It’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I don’t know what we can do. The last time we tried to help, a bunch of our soldiers got massacred.

Just in case you were wondering, if you had any doubt — Sean Penn and Steven Soderbergh are fucking morons.

I have never understood the fascination some on the Left have for bloodthirsty tyrannical communists. When I was in high school, they loved critic-imprisoning, newspaper-closing, Indian-murdering Daniel Ortega. Now all they have left is Fidel Casto and Hugo Chavez (and the corpse of Che Guevara). What is it about some people that makes them embrace evil so willingly? Evil like this:

A former revolutionary comrade recalled that, in the days before and immediately following their 1959 ascension to power, Raul and Che Guevara “competed in killings and viciousness,” executing all suspected of being “agents” of Batista or “counterrevolutionaries.” Another former comrade and friend of the Castro brothers, the writer Norberto Fuentes, told Brian Latell, author of the book After Fidel: Raul Castro and the Future of Cuba’s Revolution, a “chilling” story of Raul’s “cold-bloodedness.” In 1966 Raul inexplicably exhumed the bodies of those he ordered executed in the city of Santiago, encased them in a collective concrete “coffin,” and deposited the corpses in the deep seas off the island.

Then there was Michael Moore’s lauding of the Cuban healthcare system, which we thoroughly ripped apart over at Moorewatch.

What the hell, man? I get criticism of our system. I may not agree with it but I understand it. I get criticism of our foreign policy. I may not agree with it but I understand it. This nonsense I don’t and never will understand. It’s, frankly, a child-like way of going through life — finding someone who seems “cool” and “revolutionary” and worshipping them.

Nick Gillespie goes non-linear:

This never was a “helluva good country,” at least when it came to politicians. We just pretended it was. Certainly, after a decade or more of NPSMs up the ying-yang (apologies, but we are talking about politics, which driveth all decent men and women mad), it’s impossible to have any illusions. We are a nation of Depends wearers, even those of us who are half the age of John McCain.

I’m feeling this a lot these days. Over at Right-Thinking, it seems that 90% of my posts are whining about something stupid and massively expensive that the government is doing — from wars to bailouts. I look to Washington and am reminded of the words of Johnathan Swift:

I desired that the senate of Rome might appear before me, in one large chamber, and an assembly of somewhat a later age in counterview, in another. The first seemed to be an assembly of heroes and demigods; the other, a knot of pedlars, pick-pockets, highwayman, and bullies.

But I think things have got to turn around soon. Bill James once observed that progress comes in the guise of failure. Watergate wasn’t about politicians being corrupt — they always had been. Watergate was about the American ceasing to put up with it. Racial tension wasn’t created in the 1960’s. It just exploded into the national consciousness when we decided we wouldn’t put up with it anymore.

Thanks to the internet, our politicians no longer have a lap-dog media to cover up their nonsense. It may take a while. But I think a lot of the cynicism and anger now is because the American people are refusing to tolerate this kind of garbage anymore. A revolution is going to come (not the violent type; the ballot box type).

Ugh. So much going on. So little time to write about it.

The most depressing thing about Reason’s analysis of the financial meltdown? This:

No one fully understood how exposed the mortgage-backed securities were to the rising foreclosures. Because of this uncertainty, it was hard to place a value on them, and the market for the instruments dried up. Accounting regulations required firms to value their assets using the “mark-to-market” rule, i.e., based on the price they could fetch that very day. Because no one was trading mortgage-backed securities anymore, most had to be “marked” at something close to zero.

This threw off banks’ capital-to-loan ratios. The law requires banks to hold assets equal to a certain percentage of the loans they give out. Lots of financial institutions had mortgage-backed securities on their books. With the value of these securities moving to zero (at least in accounting terms), banks didn’t have enough capital on hand for the loans that were outstanding. So banks rushed to raise money, which raised self-fulfilling fears about their solvency.

Two simple regulatory tweaks could have prevented much of the carnage. Suspending mark-to-market accounting rules (using a five-year rolling average valuation instead, for example) would have helped shore up the balance sheets of some banks. And a temporary easing of capital requirements would have given banks the breathing room to sort out the mortgage-backed security mess. Although it is hard to fix an exact price for these securities in this market, given that 98 percent of underlying mortgages are sound, they clearly aren’t worth zero.

So instead of simply tweaking the regulations, the government decided to spend great flipping wads of cash. I realize that Washington’s solution to everything — education, healthcare, terrorism, etc. — is to spend money. But this is ridiculous. We could have apparently literally saved tens of billions with a rule tweak.

But, of course, tweaking rules doesn’t make you look glorious for suspending your campaign.

