Intellectuals and Human Nature

Mike Adams

Recently, several “intellectuals” convened to deal with a problem so serious it could not be tackled by just one college professor. The question was this: How can professors stop an epidemic of students missing their examinations without jeopardizing student grades by resorting to point deductions?

The problem was so serious that the handful of intellectuals who first noticed the problem – and noticed others noticing the problem – sent out a mass email inviting others to attend a “brown bag” luncheon to brainstorm. They were searching for “solutions”, which would stop short of actually punishing students for missing their examinations.

I certainly have no problem with professors getting together to find “solutions” to difficult “problems.” But I do have a “problem” with the way these professors were characterizing their “problem.”

A better description of their “problem” – one that better reflects its magnitude – would sound something like this: How can we retain the secular/progressive view of human nature, which is needed to justify secular/progressive policies, in light of a wealth of evidence to the contrary?

The thoughts of the professors responding to the mass email were enlightening. One complained that she wanted to give her students the benefit of the doubt, but they constantly pushed and tested her. The more she withheld punishment, the more prevalent the undesirable behavior.

Another observed that the more often she does nice things for students, the more often they take advantage of her. She seemed perplexed by the fact that rewarding a missed exam with another administration, thus giving the student more time to prepare, led to more missed exams.

The dilemma of the perplexed professors highlights the fundamental difference between the conservative and the progressive views of human motivation. The former suggests that you can sometimes threaten to do bad things to people and expect good things in return. The latter suggests that you can promise to do good things for people and expect good things in return.

In the 1960s, our government began to put the progressive view of human nature to the test. We launched a War on Poverty in an effort to build a Great Society. Soon, we began to see mountains of data refuting the secular/progressive view of human nature.

By the end of the first decade of our efforts to build a Great Society, crime in America had skyrocketed to unprecedented levels. The 1960s saw record increases in crime rates, which have yet to be broken.

Progressives thought that giving people welfare, food stamps, and huge increases in the minimum wage would all be nice favors, which would be returned in the form of greater citizen conformity. The fact that it didn’t work has done little to shake the foundations of progressive faith in human decency.

Since the failed effort to build a Great Society there have been repeated calls to build more prisons in order to clean up the mess progressives have created. But, for years, progressives have fought tooth and nail to prevent or slow the expansion of prisons.

The result, of course, has been an increase in homicides and gang-rapes in prison due to prison overcrowding. In short, the progressive view of human nature has produced more violence among both free and captive populations. More people are dying everywhere but the progressive vision of human decency is immortal. It cannot be slain by any wealth of empirical evidence.

More recently, we have seen the effects of progressive gun control policies. Like prisons, guns are reminders of human depravity, which the progressive cannot accept. And so the progressive seeks to ban guns. Nonetheless, in 2008, the Supreme Court lifted a ban on handguns in Washington D.C., which resulted in a 25% decrease in homicides the next year.

The D.C. homicide data speak volumes about human nature. The presence of guns is a threat, which helps many depraved individuals conform to the dictates of the law. Nonetheless, progressives still fight the very reforms that have helped preserve innocent lives. They do so because it is more important that they preserve their vision of human decency.

It isn’t surprising that progressives who cannot manage a classroom cannot also manage “society.” It would be better if the progressive would confine her decision to accommodate, rather than punish, irresponsibility to the classroom. But intellectuals rarely keep their ideas to themselves. They are obliged to impose them on “society.”

Replacing the Judeo-Christian view of human nature with the progressive view of human nature has proven to be a bad idea. And bad ideas have bad consequences for fallen human beings. But progressive hope for the secular transformation of human nature springs eternal.

SOURCE

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America’s ruling class — and the perils of revolution

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets' nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term "political class" came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public's understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the "ruling class." And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several "stimulus" bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind.

Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government's agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about "global warming" for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class's continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter.

The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and "bureaucrat" was a dirty word for all. So was "social engineering." Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity.

Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, "prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God "who created and doth sustain us," our ruling class prays to itself as "saviors of the planet" and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over "whose country" America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: "if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand."

The Political Divide

Important as they are, our political divisions are the iceberg's tip. When pollsters ask the American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences "undecided," "none of the above," or "tea party," these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind. That is because while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well. Hence officeholders, Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts of some one-third of the electorate -- most Democratic voters, plus a few Republicans.

This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling class's prime legitimate representatives and that because Republican politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans -- a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents -- lack a vehicle in electoral politics.

Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority's demand for representation will be filled. Whereas in 1968 Governor George Wallace's taunt "there ain't a dime's worth of difference" between the Republican and Democratic parties resonated with only 13.5 percent of the American people, in 1992 Ross Perot became a serious contender for the presidency (at one point he was favored by 39 percent of Americans vs. 31 percent for G.H.W. Bush and 25 percent for Clinton) simply by speaking ill of the ruling class.

Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to the American people. Americans' conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so.

While Europeans are accustomed to being ruled by presumed betters whom they distrust, the American people's realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked this country into well nigh revolutionary attitudes. But only the realization was new. The ruling class had sunk deep roots in America over decades before 2008. Machiavelli compares serious political diseases to the Aetolian fevers -- easy to treat early on while they are difficult to discern, but virtually untreatable by the time they become obvious.

Far from speculating how the political confrontation might develop between America's regime class -- relatively few people supported by no more than one-third of Americans -- and a country class comprising two-thirds of the country, our task here is to understand the divisions that underlie that confrontation's unpredictable future.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

MA: Firms cancel health coverage: "The relentlessly rising cost of health insurance is prompting some small Massachusetts companies to drop coverage for their workers and encourage them to sign up for state-subsidized care instead, a trend that, some analysts say, could eventually weigh heavily on the state’s already-stressed budget. Since April 1, the date many insurance contracts are renewed for small businesses, the owners of about 90 small companies terminated their insurance plans with Braintree-based broker Jeff Rich and indicated in a follow-up survey that they were relying on publicly funded insurance for their employees.”

Stop me before I regulate again!: "I’m told that this morning the Senate will pass the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill. 2,300 pages long. Nothing so complex ever makes life better for consumers. Mostly, it guarantees that you will not start a business without hiring specialists. … Yet politicians constantly create more rules. They think they know how to manage our lives better than we do. They are ignorant and arrogant. Much of this regulation drives entrepreneurs to say: ‘I won’t try. I won’t open a business. I won’t hire someone because I probably can’t fire him without getting into trouble. I better play it safe. I better not try anything new.’ This kills opportunity. But the regulation never stops. Last year the federal government added another 70,000 pages to the Federal Register. Our 535 Congressmen think they’re not doing their job if they’re not passing laws. And those are just federal lawmakers. There are even more state legislators.”

"Docfix" and the coming Obamacare deficits: "On a quiet Friday afternoon this summer, the central justification for President Obama’s health-care overhaul died a quiet death. On that day, a bipartisan coalition in Congress reversed the scheduled Medicare cuts to physician payments, ensuring that, over the next decade, the White House’s reforms will cost many billions more than advertised. After over a year of debate and lofty rhetoric, the reality is this: the president’s goal of ‘bending’ the health-care cost curve has unraveled in just a few months.”

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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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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 Immorality of the "Moral High Ground"

Throughout the War on Terror, liberals have been lecturing us on the virtue of holding on to the "Moral High Ground", which is their way of saying that we should forgo trying to defeat terrorists military, and instead show them up with our superior civil liberties. Yes Abdul, you may have a suitcase nuke, but if we catch you, we'll still pay for your legal defense. Torture our soldiers if you will, Mohammed, but see if you aren't impressed when we TIVO your favorite team's soccer matches for you in that horrible 19 million dollar hellhole of misery and degradation at Guantanamo Bay.

Of course Mohammed is never going to be very impressed by his free legal team, Halal cooking, volleyball courts and pro bono prosthetic legs, because Islamists don't derive their moral high ground from doing nice things for their enemies. They derive their moral high ground from getting up on a high place and tossing rocks or grenades down at their enemies. A Good Muslim is willing to kill for Islam. The Koran says so explicitly.

