Obama's Progress

Paul Kengor

Try to define progressivism. In fact, ask progressives to try to define progressivism . All we really know is that they’re, well, progressing. They and their ideas and their politics are always changing, evolving. This means that what they believe and hold fast and dear today may not be what they believe and hold fast and dear tomorrow, or decades or a century from now.

For instance, when progressive heroine Margaret Sanger started her American Birth Control League a century ago, she was seeking birth control for, among other purposes, what she and fellow progressives termed “race improvement.” She hoped to expunge the gene pool of what she termed "human weeds," “morons,” and “imbeciles.” She repudiated abortion, calling it “an alternative that I cannot too strongly condemn … the practice of it merely for limitation of offspring is dangerous and vicious.” She clarified in no uncertain terms: “some ill-informed persons have the notion that when we speak of birth control we include abortion as a method. We certainly do not.”

Today, Sanger’s American Birth Control League is Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion provider. Progressives have not only progressed to that level but also to the point where they demand full taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood and birth control and abortion drugs. Most amazing, those who disagree are castigated as Neanderthals favoring a “war on women.”

How did we suddenly progress to this latest stage?

That’s a long answer with a lot of factors, but we cannot disregard the huge impact of the latest influence: President Obama. If you would have told me five years ago that the president of the United States, by executive fiat, would force all Americans—including all religious organizations—to fund sterilization services and abortion drugs, I would have at least taken solace in one thing: my liberal friends would surely respect my religious beliefs and insist their president was crossing the line.

Sorry, the opposite is true. With President Obama leading, millions of Democrats have willfully fallen in line. He is not bending, and neither are they. If we disagree with what they’re compelling us to do … that’s our fault. We have failed to progress to their understanding.

My pro-choice friends always promised they’d never force me to pay for their abortions. With Obama out front, that has changed. They simply hadn’t progressed there yet.

The same is true for gay marriage, where liberals—immediately after Obama’s statement on gay marriage to ABC a few months ago—are suddenly on fire for the cause, from blasting Chick-fil-A to, according to The New York Times, considering the unprecedented step of placing gay marriage in the Democratic Party platform. Consider liberals’ progression on this issue:

A half century ago, the concept of “gay marriage” would have been unthinkable to any Democrat. Currently, I’m being frequently asked about parallels in thinking between Obama and his mentor, Frank Marshall Davis . There are striking similarities when it comes to their words on Wall Street, the rich, tax cuts, wealth redistribution, universal healthcare. I’m often asked if Davis’ writings indicated support for gay marriage and abortion. Are you kidding? Anyone who might have voiced public support for those things back then, Democrat or Republican or radical, would have been hauled off to an asylum as a public menace.

Just 20 years ago, the previous Democratic president, Bill Clinton, supported the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as strictly between a man and a woman.

While support for gay marriage has increased since then, what the progressive movement needed was a front man to light the fuse and take the lead. They got it big-time from President Obama. Just like that, the entire public debate has changed, with gay-marriage advocates on the offensive and opponents on the defensive. Those opposing the unwavering norm since the dawn of humanity, following the billions before us—what Chesterton called the “Democracy of the Dead” —are suddenly framed as extremists who must explain ourselves. And CEOs of companies who voice a mere opinion to the contrary—e.g., Chick-fil-A—are picketed, protested, banned, and attacked by the nation’s mayors for manufacturing everything from “hate thoughts” to “hate chicken.”

Progressivism. No one can see where it will end up, but we can see how it unfolds. In this latest manifestation—call it President Obama’s progress—it compels all of us to acquiesce on gay marriage and abortion. Obama didn’t begin the push, but, in only four years, he has advanced the progressive project by leaps and bounds, a stunning surge that doesn’t happen without him.

In 2008, Barack Obama promised fundamental, transformational change—and now, thanks to the American electorate, we’re getting it.

SOURCE

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Obama’s War on Family Business

One of the aspects of President Obama’s worldview that has drawn consistent fire is his evident hostility toward business. His comments in Roanoke, Virginia three weeks ago (“If you have a business, you didn’t build that”) are just the most recent in a long history of shameful displays of ignorance about the way a business is launched, how it is grown, and what makes it successful.

In his speeches, Obama tends to praise businesses only as a lead-in to calling for higher taxes on them. The President likes to attach a taint to the word “business,” as if every enterprise were Enron and every founder was Scrooge McDuck, hording piles of gold in his basement. This convenient dodge feeds a vague but satisfying resentment in some of Obama’s core constituencies toward big, faceless, evil “multinational corporations,” which are easy to hate.

But the reality about business in America is quite different, and those who understand this most keenly are those who have started businesses – and the family members who have supported them. They know firsthand that Obama’s attacks on business in general translate to a war on family business in particular.

Few people realize just how predominant family business is in the United States. So some statistics (available from the Census and the U.S. Small Business Administration) are instructive.

First, most businesses in the U.S. are not large. Over 78% of all businesses (21M out of 27M) in the United States are “non-employer” firms, meaning that they report no payroll. In other words, they are either partnerships or sole proprietorships. In fact, the vast majority (it varies from year to year, but typically around 70%) of all businesses are run as sole proprietorships.

Of the remaining 6+ million “employer firms,” nearly 90% employ fewer than 20 people. 1.3 million of these companies gross less than $100,000 each year. 3.7 million have gross receipts of less than $500,000 a year. 4.6 million – or 76% - of all “employer firms” in the United States gross under a million dollars each year.

In other words, most business in the United States is small business.

It is important to consider these data when Obama calls for higher taxes on people making more than $250,000, lumping them with “millionaires and billionaires.” Since most small businesses operate as sole proprietorships, this means that the business doesn’t pay the taxes (as a corporation would); the individual owner pays all of the taxes on the business’ income. And while some might think that $250,000 would be a cushy salary for one person, a business generating $250,000 in gross receipts is a VERY small enterprise indeed. From this amount must come state and federal income taxes, property taxes, rent or mortgage payments, insurance, salaries, benefits, unemployment and workers compensation payments, and more.

Furthermore, 80 – 90% of all businesses in the U.S. are family-owned – including 35% of all Fortune 500 companies. Family-owned businesses are responsible for 50% of all GDP in the U.S., 60% of all U.S. employment, and 65% of all wages paid in the U.S.

Family-run businesses also have a more personal investment in their employees and in their communities. According to Anne Kincaid of Family Enterprise USA, family businesses have far less leadership turnover than shareholder-owned companies, and are less likely to let employees go, even in tough times.

One would think, therefore – particularly in a struggling economy – that the President of the United States would want to encourage the creation of businesses, laud those who take the personal financial risks to start them, and use power of the presidency to minimize the burdens government can impose.

To the contrary, the policies advocated by this president are crippling to business. Just a few examples:

1. Taxes. As noted above, taxing businesses grossing between $250,000 and $1 million a year hits a disproportionate number of the sole proprietorships and small family businesses we desperately need to expand and hire more people. It also discourages prospective entrepreneurs. Then there is his “Buffet rule” tax proposal and his insistence upon raising the capital gains rate. The former is just silly posturing. The latter will negatively affect investment – which, of course, will mean that small businesses have a harder time becoming larger ones.

2. Obamacare. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will be ungodly expensive, and many small businesses – read family businesses – are not going to be able to afford to insure their current employees, much less hire new ones. Family Enterprise USA reports that 61% of the family firms they surveyed believe that the new law will make it harder, not easier, to pay for employee health care.

3. The HHS mandate. Having to provide what Obamacare considers to be appropriate insurance coverage is already burdensome. But the Obama administration has made this worse by insisting that all employers pay for sterilization and contraception – including abortifacient contraception. Catholic and other Christian universities and hospitals have filed lawsuits to contest the enforcement of this mandate, arguing that it compels them to violate the core teachings of their religious beliefs. But many family businesses are run by individuals who share those same beliefs, and they, too, are threatened by the HHS mandate. Already, at least one family business has sued – successfully. Others have followed. These are laudable developments. But most family businesses cannot afford the expense of a lawsuit in federal court.

4. The constant calls for reduction of the charitable deduction. President Obama has now tried five separate times to reduce the amount of the charitable deduction. This is inscrutable. The average family firm donates $50,000 to charities and philanthropic causes – most, locally for maximum impact. Larger companies donate much, much more.

(Sidenote: since Obama is so keen to yank America toward European-style socialism, he might want to read The Economist’s story from last week, blaming European government policies for the dismal lack of entrepreneurship and economic growth there.)

