The Size of Government and the Choice This Fall

In polls, Americans overwhelmingly prefer small government and low taxes to the alternative. Yet they've been given big government, one program at a time

By ARTHUR C. BROOKS AND PAUL RYAN

As we move into this election season, Americans are being asked to choose between candidates and political parties. But the true decision we will be making—now and in the years to come—is this: Do we still want our traditional American free enterprise system, or do we prefer a European-style social democracy? This is a choice between free markets and managed capitalism; between limited government and an ever-expanding state; between rewarding entrepreneurs and equalizing economic rewards.

We must decide. Or must we? In response to what each of us has written in the preceding months, we have heard again and again that the choice we pose is too stark. New York Times columnist David Brooks (no relation) finds our approach too Manichaean, and the Schumpeter columnist in The Economist objected that, "You can have a big state with a well-functioning free market."

Data support the proposition that Americans like generous government programs and don't want to lose them. So while 70% of Americans told pollsters at the Pew Research Center in 2009 they agreed that "people are better off in a free market economy, even though there may be severe ups and downs from time to time," large majorities favor keeping our social insurance programs intact. This leads conventional thinkers to claim that a welfare state is what we truly want, regardless of whether or not we mouth platitudes about "freedom" and "entrepreneurship."

But these claims miss the point. What we must choose is our aspiration, not whether we want to zero out the state. Nobody wants to privatize the Army or take away Grandma's Social Security check. Even Friedrich Hayek in his famous book, "The Road to Serfdom," reminded us that the state has legitimate—and critical—functions, from rectifying market failures to securing some minimum standard of living.

However, finding the right level of government for Americans is simply impossible unless we decide which ideal we prefer: a free enterprise society with a solid but limited safety net, or a cradle-to-grave, redistributive welfare state. Most Americans believe in assisting those temporarily down on their luck and those who cannot help themselves, as well as a public-private system of pensions for a secure retirement. But a clear majority believes that income redistribution and government care should be the exception and not the rule.

This is made abundantly clear in surveys such as the one conducted by the Ayers-McHenry polling firm in 2009, which asked a large group of Americans, "Overall, would you prefer larger government with more services and higher taxes, or smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes?" To this question, 21% favored the former, while 69% preferred the latter.

Unfortunately, many political leaders from both parties in recent years have purposively obscured the fundamental choice we must make by focusing on individual spending issues and programs while ignoring the big picture of America's free enterprise culture. In this way, redistribution and statism always win out over limited government and private markets.

Why not lift the safety net a few rungs higher up the income ladder? Go ahead, slap a little tariff on some Chinese goods in the name of protecting a favored industry. More generous pensions for teachers? Hey, it's only a few million tax dollars—and think of the kids, after all.

Individually, these things might sound fine. Multiply them and add them all up, though, and you have a system that most Americans manifestly oppose—one that creates a crushing burden of debt and teaches our children and grandchildren that government is the solution to all our problems. Seventy percent of us want stronger free enterprise, but the other 30% keep moving us closer toward an unacceptably statist America—one acceptable government program at a time.

This process has led to a visceral type of dissatisfaction with the current direction of our country. The president's job approval has fallen almost linearly since he took office (standing today at 45%, according to Gallup; 41%, according to Rasmussen) despite the fact that his policies are precisely what he promised when he handily won the 2008 election. Rasmussen finds that only 29% believe we are headed in the right direction as a nation and two-thirds say they are angry about current policies of the federal government. Majorities believe that "big government" poses the greatest threat to our country, according to Gallup.

Millions of Americans instinctively look to our leaders for a defense of our culture of free enterprise. Instead, we get more and more publicly funded gewgaws and shiny government novelties to distract us. For example, the administration stills touts the success of programs such as "Cash for Clunkers" in handing out borrowed money to citizens while propping up a favored industry. Yet Rasmussen found 54% of Americans opposed the program (only 35% favored it). Plenty of people may have availed themselves of that notorious boondoggle, but a large majority understand we were basically just asking our children (who will have to pay the $3 billion back) to buy us new cars—and that's not right.

More and more Americans are catching on to the scam. Every day, more see that the road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises, and an opportunistic leadership that chooses not to stand up for America's enduring principles of freedom and entrepreneurship.

As this reality dawns, and the implications become clear to millions of Americans, we believe we can see the brightest future in decades. But we must choose it.

SOURCE

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Lincoln's war

How come every other civilized country abolished slavery WITHOUT a civil war?

The truth of the matter is that the Civil War was absolutely not fought over slavery. To understand how this is so, there are two pieces of evidence to consider. The first is the situation of high protective tariffs. In this pre-16th Amendment America, the federal government was funded solely through user fees, land sales, and tariffs. The southern economy, being largely agricultural, was highly dependent upon importing manufactured goods. This situation was something that all 13 original colonies shared, but as the new Republic developed, and the Industrial Revolution took off, the North, being less suited to agriculture, became a manufacturing powerhouse. The South then had a choice to make in importing its needed goods: continue to purchase goods from the British and French predominantly (as they had done since the colonial days) or purchase from the new northern manufacturers.

In order to strongly coerce the South into doing business with the North exclusively, the federal government erected very high protective tariffs and limitations against imports. What this did was make it too expensive for the South to import goods from England or France, even if those goods were preferable, and created a monopoly in which the northern manufacturers received the majority of the South’s business. This situation is evidenced by the Nullification Crisis of 1832, in which South Carolina nullified the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832, with their near 50% average duty. The stalemate forced the hand of the federal government to lower the average rate to between 15 and 20% with the Tariff of 1833. This dispute was temporarily quieted, but not for long.

The Morill Tariff passed into law March 1861 was the final straw on the back of the South. Economist Thomas J. DiLorezo writes in a Mises.org article that the Morill Tariff increased the average tax rate from around 15% to 37.5%, while also greatly expanding the imports subject to it. The South rightly perceived that the forced tariff at the hands of the federal government, dominated by northern interests, was a tyranny upon their right to free trade.

When SC seceded from the Union, followed by ten other states, the federal government had a very grave problem on its hands. Without the forced market of the South, the federal government’s tax revenues would plummet. The federal government was entirely dependent upon the tariff that was paid exclusively by southern imports. The federal government had two options: force the South to stay in the Union, and thereby keep the tax revenue, or watch the South freely trade with other nations, and eventually run out of money. The choice was clear for Abraham Lincoln. The Union was to be preserved above all costs.

Lincoln’s own words prove that for him, this was never about human rights, but about preservation of the Union. In his infamous August 1862 letter to NY Tribune editor Horace Greeley, Lincoln betrayed his true intentions for waging war:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.

Further evidence of this is seen in the Joint Resolution on the War issued by Congress in 1861. “Resolved: . . . That this war is not being prosecuted upon our part in any spirit of oppression[...], nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those states, but to[...] preserve the Union”.

The federal government was not interested in freeing the slaves. They were only interested in keeping the South attached to the North and the tariff revenue that union provided. Let the true historical record show that the Civil War was not fought over slavery.

Secondly, as mentioned above, Lincoln was not motivated out of the concern for human rights in deciding what course to take. Even with his famed Emancipation Proclamation, the notion of him being a “Second Moses” is greatly exaggerated. If one looks at the Emancipation closely, you’ll discover a problem: “[...]all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free [...]”.

