Obama Goes for Joe-mentum

Jim Geraghty has 23 statements from Joe Biden that he probably wants to take back. I'm shocked it's only 23. Credit Geraghty with this line as well...

I'm reminded of a Rudy Giuliani response when Biden took a shot at him — "Joe's a good guy, we all criticize each other during this time... But for Joe Biden to talk about qualifications — he's never run a city, he's never run a state, he's never run a business."

That statement is true for both men on the Democratic ticket.

Two Senators together on the ticket. Obama's really hoping this ends up like 1960. Hope Richard Daley knows how to steal votes in Florida and Ohio.

Better Tax Policy?

I don't agree with everything Megan McArdle says here, but it's a very well-written explanation of why narrowing the tax base and raising rates at the higher end isn't a good idea...

High taxes on a narrow base are about the opposite of optimal tax theory. This is not because economists are mean, cruel people who are primarily interested in serving their corporate overlords, but rather because the narrower the base, and the higher the rates, the more sharply the marginal returns to rate increases diminish.

Take an extreme example. The top 1% of households, about 1 million in all, have about 20% of national income. They've also experienced most of the income gains in the last twenty years. So let's say we want to fund federal operations entirely out of their pockets. Well, to do so, we'd need an income tax rate of 100%. Even ardent liberals will surely concede that at these levels, the supply-siders are right, and we'll soon end up with no tax base.

Even a less extreme example--make them pay half the tax burden--ends up with a 50% effective rate on high earners. And to get a 50% effective rate, you need an even higher marginal rate. The problem for people who want to load tax increases on these people while cutting taxes for everyone else is that if you actually succeed in shifting the tax burden this way, you'll rapidly end up on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve.

But Megan, I hear you cry, don't you spend all this time saying that the supply siders are wrong about the Laffer Curve? Well yes. But they're not wrong that the Laffer Curve exists; it's practically a tautology. You collect no revenue if tax rates are 0%, and no revenue if they're 100%, because people won't work. The curve must maximize somwhere in between. Where supply-siders go wrong is in claiming that we're to the right of that maxima, where cutting tax rates actually raises revenue. Empirical evidence indicates that we're still on the left. But that doesn't mean we can't end up on the right, if we screw up our tax policy.

Barack Obama's tax plans probably won't put us there, even with the partial lifting of the payroll tax cap. But Barack Obama's plans do nothing to close the really fairly gargantuan deficit we're staring down--he wants to use the money to fund new spending. (And also, to fund his tax cuts for other people, which is sort of a problem; like most politicians running for office, he seems to be planning to spend the same tax increase several times over.) We've got an enormous budget gap coming down the pike in the really not-very-distant future. And the next round of tax hikes, if confined to the rich, will almost certainly put us on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve--you're talking tax rates on them of 60% or more. Rich people have the most discretion over their incomes, the most room to cut back and consume more leisure instead of work. Not everyone will--I doubt the president of GM will decide to take up golf instead. But on the margin, some will, or they'll shift their income to more tax advantaged forms, or places. If we try to concentrate all our taxation on the rich, we will quickly reach the limits of our ability to tax.

I don't know for certain where we stand on the Laffer Curve today. I doubt anyone does, although Megan seems to indicate there's empirical evidence that we're on the left-hand side right now. But I think this is a well-written explanation of why supply-siders think higher taxes can and do lead to lower revenues, and why the Democrats' game of "soak the rich" is a bad idea. I also have to note this comment in the thread:

Regardless of whether we are to the right or the left of the Laffer curve, taxing people at effective rates that will approach 50% of annual income (as in Obama's proposals) is simply wrong and profoundly unfair. No one should be forced at the point of a gun to pay half of their income to the "common good" - especially since the "common good" is defined by a gaggle of self-interested and often corrupt politicians who are primarily interested getting into and staying in office. This is my biggest problem with Obama - he seems intent on robbing Peter to buy Paul's vote.

What we really need is a flat tax, no deductions. Taking taxation out of the policy toolkit would go a long way toward improving our system of government.

I generally find arguments made on fairness grounds useless. However, the commenter's right that there is a line at which the question needs to be asked -- how much money out of one's earnings should go to government? Unfortunately, the answer is a value judgment for each person and will differ, and will also be incredibly dependent on whatever public policy goals we intend government to accomplish. I'd argue that the empirical number produced by the Laffer Curve may or may not produce the best result, but it's probably as good as we can get in the absence of the ability to have a mature debate about what our tax system is intended to do.

