This happens in my sermons, too
It was said of a certain preacher, "After his sermons, the people are enlightened, informed, inspired ... and many of them are well rested, too!"



As Ronald Reagan's funeral marked the first time Bill and Hill have been seen in public together for, what, years?, I suppose they should be forgiven for nodding off in the service. Maybe they were up late last night celebrating their reunion.

Nah . . .

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/11/2004 03:25:21 PM.
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Cartooning Ted Rall
Geitner Simmons has it.

BTW, this is the last time I shall ever mention Ted Rall.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/11/2004 12:33:40 PM.
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Beige religion
The WaPo says,

Official Washington likes its religion beige, interfaith, tastefully alluded to rather than shouted from a mountaintop.

The piece is a good profile of former three-term Senator, the Rev. John Danforth, who officiated today at Ronald Reagan's funeral service at National Cathedral.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/11/2004 12:25:17 PM.
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Online live video of Reagan funeraL
Fox News will video stream Reagan's funeral. It begins at 11:30 a.m. Eastern time.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/11/2004 08:45:12 AM.
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What the liberated say
Will Collier has a good roundup of what former Soviet and East Bloc people are saying about Ronald Reagan.

Update: Here are other insights into how Reagan pushed the Soviet Union into extinction.

How Reagan made Soviet society face its failures, USA Today.

Ron and Mikhail's Excellent Adventure: How Reagan won the Cold War, by Fred Kaplan.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/11/2004 08:01:35 AM.
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Audio blogging from the Capitol
For you night owls, Justin at Right Side Redux is providing hourly audio blogs from the Capitol in Washington, DC.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 07:15:09 PM.
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Saving energy
Steven Den Beste writes about a lot of things excellently, but I think his most enjoyable and informative essays deal with engineering issues, his professional specialty. And the ones dealing with energy issues are especially good to read. Even I understand them!

Jane Galt says of his energy essays,

It's a definitive rebuttal to the apparently overwhelming majority of people who believe that if we can just increase CAFE standards, turn off lights when we're not using them, buy energy-star air conditioners, install a couple of wind farms, adn put some solar panels on our roofs, why, we'll practically have the problem licked!

But of course, we won't, and Steven explains why from a scientific basis.

BTW, Jane herself has a series of essays on energy and global warming issues (they are related issues), inlcuding, just to whet your appetite, "Why increasing CAFE standards increases the number of cars on the road."

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 07:00:48 PM.
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Gorbachev pays respects
Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet premier whom Ronald Reagan essentially checkmated into ending the Soviet Union, visited Reagan's bier a moment ago to pay his respects.



He stayed for about a minute while cameras clicked and whirred. I think it was a very decent gesture. Reagan and Gorbachev actually became good friends after they both left office. Gorbachev visited Reagan in California more than once. They even went on a speaking tour of America together one time, hosted by multimillionaire Malcolm Forbes, who flew them around on his private jet, nicknamed "Capitalist Tool."

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 03:44:50 PM.
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Time for US to go?
Jin points out a piece citing a Brookings Insititute scholar who says that anti-US sentiment in South Korea is becoming more pervasive throughout all its society.

The US already announced that it will withdraw a US Army combat brigade from South Korea to serve in Iraq. The putative reason that US forces are stationed in the South, to defend against a potential North Korean invasion, doesn't really hold water any more.

My guess is that the near-term years will see a reduction in American forces in South Korea.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 03:31:01 PM.
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What is the Left?
In the comments to my post about the eschatology, or "Ideal Time" of the Western Left, I got into a short discussion with longtime reader and commenter Scott Forbes on the distinction between "the Left" and "liberal" when referring to American politics. Scott said that while I claim there is a distinction between the Left and liberalism, I often use the terms interchangeably.

Problem is that the media often do, too, i.e., "the left side of the aisle" means liberals (and in the Congress, Democrats) while "the right side of the aisle" means conservatives, of which there are precious few actually serving, so the term means the Republicans. Often the media, commentators and other bloggers use "the left" to refer generally to liberals, as opposed to "the right," conservatives.

