This is a welcome trend. Prosperous and stable countries make better partners than poor and benighted ones. Our trade benefits from doing business in a flourishing world. It is a myth – at least in the long run - that you can make more money through exploitation. As our trade figures clearly show, a rich country like Norway is “worth” a lot more to American business than a poor country like Malawi. Rich countries are productive ones and productivity produces wealth everyone can use.

Unbelievable as it sounds today, up until the late 1960s (even longer on some university campuses), many experts believed that communist or central planning socialist systems could actually produce more than market economies. When Nikita Khrushchev famously said, “We’ll bury you,” he meant economically. Academic theory of the times confirmed that a centrally planned economy, where resources were logically allocated by wise officials, would outperform the chaos of the marketplace. I am not sure if theory even today has caught up to reality.

Although many do not live up to it, In the last 25-50 years, much of the world has embraced the concept of the free-market democracy. Even retrogrades pretend to hold elections and when we discuss differences among prosperous countries, we are talking about different species of market economies. There are a few places like North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba or Burma that have tried to maintain centralized control. There are even a few going backward like Venezuela and Bolivia, but for the most part markets have triumphed around the world (even if democracy sometimes has not followed closely enough, cf China), even if sometimes the old fashioned rhetoric remains.

A couple generations ago, the U.S. was THE market economy. Our regulations were less onerous; our tax rates were lower and our respect for private business firmer than almost anywhere else. But this is changing. We used to have the lowest corporate income tax in the developed world. Today we are the second highest. Our rate didn’t change. Others improved theirs. The same goes for regulation. London is displacing New York as world’s premier financial capital because our regulations are now relatively more onerous. It is not that ours got worse (except maybe SOX) but theirs imroved.

The U.S. is still among the most competitive nations in the world, but we are no longer alone at the top. Investors and business people now have options. If you believe choice is positive, this is a positive development. It also limits the scope of government policymakers. Depending on your point of view, this may be a good thing too. International markets and potential competition reign in policy makers in ways that would have been astonishing a generation or even a decade ago.

This hallelujah chorus of good news is tempered by a few things I hope to discuss in subsequent posts.

Overall, however, the new world order looks to be a positive development. It may hurt the American ego, but if we become a world of market-based democracies, we will all be better off. Imagine a world were most places have governments and market-economies like the U.S., Europe & Japan. Consider the analogy of early America. The State of Virginia was once the dominant U.S. state. Most of our early presidents were Virginians. As the U.S. grew and developed, Virginia’s relative place declined rapidly, but certainly its people are much better off today than they were in 1812 and they are certainly much better off than if the rest of the U.S. had remained undeveloped or had been retarded by some sort of poor predatory government, as we found in many other post colonial situations.

Personally, I welcome the change. It is about time the rest of the world pulled it own weight and stopped blaming us for all their screw ups.

"The rationalization measure included statements such as: 'It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others,' and 'This country would be better off if we worried less about how equal people are.'"

In a political season in which it is obvious that political winds appear to be blowing away from the Republican Party this sort of survey may seem to be perplexing. If conservatives are happier people why aren't conservative candidates doing well in elections? This is not a hard question for me. In spite of the reflexive assurance among liberals that Republicans are conservatives what we conservatives see is that, at present, the Republican Party clearly is not a conservative party. On the most important issues, rule of law, fiscal responsibility, accountability and autonomy of the individual, and national sovereignty it is not even close.

In survey after survey people who practice the disciplines of a conservative lifestyle tend to be happier than those who do not. Hence, conservatives draw the conclusion that such disciplines, if extended across society, would make the whole culture happier. It is possible to argue with that point, to make "rationalizations" excusing lifestyles which appear not to promote happiness but, in the statistical world, even studies designed to make it hard to profess conservative ideals yield results showing such ideals help with self-identified life satisfaction.

So, how do I explain today's political zeitgeist? Unhappy people complain and make noise. Happy people go quietly about their business. Politicians are moved more by complainers who empower politicans by looking to others to provide them comfort than they are by those who empower themselves. In politics pain is power, and unhappy people inherently feel more pain.

Periodically such pain devolves into the empowering of incompetents. For a while we've been leaning in that direction. In November we will probably go all the way.

In 2006 the U.S. actually reduced its emissions of green house gas. This is the first time this ever happened in a time of robust economic growth. How did President Bush do this? He didn’t. It was the price of gasoline.

