One of my most vivid memories as a kid was watching a bill collector at our door talking with my mother. After some discussion, she handed him a few dollars, and he reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick roll of bills, adding our paltry contribution to his stash. I remember being amazed that any one person could walk around with that much money in his pocket. For all I knew, it could have been fifty one-dollar bills, but it looked like the gross national product of Finland to me, and I decided I wanted to have my pockets filled with a wad like that one day. What I don’t remember doing is hating the guy because we were scuffling for cash and he wasn’t. My parents had apparently neglected to teach me the joys of class envy. Well, what my parents forgot, present-day Liberals have remembered.

As I listen to debates over tax rates and income disparity and the haves, the have-nots and the have-not-enoughs , the common thread seems to be the notion there is only so much money on the table, and anyone who takes more than his “fair” share is making it impossible for others to get theirs. More and more, success is equated with greed and lack of empathy. I have a number of well-to-do (and downright wealthy) Left-leaning friends who share that view and spend their days lecturing the rest of us on why taxes should be higher and why the government should expend a greater effort to spread that wealth around. Apparently those accursed low tax rates (along with their high-priced accountants) force them to keep way too much of their income.

Here’s the suggestion I make to them, and I happily share it with everyone else who’s forced to keep too much of what they earn: simply give the government more. The tax rates are merely legal minimums, and available deductions are not required to be taken. In addition, any of us is welcome to make out a check to the U.S. Government, and someone will be happy to endorse it and deposit in the general fund (or at least apply it to the general deficit). There are, in fact, people who do that, though I’m pretty sure I don’t know any of them.

So Liberals of the world, unite! Figure out what your fair share comes to, and then send the rest to your government. It’ll be thrilled, you’ll be leading by example, and I’m sure our leaders will see that your largesse is re-routed to those who most deserve it. However, just as that bill collector didn’t pass any of his money to my mother, I don’t expect the higher-taxes crowd to jump at this idea.

Net Neutrality is one of those wonky issues that just begs to be skipped over. In a world of limited mental bandwidth, some things are just kicked to the side so that we can spend time thinking and reading about important stuff, like taxes and illegal immigration and mosques in downtown Manhattan and Tiger Woods' divorce.

Here's the nutshell version: should internet service providers be required to carry all data -- no matter whose -- for the same rate? Meaning, should they be prohibited from charging, say, Facebook traffic or Hulu videos less -- or more -- than some New Internet Startup to carry their packets of data?

My answer: no. I'm against regulating ISPs. If they want to charge more for some data and less for another kind, my view is, let them. If their customers don't like it, they'll walk. If there aren't enough ISPs in a region to foster useful competition, then attack the problem that way, by creating ISP competition, not by regulating (or, really, pre-regulating businesses before there's even a problem to address). There's a cogent argument against Net Neutrality here.

Other people answer a different way. Some think web innovation and entrepreneurial zeal will suffer if big companies (like Google and Verizon) get together to make data transportation prohibitively expensive for smaller startups. Some think that the web needs to be divided into two bright categories: companies that move and deliver data, and companies that create the data to be transported. There's a cogent -- and conservative -- argument for Net Neutrality here.

The best -- and clearest -- explanation of both positions can be heard on NPR's "Planet Money" podcast, which is really excellent.

Meanwhile, the debate has made for some strange bedfellows. From The Hill:

The Gun Owners of America (GOA) severed ties with the net-neutrality coalition Save the Internet after a conservative blog questioned the association with liberal organizations such as ACORN and the ACLU.
The blog RedState described Save The Internet as a "neo-Marxist Robert McChesney-FreePress/Save the Internet think tank" and questioned why GOA would participate in a coalition that includes liberal groups such as the ACLU, MoveOn.Org, SEIU, CREDO and ACORN.
GOA was one of the charter members of Save the Internet, but a spokesman for the gun rights group said times have changed.
"Back in 2006 we supported net neutrality, as we had been concerned that AOL and others might continue to block pro-second amendment issues," said Erich Pratt, communications director for GOA.
"The issue has now become one of government control of the Internet, and we are 100 percent opposed to that," Pratt said.
Save The Internet had long pointed to the support of gun owners as evidence that net neutrality is a nonpartisan issue....
Save The Internet views net neutrality as a free speech issue rather than a liberal or conservative one. He noted the group’s membership still includes a number of conservative groups, including the socially conservative Parents Television Council and the Christian Coalition.

Anything that all of those groups agree on has got to be wrong, somehow.
But I love the idea of those furious, paranoid MoveOn-ers sitting next to SEIU thugs, sitting next to uptight Christian Coalition guys in blue suits, sitting next to heavyset ACORN ladies, sitting next to permanently scandalized Parents Television Council, all waiting outside the FCC hearing room to testify for Net Neutrality. Maybe after that they all go for a hilariously tense lunch together. Maybe to a local Chipotle or something. (Do they have those in DC?) The lunch ends badly when the Christian Coalition guy reaches out to hold the hands of the SEIU thug and the MoveOn-er to offer a little blessing before they all dig in. And he's too late, anyway, because the ACORN lady is already into the communal chips.
Wait. What were we talking about?

One of the principal pleasures of cyberspace, at least for this little boy? Talking back. This morning, let’s take a look at the lead editorial in the New York Times, “Time for a Real Debate on Taxes.”

THE GREY LADY: Americans need to hear a serious debate about how the country can meet the twin fiscal challenges of supporting the weak economy now and taming the budget deficit as things improve. That debate is not happening in Washington, and it is certainly not happening on the campaign trail.

ME: Balderdash. Earlier this summer, Republicans in the House published an alternative budget based on—yes, indeed—the twin fiscal challenges of promoting economic growth while containing the deficit. The numbers all fit neatly together. How did the Republicans do it? By containing spending, not raising taxes. Cong. Paul Ryan has put forward a detailed plan for promoting economic growth and taming the deficit—again, without raising taxes. And one Republican candidate after another out on the campaign trail has addressed the deficit, calling for adjustments in entitlement programs, the repeal of ObamaCare, and other spending cuts.

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s there to hear it, does it make a noise? Beats me. But when a Republican advances an argument that the New York Times refuses to cover, the Republican has still advanced an argument.

THE GREY LADY: The Republicans are insisting on extending each and every one of the tax cuts forever. It is impossible to square that demand with their calls to reduce the deficit, so they do not even try.

ME: What’s the intensive form of “balderdash?” “Balderdashier?” Whatever. Extending the tax cuts is wholly consistent with bringing down the deficit, just as long as the federal government does what Republicans—and, if the polls are accurate, most Americans—insist upon. To quote Gov. Haley Barbour—and I can remember this quotation precisely, because it consists of just two words: “Cut spending.”

THE GREY LADY: President Obama is right when he says the country cannot afford to extend all of the tax cuts.

