Professor Lawrence Connell's Hypotheticals

ICYMI, be sure to read my earlier entry, "Charlotte Allen: 'The Mess at Widener Law School."



I've been thinking about the case and will have more later. Mostly, I'm trying to figure out Deans Ammons' animosity toward Professor Connell. Charlotte Allen notes:

Connell’s most egregious offense ... and probably the offense that brought down the full-bore wrath of Ammons upon him, was a series of classroom hypotheticals. The scenarios involved Ammons herself and Connell’s efforts to kill her (hypothetically) after she threatened to fire him (hypothetically) for parking his car in her parking space. In one of the hypotheticals Connell rushed into Ammons’ office with his .357 magnum and shot her in the head—except that the “head” turned out to a pumpkin artfully painted to look just like the dean. The idea was to ask the class whether under prevailing legal rules he should be tried for attempted murder—or not, since no harm actually befell her. Imaginative and macabrely humorous hypotheticals, often pitting professors against deans and other campus authority figures, are a standard feature of Old Law School pedagogy. The idea is that the students will absorb and remember the underlying legal principles better in a context of humorous narrative. Hypotheticals show up not just in law school classrooms but in exam questions and moot-court competitions. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was repeatedly murdered in classroom hypotheticals when she was dean of Harvard Law School.

Indeed, as Professor Jonathan Turley indicates, "Widener Law Professor Suspended For Using Dean In Hypotheticals":

I must confess that I routinely incorporate the Dean at our school in the same type of hypotheticals as well as any contract professors. Indeed, my final every year involves some struggle between myself and the Dean and contracts professors. Absent something more, I fail to see the basis for such disciplinary action. Other professors have raises objections to the case on sites like Volokh.



In his letter, [Widener Vice Dean J. Patrick] Kelly accuses Connell of an “outgoing pattern” of misconduct, and cites his use of such hypotheticals, including “cursing and coarse behavior, “racist and sexist statements” and “violent, personal scenarios that demean and threaten your colleagues.” Without more, the allegations raise serious concerns over academic freedom and privilege.



I am most disturbed by the statement of Gregory F. Scholtz, associate secretary and director of the American Association of University Professors. AAUP is organization that is expected to defend academic freedom. Yet, Scholtz is quoted as saying “Education is all about pushing the boundaries, and it’s all about controversial ideas, but the question always is when does it cross the line. Given our modern culture and the violence that exists, you’re really asking for trouble when you talk about killing people.” Really? That is news to those of us who teach torts and criminal law. It is common for faculty to incorporate colleagues into hypotheticals as good-humored jokes. At my school, contracts professors respond by incorporating me into their own hypotheticals. I have never found it even remotely bothersome or insulting. It keeps the attention of students and adds a needed element of levity in lectures.

It's routine. And Turley has more on how chilling the Lawrence case is for academic freedom.



Also, at Volokh, "Interview With Lawrence Connell, the Criminal Law Professor Suspended for His Hypotheticals":

Q: Can you give me an example of a hypothetical you might have used in class, to which the students who complained might have been referring? Can you describe the context in which you would have used it?



A: Yes, here is one: The Dean has threatened to fire me if she comes to school one more time and finds that I have parked in her designated parking space. Upset about the possibility of losing both my job and the parking space, I bring my .357 to school, get out of my car, put the .357 into my waistband, walk to the top floor where her office is located, open the door to her office, see her seated at her desk, draw my weapon, aim my weapon, and fire my weapon directly into what I believe to be her head. To my surprise, it’s not the Dean at all, but an ingeniously painted pumpkin — a pumpkin that has been intricately painted to look like the Dean. Dick Tracy rushes in and immediately wrestles me to the ground. I am charged with the attempted murder of the Dean.



The hypothetical raises various issues about attempted crimes that might entail discussion that spans more than one class. Some of the classroom discussion in the first, for example, will address the two basic philosophical problems of why we punish attempts, which are failed efforts at crime, and why we punish attempts less than successfully completed crimes.



A retributive argument, on the one hand, is that the attemptor has demonstrated his moral culpability by his bad conduct, and the degree of his punishment should not depend on a fortuitous turn of luck. On the other hand, a retributivist might argue that punishment in the absence of harm is unjust. For retributive purposes, has Connell demonstrated his moral culpability by shooting what he believes to be the Dean? Or does the fact that he merely destroyed a pumpkin suggest that his punishment would be unjust?

