Vindication

From Jim Geraghty at National Review:

Here is Geraghty's commentary, which I can't improve.   Great stuff:

I can hear the liberal cries of outrage, so to recap: The interrogations of KSM (which included waterboarding) and the interrogation of Hassan Ghul (held in “black site” prisons) were key to identifying the courier; the president then authorized military action in a foreign country without going to the United Nations or informing the host government; the military action was unilateral, and we did not consult with our allies; Congress was not informed of the military action; and it increasingly appears that no serious effort was made to treat Osama bin Laden as a criminal (reading him his rights, etc.). The monitoring of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s phone call was a result of an extensive global wiretapping system. Furthermore, as Charles Krauthammer notes, the helicopters used in the raid came from Bagram and Jalalabad; if we had withdrawn from Afghanistan on the antiwar Left’s timetable, we would have had no bases from which to launch this operation.

On a similar tack, Victor Davis Hanson nails the Obama administration's hypocrisy:

Senator Obama opposed tribunals, renditions, Guantanamo, preventive detention, Predator-drone attacks, the Iraq War, wiretaps, and intercepts — before President Obama either continued or expanded nearly all of them, in addition to embracing targeted assassinations, new body scanning and patdowns at airports, and a third preemptive war against an oil-exporting Arab Muslim nation — this one including NATO efforts to kill the Qaddafi family. The only thing more surreal than Barack Obama’s radical transformation is the sudden approval of it by the once hysterical Left. In Animal Farm and 1984 fashion, the world we knew in 2006 has simply been airbrushed away.

Times change. People say one thing when they are candidates for public office, quite another as officeholders with responsibility of governance. Obama as president naturally does not wish to be treated in the manner in which he once treated President Bush. Conservatives might resent Obama’s prior demagoguery at a critical period in our national security, as much as they are relieved that he seems to have grown up and repudiated it.

Okay, the public perhaps understands all that hypocrisy as the stuff of presidential politics. But I think it will not quite accept the next step of taking full credit in hyperbolic first-person fashion for operations that would have been impossible had his own views prevailed.

Birthdays Today

Really great birthdays today.  

First, today is the birthday of Sigmund Freud, born in 1856.   Freud was, of course, the author of the theory of psychoanalysis that dominated much of the middle part of the 20th Century, at least in high European, Western culture.   Freud has never been my cup of tea; I've always thought that his emphasis on childhood sexuality and sexuality generally as the main motivator of human action is both simplistic and sensationalistic.   I think human beings are both more complex and more boring than the sex-crazed loonies that seem to appear from Freud's world-view.   I also think his emphasis on dream interpretation is just silly; and that his use of the "talking cure" as the mode of treatment for depressed or neurotic or even psychotic individuals has had a horrible effect on our entire culture -- we now seem to believe (or, at least, liberals do ) that any problem can be solved simply by talking about it.   But it's hard to overstate his influence on our common cultural vocabulary.   My favorite work of his is probably Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), which deals with the repression of aggressive impulses by society and the formation of a super-ego which internalizes that societal repression.   Essentially Freud says that, while we need civilization to survive, civilization also inherently makes us unhappy because it represses our sexual and aggressive impulses.      "Civilization," Freud writes, "therefore, obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city."

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It's also the birthday of Orson Welles, born in 1915.   Welles directed arguably the greatest American movie ever, Citizen Kane, when he was 25, and followed it with some remarkable, lesser-known works, including The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil, as wells as his remarkable series of Shakespearean dramas, Macbeth, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight (focusing on the character of Falstaff).   Here is a great, great scene from a movie he took over directing and starred in, but did not receive credit for directing, The Third Man, with his running mate, Joseph Cotton:




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It's also Willie Mays' 80th birthday.   Possibly the greatest baseball player ever; surely the most exciting, Mays provided probably the greatest World Series catch ever, with this grab against the Indians in the Polo Grounds in the 1954 series:



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Finally, it's also the 28th birthday of one of our favorite actresses, from one of our favorite shows, Friday Night Lights, Adrianne Palicki, who has been a Girl of the Day in the past, but obviously deserves a reprise:

Girl Friday - Miss Wisconsin

The reigning Miss Wisconsin, Kimberly Sawyer, was apparently a college softball player at St. Norbert in Green Bay and has two cats, named Mickey and Joe after Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio.   I mean, seriously, could that get any cooler?

Update on the "Narrative"

The use of the word "narrative" to describe a sequence of facts relayed by political operatives -- it has been often used by Jay Carney, the President's Press Secretary in connection with the bin Laden raid -- has to stop.   Are they fools?  Don't they know that when the rest of us hear the word "narrative" we think "story" or "fiction" or "made-up plot"?   They should always just say, here are the facts as we know them right now, period.   Just the facts, ma'am, in other words.  

Anyway, the "narrative" for the bin Laden raid has been under some scrutiny for days now, and appears to have changed significantly.  Where initially bin Laden was an armed participant in a 40-minute firefight, it now appears that he was never armed, and that the firefight was very brief.   There is also at least some suggestions that he was captured, or else could have been captured, and was shot anyway, perhaps afterwards.  

I guess I won't lose sleep over it, one way or another, but it sure makes hypocrites out of all the liberals who claimed we needed to give due process rights to al Qaeda fighters we captured and afford them all of the rights they would get as uniformed combatants for a sovereign enemy under the Geneva Conventions. 

Here is a good timeline from Fox News that summarizes the evolving understanding of the facts about the raid -- a "narrative" about the "narrative," if you will.    

Pujols and the Concept of a "Decline Phase"

Three months ago, I wrote this in answer to the question "Is Pujols Worth It":

If Pujols' demand is for $30 million a year for 10 years, in a word, no.  Pujols will be 32 in the first year of his new contract.   If you pay him, you'll have a right to expect him to put up all-time great years for that amount of money.  But, of the 150 highest OPS years in baseball history for hitters (on base average plus slugging average), only 34 (roughly 22%) occurred when the player was 32 or older.  Of the Top 50 OPS years, only two happened when the player was 37 or older, and both were by Barry Bonds when he was, shall we say, doing some suspicious things.  And, the three players who Pujols' career most resembles through age 30 (again, through the miracle of online baseball statistics) -- Jimmie Foxx, Frank Robinson and Ken Griffey, Jr. -- had a grand total of 17 seasons between them with an OPS of 1.000 or more and none of them occurred when they were 32 years old or older.