ME: Stop right there. “The country” cannot afford tax cuts? I can afford tax cuts. The editors of the Times can afford tax cuts. Businesses of every size, shape and stripe can afford tax cuts. The only entity that would have trouble with tax cuts is the federal government. Since when, exactly, does it make sense to speak of the federal government as “the country?” The federal government represents one specific set of entities or institutions set up to serve the country, not to subsume it. Jeepers. Have the Times editors even read the Constitution?

THE GREY LADY: He [President Obama] wants to let the tax cuts expire on the top 2 to 3 percent of American households (couples making more than $250,000 a year, individuals making more than $200,000) and permanently extend them for everyone else. The problem is that a permanent extension of the so-called middle-class tax cuts is also unaffordable.

ME: This is Keynesiansm in a pure—I almost said archaic—form. The trouble with Keynesianism? The last several decades of American history. In the nineteen-seventies, Keynesian policies brought us stagflation. Then, in the nineteen-eighties, anti-Keynesian, free market policies—including, notably, tax cuts—brought us an economic expansion that lasted for a quarter of a century. You may argue that this or that aspect of Reagan’s policies proved mistaken. You may argue, in particular, over various excesses that developed, particularly in the financial markets. What you may not do is pretend that the free market policies and economic growth of the last 25 years simply never took place. Unless, of course, you’re an editor at the New York Times.

And they call us Neanderthal.

Ricochet being a place where you may indeed beat a dead horse, feel free to add a few blows of your own.

Conor, you got my wheels turning this morning with two competing posts at the Dish. In the first, you continue your longstanding criticism of Mark Levin as a prisoner of Manichean thinking. By viewing American politics as a permanent throwdown between the forces of liberty and their opponents, you say, Levin makes the mistake of assuming that "today's liberals are fundamentally driven by Statism, whereas actually what motivates most of them is a substantially different project." Later in the same post, you seem to use liberal and progressive interchangeably -- about which more in a moment.

In the second post, you hint that if liberty vs. tyranny is the wrong way to frame our ruling political conflict, rule by citizens vs. rule by elites might be the right one. And you end with the right provocation:

Here's one succinct way to put the question to Tea Party leaders: if we're choosing our ruling class the wrong way now, what alternative do you recommend?

My answer would begin with Tim Carney's latest for the Examiner: "The Republican Divide: K Street vs. the Tea Partiers." Tim lays bare the nature of the divide, which is more profound than mere politics:

Lott’s proposed co-opting is not primarily ideological — Norton and Grayson, and their inside-the-Beltway patrons are all fairly conservative. The main distinction between Team Lott and Team DeMint might have less to do with policy platforms and more to do with a politician’s attitude toward the Washington nexus of power and money.

I think it's consistent with the intuitions and judgments powering the tea parties to answer your pregnant question like this: it's not that we're choosing our ruling class the wrong way; it's that our ruling class is the wrong kind of people. They have the wrong character, the wrong disposition, the wrong objectives, the wrong -- values. The problem isn't that 'politics is broken'. That's a symptom of the real problem, which is that the ruling culture of our ruling elites is broken.

If that's right, how did we get here?

The answer takes us back to the difference between liberalism and progressivism. Those who would remind us of this difference range from Claire "I'm a liberal" Berlinski to avowed lefty liberal public intellectual Alan Wolfe. As I wrote in my American Spectator review of Wolfe's revealing book The Future of Liberalism,

Wolfe recognizes that liberalism is most threatened today not by boring conservatism but by fashionable progressivism, in its twin emotional and scientific strains. This is true in spite of his parallel claim that, with “communism now dead and socialism on the defensive, ideology is more likely to make an appearance from the right, whether in the form of free market utopianism or unrealistic hopes in what military power can achieve.”

[...] Wolfe distinguishes between the ideology of big-L Liberalism, which conservatives uniformly oppose, and the political philosophy of small-l liberalism, which conservatives criticize as friends. As Harvey Mansfield has persuasively argued, conservatism is the political philosophy that best cures liberalism from its own defects. It is a refinement of liberalism, not an alternative to it.

[...] This refined element is of great significance to conservatives. It teaches them how to be better critics of the left by showing that progressivism seeks to capture liberalism entirely and cleanse it of any and all conservative wisdom. Progressivism tempts liberalism with a paradoxical vision of perfection—perfect progress, so perfect that it is perfectly immune to criticism. For Wolfe, “progressivism’s firm insistence that it knows what is right conflicts with temperamental liberalism’s lack of certainty, and its preference for ends undermines procedural liberalism’s respect for means.”

This is true, but Wolfe then blames the progressive ethos on the necessary evil of government. “The curse the state visits upon liberalism,” he claims, “is Progressivism.” But political progressivism, as he by then has already established, isn’t the great threat to liberalism today. It’s antipolitical progressivism—in the forms of emotivism, for which politics is incidental to the insistence that all demands and desires be recognized as rights, and scientism, which frees us “from a supernatural power” only to make us “enslaved to a natural one.”

In a philosophical project all conservatives should support, Wolfe’s liberalism rejects the progressivist proposition that we have no choice but to accept the raw, unbounded power of our beastly desires and our ever-more-godlike power to appease them.

You're right to want to probe deeper than the truism that statism appeals to liberals for political reasons. But doing so reveals that progressivism appeals to liberals -- both liberal elites and everyday liberals -- for cultural reasons. And progressivism tells liberal elites that the practice of politics is an obstacle to perfecting liberal culture. As Bill Voegeli's remarks suggest, if elites with a more conservative philosophy are vulnerable to a different set of temptations, they're much less susceptible to this one. The issue is simple: what is the foundation of that more conservative philosophy? What are the principles that fuel the right culture among conservative elites?

The central philosophical proposition of the tea parties is that the Republican Party establishment has too many elites who have become untethered from those principles and have been born and raised in the wrong culture of elitehood. Whether by coincidence or for some other reason, this organizing conviction resonates extremely powerfully with the contention that the central conflict in American politics is between those who see political liberty as our most precious possession and those who see political liberty as an outdated obstacle to true justice and flourishing.

From the standpoint of the lover of liberty, there is a punchy and potent shorthand for that conflict ready to hand: liberty vs. tyranny. That's a slogan that must be unpacked, to be sure. But is it -- to use your phrase -- "almost completely useless?" I report, you decide.

To the steady drumbeat of China's rising! China's taking over the world! comes another, contrarian view. From Foreign Policy magazine, writer Michael Pettis suggests:

for all the recent excited commentary, there's less cause for baijiu toasts in Beijing than they might think. That's because China's economic growth has followed what's sometimes called "the Japanese model." In Japan and other Asian countries, this model has proved extraordinarily successful in the short term in generating eye-popping rates of growth -- but it always eventually runs into the same fatal constraints: massive overinvestment and misallocated capital. And then a period of painful economic adjustment. In short: Beijing, beware.

