A new Field Poll finds Barbara "Call Me Senator" Boxer's prospects for a fourth term less than certain. The Fresno Bee reports:

Former Rep. Tom Campbell has a six-point lead over his closest challenger in the three-way Republican primary to face Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, whose popularity has significantly eroded in the past two months, according to a Field Poll released today.

The survey found Campbell leading former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina 28 percent to 22 percent among likely Republican voters in the June 8 primary, while Assemblyman Chuck DeVore had support from 9 percent. But most prospective GOP voters, roughly 40 percent, were undecided.

While Boxer's races have historically been sleepy affairs, the poll indicates that Californians could be in for a barnburner this year. Boxer is in a statistical tie in trial matchups with both Campbell and Fiorina. In January, she had substantial double-digit percentage-point leads over all three GOP challengers.

"Formerly, I would have said this is in the Democratic column, but I would say now it's got to be moved into the tossup column," said Mark DiCamillo, the director of the poll. "There just seems to be a turning of voter opinions. I think a lot of it has to do with the Congress."

As with the Field Poll noting Meg Whitman's slight lead over Jerry Brown, the standard caveats apply. Boxer can be as vicious as anyone. (Just ask Bruce Herschensohn.) And the outcome of the Republican primary is far from assured, especially if Fiorina and Campbell continue clashing.

Somewhere, a demon sheep is bleating.

My friend Daniel Watts is running for Davis City Council. Watts ran for governor in the 2003 recall circus, and although he didn't do quite as well as Cruz Bustamante or Mary Carey, he made a respectable showing. He had planned to run for governor again this year as a Democrat, but the Jerry Brown Juggernaut was simply too much to overcome.

Instead, Watts is taking on local government. Wise choice. The Davis Enterprise reported Tuesday about his plans (subscriber-only link, alas):

Watts vows to make student issues a priority. In fact, his campaign platform focuses almost exclusively on student rights and improving the city-student relationship.

Watts said he noticed other candidates addressing the city budget, public safety and the school district.

'Their concerns were the same concerns that any other city has,' he said.

Meanwhile, he said, Davis' massive college student population is being neglected.

'There is a voice for those other issues on the City Council already,' he said. 'But nobody is addressing those student issues.'

Contrary to popular belief, starving students don't qualify as "indigent," so Watts is on the hook for a $732 filing fee. He's accepting donations via Paypal at governorwatts@gmail.com. Help a fella out.

I have a new op-ed in the Sacramento Bee arguing against the Common Core Standards Initiative, which sounds like a great idea until you realize that President Obama wants to use it as leverage to further centralize education policy.

Here's the gist:

The standards are billed as “voluntary,” but that’s a joke. The Obama administration has already announced plans to make $14 billion in federal Title I funds and another $15 billion in future Race to the Top grants contingent on states adopting the national standards. In short, the standards would be as “voluntary” reporting personal income to the IRS, regulating the drinking age, or maintaining the speed limit. Just try to opt out and see what happens.

The standards are also supposed to be “flexible,” but it’s difficult to see how. The draft reading and math requirements include detailed, year-by-year prescriptions for every child, regardless of ability. A student who struggles with reading, writing, or arithmetic would have an even tougher time keeping up, as teachers would face mounting pressure to cover all the material in federally sanctioned lesson plans.

Of course, that assumes the final standards won’t be homogenized and dumbed down to the point they would be considered “high standards” in name only. Judging by history, that’s probably a bad assumption.

One thing’s for sure: transforming common core standards into a common curriculum would turn an already contentious policy issue into a brawl as bruising and divisive as the fight over health care reform. Where health care is about our bodies, education is about our children’s minds.

Obviously, you should read the whole thing. (Try not to be scared off by the mugshot.)

And while you're at it, check out the new School Reform News Web site at the Heartland Institute. In the coming weeks, we'll be introducing daily content, and weekly interactive and multimedia features, including polls, videos and podcasts.

Update: Cato's Neal McCluskey writes at NRO:

All kids are different. They mature at different rates, have different interests, and face different obstacles. In light of this, it simply makes no sense to try to force them all to learn the same thing at the same pace. It’s something that most conservatives — who recognize the primacy of the individual — fully understand, yet Finn asserts that it’s liberals who oppose a single standard for all.

If that’s so, then why aren’t more liberals supporting widespread school choice — the key to ending special-interest control of education and enabling unique kids to find schools specializing in their needs — the way conservatives are? Oh, right: Because it’s typically liberals who love big, one-size-fits-all government solutions to problems fundamentally rooted in a lack of freedom.

The CCSSI standards might look great on paper. But federally extorted standardization? That’s something conservatives should never embrace.

McCluskey (whose review of Diane Ravitch's new book in School Reform News is a must-read) wrote a recent study assessing the case for national standards.

Meantime, Julie Ponzi at No Left Turns picks up a thread that I think deserves elaboration in a separate piece:

A perceived problem for those advocating on behalf of keeping standards at the state level has been the rancorous and, in many ways, ridiculous fight over history standards in Texas that has produced, in the words of Boychuk, "a politically correct mishmash." Any objective observer of the outcome in Texas would have to concede that their "solution" has been less than wonderful. As Ben says in the comment section under his piece, "including the Declaration of Independence in the social studies standards while excluding Thomas Jefferson is... confusing." It is also stupid and deserving of all the mockery and derision it is getting--however wrong-headed and mean-spirited some of it may be. (One way to avoid being called a fool is to avoid doing foolish things!) But this result is in no way--as left-wing critics eager to score points against the "rubes" in red states might hope--an argument in favor of national standards. It is an argument AGAINST them. Why would we want to nationalize that fiasco of a fight in Texas? For that is exactly what would happen.

More on the Texas textbook controversy soon.