As sad as it makes me to say this, I think I was prescient.  Pujols appears to now be officially in his decline phase.   He currently has an OPS of .725, and this with a red-hot Matt Holliday and Lance Berkman protecting the hell out of him.   His OPS in April of .794 was the lowest full month OPS for Albert since July of his rookie year, and it's only gone down since then as he's been slumping through the first week of May.  And, as weird as it sounds, this pattern give me some pause:

Year              OPS
2008               1.114
2009               1.101
2010               1.011
2011                 .725 (through May 5)

That pattern to me can be read as slight decline followed by significant decline followed by catastrophic-falling-off-the-cliff decline.   Now, while I fully expect Pujols to turn his season around and end up with an OPS that's decent, it wouldn't surprise me if he's going to finish with an OPS in the .900 range.   A very good player, to be sure, but not someone you want to sign to a $30 million a year contract.   He sure looks to me like he's in a decline phase.
  

Girl Thursday - Evan Rachel Wood

I much prefer my "Girl of the Day" to be an actress from the 1930s through 1950s or so; somehow looking at young actresses from today's films seems a little, well, yucky.  I have two beautiful daughters, after all, and I don't like to think of myself as ogling some girl who could easily be their older sister. 

On the other hand, the wife (the beautiful and still scrumptious JEB) and I are currently watching Mildred Pierce on HBO (we DVR'ed it when it played a month or so ago), and it's set in the 1930s, so I guess I can pretend as if the young actress who plays the evil daughter Veda in the show isn't actually the now 23 year-old Evan Rachel Wood.  (Note: this is the actress who plays the daughter at an older age; another, younger girl, plays Veda as a child.   Still evil as hell.)  

Anyway, Evan Rachel Wood is a very fine actress and a very beautiful girl, so she's the Girl of the Day:

Thoughts on Blowing the Osama PR

I am willing to cut the Obama administration some slack for some of the public relations miscues that have occurred since the successful mission to kill Osama bin Laden.    They are ably outlined here by Jim Treacher at the Daily Caller, in his article "Obama administration takes victory lap in clown car":

Then there’s the official narrative of the raid, which has already gone through more versions than the Star Wars movies. First Bin Laden had a gun; then he didn’t. He hid behind one of his wives, who was killed; wait, no, scratch that, she’s alive and wasn’t his wife. Maybe? Now Leon Panetta says he and President Obama didn’t actually see the whole thing go down, after the White House made a point of releasing that instantly iconic picture of the whole gang watching it go down.

Isn’t it kind of important to get all that stuff right the first time? Personally, I don’t care if Bin Laden was holding a tray of freshly baked cookies and asking our boys if they wanted any tea when they shot him. You’ve heard of suicide by cop? As far as I’m concerned, Osama Bin Laden committed suicide by 9/11. But now the White House just looks like a bunch of bumblers. If you’re not exactly sure what happened, why give details you might have to retract? How in the world do you screw up a win this big?

And here by Stephen Green in his article "The Gang That Could Shoot Straight -- But Not Much Else":

The plan for killing Osama Bin Laden was perfectly conceived and as perfectly executed as any special forces operation since Israel’s raid on Entebbe. But the follow-through has been strange at best, sometimes bordering on incompetence.

First, there was that weird burial at sea “in accordance with Islamic tradition.” There, the White House managed to annoy most everyone. There are those like me, who thought Bin Laden’s corpse was treated with too much respect, to those in the Islamic world now inflamed because it wasn’t really done properly after all.

Then there was the president’s oddly bloodless speech Sunday night. For almost ten years we’d been trying to get the guy who murdered 3,000 Americans, attacked our military HQ, and ripped the heart out of the New York City skyline. The effort spanned two continents, four or five countries, a Caribbean Navy base, and the persistent efforts of two presidents, the American intelligence community, and the best of the best of our special forces. And yet President Obama sounded as if he were announcing a “worthwhile Canadian initiative.”

Now the Administration can’t even decide whether or not to release a photo of the body. They didn’t have a PR plan in place before the killing? It must be amateur night at the White House, because what I’m hearing sounds increasingly like karaoke. More specifically, a Last Call group chorus of “My Way,” with the participants too drunk to remember all the words.

And, finally, a less snarky round-up of inconsistencies in the administration's story by Amanda Carey, again at The Daily Caller:   

The White House also had to backtrack on early reports that Bin Laden was armed and engaged in combat when U.S. forces swept the compound. On Monday, a senior official at a Pentagon briefing said that Osama used his wife as a shield and “was firing behind her.”

Brennan also said at his briefing Monday that the terrorist leader joined in the fight when the raid was underway. “He [bin Laden] was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in. And whether or not he got off any rounds, I quite frankly don’t know,” he said.

In Tuesday narrative change, however, Carney told reporters that Bin Laden was actually not armed during the raid.

I think the first two commentaries are too harsh.   As I said, I am willing to cut the Obama administration some slack on this.   We are talking about a huge undertaking, involving many layers of bureaucracy and much secrecy, where plans and tactics were likely kept secret even from most of the people in the White House -- and properly so, as information about such an operation would be on a strict "need-to-know" basis -- and where the events took place around the world in the middle of the night in what is aptly referred to as the "fog of war."   I get how some details would be mistaken.   It happens.  It's like the "telephone game" that kids play:  someone tells their superior in Afghanistan that X happened; the superior translates that to his superior back in the U.S.; that officer tells someone further up the chain of command; then the White House is told, perhaps at the Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State level; then the information is finally trickled back down to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney at the podium in the press room.   Not surprising that he might get some things wrong.

But (and this is a big "but") the one thing that this trail of misinformation shows beyond dispute is that, at the level of tactical details, the White House had little first-hand knowledge and little input into what was going on.   Other than giving the ultimate order (which, as I've written below, any President would have done), the White House had little involvement.   And appropriately so; civilian leaders set policy, military personnel plan and conduct the actual operations.  

But when they then take credit for their own "bravery" and act as if Obama was somehow remotely conducting the operation as tactical commander, taking away credit from the brave SEALs and the unknown number of intelligence operatives around the world who likely risked their lives to develop the information to lead to bin Laden, that's the part that really irks me.  

Obama would have gotten credit for being President when the Osama takedown occurred anyway.   He could have given credit where credit was due to the servicemen and intelligence personnel who made it happen.  He didn't need to seize the credit from them and trumpet his own wonderfulness.  It shows a good deal of insecurity, methinks. 

