So who won the Vietnam war really?

William Thompson, who teaches public administration at UNLV. makes a provocative and fairly persuasive case that insofar as "we wanted to demonstrate the viability of free enterprise capitalism in competition with state ownership of commerce," the US. -- or at least free enterprise -- won the war. He recently visited his son, who is a teacher at the South Saigon International School and noticed almost nothing but vibrant capitalism going on. After the communist takeover of the South, which did lead to great loss of life and liberty -- and to the enrichment of the cultural landscape of Orange County as an unintended byproduct -- and a fair amount of warring, communist ideology did what people predicted. It led to economic stagnation, shortages and spreading poverty. So the leaders, while still calling themselves communist, started to permit more freedoms, to recognize private property. Now they havebustling markets, capital investment, manuifacturing and export development.

This squares with what my former colleagues Steve Greenhut and Mike Shelton found when they visited Vietnam five years ago or so. The Communist Party still rules, but the ideology is generally capitalist. So who won the war? Or perhaps more pertinent, wouldn't this development have come on more quickly if we hadn't prolonged the war or maybe not fought it at all?

Some virus laid me low

I hardly ever get sick, so when I felt a little under the weather Thursday I went to work anyway. I felt pretty good Friday and Saturday, but on Sunday some kind of virus hit me like a tsunami. I didn't feel like getting up off whatever bed or couch I was lying on, but I was a bit agitated so I kept moving from one place to the other. I just didn't feel like doing a thing, had no energy. Chills and fever. I felt the same way on Monday and did stay home from work,as I'm doing today. I feel considerably better today, but far from 100%. This is all unfamiliar territory for me, but I guess some nasty bug found a way past my immune system. I hate it.

Drilling announcement mostly symbolic

I'll give Barack Obama a certain amount of credit for announcing that certain tracts on the Outer Continental Shelf could be opened to oil and gas seismic exploration and drilling. Although there's little chance any drilling will actually occur there anytime soon, he certainly has taken heat fro0m much of his base, and he had to know it was coming. It took me a while today, with help from Jerry Taylor of Cato, just what the legal status of his announcement is. As I understand it, it's an amendment to the moratorium he reinstated when he became president (see here for more of the history). It's more politically than geophysically calculated (of course), slated off the shores of states where it's likely to be popular and not off California, where it's not so likely. Jerry Taylor thinks it's his way of saying "I care" as gasoline prices rise this summer. He's probably right.

Don't Ask complications

This is too rich. As the WaPo story relates, DefSec Gates wants a survey of serving military to assess attitudes about changing the ridiculous Don't Ask Don't Tell policy regarding gays in the military, and he wants to be sure serving gays are part of it. But if a uniformed officer is told by a gay or lesbian about sexual orientation, he or she just might be required, under current policy, to initiate an investigation that could lead to dismissal. (A gay organization estimates about 2% of the military, or 66,000 people are gay or lesbian.)

This is all pretty silly. The po0licy is harmful, the military will adjust to a new policy and all this study-it-to-death gradualism is unnecessary. They ought to just change the policy, the more quickly the better.

Is Obama just obtuse about Afghanistan?

Most of the other hypotheses don't seem to make much sense, so I'm starting to approach the conclusion that Barack Obama is just not that smart. It should hardly come as a surprise. He undoubtedly has an IQ slightly higher than normal or he wouldn't have made it through college and law school (though it might be interesting to see his transcripts, which to my knowledge he hasn't released yet). But in retrospect what he seems to have displayed throughout his career is more cunning or what some would call sagacity rather than real learning. He has obviously been extremely ambitious for a long time; perhaps he has had the presidency in mind since early college days. So he has been alert to the main chance, aware of the kinds of alliances he ought to make, aware that a sensitive autobiography would make him look special in the eyes of the easily duped intellectuals of our fading empire, aware of how to present himself as a multicultural black man. But his reputation for being really smart is belied by so many of his actions.

