Body Parts

Palin's Emails Prove She Was An Honest, Hard Working, Conscientious, Reforming Governor

There are no "bombshells" in the emails, as NBC's correspondent put it. Despite the msm's efforts to make the prolonged process of getting the emails released into a negative story on Palin, there is nothing for political enemies and the Stalinist American liberal media to use against her. Shame on the media for their obvious effort to destroy her personally and politically, at the same time they turned a blind eye to John Edward's sexual misbehavior, his illegal use of campaign funds, and his phony political platter. As they failed to investigate and correct Obama's continual misrepresentation about his teaching as  temporary lecturer at the University of Chicago law school, his career as a politician, his attendance at Rev. Wright's church, his ghost-written autobiography and ghost-written political policy book, his close friendships in anti-American and Marxist Left. As they fail to investigate the alliance between big regulatory government and big banking and financial institutions in the financial meltdown of 2008. Palin is an authentic values-based political reformer. She has not played the game of "lie to the voters to get elected, then stab them in the back" of traditional politics. She challenges the legitimacy of a press that fails to exercise its freedom and its obligation to "serve truth to power". The emails would help her presidential candidacy, should she decide to run.

What Is Wrong With the American Economy is More Fundamental Than Economics

Whoa, dude! We is slipping back into recession, or at least stagnant drift, or -- gasp! -- double-dip recession. The housing recovery hasn't taken off. Manufacturing is sputtering. Jobless rate is up (again). Horrifying federal deficit and debts dampen future prospects. China faces slowdown or inflation. Europe continues to expose financial problems like a small pox epidemic. Fabulous prosperity everywhere is limited to coastal enclaves where the super-rich can ski or sunbathe or shop, do lunch, show off luxury automobiles, and sell their signature houses at ridiculous prices owing to their association with the celebrities who have dined, bedded, or died therein. Meanwhile, for the rest of us, not so much. The question is, why.

There are two traditional answers to this question of economic performance. Values or economics. Obviously, in the anthropologically rich real world, value and economics are intertwined, interrelated, intermeshed, bound up, and otherwise symbiotically mutually dependent. Nonetheless, scholars have tried for centuries to separate the two factors, because in the real world, if you want to change a situation, you have to know where to push. The modern debate began in the nineteenth century. Early capitalists, such as Spencer, argued that economics was the primary factor of economic change. Change the economic rules and conditions, economic performance changes. The advocates of laissez-nous faire policy thought that economic growth, widespread of economic wealth, and social prosperity would follow up unleashing free capitalist enterprise. Marx disagreed about the benefits of capitalism, of course, but agreed as an economist that, once the fundamental relationships of private capital ownership were established, economics ruled economic and social change.

The mighty blast against the economists came from the sociologists and, later, anthropologists, leading off with Max Weber. Weber argued that values drove economics. Persons obtained a set of values (he thought from religious belief) that encouraged behavior appropriate to prospering economically, such as honesty and building trust in relationships, hard labor, saving money, and investing for the future. Without the values, all the economic policy manipulation in the world would fail.

This historic debate is at the core of the problem of interpreting the economic indicators today. Economists and governmental policy bureaucrats argue that the sluggishness of growth is entirely the product of macro-economic conditions and prosperity can be restored by manipulation of those conditions, especially federal monetary and fiscal policies. If this philosophy is working, it is not working well, hence the public anxiety.

Other observers, such as c'est moi of Body Parts, argue that underlying social deterioration is rotting the economic foundation of America's historic economic prosperity. This is an argument I have made consistently for years. Specifically, the labor class is losing the values -- the beliefs and attitudes -- that sustained it. The faith in working hard, even at less than satisfying jobs, saving, and investing for the future is eroding. The conviction that economic independence is rooted in family formation, integrity, and success has been eroded. As a result, belief that the economic escalator of upward mobility will work and is the preferred means of betterment has been weakened. This weakening is reinforced by the prolonged economic recession and stagnant "recovery". This critique is not just an opinion based on anecdote, it is also the finding of scholarship. Charles Murray, at the Enterprise Institute, has completed a long-term study of values and behavior of the white labor class and finds just these results. Recently, in his Bradley lecture, he argued that over the last half century, the labor class has lost its historic values that made America a unique country and prosperous economy. He speculates, as one would expect from his early books, that is is the rise of the welfare state that has eroded the basis of the labor class. All of this obtains my concurrence.

So what we face in America today is a financial crisis on top of an economic crisis, driven a profoundly fundamental crisis in our social values. The collapse of the white labor class is the signal of what is wrong, and it is paralleled by precisely similar developments in the black labor class. We are in danger of losing our soul, so to speak.

