Rev. Ian Paisley retires from politics

A most doughty defender of his people. Pic below as he is most likely to be remembered. Even in retirement, his counsel will still be sought. Story here



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Pinochet's Legacy: Free, Non-Communist Chile

Gen. Augusto Pinochet was laid to rest after several years of illness, which prevented the Chilean Supreme Court from hearing criminal charges against him. I well recall the dark days of the early 1970s. We had cut and run from Vietnam. The Communists were on the march in Angola and Mozambique. Salvadore Allende had been elected by a minority of the electorate and was busy moving Chile to a Communist state.

The Soviet Union, which seemed invincible, announced the Brezhnev Doctrine. Simply stated it was this: Once a Communist country, always a Communist country. There was no turning back. You could never vote to undo a Communist regime or to overthrow such a regime by other means. If a state turned Communist it would remain a Communist regime forever.

Allende had been elected by a minority of the voters in a three-way split among the electorate. The outright conservative candidate received almost a third of the vote, the centrist candidate received nearly a third of the vote and finally the Communists under the banner of Allende received just over a third of the vote. He interpreted this as a mandate.

Pinochet staged a coup. He bombed the Presidential Palace in Santiago and took over communications in Chile. Pinochet’s saving of Chile from the Communists was ironic. Allende himself had placed the military under the control of Pinochet because he believed the military would be loyal to him. When the moment of truth came, Allende killed himself with a gun given to him by his pal Fidel Castro.

Pinochet took over Chile and ran it with a firm hand. Recognizing that he did not know anything about economics, he turned to the University of Chicago. Chicago economic scholars told him to initiate a free market. He did so. And it worked. Soon Chile was the most prosperous country in the region.

Pinochet did run Chile with an iron fist. Interestingly, when I was giving training seminars in the former Soviet Union, Pinochet’s name frequently came up. Russian leaders wanted my opinion if the Chilean model would be good for Russia.

In due course, Pinochet promulgated a Constitution. He got the voters to ratify it. Then he proposed a referendum question, which if passed would allow him to continue in office for some years. If the resolution were defeated he said he would step down. I was part of a team working with the conservative forces in Chile, in preparation for the vote on the referendum. We were able to have breakfast with Pinochet. He was obviously well educated and clearly was prepared to step down if the referendum were defeated.

We trained the conservative forces and the election was reasonably close but his proposition clearly was defeated. So he stepped down. Chile had prompted the late great Jeane Kirkpatrick to distinguish between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. The Soviet Union was totalitarian, she opined. Chile was authoritarian.

When I went to Chile I was amazed to find freedom of the press. Far more than half of the media was highly critical of Pinochet. At that time there was no opposition press in the Soviet Union. Indeed, in Chile there was freedom of assembly. All sorts of groups and potential political parties were preparing for that resolution.

I asked Pinochet point blank if indeed he would be prepared to step down in light of defeat of his resolution. He told me he absolutely would do so. He kept his word.

Pinochet should go down in history as a liberator. He, alone, reversed the Brezhnev Doctrine. Today Chile is a prosperous left-of-center nation. People there have health-savings accounts and have better health care than in any other Latin American country. Pinochet made that happen. His free market reforms made Chile into a prosperous nation. He even looked after the poor with medical care.

Yet what he is known for, it seems to me, are the deaths of some 3,000 people and the torture of others. As William F. Buckley reminded us, Pinochet “spoke with passion to say he had not himself known about, let alone authorized any of the random killings and torture laid at his door.”

Perhaps he did not know of these killings and the torture of the living. First, let it be said: He fought a war. And when you fight a war, people will end up dead. Second, to this day there are those who vilify Pinochet. I believe they cannot forgive him for reversing the Brezhnev Doctrine. He showed that you can overthrow a Communist regime and set it on a road to freedom. He was an authoritarian who agreed to step down, albeit reluctantly, when he lost the confidence of the people. Name me one Communist dictator of that era who stepped down when his efforts went astray. Not in Hungary, not in Poland, not in Estonia, not in Czechoslovakia. If something went wrong one Communist was replaced with another.

The left in Chile set out to punish Pinochet. They never succeeded. Either he won an appeal or he became too ill to testify. I know it is heresy to say this but the people of Chile should thank Pinochet. He saved their nation from a brutal Communist “experiment.” The Chilean people should ask the people who lived in the Soviet Empire how it was to live there. No free market. No free press. No freedom of assembly. I will light a candle in memory of Pinochet, the man who had the courage to take on the Soviet Empire.

SOURCE

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Support for English Language Unity Act Continues to Grow

Rep. Louie Gohmert became a co-sponsor of the English Language Unity Act yesterday, the sixth Congressman in seven weeks to support official English legislation in the House. The addition of the representative from the First Congressional District of Texas brings the number of bi-partisan supporters of H.R. 997 to 134 members of Congress from 36 states.

“I want to thank Rep. Gohmert for his support for making English the official language of the United States,” said Mauro E. Mujica Chairman of the Board of U.S. English, Inc. “From congressional district to congressional district, we may hear many different languages in our travels, but we know that the English language is the one that unites our diverse society. It is the language of opportunity, the language of education, and as more than 80 percent of Americans agree, should be the official language of the United States.”

During the last Congress (2007-08), Rep. Gohmert was a co-sponsor of the English Language Unity Act (also H.R. 997), voted to reduce multilingualism at the IRS, and voted to protect employers who have English-in-the-Workplace policies. His efforts to promote the common language of English and eliminate divisive multilingual policies earned him an “A in English” Award from U.S. English in May 2008. The three-term representative was also a co-sponsor of the English Language Unity Act in the 109th Congress (2005-06).

The English Language Unity Act would require the United States government to conduct most official business in English. Specifically, H.R. 997 would limit routine government operations to English, while giving government agencies common sense flexibility to protect public health and safety, national security, and to provide for the needs of commerce and criminal justice systems. H.R. 997 is pending in the House Education and Labor Committee and the House Judiciary Committee.

SOURCE

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Islamists Play Shell Games with Security

Despite the countless terror attacks perpetrated by their co-religionists, some Muslims still have the chutzpah to demand that security protocols conform to supposed Islamic sensitivities. But like a typical shell game, every time we think we know which procedures they grudgingly will tolerate, we discover that we have been hoodwinked yet again.

Responding to security measures implemented after the attempt to bomb a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day, CAIR characteristically charged that "the new guidelines, under which anyone traveling from or through 13 Muslim-majority nations will be required to go through enhanced screening techniques before boarding flights, … amount to religious and ethnic profiling." CAIR's proposed alternative: "First look at behavior, not at faith or skin color. Then spend what it takes to obtain more bomb-sniffing dogs, to install more sophisticated bomb-detection equipment, and to train security personnel in identifying the behavior of real terror suspects."

All are fine ideas. But in reality, Islamists oppose each of them:

Scrutinizing behavior. Consider the "flying imams" imbroglio, where six Muslims who seemed to exhibit "the behavior of real terror suspects" were removed from a plane before takeoff in 2006. Passengers and crew members became alarmed when the men spoke loudly in Arabic, refused to sit in assigned seats, and requested unneeded seatbelt extenders. How did CAIR respond? By alleging religious discrimination and suing everyone in sight — with some success. True, the imams were fingered originally by alert citizens rather than dedicated security officers. But should we believe that CAIR's reaction would have been different otherwise?

Bomb-sniffing dogs. Given that some Muslims see dogs as unclean, using them for security purposes often provokes Islamist criticism. Britain has experienced a litany of canine controversies, while a prominent Canadian Muslim recently voiced concerns about dogs patrolling Vancouver. The issue of police dogs also arose when a Detroit-based radical imam was killed in an October FBI raid. According to the Detroit News, the attorney representing his widow "said it was needlessly confrontational to send a dog after Abdullah because Muslims view dogs as unclean and anyone attacked by a dog could react violently"; an FBI canine was shot dead by the imam. How long until bomb-sniffing dogs in U.S. airports face objections?

Bomb-detection equipment. Body scanners are about as sophisticated as it gets, but now we know that these, too, run afoul of Islamist sensibilities. "The Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) emphasizes that a general and public use of such scanners is against the teachings of Islam, natural law, and all religions and cultures that stand for decency and modesty," the group explains in a fatwa issued on February 9. CAIR, which had championed "sophisticated bomb-detection equipment" just a month earlier, backed the ruling.

The shell game continues, with the Fiqh Council offering yet another idea: "FCNA appreciates the alternate provision of pat-down search" and advises Muslims to avail themselves of this option over the body scanners. After all, no Muslims balk at being touched, right?

