Cairo on the Potomac

One of the issues central to the recent Egyptian protests (are we calling it a revolution?) was an emergency law that gave the government powers to limit dissent.  The Egyptian government took the broadest possible interpretation of "emergency" since the law had been in place for thirty years.

I would be willing to bet that most Americans find this outrageous and that they don't believe something like that could ever happen here.

Open Congress reports on an extension of the PATRIOT Act:

Yesterday, the Senate voted 74-8, with 18 senators abstaining, in favor of moving forward with legislation to extend three of the most controversial PATRIOT Act surveillance powers for four more years, without any modifications...


And so by the end of the week, these expansions of government surveillance powers that were hastily put in place following the shock of the 9/11 attacks will be extended once again. Why? Well, because, in the words of Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein [D, CA] on the Senate floor yesterday, “this is a time of heightened threat.” “Maybe no specific threat,” she added. “But certainly heightened threats.”

I guess since it's only been 10 years we've still got a way to go by Egyptian standards.

Perhaps all is not lost, Rand Paul is mounting a filibuster right now.

Brown County Dems know a little something about rubber stamps

Senator Rob Cowles (R-2nd) is one of the targets of the recall.  Today Rich Langan announced he would challenge Cowles in a recall election.  Langan is a former police officer and worked with former Democratic Representative Steve Kagen.

The Green Bay Press Gazette reports "Langan says he will run against Cowles, whom he calls a rubber stamp for Gov. Scott Walker."

The notion that any Democrat in Brown County would try to paint Cowles as a rubber stamp would be laughable if it wasn't so ridiculous.  Cowles has held his seat for over twenty years and it has been over ten years since the Democrats in this area have challenged Cowles.  At the very least that's an implicit rubber stamp for Cowles.

As I've said before this is not what democracy looks like, this is not even undoing the results of the last election.  This is the Democrats in this area waking up from a decade long nap and deciding it is time to field a candidate.  I've got news for them, the time to do that was at the regularly scheduled elections.

The Democrats of the 2nd Senate District have been courting apathy for so long they may crossed over into irrelevance.  I guess we will know for sure once the recall election takes place.

Defining Conservatism Down

So I took the Pew political typology quiz and got the result "Main Street Republican."  I'm generally skeptical that these types of labels can adequately convey one's political outlook, but I also realize we need shorthand.  As shorthand goes, this result isn't bad.

On Pew's scale though, the category to the right of mine was "Staunch Conservative" which I suspect is more accurate for me.  I didn't have to look hard to figure out how Pew decided I didn't belong in this category.

Pew described Main Street Republicans as being, "generally less enamored of business than staunch conservatives."  Being enamored of business, is not the same thing as preferring free markets and it is not conservative, regardless of what Pew and most of the major media outlets in the United States believe.  Specifically, there were two questions on the quiz about business and profits where I think Pew misunderstood which answer was a conservative one.

The first asked whether or not business in general makes too much profit.  I answered yes.  Not because profits are bad or businesses are evil, but because I believe there are many companies in the United States who earn profits that they would not earn if we had a more competitive and free marketplace.  These rents are earned by employing government power to stifle competition and restrict supply.  This includes things seen as innocuous by many of us, like patents on drugs, as well as the extraordinary government bailouts of private businesses that took place over the last few years.  American capitalism in the 21st century is still a profit and loss system, but the profits and losses these days are too often determined by the ability to compete in Washington DC rather than in the market.

Mises and Hayek wouldn't have considered themselves conservatives, but their thinking about economics and markets formed one of the pillars of American conservative thought in the 20th century.  I doubt either of them would look at the current business landscape in this country and suggest we had achieved some sort of free market triumph.

The second question was whether or not I thought power was concentrated in that hands of too few large companies.  I answered that it was.  Again, I think Pew misunderstands which is the conservative answer here.  Bigness is antithetical to conservatism, which values "our little platoons" in Burke's phrase.  Thinkers like Russell Kirk were wise enough to fear big business just as much as big government.  Neither are conducive to maintaining "the permanent things."  Conservatives do believe in a hierarchical universe, it's just not one that has Ben Bernanke and JP Morgan at the top.

This sort of muddled thinking about what is and isn't conservative at times makes it difficult to have a sensible discussion about politics.  The fact that a well respected organization like Pew can't seem to grasp the problem here serves as a good reminder that when dealing with received wisdom one should always consider the source.