What has me going this time is not health care, though there's plenty of evidence there, but Afghanistan. His visit there earlier this week cemented this war as "his" war. But the war makes so little sense that you would think almost any reasonably intelligent person -- I suspect he didn't take any international relations classes in college and he certainly has not shown any special interest in that field heretofore, so maybe that's a mitigating factor -- would have been able to figure it out. The official line about keeping al-Qaida out of Afghanistan is obviously absurd -- al-Qaida hasn't been there since 2002. He has to know the Taliban is an indigenous Afghan outfit without international ambitions, so while a takeover would be sad for many Afghans it would have few if any international repercussions. He is obviously aware enough that Karzai is a corrupt tool and uncooperative to boot that it annoys him. So why does he insist on maintaining a U.S. presence in the Graveyard of Empire? Does he really want to preside over the fall of the American Empire? Is he so deluded as to think we can bring a semblance of democracy, stability or semi-decent governance in the next 15 months or so? Is he just cunning enough to realize that historians tend to rank American presidents who have presided over wars as "greater" than those who presided over peaceful periods?

Maybe he's just not that smart.

Sean Penn and Hugo Chavez

One might have thought that with Mao and Che dead and Castro an aging invalid, communist-sympathetic Americans would have no places to which to make pilgrimages in search of budding utopias to admire. But there are still a few who have managed to try to construct a hero out of the thoroughly thuggish Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. most notably Sean Penn, who really is fine actor. Reason ran a rather good piece on the phenomenon by a native Venezuelan that tries to provide some insight, the essence being that voyagers in search of utopia have long been willing to overlook shortcomings and brutality (perhaps even to admire the brutality just a mite?) if they have been able to convince themselves that a utopian foundation is being built. The human capacity for self-delusion is pretty extensive.

Or maybe, as I suggested elsewhere, he's just a fatuous fool.

A constitutional census

I'm not sure if anyone else would be interested but here's how I handled the census this year -- pretty much the same as I have every decade since 1970. I gave the number of people living in our house (2) and scrawled a big N/A after every other question. My reasoning is this. The Constitution does call for a census for the purpose of reapportioning legislatures. All they need for that is raw numbers. Age and gender don't matter, nor does whether one is registered to vote, because districts are apportioned based on sheer population, not the number of registered voters. On the questions regarding race and ethnicity I not only scrawled N/A but "very offensive."

The only time I ever heard from anybody regarding my choices as to what information to reveal was in 1970, when somebody called from the Census Bureau to try to talk me into disclosing more. I was watching a Lakers game and they were not winning, so I was in no mood to be messed with. I went through my argument that a constitutional census would ask only for sheer numbers, and that there was no constitutional warrant for them to know more -- I'm pretty sure I also said something about being offended at the census being used as tax-funded marketing research for corporations, which should spend their own money to acquire such data. When the poor girl asked whether it wouldn't be relevantwhether I was registered to vote or not I came back with the sheer numbers argument. Finally she gave up and that was the last I ever heard from the census people.

Reconnecting with, er, mature libertarians

I put up this post on the Register's Orange Punch blog the other day. Not much to add to it except that I was immensely gratified at how many people expressed an interest, by showing up, in what I had to say. I've had an e-mail to the effect that the talk was recorded, but it didn't have an attachment. I'll try to obtain it and post it both here and at the Register.

It’s been a long time since Orange County has had a libertarian supper club, but if I do say so the one that started last night with Murray Rothbard and Sam Konkin as inspirations and me as speaker is off to a pretty good start. I saw the e-mails to the Karl Hess Club list from Mike Everling on Thursday noting that there were only 22 reservations and urging those who wanted to attend to make themselves known. By last night there were at least 70-75 people in attendance. I saw people from LA and San Diego whom I haven’t seen in years. Like me, come of our local libertarians are getting a little long in the tooth, but the level of enthusiasm was high.

Of course it’s not a hard sell to convince libertarians that war is not healthy for liberty and other living things. I used Robert Higgs’ book “Crisis and Leviathan” to explain how wars and depressions have led to dramatic growth in government and restrictions on civil and economic liberties through the 20th century, with a “ratchet effect:” at the end of a war or crisis government gives back some of the powers it seized on a supposed emergency basis, but not all. At the end of each war government is a little bigger and a little more intrusive, and people have become accustomed to it, so there’s an ideological shift. I also referenced the late Brown political scientist Eric Nordlinger’s 1996 book, “Isolationism Reconfigured,” which argues that the U.S. would do well to declare North America the U.S. sphere of defense and let the rest of the world take care of itself.

