New School Politics

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According to a CNN/Opinion Research poll this week 57% of Americans believe we are currently in a recession. But, of course, we are not actually in a recession as a recession would connotate at least one (by most definitions, two) quarter of negative economic growth. This is another example of the economic illiteracy of the general public.

Bryan Caplan, a professor of econ at GMU, talks a lot about this, including in his recent book. Remember these Americans are the very ones who will be going to the polls very soon to vote for the next leader of the free world and decide future economic policy. The dichotomy between economic wisdom and conventional wisdom can at times be stark, which is why the policies of democracies and majorities can often be unwise.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Big news this morning as Sen. Joe Lieberman endorsed Sen. McCain for president. CT’s junior Senator spoke for John McCain at a rally in New Hampshire today. In my opinion it is moving to see an endorsement of such magnitude cross party lines, although I must say that it cannot sit well with the other senator from CT, Sen. Chris Dodd, who is running for president as a Democrat.

Popularity: 14% [?]

A new Rasmussen poll conducted from the 13th to the 17th of the month measured the following preferences among likely Florida GOP primary voters:

Huckabee: 27%

Romney: 23%

Giuliani: 19%

This comes as a surprise, as Giuliani has consistantly lead in Florida polling by 10-20% over the past months. The shift is stark, however much movement in opinion has been evident in the past couple of weeks and this is the first poll conducted among Republicans in Florida since December 4th.

This comes as great warning to a Giuliani campaign, which in trailing in the traditional first three states, has placed great weight on the Florida outcome.

Giuliani’s big state strategy may be floundering as Huckabee is spiking in national polls. If the Mayor does not win decisively in California, I do not believe he can win the nomination. In fact, at the present rate that the GOP primary is changing, Huckabee may soon be the front runner. Nevertheless, it believes that the race has finally matured, with three candidates pulling ahead of others–(from left to right) Giuliani as the national security and socially moderate candidate, Romney as the “normal”, in-between conservative, and Huckabee as the right-wing son of the Christian Conservative faction.

Popularity: 12% [?]

From a NYT op-ed (may require a free regestration to access article):

Huckabee! Huckabee! The man of the hour! What is it that voters love so much about this guy? Is it a hitherto inchoate yearning for a president who knows less about international affairs than they do? Hope that a man who can lose 100 pounds could also get rid of the federal deficit?

Mike is soaring ahead in the early polls, in a surge to the front of the pack that suggests Republicans cannot come to grips with the idea that they are supposed to nominate either Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani for president. There has to be a way out! What about Huckabee? He has a good heart! True, his brain doesn’t seem to have a single thought about foreign policy or know much about domestic policy, for that matter. But one well-functioning body part is better than nothing.

…

The Republican pack is one extremely unappealing bunch of politicians, and it’s no wonder that the poor voters have developed buyers’ remorse before they’ve come near the cash register. Huckabee is this week’s exercise in avoidance, and he’s not likely to be the last.

Read the whole article–it is pretty funny, although probably moreso for liberals than conservatives. Perhaps it has a point, also. Huckabee’s rise is probably indicative of Republican’s lack of satisfaction with their candidates. Although, I believe he will have more lasting power than Ms Collins supposes as he does a remarkable job of making voters “feel good” and he has that sort of teflon feel which is rare in politicians.

As little as I think of his populist candidacy, he remains one of the most natural politicians in America today. Watch out. 

Popularity: 12% [?]

I want to extend my thanks to Gary Starikoff and Scott Walterman at XM for having me on the air this morning to discuss the election. I was interviewed on POTUS 08’s “The Morning Briefing” about my thoughts on the election and my disagreement with the findings of the American University Poll that they reported last week. I also had the chance to shamelessly promote our blog and I hope that any listeners who decided to drop by our website find our ideas valuable.

For those not familiar with the POTUS 08, it is XM’s 24 hour presidential election channel where they do everything from interview the political candidates to discuss the issues and analyze the horse race with a wide range of informed pundits and experts.

For those of us who are politically involved, POTUS 08 has by far the best political coverage of the election and alone is worth justifying the cost of XM.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Peggy Noonan writes:

There was one significant mistake in the speech. I do not know why Romney did not include nonbelievers in his moving portrait of the great American family. We were founded by believing Christians, but soon enough Jeremiah Johnson, and the old proud agnostic mountain men, and the village atheist, and the Brahmin doubter, were there, and they too are part of us, part of this wonderful thing we have. Why did Mr. Romney not do the obvious thing and include them? My guess: It would have been reported, and some idiots would have seen it and been offended that this Romney character likes to laud atheists. And he would have lost the idiot vote.

