THE CRUMBLING GOP BASE

Some words of warning from Jeff Jacoby. Excerpts:

How disgruntled is the party's base? In recent polls, fewer than 70 percent of registered Republicans said they approve of the way President Bush is handling his job, a sharp drop from the 90 percent support on which he once could count. Among self-identified conservatives, Bush's standing is even lower: Just 51 percent rate his performance favorably, according to the latest New York Times/CBS poll. At a time when the president's support among Democrats has shrunk to single digits, and when only 1 independent in 4 gives him a positive job rating, the last thing he can afford to lose is the goodwill of his core supporters. But he is losing it.

And Congress is doing even worse. According to the most recent CBS News poll, while 59 percent of the public disapproves of the way the House and Senate are functioning, the figure among Republicans is 62 percent. Read that again: Republicans dislike the Republican-controlled Congress even more than Democrats and independents do....

Many on the right are no less acid in describing Bush. One conservative commentator described him recently as a "dime-store Democrat" and "something of an embarrassment" and wrote that "a Republican president and a Republican Congress have lost control of the federal budget and cannot resist the temptation to stop raiding the public fisc." It says something about Bush's willingness to listen to such criticism that the author of those words -- Tony Snow -- has just become the White House spokesman.

Reaganite conservatives have been the mainstay of the GOP for more than 20 years, and many of them are disgusted with the abandonment of Reaganite principles at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. If they had wanted skyrocketing budgets, new federal bureaucracies, more regulation of political speech, and stalemates on immigration, energy, and Social Security, they say, they would have voted for Democrats. Instead they voted for Republicans -- and what did they get? Skyrocketing budgets, new federal bureaucracies, more regulation of political speech, and stalemates on immigration, energy, and Social Security...

For the party's Reaganite core, the list of outrages is a long one, everything from steel tariffs to McCain-Feingold to gasoline demagoguery. Most troubling of all has been the explosive growth in the size and cost of government. On Bush's watch, the federal budget has grown twice as fast as during the Clinton years. Expenditures this year will come to nearly $24,000 per household -- the most, in real terms, since World War II. Not since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House has spending soared so recklessly.

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ELSEWHERE

Anything to shock: "Dutch pedophiles are launching a political party to push for a cut in the legal age for sexual relations from 16 to 12 and the legalisation of child pornography and sex with animals, sparking widespread outrage. The Charity, Freedom and Diversity (NVD) party said on its web site it would be officially registered tomorrow, proclaiming: "We are going to shake The Hague awake!" The party said it wanted to cut the legal age for sexual relations to 12 and eventually scrap the limit altogether. "A ban just makes children curious," Ad van den Berg, one of the party's founders, told the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper. "We want to make pedophilia the subject of discussion," he said, adding the subject had been a taboo since the 1996 Marc Dutroux child abuse scandal in neighbouring Belgium. "We want to get into Parliament so we have a voice. Other politicians only talk about us in a negative sense, as if we were criminals," Van den Berg said... The party also said everybody should be allowed to go naked in public and promotes legalising all soft and hard drugs and free train travel for all."

Immigration cowardice: ""The Senate isn't serious about enforcing the nation's immigration laws. It is bad enough that the bill that 39 Democrats and 23 Republicans just voted to pass provides an amnesty to illegal immigrants already here. There might be an argument for doing that if there were any evidence of a commitment to enforce the immigration laws in the future. But the bill actually prohibits local police from enforcing civil violations of immigration laws-which in practice, given the byzantine rules distinguishing between civil and criminal violations of those laws, will get local police out of the enforcement business altogether. No serious effort is being made to make the bureaucracy capable of the enforcement tasks that will now be asked of them, such as performing background checks on the illegal population. The bill forbids the federal government to use any information included in an application for amnesty in national-security or criminal investigations. Any federal agent who does use that information would be fined $10,000-which is five times more than an illegal alien would have to pay to get the amnesty... The Senate should stand down in favor of the House's enforcement-first approach, not the other way around. But it would be much better to enact no bill than to enact the Senate bill."

Bloated and overpaid U.S. Federal bureaucracy: "Compensation for the federal government's 1.9 million civilian workers in the executive branch costs almost $200 billion annually. Federal wages and benefits have been rising quickly, and by 2004 the average compensation of federal workers was almost twice the average in the private sector.... The average federal worker earned $100,178 in wages and benefits in 2004, which compared to $51,876 for the average private-sector worker, according to U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data. Looking just at wages, federal workers earned an average $66,558, 56 percent more than the $42,635 earned by the average private worker."

More of Britain's very selective law-enforcement: "Thousands of illegal immigrants are being issued with national insurance numbers every year even though officials know that they have suspect immigration documents. Staff in Jobcentres have been told that they have a duty to issue an NI number even if they realise that the applicant has forged documents and no legal right to work, official papers seen by The Times reveal. The NI number, which employers regard as a prerequisite to work, can also be used to claim various benefits."

A notorious British failure to die at last: "The Child Support Agency will be scrapped this summer and replaced with a pared-down operation to collect cash from the most hardened absent fathers who refuse to pay maintenance. The Times has learnt that, in future, separating parents will be told to sort out their own financial arrangements with the help of national guidelines on appropriate levels of child maintenance. Cash incentives may even be offered to couples for staying away from the new, slimmed-down agency. The decision to abolish the CSA, which has been plagued with problems since it was set up in 1993, is an admission by the Government that it is unable to deal with the scale of the problem of maintenance payments after family break-up."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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MORE GOOGLE SHENANIGANS?

I can post at the moment only from my old computer with a dialup connection. I just get an error message when I try to post from my normal broadband computer. Has my normal address been banned? It seems like it. I have purged cookies but that does not help.

Sunday Night with "Don Giovanni"

A small memoir of a pleasant evening last Sunday (28th. May):

Even in quiet little old Brisbane, the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart is a big deal -- with many concerts in celebration being put on. The latest one that I attended -- last Sunday -- was a concert performance of the famous opera "Don Giovanni".

Anne and I went with another couple, Jill and Lewis. Jill is actually an ex-girlfriend of mine but in my usual way I have kept in touch with her. We have a very similar love of music -- which is a very significant bond. Both Anne and Lewis put up with that past with good grace as they understand the nature of the bond.

Before the concert I made a simple dinner of sandwiches for us all -- thick-cut Gypsy ham with American mustard, lettuce and tomato -- on fresh grain bread. Being a sandwich-lover, I know how to make a good sandwich -- though that is about the limit of my culinary talents. We had planned to have the sandwiches in the park adjoining the concert venue but the weather looked a bit overcast so we had them on my verandah

As a concert performance, the sets for the opera were minimal but the costumes were reasonable and the singing was good. As always, I particularly liked the bass singer (Don Pedro), who was very competent.

It did however have the casting problem that plagues all opera: Singers wildly out of character but chosen for their voices -- as it has to be, of course. On this occasion, Don Giovanni was a quite insignificant guy and not at all convincing as a great lover -- but he had an excellent baritone. And in an amusing reversal, instead of large and aging ladies being cast as young girls, we had a young girl cast as an older woman!

