Unconventional Wisdom

Via The Bench

From The News Junkie. I think I might want to take pics of area gas prices myself. I barely remember the days when gas wasn’t anywhere close to $2/gallon. Those days are gone and no solutions in sight to make gas cost less.

From Reason:

“She incarnates all the nannying, high-taxing, high-spending schoolmarminess of Blair’s Britain. Polly is the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness and health’n'safety fascism.”

So wrote Tory Member of Parliament (MP) and newspaper columnist Boris Johnson in 2006, in a stinging attack on Polly Toynbee, The Guardian columnist and outspoken supporter of Britain’s New Labour government. His Polly-bashing rant encapsulated everything that Boris claimed to loathe about Britain under New Labour: it was fearful, dull, killjoy, illiberal, hectoring, and bossy.

If Polly, impeccably middle-class and more than a little snooty, personified New Labour, then Boris—all shaggy blonde hair, accidental wit, and bumbling persona—personified the reaction against it. Polly wants order and respect and believes you can change the world by taxing fat cats an extra 5 or 10 percent. Boris wants fun and freedom and for the government to withdraw its snout from our everyday lives.

Or so some people believed. How foolish they were. On May 1, Boris was elevated from trouble-making columnist and MP to mayor of the great city of London—and in his first two weeks he has enforced the sort of miserabilist, petty authoritarian measures that will have Polly and her allies nodding enthusiastically as they read their morning papers over bowls of muesli.

First, Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown coated Britain in CCTV cameras, dished out Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBO) to misbehaving kids, brought in new laws to limit free speech, and basically turned Britain into an open prison—and Boris berated them for it. As a libertarian myself (though of the left-leaning rather than the right-wing variety), I wrote numerous articles for Boris when he was editor of the The Spectator, attacking Blair’s zero-fun, zero-tolerance approach to life, love, and liberty.

And yet, Boris’s first actions as mayor have reeked to the high heavens of Blairite bossiness. The very first thing he did was ban the consumption of alcohol anywhere on London’s public transportation system. As of June 1, it will be against the law to sip from a bottle of ale or swig from a can of lager on London buses, trams, and the Tube. Boris says his new law of mini-prohibition is designed to tackle “aggressive behaviour by drunken yobs.”

This is the same Boris who once opposed New Labour’s ban on smoking in public places. Despite what he says, it isn’t true that London’s trains and buses are awash with fist-waving drunks. Last year there were a whopping 1.6 billion passenger trips on the London Underground, and only 1,806 reported assaults. That is one assault for every 449,690 commuters, which makes London’s tube system safer than Perth railways in sunny Australia, where last year there was one assault for every 222,360 commuters (This is worth pointing out because Brits have a tendency to move to “happy, peaceful” Australia when they tire of the crime and grime here at home).

As John Stuart Mill knew only too well, regulating the consumption of booze is really about regulating the people themselves. Mill argued that attempts by temperance groups and governments to diminish “the occasions of temptation”—by making booze expensive or shutting down pubs—were suited “only to a state of society in which the labouring classes are avowedly treated as children or savages.”

Article via Instapundit:

The Democrats may yet survive their primary blood feud to capture the White House, but it doesn’t follow that liberalism will recover with them. If it does, it will be a liberalism that still cannot be named as such. Even in 2008, in what shapes up as a terrible year for the Republican Party, leading Democrats are still reluctant to identify their policy proposals with the “liberal” moniker. By contrast, while the Republican Party may well be headed for a bloodbath in November, its leaders grasp to the term “conservative” as if it were a lifeline.

Presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama has not only had his hands full trying to distance himself from his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, but also trying to obscure his identity as a political liberal – which he most assuredly is. National Journal rated him the most liberal senator in 2007.

“A lot of these old labels don’t apply anymore,” Obama told the New York Times recently, referring to political terms like “conservative” and “liberal.” In his stump speeches during the campaign, he has frequently championed policy goals by claiming that they aren’t in fact liberal: “There’s nothing liberal about wanting to reduce money in politics,” he has said. “That is common sense. There’s nothing liberal about wanting to make sure [our soldiers] are treated properly when they come home . . . . There’s nothing liberal about wanting to make sure that everybody has healthcare. We are spending more on healthcare in this country than any other advanced country, but we’ve got more uninsured. There’s nothing liberal about saying that doesn’t make sense, and we should do something smarter with our healthcare system.”

In arguing that “labels don’t apply anymore,” Obama is making the same claim, nearly verbatim, that Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, and other Democrats have made over the years, stretching back over a generation. What these candidates found out the hard way was that labels mean plenty, especially when they refer to something that people understand–like liberalism.

