Greetings, Ricochetoisie.

My name’s Bill Walsh and I’ve been brought in by the Berlinski junta as Minister of Information. I myself am not entirely clear what that entails. It could just be Claire wants more people on the official Ricochet Trivial Pursuit team. That said, she said that equipment would be arriving for my ministry, and sure enough, I found a giant crate on my doorstep. I figured, well, maybe laptops? Perhaps some iPads?

So, I got out the ol’ crowbar and opened the thing, and I now have 200 Kalashnikovs with Bulgarian stampings. I’m not entirely sure what this has to do with the gig, but doubtless Claire will tell me. And you don’t cross Claire, as y’all have doubtless learned at this point.

So, who am I? I’m a former consultant and sometime author, editor, and translator who’s currently picking up a doctorate. I like long walks on the beach and fuzzy bunnies. Also, I can juggle moderately well. So, clearly I’m qualified to serve drinks at Rob Long’s Malibu sea-side estate. (Though not at Peter Lawford’s beach house…that’s a whole other thing…)

So, here’s a question for everybody. I agree wholeheartedly with the Ricochetic mission of fostering civil conversation…but I think it‘s definitely swimming against the tide of contemporary discourse, which seems to be increasingly polarized and angry. Truism, right? Even on the right, the tone from (my friend) David Frum’s FrumForum folks is often “get thee behind me, Walmart Jesus People!” and conversely the conservative right sometimes erupts in “Anathema, RINO! Anathema!” My question to y’all is: why do you think it is? Do you think it’s a matter of the internetization of the conversation, with immediacy and anonymity encouraging fury and incivility? Or is it a matter of the ideologicalization of the parties, with two camps with mutually exclusive premises incapable of agreement and therefore devolving into shouting? Is it a result of the end of the left’s monopoly on the commanding heights of media, and their fury at dispossession and the bloodthirstiness of the torches-and-pitchfork wielding mobs who’ve pulled them down? Is it a function of the increasingly take-no-prisoners tone of politics, from the Clinton impeachment to the 2000 election, and so on? Or is there just something in the water at this point?

It could be one, some or all of those things—or something else entirely. What do you think? Any hope we’ll get past it? Or is it just the natural outgrowth of the rough-and-tumble of democratic politics in the age of the aggressive bureaucratic state, and the idea of getting back to a less-heated environment is Pollyanna-ish wishful thinking?

And does anyone need a Bulgarian AK in 5.56 NATO?

I fear that I may become insufferable and that my friends and wife may soon seek a court order for my incarceration. You see, I can’t get this tune out of my head – and on any given day, after reading the polls -- whether I am at home or walking to my office from the parking lot -- I am apt to break into song:

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

My poor wife and children have to listen to me singing like a banshee – and never more frequently than today, when I learned that John Raese has opened up a modest lead in the West Virginia Senate race, that two polls show Linda McMahon closing on Richard Blumenthal in the Connecticut Senate race, and that the latest poll suggests that Dino Rossi is about to overtake Patty Murray in the Senate race in the state of Washington.

Someone should suggest to the Republican candidates that they should adopt this song as their anthem – for it won’t be over, folks, ’til old Bob Dylan sings. If I had a cell phone, I know what I would use for the ring tone.

At least, according to Anne Applebaum in today's Washington Post:

Look at Afghanistan, for example, where American troops have been fighting for nearly a decade, where billions of dollars of American aid money has been spent -- and where a Chinese company has won the rights to exploit one of the world's largest copper deposits. Though American troops don't protect the miners directly, Afghan troops, trained and armed by Americans, do...

America fights, in other words, while China does business, and not only in Afghanistan. In Iraq, where American troops brought down a dictator and are still fighting an insurgency, Chinese oil companies have acquired bigger stakes in the oil business than their American counterparts. In Pakistan, where billions in American military aid helps the government keep the Taliban at bay, China has set up a free-trade area and is investing heavily in energy and ports.

And it gets worse:

China has found it lucrative to stay out of other kinds of conflicts as well. Along with Western Europeans, Americans are pouring vast amounts of public and private money into solar energy and wind power, hoping to wean themselves off fossil fuels and prevent climate change. China, by contrast, builds a new coal-fired plant every 10 days or so. While thus producing ever more greenhouse gases in the East, China makes clever use of those government subsidies in the West: Three Chinese companies now rank among the top 10 producers of wind turbines in the world.

Are we being outsmarted? Sure seems like it.

It is undeniably true that California's business unfriendliness leads--if that's the word--the nation as a whole. My post last night on our state's evolving cap-and-trade fiasco spurred some comments advocating construction of a statewide fence or some other means of quarantining our economic illiteracy.

It's too late.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini, speaking at last month's Aspen Forum, summed up America's manufacturing competitiveness thusly:

"I can tell you definitively that it costs $1 billion more per factory for me to build, equip, and operate a semiconductor manufacturing facility in the United States," Otellini said.

The rub: Ninety percent of that additional cost of a $4 billion factory is not labor but the cost to comply with taxes and regulations that other nations don't impose.

"If our tax rate approached that of the rest of the world, corporations would have an incentive to invest here," Otellini said. But instead, it's the second highest in the industrialized world, making the United States a less attractive place to invest--and create jobs--than places in Europe and Asia that are "clamoring" for Intel's business.