On the other hand liberals insist that only a Bad American is willing to kill for America. A Good American will believe that Islam is a religion of peace, even while he's having his head chopped off by Johnny Mujaheed. He will eschew any tacky American flags, in favor of Chomsky and Zinn essays that will enable him to understand what a rotten country he lives in, and why the terrorists chopping his head off might have a point. All this really means is that practicing the Moral High Ground is a good way to get beheaded and reading the works of mentally ill Communists is not a good survival strategy....

Their goal is to break Western civilization. Break it of its exceptionalism. Break it of any notion that it has any worthwhile accomplishments to its name. Break it of any idea that it has a right to exist. That is their real Moral High Ground. National and international suicide in favor of nobler and better Third World creeds that won't be as greedy or as industrially developed, and will build societies based on sharing and caring, and of course the obligatory head chopping. Nothing else matters.

Israel, which has its own hard-at-work left, has something similar called "Purity of Arms" which is Hebrew for the "Courageous Restraint" medal that General McChrystal was thinking of handing out to US soldiers in Afghanistan for not killing terrorists.

Purity of Arms is one of the best strategic advantages Israel has ever handed to the terrorists, because it gives the terrorists a free pass to carry out attacks behind civilians, while threatening soldiers with severe penalties if they fire without being 100 percent certain that they're about to be murdered if they don't.

The ongoing captivity of Gilad Shalit and the entire Second Lebanon War would probably never have happened, if the IDF weren't constantly trapped in the Purity of Arms madness, as soldiers in a war zone are forced to second-guess their own survival, because Jewish self-defense is bad for public relations.

Why does Israel have a terrorist problem, and not Jordan, which has the same Arab population that Israel does? It's not simply because Israel is mostly Jewish and Jordan is mostly Muslim, though that is a contributing factor. A primary focus of Islamists is to take over countries with majority Muslim populations in order to build the Caliphate.

The reason is because in 1970 when the terrorists began hijacking planes and declared that a part of Jordan belonged to them, King Hussein sent in the army. He didn't kill a mere 52 Palestinian Arab terrorists, as Israel did in Jenin. Or a mere 107 in Deir Yassin. Not even the 800 or so killed in fighting between Arabs in Sabra and Shatilla. No, according to Arafat, King Hussein's troops killed an estimated 25,000 Palestinian Arabs.

This wasn't some sort of unique event by Middle Eastern standards. When the Islamists tried to stage an uprising in Hama, Syrian troops killed somewhere between 20,000 to 40,000 people. When Arafat sided with Saddam during the Gulf War, Kuwait expelled 400,000 Palestinian Arabs. Why did they do it? Because by 1990, Kuwait had some 564,000 native Arabs, and some 450,000 Palestinian Arabs.

So the Kuwaitis began bombing Palestinian Arab neighborhoods, top officials boasted about "cleansing" Palestinian Arabs from Kuwait, and tanks and troops were sent into Palestinian Arab neighborhoods, setting up checkpoints, killing, imprisoning and torturing thousands. There were plenty of atrocities that got brief mentions in the media, before the Palestinian Arabs were gone from Kuwait, and everyone moved on.

Just to grasp the sheer scale of the double standard here, in the same year that the Bush Administration was pressuring Israel to negotiate with the PLO in the name of human rights, President H.W. Bush gave a blank check to the Kuwaiti royal family to do anything they wanted to the Palestinian Arabs in their country. He told the Kuwaiti ambassador, "The war wasn’t fought about democracy in Kuwait" and justified everything the royals were doing, saying, "I think we're expecting a little much if we're asking the people in Kuwait to take kindly to those that had spied on their countrymen that were left there, that had brutalized families there, and things of that nature." The Kuwaiti government newspaper Sawt Al Kuwait, featured Bush's comments under the headline, "We Would Be Asking a Lot, If We Asked Them to Show Mercy."

And that just about says it all. The same Western governments which think it's asking a lot to expect Muslims to show mercy, make those demands of Israel all the time. They make those demands of their own forces, while never expecting Muslims to show mercy.

There are no efforts to indict the Kuwaiti Royal Family or the Assad or Hussein clans for atrocities or war crimes. Bashar Assad is an honored visitor to the same UK, which calls in the Israeli ambassador every other weak, to preach to him about restraint. King Hussein remains widely popular. His wife Raina has a YouTube channel in which she talks about how important human rights are, and how awful the Israelis are to the same people that her hubby's regime rules over, and which his father massacred. The web isn't cluttered with piteous sites about the Black September massacres or the Kuwaiti ethnic cleansing of their Palestinian Arabs or the Syrian massacres at Hama. Aside from a few people who were directly affected by it, no one actually cares.

And who's to blame? The Moral High Ground is. Terrorist groups can only win, if you let them. Their entire strategy relies on drawing you into a conflict, on the understanding that you won't have the nerve to really crush them. If you do crush them, the conflict goes away. But if you try to be Mr. Nice Guy, the terrorists now have you hook, line and sinker. If you restrain yourself, you'll be involved in endless little fights, dying the death of a thousand cuts, until the terrorists and their international backers successfully replace you with a Pro-Appeasement government. And if you recognize the terrorists and make concessions to them, you'll be up to your neck in terror....

It is not moral to let your family be murdered, rather than harm the murderers. He who slays those who kill his loved ones, stands on the true moral high ground. The only true Moral High Ground that there is.

More HERE

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Obamacare reasoning falsified by Massachusetts reality

Massachusetts’ universal health care system passed in 2006 -- with "mandatory" insurance

Unfortunately, Mass-Care and its mandate haven’t stopped spiraling health care costs. From 2007 to 2009 in the Bay State, the median annual premium for family plans jumped 10% to $14,300 a year. For small business, the increase was 12%. What’s worse is, Massachusetts already had the highest health care costs in the nation before Mass-Care became law.

Nor does the counter-intuition stop there. The ObamaCare debate often has focused on the $43 billion in uncompensated care bills racked up in 2008 by those without insurance (a number that represents less than 2% of the $2.5 trillion Americans spend on health care annually).

These costs have been attributed mostly to avoidable ER visits made by the uninsured. Make insurance mandatory, goes the explanation, and the ER onslaught will end. Fast forward to last week’s Boston Globe newspaper.

“The number of people visiting hospital emergency rooms has climbed in Massachusetts, despite the enactment of nearly universal health insurance that some hoped would reduce expensive emergency department use,” the paper wrote July 4th. “According to state data … emergency room visits rose by 9 percent from 2004 to 2008, to about 3 million visits a year.”

Mandatory insurance, it turns out, is not the same as access to a primary care physician. So even with the mandate, doctors are still in short supply, ER overcrowding continues and costs keep rising. Call it one more unintended consequence in the world of insurance made mandatory, a world many of us who support the Health Care Freedom acts – which already have become law in five states – are trying to avoid.

Not that everything is uncertain with this new law: America, you can rest assured, is badly in need of a new cliché. Now the only things certain in life are death and taxes – and the need to buy an insurance policy.

More HERE

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He came, he saw, he spent

In the latest stop on his “Recovery Summer” tour, rock star President Barack Obama landed in Holland, Michigan Thursday, insulted its congressman, handed American stimulus dollars to a Korean corporation, and proclaimed Obamanomics a success even as Michigan has lost 94,000 jobs since his Recovery Act was enacted.

All in all, another day in the life of an increasingly unpopular president who seems to be living in an alternative universe.

That universe insists that government is the source of jobs, and so Obama was in Western Michigan to declare another victory in Washington’s mission to create a new green economy.

But the green economy looks like a lot of green for the well-connected. The president handed $150 million in stimulus money over to Korean CEO Peter Bahnsuk Kim of LG Chem. LG Chem is an $11 billion Korean conglomerate that hardly seems a candidate for the American Recovery Act. No wonder the program is so unpopular.

Accompanying Obama was Governor Jennifer Granholm - Obama praised her as “one of the best governors in America” even as she presides over the nation’s second highest unemployment rate – who has been complaining that Washington Republicans are denying her the $500 million in stimulus money she needs to plug Michigan’s Medicaid budget hole. So here she was in West Michigan celebrating $150 million for Corporate Korea. Huh?