Gasoline demand this year so far is lower than expected. Small cars and hybrids are selling well, while the big SUVs are not selling at all. People are choosing to live closer to their jobs and taking public transportation. All the good things that we want to happen are happening because of prices.

Talk is cheap and as long as gas is cheap all we will get is talk. People cry that the high price of gas is making people change their behavior. GOOD. That is what MUST happen.

Price works. There can be no doubt. But the components of the price are important considerations. Most of the price of a gallon of gas is based on the price of crude oil.

If you bought gas at $3.89 in California last week, $2.83 was the cost of crude oil; Federal, state and local taxes took out another $.65; refining costs were $.31 and marketing, distribution and their profits were $.09. Oh yeah, the State of California charged a penny fee. You can see where the big money is and this is also the place where you can best attack the problem. BTW – oil company profits are only a couple of pennies in that $.31. If they make zero profit, you can probably shave only a nickel off the price of your gas.

If history is any guide, the price of crude will drop again in the next couple of years as more capacity driven by high prices comes on line. We should not let the price go down. That is the mistake we made in the 1990s. One big reason we have trouble with energy and so many SUVs on the road today is the cheap gas of 1998. The cheap carbon based fuels also drove alternative power producers out of business.

The answer is a carbon tax. We want cheap gas in the way a boozer wants whiskey, but it is not good for our long term health.

So John McCain and Hilary are wrong about a gas tax. Obama is on the way to being right, but perhaps for the wrong reason. None of them go as far as we need to go.

We need a good stiff carbon tax. The only way we can emit less carbon dioxide is to burn less carbon based fuel and price is the best incentive.

BTW - I hate the fact that I think this tax holiday thing will be popular. It will help Hilary and hurt Obama. I don't think it will affect McCain either way.

Oh yeah, one more - will Obama try to revese the Reagan legacy.

Only Nixon could go to China. Only Bill Clinton could enact welfare reform and only Obama can smack down the black racists. I saw him on TV today. It took great courage to stand up there and it must have caused him some personal aguish. No matter how nutty a guy like Wright can be, he is probably personally charming and pleasant to Obama and his family. You also can understand that back in Wright’s generation some of that stuff made more sense. I even feel a little sorry for Wright. He is obviously a simple man who really cannot stand up to the critical media attention, although my sympathy is mitigated by his obvious selfishness in putting his personal aggrandizement over Obama’s campaign. (Not that I am an Obama supporter, but Wright was supposed to be his friend and friends don't do that to friends.)

I will go back to criticizing Obama tomorrow but today he is my man. Well done Barack. Should have done it earlier, but well done.

BTW – as long as I am on this thought, something else occurs to me. Those who recall the French history will remember that only De-Gaulle could address the Algerian question. Maybe only McCain can address Iraq

A well-balanced ticket is now far more valuable in primaries than in the general election. Vice Presidents have lost much of their cachet as "ticket balancers" in recent general elections, as polarity and national party machines overwhelm regional loyalty. It's possible that a selection from Ohio or Florida could swing a close election your way - but close elections are the exception, not the rule. Besides, the way you're going, you won't get the chance to run in the general election. But in the primaries, name-recognition is low and voters get to vote their hearts. Your VP selection will allow voters to swallow objections to your support for *****. It will also help them take your "change of heart" on ***** seriously. And if they're worried about your lack of ***** experience, a good VP has you covered.

Choosing a VP at this stage also signals electability and leadership. It's like an endorsement, but with real commitment. There's an old saw that in a ham-and-egg breakfast, the chicken was involved, but the pig was committed. An endorser is involved, but a VP is committed. Voters who respect the VP will take his or her commitment as a strong signal that you are electable. Picking a VP - provided the choice is not silly - also shows that you are thinking about January 2009 as well as January 2008. While your opponents are trying to distill their policy proposals into soundbites, you can decisively make one of the most important and digestible judgments of your presidency and submit it to the voters.

The new system - which everyone will adopt in 2012 after you win this nomination - promotes positive aspects of democracy, like compromise and balance, instead of the polarity of the old solo-primary system.

First, let's be clear. We do NOT have an energy crisis or even an energy problem. We have a mix of energy choices. As we make different choices, options and consequences change. It is not a problem in the usual sense. Problems can be solved. This one is unsolvable. No breakthrough will save us. If it did, we would just expand our "needs" to encompass the new possibilities, as we did in the past. We can, however, manage the situation and change our energy mix. Nobody knows, because it is currently unknowable, what the optimal energy mix will be ten years from now. Some of the information we need to understand the upcoming situation and make sound decisions must be developed through trial and experimentation. Some sources and technologies that seem very promising today will prove unsuitable. They will need to be altered or abandoned w/o too much heartache or recrimination.

