"But there is a reason Ayn Rand is considered a gateway drug to the right and [Adam] Smith isn’t..."

"... the 'greed is good' ethos, whatever else may be wrong with it, is much sexier, more rebellious, and thus more appealing than staid bourgeois morality. But more to the point, it’s interesting that both [The Daily Caller's Matt] Lewis and [Andrew] Sullivan consider Smith the fons et origo of fiscal conservatism, as defined by support for capitalism. I find it interesting because it’s mistaken, albeit a mistaken belief that is held almost universally."

Mytheos Holt, writing in The American Conservative, would like you to pay more attention to Bernard Mandeville and "The Fable of the Bees."

"Pope Francis, The People’s Pope" is Time's Person of the Year.

"He took the name of a humble saint and then called for a church of healing. The first non-European pope in 1,200 years is poised to transform a place that measures change by the century."

Here's the post where I analyzed Time's 10 finalist and concluded that the person would be Edith Windsor. My runner-up was Edward Snowden.

But my rejection of the Pope had an "unless" clause: "Popes have won, but I think it's a bit early to go with another Pope yet, unless the Time folk are itching to play Obama's recently attempted income inequality theme. I think that would be shabby, so I say no."

A number of commenters here thought the Pope would win, and I want to single out Pat:

I think it goes to the Pope and not because he's said some "leftist" things. In a very short term, he has sparked new life into a very large religion. I am a crotchety grumpy conservative, and I love everything about the guy.

I haven't read the whole article yet and probably never will. Here's a key passage that connects to American political themes:

[B]ehind his self-effacing facade, he is a very canny operator. He makes masterly use of 21st century tools to perform his 1st century office. He is photographed washing the feet of female convicts, posing for selfies with young visitors to the Vatican, embracing a man with a deformed face. He is quoted saying of women who consider abortion because of poverty or rape, “Who can remain unmoved before such painful situations?” Of gay people: “If a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge.” To divorced and remarried Catholics who are, by rule, forbidden from taking Communion, he says that this crucial rite “is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”

And:

He can barely contain his outrage when he writes, “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” Elsewhere in his exhortation, he goes directly after capitalism and globalization: “Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This ­opinion … has never been confirmed by the facts.” He says the church must work “to eliminate the structural causes of poverty” and adds that while “the Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike … he is obliged in the name of Christ to remind all that the rich must help, respect and promote the poor.”

ADDED: Is that last sentence miswritten or does the Pope talk about himself in the third person like that? I looked it up. The answer is the latter, or really neither. It's more of an opinion about the role of whoever occupies the position of Pope.

Obama admits government — compared to the private sector — is far less capable of accomplishing anything on computers.

In yesterday's interview with Chuck Todd, Obama said:

You know, one of the lessons -- learned from this whole process on the website -- is that probably the biggest gap between the private sector and the federal government is when it comes to I.T. ...

Well, the reason is is that when it comes to my campaign, I'm not constrained by a bunch of federal procurement rules, right? 

That is, many have pointed out that his campaign website was really good, so why didn't that mean that he'd be good at setting up a health insurance website? The answer is that the government is bad because the government is hampered by... government!

And how we write -- specifications and -- and how the -- the whole things gets built out. So part of what I'm gonna be looking at is how do we across the board, across the federal government, leap into the 21st century.

I love the combination of: 1. Barely able to articulate what the hell happens inside these computer systems, and 2. Wanting to leap!

Because when it comes to medical records for veterans, it's still done in paper. Medicaid is still largely done on paper.

When we buy I.T. services generally, it is so bureaucratic and so cumbersome that a whole bunch of it doesn't work or it ends up being way over cost. 

This should have made him sympathetic to the way government burdens private enterprise, but he's focused on liberating government to take over more of what has been done privately. And yet there's no plan, no idea about what would suddenly enable government to displace private businesses competing to offer a product people want to buy.

Instead, we've been told we must buy a product, and things have been set up so we can only go through the government's market (the "exchange"), and the government has already demonstrated that its market doesn't work. But you can't walk away, you're forced to buy, and there's nowhere else to go. And yet, he wants us to feel bad about the cumbersome bureaucracy the government encountered trying to procure the wherewithal to set up the market it had already decided we would all need to use.

It's like a medieval torturer complaining to his victim about how difficult it is to use pilliwinks while the thumbscrews are on backorder.

And yeah, in some ways, I should have anticipated that just because this was important and I was saying this was my top priority. And I was meeting with folks once a month telling 'em, "Make sure this works."

He was meeting with his "folks" once a month. He was tellin' 'em "Make sure this works." Why didn't that work, that tellin' 'em? The tellin'-the-folks method. He is the President. I think it looked like this:



Why didn't that work? Who knew?!