Obama said his benevolence would create 300 jobs in Holland – but that’s $500,000 per job. At least it’s a bargain compared to the $ $1.25 million per job Obama spent on two solar companies in Arizona over the July 4 weekend.

West Michigan is suffering 12 percent unemployment yet President “Audacity of Hope” had the audacity to suggest that the stimulus “efforts we took we are no longer bleeding jobs." In fact, since his $1 trillion Recovery Act was passed a year ago, Michigan has lost nearly 100,000 jobs....

More HERE

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What Women Don't Want

"We don't like this fundamental transformation, and we're going to do something about it." With that line, in a savvy "Mama Grizzly" video recently posted on her Facebook page, Sarah Palin may have captured not only the political mood of much of the country, but also nailed why women seem prone to making tea and political hay this year.

It's not just Palin or even the scads of other attractive woman who are running for office as Republicans; this "year of conservative women" is manifesting itself in a big way in the Tea Party movement. The Sam Adams Alliance, which has done a series of surveys on people who identify themselves as Tea Partiers, reports that at least 45 percent of Tea Party leaders are women, some of whom never had a career outside the home but now feel the need to organize their communities. Quinnipiac similarly has found 44 percent of self-identified Tea Party supporters to be women.

Sam Adams' Anne Sorock says that she's seen women "empowered through the Tea Parties." It's the kind of thing the women's movement would like if the women's movement weren't really more about liberal politics than representing females in America.

"Attitudes about risk may partially account for their prominence in the movement," John J. Pitney Jr., professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College, offers. "Many studies suggest that women tend to be more risk-averse than men ... A liberal administration is restructuring health care and running the federal debt up to the stratosphere -- which a lot of people regard as scary and risky."

Conway agrees: "It is easy to show how the past 18 months have been a radical departure from common sense and the solutions women tell pollsters they favor. Plus, Obama's priority list does not match their own. They rejected health care; he signed it into law. They say jobs and the economy should be the top focus; his actions have made things worse."

And, while conservative women or women in Republican politics are not a new phenomenon, what's especially remarkable right now is that outside parties are noticing this new feminine pull and are looking to center-right politics. These independent outsiders appear on the covers of magazines and are the subject of prime-time debates.

Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, believes that this is only a beginning and this "year of the conservative women" meme is a real potential growth opportunity for the Republican Party: "I think there is a genuine chance to change the face of the GOP and reach an entire generation of women. Palin was the booster rocket."

More HERE

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, 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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Death Panel Demands "Obesity" Info in Health Records

Once Obamacare kicks in, the Federal government will set rules as to who is "qualified" for medical procedures and who needs to make sure their will is in order.

The Feds will use your drinking habits, smoking, EXERCISE habits, age and more as determinants as to whether "expensive" medical procedures will be allowed. Life and death is not important, it is all "About the Benjamins" [big bucks].

Add to the list your weight--if you do not meet the government weight limits you might not get the cancer medicine to keep you alive, the heart surgery, the hip replacement; all might be out of the question.

Here is a question. Let us say you lose 50 pounds, then have a heart attack, how long will it take for that information to get from Corona, California to a high school graduate working for Dr. Berswick (the death loving doctor appointed by Obama to "cull" the herd), in the basement of a building in Kentucky, to decide if you get to live or die?

Now the kicker--this was NOT a part of the Obamacare bill, it was part of the STIMULUS bill.

"Section 3001 of the stimulus law says: "The National Coordinator shall, in consultation with other appropriate Federal agencies (including the National Institute of Standards and Technology), update the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan (developed as of June 3, 2008) to include specific objectives, milestones, and metrics with respect to the following: (i) The electronic exchange and use of health information and the enterprise integration of such information.(ii) The utilization of an electronic health record for each person in the United States by 2014."

Under this mandate in the stimulus law, Secretary Sebelius issued a regulation--developed by Dr. Blumenthal--that requires that all EHRs keep track of a persons Body Mass Index (BMI) score. Body Mass Index is a ratio between a persons weight and height, and is used to determine whether or not someone is overweight or obese. It is the preferred method of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for measuring obesity."

How totalitarian is this? Were I on Congress I would just vote no on everything--Obama is killing us--even when he is stealing money for special interests.

SOURCE. See also here

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Obama is REALLY angry at the Jihadists now that they are killing blacks

He even says that they are racists, so it's serious stuff

In an interview earlier today with the South African Broadcasting Corporation to air in a few hours, President Obama disparaged al Qaeda and affiliated groups' willingness to kill Africans in a manner that White House aides say was an argument that the terrorist groups are racist.

Speaking about the Uganda bombings, the president said, "What you've seen in some of the statements that have been made by these terrorist organizations is that they do not regard African life as valuable in and of itself. They see it as a potential place where you can carry out ideological battles that kill innocents without regard to long-term consequences for their short-term tactical gains."

Earlier today a senior administration official said the Obama administration believes that Al Shabaab carried out the attack.

Explaining the president's comment, an administration official said Mr. Obama "references the fact that both U.S. intelligence and past al Qaeda actions make clear that al Qaeda -- and the groups like al Shabaab that they inspire -- do not value African life. The actions of al Qaeda and the groups that it has inspired show a willingness to sacrifice innocent African life to reach their targets."

This can be seen, the official said, in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, when hundreds of Africans were killed and thousands wounded.

"Additionally, U.S. intelligence has indicated that al Qaeda leadership specifically targets and recruits black Africans to become suicide bombers because they believe that poor economic and social conditions make them more susceptible to recruitment than Arabs," the official said. "Al Qaeda recruits have said that al Qaeda is racist against black members from West Africa because they are only used in lower level operations."

"In short," the official said, "al Qaeda is a racist organization that treats black Africans like cannon fodder and does not value human life."

The president also said in the interview that "it was so tragic and ironic to see an explosion like this take place when people in Africa were celebrating and watching the World Cup take place in South Africa. On the one hand, you have a vision of an Africa on the move, an Africa that is unified, an Africa that is modernizing and creating opportunities; and on the other hand, you've got a vision of al Qaeda and Al Shabaab that is about destruction and death.

"And I think it presents a pretty clear contrast in terms of the future that most Africans want for themselves and their children," Mr. Obama said. "And we need to make sure that we are doing everything we can to support those who want to build, as opposed to want to destroy."

SOURCE

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Given Obama's plan to make NASA an organization for propping up Muslim egos, does this mean he plans to put a Muslim on Mars?

Mightn't be a bad idea, come to think of it, particularly if it is a one-way ticket

US President Barack Obama's plan to redirect astronauts to near-Earth asteroids and eventually to Mars has received a welcome boost. The Senate Commerce Committee yesterday unanimously approved a three-year spending plan for NASA to move more quickly to develop and operate a heavy-lift rocket. The panel also agreed to extend the life of the space shuttle program for a year.

Mr Obama's plan relies on commercial space development in the near future and puts off an immediate decision on a future heavy-lift rocket program that would carry astronauts to asteroids and beyond. "The goal was to preserve US leadership in space exploration and keep as much of the rocket industry talent as possible employed," said Senator Bill Nelson said.

The measure must next be considered by the full Senate and be incorporated in annual spending bills. The compromise came after several icons of the space program, including Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, blasted Mr Obama's plan, saying it was a mistake to rely on the private sector to provide spacecraft in a timely fashion.

The plan would extend the space shuttle program, scheduled for termination, for at least another year, authorising an additional mission to the International Space Station. It extends the International Space Station to at least 2020. It maintains the $US19 billion ($21.5 billion) total funding for NASA in the 2011 fiscal year beginning October 1.

It provides an average of $US1 billion a year over the next six years to promote commercial space development, compared with the White House's original request for $US1.2 billion a year over five years.

White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said the deal worked out with the senators "contains the critical elements necessary for achieving the president's vision for NASA".

Mr Obama told NASA workers at Cape Canaveral in April that he was committed to manned space flight and foresaw sending astronauts to an asteroid and onward to Mars in the coming decades.

