Progressive Cynicism

Some wise words from philosopher Keith Burgess Jackson

I have noticed a disturbing pattern among progressives, both in and out of academia. Instead of addressing the reasoning of those with whom they disagree, they impute bad motives to the reasoners. This is nothing less than the ad hominem fallacy, which every professor of philosophy warns against in Critical Thinking. Read Ronald Dworkin's reply to Floyd Abrams. He says that the reasoning of the majority in Citizens United is "so poor as to suggest some motive other than a desire to reach the right legal result." He then speculates as to the motive. How convenient!

Does Dworkin not realize that this contempt for reason goes both ways? Those who disagree with Dworkin can impute bad motives to him, such as envy of the prosperous. Isn't philosophy about arguments rather than persons? Why do progressives so readily shift from the former to the latter? Have they lost the ability to analyze, criticize, and argue? Is everything now personal?

I fear for the future of philosophy. It is disintegrating into politics. As for why, look no further than the fact that most philosophers are progressives. They are progressives first and philosophers second. Socrates would roll over in his grave.

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The Left Squashes Life's Little Pleasures

Because they are such miseries thermselves

by Dennis Prager

Reading the onslaught of angry denunciations of Burger King by mental health organizations and mainstream media reporters this past week reminded me of a characteristic of the Left not often commented on: a certain joylessness, even an antipathy to the little joys that contribute more than almost anything else to most people's ability to endure the difficulties of life.

These characteristics further reinforce the view that Leftism functions as a (secular) religion. Like medieval Christians who wore hair shirts and Puritans who thought dancing was sacrilegious, the Left, consciously or not, is uncomfortable with many of the joys -- with notable exceptions such as sex and drugs -- that people experience.

Needless to say, the Left always has noble explanations -- usually, the protection of people's emotions and health -- for opposing and even banning many joys of life. But the end result is fewer of these little joys that mean a great deal to people.

Burger King's ad was innocuous and innocent. It featured the company's royal mascot running through a building, knocking a person over and crashing through a glass window to deliver the new Burger King Steakhouse XT burger. Called "crazy" by those present, he was finally tackled by men in white coats. "The king's insane," the ad noted, for "offering so much beef for $3.99."

This has triggered a storm of criticism from activists (a term which, unless otherwise specified, means liberal or left).

Michael Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, called the ad "blatantly offensive ... I was stunned. Absolutely stunned and appalled," he said. David Shern, president and chief executive of Mental Health America in Alexandria, Va., echoed this assessment. And reporters from the Associated Press to the Washington Post all agreed.

If this were isolated, it would be worth mentioning only in the context of wondering why people who run mental health -- and most other activist -- organizations seem to have little common sense. They should listen to William Gardner of Los Angeles, who wrote to me:

"I am a father of a 24 year old son with mental health issue. I am particularly tuned to protecting my son's self-image. My son and I have both seen the Burger King Ad that you have referred to. It did not occur to either of us that the Burger King Ad was offensive in any way. Why would I raise my son to be hyper-sensitive about his disability? My objective as a parent is to strengthen him. Making him hyper-sensitive would have the opposite effect."

But the Left has problems with much else as well: smoking (including cigars and pipes); virtually all kids games that can make a kid feel at all bad or get hurt; wood-burning fireplaces; cars; most jokes or any flirting in the workplace; incandescent light bulbs; cool homes in summer; and more.

Smoking

One of life's great little pleasures is tobacco. Just watch old war reportage to see the serenity and joy a cigarette brought to a wounded soldier. Though I do not smoke cigarettes, I have been smoking cigars and pipes since I was in college (my father still smokes cigars daily at age 91), and it would be difficult to overstate how much I enjoy both.

No one opposes educating the public about the dangers of cigarette smoking. Cigarette smoking shortens the lives of up to a third of smokers, often in terrible ways, and that is what public health organizations should be saying. But the battle against smoking and tobacco has become a religious crusade for anti-smoking zealots, who are almost invariably on the Left. If the Left hated Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro as much as it hates "Big Tobacco," the world would be a better place.

But because the Left hates the fact that people smoke (tobacco, not marijuana, which the Left defends) it uses totalitarian (I use that term with no exaggeration) tactics to eliminate it. Just as the Soviets removed Trotsky from old photos, anti-smoking zealots have forced the removal of cigarettes from old photos -- from photos of FDR, from the famous Beatles photo -- and from movies whenever possible. Torture and murder are ubiquitous in films, but smoking is all but banned -- even cigars are now banned from James Bond films.

Smoking has been banned in entire cities, outdoors as well as in. In Pasadena, Calif., one cannot even smoke in a cigar store. That the Left has contempt for Prohibition reveals a lack of self-awareness that is quite remarkable.

Kids Games such as Tag, Dodgeball, Soccer, Touch Football, Monkey Bars

Virtually every game I played as a child during school recess is now banned because organizations such as the National Program for Playground Safety deem games in which kids are "running into each other" as too dangerous. Someone might get hurt.

Until a few years ago, just about every American boy, and many girls, played dodgeball. No more. This joy, too, has been eliminated from American life. "We consider it inappropriate to use children as human targets," said Mary Marks, physical education supervisor for Fairfax County, Va. And it may hurt the feelings of kids who are eliminated. For the same reason -- potential hurt feelings of those eliminated -- musical chairs is no longer played in some schools.

Some might argue that these bans are not because of Leftism but because of fear of lawsuits. But in light of how leftwing the trial bar is, that only reinforces my argument.

Pinups

For men working in, let us say, a car repair shop, there is not much by way of excitement or visual beauty. So the typical repair shop or factory had its pinup calendar -- a calendar featuring a photo of a beautiful woman in a sexy pose, usually clad in no more than a bikini, sometimes less. The Left, in another totalitarian move, has banned pinups. The reasons: Sexism and possible Hostile Environment. How can a woman possibly work or bring her car into a repair shop where there is a picture of a scantily clad woman? The same people who clamor for a woman's right to walk in public with no top on (because men are allowed to) have banned photos of women with no top on.

Flirting at Work

A joy in life since the advent of men and women has been men flirting with or "chatting up" women. No more. Virtually anything related to a male reaction to a fellow employee who is female can be grounds for his losing his job and worse. What began as a campaign against bosses trading professional advances for sexual favors has degenerated into the elimination of essentially all the fun -- and, yes, potential emotional hurt -- of man-woman dialogue. At work, a man never knows what comment to what woman will trigger his being sent, a la Communist regimes, to a "re-education" program, being fined, having charges leveled against him, being humiliated, having a permanent mark on his employment record, and, of course, losing his job.

There is no question that some men went too far in their sexually charged comments to women. But as a rule, we have wildly overreacted. Women are not wimps. But the Left has inculcated a sense of victimhood into large numbers of women and thereby rendered them weak -- just as it has, in ways too numerous to mention, emasculated men. I deplore crude comments. But in the America I grew up, it was legal to speak crudely, and either decent men would shut the crude man up or women would give the man a well-earned smack across the face.

Today, any hint at the sexual tension that naturally and joyfully exists between the two sexes has been banned. In the attempt to eliminate all pain caused by potentially inappropriate comments, the Left has done what it tries to do about all pain -- ban actions that may lead to it. As a result, gone are the joys of the man-woman repartee in the workplace.

Cars

For most Americans, the car is not only a source of much pleasure, it is also rightly identified with individual liberty. But here, too, to the extent the Left is able to, it will tell you what kind of car you can drive and, if possible, get you out of your car and into mass transit.

The Home

To the Left, your home is not your castle; it is another place of too many joys that the Left would like to ban.

One joy I particularly identify with is the wood-burning fireplace. In California, activists on the Left, aka environmentalists, have banned them from being built in all new homes. Too many harmful emissions. Meanwhile, at the other end of the temperature spectrum, activists wish to determine how low you can set your air conditioner, lest you use more energy than the Left believes you should.

Do you like your present light bulbs? The Left has banned them in favor of CFLs that contain mercury. These new bulbs give a fair number of people headaches, emit less pleasant light, are initially much more expensive and, if broken, necessitate opening windows even in winter, and people and pets must leave the area. The EPA has issued a 16-point procedure to follow if a CFL bulbs breaks.

Indeed, if the Left had its way, the house would eventually become an anachronism as everyone gradually moves into space-saving, less polluting, less energy-wasting apartments.

Every poll has concluded that liberals are less happy than conservatives. There are many reasons for this, and given the importance of little joys to happiness, the Left's religious-like opposition to many of them is surely one of those reasons. The problem for the rest of us, however, is that, like most unhappy people, many folks on the Left don't like seeing anyone happier than they are.

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Good Riddance!

by Thomas Sowell

When Supreme Court Justices retire, there is usually some pious talk about their "service," especially when it has been a long "service." But the careers of all too many of these retiring jurists, including currently retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, have been an enormous disservice to this country.

Justice Stevens was on the High Court for 35 years-- more's the pity, or the disgrace. Justice Stevens voted to sustain racial quotas, created "rights" out of thin air for terrorists, and took away American citizens' rights to their own homes in the infamous "Kelo" decision of 2005.