So I try to make a textual distinction between "the Left" and "the left." In using "the Left," I am trying to refer to a definable set of people further to the left side of the aisle than Democrats generically. I do not mean that the Left is precisely definable, but its member have enough in common that it isn't unjustified to refer to them as a group, the "lumpen Left," if you will.

In his essay, "Why Does the Left Hate Israel?" Richard Baehr defined the Left thus:

The left in this country includes large numbers of academics, journalists, human rights activists, environmental and animal rights activists, entertainers, and some church groups, women’s groups, racial advocacy groups and unions. There are also liberals who are members of these same groups. I distinguish between leftists and liberals by one key test: how they feel about the country in which they live. If you tend to regard America as a primarily flawed, evil, unjust, racist country (or at least when Republicans are running it), and most importantly, believe that the US is the primary threat to world peace internationally, then you are a leftist, and not a liberal. ...

... But liberals, as distinguished from leftists, do not think America is a bad country. Most liberals think America is an improvable country, if only we made the tax system more progressive, spent more money on social services, and worked more through multilateral organizations abroad. Liberals tend to support overseas military missions when our effort supports a human rights concern, and much less so if the military engagement is claimed to be in support of a strategic objective. Liberals, by and large, supported American military involvement in the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti, and now Liberia, while opposing the two wars with Iraq.

Michael Totten is certainly no member of the VRWC (he defines himself as liberal), and he recently documented the anti-Judaism of the Left which they themselves proclaim. (I blogged in February 2003 that the Left and the Right are united by anti-Judaism).

Back in January Michael posted about the difference between liberals and Leftists.

Broadly defined, a liberal is a person who believes in social, political, and economic freedom. In the United States, both major parties are liberal. Most members of both support democracy, civil and human rights, and a market economy. ...

Each party is more liberal than the other in certain ways. ... Both parties champion freedom in different ways, and they do it on principle. Both parties have different liberal priorities, but they’re both generally liberal. ...

A liberal (substitute with Democrat if you want to) believes in reform. And a leftist supports revolution. Liberals (Democrats) are the left-wing of the Establishment. Leftists are radicals who seek to overthrow the Establishment (either through violence or the ballot box) and replace it with something else. ...

Liberals see America as the land of opportunity and freedom. Leftists see America as the bastion of Imperialism, Racism, and Oppression.

Liberals want higher taxes on the rich because it’s fairer to the middle and working classes. Leftists want to soak the rich out of class hatred.

Liberals want universal access to health care while leaving the system as market-driven as possible. Leftists would destroy the health care industry altogether and replace it with a state-run monopoly.

Liberals want to ban clear-cutting. Leftists want to ban the logging industry.

Liberals support globalization and trade and see it as an opportunity for economic growth and also as an opportunity to boost labor and environmental standards in the Third World. Leftists hate trade because they think it’s all about the West raping the rest.

Liberals blame the September 11 attacks on religious and political extremism in the Middle East. Leftists blame the September 11 attacks on America.

Michael admits at the end that people will disagree, but I think his essay is helpful.

The basic matrix by which the Left understands America in the world is neo-Marxist. Lee Harris's scholarly essay, "The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing," is very helpful in understanding why this is so.

The Left basically believes that America is bad for the world. Actions, military or not, that enhance America's national self interests are therefore anathema. If old "Engine Charlie" Wilson's motto was, "What is good for General Motors is good for America," the Left's motto runs perversely: "What is good for America is bad for the world."

When scratched, Leftists bleed statist blood. Leftism elevates the state apparatus and denigrates the individual. There is no greater offender to this notion than America, where individual rights are elevated and are indeed guaranteed in our founding documents, in fact, we say our rights are ordained by God himself. Hence, the Left's history of attempting to degenerate American sovereignty with inventions such as the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Treaty, and the notion that the UN Charter somehow trumps the American Constitution.

In their mind, America is imperialist in many forms - economic, cultural, linguistic and especially militarily. If America's gross transgressions are to be prevented, then America's national power, especially military power, must be turned away from promoting America's national interests.