Former eBay CEO and California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman is riding high in the polls after her appearance at the GOP state convention. The latest Field Poll has Whitman leading Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner by a whopping 49 points. Poizner immolated himself six weeks ago with his bizarre press conference claiming that Whitman's campaign tried to intimidate him into abandoning the contest.

No, what's interesting about the new numbers is Whitman's standing against likely Democratic nominee, Attorney General and former Gov. Jerry Brown.

Apparently, she's leading Brown, too.

Don't worry, it won't last.

It's early yet. Whitman is spending a fortune acquainting herself with voters and tearing down Poizner. But her message is lame, hackneyed and clichéd. As Rep. Tom McClintock said over the weekend, Whitman might as well be Schwarzenegger in a skirt.

The Los Angeles Times wonders if Poizner "can pull a Gray Davis." What's that? Get himself recalled?

No, silly...

The Poizner campaign maintains that polls at this phase of the campaign are meaningless.

Not convinced? Take a look at the headline from the Field Poll almost 12 years ago to the day. The headline of Field's March 18, 1998, survey read, "Harman moves ahead of Checchi and Davis in Democratic field for governor."

That would be Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), the candidate who eventually finished with 12% of the vote, and Al Checchi, the former Northwest Airlines executive who finished with 13% in the June 1998 primary election.

Primary rules for that election were slightly different than they are now. In that election, voters from either party were allowed to vote for whichever candidate they wanted. Gray Davis was the top Democratic vote-getter that year with 35% of the overall vote. Republican Dan Lungren, who did not have a competitive primary, was the top Republican vote-getter.

But three months before the election, Davis' victory was anything but guaranteed. The March 1998 survey found Davis with just 11% of the vote. Harman had 17%, while Checchi was favored by 15% of those surveyed.

Well, that's interesting. Interesting but totally irrelevant, that is.

Poizner could have been a contender, if he hadn't come off as a desperate loser. More likely, though, Brown is holding back, waiting for the Republican candidates to savage each other, and fully expecting to unleash his well-heeled surrogates. Oh, and though they might deny it, the press looooooves Jerry.

So don't put too much stock in the polls at this point. And never, ever count out Jerry Brown.

Bill Kristol at The Weekly Standard is convinced House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is going to resort to the "Slaughter Solution," which we've had quite the discussion about over on this thread. Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, the smart and funny Republican from Michigan, dubbed this end-run around the Constitution the "Slaughter House Rules." I like that moniker.

Anyway, Kristol outlines several quotes from House Democratic leaders reflecting their current talking points about how the American people don't care about "process," and how all of this drama is about "inside baseball" that — in the words of House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) — is only interesting to Inside-the-Beltway reporters. Kristol didn't take the time to mention what I think is one of the best dismissive and contemptuous quotes from the mouth of Pelosi. About the shenanigans going on, the Speaker said today of the Slaughter House Rules:

It's more insider-and process-oriented than most people want to know. But I like it because people don't have to vote on the Senate bill.

Yes. That's nice. The people's representatives not actually voting on a bill that will fundamentally transform Americans' relationship to their doctors, and their relationship with the government, is peachy in Pelosi's eyes. I think the Hosue Democrats, or at least their leadership, are delusional. And I think this stuff does matter to "ordinary" Americans, whom the Democrats apparently think are too stupid to understand that a fundamental trust in a consensual government is being violated here. Kristol agrees.

Here the Democrats betray their contempt for the supposed simple-mindedness and short-sightedness of the American public. They also convey their vision of the American people living under the big government liberalism: We are to be passive consumers of government action, who accept what is done for us and to us in light of our perceived narrow short-term self-interest. We are not to think of ourselves as self-governing citizens with a stake in the process of constitutional self-government and a concern for the good of the whole.

This may be the outcome — turning citizens into consumers, self-government into the nanny state — that the Democrats would like to achieve. I don't think it's one the American people wish to accept.

I don't think so, either. I think Americans' political sophistication will manifest itself in November with an historic political reckoning. Hell, the public's political sophistication is manifesting itself now. But, if this scurrilous procedure occurs, it will be probably be too late for the public to make substantive corrections.

Yet, if the future Republican majority has to resort to such tactics to repeal the totality of this disaster, I'll support it — just this once. Because it would be sweet justice.

(Please, dear readers, don't nit-pick me on this post about the history of "deeming" and other such Congressional procedures throughout history. We've gone over that in the previous post. There are enormous differences, not the least of which is the fact that stuff like raising the debt ceiling are "resolutions," not bills that our constitution stipulates are quite different.)

"Starbucks is 39 years old now, and like a lot of 39-year-olds, especially those who’ve experienced great success in their salad years but are beginning to wonder if they’ve lost their touch, it’s having a bit of an identity crisis," writes Greg Beato in the March issue of Reason.

See, I'm a few months younger than Starbucks and I can't relate to that at all. I feel like my best years are yet to come.

But I think I understand the problem. Starbucks overextended. We had two Starbucks within a couple of miles of our house. Both closed last year -- one of them after just one year in operation.

I like Starbucks. I spend a lot of time at the store across the street from where my wife works. They know me there. I can work there more or less in peace. (Thank you, Bose Quiet Comfort 2's!) The coffee is too hot and too bitter and the food is overpriced, but it does the job. Although it may not be "a venue for conversation and civic discourse," I see plenty of realtors, pastors, paralegals, students and band moms gathering there regularly to converse about... well, whatever it is they discuss.

Beato concludes:

(I)f Starbucks really hopes to re-establish its authority as an innovative, forward-thinking trailblazer, it should perhaps use its next experimental venue to honor its heritage as the first chain to take gourmet coffee culture beyond the narrow boundaries of traditional coffeehouse values and aesthetics. Imagine a place with matching chairs, clean tables, beverages that look like ice cream sundaes, Norah Jones on the sound system, and absolutely no horrid paintings from local artists decorating the walls. A place, that is, exactly like Starbucks!