The Constitution of the United States says that the government must pay "just compensation" for seizing a citizen's private property for "public use." In other words, if the government has to build a reservoir or bridge, and your property is in the way, they can take that property, provided that they pay you its value.

What has happened over the years, however, is that judges have eroded this protection and expanded the government's power-- as they have in other issues. This trend reached its logical extreme in the Supreme Court case of Kelo v. City of New London. This case involved local government officials seizing homes and businesses-- not for "public use" as the Constitution specified, but to turn this private property over to other private parties, to build more upscale facilities that would bring in more tax revenues.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the Supreme Court opinion that expanded the Constitution's authorization of seizing private property for "public use" to seizing private property for a "public purpose." And who would define what a "public purpose" is? Basically, those who were doing the seizing. As Justice Stevens put it, the government authorities' assessment of a proper "public purpose" was entitled to "great respect" by the courts.

Let's go back to square one. Just who was this provision of the Constitution supposed to restrict? Answer: government officials. And to whom would Justice Stevens defer: government officials. Why would those who wrote the Constitution waste good ink putting that protection in there, if not to protect citizens from the very government officials to whom Justice Stevens deferred?

John Paul Stevens is a classic example of what has been wrong with too many Republicans' appointments to the Supreme Court. The biggest argument in favor of nominating him was that he could be confirmed by the Senate without a fight.

Democratic presidents appoint judges who will push their political agenda from the federal bench, even if that requires stretching and twisting the Constitution to reach their goals.

Republicans too often appoint judges whose confirmation will not require a big fight with the Democrats. You can always avoid a fight by surrendering, and a whole wing of the Republican party has long ago mastered the art of preemptive surrender.

The net result has been a whole string of Republican Justices of the Supreme Court carrying out the Democrats' agenda, in disregard of the Constitution. John Paul Stevens has been just one.

There may have been some excuse for President Ford's picking such a man, in order to avoid a fight, at a time when he was an unelected President who came into office in the wake of Richard Nixon's resignation in disgrace after Watergate, creating lasting damage to the public's support of the Republicans.

But there was no such excuse for the elder President Bush to appoint David Souter, much less for President Eisenhower, with back-to-back landslide victories at the polls, to inflict William J. Brennan on the country.

In light of these justices' records, and in view of how long justices remain on the court, nominating such people was close to criminal negligence.

If and when the Republicans return to power in Washington, we can only hope that they remember what got them suddenly and unceremoniously dumped out of power the last time. Basically, it was running as Republicans and then governing as if they were Democrats, running up big deficits, with lots of earmarks and interfering with the market.

But their most lasting damage to the country has been putting people like John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court.

SOURCE

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Western Man and Liberalism

Liberals know that they are worms and hate others because of it. They reject standards and ideals because then they will have no standards and ideals to live up to

Over the years, political scientists and sociologists have attempted to figure out what causes a person to adhere to liberal beliefs. James Burnham, a communist theoretician who eventually became a right-winger, argued that “liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide” and observed that “once this initial and final sentence is understood, everything about liberalism—the beliefs, emotions and values associated with it, the nature of its enchantment, its practical record, its future—falls into place.”

Dr. Michael Savage has suggested that liberalism is a mental disorder, whereas others have opined that liberalism is nothing more than a secular religious movement that naturally occurs at the twilight of the life of a civilization.

I believe all these descriptions are accurate of liberalism, but there is a reason why a person is a liberal: they are pathetic and are unable to come to terms with their pathetic nature other than to join a political movement that includes other pathetic individuals in order to shove their pathetic ideals down the throats of normal people. When one looks at the tenets of liberalism—craving egalitarianism, adherence to moral relativism, acceptance of perversion, promotion of wealth redistribution, opposition to the natural law right of self defense, and hatred of nationalism—one can only conclude that this assessment is correct.

When discussing gun rights, liberals—who have a peculiar phobia of weapons—ridiculously think that guns are the cause of problems in society and that they should be banned. Liberals love the weapon bans that have existed in places such as Washington, D.C. and Chicago, and even though women are raped and older people are robbed because they cannot defend themselves from thugs, liberals applaud their sick and twisted accomplishment of depriving people of their natural law right to defend themselves from harm.

The idea of a person shooting dead their aggressor sickens the liberal; the liberal would much rather have a normal person be made a victim than to permit a guttersnipe from being killed. The liberal love for villains and hatred for law-abiding citizens is irrational and can only be explained as an attempt by liberals to force their cowardice upon the rest of the population.

The promotion by liberals of moral relativism—a rejection of truth and order in the Cosmos—is used to justify their pathetic, deviant behavior. There is not a pervert that walks on two legs that liberals do not adore, just as there is no degenerate activity liberals will condemn. Homosexuals without clothing marching down the street in a “gay pride” parade? “Go for it!” they say. A doctor performing a partial-birth abortion in which the baby is butchered before it comes out? “Sounds good to me!” the liberal says.

Hard drugs? “Definitely!” they proclaim. Make prostitution legal? “Most certainly!” the liberals rejoice. Normal people are revolted—as they should be—by the behavior and beliefs of liberals, whereas liberals embrace the pathetic behavior of others because it is central to their identity: pathetic, worthless beings.

The promotion of egalitarianism—the belief that people are inherently “equal”—and wealth redistribution are the biggest frauds liberals promote, for people are not equal: some are smart, some are stupid, some are strong, some are weak, and so on.

Whereas normal people believe in freedom and think that one should reap what one sows in life, liberals believe that the weak, poor, lazy, and stupid are entitled to a higher standard of living than they have earned through their labor. Liberals believe those who are inferior deserve better, because liberals can relate to the pathetic existence of these people.

Liberals believe that people are too stupid to control their own finances and plan for the long-term, so liberals have created various socialistic scams in which wealth is redistributed from the hard-working individuals to the parasites of society. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Nancy Pelosi’s socialistic health care plan, and food stamps are but a few examples of wealth redistribution in our country.

If a person chooses not to work, then they should be permitted to starve. Why should we feed the mouths of people who have no more intrinsic value to society than tapeworms have to cattle?

Political correctness, which is central to the liberal worldview, is a psychological tool used by liberals to defend backwardness, and it is time normal people call them out for it.

A liberal would consider it “racist” to point out that the Dinka people in Sudan are subhuman for performing oral sex on cows to make them lactate and taking showers in their urine to turn their hair orange (See here), just as they would say that it is “xenophobic” to suggest that Muslims are degenerate for their tendency to marry their first cousins and for worshipping a man-deity who married a six-year-old girl named Aisha.

Liberals believe that no pathetic culture is fair game to disparage, because to do so would make their very own existence a target for criticism.

Liberals are pathetic to the core, and since the West embodies all that which is an affront to their pathetic existence, they hate it. While liberals embrace cowardice and degeneracy, the Men of the West have traditionally opposed it.

Throughout Western history, hordes of foreign invaders have been repelled, tyrants have been overthrown, and Western Man loved freedom and enjoyed the fruits of his labor. In literature and folklore, the Western Hero is epitomized by a sword in his hand and a shield on his arm as he charges forward for victory. There is no room in Western culture for pathetic liberal trolls, and the liberals know it.

A study was recently conducted at Tufts University in which test subjects viewed pictures of College Republicans and College Democrats with whom they were not acquainted, and sixty percent of the time—which is a number too high for mere chance—the test subjects were able to accurately label the models as conservative or liberal.

The researcher then had other test subjects rate the models for qualities of power or warmth, and when the results were corroborated, the people who were viewed as not liberal were viewed as looking “powerful.” We all knew liberals acted like sissies; now we know they look the part, too. (See here)

Personally, I think that it is a miracle that liberalism even took root in Western countries, because historically, Western cultures killed off the offspring of their people who were deemed pathetic. Do you think for one moment that the Spartans permitted pathetic people to exist in their society? The Norse? The Germanic tribes? Where the white liberals come from, I have no idea—there is no evolutionary basis for it whatsoever.

Liberals have outright declared war on our people, our heritage, our culture, and everything that is good in the Cosmos, and it is long past due for normal people to fight back. While I was a student at Michigan State University, I confronted liberalism at every opportunity that presented itself through organized debates, panel discussions, and the hosting of conservative speakers, and as the pathetic liberals rallied for diversity, multiculturalism, degeneracy, or socialism, I could be found in close proximity to them with a megaphone—which the campus police often threatened to take from me—and a placard in my hands that read “Smash Left-Wing Scum!”

If we want to save our civilization, we must fight their ideology, we must combat their counter-cultural crusade, and we must expose them for who they are: pathetic worms who have no place in Western civilization.

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Liberal Wrongheadness on Greece

In his column yesterday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman demonstrates how wrong-headed liberal thinking on economics can be.

Pointing to the fiscal problems being experienced by Greece, Krugman correctly points to the core of the problem: excessive spending and borrowing by the Greek government. Although he doesn’t point out that all that spending and debt is to pay for the ever-growing expenditures of Greece’s welfare state, at least he recognizes that a government can spend and borrow too much. Indeed, he even recognizes that the situation can become so dire that investors don’t want to invest anymore in a government’s bonds because they fear a default, which is precisely what is now happening in Greece.

