How the Annie Moses Band saved Christmas music

We've been letting down our end. Great music has been contributed to our canon of Christmas carols for more than half a millennium, including a profusion of what may be termed "Great American Songbook" Christmas music in the 20th Century.

But then the 1960s mutated into the late '60s, and the American Songbook was closed -- its Christmas chapters with it. Oh, Paul McCartney gamely ponied up with "Wonderful Christmastime" in 1979, and George Michael, then of Wham!, added "Last Christmas" in 1984, which is of course a typical lovesong only incidentally set at Christmas. But "Last Chrismas" is at least a good tune, which is much more than can be said for that dismal and unmusical hectoring of the same year called "Do They Know It's Christmas?"

Then there are the honorable mentions for attempted contribution to the Christmas carol canon -- songs that may prove to be durable, but may just as easily turn out to be near-misses. Like "Grown-Up Christmas List", by the impressive David Foster with Linda Thompson-Jenner and introduced by Natalie Cole in 1990. That may be a little too grown-up, and can have the effect of letting the 7-Up out of one's Christmas punch. Maybe a judicious revision of the lyrics could "jolly it up", as Frank Sinatra asked Hugh Martin to do with the lyrics to "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", thus transforming it from forgotten 1940s film soundtrack fodder, to third-most performed Christmas song of the past half-decade.

"Mary Did You Know?", by Buddy Greene and Mark Lowry and released in '92, is very much in the same line: Impressive, but a bit of a downer. A nitpicker may make the case that an ancient carol like the "Coventry Carol" is a bit of a downer too, and that's a hit even after half a millennium. But the "Coventry Carol" is modal -- unless my music PhD brother says otherwise -- with those progressions which resolve in twist endings of brighter notes and chords.

So, what we're left with is old chestnuts -- some of them half a millennium old, some of them half a century old -- and not so much from the mostly useless last couple of generations.

And then, sometime about Christmas of 2008, some kids step onto a stage someplace in America and announce that they're the Annie Moses Band. They call their idiosyncratic genre "chamber-pop", which is as good a denomination as I can think of, though a little too close to "chamber-pot" for my comfort. But that's as may be.

It turns out that none of them are called Annie Moses. They're Wolavers, Annie Moses being a great-grandmother. I needn't attempt a band biography here; people who know exponentially more about it have supplied those online and in print. But suffice it to say it's a family troupe, with the two parents and some six kids. The kids, though they come off as pretty grown up by now, are virtuosos of the various stringed instruments, as well as formidable singers. The father is a composer and pianist, the mother a lyricist and vocalist.

And it is no music promoter's sloganeering to say that they make a top-tier, international-class chamber music string ensemble, and a convincing contemporary Country band, in the course of the same set.

Of particular note are the original carols "Bethlehem, House of Bread" and "Red, White & Blue Christmas". The latter may have found itself more at home in a nation bristling to march into the belly of the beast, than a nation which recently elected some glib kid Chicago politician as Commander-in-Chief. "Red, White & Blue Christmas" may be just about seven years too late. But it is the closest thing I am aware of -- musically -- to an American Songbook Christmas carol in this past half-century, and the closest lyrically to the Second World War era's pop music for fightin'.

"Bethlehem, House of Bread" might as well be an updating of a haunting "mystery play" hymn of the 15th Century.

Their arrangement of "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" finds the sympathetic jazz/impressionist-classical chords implied in the melody.

And their "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" is, as some unidentified musicologist wrote of the jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal's 1990s excursions, "large open voicings and bravura-laden playing."

The Annie Moses Band are clearly passionate Evangelical Christians and take-no-prisoners American patriots (bless their hearts). Not to mention they're a large, intact family. So America's own brand of upper-class twits -- the self-appointed elite, the new snobs, the smarmy and the snarky who set their clocks by Jon Stewart -- will of course be wont to sneer.

But the great majority of what is called the music "industry" these days ought to listen to this Annie Moses Band, and despair. If they live to be 100, they will never be the musicians these kids are, or the composers the parents are.

If the Annie Moses Band never played another lick, it could be justly said of them that they were as good as and better than any musicians of their time, and that they contributed as much music worthy of the Christmas canon in one album as the entire music industry has put up in decades.

A politician, not a pope

The press, including especially the Canadian Press reproduced in this venerable newspaper, have disgraced themselves. They have gone well past their accustomed bias and entered the giddy teeny-bopper genre of Tiger Beat magazine, cooing over the world's biggest celebrity and snarking about how beastly those few people who don't care for him are. Repeating malicious false rumours about Sarah Palin passes for front page newswire copy these days.

If the press are going to cover Barack Obama like the Vatican Information Service covers the pope, then the news of his fallibility will have to be found in the opinion pages.

Maybe the biggest surprise to come out of November 4 is that voter turnout was barely any better for Barack Obama's election than for George W. Bush's re-election. For the best part of a year the talk has been of a near-holy movement of the masses to "vote for change and hope." And yet, an American University study finds that voter turnout was "at most, one percentage point higher" in '08 than in '04: between 60.7 and 61.7 percent. Not far off of Canada's allegedly abysmal turnout in October of 59.1 percent.

With everything in the world going for him, and the gold-standard Gallup Poll on election eve showing him winning by 11 points, Barack Obama topped out at 52.7 percent, with over 66.5 million votes. Not earth-shakingly better than President Bush's '04 numbers of 50.7 percent and over 62 million votes.

Even as they elected the very most leftist major-party candidate for president at least since McGovern in 1972 and arguably in all American history, only 22 percent of voters admitted to being "liberal." 34 percent identified themselves as "conservative." A practically identical ideological break-down to 21-34 in '04, when it was Republicans who ran the tables.

Though you'd never know it from the Canadian Press "election coverage" that "Americans are becoming more socially progressive and aren't concerned with issues like same-sex marriage," gay marriage bans were actually on the ballot in three states on election day, and passed everywhere: libertarian Arizona, Obama-swinging Florida, and libertine California. Which brings the total of states outlawing gay marriage to 30, in case anyone at the CP has their note pad out.

And as most voters were electing Barack Obama, they were also rejecting four of five environmentalist ballot initiatives.

Obama's ascendance was greeted by votes of non-confidence from the markets, and a throwing down of the gauntlet by a hostile power. The Dow Jones Industrials set a new record for post-election day crashes, down 486 points, as compared with 101 points up the day after Bush's re-election in '04. The panic continued on Thursday with another 443 point decline, until $1.2 trillion in American wealth had disappeared, and only let up on Friday when Obama hinted at reconsidering his tax hikes. And within hours of the vote, Russia announced its intention to deploy ballistic missiles to its NATO borders, answering Obama's willingness to capitulate on missile defense with an "or else."

If all these admittedly secondary points can be sloughed off by Obama's many partisans as nothing to be bothered about, then they might at least give a thought to the tiny possibility that the election of Barack Obama has been the sale of a bill of goods.

Obama blitzed America's televisions with promises of "tax cuts for 95 percent" and "jumpstarting our economy." But he promises to raise the maximum capital gains rate by 5 percent at a time when investors have already fled the markets. He denounced John McCain for his plan to cut corporate tax rates by 10 percent, even as combined corporate rates in the United States rank second-highest among the 30 OECD nations. He promises to cut the taxes of the 40 percent of earners who pay nothing in income tax, and to raise taxes on the top earners, when America's top 10 percent presently pay 71 percent of federal income taxes, and the top 1 percent alone bear 40 percent of the burden. And he threatens to build walls against international trade as the global economy totters on the brink.

