Considerettes

Well, this has been a whale of a month for the ol’ blog. After a late September link by Instapundit, followed closely by a pointer from NRO’s The Corner, I’ve had a couple of serious spikes in traffic and double the average daily visits all this month. Not to mention actual regular readers! The kind that come back more than once! Woo hoo!

Anyway, if you’re one of those regulars, thanks so much for stopping by every so often. At least now I don’t feel like I’m just talking to myself anymore. I appreciate your visits, even though I’m not nearly as prolific as other blogs you probably frequent. Hope you enjoy it, and, even more, hope the opinions expressed are worth mulling over in your head.

One last chance to ensure you have the correct page bookmarked. I think there’s still a couple of stragglers for whom this will appear to be the last enter ever (since they’ve bookmarked the October, 2003 archive page). Anyway, just one last FYI.

See you in November!

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A senior member of Saddam Hussein’s ousted government is believed to be helping coordinate attacks on American forces with members of an Al Qaeda-linked terrorist group, a senior defense official said Wednesday.

What, another Saddam-al Qaeda connection? But I thought the liberals knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was absolutely no connection at all.

Imagine my surprise. Or not.

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Back in August, I gave a slight fisking to an American Prospect article entitled “The Fruits of Bushonomics” by Robert Kuttner. It was only a slight fisking, because I’m not a professional economist, but Mr. Kuttner’s points all seemed to defy history. Here’s part of what he said:

Economic growth came in at 2.4 percent for the second quarter of 2003. That was better than expected, but it needs to hit 4 percent or higher to reduce unemployment. Bush’s cheerleaders say that will happen, in well-choreographed fashion, in the election year.

I talked about how Bush inherited a sliding economy (complete with links to prove this), and said:

Further, the numbers for the past 3 quarters (1.4, 1.4, 2.4) do, in fact, point to an economy that is set to start making headway in the unemployment department. No “cheerleading” required.

Nope, no cheerleading necessary, just tax cuts. Today we find out that the economy in Q3 of this year grew at a “blistering” 7.2%. This runs completely counter to Kuttner’s predictions.

Normally in this kind of downturn, Washington helps the states. This time Bush put tax cutting ahead of aid to states and communities. Congress grudgingly included an emergency $20 billion only because Democrats insisted on it. Even so, that sum is a small fraction of the state budget shortfall.

The more people make, and more importantly the more they keep, the more money comes in to the states’ & fed’s coffers (just like they did during the Reagan administration, when the federal income tax revenues increased by $160 billion in the 8 years after his tax cuts). I’m betting that the $20 billion will pale in comparison to the windfall states will find coming in due to increased consumer & business spending.

I remember watching the 1994 election coverage the night that Newt Gingrich and the Republicans won a majority in the House right under Clinton’s nose. George Will called it “Reagan’s Third Term”. And George W. Bush is poised to start another Reagan-esque booming economy, if he keeps to conservative principles. The fruits of “Bushonomics” are ripening, and it’s good news for all of us, even the Bush-haters.

Les Moonves and the cast of “The Reagans”; you’d better call your respective offices. Last-minute shooting starts this evening on the recently-written final scenes for the mini-series. Act 7: Reagan’s Fourth Term.

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Global warming caused by…the sun? According to studies of sunspot activity, it’s certainly a big factor.

For example, between 1645 and 1715 (a period astronomers call the “Maunder Minimum”) the sunspot cycle stopped; the face of the Sun was nearly blank for 70 years. At the same time Europe was hit by an extraordinary cold spell: the Thames River in London froze, glaciers advanced in the Alps, and northern sea ice increased. An earlier centuries-long surge in solar activity (inferred from studies of tree rings) had the opposite effect: Vikings were able to settle the thawed-out coast of Greenland in the 980s, and even grow enough wheat there to export the surplus to Scandinavia.

And you thought glacial melting would destroy all life on earth, eh? Nope, it just allowed farming where it hadn’t been done before, or since. And all without having fossil fuels to blame. How did the human race survive? Listening to the dire predictions of “global warming” scientists, if Greenland was warm enough to be farmed, we’d be goners for sure. Apparently not.

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Looks like the Republicans are finally finding their spine in the battle over judicial nominees. This story says that Majority Leader Bill Frist plans a 3-phased approach, culminating, if necessary, with the so-called “nuclear option”; changing the rules to require only a simply majority to confirm nominees.

But then, maybe it’s not so much a return to principles, but more of a timing issue. Referring to when the vote on the “nuclear option” would take place,

At that time, President Bush would be in the midst of his re-election campaign, and as Novak reported, Republicans would be able to energize their conservative base around the issue.

It may just be timed to get better coverage of the tricks Democrats are playing with the judicial nomination process. Either way, I’m glad to see some movement on this.