Whew. This is too much for a Friday afternoon. Let's get back to Rick Astley for VP.

The Nominee is...

Best Obama VP prediction goes to these guys (hat tip: Instapundit).

My prediction -- no matter who he picks, the mainstream press will swoon over the guy like he's the perfect choice.

Random Movie Quote of the Day

Like all American males, I love being able to quote ad nauseum from popular movies. I figured I should share whenever a random quote pops into my head.

Chris Farley's career ended far too soon. We were discussing something at lunch today, and it reminded me of Farley's fantastic performance in Tommy Boy, which stands out as an underrated 1990's comedy classic. Here's one of my favorite quotes...

Tommy: Let's think about this for a sec, Ted, why would somebody put a guarantee on a box? Hmmm, very interesting.

Ted Nelson: Go on, I'm listening.

Tommy: Here's the way I see it, Ted. Guy puts a fancy guarantee on a box 'cause he wants you to fell all warm and toasty inside.

Ted Nelson: Yeah, makes a man feel good.

Tommy: 'Course it does. Why shouldn't it? Ya figure you put that little box under your pillow at night, the Guarantee Fairy might come by and leave a quarter, am I right, Ted?

Ted: What's your point?

Tommy: The point is, how do you know the fairy isn't a crazy glue sniffer? "Build model airplanes" says the little fairy; well, we're not buying it. He sneaks into your house once, that's all it takes. The next thing you know, there's money missing off the dresser, and your daughter's knocked up. I seen it a hundred times.

Ted: But why do they put a guarantee on the box?

Tommy: Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is, isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your customer's sake, for your daughter's sake, you might want to think about buying a quality product from me.

This has been your random Movie Quote of the Day.

What Annoying Song is Stuck in My Head Today?

If I need to suffer with a song stuck in my head, why shouldn't you have to do the same? Sometimes they're good, most times they're bad... but no matter what, they make you suffer. So I like to share the suffering whenever it happens.

Again, having children introduces you to a whole new realm of annoying songs. As I noted previously, the Barenaked Ladies have a kids album out, and this song is one of my daughter's favorites. Yes, one-year olds have favorite songs -- they're the ones that get them to start dancing and smiling. And trust me -- you'll put up with an annoying song if it gets your child laughing.

Here's "7 8 9"...

Together at Last

Loyal reader KS sends us the drink that would accompany the meatcake...

Since my home bar was among the things I had to leave behind when I moved from Virginia, I’m limited in my cocktail blogging right now. But since bacon and bourbon are two Agitator favorites, I thought a post about how to deliciously combine the two was the least I could offer. (Why would you want to put bacon in your bourbon? If you have to ask, this isn’t the post for you.)

I'm guessing the Lord of Truth will be trying this over the weekend. Part of me is reminded of this moment from the Simpsons...

Lisa: (seated at kitchen table) "It's awful being a kid. No one listens to you."
Grandpa Simpson: (also seated) "It's rotten being old. No one listens to you."
Homer: (walking in to kitchen) "I'm a white male, age 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me -- no matter how dumb my suggestions are." (reaches into cabinet and pulls out a mixture labelled "Nuts and Gum: Together at Last!")

I'm sure bacon and bourbon work better.

Oh, Wait, He is a Friend

You have to love the L.A. Times' blog coverage of the slowly developing story involving the "Chicago Annenberg Challenge", the non-profit project where young Barack Obama worked with (alleged) terrorist William Ayers...

These annoying journalists are at it again, trying to poke around into papers in the background of candidates' lives. This time it involves freshman Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, his friend and former radical activist William Ayers and the University of Illinois.

The university has refused to release records related to the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's past service for a nonprofit educational project that put him in contact with activist Ayers, a 1960s-era radical who helped found an organization advocating violence for political change.

...The university's Chicago campus maintains that the donor of the records that document the work of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge has not officially handed over ownership rights and, therefore, the school cannot open the documents to public inspection.

The university says it is "aggressively pursuing" an agreement with the donor, and as soon as an agreement is reached, the collection will be made accessible to the public.

The university has not identified the donor and not indicated if the opening would occur before the Nov. 4 presidential election.

...The conservative National Review this week posted an article online saying the institution had initially deemed the records open to inspection, but the university subsequently reversed its position. Tuesday, the university said that there had been a misunderstanding.

Ayers is an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In his youth, he co-founded the Weatherman organization, later known as the Weather Underground Organization, which espoused violence in the pursuit of political change.
Obama has acknowledged knowing Ayers but says he can't be held responsible for everything every friend did in their life. Our colleague Mark Silva has more on this unfolding story over at the Swamp.

