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Remember when I used to post annotated lists of selected good readings every Saturday, links and all? I heard from more than a few readers that they loved it, but Life Beyond the Blog intruded, and I had to break that habit, no matter how much I myself enjoyed it. That was a couple of years ago. Now I'm going to try doing the same thing, only piecemeal and not just on Saturday. It won't allow for commentary on each piece or for excerpts, but I hope you'll enjoy it anyway. You can follow these tweets by watching the Twitter feed below or on Twitter itself (follow @LocalCommentary). You might even consider making LocalCommentary one of your Twitter favorites, if it works for you. Let me know how you like it . . .
Limericists of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your . . . uh . . . uh . . .
As I post this, the Deadline of Deadlines looms. Entries to the Third Annual LocalCommentary.com Groundhog Day Limerick Contest must arrive in my Inbox by 12:00 noon, Mountain Standard Time, tomorrow -- that is, February 2, Groundhog Day.
This year's limerick categories are American Fork, Utah; Groundhog Day; National Politics and Government; and Life Among the Mormons. Mix and match these themes as you please; prizes will be for the best limericks, irrespective of category -- as long as they fit into at least one of these categories, that is.
To inspire you -- not daunt you, I hope -- here are several past winners.
From the estimable Sam Beeson, a limerick writer of national renown, if such a thing is possible:
If the valley could tweak and then torque,
And the great Utah Lake could uncork,
And the cities between
Could never be seen,
We'd have Spanish/American Fork.
We can boast, we can yell, we can call!
We can sing, "A.F. High's best of all!"
But deep in our hearts
We ain't got the smarts,
'Cause our mascot's a Neanderthal.
In the great presidential campaign
Only those with the riches will reign.
If McDonald's gives money
To anyone, honey,
You can guess they'll McSponsor McCain.
In a world full of terror and treason
It is hard to find wisdom or reason
Why we laugh or we cry,
When we fully rely
On a groundhog to tell us the season.
In the first of these next two past winners, Utah poet Marilyn Nielson (nee Nelson) achieves a remarkable feat, using "Ahmadinejad" in verse, "and correctly, I might add":
Critics gripe with such glee---"Bush's chin is odd!
He's provincial! An oaf! Hardly been abroad!" --
That they quite lose their heads!
(But they don't wind up dead --
Grace not shown by their friend Ahmadinejad.)
Though the ordin'ry groundhog's not brawny,
Ere winter's cruel weather is gone, he
Finds holes mausolean.
Can you blame him for bein'
Resentful of Phil Punxsutawney?
One more winning blast from the past: local artist Sam Nielson's "Reasons for Relish in a Groundhog's Pessimism":
Long cold winters inflame the irascible;
Make post-rodent eclipses less passable.
Yet I personally dread
The congestion-filled head
That renders spring's coming "alas"-able.
As you see, the competition can be keen. The delight is in the well-turned verse issuing from your (probably figurative) pen, whether it wins or not.
If you need a little more last-minute inspiration . . . You know the old saw about imagining the audience in their underwear, if speaking makes you public nervous? Try imagining a boss, colleague, neighbor, spouse, or parent in a limerick.
If you need a lot more inspiration, here are about 160 limericks from an Atlantic contest. A few don't scan properly, but many are quite good, and some are gems.
Last and most likely least, here are some little verses I conjured on my own just now. I'm not saying they're good, but they're limericks . . .
There once was a prez named Obama.
His term was a grand spend-o-rama.
Soon the voters so fickle,
Resenting each nickle,
Cried, "Drown us in debt, sir? Yo' mama!"
A Mormon (or Latter-day Saint)
Is a Christian, though some say she ain't,
And the sort of a neighbor
Who'll joyfully labor
Green Jello with carrots to taint.
The feds now make loans and sell cars;
The economy's still seeing stars.
I care not how they spin it;
We must urgently limit
The proliferation of czars.
Twenty-four hours.
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As I post this, you have just over 72 hours to polish your verse and get it to my Inbox.
