On the Size of Government

President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. -- Stephen Slivinski, Cato Policy Analysis #543

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. --P.J. O'Rourke

There's nothing dumber than a big spending Republican. In fact, I'm starting to think wwould have been better off letting Bill have another 8 years. As a Democrat, he was downright frugal. It's one thing to have a redistributionist government that simply takes your money and gives it to the undeserving. It's quite another to have the government spend your money on dangerous things, like more bureacrats, homeland snoopiness, and alphabet soup (SEC/FCC/FDA/BATF/NSA) busy-bodying.

I'd like to say I gave up on the Republicans in 1975, and then again in 1989. And it seems like I have to give up on them about every 2 years. The only thing worse, I'd tell myself, is Democrats, and I find it increasingly maddening that these are the only two choices we get. My goodness. What is it going to take to get a constitutional government? (Short of colonial minutemen, that is).

And then the other choice is John Kerry? He got 50 odd million votes, not based on his voting record, which was quite possibly the worst possible of any presidential candidate; but because people felt anything was better than this. Maybe they were right.

Sympathy for the Devil

"IN ONE OF THE FOUNDING TEXTS OF SOCIOLOGY, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Emile Durkheim set it down that "crime is normal." "It is," he wrote, "completely impossible for any society entirely free of it to exist." By defining what is deviant, we are enabled to know what is not, and hence to live by shared standards. This apercuappears in the chapter entitled "Rules for the Distinction of the Normal from the Pathological."" --Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1993, Defining Deviancy Down)

The third shoe has now dropped on the whole Abu Graib thing for me this week. First, we have Ted Kennedy celebrating the first anniversary of Abu Graib, as if he thought the whole affair were something worth remembering (I wonder if he also visits Mary Jo's grave once a year).

The second shoe was the rubble kicked up intentionally by Isikoff and Newsweek to try and paint a picture of Gitmo guards dumping the Koran down the crapper.

Then, we get a London tabloid tossing out pictures of Saddam in his underwear.

You know what? I've had it. So some Arabs get their burnoose in a bunch over hurt feelings. I really can't muster any sympathy for that. If Muslims were taking care of their own criminals, they wouldn't find themselves and their people exposed to the idiosyncracies of western cultures; albeit primarily pure fabrications. So what if some of their citizens get humiliated, sneered at, and denigrated. That's nothing that hasn't happened in a US prison. Or at a Dixie Chicks concert for that matter.

I have to wonder if the people who have a problem with this form of free expression have the same problem with those who would burn a US flag or spray paint a fur coat.

Defining deviancy up, for the purpose of gaining sympathy for the devil is the work of the devil himself.

Mortality

One of the reasons I write this blog is give a glimpse to my three sons of things that I believe in strongly enough to write about. It's a very selfish reason, and I indulge myself with the knowledge that if and when they read it, they do it of their own volition, and that they absorb whatever they wish from these writings.

It was not my intent to make this blog a treatise on life or philosophies thereof, but there are some things you cannot escape; much as we'd like to compartmentalize things and stash them away for processing at a later time.

Recently, my sons lost their beloved mother. It's a time for reflection for each of us, and to contemplate the rugged aspects of mortality. I hurt for the boys, and I pray that there's a hidden strength that God can grace me with to help them through it.

Suffice to say that I gladly bear the burden, if it will ease theirs. And if sometime in the distant future they have occasion to read this, I can only offer that they made her extremely proud, and they were her only true joy as the years went on. God rest her soul.

Billyism #2

Learning is the key to all your answers.

Wizer OneLiner #3

Proving yet another adage wrong, this morning I sat on the edge of the bed and put my pants on two legs at a time.

Billyism

"When thunder hits your hand, weird things happen"

Wizer OneLiner #2:

I don't need a traffic report that tells me all routes are "normal".

Wizer OneLiner #1

I don't need TV shows to figure out if there are untalented people out there.

Filibusters

The filibuster is a U. S. Senate practice whereby a single Senator, or his minority party, can block full Senate consideration of a bill or nomination by extending debate on the proposal indefinitely. The resulting "filibuster" can ordinarily be stopped only by a "cloture" vote, which requires 60 of the 100 Senators (a supermajority) to vote to end debate, and bring the bill or nomination to a final vote.

The filibuster, obviously, plays a crucial role whenever only 50 to 59 Senators support a given bill or nomination. It can ensure that the proposal is not approved, despite the fact that a majority of the Senate (or half the Senate, plus the Vice President, who breaks ties) would approve the measure if a vote were taken.

This right to endless debate evolved in the Senate over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is now embodied in the Senate's own formal rules - particularly Rule XXII, which guarantees unlimited discussion absent cloture.

Filibusters of old required the filibustering party to actually stand and hold the Senate floor by speaking continuously, in order to delay a final vote, as depicted in Frank Capra's famous movie "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," which featured Jimmy Stewart as a young and idealistic Senate newcomer. Today, by contrast, a minority party can indefinitely put off a vote on a bill or nomination by simply indicating to Senate leaders that this indefinite delay is desired - unless there are 60 Senators in favor of cloture.

--Article by Vikram David Amar. Full text at
http://www.yuricareport.com/Law%20&%20Legal/Senate%20Rules%20on%20Filibuster.html

It seems to me that if you're going to have filibusters, you should have them the old fashioned way: Have the senator stand up in front of everybody, eat his Wheaties, and give some sense to the world why he's wasting everybody's time. This business of voting whether or not to vote is pretty darned stupid.

Daylight Saving Time

"For in walking thro' the Strand and Fleet Street one morning at seven o clock, I observed there was not one shop open tho it had been daylight and the sun up above three hours -- the inhabitants of London choosing voluntarily to live much by candlelight and sleep by sunshine, and yet often complaining a little absurdly of the duty on candles and the high price of tallow." --Ben Franklin, Autobiography

Factoid: Daylight Saving Time, for the U.S. and its territories, is NOT observed in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, most of the Eastern Time Zone portion of the State of Indiana, and the state of Arizona (not the Navajo Indian Reservation, which does observe). Navajo Nation participates in the Daylight Saving Time policy, due to its large size and location in three states.

"I don't really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves." (Robertson Davies, The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, 1947, XIX, Sunday.)

Useful References: http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/

Most Hoosiers are happy leaving time alone. The reasons for this are many and varied.
1. There aren't that many "strange quirks" for Hoosiers, so let's try and keep the one.
2. We don't want to be particularly associated with either Chicago or New York.
3. We're too far West to be East, and too far East to be Central.
4. Sun's gonna come up on its own schedule. Not on ours.
5. Tell us again why you all change your clocks?
6. Okay, say we do change our clocks. Do we really want the sun shining at 10:00 PM?
7. Say we go to Central time. Do we really want the sun to shine at 5:00 AM?
8. How many clocks did you say you changed twice a year? VCR's? Microwaves? Tsk.
9. Keeps the blue states guessing.
10. 15 Indiana counties already do what they want with time. Think that's gonna change?

It's good sport to watch the Indiana legislature wrestle with this one. Seems like a lot of people care enough to harass their state legislator. This kind of belies the idea that Hoosiers are indifferent about it. It now occurs to me that by the time this is settled, we will have lost every hour that we would have gained by DST in the first place, just arguing about it.