John Kerry's amazing gaffe

John Kerry spoke at a rally for the fast-collapsing Democratic candidate for California governor, Phil Angelides, at Pasadena City College on Monday. He was still warming up the crowd with some introductory remarks when he casually complimented the students on the hard work they were putting into their education.

"You know," the Massachusetts senator said, "Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

White House spokesman Tony Snow was ready Tuesday with a page of rapid-response notes. "Senator Kerry not only owes an apology to those who are serving, but also to the families of those who've given their lives in this," he said. "This is an absolute insult."

Yes, it's that, but it's also more evidence that the wrong Democratic nominee was ridiculed for being robotic.

John Kerry is running on an autopilot that was programmed forty years ago. That's when there was a draft, known as "selective service," from which university students were exempted.

Today, in the all-volunteer (if you don't count stop-loss and involuntary call-up orders) military, many young people enlist in order to get an education. It's not that they're not "smart." It's that not everybody has a wealthy family (or wife) to cover their expenses for them.

If John Kerry is troubled that the all-volunteer military allows people with money to enjoy the national security provided by the children of people without money, he could propose universal conscription, a military draft without exemptions. But that is the single greatest infringement on freedom that it is possible for a government to carry out.

It is repulsive to suggest mandatory national service in a vague way as a partial solution to what is perceived as the general unfairness of life. Mandatory service should be reserved for a situation that threatens the survival of the United States.

If John Kerry really wanted to help the Democrats win, he would stop visiting the lush fields of Southern California campaign donors and talk about what the Iraq war is doing to the all-volunteer military.

He is in a position to articulate the short-term and long-term costs beyond the casualties; the strain on the National Guard and Reserves, the wear on military equipment, the pressure to drop standards in order to meet recruitment goals, the cost in readiness for the next conflict or disaster.

If he really wanted to help the Democrats win, he would raise the specter that President Bush's policy in Iraq has put the country on the path to a military draft and must be reversed before it's too late.

President Bush and the Republican candidates are out on the hustings telling parents they are fighting the long war on terror to keep their children safe.

Democrats could neutralize those speeches by telling parents that the president's idea of a war on terror will one day take their children from them.

If they'd rather whine about unfairness than do that, they'll probably lose.


Copyright 2006

Editor's Note: You might be interested to read "Why the Iraq policy isn't working" for a another idea on how to accomplish the president's goals in Iraq.

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Lost in translation

"It's strange how life can bludgeon you into a situation you never dreamed you could handle."

From his 1959 autobiography, "Groucho and Me," those are the words of Groucho Marx.

That is, unless you're using Google, which located a Japanese translation of the book somewhere on the World Wide Web and at the click of a mouse translated the page back into English:

"How doing, when it can insert in the hand, life whether it keeps facing, is strange ones to the kind of circumstances you have not never dreamed."

In this section of the book, Groucho is telling the story of how he and his brothers found out that they were funny all on their own and no longer needed to pad their vaudeville act with dancers or singers or other comedians. They were in the dressing room of a theater in Champaign, Illinois, when a singer named Manny Linden informed them an hour before a matinee that he was the reason for the success of the act and unless he got a raise from thirty-five dollars a week to fifty, he wasn't going on.

(If you Google "'Manny Linden' vaudeville" to find out what ever became of him, all you find is a Japanese translation of Groucho's book.)

The Marx Brothers told Manny Linden they would "struggle along without him" ("without he it can keep doing sufficiently"), and threw him out of the theater.

Groucho writes that after the singer's departure, he was "shaking with the feeling of impending doom" ("foreboding of the ruin which is imminent was shaken"). With less than an hour until the performance, he and his brothers went up on the bare stage of the empty theater and developed a comedy routine that would become their "first timid step over that mysterious line that divides the small time from the big time" ("the first step which and, exceeds the mysterious one line which separates with three flows and the top rank, does timidly").

"Naturally, we were nervous," Groucho writes, "because these college kids could be awfully tough if they didn't like what they saw ("because the university students do not like this, tried probably to mean very thing"). But it worked. They ate it up." ("They advancing, accepted that.")

"For the first time in our career we realized that we could succeed as an act without any outside help," Groucho concludes, "We had finally freed ourselves from always having some outsider along to put us over ("We finally, always borrowing the help of the person outside, from the fact that it makes the self recognize became free"), and from then on we were able to steam along under our own power." ("From that time, following to our yourselves abilities, it reached the point where spirit well it can advance.")

The purpose of telling you all this is two-fold: first, to prove that Groucho Marx is funny in two languages, and second, to plead with the federal government never to spend any tax dollars on automatic translation software, no matter how hard it is to find Arabic translators who can pass an FBI background check.