 

Thoughts on the Osama Photo

A good rule when thinking about any conspiracy is that, when the number of people who would have to keep quiet about X -- where X is something really really big, like the assassination of President Kennedy, or, now, the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan -- then the likelihood of there being a successful conspiracy to keep X quiet is vanishingly small.   So, if I never saw the picture of Osama bin Laden dead, I still wouldn't believe that there was a conspiracy to pretend that we got him, and that he's still alive, because such a conspiracy would have to involve hundreds of men and women whom, I believe, wouldn't countenance being part of it.   Men like the men of the SEAL team that took him down, men like our military leaders, and, yes, even men and women who work in the White House, even this White House.   We forget:  there are honorable people in the world, after all.  

I don't need to see the picture to prove to my satisfaction that we got him.    Weighed against the likelihood of it being used as a propaganda tool to enflame the Middle East and Islamists around the world, I'd say not releasing it is an easy call.   Another easy call that Obama has apparently gotten right.   It's the hard things -- what to do about Iran and Syria; what to do about our national debt; what to do about our unsustainable Medicare and Social Security programs -- that's when Obama has trouble.

Girl of the Day - Very Oldy, But Very Goody

Looking back, I think I've noted Mary Pickford and Clara Bow on The Regular Guy Believes, but I don't think I've ever mentioned Lillian Gish, who was arguably the greatest actress of the silent film era.   She, of course, appeared, in Griffith's landmark Birth of a Nation, but she also starred in several other Griffith films, notably Intolerance and Way Down East.  Here is the famous climax of Way Down East, in which Gish floats toward a waterfall on an ice floe (flip ahead to about 7:50 in the video)... it's absurd as a matter of physics, but brilliant as movie-making, particularly in the era before special effects:

The Decision

Much will be made of Barack Obama's decision to order what essentially is the assassination of Osama bin Laden, using Seal Team 6 "behind enemy lines" inside our erstwhile ally, Pakistan.   Certainly he deserves credit for making the decision, although in a somewhat negative way.   Surely no one can deny that, faced with the same intelligence, and offered the same advice by the American military and intelligence chiefs, any number of other actual and potential Presidents would have given the same order.  Indeed, it's hard to imagine a circumstance where anyone wouldn't give the same order -- George W. Bush certainly would have; so would John McCain, or Mitt Romney, or Sarah Palin for that matter.   The only Presidents where we have any doubt about whether they would issue such an order are, of course, Democrats -- Carter, Clinton, and Obama himself.   And perhaps Obama most of all:  isn't it true that, one of the main reasons we want to give Obama credit for making the decision and giving the order is that, for most people, we just didn't think he had the balls to do it?   In that sense, the credit we give him is negative... he gets credit for doing his job because Obama's incompetence, vacillation and weakness have become the default assumption about him.   He didn't f*** this one thing up, so we give him credit.  

So, two cheers for Obama on the great triumph of giving an order that anyone else would have given.   He's not my hero; the men of Seal Team 6 and the other brave servicemen serving in Afghanistan and Iraq... those guys are my heroes.  

Blessed John Paul II

Pope John Paul II was beatified today, the first step toward sainthood.   John Paul II was arguably the greatest man of the 20th Century.   The only man who even might be in the argument would be Winston Churchill, in my judgment.  FDR and Ronald Reagan and Gandhi might be in the next tier down.  

The crowds in Rome agree:  

The Donald

A few points:

1. He's not a real Republican and not a real conservative.   Anyone who thinks so is drunk.
2. He's not really pro-Life.   Anyone who thinks so is stoned.
3. He's not really a billionaire.   If he were to really run for President, presumably we'd get to look behind the Potemkin village of creditors that make up the Donald's empire.
4. No one, and I repeat, no one can be elected President who's been a game show host.
5. No one, and I repeat, no one can be elected who says "motherf***ers" in public, as Trump did today.
6. Finally, we can't have this hair in the White House.  

Americans can't be stupid enough to elect a jerk just because he's posing as a faux populist.  

Or can they?

Girl of the Day - From the Royal Wedding File

Bittersweet, of course, because she died too young, but Princess Diana was certainly worthy of Girl of the Day honors.   Kate Middleton seems a little more grounded, but she's not quite the innocent flower Di was either.

UPDATE:  Okay, I admit that Kate Middleton is pretty cute too.   Hard to imagine keeping your cool in such a circus, but she seems to be doing okay:



Feelin' Gassy

I filled up this morning.  I usually buy premium gas for the daddy-mobile, and regular for the wife's minivan.  Today premium was at $4.20/gallon in Milwaukee, and a fill-up cost a round $60.00.   Ouch!

Of course, I am one of those troglodyte Republicans who actually believes that gas prices are just like any other price in being subject to suppy and demand.   "Subject to" is not quite right, though; it sounds as though we're saying the price of gas would be something different if not for those pesky supplies and the equally pesky demands.   That's goofy:  a price simply is a function of supply and demand and nothing else.   In the case of gasoline, we have increasing global demand (read: China and India) and flat supply, particularly given turmoil in the Middle East.   Presto:  higher prices.   It ain't rocket science.

And, I am also one of those wags who notices things like people who complain about gas prices while waiting in line to buy their Starbucks coffee at, oh, twenty-five dollars a gallon or so!   When the price is high for chi-chi coffee, our culture just pays it and pats itself on the back for being so hip and trendy.   When the price is high for gas... why, that gives the media a chance to beat up on oil companies and "the rich"... can't miss that opportunity.  

So I'm not having a hizzy over higher oil prices.   But I do think that any fool can solve the problem with the stroke of a pen.   And by "any fool" I mean President Obama. 

Consider this article by Will Collier, entitled "Thanks to Obama, Gas Jumps in a Flash."     Collier details how gasoline prices spiked in 2008 and then immediately dropped when President Bush issued a Presidential Order permitting offshore drilling off America's coasts.   Here's the money passage:

Take a look at this chart compiled by metalprices.com. It’s the price of a barrel of crude oil over the past 5 years.

See that big peak in the middle? That was the last oil spike, in the summer of 2008. Notice how the price hit a high point, then fell off a cliff afterwards?

The day corresponding to that peak, an all-time high of $145.16/barrel, was July 14, 2008. By some strange coincidence, that was the very same day then-President George W. Bush lifted, by executive order, a federal ban on offshore oil drilling.

