A political parable from life . . .

Saw the following story on Facebook. It was a bit more partisan than the slightly edited version I have reproduced here. I'd prefer to leave out the distracting political commentary so we can focus on the concepts or worldviews.

I recently asked my friends' little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President of the United States.

"If you were President, what would be the first thing you would do?" I asked.

She replied, "I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people."

"Wow! What a worthy goal," I told her. "But I have an idea. You don't have to wait until you're President. If you come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my driveway, I'll pay you $50 and take you over to the grocery store where a homeless guy hangs out. You can then give him the $50 so he can use it toward food and a new house."

She thought that over for a few seconds, then looked me straight in the eye. "Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work himself?" she asked. "Then you can pay him the $50."

Hmmmm.

This got me thinking: If I want "the government" to do something, is it because it is the legitimate province of government and/or something that only the government can (and should) do? Or is it because I think it is a "good idea" . . . just so long as it is "someone else" who (or someone else's money that) is doing it "in my behalf"?

Put another way: If I am free to do something and I am able (both morally and physically/mentally/spiritually) to do something but I am unwilling to make the sacrifices on a personal level to achieve that end [other than to call upon "the government" to do it in my behalf], then is my vote or political agitation really a morally right thing? Why or why not?

Brilliant overview: Why you vote the way you do

The Week does it again with a brilliant summary/introduction to Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind.

I'm skipping the fascinating genetic analysis. Consider only Haidt's summary of the heroic "grand narratives" liberals and conservatives have adopted to explain their views.

From the liberal/progressive side:

[T]raditional societies were unjust, repressive, and oppressive. People who valued autonomy, equality, and prosperity struggled against the forces of oppression, and established modern, liberal, democratic welfare societies. But the struggle for a good society in which individuals are equal and free to pursue their self-defined happiness is not over.

. . . Authority, hierarchy, power, and tradition are the chains that must be broken to free the "noble aspirations" of the victims.

In my research, I have sought to describe the universal psychological "foundations" of morality. My colleagues at YourMorals.org and I have identified six in particular, six clusters of moral concerns — care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation — upon which all political cultures and movements base their moral appeals. . . .

Smith's liberal narrative derives its moral force primarily from the care/harm foundation (concern for the suffering of victims) and the liberty/oppression foundation (a celebration of liberty as freedom from oppression, as well as freedom to pursue self-defined happiness). In this narrative, fairness is political equality (which is part of opposing oppression). Authority is mentioned only as an evil, and there is no mention of loyalty or sanctity.

Now, says, Haidt, contrast that with a typical modern conservative narrative. This one, Haidt says, was extracted by Emory University clinical psychologist Drew Westen from major speeches by Ronald Reagan:

Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and undermined America by building up the federal bureaucracy and choking off the free market. They opposed God and faith. They took money from hardworking people and gave it to welfare queens. They worried more about the rights of criminals than those of victims. They pushed the sexual revolution and weakened the family by promoting first a feminist agenda and then a gay one. They cut military spending, disrespected our soldiers, and burned the flag. Then Americans decided to take their country back from those who undermined it.

With such wildly disparate narratives, can these two groups even talk effectively one with (or to) the other?

Sorry! You'll have to read the article to find out!

Oh, how I love The Week! (By the way, the "four free issues" offer is still open. I just checked.)

Freebie: While I'm on the subject of loving The Week, let me note their weekly Contest in which they ask people to come up with answers to questions related to current news articles. Totally for fun.

For example, the next (June 8) issue of the magazine, due any day now, will contain answers to the following question: "Facebook and Twitter are so addictive because they tap into a hardwired human instinct to tell other people about ourselves, new research at Harvard has found. Please come up with the next blindingly obvious thing researchers will find out about humankind."

Last week's contest--and the two answers (of three printed in the magazine) that most tickled my funny bone:

The number of PhDs receiving food stamps and other public aid tripled to 34,000 over a recent, three-year period. We asked you to come up with the title of an arcane PhD thesis least likely to result in a job.

THE WINNER: Modern Heraldry: Deconstructing the Seemingly Apolitical Lapel Pin's Post-Modernist Semiotic Signification -- Carla Holtz, Stanardsville, VA

THIRD PLACE: Urinary Tract Infections of the Common Earthworm: Implications for Organic Farming -- Russell A. and Kathleen I. Joki, Meridian, ID

Approval voting

Were coming up to primary election time here in Colorado and I am trying to learn about the candidates in "my" official party.

From what I'm told, this is the first year that "my" party is actually having a primary! And we get to vote in two races!

