Category: Ann Althouse

Althouse on the Cain Train?

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“I thought David Gregory really lost his cool early on, as he was questioning Cain about 9-9-9. If you watch the video, you can see he’s agitated and grimacing in a way that really lacks the usual polished journalist quality.”
— Ann Althouse, “Herman Cain Nailed Meet the Press”

This is an unexpected but really quite welcome development. Professor Althouse has been critical of Cain previously and (like most in academia) is not generally a fan of the populist style. From the transcript of Meet the Press, she excerpts these examples of David Gregory’s visible frustration:

The reality of the plan is that some people pay more, some people pay less…. You’re saying [prices] actually go down?… This isn’t about behavior, Mr. Cain, this is about whether you pay–if you don’t pay taxes now, and you now have income tax and a sales tax, you pay more in taxes…. Mr. Cain, we talked to independent analysts ourselves…. We’re not just reading newspaper clips here… They tell us, they’ve looked at this, based on what’s available of the plan, and it’s incontrovertible.

I hadn’t really spotted that, but she’s right: Cain stood his ground, and one of the points that flustered David Gregory was this:

MR. GREGORY: The wealthiest Americans would pay less, the poorest Americans and middle class would pay more. You don’t dispute that.
MR. CAIN: I do dispute that. You are making — you and others are making assumptions about what wealthy Americans would do with their money, and you’re making assumptions about what the middle class and the poor. You can’t predict the behavior. If wealthy Americans…
MR. GREGORY: This isn’t about behavior, Mr. Cain, this is about whether you pay — if you don’t pay taxes now, and you now have income tax and a sales tax, you pay more in taxes.
MR. CAIN: More people will pay less in taxes. More people will pay less in taxes when you consider all the taxes.

What Cain was saying is that every system of taxation involves hidden economic incentives, and incentives influence behavior. Cain was correctly saying that the sales tax element of “9-9-9,” which Gregory and others assume would impose higher taxes on the poor, would only cause them to pay more taxes if they do not respond to the incentives, namely to spend less — or buy more secondhand merchandise, which isn’t taxed under his plan.

Cain is likewise correct in saying that “you can’t predict behavior” — i.e., The Law of Unintended Consequences. While this is as good an argument against “9-9-9” as it is in favor of it, Cain is correct that we cannot make easy assumptions about how such a radical alteration of the federal tax system would impact the economic behavior and financial well-being of various classes of people.

We can agree that a flat tax will generally be of most benefit to the wealthy (who pay a much higher percentage of their income under the existing progressive system) without assuming, willy-nilly, that others will be impoverished as a result. And the point of “9-9-9” is not to achieve “social justice,” but rather to unleash capital investment to spur economic growth. It is a supply-side solution to our current economic woes, and as such has been praised by the Club for Growth and by Art Laffer.

Would a man rather be unemployed and paying no taxes, or would he rather have a job and pay taxes? That’s the real choice, and yet David Gregory can’t seem to understand it.

We could update an old joke Ronald Reagan used to tell: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job. And a recovery is when David Gregory loses his job.”

PREVIOUSLY: Remember When David Gregory Raked Obama Over the Coals on ‘Meet the Press’?

A Serious Debate About Affirmative Action

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by Smitty

Althouse, emphasis original:

I know very well from long experience that it’s nearly impossible to have a rational, serious debate about affirmative action. But I am trying. I am trying to make this blog a place where we can do that.

Let’s start here: racism, and also sexism are mostly DNA-based decision making.

Let us also be generous, and admit that affirmative action, like labor unions, may have had historical value, and maybe that has expired.

One good course of action would be to decide that the 2008 election marks the end of the affirmative action era. Let’s just gradually let the Racism Industrial Complex die out by letting anti-discrimination laws work their course, and ignoring the hucksters like Jesse Jackson and company.

I’m not doubting that legitimate acts of racism do occur. But there will always be a diminishing returns point, and the Duke lacrosse team probably would agree we’ve passed it, where the cure is worse than the disease. Too much economic activity is wasted on diversity management and lawfare. If you want economic recovery, trim this fat.

For an example in the Formidable Ann’s neighborhood, see Daily Pundit.