Because despite its ubiquity, despite its advancing years, Starbucks is still the most radical thing to hit the coffeehouse universe in the last 50 years.

Beats gas station coffee, anyway, I can tell you that.

...you'll likely enjoy this Academy Award winning movie trailer. It's the feel-good hit of the season!

(Hat tip: Steve Hayward)

(Hat tip: Cato's @ Liberty blog)

One would expect from that headline that former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines would have used an opportunity to speak from the pages of The Washington Post to provide a mea culpa on his dereliction of duty for allowing the alarmingly shoddy journalist Jayson Blair to commit serial plagiarism and fiction on his front pages in the early 2000s. And one would be wrong.

One might also expect from that headline that the former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines would have used an opportunity to speak from the pages of The Washington Post to lament his former standard of American journalism's dereliction of duty on misreporting the Tea Party phenomenon. Or how The Times continues to get its clock cleaned by British newspapers on the ClimateGate scandals? Again, you'd be wrong. Two times.

Nope. Raines says the "one question" that has "tugged" at his "professional conscience" lately is this:

Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

That Raines — who trumpeted the MSM's dogged criticism of the Nixon administration as a highlight that he did not characterize as "a propaganda campaign" but something "well covered" — feels the burning urge to slam the only major television news outlet in this country to cover the Obama administration with a critical eye says all you need to know about the self-induced destruction of the MSM.

Does he call out Fox News citing examples of the kind of fiction that he presided over at the helm of America's "Newspaper of Record"? No. He does not. Instead he laments that Ailes allows on his network a "cadre of raucous commentators" that have "overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II."

Hey, Howell. Those are commentators. MSNBC, CNN and even The New York Times has them, too. A former media big shot like you should know the difference between news reporting and commentary, of which Fox News has successfully achieved both if ratings are any gauge.

OK. I'm not being 100 percent fair. Raines attempts to provide a glaring example of malfesence on the part of Fox News. Pointing to Fox's coverage of the health care debate, Raines writes:

It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head with, among other tactics, its endless repetition of its uber-lie: "The American people do not want health-care reform."

Fox repeats this as gospel.

Gee. Why would Fox do that? It's not like there are scads of polls showing that the American people wholly reject the vision of "health care reform" that Obama and the Democratic Congress are trying to shove down our throats. The "news" of "health care reform" is not consumed with the vague and historic notions of "reform" that Raines then cites for support. "News," as Raines should know, is what's happening now. And what's happening now on that front is extremely unpopular. Why, pray tell, is reporting — and in commentary shows, reflecting — the "gospel" of public opinion somehow a sin against journalism?

Seriously, the idiocy of Raines' piece is a wonder to behold, and explains why The New York Times is losing readership faster than Monkey Ben is losing hair. Stupid didn't leave the building with Raines, but is institutionalized at the paper.

Mark Steyn and Greg Gutfeld have torn Raines a couple of new ones over his diatribe. And they are worth reading for the giggles. But I'm gonna pull out some more asininity for the dozens of readers of Infinite Monkeys (which includes family). Raines writes:

How to explain? It's like Harold & Maude, only if both characters appeared to be 12 years old and Maude was actually a vampire. And if it had the icy surroundings and slowly building sense of dread as in The Shining. With Scott Farkus from A Christmas Story making an appearance as Harold's tormenter. Oh yeah, and it's all in Swedish -- with all the awkward touches of pubescent sexuality that might imply.

Does that describe it? It's the best I can do.

Cross-posted at Cup O' Joel.

That, at least, is the conclusion of Abe Greenwald a Friday post at Commentary's Contentions blog titled "Democracy only works if you use it." Greenwald, like me, used Charles Krauthammer's latest column, but to make a different point.

Dr. K notes the contentiousness of today's political debate and writes: "Hail the untidiness. Hail democracy. Hail the rotation of power. Yes, even when Democrats gain office." Even though, as Krauthammer writes, "it’s hard to recall a more informed, more detailed, more serious, more prolonged national debate than on health care reform," what does that matter when the Congress and the president are not listening to the people? As Greenwald writes:

All of the fighting, even the polarization, would be easier to hail if the Democrats were not sidestepping it. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid are seeking to change the fundamental nature of the country, not by triumphing in rigorous debate, but rather by exploiting a procedural loophole that would allow them to act against the will of the people.

The citizens of this country have historically enjoyed a unique level of influence on their government. But we are now spectators before whom a cadre of floundering ideologues seeks to sever the trusts that make consensual governance consensual. The Democrats lost the public debate. Ask them if they care.

What I put in bold above is what is so troubling to me. Greenwald points to a recent statement by Nancy Pelosi that reflects her utter disregard — contempt, really — for the opinion of the American people as reflected in the polls and the election of several candidates who ran against the agenda of her caucus and Obama.

We will go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we will parachute in. But we are going to get health care reform passed for the American people for their own personal health and economic security and for the important role that it will play in reducing the deficit.

Is that really how our constitutional republic is supposed to work? That if the barriers to an agenda stand in the way — also known as checks and balances — those with a temporary hold on power are to ignore them, subvert them and (if necessary) "pole vault" over them? Previously in the entire history of this country, if you ain't got the votes for a major piece of legislation or "reform," you move on. That's what Bush and the Republican Congress did in 2005 regarding Social Security reform. Rigging the rules, coming up with endless schemes to get your way — including the "Slaughter Solution" to consider the Senate version of the bill passed without ever voting on it as the constitution demands — makes a mockery of our form of government. It's tyranny with a sheen of democracy.

No president, no speaker of the House, should be able to subvert our checks and balances on government power because that president and that speaker say they think its for our own good. We are not children, and they are not our absolute rulers.