As a last point, let me note that this fundamental crisis sets up the issues for the 2012 presidential election. Politicians will be deployed along its fault lines. Some politicians (e.g., President Obama, former governor Mitt Romney) will argue that technical manipulation of governmental policy and policy regulations, especially economic ones, will solve the crisis. I believe they are wrong (see above) and will only prolong the crisis and make it more difficult to solve, or even put a fundamental solution beyond reach. Other politicians (e.g., let us hope, former governor Sarah Palin) will argue that social values are the real basic issue, that we must attend to them first and revise economic policy and regulation on that basis. I agree with her. We will see this debate played out in the half dozen years, regardless of who wins in November 2012, and I will help explain the debate in the terms I have outlined above.

Sarah Palin's Appreciative Chanuka Message

Reprinted with commentary by JewsForSarah at Atlas Shrugs.

Sarah Palin Ribs Obama For His Faux Pas and Gaffes

Palin has a cheery sense of humor, as any reader of her autobiography will appreciate (see the paragraphs on the naming of her children). Now she turns her humor against Obama, to make a point about the double standard in news jouralism coverage of major political figures.

Why Do Jewish Professional Women Harbor Such Enmity Toward Sarah Palin?

Palin is a divisive figure as a culture heroine. Her opposition to abortion, her pro-life and pro-family positions, and her decision to deliver Trig enrages NoW, which is a single purpose interest group to protect abortion rights. Her open Christian faith and her consciousness of God shouldn't alienate non-Christian women, but I know that, to speak of my personal acquaintances, they have offended some Jewish women. As a principled person, she is aware that not everyone will accept her if her positions conflict with their positions. She is beginning to gain respect as a politician from men, but I suspect Palin would be as surprised as I at the depth of the hatred expressed toward her as a person and as a politician from professional women, especially Jewish professional women. It is a hatred so vile that it contorts the faces of the women who disparage her. Women, liberal and conservative, who have never listened to or read an entire Palin speech, or read her book, or glanced at the resume of her accomplishments as Governor or her prior involvement in local politics, who could not provide a clear summary of her economic and political philosophies, proclaim her bitterly as stupid and denounce her. So bitterly, their mouths twist as if filled with vinegar. Though they have no personal knowledge of her,  they act as if they are personally offended by her. That she is a fervent supporter of Israel, that her Governor's desk held the flag of Israel beside the American flag, that during her vice-presidential campaign she wore, and frequently since in public speaking she wears, a lapel pin with both America's and Israel's flags, though she has been a clear supporter of Israel against the Palestinian propaganda against the Jewish state ... none of this loyalty to the people of Abraham, Moses, and David counts for anything in the view of Jewish professional women. I am truly mystified by this profound hostility and enmity toward her. It is,alas, the mirror image of the deep bitterness toward women in public and professional life that I have heard expressed by anti-feminist men over the years. "Let me tell you a joke about women in politics ..." a liberal male friend, who would not think of himself as anti-feminist, began a conversation to me. It is part of the fury of hatred that Hillary Clinton's primary campaign for the presidency evoked. But why should women, who have advanced into public and professional life, spew anti-feminist hatred toward Palin, who is doing nothing less than they? What has produced this twisted psychology that women cannot appreciate the character, accomplishments, principle, virtues, and ideas of another woman who is courageous enough to stand up for a political ideal? This is Sarah Palin's Jewish professional women problem. It is one that should embarrass Jewish professional women.

Thank You, Sarah Palin. "Refudiate" Is New Word Of The Year!

Oxford University Press has named "refudiate" new word of the year. At their New York City offices, they've put up a sign; Atlas Shrugs visited and took the photo. It's a clever, striking, coinage, a genuine addition to the language. Thanks, Sarah!

Palin Takes on the Fed and Attacks QE2

Talking jargon and mathematics in the rarified macroeconomic world of transcendental financial policy, Bernanke and the Fed have cowed politicians. But proof is in the pudding and they haven't goosed the economy into recovery yet--it's an jobless, statistical recovery drifing sideways. And they haven't intimidated Sarah Palin. God bless her. She's got more balls than any other national politician. She has an intuitive understanding of the social landscape, over which financial policy hangs like an oppressive humid heat, from her work and business experience, which is that of the small producer of real goods (the farmer, fisherman, lumberman, manufacturer, etc.). She understands the nexus between credit, money, enterprise, regulation, taxation, jobs, and real products. Economics should connect to sociology and not coerce sociology into billets to confirm economic theory. From the depths of this historic, and traditional American economic philosophy, she criticizes QE2 and devaluing the dollar. This blog summary and commentary of her Phoenix speech is worth reading.