Thanks to Mike Everling and Howard Hinman, who have been willing to do the organizational work to get this supper club — which will meet only when there’s a fifth Monday in a month for now and be focused on geostrategy and economics — going. And thanks to all those who came up and said they get something of value from the Register editorial pages. One doesn’t always hear that — indeed, complaints tend to predominate — and I appreciated it.

Sorry for the silence

Jen and I spent most of the last week babysitting 18-month-old triplets while their mama was in the hospital having another -- in Las Vegas. Mostly had no time or energy for going on the computer. And paid little or not attention - except one day when I had to, for the Register -- to news. Then the computer wouldn't let me log in, so . . .

Video on Meg Whitman

Brian Calle, a young fellow the Register hired only a few months ago to write editorials when Steve Greenhut left, is proving quite valuable. He is much more comfortable with electronic toys than some of us dinosaurs, and I think his value is shown by the series of videos he took of California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. I don't think there's a better way to get at least a sense of what kind candidate she is at this stage of what has proven to be a successful campaign -- the Field Poll shows her leading Steve Poizner 68-14 -- than these videos. Enjoy.

States' rights now appeal across the spectrum

When I was becoming vaguely politically aware, the only people who asserted states' rights were southern states seeking to resist federal integration mandates. That may have discredited the concept for a generation or more. Now, as the NYT has noted, it seems to be having something of a vogue, and across the political spectrum. Wyoming and South Dakota are seerting it over gun rights while Utah and Oklahoma are over health care. Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconmsin are considering bills to assert gubernatorial control over National Guard members called up to serve in foreign wars.

In some ways California started it with medical marijuana in 1996. The fact that states' rights are being invoked on behalf of causes that could be called "liberal" to me validates the founders' wisdom in creating dual sovereignty guaranteeing a certain tension between state governments and the national government. In some ways it is downright annoying having several levels of government oppressing us and taking our money, but every so often the system works the way it's supposed to and different levels of government check one another's power.

So who needs to vote anyway?

It was another interesting day at work today. RealClearPolitics again picked up one of my blog items, this time one done the day before about the simply marvelous idea of writing a "deem and pass" rule to allow the House to take up amendments to the Senate health bill and deem the underlying bill passed without actually having to take a vote on it. Nancy Pelosi was refreshingly frank about why the idea appealed to her -- it would relieve some House members of actually having to vote on a bill that remains unpopular amongst the public at large (though I have to admit the margins are narrowing) and particularly unpopular in the swing districts occupied by moderate to conservative Democrats who are deeply conflicted about ObamaCare.

Anyway, by mid-afternoon the post had gotten around 7,000 hits. By way of comparison, in a moderate week the entire Orange Punch blog usually gets 7,000-8,000 hits. It lkooks as if the ket to success is getting other sites to link to our material -- but we knew that anyway; the problem has been figuring out how to get them to do so. It turns out that we did little or nothing to urge RealClear to link to us, we just gradually started to appear on their radar. Maybe it's good (or provocative) writing? Maybe it's provocative headlines. Thirty years in this business and I'm still often baffled by what appeals to people or pisses them off.

Debunking the obesity epidemic nonsense

I've never seen a full-figure picture of Paul Campos, so I don't know if he's a chubbo. The U. of Colo. law professor used to write columns that the Register sometimes ran and his headshot didn't make him look especially fat. Whether he is or not, he is to be commended for taking on the obesity fixation that our noble bien pensants are so taken by. He wrote a book, "The Obesity Myth," that makes a pretty strong case that when studies correct for factors such as physical activity weight alone has no particular meaningful correlation with health and morbidity. Both skinny and fat people who d0n't eat well or exercise are going to have a higher rate of troublesome diseases.

So even though it's old news by now, I wanted to commend him for taking on Michelle Obama's exercise in nannyism, her supposedly noble campaign against childhood obesity. When I was in school we used to call it "picking on the fat kids," and nobody pretended it was anything but mean-spirited. (If one wanted to be mean-spirited in return, one might note that Michelle, with her large behind about which she probably can't do anything, might not be the best spokesperson for svelteness.) Campos notes that the marker for obesity was picked arbitrarily, with no attempt even to justify it on the basis of demonstrated effects on health. He also notes that the trends have been that "by every objective measure, including life expectancy and rates of chronic disease and disability, like American adults, American children are bigger and healthier than they were a generation ago."The notion that today's children will have shorter life spans than their parents is sheer speculation, utterly innocent of any supporting demographic or epidemiological evidence.