Americans learned over several decades what liberalism, at least modern liberalism, was all about. Contrary to some claims that conservatives, in a sinister plot, defamed the word, liberalism did a pretty good job defaming itself: from the anything-goes ethos of the 1960s to radical war protestors, from tax-and-spend government and welfare policies to lax criminal justice, pacifism abroad, and a wide-ranging contempt for the institutions and values of American life, liberals took what had been the dominant political current in American politics and made it into a pejorative term. Today, while centrist American voters may blanch at some of the Republican Party’s positions, they have no wish to go back to governmental progressivism.

If they did, Obama-never one to miss a rhetorical trick–would be resurrecting the word “liberal” as change we can believe in.

I don’t feel like making single posts out of these so here are some brief links and excerpts:

School Board Fights Back Against Teachers Union

Grand Rapids School Board Fights Fire with Fire.
I have often wondered why school boards unilaterally disarm in the face of various job actions, like work-to-rule, slowdowns and no confidence votes. These things have little practical value, but they are very effective as stunts to get attention. The school board in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has apparently decided to grab hold of the fight-fire-with-fire-turnabout-is-fair-play-sauce-for-the-goose-goes-around-comes-around clichés in its latest contract battle with the teachers’ union. The board took a no confidence vote in Grand Rapids Education Association president Paul Helder.

Dems using racial quotas for convention?

The states and parties have different ways of filling those seats. Some, like Pennsylvania, put delegates’ names on the primary ballot. Party central committees name some delegates in others. But for Washington state’s Mr. (Jody) Rodgers, for example, the road to Denver began at a Feb. 9 caucus at his West Seattle elementary school. There, his neighbors elected him an Obama delegate to Seattle’s 34th Legislative District convention, which in turn elected him an Obama delegate to the state’s 7th Congressional District convention.

At that convention, the Obama delegates elected seven Obama delegates to Denver — three men and four women, to meet party rules that require each delegation to be gender balanced. Mr. Rodgers did not win a spot.

The 37-year-old new-technology tester for Adobe Systems Inc. has one final chance at the state party convention in June, when Washington’s 27 at-large delegates will be elected from among a pool of applicants. “It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet of democracy,” he says, “but I want to see the process through.”

The odds are long: The party’s big-tent diversity goals reserve six of Washington’s convention seats for blacks, 10 for Hispanics, and others for Asian, American-Indian, young, disabled, and gay, lesbian and transgendered Democrats. Any diversity seats that haven’t been filled at the congressional-district meeting will be plugged at the state convention.

Few States Set World-Class Standard

As the debate over the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) makes its murky way through the political swamp, one thing has become crystal clear: Though NCLB requires that virtually all children become proficient by the year 2014, states disagree on the level of accomplishment in math and reading a proficient child should possess. A few states have been setting world-class standards, but most are well off that mark–in some cases to a laughable degree.

Democrats Miss Marks to Finance Convention

The Democratic Party is struggling to raise money for its convention in Denver on Aug. 25-28, with fund-raising by the host committee falling far short of the party’s goals and lagging behind the Republicans’ efforts for their convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

So far, the Denver host committee is about $15 million short of the $40.6 million it must raise by June 16. With only $25 million raised so far, the committee is scrambling to offer a new round of special deals for corporate underwriters, as well as to devise a backup plan should the fund-raising fall short and plans for the convention need to be scaled down.

“We will raise the money,” Chris Lopez, a spokesman for the host committee, said. “We are working every day to get it done. We are in a situation where we have to get it done and we will. We can’t make any excuses.”

The Next Attack on Gold Has Begun

By substituting digits for currency, bankers have solved this problem. A depositor can move digital money out of his account, but it is transferred to another digital account. The system does not lose deposits. When someone withdraws currency and does not redeposit it, the money supply declines. So, credit cards are a banker’s dream come true. The threat of bank runs by depositors has ended.

But now a handful of small companies have offered depositors a way to substitute digital money for gold stored in a vault. This gold can now be spent digitally. This creates the threat of a rival form of money.

Hardly anyone accepts gold for transactions. So, the threat to banks is remote today. It is merely the first hesitant step in the creation of an alternative monetary system. Yet this threat has aroused the hostility of some government organizations: those that monitor money.

These articles were found first on Newsalert.

Check out one take on Conservatism and look at the comments:

Is anyone a small ‘c’ conservative these days?

I’m young and admit that my opinion is constantly developing, so I shy away from applying a political label to myself. Hell, it often changes hour to hour.

However, I’ve always been attracted to classic conservatism.

By that I don’t mean a strict adherence to all tradition…that is just silly. Instead, I like the conservatism based on doubt- understanding that no one person or group will ever ‘figure it all out.’ It draws a fine line between the legal world and the moral world. The conservative understands that the moral world is out of bounds for the government. History is littered with hundreds of millions of dead bodies at the intersections of government policy and morality policing.

A conservative, I think, places trust in the individual…they balk at the prospect of giving the government the task of enforcing morality.

How then can anyone who calls themselves a conservative want to give the government the power to decide the ‘right way to live’ for some individuals?