In light of these events, it is not surprising that the Roanoke speech has become the negative tagline for the Obama presidency. Every family with an entrepreneur in it knows that the business founder didn’t do it on his or her own; spouses and children also make substantial sacrifices to help launch a business, grow it, make it successful and keep it that way. Families in business also know how difficult government makes it.

The Roanoke speech is also the gift that keeps on giving to Mitt Romney. The president’s antipathy to business is affecting his reelection campaign. Donors had already been fleeing Obama in droves – including Democrats who are now supporting Romney. The result is nearly unthinkable to Democrat strategists: Romney is actually outpacing Obama in fundraising, and by a substantial margin.

No wonder. While it might be understandable that those who don’t own a business might vote for Obama the second time around, it is inexplicable that anyone who does – or wants to -- would. And that is a lot of people.

SOURCE

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Fear and Shame on the Campaign Trail

Anyone who doubts the enduring power of the mainstream media need look no further than the rise in Romney’s unfavorables in a recent Pew Poll. Yes, this poll is likely skewed, but the percentages are too extreme to escape the conclusion that a large number of Americans do not find Mitt “Mr. Nice Guy.” (I met him and thought he was perfectly okay — but what do I know?) Obama, on the other hand, is still considered a swell fellow.

All this although the economy has been a disaster throughout his presidency and, for the last year, probably more, he has seemed a petulant prig when confronted with the slightest criticism. Not an attractive trait.

You would think under those conditions those poll numbers would be reversed and the election polls themselves would show Romney with a gigantic lead, but no. Like a nation of ostriches, huge portions of the American public have swallowed the media/Axelrod line that Mitt Romney is a rich self-interested capitalist out of touch with the masses, whoever they are and whatever that means(it doesn’t matter as long as they vote for Obama), hell-bent on robbing from the poor to give to the rich like a reverse Robin Hood.
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In other words, a large portion of the American public has effectively been brainwashed. And the brainwashers are the Democratic Party and the mainstream media. The former is quite understandable since political parties cling to power by virtually any means when threatened. But for the media it’s another matter. Why do these people persist in their views in a situation where, objectively, almost any corporation or business would have been looking for new leadership long ago? Why are they so destructive to our society and ultimately to themselves? Don’t they have children and grandchildren?

Many explanations exist for this seeming blindness; among them, and not to be ignored, is good old-fashioned habit. But I would suggest, having lived among them, particularly the Hollywood variety, for decades, two other components: fear and shame (and, yes, loathing, to extend the Hunter Thompson analogy).

But fear first and foremost.

It seems counterintuitive, but journalists are some of the most risk-averse people around. Few of them are really entrepreneurs. Despite bohemian veneers, they have little daring. They work for somebody and that somebody calls the tune. “Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one,” as the great A. J. Liebling reminded us many years ago.

Journalists fear for their jobs and their jobs are increasingly precarious. If they change their opinions, even investigate the possibility that the other side might have some reasons, quite often they are out the door. So not only do they toe the line, they are disinclined even to consider alternatives in their minds, consciously or unconsciously, because those alternatives are dangerous to their livelihood.

And now for shame. Despite what many may choose to think, journalists are not stupid. They are at least relatively educated. They have seen the same things we all have and know that the economy (the very heart of America) is failing. And they know deep down that they are responsible for some of it, because they bought and promoted Barack Obama as if he were a messiah without the slightest bit of vetting. Obama was anointed, not elected. To this day no one knows who he is, possibly even Obama himself.

And deep down these journos are embarrassed by this (who wouldn’t be?) but they can never never admit it. To do so would injure their self-image and self-respect to the level of personality disintegration.

So this shame is projected out in rage and, yes, loathing toward you, me, Mitt Romney, and anyone else who might deign to disagree with them. We are accused racists, homophobes, sexists, classists, any refugee of sixties group speak that might stick for ten minutes, even though they themselves are more likely to be those things. It is, after all, projection. Ideology is but a pretentious cover for rage.

So no wonder they behave as a shrill gang, banging metal drums like lost characters out of Gunter Grass, “Romney bad and rich! Romney bad and rich! Romney bad and rich!” ad tedium, ad nauseum, as if they were on David Axelrod’s payroll.

And in a sense they are. For to wander off the reservation is a road to penury. And who wants that now more than ever with the number of media jobs contracting?

Of course, the ones who are screwed by this song and dance are you and me — the American public. And no doubt some day the journalists themselves.

If Obama wins, they will rejoice on election day. But they will shortly be throwing up. In the words of Brillat-Savarin, “You are what you eat.” (Actually he said, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are” — a yet more delicious irony.)

SOURCE

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my old Facebook page as I rarely accessed it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Liberal Bigotry

By Jerry Shenk

Regrettably, sadly, there's a history of religious bigotry in my family -- Germans on both sides -- some of whom continued to fight the Thirty Years War until their deaths. My maternal grandparents (long departed) never voted until 1960. They registered for the first time in order to vote against a Catholic for president. I thought the family's religious bigotry had died out with my grandparents, until a much younger, very liberal family member recently treated me to an apparently rehearsed, out-of-the-blue, shocking, gratuitous riff on Mitt Romney, and, more specifically, Mormons and Mormonism.

It was nasty, ugly stuff, containing no context other than Romney's imminent presumptive Republican nomination for the presidency, and the diatribe included no attempt to explain how Romney's LDS faith negatively informed or influenced him as the governor of Massachusetts, as founder and head of a very successful business, or as the manager who saved the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. One suspects that we will hear far more of this sort of thing as we approach November and the other campaign becomes less confident and more desperate.

It was a very disheartening experience. I'm conservative, so, naturally, liberal relatives consider me to be the close-minded, non-inclusive, intolerant one. They should be more introspective and far more objective.

For decades, the American left has aggressively attempted to redefine constitutionally enumerated rights to favor one or more groups over others. If the Declaration of Independence were to be rewritten by today's liberals, it might begin something like this:

American progressives hold these truths to be self-evident:

* All cultures and religions are equally meritorious (except for Christianity)

* There is no objective truth (until and unless progressives declare the truth)

* You cannot legislate morality (Therefore, everything is "moral" -- except Christian morality)

* Progressives celebrate diversity and are tolerant, inclusive, and accepting of all fellow humans (except conservative, white and Christian people)

* Progressives are intelligent, thoughtful, reality-based, and benevolent

Objective? Diverse? Inclusive? Thoughtful? Reality-based? Benevolent? Not really. Progressives -- liberals -- are the worst offenders of their own axioms when they talk about the "evils" of those who dispute liberal versions of facts, policy, or, especially, morality. The bigotry liberals direct toward those with whom they merely disagree is staggering.

Liberals believe in free speech, unless it offends someone's tender sensitivities (meaning only that liberals disagree with it). They protest the "wealthiest 1%," but exempt from their condemnations billionaire liberals and wealthy movie and rock stars, most of whom share the same ideology. Many liberals believe corporations -- and capitalism itself -- to be evil, even though the capitalist system and many of the corporations of which they disapprove have created the products and standard of living liberals enjoy.

But the American left reserves its ugliest bigotry for Christians. When liberals speak or write about practicing Christians, especially evangelical Christians and, in this presidential election year, Mormons, no slander is unacceptable and no religious custom is off-limits. America's most prominent liberal has condescendingly denigrated Christians as "bitter clingers" to guns and religion. Liberals have (seriously) asked: "Do All Evangelical Leaders Believe Gays Should Be Put to Death?" They worry about reports that evangelicals are voting in record numbers. And they invent scenarios which question whether religious convictions resonate in the political arena. Every Christian, of any age or gender, is fair game for liberal animosity -- or left-wing redefinition. Liberals bash Christians with impunity, because Christians are...well...Christian, and behave in a Christian manner from which liberals fear no reprisal. Ironic, huh? And opportunistic, too.

No one on the left would dare speak of Muslims the way they do about Christians. Doing so would violate the liberal orthodoxy of multiculturalism, but, more importantly, such behavior might invite retaliation from some in the Muslim community. Apparently, there is nothing like a savage history and a continuing, credible threat of violence to immunize a group from liberal animus, to focus the liberal mind, and to encourage liberals to attend to their own affairs. Muslim societies, even those relocated in Western nations, remain immune to liberal criticism despite traditional, institutional toleration of misogyny, honor killings, pederasty, brokered and arranged marriages of children, and genital mutilation, among other distasteful practices. One suspects that if Christians were to hack off a few heads in response to the treatment they receive from liberals, they'd face far less liberal hostility -- at least openly.

