Over at Commentary South Africa, Laurence notes an interview with fiction writer John Grisham, in which he says:

I think what the Republicans have done in past elections is brilliant. Because, they’ve convinced a lot of people to vote for them against their own economic self-interest, and they’ve done that by skillfully manipulating a handful of social issues, primarily abortion and gay rights and sometimes gun control. And the Republicans have used those to scare a lot of people into voting for Republican candidates. It’s skillful manipulation.

Laurence’s comment is that it’s morally questionable to expect that “people should use their vote as a tool for self-enrichment, by voting for whichever party promises to give them the greatest largesse from the state treasury”. And he’s quite right.

He also points out that the Republicans haven’t exactly been true to their small-government roots, but I’d argue (and the political promises seem to bear me out) the Democrats in the US would be considerably worse.

What few on the left recognise, or what they deliberately fudge, is that the Republicans in the US consist of an uncomfortable alliance between three constituencies: economic conservatives (i.e. small-government libertarians), foreign policy conservatives (hawks who believe the best defence is superior strength), and social conservatives (consisting mostly of the religious right). Even those constituencies are split, for example the foreign policy conservatives are divided between those who believe in strength as a useful tool in the service of liberty and democracy, and isolationists who believe government shouldn’t be entrusted with anything, including foreign wars. Calling all Republicans social conservatives is a false characterisation, and betrays either the rhetoric of a shallow partisanship, or a profound lack of understanding of American voters.

It’s a step too far, moreover, to say that people vote against their own economic self-interest. In fact, if they happened to be rich, undoubtedly their votes would be considered selfish. True, “the rich”, as leftists describe anyone who has achieved middle-class success or more, often know how a society creates prosperity. (The exception seems to be the populists in the ego-driven entertainment industry.)

But classical liberals, or economic conservatives — call them what you will — might vote against government handouts even if they’re not rich themselves. Not because they selflessly forgo them (or stupidly pass them up, as Grisham appears to believe, rather patronisingly). They vote against handouts because they believe those handouts are not in their self-interest. They believe that their individual right to determine how their income is spent and their capital is allocated is in their best interest, while tax-and-spend government programmes are not. They believe that individual productivity creates wealth, and government redistribution destroys it.

It’s true, as Laurence notes, that whether Republicans have been true to this economic view of small government and low taxes is debatable. Many on the economic right (as opposed to the social or foreign policy right) would argue that it has not. That it betrayed the Reagan legacy, and the Gingrich revolution, and that this cost them a heavy price in the 2006 mid-term elections, and might cost them even more later this year.

More interesting, however, is the general mischaracterisation of the economic right, because the same generalisations are made elsewhere in the world, including in South Africa. Those who argue the economic virtues of free markets, believing that they not only encourage wealth creation, but that this dynamic creates jobs and improves the quality of life of all of society, are all too often tarred with the same brush as the religious right and social conservatives. And they, in turn, are caricatured as bigoted.

When John Grisham says economic conservatives who vote Republican do so because of “abortion” or “gay rights” or “gun control”, he’s using exactly the same rhetorical technique as someone who caricatures the South African economic right — fiscal conservatives, free marketeers, classical liberals, free traders and libertarians — as “racist” or “counter-revolutionary” or “Uncle Toms” or “elitist” or “coconuts” or “Eurocentric”. Witness the more rabid partisans: the rhetoric of the ANC Youth League, for example, is littered with examples. The thing is, not only are such caricatures often false, but they miss the economic point entirely. And the thing is, they’re designed to miss the point.

Oh, how I wish I were a British taxpayer, so my government could also buy me plums like Northern Rock. The bank says it’s “business as usual”. Of course. What bank doesn’t say that? I’m sure all blue-blooded Englishmen are just rushing to open accounts and refinance their mortgages.

The UK government says “In the current market conditions we do not believe that they (the bids for the company) deliver sufficient value for money.” Effectively, Richard Branson’s bid (and that of management) condemns the plum as a lemon. He wishes the bank (fare-)well.