Add in the uncertainties about the next move with ObamaCare, energy policy and environmental regulation, and it's an easy first step to take your red Sharpie and draw a big X over the United States on your map of possible locations for that factory you need to open in 2012.

I'm looking at a report from a major accounting firm describing the economics of corporate relocation in our global economy. Switzerland will levy a 10-12 percent income tax for your corporate headquarters, but will reduce this to 4-9 percent if you bring manufacturing into the country. Singapore offers an even better deal: a corporate income tax rate below 5 percent in exchange for building a local manufacturing operation. In contrast, America's federal corporate income tax rate is 35 percent, and just try building and opening a new factory in a predictable period of time.

A century or so ago officials in the United Kingdom also acted as if they were the only economic game in town.

One aspect of moral and cultural life that has always exasperated me is the sheer inadvertence with which God seems to have sprinkled around the talent. Some of the worst people produce some of the best art. Picasso? Horrible man. But even if you reject Cubism, perhaps his principal achievement, you’ve got to admit when you look at his “rose period” that the man was just giganticially gifted. Salvador Dali? A lunatic. Norman Mailer? A loudmouth. Christopher Hitchens? Well, there you have it, really, haven’t you? Why would God permit such an obstinate, evangelizing atheist to write so well, to prove so charming, and to demonstrate such courage in the face of grave illness? What was He thinking?

All this came to mind when, going through a pile of old notes just now, I came across a paragraph I’d copied down sometime last year. The author is Ralph Wood, and the passage comes from his 2009 review, in National Review, of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch.

It came as almost a relief for Flannery O’Connor to find, as Gooch notes, that “you don’t have to be good to write well.” Far from encouraging O’Connor to live a self-indulgent life, neglecting the corporal works of mercy required by her Christianity, this insight enabled O’Connor to practice what [philsopher and theologian Jacques] Maritain called “the habit of art.” The word habit does not here refer to the daily routine of working at her typewriter for three hours, although this was indeed O’Connor’s regimen. Habitus, in Aquinas’s sense, means the formation of the mind and the will, the intellect and the heart, through long exercise and steady devotion to particular practices—in O’Connor’s case, to the rigorous requirements of her art.

You don’t have to be good to write well. And instead of responding to that finding with exasperation, as I do, O’Connor, somehow liberated, simply sat down and got to work. I remember now why I copied that down in the first place. Really, I was thinking, I must become more like O’Connor.

Anyone following this? Antiwar protestors’ homes raided by the FBI in Minneapolis and Chicago:

On Friday, according to (Mick) Kelly -- who was at work at the time -- agents with guns drawn broke down the door of his second-floor apartment in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood looking for proof that he has supported terrorist organizations in Colombia and the Middle East.

No one was arrested in the raids. Kelly and the other subjects of the searches have been ordered to appear before a federal grand jury next month in Chicago.

Specifically, the warrant for the raid of Kelly's apartment sought notebooks, address books, photos and maps of Kelly's travels to the Palestinian territories, Colombia and in the United States on behalf of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO). It also sought information on his personal finances and those of the group, on his "potential co-conspirators" and recruitment efforts for the group.

My eyebrows went up when I read the list of people nailed in the raid, because I knew one of them back in college. Mick Kelly was a short-order cook at the restaurant where I worked. Cheerful guy, hard-working - he’d get serious if the Issues of the Day came up, but there’s not a lot of time to discuss Central American policy when you’re trying to get the Eggs Benedict for table A-3. (This was the time in American history when colleges were enflamed by the juntas of Central America, and full of contempt for the "Freedom Fighters" who were battling the noble Sandinistas.) Apparently his ideas have remained unchanged since he was in college, which for some is a badge of honor.

Or is it a sign of intellectual rigidity? Aside from some of my cultural and aesthetic tastes, I’ve come to reevaluate most of what I held dear when I was 22. I’d be a bit nervous if I hadn’t. Which raises the question of whether your brain ossifies when you hit middle-age, and you reject reevaluating your reevaluations.

Though generally a fan of the Tea Party, Matt Lewis urges conservatives to pause to think about five elements about the movement that could prove destructive:

1. Lack of reverence for conservative leaders and organizations. It has been my observation that many of today's new activists are quick to conflate being "old" with being part the establishment....Conservatives would be foolish to abandon the wisdom of elders, much less eschew the infrastructure that has been created over recent decades, merely because it existed prior to 2010.

2. A move away from social conservatism. [T]he Tea Party has the potential to change [the conservative movement], possibly making it more libertarian...This could be good or bad (depending on your views), but it is a phenomenon worth considering.

3. Anti-Intellectualism. [C]onservatism began as a coherent intellectual philosophy. But in recent decades, conservatives have mocked "pointy-headed liberal intellectuals," creating an impression that intelligence is almost something to be skeptical of. While I am certainly not advocating elitism, I would strongly encourage conservatives to reject populism. Conservative candidates who can eloquently advocate for conservative positions have a better chance of impacting the culture than do demagogues who cannot effectively communicate their philosophy to the masses.

4. Purges. [T]here is...a danger of Jacobinism, where even fellow revolutionaries are purged -- not for philosophical apostasy but for not being "team players." In recent weeks, we have seen conservative writers labeled RINO's for questioning the background of a Tea Party candidate.