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The Weekly Standard has further proof of the rather close connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Looks like the anti-war protestors are getting a leg knocked out from under them.

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House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is all concerned about the arrest of law-breakers.

U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said on Friday police raids on dozens of U.S. Wal-Mart stores in the search for illegal immigrants this week amounted to “terrorizing” workers.

“It instills a great deal of fear in people who are only trying to earn a living and put food on the table for their family,”…

…and ought to be legitimately in fear of being discovered as criminals…

…Pelosi, a California Democrat, told reporters on a Congressional visit to Mexico.

Ah, pandering to Hispanics, buying their support by promising to ignore criminals. Worse, by promising them full benefits, including drivers licenses and health benefits. But why stop there? Let’s fix all their traffic tickets, ignore any felonies, and forgive all income taxes. (Well, even Democrats couldn’t stomach that last one.)

This is the politics of division; split us up into groups, pit us against each other, and derive power from playing both sides.

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I found the full CBS News story done by correspondent Vince Gonzales on the web. Entitled “A Dark Side to Home Schooling”, it covers a handful of extreme examples of criminal behavior that occurred in homeschool families, although it’s quite a leap of logic to suggest that homeschooling itself was the cause or even a factor in them.

Just for perspective, here’s a page from a study done by the National Center for Education Statistics that shows that during the 1998-1999 school year there were 40 “school-associated violent deaths in the United States” of school-aged children. Of course, defenders of public schools would point out how small a percentage of the population that is, as would CBS News, and rightly so. It’s not really a major, national news story. But then, CBS made a national news story out of a similar small percentage of homeschoolers.

The problem here is classic “guilt by association”. Andrea Yates homeschooled, and, as CBS dutifully reports, killed all 5 of her children. No mention is made by CBS in this story, however, of her issues with postpartum depression. One might imagine Mrs. Yates might have done the same thing after her children came home from public school, but would CBS then have somehow associated public schools with those deaths in the same manner they have done with homeschooling? The answer is obviously “No”, because domestic violence happens every day in this country in public-school-educated families, and no mainstream news organization is blaming public schools for it.

But here’s how CBS words it, letting you make the link:

Andrea Yates gained national attention when she drowned her five children in a bathtub. Deanna Laney, told investigators she beat her three sons with rocks, killing two of them. Both mothers taught their children at home.

They might as well have added, “They also had brown hair, and had their car’s oil changed within the last month”, for all that last observation is worth.

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As I’ve said before, I’m not a really big fan of polls. And that’s not really what this entry is about, so now that we have that out of the way…

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution conducted a poll on how Georgians rate Bush’s performance in a number of areas. The full results are here, but let me summarize them:

The worst Bush does among those who give him positive results is about 60%, while over half the areas give him a 70+% mark.

So what’s the AJC’s headline over this? “Georgia leans to Bush, poll says.” Where’s this “lean” bit coming from? Well, another question in the poll asks how these likely Georgia voters would vote in a race between Bush and any Democratic candidate. Bush gets 51.8% while the Democrat gets 38.6. In that one sense, you can say that Georgians only “lean” towards Bush, but in most of the other questions Georgians seem to be pretty solidly on his side.

What liberal media? The liberal media that writes headlines to minimize good results for a Republican, hoping that those who read it will see that and move on to the next story. That liberal media.

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Just a reminder, in the waning days of October, that some of you still have the October archive page of Considerettes bookmarked instead of the main page. If, when you come here, the address ends with “2003_10_01_archive.html”, then you need to change the bookmark to remove that part.

Wouldn’t want you to miss anything.

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The myths about homeschooling keep being torn down, but not many folks are listening. WorldNetDaily reports on a new study by the National Home Education Research Institute. According to the study, homeschoolers, when they’ve grown up, demonstrate that not only are they well socialized, but they more often get into college, get good jobs, and demonstrate more community and civic involvement than the average.

So who’s ignoring this good news? The mainstream media (same folks ignoring good news in Iraq) and CBS in particular. With all the studies showing how much better homeschoolers do than their public schooled counterparts, one has to wonder why CBS would present such a biased view of it. There’s an agenda here, make no mistake about it.

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If someone says to you that the suicide bombings in Israel would stop if only the Palestinians were given the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, have them consider this:

Fifty-nine percent of Palestinians believe that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad should continue their armed struggle against Israel even if Israel leaves all of the West Bank and Gaza, including East Jerusalem, and a Palestinian state is created, a new survey shows.

But wait, there’s more.

Nintey-six percent of Israeli Jews say the people who piloted the planes on September 11 were terrorists, while 37 percent of Palestinians share that view.

Slightly more than one in four - 26 percent - of Palestinians believe Israelis planned the 9-11 attacks.

Forty-two percent of Palestinians and 61 percent of Israeli-Arabs stated that they support the people who are attacking Americans in Iraq. Zero percent of Israeli Jews said they did.