The parallels with Japan are clear:

For a worrying case study, one need only look to Japan, which grew very rapidly thanks largely to very high rates of investment forced through the banking system. For a long time the problem of misallocated investment -- which was whispered about in Tokyo but not taken too seriously -- didn't seem to matter. Everyone "knew" that Japan's leaders could manage a transition easily. After all, they were extremely smart, with a deep knowledge of the very special circumstances that made Japan unique, with real control over the economy, with a strong grasp of history and penchant for long-term thinking, and most of all with a clear understanding of what was needed to fix Japan's problems. Sound familiar?

The trouble is, Japan is a staunch ally of the United States. Japan has no territorial ambition in East Asia. Japan is a democracy. So when Japan faces another Lost Decade, nobody really worries about the place going haywire, about a troublesome, ambitious, anti-American government trying to take the heat off of itself and onto its trading partners. Even in Japan's heyday it didn't hold $850 billion in US Treasuries.

So it's unclear which is worse, from an American perspective. A faltering, stagnant China with a blue-water navy, or a growing China knit more closely to the world economy.

Resisting the urge to feed this wire report into an online Ebonics translator, I reproduce it here in the original English:

ATLANTA – Federal agents are seeking to hire Ebonics translators to help interpret wiretapped conversations involving targets of undercover drug investigations.

The Drug Enforcement Agency recently sent memos asking companies that provide translation services to help it find nine translators in the Southeast who are fluent in Ebonics, Special Agent Michael Sanders said Monday.

Ebonics, which is also known as African American Vernacular English, has been described by the psychologist who coined the term as the combination of English vocabulary with African language structure.

Some DEA agents already help translate Ebonics, Sanders said. But he said wasn't sure if the agency has ever hired outside Ebonics experts as contractors.

[...] Linguists said Ebonics can be trickier than it seems, partly because the vocabulary evolves so quickly.

"A lot of times people think you're just dealing with a few slang words, and that you can finesse your way around it," said John Rickford, a Stanford University linguistics professor. "And it's not — it's a big vocabulary. You'll have some significant differences" from English.

Critics worry that the DEA's actions could set a precedent.

"Hiring translators for languages that are of questionable merit to begin with is just going in the wrong direction," said Aloysius Hogan, the government relations director of English First, a national lobbying group that promotes the use of English.

"I'm not aware of Ebonics training schools or tests. I don't know how they'd establish that someone speaks Ebonics," he said. "I support the concept of pursuing drug dealers if they're using code words, but this is definitely going in the wrong direction."

H. Samy Alim, a Stanford linguistics professor who specializes in black language and hip-hop culture, said he thought the hiring effort was a joke when he first heard about it, but that it highlights a serious issue.

"It seems ironic that schools that are serving and educating black children have not recognized the legitimacy of this language. Yet the authorities and the police are recognizing that this is a language that they don't understand," he said. "It really tells us a lot about where we are socially in terms of recognizing African-American speech."

Rickford said that hiring Ebonics experts could come in handy for the DEA, but he said it's hard to determine whether a prospective employee can speak it well enough to translate since there are no standardized tests.

National Ebonics standards now. How more absurd will the drug war get?

It's primary day for John McCain. Though by all accounts McCain will trounce his caricature of an opponent J.D. Hayworth, Tunku Varadarajan at The Daily Beast is nonetheless feeling sorry for the maverick.

He calls this "McCain's Embarrassing Last Act." He says McCain is the "Liza Minnelli of American politics"--he's "hanging on a little too long, at great cost to [his] public image." McCain's campaign against Hayworth? "Tawdry, unseemly, yucky."

“Barnacle McCain” is the way one might characterize the senior senator from Arizona, now fused so ferociously to the tidal rocks of a fifth term that he will say pretty much anything, no matter how much the utterance is at odds with his older, saner positions, in order to secure his own reelection.

Why? In his post-2008 election malaise, he gave into the devil of all vices, insecurity. Varadarajan continues:

McCain has conducted himself like a sore and unpleasant loser since his defeat by Obama, without ever plumbing those Al Gore depths in the sore-loss stakes....He seems to have taken deeply personal offense at the loss, and it has weakened him to the point where Hayworth, a Tea Party caricature whom Palin cannot bring herself to support, has forced McCain to spend $20 million to defend his Senate seat. Insecurity is a very expensive vice.

Is it time for McCain throw his towel in? It's almost too late for him to turn back now. The perfect chance for him to retire with dignity was in the aftermath of Nov 4, 2008. Now, he will surely be reelected to a fifth term as U.S. Senator, which means his embarrassing last act will continue in the limelight for another six years.

I hope McCain peacefully eases into retirement before he hits the final scene of that final act of life--the last of his "seven ages," as Shakespeare would have it.

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages...

Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion;

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Poor McCain--no wonder Varadarajan feels sorry for him.

Haven't had time to read the ruling yet, but Judge Royce Lambeth of the DC District Court has blocked President Obama’s 2009 executive order that expanded embryonic stem cell research, on the grounds that it violated a ban on federal money being used to destroy embryos. The ruling is based on the Dickey-Wicker amendment that has been in every appropriations bill since 1996.

Sounds like a victory for the rule of law, not to mention respect for life. Is this another good issue to take into the midterm elections?

It's odd to come back to your own country after being away for a long time. It's been more than ten years since I lived here, and most of my visits home since then have been brief. When you get off the plane, things look so different from what your eye has become used to that you take it in a bit as you would a foreign country, with that same intense curiosity, the same hyper-awareness of the strangeness and newness of it.

At the same time, nothing could be more familiar and comforting and normal to me than America. In the deepest reaches of my unconscious, where the template for the world is set, this is what things are supposed to look like. This is especially true of my grandmother's neighborhood in Washington, D.C. She's lived in the same building since before I was born. Her apartment is the only uninterrupted, inhabited link to my childhood in the world. I'd swear it looks just the way it did when I was three years old, although they've shrunk it and it's all miniaturized now.

The first and main thing I notice is how easy everything is. The streets are empty; there's no traffic; anything you need or could ever need is right there in the convenience store, which is (as the name suggests), located in a place that is convenient, and everything is clean, orderly, and blessedly quiet--there is just no unnecessary noise.

The second thing I notice is a pair of elegant high-heeled black pumps sitting on the sidewalk right outside the Russian Embassy.

Now, this, I did not expect. Ricochet readers may recall that I had certain issues buying shoes in Istanbul prior to my departure. I eventually found some, but they weren't quite what I was looking for. I really just needed a pair of simple, black pumps that I could wear pretty much with anything--just your basic semi-formal women's footwear--but it wasn't quite the season for buying those in Istanbul, where the stores were only featuring end-of-season summer sandals and new-season contraptions inspired by the timeless elegance of high-rent Slavic hookers.

So I'm walking up past the Embassy (in tennis shoes), just to move a bit after the long flight; it's about ten p.m, and I see them on the sidewalk. Not one, but a pair, clearly not thrown off someone's feet in a haste but placed there, as if on display, just the kind of shoes I need, in perfect condition--new, I'd say--and from all appearances exactly my size. This is a street, mind you, with nothing else on it but trees and squirrels.