But then Krugman goes awry, finding another culprit to blame for Greece’s debacle: deflation or even “excessively low inflation.”

What he’s alluding to is that because Greece doesn’t have control over its money supply, the Greek government cannot do what the U.S. government and other governments do to pay off excessive debt — simply print the money and paying off creditors in debased dollars.

Krugman says that one possible solution to Greece’s problems is to slash spending and raise taxes. But of course slashing spending would involve major reductions in welfare benefits for the Greek citizenry, who are, by the way, protesting against any reductions in their dole. They take the same position as American dole-recipients: that they have a right to their dole, come hell or high water, even if the government doesn’t have the money to continue paying them their dole. As Krugman observes, raising taxes will put more businesses out of business, raising unemployment and thereby aggravating the overall problem.

Krugman suggests that another possible solution is to have other European countries guarantee Greece’s bonds. But as he suggests, German taxpayers are not excited about having their money taken from them so that Greek taxpayers can continue receiving their “free” welfare-state dole.

So, the obvious solution to his quandary, one that the U.S. government’s Federal Reserve has long used, is simply to crank up the printing presses and pay off all that debt in depreciated, debased currency.

But there’s one big problem, one that Krugman deeply laments: Since Greece is part of the Euro zone, it doesn’t have the power to crank up the printing presses without the approval of the other EU countries, which are not likely to want to debase the Euro for the sake of saving the welfare-state dole for Greek citizens.

That leaves Greece with the option of withdrawing from the Euro zone and resorting to its own monetary system. But as Krugman points out, that might not be successful given that would likely be a rush of people to get their money out of the banks, along with a refusal by investors to buy bonds issued in the new currency.

Needless to say, Krugman deeply laments the inability of the Greek government to inflate itself out of the crisis. Never mind that paying off creditors in debased currency constitutes an intentional default. That doesn’t seem to bother Krugman one whit. All that matters, obviously, is that the Greek welfare state be saved from collapse.

Unfortunately, by not surprisingly, Krugman draws the wrong lesson for America from this Greek tragedy. He says that while the U.S. government needs to be “fiscally responsible,” it should also “steer clear of deflation, or even excessively low inflation.”

In the final analysis, Krugman gets it wrong. What has collapsed in Greece is the welfare state, and hanging onto this anchor is what is sending Greece to the bottom of the ocean.

Americans need to take what has happened in Greece as a warning: Get off the dole-road before it’s too late.

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The tax system is dangerously unbalanced

According to the Tax Policy Center, for the year 2009, 47 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax. Obviously, many of them pay other kinds of taxes.

State tax, property tax, cigarette tax. But at a time of massive increases in federal spending, half the country is effectively making no contribution to it, whether it's national defense or vital stimulus funding to pump monkeys in North Carolina full of cocaine (true, seriously, but don't ask me why). Half a decade back, slightly fewer than 40 percent paid no federal income tax; now it's slightly fewer than 50 percent. By 2012, America could be holding the first federal election in which a majority of the population will be able to vote themselves more government lollipops paid for by the ever-shrinking minority of the population still dumb enough to be net contributors to the federal Treasury. In less than a quarter-millennium, the American Revolution will have evolved from "No taxation without representation" to representation without taxation. We have bigger government, bigger bureaucracy, bigger spending, bigger deficits, bigger debt and yet an ever-smaller proportion of citizens paying for it all.

The top 5 percent of taxpayers contribute 60 percent of revenue. The top 10 percent provide 75 percent. Another two-fifths make up the rest. And half are exempt. This isn't redistribution - a "leveling" to address the "maldistribution" of income, as Sen. Max Baucus, Kleptocristan Democrat, put it the other day. It isn't even "spreading the wealth around," as then-Sen. Barack Obama put it in an unfortunate off-the-prompter moment during the 2008 campaign. Rather, it's an assault on the moral legitimacy of the system. If you accept the principle of a tax on income, it might seem reasonable to exclude the very poor from having to contribute to it. But in no meaningful sense of the term can half the country be considered "poor." ....

And what's to stop this trend? Democracy decays easily into the tyranny of the majority, in which 51 percent of voters can empty the pockets of the other 49 percent. That's why a country on the fast track to a $20 trillion national debt exempts half the population from making even a modest contribution to reducing it. It's also why the remorseless shriveling of the tax rolls is a cancer at the heart of republican citizenship....

We are now not merely disincentivizing economic energy but actively waging war on it. If 51 percent can vote themselves government lollipops from the other 49 percent, soon 60 percent will be shaking down the remaining 40 percent, and then 70 percent will be sticking it to the remaining 30 percent. How low can it go?

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Back to the trees: "Socialism, whether it’s the ’soft tyranny’ of the EuroAmerican management state or the murderously repressive forms taken by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, is all about disindividuation, a steady, relentless erasure of the individual differences among us, everything that makes us who we are. ‘Everybody in, nobody out!’ is the marching mantra of militant collectivized medicine, but it accurately describes all other aspects of collectivism, as well. No alternatives allowed, no choices, no individualism, no individuality, and ultimately, no individuation.”

Up from serfdom: "It is true that the principles of liberty on which our ancestors founded the U.S. government were not applied to everyone, especially slaves; and there were, of course, other exceptions and infringements on freedom, such as tariffs and denying women the right to vote. But should those exceptions and infringements prevent us from appreciating and honoring the fact that our ancestors brought into existence the freest, most prosperous, and most charitable society in history? I don’t think so. I believe that it is impossible to overstate the significance of what our American ancestors accomplished in terms of a free society.”

Decrying the union pension bailout bill: "Some members of Congress seem to like putting taxpayers on the hook for practically unlimited liabilities. The latest Congressional Budget Office forecasts 2020 public debt climbing to 90% of GDP under President Obama’s 2011 Budget. This is not enough for Senator Robert Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat and habitual ally of labor, who now wants Americans to bail out union pension plans underfunded by hundreds of billions of dollars. Following on the healthcare model, it’s all part of a political calculus in which Washington politicians try to buy votes today for the next election with money that Uncle Sam won’t have to spend until afterwards."

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

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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Academics join the tea-party=racism claim

You have to read academic writing carefully. Most people probably would conclude that the following survey is of tea-party members. It is not. It is about attitude to the tea partiers among a rough "sample" of the general public, including 494 whites and 380 blacks -- which shows it was not a random sample. Blacks are only about 12% of the overall population.

What that tells you is anybody's guess. It is more likely to reflect what the media have said about the tea partiers than be the fruit of any actual contact with tea-partiers.

The whole thing is clearly just a feeble attempt to give some patina of academic respectibility to current Democrat propaganda. Being a very experienced survey researcher, I have no doubt that if I looked at the detailed survey protocols I would find much more to laugh at -- but why keep shooting a dead horse?

The tea party movement has gotten much attention in recent months, but aside from decrying big government and excessive spending, who are the supporters and what else do they appear to believe?

A new University of Washington survey found that among whites, southerners are 12 percent more likely to support the tea party than whites in other parts of the U.S., and that conservatives are 28 percent more likely than liberals to support the group.

"The tea party is not just about politics and size of government. The data suggests it may also be about race,"said Christopher Parker, a UW assistant professor of political science who directed the survey. It found that those who are racially resentful, who believe the U.S. government has done too much to support blacks, are 36 percent more likely to support the tea party than those who are not.

Indeed, strong support for the tea party movement results in a 45 percent decline in support for health care reform compared with those who oppose the tea party. "While it's clear that the tea party in one sense is about limited government, it's also clear from the data that people who want limited government don't want certain services for certain kinds of people. Those services include health care,"Parker said.

More HERE

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The Scientific Socialism of Today

A certain kind of mind believes that human beings exist as objects to be experimented upon as society is perfected by the privileged class -- a utopia engineered by elites. There's a reason why Engels called it Scientific Socialism. Thomas Sowell alluded to it when he wrote: "The grand delusion of contemporary liberals is that they have both the right and the ability to move their fellow creatures around like blocks of wood -- and that the end results will be no different than if people had voluntarily chosen the same action."

But Sowell's insight tells only half the story. Allow me to furnish the other half with a little posthumous help from Thomas Edison.

Conventional wisdom credits Edison with inventing the electric light bulb, but conventional wisdom is wrong. It was actually an English physicist, Sir Joseph William Swan, who invented the first working light bulb. But sadly for Sir Joseph, his "working light bulb" did not work very well, burning itself out after only 13.5 hours -- far too short an operating life to be commercially viable. What Edison did was improve Sir Joseph's invention, extending its operating life first to forty hours, then to a hundred, and eventually to fifteen hundred.

This did not happen overnight. It took three years and the testing of "at least three thousand different theories" to develop the first practical incandescent light bulb. When Edison famously described genius as "one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration," he knew what he was talking about.

Three years passed, during which time the public did...what? They continued to use the existing technology -- candles, kerosene lamps, and (for public lighting) arc lamps. And if Edison had failed, if developing a practical incandescent light bulb had proved impossible, surely people would have continued using the old technology until someone came up with something better.