I think the Times is trying to be sarcastic about the "annoying journalists" point. But their decision to soft-peddle Ayers' terrorist past is ridiculous. As I have noted in the past, he did more than simply found the group. He planted bombs, for crying out loud. And while he was founding his terrorist organization and blowing up things, John McCain was a POW being tortured and refusing early release. That's not a distinction the Obama campaign wants to have out there. I don't think Obama needs to be held responsible for everything Ayers did, but it would be much better to hear that he's ashamed of being associated in any way with an unrepentant terrorist. Take a look at the picture the L.A. Times posts with its' blog post -- the guy is standing on the American flag. That's not someone I would want as a friend, particularly if I'm running for President.

Tom Maguire has some more links, including to this article by John Kass at the Chicago Tribune, who tells us this is all about Chicago politics...

Conservative writer Stanley Kurtz—researching an article for the National Review about connections between Barack Obama and former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers—made a big mistake.

The poor man took a wrong turn on the Chicago Way. Now he's lost.

Kurtz's research was to be done in a special library run by the University of Illinois at Chicago. The library has 132 boxes full of documents pertaining to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation vested heavily in school reform.

...First the librarians told Kurtz yes, come look. But by the time Kurtz landed in Chicago, the librarians changed their minds. The donor of the documents hadn't cleared his research. Perhaps they'll let him look at the documents on Nov. 5.

..."This is a public entity," Kurtz told us Wednesday. "I don't understand how confidentiality of the donor would be an issue."

You don't understand, Mr. Kurtz? Allow me to explain. The secret is hidden in the name of the library:

The Richard J. Daley Library.

Eureka!

The Richard J. Daley Library doesn't want nobody nobody sent. And Richard J.'s son, Shortshanks, is now the mayor.

...The Tribune's City Hall reporter, Dan Mihalopoulos, asked Daley on Wednesday if the Richard J. Daley Library should release the documents. Shortshanks didn't like that one. He kept insisting he would be "very frank," a phrase that makes the needles on a polygraph start jumping.

"Bill Ayers—I've said this—his father was a great friend of my father," the mayor said. "I'll be very frank. Vietnam divided families, divided people. It was a terrible time of our country. People didn't know one another. Since then, I'll be very frank, [Ayers] has been in the forefront of a lot of education issues and helping us in public schools and things like that."

The mayor expressed his frustrations with outside agitators like Kurtz.

"People keep trying to align himself with Barack Obama," Daley said. "It's really unfortunate. They're friends. So what? People do make mistakes in the past. You move on. This is a new century, a new time. He reflects back and he's been making a strong contribution to our community."

Hey, if Daley wants to say they're friends, maybe that should be enough -- Obama has a friend who's an unrepentant former (alleged) terrorist. I don't need more.

Even if Kurtz wants more, he may not find much in those boxes. As Instapundit noted:

I caution those who are excited about getting into the archives, though: It probably won't happen, and by now I'm sure that the files have been vacuumed of any seriously embarrassing matter anyway. This is Chicago.

Maybe Obama is more like Kennedy than I thought -- he might end up owing his Presidential election to corrupt antics by a mayor of Chicago named Richard Daley.

That's A New Take on Phelps

I hadn't seen this headline, but it's definitely something you wouldn't see in a U.S. newspaper.

Obama's Abortion Problem

There's a burgeoning controversy related to Barack Obama and his opposition to the Illinois version of the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act. The Washington Post provides some background as part of an article that discusses the abortion issue as it qapplies to the Presidential battle...

Abortion foes are now accusing Obama of being an abortion-rights extremist. In recent days, the National Right to Life Committee has charged that Obama is misrepresenting his record to broaden his appeal. At issue is a measure in both Illinois and Congress called the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which defines as a protected human any life expelled from a mother. Abortion foes championed the cause when an Illinois nurse and antiabortion activist said some pre-viable fetuses were being aborted by inducing labor and then being allowed to die.

Obama, then a state senator, opposed the measure in 2001, saying it crossed the line of constitutionality and "essentially says that a doctor is required to provide treatment to a pre-viable child, or fetus."

As a committee chairman in the state Senate in 2003, Obama supported GOP efforts to add language to the act, copied from federal legislation, clarifying that it would have no legal impact on the availability of abortions. Obama then opposed the bill's final passage. Since then, he has said he would have backed the bill as it was written and approved almost unanimously the year before.

Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, charged that Obama is trying to have it both ways because the Illinois bill he opposed was virtually identical to the federal law he said he would support.

