More in The American Spectator: this time my thoughts on an aspect of Obamacare

This morning, The American Spectator is publishing my web article about the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF). I specifically touch on that body's findings last year about prostate cancer screening.

As readers of this website know, I am a mild-mannered urologic surgeon by day and an occasional intrepid blogger and free-lance writer by night. Here in Montana, as is true in most parts of the country, we urologists are in short supply and have more work than we can handle, so I don't view the USPSTF's findings as an existential threat to my profession in the way that some of my more counterparts in saturated urban markets do. Any doctor who doesn't want to find that certain tests and treatments are unnecessary -- well, let's just say that is someone I wouldn't want to be my doctor. I disagree that prostate cancer screening is unnecessary, but I do believe that treatment should be done more selectively.

The larger point, and the reason I chose to write about it, is that this is an example of a government agency having some correct information but drawing the kind of wrong conclusion that only an impersonal committee can. Anyway, welcome to medical care dictated by impersonal committees. With Obamacare we will only get more of the same -- unless, of course, "we" are elites (like the President) who will be exempt from its strictures.

Here is the link -- enjoy!

Steve Daines has it right on spending cuts

Do the hard things first -- good advice for almost any job, but certainly for those who would presume to balance budgets at the federal level.

Montana's newly elected Congressman had some thoughts that were reported on in a Lee Newspaper article. They boil down to this:

“President Obama’s proposal of raising taxes brings in revenue that will be about 8 percent of the deficit, so that leaves us 92 percent to chew on,” he said in an interview. “We need to start the discussion on where we can find ways not only to slow the growth in federal spending, but actually see some decreases.”

Indeed. And politically, raising taxes on 1-2% of Americans, as President Obama proposes to do, is relatively painless. In the last election, President Obama demonstrated that the very wealthy are at least as likely to vote Democratic as Republican (the states, counties, and Congressional districts with the wealthiest residents actually are more like to vote Democratic -- even when you are promising to take more of their money away from them.) Those who benefit from government spending, on the other hand -- those who work for the government or who receive government payments of some sort -- tend to be very punishing to anyone who presumes to take their goodies away.

Ergo, it is always politically easier to raise taxes (especially on the dastardly rich) than to cut spending. So, when 92% of what needs to be accomplished has to come from spending cuts, and those cuts are politically hazardous, it is the spending cuts that need to be given priority.

Past political experience has shown that politicians consider reductions in the rate of increase of spending to be spending cuts, when they really aren't cuts at all. Past political experience has shown that any cuts (or decreases in the rate of rise) that actually materialize only occur when politicians are forced to make them. Tax increases, furthermore, are always real, whereas spending cuts often prove to be ephemeral. Much ado was made about "austerity" in Great Britain, where what was promised was a ratio of 3 to 1 -- 3 pounds in spending cuts for every pound in tax increases. Subsequent experience has shown that most of the spending cuts were fake, whereas the tax increases were real. And this is with a "Conservative" government in charge.

We can expect the same here in America, where the tax increases that President Obama and the Democrats have been promising us will be very much real. Spending cuts? Without vigilance, they will be no more real than were the spending "cuts" that House Speaker John Boehner extracted from the Democrats in exchange for Republicans voting for an increase in the debt ceiling. (What Boehner obtained as "concessions" were a joke and an insult to any right-thinking American's intelligence.)

In light of all of this, Congressman Daines is exactly right to stand with those who refuse to vote for tax increases, and who insist on seeing real spending cuts (and not just reductions in the rate of increase of spending) before considering any moves that increase revenue.

If President Obama and the Democrats in Washington were serious about reducing the annual deficit (let alone reducing the national debt), they would long ago have been furiously looking for places to cut spending -- but they aren't and never have been. Trust us, if Republicans in Washington were to allow them to raise taxes without insisting on spending cuts, that is exactly what would happen.

Republicans in Washington have often been rightly accused of not being serious about cutting spending. What they have to commend them is that the alternative is so much worse, as we discovered between 2008 and 2010. Many of us rhetorically asked ourselves prior to the 2006 and 2008 elections, "could the Democrats really be any worse than the Republicans when it comes to spending too much?" Alas, we found that the answer to that question is a simple one: "oh yes... and how..."

On to more important things...

I wouldn't trade this beautiful piece of land for anything, but one of the downsides of having the ancestral homestead be across the border in South Dakota is that I have to apply as a nonresident for the privilege of hunting deer on my own land, competing with everyone else in the country who wants to come to this corner of the state to hunt (there seem to be more every year.)

This year I actually drew a tag, and was thus obligated (yup, absolutely no choice in the matter) to block off an entire week of my schedule in this, the busiest time of my work year. No choice but to come out here to immerse myself in a ritual in which I haven't participated for 30 years. When I put it in writing like that, the only thing that springs to mind is "what was I thinking?" But of course, when one is young, one always thinks that there will be plenty of time for all of that in the future, putting it off one year, and then another, and another... Part of the whole deceptively simple concept of delayed gratification. During the two decades of exile, i.e. education and military service, there was also the small problem of not having the time, the money, or both, to carve out a full week to make the long journey home during a time of uncertain weather and travel conditions, so I will be gentle with myself.

And indeed, with the snowstorm that hit this part of the world over the past weekend, the trip was delayed by a couple of days, and I was tempted to despair, but fought it by getting my last guitar adjusted and set up (Art at Hanson's does a beautiful job of such things), then spending hours on Saturday playing Grieg and Bach on the piano, then bluegrass and Celtic music on guitar, finishing off with learning more on my new mandolin. Ran a lot of necessary errands and got caught up on some sleep as well.

Leaving the Billings abode in the capable hands and watchful eyes of my college-age son, who couldn't get away from school to join me, the beloved and I hit the road Monday morning. There were a few white-knuckle moments on I-94, but for the most part the roads had been cleared, and we pulled up to the house as a red winter sunset was glowing behind the buttes on the western horizon.

Getting the week off to a good start, after dinner I tuned in, courtesy of the wonders of DSL, which have reached even these remote parts, to the first full Boston Celtics game I've been able to watch this year -- a satisfying win over the Chicago Bulls (they don't have Derrick Rose back, but we don't have Avery Bradley, either, so no asterisk by this one.)

Tuesday morning comes early but I am up before dawn, with a bewildered Ginny (see puppy photo of the same, above) not able to understand why the good master is donning outdoor gear and readying a firearm while she is being left behind. From the road in the previous evening's dusk, I had seen a group of whitetails (mule deer are scarce in recent years around here) disappear over a ridge heading for CRP we planted last year on the easternmost part of the ranch, so I had decided my hunt would start there. My brother is still trying to fill his tag up near Hettinger, ND where he lives, so I will be hunting alone today.

As I drive slowly along a high ridge south of the home place, getting ready to head several miles east to get to my destination -- a rocky outcropping near the far northeastern corner of the ranch from which I will be able to glass the fields below -- I catch a fleeting glimpse of a buck and doe on the horizon to the south, heading toward an area where there is another expanse of freshly planted CRP. I change plans midstream and turn that direction, sending an email by my smartphone to the beloved telling her where I am going. There is at best a 50% chance that it will go through given the spotty coverage out here, but I know I will be parking where she will see the truck if she heads east to look for me later in the day should I become incapacitated from a twisted knee, a heart attack, or simple old age.

I pull to a stop before I reach the final rise, and am relieved to turn off NPR news (the only time I listen to National Progressive Radio is when I am driving around in the old farm truck -- no XM radio, and I'm not always in the mood for the local AM stations.)

The sky is still overcast in the morning twilight. The expansive view to the south across the broad South Grand River valley takes my breath away, as it has all my life, and the long range of Ponderosa pine-clad rimrocks called the Slim Buttes (the farthest east unit of Custer National Forest) dimly anchor the southwest horizon.

Those Slim Buttes were always one of the visual constants of my life growing up here, always seeming to beckon me to come further west where there would be more of the same. I of course eventually did, as soon as I could, with me now living in the shadows of different Ponderosa pine-clad rimrocks.