I give it a minute or two of perplexed cogitation, then dismiss the theory that God just left them there because he loves me and wants me to be happy. I'm a woman of faith, but I just don't think it works that way. I then dismiss the theory that American capitalism has become so advanced, so sensitive to demand, that Google has managed to achieve this through some algorithm it uses to monitor keywords I use on the Internet and by means of this place items I might wish to consume in front of me. No, no, I decide, America is convenient, but this is a little more convenient than even I can fully take in.

I'm tempted to try them on, but I think better of it--no you may not, I say to myself, they're not a gift from God. Someone left them there because her feet were hurting, she's unpacking groceries or something, she'll be back for them. (Not persuasive, I know, but you come up with a better explanation.)

An hour later, I come back, they're still there, untouched.

Right outside the Russian Embassy.

A signal to someone's handler?

An inscrutable protest against Vladimir Putin?

The last trace of a Russian diplomat's daughter who has just leapt the fence and eloped?

I guess I don't know my country as well as I thought. Does this sort of thing happen often? You guys have a better explanation?

I left them there, in the end. I just felt they were more important to the novel, whatever the novel is, than they would be on my feet.

Recently, the New York Times, which should know better, ran a puff piece on Andrew Cuomo so preposterous that I hope it may never be linked to again. The sense one gets from this plump profile is that Cuomo, who has openly coveted the governorship of New York and now likely will get it, is just the most squeaky-clean golden boy in the whole world. The Times should have referred back to its in-depth analysis, published this January, of Cuomo's heavy political and financial reliance on some of New York's most prominent real estate moguls.

Not that the Times learned the whole story -- or endeavored to publish it. As I reported this past spring, Cuomo's record as HUD's Clinton-era head and all-round boy wonder points way beyond mere shared responsibility for the near-total meltdown of the entire U.S. economy:

Though America’s financial fortunes suffered after Cuomo’s time at HUD, his own personal fortune soared. The bulk of this financial “windfall” came courtesy of Andrew Farkas, the billionaire real estate developer who helped Cuomo amass his wealth as a business partner and campaign fundraiser. Farkas — now Cuomo’s financial chairman as he circles the governorship — has personally given Cuomo at least $1.8 million in cash.

As New Yorkers are beginning to discover, Andrew Cuomo personifies the long reach of many at the top of the Democratic Party who built their fortunes on the mortgage bubble and the sub-prime collapse, but have yet to be tarred and feathered as architects of the nation’s worst housing crisis.

Cuomo’s heavy reliance on funds raised from big players in New York real estate, analyzed in detail by the New York Times this January, “hasn’t drawn much scrutiny yet, but it will,” said Blair Horner, legislative director at NYPIRG, the New York Public Interest Research Group, in an interview with Pajamas Media. “If and when he announces as a candidate for governor, because it’s obviously an issue that the public deserves to have explored.”

Notably, another recipient of largess while Cuomo was HUD secretary is current White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Clinton appointed Emanuel to the board of Freddie Mac while Cuomo headed HUD. Both Cuomo and Emanuel turned their privileged positions atop the nation’s mortgage finance system into opportunities for quickly amassing personal wealth, which they then leveraged into greater political power.

Thanks to Farkas, Cuomo’s current campaign war chest for governor is $18 million – big enough to eliminate primary competition before it starts. With a past already raising uncomfortable questions for Cuomo, Farkas is deeply embedded in controversial Middle East financial dealings, having created a “Fannie and Freddie for Dubai” in the United Arab Emirates. A quick wheeler-dealer, Farkas bailed out before the Emirate’s colossal credit crisis, and made a string of similarly well-timed deals with Dubai World in 2009, with whom he flipped marquee Manhattan properties. Just last week, Farkas raised eyebrows with his acquisition of Centerline Holding Company, which services over $110 billion in commercial mortgages.

“All of this stuff is fair game, so certainly Farkas’ relationship is going to be an issue,” Horner said. “If Cuomo runs for governor, I assume his relationship with Farkas is one of the obvious things that Lazio or whoever the Republican candidate is would bring up.” Horner pointed out that the issue is likely to arise “even if Cuomo has a Democratic primary.” “The public should hear what his response is,” he said.

In 2007, Horner was handpicked by Cuomo to create Project Daylight, Cuomo’s centerpiece online transparency initiative. Horner returned to NYPIRG as legislative director in 2008. Like “any other interest,” he said, real estate interests “give money under the theory that they get something in return. Whether or not they do, of course, is really the question. But they believe that it gets them at least access, and the question is, do they get that or even more? It’s a legitimate question, and it’s a legitimate question that all candidates have to face when you get big bucks from powerful interest groups.”

But when your name is Andrew Cuomo, you laugh in the face of legitimate questions. Actually, you stonewall them until the people annoying you with the prospect of the truth roll over and play dead:

Mr. Cuomo, whose tenure at HUD ended in early 2001, refused repeated requests to talk about his experience running the nation’s housing agency and how he wrestled with such policy questions. He gave no reason for his reticence. Instead, his staff issued a statement, and his former chief of staff at HUD, Howard B. Glaser, took the role of surrogate for the candidate.

All class. Say hello to your next Governor, New Yorkers. This man, to be perfectly blunt, stinks. He reeks. There is more than a little something abidingly fishy about Andrew Cuomo, in the way a dead fish wrapped in newspaper leaves an abidingly fishy smell in your mailbox. Before the campaign has even gotten underway, the Times is reduced to hiding a crumb of honesty in a blog post designed to ward off the maximum number of readers who chance upon its title: "A Wonk's Guide to Andrew M. Cuomo and HUD." Well, some of us are undeterred, folks:

There are, as ever, subtleties within subtleties here, and while Mr. Cuomo may not have played an outsize role in the crisis, he also seems not to have addressed some critical issues that fed the subprime mess. One area was the instrument known as the yield spread premium, which was essentially an incentive paid by banks to mortgage brokers to push up interest rates on mortgages.

There are so many subtleties, in fact, that only someone who has stuffed their head in a woolly sack could fail to grasp the obvious. Andrew Cuomo is a terminally self-entitled plutocrat with a habit of brazenly-yet-secretively leveraging public service to concentrate power and bloat his fortune. He is an arrogant, patronage-soaked cronymonger who has left a trail of scum across multiple continents, and he has as much business governing the state of New York as a prize crocodile. He is a living symbol of everything that is craven and wrong in America, and nobody seems capable of stopping him.

In his post about roadside memorials, I was glad to see Richard Epstein touch on a subject so close to my own heart. I'm fascinated by the variation of memorials from state to state, and I think the matter, because it seems trivial and apolitical enough to escape "serious" attention, is a great indicator of where the dead hand of standardization weighs most heavily, and where citizens still push back against it sentimentally.