Bush’s order was, of course, immediately dismissed by the “experts.” Reuters waved away the action as “a largely symbolic move unlikely to have any short-term impact on high gasoline costs.” Barack Obama’s campaign lectured that if “offshore drilling would provide short-term relief at the pump or a long-term strategy for energy independence, it would be worthy of our consideration, regardless of the risks. But most experts, even within the Bush administration, concede it would do neither.”

The movement left was even more dismissive. ClimateProgress.org blasted The Washington Post for failing to headline their story about the order “Offshore Drilling Raises Oil Prices.” In response to Bush’s assertion that additional offshore extraction could equal current U.S. production in 10 years, they editorialized: “Yes, and monkeys could fly out of my butt” (emphasis in original).

There was just one problem: reality. Even though, as critics were eager to point out, any additional American drilling was years in the future, oil prices immediately went into free-fall. By Friday, July 18, the price of a barrel of crude had dropped to $128.94, a 12% decrease. A month later, on August 14, the price had fallen to $115.05. In spectacular fashion, Bush’s academic and media critics were proven seriously wrong.

For commodities traders who’d been pricing oil based on a supposition of scarcity, the potential for millions of additional barrels on the market hit like a thunderbolt. The simple act of putting America’s resources on the table popped the oil bubble, and a stunning price drop followed in short order. By election day, November 4, the price of a barrel of crude had plummeted to $70.84 — a 51% decrease in less than five months.

By contrast, what did the Wonder Boy in the White House do?  By the Christmas before Obama took office, gasoline was down to $30 a barrel, 80% off its July 2008 peak.   But, then, as Collier describes it:

Obama had been president-elect for all of five days when he announced his intention to rescind Bush’s order. Oil prices started going up again in January of 2009 and steadily increasing ever since. Obama Energy Secretary Ken Salazar announced a highly restrictive offshore leasing policy last December, and the Bush executive order was officially reversed on February 8, 2011.

The price of crude that day was $85.85. By April 19, it had risen to $107.18, with no end in sight.

There is little doubt in my mind that the price of gasoline could drop practically overnight if America would once again permit aggressive drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, off the California coast, and on the North Slope of Alaska.   The environment is  wonderful thing to save, if you can afford it; but we can't.  

Drill, baby, drill!

P.S.  If gasoline prices continue to go up, one odd result could be that it makes Sarah Palin a much more viable Presidential candidate, because she would be the one candidate who could say with credibility "I told you so" about energy costs.

Why I Became A Conservative

Ace of Spades asked this question in a post today.   Here was my comment:

As weird as it seems to look back on, I became a conservative while I was at Duke University getting a Ph.D. in English in the 1980s -- the time when Stanley Fish and Frank Lentricchia and Frederic Jameson were all over the place and Duke was "hot" in academia, mainly because its leftists were even further left than other schools' leftists.   I thought of myself as a left-liberal, although I didn't much know what that meant; mostly I just liked being thought of as someone who liked the cool books (Foucault, Derrida, the Frankfurt School, etc.), and someone who thought the same way as everyone else.  

Anyway, one day in the department office, a twenty-something grad student woman I knew asked me to sign a petition that would demand that the University Health Clinic provide free abortions to students.   I declined to sign; if I remember, my reaction was more toward the notion of university money going to pay for it, rather than a reaction against abortion per se.   But the withering, absolutely hateful reaction from the woman that I got really took be aback.   I had immediately become for her a pariah simply because I wouldn't subscribe to her little free abortion on demand petition.  It seemed so odd a reaction on her part, and it made me feel very uncomfortable and, frankly, mad.   I was a good guy, I thought the right thoughts -- how could she look at me like that?

It got me to thinking, though.  At the time I was single with a capital-S, and, looking back, I was behaving pretty badly with young women I knew.   I worked in a bar, and it gave me lots of opportunities, if you know what I mean.  When I honestly examined my own conduct (albeit not without a lot of backsliding), at some point I concluded that my attitude on abortion had a lot to do with empowering me to act badly.   I still think that's true about abortion-on-demand; it's basically been a disaster for women and a boon for irresponsible young men.   So I began re-thinking my own prejudices, which is what I had thought was supposed to be part of the liberal arts anyway.  (Surprise!  It wasn't.)   And I, over the course of a few months, suddenly found myself becoming Pro-Life, which I've been ever since.

The truth for me about becoming a conservative is that, once you've flipped on abortion, the rest follows, because once you start confronting the question of personal responsibility, a whole host of conservative positions  -- on marriage, children, work, taxes, etc. -- all flow from that original concept.   (It helped that, at about the same time, my friend Ira introduced me to National Review too.)

P.S.  I managed to get the Duke Ph.D. by, frankly, concealing my conservatism in my dissertation.    But it was a close run thing.   Luckily, I'm now far, far out of academia, and safely ensconced in the Real World.   Managed to become a Catholic too, or at least marry a Catholic and raise Catholic children.
 
P.P.S.  A lot of it too, as early Bruce Springsteen would say, was just "ooooh, ooooh, growing up."   Cheers. 

Earth Day? Really?

This Friday is the day we celebrate "Earth Day," a quasi-religious, borderline public holiday that will spawn all kinds of rhapsodies from the mainstream media about global warming and similar human-inflicted ailments of the planet. 

This Friday is also, of course, an actually religious holy day, Good Friday, consecrated by Christians the world over as the day their Savior, Jesus Christ, was crucified and died for our sins.  

One of these is real and important.   The other is manufactured and trivial.  

Would Muslims tolerate Earth Day on the first day of Ramadan?  Would Jews tolerate Earth Day landing smack atop Rosh Hashanah? 

Didn't anyone think that, maybe, just maybe, having a secular tree-worshipping holiday right on top of one of the most holy, if not the holiest day in Christendom, might be a tad offensive?

Once again, Catholics are the one religion, the one "minority," that it's acceptable to offend. 

I'm just sayin'.  

OK, Now I Am Depressed

Here's a graph from the Yale economist, Robert Schiller, showing home prices adjusted for inflation since 1890.   The projection at the end suggests that the housing bubble we have been in still has a way to fall before it gets back to historical norms.   Great!   For those of you who took out a bunch of home equity... bon appetit!    You're underwater!

Luckily, I'm healthy enough to work until I'm, oh, eighty or so.  

Taxes v. Dentistry

After having completed my federal and state taxes over the weekend I spent this morning having two cavities drilled.   On the whole, I preferred the dentistry.  

