Tuesday, March 28, 2017
When the Devil quotes scripture to his purposes
Jeff Jacoby writes below. He is a fine fellow and I often quote him. He was Anti-Trump but so were a lot of people. So it's amusing to see a gap in his basic cultural knowledge. He quotes Shakespeare below but seems unaware of the Bible background that Shakespeare was referring to. It is in Luke 4:10-12, where the Devil tempts Jesus in the wilderness. But Jeff is Jewish so a lack of familiarity with Christian scripture can readily be forgiven
"THE DEVIL can cite Scripture for his purpose," says the wealthy Antonio to his young friend Bassanio in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice."
So can the politician, he might have added. And the party activist.
When the Trump administration released an outline recently of its forthcoming budget proposals, many on the left expressed dismay. The White House wants to reduce spending on the State Department, environmental programs, arts and broadcast subsidies, and housing initiatives, while significantly increasing outlays on defense, homeland security, and veterans' health care.
Cue the Scripture-citers.
Rachel Held Evans, a liberal Christian author, took to Twitter to decry proposed cuts to the Meals on Wheels program. "There are few things the Bible is unambiguously clear about," she tweeted, "but from Hebrew Scripture to Matt. 25, care for the poor & needy is one of them."
Nicholas Kristof used his New York Times column to craft a pastiche about Jesus and "Paul of Ryan," with the former speaking familiar lines from the New Testament — "Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God," "From everyone who has been given much, much will be required" — while the latter disdainfully swats those teachings away. "Oh, come on, Jesus," the Ryan character sneers, "don't go socialist on me again."
On Monday, a story from the Religious News Service was headlined: "Trump's Budget Slashes Aid To The Poor. Would Jesus Have A Problem With That?" The piece recounted the "scriptural smackdown" pitting conservative blogger Erick Erickson against liberals condemning Trump's budget scheme as religiously "immoral" and downright "evil."
On a different tack, liberal activist Jay Michaelson weighed in with a bizarre biblical defense of the National Endowment for the Arts — God's appeal to the Israelites in Exodus 35 to donate precious metals, jewels, fabrics, and spices for the construction of the Tabernacle and its vessels. "Public art projects like the Tabernacle of the Israelites," writes Michaelson, demonstrate "what our civilization stands for" and why taxes should fund it.
Debating government spending is standard fare in Washington. Sanctimony is, too. But the posturing grows a little too pious when pundits and politicos, brandishing a line from the Bible, declare that Jesus would never reduce spending on X or that God must be in favor of budget hikes for Y — and imagine that that settles the debate.
Some of these Biblical invocations are just silly. The Tabernacle described in Exodus was not a "public art project," it was religious infrastructure used for priestly sacrifices and to house the Ark of the Covenant.
More importantly, the Bible is a sacred text, not a Cliffs Notes for federal budgeteers. No one can deny that Scripture is replete with exhortations to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and be compassionate to the downtrodden. But those injunctions are personal, not political. If they constitute a moral mandate, it is for the action of private individuals guided by conscience, not for government programs created by the state and collectively imposed through the pains and penalties of law.
I would never argue that American politics should be devoid of religious influence. This has always been a nation of Bible-readers and churchgoers. "In God We Trust" is the nation's motto. God appears four times in the Declaration of Independence. His blessing is entreated in every state constitution, and in countless presidential proclamations. It is altogether fitting and proper that religion has played so prominent a role in America's great social movements, from independence to abolition to equal rights.
But the nation's deep current of religious influence does not mean that public policy can be made by pointing to Bible verses. It is reasonable to read (for example) Jesus' words in Matthew 25 — "Whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me" — as a reminder that the ethical test of any society is how it treats its most vulnerable members, and a call to each of us to extend a hand to those in need. It is not reasonable to claim that every faithful Christian must therefore endorse Meals on Wheels or defend public housing vouchers from budget cuts.
The temptation to quote the Bible for political purposes is bipartisan: Republicans and Democrats do it; conservatives and liberals do it. The impulse may be sincere. But flaunting a verse from Scripture to promote a political purpose ends up tarnishing the one without elevating the other.
By all means, study the Bible. Take its lessons to heart. Let those lessons guide how you live your life. Just don't confuse the word of God with a partisan political agenda.
SOURCE
Typical Leftist thuggery
They seize their right to demonstrate but want to deny it to others. These are seriously bad people
A fight broke out on a Southern California beach on Saturday night as supporters of President Donald Trump clashed with counter-protesters who doused organizers with pepper spray.
The violence erupted when the "Make America Great Again" march of about 2,000 people at Bolsa Chica State Beach reached a group of about 30 counter-protesters.
The counter-protesters, dressed in black, created a wall to stop the rally. A masked man began spraying the irritant in the face of an organizer, said Capt. Kevin Pearsall of the California State Parks Police.
The masked counter-protester using the pepper spray attempted to flee the scene but was quickly detained by highway police.
Pearsall added that two additional male counter-protesters were arrested on suspicion of illegal use of pepper spray and a third female counter-protester was arrested on suspicion of assault and battery. Two people suffered minor injuries that didn't require medical attention, he said.
SOURCE
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Thanks to Trump, Pruitt, Gorsuch, and Goodlatte, the Constitution Is Back in Business
America has begun the process of reclaiming the Constitution.
This week, the Senate is taking up the confirmation Judge Neil Gorsuch, one of many Trump nominees known for his dedication to constitutional government. This follows the Senate confirmation of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as head of the EPA — a federal agency he has sued not once, not twice, but fourteen times.
Pruitt’s appointment could not come at a better time. During the past eight years, the Obama administration has passed well over 25,000 regulations. These regulations cost taxpayers a whopping $890 billion, or about $15,000 a household. And of that $890 billion, the EPA is responsible for $344 billion — more than any other agency.
This kind of power goes directly against the framers’ original intent. These regulations are not openly promulgated on the floor of Congress by elected legislators who serve a set term. Instead, they are quietly passed by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats.
Not only do they affect matters at the federal level, but they also impact states, regions and even other countries. When Obama signed the Paris Agreement last year, he did so entirely of his own accord and without the necessary ratification in the Senate. Shocking as this is, it’s only a symptom of the ongoing erosion of the Constitution’s separation of powers.
Administrator Pruitt has spent his career fighting against this erosion. He created a “federalism unit” in Oklahoma to defend the states against federal overreach and sued the federal government over the enactment of Obamacare. His confirmation is a strong first step towards restoring the vision of the Founding Fathers — but it is only a first step. If the Constitution is to be revitalized, the executive agencies must continue to concede their excess power and the other branches must step up and claim what is constitutionally theirs.
Since his inauguration, President Trump has done just that. At the end of January, he signed an executive order that directs the agencies to repeal two regulations for every new one they pass. The order also prohibits the agencies from spending any more money this year on regulations unless they receive a direct mandate to do so from Congress or approval from the Office of Management and Budget. Such radical restrictions on regulation would have devastated Obama’s cabinet, but leaders like Pruitt will use them to effect change in a conscientious and constitutional way.
This week’s confirmation hearings mark Trump’s most significant step in restoring the Constitution: his selection of Judge Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court seat left empty after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia last year. Many have noted the similarities between the two. By and large, they both favor a strict and literalist interpretation of the Constitution. But Gorsuch takes it one step further than Scalia did: he openly opposes Chevron deference.
Chevron deference is the reason that the EPA has the kind of power that it does and could spend the kind of money it did. It is the result of a 1984 Supreme Court case Chevron USA v. the National Resources Defense Council. The court, in a remarkably self-defeating decision, ruled that the courts should defer to an agency’s interpretation of legislation or statutes. The result was that agencies were free to interpret any vagueness or ambiguity in legislation as they saw fit — without review from the courts.
Gorsuch opposes Chevron deference because of its blatant violation of the separation of powers. He has made no bones about his position: in his opinion in Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch, when he argued, “There’s an elephant in the room with us today… Chevron… permit(s) executive bureaucracies to swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power and concentrate federal power in a way that seems more than a little difficult to square with the Constitution of the framers’ design. Maybe the time has come to face the behemoth.”
The time has indeed come to face the behemoth — if the legislative branch can work up the courage to challenge it. The Senate has already shown its mettle in confirming Pruitt, another avowed enemy of agency overreach, to lead the most overreaching agency of all. Congress at large will have two more opportunities to confront Chevron in the months to come. The first is on March 20, when Gorsuch’s confirmation hearings will begin. Speedily confirming him will be another step towards regaining the power lost to the federal agencies in Chevron.
