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Andrea Mitchell has never had any credibility whatsoever. Is this where they’re putting her now? I don’t get regular television anymore. I assume she has a “presence” on regular cable; why, I do not know.

I have nothing to react to here; I just thought that I would embed a clip and have a laugh. It’s not like there’s any thought going into whatever she is repeating for her corporate masters.

Does anyone truly believe we learned from the attacks on September 11, 2001? So why rehash it all? Our enemies are watching us spend ourselves into oblivion. Our freedoms are trashed. A jowly huckster of a preacher is threatening to burn some books and the whole country is paralyzed with fear and ignorance.

It’s not hard to be an American. In the old days, a shill and a dishonest whore like Andrea Mitchell would be thrown out of the trade of journalism. A real newspaper would tell Americans how things really work, and a politician or a government official would scream at his underlings about the article. People would vote accordingly. An informed populace would make decent decisions. Now, they clear the news with the advertisers. Now, they chum around with the people they cover. Now, they refuse to call someone a whore even when dirty money and a freshly-burned DVD of their transgressions falls out of their pants pocket. Now, they just run crap all day long on an endless video loop, scaring the shit out of people who are too stupid to know better.

Oh, come now. Clever doesn’t get you laid these days.

Money gets you laid.

And money is defending our nation. If we have money to defend ourselves, then every American can sleep safe and sound tonight knowing that our interests abroad have a level of protection that no other nation can match.

The problem is, we’re running out of money. And, when we do, steep cuts will need to be made. That is when our enemies, who are real and need to be held in check, will take advantage of our drastic steps to realign what we defend and what we do not defend.

Anyway, to get back on task, let me draw your attention to this graphic:

Graphic from The National Journal

Now, there are many ways to react to this. I’ll tell you the right way to react to this.

With humility.

That’s right. Humility. Because only a solid dose of humility will get us back on track. I do not mean taking a knee before our enemies. I mean, we need to have the humility necessary to extricate ourselves from “security and training operations” in one hundred and twenty different countries around the world. Yes. 

We have a presence, or “boots on the ground” in 120 countries. That’s ridiculous. Our interests are not found in that many countries. We have clear enemies and places where we must stand between them and oblivion, and that’s nothing to minimize. Are we really examining what is, and what is not, a priority right now? Have we become too proud of own presence to know when we don’t really need to extend ourselves in all of these different directions?

That’s what hubris brings you—the belief that you are the world’s policeman and the world’s answer to whatever ails it. This breeds a dependence on American military and economic power that cannot be sustained forever. We must find a way to have the humility to say “you know what, we can’t help Namibia with their internal issues right now” and we need to have the humility to say, “I’m sorry, Peru, but you’re going to have to build a world-class military on your own dime.” And I’m being general, not specific, because I don’t know if we are in Namibia or Peru, but when you talk about 120 different countries around the world, Namibia and Peru are bound to be one of those, assuming there even still is a Namibia.

We cannot have a massive around-the-globe footprint as the sustained, permanent policy of the American defense establishment. And where is the State Department? The State Department should have some presence or policy in 120 different countries—really, all but two, but I digress (North Korea and the other one, Cuba, I think).

This is the price we now pay for the bureaucratic wrangling that occurred between Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice. Brief though it may have been, their tenure was a disaster for America’s future. We are suffering because of these fools and their incompetence. Why not name names? Too impolite? Well, I wouldn’t go to those kinds of parties anyway. My outlook tells me that we are in need of humility, not schmoozing.

Polizei

If you look carefully at the license plate on the police car pictured above, it appears to be registered to Boblingen, which is near where we live now in Germany. Boblingen is a wonderful little city, but the traffic and speed cameras there are no fun. They are hidden all over the city, and they do Johnny Law’s job for him—they get everyone to slow down and drive reasonably.

Not every police officer can drive a Porsche, however:

There’s a three-way shoot-out blazing on the mean streets of Detroit. This one pits Ford against General Motors, with Chrysler hoping to score with a lucky shot of its own.

The three makers are all vying for the police interceptor market Ford will vacate when it pulls the plug on its time-worn Crown Victoria, long the vehicle of choice for the nation’s law enforcement community, in September 2011.

While police departments have used a variety of vehicles in recent years, especially for unmarked and undercover cruisers, the Crown Victoria Police Interceptor has garnered the lion’s share of law enforcement sales, with about 60 percent of the 75,000 vehicles sold annually. That demand was one of the main reasons Ford has kept the Crown Vic in production so long.

Most of the cities and towns patrolled by Johnny Law are flat broke. There’s no money left. So, why not just abandon the idea of having Johnny Law use a police car? Why not have him use a minivan? A minivan is the ultimate Johnny Law vehicle. Buy them used and change the oil or do whatever is necessary to ensure that the thing doesn’t break down after a few thousand miles.

The roomier ones are perfect for law enforcement work. The minivan could be the unsung hero of fiscally conscious communities all over the nation. The minivan can patrol with excellent views of the surrounding area. It can even be fitted with a Johnny Law perched on top, spinning a spotlight around. The minivan can be retro-fitted for multi-use. It can use one to three Johnny Laws if necessary. It can fit a couple of them up front and it can haul between five and seven rowdy small-town teenagers. Put bigger motors in them and you’ll see the difference. Johnny Law doesn’t do much chasing these days anyway.

I know, I know—they’re dowdy. Well, so what? Dowdy is reliable, and reliable is the new austerity trophy. Get yours today.

When I read stories about the victims of the Mexican drug war, I come away with the sense that this is one of the most tragic stories of our time. You can certainly find this news, and there are people writing about the subject, but it has not reached a critical mass in the American consciousness as yet. There is no collective movement to deal with this problem and stop the killing.

Here’s another tragic story:

The murders of 25 people by suspected drug hitmen on the U.S.-Mexico border on Thursday was the bloodiest day in almost three years in an area gripped by an escalating drug war, officials said on Friday.

 

Gunmen burst into several houses in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, and shot people accused of working for rival drug gangs, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office said on Friday morning.

 Four bystanders were also killed on Thursday as a convoy of hitmen shot its way out of traffic in Ciudad Juarez, local newspaper El Diario said. Police declined to confirm that report, but said 25 people had died in drug violence, in the worst single day of killings in Ciudad Juarez since January 2008, when recent drug murders began.

Mexican police do not typically release information on death tolls from violence until the day after an incident.

The rampant bloodshed in Ciudad Juarez, where hitmen detonated a car bomb in July, and other parts of Mexico is helping fuel fears in the United States that the nation may be losing control of drug violence.

And what can I add? What can I say that will make a difference? Well, being an older fellow, my experience tells me that writing about the subject can’t really achieve much. Most of the people who visit my blog are here for the stories about Father or for the recipes and the lifestyle advice. There’s nothing that a professional blogger can do except note the event, write down a few thoughts, and then engage with the readers of the blog a little in order to clarify or learn from what is going on.

The drug war is changing attitudes towards legalization of certain drugs, and that’s probably where any discussion about dealing with these events has to start. We are locked in a new and different struggle, one where the act of legalizing drugs would change the landscape where the drug gangs operate. It would, in some ways, force them to move into harder drugs (cocaine and crystal methamphetamine will probably never, ever be legal, but keep hoping, Skippy) and it would force American culture to adapt and grow.

Can we sustain a violent, bloody gang war on our Southern border? My guess is that we will because there aren’t enough Americans affected by it as yet. When that changes, perhaps we will see that convergence of popular opinion and outrage that I really have not seen as yet.

This is just sad:

What happened to Barack Obama’s once vaunted political machine? The outfit that put upwards of 8 million volunteers on the street in 2008 — known as Organizing for America — is a ghost of its former self. Its staff has shrunk from 6,000 to 300, and its donors are depressed: receipts are a fraction of what they were in 2008. Virtually no one in politics believes it will turn many contests this fall. “There’s no chance that OFA is going to have the slightest impact on the midterms,” says Charlie Cook, who tracks congressional races.

Neglect is to blame. After Obama was elected, his political aides ignored the army he had created until it eventually disappeared. No one was in charge; decisions were often deferred but rarely made. By the time they realized they needed more troops, says longtime consultant Joe Trippi, “their supporters had taken a vacation from politics.”

So earlier this year, when the White House gave OFA a whopping $30 million — more than half of the party’s entire budget for 2010 — senior Democrats suspected a hidden agenda. Several tell Time that OFA boss David Plouffe, who ran Obama’s 2008 campaign, is using the cash to rebuild an army for 2012 under the cover of boosting turnout in 2010. OFA is putting staff into such states as Virginia, North Carolina and Arizona, which have few close statewide races this fall but which are all prime targets in an Obama re-election campaign. “This is totally about 2012,” Cook says.

Think of the bloggers! Think of all of that positive energy as it continues to dissipate like the air being let out of an enormous tent. By the time 2012 rolls around, only the bankers and the union bosses will support this President. The kids were motivated to put on their walking shoes in early 2009 and all that was needed was an apparatus to engage them and channel their energies into something positive. Like every other movement in history, the money men took over and pissed it all away.

This American Lion wonders where the Americans went

Am I for cutting taxes? Yes. Is there a war on? Yes.

What then?

Well, because I am an American first, a businessman second, and a taxpayer third I have to say—you must pay for the wars we are fighting and that means taxes.

Would I raise taxes? No.

Would I cut taxes? No.

There’s a war on, Cletus, and you don’t give people a tax cut when there’s a war on. It’s really that simple. Now, when the war ends, do you cut taxes? Yes, if you want people to engage in constructive behavior. You cut taxes to get people to invest in businesses that will create jobs.

When I read something like this, I wonder where all of the Americans went:

Momentum built Thursday for extending all of the Bush-era tax cuts after President Obama avoided a veto threat and a key Senate Democrat voiced support for the extension.

Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.), a centrist who has been a key vote on several Obama administration initiatives, said Thursday he supports extending all of the George W. Bush-era tax cuts until the economic recovery has taken root. Raising taxes on wealthier taxpayers could hurt the economy, he said.

“I support extending all of the expiring tax cuts until Nebraska’s and the nation’s economy is in better shape, and perhaps longer, because raising taxes in a weak economy could impair recovery,” Nelson said in a statement Thursday.

Earlier in the day, Obama refrained from promising to veto legislation that extends tax cuts not only for the middle class, but also for individuals with incomes of more than $200,000 and families with incomes of more than $250,000.

Wasn’t that Nelson fellow the big boy in the big pants who ruined health care reform? Isn’t he a pantload of epic proportions? How did he manage to appoint himself the Senator of Deep Pockets? He’s from Nebraska. Aside from Warren Buffet, there’s no money in Nebraska.

In this economy, the wealthy are not hurting; I’m not hurting, and I stand to see taxes go up on the portion of my income that is still taxable (hint—not that much). Does it mean I’m going to wallow in self-pity and howl out of the basement window? No. It will hurt, but it won’t hurt as much as watching a millionaire explain why Joe Sixpack has to sit there with his last unemployment check burning a hole through his work pants and suck it up and not resort to “class warfare” when he expresses some sort of displeasure at watching his rich neighbors continue paying taxes that, in relation to the settled, civilized world are still pretty low.

Spare me the outrage; remember what it was like in the 1970s? If not, then come talk to me when you know something about taxation rates and confiscating wealth. Since Reagan, I have done quite well. Many have done quite well. But this is a tough economy for decent, hard-working people. Let’s not talk tax cuts when so many are in need of support. 

Did I mention the war? I hope that got across as well.

For a class, I read an old (1986) paper by Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler on fairness. It’s based on surveys posing various hypothetical situations where businesses can take some action. For example, most people thought that it was OK for a grocer to pass on a wholesale price increase to consumers (Question 7) but not to raise prices because there is a general shortage and the grocer has the only shipment of a certain item (Question 12). In short, people have an intrinsic sense of fairness the authors summarize this way: “The cardinal rule of fairness is surely that one person should not achieve a gain by simply imposing an equivalent loss on another.”

Today in class, the professor posed the first question from the paper:

“A hardware store has been selling snow shovels for $15. The morning after a large snowstorm, the store raises the price to $20.”

In 1986, 82 percent of respondents thought this was unfair. In class, it was about 50-50.

As the professor said, this is probably because there are a lot of business school students in this class. Business school students are classic Econ 101 robots. They know enough to know that if there is a demand shift, not only is it OK to raise prices, but you should raise prices in order to clear the market. In this case, supply is fixed in the short term, so raising the price won’t increase supply; the Econ 101 argument is that raising the price allocates the shovels to people who will derive more utility from them (because they will pay more), thereby increasing social welfare.

I was taught that, if you shifted prices too quickly in the wake of a natural disaster, you were inviting trouble from the do-gooders who would charge you with price gouging.

There is a discussion out there that centers around the mistaken belief that the rules of the United States Senate are keeping us from getting anything done. Far from it. The rules are keeping Senators from doing too much to weaken and injure the republic. Any fool can see that:

For those of us on the train for Senate reform, Elizabeth Drew’s Politico piece is worth reading, as she offers a very strong — and very convincing — defense of the chamber’s status quo. The short of her argument is that reformers are vastly overstating the extent to which the body is paralyzed or “dysfunctional”; by and large, Drew argues, this Senate has “essentially met all of the president’s major goals,” including one of the most significant public-policy “breakthroughs” in a generation. Yes, the Senate hasn’t moved on climate change and immigration, but as Drew notes, those are issues where there is significant disagreement within the Democratic caucus.

As I’ve argued before, I think this line of defense misses the damage intense minority obstruction does to the Senate’s other priorities; in addition to passing legislation, the Senate is responsible for confirming the president’s executive-branch and judicial nominees. Thanks to the filibuster and other parliamentary maneuvers, GOP senators have kept hundreds of executive-branch nominees and dozens of judges from filling their positions. PresidentObama has the lowest judicial confirmation rate of any president in the last 30 years, and for a long time, key executive-branch agencies were pitifully understaffed.

That said, there’s a lot Drew gets right in her piece, and this in particular needs to be said more often:

A lot of people also confused the fact that for the first time in 30 years a party, in this case the Democrats, had 60 votes (actually, 58 Democrats and two independents who caucused with them) with the idea that it automatically had 60 progressive votes, or 60 votes for the president’s program, which it rarely had. Some of those 60 are moderates from more conservative states (or smaller states, which have disproportionate power in the Senate). Also, Democrats technically had 60 votes for only seven of the 13 months of this Congress so far.

Julianne Moore

Julianne MooreJulianne Moore

There’s nothing to suggest that these aren’t a little risque, but worthy of being banned? Hardly. When did the prudes take over Italy? I must have missed that event.