5. The Victim Card. Recently, a prominent conservative voice accused Karl Rove of sexism. While sexism certainly does exist, fair criticism and analysis of a female political candidate does not constitute sexism. Though winning is important, how you play the game is, perhaps, more telling. Conservatives should avoid copying the tactics of the left.

I can't exactly see where Lewis is coming from with his fifth point -- a single example can hardly be used to identify a characteristic of an entire movement -- but his other points seem fair and constructive. Though it seldom happens in the world of politics, a bit of introspection seems like an entirely healthy and positive thing.

While I was reading today's WSJ (see below), I saw that they gave HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius a chance to respond to charges of "thuggery" based on her threats against health insurers. Sebelius says that she did nothing more than tell "health-insurance companies that, as required by law, we will review large premium increases and identify those that are unreasonable."

No, no, no. That's not what she said. As I pointed out here, Sebelius specifically threatened to crack down on insurers based on what they said; namely, for blaming rate increases on Obamacare. Her words:

There will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases . . . Simply stated, we will not stand idly by as insurers blame their premium hikes and increased profits on the requirement that they provide consumers with basic protections.

She went on to warn that wayward insurers could be excluded from the new insurance markets. In short, the administration has threatened to put dissenting companies out of business. You just can't spin your way out of that.

Following Ricochet tradition, let me recommend Bill McGurn's excellent column in which he discusses the "litigious legacy of Kelo."

Kelo is the Supreme Court's 2005 decision that allows government to use eminent domain to seize your property and give it to a private developer. In practice it gives politicians the power to bulldoze neighborhoods for the sake of vanity projects. That's what happened in Freeport, Texas, where the city fathers tried to destroy a shrimping business to make way for a marina. And when a book exposed the collusion between the city and developer H. Walker Royall, Royall sued everyone in sight for "defamation" -- including Ricochet's own Richard Epstein who merely "blurbed" the book.

The expanded eminent domain power plus the use of courts to intimidate the opposition is a potent combination. Let's hope Royall's suit goes down in flames. In the meantime, Bill: if Royall sues you, give me a shout. I might know some lawyers.

A new Pew study has revealed that (surprise! surprise!) Americans know little about religion. (Add that subject to the list of remedial courses we all need in history, geography, and math.)

Anyway, the interesting part, for me, was the breakdown of religious knowledge by denomination:

On questions about Christianity – including a battery of questions about the Bible – Mormons (7.9 out of 12 right on average) and white evangelical Protestants (7.3 correct on average) show the highest levels of knowledge. Jews and atheists/agnostics stand out for their knowledge of other world religions, including Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism; out of 11 such questions on the survey, Jews answer 7.9 correctly (nearly three better than the national average) and atheists/agnostics answer 7.5 correctly (2.5 better than the national average). Atheists/agnostics and Jews also do particularly well on questions about the role of religion in public life, including a question about what the U.S. Constitution says about religion.

Here's a sample 15-question quiz. How do you do?

Rich Lowry, over at National Review, has a great editorial out today about the out-of-touch liberals who are ruling our country. He takes aim first at Sen. John Kerry, who in the wake of Velma Hart's outspoken frustration against President Obama, said last week,

We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening.

Reacting to this, Lowry writes:

When John Kerry calls you out of touch, you must be so far out of touch that you need to call Mazlan Othman, the U.N.’s designated liaison to space aliens, to re-establish contact with Planet Earth.

He then makes the broader point that to Democrats, "Whenever citizens reject the liberal agenda, they must be either monsters or fools."

Whatever else you think of Democrats, they are lousy amateur sociologists and political scientists. Whenever the public rejects them, it’s a “temper tantrum,” in late ABC News anchor Peter Jennings’s term for the 1994 electoral rout. Liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson has teed up that tried-and-true explanation for this fall: “The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats.”

This attitude, according to Cornell Law Professor and conservative blogger William Jacobson, is exactly why the outlook is so bleak for Democrats in this election cycle.

It just continues the Democrats’ theme that the reason people are upset is because they don’t understand — they're not smart enough...That sort of rhetoric just gets people even more upset.

Lowry concludes:

When the late Democratic Sen. Mo Udall ran for president in 1976, he commented after one primary loss, “The voters have spoken . . . the bastards.” That’s a great line, but a poor message for a political party.

If you haven't heard of Hassen Chalghoumi, don't blame Islam. Blame the US media. Nine returns on Google News, not one in English. The Italian press agency ANSA reported this story. I don't believe this book has been reviewed anywhere in the English-language press. He's well-known in France, but you'd have to be really combing the news to know his name in America. He's surely trying his best to be heard, however. You cannot say he isn't trying.

An advocate for an Islam that respects the values of France known for his position against the full veil, the imam of the Mosque of Drancy (near Paris), Hassen Chalghoumi, published a book caustic book, Pour l'Islam de France, in which he criticises threats of Islamification, which in his view are looming over the country where he has lived since 1996. In bookstores tomorrow, the night before the end of Ramadan, the pamphlet, reports Le Parisien today, fiercely attacks the burqa, as well as forced marriages, female genital mutilations, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Union of Islamic Organisations of France (UOIF). His heavy criticism is destined to provoke violent reactions: it's no coincidence that the 37-year-old Tunisian imam is always surrounded by bodyguards after months of hostile demonstrations following his statements about the full veil that led to the closure for several days of the mosque in Seine-Saint-Denis department, which has a high population of Muslim immigrants. Now he has said enough to the constant postponements to the publication of the book. ...

