But the cause of Crook’s perplexity is equally obvious. He’s starting off at the wrong end of the argument. While Glenn Beck may have genuine fans, the attendance at the “Restoring Honor” rally wasn’t driven by people running to Beck so much as propelled by people running away from “the uncomprehending godless elite”. If Brook wants to understand why so many he should look in the mirror and ask, ‘why so few’?

The Washington elite sees everything through its particular prism. Nancy Pelosi, for example, called for an investigation into whoever was ‘ginning up’ opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque because in her universe, no grass grows unless it is astroturf. Similarly Crook cannot imagine the such crowds at the Mall as drawn by anything other than mass hysteria and ignorance. It may never occur to him to recall the words, ‘therefore send not know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.’

Just as I cautioned my fellow conservatives not to despair over the left’s huge success in 2008, we may be faced with despondent liberals who fret that the human race has descended into darkness in late 2010. My distaste for the Beck-types in the conservative media, who appear hysterical over the normal swings in political moods in this country, extends to the left’s purveyors of gloom as well. They poison the well with alarmism and historical comparisons stripped of context.

The American people are better than all of the pundits, right and left. The people at the Restoring Honor rally are American people, just like the people at any campaign rally for candidate Obama during the last election. They are not devotees of a new secular religion or anti-American nutjobs hoping to usher in a theocracy or socialist utopia. They are Americans.

This election will be a course correction because the Democrats misread their “mandate”. Running as a moderate, “let us all get along” unifier, Obama proved to be a doctrinaire liberal, unwilling to compromise with the minority party. In the confusion after the financial crisis, with the salve of the bank bailout already applied by the last Congress, the Democrats pushed through a pork-laden stimulus bill, and they thought the voters would confuse the two. Now, with the public’s attention focused on huge debts, they resort to the bankrupt meme “but Bush passed the bank bailouts!” to try and perpetuate the confusion. But there is no confusion.

The Democrats took over the Congress in 2006, and deficits ballooned after that. Bush issued his first vetoes, but the tide was rising. The financial crisis presented a horrible scenario of complete collapse, and the bank bailouts, as distasteful as they were, did avoid a calamity. The ensuring stimulus and health care bill in 2010 were opportunistic and unnecessary. The Democrats thought the people weren’t looking.

But the American people are smarter than that. They routinely remake their government every two years, and most times, they vote their assent to their legislature and send incumbents back to Washington. 2010 will be different because, well, 2008 and 2009 were different.

The Democrats forgot the American people. But the American people have not forgotten the Democrats.

The policies match the needs of the population, the members of which are more likely to injure themselves kite surfing than suffer the effects of a chronic disease. But alas, the student population, who voted overwhelmingly for candidate Obama, may be heading straight for a real-life education on unintended consequences:

Without a number of changes, it may be impossible to continue to offer student health plans, says a letter that the American Council on Education sent Aug. 12 to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, signed by 12 other trade associations that represent colleges.

Additionally, the colleges say that some provisions of the law don’t apply to their policies, including those that require insurers to spend at least 80 percent of their revenue on medical care and that bar them from setting annual coverage caps.

At issue is the way the policies are made. You see, these policies are intended to meet the customer’s needs, not Washington’s requirements. Damn those evil marketers! NY Attorney General General Andrew Cuomo has been investigating them:

His investigation has found that policies offered to New York students were inexpensive, ranging from as little as $100 a school year to more than $2,500, but that the benefits also vary widely, with some capping annual coverage at $25,000 or setting per-illness caps as low as $700.

“Buying these kinds of low-quality products with low premiums enables colleges” to keep students’ costs down. “But the problem is the protection provided students under the plans isn’t sufficient,” said Mark Rukavina of the Access Project, an advocacy group in Boston that’s studied student health plans. “If you are a student who needs care, given the caps on benefits, you are in trouble.”

The solution, of course, will be to ensure the students have full coverage, and increase taxes on college graduates to compensate for the increased cost of coverage. Someone will have to pay for it, and I propose that we abandon the idea of taxing the uneducated to support those in college. Instead, let’s tax the educated elites, who benefit the most from our emphasis on higher education. “Educated elites” are defined as those with more education than me.

Perhaps a top rate of 78% would suffice for all phDs, 60% for those with Masters degrees, and 48% for Bachelor’s degrees. Because society has bestowed respect, an invaluable gift, upon those with degrees, we should tax all income of individuals with degrees at those rates rather than enriching them further with a graduated income tax. After all, some graduates have artificially reduced their income by pursuing careers in lower paying jobs in non-profits, volunteering their talents to help third-world victims and assisting the inner-city poor. We shouldn’t let them get away with it.