If anyone were to describe blacks, Latinos, and women using the same sort of ugly stereotypes that liberals use to characterize Christians, liberals would be, rightly, angry and offended. But so would be conservatives. The point of an identical reaction from their ideological opposites escapes the left, which reserves for itself, alone, the "moral authority" to detect, condemn, and punish the most minute, even imagined examples of racism and ethnic or gender slurs, but only those which target black, gay, Hispanic, and female victims who embrace liberal orthodoxy. Liberals do not consider black, gay, Hispanic, and female conservatives "authentic." Accordingly, these do not merit liberal concern. In fact, the perceived political apostasy of minority and female conservatives and Christians has made them liberal targets.

Sadly, liberals will not consider, much less accept, that their shabby treatment of Christians is as ugly, ignorant, and offensive as the behavior of those who resisted the integration of blacks into American society. Though they are frequently both, liberals do not see themselves as either hypocrites or bigots.

They're too busy muttering liberal platitudes and insisting that the people they demonize pick up the tab for their liberal "generosity."

SOURCE

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Why America has so much wasteful litigation

But if Jefferson’s decimal coinage concept was a good idea that quickly spread around the world, another idea that developed here at that time was lousy: the so-called American Rule, whereby each side in a civil legal case pays its own court costs regardless of outcome. This was different from the English system where the loser has to pay the court costs of both sides.

The American Rule came about as what might be called a deadbeat’s relief act. The Treaty of Paris (which ended the American Revolution) stipulated that British creditors could sue in American courts in order to collect debts owed them by people who were now American citizens. To make it less likely that they would do so, state legislatures passed the American Rule. With the British merchant stuck paying his own court costs, he had little incentive to go to court unless the debt was considerable.

The American Rule was a relatively minor anomaly in our legal system until the mid-20th century. But since then, as lawyers’ ethics changed and they became much more active in seeking cases, the American Rule has proved an engine of litigation. For every malpractice case filed in 1960, for instance, 300 are filed today. In practice, the American Rule has become an open invitation, frequently accepted, to legal extortion: “Pay us $25,000 to go away or spend $250,000 to defend yourself successfully in court. Your choice.”

Trial lawyers defend the American Rule fiercely. They also make more political contributions, mostly to Democrats, than any other set of donors except labor unions. One of their main arguments for the status quo is that the vast number of lawsuits from which they profit so handsomely force doctors, manufacturers, and others to be more careful than they otherwise might be. Private lawsuits, these lawyers maintain, police the public marketplace by going after bad guys so the government doesn’t have to—a curious assertion, given that policing the marketplace has long been considered a quintessential function of government.

The reason for this is that when policing has been in private hands, self-interest and the public interest inevitably conflicted. The private armies of the Middle Ages all too often turned into bands of brigands or rebels. The naval privateers who flourished in the 16th to 18th centuries were also private citizens pursuing private gain while performing a public service by raiding an enemy’s commerce during wartime. In the War of 1812, for instance, American privateers pushed British insurance rates up to 30 percent of the value of ship and cargo. But when a war ended, privateers had a bad habit of turning into pirates or, after the War of 1812, into slavers.

Predictably, the American Rule has spread exactly nowhere since its inception at the same time as the decimal coinage system. There is not another country in the common-law world that uses it. Indeed, the only other country on the planet that has a version of the American Rule is Japan, where a very different legal system makes it extremely difficult to get into court at all.

The United States has more lawyers and more lawsuits, per capita, than any other country. But lawsuits don’t create wealth, they only transfer it from one party to another, with lawyers taking a big cut along the way. Few things would help the American economy more than ending the American Rule. Texas reformed its tort law system a few years ago and the results have been dramatic. Doctors have been moving into the state, not out of it, and malpractice insurance costs have fallen 25 percent. And remember, good ideas always spread.

SOURCE

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The workers Obama shafted

While Team Obama promotes fables to indict Romney, the incontrovertible stories of the current administration's economic malpractice are finally getting out. In 2010, I first reported on how Obama's UAW bailout threw tens of thousands of nonunion autoworkers under the bus. It's the ongoing horror story of some 20,000 white-collar workers at Delphi, a leading auto parts company spun off from GM a decade ago.

As Washington rushed to nationalize the U.S. auto industry with $80 billion in taxpayer "rescue" funds and avoid contested court termination proceedings, the White House auto team and the Treasury Department schemed with Big Labor bosses to preserve UAW members' costly pension funds by shafting their nonunion counterparts.

In addition, the nonunion pensioners lost all of their health and life insurance benefits. The abused workers -- most from hard-hit northeast Ohio, Michigan and neighboring states -- had devoted decades of their lives as secretaries, technicians, engineers and sales employees at Delphi/GM. Some workers have watched up to 70 percent of their pensions vanish.

"I worked for 34 years at GM/Delphi Corp. When Delphi went bankrupt, we lost everything," Dana Strickland of Michigan wrote me. "Because I was salaried (middle management), we lost our pension and health insurance. I did not belong to the union, so GM/Delphi could have cared less. I have never felt so betrayed. We never hear this brought to the public's attention. People need to know how we were screwed, while the Obama administration kissed up to the union."

"I'm one of the Delphi Salaried Retirees that lost the health care, life insurance and 67 percent of the pension I was promised in retirement after working hard for 40 years," Charles Stone of Michigan e-mailed. "Words cannot describe the frustration and let down these events have thrust on my family's lives, and to have GM's rescue all sugar-coated in the current political environment is like putting lipstick on a pig. ... We will continue to fight to right this grievous wrong."

Tom Rose of Ohio added: "I am one of the 20,000 salaried retirees that lost all of my health care and -- in my case -- a 40 percent pension cut. So I am now paying increased health care costs with fewer pension dollars and contributing what is left to our lawsuit to correct this injustice. Meanwhile, the politically connected union has their full pension and 90-plus percent of their health care. You have hit upon the key question: How can our own federal government pick winners and losers amongst its own citizens?"

Through two costly years of litigation and investigation, the Delphi workers have exposed how the stacked White House Auto Task Force schemed with union bosses to "cherry pick" (one Obama official's own words) which financial obligations the new Government Motors company would assume and which they would abandon based on their political expedience. Obama's own former auto czar Steve Rattner admitted in his recent memoir that "attacking the union's sacred cow" could "jeopardize" the auto bailout deal.

In June, 20 months after a federal judge first ordered the government to cooperate, the Delphi Salaried Retirees Association broke through the administration's information stonewall and dislodged 62,000 pages of documents in their lawsuit to right the administration's wrongs. As The Daily Caller reported on Tuesday, the documents included "internal government emails (that contradicted) sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts ... and that administration figures violated federal law."

Meanwhile, the Delphi workers who got shafted are getting in the faces of the administration and the public with a new web ad produced by conservative advocacy group Let Freedom Ring. They are asking, "Why, Mr. President? Why?" They -- and America -- deserve answers and justice, not more Bizarro World smears and fantastical bedtime stories.

SOURCE

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Obama Regime Tries to Hide Its Funding of Racist La Raza

Liberals are never more sanctimonious than when denouncing “racism.” Yet the most explicitly racist organization imaginable — La Raza (The Race), which explicitly exists to advance the interests of Hispanics at everyone else’s expense — snuggles affectionately if sometimes secretively in bed with the ultra-liberal Obama Administration. Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch reports:

On July 18, 2012, we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Obama Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) seeking access to records detailing taxpayer-funded grants provided by the Centers for Disease Control to the National Council of La Raza (The National Council of “The Race”).

The lawsuit was necessary due to Obama’s vaunted “transparency”:

HHS acknowledged receiving our request on December 13, 2011, and was required by law to respond no later than January 26, 2012. However, as of the date of Judicial Watch’s lawsuit, HHS has failed to respond in accordance with FOIA law.

La Raza’s agenda goes beyond granting ever more special perks to illegal aliens. It appears to share the more openly sinister MEChA’s aspiration of driving all non-Hispanics out of the Southwest and splitting it off from the United States.

Judicial Watch investigated a radical Mexican separatist school in Los Angeles, California, called Academia Semillas Del Pueblo. (You can read our report here.) And who did we find pumping good money after bad into this failing school? The National Council of La Raza, and another radical organization called M.E.Ch.A., or Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán or Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán. (Taxpayers also paid the tab to the tune of $1.6 million per year.)