I sling my binoculars (old friends for many years that feel just right) over my neck and my new (to me) .30-06 over my right shoulder. A gun-dealer friend found it for me when I told him I needed a different all-purpose rifle. I had sighted it in on my last trip here, and found it to be a most pleasing firearm to handle. Like musical instruments, guns either just feel right in one's hands or they don't. The .270 I bought when I first moved back to this corner of the world never really did. I grew up shooting my dad's .243 (now in the possession of my brother, who is the real hunter of the family), but had devoured enough Jack O'Connor tales in Outdoor Life growing up that I just knew I wanted a .270 when I "grew up." There may still be a .270 out there that's right for me, but the one I owned never felt right in my hands. Today, I have the spring in my step that only a rifle and scope that feel just right can give. Growing up, deer hunts had always been a one-shot affair for me, and I have a good feeling about today.

Crossing the rise, I see the heads of a couple of does bedded down on the western end of the expanse of thick CRP. I stop and glass them patiently, and one of them looks back at me, unsure if I have spotted her. I angle to the east a little as the light steals up little by little over the horizon to my right. Take a few steps, my feet crunching in the snow. Glass everything around me for a few minutes. Take a few more steps, glass slowly again -- nothing worse than missing something right in front of you. The quiet is beautiful.

Finally, bingo -- on the far eastern edge of the CRP I spot a couple of dark dots. I turn my glasses that direction and see that it is a buck and a doe. Then a second buck comes tentatively from the south toward them. I know I need to take a long hike and come up through the draws and coulees in what we call the south pasture. Changing course, I skirt west around the two bedded does, still glassing them to see if a buck is hidden nearby. They finally bolt toward the east -- it's just the two of them. The air is cold, but the sun is starting to burn off the overcast as I hike briskly along the western edge of the CRP and through the gate into the south pasture where I can disappear down a draw where the distant deer can't see me. I can move quickly now.

When I get far enough that I want to take another look, I crawl to the top of a ridge onto some rocks where I know I will have a view of the part of the CRP field where I had seen the two bucks. I lie there and glass them for about ten minutes, seeing if they are moving. The two bucks never actually lock horns, but the dominant one (neither is particularly large) keeps the other at bay, and is making overtures to the doe, who plays it coy. I could watch this for hours, but I need to keep moving.

I crawl slowly backward until I know I will be out of sight, and hike down the draw. Where it forks, I can see up the draw and spot a couple of does, but no buck. They must be moving. To keep out of sight I will have to hike still further south, cross a low part of the ridgeline into the next draw, and hike back north along it to reach the southern corner of the CRP, which is laid out in a big L shape.

This will be more tricky, since the final rise is a gentle one. I drop to hands and knees to crawl forward, still stopping every few feet to glass 360 degrees around me. Coming across from a neighbor's land comes another buck -- not huge, but bigger than the ones I had been glassing. I wait and watch as he makes his way toward a dugout that is in an otherwise dry creek just over onto our land. There is not going to be any way to stalk him, though -- no cover. I crawl forward on my belly a little further, and as I rise to my elbows to glass again, there is now a small fork-horn buck and a doe right at the edge of the CRP field.

Decision time. I have a clean shot, but I want to see if the larger buck will start making his way over toward us. Instead, the two deer I am watching see him and bolt in his direction. The three of them rapidly disappear across the southeast pasture, and I see them circling north. I will have to get back to my truck and get to another vantage from which to glass fields near the center of the ranch where they have probably headed, and I start my hike back to the truck. My knee is doing OK, but for how long, I wonder?

I am walk in a small, rough corner of native grassland that is enclosed with the CRP fields, glassing as I go, eyeing a group of four does that are roughly in the center of the brushy fields. As I cross a small rocky ridge, I see three deer directly ahead of me -- a doe and two small bucks -- and drop to the ground to look them over with my binoculars.

Too late... they have spotted me, and start moving rapidly up to the top of the high ridge above them. As they cross it, though, I see the back of the last one turning east. Decision time again. I decide to try to intercept them and get a better look, crossing the fence and deliberately walking east on a diagonal, figuring they will wheel around to the south. I begin to cross a swelling rise, and just like that, I am staring at a buck and a doe on the other side of a shallow draw. They can see only my head and shoulders at this point. All of us freeze -- I slowly raise my glasses with my left hand while holding my rifle in my right. Small buck -- a 3-pointer by western count, beautiful little animal, though.

Decision time again. There is the old question hunters ask themselves: "if it ends up that this is the only clean shot I get all week, will I regret not taking it?" Young bucks make better eating than old bucks, and I've never been a trophy fiend. Ginny will be glad if I make short work of the deer season and take her out after pheasants and partridge every day for the rest of the week, and she needs the field work. My knee is still good, but for how long? It is a clean shot of less than 100 yards -- I detest long-distance sniping. On the other hand, when will I draw a tag again? Should I spend the week patiently hunting a trophy? On the other hand I've spent a lot of time roaming across the ranch this summer and fall, and haven't seen a single trophy buck all year -- not this year (of course.)

All of this flies through my mind in perhaps 3-5 seconds as I lower the glasses slowly and raise the rifle gently, wrapping my left arm in the sling for extra stability -- one of those maneuvers that kinesthetic memory brings back unconsciously. Perhaps he will bolt and make the decision for me.

It is an off-hand shot, whereas I usually prefer a supine shot, or at least a braced kneeling or sitting position. But my hands are surprisingly unmoving and steady. The crosshairs settle on his front shoulder in case he bolts forward just as I pull the trigger. Slow breath out... gentle squeeze of the right hand. I hear the boom of the rifle as though I were hearing it faintly in a dream-state, and I almost feel the impacting thud of the bullet as it strikes the deer more than I hear it. He drops instantly and doesn't move. The doe flees to the south. A clean stalk, one clean shot, the hunt over by 8 AM. The overcast haze has returned without my noticing it.

Some things you don't forget. I sign the tag, cut out the date, and attach it to the back lower leg. I move his head uphill and pull out my Buck knife. I handle him gently and respectfully, just like I remember my dad doing -- not just with deer, but with any animal I ever saw him handle, living or dead. I had already slit his throat and windpipe quickly and let him bleed out -- he hasn't reacted to my approach, but I've heard about guys getting nasty surprises when they start to open the belly cavity only to be rewarded by a merely stunned and very much alive deer kicking them in the shoulders when stimulated by the pain of the incision. Besides, I want to be absolutely sure he is dead before I do what I have to do.

I open his hindquarters and place a foot on each leg. I slit open the belly and the steam rises into the air. I think of Han Solo in "The Empire Strikes back" killing the tauntaun and warming Luke Skywalker in its warm belly while he sets up a bivouac to try to survive the freezing night that is falling on the planet Hoth. But only for a split second, and then I'm back, very much on this planet, very much here. I may be in a time long, long ago, though.

I work quickly, and all of the internal attachments fall away beneath the sharp blade of my knife. Rule one -- work deliberately and don't cut yourself. Belly contents, lungs, heart... I reach up high to sever the trachea, and end by cutting around the rectum, freeing it up so I can pull it out from above. A better hunter than I would save the heart, liver, and kidneys to eat, but I leave them as a gift for the coyotes, who will enjoy them more than I would.

Time now for the couple miles back to the truck. I walk back up the ridge across the corner of the southeast pasture where my hunt ended. I reach the north edge of the CRP, and there are now at least a dozen deer that have gathered in its center. They move away from me and are too distant to see well with the naked eye, but somehow seem to know that I am no longer a danger. I have left my rifle and binoculars at the kill site, so I can't look closely at them. Just as well -- I don't see anything that looks like a monster buck among them, but I'd really rather not know at this point.

I reach the truck, drink some water, turn over the engine and turn off NPR. I want to be completely alone and in silence at this point.

I have to drive through the large central pasture. It has the highest hills and ridges on the place, and I pass the 9-foot tall cairn (or "stone-Johnny") that has stood there for more than a century now, ever since an open-range sheep-herder built it back in the day. I have to circle around to get to the southeast pasture, and finally reach the site. I am able to back down into the draw and up toward the deer. I put on the emergency brake, drop the tailgate. Now for the hard part -- I've never loaded a deer into a truck by myself before. Will I need to go get the beloved for some assistance? No. I lift his head and shoulders onto the tailgate and pin it into place with my right arms, then reach down with my left hand to grab the hind hooves and do an explosive leglift (just like doing a deadlift with barbells), and the deer is in the back.

I'm back in the yard of the home place by 9:30, washing the blood out of the bed of the truck and rinsing some blood and stray hairs from the body cavity while the beloved looks on with interest (very new for her.)