It might be nice to present each new graduate with a pro-forma invoice showing their future tax burden, based upon annual expected earnings rather than actual earnings. Or better yet, let’s provide the young college-bound student, before his 18th birthday, with his expected future tax bill should all his proposed idealism be enacted into law.

Finding the right balance between maximum freedom, smallest government, and social order is difficult. But if the choice is between limiting the reach of government into our daily lives and limiting access to political activism by gay people, it might be instructive to take this simple three question test:

Choose one answer in each question:
Within the last 500 years, which one of the following groups has wrongly imprisoned, tortured, and executed people in violation of natural law:
A. Governments
B. Gay people

Within the last 500 years, which one of the following has extracted onerous taxes from people, often without giving them the right to be represented:
A. Governments
B. Gay people

Within the last 500 years, which one of the following has restricted various liberties, including property rights, religious liberty and freedom of speech:
A. Governments
B. Gay people

My conservative tendencies recoil at a judge invalidating a vote of the people, although the rationale of doing so to prevent a “tyranny of the majority” is a sound one. Proposition 8 is a study in conflict for me. I didn’t like the state supreme court declaring gay marriage a right because we were very close to deciding the issue through our elected legislature (California’s legislature had passed a gay marriage bill, but it was vetoed — improperly, in my view — by the governor). I opposed Proposition 8 on the grounds that we had 5 months of gay marriage, and outlawing it would produce an untenable situation. You simply cannot have two classes within the same group of people, those lucky enough to fall in love and marry during the five months of legal gay marriage, and the rest of the gay community that would not be allowed to marry.

My concern with the courts usurping the issue is that it prevents rational discourse of the issue on its merits. Instead, you have dogmatic and extreme statements from both sides of the issue, comparing the decision to to either Brown v Board of Education or Dred Scott. Like Roe v Wade, I worry that the court’s intervention will stall a political decision that would be accepted by all the people as a natural outgrowth of our democracy.

There are some voices I agree with, like Jonathan Adler writing at the Volokh Conspiracy, who comes close to my view:

Marriage, in my view, is first and foremost a private institution and insofar as the state has anything to say in who gets married, I don’t think it should distinguish between gay and straight couples. If two men or two women want to solemnize their love for one another, the government should not stand in their way. I’ve also been convinced by Dale Carpenter’s arguments that recognizing gay marriage is the prudent — and dare I say “conservative” — thing to do. But I am not convinced that gay marriage is required by the 14th Amendment, and Judge Walker’s opinion has not changed my view. He makes many sweeping pronouncements and factual findings with which I agree, but I don’t think his opinion rests on particularly solid legal ground, let alone a proper interpretation of the constitution’s text.

I would expand it to say that the only reason for government to recognize marriage is because of the benefits it provides to the population at large, as married people are generally more stable, provide better homes for children, and drain the least resources from society. Those benefits flow from both heterosexual and homosexual unions, with the possible edge going to homosexual unions (if the stereotype of the promiscuous male homosexual is to be believed).

For some legal analysts, the decision will reside in one man: Supreme Court Justice Kennedy. He is the most likely one to get an appeal request if the 9th District refuses to overturn the decision. As Prof. Rick Hasen at the Election Law blog notes:

I have little doubt that if the Ninth Circuit denies a stay, that a stay request will be filed with Justice Kennedy, who will then refer the matter to the whole court.

Getting an emergency stay request before Justice Kennedy during the Court’s summer recess is going to put a lot of pressure on the Justice to decide this matter quickly, and without the opportunity for the reflection that we’ve heard Justice Kennedy engages in when considering more difficult cases. The pressure of time could lead him to grant the stay, and to be put off by the plaintiffs for having brought the case in the first place.

