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The ownership society

"He who frames the issues tends to determine the outcome of the election," writes Michael Barone at Jewish World Review, quoting from the President's speech last week to the Republican governors:

The American people will decide between two visions of government: a government that encourages ownership and opportunity and responsibility, or a government that takes your money and makes your choices . . .

When people have solid assets to call their own, they gain independence and security and dignity and more control over their future. I believe in property so much, I want everyone in America to have some . . .

Our opponents are against the personal retirement accounts; against putting patients in charge of Medicare; against tax relief. They seem to be against every idea that gives Americans more authority and more choices and more control over their own lives.

[via Goomp]

We are reminded of a report, "Dependency Divas: How the Feminist Big Government Agenda Betrays Women," wherein [Carrie L.] Lukas argues that rather than helping women achieve independence, the feminist movement promotes dependence on government as a substitute for dependence on men.

Follow the money trail

"Good news: our senators are really, really smart," deadpans blogger Tyler Cohen at Marginal Revolution, citing the results of a new study reported by FT.com in the New York Times:

US senators' personal stock portfolios outperformed the market by an average of 12 per cent* a year in the five years to 1998, according to [the] study . . .

The results suggest that senators knew when to buy their common stocks and when to sell . . .

"The results clearly support the notion that members of the Senate trade with a substantial informational advantage over ordinary investors". . .

There was no difference in performance between Democrats and Republicans . . .

The Ziobrowski study notes that the politicians' timing of transactions is uncanny. Most stocks bought by senators had shown little movement before the purchase. But after the stock was bought, it outperformed the market by 28.6 per cent on average in the following calender year.

*A separate study . . . showed that the average household's portfolio underperformed the market by 1.44 per cent a year, on average. Corporate insiders (defined as senior executives) usually outperform by about 5 per cent.

[via David W. Drezner]

We're reminded of Senator Clinton's early market savvy , during her hubby's first run for governor, when she parlayed a $1,000 investment in the commodities market into an unheard-of $100,000 return. She really IS the Smartest Woman in the World™.

Oh, and who's the Smartest Man in the World™? That would be the only senator to break the $600,000 barrier in individual campaign donations from those he calls "influence peddlers," John Kerry.

Just their views are fit to print

"Same news, totally different affect. Fascinating," writes Roger L. Simon, comparing the Washington Post's and New York Times's opposite takes on the same bit of news coming out of Iraq:

"Iraqi Cleric Yields on Elections" (WaPo)

"Iraqi Ayatollah Insists on Vote by End of Year." (NYT)

"I guess they [the folks at the Times] don't want Bush and Blair to get too cocky -- that something might be turning out well for once," comments Simon.

We had noticed a similarly willful misrepresentation of events, designed to put the US in the worst possible light, in an e-mail alert from truthout, an anti-Bush outfit which turns out to be a great source of info about what the other side is thinking. Truthout selected an Associated Press piece headlined "Iraqi Cleric Calls for Elections by Year's End":

A senior coalition official said on condition of anonymity that al-Sistani appeared to be responding to a United Nations fact-finding mission report and "we are really turning to the UN."

The US can do no right. The UN can do no wrong. Now that sounds fair and balanced.

Life imitates art

"Convergence II" by Charles Sheeler (left) and "Storm Ranger"

Flying the Bahamian Civil Ensign, the bulk carrier "Storm Ranger," across the street unloading salt, catches the sun's early rays. Her superstructure would have pleased the eye of Modernist/Precisionist painter Charles Sheeler.

But I know what I like

The Royal Ballet School Bridge by Wilkinson Eyre Architects (left, Nick Wood photo) and "Iced Time Tunnel" by Tadao Ando + Tassuo Miyajima at Finland's "The Snow Show" in Lapland (Jeffrey Debany photo)

We were struck with the similarity of form and feeling -- the sense of mystery and promise --  between the two architectural structures pictured above, one an aluminum footbridge to allow students passage between their school and the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, the other an ephemeral snowblock tunnel built for an invitational exhibition meant to draw attention to Kemi and Rovaniemi, Finland.

Brian Micklethwait of Brian's Culture Blog turned his visitors on to the London bridge with his artful prose: 

There is something very charming about a balletically beautiful footbridge enabling ballerinas to get from their ballet-nunnery or whatever it is, to their big cathedral, without having to cross the street, where the poor little creatures might be attacked and damaged, or where they might be persuaded by passing graphic designers or record producers to forget their ballet vows.

Similarly, we discovered the Lapland tunnel via the critical prose of Matthew Gurewitsch's Opinion Journal review:

As snow jobs go, "The Snow Show" does have its charms . . .  The snow was man-made, more uniform in consistency than Mother Nature's. The blocks of ice were painstakingly processed, too, for a transparency not found elsewhere. Those blocks were gorgeous: cracked internally like rock crystal, shot through with needles of trapped air that twinkled in the light like meteor showers.

We empathize with Gurewitsch's lack of sympathy for the premise of the show, however:

[It realizes] a vision of the diminutive, bespectacled curator Lance M. Fung of New York, a fast talker who arranged pro-tem marriages of convenience between brand-name artists and brand-name architects to test their creativity against a new and challenging medium. Evidently, his powers of persuasion are formidable.

