This year's primary season does seem to be getting a little strange. Despite my ill opinion of both of them, I have twice recently defended things the Clintons have said (here and here) and now Iain Murray has done similarly -- also to his surprise.
Poverty American-style: "It's apparently okay to buy unnecessary and expensive electronics at a discount - even if you've lost your job and money is "tight. After all, the Super Bowl is Sunday. CNN's January 30 "American Morning" mentioned retailers were cutting prices to get customers to purchase more, but no one during the broadcast had a problem with one unemployed woman buying one of those fancy televisions. "Veronica McNeil has two kids," said Cho. "She recently lost her job. Her husband's an ironworker and the family is feeling the pinch." "If I'm here to buy baby stuff and I see a TV at a good sale price, I'll grab it," McNeil said. Cho pointed toward "rising gas and home heating oil prices and Americans losing their homes" for money being "tight." Personal responsibility and wise financial decisions were lost on Cho."
For sheer bureaucratic stupidity, the winner is ... : "Hate is a pretty strong word. But not strong enough to express how I feel about the TSA -- the Transportation Security Administration or Thousands Standing Around, depending on your point of view -- which runs those security checkpoints at American airports. I may fear the IRS, and I may dread the DMV -- but for sheer bureaucratic stupidity and its affront to personal liberties, the TSA has earned a special place of loathing in my heart. And apparently I'm not alone."
A McCain adviser's view of McCain: "The sad failures of government-centered economic development have proven that private markets are the only true hope for sustained prosperity. Republicans believe that government should do only those things we cannot do individually, should tax no more than is necessary, and should spend only on genuine national priorities. Mr. McCain will preserve these principles, and thus also preserve and enhance Americans' economic freedom. Entrepreneurs lie at the heart of innovation, growth and advancing prosperity. Hard work, ingenuity and entrepreneurialism are a proven route to meeting one's goals and providing for children and family. Mr. McCain is committed to preserving their freedom, ensuring that they are not shackled by excessive regulation, starved of risk capital, or taxed into submission. Over the past year, Mr. McCain has outlined a vision for steps toward a U.S. tax code that is simpler, fair and flatter. He will begin by keeping taxes low -- making permanent the current income and investment tax rates, and defending those rates against Democrats' partisan goal of taxing our economy into collapse. He has proposed that it should require a three-fifths majority vote in Congress to raise taxes."
Buried WMD Scoop: "Journalists are taught never to "bury the lead." Yet it looks as if that's precisely what CBS's "60 Minutes" did in reporter Scott Pelley's fascinating interview Sunday with George Piro, the FBI agent who debriefed Saddam Hussein following his capture in December 2003. The Lebanese-born Mr. Piro, one of only a handful of agents at the bureau who speaks Arabic, was able to wheedle information from Saddam over a matter of months through a combination of flattery and ego-deflation that worked wonders with the former despot. But as Bruce Chapman of the Discovery Institute first noticed, the most important news in the segment comes when Mr. Piro describes his conversations with Saddam about weapons of mass destruction. The FBI interrogator says that, while Saddam said he no longer had active WMD programs in 2003, the dictator admitted that he intended to resume those programs as soon as he possibly could."
French morale hits a new low: "French morale is at its lowest ebb in two decades, according to new research. Quality of life in France is envied the world over but government figures show the "morale of French households" is at its gloomiest - minus 34 points - since the study began in 1987. French people's belief that their living standards will improve has declined steadily since President Nicolas Sarkozy took office last June, and has been exacerbated by rising fuel and food prices".
The emptiness of Obama's "change" rhetoric: "Obama, despite his rhetoric, has not really thought through what should change in the future. In South Carolina, one of his most well-received lines was: `It's about the past versus the future.' Okay, we got the reference to the Clintons representing the past. But what about the future part? What great policy ideas do we have to look forward to? That all politicians will learn to play nicely together? Even if he could manage to control others' behaviors, that would hardly qualify as a `higher purpose' or as truly `transformative'.... I don't expect Obama to create a true mass movement. But why is he so reluctant to engage the public in debate on policy specifics that can take us forward? I agree that change in American politics is sorely needed. And even Obama's rhetoric isn't necessarily problematic. For instance, in today's times of anti-consumerist miserabilism, I'm all in favour of upholding aspirations like the American Dream. But you're not going to go far if you line up behind someone who can't spell out what that Dream should mean today."
A crime against all Africans: "The catastrophe that has befallen Kenya since the rigged election of Dec. 27 -- killings and displacements, curtailed freedoms, a promising economy on the verge of being wrecked -- confirms for the umpteenth time that local politicians, not the remnants of imperialism or ancestral customs, are the major culprits of sub-Saharan Africa's misery."
Katrina lawsuit dismissed: "Saying his hands were tied by law, a federal judge dismissed a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over levee breaches after Hurricane Katrina, but rebuked the agency for failing to protect the city. U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval ruled Wednesday that the Corps should be held immune over failures in drainage canals that caused much of the flooding of New Orleans in August 2005. He cited the Flood Control Act of 1928, which protects the federal government from lawsuits when flood control projects like levees break. The lawsuit led to about 489,000 claims by businesses, government entities and residents, seeking trillions of dollars in damages against the Corps. The fate of many of those claims was pinned to the suit and a similar one filed over flooding from a navigation channel in St. Bernard Parish"
More Leftist ad hominem abuse. Comment by Tibor Machan: "Among the first lessons one learns in an elementary logic course is that there are various informal fallacies that too many people commit as they go about thinking things through. For example, the fallacy of begging the question or ad hominem or the genetic fallacy. One would not expect anyone in the discipline to commit any of these and similar fallacies. Yet Dr. Kurtz manages to do just that when he claims that I hold my views on taxation and the free market 'as a result' of my having 'escaped communist Hungary.' It is where I come from, what happened to me, the circumstances of my early life that produced in me my views, not my careful reasoning, study, analysis, and such, all those methods that secular humanist advise we use when considering, for example, such issues as evolution, abortion, the existence of God, intelligent design and so forth. No. Dr. Kurtz chooses, instead, to treat my views as some kind of affliction that comes to people who escape from communist Hungary or similar tyrannies."
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and TELSTRA/BIGPOND.
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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.
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) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".
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