Wisdom lies not in knowing the best future, which is unknowable at current levels of technology & information. The appropriate solutions literally have not yet been developed. The best choices of 2025 are perhaps still not invented. Wisdom lies in having a system that can develop alternatives, smoothly transition from one option to another and easily course correct when appropriate. We need a system that allows people to imagine and innovate and then develop innovations into useful solutions. Fortunately, we have such a system.

This is something only the market can do. Government’s role is to point in the general direction of options that are politically acceptable. Within that broad constraint, however, government has no business picking winners of losers and it has no capacity to manage or micro manage the process. The more detailed instructions that politicians and bureaucrats give to those developing solutions, the less likely they are to succeed. The ethanol debacle is a good example. Government rule and subsidies are locking us into a technology and feed source that is proving a mistake. It is a QWERTY solution. (If you don’t know what a QWERTY solution is, take a look at your keyboard. This keyboard was designed to SLOW typists in the time of mechanical typewriters so they would not jam. Does your computer jam?)

The fundamental strength of the market is NOT its ability to choose the right choice. Rather it is the ability to try many solutions simultaneously, experiment and change course rapidly and smoothly. This is almost exactly the opposite of the skill set government bureaucrats and planners bring to the table and it is usually anathema to politicians trying to win votes. (Why didn’t they dump the ethanol subsidies last year?)

Ethanol from abundant American corn seemed a great idea. It was well worth the experiment and certainly some ethanol will be made profitably from corn in the future. It was NOT a bad decision, but unfolding events, new information and developing technologies over took it. The market can and to some extent is turning away, but the power of politics will prop up this sick horse for years to come. People in developing countries will go to bed hungry because of the good policies of the U.S. and Europe. Sometimes things go wrong BECAUSE of not in spite of our best efforts and every solution has the potential to become a problem. When condition change, we should change our minds too.

After all, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but in the interestes of smart consistency, let me repeat the two magic words - carbon tax.

I don’t care if most people like me or not or what they think of me. If I go to McDonalds and the clerk gives me what I want w/o doing something nasty, it doesn’t matter if he loves me or hate me. Most likely he doesn’t care and that is the way it should be. I don’t want to get to know this guy and don't want him to know me.

Well, saying that I don’t care is not exactly accurate. The word I really would like to use is “disinterested”. Unfortunately, that word can no longer be used with 90% of the population, who will misunderstand the meaning. It doesn’t mean that I am uninterested; it merely means that I don’t have an interest in this particular thing. I don’t have a dog in that fight.

For example, I am very interested in politics, but I have no interest whatsoever in knowing the politics of the clerk at Seven-Eleven or the guys whose used car I might want to buy.

Besides being disinterested, I want to be pragmatic. Pragmatic is another word that is misused. Many people use it to mean expedient. I mean judging something by its sensible effects, sort of the William James version. I don’t care what people say about something, I just want to know what it does. Even narrower, I only want to know what it does in relation to my limited relationship with it. In the example of our transgendered guy above, I don’t care if the person born a boy wants to be called a woman, but I would rate her chances of producing a baby as very low. I would say zero, but you never know what machinations modern science can give us.

Disinterested pragmatism is becoming more difficult. For one thing, people insist on being affirmed. I would prefer to ignore most things, especially those things I don’t like. It saves us all a lot of trouble. I can tolerate a lot more things than I want to affirm. Don’t make me make a choice. Do I support transgendered “rights”? For the individual, probably yes. I will treat the individual with respect and I hope kindness. For the group, probably not, because I am not sure exactly what that entails and I don’t have the inclination or time to find out.

It gets worse as the net of rights and proactive government expands. I might tolerate what I consider the bad habits of my neighbors, but if they ask me to take part or pay for it, that changes the equation. In the transgender example, I don’t care if the person wants to alter his/her physical appearance (although the cutting off makes me shutter and the adding on seems a nuisance) to be more in line with his preference, but I don’t want to pay for it through my taxes or insurance rates.

The good thing about limited government is that it promotes tolerance by promoting disinterest. I saw this in relation to immigration if you compare the U.S. and Europe. There are many cultural reasons why Europe has been less welcoming of immigrants, but one practical one is the welfare state. An immigrant to America was supposed to make it on his own. He provided a benefit to the county or he didn’t come. That was the theory at least. In Europe, an immigrant represents another consumer of state services and probably one that will not pull his own weight for a while. When I lived in Europe, I remember the difference in tone. The American question is something like, “what can the immigrants contribute?” The European one is more like “how can our services accommodate immigrants?”