Will Saletan makes a dumb point:

As the latest Reuters report notes, over the last four decades, U.S. life expectancy has climbed from 70.8 to 77.8 years. By 2015, it’s on track to hit 79.2 years. Meanwhile, unlike other industrialized democracies, the United States has replaced pensions with 401(k) plans. So your retirement-income pie can suddenly shrink—as, for example, it’s doing right now—and, at the same time, the longevity you’ve gained from all this lovely industrialization requires you to carve that pie into more and more annual pieces.

Apparently, we should prefer the certainty of pensions — these being the pensions that are bankrupting both industry and the nation. These being the pensions that are almost guaranteed to be slashed and hacked to the bone to balance budgets.

Sorry, Will, I’ll salt my 403b into more conservative investments before I become a ward of either the state or my employer. I’ll trust my income to the vagaries of the market before I trust it to the inflationary vagaries of politics.

I probably linked to this a while ago, but it bears linking to again. These sex offender registries are causing a lot of collateral damage, aren’t they? But no one is going to stand up and potentially be told they are defending perverts.

Um, OK:

Lap dancing “is not sexually stimulating”, the chairman of the Lap Dancing Association told a parliamentary committee today.

Simon Warr made the claim, which was greeted with scepticism by MPs, while he was giving evidence to the Commons culture committee as part of an inquiry into the operation of the Licensing Act.

The government is under pressure to change the act so that lap dancing clubs have to be licensed as sex encounter establishments.

At the moment, they are licensed in the same way as pubs and clubs, which has led to complaints from councils who believe that they do not have the power to stop clubs being opened in their areas.

See, this is why the British Parliament is so much more entertaining than our Congress. Even if our Congress did hear testimony from the President of the Lap Dancing Association (really?), it wouldn’t be nearly as funny:

[Tory MP] Davies responded with even more astonishment.

“So if I did a straw poll of all the customers who came out a lap dancing club and said ‘Did you find that in any way sexually stimulating?’ I would find a big resounding fat zero? On that basis you would have a lot of dissatisfied customers.”

Here’s something I’ve grown awfully sick of: endless book titles. It seems that no book these days can be published without a paragraph length subtitle. For example, Leviathan on the Right wasn’t long enough, so it got the subtitle How Big Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution. The Dark Side wasn’t enough, so we got The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. Ron Paul is seemingly the only man who can avoid this. His book has the comparatively simple and concise title of the The Revolution: A Manifesto.

But Dick Morris’ latest ignorant screed has to take the cake. Here’s the title: Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want to Kill Talk Radio, the Do-Nothing Congress, Companies That Help Iran, and Washington Lobbyists for Foreign Governments Are Scamming Us … and What to Do About It. I’m tired just reading that epistemological and grammatical nightmare.

That’s what the City of New York could save if it put kids back in Catholic schools. Wow.

I was thinking today about how brand loyalty is established in politics. Most voters are not independent, their pretensions not withstanding They typically break for the same party year after year. Voting is much easier when you can identify a party that you will always vote for or that you will never vote for.

However, while this brand loyalty is fixed at any one moment in time, there are historical events than can cause millions of voters to either establish or break their loyalty. Given the general closeness of elections, this can shift the balance of power dramatically.

For example:

That’s why I worry about this election. I worry that we have seen another 1980 — both an Always Moment and a Never Moment.

Young voters broke massively toward Obama and the excitement of being part of something so historic is going to cause millions of them to always vote Democrat, no matter what. They will feel about Obama the same way I feel about Reagan. They will always remember the excitement and thrill of 2008 and connect that with the Donkey Party.

At the same time, millions moved into the Never Republican category. Between the Iraq War, the economy, torture and the culture war, the Republicans have driven young voters away in droves. The only demographic McCain won was seniors. That’s not something to build on because, in twenty years, the Republican “base” will be literally dead.

I suppose we can hope that Obama has a Carteresuqe reign that turns the brand loyalty over in six short years. But I think that’s unlikely. Obama isn’t as idealistic as Carter, the country isn’t as leftist. Moreover, the GOP does not have “the next Reagan” — hence the bizarre enthusiasm that many conservatives have shown for Sarah Palin despite her lack of … anything other than good looks and a sharp tongue.

I also suppose that the enthusiasm could fade quicker than expected. Eight years ago, after all, it was the Republicans who supposedly had all the excitement and brand loyalty. They had the droves of young Christians who were going to create a permanent majority.

The stunning collapse of Bush’s support is, however, unlikely to repeat itself. Obama would be hard-pressed to alienate the American voter as thoroughly and effectively as Bush has.

No, I think we’re in for a long dark teatime of the soul.

Something I forgot to post about last week — the idiots in San Antonio caved in to the relentless pressure of all the combined special interest in existence and doubled the term limits for the city government. So much for one of the best-run cities I’ve been in.