Obama swore to lead America to energy independence within a decade. But he threatened to bankrupt America's coal industry and to make electrical rates "necessarily skyrocket," for the cause of "healing the planet." And he shares his party's doctrinaire hostility to oil drilling and nuclear power.

Obama presumed to be the one to get Osama bin Laden, win Afghanistan once and for all, and maybe wade into Pakistan to boot. But he fought the policy that won the war in Iraq. He built his very candidacy on retreating from a winnable war in the heart of enemy territory and abandoning the people to their civil war and genocide. He has no military experience, no executive experience, and until a matter of months ago he hardly pronounced on military affairs except to condemn American efforts. He pledged to limit new weapons systems and missile defense while America's chief enemy in the world builds its first nuclear warhead. And he leads a majority party which threatens to cut military spending by a quarter in the midst of a global war.

Obama decided he was a moderate the day after he clinched the Democrat nomination in June. But he wanted driver's licenses for illegal aliens. He couldn't bring himself to support a measure compelling doctors to save viable babies born alive despite an attempted abortion. He backed a gun ban struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. And he pledges to abolish the secret ballot in union votes.

President-elect Obama got himself over the top, with every variable breaking in his favour and presenting himself as a Barack Obama who did not exist just months ago. It may be a tough act to keep up.

Andrew W. Smith, Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Kinder, gentler lending and the Panic of '08, Part II

There is a Canadian notion that America is the land of unfettered capitalism, where government dares not intrude in the natural course of economic events, and declines to police even the more bandit-like of business behavior. It is commonly found on college campuses, the CBC, etc., and I believed it myself once. But it turns out that there is a positively Canadian level of government intervention in the economy even in the post-Reagan United States, and particularly in mortgages and financing.

Far from hesitating to intervene in the economy for the protection of the poor and the destitute, the U.S. government has been overriding normal business practice in order to put poor folks into $100,000 homes, and effectively guaranteeing the gamble with taxpayer dollars. It is that massive government intervention which is at the root of this financial crisis -- not some pro-business deregulation, but affordable housing affirmative action.

It's bad form to be so partisan, but a disservice has been done to that unloveable bunch called Republicans, and in the spirit of this newspaper's mission statement about wrong not thriving unopposed, the record ought to be set straight. Republicans are being blamed for policies they never supported, while the very Democrats who championed the disaster are sought out for guidance. It is blaming the fire on the fireman, and entrusting the fire department to the arsonist.

And the blame ought not be put on either the borrowers or the lenders, who were only taking advantage of a perfectly legal -- and encouraged -- government-ordained system. That irresponsible borrowing and lending was precisely what the federal government had intended.

The federal government under President Clinton in the good-timing 1990s directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to take on what would become $1 trillion in dodgy mortgages, and to spread the risk among other financial institutions, in order to meet their federal mandates for affordable housing.

Because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were creatures of the federal government, any financial outfit was happy to have their liability on its books, the assumption being that, if the bottom dropped out, the U.S. Treasury would be good for any paper with "Fannie" or "Freddie" on it. The reward may have been privatized, but the risk was socialized, in a perverse inversion of the principle behind trusting the market to make the best decisions.

Such deregulation as there was in this area had to do with an old chestnut from President Roosevelt's New Deal called the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which was repealed in 1999. That was a deregulation, sure enough, and one supported by Republicans, as well as President Clinton and Congressional Democrats. But allowing the combining of commercial and investment banking services as the Europeans do enabled neither subprime lending nor the over-leveraged securitizing that spread the subprime risk far and wide. The chief effect of Glass-Steagall's repeal here, in fact, has been to allow the formation of the few major financial institutions that are still standing.

President Clinton himself was not always so enthusiastic about this social engineering through government-mandated lending. Clinton in 1994 -- like President Bush in 2003 and Congressional Republicans in 2005-6 -- tried to fix the Fannie and Freddie problem while it was still fixable. Clinton's own account of what became of those attempted reforms may be the last word, as it is a noteworthy thing when Bill Clinton feels compelled to point a finger at his own side: "I think the responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was president, to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

When it is occasionally conceded that Republicans opposed this mortgage monkey-business all along, the argument goes that they must be to blame nonetheless, because they controlled both houses of Congress for four of President Bush's eight years. It looks good on paper, but it's not the way things work in practice in the United States Senate.

Democrats have controlled the Senate for half of Bush's presidency, and the House for a quarter. And for the four years from '03 to '07 in which Democrats were minorities in both houses of Congress, they were never fewer than 45 percent of the Senate -- four seats to spare over the 41 percent necessary to effectively kill presidential initiatives and Congressional legislation. The Democratic minority's ability to deny cloture motions alone was enough to block reforms from consideration by the full Senate.

If all the keys to Washington are to be handed to this crowd who were still cheerleading for Fannie and Freddie as late as July, and who are even now blaming some imaginary deregulation for the failings in government direction of the housing and financial sectors, then it is difficult to see how the wreck can be put right before it has landed the advanced economies in a protracted contraction.

One day, the history of subprime lending and the Panic of '08 will be written, and it will bear little resemblance to the first draft, with all its "blame Bush" and "Republican deregulation" and "collapse of capitalism" boilerplate. It had precious little to do with President Bush or pro-business deregulation or even capitalism itself. It was government mandates to put poor folks into homes they could not afford, and effective government guarantees to financial firms for playing along with the racket, to bail them out at taxpayers' expense when the whole crazy social engineering project came crashing down.

Andrew W. Smith, Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

An '04 Hummer in 2024

I take it a little personally when I read "eight dark years of George W. Bush"* and like lines, from some Democrats in this country and more than a few foreigners -- the sort of people who fantasize that earth-shaking and history-shaping judgments of national defense and foreign policy could possibly be explained by the prospect of a few new oil contracts for old friends, or that a nation with 11 million illegal aliens could possibly be a "police state". (No self-respecting actual police state would abide even a few hundred illegals, surely.) I feel about the "eight dark years" business much the same as I feel about the annual denunciations of Christmas displays and music in stores: I actually get a kick out of animated plush snowmen singing Christmas carols in the Wal-Mart seasonal section, even in October.

It's been my privilege to live in "Bush's America" for about six of Bush's eight years, in a state which voted to re-elect President Bush in 77 of its 77 counties, and it's been the happiest time of my life yet. I hope to be here for many administrations to come, and whatever my disagreements with those administrations, I like to think I'll never take them out on this country or be so carried away by them as to damn their place in time.

It's long ago and far away, since the Panic of '08, but over all the crisis and chaos since the bursting of the tech bubble and later the 9/11 attacks which yanked us from our holiday from history, it was only last year that the Dow Jones was setting records at over 14,000 points, the U.S. jobs market was setting records for longest unbroken gains at 52 months, and the average unemployment rate under Bush was better than the holiday-from-history Clinton average of 5.2 percent. Numbers out of the World Bank even now show President Bush leaves America's economy larger than he found it, by 19 percent.