He has also been fighting to bring the Jewish community closer, he has accused the Muslim Brotherhood and UOIF of trying to alter French Islam through a war over control of French mosques, and he underlined that "it was Tariq Ramadan (the controversial theologian) who caused a build-up of racism in Switzerland, which led to the vote against minarets."

A shame that no one has sub-titled this interview in English.

Rough translation: He's the real thing--a pious Moslem who rejects radical Islam root and branch. He claims to represent the "silent majority." That's an exaggeration, but it's also an exaggeration to say the numbers of men and women like him are so small as to be politically trivial.

Yesterday, as I was writing about frustrated liberals who are losing hope in President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden was telling Democrats to quit whining (via Big Government). Speaking at a fundraiser in Manchester, NH, he implored around 200 Democratic activists and donors to remind

our base constituency to stop whining and get out there and look at the alternatives. This President has done an incredible job. He’s kept his promises.

He then acknowledged that if the midterm elections become a referendum on the "current state of affairs," the Democrats will lose:

If we make this a referendum on the current state of affairs, we lose, and so that’s why we’ve got to make this a choice.

Just last week, Obama censured what he called "griping and groaning Democrats," saying

Folks: wake up. This is not some academic exercise. As Joe Biden put it, Don’t compare us to the Almighty, compare us to the alternative.

So in the heat of election season, the Democrats are running on the negative platform that they are not Republicans?

Or, at least, that's what Nasim Nicholas Taleb says.

The author of one of my favorite books on investing and the economy, The Black Swan, is a gloriously cheerful pessimist. He's tough on Obama:

“Obama did exactly the opposite of what should have been done,” Taleb said yesterday in Montreal in a speech as part of Canada’s Salon Speakers series. “He surrounded himself with people who exacerbated the problem. You have a person who has cancer and instead of removing the cancer, you give him tranquilizers. When you give tranquilizers to a cancer patient, they feel better but the cancer gets worse.”
Today, Taleb said, “total debt is higher than it was in 2008 and unemployment is worse."

But he's also tough on a tax break that a lot of conservatives like:

Canada’s economy ... benefits from the fact that homeowners, unlike their U.S. neighbors, can’t take mortgage interest as a tax deduction, Taleb said. That removes the incentive to take on too much debt, he said.“The first thing to do if you want to solve the mortgage problem in the U.S. is to stop making these interest payments deductible,” he said. “Has someone dared to talk about this in Washington? No, because the U.S. homebuilders’ lobby is hyperactive and doesn’t want people to talk about this.”

As a homeowner, I love my mortgage interest deduction. (I love all deductions, period.) But it doesn't seem to make much sense, economically. The answer, as usual, is for taxes across the board to get fairer and flatter, and less jerry-built around specialized incentives and deductions. What are the odds, though, that there's anyone in Washington with the courage to make that kind of proposal? They'd get whacked from both sides, wouldn't they?

Turkish police have apparently detained former police chief Hanefi Avcı. His recently-published book alleges that Fethullah Gülen has covertly taken over control of the state.

Let this be a warning to you, Kenneth.

As the critical mid-term elections approach, it seems every columnist, blogger or tweeter feels the need to predict what will happen. This year, most everyone agrees the Democrats are in trouble, and the Republicans will make strong gains. The disagreements come in trying to forecast how lopsided the results will be. Anyone who engages in this prediction game has his or her own set of criteria as well as a political prism through which those criteria are viewed.

No matter what happens, some of these prognosticators will be wrong; some of them very wrong, and, yet, none of them will be held accountable for their misreading of the tea leaves. Just as when the pollsters get it wrong, people will be reading their forecasts for the next cycle just as eagerly as they did this time. It seems to me there ought to be some kind of scorecard kept on these guys so we know what their track record is. If a football tout or a stockbroker keeps getting it wrong, business will fall off, but these political “experts” just shrug off a bad pick and move on. If they do offer a post mortem on their follies, it’s generally to justify why things didn’t turn out the way they were supposed to.

It’s fun to position yourself as a political expert, but if it comes to pass that you don’t know what you’re talking about, shouldn’t there be some shame attached? Some penalty? Maybe a one-year suspension from political writing? Frankly, I like the idea of a Punditry Prison. Your sentence would be based on the extent of your errors, and repeat offenders would be treated more harshly. Of course, that would mean a life sentence for Bob Shrum. Without possibility of parole.

More From Pat Sajak:

Dems Declare War on American Voters

What's the Rush, Rahm?

Withholding Power

This just in. Today, Rick Lazio quit the race for NY governor, where he had been running on the Conservative line. So: no more spoiler, just one serious candidate to oppose Cuomo. Carl Paladino.

As Paladino looks more formidable, Cuomo looks more desperate. He's denouncing all tea partiers as "extremists." He's reaching out to such giants as Charlie Rangel to suggest that the tea party is racist. He's accepted the backing of the loony-left Working Families Party, and has stopped talking about standing up to unions.

New York being what it is, Cuomo remains the man to beat. But he's doing his best to look like a desperate man.