So are his academic pretensions, writ large in a curatorial statement. "A ritual is formed between paired artists and architects that will be manifested in snow and ice," Mr. Fung writes in a textbook example of artspeak mumbo-jumbo. "By replacing materials that are both familiar and permanent with ones that are freshly unusual and ephemeral, the curators [read: I, I, I] hope to neutralize initial fixity of ideas. This partnership of artists and architects in a unique setting will encourage a freeing flow of communication that allows an overlap in their individual interests and expertise."

What would Jesus watch?

We had already decided to skip Gibson's "Passion," based on all we had read, heard and seen on TV and the internet. Roger L. Simon puts into words what our gut had already told us:

Now I have to admit I have a dislike for graphic violence on the screen. But I think it is no accident that in the classics of dramatic art most of the mayhem occurs off stage, as in “Oedipus Rex,” or quite briefly and powerfully in something like “Boyz N the Hood.” Rubbing our faces in bloodshed over and over is the pornographer’s art. It takes no particular directing or writing skill. It just takes a good makeup artist who, in “The Passion of The Christ,” was the person I thought deserving of the most kudos on the production . . .

Finally, was it anti-Semitic? Of course, but what do you expect from a film that treats the whole subject so brainlessly? I think it’s anti-human as well.

Who's up and who's down?

"In fact, although 'neo-conservative' is the current watchword for all that is malign in European eyes about the Bush administration’s foreign policy, it is an open question as to whether Rumsfeld is one at all," writes the Heritage Foundation's John C. Hulsman in 'Rumsfeld v Powell: beyond good and evil" at openDemocracy:

During my many travels to Europe over the past year, a familiar motif has played itself out. No sooner do I hit the tarmac than my hosts’ cheerful welcoming banter is followed by the first serious question: “who’s up and who’s down?” in the putative fight to the death being waged between the United States’s secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and its secretary of state, Colin Powell . . .

In a cartoonish way, foreign observers often contrast the decent, honourable, mild-mannered, multilateralist Powell with an overbearing, rude, blunt, abrasive, arrogant, unilateralist Rumsfeld. This simplicism is a metaphor for how little the rest of the world really knows about the sole remaining superpower. It is also a fine place to start explaining the realities of post-9/11 America to the rest of the world.

Hulsman concludes that "A historic clash between different foreign policy doctrines is taking place; 'who’s up and who’s down?' is mere European soap opera in comparison."

[If] foreign views of differences between Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell are exaggerated, they are correct about one fundamental truth: the Bush administration’s foreign policy is not monolithic. In fact, a titanic struggle between realists and neo-conservatives for control of the Bush administration and the Republican party is underway; and it is mirrored by the ideological battle within the Democratic party between traditionalist and harder-edged Wilsonians. America has not been in this much ideological ferment regarding foreign affairs since the Truman era after the second world war . . .

[It] is likely that the emerging, dominant paradigm of American foreign policy will be a hybrid that fuses elements of all three schools of thought: realism, Wilsonianism, and neo-conservatism.

[via Milt's File]

The visible hand

Jeff Jarvis offers a nice little lesson in basic economics:

The bottom line: Any medium that can be government-regulated will shrink; any medium free of government regulation will grow.

Government censorship will grow until, at long last, libertarians and Republicans and Democrats wake up and realize that this is not the role they want for government, this is not the America they envision. But in the meantime, they will have destroyed a medium or two.

And why don't you tell the FCC what you think . . . I don't need a government nanny, do you? I didn't think so.

Let's hear a little liberartarian outrage at government meddling in our lives and our speech.

Let's hear a little conservative outrage at government growing beyond its bounds.

Let's hear a little liberal outrage at goverment stifling free speech.

I don't give a damn whether you like or despise Howard Stern; that's beside the point. If you're American, you cherish free speech, and you should be appalled at what is happening to it. This is not coming from media consolidation. This is coming from government intimidation.

Don't know much about the French I took

Charles Johnson alerts us to "an excellent profile piece about one of our favorite writers, Victor Davis Hanson, in the Los Angeles Times, 'Right Way to Farm the Classics'":

In Hanson’s opinion, expressed in his recent military history Ripples of Battle, Bush, despite intellectual shortcomings (“he lacked his predecessor’s encyclopedic knowledge of names, places and dates”), was the right leader at the right time in responding to Sept. 11.

The terrorist war proved that he [Bush], like the Greek iambic poet Archilochus’ hedgehog,” Hanson wrote, knew one thing, but a big one: how to galvanize his people and lead them into battle against an evil enemy in the hour of his country’s great peril.”

Lyrics to What a Wonderful World This Would Be

A cat of another stripe

Chris's "20 pound satanic monster cat" Zoom is a Friday Cat Bloggee

Reader Chris of Strata Lucida, a practitioner of Friday Cat Blogging, writes to say he likes our Everyday Animal Blogging. Friday Cat Blogging™ was started by Calpundit last year and has been uniting bloggers of all stripes ever since.