The Town Crank

Recent commentary: politicians' personal lives

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:54:00 GMT

Do candidates' personal lives matter?

(published 30-Jan-2012, Appleton Post-Crescent online)

You can argue the issues all you want and claim to be objective every time you enter a voting booth. But you and I both know that it really comes down to whether you think you could have a beer with the guy, right? Is he at least middling honest? Are the bribes he's taken modest? Do his children not gag too much whenever they attend one of his rallies? Does his wife look like she's actually smiling and not gritting her teeth? There's SOMETHING about the way a politician lives his life that affects you when you find out about it. We treat politicians like the tabloid stars: we revel in their affairs, peccadilloes, and bad judgment. All of that shapes our opinion much more than their stands on the issues, which, by golly, seem to shift around quite a bit. Issues? Phooey! Whatever sticks to the wall, man!

[This long series of "Recent Commentary" posts (beginning in November, 2003!) is from the Appleton Post-Crescent weekly Reader Reaction Forum feature. Each submission can be no longer than 150 words. Any comments to RRF postings on-line can be no longer than 2000 characters. That explains some of the terseness of expression and cramming to fit. - Ed.]

Recent commentary: cutting health care costs

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:02:00 GMT

What would help keep medical costs in check?

(published 16-Jan-2012, Appleton Post-Crescent)

I've had a solution to the health care crisis for years. If you remember that doctors take money from sick people, you'll realize that health care isn't a "right"; it's just a service like plumbing or snow removal. There's a crisis in health care costs and availability because government caps the price paid for services to Medicare and Medicaid providers; that is, price CEILINGS are enforced. The result? Lots of doctors don't accept Medicare or Medicaid patients. Thus there's a shortage of health care services due to government meddling. Anything in short supply costs more. What we could try is something akin to milk price supports. That is, place price FLOORS on medical services. You don't hear about ice cream shortages do you? No, because milk prices are supported. Thus we have plenty of milk. Do that for health care services and instantly there'd be a surplus of medical services.

Recent commentary: the top story of 2011

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 19:50:00 GMT

What was the top news story of the year?

(published 26-Dec-2011, Appleton Post-Crescent)

I'll sidestep the top international story since there are only a couple of choices and everybody will make one or the other (I mean the killing of Osama bin Laden and the Japanese earthquake / tsunami / nuclear accident). I'd rather look at Wisconsin. In my opinion the top story was the chronic temper tantrum thrown by the public employee unions this year. From the state capitol demonstrations manned by AWOL teachers with fake doctors' excuses; to the Fleebaggers; to the recall of 9 -- count 'em! -- 9 state senators; to the senate recall elections that did NOT tip the majority to the whiners...I mean the Democrats; to the bubbling resentment and grass roots organizing that took place before a Recall Walker movement could officially begin; to the recall signature-gathering effort itself (and the conservative backlash) ...all of it has made Wisconsin the bellwether political state, supplanting the woebegone California.

Bullying as a federal issue

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 14:54:00 GMT

Today I saw this headline on Drudge: 7-Year-Old Boy Charged with Sexual Harassment for Kicking Bully in Groin.... It's a CBS News report about the trouble a boy has gotten into by (vigorously) defending himself from a bully on a public school bus. It's the "public school" part that has led to the logical...I'm sorry, I meant to say "ridiculous" conclusion.

Elizabeth Warren vs. Ayn Rand

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 14:35:00 GMT

Remember Elizabeth Warren?

Warren is the leading Democrat challenging Senator Scott Brown in his re-election bid. She became the poster child standard bearer for the Democratic party when she famously spoke out at a September campaign rally in Massachusetts.

Take the Reason quiz

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:58:00 GMT

I like Reason Magazine. A lot. Today I took its "super-scientific" quiz to determine which Republican Presidential candidate voiced positions on the issues that most closely match my own.

Here's how the quiz works. On nine burning issues of the day, Reason lists responses made by the top 10 Republican candidates (even including Sarah Palin) during the debates.

The "super" committee and its impossible mandate

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:26:00 GMT

Why did the debt supercommittee struggle to agree?

