I wondered what Andrew Sullivan’s point about Bush and big-government conservatism was last week. Ramesh Ponnuru has responded to his post in a similar manner:

His thought experiment, meanwhile, is thoughtless. For it to begin to work, his President Al Gore would have had to have overthrown the Baathist regime in Iraq, enacted Health Savings Accounts, cut taxes, proposed a free-market reform of Social Security, nominated conservative judges, and so forth. (There have been more conservative policy achievements under this president than there were at the height of Gingrich’s revolution, a fact which certainly tempers my nostalgia for it.) Is Sullivan really suggesting that opposing Bush and backing John Kerry would have been the truly conservative thing to do in the last election? Oh right: That is what Sullivan thought. Now he’s complaining that NR refused to join him in his folly.

Kathleen Antrim says that Michael Moore’s former manager doesn’t have kind words for him:

With characteristic zeal, Moore campaigned vigorously for a Best Picture nomination.

“He was at every Oscar party and screening,” said Moore’s former manager Douglas Urbanski, a critically acclaimed 25-year veteran of the entertainment industry most recently known for the movie “The Contender,” starring Gary Oldman, Joan Allen and Jeff Bridges. “He took out full-page ads, cut his hair, bathed and even wore a suit. [Moore was] very present around town.”

Emphasis mine. Apparently, Hollywood is blaming him for Kerry’s defeat. And then there’s this:

…he feels no compunction in talking about the only client he ever fired. And he fired Moore with a ten-page letter.

“A more dishonest and demented person I have never met,” Urbanski wrote me in an e-mail, “and I have known a few! And he is more money obsessed than any I have known, and that’s saying a lot.”

Urbanski believes that Moore hates America, hates capitalism, and hates any normal concept of freedom and democracy. This seems odd considering that if it weren’t for America, freedom and capitalism, Moore’s brand of expression and capitalistic success would be impossible, if not illegal. “Michael Moore could not withstand

Mark Steyn says that Europe is set to implode:

Many Americans wander round with the constitution in their pocket so they can whip it out and chastise over-reaching congressmen and senators at a moment’s notice. Try going round with the European Constitution in your pocket and you’ll be walking with a limp after two hours: It’s 511 pages, which is 500 longer than the U.S. version. It’s full of stuff about European space policy, Slovakian nuclear plants, water resources, free expression for children, the right to housing assistance, preventive action on the environment, etc.

Most of the so-called constitution isn’t in the least bit constitutional. That’s to say, it’s not content, as the U.S. Constitution is, to define the distribution and limitation of powers. Instead, it reads like a U.S. defense spending bill that’s got porked up with a ton of miscellaneous expenditures for the ”mohair subsidy” and other notorious Congressional boondoggles. President Ronald Reagan liked to say, ”We are a nation that has a government — not the other way around.” If you want to know what it looks like the other way round, read Monsieur Giscard’s constitution.

Maybe Bush’s decision to endorse the EU this week was just his way of hurrying things along.

Andrew Sullivan complains about a supposed double standard among conservatives and the staff at the National Review in particular:

Ponnuru argues…that he and others at National Review have indeed opposed Bush’s big government nanny-state tendencies….Fair enough – to a point. But try this counter-factual: If Al Gore, say, had, turned a surplus into years of mounting debt, if he’d added a huge new federal entitlement to Medicare, if he’d over-ridden the rights of states to set their own laws with regard, say, to education, if he’d put tariffs on steel, if he’d increased government spending faster than anyone since LBJ, if he’d said that government’s job was to heal hurt wherever it exists, if he’d ramped up agricultural subsidies, poured money into the Labour and Education Departments, thrown public dollars at corporate America, spent gobs of money on helping individuals in bad marriages, used the Constitution as an instrument of social policy, given government the right to detain people without trial and subject them to torture, and on and on, I don’t think National Review would have been content merely to nitpick. Do you? I think they would have mounted a ferocious attempt to remove the guy from office…I think that tells you a lot about where some conservative thinkers are really coming from.

I guess I fail to see the point. Obviously, they would work to remove a Democrat (and particularly Al Gore) had he followed those same policies. Because he would have no redeeming virtues.