In short, Michelle Obama is nannying on a totally phony cause. Perhaps you could say it is at least harmless, but there's evidence that social stigmatization is harmful to children and teenagers and there's a real danger that the obsessiveness with food she wants to urge on parents could lead to eating disorders.

Desperation in DC

You know Nancy Pelosi doesn't yet have the votes when she's willing to say that perhaps her favored plan for getting the Senate health care plan to a House vote is -- not to make timid House Dems vote on it directly at all. The idea, of course, is "deem and pass," whereby the Rules Committee writes a rule, called a self-executing rule, for a vote on the amendments to the Senate bill the House wants that declares that by voting on the amendments to be pushed through polarizing "reconciliation" -- funny how political terms so often sound like the opposite of their common-sense meaning -- the underlying bill will be deemed to have been passed. I think it's too clever by half and that using it will discredit the House even more than it's already been discredited and cause millions of Americans to see ObamaCare, if it passes, as fundamentally illegitimate. But I'm not counting votes there and Nancy is prettyb good at it.

Space's future: Cameron gets it

For what it's worth -- perhaps not much, given that I didn't see "The Hurt Locker" -- I thought James Cameron and "Avatar" were a little short-changed at the Oscars this year. "Avatar" might not have had a great story, but the world created through special effects, in 3-D, was something of a revelation. We had an interesting debate in the pages of the Register last year, with Brian Calle of our staff dinging "Avatar" for being a manipulative piece of green leftism and Dave Boaz of Cato saying that on the contrary it was a tale of people, who turned out to be the good guys despite being blue, protecting their land and property from alien invaders. Both had good points but I think Dave had the better of it.

That's prelude to being pleased that in this op-ed for the WaPo a while ago -- I've had it on my stack of stuff for a while -- director James Cameron appears to get it about the intelligent way to go forward with space exploration. He notes that NASA's budget reflects the policy going forward -- knowing the shuttle will be retired soon they're ready to let private companies provide transportation to low earth orbit -- though they might have to rely on the Russians in the interim, while NASA will focus on deep space exploration, both robotic and human. This has made sense for a long time, but it wasn't inevitable that NASA would come to this conclusion.

When I went to Mojave to see SpaceShipOne get into space for the second time and win the X-Prize a few years ago, I was a little surprised to see a high-ranking NASA official take part in the subsequent press conference and sound supportive. I had been to a conference a few years before that at which Burt Rutan, the visionary genius behind SpaceShipOne, was extremely dismissive of NASA, and with good reason. The Space Shuttle was a wasteful detour and he was on the verge of proving that a private company could do low Earth orbit space trips better. But apparently NASA has seen the light, and it's encouraging that James Cameron gets it too.

Of course Heinlein in one of his novels had private companies do almost all the space exploration, and it's theoretically possible for a private companies, or competing private companies, to do deep space exploration, probably better than NASA. But for better or worse NASA is probably not going away, so letting it handle deep space and let the private sector commercialize what has become almost routine may be the least-worst of the readily available policies.

Watershed week for the U.S.

It's hardly news that this is the week Obama and congressional Democrats (well, some of them; the only bipartisan coalition in Washington is in opposition to ObamaCare considering that 39 House Democrats voted against it in the first go-round) will do everything they can, including buying votes with your money, to get something that can be called health-care reform passed. In some ways, however, it's even bigger than that. As this Register editorial from Sunday explains (Pardon me, that's another and I don't know how to de-link; here's the correct link.) It could mark a virtually irreversible step toward a European-style welfare state. It's hardly a secret that that's what a significant number of American "progressives" really want. The traditional Constitution-fearing limited government that kept the U.S. in good stead is simply unbearable to them. It seriously frustrates the impulse to have government do more -- much more -- for us -- and to us.