(published 28-Nov-2011, Appleton Post-Crescent)

Because they were tying themselves in knots trying to appear fiscally conservative yet compassionate; unyielding yet conciliatory; determined yet accommodating; implacable yet benevolent; cold-blooded yet warmhearted...you know the drill. It was the old economic balloon animal squeezed by a committee – which, as everyone knows, is a life form with three or more stomachs and no brain. I can't imagine what the "super" version of a committee would be. Maybe something like a sea cucumber that ejects its stomach in self-defense, I don't know. What I do know is that the "super" committee wasn't going to come up with anything better than the European Union did in its latest Greek bailout scheme. They weren't actually going to cut anything or raise anybody's taxes! C'mon! $1.2 trillion in "savings" over ten years? We're hosed. They know it. So first: get re-elected. Then they can blame the other side. So relax! Nothing's changed.

Recent commentary: what should the Feds do about the schools?

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:18:00 GMT

What can Washington do to improve education?

(published 24-Oct-2011, Appleton Post-Crescent)

Short answer: Stay the heck out of it! The long Tea Party answer: Deep-six the Department of Education, repeal the "No Child Left Behind Act" and "Race to the Top", and keep President and Mrs. Obama away from school lunch menus. The Obama administration wanted to limit the amount of potatoes served in school meals; but the Senate unanimously voted to prohibit the Department of Agriculture (which provides funding for publicly funded government monopoly school meals) from setting any maximum limits. Good grief! Our Congresscritters seem to have misplaced the 10th Amendment. Government is the only entity that treats a failure like a success. How? By feeding more money into failing programs year after year after year. And that's the problem: failing programs "need" to be supported with more and more tax dollars -- or, these days, borrowed dollars. What they've become are pet projects to bolster our Congresscritters' re-election chances.

[This long series of "Recent Commentary" posts is from the Appleton Post-Crescent weekly Reader Reaction Forum feature. Each submission can be no longer than 150 words. Any comments to RRF postings on-line can be no longer than 2000 characters. That explains some of the terseness of expression and cramming to fit. - Ed.]

Recent commentary: Tax the rich?

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 09:53:00 GMT

Should the wealthy pay a higher percentage in taxes?

(published 3-Oct-2011, Appleton Post-Crescent online)

That's a cart-before-the-horse question. Yes, it's true: I don't care about the poor and the less fortunate. All I care about is that my rich buddies get to keep all the money...which is really the government's money, right? "From each according to his ability", right? Nope. I don't buy it. The real question is: Should the government overspend as much as it does? Answer? Heck, no! If you accept that the government can spend like a drunken sailor then we have no common ground. You accept as a necessary corollary that the government can tax as much as it wants to try to cover at least a portion of what it overspends. Go ahead and tax the wealthy all you want. See where it gets you if the government makes no changes to its monstrously gross overspending...which it won't. How can it? There are Congresscritters to be re-elected!

Recent commentary: another stimulus?!

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 23:40:00 GMT

What should another stimulus bill accomplish?

(published 19-Sep-2011, Appleton Post-Crescent)

I cannot agree that there should be another stimulus! The federal government has been pouring money we don't have into too many things that have no bearing on economic recovery. From the President's admission that there WERE no "shovel-ready" projects, to massive high-cost rail projects -- Yay! Governor Walker, by the way! -- to the recent collapse of Solyndra, the Silicon Valley company that was supposed to showcase the Obama administration's clean energy policies...it's unbelievable to me that we've been duped into agreeing that propping up unprofitable technologies by borrowing money from the Chinese is the way to get the economy going. The global warming johnnies are in on it, too, with their unprovable assertions that wind power and solar power will be so much more efficient -- and CHEAP -- in the future that we should throw money at alternative energy companies. Complete and utter balderdash! Twaddle, even!

An email to Rush

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 14:15:00 GMT

Here's the email I sent this morning under the subject line of "Give 'em hell, Harry!" This will not, I'm afraid, endear me to the female faculty at the Middle School!

Dear Rush,

While re-reading Paul Johnson's excellent, "A History of the American People," I ran across a quote from Harry S. Truman that made me laugh out loud. The quote comes at the end of this passage on page 794 in which Johnson describes Truman's moral upbringing:

Recent commentary: 9/11 ten years after

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 22:09:00 GMT

What does the Sept. 11 anniversary mean to you?