The whole of the 1970s by any measure was a much more miserable time than we've seen since: Vietnam draft and defeat, Watergate melodrama and the only presidential resignation in the history of the republic, runaway inflation plus slow growth or "stagflation", Soviet ascendancy, the first energy crisis, gas lines and the first defeat of the American car by Japanese imports, inner city lawlessness, counter-cultural chaos, etc. And yet since sometime in the early '90s, the '70s has been the fixation of much of the nostalgia in American popular culture. When bellbottoms reappeared in the early-to-middle-'90s, it was my hope that the fad would be blessedly fleeting; the retro bellbottoms were not fleeting or blessed. Then with the coming of Austin Powers and Boogie Nights, it was my hope that the '70s nostalgia would be succeeded soon enough by '80s nostalgia in film; I'm waiting still for my retro-'80s movies. That '70s Show was followed by a companion sitcom called That '80s Show; the '70s show became an institution and the '80s show was promptly put to pasture. And has not VH1 given the world two 10-hour series reliving the '70s? Nostalgia for the 1970s by now has outlasted the 1970s.

So plainly the papers and textbooks are missing something, when they're not wrong altogether. And if you're one of those people who imagines everything's just awful and has been since sometime in January of 2001, see if you feel quite the same in 20 years' time, if not a lot sooner. An '04 Hummer in 2024 will look like a '56 Chevy in 1976. The War in the Desert from '03 to '07 will look in 2027 like the final few years of the Cold War look to us today. Or take The Sopranos, or Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings, or 300 or The Dark Knight, or even Borat; there'll be "2000s nostalgia" before the decade is very long past, and the old refrains of "eight dark years" will be exposed for the partisan hysteria they only ever were.

* - Those being the words of a Canadian news director

How kinder, gentler lending caused the Panic of '08

Today it's called "subprime lending," or, if you're of a more Marxist bent, "predatory lending." But back before the bubble burst, it was called "affordable housing." Today it's called "greed" and "corruption," but until the bottom fell out it was progress for "minorities and the poor."

Sloganeering has been a handy stand-in for understanding of this credit crisis. "Crony capitalism," "neocons," "politics of greed," and on and on. That may have been good enough for Soviet poster printers, but it does nothing to explain exactly what happened.

Between 2000 and 2006, the average home price in the United States rose by some 93 percent. It was the good times for that mania of these first years of the 21st Century: house-flipping. A fixer-upper might be bought for $100,000, renovated for $35,000, and re-sold for $200,000. But it was all too far, too fast. Inflation at that rate was insupportable, and the painful but necessary correction started in 2006.

In the boom years of '00 to '06, a fellow who found himself unable to manage his mortgage payments might simply put his house up for sale, and sell it within a few months for considerably more than he had paid for it. And the lender which had approved that bad mortgage was not much bothered by the borrower being a bad risk, so long as there was an out -- a quick turnaround in a market that could only go up.

But then, interest rates returned to more realistic levels. And the other side in the bargain -- the people who buy homes -- decided that home prices were getting to be higher than home values. Buying slowed, and the music stopped in the musical chairs game of moving from home to better home. New home construction slowed. Existing home prices deflated. Then the bad risk borrowers were back on the hook, and started defaulting. And finally the lenders and securitizers found themselves holding "bad paper."

It may fairly be said that conservatives had no problem at all with sellers and lenders playing the housing game and getting rich quick. And until 2007, the Bush Administration often touted the record numbers of home owners, and the new stake in America for millions which that homeownership represented. But there was nothing very conservative or capitalistic about lending to bad risks in the first place. That was a policy of progressives, leftists, and Democrats.

It all started with President Carter's Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, revised and enhanced in 1995 under President Clinton. The progressive set urged and mandated lax lending practices, particularly through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- the two formerly quasi-governmental lending houses which accounted for the largest share of American mortgage holdings. The idea was to open homeownership to the sort of people who had traditionally been shut out of it, for the now clearly sensible reason that they were unlikely to meet their mortgage payments. Bad risks. Or, according to the CRA's supporters, "minorities and the poor."

The election-season fever-dream, that subprime lending was some Bush Administration/John McCain "neocon" ponzi scheme, is perverse. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are no friends of conservatives and Republicans. Their address books and campaign contributions skew in the other direction. And as it happens, the Bush Administration proposed that Fannie and Freddie be subject to "the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis," all of five years ago, in September of 2003.

This has been the way. The Administration tried to open domestic oil drilling in 2001 and 2005, when limited supply first started driving oil prices into troubling territory. The Administration made a Quixotic run at reforming Social Security in 2005, trying to move younger Americans off of Social Security dependence before the Baby Boomer retirement tab came due.

And cranky old John McCain was about the most vicious critic of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in American public life. In 2005, McCain co-sponsored the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act, and assailed Fannie and Freddie as monstrosities, exposing the market and the taxpayer to untold risk.

But all these measures were blocked in Congress by a certain party which considers it a Golden Rule that any and every utterance and action by the president and his party must necessarily be wrong, stupid, and bad. The 2003 Bush Administration attempt to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was received by the Fannie and Freddie Party as an assault on the poor, and on the good work of those two progressive friends of the little guy. Fannie and Freddie were "not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' and ''the more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.'' That, according to the now-Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

The true indictment against the Bush Administration is that they failed to fight and win those political battles, not that they didn't see the trainwrecks coming, or that they supported the status quo. They saw the problems clearly enough. But their proposed fixes were pronounced "dead on arrival," in the words of a Senate Majority Leader, and the Administration invariably dropped the issue and returned to fighting wars, or other more immediate concerns.

The Panic of '08 was not the product of some scam to take from the poor and give to the rich; it was the end result of government-directed "kinder, gentler" lending that spiralled into the stratosphere when it combined with low interest rates and the housing boom. But what's done is done. Now all that's left is to absorb the bad debt and restrict the bad risks -- as the U.S. government is doing -- and let America get back to business. And save the musty Socialist rhetoric for the museums.

Andrew W. Smith

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

The lighthouse tower and the boutique city

Crude sketch of Halifax "Lighthouse Tower" skyscraper, here proposed. (I never said I was an architect. Or an artist. So lay off.)

Halifax, Nova Scotia is becoming a boutique city. It is by far the largest North American center north of Boston and east of Quebec City, and has the makings of a world class city, even if not of the first or second tiers. But the unholy alliance of Nova Scotia politics -- radical environmentalists and anti-capitalists, with anti-change traditionalists -- is seeing to it that Halifax remains a fossilized provincial port settlement of small shops, heritage buildings, summer tourists, and views of the ocean unobstructed by human development.

The irony is that if it's sea-views and trees a fellow wants, he'll find little else almost anywhere in Nova Scotia outside of Halifax. It's hardly as if under-developed land is scarce in Nova Scotia. We've got all the rocks and trees and rotting timbers we can stand. Halifax is supposed to be a city, and the largest in its big neighborhood; it is only proper for such a center to have all those things that serious cities have.

The usual suspects who constitute Nova Scotia's anti-development alliance are two quite divergent groups: Tradition-minded heritage types, and "transgressive" environmentalist types. Both are positively acrophobic. The mere mention of skyscrapers sends them into conniptions. The traditionalists detest the clash of 21st Century against 18th and 19th Century, and the pinkos see steel and concrete as the Devil's work, and try to persuade themselves that the future belongs to stripped-down structures closer to their ideal of squatting in the bushes.

This is approximately the same alliance which joined forces to oppose the legalization of Sunday shopping until recently: Traditionalists who believe in the idea of a Lord's Day, and radicals who would defend any law prohibiting commerce, for any reason at all. A similar alliance blocked offshore drilling which might have rescued a lot of coastal communities from their perpetual poverty: tradition-minded fishermen who were made to believe that an oil rig would kill their livelihood, plus environmentalists and anti-capitalists who believe that extraction of resources from the earth is a kind of sin against God, or "Gaia".