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Democrats ready to break Obama's tax promises: "Tax increases may be necessary to rein in $12 trillion in federal debt, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Monday. Hoyer emphasized the need to reform Social Security and Medicare, but he also made it clear that raising taxes will have to be on the table. “No one likes raising revenue, and understandably so,” Hoyer said in an address at the Brookings Institution. “But if you’re going to buy, you need to pay. “If need be, I am hopeful that both parties will agree to look at revenues as part of the solution — not as a gateway to higher spending, but as part of a compromise that cuts spending and balances the budget,” he added. Hoyer, a voice for centrists in the House leadership, said reining in record debt requires a combination of spending cuts and tax increases."

US Senate votes unemployment benefits, highway funds : "The Senate on Tuesday passed a $10 billion measure to maintain unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless and provide stopgap funding for highway programs after a holdout Republican dropped stalling tactics that had generated a Washington firestorm. Kentucky Republican Jim Bunning had been holding up action for days but conceded after pressure intensified with Monday’s cutoff of road funding and extended unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for the jobless.”

CA: Jerry moonbeam officially enters race for governor: "Asserting that California needs ’someone with an insider’s knowledge but an outsider’s mind’ to pull the state out of its economic doldrums, state Attorney General Jerry Brown strode into the governor’s race Tuesday morning after taking months to make the inevitable official. … Brown, the son of former two-term Gov. Pat Brown, has served as secretary of state, governor, mayor of Oakland and state attorney general in a career that spans 40 years and three short-circuited runs for the presidency.”

UK: Cleric issues anti-terror fatwa : "A leading Islamic scholar has issued a fatwa in Britain condemning ;terrorists; as the enemies of Islam, in a bid to deter young Muslims from extremism. Muhammad Tahir ul-Qadri, head of the Minhaj ul-Quran religious and educational organisation, said suicide bombers were destined for hell as he released his 600-page edict in London on Tuesday.”

Panic time for liberals : "Liberals seem to be getting bent out of shape over the fact that increasing numbers of people are challenging their statist paradigm. They’re suggesting that anyone who questions their beloved welfare-state socialism must be crazy, insane, irrational, greedy, selfish, and evil.”

Obama's bipolar energy policy : "Supporters of generating electricity with nuclear power cheered after learning that President Obama had included federal guarantees in next fiscal year’s budget to clear the way for starting work on the first two new U.S. nuclear power plant in decades. The same people jeered when they also saw that the president proposed eliminating funding for a national nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, originally scheduled to open this year, but delayed by congressional diversions of monies appropriated for the site to other spending programs. So with one hand, Washington plans to facilitate the construction of a new nuclear power plant by shielding owners from liability for future accidents, but with its other hand, doesn’t want to finish building a repository to safely store nuclear waste.”

Obama used the Post office as an example of a government-run business: "In some rather believable news, the Postmaster General has announced that the Post Office could lose $238 Billion over the next decade. According to the Washington Post, "The U.S. Postal Service estimates $238 billion in losses in the next 10 years if lawmakers, postal regulators and unions don't give the mail agency more flexibility in setting delivery schedules, price increases and labor costs." Fiscal Conservatives and libertarians have long opined on how the Post Office was the perfect example of why Government does not know best when it comes to business sense. And now, even the Postmaster General, John E. Potter, is aknowledging the inefficiencies that are created by the Federal Government and Unions" [A foretaste of Obamacare]

ACORN Housing Boom: "As ACORN gears up to use your tax dollars to get involved in the 2010 Census and influence future elections, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is conducting a "massive" probe of ACORN Housing Corp., a source familiar with the ongoing investigation says. The HUD probe comes as ACORN Housing, the best-funded of ACORN's affiliates, participates in the ACORN network-wide rebranding aimed at duping funders and the public and allowing ACORN to continue to devour government grants. ACORN Housing is a key component of the far-flung ACORN empire of activism which has long used its housing affiliate as a piggy bank -- so it's too important to be allowed to collapse. Although ACORN is now converting state chapters into new shell corporations operated out of the same old ACORN offices and staffed by many of the same people, ACORN Housing opted simply to change its name. ACORN's latest public relations ruse may give it an opportunity to take in untold millions of taxpayer dollars under cover of darkness just in time to cause trouble during the 2012 election cycle."

A Stern Word on Obama's Debt Appointment: "Barack Obama announced his appointments to the Bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform this past Friday, February 26th, nominating none other than Andy Stern. Stern is one of the White House's most frequent visitors, and President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), an organization with close ties to ACORN and a substantial Democratic campaign contributor. But for a bipartisan panel, supposedly created to "improve the fiscal situation," and "achieve fiscal sustainability," Stern must have some qualifications that make him an ideal addition to this panel. Right? As J. Justin Wilson, Managing Director for the Center for Union Facts told LaborPains.com last week, "Stern and his unions know a thing or two about government debt, as they do their fair share to contribute to it. The SEIU has single-handedly driven more than a few states to the edge of fiscal insolvency. For instance, in 2009, SEIU members in California earned wage increases nearly double the national average, despite the fact that California's economy is in one of the worst in the nation".

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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GOP Should Learn from Ron Paul’s CPAC Victory

In the days following Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s decisive win over former governors Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin in the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) straw poll, left-leaning networks, predictably, treated the event as further proof that tea party activists are taking over the Republican Party. That was to be expected. Liberal smear tactics, particularly those which rely on outright lies, are never justified; however, their derisive reaction to the poll should be interpreted as a nerve struck. A televised view of a crowd of young, enthused conservatives is bound to disturb the opposition.

But conservative networks —one in particular— have no excuse for their after-the-fact “spin” treatment of the event, portraying it as marginal and irrelevant to the 2012 presidential race. One commentator conveniently neglected to mention that Paul is a Republican, instead referring to him as a “libertarian.”

One must wonder; do Republicans want to attain victory in the next two elections? Does the GOP want a future, or would it prefer to ignore the concerns of young voters, engage in internal bickering about an ideologically inconsistent platform, defend party insiders from fresh, new challengers, and eventually fizzle out like a defective bottle rocket?

Increasingly, this seems to be the case. Rep. Paul was scorned by his fellow Republicans during the 2008 primary for his “conspiracy theorizing” about an imminent financial collapse. Within months, the theory became reality, but by then Republicans had already chosen the lukewarm McCain, who would soon prove to be a losing choice.

Paul is not—cannot be—the future of the GOP. He will turn 75 in August, and would be 77 if elected in 2012; Reagan’s age when he left office. But the real future of conservatism, voters under 30, love the man.

More precisely, they love his beliefs. His ideology, which is based on the principles of limited government outlined by the Constitution, appeals to a large group within the Republican Party that is disgusted by big-government conservatism, which itself is a ridiculous, contradictory notion. It does not matter how angry this group is at Obama’s policies; if, in 2012, the GOP puts up another flimsy candidate who does not make limited government a key plank of his platform, these “Ron Paul Republicans,” tea partiers, and independents could easily vote for various third-party candidates, or simply stay home out of frustration.

They would be justified. A party that compromises with anti-constitutional progressivism in the hopes of appealing to political moderates is not worthy of respect. Or votes. It is part of the problem, not the solution. Independent voters are leaning toward the right, temporarily, in reaction to a calamitous Democratic administration, but it will take more than a vague sense of antiestablishment anger for the GOP to regain control of the federal government, and reinstitute conservatism and common sense.

Here’s some food for thought for Republicans: Ron Paul is a digital politician in a digital world. His creative use of YouTube and other online networking tools has bridged a gap between 20-somethings and a 74-year-old man, proving that true conservatism is neither out-of-touch nor outdated.

McCain did not connect with the nation’s youth, while Obama did, provoking a record turnout of 18- to 29-year-old voters. Would the outcome of the 2008 election have been different, had Obama faced the dynamic, independent, web-savvy Paul, rather than the wishy-washy, semi-conservative McCain?

Would we, sixteen months later, face a threatening socialist attack on our precious principles and once-great nation? Or would we be experiencing a refreshing revival of liberty and prosperity?

SOURCE

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Ending welfare reform

Barack Obama came to the presidency promising to be America's first post-partisan president. It is, therefore, ironic that one of his signature achievements has been to roll back one of the great bipartisan triumphs of the last two decades. Under the guise of helping unemployed Americans in a tough economy, the Obama administration and its congressional allies are reversing the 1996 welfare reforms that have been lauded as an overwhelming success by Republicans and Democrats alike for lifting millions of Americans from poverty.

