Captain Yips Secret Journal

Ready for Reform?

A few days ago, Chris mentioned the possibility that the Democrats would lose Barack Obama's former Senate seat.  I'm certainly a long term, and somewhat nauseated, observer of Illinois politics.  I don't know that my thoughts are worth a hill of beans.  That won't stop me.

• History.  The critical event in recent Illinois politics was the 1972 election for governor.  The Heffalump incumbent, Richard Ogilvie, was probably the best governor Illinois has had in the post war era, if by "best" we mean, "someone who actually tried to deal with problems."  His term saw a state constitutional convention, the establishment of the Regional Transportation Authority to fund and manage public transit in the Chicago area, and (ominous music) the imposition of a state income tax.  Oopsie.  The state income tax was, shall we say, unpopular.  Ogilvie was defeated for reelection by Dan Walker, an incredible buffoon who indulged himself in the fantasy that a Democratic governor could govern without reference and deference to the Mayor of Chicago, Richard I.  What Illinois politicians learned from Ogilvie's defeat was Do As Little As Possible.  The effect on Illinois has been calamitous.  Our politicians refuse to restrain spending, and refuse to take any steps to revenue reform or tax increase.  Sound familiar?  Yes, the country elected a president from this tradition.  You can't do both, but magical accounting puts off the day of reckoning. 
• Mark Kirk is an electable Republican in the current climate.  He's not an ideological purist, but he's sound on defense policy.  He's been an officer in the Navy Reserve, and is pretty reasonable about fiscal matters.  Perfect according to some strict notion of conservative purity?  No.  Electable?  Yes.  The Donks haven't come up with a compelling candidate yet, and I don't see any on the horizon.  I suspect that they would rather have a good shot at Kirk's seat in the House.
• The 2004 senatorial election here was the weirdest election I have ever witnessed.  The public destruction of Obama's opponents, first in the Donk primary election, then in the general election, was astonishing to behold.  Jack Ryan, the Heffalump candidate, was never popular within the party, and as the faux-scandal about his divorce grew, it became obvious to him that the other Heffalumps would give him no support.  Massive amounts of blame-the-victim were applied, and he understandably withdrew.  No electable Heffalump was about to step up, given the destructions of Ryan and of Blair Hull, Obama's chief opponent in the Donk primary. 
• There's some degree of sense that we are poorly governed.  Duh.  Whether that sense can be galvanized into a throw-out-the-bums movement can't be guessed.  Richard II's greatest accomplishment may have been the creation of a sense of inevitability.  "We may be bad, but you know we're going to win.  Make the best of it."

Dodged That One

Chicago loses out on the Olympics:  big sigh.  It was never a good idea to let King Richard have control of so much money.  But instead, the Summer Olympic Games are going to Rio. Where it will be winter. Makes as much sense as the Olympics ever does. 

Aside

In web design, as in print journalism, the notion of "the fold" plays a part.  For web designers, "below the fold" is the area of a page to which most users have to scroll down.  Unlike print journalism, the web head has to guess where the fold, monitors and resolution varying. 

The Chicago Tribune is, shall we say, invested in Barack Obama's presidency, and so it is curious that yesterday's probably most significant story, the tax protest rally in Washington DC, is not mentioned at all on the Trib's home page.  If you click through to "News/Nation," you'll find a picture of the president above the fold but must scroll down to find that "tens of thousands of protesters" marched in Washington.  "Tens of thousands" seems to be an understatement.  This story, and a certain minimizing of coverage, will be interesting as the days go by.  Will the Democrat controlled Congress be driven by its ideologues or by the practical politicians?  Will the Republicans stand firm against some really bad ideas, or will enough act like of bunch of collegial-minded Episcopal bishops? 