Maybe The Answer Is ‘We Obsess Too Much About Crotches’

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by Smitty

Am I jaded? Althouse:

Single men earn less money the heavier they are, while single women earn more money the heavier they are. And: Lesbians earn more money than straight women.

Almost a decade back, I started a PhD program, and one of the courses was “Philosophical Foundations of Public Policy” or some such. Lots of Rorty and Lévi-Strauss and Karl Popper.

I got better.

Now, when I read about social science research in general, and anything to do with sexuality in particular, my default assertion is that there are good odds the research is sheer poo. In fact, the research may only represent some boob’s wishful thinking, carried out at public expense, as they seek to twist reality into some other, desired end state.

Central to the pursuit of liberty is the notion of privacy. If we’re going to be good neighbors, and get along nicely with all races, creeds, colors, and orientations, we have to recall that being neighbors implies the notion of walls and fences. Being a neighbor does not mean being family, where personal space is significantly lessened. Furthermore, respecting you as my neighbor means divorcing myself of curiosity about what you’re doing in private. If you’re not a criminal, and I’m on your jury, I really don’t want to know the sordid details of your personal life.

Part of our societal healing will be neglecting to fund asinine research about overweight left-handed minority lesbian plumbers.

Your Motto Is ‘Forward’, Knucklehead

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by Smitty

Somebody tell this twerp on video over at Althouse’s site that Wisonsin’s motto is ‘Forward’. SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS is the motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

One is tempted to say that the public sector unions are behaving tyrannically in Wisconsin, but that gives the unions too much credit. They’re behaving in an inept, infantile fashion.

If Scott Walker actually was a tyrant, and we allow that Caesar was also such, I’d reply to this knob:

Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris
“If Caesar lived, you’d be chained to an oar”

While I don’t actually want to see anyone enslaved, I do wish these goobers could taste the absence of liberty long enough to mature them a bit.

From the Undeceived to the Rube: My Second Notice of Your Previous Insult

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It’s come to this: Not content to insult our intelligence by claiming that her vote for Obama in 2008 was a “rational choice,” now Ann Althouse has sown discord between Smitty and me, distracting me from important issues — there has been another royal upskirt incident that regular readers would normally expect me to cover in comprehensive detail — while I replied to his pro-Althouse post:

Smitty, I assure you I don’t give a damn about Ann Althouse’s voting habits, but was ticked off by her attempt to distinguish her “rational choice” from the millions of other fools who voted for O.
You can’t do that. If anyone had bothered to read the “Future Ex-Democrats” column that I linked in the post — and I linked with the express hope that people would read it — they would find my own confession that I was a huge supporter of Bill Clinton in 1992. And I explained why I was such a damned fool. What I did not do was to attempt to claim that my folly was anything but folly.
Althouse evidently wants to have her cake and eat it, too, without any questions. Pretty damned imperious, don’t you think? And, indirectly, an insult to those of us who were never fooled by Obama. If it was “rational” to vote for Obama in 2008, after all, isn’t Althouse saying that those of us who didn’t vote for him were irrational?
Well, maybe you’re willing to be publicly insulted that way, but I’m not going to take it. Unless and until she owns up to her rubitude — and takes back that slanderous insult — she is still a rube.

Far be it from me to seek to make enemies of Professor Althouse and her many loyal readers. But there is an old country saying that applies here: Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining.

Every man is the steward of his own honor, and none of us can make ourselves judges of whether someone else has been insulted.

We can, however, judge whether the insulted party has responded prudently to the insult. Continue reading From the Undeceived to the Rube: My Second Notice of Your Previous Insult →

Ann Althouse: Rube

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“[Obama] really is a solid, normal person who remained grounded in the middle of all this craziness. And I like to think that, now that he’s President, with his steely nerve, his intelligence, and his groundedness, he’ll do the job that must be done. The trickery is over.”
— Ann Althouse, Jan. 22, 2009

“The guy who said that his election would heal the planet and cause the seas to recede was the guy we were warning Ann and all the other rubes about. Ann thought she had Obama figured out; that the guy behind the curtain was sane and smart and up to the job; the guy on stage was all an act. As Glenn Reynolds so often asks ‘who’s the rube,’ Ann?”
— Moneyrunner, July 9, 2011

Friday, the Wisconsin law professor asserted that she “made a rational choice” in voting for Obama in 2008, because she does not want to admit the truth: She was wrong, and not merely incidentally wrong, but disastrously, catastrophically wrong.