My feeling is we’ve bowed too far to the idiots. This is true in politics, journalism, and just about everything else.

It was very gratifying to read this from Ms Noonan. Remember, she’s hardly one of the faithless either. She is a devout catholic, biographer of Pope John Paul II, and was a top Reagan aid and speechwriter–a consistent conservative, by all means.

To recap, Romney’s speech played out very well and it looks to be a political success. First, he looked very presidential, and, second he sent a positive message to American Evangelicals, among others. His basic message: candidates should not be judged on personal religious denominations, but rather on their underlying faith. Of course, this implicates secularists as well as the 1 out of 10 Americans who doubt God’s existence.

The obvious political goal is to juxtapose his piety versus the impiety of assorted secularists instead of his Mormonism versus traditional American Christianity. It is cunning politics, but it is exploitative. Under the facade of religious accommodation, Romney is simply trying to divert the conflict. Despite the fact that the speech has been compared to JFK’s of 1960, Romney is no JFK. Kennedy was the most ardent believer in separation of church and state as well as separation of church and politics while Romney is trying to court the religious right on their moral terms.

David Brooks writes in the NYT:

From Neuhaus, Romney borrowed the conviction that faith is under assault in America — which is the unifying glue of social conservatism. He argued that the religious have a common enemy: the counter-religion of secularism.

He insisted that the faithful should stick stubbornly to their religions, as he himself sticks to the faith of his fathers. He insisted that God-talk should remain a vibrant force in the public square and that judges should be guided by the foundations of their faith. He lamented the faithlessness of Europe and linked the pro-life movement to abolition and civil rights, just as evangelicals do.

In his speech he recounted Sam Adams call for faith among the founders in time of crisis. However, many of the founders not only framed this nation in the image of a secular state but also questioned the existence of God out-right. There was no Christian consensus among the founders, many were probably not even Christian. James Madison, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson were probably among these men. The third president, for instance:

“Fix Reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than of blindfolded fear. … Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it end in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and in the love of others which it will procure for you” (Jefferson’s Works, Vol. ii., p. 217).

In 1797, the US Senate unanimously ratified the Treaty of Trippoli, which addresses the non-religious nature of America bluntly:

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

The fact of the matter is that non-believers are a part of the American family, Mitt Romney’s speech notwithstanding. Secularists have made significant contributions to America from the beginning, and as they were treated on the merits of their reason and platforms from the time of Jefferson, they should be still today.

ADDENDUM: Zach has recently shown me a story in which a Romney spokesperson will not say whether atheists are part of the American family.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Today is a good day to be a Romney supporter. Governor Romney gave what was without a doubt the most important and the most impressive speech by any candidate of the presidential campaign. With the national press listening, he spoke about not only his Mormon faith, but the role of religion and its importance in America.

I will not go into specifics of the speech because-well quite frankly I would not be able to say it as well as Governor Romney.

You can find the speech here on the Governor’s presidential website. It is also available on MSNBC’s homepage.

As for early reactions from the pundits, here are a few quotes from MSNBC’s post speech coverage.

Pat buchanan, “Beautiful, almost perfect.”

Chris Mathews, “After almost a year of this presidential campaign I have finally heard the most impressive speech in this race.”

Joe Scarborough, “A landmark speech on American religious identity, he did everything he had to and just hit it right out of the ballpark.”

Popularity: 32% [?]

Here is an eye-popping link enumerating scores of different trends which have been linked to global warming.

Some of my personal favorites: rape, suicide, teen drinking, terrorism, child insomnia, less circumcision, polar bear cannibalism, poisonous spiders invading Scotland, rainfall increase, rainfall decrease, more colorful trees, less colorful trees, taller mountains, smaller mountains, and, best of all, another ice age.

The climate change sensation is prevalent in contemporary culture, and while the pressure is strong to hop on the band-wagon, any independent and rational thinker will notice it wreaks of dubious logic and claims. For instance, the current Secretary-General of the UN blames global warming as the primary culprit in the Darfur conflict. And, while the Sudanese campaign has been motivated in part by desertification of land in the north, it is giant leap to blame global warming for local weather trends. Not to mention the fact that by blaming climate change you are invariably evading the real issue which is that no government or people have the right to systematically violate people’s lives and property in the manner that the Sudanese government is doing.

An articulate editorial in the WSJ today posits how mob mentality may be perpetuating the matter:

How this honor has befallen the former Veep could perhaps be explained by another Nobel, awarded in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman for work he and the late Amos Tversky did on “availability bias,” roughly the human propensity to judge the validity of a proposition by how easily it comes to mind.

Their insight has been fruitful and multiplied: “Availability cascade” has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; “informational cascade” for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd’s beliefs; and “reputational cascade” for the rational incentive to do so.

