What's wrong with Spaghetti-Os?

Jonah Goldberg receives an insulting e-mail, and I'm puzzled by one of the insults.

You're so stupid you must eat with a rubber spoon. Otherwise, you'd stab yourself accidentally when inhaling your Spaghetti-O's.

What's wrong with Spaghetti-Os? They're not my favorite, but the kids like them. I prefer the mini-ravioli myself. But on a cold day and you're looking for quick, cheap food, Spaghetti-Os are not the worst choice.

I didn't realize canned spaghetti was an ideological identifier and somehow insulting if served to a liberal. After all, it's not like Franco-American had to kill any dolphins to make it.

Qualifiers

Quote of the day:

"Roland Burris is more qualified to be undemocratically appointed to the Senate than Caroline Kennedy is." - Jonah Goldberg

The foggy oracle of 2008

Each year at this time I peer into the magic crystal ball, and each year I just see my reflection. But I still make predictions. Using the typical sportswriter's accuracy for predicting NFL games as my benchmark, I don't do half badly. On the other hand, have you noticed how few sportswriters chuck the job and move to Las Vegas?

Herewith are the results from last year's predictions with the update in italics.
1. Despite high turnover on the Waukesha County Board, Jim Dwyer will remain as County Board Chairman. Meetings will still continue to be held during the day preventing many qualified people from running and serving.
Well, yeah. I gave myself an easy one to start.

2. The Waukesha School District will win its arbitration case with the teacher’s union. The teachers will retaliate by behaving unprofessionally even though the district didn’t get very much.
The school district opted instead to punt.

3. At least one local radio personality will be suspended for something said on air.
Not even off air. I was really betting on Joel McNally.

4. State Representative Bill Kramer will only face token opposition from the Democrats.
Well, define token. Okay, I was wrong, but it proved to be a safe Republican seat.

5. There will not be a school referendum in 2008 in Waukesha.
Hah! Score one for me.

6. Jonah Goldberg’s book will be judged more by its cover than by its content.
Too easy.

7. Mayor Larry Nelson will wear a suit, tie and even real shoes to a city function.
Yes, yes he did. Unfortunately, it was Governor Lee Dreyfus' funeral.

8. Alderman and County Supervisor Kathleen Cummings will be caught talking to herself oddly. No, but how can you be in favor of train whistles?

9. I will lose weight, stop snoring, and figure out my sinus problems. (Cross-reference my New Year’s resolutions) I stopped snoring, just in the nick of time.

10. The Dallas Cowboys will win the Super Bowl. Only if you play Madden 2008.

11. Rumors will start about Waukesha County Executive Dan Vrakas running for governor in 2010 (even if I have to start them). I'm trying Allison, but I'm the only one mentioning his name. The problem is there's this guy over in Wauwatosa...

12. The Milwaukee Brewers will finish 88-74. (88+74=162, okay I didn’t screw that up this year.) 90-72, not a bad prediction.

13. Bud Selig will not finish 2008 as Baseball Commissioner. This was wrong early.

14. Some politician will go to jail in Madison but it won’t be Governor Doyle or former Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen. Close. How's the drunk tank, Representative Wood?

15. Paul Soglin will be arrested for counterfeiting tickets to enter downtown Madison on Halloween. He’ll be sentenced to community service – snowplowing Madison’s bike trails. He'll be caught this year.

16. The Republican nominee for President will be… Mitt Romney. So much for the barnstormin' Mormon.

17. The Democratic nominee for President will be… Barack Obama. Do we have to kiss his ring?

18. Joe Liebermann will run for Vice President. And I’m leaving it at that. He gave a great vice presidential speech at the Republican convention.

19. Britney Spears will be pregnant. With John Edwards' love child.

20. Assembly Democrats will win the state assembly and State Senate Democrats will retain control. Oh, the humanity!

21. There will be a human rights protest or incident at the Beijing Olympics that will be ignored by the media until the blogs and talk radio forces them to cover it – too late. The protestors were better organized worldwide than the Chinese.

22. Jim Doyle will propose his own version of Healthy Wisconsin. Lord help us, but Doyle may be the only one to save us from the madness.

23. Jim Doyle will propose shifting school funding to the sales tax. He’ll call it "property tax relief." I think this idea is actually DOA. How'd that happen?

24. State Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler will win re-election. Federal Judge Louis Butler. It's like whack-a-mole.

25. Local activist Steve Edlund will be caught skinny-dipping in the Waukesha South High School Pool. No, but we had to hear about sex in Frame Park. Ewwww.

26. Ed Thompson will be elected mayor of Tomah. Somebody in the family has to hold a steady job, even if he is a conspiracy theory nut.

27. The United States will have forces inside Pakistan by the end of the year. Barack has a list of 41 other countries to invade, too.

28. Ann Coulter will be fined by the FCC for uttering an obscenity on the air. She will blame her critics. I think the broken jaw saved her.

Bonus leap year prediction:
29. JB Van Hollen will not find any terrorist training camps in Wisconsin.
No, the GAB doesn't count.

I count 10 of 29 for a correct score of 34%. Better than your daily horoscope, almost as good as the weatherman.

Don't blame Wall Street, Blame Washington

 Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online explains what happens when housing policy is run from Washington DC.

The self-proclaimed angels in Washington will tell you they’ve been working tirelessly to expand the American dream of homeownership by making mortgages available to people unable to plunk down 20 percent on a house. Franklin Raines, the Clinton-appointed former head of Fannie Mae from 1998 to 2004, made it his top priority to make mortgages easier to get for people with poor credit, few assets and little money for a down payment. 