Beyond the question of whether ObamaCare is good for the people — and I believe it is not — is proceeding with such contempt for our constitution and the will of the American people good for the country? Does it foster respect for our form of government, or cynicism (which Obama famously said in his campaign was his "real" opponent)?

Obama, Pelosi, and Reid now believe they must pass ObamaCare by any means necessary, because somewhere along the way, the quest to get this done turned into a political suicide mission. Might as well get what you came for, then, and have your political death not be all for naught. It is now left to a handful of House Democrats to decide if they want to take down 200-plus years of what Americans have considered consensual government down with them. Because a "yea" vote not only ratifies ObamaCare, but sets a precedent that "by any means necessary" is now how this republic governs the people.

Every nation has its own creation myth, something that illuminates our understanding of how a country sees itself, and the emergence of China as an economic superpower in the last couple of decades has prompted some cinematic consideration of how it came into being. Notable among these movies in recent years was Jet Li's Hero, which featured some wonderfully staged action scenes -- it was a Jet Li movie, after all -- but was also troubling to Western and democratic sensibilities with its seemingly pro-totalitarian bent.

Hero, though, was preceded a few years by 1998's The Emperor and the Assassin, and one hopes that this version of China's creation myth doesn't really show us how that country's citizens and artists think of themselves -- because it is super twisted.

Long story short: Li Xuejian plays Zheng Ying, the King of Qin who in 221 BC united all of China's disparate kingdoms under one empire. He's the Chinese George Washington, only if George Washington had a frothing bit of Macbeth in him, sprinkled with a twist of Hitler: Even at the outset he's clearly insane -- and as the movie progresses, it becomes clear he'll do anything to consolidate power: Murder his own family members, wipe out all the children of a city, and destroy entire families at a whim. But he manages a moment of clarity early on, describing China as he will one day rule it with kindness and wisdom.

His lover, Lady  Zhao, is played by Gong Li, who is one of the most beautiful actresses ever to appear on screen anywhere in the world at any point in cinematic history. (I wanted, during the movie, to call her Lady Rowwwwr.) She is so moved by Ying's promise to benevolently rule a unified China that she has her face branded, part of a plot to create a pretext for Qin's invasion of a neighboring kingdom, Yan. But she changes her mind when she sees Ying's dark side, and plots with a reformed assassin to kill the king.

We know from history that Ying did become the first emperor of China, and thus we know what becomes of the plot. But still, something buzzes throughout the movie: This is China's creation myth! And it's full of double-crosses, palace intrigue and deaths to fill two or three Shakespeare plays! We're apparently supposed to take it as a given that the unification of China was a worthy thing -- and if you're a Chinese moviegoer watching this, that may well be a given. The rest of us, though, are left aghast at the horror of it all. Put it this way: I've never seen a movie with so many dead children on screen.

China's movie industry is not known, for obvious reasons, for its subversiveness. But there might be a hidden message in all of this. Lady Zhao is so moved by the king's promises of benevolence, food, safety and even good roads for all that she deforms her own visage to enable Ying's military adventurism ... only to find his bright vision similarly deformed by the awful task of acquiring power. A lesson learned: Never, ever trust the king.

Cross-posted at Cup O' Joel.

Charles Krauthammer is always required reading in my mind, but he really hits it on an intriguing and unsaid dynamic of today's politics by riffing on the disappearance of the anti-war left.

Surely, there are hard lefties (and even mainstream Democrats) unhappy with the state of America's continued war-mongering foreign policy more than one year after that swaggering, idiot cowboy left the Oval Office and a liberal Democrat (with a like-thinking Congress) settled into power. But the good doctor, like me, looks at wonder at the tranquility on the war-protesting stage.

Do you think if John McCain, let alone George W. Bush, were president, we would not see growing demonstrations protesting our continued presence in Iraq and the escalation of Afghanistan? That we wouldn't see a serious push in Congress to cut off funds?

Why not? Because Barack Obama is now commander in chief. The lack of opposition is not a matter of hypocrisy. It is a natural result of the rotation of power. When a party is in opposition, it opposes. That's its job. But when it comes to power, it must govern. Easy rhetoric is over, the press of reality becomes irresistible. By necessity, it adopts some of the policies it had once denounced. And a new national consensus is born.

Left unsaid by Krauthammer, and what needs to be said, is that there's a reason why the protests from those "out of power" have not materialized. Those out of power today have a sense of decorum and — OK, I'll say it — patriotism. Those out of power today don't just support the troops in some kind of vague sense. They realize that you can't really support the troops without supporting the mission.

But Krauthammer asks a great question: Where are all you smelly hippies! I guess we'll have to wait until ObamaCare dies to see them. ;-)

As I await the fusillade of approbrium ... please read the rest of Krauthammer's latest. Even you liberals. It's good stuff, and not nearly as snarky as my asides.

The popular image of Mike Tyson has long been that he's a dumb, savagely abusive brute who treats women -- in particular -- like crap. James Toback's documentary, Tyson, is supposed to correct the record a bit and it does: Now we know that Mike Tyson is somewhat self-aware that he's a savagely abusive brute who treats women like crap.

That's not what Toback is necessarily aiming for in this 2008 documentary. After all, we're treated to many, many images of Tyson staring pensively at the ocean while he tells his rags-to-riches story of a youngster who went from being the first coming of Omar Little -- robbing drug houses -- to the world's youngest heavyweight boxing champion to a convicted rapist to Holyfield ear-chewer and finally to a washed-up boxer and family man. We're also treated to private home video footage of him play-boxing with one of his young children. This is supposed to make us think that Tyson's not quite the brute we've perceived him as: Google up the phrase "Mike Tyson Toback complex" and you'll get 32,000 hits.