The document is clear that the states “in rebellion” would have their slaves freed. However, if you were a slave in Delaware, Kentucky, Marlyand, or Missouri, slave-holding states that did not secede from the Union, you were not emancipated at all. In fact, for the first time in US history, slavery was actually officially recognized on the federal level. The Emancipation Proclamation drew the lines of slavery inclusively around the slaves in the border states, through an executive order. Great Emancipator? Hardly.

The last point to be addressed will show how Lincoln wrote the blueprint for the excess in government and tyranny that has become hallmarks of the American political system, and of the presidency in general. So much of the angst in our country today is over the intrusion of the federal government into our personal lives. We are touched by government everyday in more ways than we can imagine. In no particular order, I will just list off some of the actions of President Lincoln that put us on the slippery slope to where we are today.

1. Violation of Article 4 Section 4 that compelled the federal government to protect the states from invasion. Here the federal government was the invasion force.

2. Arrest and detainment without trial of the Maryland Legislature to prevent a vote on secession.

3. Conversely, supporting the secession of WV from VA, and recognizing the reorganized government of Virginia as legitimate despite the fact that it was not popularly elected.

4. Suspension of habeus corpus. Imprisonment and detainment of thousands of dissidents, including newspaper editors and even Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio.

5. Established the first direct income tax in 1862.

Much of what Lincoln did during the course of the Civil War was repeated and expanded in later years. As historian James G. Randall notes in his book Constitutional Problems under Lincoln, “it would not be easy to state what Lincoln conceived to be the limit of his powers.” Perhaps a more appropriate moniker for Lincoln would be the “Great Tyrant”.

The federal government greatly increased its powers over the states and the citizens as a direct result of the war. Where the South was devastated by its effects, the federal government emerged stronger and more haughty than ever. As a condition of allowing the states back into the Union (that they created in the first place) the state constitutions of the former Confederacy were forced to be rewritten, in order to specifically outlaw secession (proof that secession was not illegal in 1861). The federal government had waged a war to gain power, control, and revenue, and it made sure that this power gained would be permanent.

The veneration of corrupt men as demigods in the secular, civil religion of American history is not only inaccurate, but it is nefarious and shameful. The point of this article isn’t to be provocative, or to just flame-throw. I am not anti-American, or pro-slavery, or anything else one might try to read into my words. I am, however, very deeply interested in truth. Truth will only be achieved by erasing mythos out of American history. Literature has plenty of fictional heroes, the stuff of legend. An American history textbook should have no such characters.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Cuba: Regime to eliminate 500,000 state jobs, spur private sector: "Cuba will let more than 500,000 state employees go by next March and try to move most to non-state jobs in the biggest shift to the private sector since the 1960s, the official Cuban labor federation said Monday. … The statement said eventually more than a million jobs would be cut … More than 85 percent of the Cuban labor force, or over 5 million people, worked for the state at the close of 2009, according to the government.”

Obama will sell advanced arms to fundamentalist Muslims: "The Obama administration is preparing to notify Congress of plans to sell $60 billion of military equipment to Saudi Arabia, according to a U.S. defense official. … The proposed package includes 84 newly manufactured F-15/SA fighter aircraft; 70 upgraded aircraft, 70 Apache helicopters, 72 Black Hawk helicopters, and 36 AH-6 Little Bird helicopters. A number of bombs and missiles also are in the deal, including the Joint Direct Attack Munition, a satellite-guided bomb, as well as a laser-guided Hellfire missile variant and some advanced targeting technology.”

US Senate Republicans say they’ll block tax increase: "President Barack Obama’s plan to raise taxes on wealthier people while preserving cuts for everyone else appears increasingly likely to founder before Election Day. Senate GOP leaders declared on Monday that Republicans are, to a person, opposed to legislation that would extend only middle-class tax relief — which Obama has repeatedly promised to deliver — if Democrats follow through on plans to let tax rates rise for the wealthiest Americans.”

There is a big 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

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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What makes Obama tick?

Like all modern-day Leftists, he hates America -- but for somewhat different reasons

By Dinesh D'Souza

A good way to discern what motivates Obama is to ask a simple question: What is his dream? Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King's dream? Or something else?

We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.

So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.

An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.

I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century. To most Americans, however, anticolonialism is an unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.

Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races."

Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in their own countries. Obviously the solution is to resist and overthrow the oppressors. This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India.

Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?"

As he put it, "We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now." The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."

Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.

While the senior Obama called for Africa to free itself from the neocolonial influence of Europe and specifically Britain, he knew when he came to America in 1959 that the global balance of power was shifting. Even then, he recognized what has become a new tenet of anticolonialist ideology: Today's neocolonial leader is not Europe but America. As the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said--who was one of Obama's teachers at Columbia University--wrote in Culture and Imperialism, "The United States has replaced the earlier great empires and is the dominant outside force."

From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the end of the Cold War, America has been the sole superpower. Moreover, 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world.

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world's energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America's carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.

Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government's leash. That's why Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks--so that he can maintain his control.

For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.

If Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn't really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified under certain circumstances.

Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan. He views some of the Muslims who are fighting against America abroad as resisters of U.S. imperialism. Certainly that is the way the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi portrayed himself at his trial. Obama's perception of him as an anticolonial resister would explain why he gave tacit approval for this murderer of hundreds of Americans to be released from captivity.

In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir "the record of a personal, interior journey--a boy's search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." And again, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself."

Much more HERE

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The background to 9/11: Left-inspired American spinelessness

In contrast to Pearl Harbor, the assault on the World Trade Center was hardly a “sneak attack” that American intelligence agencies had little idea was coming. Its Twin Towers had already been bombed eight years earlier, and by the same enemy. The terrorists themselves were already familiar to government operatives, their aggressions frequent enough that several commissions had been appointed to investigate. Each had reached the same conclusion. It was not a matter of whether the United States was going to be the target of a major terrorist assault; it was a matter of when.

In fact, the al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks had first engaged U.S. troops as early as 1993 when the Clinton Administration deployed U.S. military forces to Somalia. Their purpose was humanitarian: to feed the starving citizens of this Muslim land. But, America’s goodwill ambassadors were ambushed by al-Qaeda forces. In a 15-hour battle in Mogadishu, 18 Americans were killed and 80 wounded. One dead U.S. soldier was dragged through the streets in an act calculated to humiliate his comrades and his country. The Americans’ offense was not that they had brought food to the hungry. Their crime was who they were—”unbelievers,” emissaries of “the Great Satan,” in the political religion of the enemy they now faced.

The defeat in Mogadishu was a blow not only to American charity, but to American power and American prestige. Nonetheless, under the leadership of America’s then commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton, there was no military response to the humiliation. The greatest superpower the world had ever seen did nothing. It accepted defeat.

On February 26, 1993, eight months prior to the Mogadishu attack, al-Qaeda terrorists had struck the World Trade Center for the first time. Their truck bomb made a crater six stories deep, killed six people and injured more than a thousand. The planners’ intention had been to cause one tower to topple the other and kill tens of thousands of innocent people. It was not only the first major terrorist act ever to take place on U.S. soil, but—in the judgment of a definitive account of the event—”the most ambitious terrorist attack ever attempted, anywhere, ever.”