It's obviously a powerful heuristic.



More on this tonight. I'm checking around for more on Deans Ammons' motivations to persecute Professor Connell.

Charlotte Allen: 'The Mess at Widener Law School'

At Minding the Campus (via Glenn Reynolds):

Old Law School culture revolves around a traditional curriculum—those torts and contracts courses—and the Socratic method of instruction, with its pointed and rigorous give-and-take between professors and students. Old Law School assumes that the process of training lawyers is training them to a centuries-old Anglo-American tradition of lawyerly thought, which rests on the careful crafting of legal arguments and the relentless challenging of those arguments, often by the professor in the classroom. Old precedent-setting cases may be supplanted by newer cases, and legal principles may shift, but the underlying methodology of close analysis of written court opinions and the arguments on which they rest, along with certain assumptions underlying the American legal systems—that human beings are generally capable of exercising reason and free will and thus should be held responsible for their actions—are Old Law School constants.



New Law School culture, growing out of the Critical Legal Studies movement that first surfaced in law schools during the 1980s, is quite different. In New Law School thinking, the law does not embody a rational system of justice—or even strivings toward such a system—but is essentially a political construct that has historically operated to keep the rich and powerful in their places of wealth and power and other groups—women, racial minorities, the disabled, and the poor—in their socially subordinate places. If this characterization sounds Marxist, that is because Critical Legal Studies—and its intellectual progeny, Critical Race Theory and Feminist Legal Theory—grew out of the New Left radicalism of the 1960s, which viewed American governmental and social structures as systems of oppression. It has also been influenced by postmodernist literary theory, with its assumptions that there is no objective truth or reality. In New Law School thinking, reason, free will, and personal responsibility are illusions, for all legal battles are actually struggles of race, class, and gender, in which power, not justice, is the ultimate goal. In New Law School scholarly writing, rigorous analysis of court opinions and the drawing of fine distinctions underlying legal arguments have been supplanted by “story telling": personal narratives typically involving the law professors’ own experiences as members of an oppressed group with the race-gender-class matrix that is the source of their oppression. Since a shift in the power structure, not justice, is the goal, any tactic that coerces the recalcitrant into conforming to the new power regime is permissible in New Law School thinking.

Continue reading. Especially good is Allen's discussion of Linda Ammons. I wrote briefly along the same lines here, "Widener's Dean Linda Ammons Goes After Law School Professor Lawrence Connell."



And from Allen's conclusion, she notes that Professor Lawrence Connell was exonerated of the allegations against him, yet Ammons still prevailed on her preposterous charge that Connell "retaliated":

What is appalling is that, despite both exonerations, Ammons appears to have gotten her way in the end after all, exacting sanctions against a tenured professor that are not only costly but humiliating (he is supposed to apologize to the complaining students. The charge of retaliation, based on a vague prohibition in the faculty handbook, seem especially flimsy. Connell’s e-mail to his students in December neither named his accusers nor referred to them in any way. As for the lawsuit, Connell never waived his right to seek redress in court against individuals whose false accusations have already cost him quite a bit of money and promise to cost much more. But that is the way of New Law School. It is perhaps only Old Law School, with its emphasis on fairness, reasonableness, and color-and gender-blind justice, that would find something totalitarian in Widener’s treatment of Connell and accordingly demand Linda Ammons’ resignation. In New Law School thinking, where power is everything, and the claims of grievance-bearing identity groups will always prevail over fairness, it is perfectly fine to strip your perceived opponent of his livelihood and to consign him to the ministrations of your own Nurse Ratched—and there is no such thing as abuse of power.

Ann Althouse Attacked at Wisconsin Capitol Singalong

This is generating some interesting discussion: "Attack on Althouse at the Wisconsin Capitol singalong" (found at Memeorandum).

Plus, Althouse gets picked up at Breitbart TV, and from the comments there:

As they keep doing this kind of behavior on a near daily basis now, they do not realize that America has grown tired of this and their patience will eventually wear thin. Because the left is losing power and their true agenda is now exposed in the light of day for the Communist agenda that it is, they are desperate to achieve that ever elusive and imaginary Utopia their leader has promised. When in reality, all they accomplish by doing this is to unite the opposers to Obama's agenda even more.



Not to mention the fact that some day, probably soon, they will pick on the wrong person and find out what it feels like to have your ass beat, and good.

