladimir Putin is counting on this.

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A couple of environmental factoids:

Glaciers are advancing in Northern California, Norway, Sweden, Pakistan and New Zealand.

Arctic ice has been thinning by 3% per decade, but Antarctic ice has been growing by 1% a decade. Antarctic ice is 20 times bigger, which means that overall global polar ice is growing by 8/10 of 1% a decade.

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On a related note, the California legislature passed a bill that would have required the state’s public schools to teach “climate change,” which fortunately was vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger. An increase in such inconvenient truths has led greens to sense some urgency in their quest to indoctrinate our youth; gone are the good old days when you could wait until college to start the brainwashing.

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Energy analyst Vinod Dar (Dar and Company) on why global action on climate is unlikely to happen: The US and Japan will not tell Asia and Africa to choose poverty, disease, hunger and illiteracy over electricity. Europe might, but nobody will listen.”

Dar (sorry Ticket fans, his nickname is probably not “Eight Dollar”) lays out his vision of what we should do:

“Contingency planning should entail strategic responses to a warming globe, a cooling globe and a globe whose climate reverberates with laughter at human hubris.”

Indeed, the thing to keep in mind is that not only do we not know if the planet is going to warm or cool long term, we also do not know whether warming would be beneficial or harmful to man. We do know, from relatively recent experience (a little over a century ago), that a world more than a wee bit cooler would be harmful.

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Is Rep. Jack Murtha ever going to apologize to the US Marines for his shameful “killed innocent civilians in cold blood” slander from May 17, 2006? His allegations, irresponsible at the time, have by now been conclusively shown to be false.

If Murtha is an honorable man, he will do the honorable thing. I won’t be holding my breath.

Anti-(some)-war, etc.

Where were the denunciations by anti-war groups and the demonstrations over Russia’s attempt to annex Georgia? What naked hypocrites they are…

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It is heartbreaking that Taiwan is allowed to compete in the Olympics (and participate in other international organizations) only if they do so under the moniker “Chinese Taipei.”

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It’s all corruption in the end: A Rasmussen poll says 55% Say Media Bias Bigger Problem Than Campaign Cash.

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Did you catch Obama saying the following of his wife:

"She's just a wonderfully normal, levelheaded person. Any American woman who meets her would immediately identify her as a fellow traveler."

With husbands life that, who needs enemies? The sad thing is, many on the left won’t even recognize what a catastrophic gaffe it is.

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From Jay Nordlinger’s excellent series on the Beijing Olympics:

[T]he 1936 Games were a great boon to the Nazis, giving them legitimacy and cementing their power. Years later, the journalist William Shirer wrote, “Hitler, we who covered the Games had to concede, turned the Olympics into a dazzling propaganda success for his barbarian regime.” And Duff Hart-Davis, in his book Hitler’s Games, tells us that Berlin was turned out prettily and benignly — creating the illusion that Nazi Germany was “a perfectly normal place, in which life went on as pleasantly as in any other European country.”

I fear that history might be repeating itself.

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Amplifying on my post on global warmist desperation, check out Joel Achenbach’s observation:

Somewhere along the line, global warming became the explanation for everything. Right-thinking people are not supposed to discuss any meteorological or geophysical event -- a hurricane, a wildfire, a heat wave, a drought, a flood, a blizzard, a tornado, a lightning strike, an unfamiliar breeze, a strange tingling on the neck -- without immediately invoking the climate crisis. It causes earthquakes, plagues and backyard gardening disappointments. Weird fungus on your tomato plants? Classic sign of global warming.

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Of course, not everybody sees possible global warming as a bad thing; some knuckle-dragger named Dave Lindorff (who bears an appropriate resemblance to Rob Reiner) sees a “silver lining”:

Look at a map of the US. The area that will by completely inundated by the rising ocean—and not in a century but in the lifetime of my two cats—are the American southeast, including the most populated area of Texas, almost all of Florida, most of Louisiana, and half of Alabama and Mississippi, as well as goodly portions of eastern Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. […]

So what we see is that huge swaths of conservative America are set to face a biblical deluge in a few more presidential cycles.

Then there’s the matter of the Midwest, which climate experts say is likely to face a permanent condition of unprecedented drought, making the place largely unlivable, and certainly unfarmable. […]

So again, we will see the decline and depopulation of the nation’s vast midsection—noted for its consistent conservatism. […]

Finally, in the Southwest, already parched and stiflingly hot, the rise in energy costs and the soaring temperatures will put an end to right-wing retirement communities like Phoenix, Tucson and Palm Springs. […]

So the future political map of America is likely to look as different as the much shrunken geographical map, with much of the so-called “red” state region either gone or depopulated.

There is a poetic justice to this of course.

It is sad that such naked bigotry can find a home in what appears to be a real newspaper of some kind; this is the stuff of fringe hate groups.