Other than that, though, what's wrong with Venezuela?

From the WaPo:

According to a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, even media not directly controlled by the government have been reluctant to report critically on Mr. Chavez.  Many voters, too, are intimidated by high-tech polling machines that read their fingerprints; polls show that they suspect their votes will not be secret.  Those not motivated by fright might be lured by greed:  The government has amassed a list of 3 million people it has promised new homes. There are about 12 million likely voters. 

That Mr. Chavez is in danger of losing in spite of all this is testimony to the havoc he has wreaked in what was once Latin America’s richest country.  At more than 20 percent, inflation is the highest in the region and is accompanied by chronic shortages of food, basic consumer goods and power.  The country’s infrastructure is crumbling:  Within the last two months an explosion at a state oil refinery killed 50 people, and a major highway bridge collapsed.  Perhaps worst of all for average citizens, violent crime has become epidemic under Mr. Chavez.  The murder rate, which has more than tripled, is one of the five highest in the world.  Drug traffickers have made Venezuela a hub for shipments to the United States and Europe with the help of senior government officials, including the current defense minister.

Chavez won his re-election campaign.  Here's a giddy socialist take on the news:

The accomplishments of the Chavez regime over the past 13 years are undeniable.  When he entered office, Chavez took command of an economy that had been ravaged by IMF structural adjustment plans that had devastated most of the welfare subsidies and social guarantees that had been built up by the progressive nationalist regimes of the 1970s.  . . .  [S]ince Chavez was elected President in 1999, unemployment has been cut in half – declining from 14% to 7%.  Increased access to medical care, particularly through community clinics staffed by Cuban physicians, has led to a decline in infant mortality from 20 deaths per 1,000 live births to 13 deaths per 1,000.   Per capita GDP has increased from $4,000 in 1999 to $10,000 today.  And extreme poverty has declined from 23% of the population when Chavez entered office in 1999 to 8.5% today. . . . The election of right wing opposition candidate Henrique Capriles would have meant an immediate end to this process of social transformation. . . .

I guess we'll see.  Chavez is facing another contest that I doubt he'll win.  Whatever path Venezuela takes will have to be without him, one way or another.

A Pithy Commentary on the History of...shall we call it Canaan?

may be found here. Abstracting it to every other part of the human-occupied earth is left as an exercise for the reader. h/t Gene Expression.

Things That Never Cease to Amaze

American society is very strange about its food:

Speaking of eggs, balut is a soft-boiled duck egg, where the embryo is almost fully formed--feathers, bones, and all. The egg is cracked open, the soupy liquid drunk, and the fetus dug out to eat. It's popular in the Philippines, Laos, and other Southeast Asian countries.

What's being done: Thanks to domestic foodie demand, this "snack" is available in the U.S. too. Dekalb Market in Brooklyn hosted its first ever balut-eating contest this summer--and the winner downed 18 embryos in 5 minutes.

What to eat instead: Regular eggs (organic, cage-free, preferably my-farmer-sold-them-to-me eggs, that is) will give you a protein fix without the feathered fetus.

Why should this be a problem? Don't we know from our political debate that there is absolutely no distinction between an egg at day one of fertilization, and an egg about to hatch?

Besides, you'd eat the adult duck, and you'd eat the egg in an earlier state. Why so queasy about eating the almost-hatched fetus? What makes it the one phase that's worthy of protection -- or that makes it the one phase that it is revolting to kill and eat?

Fun with balls

As a way to move balls around to no evident purpose, this struck me as a lot more entertaining than football.

Hey, Shut Up!

This was at Sam Houston State University. I'll bet old Sam would have some choice words to say about that.

We Lost, You Must Have Cheated

One hears this line from little boys who don't like to lose, but it's a little surprising to hear it in the context of a Presidential debate. Still, GWB was also accused of "cheating," so I suppose it's always the default assumption when a conservative whips up on a liberal in a battle of ideas. (After all, we're supposed to be disarmed.)

What strikes me about the charge, though, is that it is flatly incompatible with the other excuse for the Obama loss: that Mitt Romney lied, lied, lied with every thing he said. You don't need to smuggle in a day planner full of facts if you're just going to make stuff up. The only purpose a "cheat sheet" would serve is making sure that you accurately remembered the facts you wanted to cite, so you wouldn't give your opponent an easy out by misquoting something you had mis-remembered.

