Half Sigma

Joe Biden lol

In my previous post on the Democratic side of 2008, a commenter complained:

What about Biden? Of all the Democratic contenders, he is one of the few who can actually explain his beliefs without a scripting coach and stick with it.

Well, today's news story validates my leaving him off the Democratic short list. It looks like Joe Biden's announcement of his candidacy has helped Barack Obama more than it did his own candidacy. As Christine Bork observered:

[Biden's] plain spokeness and unguarded honesty are no longer acceptable in our teflon mickey mouse platitude mumbling culture.

State of the Union address, 2007

NY Times transcript of the State of the Union address.

Economy: Bush says we need to reduce government spending, and elimnate the sneaky ways in which Congressmen slip special interest earmarks into spending bills. I'm in favor of this.

Education: Bush talks about "giving local leaders flexibility." Great, shut down the Department of Education thus giving local leaders complete flexibility. Unfortunately, Bush just wants to expand the federal governments role in education. Bush says "we must increase funds for students who struggle" but there is no mention of student who are above average but are being shortchanged by the school system because all the focus is only on the "struggling" students.

* * *

Health Care

This is the best part of Bush's speech:

I propose a standard tax deduction for health insurance that will be like the standard tax deduction for dependents. Families with health insurance will pay no income or payroll taxes on $15,000 of their income. Single Americans with health insurance will pay no income or payroll taxes on $7,500 of their income.

It's about time that there is finally a proposal to separate health insurance from the employer. Under the current system, the individual who wants to purchase his own insurance is doubly screwed. In the first place, there's no tax break for individually purchased insurance. And in the second place, there isn't even any insurance marketed to individuals because the entire focus is on selling comprehensive insurance plans to businesses.

Because the Bush plan gives a fixed deduction, it encourages people to shop for lower priced insurance rather than take the most expensive plan on account of the fact that government is paying for part of the additional cost.

This is the best idea to ever come out of W's mouth.

* * *

Immigration: Bush says let more people come here to work. Let them become citizens. Bush doesn't care about preserving our nation the way it is. Big thumbs down to Bush.

Energy: Clean coal technology is good and nuclear energy is even better. Unfortunately that is lost because most of Bush's energy focus is on alternative fuels, and government mandates to force companies to make the stuff. If alternative fuels were in any way practical, the high gas taxes in Europe would have encouraged the adoption of such technologies over there. Instead, Europeans have reacted to high gasoline costs by driving small cars.

Judicial nominations: Bush complains that Congress isn't doing its job in confirming his judicial nominees, and he is right. Shame on Congress.

Terrorism, Iraq, foreign policy: I'm not going to comment on this stuff at this time.

John Faso for Governor of New York

Half Sigma endorses John Faso, the Republican candidate, for Governor of New York.

The most important issue facing middle class residents of New York is the unaffordability of housing. With this in mind, I read what both candidates have to say on housing. I learned that Elliot Spitzer, the Democratic candidate, just doesn't get it, and his policies will cause the price of housing to increase rather than go down.

Elliot Spitzer's website says that housing is too expensive because, even though NY is one of the most heavily taxed states, state government still isn't spending enough money on housing:

The State's investment in housing, adjusted for inflation, has declined by 15% during the last decade. Moreover, state-assisted public housing has been operating at a deficit due partly to the elimination of state operating subsidies in 1998.

Elliot Spitzer's website also includes a defense of rent control:

To stop the loss of affordable homes that already exist, we will address several issues, including lax enforcement of the housing maintenance code and the state's rent laws and the number of units facing expiring government subsidies or restrictions. Only by doing so, can we preserve the fabric of many of our communities.

Elliot Spitzer seems to believe that affordable housing comes from government regulation when, in fact, just the opposite is true, regulation drives up the costs of housing.

In contrast, John Faso's housing position paper doesn't endorse government spending and regulation as the way to make housing affordable.

