Most talk of disincorporation appears to be exploratory, and some public-finance experts say towns may not have that option if it is being used to unload financial obligations. "This is somewhat of a legal gray area, because disincorporation was not designed to allow cities to escape financial hardship," said John Knox, a public-finance consultant with the San Francisco office of law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.
Mr. Knox, a bankruptcy consultant to Vallejo, said shifting oversight of a city's services to a county or state during the current economic environment would be a tall order. In California and many other states, the county or state must approve such a move, he said. Most counties are ailing as badly as cities, and are unlikely to readily approve a disincorporation, he said.
That isn't stopping some towns from checking into the possibility. In Mountain View, a Denver suburb with about 500 residents, sales-tax revenue has shriveled with the departure of four businesses last year, undermining its ability to pay city-government employees or to afford police and sewage service.
26.5.09
Shrugging...
Disincorporation - dig it.
25.5.09
Excellent Mem-Day post
There are several types of pieces writers publish on days like Memorial Day. As I noted on my FB feed, like most Americans, I spent a weekend with friends/family grilling/eating/drinking/catching up, but Memorial Day is an observance, not a celebration like July 4th.
One interesting thing I didn't know about Memorial Day is disclosed here, in a good piece by Kurt Schlichter over at Big Hollywood:
At the risk of being presumptuous, those who gave their lives for our country would want you to gather your buddies and drink beers and eat barbecue (Resolved: Barbecued beef ribs are superior in every way to pork ribs. Discuss.). I plan to. There is a reason that on Memorial Day the flag flies at half-staff only until noon, when it is raised to the top of the pole again. It symbolizes that we honor our dead by going forward with our lives.
Honor our fallen by remembering them, and just as importantly, what they did. We can do that best by confronting the nonsense that surrounds us by telling the stories of these brave American men and women. When little Jimmy comes home confused because the teacher said that America is irremediably racist, you tell him about the Union soldiers who fell at Gettysburg. When your daughter tells you her textbook says that World War II was really instigated by war profiteers, pop in the disc of the Band of Brothers episode where Easy Company stumbles onto a Nazi death camp. When your son asks what that bumper sticker saying “End the War” means, you tell him about what the cops and firefighters had to do on 9/11. Let the truth be your tribute.
More Cheney love here, and more to come
Hey-O! I like the phrasing in this excerpt, but it's an excellent piece. For someone who was going to put aside the old ways of politics, it sure does take someone special to rehab the image of Dick Cheney - the defenses keep coming:
Think about that. Back in those heady days after the 2008 election, anyone who suggested that Mr. Obama might find himself playing defense to Dick Cheney on Guantanamo would have been hauled off as barking mad. Yet that's exactly what Mr. Cheney has pulled off, leaving a desperate White House to try to drown him out by adding an Obama speech the same day Mr. Cheney was slated to address the American Enterprise Institute.
Great piece by RS McCain
I was not home-schooled but have long been an advocate of it. I don't buy the absence of "socialization" in home-schooled kids because it is a false argument on two fronts: home-schooled children are more likely to be involved in any number of religious, civic and charitable organizations than students of the public schools, and when we speak of socialization, we need to examine what it is, exactly that we're talking about.
Here is a wonderful piece from The Other McCain about his daughter, and within it you'll find yet another piece from a prominent LP. What is understandable from parents who resist homeschooling is the peer-pressure and sense of "they're kooks" from friends, and that's not a trivial concern. Yet, I would recommend any parent who is considering sending their children to a public school to get qualified as a substitute teacher and spend a few weeks in one, then see if this is really the kind of socialization you want your children exposed to:
Bragging on one's children is an especial joy when the kids are home-schooled, since Kennedy's achievements reflect credit on her mother, who spent seven years teaching our daughter at the kitchen table.
The success of home-schoolers is a refutation to the arrogance of a government education bureaucracy that is prone to assert, with the self-righteeous authority of official expertise, that my kids and theestimated 1.5 million other home-schooled students in America are being deprived of something useful. My only regret is that more children are not similarly deprived.
Steyn's latest
Back from Memorial Day Weekend fun and observation, and back to the real world, which continues to crash about us. It took Rome a bit to fall - it's going to take The United States much less time. What a shame:
S
EVCA serves two rural counties with a combined total of a little over 40,000 households. If you wanted to stimulate the economy, you’d take every dime allocated to Windsor and Windham counties under ARRA and divide it between those households. But, if you want to stimulate bureaucracy, dependency, and the metastasization of approved quasi-governmental interest-group monopolies as the defining features of American life, then ARRA is the way to go. Oh, you scoff: ARRA, go on, you’re only joking. I wish I were. We’re spending trillions we don’t have to create government programs to coordinate the application for funds to create more programs to spend even more trillions we don’t have.