Copyright 2006


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Bill Clinton's 60th birthday surprise

What in the name of God is Bill Clinton selling?

This weekend, Bill and Hillary Clinton will collect $60,000 apiece from donors who want to attend a Rolling Stones concert with the former first couple. A backstage pass, including dinner and a photo, will run you $500,000.

Five hundred thousand dollars.

Five hundred thousand dollars.

For another half-million dollars you can play a round of golf at the Bayonne Golf Club on Sunday morning. Or spend $100,000 and raise $250,000 more and you can have breakfast with the Clintons at the French bistro Pastis.

Not to be overly cynical, but it seems to us that smart people don't just throw a million dollars cash into a politician's lap (or his foundation) without expecting something of significant value in return.

Help with foreign business deals? U.S. Senate access? Future ambassadorships?

We won't know for years, if ever, and when we finally find out we'll be accused of running a right-wing conspiracy if we put two and two together.

Just the same, we recall the words of Agatha Christie:

"Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody."



Copyright 2006


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Vote for Kinky Friedman if you want to

People who want to vote for an independent candidate are often told that they're wasting their vote. There's no point, they're assured, because the independent candidate can't possibly win. The only reasonable thing to do, reasonable people insist, is vote for the lesser of the two major-party evils.

But that's not very good advice.

In politics, nothing gets everybody's attention like a big clump of votes.

If people who favor an independent candidate don't express that view at the ballot box, nobody knows they're there. But if they turn out and vote for the independent candidate, everybody who wins or wants to win takes note of the number of voters who favor those positions.

They take note of it for many years to come.

They take note of it in future statewide races, and in the presidential primaries.

If you support an independent candidate and you don't vote for him (or her), future candidates have no way to know that you exist.

Sure, there are polls. But after the election, nobody pays attention to pre-election polls. Polls are only a guess based on the number of people who answered their phone at dinner time. Votes are actual people who knew the date of the election and the address of their polling place.

So if you want to vote for Kinky Friedman, or any independent candidate, don't be touted off the idea. Your vote counts. Maybe not in this election. But very likely in the next one.



Copyright 2006


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Having a COW: The Bush family's lobbying business

Today's Los Angeles Times has a fascinating report on Neil Bush's educational software company, Ignite! Learning. But a close reading indicates that the headline, "Bush's family profits from 'No Child' act," misses the real scandal.

The page-one story says the company founded by the president's brother, and owned partly by his parents, has placed its Curriculum on Wheels (COW for short) product in forty U.S. school districts. The paper reports that at least thirteen districts have used federal funds from the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 to purchase the program. The "portable learning centers," which resemble big purple cows on wheels, cost $3,800 apiece.

That's not the scandal.

The scandal is tipped off by the list of outrageously wealthy foreigners, in businesses totally unrelated to education, who "invested" in Ignite! Learning or made grants and gifts to U.S. school districts with the stipulation that the money be used to buy Ignite! Learning products.

Neil Bush founded Ignite! Learning in 1999 when his brother was governor of Texas and a strong favorite to win the Republican nomination for president. The Times reports that by 2003, according to SEC records, "Neil Bush had raised about $23 million from more than a dozen outside investors, including Mohammed Al Saddah, the head of a Kuwaiti company, and Winston Wong, the head of a Chinese computer firm." More recent investors include "Russian fugitive business tycoon Boris A. Berezovsky and Berezovsky's partner Badri Patarkatsishvili. "

School districts in the United States received unexpected gifts from Saudi-owned Aramco Services Co., Apache Corp., BP and Shell Oil Co., all conditioned on the districts buying Ignite! Learning's software.

And don't expect Neil Bush to rest on his laurels for the two remaining years of the Bush administration. "As our business matures in the USA we have plans to expand overseas and to work with many distinguished individuals in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa," he wrote to the Times in an e-mail, "Not one of these associates by the way has ever asked for any access to either of my political brothers, not one White House tour, not one autographed photo, and not one Lincoln bedroom overnight stay."

Look closely at that statement. "We have plans" tells you that no money has yet changed hands. "Not one of these associates . . . has ever asked" doesn't tell you that they won't, or that they'll have to.

So what's going on here?

The facts reported by the Times support an interpretation that Ignite! Learning is a conduit for payments to Neil Bush, and perhaps to former president Bush and his wife Barbara, for some sort of lobbying services.

After all, if Shell Oil and Aramco and a dozen cash-rich international businessmen want to support schools in the United States, they don't need Neil Bush to do it. They could donate directly or to any of the foundations that support education.