This morning finds me musing in verse about the Third Annual LocalCommentary.com Groundhog Day Limerick Contest. (That's a long name, but I don't suppose calling it TALCGDLC would help much.) The deadline for electronic entries -- no one has ever sent any other kind -- is 12:00 noon MST on Tuesday, February 2. You may think it odd that such a contest is not attached to a certain Irish holiday in March, but, believe me, February desperately needs a holiday with whimsy, not just the one devoted to romance. Limericks can only help that cause.
Ahem.
The State of the Union is done.
The Kennedy seat, lost and won.
It's time now to see
What the weather will be.
The groundhog's bipartisan fun.
The lim'rick's diminutive size is
Just right, when your levity rises.
If you write one real soon --
Before Tuesday at noon --
You may win your choice of cool prizes.
Fair warning is given where due:
A lim'rick's one stanza, not two.
It must not only scan;
On its own it must stand!
And if you write an anti-limerick, where the last line deliberately doesn't fit, the judge might think you very clever, but we won't be sending any prizes to you, even if you arrange for the last line to fit the rhyme scheme, as this one would have if I had stopped at -- and still does, because I'm about to repeat -- the word you.
A brief look at field of challengers for US Senator Bob Bennett, and more lengthy notes on my 45-minute telephone interview with Tim Bridgewater last evening.
Last evening brought a somewhat unexpected opportunity to interview US Senate candidate Tim Bridgewater one-on-one by phone for about 45 minutes. He's making the rounds of bloggers. I approached the interview with considerable anticipation. I have heard good things about him from an insider or two over the years. And I already knew I liked another of Senator Bennett's Republican challengers. I wondered if I would end the evening liking two of them.
Before I recount some highlights of the interview, here are my current notes on whole field.
The Candidates
I mentioned in September my serious displeasure with US Senator Robert Bennett. There are at least four Republicans running against him now, as well as two or more Democrats running for their party's nomination. I'll be a little surprised if Senator Bennett avoids defeat in convention, but as a campaigner he's pretty sharp, not to mention well-funded, so the possibility exists.
I don't expect to vote for either Democrat, but all I know about their principles at the moment is that Christopher Stout is trying to sound like a Utah conservative -- maybe he is one -- and Sam Granato's campaign Web site promises that information about him is coming soon, but doesn't yet offer any.
With what I expected to be a conference call with Bridgewater and other bloggers looming, I decided it was time this week to take a serious look at the Republicans in the race. If it seems rather early to you, it's . . . not. Precinct caucuses are in March, and the Utah State Republican Convention, which will eliminate all but one or two Republican candidates, is in early May. Of the challengers, Mike Lee, Cherilyn Eager, James Williams, and Tim Bridgewater, I was somewhat acquainted only with Lee before this week.
Before I proceed, I'm inclined to a disclaimer. To wit: Some readers may think me unduly judgmental. Supporters of certain candidates will find me unfairly so, perhaps. But as a voter I am required to pass judgment, and as candidates the five people I will discuss have invited me to pass judgment on them. So here goes.
I spent a couple of hours last fall listening to Mike Lee at a gathering in Alpine. He wasn't a declared candidate at the time, but it was clear that he was working toward a run for some national office. I hoped he'd run against Congressman Jim Matheson, but he has his eye on a longer term on the other side of the Capitol. At the time, I declared with some enthusiasm -- in fact, this was the title of the blog post -- "I Think I Found a Great Candidate." He still has some things to prove -- that's what campaigns are for -- and I've kept enough of an open mind to wonder if there's another equal or better candidate in the field.
Cherilyn Eager has an impressive resume in business and politics. She pushes the same conservative buttons as the rest of the candidates, more or less. But I quickly lost interest when I clicked the "Principles" button at her campaign Web site. That page is almost long enough to be a filibuster, which is rather senatorial, I suppose. But she wants to read to me from Cleon Skousen's The Five Thousand Year Leap. I have a certain amount of respect for Skousen and his thinking about government. I've read some of his writings, and his views have had some influence on mine. But I also have at least one candidate who wants to read to me not Skousen, but the Constitution itself, and who speaks of it intelligently and insightfully. Eager loses me on basis of that comparison alone, even before I reason that the Constitution itself is a lot more likely than Skousen's book to be the basis of an effective, broad-based conservative movement on Capitol Hill. Besides that, the Constitution is already the supreme law of the land, and The Five Thousand Year Leap is not.