The stimulus will do nothing for the economy, but it will dramatically advance the cause of statism (as Mark Levin rightly calls it). Last week’s vote in California is a snapshot of where this leads: The gangster regime in Sacramento is an alliance between a corrupt and/or craven political class wholly owned by a public-sector union-bureaucracy extortion racket. So what if the formerly Golden State goes belly up? They’ll pass the buck to Washington, and those of us in non-profligate jurisdictions will get stuck with the tab. At some point, the dwindling band of citizens still foolish enough to earn a living by making things, selling things, or providing services other than government-funded program coordination will have to vote against not just taxes but specific agencies and programs — hundreds and thousands of them.
22.5.09
Creepy
The Dear Leader and his henchmen never miss a beat when it comes to controlling the message. From Tapper:
Read the TV pool report: "Your Pool was not allowed to go over and shoot POTUS with the team shooting hoops. We protested loudly."
Now we know why: Obama White House officials decided to do their own media report on the visit, complete with cuts, interviews, and chyrons identifying who's speaking.
21.5.09
A brief history of Gitmo
Wow.
Gitmo was never meant to be a prison where inmates were to serve sentences for crimes. It was, in the words of a Defense Department document, a detention facility set up in order to prevent “enemy combatants from continuing the fight against the US. and its partners in the war on terror.” Its goals were military and tactical, not juridical or penal. Still, the conditions under which these unconventional prisoners were to be held did involve questions.
I'm shocked, shocked! to learn that Greenunist Dogmatists are profiting from it!
What can you say? This isn't exactly a new story, but Bjorn Lomborg is the anti-Gore in ever sense of the word, and his case at WSJ.com should make headlines everywhere. Sadly, it won't. Fascism won't come to America with a cross and a flag, it's coming here with a recycle-bin and Prius with a Hopenchange bumper strip.
The opening keynote address is to be delivered by Al Gore, who actually represents all three groups: He is a politician, a campaigner and the chair of a green private-equity firm invested in products that a climate-scared world would buy.
Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to profit from carbon regulations. The term used by economists for their behavior is "rent-seeking."
The world's largest wind-turbine manufacturer, Copenhagen Climate Council member Vestas, urges governments to invest heavily in the wind market. It sponsors CNN's "Climate in Peril" segment, increasing support for policies that would increase Vestas's earnings. A fellow council member, Mr. Gore's green investment firm Generation Investment Management, warns of a significant risk to the U.S. economy unless a price is quickly placed on carbon.
20.5.09
Obama as Spock? Not so, says some guy
I find The Medea's insistence on Obama being some kind of modern Spock funny, because, well, is there anything remotely intelligent they won't compare him to? Oh wait, they haven't compared him to me, so that's that. I'd note, no matter your politics, if you're not the smartest guy in the room but you proudly state that you can identify who that guy is, you're not only not the smartest guy in the room, you're not even in the unspoken coterie of smart people who actually know who the smartest guy in the room is.
Anyway, from Parcbench, a relatively new Conservative culture site, comes this interesting piece by Nick Rizzuto:
Obama’s lack of logical guidance can also be seen in his reversals on key issues. From military tribunals, to wiretaps, to the abuse photos, Obama seems to have only adopted logical positions after he discovered that his initial ones were illogical and unworkable.
Obama’s entire political career has been based on emotional pleas to victim groups, as can be plainly seen by some of the alliances he’s chosen in the past. As a matter of fact, Barack Obama’s most Spock-esq calculations have been of a political nature rather than decisions that legitimately speak to his abilities as a leader.
19.5.09
Huh?
Ross Douthat's piece in the NYT takes a crazy U-turn. Writing about Dan Brown's Catholic fanfiction that is The Davinci Code and Angels and Demons, he brings up Ayn Rand?
Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots,he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.
Ah, so Rand's an idealogue now. So, aside from being a crank, a cult-leader and such, she's also now compared with Dan Brown while lumped with Deepak Chopra. Seriously?