And if they're looking for a profitable investment vehicle, it's a passing strange coincidence that this collection of characters would randomly hook up in a tiny Texas software firm that puts purple cows in grade-school classrooms.

So, is Ignite! Learning a perfectly legitimate Texas business?

Or is it a clever way for foreign governments and businesses to pay the Bush family for lobbying and consulting services without the ugliness of the president's relatives registering as foreign lobbyists?

We can make an educated guess.


Copyright 2006

Editor's Note: You might be interested to read the earlier posts, "The Bush family's Dubai Connections" and "The president's motive in the ports deal."

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Bill Clinton trades freedom for goodness

Just when you think the Republicans are trying to give it away, the Democrats won't take it.

Thirty times. That's how often former President Bill Clinton mentioned "the common good" in his speech at Georgetown University on Wednesday.

Americans who value their freedom should find those words chilling. They probably won't. Instead they'll just feel a little guilty that they aren't going to vote for the people Bill Clinton called "us 'common good' folks," because everybody knows by now that "common good" means the government is going to take money out of some people's paychecks and give it to other people.

There's no reason to feel guilty for resisting this idea.

If you accept the Clinton argument that government should be in the business of striving for "the common good," then you are accepting the idea that it is an appropriate role for government in a free society to evaluate each person's need for income and then use the tax code to shift it around accordingly.

Former President Clinton told the crowd at Georgetown he thinks it's illegitimate for the government to give him, a millionaire, five tax cuts while the cost of a college education climbs out of sight.

But look closely at that statement. Is it Bill Clinton's obligation to pay for the college education of other people's children? Is it the proper role of the government to decide how much money he really needs and then take the rest in taxes for the benefit of other people?

Is it any of the government's business how much of your money you need?

You have the right to enjoy the fruits of your own efforts. That's the difference between freedom and slavery.

If need is a license to take money from other people, then you are enslaved to the needs of people you don't know and can't control. Whether they make careful and responsible decisions or reckless and stupid decisions, their needs have a claim on your efforts.

And it is the first claim on your efforts. "The common good" isn't mentioned by name on your pay stub; look for the line that shows all the money that goes to other people before you ever see it.

Sure, they stop before they take it all. But the only thing that stops them is the fact that at some point you say, "That's it, no more." The guiltier they can make you feel, the longer you'll wait before you say it. That's why everything has to be your fault: your car is causing global warming, your selfishness is causing hunger in Africa, your greediness is causing U.S. corporations to seek profits instead of "helping people" (and gradually going out of business). Induce guilt, collect money. If John Dillinger had thought of this he might be on Mount Rushmore today.

In any case, it's a myth that there is such a thing as "the common good." The United States is a big country filled with big interests and big disagreements. We rely on our carefully-constructed representative government to hammer out the compromises that keep the nation from fracturing.

Of course it's hard to find common ground in Washington. That's the place we send our arguments. Only dictatorships have quiet, cooperative, unanimous governments.

We should all be happy that we're not there yet.


Copyright 2006

Editor's Note: You might be interested to read "The Tyranny of the Children" at www.SusanShelley.com.

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Delivery for Paul McCartney

America Wants to Know happens to have a psychic medium on staff and every once in a while she gets an unexpected message that we thoughtfully (if ineffectively) deliver to the intended recipient through the medium of this blog.

You may remember that she recently received a message from former President Richard Nixon for Vice President Dick Cheney, and just today, as the story of Paul McCartney's divorce fell deeper into the tabloid muck, she received another message from the Great Beyond.

The medium held two absolutely clean chalkboards face-to-face against each other and went into one of those weird, creepy trances that she has. The chalkboards never left our sight for a moment, yet when the medium returned to her senses and pulled the slates apart, there was writing on one of them.

And this is what was written:

James Paul McCartney,

Lock yourself in a room with a piano, and write.

The message was unsigned, but the medium said he'd know who it was from.

Whatever. If you see him, let him know.



Copyright 2006

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High in the Sky

Did you know the Russians have an open bar on the International Space Station?

Two NASA astronauts made guest appearances on the Emeril Live show last week and chatted with celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse about the inconveniences of dining in zero gravity. Emeril, it turns out, was invited by NASA to cook a meal for the crew of the International Space Station and he was demonstrating the recipes (Mardi Gras Jambalaya and Kicked-Up Bacon Cheese Mashed Potatoes) for his TV audience.

Emeril said he learned a lot about NASA's rules and regulations for space food, including the agency's total ban on alcohol. (Rum-soaked raisins in the rice pudding didn't make the cut.)