Six Palestinian and Egyptian conspirators responsible for the attack were tried in civil courts and got life sentences like common criminals, but its mastermind escaped. He was identified as Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, an Iraqi Intelligence agent. This was a clear indication to authorities that the atrocity was no mere criminal event, and that it involved more than individual terrorists; it involved hostile terrorist states.

Yet, once again, the Clinton Administration’s response was to absorb the injury and accept defeat. The president did not even visit the bomb crater or tend to the victims. Instead, America’s commander-in-chief warned against “over-reaction.” In doing so, he telegraphed a clear message to his nation’s enemies: We are unsure of purpose and unsteady of hand; we are self-indulgent and soft; we will not take risks to defend ourselves; we are vulnerable.

The al-Qaeda terrorists were listening. In a 1998 interview, Osama bin Laden told ABC News reporter John Miller: “We have seen in the last decade the decline of the American government and the weakness of the American soldier who is ready to wage Cold Wars and unprepared to fight long wars. This was proven in Beirut when the Marines fled after two explosions. It also proves they can run in less than 24 hours, and this was also repeated in Somalia. We are ready for all occasions. We rely on Allah.”

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Netanyahu toughens up: "Israel's Prime minister touched a raw nerve with the Palestinians last night by demanding they recognise Israel as a Jewish state - something they have long rejected. Benjamin Netanyahu insists such recognition must be the foundation for peace and that he regrets that the Palestinians have not yet agreed. "The foundation of the state of Israel is that it is the nation-state of the Jewish people," Mr Netanyahu said at the start of the Israeli Cabinet's weekly meeting. "That is the real basis of the end of demands from the state of Israel and the end of the conflict between the two peoples." Mr Netanyahu has made recognition of Israel's Jewish character a central demand, suggesting the Palestinians' failure to do so means they have not come to terms with Israel's existence."

Creative destruction: "Who is Greg Ip? I hadn’t heard of him, and began reading his WSJ Op Ed expecting another tedious diatribe, but the economics editor of the Economist surprises me with new insights. First he reminds us how the silly American media worried about a rising Japan in the 80’s. … He argues that Japan grew faster in the 80’s because it was catching up. … Now both countries fear stagnation. Ip’s wise solution? More creative destruction.”

Obama aides cheat on taxes: “Forty-one aides to President Obama owe $831,000 in back taxes. Meanwhile, as noted earlier, unpaid taxes have risen 37 percent among Capitol Hill staff, to $9.3 million. Taxes, it seems, are only for the little people, not their liberal overlords. Even the Treasury secretary, who oversees the IRS, has cheated on his taxes.”

Shielding “professionals” from competition: "What Sturm wants, of course, is the federal government to intervene in the dying newspaper market and save it from Internet-based competition. This is why the Federal Trade Commission has been holding b.s. ‘workshops’ on this subject. A shield law is an important step towards cartelizing journalism under federal control. Once you have a shield law, you have to define what a journalist is and is not. This becomes a judicial (and regulatory) question that requires input from all sorts of lawyers, academics, and other ‘experts.’ The process alone will exclude the blogger (*cough*) who simply wants to bring greater transparency to the state and its harmful interventions.”

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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Geert Wilders Warns America at 9/11 Remembrance Rally

And he didn't need a teleprompter



Dutch Parliamentarian and freedom fighter, Geert Wilders, gave an outstanding speech. “No place on earth had a more multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-lingual workforce than New York’s proud towers.

That is exactly why they were targeted. They constituted an insult to those who hold that there can be no peaceful cooperation among people and nations without submission to Sharia; to those who wish to impose the legal system of Islam on the rest of us.

But New York and Sharia are incompatible. New York stands for freedom, openness and tolerance. New York’s Mayor recently said that New York is “rooted in Dutch tolerance.

Those are true words. New York is not intolerant. How can it be? New York is open to the world. Suppose New York were intolerant. Suppose it only allowed people of one persuasion within its walls. Then it would not be New York, it would be New Mecca, a city without freedom.”

SOURCE

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Three Realizations from 9/11

The events of 9/11 were a trauma for America, but as in all traumas, there is much to be learned. Some of this is practical, e.g., prohibiting box-cutters on airplanes, but others lessons are more complex. Let me offer three such realizations.

First, we now know that millions of people, mainly zealous Muslims both here and abroad passionately hate America. This is not the garden variety anti-Americanism, for example, European contempt for our crass popular culture. Nor is this aversion just “a dispute.” Those who merely disagree do not become suicide bombers and kill themselves to make their point.

It is boiling, mind-clouding hatred of everything about us: majority rule democracy, religious tolerance, cultural pluralism (e.g., homosexuality, women’s rights), separation of church and state, protected free speech and a free press, ample personal liberty, a passion for economic achievement and everything that defines who we are.

Indeed, loathing even applies to rationality, intellectual debate, science—in short, they hate “the West.” This obsessive abhorrence has existed for decades perhaps longer, but until 9/11 we hardly noticed it and Many Americans still cannot grasp its scope and intensity.

Second, this detestation seems incorrigible. It will not vanish if America’s Middle East policy shifts nor if we shower Afghanistan will billions in foreign aid. Nor will anger cool if Americans make nicy-nice to Muslims at home. Pandering by inviting Imams of dubious backgrounds to the White House to celebrate the end of Ramadan or talking tough is irrelevant.

It is almost as if hatred is genetically hard-wired so any action, regardless of motive or outcome “proves” America’s evil. Again, as with the hatred itself, Americans, an overwhelmingly kind and pragmatic people, have real trouble understanding this rage —surely, we hope, there must be something we can do to abate this anti-American, anti-West fury. Apparently not, however.

Third, since 9/11 our historical repertory of responses has proven useless and we continue to be befuddled. Bombing the Taliban into the Stone Age is pointless when they already live in pre-modern villages. As mentioned, all the economic and humanitarian generosity counts for naught. We intervened in Bosnia to save Muslim lives, withdrew our military from Saudi Arabia so as not to offend Muslim sensibilities, even sent US troops to rescue Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, but nothing mattered. Have Saudi princes re-directed their charitable giving to the USO as a sign of gratitude?

To speculate just a bit, when it comes to winning friends abroad, we seem stuck in the Europe of between 1944 and the early 50’s. Here America was the heroic (and appreciated) savior from Nazi rule and impending starvation, and young Parisian girls rushed out to kiss the liberating GI’s. Those newsreels have left an indelible impression on our collective mind. No doubt, many Americans still don’t fathom why so many Iraqis violently turned on us after we freed them from Saddam Hussein’s bloody dictatorship. Muslim women rushing up to GI’s are now assumed to be suicide bombers.

But of all this befuddlement, none outshines our self-induced paralysis. Nine years afterward we are still confused, squabbling over the most elementary facts and it seems endless. Thanks to our PC infected brains, we want to fight “a war” without offending the enemy.

How many Americans know the difference between al-Qaida and the Taliban? We are even perplexed about the enemy’s name—are they Islamic terrorists or just plain “terrorists”? How about generic sounding “militants,” “extremists,” or, as in Iraq, “insurgents”? What about Islamofacism? Or even “perverted Islam”? Where does the ethnic label “Arab” fit when many terrorists are not Arabs, do not speak Arabic and may even loathe Arabs? And what drives their passion—Islam in general? Is the culprit just Wahhabism? Or, conceivably, do the attacks reflect only personal grievances and frustrations cloaked in a religion?