Look, I would have loved to fire George Bush for all those things, but there was no way to do that without replacing him with someone who would almost certainly be even worse on almost all of those issues, and who was unserious about our defense as well. There were no conservatives on offer in this past election on domestic economic issues.

Does Andrew really believe that if the folks at The National Review aren’t actively trying to remove Bush from office (to be replaced with…what, exactly?) that they cannot claim to be conservatives? Sorry, but makes no sense at all. To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, you work with the president you have, not the one you wish you had.

Andrew Sullivan complains about a supposed double standard among conservatives and the staff at the National Review in particular:

Ponnuru argues…that he and others at National Review have indeed opposed Bush’s big government nanny-state tendencies….Fair enough – to a point. But try this counter-factual: If Al Gore, say, had, turned a surplus into years of mounting debt, if he’d added a huge new federal entitlement to Medicare, if he’d over-ridden the rights of states to set their own laws with regard, say, to education, if he’d put tariffs on steel, if he’d increased government spending faster than anyone since LBJ, if he’d said that government’s job was to heal hurt wherever it exists, if he’d ramped up agricultural subsidies, poured money into the Labour and Education Departments, thrown public dollars at corporate America, spent gobs of money on helping individuals in bad marriages, used the Constitution as an instrument of social policy, given government the right to detain people without trial and subject them to torture, and on and on, I don’t think National Review would have been content merely to nitpick. Do you? I think they would have mounted a ferocious attempt to remove the guy from office…I think that tells you a lot about where some conservative thinkers are really coming from.

I guess I fail to see the point. Obviously, they would work to remove a Democrat (and particularly Al Gore) had he followed those same policies. Because he would have no redeeming virtues.

Look, I would have loved to fire George Bush for all those things, but there was no way to do that without replacing him with someone who would almost certainly be even worse on almost all of those issues, and who was unserious about our defense as well. There were no conservatives on offer in this past election on domestic economic issues.

Does Andrew really believe that if the folks at The National Review aren’t actively trying to remove Bush from office (to be replaced with…what, exactly?) that they cannot claim to be conservatives? Sorry, but makes no sense at all. To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, you work with the president you have, not the one you wish you had.

Andrew Sullivan complains about a supposed double standard among conservatives and the staff at the National Review in particular:

Ponnuru argues…that he and others at National Review have indeed opposed Bush’s big government nanny-state tendencies….Fair enough – to a point. But try this counter-factual: If Al Gore, say, had, turned a surplus into years of mounting debt, if he’d added a huge new federal entitlement to Medicare, if he’d over-ridden the rights of states to set their own laws with regard, say, to education, if he’d put tariffs on steel, if he’d increased government spending faster than anyone since LBJ, if he’d said that government’s job was to heal hurt wherever it exists, if he’d ramped up agricultural subsidies, poured money into the Labour and Education Departments, thrown public dollars at corporate America, spent gobs of money on helping individuals in bad marriages, used the Constitution as an instrument of social policy, given government the right to detain people without trial and subject them to torture, and on and on, I don’t think National Review would have been content merely to nitpick. Do you? I think they would have mounted a ferocious attempt to remove the guy from office…I think that tells you a lot about where some conservative thinkers are really coming from.

I guess I fail to see the point. Obviously, they would work to remove a Democrat (and particularly Al Gore) had he followed those same policies. Because he would have no redeeming virtues.

Look, I would have loved to fire George Bush for all those things, but there was no way to do that without replacing him with someone who would almost certainly be even worse on almost all of those issues, and who was unserious about our defense as well. There were no conservatives on offer in this past election on domestic economic issues.

Does Andrew really believe that if the folks at The National Review aren’t actively trying to remove Bush from office (to be replaced with…what, exactly?) that they cannot claim to be conservatives? Sorry, but makes no sense at all. To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, you work with the president you have, not the one you wish you had.

The Yalta summit was sixty years ago today. The Germans had been defeated in the Battle of the Bulge a couple weeks before, and the end of the Nazi regime was clearly only weeks or at most months away. Much of the damage of that conference was undone in the late eighties, as the Wall came down. But Arthur Herman says that President Bush should (as he implied in his inaugural address) finish the job.