That's when astronauts Cady Coleman and Ed Liu gave the audience the old wink-wink-nudge-nudge and said of the ban on alcohol, "That's the official policy." The Americans, they said, do not bring alcohol into space.

"But the Russians," Emeril began.

He was interrupted by cheers and applause from the studio audience, joined enthusiastically by former space station resident Ed Liu.

Hey, why not?

America Wants to Know has previously written [see "Space Station Zero"] that the space station is nothing but an excuse for big federal contracts that U.S. lawmakers hand out in exchange for big campaign contributions. You don't need the Hubble telescope to see that the whole manned space program has degenerated into an elaborate public relations ploy to fool the taxpayers into thinking their money is going into exciting, futuristic, space-exploring, mind-expanding research, when in fact it's going in a circle around the earth, again and again and again, accomplishing nothing.

The astronauts take questions from grade-schoolers and give interviews to talk show hosts and stand in front of cameras while millions of people watch their hair float sideways. They perform like actors. They might as well drink like them.

Speaking of performances, you should have seen astronaut Cady Coleman, a woman who has a bachelor of science degree in chemistry from MIT and a doctorate in polymer science and engineering from the University of Massachusetts, talking like a Valley girl and describing her work deploying the Chandra X-Ray Observatory in 1999 as "very cool." Speaking as if she were addressing a class of fourth-graders, she described what it was like to do science experiments with globs of liquids in zero gravity. "Very cool," she said again.

Well, that's what matters. You can't expect taxpayers to stand still for anything nerdy. Unfortunately, Cady's cool experiments are a thing of the past now that NASA is planning to drop all science research on the International Space Station in order to save money.

But don't worry, the space station still has a purpose. It's a working Bed and Breakfast Inn for tourists who pay the Russian government to fly them up there for a visit. The Russians charge twenty million dollars for a trip to the space station that U.S. taxpayers shelled out a hundred billion dollars to build.

No wonder they're opening champagne.



Copyright 2006

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Justice Scalia recommends The 37th Amendment: A Novel

No, not really.

Justice Scalia didn't recommend The 37th Amendment but he did say in a televised debate with ACLU President Nadine Strosser tonight that Americans ought to amend the Constitution for privacy rights instead of expecting unelected judges to declare rights that aren't in the Constitution.

And that's the premise of the book.

The 37th Amendment is the story of a man caught up in a murder trial in Los Angeles in the year 2056, forty years after the 37th Amendment has removed the guarantee of "due process of law" from the U.S. Constitution.

All the federal constitutional rights that the Supreme Court derived from the due process clauses are either gone or replaced by constitutional amendments. In the new world of 21st-century states' rights, California has achieved safe streets by running a criminal justice system that makes Singapore look soft by comparison. But some people decide they've had enough of it and begin an effort to repeal the 37th Amendment and go back to the system we have today.

You will read this book in two nights.

It makes a great Christmas gift for people who like mysteries, histories, politics (either party) and speculative fiction. Click over to www.The37thAmendment.com and read it online, or order it from BarnesandNoble.com, Amazon.com, or your favorite bookstore.

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Reading the people who are reading the polls

Today the Washington Post ran a story headlined "White House Upbeat About GOP Prospects; Self-Assurance of Bush, Rove and Others Is Not Shared by Many in the Party." Is this a case of "justified confidence," the paper asks, or is it "self-delusion?"

Let's see if we can figure it out.

The Washington Post details Karl Rove's analysis that the Republican Party will not lose more than eight to ten seats in the House, short of the fifteen needed to turn over control to the Democrats. He is equally confident that Republicans will hang onto control of the Senate.

The Bush White House has been wrong about a lot of things, but this is their area of expertise.

Another acknowledged expert in electoral politics appears to agree with them. Former President Bill Clinton told party activists in Des Moines Saturday that Democrats running this year should promise not to raise taxes, a startling comment from a man whose standard speech includes a couple of paragraphs on how much money he makes and how the Republicans have given him a tax cut he doesn't need.

President Clinton must have read the same polls President Bush was reading when he hit the campaign trail last week and told supporters at every stop that Democrats will raise their taxes and Republicans won't.

Also in the category of smart money is the New York Stock Exchange, where you might expect the possibility of a Democratic takeover on Capitol Hill to send a defensive shudder through the markets, sensitive as they are to any talk of higher taxes and business-unfriendly regulation. Instead, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is in record territory. Tobacco company stocks, as of Friday, were trading closer to their 52-week highs than than their 52-week lows, perhaps telling us that the market doesn't expect to see a gavel in Rep. Henry Waxman's hand any time soon.