Rand isn't for everyone, because her works take effort to read and they challenge assumptions most people have about the way the world works. The only thing Dan Brown has in common with Rand is that his novels sell in the millions. To lump her in with a hack writer of Catholic fanfiction and two spiritualist nut-jobs is, well, expected, I guess. That Rand was an atheist who glorified Capitalism while eschewing almost all metaphysics is beside the point.
Whenever possible, dump on Rand. It'll get the commentariate going.
Great piece about Nock at NRO
Aside from being an informative intellectual bio about a writer I'm barely familiar with, Jonah Goldberg has penned one of the better essays I've read in the last few months. I recommend the whole, but I love this passage:
But here is the odd, or wonderful, thing about Nock. For all his clarity and passion, he professed no interest whatsoever in trying to persuade anybody. “The wise social philosophers,” he wrote, “were those who merely hung up their ideas and left them hanging, for men to look at or to pass by, as they chose. Jesus and Socrates did not even trouble to write theirs out, and Marcus Aurelius wrote his only in crabbed memoranda for his own use, never thinking anyone else would see them.” Indeed, Nock struck a pose of bemused disdain for the self-proclaimed prophets of the New Age — the Father Coughlins, the Huey Longs, the Upton Sinclairs, and even the Liberty Leaguers. Surveying the landscape of demagogues, mountebanks, and experts sucking the oxygen out of democratic discourse in the 1930s, he wrote, “I cannot remember a time when so many energumens were so variously proclaiming the Word to the multitude and telling them what they must do to be saved.”
17.5.09
Abortion and Bias
Wanna see a nice example of bias? Read any of the Medea's reporting - not commentary, reporting - on why there is a kerfuffle over The Dear Leader visiting Touchdown Jesus. According to media reports, like the one from Time excerpted below, the issue is with Obama giving the address at Notre Dame. That is controversial, yes, but it's not why Catholics and Lifers have gone nuts - it's the awarding of an honoroary degree.
Note the sarcasm at the beginning of the piece as well. The Vatican, like Notre Dame, has lost credibility on this issue. The Medea has not lost crediblity because it no longer has any.
At the rate things are going, Pope Benedict XVI may find his next trip to the U.S. dogged by airplanes overhead trailing banners with images of aborted fetuses. O.K., that's a bit of hyperbole. But while several prominent conservative Catholics in this country are apoplectic over the University of Notre Dame's invitation of the pro-choice Barack Obama to give the school's commencement address on May 17, the Vatican has stayed completely silent on the matter.
Oh yeah, they want to kill off old people too
In Atlas Shrugged, the story of the decline of The Twentieth Century Motor Company, once the greatest motor company in the world, is arguably Rand's strongest argument by rhetorical example she ever produced. The TCMC was willed to three direct heirs, who applied the creed 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need' and they ran the company into the ground.
We learn the story from a steamer tramp, who tells Dagny the story as he eats with her in her dining car. As he tells the story, everyone started keeping tabs on everyone else, because the harder you worked, the harder you had to work, and the more you needed, the harder others had to work. Near the end, he tells of an old woman in their community that was beloved by the people at the factory, the elderly mother of one of the workers. She fell, and was going to need a costly operation (to be shared by everyone, of course) and the tramp tells Dagny that a couple nights before the surgery, she mysteriously died.
In short, someone killed the kindly old woman because they got tired of having to pay for other people's problems. You have a microscript for what national healthcare and the monsters who are trying to force it down our throats have in mind. Literally. Also from NRO:
Word to the wise: Short your shares in Grandma, Inc. That’s because Dr. Emanuel has embraced a technique for simplifying some of the tough calls: age discrimination. He wrote in The Lancet in 2008: “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination.” We all were young once, the argument goes, so denying the elderly and weak in order to care for the young and fit is just. It does not take the fine nose of a Robert Parker to detect a whiff of Social Darwinism in ideas of this vintage. It is morally shallow, but unsurprising: Age discrimination is not a side effect of politically managed health care; it is a critical and fundamental feature of Britain’s National Health Service and other government-run health systems admired by Obama and his advisers. Under their arithmetic, the rewards of a procedure must be divided by the remaining life expectancy of the patient, leaving the elderly with what McCaughey calls a “denominator problem.”