Eager also quotes Glenn Beck at some length. I listen to Beck occasionally and find him insightful at times. He is admirably passionate about important things at all times. But leading with Glenn Beck is not the mark of an effective candidate for US Senator or an effective Senator. We need more than a reliable conservative vote in Washington. We need a leader who can attract and persuade peers who are not quite conservative to support conservative legislation and principles.
As a matter of fact, if I click the "My Principles" link at James Williams' campaign Web site, I'm turned off before I ever realize that the 28 principles he quotes there are from the same Cleon Skousen book. (By the way, did either candidate get the copyright holder's permission to quote the book?) It's less than two months to the precinct caucuses, and less than four to the state convention, as I've noted. A serious campaign for the US Senate should look professional by now, including his campaign Web site. To my eye, Williams' campaign does not.
Senator Bennett himself is a candidate, of course. He's a savvy, seasoned politician with seniority -- none of which is bad in itself. He's less conservative than I am, and I have some major objections to his positions on some crucial issues, but I've voted for him before, and I would do so again if he were the best candidate in the field. At present, I don't think he is.
That leaves Tim Bridgewater, who ran unsuccessfully for the US House of Representatives some years ago. My initial explorations suggested that he was worth a longer look, so I watched the October speech in which he declared his candidacy. (The speech and subsequent questions and answers are in three parts on YouTube.) I found him adequate but less than scintillating as a speaker. However, we've seen clearly in the last year, if we didn't already know, that a great orator doesn't necessarily make a good leader, so I will not write off a candidate for sounding like he is reading his speech when he is, ahem, reading his speech -- as long as he is talking sense. Bridgewater was.
The Bridgewater Interview
(Note that I'm working from notes and memory here, not from a recording or transcript.)
Tim Bridgewater describes himself as an entrepreneurial capitalist, and he has the business resume to prove it. Experience in the real business world is sorely lacking among the Beltway sages who now presume to repair and regulate our economy. More of such experience among them could not be a bad thing.
I said something about all the candidates trying to push the same conservative buttons and asked Bridgewater what differentiates him from the others. Later I posed a more specific question about what separates him from Mike Lee. (He spoke positively of some of Lee's experience and qualifications, by the way.) His answers to these similar questions were essentially the same and basically two-fold:
First, he grew up in a single-wide trailer house with a mom and a stepfather. He comes from a neighborhood where people worked long and hard, and he was the first from his family to go to college. He sees this background as an advantage for someone who proposes to represent all the people of Utah.
Second, while he has some experience in government at the state and federal levels, under Governor Huntsman (education policy) and in the Reagan administration (Treasury), he has a great deal more experience in business than Lee has. He knows what it means to struggle to meet payroll, and he has firsthand experience trying to build and grow small businesses in an increasingly oppressive regulatory environment. He has seen up close, he said, how small changes in law and regulation can put people out of work and put businesses out of business -- a sensitivity one wishes would burst forth in Washington, to be sure. He also brings to the table some international project development experience.
I like the fact that he lived for several years outside of Utah, in Washington, DC, and in Houston, Texas, not to mention a two-year stint in Venezuela. I think there is valuable perspective to be gained in living in other places. (Naturally, I would think that, having lived much of my life elsewhere.)
During the interview Bridgewater kept returning to his central theme, the need to impose a sense of fiscal responsibility in Washington. We are spending too much, borrowing too much, and sapping our economic strength by regulating too much. In addition to "exploding" debts, we find government increasingly intruding into every aspect of our lives. When government picks the winners and losers in the the economy, he observed, it distorts markets.
He said that we need to work toward a balanced budget; he thinks it could take ten years to get there. He emphasized the importance of entitlement reform, declaring that Congress determines entitlement spending, and that for Congress to plead that it has no choice in such matters is to abdicate responsibility. He suspects that those who are elected to the US Senate this year will arrive with a clear mandate to put the government's fiscal house in order.
He asked me what is my greatest concern, as a voter and an observer. I mentioned a related theme: We, especially in Washington, seem to have lost all sense of the necessity and desirability of limited government and enumerated federal powers. (Here I must note that my own political optimism these last few months is rooted in the sense that Americans at large have not altogether forgotten these things.)