Now imagine a different scenario. Imagine that 21st-century liberals had governed 19th-century America. Would anything have been different? In the words of a certain hot biker chick, "You betcha!" For one thing, candles and kerosene lamps cause pollution (soot), and to liberals, even the most miniscule amount of pollution is intolerable. So it's a safe bet that a liberal in 1878, as today, would already have been on the lookout for an alternate, less polluting source of illumination -- a "green" light, as it were. But then, as now, that would be just step one. Step two would be to force people to use the new stuff by banning the old stuff. This, in fact, is precisely what a Democratic Congress did in 2008, when it banned the incandescent light bulb in favor of the "CFL" (compact fluorescent light bulb).

To be fair, Congress didn't actually ban incandescent light bulbs; they merely set new, higher, and more energy-efficiency standards -- standards so high that no incandescent bulb could possibly meet them.

Perhaps a liberal Congress circa 1878 would have decreed that all candles and kerosene lamps produced after 1891 would be required to emit a flameless light. A bolder Congress might ban candles and kerosene lamps outright. But one way or another, candles and kerosene lamps would be banned.

Needless to say, complaints that the new light bulbs cost much more than candles and kerosene and needed to be replaced after only 13.5 hours of operation would be ignored, as would arguments that the new bulbs' "pollution-preventing" effects might be more than outweighed by the pollution-creating effects of the new power plants needed to generate the electricity to light the bulbs. And anyway, improvements in cost and efficiency would come. In time.

But how to get that time? Edison, of course, had all the time in the world because Edison conducted his experiments with inanimate matter in the world of the physically tangible. But how does one guarantee oneself sufficient time to conduct an unlimited number of experiments on an entire society?

For liberals, the solution is a simple as it is obvious: Eliminate all the alternatives. Entice, if possible, and force, if necessary, the American people to cross the bridge, and then burn it behind them. Cut off all paths of retreat and leave no alternative to the old ways of doing things, even if the old ways were better, and, liberals reason, society will have no choice but to go in one direction: theirs. And they -- we -- will thank liberals for having forced us against our will to go there.

For liberals, it's not enough merely to promote their policy preferences, insufficient to argue the merits of their ideas in the marketplace of ideas, intolerable to allow people to test these ideas against competing ideas. And there is no room to allow people to decide for themselves which ideas have the most merit; to communicate their preferences to their elected representatives in letters, phone calls, town hall meetings, and, ultimately, at the ballot box; to choose, each of us, what we want and allow that same freedom of choice to others. All of this is intolerable. Liberals' ideas are just too important, too "incandescently" brilliant, the need to implement them too urgent.

So if one is a liberal, one must ban drilling for oil now, in as many places as possible (ideally everywhere) before an efficient, economical and practical alternative energy source can be developed. Private companies must be forced, both by law and through the creation of artificial shortages, to produce whatever products and services liberals deem best for us. And finally, Americans must be forced to buy and use them, whether they want them or not, cost and efficiency be damned.

As it is with light bulbs and oil, so it is with health care. Anyone who thinks that ObamaCare won't put a lot of private insurance companies out of business, or perhaps even eliminate private insurance in America entirely -- anyone who doesn't think that the bill the Democrats rammed through both Houses without a single Republican vote was purposely designed to do precisely that -- is either naïve or a liberal, and probably both.

Some call it socialism, some call it fascism, and some call it Chicago politics. I call it what Marx and Engels called it: Scientific Socialism. And our system of government? No, it's not a tyranny: The American people who voted these pols into office retain the power to vote them out. But it's not a democracy, either, when elected representatives ignore and govern diametrically against the will of the people who elected them.

What we have in America today is a new system of government for which a new term must be coined: Scientific Oligarchy, wherein a self-styled enlightened elite arrogate to themselves the right to decide the kind of society in which they would like us to live someday and then experiment on human beings until they can get it right -- however long it takes, however much their unwilling subjects suffer in the process. In this system, this scientific oligarchy, we are neither citizens nor subjects. We are guinea pigs.

Edison never gave up. Liberals won't, either. If we vote them out in November, they'll wait patiently for the day when a future generation foolishly votes them back in. Then they'll pick up where they left off.

Maybe it's time we conservatives did a little bridge-burning of our own.

SOURCE

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The Ongoing Melodrama of Victims and Oppressors

President Obama, in the tradition of progressive Democratic leaders, believes government should ask the more economically fortunate citizens to be responsible for helping the less well off.

But the president seems to fail to acknowledge that there are plenty of actions an individual can take to avoid becoming part of that growing crowd of "less fortunate." Instead, in Obama's world, there exists a simple zero-sum melodrama of victims and oppressors.

If recent poll numbers are correct, many Americans find that life in the real world is a lot more complicated than the near-constant us vs. them rhetoric about bad-guy insurers, surgery-hungry doctors, reckless financiers, greedy bankers, heartless corporations and tight-fisted employers who con and hurt the blameless good guys now in need of Mr. Obama's all-knowing benevolent government help.

Surely life is too complex to be such a fairy-book morality tale.

Take finance. Of course, we are all still furious at the speculators on Wall Street for the September 2008 meltdown. But not all Americans took out sub-prime mortgages for homes at inflated prices. So why must some continue to pay their underwater mortgages to keep their homes, while others, as victims, may not have to?

Everyone should pay some income tax. So, why does the administration talk about raising rates sharply and adding even more taxes on the 5 percent who already pay 60 percent of all federal income-tax revenue?

Health care also is also poorly defined by Obama's simplistic view of a noble public victimized by a few greedy insurers. Some Americans budget $100 to $200 each month for high-deductible, private catastrophic health plans. That means they pass on some consumer purchases to ensure they won't get stuck without coverage for an unexpected operation or accident. In other words, people make choices on how they allot their resources, and are not always just victims who are cruelly denied, or cannot afford, some sort of basic health insurance.

One reason so many Americans were against federalizing their health care is that those who do avoid some medical risks - alcohol and drug use, poor diet, obesity, or lack of exercise - are, in some cases, asked to pay for the health problems of those who don't.

Obama now may take on immigration reform in the same sort of bipolar fashion. He decries the present policy toward illegal immigration and cites heartbreaking stories about workers forced to toil in the shadows by profit-hungry employers and an indifferent public. But again, we hear no mention by Obama of the role of human choice and individual responsibility.

When one breaks the law by entering the United States without proper authority, and then continues to live as an illegal alien, choices are made that have many unfortunate consequences, both for self and society at large. A failure to learn English or a decision to send back thousands of hard-earned dollars to Mexico or Latin America can only compound the dilemma of living without legal certification.

In all these cases, Obama commendably wants to help the less fortunate. But he seems to care far less for those who act responsibly - except to demonize them if they question whether it is either fair or even sometimes wise to subsidize those who at times don't.

The president would surely improve his standing if he urged Americans to buy fewer DVDs and instead more insurance plans - or to avoid drugs and drink, or not to borrow money that they have no desire or ability to pay back, or not to enter the United States in the first place without a proper visa.

Here I do not mean just offering the usual presidential generic good advice and platitudes, but tougher talk -- backed up by decisions on policy -- about the inability of any government always to make right the freely incurred bad choices of its citizens.

Then when things unexpectedly get rough, my bet is the American people would be more than happy to help the unfortunate.

SOURCE

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Shocker: Massive aid does not mean improvement

Even the Left-leaning "Lancet" says so

Do massive donations of cash as aid to poor nations allow them to focus on structural improvements and increased spending on health? Or does that money allow corrupt governments to divert resources that they would have spent on those issues to other priorities? A new study by Lancet strongly suggests the latter — even when the donors believe they have secured the distribution of the funds:

After getting millions of dollars to fight AIDS, some African countries responded by slashing their health budgets, new research says.

For years, the international community has forked over billions in health aid, believing the donations supplemented health budgets in poor countries. It now turns out development money prompted some governments to spend on entirely different things, which cannot be tracked. The research was published Friday in the medical journal Lancet. …

The research raises questions about whether international aid is sometimes detrimental. Previous studies have found pricey United Nations health initiatives haven’t paid off and occasionally hurt health systems. Experts estimate about half of international health aid can’t be traced in the budgets of receiving countries.

Murray’s paper also found debt relief had no effect on health spending. Activists like Bob Geldof and Bono have long argued canceling African debts would allow countries to spend more on their health problems, but there was no evidence of that.

“When an aid official thinks he is helping a low-income African patient avoid charges at a health clinic, in reality, he is paying for a shopping trip to Paris for a government minister and his wife,” said Philip Stevens, of the London-based think tank International Policy Network. He was not linked to the study.

What can we learn from this study that we really should have already known?

1. Money is fungible – Giving block grants to a state for one purpose doesn’t mean that the purpose gets more money. It allows the state to divert its already-committed resources to other purposes. We’ve learned that here in the US with Porkulus block grants to states. Without accountability, that money can go anywhere and either directly or indirectly feed the corruption at the heart of Africa’s problems.

2. Corruption is the root cause of nationwide poverty – We have sent monetary aid to Africa for decades in attempts to fix the problems of poverty and disease. That should tell us that money isn’t really the root problem in these countries. The governments, mostly corrupt dictatorships, create the problems through outright theft or the imposition of incompetent central economic planning. In Zimbabwe, for just one example, it’s both. That nation’s land used to provide for much of Africa’s food, and now it can’t even feed itself.

