The New Discrimination

In favour of unionists

The election of a president of mixed race was supposed to mark an end to discrimination in America. Instead it has ushered in a new era of blatant discrimination. The very first piece of legislation enacted by the Obama administration was supposed to create or save 4 million jobs and prevent unemployment from going above 8% if enacted. Instead, the Stimulus Bill provided funding for existing government programs and many state programs for two years.

The real intent of this bill was to prevent the loss of unionized public sector jobs that make up 50% of all union workers and virtually all of SEIU's workers. Even the 10% of the bill that was supposed to repair roads and bridges contained provisions to limit the jobs to only union workers. Consequently, the unemployment rate has risen above 10%, despite the passage of the 787 billion Stimulus Bill.

The next action taken by the Obama administration was the government bailout of General Motors and Chrysler. This bailout violated bankruptcy laws which provide secured creditors with the first right to the company's assets. Instead the secured creditors got 29% of their investment while the United Auto Workers (UAW) got 78% of their investment and partial ownership of the company.

The hourly wages and benefits at Chrysler are $75.85 and at GM $73.25. If the cost of current retiree benefits cost is included, the hourly wage and benefit cost at GM would increase by another $31.00 per hour. When one compares these costs to the hourly wage and benefit cost at Honda of $42.95 and of all U.S. manufacturing jobs of $25.50, is there any doubt that the bailout of GM and Chrysler was a waste of taxpayer money on woefully non-competitive companies. The auto bailout plan was simply a way to skirt the bankruptcy laws to preserve UAW wages at the expense of the secured creditors and the American taxpayers.

However, the most blatant example of discrimination is in the healthcare bill. After a closed door meeting with labor union officials, Obama, Pelosi and Reed decided to exempt public and private sector union healthcare plans from the 40% tax on Cadillac plans. Why should organized labor that makes up less than 15% of the workforce receive their high value healthcare untaxed while the rest of the population that receive high value healthcare pay a 40% tax. This act of discrimination will cost taxpayers 60 billion dollars if the healthcare bill is enacted.

The 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law for all citizens, yet the Obama administration has discriminated against 85% of working Americans to reward his allies in SEIU, their surrogates ACORN and other organized labor groups that helped him become elected.

SOURCE

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Recession chugs on, except in government

White House apologists were quick to point to the unemployment rate decline from 10 percent to 9.7 percent as evidence that the recovery is gathering momentum and that President Obama's policies -- especially his $787 billion economic stimulus bill Congress approved last February -- are "working." But the back story behind the figures provides cold comfort.

First, the drop to 9.7 percent unemployment does not reflect the creation of new jobs that normally accompanies an economic recovery. The number of new jobs is actually declining. Total nonfarm payroll employment, for example, dipped by an additional 20,000 positions after a December decline of 150,000 positions. The unemployment rate the day Obama took office last year stood at 7.6 percent and 134.6 million people had jobs. When he signed the economic stimulus, Obama promised the bill would bolster the economy sufficiently to keep unemployment below 8.0 percent. But the unemployment rate has exceeded 8.0 percent since last fall, and total employment stands at only 129.5 million. The stimulus has been a bust.

Second, anybody who thinks the job situation is going to improve dramatically in coming months is not paying attention to what's going on behind the unemployment rate.The Hudson Institute's Diana Furchtgott-Roth notes that "This is a better employment report than last month's report, yet the economy is still not creating jobs. The percent of the unemployed who are out of work for 27 weeks or more exceeded 41%, an all-time high. This is unacceptable and shows that Congress and the President need to focus on job creation, rather than on expanding government, because the tax increases and borrowing used to expand government reduce overall job creation and create uncertainty." Furchtgott-Roth further notes that "the labor force participation rate is the lowest since mid-1985." This means that fewer Americans are in the labor force.

Third, among the few sectors of the economy showing net employment growth over the past year is the federal government. The federal civil service is rapidly expanding as Obama increases the size of government, with 33,000 new positions being added in January alone. Only 9,000 of those new slots were for temporary census jobs. In other words, what we are seeing is good times for the public sector and the growing prospect of a continuing and perhaps even deepening recession for everybody else.

SOURCE

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Memo to Arianna: Stop being silly

By: Hugh Hewitt

Yesterday's joint appearance with Arianna Huffington on CNN's "Reliable Sources," hosted by the estimable Howard Kurtz, gave me a chance to tell Arianna in person what most people think about her crusade against the Fox News Channel: It is silly. Her focus on a word here and a phrase there is silly. The warning that Glenn Beck or others are "inciting" the public and that this is dangerous is silly.

The program also gave me the opportunity to say on television what I often say on radio: If I had it in my power, I'd give Keith Olbermann a 24/7 cable channel because he does more good for the center-right than almost anyone in America. His wild-eyed craziness combined with obvious lack of knowledge about so many things make him an advertisement for conservatism, and I really hope he survives his ratings plummet. He's the perfect example of a prompter-dependant sports announcer-turned-political commentator who digs a hole for the Left every night. Long may he broadcast.

But what I really enjoyed saying the most was the obvious: The Beltway-Manhattan media elite still cannot figure out Fox for the same reason they can't figure out Rush or Sarah Palin. They are elitists who long ago lost touch with the center of American opinion and who have no way of finding their way back again because they continue to staff up with a lethal (for ratings) combination of privileged execs, liberal-to-left-wing writers and producers, and know-nothing teleprompter readers.

What Roger Ailes has figured out that results in the cable ratings domination by Beck, "Special Report," Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Greta Van Susteren is not string theory. It begins with respect for the audience as opposed to contempt, and then adds in good humor and balance. The "Special Report" panel is the best panel in the business because it always has at least one smart and well-read lefty on it. Hannity's Great American Panel is the same.

Rarely if ever will you find a Fox anchor using the term "tea bagger" because to do so is to insult the millions of activists involved in the past year of town halls, demonstrations and debates, but also those who know them and beyond that those who are interested in what they have to say.

And you will find Fox covering the president's stumbles and the stories about the administration's rising tide of failure. The MSM has an enormous double standard -- imagine if Palin had mispronounced the word corpsman twice in her address Saturday night or her interview with Chris Wallace on Sunday morning -- and that double standard first astonishes and then offends.

The refusal to cover comprehensively the president's year of serial pratfalls and his risible reflex to blame Bush confirmed for a vast segment of the American audience that the MSM remains just as in the tank for President Obama as it was for candidate Obama. When the networks cease to be infomercials for the president, they might win over some of Fox's broad and growing audience.

There is no reason why MSMBC and CNN have to lag so far behind Fox. The audience is up for grabs every single night in America. There is no "brand loyalty" in the world of cable news. But to compete, you have to at least try to be fair and balanced. Or you at least have to be talented and smart.

SOURCE

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Obama thinks small (for once)

Before his speech in New Hampshire on Tuesday, President Obama visited a small technology company in Nashua called ARC Energy. During his talk, he promoted ARC Energy as an example of the kind of innovation he wants taxpayers to subsidize with what he called "seed money" in the form of federal "green jobs" funding. We need to do it, he said, so we can get ahead of the Chinese.

Probably few in the audience knew what the people who founded ARC Energy only two years ago know: ARC received no federal startup money. Dr. Kedar Gupta and his wife founded the company with their own money, the same way Dr. Gupta co-founded GT Solar, the world's largest maker of photovoltaic cells, in the 1990s.

Obama presented a narrative that was fundamentally false - namely that, without federal "seed money," our technology sector won't advance quickly enough to beat the Chinese. But guess where ARC Energy sells many of its products? China.

That sleight of hand was typical of Obama's speech. The main point of his presentation was to tout his plan to pump $30 billion into small banks for the stated purpose of providing them with enough money to lend to small businesses. But that cannot possibly be the real goal of the program, for several reasons.

First, community banks are not short of cash for lending. According to Stephen Wilson, the chairman-elect of the American Bankers Association, they aren't lending because federal bank regulators have forced them to tighten their standards. "Obama is calling us `fat cats' and telling us to be lending more, and then he sends his bank examiners and regulators to stifle our lending," Wilson told the Cincinnati Enquirer last month. If Obama wanted to free up cash for small businesses, he could have his regulators back off and let small banks lend.

Second, if Obama were really interested in freeing up more money for lending, why is he proposing to tax large banks? Wells Fargo, one of the large banks Obama wants to punish with a new tax, is the largest small-business lender in America. It expects to loan $16 billion to small businesses this year. Bank of America projects a similar figure.