I wish I could define a clear dividing line between American liberalism and Leftism. But they merge rather than delineate, just as conservatism and the Right tend to merge the farther right you get. (But today's conservatism is awfully similar to JFK liberalism, and much of today's liberalism is similar to old-style conservatism.)

James Taranto of OpinionJournal wrote in September 2002 of "The Reactionary Left."

As anyone who's attended an "antiglobalization" protest knows, the only thing uniting the left is its hatreds--of capitalism, America and Israel. You find at these events a menagerie of special interests promoting their own little causes. But the far left today, though it styles itself "progressive," has no coherent vision of how to make the world better--in sharp contrast with today's conservative internationalists, who favor the vigorous use of U.S. diplomatic and military force to expand democracy.

In a nutshell, liberals affirm while the Left despises the idea of America.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 03:12:41 PM.
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Ray Charles is dead
He died today at age 73. The cause has not been announced. He died at home.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 03:08:07 PM.
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National Council of Churches on Reagan funeral
I just got this email through the channels of the UMC:

On Friday, June 11, our country will observe a National Day of Mourning for the death of the 40th President of the United States, Ronald Wilson Reagan.

As part of this observance, houses of worship across the country have been asked to ring their bells 40 times on Friday at 1:15 pm Eastern Time.

The National Council of Churches invites all of America's congregations to share in this moment of mourning and reflection.

We express our condolences to Mrs. Nancy Reagan and the Reagan Family.

Sadly, my church does not have bells. I find no mention of this on the NCC's web site, however.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 02:55:58 PM.
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What he said
President Bush just said in his closing remarks to the G8 summit, "The best way to defeat terrorim is to speak to the hopes and aspirations of women and men."

Note the order the sexes were spoken. Bush well knows that the civil and religious oppression of women is a main part of the dysfunction of Muslim societies (some more than others).

Liberating women was one of the chief objectives of Douglas MacArthur as he governed postwar Japan. He knew that Japanese militarism and the cult of Bushido could not survive politically enabled wives and mothers. He was right.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 02:46:41 PM.
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Gas war!
What do you do if you are two gas stations in one of the richest sections of Nashville?

Why, get into a price war, of course.

Daily's Shell station and Chevron/ Kaya's Korner have had the cheapest gas in the area for about a week, area motorists say. Yesterday's price for regular unleaded at both locations dipped to $1.769 per gallon, or about 15 cents below the Nashville area average as reported by AAA surveys.

These prices are about 15 cents per gallon less than other area stations.

Jay Rim, manager of the Belle Meade Shell at 4409 Harding Pike, has kept regular unleaded gas at that station at about $1.95 a gallon.

"I can't make the owner of this store lose money," he said. "I can't do business if I am not making any money. At my cost (of gasoline), we would lose at least 10 cents per gallon at that price."

The manager of one of the stations said he lowered prices to boost sales of the station's convenience stores. The station next door followed suit, and the price war was on.

Of course, as Bill Hobbs points out, "a year ago $1.76 a gallon would not have sounded like a bargain." Perhaps nowadays Dinah Washington would be singing, "What a Difference a Year Makes."

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 07:13:24 AM.
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McGovern to Reagan
Author Tom Donelson has a long and insightful essay about how and why he morphed from a McGovern liberal to a Reagan conservative.

In 1972, I voted for George McGovern and 1976, I voted for Jimmy Carter. In 1980, I voted for Ronald Reagan and became a Reagan conservative, which I am still today.

Part of the reason was that Reagan was an anti-Nixon, which the Republican party badly needed.

Contrast Reagan with Nixon and you have the difference between what being Republican means today vs. in the early 70’s. Nixon was one of the most intelligent men to enter the White House and the least principled. Nixon Foreign Policy was managing a nation in decline and his policy basis began with the idea that America position in the world was diminishing. His policy was not about elevating America but slowing the eventual decline. His economic plan was surrender to the Keynesian dogma of the time and he also surrendered to the environmental ideas that we were running of our energy. Nixon was a pessimist and that is why is policies failed. They fail to take in account the American spirit.