(published 5-Sep-2011, Appleton Post-Crescent)

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said recently, "the one thing the terrorists cannot do - not one of them, not 10 of them, not 10,000 of them -they can't change who we are." I'm afraid that that turns out NOT to be the case with respect to the site of the World Trade Center. A nation that sent a man to the moon in less than a decade after President Kennedy set that goal cannot seem to build a new building on the site of the 9/11 disaster in New York. Bickering, wrangling, grandstanding, whining, posturing, and mewling and puking like infants. As an old friend of mine said about it, "Everyone's ego had to be massaged." We're definitely good at the self-esteem game, but we can't seem to build anything anymore, even at the site of one of our greatest national tragedies. What happened to us? Powell, unfortunately, is wrong.

Recent commentary: worries

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 16:16:00 GMT

Reader Reaction Forum: Do the stock market's daily ups and downs worry you?

(published 15-Aug-2011, Appleton Post-Crescent)

In a word, no. What really worries me is something that Mark Steyn pinpoints in his new book, "After America". That is, "When did human life become impossible without a 'safety net'?" In other words, what happened to the American "can-do" spirit? The most recent sign of the ignominious retreat from our status as the world leader in just about everything was the end of the Space Shuttle program, leaving a bloated bureaucracy behind. We solved the greatest engineering problem in the world in just 8 years: getting a man to the moon and back safely. NASA's mission now? "...to reach out to the Muslim world...to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science," as NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. As Styen says, "There's your American decline right there...an increasingly unmanned flight from real, historic, technological accomplishment to unreal, ahistorical, therapeutic, touchy-feely multiculti." That's what worries me.

Recent commentary: on whether recall elections are "good"

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 13:39:00 GMT

Recently, the Appleton Post-Crescent web site overseers allowed the length of comments posted to online articles to increase from 1000 to 2000 characters. I took advantage of that largesse today in posting my two cents in the online discussion of recall elections in Wisconsin.

My old high school chum, Brian Farmer, wrote the best 150-word essay on the question: "Are recall elections good for Wisconsin?" To offer applause for his essay and to stick my own oar in the water, I responded. Here is the Reader Reaction Forum question, Brian's post, and my comment:

Steyn does it again!

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 19:39:00 GMT

This is the title page of my copy of Mark Steyn's latest book, "After America: Get Ready for Armageddon". Note the keen dedication!

A couple of my friends asked if Steyn actually read The Town Crank blog. I had to confess that I'd read about the release of the book last month, and pre-paid list price + shipping to get Steyn to dedicate as well as autograph a copy for me. He was gracious enough to inscribe the six words you see above.

As satisfying as it is, that's now what I'm writing about today. I'm writing to offer my initial impression of the book. It is excellent.

Steyn is the best (and the funniest) political commentator of the century. I still hold P. J. O'Rourke right up there (I loved "Parliament of Whores", "Give War a Chance", "Holidays in Hell", etc.); but I think that Steyn has surpassed O'Rourke as the more trenchantly witty.

I haven't finished reading the book yet, but I had to share a passage from it that struck home very strongly.

For a long, long time I have been very disenchanted with NASA. Since we stopped going to the moon, it's been hard to work up any spit for what the agency has done; and along the way it has grown to gargantuan proportions while doing all these spit-less missions.

Steyn encapsulates the decline of America with a rather poignant portrayal of the decline of the U. S. space program in the hands of NASA and our overweening government:

Half a century ago, the future felt different. Take 1969, quite a year in the aerospace biz: in one twelve-month period, we saw the test flight of the Boeing 747, the maiden voyage of the Concorde, the RAF's deployment of the Harrier "jump jet", and Neil Armstrong's "giant [leap] for mankind."

Buzz Aldrin packed a portable tape player with him on Apollo 11, and so Sinatra's ring-a-ding-ding recording of "Fly Me to the Moon" became the first (human) music to be flown to the moon and played there. Had any other nation beaten NASA to it, they'd have marked the occasion with the "Ode to Joy" or Also Sprach Zarathustra, something grand and formal. But there's something marvelously American about the first human being to place his feet on the surface of a heavenly sphere standing there with a cassette machine blasting out Frank and the Count Basie band in a swingin' Quincy Jones arrangement – the insouciant swagger of the American century breaking the bounds of the planet.

In 1961, before the eyes of the world, President Kennedy had set American ingenuity a very specific challenge – and put a clock on it:

This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

That's it. No wiggle room. A monkey on the moon wouldn't count, nor an unmanned drone, nor a dune buggy that can't take off again but transmits grainy footage back to Houston as it rusts up in the crater it came to rest in. The only way to win the bet is with a real-live actual American standing on the surface of the moon planting the Stars and Stripes. Even as it happened, the White House was so cautious that William Safire wrote President Nixon a speech to be delivered in the event of disaster:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace...