Well, yeah. All in self-defense, of course.

Prime Minister David Cameron Vows Crackdown on Rioters

Cameron wants to go after street thug anonymity, "Social Media, and Facemasks, Are Targets After British Riots." The full text of the prime minister's speech at BBC, "Riots: David Cameron's Commons statement in full."



Social media's not the problem. And amazingly, some folks are still debating the causes of the rioting, as if sheer hooliganism and evil needed further explanation. More at London's Daily Mail, "Unmask the thugs! Looters will no longer be able to cover up, says PM as he also promises a crackdown on social media AND cash for the rioters' victims."

'Descent Into Evil'

I had this at the blog-item finder, and now it's an essay at New York Post, from John Hinderaker:

What makes the present such a frightening time is that a number of nightmarish phenomena that we had thought consigned to the dustbin of history are reappearing. Rioters in the streets. Burning buildings. Plunging markets and the threat of depression. The scent of socialism in the air.



Who, as of, say, 1989, could have imagined that in barely 20 years, what was then known as the Free World could sink so far?



What we are seeing in London and other English cities is an outpouring of evil. To try to explain evil as the result of something else is almost always a mistake.

'I don't call it a riot... I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people...'

When the riots first broke out I checked over at a couple of the anarchist "occupy everything" blogs and it seems like a lot of them are silent, apparently frustrated at the slow development of revolutionary consciousness. But one needn't look too hard to find deep sympathy for the hooligans (at Comment is Free, for example). Hard-left progressives see in the micreants' criminal thuggery some long needed blows against the capitalist state, even if those were mostly just some deviant losers robbing the shelves blind of goods for which they actually had enough money to purchase. It's not deprivation driving unrest, but hatred of conventional goodness, nurtured by decades of socialist progressivism, manifest in the left's deliberate breakdown of the common family structure, which has left generations of "yobbers" free to destroy property and the sense of sanity in society. Jawa Report posted this video, of Darcus Howe, in which he calls the unrest some kind of dialectical historical moment, "London's Thuggery, Murder, Neo-Marxist, Socialist, etc., etc. Mahem + USDayofRage."

Not surprisingly, BBC is now apologizing for suggesting that the bloke might have been involved. See Telegraph UK, "London riots: BBC apologises for accusing Darcus Howe."



We are witnesses the Mad Maxification of society in the early 21st century.

Republicans Holds Four of Six Contested Seats in Wisconsin Recall Elections

William Jacobson warns not to celebrate just yet: "The Wisconsin Recalls Are Not Over." And he's right. Next week's recalls in Wisconsin will be crucial for control over the Senate. But I think a little celebration is in order. Don't you just love this screencap from the Los Angeles Times below. And I swear that Democrat on the right looks like she's wearing a shirt that reads, "Union Thug." Ha, ain't in the truth! And at the Times' article, "Parties seek clues for 2012 in Wisconsin recall election results."

William has more at Legal Insurrection, "“I can see 2012 from my house”," and "The Battle of Wisconsin was not Democrats’ finest hour."



RELATED: Don't miss Chicago Boyz, "This is What Democracy Looks Like." (Via Memeorandum.)

Norway, Free Speech, and the Counter-Jihad

From Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, at American Thinker.

And fro Pamela's introduction at Atlas Shrugs:

Please read the rebuttal that Robert Spencer and I wrote in response to the scurrilous Norway blood libel made against us by media shills and Islamic supremacists. We submitted our piece to publications that damned us and others -- the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the New York Post, National Review, the American Spectator, the London Spectator, the Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal. Nyet. The notorious Guardian, the New York Times, and the Washington Post have published any number of articles smearing us, but would sooner strap on a homicide bomb than let us challenge their lies.



Allow me to extend my deep thanks to the one fine and decent editor who had the integrity to run it, Thomas Lifson of the singular American Thinker.

Re-Education Camps

Progressives are calling for the camps. I kid you not. See Matt Welch, "If Only Americans Weren't So Goddamned Stupid We Wouldn't Have to Send Them to Re-Education Camps."



The camps. Progressives love the camps. The world knows what happens in the camps. And the left wants you to forget why they need the camps. Kevin Robbins ASFL wants you to turn away from the camps. Socialism kills. Now time for your reeducation:

Hat Tip: LCR.

