ELSEWHERE

British coverup coming apart: "A clerk at the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) was suspended last night for allegedly leaking secret documents about the Stockwell Underground shooting of an innocent man to a television station. The suspension will come as a severe blow to the credibility of the commission, which is handling its first big inquiry since it was opened 18 months ago to replace investigations by police themselves".

The Bush boom: "Why President Bush seemingly gets no credit for the strong economy is one of the enduring political mysteries of our time.... Most polls show the president’s economic approval rating around 40 percent or even less. Scott Rasmussen, who does extensive consumer and investor polling, shows that the confidence ratings of both are about 15 percent lower than in late 2003. Meanwhile, a splendid group of economic data points show clearly the effectiveness of the president’s marginal tax-rate reductions of two years ago. The tax-cut package was in large part directed at stock market and business capital formation, both hard hit a few years back. This was the correct target. Share prices have recovered about 70 percent in recent years, with a number of widely tracked indexes, like the NYSE and the S&P small- and mid-cap indexes, now trading at all-time highs. The economy itself is growing at about 4 percent per annum since the tax cuts, with business investment leading the surge".

Great progress in China: "The major reform achievement has been in privatizing state enterprises. The private sector accounts for 70% of gross domestic product. There are 200 large state companies -- basically, they are in utilities, some in heavy industries, some in resource industries. Traditionally, this is where governments have invested. China Mobil and China Telecom are huge, but these are natural monopolies. Even France and Britain had those large state companies for a long time. If you take these away, China is a private-sector economy"

Whew! I have just finished the big job of cleaning out my blogroll -- deleting links that no longer work or links that led to blogs that are no longer regularly updated. If anybody thinks I have unfairly deleted them, let me know.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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