(For that matter, why is she standing alone? Why don't some conservative economists on their own form an economic policy committee and offer support to Palin? Let's see them come from out behind their blogs and walk up to national podium to support her.)

Sarah Palin Running the Gauntlet, This Time Noonan Strikes

Peggy Noonan acts, if metaphorically, as the widowed literary mistress of the Great President, forever protecting the reputation of the man who could not marry her. Any perceived slight of the Great President's reputation provokes a frantic attack with her sharpest knife. So, when Sarah Palin remarks that Ronald Reagan was an actor, in defense of her own acting in a television series, Noonan stabs relentlessly searching for a jugular: " 'He was a great man and you are a nincompoop' ". Such sabering, arising out of the unconscious, reflects the deepest insecurities of the aging woman holding them. Was perhaps Ronald Reagan not a great man but a nincompoop? Many thought so at the time. Despite the speeches that Noonan wrote for him, living in a university culture as I did at the time, the condescending putdown of Reagan was constant and similarly stained with vitriol. Though I was a Democrat and a liberal, my merest suggestion that Reagan might have some intelligence to bring to his presidency was greeted by colleagues with bitter and ugly rejection. He was an actor and all actors were ignorant, making a living by repeating others' words, a charge to which Noonan would be sensitive, as Reagan repeated words she wrote for him. I was involved in hosting a statewide conference at my UC campus when Reagan was shot. A group of participants were walking toward a building. I walked up to them, shaken, "Did you hear that Reagan was shot?" I exclaimed. "Good," responded with satisfaction the assistant director of a California state department. On other occasions, when I defended movie culture, by reference to the association of literature, music, theater, and craft skills in the personalities that inhabited Hollywood, my colleagues were appalled. Such ignorant people knew nothing about the sciences or humanities or law in which my colleagues made their living. I don't know how Reagan reacted when such insults reached his ears; I want to believe he laughed and shrugged them off. For, of course, he had his defenders. Diminutions of Reagan offended Noonan and her anger stayed buried in her, ready for release like a zombie jack-in-the-box whenever anyone pressed her anxious button. Of course, Reagan was not a nincompoop, despite what UC professors thought, and neither is Sarah Palin, despite what UC professors think. Reagan was not a "Great Man" before his presidency, though a spokesman for a largely unpopular political ideology and an effective and controversial governor. He became a great man only during his presidency, and nearly missed losing it all in the Iran-Contra affair. As a great man and a great president, I am sure Ronald Reagan would be offended by the small-minded, ungenerous, and false defense made of him by his former speech writer.

Morning In America

Thanks, Sarah. It is surely a wonderful morning in America.

 

Sarah Palin Should Not Announce Her Candidacy For The 2012 Presidential Election Anytime Soon

Note that the question of running for (nomination for) the presidency is different from the question of when and how to announce a run for the presidency. As to the latter, Palin should not now announce a run for the presidency. Why? It's much too early. She has just begun to build an organization. She has just begun to mature as a confident, powerful public speaker. She has just begun to formulate personal positions on policies. She has just begun to master the chamber of horrors of modern national politics. The mid-term elections in November have not yet been held and the scope of a GOP resurgence is not determined, so the extent of her influence on the election is not yet known, even if promising. Further, the moment she announces some form of candidacy, she will be a more prominent target and will provide the opportunity for her oppositions--other independent and GOP hopefuls and President Obama, who will certainly be the Democratic Party nominee in 2012--to focus their attacks. Those attacks will be vicious, deceitful, and intens. Dirty tricks will be played on her. Announcement of candidacy now would give the Left more time to organize itself to oppose her--she needs to take them by surprise. Reporters will hound her with questions about every policy issue on the national scene, when it is better for her prospects to be able to pick and choose what issues she wants to discuss and not to be specific about policy matters. Better, too, that there be a pack of independent and GOP hopefuls announcing their intent in late 2011 and early 2012; it will force her opponents to disperse their fire.

As for the former question, I surely hope that Palin runs for president. But she has another year or more of groundwork and fundraising before she is ready for the combat and take-on-all-comers that her candidacy, as any candidacy, would provoke. She has everything to gain and nothing to lose by waiting. And if 2012 seems unpropitious a year for her, 2016 will be another opportunity--she will still be a youthful middle aged woman. And in 2016, she would not face a sitting president running for re-election, with all the formidable weapons and funding he will possess.