London Riots Day 4: Manchester and Midlands on Fire

Criminal unrest continues in Britain as the government struggles to regain control. See Independent UK, "Riots spread north as London cools." And at Daily Mail, "Now it's Manchester and the Midlands' turn as London braces for FOURTH night of rioting." And also Telegraph UK, "London riots spread to Midlands and north-west on fourth night of trouble."

See also Amusing Bunni, "Save Our Streets," Daley Gator, "Would I be wrong to ask just one question concerning the UK riots?," JammieWearingFool, "Heroes of London: 'It Was Like Being in a War'," Right Wing News, "There’s Nothing Wrong With The Government Shooting Looters & Rioters Down Like Dogs In The Street," and Saberpoint, "Massive Rioting in the U.K., Black on White Violence: What's the Solution?"

Also, at New York Times, "Cameron Deploys 10,000 More Officers to Riots," and "London Riots Put Spotlight on Troubled, Unemployed Youths in Britain." (At Memeorandum.)

Stock Market Plunges

At USA Today, "Crisis of confidence leads to fears of bear market," and New York Times, "Stocks Plunge in Worst Day in Two Years." Also, at Wall Street Journal, "Downgrade Ignites a Global Selloff: Dow's Plunge Worst Since '08":

The downgrade of the U.S.'s credit rating sparked a global selloff on Monday, pushing the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its sharpest one-day decline since the financial crisis in 2008.



In scenes reminiscent of three years ago, selling accelerated as the day went on, and investors were forced to sell to meet margin calls from lenders demanding more collateral. The Dow ended the day down 634.76 points, or 5.5%, at 10809.85, its lowest close since last October. Trading volume of stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange hit the fourth-highest level in history.



It was the Dow's biggest percentage drop since December 2008 and its sixth-largest point decline ever. Other major stock indexes also fell heavily. Traders also dumped corporate bonds and industrial commodities.



Investors fled to the traditional refuges: gold, currencies of safe-seeming countries such as Switzerland, and, ironically, the very securities that Standard & Poor's downgraded on Friday, U.S. Treasury bonds. For most investors, Treasurys seemed a lot safer than stocks.



Tuesday morning in Asia, Tokyo shares opened lower, falling 3.4% in the first minutes of trading.



The Financial Stability Oversight Council, a group of U.S. regulators led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, held an emergency conference call Monday afternoon to discuss the financial-market volatility, a person familiar with the call said.



"There's probably as much uncertainty as we've seen since 2008," said Eric Pellicciaro of asset manager BlackRock's Fundamental Fixed Income division, which has $612.5 billion in assets under management. "There's a general feeling that policy options are few and far between. There's a feeling that fiscal austerity is coming at the worst possible time."

Interesting how Treasury securities remained a safe haven. That can't go on forever.



I'll have more on this tonight.

Ross Douthat, Political Scientist

Douthat draws on political science research at New York Times, "Waiting For a Landslide." And for a second I thought he'd blow it, because "realignment theory," which he discusses, hasn't accurately explained, much less predicted, partisan trends for decades. But Douthat adds this, which is just right:

In reality, the next election may be no more transformative than 2008 turned out to be. The next Republican president may find himself as hemmed in and frustrated as President Obama has become. Meanwhile, America will still have a credit rating to fix, and a deficit to close.

More at that link at top, and Douthat had a great piece a few days ago on the debt deal, "The Liberals’ Dilemma." Note especially:

... American liberalism risks becoming a victim of its own longstanding strategy’s success. Because yesterday’s liberals insisted on making universal programs the costly core of the modern welfare state, on the famous theory that “programs for the poor become poor programs,” today’s liberals find themselves defending those universal (and therefore universally-popular) programs at the expense of every other kind of government spending — including, yes, programs for the poor. It’s a classic example of putting liberal political interests ahead of liberal policy priorities. In the short term, the insistence on ring-fencing Medicare and Social Security has left Democrats defending a system that often just ends up redistributing money from the younger middle class to the older middle class while accepting caps on programs that might do more (both directly and indirectly) to help downscale Americans get ahead. In the long term, by postponing any reckoning with the cost of entitlements, it’s making it more likely that the inevitable crunch will hit the poorest recipients of Medicare and Social Security harder than it should.

Read that whole thing. Basically, progressives will never cut entitlements because gargantuan socialist welfare states form the core of socialist existentialism.