Obama aides acknowledged yesterday that the wording of the state and federal bills was virtually identical. But, they added, the impact of a state law is different, because detailed abortion procedures and regulations are governed by states. Johnson and others are oversimplifying the situation, aides said.

"They have not been telling the truth," Obama told the Christian Broadcasting Network in response to a question on the matter. "And I hate to say that people are lying, but here's a situation where folks are lying."

Lying is a loaded term, even in politics. But Obama has a problem here -- if his opponents aren't lying, then Obama chose to fight a bill that called for the protection of infant children that survived an abortion.

So, who's lying? The New York Times tried to explain things...

In 2002, President Bush signed a federal “born alive” law. The measure passed by sweeping majorities in Congress, with the support of many legislators who usually vote against legislation favored by groups seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. Even organizations like the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, now known as Naral Pro-Choice America, did not oppose the bill.

Mr. Obama has repeatedly said that he would have been willing to vote for such a measure in Illinois had it been identical to the federal statute. But “that was not the bill that was presented at the state level,” he said Saturday. “What that bill also was doing was trying to undermine Roe v. Wade.”

The statute Congress passed in 2002 and the one the Illinois committee rejected a year later are virtually identical. Both say, for example, that “the words ‘person,’ ‘human being,’ ‘child’ and ‘individual’ shall include every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development,” regardless of whether that birth “occurs as a result of natural or induced labor, cesarean section or induced abortion.”

That has led Mr. Obama’s critics to accuse him of playing fast and loose with the truth when he says he “would have been completely in, fully in support of the federal bill that everybody supported” if it had been offered at the state level.

“I don’t know whether he is lying or whether he forgot, but with his words, he is condemning himself, “ said Jill Stanek, a nurse in the Chicago area who was a main proponent of the federal measure and writes an anti-abortion blog. “He voted one way and then covered it up, and he has to explain that, not just to me, but to the American people.”

But the Illinois proposal always had a companion bill. The accompanying legislation, called the Induced Infant Liability Act, would have allowed legal action “on the child’s behalf for damages, including costs of care to preserve and protect the life, health and safety of the child, punitive damages, and costs and attorney’s fees, against a hospital, health care facility or health care provider who harms or neglects the child or fails to provide medical care to the child after the child’s birth.”

Groups that favor abortion rights say that bill would have introduced the possibility that doctors could be sued for failing to take extraordinary measures to save the lives of pre-viable infants, those born so prematurely that they could not possibly survive. As a result, they argue, it is disingenuous of anti-abortion organizations to claim that Mr. Obama was moving to quash only a narrow and innocuous definitional bill identical to federal law.

You know the answer for Obama's not looking good when even the Times admits the language in the bills is identical. Yuval Levin attacks the rationale set forth by the Times that Obama voted against the bill because it was being oushed as part of a package...

The excuse the Times pushes most forcefully is the absurd notion that because around the same time as the Born-Alive bill the legislature was also considering another bill that would have allowed children who survive abortions to also sue for damages, and because Obama and other abortion rights advocates didn’t think damages should be allowed, it makes sense that Obama would have voted against both bills. That’s simply nonsense. These were two separate bills, Obama voted on them separately, and he voted against not only the one that involved damage claims but also the one that did exactly the same thing in exactly the same way as a bill that had already passed unanimously at the federal level, and that he has since claimed he would have supported.

This new excuse is surely the lamest one yet, although the one offered to the Post (that things were different because this was a state bill, and state laws on abortion actually matter) does have the added advantage of explicitly contradicting Obama's past statement (noted by the Times) that he would have voted for the federal bill if one just like it had been proposed at the state level. The latest twist in the campaign's explanations suggest he actually wouldn't have. And of course, the facts demonstrate that he didn't.

Ouch. The logic here is tough to avoid. If Obama's objection was not to the first bill but the companion bill, one would have expected that to have been the logic his campaign initially put forth, not the tripe about the language in the bill undermining Roe. And that new explanation still doesn't explain why he couldn't vote for the first bill and against the companion bill -- indeed, a smart politician might well have championed the first bill and accused political opponents trying to push the second bill of trying to play politics with the lives of vulnerable infants (hey, maybe Obama really isn't a typical politician!).

Ramesh Ponnuru's summary leads to a troubling conclusion for Obama...