If health care passes, it will be almost impossible to eliminate even if the Reps take back Congress in November. Obama would veto a repeal of course, and before long, like most entitlements it would be part of the landscape, fiercely defended by recipients even as they complained that it didn't deliver enough or deliver it well. Mark Steyn explains much of the process in this recent column.

Buying health-care votes with your money.

Like the health-care imbroglio that has the White House and congressional Democrats srambling to offer favors and fortune to wavering Democrats? Perhaps you should learn to enjoy it. After all, you're paying for it -- in so many ways.

As this Register editorial explains, the big-ticket bribes in the Senate bill -- the Cornhucker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase and the like -- which have raised so much negative controversy, are supposed to be off the table when the House and Senate get together to pass a "reconciliation" bill when -- if -- the basic bill passes the House. But White House counselor David Axelrod said Sunday that similar stuff might become part of the final package if it isn't targeted at a single state but offers similar taxpayer-paid to two states. Only two states? Judging by what Axelrod said, it could be that. The administration considers your tax dollars an open wallet.

It would be helpful to watch what happens over the longer term, when and if a bunch of Democrats lose their seats. Will those who stuck with the president get sweetheart jobs in the administration or from think tanks or colleges that are aligned with the president. Keep an eye out. I will be.

Dems in swing districts in serious trouble

Nationwide opposition to ObamaCare has been pretty steady at somewhere between 51 to 59% opposed since last July or August, though as Pollster.com shows, the gap has narrowed somewhat in recent weeks as Obama and the rest have put on their full court press. However, as I suggested in my Orange Punch post that RealClearPolitics picked up, the moderate to conservative Democrats in swing districts, especially those that went for Bush or Obama even as they elected pro-gun and/or anti-abortion Democrats, would likely face a different calculus than Dems from safe Democratic districts. For them, the argument that "if we don't get this passed people will see Democrats as failures and punish in November" resonates less than "you may be in trouble either way but if you vote for ObamaCare you're toast."

It turns out that Independent Women's Voice commissioned a poll in 35 swing districts and found even more dramatic results. 60% of those voters want Congress to start over from Square One on health care, 75% oppose an individual mandate, and strong majorities think it will make their immediate families, the economy, and the quality of health care worse. A daunting situation for congresscritters from those districts.

Riding health deform opposition to serious hits

I had another nice experience today with RealClearPolitics picking up one of my blog items from the Register's Orange Punch, vastly increasing the number of hits (more than 10,000) and comments far beyond what is normal for a blog post that is read mostly by the usual gang of suspects that logs on to the Register site most days. Not surprisingly, it was on health care, the hot topic for this week as the effort to ram ObamaCare through comes to a head. It expressed some skepticism about the likelihood of thousands and thousands of Obamaniacs following his call to knock on doors, make phone calls and the like in support of this mess of misbegotten and misnamed reform, as Jonathan Cohn hopes.

(In case anyone has forgotten, I have consolidated my thoughts on genuine reform several times.)

Overreacting to an overreaction

So the Obama administration has decided to make a big deal out of the announcement, during VP Joe Biden's visit, that Israel is planning 1,600 new housing unites for Israelis on the West Bank -- close to Jerusalem and as I understand it an addition or expansion of an existing settlement, not a new settlement. There's little doubt that someone in the Israeli government -- it looks as if Netanyahu is still denying personal advance knowledge of the announcement -- did intend to embarrass Biden. For various reasons the Israeli government is not especially pleased with Obama or his administration. Israel is mainly concerned about Iran right now, and in no mood -- and probably no position -- to negotiate with the Palestinians, whether through an intermediary or toherwise. When Obama called on Israel a year or so ago to halt West Bank settlements it was a blunder -- a president sholdn't make such a request unless he has already negotiated acceptance behind the scenes. Oops. Israel wasn't ready for that, though it softened its utter resistance after a while. Somebody was ready to put some egg on the American face.

The mistake is compounded by making such a big deal of it. The U.S. is in the position it has been in through much of the last 30 years or so -- wanting Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and a two-state settlement more than either of the parties involved want it right now. If Obama were smarter he would say nothing and start cutting off aid -- informing the Israelis but not making a public announcement. But after lookiing "soft" after letting the firm demand to stop settlements wither and die, he has to look "tough" now. Or so the constricted logic of too much of what passes for diplomacy goes.