But where women are concerned, Mike Tyson is anything but complex. He professes openly that his goal is to dominate women, particularly sexually, and particularly if they're extraordinarily powerful. He calls Desiree Washington, the woman he was convicted of raping, a "wretched swine" -- betraying no Kobe-like awareness or contemplation of the possibility that (at the very least) the sexual advances he thought were welcome actually weren't. Every moment that Tyson talks about women makes you cringe -- though at least there's a laugh to be had when he describes performing "fellatio" on one young woman he met early in his career.

One, though, can be unsympathetic to Tyson and still recognize his story as a tragedy -- a tale of talent, riches and opportunity pissed away because of his own faults, and stolen from him by the always-corrupt game of boxing. But Tyson's contemptible characteristics loom too large in the story for you to feel sorry for him for long.

"Netflix Queue" features reviews of movies I just got around to watching -- no matter how out-of-date they might be. Cross-posted at the brand-new Cup O' Joel.

I'm no Second Amendment zealot -- I've said before that I think the right to bear arms probably isn't such a hot idea in cities plagued by gun violence. Still, I think there's a bit of disingenuousness in today's LA Times op-ed piece by Paul Helmke of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence -- a call for Starbucks to ban from the premises any customers who lawfully enter the store with a gun on their person.

Here's the laugh-out-loud untruth:

We are not asking Starbucks to take a position on America's gun debate. We are asking it to establish a policy to protect its customers -- including gun owners and employees -- against the possibility that misused firearms carried into the stores by those The Times describes as "postmodern cowboy wannabes" could cause great harm. We are not pressuring Starbucks to take a position against anyone's beliefs.

Oh, bullcrap.

I suppose this is narrowly true in the sense that the Brady Campaign isn't asking Starbucks to send lobbyists far and wide to campaign for restrictive gun laws. But the Brady Campaign is clearly asking Starbucks to send a rather clear message about the state of gun laws in California and America -- that they're not restrictive enough to protect public safety, and that further steps must be taken by private businesses to do the job if politicians in Sacramento and D.C. won't.

That's clearly a political act, clearly the taking a position on America's gun debate. And it is, in fact, a legitimate position for both the Brady Campaign and Starbucks -- should it ever choose to do so -- to take. But it is a not-very-good lie, an unnecessary lie, to pretend that such a position is somehow apolitical. The Brady Campaign should own its beliefs and positions instead of this pretense. Truth matters.

Cross-posted at Cup O' Joel.

Good posts from both Monkey Joel and Joe Carter over at First Things about the latest stupidity to spring from Glenn Beck's mouth.

As a (theologically) conservative protestant, let me say that I'll stick with Aquinas on the "social justice" issue, rather than the crazed rantings of a man who chose his religion almost incidentally.

It's Academy Awards Weekend. Ben and Joel are joined once again by Christian Toto of What Would Toto Watch? and Matt Prigge of Philadelphia Weekly to talk about the 2009 nominees in the run up to Sunday's awards. (And if you are listening to this after the show, check out just how wrong -- or how right! -- we were.)

Among the questions we explore:

• Are 10 Best Picture nominations better than five?
• Or is expanding the nomination pool just a gimmick?
• Never mind what the Academy says: What movie really deserved the Best Picture Oscar?
• Is "Avatar" art -- or an embarrassment?
• What set "The Hurt Locker" apart from other recent war movies?
• Is it time for a gender-neutral “Best Actor” Oscar?
• Which movie released in 2009 should have been on the Best Picture list?
• Could there be a better Nazi zombie movie than "Dead Snow"?

Music heard in this podcast:

• "Hooray for Hollywood," Geoff Muldaur
• "I See You (Theme from 'Avatar')," some cheap knockoff cover, not the Leona Lewis version from the "Avatar" OST
• "Slaughter," Billy Preston (from the "Inglourious Basterds" OST)
• "Julia's Theme," Alexander Desplat (from the "Julie and Julia" OST)
• "Up With End Credits," Michael Giacchino (from the "Up" OST)

00:35:04 minutes (20.51 MB)

we need an "education" topic pigeonhole around here. imo

NEWS! AS ONLY THE L. A. TIMES CAN COVER IT (that is, lukewarmedly)!

"California disqualified from receiving federal education funds"

" The competition was set up to encourage states to take on reforms supported by the Obama administration. "

Anyone want to tell me how a state with 10% of the population blew this one? WHO ARE THE GRANT-WRITERS RESPONSIBLE? I WANT THEIR PENCILS BROKEN.

Not necessarily because I favor federal funds being taken from states, filtered thru the feds and then generously being returned to us a little at a time. Rather, mostly because you could pluck me out of bed at 3 A.M. and I would be able to write a pretty good grant proposal for federal education funding. These grant-writers are obviously inept.

Present company excepted, sirs!

Preface: Zaius and I got into it more than usual last week over a blog post in which I -- perhaps too casually -- suggested racism was at play in a posting at Andrew Breitbart's Big Government website. We've kissed and made up behind the scenes, but this post involves some of the same issues, so I want to be clear: I'm not trying to bait anybody here.

That said, here's a video posted at Big Government right now:

It's billed as a "comedy rap video" so I'm sure I'll be admonished not to take it so seriously. But as Spencer Ackerman notes:

This is a conservative rap song that repeatedly addresses the first black president as “boy”; has a lyric in which a rapper imagining herself as a soldier in Iraq declares herself “sick of smelling like a mosque after Ramadan”; and then features a birther talking about how Obama isn’t an American.

You know what? That speaks for itself.

Um, well, it certainly seems to. But I also know my conservative friends -- and Zaius is my friend, let me shout it from the rooftops -- are very sensitive about loose allegations of racism directed at conservatives. So I want to tread carefully here ... and yet I don't want to be so careful that I ignore troubling content at leading mainstream conservative site. But I wonder: How should we interpret this?

Thus endeth one of the most carefully worded posts I've ever written.