Those two banks alone would lend about as much (more, if the economy improves) to small businesses this year as the $30 billion Obama wants to spread among smaller banks. But rather than make it easier for them to lend, Obama is making it harder by proposing to tax them simply for being large and by having his regulators restrict their ability to take risks. By encouraging banks to build up larger cash reserves, Washington is reducing the amount of money available for lending.

Clearly, Obama's interest is not in freeing up money for small businesses. The only explanation for his behavior - taxing the largest banks and distributing money to smaller ones - is that he wants to use the power of the state to shift assets (and, thus, power) from large banks to smaller ones.

This is purely an ideological crusade. Obama believes that large banks are generally a bad thing, and small ones are generally a good thing. So, he's taking from the large and giving to the small. It's economic idiocy, but in his mind it's a morally just cause.

What Obama did in New Hampshire is the same as he has done for the past year, and on the campaign trail before that. He presented a fa‡ade of an argument to justify actions Americans would not possibly support were he to state their real motives. It's exactly how he tried to sell health care reform (it's vital to economic recovery!), his massive transfer of wealth from private producers to government employee unions (it's shovel-ready stimulus!), and his cap-and-trade bill (it will create green jobs!).

If we take any lesson from his New Hampshire "town hall" event (it wasn't a town hall meeting), it is that we must ignore what the president says his proposals are intended to do and scrutinize what they actually do. More often than not, we will find that they simply transfer wealth and power from people and groups Obama dislikes to those he favors.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Liberal Icon Attacks Obama Over Israel: "Marty Peretz, editor-in-chief and former owner of the liberal magazine The New Republic and a staunch supporter of Barak Obama in 2008, has written a column sharply critical of the president over Israeli aid to Haiti. On Jan. 15, Obama commented that in addition to U.S. aid to Haiti, assistance had come from "Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic, among others." He declined to mention Israel. In a column headlined "Maybe I'm Getting Paranoid . . . About Obama," Peretz wrote: "The fact is that, next to our country, Israel sent the largest contingent of trained rescue workers, doctors, and other medical personnel. "The Israeli field hospital was the only one on the ground that could perform real surgery, which it did literally hundreds of times . . . "So didn't Obama notice? For God's sake, everybody noticed the deep Israeli involvement."

Big pay for parasites: "The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data. Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months - and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted. Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time - in pay and hiring - during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector. The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available. When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000."

Biden Senate seat looks shaky: "The Democrats' future in the U.S. Senate looks even gloomier following Delaware Attorney General Joseph R. "Beau" Biden's announcement on January 25 that he would not run for the seat vacated by his father, Vice President Joseph R. "Joe" Biden, Jr. Democrats at the national level, unnerved by a recent series of Republican victories in special elections, had looked to the younger Biden as their best hope for keeping both of the First State's Senate seats in Democratic hands. The refusal of the vice president's son to run for Senate in the nation's second-smallest state says a lot about the current political climate."

Another extremist adviser for Obama: "President Obama has picked to advise him on military actions inside the U.S. the Missouri governor whose state "Information Analysis Center" last year linked conservative organizations to domestic terrorism and said law enforcement officers should watch for suspicious individuals who may have bumper stickers from Ron Paul or Chuck Baldwin. Missouri Gov. Jeremiah Nixon, a Democrat, is being joined on the Obama's special advisory panel by the governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Fortuno, and Arizona Gov. Janice Brewer, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano's replacement when she moved to Washington. They are among Obama's nominations for the 10 positions on Obama's new "Council of Governors" that he will use for advice on "military activities in the United States."

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog 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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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

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Is China a paper tiger?

An email from the optimistic Ray Kraft [rskraft1@gmail.com] below. Mao used to call America a paper tiger, meaning that it looked strong but was not

Even the Chicom government has calculated and published its estimate that circa 2015 the number of workers in China will enter a period of permanent decline in both absolute and proportionate numbers, while the number of retireds in China will enter an indefinite period of increase in both absolute and proportionate numbers. I.e., the Graying of China begins, in about five years.

At that point, the long-term economic decline of China begins, and because of 30 years of its one-child policy - it would take generations of 2+ children per family to reverse the trends - this in a society in which one-child per family is now the social / cultural norm, and which faces an imminent and indefinite era of economic decline.

My expectation is that within a few years after the decline begins - circa 2020-2030 - the Chinese empire will begin to unravel, if it hasn't begun before then. It was cobbled together after WWII from a vast array of provinces and cultures, and is as fragile as the old Soviet Union was, and could disappear as quickly. It is held together now by prosperity and force, but as prosperity declines, force will become inadequate to keep it together.

If America avoids suicide, America will emerge within a generation as an even more dominant geopolitical and economic power as:

1. China slowly self destructs.

2. Russia, with a population declining by 1/2% per year, also slowly unravels.

3. The EU, cobbled together from a couple of dozen different economies artificually slaved to a single currency, drifts more or less aimlessly in the Sargasso Sea of political incoherence.

4. The Middle East has peaked, and if America has sense enough to move toward energy independence with nuclear and other sources (note that Obama has proposed $56 billion in new loan guarantees for nuclear power plants in his new budget), the decline of Islamic Middle East will be as inexorable as that of China and Russia.

If America manages at least to Muddle Through, at best to Flourish and Prosper, America's destiny will be to become the next "Roman Empire." It's our's to lose. The biggest threat is that America will not understand and grasp this destiny, and will fail to understand and accept the responsibility ("noblesse oblige") that goes with it. i.e., the destiny and fate of Civilization now lies in America's hands, even if we don't know it. And we need to look to the Athenian Democracy and the Roman Empire for lessons learned.

Ray Kraft was responding to a Jack Wheeler article of 5th. which also said that China was in a weak position. Excerpt:

The myth that the Chicoms magically turned their economy around on an instant dime - one minute double-digit GDP growth via the US gorging on their exports, the next minute the exports fall off a cliff as we stop buying yet they still have double-digit GDP growth via a hocus-pocus stimulation of their domestic economy - is a myth few big-time investors believe in now.

And finally, folks are figuring out that of all China's bubbles - make-believe growth, stocks, real estate - the biggest of all is its gigantic pile of "dead money" - those $2.4 trillion of our alleged dollars.

How many countless times have you heard some pundit bemoan how much we "owe" China? Yep, sure was stupid of us. We got all this stuff - as in real physical products we actually use in our lives - and they got all this paper, all these imaginary things called "T-bills" and such, and please explain how they cash them in.

Finally, bankers are figuring it out. "There's nowhere for China's reserves to go," is the latest buzz in London's City. "How do they unload them without taking a trillion dollar haircut?" And with the whiff, the merest whiff of the US defaulting on its debt, the Chicoms are running scared and retrenching. Their attempted stimulus of their economy has run out of steam - any more would be like pushing on a string.

So they've pulled back on buying up the world's commodities, which is why everything from copper to oil to soybeans is down - which is why, e.g., Brazil's Bovespa index is down thousands of points as China isn't buying its beans and iron ore.

More HERE

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Sarah Palin is miles ahead of every other politician in America

Watching Sarah Palin's speech to the Tea Party National Convention last night in Nashville on PJTV, it was clear that she has a rapport and comfort with the Tea Partiers that is unmatched among politicians at the national level. While I suspect that mine is a minority view among the leadership of conservative activism and journalism (and I am often reminded in a jocular sort of way that my view of Palin is a minority among my colleagues at The Examiner and The Weekly Standard), I believe Palin is miles ahead of every other national figure in understanding where the country has been in the last year and what the Tea Party movement means about the future course of American politics.

That doesn't mean I think Palin is or even should be a candidate for president or any other elective office in 2012 or any other time. What it does mean is I believe Palin has a unique insight into the state of things and is moving systematically and intelligently in concert with that insight. Where that leads, nobody, including Palin, likely knows at this point.

That I am not alone in seeing Palin in such terms is demonstrated by, of all places, The New York Times where reporter Mark Liebovich wrote:

"Her growing cast of advisers and support system could be working in the service of any number of goals: a presidential run, a de facto role as the leader of the Tea Party movement, a lucrative career as a roving media entity — or all of the above. Ms. Palin represents a new breed of unelected public figures operating in an environment in which politics, news media and celebrity are fused as never before.

"Whether she ever runs for anything else, Ms. Palin has already achieved a status that has become an end in itself: access to an electronic bully pulpit, a staff to guide her, an enormous income and none of the bother or accountability of having to govern or campaign for office.