We are even unsure of whether dozens of similar incidents are linked or just perpetrated by “lone wolves” who coincidently share certain religious beliefs about killing innocent Americans. Indeed, a few public officials disdain the whole idea of “a war on terror” and insist that everything can be handled as if these were humdrum criminal acts. Recall WW II when Admiral Bull Halsey explained his strategy as “killing Japs, killing more Japs and pretty soon they lose the will to fight.”

These recognitions—hatred, intractability and our confusion--do not arrive with simple prescriptions for improvement; solutions must be extracted. There is a place for complexity and nuance but not when fighting a war. Clearly, at least in my view, acting wisely on these lessons requires a leadership to articulate the problem, honestly explain why past solutions have failed, and perhaps most of all, stop trying to assuage our enemies in the futile hope that yet one more appeasement will bring victory.

SOURCE

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Americans are finally beginning to open their eyes to the reality of a hostile Islam

Once again we remember and honor those who perished in the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks. And we stand eternally grateful before those who have sacrificed so much to keep us safe from further attacks and other dangers.

But something new and extraordinary commingles with commemoration on this ninth anniversary of the attacks. One senses a heightened public understanding of Islam, and in particular its dark – theocratic and jihadist – side. Add to that deep fear that our appeasement-minded political and opinion leaders are causing us to lose the war against Islamic radicals who attack us in the name of their religion and against those in our midst who practice “stealth jihad.”

Andrew McCarthy, author of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, views this epiphany as a “tectonic shift” dramatically triggered by the planned construction of a mega-mosque next to the sacred precinct of Ground Zero. How apt this locus, the former site of the World Trade Center, “the inevitable fault line between Islam and the West.”

Most Americans reject the building of this mosque on grounds that its existence would stand as a cruel and monumental insult to those who died on 9/11. They believe that Islamic radicals would trumpet it as a symbol of their victory over us and, indeed, many triumphal mosques have been built on the revered sites of conquered peoples throughout Islamic history.

Americans are also concerned that this mosque would serve as a stronghold for political Islam and Islamic hegemony in New York City. Ground Zero mosque imam Feisal Abdul Rauf openly promotes Islamic Sharia law, a system that denies our basic cherished freedoms and the equality of rights for all people before the law.

Americans in droves now reject both the erection of this mosque and the elites’ accommodation to Islamism. They have begun to grasp that, doctrinally, “moderate Islam” does not exist, although, as McCarthy states, “there are millions of Muslims who are moderate people” as well as “dedicated Muslims working to transform their faith into something that is institutionally moderate.”

For twenty years Americans have been slaughtered by Islamists, spilled blood and treasure for Islamic peoples, and accepted the building of thousands of mosques, even though, McCarthy explains, they have been used to violent ends against us. All the while, we have been labeled as intolerant victimizers.

On 9/11/10 many Americans are indicating they have had enough. Signs of passionate resistance abound. The prospect of a Ground Zero mosque (combined with the fact that in the Age of Obama, as Caroline Glick notes, they are repelled by rejection of the American creed and seek to reclaim what they feel to be their birthright) have awakened this nation to radical Islam and an array of other present dangers.

Daniel Pipes conveys this bracingly: "The energetic push-back of recent months … now feels like a movement … those who reject Islamism and all its works now constitute a majority and are on the march …"

Once this lesson is learned, the new energy brings the defeat of Islamism dimly into sight.

SOURCE

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9/11 With My Son

Bruce Kesler

On 9/11, I awoke, turned on the computer, saw something bad had happened in New York, turned on the TV in the living room, and sat there from 6AM to 9PM Pacific. My then 1 ½ year old son was toddling around. Several times I hugged him and cried, for America, for New Yorkers, for the battles that I was sure lay ahead, and for my son’s future in that world.

My son has a Hebrew name, shield of Joshua, and an English name, non-labeling, as he, his younger brother and my wife visit my mother-in-law in Dusseldorf, Germany for a month each summer. We don’t want the boys targeted by the increased number of open anti-Semites in Europe, especially the radical Arab youth who prowl the streets. Some of the wonderful counselors at the summer camp my sons go to in Dusseldorf are Muslim. My sons are warned to keep their religion to themselves, not knowing who might be infected with hate. The synagogue in Dusseldorf is well-secured and under constant police protection.

Back home, in suburban San Diego, my sons don’t have that fear. But, since 9/11 there is a locked gate and a guard at the Jewish preschool my sons attended, and guards around our synagogue. The fear is spreading in the US, as is the Leftist-Muslim alliance to delegitimize Israel and to stir hate. We have Muslim friends, who are not radical, and appreciate being in the US. And, 64% of Arabs in the US are Christian, who know persecution for not being Muslim. Unfortunately, their voices, though subdued, are drowned out by those with bigger mouths and designs.

Last Memorial Day, we went to Petco for a Padres game. At the end was a stirring salute to the US military. On the way home, my now 10-year old son, knowing I served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, quietly asked me what I felt. I told him, simply, that sometimes we have to fight, not because we want to, only after trying not to, to do good and to survive.

To my surprise, a few weeks ago, my son came into my office and told me he was watching a four-part, two-hour, documentary about 9/11 on Youtube. Since 9/11, I’ve not watched such films, trying to avoid the pain and fear I felt in 2001. Neither had my son watched any, or been taught about it in school.

I watched the documentary, very factual and matter-of-fact, with my son. After, I asked my son what he was feeling. He said, “I’m glad the US has people who will fight so another 9/11 or worse doesn’t happen again.” Religion is about doing good, not feeling good.

SOURCE

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Victory over Evil

When a nation loses its way and gives up on its own destiny, exchanging the birthright of its own exceptionalism for the porridge of self-amusement—it takes a collision with an unthinkable evil to remind it of its place in the world. Too many Americans had accepted the postmodern view of the world, one in which there was neither good nor evil, just a variety of opinions and viewpoints. That postmodern world seemed more comfortable with its welcoming non-judgmentalism and its disbelief in destiny. It was a world that did not ask anything of us, except to occasionally pretend that we care.

9/11 changed that. It tore down the sky and opened a gaping hole in the self-centered arrogance that had been the legacy of the 90’s, best exemplified by its champion, the morally ambiguous William Jefferson Clinton. It reminded us that we cannot just be satisfied with bread and circuses. That the world does not exist for our amusement. And that all views and beliefs are not created equal. That despite the ironic detachment of pop culture, there was a right and a wrong. And that despite the retreat from faith in a higher being, to a faith in our own technocratic castles in the sky, there was such a thing as good and evil. And not that we had forgotten that we were meant to be the good-- evil had come to pay a call on us.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, and even long before then, many Americans had ceased to believe that there was an evil out there. Only different views, governments and cultures. But in defeating one evil, a power vacuum had opened in which an old dormant evil could thrive again. And so it shall always be.

We had come to think of the “good life” as a natural and inevitable outcome of our own gifts and talents. But it requires more than that. It requires that we stand ready to resist those who would destroy it. On 9/11 we met our opposite, the mirror image of what we had allowed ourselves to become. Fanatics with a murderous faith, confronting a country that had come too close to forgetting its own. Destroyers attacking a civilization of builders. Barbarians besieging the gate of a civilization that had forgotten the sacrifices which had built their cities, and the price paid to raise up their walls.