Before welfare reform, under the federal assistance program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the federal government gave the states more money for every family they added to their welfare rolls. Not surprisingly, this system gave states a disincentive to help people transition from unemployment and dependence on government to work and independence. AFDC came under heavy criticism across the ideological spectrum for producing perverse incentives. These included out-of-wedlock births and perpetual unemployment. Recipients had little incentive to get off welfare; in fact, they had a disincentive to do so, because they could get paid indefinitely for not working.

Reforming the broken federal welfare system became a cornerstone of the Contract with America, which helped Republicans recapture Congress in 1994. Premised on reducing dependency on government, the federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) passed Congress and was signed by President Clinton in 1996.

PRWORA replaced AFDC with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which drew on successful state-level innovations and emphasized, as the name suggests, time-limited financial aid. Under TANF, states got a block grant from the federal government, which gave states an incentive to cut their welfare rolls and get people into jobs. The reforms included requiring work after two years of benefits, implementing a lifetime limit of five years on benefits, encouraging two-parent families and married childbearing, and enhancing enforcement of child support.

Several further reforms have been made since 1996. Conditions for receiving welfare have been tightened, and states now enroll more welfare recipients with physical or mental disabilities. Some states even require welfare applicants to participate in employment counseling or job training as a prerequisite to receiving benefits. PRWORA was reauthorized in the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005.

Welfare reform has been an overwhelming success. Since 1996, welfare caseloads have decreased 70 percent, which translates into 8.8 million fewer people dependent on government. Child-poverty rates dropped, particularly among blacks and Hispanics. Teen pregnancies have (until recently) decreased, and child-support collections have increased.

Despite its success, or perhaps because of it, President Obama and his allies are doing all they can to destroy welfare reform. Mr. Obama's $862 billion stimulus package last February essentially abolished welfare reform by subsidizing the expansion of welfare rolls. The federal government now pays states 80 percent of the cost for each new family they add to their welfare rolls, a move that eliminates states' incentive to push welfare recipients into the job force. Partly as a consequence of the infusion of federal welfare funds, welfare rolls increased in 2009 for the first time since PRWORA was enacted, growing 5 percent as 200,000 more Americans were added.

Welfare encompasses not just cash assistance, but also food stamps, housing, Medicaid and scores of other programs across more than a dozen federal agencies. And Mr. Obama is committed to expanding them all. According to a September study from the Heritage Foundation:

"In his first two years in office, President Barack Obama will increase annual federal [welfare] spending by one-third from $522 billion to $697 billion. The combined two-year increase will equal almost $263 billion. After adjusting for inflation, this increase is 2 1/2 times greater than any previous increase in federal welfare spending in U.S. history."

Mr. Obama's welfare increases are not temporary. In fact, over the next decade, Mr. Obama will spend $10.3 trillion on welfare. That equals, according to the study, "approximately $250,000 for each person currently living in poverty in the U.S., or $1 million for a poor family of four."

Meanwhile, the president's newly proposed 2011 budget adds a new "emergency fund" to TANF at a cost of $2.5 billion.

The unraveling of welfare reform shouldn't be a surprise at a time when its adversaries have gathered power both in Congress and in the Oval Office. Many top Democrats in Congress voted against PRWORA, and in 1997 Mr. Obama, on the floor of the Illinois state Senate, said, "I probably would not have supported the federal [PRWORA] legislation."

The liberal justification for all this welfare spending is, in essence, that desperate times call for desperate measures. Or as Mr. Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, famously put it: "Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is [the recession is] an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."

There's nothing wrong with enacting bold solutions to alleviate serious crises. But Mr. Obama and his allies are exploiting economic anxiety to destroy a successful law in pursuit of their goal of massively and permanently expanding the welfare state. We know why. Big-government proponents embrace both the power of the federal government and the idea that millions of Americans ought to be dependent on its largesse. It's time to return to our Founders' love for small government. More is not always better.

Source

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The U.S. Department of Labor should be abolished -- is of no benefit to the workers

By Rob Schwarzwalder

I was a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union for about seven years. In high school and graduate school, and for a couple of years thereafter, I loaded trucks, moved pallets and honed the fine art of rapidly throwing cans into paper bags.

So, when I suggest that the U.S. Department of Labor should be abolished, I do not do so with the airiness of an ideological theoretician. Working for hours in icy freezer-lockers, on the one hand, and on sweltering loading docks, on the other, tends to temper uninformed zeal.

First things first: The existence of the Labor Department has no basis in the Constitution. The Founders never envisioned a federal agency that "fosters and promotes the welfare of the job seekers, wage earners, and retirees of the United States by improving their working conditions, advancing their opportunities for profitable employment, protecting their retirement and health care benefits, helping employers find workers, strengthening free collective bargaining, and tracking changes in employment, prices, and other national economic measurements."

Got that? It's Labor's formal mission statement. It means that Uncle Sam is going to intrude endlessly into every facet of American private enterprise. And while some of Labor's purposes are noble ones, they (a) lack constitutional support and (b) are better done at the state and local level.

This, fundamentally, is a point of departure between left and right: Liberals believe that the federal government should superimpose itself on American society at large, and conservatives don't. The latter, of whom I am one, believe that the Founders were right in their argument that the functions of the federal government should be few and targeted. A gigantic, controlling and threatening federal employment bureaucracy was not one of them.

Second, state governments actually do serve a purpose. That's a shocking assertion to my friends on the left, certainly, but James Madison - aka the "Father of the Constitution" - was characteristically correct when, in 1794, he said, "The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general."

States have the authority to enact minimum wages, to subsidize private industry and regulate its behaviors, to hear complaints by employees against employers and ensure workplace safety. The federal government, constitutionally, does not. And it should not: It's too big and cannot do these kinds of things with particular efficiency or without arrogantly disturbing myriad local and regional entrepreneurial efforts and regulations.

There are 54 departments of labor (or the equivalents thereof) in our states and territories and the District of Columbia. Are they so incompetent, so heartless and so simply stupid that they cannot address issues of employee health, racial or religious discrimination, medical insurance, etc.? This is, evidently, the underlying if unspoken presumption of the governing elite within the Capital Beltway.

Third, consider some basic issues of efficiency: Why does Labor's Bureau of International Labor Affairs (backwardly acronymed ILAB) have a human-trafficking division when such a division already exists within the State Department? For that matter, why does the United States have an ILAB to begin with? Aren't Iceland and Ireland and Angola and Andorra capable of working with their own work forces?

More HERE

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BrookesNews Update

Why the US economy could suffer another contraction : The US economy is now in a situation that is unique in its monetary history: a massive and totally unprecedented expansion in its monetary base followed by a contraction in bank deposits. Only an utterly incompetent Democratic administration could pull off a stunt like this
Does it make sense to resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act? : The policy makers of the Fed are of the view that they can somehow navigate the economy toward the path of stable economic growth. Their navigation via money pumping leads to fluctuations in the money supply's rate of growth. This in turn leads to the boom-bust cycles that the Fed supposedly is trying to smooth out or eliminate all together
The US recession and the myth of 1937 : The current situation has many people referring back to the Great Depression, particularly the 1937 downturn. As usual they are drawing the wrong conclusions. The lesson that so many have failed to grasp is that the Great Depression is a tragic testimony as to what can happen to a country when governments defy economic laws
Carbon taxes energy production and technology: more green nonsense : Trying to run an advanced economy on alternative energy sources would be an economic and social disaster. Moreover, the idea that raising the cost of energy will induce the emergence of new technologies could only be proposed by people completely ignorant of economic history and the history of technology
Green policies are laying down the foundations for future famines : The current frigid conditions affecting the Northern Hemisphere may not be an isolated weather event but may be a harbinger of natural climate change. In the meantime Australian politicians are deliberately sabotaging Australia's capacity to produce food
Has the US Department of Justice been turned into the Department of Jihad? : It has been revealed that Attorney General Eric Holder is knowingly putting extreme leftwing lawyers on the DOJ payroll, lawyers who volunteered their services pro bono to defend terrorists and are still doing everything within their power to have these mass murderers released. Holder's old firm of Covington & Burling has an appalling reputation for sympathizing with terrorists. Any sensible person would consider this firm's actions as bordering on treason
Obama: America's first cargo cult president : How much is obfuscation or deliberate deception? Are the political, educational and punditry high priests and priestesses true believers? Or do they just perpetuate the myths to perpetuate themselves? Is there a way to tell? To distinguish between the cultists and those who are not? Would it make any difference if we could?
I was a 'useful idiot' : The term 'useful idiot' was originally coined by Russian mass-murder Lenin, referring to blind defenders and apologists for the Soviet Union in the Western democracies. The most famous of these useful idiots was New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty

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)

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

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 small note to blogspot bloggers

It is a sad truth that all blogging platforms seem to have their limitations and problems. I have both Wordpress and blogspot blogs and on the whole I prefer blogspot, which is hosted by Google. Most Wordpress templates ("themes") disallow some html commands, which is quite mad. What they hope to gain by that is beyond me. One of my Wordpress templates won't even allow me to post videos!