“'Few public figures not in office have leveraged the nexus between media and political positioning as Sarah Palin has,' said the Washington lawyer Robert Barnett (who negotiated, among other things, Ms. Palin’s lucrative deal with Fox News, an arrangement with the Washington Speaker’s Bureau that pays her a reported $100,000 a pop, and a deal with Harper Collins to write her memoir, 'Going Rogue,' which has already earned her upward of eight figures)."

Liebovich thus demonstrated, as University of Wisconsin law professor and contrarian blogger Ann Althouse mused, how Palin has gone from "blithering idiot" to "devious genius" in barely more than a year:

"What I love about all this is the extreme contrast to the way Palin was mocked when she resigned as Governor of Alaska. I, myself, did not think it was stupid, because I pictured her doing something like what she is actually doing, but I certainly remember the derision. Her political career was over. She was 'toast.'

"A big difference between what I pictured and what she's doing is that she's staying in Alaska. I thought she needed to get out of Alaska (in order to run for President). It's innovative the way she's staying in Alaska. As a blogger, operating from my remote outpost in Madison, Wisconsin, I love that she's working through Facebook and staying rooted in Wasila, Alaska. Fox News is building a TV studio in her house in Wasila. That's so not toast."

During her 40-minute Nashville speech, Palin repeatedly struck rhetorical gold by assailing Washington politicians for talking down to the American people, as when she branded the exploding national debt a form of "generational theft" and proclaimed that "many of us have had enough."

Similarly, she zeroed in on President Obama's policy of treating terrorists like the Christmas Bomber who tried to blow up a Northwest Air plane carrying nearly 300 passengers and crew members with a bomb sewn into his underwear on the same legal basis as an accused liquor store robber, saying "treating this like a mere law enforcement matter places our country at great risk because that's not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this. They know we're at war, and to win that war we need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern."

Palin understands the frustration felt by millions of Americans, including legions of independents and moderates, watching as Washington leaders careen down a path of expanding federal power and the skyrocketing spending, taxation, regulation and debt that inevitably accompanies that expansion, even as public opinion surveys document growing oppposition to such a course.

Washington is embarked on a fundamentally anti-democratic course that undermines public confidence and government credibility, the two most essential elements of a regime's legitimacy, and alienates voters across the political spectrum. Most people don't articulate it in such terms but, as political philosopher Willmoore Kendall (himself a product of Oklahoma populism)often said of Middle Americans, they "feel it in their bones," and they are repelled by it.

Palin also demonstrated an understanding that the Tea Party movement must be independent of both major political parties, which share the blame for the country's current morass, in order to be credible. She encouraged her Nashville audience "against allowing this movement to be defined by any one leader or any one politician. The tea party movement is not a top-down operation. It's a ground-up call to action ... it's bigger than any king or queen of the tea party, and it's a lot bigger than any charismatic guy with a teleprompter." Thus she encouraged the Tea Partiers to remember that they "have both parties running scared" and that their movement is "fresh, young and agile."

While watching Palin last night, I was reminded of something I wrote in The Examiner the day after the 2008 election: "Palin connects with real people as one of them because she is. She has that rare gift of speaking with candor and grace in the common manner."

Palin is not the first conservative politician to display such a gift. With his eight extraordinary years in the White House behind us, it is sometimes difficult to remember that strident voices from the same quarters who today mock and deride Palin did much the same thing to Ronald Reagan. He was old, he was an actor, he was simple-minded. And, just as Reagan was consistently under-estimated by his opponents in the years before the White House, Palin appears to be blessed with opponents in both parties who accord her a similar lack of respect.

They say God looks after drunks and the United States of America. Maybe that's why Palin's speech last night opened with this tribute: "I am so proud to be American. Happy birthday Ronald Reagan."

SOURCE

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Leftist "Salon" Article Accusing James O'Keefe of Racist Motives Challenged

Kevin Martin of the black leadership group Project 21 and Amy Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research are questioning the accuracy of an article in the left-wing online magazine Salon which implies that independent filmmaker James O'Keefe is a racist.

The article, "James O'Keefe's Race Problem," by Max Blumenthal, cites O'Keefe's attendance at a "Race and Conservatism" panel in 2006 as evidence that, as Blumenthal put it, O'Keefe's "short but storied career has been defined by a series of political stunts shot through with racial resentment."

Black conservative Kevin Martin, one of several panelists at the event, disagrees. In fact, Martin says, O'Keefe approached him after the event and expressed support for Martin's positions, which are certainly not racist:

"As a panelist at the Robert Taft Club 'Race and Conservatism' event in 2006, I had the chance to personally meet James O'Keefe after the event ended. He voiced personal support for me and my positions. He also repudiated the radical elements in the room that night.

"Marcus Epstein invited me - a black conservative - to a discussion on race issues, not O'Keefe. What transpired was a spirited debate against radical elements of which I and other conservatives were clearly opposed. At no time did I feel intimidated, nor was I ever treated poorly by my hosts. The Blumenthal story is long on accusation and short on facts.

"The left is attempting to label O'Keefe as a racist, but this probably has nothing to do with his ideas or associations now or then. I believe it is only because he recently exposed the radicalism of ACORN and the illegal advice its workers chose to give out. By labeling O'Keefe a racist, they likely seek to change the public view of O'Keefe's work from one of exposing corruption and law-breaking to one of a white conservative going after a group empowering the poor and minorities."

Blumenthal's article in Salon also says the following about Project 21: "A speaker from the right-wing black front group Project 21, founded by white conservative David Almasi to shill for corporate clients and provide cover for conservative politicians, was added at the last minute."

In response, Amy Ridenour, CEO of the National Center for Public Policy Research, which sponsors Project 21, said:

"I can't imagine where Max Blumenthal got his information, unless he made it up. Project 21 was founded in 1992 as a way to introduce black conservatives to the news media during policy discussions sparked by the Rodney King riots (as Project 21's website clearly states at www.nationalcenter.org/P21History.html), not to support any politicians. David Almasi did not found it -- in fact, he worked elsewhere until five years later -- and his role now is to book interviews for Project 21 members in response to media inquiries and to manage support staff in such tasks as sending op-eds and press statements by Project 21 members to the press, something he does in addition to his main professional duties as executive director of the National Center for Public Policy Research. Project 21 is actually chaired by Mychal Massie, and its sole full-time employee is Deneen Borelli, both of whom are black.

"Max Blumenthal's notion that Project 21 has 'corporate clients' is silly, as Project 21 is non-profit. It's expenses are met by the non-profit National Center for Public Policy Research, which has never had corporate clients and which receives less than one half of one percent of its overall revenue from corporate contributions, and from individual Project 21 members, who often undertake travel and activities at their own personal expense. I'm told neither Max Blumenthal nor anyone from Salon contacted the Project 21 office or Kevin Martin when researching or fact-checking this story, and it shows."

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Bayh a tough sell in Indiana: "If you want more evidence of how deep Democratic losses may be in the fall midterm elections, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh's suddenly shaky bid for a third term is Exhibit A. A few months ago, Mr. Bayh was considered a shoo-in for re-election in the Hoosier state. Now election handicappers have moved him from "safe" to endangered. Within hours of former Sen. Dan Coats' announcement Wednesday that he is considering challenging Mr. Bayh, the dynamics of the race changed dramatically. The conservative Republican's "likely entry into the Indiana Senate race puts another seat into play," said election forecaster Stuart Rothenberg. "Move from Currently Safe to Narrow Advantage for the Incumbent Party," he wrote. However, the senator's "narrow advantage" may be precarious, according to recent polls that show growing disapproval of the two-term senator, who once had presidential ambitions. Despite Mr. Bayh's once carefully cultivated image as a party moderate, he has lurched left under the rhetorical spell of the Obama presidency and the pressures of the Senate's liberal Democratic caucus. He voted for the $2.5 trillion Obamacare bill despite strong opposition back home, where polls showed 60 percent opposition."

Tancredo ruffles feathers: "Former congressman Tom Tancredo took heat Friday for remarks at the national Tea Party convention that critics viewed as calling for a return to Jim Crow laws. But Tancredo said he wasn’t targeting a specific group when he suggested in Nashville there should be a ‘civics-literacy’ test before someone could vote. ‘People who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House,’ Tancredo said in his opening-day speech Thursday. ‘His name is Barack Hussein Obama.’” [Universal suffrage is a relatively recent idea. Might it not need some fine tuning? Requiring literacy should not be too onerous]

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

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog 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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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

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Islamic radicalism blamed on "conservatism"

The stupid definition of conservatism as "opposition to change" is still something of a reality-defying mantra among Leftists -- despite conservatives often being major agents of change -- from Benjamin Disraeli to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. And if George Bush's movement of American power into two countries of the Middle East is not a major policy change, I would like to know what would be. It is Obama who hasn't changed that, for all his talk of change.