The concert was in one of Brisbane's old powerhouses, converted some years ago into a performing arts centre now that Brisbane gets its electricity from vast generators situated alongside equally vast central Queensland coalfields. The conversion into an arts centre deliberately retained a fair bit of the original powerhouse interior. The idea of that was undoubtedly "arty" but it works well enough and I of course am very much in favour of retaining reminders of how we all got to where we are today.

The most surprising thing about the night was the audience. Far from being geriatric, there were people there of all ages, with a good representation of young people. I like to think that we have the universal appeal of Mozart to thank for that.

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BRITISH ACADEMICS' VOTE OF SHAME

(Post lifted from Norm Geras)

NATFHE has today voted to blacklist Israeli academics:

The largest university and college lecturers' union in Britain on Monday voted in favor of a motion recommending that its members boycott Israeli academics and institutions that do not publicly declare their opposition to Israeli policy in the territories. The motion passed with 106 in favor and 71 against. There were 21 abstentions. The 69,000-member National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) debated the proposal for the boycott at its annual conference in the northern English city of Blackpool. Two parts of the motion passed with a show of hands while a third went to a vote. Under the boycott, union members also will not submit articles to Israeli research papers.

The report in Haaretz goes on to quote Paul Mackney, NAFTHE general secretary, as saying:

Criticizing the Israeli government does not make me anti-Semitic...

Fancy footwork there, Paul, but not good enough. A blacklist of individuals isn't 'criticism' of their government; and the issue isn't whether you, personally, are an anti-Semite, but whether a policy of targeting the academics of one and only one country - Israel - is anti-Semitic. There's also the small matter of an academic union requiring of people a political declaration as a precondition of their being extended the usual courtesies and advantages of scholarly cooperation. What a disgrace to the profession the NATFHE decision is.

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Brookes News Update

Are dark clouds forming over the US economy?: How has the US economy roared ahead while undergoing a monetary slowdown? I think the answer lies in President Bush's cut to capital gains taxes. Nevertheless, though a recession can be delayed it cannot be avoided
Savings, jobs and Professor Quiggin's bad economics: The absurd and long-ago discredited economic fallacy that taxation can expand the demand for labour by putting the unemployed on the public payroll is reemerging
Liberal Party trips up on labour market reform: Who the hell is advising the Liberal Party on labour markets? It seems that not a single Liberal Party official has a clue about how these markets function
Google censors critic of Islamofascism: The well-known columnist Arlene Peck has been censored by Google for "hate speech". And what did this speech consist of? Criticizing ACLU and the US-based Muslim organization CAIR that is allegedly the `legal arm' of HAMAS, an Islamofascist terrorist organisation
Lefty journalist bashes Republicans as "reactionary" over illegal immigration: Stephen Ellis, US correspondent for Murdoch's `Australian' seems to think that the debate about illegal immigration that is now raging in the US is a handy weapon to bash Republicans with by referring to the so-called "reactionary wing of the party" that opposes open borders
Leftwing journalist slimes US conservatives on civil rights: According to Elliott the Democrats has always been the `traditional supporters of minorities `. This is pretty rich as well as being lousy history when one considers that the Republican Party was the Party of abolition and the Dems were the slave Party
Journalists smear President Bush over NSA spying program: It's reached the point where no reasonably informed person can take the media seriously any more, at least as a source for news. Anyone who values honest reporting can only be appalled at the bigotry and out right dishonesty of leftwing journalists
The latest dangers in cyberworld: The problem is mySpace.com, a supposedly innocuous Internet website where people can post their pictures, chat, and post their musings about the universe. The trouble is, mySpace attracts individuals who want to sexually exploit teenagers

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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Smart army man trumps scare-mongering media



An Australian military commander has tried to ensure truth does not become a casualty of conflict in East Timor, but embarrassed a TV network in the process. Australian commander in East Timor Brigadier Michael Slater appeared this morning in a live cross from Dili to the Nine Network's Today show, with helmeted and heavily armed Australian soldiers standing behind him. He was pressed by Today host Jessica Rowe about whether Dili really was as safe as the Australian military claimed, given the presence of armed soldiers at his shoulder. Pausing briefly, Brig Slater replied: "Jessica I feel quite safe, yes, but not because I've got these armed soldiers behind me that were put there by your stage manager here to make it look good. "I don't need these guys here. "It is not safe on the streets, as it is back home in Sydney or Brisbane - no it's not, if it was we wouldn't be here. But things are getting better every day."

Rowe apologised, saying she didn't realise the guards had been placed specifically for the interview. But Rowe ran into more trouble when she persisted with her line of questioning, and referred to footage of looting and violence. Brig Slater told her the pictures were a "couple of days old". TV rival the Seven Network gleefully circulated grabs of the interview this morning.

Source

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ELSEWHERE

The war on poverty: "Four decades after President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in 1964 it remains a compelling need in America. The US Census Bureau still measures poverty in great detail, and the total number of people living in poverty during each of the past 40 years has remained stubbornly high. After hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent to aid impoverished Americans, the conventional wisdom is that more than 35 million are still without adequate income. Conventional wisdom describes the 'poor' as a large and persistent group of families and individuals left out of the economic success of America. Enduring debilitating poverty, the poor -- a group of individuals larger than California's entire population -- are entitled to political advocates, specially funded programs, and government bureaucracies to coordinate benefits. Fortunately for America, the basic description of the poor is wrong. And therefore public policy based upon an aggregate view of poverty is inherently misinformed."

The death of the nation-state: "The disintegration of Yugoslavia, the second partition of Czechoslovakia and the breakup of the Soviet Union into 15 nations -- many of which had never before existed -- seem to confirm what Israeli historian Martin van Creveld and U.S. geostrategist William Lind have written. The nation-state is dying. Men have begun to transfer their allegiance, loyalty and love from the older nations both upward to the new transnational regimes that are arising and downward to the sub-nations whence they came, the true nations, united by blood and soil, language, literature, history, faith, tradition and memory. Imperial and ideological nations appear, for the foreseeable future, to be finished."

Federal Government regulations Created Hawaii's Asphalt Shortage: "An article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on Tuesday May 16, 2006 is a study in economics and the results of government interference in the marketplace. Detailing the shortage of asphalt the article reveals that government is, in fact, the cause of the shortage. The problem is that there are only two oil refineries in Hawaii and one of them, Chevron, has stopped producing asphalt. The reason given for this is that "the federal government is requiring refiners to produce gasoline and diesel that have a lower sulfur content" so Chevron has switched to a lighter type of crude oil. Tesoro, the company that owns the other refinery in the state, is waiting for a shipment of the proper type of crude to then produce the needed liquid asphalt. In the meantime the city of Honolulu has stopped repairing potholes and several projects around the state are on hold. Companies dependent upon asphalt for their products are closing and employees are being laid off."