SOURCE

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Left-leaning AMA was suckered

During the health care reform debate, while ignoring the throngs of angry Americans who took to the streets all across the country to protest the looming passage of ObamaCare, the White House and its congressional allies were very attentive to the constituents they valued. Mindful of the mistakes that had doomed Hillarycare in 1993, they worked assiduously to co-opt health care industry "stakeholders." The American Medical Association was by far the most important target of this strategy. Its shrinking membership notwithstanding, the AMA was still seen as a force to be reckoned with inside the Beltway and continued to enjoy considerable public esteem. Thus, Obama and the Democrats badly wanted their flagship social program to benefit from the political and PR advantages that come with the AMA's stamp of approval.

This was fortuitous for the AMA. It had a big problem called the "sustainable growth rate formula" (SGR). Created by the "Balanced Budget Act of 1997," SGR was meant to slow the growth of Medicare spending by tying physician payment increases to the expansion of Gross Domestic Product. And, because the cost of providing medical care grows faster than GDP, this formula guaranteed annual payment cuts for doctors who treat Medicare patients. The AMA has pressured Congress to repeal SGR and replace it with a system that tracks medical cost inflation, but this "permanent fix" has never materialized. Congress has instead opted for a series of last-minute, short-term fixes. Meanwhile, the cumulative payment cuts mandated by SGR hang over the medical community like the Sword of Damocles.

Thus, the AMA saw the push for ObamaCare as an opportunity to get SGR deep-sixed once and for all. Instead of fighting them, as it did during the 1990s, the venerable physician association decided to climb into bed with the Democrats. In exchange for an implicit promise to finally enact the long-sought permanent fix, the President of the AMA became a high-profile cheerleader for "reform."

In the end, however, "the physicians' perspective" wasn't valued quite as highly as Dr. Rohack was led to believe. The permanent fix was conspicuously absent from the final health care bill signed by the President in March, and the ObamaCare cost estimates promulgated by the Democrats assumed that SGR will stay in place. Nonetheless, still clinging to sweet memories of White House tête-à-têtes, the credulous medico continued throughout April to rhapsodize about ObamaCare. Implausibly claiming that "reform" would improve competition, provide more choice in the insurance marketplace, and reduce administrative burdens, Rohack was determined to keep his smile in place as he stood waiting at the altar.

He was still waiting at the end of May. The House had passed a temporary fix, which the AMA pronounced inadequate, but the Senate refused to go along even with that half-measure. By June 1, when a 21 percent cut in the Medicare payment rate was due to take effect, Rohack finally understood that he and the AMA had been …ah ... had. And Hell hath no fury like a surgeon scorned. On June 3, the seething sawbones denounced the Senate's irresponsibility, accusing Reid & Co. of going on vacation while the nation's seniors and their physicians waited for relief. He went on to unsheathe what he evidently thought would be a deadly weapon: "Today, the AMA is unveiling a new multi-million dollar ad campaign encouraging the public to contact their Senators and tell them to get back to work and fix Medicare now."

The Democrats of "the world's greatest deliberative body" were, however, not impressed. When the Senate finally returned to work, it passed a temporary measure even less satisfactory to the AMA than the House bill -- a "doc fix" that put off the Medicare payment cuts for a mere six months. Then, adding insult to injury, Nancy Pelosi refused to allow a House vote on that measure until the Republicans agreed to support a "jobs bill" they had absolutely no interest in passing. The GOP gleefully pleaded with Pelosi not to throw them in that briar patch while the AMA's new President, Cecil Wilson, cried foul and began to rend his clothing. Meanwhile, calculating that Congress would eventually grant yet another of its last-minute reprieves, the bureaucrats at Medicare halted payments to all physicians.

At length, as Congress prepared to head home for recess, the Democrats tossed a pittance in the direction of the weeping Dr. Wilson and thanked the AMA for its trouble. The country's largest physician association had completely compromised its integrity and received virtually nothing in return. Rohack and his fellow quislings delivered their patients and colleagues into the hands of Washington's health care bureaucrats in exchange for yet another temporary reprieve from Medicare payment cuts. They whined about Beltway perfidy, but had little choice but to accept a short-term fix set to expire immediately following the midterm elections, when neither the Democrats nor the Republicans will have any incentive to cough up the $240 billion required for a permanent solution to the SGR mess.

Even worse, the once-feared physician lobby has revealed itself to be far weaker than most, including the organization's membership, realized. The people that matter inside the Beltway now openly wonder how much clout the AMA actually wields. Sadly, it didn't have to be this way. Dr. Rohack could have used his organization's influence to encourage genuine free market reform.

SOURCE

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BrookesNews Update

Like every good Democrat Obama is incapable of learning his economic lessons: If the present trend continues then we can expect manufacturing to contract, overall production to shrink and unemployment to rise again before the November elections are called. The Democrats could then find themselves confronted by the electoral consequences of their own economic folly and the Fed's monetary mismanagement
Nancy Pelosi's economic idiocy and unemployment benefits : Nancy Pelosi's statement that unemployment payments stimulate growth and create jobs must rank as one of the most stupid statements ever made by a US politician. Nevertheless, it is based on one of the oldest fallacies in economics and one that needs to be constantly refuted
Obama's economic nightmare : Things have come to a sorry pass when millions of Americans can be so easily gulled by a political joke, the sort of man the English speaking peoples used to mock South Americans for electing. Just think Peron and what he did to the once very wealthy Argentina
Terrorist sympathisers hijack US Social Forum and spike reports on persecution of gays by Muslim states : As has happened so frequently in the history of anti-Semitism, hatred of Jews becomes a scapegoat and a smokescreen to avoid reality, personal failings, and real world problems. Sadly, like the "deshelved" Israeli products that the USSF hopes will rot on grocery store aisles, the USSF itself was dominated by the rotten stench of bigotry and ignorance
Market failure, the ABC and the economic illiteracy of the left : It isn't so-called market failure we have to fear but government failure and the economic ignorance of the media and the left
Six months to go until the largest tax hikes in United States history : In just six months, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect. They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves on January 1, 2011. For this gift Americans can thank President Obama and his fellow Democrats
The media leftist bigotry aids treason : The leftist media will defend mass murderers, treason, tyrants, sadists and all manner of political gangsters so long as they are socialists. To these treasonous ideologues it is not the crime that counts but who does it

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, 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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Rules changing in favour of the GOP?

Jonah Goldberg

For nearly a century now, the rules have said that tough economic times make big government more popular. For more than 40 years it has been a rule that environmental disasters -- and scares over alleged ones -- help environmentalists push tighter regulations. According to the rules, Americans never want to let go of an entitlement once they have it. According to the rules, populism is a force for getting the government to do more, not less. According to the rules, Americans don't care about the deficit during a recession.

And yet none of these rules seem to be applying; at least not too strongly. Big government seems more unpopular today than ever. The Gulf oil spill should be a Gaiasend for environmentalists, and yet three quarters of the American people oppose Obama's drilling ban. Sixty percent of likely voters want their newly minted right to health care repealed. Unlike Europe, where protestors take to the streets to save their cushy perks and protect a large welfare state, the Tea Party protestors have been taking to the streets to trim back government.

But even on the continent the rules are changing. European governments have turned into deficit hawks to the point where the American president feels the need to lecture them on their stinginess.

Of course, he increasingly feels the same need here at home as our out-of-control debt is becoming a live issue, despite the fact that voters should be clamoring -- according to the rules -- for more taxpayer-funded jobs.

Barack Obama recently recruited Bill Clinton to stump for the Democrats as a surrogate because the former president is more popular than the current one. It's ironic because candidate Obama had once disparaged the Clinton presidency as not ambitious enough. Obama wanted to be a liberal Reagan who would reverse the rising conservative tide in American politics (just as he would reverse the rise of the oceans), not be the sort of president who accepted the tide and merely navigated its currents.

But is it really so outlandish to imagine that Bill Clinton, a creature spawned from politics like a golem from clay, had a better sense of political reality than the ivory tower intellectual currently occupying the White House? Clinton proclaimed the era of Big Government was over, and left office quite popular.

Barack Obama said, in effect, "Oh no it's not" and his presidency and his party are in freefall, despite an economic climate that, according to the rules, says he should be not only running the table but be popular for it.