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Some random thoughts on taxes:

1. The arguments about taxes in this country are insipid, and backwards.   The premise of much of the political debate is focused on whether the "rich" (an elastic category) pay too little in taxes and should be made to pay more as a matter of fairness (the Democratic position).   Republicans oppose the Democratic position, but their opposition is essentially couched in terms of the proposition that raising taxes on the rich would hurt the economy (with the implication that, if it didn't, then raising taxes on the rich would be okay).   The truth is, of course, that the rich are overtaxed by any reasonable measure of fairness, not undertaxed.   And the converse is true:  the non-rich are undertaxed, not overtaxed, again as a matter of fairness.   How could it be fair that 45% of Americans pay no federal income tax at all?  And don't tell me that they pay Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes.   Everyone knows, or ought to know, that those payroll taxes do not begin to pay for those programs, so the truth is that, as things stand now, that everyone will get back more than they pay in for Social Security and Medicare.   But no one, and certainly not the national GOP, will dare say that the rich are overtaxed and the poor undertaxed.   So we let the argument go on in all its vapidity, with the result that we have a nation of deadbeats who think it's perfectly moral to mooch off the so-called "rich."

2.  Doing taxes is far, far too complex.   I do my own but I (a) have relatively simple taxes to do; and (b) have relatively high skills with reading legalese, with following step-by-step instructions, and with doing simple arithmetic.   It still took me most of Saturday and Sunday.   For the average person, I suspect it's a nearly impossible task.   And so we have a huge industry whose sole purpose is tax compliance -- preparers, accountants, tax attorneys, etc.   This is an entirely unproductive sector, and a huge drain on the time and money of the nation, a drain which has been estimated here (by Arthur Laffer no less.... yes, that Arthur Laffer) at $431 billion a year.   Simplifying the tax code should be a major priority... but, alas, I fear that the tax compliance industry is "too big to fail."

3.  I paid roughly 27% of my income in federal and state taxes, including self-employment taxes (both employer and employee shares of Social Security and Medicare).   I paid another 3% of my income in state property taxes.   In Wisconsin we have a state sales tax of 5.6%, so I likely pay another 4% or so of income to sales tax (food purchases are not taxable).   Then there's licenses, fees, gasoline taxes, etc.   So let's round up all of those and I guess it's pretty likely that I paid somewhere around 35-40% of my income to taxes.    Compare that to:  mortgage (about 9% of income this year); new car payments (about 6%); tuition at Catholic School (about 3%), health insurance (about 8%), retirement savings (about 10%).   So I pay in taxes about what I pay for my house, my cars, my kids education, my health care, and my retirement savings.    And what exactly do I get for it again?   Forget about the real estate bubble and even forget about the so-called "higher education bubble."   What we have now is the worst of all bubbles.... the "government bubble."   Government, viewed purely as an asset, is wildly over-priced.   Sooner or later, people are going to wake up and realize that it's just not worth it.

Meanwhile Back to the Biggest and Bestest Birthday of Them All

I had made the command decision on Tuesday that my beautiful, brilliant, most-wonderfulest-wife-ever wife, the saintly and scrumptious at the same time Joan, was too precious to blog about on her birthday, too important to reduce to a mere blog posting on what is frankly somewhat of a puny blog to begin with.    That was on April 12... a date which shall now live in infamy, or at least in the Husband Hall of Shame.   Once again, my judgment failed -- an "epic fail," as the kids say nowadays.   How could I have failed to know that Joanie -- one of my handful of readers to begin with, and the only one who keeps me warm at night -- would have wanted a shout out from The Regular Guy, or at least a birthday wish from The Right Curmudgeon?   Fool!   Scoundrel!   Idiot!   (Spoken with an Irish accent, as in "eedjit.")  

And such a beauty too!   Here she is at about 11, looking remarkably like daughter Annie methinks.   (Sorry for the blurry pic... this is a picture I've carried with love in my wallet for lo these many years.)  

And here she is at 21 or so, in college, two years before I met her.   Did she know that her undoing was just around the corner?   Did she sense a short and squatty presence approaching?   Did she have a premonition that her life would soon be tied forever to a Protestant know-nothing whom she would have to work assiduously the rest of her life to turn into a semi-Catholic know-something?   Like Mona Lisa, her look seems to suggest she knew more than she was letting on.   Poor girl!   Man, what a hot ticket, though!   (Again, the picture is blurry because it has been carried in the Regular Guy's wallet for years; it's probably his favorite picture, and one he will occasionally take out on long plane rides or out of town on business just to provide a little sense of what he's missing and a reminder of what a lucky man the RegGuy is!)  

And here she is now at.... well, we won't go into that... the Mother of Three, the First, Ever and Only Wife, and the best, most Christian, smartest, prettiest girl I know:

So, Happy Birthday, my darling.   I won't make that mistake again.   :)

P.S.   The flowers were also to get me out of the doghouse.

Birthdays Yesterday - Ira

I missed blogging yesterday, so I missed mentioning the big birthdays on April 13th.   Yesterday was the birthday (53?) of one of my best friends from my graduate school days, and the best man at my wedding, Ira.   Ira probably did more than anyone else in turning me in my 20s from shallow liberalism to I-hope-somewhat-less-shallow conservatism; from being unthinkingly pro-choice to ardently pro-Life; and from the silly hate-the-rich socialism so characteristic of the non-productive classes often found on college campuses to... well, let's just say that I have a more adult view of the purposes of government worth taxing me for now that I have actual income to tax.   Thanks, Ira!   And, Happy Birthday!  

Girl(s) of the Day - Laker Girls

The NBA playoffs are on the way this week.  My pick to win the championship?   Well, I'd love to see Derrick Rose and the Bulls (with Dukie Carlos Boozer at power forward) come out of the East.   And I'd love to see Tim Duncan make one more run at his fifth title in the West.   And I'd love to see the Miami Heat and Lebron James make it to the Finals, after a season of being vilified for having had the temerity to do what nearly anyone would do when faced with the same choice.   (What?  Rather than play out my career in Cleveland, I can choose instead to pursue and likely win championships at some point playing in Miami, a world-class tourist destination that's warm year-round filled with (ahem) available young supermodels and assorted other attractive young femmes?   Really?  Forget about "the Decision".... what's to decide?)