With a h/t to Eugene Volokh for the reference above, and Volokh blogger Orin Kerr for the quote below, I have to say the libertarians have the right perspective on this one. Kerr examines Kennedy’s ruling in a past case that is on point with Judge Walker’s “fact finding” in striking down Proposition 8:

If the standard of review ends up being “rational basis,” the factual record is largely beside the point. Here’s how Justice Kennedy described the role of the factual record in conducting rational basis review in Heller v. Doe, 509 U.S. 312 (1993), with citations omitted and emphasis added:

A State . . . has no obligation to produce evidence to sustain the rationality of a statutory classification. “[A] legislative choice is not subject to courtroom factfinding and may be based on rational speculation unsupported by evidence or empirical data.” A statute is presumed constitutional, , and “[t]he burden is on the one attacking the legislative arrangement to negative every conceivable basis which might support it,” whether or not the basis has a foundation in the record. Finally, courts are compelled under rational-basis review to accept a legislature’s generalizations even when there is an imperfect fit between means and ends. A classification does not fail rational-basis review because it “ ‘is not made with mathematical nicety or because in practice it results in some inequality.’ “The problems of government are practical ones and may justify, if they do not require, rough accommodations-illogical, it may be, and unscientific.”

Given that the rational basis standard “is not subject to courtroom factfinding,” the Court isn’t likely to pay much attention to Judge Walker’s courtroom factfinding if the law is subject only to rational basis scrutiny. It’s a different story if some heightened scrutiny applies — at that point the factual record really matters.

By short circuiting the legislative process, heretofore headed inexorably toward securing rights to gay marriage, Judge Walker may have delayed the very thing he sought. If the rhetoric from either side is any indication, rational discourse and the ultimate resolution may take another generation instead of a few years.

But I’m paying the “hybrid premium”, you say? Let’s examine that common objection to the Prius.

My daily commute is 90 miles round trip, about 20,000 miles a year just back and forth to work. My Prius has 125,000 miles on it, and I’ll probably trade it in sometime in the next two years. There are at least two ways to approach the cost of driving; one is to buy a more economical car, even if it doesn’t eke out the 51 miles per gallon I get with my Prius. The other is to calculate the total cost of ownership. So I sat down and did some calculations, with just the vehicle purchase price and gas cost in mind (both cars can be expected to have about the same cost of maintenance over 150,000 miles).

The 2012 Ford Focus looks to be a great economy car. It is expected to cost in the $18,000 range, and should get somewhere around 28 MPG. Great mileage. I calculated the total cost of driving 150,000 miles — my average mileage when I trade a car in — at a cost of $3.50 a gallon. The Focus would use 5,357 gallons of gas at a cost of $18,749. That makes the total cost, car purchase plus gasoline, at $36,749.

The 2011 Toyota Prius will be the same as this year’s model, and pricing is expected to be similar at $23,000. At 51 MPG I’m getting with my current Prius, it will burn 2,941 gallons of gas over its 150,000 mile life. Applying that $3.50 cost shows the Prius total gas cost to be $10,294. Add that to the purchase cost of the car, and the Prius costs $33,294 over its life.

The more expensive Prius ends up costing less … $3,455 less … than the less expensive Focus.

Americans don’t buy cars just with personal economics in mind; the ride, comfort, handling and status of a car all figure into the equation. So cost alone won’t be the determining factor.

In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” as Limbaugh writhed in torment.

In boasting that she would gleefully watch a man die in front of her eyes, Spitz seemed to shock even herself. “I never knew I had this much hate in me,” she wrote. “But he deserves it.”

Spitz’s hatred for Limbaugh seems intemperate, even imbalanced. On Journolist, where conservatives are regarded not as opponents but as enemies, it barely raised an eyebrow.

Her vile hatred now laid bare, Spitz doesn’t deny writing it, but issues this lame apology:

I made poorly considered remarks about Rush Limbaugh to what I believed was a private email discussion group from my personal email account. As a publicist, I realize more than anyone that is no excuse for irresponsible behavior. I apologize to anyone I may have offended and I regret these comments greatly; they do not reflect the values by which I conduct my life.

Evidently, the “values by which I conduct my life” do not include apologizing honestly for mistakes. She tips her hand that the comments were meant to be kept among her friends … the phrases “private email discussion group” and “personal email account” are in this vein. This implies that it is not the words themselves that were wrong, and that she is sorry she said them, but simply that no one except fellow haters should have seen them.

The weasel words “as a publicist” and “anyone I may have offended” show that Ms. Spitz is not repentant about anything. Like any other person engaging in hate speech, she is still rationalizing away the horrible truth: she is filled with destructive hate, and should seek counseling.

A truly repentant apology would acknowledge that the statements were wrong, and not merely “regrettable”. It would have started with a phone call or email to the person she wronged, apologizing directly. And the public apology would be unequivocal:

“I am sorry for my comments. I have reached out to Rush Limbaugh and apologized to him, and I apologize to his family, friends and fans via this public forum. I can imagine how offended and hurt I would feel if I read something similar about me, or about any one I loved. I was wrong to even contemplate such thoughts, much less express them in an email list among colleagues. We all share a common humanity, and we all deserve more respect than I showed. While I know an apology is a poor substitute for inflicting the pain I caused, I hope that those I have hurt can forgive me.”