Faso says that "New York must lower the cost of building houses," and he has some specific proposals including reforming the "Scaffolding Law" which he says adds $6,000 to $10,000 to the cost of a new house.

Faso also proposes consolidating the state housing agencies in order to reduce time consuming and expensive administrative overhead that builders face:

Currently, developers must go to two places, fill out two applications, and manage two timeframes before they can be approved to build. This system is grossly inefficient and a waste of limited resources. The Faso Plan will consolidate the Division of Housing and Community Renewal with the Housing Finance Agency, as they have been in the past.

Faso's housing plan isn't perfect. There are two facets to the high cost of housing in New York City. One is the regulations which drive up costs. The other is zoning which prevents housing from being built in the densities required by the large population in need of housing.

Spitzer's plan does mention zoning, but only as a means to use taxpayer money to build more public housing. Spitzer obviously does not believe in turning the free market loose to build more housing.

Faso's plan is flawed because it doesn't talk about zoning reform, but unlike Spitzer's anti-free market plan, Faso's plan is a step in the right direction.

* * *

The latest poll shows Spitzer leading 77% to 22%. Why even bother to vote? No matter how much Spitzer disgusts me, I don't see the point of wasting time going to the polling place.

Why Democrats suck, part II: college

One of the factors of the new economy which makes the middle class, especially the young middle class, worse off today than they were in the past is the increasing cost of higher education combined with the increasing years of higher education which people feel necessary to obtain in order to be competitive in the economy.

Athough some college programs teach real skills (such as medical school, nursing, and engineering), the majority of college students are enrolled in majors which doesn't add much in the way of knowledge capital.

Student loans are increasingly used to pay for college, and the result is that young people have to go into debt in order to obtain a job which they could have obtained a generation ago debt-free without a college degree. With the exception of programs which generate genuine knowledge capital, college is mostly a transfer of money from the uncredentialed to the credentialed. Most college graduates obtain their knowledge capital on the job and not in college.

People harmed the most are those who start college and never finish. They rack up the debt, but they never gain a credential so they obtain no pecuniary benefits from their college education.

Democrats don't get it. Their goal is to spend ever increasing amounts of public money on the useless goal of making college as universal as high school. Do Democrats think that people who graduate high school barely knowing how to read are going to get anything out of college? Do they think that Walmart workers need a college degree?

UPDATE

The commenter who calls himself "Austrian" left a link to an interesting opinion article from the Washington Post. The author complains that the government isn't spending enough money on graduate education:

Once you aspire beyond a bachelor's degree, the financial aid door is pretty much closed unless you, or your family, have the economic ability to finance whatever costs are not covered by your guaranteed federal student loans.

Today's job market is becoming more and more competitive. Bachelor's degrees don't carry the weight they used to. It's almost necessary to have a graduate, doctorate or law degree to compete with the current highly qualified pool of candidates.

The article demonstrates both the demands for increasing government spending for higher education and the futility of such spending. Because bachelor's degrees have become so common, upper middle class parents now pay for their children to get graduate degrees to make their credentials stand out. If the bad advice of the author of the article is followed, and graduate degrees become as universal as college degrees, then upper middle class parents will then send their kids to yet some higher level of education once again out-credentialing the poor people. It's an "arms race" that can't possibly be won.

Why Democrats suck, part I: housing affordability

Because there are so many ways that Democrats suck, it's too much for a single post. So I start out with Part I, housing affordability.

The biggest problem facing the middle class is the high cost of housing. You hear Democrats occasionally say stuff like "today it takes two incomes where one used to do," but they seem completely clueless when it comes to the reason why it takes two incomes: the unaffordability of housing.

Because Democrats never met a regulation they didn't like, they have zoned and regulated the housing market and caused a massive increase in the cost of housing. If a residential development is even allowed by zoning laws in the first place, the builder faces bureaucratic hurdles in getting it approved for construction which significantly increase the builder's costs.