Much of the blame for this foolishness must rest on the Palestinian “government”, as their indoctrination programs seem to still be working.

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The Rumsfeld memo is being defended by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in much in the way I concluded yesterday:

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers said the memo, which poses more questions than answers, was written to generate ideas on how to begin the secretary’s long-term goal of transforming the Defense Department to meet new threats.

“The experts will tell you that if you talk to somebody about change or transformation of anything, they will tell you that the larger an organization and the older an organization, the more difficult it is to change it, and it’s not going to happen unless you have a CEO bought into the need for change. So, what you’re seeing in this memo, the way we do business, is that our boss is challenging us with a lot of questions on are we changing ourselves to deal with this 21st century threat environment we find ourselves in,” Myers said.

Rumsfeld is challenging the status quo in the DoD because the status quo in the world changed on 9/11. He’s not ducking the hard questions, he’s got the courage to be asking them, and he wants answers.

Of course, the Democrats are willing to use anything at all for political gain:

“Secretary Rumsfeld’s comments are an illustration of the concern that they have about the failure of their policies in Iraq so far. There can be no other description of those words than that,'’ said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.

Rumsfeld is thinking outside the box. Daschle is still inside the box, criticizing anyone who leaves it, and hoping that criticism garners him and his party more votes. Never mind that these kinds of memos and questions and challenges are necessary, nay required, for this new warfare if we want to survive it. Nope, for Tom Daschle, power is the prime mover.

The good news is that not all Democrats think the same way.

Many members of Congress said it was critical the questions Rumsfeld raised be addressed.

“This is a far-reaching call for his advisers to think outside the box,” said Rep. Jim Turner, D-Texas, who met with Rumsfeld Wednesday.

“Are we winning or losing the global war on terrorism? Those questions need to be answered,” said Missouri Rep. Ike Skelton, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

But there are still plenty of those that just don’t get it.

Rep. Harold Ford, D-Tenn., was more critical. He said the memo showed the administration has exaggerated its success in the war on terrorism.

Not so. These questions are ones about getting at the root of the terrorism weed, and we wouldn’t even need to be asking them if we were still frightened, hunkered down behind our own borders, hoping that it wasn’t our building that would be dive bombed next. Instead we’re making progress in the war on terrorism. These questions highlight that we’ve made good progress and now need to look at the tougher issues.

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I finally got a real live blogroll set up. Blogrolling.com is up and running again, so I’ve got it all squared away, and now have an actual list of blogs I frequent. Enjoy!

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USA Today reports on a memo Rumsfeld sent out. Granted, it sounds more dour than his typical public pronouncements, but I would imagine part of the reason he is more upbeat outwardly is that he’s got, not just the military’s, but the entire nation’s morale in his hands. Still, let’s take a look at the 3 points USA Today notes:

• The United States is “just getting started” in fighting the Iraq-based terror group Ansar Al-Islam.
  Administration officials have been saying we’re just getting started with terrorists in general. There has never been the illusion (even in Rumsfeld’s “positive public comments”) that this was going to be anything but a long, hard fight. No news here.
• The war is hugely expensive. “The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists’ cost of millions.”
  What war isn’t hugely expensive? Although, that’s not exactly what Rumsfeld is saying. He’s simply noting that terrorism costs less than protecting the citizens plus routing the terrorists from their holes/havens/palaces, and that this reality is something that should be taken into consideration. No news here.
• Postwar stabilization efforts are very difficult. “It is pretty clear the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.”
  See the first item. Stabilizing Iraq means instituting a government of the people, not of the Ba’athists. This takes time. Another country you may be familiar with took about 7 years to go from post-war to constitution. The U.N. thinks Iraq should be ready to go it alone in less than 1. Rumsfeld is correct in saying that it will take more time than those in the ivory tower think it should. No news here.

So this is not really news at all. The three main topic pointed out by USA Today don’t really give us any information we don’t already have, or could figure out with the simplest knowledge of history.

That, of course, hasn’t stopped others from trying to prove that, when things don’t go precisely as planned, those plans were just trash talk to get the gullible citizenry on-board. The implication being that this never happens with plans laid by Democrats. Admitting that fighting terrorism is a new kind of war and that we may need radical changes in how we prosecute this war vs. those in the past is being portrayed by Bush-haters as a sign of stupidity or weakness, instead of what it really is; a bold, paradigm-shifting solution to a different kind of threat. Again, the implication is that a Democrat would have done the same ol’ things in the same ol’ ways because “we’ve always done it that way before”. Is this the “progressive” thinking that liberals so highly tout?

Rumsfeld’s memo shows he is a realist and a visionary. That’s the kind of person we need in charge of our post-9/11 military.

UPDATE: A thanks to Mr. Preston at Junkyard Blog for linking to this entry from his in-depth commentary on the subject.

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