He asked what I'm looking for in a candidate. I almost reverted to what I have often told my college writing students I'm looking for in their papers: evidence of thought. Instead, I explained that I'm not just looking for someone who can defeat the Democratic nominee in the general election, and I'm not just looking for a reliable conservative vote in the US Senate. I'm looking for someone who can reach out intelligently, effectively, and relentlessly, drawing support in the Senate from a broad segment of the political spectrum, and actually push things in a productive, conservative direction.
This means that my final decision, if I'm given a choice on a primary or convention ballot, will be in some measure an instinctive one. It's hard to know how campaign promises and high-flown principles will translate into influence and productivity on the Hill. So we do the best we can in the election, and then we watch to see if we got what we need. If we find that we can do better next time, we decline to renew his contract.
I asked him what foreign policy issues loom large for him. I won't try fully to reconstitute his answer from my notes, but he touched intelligently, I thought, on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and China. He thinks, for example, that victory in Afghanistan will be very difficult, and he'd prefer that we weren't at war there -- but we are there, so we have to win. And he is persuaded of the need to help and encourage internal opponents of the Iranian regime.
To improve my sense of where Bridgewater fits into the Utah conservative spectrum, I wanted to discover his view of Senator Orrin Hatch, another arch-villain in the minds of some conservatives (not including me). So I asked him a hypothetical question: If both Hatch and Bennett were running this year, and both seemed vulnerable, against which would he choose to run? He said, Bennett. Hatch has not only fought the good conservative fight in some important ways over the years, as in the case of several judicial nominees; he has led the good fight. (That's my paraphrase of Bridgewater's answer.) Then he added this interesting observation: As he has traveled the state, he has found passionate opposition to both senators. For Senator Hatch -- but not for Senator Bennett -- there is also passionate support. People don't seem to see Bennett as "part of the solution," he said.
Conclusions and Beyond
I found Tim Bridgewater to be intelligent, personable, and candid, including in a matter I asked him off the record. He didn't strike me as a knee-jerk right-winger of the sort that would surely be marginalized if he ever got to DC in the first place. His demeanor, his thinking, his positions on various specific issues, and especially his priorities don't seem wing-nutty at all.
Where my own vote is concerned, the best outcome Bridgewater could reasonably hope for as a result of last night's interview was that I would remain for the present undecided between him and Mike Lee. I told him this. I also told him at the end that he achieved that outcome. That's where I am now.
With two fine candidates in the race -- Mike Lee and Tim Bridgewater -- the chance that I will vote for Senator Bennett is near zero. To reenter the race for my vote, Bennett would have to convince me that what I've seen is not what it appears to be at all, which seems unlikely. So it's now a two-way race for my vote, and I'll enjoy watching both Lee and Bridgewater as the campaign unfolds.
There was a debate among the challengers in Provo the other day. I wasn't there. Bridgewater promised to send me a link to the video recording of the debate, when it's available. It may be illuminating.
So tell me, do you agree or disagree with my view of these candidates? Why?
(Editorial note: I tweaked the prose in this post in several places after publishing it, to make it read more smoothly, but not to change its substance. DR)
In the wake of Tuesday's special US Senate election in Massachusetts, the reasons and excuses we offer after an electoral defeat seem relevant.
Explanations, Scapegoats, and Excuses
You probably noticed that the Democratic Party began its damage control days before the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' so-called "Kennedy seat" in the United States Senate fell to -- maybe you should sit down -- a Republican, Scott Brown. The gossip which began to swirl was rather predictable: Democrat Martha Coakley was a bad candidate, a lazy candidate, a complacent candidate. She believed the early polls that said it would be a cakewalk, and by the time she woke up, it was too late. That sort of thing. I even heard that ACORN was unable to ramp up its absentee ballot fraud machine fast enough, because the race didn't look like it would be close enough to justify the effort until it was too late.
Nationally, Democrats don't want this little revolution to be pinned on President Obama and his policies or, for that matter, on House and Senate Democrats. Some Democrats who are up for reelection this year don't want to think about how much trouble they themselves may be in, come November, if Massachusetts -- and New Jersey and Virginia before that -- mean anything. So there are psychological reasons to want to blame the candidate, quite apart from the fact that in this case the blame might be quite legitimate.