As a conservative, I'm very reluctant to believe that the rules change easily or often. And there's no end of explanations for the political climate that would leave the rules intact. But it's just becoming harder and harder to shake the feeling that something bigger than politics as usual is at work.

More HERE

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Voting fraud is real and can make a difference

Senator Al Franken likely owes his Senate victory to felons. With a razor thin victory over Senator Norm Coleman in 2008 of just 312 votes, felons convicted of crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assaults may have given Democrats the filibuster proof sixtieth vote that allowed Obamacare to be passed. Americans have good reason to ask how this could happen. Consider this:

--A conservative watchdog group Minnesota Majority has gone through voting records reportedly finding that at least 341 convicted felons voted illegally in just two of Minnesota's 87 counties during the 2008 general election. Undoubtedly other felons voted illegally in other counties.

-- After culling through 500 initial allegations of felons illegally voting, the Ramsey County Attorney's Office told The Minneapolis Star Tribune Monday that they are seriously investigating about 180 cases. Another 28 felons have already been charged. Hennepin county, which includes Minneapolis, winnowed 451 initial cases down to 216 that they are still looking at. Some other felons have already been charged. Both the Ramsey and Hennepin county attorneys are Democrats.

Whether one believes that those two counties account for 341 or possibly well over 400 felons illegally voting, the 2008 Senate vote was so close and research finds that felons vote so overwhelmingly for Democrats that the odds are quite likely that felons from those two counties gave Al Franken the election.

Even if no other felons voted in any other county, 341 votes and 96 percent of felons voting for Democrats would have given Franken the election. In fact, more than 96 percent of felons probably vote for Democrats (see here).

How can so many felons break Minnesota's law and vote? The problem is that voter registration lists are a mess. States are mandated under Section 8 of the "Motor Voter" law to periodically purge voter rolls -- to remove dead people, felons, illegal voters and those who have moved out of state.

But many states, including Minnesota, have refused to check these rolls, making it easy for felons to vote and for other vote fraud to occur.

The Bush administration had tried to force states to address these concerns. In 2005, one-third of Missouri counties refused to purge voter roles, leaving more registered voters than voting age residents.

The Democratic Secretary of State Robin Carnahan refused to enforce the federal law, and the Bush administration sued. Yet, in March 2009, the Obama administration dropped the case and it has not brought any others.

Worse, there is some evidence that the Obama administration doesn't want to stop voter fraud. J. Christian Adams, a former career Justice Department lawyer, told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights last week that Obama's Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes ordered Justice Department lawyers to drop all these cases. According to Adams, on November 30 last year Fernandes told 40 Justice Department lawyers: "We're not interested in those kind of cases. What do they have to do with helping increase minority access and turnout? We want to increase access to the ballot, not limit it."

For those who claim that vote fraud isn't a problem, Al Franken's election to the Senate demonstrates not only that vote fraud exists but also that it can alter elections and indeed the laws of the country.

Murderers, rapists, and robbers may not be the people we want providing the crucial votes that determine what America's laws should be.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Health insurance premiums to rocket: "The White House on Wednesday issued new rules requiring health insurance companies to provide free coverage for dozens of screenings, laboratory tests and other types of preventive care. The rules will eliminate co-payments, deductibles and other charges for blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol tests; many cancer screenings; routine vaccinations; prenatal care; and regular wellness visits for infants and children. Other services that must be offered at no charge include counseling to help people stop smoking; screening and counseling for obesity; and tests for infection with the virus that causes AIDS."

Obamacare begins — in Idaho: "When the Regime sets prices, this is called ‘applied compassion.’ When producers organize to complain about price controls, and then freely decide not to offer their services at the artificially low price, this is called ‘a criminal conspiracy to fix prices.’ This is the central claim of the ‘consent decree’ inflicted, at gunpoint, on a group of Idaho orthopedic surgeons by the Obama Regime — with the eager collaboration of the Idaho State Attorney General. Under the terms of that extorted agreement, it would be tantamount to a criminal offense for a doctor to complain to his peers about regulatory actions that may drive accomplished medical specialists out of business.”

Dems Have Lost Voters' Policy Support: "The Democrats got an earful from voters over the long Fourth of July recess, reinforcing internal party polls showing they have lost the nation's support for their big spending, welfare-state agenda. The boiling point came last Tuesday in a closed-door party caucus meeting of House Democrats in the Capitol, where rank-and-file members vented their anger toward a White House that seemed to be doing nothing to defend them and their "walk the plank" votes on everything from a failed trillion-dollar stimulus, Obamacare and energy taxes to excessive financial regulation reform."

Majority math: "Ok, so I’m hearing a lot of noise from people on the right and libertarian side of the aisles that ‘the dems are going to lose everything this election and we can undo everything Obama has destroyed yaaaay!!!!’ Yeah … No. Not Gonna Happen.”

Obamaland pension meltdown update: "And so it was prophesied: Illinois is headed into a public-pension death spiral even sooner than predicted. The Land of Obama leads the way. The state of Illinois — broke, overleveraged, and still refusing to get its accounts in order — is up to something interesting: selling bonds to meet its pension obligations.”

Pathetic spies: "Some of the commentary on the Russian agents recently captured by the FBI has centered on the fact that Moscow was spying on the United States while President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev celebrated their nuclear and diplomatic partnership at Ray’s Hell Burger, or on the evolving focus of Russia’s intelligence services. But all of this misses the real point: how much the mediocrity of the spy ring reveals about the decadence of present-day Russia.”

How about a triple-dip recession: "The politicians think they have discovered the magic cure. It’s called quantitative easing, or just plain printing money, but it’s the same the world over. When the economy looks bad, create more of those greenbacks. Whip your interest rates down. Then suddenly, instead of being strapped for cash, everyone’s wallowing in the stuff, and the low interest rates make it cheap to borrow for that new home, that new machine or factory, and indeed just to go on a shopping trip. The trouble is that, before long, people begin to realise that this is all just funny money. As the spending boom goes on, shopkeepers, property sellers and equipment manufacturers all put up their prices, so the big spenders are no longer any better off. They’re just deeper in debt. So then you dip down again, and off we go.”

Wards of the state: "The best book on Obama’s America has already been written. The president has two more years in office, six if he’s lucky, but already we know enough about the contours of his mind, his governing instincts, to predict that the volume in question will not be bettered. This is a large claim for a book that never once mentions Obama or America or the gushing wells of oil and words that seem to be, so far, his chief gift to us. Written in 1912 by Hilaire Belloc, an Anglo-Frenchman whose true home was the Middle Ages, The Servile State is an unlikely vade mecum for 21st-century Washington. Yet men with French names have a way of understanding the inner life of this country.”

Shocking the bourgeoisie: "Marx invented a world-historical role for them, Flaubert set out to disconcert them, and Matthew Arnold denounced them as the ‘Philistine class.’ They were the perfect foil for wit, exuberance, and iconoclasm, and for a hundred years following The Communist Manifesto of 1848 they filled an evident dramatic need. For the bohemian artist the bourgeoisie were visible, shockable, and obviously bad. They justified art as no class before had justified it, by being the defenseless target of abuse and satire. For the last 50 years, however, the bourgeoisie have been slipping quietly away.”

Terrorist-loving Leftist lawyer gets 10 years: "Radical lawyer Lynn Stewart is to be sentenced to 10 years and a month in prison — a new penalty that could keep her behind bars until she turns 80, a judge said Thursday. Stewart, 70, wiped tears and her supporters in Manhattan Federal Court started sobbing as the judge made his annoucement ahead of the formal sentence expected later Thursday. The controversial civil rights attorney was convicted in 2005 of helping bomb plotter Omar Abdel Rahman pass messages from prison to his terror cohorts in Egypt.”

In defense of payday lenders and their customers: "Almost 40 years ago Walter Block wrote a fun little book called Defending the Undefendable. In it he explicated the libertarian arguments in defense of all sorts of people and practices that most observers would find objectionable: drug dealers, pimps, and the like. One such group he defended was loan sharks, who charge high interest rates, normally on short-term loans.”