The second opportunity lies in a piece of legislation currently sitting on the floor of Congress. Introduced by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), the Regulatory Accountability Act combines several pieces of previously passed legislation to roll back the power of the agencies. It forces agencies to adopt the least expensive rule and to publish electronically all the evidence (transcripts, exhibits, etc.) used in crafting a rule. It demands that agencies research and report on the effect their regulations will have on small businesses, which are often sunk before they start by the exorbitant legal fees necessary to deal with federal regulations. But most importantly, it overturns Chevron deference and restores the separation of powers that makes up the beating heart of our republic.
In the 1940s, with his artery-clogging alphabet soup of agencies, Franklin Delano Roosevelt expanded the size and scope of the federal government more than any other 20th century president. But he was aware of the health risks, and worried “that the practice of creating independent regulatory commissions, who perform administrative work in addition to judicial work, threatens to develop a ‘fourth branch’ of Government for which there is no sanction in the Constitution.”
The result was the Administrative Procedure Act, a 1946 piece of legislation that attempted to keep the agencies in check via judicial review. Whatever the act attempted to do has been undone by years of executive overreach that cripples American companies and crushes American citizens.
But no more. President Trump’s executive order explicitly mentioned the Administrative Procedures Act and commands the agencies to abide by it as they begin to slash old regulations. Between Trump’s surrender of executive power, Gorsuch’s appointment to the Supreme Court, and Congress’ passage of the Regulatory Accountability Act, the U.S. has the chance to return to the kind of government the founders imagined — namely, a three-branch government that genuinely promotes the general welfare without risking the blessings of liberties either for ourselves or for our posterity.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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Monday, March 27, 2017
Teetotalling is bad for you
That's the basic conclusion of the research below. The findings are in fact fairly conventional. Moderate drinkers get fewer strokes and heart attacks than either teetotallers or heavy drinkers. The good old Golden Mean again. All the associations were quite weak in absolute terms but are fairly high in the context of what one generally finds in medical research. It is also interesting that the various subtypes of cardiovascular disease all seem to be alcohol influenced. So the conclusion embodied in my heading above is reasonably safe.
What's amazing is the spin that "New Scientist" put on the findings. Their conclusion is:
“This study suggests that sticking within alcohol guidelines may actually lower your risk of some heart conditions,” says Tracy Parker, of charity the British Heart Foundation, who was not involved in the study. “But it’s important to remember that the risks of drinking alcohol far outweigh any possible benefits. These findings are certainly no reason to start drinking alcohol if you don’t already.”
Which is actually the reverse of what the study found. It's just do-gooder lying. But when is lying doing good? Far from "the risks of drinking alcohol outweighing any possible benefits", alcohol actually confers the benefit of helping you to live longer! There were fewer "unheralded coronary deaths" [fatal heart attacks] among moderate drinkers. That's a pretty good benefit. The British Heart Foundation should fire the lying Tracy Parker. She is a preacher of some Puritanical ideology, not a competent science commentator
Association between clinically recorded alcohol consumption and initial presentation of 12 cardiovascular diseases: population based cohort study using linked health records
Steven Bell et al.
Abstract
Objectives: To investigate the association between alcohol consumption and cardiovascular disease at higher resolution by examining the initial lifetime presentation of 12 cardiac, cerebrovascular, abdominal, or peripheral vascular diseases among five categories of consumption.
Design: Population based cohort study of linked electronic health records covering primary care, hospital admissions, and mortality in 1997-2010 (median follow-up six years).
Setting: CALIBER (ClinicAl research using LInked Bespoke studies and Electronic health Records).
Participants: 1 937 360 adults (51% women), aged ≥30 who were free from cardiovascular disease at baseline.
Main outcome measures: 12 common symptomatic manifestations of cardiovascular disease, including chronic stable angina, unstable angina, acute myocardial infarction, unheralded coronary heart disease death, heart failure, sudden coronary death/cardiac arrest, transient ischaemic attack, ischaemic stroke, intracerebral and subarachnoid haemorrhage, peripheral arterial disease, and abdominal aortic aneurysm.
Results: 114 859 individuals received an incident cardiovascular diagnosis during follow-up. Non-drinking was associated with an increased risk of unstable angina (hazard ratio 1.33, 95% confidence interval 1.21 to 1.45), myocardial infarction (1.32, 1.24 to1.41), unheralded coronary death (1.56, 1.38 to 1.76), heart failure (1.24, 1.11 to 1.38), ischaemic stroke (1.12, 1.01 to 1.24), peripheral arterial disease (1.22, 1.13 to 1.32), and abdominal aortic aneurysm (1.32, 1.17 to 1.49) compared with moderate drinking (consumption within contemporaneous UK weekly/daily guidelines of 21/3 and 14/2 units for men and women, respectively). Heavy drinking (exceeding guidelines) conferred an increased risk of presenting with unheralded coronary death (1.21, 1.08 to 1.35), heart failure (1.22, 1.08 to 1.37), cardiac arrest (1.50, 1.26 to 1.77), transient ischaemic attack (1.11, 1.02 to 1.37), ischaemic stroke (1.33, 1.09 to 1.63), intracerebral haemorrhage (1.37, 1.16 to 1.62), and peripheral arterial disease (1.35; 1.23 to 1.48), but a lower risk of myocardial infarction (0.88, 0.79 to 1.00) or stable angina (0.93, 0.86 to 1.00).
Conclusions: Heterogeneous associations exist between level of alcohol consumption and the initial presentation of cardiovascular diseases. This has implications for counselling patients, public health communication, and clinical research, suggesting a more nuanced approach to the role of alcohol in prevention of cardiovascular disease is necessary.
BMJ 2017;356:j909
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Time to Repeal the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act
America is the only major country in the world to have an extraterritorial tax system, demanding its expatriate citizens pay tax on their foreign earnings. For many years this rule was obeyed more in the breach than the observance, but in 2010 the Congress, looking for new sources of revenue to shore up America’s teetering finances, passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act – FATCA. This law has empowered the IRS to demand extraordinary compliance from expats and those who provide banking services for them, at home and abroad, to demonstrate their incomes and pay taxes on them.
The consequences have been devastating. Families have been broken up, passports cancelled, citizenships have been revoked, and dictators have been given a glimpse into dissidents’ finances. Expat Americans have found it increasingly difficult to find anyone willing to offer them banking services. FATCA amounts to a fine levied by the U.S. on any of its citizens who have the temerity to live abroad.
It is time for the law to go, as a simple matter of justice. That’s why I signed this coalition letter along with 22 other leaders from think tanks, taxpayer groups, and grassroots organizations, calling for the repeal of FATCA. As the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, which organized the letter, says:
The letter makes 5 key points: 1) FATCA fails in its primary goal to catch wealthy tax cheats; 2) It ensnares innocent Americans with excessive reporting requirements and draconian penalties for the slightest oversights; 3) It makes U.S. citizens living and working abroad toxic assets in the eyes of both financial institutions and employers; 4) Its compliance costs far outstrip the revenue it collects; and 5) It encourages other nations and international organizations to pursue aggressive tax grabs that threaten American businesses and the global economy.
Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute said, FATCA may be “the worst provision in the entire tax code.” He’s right. Moreover, if other governments start thinking FATCA is a good idea, we could start seeing large numbers of people in this nation of immigrants taxed by foreign powers. Extraterritoriality was a bad idea to begin with. It should end before it gets any worse.
SOURCE
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Ted Cruz Exposes Dem Hypocrisy Over Criticizing Federal Judges
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) made an interesting observation on day three of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch's confirmation hearings. The Democrats, he said, have no right to criticize President Trump for his negative treatment of U.S. federal judges who defy his executive orders, when they have done nothing but impugn Judge Gorsuch’s integrity all week.
The senator offered an abbreviated list of the Democrats’ smear campaign against the judge.
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Cruz recalled, told Gorsuch he has a tendency to “choose corporate interests over people.”
He then reminded Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) that he told Gorsuch he was guilty of "rejecting families" and failing to defend their freedoms.
Other Democrats, I would add, have been trying to corner the judge into revealing his personal opinions on controversial issues like abortion and torture, despite his reiterating how inappropriate that would be to future litigants.
Later on, Sen. Ben. Sasse (R-NE) said there is a “danger in not condemning reckless attacks” considering most Americans don’t watch these hearings and will only see sensational headlines once the Senate Judiciary holds the vote on Gorsuch.
SOURCE
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This reckless Russia-baiting must stop
And so this weekend, with the first deployment to Estonia of a prospective 800 UK troops, the NATO plan to ‘project… stability’ against Russia, agreed upon at a summit last July, continues to move up a gear. In total, NATO members will soon have deployed four battalions, consisting of nearly 4,000 troops, in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – that is, right along Russia’s western borders. This will be supplemented by the provision of hi-tech weaponry, vehicles and aircraft, and the construction in Romania and Poland of missile-defence systems.