Like I said on Election Day: “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Bob Barr!”

No American should ever feel compelled to vote for a candidate they believe to be the lesser of two evils, and I didn’t. 

If you put a gun to my head and told me to vote for John McCain, I’d tell you to go ahead and pull the trigger. The whole point of calling this blog “The Other McCain” was to distance myself from the disgrace of my distant cousin. He is the emblem and example of all that is wretched, dishonest and corrupt in American politics, and if there is any comfort in the Obama Age, it is this: John McCain will never be president.

We should all thank God for that. And the Republican Party should hang its head in shame at having nominated that treacherous bastard.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2008 election, I wrote three columns analyzing the GOP’s well-deserved defeat:

Go read all of those and tell me if I was wrong about any of it. I wasn’t. I was right, right, right, the whole time Ann Althouse was being wrong, wrong , wrong. However, I’m not just reminding you of how right I was for the sake of my own vainglorious ego, but because Althouse — by continuing to defend her disastrous choice as “rational” — is undermining the work that needs to be done to convince millions of her fellow rubes that they should become ex-Democrats:

Such irrational expectations are inevitably followed by disillusionment. No prediction of what the next four years might bring is safer than this: The yawning gap between Hope and reality will produce a bumper crop of ex-Democrats.

I wrote that less than three weeks after Election Day, and Professor Althouse is doing the exact opposite of what needs to be done to persuade those millions to abandon the Democratic Party. Instead of claiming she “made a rational choice,” she needs to begin asking herself why — and honestly telling readers how — she was so completely deluded as to believe that Obama would be successful because of “his steely nerve, his intelligence, and his groundedness.”

He’s a left-wing ideological fanatic, Professor!

His calm exterior demeanor, his resonant baritone voice, his occasional nod toward political pragmatism — these superficialities cannot deceive intelligent observers. Barack Hussein Obama is a menace to American liberty, inimicably hostile to everything good and decent in our nation’s traditions, and he must be defeated.

Why does Ann Althouse refuse to own up to being a rube? Does intellectual pride prevent her from admitting that her expectations of Hope and Change were no more rational than those of Peggy Joseph?

“I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car; I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage. You know, if I help him, he’s gonna help me.”

You’re even a bigger rube than Peggy Joseph, Professor, because you should have known better, and you refuse to confess your error.

I agree wholeheartedly with Moneyrunner: “Intellectual Pride Makes You Stupid. . . . and denial is not a river in Egypt.”

UPDATE: Donald Douglas accuses me of insincere traffic-baiting:

We know Althouse breaks political convention, and she’s been hammering Obama for some time now. Besides, you just like posting her picture.

No, honestly: Read the linked posts — both Althouse and Moneyrunner — and see if you don’t think it was a bit too much for her to put an asterisked footnote into her Friday post, trying to deny her rubeness.

Or should that be “rubehood”? Never mind. The point is that she needs to own it, and until she does, she deserves to be mocked, and often, and by someone who knows how.

UPDATE II: Thanks to the commenter who suggested “rubitude” for Althouse’s condition. The Lonely Conservative offers lots of rational reasons why she didn’t support Obama.

UPDATE III: Linked by Pat Austin at So It Goes in Shreveport — thanks!

UPDATE IV: Linked by That Mr. G. Guy — thanks! — and now a Memeorandum thread.

UPDATE V: Small Dead Animals suggests morning-after remorse on Professor Althouse’s part. It’s probably sexist to think of it that way. But I’m scarcely the one to be lecturing others about sexism, eh?

UPDATE VI: Everything you ever need to know about not trusting Obama, Cynthia Yockey learned as a lesbian Democrat supporting Hillary Clinton.

UPDATE VII: “From the Undeceived to the Rube: My Second Notice of Your Previous Insult.”


What A Morose Outlook

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by Smitty (via Ann Althouse)

Sendak, one wonders as to your eternal hope:

“When I kick the bucket,” he begins – about to describe why he’s glad his stuff has ended up at the Rosenbach, where it will be seen, not archived – then goes parenthetical: “Which can’t be too long from now. I think I’m getting out just in time. Watching the news, everything seems to be in disorder. Everybody seems to be unhappy. We’ve lost the knack of living in the world with the sensation of safety.”