The idea of conservatives being opponents of change is quite laughable, in fact. Every single conservative that I have ever met has got a HEAP of things he would like to see changed in the society about him. Conservatives are opponents of the brainless ideas of Leftism but that is far from being opponents of change -- much though Leftists might like to think otherwise.

But, in terms of the stupid Leftist definition, it does make some slight sense to describe Islamic fundamentalists as "conservative" -- though one could argue much more reasonably that Islamists are in fact reactionaries: Far from opposing change they want the major change of a sudden and violent return to 7th century ways.

However you look at it, however, the violent authoritarianism advocated by Islamists has NOTHING in common with the individual liberty orientation of American conservatives. So it is just Leftist propaganda to claim some basic similarity between American Christian conservatives and Islamists. But calling Christian conservatives "Taleban" is in fact a fairly common Leftist form of abuse -- dare I call it "hate speech"?

This is all brought to mind by the following academic journal article:

Arch.europ.sociol., L, 2 (2009), pp. 201-230.

Why are there so many Engineers among Islamic Radicals?

By Diego Gambetta & Steffen Hertog

Abstract

This article demonstrates that among violent Islamists engineers with a degree, individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent than we would expect given the share of engineers among university students in Islamic countries.We then test a number of hypotheses to account for this phenomenon. We argue that a combination of two factors - engineers' relative deprivation in the Islamic world and mindset - is the most plausible explanation.

SOURCE

It turns out that the "mindset" they identify is religious conservatism. In a summary of the article we read: "Statistical analysis of poll data on US faculty shows that the odds of being both religious and conservative are seven times greater for engineers relative to the odds of a social scientist. Engineering as a degree might also be more attractive to individuals seeking cognitive “closure” and clear cut answers – a disposition that has been empirically linked to conservative political attitudes."

So they explicitly conflate American conservatism with the mindset that drives Jihadists. They also incidentally accept the junk-science claim that conservatives have a rigid cognitive style.

I am not going to comment on any of that right now. I already have a large historically-based paper on what is central to Anglo-Saxon conservatism here and I have a large number of academic journal articles on the claim that conservatives are mentally rigid oversimplifiers here.

But what I have said so far is criticism and there is an old axiom that bad science is driven out only by better science. So I am going to propose what I think is a better explanation of the phenomenon in question. I think it is all "cognitive dissonance"

It seems to me that engineers get intimately involved in a world of great rationality and logic. You can't afford to let ideology dictate your design of a bridge, for instance, or the bridge might fall down. Christians are used to living in both worlds: The secular world about them and their private religious beliefs. But Muslims are not. The engineer's mental world is quite opposed to the intense religiosity and scant regard for rationality that permeates the Muslim world. So the Muslim engineer is put into a situation of great conflict. He is thrown into a mental world that runs counter to all his religious assumptions and ways of thought. And sometimes he relieves the pressure of that -- in psychologist's terms he "reduces his cognitive dissonance" -- by reasserting his Muslim identity in an explosive or extremist way. The violence of his reaction is a testimony to how great has been the dissonance and mental conflict he has been subjected to in an engineering environment

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Obama's Actions don't match his Words

Daily, it dawns on ever more Americans that the man in the White House is not the one they thought they met when he waltzed onto the stage and stole their hearts at recent Democratic National Conventions. At that time, Obama intoxicated the masses eager for hope and change with his punch of smooth oratory, soaring rhetoric and promises galore. Now he's left Americans high and dry. Barack Obama's hypocrisy is bubbling to the surface and his well built facade is crackling and crumbling.

Pledges to clean up government and ban lobbyists evidently only applied to lobbyists of his choosing. His pledge to bring transparency to healthcare dealings and televise them on CSPAN, actually boiled down to an hour on CSPAN with hours on end conducted behind closed doors. How about promising to usher in bipartisanship and closing Guantanamo Bay? With honesty that matches John Edwards', a year later, Guantanamo Bay is still open and bipartisanship is a thing of the past. Signs of the American people's Obama-hangover are evidenced by his poll numbers and the repudiation of his policies as seen in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia.

Despite Obama promising to usher in a new era of politics, in practice he behaves like a Chicago Machine politician. In true mob fashion, he's exacted retribution from moderate Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak by eliminating the $1 million funding for the B. J. Stupak scholarship that supports aspiring Olympians at Northern Michigan University. It's named after Stupak's son, who tragically died as a teenager. Obama's message is clear: Stop being a thorn in my side by insisting that Obamacare not fund abortions. And you other congressmen better watch out and not step out of line either, or you'll be next. This is the modus operandi of his controversial chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. As Obama told Rep. Peter DeFazio in true mobster form, "Don't think we are not keeping score, brother."

Obama's most recent bit of political chicanery is his proposed "spending freeze." He knows that this empty promise will have the net effect of increasing the government over time. Obama likes to claim he inherited record deficits from Bush. The only problem with this assertion; Obama's party controlled Congress the last two years of the Bush administration and then-Senator Obama supported the bank bailout which is the single largest aspect of the Bush deficit legacy. Obama fails to take credit for his massive economic stimulus, and other bailout programs that ran up the deficit in his first year in office. He proposes to "freeze" federal spending at 24 percent of GDP through fiscal year 2020. This is opposed to the historic average of government spending hovering around 20.5 percent of GDP. So while Obama claims that the deficit is temporary and he's "losing sleep over it": Americans beware. He wants to freeze spending all right, but freeze it at a higher level than ever before.

His doublespeak continues. When lecturing Republicans on bipartisanship, he means: Abandon your principles and vote for my policies, no matter how liberal. He claims Republicans need to stop rehashing disproven talking points, yet when it comes to rehashing talking points, Obama is the master. He does it on an almost daily basis. Obama lied in the State of the Union about a Supreme Court decision, claiming it eliminated 100 years of precedent and would allow foreign businesses to contribute influence to American political campaigns. And without batting an eyelash, Obama deceitfully claims that "our healthcare plan does not fund abortions."

Obama's lie that he is not an ideologue does not match with reality. When running for office, Obama positioned himself as the most liberal of the candidates on healthcare and on the Iraq war. Currently, he is running the most leftist administration in American history. The Federal Government payroll will balloon to a record high of 2.15 million employees in 2010. His administration is ramming a radical agenda of bigger government with no end in sight. Sen. Judd Gregg, the same Senator who nearly gave up his seat to work in the Obama administration before he realized that Obama was all talk, calls Obama's colossal budget an "unsustainable disaster."

If that doesn't make him an ideologue, we don't know what does.

Obama speaks about all the right things. The problem is, and continues to be, his radical actions. Our only hope is that Americans will watch what he does, and not be deceived by what he says.

SOURCE

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

ELSEWHERE

Palin to tea party: It's revolution time: "Sarah Palin declared "America is ready for another revolution" and repeatedly assailed President Barack Obama on Saturday before adoring "tea party" activists, a seemingly natural constituency should she run for president. "This movement is about the people," the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee said as the crowd roared. "Government is supposed to be working for the people." Noting Democrats' recent electoral losses just a year after Obama was elected on promises of hope and change, she asked: "How's that hope-y, change-y stuff workin' out for you?" Her audience waved flags and erupted in cheers during multiple standing ovations as Palin gave the keynote address at the first national convention of the "tea party" coalition, an anti-establishment, grass-roots network motivated by anger over the growth of government, budget-busting spending and Obama's policies. Filled with Palin's trademark folksy jokes, the speech amounted to a 45-minute pep talk for the coalition and promotion of its principles."

Budget Buster Express: "Members of Congress must feel a bit shortchanged by the amount of playtime they received during childhood. Their ongoing fascination with one of the world's most expensive model-train sets, Amtrak, otherwise defies explanation. Politicians continue to treat the heavily subsidized operation more like a prized toy than a solid business operation. The time has come to stop shoveling money into this runaway choo-choo. Congress allocated nearly $10 billion to shore up Amtrak over the next five years, plus $1.3 billion in "stimulus" funding intended to make up for decades of deferred maintenance. Even these sizable amounts fall short of the rail giant's claimed need for $20 billion to clear a backlog of essential projects. Proudly wearing the conductor's hat, Congress is having too much fun to worry about numbers. Legislators routinely reject the most common-sense of reforms"

Uganda Rejects Obama’s Pro-Homosexual “Change”: "Ugandan Christian minister Martin Ssempa has issued a strong rebuttal to President Obama's criticism of his country for considering passage of a law to discourage and punish certain homosexual practices. "Sodomy is neither the change we want nor can believe in," says Ssempa, who runs the Family Policy and Human Rights Center in Uganda. Ssempa, a major player in the country's successful anti-AIDS program, says that Obama has an "obsession with the spread of sodomy in Africa," in contrast to the efforts of the George W. Bush Administration to help Uganda resist the dangerous sexual practices which facilitate the spread of the deadly disease. The Ugandan anti-AIDS program has emphasized abstinence and monogamy."