In 2008, I tried to solicit responses from American Scene readers about their state's policies and practices, without much luck, so maybe it's worth trying again. Would any Ricochet members care to report on their states' roadside memorials? Are they -- like here in Virginia -- official-looking signs with a civic admonishment to drive carefully, or are they -- as in Wyoming -- lengths of rebar with stark sheet-metal crosses welded to them? How often do kitschy handmade memorials last before being removed? Is there any public or political controversy associated with them? Photographs are especially welcome.

John Gruber:

In a weekend WSJ interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Schmidt said:

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next. […] The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically.”

Nick Carr, quoting the above, quips:

I hope Google will also be able to tell me the best candidate to vote for in elections. I find that such a burden.

But Carr doesn’t even mention the oddest part of the WSJ interview:

[Schmidt] predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

I’ve been thinking about this since Saturday. Here’s my theory: the problem with Google is that Eric Schmidt is creepy. I think he’s a really weird dude. Recall, for example, this comment of Schmidt’s from 2009, regarding Google and privacy: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

The industry is filled with eccentric CEOs — billionaires who, say, wear a wardrobe that consists of nothing but identical black shirts and Levi’s 501 jeans, or who dress as a samurai warrior, including swords, at their home. But Schmidt doesn’t seem eccentric (or at least not merely so). He seems creepy.

Here’s a report by Jon Fortt for Fortune, regarding a talk Schmidt gave in March in Abu Dhabi:

In one of the sharper exchanges of the afternoon, a questioner challenged Schmidt with the fact that Google is collecting a staggering amount of information about who we are, what we’re thinking, and even where we are. “All this information that you have about us: where does it go? Who has access to that?” (Google servers and Google employees, under careful rules, Schmidt said.) “Does that scare everyone in this room?” The questioner asked, to applause. “Would you prefer someone else?” Schmidt shot back – to laughter and even greater applause. “Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?”

What can't that rhetoric be used to justify?

The Gulf Oil Spill, according to lots of sources, isn't quite the disaster we were all promised. From the Miami Herald, about Mississippi:

The best-case scenario for Mississippi and the region is that once BP's busted well is plugged, the warm waters and bacteria of the Gulf will dispose of the oil quickly, breaking it into its main components of carbon and water, and normal life and commerce on the Coast can resume.

Gov. Haley Barbour, and the chiefs of the state's two main environmental agencies — the Departments of Marine Resources and Environmental Quality — have proposed that this natural cleanup, along with some relatively minor scouring of tar off the beaches by BP workers, can be handled in a matter of weeks or a few months, not years.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

even for those who use past experience to foresee the Gulf's recovery, it's a cautious optimism.

"There's going to be a big damage-assessment study of this spill over the next 10 years," says LSU's Overton. "But if my assessment is close to right, it means our environment will come back fairly quickly and people's lifestyles will not be wiped out, that they'll be able to make a living off the northern Gulf and enjoy the recreational benefits of this body of water. We'll have to see."

So what's been the biggest damage? Looks like tourism. In a great column by Paul Mulshine from the Newark Star-Ledger:

A simple apology would have been in order.

I’m talking about President Obama’s visit to the Gulf Coast over the weekend. Obama was a co-conspirator in the effort to hype the BP oil disaster out of all proportion. The effects of that spill were supposed to linger for years. But it’s already gone without a trace, or at least a trace visible to me as I visited the coast in two states...

There was not the slightest indication the Gulf has just gone through what the president termed “the greatest environmental disaster in American history.”

Far more economic damage was done by the alarmism than by the oil, several merchants told me. At a surf shop called Blonde John’s, owner John McElroy, who was appropriately blonde, blamed the media for driving the tourists away.

“The media sacrificed us, man,” McElroy said. “Everybody wants to focus on the negative. We only had one bad week of it.”

And then there's this, from Time Magazine. Brace yourself:

The obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh has been a rare voice arguing that the spill — he calls it "the leak" — is anything less than an ecological calamity, scoffing at the avalanche of end-is-nigh eco-hype.

Well, Limbaugh has a point.

Limbaugh has a point? For Time Magazine, that's close to an unconditional surrender.

Richard is right on a universe of issues here. It is a target rich environment. Let me add a few points, beyond noting that the problem of collusion between parties in litigation is an equally big problem when it comes to class actions against the government, where plaintiffs sue school districts, claiming insufficient resources, they settle, a court blesses it, all with the aim taking money from the state to fund their institutions without going through the normal budgetary process. Another reason why several states are being run into the fiscal ground.

But I digress. A few additional thoughts.

1. If Judge Walker thinks that the Prop 8 defenders have no standing to appeal, he should not have found that they had a sufficient "interest" to intervene at trial, and certainly not to do anything so important as serve as the main defenders of the law in a federal court. If the pro-Prop 8 parties are the wrong appellants, then they were the wrong defendants. If Walker was wrong on this, he could be reversed and the case sent back to his courtroom, where the state could change its mind -- this would be after the November elections -- and put on a defense. This could be another example where Walker over-extended himself and gives the appeals court the ground to reverse. If Republicans win either the Governor's or Attorney General's elections, and Walker is reversed on this point on appeal, they could then come in and defend.

2. The CA governor's election could interact in significant ways with the Prop 8 case. The reason Walker can make this standing call is because neither Schwarzenegger nor Jerry Brown (as attorney general) will defend the law in court. It is difficult to see how this is consistent with Brown's duty under the California constitution to enforce the law. He could claim, as did San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, that he has a higher duty to the U.S. Constitution. U.S. Solicitors General sometimes face this question when they defend a federal law before the Supreme Court, but they will almost always defend the law even if its constitutionality is doubtful (they usually require the law to be obviously unconstitutional if they won't defend). But there is a provision in the California constitution which requires state officials to defend the law unless an appellate court has held it unconstitutional. It was on this ground that the California Supreme Court reversed Newsom's policy to allow gay marriages. So Whitman could argue, regardless of anyone's position on gay marriage, that Jerry Brown isn't even doing the job he has, not to mention the one that he wants next. At the very least, Brown should explain why he thinks gay marriage is so obviously required by the U.S. Constitution.

3. The whole point of the initiative, thanks to its progressive progenitors, is to enact legislation when the government is captured by special interests that are blocking reform. So it is likely that cases would arise where elected officials would refuse to defend initiatives. Suppose, for example, that an initiative called for caps on government salaries and pensions or term limits -- officials out of their self interest might not want to defend the law. California law, I believe, permits the groups that gathered the signatures and campaigned for an initiative to defend it. They might actually be the groups that are "injured in fact" within conventional standing analysis, rather than the state officials. The main concerns of standing are, as Richard says, to make sure that the parties are actually harmed and have an interest in pursuing the case robustly, to make sure that it is a real controversy and not a hypothetical question, and to make sure that the courts do not become roving inspectors general simply called on to nitpick on every government decision. Here, no one doubts that the plaintiffs have standing, so these concerns are not at issue when it is the defendants who are appealing.

Seven weeks ago, I reported on Heritage Action for America's effort to convince House members to sign onto a discharge petition forcing a floor vote to repeal the entire tottering edifice that is Obamacare.

How are we doing?

