Winter escape

There will likely be no posting for the next two weeks, while me and the missus head south to escape Winter’s icy grasp.

Icy grasp? Who’re you kidding, there John? The temperature yesterday reached a bone-chilling 63°.

Hey, I’ll take it. Winter will too soon realize that it doesn’t have the month off.

Cheers; see you a while ago…

Fox not “conservative?”

There is some sentiment, at least on the right, that Fox News is, somehow, becoming “liberal.”

This seems to relate the the unseemly departure of Glenn Beck last year. It’s hard to know what motivates some folks to throw such claims about. I happen to think that Fox does a reasonably good job of being “fair and balanced.” Sometimes too good.

A lot of people seem to think that because Fox has Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and other reliably conservative commentators, it is, somehow, a right-wing network. They key word is “commentator.”

But Fox routinely provides both a liberal and conservative point of view of controversies in the news. This may confuse some people, because they’re perhaps used to an unending stream of in-the-liberal-bag “news” from NBC, ABC, and CBS. Let’s not even mention MSNBC, which could double as Obama’s reelection committee.

But yesterday Fox kind of demonstrated that they’re not nearly as conservative as might be thought. Two men who appeared Friday should destroy that myth. First, Fox continues to allow Geraldo “Blanket Amnesty” Rivera air time. Whenever he talks about the nation needing a “comprehensive” immigration policy, he means amnesty.

But Rivera is not the worst. That would be Jesse Jackson, also on this morning (don’t know what he said; I don’t listen to charlatans so turned it off). Fox also has been hoodwinked into allowing the all-but-convicted felon and charlatan Al Sharpton on the air. At least Sharpton is personally charming; Jackson is a Chicago thug.

It’s not that I disagree with what those worthies might have to say. It’s that they have no moral standing; they are serial liars. Shame on Fox for having them on, more than once.

Having the likes of these on Fox says nothing, however, about Fox’s alleged political bias. It says a lot about their judgment of who or what is newsworthy.

Make it stop…

And then there were 19 of the hellish things. Last night’s debate shed some heat and a little light. Conventional wisdom in the right-leaning ‘sphere is that Newt shot himself in the foot, Mitt came alive, and Rick really, really looked and sounded good.

Too bad it’s become a two-man race in Florida, because Rick Santorum looks a lot more like a principled conservative who will not have to defend flip-flops. Because he’s not had any on social issues that are near and dear to us (though he does have some weakness on fiscal issues, but, hey, nobody is the perfect candidate).

One of the worst moments in the debate came when Gingrich accused Romney of being, somehow, anti-immigrant. Not anti-illegal immigrants, just, plain, that man hates immigrants. Especially Hispanics, which, coincidentally of course, comprise some 20% of the Republican electorate in Florida.

Well I guess Newt can accuse Mitt of hating Hispanics. Or something; coming from Newt it’s just the noise of the moment. Neither Mitt nor Newt “hate” immigrants. Both would be for stronger border controls and more enforcement of existing immigration laws, with amnesty in selected cases. Both as president would be much less likely to prosecute states such as Arizona and South Carolina for attempting to enforce existing federal law.

All this back-and-forth nastiness between Mitt and Newt doesn’t help them nationally, but that is the nature of internecine warfare in a primary. Voters as a group will likely not remember nor care about the details of 19 debates come this fall. They will care about the actual nominee, what policies he supports, and whether they think Obama is worthy of a second term.

While the give and take was “silly and petty” (Larry Sabato on Fox just now), and we all wish the Republican front runners would tone it down when attacking each other, we go to war with the army we have.

It’s looking a lot like that army will be headed by Mitt Romney, should he prevail in Florida next Tuesday.

White boy in a bubble

Charles Murray, he of The Bell Curve fame, is at it again. This time he’s taking aim at white boys like me, claiming that white America has become two radically different and diverging camps.

Kay Hymowitz in City Journal has a brief review of Murray’s latest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.

Murray paints a picture of a (broadly) lower- and upper-class white America. The two Americas have diverged socially from each other, to the point that the uppers might be considered living in a bubble. As in, having essentially no interaction with the culture of the lowers.

There’s even an online quiz, “How Thick Is Your Bubble?”, which was put forward to publicize Murray’s book.

This entire business is more than a little discomforting. It brought to mind Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World with its rigid and enforced class distinctions. Meant as biting satire in the 1930s, Murray’s book may be telling us to pass the soma; there’s been some progress towards such a dystopia.

There is a parallel notion that our leaders live in the bubble of the upper class. And that this might not be such a good thing. Recall the scorn that was heaped on John Kerry for his patrician pursuits? Or on Bush 41 for his unfamiliarity with a grocery checkout scanner? Can’t wait until Mitt Romney starts getting bricks thrown at him because he doesn’t go to NASCAR events.

Well, with all due respect to anyone who thinks we should all get drunk on Natty Boh or Pabst at NASCAR races, I’ve been trying my whole life to get into that bubble. And why drink swill like Natty Boh or Pabst when there’s Guinness to be had?

Is what Murray describes a problem? Should we be doing anything about it? Yes to the first, because it erodes the moral compact that each citizen should have with the commonwealth.

What it takes to fix it I haven’t a clue, and suspect any politician who tries to tackle it will fail miserably and only make it worse. I suggest the best the uppers can do on this is set a good example with three “bes:” be industrious, be married, be churched. And don’t believe the elite media and entertainment wallahs when they tell us we’re wrong.

Taxing, isn’t it

To have to listen to the TOTUS drone on about how unfair it all is. “It” being, among other whines, the notion that the rich don’t pay their “fair” share in federal taxes.

The graphic above tells a somewhat different story. Seems that the upper brackets pay a lot more in taxes, both in absolute terms (unsurprising) and as a percentage of income. Which will probably surprise the idiots at Occupy Wall Street, those few that actually read.

Facts can be pesky things, and they should matter. One may only hope that the Republican nominee schools Obama on hard facts, and asks him “how much is enough?” Such an exchange might serve to allow us to see the real Obama, he of the Saul Alinsky school for radicals. That is, Obama is nothing more than a would-be socialist dictator, intent on all people having the same income and paying the same taxes.

Trouble is, we’ve seen such attempts at leveling: Cuba, North Korea, the Soviet Union. In such places, only the leaders and their cronies do well. Everyone else is pretty much the same: poor.