Abortion booster give speech to Cathoilics
I've made clear my feelings on the subject over at CBK.com, but my question here is a bit different: is there a mandate among Catholic parishoners that abortion, the intentional destruction of human life, is always and forever wrong? From Gerard V. Bradley over at NRO:
Three hundred thousand Catholics have signed petitions criticizing the university. Over $8 million in donations has been withheld in protest. Local bishop John D’Arcy is boycotting the commencement. Scores of other bishops have spoken out against honoring Obama, because the president has (in Bishop D’Arcy’s words) “reaffirmed, and has now placed in public policy, his long-stated unwillingness to hold human life as sacred.” D’Arcy suggested that Notre Dame had chosen “prestige over truth.”
What surprises me about this that 300,000 people signed the petition, but there are millions of Catholics in America. In the age where signing a petition takes about 15 seconds online. What is creepy - very creepy - about this business is the honorary degree. Keep in mind we're discussing a politician who refuses to say what his stance is on abortion, because his stance would appall most thinking people. Recall it was State Sen. Obama who voted Present - not Yay, Not Nay - on the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, a bill that states if a child lives through an unsuccessful abortion, they cannot be murdered. As the stories of what happens to these children after they are born are too greusome to go into here, I'll leave it at that. I think 99.99999% of the public agrees that once a child has exited the womb and taken a breath of air, life has most certainly begun.
One aspect of this story that I find intriguing that is off the radar is the fact this is an administration who wants to take away the right of doctors to not take part in medical abortions (the so-called "conscience clause). If this becomes law, that means that Catholic hospitals, who overwhelmingly serve the underprivileged, would either have to start performing abortions or shutter their doors. You want to honor people who believe in this obscenity with degrees, just because they don't look like the guys on the dollar bill and have a funny name?
What a disgrace. The more I think about it, the more I think serious Catholics may want to start a new sect. I'm glad to see there is a serious divestment campaign underway. As I've said elsewhere, don't like Progressive, anti-human values the Left keeps beating over our heads? Quit sending your money to these institutions just for better parking and seats at games. It's pretty simple.
Wow, this chick really hates atheists
Fascinating piece in the LA Times by Charlotte Allen (h/t Hotair), who's had it up to here [picture me holding my hand under my chin] with these goddamn atheists - sorry, couldn't resist. There's plenty not to like about all sorts of atheists, but Allen certainly picks some strange fights. I rarely write about this online, but yes, I am an atheist, 'out of the closet' for about three years, 'in the closet' since I was 22, agnostic since I was 17, and before that, I was a Christian who'd wanted to become an evangelist or a missionary.
Seriously.
My fear, honestly, was that my family would disown me - and I've still never explicitly told my mom, though I suspect she knows. When I finally did come out of the metaphysical closet, I promised to myself that I'd not be one of these atheist know it alls who go about bashing religious people and their beliefs over the head with it, and I don't. I'm just as likely to agree with a religious point of view as not (see my Pro Life stance, support of Israel, etc). Being a Conservative Atheist is the most natural thing in the world to me, but most people on both sides claim it's either hypocritical or self-hating. I have plenty of self-hate, but not about my view of a rational world. I learned all the self-hate I needed while sitting in church.
Anyway, the point is that Allen makes some of the silliest points about why she hates atheists imaginable. The atheists she's talking about are
a) either hated by most atheists (those ones always going to court over some right of their that was violated
b) or misrepresented by Allen.
Consider the point she makes the excerpt below. I have read all the atheist books she references, have watched debates involving every one of these men (many of them debating renowned religious scholars about a/theism) and she represents them in the worst possible light, if not actually misconstruing what they say. The point Dawkins is making that Allen fudges is not that is evil, it's that if the Judeo-Christian God - especially the one of The Old Testament - was real, he was one mean, cruel entity.
We don't claim that God is evil or that God is dead, we claim that God does not exist. If you want to nail an atheist to the wall, see what kind of weird superstitious beliefs they have. Bill Maher - who's film 'Religulous' everyone tells me I must see - has some pretty strange beliefs of his own. He's not an atheist, he's just anti-religion. The fact that he calls himself an atheist to sound cool, that's the kind of atheist I hate. Anyway, from Allen's piece:
And then there's the question of why atheists are so intent on trying to prove that God not only doesn't exist but is evil to boot. Dawkins, writing in "The God Delusion," accuses the deity of being a "petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak" as well as a "misogynistic, homophobic, racist ... bully." If there is no God -- and you'd be way beyond stupid to think differently -- why does it matter whether he's good or evil?
16.5.09
A pretty straight definition of torture
I wrote extensively about torture, what it is, what it ain't and what it means on CBK.com this week. Victoria Toensing, former chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee, just penned as instrucive a primer as you're going to find on what legally constitutes torture by the standards of United States and United Nations law.