This was written in the 18th century!: "There are no more Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, even Englishmen, nowadays, regardless of what people may say; there are only Europeans. All have the same tastes, the same passions, the same morals, because none has been given a national form by a distinctive institution. All will do the same things under the same circumstances; all will declare themselves disinterested and be cheats; all will speak of the public good and think only of themselves; all will praise moderation and wish to be Croesuses; they have no other ambition than for luxury, no other passion than for gold. Confident that with it they will have whatever tempts them, all will sell themselves to the first man willing to pay them. What do they care what master they obey, the laws of what State they follow? Provided they find money to steal and women to corrupt, they are at home in any country."

Second-rate British academics attack Israel: "The British government regrets the decision by the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) to vote in favor of boycotting Israeli academics and institutions, British Foreign and Commonwealth Office Minister Lord Triesman said Monday. "The British Government has a record of supporting academic freedom for academics throughout the world. We also recognize the independence of NATFHE. We believe that such academic boycotts are counterproductive and retrograde. Far more can be obtained through dialogue and academic cooperation," a statement read".

Iraq Less Violent than Washington, D.C. : "Despite media coverage purporting to show that escalating violence in Iraq has the country spiraling out of control, civilian death statistics complied by Rep. Steve King, R-IA, indicate that Iraq actually has a lower civilian violent death rate than Washington, D.C. ... Using Pentagon statistics cross-checked with independent research, King said he came up with an annualized Iraqi civilian death rate of 27.51 per 100,000. While that number sounds high - astonishingly, the Iowa Republican discovered that it's significantly lower than a number of major American cities, including the nation's capital. "It's 45 violent deaths per 100,000 in Washington, D.C.," King told Crowley. Other American cities with higher violent civilian death rates than Iraq include: Detroit - 41.8 per 100,000; Baltimore - 37.7 per 100,000"

There is a revealing, though somewhat dated, comment on "Peace Mom" Cindy Sheehan here

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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ALICE IN AMERICALAND

Some excerpts:

The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for informing our terrorist enemies who want to kill us that our government was listening to their cell phone calls. A prize? For aiding and abetting the enemy during wartime? The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting that the CIA held terrorists in "secret prisons" in Europe. The problem is, the same newspaper has since reported that Europeans investigated and found zero evidence that any secret prisons ever existed.

The U.S. Senate is cracking down on illegal immigration with a new law that will allow merely 193 million aliens into the country over the next 20 years. That should solve the problem, since we've had only 12 million illegals sneak into the country over the past 20 years. This way we can increase the flow by 171 million simply by making it legal. That should be a big boost to the school and health care systems, to say nothing of rush-hour traffic.

Iran, which wants to become a nuclear power, says the U.S. is the great Satan and that Israel should be wiped off the map. So we have turned the matter over to the United Nations and its courageous corps of foppish European diplomats, Third World crooks and assorted despots and dictators. If this isn't Alice in Wonderland thinking, what is?...

The ACLU has announced that no one should think it's launching a war on Christianity, despite filing lawsuits for decades from coast to coast to remove any reference to God, bar any utterance about Jesus and prohibit any instruction concerning the Lord from every public venue.

Vanity Fair's magazine cover headline insists global warming is a worse threat than terrorism, despite the fact so-called global warming may have managed to heat the earth all of one degree Fahrenheit over the last century, and fluctuated far more radically hundreds and thousands of years ago, long before factories or SUVs....

Democrat Party chief Howard Dean says his party has evangelical Christian values, even though they are for males committing sodomy with other males, women marrying women, men marrying men, children being raised without a mother or without a father if one of the spouses wants it that way, mothers killing their babies if they don't wish to be bothered by them, cloning humans to destroy them and then harvest their parts, keeping cold-blooded murderers alive, enforcing "charity" by taking your money at gunpoint and giving it to someone else, trying to understand people who have sworn to kill us, keeping God out of schools where children might hear about Him and extending the rights of law-abiding citizens to law-breaking foreigners.

On second thought, I'll keep reading my granddaughter Alice in Wonderland. She's got a really good imagination, but this other stuff is just too hard to believe.

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ELSEWHERE

Socialist Britain: "The growth in public spending in northern areas of Britain is so rampant that it is resulting in the "sovietisation" of swathes of the country, new figures show. Gordon Brown, the chancellor, has pushed up national public spending beyond the levels of former communist countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.... The "sovietisation" of parts of Britain as a result of Brown's huge increases in public spending looks even more dramatic when the figures are adjusted for comparison with other countries. On this basis, public spending is equivalent to 76.2% of the size of the Northern Ireland economy this year, 66.2% in Wales, 64.9% in the northeast, 57.7% in Scotland and 56.1% in the northwest. This compares with 56.1% in high-spending Sweden, 54.1% in France, 51.9% in former communist Hungary, 51.5% in Denmark, 46% in Germany, 42.6% in the Czech Republic, 41.2% in Poland and 36.3% in Slovakia. Sir Digby Jones, director- general of the CBI, the employers' organisation, said that he was increasingly concerned about the "crowding out" of the private sector by a rapidly expanding public sector. "I'm very, very worried about this," he said. "The private sector is responsible for around 62% of GDP in China - a communist, totalitarian regime." In the northeast of "the fifth largest economy in the world" there is a mirror image, he pointed out, with the public sector responsible for nearly 62% of GDP."

'Alimony' coming for unmarried in Britain: "Unmarried couples who live together for more than two years are to be given new legal and financial rights under official proposals to be unveiled this week, write Isabel Oakeshott and John Elliott. Under the Law Commission plans, cohabiting couples will be entitled to lump sums and annual maintenance payments if they split up, and some inheritance benefits in the event of a death. The changes were criticised by the Church of England, which said it was concerned by any proposals that could "undermine the gift of marriage".

Charley Reese on "reparations": "I don't feel guilty about slavery. I don't feel guilty about the fate of Native Americans. In fact, I don't feel guilty about anything that happened prior to the date of my birth. I never owned a slave or desired to, nor did I ever shoot an Indian and steal his land. I say this because there are a lot of special-interest groups trying to lay guilt trips on Americans of European ancestry. That is nothing more than a con game. All we inherit from our ancestors are genes.... People who never owned slaves who apologize to people who were never slaves only succeed in making public fools of themselves. Our ancestors don't give half a cow pie what we think of them. People who were never slaves and want people who never owned slaves to pay them money are just trying to pull off a con job. Good luck if they can find somebody stupid enough to fall for it.

Walter Williams on "reparations": "But, in the recognition Europeans themselves have been victims of various and sundry human rights violations to wit: the Norman Conquest, the Irish Potato Famine, Decline of the Hapsburg Dynasty, Napoleonic and Czarist adventurism, and gratuitous insults and speculations about the intelligence of Europeans of Polish descent, I, Walter E. Williams, do declare full and general amnesty and pardon to all persons of European ancestry, for both their own grievances, and those of their forebears, against my people. Therefore, from this day forward Americans of European ancestry can stand straight and proud knowing they are without guilt and thus obliged not to act like damn fools in their relationships with Americans of African ancestry."