These two groups, who would probably quite dislike one another if forced to live together for half a day, are allied again on the issue of building things in the city. They're against it.

The thought occurs that the buildings which are today cherished as near-sacred relics, were once current, or "modern" in their time. No doubt someone lamented the raising of these new-fangled buildings, when the centuries-old things were first built.

And no doubt someone lamented the clearing of the trees which made the city possible in the first place, including the lots on which these very Halifax environmentalists make their homes today, or the lots for their coffee shops or vegan restaurants or transgressive art galleries. But you've got to break some eggs to bake a cake. So the evergreens came down, the buildings went up, and there were still plenty of trees to be had in the big old world.

But it gets worse. The twist is that the leftists who oppose development in the city core also oppose development in the suburbs. Where all the people are supposed to go is a good question, and the rarely-spoken answer is that these leftists want considerably fewer of us human beings treading the earth, "despoiling" it and going about our "unsustainable" ways.

Nova Scotia's trendy enviromentalists are positively hateful toward suburbs and their dwellers. The going thing among Nova Scotia's elites generally is to regard suburbs as selfish, wasteful, monotonous and conformist, apartheidist, fearful of poverty and "the other", even doomed by high gas prices -- as if gas prices can never come down, or as if the people who can afford suburban homes and SUVs in the first place are going to be priced back down to apartment/pedestrian lifestyles by an extra dollar a day for their commute.

A September opinion editorial in Halifax's Chronicle-Herald actually sought to atone for the author's "guilty pleasures" of living in the suburbs. Living in freesanding homes in pleasant neighborhoods near the city is something which most functional folks either enjoy or aspire to; it is not something to condemn as a sort of sin. It is perverse to see comfortable, happy homes as sinful and disgusting, and not the sort of thinking one finds in bold, world-beating societies.

And another thing. There are some internal inconsistencies with the anti-skyscraper/anti-suburbs line of argument. This new Left extolls the virtues of apartment dwelling, since it leaves a "smaller footprint" or some gobbledygook, as if humans were a scourge to be contained as restrictively as possible. But that of course is precisely the effect of a skyscraper: The most efficient concentration of people and services. Skyscrapers are stacked upward instead of spread outward, to use a single lot instead of several city blocks. So this smaller footprint business could as easily argue in favor of skyscrapers as in favor of the sardine lifestyles of apartment dwellers. Not to mention the inconsistency of advocating apartment living while denouncing the sameness of the suburbs as some abomination. What could be more "cookie-cutter" than blocks of apartments? They're small cubes in big cubes.

And like the Marxists who were so certain since the mid-19th Century that capitalism was on the cusp of collapse, today's anti-skyscraper/suburbs set is sure that skyscrapers and suburbs are about to be washed away by a tidal wave of history. But skyscrapers are sprouting like bamboo shoots from Dubai to Shanghai. And suburbs will remain as long as they are what they always have been: a pleasant and convenient place to live for real people in the real world.

The environmentalist/anti-development crowd live in a parallel universe, where business demands and even human nature don't exist. They have the luxury of imagining that their toaster plugs are "killing the earth", and of sitting in judgement on the decent folks who go about their lives and produce the things that make our existence possible and comfortable. Alone, they may not be able to make the difference, but with their allies on the crusty, change-hating side, they make a near invincible bloc in Nova Scotia. The person who peels the traditionalists from the radicals will have solved the riddle, and allowed Halifax to grow and be the city it is supposed to be.

My own not-so-modest proposal is that Halifax get itself a spectacular, signature skyscraper. One that will tower over the rest of the skyline, and become an immediately identifiable icon for Halifax, the province, and even the region. A point of pride for the people. As well as herald a new era, in which Halifax welcomes development as a city in its position must. Something to break the old deadlock and make development a good word in Halifax again. The proposal is a stylized lighthouse tower. Six-sided and tapered toward the top like the old white wooden lighthouses which dot the shores. With an impressive steel and glass top, like the old lighthouse cupolas. And with spectacular lights at night. It is supposed to be a lighthouse, after all.

Military records and picking presidents

This back and forth on the role of military service in evaluating presidential candidates has gotten to be needlessly convoluted. Can it not be agreed simply that the military service of a candidate for public office, or the lack thereof, is something for voters to take into account? A lack of service is not necessarily a disqualifier, and a military record isn't a "Get Into Office Free" card; just as a military record is undeniably a valuable thing to have in government and in life generally, and can reflect well on questions of character. It is something to be taken into account -- one of many considerations in a vote for Leader of the Free World.

In John McCain's case, it is not so much the mere fact that he served that inspires confidence, but that he went far above and beyond the call of duty, enduring imprisonment and torture for some five and a half years including in that hellish North Vietnam POW camp called the Hanoi Hilton -- without breaking or turning against the country he was suffering for.

And while we're on the subject, the new pro-Obama argument that John McCain's resume isn't suffiently "executive" or (bizarrely) "war-time" for the presidency is a strange fight for Obama supporters to pick: Barack Obama has exactly zero "executive" and "war-time" experience, and precious little experience of any other type for that matter. Obama is the political equivalent of a newsreader, an average TV anchor who reads whatever the telepromter shows, and has little to offer when the scrolling stops. So if John McCain's resume doesn't pass presidential muster for the Gen. Clarks of the world, then what are they seeing in Barack Obama's slender resume that has been lost on the rest of us?

Obama observations

The Democratic Party has made a mistake. In choosing Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton for their presidential nominee, Democrats have got themselves one of the very most radical, under-qualified, America-disdaining, elitist, empty-suited, almost cult-leader-like major party candidates ever to run for president.

It's bad enough that pathetic sycophants like Oprah Winfrey call him "The One", or that idiot celebrities line up to make cultish videos in worship to him, or that Soviet-style poster artists make Stalinesque portraits of him -- all completely sincere, and without irony. What is worse is that Obama himself, and his wife, clearly believe these most lunatic fantasies of Obama's most deranged supporters.

The Obamas are remarkable in American political history not because they use messianic language, but because they speak in messianic terms about themselves. Many presidents and candidates for president have used messianic language -- the Bushes, Reagan, Kennedy, etc. -- but they did so in speaking about America and its role in the world and history. The Obamas don't think enough of America to speak of it in messianic terms, but they evidently think enough of "The One" to apply the messiah rhetoric to him.

It goes beyond the vacuous, New Age-y "We are the change we have been waiting for" and one-word slogans of "Hope" and "Change", as if "change" must necessarily mean "improvement". This remark by Michelle Obama in February was a perfect exposition of a totalitarian, messianic vision: "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed." This is not the language of politics and government in a healthy representative democracy; It is the language of the Bible Gospels appropriated in the service of radical left politics and the deification of an empty-suit politician from Chicago.


The Wright/Pfleger/Ayers revelations may be old news by now, but they led to one of the most unusual developments of this primary campaign: The likely Democrat nominee lost the great majority of those primaries which came AFTER he had become the likely nominee. It was those revelations that brought Obama down to earth, and had they emerged earlier, when he was winning the delegates that made him the frontrunner, he might well be angling for the vice presidential spot today.