But Google are always trying new ideas towards optimizing their processes and that occasionally hits blogspot -- not as often as it used to do, thankfully. Some of their past "improvements" were quite disastrous initially.

The latest brainstorm appears to be that blogspot puts a limit on the length of a page that it will display. The limit is large so it does not affect individual posts but it does affect archives (the record of your past posts). If you are using an older template half your archives may disappear. But with a more recent template you may get as little of a quarter of your archives for a given month followed by a link to "previous posts". They seem to have adopted that idea from Wordpress, a feature of Wordpress that I have always disliked. It does make your archives a lot harder to access.

I save all my archives to disk and post them in month-long slabs elsewhere so some other bloggers may want to adopt that practice.

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Neuroscientists find brain system behind general intelligence

Which doesn't exist, according to Leftists

A collaborative team of neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology, the University of Iowa, the University of Southern California, and the Autonomous University of Madrid have mapped the brain structures that affect general intelligence.

The study, to be published the week of February 22 in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, adds new insight to a highly controversial question: What is intelligence, and how can we measure it?

The research team included Jan Gläscher, first author on the paper and a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, and Ralph Adolphs, the Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and professor of biology. The Caltech scientists teamed up with researchers at the University of Iowa and USC to examine a uniquely large data set of 241 brain-lesion patients who all had taken IQ tests. The researchers mapped the location of each patient's lesion in their brains, and correlated that with each patient's IQ score to produce a map of the brain regions that influence intelligence.

"General intelligence, often referred to as Spearman's g-factor, has been a highly contentious concept," says Adolphs. "But the basic idea underlying it is undisputed: on average, people's scores across many different kinds of tests are correlated. Some people just get generally high scores, whereas others get generally low scores. So it is an obvious next question to ask whether such a general ability might depend on specific brain regions."

The researchers found that, rather than residing in a single structure, general intelligence is determined by a network of regions across both sides of the brain. "One of the main findings that really struck us was that there was a distributed system here. Several brain regions, and the connections between them, were what was most important to general intelligence," explains Gläscher.

"It might have turned out that general intelligence doesn't depend on specific brain areas at all, and just has to do with how the whole brain functions," adds Adolphs. "But that's not what we found. In fact, the particular regions and connections we found are quite in line with an existing theory about intelligence called the 'parieto-frontal integration theory.' It says that general intelligence depends on the brain's ability to integrate —to pull together— several different kinds of processing, such as working memory."

The researchers say the findings will open the door to further investigations about how the brain, intelligence, and environment all interact.

SOURCE

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Debra Medina, new star of America's right, is firing up the race for Texas governor

Lytle is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it kind of town, one of hundreds that dot the vast flat ranchlands of southern Texas. A smear of houses by the main highway between San Antonio and Laredo. Population: 2,383. The first streets only got paved here in the years after the second world war. A sewage system took a little longer, not being built until the 1960s. In short, Lytle, Texas, has never been big enough to have much impact on the politics of the Lone Star state. And few Texas politicians have ever paid much attention to it.

Until Debra Medina, that is. When Medina breezed into Lytle's community hall the locals found themselves confronted with a Texan version of Sarah Palin. She wore a sharp scarlet skirt suit, librarian-style glasses and a puffed-up hairdo. More than 60 Lytle residents had gathered to meet her, a hefty turnout on a weekday at 11am for a Republican primary election in the race to be Texas governor. Medina has become a political phenomenon in Texas. Emerging as a genuine star of the rightwing populist Tea Party movement, she delivers a fiery message of slashing taxes and the abolition of almost all forms of federal government, and issues dire warnings that President Obama is taking America down a slippery slope to Soviet-style communism.

It's working. Previously unheard of by the vast majority of Texans, Medina has set the race for governor on fire, upsetting the primary contest between the incumbent, Rick Perry, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison.

Those gathered to see Medina in Lytle loved her. Young and old, men and women, Latino and white, listened with rapt attention as she outlined her agenda and asked them to back her in this week's first round of voting. If she can beat Hutchison into second place, she can secure a runoff against Perry. That would raise the possibility – distant but real – of a Tea Party activist capturing the government of the second biggest state in America. The Tea Party movement would have gone from being a bunch of ragtag protesters to heading one of the largest single economies in the world. "If we can change politics as usual in Texas, then we can change politics as usual across America. This is not just about Texas, but about changing the whole country," Medina told the Observer before addressing her supporters in Lytle.

She is not alone in that ambition. Across America other extreme candidates have emerged on the Republican right to challenge familiar party figures with a fiery mix of Tea Party-inspired populism. In Arizona, Senator John McCain is facing a tough re-election fight against a former congressman, JD Hayworth, who has expressed public doubts as to whether Obama was born a legitimate American citizen. In Florida the moderate Republican governor, Charlie Crist, is lagging badly in his own primary election to rightwing challenger Marco Rubio, who has the backing of local Tea Party groups.

On the right of US politics, this is big stuff. Instead of forcing mainstream Republicans to woo them for their votes, the rightwingers are now bidding for power. It is an attempt at revolution that could have huge meaning for America and the world, especially given the disastrous showing of Democrats in recent polls and elections. Medina knows this. After her speech she ended with a plea to her audience. "We can win this race," she said, then held up her hand and squeezed two fingers together. "It is this close."

Later that night, at a firemen's association hall in the much larger city of San Antonio, Medina's face stared down from a huge screen as she delivered a long policy monologue. To her audience she was the very antithesis of establishment power: a heroic revolutionary, out to destroy government and bring power to the people. "She is not a career politician. Everything she is saying will make Texas better than what it is," said Sergeant Shawn Mendoza, 30, a veteran of three tours to Iraq and Afghanistan. A few minutes later the flesh-and-blood version of Medina entered the hall. She got a standing ovation before she had said a word.

She began her stump speech again, still wearing the outfit she had in Lytle. But when it comes to speeches Medina is no Sarah Palin. She has no need to write on her hand to remember her talking points. Instead her speech was a complex walk through her extreme anti-government philosophy, citing sources as varied as the Austrian school of economics, St Augustine and modern French philosophers. She said she wanted to get rid of property taxes and allow Texans to do whatever they wanted with anything they owned, whether that was dig for oil or build an extension. There was, she said, no constitutional basis for a federal Department of Education or an Environmental Protection Agency or the Federal Reserve. Texas should assert its rights almost as a nation-state, controlling over its own National Guard units. The disdain for government was visceral. The American way, she said, was simple. "There are two rights essential to freedom: private property and gun ownership."

Such thoughts find fertile ground in Texas. This state has always had a swaggering, independent streak and a dislike for too many laws. Medina was born on a farm near the small town of Beeville in south Texas. She speaks with a homely Texas accent and worked as a nurse before entering politics at county level in the 1990s. Her bid for governor was largely ignored by the media as she crisscrossed the state for 13 months, visiting small town after small town. Gradually she crept up in the polls and forced her way into the televised debates, where she performed strongly. Campaign money began to pour in. One poll puts her as high as 24%, just behind Hutchison and within reach of catching her and forcing Perry into a runoff.

Medina believes she is not really in third place, citing the fact that the polls only telephone previous Republican primary voters, whereas she is bringing in thousands of new supporters. "I feel fantastic. I think we can win this," she said in Lytle.

More HERE (The article is from the Leftist "Guardian" so the rest of the article is mainly snarky comments and unsubstantiated assertions)

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The coming catastrophe

By David Warren, writing from Canada

A spectre is haunting Europe, and America -- the spectre of Keynesianism finally gone nuts. What began, not very innocently, as a suggestion that governments should run deficits in bad times, and surpluses in good times, gradually "evolved." In the next phase, governments tried to balance at least the operating account during the best of times. In Phase 3, governments ran deficits by habit during the good times, but much bigger "stimulus" deficits during the bad times. We are now entering Phase 4.

The U.S. national debt now exceeds $12.3 trillion in a $14.2-trillion economy, and the U.S. government is now piling it on with unprecedented new deficits. The U.S. Treasury's borrowing requirement is, as it were, coming up against the Great Wall of China.