George Will on the Leftist "plantation": "The unbearable boredom occasioned by most of today's talk about race is alleviated by a slender, stunning new book. In "White Guilt," Shelby Steele, America's most discerning black writer, casts a cool eye on yet another soft bigotry of low expectations-the ruinous "compassion" of a theory of social determinism that reduces blacks to, in Steele's word, "non-individuated" creatures. That reduction is the basis of identity politics-you are your (racial, ethnic, sexual) group. A pioneer of this politics, which is now considered "progressive," was, Steele says, George Wallace. He, too, insisted that race is destiny.

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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POLITICAL PARASITES

In our modern politicized economy - which National Journal columnist Jonathan Rauch called the "parasite economy" - no good deed goes unpunished for long. Some people want to declare Google a public utility that must be regulated in the public interest, perhaps by a federal Office of Search Engines. The Bush administration wants Google to turn over a million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from a one-week period. Congress is investigating how the company deals with the Chinese government's demands for censorship of search results by Chinese users. So, like Microsoft and other companies before it, Google has decided it will have to start playing the Washington game. It has opened a Washington office and hired well-connected lobbyists. One of the country's top executive search firms is looking for a political director for the company.

What should concern us here is how the government lured Google into the political sector of the economy. For most of a decade the company went about its business, developing software, creating a search engine better than any of us could have dreamed, and innocently making money. Then, as its size and wealth drew the attention of competitors, anti-business activists, and politicians, it was forced to start spending some of its money and brainpower fending off political attacks. It's the same process Microsoft went through a few years earlier, when it faced the same sorts of attacks. Now Microsoft is part of the Washington establishment, with more than $9 million in lobbying expenditures last year.....

Microsoft went through the same hazing, though with more of an edge. A congressional aide said, "They don't want to play the D.C. game, that's clear, and they've gotten away with it so far. The problem is, in the long run they won't be able to." Sorta like, "Hey, Bill, nice little company ya got there. Shame if anything happened to it." And companies get the message: If you want to produce something in America, you'd better play the game. Contribute to politicians' campaigns, hire their friends, go hat in hand to a congressional hearing and apologize for your success.

The tragedy is that the most important factor in America's economic future - in raising everyone's standard of living - is not land, or money, or computers; it's human talent. And some part of the human talent at another of America's most dynamic companies is now being diverted from productive activity to protecting the company from political predation. The parasite economy has sucked in another productive enterprise.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Another "hate crime" that wasn't: "A case of alleged hate crime in Des Moines has a bizarre ending. Several times over the winter, the Hermasillo family thought they were the targets of hate crimes. Two of the family's cars were set on fire and their house at 317 S.W. Watrous Ave. in Des Moines was broken into and vandalized. "The house was a mess, graffitti on the walls -- KKK, wetbacks, go back to Mexico -- on the door here, was a Nazi sign," Luis Silva told KCCI in February. Silva lived in the house with the Hermasillo family, but he was later kicked out of the house. Des Moines police now say Silva is accused of doing the vandalism. "He fabricated everything," Sgt. Tony Steverson said. Steverson said Silva burned cars and vandalized the Hermasillo's home in an effort to convince the family he was needed as protection. Silva is charged with arson, stalking, criminal mischief and filing false police reports. He is being held in the Polk County Jail.

Is racism worse now than in the 80s?: "Racism and sexism may be deepening despite decades of measures aimed at cleansing them from society. This conclusion is suggested by the ugly and unrelenting public backlash that surrounds the Duke Lacrosse case in which a black female was allegedly raped by three white males. If racism and sexism are deepening, I believe it is because of and not despite the measures now being taken. Racism shares many political characteristics with sexism, and the two are usually addressed in a similar manner; almost identical laws and policies seek to eliminate or otherwise control both."

Senate reveals ugly underside of the "nanny state": "According to populist presidential 'wannabe' John McCain (R.-AZ), illegals deserve access to the social security funds because they paid taxes. Yet nobody seems to know how much they paid, what percentage of their paychecks was withheld by the government, or how much more they have cost American society than they may have paid into the system. The lingering myth that social programs exist for the 'good of the people' has just been shredded by the proposed Senate action. Such programs were never devised to assist those in need, but rather for the political empowerment of the individuals dispensing the 'benefits.' Although liberals in Congress wailed that President Bush's proposal to privatize a tiny portion of Social Security would bankrupt the system, they are now perfectly willing to give away an enormously larger portion of those funds to the millions of illegals working in the dark fringes of the U.S. economy."

What conservative paradigm?: "While we have some conservative-oriented politicians, who occasionally pass some conservative-oriented legislation, the truth is that on the truly big issues on the ground, America is still in the grip of the liberal paradigm that came into existence under FDR. The American people may in some sense be 'conservative,' but the political, intellectual, and economic elites that set the terms of debate, and largely control the direction of society, are most definitely liberal -- indeed, in many ways, more so than they ever have been."

Canada now "vibrant": "In Canada, guns and gangs are a relatively new phenomenon, particularly in Toronto, known as "Toronto the Good" for its traditionally safe streets and low homicide rates. There were 52 deadly handgun shootings in the city in 2005, compared with 12 in 1995. Police and social workers alike attribute the acts largely to young black males - many of whom are the children of West Indian immigrants - who feel marginalized and drop out of school early to join the "gangsta" culture where they make quick money through drugs, guns, or prostitution."

Publicity-seeking at Ellis Island: "British music producer Adam Kidron, who sparked controversy last month with the release of a Spanish-language version of the national anthem, will present the song and its album, "Somos Americanos (We Are Americans)" live in concert Tuesday at Ellis Island. The album features "El Himno Nacional" along with a compilation of previously released songs by artists from across Latin America and the United States, all singing about the immigrant experience. "We were very happy to get permission to perform on Ellis Island because of symbolism of the place," said Kidron, who also invited Latino veterans to attend the event in honor of Memorial Day. Kidron had said he hoped the song would be become the anthem of recent pro-immigrant protest marches. Yet despite the publicity and accompanying backlash the song generated, it has gotten little play. It garnered 95 plays in the first week but hasn't been played since on any stations tracked by Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems, according to Billboard Magazine"

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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NO CONSISTENCY OR PRINCIPLE ON THE LEFT

Burt Prelutsky thinks Leftists are nuts. The relevant clinical diagnostic category is psychopathy

The thing that has me stumped is trying to figure out what leftists want. For example, when left-wing judges take it upon themselves to legislate from the bench, liberals are quick to say that the Constitution is a living document and that it has to evolve to accommodate a changing world. However, whenever a conservative suggests that the 14th amendment, which grants automatic citizenship on any person born in America, ought to be changed to deny that gift to those born to illegal aliens, those same people carry on as if the Constitution, like the 10 Commandments, was carved in stone.