96 percent of House Republicans have signed Discharge Petition #11. Yet, not one Democrat has done so, including the 34 Dems who voted against Obamacare's passage. Heritage Action CEO Mike Needham comments in the Daily Caller:

There are two explanations as to why no Democrats have signed the discharge petition. They may have genuinely changed their mind on the merits of Obamacare and now support the law. If this is the case, they owe it to their constituents to say so and explain what new information caused them to change their position.

Alternatively, they have always supported Obamacare, but publicly opposed the measure to avoid political pain. Now, they are afraid of having another health care debate as they are aware the American people overwhelmingly oppose Obamacare. This means that they are implicitly endorsing the government’s takeover of the health care industry – 1/6th of the United States economy – which they claim to oppose. This scenario is why so many Americans are cynical about Washington.

Seems like the "Blue Dog" should be renamed the "Chameleon." It's good to have a bright-line difference between the two parties again.

Wow, it's good to be home.

"In its order for an expedited appeal," Elizabeth Wurtzel notes, "the Ninth Circuit panel has asked the proponents of Proposition 8 to brief them on the issue of standing in their arguments." Earlier in the same article, she suggests that the "appeal of Judge Walker’s decision may be defeated before the issues are even examined—it might be dismissed for lack of standing—and the litigation may simply end in California."

The levels of irony in this standing issue are so numerous that it is difficult to sort them out. The usual view on standing is that with respect to discrete injuries to particular persons, only those persons can sue, not others who wish to vindicate some abstract claim. The textbook case is that if A assaults B, C cannot bring suit for that harm because we know who should have control over the case.

The difficulties with standing (all of which are a function of unwise constitutional interpretation) have applied that same requirement for discrete injury in cases where there are no discrete injuries, ie taxpayer suits against illegal action, where it leads to the odd result that massive structural harms are not within the power of the court to redress. The usual rationale for this is that no one has sufficient interest to maintain these suits, which therefore will be poorly prosecuted, which seems just absurd in cases like the present where the emotional and symbolic content are both so high.

At this point, the standard application of the rules says that for the purposes of appeal only those who were parties to the original case may sue, and that means that the amicus parties who defended the statute when the state took over cannot sue under these rules.

But this rule presupposes that the actual party in interest is not in league with the party on the opposite side. Clearly someone should be allowed to appeal, and I think that one of two approaches are relevant. First, the state files the appeal and announces that it will allow to be pursued by the same parties who did the trial. If that accommodation worked at one level, it should work at the second. Alternatively, Judge Walker should on a nunc pro tunc (now for then) basis make the defenders of Prop 8 parties to the litigation so that they should be able to bring the appeal. What is unconscionable is to allow collusive action by parties on opposite sides of the litigation to block and appeal when there is no honest settlement of the underlying differences.

Last week I sat down for an Uncommon Knowledge interview with Peter Robinson during which he asked what possessed me to become a Republican in 1968, when the South was still solidly Democratic.

My oldest brother came home from the Army a Goldwater Republican in 1965, and in spring of 1968, he ran for mayor of Yazoo City, Mississippi. He quit his job at the bank, and because the Republicans didn’t even have a line on the ballot, he had to run as an Independent. We had to get a petition going so that he could make it on the ballot. I thoroughly enjoyed that experience, so I dropped out of Ole Miss the fall of my senior year to go work on the Nixon presidential campaign.

To be a Republican in Mississippi in 1968, you really had to take a long view! The first time I ever saw a poll was during the 1968 campaign. That year, six percent of Mississippians identified themselves as Republicans – six percent! Nixon didn’t do well in Mississippi that year because George Wallace, the third party candidate, was hugely popular in the South. But by the 1972 elections, Mississippi represented the state with the highest percentage of its vote going to Nixon. More importantly, the 1972 elections resulted in the election of two young Republican Congressmen: Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, who both became giants in the Senate. Today, we not only have a Republican governor, but seven of our eight state elected officials are Republicans, as are both of our United States Senators.

After interviewing Haley Barbour for Uncommon Knowledge last Friday, I joined him for 90 minutes of freewheeling conversation with a few Hoover fellows, including former Secretary of State George Shultz. (Mr. Shultz is also a former Secretary of the Treasury, a former Secretary of Labor, and a former Director of the Office of Management and the Budget. If anyone else has ever occupied four Cabinet positions, I’m unaware of him.) Gov. Barbour laid out his expectations for November—in brief, Republicans will win, big—then allowed that his chief worry now concerns the two-and-three-quarters months between election day this November and the day in January when the new members of Congress will take their oaths of office.

“The Democrats’ll call a special session,” Gov. Barbour said—I’m quoting him from memory. “And they’re going to pass their whole doggoned wish list, including card check, and send the legislation down to the White House. The President’ll be standing by with the cap already off his signature pen.”

For Democrats in Congress, everyone agreed, there would be little to lose. The leadership—Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman, to name two—represent safe seats. Their constituents will re-elect them in 2012 no matter how thoroughly they undermine the Republic in the meantime. Others—perhaps, with any luck, Harry Reid—will already have lost their seats. Voting for the rest of the liberal agenda will enable to them to feel righteous and defiant while costing them nothing. But for the President? What sense could it possibly make for Barack Obama to sign a raft of liberal legislation, several of us asked, when he’ll be facing re-election in two years?

“Mr. Obama,” Gov. Barbour replied, “is a true believer.”

Shelby Steele concurred. (Dr. Steele has been engaged in a close study of Barack Obama ever since he began research for his 2008 book about Obama, A Bound Man.) “Barack has said he wants to be transformational. My sense is that he’d rather sign liberal bills into law than serve a second term.”

I spent the weekend having a lot of trouble getting used to that thought. Then today, nosing around on the Internet, I found this. Jeepers. For the last six months, Rob has been trying to tell us that Hillary Clinton will resign as Secretary of State to challenge Obama for the 2012 Democratic nomination, and for the last six months I’ve been telling Rob that he’s crazy. Maybe we’re both wrong. Maybe Obama will give Hillary the nomination.

Barack Obama, a one-term president—by his own choice?

What think?

It can't be said enough: when taxes are cut, money isn't being 'given' to anyone. Money isn't 'going back' to anyone. It's not being returned. It's staying with those whose property it is. In a world where commentators with national platforms continue to write as if all property is the state's, that's a point that fans of liberty ought not be afraid to make again and again.

(via Tim Carney)

When the workers own the means of production, as the saying goes, a magnificent workers' paradise will unfold.

Depending on whom you ask, the United Auto Workers union owns about 39% of General Motors. That, coupled with the Obama administration's stake of about 50%, gives it a major voice in the direction of the company.