Ever since it became apparent we weren't actually going to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, certain conservatives have continued to argue that the invasion was still a good idea. Maybe he didn't possess nukes or other WMDs, the thinking goes, but Saddam Hussein was still a bad guy -- a threat to his own people and a destabilizing force in the region who needed to be removed. As National Review's Victor Davis Hanson said last year: "Congress cited 23 reasons why we should remove Saddam. The majority of these authorizations had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction."

I've long contended that's a dodge: Maybe there were plenty of reasons to want to see Saddam Hussein out of power, but there was only one necessary and sufficient reason the American public was going to back an otherwise-unprovoked invasion of Iraq: the WMDs.

Guess who agrees with me? Karl Rove and George W. Bush:

While the opportunity to bring democracy to the Middle East as a bulwark against Islamic extremism "justified the decision to remove Saddam Hussein," Mr. Rove makes clear that from the start, at least, the suspected weapons and their perceived threat were the primary justification for war.

"Would the Iraq War have occurred without W.M.D.? I doubt it," he writes. "Congress was very unlikely to have supported the use-of-force resolution without the W.M.D. threat. The Bush administration itself would probably have sought other ways to constrain Saddam, bring about regime change, and deal with Iraq's horrendous human rights violations."

Rove goes on to reject that Bush "lied" the United States into war -- he really, really believed Hussein had the weapons. Fine. Lots of people and nations did. Only one problem: There was a process in place before the war to determine the nature of Saddam's WMD programs -- the UN inspectors -- and their inability to find the non-existent weapons somehow became proof that the weapons actually existed!*

*Not to mention that there were options besides invasion for deterring Saddam Hussein if he possessed WMDs. But that's a whole 'nother argument.

But the math here is simple and, really, inarguable. If the invasion of Iraq wouldn't have happened without the WMDs, and if Iraq didn't actually possess WMDs, then the invasion of Iraq was a huge mistake -- one created in part by the Bush Administration's aggressive blunder in short-circuiting the U.N. process. The debate, such as it was, is over. We can all move on.

I've said it before, but in light of this column today by none other than Jonah Goldberg, I'll say it again: "Big business" and "big government" are two sides of the same coin, and it's a mistake for conservatives to side with one over the other. The problem again is the adjective, not the noun.

Here's Goldberg making a related point in USA Today:

The lesson here is fairly simple: Big business is not "right wing," it's vampiric. It will pursue any opportunity to make a big profit at little risk. Getting in bed with politicians is increasingly the safest investment for these "crony capitalists." But only if the politicians can actually deliver. The political failures of the Obama White House have translated into business failures for firms more eager to make money off taxpayers instead of consumers.

That's good news. The bad news will be if the Republicans once again opt to be the cheap dates of big business. For years, the GOP defended big business in the spirit of free enterprise while businesses never showed much interest in the principle themselves. Now that their bet on the Democrats has crapped out, it'd be nice if they stopped trying to game the system and focused instead on satisfying the consumer.

This also relates to the arguments we had here and at Joel's place about the Supreme Court's decision in the Citizen's United campaign finance case. If you're going to inject politics into business by way of regulation, it's only natural that business will seek to inject itself into politics to protect its interests. Hence: "Vampiric" big business.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday heard oral arguments in the case of McDonald v. Chicago, which is challenging the Second City's 30-year-old ban on handguns. McDonald is the sequel to Heller v. District of Columbia, in which the justices ruled that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to bear arms in federal jurisdictions. If the court follows its own logic in McDonald, it will "incorporate" the language of the Fourteenth Amendment with the Second Amendment, extending the right of gun ownership to the states.

That would be a very good thing, of course. But as Randy Barnett argues in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, what's most interesting about McDonald are the questions the justices aren't asking.

At the McDonald argument, it seemed obvious that five or more justices will vote to apply the Second Amendment to the states. This would be a great victory for gun rights—one that until a few years ago would have been unimaginable. But it was also obvious that most were deeply afraid of following a text whose original meaning might lead them where they do not want to go. When it came to following the written Constitution, a visitor from another planet would not, I suspect, have been very impressed.

Barnett has bigger game in his sights; namely, the Fourteenth Amendment's "Privileges and Immunities" clause: "Justice Scalia insisted that the right to keep and bear arms is right there in the text, which of course is true. But so too is the Privileges or Immunities Clause, which, unlike the Court's due process jurisprudence, has a historical meaning that helps define and limit the rights it was meant to protect."

There is more, of course. Much more, in fact. Barnett continues the argument over privileges and immunities with Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy. And David Kopel weighs in on the question of "reasonable regulation."

The Orange County Register editorializes Wednesday on Jerry Brown's official entry into the 2010 governor's race:

In his announcement video, Mr. Brown spun his age and experience – he has also been California secretary of state and mayor of Oakland and currently is the state attorney general – as an advantage during a time of crisis. The question of the day is: which Jerry Brown will show up?

In the 1970s he acquired the moniker Gov. Moonbeam for his advocacy of sometimes utopian, or just plain eccentric, projects. He had a strong environmental record (as these matters are understood in conventional political terms) and railed against Big Oil. He also ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976 and 1980. In 1982 he lost a U.S. Senate race to Republican Pete Wilson, who later became governor.

Jerry Brown's experience as mayor of Oakland – a position in which people can see readily whether potholes are being filled or the fire and police departments show up when called – may have tempered his eccentric utopian streak with some fiscal realism. In his announcement he promised no new taxes and a downsizing of state government.

Actually, what Brown promised was no new taxes without the approval of the electorate. That could be interpreted in all sorts of mischievous ways, and I'm sure we'll see a ballot initiative or two, and a tax hike or two with or without the people's endorsement. Brown is shrewd -- very shrewd -- and all of Meg Whitman's (or Steve Poizner's) money may not be enough to overcome old Jerry's savvy.