Steve Sailer has empirically proven the damage done to housing affordability by Democrats by demonstrating the extremely high inverse correlation between whether the people of a state voted for Bush and how much housing costs have risen in that state (greater percentage of votes for Bush equals lower housing costs). Where Democrats run things, they create zoning laws and construction regulations which cause housing to become unaffordable. Unfortunately, Steve seems more interested in how this affects "affordable family formation" instead of using this as evidence that the Democrats are the political party which has most hurt the poor and the middle class.

How hypocritical is it for Democrats to complain about housing affordability when it's their fault?

Would you vote for a guy who looks like this?

A Hillary Clinton supporter at the New York Times hopes not. View the NY Times Magazine photo of Mark Warner at NPR.

The apology at the NY Times only acknowledges that the colors were accidentally changed because of bad film processing. I doubt it was an accident.

The cover photograph in The Times Magazine on Sunday rendered colors incorrectly for the jacket, shirt and tie worn by Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor who is a possible candidate for the presidency. The jacket was charcoal, not maroon; the shirt was light blue, not pink; the tie was dark blue with stripes, not maroon.

The Times's policy rules out alteration of photographs that depict actual news scenes and, even in a contrived illustration, requires acknowledgment in a credit. In this case, the film that was used can cause colors to shift, and the processing altered them further; the change escaped notice because of a misunderstanding by the editors.

Photos don’t come out this bad by accident, not by professionals who prepare the cover photo for the New York Times Magazine. The bad film processing story ignores the use of the wide angle lens. Photographers only use a wide angle lens for a face shot when they want the subject to look ugly.

It’s refreshing to see criticism of the NY Times coming from NPR instead of just the right wing blogosphere.

Kerry dumber than Bush

Via Instapundit, Dean Barnett of Soxblog tells the world how he was right about Kerry not being so bright:

[P]roof has come and Soxblog has been vindicated. The Boston Globe obtained a copy of Kerry’s undergraduate transcript and it is inferior to Bush’s (even though the Globe insists on calling them “virtually identical”). The Globe refers to Kerry as a “lackluster” student; not to quibble with Globe reporter Michael Kranish’s choice of words, but four D’s in one’s freshman year (as Kerry received) suggests a performance considerably more execrable than “lackluster.”

My thoughts:

(1) Obviously Democrats who harped on Bush’s lackluster performance in college are hypocrites, with 20/20 hindsight.

But with foresight it could have been figured out. The guy from Soxblog brilliantly wrote last summer:

If you’re not from Boston, you might be unaware of the following truth: No one here, in spite of Boston College’s undeniable strengths, would eschew an invitation to attend Harvard Law School to attend B.C. It’s simply not done. Thus we can reasonably infer that Kerry did not get in to Harvard Law.

And that’s remarkable. Given his family connections and his post graduate work both in the war and later protesting it, his admission should have been a given. The only thing that would explain Kerry not getting into Harvard would be that he performed dreadfully at Yale. Indeed, he would have had to perform at a level that would have raised the prospect that he couldn’t handle the work at Harvard. His efforts were probably so weak, they could even be described as sub-Bushian.

That Soxblogger guy is a genius. I wish I had caught that.

In October 2004, before the election, Steve Sailer performed a quantitative analysis of Kerry’s test scores,and estimates that Kerry would have scored 1103 on the SAT compared to George Bush’s 1206. (Check out Steve's I told you so post.)

So we see that two bloggers, probably both unaware of the other one’s efforts, figured out before the election that Kerry wasn’t so smart. But the liberal media, too lazy to do research or draw conclusions, happily promoted the idea that Kerry was the smarter candidate. (The NY Times really needs to hire a journalist like Steve Sailer who knows how to do research.)

(2) Is this a legitimate area of public inquiry? I say yes. Presidential candidates say their character is important. Whether they were studying in college is an important part of their character. Both Bush and Kerry fail. In our next election, can’t we have some candidates who had better than a C average? The press should demand that all candidates release their educational transcripts.