A glorious day for the working man, right? Not so fast. From the truly wonderful World Socialist Web Site:

Workers at a General Motors stamping plant in Indianapolis, Indiana chased United Auto Workers executives out of a union meeting Sunday, after the UAW demanded workers accept a contract that would cut their wages in half.As soon as three UAW International representatives took the podium, they were met with boos and shouts of opposition from many of the 631 workers currently employed at the plant. The officials, attempting to speak at the only informational meeting on the proposed contract changes, were forced out within minutes of taking the floor.The incident once again exposes the immense class divide between workers and union officials, who are working actively with the auto companies to drive down wages and eliminate benefits.

On the one hand, it's deliciously fun to watch the UAW fatcats get it from their own rank and file, and have to learn that running a company and creating shareholder value is what it's all about. But on the other hand....

No, wait. There isn't an other hand. It's just fun, and that's that.

Just got back from a family vacation, and that meant taking the interstate. That's what a Dad does: load everyone in the back, pack the trunk, gas up, find the onramp and cruise uninterrupted until kidneys do their work or stomachs growl - then pull off, get gas, slake needs, void bladders, and blam! Back on the road. It gets you there, and sometimes the scenery's nice; half the time you're dealing with a driver who can't judge speed and distance, and doesn't realize you are, in fact, in process of passing someone else, you're just not going to go all Craig Breedlove to do it. You have tailgaters, left-lane prissy-pokers who are doing the speed limit, thank you, and have no interest in letting you driving one MPH faster than you should. It's a great American achievement, the interstate highway system. I avoid it if I can.

I'd rather take the old highways. They don't skirt small towns, they plow right through them. You stop at a light, you see things. You add an hour to your trip, but you learn about where you've been. Taking the interstate is almost like flying. Almost: you could pull off on any exit if you like, slow down, find a town, poke around, look at the old buildings, wonder about the names up on the crumbling brick cornices, imagine the main street on Decoration Day when everyone turned out for the parade. But you don't. Keep going, the Interstate says. It’s about arrival, not travel.

My father has driven enormous trucks for many years - 83, and he can still parallel-park a double tanker, and yes, he has his license - so he doesn't quite get the allure of the back roads. For him the constant thrum of the flat straight road is a Zen joy. Maybe after a few hours he'd turn on Willie's Place channel on the satellite radio. He sees these trips in terms I'm sure Dave Carter knows: the amateur reads the road in intervals of hours, the pro paces himself differently, thinks in terms of states. Eight hours for a civilian is a long, long drive, but I imagine the professional rig-wrangler thinks we'd all be content to spend eight hours sitting at our desk, and where are when when the work day's done? Same damned place.

Maybe it’s because I’m older. Everyone who took a long spontaneous road trip in college knows the gypsy joy you feel when you pull off the road at the end of the day at some all-night joint where the sign buzzes high ahead, the traffic hums in the distance, and you know when you walk inside there will be the smell of french fries and coffee, and there will be guys at the counter with their hands folded as if in prayer, with a cigarette idling between the knuckles.

Or so it was when I did the long drives. As I said, now it's back roads if possible. But on yesterday's interstate jaunt, I noted two things:

1. The number of trucks with patriotic themes - bumperstickers, elaborate paintings of Mt. Rushmore, eagles, flags. LAND THAT WE LOVE said one, splashed on the cab. One reefer had a Bible verse on the back, telling us to do everything we do with love. I hate to presume about the politics of the driver, but I'd guess they're not the sort if favor of cap and trade.

2. Saw a sign that told me a construction project was funded by the Recovery Act. Hey, great. But who funded it before? The Magic Concrete Fairies? Taxpayers, of course. They don't get a sign. But when we need to be reminded that the Special Extra Life-Enhancing All-Solving Stimulus had a hand, well, up go the blaze-orange announcements.

Finally: we made one stop to use restroom, and didn't need any gas or anything else. I bought some peanuts. It's one of those things you learn when your family's in the business. You walk into their store, you use their bathroom, their water, their soap, their towels - then you walk past the inventory, which is usually about $100K worth of stuff they have to carry in case you want Pop Tarts and a comb? Shake loose a buck to say thanks.

One of the left's best tricks, in my opinion - and one the right falls for again and again - is demonizing perfectly reasonable actions and opinions by giving them sinister names. A good example is the feminist complaint that men "objectify women," when they admire their beauty. This didn't catch on over the long term for the same reason coffee health scares never catch on - because no one's going to give it up. A more successful example is "racial profiling." I'm sorry, but if crimes of some kind are primarily being committed by a certain race, the proper name for "racial profiling," is "good police work."

But the most dangerous one on the market right now--being bruited about especially in the Ground Zero Mosque affair--is "Islamophobia." The dictionary defines "phobia" as an irrational fear. There is nothing irrational about being afraid of a religion currently cancerous with violence, bigotry and triumphalism. Instead of trying to defend ourselves against the charge, we ought to challenge the phrase itself wherever it occurs. It's not a condemnation of all Muslims to say that Islam has a major problem adjusting to a world of liberty and multi-culturalism. It's just the simple truth.

Remember back in June, when China revalued its currency? It was hailed as a subtle victory for the Obama administration, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner especially.

Americans have long been obsessed with the dollar-renminbi (RMB) rate of exchange. The strong RMB -- propped up by Chinese government support -- is blamed for our lousy trade deficit with China, a failing American industrial and manufacturing economy, and pretty much every other economic problem we can find.

Not so fast, says Yiannis Mostrous in InvestingDaily:

On the political front the protectionists in the US can declare victory even though they know that, economically, their arguments about the RMB and its impact on the US economy are shaky at best. Recall, for instance, that from 2000 to 2004, when Chinese export prices were falling by around 1 percent a year, inflation in the US for corresponding goods (i.e. apparel, personal care products, sporting goods, toys and audio/video products) was also falling by 1.2 percent. But when Chinese export prices started rising between 2005 and 2008, at a rate of around 3 percent year over year, the corresponding inflation in the US fell around 0.7 percent.

This may sound trivial. But although China exports represent around 60 percent of these goods in the US, the domestic situation in that country doesn’t have any real impact on the US economy--at least not a negative one. The reason, of course, is that more than 70 percent of the final prices US consumers pay for these products is attributable to costs associated with shipping, advertising, rents, profits margins, sale costs and the like. Chinese producers have no material cost contribution to speak of.

It doesn’t matter how much wages will rise in China, or how much stronger the RMB will be in the next five years. The big costs are to be found after the products leave the Chinese factories, and therefore the eventual “haircut” will need to take place in the US in terms of money charged for services once the goods reach the US coasts.

And in any case, it doesn't look like the Chinese were serious about revaluing their currency. The RMB has actually fallen since June. And the timing couldn't be worse.

Writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in The Telegraph:

Tension between the US and China is escalating on several fronts. China has restricted exports of rare earth minerals by more than 70pc in the second half of this year, cutting off the world supply. China produces 97pc of these minerals, used in a wide range of high-tech industries, from hybrid engines to computers, mobile phones, radar, navigation and precision-guided weapons.

The US is to conduct naval manoeuvres with Vietnam in the South China Sea in response to live fire exercises by China, which has stepped up its claims to total sovereignty over a region disputed by a ring of countries. The US is also conducting manoeuvres with South Korea, prompting accusations of "gunboat diplomacy" in the Chinese media.