Since I am being pragmatic, I have to admit that the practical consequence of xenophobia is often similar, but the American idea of the immigrant as useful does tend to soften the PRACTICAL hostility and help us integrate immigrants much faster.

In our increasingly pluralist societies, nobody can expect us to affirm or even like most of the habits, lifestyles & cultures around us. With time, most of us come to appreciate many aspects of the “other” as we all modify our expectations. It is how cultures grow and change. But the ability to do so requires the ability NOT to be submerged all at once and you don’t have to like or affirm everything.

My wife’s family is Norwegian. They had some horrible food called lutefisk, which is essentially rotten cod. I don’t eat lutefisk now. I didn’t eat it back then. I will never eat it unless I am starving to death in the dead of winter which, IMO, is how they invented lutefisk in the first place. If I had been forced to affirm every aspect of the family culture, we certainly would not have stayed married for more than 25 years and had three kids.

Even in your closest relationships, you sometimes have to be pragmatic and disinterested and these things are the basis of a good, just and successful society. So let’s all of us keep our weird idiosyncrasies to ourselves. Not many people really care what we think, what turns us on and what we dislike. They don’t need to know. To use the sort of official term, don’t ask and don’t tell.

Ordinary people don’t want to appear out of touch with the intellectuals, so they also feign pessimism. But it is really the intellectuals who are out of touch. Americans are not a pessimistic people, and opinion polls are interesting in this regard. In the abstract, people often say that the country is going in the wrong direction or that the economy is going to hell. But when asked about their personal situation, they are usually much more optimistic. In other words, they are optimistic about what they know from firsthand experience and pessimistic about what they have been told by the media, politicians and other experts.

A particular interesting vignette discovered by Pew Research was that Two-thirds of working-class Democrats have a favorable view of Wal-Mart compared with 45% of professional-class Democrats. In these two groups, who do you think has been to Wal-Mart more often? And in Pennsylvania even those bitter guys clinging to guns and God, as Obama says, are doing okay.

Our self appointed elites just cannot forgive ordinary Americans for being happy and they cannot understand why they do not vote and behave the way elite sociologist say they should. This has been like this so long that we don’t even notice anymore.

Consider this spin. The headline says, “Study: Women's Life Expectancy Dropping.” The study says exactly the opposite. Life expectancy is at an all time high. However, it has dropped for some groups because of lifestyle choices such as obesity and smoking and this has been the emphasis of the media.

We have to explain something about averages. The media will often say something like, “the average is good, but some people are doing worse.” This is a tautology. Of course there are some people doing worse and some people doing better. That is the definition. But in the pessimistic spin, that sounds as ominous as the also always true statement, “half of all Americans earn less than the median income.” Or my favorite from "The Onion" World Death Rate Holding Steady at 100%, a massive failure of world health care.

It is past time to make a balanced assessment. Both optimism and pessimism can be excessive. Most of life’s situations contain elements of good and bad. It is not smarter to be a pessimist. Optimists tend to do better in life and a realist looks for options, even in the worst situation.

The bottom line is that unless you are a bit of a loser or your parents were especially successful but didn’t pass any of that along, you live better than your parents did and your kids will probably do better than you have. Of course, you could do better. Some people have too much success, but nobody has enough. A cynic recognizes that and gets depressed. A wise person understands that this is just the way people are and tries to figure out ways to improve but knows that life is a continuous journey and usually fun if you allow it to be.

Maybe Obama will be the first Democratic presidential candidate to win a majority since Jimmy Carter did it in 1976, but before that he has to win among Democrats and for the time being he has not managed to win a majority among Democratic voters. In fact, if you choose not to disenfranchise voters in Michigan and Florida, Hilary actually has more votes than Obama at this time. If you include the Michigan and Florida, Hilary leads the popular vote by 113,000 votes out of 29,914,356 cast. If you exclude the voters of Michigan and Florida, Obama is ahead by a little bit, but no matter how you count, neither Democratic candidate can win on won delegates alone and there is no Obama landslide either among voters or delegates. Anyway, Democratic insiders, not Democratic voters, will decide who wins the nomination.