My Only Healthcare Post

I wonder if there is not something, if not actually dishonest, deeply misdirecting in the drive to federalize health care.  The emphasis seems to be on cost reduction (as far as I can figure these things out) bundled with a bunch of various legislators favorite, albeit iffy, programs.  The emphasis on cost reduction seems inevitably to lead to rationing:  and that seems to be sinking in.  To effectively reduce costs, though, the rationing will most affect the larger medical consumers, that is, the elderly, the very young, and those with chronic, intractable or difficult conditions.  Thus the rather alarming talk of "end of life counseling" and so on.  If a gaggle of Heffalumps had proposed something remotely akin to this, the Kos gang would be muttering "soylent green is people," and those rowdy town hall meetings would be more than rowdy:  townsfolk, torches, pitchforks.  If George Bush's White House had asked folks to report people spreading "fishy" information about his policies, the dread term "enemies' list" would have filled the internet, as well it should have.  

The real drive here seems to be to federalize health care, willy nilly, just as, in the plans of those agitating about climate change, there's an underlying wish to gain control over the economy.  Socialism, a repeat failure, sleeps restlessly.

Not to say, of course, that we should not look for better and cheaper ways to deliver high quality medical care, or that we should not take pains to keep our home clean.  Centralizing control is the least likely way to do either.  I know of at least two guys looking into ways to make thin-film photoelectric coatings - essentially, ways to paint photoelectric cells onto a vehicle.  Wouldn't solve all polution problems, but would help.  The problem with centralized control - of health care or environmental issues - is that governments tend to look for single solutions.  Clever human beings can come up with multiple solutions, each efficient for a particular case. 

And then there's the long haul effect on the quality of medical care.  Some of these Eeyores seem to think that the M.D. degree came with a vow of poverty.  Now or later, federalizing medical care will result in caps on physicians' incomes, but without doing anything to cap the ever rising malpractice insurance premia they must pay.  In a generation, we'll have shortages of physicians. 

All this is easy to see, which is why I wonder if the goal is not merely to federalize, for some reason not very well understood, rather than to improve the distribution of medical care.  The idea is so obviously and disasterously bad that I can't quite believe that the goal is to reform what we have rather than to fundamentally alter it.

Now I'll shut up.

Calling Daniel Webster

So now we have the prospect of a Senate containing not only Tombstone Roland Burris but Unfunny Al Franken.  Al would at least move some of the attention away from Roland, and make some folks suspect that Illinois voters aren't the only gullible voters in the Midwest. 

Blago Attacks!

Boy Gov Rod "Rod" Blagojevich (D-Mope) has appointed veteran Donk party hack Roland Burris to the vacant Senate seat.  Burris spent several years trying to get elected governor, but is, if possible, even more unmemorable than most Cook County politicians.  I had kinda hoped that the Boy Gov would appoint Jan Schakowsky to the seat, so as to rid myself of her representation in Congress and to force her to run a state wide campaign.  Jan is so far to the left that she's nearly a caricature of herself.  'Twas not to be.  It seems that the Senate Democrat caucus has sworn not to seat anyone the Boy Gov appoints, so it looks like we'll probably get some nice expensive and useless litigation out of it.  I wonder if Illinois Attorney General and Governor-in-waiting Lisa Madigan will be obliged to bring some sort of suit against her fellow 'Crats (including good buddy Illinois Senator Dick Durbin) if they refuse to seat Burris?  Isn't this fun?  Isn't it great to have this to distract you from how your state is misgoverned?  Don't you wish you had to pay the 10.25% sales tax that Chicago residents have?

The Question

Is the President-elect a covert, committed socialist radical, or merely a tightly wound coil of ambition who adapts his professed policies to whatever wins elections?  I don't know that we can tell at this moment, though his position on abortion and a good deal of the rhetorical style suggests the committed radical.  We won't be able to tell by his words:  the rhetoric of the left now uses the vocabulary of the center and sometimes the right.  It's here that the experience of American Anglican conservatives can help.  The EpiscoLeft is skilled at using words that soothe and calm while behaving indeed like a duck:  all calm and placid above, but below paddling furiously.  So we must watch what President-elect Obama does, and stop our ears to what he says. 