But, really, we have no reason to believe that the Founding Fathers, who fought a war to gain sovereignty for this nation, wouldn't have entertained second thoughts if they'd ever envisioned a foreign invasion numbering in the millions. I mean, it's a basic tenet of the law that nobody is entitled to profit from a crime. To suggest that the child, the beneficiary of his parents' illegal act, doesn't profit is patently absurd. To argue that he shouldn't be deprived of the advantage because he didn't break the law, is ridiculous. You might as well suggest that if a bank robber gives his ill-gotten gains to his wife and kids, the family should get to keep the loot because, after all, they weren't the ones who drove the getaway car.

Another thing about liberals I can't begin to figure out is their abiding devotion to failed economic theories. The fact that communism hasn't worked anywhere in the world doesn't cool their ardor in the slightest. The fact that Marx's brainstorm invariably metastasizes into a despotic tyranny - be it in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Cambodia or Venezuela - doesn't make the slightest impression on them. Neither does the fact that socialism has brought much of Europe to the brink of moral and financial bankruptcy faze them in the least.

In our own country, the most obvious failure of socialism is Social Security, the single largest pyramid scheme ever conceived by the mind of man. When Ponzi did it, he went to jail for fraud; when Roosevelt pulled it off, he was hailed as a savior. As someone or other once observed, if you're going to steal, steal big.

So why is it that leftists continue to promote these half-cocked alternatives to capitalism, the only economic program that's ever motivated people to aspire, to compete, to achieve and to innovate? Well, I hate to be impolite, but when people keep doing the same thing in spite of getting the same rotten results, we have been told by experts in the field that it's a pretty sure sign of insanity. And just in case any doubt remains, you merely have to look to those who speak on their behalf. Assuming you're not a cuckoo yourself, can you possibly imagine rallying around the unappetizing likes of Gore and Kerry, Schumer and Durbin, Kennedy and Rangel, Leahy and Biden, Byrd and Boxer, Sharpton and Jackson, McKinney and Waters, Al Franken and Michael Moore, George Soros and Norman Lear, Hillary and Bill, and Jimmy Carter?

More here

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Saturday night's massacre: "America, Mark Twain said, is a nation without a distinct criminal class 'with the possible exception of Congress.' Apparently nothing changes. This week it was the Democratic Party's turn to feel chagrined as one of its own was captured on tape taking bribes. William Jefferson (D-Louisiana) was allegedly involved in a Nigerian Internet scam. No, not that Nigerian Internet scam, the one that shows up in your email inbox each time you log on. Congressman Jefferson, after all, is no dummy. He is a 'Harvard-trained' lawyer. His scam was a bit more sophisticated. Faced with yet another malefactor in their ranks, congressional leaders sought to divert the media's attention, while they doubtless made desperate phone calls to their staff with orders to shred evidence and bury the bodies."

A serious challenge for the New York Times: "The Times is launching a US edition next month that will be printed at facilities owned by its News Corporation sibling the New York Post. "This is a key moment in the development of The Times as an international media brand," the paper's Australian-born editor, Robert Thompson, said in a statement last night. "We have seen a large increase in our Times Online readership in the US and the appearance of the newspaper on the streets of New York marks the next stage in our print and web expansion." The launch is set for June 6, the week the football World Cup kicks off in Germany. [A repeat of Murdoch's Fox TV success would put the cat among the pigeons!]

A sign of the times: "Hell has frozen over. In a debate in Congress it took a well-known Left-wing Democrat, Barney Frank, to refer to Hayek and Mises to chastise Republicans for supporting subidies to agriculture. The Republican Party has gone far astray that even a man as far Left as Rep. Frank is more free market on this issue. Here is what Frank had to say ..."

Sin cities on a hill : "'Now we see,' Wolf complains at the Sheraton, 'as if our nation isn't saturated enough with gambling, a group of investors this spring has announced plans to try to open a casino two miles from historic Gettysburg.' To desecrate such hallowed ground, Wolf implies, isn't just a lapse of good taste; it's a blight on our national honor. Alas, in trying to protect history from gambling, you also have to protect history from history. As any contemporary gambling booster will tell you, Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, was underwritten by a lottery conducted in London by the Virginia Company. That trend continued as the New World moved toward nationhood. With all 13 colonies establishing lotteries at one time or another, government-approved gambling was one of the original features of the landscape."

Affirmative folly: "A reader responds to an animadversion of mine against affirmative action by e-mailing me President Lyndon Johnson's famous argument in favor of racial preferences: 'You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say, 'You are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.' In reply, I e-mail back the words of Frederick Douglass, a runaway slave who became the foremost black spokesman of his age. In a speech in Boston in 1865, Douglass said: 'What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us. ... Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, What shall we do with the Negro?' I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! ...'"

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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Brookes News Update

Bernanke's monetary policy likely to generate more instability: Further strengthening in the growth momentum in the US money supply raises possibility that economic activity will strengthen and that the Fed runs the risk of setting the platform for a higher inflationary expectations and higher price inflation
Is the Australian economy facing recession?: Australia's manufacturing problems have not been caused by China's massive demand for resources - which is largely driven by China's loose monetary policy - but by the RBA's loose monetary policy
Fidel Castro's true wealth: Because `Forbes' named Castro among the world's richest heads of state in 2005 he is terribly upset. He ought to be. As one of the world's biggest political gangsters he's a lot richer than that. The whole of Cuba, including its hapless people, belong to him and should be included as part of his assets
Natural resources: The market knows best, not Bracks and other meddling politicians: With all the arrogance of a Soviet-style planner Bracks is wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on grossly inefficient wind generators and is also locking away natural resources
True leadership needed on illegal immigration: The root cause of our illegal immigration dilemma stems from the overwhelming availability of illegal employment in the US. Hiring illegal immigrants, employers also create the incentive for otherwise law abiding foreign nationals to become law-breakers
The Church is keeping Marx alive in Brazil and undermining the rule of law: Despite the lessons of history Marxist clergy in Brazil are preaching violence and the necessity for a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship
The question of illegal immigration and a border fence: Illegal immigration is now taking centre stage. How long will it be before the Government succumbs to public pressure and takes drastic action?

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An email from Sean Gabb (in good form): "Those who contribute additional funds [to the Libertarian Alliance] may be eligible for our Top Top Secred Dinners held in a cellar deep below Buckingham Palace. Here you will meet prominent members of the Royal Family and others of the Illuminati. Last month, our dinner was graced by the presence of Her Majesty the Queen, who for the occasion assumed her lizard form and sacrificed a virgin. Those of you who may be familiar with the welfare policies of the Blair Government and the corrupt and pornographic nature of our media will appreciate the trouble we faced in providing Her Majesty with a semi-attractive virgin from the working classes under the age of five. I am proud to say I did find one during a nocturnal prowl through Doncaster. Her loved ones have been silenced by the promise of a quintuple rollover jackpot win for her mother on the National Lottery this August and the admission of her latest "uncle" to the Big Brother household."

Ritalin Making Kids Sick: "Accidental overdoses and side effects from attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder drugs send about 3,100 Americans -- 80 percent of them children -- to hospital emergency rooms annually, a federal survey has found."