Candidates usually are not quick to blame themselves. They may blame their opponents' dirty campaigning, the biased media, bad luck, someone further up the ticket with insufficient coattails, the state or national party for not sending the needed funding, or outright voter fraud or intimidation. They may blame the voters themselves, for not showing up or for being stupid, bigoted, selfish, or, ironically, not self-interested enough. More recently, they may blame the blogosphere or the World Wide Web in general. Sometimes these explanations are quite legitimate, too. Often they are not.
I'll have some thoughts soon about the virtues and vices of the blogosphere, where politics and government are concerned -- there are plenty of both virtues and vices -- but today let's consider two other themes: first, the laziness or complacency of the candidate, and then voter turnout.
The Complacent Candidate
We see complacency often enough in places where a particular party dominates politics year after year, as the Democrats do in Massachusetts. A state attorney general who is a Democrat is not likely to feel threatened by a relatively unknown Republican there -- and it appears that Martha Coakley didn't, until it was too late. It is also quite common for an incumbent, especially a well-funded, multi-term incumbent, or one who was most recently elected or reelected by a large margin, to feel the same sort of complacency and to approach a campaign casually or even lazily. A variation is the candidate who loves to govern but dislikes campaigning; George H. W. Bush comes to mind. These things are not lost on the voters.
Sometimes the complacent candidates are right, and they sail to victory despite a lackluster effort. There's an art to deciding in advance how much of a campaign you'll need to run, and overkill is expensive.
But often such candidates are defeated, by narrow margins or quite resoundingly. We see this in local, state, and national politics, year after year after year. Former Congressman Chris Cannon is intelligent and personable -- at least I found him so -- but he didn't seem to enjoy campaigning, and he wasn't very energetic about it. He ran into a campaigning machine, current Congressman Jason Chaffetz, and . . . well, you know what happened. I'm not crazy about Chaffetz, as long-time readers will recall, but there's no denying that the man knows how to campaign, and lazy is the last word we would use to describe him.
The Hard-Working Candidate
I heard a story just the other day about a candidate for local office in the last election, somewhere in Utah County. He happened to see a negative comment about him, left by someone at a newspaper Web site. Most of us know that such comments are often essentially anonymous and tend to be vicious, if not actually deranged. He could have just dismissed the criticism, with or without jaded comments about the Internet. But one of the comments made enough sense to him, as a criticism of his own position on a matter, that he decided to pursue it. The commenter's username at that site was a first name and a last initial, so he assumed that it was a real name, and he got out the phone book. To his good fortune, the last initial was uncommon enough that only one family in his town had it, according to the phone book, and he was acquainted with the family.
He went, knocked on the door, and asked if there was a person by that particular name in the household. There was such a person, and, as it turned out, it was she who had left the negative comment about the candidate. It's not unknown for candidates in such a situations to try to intimidate, threaten, or simply bluster, but this candidate is a gentleman. He listened, while she explained her concerns. She listened, while he explained his position and the thinking behind it. They talked for a while, and by the time he left her home, he had won her vote. As these things go, I'd bet that by the time Election Day came, she had won him some additional votes among her family and friends.
Such a conscientious and hard-working candidate does not always win the election, but this one did. I'm inclined to think that his mature willingness to confront and consider the message, rather than simply blaming the messenger, had something to do with his victory.
I have just enough experience with such matters that I think I can say that, if I were in the commenter's shoes, I would have been inclined to vote for this candidate even if I still disagreed with the position that originally troubled me. There are some in various levels of local government with whom I have fundamental disagreements on some issues; this is unavoidable. Some of these are willing, even eager, to listen and consider and explain, even if no one's mind changes as a result. These I hold in high regard. And, yes, I tend to vote for them, despite disagreement on some issues.
The Will of the People
Do the math. If voter turnout is 50 percent, and the winner in a two-way election wins by a single vote, the election was decided by just barely more than one-fourth of the registered voters.
If voter turnout is 99 percent, and the margin of victory is a single vote, the election was decided by less than a majority of registered voters.