3. We need to change direction in Africa – None of us want to see an entire continent fail, but we apparently have two choices. Either we drop billions on Africa every year in aid that extends the status quo, or we cut off the aid and force African nations to change from within. The US had moved toward the latter in the last few years, but guilt-trip initiatives (however well meaning) keep putting political pressure on nations to maintain the status quo.

If we really want to solve the problem of poverty and illness in Africa, we need to demand political reform. Everything else is a band-aid, and not the kind of Band Aid that means aging rockers taking to the stage on G-20 conferences.

SOURCE

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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ObamaCare System Kills Health Insurance in Massachusetts

If you want to buy health insurance in Massachusetts–thanks to the Democrat Governor, an ideological twin to Barack Obama, you can’t.

“The Massachusetts small-group market that serves about 800,000 residents shut down after Patrick kicked off his re-election campaign by presumptively rejecting about 90 percent of the premium increases the state’s insurers had asked regulators to approve. Health costs have run off the rails since former GOP Gov. Mitt Romney passed universal coverage in 2006, and Patrick now claims price controls are the sensible response to this ostensibly industry greed.”

The insurance companies will lose $100 million–this year.

Obama would blame the insurance companies profits–but here are the facts, “One irony, says the Journal, is that Patrick’s own Attorney General and his insurance regulators have concluded — to their apparent surprise — that the reason Massachusetts premiums are the highest in the nation is the underlying cost of health care, not the supposed industry abuses that Patrick and his political mentor President Obama like to cite.”

Looking at Massachusetts we now know that ObamaCare IS single payer. Once implemented, private health insurance companies will fold, due to mandated losses. Then the Feds will take over, and without another legislative vote, politicians, not doctors will control whether you live or die.

Republicans do not have to scare anybody about ObamaCare–all they have to do is look at Massachusetts and see the future of Third World health care hitting the United States.

SOURCE

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Palin gets good response at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference

Palin didn't hint at her 2012 plans in her keynote address to SRLC, but she did provide some meaty thoughts on energy policy, possibly her most important campaign issue if she does decide to run.

"Republicans need to hit the road in 2010, and show America what an all-of-the-above energy policy looks like," she said.

Alaska is a leading producer of crude oil, and Palin has been an outspoken opponent of Obama's cap-and-trade proposals, which have been a stalled agenda item for his administration. But Republicans have the opportunity to steal that issue away from him, said Palin.

"It's an issue that really touches every challenge that we face. There is an inherent link between energy and security, and energy and prosperity, and energy and freedom," she said.

In her SLRC speech, there were more harsh words for Obama's two-faced energy policy; the President has claimed to support nuclear energy and wind turbines, but has stalled the development of those resources at every turn. While preaching support for nuclear energy, Obama has opposed the development of a nuclear disposal site at Yucca Mountain and has gummed up regulations for those trying to open production sites.

"You can't claim to support nuclear energy and then gut our supply at both ends of the fuel cycle," she said.

She was especially critical of Obama's announcement that he wanted to open up large swaths of the Gulf of Mexico and the eastern seaboard for energy production. She said such plans amounted to nothing more than "more studying" — a common complaint from many conservative critics. She also said Obama's desire to open up wind turbines in the U.S. was baseless.

Every time someone tries to begin wind production, she said — probably referring to T. Boone Pickens failed wind energy plan — Obama drags his feet with inane excuses. According to Palin, Obama is afraid that "Someone may see [a turbine], or a gecko may bump into one." Palin then reiterated her call to "drill, baby, drill," and not, "stall, baby, stall."

Also on her agenda was foreign policy, with more criticism for Obama's dealings with Israel, and his acquiescence to foreign dictators. "The President, with all the vast nuclear experience he acquired as a community organizer... still can't deal with North Korea and Iran," she said.

Obama's recent treatment of Israel is shameful, she said, Jerusalem is not a settlement, and Israel is our friend. His overall foreign policy approach "defies common sense," such as with the recent Russian nuclear weapons treaty.

She was also quick to play off of the recent criticism of her campaign to "target" Democratic districts in the November elections. Liberals said such rhetoric amounted to declarations of violence. "Common sense conservatives can rely on some slogans... like, repeal and replace," she said. "Or my favorite: don't retreat, reload."

SOURCE

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Shariah ... the next totalitarian threat after Nazism and Communism

For the first time in its history, the United States is trying to wage and win a war without accurately identifying the enemy or its motivations for seeking to destroy us. That oversight defies both common sense and past military experience, and it disarms us in what may be the most decisive theater of this conflict: the battle of ideas.

Such a breakdown may seem incredible to veterans of past military conflicts. Imagine fighting World War II without clarity about Nazism and fascism, or the Cold War without an appreciation of Soviet communism and the threat it posed.

Yet today, the civilian leaders of this country and their senior subordinates - responsible for the U.S. military, the intelligence community, homeland security and federal law enforcement - have systematically failed to fully realize that we once again face a totalitarian ideology bent on our destruction.

That failure is the more worrisome since the current ideological menace is arguably more dangerous than any we have faced in the past, for two reasons. First, its adherents believe their mission of global conquest is divinely inspired. Second, they are here in the United States in significant numbers, not just a threat elsewhere around the world.

What, then, is this ideology? It has been given many names in recent years, including political Islam, radical Islam, fundamentalist Islam, extremist Islam and Islamofascism. There is, however, a more accurate descriptor - the one its adherents use. They call it "Shariah."

Perhaps the most important thing to understand about Shariah is that it is authoritative Islam, which presents itself as a complete way of life - cultural, political, military, social and religious, all governed by the same doctrine. In other words, this comprehensive program is not simply the agenda of extremists hunkered down in caves in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Neither can its directives be attributed to deviants hijacking Islam.

Rather, Shariah - which translates from Arabic as "path to God" - is actually binding law. It is taught as such by the most revered sacred texts, traditions, institutions, top academic centers, scholars and leaders of the Islamic faith. Fortunately, hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world do not wish to live under a brutally repressive, woman-demeaning, barbaric and totalitarian program. Such Muslims are potentially our allies, just as those who do adhere to Shariah are our unalterable foes.

The immutability of Shariah-adherent Muslim hostility toward the rest of us derives directly from the central tenet of Shariah: Muslims are explicitly required to seek the triumph of Islam over all other faiths, peoples and governments.

The ultimate objective of Shariah is the establishment of a global Islamic state - Sunni Muslims call it "the caliphate" - governed by Shariah. The means by which this political outcome is to be achieved is called "jihad."

Since 9/11, many Americans have become unhappily acquainted with the terrifying, violent strain of jihad. Under Shariah, violence - often described by non-Muslims as "terrorism" - is the preferred means of securing the spread and dominion of Islam, as it is the most efficient.

While Shariah deems jihad to be the personal obligation of every faithful Muslim capable of performing it - man or woman, young or old - they can forgo the violent form when it is deemed impracticable. In such circumstances, the struggle can be pursued through means that are, at least temporarily, non-violent. Taken together, the latter constitute what renowned author and expert Robert Spencer calls "stealth jihad." Adherents to Shariah call it "dawah."

Examples of stealth jihadism abound in Western societies, notably Europe and increasingly in the United States. They include the demand for symbolic and substantive accommodations in political, economic and legal areas (for example, special treatment or rights for Muslims in the workplace, in public spaces and by government); the opportunity to penetrate and influence operations against government at every level; and the insinuation of the Trojan horse of "Shariah-compliant finance" into the West's capital markets.

If stealth jihad seems less threatening than terrorism, the objective is exactly the same as that of violent jihad: the subjugation to the Dar al-Islam (House of Islam) of all non-Islamic states that, like the United States, make up the Dar al-harb (House of War). It follows that those who seek ostensibly to impose Shariah through non-violent techniques - notably in the West, the organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood - are our enemies every bit as much as those who overtly strive to defeat us by murderous terrorism.

Many Western elites, including the Obama administration, have been seduced by the seemingly benign quality of the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, we know from the 2008 prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation - the largest terrorism-financing trial in U.S. history - that the Muslim Brothers' mission in the United States is "a kind of grand jihad to destroy Western civilization from within ... by their own miserable hands." ...

Adherents to Shariah insist that their law prohibits any slander against Islam or Muhammad. Under such a catch-all restriction, virtually any kind of conversation about - or critique of - Islam can be considered impermissible if Muslims find it offensive. Particularly in Europe, the ever-present prospect of violence, like that which followed the September 2005 publication of Danish cartoons poking fun at Muhammad, is generally sufficient to induce self-censorship...

To a stunning degree, U.S. leaders have been effectively conforming to Shariah slander laws for some time now. For instance, presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have both repeatedly described Islam as a "religion of peace," without acknowledging the requirement for jihad its authorities demand, pursuant to Shariah.

At the Muslim Brotherhood's insistence, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department have barred the use of perfectly accurate terms like "Islamic terrorism." The U.S. government has also embraced the Muslim Brothers' disinformation by translating jihad as nothing more than "striving in the path of God."