Arrogant do-gooder: ""Online poker players will have to fold their hands if a Virginia congressman gets his way. Today, the House Judiciary Committee will mark up a bill introduced by Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte (R) that would ban much online gambling, including bets on sporting events and games of chance -- namely poker, which has enjoyed a boom in recent years."

Well-deserved award: "Sara Carter of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin in Ontario, Calif., has been named the recipient of the 2006 Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration. This award, presented since 1997 by the Center for Immigration Studies, is intended to promote informed and fair reporting on this most contentious and complicated issue. Traveling frequently from California to Arizona and Texas and Mexico, Ms. Carter broke story after story related to the dangerous conditions all along America's southern border. Rare has been the week in the past six months that Ms. Carter hasn't appeared on a cable news program discussing her latest scoop. It was Ms. Carter who broke the story that our government was alerting Mexico City to the locations and membership and other details of the Minuteman Project civilian border-watch group".

In defense of consumerism: "I'm beginning to think that the epithet 'consumerism' is just another word for freedom in the marketplace. It's true that the market is delivering goods, services, and technological advances by leaps, day after day. People claim that they are so inundated with techno advances that they don't want anymore. Say no to the latest gizmo! But we really don't mean it. No one wants to be denied web access, and we want it faster and better with more variety. We want to download songs, movies, and treatises on every subject. No amount of information is too much when it is something specific we seek. And that's not all."

Taxing questions: "Do you think your taxes are too high or too low? Though I expect that well over 90 percent of you are thinking 'too high,' many in the media and political class keep telling us taxes are too low. The left-leaning intelligentsia, in their arrogant smugness, claim we just don't know what is good for us. Yet, they are the ones who ignore the empirical evidence and are unable to distinguish between variables and constants. As a prime example, a May 7 editorial in The Washington Post, advocating higher tax rates on the rich, states: 'Economics cannot predict how high taxes can be raised before they reach counterproductive levels.'... The left has a notable ability to ignore the fact that low-tax-rate states tend to create more jobs and grow more rapidly than high-tax-rate states. We see this throughout the world, but one of the greatest laboratories of the benefits of tax competition is that between the 50 U.S. states"

Why we overregulate: "Assume you are a mid-level bureaucrat in a government regulatory agency, and you know your pay and title depend on how many regulations you are responsible for administering, and the number of people who work for you. Do you think you would push for more or fewer regulations? Assume you are a corporate regulatory compliance officer, and again you know your pay depends in part upon the number of regulations you must comply with, and the number of people who work for you. Would you tend to favor a world with more or fewer regulations?"

One for the Straussians: "The demonization of Leo Strauss, in short, is one of the most dismal signs of the times. The shamelessness and baseness of much of what has been written about him is redolent of the propaganda of the 1930s, Auden's "low, dishonest decade."That is why "Reading Leo Strauss" (Chicago, 256 pages, $32.50), a sober new study by Yale professor Steven Smith, feels so heartening.By returning to the source and examining what Strauss actually wrote, Mr. Smith lets the breeze of reason into the feverish sickroom of ideology. He portrays a Strauss who cherished democracy as the best bulwark against tyranny, and who valued intellectual honesty above all. By the time Mr. Smith is done, nothing is left of the Strauss caricature except the ignorance and malice that fathered it.



For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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LEFTIST "CARING" IS JUST HYPOCRISY

Consider the case of Nancy Pelosi, the ultimate San Francisco big-government liberal, and leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. She is the daughter of Big Tommy D'Alesandro, boss of the Baltimore Democrat political machine. She grew up in a household built around the use of political power for personal gain, under the banner of compassion. In her career in Congress, she has garnered the highest praise from the AFL-CIO, the Americans for Democratic Action, and the League of Conservation Voters. She is grotesquely pro-union and pro-regulation, and a fierce "environmentalist," of course. Her favorite pastime is attacking people on her political right - which is everyone to the right of, say, Mao Zedong - as enemies of clean air, clean water, the working man, or whatever. To her, we're all greedy, vile exploiters of the poor.

Actually, to be fair, her favorite pastime is enacting laws to increase the power of unions, trial lawyers, and the federal government. But Pelosi's private life is all capitalist. She and her husband have a net worth of over $50 million - not bad for champions of the poor. Much of their wealth comes from real estate ventures, such as the development of the Corde Valle Golf Club and Resort in Silicon Valley. Schweizer documents how the Pelosis' private partnership (Lions Gate Limited) managed to get approval to develop some raw land over the objections of environmentalists and other local groups, by contractually promising that the club would be primarily a public course and that the development would be ecologically friendly. But the developers stiffed the public. The golf course turned out to be primarily for the use of the ultrawealthy: the hoi polloi have to reserve three days in advance and pay $275 for a round of golf. A membership at the club costs $250,000! And Lions Gate failed to live up to the promised environmental guarantees. When the San Jose Planning Commission started thinking about looking into whether Lions Gate had made fraudulent representations to get the development approvals, the Pelosis simply hired some local, well-connected lobbyists, and the Planning Commission backed away like frightened kittens.

In a similar manner, Schweizer shows that Pelosi, winner of the Cesar Chavez Legacy Award, uses companies without United Farm Workers contracts to harvest grapes on her vineyard, and she sells those grapes to nonunion wineries. Again, this darling of the AFL-CIO (and recipient of a huge amount of its money for her campaigns) owns a big chunk of two lavish hotels and a chain of chi-chi restaurants that are all resolutely non-union shops.

Next consider Ralph Nader, the ultimate corporation basher and perennial candidate for the presidency (not to mention sainthood). Nader's persona is that of the Spartan lefty, the "walk the walk not just talk the talk" opponent of the hideous corporate greed that dirties the soul of America. When he visited the Soviet Union back in the 1960s, he admired the lack of consumer products, and when he returned to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet system he was dismayed to hear people praising free market economics. To Nader, corporations are evil: they dominate governments, rig prices, sell dangerous and useless products, and generally hurt our standard of living.

But in his personal life, about which St. Ralph is very secretive, things are different. He lives well, using a D.C. mansion that he apparently owns (though the title is in his sister's name), earns millions from speaking and writing, and invests in - big, multinational corporations! He has net assets of about $4 million, most of it in corporate stock, such as the $1 million he owns in Cisco Systems, not to mention his stocks in major defense contractors such as GE and IBM. He controls nonprofit organizations and trusts, all secretly run, with his family members on the governing boards. His charitable foundations give away 4% of their assets every year, the lowest amount possible to keep their IRS tax-exempt status. The remaining assets are also in corporate stock, including telecom monopolies such as Verizon, BellSouth, and Qwest.

More here. And yet more here

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Bush: US would aid Israel under attack: "President Bush said Tuesday that the United States would come to Israel's aid if it were attacked by Iran and welcomed the Jewish state's plan to define its borders. He made the comments at the White House during a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert after a meeting between the two leaders. It was Olmert's first official visit to the United States as prime minister. Bush also praised Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and called on the Hamas-led Palestinian government to meet international demands."