Not to say I told you say, but you'll note the language of Ms. Toensing's piece and my definition of torture fall neatly in line, even though I'm far removed from the gods on The Hill.
The memo to the CIA discussed 10 requested interrogation techniques and how each should be limited so as not to violate the statute. The lawyers warned that no procedure could be used that "interferes with the proper healing of Zubaydah's wound," which he incurred during capture. They observed that all the techniques, including waterboarding, were used on our military trainees, and that the CIA had conducted an "extensive inquiry" with experts and psychologists.
But now, safe in ivory towers eight years removed from 9/11, critics demand criminalization of the techniques and the prosecution or disbarment of the lawyers who advised the CIA. Contrary to columnist Frank Rich's uninformed accusation in the New York Times that the lawyers "proposed using" the techniques, they did no such thing. They were asked to provide legal guidance on whether the CIA's proposed methods violated the law.
Shrugging
These casual accusations of criminality and deceit come easily to Obama, who has been a real bull in the china shop of the credit industry. He’s threatened Chrysler’s bond holders with personal destruction, and used raw government power to adjust the balances on home mortgages. Nervous banks have taken TARP funds designed to stimulate new lending, and sat on those funds instead, because they’re afraid to make loans in the increasingly Venezuelan business environment the Administration has created. U.S. Treasury bonds are losing frightening amounts of value in the face of reckless deficit spending.
Another defense of Dick Cheney
An interesting trend is emerging. I have never been shy about my admiration of Bush and Cheney, especially Cheney, but I've noticed many denfenses of the man, the latest coming from a very odd place: the Washington Press. The piece, by veteran Washington reporter Carl Cannon, is astonishing because it is honest, something we no longer expect from the Washington press and the larger MSM, which I have taken to calling The Medea.
My theory on this - well, I don't really have a theory, I think it's just common sense - is that even pragmatic liberals are starting to understand that The People are playing politics with national security, which is not only suicidal and insane, it is also reprehensible (Steyn illustrates that point quite well). I don't like politics being play with health care and cap and trade, but that's life. However, using the political winds as an excuse to not only endanger the country, but save your own ass is despicable. I expect more of these defenses of Cheney in the future.
At about 10 a.m. that awful morning, the vice president entered a secure White House shelter. He was told that the Air Force was attempting to scramble planes to defend the air space over Washington. That raised another question, one pertaining to the missing plane White House officials assumed was heading their way: Who was going to authorize shooting it down? Cheney, with Bush's concurrence, gave such an order. Minutes later, officials in the shelter learned a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania. In the unemotional prose of the report, the 9/11 commission noted: "Those in the shelter wondered if the aircraft had been shot down pursuant to this authorization."
At 10:39 a.m., Cheney spoke with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. It's clear from the transcript of that call that Cheney believes he may have authorized the shooting down of an American passenger jet. Rumsfeld seems skeptical, but he doesn't really know either. I'm not sure "changed" is the right word, but I believe that in those 40 minutes--with the nation under attack, with Cheney not knowing if his daughters and grandchildren are safe, with his impression that he's directed a very hard order to some flyboy in the U.S. Air Force, possibly killing another 200 Americans--that Dick Cheney resolved to do whatever it would take to protect this country, regardless of the cost to his reputation or popularity. I respect him for that, and I empathize with him.
Steyn's latest howler
Steyn's turning into the king.
It’s worth noting that, by most if not all of her multiple accounts, Nancy Pelosi is as guilty of torture as anybody else. That’s not an airy rhetorical flourish but a statement of law. As National Review’s Andy McCarthy points out, under Section 2340A(c) of the relevant statute, a person who conspires to torture is subject to the same penalties as the actual torturer. Once Speaker Pelosi was informed that waterboarding was part of the plan and that it was actually being used, she was in on the conspiracy, and as up to her neck in it as whoever it was who was actually sticking it to poor old Abu Zubaydah and the other blameless lads.
Where is Where is John Galt?
Apologies for an absence of posting since DMB weekend. Frankly, I've had the writer's block but have finally come out of it. So, the posts will start back up today. --CBK
13.5.09
10.5.09
CBK.com update
Sorry for the absnece on the site and here, but I've been away. Anyway, it's update time:
http://www.cbrookskurtz.com/articles/2009/5/10/the-real-white-house-correspondents-dinner-speech.html --Warning - graphic language ahead on this one
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