If you haven't guessed by now, yes, I am registered as something other than Democrat or Republican.

"Oh, no!"

How could I do that? I'm just "splitting" the vote, aren't I?

Well, no. I'm also attempting to express my personal convictions.

It fascinates me how distressing "third-party" really is both for those of us who are members as well as for people who are members of one of the two major parties. Dan Sallis, one of the Libertarian candidates in Colorado, has written an article about this issue titled Voting Libertarian is a Wasted Vote–Wrong! It's an interesting article. I don't like some of his language. (A warning for those who are easily offended.) But I think it makes a lot of sense: The candidates you vote for do NOT have to win for your vote to have an impact. When the numbers change, the major parties do take notice.

More interesting to me, however, than Sallis' article is one written by his opponent, Jaimes Brown: Libertarian Gubernatorial Candidate Comments on Tancredo's Entry in the Race.

In case you're not familiar with the name, Tom Tancredo was a five-time US Congressman from Colorado any one time Republican presidential candidate (2008). He made a name for himself a few years ago through his strong and outspoken positions with respect to immigration into the United States.

Brown comments:

As a Libertarian candidate for governor in Colorado, I have watched with amusement and wonder at the hand wringing that Republicans have gone through over the past two weeks with the entry of Tom Tancredo in the governor's race.

Republicans have come out of the woodwork to condemn Tancredo for "splitting the vote", being a "spoiler" or "wasting your vote". As a Libertarian, we are typically painted with those descriptions, whether it is the perceived taking of votes from Republicans or Democrats.

And . . . ?

Brown suggests a solution I have never heard of before. I am intrigued.

Approval voting allows you to vote for multiple candidates. The candidate with the most votes wins. Pretty simple. This method allows you to vote for your favorite candidate, but also vote for the other "lesser of the evils" if you think that you could prevent the worst candidates from winning.

The whole issue of Tancredo in this race would be a moot point for the Republicans, with approval voting. Plurality voting splits the vote of similar ideologies. Approval voting would encourage the nearly 50% of eligible voters who don't bother voting because the two parties do not represent them.

Can something like this work?

A while, here is what Americans for Approval Voting has to say on the subject:

Approval Voting is similar to the plurality system that is generally used in America today except for one twist: Instead of voting for just one candidate per office, Approval Voting allows you the option of voting for any number of candidates for a given office. The candidate who collects the most votes wins.

Approval Voting in effect allows you to vote up or down on every candidate in every race. The election results are therefore most easily expressed as an "Approval Rating" for each candidate.

Approval Voting in public elections has a long history going back to 12th century Venice. Its use has been growing in recent years. Several private member associations have used Approval Voting to elect officers for over 15 years and are pleased with the system. A form of Approval Voting was also used in the Security Council of the United Nations in 1996 to narrow the list of potential candidates for Secretary General.

Approval Voting has been used for municipal ballot propositions in the United States as well as for internal elections of state political parties in Pennsylvania.

Approval Voting is overwhelmingly supported by mathematicians, political scientists and other specialists in the area of elections. While no system is perfect, Approval Voting is the only easy-to-use and simple-to-explain alternative system that can be used with existing election equipment. Fortunately it has marvelous properties that will dramatically improve elections in the United States.

Check out Americans for Approval Voting and Citizens for Approval Voting for more information.

Sorry. Another story to get your blood pressure up! (But you can do something!)

Perhaps I've had my head in the sand not to have seen this story about Goldman Sachs' too-cozy relationship with the federal government and U.S. citizens' tax money!

Good grief! (Emboldening mine--JAH.)

As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the [expletive deleted] chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman. . . .

--Anyone see any potential conflicts-of-interest, here?

Oh! Oh! Oh!

But talking about conflicts-of-interest! . . .

Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict-of-interest waiver from the government. [!!!!!!] Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank-holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares [of a company that he is supposed to be regulating! --We're not even talking potential conflicts-of-interest. This is, absolutely and completely, a full-blown conflict-of-interest. And the government approves!?!?!!!!--JAH] in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. [Only $3 million? --JAH] Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman — New York Fed president William Dudley — is yet another former Goldmanite.

Yeah.

"No problems!"

And we are supposed to trust our government to be looking out for us?!?

Let's see how these guys' disinterested "public service" works out in practice:

Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, [then-Treasury Secretary] Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers — one of Goldman's last real competitors — collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, "and an investment-banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.

Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds [They couldn't find anyone else who might have better qualifications? --JAH]. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bank-holding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding — most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.

But this, what we have already seen, may be small change compared to what's coming:

Sorry. I'm not going to quote the end. You really have to read the last few paragraphs for yourself on the article owners' site.

The collective message of all of this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank-holding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage."

Ouch!

Time to audit the Federal Reserve! (Follow the link; there is a wonderful series of tools to help you contact your congressional representative and senators. --My Republican Representative is sponsoring the audit bill; neither of my state's Democratic senators has signed on, yet. [But I thought the Democrats were opposed to big business' and governmental corruption, while the Republicans were always pro-big business?! (????!!!!)]

I'm writing!

A little more about politics . . .

I am so sick of this election season!

I don't know that I have a whole lot of news worthy of taking your time, here.

• Sarah Palin is found to have "abused" her power as governor . . . apparently primarily by having failed to rein-in her husband. As the AP's Matt Apuzzo reports,
  

  Todd Palin had extraordinary access to the governor's office and her closest advisers and he used that access to try to get Wooten fired.
  
  Gov. Palin knowingly "permitted Todd to use the Governor's office and the resources of the Governor's office, including access to state employees, to continue to contact subordinate state employees in an effort to find some way to get Trooper Wooten fired," Branchflower's report reads.

• And Obama has been tied far too closely to ACORN.
   
• And in an apparent surge of truly amazing "decency under fire" [or did he go too far? And was he conceding defeat?] John McCain stands up against outlandish charges against his rival.
  
  

But what I really want to write about are two things that have come to my attention in the last two days.

First, a tie between ACORN (and ACORN's tactics) and a fundamental philosophical paper written 40 years ago. And, second, a political commentary in our local newspaper that, together with my having finally read the platforms of my two chosen "third parties," has gotten me wondering if I should back off of my earlier claim that I think I finally feel free to "vote my conscience."

First, the philosophical paper.

In a fascinating (or should I call it disturbing?) paper written back in 2005 and found at DiscoverTheNetworks.org, "a guide to the political left," we read,

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse. . . .

Cloward and Piven published an article titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, . . . [a]ctivists were abuzz over the so-called "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would "the rest of society" accept their demands. . . .

Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven's article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the United States -- often violently -- bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation.

Regarding Wiley's tactics, The New York Times commented on September 27, 1970, "There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests - and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones."

These methods proved effective. "The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley's wildest dreams," writes Sol Stern in the City Journal.

"From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city's private economy."

As a direct result of its massive welfare spending, New York City was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness. . . .

In 1982, partisans of the Cloward-Piven strategy founded a new "voting rights movement," which purported to take up the unfinished work of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like ACORN, the organization that spear-headed this campaign, the new "voting rights" movement was led by veterans of George Wiley's welfare rights crusade. Its flagship organizations were Project Vote and Human SERVE, both founded in 1982. Project Vote is an ACORN front group, launched by former NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE was founded by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, along with a former NWRO organizer named Hulbert James.

All three of these organizations -- ACORN, Project Vote and Human SERVE -- set to work lobbying energetically for the so-called Motor-Voter law, which Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. The Motor-Voter bill is largely responsible for swamping the voter rolls with "dead wood" -- invalid registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people -- thus opening the door to the unprecedented levels of voter fraud and "voter disenfranchisement" claims that followed in subsequent elections.

The new "voting rights" coalition combines mass voter registration drives -- typically featuring high levels of fraud -- with systematic intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits, unfounded charges of "racism" and "disenfranchisement," and "direct action" (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped America's welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven devotees now seek to overwhelm the nation's understaffed and poorly policed electoral system. Their tactics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries.

Yeah. I'd say that describes things pretty accurately!

And then the editorial that has me in a quandary about "voting my conscience" v. voting for the "lesser of two evils."

Mike Rosen, a conservative columnist with a modest libertarian bent, suggested, in yesterday's paper, that Party trumps person--with a corollary idea that "Major party trumps [i.e., ought to trump] minor party" affiliations.

A superficial cliche goes something like this: "I'm an independent thinker; I vote the person, not the party." This pronouncement is supposed to demonstrate open-mindedness and political sophistication on the part of the pronouncer. [But that's naive.]

For better or worse, we have a two-party system. Either a Republican, John McCain, or a Democrat, Barack Obama, is going to be our next president. No one else has a chance. . . . Minor-party candidates are sometimes spoilers . . . but they don't win presidential elections. . . .

In Europe's multiparty, parliamentary democracies, governing coalitions are formed after an election. In our constitutional republic, the coalitions are already in place.

The Republican coalition is an alliance of conservatives, middle- and upper-income taxpayers (but not leftist Hollywood millionaires and George Soros), individualists who prefer limited government, those who are pro-market and pro-business, believers in American exceptionalism and a strong national defense, social issues conservatives and supporters of traditional American values.

The Democratic coalition includes [people with different views].

I say party trumps person because regardless of the individual occupying the White House, his party's coalition will be served. A Democratic president, for example, . . . can only operate within the political boundaries of his party's coalition. The party that wins the presidency will fill Cabinet and sub-Cabinet discretionary positions in the executive branch with members of its coalition. Likewise, the coalition will be the dominant source of nominees to the federal courts, ambassadorships, appointments to boards and commissions, and a host of plum jobs handed out to those with political IOUs to cash in.

It works the same way in the legislative branch. After the individual members of a new Congress have been seated, a nose count is taken and the party with the most noses wins control of all committee and subcommittee chairmanships, the locus of legislative power.

Let's say you're a registered Republican who prefers that party's philosophy of governance. And you're a fair-minded, well-intentioned person who happens to like a certain moderately conservative Democrat running for U.S. Senate. So you decide to cross party lines and vote for him. As it turns out, he wins, giving Democrats a one-vote majority, 51-49. Congratulations! You just got Charles Schumer, Patrick Leahy, Diane Feinstein and Hillary Clinton as key committee chairs and a guarantee that your Republican legislative agenda will be stymied.

That's the way the process works. Does this mean that in our two-party system it comes down to choosing between the lesser of evils? Exactly! . . . You can be a purist and cast your vote symbolically with a fringe party, or be a player and settle for the least imperfect of the Republican or Democrat alternatives.

A vote for McCain is a vote for the party of constitutionalist judges, Adam Smith, the NRA, Gen. David Petraeus and Ronald Reagan. A vote for Obama is a vote for judicial activism, Karl Marx, the ACLU, the NEA, the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, Al Gore, Cindy Sheehan, Keith Olbermann and Rosie O'Donnell.

Your vote; your choice.

Ouch!

Political Do-Not-Call Registry

From Direct magazine:

When the federal [Do-Not-Call] registry was established, politicians claimed exemption, arguing that their pitches were not sales calls but free-speech efforts aimed at informing voters.

Perhaps. But sometimes the information given out is mighty dubious. . . . And when even genuine informational calls are followed by direct mail campaign contribution solicitations, the combined effort smacks more of multichannel marketing than political discourse.

So . . .

Shaun Dakin wants to give politicians a taste of their own medicine.

Dakin, a database marketer, was once a volunteer political telemarketer. In 2006 he got an earful of complaints about candidate calls, especially from people who had added their names to the National Do Not Call Registry. Now Dakin has set up his own list for those seeking to avoid political telemarketing. . . .

Dakin's registry is an initial response to the arrogance of politicians who pass restrictive marketing laws they don't intend to follow themselves.

Is it perfect? Probably not. But it gets the debate started. . . .

“If this thing takes off, there'll be a lot of very angry voters who may not vote for candidates who don't participate,” Dakin says of his registry. He hopes to sign up 1 million names by next March.

It's an ambitious goal. The registry (www.stoppoliticalcalls.org) launched in late September.

You'll want to read the article to see exactly what the registry does and does not do.

I know I was frustrated, last presidential round, at how many stinkin' phone calls we received from political operatives. Our phone is normally very quiet. But for a two- or three-month period . . . !!!!

Something about humor . . . or a lack thereof

Through about a 10-step surfing expedition beginning from Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except in a Popular Video Game at Church, . . . I discovered that FDR (Franklin D. Roosevelt) could be quite a humorist.

This is from a September 1944 campaign speech he made to the Teamsters:

These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him - at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars- his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself - such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.

While I'm on the subject of humor, however, let me note two of the stops I made on my way to reading FDR's comment.

I didn't first bump into the two of them in the sentence, "How they laugh doesn't tell you much; what they're cackling at says a lot: Conservatives Are Such Jokers."

I believe the sentence should actually read, "How they laugh, sadly, can tell you a lot; and what they're cackling at can reveal more than you'd like to know."

The first reference is to an article about Hillary Clinton's laughter. (I don't watch TV nor do I listen to radio, so I can make no personal comments on her behavior.)

The second reference is to an Op-Ed piece by Paul Krugman in the New York Times. When I read what he wrote, assuming he is telling the truth, I found myself truly disgusted.