Under the Bush and Obama administrations, the favored name for the enemy has been "violent extremism" - a formulation that neither offers clarity about the true nature of our foe nor lends itself to a prescription for a successful countervailing strategy. Even when al-Qaeda is identified as the enemy, it is almost always accompanied by an assurance that its operatives and allies have "corrupted" Islam. Ignored, or at least earnestly obscured, are two unhappy realities: such enemies are implementing Shariah's dictates to the letter of the law, and they have millions of fellow adherents around the world who view Islam's requirements the same way.

One of the most egregious examples of this practice of unilateral disarmament in the battle of ideas is the January report of the independent review of the Fort Hood massacre, co-chaired by former Army Secretary Togo West and former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vernon Clark. Their 86-page unclassified analysis purported to dissect an event allegedly perpetrated by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan - a medical officer whose business card described him as "Soldier of Allah," whose briefings justified murder of his comrades in the name of jihad, and who shouted the Islamic martyr's cry "Allahu Akbar!" ("God is great!") as he opened fire, killing 13. Incredibly, the words "Islam," "Islamic terror," "Shariah," "jihad," and "Muslim Brotherhood" were not used even once in the West-Clark report.

Such political correctness, or willful blindness up the chain of command, doubtless caused Hasan's colleagues to keep silent about his alarming beliefs, lest they be punished for expressing concerns about them. Now, reportedly, six of them have been designated as the scapegoats for what is manifestly an institutional failure.

The painful truth is that however we rationalize this sort of behavior, our Shariah-adherent enemies correctly perceive it as evidence of submission, which is the literal meaning of the word "Islam," and what Shariah demands of everyone, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

Indeed, Shariah offers non-believers only three choices: conversion to Islam, submission (known as dhimmitude) or death. Historically, dhimmitude was imposed through successful Muslim conquests. In more recent years, tolerant Western nations have increasingly succumbed to stealthy jihadism, backed by more or less direct threats of violence.

That trend, worrying as it is, may be giving way in this country to a new campaign: jihad of the sword. The past year saw a fourfold increase in the number of actual or attempted terrorist attacks in the United States. Sadly, that statistic will likely be surpassed in the year ahead. Four of the nation's top intelligence officials have testified before Congress that it is certain new acts of violence will be undertaken in the next three to six months. Worse yet, a blue-ribbon commission has calculated that the probability of the use of weapons of mass destruction somewhere in the world by 2013 is now over 50 percent.

Is this dramatic upsurge in violent jihad directed at the United States unrelated to our behavior? Or does it reflect a growing calculation on the part of our Shariah-adherent enemies that violence against the United States is now, once again, practicable?

Either way, the time has clearly come to make a far more serious effort to defeat both the violent and stealthy forms of jihad being waged against this country. If we are to do so, however, we have to start by telling the truth.

Our enemy is not "violent extremism," or even al-Qaeda alone. Rather, it is the millions of Muslims who - like the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda and their allies - adhere to Shariah and who, therefore, believe they must impose it on the rest of us.

We are at war with such individuals and organizations. Not because we want to be. Not because of policies toward Israel or the Middle East or anything else we have pursued in recent years. Rather, we are at war with them because they must wage jihad against us, pursuant to the dictates of Shariah, the same law that has guided many in Islam for some 1,200 years. ...

The extraordinary reality is that none of this - the authoritative and malevolent nature of Shariah, its utter incompatibility with our civilization, and its adherents' determination to force us to convert, submit or die - is concealed from those willing to learn the truth. To the contrary, the facts are widely available via books, the Internet, DVDs and mosques, both here and overseas.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Another Obama nomineee bites the dust: "President Barack Obama's nominee to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel has withdrawn her bid for confirmation, after several Republicans objected to her criticism of the Bush administration's terrorist interrogation policies. Dawn Johnsen's withdrawal -- a setback for the Obama administration -- was announced late Friday by the White House ... The decision about who should lead the little-known office became a political flashpoint because of the controversies surrounding Bush-era interrogations of terror suspects. During the Bush administration, lawyers at the OLC wrote memos approving interrogation techniques that human rights advocates call torture"

Abortion traitor bows out: "Rep. Bart Stupak, the Michigan Democrat who led a months-long battle with President Obama and his party's leaders over abortion language before ultimately supporting their health care bill, said Friday he won't seek re-election this year. He became a chief Republican target after he ended up voting for the health care bill even though it still contains the abortion coverage language he objected to for months"

Obama: Gas Us Without Fear of Nukes: "If any nation wants to attack the United States with chemical, biological or electromagnetic pulse weapons, it need not fear nuclear retaliation as long as it has no nuclear weapons and abides by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Obama has announced. So, as New Yorkers are coughing their lungs out from mustard gas or dying in the streets of biological weapons, they will know that their government will not use nuclear weapons to retaliate against their murderers. His incredible announcement amounts to a green light for anti-American nations to hit our cities with gas or poisons, resting secure in the knowledge that we will not use our nuclear arsenal to reply."

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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Obama Off the Deep End

Floyd and Mary Beth Brown brand Obama below as a narcissist -- but narcissism is a leading symptom of psychopathy. That Obama seems cool, calm and confident even when he knows virtually nothing of what he is talking about is another symptom of psychopathy. For the pervasive influence of psychopathy among Leftists, see here -- JR

A recent analysis by Roger Simon of PJTV Media maintains that Obama is showing signs of mental illness. A wide variety of commentators have observed that Obama displays severe narcissism. Obama is conceited, and he is demonstrating a serious disassociation from reality.

A recent case in point was Obama's bizarre and meandering 17-minute, 2,500-word answer to the simple question about how he could justify raising taxes for ObamaCare during a recession when citizens are already overtaxed.

Obama's wildly inappropriate answer left the audience stunned and led commentator Charles Krauthammer to mockingly say, "I don't know why you are so surprised. It's only nine times the length of the Gettysburg address, and after all Lincoln was answering an easier question, the higher purpose of the union and the soldiers who fell in battle." This lapse of delusion occurred in front of a friendly audience. Overall, Barack Obama seems to be slipping into a slightly more delusional state these days.

On Monday, following his embarrassing answer on Saturday, Obama stopped by the Washington Nationals home opener to loft an effeminate toss toward home plate constituting the ceremonial first pitch. After this display, Obama was mucking it up in the press booth talking about his love of the Chicago White Sox.

The announcers asked Obama which players he supported growing up a White Sox fan. After hemming and hawing for about 30 seconds, Obama responded that he grew up in Hawaii and was actually an A's fan. Again, he avoided mentioning any players by name. Obama seems to believe that he can say whatever he wants, and not reap the consequences or be forced to defend his empty assertions. Obama behaves in a manner so disconnected from reality that he is shocked when someone has the audacity to question him. Obama acts like his word is infallible.

In March of last year Obama was on "60 Minutes" with Steve Kroft. Throughout the interview as Kroft questioned about the economic downturn and people losing their life savings, Obama just kept laughing. A one point CBS's Kroft stopped him and asked, "Are you punch drunk?" How will the American people react to seeing their president laugh off their predicament? Obama's inappropriate laughter clearly demonstrated he has lost touch with the pain that people are feeling.

Obama portrays himself as the larger-than-life figure towering above the political fray. At the summit when Obama was pushing his healthcare package through Congress, he attempted to act as if he were the chief arbiter of truth. With petty insults, he slapped down what the Republicans proposed and audaciously claimed his was a "bipartisan bill." Obama distorts the truth with such frequency that one must start to question if Obama even realizes he is lying or is so disassociated from the truth that he believes what he says. [Typical psychopathy]

A further example of Obama's delusions of grandeur occurred when he gave himself a "good solid B plus." Believing that his presidency was an above average success when America is hurting is absurd. Obama went so far as to claim that he would give himself an "A" once healthcare was passed. Obama is not living in the same reality as the rest of us.

As Charles Krauthammer wrote, "Not that Obama considers himself divine. (He sees himself as merely messianic, or, at worst, apostolic.) But he does position himself as hovering above mere mortals, mere country, to gaze benignly upon the darkling plain beneath him where ignorant armies clash by night, blind to the common humanity that only he can see."

Obama sees himself as the greatest man to be president in all time. He truly believes it when he said "we are the ones we have been waiting for," and "this is the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal." He believes that he can do anything he pleases and the people will love him for it. Obama plans to radically transform this country and go down in history as, in his mind, the greatest ever. Obama is clearly disconnected from reality.

Obama is, according to Newt Gingrich, "potentially the most dangerous (president), because he so completely misunderstands reality." Gingrich was referring to Obama's inept and weak stance on missile defense amongst other things. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said that Obama is an amateur; so much for wowing the world.

Obama lives in an alternate universe where he treats our friends poorly and expects our enemies to change and become our friends. Here's hoping that the voters help to connect this president back to reality in November.

SOURCE

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Obama's elitism will damage him most

President Obama is a man of the Left. He’s is a fairly pragmatic center-Left social democrat, a Fabian who infuriates the hard Left as much as he does the Right. The more he’s attacked as a kind of Stalin-lite, the more justified he must feel in thinking we “don’t get it” and … the louder he snickers. The Right keeps attacking Obama in ways that only reinforce his worst instincts.