“Unintended consequences”: A feature, not a bug: "It’s misleading, in my opinion, to refer to the ‘unintended consequences’ of legislation. Most of the powers government exercises, and the bread and butter of its functionaries, are probably ‘unintended consequences’ of legislation. Despite the role that industry lobbyists play in drafting legislation, there are still probably a considerable number of idealistic Congresscritters and legislators who actually intend the legislation they churn out to achieve its publicly stated aims. These people may be statists, but they’re sincere; when they pass ‘A Bill to Do X,’ it’s because they want to do x. The problem is, such people are useful idiots for the interests that really benefit from the legislation. And from the standpoint of the latter, the ‘unintended consequences’ are the whole damn point of it. Functionally, unintended consequences are what legislation is really all about.”

More French saying 'oui' to McDonald's: "Would you like a steak au poivre sandwich and some deluxe potatoes, followed by a lemon macaroon and a cappuccino? Welcome to McDonald's, French version. And the French are lovin' it. They've increased spending each year on McDonald's to the point that France is now the U.S. chain's second-biggest market, even in the midst of a global recession. In perhaps the ultimate cultural inversion, McDonald's in the U.S. is taking some notes from the French franchises' recipe for success. McDonald's sales in France amounted to 3.6 billion euros ($5 billion) in 2009, according to numbers released in late January. That was an 8.5 percent increase over the 2008 figure, which was 11.2 percent higher than the previous year. For 2009, McDonald's France marked the sixth consecutive year that sales increased at a more rapid rate than any of the chain's other European subsidiaries."

Mirandize bin Laden?: "At the end of a Senate hearing yesterday, Dennis Blair -- Obama’s Director of National Intelligence -- refused to answer a very simple question. Now, the DNI -- like most people who live behind the walls that protect our nation’s secrets -- is not going to answer a lot of questions. But this question was simple, and didn’t require complex decisions on divulging secrets. Blair was asked whether, if we now caught Usama bin Laden, should the terrorist boss be read his “Miranda” rights. And Blair declined to answer. This, at the end of a hearing at which Blair and other Obama anti-terror “experts” stated clearly that another attempted terrorist attack on the United States is likely within the next few months. This is how far we’ve come. On 9-11, Usama bin Laden’s soldiers committed an act of terrorism illegal under the Law of War. This war crime took the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans. Since then, we’ve gone to war in Afghanistan because -- if you will recall -- the Taliban regime that then ruled Afghanistan refused to turn bin Laden over to us when Bush gave them the choice between surrendering the terrorist and war. And now UBL -- who has no right to draw another breath, far less a right to an attorney before we waterboard everything he ever knew out of him -- is, according to the DNI, someone who may be treated as if he were a Beverly Hills purse snatcher."

The New Jersey folly: "Too many of those pain-in-the-neck productive people living in your state, making everyone else look bad? Want to get rid of them? Let the Garden State show you how it's done through the tax code. At one time in the not-too-distant past, New Jersey was by some measures the wealthiest state in the country. No more. Wealth is fleeing at an alarming rate. Between 2004 and 2008, more than $70 billion in wealth headed for the exit, according to a new study by Boston College's Center on Wealth and Philanthropy. Worse, it's not being replaced. Though more people moved into the state than moved out during the period of the study, the net worth of the people who fled was, at $618,300, 70% higher. Those who left also tended to be better educated, more entrepreneurial and more professional. The problem isn't New Jersey's cold winters. The productive are leaving for states where the economic climate is more favorable. Increases in levies on income, sales, property and millionaires have all contributed to the exodus".

Repeal rent control, and sow salt where it once stood : "It is no news that free market economists would oppose rent control, root and branch. It is, however, a bit ‘man bites doggish’ that even economists with sterling left wing credentials would oppose it too, and just about as bitterly. … Why? It is because this law, which supposedly helps impoverished tenants, actually does no such thing. Indeed, its effects are just about 180 degrees off, in the opposite direction.”

Fire the parasites: "Newly seated Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown has triggered a firestorm by having the audacity to go on ABC's "This Week" and suggest: "We need to put a freeze on federal hires and federal raises because, as you know, federal employees are making twice as much as their private counterparts." Public employee union bosses, of course, exploded in anger. Public employees swooned and reached for the smelling salts (as opposed to their usual fare of bon-bons and Sominex). And Barack Obama reportedly performed a séance in hopes of raising Ted Kennedy from the dead. But, the fact is: Scott Brown was right – as far as he went. And he should have gone much further. We don't simply need to put a freeze on federal hires and raises. We need to fire federal employees."

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog 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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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

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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A BIRTHDAY TO REMEMBER

Today is the Gipper's birthday. If only we still had him with us



Feb. 6, is the 99th anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States. Although it has been 21 years since President Reagan completed his second term and left the White House, he still remains a figure of great interest to many Americans, including a large number of young people who were not even born during the time he was president.

New books come out about Reagan every year. The more research that is done about him, the greater the appreciation of what he accomplished and of him as a person. During 2008 Reagan was the president whose name was most mentioned in the debates of both parties, as an example of an effective leader the candidates wished to follow. Since he left office, Ronald Reagan has been the standard to which subsequent presidents have been compared. In numerous polls Reagan has been selected as one of the outstanding presidents in the history of the country

More here

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Obama's 2011 Budget Tax Hikes Contradict Focus on Job Creation

President Obama has said his number one goal for 2010 is to create jobs, but the abundance of tax increases in his recently released 2011 budget contradict this objective. Higher taxes on businesses, upper-income taxpayers, and fossil fuels; an increased death tax; and new taxes to pay for health care would destroy jobs and slow economic recovery. Congress should reject these higher taxes and the rest of its business-killing agenda to speed economic growth and encourage job creation.

President Obama's 2011 budget calls for $2 trillion in higher taxes over 10 years--after accounting for the $154 billion in tax cuts called for in the budget. This would be a $17,000 tax increase for every American household during that span. This figure does not include possible revenue from the cap-and-trade legislation currently before Congress.

The budget claims additional tax cuts, such as the Making Work Pay credit for 2011 and 2012, the research and experimentation credit, and bonus depreciation for certain assets. Each of these provisions is an extension of current policy and should not count as an additional tax cut. The tax increases proposed in the budget break down into six broad categories:

1. Higher Taxes on Businesses. The higher taxes on businesses include the recently proposed "bank tax" that is supposed to recapture the money lent to big banks as part of the TARP program--even though most of the banks hit by the tax have already paid back the funds they received.[2] The Obama budget would also repeal the "last in, first out" method of inventory accounting that allows businesses to deduct their more costly inventory from income first. This would increase taxes for many businesses.

The most damaging tax increase on businesses, however, would be the higher levies on businesses operating internationally. The budget would restrict their ability to deduct interest expenses associated with foreign income until the business recognizes it in the U.S. The budget would also make it more difficult for businesses operating internationally to claim a credit for taxes paid in foreign countries, increasing the likelihood of double taxation.

The U.S. is the only country in the world that taxes the overseas income of its businesses. All other countries tax only income earned within their borders. To help level the playing field, the tax code allows businesses with foreign income to pay tax only when businesses bring the income back to the U.S. This tax credit prevents them from paying tax on income already taxed by other countries.

Changing these provisions will substantially increase taxes on U.S. businesses that operate overseas and, in doing so, hurt job creation at home. Higher taxes will further encourage these businesses to keep their income earned abroad in those foreign countries and invest it there. They will move jobs they would have created in the U.S. to other countries. Not only will this reduce employment in the U.S., it will depress wages for existing workers.

Going after businesses that operate internationally is a backward method of job creation that is akin to trade protectionism.[3] The U.S. already has the second highest corporate income tax in the world, trailing only Japan.[4] Implementing these provisions would only further reduce America's international competitiveness and discourage businesses from opening new ventures in the U.S.