Douthat's coming of his own as a New York Times columnist, by the way. He had cold feet or something after leaving The Atlantic, but he's been more consistent in posting some excellent commentary of late.

America Gets Downgraded

At Wall Street Journal, "A spend and tax policy mix always leads to economic decline":

... is there anything that S&P said on Friday that everyone else doesn't already know? S&P essentially declared that on present trend the U.S. debt burden is unsustainable, and that the American political system seems unable to reverse that trend.

This is not news.

In that context, the Obama Administration's attempt to discredit S&P only makes the U.S. look worse—like the Europeans who also want to blame the raters for noticing the obvious. Treasury officials and chief White House economic adviser Gene Sperling denounced S&P for relying on a Congressional Budget Office scenario that overestimated the U.S. discretionary spending baseline by $300 billion through 2015 and $2 trillion through 2021.

But even adjusting for that $2 trillion would only reduce U.S. publicly held debt to 85% or so of GDP—still dangerously high. And that assumes that recently agreed upon spending caps are sustained over a decade, something which rarely happens.

We think the larger problem with S&P, Moody's and Fitch is that they make no distinction over how a nation balances its books—whether through tax increases or spending reductions. Like the International Monetary Fund, the raters care only about balance.

This takes too little account of the need for faster economic growth, which is the only real path out of a debt crisis. Britain's government has earned rater approval for its fiscal consolidation, but its increases in VAT and income tax rates are hurting its tepid recovery. Letting the credit raters dictate tax increases is the road to an austerity trap.

The real reason for White House fury at S&P is that it realizes how symbolically damaging this downgrade is to President Obama's economic record. Democrats can rail all they want about the tea party, but Republicans have controlled the House for a mere seven months. The entire GOP emphasis in those seven months—backed by the tea party—has been on reversing the historic spending damage of Mr. Obama's first two years.

Continue reading.

IMAGE CREDIT: The Astute Bloggers.

The Progressive-Left's Communist Holocaust Denial

Judson Phillips, leader of Tea Party Nation, is trending at Memeorandum for his statement that...

I detest and despise everything the left stands for. How anybody can endorse and embrace an ideology that has killed a billion people in the last century is beyond me...

Actually, the numbers of those killed under communist totalitarianism probably don't reach one billion for the 20th century, but certainly hundreds of millions were killed during the rule of the Soviets to Communist China, with a turn at genocide in the "paradise" of Cambodia. One commenter at Alan Colmes' "Liberaland" compares the history of left-wing genocide to U.S. support for "death squads in El Salvador." That's the kind of moral equivalence that allows the left's search for ideological utopia to continue and thrive. Jamie Glazov wrote on this specifically, "Cold War Revelations and 'Progressive' Holocaust Denial":

The Western "progressive" milieu's refusal to acknowledge Communist crimes is, of course, rooted in that disease with which we have become all too familiar in the second half of the twentieth century: anti-Americanism. It explains well why not one Revisionist historian, including Gabriel Kolko, has come forward to apologize for his errors. However, the refusal to acknowledge grievous faults on the Cold War, and to seek refuge in other politically correct orthodoxies, is all part of a larger phenomenon: Holocaust denial. A clear analogy can be made between the neo-Nazi Holocaust denial and the Left's refusal to acknowledge Communist Holocaust. In denying that the genocide of Jews occurred, Holocaust denial perpetuates anti-Semitism and keeps it alive. By erasing historical memory, Holocaust denial gives birth to moral relativism, which, in turn, instills a mindset that facilitates the possibility of yet another Holocaust. Holocaust denial, in other words, is the craving for another Holocaust.

This is precisely the case in the Western Left's refusal to acknowledge the genocidal consequences of the socialist idea in the twentieth century. The causes of this Holocaust denial are directly rooted in the Holocaust itself. The Nazi Holocaust, for instance, was the logical outcome of anti-Semitism, but anti-Semites need to keep anti-Semitism alive. Thus, anti-Semitism's existence is kept alive easier if its darkest consequences are supported but simultaneously denied. So too, if Stalinism was the inevitable result of the pursuit of equality, then the belief in the possibility of equality must be kept alive by the socialist milieu. The historical memory and significance of the Gulag, however, must be wiped out.

It's the progressive-left's Communist Holocaust denial. It's alive. And it's deadly.

PHOTO CREDITS: Wikipedia Commons.