Little things, such as the heart of the U.S. space program, are being gutted to make way for metastasizing social security entitlements and debt service payments that will soon swamp the entire federal budget -- thus requiring the elimination of more little things such as the army, navy and air force. At some point the entitlements simply can't be paid, without hyperinflation.

I am not exaggerating. The American debt is now at levels that ring bells at the International Monetary Fund. And as the world's biggest debtor rapidly accelerates its borrowing, the fiscal carrying capacity of the rest of the planet comes into question.

There are two large reasons why we cannot afford to be smug up here. The first is that after adding the "entitlement" heritage of our provincial governments to the federal debt load, our position is not much better. The second is that even if it were much better, the tsunami coming from south of the border will anyway sweep all our dikes away.

The Obama administration's financial projections are extremely optimistic, yet even if they all come true, the U.S. debt will continue to grow unsustainably. The kind of alarm falsely placed in "global warming" would more usefully be directed toward the remarkable cooling effect this will have, as all our fiscal and demographic trends converge. For this is a predictable future; an issue where the numbers correspond to real things, not to mere speculation.

We can already see where the U.S. is headed, because Iceland and Greece are showing the way. Both have now passed a point of no return, and both are being followed down that plughole by Britain and several other European countries that will probably precede the U.S. into outright bankruptcy. The State of California also gives some clues.

While an optimist would say that we are witnessing the final demise of the welfare state, and good riddance, a pessimist would observe that everything must go down with it. Moreover, as we have seen from the history of Germany and other countries, fiscal catastrophe accentuates every latent threat to public order.

For our governments have created vast bureaucracies, employing immense numbers whose livelihoods depend entirely (whether they realize it or not) upon the capacity of profit-earning people to pay constantly increasing taxes. It should have been grasped, decades ago, that the constant transfer of resources from the productive to the unproductive must eventually tip the ship. And when it does, real people go over the side who get angry when they are thrown in the water. There are consequences to that anger.

The idea that we can spend our way out of a debt crisis -- or what I called above "Keynesianism gone nuts" -- has already been rejected by the Tea Party movement in the U.S., and has always been rejected by voters of conservative tendency. They know what's wrong with the present order, and have an important teaching function to the rest of the electorate, which doesn't get it yet.

But more urgently, we are in need of a positive conception of how to rebuild the economy and society, when Nanny State collapses under her own weight. For yelling "run!" is only a short-term solution.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

TN: Lynn pushes state sovereignty: "State Rep. Susan Lynn says she isn’t trying to fight the political battles of the Civil War again. But she isn’t afraid to push to restore Tennessee’s ’sovereignty.’ Lynn believes it’s time Tennesseans reworked their relationship with the federal government. And she says one of her jobs as a state legislator is to open that dialogue, even if it means sparking confrontation with political leaders in Washington, D.C. ‘For a very long time, the federal government has been growing and growing and becoming a bigger and bigger deal,’ Lynn said last week. ‘Maybe it’s time to pull out the document.’ … With libertarian outrage toward the federal government seemingly on the rise … Lynn has become one of its foremost champions in the Tennessee legislature.”

Report: Not just Toyota with acceleration problems: "The challenge of the rogue gas pedal is apparently not unique to Toyota. In the five years ending last September, all of the six largest carmakers operating in the US marketplace had at least 50 complaints about unintended acceleration filed against them, according to Edmunds.com, a provider of auto industry information based in Santa Monica, Calif. Toyota had the most complaints: 532 during the five-year period, or 4.81 per 100,000 vehicles sold by the company or its Lexis or Scion brands. But some other carmakers also drew numerous complaints, according to the analysis of data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).”

Intervention and economic crisis: "No supporter of the market economy could have been surprised when the recent financial crisis was inevitably blamed on ‘capitalism’ and ‘deregulation.’ The free market, we were told, was a recipe for financial instability. ‘Advocates of the free market must confront the fact that both the Great Depression and the current financial chaos were preceded by years of laissez-faire economic policies,’ wrote Katrina van den Heuvel, editor of The Nation, and author Eric Schlossel, in September 2008.”

Social justice, the new feudal capitalism: "Social justice is a feel-good term that stands to, as Obama has promised, ‘Fundamentally change our economy.’ Social justice has undergone a transformation in the past fifteen years; it has been adopted by the left as a talking point that can put a friendlier face on more politically charged terms like ‘income redistribution’ and ‘property redistribution.’ But for social justice to become a reality, it is necessary for the middle class to take a step back on the economic scale. Rest assured, our social engineers in Congress and the Administration will sacrifice the continued growth of our middle class for their vision of economic egalitarianism that, in the name of sharing wealth, will consolidate power in a new elite class.”

Census confidentiality? The check is in the mail: "Some promises shouldn’t be taken seriously. ‘The check is in the mail,’ or ‘Of course I’ll respect you in the morning,’ or ‘I won’t raise taxes.’ To that list should be added, ‘Your answers to census questions will remain completely confidential.’ Already this census season, many of homeless people have refused to divulge personal information to census takers. Some of the homeless have fears that their personal plight will be revealed to far-away relatives.”

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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Are the Donks prepared to lose this year in order to get Obamacare through?

I generally agree with what appears on NRO, but I think that the anaysis below, while containing some truth, commits the sort of mistake that Leftists usually make: It looks at the group rather than the individual. I have no doubt that the political Left as a whole have an abiding hatred of American success and a yen to destroy it, but the number of Democrat Congresscritters who would voluntarily put themselves out of a job in the service of that hate is surely very small. From all indications, they REALLY LIKE being in Congress and the great majority will do all in their power to stay there: Even to the point of voting down Obama's pride and joy if they think that will help them this November

On Sean's panel last night, when the conversation turned to how nervous Democrats supposedly are over what for now is teeing up like a very bad November, I felt like I was channeling Mark Steyn, Mark Levin and Rush. That is, I think our side is analyzing this all wrong: Today's Democrats are controlled by the radical Left, and it is more important to them to execute the permanent transformation of American society than it is to win the upcoming election cycles. They have already factored in losing in November — even losing big. For them, winning big now outweighs that. I think they're right.

I hear Republicans getting giddy over the fact that "reconciliation," if it comes to that, is a huge political loser. That's the wrong way to look at it. The Democratic leadership has already internalized the inevitablility of taking its political lumps. That makes reconciliation truly scary. Since the Dems know they will have to ram this monstrosity through, they figure it might as well be as monstrous as they can get wavering Democrats to go along with. Clipping the leadership's statist ambitions in order to peel off a few Republicans is not going to work. I'm glad Republicans have held firm, but let's not be under any illusions about what that means. In the Democrat leadership, we are not dealing with conventional politicians for whom the goal of being reelected is paramount and will rein in their radicalism. They want socialized medicine and all it entails about government control even more than they want to win elections. After all, if the party of government transforms the relationship between the citizen and the state, its power over our lives will be vast even in those cycles when it is not in the majority. This is about power, and there is more to power than winning elections, especially if you've calculated that your opposition does not have the gumption to dismantle your ballooning welfare state.

Consequently, the next six weeks, like the next ten months, are going to be worse than we think. We're wired to think that everyone plays by the ususal rules of politics — i.e., if the tide starts to change, the side against whom it has turned modifies its positions in order to stay viable in the next election. But what will happen here will be the opposite. You have a party with the numbers to do anything it puts its mind to, led by movement Leftitsts who see their window of opportunity is closing. We seem to expect them to moderate because that's what everybody in their position does. But they won't. They will put their heads down and go for as much transformation as they can get, figuring that once they get it, it will never be rolled back. The only question is whether there are enough Democrats who are conventional politicians and who care about being reelected, such that they will deny the leadership the numbers it needs. But I don't think we should take much heart in this possibility. Those Democrats may well come to think they are going to lose anyway — that's why so many of them are abandoning ship now. If that's the case, their incentive will be to vote with the leadership.

At the end of the summit debacle, President Obama put the best face on a bad day by indicating that he intended to push ahead with socialized medicine and face the electoral consequences ("that's what elections are for," he concluded). He's right about that. For Republicans, it won't be enough to fight this thing, then deride it if Democrats pull it off, and finally coast to a very likely electoral victory in November. The question is: What are you going to do to roll this back? What is your plan to undo this?

This post from Irwin Stelzer at the Standard caught my eye this morning: "Americans overwhelmingly say that their main concern is jobs, and that they are satisfied with their current health care arrangements. In response, an allegedly chastened President Obama “pivoted,” and says his primary concern from now on will be job creation, which will take priority over his controversial plan to radically change the nation’s health care system. Yet, last week he backed a $15 billion job-creation bill, which passed the Senate, and a $1 trillion health care bill. Since the federal balance sheet is already under huge pressure, this set of priorities tells us that the Obama administration intends to concentrate available resources on transforming the economy — a long-term, permanent restructuring of the health care and energy sectors that was planned long before the failure of Lehman Brothers triggered the financial mess Obama inherited." Yup.