So which was it? Did he cheat, or did he lie?

America from the Road

Ed Driscoll wants to write something punishing about the 'death of middlebrow culture,' comparing the fall from Lawrence of Arabia to Easy Rider. It's true that the two films don't really compare. Lawrence is a masterpiece, something we often watched in Iraq and when preparing for Iraq -- although Lawrence was leading an insurgency, not a counterinsurgency. Still, in the high days of the Surge, we were almost doing the same thing: leading a counterinsurgency that was really an insurgency, turning the Sunni tribes against al Qaeda and its fellow travelers, because it was their pleasure.





Easy Rider is another kind of story. It has nothing to do with glory. It does have something to do with America, though. John Wayne spoke of America, and why he loved her. His reasons were simple. They had to do with what America was.



It happens that the full version of Easy Rider happens to be available online right now. You'll find a lot of harmony between what John Wayne said, and what you see in the movie. It is about Monument Valley, and the sun shining through the trees along a desert highway, about New Orleans at Mardi Gras and the good life, as it is lived in a little place, where a man draws his living from the ground.



There's something more to be said for this movie than has been said for it. It is true that it is not Lawrence of Arabia, but it never intended to be. It explores the poison of drugs, which is a topic new to the era. But there is still something about the appreciation of the place, of America as it is a place to be ridden through and enjoyed and seen. It's the place that is worth loving, worth defending, worth sacrifice.

Maybe, even after that, the hippies in the movie wouldn't have fought for it. In that way they are wrong just where Lawrence and Wayne were right.

An Outstanding Metaphor

“You may want to move on to another topic,” Obama implored Lehrer, a bit like a motorcycle thief begging a cop to take him into custody rather than let him stay with the surly biker gang that caught him.

No, no. Leave him here. We'd like a few more words.

Strandhögg

You've read the written report, but here's the video of Lars Walker capturing himself a young bride in plain combat:

Funny, That's Not How I Remember It...

Apparently a teacher up in Philly demanded a Romney/Ryan shirt be removed from the body of a girl attending her class, on the grounds that it was like wearing a KKK shirt.

We actually had the Klan show up on the county courthouse square from time to time when I was a boy, so I can see how you'd hate to be reminded of them. Still, as I recall it, the county was a Democratic monolith in those days. Don't remember them being Mormons or Catholics, either.

UPDATE: On the other hand, there's this:

@ZekeJMiller
Romney motorcade just passed a hill flying a large confederate flag in rural SW VA

Clearly, that's demonstrative. I mean, any decent human being would have stopped, turned the motorcade around, and driven however far out of the way was necessary to avoid passing a hill with a Confederate flag on it. (H/t: Instapundit.)

"My name is Khamenei, and I'm building a nuclear weapon. . . ."

He's signing on to a 9-step program to treat his addiction.   The problem?   Steps one through eight consist of the West's reversing the economic sanctions that have led to a currency crisis and riots in Teheran.   Step nine is "a 'suspension' of the medium-enriched uranium production at the deep underground site called Fordow."

We should jump on that deal.

Presidential empathy

From the National Review, an excerpt from Mitt Romney's book "No Apology":

During my campaign for governor, I decided to spend a day every few weeks doing the jobs of other people in Massachusetts.  Among other jobs, I cooked sausages at Fenway Park, worked on an asphalt paving crew, stacked bales of hay on a farm, volunteered in an emergency room, served food at a nursing home, and worked as a child-care assistant.  I’m often asked which was the hardest job – it’s child care, by a mile. 

One day I gathered trash as a garbage collector.  I stood on that little platform at the back of the truck, holding on as the driver navigated his way through the narrow streets of Boston.  As we pulled up to traffic lights, I noticed that the shoppers and businesspeople who were standing only a few feet from me didn’t even see me.  It was as if I was invisible.  Perhaps it was because a lot of us don’t think garbage men are worthy of notice; I disagree – anyone who works that hard deserves our respect.  – I wasn’t a particularly good garbage collector:  at one point, after filling the trough at the back of the truck, I pulled the wrong hydraulic lever.  Instead of pushing the load into the truck, I dumped it onto the street.  Maybe the suits didn’t notice me, but the guys at the construction site sure did:  “Nice job, Mitt,” they called.  “Why don’t you find an easier job?”  And then they good-naturedly came down and helped me pick up my mess.