Any bloodied clothing (gloves, bibs, gaiters) goes into the washing machine and I set it running. I clean my knife at the utility sink, unload the rifle (including the single expended shell that is still in the chamber), and after cleaning myself up, I sit down to devour the freshly baked cornbread that the beloved has just removed from the oven. My knee is starting to hurt, and I knew that my split-second decision to pull the trigger was the right one. It really was a beautiful hunt, the way I like to do it -- all on foot; spot, stalk, trying to think like a deer, all very quiet until there is that single sure shot that ends the killing part of the hunt.

After a little rest, a drive to the meat-packing plant in town to process the game and to pick up a few supplies. In the evening, I build a stout fire in the wood-burning stove as the beloved and I sit and read in the living room. Later, I pull out my guitar and play until I am content. We step outside before bed to look at the stars, and Orion is brilliant in the east, Cassiopeia is brilliant at the zenith, and the bright wanderer of the sky tonight is Jupiter.

Wednesday now belongs to Ginny, a day which is winding to a close as I finish writing this. We hunted a different large CRP field today -- very thick and wild, filled with pheasants that were even wilder, usually exploding into the air long before we could make an approach. I didn't get out until afternoon, so the scent was harder for Ginny to lock onto, but she got several beautiful points. The best ones were, of course, on hens, and Ginny looked at me, wondering why I wasn't shooting -- game laws are not part of their natural instinct. Still, there was a rooster breast for me to saute at dinner, and we had had a glorious day in the field, seeing birds everywhere, even if most were out of range. We've had a couple of short hunts this fall, but nothing like today, where she had a veritable feast of bird-scent for her birdy nose. Ginny is sleeping the happiest sleep she has had in months, having spent a long afternoon doing what she was born to do. Every time I do something (vocationally or avocationally) that I feel I was born to do, I have a tendency to think of her. And every time the weather turns crisp in the fall, she knows it is her time -- looking at me nearly every day with a cocked head that says, "don't you know what time of year it is, dear master?" It grieves me that there are some who own these fine animals (she is a Wirehaired Pointing Griffon) and don't hunt with them. It's like owning a Border Collie in a city where it can never see a sheep. Just wrong.

To make the perfect end to the day, after dinner I watched the Celtics win a close one over the Jazz while the beloved read her novel and periodically looked up to comment on a good play (she has become a Celtics convert, sound in judgement as she is.) It was a good day, filled with things of the highest importance, and when, as Ginny and I drove to the place where we planned to hunt, I heard The One speaking unctuously on NPR about the need to raise taxes and about how it was perfectly natural that he knew nothing of a months-long investigation by his FBI of the head of his CIA until the day after his re-election, I felt no anger, no despair, no anxiety.

Acceptance is the nicest phase of grief. Or maybe being immersed in important things simply allowed me to transcend for a time the grief I have felt at the recent rude reminder that the America I knew is gone for good. For this moment at least, I am back in the Old America of my childhood, aided by being in the home of my childhood, the house my grandfather built more than a century ago and in which my father was born. I am a mile from the one-room country school in which I was educated for 8 years, and where -- for the first 4 years anyway -- we bowed our heads to pray before eating the lunches our mothers had packed.

I look up at the bookshelves above me to see the great classics on one shelf, a set of the writings of the ancient Fathers of the Church on another, a 1950's era encyclopedia on another, a large part of my extensive collection of books on gardening, ranching, farming, and assorted agricultural topics on yet another. Across the room is a large bookshelf with a full collection of National Geographic magazines dating uninterruptedly back to 1960 and sporadically back to the 1930s. Most family members randomly explore their pages on nearly every visit -- it's a tradition.

Time first, though, to read a few more pages in Victor Davis Hanson's The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization -- a book I have been reading at on nearly every visit here for the last half-dozen years. I've almost completed it, but almost don't want to, since it has become a familiar friend. Unfortunately, the ending of the story is not a happy one, since the agrarian ideal of the yeoman farmer eventually disappeared in ancient Greece, just as it is disappearing here. The plant that grew from the roots was a good one, though -- a western civilization that is our heritage. On days like today, I believe that the agrarian roots of our own American civilization will somehow survive and give life of some sort to our country for many years to come, even after the way of life of those who built it is destroyed, and indeed despised by its new masters.

In short, on days like today, I have hope. And that's a good place to stop.

A dedication to academic freedom at the University of Montana? Maybe not so much...

Welcome to the new world of censorship -- or at least something uncomfortably close to it.

On the national scene, all of the attention is on the subtle pressure that the Obama administration placed on Google to get the company to remove a video clip deemed offensive by Muslims. The government of course didn't tell the company to remove it -- they just asked Google to review whether it met their policies for allowing videos to be posted.

Amusing, since most usage policies for anything on the internet are so long and complicated that no-one actually reads them. The policies are written to keep lawyers happy, one can be sure, and to protect the company from lawsuits. The government doubtless believed that somewhere in all of that verbiage would be found a clause that Google could use to yank the video, and that Google would be intimidated enough to do so. After all, that video is the cause of all of the rioting in the Mideast -- the current administration's policies and weaknesses could have had nothing to do with it.

The Obama administration was more or less standing there with a metaphorical tire iron in its metaphorical hands, saying, "nice little company you have there -- be a shame if anything happened to it."

Google is to be commended for not caving in to the pressure.

This must be the wave of the future for the new censorship, however, since even our governor here in Montana has gotten in on the act, twisting a few arms over at the University of Montana because of a study done by a law school professor.

Apparently, the professor was hired (in her own private time) to do a study for Cablevision/Bresnan examining certain aspects of Montana tax policy. This sort of thing is done all the time -- studies for companies, for non-profits, for various interest groups, etc. While clearly stating in legislative testimony that her work represented her own opinion, and not that of the University of Montana, she neglected to include that caveat in the written report. Her bad, and she admits it.

But, Governor Schweitzer was displeased and got on the phone to the president of the university. According to the governor, here was how he started the conversation:

"I asked him (President Engstrom) if it was the policy of the University of Montana to shift $100 million in taxes from a dozen out-of-state corporations to 45,000 Montana businesses and 350,000 homes,” Schweitzer said in an interview Friday.

Engstrom said he didn’t know what Schweitzer was talking about, the governor said, so he told the UM president: “You have a person who represents herself as a UM professor. You assume that someone who represents the law school represents the University of Montana.”

One would hope that the head of an academic institution would have looked into it, apologized for the missing disclaimer, made sure it was corrected, and left it at that. One would hope that the head of an academic institution would have made a clear statement about the importance of university professors having the academic freedom to do studies without having to worry about whether politically powerful people liked the conclusions or not. One would hope wrongly.

Instead, the timorous president had this to say:

“I’m sorry that one of our faculty members engaged in an activity that did not fully comply with existing policy,” Engstrom said. “Her activity may have created the impression that the university has a position on the specific matter of property taxation. It does not."

So far, so good, right? Yes indeed, but it turns out that he later contradicts himself -- apparently the University of Montana actually does have a position on taxation:

“Clearly, as a university, we are interested in policies and practices that permit optimal investment in higher education. To the extent that Professor Juras was making recommendations that decrease resources available to the state, she was not speaking for the university.”

One gathers from this that any recommendations that "decrease resources to the state" are contrary to U of M policy. Come again? So if a university professor identifies (for the sake of argument) elements of Montana tax policy that are unfair, contradictory, or even unconstitutional -- and if acting on that information would "decrease resources to the state" -- a professor would be speaking contrary to the the position of the University. After all a university's primary interest is getting "optimal investment in higher education." Not putting out academically sound work, and certainly not searching for the truth. Just getting more funding.

U of M's president should be ashamed of himself for that statement. His primary interest in a conflict like this with a powerful authority figure like Governor Schweitzer should be to shield his faculty from political pressure. Do we want a Republican governor putting the screws to the U of M president if a faculty member publishes some sort of liberal nonsense? I certainly don't.

When a high-level government official asks questions like these, it is not benign, since governors and U.S. Presidents have a lot of power that can be used at their discretion. Everyone knows this. Who knows which junior faculty member at a Montana university is looking over research currently in progress, thinking, "hm, maybe I just don't need the negative attention this might get me from the powers that be..."

The next interesting question is this -- will there be an outcry from the University of Montana faculty about this episode? Will they be calling for President Engstrom's head? Sadly, one suspects that they are just as politically liberal as most university faculties and that therefore they will remain quiet -- at least until a future university president caves to pressure from a Republican official.