9/11 interrupted the culture of passivity with a warning and a challenge. Either we would defy and defeat evil anew, or it would consume us whole, as it had done to so many cultures and countries around the world. Our “good life” could not be seen as an unchallenged gift, but an inheritance we would have to fight for over and over again. There is horror in that, but there is also greatness. Because men and women are not uplifted by wallowing in comfort and plenty, but by testing their bodies and souls against challenges, and prevailing over them.

SOURCE

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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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IN MEMORIAM

Of the innocent victims of a primitive and barbaric religion

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A Conservative Movie Initiative

The midterm elections this fall will feature young people born in 1992 – in other words, four years after Ronald Reagan left office. What do they know about this man?

It’s quite likely that many of them have been told of Reagan’s firm resolve to win the Cold War. But it’s also likely they haven’t learned about the Reagan budget policies that led to a historic economic recovery. Instead, liberal revisionists are working overtime to assign to the Gipper’s tax cut policies the blame for deficits on his watch. Given the disastrous performance of Barack Obama, it’s time to give this man a serious look once again.

Young Hollywood director and producer Ray Griggs has made a breezy and yet substantive documentary titled “I Want Your Money” that can educate young voters on the differences between Reaganomics and Obamanomics. Some might say that Griggs is trying to become the conservative Michael Moore, but that would be unfair, since Moore’s documentaries often depart from the classification of “nonfiction.” When Moore claims health care is better in Cuba than America, or that Iraq before the Iraq was a placid kite-flying paradise under Saddam Hussein, serious filmmakers run from him.

Griggs is talking about a real, gripping American disaster: our trillion-dollar deficits under Obama and the ever-increasing weight of the national debt. Conservatives in this film are appalled by the loose spending of George W. Bush and Congress over the last decade, and correctly so. But they know Obama is making those deficit years look like a nursery-school exercise in overspending. What’s emerging now is Tea Party anger, of conservatives who’ve been pushed too hard for too long.

“I Want Your Money” is stuffed with weighty conservative experts – Steve Moore, Steve Forbes, Newt Gingrich, Ed Meese, Ken Blackwell, and more. But perhaps the most affecting visuals are the old clips of Ronald Reagan, speaking so clearly about the perils of liberal profligacy. There is Reagan at the convention in Dallas in 1984 joking “We could say they spend money like drunken sailors, but that would be unfair to drunken sailors...because the sailors are spending their own money.”

It also has a “BS meter” which goes berserk when Speaker Nancy Pelosi claims that the Democrats will pass the Obama agenda, including ObamaCare, with “no new deficit spending.”

The film not only discusses green-eyeshade budgeting, but the larger philosophical debate between capitalism and socialism. In an animated segment, the Reagan character lectures “Obama” about what kind of productivity you would get in a classroom if everyone was awarded the same grade, no matter how serious the effort: a dramatically reduced work effort from the productive people, while the lazy students would forever be lazy.

It exposes a real contrast between presidents. As experts point out in the film, Ronald Reagan used clarity to teach you about the real world. Barack Obama uses eloquence to hide what he’s doing, because if his real agenda became clear, as it did with ObamaCare, it would be opposed by the majority.

Griggs found a very nice film clip of the late Nobel Prize-winning capitalist economist Milton Friedman speaking to a dark-haired Phil Donahue in 1979. Donahue proclaimed that capitalism was all about greed. Why, Friedman wondered, was it that political self-interest was so much nobler than economic self-interest? A voter born in 1992 has probably never witnessed Milton Friedman’s television work, especially his “Free to Choose” documentary series (also in those paper-stuffed things called books). This kind of exposure could cause a rediscovery, just like this year’s new interest in Friedrich Hayek’s book “Road to Serfdom.”

So how will this film get into theaters, since it’s not one of those left-wing documentaries? A national effort is being organized by Motive Entertainment, the company that promoted the grassroots campaigns for “The Passion of the Christ” and the first “Chronicles of Narnia” movie. In mid-September, they’ll begin organizing private screenings to celebrate Constitution Day on September 17. From there, organizers will prepare for an October 15 theatrical launch in more than 500 theaters from coast to coast.

But this campaign to show box-office appeal won’t be successful without the same grass-roots energy that mobilized the Tea Party protests. The movie trailer on YouTube has more than two million page views. If everyone who watched the trailer would turn out for the whole movie, then theater owners would have no choice but to take notice.

Perhaps, then, Americans will laugh when news anchors (like CNN’s Rick Sanchez) try to describe Obama’s campaign speeches as “Reaganesque.” We can’t even find a Republican who has fully earned that grand adjective, and it certainly doesn’t fit the socialist blather of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

SOURCE

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Afghanistan presents no impossible military challenge, its so-called ‘history’ notwithstanding

By ANDREW ROBERTS

In the lexicon of the Left, the adjective “unconquerable” has now attached itself to the noun “Afghanistan” just as indelibly as the adjective “illegal” once attached itself to the noun “war in Iraq.” The New York Times, NPR, the Huffington Post, and the BBC, let alone the wilder shores of the liberal blogosphere, all take it for granted that Afghanistan has always been “the graveyard of empires” — thereby more or less openly encouraging us to draw the inevitable conclusion that the present struggle against the Taliban is unwinnable. Yet the truth could not be more different; rather than the graveyard of empires, Afghanistan has historically been their revolving door.

For as Thomas Barfield of Boston University, author of Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, points out: “For 2,500 years [Afghanistan] was always part of somebody’s empire, beginning with the Persian Empire in the fifth century b.c.”

The reason that Alexander stayed in Afghanistan so briefly was that there was so little to keep him there, in terms of wealth or produce; he went to Afghanistan to pass through into India. Afghanistan had already been conquered by the Median and Persian Empires beforehand, and afterwards it was conquered by the Seleucids, the Indo-Greeks, the Turks, and the Mongols. The country was quiet for most of the reigns of the Abbasid Dynasty and its successors between 749 and 1258. When Genghis Khan attacked it in 1219, he exterminated every human being in Herat and Balkh, turning Afghanistan back into an agrarian society. Mongol conqueror Tamerlane treated it scarcely better. The Moghuls held Afghanistan peaceably during the reign of Akbar the Great, and for well over a century afterwards.

Hardly any of these empires bothered to try to impose centralized direct power; all devolved a good deal of provincial autonomy as the tribal and geographical nature of the country demanded in the period before modern communications and the helicopter gunship. Yet it was they who ruled, and the fact that the first recognizably Afghan sovereign state was not established until 1747, by Ahmad Shah Durrani, illustrates that the idea of sturdy Afghan independence is a myth.

Nor is Islamic fundamentalism a historically deep-seated phenomenon in Afghanistan. NATO is often accused by the Left of trying to impose Western values on the Afghans, but it was King Amanullah who instituted Kemalist modernization — such as monogamy, Western clothing, and the abolition of the veil — back in 1928. The only people seeking to impose a foreign culture on Afghans are the Taliban.

One of the more recent historical examples of Afghans’ supposed ability to fend off colonial powers, the country’s struggle with the British Empire, deserves close scrutiny. For all the undoubted disaster of Britain’s First Afghan War, the popular version of events is faulty in several important respects. It is true that 16,500 people died in the horrific Retreat from Kabul, but fewer than a quarter of them were soldiers, and only one brigade was British.