The Debt Downgrade Blame Game

I was up in time for the Sunday news shows. I flipped back and forth for a minute between ABC and NBC and finally settled on "Meet the Press." John Kerry and John McCain were interviewed, forgettably, with the exception of McCain's comments on Afghanistan. But the roundtable discussion was a keeper. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Allan Greenspan stole the show (a bit of which can be seen here). But frankly the reason I didn't channel surf further was Rachel Maddow. Maddow is maddening. The S&P downgrade dominated the discussion, and Maddow's entire shtick was political. David Gregory asked her about economic implications and she segued into an attack on "Republican intransigence." Check it out:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Maddow was sticking like glue to S&P's press release, which claimed that the downgrade was a comment on political gridlock in Washington. But Maddow's fascinating because she perfectly encapsulates all that's wrong with the Beltway media mindset: She blames Bush for the crisis, citing the revised GDP numbers to argue that "the hole we've been getting out of is even deeper than we thought." Well, I guess if you're in a hole you stop digging, but the Obama-Dems 2012 budget was pegged to add $7.2 trillion in new debt over the next decade, and that's after racking up $1.7 trillion after the administration's first year in office. Congressional Republicans stood up to this, and that fortitude so enraged the progressive political class that "tea party terrorists" were claimed to be the greatest threat to national security since Nazi Germany. But Maddow goes on. And bless his heart, but Alex Castellanos fails to get a smackdown rebuttal until much later in the broadcast. I reported on Janet Daley's essential piece earlier, "A Capitalist Economy Can't Support a Socialist Welfare State." The GOP talking point has to focus on the unsustainability of big-government entitlements. Republicans won the day by standing firm, and the S&P downgrade ultimately will damage Democrat reelection prospects next fall, hence Maddow's desperate efforts to spin this as not an economic issue at all, but one of tea party "intransigence."

In any case, see Karl at Patterico's Pontifications, "For Whom the Downgrade Tolls":

In sum, the S&P downgrade marks a post on the road where progressive demagogy loses its power. The downgrade marks a post on the road to extinction for 19th-20th century progressivism. That’s why the Obama administration — and true progressive ideologues — made S&P their first target, however futile the gesture.

RTWT.

I wouldn't separate the partisan left from the ideological left so much (Maddow is both, for example), but it's a really perceptive essay otherwise.

UPDATE: Linked at Atlas Shrugs and Yid With Lid. Thanks! Also linked at Blazing Cat Fur!

A Capitalist Economy Can't Support a Socialist Welfare State

The obvious realities are the ones people most desperately resist, especially progressives, who live in a utopian world where higher taxes and endless spending are held to promise a classless, want-free society, which is impossible.

See Janet Daley, "If we are to survive the looming catastrophe, we need to face the truth" (via Memeorandum):

Contrary to what the Obama Democrats claimed, the face-off in Congress did not mean that the nation’s politics were “dysfunctional”. The politics of the US were functioning precisely as the Founding Fathers intended: the legislature was acting as a check on the power of the executive.

The Tea Party faction within the Republican party was demanding that, before any further steps were taken, there must be a debate about where all this was going. They had seen the future toward which they were being pushed, and it didn’t work. They were convinced that the entitlement culture and benefits programmes which the Democrats were determined to preserve and extend with tax rises could only lead to the diminution of that robust economic freedom that had created the American historical miracle.

And, again contrary to prevailing wisdom, their view is not naive and parochial: it is corroborated by the European experience. By rights, it should be Europe that is immersed in this debate, but its leaders are so steeped in the sacred texts of social democracy that they cannot admit the force of the contradictions which they are now hopelessly trying to evade.

I discussed the political angle previously, "Time for Institutional Reform? Well, Only When Democrats Are Losing." But read Daley all the way through. Progressives argue that "politics is broken" when the people revolt against the socialist political class. If folks want to fix what's broken they need to look at what we're spending. Are we going to cut spending and reduce the size of government? It'll take a helluva lot more than downsizing defense. But America's Obama-Democrat-Socialists are impervious to reality. The reckoning is coming in 2012. Folks always say this election is "the most important election in my lifetime." I usually don't, but with the credit downgrade and America's military abusively stretched thin around the globe, my normal optimism is found wanting.

More on this in upcoming posts.

IMAGE CREDIT: The People's Cube.