2. Higher Taxes on Upper-Income Earners. President Obama's 2011 budget would allow the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts to expire for families making over $250,000 a year and raise their top two marginal tax rates from 33 and 35 percent to 36 and 39.6 percent, respectively. The budget would also limit the amount these families could deduct from their income and reduce their personal exemptions. President Obama also proposes raising the tax rates on dividends and capital gains from 15 percent to 20 percent for taxpayers with incomes over $250,000 a year.

Each of these provisions would hurt economic growth and lead to slower job and wage growth. Higher income taxes on high-earners would decrease investment, which would lead to fewer new businesses opening and dissuade existing businesses from expanding operations. Higher taxes on dividends and capital gains would drive the cost of capital higher, which would compound the problem.

President Obama would also hammer taxpayers that move income offshore with higher taxes. To the extent these taxpayers are engaging in illegal activity, they should be prosecuted. But most of the taxpayers that move their income offshore do so legally because of high capital taxes in the U.S. The answer to this problem is not to make the U.S. even less inviting for capital investment but to reduce capital taxes to keep that money here so it can support domestic job creation.

3. Death Tax Increase. The dreaded estate tax, better known as the "death tax," expired on January 1. This was the result of a decade-long policy that reduced the tax and finally repealed it for 2010. But due to budgeting quirks, the tax comes back to life in 2011. The Obama budget stealthily increases it by assuming in its baseline that Congress will vote to continue the death tax at 2009 levels (45 percent rate and $3.5 million exemption) starting in 2011 and beyond. If Congress continues the tax, it would be a tax increase, and the budget should explicitly count it as such.

The budget would also increas taxes on family farms and businesses. When the death tax was active, family farms and business could discount asset values to account for the fact that it is difficult to sell them in order to pay the death tax. The Obama Administration would disallow this discount and force families to pay the death tax on the full value of the assets, even though there would be no new cash generated to pay the tax. The budget would also make it more difficult for family-owned businesses to protect their business from the death tax as it grows. Repealing the death tax permanently would create 170,000 to 250,000 jobs each year.

4. Higher Energy Taxes. The budget increases taxes on oil, gas, and coal companies by repealing several tax credits available to these businesses.

These energy companies would undoubtedly pass these tax increases on to customers in the form of higher prices, which will increase costs across the entire economy. And higher taxes on energy would act as yet another deterrent to job creation, since they increase the cost of doing business, which includes hiring new workers and retaining existing ones.

5. Health Care Taxes. The budget creates an allowance for revenue raised due to health care reform. Since a final bill is not complete, it is not possible to know what specific taxes would pay for health care reform if it passes Congress.

The taxes included in the separate House and Senate bills--and a variety of other taxes proposed but not included in either bill--are the best guide available to which taxes could do the job.[7] Each of these taxes would have their own punitive effect on the economy and each would hinder job creation in its own way.

6. Other Taxes. The budget includes several other tax increases, including taxing carried interest as regular income, closing the tax gap through stricter enforcement, more taxes on businesses, and making the unemployment insurance surtax permanent.

President Obama has said repeatedly that job creation is his number one priority in 2010. But if Congress passes the tax hikes included in the budget into law, countless jobs will be destroyed.

Congress should pass on these tax hikes and drop the anti-business legislation it is currently considering. Legislation such as health care reform, cap and trade, card check, and other regulations are plaguing businesses with uncertainty that is preventing them from expanding, taking on new risk, and adding new workers. Unfortunately, all the new taxes proposed in President Obama's budget will only add to their worries.

SOURCE

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Liberal Economic Illiteracy

When it comes to economic policy, there's stupid, breathtakingly stupid — and liberalism. Thursday, in another mind-numbing display of ideology-driven stupidity, Senate Democrats passed new budget rules only a liberal could believe will make it harder to run up the deficit: they will make it as difficult as possible to extend the current tax cuts, or enact new ones.

This is precisely what happens to people suffused with an ideologically-inflamed sense of superiority. They truly believe that both common sense — and historical evidence — are irrelevant considerations with respect to economics. For example, it doesn't matter one iota that there have been three major tax cuts initiated by three different presidents since the 1960s — and every one of them resulted in increased revenue flowing into federal coffers. It doesn't even matter that the largest one was passed, not by a Republican president, but by Democrat John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Here's what one of the American left's most cherished icons had to say about the subject: "Lower rates of taxation will stimulate economic activity and so raise the levels of personal and corporate income as to yield within a few years an increased-not a reduced-flow of revenues to the federal government."

Anyone seriously believe JFK wouldn't be drummed out of the current Democrat party for spouting such "heresy?"

Liberals would like the public to believe they can't make a connection this simple: Americans who have more of their own money to spend actually spend it. This produces more economic activity. More economic activity produces greater amounts of taxable income. Greater amounts of taxable income produce greater amounts of revenue for the government. Greater amounts of revenue for the government more than offset revenue lost from the original tax cuts. Game, set, match.

What a lot of Americans don't know is that liberals can indeed make the connection, but they resist it for one simple reason: more private sector success equals less need for government. Less need for government equals less power for big-government liberals. Less power for big-government liberals with monstrous, "we know what's better for you than you do" egos equals an unacceptable trade off. Game, set, match — and screw the country.

In other words, this is a naked power grab courtesy of a Democratically-controlled Congress which has spent every dime we've sent them — plus trillions more in deficit spending. Liberals love to characterize such insanity as "taking care of the little guy" or instituting "social justice."

Absolutely nothing could be further from the truth. Ten percent of America is unemployed and these hacks actually think that makes it the perfect time to take even more of our hard-earned wages — or in the case of far too many Americans, our savings — and spend it on whatever suits their fancy.

Even more infuriatingly, the left's media lapdogs will tout this unconscionable heist as "Democrats getting serious about fiscal responsibility."

I've said it before to liberals and I'll say it again: keep it up, comrades. Keep it up until even the deepest Kool-aid drinkers recoil in disgust. Keep it up until those with no memory of the Carter years learn their own historical lessons firsthand. Experience is by far the best teacher, and when Americans get tired of experiencing high unemployment, exploding deficits and ever-greater losses of economic and personal freedom, you'll all be tossed under the bus. It couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of egotistical ideologues.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Dodgy jobs data: "The US economy lost 20,000 jobs in January while the unemployment rate fell, according to official data that offered mixed signals about prospects for a sustainable recovery. The Labor Department report, seen as one of the best indicators of economic momentum, puzzled analysts since the two surveys used offered a vastly different picture of the labour market. The report released overnight showed the jobless rate eased to 9.7 per cent from 10.0 per cent in December, based on a household survey that appeared to contradict the payrolls data, but reflected in part discouraged workers leaving the labour force. The nonfarm payrolls data fell short of expectations for a gain of 15,000 jobs that would have been a clear sign of a turnaround in the troubled labour market... The divergent paths for payrolls and unemployment stem from the use of two separate surveys that often provide conflicting results. The payrolls figures, often seen as a more reliable indicator of hiring, comes from a survey of 140,000 businesses, while the jobless rate is calculated from a survey of 60,000 households." [General population surveys are easier to "fiddle"]

Social security is finally broke: "Don't look now. But even as the bank bailout is winding down, another huge bailout is starting, this time for the Social Security system. A report from the Congressional Budget Office shows that for the first time in 25 years, Social Security is taking in less in taxes than it is spending on benefits. Instead of helping to finance the rest of the government, as it has done for decades, our nation's biggest social program needs help from the Treasury to keep benefit checks from bouncing -- in other words, a taxpayer bailout.... years earlier than projected, Social Security is adding to the government's borrowing needs... this year's Social Security cash shortfall is a watershed event. Until this year, Social Security was a problem for the future. Now it's a problem for the present.

How to Make a Weak Economy Worse: "You get the feeling President Obama is girding for battle with the financial sector. In last week's State of the Union address, he promised to regulate the industry. On Jan. 21, he was blunter, warning that he would not let companies that enjoyed "soaring profits and obscene bonuses" block his financial reforms. "If these folks want a fight," he said, "it's a fight I'm ready to have." This declaration of war echoes that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1936, late in his campaign for a second presidential term, FDR spoke of the challenges of "business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking." Wall Streeters and businessmen hated him, he said, adding that "I welcome their hatred." Mr. Obama might want to stick to a moderate approach. FDR's war against business played to the crowd, but it hurt the economy. While monetary policies impeded recovery in the late 1930s, it was the administration's assault on companies and capital that ensured the Depression's duration.... The attacks started with taxes. In 1935, well before the "hatred" speech, FDR led Congress in passaging a law that replaced a flat rate on corporate income with a graduated rate—itself a penalty on larger firms....Even John Maynard Keynes chided FDR for his attitude about businessmen: "It is a mistake to think they are more immoral than politicians." Among themselves, the New Dealers acknowledged failure. FDR's second Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, eventually determined that the problem was lack of what he labeled "business confidence."