Illinois law has rules — loophole-ridden rules, but rules — requiring treatment of babies who have “sustainable survivability.” If an attempted abortion of a pre-viable fetus results in a live birth, the law did not protect the infant. Nurse Jill Stanek said that at her hospital “abortions” were repeatedly performed by inducing the live birth of a pre-viable fetus and then leaving it to die. When she made her report, the attorney general said that no law had been broken. That’s why legislators proposed a bill to fill the gap.

Obama did not want the gap filled. He did not want pre-viable fetuses/infants to have any legal protection. In the Illinois legislature, he argued that providing them with legal protection would both be unconstitutional in itself — a violation of the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence — and undermine the right to abortion.

Obama was wrong about these points. The Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence treats the location of the young human organism, not its stage of development, as the key factor in whether it can be legally protected. But that’s the ground on which he stood, at the time. In recent years, however, he has had very little to say about the importance of denying legal protection to this class of human beings. He knows that’s a losing argument politically. So he has instead been emitting a thick cloud of smoke.

Only yesterday has the Obama campaign finally, in desperation, gotten close to telling the truth about Obama’s position. In its latest apologia, the campaign isolates the language it found so objectionable in the Illinois bill. “A live child born as a result of an abortion shall be fully recognized as a human person and accorded immediate protection under the law.” The campaign calls this “Language Clearly Threatening Roe.”

If that language threatens Roe, then Roe is not sustainable. I think Obama's problem here is that he chose to think more like a lawyer than as a legislator. If he was that concerned with the law undermining Roe (or state precedents that he may have wanted to protect) did he look to find compromise language? Did he introduce compromise language? Perhaps others have a different value judgment, but this issue strikes me as important enough that it deserved a concerted effort by Obama to get acceptable language for passage.

At the end of the day, it's difficult for Obama to appeal to pro-lifers, because he is pro-choice. His past comments have indicated as such...

Speaking about sex education at an event in Pennsylvania Saturday, Obama said, according to the Christian Broadcasting Network, that he will educate his young daughters but “if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at the age of 16.”

A poor choice of words tro say the least, since the words can be read to say he's equating a baby born to an underage teenager with the teenager contracting an STD. I doubt Obama means it that way. But as the father of a one-year old daughter, I find the words offensive. One presumes that with loving parents, either of Obama's daughters could have a child and give it up for adoption. The punishment there would be suffering through pregnancy, which would be difficult. But I'd also argue that no matter what, there is punishment for the pregnant teen from an abortion -- you're talking about surgery and physical recovery, as well as the emotional scarring that often takes place for women who undergo abortions. No matter what, I have a hard time swallowing the argument that the child itself is a punishment.

At the end of the day, all this does is show that Obama is a traditional liberal with pro-choice beliefs. There's nothing wrong with being pro-choice, since we are allowed to hold differing positions on the issue. It's not surprising to see Obama twist himself in knots on this, though, because all but the most extreme pro-choice people would agree that if a baby survives an abortion, it should not be denied medical care. And Obama's position on this issue therefore looks extraordinarily extreme. If he's looking to court pro-life voters, he may have to admit to a mistake in voting against the Illinois bill. Otherwise, it's difficult to see obama as someone who actively respects a pro-life point of view.

Wow, He Went to Harvard and He's Not an Elitist?

I've been meaning to comment on this for a couple weeks, and finally got a moment to go back and find the article. Both David Gergen and Ed Rollins seem to find McCain's attempt to paint Obama as "elitist" to be out of whack, if not offensive (in Gergen's view)...

"Here is a man who grew up in a broken home whose father left at a young age and who was raised by a single mother," said David R. Gergen, director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, who has previously served as a White House adviser to Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. "It's an admirable story of rising from rags to riches, one that resonates. In many ways he's a modern Horatio Alger.

"Now the McCain campaign wants to create a dramatically different narrative," Gergen continued. "They want you to see him as a man who went to fancy schools; who has had the beneficiary of an elite life, and is increasingly removed from the mainstream of normal American life. They want to create someone who is 'The Other.' That's what they did for John Kerry. They succeeded in turning his medals of honor in Vietnam into a liability.

"And now the McCain campaign wants to turn Obama's strength into a weakness and make him seem like a celebrity who has nothing to offer but high-blown words.," Gergen continued. "He's obviously not in the same league as Britney Spears or Paris Hilton. They've gone way too far with that. But we've seen where strategies that have been derided by commentators have been effective with voters.

"We've learned from previous campaigns that the effective way to create an alternative story for your rival is the summer before the fall campaign," Gergen noted. "You can but a ball and chain on an opponent and he's going to have a hard time running a race in the fall."