Senate ignoramuses: "Although most provisions of the current U.S. farm bill won't expire until September 2007, a group of senators recently proposed extending it until after the Doha Round of global trade negotiations is complete. Extending the farm bill -- damaging though it is -- will 'send a signal to our trading partners,' says one of the legislation's sponsors. It certainly will. At a time when leadership in the global trade talks is sadly lacking and desperately needed, the signal will be a big fat raspberry."

Pondlife Murtha and his probably false allegation: "Rep. John Murtha, who last year called for the immediate pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, [has] accused an entire Marine company of murdering 15 Iraqis 'in cold blood.' Mr. Murtha claims he received his information from sources inside the Pentagon, which is conducting an investigation into the Nov. 15 incident in the town of Haditha. That investigation is not yet completed, which makes Mr. Murtha's accusation not only irresponsible, but an egregious violation of ethical conduct by a sitting congressman. Mr. Murtha concedes that he has not read any part of the Pentagon's unfinished report. All he has are his 'sources.'... The incident in question occurred when a roadside bomb struck a Humvee carrying Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, killing Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas. What happened next is the subject of the Pentagon investigation, but 15 Iraqis were in fact killed... What's important to remember is that if the Marines did act outside the rules of combat, they will be tried by a military court martial-not by Jack Murtha, a former Marine who should know better. Which makes us wonder if there's an ulterior motive behind his indefensible comments: 'Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood,' he said. Mr. Murtha is actually accusing the Bush administration of murder, because of the 'pressure' it has put on U.S. troops... Mr. Murtha obviously has a problem with the Bush administration and the Iraq war. Fair enough. But he should leave the troops out of his vendetta."

Australians now objectively better off than ever before: "Spending power may have increased by $9000 for every man, woman and child over the past decade... Over the past decade, real disposable income per capita has been growing steadily at an annual average rate of 3 per cent, reaching more than $35,000 per person last financial year, compared to about $26,000 in 1994-95. The spoils of economic growth over the past decade also appear to have been reasonably evenly shared. The bureau said the average weekly income of low-income earners leapt 22 per cent to $300 over the nine years to 2004, while weekly incomes for high earners increased 19.3 per cent to $1027... Australians are also living longer. Boys born in 2004 can expect to live three years longer than boys born in 1994, while girls can expect to live two years longer."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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SMALL GOVERNMENTS NOT ONLY PROMOTE WEALTH BUT ALSO HEALTH, HAPPINESS AND A CLEANER ENVIRONMENT

A few excerpts

When it comes to government spending, less is more. Less government spending and involvement in the economy - both in terms of regulatory interference and taxation burden - are associated with higher rates of economic growth, better productivity and more diverse markets for products. This is supported by country-specific evidence and several long-running international indices ranking economic environments.

To discount the benefits of the minimal government, the state-reliant opponents of free markets and personal freedom usually argue that while less government may indeed mean more economic prosperity, smaller governments deliver lower quality of public services. In doing so, supporters of the large welfare state usually point to the alleged lack of public services in the US - a myth hardly supported by reality. The supposedly contrasting social-services-in "rich" European welfare states are similarly mythical.

Two recent studies released by UK and Swiss researchers provide some insight into the overall argument: is smaller government better for a country's non-economic well-being?

First, a group of Swiss and Danish researchers from the WIF Institute of Economic Research in Zurich looked at whether government involvement in the economy is conducive to life satisfaction across 74 countries. The results show that life satisfaction actually decreases with higher government spending. This negative impact of the government is stronger in countries with a left-leaning median voter. It is alleviated by government effectiveness - but, crucially, only in countries where the state sector is already small. In general, a one standard deviation increase in government spending yields a median decrease of 4.42 percent in self-reported satisfaction by the voters, a drop in the degree of economic competition of 4.17 percent and a shift in voter preferences in rightward ideological direction of 4.15-9 percent.

Another comprehensive study released by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) in the UK summarized available data from various sources, to show that modern governments that spend less can, indeed, provide better public services, a better standard of living and more equitable incomes than high-spending governments....

Not surprisingly, the data show that countries with smaller governments also outperformed those with larger state spending in domestic savings (by over 31 percent), investment (which grew 2.5 times faster in the 1990s in the leaner states), and lending to private sector. Since 1987, the leaner states also say lower inflation and slightly higher wages growth, implying that inflation adjusted wages grew faster in the smaller government states over the last 20 years period. Controlling for the native firms investments abroad, countries with smaller government enjoy the stock of FDI that is twice the size of that found in the states with larger governments. Similar trends hold for private sector productivity growth, private non-residential investment growth and the overall size of the countries' stock markets.

However, contrary to popular beliefs, the better economic and social spending indicators performance by the leaner countries were also associated with the relative strength of their performance in terms of environment. In 1990, states with larger government produced some 0.4 kg pf carbon dioxide emissions per 1 unit of income. By 2000 this figure fell to 0.3 kg. Comparable measures in the states with leaner governments were 0.5 kg in 1990 and 0.4 kg in 2000. On the surface, this appears to be the story of matched improvements across the two types of states with the leaner states continuing to lag behind the larger states. The problem with this arithmetic is that it neglects the vital role of CO2 sinks, such as forests, capable of absorbing the emitted pollutants. Leaner states have 11.6 times greater volume of sinks than the larger states and their forestry areas are increasing at double the rate of forestry growth in the states with large government. Adjusting for the average absorption rates for forestry sinks and relative size of sinks in two groups of countries, the states with leaner government have net CO2 emissions of 0.25 kg per unit of output. This, effectively, is less than the pollution intensity of output that is hoped to be achieved under the Kyoto Protocol.

Overall, the study concludes that "It may be surprising, even counter-intuitive, to find that countries with leaner governments spend more on health and education than those with larger governments (and have been growing that expenditure at a faster rate), that they have a better standard of living, better employment records and similar spending on income support. But the data... should give policy-makers some confidence in arguing [that] ...the leaner governments clearly benefit their citizens more than the narrow illusory benefits offered by larger governments."

The lesson is a simple one. If the real objective of European governments is to improve social and personal well-being, they should lower taxes, cut state spending and let the private sector do its job.

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There is an interesting Reuters video just up here of modern day German neo-Nazis that refers to them as "Far Right". The commentary is however careful not to translate the banner being paraded by the "Far Rightists" concerned. It reads: "Unser Sozialismus ist national. Arbeiter der Stirn und der Faust". Translation" "Our socialism is national. Workers of the hand and the head". So a socialist workers' party is "Far Right"??? That the group concerned (the NPD) is Nazi is however totally clear. You can see here that Hitler used exactly the same slogan. Nazism was socialist in the 30s and it is socialist now.

George McGovern criticizes unions and defends Wal Mart!: "I have never wavered in my support for policies that relieve poverty and improve the standard of living of American workers. As a lifelong liberal, I supported Medicare and Medicaid, civil rights, Social Security and workplace safety requirements. Today, I strongly support universal healthcare. And I have always been a supporter of the labor movement. Unions have a proud legacy of improving the lives of millions of workers over the last century. But lately I have seen developments that have me worried. And I have been reminded of legendary union leader John L. Lewis, who was once asked what his miners were after. His answer? 'More.' It was a funny answer, and perhaps it was honest too. But these days, it's not a very effective strategy, and we are seeing some unfortunate and unintended consequences of Lewis' 'more' philosophy."