The moronic major-general William George Keith Elphinstone evacuated Kabul in midwinter, on Jan. 6, 1842, and the freezing weather destroyed the column as much as the Afghans did; one Englishwoman recalled frostbite so severe that “men took off their boots and their whole feet with them.” Wading through two feet of snow and fast-flowing, freezing rivers killed many more than jezail bullets did, and despite Lady Butler’s painting of assistant surgeon William Brydon entering Jalalabad alone on his pony, in fact several hundred — possibly over a thousand — survived the retreat and were rescued by the punitive expedition that recaptured Kabul by September 1842. Early in 1843, the governor-general, Lord Ellenborough, sent Sir Charles Napier to capture Sind, and thereafter Afghanistan stayed quiet for 30 years.

Sir Jasper Nicolls, the commander-in-chief of India, listed the reasons for the defeat at the time as: “1. not having a safe base of operations, 2. the freezing climate, 3. the lack of cattle, and 4. placing our magazines and treasure in indefensible places.” The lessons NATO needs to learn from the Kabul catastrophe of 1842 are therefore precisely nil, for none of these are applicable in Afghanistan today, where NATO has not lost a single man from frostbite, has not lost a significant engagement against the Taliban, and does not fight with a baggage train of civilians four times its number. Lack of cattle isn’t so important nowadays, either.

The Second Afghan War, which was actually won by Maj. Gen. Sir Frederick Roberts (no relation) at the battle of Kandahar in August 1880, holds similarly few lessons for us today. The major problems in 1878 were the maintenance of lines of communication over the passes and the intimidation of people in the occupied towns. NATO’s lines of communication are not being harried today, and anyhow air power has transformed that as well as the battlefield.

After 1880, in the words of Richard Shannon’s book The Crisis of Imperialism, “Afghan resistance was subdued and Afghanistan was reduced to the status virtually of a British protectorate” until it was given its independence in 1919.

More HERE

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How ObamaCare Guts Medicare

The president's pledge that 'If you like your health plan, you will be able to keep it' clearly does not apply to America's seniors

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has attacked Senate Republican candidates for wanting "to end Medicare as we know it." And in Nevada's hotly contested Senate race, Majority Leader Harry Reid is attacking Republican Sharron Angle, saying she wants to "gut" Medicare. But Mr. Reid has already gutted it. He and his colleagues did so by passing ObamaCare.

In his analysis accompanying the recently released Annual Report of the Medicare Board of Trustees, Richard Foster, Medicare's chief actuary, noted that Medicare payment rates for doctors and hospitals serving seniors will be cut by 30% over the next three years. Under the policies of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, by 2019 Medicare payment rates will be lower than under Medicaid. Mr. Foster notes that by the end of the 75-year projection period in the Annual Medicare Trustees Report, Medicare payment rates will be one-third of what will be paid by private insurance, and only half of what is paid by Medicaid.

Altogether, ObamaCare cuts $818 billion from Medicare Part A (hospital insurance) from 2014-2023, the first 10 years of its full implementation, and $3.2 trillion over the first 20 years, 2014-2033. Adding in ObamaCare cuts for Medicare Part B (physicians fees and other services) brings the total cut to $1.05 trillion over the first 10 years and $4.95 trillion over the first 20 years.

These draconian cuts in Medicare payments to doctors, hospitals and other health-care providers that serve America's seniors were the basis for the Congressional Budget Office's official "score"—repeatedly cited by the president—that the health-reform legislation would actually reduce the federal deficit. But Mr. Obama never disclosed how that deficit reduction would actually be achieved.

There will be additional cuts under ObamaCare to Medicare Advantage, the private option to Medicare that close to one-fourth of all seniors have chosen for their coverage under the program because it gives them a better deal. Mr. Foster estimates that 50% of all seniors with Medicare Advantage will lose their plan because of these cuts. Mr. Obama's pledge that "If you like your health plan, you will be able to keep it" clearly does not apply to America's seniors.

Moreover, there will be additional cuts to Medicare adopted by bureaucrats at the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board. ObamaCare empowers this board to close Medicare financing gaps by adopting further Medicare cuts that would become effective without any congressional action. Mr. Foster reports that "The Secretary of HHS is required to implement the Board's recommendations unless the statutory process is overridden by new legislation."

The drastic reductions in Medicare reimbursements under ObamaCare will create havoc and chaos in health care for seniors. Many doctors, surgeons and specialists providing critical care to the elderly—such as surgery for hip and knee replacements, sophisticated diagnostics through MRIs and CT scans, and even treatment for cancer and heart disease—will cease serving Medicare patients. If the government is not going to pay, then seniors are not going to get the health services, treatment and care they expect.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

City Council Meetings to Begin with Muslim Prayers: "In the wake of the battle over a mosque at Ground Zero, a move by the Hartford City Council is sure to have its critics. The Council announced Tuesday that it has invited local imams to perform Islamic invocations at the beginning of the Council meetings in September. Though meetings don't regularly begin with any form of prayer, an email from the Common Council called it "an act of solidarity with our Muslim brothers and sisters."

Missouri’s licensing boards: Killing jobs every day: "Decades ago, only doctors, lawyers, and accountants were required to get a license from the state before they could lawfully practice their professions. Over time, however, clever people in other lines of work realized that they could use the state government insulate themselves from competition by establishing licensing requirements and other regulatory barriers. The established interests in that profession would, of course, be ‘grandfathered’ in and so would not have to obtain the schooling or pass the examinations that would be required for those wishing to compete with them.”

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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Yearning for rites, ritual and group membership in the world of the individual

I have long argued (See particularly the subhead "Conservatives and emotion") that there is a human need for connectedness both with a group (which can be as broad as a nation) and with the past (which can be a family past or a national past). And conservatives easily satisfy that instinctive need with, for instance, concentration on the family and love of their country and its traditions.

Leftists, however, in their hatred of their own society, are largely cut off from such satisfactions -- hence their extremism and irrationality when they find something or someone whom they feel they can identify with -- from Adolf Hitler to Barack Obama, from Nazism to the many other forms of extreme Leftism (including Communism, Trotskyism etc.)

Interesting to see similar thinking below in a Westernized Australian Muslim. The examples of ritual and custom that he gives focus on Australia but similar American customs and rituals come easily to mind: Thanksgiving, 4th of July etc.

By Tanveer Ahmed

Life in our secular and material world often lacks ritual. From praying in a house of worship to participating in a family dinner, time-honoured rites have become less common. The demands of efficiency do not care for such intangible worth.

Ramadan, the holy month of fasting when Muslims abstain from eating or drinking from sunrise to sunset, is ending. It is believed the first verses of the Koran were revealed during this period, and its end is signalled by the sighting of the new moon.

My family is not religious, but it is a practice we like to perform. It binds us to our ancestral past and connects us to a cultural group. Almost all cultures have some tradition of fasting. Whether it is Catholics avoiding meat on Fridays, the Jewish tradition of Yom Kippur, or Native American tribes fasting to stimulate ecstatic experiences: fasting is ubiquitous.