The fine print to this noble intent was an ill-conceived loosening of standards. For instance, the Clinton administration reinterpreted the Jimmy Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act to politicize lending practices. Under the CRA, the government forced banks to prove they weren’t “redlining” — i.e., discriminating against minorities — by approving loans to minorities and various left-wing “community group” shakedown artists whether they were bad risks or not. (A young Barack Obama got his start with exactly these sorts of groups.) Sen. Phil Gramm called it a vast extortion scheme against America’s banks. Still, the banks were perfectly happy to pass the risky loans to Raines’ Fannie Mae, which was happy to buy them up.

That’s because Raines was transforming Fannie Mae from a boring but stable financial institution dedicated to making homes more affordable into a risky venture that abused its special status as a “Government Sponsored Enterprise” (GSE) for Raines’ personal profit. Fannie bought the bad loans and bundled them together with good ones. Wall Street was glad to buy up these mortgage securities because Fannie Mae was deemed a government-insured behemoth “too big to fail.” And others followed Fannie’s lead.

Funniest thing I read today

"Recent events," mused former Clinton impeachment lawyer Greg Craig, "raise the question: if Hillary's campaign can't control Bill, whether Hillary's White House could."

I love this. But it's worth remembering that Bill's White House couldn't control Bill either. Neither could Bill's wife, no matter how many lamps she hucked at him. Bill's conscience? That was esconced in a Naugahyde Barcalounger eating a box of Ring Dings during much of his presidency. Meanwhile his id and his ego were Jell-O wrestling with two strippers from Reno and a cigar-smoking midget with a Ziploc bag full of male-enhancement party favors."

- Jonah Goldberg "Tornado at a Frat Party" National Review February 11, 2008

Liberal Fascism, the blog

Jonah Goldberg has a new blog discussing his book Liberal Fascism at National Review Online. Already an interesting reminder of Mussolini's position pre-Axis days.

It is finished

Jonah Goldberg says his long-awaited book is finally done. Well, it's at the publishers. I forget where I saw or heard it, but Fred Barnes was once quoted as saying about an article he did for The New Republic, "It has the quality of doneness."

I sometimes have that same feeling around here.

Update! This is the cover referred to in the comments.


Find classic movies at Amazon.com

McCain Bonaparte

Jonah Goldberg of National Review asks conservatives to take a second look at Senator John McCain.

In response, McCain has decided to slap conservatives out of their haze. In what his campaign is billing as major speeches, the first on Wednesday at the Virginia Military Institute, McCain plans to make his candidacy a referendum on victory in Iraq. It is a truly bold and courageous gambit. At a time when the polls advise running away from the war, McCain will embrace it.

By positioning himself to the hawkish right of the Bush administration, McCain might be able to make the election a referendum on the future of Iraq, rather than a referendum on the last four years. As a war hero with two sons in the military, McCain can argue with obvious moral authority that while we may have blundered our way into Iraq, it would be an even greater blunder to get out before winning.

There are many reasons to have reservations about McCain: his love of regulation, his animosity toward free-marketers, or simply his age and temper. But conservatives who claim that the war trumps everything but won’t even consider pulling the lever for McCain have some growing up to do.

In response to his critics, Goldberg writes in The Corner,

A few responses to general themes of the most hostile emails. First, I think some folks confuse being a bad Republican — which McCain has surely sometimes been — with being a bad conservative which he has less frequently been. His apostasies often cut for and against his conservative credentials. Second, the most common objection is that McCain's push for campaign finance reform is a first order disqualifier, end of story. I'm actually quite sympathetic to this and I think my dozens of columns on campaign finance reform make it clear I think McCain is all wrong on the subject. But the folks offering this complaint do need to answer how they view Bush, since it was President Bush who signed the bill into law at a ceremony where he ostentatiously took credit for signing it while also confessing that he thought the law was unconstitutional. Moreover, Fred Thompson was a CFR supporter unless I'm mistaken, and I'd bet Giuliani was too (though I'd need to look that up).

Some readers complain that the war in Iraq doesn't trump everything as far as they're concerned so my logic about McCain isn't persuasive. To which I respond: Fair enough. But Giuliani's support seems in large part to be driven by people who think the war on terror is the single issue in the '08 election. If that's the case, they need a better argument for why McCain is unacceptable.

Mark Krikorian responds in The Corner:

Jonah: I think you may mistake the conservative discomfort about McCain. Speaking for myself, my problem with McCain isn't about policy specifics—I abhor his immigration views, obviously, but then I held my nose and voted for W last time, and could see myself, under certain narrow, special circumstances, voting for Giuliani, and they're both as bad as McCain on immigration. Rather, the things people point to—the maverick stuff, the moral preening for the media, limits on the First Amendment, maybe even Kyoto—are symptoms of a larger problem; specifically, that he's a bonapartist or, as Grover puts it, a caesarist. I don't mean just that he has a big ego and thinks he's the greatest thing since the hula hoop—that's pretty much a job requirement for politicians. Instead, (and again, this is just the vibe I get from him, I don't have any youtube videos to point to) he acts as though he's the embodiment of the General Will, the personification of the Nation, "the man on the white horse", as the French say. I don't mean to sound unhinged about the man, but his character—his political temper, at least—is simply incompatible with republican institutions.

I'm undecided, but Jacques-Louis David is one of my favorite artists.

Are you getting Wiggy with it?

Even Jonah Goldberg is getting Wiggy With It.


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