Nevermind wishing I were a British taxpayer (after all, my government owns lots of juicy fruit, such as Eskom, parts of Telkom, Infraco, and South African Airways). What I really wish is that I were a British banker. Imagine. Set up a bank. Take whatever risk you like. Undercut your rivals. Crush them! Be daring, be bold! Because if you win, you’ll be up to your eyeballs in fame and fortune. And if you lose, well hey, Gordon Brown’s party will take the disaster off your hands. What a steal!

I’d love to hear why the British government does not think nationalising Northern Rock introduces moral hazard throughout the British banking sector — why it doesn’t think this decision will poison the quality of risk-taking in the UK.

What a sad day for the City.

“I can categorically say that we are not facing a water crisis, or a water-contamination crisis,” Lindiwe Hendricks, the Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry told a media briefing in parliament yesterday. “The water that comes out of our taps is among the best in the world.”

That may well be true. But who can believe her? After all, we weren’t facing an electricity crisis either, remember? Our own president told us so.

Steven Lang wrote a damning report in October 2007, for the Inter Press Service that:

Sewage plants in South Africa’s northern Gauteng Province poured millions of litres of untreated waste into three rivers between the capital, Pretoria, and the commercial centre of Johannesburg earlier this month. National power utility Eskom cut electricity to the treatment plants, which were then unable to process the waste water before it was released into the rivers. […]

Department of Water Affairs and Forestry’s Themba Khumalo attempted to downplay the gravity of the spillage [of 200 million litres of untreated sewerage from eight treatment plants into the Apies, Hennops and Pienaars rivers, which flow into the Hartebeespoort Dam]: “It is a catastrophe, but certainly not a national crisis.”

He went on to place the responsibility for averting similar crises on the shoulders of individual municipalities, saying they should negotiate directly with Eskom and tell the power utility which sanitation works should not be included in power cuts.

Ah, so it’s not a national crisis because you can shift the blame to local municipalities? Good to know.

Such problems aren’t isolated, however. In Cape Town, last month, raw sewerage overflowed into the Milnerton lagoon when the Koeberg sewerage pump was shut down. A similar thing happened near Simon’s Town. Cape Town reports having 30-odd generators, half of them fixed, to keep 395 sewerage pumps going.

According to minutes of a January 2008 meeting of the Blesbokspruit Catchment Forum, in the Vaal catchment area (PDF):

Eskom load shedding had stalled all instrument analysis causing damage and work had to be outsourced. Erlab [the East Rand Water Care Company Laboratory] will resolve this problem as analysie (sic) for some of the important sewage works will not be done. […]

[The forum] noted again that the pump stations in the Ekurhuleni region are of major concern particularly with regards to the latest problems of load shedding caused by Eskom. […]

All members present at the meeting agreed that the continued practice of load shedding will have a serious and significant impact on wastewater treatments not being able to operate and meet discharge requirements.”

Ja, people, but only in the Vaal Dam, not nationally!

The problem is also not new. After the 2006 power failures, Cape Town was warned that sewerage was being pumped into the sea.

Derek Bock, chief operations officer for the Central City Improvement District, said the CCID had warned the city eight months ago that the sewage pumps were inadequate and contingency plans for such emergencies as the power cuts were unsatisfactory.

And here we are in 2008, and still they have only 30 generators?

Not only is problem not new, it is not superficial. The cause goes deeper than recent blackouts that caused sewerage spills or industrial contaminants in source water. Almost a decade ago, this article by Peter Wellman for the African Eye News Service documents problems with water reticulation and drinking water delivery problems, and a note is added:

It is clear that all is not well in the water supply and sanitation sector in South Africa.

A great deal was sacrificed in the interests of accelerated delivery, mainly in the form of community engagement, consumer education and a disregard for the hard learned lessons of development from around the world.

The article particularly quotes the Director General, Mr Mike Muller, as effectively blaming the communities and consumers for the failure. However, sustainable services have not been delivered, whether the cause of failure is technical, social or financial. It is not as though these issues are new or a surprise in the South African situation. It is not as though the circumstances leading up to the failure have not been highlighted on dozens of occasions over the past few years. What is surprising is that all the warnings were not heeded.

It is a double irony and extremely cynical to blame the people for the failure.

The Mail&Guardian article, in which Minister Hendricks says “there is no crisis”, continues:

She also admitted that there has been a problem with ageing infrastructure, because no provision was made in the past for upgrading infrastructure. “Repair and refurbishment haven’t kept up,” she said.