Pretty interesting read, so browse on over.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 07:01:09 AM.
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Chirac snubs Kerry!
I guess French President Jacques Chirac wasn't one of the foreign leaders who, said John Kerry, told Kerry they supported him against President Bush. Chirac just vicariously told Kerry to take a hike when it comes to Iraq.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/9/2004 10:03:11 PM.
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What they said about Lincoln
Congratulations to American Digest, which just passed its first birthday. Blogger Vanderleun posts about "The Passing of a President, 1865."

Harpers Magazine, June 1865, regarding the The Death of Lincoln:

"Men and papers who had opposed his policy and vilified him personally, now vied with his adherents and friends in lauding the rare wisdom and goodness which marked his conduct and character."

I am not so sure that those who vilified Reagan are now lauding his rare wisdom, but it is true that Lincoln suffered from a frequently vicious press.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/9/2004 09:22:19 PM.
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Allah's back!
Allah is in the House has returned, in case you didn't know. Allah has some comments - and some even better photos - of the G8 meeting that just ended.

Like this one, for example - I don't know, and I don't want to know!

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/9/2004 07:53:24 PM.
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Ronald Reagan returns to Washington
The joint-service caisson carrying President Reagan's coffin en route to the Capitol rotunda, where he will lie in state beginning this evening.




The honor guard carries the coffin into the Capitol (next two pictures).






The president's coffin is carried into the rotunda and placed upon the bier.










Mrs. Reagan in the rotunda.



The honor guard is now posted.



Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/9/2004 05:33:24 PM.
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Ridiculous item of the day
Asthma prevalence now blamed on global warming

I heard on the radio this morning an ad that started off with the sounds of someone coughing and hacking. Then the voiceover said it was the sound of global warming. Asthma is increasing, said the ad, and the fault lies with global warming.

Then I was informed global warming is to blame for the decreasing visibility in the Great Smoky Mountains (along the Tennessee-North Carolina border), which have been called "smoky" since the first settlers cross them more than 200 years ago, when presumably the globe wasn't warming.

But wait! There is salvation! Call your senators today to urge them vote for the "McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act."

The bill would cap the 2010 aggregate emissions level for the covered sectors at the 2000 level. The bill's emissions limits would not apply to the agricultural and the residential sectors. Certain subsectors would be exempt if the Administrator determined that it was not feasible to measure their GHG emissions. The Commerce Department would biennially re-evaluate the level of allowances to determine whether it was consistent with the objective of the United Nation’’s Framework Convention on Climate Change of stabilizing GHG emissions at a level that will prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.

Clear?

It can't be denied that asthma is rising in prevalence, in children more than adults and in blacks more than whites, according to a US Army study, but blaming "global warming" has all the scientific grounding of "The Day After Tomorrow."

Things in the environment trigger an asthma attack. These "triggers" vary from person to person, but common ones include cold air; exercise; allergens (things that cause allergies, such as dust mites, molds, pollens, animal dander or cockroach debris); and some types of viral infections.

Not one of these things is attributable to global warming, even if we accept that human-caused global warming is a real phenomenon. Furthermore, Canadian health authorities attribute the increase in asthma in large part to more sterile home environments, which cannot even in a drunken stupor be attributed to global warming. "More sterile" really means more tightly sealed because of modern construction techniques. Australian health authorities say that such homes pose an increased threat to asthma sufferers or those prone to asthma because they trap moisture inside the home and that leads to mold infections.

The [Royal Australian Institute of Architects'] chief executive, Robin Ould, says the level of rising damp in a home can in many cases, trigger a potentially fatal attack in some asthma sufferers.
"A lot of people's asthma is triggered by dust mites, by fungus and by the spores or the pollen that comes out of mould," he said.

"So that where you've got an environment that's conducive to the build up of mould and mildew and harbours dust mites and increases the environment, where dust mites can thrive then the potential there is for people with asthma to have their asthma triggered in the home."

