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Continental Drift
While at last night’s Boo Hoo Rambler’s show, my friend Beth said something about “The country getting more conservative” which I wonder about. She was grouping the politics and the society but the general thought can be either true or false. More Republican certainly, but by what measure is the country getting more conservative? I thought I’d make a list:
Top moves to the left
- Massive Federal Spending
- Wars for Democracy (this has been adopted by the Republicans, but the idea has been on the left for quite some time)
- Gay marriage on horizon
- Government involvement all aspects of the medical system
- Abortion available for minors without parental consent, paid for by the feds in some cases. This is something that has stayed the same, but it’s a huge red flag for a lot of the right.
- Central planning for education under the guise of No Child Left Behind.
- The income tax actually becoming more progressive under Bush
- Campaign Finance “Reform”
Top moves to the right
- A push for Social Security privatization
- A move to end the death tax
- Assault Weapons ban NOT being renewed
- Higher defense spending (Bush was proposing this before 9-11 so I’ll include it here)
- Over 55 speed limits remain in effect
- 3 rounds of tax cuts
I’m sure I’ve missed a lot but that is something of a gist. Certainly the Republicans have been doing much of the above (on both sides) but where is the country actually drifting? IMHO the Democrats have not been following an Evolutionary Stable Strategy for quite a while which allows the Republicans play both sides of the street.
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From Ben Stein
Actually a Ben Stein article in the American Spectator
Can anyone even remember now what Nixon did that was so terrible? He ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the POW’s, ended the war in the Mideast, opened relations with China, started the first nuclear weapons reduction treaty, saved Eretz Israel’s life, started the Environmental Protection Administration. Does anyone remember what he did that was bad?
Oh, now I remember. He lied. He was a politician who lied. How remarkable. He lied to protect his subordinates who were covering up a ridiculous burglary that no one to this date has any clue about its purpose. He lied so he could stay in office and keep his agenda of peace going. That was his crime. He was a peacemaker and he wanted to make a world where there was a generation of peace. And he succeeded.
That is his legacy. He was a peacemaker. He was a lying, conniving, covering up peacemaker. He was not a lying, conniving drug addict like JFK, a lying, conniving war starter like LBJ, a lying, conniving seducer like Clinton — a lying, conniving peacemaker. That is Nixon’s kharma.
Ben Stein (before he had his own game show, talk show, movie roles et al) was a Nixon speechwriter. Read the whole thing.
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The Boo Hoo Ramblers
I saw the Boo Hoo Ramblers at Blind Willies’ last night and they’re still my favorite new (to me) band. A very tight trio of guitar (periodically banjo) bass and fiddle the Boo Hoo boys perform a well stuctured and very long show. I highly recommend seeing them.
On a side note, the singer/guitarist is Clark Ashton, who also has Commuter Art Gallery, A.K.A. the house with all the large iron statues in the front yard on North Druid Hills road.
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Computer problems
And of course, now that I reboot my server (I had turned it off to disconnect the monitor cable to install the KVM switch) I get problems. The server boots normally, but just as it gets to the login screen it reboots and the Bios then displays “Disk boot failure, Insert System Disk and press enter”. The server had been going for several weeks between reboots.
Ideas anyone? I seem to recall the last time this happened it was a memory problem, which could be the case. That CPU/mobo/ram is pretty ancient. The hard drive is only 10 months old though.
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A new KVM switch
I just saw this D-Link KVM (Keyboard, Video and Mouse) as a Buy.com “Deal of the Day” and I have to say, it works very well. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it came with six foot cables (I think the average is 3 foot cables). I can finally have more room for all of my other stuff on that desk in my office.
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Blogging will be light the next few days
Work is whupping up on me this week.
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Memorial Day being an odd coincidence
I was looking at the referral logs for moodyloner.net and came across A Day in Iraq. It’s a blog written by a soldier from Fort Benning (in Columbus Georgia) and his life there. Fascinating stuff with many pictures. A blog very much worth reading.
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Affordable Family Formation
This article by Steve Sailor (via Mickey Kaus) is will worth reading. Put simply, it explains the current American Red State/Blue State gap largely in terms of self selection and children. It’s much more expensive to have children in a blue (Democratic) state compared to a red (Republican) State. Throw in some freedom of movement and self selection and you’ve got a bifurcated America.
A few quibbles. He seems to throw in Atlanta as a “Red City” which is very much not the case. While metro Atlanta is a very red metro area, the city itself is quite blue. Also, the areas with the most recent and illegal immigrants (here in the Atlanta metro area anyway) seem to be the most Republican areas, which is seemingly at odds with his theory.
He also does not mention the Roe Effect, payroll taxes, the total tax burden, the actual cost of a mortgage (I got the full spiel from my mortgage broker when I refinanced, the cost of the mortgage itself can really vary quite a bit.)
On the whole, well worth reading though.
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A good article from Landsburg
I stumbled across this on Cafe Hayek.
“Diversity” has always been my least favorite Shibboleth of the left. In fact, nothing else even comes close, although the right wing habit of appending “of faith” at the end of ever sentence is rapidly closing catching up.
That was why I liked this piece by Steven Landsburg. Initial Paragraph:
I was invited to speak about “diversity” to an audience of about 80 students, roughly half black and half white. Most of the blacks sat on the left side of the room and most of the whites sat on the right—as good an indication as any that nobody really cares very much about diversity.
How much of life is taken up with these self-conscious display of piety? If you removed all of the man-years that people have spent talking about “diversity”, “sexuality”, “culture of life”,”family values” I wonder what, if anything would be lost.
5-30-2005 Updated for Clarity (verb tense)
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Not that happy with FeedDemon
After a full day’s worth of using the FeedDemon I’m switching back to Abilon. While FeedDemon actually functioned better in every respect, I dislike not being able to see all of the feeds at the same time. Tabbed browsing in the program is essential too. Oh well. I suppose Abilon can always improve with time.