But if Republicans have any sense at all, and I believe that they do have some, they will make an affirmative argument for John McCain but also a devastating argument against Barack Obama, that does not focus on Obama's attachments to anti-American, crackpot, racist radicals, but only takes them as a reference point. Obama's real problem may not be that he's had long associations with radicals, so much as that his own most candid statements reveal that he truly does come from their rarified corner of the political universe after all.

There was Obama's San Fransisco fundraiser remark in April that demonstrated his disdain for Bible-believing, Second Amendment-supporting Americans. And this recent remark from Obama is a ready-made campaign ad against him: "We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times…and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen." What sort of candidate for president even thinks of determining the caloric intakes or room temperatures of Americans, let alone determining such things according to foreign resentments? The sort of candidate who cannot possibly win a national election in America.

Plus which, Barack Obama is a gaffe factory. It is only because he is the favored candidate of the press that he has not already been destroyed by his appalling stupidity like poor Dan Quayle was for misspelling "potato". It must be nice to be Barack Obama and sleep assured that the main press will voluntarily sit on the stories that hurt you, and push the stories that hurt your opposition. But this is not the bad old days of Walter Cronkite's one-man show. There has been an exponential proliferation in the voices heard in American public life today, and the friendlies in the press can't save Obama from himself forever.

If President Bush had miscounted the number of states in the Union, as Barack Obama has -- twice -- it would surely be known to all 6 billion people on earth by now. But Obama has been above blasphemous ridicule for such trifles as failing to remember the number of U.S. states. Or claiming that the Iraq War had taken America's Arabic translators away from the Afghan War, when Afghans do not speak Arabic. Or holding out the 1961 summit meeting between President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev as an example of the successful negotiating he intends to pursue, when the Soviets followed it by building the Berlin Wall and placing nuclear ballistic missiles in Cuba, and when Kennedy himself immediately acknowledged that the summit was a disaster. Or claiming that Roosevelt and Truman negotiated with America's enemies, when they took the hardest line possible against our enemies and expressly rejected negotiation, in their demand of "unconditional surrender".

On many of those issues that are primary ones for a president and commander-in-chief of the United States, Barack Obama's head is as empty as his rhetoric, and the Walter Cronkites can't always cover for him in an age when a free YouTube video can be seen by millions in a day.


Americans distrust a cult, and that is what Barack Obama's core supporters are. Americans abhor deification, and that is what Obama's candidacy does. Americans have little patience for seeing no evil in the world except within the United States, and that is what Obama's worldview shows. And the American people positively hate being told how to live their lives -- especially in the service of ideological pieties and international opinion -- and that is what Obama's policies amount to.

Add to that Obama's index-card resume and stunning ignorance, and Barack Obama is looking very much like a man who will never be president of the United States.

Counting electoral votes in April

Other things being equal, a decent Democratic nominee for president might have expected a reasonably comfortable walk to the White House in 2008. But then the Republican Party nominated the one Republican born for running nationally in the peculiar circumstances of 2008, and Democrats got stuck in a protracted "civil war" for their party's leadership, with a radicalized base making demands of its nominee which leave him or her little room for maneuver.

U.S. presidential campaigns are won and lost in the individual state battles, so it is the state-level polling that best tells the future, and we dreary political science-types have a game of calculating electoral votes based on those state polls.

In the "election-gaming" between de-facto Republican nominee John McCain and the leading Democrat candidate Barack Obama, McCain is bidding fair to collect 260 of the 270 electoral votes needed to claim the presidency. And McCain polls very respectably against Obama in another ten states, any one or two of which would put him over the top.

That swath of the country which may be termed the "Rust Belt" is not exactly seized by Obama-mania. And the Rust Belt counts states which any Democrat for president must carry in a general election and which Republicans may expect to lose even in a good year, but polling there has found cause for hope for John McCain, versus Barack Obama.

And that is certainly the pitch that the Clinton campaign is making to the Democrat superdelegates even now. It is a compelling argument, but following it may be to exchange one set of problems for another. It may well amount to Democrat Party elites overturning Barack Obama's majorities in the popular vote and delegate allocation. Obama supporters would be fit to be tied if their votes were effectively vetoed by some party big-wigs in favour of Hillary Clinton, whom they don't much care for as it is.

The schizophrenic Democrat Party primary system, as much as anything else, has led to this state of affairs. Results are allocated by an ultra-democratic proportional representation scheme, then subjected to an anti-democratic veto by party elites. The effect is that an even match in the primaries and caucuses will yield no clear winner, and the superdelegate wildcard will give a close-running loser reason to carry on in hopes of a last-minute reprieve.

A solution has been proposed, of course: split the difference and put both Obama and Clinton on the Democrat ticket. But a shocking WNBC/Marist College poll of April 9 found that a ticket with Clinton and Obama -- in either combination -- would lose to a speculative John McCain-Condoleeza Rice ticket...in overwhelmingly Democratic New York state. If that poll is even remotely close to accurate, it would indicate that Obama and Clinton could be weaker together than individually.

And would either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama be prepared to carry the other's coat, and tie themselves to the other's fate? What if this Obama-Clinton ticket lost the election, or won but managed an unsuccessful single term? There would be little to be gained for either of the two by playing second fiddle, and quite a lot of risk. Still, plenty of primary opponents have wound up as general election running-mates, so it is a possibility, and the Clinton campaign has publicly raised the prospect of sharing a ticket, with Clinton at the top, naturally.

The superdelegates must surely be pondering these days whether Obama would bring debilitating liabilities to a general election, weaknesses that have not been probed much in the primary process. The Democrat Party of 2008 is to the left of its bearing in 1992, '96, or 2000, and consequently Hillary Clinton could hardly campaign by branding Barack Obama as "too liberal" or "too leftist". That would be a stick in the eye of the party base she needs in order to win.

But Obama was rated by the notoriously nonpartisan National Journal the "most liberal" of the 100 U.S. Senators in 2007, further left even than the self-described Socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. That is all well and good in the Democrat Party caucuses of 2008, but not so much for a presidential election in what is the Western world's most conservative nation.

Which is not to say that there is no trouble in paradise on the Republican side. The latest twist has been the prospective third-party candidacy of Bob Barr. Barr is a former Republican Congressman who would never be mistaken for charismatic, most famous for his role as a Congressional prosecutor in the Clinton impeachment trial of 1999. But Barr has now abandoned the Republicans for the Libertarian Party, and threatens a vanity campaign as its presidential candidate.

Without reliable polling on Barr, or an electorate that is even aware of him, it is impossible to know what if any effect on the election he might have, but Democrats must be hoping he plays the Kamikaze against McCain, siphoning just enough potential McCain voters to make the difference in a close state or two.

There are still almost seven long months 'til Election Day. In a fraction of that time, Hillary Clinton went from presumed presidential nominee to underdog in a Democrat race that has already lasted over two months longer than anticipated. So, in American national politics as in life generally, anything can happen and it usually does.

The Revenge of the Sith and the politics of George Lucas

I'm no authority on Star Wars, or much more than a casual watcher, but I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to declare Revenge of the Sith the best of the three Star Wars "prequels", by far. Revenge of the Sith premiered in 2005, about half-way through President Bush's two terms as a war-time president.

A single line from the film crossed into the politics of the time. The Anakin Skywalker character has by this point in the film gone over to the "Dark Side" and will be fully transformed into the evil force of nature, Darth Vader, a matter of hours later. He is about to face his mentor, Obi Wan Kenobe, in an epic duel to the death, or close enough to death. And then Anakin/Darth Vader declares to Obi Wan, "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy."