Meanwhile, we are all learning that when a government official picks up the phone and asks us whether we are following our policies, the real message may be, "you just did something we don't like -- care to rethink it?"

What is truly interesting is that in these particular cases, a university that supposedly has a quasi-religious obligation to protect academic freedom went straight into groveling mode, while it was a private company -- Google -- that seemed willing to take a chance with an irate federal government rather than compromise their commitment to the open exchange of information.

Re-routing the Keystone XL pipeline -- implications for Montana and the Bakken

The last we heard, the Canadians were going to deal with the Obama administration's refusal to approve the Keystone XL pipeline by building one west to the Pacific instead, allowing for easier delivery to hungry Chinese and east Asian markets -- a move that would have left Montana and the Bakken fields out in the cold.

It seems that Transcanada is going to try again, by proposing a new route through Nebraska. The Obama administration had used Nebraska's failure to sign off on their portion of the route as the ostensible reason for nixing the project entirely.

As a U.S. News article points out, however, it really wouldn't matter what magical route could be found through Nebraska:

The regulation redundancies only scratch the surface of many environmentalists' concerns over the pipeline. Their beef with the project is further upstream and involves the extraction and processing of the oil sands themselves, an issue no amount of creative pipeline re-routing can address.

Exactly. While the Nebraska route and environmentally sensitive areas may be the immediate reasons given for torpedoing the project, the real problem is that the oil pipeline would carry.... well... oil.

Even if the Canadian oil sands produced oil without a process that emits greenhouse gases, environmentalists would still oppose it, because oil pipelines carry... well... oil.

I've heard some Obama partisans criticize the Obama administration for not laying all of the blame for the Keystone XL pipeline debacle squarely at the feet of the state of Nebraska, which would allow President Obama to escape responsibility.

Such arguments miss a fundamental feature of the landscape: the President is a true believer in shutting down traditional energy development. Were he to use the Nebraska problem to full rhetorical advantage, he would be boxed into approving the pipeline should a Nebraska route eventually be approved. Should he be re-elected (an eventuality that MH predicted long ago) he will use whatever reason is convenient to torch the project.

Transcanada obviously is hoping for the best, but one suspects that their best plan will be to start planning their pipeline route through the Canadian Rockies. Montana and the Bakken will just have to keep hauling much of our oil by the more environmentally destructive means of truck and train...

Sen. Jon Tester promises to push for balanced budget -- after the election (when he has more flexibility?)

Sen. Jon Tester made a bit of a splash with the help of an unsurprisingly uncritical print media, saying that his "biggest priority after re-election would be to push a bipartisan balanced budget solution that has so far languished in Congress."

Just out of curiosity, I did a search of the archives of the Billings Gazette from January 1, 2007 (around the time Tester took office) until January 1, 2011 (when the Montana Democratic playbook dictates that their U.S. Senate candidates are to be transformed into sounding like conservative Republicans for the final two years of their term.) The search was for "Jon Tester balanced budget."

I did not find a single news report that detailed Sen. Tester's labors to balance the federal budget. Given that Sen. Tester votes with President Obama close to 100% of the time and given that President Obama has broken the bank with unprecedented increases of debt, this was hardly surprising. Something may have slipped past me, but one would expect that Sen. Tester's "biggest priority" would have shown up many times during those first four glorious years after taking office -- and surely from 2008 - 2010 when Democrats controlled all branches of the federal government?

It is important to note that the words "balanced budget" are today code words for "tax increases" in the Democratic lexicon, so even Sen. Tester's election year (re)conversion to the cause of fiscal austerity should be taken with a grain of salt.

The political point to note is that for years, it was only Republicans who (officially, anyway) called for a balanced federal budget -- it was Democrats who openly advocated for Keynesian deficit spending (with a devilish twist -- unlike Keynes, they have advocated for just as much deficit spending in good economic times as in bad.)

So from a political point of view, calling for a balanced budget makes a Democrat sound a bit like, well, a Republican -- especially if you don't read the find print. And sounding like a Republican in the year or two before an election is precisely what Democrats running for the U.S. Senate in Montana specialize in.

We'll see if Montana voters buy into Sen. Tester's game this election. They've bought into it from Sen. Baucus for decades, so Sen. Tester is hardly foolish to give it a whirl.

From the bookshelf: Peace, They Say -- by Jay Nordlinger

Update: Here is a link to my main review of this book in the journal Touchstone, that was published later (Jan 2013).

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With more than a century’s worth of laureates to choose from, Jay Nordlinger (a senior editor at National Review and music critic for The New Criterion) has said that some well-meaning friends advised him to write only about the interesting ones in Peace, They Say, his history of the Nobel Peace Prize. The trouble with that approach, he says, is that the laureates are all interesting – one doesn’t win “the most famous and controversial prize in the world” by having lived a boring life.

Besides an author’s understandable desire for completeness, however, one suspects that another reason for including at least a short account of every laureate from the founding of the Nobel Peace Prize at the dawn of the last century through the crowning farce of President Obama’s selection in 2009 (he was nominated shortly after taking office) was to put the achievement of this award into a certain mildly skeptical context, since the more deserving laureates stand out clearly from the crowd.

Nordlinger groups decades worth of Nobel Prize winners into chapters he calls “parades” (echoing the Oslo torchlight parade that is held in honor of the winning laureate,) interspersing these chapters with fascinating background material such as the actual nuts and bolts of the selection process, a biography of Alfred Nobel himself, reflections on why certain seemingly obvious candidates weren’t selected, and disquisitions on the meaning of the word “peace.” While all of the winners are indeed interesting, all too many prize winners are interesting in almost everything except for the real reasons they won the prize.

The most memorable highlights of the book are when a personality periodically breaks through the mind-numbing strings of organizers, activists, relief workers, and professional moralizers, arresting our attention with sheer (dare one say it?) manliness. One is Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian who won in 1922. He was a “scientist, explorer, athlete, professor, diplomat, executive, humanitarian,” and Nordlinger describes him as being a more accomplished Indiana Jones, with the additional quality of actually being real. He broke a world speed-skating record, charted the Arctic, was Norway’s first ambassador to Great Britain, curated the Bergen Museum, and engaged in a series of humanitarian missions around the globe at the request of the League of Nations, beginning with taking charge of repatriating hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war to their native lands after the Great War of 1914-1917.

Another is Ralph Bunche, a Detroit native who was a high school sports star and valedictorian, going on to UCLA on a basketball scholarship, where he was again a sports star and valedictorian. Then, on to Harvard and two graduate degrees -- all of this achieved by a black man living c. 1920 in a pre-affirmative action America. Bunche’s politics tended toward the radical in his early days, according to Nordlinger, but unlike so many radicals of his time, he had the awareness to recognize when organizations were controlled by the Communist Party and the good sense to avoid them. After serving in the American intelligence services during WWII, he went on to work for the State Department and then the U.N., where he found himself as the chief mediator between the newly-formed state of Israel and several neighboring Arab states. As with all such efforts in the Middle East, the resulting peace was short-lived, but Bunche stands out for the remarkableness of his personal story, irrespective of his personal politics or the transience of the achievements for which he received the Nobel.

Early winners of the Nobel Peace Prize tended to be idealistic sorts with great fondness for committees, associations, treaties, conferences, and arbitration. Their naïveté is almost touching, knowing what we do about the coming bloodbath that was the Great War, an event that flicked members of the peace movement away like so many fleas.

It is a bit embarrassing, really, to see the silly utopianism of American Secretary of State Frank Kellogg (the 1928 winner) who “outlawed war” with the Kellogg-Briand Pact– a document that in its bearing on reality resembles a court injunction to shut down the earth’s gravitational field. Such laureates were, however, acting at least in part in the spirit of Alfred Nobel, the founder of the prizes that still bear his name today, and who viewed war as the “horror of horrors.”

Nordlinger’s account of Nobel’s life is one of the most intriguing stories in the book, painting a much more complex portrait of the man than the commonly encountered one – namely, that he was a man who felt so guilty about inventing (and spending a lifetime manufacturing and selling) the dynamite that was used in arms-making that he established these prizes to relieve his sense of guilt. While this story fits modern liberal sensibilities and guilt-complexes, it isn’t true.