The narrative justifying this display of military might has been repeated to thought-nullifying effect. UK defence secretary Sir Michael Fallon was the latest to rehearse this deadeningly familiar story, as he explained that the aim of the NATO plans is to ‘deter [Russian] aggression’. After all, that’s what Western political and media elites seem to think Russia is: an aggressor. We know this because that’s what we are constantly being told: that Russia is now in the grip of the imperialist delusions of Mad Vlad Putin; that it wants, in the words of US defence secretary James Mattis, to break the postwar global order; that it will stop at nothing to order the world according to Putin’s grand designs.
That’s why Russia supposedly semi-rigged the US elections, why it bombed Syria into Russian line, why it invaded Ukraine. Because it wants to dominate its enemies, and where its desire exceed its means, undermine and disorient them. As UK defence chief Mike Penning told parliament in October, it’s time ‘to look back to the old foe’ and defend ourselves.
Yet to see Russia as the aggressor, and the NATO-fronted West and its allies as the picked-upon, is a distortion of historical reality. For every cruise missile test by the Russians, there has been a ‘military training exercise’ by NATO – such as that in June, when NATO members embarked on the largest movement of foreign allied troops in Poland since the Second World War. For every annexation of former Russian territory in Ukraine, there has been a Western-backed coup to install a pro-EU premier. For every heavily highlighted sign of Russian aggression, there has been an accompanying, obscured, misrepresented act of Western aggression to prompt it.
In fact, since the end of the actual Cold War, the West, with NATO its institutional and organisational expression, has seemingly been set on antagonising Russia. Not deliberately, exactly, but almost as a byproduct of the West’s post-Cold War disorientation, its want of purpose – a want writ large in NATO itself, a remnant of the Cold War that has lived on in search of an enemy to justify its mission. And where better to look for this enemy than towards the ‘old foe’, as Penning tellingly called Russia.
That’s why after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and despite promises to the contrary, NATO actually became more pro-active, more expansionist, extending its membership eastwards towards the Russian border, taking in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. It was reaching out for a point, enemies against whom it could define itself. As then US president Bill Clinton insisted in 1997, in almost existential terms: ‘The bottom line is clear: expanding NATO will enhance our security. It is the right thing to do.’ Then, following the NATO invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the former Soviet satellite states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were admitted in 2004, followed by Croatia and Albania in 2009. A 2012 NATO strategy statement captures well its expansionist logic: ‘[NATO’s] goal of a Europe whole and free, and sharing common values, would be best served by the eventual integration of all European countries that so desire into Euro-Atlantic structures.’
In the West of course, NATO’s expansion is seen as benign and right. Every intervention in territories picked almost at random, from Kosovo to Afghanistan, Iraq to Libya, is presented and perceived as an intervention in the service of the good, the ethical (no matter the often terrible consequences). And every new member admitted, almost entirely from the old Eastern Bloc, is presented and perceived as an extension of peace and security. But it’s not difficult to see that from the perspective of Russia, the perspective of the Kremlin, NATO’s wars, its expansionism, might be seen as at least something approaching an act of aggression.
And now, incredibly, NATO is amassing troops on the Russian border. So while Fallon et al might try to paint Russia as the aggressor here, it doesn’t take an FSB agent to see a rather less West-flattering counter-narrative. This is why, following the announcement of NATO’s plans to deploy troops to its eastern frontier states, former Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, a man well-versed in old-school Cold War diplomacy, declared: ‘[NATO’s rhetoric] screams of an intention practically to declare war on Russia. They only talk about defence, but in fact they are preparing an offensive.’
Yes, Russia has made its own moves. It did annex Crimea in the aftermath of the EU-backed, de facto coup in Ukraine in 2014. It is involved in the rebel-controlled eastern region of Ukraine. And Russian armed forces did help Assad’s Syrian regime roll back ISIS at great civilian cost. But these actions are not those of a power-crazed military aggressor — they’re those of a nation state with relatively clear strategic interests, chief among them being the protection of its borders, and beyond that, preserving regional stability. Russia is not so much driving conflicts as it is responding to them – responding to the West’s unravelling of the Middle East, responding to NATO and the EU’s various entreaties to the Baltic states, and responding, above all, to the transformation of Ukraine from a long-term ally into a EU-ified and NATO-encouraged antagonist.
Yet if NATO’s reckless sabre-rattling on the ground continues, Russia might really become what its Western antagonists presently only imagine it to be: a clear and present danger to the West.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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Sunday, March 26, 2017
Obamacare: My two cents
GOP congressmen are presently divided into two: One lot who want Obamacare completely repealed because of its huge costs and reduction in access to health care for many. The other lot fear that if they change too much they might lose the votes of those who currently benefit from Obamacare. So the abolitionists won't vote for the wishy-washy Ryancare and the nervous nellies won't vote for abolition. It looks like a stalemate.
But I think there may be a way out: Vote for Obamacare to cease as of the end of this year and in the meanwhile work on one of the many replacements that have been proposed -- so that a new system begins when Obamacare finally expires.
Hope that a brand-new system might not sacrifice GOP votes lies in both the huge costs of Obamacare and the fact that most people who have enrolled in health insurance for the first time have done so via the expanded access to Medicare and Medicaid that Obamacare enabled. So follow up on that by taking the savings from an abolished Obamacare and putting them into expanded Medicare and Medicaid programs.
Long before Obama, America had extensive provisions to get healthcare to the poor and the old so Obamacare was to some extent a solution in search of a problem. Where there was a problem was that many middle income families could not easily afford health insurance and got no government help with that. But expanded eligibility for Medicaid should fix most of that problem -- leaving only those who are really well-off to pay their own way.
I can't see many lost votes under those circumstances. There must of course be a limit to another expansion of Medicaid so my proposal for that would be to limit it to what was saved by abolishing the Obamacare octopus. Whole Obamacare agencies could go.
My proposal is of course nowhere near ideal but something like it may at the moment be the only way of lifting the many Obamacare burdens. Obamacare gave healthcare to some while taking it away from others. My proposal should genuinely expand access to healthcare.
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Jacob son of Moses sees some light
I think Yaacov Ben Moshe must be a nice guy. He still seems to believe SOME things that Leftists say. He seems to accept that the Left believes that "human nature is naturally good". They don't believe that. They have contempt for everyone but themselves. They don't even believe that one-another are good. After the Russian revolution, Lenin and Stalin killed off most of their old Bolshevik comrades. The "man is good" shtick is just good propaganda for the purpose of kicking away all the constraints and precautions of civilization.
Jacob also believes that there is a difference between liberalism and progressivism. There was once but both names are just euphemisms for "Leftist" these days. But he has some good points below nonetheless. I too have often pointed out that the delusory Leftist quest to create a new Eden excuses all sorts of brutality. Olavo de Carvalho is good on that point
I was startled to find a quote from Mark Steyn that, in referring to the rape in Rockville on a Fox television program, "This is the depravity of the political class. They’re basically willing to offer up their own citizens, 14-year-old schoolgirls and sacrifice them on the altar of diversity and virtue signaling and the shameless political posturing.”
This remark echoed and reinforced a theme I have been exposing for some months now and has led me to a new conclusion about my the waxing trend toward Human Sacrifice in the world today.
To explain this conclusion I need to take a step back and explain from the beginning.
The left acts as though it believes that human nature is naturally good and left to their own devices, people will be happy and content in a “natural” state. They ascribe all that is painful and even evil in life to flaws in “society”, “organized religion”, “morality”, “the culture” or any other target that exerts control over human behavior. This blameless image of the individual seems soothing and comfortable but the result is, anything but comfort. It leads to the idea that “freeing” the human spirit from those controlling institutions and forces is the way to achieve peace, health, enlightenment and happiness. Wishing only to make life better and more equal for all, they set about dismantling or (at the least, arbitrarily refashioning) all the structures and values that have evolved to maintain health, peace and equilibrium.
Welcome to what the inverted logic of the left calls progress; they want to tear away the culture and safeguards and begin to replace them with socialism that resembles nothing so much as the egalitarian propertyless primitive hunter/gatherer groups in pre-tribal cultures. They want equality without considering that the outcome of equality is to bring all economic development to a standstill and redistribute wealth so that industrious and clever people earn no more than what the most indolent and incapable receive. They call this Progressivism.
This is what fuels the zeal of “Progressives”. They feel they know what is needed and are willing to force people to agree to their view of things- whether they like it or not. When reality becomes impossible to ignore and the progress leads to conflict, chaos and inequality (as it inevitably does in the real world), it is either blamed on individuals who are not progressing (kuffirs, counter revolutionaries or enemies of the state as the case may be), or it is blamed on whatever “system” is still in place. Revolution, suppression and barbarity often ensue. Any idea that contradicts the romantic egalitarian principles is suppressed - made politically incorrect. All collectivist governments are leftist; and they are all to some degree quite literally, murderous, totalitarian and nihilistic.