As a result, some dams and rivers have been polluted where informal settlements have grown up on their banks. This too is being dealt with, she said, “but infrastructure construction takes time”.

What? No provision was made for upgrading infrastructure? One can safely assume, then that water reticulation is both over-stressed and under-maintained.

I’ve lived most of my adult life in the north and north-west of Johannesburg. In just the last decade, entire landscapes have been turned into fields of ticky tacky houses stretching to the horizon. Thirty years ago, Midrand and Centurion didn’t exist, and the road between Johannesburg and Pretoria was 70km of… well, there was the Snake Park. Twenty years ago, they put up stop signs at an intersection in the back of beyond, and called it Fourways. There was nothing but dark two-lane blacktop north of Corlett Drive on the M1. Ten years ago, a trip to the Walter Sisulu Botanical Gardens was a trip to the country, and driving to Kromdraai was to venture into the deep hinterland. Not so long ago, Diepsloot was little more than a small rural settlement for a few thousand families. Several hundred thousand people now live there, many moved there by the government from Alexandra township near Sandton. Roodepoort’s population grew by 50% in the last decade.

Given all this helter-skelter development, why on God’s green earth was no provision made in the past for upgrading infrastructure? True, many of the early residents of these areas are snooty mink-and-manure types, but do they not shit?

It’s not even like the municipalities had to single-handedly keep up with rampant growth and development despite stretched budgets and capacity, or fail. They didn’t have to do it all themselves. A lot of this is new-built stuff, sold to middle- and upper-class residents. Surely a prescient city planner somewhere could have required that developers upgrade electricity, roads, sewerage and water reticulation plant before issuing planning permission? The municipalities themselves could then focus just on urban renewal, township rehabilitation and upgrading, idealistic public transport development, and pipe dreams of mixed-income integrated housing developments.

I used to laugh, proudly, at foreign visitors who arrived here with bottled water. “Rand Water makes the best tap water in the world! It’s Paris water that’ll kill an ox.”

Our tap water appears to be largely okay, for now. But there’s only so much that Rand Water and its equivalents elsewhere can do in the face of aging infrastructure that has not been upgraded to keep up with development, and decaying power infrastructure that interrupts critical pumping and treatment facilities. This adds up to only one conclusion: buy shares in companies that make polyethylene terephthalate. That’s what water bottles are made from, and we’ll need at least 400 million of those for the 2010 World Cup.

In 2006, Thabo Mbeki told us, about electricity, that “there is no crisis”. Now Lindiwe Hendricks tells us, about water, “there is no crisis”. My question is, why would anyone believe her?

Here’s a fascinating story. Inspired by Nickel and Dimed, a book by Barbara Ehrenreich that told of her experiment of living a lower-class life and how hard it was to escape poverty and pursue the American Dream, Adam Shepard decided to repeat the experiment. Denouncing his former life as a well-off college graduate, he entered a homeless shelter with $25 and the clothes on his back. His goal was to have a furnished apartment, a car and $2 500 in savings within a year, without calling on his former contacts or education. Ten months later, when he had to quit the experiment, he had a pickup truck, a job, and $5 000 in savings. He wrote a book about the experience.

CSM’s interview with him suggests that the left-wing generalisations about class structures, the accident of birth, and poverty traps don’t always stand up to real-life experience. Shepard’s story suggests that character, responsibility and self-discipline have a great deal to do with how “privileged” you end up being. He not only shows this from his own experience, but also from his characterisation of some of the people with which he shared his poverty and life on the street, some of whom were upwardly mobile, and others not.

It confirms the notion that few people are doomed to poverty by the rigid dictates of a cruel society dominated by uncaring capitalists. In fact, especially in more prosperous countries with a well-established middle class and healthy economy, there’s a lot of churn in the ranks of the poor. Some people rise out of poverty, and others fall into it. The poor of today aren’t the poor of five years ago, nor the poor of five years hence. One estimate I read a while ago said that the small percentage of Americans who earn minimum wage on average do so for only two or three years. The churn is high, yet the percentage remains stable, suggesting that the class of minimum wage earners consists of a combination of first-time employees who soon step up the ladder, and people who fall into low-wage jobs, but soon work their way back out of their relative poverty.

