Time for another roundup of this and that:
LinkSwarm For February 15, 2012
February 15th, 2012Liberal Contempt for Religious Believers
February 14th, 2012(This piece originally appeared on December 20, 2010. Given the Obama Administration’s recent decision to force Catholics to fund contraception against their religious beliefs, I thought I would repost this, as it remains all too timely.)
Yesterday I read this piece on how Democrats gave up trying to reach out to people of religious faith. I didn’t know that Democrats had seven people working on the faith-based outreach efforts in the 2008 election cycle, or that they made small but measurable inroads among evangelical voters (to go along with their inroads among theoretically conservative pundits with a fetish for well-creased pants legs). In the 2010 election cycles, those seven staffers were down to one.
But missing from the article is the most obvious reason for the decline of religious voters in the Democratic Party: the naked contempt liberals exhibit for religious believers. This contempt can be found in pretty much every online forum where liberals gather.
In the liberal worldview, believers are bitter people clinging to guns and religion. They’re rubes and dupes who believe in an invisible sky wizard, and are to be made fun of at every chance with the Flying Spaghetti Monster. They just can’t help but feeling contempt for those inbred redneck freaks of Jesusland.
There’s a double-standard liberals seem to apply when judging professions of faith: When they come from Republicans like George W. Bush or Sarah Palin, they’re a sign that they’re morons, when they come from Democrats like John Kerry or Barack Obama, they’re a sign they’re canny politicians. Democratic insiders just naturally assume than any expression of faith on behalf of a Democratic office-seeker is just for show, and they don’t really believe any of that God nonsense.
Not all liberals have this contempt, but I suspect that it is the default attitude of those staffing liberal organizations and congressional offices: We, the enlightened few, must somehow find a way to dumb down our message about the wonders of Big Government enough so even those ignorant religious hicks can understand it. It’s hard to make your case to people who fill you with contempt. But more and more, contempt for people who don’t believe in the virtues of big government seem to be the only thing holding the left together. Well, that and divying up the spoils.
Of course, not all believers are considered equal. Though the urban secular atheists who make up the core of modern liberalism theoretically have the same attitude toward all religious faiths, their true animosity is generally reserved for Christianity in general, and evangelicals and Catholics in particular. (Muslims are exempt for this contempt, due to the Religion of Peace™ now being at apex of Identity Politics Victimhood, and their tendency to decapitate critics seems to provide a powerful deterrent to liberal criticism.) After all, they’re the ones clinging so bitterly to guns and religion, and therefore thwarting liberal dreams election after election.
Keep in mind that I myself am not a religious believer; as an agnostic, I have no God in this fight. But I’m a great believer in the social utility of religion.
If liberals actually wanted to reach out to religious believers, they might want to start by substituting respect for naked contempt. How likely is that? Well, for an answer, you might look to the fable of the frog and the scorpion…
No Wonder Ricardo Sanchez Dropped Out
February 14th, 2012While it may be unseemly to kick someone when he’s not only down but actually out, the FEC report for now-withdrawn Democratic Senate candidate Ricardo Sanchez tells why he had to drop out of the race (even apart from his unfortunate house fire) in stark detail.
For Q4, Sanchez pulled in a paltry $40,317. So the anointed Democratic candidate pulled in about one twenty-fifth the amount in contributions serious Republican candidates like David Dewhurst and Ted Cruz received during the same period.
During the same quarter, the Sanchez campaign laid out $133,210 in operating expenditures. Even deducting the (by my quick count) $32,600 in refunded contributions at the end of the quarter, that’s a ruinous burn rate given how little he was taking in. Like the blue model welfare state, this sort of mismatch between receipts and spending is unsustainable.
If he were still in the race, I might wonder why Sanchez was not only paying a Jennifer Lehner $11,864 in payroll between October 1 and November 26, plus a $4,000 housing stipend (for San Antonio? That seems reasonable…if it’s for six months), but was also ponying up $2,500 consulting fees for a “Mrs. Ada B. Lehner” residing at the same Carmichael, California address as Jennifer. (“If you hire me, you also have to hire my mom.”) But since he’s dropped out, what’s the point?