The right, on the other hand, behaves as if they think that human nature, and indeed the larger natural world as a whole, is the source of chaos and evil as well as good and harmony. They acknowledge that society, religion and culture are all merely tools that have evolved to put the individual into a condition whereby he and the larger society can prosper and be safe. Different cultural systems may have more or less success in the attempt to control and channel whatever energy, chaos and evil exists into productive or, at least, harmless endeavors.
These opposite views of human nature and the nature of the world are the invisible but omnipresent forces that pit left wing and right wing against each other. There has been, a sort of compromise that was arrived at in Western Civilization. I refer to the particularly American brand of what I think of as Classical Western Liberalism- not to be confused with what is called Liberalism today. The founders of the United States were all liberals of some stripe in that they all believed in something that they called Liberty. This idea of human dignity and responsibility through Liberty found its expression in our revolution against tyranny and the nation that emerged from that revolution. Today,The Constitution of the United States stands alone in the history of humanity as the one concise system that has given rise to the freest, most prosperous in all human history.
So what is the difference between the liberals who founded our country and those who have inherited the name? There is confusion around the inexact application of the table “liberal” because there is a fundamental lack of understanding of where liberalism ends and progressivism begins.
The key difference between liberalism and progressivism is that progressivism requires the acceptance even the advocacy of human sacrifice as part of the “progress" toward the “new (and improved) world” they imagine that they have the wisdom and mandate to force us all to “evolve into.
This sacrifice takes many forms. Among these are:
The acceptance of terroristic atrocities as “the new normal”
The refusal to take and steps to prevent rapes and murders by stopping illegal immigration (as in Rockville)
The willful ignorance of the connection between Islamic scripture and modern Jihad.
The abandonment of U.S. officials and employees to danger and death in order to insulate the higher officials - esp during political campaigns (eg Benghazi).
The swallowing up of private relationships that are central to well-being and happiness by stifling bureaucracies (Obamacare)
The insidious growth of a dual standard of justice in which progressive politicians and their administrative lackeys (eg, Lois Lerner)are less subject to media exposure, law enforcement investigation and prosecution when they harm and betray citizens.
The "New Man”, the Caliphate and the "perfected societies" of Mohammed, Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and all the other promised utopias that were really dystopian houses of horror had that one thing in common with our American Progressive movement. Stretching back to Wilson (supporter of the KKK and popularizer of the concept of the “living constitution”), Sanger (Eugenesist) and Roosevelt (socialist nationalizer of private business) and led more recently by Obama (Open borders enabler and Islamist apologist) and Clinton (all of the above and “what difference does it make now anyway?”).
Their Ultimate Sacrifice, if we do not stop them is The Constitution and our Republic.
SOURCE
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The puzzle of Genesis 1:6-9
In my recent comments on Genesis chapter 1, I suggested that chapter 1 was not an original part of the Torah and should be recognized as deuterocanonical (apocryphal). I did however add the rider that what Genesis 1 had to relate was probably based on something relatively ancient, such as a myth or oral tradition.
And I think Genesis 1:6-9 fairly reliably identifies part of what that source was. It goes right back to the theology of ancient Sumer -- the first known human civilization, situated in what is now Southern Iraq.
Here is what 1:6-9 says in the New International Version:
"And God said, "Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water. So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. God called the vault "sky." And there was evening, and there was morning--the second day. And God said, "Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear." And it was so."
Wha? Was the Genesis writer saying that there was a body of water ABOVE the sky as well as on the surface of the earth? That is an extraordinary idea by modern scientific standards but it is precisely what the Sumerians believed. The rains came down from above, didn't they? So there must be another body of water way up above that the rains came from. It was a fairly reasonable deduction given their complete ignorance of modern science.
There is nothing else in Genesis 1 that is starkly contrary to what we know today -- though it's a bit odd that birds were created before land animals. It is more or less common sense and could have been made up by anyone. But 6-9 is very distinctive and clearly of Sumerian and later of Babylonian origin. The Babylonians borrowed a lot from Sumer, including the 7-day week.
The Sumerians and other early civilizations also had their own creation myths but there is absolutely no similarity to Genesis 1 in any of them. It would seem, therefore, that the 7 day account of creation is mainly of ancient Israelite origin with Sumerian "wisdom" added in to give it authority.
Genesis 1 does read in a very orderly way so I surmise that it was in fact the work of one man. When it was originally written is completely unknown. But its allusion to Sumerian/Babylonian thought could make it quite ancient. Textual criticism does however enable us to trace the version that appears in the Bible to about the third century BC --JR.
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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Friday, March 24, 2017
Learning from the past
If the past is indeed a capable teacher, it would seem there is much to be learned from America’s industrial lions of the early 20th century – people like Andrew Mellon, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie.
Most men today do not argue that as the 49th U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon knew more than his fair share about the philosophies and policies needed to stoke the engines of economic prosperity. It was Mellon, more than almost any other, who put the economic roar into the Roaring 20’s. And he did it by employing the business theories espoused by Adam Smith.
More than a century before, Smith – an economist, author, and philosopher – poured the concrete foundations for what would become classical free market economic theory. In “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression,” author Amity Shlaes quotes a passage from Andrew Mellon’s book that harkens back to Smith and rings forth to us today:
“Does anyone question that Mr. Ford has made more money by reducing the price of car and increasing his sales than he would have made by maintaining a high price and a greater profit per car, but selling less cars? The government is just a business.”
Free market economic theories have just as much to teach us in the Twenty-first Century as they did in the Twentieth during Mellon’s day and the Eighteenth Century of Smith. You don’t have to be an economic genius to grasp Mellon’s principles: lower taxes allow business to expand. When a business expands, it hires, it produces things, it essentially puts money in the pockets of its people.
Intuitively, Americans know this. We love a bargain; lower prices equal more sales. And so, when we transfer these ideas to the behemoth now known as the American economy, we can and should expect positive results.
This week a new health care plan comes before Congress. It may not be perfect, but it’s obvious to all that the old one was crumbling before our very eyes – and in a very short time.
As well, a new budget is put before lawmakers. Yes, there are cuts involved. But anyone who is in debt up to their ears knows that at some point the belt must be tightened. And right now, the United States of America has unimaginable debt. The gross U.S. federal government debt is estimated to be $20.1 trillion, at the end of the fiscal year 2017.
I’m not advocating on behalf of either of these pieces of legislation. But I am saying we should look at what has worked for us in the past. The American economy is the proverbial Titanic. It will take a long time to turn it around, but heaven forbid we don’t see the iceberg ahead and at the very least try and avoid it.
So, if all politics is personal, my family member and I may not agree how to turn the ship around, but we both instinctively know that we are not headed in the right direction. The only question then becomes: Do we turn right or left to avoid hitting that wall of ice?
SOURCE
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The Misplaced Compassion of 'Sanctuary Cities'
Once again the Left’s engagement in fantasy instead of fact leaves rationale people shaking their heads in utter disbelief. A mere four days after two criminal aliens were arrested for brutally raping a 14-year-old girl in a Rockville, Maryland high school, the state legislature passed a bill declaring Maryland to be a “sanctuary state,” affording illegal aliens more protections from deportation. As Mark Alexander noted last week, the “sanctuary” charade certainly makes these places safer for criminal aliens. Maryland’s Republican governor Larry Hogan, who promised to veto the bill, angrily responded to the crime and called for Montgomery County to “immediately and fully cooperate with all federal authorities” as they investigate the “heinous crime.”
To add insult to injury, it has been learned that one of the illegals had been previously detained in Texas for illegally entering the country, but was subsequently released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Obviously he should never have been released.
This past Monday, the Department of Homeland Security released a list, which is by no means exhaustive, of “jurisdictions that have enacted polices which limit cooperation with ICE.” A majority of the jurisdictions were located in Texas, but not surprisingly Montgomery County, Maryland, was also included on the list. Donald Trump has been working to expose just how big the problem of lawless local governments aiding and abetting of illegal aliens has become.
Denying the growing illegal alien crime epidemic will only create more suffering for law-abiding citizens. Lawlessness unchecked leads only to greater and more severe criminal acts, as the Rockville rape case attests. The great fallacy preached by many on the Left is the insistence that to be the truly compassionate one must ignore “lower-level” lawlessness. The assumption being that a nation committed to the Rule of Law is inherently socially unjust.