Now, George Lucas was the writer, director, and executive producer of the film. There is no possibility that Lucas was not responsible for that line. And there is no possibility that he was unaware that the line was effectively identical to a remark made famous thoughout the world by President Bush in 2001, just days after the 9/11 attacks: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

Lucas could only have intended the line as a political statement, and seeing as how Darth Vader is an icon of evil in Star Wars and in the popular culture, a not very complimentary one to President Bush.

Fine. George Lucas is free in America to imply that his war-time president is evil, in the course of a science-fiction fantasy that adds several more tiers to the towering Lucas fortune. But the way President Bush is regarded in history will be unrecognizable from how he is often viewed today, and from how he was seen by George Lucas in 2005. And some years from now, when viewers recoil from hearing one of the most famous quotations of a past war president -- who was moving heaven and earth to keep the nation safe in the wake of the worst attack in its history -- put into the mouth of an evil movie villain, that gratuitous line will be a blemish on an otherwise fine film, and on Lucas himself.

There are undoubtedly those who think that the President's remark really was evil or more probably overly-simplistic, deserving of condemnation and scorn, but why exactly was it wrong to warn that failing to help thwart an attack would be effectively to enable it? This isn't a disagreement over the rate of increase in the HUD budget.

The Wikipedia entry on "You're either with us, or against us" includes a helpful list of comparable quotations by some other famous figures including Jesus, George Orwell, writing in defense of the Allied war effort in 1942, and even Hillary Clinton, in exactly the same context and on exactly the same date as the Bush quote.

George Lucas is notorious for re-editing and re-releasing the Star Wars films -- like Handel revised The Messiah for new performances -- and it is not inconceivable that he might someday reconsider equating President Bush with one of the most iconic villains in movie history, and find a way to amend that line in a future edition of Revenge of the Sith.

Then the only problem with the movie will be the bland dialogue.

Don't count Chinese chickens before they're hatched

I once heard a U.S. Postal Service worker, while waiting on some unlucky customer, preach for all the world to hear that it was "a matter of when, not if" America was overtaken by China .

But before we start learning Mandarin and hanging portraits of Chairman Mao in every public place, it might be worth considering a second opinion.

The same sort of prophesies were made in the 1980s and into the '90s, when the coming colossus was supposed to be Japan. Or Germany. Or in the 1970s, when the Soviet Union was supposed to have been winning the Cold War.

Today’s visions of a Chinese future got some clarification late last year, when the World Bank reported what may qualify as the world’s biggest accounting error. It found that “the size of China’s economy is overestimated by some 40 percent based on most current measures....” That overestimation was a ballyhooed factoid in more than a few forecasts of Chinese ascendancy and American decline.

It must be said that China is a great power already, and has been for some time. China began its double-digit annual growth in the 1980s; it was a foreign policy obsession in Washington in the 1970s; it has been a nuclear power since 1964; it has had a space program since 1956; it held American-led forces to the 38th Parallel in Korea in the early 1950s; and it has been one of only five permanent members of the Security Council since the UN's founding in 1945.

So China has been a leading power in the world for 60 years. But it is a long way from there to global hegemony. And China is a big country with problems to match.

The numbers show much more than an unstoppable sprint to global domination. China ’s economy is now second only to America ’s, but U.S. GDP is still twice China ’s, and equal to the second, third, and fourth largest economies combined. China is awash in cash -- enough to help finance U.S. debt -- yet mainland China’s market capitalization is not very much higher than tiny Hong Kong’s, and only about a quarter of America’s.

Many Chinese cities – Beijing , Shanghai , Guangzhou -- are truly impressive, even evocative of some futuristic science fiction film. But outside the favored urban centres, China remains profoundly impoverished. 800 to 900 million of China 's 1,300 million souls are peasants, and nearly half the Chinese people live on less than $2 a day.

China ’s success has been largely propped atop its exports to the West, and China produces those exports to Western designs, in Western factories, for Western consumers. The Chinese export economy is an enormous branch plant. And branch plants are derivative and dependent. Taiwan was once the West’s preferred branch plant location. India could easily be our next, or even Vietnam. What happens to Chinese growth then?

And the fear of dependence on China should be mutual. China has precious little natural resources for its size. Even the Chinese staple of soy beans has to be imported, largely from the United States.

China is also getting old. As a predictable consequence of the Communists' forced one-child-per-couple policy, every generation is twice the size of its children’s generation. China 's ratio of retirees to workers hit 1:3 in 2003. So it's not for nothing that China-watchers often say " China will get old before it gets rich."

America, meanwhile, has increased its fertility rate to the highest in 35 years, reaching the "replacement rate" in 2006 for the first time since 1972.

And the one-child policy has had another consequence. The male-to-female ratio in China has already become imbalanced, at 6:5, and it is difficult to see how that trend can be anything but problematic.

The fantasies of a Chinese-dominated world are in some part a product of resentment and contempt for America. And though it may be appealing to certain people to imagine a world in which Washington takes orders from Beijing, such a world would be appreciably less free, less democratic, less humanitarian, even less environmentally-friendly.

The recent satellite shoot-downs may put things into some perspective. When China decided to shoot down a satellite in 2007, it did so unannounced and at an altitude that put the thousands of shards into the paths of other satellites and spacecraft. When the United States decided to shoot down a satellite in February, it informed the affected governments directly, then the international press, and it smashed the satellite at just the altitude to cause the debris to be incinerated in re-entering the atmosphere.

A crass assessment would call both powers bulls in china shops, so to speak, but clearly there is a bad way and a better way of going about being a superpower.

China has been a top-tier global power for some time already, and it has room to grow. But to conjure the future and see China in anything like the role America now plays is wildly speculative and takes far too little account of China’s gargantuan problems.

The kind of nation that denies its citizens the right to have children as they wish, or to worship as they wish, let alone to vote, is not the sort of nation that can hope to compete over the long term with the boundless creativity and energy, the self-correction and dynamism, of the great free societies.

Andrew W. Smith

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Presidential predictions

My amateur prognostication last October -- when John McCain was polling third among Republicans and his campaign was in debt -- was that McCain was the Republicans' strongest candidate, and that winning the Republican nomination would be the harder part for him: If John McCain won the Republican nomination, he would be most likely to win the presidency.

That seems about right today, now that John McCain has in fact become the Republican nominee and Democrats have managed the impossible and turned a broadly favorable political situation with no real policy disagreements into a civil war and the longest primary fight since 1968.

The latest poll averages at Real Clear Politics show John McCain edging out both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, by 0.5 percent and 1.2 percent respectively.

I would expect McCain to "close hard" in the last days before the election. McCain is the safe vote. He has no real liabilities in experience, credibility, partisanship, corruption, plausibility, or likeability.

I would also expect the economic/financial picture to be brighter by Election Day. The numbers may worsen in the current quarter and possibly into the next, but unemployment is still very healthy, at 4.8 percent, and the economy was still growing in the last quarters for which we have statistics -- 0.6 percent in Q4 and 4.9 percent in Q3. The problems so far have been related to the mortgage crisis and the high cost of a barrel of oil. But the stimulus package should help offset the oil inflation, and federal mechanisms are right now being brought to bear on the financial dislocation. Even some of the analysts preaching recession are looking for better numbers by the third quarter.