Athens Burning
February 13th, 2012So the latest “final” bailout is agreed upon, the Greek parliament passes the austerity measured decreed by their German overlords like good little members of the Eurocratic elite, and for their troubles Greek citizens (whose input on the issue is neither required nor desired) responded to these events with widespread arson and looting.
Here are some protesters expressing their displeasure with austerity measures via the now-traditional medium of Molotov cocktails:
Who are we supposed to root for, the Eurocrats who turned a blind eye to Greece’s spendthrift ways when they let them join the Euro, the Greek bureaucrats who went on an orgy of unsustainable welfare state spending with Germany’s credit card, or the Greek citizens who happily sucked at the welfare state teat as long as Uncle Helmut was paying for it and are now throwing a hissy fit because mean Aunt Angela wants to ween them away? It’s like trying to decide between the pusher who stops giving away free heroin after ten years, or the junkie suddenly denied their fix: There are no heroes or sympathetic actors. Keep giving me my heroin or the Acropolis burns!
Other burning Euro issues:
As long as Germany wasn’t complaining, others could make free with Germany’s credit card. Once in the euro, Greece, Italy, Spain, and other countries that bankers used to consider reckless or unstable could borrow at the same rates. (The treaties that bound all these dissimilar countries together stipulated that there would be no bailouts for those who borrowed too much, but bankers obviously didn’t believe that.) A boom in lending pushed up wages and prices in those “peripheral” countries, rendering them uncompetitive. After the financial crisis of 2008, the countries that had overborrowed were saddled with more debt than they could comfortably repay. The eurozone’s Mediterranean members have come to think that Germany ought to rescue them. But the Germany to which they are addressing their petitions is not the penitent, diffident, and easily browbeaten land that they came to know over the last three generations. Germany has its own ideas about economics and morality, and it is ready to insist that its weaker neighbors adhere to them.
(snip)
The German public was dragged into the euro reluctantly and would never have consented to it had they been consulted. “The euro has always been the ‘Golden Calf,’ so to speak,” says Barclays’s economist Thorsten Polleit. “It was forced upon Germans.” There is still a lot of debate about how it was forced upon Germans. The most common explanation is that French president François Mitterrand insisted on the euro as a condition of Germany’s reunification. A number of Germany’s top politicians and economists assured citizens that the new currency would hold prices stable. That turned out to be right. They also promised that this would not mean sharing wealth and bailing out laggards. That turned out to be wrong—and perhaps catastrophically, apocalyptically wrong. In the late nineties, “many chief economists did a lot of client presentations where they told people the euro would be as stable as the German mark,” says Jörg Krämer, chief economist at Commerzbank. “I am quite happy I was young enough not to have had to do this.”
Read the whole thing.
Blogroll Additions: UrbanGrounds
February 11th, 2012The latest blogroll addition is UrbanGrounds written by Robbie Cooper, “a conservative, a biker, a Veteran, a professional writer, and a blogging enthusiast in the heart of uber-Liberal Austin, TX.” It has a nice mix of local and national news that’s well worth checking out.
First New Nuclear Reactors Since 1978 Approved
February 10th, 2012This is good news: “A consortium of utilities in the South won government approval Thursday to construct two new atomic energy reactors at an estimated cost of $14 billion, the strongest signal yet that the three-decade hiatus of nuclear plant construction is finally ending.” The new reactors are going in at reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia. Or its good news except for “massive federal loan guarantee and other incentives.” The only incentive they should get is shielding from the inevitable frivolous lawsuit from those segments of the green community who oppose the only practical zero-emission power generating technology available.
Though not in that story, the two reactors appear to be using Westinghouse AP1000 duel-loop pressurized water reactors, which is a significant improvement over current working American reactors (and the Fukishama reactors). Personally I would have liked to see a move to a more inherently safe reactor technology like pebble bed (it’s too early to expect commercialization of the molten salt design), but this is certainly a step in the right direction.
