Better Banter

Ten days after an extremely disappointing election, the pundit class is pointing fingers in every direction. What caused the Romney loss? Was it the ground game? The media putting its thumb on the scales? Failure to press Benghazi as an issue? Ideology? Apathy? Gaffes? There's been plenty of good and bad pontificating on all of the above. Certainly the much-vaunted Project Orca was a failure. But why? I'd like to take a closer look today, and address the recent "who built it" scapegoat effort. As someone who has managed web-based software application products and projects since there have been web-based software applications, and a Project Orca observer on the ground in Ohio on election day, I thought I'd bring my perspective to the problem. Not to spoil the ending, but I believe that the application itself was the least of Team Romney's problems on election day, and were overshadowed by problems with deployment and fatal problems with the concept itself. ...

So it's interesting that all these news organizations are starting the Orwellian "fact check" campaigns. Isn't that part of every journalist's job? Are they admittedly only checking the facts in the one article each day? Sounds about right. But now we've gone beyond cherry-picking whose facts to check, and have wrapped opinion journalism snugly in the context of a fact check. Here's one from ABC on Romney's speech: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/fact-check-mitt-romneys-republican-national-convention-speech/story?id=17119764#.UEYSFiIWoRY Please tell me which fact he got wrong. Some of these are jaw-dropping, like the one about the Poles and Czechs. BTW, what do Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa think about it? Dare they ask? Read the tortured logic on how the Medicare cuts aren't really cuts, and the only word that will spring to mind is "shill."

Kelly Ayotte had a slower delivery than a unionized pizza shop. Good grief. Gilchrist's accent reminds me of home. Kasich knocked it out of the park at the Romney rally on Saturday, borrowed heavily from it for today, but wasn't nearly as good in such a formal setting. Would love to catch Gwen Ifil's mic open after she finished with Terry Branstead. Mark Shields seems completely baffled by the purpose of the convention. Wow. Huge ovation for Scott Walker's entrance. Well deserved. 94% of employers think Wisconsin headed in the right direction vs just 10% previously. 225th anniversary if US Constitution coming up. I wonder if anyone will care when we hit 250? Every question from Judy and Gwen is challenging. Does anyone doubt that tune will change in a few weeks? "is it hard being so smart? What's on your iPod?" Senator Barrasso has some gravitas. Shoved Shields' EPA question neatly back down his throat. Wow, they are jumping all over th...

Catching upon some of James Delingpole's work for The Telegraph in which he notes the industrial blight that is about to be unnecessarily perpetrated upon the people of Wales in the form of wind turbines. Beautiful countryside will become disfigured, for the purpose of gaining an unreliable energy source. When you think of how many people live on an island as small as the U.K, it's remarkable such tracts of virtually unmolested land exist at all. But they do, and we'll mar them in the name of being green. Of course, the irony of this is that we can't drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge because if it's "pristine-ness." That the actual area where oil will be extracted is possibly the ugliest natural place on planet earth, that no human being would ever willingly venture there were it not for oil, that the entire industrial footprint would be the size of a medium-sized airport seem not to matter to these zealots who seem to think that  all ...

Well it's 2011. That means it's time to start seriously talking about 2012, no? Jay Nordlinger at National Review makes a good case for John Bolton. I can't say I can disagree with anything about the man; I do question his electability. Still, why not latch onto this guy during primary season instead of anybody else? When Palin and Huckabee are mentioned as possible strong candidates, I shudder. Probably because I believe it. I read something interesting the other day about the two strains of candidates emerging in the Republican primary season: ideological and managerial. Palin heads up the ideological wing and thus has huge Tea Party support. Romney heads the managerial wing and gets more traditional (and RINO) support. The managerial type is going to be more apt to get crossover milquetoast votes... those same voters that switch back and forth depending upon which way the wind is blowing. However, I think the ideological side can attract votes too, if it's positione...

Disappointed in some of the races. We got the ones we were supposed to get, but not many of the true toss-ups. Toomey and Kirk being the exceptions. The Tea Party certainly inspired a lot of the change, but Miller, Angle, and O'Donnell going down in flames does not bode well for 2012. On the other hand, I'm excited about Rubio, excited about Kasich, and excited about Col. Allen West winning a House seat in Florida. Disappointed McClung (the rocket scientist in Arizona) couldn't beat the incumbent, but she was badly outspent. Amazed Barney Frank beat Bielat by such a huge margin given what a scumbag Frank is and what a smart, stand-up guy Bielat is. But it's on par with Rangel winning with 85% of the vote. He's a criminal and a gangster, but he's our criminal . That must be the thought process. If you don't believe government should be about laws being applied to people equally, and think it should be about changing outcomes and getting more for your group, ...