Obama is a liberal of the kind we have not seen in a long time. He inspires liberal students on college campuses and there are many, until experience sets in. Liberals in the media and on the Internet love him. He has something like 1.5 million donors, many of them small donors. That is given as evidence of his popularity and it is impressive that so many people are willing to cough up the cash, but when you recall that there are more than 300 million people in the U.S., and 121,068,721 people voted in the last election, you see that Obama has an impressive and energized small group, mostly on loan from moveon.org, Oprah & George Soros.

Obama clearly has the coin. He will go back on his promise to run a publicly funded election, so he will use that money as an offensive weapon. If money can buy elections, Obama will certainly win. However, Hilary and Pennsylvania have shown that the big bucks don’t always translate into victory. Obama got every vote his money could buy and he still came up more than 9% short.

The bottom line is that Obama has so far failed to unite even Democrats. Dems still have not chosen their nominee and a lot can happen before November. Maybe all those bitter guys clinging to God and guns are more important than Obama thinks. Maybe moveon.org cannot help Obama keep in touch with ordinary people. Maybe nothing is inevitiable. Maybe we should get used to the sound of "President McCain."

But I don't really share in the mass fears of a fundamental breakdown of American education. There are a number of specific reasons for my faith, but most of it boils down to two important and interlocking points.

1. The American public is no longer satisfied with the status quo. When a majority of Americans are so dissatisfied with an institution and are willing to invest their time, money and sweat into changing that institution, change will come and it will be dramatic. When that mind set becomes the norm, change is bound to occur. I am not sure we are at majority status yet, but we are getting there and change is already occurring.

Witness the explosive growth of charter schools. Twenty five years ago, charter schools may not even have been an idea in the head of Ray Budde. But by 1991, Minnesota passed the first charter school act. Today, 40 states and the District of Columbia have charter school operations. Once thought to be relegated to the worst of the inner city school districts, charters are now sprouting up in the suburbs. When charters become as common place a feature of the education landscape in the suburbs as you see in the inner city, the silent indictment of the traditional public school will become a massive death knell of education policy as we have known it.

While charters are making in-roads in the suburbs, other changes in the educational offerings have been occuring, even before charter schools became popular. Magnet schools are public schools with a specialized or focused criteria. Magnet schools have embraced specialization in science and technology, the performing arts, languages, etc. There are foreign language immersion schools, where classes are taught and conducted in Spanish, French, Japanese, German, and on and on. These options were once considered radical as well, yet today are very common place.

Another key indicator is the growth of homeschooling. Once the providence of the intensely religious, usually conservative Christians, it is now common place even among those who are less religiously devout, but devoted to their children. Without question, the ability for homeschoolers to communicate, collaborate and share via the Internet has made homeschooling practical and possible for average Americans who are not satisfied with the quality of schooling their children receive. That homeschoolers routinely and significantly outscore their public school peers indicates clearly that you don't have to be a Columbia Teachers College graduate to help educate your kids.

So as the public begins to move away from simply accepting the public school system you will see policies shift, slowly at first, but more and more rapidly. Keep an eye on Louisiana where Governor Bobby Jindal has a chance to really push through significant education reform in his state that could be a model for changes elsewhere.

2. Change agents are already at work. The second major reason for my faith is that there are many educational entrepreneurs who are challenging the status quo for all sorts of ideas, ranging from private enterprise, to charitable foundations, to public/private partnership advocates. Because change cannot happen as easily inside a system, the change must come from without. It is not just charter school advocates, but well-known groups like the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, Teach for America, and Edison Schools and lesser known groups like DeHaviland Associates who are really making people sit up and consider that you don't have to be an ed-school graduate to be a good teacher and you don't have to be a lifelong educator to be an effective school leader. The only qualification to lead change is an idea and the courage to pursue it. As more and more of these educational entrepreneurs like Wendy Kopp, Chris Whittle, Michelle Rhee, Brett Pawlowski and others of their kind begin to draw in people from outside education to help them manage educational problems there will be more change and much of it for the better.

I know that change happens slowly in education, if for no other reason than institutional inertia. But one hundred years ago we had just begun manned, powered flight. Fifty years ago, only science fiction writers had conceived of manned space flight, let alone be on the cusp of practical, private space flight. Thirty years ago, most people could not conceive of a powerful computer that could fit in the palm of your hand, but a few imaginative souls probably did.

Despite all the work that has gone before, in comparison the next steps will be harder to take, but will be more transformative than any previous steps. What will come next? I am not sure. We will see changes in measurement, accountability and testing. We will soon likely see changes in curriculum. No doubt there will be changes in education delivery and pedagogy. We may soon see full choice with educational funding following the student directly, allowing parents the absolute right to choose the school for their children independent of where they live. There are certainly ideas out there that I haven't heard of, simply percolating in someone's head. Of this I have no doubt.