In modern times fasting has become more associated with political protest than religion. Gandhi is perhaps its most famous proponent, but more recently in Australia, asylum seekers have become the torch bearers. Tamils protesting at the maltreatment of their brethren in Sri Lanka are the latest examples.

As a psychiatrist, myths and their associated rituals often form the backdrop to many problems I see.

A growing group of my patients fall in the category of what is called borderline personality disorder, an illness where patients cannot calibrate their emotions and often engage in damaging behaviours like self-mutilation or food deprivation. They can suffer visions and a loss of boundaries. They usually present in their adolescence.

An American study in 2008 study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found the prevalence was much higher than was previously thought, at around 6 per cent.

Many of these damaging behaviours are similar to rites of passage in more traditional cultures, suggesting the disorder may be related to the failure of Western, liberal culture to provide context and myth for meaningful phases in development. Their symptoms may actually be attempts at self healing gone astray in a culture bereft of an integrative spiritual and ritualistic context.

Individual narratives have their parallels in societies and communities. Anthropologists have long had a chicken and egg argument about the relationship between myths and ritual.

Anzac Day is an example. There have been record turnouts in recent years to dawn services in venues such as Martin Place, especially among young people. A new generation of Australians have embraced the Anzac legend as their most powerful myth of nationhood, and with it has come the ritual of attending the dawn service. It has helped fill a need in a post-religious society that no longer delivers ancient certainties to young people in search of spiritual nourishment.

Our most recent election could also be construed as a grand ritual built on a myth. Modern democracies hinge on the idea of representation, of one person standing for a much larger group of people, making the decisions "they" might expect to make had they been consulted. This mysterious link between representative and represented is established and renewed in ritual form; through elections.

An anthropologist at Sydney University, Stephen Juan, argues the yearning for ritual and group membership has never been greater, especially in a society becoming more fragmented and atomised. He points to a host of trends such as rave parties, the growth in events like outdoor concerts and the rise of radical religious movements such as Hillsong or Islamic extremism as part of the same pattern.

Juan has observed that even consumer rituals such as buying presents or shopping for oneself are examples of rituals of the least nourishing kind. "When in doubt, we go and buy. It makes us feel empowered, that we are deserving of love, albeit for an instant."

But even consumer rituals can have value when used to create social bonds and nourish interpersonal relationships, a fact marketers have long exploited, often resulting in people putting consumption ahead of the social bonds the act of shopping is meant to strengthen. And yet consuming more only increases our yearning for those bonds.

SOURCE

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Even America's liberal elites concede that Obama's Presidency is crumbling

Democrats in Congress are no longer asking themselves whether this is going to be a bad election year for them and their party. They are asking whether it is going to be a disaster. The GOP pushed deep into Democratic-held territory over the summer, to the point where the party is well within range of picking up the 39 seats it would need to take control of the House. Overall, as many as 80 House seats could be at risk, and fewer than a dozen of these are held by Republicans.

Political handicappers now say it is conceivable that the Republicans could also win the 10 seats they need to take back the Senate. Not since 1930 has the House changed hands without the Senate following suit.

Is this a piece from National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal or Fox News.com, all major conservative news outlets in the United States? No. It’s a direct quote from yesterday’s Washington Post, usually viewed by conservatives as a flagship of the liberal establishment inside the Beltway. The fact The Post is reporting that not only could Republicans sweep the House of Representatives this November, but may even take the Senate as well, is a reflection of just how far the mainstream, overwhelmingly left-of-centre US media has moved in the last month towards acknowledging the scale of the crisis facing the White House.

To its credit, The Washington Post has generally been ahead of the curve compared to its main competitors such as The New York Times in reporting President Obama’s travails, but its striking front page coverage of the “Democrats’ plight” and talk of a possible GOP Senate win (regarded as fantasy just a fortnight ago) was a bold step for a publication that is probably read in every office of the Obama administration.

The Post also ran another headline yesterday on its front page – “Republicans making gains ahead of midterm elections” – which would undoubtedly have sent a shudder through the White House. It carried a new poll commissioned jointly with ABC News, which showed public faith in Barack Obama’s leadership has fallen to an all-time low, with just 46 percent approval. The Washington Post-ABC News survey revealed high levels of public unease with President Obama’s handling of the economy, with 57 percent of Americans disapproving, and 58 percent critical of his handling of the deficit.

For most of the year, America’s political and media elites, including the Obama team itself, have touted the notion of an economic recovery (which never materialised), significantly underestimated the rise of the Tea Party movement, and questioned the notion that conservatism was sweeping America.

It is only now hitting home just how close Washington is to experiencing a political revolution in November that will fundamentally change the political landscape on Capitol Hill, with huge implications for the Obama presidency. What was once a perspective confined largely to Fox News, online conservative news sites, or talk radio is now gaining ground in the liberal US print media as well – historic change is coming to America, though not quite the version promised by Barack Obama.

SOURCE

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The Constitution Trumps Islamic Law

When reading stories about that formerly obscure Florida preacher who wants to mark the ninth anniversary of 9/11 by burning a stack of Qurans, bear in mind that the only law he breaks in doing so is Islamic law. With this in mind, it should become clear that the extraordinary global campaign against this stunt is yet another concerted effort, aided by an army's worth of useful fools, to bring our constitutional republic into conformance with Islamic law.

Islam demands "respect" with an intensity and strategic purpose well beyond other beliefs. (Still) don't believe me? For indelible culture contrast, imagine the worldwide body count in reaction to a hypothetical NEA-funded project entitled "Piss Mohammed," or the absence of a worldwide body count in reaction to the Army's actual decision to discard and burn a bunch of Bibles on a U.S. base in Afghanistan last year for fear of offending Muslims in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan -- a land where Christian converts (Abdul Rahman) and promoters of (minimal) women's rights (Sayed Pervez Kambakhsh) must flee with their lives, by the way.

What Islam is demanding, then, is a separate speech code for itself. This demand is manifested at the highest diplomatic levels in a strategic campaign by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the Islamic bloc of 57 nations that functions in the international arena as an Islamic supra-state. The OIC has long been maneuvering to bring international law into conformance with Islamic law by prohibiting "defamation of religions" -- namely Islam -- at the United Nations.

This same demand also manifests itself in the society-level assumption that Islam should somehow exist in a state of exaltation that no Western society grants any belief system, or any God.

That narrative, or rationale, tells us that burning a Quran causes murder and mayhem, putting our troops, our citizens, our cities and our interests at increased risk. In this narrative, the actual bad actors are absolved of both volition and blame. Similarly, drawing cartoons of Muhammad (Kurt Westergaard, Lars Vilks) -- or not drawing cartoons of Muhammad ("South Park") -- sermonizing about violence within Islam (the Pope), and critiquing Islam (Geert Wilders' "Fitna") are increasingly viewed as unacceptably "insensitive" and "disrespectful" provocations in Western society, regardless of their free-speech protections.

This is rank capitulation to dhimmitude, the non-Islamic state of deference to Islamic law, and it is now being repeated in the misdirected Western offensive against the Florida preacher -- an effort that should be turned into an unapologetic defense of his constitutional rights. Repeat after me: The Constitution trumps Islamic law.

More HERE

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Pataki: ObamaCare Individual Mandate "Patently Unconstitutional"

State lawsuits that argue against the constitutionality of ObamaCare under the Commerce Clause have considerable merit and could potentially come before the U.S. Supreme Court former New York Gov. George Pataki told reporters Wednesday during a question and answer period at The National Press Club.