This extremely unsavory organization receives taxpayer funds in part because it has friends at the very top of the dung heap.

Cecilia Muñoz previously served as Senior Vice President for the Office of Research, Advocacy and Legislation at the National Council of La Raza. So she was, in effect, a lobbyist for illegal aliens and their Mexican separatist friends. Because her appointment would have violated Barack Obama’s lobbyist ban, the president granted Muñoz an “ethics waiver” so she could join his administration as Director of Intergovernmental Affairs. (Muñoz now serves as the Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.)

According to a Judicial Watch investigation, federal funding for the National Council of La Raza nearly tripled from $4.1 million to $11 million in FY 2010, the year Muñoz joined the Obama administration.

To the extent that La Raza advocates the foreign conquest of American territory, funneling our money into it constitutes treason. No wonder Obama won’t cough up the documents.

Don’t hold your breath waiting from his accomplices in the “mainstream” media to show any interest.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my old Facebook page as I rarely accessed it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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The blowhard speaks

Fails to push the one thing that would work: Ban gun-free zones

SPEAKING just miles from the scene of the Colorado movie theatre shooting, President Barack Obama said Americans needed "to put an end" to "senseless" violence that killed 12 in Aurora and six at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, although he offered no specific solutions.

"I think we can all acknowledge we've got to put an end to this kind of senseless violence," Obama told a campaign rally in Denver on Wednesday.

"Whether in Aurora, whether it's in Oak Creek, whether it's in Tucson, whether it's in cities all across America where too many lives are cut short because of senseless violence - this is going to have to stop," he said. "And as an American family, as one American family, we're going to have to come together and look at all the approaches that we can take to try to bring an end to it."

Since the back-to-back shootings, Obama has called for soul searching on the issue of violence, but made no forceful push for new laws. White House aides have noted that the president supports reinstating a ban on the sale of assault weapons but sees no sign that Congress is moving toward action.

More HERE

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“We Now Have Our Smallest Government in 45 Years”

Now Leftists are trying to define away the truth

That’s the absurd title to a blog post over at The Atlantic today. The writer claims that the U.S. government is now the smallest it’s been since LBJ was president. The article is making the rounds among leftists, who, against all reason and common sense, have managed to convince themselves that the US government is getting smaller.

The claim is based on a calculation of total government employment as a ratio of the total US population. Right off the bat we know that comparing these ratios from 1968 and today will be off. This is largely because in 1968, most people whose salaries were funded by taxpayer sweat actually worked for the government. There weren’t mercenaries shooting up foreigners back then, or an enormous government-funded non-profit sector or legions of “consultants” who are really just government employees making extra-large salaries.

On top of this is the fact that government size is not only measured in the number of government employees. Better measures would include the US prison population, or taxes paid, or pages of government regulations or the number of federal laws, or the number of people groped by TSA pedophiles. Needless to say, all of these things have exploded in recent decades. On top of that, you have the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on salt, fat, guns, raw milk, and a number of other things.

Yep, government sure is a shadow of its former self!

But, to make it simple, let’s just look at government spending. In 1968, the US government spent $883 dollars for every one of the 201 million Americans, or annual outlays totaling 178.1 billion. In 2011, the US government spent a whopping $11,493 for every one of the 313 million Americans for total outlays of 3.6 trillion. That’s an increase of 1,923 percent since 1968. The CPI over this period increased 545 percent, so we’re talking an enormous increase, even when adjusted for the official inflation rate.

We can also look at this another way. The amount of money taken from each American has increased almost 2,000 percent since 1968, which is more than triple the inflation rate.

SOURCE

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The Rich Don’t Make Us Poor

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the need for the wealthy to “pay their fair share” so that the federal government can pay down its debts and continue to fund programs to provide basic human necessities for the poor, such as food, shelter, and prophylactics. Their argument is that the greedy rich have been stealing increasingly large percentages of the nation’s GDP, and have been hoarding their riches, rather than generously giving them to the federal government to be used for the common good. The only solution is to increase taxes on the rich, so that instead of letting billionaires covetously hold onto (and thus waste) their excess wealth, which they don’t really need, the government can take that cash and use it much more effectively, to give the rest of us free stuff. After all, it just isn’t fair that some Americans control billions of dollars’ worth of wealth, while others struggle to make ends meet.

Sounds plausible, right? Of course it does. Unfortunately for those who make a living out of inciting class warfare, it’s not true. There are a number of errors embedded in the above explanation of our nation’s woes, but let’s cut to the central one: the fallacy that there always has been and always will be a fixed amount of wealth in the world, and that wealth is merely shifted back and forth among people, but it is never really increased. Economists call this the “fixed pie” fallacy.

This is not a new fallacy. In fact, it’s been around for almost as long as economics has been a science. Let’s look at one relatively recent example: in his 1912 work The Servile State, English historian Hilaire Belloc presents his case against capitalism, arguing that by its very nature it is immoral. Belloc – who was not an economist – has become especially popular among some Catholics who decry capitalism as being antagonistic to Christian social and political virtues, and who pine for the idyllic days of subsistence farming and feudal lords. For many of these people, The Servile State is their only exposure to economic thought. This is a shame, because Belloc is a prime example of someone who fell for the fixed pie fallacy.

Belloc defines capitalism as a “society in which private property in land and capital, that is, the ownership and therefore the control of the means of production, is confined to some number of free citizens not large enough to determine the social mass of the state, while the rest have not such property and are therefore proletarian.” The definition Belloc offers is a sign of a deeper mistake on his part: the belief that economics is a stagnant business. His definition of capitalism paints a picture of the wealthy few hiding their money in mattresses, while the rest of us languish with no hope of ever acquiring wealth or living well.

I suppose there could be instances of that happening, but they certainly won’t continue for any sustained period of time. Think about it – if the wealthy hoard their money and don’t do anything with it, how do they support themselves? You don’t live well by having money; you live well by using money. In order to use it, you have to give it to someone else in exchange for goods or services that they give to you. Entrepreneurs get wealthy by using their resources to provide others with jobs. This increases their own well-being, as well as the lives of those they hire; both employer and employee benefit by being part of a useful business from which they can make a living. So the idea that the wealthy are able both to hoard their money and to live well, even affluently, is absurd.

Historical reality bears out the fact that in capitalism, people become rich by putting what capital they have to good, productive use, and that anyone, no matter how poor they start out, can become wealthy. Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, which leftists love to hate, and other venture capital groups risk their own money to provide small entrepreneurs with the means of jump-starting their companies, providing jobs both for those working in venture capital firms, and those employed by entrepreneurs.

Many famous entrepreneurs, such as Henry Ford, Sam Walton and James Cash Penney became fabulously wealthy not by hiding their money in a mattress, inheriting it, or cheating on their taxes, but by delaying gratification, providing workers with decent paying jobs, and putting in long hours for years, to build and maintain successful companies that serve their employees and their customers well. The historical reality of entrepreneurs gives the lie to two of Belloc’s assumptions: that the wealthy can maintain luxurious living standards by sitting on their wealth, and that capitalism prevents the poor from working their way up the economic ladder.

Sadly, it seems that many Americans, including the Occupy crowd and even our own President, are not aware of the unique and amazing power of entrepreneurship: the ability to use our resources and God-given talent to better the lives of those we work with and those we serve. Only when we as a nation remember that the phenomenon of money can be used in a dynamic way to participate as co-creators with God, will we begin to work our way out of the economic mess we are in.

SOURCE

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The Chicago Way Works

By Victor Davis Hanson

If I were Romney, I would not count on the idea of class warfare, the so-called politics of personal destruction, and McCarthyite tactics not working, because they always have for Obama/Axelrod in the past — and seem to be in the last week.

In the last ten days Mitt Romney has been reduced by various Obama surrogates, through rumor, innuendo, and falsity, to a tax-avoiding cheat who “probably” never paid taxes for a decade, a near felon who lied on a federal form, and a veritable killer who in piratical fashion destroyed a cancer victim’s chance of getting medical attention — all untrue and yet all damaging, as the corrections are not even out before Obama goes on to the next new inaccurate charge. Obama is running a Robin Hood, class-warfare blitzkrieg, even though he knows that the upper income levels have never paid a higher share of the nation’s aggregate income-tax revenue, and bumping them up to 39 percent would only lower the deficit in minuscule ways, given the gargantuan spending since 2009 and the general absence of new revenue when unemployment is in its 41st consecutive month of more than 8 percent and we are now in our fourth $1 trillion-plus budget deficit.