Denmark shows the way: "Danish special forces have stormed a Slovenian cargo ship which had been captured by pirates in the Gulf of Aden, freeing the 25 crew members, a spokesman for the EU's anti-piracy naval force says. "It's the first time that an assault of this nature has taken place,'' John Harbour, spokesman for the European Union Naval Force (NAVFOR) said today. The operation took place around 1100 GMT yesterday (10pm yesterday AEDT) soon after the pirates seized the Antigua and Barbuda-flagged cargo ship Ariella. The ship's crew had managed to send out a distress signal which the international coalition forces patrolling the waters off Somalia intercepted. A plane from the EU anti-piracy force flew to the spot and called on a Danish NATO ship in the area to intervene with its special forces. That was made possible after the whole ship's crew managed to lock themselves into a room on board, the spokesman said."

Afghanistan situation no longer deteriorating says Stanley McChrystal: "The American commander who warned in September of "failure" in Afghanistan has said that the situation there is no longer deteriorating and President Barack Obama's troop surge has set the stage for "real progress" in 2010. Speaking in Istanbul before the anticipated offensive against the Taliban-held town of Marja in southern Helmand, Gen Stanley McChrystal gave a strikingly upbeat assessment of the situation in the country he said last year was in danger of slipping into Islamist hands. The Marja offensive is widely viewed as the first major test of Gen McChrystal's counter-insurgency doctrine... Gen McChrystal conceded that it was "unconventional" to announce the Marja offensive beforehand because it gave the Taliban the opportunity to flee, bury bombs and fortify. The aim, however, was to send a message to insurgents that "it's about to change" and to Afghans that the writ of their government was about to be extended. "If they want to fight, then obviously that will have to be an outcome. But if they don't want to fight, that's fine, too, if they want to integrate into the government. "The biggest thing is in convincing the Afghan people. This is all a war of perceptions."

Dutch must help Iran with nukes: "Students from Iran can take nuclear courses in the Netherlands after all. A judge in The Hague ruled yesterday that the government is not allowed to exclude them. The judge ruled that the Iranians were discriminated against by the exclusion regulation. This regulation, introduced based on a UN resolution by Education Minister Ronald Plasterk and Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen, will now have to be scrapped. A group of Iranian Dutch were opposing the sanction measure excluding students from Iran from certain Master's courses and studies at certain locations, including the nuclear installations in Petten and Borssele. Verhagen had not yet commented on the verdict yesterday. The measure was intended to prevent Iranian students from being able to collect information that could help with the making or spread of nuclear weapons. In the past, nuclear secrets came into the hands of a number of countries via an Iranian nuclear physicist who took them with him from Dutch uranium processing company Urenco."

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog 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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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

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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RACE AND IQ

I suppose I am dreaming but I have this crazy idea that as a much-published psychometrician, I should be permitted to convey what I know about IQ research. IQ research is part of psychometrics. I will of course be accused of being a "racist" for telling what I know but to hell with that: truth comes first for me. If telling the truth makes you a racist, that sounds like praise for racism to me.

I reproduce below some excerpts from the latest academic paper on the subject. I first give the abstract and then an excerpt from the body of the article. Readers who want to look at the full article will find the link at the bottom, as is my usual practice. The excerpt from the body of the article first gives the misleading claims of Nisbett in Nisbett's own words and is followed by a recounting of what Nisbett has left out or misrepresented.

The Open Psychology Journal, 2010, 3, 9-35

Race and IQ: A Theory-Based Review of the Research in Richard Nisbett's Intelligence and How to Get It

By J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur R. Jensen

Abstract:

We provide a detailed review of data from psychology, genetics, and neuroscience in a point-counterpoint format to enable readers to identify the merits and demerits of each side of the debate over whether the culture-only (0% genetic- 100% environmental) or nature + nurture model (50% genetic-50% environmental) best explains mean ethnic group differences in intelligence test scores: Jewish (mean IQ = 113), East Asian (106), White (100), Hispanic (90), South Asian (87), African American (85), and sub-Saharan African (70). We juxtapose Richard Nisbett's position, expressed in his book Intelligence and How to Get It, with our own, to examine his thesis that cultural factors alone are sufficient to explain the differences and that the nature + nurture model we have presented over the last 40 years is unnecessary. We review the evidence in 14 topics of contention: (1) data to be explained; (2) malleability of IQ test scores; (3) cultureloaded versus g-loaded tests; (4) stereotype threat, caste, and "X" factors; (5) reaction-time measures; (6) within-race heritability; (7) between-race heritability; (8) sub-Saharan African IQ scores; (9) race differences in brain size; (10) sex differences in brain size; (11) trans-racial adoption studies; (12) racial admixture studies; (13) regression to the mean effects; and (14) human origins research and life-history traits. We conclude that the preponderance of evidence demonstrates that in intelligence, brain size, and other life history traits, East Asians average higher than do Europeans who average higher than South Asians, African Americans, or sub-Saharan Africans. The group differences are between 50 and 80% heritable.

2. THE MALLEABILITY OF IQ SCORES

Nisbett:

James Flynn discovered that in the developed world as a whole, IQ scores increased markedly over the last 50 years. This suggests that the 15-point IQ difference between Blacks and Whites will gradually disappear over time. Indeed, Black IQ today is superior to White IQ in 1950! Dickens and Flynn [24] showed the Black-White IQ gap narrowed by 5.5 points between 1972 and 2002. They documented a drop from 15 to 9.5 points on a combination of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), the Stanford- Binet, and the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT). It is hard to overestimate the importance of a gap reduction of this magnitude. It reduces the ratio of Whites to Blacks with an IQ of 130 (the level needed to be a highly successful professional) from 18 to 1 to only 6 to 1. Even including the several additional tests that Rushton and Jensen [25] said were wrongly omitted, the median Black IQ gain is still 4.5 points, which is not very different from the 5.5 point estimate given by Dickens and Flynn.

The Black-White difference shrank comparably on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Long- Term Trend tests. These have been given every few years since the early 1970s by the U.S. Department of Education to a random sample of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds. For children born as early as 1954, the Black-White difference in reading and math averaged a full 1.2 SDs. For the most recent cohorts the gap is between .60 and .90 SDs-a very large reduction. It is interesting to note that if we convert the NAEP gains to IQ-type scales with a mean of 100 and SD of 15, and average the gains in math and reading across all age groups, we obtain a 5.4 point reduction in the Black-White education gap during the period for which Dickens and Flynn [24] found a 5.5 point reduction in the IQ gap.

Rushton and Jensen:

In fact, there is very little evidence of any significant narrowing of the Black-White IQ gap. Rushton and Jensen [25] disputed Dickens and Flynn's [24] claim that Blacks gained 5.5 points by showing that Dickens and Flynn excluded several tests and then "projected" forward by multiplying a small gain from their highly select group of tests by more years than were available for most of the data. Dickens and Flynn excluded the Wonderlic Personnel Test, which showed a gain of only 2.4 points for Blacks between 1970 and 2001; the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC), which showed a loss of 1 IQ point for Blacks between 1983 and 2004; the Woodcock-Johnson test, which showed a zero gain for Blacks; and the Differential Ability Scale, which showed a gain of only 1.83 points for Blacks between 1972 and 1986.

Moreover, even the test data they did present did not directly support their conclusion. Simple arithmetic, rather than a multiplied projection, yielded a mean gain for Blacks of 3.4 points (23%), not the 5.5 points claimed (37%). Including the aforementioned tests reduced the gain from 3.4 to 2.1 points (14%).

Nisbett does not explain how he arrived at an overall Black gain of 4.5 IQ points (30%) after including the four small (or negative) gain tests. Simple arithmetic applied to all eight tests yielded a mean gain for Blacks of only 2.1 points (14%).

Other researchers have also failed to find a significant narrowing of the Black-White gap over the 30 years covered by Dickens and Flynn (i.e., from 1972 to 2002). For example, Murray [26, 27] concluded there was "no narrowing" in two independent studies. In the first, he found no narrowing in either verbal IQ or achievement test scores for children born to women in the 1979 sample of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. In the second, he found no narrowing for 6- to 65-year-olds in the Woodcock-Johnson standardizations of those born in the last half of the 1960s and early 1970s.