Via Instapundit, Joshua Claybourn is cynical and pessimistic about the prospects for cutting farm subsidies. While I’m not optimistic, his pessimism, at least as stated, seems unjustified on two counts.

First, not to use an argument from non-authority, but quoting Atrios is hardly likely to be persuasive to any thinking person….

But more to the point, Atrios’ “argument” (such as it is) is flaccid:

…I predict that the most likely result of this attempt to cut farm spending is precisely what happened in 2002 when Bush also proposed cutting farm subsidies. A bill will pass which significantly increases farm subsidies, at which point Bush will sign it and praise it.

Well, not to sound too trite, but that was then, and this is now. 2002 was an election year, in which Congress was up for grabs, and the president still had a reelection of his own coming up. He also had less support in both houses of Congress than he does today.

It appears to me that the president, having been reelected and having to worry no more about having to win another election, has decided to cut back on the “compassionate conservatism” (for which read standard liberalism and government growth, but not quite as fast) and try to make up for past sins in his second term (on a number of fronts, not just farm subsidies). I suppose it’s possible that he’ll end up signing and praising an increase in agriwelfare, but the politics of it this year make it seem unlikely. He may not get what he wants, but I’m guessing that he’ll at least threaten a veto to attempt to, and if he doesn’t, he won’t praise it this time.

Here’s a whiny piece from the LA Daily News, with at least two questions not asked (nor are they ever asked in pieces like this, or if they are, it’s rare):

President George W. Bush’s lean $2.57 trillion budget plan to beef up the U.S. military comes at the expense of Southern California’s ability to hire more cops, help battered women and clean its drinking water.

The proposed 2006 budget slashes programs considered vital by local officials, including Los Angeles’ Community Oriented Policing program, used to hire more police, and community block grants that fund low-income housing and other social services.

Boo.Hoo.

First unasked question: Why is it the responsibility of a taxpayer in Wyoming to provide clean drinking water for Los Angeles residents? Or pay cops’ salaries?

How did this come to be within the purview of the federal government? These are local issues, that should be locally funded.

On to the next:

Getting California’s fair share of federal tax dollars has long been on the agenda of Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders of both parties, with all five of them scheduled to be in Washington on Feb. 17 to meet with the state’s 53 congressional members to see whether the current situation can be improved.

Estimates currently peg the state’s take at 77 cents for every dollar paid to Washington by California taxpayers, and Democratic leaders in Sacramento said Monday that the president’s budget doesn’t bode well for rectifying that imbalance.

Our intrepid reporters report this as though it’s a perfectly sensible notion that each state should get back exactly as much (if not more–though then that would beg the question of which state wasn’t getting back as much to pay for the overage) as it pays in federal taxes, in the form of federal outlays.

The purpose of federal taxes is not to get them back in benefits to the state in proportion to the taxes paid. In fact, that would be impossible, since just the overhead costs of sending them to Washington and back would dictate that the total amount going back to the states would have to be less than that sent to Washington. It also ignores the funding that’s sent overseas (embassies, military activities, foreign aid, etc.) that can’t be spent in any of the fifty states. So when California insists on getting back all one hundred cents of its federal tax dollar, it’s really saying that at least some, if not all other states should get less.

I’ve got an idea. Instead of state officials lobbying to get the gummint to spend money in their states, howzabout they lobby to reduce federal taxes, so that the people who live in the states have more money to spend on their own states, and don’t have to rely on benefactors in Washington to pay for their police departments and womens’ shelters after skimming their umpteen percent off the top?

Perhaps a second Bush term will do more for smaller government than the first term did.

I hope so, but this will be a battle royal with his own party:

President Bush will seek deep cuts in farm and commodity programs in his new budget and in a major policy shift will propose overall limits on subsidy payments to farmers, administration officials said Saturday.

Such limits would help reduce the federal budget deficit and would inject market forces into the farm economy, the officials said.

As a new Floridian (and occasional sugar consumer), I hope that they can reduce (if not eliminate) sugar subsidies specifically. They’re helping destroy the Everglades, and many Third World economies, including many in the Caribbean.