But what I think is going to happen is that the Lakers and the Celtics are going to make one more run before Kobe Bryant of the Lakers and Kevin Garnett et al. of the Celtics are too old.   One more great series between LA and Boston.   And, in the end, I think, as I have long thought, that Kobe Bryant is just too good, too tough, too ruthless, too much of an end-of-game killer.   He wants his sixth ring to match Michael Jordan and stake his claim for the "greatest ever."   Lakers in 7.

And, of course, they also have the best cheerleaders in the world:

VDH on the President's Speech

Victor Davis Hanson eviscerates Obama in this post from last night analyzing the President's speech yesterday on the debt crisis:

The president gave the sort of scare speech he not long ago warned against, and blasted the income-tax rates he not long ago agreed were necessary — in a context in which he has just presented a budget with a $1.6 trillion deficit of the sort he now says is unsustainable, and has warned about recklessly voting against raising the debt ceiling in a fashion that he himself had once done, in a larger landscape in which he had once damned attacking Middle East countries in optional wars, Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention, intercepts, wiretaps, Predators, and leaving troops in Iraq, and then embraced or expanded all that and more (this list is infinite and includes everything from drilling to campaign financing to earmarks).

These weird about-faces raise interesting questions that transcend the current politics of the deficit:
a) Has Obama in his past careers never been called to account and so reached a point where simply being Obama means that we are not supposed to apply standards of accuracy, memory, and consistency to him in the way we do to all others?
b) Or does an absent-minded Obama carelessly make up things up ad hoc as he goes along, forgetting what he said earlier, but secure that his hope-and-change delivery of the moment will so mesmerize the audience that no one will remember or care if at times he ends up saying exactly the opposite of what he had said earlier?
c) Or is he so blatantly partisan a politician that he has no principles at all and knowingly says things that are aimed at appealing to 51 percent of the public at any given moment, and therefore will always change with public opinion?
d) Or is he so cynical that he understands campaign rhetoric has nothing to do with actual governance, and so he is allowed to say something that he knows in advance that he is not bound to follow?
e) Or is he so bored with the trying job that he feels no responsibility to offer reliable, consistent governance, and so rashly throws things out and then hastens back to the more enjoyable PR aspects of the office?

I vote f) All of the above.

Quick Thoughts on GOP Presidential Candidates

Some very quick thoughts on GOP candidates:

1. Romney.   Romney should not be the nominee and cannot win.   If the GOP nominates Romney they will have given away the best argument they have against Obama, namely, that Obamacare is an abomination.   This is because Romneycare in Massachusetts has apparently also become an abomination:

As a health care plan, Romneycare is an unmitigated fiasco. It has caused costs to skyrocket, insurance premiums to soar and nonprofit providers like Blue Cross to suffer hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. 

But as a political policy, Romneycare is nearly unparalleled in Republican history. It has destroyed one front-runner’s presidential hopes (Romney’s) and helped undermine an entire presidency. For, as Barack Obama’s supporters keep reminding us, Romneycare was the precursor to Obamacare.

2. Trump.   Really?   Donald Trump is no conservative.   He's an egomaniac, and an opportunist, and he's apparently bent on destroying the GOP's chances of defeating Obama by running as an independent if he doesn't win the Republican nomination (and he won't).   And yet he's apparently running well based on pure name recognition in Republican straw polls.   Eek!  If he's serious, it's a train wreck for the GOP.

3. Anybody else?   Palin?   In a word, no.   She won't run, because she'd have to give up too much money to do so.   Bachman?  She's Palin lite and Palin prettier.   I like her, but she's too far out there to win.   Pawlenty or Daniels?  If we wanted boring and unelectable, we'd nominate Romney to begin with.   Huckabee?   Please.   The country cannot survive a President whose name sounds like a character from Li'l Abner.   Herman Cain?  No way.  Nice man, not a pol, not going to win an election.

4.  The real deals.   So, in my view anyway, the race is wide open for someone to come in from the outside who could capture the GOP's imagination, someone who hasn't run for national office before, but who has significant media appeal,and who is the real deal on deficit reduction and conservative ideals.   My choice right now:  Paul Ryan/Marco Rubio.   And I'm not the only one.... here's William Kristol in the Weekly Standard:  

On April 3, Paul Ryan and Florida senator Marco Rubio appeared as guests on Fox News Sunday. Ryan explained and defended his budget. Rubio called for more decisive action in Libya. Later that day, I wrote a short item half-jokingly suggesting (once again) a Ryan-Rubio ticket in 2012. This is just a small sample of the emails we received:

• I love the two, couldn’t be any better or smarter pair for 2012. They have my vote! I could finally sleep at night with those two running the country. Pray they team up and run in 2012.

•  Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio are the future of not only the Republican party, but also America. Get rid of the old hacks, it’s time for these dynamic American leaders. If they won’t run, add Chris Christie to the mix. .  .  .

•  I am a registered Democrat. .  .  . I agree with you on Ryan-Rubio, and would be willing to work for them in Joe Biden’s home state of DE. I don’t consider myself a Tea Party guy, although I agree with most of what they stand for. .  .  . Sign me up.

•  Tell Ryan we’ll let his kids roller-skate in the W.H. .  .  . ANYTHING! .  .  . Seriously, I understand they lack experience in some areas. However, when it comes to fiscal reality Paul Ryan IS the smartest man in the room. And he knows a whole lot about American political history .  .  . love the guy.

All of this suggests a willingness to consider more and hitherto unexpected options for the GOP nominee. And the following email correctly implies that not Obama but a fatalism about politics and the country may be the greatest obstacle to Republican success in 2012:

Mr. Kristol,
While your idea of a Ryan-Rubio 2012 ticket is a worthy one, it just won’t work.
Rubio makes much too much sense for such a new senator; and he would have way too much appeal to the fastest growing population segment of our country.
Ryan is:
Much too smart.
Much too sensible.
Much too straightforward.
Much too knowledgeable and specific in his solutions.
Much too knowledgeable in the actual workings of government.
Much too genuine.
And waaaaaaaaaaay too likable.
How can this possibly work?
Make it work.

They're young; they're attractive; they're smart; they're conservative.   Maybe we need to stop nominating the Bob Doles and John McCains and start taking our best and brightest and selling them to the American people.  