In a trade and currency and saber-rattling war between the United States and China, who do you think is going to win? Can you say duí bu qï?

It's simple, really, and the writers at Mad Men are by a long shot not the first to put it to words. War can't go on forever, and neither can peace, and the great balancing act is a peace that doesn't soften too much, but has mellowed well enough -- ripened -- so as to be round and full, not bitter and hard. Because this is still a show (at least in part) about men, I can't resist putting the paradox of peace into masculine terms. How does a man fight well? What does it mean to fight well? Not in a battle or even an army, but as a man who must earn a living, a man who is (or was, at least) a head of household? What is the peace dividend? Retirement? That can't be right.

It isn't the same question as happiness, which is a state of mind. Peace is I suppose something susceptible of being called a state of mind, too, but peace is physical in a way happiness isn't. Peace is not the absence of war, but if the absence of war or violence and turmoil isn't sufficient for peace, it sure seems necessary. One can be happy at war or at peace. One can be bored at war or at peace. The paradox of peace is that you want your peace to outlast you, even though, when it becomes someone else's, it has to stop being yours alone. Historical memory -- the Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, 9/11, on and on -- is a great and powerful thing. But the physical facts of peace make the gravity of war unreal. Last year I walked down a hallway by the food court in Georgetown and Undergrad A said to Undergrad B "I don't even know why we celebrate Armistice Day. World War One was like a million years ago." (+1 for knowing what Armistice Day means, -1 for saying 'celebrate'.) It's like macaroni salad: how long can it keep in the sun? How can a catastrophe live on in a culture as a potted plant?

Teaching the facts is important, but teaching the facts won't do. There must be a deep, deep fabric woven from wartime past out and into peacetime, person to person, generation to generation, even when those who knew firsthand and so didn't have to remember feel very much like not sharing. But maybe above all a culture has to reserve in peaceful times a poetic sense of war. Eyes must light up when these things are told, even in spite of the horror. The imagination must be seized. Tonight, as the rival exec spontaneously performed the motorcycle ad he pitched his colleagues, we saw the way advertising had come to seize imaginations: commerce became our muse, and products our window onto poetry. How can a peace be a -- well, manly peace, if war stories fail to catch that same sparkle and gleam?

Yet we don't want to be bloodthirsty, and we're not a nation of aggressors. And man by man we still incline more toward fatherhood as the house of manliness than combative bachelorhood. Which is why fighting for freedom helps, a bit, to unravel the paradox of peace. What keeps the gleam in the American eye is not that we fight but why.

If your state is like mine, local National Educational Association apparatchiks frame every public school discussion in terms of inputs: the amount of tax money being doled out for public school instruction on a per pupil basis. Everyone outside of New York – the funding “winner” at $17,173 per head in 2008 – is lectured endlessly about how underfunded the local schools are relative to, well, New York.

But where does the money actually go?

Tonight, Matt Drudge is highlighting one project soaking up some of the educational loose change rattling around my bankrupt state: Next month’s opening in LA of the nation’s costliest school, a $578 million state-of-the-art structure housing 1,700 K through 12 students.

Let’s analyze the economics using the NEA’s preferred formula. $578 million divided by 1,700 students yields a cool $340,000 per student. Ah, but I’m being unfair since many students will use the facility over time. Fine. Let’s assume that the structure survives twenty years of wear-and-tear without a dime of taxpayer-funded repair or renovation. The adjusted cost per pupil per year drops to a New York-style $17,000. But this “investment” covers only the empty building. Anything educational is extra.

And the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools isn't exactly a one-off for the teacher-firing, class-size-increasing LA Unified School District.

The RFK complex follows on the heels of two other LA schools among the nation's costliest — the $377 million Edward R. Roybal Learning Center, which opened in 2008, and the $232 million Visual and Performing Arts High School that debuted in 2009.

The pricey schools have come during a sensitive period for the nation's second-largest school system: Nearly 3,000 teachers have been laid off over the past two years, the academic year and programs have been slashed. The district also faces a $640 million shortfall and some schools persistently rank among the nation's lowest performing.

It is evident that public school outputs in California are poor -- only 63 percent of high school students graduate, despite the gold-plated buildings. Nevertheless, the NEA argues that $9,863 per pupil per year is too little to afford more than a Zimbabwe-level education.

Basic arithmetic points to a serious flaw in the "aren't we stingy" argument. Twenty students carry $197,000 in annual spending into an average California classroom. Since their teacher earned approximately $64,424 in 2007, this leaves only $133,000 for rent, supplies and administrative support. You’ve gotta love a business that can’t get by on a 66 percent overhead rate.

Why can't school officials eschew real estate development, cut overhead, fund academic programs and hire great teachers? Why can't most of the line items in California's monstrous education budget be zeroed out in favor of per pupil block grants to principals and local school boards?

My head hurts.

Yesterday the high school football team held its first scrimmage. I sat in the stands with friends—right next to Pitch and just in front of Ellie, and all three of our boys had been in school together since kindergarten. The sky was cloudless, with that particular look of pale, glowing luminescence specific, in my experience, to California. My son? After a summer during which he had worked out twice a day, dropping ten pounds, taking an eighth of a second off his time in the forty, and adding five inches to his vertical jump, my son was looking pretty good out there. I don’t know why—maybe because I’d overheard someone describe the weather as “paradise”—but for a moment my mind engaged in a brief speculation about heaven. And do you know what I discovered? That I couldn’t imagine—literally, I simply could not imagine—any way in which heaven could improve on that very moment.

The thought has no bearing on politics, history, or culture. I know. But every so often—and particularly on the last real summer weekend (school starts on Tuesday) there’s no harm in pausing to note the sweetness of American life.

A moment ago, come to think of it, Bill McGurn and I exchanged emails. Returning by train to New Jersey after a family vacation in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Bill was in much the same mood I’m in. “Very old-fashioned,” Bill wrote. “Hardly spent any money, save for a game of putt-putt one day and a few ice creams. Just a lot of beach time….I do like going out at the end of the day and enjoying the waning sun.”

If anyone else is in the mood to offer a postcard, so to speak, from the summer of 2010, I'm sure in the mood to read it.

So I’m watching Aftermath: Population Zero on the National Geographic Channel Sunday afternoon (okay, so my life isn’t all that exciting), which asks the question: what would happen if the entire human race simply vanished one day? Well, it turns out things would be pretty rough on domesticated animals and on the ecosystem as a whole, primarily as the result of nuclear plants around the world exploding and releasing radiation without man to, uh, man them.

Happily, though, the earth would heal quickly, plantlife would flourish without the pollution we nasty humans create, and there would be a heaven on earth. So there we have the problem. It’s us. The sooner we leave the better. I commend the good folks at the National Geographic Channel for their willingness to celebrate a world in which their ratings would take a severe hit.

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The Bill of Rights, 2010 Style