"Dreams of My Father" it's not.  Was Romney just slumming for effect, after living a silver-spoon existence?   There's no doubt his wealthy father helped him get a start in life.  On the other hand, by the time his father died, Romney already had become quite successful himself, so he donated his inheritance to BYU.

Quit giving them ideas

Admiring a Paris bike-sharing program that positively encourages people to ride around without a trace of helmet protection, on the theory that more lives will be endangered by sedentary obesity than by head trauma, New York Times correspondent Elisabeth Rosenthal quotes/muses:

[I]f we wear helmets for cycling, maybe we should wear helmets when we climb ladders or get into a bath, because there are lots more injuries during those activities.”  The European Cyclists’ Federation says that bicyclists in its domain have the same risk of serious injury as pedestrians per mile traveled.

Or we could adopt the California approach:

In the United States, cities are struggling to overcome the significant practical problems of melding helmet use with bike-sharing programs — such as providing sanitized helmet dispensers at bike docking stations, says Susan Shaheen, director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Right next to the condom dispensers. Helmets are health care too, you know!   We ought to think about mandating them for pedestrians, ladder-climbers, and bathers.  But that bomb-throwing anarchist Rosenthal, she probably ate non-pasteurized cheese while she was in Paris.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

I know what he means

From a 2002 speech by Barack Obama at a Martin Luther King Day memorial service:

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but rich people are all for nonviolence.  Why wouldn’t they be?  They’ve got what they want.

Yep, whenever I decide whether to indulge in violence, my first order of business is to think through whether I have everything I want yet.  If not, all bets are off.

Another viewpoint

Just to keep things fair, Bryan Preston's alternative explanation for the President's abysmal debate performance:  "Obama wasn't just tired or off his game.  He was incoherent because his ideas stink."  Obama issued his usual complaint that he inherited a big deficit, including "two wars that were paid for on a credit card."  Then he suggested "that we take some of the money that we’re saving as we wind down two wars to rebuild America and that we reduce our deficit."  Hey, wait a minute, Preston objects:

If the two wars are paid for on a “credit card” as the president says, how then are we going to reduce the deficit by taking that money and just spending it on something else?  Wouldn’t it make more sense just to not spend that money at all?  Since, you know, we don’t have it in the first place?

A commenter chips in:

The way to fix my household budget deficit is to take the money I have already spent on the security system and somehow get it back from the ether and plunge it directly into the toilet.  This doesn’t help keep my family safe and destroys the plumbing.  And, if two wars were costing so much money . . . why enter a third in Libya, then fail to protect the people you sent there to clean up the mess.

Was that a good jobs report or a bad one?

It may have been naive to expected an un-jimmied jobs report this close to the election, but even by the loose standards we've learned to apply, this one is a doozy.  Somehow, we added fewer jobs than are needed to keep pace with a growing population, but the unemployment rate took a dive to 7.8%, the first time in 43 months it's been below 8%.  OK, you can get there by driving a phenomenal number of people out of the workforce, I guess, but the numbers still don't add up.  We added 114,000 non-farm jobs but lost 456,000 unemployed people, while the household survey showed that the number of people with jobs rose by 873,000 (seasonally adjusted) -- the highest one-month increase in 29 years.  It seems that the latter number includes 582,000 part-time jobs accepted by workers who were seeking part-time work but taking what they could get.  Total "multiple jobs holders" rose by 183,000.

Zero Hedge is having some trouble with the numbers.  Here's an interesting coincidence, for instance:  the household survey figure is 873,000 jobs, of which 582,000 are part-time, which is precisely 2/3.  Sound a bit like a plugged number?

I'm totally confused, but I take it that the unemployment number uses the household-survey jobs (873,000) instead of what Zero Hedge calls the "establishment" jobs number, which was the 114,000 figure.  Also, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has unexpectedly revised upward the disappointing jobs figures for the last three months.