Iraq is a won war, though it could still be lost, and today the Iraq issue is not the vote-loser for Republicans that it was just a year and a half ago. What is more, Iraq became America's showdown with international jihadism and al Qaeda, and America won. John McCain can be expected to make that point forcefully and repeatedly.

Democrats have become the anti-war party, which historically has shut them out of the White House. Democrats became the anti-war party in 1968 and lost seven of the next ten presidential elections; they became the anti-war party in 1864 and didn't elect a two-term president until 1916. Americans do not elect pacifists, or those who can't take their own country's side in a war, as president.

McCain's age may be an issue, but 71 isn't as old as it used to be, and a solid, young vice presidential pick should mitigate any age concens, plus McCain should be able to make a virtue of necessity with his age, like Reagan did in 1984 especially.

And McCain will be the only candidate in November who fits the presidential "profile". John McCain is an old male WASP (not "Anglo-Saxon" per se in McCain's case, but Protestant British Isles), Episcopalian, which happens to be the most common denomination among presidents, and even named "John", which happens to be the second-most common name among presidents. McCain matches the profile of 42 of the 43 presidents of the United States (the Irish Catholic John Kennedy being the one real exception to the "profile" rule).

I do think a black man or a white woman could become president of the United States, incidentally, but that it would more likely be a conservative woman or conservative black man, not the Clinton and Obama types.

Much ink has been spilled on the subject of the President's low approval ratings, but the lesser-told other side to that story is that the Democrat-controlled Congress has consistently had approval ratings of about ten points lower than the President's for nearly a year now. And all the talk about Democrats out-fundraising Republicans in the presidential race has neglected the fact that Republicans have been winning the fundraising battle of the National Committees.

Plus which, Democrats have no strategists and organizers -- to my knowledge, at least -- to equal Ken Melhman or Karl Rove, both of whom have started advising the McCain campaign. Rove is a towering intellectual of American politics and government, and understands every heartbeat.

And at this point there are no apparent spoilers -- third party vanity candidates who siphon enough votes from one of the big two to throw the election result. The only third party character with a hat in the ring thus far is Ralph Nader, who could only possibly take votes from Democrats, but who is of course unlikely to manage much more than half a percent or so of the national vote.

So there is one man's forecast. I do think the race will be close, that the campaign against Hillary Clinton would differ from the campaign against Barack Obama, and that there are any number of unforeseeable events that could alter the landscape radically, including even attacks in America or overseas. But based on everything I know now, and everything I can foresee, John McCain is the most likely next president of the United States.

The New York Times: Rooting against America's economy since November 2000

"Sharp Drop in Jobs Adds to Grim Picture of Economy" read the March 7 headline in The New York Times.

That "sharp drop" to which The Times refers was 63,000 for the month of February, which is undeniably unwelcome news, at least for those of us who want to see America moving from strength to strength.

But what was The New York Times reporting for the record 52 consecutive months of job growth that ended just this January? The four years and four months in which the U.S. economy created a net 8.3 million jobs?

The Times can take pride in having predicted this downturn. Indeed, The New York Times has anticipated hard economic times nearly every month since sometime around November, 2000.

When the Labor Department reported last November 3 that the U.S. economy had gained 166,000 jobs in October, The New York Times demurred. "Despite Gain in Jobs Data, Wall Street Is Skeptical". At The Times, "despite" is always a good sort of way to start a headline reporting good news.

128,000 jobs were added in August of 2006, but The Times had the cold water ready for that. The September 2 story was headlined "Jobs and Wages Increased Modestly Last Month", and began, "Job growth seems to be reaching its peak," just in case the poor reader was getting carried away with all the wet blanket-wrapped good news.

The Labor report for July of 2006 found an increase of 113,000 jobs. The August 5 New York Times headline? "Job Growth Slackened Last Month".

And what would The Times do if jobs grew at such a pace that it would be impossible to deny the improvement without losing all credibility? Like a quarter of a million jobs added in a single month?

The jobs report of March 10, 2006 was a blockbuster. In February, the U.S. economy had added 243,000 jobs. So, The New York Times avoided adjectives altogether. " U.S. Says Employers Added 243,000 Jobs in February". Note that "U.S. Says", as if the numbers might be in dispute, or are just one opinion on the subject.

It only got worse from there. The Times actually found a way to turn an explosion of 243,000 jobs in a month into a troubling development, within the first paragraph: "...igniting concerns among many Wall Street economists that higher wages could fuel inflation and increase expectations that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates further."

In fact, only five of the article's 23 paragraphs were upbeat, and the piece was peppered with lines like, "But the increase in wages was greeted with some furrowed brows." Including at The New York Times, apparently.

The Times even managed to work in a little global warming-ism among the economic data. "January's average temperature of 39.5 degrees was the highest ever recorded." What that has to do with the price of tea in China is unclear, but The Times does have the world's temperature to worry about as well as the negative ramifications of a quarter million fewer jobless Americans.
Give credit where it's due. In 2005, when the United States was busy adding 2 million jobs and there were no national elections for The Times to worry about, the headline writers were good enough to toss the optimists a bone: "Creation of Jobs Surged in April, and Income Rose".

But on May 7, The Times editorial writers calmed their excitable scribes. "If April's numbers are the start of a new upward trend, great. But it's too soon to tell. Policy makers must be especially mindful that the economy has been at this juncture before, and then failed to deliver on its promise."

October 9, 2004: Labor Department reports 96,000 new jobs in September; New York Times reports "Growth of Jobs for Last Month Seen as Sluggish". You'll have to forgive The Times for that one -- you can't have good news getting through at election time.

And as the 52-month job expansion was beginning in August of 2003, The Times headlined "Not Much Job Growth, but Mediocre May Look Good in 2004".

So, at The New York Times, a loss of 63,000 is "sharp" and a gain of 128,000 is "modest"; 96,000 is "sluggish", 113,000 is "slack", and the less said about 243,000, the better.

Play down the good news, play up the bad. That's how The Times makes the news fit to print. Unless of course The Times supports the president of the day, in which case, reverse those rules exactly.

Now The New York Times has that slowdown they've been dreaming of since the last boom began in President Bush's first term, and just in time for a presidential election, too. Better hope the stimulus package doesn't work. But even if it does work, The Times can always say it's only made things worse. An election season would be no time to start acknowledging good news.

It's not for nothing that The Times' circulation and advertising taken the same direction as its writers and editors have been wishing on America 's economy. The bad news is that among those stragglers who still worship at The Times' Gothic nameplate are almost the entirety of the English-speaking world's journalist class, amplifying the axe-grinding of The New York Times in newsrooms from Houston to Halifax .

Surge success and anti-war assumptions

The last-ditch American drive to win the war in Iraq -- the "surge" policy -- finally took full effect on June 15 of last year. By the end of the year, Iraqi civilian deaths were a quarter of the body count 12 months earlier. Between May and September, U.S. military deaths were halved; By year's end, the death toll had been cut by another two-thirds, to the lowest monthly losses in nearly four years and the second-lowest of the entire war.

American military and civilian leaders have thus far declined to declare even a limited victory, having learned the hard way how fragile victory in the Middle East can be. But the numbers speak for themselves.

No war supporter will deny that the war has taken too long and cost too much, that implanting democracy in the wreck of a Mideastern nightmare tyranny was not exactly like shooting fish in a barrel, or that the desire of all sides for an early draw-down of Western troops in fact enabled the insurgency. But if we war supporters had to re-think the war, some of the anti-war side's assumptions of the past several years are not above re-thinking, as well.