Nobel as Nordlinger portrays him is a man such as our own age seems unlikely to produce: a polymath and polyglot, deeply read in literature, an amateur but dedicated writer and translator – and all the while, a brilliant scientific inventor and entrepreneur and a hugely successful industrialist unashamed of his accomplishments and of the wealth he accumulated.

While Nordlinger conveys that Nobel’s political views were complex and sometimes contradictory, of interest is his observation that Nobel was “skeptical of democracy, and of the mob,” sentiments that would be abhorrent to those who control the Peace Prize today. Also contrary to the views of many of laureates, Nobel believed that demanding disarmament was “really only to make oneself ridiculous without doing anyone any good.” On one point, Nobel showed a certain prescience: he believed that once weapons became powerful and terrible enough, nations would be forced, out of self interest, to stop going to war. Nordlinger terms this a point of “innocence” on Nobel’s part, but in a sense Nobel was right. Once large stores of nuclear weapons were accumulated, direct war between great powers became a thing of the past. Traditional wars with guns and bullets largely took place on the periphery of the Cold War, and even afterwards wars between nuclear powers have been avoided.

The Prize has evolved into something highly political, and few things show this more clearly than the fact that the last three Democratic administrations contain Nobel laureates (Presidents Obama and Carter, and Vice President Gore.) The last award to someone in a Republican administration (given to Henry Kissinger in 1973 for his work in peace talks with North Vietnam) is, according to Nordlinger, the most unpopular in the history of the Peace Prize.

Perhaps an even greater source of irony is the fact that President George W. Bush, regardless of how history will view his tenure in office, managed to achieve a certain level of immortality in the world of the Nobel Peace Prize by being responsible, in whole or in part, for no fewer than 6 awards. The committee despised him so much that they seem to have been unable to resist giving awards that would be seen as a slap in Bush’s face.

The series of “anti-Bush” awards started with a sort of pre-emptive “warning” award after 9/11, with the run being interrupted only long enough to give the prize to a tree-planter in Kenya (2006) and a Third World “microloan” specialist (2008) -- awards that serve almost as comic relief from the otherwise tedious obsession with Bush during that decade. The awards to former VP Gore (2007) and to the newly-elected President Obama (2009) brought the art to new heights, combining anti-Bush animosity with specious grounds for being given the award (Mr. Gore for his global warming activism and Mr. Obama for not being Mr. Bush.)

Even someone skeptical about the value of the Nobel Peace Prize has to admit that the history of this award is fascinating, especially when presented in the way that Nordlinger does. He highlights obscure laureates who have been unjustly forgotten, and he shares anecdotes about even the best-known selections. In one instance, we learn that Lech Walesa may have owed his award to a handful of Polish protesters at the previous year’s ceremonies, accusing the Nobel Committee of being afraid of challenging the Soviets on anything. In another, he notes that the same committee that gave the award to Begin and Sadat wanted to include President Carter, who had helped broker the talks – but couldn’t, because no-one anywhere on the globe had nominated him.

Nordlinger’s predictions for where the Nobel Peace Prize will go from here tend toward more of the same, including new fashionable causes that will stretch even further what “peace” is, as defined by the committee. Even though skepticism is a subtext of the book, he unfailingly treats both Prize and laureates with the respect and decorum that is a trademark of Nordlinger’s writings. He has to be one of the few writers who could induce this reader to read and thoroughly enjoy a history of the Peace Prize.

* * * * *

Note: There is a lot to say about this fine book. My main review (equally laudatory) of this book will be appearing in an upcoming issue of Touchstone magazine. I'll provide details when it appears -- a link if available, or a reprint on this website 90 days after it appears, as per that magazine's guidelines.

Don't like Obamacare? Fire Senator Jon Tester

Update: Read this piece at "The Fix" at the Washington Post, in which Sen. Tester is prominently featured. It seems that Sen. Tester is quite aware of the unpopularity of his vote for Obamacare and is trying carefully to thread the needle.

________

It's Wednesday, and time for a little Montana politics to celebrate Independence Day.

There is a lot to dislike about the recent Supreme Court ruling upholding the constitutionality of Obamacare, and since this is a blog that sticks to Montana politics, the urge to wax overly eloquent will be resisted. A couple of things stand out, however:

First, one is liable to get whiplash from following liberal opinion about the Supreme Court. Prior to the ruling, the left was preparing to discount the very legitimacy of the Court -- thinking it was going to rule against the constitutionality of Obamacare. Now, they are back to having the Supreme Court as bosom buddies, and the once-hated Chief Justice Roberts is now an exceedingly wise rock star -- Confucius meets Bono. Go figure.

On a related point, one notices that the left is accusing the right of being whiners and crybabies. Some expressions of outrage have perhaps been unseemly, but how would the left be acting right now had Roberts voted the other way? We got a pretty good preview from the full-court press bombarding the Court from Democrats and the mainstream media prior to the decision. Chief Justice Roberts was about to experience his own high-tech lynching had he decided otherwise, and he knew it.

But really, that isn't the proper analogy, is it? No, the proper analogy would be this: imagine that Justice Roberts voted exactly as he did, but that Justice Sotomayor had a last-minute change of heart, voting with Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Kennedy.

That's the real analogy. Think about it -- has there ever been a single major case in which a justice appointed by a Democratic President has broken ranks and cast a deciding vote with a conservative bloc on a hot-button issue? Once? Ever? I’ve been Court-watching for decades and can't think of an example. Were it ever to happen, the wrath from the left against that traitorous Justice would make current conservative hand-wringing pale by comparison. For if there is one thing we know, it is this: Republican-appointed Justices break ranks, evolve, whatever... Democratic appointees never do. Democrats know exactly what they are getting in their Supreme Court picks -- Republicans just have to hope.

George Will , Charles Krauthammer, et al, are wrong that Chief Justice Roberts somehow slyly stole a march on the left by voting as he did (you know, limiting the commerce clause, giving the political fervor to Romney rather than Obama, neutralizing liberal claims of a politicized court, gaining cover for future groundbreaking decisions, yada, yada...) One can't blame them for looking for a silver lining, but it is a joke to consider this as anything but a disaster for traditional conceptions of what the Constitution is supposed to do -- namely to limit the power and reach of the federal government. Roberts has instead given the federal government a roadmap for doing basically anything it wants to do -- just incorporate a tax into anything you want to do, and you'll have his vote and that of the 4 liberal Justices. (Unless he plans to go into even greater contortions next time to undo his thinking.)

Let's be generous to Chief Justice Roberts and assume that he is playing at a high-level chess game, of which this move is 6 steps ahead on a long-term strategy. If so, Roberts is trying to be too clever by half, and it won't work. Leaving aside the fact that his legal contortions are underwhelming, he is forgetting the real point to being a Supreme Court Justice: to protect and defend the Constitution. He didn't do that, and let's not pretend that he did, even if we can come up with some theoretical short-term advantages to be gained from all of this.

The true silver lining, such as it is, is this (and here, we return at long last to Montana politics): the Supreme Court didn't mandate Obamacare. Hence this decision in no way ranks with the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time -- this ruling doesn't create law out of whole cloth in the manner of many earlier Court decisions, but rather allowed a law passed by Congress and signed by the President to stand.

Which means that the law can be (and must be) repealed and/or gutted by the same democratic process. Chief Justice Roberts said, in effect, "you elected these jokers, you get to clean up the mess or live with the consequences." For Montanans, that means a number of things:

1. Montana needs to do its part in retaking control of the U.S. Senate, firing Sen. Tester, who voted for this monstrosity and would be a reliable vote to uphold it. He would be a vote against conservative judges and justices or for liberal ones (depending on the outcome of the Presidential election.) There are a number of paths to taking control of the Senate, but most involve Congressman Rehberg winning this race. We just need to get it done.

2. We need to elect Steve Daines as Montana's U.S. Congresman. While control of the House is not in immediate jeopardy, every hand is needed on deck to keep the GOP majority a comfortable one with plenty of breathing room. He will vote to repeal Obamacare, and his opponent would vote to keep it.

3. We need to elect Rick Hill as governor. States will have some discretion in implementing provisions of Obamacare, and we need someone who will stand strong with a conservative Republican legislature. We know from the fact that AG Steve Bullock refused to participate in the lawsuit against Obamacare that he supports it. We just don't need any more of that in the governor's office.