He says this can exacerbate an asthma sufferer's condition or it can actually trigger a very severe asthma attack.

The reason homes are built so tight these days is for energy efficiency. Tighter homes bleed less heat into the outside during winter and allow less heat in during summer. Of course, tighter homes use less energy than otherwise. Using less energy combats global warming, does it not?

So with tongue partly in cheek, I might say that the rising prevalence of asthma - which is serious, make no mistake - is due in large part to measures taken by builders and others to do things which fight global warming. So is the fight-global-warming movement actually helping to cause more asthma?

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/9/2004 10:43:05 AM.
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Template tweaking
Changes to the template:

Moved several permanent links to a horizontal line across the masthead where they will be easier to find

The move necessitated changing the background color of the masthead from dark blue to pale yellow because the master style code for the whole blog makes all links navy blue (red when moused over). If there is a way to change the color of links for just the masthead, I couldn't find it.

Added some hard line breaks a few places that you may not notice, but that I did.

Sorry, no PDA-friendly page. Blogger just doesn't offer a way to publish a post to two different pages (this one and a PDA index page) at the same time. I'm still working on a solution, though I don't know what it might be.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/8/2004 09:39:27 PM.
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Incredible turnout for Reagan repose
A caller to Sean Hannity's radio show said today that he waited in in his car for five hours just to exit off the interstate to drive where Ronald Reagan's flag-draped coffin reposed for public viewing at the Reagan Library. Then he waited another five hours to stand in line to reach the coffin, where, as a retired US Marine, he rendered the hand salute and left.

Total time at the coffin: one minute, after waiting in line for 10 hours.

James Joyner has an excellent roundup of news coverage and links.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/8/2004 07:39:04 PM.
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Is hockey finished as a big league sport?
A columnist for Nashville's Tennessean paper says that the end of the Stanley Cup tourney may mark the end of the NHL as a major pro sport.

An NHL lockout is imminent, the sides incredibly far apart on the fundamental issues.

That's just the financial end of it.

The league, led by blindfolded commissioner Gary Bettman, barely acknowledges the problems with the game. Because the high-ranking guys don't like to be on the hook for altering the status quo, and because they fear tinkering with anything that might upset the Canadian hockey fanatic or the Original Six, they can't see it's more than finances that are killing the game:

The low scoring, the lack of personalities, the monstrous influx of players from outside North America, the overly long schedule, the drawn-out playoffs.

And the Stanley Cup was a ho-hummer for most of America. ABC Sports reported that, "the average rating for the five Stanley Cup final games on ABC were the lowest since the network began broadcasting the finals again in 2000."

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/8/2004 07:00:31 PM.
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Who would have thought?
George Miller, who was "indoctrinated" in the superiority of the communist system while attending the University of Manchester, England, writes about Ronald Reagan and the collapse of communism.

The academics will tell a new generation a pack of lies and distortions, belittling the role of Western values and of democratic leaders and spending hours in seminars on Iran/contra while their students are forced to discover Reagan's Berlin speech on the Internet.

However, we have the evidence, on video, of the President of the American Republic standing in Berlin in 1987, appealing directly to the subjugated people of Eastern Europe to throw off their chains. Who would have thought that the most effective revolutionary visionary and strategist of the late 20th Century would be a conservative president of a democratic republic? Certainly I, indoctrinated to believe that radicalism was the preserve of the Left, did not think it remotely possible - hence the mantra and hence the realization, in his death, that Reagan, already a figure of immense importance to people who love liberty, will be regarded as one of history's great democratic leaders.

Practically alone among Western political leaders, Reagan believed that the Soviet empire would fall if pushed the right way. Fortunately, another key leader, just as tough minded as Reagan, agreed - the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher.

Stop and ponder sometime how much history of the last 100 years has been shaped by America and Great Britain.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/8/2004 06:40:44 PM.
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This blog's RSS feed
Bill Hobbs asked in a comment to the next post down whether I had an RSS feed for this blog. I have had RSS for a very long time, but his question made me realize that the link had been buried low on the left column.

