Federal Review Dot Com

LIEBERMAN GETS FARKED
The website Fark.com has daily competitions of photoshopping skill, where a picture is presented for manipulation. Here's Senator Lieberman at a clean air rally (link for contest is here):

And here's the enchanced version. Is that Supreme Chancellor Palpatine?

That site cracks me up. I can't wait to see what they do with Governor Schwarzenegger.

WHY NOT ARNOLD?
NPR reports on Arnold Schwarzenegger's run for California governor by saying that nothing really "shocks" Californians, as though maybe this should. But you may recall that in 1998, John Edwards, a successful personal injury trial lawyer from Raleigh, threw his hat in for United States Senate. At the time, Edwards had no discernible history of political involvement, and had hardly even voted prior to his entry into the race. Yet, a mere two years after taking his seat in the Senate, Edwards was seriously considered to be qualified to be Vice President, and after 4, President. Sure their were rumblings about lack of experience, but mostly from the right and these were written off as partisan attacks.

And unlike Edwards in 1998, Schwarzenegger has a much longer history of political involvement. From working on the President's physical fitness council in the 1980s, to campaigning for candidates throughout the 1990s and spearheading a ballot initiative in California just recently. Plus, his dogged determination and focus on developing a successful career in a difficult industry, from a point where he could hardly speak English to being a top box office draw and one of the post powerful people in his industry, he's shown plenty of success in life to suggest he would be tough enough to assemble a team capable of handling California's problems. And he has the added advantage of being a political moderate that shouldn't be seen as a divisive partisan.

Great political theater for the political junkie.

THE "BEST DIGGER IN EGYPT" GETS IT
Here at Federal Review, some of us are quick to jump on the backs of the idiot famous when they show their incomprehension of evil, so its a pleasure to draw attention to an actor who has a better understanding of what's at stake in the war on terror. An alert reader points out the following statements by actor John Rhys-Davies who can currently be seen as Gimli in The Lord of the Rings:

But the question I'd like to get asked is 'Does it mean anything?' and uh, I suspect it does. I think that Tolkien is a man living in a particular age of crisis and his life is quite uneventful, really, except for the fact that he's a captain in the First World War. He was at the first battle of the Somme. The British army in the first DAY of the first battle of the Somme I think probably had 20,000 dead and maybe 60 or 80,000 wounded. And that was the first day. You don't go through that sort of furnace without having to ask yourself questions: Why are we fighting? Is the cause we're fighting for a just one? How can I justify the deaths of those men that I'm leading? And I think that

Tolkien found a justification for it. His justification is that there are certain times when your civilization is challenged and if you do not meet that challenge and overcome it, you will lose your civilization.

And I think that there's a terrible resonance between that period of time and our period now. I do think that our civilization is being challenged. We've been challenged internally because I think we've lost so much character, moral fiber, decency, integrity, and I think it's being challenged partly, because we have lost those, externally by fundamental Islam. And I think that if we do not pull ourselves together and recognize that that challenge is there, we're going to end up with people taking a hammer to the Pieta and to the.you know, defacing pictures and portraits in the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But you Americans I think are further along the way of realizing that. I actually think that you're morally a stronger country than Britain is. I'm appalled by what I see in England these days. There was a time when an Englishman's word was his bond and an Englishman didn't steal. Even Welshmen. (laughter) The little town where I live in Wales, well not far from where I used to live in Wales, has one of the highest rates of carjacking in the world. More cars are stolen from Exely and Swansea and places like that than almost any other part of the world, including Bogotá and places like that. I'm ashamed and embarrassed by that but you, know unless we start to affirm that we are not going to steal, that we will not put up with theft, that we will not put up with drug-taking, we will lose our society, and then perhaps it will be for the best that fundamental Islam, which forbids these things, sweeps across the world. I personally dread that thought. I hope one day that I will have great-granddaughters and I am very adamant and determined that one should not lose one's daughter's fingernails to the local Taliban if she dares to paint them.

The resonance between Lord of the Rings and present time is that we need people of courage to take the real challenge to our civilization and meet it head-on and win.

And that is a very unpopular cause, often, and it is very easy to say 'Oh, let somebody else do it'. And that is one of the questions that I wish somebody would ask. At least, one of the answers that I would give to one of the questions that I wish someone would ask (applause).

Please read the whole interview with an actor who is a joy to watch over at Theonering.net.