Cutting Spending or Raising Taxes - A Thought Experiment II

Let's slice this issue another way.   Let's assume we could have a magic wand and grant the wish of liberals like Mika Brzezinski, the co-host of "Morning Joe" on MSNBC with Joe Scarborough, who today apparently offered that, if "rich white men" making $250,000 or more don't start paying more in income taxes, we're going to have "class war."   OK.   That seems to be the mantra of a lot of liberals.   Let's do the math.   The richest 1% of the nation in 2008 averaged $380,000 a year and paid 38% of the federal income tax.   The richest 5% averaged only $159,000 a year, but paid close to 60% of all of the federal income tax.   The liberals' threshold is higher than that at $250,000 -- the magic number Obama has repeated ad nauseum -- so let's say you'd be taxing only the richest 3% who pay about 50% of the total federal income tax.   These are approximations, but I think they are "fair," as they say.

As I said below, however, federal income tax accounts for "only" around $1.1 trillion a year, so the taxes paid by the upper 3% would "only" be around $550 billion a year.   To solve the $1.6 trillion deficit by raising taxes only on "the rich" who make over $250,000 a year, you'd thus have to quadruple their taxes.   Do you think that would make them change their behavior?   All those doctors and lawyers and business owners... do you think they might change their decisions?   Do you think that might have an impact on economic activity, on hiring, on investment?   Huh?   Do you think?   Again, an economy is not a static system... it's composed of actors who will act rationally and will change decisions based on incentives and disincentives.  

And, even more importantly, Miss Liberall, do you really think that's fair?   If those 3% are already paying half of the federal income tax burden, do you think it's fair to ask them to quadruple what they pay?   At that rate, they'd be paying around 80% of the federal tax burden (about $2.2 trillion out of $2.75 trillion), rather than 50% ($550 billion out of $1.1 trillion).  

We can't tax our way out of our deficit, no matter how many times we invoke the evil "rich white men."   The only way we can do it is to cut our spending, and do it soon. 

UPDATE:

Ace of Spades makes much the same point I've been making here, and does so with the added bonus of beating up on Paul Krugman, one of the most despicable liberal pundits out there:

Okay, so, hypothetically, the "Bush Tax Cuts" are now ended. Poof. That brings the yearly deficit from $1.65 trillion all the way down to... $1.468.5 trillion per year.

And what next, Krugman? You violently oppose any reduction in spending so you must have in mind either:

1) The simple collapse of government and the economy, or
2) Generating more revenue from somewhere else.

Where else, Mr. Krugman? Where are you imagining you can get ten times the $181.5 billion per year you just heroically "saved" us?

And what next?

Cutting Spending or Raising Taxes - A Thought Experiment

Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin has laid out a real proposal to move toward fiscal sanity through spending cuts that run to trillions of dollars over the next 10 years.   The Democrats like Chuck Schumer (or, as I like to call him, the "Great Satan") oppose the plan, and call the proposed cuts "extreme" or "draconian" or "heartless."   Fine.   We must presume, though, that Democrats are not in favor of fiscal insanity, so they must want to do something else.   The something else can only be... raising taxes on everyone.    If you won't cut expenses, you have to raise revenues; if you can't raise revenues, you'll have to cut expenses.   Q.E.F'n.D.  

So, no matter what they say, you better believe the Democrats are in favor of raising taxes.   To be sure, they will say they only want to tax the rich, to make the rich pay their "fair share," whatever that means.    As everyone who has spent any time at all with the numbers can tell you, the rich already pay the lion's share of taxes.  (The Top 10%, with adjusted gross incomes over $113,000, paid 70% of all federal income taxes in 2008.)  You can't tax them much more.  

So they're going to have to raise taxes on everyone else too.   Assuming that they mean income taxes, exactly how much are they talking about?

Well, last year the federal government brought in approximately $2.2 trillion in total revenues, of which approximately 53% (around $1.15 trillion) and around 37% (about $800 billion) in Social Security taxes.   So, without putting to fine a point on it, if you wanted to close the budget deficit of $1.6 trillion simply by raising taxes, you'd likely have to come close to doubling everyone's taxes, and not just income tax, but also their Social Security tax. 

Anybody think the Democrats will be honest about what the alternative they are proposing really entails?    I didn't think so.  

And this, of course, begs the question.... wouldn't doubling everyone's tax rates crash the economy in a New York minute?   Of course it would.   So, while you might think that if at current tax rates we raise $2.2 trillion, if we doubled them we'd raise $4.4 trillion and have a surplus, the truth is that raising tax rates that high might actually result in lower revenues, as small businesses stop hiring, people with the ability to control how much they earn stop working as hard, being disincentivized, people stop spending discretionary income that they don't have anymore (because they government confiscated it), etc.   The economy is not static, it's dynamic, and you can't just raise tax rates to raise a proportionate amount of revenue.  

There is no realistic alternative to the types of spending cuts Paul Ryan has proposed.   We either become adults, and soon, or we are driving off a cliff.

Libya? What Libya? I Don't Know Anything About Any Libya.

Weren't we in a war over there?   I've lost track.   The befuddled policies of our President on Libya have been the subject of a set of great posts by my favorite writers, Mark Steyn and Victor Davis Hanson recently.   Here's Steyn: 

The Tunisians got rid of Ben Ali in nothing flat, Mubarak took a couple of weeks longer to hit the road, and an exciting new ‘Islamic Emirate’ has just been proclaimed in South Yemen. But, with his usual unerring instinct, Barack Obama has chosen to back the one Arab liberation movement who can’t get rid of the local strongman even when you lend them every functioning NATO air force.

And here's the great Victor Davis Hanson, in high dudgeon, asking a series of questions needing answers (which we'll never get):

It will apparently be up to NATO to finish the war — without direct American combat participation. The relieved Obama administration had never quite explained what the mission was in the first place — or for whom and for what we were fighting. Was the bombing to stop the killing, to help the rebels, to remove Gadhafi, or to aid the British and French, who both have considerable oil interests in Libya?

Were we enforcing just a no-fly zone, establishing a sort of no-fly zone with occasional attacks on ground targets, or secretly sending in American operatives on the ground to work with rebels? Did the Obama administration go well beyond the Arab League and United Nations resolutions by trying to target Gadhafi for a while and ensure that the rebels won? If so, did anyone care? Was the administration ever going to ask for congressional approval — at a time when we are running a $1.6 trillion annual budget deficit and have about 150,000 troops committed in Afghanistan and Iraq? Was Libya a greater threat to our national security than Syria or Iran, or a greater humanitarian crisis than the Congo or Ivory Coast? Are our new allies, the rebels, Westernized reformers, Islamists, or both — or neither?