Blogroll Additions: An American Housewife, Formerly in London
February 9th, 2012I’ve been meaning to update the blog roll for a while, so now’s as good a time as any.
Today’s addition is An American Housewife, Formerly in London. She spent five years in London, then moved back to Houston, and blogs about a variety of issues, both personal and political, from the expat (and repat) life and mothering to the latest Obama idiocy.
Anyway, she’s been linking and dropping into BattleSwarm with useful comments for a while now, so I’m happy to return the favor. Do drop by when you get a chance.
Why the Tea Party Exists
February 9th, 2012This piece by Dan McLaughlin encapsulates why the Tea Party exists, and why it has to fight a willfully heedless Republican establishment, so well that I’m going to quote whopping great chunks from it:
As anyone with a passing familiarity with Republican politics over the past four or five decades knows, conservative magazines and think tanks have been making detailed entitlement reform proposals for most of those years, and Republicans running for offices high and low have been running on platforms of reducing the size and cost of government for just as long. And then nothing happens.
That’s why Congress’ battles over the debt ceiling and related issues provide such a potent example. Basically all Republican Senators profess to be in favor of smaller government, and yet so few are willing to go to the barricades to make it a reality. Now, I’m a realist – there are limits to how much we could expect even a completely united GOP to bring home as long as Obama is the President and Harry Reid the Senate Majority Leader. But the repeated spectacle of leading pundits and Beltway Republicans tut-tutting Boehner and company for even trying to use their leverage to exact real concessions is a sign that the message Republican voters have been sending is not getting through to everyone.
(snip)
The related point here – and one that says much about why RedState has put so much energy into intra-party primary battles rather than the production of white papers – is that personnel is policy. The ideas are already there; what is lacking is the necessary corps of people with the will to fight for them.
(snip)
The point of my essay was not to denounce anyone, but to explain the history and depth of the current popular distrust on the Right of leaders who seem unwilling to lead. The battle to restrain runaway government spending is so much smoke and mirrors unless the people who profess to support it in word are dedicated to it in deed. No wealth of position papers, endorsements and Power Point presentations can demonstrate that. Voters and activists who have figured this out are rightly skeptical of those who don’t seem to “get it”. And they are more than willing to embrace flawed champions – even such a creature of the Beltway as Newt Gingrich – if they demonstrate the willingness to actually do something to stop the runaway train of federal spending. Every time some Beltway figure calls Newt or some Tea Party candidate crazy, voters think again, “he might actually be crazy enough to upset some applecarts to get things done.”
Read the whole thing.
(Hat tip: An American Housewife in London, more about which anon.)
Texas Senate Update for February 8, 2012
February 8th, 2012Both the Senate race and the redistricting fight continue to grind on, with the primary date for the former dependent on the latter.
Dewhurst Tosses in Another $2 Million of His Own Money
February 8th, 2012David Dewhurst loaned his campaign another $2 million of his own money, according to his Q4 report. That’s a considerable chunk of change, but I imagine the Cruz campaign is breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn’t 5 times that much.
Another thing that strikes me about his Q4 report (which I have only given a cursory glance to, given there’s more than 800 pages to it) is Dewhurst’s incredibly high burn rate. He’s already spent $4,397,491. Some examples of what he’s spending money on:
The nice thing about being the “bank” in the race is that you don’t have to worry about funding a top-heavy campaign if you’re getting results. Is he? So far the Dewhurst campaign hasn’t knocked me out with its organizational skill. It’s competent, but I think both the Cruz and Leppert campaigns have been more obviously focused and effective at communicating. But I’m probably not the type of voter the Dewhurst campaign is trying to reach (as far as I can tell, Team Dewhurst reachout to bloggers and new media (beyond the obligatory Facebook and Twitter accounts) is non-existent).