250 Above the Fold

The same World's Greatest Newspaper that gleefully, almost hysterically endorsed Barry Goldwater in 1964, has now endorsed Barry O for president in a mash note of an editorial.  No big surprise here:  the Trib has been salivating at the idea of an Obama presidency since, O, about the day after his election to the Senate, and it played a role in the destruction of Obama's only credible Republican challenger. The Trib very nearly lost me as a subscriber then - not because I thought Jack Ryan should get a pass on anything, but because the Trib's indulgence in cheap shot politics was disgusting.  As it turned out, media action back then allowed Obama to coast into the Senate without any inspection of his beliefs and principles at all.  A full  campaign versus Ryan -the anti abortion, fiscal conservative that Ryan is - would have at least provided some light on whatever it is that Obama actually believes.  He was spared that, as he's been spared it so far. 

This election reminds me more and more of the 1945 election in Great Britain.  'Course, the US isn't an elective dictatorship.  It may be that the greatest potential damage from an Obama victory would be to pro-life efforts.  A President Obama would probably get at least one and maybe two nominations to the Supreme Court, putting an indefinite halt to the slow reshaping of the Court.

The title of this post?  Since the Trib's redesign a couple of weeks ago, that's the approximate number of words found above the fold on page one.  That number includes Chicago, Tribune, the date, and the new slogan, "The Midwest's Largest Reporting Staff."  We now get an advertisement on page one.  Maybe not for much longer, for me.

Why So Quiet?

Accumulated busy-ness, partly, and the associated weariness.  Sometimes the wheels fall off, and when they do, you can’t put them back on all at once. 

And revulsion over the descent of what’s left of The Episcopal Church into mere lawless chaos.  With the contrived and illicit expulsion of the Bishop of Pittsburgh, the House of Bishops, the same House that tolerates the manifold inanities of John Spong, that couldn’t bring itself to bring James Pike to account, has declared its absolute irrelevance - to anything.  How the vote was contrived and excused is not terrifically important.  With it, the EpiscoLeft has declared that the revolution must go forward.

I am, happily, out of TEC and won’t return.   The fight in the Diocese of Chicago was lost a long time ago, probably when I was in my 20s, and when we didn’t know there was a fight on anyway.

There are stimulating comparisons to be made between the inability of the EpiscoLeft to actually respond - intelligently, biblically, and theologically - to criticism from the likes of Bishop Duncan and the reaction of the political Left* to Gov. Palin.  It’s quite possible to be skeptical of Gov. Palin - we haven’t had much chance to get to know her, and it’s quite impossible to tell how this nomination will work out - but the reactions and the need to destroy her are sort of diagnostic.  The political and cultural Left seems unable to meet her on her own terms, cannot imagine anyone making the choices she has made, and seems completely unable to understand her appeal.  Just as the EpiscoLeft seems unable to respond other than by brute force, the political and cultural Left seems only able to destroy Gov. Palin rather than counter her. The Vice Presidential debate will be interesting, I think.

*Important note.  I will no longer use the word “liberal” to denote the American Left, religious or political.  “Liberal” is a noble word, rooted in freedom and liberty, and the American Left is no longer interested in freedom nor in liberty.  The American Left is now statist and intolerant of difference.

Community Organizing

Or, "We don't want nobody nobody sent."

On the other hand, the fuss and snark about the junior senator from Illinois years as a "community organizer" are overstated.  Barack Obama moved to Chicago with ambition for a career in politics but without contacts or associations with the city.  The oligarchy that runs Cook County (otherwise known as the Regular Democratic Organization of Cook County) is a closed system of relationships.  You don't barge in with sharp elbows.  To give the man credit, Obama took a long apprenticeship.  The "community organizer" role introduced him to the power structure without directly challenging it.  Decision makers could get used to him, and he placed himself within a net of relationships that could be recognized by the oligarchy as acceptable.  So let's give the man credit for patience and for understanding what he had to do to make his way.  Of course, it does diminish his image as a reformer.  As a part of the Chicago system, he never reformed much of anything.