Shepard’s story offers yet more support for a society in which individual freedom trumps social engineering. Not only is such a society able to build higher average prosperity and quality of life, but it offers a better chance to its poor and unemployed, too.

(Hat tip: GeekPress)

A few weeks ago, Bush announced that he had agreed with Congress to steal from the rich to give to the poor, quacking, “Stimulus! Stimulus!” This was my reaction:

When US president George W Bush praises Democratic speaker Nancy Pelosi for her leadership, as he did over the “stimulus package” he proposed, you know something bad just happened. When Pelosi beams broadly, and places emphasis on how the measures are “temporary”, you just know she means, “when the election is over, you’ll be paying for it, you gullible fools”. If there’s anything more distasteful than a misguided but principled partisan proposal, it’s a waffly but expensive bi-partisan cop-out.

Yesterday, Arthur Laffer, to whose explanation of how tax works in the real world I referred, wrote this:

Bipartisanship, a notion that stands as anathema to our basic political premise of checks and balances, has resulted in a stimulus package that will do enormous damage to the U.S. economy. [Cut detailed explanation why robbing Peter to pay Paul has zero stimulus effect, but discourages production.] Whenever you observe bipartisan cooperation, hold on to your wallet and run to the basement.

His exposition of the problem of tax rebates, as opposed to tax cuts, as a method of stimulating a sluggish economy, is clear and devastating. I disagree with him on one matter, though, or rather, think he missed a relevant point that leaves his otherwise sound argument open to dispute.

Laffer argues, in essence, that rebates amount to wealth transfers, and in this case were specifically designed to benefit the poor. Inasmuch as someone has to pay for them, this has zero stimulus effect, and has substantial negative effect in terms of disincentivised production on the part of the most productive. So far, entirely agreed.

One effect of a tax rebate that is not accounted for in this explanation, however, is that it brings forwards consumption. The rebates go to people who are more likely to spend it on consumption in the short term, and are taken from people who are more likely to save their money and defer consumption. It is true that the net effect is zero (and the costs make this negative). Instead of sending out $170 billion rebate cheques, you might just as well have ordered taxpayers to spend $170 billion and deduct if from their taxes due. (At least, in the latter case, people would have kept their own hard-earned money.)

The impact of a rebate, therefore, is to borrow from future consumption to stimulate present consumption. This would dampen the effects of today’s downswing in consumption, at the expense of tomorrow’s upswing, and therefore would have an effect. No positive net effect, true, but an effect nonetheless.

Not that such inefficient redistributionist intervention is advisable, of course. By every economic measure, tax cuts are preferable to tax rebates, but ignoring the dampening effect of a shift in consumption timing ignores the key reason Nancy Pelosi grinned so broadly: the “stimulus” is “temporary”, meaning it achieves nothing in the end except redistribution. That sounds like “fiscal responsibility”, because there’s no risk that it will actually make anyone (and heaven forbid, “the rich”) more prosperous in the long term. Such perverse economic logic warms the cockles of any socialist heart.

This is a sweet little election gimmick. It estimates what Barack Obama — who clearly is already the GOP’s main target — would spend in his first term, if he were to keep his campaign promises. Even adjusted for partisan bias, that’s a pretty hefty budget. He sure wasn’t kidding when he told his California supporters that, “I suspect a lot of this crowd — it looks like a pretty well-dressed crowd — potentially will pay a little bit more. I will pay a little bit more.”

(Hat tip: Ed Morrissey @ Captain’s Quarters)

Update: Over at the Tygrrrr Express, Eric has a great post arguing that the GOP isn’t going after Obama because they see him as the presumptive nominee, but because they’d rather fight Hillary Clinton in the election, and are salivating over the prospect. It includes this lovely paragraph:

The Clintons could deck Obama’s children, take their candy, and make them cry, and James Carville would mumble, “that’s just Arkansas politics.” The republicans would get blamed.

Despite his admitted lack of evidence for why Clinton will defeat Obama, it’s a worthy theory, and expressed (ha ha) with his usual from-the-gut flair for ranting eloquent.

The annual SA Blog Awards, organised by the good folks at Cherryflava, Ideate and WebAddiCT(s), are upon us, and nominations are open. I’m not hinting, of course. I would never.

