Category Archives: Cleaning my desk

Loving me some planet

Pooge_002

Ya gotta love this: So I’m going through my snail mail IN tray, something I do every month or so whether I need it or not (please, please don’t send me anything urgent or important via snail mail), and I run across this tabloid-sized publication called Environment & Climate News, and of course my usual move with anything unsolicited that is printed on something like newsprint is to toss it in the newsprint recycling bin.

But I can’t, because IT’S WRAPPED IN PLASTIC.

So who in the world who’s so interested in the environment be so utterly clueless as to send something so grotesquely incongruous to a crack, trained observer such as myself?

Well, once you know the answer you say "of course:" It’s our old friends Joseph L. Bast and his Heartland Institute, which is an organization that, like our governor, would never ever want gummint to do anything about climate change or anything like that.

Oh, and you say the picture above is hard to read on account of the glare? Well, that’s because IT’S WRAPPED IN PLASTIC!

But before you walk away chuckling, I should point out something that probably would never have struck me if not for my habit of saving up the mail to go through all at once: A few minutes before, I had dispensed with (by which I mean I had passed it on to Cindi because I noticed there was an item related to S.C. state policy) a publication called Health Care News, which as it happens is also put out by The Heartland Institute. Three guesses as to what the Institute wants us to do about health care. You got it: Nothing. (Mainly because the concept of "us" is anathema to such groups.)

This organization now has my attention. Ubiquity will do that. This group may be better funded, and operating on more fronts, than its spiritual brother Howard Rich.

Amazing the amount of money people will spend rather than pay taxes, isn’t it?

Pooge

Hey, Ron Paul libertarians: This is what I meant

First, let me apologize for using "Ron Paul" in a headline for a second time this week. I realize that it’s a cheap traffic driver, like putting cheesecake photos of female celebs on your site.

But the previous time I invoked the nation’s most popular libertarian, a lot of those who were drawn hither by Google expressed puzzlement that I thought the phrase "freewheeling fun" was a hoot when applied to libertarianism.

This still doesn’t quite explain it, but it at least shows that some libertarians are fully aware of the dark, grim, foreboding side of their worldview, which tends to be the one I generally see. I’m cleaning my desk and IN box today, and I run across a copy of The Heartlander, a newsletter put out by The Heartland Institute, which describes itself as "A nonprofit organization devoted to discovering, developing, and promoting free-market solutions to social and economic problems".

The lead article in the latest newsletter is written by the organization’s president, Joseph L. Bast, and it begins:

    We all have some friends and acquaintances who seem congenitally to be optimists and others who were born pessimists.
    Among libertarians – for whom extremism is never a vice – the
division is especially sharp, and pessimists outnumber optimists by a
wide margin. I know plenty of libertarians who believe we are at the
gates of hell, carried there in a charred handbasket by people whose
names change over time (sometimes “Clinton,” sometimes “Bush”) but who
always walk in the same direction. Are they right?

That’s what I’m talking about. What I usually hear when libertarians speak is the cry of those "who believe we are at the
gates of hell, carried there in a charred handbasket…"

What I don’t hear is the voices of those few (according to Mr. Bast, they are indeed in the minority) sunny optimists among libertarians — although his article is an attempt to foster that attitude. And his list of things to feel good about strike me as mostly unhappy news (such as "President Bush vetoed a proposed expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program"), but then I’m not his intended audience.

I’ll keep my eyes peeled for the next issue of The Heartlander. Maybe I’ll find the "freewheeling fun" of libertarianism in that one.

Cleaning my desk III: Sensitive candidates

A scrap of paper on my desk bears the following scribbled note from a voicemail message from Agriculture Commissioner Hugh Weathers:

"In true laconic form, I’ll keep this brief…"

Candidates can be so touchy about what you say about them. Today, we interviewed Democratic gubernatorial nominee Tommy Moore, and he started with the following warning, spoken while speaking directly to me:

"Don’t get too close, ’cause I’ve got fire in the belly!"

I know how he feels. I get that, too. A little sodium bicarbonate stirred into warm water usually helps.

Cleaning my desk II: Al Franken gets one right

The September 18 edition of TIME magazine (cover: "Does God Want You to be Rich?"), there’s a brief interview with Al Franken. Here’s the best one:

Do you consider yourself a conservative on any issues?
… I’m probably a conservative when it comes to foreign policy. I believe in not attacking a country pre-emptively unless you’re sure of what you’re doing and you’re working with allies.

Absolutely — that indeed is a conservative position. My support of the war is something that I list among my own liberal positions (I have a bunch of them, and a bunch of conservative ones, and some that just don’t fit on the spectrum). Liberals historically have been optimistic people who believe that it’s not only possible, but imperative — particularly if you possess great power — to go out and make the world better. Conservatives are isolationist, and turn up their noses at building nations.

Vietnam just skewed the whole thing so it doesn’t make sense any more. But if you go back to JFK and beyond, you find interventionists galore, with the right embracing "America First."

Cleaning my desk I: Clemson list

Trying to clear the decks a bit as we draw close to the end of our endorsement interview marathon (both Mark Sanford and Tommy Moore today), I ran across the several blog-worthy items that had been lying around on my desk. Here’s the first:

Recently, Clemson President James F. Barker spoke to my Rotary, and he told us about "five things you don’t know about Clemson." Well, by the time I got a chance to take notes — about 45 minutes later — I could only remember three. I suppose they were the most interesting three. They were interesting to me, anyway:

  1. It has the largest collection of plant genes in the world. I mean, I knew they were into agriculture, but that’s quite a statistic.
  2. Athletes graduate in a higher percentage than at any other ACC school — a category that includes Duke and UVa.
  3. It runs the largest free public transit system in the world, serving 13,000 in the town of Clemson.

Around here in Gamecock country, those are not the kinds of items you normally hear in a list about Clemson.