None of this is new. The media favorite Obama eliminated all his Democratic rivals in his first election for the Illinois legislature by suing in court to invalidate their nomination petitions and ran unopposed in the primary. Obama demolished his U.S. Senate Democratic primary rival through leaked divorce records. He demolished his initial Republican rival through leaked divorce records. When he got through with Hillary Clinton, the liberal former first lady and U.S. senator had transmogrified into a prevaricating hack and veritable racist, as Bill Clinton lamented the race card being played. John McCain released his health records and his general dismal ranking at Annapolis, leading to a false narrative that he was naturally inattentive and reckless, and scarcely hale, while Obama released neither his medical nor his college records; as Sarah Palin — heretofore a reformist governor of Alaska who in bipartisan fashion had fought special interests — was reduced to a caricature of an uninformed poor (and trashy) mom. All of the above transpired while Barack Obama ran as a “reformer” and proponent of “civility,” who vowed to run a “transparent” campaign of full disclosure, and to leave the old “petty” and “gotcha” politics behind.

SOURCE

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The Natural Map of the Middle East

Pat Buchanan

"Apart from political maps of mankind, there are natural maps of mankind. ... One of the first laws of political stability is to draw your political boundaries along the lines of the natural map of mankind." So wrote H.G. Wells in "What Is Coming: A Forecast of Things to Come After the War" in the year of Verdun and the Somme Offensive.

In redrawing the map of Europe, however, the statesmen of Versailles ignored Wells and parceled out Austrians, Hungarians, Germans and other nationalities to alien lands to divide, punish and weaken the defeated peoples.

So doing they set the table for a second world war.

The Middle East was sliced up along lines set down in the secret Sykes-Picot agreement. But with the Islamic awakening and Arab Spring toppling regimes, the natural map of the Middle East seems now to be asserting itself.

Sunni and Shia align with Sunni and Shia, as Protestants and Catholics did in 17th-century Europe. Ethiopia and Sudan split. Mali and Nigeria may be next. While world attention is focused on Aleppo and when Bashar Assad might fall, Syria itself may be about to disintegrate p.

In Syria's northeast, a Kurdish minority of 2 to 3 million with ethnic ties to Iraqi Kurdistan and 15 million Kurds in Turkey seems to be dissolving its ties to Damascus. A Kurdish nation carved out of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran would appear to be a casus belli for all four nations. Yet in any natural map of the world, there would be a Kurdistan.

The Sunni four-fifths of the Syrian population seems fated to rise and the Muslim Brotherhood to rule, as happened in Egypt. The fall of Assad and his Shia Alawite minority would be celebrated by the Sunni across the border in Iraq's Anbar province, who would then have a powerful new ally in any campaign to recapture Sunni lands lost to Iraqi Shia.

With its recent murderous attacks inside Iraq, al-Qaida seems to be instigating a new Sunni-Shia war to tear Iraq apart.

The fall of the Alawites in Damascus would end the dream of a Shia crescent -- Iran, Iraq, Syria and Hezbollah -- leave Hezbollah isolated, and conceivably lead to a renewal of Lebanon's sectarian and civil war.

The losers in all this? Certainly Iran, which seems fated to lose its only Arab ally, Syria, and its land link to Hezbollah.

More HERE

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An Extraordinary Record of Failure

Comment below by Dick McDonald

That is what Romney called our latest jobs report “An extraordinary record of failure” but the leftists at the New York Times buried his comment deep in the article below preferring to advance their liberal propaganda by hiding their own and Obama’s leftist policy failures by making the headline “Hiring picks up in July.” In turn the leftist media will assure Americans of that deception by peddling that sound bite while failing to mention that the underemployed and those who have given up looking rose to 15%.

The NYT even buried the followig comment in the last line of the article - “Nearly the entire reduction in unemployment since October 2009 has been accomplished through a significant drop in the percentage of adults participating in the labor force,” said Peter Morici, a professor in the business school at the University of Maryland – proof of an extraordinary record of failure.

But the so-called “Paper of Record” remains the main cheerleader of lies that Obama needs every morning to fool the uninvolved that his Sunday Morning Revival populism isn’t working and his demand-side Keynesian economics is a massive failure.

Yet the paper spits out the nonsense that what we need is more government stimulus such as spending taxpayer’s money on infrastructure and hiring more teachers. That didn’t work before but as Einstein said only a liar like the NYT would repeat insanity.

They admit the Federal Reserve has shot its wad but assure their leftist sympathizers that the Fed will come to the economy’s rescue. Of course this is more liberal smokescreen. You can read more of that below.

Hiring Picks Up in July, but Data Gives No Clear Signal

America added more jobs than expected last month, offering a pleasant surprise after many months of disappointing economic news. Even so, hiring was not strong enough to shrink the army of the unemployed in the slightest.

Employers added 163,000 jobs in July, the Labor Department reported on Friday. That was more than twice the job growth in the previous month, and substantially more than Wall Street analysts had forecast. The underlying details of the report, however, ranged from unimpressive to outright discouraging and provided plenty of fodder for Republican attacks on President Obama’s economic legacy.

The Obama administration, for its part, argued that Republican obstructionism to its economic policies was holding back the recovery.

July’s jobless rate ticked up slightly to 8.3 percent, about the same as it has been all year. A broader measure of unemployment — including part-time workers who want full-time jobs, and people who have given up looking for work — rose to 15 percent.

More HERE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my old Facebook page as I rarely accessed it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Typical Leftist deception

The truth is poisonous to them



More HERE

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No Mystery to Slow Growth: Progressives Are the Problem

The Big Picture Lesson of the 20th century was that capitalism works and socialism and communism don't. The rest of the world learned that lesson far better because they and their close neighbors suffered far more with the socialist and communist progeny of Saul Alinsky's first radical. But America should know better because it has enjoyed most the workers paradise of capitalism.

Yet those who call themselves Progressive, a polite, Americanized word for Marxist, refuse to accept that obvious conclusion. That is why our politics have become so nasty. The Progressives know they can't win a debate based on reason. So they turn to name calling, demonization, ostracism, anything to distract from and avoid a reasoned debate. Hence the widespread use of the term "dumbass" by pot smoking hippie Progressives in commenting on the reasoning of careful scholars that they disagree with, or the ubiquitous allegations that anyone who disagrees with them is lying, or bought off.

This reflects the despotic nature of the Progressive personality and philosophy. Progressives most fundamentally are certain that they are so much smarter than the rest of us, and that they are so much more moral than the rest of us. Because of that they are certain that they have the right to rule over the rest of us. It's a very anti-social attitude that the rest of us should not be expected to have to live with.

That is why they are not interested in reason. They are interested in power, for themselves, over the rest of us. In their view, they have the unquestionable right to rule, and the rest of us have the unquestionable duty to obey. The last time America was authoritatively subject to that attitude was under the reign of King George III. And, of course, you know what happened then (unless you are in public school).

That is why the Progressives are so fundamentally in rebellion against the U.S. Constitution. That governing framework was designed to preserve the rights and liberties of the people, and to restrain the powers of government and of self-appointed, supposedly benevolent despots. But if you are so sure you are so much smarter and more moral than everyone else, then the Constitution is an outdated, 18th century barrier to your imposition of your notion of the perfect society on everyone else. That is why for over 100 years now, so-called Progressivism has been an open conspiracy against the Constitution, and so at its root treason.

All of the supposed fevered passions of the Progressives are really just props to justify more control over more money and power for them. The Progressives claim they will take care of the poor, if only we will give control over the money and power to the Progressives. They are not really interested in economic growth and prosperity, which is the only real solution to poverty. That does not expand their power and control over the rest of us. They are interested in promoting dependency, which builds their political machine, and their power.

That dependency perpetuates rather than solves poverty is not a problem for the so-called Progressives. They are perfectly happy with that vote buying, long term, status quo, even if that is really no damn good for the poor. See, e.g, Medicaid, under which the poor suffer and die, because the government won't pay the doctors and hospitals enough to serve them.

Similarly, Progressives believe in Keynesian economics not because it works to promote economic recovery and growth. Borrowing a trillion dollars out of the private economy for the government to spend a trillion dollars back into it does nothing to promote economic recovery and growth on net. Obamanomics just proved that again.