But that’s not the “apology” she wrote. Instead, she plays the Muszak of modern political apologies, and wants us to believe it is Mozart.

But it is not what it appears.

The Daily Caller broke the news that Journolist, a private email list of several hundred journalists and academic professionals, conspired to frame the news to support Barack Obama. Their discussions reveal a deep-seated hatred of conservatives, the then-current administration, and, yes, America itself. Chris Hayes of The Nation wrote about his outrage at ABC News. ABC was reporting on the racist, anti-American diatribes of Obama Pastor Wright, and Hayes thought it unseemly:

“Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians — men, women, children, the infirmed — on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor,” Hayes wrote.

Hayes urged his colleagues – especially the straight news reporters who were charged with covering the campaign in a neutral way – to bury the Wright scandal. “I’m not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don’t think he’s worthy of defense, don’t defend him! What I’m saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable,” Hayes said.

You might expect a journalist at The Nation to be liberal, but what is shocking is not that Hayes holds these views. But that he advocates framing and molding the news coverage to support his political viewpoint. Lie, he says, in this very clever way.

More from The Daily Caller article:

“Part of me doesn’t like this shit either,” agreed Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent. “But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.”

Ackerman went on:

I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

Never mind that no one called Ackerman a race-baiter. Or noted that he besmirches the memory of thousands of victims of racism, those who were lynched, and those who struggled under Jim Crow. Using charges of racism to further a partisan point trivializes the suffering of those who lived under the yoke of oppression. Some disagreed with Ackerman, but not from an ethical standpoint. They disagreed from a purely practical standpoint: false charges would backfire.

I used to think media bias was unintentional, that reporters were, like everyone else, subject to the interpretations that their world view demanded. And that journalists, while they tried to obtain that nirvana-like state of “objectivity”, simply failed a portion of the time. Bias was unintentional, but somewhat inevitable.

But the scales have fallen from my eyes, and the evidence is clear: there is intentional bias, designed to further the reporter’s individual views and beliefs. The journalist is no longer the supplier of objective facts, but the broker of sectarian viewpoint.

The death of journalism is not a natural death, not borne of the modern era as a result of the relentless march of technology. The death of journalism is not a murder plotted by ignorance or apathy. The death of journalism is self-inflicted. It is a suicide.

The problem with PlayOn: their clumsy attempts to “monetize” the product. Right after buying a one-time “lifetime license”, they announced a “Premium Product” that would have a yearly subscription fee. Early adopters felt betrayed, and PlayOn reacted by announcing a “special price” for the first year of the subscription for those customers. At $4.95, it seemed like a reasonable compromise. Even though it still seemed like a broken promise, it was a $5 broken promise.

I clicked through to subscribe, and found the final insult. The annual fee, to increase to approximately $20 a year after the introductory rate, has to be purchased with a auto-renewal option on your credit card. This means in order to cancel the service you have to proactively remember your renewal date and act before the date arrives. I suspect PlayOn is banking — literally — on subscribers neglecting to be that proactive.

Sorry, PlayOn. You lost me.

I’m usually not that cynical, but I no longer trust this company. They have exhibited, at least, their ignorance of even mediocre customer service skills. Today I received a notice from them that I shouldn’t question, yet I find myself wondering if this is just the first of many events tto encourage premium subscriptions:

We recently had a technical hiccup that affected many of our PlayOn Basic users, where they couldn’t view content from many of the channels included in the Basic license, such as Hulu and Netflix. This was a bug on our part, and we sincerely apologize!

I’m not usually a member of fever swamps, tucking tin foil into my cap and watching out for black helicopters, but as I said, I don’t trust them. This probably was simply a software bug, but the nagging doubt is there.

I may continue to use the “basic” product that will, I’m sure, be more and more limited as the downward spiral of a once promising company has the life squeeze out of it by bad decisions.

xbmc, an open source “front end” for your Xbox and media center PCs, is the likely successor. An active user community is developing scripts to stream Hulu and other on-line content providers from within xbmc. Yes, Virginia, there is a place where the promise of free software is alive and well.

A while later, he came outside to get something from his van and froze in his tracks.