There are gonna be some lessons learned....

Yeah, he had to learn that you can't just say This is important, I care — Obamacare — and so let it be done. Make sure this works.

"The Lighter Side of Copyright Infringement."

Appropriating the panels Dave Berg drew for MAD and replacing the word balloons. (Via Metafilter.)

National Lampoon did it in 1971, and "'in 1991 or 1992,' Sam Henderson and some unnamed friends put together a zine titled The Lighter Side of Copyright Infringement, featuring Berg MAD art with rewritten, raunchy words in the balloons. (Henderson is proud that they found a font similar to MAD’s mechanical typography.)" And:

The editors of MAD began to practice Berg-détournement themselves when they introduced (in #487, March 2008) their “Darker Side of The Lighter Side” feature, a recycling of Berg’s images with new word balloons. Now Berg’s delicately-drawn characters deliver jokes about murder and sex offenders in the pages of the magazine itself. Late capitalism can recuperate and profit from anything, including the subversion of its own laws about property ownership, but the inspiration for “The Darker Side of The Lighter Side” goes back to the earliest comic-book issues of MAD, where Harvey Kurtzman wrote new, supposedly funny word balloons for previously published E.C. horror stories (“Murder the Husband!” / “Murder the Story!” MAD #11, May 1954) and slapped captions on pictures of babies (“Baby Quips!” MAD #13, July 1954) to save money on contributors’ wages and keep ahead of crushing deadlines.

Will the Koch brothers own The L.A. Times?

They are "exploring a bid to buy the Tribune Company’s eight regional newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant."

[T]he papers could serve as a broader platform for the Kochs’ laissez-faire ideas. The Los Angeles Times is the fourth-largest paper in the country, and The Tribune is No. 9, and others are in several battleground states, including two of the largest newspapers in Florida, The Orlando Sentinel and The Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. A deal could include Hoy, the second-largest Spanish-language daily newspaper, which speaks to the pivotal Hispanic demographic....

A Democratic political operative who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he admired how over decades the brothers have assembled a complex political infrastructure that supports their agenda. A media company seems like a logical next step.

This person said, “If they get some bad press that Darth Vader is buying Tribune, they don’t care.”

The Tribune Company is worth  $623 million, but Koch Industries takes in $115 billion a year. So the Kochs don't need this media business to make money. They would, apparently, be doing this to get their message out. Is this fair to L.A.?

“It’s a frightening scenario when a free press is actually a bought and paid-for press and it can happen on both sides,” said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

Let's talk about what freedom means in this context. The newspaper businesses are privately owned and the newspapers themselves are objects of commerce in a free market. Anyone is free to start a newspaper business. L.A. is a liberal place, with lots of people who've made lots of money in the entertainment business, which is also a form of expression accomplished through privately owned businesses. News media and entertainment media operate in the commercial marketplace and the marketplace of ideas.

What is the frightening scenario? That so much money is involved that some speakers are far more powerful than others? But isn't that gigantic power needed to counterbalance the most powerful speaker of all, the government? And unlike the government, news and entertainment media can't make us consume their product. Or am I just saying laissez-faire things because the devious Koch brothers have insinuated their ideas into my innocent, pliable little brain.

By the way, speaking of brothers and frightening scenarios, what percentage of Americans think the Koch brothers are worse than the Tsarnaev brothers? I can't answer that, having lived in Madison, Wisconsin too long. I'll just share this old video, shot by Meade on April 4, 2011, with street performers in top hats portraying the Koch brothers as puppeteers manipulating Governor Scott Walker:



"Come along, Scottie!"

ADDED: "You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year...."

"At Howard University, Rand Paul Falsely Claims He Never Opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act."

Writes Adam Serwer in Mother Jones, quoting a 2010 interview in which Rand Paul said:

PAUL: I like the Civil Rights Act in the sense that it ended discrimination in all public domains, and I'm all in favor of that.

INTERVIEWER: But?

PAUL: You had to ask me the "but." I don't like the idea of telling private business owners—I abhor racism. I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant—but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership. But I absolutely think there should be no discrimination in anything that gets any public funding, and that's most of what I think the Civil Rights Act was about in my mind.

Back in 2006, some of you may remember, I got into a very uncomfortable situation with some libertarians over precisely this issue. Rand Paul wasn't around, but I got a close-up view of some libertarians displaying an attitude about private race discrimination that literally made me cry:

What disturbed me was the assertion in the writings that the public accommodations provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act were pernicious. And when I said that at the conference, a lot of the participates immediately challenged me. Did I think the law was right?!! This is what I mean by the excessive belief in the libertarian principle at the abstract level. These folks -- including [Reason Magazine's Ron] Bailey, I think -- would have left restaurants and hotels to continue discriminating against black people as long as they pleased. Someone asserted that the free market would solve the problem better than government regulation. I said that the restaurant in the case about the constitutionality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in fact made more money by seating only white customers and serving take-out to black people. One other person at the table agreed, but the point was pushed past. It didn't fit the abstraction. I thought the failure to deal with this point was very damaging to the credibility of what we were reading and talking about.