Moreover, in a market economy there can be no such thing as inadequate demand, the central concern of Keynesian economics. That is because in a market, if demand is inadequate to sell the supply, prices just fall until supply equals demand.

But that logic and experience has no effect on Progressive devotion to Keynesian economics. That is because the real reason they are in favor of Keynesianism's proven nonsense is not really because they think it works, but because it justifies what they want, which is more government spending, deficits, and debt, as that means more power and control for government and the all wise Progressives guiding us to their promised land.

The same can be said about the hoax of global warming, a greater scandal of science in the end than Lysenkoism. Carbon dioxide is a trace gas natural to the environment and essential to all life on the planet. There is no sound science demonstrating that it controls the climate, much less that the return closer to historic levels of CO2 in the atmosphere threatens catastrophic global warming. See the thorough scientific explanation that the pattern of global temperatures throughout the 20th century to today is dominantly controlled by natural causes definitively demonstrated in the more than 1,000 pages of the Heartland Institute's Climate Change Reconsidered, published in 2010, and the succeeding Interim Report, published in 2011. This is why advocates of catastrophic, anthropogenic, global warming effectively admit that they cannot defend their claims in public debate.

But science has nothing to do with the belief of Progressives in the theory of man caused, catastrophic, global warming. Progressives worship it because again it means more power and control for governments the world over, from local governments, to national governments, to ultimately world government, which again means more power and control for Progressives to rule us in accordance with their benighted vision of the perfect world.

The greatest Progressive passion of all is supposed to be equality. That is not the classic liberal concept of equality under the law, or equal rules for everyone, which protects and maximizes individual liberty. It is the totalitarian concept of equality of results, which requires the abnegation of personal liberty to enforce.

A regime of equal incomes and equal wealth for all leads not only the more productive to flee the regime, but anyone who does not want to live in an economically stagnant, poor society. That is the result because under a regime of equal incomes and wealth for all, there are no grounds for any capital investment at all, the foundation of economic growth and prosperity. That is because capital investment and wealth increases the income and wealth of the investor, and so would have to be confiscated to enforce equal incomes and wealth, leaving no basis for anyone to pursue any such capital investment.

Moreover, under such a regime, there are no grounds for any work either. That is because if you work more than average, the extra income that would result would have to be confiscated as well. But if you work less than average, the government would pay you out of what is confiscated from the more productive to restore your income to the average. Consequently, there is no reason for anyone to work at all, because all would be paid the same as anyone else in any event.

This is where the Berlin Wall came from. But so-called, progressive, social justice equality requires even more egregious transgressions in personal and individual liberty. It would require reversing all the voluntary transactions in a free society that result in unequal incomes and wealth.

These are the reasons why social justice equality is the ultimate for supposed Progressives. It requires the reversal of all the preferences and choices of the common man, in favor of the vision of the all wise Progressives.

This all adds up to the conclusion logically that Progressivism is not just wrong, but evil, as it involves the assertion of despotism over the liberties of common men and women, and abnegation of their personal prosperity, as it has all over the world wherever Progressivism has been taken to its logical conclusion.

This is why as long as free elections are maintained, common men and women will always throw off the yoke of Progressivism. But this time, once the people are truly liberated, those who are certain that they are smarter and more moral than the rest of us must be empowered to exercise that superiority to the fullest, among themselves, through some form of separation from the rest of us.

But will free elections be maintained? Or how far down will America fall?

SOURCE

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The Week in Liberal Stupid

Every attempt to find the dumbest thing in liberal world this week just led to another, and another, each dumber than the last. Picking just one to rant about became a task of epic proportions, so two of them it is. In no particular order…

A Chicken

The name Adam Smith has a storied history, particularly in economics. Now, that name has a smudge on it thanks to Adam Smith of Arizona. This Mr. Smith became infamous on Wednesday for his uncontrollable hatred for anyone who might disagree with him on the issue of gay marriage. That’s fine. Far be it from me to attempt to deny him that which he seeks to deny others – the right to their opinion. But, in this reality TV/YouTube age where nothing is worth unless the world sees it, Smith decided everyone on Earth needed to see just how enlightened he is, so he filmed his “activism.”

What he thought would be seen as a triumphant moment for progressives ended up being what it was – a middle-aged man misdirecting his irrational anger over a difference of opinion towards a teenager simply trying to make a buck at her local fast-food restaurant. Anyone watching it could see how disgraceful it was…except Adam Smith, who had to have watched it before he uploaded it to the Web.

Within a day, the controversy had blown up. Smith got what he was seemingly after, to be famous. But he got something else … something he clearly was unprepared for.

Smith was fired from his job the next day and, shell-shocked, issued a video apology to the girl he attacked for daring to work for a corporation run by a man whose thoughts differed from his.

It’s hard not to feel sorry for Smith, he did lose his job. But he did it to himself. I got the same feeling when I saw former NFL quarterback Gus Frerotte celebrate a touchdown by headbutting a wall and giving himself a concussion. You just look at it and think, “What the hell did you expect? A parade?”

There are no “middle-aged men being mean to teenage girls” trading cards, so it’s not really a skill he could have marketed. Which is too bad because he could use a job about now.

On the bigger issue of being mad at a company over the opinions of the guy at the top, I say this: Get a life! If you need validation of your sexual orientation, or anything about yourself, from a fast-food restaurant, there isn’t enough therapy in the world to help you. That being said, if Best Buy ever comes out against white socks with black low-top Converse Chuck Taylor’s I’m going to lose it on the Geek Squad!

Another Chicken

In politics, as in life, you can tell a lot about people by who they choose to lead them. For example, Republicans in the Senate chose Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. He’s a perfectly fine human being, but not the most conservative nor the most charismatic, by any measure. So, you get what you get with someone like that – he’s good most of the time, particularly when he’s going to lose a vote anyway, but he’s quick to cut the legs out from under people in his own party when it suits his needs (see the debt ceiling debate a few years ago).

Then you have the Democrats.

For their leader, they chose Nevada’s Harry Reid. Reid is a member of the old school Congress – someone who came to Washington with relatively modest means and somehow, through curious “land deals” with shady characters, managed to become a multi-multi-millionaire while being a “public servant.” The “old school” I was referring to was the time of nearly open graft in the late 19th and early 20th century.

And it’s not just Reid’s malleable ethics on personal financial issues; his character leaves a lot to be desired. That Democrats would choose him for their leader says a lot about their character.

When I worked in the Senate, I had two senators tell me Sen. Reid was the most untrustworthy man they’d ever known. They told me this in private conversations, so I won’t say who they are. But both had been in Congress a long time, so this was saying something.

This week Reid says he received a phone call from a “credible source,” who claims knowledge of Mitt Romney’s taxes from his days at Bain Capital and claims Romney paid zero taxes for the better part of a decade. By the time Reid told the Huffington Post about this, he had “a number of sources” claiming Romney paid no taxes. But he wouldn’t elaborate.

Not content with the ink and airtime his first round of BS got, Reid took to the Senate floor to claim “the word is out” that Romney hasn’t paid any taxes. So a single source had become “a number of sources” in one day. A day later, the “number of sources” became “the word is out,” as in everybody knows. The “word” came “out” from him. But did the media ever ask about this? Did the media ever let journalism get in the way of good rumor-mongering when it comes to attacking Republicans? Of course not.

Given the studies recently that show the connection between head trauma and long-term effects on brain function, perhaps Sen. Reid’s days as a boxer are catching up to him. Or maybe he’s just a pederast.

You may be asking yourself, “What?!?!?” Well, I’ve heard some rumors Harry Reid is a pederast. These are made-up rumors on Twitter, clearly presented as such … but I heard them. I can’t tell you where I first heard this rumor because I don’t remember. There were a lot of people spreading it, though. Sen. Reid refuses to address the rumor.

More curiously, Romney has come out and said Reid’s accusations against him are BS. But Reid has yet to comment on whether he’s a pederast.

Again, I have no proof Senator Harry Reid has a strange sexual attraction to young boys or whether he’s acted on his perversion, I’m just relaying what I’ve heard. Sen. Reid said, in the great liberal tradition of Republicans being guilty until proven innocent, it’s up to Romney to prove he paid taxes (even though the IRS seems strangely satisfied that he has). Under that thinking, it’s up to Sen. Reid to prove he isn’t a serial pederast.

Bonus Stupid

Dave Sirota is a writer who (apparently) has written a couple of books about something progressive or other. He is the kind of guy who wakes up every day and randomly calls someone in the third-world to apologize for being an American. Well Dave, the rest of us feel the same way…about you.