American does not suffer from a lack of ingenuity. Sometimes it takes a warning bell like A Nation at Risk to get us moving. But there is no need to fear A Nation at Risk and I don't for one second believe that our children are worse off now than they were twenty five years ago. There have been too many changes, too many advancements and there are too many ideas for this nation to fail at making our schools the best they have ever been, the best the world has ever seen.

More surprising to me is the oxymoron of a politician being a uniter. According to recent polls 60% of Americans think Obama can unite Americans. McCain scores about the same (58%). Every politician promises this and I think they believe what they say. Most Americans seem to buy it, but it is the triumph of hope over experience. The closest our country has come to having a uniter during my lifetime was Ronald Reagan and (as I mentioned above) more than 40% of the people voted against him.

We hear that Obama is a uniter. How? He cannot even unite Democrats. About half the Democrats still prefer Hilary. He has united the left wing of the Democratic Party so far. If he wins the nomination he may unite the Democrats, but he is unlikely to get much of the other half of the population behind him. No politician can. It is the nature of politics.

That is why a less intrusive government is desirable. When we all have choices and must make agreement s with each other, we come up with solutions that are win/win. In a voluntary agreement, each person gets more than he would have gotten w/o the agreement. It is a positive sum proposition. The total benefit increases. Government can almost never do this. That is why it relies on coercion.

Government has an essential role to play in our society. Don’t get me wrong about this. But government is only one player in a mix of solutions that include private individuals, firms, NGOs, religious organizations, associations and the myriad of intuitions that make up our civil society. Government is part of many solutions, but rarely the most important part. Government does best when it builds and physical and societal infrastructure of society, but where it does not manage particular transactions. In the old metaphysical metaphor, government should be like the watchmaker who sets programs in motion but then lets them more or less alone.

The idea that government will do much else, especially that the Federal Government will do much else, is a threat to freedom. We learned that lesson many times, but it does not stick, and it looks like we will have to learn it again the hard way. We can hope for more, but we really cannot get it.

To this point in the investigation of the compound there has been no sign of the supposed under aged mother who was the original complainant.

This information raises some questions about the evidence which caused the raid in the first place and places additional burdens on the evidence gathered in legitimate investigations prior to the raid and since.

In the meantime a legally mandated state hearing required to commence within fourteen days of the seizure of children by CPS began yesterday (April 17th) with officials alleging that women under 17 years of age were found either to be pregnant or to have already given birth. The raucous hearing, in which as many as 250 lawyers were said to have been present representing children and mothers, appears, from news reports, to have progressed glacially, with only two witnesses testifying while constantly being barraged by objections from lawyers.

In Texas, which has conducted four times as many executions as any other state since the death penalty was reinstated in 1982, Governor Rick Perry pledged to resume executions as soon as possible.

With so much having been written on this issue already I will list a few sources for a wide variety of types of information on the Baze case. The first is a general Baze compendium which is regularly updated to show article on the case.
The text of the various opinions is accessible through the first link on this article.

Next are stories from yesterday's reporting-
Associated Press
Reuters
AFP
NPR print report - Q & A
NPR audio report
Christian Science Monitor
The Docket of Baze to date

I have been thinking about Obama’s clinging comments in San Francisco - that people cling to guns and religion because they are bitter about their lives. I think the guys in the big new houses would agree with him when talking about the people they displaced. I wonder what the other side thinks of them. It shows how out of touch the communities really are.

Some people had a culture that included guns and religion long before any of the current economic downturns or upturns. My old neighbors understand that hunting is a great tradition that brings people closer to nature and their faith helps them find meaning in life. My new neighbors know about hunting from watching Bambi and many probably think of faith in God as something to be found in anthropological texts. There is a disconnect.

Obama’s clinging comment may not hurt him. After all, we don’t have a video and the friendly media is spinning Obama’s way, i.e. emphasizing “bitter” over “clings” and generally ignoring the mindset that would move someone to say something so silly. It may just show how society has changed, that the rural & working population really is marginalized to the extent that San Francisco liberals talk about them like some kind of exotic tribe, not with anger but with a kind of pity. Maybe the future does belong to the guys in the big houses, who drive Prius, shop at Whole Foods and vote Obama. I hope not but It will be interesting to see. You have to give them credit for improving the quality of the local restaurants and their houses are prettier, although shopping at Whole Foods is a collosal waste of money.