Retail Politics in the North country.

George Pataki came to Littleton this morning.  Despite a couple a hundred emails announcing the event, turnout was light.  We had nearly as many people from the local papers as we did voters.  George Pataki was looking and sounding good.  His hair hasn't turned gray yet, he is tall, erect carriage, looks good speaking.  In reply to my question "What should we do to get GNP growth up from 2-2.5 percent to 3.5-4 percent, the governor mentioned income tax reform to bring off shore corporate money home, scrapping Obamacare, and reducing government regulation.  He asked the audience how they felt about the future of America, received equivocal answers, and then went on to say that that government meddling was the cause of universal American pessimism.  He is against Common Core.   He wants stronger American armed forces.  He wants to control the borders, but expressed pride in his own immigrant roots.

Crowd was sparce.   Judy Clews and Silvia Smith in the front row.

Bob Menendez, Senator, DOJ target

All I know is what I see on TV.  But the charges against Menendez sound like constituent service to me.  You take care of your constituents, your voters, your donors, your friends.  People only donate money to your campaign 'cause they want something from you.  There is little difference between campaign contributions and bribes.
   Anyhow, the Obama administration has decided to prosecute a democratic senator on shaky grounds.  Maybe they want to silence a critic.  Maybe some DOJ people have a grudge.  Who knows?  But life in the United States is becoming dangerous when even US Senators can be attacked by their government.  

Iran and Nukes and Obama

With out getting into how many centrifuges,  what kind of inpections,  years to breakout, etc, we need to recognized a few basic facts. 
The Iranian want their own nukes.  They want them so badly that they will do anything to get them.  Flim flamming inspectors, lying, breaking their sworn treaty, is small change to them. 
   Their first and greatest desire for nukes is to deter  the Americans from doing a regime change on them, just the way they did to Saddam Hussein.  Even the hardest of hard core American hawks will be deterred by a threat to nuke Tel Aviv, or Riyadh or Cairo or New York.  Without nukes, the Americans could do Iran down as easily as they did Saddam.  One division, 3rd Infantry Division, (although it had enough tanks to be called an armored division) crushed the Iraqi army in a matter of weeks.  The Ayatollahs know that right now, the Americans could do the same thing to them.  Only Iranian nukes give them a chance of survival. 
  Secondary desires for nukes are the prestige they would bring Iran, very helpful in asserting control of the middle east.  And the really hard core Ayatollahs dream of nuking Israel. 
  We don't want the Iranians to get nukes.  Soon as Iran gets a nuke, everyone else in the middle east (Saudi, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, even Jordan, will get them too.  The Pakis have nukes now, and would probably sell bombs or technology to fellow Muslim powers.  So would the Norks.  Soon as everyone has nukes, someone will use them.  Leadership in that part of the world is full of crazies.   
   So we ought to be telling the Iranians, you don't get nukes.  If you try, we will bomb your nuclear sites. And tighten the economic sanctions even more.  Cooperate and we will lift sanctions.  Cooperation means turning over all enriched fissionables and destroying all the centrifuges, and no you don't get a nuclear reactor. 
   Obama doesn't understand this.  But the voters do.  Even the Congressman do.

Religious Freedom Restoration Act

After all the chatter on TV about Indiana's new RFRA act I took the trouble of googling for the text of this controversial act.  For all the sound and fury about it, the written text is unimpressive.  It's only a couple of pages long.  Divided into 11 sections.  The first seven sections are definitions of terms.  They bother to define well known phrases such as "establishment clause".  They give some really far out definitions such as "person" to mean churches and corporations.  In proper English, person means a human being, either male or female.  In lawyer's gobbledegook  person can mean any sort of organization that wants to sue.  The last three sections are quibbles and unbelievable stuff such as "  not intended to, and shall not be construed or interpreted to, create a claim or private cause of action against any private employer by any applicant, employee, or former employee."  Yeah right. 
   Section 8 seems to be the working part of the law.  "a governmental entity may not substantially burden a person's exercise of religion, even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability."   Sounds nice, but it's terribly vague and courts could stretch this to forbid or require damn near anything of anybody.   This sort of obfuscation just provides welfare for lawyers.  The legislature, unable or unwilling to write a real law, has tossed the entire matter into the lap of the courts. Me, I don't like to live in a judge ruled country. 
   Nor does this "law"  say anything about the division between burdening a person's exercise of religion and plain oldfashioned discrimination.  We have laws that forbid discrimination in public accommodations, hiring, housing, lending, and probably more stuff that I don't know about.  Discrimination against blacks is forbidden everywhere.  Discrimination against LGBT persons is forbidden in many states but not all.   
  Although I don't like the courts beating up on mom and pop bakeries and photographers for refusing to serve gay weddings, neither do I like discriminating against blacks in hiring, housing, and public accommodations. 

