AMERICA'S COMING BURDEN

"The American people voted for change and they voted for Democrats to take our country in a new direction," said a triumphant Nancy Pelosi upon becoming the new Speaker of the House. This might well turn out to be a case of being careful what you wish for, lest it come true.

Not only is Pelosi herself radical, but many of the powerful Democratic committee chairmen-in-waiting are members in good standing of what veteran bipartisan presidential advisor David Gergen has called the "loony Left."

Much of American commerce that depends on innovative science and technology will likely suffer in the new regime - biotechnology, nanotechnology, and pharmaceutical R&D, to name just a few sectors. Many senior Democratic members of Congress and their staffs are relentlessly anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-business. Worst of all, they're uneducable. They remind me of the reputation of France's King Charles II, about whom it was said that he never learned anything and never forgot anything.

From my days as an official at the FDA during the '80s and early '90s, when the Democrats were in the congressional majority, I recall the incessant, uninformed, and highly politicized meddling by prominent members of Congress. They did incalculable damage to science and technology. And now they're back.

More here

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Brookes News Update

The Clinton recession and Britain's railway boom: What needs to be explained are the forces that create the boom, trigger off the speculation, create excess capacity and finally leave, as John Stuart Mill regretfully put it, so many "to repent at leisure"
Australian economy and the trade deficit: blame the Reserve Bank, not the market: It is the Reserve Bank of Australia that has been fuelling the housing boom, domestic borrowing and the demand for imports
Kevin Rudd's imaginary contradiction: Kevin Rudd has demonstrated that he has no grasp of the extended order, the concept of conserving but evolving institutions that lies at the very heart of free market liberalism. There is no contradiction between conservatism and economic liberalism
Why industrial relations reforms flopped with the public: The recent decision by the Fair Pay Commission to raise the minimum wage by $27 reinforces Senator Nick Minchin's embarrassing admission that the Government had failed to get a mandate from the Australian people for its labour market reform legislation
Are the Democrats already aiming for a boot in the jack-ass?: In a post-election poll 69 percent said they were concerned the Democrats would keep the president from doing what is necessary to combat terrorism, and 78 percent said they feared Democrats would seek too hasty a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq
A blueprint for a Republican victory: If the political spectrum were a football field and the network news anchors were acting as referees, "center" would be defined as the two yard line - in other words, somewhere in Hillary Clinton territory
Abortion stops a bleeding heart: With even liberals backing away from Roe, apparently the last group of people on Earth to realize the Supreme Court's abortion jurisprudence is a catastrophe is going to be the Supreme Court

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ELSEWHERE

Nutty British "security": "It's a Boy's Own gift that will be stuffed into thousands of Christmas stockings, but a retired brigadier has discovered that the credit card-sized toolkit - complete with 5cm (2in) blade, compass, tweezers and toothpick - could put the recipients on the wrong side of the law. Tom Foulkes, 56, who spent 35 years working for the Ministry of Defence developing real weapons, was arrested, locked up and had his fingerprints and DNA sample taken after the kit was discovered in his overnight bag by police. The former Royal Engineer was preparing to board a Paris-bound train at Waterloo when an X-ray machine alarm was triggered by the toolkit. He was hauled from the station, placed in a cage in a van and taken to a police station for questioning. Four hours later he was released and cautioned"

Britain: What about the human rights of the general public? "A man who has been barred from every pub in his village after behaving aggressively towards staff at his local is being backed by a leading civil liberties group. Liberty is contending that the ban infringes the man's human rights."

Primitive Saudis: "A Saudi mother has issued an appeal from prison for King Abdullah to reunite her with her husband after a court divorced the couple against their will. Fatima al-Timani was jailed in July with her two children, a girl of 2 called Nuha and a boy, Sulaiman, who has just turned 1. The court has said that she could be freed if she returns to her estranged family, who engineered the annulment of her marriage last year because they despised her husband, Mansour. But Ms al-Timani, 34, insisted: "I'm leaving this place on one condition only - that I go back to my husband." ... The case has riveted the usually reserved Saudi media, which have been sympathetic to the couple who wed for love more than four years ago in a country where most marriages are arranged. The couple had been married for more than three years and already had Nuha when two of Fatima's half-brothers demanded that they divorce on the grounds of "tribal incompatibility" and took the case to court."

Good news for bloggers: "The California Supreme Court held today that "plaintiffs who contend they were defamed in an Internet posting may only seek recovery from the original source of the statement." In other words, Web publishers currently have absolute immunity for the republication of allegedly defamatory statements originally made by others. The implications of this ruling are significant, and are, in my view, a net positive for free speech in this country."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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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