The leaders who are blamed for everything that ever went wrong in Iraq have gotten no credit for the quick and clean invasion or the eleventh-hour pacification, but what about the Congressmen and Senators who authorized and supported the war when it was popular, then opposed and undermined it once that became the popular thing? How should history remember the sort of politicians who do whatever is most convenient at any given time?

The Weapons of Mass Destruction rationale for the war was no "lie." If it was, then the Clinton Administration were liars, too; anti-war foreign leaders like former French President Jacques Chirac were liars, too; and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Al Gore were liars, too. They all said the same things about Saddam Hussein's WMD threat that the Bush Administration did. The Hussein government actually used WMDs on ten known occasions, after all.

And there were many other grounds for the war named in the joint resolution of the U.S. Congress that authorized the use of force in Iraq. The failure to find WMD stockpiles does nothing to diminish the numerous other justifications for the war. Saddam Hussein ensured that no-one would ever want for good reasons to dismantle his dictatorship.

The United States has not grabbed Iraq's oil. If former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan wrote recently that the war was "largely about oil," he was referring to his own idiosyncratic view, as he explained: "I was not saying that that's the Administration's motive. ... I'm just saying that if somebody asked me, 'Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?' I would say it was essential. ... I have never heard [Bush and Cheney] basically say, 'We've got to protect the oil supplies of the world,' but that would have been my motive."

Hysterical figures like 655,000 or 1.2 million civilian dead are impossibly high and based on spurious polling and methodology. The most widely-accepted tally has been by Iraq Body Count, which is an anti-war outfit with no interest in diminishing the numbers. That puts the total civilian deaths since March of 2003 at 80,000-88,000. Saddam Hussein's enforcers killed more Iraqi Kurds in a single "Anfal" campaign.

The worst killer of Iraqi civilians remains Saddam Hussein. By far. Human Rights Watch has concluded that Hussein had 100,000 Kurds killed in 1988 alone, and that 290,000 Iraqi civilians in all "disappeared" during Hussein's 23-year tyranny. Which does not include hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in the pointless 8-year Iran-Iraq War, launched by Saddam Hussein.

So concern for Iraqi civilians can as easily argue in favour of the war to end the Saddam Hussein nightmare, and in favour of the continuing surge against the jihadists and death squads which target civilians.

The Iraqi-al Qaeda connection cited as cause for war in Congress' Iraq resolution has been branded another "lie," but again, even the Clinton Administration was convinced half a decade before the war that al Qaeda and the Hussein government were allied. The Clinton Justice Department's 1998 indictment against Osama bin Laden found that al Qaeda had agreed to "work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq...on particular projects, specifically including weapons development."

And if the pre-war relationship was not extensive enough, no less an al Qaeda authority than Osama bin Laden later called Baghdad the "epicentre of jihad" and "capital of the Caliphate." A more recent Iraq assessment by bin Laden, however, is that "the darkness has become pitch black." Al Qaeda is being routed on its self-described central front in the global war. Pounded and harassed militarily, and repudiated by practically every sect and tribe of the Iraqi people.

As for the surge's skeptics, the policy has largely separated the insurgency from the Iraqi people, decimated the insurgents, and secured the population. It has taken more American troops, more time and money, riskier tactics, and a final revulsion of the Iraqi people against the jihadists and militants. But a miracle was worked in a matter of months.

It has always been the case that ultimate failure in Iraq would color the entire enterprise as wrong and hopeless. But the other side of the coin is that a lasting fix would re-cast the war in a favourable light, as a worthy cause, and one for which the sacrifice was not in vain.

Andrew W. Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Saturday Night Live conservatives

By the time Dennis Miller had a show of his own in the 1990s, it was established that he was for the death penalty, at least. Miller's HBO show was even the soap-box for a memorably strident defense of American capitalism: "Coming to America and complaining about the capitalism is like walking onto a baseball field and complaining that nobody's playing soccer." But even there Miller defied labeling as a conservative, as by devoting an installment to "What's wrong with Republicans?" and appealing for answers to Arianna Huffington. Then came 2004, when Dennis Miller "came out" on The Tonight Show in the most unabashed apologia for President Bush. He explained later that he had found himself on the Right on some questions for some time, but that it wasn't 'til after the 9/11 attacks that he turned the corner to conservatism, with the accustomed qualifier that he wasn't so conservative on those bothersome "social issues". And Dennis Miller today is a defender of President Bush and booster of Rudy Giuliani and a no-foolin' conservative commentator, with jokes.

Norm Macdonald in the presidential election year of 1996 graduated to the leading Bob Dole impressionist, and when he signed off his final Weekend Update before Election Day with "Vote for Bob Dole," that might've been influenced by the prospect of Macdonald's elevation to leading impressionist of a president of the United States, or a joke. Macdonald appeared on a Comedy Central year-in-review special not long after the 2004 election with a stand-up act that came at John Kerry's campaign from the sort of angle a skeptic would see, but still, nothing declarative. Well, it turns out that Norm Macdonald is something of a conservative, and a John McCain man of long standing.

Sometime in the early-middle '90s, before nostalgia for President Reagan had spread beyond committed conservatives, Dana Carvey gave an interview on Later with Bob Costas which got around somehow to a recollection of Reagan's reaction to the attempt on his life. It was highly sentimental, with the sort of admiration unlikely in anyone who'd passed the 1980s shrieking "trickle-down economics" or other leftist indictments of the greatest presidency and greatest age in America since mid-century. Carvey's George H. W. Bush impression was something of a sensation in the early '90s and earned him a relationship with the actual George H. W. Bush, and there was no concealing Carvey's affection for the man. Then in California's gubernatorial recall election of 2003 Dana Carvey campaigned for Arnold Schwarzenegger -- this being before Schwarzenegger's unconservative governorship dispelled the notion of his being a conservative Republican -- and against the Democrat governor and lieutenant governor Carvey took no prisoners.

Adam Sandler signed an open letter in defense of Israel at the time of its summer war against Hezbollah in 2006. Not very Hollywood of him, but an otherwise-impeccable leftist may be excused a parochial, pet heresy. But it turns out that Adam Sandler also is a Rudy Giuliani man, a donor to Giuliani and in the fullness of time not impossibly also a public advocate.

And then there's Victoria Jackson, who's been known even to turn up on The 700 Club: a lifelong and devout evangelical Christian and a longtime conservative.

This probably is not a complete list, and SNL is of course an institution with by now so many seasons and so many casts, that an SNL alumnus or two might be expected to be political conservatives, as a matter of statistics. But to watch Comedy Central for any length of time is to appreciate that contemporary comedy and shrilly-partisan, stock leftism are twin worlds in America. If nothing else, the monopoly is broken.

Addendum: A couple more SNL alumni, lifelong Democrats both, driven off the plantation or all the way over to the other side in the Age of Obama. Jon Lovitz who by 2012 was a businessman laboring to keep up a couple California comedy clubs bearing his name, "went F-bomb" on Obama and his class warfare, on mic, and then admirably stood his ground when the little enforcers of the Left inevitably descended on him for his heresy and blasphemy. And in 2013 Rob Schneider whose vitamins business had been chased out of his Democrat one-party-state of California, converted to Republican and endorsed a Republican assemblyman for governor.