One World, Divisible by David Reynolds

"A global history since 1945".  An irritating read.  The author, a British college professor, is totally left, likes everything socialist and dislikes everything capitalist.  His text is full of flattery for the left and dissing of the right.  And he throws out amazing statements, like "French communists were forced out of government in 1947" with no backup, no elaboration, no quotes, no names.  From what I heard, the communists were on a roll right after WWII (Poland, Czechoslovakia,Romania, Hungary, Albania, Yugoslavia, Greece, East Germany, China) and I never did hear how that roll got stopped.  Here is Reynolds devoting just one sentence to a fascinating topic that deserves elaboration. 
   Much of his treatment of the second half of the twentieth century is superficial, a mere reciting of headlines from the era, many of which I remember, just from a casual reading of newsmagazines and newspapers.  Little background to the headlines, like who was on which side, and why, and what gave victory to the winning side. 

STEMing it

Lots of praise these days for Science Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM),  a few despairing wails for preservation of the classical liberal education.  What's a student to do?  Especially a student of ordinary means who has to get a job to support him/her/self upon graduation? 
   You want to think about what you want to be when you grow up.  Most of us would settle for well paid.  Boys often think of jobs like railroad engineer, fireman, policeman, soldier, pilot, sailor, musician, athlete, doctor, and so on.  Girls can have all those dreams (except maybe railroad engineer) and others besides.  Getting a job that you like doing leads to a happier life. 
   In the STEM world, an engineering degree (electrical, chemical,civil, mechanical) is the top of the hierarchy  for a career that is fun to do, well paid, and in demand.  Engineers design new stuff, buildings, bridges, products, ipads, cell phones, space craft.  Design is fun, it deals with new ideas, processes.  Engineers are the key people in real world industries, the industries that make stuff, rather than just push paper.  When the grave yard shift cannot made the new product go together, they call the design engineer at home.  They don't call the lawyer or the accountant or the manager, they call the engineer. 
  To do engineering, and the other STEM subjects, you need mathematics thru calculus.  Mathematics ain't hard, but you have to start early, high school.  High school has to give you algebra, Euclidean (plane) geometry, trigonometry.  With that you can take calculus freshman year in college.  Which is a pre requisite for most of the sophomore and up STEM courses.  If you get to college without the math, you can take it in college, but by the time you get the algebra, trig, geometry and calc courses in, you will be a junior, and that pretty much locks you out of a STEM major. 
  So about the time you finish up middle school, you want to do some serious thinking about what you want to be when you grow up.  Most likely, you won't have a clue at that age.  I didn't.  But think about it.  You don't want to lock yourself out of an engineering degree at the age of 15.  The smart student makes sure they get the necessary math courses in high school just in case they want to go on to engineering in college. If you skip the math in high school, you are forced into a liberal arts degree in college. 

Budget Cuts, Real vs Fake

A real budget cut is when an agency gets less money than it did the previous year.  Republicans like real budget cuts.  A fake budget cut is when the agency gets less money than it asked for.  Democrats like fake budget cuts, either to tell the taxpayers that they are not getting ripped off, or to lambast Republicans who appropriate less money than the agency asked for, even when the agency gets more money than it did the previous year.
   This was on display on WMUR's Sunday pundit show with Josh Mcelvane this morning.  The house finance committee has been whacking Maggie's budget down to size.  Josh had two finance committee reps, one Democrat, one Republican, both new faces to me, on the show.  Both talked about cuts, whether there was one or was not one.  Apparently the cuts are fake cuts,  the final trimmed down budget is still bigger than last year's budget.  Maggie didn't get as much money as she asked for and that is terrible.  It might even mean layoffs in Concord.  Oh the horror! 
   Neither off them spoke of dollar amounts, of how much is going where, of substantial things like finishing up widening I93,  providing somewhere to put violent insanity cases other than hospital emergency rooms, or attracting new industry to NH.  They just talked about cuts, this is a cut, this is not a cut.