David McElroy

If this video of a judge beating his 16-year-old daughter in a fit of profane rage doesn’t disturb you, there’s something wrong. Judge William Adams can’t even control himself, but he’s had power over other people. He’s a perfect example of why it’s immoral and scary for a few to have power over others.

This video was made in 2004, but it was only posted to YouTube last week. Hillary Adams was 16 when she set up a camera in her bedroom to finally catch her father on videotape during one of his angry rampages. She finally decided to post the video last week. You can read her comments to a Corpus Christi television station here — along with her father’s admission that it is indeed him in the video. (You’ll have to scroll down the page to find comments from both of them.) Police are investigating to decide whether the beating was a crime.

There are a lot of things to read and digest about this story. In the video, the father is angry at the girl for something involving a computer. She now says it was because she was downloading music over the “file sharing” service called Kazaa, which wasn’t legal at the time, so this is the “stealing” that the father was upset about. You have to wonder what the man would have been like if she had don’t something really serious.

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When politicians want more money, their favorite words are, “It’s for the children.” Even those magic words didn’t work in Colorado Tuesday, as voters rejected a $3 billion “temporary” tax hike for government-run schools. Penn Pfiffner, chairman of the underfunded group opposing the tax, showed his joy last night at a celebration in the Denver suburb of Littleton.

Is this a preview of the 2012 election? Republicans hope so. Democrats hope not. I don’t think you can draw a conclusion other than saying that many voters are angry and don’t intend to vote for anything they see as a sacrifice for them. Conservative voters are going to reject even the most well-intentioned tax hike. (Check out this story if you want to know what the Colorado tax would have done.) Liberal voters are going to reject anything they see as being favorable to people who they believe already have money or privilege.

In other words, it’s going to be an especially polarizing election in 2012 in many places. In their anger, people aren’t going to be voting for someone as much as they’re going to voting against someone who represents something they hate.

Republicans will end up nominating one of the usual suspects (such as Mitt Romney), and Democrats will presumably stick with Barack Obama. Republican voters won’t love their nominee, but they will hate Obama and work passionately to defeat him. Democrats won’t love Obama, for the most part, but they will hate the Republican nominee, who they will see as a representative for “the rich.”

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Republicans in Congress talk big about cutting spending. They rail against the ridiculous pork that they’re going to cut from the budget. But when it’s time to put their words into action, these budget hawks become gentle as doves. The spending never stops.

It happened again Tuesday. Republicans in the U.S. Senate had a chance to show they were serious about cutting spending — in at least a small way. Tad DeHaven of the Cato Institute points out that 32 Republican senators voted against cutting $1 billion in rural development subsidies. (If you’re in the United States, check here to see how your senators voted. Both of the chicken hawks from my state voted against the cuts.)

So if Republicans won’t even cut some money out of the budget that includes the National Sheep Industry Improvement Center, what cuts are they willing to make? It’s time to be painfully blunt. Republicans are only willing to cut things that don’t touch most of their constituents. Democrats are only willing to cut things that don’t touch most of their constituents. In other words, everybody is interested in keeping interest groups happy. Hardly anybody really cares about fixing the budget and the debt.

(If you’d like to know what those rural development subsides are used for, Cato had a great paper a couple of years ago that explains it nicely.)

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