Leftists continue to double down and ignore the genuine plight of the innocent victims who have been begging for protection and the enforcement of the law. Where is that great “compassion” from the Left for law-abiding American citizens?
SOURCE
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The New Democratic Party
Where is the Democratic party? The party of political giants like FDR, LBJ and JFK is missing in action along with the letters that defined its heroes. This is now the party of Obama, Schumer, Pelosi - a facsimile of the past and a party without direction and policy guidelines.
America needs a two-party system. Differences are desirable within a Constitutional framework. Parties have served the nation well; albeit exceptions abound.
However, in my opinion, the nation has entered a new phase in party history. The Democratic party has become the party of NO. It stands against Trump, but it offers almost nothing of substance. A party that was the incubator of ideas is now bereft of them. More importantly, the Democratic party is intent on using any method in its quiver to hurt Republican counterparts. Politics may not be bean bag, but it wasn't a bloodsport until recently. Now Democrats view Republicans as the "enemy" and, of course, enemies must be defeated.
There was a time when Republicans were merely "foes" and "rivals." Those days have passed. Now lies, character assassination and personal vindictiveness are fair play. Anything goes in a world where winning is all that counts. What this means, of course, is that partisanship makes it far more difficult to govern.
During the 2012 campaign Senator Harry Reid said Mitt Romney did not pay his taxes. This claim was a bald faced lie. In fact, Mr. Reid admitted as much. Yet he also claimed this tactic was acceptable. For Reid, it shows something about political verve. What it shows is that lying is okay as long as it undermines the enemy.
This is the path to a political nightmare in which crushing the opposition is all that counts. But politics is not Vince Lombardi football; the opposition stays in the halls of Congress, continues to play a role and may be needed to get legislation passed even after electoral defeat. How can a modicum of cooperation be engendered in the present environment? Moreover, Democratic leadership has made up its mind that the present anti Trump strategy will be to resist. Tom Perez and Keith Ellison, the two newly named heads of the Democratic National Committee, have made it clear that they will resist this president even before a political offer is made. This is the politics of preemption. Reject even those offers that might benefit your party and could benefit the country.
It is instructive that two of the most radical voices in the Democratic party now represent its leadership. So far in the hard core left direction have Democrats gone that Mr. Ellison who once supported Reverend Farrakhan and who routinely made anti-Israel and - some would contend - anti-Semitic comments is supported by Senator Charles Schumer, a self-described moderate and a booster of Israeli-American relations. Schumer can read the handwriting on the wall. The party is in thrall to the hard left leaving in the dust an organization that was thoughtful and largely pragmatic.
This is the new Democratic party, one that shuns pragmatism and embraces ideology. In fact, the former head of the Democratic National Committee at the last party convention could not distinguish between socialism and Democratic positions. Alas, few Democrats can - the party is ensconced in the febrile left with little room for any other position.
What this means is that the Democratic party is working vigorously to be a marginal organization operating at the fringes of politics. Winston Churchill understood why this movement to the left is bound to fail by noting: "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."
SOURCE
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"Racist" Trump to appoint Indian Appeals court judge
The White House announced Tuesday that Trump intended to nominate U.S. District Judge Amul R. Thapar to serve as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.
Thapar, son of Indian-American immigrants and a former federal prosecutor, now serves as a federal judge in the Eastern District of Kentucky. Bush appointed him in 2008.
The announcement for a nomination comes as Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, is going through his confirmation hearings in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Appeals court judges can be nearly as important as Supreme Court judges since the high court is limited in the number of cases it accepts.
There are 19 appellate court vacancies across the United States that Trump could fill, and 96 on federal district courts, according to Elizabeth Slattery, a legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
There are also two vacancies on the U.S. Court of International Trade and six on the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. There are a total of 677 authorized district judgeships and 179 total court of appeals judgeships.
“This is a great sign that President Trump takes lower courts seriously,” Slattery told The Daily Signal. “The last administration did not make lower court judges a priority, and that ended up being good for conservatives because it has left Trump with a lot of opportunities. There was a lot of thought that the president would wait until the Gorsuch nomination reached its conclusion.”
Given his position on the Trump campaign’s Supreme Court list of 21 names, this could be grooming Thapar for the Supreme Court, said Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, a conservative legal group, and a senior legal fellow for FreedomWorks.
“Everyone on that list was ranked somewhere from good to great as far as being a constitutionalist,” Levey told The Daily Signal. “Certainly if he is qualified to be on the Supreme Court, he is qualified to be on an appeals court. He would be the first Indian-American on the Supreme Court. There is no better way to give him credentials.”
Thapar began his legal career in private practice. He clerked for Judge S. Arthur Spiegel on the District Court for the Southern District of Ohio and then with Judge Nathaniel R. Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, to which Trump has selected Thapar to serve on. Thapar received his bachelor’s degree from Boston College in 1991 and his Juris Doctor from the University of California, Berkeley.
SOURCE
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Trump was ‘wire-tapped’ after all
Devin Nunes, the Republican Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, revealed overnight that some of the US President’s personal communications had been caught up in “incidental” surveillance involving a foreign power in the months after the election.
Nunes said the information, which he said was obtained from a source he did not identify, was collected legally in November, December and January — from the November 8 election to Trump’s January 20 inauguration — but the names of some Trump officials involved had been “unmasked” and the communications “widely disseminated” within spy agencies.
More HERE
And the Donks are now in full hate-speech mode against Rep. Nunes
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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Thursday, March 23, 2017
The "majority of the popular vote" myth
And a proposal for Federal legislation
That Hillary won a majority of the individual votes cast in the last presidential election has been a huge talking point for the Donks. They use it to justify their Fascist attacks on free speech and attacks on Trump generally. But it is basically a fraudulent claim. Donks use it to claim that Hillary had more support than Trump among the voters at large. But it does not indicate that at all.
The key is that "votes cast" is only part of the story. What about the non-voters? Non-voters could be non-voters out of indifference but there is another large reason for non-voting. Take California. California gives ALL its electoral college votes to the candidate who won the majority of the popular vote in that State. Other states send electors to the electoral college in proportion to the popular votes gained. So if a candidate got 55% of the popular vote, only 55% of the electoral college votes from that State would go to that candidate.
So what would a rational GOP supporter do in California on election day? Stay home. California is a solid Democrat state so there is no point in the GOP voter troubling himself on election day. ALL the electoral college votes from CA will without fail go to the Donk candidate.
In most other states, however, there is a BIG reason for a GOP voter to go out and vote. The number of GOP voters who turn out will influence the makeup of the electoral college. Even if a majority of the State's voters support the Donks, GOP voters in that State can still send a lot of GOP votes to the electoral college.
So nobody in fact knows how many people supported Hillary versus Trump.
But the imbalance between the popular vote and the electoral college vote certainly looks anti-democratic and that is deplorable. So can anything be done to fix that situation? It can. Pass over-riding Federal legislation to wipe out the California practice. Oblige the States to give their electoral college votes in proportion to the poplar vote. Had that been done in the recent election, Trump might well have gained a majority in the national popular vote. There could have been a LOT of "discouraged" GOP voters in CA.
Footnote: There is a distinction between the number of votes counted and the number of votes cast. States don’t count their absentee ballots unless the number of outstanding absentee ballots is larger than the state margin of difference. If there is a margin of 1,000 votes counted and there are 1,300 absentee ballots outstanding, then the state tabulates those. If the number of outstanding absentee ballots wouldn’t influence the election results, then the absentee ballots aren’t counted -- JR.
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Trump Budget Drains the Swamp
Everyone in Washington hates Donald Trump’s new budget. So it must have something going for it. This is a budget plan that will surgically remove trillions of dollars of wasteful spending from the obese $3.9 trillion federal budget. Many agencies will have to live with cuts of 5, 10 and 30 percent, while other outdated, duplicative or unproductive programs will go to the graveyard.
It’s a gutsy document that takes on the hoards of special-interest groups that populate Washington, DC. The Washington metropolitan workforce will shrink, and so the town is in cardiac arrest. The Washington Post quoted an unnamed “official” who said that his fellow workers at the Department of Housing and Urban Development were feeling “demoralized.” Boohoo. Then the anonymous bureaucrat added: “This is just a tough, tough time. HUD is no different than any other domestic agency in just feeling as though these cuts are all very arbitrary and unnecessary.”
Well, maybe the workers at HUD now know how “demoralized” Americans feel about the way their agency misspends tax dollars.
No surprise here that Trump, who promised to drain the swamp, is getting resistance from the people who live in the swamp. The rest of America, outside the Washington Beltway, couldn’t be more pleased.