For that matter, if voter turnout is 50 percent, and the loser gets only one vote, and the winner gets all the rest, the election was decided by less than a majority of registered voters.
In any of these cases, but more likely when turnout is relatively low, we may hear defeated candidates complain that their opponent's election was not the will of the people -- of a majority of the people, they mean. If more voters had voted, surely the will of the people would have been to elect the . . . loser.
On one level, the substance of such whining is a mathematical fact. On a more politically mature level, this is just another of those happy illusions which defeated candidates harbor. If they sleep better at night as a result, fine, but I'm not inclined to accept their analysis.
Tell me if you think this is too clever: Candidate A defeats Candidate B by a 56-to-44 margin, and voter turnout is a mere 25 percent. (I picked these numbers because the math is easy.) Candidate B may be tempted to complain that his opponent was elected by only 14 percent of the registered voters. His arithmetic would be correct, but here's something Candidate B isn't thinking, or at least isn't saying. In this scenario, it was the will of 75 percent of the voters to let the other 25 percent choose the winner. Therefore, despite the low turnout, the will of all the registered voters really was expressed, and the will of a large majority was done.
Happily, Brown's five-percent margin over Coakley, together with turnout over 50 percent (in a January election!), will probably spare us most of the low-turnout/not-the-will-of-the-people arguments in this case. We are not always so fortunate.
I'm not saying that high turnout is a bad thing, or that it's necessarily a bad thing to do the will of the majority. But I wouldn't claim that it's necessarily a good thing. As far as I'm concerned, eligible voters should register to vote. Registered voters should be well-informed and attentive generally and should study the issues and candidates carefully. And well-informed, registered voters -- whether 75 percent or 25 percent -- should vote. I'd prefer that the others -- whether 25 percent or 75 percent -- simply stay home or go to a movie.
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Numbers mean things, and I adore them. But they don't always mean what they appear to mean at first glance.
I love numbers. I've loved them as long as I've known them. I work with them, off and on, and I like to relax with them, too. In my youth, I would buy a calculator, learn all the math it could do, then buy a more advanced calculator and repeat the process. More recently, this trend has petered out; I've had the same calculator for about ten years, and I'll probably never learn everything it does.
Numbers are wonderfully useful, insightful things, as long as you use them right. But they themselves tempt us to misuse them, and there are also people out there who are perfectly willing to encourage the abuse.
Consider today's special election in Massachusetts to fill the late Senator Edward Kennedy's vacated seat. Polls before the election can give us some sense of what to expect and why, but things change from day to day, and the polls themselves are easy to skew, if you're trying to achieve a particular result. Exit polls are interesting too, but they, too, have their limitations. They're often poor at predicting actual outcomes.
In the end, the numbers that really matter are the actual votes cast by the people who actually vote. Knowing those numbers, we are poised to look back at the exit polls, for example, for some explanations. Exit polls are much better at explaining something we already know happened than they are at predicting what will happen.
From time to time, we hear of increasing troop counts in -- at the moment -- Afghanistan. But they are a poor measure of our national commitment there, not to mention our intentions and prospects. Significantly, the numbers tell us nothing about our troops' rules of engagement, which in the modern world is often where a war is won or lost.
For many months we've been hearing counts of people who have H1N1, the Malady Formerly Known as Swine Flu, as well as the death tolls. But stories which put those numbers in perspective are relatively rare. For all the news reports I've heard and read on the subject, only about a dozen have compared H1N1 infections and fatalies to other flu epidemics. Are more people getting it, or fewer? Are more people dying, or fewer? Is the percentage of people infected who actually die lower or higher than with other influenza strains and epidemics? In other words, should we be more worried about H1N1 than about other flus? Body counts don't tell us much. When more numbers come out, yes, swine flu seems a little deadlier. And the really interesting numbers show a major difference in who is dying: with H1N1, it tends to be young people, which is the opposite of ordinary flus.