GOVERNMENT PARTICIPATION CAN SCREW UP THE FREE MARKET
That's what John has learned as set forth in his post below. John is correct in arguing for reform in the Department of Defense, which proves the inefficiency of big government programs. Reform is needed because defense is one of the core functions of government that cannot really be privatized. We see other failures of the free market in other areas where government is a major customer, such as in the health care industry, and there is plenty of opportunity for the government to scale back its involvement. Unfortunately, things are heading the other way. When the person purchasing goods and services, i.e., the patient, does not make a decision even partially based on the price of the service, then the market gets well out-of-whack. This can happen when the insurance company is picking up the tab or when government is. Now, the Republicans and Democrats want the government to pick up the bill for your prescription drugs. No longer will you decide that you can really survive on Sudafed and you don't need that prescription Clarinex, because here comes the government to pick up the tab. Demand stays artificially high, and there is no pressure on prices to fall.

DOD sees this. When its budget rises, so do the costs of tanks, planes and spare parts. Cut the budget, demand falls and so do prices. It's Econ 101. Now, if liberals and conservatives could work together to eliminate DOD waste and not inject artificial demand into the health care, we'd all be better off. Unfortunately, few government decisions are based on such obscure criteria as the rules of Economics, so expect more big government giveaways so that the average voter will thing that Congress is "doing something" about health care or the war on terror.

Of Nervous M.I.C.E., Versailles on the Potomac & the Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone

-- the following is a paraphrased-blog-interpretation of an interview with Chuck Spinney, former Pentagon analyst-turned-writer/pundit on UNCTV. Were I a better blogger, you'd have a convenient link to Spinney's stuff..but I'm not, so ..if you're curious, Google-him.

Inside the Beltway, the "rationale" for decisions in the Defense Department, or MICE - the Military Industrial Congressional Enterprise - are not based on the sort of economic rationale that businesses have to face (though some were putting it off with Enron-esque accounting tactics). The decisions are made on political grounds, not by business "rules".

Every time the DOD budget is raised, the cost of weapons rises (mysteriously?, c'mon...), every time procurement is cut, they find price cuts ...equally mysteriously, of course. "They" is in this case defense contractors (not Bernie Horowitz, as Gary Larson suggested........Far Side Geeks Unite!)

The congressional protectors are fine with this as defense is a huge jobs program for many states. The National Guard are the various Governors' fiefdoms.

Rumsfeld's planned changes to the DOD shake the foundation of the MICE business model (the politically-based self-licking ice cream cone) because it does not call for building a military that is designed to fight state vs. state wars, but Global War on Terrorism (the GWOT, believe it or GNOT) or peace-keeping/making missions. These efforts call for more Special Operations Forces-small numbers of highly trained soldiers -- not the stuff of huge manufacturing contracts for tens of thousands of copies of a weapon system. The program managers and congressional chairmen feel they are acting patriotically when they fudge numbers to get the F-22 or whatever needless program feeds their state. We are sending a brigade of Stryker vehicles to Iraq for experimentation purposes. In other words -- there is no operating concept for the Stryker. It is a budget program being fulfilled, yet searching for a real purpose. It has tires instead of tracks to save weight - yet DOD has run through tires like wildfire in Op Iraqi Freedom.

(For disclosure purposes, I live in a state that gets back much more in tax $$ than it pays...there are 22 such states at last count...) The MICE are nervous......

The distinction between peace-keeping and peace making is huge - you need big numbers of people trained to do very different things. Many are in the guard/reserve and can't be easily changed over to active duty because they are embedded in local communities, who are missing their abilities while the military has use of them.

Essentially, there is no real market in DOD. There is no profit...you are buying military capability, not return on assets expressible in dollars earned. By the way, we are spending over 400 Billion (yes, that's with a "B") every year on defense, and with the now-annual supplemental appropriations, it won't be long before we are spending HALF A TRILLION $$ every year on defense...............

Who is accountable for this? In what way is the current government doing anything to staunch the hemorrhaging ? The DOD has never passed a SINGLE audit attempt as called for in the 1990 Chief Financial Officers Act? In fact, after 13 failures, the embarrassed congressional MICE contingent waived the requirement for DOD in an embarrassingly tacit admission that it has NO IDEA WHERE BILLIONS ARE GOING?

The madness must stop......... Conservatives......where is the outcry against these anti-market practices? Liberals...where is your reputed spine? Sheesh.

When the soldiers on the front lines and taxpayers have to eat the consequences of the MICE's self-licking-ice-cream-cone spending decisions, then we have to ask some fundamental questions about what interests are being served in our democratic republic.