The deep cutbacks in the State Department, foreign service and foreign aid have been met with particular scorn by liberals. But why? Americans have been saying for decades that they believe foreign aid is a waste of money. They’re right. Some $50 billion of aid money has gone to sub-Saharan Africa and surrounding regions over the last 40 years and it has bought nothing.
The welfare industry is complaining about cuts to housing, energy, and community-development programs. They claim that the safety net for the working poor is being slashed. But the working poor don’t want more community-development block grants, job training programs, legal aid and so on. They don’t want handouts; they want jobs that bring real economic development. The Trump tax cuts and the regulatory relief that will bring back industries such as coal will have a much more positive impact on their lives than billions of dollars of federal assistance.
Welfare programs will be forced to become more efficient and less wasteful. The government’s auditors at the Government Accountability Office recently found more than $110 billion annually in fraudulent and erroneous payments to claimants. No one has ever taken a serious stab at reducing fraud and cheating in Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, earned income tax credits and so on. Trump will.
Trump’s budget, in short, is holding liberalism accountable for the trillions of dollars spent that have delivered pitiful results. The region of Appalachia has been showered with tens of billions of dollars in federal aid over the last 50 years, and inner cities have received hundreds of billions. Where are the jobs? Where is the development? Where are the good schools, the safe streets? Where is the community renewal? Why haven’t minorities — blacks and Hispanics, whose incomes still lag so far behind those of whites — been lifted up?
When the welfare state was created, Lyndon Johnson said that the “days of the dole in this country are numbered.” Fifteen thousand days and $10 trillion in welfare later, Americans don’t like what all this has bought.
Trump wants to move our fiscal policies in a new direction that ends waste, demands accountability and more personal responsibility, funding only what has a proven track record of working. He wants to unplug government programs from their perpetual life machine. Government must become lean and efficient and customer friendly. It must begin to pay its bills.
Liberals believe this is radical and cruel. The rest of us think it is common sense.
SOURCE
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Justices on 9th Circuit feuding over travel ban ruling
A feud is reportedly playing out among judges on the federal appeals court that upheld a block on President Trump's original travel ban.
Politico reported Saturday that five judges on the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals this week publicly recorded their disagreement with last month's ruling made by three of their colleagues.
Days later, on Friday, another filing from the court's conservative justices argued that most people affected by the original travel ban are not entitled to Constitutional protections, because they have not yet entered the U.S.
"The vast majority of foreigners covered by the executive order have no Due Process rights," Judge Alex Kozinski wrote in the filing, joined by four other conservative justices.
"Nevertheless, the district court enjoined the order’s travel provisions in their entirety, even as applied to the millions of aliens who have no constitutional rights whatsoever because they have never set foot on American soil."
The court's liberal justices fired back, saying that the conservative judges were trying to influence ongoing legal dispute over Trump's revised travel ban issued last week. That case, two of the justices argued, was not current before their court, and the conservatives' filing was an unwarranted expression of their personal views.
"Judges are empowered to decide issues properly before them, not to express their personal views on legal questions no one has asked them," Judge Marsha Berzon wrote, according to Politico. "There is no appeal currently before us, and so no stay motion pending that appeal currently before us either."
"We will have this discussion, or one like it," she added. "But not now."
Trump issued his first travel ban executive order on Jan. 27 barring citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries – Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Sudan and Somalia – from entering the U.S. That measure was blocked by a federal judge in Seattle, whose ruling was later upheld by the three-judge Ninth Circuit panel.
That prompted Trump to issue a revised ban on March 6, which exempts Iraqis from its list of banned foreign nationals and carves out exceptions for visa and green card holders. Still, the measure has drawn backlash and federal judges in Hawaii and Maryland have blocked it.
Trump reacted furiously to the Hawaii judge's injunction at a rally in Nashville, Tenn., on Wednesday, vowing to appeal the ruling up to the Supreme Court if necessary.
"This ruling makes us look weak, which, by the way, we no longer are," he said. "Believe me."
"We're going to fight this terrible ruling. We're going to take our case as far as it needs to go, including all the way up to the Supreme Court."
SOURCE
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Leftmedia Attempts Hit Piece on Gorsuch
The New York Times decided to help out its Democrat buddies by running a story clearly designed to be used as a hit piece against Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. The Times article, entitled "Neil Gorsuch Has Web of Ties to Secretive Billionaire," attempted to paint Gorsuch as a puppet of the wealthy conservative business man Philip Anschutz, due to the fact that Gorsuch had previously worked for the man years ago when he was a lawyer. The story submits no compelling evidence supporting its insinuation of corruption and offers little anecdotal evidence besides. It'd be laughable if it weren't so outrageous. The best they could come up with is that Gorsuch and some executives at Anschutz's companies decided to go in together on buying a vacation house. Shocking, no?
This story contains about as much news as Rachel Maddow's silly reveal of Trump's 2005 tax return. There's no there, there. Gorsuch had already disclosed all his prior business ties, including his having worked for Anschutz. He has also recused himself from hearing any cases involving his former clients. The fact that Gorsuch is friends with former clients is only natural. Besides, it's not as if Anschutz is some nefarious fellow. His business assets are well known and are all above board.
The problem for the Leftmedia and Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is their belief that a judge should base his rulings primarily upon social activists' concerns, not upon the Constitution and the letter of the law. Gorsuch has a sound and proven track record of ruling appropriately, even if he thinks that a given statute may need changes. In his rulings, he has repeatedly recognized and emphasized that a judge is bound and limited by the law, and that it's the role of legislators, not judges, to create laws. That's why Gorsuch presents such a threat to leftists and their disregard for the Rule of Law.
With activist justices such as Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg already on the bench, it's indeed refreshing to hear a judge speak so clearly about the limits set upon the judicial branch by the Constitution. The more Democrats and the Leftmedia attempt to smear Gorsuch, the more he's proving to be an excellent choice for the Supreme Court.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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Wednesday, March 22, 2017
Why the high intelligence of Indian Americans?
I reproduce below a well-informed answer to the above question. I disagree with his conclusion that it is all due to nutrition however. Other work finds only 5 IQ points attributable to nutrition. The suggestion of 15 IQ points is therefore startling. So I think we need to look at other possibilities. I think that the Indian advantage is probably a compound of several factors.
The treatment of Indians as a single group is of course absurd. Almost any Indian will regale you with stories about the great gaps between the castes. And the castes do seem to have a racial and historic origin. A Brahman and a Dalit are worlds apart in all sorts of ways, including skin color. And it is usually held that the differences arose from the Northern Brahmins being in fact late "Aryan" invaders on top of an original Dravidian population. So we would expect Brahmins to have higher IQs. And Brahmins seem well-represented in Indian immigrants to America.
Everything in the above paragraph is however subject to controversy so how much caste accounts for higher IQs in Indian Americans remains "under study". Something that would reveal the effect (or not) of caste would be a study of Indian diaspora populations in places such as Fiji, where the Indians there are the descendants of coolies imported to act as agricultural labourers. If they have high IQs, there is no caste effect. But I can find no data on such populations. It is however true that Indians run just about everything in Fiji these days.
The next possibility is related to the one above: A general selective effect of immigration. Diaspora populations are not always brighter than the home population but when we are looking at poor countries they probably are. To get yourself out of a poor country to a rich one surely requires brains. So regardless of caste, diaspora Indians should be brighter.
The third possibility is one shown up by the Flynn effect: Education. Education does have an effect on at least some measures of intelligence. How that works is speculative but the most plausible explanation is that doing tests and exams in the course of a long education develops test-taking skills (e.g. guessing when uncertain) that generalize to IQ tests. And the Indian education system is woeful so a transition to the less woeful U.S. system should confer an advantage.
A fourth factor that is rarely mentioned in these discussions is regional differences within India. The Indian South seems to be much brighter, particularly where mathematical ability is concerned. The great concentration of Indian IT knowledge is in Bengaluru (Bangalore), which is in the South. And it was almost entirely Southern engineers who were behind the quite remarkable Indian Mars shot.
I am not going to say much about why the Southerners are smarter but I note that they hate one-another. Keralans despise Tamils, for instance. And that is related to the long history of warfare between them. And dummies are the least likely to survive wars. So warfare has dragged up the average IQ of most of the South.
But getting back to Indians in America: I have seen no figures on it but I gather that a huge proportion of Indians came to America to work in IT. If that is so, they would mostly have come from the South -- because that is where the IT ability is. So the Indian immigrants to the USA came from a (Southern) population that was ALREADY pretty high on IQ. So from that starting point, the various advantages (already mentioned) of life in the USA could easily have added one third of a standard deviation -- which could explain what we see. It could in fact explain the whole of what we see.
And regardless of where they come from in India, being employed to work in IT is a HUGE selective pressure. To code easily in languages like C and its derivatives requires an IQ within about the top 2%. If that doesn't bring up the average, nothing would.