Death of Keynesianism? Not for Paul Krugman

Some have been speculating on the death of Keynesian economics, but folks need look no further than Paul Krugman to see how strong a grip discredited academic theories still hold on the establishment class. See Krugman's essay this morning, "Macroeconomic Folly":

All of a sudden, people seem to have noticed that policy is moving in exactly the wrong direction. We’re getting headlines like this: Debt Deal Puts U.S. on Austerity Path as Economy Falters.

I’ll need to write up my thoughts here at greater length, but let’s just say for now that what we’ve witnessed pretty much throughout the western world is a kind of inverse miracle of intellectual failure. Given a crisis that should have been relatively easy to solve — and, more than that, a crisis that anyone who knew macroeconomics 101 should have been well-prepared to deal with — what we actually got was an obsession with problems we didn’t have. We’ve obsessed over the deficit in the face of near-record low interest rates, obsessed over inflation in the face of stagnant wages, and counted on the confidence fairy to make job-destroying policies somehow job-creating.

It’s a disaster – and maybe not only an economic disaster.

Fears of far-right rise in crisis-hit Greece...

Well, that's fear alright ... fear-mongering.

The Death of the Socialist Left

Actually, as I noted earlier, I'm a little surprised how much clout the tea party is wielding, but this is a great essay from Toby Young, at Telegraph UK, "The real story of the US debt deal is not the triumph of the Tea Party but the death of the Socialist Left":

Most pundits are crediting this U-turn to the political muscle of the Tea Party and it’s true that President Obama would never have agreed to this deal if the Tea Party Republicans in the House of Representatives hadn’t engaged in the brinkmanship of the past few weeks. But to focus on the Tea Party is to ignore the tectonic political shift that’s taken place, not just in America but across Europe. The majority of citizens in nearly all the world’s most developed countries simply aren’t prepared to tolerate the degree of borrowing required to sustain generous welfare programmes any longer.

As I pointed out in a blog post last May, tax-and-spend Left-wing parties have fared poorly in election after election over the past two years:

Labour was punished by the British electorate last year, polling its lowest share of the vote since 1983, but not as severely as the Social Democrats were by the Swedes, polling their lowest share of the vote since universal suffrage was introduced in 1921…

The same picture emerges wherever you look. In the European election in June, 2009, the Left took a hammering. In Germany, the Social Democrats polled just 20 per cent of the vote, their worst result since the Second World War. In France, the Socialist Party only mustered 16.5 per cent, its lowest share of the vote in a European election since 1994. In Italy, the Democrats polled 26.1 per cent, seven percentage points less than they received at the last Italian election. As David Miliband pointed out in a recent lecture: “Left parties are losing elections more comprehensively than ever before. They are fragmenting at just the time the Right is uniting. I don’t believe this is some kind of accident.”

For believers in redistributive taxation and egalitarian social programmes like David Miliband, Obama was the last great hope. Here was a centre left politician capable of building the kind of electoral coalition that underpinned the massive expansions of state power in Britain and America, from Attlee’s post-war Labour Government to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. That is, a coalition of the white working class, minorities and middle class liberals. Yet in spite of sweeping to power in 2008 and ensuring the Democrats won in both the House and the Senate, Obama has proved unable to sustain that coalition. Last night’s debt deal represents the moment when he acknowledged that trying to maintain the levels of public spending required to fund ambitious welfare programmes is political suicide. Which is why the deal has been greated with cries of impotent rage by the British Left.

Well, perhaps Britain needs a tea party, although that would be historically incongruous.

More at the link (via Memeorandum). See also Damian Thompson, "'Obama has betrayed us!' wails Britain's trendy Left."

Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action

I've forgotten now, but I'm sure I got a few NEA e-mails on this. Here's the website.

These people are angry and stupid, and dangerous combination. Video c/o Glenn Reynolds:

Economy Grew at Weak 1.3 Percent in Second Quarter

At LAT, "The U.S. economy grew at a weak rate of 1.3% from April through June, another sign that the recovery has faltered dramatically."

And at Sundries Shack, "Let’s Stop the Clubbing of America":

It’s not so much that President Obama has hamstrung the economy but that he’s methodically stalked it over the past two and a half years.

And now he’s clubbing it to death.

And hear it from the Stalker-in-Chief himself:

See also, Dan Riehl, "O'petulance: Master Barry's Childish Temperament," and Weasel Zippers, "Obama Demands Congress Give Him Debt Bill By Tuesday, Still Refusing To Come Up With His Own Plan…"