Supreme Court: Police don't need warrants in emergencies: "The Supreme Court reaffirmed Monday that police can enter homes in emergencies without knocking or announcing their presence. Justices said four Brigham City, Utah, police officers were justified in entering a home after peeking through a window and seeing a fight between a teenager and adults. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the unanimous court, said that officers had a reasonable basis for going inside to stop violence. The decision overturned a ruling by Utah's Supreme Court that said a trial judge was correct to throw out charges stemming from the police search."

Senators back useless gesture: "The Senate, eager to stanch the flow of illegal immigrants, signaled overwhelming support Monday for President Bush's plan to dispatch National Guard troops to states along the Mexican border. No tour of duty could last longer than 21 days and troops would be excluded from 'search, seizure, arrest or similar activity.' They would support the Border Patrol, which has primary responsibility for intercepting illegal immigrants."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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MINNESOTA: MORE OFFICAL INDULGENCE OF ILLEGALS

The debate over illegal immigrants is especially important to some local law enforcement agencies, who say they often have must release illegals who commit crimes because they do not have valid identification. Winsted Police Chief Mike Henrich says the U.S. Citizen and Immigration service (formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service) will only apprehend and deport illegals when local police have a large number in custody. "We have taken a few of these immigrants and detained them, and we've found that unless you have a lot of illegal immigrants, they will not come and get them," Henrich says.

One illegal immigrant was arrested four times for driving while intoxicated and once for possession of a sawed-off shotgun, each incident involving a separate incident. "These people are getting away with things that somebody who had a genuine, legitimate ID would be held accountable for," says Sheriff Wayne Vinkemeier of McLeod County. "I think that's something the state needs to take a look at."

Gov. Tim Pawlenty says the problem illustrates that current laws are not working. "It just reinforces the fact that the current system is obviously broken," he says. "We have people making a mockery out of our laws." Pawlenty says the solution is to develop a national I.D. card with fingerprint or eye scan technology. The C.I.S. says it often tells police to release illegal immigrants after arrests, adding that that decision is made on a case-by-case basis, based on the crime and past criminal history.

Source

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ELSEWHERE

Mexico sets the example: "If Arnold Schwarzenegger had migrated to Mexico instead of the United States, he couldn't be a governor. If Argentina native Sergio Villanueva, firefighter hero of the Sept. 11 attacks, had moved to Tecate instead of New York, he wouldn't have been allowed on the force. Even as Mexico presses the United States to grant unrestricted citizenship to millions of undocumented Mexican migrants, its officials at times calling U.S. policies "xenophobic," Mexico places daunting limitations on anyone born outside its territory. In the United States, only two posts - the presidency and vice presidency - are reserved for the native born. In Mexico, non-natives are banned from those and thousands of other jobs, even if they are legal, naturalized citizens... Recently the Mexican government has gone even further. Since at least 2003, it has encouraged cities to ban non-natives from such local jobs as firefighters, police and judges."

Immigration nonsense: "To assert as some have that illegal immigrants do not depress wages because they do the jobs Americans refuse is the kind of nonsense economists speak when they strain to be counterintuitive. It is similar to saying that cheap imports do not hold down prices. If employers paid higher than substandard wages, Americans (who famously do almost anything for money, including eating worms, shooting themselves from cannons and listening to Barbra Streisand sing) would take these jobs."

Europe is learning: "Across Europe, countries that for decades have provided a generous reception for immigrants and refugees are now pulling away the welcome mat. Anti-immigrant sentiment bordering on the xenophobic -- once the purlieu of a few right-wing parties -- has become mainstream politics in such countries as the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Britain. New laws are raising the hurdles for newcomers, especially Muslims, and winning cheers from many Europeans. Polls indicate that strong majorities in almost every European country favor not just tightening restrictions on ordinary immigrants but also casting a colder eye on the hard-luck tales of refugees seeking asylum".

IBM researcher slams UK ID card scheme: "IBM researcher Michael Osborne, whose job is research into secure ID cards, slated the UK government's ID cards scheme on the grounds of cost, over-centralisation, and being the wrong tool for the job. Based in Big Blue's Zurich research labs, where the scanning tunnelling microscope was invented and won its inventors a Nobel Prize, Osborne said that the problem is neither the cards nor the fact that the scheme is intended to use biometric technology. The big issue is that the UK government, plans to set up a central database containing volumes of data about its citizens. Unlike other European governments, most of whom already use some form of ID card, the central database will allow connections between different identity contexts - such as driver, taxpayer, or healthcare recipient - which compromises security. Centrally-stored biometric data would be attractive to hackers, he said, adding that such data could be made anonymous but that the UK Government's plans do not include such an implementation. Osborne added that biometric technology is still immature. "It's not an exact science", he said. In real world trials, some 10 per cent of people identified using iris recognition failed to enrol - which means the system didn't recognise them. Even fingerprinting is no panacea, as four per cent failed to enrol. Scale that up to a whole population - the UK contains nearly 60 million people - and the problem of biometric identification becomes huge, he said."

What a laugh! "Super-sizing was still a national pastime back in 2001, when Eric Schlosser's first book, Fast Food Nation, made the New York Times best-seller list. Since then, Wal-Mart has started selling organic foods, free-range chickens can be spotted at almost any supermarket and checking for a product's trans-fat content has become commonplace. But awareness isn't the only thing that's grown. Unfortunately, so has the incidence of childhood obesity.

The Anchoress hits back very powerfully at conservative critics of GWB. She says that people are criticizing him for not being a conservative purist even though he has always claimed to be a moderate ("compassionate") conservative.

Pathological Saudi textbooks: "Saudi Arabia's public schools have long been cited for demonizing the West as well as Christians, Jews and other "unbelievers." But after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis -- that was all supposed to change. A 2004 Saudi royal study group recognized the need for reform after finding that the kingdom's religious studies curriculum "encourages violence toward others, and misguides the pupils into believing that in order to safeguard their own religion, they must violently repress and even physically eliminate the 'other.' " Since then, the Saudi government has claimed repeatedly that it has revised its educational texts.... The problem is: These claims are not true. A review of a sample of official Saudi textbooks for Islamic studies used during the current academic year reveals that, despite the Saudi government's statements to the contrary, an ideology of hatred toward Christians and Jews and Muslims who do not follow Wahhabi doctrine remains in this area of the public school system. The texts teach a dualistic vision, dividing the world into true believers of Islam (the "monotheists") and unbelievers (the "polytheists" and "infidels"). This indoctrination begins in a first-grade text"

See Education Watch for the latest 9th Circus (Whoops! Circuit) outrage. The court which does its best to suppress Christian expression has made participation in Islamic practices compulsory in Californian schools!

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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

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

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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