SOURCE

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Barack Obama ‘destroys first year in office’

Obama is fixated on health reforms but voters' chief worry is jobs

When Barack Obama took office last year he was compared to Superman, even joking at a dinner that he had been “born on Krypton and sent here ... to save the planet Earth”. Last January he appeared on the cover of Spider-Man. Now, with his legislative agenda in tatters, the president has moved from comic-strip hero to comparisons to one of the great flawed figures of American literature. Ten days ago Charlie Cook, a leading election analyst, compared Obama and his battle to push through healthcare reform to Captain Ahab and his suicidal hunt for the great white whale.

Despite poll after poll showing that Americans’ main priority is jobs, the president has focused on reforming the US healthcare system and extending coverage to the 40m citizens with no insurance. “I think choosing to take a Captain Ahab-like approach to healthcare — I’m going to push for this even in the worst downturn since the Great Depression — is roughly comparable to Bush’s decision to go to war [in Iraq],” Cook told Politico. “It basically destroyed the first year of a presidency.”

Obama made a last-ditch attempt last week to secure opposition support through a seven-hour summit shown live on television. Although he was admired for his unflappable handling of 40 legislators, no progress was made as Republicans called for a clean sheet. “Boy, that didn’t work,” wrote Peggy Noonan, the veteran Republican commentator, in Friday’s Wall Street Journal.

With both sides so entrenched, she was not alone in regarding the summit as a waste of time. CNN described it as “theatre of the absurd”. Dick Morris, political consultant and former adviser to the Clinton administration, said, “I think it’s Romeo and Juliet. The two families fighting.”

Winning over the Republicans may not have been the real objective. “Obama never expected some magical epiphany from the Republicans,” said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a political analyst. “He achieved the point, which was to give the message to the nation that we all agree we need healthcare and it is the Republicans obstructing everything, not us.” The president is left with an unenviable choice. Either he moves on to other priorities or he uses what is still the biggest Democrat majority in 30 years to push legislation through, via a process called reconciliation.

“He’s damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t,” said Douglas Rivers, professor of political science at Stanford University. “If he rams it through it will be perceived as hardball politics. But the alternative of getting nothing through will be viewed as a political catastrophe.”

The irony is that Obama got close to netting his Moby Dick. After months of wrangling, the Senate voted on Christmas Eve to pass a bill for universal coverage. It seemed the best possible Christmas present. The Democrats had already pushed a bill through the House and all that remained was to combine the two into law.

They had barely digested their turkey when the unexpected victory of Scott Brown in the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts in mid-January robbed the Democrats of the 60 votes they need for easy passage in the Senate. Health reform seemed written off, particularly as polls showed Brown’s opposition to the bill was key to his victory. But Obama refused to give up.

Most Americans support the benefits promised in the House and Senate bills. These include banning insurance companies from screening out customers with pre-existing conditions, such as diabetes.

The problem is that by equally large margins Americans oppose all the things necessary to pay for these reforms, in particular the $500 billion (£330 billion) cuts in payments to Medicare, the healthcare system for retired people.

Obama’s case was not helped by a last-minute resort to traditional pork-barrel politics to get the Senate bill passed by his own party. Special deals included giving trade unions a tax loophole on their members’ more lavish plans. The crucial vote from Ben Nelson, the Nebraska Democrat, came only after the federal government agreed to pay his state’s extra costs for Medicaid, a health programme that provides limited help for the poor.

After such a struggle, Obama’s team is insistent that it will not give up and has set a time-frame of a month to six weeks to pass legislation. “We are determined that we are going to pass healthcare reform,” vowed Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker. Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said Obama will make an announcement this week about the “way forward”. He cited potential areas of agreement with Republicans, such as imposing ceilings on payouts in cases of medical malpractice and curbing Medicare fraud.

In a rare show of bipartisanship last week, a number of Republican senators voted for Obama’s jobs bill. But Republican support for his healthcare reform is something perhaps only Superman could achieve and the president will instead have to rely on rallying his own party. With mid-term elections looming in November and many Democrats’ seats in danger, they will be reluctant to support an unpopular bill.

Obama has said healthcare is so important that he will get it through even if it means he ends up as a one-term president, like Jimmy Carter. He may get his wish. The latest poll by CNN/Opinion Research found 52% of Americans think he should serve only one term.

SOURCE

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Undying Creed: The Acceleration of Our Exceptionalism

Many Americans —particularly those involved with the major news media, academia, and the world of policymaking— envision their country becoming an ever more predictable follower of global fashions in everything from health care to climate change, jurisprudence to economic policy. In other words, they look ahead and see a nation that is a somewhat larger version of those that make up the European Union.

But in reality, those who believe that the United States is sliding down from its historical apex —and that we must accordingly downscale our expectations and adopt the assumptions and economy more appropriate to our European friends— are wrong. American exceptionalism has lost none of its momentum, and the United States is becoming more, not less, distinct among the countries of the developed world in its economic, demographic, and cultural evolution.

For at least a generation, the appeal of declinism and the belief that we must embrace foreign models has constituted, in the words of Georgetown University’s Robert Lieber, a kind of “historical chic” both domestically and abroad. “There is much to be said for being a Denmark or Sweden, even a Great Britain, France, or Italy,” Andrew Hacker suggested in 1971. More than thirty-five years later, the same refrain can be heard from author Parag Khanna, who envisions a “shrunken” America lucky to eke out a meager existence between a “triumphant China” and a “retooled Europe.” America, notes Morris Berman, another critic, is simply “running on empty.”

Such assessments consistently underestimate the sources of what the Japanese scholar Fuji Kamiya has described as America’s unique sokojikara, or reserve power. The peculiar demographic, economic, and cultural strengths of this country, Kamiya believes, create a vastly different reality from that of its major competitors.

This fact was largely ignored at the outset of the current financial crisis, which many pundits here and abroad blithely expected to accelerate American decline as other countries adapted more easily to hard times. Yet Japan’s rate of decline in GNP was three times that of the United States, while Germany and Britain contracted by twice as much. Moreover, the current recession has sparked far more overt social unrest in Europe, China, and Russia than in the United States.

America’s unique strengths will not fade quickly, and it’s difficult to see how an aging Europe, with its own ethnic problems, out-migration of skilled workers, weak military, and weaker technological base, could challenge our preeminent position. India and China are more likely long-term competitors, but both suffer from a legacy of poverty and underdevelopment that will take decades, if not generations, to overcome.

In India’s case, per capita income in 2005 ranked just slightly above that of sub-Saharan Africa; it endures chronic ethnic and religious conflict, as well as an ongoing and lethal struggle with Pakistan. Meanwhile China, like America’s former great rival, Russia, lacks the basic environmental protections, reliable legal structures, favorable demographics, and social resiliency of the United States. Inequality, a growing issue in most countries, including America, has been rising even more quickly in theoretically egalitarian China, which could further undermine its long-term social stability. China’s tendency to ascribe superiority to the Han race will also limit its ability to project itself onto a world that will remain predominately non-Chinese.

Perhaps the key distinguishing characteristics of the once and future American exceptionalism derive from the fact that in the coming decades America’s population will grow dramatically, adding at least 100 million people by 2050. This contrasts with more rapidly aging basic rivals in Europe and the Far East, including China....

Much more HERE

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Theodore Roosevelt, Big-Government Man

Theodore Roosevelt has been known as “the Good Roosevelt,” “the Republican Roosevelt,” and “the conservative Roosevelt,” as distinguished from his fifth cousin Franklin, who’s credited with ushering in modern American big government.

Yet promoters of big government have long recognized TR as one of their own.

Biographer Frank Freidel wrote that “While at Groton [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] first fell under the spell of his remote cousin Theodore Roosevelt. . . . Theodore Roosevelt believed in using to the utmost the constitutional power of the president. . . . This strong use of government was for the most part appealing to Franklin.” During the Great Depression, FDR promoted “a program emphasizing national planning in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt.” Freidel noted that “in words reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt, FDR declared ‘the duty rests upon the Government to restrict incomes by very high taxes.’”