... Like Gergen and Coelho, the pugilist and Republican campaign consultant Ed Rollins, who served as national campaign director for Ronald Reagan's 1984 victory, and more recently the national campaign chairman for Mike Huckabee's Republican primary run, sees no lasting power in the ad.

"It's a nice try," Rollins said, "but he's not an elitist. That's not a sustained campaign tactic. Here was someone who grew up with nothing verses the son of four-star admirals. It's a nice try and a good diversion in the first part of August, but painting him as an elitist is not a winning strategy going into the fall."

We can argue about the long-term effectiveness of the ad another time (for the record, I think it's helpful, but the long-term impact is only helpful in establishing a theme about Obama -- McCain still needs to sell himself). What I want to address is the elitism concept.

Gergen and Rollins seem stuck on the idea that Obama's life story insulates him from charges of elitism, much like (to draw out Gergen's analogy) John Kerry's war record insulated him from charges of being a weak-kneed liberal on foreign policy issues. This would be correct... if elitism is a concept that is determined solely by reference to one's upbringing.

Just because I want to do so, I'm going to reference Caddyshack. Ted Knight's Judge Elihu Smails is a complete snob and elitist, and it's fair to conclude that his background led him to become one. However, Chevy Chase's Ty Webb comes from a pretty privileged background as well -- but he's not an elitist (he's a lazy bum, but he's not an elitist). Background doesn't make you an elitist -- it can help, but ultimately, it comes down to who you are today and how you act. In Obama's case, he may be the opposite of Ty Webb -- he grew up without privilege, but attained a life of privilege through hard work... and possibly became an elitist.

Now, are there facts that would tend to point one toward a conclusion that Obama could be considered an elitist? Sure. He went to an Ivy League institution for his undergraduate education. He went to Harvard Law School for his law degree. He's been a con law professor, so he's an academic. His big money-making endeavor was writing a book about himself. He's a politician with a cult of celebrity around him.

None of this guarantees that Obama is an elitist (well, except the Harvard Law School thing. Everyone who goes there becomes a complete snob). But the reverse is true regarding Obama's upbringing -- simply citing it doesn't insulate him from charges of being an elitist. Put it this way -- if Obama started windsurfing off Cape Cod tomorrow, his upbringing couldn't defend him from the charge that he'd become an elitist. However, if he wants to try and prove me wrong and go windsurfing, he's welcome to do so.

Irrelevant Unsolved Mystery of the Day

Bringing you the questions that don't matter, except they get stuck in your head and make you wonder...

I know every complex crime in Idaville gets solved by Encyclopedia Brown. I also understand why Bugs Meany and other kids commit petty criminal acts -- they're kids, and kids do stupid things. Here's what I don't get -- why do intelligent professional criminals keep committing crimes there? Don't they realize they're going to be caught?

Vlad Has Mail

Kathleen Parker hacked into Vlad Putin's email and and found out how Bush, Obama and McCain are reacting to Putin's invasion of Georgia. I can't really see Obama proclaiming himself at a loss for words at any time, I do wonder whether President Bush would have spelled everything correctly, and we all know McCain doesn't understand the Interweb. However, the emails do seem to match their public positions otherwise.

Stop Covering Edwards, Please

Dear God. John Edwards, wall-to-wall coverage. These guys even link to the Gawker's brilliant find of Rielle Hunter in the Denzell-Lithgow-Ice T movie Ricochet. Yes, they once made a movie with Denzell and Ice T together. And thanks to John Edwards, it's now been dredged up. Bastard. On top of that, Hunter was also in Overboard, which means we'll have to see clips of that movie soon as well. When will our long national nightmare end?

I take it all back. The media can cease coverage of the story now.

Ummmmm... Meatcake

Greatest recipie ever. I'm pretty sure that if someone had come up with this three years ago, I'd have found a way to serve this at my wedding. I'm also certain my wife would have left me.

Of Crosses and Swiftboats

I wanted to smack around the folks who seem obsessed with trying to prove John McCain's story about a Vietnamese prison guard drawing a cross in the dirt was stolen from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but Tom Maguire has a head start by mocking Andrew Sullivan. Byron York piles on nicely as well. Sister Toldjah stops by for a spell. And Maguire hits Sullivan one more time, and this one's worthy of a quote...

Let's see if I get Sullivan's argument - McCain's memory of a cross in the dirt is not a story about his courage or in his military record, and he may or may not have invented it in 2000 for political purposes; therefore, critics are not engaging in "Swiftboating" when they pick at it.