FTC wants to eliminate competition with government courts: "Yesterday the Federal Trade Commission staff issued a report declaring the nation’s debt collection system ‘broken.’ The staff concluded this because ‘consumers are not adequately protected in either debt collection litigation or arbitration.’ The staff is particularly down on arbitration, which is understandable. Arbitration competes with government-run courts, and the last thing the FTC — the agency charged with protecting and promoting competition — would want is to promote competition for the resolution of consumer credit disputes.”

NBC, CBS Reject Anti-Ground Zero Mosque Ad: "CBS and NBC have refused to air a provocative ad from the confrontational, well-funded National Republican Trust PAC that calls on Americans to oppose the building of a mosque two blocks from the World Trade Center site. The ad — which has about 100,000 views on YouTube — intersperses some of the most horrifying images from the Sept. 11 attacks with the sounds of Muslim prayer and images of Muslim militants. It focuses on what’s become a divisive — and partisan — issue in New York state, the erection of a Muslim cultural center on Park Place, in the neighborhood near the fallen towers."

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, 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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Hillary Supporters Shocked at Obama Tactics

Politics makes for strange bedfellows, all right. In light of appalling revelations of the fraud and intimidation Obamunists used to steal the Democrat nomination from Hillary, her own supporters — left high and dry by a mainstream media that is for all intents and purposes part of the Obama machine — are appealing to patriots to get their message out. From HillBuzz:

Here's filmmaker Gigi Gaston on Fox & Friends this morning, calling for an investigation into the fraud and voter intimidation Obama and his campaign engaged in back in 2008.

This is how Obama took the nomination from Hillary Clinton, and he used these same thug tactics in the general election to intimidate voters. He will be using the same playbook in 2012 as well, unless he and the DNC are stopped.

In this FOX clip, it's noted that Gaston is the granddaughter of a former Democrat governor … and she's now dedicated her life to exposing the DNC for the cesspool of corruption, fraud, and illegal activity that it is. That is the same boat all of us here are in as well: until 2008, we were all lifelong, unquestioning, party loyal Democrats who never in our lives dreamed our party would be responsible for thuggery like this.

The best way we can describe the feeling we have when we think about the DNC is to remember what the human characters on the TV show "V" felt like when they saw the masks ripped off the "Visitors", revealing them to be lizard people underneath. Even people who had been helping the Visitors, and trying to convince others that they were really here to "serve the human race" in the non-cook book sense were instantly transformed into Resistance fighters when they saw what really lurked behind those masks.

So it is for many lifelong Democrats out there, including such prominent names as Lynn Forester de Rothschild as well, who will never look at the DNC the same way again … not after its mask has been ripped off so spectacularly.

We need to find as many creative and engaging ways as possible to get conservatives and independents out there, who did not pay attention to the Democrat primaries in 2008, to know the story Gigi Gaston has told so well in We Will Not Be Silenced 2008.

It's the only way to stop the lizards at the DNC from doing all of this again in 2012.

Hillary Dems tacitly acknowledge that the establishment media isn't only vociferously partisan; it is sectarian. The DNC subsidiary known as the MSM decided the Manchurian Moonbat should be President. Otherwise, his minions' dirty tricks would have been plastered across the news from the beginning. This is why Shrillary supporters are counting on conservatives and independents to spread the word on Obama's Third World tactics.

Apparently even authoritarian collectivists advocate clean elections when dirty tricks leave them shafted. Here's where everyone but the most fanatical Obamunists can agree: Obama's tactics in the 2012 election, after he's had four years to load the system with ACORN/New Black Panther types, are going to create a stink that will make even his prototypes Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe wrinkle their noses in disgust. The dinosaur media will again be complicit.

SOURCE (See the original for links)

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Liberals analyze their Obama 'despair'

For many liberals, this is the summer of their discontent. Already disappointed with President Barack Obama’s ability to deliver on campaign promises, they now contemplate a slowing economic recovery and a good chance of Republican gains in November — two developments that could make enacting Obama’s agenda even more difficult.

Two recent essays framed the debate raging within the progressive community over why the promise of Obama’s candidacy has not lived up to their expectations — and how liberals should proceed in what they fear will be difficult months ahead.

In a 17,000-plus-word piece published in The Nation on Thursday, journalist Eric Alterman calls the Obama presidency “a big disappointment” for progressives and blames a broken system in Washington that he says allows the minority party to rule with impunity — and special interests and big money to dictate legislative policy.

“Face it,” he concludes, “the system is rigged, and it’s rigged against us.” His essay is subtitled: “Why a progressive presidency is impossible for now.”

But writing in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, editor Michael Tomasky counsels patience, arguing that American history has shown that change always takes time and continued effort against entrenched conservative opposition.

“The changes we want to see won’t happen in 18 months, or in two years, or four, or probably even eight,” he concludes in his article, “Against Despair.”

The essays suggest it is a time of reckoning for a liberal community whose relationship with Obama has had a series of ups and downs since the moment of hope and expectation when he claimed the presidency in Chicago’s Grant Park on Nov. 4, 2008.

“It’s not just really about Obama; it’s about the state of our country. Every day, you have a sense that people are wondering where this country is headed,” says Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation.

The elation of that night in 2008 quickly gave way to the realization that the No. 1 issue, the economy, and the ensuing fight over an $800 billion stimulus bill, would make Obama's agenda different from the one he had described in his campaign.

From the beginning, the stimulus bill was viewed as containing too many compromises in a futile attempt to garner Republican support. Economist and columnist Paul Krugman led the charge, arguing that the bill was not ambitious enough, containing too many tax cuts and not enough funding for infrastructure projects.

But the bill’s $800 billion price tag created a toxic environment for congressional Democrats when they began the long debate over health care, and many liberals viewed Obama’s compromises on the legislation as a betrayal. The low point may have been after the special election victory of Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) in January, when the possibility of any health care legislation seemed lost.

“It’s open season on Obama, whom so many hoped would lead us out of the neoliberal wilderness,” Firedoglake blogger Les Leopold declared not long afterward. “He once was a community organizer and ought to know how working people have suffered through a generation of tax breaks for the rich, Wall Street deregulation and unfair competition. When the economy crashed, he was in the perfect position to limit the unjustified pay levels on Wall Street.

“Instead, we got a multitrillion-dollar bailout for Wall Street, no health care reform, no serious financial reforms whatsoever, record unemployment and political gridlock that will be with us for years to come.”

More HERE

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Tax mad New York

And LeBron James is not the first to vote with his feet. Climate is not the only reason why the phonelines run hot between Boca Raton and NYC

A WEEK before LeBron James's announcement on ESPN that he was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to join the Miami Heat, the New York Post and Rush Limbaugh saw it coming -- and for reasons having nothing to do with sports.

"If LeBron James goes to the Miami Heat instead of the Knicks," the Post noted gloomily on July 1, "blame our dysfunctional lawmakers in Albany, who have saddled top-earning New Yorkers with the highest state and city income taxes in the nation, soon to be 12.85 percent on top of the IRS bite. There is no state income tax in Florida." Consequently, a five-year, $96 million contract (the estimated deal he could get in either city), would cost James $12.34 million in New York taxes, but nothing in Miami. "Quite a penalty for the privilege of working in Midtown."

On the radio that day, Limbaugh, an ex-New Yorker, amplified the point: "Here you have these poor schlubs that . . . own the Knicks and they're going to try to persuade LeBron James to move to New York to play for the Knicks and they gotta tell him, 'By the way, you're going to pay about 12 to 15, maybe $20 million more in taxes in New York than you would [in Florida].'" Limbaugh drolly asked his audience whether James should take the Knicks' offer "and pay the additional taxes to show his 'compassion,'" or sign with Miami and "use the additional money for his own economic stimulus."

Other armchair accountants raised the tax issue after James's announcement on July 8. The Miami Herald and CNBC pointed out that because Cleveland has a city income tax and Miami doesn't, even a Heat contract worth $29 million less than what the Cavs offered him would still leave James with $1 million more in take-home pay. The Wall Street Journal remarked that Cleveland should be used to high-income refugees fleeing its excessive tax rates, having seen half of its Fortune 500 companies -- and tens of thousands of taxpayers -- leave in recent years.