Peter, I'll get to your excellent questions about Ed Miliband soon. My schedule is a bit hectic today and tomorrow owing to the exciting arrival in Istanbul of Manju Jois, who will be instantly recognized by Ashtanga yoga fanatics (and only by Asthanga yoga fanatics) as the eldest son of the great departed Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, the father of Ashtanga yoga. The elder Jois was the subject of this profile in the New Yorker by Rebecca Mead, which makes him sound entirely loathsome, but in fact I've yet to meet someone who didn't describe him as wonderfully amused by himself and by his curious popularity with the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, whom he apparently thought was a "very tall man."

As befits an authentic and legendary utter yoga prima donna, Manju is teaching his classes at 6:30 am. We're supposed to suck it up; after all, his father made him get up at 3:30 am. I'm not happy about this, but I'll do it anyway. He's Manju Jois, after all.

So Miliband takes a back seat for today, but readers can start with this background, the key point being that he beat his own brother for the leadership of the Labour Party. Imagine what dinner conversations are like these days in that family:

The former foreign secretary was doing his best to put a brave face on it, telling BBC News: "This is Ed's day, it's a big day for the Miliband family, not quite the day for the Miliband family that I would have wanted - the Milband D family, rather than the Miliband E - but that's the way things go."

He said the party now had to rally behind his brother and there was a "strong mood" within Labour to do so.

He refused to talk about his own future, amid speculation about whether he would serve under Ed.

One more quick point from an e-mail sent to me by an old friend. (I'd credit him, but I'm not sure he wants me to, since he's active in Labour politics.)

Just in case you guys haven't yet got the memo from the Elders, the leader of the UK Labour Party is now a Jew.

And whatever you think about Ed politically (I agree with you that he's a nebbish), this cartoon in the Independent is disgusting.

They just couldn't resist the opportunity to swill around in a bit of the old blood libel, could they?

So I flashed back yesterday on the last time we -- Ricochet member Misthiocracy included -- talked Mad Men:

Series creator Matthew Weiner once said that if he'd read Revolutionary Road earlier in his life he never would have created Mad Men.

It seems significant to me now, more than ever, that the soul of Mad Men is located firmly in the city, and not the suburbs. The former Mrs. Draper aside, we hardly even see what looks or feels suburban. What we get, week in and week out, is a long hard look at urban working and urban living. What we don't get is clumsy suburb-bashing. Heaven knows the suburbs are no paradise, but when it comes to these things, I'm with Matt Feeney --

somebody who, though not very fond of suburbs as a place to live or get stuck in traffic in, genuinely loathes suburbia as a target of satire and smug critical harangues. I also suspect that my loathing of the the critical trope “suburbia” has become so widely shared (I mean, everyone hates American Beauty by now, right?) as to have emerged as a tired counterpart to the suburbia trope itself [.]

Traditionalist conservative attacks on the suburbs focus on what's considered the artificial and alienating character of suburban development. The more prominent (and popular, and reflexive) attack from the left focuses on the kinds of people who live in suburbs -- that is, people who don't want to live in high-density urban environments. It's this second line of criticism that rankles this critic (how quickly it becomes one set of bourgeois preferences' assault on another!). Count it another point in Mad Men's favor that we're invited to spend the great majority of our time as viewers picking apart the lives of city mice.

Early Fall in Northern California is special; nights are cool and the days hot—you can see a 40-degree temperature swing between 6a.m. and 4p.m.— but the heat lasts for just a few hours. And the light! The light has this golden quality that suffuses the world with a magical glow. It’s hard to feel down when surrounded by such natural beauty.

Perhaps the gorgeous weather explains the difficulty California voters have focusing on gritty economic reality.

I’m referring to California’s AB32, the evocatively named “Global Warming Solutions Act,” enacted in 2006 to provide us left-coasters the blessings of carbon dioxide cap-and-trade. AB32 requires total state carbon dioxide emissions to be reduced to 1990 levels by 2020, and by 80 percent by 2050. The California Air Resources Board (CARB)—our state’s air pollution control bureaucracy—has been empowered to draft the regulations necessary to convince us to embrace the clean-tech economy, usher in an era of CARB-approved “green jobs” for all and, incidentally, save the planet. And all this economic goodness is about to come gushing our way because our legislators and Governator care—care deeply—about planet Earth, unlike government officials elsewhere.

Oh yes, I nearly forgot: A study commissioned by the California Small Business Roundtable calculates that those Californians not tethered to a venture capitalist recycling CALPERS dollars into the Economy of Tomorrow won’t fare so well:

On average, the annual costs resulting from the implementation of AB 32 to small businesses are likely to result in loss of more than $182.6 billion in gross state output, the equivalent of more than 1.1 million jobs, nearly $76.8 billion in labor income, and nearly $5.8 billion in indirect business taxes. . . . the total cost of AB 32 is $49,691 per small business in California

Even if you avert your eyes from ClimateGate, holding to your faith in the upward trajectory of Al Gore’s net worth and the corollary fairy tale that is anthropogenic global warming, how will California, acting on its own to limit the freedom of its citizens to consume energy, affect the global climate?

Enter Proposition 23 from stage right, a ballot initiative suspending implementation of AB32 until California’s sky-high 12.4 percent unemployment rate falls to 5.5 percent for four quarters. Most of the cognoscenti don’t like it. And now gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman is taking flack for joining, if reluctantly, the San Jose Mercury News and the other Flat-Earthers manning the heavily listing SS Gore.