When Roth et al. [9] confirmed the 1.1 SD difference in a sample of 6,246,729 corporate, military, and higher education testees, they also addressed the question of whether the differences were decreasing. They concluded that any reduction was "either small, potentially a function of sampling error.or nonexistent for highly g loaded instruments" [9, p. 323, our italics].

Nisbett seems also to have exaggerated a select sampling of NAEP scores to emphasize gains. Gottfredson [28, 29] found that from the 1970s to the 1990s, the Black-White difference on school achievement tests only narrowed from 1.07 to 0.89 SDs. Even this 20% reduction (not the 35% claimed by Nisbett) had: (a) occurred by the 1980s and no longer continued; and (b) was compatible with a heritability of 80% for IQ.

However, the differences in results between Nisbett and Gottfredson are partly due to the NAEP scores coming in two distinct varieties. Nisbett reported on the NAEP Long Term Trend Assessment test, which measures student performance in Reading and Mathematics every four years or so and has remained relatively unchanged since its first administration. Gottfredson analyzed the Main NAEP Assessment test, which is given every two years and includes other subjects such as Science, Geography, and History, with test items modified every few years to reflect changing school curricula.

In any case, when gains do occur, they may be due to increased familiarity with test material and "teaching the test" rather than to genuine improvement in learning (see Section 8.1).

More HERE

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Obama ditching soft approach towards China?

By Dr John Lee

If 2009 was the year of treating China with kid gloves, 2010 is likely to be much more tumultuous with President Barack Obama gearing up to prove that he has the mettle to defend American interests as well as the charm that swept him into power.

Last year, Obama’s foreign policy advisors conceded that China responded to the President’s softly, softly approach with disrespect and ‘kicked him in the teeth’ over and over again, most notably at the Copenhagen Summit. With poll numbers sagging and no foreign policy achievements to speak of, he is trying to avoid being compared to previous failed Presidents such as the one-term Jimmy Carter – also a Nobel Peace Prize winner – who was seen as cerebral but naïve and weak.

Indeed, it the first month of 2010, Obama has publicly defended Google in the company’s spat with China, approved an arms package for Taiwan that includes a few unexpected military ‘extras,’ and announced his intention to meet the Dalai Lama – something that was postponed in 2009 to appease Chinese sensitivities when the Dalai Lama visited the United States. America has done more in January to stand up to and enrage China than during the whole of 2009.

Ultimately, Washington wants China to be part of the solution rather than problem on global issues: to be a ‘responsible stakeholder.’ When China fails to behave like one – which is often the case – it creates additional headaches for an America burdened by global responsibilities. From Beijing’s point of view, the ‘responsible stakeholder’ approach is cleverly designed to inhibit and restrain China’s rise and to preserve American advantages in the bilateral relationship and within the global order. The implication: US-China tension is structural.

The above is a press release from the Centre for Independent Studies, dated February 5. Enquiries to cis@cis.org.au. Snail mail: PO Box 92, St Leonards, NSW, Australia 1590.

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Dumbama just hasn't got a clue

Today President Obama told Senate Democrats that they had faced "enormous procedural obstacles that are unprecedented.." "You had to cast more votes to break filibusters last year than in the entire 1950s and 1960s combined. That's 20 years of obstruction jammed into just one."

This is astonishing. A filibuster is the successful use of 41 or more votes to prevent the closing of debate. There wasn't a single filibuster in 2009. Not one.

The president will say anything to advance a narrative that makes him a victim of obstruction. It is clear that 2010 will be spent pivoting from his 2009 mantra of Bush's fault to his campaign year blasts at the "do nothing Republicans."

SOURCE

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The Great Peasant Revolt of 2010

"I am not an ideologue," protested President Obama at a gathering with Republican House members last week. Perhaps, but he does have a tenacious commitment to a set of political convictions. Compare his 2010 State of the Union to his first address to Congress a year earlier. The consistency is remarkable. In 2009, after passing a $787 billion (now $862 billion) stimulus package, the largest spending bill in galactic history, he unveiled a manifesto for fundamentally restructuring the commanding heights of American society -- health care, education and energy.

A year later, after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a "jobs bill."

This being a democracy, don't the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don't they understand Massachusetts? Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.

Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-Massachusetts, remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking "in the plain words of plain folks," because the people are "suspicious of complexity." Counseled Blow: "The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, 'Mr. President, we're down here.'" A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob, explaining that we are "a nation of dodos" that is "too dumb to thrive."

Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when, with supercilious modesty, he chided himself "for not explaining it (health care) more clearly to the American people." The subject, he noted, was "complex." The subject, it might also be noted, was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.

Then there are the emotional deficiencies of the masses. Nearly every Democratic apologist lamented the people's anger and anxiety, a free-floating agitation that prevented them from appreciating the beneficence of the social agenda the Democrats are so determined to foist upon them.

That brings us to Part 2 of the liberal conceit: Liberals act in the public interest, while conservatives think only of power, elections, self-aggrandizement and self-interest.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Biden swears in Brown as newest US Senator: "Republican Scott Brown has become the junior senator from Massachusetts today after being sworn in a week earlier than expected on the Senate floor. Brown, 50, was sworn in by Vice President Joe Biden more than two weeks after his upset victory in the Jan. 19 special election shook up the political landscape in Washington by giving Republicans the 41 votes they need to block controversial bills.”

Hypocrite Obama hits tactic he himself used as a senator: "President Obama blasted Senate Republicans Wednesday for using "holds," a Senate tactic that delays consideration of nominees - even though as a senator he used the technique to block several of President George W. Bush's appointments. Mr. Obama complained that Republican objections have created "a huge backlog of folks who are unanimously viewed as well qualified" but who get held up because a single senator is trying to force the administration's hand on an issue. He said that's the case with Martha Johnson, his nominee to head the General Services Administration. "Let's have a fight about real stuff. Don't hold this woman hostage. If you have an objection about my health care policies, then let's debate the health care policies. But don't suddenly end up having a GSA administrator who is stuck in limbo somewhere because you don't like something else that we're doing," he said. But that's exactly what Mr. Obama did in two instances when, as a senator, he blocked all Environmental Protection Agency nominees in late 2005 to try to force release of new rules on lead paint and, a year later, blocked a Federal Aviation Administration nominee to try to force the FAA to decide whether Midwest wind farms would interfere with radar."

Job losses from Great Recession about to get worse: "Job losses during the Great Recession have been huge and they’re about to get bigger. When the Labor Department releases the January unemployment report Friday, it will also update its estimate of jobs lost in the year that ended in March 2009. The number is expected to rise by roughly 800,000, raising the number of jobs shed during the recession to around 8 million.”

Air marshals say service roiled with cronyism, chaos: "Despite calls from President Obama to beef up the program designed to provide security aboard U.S. flights, the Federal Air Marshal Service is in disarray, a CNN investigation has found. In more than a dozen interviews across the country, air marshals said the agency is rife with cronyism; age, gender and racial discrimination; and attempts by managers to make the agency appear more efficient than it is by padding numbers.”

Zogby poll: Ethnic and religious profiling OK: "Majorities of U.S. adults favor both ethnic and religious profiling and full-body scans at airports as measures to prevent terror attacks; and 69% say they are comfortable sacrificing some privacy for security. These are among the findings of a Zogby Interactive survey of 2,003 U.S. adults conducted from Jan. 15-18, 2010. This survey has a margin of error of +/-2.2%, with larger margins for sub-groups. The survey also found that 51% expect a major terror attack in the next year, and 25% plan to fly less frequently in order to lower their risk of being a terror victim. Seventy-five percent agreed that there is too much political correctness in discussion of terrorism."

Illinois primary voting numbers look good for Republicans: "Illinois held the nation’s first non-special primary election this year, and almost all the results are in. The big story for national politics is the race for Barack Obama’s old Senate seat, now held by the inimitable Roland Burris. And the news is very good for Republicans. North Shore suburban Congressman Mark Kirk won the Republican primary with 57% of the vote to 19% for conservative Patrick Hughes, while the Democratic race was much closer. State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, long well ahead in the polls, won 39% to 34% for former Chicago Inspector General David Hoffman. Giannoulias has been running mostly ahead of or even with Kirk in public polls, but there’s reason to believe he is beatable. He is young and articulate, but his family-owned bank, Broadway Bank, has made some loans to unsavory individuals, including convicted fraudster Tony Rezko. Kirk, in contrast, is a clean-as-a-whistle representative of the affluent North Shore suburbs, historically very Republican but in recent years trending Democratic on cultural issues; Kirk managed to win reelection by a 53%-47% margin in 2008 even as Barack Obama was carrying his district 61%-38% and his Democratic opponent was spending $3.5 million."

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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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