4. We need to elect Tim Fox as Montana Attorney General. Republicans and conservative-leaning independents in this state have for too long had a tendency to treat the AG office as a "gimme" for the Democrats, who always want it more badly than we do. There may not be more lawsuits challenging this or that aspect of Obamacare (and other items of federal overreach,) but if they do happen, I want Montana's AG being a part of it. (Living mentally in the 19th century and pretending that the Copper Kings are still running Montana doesn't count.)

In short, we just have to win this fall, here in Montana and all across the country. Elections have consequences.

Montana GOP and reporting about the outhouse -- the power of headlines

It's Wednesday and time for a little Montana politics.

By now, the entire political world knows that a yahoo (we seem to have used that word more than once lately, but really -- is there a better one?) brought an outhouse to the parking lot outside the hotel where the Montana GOP state convention was being held.

It had a sign proclaiming that it was the "Obama Presidential Library," was reportedly painted to look like it had bullet-holes in it, had an Obama birth certificate inside with a scatological term of opprobrium written across it, and had the names of several nationally prominent Democratic women written on the wall inside, complete with a "for a good time call" message.

It is hard to imagine a uglier display of ad hominem boorishness. Our tender sensibilities are, in this vulgar world, frequently subjected to even greater depths of tastelessness just when we think we've seen it all. We have also been quite critical of hamfistedness whenever it rears its head at Montana GOP high command.

So we're about to pile on, right?

Wrong.

Why not? After all, the facts are clear, aren't they? The Missoulian had a headline saying "Montana GOP convention features bullet-riddled 'Obama outhouse'" -- and KFBB television in Great Falls led off with "Montana GOP Makes 'For a Good Time' Reference to First Lady."

Yes, but the problem is that those headlines were wrong, and they skewed every bit of coverage that followed. Those headlines seem to claim that the Montana GOP made this particular crude display -- but in point of fact "the Montana GOP" had nothing to do with it.

As a parenthetical note, way back in the mists of time, the title of this blog was inspired in part by a series of misleading headlines in the Billings Gazette that got our goat. The headline is often all that many readers see. They won't see the caveats inserted in the second half of the article, and many won't read the article at all. Misleading headlines (which, incidentally, are generally written by the editors, not the reporters writing the piece) can be just as damaging as errors in the text of the articles themselves. And that is true of the Missoulian piece. You have to get deep into the article to learn that the Montana GOP convention didn't "feature" the outhouse at all. Some person of interest left it in the hotel parking lot for folks to gawk at.

This particular piece of post-modern sculpture, we later learned, was created by a guy named Dave Hurtt, who had the deep insight to tell the NBC reporter interviewing him that "maybe my humor is a little bit crude for some people." Whoa -- say it isn't so! Andres Serrano, here we come...

In fact, from what we can gather from subsequent reporting, GOP officials immediately followed appropriate procedures by talking to the hotel staff about having it moved off the property. Which is about all that could be done. The outhouse was someone's private property sitting on someone else's private property, and GOP officials would have no right to physically dispose of it themselves.

What about expressions of outrage? Shouldn't that have been the immediate response of Montana GOP leaders? Indeed, some have found the lack of a hand-wringing response from GOP leaders to be a bit damning.

Let's think about that. So, the whole GOP convention should grind to a halt while a string of speakers condemn a crude act that went on in the hotel parking lot -- raising the question of "why are they making a big deal about this -- do they have something to hide?" GOP Chairman Will Deschamps probably did the best he could with a bad situation by calling it a "sideshow" and pointing out that the president should be treated with respect -- if you give something like this oxygen by paying serious attention to it, that's not good either. Do you run to reporters and condemn it immediately, thereby shining an even brighter spotlight on it -- when really what you are wanting is for the yahoo to take his blasted prank elsewhere and let you get back to the business of having your convention?

This is the sort of thing that is deeply embarrassing to serious Republicans with a sense of dignity and decorum -- which is the vast majority of us, in my experience. We're all for good humor around here -- even tasteless humor can sometimes be hilarious in just the right setting (cf. Saturday Night Live.) The outhouse stunt pulled by Mr. Hurtt piles offense upon offense -- the last and perhaps worst of which is that when it comes to this self-proclaimed "spoof," there just wasn't anything funny about it.

Mark Steyn on Governor Brian Schweitzer and other sophisticates

(A quick note on the photo: MH has long maintained that Jag is a good Republican dog doing his best with what has been served up. As always, we wish him good health and long life.)

So, not only does Montana’s Governor Brian Schweitzer have to suffer the ignominy of not being able to dodge questions even in friendly environs like David Letterman’s show regarding his “polygamy commune” jab at Mitt Romney, he now gets to play the leading man in a Mark Steyn column at National Review. Quite a week of auditioning for the governor's next gig -- is this really a good strategy for maneuvering Sen. Baucus into retirement to open up that seat?

We had the “dog wars,” where the fate of the Republic apparently depended on what Americans will find more viscerally repulsive -- a President who ate dog meat as a boy or a would-be President who transported his dog in a carrier on top of his car. Who “won” that debate? It’s hard to care, really, and the fact that the Obama camp picked the fight and the Romney camp finished it isn’t particularly meaningful, let alone gratifying, to anyone but the most hardened partisans of either.

Neatly pivoting from that bit of statesmanship, we have the President’s coterie dispatching one of his surrogates (any governor making public statements of this sort is a surrogate -- we may be simple folk around here, but we’ve figured that much out,) casually bringing up Mormon polygamy in the Romney family tree. Only the obdurate would refuse to acknowledge that if you scratch anyone of old-Mormon blood, polygamist lineage will be found somewhere underneath. It is as remarkable as observing that a resident of the District of Columbia votes Democratic.

What is quite remarkable, however, is that the Obama camp should choose this moment, when they are grumpily complaining that young Barack didn’t have any choice about eating the dog set before him, to use something over which Governor Romney had even less control (children have been known occasionally to refuse to clean off their plates, while LDS time-travel has yet to be invented) to prod at a culturally sensitive spot for Mormons, in what can only be an initial probe to see whether this dog can be hunted... to return twistedly to a previously mentioned theme.

We, being sensitive sorts around here, really do have some sympathy for the governor in this matter -- it was a dirty job that someone in the Obama campaign wanted done, and it is perhaps an indication of the esteem in which the governor is held by the administration that he was selected to do it. The conspiratorially-minded might see the hand of long-time Baucus aide and ally (and current Obama campaign manager) Jim Messina in this assignment -- but we digress.

Suffice it to say that surrogacy is a sometimes slimy business -- recall, if you will, Mitt Romney sending out surrogate U.S. Senators to blast Rick Santorum for voting for bills they themselves had voted for. The higher you are on the campaign’s totem pole, the more positive you get to be in your media appearances advocating for the candidate, and the lower you are, well, the more likely you are to get stuck with mud-throwing bits like the polygamy beat, figuring out how to blend in a poll that (newsflash!) says 86% of American women don’t approve of polygamy.

Steyn, characteristically, avoids all of this nice analysis and goes straight for the jugularic facts:

Just for the record, Romney’s father was not a polygamist; Romney’s grandfather was not a polygamist; his great-grandfather was a polygamist. Miles Park Romney died in 1904, so one can see why this would weigh heavy on 86 percent of female voters 108 years later.

Meanwhile, back in the female-friendly party, Obama’s father was a polygamist; his grandfather was a polygamist; and his great-grandfather was a polygamist who had one more wife (five in total) than Romney’s great-grandfather. It seems President Obama is the first male in his line not to be a polygamist. So, given the “gender gap,” maybe those 86 percent of American women are way cooler with polygamy than Governor Schweitzer thinks. Maybe these liberal chicks really dig it.

And again, Steyn being Steyn, he has some other uncomfortable observations that really are more directed at smugly multi-cultural liberals than they are at anyone’s political campaign:

...self-loathing cultural relativism is so deeply ingrained on the left that any revulsion to dog-eating is trumped by revulsion to criticizing any of the rich, vibrant cultural diversity out there in Indonesia or anywhere else.

Most polygamy in the developed world has nothing to do with Mormons: It’s widely practiced by Western Muslims, whose plural marriages are recognized de facto by French and Ontario welfare departments and de jure by Britain’s pensions department. But “edgy” “transgressive” leftie comics on sad, pandering standup shows will reserve their polygamy jokes for Mormons until the last stern-faced elder in Utah keels over at the age of 112.