Well, I just hope the jobs picture is turning around, and these aren't simply numbers that will be quietly revised downwards later, per the usual practice.

A tale of two ads

It was the RNC perspective, it was the DNC perspective.  Erika Johnsen at Hot Air shows the first two ads to run clips from this week's presidential debate.  The RNC ad splices shots of Romney explaining what he thinks has to change and why, while the President, on split-screen, grimaces.  The DNC ad cuts rapidly among Romney, a pundit, and Jim Lehrer, as Romney tries to keep the floor, Lehrer interjects "Just a moment," and the pundit says, "He just kept going.  He just kept going.  He just kept going."  The President doesn't even appear in this little drama.

Explanations for the President's lackluster performance include altitude sickness, or distraction by his secret national security duties, or spiritual exhaustion from the strain of being forced to conduct wars.  These theories are difficult to take seriously.  A more telling consensus is that the President dislikes personal confrontation, and was at an unfair advantage because Romney lied.  (See here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for a sampling from the nearly 9 million search engine hits on that theme.  You would be hard-pressed to find a comments thread on the subject that omits this favorite theory.)  What did he lie about?  That's not so clear, but a central argument is that Romney misrepresented his own platform.

The latter two explanations -- a distaste for personal confrontation and an inability to confront "lies" -- are more related than they might seem at first.  Nothing in the President's background or career has equipped him to grapple with his opponents' different worldviews.  He and his set dismiss them without really trying to understand them.  Unlike Reagan, for instance, he did not start out on one end of the political spectrum and change to another over time.  He spent his life and career among like-minded political activists in academia, in community work, and in public office.  It's even possible he gets no more accurate information about Romney's platform than the average voter gets from a hostile media.  He seemed genuinely stunned by Romney's assertion that he did not propose to cut taxes by $5 trillion.  Strange!  Every time I heard Romney on that subject, he stressed that, although he wanted to lower rates, no taxpayer should get excited about the prospect of a lower bill, because the idea was to get rid of a lot of deductions in order to make the changes revenue-neutral.  That is, he proposes a flatter and simpler tax structure rather than lower taxes overall.  But unless the President is a phenomenal actor, he was surprised when Romney corrected him about his platform.  In preparation with his sparring partner, John Kerry, the President may have spent all his time preparing to respond to a caricature.

Is it really possible that the President assumed Romney would get up on the debate stage and advocate the parody of his own platform that is all anyone had been allowed to see on network TV or in the New York Times?  Maybe so.  Maybe the President really is that unused to arguing with anyone outside his bubble.  He doesn't get a charge out of meeting people on their own intellectual ground and trying to bring them around to his point of view; he's more at ease with a captive, silent audience.  As Cassandra so memorably put it, he's like a prize fighter who's used to fixed fights:  shocked and helpless the first time his handlers put him in the ring with someone ready, willing, and able to land a punch.

Interesting analogy

"The rich are hoarding all the toys," laments the New York Times:

Imagine a kindergarten with 100 students, lavishly supplied with books, crayons and toys. 

Yet you gasp: one avaricious little boy is jealously guarding a mountain of toys for himself.  A handful of other children are quietly playing with a few toys each, while 90 of the children are looking on forlornly — empty-handed.

Shouldn't the grownups step in and force the mean little boy to share?  Wait a minute -- if the American people are a bunch of babies, who's the grownup in this analogy?

We're from the government . . . .

John Stossel recounts the experiences of his intern looking for a job by way of government-funded jobs programs, which turn out to be centers for signing up for unemployment benefits.  Unjob programs, except for the public employees drawing checks for running the programs.

Has anyone here ever gotten a job through a government jobs program?  Or known anyone who did?

The Gas War

I know people are pretty happy with the debate last night, but this picture from Drudge is pretty powerful too:

It's hard to remember prices that low. What's not hard to remember is the President's commitment to higher energy costs for Americans. He has always been clear that he wants to restrain our consumption by pursuing higher prices for the American consumer.



He didn't get 'cap and trade,' and we aren't quite to Europe's gas price levels, but he has a partial success to chalk up here. Energy prices are much higher than they used to be: as the sign shows, gas prices have doubled.