Well, then, what about folks, including the Swiftboaters, who questioned Kerry's "Christmas in Cambodia" story? That incident was not in Kerry's record (since it never happened!); he had not received a mdeal for it; and he seemd to have invented it for political purposes (e.g., in a Senate speech in 1986 Kerry's point was that he had special moral authority to denounce a secret Iran-Contra war since he had been a participant/victim of Nixon's secret war in Cambodia in 1968. Please ignore the fact that Nixon was inaugurated in January 1969.)

By Sullivan's new standard the Swiftboaters were not Swiftboating Kerry on this topic, since they were only questioning a politically motivated story and not "real" conduct in Vietnam. A fine distinction - can we call this "Sullyboating"?

Pretty complicated! In my world, if a politician wants to run on his record, critics should be free to examine it, and take the consequences. In Sully's world, the rules are less clear, but let me guess at a summary - it is OK to attack Republicans.

For the record, this would only qualify as akin to the Swifties' perfectly legitimate attack on John Kerry if it were his fellow veterans questioining McCain's actions because they were in the same prison cell, and if a number of their claims were actually proven true. After that, the mainstream press would need to ignore the matter entirely for months, until McCain responded, and the press than parroted McCain's response. But this attack does qualify as similar to the left's definition of "Swiftboating", which seems to mean "unfair attacks against a political candidate, particualrly focused on tearing down their status as a war hero."

Is this whole debate stupid for Obama fans? Yes, mostly because it re-emphasizes who McCain is -- a war hero. The only questions it could raise are about the depth of McCain's faith in God and his truthfulness about it, and there's no way to prove it to be incorrect. The reason the Swift Boat veterans were so devestating to Kerry is that it undercut his stance as a war hero (which was his only redeeming feature, based on how his campaign positioned him), and they could prove it.

Perhaps the best summary of Sullivan and his ilk tilting at windmills comes from his colleague Megan McArdle...

What, exactly, is the point of this exercise? Gulag Archipelago was published in 1973, the same year that John McCain was released from the POW camp. There is no way of proving what the bloggers hope, which is that no mention of this story was made until after the book's publication. And even if that were the case, all it would prove is that John McCain didn't tell this story until after the book's publication, not that it didn't happen. Vietnam is a country with pretty rich Catholic tradition; tracing a cross in the dirt at Christmas is not something so unthinkably bizarre that it could only have happened in one communist dictatorship.

The only way this would actually hurt McCain is if you found a signed letter from him saying that this never happened. Since it's very unlikely that such a letter exists, the very best that this effort will achieve is sowing seeds of doubt in a few minds, making themselves look desperate to almost everyone else (and thereby making people wonder what's wrong with Obama, that they're this desperate), and outraging a number of people that you would call McCain's honor into question with absolutely no evidence, or hope of obtaining same.

Actually, McArdle's other point - dealing with the silly allegations that McCain cheated when he "won" the Saddleback forum on Saturday night -- is also pretty good. Meanwhile, Ace has a list of other quotes stolen from Solzhenitsyn as well.

Obama and Taxes

Ted Frank's post at Above the Law yesterday had a few words that struck home, when discussing Obama's recent reversals on tax policy...

The question is whether President Obama will have the same tax plan as Senator Obama, Primary-Election Obama, or General-Election Obama -- and whether Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are going to go along with General-Election Obama. A clue is the editorial's references to Bill Clinton. Old fogies like me remember that Clinton, like Obama, promised a middle-class tax cut in 1992, and then raised taxes on the middle class in 1993.

Obama can't even keep his promises during election season. He pledged in September 2007 to accept public financing in the general election, and then broke his pledge. He assured the MoveOn crowd in the primaries he opposed FISA reform, and then voted for it, tying supporters in pretzels. In November, he supported DC's gun ban; today he claims to support the Heller decision (though he would almost certainly appoint justices who would eviscerate that ruling). Campaigning for the Senate in Illinois, he called for an end to the Cuba embargo; speaking to Miami residents in 2007, he supported the embargo. He told an AIPAC audience that he supported an undivided Jerusalem, a position that lasted less than 24 hours. Is it any surprise that he told the Wall Street Journal that he has a new belief against tax increases?

Even the Obama economists who wrote the Wall Street Journal piece are flip-flopping. As Greg Mankiw notes:

[Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee] take a swipe at Senator McCain's proposal to replace the tax exclusion for employer-provided health insurance with a more flexible health insurance credit. When President Bush suggested a similar idea last year, Furman and coauthors called it "a step in the right direction," and many other commentators agreed. It is too bad that Team Obama is now dissing the proposal.