Nor do I have a sordid fascination with the intricacies of competition rules, but after selflessly researching the matter in some depth, I can disclose the very interesting fact that there are a range of categories, such as best post, best original writing, best politics blog, best new blog, most controversial and most humorous blog, and most bestest blog of all. I’m no expert, but my reading of the rules is that multiple blogs can be nominated in each category, and the top-ten nominated blogs in each category go on to general voting and judging. Also, the overall winner gets R20.08 in prize money, which I hear goes a long way towards buying a beer in Cape Town. The colourful button on the right is just something colourful I put up there because it’s colourful, and on this site colourful things, like most things, tend to end up on the right.

If the spike wins in the best green blog category, I’ll fall off my chair, and immediately make a donation, exceeding any prize purse, but not exceeding my means, to the little fellow on the (ahem) right. I do, after all, advocate private charity in pursuit of one’s social and environmental goals, and as a life-long fan of some of the rarer wild felines and canines, I think the De Wildt Cheetah and Wildlife Trust does good work, and is worth a few farthings.

So make this colonialist warmonger lizard king free-market nutter fluffy kitten happy, and go vote. In the green category. But check out the other categories too. They may be surer bets and after all, you might detest small furry animals.

Update: The button on the right was wrong. Now, now, no sniping from the left, please. There was an extra http tag in there that hundreds, or possibly thousands, of fluffy furball fans have had to remove manually since the nomination button went up two days ago. My thanks (and that of the cheetah cub) to Wouter J for pointing out the problem. Teach me not to proofread widget code.

No plan to fix the power catastrophe in South Africa will work overnight. The crisis is deep and wide and will have grave impacts on economic growth, inflation, and poverty alleviation for many years to come. (I’m usually reluctant to bandy about terms like “catastrophe” and “crisis”, but they’re justified in this case.)

This proposal, relatively simple in principle, is from Advocate Hendrik Schmidt, a parliamentarian for the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance. He makes a good, concise case, of which the essence is this:

Eskom’s monopoly over electricity supply is one of the main causes of South Africa’s electricity crisis. The permanent solution to our energy future lies in dismantling this monopoly. Until independent power producers (IPPs) are allowed to enter the market to expand and diversify the sources of power we have access to, and until we are relieved of the burden of having to rely on Eskom’s outdated and dilapidated processes and infrastructure, local demand for electricity will continue to exceed supply.

This should have happened ten years ago. Even at this late stage, however, combined with short-term market-based efficiency measures, it offers the best hope for as rapid and complete a recovery as possible.

A return to state-controlled insularity and an “emergency plan”, funded by billions of public money, could work too, of course. But it would be expensive, it would be far more risky, it would be wide open to corruption, and it would be implemented by people with a disproven track record. And even if it does work, it will likely leave the country worse off in the end (albeit without an alternative future with which to compare it).

Usually, pricing electricity for the poor is raised as the core objection to permitting the free market to prove its mettle. Capitalists will simply raise prices, they say, and profiteer from the crisis. For a while, that is probably true. FA Hayek wasn’t wrong when he noted that the cure for high prices is high prices. They attract competition by signalling that supply must rise to meet demand. In a free market, in which legislated monopolies do not control supply, this results in downward pressure on prices.

But those who think that the concern of high prices is justified should lobby for a simple subsidy for the first X kWH of electricity metered. Or call for a “progressive electricity pricing scale” that works just as progressive taxation does. I’m not saying those are great solutions. My fear would be that price regulation for poor consumers will discourage companies from serving markets that are expensive to serve. But to satisfy those in government and elsewhere who fail to grasp this logic, such policies will overcome the most common populist objections to liberating the market. And at least they won’t break the market mechanism entirely. At least they won’t leave us all critically dependent on a dysfunctional and inefficient state-run industry.

As if he doesn’t have enough trouble because he demonstratively (and provocatively) refuses to bow to the orthodoxy of wearing a stars-and-stripes lapel pin — suggesting some who do are hypocrites — a TV image of the interior of a volunteer Obama campaign office in Houston, Texas, threw up a new reason to be wary of this fellow.

