No Free Lunch

Fred Barnes's article on Social Security ("Republican Insecurity," Dec. 20) misses two basic facts. One, a big cut in benefits is a big cut in benefits. Two, a big cut in benefits will never pass in the current environment.

Liberals know that eventually there will be a crisis, and when there is a crisis (around 2015 or 2020) they will demand a big tax increase and a small benefit cut. They will have scored an ideological victory.

Strategic conservatives know that getting a big (6 percent) personal Social Security Savings Account is the biggest step toward personal freedom and personal responsibility we will take in our lifetime.

They also know Chile's record and the Savings and Loan bailout both proved you could take the transition financing off-budget and then use the improved revenue-to-expenditure process to pay off the bonds over a generation with no burden on the general budget.

The Ryan-Sununu plan has already been scored by the Social Security actuary as having achieved solvency for Social Security.

If Barnes wants to quote someone calling us "free-lunchers," then I would urge him to call our opponents "the suicidal wing." It is impossible for Republicans to propose a big benefit cut and pass it. The effort would lead to a shattering defeat in 2006.

Newt Gingrich
Washington, DC

A Real Filibuster

In Duncan Currie's article about overcoming Democratic filibusters of judicial nominees ("A New Weapon in the Judges' War," Dec. 6), he discusses several "nuclear" options for breaking the impasse. Nowhere, however, have I seen a discussion of using what I would call the "conventional option," the one envisioned by the framers of our Constitution, which would be to make the Democrats conduct a real filibuster.

Up until now, Senate majority leader Bill Frist and company have let the Democrats merely sign a pledge to filibuster a nominee. The nomination is then tabled, the Senate moves on, and the obstructionists get off easy. At no point have the Democrats been forced to make the endless floor speeches to prevent the up-or-down vote. To my knowledge, we have not seen a real filibuster since the civil rights era.

Forcing a real filibuster would accomplish several things. It would clearly paint the Democrats as obstructionists. It could sort moderates such as Bingaman, Conrad, the two Nelsons, Carper, and Dayton out from the pack. And if Frist were to schedule the seven blocked nominees as the first seven votes of the new session, and then force Democrats to filibuster one after the other, future votes on Supreme Court justices, tax reform, and Social Security reform would go more smoothly.

And besides, if this resulted in the Senate accomplishing nothing for a few months, would we really be worse off?

Dale Johnson
Ashburn, VA

Media Mismatch

Robert J. Barro's "Bias Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" (Dec. 13) evaluates the media in terms of liberal bias. On a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being most liberal and 0 being most conservative, the Wall Street Journal ranks highest, with a score of 85. But Barro recognizes that the Journal's editorial page is on the opposite end of the scale:

"The rating for the Journal's editorial pages would of course look very different. (As one quipster observed, James Carville and Mary Matalin probably agree more often than the news and editorial divisions of the Wall Street Journal.)"

I have been a Journal reader for over 50 years, and frankly, I cannot reconcile this perspective. I find myself fairly consistently in accord with the Journal's editorial page; and yet at the same time, I'm not offended by the news content.

By contrast, I check out the New York Times quite regularly. I rarely agree with their editorial policy and am almost always offended by their editorials masquerading as front-page news.

Dick Goldberg
Morrison, CO

Errata

In Christopher Caldwell's "Holland Daze" (Dec. 27), the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was described as occurring "911 days after 9/11." In fact, van Gogh was killed 911 days after the May 2002 murder of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. Also, the article stated that there are about 3 million foreign-born in the Netherlands. There are roughly 3 million people of non-Dutch ancestry ( allochthonen) in the Netherlands, of whom about 2 million are foreign-born.

Because of an editing error, a Scrapbook item last week on Louisiana district judge Timothy Ellender mistakenly identified the date of an infamous Halloween party he attended as 1983. The party actually occurred in 2003.