zenpundit.com

“THEY HAVE TRUST FUNDS, NOT LOCKBOXES”

I would like to welcome Don Surber, Charleston Daily Mail columnist and blogger to the Zenpundit blogroll where he joins the growing ranks of dual Old Media-New Media hybrid pundits with one foot in both camps, a list that includes Austin Bay, Geitner Simmons, Thomas P.M. Barnett and Robin Burk.

Don is an ex-Democrat who writes on political issues with a feisty, combative yet civil style. Here he is taking on Democratic hypocrisy on the value of Stock Market investing, public and private:

“The five richest senators are John Kerry, Herb Kohl, Jay Rockefeller, Jon Corzine and Dianne Feinstein. Democrats all. They have trust funds, not lockboxes.

Another Democratic senator, Barbara Boxer, is a former stockbroker.

I am tired of the do-as-we-deem, not-as-we-indulge attitude of limousine liberals.

But it is not just their personal accounts that they refuse to put in lockboxes. Federal employees already have the very choices President Bush wants to give all American workers.

The federal thrift plan boasts of returns that average 10 percent a year. By the end of 2003, the plan had $128 billion invested by 3.2 million people.

State pension plans across the nation invest in Wall Street.

With their $5.5 billion pension bond proposal, Democrats in West Virginia are promising voters that Wall Street will average better than 7.5 percent returns annually for the next 30 years. Most of that money will be used to shore up the teacher pension plan.

If Wall Street is good enough for their teachers, then it should be good enough for my kids, who will face 30 percent cuts in their Social Security when they retire.

President Bush ought to visit West Virginia and endorse this pension bond plan — and double-dog-dare Sens. Bob Byrd and Rockefeller to denounce the $5.5 billion pension bond as a “risky scheme.”

Let John Kerry propose liquidating the federal thrift plan to protect federal workers from the next bear market.”

I can hear the blood pressure rising out there in some quarters of my blogroll already ;o)

Welcome aboard Don !

ONE MORE READING RECOMMENDATION

Most of us bloggers are simply frustrated writers. I have some familiarity with going through a professional editing process but not much, relatively speaking, so I found it interesting to read how Tom Barnett was put through his paces by the process at Esquire magazine.

It’s a good lesson for aspiring writers on the degree to which you need to have your ducks in a row if you expect to someday get published in a big-time forum. Tom’s rep as a visionary, best-selling, author did not stop Esquire from taking his reportage and running it through an editorial Iron Maiden – several times. No quarter was asked or given. Dr. Barnett referred to it as becoming ” a made man” at Esquire.

I kind of imagine Mark Warren sitting across a large desk, manuscript in hand, and looking down the barrel of a red-marking pen at a prospective writer laying prostrate on his office floor, and saying:

” Do you feel lucky, punk ?”

SUNDAY MORNING RECOMMENDED READING AND A BIT OF A RANT

“ France fell because there was corruption without indignation” is a quote about the tragic Third Republic that might now fit the Fifth Republic as well. See Marc Schulman at the American Future about Saddam’s view of French politicians.

CKR of Whirledview uses the Foreign Policy article by the formerly respected Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as a starting point for an intelligent analysis of the upkeep of our nuclear forces.

The esteemed Pundita has a two part series on how Mexican-American relations intersect with the GWOT. In Part I. Pundita puts the need for Mexican reforms in context with disaster planning for a catastrophc Terror attack. In Part II. Pundita sums up the problem of elite reality avoidance rather pithily ” If only there was some way to get across to the Mexican government, and the American oil company executives who don’t want to rile the Mexican government, that Ayman al-Zawahiri is not Pancho Villa.”

Dr. Von laments the decline of young Americans going into the hard sciences as a threat to the American technological edge that we hold over China, Japan, India and the EU.

My view is somewhat different – the decline of Americans goping into the hard sciences coupled with fewer foreigners entering American PhD. programs due to post-9/11 Visa restrictions is a serious problem. Many of these super-bright foreigners never go home – except as newly minted American citizens. Discouraging 180 IQ Chinese or Indian students from going to MIT through a pile of paper work and long delays hurts us economically without impinging on al Qaida in the least.

The answer is thoroughly vetting Pakistani and Arab Muslim male Visa applicants -including those residing in Europe holding citizenship in Allied countries- for contacts with Islamist organizations when they are still at home, the way we once looked hard at people who might have been potential Eastern Bloc spies.

Having relatives or membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb-ut-Tahrir or HAMAS or merely worshipping at Mosques frequented by such people ought to be enough to bar entry into the United States. I realize both our European allies and American Muslim advocacy groups will screech at this policy change but so did leftist front groups that back in the day who pimped for Soviet interests when we scrutinized fellow travellers. It’s to be expected and to be ignored. This kind of change in Visa security might also have the salutory effect of encouraging Arab-Muslim family networks whose senior men have economic ties to the U.S. to police their own junior members behavior instead of enabling it.

Finally, a general admonition to go to Registan.net today for Nathan’s latest updates and always excellent commentary on the latest in the current crisis in Uzbekistan.

PART I – A PREFACE TO A DISCUSSION OF RULE-SET THEORY

Recently, Dan of tdaxp was kind of enough to do a thorough review of my article on Rule-Set theory that was published in the first issue of The Rule-Set Reset. Dan asked many good questions and raised lots of issues and after reading his review, I thought I owed him a detailed response. I intend to tackle Dan’s questions directly in Part II. after giving some background information on how my article originally came about.

Dr. Barnett had hired/partnered with Dr. Bob Jacobson to have Bob publish RSR and from conversation and innumerable email exchanges Bob indicated that one purpose of RSR would be to develop Rule-Set Theory as an operating paradigm for analysis. Shooting ideas back and forth before I started writing and then during the editing process we came to a point where we conceived of Rule-Sets as a series of concentric circles, with the smaller circles subject to the earlier, broader Rule-sets – ultimately in the center would stand the individual ( something I can’t show with my crude grasp of graphics – face it people, your damn lucky to even have this one – so I’m stopping at Explicit Rule-Sets, basically at the nation-state level, just as the article did)

Eventually, we were supposed to connect all of these circles through a series of articles in a comprehensive theory of how Rule-Sets govern human interaction but are in turn dynamically evolving due to human action ( at least within those circles that humans can affect since obviously we can’t change the laws of physics). Bob would have preferred that I had started logically with the outermost circle and work inward but…well…and I didn’t feel quite up to that task being a humble historian rather than a physicist like Dr. Von. So I decided to write an article on an aspect of Rule-Set theory that was ” closer to home” in terms of my intellectual comfort zone. Critt liked it at any rate even if Bob had some reservations.

With RSR as dead as Julius Caesar, it’s not terribly likely that Rule-Set Theory will go much further along these lines unless Dr. Barnett decides to pick up that ball and run with it in some fashion. We’ll just have to wait and see what he wants to do. So there you have it, some PNM inside baseball.