In sports as in most other enterprises, the more you tax something, the less of it you generally end up with it. World-class athletes are no more immune to financial incentives than world-class doctors, lawyers, or entrepreneurs.

On Monday, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, the world record-holder in both the 100- and 200-meter dash, pulled out of next month's Diamond League track meet at the Crystal Palace in London. The reason: Britain's exorbitant tax laws, which would force Bolt to pay more in taxes than he would earn by winning the race. Lewis Hamilton, a British Formula One racing star, moved to Switzerland after his first season in 2007. He initially said he was seeking "to escape the public eye," commented the Wheels blog at NYTimes.com, "but there's no getting around the fact that Switzerland is also a tax haven."

The first boxing event at the new Yankee Stadium in June -- a fight between Miguel Cotti and Yuri Forman for the World Boxing Association's junior middleweight title -- attracted well over 20,000 spectators. But Yankees COO Lonn Trost conceded afterward that future fights of that caliber are unlikely, since the tax on a fighter's purse in New York is much higher for non-residents than it is elsewhere. That extinguishes any hope of a Yankee stadium superfight between champions Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao. "We'd love to do [Mayweather-Pacquiao], but I believe both of them are non-residents," Trost told the New York Post, "and the tax could be as much as 13 percent on the purse, where the tax out in Vegas is zero. That's a big difference." It sure is.

Avoiding high taxes is not the only reason sports stars -- or anyone else -- move from one jurisdiction to another. Weather, family, education, love -- any of them may play a role. But it is no coincidence that far more people migrate from high-tax states (California, New York, Ohio) to low-tax states (Florida, New Hampshire, Texas) than the other way around. When tax rates bite, taxpayers and businesses are driven to escape -- or are deterred from coming in the first place. There's nothing inexplicable about the fact that people don't like paying high taxes and may change their lives to avoid them. The real mystery is why so many advocates of high taxes never seem to learn that lesson.

SOURCE

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An interesting email from Sam Wells, one libertarian who is NOT reflexively "anti-war"

As the 2010 elections approach, the pro-Democrat Party propaganda machine is in high gear and left-wing agents of disinformation are being dispatched to confuse and mislead. Much of this activity has already been going on for years; it is just on a more intense level these days.

For example, regardless of the actual historic origins of the word "neoconservative" in America, the label "neocon" has come to be used as a smear term against conservative Jews -- i.e., those independent thinkers who have chosen to leave the Democrat Party reservation and vote Republican instead of doing what they are told to do by the old-guard left-wing leaders. According to exit polls, 77% of those who identified themselves as Jewish voted for Obama in 2008. The DNC wants to keep it that way, of course, but since Obama's election there has been an increasing wave of sentiment change within the Jewish community away from the Democrat Party and toward the Republican Party or in sympathy with the tea party activities. The label "neocon" is also used by "anti-war" posturers against anyone they perceive as disagreeing with them.

At the same time, those individualist libertarians and objectivists who have warned against the trap of ethnic identity syndrome (as exemplified by the Madoff swindle cases) are targeted by whispering campaigns as "antisemitic" or worse. Genuine self esteem comes from personal efforts toward achievement of laudable goals rather than identifying oneself with a racial collective or tribal group. It is important for libertarians and conservatives not to fall for these divisive tactics of the establishment Left.

This is certainly not to say that I agree with all those who define themselves as "neoconservatives"; not at all. I have often cautioned that many of even the true neoconservatives seem to cling to some liberal-left baggage from their pasts, especially in the area of economics or domestic policy. But I am more concerned about the possible influence of populistic ideological tangents on the pro-liberty American Right.

We need all the allies we can get, it seems to me. To the extent that the neoconservative agenda (a strong U.S. military preparedness and a pro-American foreign policy) is consistent with my own pro-freedom outlook tactically and strategically, I advocate welcoming those who are relatively new allies in the fight against leftism rather than denouncing them with smear labels borrowed from the left-wing propaganda mills.

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, 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 National Association for the Advancement of Coddled People

Michelle Malkin

Before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People decided to ride the anti-tea party wave back to political relevancy, its most recent activist crusade involved a silly space-themed Hallmark graduation card. Yes, the NAACP has been lost in space for quite some time now. And blaming whitey will no longer cut it.

In June, the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP demanded that the greeting card be pulled because it used the term "black holes" (which the bionically equipped ears of the p.c. police insisted sounded like "black whores"). "It sounds like a group of children laughing and joking about blackness," one NAACP official complained.

It was a group of hipster cartoon characters chattering about the universe and galaxies and wide-open possibilities to new high school and college grads. Alas, this is what has become of the once-inspired drive against racial discrimination.

In just a few short decades, the stalwart strivers for equality have turned into coddled whiners for hypersensitivity. The NAACP is a laughingstock. The group no longer represents the best interests of oppressed minorities, but the thin-skinned whims of the black elite and the ravenous appetite of the Nanny State. Establishment civil rights leaders now use their once-compelling moral authority to hector, bully and shake down corporate and political targets.

As Ward Connerly, the truly maverick opponent of government racial preferences who is black, wrote recently, "the NAACP is not so much a civil-rights organization as it is a trade association with clear links to the Democratic Party, despite the claim of its chairman that 'the NAACP has always been non-partisan.' Such a statement doesn't pass the giggle test. The NAACP uses the plight of poor black people as a fig leaf to hide its true agenda of promoting policies that benefit their dues-paying members, not black people in general or poor black people in particular."

To compensate for squandering the proud history of the civil rights organization on innocent greeting cards, NAACP leaders introduced a much-hyped resolution at their annual convention this week attacking the nation's biggest racial bogeyman: the tea party movement. It's a tried and true tactic of worn-out grievance-mongers: When you can't find evil enough enemies to blame for your problems, manufacture them. (Just ask hate crimes huckster Al Sharpton.) This is why one of the most popular signs spotted at tea party protests across the country remains the one that reads: "It doesn't matter what this sign says. You'll call it racism, anyway!"

The NAACP resolution calls on its chapters across the country to "repudiate the racism of the Tea Parties" and stand against the movement's attempt to "push our country back to the pre-civil rights era." Yet, it's the NAACP that lobbied the Obama White House to dismiss voter intimidation charges against the thugs of the New Black Panther Party, according to Justice Department whistleblower J. Christian Adams. It's the NAACP that opposes the 21st century school choice movement to free poor minority students from rotten government schools, as black parents in Washington, D.C., have suffered firsthand. It's the NAACP that elevates "diversity" above academic rigor as its primary education goal. And it's the NAACP that backs retrograde, race-based set-asides and classifications that encourage cronyism of color championed by their water-carriers at the Congressional Black Caucus.

And it's the NAACP that tolerates racist sneers and smears like those leveled by the St. Louis NAACP chapter against black limited-government activist Kenneth Gladney, who was derided by civil rights leaders as an "Uncle Tom" after he was beaten bloody by Service Employees International Union henchmen last summer.

Addressing the convention on Monday, first lady Michelle Obama urged NAACP mau-mau-ers to "increase" their "intensity." She's a pro at employing intense accusations of racial oppression as a defense against criticism and milking the victim-ocracy for all its worth.

At Princeton, she complained about "further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant." But rather than remaining "on the periphery," Mrs. Obama climbed the crooked Chicago ladder on a rapid ascent to the top. She hopped from Princeton to Harvard to prestigious law firms, cushy nonprofit gigs and an exclusive Hyde Park manse, before landing in the East Wing with the greatest of ease.

Question the timing of the tea party-demonizing resolution? You bet. The NAACP's man at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. finds himself radically out of step with the American mainstream in the lead-up to the 2010 midterms. He sent his wife to the convention to re-establish White House racial authenticity at a time when increasing numbers of minorities are now as fed up with massive debt, usurpation of individual liberties, corruption in Washington and chaos on the border as everyone else.

It's a black hole bonanza. Cue the distraction: RAAAACIST!

SOURCE

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Prosperity Requires Humility

In August of 2005, Houston investment banker Matt Simmons predicted in a New York Times feature article that the price of oil, then $65/barrel, would soar.