On Thursday, Whitman finally came out against Proposition 23, an initiative funded by out-of-state oil companies that would all but repeal the global warming law. She announced her conclusion a full year after writing an op-ed for the Mercury News extremely critical of AB 32, calling it "job killing" -- and just two days after our meeting, during which she said that if AB 32 came before her today as governor, she would "probably" veto it.

So we are left to wonder: What does Meg Whitman really stand for? Why did it take her a full year to say whether she'd vote to repeal the law, having had strong enough thoughts that far back to write an op-ed about how bad it was? And why did she reach this particular conclusion now if she would "probably" veto the law if she could?

We have a suspicion: polls. The law requiring California to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2020 is popular here, both among environmentalists and industry groups (although surely not oil companies).

Whitman understands macro-economics and realizes AB32 will destroy jobs, just as similar top-down efforts in Spain have yielded the $750,000 "green job," but AB32 remains popular with voters who hear the glowing cheerleaders daily but have yet to live the gritty reality. And so she must thread the needle between sanity and electability in our deep blue state.

I feel another failed liberal experiment coming on here.

[Edited to fix ClimateGate link]

Apparently, a lot of people do. Only 51% of American workers in this survey are "satisfied" with their bosses.

That strikes me as a pretty high number, but Robert Sutton, in Harvard Business Review, begs to differ. He's got some other pieces of the puzzle:

But other evidence paints a less gloomy picture. For example, a recent poll [pdf] by StrategyOne of over 500 American workers finds that over 80% of employees feel respected by their supervisors and believe their supervisors value their work. And I just heard from a Danish journalist about an ongoing effort by staffing firm Randstad to index satisfaction and other work-related attitudes and behavior across 26 countries. While Japan, according to it, has the lowest satisfaction, with only 41% of its workers calling themselves either very satisfied or satisfied with their employer, Denmark tops the charts at 83%. (Note that there is other research that shows the Danes are the happiest people in the world.) US workers, while not as satisfied as their near neighbors the Canadians (78%) still came in at 70%. Worldwide, some 68% of employees are satisfied with their employer. (I realize this does not necessarily mean they are satisfied with their bosses. The old saw that people leave bosses, not companies, is supported by a lot of research.)

Sutton is the author of Good Boss, Bad Boss, which I haven't read (yet). On his blog, Work Matters, he describes some of the worst boss types he's come across:

Research on power poisoning suggests that because wielding authority over others leads to "dis-inhibition," impulsiveness, and disregard for and detachment from the reactions of others -- bosses are likely to do some pretty strange and offensive things. Here are a few examples to get you started:

He walks around the office with his shoes off, and doesn't realize that his feet stink.

She picks her nose during meetings.

He talks VERY loudly on his cell phone, even when talking of company secrets.

She talks and talks and talks, and seems incapable of listening.

He keeps forgetting to zip-up his pants after going to the men's room.

When we go to lunch, she eats food off our plates without asking permission.

He calls women "honey" and "sweetheart" and doesn't realize that they find it offensive.

Only some of which I've done. Actually, I'm kidding. For some reason, although I recognize all of those things as rude or unpleasant, it's not exactly what I think of when I think of "bad boss." I guess my mind goes more towards the psycho, the screamer, the scaredy-cat. In my experience, those are the worst kinds of bosses.

This is the big news in the NFL, folks.

It seems that wife Gisele Bundchen and Justin Bieber are the only fans of Tom Brady's new look.

"Nice haircut, Brady," the tween singing sensation told the [Boston] Herald in an email. "Dude's got golden locks. Haha!"

Photo: AP

A few months ago, as you'll recall, Rob hypothesized that Hillary Clinton will announce her intention to challenge Obama for the Democrat Party's nomination in 2012 sometime next summer. As supporting data points for his conjecture, Rob pointed to polls that showed Hillary Clinton's approval rating at 10 to 15 points above President Obama's.

Since then, not only has the gap in approval ratings continued to widen -- Clinton now polls at 66 percent approval, while Obama has fallen to the low 40 percent range -- but the country seems to have fallen deeper into crisis, rendering null the promises of hope and change. Which is great news for Hillary. The Wall Street Journal reports on a new study in the British Journal of Social Psychology:

Times of crises change what people look for in a leader. And men don't fit the bill. A new study explores a phenomenon called the "glass cliff," in which female leadership becomes more desirable during times of uncertainty. Previous research has found that when women attain leadership positions, they are more likely to be asked to take over organizations in crisis.

Researchers gave test groups information about fictitious companies, some of which were in crises. They found that women were more likely to be selected than men if the company was struggling. The reason seemed to be that stereotypically female characteristics were suddenly valued when everything went to pot: interpersonal qualities such as being "intuitive" or "aware of the feelings of others."

Women are perceived as being better leaders during times of crisis. And we certainly have plenty of examples of women making great leaders during crises.

Consider that data point #3 in support of Rob's speculation.

I hate to give this any more press than it's already gotten, but as it's part of a trend, I think it's worth a mention. Brazilian artist Gil Vicente has manufactured some controversy over charcoal drawings that show him assassinating such horrors of humanity as George W. Bush, Pope Benedict XVI, Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, Queen Elizabeth and... you get, as it were, the picture. In doing this, Vicente joins the ranks of such other sad hate mongers as Nicholson Baker, who imagined killing W in his novel Checkpoint (I'm not linking. Find it yourself.), and the clowns who made the film showing Bush's murder, whatever it was called.