Before his eyes were two firetrucks, each staffed by three firefighters, including paramedic and hazardous-materials specialists. There were two city of Oxnard code compliance officers. A Harbor Patrol vessel had been dispatched. A California Department of Fish and Game warden also responded. The scene was short only moon suits and a hovering helicopter.

In all, 13 public officials arrived on the scene.

California has strict laws governing the type of paint that can be sold. The painter was using the proper paint. It was low “VOC”, water based latex paint. The painter followed the procedures he learned in obtaining his contractor’s license, mopping up the spilled paint with rags he saved to dispose of properly. But some of the paint had dripped onto the driveway, so he mopped that up and then washed the residue off with a hose.

In Southern California, all run off from lawns, driveways and streets ends up in the ocean. All storm drains lead there eventually. Regulations on the type of chemicals that can be used are stricter than in other areas of the country. Students holding car washes as fund raisers have to be careful that the sudsy water doesn’t go down the storm drain.

The painter’s mistake was washing off the driveway with a hose, and allowing the water to leave the property. According to one official, that made a small spill into a “40 or 50 gallon hazardous spill”.

He has been billed for $534 by the Fire Department for their response. And he faces up to $25,000 in fines for violating the California Health and Safety codes.

Of all the hazards in California, regulation and over-reaction are the pre-eminent ones.

I note that enthusiasm for Barack Obama and his administration seems to be conspicuously missing. Lloyd Grove has a pungent account in The Daily Beast titled “The Elite turn against Obama,” based on speeches by Niall Ferguson and my former boss at U.S. News Mort Zuckerman on economic policy.

Grove’s article in The Daily Beast is searing. Some quotes:

“The real problem we have,” Mort Zuckerman said, “are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.”

[...]

“We are, without question, in a period of decline, particularly in the business world,” Zuckerman said. “The real problem we have…are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.”

“If you’re asking if the United States is about to become a socialist state, I’d say it’s actually about to become a European state, with the expansiveness of the welfare system and the progressive tax system like what we’ve already experienced in Western Europe,” Harvard business and history professor Niall Ferguson declared during Monday’s kickoff session, offering a withering critique of Obama’s economic policies, which he claimed were encouraging laziness.

“Long-term unemployment is at an all-time high in the United States, and it is a direct consequence of a misconceived public policy.”

Its one thing for pundits and economists to proffer critical opinions from the lectern, but quite another when even the elite entertainment crowd chimes in:

This was greeted by hearty applause from a crowd that included Barbra Streisand and her husband James Brolin. “Depressing, but fantastic,” Streisand told me afterward, rendering her verdict on the session. “So exciting. Wonderful!”

Brolin’s assessment: “Mind-blowing.”

As if that weren’t enough, Grove quotes new media tycoon Arianna Huffington:

He said jobs were going to be his No. 1 priority—there’s a huge disconnect between Washington and what’s going on out in the country. The president’s economic team kept talking about a ‘cyclical’ problem. Larry Summers said jobs were a lagging economic indicator. All these things are simply wrong. The president put all his trust in the wrong economic team—an economic team that didn’t understand what was happening.

Baron notes that there were “even occasional notes of nostalgia for George W. Bush” among the rich folks gathered there.

Before conservatives smile and enjoy their moment of schadenfreud, Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club has some sobering thoughts:

The interesting question is what happens if enough people lose faith in the administration and find that even after they’ve affixed the blame the downward momentum still continues. Will the country have a ‘Thresher moment’ and lack the time and energy to set things right? In 1963 the USS Thresher which was the newest, fastest SSN [submarine] in the US Navy was on a test dive off Cape Cod. It probably sprang a leak at test depth. There at the edge of its envelope, the leak triggered the worst possible response: an automatic reactor shutdown. Without the power to drive itself to the surface the Thresher continued to sink. They blew ballast. But something unexpected happened: in those conditions the high pressure air cooled and froze the pipes. She had plugged herself and sank ever deeper until the depths claimed her.

That terrible loss of reserve energy just when the system needed it most is the biggest threat that the Obama bleed-off of resources poses. The presumption is that once enough political erosion has occurred then someone will blow the ballast and the sub will surface. What must be factored in is time. Nations don’t turn on a dime. The gigantic programs initiated by the administration will bear a momentum not easily reversed.

Government spending is no substitute for real jobs, created by private industry, that employs real people. The Obama administration tried to apply 1940′s Keynesian solutions to a 21st century problem, and succeeded only in introducing uncertainty. So much uncertainty that business will not take the risk of adding jobs to their payroll.