So I would summarize that the high IQs of Indians in the USA is the combined effect of nutrition, education, caste, an immigrant effect, an effect of regional origin and an effect of occupation.
Given the extraordinary difference in average IQ between Indians in India and Indians in America (well over one standard deviation) I think a multifactorial explanation has to be strongly indicated. But all answers at this point are speculative.
One of the great mysteries in IQ research is why Indian Americans are such super achievers despite the fact that India reportedly has an IQ of only 82 according to the book IQ and Wealth of Nations.
And yet Indians in North America are known for their high intelligence and scholastic achievement, and despite being new to America, are already slightly over-represented on Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans. In some parts of Canada (particularly the maritime provinces like Newfoundland) if you’re Indian, all the white will people will assume you’re a doctor.
So how can Indians in North America be so smart when India’s average IQ is not great? Many people in the HBD-blogosphere invoke the theory that India is nation of many micro-races (castes) and that largely the smartest castes migrate to America, but the truth is usually much simpler.
Of the 2.8 million Indians in America, probably no more than 25% (700,000) are the ones who initially gained immigration (and the remaining 75% are the spouces, siblings, parents, and children, who came alone for the ride). But these 700,000 who actually gained immigration for themselves and their families are probably roughly the most occupationally successful 700,000 Indians out of a population of nearly 1.3 billion. In other words, they are above the +3.3 standard deviation mark in occupational status, and are on on average +3.5 SD. Since occupational status (mostly a function of education and income) correlates 0.7 with IQ, we should expect their IQ’s to be 3.5(0.7) = 2.45 SD higher than the average Indian (assuming Indians have a mean IQ of 82 and an SD 15, those who initially gain immigration to America should have an IQ of 119).
But because the IQ correlation between a parent and his adult offspring is about 0.45, the children of these high achieving immigrants from India should regress precipitously to the Indian mean:
0.45(119 – 82) + 82 = 99
Thus we should expect second-generation Indians born in America to have IQ’s around the U.S. average which is inconsistent with their incredible achievements. Can their achievements thus be explained by Tiger Moms? According to excellent Jamaican American blogger JayMan, parenting has zero impact.
So how do we explain the high achievements of second generation Indian immigrants? Nutrition. Blogger Steve Sailer was perhaps the first to notice that even un-mixed black Americans who have lived in the United States for centuries are several inches taller and about 13 IQ points smarter than black Africans. This suggests that first world nutrition adds about 13 IQ points (and several inches of height) to people of third world ancestry.
More HERE
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Ditch Obamacare, and don't stop there
by Jeff Jacoby
TO HEAR the liberal denunciations of the proposed American Health Care Act — House Speaker Paul Ryan's plan to replace Obamacare — you would think the GOP had set out to wreck a brilliant and much-loved social reform that Americans couldn't imagine living without.
Democratic leaders in Congress have slammed the Republican legislation as a plan to "Make America Sick Again," and to wreak, in Nancy Pelosi's words, "massive damage to millions of families across the nation." The AARP, an influential pressure group that claims to represent older Americans, has launched a high-profile campaign against the bill on social media, by video, and in an open letter to lawmakers. AARP warns that the Republicans' health care overhaul "raises premiums and weakens Medicare" and would "dramatically increase health care costs for Americans aged 50-64."
Well, yes and no. The Ryan plan is indeed deeply flawed. Not because it obliterates Obamacare — but because it doesn't.
This is only the latest turn in a long saga of health care "reforms" that have constricted choice, disempowered consumers, banished price awareness, eliminated competition, and discouraged innovation. The results are all around us: skyrocketing medical costs, mounting economic pressures on employers, employees, doctors, and patients — and a political obsession with providing insurance, rather than with producing good health.
It would take a miracle for Congress to find the courage to pull up the whole misbegotten system by its roots. But the payoff would be even more miraculous.
From Day 1, Obamacare was relentlessly unpopular. Republicans surged to one political triumph after another by vowing to get rid of it. Some libertarians and free-market conservatives, to their credit, have spurned the leadership bill as nothing more than Obamacare Lite. But many weak-kneed GOP moderates have been spooked by the assault from liberals, especially after the Congressional Budget Office prediction that ending Obamacare would mean 24 million more people without health insurance. There is good reason to doubt the CBO's conclusions — its previous coverage estimates have routinely turned out wrong — but Democrats and their allies are flogging them with enthusiasm, raising alarums about the catastrophe to come if Obamacare is dismantled.
Yet many in the GOP are now waffling because they fear the political costs of doing anything else. They would like to get rid of the mandates, taxes, and regulations that the public has never liked, but can't bring themselves to scrap the law's popular benefits and entitlements. They don't want to be held accountable for not allowing young adults to stay on their parents' insurance plans until age 26. They don't want to face the outrage that will follow when insurers charge higher premiums to customers with pre-existing conditions.
"Republicans want medicine to be inexpensive and effective," commentator Mark Humphrey writes, "but they do not want to repeal the morass of regulations that make it expensive and ineffective.
Just so. But they can't have one without the other — and without braving the political storms that have made such chaos of America's health care and health insurance landscape.
If Republicans were serious, and willing to endure some political pain to reach a better outcome, they'd eliminate the tax deduction for employers who provide health insurance as part of employee compensation. They'd repeal laws that force insurers to cover a legislated array of medical benefits and treatments. They'd remove the barriers that restrict consumers in one state from purchasing health insurance across state lines.
And they'd break the destructive habit of treating health insurance as the logical and preferable way to pay for routine health care.
Were members of Congress to enact all that, they would be replacing a dysfunctional, expensive, and coercive environment with something vastly better: a robust, competitive market focused on the interests of consumers — not on the demands of the insurance cartel and the political class. They would be restoring the price transparency that has long been missing from health care. They would be encouraging medical providers and insurers to compete in earnest — which would inevitably lower prices and improve quality. They would be de-linking medical coverage from employment, and endowing tens of millions of Americans with the economic leverage that comes with choosing for themselves what policies they will buy and from whom. And they would be ending the crazy distortions caused by using health insurance to pay for regular, ordinary expenses — something we would never think of doing with automobile or homeowner's insurance.
Instead of solving the system's problems, Obamacare only entrenched them. While Democrats portray repeal of the Affordable Care Act as an assault on baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet, Republicans ought to be reminding voters how Obamacare played out in real life: reminding them, for instance, that it hurt more families than it helped. That it saddled insurers with losses so massive they were forced to pull out of many state exchanges. That it forced millions of Americans off their existing health plans. That it fueled double-digit annual increases in premiums. That it added billions to the national debt.
Since 2010, Republicans have been swearing up and down that they would scrap Obamacare. The way to do that is to scrap Obamacare.
Scrap the subsidies, the community-rating rules, and the guaranteed-issue requirements. Scrap the employer mandates and the individual tax penalties. Scrap the "slacker mandate" for those 26 and under. Scrap the guarantee of coverage for pre-existing conditions.
And then keep going.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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Tuesday, March 21, 2017
In their rage at being dispossessed, the elite out themselves as being anti-democratic
They just cannot understand that there are many who disagree with them. They just cannot conceive that there are many of us who chortle with delight at Trump's daily attacks on the Leftist thought police. My son and I are both highly educated but in conversations with one-another we are something of a Trump admiration society -- JR
Brendan O'Neill
Has there ever been a tantrum as tinny and irritating as the one thrown by the chattering classes in response to Brexit and Donald Trump? It’s the mother of all meltdowns. The huff heard round the world. A hissy fit of historic proportions.
Children who don’t get their way normally foot-stomp and wail “I hate you” for three or four minutes before collapsing into a knackered heap. The liberal elite has been at it for nine months, ever since Brexit last June pricked the sealed, self-satisfied bubble they live in and reminded them that — brace yourself — there are people out there who think differently.
Brexit and Trump signal the demise of Western liberal civilisation, they sob. Fascism is staggering back to life, they cry. “Boy does this age remind me of the 1930s,” said British politician and historical illiterate Paddy Ashdown about Brexit.
Russia planted Trump in the White House, they yelp, like neo-McCarthyists convinced the Kremlin has commandeered Washington with an evil eye for steering it towards destruction.
Their arguments grow more unhinged every day. Their contempt for ordinary voters intensifies. Their toddler-like search for some evil thing to blame their political troubles on gathers pace.
What we’re witnessing is the rage of the entitled, the fury of a technocratic elite that had come to see itself as the rightful, most expert overseer of politics. They really cannot believe that everyday people, millions of the idiots, have had the brass neck to say: “We don’t like how you do politics. We’re going to try a different approach.”