Yet America did it. "Fly Me to the Moon/Let me sing forever more." What comes after American yearning and achievement? Democratization: "Everybody Gets to Go [to] the Moon." That all but forgotten Jimmy Webb song from 1969 catches the spirit of the age:

Isn't it a miracle
That we're the generation
That will touch that shiny bauble with our own two hands?

Whatever happened to that?

Four decades later, Bruce Charlton, professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham in England, wrote that "that landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans." That's a good way to look at it: the political class presented the boffins with a highly difficult and specific problem, and they solved it – in eight years. Charlton continued:

Forty years ago, we could do it – repeatedly – but since then we have not been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.

Of coure, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer wanted to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something... But I am suggesting that all this is BS... I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since.

Can that be true? ... [I]f you think about it, isn't it kind of hard even to imagine America pulling off a moon mission now? The countdown, the takeoff, a camera transmitting real-time footage of a young American standing in a dusty crater beyond our planet blasting out from his iPod Lady Gaga and the Black-Eyed Peas or whatever the twenty-first-century version of Sinatra and the Basie band is... It half-lingers in collective consciousness as a memory of faded grandeur, the way a nineteenth-century date farmer in Nasiriyah might be dimly aware that the Great Ziggurat of Ur used to be around here someplace.

So what happened? According to Professor Charlton, in the 1970s "the human spirit began to be overwhelmed by bureaucracy." The old can-do spirit? Oh, you can try to do it, but they'll toss every obstacle in your path. Go on, give it a go: invent a new medical device; start a company; go to the airport to fly to D.C. and file a patent. Everything's longer, slower, more soul-crushing. And the decline in "human capability" will only worsen in the years ahead, thanks not just to excess bureaucracy but insufficient cash.

"Yes we can!" droned the dopey Obamatrons of 2008. No, we can't, says Charlton, not if you mean "land on the moon, swiftly win wars against weak opposition and then control the defeated nation, secure national borders, discover breakthrough medical treatments, prevent crime, design and build to a tight deadline, educate people so they are ready to work before the age of 22..."

Houston, we have a much bigger problem.

To be sure, there's still something called "NASA", and it still stands for the "National Aeronautics and Space Administration." But there's not a lot of either aeronautics or space in the in-box of the agency's head honcho. A few days after Charlton penned his elegy for human capability, NASA Adminstrator Charles Bolden appeared on al-Jazeera and explained the brief he'd been given by President Obama:

One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering.

Islam: The final frontier! To boldly go where no diversity outreach consultant has gone before! What's "foremost" for NASA is to make Muslims "feel good" about their contributions to science. Why, as recently as the early ninth century Muhammad al-Khwarizmi invented the first universal horary quadrant! Things have been a little quiet since then, or at least since Taqi-al-Din's observatory in Istanbul was razed to the ground by the Sultan's janissaries in 1580. If you hear a Muslim declaring "We have lift off!" it's likely to be a triumphant ad-lib after lighting up his crotch. As far as I recall, the most recent Islamic contribution to the subject of space exploration came from Britain's most prominent imam, Abu Hamza, who in 2003 declared that the fate of the space shuttle Columbia was God's punishment "because it carried Americans, an Israeli and a Hindu, a trinity of evil against Islam."

It's easy to laugh at the likes of Abu Hamza, although not as easy as it should be, not in Europe and Canada, where the state is eager to haul you into court for "Islamophobia." But the laugh's on us. NASA is the government agency whose acronym was known around the planet, to every child who looked up at the stars and wondered what technological marvels the space age would have produced by the time he was out of short pants. Now the starry-eyed moppets are graying boomers, and the agency that symbolized man's reach for the skies has transformed itself into a self-esteem boosterism operation. Is there an accompanying book – Muslims Are From Mars, Infidels Are From Venus?

There's your American decline right there: from out-of-this-world to out-of-our-minds, an increasingly unmanned flight from real, historic, technological accomplishment to unreal, ahistorical, therapeutic, touchy-feely multiculti.

