Considerettes

For those who asked, “The GDP jump was good, but what about unemployment?”, here’s you’re answer.

Bill Clinton has a great idea on how to end the North Korea arms crisis:

Former US President Bill Clinton yesterday said Washington should offer food and energy supplies to North Korea in return for access to its laboratories to help resolve a crisis over the North’s nuclear program.

Oh yeah, that really worked well last time. In 1994, Jimmy Carter got them to say they’d freeze their nuclear program in exchange for aid like this. And of course we can take the word of a tyrant, can’t we?

Now they’re back, holding a bomb in the air, threatening to drop it, unless we do the Jimmy Carter Tango again (but this time, it sounds like Bill wants to lead). And, for some reason, Bill thinks that doing the same thing will really work this time. Given the same situation, he wants to do the same thing, and somehow he expects a different outcome. This is patently insane, but it is how government works (This new program didn’t work? Give it more money!) and may explain why Bill was such the consummate politician.

Clinton continued, “I don’t believe that North Korea wants to drop a bomb on South Korea or Japan. I think what they want to do is eat and stay warm.” Well yeah, that and continue to coerce it out of us until such time as we won’t take it anymore.

Too much communism, not enough (or any) capitalism. That’s the problem in North Korea. Giving into their demands like some spoiled brat will not break them of their bad behavior. Instead, it will reinforce it, and then we become their enablers.

Some voting advice from Howard Dean:

Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean told a Tallahassee audience today that southerners have to quit basing their votes on “race, guns, God and gays.”

Not basing a vote on race is a good thing, but the rest is probably best translated, “Please leave your Constitution, your religion and your morality at home before coming to the voting booth.” Even the mention of race is most likely a call for Southerners to abandon any push to treat people the same regardless of race, and instead just let the policy of reverse discrimination continue.

Thanks, but no thanks, Howard. Close my eyes, plug my ears, hold my nose and vote Democrat? What sage advice.

In celebrating the amazing GDP growth last week, I said that Robert Kuttner’s lament that the states weren’t getting more federal money was probably premature, since a growing economy means more tax revenue without having to raise rates.

Here’s one sign that it’s happening.

[Georgia] State tax collections rose 6.1 percent in October, the third consecutive month of improvement for the first time in two and a half years, since early 2001.

October collections were up $62.7 million, led by big gains in sales and income taxes. For the first four months of the current 2004 fiscal year, revenues have climbed $185 million, or 4.7 percent.

The economy was in a slide when Bush took office, and once his tax cuts hit, they not only helped the consumer, but the states as well.

You may have heard the big news in Republican circles that Democrat Senator Zell Miller of Georgia has said he’s going to vote for George W. Bush in 2004, bucking his half-century-plus voting trend. Read why in his own words.

You can’t tell me that homosexuals just want to be left alone and do what they want to in private when this sort of thing is happening:

A Christian mother is appealing a judge’s decision that prohibits her from teaching her daughter that homosexuality is wrong.

Religious freedom in the home is being made subordinate to the promotion of homosexuality.

Oh, and those of you who say that religious freedom is OK as long as it’s in private (the “freedom from religion” crowd), I expect you to be opposing this just as forcefully.

Thanks to Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy for pointing this out. He is correct in noting, “This is a troubling story, and it supports the arguments of some that the pursuit of gay rights is now sometimes suppressing the rights of others — free speech rights, religious rights, associational rights, and so on.” Homosexual groups have always hand-waved away the idea of some sort of social & political “homosexual agenda”. Individually, perhaps not, but as a group, it’s certainly looking like there’s an agenda here, and it’s making way too much headway.

Eugene’s a law professor, so it’s worth reading his whole initial analysis of this. It’s quite balanced for & against both sides.

About this time every year, I get a bunch of visitors coming here who’ve Googled for search terms like “christmas origins” or “origin of thanksgiving”. What they find is “Thanksgiving & Christmas Origins”, an essay I wrote about those holidays as they relate to the separation of church and state. You might want to check it out.

Link to me, and I notice. 🙂 “Pat’s World”, in a diatribe against those who think partial-birth abortions are an inherently good thing, linked to my “Lessons Learned from Impeachment” essay. The phrase she hyperlinks to it is “dung heap”, but no, not because that’s his description of the essay, but because he’s referring to Iowa Senator Tom Harkin who used those words to describe Ken Starr’s impeachment evidence even before he saw the evidence. Pat now refers to him as Tom “Dung Heap” Harkin, which is, no doubt, an editorial statement.

Thanks for the link, Pat! (Oh, and I only now noticed it because someone clicked on it just yesterday. But hey, I’ll take what I can get, eh?)

Scott Ott of ScrappleFace, once again, has satire (as they say on TV) “ripped from the headlines”:

CBS Evening News Moved to Showtime

(2003-11-04) — Just hours after deciding to sell the planned CBS miniseries ‘The Reagans’ to the Showtime cable movie channel, network chief Les Moonves announced that the ‘CBS Evening News with Dan Rather’ would also move to Showtime starting in December.

“It just doesn’t work,” Moonves told staffers. “Listen, we are not afraid of controversy, we’d go out there if it came in at 50-50, pro and con, but it simply isn’t working. It’s biased.”

According to an unnamed CBS insider, “He made up his own mind after seeing it. He’s made a brave, decisive move.”

Of course, the italic comments are what Moonves said about “The Reagans”, but they could work in this context too, eh?

Spinsanity has a good treatment of the whole “imminent threat” brouhaha. They examine the evidence from both sides (when the Bush administration specifically avoided calling Iraq an “imminent threat”, as well as what it calls “extremely few instances” when they suggested that it might be), and this is their conclusion:

As we have pointed out before, many of the arguments for war made by the Bush administration were deceptive or false. However, critics who make it appear that the Bush administration’s case relied primarily on claims of an imminent threat distort a more complex argument that painted Iraq as an intolerable, but not imminent, threat. Those unfair attacks do not make it legitimate for Bush supporters to jump on any critic who uses the phrase, however, or claim that nobody in the administration ever suggested Iraq could pose an “imminent threat.” Complexity is not an excuse for cheap shots from either side.

Basically, the administration, with precious few slips, did not portray Iraq as an imminent threat, and that distorted attacks by either side are inexcusable.