So I repositioned it to the upper left, above the Blogads slot. So RSS away!

Update: A commenter pointed out that the feed only had the first part of each post, so I have changed the setting so that all of each post should now come through. I hope this helps!

Also, a reader emailed to suggest I should have a PDA-friendly page like Glenn Reynolds site does (here). I'd love to, but as far as I know, it is not possible to do this using Blogger.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/8/2004 05:57:32 PM.
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Blogads work, this blog is part of the proof!
I am very grateful to Jeff Jarvis for publishing an email he received from Jeff Sharlet, editor of the Revealer, a blog about religion at NYU.

You will notice a blogad for The Revealer in my site's upper-left column.

Jeff wrote Jeff that Blogads "blew conventional media out of the water" when it came to advertising returns:

The conventional media we chose were Beliefnet, Columbia Journalism Review, and American Journalism Review. CJR and AJR are small, specialty sites, but Beliefnet claims a readership of 2 million. I don't know what Talking Points, Little Green Footballs, and Daily Kos claim, but I'd estimate that our small, second-level blog ads on those sites EACH outperformed Beliefnet by a factor of 10. At least. Other blogs, like Matthew Yglesias, Reason's Hit and Run, and the Washington Monthly did so probably by a factor of five. And even very small blogs, like Donald Sensing's, beat Beliefnet [boldface added - DS].

I am flattered and honored to be cited!

Blogads recently released the results of its own survey about who reads blogs and responds to Blogads featured on them:

This survey shows that blog readers are older and more affluent than most optimistic guestimates: 61% of blog readers responding to the survey are over 30, and 75% make more than $45,000 a year.

Moreover, blog readers are more cyber-active than I'd hoped: 54% of their news consumption is online. 21% are themselves bloggers and 46% describe themselves as opinion makers. And, in the last six months:

50% have spent more than $50 online on books.
47% have spent more than $500 online for plane tickets.
50% have contributed more than $50 to a cause or candidate, and 5% have contributed more than $1000. (Only 25% of NYTimes.com readers have contributed anything online in the last year.)

There's more to their release, of course.

More and more business ple are discovering that advertsing on blogs is smart, and the most effective blog advertising there is is through Blogads.

To advertise of this site, just click here!

BTW, compared to those other guys Mr. Sharlett cited, my blog is smaller. But this blog is still fairly large. One Hand Clapping is ranked 38th for traffic on the TTLB Ecosystem, 52nd in importance in the Blogrunner 100, and 113th in importance out of 143,873 blogs ranked on Blogstreet - all figures as of the time of posting, of course.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/7/2004 09:39:23 PM.
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Ronald Reagan
I am probably about the last blogger in America to post about the death of former President Ronald Reagan. The big news day for his death was Sunday, the one day of the week I really try to take off from blogging. It's not a special sensitivity of doing no labor on the Christian Sabbath so much as that Sundays are my busiest day anyway. The first Sunday of the month (yesterday) is also when we celebrate Holy Communion, and on those Sundays I spend the afternoon taking Communion to our shutins and visiting with them.

I never met President Reagan nor as far as I remember did I ever see him in person. The closest brush I had with him was the day that Bob Hope almost made me rich. I remember the day Reagan was shot, but not very vividly. I was a company commander at Fort Jackson, SC, and my first sergeant heard it on the radio, then told me.

I never lionized Reagan. He was a good president overall, but I suspect a serious examination of his legacy will reveal some serious problems with how he executed a number of initiatives. Iran-Contra comes to mind.

Probably Reagan's presidency, the first few years anyway, look good partly because Jimmy Carter's presidency was so crummy. Except for the Camp David Accords, affirming peace between Egypt and Israel, it's hard to recall another noteworthy accomplishment of Carter.

James Fallows, who served on Carter's White House staff, said that Carter was a man of Great Ideas but no Big Ideas.

There was, Fallows observed, no real organizing principle to Carter's administration, just one Great Idea after another, unconnected with one another.

