Political Points

Just a few quick things I wanted to mention before I get going on being productive (again, yeah, I've actually gotten some stuff done) today:

• Did any of you catch the state of the union last night, that I guess isn't technically a state of the union? I strongly dislike Nancy Pelosi. She had this deranged, europhic look on her face the entire time. It felt like a pep rally more than a political speech. I was glad to read some other reactions from prominent conservatives voicing the same sentiments. And then Biden sat in the back and had this perpetual grin and witless look about him. I feel like I'm being overly critical, but I swear...they looked like a couple of idiots. Obama set forth a very ambitious agenda - exploration of renewable energy solutions, health care reform, advancement of education. The Bush tax cuts will not be renewed, and capital gains taxes are among those set to increase, which is a strong disincentive to invest in the stock market. Admittedly, as a orator, the guy is amazing. Flat-out amazing. Content-wise, very lacking.
  
• Was talking with a friend last night about drug legalization, more specifically about legalizing marijuana in the state of California for personal use, not just medical use. In this post from last summer, I briefly made my case against the legalization of drugs. Please allow me to quote myself:

  While I'm jumping topics again, legalization of drugs is the dumbest idea ever. A lot of times the argument for legalization of drugs is that it will reduce the amount of drug related crime and eliminate the black market. What are two of the three most preventable causes of death in the United States? #1 is tobacco use, and #3 is alcohol consumption. Almost 500,000 people die prematurely each year because of each of those legal drugs. In the years from 1995-1999 it cost the United States approximately $157 billion annually in health-related economic losses just from tobacco use. That's staggering, isn't it? Right now the death rate for use of illicit drugs is only 17,000. Can you imagine how that number would surge if we were to decriminalize illicit drug use? That alone is reason enough not to legalize drugs.

  I mention all this because Mark Perry posted recently about the topic arguing for a shift in our approach to illicit drugs here. I'm still not buying it, partly because of the argument that Brooks in the next item to follow.
• I posted an article of his last week, but David Brooks of the New York Times is one of my new favorite writers. This is his latest piece. He says in this article:
  

  When I was a freshman in college, I was assigned “Reflections on the Revolution in France” by Edmund Burke. I loathed the book. Burke argued that each individual’s private stock of reason is small and that political decisions should be guided by the accumulated wisdom of the ages. Change is necessary, Burke continued, but it should be gradual, not disruptive. For a young democratic socialist, hoping to help begin the world anew, this seemed like a reactionary retreat into passivity.

  Over the years, I have come to see that Burke had a point. The political history of the 20th century is the history of social-engineering projects executed by well-intentioned people that began well and ended badly. There were big errors like communism, but also lesser ones, like a Vietnam War designed by the best and the brightest, urban renewal efforts that decimated neighborhoods, welfare policies that had the unintended effect of weakening families and development programs that left a string of white elephant projects across the world.
  

  With respect to the previous point, I think there are a number of other far-reaching consequences that we haven't even begun to fathom with a major shift in decriminalizing drugs. It's simply too dangerous. This article gives a pretty dispassionate review of the issue as it pertains to California.
  
  It's kind of interesting that some of the best conservatives are converted liberals. Brooks appears to be one of these. Churchill started out liberal, as did Reagan. Jay Nordlinger describes a little about his liberal beginnings in his most recent Impromptus column, thusly:

  An e-mail that arrived yesterday struck a chord with me—and it may well with you, too:

  Dear Mr. Nordlinger,
  
  I was very moved by your column today (“The case of Baby Shanice, &c.”). Like you, I was raised in an ultra-liberal environment—Santa Cruz, Calif., in my case. Only now, at 37 years old, am I questioning my long-held assumptions, particularly about abortion.
  
  I was a huge supporter of Senator Clinton for the presidency. But the tactics of the far Left—the DailyKos and MoveOn crowd—left me cold. I voted for McCain, the first time I ever voted for a Republican.
  
  Increasingly over the last year, I have found myself siding with conservatives on issues like illegal immigration, affirmative action, fighting jihad, and the role of markets. What Arthur Schlesinger termed “the liberal mind”—what I take to mean freedom from totalitarian thinking (anti-Communist that he was)—I see reflected by conservatives today.
  

  Yes, he is on his way, this letter-writer. I remember the journey myself—vividly. I didn’t want to become a conservative! In my world, “conservative” was a dirty word: It meant “bigot,” “racist,” “ignoramus,” “warmonger,” and other unpleasant things. No one would have chosen to become a conservative in Ann Arbor, Mich., unless he was a complete masochist, which I surely was not.
  
  It’s just that life and events and thought and facts—well, they pushed me that way. And I was devouring Commentary and National Review. And, mirabile dictu (as WFB might say), here I am . . .

• In that column, he posts this article about an Iraqi woman who organized the rapes of 80 women so that they would seek absolution through their participation in suicide bombings. Radical Islamists are not just bad people, they are evil people. These are not people who just dislike America because we had a President with an aggressive foreign policy. They hate you and want to destroy your way of life. Don't forget that. In many ways we're regressing to a September 10th mindset. Iran is on the verge of acquiring nuclear technology; North Korea is implementing missile systems that can reach our mainland; Russia continues to seek out reestablishing the former USSR. And last night Obama declares that we're going to begin dismantling cold war-era weapons that we don't use. The fact that we don't have to use them is because we have them in the first place, carrying a big stick. Reagan was responsible for the collapse of communism because of his foreign policy approach. Diplomacy doesn't work with dictators, tyrants, and all others who are bent on your destruction.

That's all. Now on to writing questions about t-tests, regression, and the like....bleh.