As a libertarian (notice I am not using a capital L!), I do not believe the government should be providing the benefits Krugman and others seem to think it ought to provide. BUT. I hate to find my anti-government-funded-services position represented by "humor" of the forms he quotes:

Ronald Reagan thought the issue of hunger in the world’s richest nation was nothing but a big joke. Here’s what Reagan said in his famous 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing,” which made him a national political figure: “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.” . . .

On Wednesday, President Bush vetoed legislation that would have expanded S-chip . . . providing health insurance to an estimated 3.8 million children who would otherwise lack coverage.

In anticipation of the veto, William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, had this to say: “First of all, whenever I hear anything described as a heartless assault on our children, I tend to think it’s a good idea. I’m happy that the president’s willing to do something bad for the kids.” Heh-heh-heh. . . .

Before the last election, the actor Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s and has become an advocate for stem cell research that might lead to a cure, made an ad. . . . It was an effective ad, in part because Mr. Fox’s affliction was obvious.

And Rush Limbaugh . . . immediately accused Mr. Fox of faking it. “In this commercial, he is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He is moving all around and shaking. And it’s purely an act.” Heh-heh-heh. . . .

I believe that the lack of empathy shown by Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Kristol, and, yes, Mr. Bush is genuine, not feigned.

Ouch!

Krugman goes on:

Mark Crispin Miller, the author of “The Bush Dyslexicon,” once made a striking observation: all of the famous Bush malapropisms — “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family,” and so on — have involved occasions when Mr. Bush was trying to sound caring and compassionate.

By contrast, Mr. Bush is articulate and even grammatical when he talks about punishing people; that’s when he’s speaking from the heart. The only animation Mr. Bush showed during the flooding of New Orleans was when he declared “zero tolerance of people breaking the law,” even those breaking into abandoned stores in search of the food and water they weren’t getting from his administration.

Yowzie!

******

Okay. Now I'm going to wander away from the primary subject of humor (or lack thereof).

******

Way down the page of commentary in response to the blog article from which I quoted the single-sentence reference to both Hillary and Krugman, someone objected to Krugman's reference to Miller and his "Dyslexicon":

All? . . . Did Mr. Miller say "all [Bush malapropisms]"? Here's a genuine Miller quote: "It's mainly when he tries to feign idealism or compassion that the man [Bush] stops speaking his own native language."

******

I have confessed it before. I will confess it again. I am a relative innocent when it comes to politics. I occasionally take a glimpse at what the politicians are saying or doing. Mostly, however, I remain blissfully ignorant of the primary parties' shenanigans.

I thought the immediately preceding commentator made some interesting observations, however, when he said,

As Altemeyer shows, certain relatively extreme political attitudes do tend to cluster together, and people in those clusters do tend to behave, politically, in somewhat predictable ways. The followers are not the same as the leaders, though. Altemeyer, for example, shows that right-wing authoritarian followers have definite egalitarian and socialist tendencies (as long as the socialism part isn't benefitting people outside their own group identity. . . .)

Followers have political attitudes. Leaders appeal to the attitudes, in order to pursue goals and policies. An attitude is not the same as a policy, and appealing to a political attitude is not sharing it.

Krugman's column could be viewed as having several partisan purposes, but whatever those purposes, its context is partisan division.

I suppose that my mixed feelings have to do with a David Broder-like wish for the kind of politics [another respondent to the original blog post--JH] projects onto the unlikely figure of William Kristol: "we should judge policies by a careful examination of the substance" where compromise in a deliberative legislative process would improve laws and programs, a world where liberal soft-heartedness is balanced by a good-natured conservative hard-headedness, and everyone wants the good of the country.

That's not the present state of our politics and partisan divisions, though. Our times are calling for sterner stuff.

This guy's comment about "right-wing authoritarian followers hav[ing] definite egalitarian and socialist tendencies" intrigued me. But I wasn't sure whether I really believed it until I read someone else's comment further below:

In regards to right-wing socialism. The military has free medical care for active and retired members, as well as access to reduced prices at the PX and commisary. Military people expect this for their own, but in general are right-wing and opposed to "socialism" for the rest of society.

!!!!

I wouldn't have expected this . . .

. . . Though I probably should have. After all, "Nothing new under the sun," right?

More political scandal, and this one right off the bat with brand-new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi! . . . Perhaps the fact that she has been around for years almost necessarily taints her. One would wish not. But that she is being "outed" by a Washington Post writer! --Isn't the Post supposed to be a liberal standard-bearer?

Then again, it's "politics as usual," isn't it? Republicans have been virtually drowned in scandal; now it's the Democrats' turn.

Check out "Incoming Speaker flunks her first test by backing congressman" by Ruth Marcus.