The title of his piece (of …) on Salon, “Don’t chant U.S.A.! It’s liberal Americans’ Olympic dilemma: How do they root for their countrymen without being jingoistic?” tells you everything you need to know about Sirota … except that he doesn’t have a long gray ponytail (at least not now). There’s more stupid in this piece than I have the energy to convey. It perfectly encapsulates the liberal mindset. Imagine Brittney Spears pontificating on the meaning of life, square it, and you’re getting in the zip code.

He’s proof of what I call “Michael Stipe’s Disease.” Named after the lead singer of band REM, Stipe always seemed just miserable. Not because of anything going on in his life, but because someone, somewhere was suffering. It’s a tragic disease that afflicts liberals, causing them to sit around coffee houses with their laptops and Charles Bukowski books and judge anyone who smiles or laughs. They often can be overheard saying things like, “I don’t know how you can sit there laughing when people are being killed/going hungry/suffering in whatever the liberal cause celebre country of the moment is. They’re also the people who talk constantly about how race doesn’t matter, that we need to move beyond it, but manage to keep a mental spreadsheet of the ancestry of everyone they’ve met and mention what kind of hyphenated-American they are in every story they tell. In short – jerks.

Tragic…and couldn’t happen to nicer people.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Egypt: Regime vows crackdown on “infidels” after border massacre: "Egypt branded Islamist gunmen who killed 16 police near the Israeli border as "infidels" and promised on Monday to launch a crackdown following the massacre that has strained Cairo's ties with both Israel and Palestinians. An Egyptian official said insurgents crossed into Egypt from the Gaza Strip before attacking the border station on Sunday. They then stole two vehicles and headed to nearby Israel, where they were eventually killed by Israeli fire."

Communist Vietnam donates 5,000 tons of rice to flood-stricken North Korea: "Vietnam's president said his country would donate 5,000 tons of rice to flood-stricken North Korea, Vietnamese state media reported Tuesday. The pledge was made by President Truong Tan Sang in a meeting with North Korea's visiting nominal head of state Kim Yong Nam in Hanoi on Monday, the Communist Party newspaper Nhan Dan reported." [Vietnam has a largely capitalist economic system]

TN: Gibson Guitar CEO strikes back: "Late in the same day that Department of Justice announced they had reached a settlement with Gibson Guitars, in which Gibson acknowledged illegally importing environmentally endangered woods, CEO Henry Juszkiewicz struck a defiant tone as he continued to criticize government actions. 'We felt compelled to settle as the costs of proving our case at trial would have cost millions of dollars and taken a very long time to resolve,' he said in statement released via the company’s @gibsonguitar Twitter account late Monday."

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my old Facebook page as I rarely accessed it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Examining the opposition case

Elections are not a time for considered economic analysis, but then few times are. Opponents of the free market are able to point out obvious flaws in recent economic trends, but are met with mere cheerleading by free-marketers. The appearance of an Obamaist policy document “Prosperity for All” written by Yale professor Jacob Hacker and Nathaniel Loewentheil is thus a useful opportunity to check out the opposition thinking, spot its flaws and ideological blind spots, but more important, determine where it indeed makes good points, and what the answer to them should be.

Perhaps the most powerful current argument against the relatively free market policies of 1980-2006 is that of recent U.S. trends in inequality. In economic principle, there should be no great preference for one income distribution over another, but in practice observation has found that both extremes are bad. Very flat distributions of income and wealth, especially if caused by government fiat, destroy wealth creation and suppress economic growth (and give too much power to government bureaucrats – more on that later.) Equally however very skewed distributions of income and wealth, if accompanied by democracy, produce economic stagnation at the bottom and therefore appallingly bad governments since the poor majority sees no way out of its impoverishment and votes for nut-job populists.

The main problem with the increase in inequality since 1973 (as it has not taken the U.S. particularly far out into the Latin American part of the curve) is the stagnation of income for the working class, in spite of 40 years of technological progress and productivity increase. In this diagnosis, “Prosperity for All” is correct; its explanation of why it happened and its suggested cures are however mostly misguided.

There are other areas of agreement. “Prosperity for All” decries the bad behavior on Wall Street and the “crony capitalism” of government handouts to favored industries. We can all agree on that, although when it comes to solutions the document proposes several that are equally crony capitalist. It proposes that Wall Street houses should be split between commercial banking and trading operations – again we can agree; it’s not a free-market solution, but with deposit insurance and an over-powerful Fed it may be the least bad second-best approach. It wants a Tobin tax on trading to reduce its profitability – again I agree, though I want a much smaller one that attacks primarily automated “fast trading” which essentially uses insider information on market activity.

“Prosperity for All” decries the lack of investment in infrastructure. Here I agree to an extent, but the problem is nothing to do with the free market; most infrastructure is provided by governments, which have incentives to build flashy new ziggurats like California’s high speed train and neglect maintenance. More seriously, infrastructure costs have been grotesquely inflated by union featherbedding, environmentalist nonsense and excessive regulation. The Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River, completed in 1927, cost $48 million, equivalent to $700 million today. New Jersey Governor Christie’s zapping last year of a duplicate tunnel, expected to cost $8.7 billion, indicates just how out of control infrastructure costs have become.

Finally, “Prosperity for All” decries the insecurity of the current economy, especially for those without great resources. Social security and Medicare programs are both endangered, and likely to cover fewer of the old-age costs of those now approaching retirement, especially with the rapid escalation in medical costs. The collapse in house prices has removed what many people saw as a net worth cushion that could be tapped in time of difficulty. College costs have soared, and the employability of college graduates has increasingly come into question. Here the effect of prolonged recession has merged with relentless cost escalation in education and medicine, the actuarial problem of baby boomer retirement and the effects of excessive leverage to produce a toxic increase in insecurity beyond that inevitable in a free economy.

Having given “Prosperity for All” credit for its successful diagnoses of many of our current ills, it is nevertheless impossible to be so complimentary about its proposed treatments. Its most egregious error is a refusal to accept that governments, unions and NGOs have incentives too, just like corporations. Consequently, however easy it may be for an optimal analyst in a comfortable armchair to propose government-directed solutions to economic problems, governments are no more likely to behave in a “socially optimal” way than are corporations.

This is the central fallacy of Keynesianism. Keynes himself was so convinced of the quality of his analysis that he negotiated an overvalued fixed exchange rate for post-war Britain that killed stone dead the surge of automobile exports planned by the brilliant William Morris, Lord Nuffield. Morris, who left school at 15 to work in a bicycle repair shop but was Britain’s most successful industrialist, was not someone Keynes was accustomed to consulting about the economy’s needs. The Keynesian Bureaucrat Fallacy, that bureaucrats of immense intelligence and complete incorruptibility can arrange the workings of the economy, is probably the most damaging economic belief of all time, even worse than Marxism.

Apart from its inability to invest efficiently, the most important failing of incentive-ridden government is in regulation. Agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Product Safety Commission exist simply to propagate and enforce regulations, and the more regulations they propagate and enforce, the more benefits in terms of remuneration, power and staff their senior officials obtain. Accordingly, we get nonsenses like the EPA regulation of carbon emissions, which may well shut down much of the U.S. power sector, thereby causing economic damage far beyond that sector.

Regulatory government is essentially irrational, and in practice pays little or no attention to the cost of the regulations it enforces – for example, a recent regulation banning “buckyball” products on the grounds children might swallow them, which bids fair to put a $50 million company out of business. As I have written previously in this column, it seems likely that the EPA’s advent was responsible for much of the decline in U.S. productivity growth after 1973, and that the current lethargy in the U.S. economy is at least partly due to the tsunami of new and expensive regulations under President Obama.

The cost of government favoritism is probably less than the cost of regulation, simply because the latter costs are so easy to hide. Nevertheless the entire clean energy program, based as it has been on science which increasingly looks chimerical, has been a bonanza of opportunity for the world’s least scrupulous businessmen. Not that “global warming” should be held entirely to blame; the corn-based ethanol boondoggle, pointless environmentally even if global warming were a problem, is a simple outgrowth of U.S. agriculture subsidies dating back to the 1930s. Needless to say, such programs almost never disappear, because the lobbies depending on them become so powerful; they only multiply.