In the United Kingdom, 57 percent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins, with attendant increases in their children’s congenital birth defects. But the comics save their inbreeding jokes for stump-toothed West Virginians enjoying a jigger of moonshine and a bunk-up with their sisters.

The editor of Washington’s leading gay newspaper was gay-bashed in Amsterdam, “the most tolerant city in Europe,” but by Muslims rather than the pasty rednecks who killed Matthew Shepard, so liberals don’t have a dog in this fight.

Being on the receiving end of selective ridicule should be familiar territory for us Republicans, who are, by definition, less sophisticated than our liberal betters, and hence deserving of satire. Columns like Steyn’s won’t change any behavior on the left when it comes to deciding who can be lampooned safely and who needs to be tiptoed around. In fact, if ever any proof was needed that supposedly irrational gun-clinging Americans really aren’t that terrifying to the washed, contrast the kid-glove treatment of Muslim sensibilities with the steady diet of redneck ridicule coming from the clever set.)

Still, columns like Steyn’s serve a certain purpose: they confirm that, no, we aren’t crazy -- there really is a double-standard when it comes to the left’s self-proclaimed pieties of treating other cultures with respect.

Sen. Tester and "All of the Above" -- the sincerest form of flattery?

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Sen. Jon Tester is making veritable goo-goo eyes at Congressman Rehberg, his opponent in this year's U.S. Senate slugfest. Forwarded to us in today’s email was a message from Montana's junior Democratic Senator entitled "An All-of-the-Above Energy Plan." It has apparently only taken Sen. Tester 4 years or so to realize that Denny Rehberg has had the pulse of the Montana electorate on this issue all along.

While we seem to recall hearing Mr. Rehberg use the phrase "all of the above" when discussing energy policy as early as 2007, the earliest reference readily available is from a Tulane University debate in July of 2008, where a report on the proceedings included this quotation:

“We depend on oil, gas, coal, wind, hydro and nuclear,” countered Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.). “Which of these is the answer to the energy challenge? All of the above and more. Leave no stone unturned.”

Granted, that was down in Louisiana, but were Sen. Tester’s staffers not checking out Montana newspapers in 2008? In case Sen. Tester missed Rehberg on “all of the above" in 2008, there is always 2009, or maybe 2010, or perhaps Congressman Rehberg's 2011 “all of the above” energy tour?

Of course, it isn't as simple as Sen. Tester directly copying Congressman Rehberg -- Tester is actually copying President Obama, who is copying Rehberg and his fellow House Republicans, who are not amused. While the rhetorical theft is indeed breath-taking in its audacity, it is politics as usual.

Republicans should be amused -- and flattered. President Obama is batting his eyelashes at their energy policy, at least when it comes to words. The GOP does, of course, have to get down to the tedious political work of making sure that the American people know that the President is following the Republican lead. Amusing as it is, one can’t let shameless rhetorical pilfering go unpunished in politics, especially when President Obama and the Democratic Party have done far more to hinder energy development than to promote it over the past 3 years.

But one hopes the GOP -- especially Denny Rehberg right here in Montana where so many of us have been hearing him talk about “all of the above” for years -- can do it with a good-natured sense of humor. With the laugh being at the President's expense... and of course Sen. Tester's.

OK, we give -- Democrats are smart and sophisticated, Republicans are stumblebums

It has been a fairly regular feature of Montana Headlines to engage in honest self-analysis of the right side of the political spectrum. After all, does it really hurt to admit that those on the left are smarter, better educated, more sophisticated, better read, more widely traveled, etc.? Why argue with the obvious, after all? Certainly here at Montana Headlines, with manure still clinging to our boots, we know our place.

A commenter in the last post compared Republicans to Nazis, but then really decided to get serious and go for the jugular, shaming us for our "reflexive" support for a "beauty queen" who is "dumb as can be." The Nazi thing hurts, but really, to that last part all we can say is an emphatic "ouch!"

It must be acknowledged that it has been some time since Montana Headlines has forthrightly confessed our intellectual inferiority, so it is time for one of our periodic exercises in verbal self-flagellation for our sins against reason.

After all, what are we thinking when we support someone who went to North Idaho College and then made the big move up to the (drum roll, please) University of Idaho (using scholarship money from the Miss Alaska pageant -- how embarrassing is that?) Especially when we could have as our next President someone who graduated from Columbia and from Harvard Law? With a choice like that, there really shouldn't be any point to even holding an election. Oh yeah, that white-haired guy went to the Naval Academy (a reactionary thing to do in and of itself,) but graduated near the bottom of his class, so he really doesn't help.

After all, as Bob Herbert decrees in the august pages of the New York Times, Palin is "dimwitted." Well, that settles it.

Actually, Herbert and the many others who heap scorn on Sarah Palin (and by association, all of us Neanderthals on the right) could just as well save their breath. After all, we already know that we aren't as bright, educated, and sophisticated as our peers on the left (or perhaps it is being presumptuous to call them our peers -- perhaps "counterparts" would be a more appropriately humble word.)

We just tend not to be paralyzed by insecurity, even though we probably should by all rights be crawling into corners in shame because of our paleolithic mindsets. We've seemed somehow to figure out that our lack of intellectual sophistication doesn't have to keep us from becoming productive citizens -- running businesses that keep people employed, becoming successful professionals, achieving financial security for our families, reaching positions of leadership in the military, or even (most shocking of all) winning elections and effectively governing. In this enterprise, we are of course aided by our counterparts, as Tony Blankley recently put it when quizzed by the 3 left-leaning members of a public radio talk-show panel:

One of the reasons the Republicans have done so well in national elections over the last 30 years is that we’ve been blessed with a liberal media and a liberal Democratic party that cannot help but sneer at about, you know, 65 percent of American culture, the people of small town America.

So we benefit from that, and even the stumblebums can figure out how to take advantage of snobs who are our opponents. And it’s sort of remarkable that they can’t restrain themselves even for a season.

We as stumblebums nevertheless keep getting re-elected...

One of his lefty opponents on the panel protested loudly when Blankley made the point that Sarah Palin's experience level was comparable to that of Barack Obama. The evidence that he cited for Obama's superiority? Why, Obama's impressive education and travel experience. Seriously. Well, that really settles it.

But when you look at it historically, he has a point. After all, if you took a poll of university professors, who would be consdidered to be smarter and more intellectually sophisticated, and which was was the hapless bumbler?

Ike or Adlai Stevenson?
Kennedy or Nixon?
Johnson or Goldwater?
Nixon or Humphrey?
Nixon or McGovern?
Carter or Ford?
Carter or Reagan?
Reagan or Mondale?
Bush I or Dukakis?
Clinton or Bush I?
Clinton or Dole?
Bush II or Gore?
Bush II or Kerry?
Obama or McCain?

Really isn't very fair, is it? I'd like to hear from anyone on the left who wouldn't choose the Democrat in every single one of those elections -- or at best declare certain matchups to be more or less a tie. (Diabolically shrewd doesn't count -- we're just talking intellectual depth that would make the faculty club swoon.) After all, if the Republican in question were all that bright, he wouldn't have been a Republican, correct? And to be fair, while we would probably choose or defend the Republican in each of those races, it wouldn't be because of a belief that he would conduct a better graduate seminar in the philosophy of conflict resolution.

And yet, the electoral history is, in spite of it all, surprisingly impressive for those inferior Republican candidates.

The link escapes us right now, but someone recently wrote that for the first time in his life, Sen. Obama is running against actual Republicans -- and he is shocked to be up against opponents who don't care what the editors of the New York Times or Washington Post think. He also has the simultaneous misfortune of encountering, also for the first time in his political life, an electorate where well over half of the voters will be people who likewise really don't care what smart set thinks.

That has to be a disconcerting experience for someone who believes that a 100% ADA rating is a path to post-partisan politics. Maybe on the south side of Chicago -- but in the rest of the country, not so much.

We hayseeds have an annoying habit of showing up to vote, and perhaps that is why a Democratic candidate has only reached the 50% mark in the popular vote exactly twice since WWII. Wouldn't it be something, in a year that was supposed to be a Democratic landslide of 1964 proportions, if the Republicans stumblebummed themselves to yet one more victory?

Another good commentary on Obama and the state of the race from Gerard Baker

From the guy who brought us one of the finest parodies of Obama-mania, again, courtesy of the London Times.