The man who imagined escapes as romps that ended with warm suppers says, “I wonder why people still have children. I mean, why put kids in the world when the world is so insecure? This is how old people rationalize their death. You get a little crotchety with the world.

“That’s the one thing that I think makes the mural worth having. It represents a time on a personal level when I was secure and young and happy. And I didn’t think about dying . . . about my friends dying.”

In the first place, I doubt that the increased sense of disorder and unhappiness is more than a subjective thing. The Tower of Siloam just seems to topple at higher frequency due to things like tornadoes. But is tragedy, scaled for population, increasing as a function of time? Each individual death is a tragedy, and I don’t mean to lessen that, but I really doubt that our current woes exceed, say, bubonic plague:

It is generally held that the most infamous and devastating outbreak of bubonic plague was the Black Death, which killed a third of the population of Europe in the 14th century.

This threat now has been reduced to a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
It really is all about perspective. As someone currently praying for the continued good health of the wife and that of the World’s Youngest Blogger, there is no question that being fruitful is the Right Thing To Do. Admittedly, dying old and bitter might be the Left Thing To Do. However, succumbing to the Overpopulation Myth is about as soul-crushing stupid as succumbing to the Global Warming Myth, the Social Justice Myth, or the Feminist Anti-womanhood Myth (moron that next week). If you notice a pattern of idiocy piling up on one side of the political divide, you may be perceptive.
Sure, there is legitimate concern about the government nationalizing every bit of the meager IRA and 401k wealth that the wife and I have squirreled away. The fog of peace that is an unavoidable side-effect of government has given way to systematic dishonesty. The spirit of Colonel Jessup’s “You can’t handle the truth!” pervades legislation and the avoidance behavior about the fiscal situation.
On the other hand, allowing legitimate concern to become paralysis is tacitly saying the Almighty has given up on Creation. In a word, foolishness. And are we having that? Why no: no, we are not.

Don’t Touch My Birth Certificate Junk

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by Smitty

Ann Althouse:

You could criticize Obama for wasting our time by not just releasing the damned thing earlier. But he could have thought it was demeaning to have to do this, so I’m inclined to give him a pass.

No, really: if we are truly an egalitarian society, then there is no pass for public figures on such documents.
We’re talking about a piece of information from decades ago, so there is no physical security argument to make.
Just before the above quotation:

I’d say, the reason Obama did not release the long-form birth certificate before is that he thought it was to his advantage to allow other people to look bad or crazy in one way or another by going on in the birtherist mode. But there was a tipping point, as Trump got traction and polls showed huge numbers of American’s entertaining doubts. So, it was all political strategy.

Well, no kidding, Ann! The POTUS had a guitar, and he riffed that thing until the strings were all broken, then acquiesced. Thank you, BHO! Way to be the conciliator, and pursue healing and unity in the country!
In fact, as a fellow Christian, let me pile on a bit here about integrity. Integrity is a habit that must be systematically exercised. Truly Christian men go to ridiculous lengths to keep their integrity intact. Many I know will not meet privately with women not their wives, no matter how innocent the occasion. Contrast Billy Graham:

Scandal never touched his life. He managed the finances of his profession as few itinerant preachers have ever done. The Billy Graham Evangelical Association had a board of directors that oversaw the operations and paid their star evangelist a fixed monthly salary. Their books were regularly audited and were open to public inspection.

Why is it that we cannot have an equally impeccable president? We don’t demand such as voters.
Also, one must address a commenter on the earlier birth certificate post:

I don’t give a fig one way or the other, but 99+ percent of the media, and RS McCain, have gotten this wrong: this is a Certificate of Live Birth, not a birth certificate. The difference is important: a birth certificate tells where someone is born, a certificate of live birth means ‘here’s a baby that’s alive’ but does NOT establish where said baby was born.

Here I can extend some Sympathy For The President. “Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii” becomes a non-falsifiable proposition at some point (not to say that the commenter in question has gone there, though). No matter what BHO does, there is always going to be some tinfoil hat type out there, claiming that he Hasn’t Done Enough.
It’s great that the Constitutional crisis has been averted. Now, back to the TSA group-grope.

Update: linked by That Mr. G Guy.

Update II: also linked by Amused Cynic.