So we can't go to the moon. And, by the time you factor in getting to the airport to do the shoeless shuffle and the enhanced patdown, flying to London takes longer than it did in 1960. If they were trying to build the transcontinental railroad now, they'd be spending the first three decades on the environmental-impact study and hammering in the Golden Spike to celebrate the point at which the Feasibility Commission's expansion up from the fifth floor met the Zoning Board's expansion down from the twelfth floor.

Google and Apple and other latter day American success stories started in somebody's garage – the one place where innovation isn't immediately buried by bureaucracy, or at least in most states, not until some minor municipal functionary discovers you neglected to apply for a Not Sitting Around on My Ass All Day permit. What did Apple and company do in those garages? They invented and refined home computers – an entirely logical response to late twentieth-century America: when reality seizes up, freedom retreats and retrenches to virtual reality, to the internal. Where once space was the final frontier, now we frolic in the canyons of our mind. We're in the Wilbur & Orville era of the Internet right now, but at the Federal Communications Commission and other agencies they're already designing the TSA uniforms for the enhanced cyber-patdown.

And what do you have to show for all that government? It's amazing with a mutli-trillion-dollar barrel how quickly you wind up scraping the bottom of it. In Obama's "American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan," two of the five objectives were to "computerize the health-care system" and "modernize classrooms." That sound you hear is the computerized eye-rolling with which every modernized hack author now comes equipped. For its part, the Congressional Progressive Caucus wanted "green jobs creation" and "construciton of libraries in rural communities to expand broadband access." And in a postmodern touch, Mark Pinsky at the New Republic made the pitch for a new Federal Writers' Project, in which writers laid off by America's collapsing newspaper industry would be hired by the government to go around the country "documenting the ground-level impact of the Great Recession." America has a money-no-object government with a lot of money but no great objects.

No apologies from this quarter for the length. Steyn is always worth reading and he has made America's decline manifestly axiomatic to even the meanest intellect.

Google Maps and the Sheik Hamad

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 17:55:00 GMT

Just following up on the story about the UAE sheik who had his name carved into the desert. Above you'll see the Google Maps view of the name. Those fun folks at Google have actually traced out the letters of the name in one of their maps. Click "Read more..." to see the map itself.

1st video on the new phone

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:14:00 GMT

I finally broke down and purchased a no-contract smart phone at Radio Shack this week. It's an LG Optimus V from Virgin Mobile. The price had dropped 25% in recent weeks. My son, Alex, already has one from Sprint (for which he's paying a lot more per month) and he's actually happy with it, unlike the last couple of phones he's had.

The phone sports a 3.2 megapixel camera/videocam and I had my first opportunity to use it this morning. Of course it's a kitten video; what did you expect?

Recent commentary: Too early?

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 20:25:00 GMT

Is it too early to pay attention to the Presidential race?

(published 11-Jul-2011, Appleton Post-Crescent on-line)

I'd pay a lot more attention if a Democrat challenged Obama in a primary. THAT would be interesting. Kinda like when Reagan challenged Ford. But, no, it isn't too early...it actually can't come early enough for me. I determined quite a while ago that if asked about Obama I'd say, "The President's got a tough job. Lets see how he does." Well, we've seen. The guy is living in a fantasy world with respect to the economy. I liked a couple things that happened on his watch, though: The Navy SEAL raid on that Somali pirate lifeboat in April, 2009, that freed Captain Richard Phillips; and the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden's Pakistani compound. And I won't be unhappy if some major troop withdrawals take place in Afghanistan and Iraq. But that isn't enough to make me want him to be re-elected. No sir.

[This long series of "Recent Commentary" posts is from the Appleton Post-Crescent weekly Reader Reaction Forum feature. Each submission can be no longer than 150 words. Any comments to RRF postings on-line can be no longer than 1000 characters. That explains some of the terseness of expression and cramming to fit. - Ed.]

This is what drives me crazy...

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 16:27:00 GMT

...about the progressive mindset: the cloying yearning for expensive projects that have no chance of standing on their own.

I was a member of the board of directors for a small community theater group in Oshkosh, WI, in the early 80s. I was the Secretary and a close friend of mine was the Treasurer. Our group had done well with its productions so we decided to rent larger space in a strip mall owned by a fellow who had several businesses. He charged our group a very low rent.

What a concept!

steve-erbach@new.rr.com — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:28:00 GMT

From the comic strip, Family Tree. "I'll suggest that." Yes, do, please. Pretty please?