Yep, that’s a Cuban flag, with an image of Marxist revolutionary, fraud and murderous thug, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, superimposed on it. Obama called the flag “inappropriate”, but clearly some of his supporters are the kind of people that go in for romanticising such icons of often-militant opposition to the free world. NewsBusters has a good roundup of analysis, noting that Obama himself didn’t hang the flag, and that the image is a symptom of little more than juvenile radicalism. Still, the association should worry the rest of his supporters.

Meanwhile, the best headline on the subject is from Ed Driscoll’s blog: Sixties Radical Chic, Frozen In Amber.

Mark Helprin has written an excellent piece on the opposition to John McCain from right-wing talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and other thorns in the liberal side, such as Ann Coulter. The latter has threatened to campaign for Hillary Clinton if McCain wins the nomination, a show for which I want front-row tickets.

His writing is sparkling — note the line about “bloody ink of a dying industry” — but the most intriguing of his points concerns the ratings boost that would come from bitching about a Democratic presidency, as compared to relentless defence of all things Bush. I fail to see how campaining for Romney or Huckabee gibes with such a motivation. Either way, that allegation is also the point that Michelle Malkin takes the most exception to.

Here’s a cut version of Helprin’s column, followed by Malkin’s rebuttal. Great reading, on both counts. Now, where were the claims of some monolithic right-wing dogma, or some vast right-wing conspiracy?

What a kerfuffle! Half a dozen talk-radio hosts whose major talent is that, like hairdressers, they can talk all day long to one client after another as they snip, have decided that the presumptive Republican nominee does not hew sufficiently close to their gospel.

As anyone who has listened to them knows, the depth of their thought is truly Oprah-like. And if a great institution of the left can weigh-in as it does in the choice of a nominee, why not its fraternal twins on the right? It doesn’t matter that Mitt Romney, suddenly their Reagan, became a conservative in a flash of light sometime last year, or that their other champion, a populist theocrat, is in many ways as conservative as Vladimir Lenin. The task is to stop the devil McCain.

As a mere print person whose words are not electrified and shot through walls, automobiles, pine trees, and brains, I realize that what I write in the bloody ink of a dying industry may be irrelevant. But from my antiquated perspective, something is very wrong.

Ostracism following tests of “right thinking” is a specialty of the left. Not that it doesn’t exist on the right, blooming with great malice especially on the radio. But in light of their prospects, conservatives have no room for it. For by their neglectful forfeit they have lost the battles of culture and education, and to remain other than an occult force they must express their beliefs through politics, from which, after November, they may be for a time excluded.

[…]

[The protracted Iraq war] and the economy threaten to throw the conservative enterprise back to where it was before Ronald Reagan or even William F. Buckley. Along comes John McCain, who has an 80% positive rating from the American Conservative Union but who as a truly independent soul does not fit, at the margins, some of the transient notions of what makes a conservative. Because of his independence and flexibility, he is the only Republican candidate who has a chance of winning, and thus preserving the core principles of conservatism, in relation to which he is unimpeachable. They are national security (in particular the strength of the military after Iraq and vis-à-vis China and a resurgent Russia), Constitutionalism (as in individual vs. collective rights), and the economy (free markets vs. government industrial policy).

One can agree or disagree with his peripheral positions, but political orthodoxy is political death. If those who are in a hissy fit about Sen. McCain would rather have Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, they will get Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton … and they will wake up to a great regret, as if in their drunkenness they had taken Shrek to bed.

But, guess what? Even if, as the country veers left, living conservatives gnash their teeth and dead ones spin in their graves, a small class of conservatives will benefit. And who might they be? They might be those whose influence and coffers swell on discontent, and who find attacking a president easier and more sensational than the dreary business of defending one. They rose during the Clinton years. Perhaps they are nostalgic. It isn’t worth it, however, for the rest of us.

So, rather than playing recklessly with electoral politics by sabotaging their own party ostensibly for its impurity but equally for the sake of their self-indulgent pique, each of these compulsive talkers might be a tad less self-righteous, look to the long run, discipline himself, suck it up, and be a man. And that would apply equally as well to the gorgeous Laura Ingraham and the relentlessly crocodilian Ann Coulter.