There is a better way. A blogger, “Repulicae” writes on nolanchart.com: “The Fabian Society began in England in 1887 by a very small group of elitist socialist[s].” Key word? Elitist.

Obama, politically and psychically, is vulnerable not as a progressive but as, demonstrably, an overbearing elitist. America was founded on the self-evident truth that all are created equal.

Elitism is abhorrent to Americans. Elitist politicians flinch when called out. Obama is proudly progressive. He appears ashamed of his elitism, which he carefully and continually veils. Exposing him as elitist will be Obama’s apocalypse ( “apocalypse” meaning “to lift the veil”). This will trigger a series of immediate reactions.

First, it will rally, and focus, the voters. Obama’s elitism is an insult. “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge,” begins Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.”

Americans are bearing up under the thousand injuries of Obama. It erodes his popularity but doesn’t trigger a focused reaction. (And as the business cycle begins to restore jobs, as it is, the sense of injury will fade.) But when people realize that he has ventured upon insult, they, politically, will immure him.

This will alienate Obama’s key allies from him. Democratic congressmen may swallow hard and vote with him in piling trillions in debt upon our children. That can be rationalized in the name of a crisis or of jobs.

But elitism can’t be rationalized. There is no way to rationalize insulting your voters. Obama is shielded by the massive apparatus of the White House and by guaranteed post-presidency fame and fortune. Members of Congress are not so shielded and sooner or later will distance themselves from insultingly naked elitism.

This will call out to Obama’s own conscience. Baring his elitism may force Obama into some overdue soul-searching. Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson, in “The Battle for America 2008,” report that in preparing Obama to run, advisor David Axelrod wrote to him:

"It goes to your willingness and ability to put up with something you have never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism. At the risk of triggering the very reaction that concerns me, I don't know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much what is written and said about you.”

Obama presents himself as fundamentally decent, albeit infuriatingly smug and not nearly as smart as he thinks (nor as smart as what The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki calls “the wisdom of crowds”).

Baring Obama's elitism will put him on the defensive. Obama is likely to begin to second-guess himself and even may begin to check his own worst excesses and begin a return toward embracing the common sense wisdom of the people.

Attacking Obama as a Leftist attacks him on his own turf. Attacking him as elitist attacks him on ours. Alinsky teaches us (Rule 3, Rules for Radicals), “Whenever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear and retreat.”

The simple truth? Obama is an elitist. The winning strategy? Rip away the veil and reveal the hidden truth. Naked elitism is Obama’s apocalypse.

SOURCE

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"Give Me 'Niceness' or Give Me Death"

I believe that one of the greatest obstacles facing opponents of the socialist agenda of Obama Democrats is this misguided insistence that we always have to give them the benefit of the doubt -- as if it were virtuous not to be vigilant in safeguarding our sacred liberties. Only if we first recognize and then clearly speak out against what they're truly about will we have any chance of stopping their suicidal blueprint for America.

Willful blindness has destroyed many nations from within (and without) and is well on the way to destroying us. Those who would pat themselves on the back for being too kind to call it as they see it -- or for sanctimoniously condemning those who are calling it as they see it -- should reconsider. In the words of the great Edmund Burke, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." He might have added, "Or say nothing."

That's why Sen. Tom Coburn's statement that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is nice was disappointing.

In the first place, it is irrelevant to the future of this nation whether Pelosi or President Barack Obama is nice. That said, I respectfully disagree with Dr. Coburn's assertion.

Let's look at what prompted Coburn -- an admirably fierce opponent of Obamacare -- to make the statement. At a town hall meeting, a woman asked him whether, under Obamacare, "they can put us in prison" for not purchasing health insurance.

Coburn responded: "The intention is not to put anybody in jail. That makes for good TV news on Fox, but that isn't the intention." That wasn't a very "nice" thing for Coburn to say about Fox News, which has finally provided balance to television network news -- representing a sea change from decades of left-wing mainstream media uber-domination.

Coburn added, "I'm 180 degrees in opposition to the speaker; she's a nice lady." When the crowd showed its displeasure, he persisted: "Come on now, she is nice. How many of you all have met her?"

Coburn was obviously trying to assure the audience that nice people wouldn't put people in jail for not purchasing health care at the government's order. That's the only possible relevance of his statement.

Well, Doctor, the Pelosi version of Obamacare (H.R. 3962, as amended) contained jail penalty provisions (up to five years in prison) for those failing to purchase health insurance. When Pelosi was asked about the provision, she wouldn't answer the question directly but implied imprisonment is fair. "The point is we want to make sure everyone has health care," she said. "We all have to do our part. ... The legislation is very fair."

So if Coburn believes Pelosi is too nice to support imprisonment for those not buying health insurance, he's wrong. She would (and did). And with all due respect to Sen. Coburn, it wasn't very "nice" of him to suggest that there is something wrong with people's outrage at what's going on. He is wrong to attempt to shame people for their justified indignation at "nice" politicians for systematically dismantling and bankrupting the America they love, let alone putting them in jail.

But for the record, I don't believe nice people would constantly lie about their intentions for the nation, as liberal politicians often do to get elected to national office in this center-right nation. Nice people wouldn't force people to buy health insurance in the false name of compassion, especially when to do so violates the Constitution.

Nice people wouldn't lie about what's in a piece of legislation that involves government control over one-sixth of the U.S. economy, such as whether the federal government would fund abortion. Nice people wouldn't condemn those who condemn them for lying about what's in this bill. But that's what Obama, Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership did. Nice people wouldn't suggest that patriotic, freedom-loving Americans are swastika-wearing rubes just a hair trigger away from "Clockwork Orange" ultra-violence.

Nice people don't accuse capitalist and constitutionalist opponents of Obama's socialist agenda of racism, yet that's going on daily from the Democratic leadership and the liberal commentariat. Obama himself came close when he condemned a wide swath of Americans with his warped notion that they cling, among other things, to "antipathy to people who aren't like them." Is he projecting?

The best interest of this nation does not depend on our elected leaders' being nice to one another. It does depend on their reversing the masochistic path of bankrupting spending, retreating in the war on terror and surrendering to the culture of death being forcibly imposed by moral relativists. It depends on rekindling the fire of liberty in our hearts.

Can you imagine Patrick Henry saying, "Give me nice legislators or give me death"?

SOURCE

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BrookesNews Update

Deficits, interest rates and the US economy : Given the America's horrible fiscal condition I cannot see how higher interest rates can be avoided. The demands now being made on the economy by government must result in a significant reduction if not an actual end to the rate of capital accumulation exceeding population growth. This can only mean a general fall in real wages. furthermore, the government — or a government — will be driven to use inflation to engineer a very large partial default
Obama's Yellen appointment signals very bad news for the US economy : Janet Yellen is an inflationist first and foremost. She has made it abundantly clear that all of her policy suggestions will be geared to promoting an inflationary policy. Like all Keynesians she seems congenitally incapable of grasping the dangerous microeconomic consequences of inflation for investment, jobs and the standard of living. She is in fact a very dangerous woman
U.S. government, on its way to bankruptcy, Part 3 : When it becomes clear that the U.S. government can not make good on its mounting debt obligations by taxing its citizens, its creditors, fearing the debasement of the dollar and therefore the value of their investments, will go from friends to foes, from eager buyers of those treasury bills, notes and bonds to eager sellers. It won't be pretty
Why a "cheap dollar" would not save the US economy : Do the advocates of a depreciating dollar think that by merely increasing exports the US would enjoy rise in per capita investment, especially in view of Obama's crippling fiscal policies? Have these people ever given any serious thought to the actual nature of economic growth?
The Left's ludicrous accusations against Tea Partiers : It's Democrats, not conservatives, who use ad hominem attacks, steal elections, make outrageous accusations and conjure up violent imagery. The accusations of racism and threats of violence put forth by race-baiting congressional Democrats since are straight out of the Alinsky playbook. The Dems are well and truly the Party of Hate
Andy Garcia's The Lost City — when film critics turn historians : Andy Garcia's film the Lost City showed that in1958 Cuba was undergoing a rebellion, not a revolution. Cubans expected political change, not Fidel Castro's Stalinist cataclysm. It is no surprise that such distinctions are far too 'complex' for the typical leftwing film critic to grasp
My destructive generation : Under the leadership of my fellow baby boomers, there is a very good chance that the America that we all know and love could end up on the ash heap of history

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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The NYT is already preparing Americans for bureaucratic rationing of medical care

America will now be getting its version of Britain's much-loathed NICE -- which repeatedly denies drugs to patients who need them -- if the drugs are expensive. Too bad if you die or are disabled: NICE doesn't care. NYT excerpt below:

From an economic perspective, health reform will fail if we can’t sometimes push back against the try-anything instinct. The new agencies will be hounded by accusations of rationing, and Medicare’s long-term budget deficit will grow.

So figuring out how we can say no may be the single toughest and most important task facing the people who will be in charge of carrying out reform. “Being able to say no,” Dr. Alan Garber of Stanford says, “is the heart of the issue.”

It’s easy to come up with arguments for why we need to do so. Above all, we don’t have a choice. Giving hospitals and drug makers a blank check will bankrupt Medicare. Slowing the cost growth, on the other hand, will free up resources for other uses, like education. Lower costs will also lift workers’ take-home pay.