The only point I want to make about this, is that these artists and the people who cover them and even the people who are outraged by them all fail, it seems to me, to ask the pertinent questions the work actually raises. To wit: If your philosophy fills you with murderous rage, shouldn't you change your philosophy? If murder is the necessary outcome of your politics, shouldn't you change your politics? If your worldview has no room for art that transcends death shouldn't you change your worldview?

Or to put it another way, if this is all you have to contribute, shouldn't you just shut up and go soak your head?

By way of Twitter, this just in from Uncommon Knowledge viewer Travis Lindsay:

Peter, if you had to make a list of the top conservative intellectuals today who would make your list?

A lovely question. We’ve come a long way since Lionel Trilling’s 1950 declaration that “[i]n the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominate but even the sole intellectual tradition.” Our side has brilliant scholars, think tanks, intellectual ferment. Of any number who belong on this long list, three who come immediately to mind:

1. Historian Paul Rahe. From the very beginning of the Obama administration, while lots of other conservatives were sunk in gloom, Paul remained persistently cheerful, arguing, as he put it, that “the Obama administration is a gift to the friends of liberty.” In predicting the emergence of a popular revolt—Paul foresaw the Tea Party before it existed—Paul didn’t merely have his finger to the political winds. He had his mind attuned to the deepest currents of American history. Drawing on his immense erudition—in particular his detailed knowledge of the political culture of the first half of the nineteenth century—Paul decided things were about to get better, not worse.

People like me wanted to believe him but couldn’t quite bring themselves to do so. But just look. Paul was right. An astonishing intellectual achievement.

2. Economist John Taylor, who, I’m proud to say, appears from time to time right here on Ricochet. During the first months of the financial crisis, the narrative that took shape in the academy and was then amplified in the mainstream press was simple: Markets had failed. Capitalism had been discredited. Big government needed to save us. Milton Friedman? To the ash heap. Long live John Maynard Keyes! John Taylor bravely stepped forward to say “Not so fast.”

Drawing on a detailed analysis of Fed policy and the housing markets, John demonstrated that big government had had a lot to do with causing the crisis in the first place. The Fed had expanded the money supply too fast, creating the housing bubble. Then Congress had pressured Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to increase low-income mortgages, and, eagerly complying, Freddie and Fannie had in effect created the subprime market. John transformed the way serious people look at the crisis—and at what still needs to be done to clean the mess up. Again, a remarkable intellectual achievement.

3. Classicist Victor Davis Hanson, who is, again, a Ricochet contributor. Victor’s achievements as a historian of the ancient world are simply massive. Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece. The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece. A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power. In his analysis of—and, broadly speaking, support for—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Victor has deployed his undoubted scholarship. All by himself, he has made it impossible to deride as yahoos or ignoranti those who believe that from time to time the United States must—skillfully and wisely, but unapologetically—make use of its military might.

Now, into the mosh pit.

Good people of Ricochet, you’ve seen my list. Who’s on yours?

It's subscriber only, but Stanford economist Edward Lazear has a must-read op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today. Lazear's done the math and concluded that if America limits growth in government to the inflation rate minus one percent, we'd have a balanced budget within a decade and would be in a better position to pay down the debt. Lazear's argument complements the GOP pledge to return non-defense discretionary spending to 2008 levels. Personally, I'd like to see larger cuts, especially in the Post Office. But Lazear's proposal strikes me as politically realistic.

In the past, Democratic attacks made Republicans cautious about calling for limited government and budgetary restraint. To put it mildly, our democracy doesn't have a fantastic track record of rescinding entitlements. But the past half decade of political and economic upheaval may have caused the public, or at least conservatives and independents, to open up to new approaches to governance. You see this newfound openness in the Tea Party's popularity and the rise of Paul Ryan. That's why the GOP Pledge to America can be rightly criticized for being too cautious. If Republicans gain power, here's hoping Congressman Ryan hands out Lazear's article at the first House Budget Committee meeting.

By the way: I've started writing a weekly newsletter over at home base, the Weekly Standard. Sign up today!

Yesterday I missed my flight home from Las Vegas, spent ten hours in the airport, had my credit card stolen, and spent 40 minutes trying to find a parking spot in my neighborhood when I finally made it back to San Francisco. So I was a bit grouchy this morning when I reported to the Ricochet editor's desk.

Grouchy, that is, until I happened upon the Young Cons' rap video, "The Problem." Ronald Reagan rapping, a shout out to Mark Steyn, and a bite sized nugget of the Christian Gospel -- I can't imagine a better way to start the day.

Looking over Mollie Hemmingway's post regarding the admonishment 60 Minutes administered to those of us opposed to the Ground Zero Mosque, I was struck by the continuing theme that those of us who find the project distasteful or offensive are guilty of simple and ignorant bigotry. Who wants to be found guilty of that? Perhaps, if 60 Minutes, the editorial board of the New York Times, and the rest of the DNC, want to find real bigotry, they should broaden their horizons just a tad.

Here's an example. In Pakistan last March, a 38 year-old Christian man was burned alive and his wife raped. Their crime? They refused to convert to Islam.

Or how about this? Kiran George, a Christian maid, was raped by the son of her Muslim employer. When she threatened a lawsuit, her attacker killed her.