I have to believe this book, brought to you by the same guy who wrote Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, will be terrible. (These mash-up books featuring classic characters or historical figures battling supernatural creatures are sort of annoying, aren't they?) But the book's "trailer" looks fun. I will probably skip the novel and wait for the feature film. Incidentally, movie version of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which stars Natalie Portman, is in production now and is scheduled for release in 2011.

(Hat tip: Gamma Squad)

Jerry Brown has been running for governor of California for about three years, but he'll make it official today. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

The announcement by the 71-year-old state attorney general sets up what will be one of the nation's most expensive, high-stakes and potentially combative contests in the 2010 elections.

The move means that Brown - who is also a former California secretary of state, Oakland mayor and U.S. Senate candidate, as well as a three-time presidential candidate - will now face one of two wealthy Republicans in the November general election.

In other news, I just ordered a raft of books on Brown's first couple of terms as California governor, because it's 1978 all over again. Since the protean sage of Oakland is serenely content to let the records of his governorship remain locked up, voters will have to relive those glory days through contemporary accounts, flawed though they may be.

Update: Here's Brown's announcement video. Note his three principles. He's running as a moderate.

I've been writing lately about the centralization of education under the Obama administration. Nothing is available online at the moment, but it should be real soon now. The problem is, centralization and bureaucratization -- two horrible words -- lead to rigidity and... well, stupidity.

Joel Kotkin, writing in Forbes, offers a trenchant critique of Barack Obama's centralizing tendencies:

From health care reform and transportation to education to the environment, the Obama administration has--from the beginning--sought to expand the power of the central state. The president's newest initiative to wrest environment, wage and benefit concessions from private companies is the latest example. But this trend of centralizing power to the federal government puts the political future of the ruling party--as well as the very nature of our federal system--in jeopardy.

Kotkin, who currently teaches at Chapman University, still considers himself a "social democrat." He would rather see government foster economic policies that work to the benefit of the lower and middle classes. Inasmuch as that requires government to get the hell out of the way, it's tough for me to disagree. Kotkin's latest book is "The Next Hundred Million: America at 2050."

As a sucker for lost causes, I'm a Chuck DeVore guy pretty much all the way. But when I read that Mickey Kaus mounting a challenge against Barbara Boxer for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, I'm sorely tempted to pull the donkey lever in the primary. At least Kaus can feed and dress himself without assistance. I'm not so sure that's true of Boxer.

Unfortunately, switching party allegiances would preclude me from voting for John Eastman for attorney general in the GOP primary, and I can't have that.

Sorry, Mickey. I hope you can give Boxer a run for her money, though.

Update: From Kaus's blog:

This isn't the place to make an electioneering spiel--I don't want to be a test case of campaign finance law if I can help it. But the basic idea would be to argue, as a Democrat, against the party's dogma on several major issues (you can guess which ones). Likeminded Dem voters who assume they will vote for Sen. Boxer The Incumbent in the fall might value a mechanism that lets them register their dissent in the primary.

Next phase: Lowering expectations!

Indeed.

Apparently some nutty Argentinians tried to kill themselves -- and their baby -- over fears about global warming. It's crazy, crazy stuff that clearly doesn't represent mainstream environmentalism; how many global warming suicide pacts have you seen?

Still, making distinctions between the mainstream and a few troubled souls is an ability that eludes folks like Jim Hoft, the "Gateway Pundit" at the First Things website.

He writes:

Someone should sue Al Gore. He played on their fears and now a whole family is dead.

What an ugly -- and dumb -- cheap shot. Jim Hoft is a jerk who clearly seeks political advantage in the ugliest of situations. Given that First Things is devoted to advancing "a religiously informed public philosophy," I've got to say: Keep me away from whatever religion he's advancing. I had, until tonight, respected First Things as a locus of thoughtful and humane conservatism. Apparently I was wrong.

Let me slow down, though.

These days, we're all having a hell of a time telling our political opponents from the lunatic fringe. I look at the Tea Party folks and see birthers and racists and militia types lurking around the edges and wonder how much Republicans are willing to pander. I see the murder of an abortion doctor in Kansas and wonder how much Bill O'Reilly is to blame. I see a suicide attack on an IRS building and wonder how much over-the-top anti-government rhetoric is to blame.

Maybe all of us need to take a step back and take a very deep breath. Because we're all so busy -- and so loudly -- pointing out the craziness on the other side that we're sounding a little crazy ourselves. And that makes it more difficult, not less, to accurately identify where the militants and the kooks really are penetrating the mainstream. We're starting to think that every idea that is dissimilar to our own is dangerous: It means that everybody else in the world is crazy. And if that's the case, nobody's crazy.

The parents in Argentina were obviously troubled souls. They did something extreme and unwarranted and tragic. To put such brokeness to the task of advancing our political squabbles isn't just unwise; it's very nearly inhuman.

That's the scuttle, according to Fox News.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday President Obama will soon propose a health care bill that will be "much smaller" than the House bill but "big enough" to put the country on a "path" toward health care reform. A senior administration official told Fox Obama's proposal will be introduced Wednesday.

"In a matter of days, we will have a proposal," Pelosi said, pointing to Obama's forthcoming bill. "It will be a much smaller proposal than we had in the House bill, because that's where we can gain consensus. But it will be big enough to put us on a path of affordable, quality health care for all Americans that holds insurance companies accountable."

Melody Barnes, a top Obama domestic policy adviser, did not dispute Pelosi's characterization of the new plan as smaller in scope - and quite possibly in cost - than either the House or Senate health care bills.

"It's going to be matter of drawing on these different ideas and coming up with the right proposal," Barnes said in an exclusive interview with Fox. "That's what my colleagues are working on. That's what they're talking with Congress about. We'll see what it looks like when the proposal is sent forward."