But I suspect that these arguments won’t be persuasive. They have the faint ring of an insurer’s rationale for denying a claim. Compared with an anecdote about a cancer patient looking for hope, the economic arguments are soulless.

The better bet for the new reformers — starting with Donald Berwick, the physician who will run Medicare — is to channel American culture, not fight it. We want the best possible care, no matter what. Yet we often do not get it because the current system tends to deliver more care even when it means worse care.

It’s not just CT scans. Caesarean births have become more common, with little benefit to babies and significant burden to mothers. Men who would never have died from prostate cancer have been treated for it and left incontinent or impotent. Cardiac stenting and bypasses, with all their side effects, have become popular partly because people believe they reduce heart attacks. For many patients, the evidence suggests, that’s not true.

Advocates for less intensive medicine have been too timid about all this. They often come across as bean counters, while the try-anything crowd occupies the moral high ground. The reality, though, is that unnecessary care causes a lot of pain and even death. Dr. Berwick, who made his reputation campaigning against medical errors, is a promising (if much belated) selection for precisely this reason.

Can we solve the entire problem of rising health costs by getting rid of needless care? Probably not. But the money involved is not trivial, and it’s the obvious place to start.

The final step is the bluntest. It involves changing the economics of medicine, to reward better care rather than simply more care. Health reform doesn’t go nearly far enough on this score, but it is a start.

The tax subsidies for health insurance will shrink, which should help people realize medical care is not free. And doctors who provide good, less expensive care won’t be financially punished as often as they now are.

None of these steps will allow us to avoid the wrenching debates that are an inevitable part of health policy. Eventually, we may well have to decide against paying for expensive treatments with only modest benefits. But given how difficult that would be for this country, it makes sense to start with the easier situations — the ones in which “no” really is the best answer for patients.

More HERE

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Health care overhaul spawns mass confusion for public

Two weeks after President Barack Obama signed the big health care overhaul into law, Americans are struggling to understand how — and when — the sweeping measure will affect them.

Questions reflecting confusion have flooded insurance companies, doctors' offices, human resources departments and business groups.

"They're saying, 'Where do we get the free Obama care, and how do I sign up for that?' " said Carrie McLean, a licensed agent for eHealthInsurance.com. The California-based company sells coverage from 185 health insurance carriers in 50 states.

McLean said the call center had been inundated by uninsured consumers who were hoping that the overhaul would translate into instant, affordable coverage. That widespread misconception may have originated in part from distorted rhetoric about the legislation bubbling up from the hyper-partisan debate about it in Washington and some media outlets, such as when opponents denounced it as socialism.

"We tell them it's not free, that there are going to be things in place that help people who are low-income, but that ultimately most of that is not going to be taking place until 2014," McLean said.

Adults with pre-existing conditions are frustrated to learn that insurers won't have to cover them until 2014 (though those under 18 will be protected in late September); then they become both hopeful and confused upon learning that a federal high-risk pool for them will be established in the next few months. "Health insurance is so confusing. You add this on top of it and it makes it even more confusing," McLean said.

More here

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Federal Sales tax (VAT) coming to America

We all know it’s coming, but I’m reasonably sure Volcker missed a memo instructing advisors not, repeat not, to mention this publicly until, oh, say, the day after Election Day 2012. As it is, look for Gibbsy’s spin tomorrow to be, “B-b-but he was Reagan’s Fed chairman!”

"Volcker, answering a question from the audience at a New York Historical Society event, said the value-added tax “was not as toxic an idea” as it has been in the past and also said a carbon or other energy-related tax may become necessary."

Though he acknowledged that both were still unpopular ideas, he said getting entitlement costs and the U.S. budget deficit under control may require such moves. “If at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes,” he said.

Krauthammer’s column on the VAT came out a few weeks ago, but if you missed it at the time, now’s your chance to catch up. Perfection:

"Obama set out to be a consequential president, on the order of Ronald Reagan. With the VAT, Obama’s triumph will be complete. He will have succeeded in reversing Reaganism. Liberals have long complained that Reagan’s strategy was to starve the (governmental) beast in order to shrink it: First, cut taxes — then ultimately you have to reduce government spending.

"Obama’s strategy is exactly the opposite: Expand the beast, and then feed it. Spend first — which then forces taxation. Now that, with the institution of universal health care, we are becoming the full entitlement state, the beast will have to be fed."

Precisely. The One’s perverse insight was that a giant federal expansion of health-care benefits had to be passed before any major entitlement reform could happen. Had he tackled the latter problem first, declaring that America had reached a moment of fiscal emergency and demanding that both parties address the crisis, he would have done his country a world of good but in the process created two problems for himself.

First, the political fallout to his party from cutting entitlements likely would have been devastating, which would have wrecked any chance at passing health-care reform aside from a modest GOP bill.

And second, even if the Democrats survived the electoral backlash, they’d have a hard time trying to sell the idea of a brand new entitlement after the country had sacrificed so much to get its fiscal house in order. No, the only way to get O-Care done was to add it to the entitlement basket first and then wait for dependency to work its magic so that, when the crisis finally hits full force, it’s already a fact of life. That was a fantastically reckless thing to do but he wanted his agenda passed at all costs. And I do mean “all costs.”

I’ll leave you with James Pethokoukis’s piece this morning gaming out a way that the Democrats might try to sell the VAT to the public. Essentially, it’d have to be the fiscal equivalent of comprehensive immigration reform: If the public’s going to be asked to accept the bitter in the form of amnesty or new taxes, it had better get the sweet of border enforcement or fiscal responsibility in the same deal.

SOURCE

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Apples and ObamaCare

Let's do a quick thought experiment. The price of apples keeps going up. The government decides that every American must buy apples. But some can't afford them.

Government starts controlling how much apple farmers are paid, it mandates that every single American buys apples and subsidizes those under a certain income level so they can.

Will the price of apples go down, stay the same or go up? Or, in economists' language, if you limit the supply of a commodity and increase demand, will the price of that commodity go up or down?

Did you say "up"? You get an A. But if you did say "up," you surely are not a Democrat.

Democrats have just committed multitrillions of our money, and, as a bonus, sold a big chunk of American freedom down the road, betting that everything a college freshman learns in basic economics is not true. Or, that health care doesn't follow the rules of economics. Because our new health-care system is pretty much the apple scenario described above.

Or, maybe they don't care? Maybe it's not about economics, but about ideology and political power. And that the real issue is freedom. They think we've got too much and that politicians should decide what is fair and who should have what.

A revealing moment during the presidential campaign occurred when, during one debate, ABC's Charles Gibson pushed then-Sen. Barack Obama about his stated intent to increase capital gains taxes. Gibson brandished data showing that when you cut this tax, government tax revenues increase, and when you raise it, revenue drops (punishing investment surely produces less).

"So, why raise it?" Gibson asked. Obama responded that maybe it won't happen that way this time. And besides, he said, his motive was "fairness."

After voters in Massachusetts elected a Republican to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, killing the Democrats' filibuster-proof Senate majority, many pundits wrote that President Obama had to move to the political center.

I wrote then that this wouldn't happen because, unlike President Bill Clinton, who did moderate, Obama is a left-wing ideologue. He didn't run for president to be somebody. He did it to do something. He did it to change America.

As polls showed waning public support for what Democrats were pushing on health care, many assumed they would back off. It was still conceivable that they could stand rules on their head and ram the thing through using the so-called reconciliation procedure. But why would they do it when polls suggested they would be punished in November elections?

But Obama understood that when you are selling dreams, numbers don't matter.

So, as in the housing and financial debacle we just went through, you commit taxpayer money to subsidize a product to make it look cheaper than it is, you get people to buy it, and when it all comes crashing down, it doesn't matter. By then you're long gone.

And, another bonus, as more Americans get herded onto the government plantation -- 30 million more with this new bill -- it's easy to keep them there. So the most likely political outcome going forward is higher taxes and income redistribution to pay for it all, entrenching socialism more.

As I have written before, if you want to know where it all leads, look at our inner cities that were long ago taken over by government compassion. This is our future, my fellow Americans.

Oh, back to the apples. Their prices were rocketing up to begin with because government was already controlling and regulating them.

Republicans are mad. But will they be able to entice Americans off the ever-growing government plantation? Will they propose and succeed in selling the bold ideas necessary to turn the basket case we're becoming around? We'll see.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Overtaxed homeowners start to fight back: "Now that the housing bubble has burst, up to 60 percent of the nation’s taxable property may be overassessed, meaning owners are paying thousands of dollars more in taxes than they need to, experts say. That is leading to a flood of appeals in many markets from homeowners eager to cut their taxes and speed the process of aligning tax valuations with reality.”

Health care’s history of fiscal folly: "The Affordable Care Act — otherwise known as ObamaCare — isn’t the first attempt to expand health insurance coverage in America. Before Washington passed its law, a number of states took smaller-scale cracks at the job — each of which proved far more expensive than planned. As the nation dives further into debt, the destabilizing fiscal effects of those programs don’t bode well for how ObamaCare will shape the U.S. budget.”

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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