However, lest the tolerant people of that region be found guilty of age discrimination, we should not leave out the story of 12 year-old Shazia Bashir, who was murdered by her "employer," a wealthy Muslim lawyer.

For if there is one thing that these practitioners of the 'Religion of Peace' cannot abide, it is an indelicacy. In Punjab, Pakistan, for example, Christian children have been accused of marking a copy of the Koran with ink and chewing gum. Naturally, the locals have sworn death against several Christian families, who have had to go on the run. As the local mosque announced, "It is a matter of respect of Islam." Quite.

So to recap, Christians are murdered and raped for their faith in a predominantly Muslim country, and the media is silent. But if American citizens peacefully express reservations about a mosque at the place where Muslim extremists slaughtered 3,000 innocent human beings, it is the Americans who must be lectured.

How about this: How about 60 Minutes taking their cameras and their stop watch overseas to where ignorant bigotry is a way of life? And how about Imam Rauf taking his little road show and his inter-faith mosque to Muslim countries and practicing some moderation where it is most sorely needed? Again I ask, how is that cathedral in Mecca coming along?

The Post Office wants to raise its rates. From 44 cents to 46 cents, to mail a first class letter. Because, as we all know, it's a finely-tuned model of efficiency and service.

Of course, it lost about $3.5 billion last quarter, and is projected to lose almost $250 billion more in the next ten years. And they want to eliminate Saturday delivery. Call it Long's First Law of Public Sector Economics: If it's even remotely politically possible for a government-sponsored enterprise to increase its fees and reduce its service, it will do so annually.

(Long's Second Law of Public Sector Economics, by the way, is that any government-sponsored enterprise that is legally and explicitly not backstopped by the American taxpayer -- Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, for instance -- will in fact be backstopped by the American taxpayer for losses in excess of 100x what anyone dreamed of.)

The real question with the Post Office, though, is where does all that money go? Speaking personally, my surly letter carrier appears only intermittently. And my local post office, where I keep a P. O. Box, has signs everywhere announcing that All Box Mail Will be Delivered by 11AM. Box mail is usually available around 3PM. When a helpful customer (me) points this out to the folks behind the counter, he is told that the signs are only there for when the local supervisor drops by. They'll try to get the mail in the boxes by four, five at the latest.

So where does the money go? Well, according to the Washington Times, a lot of it goes to things like this:

Even as the U.S. Postal Service began sliding into the worst financial crisis in its history, some postal executives in recent years found a way to earn more money by resigning from their jobs and returning as highly paid contractors while doing essentially the same work.

In three recent contracts awarded without competitive bidding, for instance, former Postal Service executives were hired to perform what contracting records described as "knowledge transfer," according to a review of the agency's multibillion-dollar contracting operation by thePostal Service's office of inspector general.

"These contracts were put in place, even though highly experienced postal executives filled the positions vacated by the former executives," the inspector general's office concluded in a report, which was ordered by two senators amid a procurement scandal involving the agency's former top marketing officer.

One former vice president retired in May and within two months received a $260,000 no-bid "knowledge transfer" contract for the postal executive who assumed his old job, the report found.

I like that phrase -- "knowledge transfer." But I wonder what that "knowledge" is? Aside, I guess, from knowing how to charge more for less and get away with it.

In our our discussion on Uncommon Knowledge this week, Claire, you argue that Margaret Thatcher achieved changed British politics profoundly, achieving a permanent victory. What would the Iron Lady have made of the election last week of the leftist Ed Miliband as the new leader of the Labour Party?

Googling around this morning, here’s what I’ve been able to find out about the 40-year old Mr. Miliband:

• Ed Miliband’s principal opponent in the leadership contest was his older brother, the former Foreign Secretary David Miliband. David stood unambiguously for continuing the New Labour policies of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown—in a word, for the “third way,” the centrist attempt to support the welfare state while also standing for economic growth. Young Ed stood instead for a move back to the left.

• How far to the left? Not all the way back to the position of Michael Foot, who, as leader of the Labour Party during Mrs. Thatcher’s first years in office, continued to call for state ownership of all means of production. But still. Ed Miliband wants higher taxes. He demonstrates particular animosity to the City, London’s financial district, calling for a new transactions tax and insisting on making permanent the tax on bonuses, which former Prime Minister Gordon Brown enacted as a one-time tax during the financial crisis.

• Ed Miliband’s intellectual pedigree traces back to the hard left. His father, Ralph, was a Marxist theorist. After attending Oxford, Ed studied at the London School of Economics, an institution that retains a fundamentally statist outlook

• Although he won with support of the trade unions, his experience of the working class—or, for that matter, of work itself, as most understand the term—is nugatory. After graduating from Oxford and the London School of Economics, he worked briefly in television, then became a speechwriter for Harriet Harman, a leading figure in the Labour Party. Miliband has remained in government and politics ever since. Unmarried, he lives with a partner, by whom he has one child.

Miliband represents, then, a pure artifact of what Tony Blair used to call “cool Britannia.” Untouched by physical labor, lacking any experience whatsoever of business, completely uninterested in the military.

What would Mrs. Thatcher have made of this man? She was serious. He? Miliband may prove me wrong, but he certainly appears an utter lightweight. Does his election suggest that the Britain she strove to create—free, proud, and, once again, a power in world affairs—has simply…evanesced?

Claire?