I sit puzzling over why it seems that Republicans are the only ones who are serious about tossing out the unethical in their ranks. Charlie Rangel, Mark Dayton, Barney Frank spring to mind as I watch the returns. But it occurred to me that if you subscribe to the concept of a "gangster government" as Michael Barone termed the Obama administration, it doesn't make any sense to vote for anyone but your own gangsters.

Happy St. Patrick's Day! For your reading enjoyment (this has nothing to do with St. Patrick's Day), please see the latest Doctor Zero piece. The entire thing is just too damn good to pull a quote from, so go read it all. Right now. I guarantee satisfaction or your money back. Concluding paragraph is fantastic. It definitely makes me long for a politician who can think on his feet with this kind of command of language, and this level of clarity of principle. He (or she) would make an utter fool of anyone in the next chair on Meet the Press.

How many times did Obama say he's a "stalwart ally of Israel" on the campaign trail? He sure has a funny way of showing it : Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, has told the country's diplomats there that U.S.-Israeli relations face their worst crisis in 35 years, despite attempts by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office to project a sense of "business as usual." Apparently, the crisis is due to the Obama administration taking grave offense over a "diplomatic gaffe" that occurred while Slow Joe Biden was visiting Israel (they announced construction plans for new settlements while he was in the country). Really? Do we need to start listing all of the diplomatic offenses that "The One" has committed toward our allies in a scant year in office? You know what they say about people in glass houses. How about the Falklands and throwing the Poles under the bus for starters? But Barack has been offended, s...

Great post from "Captain Capitalism" about his $38 visit to the doctor . No, that wasn't the co-pay. That was the cost of the visit. As he points out, it was less than an oil change. It's funny how cutting out layers of paper-processors can save money. Everyone who touches your insurance claim needs to take a slice. And so does their boss, and their boss' boss, and every executive. Oh, and the government expects to get their portion of each of  those portions, plus a nice chunk of the overall profits. And not one of those people in the long line of people getting paid actually provides a service to you the patient. Well, except for the doctor, who is increasingly becoming an afterthought. After all, the government is ready to slash "reimbursements" to doctors as a way of controlling the costs of this monstrous new bureaucracy, designed, without irony, to make health care affordable. What would car insurance premiums be if oil changes and other routine ma...

The Democrats are pretty amazing. Now that they've got this "reconciliation" bill on health care that could pass without going back to the Senate and getting 60 votes, they're seeing what else they can stuff in there. Like taking over the student loan industry (a natural extension of health care, obviously). Really. http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=1201

Yesterday, Barack Obama railed against big insurance companies and their "greed" as he publicly pushed for health care reform to be passed through reconciliation. There are so many things to say on this topic but I will limit myself to just a couple. First is the continued Orwellian language Obama has been relying upon in so many instances over the past year. His new mantra is that health care reform deserves "an up or down vote." What he means, of course, is a simple majority vote, which can be achieved via the reconciliation process. But he can't say "simple majority," due to the election of Scott Brown in the most liberal state in the union. Brown's election was in no small part a referendum on health care reform, and a referendum on the public value of the filibuster. It was Massachusetts, a state that is discovering its own woes with an ambitious health care system, standing athwart history, yelling "Stop!" So to say "simple maj...

James Taranto points us to this story in the Boston Globe : You probably missed this, with all the U.S. Senate election excitement, but a new law quietly went into effect Jan. 1 that may have more of a day-to-day impact on our daily lives than anything Scott Brown does. That's right -- government mandated toothbrushing . No not you, silly. The kids. The state Department of Early Education & Care is requiring all children in day care longer than four hours and/or who eat a meal to have their teeth brushed on-site. (Parents send in the brush, which is to be replaced every few months, or if the kid is out sick.) The Globe column continues by pressing those who take exception to this rule to explain themselves. My first response is "bite my ass." My second response is, just because something is good for you doesn't mean the government has the duty or right to force people to do it. If I'm OK with my kids getting their teeth brushed twice a day, and my da...

I posit that if Scott Brown does indeed win today's special election for the open Massachusetts Senate seat, Democratic congressmen everywhere will indeed respond by crapping their pants. Unfortunately, there's a slim chance these fat cats will be sitting on vinyl when it happens.

