Category: Politics

VOANews.com

The leader of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been appointed prime minister…Mr. Erdogan has said his new government will decide whether parliament will vote again on allowing U.S. troops into the country for a possible war against Iraq.

New PM, new government, new deal, new vote. I’d rather we liberate Iraq without Turk support, the better to keep the Kurds free, and the better to keep a balanced budget somewhere in sight.

With the final episode of the smarmy “Mr. Sterling” show coming up this week, Dan Walters, the dean of California political journalists, memorializes its stupidity:

Perhaps one should not be surprised that “Mister Sterling” falls so short of even fictional relevance to real politics. “The West Wing,” after all, is more about what Hollywood liberals wish would happen in the White House, than what really happens, regardless of its occupant. In that sense, perhaps, it accurately reflects something basic to both entertainment and politics: Perception and image are always more powerful than reality.

He’s all for pulling the plug, which appears to be happening. The show trails everything else in its time slot in the ratings, so we should expect it won’t be back in the Fall. Good riddance.

UPDATE: NBC has axed Sterling from its fall lineup. Hoorah, the people have spoken and the network listened, although the rumors that it was going to be saved by adding “Baghdad Bob” to the cast were great fun.

Check out this long and very good history of the Middle East in the Jerusalem Post Internet Edition. Teaser:

The impending ouster of the Arab world’s most notorious post-colonial dictatorship may prove a turning point in the broader history of Middle Eastern totalitarianism

More on this later.

Old Fart Tim Oren wrote a nice summary of the Great Anthill debate on his Due Diligence blog. Like Jeff Jarvis, he thinks I’m right:

Gents, goal incongruence is what politics is all about. If you think you can avoid that at the scale of a nation, I’ve got some juche for you right here, because it’s just your flavor. Having observed at first hand how supposedly coherent sets of people like the old Well-beings made a hash of things, I shudder to think about that sort of ‘organization’ in any proximity to the coercive powers of war and taxation. Give me that representative government, because it’s still the worst thing except all the alternatives. While Mr. Bennett may have the manners of a troll, he does have a point.

Oren proves that not all venture capitalists are abject hive-minded idiots, which is always a nice thing to know, and especially so in these days of digging out the rubble left behind by all the exploding Cerent-me-toos.

Rajan Menon writes in the LA Times about the end of regional alliances that played such a big part in the Cold War era:

New Order: the End of Alliances

NEW YORK — As we await “The End of History,” Francis Fukuyama’s vision of a world governed by capitalism and democracy, we can anticipate an earlier, if more mundane, transformation: the End of Alliances. It’s hard to imagine a world without NATOs and SEATOs, but it’s coming, and the change will bring both opportunities and vulnerabilities.

One of the functions these blocs served was to stimulate trade by removing barriers, and the other was to secure national defense through permanent alliances. Since we now have explicitly commercial blocs like the EU and NAFTA, the first function is obsolete, and with countries like France making mischief in alliances like NATO, the second function is less effective. We no longer have permanent allies, only permanent interests, right? Except that we do have permanent allies, with whom we share ties of culture and history, like the Anglosphere nations and the former Eastern Bloc nations of New Europe with whom we share values.

The alliance most in jeopardy right now has to be the UN, because it’s both too big and too unprincipled to do anything good, and has essentially degenerated into a Lilliputian Alliance of the Bitter and Irrelevant.

Writing in the Wall St. Journal (subscription required) Steven Malanga speculates on a Miguel Estrada v. Chuck Schumer race for the New York Senate seat not occupied by Hillary Clinton:

Ronald Reagan once said that most Hispanics were Republicans who “just don’t know it yet.” It isn’t merely ethnic pride that would attract Hispanics to Mr. Estrada, but a growing sense that New York’s increasingly radical Democratic Party is out of step with the cultural values and upwardly mobile aspirations of many Latinos.

Mr. Schumer must run for re-election next year, when an Estrada candidacy in New York would be especially powerful. President Bush will be running for re-election, and the Republican National Convention will take place in Gotham. Having Mr. Bush campaigning with Mr. Estrada throughout the state’s Hispanic enclaves can give a Democrat cold sweats.

If the current Democratic jihad against Mr. Estrada fails, the Republican Party should still consider recruiting another talented Latino candidate to challenge Mr. Schumer in 2004. The party might even consider doing what the Democrats did in the 2000 Senate race: importing their best candidate from somewhere else to vie for the New York seat. Hillary Clinton showed the Republicans how to play that game. Now why not turn the tables?

Schumer is not only the most unprincipled party hack in the Senate, he’s ugly, so Estrada should consider this if the anti-democratic filibuster succeeds.

Marshall McLuhan’s chief acolyte Mark Federman takes me to task for believing this is the best of all possible worlds, our political system (“representational democracy”, whatever that is) can’t be improved, and that technology only advances by intended consequences. I don’t get the whole “Global Village” thing, in other words.

I really do hope that the people who build these strawmen out of my observations enjoy ripping them apart as much as I enjoy laughing at them, because the prospect of professors of English and Mass Media explaining technical progress in networking to someone who’s been making it happen for 25 years is pretty hilarious, you have to admit.

I certainly don’t deny that tools, policies, and initiatives have unintended consequences; I’ve spent way too much time combating these in the legislature not to know that. But I also know that these things also have some clearly intended consequences, and that nobody embarks on a tool-building exercise without some idea of where he’s going and why he wants to go there. I don’t just start up Visual C and turn the keyboard over to an infinite number of monkeys, and neither does any other technology dude. And while we don’t have omniscience about all the long-term effects of our work, we do have crisp specification in hand before we start laying code, for the most part. That’s how progress works: you get an idea, flesh it out, and then lay some code and see how it works. Brownian motion just isn’t a good methodology.

I liked McLuhan when I read his books (you know, those old-fashioned paper things with black marks on them) 30 years ago; they were provocative and challenging, but now that they’ve been fossilized into a religion, I doubt McLuhan himself would have much use for the causes to which they’ve been yoked. Best to strive for you own vision than to spend your life erecting monuments to dead guys.

Cowardly Joi Ito as much as admits that his ideas about the so-called “emergent democracy” are incoherent and indefensible, and concedes defeat by banning me from leaving comments on his blog (right after I said by-bye). Read the whole thing, it’s a hilarious example of the kind of reasoning that’s very stylish in France these days.

Apparently the boy can’t control his lust for power after all.

The Sacramento Bee — sacbee.com — GOP unveils its no-tax-hike plan: “Senate Republicans unveiled their long-awaited plan Wednesday to fill California’s budget hole without raising taxes, saying they would roll over a $3 billion deficit until 2005 and slash billions from state programs.”

Jim Brulte, Senate Republican leader and likely candidate for Governor in ’06 if Schwartzenegger is terminated unveiled a plan for balancing the California budget without raising taxes or fees as the Democrats have proposed. The Brulte plan makes 7% across-the-board cuts in General Fund spending, and refrains from raising Community College fees or raping counties, the two methods most preferred by budget-balancers in the past. Brulte also plays some accounting games to comply with the state’s balanced budget law, such as using a two-year budget cycle and altering Medicaid accounting. The big question mark is how it squares with Prop 98, the law setting a floor on school spending pegged to a percentage of the General Fund, but the Davis plan has a similar exposure.

The good thing about the plan, from a bipartisan viewpoint, is that it gets the ball rolling on talks among the Big Five* that will ultimately resolve the budget impasse.

*The Big Five are the Dem and Rep leaders of the two houses plus the Governor. They traditionally do the big horse-trading that leads to a budget each year, and are very late getting started this year, which had led to fears that the Reps were going to hold out until the state couldn’t issue checks before getting down to business.

The National Organization for Women is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, an extremist organization that pretends to stand for mainstream American values such as equality and freedom of choice. While claiming to speak for women, NOW has an agenda that’s profoundly hostile to men, marriage, family life, and heterosexual women. The Supreme Court issued a stark reminder of NOW’s extremism yesterday by overturning, on an 8-1 vote (Stevens dissenting) NOW’s use of the federal RICO statute to silence protesters at abortion mills. While there’s so far been little in the way of editorial comment on this case in the Corporate Liberal Media, the Wall Street Journal had a few choice words to say:

NOW’s argument, which has been wending its way through the courts for years, was that abortion opponents were in violation of the RICO and Hobbs acts, federal statutes enacted to pursue Tony Soprano, not local church groups passing out flyers on a sidewalk.

NOW nonetheless claimed the latter was engaged in racketeering and conspiring to “extort” the “property” of abortion seekers by demonstrating in front of clinics. Since RICO violators are susceptible to treble damages, NOW had hoped either to bankrupt its political opponents or scare them away with the threat of a financially debilitating verdict. Mr. Terry, for example, filed for bankruptcy in 1998 owing $1.6 million to NOW and Planned Parenthood.

But Chief Justice Rehnquist, writing for the majority, cited NOW’s “fatally flawed” efforts as an attempt to extend the reach of these laws well beyond what they were originally intended to cover. “Such a significant expansion,” wrote Justice Rehnquist, “must come from Congress, not from the courts.” And Justice Ginsburg reiterated that the court was “rightly reluctant, as I see it, to extend RICO’s domain further.”

It should have been obvious on its face that abortion protesters are driven by fundamentally different motives than are mobsters, but it took the Supremes to sort this all out. This is because courts bend over backwards to appear fair to NOW, even when that means sacrificing the fundamental civil liberties of the majority, such as peaceful protest.

More on this case in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the Washington Times. NOW’s analysis from president Kim Gandy: “It’s a green light for those kingpins to start again orchestrating violence across the country.”