I heard a story just today that there are 116,000 dead voters on Massachusetts' voter rolls. What does this number mean? Is there massive voter registration fraud? Will today's results be illegitimate, no matter what they are? Or is this simply a matter of local governments having more urgent matters to which to devote their limited funding than keeping the voter rolls squeaky clean? In truth, I've never seen a voter registration roll that was completely current, and I never expect to. The crucial numbers are the ones we don't yet know: How many of those dead registered voters will vote today? And how many times each, on the average? That's where the harm is, and it is preventable in other ways. In the end, it's a lot cheaper to require photo identification at the polls than it is to update the voter rolls every time a newspaper runs an obituary.
Every so often we hear reports of rampant hunger in the United States. There was a story two or three months ago which claimed that one-sixth of Americans "don't know where their next meal is coming from." Let's take a moment to think about conditions in Haiti right now, where the problems are massive. Now, if you please, let's look back at the United States. One-sixth?
The stories are spun as showing the need for even more generous donations to food banks and other similar charities -- which would be perfectly fine with me. There are real needs out there, especially lately. But am I supposed to believe that one-sixth of Americans (a) have completely bare cupboards, pantries, and refrigerators; and (b) have no money to buy any food at all; and (c) aren't receiving food stamps; and (d) have no honest way of earning a little money for food or of otherwise obtaining food today?
In slightly better economic times, I'd be willing to believe that one-sixth of Americans don't know where there next meal is coming from because they haven't decided where they'll eat out (or take out) this time. If one-sixth is a real number at all, in this case, I might be willing to believe that they asked a lot of children, who don't know where their next meal will come from, not because their parents don't feed them, or at least provide food to eat, but because they're children and don't have to worry much about these things. The news story in this case didn't say anything about whom they asked, what questions they asked, what the answers were precisely, and how they evaluated the answers. Without that information, the number is just hype.
A final thought: My readers are probably too intelligent for this, but there are others out there who would take my skepticism about specific numbers as evidence that I don't think anyone's hungry out there, or that I don't think we should help them -- or similar things about H1N1 victims, voter fraud, or other significant matters. For some reason, some people think that we who refuse to swallow every proferred dram of hype lack compassion for real people who suffer real problems. I'm glad my readers are smarter than that.
As regards compassion, well, that's a topic for another day. I estimate there's about a 72 percent change that it will be next week, tee hee.
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Last week, Mike Lee declared his candidacy for US Senate, opposing fellow Republican Bob Bennett. I'll scrutinize the other candidates, too, but there's now at least one intelligent conservative in the race.
In August I went to Alpine and heard Mike Lee speak, at one of those meetings he's been holding all over Utah. The title of my subsequent blog post was, "I Think I Found a Great Candidate." I was hoping he'd run this year against Congressman Jim Matheson, but he's running against Senator Bob Bennett instead, as he officially announced last week. That works for me, too.
I'm not ready yet to say that Mike Lee is the best candidate in the race. There are other Republicans running against Bennett, and at least some of them are conservative. I'll be looking at them, too. But they'll have to impress me quite a lot, or Lee will have to stumble, if they're going to eclipse him in my mind.
There are various sorts of conservatives out there. Most of them swear fealty to the US Constitution, and some of them wrap themselves in it. Mike Lee is immersed in the Constitution, to be sure, and particularly the notions of limited government and enumerated federal powers, which I take to be the critical points right now. But he's not just caught up in the ideal of it all. He has a very practical, historical, and experienced view of our constitutional government. He has an unusually deep understanding of the principles, and he has a good resume, too. He may or may not win, and, if he wins, he may or may not prove to be a great US Senator. But he's the kind of leader I want to send to Washington. I'll be scrutinizing the other candidates to see if they are this good, too.
In case you're wondering, Bob Bennett lost my vote -- assuming there's a promising alternative -- over two matters. The first, chronologically, was his failure (as a senior member of the Senate Banking Committee) to raise the alarm and do something before the mortgage crash, even if it required doing something beyond politics-as-usual. The second was his sponsorship of legislation which acknowledged a universal right to health care -- because the only place that leads, we might say, is to a right to universal health care, provided by the goverment. (I'm all for health and health care, but that's a separate discussion.) I noted these objections in more detail in September in "Two Questions, Please, Senator."
To investigate Lee for yourself, you may want to start at his campaign Web site or his Facebook page. No doubt I'll have more to say about this race in months to come.
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