So many Democrats have spoken so confidently about winning the House and Senate that they risk a real bloodbath in the leadership if it doesn't happen. If the best internal polls are really predicting Republican victory, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, party chairman Howard Dean, and House and Senate campaign committee chairmen Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer should probably start lowering expectations right now, before they catch all the blame for losing a sure thing.

Watch for that.


Copyright 2006

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Saving Katie Couric

CBS put a lot of money and effort into revamping the CBS Evening News, but five weeks into the experiment, the broadcast has fallen to third place and the ratings are below the mark set by Bob Schieffer during his last week as anchor in late August.

Here at America Wants to Know, we think we know why.

The broadcast feels like a classroom film. It seems to stop for explanations of the news, while other broadcasts just report the latest development and move on.

It appears that the producers and writers of the CBS Evening News, and perhaps Katie Couric as well, are frightened that the audience either isn't interested in, or doesn't understand, the news.

You can sense the fear as Katie Couric both reports and explains every story. She seems to be silently telling viewers, "Don't be afraid! This is really interesting and important! It's relevant to your life! If I can understand it, you can understand it! Wait, don't go!"

CBS News could take some advice from Ayn Rand, who once said, "When you write, do not think about how beautiful your words are, or how people will react, or above all, what it supposedly proves about you. Think exclusively of what you want to say."

CBS should send the audience-research department home and put its resources into investigative journalism and reporting. Then Katie Couric will have something interesting to say. They may find it's easier to command attention than to plead for it.


Copyright 2006

Source note: The Ayn Rand quotation is taken from "The Art of Nonfiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers" (page 110). The book is available on Amazon.com or at the Ayn Rand Institute's online bookstore.

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier post, "Bob Schieffer's Elegant Exit."


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The GOP's bad bet

Today, without a word of comment, President Bush signed a law banning Internet gambling.

He didn't really have any choice, because Republicans attached the ban, which makes it illegal for banks and credit card companies to process payments for online wagers, to the completely unrelated Safe Accountability for Every Port Act.

The Republicans slipped the gaming ban into the port security bill after they failed to stick it onto the defense appropriations bill.

They're betting that the crackdown on demon rum -- sorry, online poker -- will energize and mobilize social conservatives, who might otherwise stay home on Election Day and mope about the persistence of sin despite twelve years of Republican majorities on Capitol Hill.

What they're missing is what all the polls miss. People don't tell the truth about what they do on the Internet.

For every social conservative who rails against pornography and gambling, there are two, or four, or four thousand, or maybe forty thousand, individual Americans who like to surf porn sites and gamble in online casinos.

They're not going to show up in any poll. But if they show up on Election Day, they won't be feeling kindly disposed toward the Republicans.

It's entirely possible that the Republicans will lose close races on this issue alone. We will never have empirical data to support the theory that the gambling ban is what cost the GOP its majorities, because people won't tell anyone with a pencil or a tape recorder that they're angry about the ban on Internet poker. They'll say something about Iraq or something general about the need for a change.

Of course, the Republicans think the Internet gambling ban will excite their base. They picture close races going their way on the strength of all those doorbell-ringing evangelicals who suddenly feel a warm rush of righteous affection for the GOP moralists.

We'll see.

This is more than a political issue for one election. This is a fight over whether conduct that some people consider immoral should be criminalized for the entire nation, and more broadly, whether it is appropriate for the U.S. government to use federal law to regulate private moral conduct.

The Constitution limits the power of the federal government to do that kind of thing. When social conservatives of another era wanted to ban alcohol, citing a list of social ills much like the ones cited by gambling opponents today, they had to get a constitutional amendment to do it. The Constitution did not give the federal government the power to regulate alcohol.

Of course, Prohibition was repealed. That took a constitutional amendment, too.

In a free country, citizens do not have to get permission from their government for everything they want to do. The government has to get permission from its citizens for everything it wants to ban.

But the Republicans did not do that.

Instead of voting openly on the Internet gaming ban, the Republicans slipped it into an important bill on port security. They did it late on a Friday night, just before adjourning for the fall campaign season, knowing that no one would have the nerve to vote against port security and then go home to face the voters.

That may be a well-established Washington practice, but it is not government by consent of the governed.

Here's some advice for politicians who want to repeal the ban on Internet gaming but are afraid to look like they're standing up for sin: Stand up for freedom, for limited government, and for the principle of government by consent of the governed. Don't be intimidated by those who cite the welfare of children to justify a constant expansion of federal power. Stiffen your spine with the words of President George Washington: "Let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed."


Copyright 2006


Editor's Note: You might be interested to read "Marijuana, Prohibition and the Tenth Amendment" at www.SusanShelley.com.

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