Historian Eric F. Goldman said that Lyndon Johnson, who simultaneously launched huge domestic entitlement spending programs and escalated the undeclared Vietnam War, admired “the hyperactive White House of Theodore Roosevelt.” LBJ reportedly remarked, “Whenever I pictured Teddy Roosevelt, I saw him running or riding, always moving, his fists clenched, his eyes glaring, speaking out.”

Richard M. Nixon, who dramatically expanded federal regulation of the economy, liked Theodore Roosevelt “because of his great dynamic drive and ability to mobilize a young country.”

In recent years, influential Republicans like Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, and John McCain have gushed with admiration for TR.

For starters, TR reinterpreted the Constitution to permit a vast expansion of executive power. “Congress, he felt, must obey the president,” noted biographer Henry Pringle. Roosevelt wanted the Supreme Court to obey him too. TR ushered in the practice of ruling by executive order, bypassing the congressional process. From Lincoln to TR’s predecessor William McKinley, there were 158 executive orders. TR, during his seven years in office, issued 1,007. He ranks third, behind fellow “progressives” Woodrow Wilson (1,791) and Franklin Roosevelt (3,723) in that category.

Much more HERE. See also here

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ELSEWHERE

CNN Poll: Majority says government a threat to citizens' rights: "A majority of Americans think the federal government poses a threat to rights of Americans, according to a new national poll. Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal government's become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Forty-four percent of those polled disagree. The survey indicates a partisan divide on the question: only 37 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Independents and nearly 7 in 10 Republicans say the federal government poses a threat to the rights of Americans. According to CNN poll numbers released Sunday, Americans overwhelmingly think that the U.S. government is broken - though the public overwhelmingly holds out hope that what's broken can be fixed.

The American Bar Association exposes its liberal bias once again: "I wrote here about Goodwin Liu, the leftist law professor nominated by President Obama for a spot on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Among my observations was that Liu has only practiced law in earnest for two or three years. The rest of his time since graduating from law school has been spent as a law clerk or a law professor. Moreover, Liu appears to have no trial experience. Nor, as far as I can tell, has he ever argued a case before a court of appeal... Yet the ABA has rated Liu "highly qualified."

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 nasty memory of bigoted Leftism among American academics

My career as a social science researcher was not a difficult one. As a conservative, I had to write at a much higher standard than if I had been a common or garden variety Leftist but I could do that so 200+ of my articles got published in the academic journals.

One episode from the '90s, however, I still remember with displeasure. In the early '90s the editor of Sociology & Social Research was David Heer -- a sociologist who was basically interested in the facts of the matter rather than pushing an ideological wheelbarrow. He was located then and still seems to be at USC.

And I did at one stage submit a paper to him for publication in S. & S.R. which he accepted for publication. He seems however to have been too mild for the frantic Leftists in USC sociology and got pushed out of the journal editorship shortly thereafter.

And his successor at the journal -- Marcus Felson -- did something almost unheard of in academe: He "unaccepted" my paper. It was apparently too conservative for him, though he gave some other quite specious reason for rejecting it. He seemed to be a young man in a hurry so I appealed the matter to his Department Head at the time: Paul Bohannan. Bohannan was unmoved. So I appealed to the university President. But he was unmoved too.

The paper eventually appeared in another journal so Heer was vindicated and Felson was shown up as the nasty piece of work that he is. Without blowing the dust off some very old files (which makes me sneeze) I cannot remember for certain which paper it was but I am pretty sure that it is this one. I submitted the paper to S. & S.R. because it dealt with a matter originally raised in that journal.

I did write a scornful letter to Bohannan when the paper finally appeared in print. Felson I regarded as beneath contempt.

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Low IQ among criminals

This study is from Australia but the same is generally true worldwide

ALMOST half the young people in NSW juvenile detention centres have an intellectual or borderline intellectual disability, a new study shows, and half have parents who have been in jail. "The kids in custody are some of the most disadvantaged and marginalised people in NSW," Peter Muir, the chief executive of the Department of Juvenile Justice, said yesterday.

The Young People in Custody Health Survey shows 28 per cent of the girls in detention centres have been admitted to a mental hospital and 43 per cent have harmed themselves at some time in their lives. More than 65 per cent of the young people have regularly used drugs in the year before coming into custody and almost all have used alcohol regularly. The numbers in juvenile detention increased by 52 per cent between 2004-5 and 2008-9, from a daily average of 280 to 427.

The Minister for Juvenile Justice, Graham West, commissioned the first review of the system in 17 years.

Mr Muir told a juvenile justice conference this week that the public wanted something done about juvenile crime but understanding who the offenders were could lead to a better outcome. "There are other ways to meet community concerns that don't involve custody," he told the Herald.

Rigorous testing found 13.5 per cent had an IQ of less than 70, which signifies an intellectual disability. A further 32 per cent had an IQ between 70 and 79, considered borderline. Only 9 per cent of the general population scores under 79. Mr Muir said intellectual disability might have contributed to the increased numbers of juveniles detained for bail breaches.

SOURCE

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A Leftist rot in the body politic

Leftists believe only in themselves -- and it shows. Too bad about anybody else

American politics, particularly in the big-government, ever-more-insolvent blue states, are increasingly driven by scandal. We are witnessing a meltdown of the political class in states where the growth of government has, even in weakened economies, offered bountiful opportunities for living well off the public purse. Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut have all had to force corrupt governors from office in recent years. But now New York is sprinting ahead in the scandal sweepstakes. If extraordinary front-page editorials in today's New York Daily News and New York Post calling for the resignation of David Paterson are any measure, the Empire State is headed for its third governor in three years.

That isn't to say that Illinois, New Jersey, and Connecticut haven't put up a good fight. A recent string of scandals helped defeat New Jersey governor John Corzine at the polls and forced Connecticut senator Chris Dodd to drop his reelection bid. In Illinois, Barack Obama's path to the presidency was paved by two scandals against would-be opponents that opened the door to the Senate for him. The governor whom Obama twice supported for office, Rod Blagojevich, has been impeached, in part for trying to sell Obama's Senate seat, while the man who bought the seat, Roland Burris, has been forced to step aside come November. Alexi Giannoulias--Obama's buddy, heir to the Broadway Bank, and the Democratic nominee for the Obama-Burris seat--is involved in his own troubles. His family's once-thriving bank made loans to the mob-associated Michael "Jaws" Giorango, who was convicted of running gambling and prostitution operations, and to Tony Rezko, a fixer with close ties to both Obama and Blagojevich. It seems unfair not to give Scott Lee Cohen, briefly this year's nominee for Illinois lieutenant governor, a passing mention. Cohen, a pawnbroker who self-financed his runaway victory despite being unable to pay child support to his ex-wife, dropped out of the race after accusations came to light that he had held a knife to the throat of one of his girlfriends, a prostitute.

And then there's Obama's hometown of Chicago, where he racked up an enormous majority in the Democratic Party presidential primary that was crucial to his early lead over Hillary Clinton in the popular vote count. A new study from the Better Government Association notes that in the past 36 years, "31 sitting or former Chicago aldermen have been convicted of corruption or other crimes."

Illinois and New Jersey are probably the only two states where corruption has burrowed so deeply as to involve the public medical schools. In Illinois, until recently, you could buy admission to the state's medical school. In New Jersey, thanks to the patronage of Senator Robert Menendez of Hudson County--a man elected to the U.S. Senate despite being caught on tape engaging in a shakedown--until last year you could buy the presidency of the University of Medicine and Dentistry. Shocking? Not when you remember why former New Jersey senator Robert "the Torch" Torricelli was forced to drop out of his 2002 campaign for reelection: he had accepted gifts from David Chang, a lobbyist of sorts for nuclear North Korea. New Jersey law clearly states that in the final 51 days of a campaign, a candidate, no matter how badly tarnished, can't be replaced by a substitute. Never mind: Torricelli's fellow Democrats on the New Jersey Supreme Court shredded the law and allowed him to be re! placed by fellow Democrat Frank Lautenberg, a former U.S. senator who went on to win the election. Lautenberg, whose accomplishments as senator are less than noteworthy, was one of the 60 votes that allowed President Obama to push his health-care proposals.

But for all this, New York doesn't need to take a backseat to Illinois and New Jersey. In the past few years, Joe Bruno, the Republican temporary president of the New York State Senate, and Democrat Alan Hevesi, the New York State comptroller, have been forced to step down and then convicted of taking bribes. Meanwhile, the inventory of state legislators and New York City Council members caught up in shenanigans is too long to list, though Hiram Monserrate is worthy of special mention. Monserrate, who has enjoyed close ties with the Scientologists, helped paralyze the State Senate for two months this past summer while he switched back and forth between the parties, looking to buy himself the best possible deal. Earlier, he had assaulted a lady friend with a piece of broken glass. When that case finally came before the bar of justice, Monserrate, an embarrassment even in Albany, was rebuked by the courts and expelled from the Senate.