Simmons, who had written a book arguing that the world is running out of oil, was predicting oil prices “in the high triple digits.”

After reading Simmons’ prediction, John Tierney, a libertarian, who was then an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, telephoned Simmons and called him on it. He asked him if he’d be willing to put money on his prediction.

The two made a $10,000 bet. If the average oil price five years hence in 2010, adjusted for inflation, exceeded $200, Simmons would win. If not, Tierney would pocket the ten grand.

We’re now into the second half of 2010, and the average oil price, in 2005 dollars, is $70. Unless there is a remarkable explosion in the oil price for the remainder of 2010, driving it well above $300, Matt Simmons loses this bet. It was not even close.

The point here is to try and learn something from this that is relevant to what is going on today.

Simmons is an energy specialist. The company he founded advertises itself as “the only investment bank specializing in the entire spectrum of energy.”

It’s reasonable to assume that he knows a zillion times more about exploring for and producing oil than John Tierney. But Tierney didn’t make the bet because he felt he knew more about drilling for oil. He made the bet because he knows something about markets and change.

If markets are relatively free to adjust, it just doesn’t matter how smart you are, or how much you know about a particular commodity or business, you are not going to know what the world is going to look like in five years. Chances are, you are not going to know what it is going to look like in a year.

Now suppose Matt Simmons, instead of being a private businessman making bets on his convictions was, instead, a government official setting policy.

This is what we’ve got today. Pinheads with power who think they know the last detail of how the world works and what it is going to look like, not just over the next couple years – but years down the road.

For them tomorrow is simply a repeat of yesterday. The idea that life is about surprises and the unknown – that what we know is a small splotch compared to what we don’t know – takes humility. And humility is the last thing on the radar screen of power brokers who feel they know so much that they are comfortable planning and taking over the lives of their fellow citizens.

Doomsday scenarios dominated thinking about energy in the 1970’s. It led to major government interference in these markets that just made things worse.

Reagan became president in 1981, cut taxes, cut spending, and decontrolled oil prices. Within a couple years, oil prices dropped to a third of where they were, and stayed there for 15 years.

When I worked on welfare reform, doomsday sayers claimed that getting rid of perpetual government welfare would throw poor people into the street. No one wound up in the street, and many got off welfare, found work, and built new lives.

The biggest problems our country has today relate to government planning gone awry. The huge solvency problems we have with Social Security and Medicare all relate to assumptions these government planned systems were built on that turned out to be false.

Now we have only to watch and wait as the disaster that will follow our new government takeover of our heath care unfolds. Every opportunity for new, creative solutions that would emerge from a free market has been squashed. The bureaucrats now reign.

Freedom is about humility not hubris. Our nation’s current problems reflect the latter. Our only hope for renewed bounty and prosperity is to restore the former.

SOURCE

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Attacks on Freedom

John Stossel

Something's happened to America, and it isn't good. It's become easier to get into trouble. We've become a nation of a million rules. Not the kind of bottom-up rules that people generate through voluntary associations. Those are fine. I mean imposed, top-down rules formed in the brains of meddling bureaucrats who think they know better than we how to manage our lives.

The National Marine Fishery Service (NMFS) received an anonymous fax that a seafood shipment to Alabama from David McNab contained "undersized lobster tails" and was improperly packed in clear plastic bags, rather than the cardboard boxes allegedly required under Honduran law. When the $4 million shipment arrived, NMFS agents seized it. McNab served eight years in prison, even though the Honduran government informed the court that the regulation requiring cardboard boxes had been repealed.

How about this one? Four kindergartners -- yes, 5-year-old boys -- played cops and robbers at Wilson Elementary in New Jersey. One yelled: "Boom! I have a bazooka, and I want to shoot you." He did not, of course, have a bazooka. Nevertheless, all four boys were suspended from school for three days for "making threats," a violation of their school district's zero-tolerance policy. School Principal Georgia Baumann said, "We cannot take any of these statements in a light manner." District Superintendent William Bauer said: "This is a no-tolerance policy. We're very firm on weapons and threats."

Give me a break. These are just some of the stories featured in a new book, "One Nation Under Arrest". I'll discuss more on my Fox Business show Thursday night.

Here's another: Ansche Hedgepeth, 12, committed this heinous crime: She left school in Washington, D.C., entered a Metrorail station to head home and ate a French fry. An undercover officer arrested her, confiscating her jacket, backpack and shoelaces. She was handcuffed and taken to the Juvenile Processing Center. Only after three hours in custody was the 12-year-old released into her mother's custody. The chief of Metro Transit Police said: "We really do believe in zero-tolerance. Anyone taken into custody has to be handcuffed for officer safety." She was sentenced to community service and now carries an arrest record. Washington's Metro has since rescinded its zero-tolerance policy.

Keith John Sampson, a student-employee at Indiana-Purdue University Indianapolis, had the temerity to read "Notre Dame Versus the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan" during breaks on the job. One student complained because the book's cover depicted the Klan. The university then found Sampson guilty of racial harassment! Thankfully, a great organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), came to his defense and got his school record cleared.

Palo Alto, Calif., ordered Kay Leibrand, a grandmother, to lower her carefully trimmed hedges. Leibrand argued that no one's vision was obstructed and asked the code officer to take a look. He refused. Then the city dispatched two police officers. They arrested her, loaded her into a patrol car in front of her neighbors and hauled her down to the station.

In 2001, honor student Lindsay Brown parked her car in the wrong spot at her high school. A county police officer looked inside and saw a kitchen knife -- a butter knife with a rounded tip. Because Lindsay was on school property, she had violated the zero-tolerance policy for knives. She was arrested, handcuffed and hauled off to county jail where she spent nine hours on a felony weapons possession charge. School Principal Fred Bode told a local paper, "A weapon is a weapon."

Congress creates, on average, one new crime every week. Federal agencies create thousands more -- so many, in fact that the Congressional Research Service itself said that merely counting them would be impossible.

This is a bad trend. As Lao Tsu said, "The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be."

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Democrats losing Wall Street fat cat support? "At some point when your enemy continues to bash you and hurt you and cost you money, you reach the point of ‘Enough’s enough!’ It seems the power brokers on Wall Street are getting the message. Democrats aren’t their friends. … There’s a fine line here that Democrats in their hubris clearly have crossed. Wall Street, like business interests and taxpayers and any other segement of the population, can be bullied and mollified — to a point. At some point the pain inflicted exceeds the bones thrown to appease, such as cutting special tax deals for segments of the larger group, or handing out stacks of other taxpayers’ money. At some point the pain is plainly more than any perceived benefit.”

American sclerosis: "On Stuart Varney’s FBN program this morning, they debated whether the financial ‘reform’ bill will kill job creation. I can’t see how a two-thousand plus-page law ever avoids doing that. Politicians, many of whom are lawyers, share the conceit that they can manage life with paper and procedure. They don’t understand that just the quantity of their rules cause entrepreneurs to simply say: ‘I won’t even try.’ Why did German and Japan thrive after WWII? Because American bombs destroyed years of accumulated bureaucracy. Well, that’s probably one big reason. Their new governments started from scratch. With fewer rules, German and Japan prospered. America now moves in the opposite direction.”

Increasingly unpopular airport body scanners may offer false security: "USA Today documents the growing resistance to the use of body scanners at airports — a resistance that’s particularly marked in Europe. Complaints about the devices include the expected concerns about privacy, long lines, expense and potential health concerns from even the relatively low levels of radiation emitted by the machines. It should be noted in addition, however, that body scanners aren’t some kind of proven, super-secure technology that offers us a choice between guaranteed safety and keeping our naughty bits under cover. In fact, the machines may offer a false sense of security.”

Live Aid: 25 years later: "It’s been a quarter-century since the dream of Band-Aid, USA For Africa, Live Aid, and other celebrity-studded charitable means to stop the famine in Africa generally and Ethiopia particularly. But one wonders how one should send relief in an area where famine was caused in part by civil war? The relief aid would become just another target of the warring factions. Since then, little has changed on the continent.”

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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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

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

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