Mr. Gore clearly understands the game he’s playing, judging by his resort to such nondispositive arguments as: “The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona.”

Two things to remember are, a) its bad when open, rational debate is not tolerated and people blindly follow the leader and b) environmentalist politics are consequential and if people truly accept the idea that there are catastrophic warming trends, logically, regulations will follow that could severely hamstring the economy by attacking both its energy sources and its related price system.

The fact remains that the scientific data does not add up to the earth melting. For one, humans contribute a very small fraction of the greenhouse effect (try less than 2%). Moreover, the earth warmed more during the first half of the twentieth century then the second half and actually cooled for much of the period from the 50s-80s (hence, the “global cooling” scare), all the while industrial emissions were increasing steadily.

Such inconsistencies, among others, are not addressed in the mainstream. A documentary released in the UK in the past year called “The Great Global Warming Swindle” is a very informative source. Ultimately it demonstrates that “the debate” is not over–as a matter of fact, it has never even started–and that before we do anything too crazy the world should start openly and freely discussing the issue.

ADDENDUM: In a comment, Simmons said he did not believe me when I said that human contribution to the Greenhouse effect was just about 2% of the total greenhouse effect. While it is difficult to measure the exact contribution of humans, even what I consider generous estimates, measure human contribution at no more that 2 and a fraction %. From Junk Science:

Humans can only claim responsibility, if that’s the word, for abut 3.4% of carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere annually, the rest of it is all natural (you can see the IPCC representation of the natural carbon cycle and human perturbation here or a simple schematic from Woods Hole here).

Half our estimated emissions fail to accumulate in the atmosphere, “disappearing” into sinks as yet undetermined. Humans’ total accumulated carbon contribution could account for perhaps a quarter of the total non-water greenhouse gases (that is, accounting for all the increase since the Industrial Revolution regardless of source and irrespective of whether warming from any cause might result in an increase in natural emission to atmosphere — we’re simply claiming the lot as anthropogenic or human-caused here).

Assuming that water vapor accounts for about 70% and clouds (mostly water droplets) accounts for another 20%, thus water in it’s various forms is 90% of the total greenhouse effect, leaving 10% for non-water greenhouse effect (we know we cited 95% above — see “important distinction“). Of this remaining 10%, mainly atmospheric carbon, humans might be responsible for 25% of the total accumulated atmospheric carbon, meaning 0.25 x 0.1 = 0.025 x 100 = 2.5% of the total greenhouse effect.

Within the given range, 2.5% is the maximum estimation because  it used the maximum estimates of CO2’s greenhouse composition and human emmisions of C02. Being that CO2 may be as little as 4 or 5% of the greenhouse effect, and humans may contribute as little as 3.4% of CO2, a reasonable estimate would also pin human greenhouse effect as low as (.034 x .05) .17%.

Popularity: 48% [?]

The story about has been in the news a couple of days now. A British woman teaching in Sudan has been arrested for naming her class’ teddy bear “Muhammad,” which constitutes degradation of the prophet (at least according to the Sudanese government and many angry Muslims). From the AP:

Thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and swords and beating drums, burned pictures of a British teacher Friday and demanded her execution for insulting Islam by letting her students name a teddy bear Muhammad.

Many in the protesting crowd shouted “Kill her! Kill her by firing squad!”

…

Gibbons was sentenced Thursday to 15 days in jail and deportation for insulting Islam with the naming of the teddy bear, which was part of a class project for her 7-year-old students at the private school.

She escaped harsher punishment that could have included up to 40 lashes, six months in prison and a fine. Her time in jail since her arrest Sunday counts toward the sentence.

Most also believe that the government, which for its escapades in Darfur has received castigation from the west, is exploiting the incident insofar as it wishes to fuel anti-western sentiment among its people.

The article continued:

The 54-year-old Gibbons, who was sentenced to 15 days in jail, spoke Friday with her son John and daughter Jessica in Britain by telephone.

“One of the things my mum said today was that I don’t want any resentment towards Muslims,” the son told AP.

But why shouldn’t she hold resentment towards Muslims? For many of them and according to their religious scripture free expression must be compromised to make room for sharia law, and in this case outlawing depiction of the prophet or “degradation” of any part of the religion. Many Muslims would want to see her put to death, at least imprisoned, for her benign actions, why should the teacher turn the other cheek? She shouldn’t. She should stick up for herself, just like the west should stick up for itself in the face of such controversies as the Danish cartoon incident among others.

This comes in light of new “youth” riots outside of Paris, which, like the more widespread riots of a year ago, the media mostly forgets to mention predominantly feature the wrath of one religion in particular.

Popularity: 29% [?]