(3) The problem with Bush is not merely that he had poor grades in college, but he continues to act dumb. He has no shame that he sounds stupid.

* * *

Michelle Malkin offers a huge list of links to blogs writing about this, and she also wonders if more juicy stuff is being hidden.

Jay Tea of Wizbang wonders if this was the real reason Kerry withheld his military records until now: “I've heard some speculation that Kerry held this back because one of his biggest strengths in the campaign was his perceived intellectual superiority to Bush, and this would put a big dent in that image. But I'm wondering if this is just some "red meat" to keep attention away from a REAL smoking gun...”

Mark of Decision ’08 titles his post: Is John Kerry the Stupidest Politician Alive? I say no, I’ve seen some members of Congress on news shows who were total morons, making either Bush or Kerry seem like rocket scientists in comparison.

Captain Ed points out that Kerry’s and Bush’s academic and military records are very similar. He then comments: “The key difference, of course, is that Bush never pretended to be a great student at college, just as he never pretended to be a war hero.”

Elected official violates her own law

An elected official by the name of Ann V. Null violated her own law:

As it turns out, she rented a room to an immigrant family for about a year in violation of town ordinances against overcrowding of homes -- laws that she campaigned for and voted to approve last year, according to town documents and officials.

If you follow my blog, you know that I strongly oppose unnecessary government regulations, especially zoning laws, because it’s onerous zoning laws that keep the price of housing high and make it impossible for middle and lower income workers to have a decent standard of living.

So I am especially outraged when an elected official violates the very law she voted for. This little story demonstrates a big part of what’s wrong with our government and our politicians.

Laws that are too difficult for even the lawmakers themselves to obey shouldn’t be on the books.

Bolton inquiry continues

The NY Times reports:

In a widening of the inquiry into John R. Bolton's nomination to be ambassador to the United Nations, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee intends to conduct formal interviews in the next 10 days with as many as two dozen people, Congressional officials said Tuesday.

This is getting ridiculous. Don’t they already know enough about the guy? Vote yes or no and stop wasting the taxpayers' money with this ridiculous investigation.

All they are going to find out is more of the same; he’s a conservative hardliner on foreign policy issues, and he’s obnoxious to his subordinates (not the only guy in DC). He would have been confirmed by the Senate long ago were it not for his foreign policy views that liberals disagree with.

Filibuster poll and the stupid impressionable public

According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll:

[B]y a 2 to 1 ratio, the public rejected easing Senate rules in a way that would make it harder for Democratic senators to prevent final action on Bush's nominees.

If ever there was a case of Americans having an opinion about what they don’t understand, here’s a great example. Do even 5% of those polled really understand how the Senate rules work, how they relate to the Constitution, and the history of the rule in question? No they don’t, so any “opinion” they have is merely what they are feeding back from what they’ve seen or read in the liberal-biased news media, or is influenced by how the poll question was worded.

Republicans should ignore this bogus poll and do what they have to do.

Read my previous post on this topic:

Advice to Senate Republicans: end filibuster now.

The Judge Bork-John Bolton connection

The Moderate Voice explains that the reason why John Bolton is having problems being confirmed is the same reason that Robert Bork couldn’t get confirmed: it’s the weird facial hair.

Yes it’s a funny blog post, yet I think that the weird facial hair really is related to both Bork and Bolton’s problems. What kind of person would flaunt weird facial hair? Someone who doesn’t care what other people think about him? Someone who is such an egghead that they lack interpersonal skills? Someone who is lousy at politicking and schmoozing?

Yes, I think that people with weird facial here are eggheads who are probably not so good at politicking and schmoozing, and these are skills which are very helpful in getting fifty senators to vote for you. (But if he’s so bad at schmoozing, how is he a diplomat?)