Finally catching up with some of my reading and came across Scott Johnson's annual post about the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and specifically Lincoln's scathing rejoinder of July 10, 1858. Lincoln spoke in response to Douglas' speech the previous night. He had no word processor, no team of writers, and certainly no teleprompter, but he penned and delivered a speech for the ages. Worth reading again even if you've seen it a hundred times: Now, it happens that we meet together once every year, sometime about the 4th of July, for some reason or other. These 4th of July gatherings I suppose have their uses. If you will indulge me, I will state what I suppose to be some of them. We are now a mighty nation, we are thirty---or about thirty millions of people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years and we discover that we were then a very small people in point ...

Rain has made for a lazy day indoors today, and I wanted to revisit the notion I brought up earlier of CAFE standards and the government directing product strategy. The argument seems to be that the Big Three has been terrible at choosing what people want (not making enough small cars) and perhaps the U.S. Government can force them to do what consumers have wanted all along.. It's true the Big Three made few small cars and loads of bigger and bigger SUVs. They also profited handsomely from the practice because consumers bought up the behemoths like hotcakes - not because there were no alternatives, but because they wanted large vehicles and gas was cheap. Obviously, the manufacturers were ill-prepared for a sharp increase in gas prices. It was always a risk, and in hindsight it was one that was managed poorly. But that's what capitalism is: you take risks and you may profit or lose your shirt. I have a little something to do with product strategy at my company. I have made LOA...

Look, America. It's time we all say this together: "There's no such thing as a free lunch." As I mentioned earlier, we seem to be either unable or unwilling to look beyond the tips of our noses to see how whatever it is we're doing now is going to play out in the future. Today's case in point: New CAFE standards for automobiles. Let's back this up and proceed deliberately here. What are CAFE standards? Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards were imposed on automakers in the wake of the OPEC oil crisis of the 1970s to help reduce fuel consumption by automobiles. The idea, of course, was to force automakers to make more fuel-efficient vehicles. It worked, but with a wrinkle. Fuel economy standards were broken out by type of vehicle. "Average fuel economy" is actually a fairly complicated formula, not a simple arithmetic mean, but that doesn't much matter to the purposes of this discussion. The end message for the automakers was not that each ...

Read some WSJ on Dead Tree last night on the plane. Good editorial about the climate change fiasco facing the G8. It's always a little more complicated than it seems, isn't it? Meanwhile, the supposed economic benefits of "green technologies" are evaporating. In Germany, government subsidies for installing solar panels -- and, it was presumed, thereby creating domestic manufacturing jobs -- backfired when it turned out that it was cheaper to make solar panels in China. A recent paper from Spanish economist Gabriel Calzada Álvarez noted that since Spain started investing in a "green jobs" policy nine years ago, the country has lost 110,500 jobs in other parts of the economy. That amounts to 2.2 jobs lost for every green job created. Thomas Sowell laments frequently that politicians don't "think beyond Stage One." Stage One gets somebody elected. Stage Three is somebody else's problem. We need to start recognizing that Stage Three is everybo...

Wrote last week but neglected to actually post: Nightline has become simply absurd. Tonight: Hit piece on Palin ("controversy" with Letterman consisted of Palin accusing him of being strangely obsessed with her daughter... Wouldn't be newsworthy to repeat what he said, would it?) Next was something about a couple of Christians taking their message to remote and dangerous parts of the world, and the tone was a bit snarky, in my opinion. But they outdid themselves with a story about how many people live to be centenarians in Japan. They report that in 1963, there were only 153 people who had reached that milestone. Today there are over 36,000. They spent most of the piece giving the boilerplate soft news profiles of very nice but very old people, and reported many assorted theories, including diet, for the phenomenon. But then, inexplicably, they say it's all at risk... due to us. Yes, ominous music coupled with shots of Burger King and McDonalds and the warning that al...

The other night I was looking through some old Word documents of mine and stumbled across this essay I wrote a dozen or so years ago, when I was 25, about my fears for Social Security. Upon re-reading, I winced at a couple of my analogies, but thought it was worth posting as it hasn't held up that badly with time. What bothers me about my future, what wakes me up at night in a cold sweat, is not that social security will not be there for me when I retire, but that it WILL be there. I'm worried that in 50 years, I'll be 75 years old and eligible for the first time for social security. And that this dinosaur of a program, the T-Rex of big-government money-burning plans, will somehow still be in place. I shudder at this is because I cannot imagine the cost of making this happen. I wonder under how much debt will my children and grandchildren be burdened so that I can have a paycheck from the government. I try to speculate about the debt we have accumulated as a nation to...