Asked how White House staff is putting the new proposal together, Barnes said they are "borrowing" from conversations at Thursday's health care summit.

"We're going to be borrowing from those conversations ... to come up with a bill that we hope can receive bipartisan support," Barnes said.

When asked if White House staff, as Press Secretary Robert Gibbs indicated Friday, would work on GOP ideas for health reform over the weekend, Barnes identified two: tort reform and allowing insurers to sell policies across state lines.

Well, it's about time. Obama could have saved himself a wasted year — and perhaps saved Ted Kennedy's Senate seat for the Democrats — by doing this sometime in early 2009. That's what president's normally do when they'd like to enact major reforms: They submit a bill that lays out clear priorities, and then lets Congress mess around with it, but not too much. Instead, he let Pelosi and Reid come up with a plan from scratch that turned into the monstrosity that polls show the American people are overwhelmingly against.

Time will tell if this last-ditch effort to save his No. 1 domestic priority will bear fruit. But if Obama is expecting this bill to be "fast-tracked," he's kidding himself. If Obama really wants what he presents Wednesday to be passed, it has to start winding its way through the legislative process all over again — which means it needs to be taken up by several relevant committees in both chambers, get debated, marked up, sent to the floor, debated again, voted on, and, if passed, have the differences reconciled in a conference committee. Oh, and it would have to survive a filibuster in the new 59-41 Dem/GOP ratio in the Senate.

Yes. Important legislation can be passed in a matter of a few weeks. The Patriot Act comes to mind, but that's hardly a model Democrats can defend considering they've complained for years that it was passed and signed into law too quickly (while nonetheless passing up nearly every opportunity to correct the abuses and errors they say are in the law). One could argue that The Patriot Act was an "emergency," necessary to equip the federal government to respond to the threat of international terrorism that hit home on 9/11. What's the emergency here to get health care reform passed? That Democrats might lose their majority in eight months? No sale.

Also, the devil will be in the details. While I'm encouraged to see that Obama appears to be on board with malpractice insurance reform and allowing interstate health insurance sales, those proposals have to be substantive. Allowing a Californian to purchase health insurance plans that people in Arizona buy is meaningless if California's rules for what must be covered in a plan still hold. And we must also see what is in Obama's plan. A lot of it could still be objectionable (in fact, I'm counting on it).

Will Obama's plan be honest in its cost, free of the trick of "scoring" it with 10 years of tax increases but six years of benefits to make it "revenue neutral" but phony? Will the Medicare "Doc Fix" be included so it reflects the real cost of "reform"? Those are key questions. And if it also includes the vast federal bureaucracies to micromanage the health insurance market from Washington, I don't see Republicans getting on board. Not now.

The irony is that if Obama proposed his own "much smaller" bill in February 2009, he'd probably have his "health care reform" already — and with enough Republican support to truly call it bipartisan. But only now, in an incredibly weak position, is Obama reaching his hand up toward Republicans asking to be saved — the same Republicans he treated with contempt for 12 months. I would not be surprised if Republicans decline to pull him up and save his political bacon ... and take their chances with voters in November while carrying the label of "obstructionists."

(HT: The Corner)

As we no doubt all know, yesterday President Obama and several lawmakers spent more than seven hours talking past each other at the Blair House. Probably the most dramatic thing to come out of the meeting was the (renewed) Democratic threat to use Budget Reconciliation to push a HCR bill past a threatened filibuster. This isn't the first time this idea has been bandied about, but the threat carries more weight now that Democrats only hold 59 seats in the Senate. Republicans countered, predictably for the opposition party, that such a move is unprecedented and not appropriate for such sweeping social reform. Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist argued such last night on WSJ online.

Senators of both parties have assiduously avoided using budget reconciliation as a mechanism to pass expansive social legislation that lacks bipartisan support. In 1993, Democratic leaders—including the dean of Senate procedure and an author of the original Budget Act, Robert C. Byrd— appropriately prevailed on the Clinton administration not to use reconciliation to adopt its health-care agenda. It was used to pass welfare reform in 1996, an entitlement program, but the changes had substantial bipartisan support.

Since 1980, Budget Reconciliation has been used (and not vetoed) 19 times. (link is .pdf) Fourteen of those times, or 74% of the time, it was a Republican congress that has done so. The largest uses, in terms of net effect on the deficit, were:

• Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (Republicans): increased deficit by $552 billion
• Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 (passed by Democrats): reduced deficit by $504.8 billion
• Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (Republicans): increased deficit by $342.9 billion

In today's dollars, those are roughly equivalent to $670b, $738b and $398b respectively.

I'm not entirely decided on the Budget Reconciliation idea. I think Frist does have a point that HCR reform is more expansive than Bush's two rounds of tax cuts, Clinton's welfare reform and tax increases/spending cuts, and Reagan's tax and welfare/spending cuts. On the other hand, the Republican's complete refusal to participate in the process leaves the Democrats without many alternatives. Both McCain and Boehner have said they want to scrap the bill and start over from scratch. This could be shrewd political strategy. Another 9+ months of debate will probably help the Republicans this fall.

Yesterday, as the meeting was going on, I heard a congressman (Democrat I think - I wish I had caught his name) on the radio talking about the 3 legs of the Health Care Reform stool. The first was coverage for preexisting conditions. There seems to be broad bipartisan support for this idea. The congressman's point was that mandating that insurance companies cover preexisting conditions necessarily requires mandating universal coverage, which in turn necessitates government subsidies (the second and third legs of his stool). I wonder what the Conservative or Libertarian response to this is? Do they not want coverage for preexisting conditions? Or are they willing to mandate universal coverage? And if so, are they willing to subsidize insurance for the poor? Or are there other solutions to these two problems? These seem like deal breakers to me, which lends credence to the thought that Health Care Reform (that includes coverage for preexisting conditions) will not be possible without resorting to Budget Reconciliation.