A further fallacy perpetrated by “Prosperity for All” is the beneficial nature of unions and non-governmental organizations. Such entities, like governments, operate according to their own incentives dictating growth and the search for power. The best conditions for skilled and unskilled workers exist and have always existed in the most prosperous and fastest growing industries. Henry Ford’s $5 day, for example, the greatest single leap forward in unskilled-worker welfare of the twentieth century, was instituted in his entirely non-unionized plant in 1914, after the incredible success of the Model T. Automobile unionization happened only twenty years later, during the Great Depression and in the long run resulted in the U.S. automobile industry becoming hopelessly vulnerable to foreign competition. As for NGOs, their goals are political and their proliferation is entirely the result of the indefensible tax benefits given the “charitable” organizations. Remove those benefits, and NGOs would mostly wither away, leaving national prosperity very much greater for their absence.

Finally, “Prosperity for All” demands immediate legalization of the 10-12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Far from improving living standards, this would produce a further flood of unskilled undocumented immigrants, as did the 1986 amnesty. The result would be profits for Big Agribusiness but further immiseration of the less skilled half of the U.S. population. An economically successful society needs to be governed by the rule of law, and to ensure that its less productive citizens are able to get adequately paying employment without being subjected to wage-destroying competition from a flood of outsiders.

Since the problems identified by “Prosperity for All” are mostly genuine, and the solutions mostly chimerical, it behooves us to propose solutions that might actually work. Far from chivvying the Fed to satisfy its “full employment” mandate under the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Act, we need to reduce its remit to the single mandate of preventing inflation, and pass further rules so that its operations become “Volckerized” ensuring that henceforth it keeps interest rates high. With high interest rates, capital formation will be encouraged, and the United States’ traditional capital advantage over emerging markets will thereby be rebuilt, allowing its living standards and employment to remain at a satisfactorily high level because of its high ratio of capital to labor.

Tax reform is another essential. The current loopholes for home mortgage interest, state and local taxes, healthcare premiums and above all charitable contributions need to be removed, and the system pushed as far as possible towards taxing consumption rather than production. That way, the U.S. economy’s excessive dependence on mindless consumer spending will be removed, and it will become a high capital formation powerhouse like Germany and the best economies of Asia.

Markets in education and medicine must be reformed, by removing government subsidies and excessive regulation. That will make the reform of Medicare and Social Security very much easier, so that a Paul Ryan-style plan of limited targeted subsidy to those in need can be implemented, while costs are brought back under actuarial control. In these areas, foreign examples such as those of Germany and Japan are extremely useful, showing that quality can be improved and costs reduced without condemning America’s less fortunate citizens to sickness or illiteracy.

Finally, a bonfire of regulations must accompany a massacre of corporate welfare schemes. By these means, the economy will become more efficient and government costs will be greatly reduced, enabling proper provision to be made for the unfortunate while taxes are kept moderate, economic growth rebounds and full employment is restored in a natural unforced manner.

Looking at the detailed plans of political opponents is highly beneficial. Their diagnosis of society’s ills is often correct, and even if their solutions are misguided, one can at least ensure that one’s own plans address the ills they have identified. Nobody ever learned much through dialogue only with the like-minded.

SOURCE

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Generation squeezed

After the destruction wreaked by Obama and the Democrats, America is undoubtedly in the grip of a Carter-esque "malaise". Reagan rescued America from Carter; Could Romney be a new Reagan? The instinct is to laugh out loud at the idea that a former governor of Massachusetts could be a new Reagan. But don't forget that Reagan was a former governor of California. So perhaps there is hope. Below is one expression of the malaise --JR

I worry about the future -- not mine but that of my three children, all in their 20s. It is an axiom of American folklore that every generation should live better than its predecessors. But this is not a constitutional right or even an entitlement, and I am skeptical that today's young will do so. Nor am I alone. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll finds that nearly 60 percent of Americans are also doubters. I meet many parents who fear the future that awaits their children.

The young (and I draw the line at 40 and under) face two threats to their living standards. The first is the adverse effect of the Great Recession on jobs and wages. Even if this fades with time, there's the second threat: the costs of an aging America. It's not just Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- huge transfers from the young to the old -- but also deferred maintenance on roads, bridges, water systems and power grids. Newsweek calls the young "generation screwed"; I prefer the milder "generation squeezed."

Already, batteries of indicators depict the Great Recession's damage. In a Pew survey last year, a quarter of 18-to-34-year-olds said they'd moved back with parents to save money. Getting a job has been time-consuming and often futile. In July, the unemployment rate among 18-to-29-year-olds was 12.7 percent. Counting people who dropped out of the labor market raises that to 16.7 percent, says Generation Opportunity, an advocacy group for the young. Among recent high-school graduates, unemployment rates are near half for African-Americans, a third for Hispanics and a quarter for whites, notes the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.

The weak labor market hurts even job holders. From 2007 to 2011, "real" (inflation-adjusted) wages fell nearly 5 percent for recent college graduates and 10 percent for recent high-school graduates, says EPI. Among college grads, only four in 10 said their jobs required a four-year degree, reports a survey by the John J. Heldrich Center at Rutgers University. If the economy doesn't fully recover, slack labor demand will continue to depress employment and wages for years.

Of course, generalizations can be overdone. Countless millions of young people are doing -- and will do -- fine. History can't be predicted. The mass retirement of baby-boom workers may create job scarcities and raise wages. Still, some setbacks will endure. Some skills that would have been learned on the job won't ever be. Life decisions are deferred. Among 18-to-29-year olds, the weak economy is causing 18 percent to postpone marriage and 23 percent to delay starting a family, reports a survey by Generation Opportunity.

And then there are the costs of aging. Gains in productivity -- from new technologies or better skills -- that would normally flow into paychecks will be siphoned off to pay for retiree benefits, underfunded state and local government pensions and infrastructure repair. Taxes will rise; if not, public services will fall. Or both. Population change can't be repealed. The ratio of workers to retirees, 5-to-1 in 1960 and 3-to-1 in 2010, is projected at nearly 2-to-1 by 2025.

It's often said that today's young will ultimately benefit from this lopsided tax-and-transfer system. Old themselves, they will be similarly subsidized by their young. Doubtful. Sooner or later, the system's oppressive costs will become so obvious that future benefits will be curbed. Chances are the young will still pay for today's elderly without themselves receiving comparable support.

As a parent, all this rattles me. We judge our success by how well our children do. We love them and want them to succeed, even if most of us recognize -- at some point -- that our ability to influence and protect them has expired. Peering into the unfathomable future, we don't like what we think we see. We're dispatching them into a less secure and less prosperous world. These parental anxieties, I think, are the presidential campaign's great, unacknowledged issue. Many voters will decide based on a calculus of which candidate would minimize the economic perils for their grown children.

But the calculus will be selective. To aid the young, we could tighten Social Security and Medicare, raising eligibility ages and reducing payouts for wealthier retirees. Unlikely. Younger voters seem clueless about advancing their economic interests. In 2008, 18-to-29-year-olds supported Barack Obama by 34 percentage points. They love his pseudo-youthfulness. Or his positions on other issues (immigration, gay rights) trump economics. As president, Obama has done nothing to improve generational fairness.

If the young won't help themselves, their parents and grandparents might. They might champion revising retirement programs. Dream on. Parents and grandparents may be worried about their offspring's prospects, but they're not so worried as to sacrifice their own. There are real conflicts between the young and old; so far, the young are losing.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Obama gets something right: "President Obama echoed the sentiments of the essential founder of the American experiment in his response to Sunday’s horrific killings at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin. 'As we mourn this loss which took place at a house of worship,' said Obama, as the nation learned of a shooting spree by an alleged white supremacist at a place of worship in suburban Milwaukee, 'we are reminded how much our country has been enriched by Sikhs, who are a part of our broader American family.' That notion of the Sikh community as 'part of our broad American family' is not a new one. Sikhs have been a part of the American religious fabric for the better part of two centuries."

Gibson Guitar hit with grossly excessive penalties over “illegal” wood: "Nashville-based Gibson Guitar Corp. will pay a $300,000 fine and make a $50,000 community-service payment for conservation in response to federal allegations that the company used illegally obtained ebony wood in the manufacture of its products. The U.S. Justice Department issued the following news release about the settlement this morning: Gibson Guitar Corp. entered into a criminal enforcement agreement with the United States today resolving a criminal investigation into allegations that the company violated the Lacey Act by illegally purchasing and importing ebony wood from Madagascar and rosewood and ebony from India." [Obama's hatred of business on show]

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my old Facebook page as I rarely accessed it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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