And from RealClearPolitics, parts of Malkin’s response:

The most anti-conservative rhetoric against conservative talk radio these days is coming from supposedly free-market conservatives. It’s disgusting.

[…]

It’s one thing to hear such petty snark coming from the left. Outraged that conservative talk radio has succeeded in the marketplace while liberals have bombed, and unnerved that new media outlets have upended mainstream journalism’s monopoly apple cart, liberals have long crusaded against the medium. […]

But now, we have establishment Republicans parroting liberal ad hominem rhetoric: Talk-radio hosts are talentless blabbermouths. Their listeners are mind-numbed robots. Or, as supposed free-market conservative and McCain supporter Phil Gramm put it in his broadside against talk radio in the Washington Post last week: “They say they have principles, but some of it is their ego and power, too. They’re well-known, and they’re used to having power.”

Funny. These trash-talking GOP politicians and pundits had no problem when conservative talk-radio hosts used their “ego and power” to help kill Hillary Clinton’s massive government health care takeover in 1994. They had no problem when conservative talk-radio hosts used their “ego and power” to galvanize support for the Republican revolution, two Bush presidential campaigns and the war in Iraq.

[…]

Helprin accuses conservative talkers who oppose McCain of rooting for a liberal presidency because their “influence and coffers swell on discontent” and they are “nostalgic” for the Clinton years. Translation: They’re all just greedy self-promoters who care more about themselves than the good of the country. Gramm leveled the same attack: “They’re people who put their dogma in front of the interests of the country.”

Cocooned conservative establishment snobs denigrate talk-radio hosts for preaching to the choir. But these same critics have no problem using the medium to market their own work. Ask their publicists. The message of the anti-conservative conservatives dissing talk radio: Self-interest for me, but not for thee.

No need to wait for a Clinton to take the White House. Clintonism is alive and well among conservative talk-radio haters on both sides of the aisle.

Excuse me while I fetch the popcorn.

Perhaps the government officials and Eskom directors can use some of their bonus money to buy a bunch of flowers and a card that says “We said we’re sorry, you know!” for the Diza family:

A man died at Mankweng Hospital because the operating theatres at Polokwane Provincial Hospital were undergoing load shedding and doctors there couldn’t operate on him.

This was claimed by sources within the hospital this week.

A nurse at the Mokopane Hospital’s casualty ward, Hilda Kgonyane, said Stephen Diza, 22, was stabbed in the abdomen and brought to the hospital at 3am on Sunday morning.

He arrived at Polokwane Hospital casualty ward at about 9am as Mokopane was not equipped for the operation.

Polokwane doctors found 40cm of his intestines protruding from the wound. They rushed Diza to the theatre – only to find that the theatre had no electricity as the hospital had been hit by load shedding.

According to a reliable source at the hospital, the hospital’s generator had kicked in but the chief electrician had then diverted power from the theatre to the other wards.

“The generator’s capacity is not enough to supply the entire hospital with electricity.”

He said doctors tried to get hold of the electrician from 9am to 11am – and did not succeed.

“Because of the patient’s critical condition, he went into cardiac arrest and doctors kept resuscitating him.

“Doctors asked for a helicopter to take Diza to another hospital, but the manager in charge said it was too expensive. They then asked him if they could operate in the casualty ward, but he said it was ‘inappropriate and risky’,” he said.

Doctors then called the provincial Emergency Medical Services (EMS) at 1pm to transport Diza toMankweng Hospital.

“EMS didn’t respond to the calls. Netcare 911 was called and Diza was taken to Mankweng Hospital. He died as doctors started operating on him,” said the source.

Had there been electricity Diza could have been saved within an hour, the source said.

Perhaps Thabo Mbeki or Buyelwa Sonjica can make another speech, asking us to please refrain from stabbing each other until new generation capacity comes online.

Mike Naicker is a white oke, but don’t call him that to his face. He hails from the capital of India, Durban, and has a YouTube riff on South Africa’s electricity crisis:

It’s very funny. But it’s not funny. Here is Bloomberg’s take:

Gold is above $900 an ounce and platinum has never been higher, yet traders are selling the South African rand faster than any other major currency because President Thabo Mbeki can’t keep the lights on.

Rather go to Mike Naicker’s excellent site. It’s less depressing.