Advice to Senate Republicans: end filibuster now

I fully support the proposal to modify the Senate rules to prevent filibusters for judicial nominees. My advice to Senate Republicans is to get on with it and change the rules already. Do it first thing Monday morning.

It’s the good judicial nominees that the Democrats are blocking. The ones who believe in strict construction and in the original intent of the Constitution. The ones most deserving of serving as judges.

This issue is bigger than the nominees currently being filibustered. Between now and the end of Bush’s term, more judicial slots will be open for nomination, including Supreme Court positions. Are the Republicans going to let Democrats filibuster the nomination of a conservative Supreme Court Justice, one whose philosophy is similar to Justice Scalia?

It’s obvious that if the Democrats are going to use the filibuster against nominations to lower courts, they are certainly going to use it for a Supreme Court nomination. Therefore the Republicans should just get rid of the filibuster now instead of letting the issue drag on for the next three years. Republicans mustn't let Democrats cow Bush into nominating a Souter-like Justice to the Supreme Court.

The only reason for not getting rid of the filibuster is the theory that in the future a Republican minority in the Senate could use it against a Democratic president nominating liberal justices. I use the word “theory” because (1) who knows when that scenario is going to happen? and (2) if that scenario does happen the Democrats could just as easily change the rules as the Republicans can now.

I applaud Dick Cheney for supporting the elimination of the filibuster. (See today’s Washington Post.) Stephen at Hold the Mayo asks if this was too soon. “The question remaining is was the timing right for Cheney's statement.” No, it’s not too soon, it’s too late, the Republicans should have done this already.

The liberals are, of course, upset about this. For example, Blogenlust writes, “…the Republicans want to end the filibuster for no other reason than to grab more power[.]” It’s not about “grabbing” anything, it’s about getting good deserving nominees onto the courts, using the existing power granted by the Article II Section 2 of the Constitution. And we know very well that Democrats would do the same thing if they were in power and the Republicans were being as obstructionist as the Democrats currently are.

Give D.C. back to Maryland

About a year and a half ago, I wrote, “If a solution to D.C.'s lack of representation is really required (and I don't think it is), then I'd suggest that D.C. be given back to Maryland.”

Today, Eugene Volokh writes, “And the fairest remedy, I argue, is not to give D.C. residents two Senators, but rather to give them a say in the election of a neighboring state's (e.g., Maryland's) two Senators.”

When I wrote my original post, I thought my idea was unique. Maybe Eugene has been reading my blog?

Frist and faith

At the Politburo Diktat, there’s a roundup of posts about Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s plan to participate “in a telecast portraying Democrats as ‘against people of faith’ for blocking President Bush's nominees” (to quote the NY Times).

I strongly disprove of the Democrats for filibustering Bush’s judicial nominees. The history here is that liberals have been able to achieve a lot of policy goals through their control of the courts, which have often disregarded the actual law in order to achieve the “correct” (from a liberal perspective) results.

“Legislating from the bench” weakens our legal system. So I support the nomination of judicial conservatives who respect the laws and the Constitution as they are written and also respect the principle of stare decisis. Unfortunately for our legal system, liberals place their policy objectives above a judiciary that rules consistently and respects the original intent of the Constitution.

The religious context here is that liberal judges have crafted rulings that the Christian Right hates, the most obvious example being Roe v. Wade which legalized abortion. As much as I support abortion, as a rational person who has studied the Constitution I have to tell you that the Constitution says absolutely nothing about abortion, and the ruling of Roe v. Wade is completely inconsistent with the rest of modern Constitutional doctrine which generally holds that legislatures can pass any laws that they want.

The divide between Republicans and Democrats is becoming more about religion and less about the reasons why I used to be a Republican. Frist’s strategy to turn the Democratic filibuster into a religious issue should not be the least bit surprising given the trend over the past few decades.

(To be balanced here, for a more left-wing perspective you can read oldman's post at BOP.)