View 646 October 25 - 31, 2010 (original) (raw)
Monday, October 25, 2010
Maximum Effort
Election Day is one week from tomorrow, but with the modern trend in absentee ballots cast early it may be decided by then. This election will be decided in large part by the ground game. Who can get voters to the polls. You may be certain that in nearly every election, state or local, there will be enough people to have changed the outcome who did not vote, but would have voted for the losing candidate had they bothered. That has been true in most US elections, and it will be true in this one.
Which means, simply, that this week -- all of it, not just next Tuesday -- is a time for maximum effort for the Tea Party. It is time to harvest the votes. It is time to find the local tea party people and volunteer. If every tea party enthusiast got just one more person who shares their sentiments to the polls, the result will be a landslide. One more vote per precinct will be important. This is a maximum effort election, and this week is maximum effort week.
What the tea party needs is a landslide, not just a win: the purpose is to put some iron in the spine of wavering Republicans, who will, shortly after the election, be subject to every seductive move in the liberal arsenal, including offers from the New York Times to praise them for their "growth" when they succumb to the blandishments of the "cross the aisle" arguments. If the tea party wins its close elections, the message will be clear; and it needs to be clear.
Any close election will be contested, with recount after recount until the result is what the ruling class wants. The only cure for this is a landslide.
Maximum effort.
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The Bell Curve resurfaces
Murray: 'We are watching the maturation of the cognitive stratification that Richard J. Herrnstein and I described in "The Bell Curve" back in 1994.'
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/22/AR2010102202873_pf.html>
---- Roland Dobbins
One important thing Murray does not address in this important observation is just what is taught at Harvard and the other elite schools. His most important point is that the new elites are isolated from the rest of the nation.
Far from spending their college years in a meritocratic melting pot, the New Elite spend school with people who are mostly just like them -- which might not be so bad, except that so many of them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of privilege. Few of them grew up in the small cities, towns or rural areas where more than a third of all Americans still live.
When they leave college, the New Elite remain in the bubble. Harvard seniors surveyed in 2007 were headed toward a small number of elite graduate schools (Harvard and Cambridge in the lead) and a small number of elite professional fields (finance and consulting were tied for top choice). Jobs in businesses that provide bread-and-butter goods and services to individual Americans, which make up the overwhelming majority of entry-level openings for aspiring managers, attracted just 1.7 percent of the Harvard students who went to work right after graduation.
The bubble that encases the New Elite crosses ideological lines and includes far too many of the people who have influence, great or small, on the course of the nation. They are not defective in their patriotism or lacking a generous spirit toward their fellow citizens. They are merely isolated and ignorant. The members of the New Elite may love America, but, increasingly, they are not of it.
This isolation is quite real. I grew up in the Old South, where there was legal segregation. I was convinced that the law ought to be colorblind and there should be racial equality, but after I got to high school I never met any blacks -- Negroes, as we were taught to say in my social class; others used different terminology. By the time I got to high school we had moved from the Capleville farm where I went to school with the children of farmers and small shop keepers and mechanics, and my best friend's father was a Watkins route door to door salesman; but when we moved back to Memphis and I went to high school, we were in a University neighborhood and Christian Brothers was the "smart kids" high school, and I didn't know many people who weren't college bound.
All that changed when I joined the Army, of course. We had conscription in those days, and Basic Training was not segregated. I met all kinds of people, from many parts of the country. The experience was enlightening. I think that doesn't happen any more.
Self government requires people willing to govern themselves.
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The Henty Books
A reader with more patience than I have listened to all of the ditzy MSNBC piece that concludes that Art Robinson isn't fit to be in Congress because he has his kids read the Henty books, and that's just unacceptable. Apparently someone at MSNBC found a Wikipedia article about Henty that includes elided text, including this about Negroes:
"They are just like children," Mr. Goodenough said. "They are always either laughing or quarreling. They are good natured and passionate, indolent, but will work hard for a time; clever up to a certain point, densely stupid beyond. The intelligence of an average negro is about equal to that of a European child of ten years old. A few, a very few, go beyond this, but these are exceptions, just as Shakespeare was an exception to the ordinary intellect of an Englishman. They are fluent talkers, but their ideas are borrowed. They are absolutely without originality, absolutely without inventive power. Living among white men, their imitative faculties enable them to attain a considerable amount of civilization. Left alone to their own devices they retrograde into a state little above their native savagery." -- from By Sheer Pluck, Chapter VIII. To the Dark Continent
Note this is said by a character in a novel.
An irate fan once wrote a long tirade about the beliefs and actions of one of Larry Niven's characters. Larry, who has more patience than I do, wrote back:
"Dear Sir,
"We in the writing profession have a technical term for those who attribute a character's opinions to the author himself: we call them idiots.
"None of my best friends are idiots.
Merry Christmas."
Mark Twain might have written the same letter. As might Charles Dickens. If we restrict our reading to books in which all the characters are modern enlightened liberals -- which I suspect they do at our elite schools -- we will throw out all the great literature and all of our past.
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Now the pundits are joyfully (with pretended sadness) reporting that Meg Whitman's son was accused of date rape at Princeton, but acquitted of the charges. One of the gleeful pretenders keeps saying things like this happened but it ought not matter, but it will.
When I was manager of Mayor Yorty's campaign for reelection, the daughter of his opponent was arrested for shoplifting. That was immediately reported to me by the police, and I told the Mayor. His instant response was "We're not going to use that!" To which I agreed, and we never mentioned it unless asked by reporters, in which case our comment was to express sympathy for the Councilman and point out the irrelevance of the question. Of course LA Time columnists couldn't leave it alone -- they tried to somehow make it the Mayor's fault that he was even told of the event! I fear my opinion of the integrity of reporters never recovered from this. Anything for a story! Glee!
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Anyone in California who is aware of much would know to vote yes on proposition 23, which suspends the operation of a crazy "ultimate" carbon law in California. Apparently there is multiple advice on this in various places. Meanwhile, although the Democrats took control of Congress in 2006, and Obama got the White House and supermajorities in both houses in 2008, it's still the Republicans' fault that he hasn't got his most left-wing proposals like amnesty for undocumented Democrats. The Republican remnant wouldn't support his agenda.
Now he is angling to get the Republican leadership to work with him. Fortunately not many of them have so lost their minds as to believe that they will be inducted into the ruling class if only they cooperate with Obama.
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