As with all tantrum throwers, their first instinct is to deflect blame from themselves. “I didn’t do it!” is the cry of the child who did do it, and so it is with the melting old oligarchy.
Seemingly incapable of reasoned self-reflection, unwilling to accept that lots of people are simply rejecting their politics, the chattering class goes on the hunt for some naughty force on which to pin the blame.
It was Russian meddling that swung the election for Trump, they say. Trump is “Putin’s puppet”, apparently. A YouGov survey of Democratic voters in the US found that 50 per cent of them believe Russia “tampered” with vote counts. There’s no proof whatsoever for this. It’s an “election-day conspiracy theory”, in YouGov’s words.
Some even claim that we 17.4 million Brits who voted for Brexit were somehow got at by Putinite masterminds, though they never explain how. British Labour MP Ben Bradshaw says it’s “highly probable” Russia interfered in the EU referendum last June. He’s offered not one shred of evidence for this. But then, we’re no longer in the realm of reason — we’re in a world of tantrums.
As Masha Gessen argues in The New York Review of Books, the “unrelenting focus” on Russia of Western liberals has become a way of avoiding self-analysis. It’s become “a crutch for the American imagination”, a catch-all explanation for “how Trump could have happened to us”. So the problem isn’t that Hillary Clinton and her myriad media cheerleaders failed. It’s that powerful foreign forces meddled with American minds and warped the American political fabric.
The chattering-class tantrum is fuelled by an urge to dodge self-reckoning; by an absolute terror of asking what the old politics was getting wrong.
Some in the meltdown lobby are blaming “bots” — computer programs that pump out pro-Trump or pro-Brexit messages on social media. These sinister machines “changed the conversation”, says Britain’s The Observer newspaper. EU aficionado and one-time rationalist Richard Dawkins goes further, saying “sinister social media bots read minds and manipulate votes”, and apparently this “explains the mystery of Trump and Brexit”. They really are losing it. Another ingredient of temper tantrums is the use of heated language that’s way over the top to the situation at hand. The chattering class meltdown has plenty of this.
Witness the growing reliance on Nazi talk. Protesters against Trump wave placards of him wearing a Hitler moustache next to the words “we know how this ends”. The Archbishop of Canterbury says Brexit and Trump are part of the “fascist tradition of politics”. Prince Charles says the Brexit era brings to mind “the dark days of the 1930s”. Calm down, Charlie.
This casual marshalling of Nazi horrors to demonise Brexit and those Americans who voted for Trump is pretty outrageous. It drains the word Nazi of its historic meaning and turns it into an all-purpose insult, to be hurled at anyone we don’t like. Again, it’s tantrum-like when these people shout “Hitler!” — what they’re really saying is “I’m so angry I could cry”. They’ve turned the Holocaust into an exclamation mark to their fury — an unforgivable abuse of history.
And, of course, all tantrums involve lashing out, as this one does. The levels of antipathy aimed at voters, and at democracy itself, has been extraordinary.
We have failed to “keep the mob from the gates”, says Brexit-fearing columnist Matthew Parris. American writer Jason Brennan has become a favourite of liberal publications in the tantrum era because he wrote a book called Against Democracy and says “low-information white people” should not be trusted to make big political decisions.
American-British conservative Andrew Sullivan frets that the “passions of the mob” have been unleashed. A writer for The Observer says it’s time to smash the “taboo” against saying that ordinary people are often very stupid, and “there are times when their stupidity combines to produce gross, self-harming acts of national stupidity”.
Don’t worry, mate: that taboo has been well and truly demolished, if it ever existed. Post-Brexit and post-Trump, the chattering classes have not been shy in wondering if the masses are too daft for politics.
This is the frenzy of entitlement. The “third way”, pro-EU, Clinton-style technocratic classes that have dominated public life for a couple of decades came to think of themselves as the only people properly cut out for politics.
They insulated the business of politics from popular opinion. They made it all about expertise, not public engagement. Through bureaucratic institutions like the EU, and by giving greater decision-making powers to quangos and the judiciary, they sought to elevate politics far above us, the plebs.
They really convinced themselves that politics was for people like them, for the cool-headed and clever, not for us; not for the poor; not for the ill-educated or those driven by conviction rather than science.
And that’s why Brexit, Trump and other quakes have devastated them so, propelling them into a permanent state of tantrum: because they’d become so aloof and so arrogant, that they started believing no one except their set, their friends, their institutions, could be trusted with deciding the fate of nations.
And guess what? That’s why so many are voting against them. We’re witnessing a revolt of the demos against a political class that thought it could get away with governing from on high and treating people as problems to be fixed rather than as political citizens to be taken seriously. In a beautiful irony, the fact that their response to this revolt has been “Waaaah! How dare you?!” proves the revolt was long overdue.
SOURCE
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Trump the conservative
The article below is from a Left-leaning source so I have cut out some expressions of opinion
The Republican agenda in Trump’s Washington is driven by hard-line conservative doctrine about starving the beast of government, slashing programs for the needy, and — upcoming on the agenda — tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations that supposedly will help those farther down the food chain.
The hardest evidence so far of this shift from Trump’s campaign rhetoric to his governing reality is the two specific, sweeping proposals released in the last two weeks: the plan to replace President Obama’s Affordable Care Act and Trump’s budget outline for 2018.
Facing trouble winning hard-line conservative support to fulfill his promise campaign promises to replace the Affordable Care Act, the president leaned even harder to the right last week, offering to add to the GOP’s health care plan a requirement that able-bodied Medicaid recipients must work to qualify for coverage.
The plan already would dramatically cut subsidies for working-poor beneficiaries of the Obama program, with the heaviest burdens — thousands of dollars a year in additional expenses — falling on people from 50 to 64 years old.
It also would break a campaign promise that Trump made not to cut Medicaid: Instead, it slashes deeply into the program. In all, official estimates say 24 million people would lose insurance by 2026.
House Speaker Paul Ryan explicitly credited Trump for helping push long-held conservative policy objectives like the health care bill. “Did you see him yesterday in Detroit, in Tennessee?” Ryan asked reporters at his weekly press conference, detailing how the president is helping Republicans move the controversial health bill forward.
“The president has a connection with individuals in this country. He goes — no offense — but he goes around the media and connects with people specifically and individually,” Ryan said. “That helps us bridge gaps in Congress and get Republicans unified so we can deliver on our promises. And that is extremely constructive.”
Trump’s first months in office have been a relief to people like Matt Mackowiak, a GOP strategist and president of Potomac Strategy Group, who had been skeptical of Trump during the campaign. Now, Mackowiak said, conservatives feel they have “a lot to be excited about.”
“You can credibly say this is the most conservative Cabinet at least since Reagan and perhaps even going further back than that,” he said. “I really have been encouraged in a lot of ways.”
“My sense is Trump wants to be successful,” Mackowiak said. “He’s less concerned about specifically what success means. He’s more concerned with the perception that he is successful and the best way for him to be successful this calendar year is to remain united with Republicans and to advance a conservative agenda.”
The conservative circle around Trump includes his budget director, Mulvaney — who was such a committed deficit hawk in Congress he even advocated for cuts to military spending, which is outside typical Republican thought — and Tom Price, the president’s new health secretary, a former Representative from Georgia who was one of the most vehement opponents of the Obama health law in Congress.
Nevertheless Trump’s team still finds itself defending the president to conservatives. On Friday morning, Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway sold Trump’s right-leaning bona fides to a Washington audience. “I do think Donald Trump is a conservative,” she said, listing his budget and health care plan. “I think the National Review crowd should be very happy.”
The embrace of the party’s conservative flank has many Washington baffled. “It’s bizarre in a lot of ways,” Norman Ornstein, a political analyst with the conservative American Enterprise Institute and no fan of Trump’s, said of the president’s conservative agenda focus.
He highlighted what he sees as the most “bizarre element” to date of Trump’s shift in focus and priorities: the lack of an infrastructure plan.
Again and again, Trump has promised to invest in rebuilding the nation’s crumbling bridges and roads; Bannon embraced a trillion-dollar infrastructure program as key to his plans to build a new political coalition.
But the budget Trump unveiled makes deep infrastructure cuts, with the exception of putting aside money to build a wall on the Southern border. (Trump’s team says a building program is coming later in the year.)
But like many observers, both supporters and critics of Trump, Ornstein doesn’t think the conservative budget tilt is a conscious choice of the president’s. “My guess is that the budget is basically [White House budget director] Mick Mulvaney’s, and Bannon is happy because he wants to blow up the state and engage in disruption,” Ornstein said.
Trump has put conservatives in key positions, and their work product is showing.
“Trump is a New York Republican who has surrounded himself with conservatives,” said one Republican strategist with ties to the Trump White House.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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