Now, Charlie Rangel--New York State's ranking member in the U.S. Congress and the chair of the House's powerful, tax-writing Committee on Ways and Means--has been given a slap on the wrist by his fellow Democrats on the House Ethics Committee for taking lobbyist money for a junket to the Caribbean. Rangel, who is far better at raising other people's taxes than at paying his own, also recently discovered that his taxable net worth was roughly $1.5 million more than he had previously stated.

But when all is said and done, top billing in this debauched political floor show goes to the governorship of New York. Two years ago, Eliot Spitzer, anointed by The New Republic as a liberal messiah--this was in the pre-Obama days--had a brief rocky stretch as governor after he was caught using the state police to try to gather incriminating evidence about political rival Joe Bruno. But it was his patronage of a brothel that brought down this self-proclaimed supporter of women's rights.

The state police and the abuse of women play a similarly prominent role in the current scandal involving Spitzer's successor, David Paterson. One of Paterson's first acts after his predecessor's fall from grace was to admit his own extramarital affairs, including with staff members, and past drug use. He also demanded that Attorney General Andrew Cuomo investigate the state police, claiming that it had a special unit to collect information on public figures. Cuomo's investigation, released last year, unearthed no such unit, but it did find political interference by state police higher-ups, including an attempt to lessen the impact of a domestic-violence report involving a Republican congressman.

Now, in the middle of a budget crisis, Paterson has been caught in a new disgrace in which, like Spitzer, he's apparently put the state police to personal use. One of his closest aides, David Johnson, had by all accounts physically intimidated a girlfriend who went to court to receive an order of protection against him. But before she was to testify in court, she was visited by state police superintendent Harry Corbitt. She never testified. Key political allies have now called on Paterson to end his reelection campaign. Even more ominously, some political figures, including Congresswoman Nita Lowey, are now saying publicly what they've been discussing privately: that it's time for the inept Paterson, who's been largely ignored by the state's spendthrift legislature, to step down from office. A resignation by the floundering Paterson would turn the governorship over to his unelected lieutenant governor, Richard Ravitch, who no longer seems to be in regular contact with Paterson.

Ravitch owes his office to a dubious ruling by New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals. It was a decision, like that in the Torricelli case, that directly contradicted the state's constitution, which made no provision for appointing a lieutenant governor should the post become vacant. The constitution does provide that in such a case, the president of the State Senate "shall perform all the duties of the lieutenant governor." But as they eyed the chaos in the Senate--where Joe Bruno had been forced to resign as president, and where a collection of parochial pols, including the ineffable Monserrate, were running the show--the majority of the justices decided that the letter of the law needed to be ignored. (This may turn out for the best. As temporary president of the Senate, Democratic Majority Leader Malcolm Smith would have been next in the line of succession to the governorship, if not for the court's legitimating Ravitch's appointment. If Smith had become gover! nor, he too would have been mired in scandal, having played a key role in the rigged bidding process that handed a lucrative state contract to run casinos to a group of which he was a partner.)

Paterson's appointment of Ravitch as lieutenant governor may be recorded as his best decision. The widely respected 75-year-old Ravitch, who played a key role in New York City's 1975 fiscal crisis, has no political ambitions, and he has the intelligence and integrity, despite a predilection for new taxes, to stabilize the ship of state for the time being. In fact, it is the presence of Ravitch in the lieutenant governorship that makes it possible to call for Paterson's immediate resignation.

In both New York and Illinois, there is a close connection between fiscal irresponsibility and political malfeasance. Both states are in marked decline; both are essentially one-party polities run by Democrats (although the Republicans, when in office, have engaged in their fair share of corruption). In both cases, a largely unaccountable political class left unchecked by a decreasingly engaged electorate has, buffered by the rhetoric of compassion, gone into business for itself. Big government may not be good for the economy or for the citizens, but it been very good for a political class that has thrived on state spending despite the growing risk of getting hauled off to the hoosegow. In New York and Illinois, oversized government seems immune to reform; scandals have led only to new scandals.

In the absence of functioning political and fiscal systems, excessive spending in New York and Illinois, like that in famously corrupt Greece and Spain, can probably be restrained only by the bond market. But by the time that happens, we can expect each of these semi-sovereign entities to be in for a long stretch of hard times.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

I see that Time magazine has picked up on the study that I critiqued yesterday: "Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent". The "Time" article is surprisingly good and even points to evidence contradicting the headline claim. A small point, though: The author says that Leftists are more open to experience but the reference he gives for that shows nothing of the sort. The claim is however an old favourite of Leftist psychologists. My last look at the academic literature on the question is here. I conclude that, as psychologists usually define it, there is no political polarization on openness to experience. Leftists are however sensation-seekers. That might seem like a fine distinction but it is not if you look at how psychologists use the various terms concerned. The "openness to experience" claim is a way of saying that conservatives are rigid and narrow-minded whereas the sensation-seeking finding implies that Leftists like novelty for the sake of novelty.

Turnaround at British car company -- under Indian ownership: "After years in the red, Jaguar Land Rover has achieved a $60 million profit for the final quarter of 2009. The company, now Britain’s largest car industry employer, said that its return to the black had come amid a recovering market in luxury cars, backed by its own well-received new models. An amalgam of two of Britain’s most famous motoring marques, the company, which employs a staff of 14,500, was bought by India’s Tata Motors from Ford, of America, for $2.3 billion in the summer of 2008. Tata said that volumes in the last three months of 2009 had increased by 28 per cent compared with the period between July and September, big rises being recorded in North America, Europe and China. Land Rover was up 34 per cent after positive customer reaction to new vehicles, while the XF helped Jaguar to rise by 11.5 per cent. Despite latest sales data that shows Land Rover’s global sales more than tripled in January from the same month last year to 13,295 and that Jaguar sales more than doubled to 2,974 over the same period, there is more cost-cutting to come."

California is a greater risk than Greece: "Jamie Dimon, chairman of JP Morgan Chase, has warned American investors should be more worried about the risk of default of the state of California than of Greece's current debt woes. Mr Dimon told investors at the Wall Street bank's annual meeting that "there could be contagion" if a state the size of California, the biggest of the United States, had problems making debt repayments. "Greece itself would not be an issue for this company, nor would any other country," said Mr Dimon. "We don't really foresee the European Union coming apart." The senior banker said that JP Morgan Chase and other US rivals are largely immune from the European debt crisis, as the risks have largely been hedged. California however poses more of a risk, given the state's $20bn budget deficit, which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is desperately trying to reduce. Earlier this week, the state's legislature passed bills that will cut the deficit by $2.8bn through budget cuts and other measures. However the former Hollywood film star turned politician is looking for $8.9bn of cuts over the next 16 months, and is also hoping for as much as $7bn of handouts from the federal government."

Don’t Count on Printing Press, Bernanke Warns Congress: "With uncharacteristic bluntness, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke warned Congress on Wednesday that the United States could soon face a debt crisis like the one in Greece, and declared that the central bank will not help legislators by printing money to pay for the ballooning federal debt. Recent events in Europe, where Greece and other nations with large, unsustainable deficits like the United States are having increasing trouble selling their debt to investors, show that the U.S. is vulnerable to a sudden reversal of fortunes that would force taxpayers to pay higher interest rates on the debt, Mr. Bernanke said. "It's not something that is 10 years away. It affects the markets currently," he told the House Financial Services Committee. "It is possible that bond markets will become worried about the sustainability [of yearly deficits over $1 trillion], and we may find ourselves facing higher interest rates even today."

Another Democratic incumbent trailing in the polls: "Add New Mexico to the list of states (Arkansas, Indiana, Massachusetts, North Dakota) where polling has shown Democratic incumbents behind Republican challengers. The Democratic polling firm PPP shows New Mexico 2nd district Democrat Harry Teague trailing Republican Steve Pearce by a 43%-41% margin. That’s insignificant statistically but, in my view, significant politically, because incumbents usually do not trail challengers and can usually be expected to top 50% in polling; after all, every House member has won an election less than two years before the poll was taken. Teague carried the 2nd district 56%-44% 15 months ago. There’s a mitigating factor here: Pearce was the incumbent in this district from 2002 to 2008, and in the Democratic year of 2006 won reelection by a 59%-40% margin against a low-spending Democrat. In 2008 he ran for the Senate and lost 61%-39% to Democrat Tom Udall, and in that contest failed to carry the 2nd district.

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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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