And here, again, Hanson:

In fact, the entire American response to unrest in the Muslim world is ad hoc, reactionary, and often contradictory — apparently favoring government repression of rebels in the Gulf while intervening to stop such crackdowns in Libya but not elsewhere; pressuring pro-American tyrants in Tunisia and Egypt, while carefully not antagonizing anti-American tyrants in Iran and Syria; declaring support for human rights and transparency in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, while ignoring these values altogether in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. In eerie fashion, the less the Obama administration seems to know about the complexities of the serial unrest, the more it jumps in with blunderbuss sermonizing.

Re the Budget Deal

Meh.   The GOP got more than I thought they would, getting $38.5 billion in additional cuts to the FY 2011 budget, and averting a government shutdown, which the MSM would have "spun" to help the Democrats.   (You know the lyrics, so hum the tune:  "Heartless GOP takes money from Head Start!   Soulless GOP wants to take Grandma off her meds!   Mean GOP wants our boys overseas fighting to miss paychecks!   Rinse, repeat.)   And they got some good things too, like the promise of an up-or-down vote on funding Planned Parenthood.   (See below.)

But, on the whole, this is a drop in the proverbial bucket.   To put it in perspective, the federal budget for 2011 is likely to end up spending around $3.8 trillion.   So the "cut" was about 1%.   But meanwhile we're running a $1.6 trillion deficit, using money either printed or borrowed from the Chinese.   Perhaps Paul Ryan's "Path to Prosperity" budget will do better for FY 2012.   But, by then, in the fall of 2011, everyone will be in full campaign mode for 2012, and the Democrats will demagogue every proposed cut as the end of the world.  

Sooner or later, of course, it actually will be the end of the world:  Chinese leverage, a rise in worldwide interest rates, significant state defaults (California?  Illinois?), significant sovereign defaults overseas (PIGS, you know who you are... Portugual, Ireland, Greece, Spain), etc.   We're doing increments when we need amputation -- significant cuts of whole segments of what government does.  

My vote:   the Departments of Education, Agriculture, and Commerce.   Cut them now, tomorrow.   That's more than $100 billion in discretionary spending that we'll never miss.  It's still just a drop in the bucket, but it's a bigger drop and would send a bigger message. 

Why Defunding Planned Parenthood is Important

At the end of the budget negotiations last week, the sticking point was the GOP's insistence that Planned Parenthood's federal funding be cut.   Why were Republicans pushing so hard for what may have seemed like a peripheral issue? 

Some of it undoubtedly was an offshoot from the video stings from a few months back showing Planned Parenthood representatives in offices in across the country giving nonchalant advice to sex traffickers about getting birth control services for underage prostitutes.    These were the stings conceived by Lila Rose, about whom I've written before.   Planned Parenthood doesn't come off too good in the videos, to say the least.

But mostly it's just an opportunity to do what needs to be done constantly about all government spending.... to put before the American people the facts about what their federal government spends money on, and ask the simple question.... is it appropriate to spend that much money on X, whatever X is.   I'd wager most Americans are completely in the dark that Planned Parenthood is government funded, and even more in the dark about what Planned Parenthood does with that money.   Read:  with my money, and with your money.  

In the case of Planned Parenthood, it receives approximately $363 million in federal funding each year.  (This is for 2009, the last year available.)   Planned Parenthood's total revenues for that year were $1.1 billion, according to its own Annual Report at p. 29.   So federal funding provided precisely one third of the funding for Planned Parenthood.  

But the organization, according to its own "fact sheet," also performed 332,278 abortions in the last full year for which there are statistics, 2009.   During that year there were a total of approximately 1.2 million abortions nationwide, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which is a public policy research affiliate of Planned Parenthood.   So Planned Parenthood performed roughly 25% of the all of the abortions nationwide. 

In other words, no matter what they might say or how they might massage or "spin" the numbers, the truth is that the federal government is providing subsidies for abortions with your tax dollars (and mine).   Now it may be that America is evenly split on the morality of abortion.   I think that's changing with the advent of ultrasound and with greater attention called to the abortion culture and industry, but let's leave that aside for now.   Assume that we're evenly split on the moral issue.   Even so, I don't believe and I don't think any observant person in America believes that we're evenly split on the issue of whether American taxpayers ought to be made to pay for abortions.   I think that split might be 75-25 against, with a lot of blue-collar Reagan Democrats (working-class Catholics) crossing over.   Taxpayer funds ought not go to pay for abortions, period.  

That's why the Republicans were fighting for that seemingly minor amount of spending.   At some point, there really are things that government should not do, and taxpayers ought not be compelled to fund.

Birthdays Today

Mediocre birthdays today, perhaps only interesting to me.   But then... what else is a blog except what's interesting to the person doing the blogging?

First, it's Edward Everett's birthday.   Born in 1794, Everett was the "orator" -- I suspect we don't have people who are "orators" anymore; a sign of the times, since our attention spans grow too short for listening to long speeches -- who spoke for more than two hours at Gettysburg in the fall of 1863, only to be eclipsed in history by a short set of comments spoken immediately after him, of course, by President Abraham Lincoln, the "Gettysburg Address."  

Everett was a very accomplished man -- Governor, Senator, Congressman, President of Harvard, etc. -- yet he is remembered as a bore who spoke too long when Lincoln captured the moment in a few words.   History is funny that way.   But, then, Everett had the good sense to realize it at the time, when few did, commenting to Lincoln that "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes."  

It's also Bill Irwin's birthday, born in 1950.   What exactly is Irwin -- an actor?  a comic?  a clown?  a magician?   Hard to say.   I remember watching a show he did many years ago called The Regard of Flight, which I thought was one of the most brilliant things I had ever seen.   Here's a scene from that show:

Girl Monday - The Violin Girl from Treme

One of our favorite shows is set to premiere its second season on April 24th on HBO, Treme, by the creators of The Wire.  Treme is set in New Orleans post-Katrina, and basically focuses on the music world and the poor black inner city community surrounding it.   It's a great show, with a lot of veterans of The Wire.   One of the recurring characters is a young jazz violinist trying to make it as a street entertainer.   She's played by Lucia Micarelli, who is herself a concert violinist.  

Here's a great scene from the show, where the lead character, a broken-down trombone player, sings "I Don't Stand a Chance With You" with accompaniment by the girl violinist in the street: