Taxing "The Rich"

Obama is trying to get tax hikes on "the rich" through Congress to pay for all his promises to other people. But his simplistic Leftist worldview seems to have prevented him from seeing who the people are whom he proposes to tax more. Who are the people earning over $250,000 a year whom Obama wants to hit? Income is a sort of a pyramid. There are a few very rich people at the top but most of "the rich" whom Obama wants to tax are near the base of the pyramid: fairly close to that $250,000 mark. And most of them are hard-working people: doctors, dentists, businessmen and professionals generally.

So will they just pay the extra tax and grin and bear it? If the tax increase were limited to paying 39.6% instead of 33% on any income above $250,000, those just over the mark might not think the change worth bothering about -- and sneering Leftist Jonathan Chait makes that point. But Chait fails to acknowledge that there is a lot more to Obama's tax proposals than the new top rate. Obama also wants to cut out a lot of tax deductions available to those earning over $250,000 and he also has proposed increasing their tax rate on capital gains and dividends from 15 to 20 percent. So many professionals will take a fairly big hit if they carry on as before. So lots of them will reorganize their affairs so that Obama gets exactly nothing extra from them.

And The Corner has a collection of emails from high earners that gives lots of detail about what many of them will do. One example:

"My wife and I are both pediatricians. We own our own practice together. We have one PA and 7 other employees. We each gross about $200 K a year. We have 3 young children at home, 2 of whom are not in school. We also employ an in-home nanny. My wife has been torn for years about not being at home for these children, which are our biggest investment in the future. We operate parallel S corporations as PC's, with a 50/50 ownership of the LLC that is our business. We file taxes jointly. After crunching some numbers concerning the President's tax hike proposals, I have come to the following conclusions. If the President's plan is enacted, we will do the following:

1. My wife will become a stay at home mother.

2. At least 3 of my 7 employees will be released.

3. The practice will downsize to a smaller office space, i.e. less rent.

4. The number of patients cared for on a daily basis will drop by 40%.

5. My wife will come out of the forced ER call schedule for good.

6. I will gross $249,999.00 a year, exactly.

7. The net income of our personal home will decrease by less than $10 K a year from where it would have been if we changed nothing.

So a lot of important service providers will reduce the services they provide in response to the simple-minded ideas of the simple-minded Leftist in the White House -- and America will be the poorer for it. Wealth is not money. Wealth is the goods and services that money can buy and reduced services available reduces the total national wealth. And that's no abstraction. As one of my medical correspondents notes:

"Seeing that almost half of doctors are women, and most are married and many have children, it should be obvious that many will reduce their hours worked. And with all the problems that Obama Care will create, there WILL be a shortage of doctor hours to care for patients. So EVERYONE will EQUALLY WAIT IN LONG LINES FOR CARE.

Another relevant excerpt which shows that the loss of wealth will be large:

"President Lyndon Johnson's administration was known for his War on Poverty. President Obama's will become notable for his War on Prosperity. We're speaking, of course, of Obama's plans to hike income taxes on the most wealthy 2 or 3 percent of the nation. He's not just raising the top rate to 39.6 percent; he's also disallowing about one-third of top earner's deductions, whether for state and local taxes, charitable contributions or mortgage interest. This is an effective hike in their taxes by an average of about 20 percent.

And soon the next shoe will drop - he'll announce that he's keeping yet another of his campaign promises: to apply the full payroll tax to all income over $250,000 a year. (Right now, the 15.3 percent Social Security tax only applies to the first $106,800 of income - you neither pay the tax on income above that, nor accumulate added benefit.) For many taxpayers in this bracket, this hike will raise their total taxes by about half. Finally, he's declaring war on investors by raising the capital-gains-tax rate to 20 percent. These increases are politically insignificant: The top 2 percent of the nation casts only about 4 percent of the votes, barely enough to attract the notice of even the most meticulous pollsters. But they have enormous economic significance. Those who earn more than $200,000 pay almost 60 percent of America's income taxes and account for a third of its total disposable income. If these spenders and investors are hunkering down, waiting for the revenuers to beat down their doors, their confidence will be anything but robust. Their spending will drop; they'll be unlikely to invest (except in new tax shelters)."

So Obama's increase in the tax rates could well bring about not an increase but a REDUCTION in the amount of tax revenue received.

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Obama's attack on American oil producers

When there are huge cries for energy independence, Dumbo is doing his best to throttle the investment that could make it happen

Last summer, when the price of oil rocketed nearly to $150 per barrel, presidential candidate Barack Obama scored political points by calling for a windfall-profits tax on the so-called "Big Oil" companies. Obama's plan was to wallop them with extra taxes for every barrel they sold, so long as prices remained over $80 per barrel. By Inauguration Day, though, the global economic crisis and plummeting oil demand had driven prices to less than $30 per barrel, and with no windfall profits available to tax (and gas prices at the pump no longer an issue), the Obama team quietly dropped the idea. But now, in his proposed budget, Obama has found a new outlet for his desire to punish Big Oil-and, ultimately, the American public-with higher taxes.

Announced last week, the president's budget aims to raise more than $31 billion from energy producers over the next ten years by assessing new levies, repealing existing tax deductions, and rejiggering accounting rules. Among the new charges is an excise tax on oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico, which the administration hopes will raise $5 billion over 10 years. Obama also wants to limit companies' ability to deduct their oil and gas drilling costs, thereby raising their taxable income. And he would impose a fee on non-producing oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico on top of the rents and fees companies already pay for leases.

This last item supports a dubious claim made by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and others during last summer's high-gas-price hysteria: that Exxon Mobil and its brethren were limiting supply and boosting prices by refusing to produce oil and natural gas from federal leases that they held. What the conspiracy theorists never mentioned was that companies must pay rents on leases whether they produce or not, and that companies buy leases from the government for the right to investigate whether the sites contain extractable resources. Often, of course, they don't contain enough extractable oil or gas to make drilling worthwhile, though the government keeps all fees and royalties. There are other instances in which leases are legitimately non-producing. Leaseholders must negotiate an expensive bureaucratic maze to gather the necessary environmental permits to begin exploration and drilling. That can take years. Moreover, environmental organizations like Earthjustice and the Sierra Club routinely take leaseholders to court as a way to sow delay and drive up energy companies' costs.

Perhaps the surest sign that Obama wants to go after the oil and gas industries is his proposal to make them completely ineligible for the manufacturing-tax deduction. Congressional Democrats have long sought this move, calling it a repeal of a special tax break that Washington supposedly gives the petroleum industry. The reality is just the opposite: the manufacturing-tax deduction is available to virtually every manufacturing industry in the United States, not just oil and gas producers. Denying the deduction to Big Oil won't snatch away an ill-gotten favor in the name of fairness; it will unfairly penalize an industry denounced in recent years for the sin of making money.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Corporatism: FDR's "right path" is alive and well! : "`I believe that President Roosevelt has chosen the right path. We are dealing with the greatest social problem ever known. Millions of unemployed must get their jobs back. This cannot be left to private initiative.' And, sure enough President Barack Obama's overall Budget will generate hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the Government sector, people who will be grateful voters in the next election. Here is the Washington Post's piece on that: I'll bet readers thought the opening quote above was perhaps by our President Barack Obama, an admitted admirer of the New Deal. Actually, it was Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief, in 1933, speaking admiringly of the New Deal as the way for National Socialism to follow."

Obama's audacious agenda: Who's paying for it? : "Audacity on steroids. How else to describe the Obama administration's fiscal 2010 budget proposal, unleashed on an American public so staggered by the events of the last few months that they cannot comprehend the magnitude of the plans Mr. Obama and his still-inchoate Cabinet have for the nation. The list of problems the new president has resolved to put right reads like a roll call of the loftiest policy ambitions of every administration since FDR. . That each of these projects failed to one degree or another would give pause to most administrations intent on tackling any one of them. By contrast, Obama has declared that, amidst the greatest financial crisis since World War II, he will solve all of them."

Stimulus bill is really lawyers' full employment act: "A law firm announced last week it was building a special legal team to help its clients acquire some of the $787 billion in the stimulus bill. `We recognize this is an extraordinary opportunity to help advance the interests of our clients,' said team leader Doug McGarrah of Foley Hoag LLP, with offices in Boston and Washington, DC. The clients will need all the help they can get, because deciphering the legal complexities of the stimulus bill is going to occupy lawyers for decades."

An uncharitable tax : "The federal government budget proposed by the president imposes higher taxes on incomes above $250,000. One of the provisions is that charitable donations would no longer be tax deductible. . Without a tax deduction, charitable donations get tax punished. When the beneficiaries of donations are the poor and other good causes, these suffer from fewer gifts. A tax on charitable donations hurts the homeless, the hungry, the wildlife that does not get preserved, the ignorant who do not get educated, and all humanity which loses knowledge and more of its natural legacy. When government taxes the rich like this, it taxes the poor."

Mormon polygamy: Your tax dollars at work: "One of the things I mentioned to Jessop was how I was convinced that Mormon polygamy, for the most part, could not survive without the active help of government. Officially none of the multiple wives are legally married - they are single mothers eligible for all sorts of financial aid from the county, state and federal governments. When you consider that the media age in polygamous Mormon communities is around 12 or 13 you will understand precisely how many millions of dollars politicians are willing to give the sect `for the sake of the children.' Jessop agreed and said: `You can't support three kids these days by yourself, let alone 28.' She confirmed that millions in taxpayer funds were flowing in to polygamous communities keeping the[m] alive. Jessup says that these communities have individuals whose job is to write up grant proposals and submit them to various levels of government. So housing rehabilitation grants, highway grants, educational grants, development grants, etc., pour into these communities. With virtually no separation of church and state in these communities, the church uses the millions showered on the local governments, for its own purposes. Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said that the polygamists `proved themselves the master of grant applications.'"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and 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 or here or here

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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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Material success and social failure?

More junk epidemiology below. The authors find less social dysfunction in Nordic countries and in Japan and say that is because incomes are more equal there. So, like nearly all epidemiologists, they make causal inferences from correlational data -- which you cannot logically do. They allegedly spent 30 years arriving at their conclusions so I am sorry to say that it took me approximately two minutes to see an alternative explanation for their findings: ethnic diversity. Japan to this day has few immigrants and the Nordic countries have only recently begun to have a large immigrant population. And as Robert Putnam has famously shown, social homogeneity expands trust and co-operation. So there is less social dysfunction because people feel happier and safer and more co-operative in a country where most people are like them.

And, without looking at it in detail, I am guessing that the same applies to U.S. States. States with the largest minority populations (the South?) have the highest level of social dysfunction.

How nasty of me to undermine so quickly conclusions that so suit the prejudices of the Left! But even if all of the explanation that I have just given is wrong, the point still stands that "correlation is not causation". You learn that in Statistics 101 but if you are a grand epidemiologist, you are allowed to ignore that, apparently. And BOTH of us could be wrong. There could be some third process at work generating the numbers concerned. Assigning causes from epidemiological data is always mere speculation

It is common knowledge that in rich societies the poor have shorter lives and suffer more from almost every social problem. Likewise, large inequalities of income are often regarded as divisive and corrosive. In a groundbreaking book, based on 30 years' research, Richard Wilkinson, Emeritus Professor at The University of Nottingham together with co-author Kate Pickett from the University of York, go an important stage beyond either of these ideas to demonstrate that more unequal societies are bad for almost everyone within them - the well-off as well as the poor.

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett forcefully demonstrate that nearly every modern social and environmental problem - ill-health, lack of community, life, violence, drugs, obesity, mental illness , long working hours, big prison populations - is more likely to occur in a less equal society, and adversely affects all of those within it.

The remarkable data the book presents and the measures it uses are like a spirit level which we can hold up to compare the conditions of different societies. It reveals that if Britain [Which has always received lots of immigrants and which as a consequence now has a large and troublesome minority population] became as equal as the average for the four most equal of the rich countries (Japan, Norway, Sweden and Finland), levels of trust might be expected to increase by two-thirds, homicide rates could fall by 75 per cent, everyone could get the equivalent of almost seven weeks extra holiday a year, and governments could be closing prisons all over the country.

The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, shows us how, after a point, additional income buys less and less additional health, happiness and wellbeing. The issue is now community and how we relate to each other. This important book explains how it is now possible to piece together a new, compelling and coherent picture of how we can release societies from the grip of pervasive and schismatic dysfunctional behaviour, a picture which will revitalise politics and provide a new way of thinking about how we organise human communities. It is a major new approach to how we can improve the real quality of life, not just for the poor, but for everyone.

More here

The above post also appears today on my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog, which is where I normally debunk epidemiological theorizing

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ELSEWHERE

Obama and special interests: "In his weekend radio address of February 28, 2009, President Obama once again talked about how he isn't captive to any special interest group. As he put it, `The system we have now might work for the powerful and well-connected interests that have run Washington for far too long, but I don't. I work for the American people,' Obama declared. `I didn't come here to do the same thing we've been doing or to take small steps forward, I came to provide the sweeping change that this country demanded when it went to the polls in November.' . Who are all these (mean, vicious) special interests? And who are all the (honorable, virtuous) American people? Lo and behold they are the very same citizens of the country! Yes these special interest groups are composed of Americans who are represented by experts at approaching the government for various types of support. They are farmers, artists, merchants small and large, teachers, steel workers, auto workers, bankers, brokers, dentists, doctors, and so on and so forth. That is who all these nasty, vicious special interest groups are made up of, the same folks who are so noble and innocent, The People!"

The return of big government: "Despite the bad economy he inherited, the political circumstances, for Obama at least, are favorable. He's popular, as new presidents usually are. He talks about `hard choices' but hasn't made any. With large Democratic majorities in Congress, he's free of worry about rebellion on Capitol Hill. Despite glitches in picking his cabinet, his cool demeanor is unshaken. He governs campaign-style, largely with speeches and announcements. No wonder he enjoys being president. Accountability comes later. But there's a problem. Candidates don't have to deal with reality. They talk about the wonderful things they can accomplish as if advocating them is the same as achieving them. They live in a world of political make-believe in which everything from reconciling conflicting interests to paying for costly programs is easy. That's the world Obama continues to inhabit."

Waiting for Godot?: "Is he really just a one-trick pony? What does he do but grind out speeches? What meat-grinder is running behind him, fed with lists of great words, lists of lofty leftist platitudes? His fans swoon, hearing only heavenly hope, nothing but the sweetest swill. Obama is surely the greatest speechmaker in generations. I think he tops Clinton, he challenges Ronald Reagan, Eugene McCarthy, even Franklin Roosevelt. Are we rats following the pied piper? What is the substance? Where is the beef? No beef."

It would be cheaper to fight World War II again: "What is the right word to describe the U.S. government's current and proposed fiscal condition: fantastic, unbelievable, surreal? The Obama administration now expects a budget deficit in fiscal year 2009 of $1,750 billion, or more than 12 percent of GDP. Total federal spending this year is expected to be $3,940 billion, or 27 percent of GDP. President Barack Obama promises that the deficit will be brought down to $1,170 billion in fiscal year 2010. Don't bank on it. Did anyone, even two or three years ago, expect this situation to develop? We need to go back only ten years, to fiscal year 1999, to reach a time when the government's total outlays were smaller than this year's deficit."

Bureaucratic corruption: "Televisions, X-Boxes, alcohol, Internet software and tuition. Inspector General auditors say those are just some of the questionable purchases made by Tennessee Valley Authority employees on their government charge cards. An audit of the program created to pay for small business-related expenses finds spending has swelled to more than $75 million annually, with nearly a third of those purchases over $5,000. One unidentified cardholder had nearly $6 million in charges on six cards in two years. The auditors say the program lacks `accountability and physical control.' TVA managers agree and say they are cracking down."

How big government infrastructure projects go wrong : "The recently enacted $787 billion 'stimulus' program appears to be the down payment on a sweeping `new New Deal' that will include many other ambitious government programs - including the possible nationalization of health care. Given the size and scope of such interventions into the economy, it's important to remember that big government programs often have results that are very different than what was intended. We can gain particular perspective by reflecting on the experience of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's most ambitious infrastructure program, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)."

Scotland: Price control for booze -- to put the price UP, not to keep it down: "Scotland will enter a new age of temperance under radical plans aimed at curbing endemic drinking in a country with some of the worst alcohol abuse rates in the world. Ministers unveiled new plans yesterday which will set a minimum price for drinks, based on the number of units they contain, and a ban on promotions such as buy-one-get-one-free offers. If the plans are approved, Scotland will become the first country in Europe to fix a minimum price on drinks."

Capitalism is the cure not the cause: "Capitalism has become an easy scape-goat recently. This is best exemplified by the Obama Administration's New Deal on steroids. Rather than let the market process work on its own, the Administration has seen it fit to use this as an opportunity to naively think that by spending more money in order to create jobs, the economy will recover. President Obama's logic comes from the vantage point that government, not individuals, create wealth and prosperity and the institution must intervene in areas of human need, such as housing and healthcare, when people are unable to help themselves. Even when the economy slumps. If history is any guide, this is pure fantasy."

The beautiful harmony of collective community: "One of the arguments against decentralized decision-making is that it's too selfish. There's no collective action. There's no community. When the government does stuff, it's collective and therefore - so goes the argument - there's an opportunity for everyone to be acting on everyone else's behalf. These arguments have always struck me as strange. There's lots of collective action, it just isn't coerced. And I've never understood the `community' created by taxation."

China's first moon probe crashes to lunar surface: "China's first moon probe Chang'e 1 intentionally crashed into the lunar surface on Sunday after more than year of science observations, according to state media reports. . Chinese space officials said they planned to launch a follow-up mission - Chang'e 2 - by 2011. Chang'e 1's intentional crash was slated to be a dry run for a potential moon landing, they said Sunday."

The infinite dullness of PBS TV news: "Over the last few months I have had my TiVo record the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, the famed PBS TV program deemed very highfalutin by my liberal colleagues and pals. It's not so much that I lack news sources but more a matter of my own limited amateur investigative journalism. I am curious how a substantially government-funded news program deals with the current national and international economic fiasco. By now I have watched over three months of this program and just as I suspected, it is so terribly biased, so uninterested in balanced reportage that it has become very boring to watch it evening after evening."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and 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 or here or here

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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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Obama and the "Mikoyan syndrome"

A comment received from Gerard Jackson of Brookesnews

A number of people have commented on the hypocrisy of Obama and his rich supporters, whose attitude is one of "do as I say and not as I do". Critics do not realise that this is characteristic of leftists. They always exempt themselves from their own strictures. I call this behaviour the Mikoyan syndrome.

Anastas Mikoyan was a communist agitator in oil refineries at Baku Batoum that were owned by an industrialist called Zubalov, Mikoyan led strikes, protests and organised study groups. One can think of him as the pre-Soviet equivalent of a "community activist". However, once the Soviets grabbed control of the state he took Zubalov's mansion for his own, including the servants, cracked down on strikes, shot protestors, banned study groups that questioned the party's authority and sent their organisers to labour camps. He was justified in doing this because - like today's Democrats - he believed that anyone who challenged the Party was evil or stupid. I regret to say that Mikoyan survived Stalin's purges and died of old age, unlike thousands of his victims.

At the end of the day, Obama is nothing but a highly polished Hugo Chavez with the same corrupt instincts. To him the crisis is an opportunity to plunder Americans and then - with the willing assistance of America's corrupt media - use the loot to effectively turn the US into a one-party state.

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Obama adds to the mortgage problem

An email from the National Association of Realtors. Simplistic Leftist thinking about "the rich" is going to make the financial crisis worse

You may have seen news reports about President Obama's budget proposal that was released today at 11:30 AM Eastern Time. A small section of the sweeping budget plan has the potential to become a major impediment to a recovery in real estate markets across the nation. NAR is 100% opposed to the provision that modifies the Mortgage Interest Deduction and is prepared to use its formidable array of resources against its enactment.

As currently drafted, the plan changes the Mortgage Interest Deduction by reducing the amount of mortgage deductibility on families earning over $250,000. This proposed change in the Mortgage Interest Deduction will result in further erosion of home prices and home values. If this proposal is enacted it will lead to a new round of price depreciation, will cause greater distress on the balance sheets of banks as the collateral value of mortgage backed securities declines. A second credit crisis could emerge before the first one is resolved.

As you read this NAR is launching a multiphase plan of action to eliminate this provision from the budget plan. In the next 24 hours, NAR will be expressing our concerns directly to President Obama, to all members of the United States House of Representatives and the Senate, placing advertisements in the publications read by Washington, DC decision makers. Additionally, NAR will be forming a coalition with other groups affected by this proposal.

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Does the Media Still Love Obama?

Obama is struggling to adjust to a media that isn't fawning over him as much as they used to. From the Canada Free Press

The day following President Obama's State of the Union speech I opened my daily newspaper to read the headline "What the president said and what the facts say." It was an Associated Press story and it drove a tank through the President's various promises and assertions.

The AP reporters weren't the only people who had some doubts. A Reuters news story confirmed my prediction, noting that "Stocks fell on Wednesday as investors found little new in a major speech by President Obama on how he planned to stabilize the economy, while gloomy home sales data weighed on the market." Facts are stubborn things. Eventually they cannot be ignored.

I have previously pointed out that this new President's start in office has had what is surely the shortest "honeymoon" on record with both the public and the media. We're not talking about FDR's famous "first hundred days." We are talking 56 days as this is being written.

There is, I suspect, a growing feeling among both the public and the media that this recession, if the White House and Congress had done NOTHING, would have run its course. All recessions do. But Obama came out almost immediately calling it a "catastrophe" in order to gin up support for a "stimulus" bill that surely had been in the works for the last two years that Democrats had control of Congress, but were unable to get passed because of a potential presidential veto by George W. Bush.

Obama's inexperience has cost him some media credibility and if his economic program doesn't work he will be looking for a new job in 2013.

SOURCE

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Conservatives and Porn

You're going to be hearing about this:

Porn in the USA: Conservatives are the biggest consumers

A quick look at the study reveals all sorts of problems: It doesn't examine individuals, but rather averages across areas, which leads to a red state vs. blue state analysis that allows for startling headlines but in fact tells us very little. One of the findings is that Utah has more per-capita online porn subscriptions than other states. It's probably also true that Salt Lake City is one of the toughest places in America to pay for a lap dance or a peep show. So what do porn-prone Utahns do? They go online, and skew the very statistics now being trumpeted as newsworthy.

For an antidote, read this data-driven NRO piece by Arthur Brooks on conservatives, liberals, and romance. One highlight, drawn from the 2006 General Social Survey:

About 60 percent more Democrats than Republicans confess to having watched at least one pornographic movie in the past year.

This finding never made the news. I wonder why.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Hamas tortures other Palis: "The world makes too little of the oppression of Palestinians--by other Palestinians. So Amnesty International is to be applauded for its recent report on Gaza. The nub of it is, "Hamas forces and militias in the Gaza Strip have engaged in a campaign of abductions, deliberate and unlawful killings, torture and death threats against those they accuse of 'collaborating' with Israel, as well as opponents and critics." The details are characteristically disgusting, and Hamas has been doing this for years. (So has the PLO but that is another story. No, actually the same one, pretty much.) At least a big human-rights group has taken notice. People who claim to care about Palestinians but speak only of Israel are pretending.

WA: State "death with dignity" law takes effect: "Terminally ill patients with less than six months to live will soon be able to ask their doctors to prescribe them lethal medication in Washington state. But even though the `Death with Dignity' law takes effect Thursday, people who might seek the life-ending prescriptions could find their doctors conflicted or not willing to write them. Many doctors are hesitant to talk publicly about where they stand on the issue, said Dr. Tom Preston, a retired cardiologist and board member of Compassion & Choices, the group that campaigned for and supports the law." (03/01/09)

AG: Justice Department will stop medical marijuana raids: "In a little-noticed remark Wednesday, Obama Attorney General Eric Holder said that the Justice Department will no longer raid medical marijuana dispensaries established under state laws but technically prohibited by the federal government. The decision marks a shift from the Bush Administration, which was more draconian in its approach to hunting those who sought to dispense marijuana for medical purposes. Numerous states have decriminalized marijuana in recent years, and new fiscal pressures are turning more states toward being more lenient toward first-time drug offenders as the cost of keeping drug users in jail becomes untenable for state budgets. The remark was caught by The Huffington Post's Ryan Grimm."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and 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 or here or here

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (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 Left do NOT mean well

Fifteen years ago Jeff Jacoby's first regular column appeared in the Boston Globe. He has recyled it recently. See below. I usually agree with him but I have some reservations about this column that I set out at the foot of it

So what's a nice conservative like me doing in a newspaper like this? Wondering, for a start, why so many liberals think of conservatives not so much as people they disagree with, but as people they despise.

Most mainstream conservatives acknowledge that liberals are essentially well-meaning. Misguided, to be sure. And naive? Certainly. And elitist, self-righteous, collectivist know-it-alls, chronically unwilling to learn from their mistakes, clueless when it comes to the workings of the marketplace, always persuaded that the next government program will fix whatever went wrong with the last government program? Yeah. But well-meaning.

It should go without saying that you can mean well and do ill. Those liberal good intentions have helped pave more than a few of the 20th century's roads to hell, from the Evil Empire to the welfare state to the meltdown of the American criminal justice system. Conservatives condemn the demonic results that liberal good intentions have led to, and with gusto. What they don't do, as a rule, is demonize their opponents. Liberals do.

Liberals look at conservatives and see moral cripples: Conservatives hate the poor. Conservatives are greedy. Conservatives have no compassion. Conservatives are Neanderthals . . . racists . . . homophobes . . . warmongers. To be conservative, in the eyes of many fervent liberals, is to be by definition a vile human being -- someone to recoil from, not reason with; someone to damn, not to debate.

Personal vignette: It was a roundtable discussion about poverty and social welfare policies in Massachusetts, and I had made some point or other about welfare and illegitimacy. The representative from the prominent, Boston-based foundation spoke up in disagreement. "People like Mr. Jacoby can say that because they don't care about the poor," she began. "But the rest of us . . ."

"They don't care about the poor". Period, end of story. No room for differences of philosophy here. You're a conservative? Then you're morally defective, your views are warped, and would you please get out of the marketplace of ideas before you stink up the joint. Think of Ted Kennedy's slander of Judge Robert Bork in 1987 ("Bork's America is a land in which . . . blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids . . ."). Or of Boston City Councilor Charles Yancey's foul comparison of his colleague, conservative James Kelly, to a Nazi ("It would be like electing David Duke . . . he has the same politics and rhetoric as David Duke.")

"Liberals go for the jugular," says David Horowitz, the one-time antiwar activist and editor of the radical magazine Ramparts. "With them, it's always about character assassination. If you're conservative, you're either sick or in some way deeply malevolent."

The most flagrant recent example oozed across The New York Times op-ed page last month, when columnist Frank Rich launched a vitriolic personal assault on conservative journalist David Brock, author of a controversial article on Bill Clinton's extramarital adventures. Brock's "motives are at least as twisted as his facts," wrote Rich. "It's women, not liberals, who really get him going. The slightest sighting of female sexuality whips him into a frenzy of misogynist zeal. All women are the same to Mr. Brock: terrifying, gutter-tongued, sexual omnivores."

Imagine a conservative trying to discredit a liberal by sledgehammering him as an unhinged woman-hater, or none-too-subtly "outing" him as a homosexual. Actually, that's hard to do: The last well-known conservative with a taste for baseless personal invective was named Joe McCarthy.

At the 1984 Democratic National Convention, Tip O'Neill -- the great-hearted, much-mourned late Speaker himself -- voiced his opposition to President Reagan's policies thus: "The evil is in the White House." The evil. Never would Reagan have used such language to describe O'Neill.

But then, Reagan wasn't a man of the left. He wasn't on a utopian crusade. Like most conservatives, he didn't think the blights of the world could be ended by transforming human nature. And he certainly didn't imagine the only thing blocking that transformation was wrong-thinking people who must be gotten out of the way -- or excommunicated as "evil."

So what's a nice conservative like me doing in a newspaper like this? Why, conserving. Looking to the past to figure out what has succeeded, and trying to apply its wisdom to the conundrums of the present. Acknowledging that there are no guarantees and that life is unfair, but knowing that the best road for the pursuit of happiness is the one marked with the old signposts: Freedom. Responsibility. Virtue. Work.

Source

I think Jacoby is right in saying that many conservatives give Leftists the benefit of the doubt -- but I think that is a mistake. I think Leftist motives have to be inferred from their deeds, not their words -- and their deeds are with eerie consistency destructive of the wealth and wellbeing of the society in which they live. That cannot just be a mistake. Except for Joe Biden, Leftists are not stupid people. I think that the Leftist AIM is destruction of the world they see about them and which they hate for various reasons. Conservatives may or may not support the status quo but Leftists uniformly want to destroy it. And the Leftist hatred of conservatives is a part of that. They see that conservatives do NOT want to destroy the society in which they live so conservatives are hated obstacles to Leftist aims. I think conservatives should view Leftists as evil. They have no hesitation in viewing us that way. It is of course an old Leftist dodge to see in others what is true of themselves ("projection"). Conservatives need to wake up to that. "You're just projecting" should become a standard reply to Leftist abuse.

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Obama misrepresents his opposition

Why does he routinely ascribe to opponents views they don't espouse?

By KARL ROVE

President Barack Obama reveres Abraham Lincoln. But among the glaring differences between the two men is that Lincoln offered careful, rigorous, sustained arguments to advance his aims and, when disagreeing with political opponents, rarely relied on the lazy rhetorical device of "straw men." Mr. Obama, on the other hand, routinely ascribes to others views they don't espouse and says opposition to his policies is grounded in views no one really advocates.

On Tuesday night, Mr. Obama told Congress and the nation, "I reject the view that . . . says government has no role in laying the foundation for our common prosperity." Who exactly has that view? Certainly not congressional Republicans, who believe that through reasonable tax cuts, fiscal restraint, and prudent monetary policies government contributes to prosperity. Mr. Obama also said that America's economic difficulties resulted when "regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market." Who gutted which regulations?

Perhaps it was President Bill Clinton who, along with then Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, removed restrictions on banks owning insurance companies in 1999. If so, were Mr. Clinton and Mr. Summers (now an Obama adviser) motivated by quick profit, or by the belief that the reform was necessary to modernize our financial industry?

Perhaps Mr. Obama was talking about George W. Bush. But Mr. Bush spent five years pushing to further regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He was blocked by Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank. Arriving in the Senate in 2005, Mr. Obama backed up Mr. Dodd's threat to filibuster Mr. Bush's needed reforms.

Even in an ostensibly nonpartisan speech marking Lincoln's 200th birthday, Mr. Obama used a straw-man argument, decrying "a philosophy that says every problem can be solved if only government would step out of the way; that if government were just dismantled, divvied up into tax breaks, and handed out to the wealthiest among us, it would somehow benefit us all. Such knee-jerk disdain for government -- this constant rejection of any common endeavor -- cannot rebuild our levees or our roads or our bridges." Whose philosophy is this? Many Americans justifiably believe that government is too big and often acts in counterproductive ways. But that's a far cry from believing that in "every" case government is the problem or that government should be "dismantled" root and branch. Who -- other than an anarchist -- "constantly rejects any common endeavor" like building levees, roads or bridges?

During his news conference on Feb. 9, Mr. Obama decried an unnamed faction in the congressional stimulus debate as "a set of folks who -- I don't doubt their sincerity -- who just believe that we should do nothing." Who were these sincere do-nothings? Every House Republican voted for an alternative stimulus plan, evidence that they wanted to do something. Every Senate Republican -- with the exception of Judd Gregg, who'd just withdrawn his nomination to be Mr. Obama's Commerce secretary and therefore voted "present" -- voted for alternative stimulus proposals.

Then there's Mr. Obama's description of the Bush-era tax cuts. "A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy," he explained in his Tuesday speech, after earlier saying, "tax cuts alone can't solve all of our economic problems -- especially tax cuts that are targeted to the wealthiest few."

The Bush tax cuts were not targeted to "the wealthiest few." Everyone who paid federal income taxes received a tax cut, with the largest percentage of reductions going to those at the bottom. Last year, a family of four making $40,000 saved an average of $2,053 because of the Bush tax cuts. The tax code became more progressive as the share paid by the top 10% increased to 46.4% from 46% -- and the nation experienced 52 straight months of job growth after the cuts took effect. And since when is giving back some of what people pay in taxes "transferring wealth?"

In his inaugural address -- which was generally graceful toward the opposition -- Mr. Obama proclaimed, "We have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord." Which Republican ran against him on fear, conflict and discord?

Mr. Obama portrays himself as a nonideological, bipartisan voice of reason. Everyone resorts to straw men occasionally, but Mr. Obama's persistent use of the device is troubling. Continually characterizing those who disagree with you in a fundamentally dishonest way can be the sign of a person who lacks confidence in the merits of his ideas.

It was said that Lincoln crafted his arguments in "resonant words that enriched the political dialogue of his age." Mr. Obama's straw men aren't enriching the dialogue of our age. They are cheapening it. Mr. Obama should stop employing them.

SOURCE

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A Leftist realizes that Obamism is Fascism

Here's some news: a liberal has proven capable of recognizing true fascism. Here's liberal journalist Robert Scheer on NPR, via The Hawblog:

I don't think the idea of nationalizing, as it's now being called - which means bailing out these banks, setting them straight, then letting them go private again, which is the model that everybody is using, and the people who get screwed are the people whose retirement funds had common or preferred shares and they get wiped out, and these bankers come out richer than ever at the other end - that's not a leftist idea and it's not socialism. This is what we used to, in Comparative Economic Systems, call fascism. It's putting government at the service of the big financial interests. That's what happened in Italy, that's what happened in Germany, that's what happened in Japan.

Despite the "down with bankers" slant, Scheer is correct that fascism is what you get when an authoritarian government entangles its tendrils with ostensibly private industry. Tony Blankley was on hand to ask,

What I don't understand is how my colleagues on this show, who I believe were for Obama, are now saying he's leading a fascist regime. Did he mislead them a few weeks ago when he was still running?

Scheer's befuddled response is something we'll be hearing more often as liberals who aren't total fiends wake up and realize what they've done to this country:

To answer your question, I am disappointed in Barack Obama and I'm not quite sure what he's doing.

It's going to be a little difficult to pretend the Moonbat Messiah is whoever you want him to be, now that he is actively engaged in destroying our economic system to pave the way for authoritarianism - as anyone familiar with his background should have predicted he would do.

SOURCE

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and 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 or here or here

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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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Obama embraces the Bush legacy

Though the headlines from the President's speech mostly focused on his promise to end all U.S. combat operations in Iraq by August 31, 2010 -- and withdraw U.S. forces fully by the end of the following year -- there was considerably more to it than that. For starters, Mr. Obama again acknowledged that our forces in Iraq had "succeeded beyond any expectation," not least his own.

Mr. Obama was also rightly generous in his praise of outgoing U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno, "two of our finest generals." All three men were Bush appointees, and all were instrumental in devising, advocating and implementing the surge strategy that Mr. Bush pursued amid the derision of his critics, including then-Senator Obama.

President Obama also recognized that Iraqis themselves have made significant political progress, and that "there is renewed cause for hope in Iraq." That's a far cry from his message of last July, when he told reporters, after visiting Iraq, that "So far, I think we have not seen the kind of political reconciliation that's going to bring about long-term stability in Iraq."

But more important than Mr. Obama's implicit repudiation of his own positions as a candidate (and the implicit vindication of Mr. Bush's position, to say nothing of John McCain's) is his decision to maintain a sizable U.S. military presence in Iraq -- in the range of 35,000 to 50,000 troops -- past the August 2010 "withdrawal" date. That "transitional force" is roughly the size of the U.S. military presence in South Korea through the Cold War. And its mission, involving training of Iraqi forces, U.S. force protection and "targeted counterterrorism missions," largely describes what the U.S. is already doing in Iraq.

Most of Iraq's provinces are under full Iraqi security control, and U.S. forces will be out of all Iraqi cities and towns by this July, as stipulated in the Status of Forces Agreement that the Bush Administration concluded with the Iraqi government last year. By making it clear a sizable U.S. force will remain in Iraq, Mr. Obama is showing a commitment to Iraq's continued democratic progress and should help deter a revival of ethnic tensions. He's also making clear the strategic advantage of having a stable U.S. ally in the heart of the Persian Gulf.

More here

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Obama's Budget Will Harm Small Businesses and Destroy American Jobs

Simplistic Leftist theory gets it wrong again

Few would suggest that Barack Obama would intentionally kill American jobs and persecute the small businesses that create them. Unfortunately, that's precisely the effect of his new budget and tax scheme. By raising taxes on small business and reneging on his campaign promise to provide them capital gains tax relief, he will punish the very entrepreneurs that create most American jobs and market innovations.

Obama, of course, would righteously protest that he seeks to help small businesses, and will only raise taxes on the "wealthy" earning over $250,000. The simple truth, however, is that most taxpayers filing above the $250,000 benchmark are not individual fat cats or trust-fund babies. Rather, over 65% of them are actually small businesses, which file as individuals rather than corporations because they have fewer than 100 shareholders and do not pay dividends. Small businesses constitute 99% of employers, and employ over half of all private-sector employees in America, and many of them file above the $250,000 threshold.....

According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), which defines "small businesses" as those employing between 3 and 199 people, these entrepreneurs employ over 50% of the nation's private-sector employees and account for over half of American non-farm private gross domestic product (GDP). In addition, given the dynamic nature of our economy, these small businesses create approximately two-thirds of net new jobs and provide the first job for most new entrants into the workforce, according to the NFIB, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the United States Census Bureau. In fact, America's small businesses would comprise the world's third-largest economy (after the United States and Japan) if standing alone, and represent an astounding 99.7% of all employers in America.

If Obama really wanted to stimulate the American economy and create jobs, he would stop punishing small businesses with tax increases that falsely target "the rich." Instead of repeatedly shoveling billions of dollars to well-connected big businesses that employ armies of lobbyists but refuse to correct their defective business models, he might provide relief to small entrepreneurs like those who created Wal-Mart, Apple or Microsoft. Instead of raising taxes on small businesses, he would honor his campaign promise to cut them. Instead of futilely attempting to preserve jobs at failing giants, he would provide the incentives for the smaller businesses that create jobs. Along the way, he might consider reducing payroll taxes or providing tax hiatuses for new small businesses until they successfully transcend their fledgling early stages.

President Obama and Congress, your massive spending bills are only worsening the market and harming the economy. If you really want to restore American innovation and begin creating jobs again, stop targeting supposedly "rich" small businesses and raising their taxes. You'll be amazed at the economic growth that follows.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

There is a new website called A Faithful Soldier which may be worth a look. It honors everyone in the US military all around the world. Dog tags are sold on it and 15% of all proceeds is said to go to a charity (Soldier's Angels) which helps injured soldiers or families of those that lost their lives in the military. The tags could be personalized with either your name or someone you know in the military and could be good as gifts.

A good comment here on the huge political bias in the reports by snopes.com -- something I have myself mentioned two or three times.

Where are all those "Green jobs"?: "California's unemployment rate jumped to 10.1% in January, the highest since 1983, as employers in the nation's most-populous state cut 79,000 jobs in the month. Meanwhile, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday declared a state of emergency to address California's third-straight year of drought, ordering officials to take steps to reduce urban water consumption and to expedite water transfers throughout the state. The rate, released Friday by the state's Employment Development Department, is up from a revised figure of 8.7% for December 2008. The national jobless rate for January was 7.6%. There were 3.3% fewer jobs in California than a year earlier. The report said there were 1,863,000 unemployed Californians, up 754,000 from January 2008."

A few fountains of bias to dry up: "After 150 years the final edition of the Rocky Mountain News landed on readers' doorsteps yesterday morning with the headline "Goodbye, Colorado". It is Colorado's oldest newspaper and the largest-circulation daily to succumb to the crisis in the newspaper industry. The 144-year-old San Francisco Chronicle is in danger of closing "within weeks", making San Francisco the first big city in the United States without a major daily paper. The Seattle PostIntelligencer and Tucson Citizen could also shut down if no buyer steps forward. Analysts predict that other titles will follow the 210,000-circulation Rocky Mountain News because of the economic downturn and the flight of advertising and readers to the internet"

Good demographic news from Israel: "According to the CBS, the country's Jewish population is getting younger and the Arab population getting older. The number of annual Jewish births increased by 45% between 1995 (80,400) and 2008 (117,000), as a result of aliya from the USSR, the shift by the Soviet olim from a typical Russian rate of one birth per woman to a typical Israeli rate of two-three births, the rising secular Jewish rate and the sustained high Orthodox and haredi rate. The number of annual Arab births has stabilized - since 1995 - at around 39,000, reflecting a most successful integration by Arabs into the country's infrastructures of education, health, human services, commerce, finance, culture, sports and politics. The fertility gap is down from six births per woman in 1969 to 0.7 in 2009, and the proportion of Jewish births has grown from 69% (of total births) in 1995 and 74% in 2007 to 75% in 2008. The downward trend typifies, also, the Arabs in Judea and Samaria due to large scale emigration, entrenched family planning, reduction of teen pregnancy, rapid urbanization, expanded education especially among women, record divorce rate and higher median marriage age. The Westernization of Arab fertility rate (3.5 births per woman in pre-1967 Israel and four in Judea and Samaria) is apparent throughout most of the Arab and Muslim world."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and 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 or here or here

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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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More on the instinctive nature of morality

The origins of morality lie in the disgust that makes us avoid rotting food and other health hazards, according to research that explains why injustice is said to leave a bad taste in the mouth. Scientists have discovered that the feeling of being cheated evokes the same revulsion response as foul-tasting food and drink. The involuntary emotional reaction that keeps us away from sources of infection also prompts us to uphold moral standards and to shun those who do not.

The findings, from a team of psychologists in Canada, suggest that disgust was important to the evolution of morality, and that our sense of what is ethical is based not only on reasoning but powerful gut reactions as well. "Morality is often pointed to as the pinnacle of human evolution and development," said Hanah Chapman, of the University of Toronto. "However, disgust is an ancient, rather primitive emotion which played a key evolutionary role in survival. Our research shows the involvement of disgust in morality, suggesting that moral judgment may depend as much on simple emotional processes as complex thought."

Her colleague Adam Anderson said: "These results shed new light on the origins of morality, suggesting that not only do complex thoughts guide our moral compass, but also more primitive instincts related to avoiding potential toxins. Surprisingly, our sophisticated moral sense of what is right and wrong may develop from a newborn's innate preference for what tastes good and bad."

Disgust is a universal emotion that is thought to have evolved to promote survival. The things that we find revolting, such as rotting food, faeces, corpses and open wounds, are potent sources of germs, and the sense of abhorrence that they invoke helps to ensure that we stay away from them. The emotion is caused by similar triggers across different human societies, pointing to deep evolutionary roots. There is also a universal facial expression attached to disgust, involving a curl of the lip, a wrinkled nose and lowered eyebrows, which is recognised around the world. The study shows that the same expression is activated when people are treated unfairly, indicating that both physical and moral disgust have the same root.

The results, published in the journal Science, suggest that the powerful emotion of disgust was co-opted to drive morality, as systems of ethical standards became advantageous to human societies. A disgust response is a powerful incentive to avoid behaviour that might induce it and people who make you feel revulsion. This would have promoted fair and co-operative behaviour by making people disgusted with themselves when they transgress and by imposing a social cost on those who break moral rules. "Unfair offers may be received like a plate of spoilt food," the researchers wrote. "This turning away or rejection of unfair actions may also extend to later avoidance of transgressors."

In the study, the scientists measured movement of the facial muscles in subjects playing a game in which they were asked to accept or reject when offered shares of a sum of money. Low offers elicited an expression of disgust similar to that caused by a bad taste. The results suggest that both types of disgust stem from the same neural systems and evolutionary roots, and that moral disgust grew out of the original health-related emotion.

SOURCE

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Obama's incompetent arithmetic

President Obama has laid out the most ambitious and expensive domestic agenda since LBJ, and now all he has to do is figure out how to pay for it. On Tuesday, he left the impression that we need merely end "tax breaks for the wealthiest 2% of Americans," and he promised that households earning less than $250,000 won't see their taxes increased by "one single dime."

This is going to be some trick. Even the most basic inspection of the IRS income tax statistics shows that raising taxes on the salaries, dividends and capital gains of those making more than $250,000 can't possibly raise enough revenue to fund Mr. Obama's new spending ambitions.

Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and "the wealthiest 2%." Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That's about 7% of all returns; the data aren't broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% -- about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 -- paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income.

Note that federal income taxes are already "progressive" with a 35% top marginal rate, and that Mr. Obama is (so far) proposing to raise it only to 39.6%, plus another two percentage points in hidden deduction phase-outs. He'd also raise capital gains and dividend rates, but those both yield far less revenue than the income tax. These combined increases won't come close to raising the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Mr. Obama is going to need.

But let's not stop at a 42% top rate; as a thought experiment, let's go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That's less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable "dime" of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.

Fast forward to this year (and 2010) when the Wall Street meltdown and recession are going to mean far few taxpayers earning more than $500,000. Profits are plunging, businesses are cutting or eliminating dividends, hedge funds are rolling up, and, most of all, capital nationwide is on strike. Raising taxes now will thus yield far less revenue than it would have in 2006.

Mr. Obama is of course counting on an economic recovery. And he's also assuming along with the new liberal economic consensus that taxes don't matter to growth or job creation. The truth, though, is that they do. Small- and medium-sized businesses are the nation's primary employers, and lower individual tax rates have induced thousands of them to shift from filing under the corporate tax system to the individual system, often as limited liability companies or Subchapter S corporations. The Tax Foundation calculates that merely restoring the higher, Clinton-era tax rates on the top two brackets would hit 45% to 55% of small-business income, depending on how inclusively "small business" is defined. These owners will find a way to declare less taxable income.

The bottom line is that Mr. Obama is selling the country on a 2% illusion. Unwinding the U.S. commitment in Iraq and allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire can't possibly pay for his agenda. Taxes on the not-so-rich will need to rise as well.

On that point, by the way, it's unclear why Mr. Obama thinks his climate-change scheme won't hit all Americans with higher taxes. Selling the right to emit greenhouse gases amounts to a steep new tax on most types of energy and, therefore, on all Americans who use energy. There's a reason that Charlie Rangel's Ways and Means panel, which writes tax law, is holding hearings this week on cap-and-trade regulation.

Mr. Obama is very good at portraying his agenda as nothing more than center-left pragmatism. But pragmatists don't ignore the data. And the reality is that the only way to pay for Mr. Obama's ambitions is to reach ever deeper into the pockets of the American middle class.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Why Obama's economic plan will fail : "The recent passage of the $787 billion malapropism known as the `American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009? on Friday the 13th was full of irony. Beyond the portentous date of passage, or its questionable moniker, was the ugly process leading to the confirming Senate vote. While promising `unprecedented responsibility, transparency, and accountability' in securing passage of the largest ad hoc spending bill in U.S. history, the Obama team instead permitted their Congressional allies to rush through a 1,000-page monstrosity with no effective deliberation, no promised prior posting, and no lawmaker coming close to fully reading the pork-laden bill. But the reaction of President Obama was, itself, the ultimate incongruity. For even as Mr. Obama hailed its passage as a `major milestone on the road to recovery' which would lead to `3.5 million new or saved jobs in two years,' the bill in fact guarantees the failure of his economic program, a prolonged downturn, and a golden opportunity for the revival of his political opponents."

Long overdue: President Barack Obama will phase out government payments to crop producers making more than $500,000 a year and eliminate subsidies for cotton storage to help trim the U.S. budget deficit, a senior administration official said. Obama, who lays out his budget proposals later on Thursday, targets agriculture, tax procedures, and defense procurement in his efforts to cut spending and rein in a deficit the White House projects will reach $1.75 trillion this year. "Roughly a third of farmers receive direct payments, which they receive regardless of whether they are producing anything or not," the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said while explaining elements of the budget ahead of its release. "We would propose that for farms with revenue above $500,000 a year that we phase out those direct payments over time."

Look out, Washington, we're tea-ed off : "Only in America does the term `tea party' sound ominous. In much of the world, it's a high-falootin', civilized gathering. In the U.S., it has meant tax rebellion ever since a few Boston patriots decided they liked their tea mixed with salt water instead of sugar. Last week CNBC's Rick Santelli made national news when he called for a `Chicago tea party' in a populist rant so powerful that the White House had to scramble to respond. With more than 2 million views, his anger and frustration have poured across the Internet. On Friday, February 27, at least 15 `tea party' protests are planned from Atlanta to San Diego. . You might say Obama's media fans were `tea-ed off,' and they weren't alone."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and 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 or here or here

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (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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Why do so many people hate Gail Trimble?

Britain has a TV quiz show called "University Challenge", in which teams from various universities compete against each other to answer some very obscure questions. The team from Oxford's Corpus Christi college has just won. They won because one member of their team, Gail Trimble, seemed to know just about everything. As a much-published academic, I think I have some claim to being bright and knowing a lot but I would not have been able to answer a single one of the questions that Miss Trimble answered even before the question was finished.

Knowledge and intelligence are not the same but her prodigious knowledge is a byproduct of stratospheric IQ. She was reading at age one. And early language mastery is one of the best indices of IQ. Confirming the disjunction between knowledge and IQ, however, Miss Trimble failed utterly at answering "Pub Quiz" questions about film stars, TV shows and the like. She knows as little about popular entertainment as she knows a lot about academic things.

Since it is high IQ people who are responsible for the many scientific and technical advancements that have made our lives so much easier than the "nasty, brutish and short" lives of our ancestors, one would think that high IQ people would always be celebrated and admired. And they do often get recognition of various sorts, the Swedish (as distinct from the Norwegian) Nobel prizes, for instance. But I guess it will be no surprise that high IQ people also attract dislike and hatred. Envy is a very common human trait and it is not only higher incomes that are envied but many other things as well. And Miss Trimble has certainly attracted lots of dislike and abuse as a result of her abilities. See the insert below.



And that ties in with politics. The nonsensical and incoherent claim that underlies so much Leftist discourse is "all men are equal". And that is the envier's gospel. It makes not a scrap of sense and shows no contact with reality but it is something that enviers resort to as a way of soothing their envious feelings. They deny the very differences that give them so much heartburn. "Denial" was long ago indentified by Freud as a maladaptive psychological defence mechanism and "All men are equal" is a prize example of that. Whatever one thinks of his theories, Freud was undoubtedly an acute observer of people and very few psychologists today would doubt the maladaptive nature of denial as described by Freud.

So Gail Trimble by her very existence offends Leftists. Her existence pushes down their throats the falsity of their central dogma. Reality is SUCH a problem for Leftists! And because their central dogma is not rational, they can only respond to inconvenient reality by hatred and abuse. Conservative bloggers know from their email and the comments that they get on their blogs how most Leftists respond to any presentation of facts that are inconvenient to them. A rational comment backed up by facts is very rare. It is almost all assertion and abuse. If you are very lucky you may get selective attention to the facts but that is all.

Envy has always been with us and the envier's gospel has therefore had many outings throughout history. One thinks of the "Levellers" of Cromwell's day, for instance. And it also appears in the American Declaration of Independence, of course. There were enviers among the American revolutionaries too. But the declaration was of course a compromise document and Jefferson inserted into the envier's creed the word "created" ("all men are created equal"), which removed it from everyday reality and made it clear that the dogma was a matter of faith, not fact.

I think it must be because of that one word "created" in the Declaration that some Christians claim that God suffers from poor sight. They say "all men are equal in the sight of God". As the Leftist FDR said in his January 6, 1942 State of the Union address: "We are fighting, as our fathers have fought, to uphold the doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God."

That is, however, very poor theology. The Bible makes it clear that God treats saints and sinners very differently. Homosexuals are accursed and condemned to death, for instance (Romans chapter 1). All men are NOT equal in God's eyes. I have seen Galatians 3:28 quoted in support of the equality myth but that text quite clearly refers to committed Christians, not to all men.

More about the brilliant Miss Trimble here and here

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REASONS FOR GLOOM

Looming ahead of us-- and our children and their children-- are dangers that can utterly destroy American society. Worse yet, there are moral corrosions within ourselves that weaken our ability to face the challenges ahead. One of the many symptoms of this decay from within is that we are preoccupied with the pay of corporate executives while the leading terrorist-sponsoring nation on earth is moving steadily toward creating nuclear bombs. Does anyone imagine that we will care what anyone's paycheck is when we see an American city in radioactive ruins?

Yet the only serious obstacle to that happening is that the Israelis may disregard the lofty blather coming out of the White House and destroy Iran's nuclear facilities before the Iranian fanatics can destroy Israel. If by some miracle we manage to avoid the fatal dangers of a nuclear Iran, there will no doubt be others, including a nuclear North Korea.

Although, in some sense, the United States of America is still the militarily strongest nation on earth, that means absolutely nothing if our enemies are willing to die and we are not. It took only two nuclear bombs to get Japan to surrender-- and the Japanese of that era were far tougher than most Americans today. Just one bomb-- dropped on New York, Chicago or Los Angeles-- might be enough to get us to surrender. If we are still made of sterner stuff than it looks like, then it might take two or maybe even three or four nuclear bombs, but we will surrender.

It doesn't matter if we retaliate and kill millions of innocent Iranian civilians-- at least it will not matter to the fanatics in charge of Iran or the fanatics in charge of the international terrorist organizations that Iran supplies. Ultimately, it all comes down to who is willing to die and who is not.

How did we get to this point? It was no single thing. The dumbing down of our education, the undermining of moral values with the fad of "non-judgmental" affectations, the denigration of our nation through poisonous propaganda from the movies to the universities. The list goes on and on.

The trajectory of our course leads to a fate that would fully justify despair. The only saving grace is that even the trajectory of a bullet can be changed by the wind. We have been saved by miraculous good fortune before in our history. The overwhelming military and naval expedition that Britain sent to New York to annihilate George Washington's army was totally immobilized by a vast impenetrable fog that allowed the Americans to escape. That is how they ended up in Valley Forge.

In the World War II naval battle of Midway, if things had not happened just the way they did, at just the time they did, the American naval force would not only have lost, but could have been wiped out by the far larger Japanese fleet. Over the years, we have had our share of miraculous deliverances. But that our fate today depends on yet another miracle is what can turn pessimism to despair.

Source

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BrookesNews Update

Dark clouds gather as Obama spooks the markets: Business men are not going to invest if they believe they will be punished for their success. They are not going to invest if they believe some blustering thug like Pelosi, Schumer or Barney Frank is going to start telling them how to run their businesses. When this kind of situation emerges the wisest thing for business to do is batten down the hatches. And this is just what might be happening
Central banks, including the Fed, are cranking up the money supply like crazy : We live in an age of grave economic ignorance, if central-bank policy is an indication of prevailing economic theory. It is apparent that we've learned nothing from centuries of monetary destruction. The persistent demonstration that capital, not paper, is the basis for prosperity has fallen on deaf ears. Daily, we face the sad spectacle of government officials, pundits, and even Nobel laureates telling us that printing money is the answer to an economic downturn
The economy tanks and the government resorts to snake-oil policies : It very much looks like the Reserve is counting on monetary policy to boost the economy. If this is so then we can expect it to continue cutting the cash rate until it detects signs of recovery or in its opinion prudence demands a halt to the expansion. No bank can expand the money supply at these rates without generating inflation
The fallacies behind Keynesian dogma: The global economic crisis that the reckless monetary policies of the world's central banks visited upon us has led to many mislabelling the situation as on of 'classic Keynesianism'. That vulgar Keynesian thinking contributed mightily to the crisis never enters the heads of these economic commentators - but then very little ever does
The New York Times vs. accurate Cuban history : The ACLU and the New York Times are outraged. A book filled with lies that extolled the virtues of Castro's bloodstained regime and treated the sadistic Che Guevara as a hero was withdrawn, at the insistence of parents, from Miami's public school libraries. A federal appeals panel supported the action. In doing so noted the gross dishonesty of the book. That also outraged the ACLU and the New York Times. How dare anyone expose their heroes as the murderous thugs they are
The People's Democratic Republic of Victoria: Premier Bracks and his fellow leftwing extremists have been gradually imposing draconian regulations and laws on Victorians that are rapidly eroding their democratic rights. This is the same despicable crew whose green policies savaged capital accumulation and recently killed more than 200 Victorians. One move is to bar from hospitals doctors who refuse to submit to the government's abortion laws. The thuggish and cowarly Bracks believes that acting according to one's conscience is a privilege that only Australian-hating leftists should be allowed to enjoy
Venezuela's bright side : The referendum results confirm that Chavez's base in the major urban centers, where Venezuela's biggest slums are concentrated, has been seriously eroded: His power is increasingly reliant on the more rural or provincial parts of the country. The symbolism of Chavez's defeat in Petare, a major slum in Caracas, cannot be overstated. Chavez still does not command enough power to achieve his totalitarian dream
Israel: the Time of NO Alternative: The only winner in the Israely election is the current 'lame duck' Prime Minister of Israel, Olmert, who will be able to stay in power and avoid corruption charges for a bit longer while this charade of forming a new Israeli government progresses
What we are not told about oil prices: The media is not telling the truth about oil prices. Is this because they want people think the worst of business make it look like a racket? By painting business as corrupt the media hope to get Americans to look to government to solve their problems. This way the people will more readily accept the socialist paradigm
Obama's Presidency: Is it any wonder the market continues to sink?: Obama's economic policies and his administrations constant attacks and threats again business have created an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that has helped drive down the markets. If he continues with reckless behaviour we can also expect to see investment drying up. This would create a very ugly picture for unemployment and growth
Obama's 700 billion dollars: Obama's 700 billion dollars, one on top of the other, will be 233,333,333 feet high. That equals about 44,000 miles. New York City and Los Angeles are about 3,000 miles apart. This means that Obama's 700 billion dollar stack, if laid on the ground, would go from New York to LA and back to New York over 7 times. Now that's a fur piece!

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and 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 or here or here

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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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Financial Stability, or Fascist Decline?

Increased state control in response to economic turmoil is nothing new. After the First World War, the resultant economic depression in Europe was used as a springboard by both Germany and Italy to embrace a fascist form of government. While the word "fascist" has fallen into disuse today (except as a political insult invariably hurled by the Left at the Right) its corporatist methodologies are front-and-center stage in the nation's capital. And it's time to reexamine their origins-and impact.

While most Americans are no doubt familiar with the militaristic facet of fascism, the economic side tends to be neglected-likely in part because those principles are shared by many in government today. The primary economic principles behind fascism focus on state intervention in private industry. In fascist economies, private individuals continue to run private industry, but only under the firm control of the government. This differs from socialism, where the state actually owns the industry.

A quick glance at history may make the pattern clear: As the inter-war economy worsened, so too did statist policies that destroyed innovation and initiative. In the mid-1920s, Italy's monarchical government was confronted with the rise of fascism, partly spurred by a fear of the rise of communism and partly from festering discontent over the way Italians perceived they had been slighted after WWI. Benito Mussolini, the leader of the Italian fascists, began to introduce state-centric policies. Il Duce (sound familiar?) was particularly infatuated with large public works projects to cope with the worldwide depression that hit.

In the early 1930s, he founded the Institute for the Industrial Reconstruction, whose purpose was to bail out debt-laden corporations. By the end of the 1930s, the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction had become a tool for the state to push its policies amongst the industries. Columnist Michael Ledeen, in his chilling piece, "We are all Fascists Now," states that fascism's "most durable consequence was the expansion of the ability of the state to give orders to more and more citizens, in more and more corners of their lives."

Similarly, in the late 1980s, Congress created the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC), as a result of the savings and loan crisis. The RTC was a government agency intended to temporarily bail out bad assets. Its role, however, was taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in the mid-1990s, which has had to continue doling out cash to failing banks, as seen over the past year. The FDIC's individual account coverage rose from $100,000 to $250,000 last year, thanks to the TARP, putting taxpayers on the hook that much more. As ALG News previously reported, in the aggregate FDIC assurances rose some $2 Trillion in 2008.

And this same state-centric philosophy is behind President Obama's recently announced $2.8 Trillion Financial "Stability" Plan-a plan that demonstrates a strong affinity towards state control of private industry. In the fine print, firms that take TARP dollars will be forced to prove that they will use it to lend money. Yet such a policy does not learn the lessons of history. Mandatory lending and excessive credit by the Fed, the exact problem that put America into the current economic mess, is now proposed as the solution-and the government's prying hand will reach farther than ever into the nation's economic engine.

Already, Citigroup and Bank of America are rumored to be considered for nationalization. Investors are not taking the rumors kindly, and have responded by selling off as much stock as possible. The banks have been given a combined $95 billion since September, according to OpenSecrets.org, yet now they appear to be coming back for more. And the stock market is continuing to plunge with each new intervention.

So why is this government subsidy not working? The reason is that, as the government becomes more and more involved with the financial institutions, investors show less and less inclination to throw good money after bad. In short, they do not want to invest in companies that will be run by the federal government, for fear of failure. That in turn forces the federal government to purchase yet more shares to keep companies from going under. Ultimately, the government ends up owning the entire corporation. Corporatist fascism leads to socialism, in that sense.

History is not on the side of state-centric economic systems. Yet as long as those in Washington continue to insist on a government solution, so long will the market continue to flounder and corporations fail. And the blame will rest securely on a government which will have manipulated the economic crisis for its own benefit. After all, as President Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel stated so eloquently, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." Unfortunately, it has all been done before. And thereby hangs a tale of woe.

SOURCE

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Taxpayer-fed fat cats

Last year, crippling pension and benefits costs caused the city of Vallejo, California to declare bankruptcy. In this year of compounded economic crisis, more towns and cities may follow Vallejo's lead, pushed over the edge by an accounting and financial-reporting provision known as GASB (pronounced "gaz-bee") 45. "It's a perfect storm of pension liabilities hitting us at a time when the economy is tanking and revenues are tanking," says David Edwards, the senior policy advisor to Atlanta's mayor. "It's unprecedented."

Localities that have already complied with GASB 45 have had to disclose the compromising long-term costs of lifetime health care and other retiree benefits. In New York City, which began compliance in 2007, the accounting measure has placed a new $63 billion liability on the books. Atlanta's pension- and benefit-related expenses exploded from $44.5 million in 2005 to $118 million today, even while the city cut its personnel headcount by 8.6 percent. In Vallejo's case, the city's declaration of bankruptcy last May was due to the fact that it was spending 74 percent of its $80 million general-fund budget on public-sector salaries and benefits. Police captains were entitled to receive $306,000 annually in pay and benefits, while 21 firefighters earned more than $200,000 a year, including overtime. After five years on the job, all were entitled to lifetime health benefits.

The culprit, of course, isn't GASB 45 itself but the ugly reality that it exposes. There are 22.5 million public-sector employees in the United States. The average state and local government employee now makes 46 percent more in combined salary and benefits than his private-sector counterpart does, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute-including 128 percent more on health care and 162 percent more on retirement benefits. Four out of five public-sector workers have lifetime pensions. Paying for such lavish treatment is difficult; in 2007, Credit Suisse estimated that state and local governments owed more than $1.5 trillion in unfunded health-care and non-pension benefits. Further, the market meltdown has erased $1 trillion from municipal pension funds, according to Boston College's Center for Retirement Research.

New York City now spends an average of $107,000 for each of its 281,000 current employees-a whopping 63 percent increase since 2000. At the same time, its direct pension expenses each year have increased from $615 million to $5.6 billion. And New York isn't alone. Forty states estimate that their liabilities for public-sector health-care and other benefits exceed $400 billion-more than their entire public debt, according to Standard and Poor's. New Jersey has dug a particularly deep hole for itself. Its state pension fund lost half its value in 2008 but pays out $5.2 billion each year in benefits. "The state of New Jersey is insolvent," writes bond analyst Mike Shedlock. "Bankrupt might be a better word."

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Private sector wisdom: Koch Industries is a legend in modern American enterprise. It is the the largest private company in America, based in the heartland at Wichita, Kansas (originally an agricultural business). Activities include refining and chemicals; process and pollution control equipment and technologies; minerals and fertilizers; polymers and fibers; commodity and financial trading and services; and forest and consumer products. The companies have branches in nearly 60 countries and employ about 70,000 people. Two of the things that make Koch different. First, they put many millions into the free enterprise movement at the level of teaching and research at universities, notably the George Mason Uni. Second, they have an explicit committment to the moral values of classical liberalism. "At Koch Industries, we are firmly focused on long-term success. We believe in creating real value, rather than just the illusion of value. To do so, we strive to live by core values and guiding principles that include integrity, humility, respect and Principled Entrepreneurship". Their current newsletter has two striking pieces, one on the steps that they took twelve months ago to prepare for the disaster that they could see was coming. The other is a statement on the dangers of government intervention."

Winners in Life's Lottery: "Dick Gephardt was famous for calling the rich the "winners in life's lottery". He was of course implying that all those that were rich were simply undeserving trust-fund leeches, and that of course is unfair to the other 95% of America. Never mind that most of these 'winners' worked hard to get where they were...that gets in the way of the meme... Interestingly though, we now have a new class of folks who are more deserving of the label "winners in life's lottery." I refer of course to those 9 million mortgage defaulters who will be the beneficiaries of President Obama's Mortgage plan. Lets see.....get a mortgage you can't afford, get nailed by a nasty financial downturn, and get bailed out and keep your home. Wow! I can't think of anyone else who might be worthy of being called "winners in life's lottery". Talk about something that is is unfair to the other 95% of America...."

Jindal calls stimulus `irresponsible' in GOP response : "Tapped by the Republican party to deliver the GOP's response to President Barack Obama's congressional address Tuesday night, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal took on the massive stimulus package and big government - and pledged that his party would regain the nation's trust. `In the end, it comes down to an honest and fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government,' Jindal said."

Brown vs. monkey: Where's the outrage?: "A political cartoon is misinterpreted and African-American organizations and their talking heads immediately see an opportunity to make noise. Meanwhile, a famous black woman is beaten down by her equally famous black boyfriend and commentary in the black community centers around, `What did she do to cause it?' Why are some African-Americans so cowardly when it comes to addressing black-on-black violence? . Rupert Murdoch may be public enemy number one for the progressive community, but he and his posse at The New York Post are not sanctioning the abuse and killing of black women. The beating Rihanna experienced at the hands of Chris Brown was tragic, but definitely not uncommon. . Where is the outrage? Where is the boycott? Where is the speech?"

ALG Hails Supreme Court Ruling Upholding Idaho Law Prohibiting Union Payroll Deductions from Being Used for Political Purposes: "Bill Wilson, President of Americans for Limited Government, hailed the Supreme Court's 7-2 decision in Ysursa v. Pocatello Education Association. "We at ALG are extremely gratified that the Supreme Court agreed with us," said Wilson. "This a victory for taxpayers who do not wish to be forced to fund union politics," he added. The decision determined that a state government may prohibit its counties, cities, and towns from subsidizing union political activities via its government payroll systems. "This is a great win. The First Amendment does not require government to devote taxpayer resources to facilitating the speech of its workers, their preferred political organizations, or anyone else," said Wilson. "This sets the table for states across the nation to set up similar prohibitions," Wilson added.

Democrats Halted Recovery, Derailed Economy Last Summer: "January's [1] Employment Situation Report from Uncle Sam's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) was even worse than expected. Seasonally adjusted employment fell by 598,000 jobs and the unemployment rate rose to 7.6%. In [2] his Saturday address that followed this news, President Barack Obama was correct in pointing out that 3.6 million jobs have been lost since the recession, at least as "defined" [3] by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), began. The recession, [4] as normal people define it ("a decline in gross domestic product [GDP] for two or more consecutive quarters"), began in the third quarter of 2008 and became official late last month when [5] the fourth quarter came in negative. What Mr. Obama "somehow" forgot to tell us is that almost 1.8 million of those seasonally adjusted job losses have occurred since his election, when his non-stop economic [6] no-confidence game went into high gear, and that 2.8 million jobs have gone away during the seven months that began in July 2008, the first full month of [7] the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy. Beyond that, in comparing the raw month-to-month figures, i.e., before seasonal adjustment, it's clear that conditions on the ground in the real economy are in a worse state of decay than the seasonally adjusted data would indicate. The November 2008 to January 2009 economy underperformed the same months of the previous year by over 2.2 million jobs"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and 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 or here or here

****************************

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