Reagan, OTOH, was not a man of Great Ideas. He was a man of Big Ideas, of which there were precisely three: decrease taxes, "get government off the backs of the people," and build up the military. That was Reagan's 1980 campaign platform in a nutshell, and Reagan ruthlessly stomped on campaigners or, later, his administration's officials, who tried to divert him or his administration from doing those three things.

Fallows wrote that under Carter, the administration's leaders many days literally did not know what they were supposed to be doing in their office to move the administration's goals forward. The reason was that there were so many goals, and they changed all the time.

Under Reagan, however, every department head, every administrator arose every morning and knew s/he was supposed to do one or more of three things, and s/he'd better get to it.

I think this focus became somewhat blurred in the second term, which was flawed in comparison with the first.

As an Army officer throughout Reagan's eight years, I saw firsthand the benefits of the Reagan buildup of the nation's military. There was a bit of Hollywood to some of it - the "600-ship Navy" for example. Why 600? Why not 575 or 611? Because "600-ship Navy" rolled trippingly off the tongue. It was sound bite driven.

I wrote 13 months ago that even though an Iraqi general attributed his country's defeat to American "technology beyond belief,"

There are other advantages the US military brings to the fray that are not shared by any other military force in the world, not even Great Britain's or Israel's, impressive as their forces are. They are, in no particular order:

Funding and equipping,

Training and training facilities

A horizontal organization

The first two of these items had their genesis in the Reagan administration.

The real funding advantage of American forces is found less in numbers comparisons than it is in funding endurance. The post-Vietnam austerity ended in the last year of Jimmy Carter's presidency. Under the Reagan administration, funding climbed dramatically and has stayed there since. There were decreases during the Clinton years, yes, but not anything like the services had to endure after WW 1, WW 2, Korea and Vietnam. ...

However, the main advantage that America’s military has in funding is that the defense budget has been pretty well provided for by five successive administrations (a late start under Carter, yes, but a start nonetheless). By American historical standards, this is exceptional.

A reasonable assurance that the military would not go through cycles of starvation and feasting enabled the generals and admirals to focus on training and training technology in way they never could before.

It is also worth remembering that throughout his tenure, Reagan had to contend with a Congress in which both houses were controlled by the other party. I heard a radio commentator say today that despite overall lower tax brackets, federal tax revenue doubled during his term. Yet the federal budget deficit was three times greater when he left office than when he began. Ultimately, of course, this state of affairs can be laid only on the shoulder of the Congress, especially the House, which originates all money legislation. The commentator said that for every dollar of new revenue the government brought in during Reagan's term, the Congress spent $1.83.

It would be an interesting thing to compare the budgets Reagan submitted to the Congress with both the revenues coming in for the same fiscal year and the budgets the Congress finally passed (and Reagan signed).

Reagan started off as a Roosevelt Democrat, about the time he hit Hollywood for his movie career. Yet by the late 1950s, at the latest, he had formed an anti-New Deal political philosophy. If the belief that both government and taxes should be as small as possible define American political conservatism, then Reagan was last conservative of either party we have seen. Certainly the present president is no conservative in the Reagan sense; if anything, G. W. Bush is a Roosevelt Republican, which I don't think is a good combination. Heaven knows that W. doesn't talk about smaller government or "getting government off the backs of the people," as Reagan did (even though, I believe, the federal government actually grew larger from 1981-1989).

I will not dwell on the fact that Reagan was the only president who believed that the Soviet Union could fall and would fall if American policies were stout enough to make it happen. His alliance with Pope John Paul II to shore up the Solidarity movement in Poland (the Pope's native country) was brilliant. A politically liberalized Poland reverberated throughout the entire East Bloc.

Regarding the USSR itself, Reagan was singularly fortunate to have a Mikhail Gorbachev named as his counterpart leader of the communist empire. Gorbachev entered office as the general secretary of the CPSU after heading the ministry of agriculture - not the usual route for a gensec. But Gorby's experience there revealed to him just how hollow and weak the Soviet economy was.