McCain's YouTube dominance

Montana Headlines was recently taken gently to task over at Billings Blog for having acquired a taste for some of the more recent McCain ads mocking Obama's greatness and celebrity.

While Montana Headlines very often disagrees with David Crisp's opinions, they are always worthy of consideration and response.

To be sure, these recent McCain ads aren't on the artistic level of a Fassbinder trilogy, but then, they aren't supposed to be. Nor are they intended to be wonkish pieces with voices droning on about serious policy proposals.

John McCain is running against an opponent who has been basking in an aura that a very astute Obama campaign has assiduously worked to create. A big part of this has been the way that this aura is passed virally to susceptible hosts, as it were.

The job of a good political campaign faced with battling an opponent who floats in the clouds is to turn on a very strong fan an point it at said nebulous construction. And that is what the recent spate of McCain ads were intended to do. Hillary Clinton tried to pierce the Obama bubble, but unsuccessfully -- mainly because it was impossible for the Clintons to deal with such an upstart with a sense of humor. And it does take a sense of humor to deflate hubris of the Obama magnitude.

These niche videos were never to be broadcast on television to a broad audience -- they were intended to go viral, and that is exactly what they have done.

Mr. Crisp says that the McCain videos aren't particularly funny and are an "acquired taste," but it is apparently a taste increasingly shared by many:

Writing in the Washington Times, Stephan Dinan notes that McCain has solidly taken the lead in the YouTube wars.

Mr. McCain has pumped out a series of brutal yet entertaining attack ads and Web videos mocking the press and Mr. Obama, and the combination of wit and insult has pushed his YouTube channel to the sixth most watched on the site this week.

Mr. McCain has beat Mr. Obama's channel for seven straight days and 11 of the past 14 days, in a signal he intends to compete for the YouTube vote.

That is a giant reversal. Mr. Obama had been quadrupling Mr. McCain's YouTube views and beat him every day since February, according to TubeMogul, which tracks online video viewing.

Do we political types want to sit around and debate the finer points of policy? Absolutely. Has McCain sunk to a low level, as Mr. Crisp contends? Perhaps. But it is in the soothingly warm sunken jacuzzi of nebulous feel-good imagery that Sen. Obama has been basking during this campaign -- casually putting away a field of quite distinguished Democratic contenders, most of whom were superior to him in political and governmental experience.

Since then, he has been just patiently waiting, it seems, for the boring routine of having the people vote to annoint him President.

Willie Sutton famously answered the question of why he robbed banks with a simple answer: "because that's where the money is."

And in any war -- real or metaphorical -- at some point you have to chase down the opposition where it is living and destroy it. That's all that McCain is doing with ads like "Celebrity" and "The One."

The world of the internet video is not the only front in this campaign, but it is an essential one in 2008, one where until now Sen. Obama has had the field largely to himself, reaping huge benefits in the process. As a result, we now face the improbable situation of putting a man who only 4 years ago was an undistinguished Illinois state senator (and who has done little during 4 years in the U.S. Senate but run for President) into the most powerful elected position on the planet.

Oh yes, not only is it allowable for John McCain to enter this particular fray -- it is his duty.

"Net-roots Ninnies" -- and a note on Sirota

Note the quotation marks -- Montana Headlines isn't given to calling names, but we do enjoy quoting the title of the piece in today's New York Post by one of our very favorite liberals -- the very smart, articulate, and unflappable Kirsten Powers. She is a Fox News regular, and is one of the few people who can get Sean Hannity to be polite for a few minutes. And when she is subbing on the best conservative talk-radio program around, "Brian and the Judge," it is always a treat.

So why does Kirsten call the netroots folks "ninnies?" In short because in their obsession about Obama's recent flip-flop on FISA and other perceived transgressions against progressive purity, they are losing sight of the fact that they are, in the end, not terribly relevant to the Democratic Party's electoral prospects:

Newsflash to the netroots and the media (which seems perpetually confused on this issue): The netroots are not the base of the Democratic Party.

Overwhelmingly white, male and highly educated, they're a loud anomaly in a party that's wholly dependent on the votes of African Americans, women and working-class whites.

Ouch. Ms. Powers is of course right that this demographic doesn't provide a lot of the votes to the Democratic machine, but on the other hand highly educated white males have always played a disproportionate role in Democratic politics -- even before the netroots came along. It's all part of that egghead thing, or what John Kenneth Galbraith called the members of his "New Class" that were needed to run things in the modern world.

If you have a welfare state with a highly centralized government, there will always be a place for technocrats to make decisions, tell people what to do, and generally run things. Cf. Democratic voting patterns in university towns, in capital cities, and on the staffs of most news organizations.

But leave it to Kirsten Powers to be unimpressed with the idealistic take-no-prisoners attitudes she sees these days from the left-roots:

Grow up, net rooters: You're going to see more Obama compromises with reality, more shifts to address what the real Democratic base cares about. Don't even be surprised if he comes out with a plan to allow domestic oil drilling.

Drill, drill, drill? We can only hope.

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Speaking of loud anomalies, David Sirota springs to mind. A one-time quasi-Montanan now back in the big city, he is a sound and fury sort, proffering what are generally conventional leftward solutions disguised as pseudo-populism. So it was surprising to find that MH and Sirota were in agreement with something the latter wrote in today's column that appeared in the Billings Gazette.

Most of the piece is of the unremarkable "Accidental Tourist" genre, bemoaning the homogenization of American society. (It is of course all the fault of corporations and franchizing -- making one wonder if Sirota is advocating legislation to ban Applebee's.)

But he does take note of something very real that Montana Headlines, with its emphasis on state and local politics, can't help but decry:

...in every corner of the country, the discussion is almost completely national focused. Who will be the vice-presidential nominees? What will the latest scandal mean for the presidential candidates? How can Democrats or Republicans win the congressional election?

Now, even decades ago, in the politically precocious early days of a young Montana Headlines, presidential politics were all the rage with the general public, while local and state races were dutifully ignored just as today.

What is perhaps different is that the explosion of media sources -- traditional and alternative -- have dramatically increased the level of detail that a political junkie has about national races and issues that really didn't perhaps need a lot more attention. Which is, of course, the great thing about the blogosphere part of the alternative media -- left and right alike. Because it is decentralized, it allows both "net-roots ninnies" and right-wing ranters like MH the opportunity to draw attention to state and local races and issues that in the past would have been ignored.

It is unfortunately true, of course, that all too many posts in regional blogs like those found in the Montana blogosphere simply rehash talking points about national politics that have already been endlessly regurgitated.

But the possibilities are there for us to make Mr. Sirota happy by dissecting state and local politics -- so shouldn't we try?

____________

Update: Jay at LITW believes the above post to be "mean-spirited" -- the readers can decide for themselves. His musings are worth perusing, but there is one point in particular that bears comment.

He claims that concerns about FISA on the left are a reflection of civil liberties concerns, while saying that those on the right who supported that bill were primarily motivated because it was "our team's" idea.

The bottom line is that the final sticking point on the bill didn't involve high-flown ideas about civil liberties. It was retroactive telecom immunity from being sued at the plaintiff's bar. Supporting such immunity should be pretty much a matter of common sense -- after all, if someone was wronged by government intrusion into their privacy, violating principles of unreasonable search and seizure, who did the wrong? Pretty clearly it would seem to be the government that demanded the cooperation of the telecom companies, and not the companies who cooperated with what the government asked for, citing a time of national threat.

If bounds were overstepped, or if threats were over-stated, the fault lies with the government, and it is the government that should be punished within the constraints of the legal system. And it is from the government that anyone who has suffered loss should seek restitution.

There was one group, and one group only, who wanted the immunity stricken from that bill, and that is trial lawyers who hoped to make easy and tidy windfall profits from cases against telecom companies who would hopefully fold quickly in order to have it over with.

Not only would the wrong party be unfairly footing the bill, but we could be assured that they would have reason not to cooperate with, say, a President Obama faced with a future national emergency, demanding their help in gathering information about potential threats to the American populace.

It was perhaps wrong to characterize progressive furor over FISA as being a matter of "progressive purity," at least in an ideological sense. It was, at root, much more venal than that. It is well known that trial lawyers provide the backbone of funding for progressive politics, so the temporary intransigence of the left on retroactive immunity for telecom companies can fairly be seen as an act of simple financial self-interest.