Much more at that second link. What we were reading and talking about — at a big, well-funded conference — was "a slim book touting a political philosophy that was used in its time very specifically to oppose civil rights and desegregation."

Too many people at the table wanted to talk -- at length and repetitiously -- about abstractions, such as the meaning of the word "virtue." I found this perverse and offensive.... Why should I respect this man [Frank] Meyer at all to want to engage with his book? He wrote screeds in the National Review urging the southern governors to take over the National Guard and fight off school desegregation!

I have no idea if Rand Paul has the cold inner core that I saw amongst the libertarians in 2006. I would like to like him. But this point about private discrimination and the free market... Paul needs to tell the truth!

Rush Limbaugh calls Margaret Thatcher "one of the greatest Americans, quote, unquote, that I've ever met."

He describes a dinner party at which the hostess, Gay Gaines had seated him next to her longtime friend Margaret Thatcher and was urging him to talk about the latest political issue, which he said he was too tired to do. Thatcher said  "Gay, he doesn't wish to speak about politics. So let's talk of the rule of law" and, as Rush puts it:

... bam, there we are off on a discussion, the rule of law. She loved the founders. She absolutely thought they were the most brilliant people, 'cause they were Brits, don't forget. Our founders were British. She loved them.

She loved Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was it. But she loved them all. She knew the history of this country better than most people in this country do, and she revered it. She was one of the greatest Americans, quote, unquote, that I've ever met.

What topic would you suggest if your tablemate said he was tired of talking about politics? The rule of law?! I'd hear a cue to go somewhere lighthearted. Perhaps something about pop culture.

Here's a "Firing Line" appearance from 1977 that's up at the Rush Limbaugh website:



That's a 15-minute clip, not all of which was played on yesterday's radio show, but here's one of the parts that was:

THATCHER: I think what we've learned in Britain is that we've gradually, over the last certainly 12 or 13 years, with perhaps a little interruption, gone slowly further and further away from the free society towards something else.... At the same time we've found -- I don't find it strange, but some other people do -- that we have stopped creating wealth. We've had a large number of increasing restrictions. And you've been finding two things: First, that we are more and more concentrating on redistributing the wealth we've got, rather than creating any more. To create more, you need a slightly freer society, and you need an incentive society. Naturally when I see that happening, I look with very great alarm to societies which have gone even further left. That is, they've tried to redistribute even more and haven't had the incentives for people working hard on their own account, doing well for their families and often then being able to create jobs for others, they've produced a much more prosperous society than we have. But by and large you've got the two broad, different economic and political approaches.

RUSH: Here we are, 1977, and again, the value here, not just an illustration of who Lady Thatcher was, for those who don't know, but rather in 1977 it was known what is known today. And it was being executed then, as it's being executed now. And in 1977 it failed, i.e., the redistribution of wealth, the stoppage and the creation of wealth, which happens at the same time. The moment a society becomes redistributive, it stops creating wealth. She was cataloging current circumstances in Britain in 1977. And this was, of course, to set up her eventual triumph as prime minister.

"What America needs is not Robin Hood but Adam Smith."

Rand Paul delivers the SOTU response from the Tea Party.

Thomas Friedman calls on Obama to stress "the private side..., a lot more entrepreneurship, a lot more start-ups and a lot more individual risk-taking..."

"... things the president rarely speaks about."

Somehow, this column is called "It’s P.Q. and C.Q. as Much as I.Q." It's some lingo that replaces entrepreneurship and individualism:

The winners won’t just be those with more I.Q. It will also be those with more P.Q. (passion quotient) and C.Q. (curiosity quotient) to leverage all the new digital tools to not just find a job, but to invent one or reinvent one, and to not just learn but to relearn for a lifetime. Government can and must help, but the president needs to explain that this won’t just be an era of “Yes We Can.” It will also be an era of “Yes You Can” and “Yes You Must.”

Why did Friedman use the terms P.Q. and C.Q.?
	NYT readers are afraid of individualism and other ideas associated with the right.
	NYT readers pride themselves on their I.Q., so P.Q. And C.Q. resonate.
	Best-seller writers like Friedman need to brand themselves with unique terminology.
	It connects the idea to Obama, whom NYT readers stereotype as having a high I.Q.
	Passion and curiosity fit better with the way women feel about themselves.
	All of the above.
	More than one, but less than all of the above. (Explain in the comments.)
	None of the above. (Explain in the comments.)
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