That Goolsbee co-wrote the piece is a delicious irony. You'll recall that Goolsbee was the economic advisor who told the Canadians not to believe anything nasty Obama said about NAFTA in the hotly-contested Ohio primary because it was just "political positioning" and had to disappear for a few months. (Obama gave five different explanations for what happened.) It's hard to see the Obama tax plan as anything other than "political positioning," making Obama's tax promises meaningless. I simply don't know where Obama really stands, and neither do you.

Frank is a McCain supporter, but that doesn't disqualify a key element in his analysis -- it's right. Obama's continued reversals on policy decisions are the mark of a normal politician, but his supporters have tried to sell him as something better than a normal politician. The danger in that is when the voters realize the would-be emporer has the same shoddy clothes as the other public officials.

I think William McGurn would beg to differ with Frank, but probably not in a way that would make Team Obama happy. At the Saddleback Church forum Saturday night (more on that later), Rick Warren asked Obama and McCain what level of income makes a person rich. In discussing Obama's answer, McGurn nails the principles behind Obama's fiscal policy...

Mr. Obama, by contrast, started out much more directly, suggesting that if you make $150,000 or less you may be poor or middle class. A family with an income above $250,000, he went on to say, is "doing well." And if you find yourself in that category, he's going to target you for a tax hike -- all in the name of creating "a sense of balance, and fairness in our tax code."

In fact, the idea of fairness is at the heart of his whole economic argument. And he goes back to it in almost every public appearance.

He talks about it as a general theme: "It is time for folks like me who make more than $250,000 to pay our fair share."

He invokes it as a solution for Social Security: "[W]e will save Social Security for future generations by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share."

He points to how it guides his energy policy: "The first part of my plan is to tax the windfall profits of oil companies and use some of that money to help you pay the rising price of gas."

And he stuck to it on capital gains, even after ABC's Charlie Gibson noted that the record shows increased taxes on capital gains -- which would affect 100 million Americans -- would likely lead to a decrease in government revenues: "Well, Charlie, what I've said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness."

Translated into ordinary English, what that means is that it doesn't really matter whether a tax increase actually brings in more revenue. It's not about robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Robbing from the rich will do, especially if it's done in the name of fairness.

Now I know I can't vote for Obama.

In case people don't know this, I hate appeals to fairness when they're made by politicians. Every politician makes them (McCain does it far more than I like), but they're all fundamentally stupid. Particularly when it comes to fiscal issues. I can sit here and debate the issue very simply with Senator Obama -- why is it "more fair" for someone who earns more than $250,000 to pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes to the government than someone who earns $240,000? Or $230,000? Or $150,000? Or $50,000?

Why is it fair for some people to pay more money into Social Security to provide for America's seniors, when the system has always been touted as one where we pay money in and get benefits when we retire? As I read this Obama wants some people to pay extra money into the system, money they will never see in retirement. How is that fair?

The windfall profits tax is about the dumbest thing said during this election campaign, even dumber than McCain's gas tax holiday. At least the gas tax holiday put money in consumer's pockets. No matter what the tax is, businesses will and do find a way to pass the costs on to consumers. And I haven't even gotten to the issue of defining "windfall" profits, a term as difficult to define as "rich."

I've never understood the people who claim progressive income taxes create a fair tax code. All they do is create a massive transfer of wealth system, designed to re-allocate money from one group of people to the government, which then determines who gets it. I've debated the issue with people who can't admit that it's about that, who insist that because I am making more money, I'm receiving more in government services (a difficult if not insipid argument). I truly enjoy the argument that I owe the money back into the system for my success, because the system is partially responsible for my success (under this theory, I suppose recipients of government largesse are being paid back because the system was responsible for their failure -- it's intellectually consistent, I guess).

Obama wants to take even more wealth from people who work hard to earn it, to give it to the government -- the same government whose governing bodies are generating record-low approval ratings. The same government which appears close to spending billions of said money to prop up Fannie and Freddie.

If government were a business, they'd be forced to cut prices, not raise them, to make up for the fact that their customers are dissatisfied with the services they offer. Instead, we're going to get hit with a tax increase against the most productive members of our economy, to hand money to a government who seems capable of only spending it.

We're #1! We're #1!

With the start of the NFL season less than three weeks away, I'm getting ready for another run at the titles by my beloved Iggles. Luckily, I can celebrate one title now -- Fox Sports says Eagles fans are the #1 fanbase in the NFL.

Now, if the team can join us, the world will be a better place...