Gorby knew that the USSR could not continue with business as usual. There were several features of Reagan's security policies that both compelled and enabled Gorbachev to steer the USSR into a new direction that finally led to the end of the Soviet empire (which Gorby, of course, never intended):

the prospect that the US would develop and deploy a Ballistic Missile Defense (aka, "Star Wars"),

the strengthening of America's conventional military across the board,

the deployment of American Pershing II missiles in Europe - they could range Moscow and negated the Soviets' deployment of SS-20 missiles in eastern Europe,

the deployment of cruise missiles in Europe, a weapon for which the Soviets had no real counterpart and no defense.

The Soviet leadership finally had to face facts: the USSR was too broke to keep up and lacked the technical skills and industrial base to do so anyway. The rest, as they say, is history.

Reagan's arms buildup also unhinged the Kremlin. His clarion call for a missile-based defense system against nuclear weapons in 1983 helped convince the Politburo to select Mikhail Gorbachev as a less hard-line Soviet leader in 1985. "Reagan's SDI was a very successful blackmail," says Gennady Gerasimov, the Soviet Foreign Ministry's top spokesman during the 1980s. "The Soviet economy couldn't endure such competition." Mr. Gorbachev himself agrees the U.S. exhausted his country economically and acknowledges Reagan's place in history. "Who knows what would have happened if he wasn't there?" he told the History Channel in 2002.

Need I point out that the American military today is itself a legacy of Ronald Reagan? The precision weapons, communications and control systems and extremely high levels of training found among the military almost all had their genesis during his administration. If you try to imagine what the military would have looked like had it stayed the post-Vietnam course it was on in 1981, then you will discern that our options after Sept. 11, 2001 would have been extremely limited.

For all the ink now about Reagan's enduring legacy, it seems to me that only three have outlived him. The first is the power and flexibility of the military I just described. The second is the termination of Soviet communism and with it the liberation of hundreds of millions of people under the Soviet yoke. And that without a shot being fired against them. That alone gives him a honored place in history and in my view completely outweighs everything on the negative side of his presidency's ledger.

The third is his tax policy. Since his term it has been very difficult for presidential candidates to talk successfully about raising personal income taxes (notice Kerry has shut up about it in recent weeks). Even though almost all "tax reform" schemes since his term really just shift the tax burden around rather than truly lower taxes, any candidate knows that across-the-board increases are DOA. The WSJ wrote today,

When Mr. Reagan took office, the top marginal U.S. tax rate was 70%. When he left the top rate was 28%; it is now 35%, and even John Kerry has conceded with his proposal to cut some corporate taxes that the marginal rate of tax matters. Today Americans may disagree about what tax cuts are needed, how deep they should go, and what they ought to target. But the debate itself reflects Mr. Reagan's central premise: that people respond to incentives, and that high taxes interfere with natural human creativity and drive.

This Reagan tenet alone has had a lasting effect on American political discourse and will for many years to come, I am sure.

Absent these three achievements, Reagan would rank as merely mediocre. But they are huge. They propel him into the first rank of occupants of the Oval Office.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/7/2004 09:32:16 PM.
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Monastery blogging
David Whidden has a blog devoted to his stay in a monastery. Today's post:

Today I’d like to spell out what I see as the problems that exist in our churches now. First, religious commitment tends to be viewed as something that is for the benefit of the individual. ...

Second, this individualistic bent seems to have lent itself to the idea that someone can be “spiritual, but not religious.” ...

Third, the cultural individualism in which we swim creates serious issues with authority.

So take a look if you are so inclined.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/7/2004 05:57:28 PM.
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Saudis: You're either with us or with the terrorists
The Saudi government says,

... anybody who fails to report Al Qaida activities will be prosecuted as terrorist accomplices. At the same time, authorities have offered major awards for information that would lead to the capture of Islamic insurgents

The kingdom's clerics have also been ordered to condemn al Qaeda in their sermons.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/7/2004 05:42:06 PM.
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