In response to a question from The American Spectator that asked whether or not the state suits could potentially reach The Supreme Court, Pataki responded “Yes, I do.” But he also said that opponents should not rely on the judiciary alone and work toward the election of a new Congress more responsive to public sentiment.

“I think that there are legitimate constitutional issues when the federal government is imposing new burdens on the states, new burdens that they have to increase their Medicaid eligibility break when the states pay a significant part of that without providing any funding,” he observed.

Pataki continued, “I think there are some serious constitutional issues particularly when you are telling someone who just doesn’t want to be a part of the system that you’re going to get health care coverage acceptable to a Washington bureaucrat or we’re going to fine you.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

US Marines storm pirate-held cargo ship: "US Marine commandos stormed a pirate-held cargo ship off the Somalia coast, reclaiming control and taking nine prisoners without firing a shot in the first such boarding ride by the international antipiracy flotilla, according to the US Navy. The mission — using small craft to reach the deck of German-owned vessel as the crew huddled in a safe room below — ranks among the most dramatic high seas confrontations with pirates by the task force created to protect shipping lanes off lawless Somalia. The crew managed to kill the engines before taking refuge in an panic room-style chamber, leaving the ship adrift and the pirates so frustrated they started damaging equipment after hijacking the vessel on Wednesday"

Switzerland: Shelter for newly separated husbands opens: "A trickle of newly separated Swiss fathers looking for shelter and help after marital breakdown have been finding a warm bed and a sympathetic ear from a pilot project on the shores of Lake Zurich. Unique in Switzerland, the project has seen the numbers of applications to stay in the house increasing every week. ‘80 percent of the time it is the wife asking for a divorce and the children stay in the family home while the father leaves with his suitcases and becomes more vulnerable,’ Cabalzar told Reuters.”

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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Our Waning Obama Worship: We Americans know not what we do

A touch of sarcasm from Victor Davis Hanson

In just 20 months, President Obama’s polls have crashed. From near 70 percent approval, they have fallen to well below 50 percent. Over 70 percent of the public disapproves of the Democratically controlled Congress. Hundreds of thousands of angry voters flocked to hear Glenn Beck & Co. on the Washington Mall. Indeed, things have gotten so bad that the cherubic Mormon Beck might outdraw Barack Obama himself on any given Sunday.

All this was not supposed to be — and it has evoked a lot of anger. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson thunders, “The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats.”

You see, hoi polloi want “easy solutions” — like trying to close an open border, cut federal spending, and balance the budget. Instead, they should be manning up to pay more for gas, more in taxes, and more for entitlements for more to come across the border.

Worse still, the uninformed voter cannot seem to appreciate the brilliance of Barack Obama, who has deigned to suffer on our behalf, in offering only unpopular but necessary solutions. Obama has tried his best to prepare an immature nation for amnesty, borrowing at record levels, cap and trade, and additional trillions of national debt — the castor oil that the obese and now constipated public for some reason just won’t swallow.

Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution chimes in with the thought that Neanderthal Americans can’t really distinguish between cause and effect. So in clueless fashion, they blame big deficits, big spending, and high unemployment on Obama, when what they’re really afraid of is the “browning of America.” In other words, we remain a nation of primitives resisting the future. “Successful black and brown professionals have had to learn to be comfortable in a sea of white faces, but most white Americans have not experienced the reverse. And many are not eager to have that experience. While some prognosticators were naïve enough to believe that Obama’s election signaled the beginning of a post-racial era, it prompted something altogether different: a backlash against the browning of America.”

Vanity Fair just ran yet another hit piece on the now-worn subject of the ogre Sarah Palin. Uppity Sarah, you see, is still on her hind legs — even after the 2008 swat from the Katie Couric set, the jogging-suit photos, and the true-story revelations from the philosopher Levi Johnston.

Worse still, Sarah is no longer quite the white-trash yokel with the snowmobiling husband and pregnant teenage daughter that so appealed to Cynthia Tucker’s backlash America. Instead, Palin has had the gall to have devolved into a fake yokel, with Michelle Obama–like fashion pretensions. So Vanity Fair shocks us with the dirt that the now-clothes-hungry former mayor of Wasilla is making some money speaking. She is not the sandwich-making mom of five that she used to be. And she doesn’t really do the moose-and-fish thing any more.

Still, in reading Vanity Fair’s bill of particulars, we wonder, “Compared to what?” Is Ms. Palin making any more money than the aggregate $100 million collected by good ol’ boy Bill Clinton — as he jetted his way around the globe between 2001 and 2009, offering his “aw shucks” global initiatives to any creepy foreign thug who would pony up the near-million-dollar fee? Are the now-orphaned Palin children missing their careerist mother more than, say, the Obama children missed their absentee father huckstering on the campaign trail for two years in 2007–2008? And is Ms. Palin really less of a game-eating shooter than the duck-hunting camouflaged John Kerry was in 2004?

The New York Times is just as let down with the volatile American mob that has stormed out in the middle of the sermon on the mount — after once so bravely thronging to the “god” who assured us that he would stop the flooding and cool the planet. Vero possumus indeed.

Americans, and even liberal New Yorkers, poll over 70 percent opposed to the so-called Ground Zero mosque — even after our president gave a courageous standing-ovation pep talk to a group of anguished Muslims at a White House Ramadan dinner. “New Yorkers,” the Times scoffed, “like other Americans, have a way to go.” My god, you would have thought that we had given a discount to moveon.org to run a slanderous “General Betray Us” ad, as an American general came back from the front to Washington to save a war.

The president himself is grieved by these polls and the Beck-led protests. Indeed, he derides it all as the “silly season.” He does not mean “silly” as in Michelle Obama’s Marbella–to–Martha’s Vineyard odyssey, or his own mini-recession summits on the golf links. Instead, like Robinson and Tucker, he is bewildered that millions don’t appreciate that our godhead is “making decisions that are not necessarily good for the nightly news and not good for the next election, but for the next generations.” I suppose here the president means that he is on schedule to add more debt than all previous presidents combined — just the sort of bravery that the “next generations” who will pay for it will appreciate.

In the case of Obama worship, the tone is always set at the top. So we are back to 2008, when candidate Obama likewise attributed any rejection to the inability of yokel America to appreciate his inspired leadership — “it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

In short, a frustrated America has let the liberal elite down. And it is all the more disheartening when you think that just two years ago we proved sort of redeemable by electing Barack Obama — amid the hysteria following the financial panic of September 2008, the lackluster campaign of John McCain, Obama’s own faux-centrist veneer, the glow of electing America’s first African-American president, and the first orphaned election since 1952 when no incumbent of either party was running.

Apparently the liberal elite did not consider that perfect storm of events that elected a northern liberal in a way that had been impossible with George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry. Instead, they really believed that Obama’s election was proof that at last America had shed its odious -isms and -ologies. America was now ready for an updated FDR New Deal — as if, after seven decades, America had never tasted Social Security, unemployment and disability insurance, a 40-hour work week, and trillions in unfunded pensions and entitlements. In this “never let a crisis go to waste” teachable moment, the cognitive elite was convinced that America had at last crossed the liberal threshold and so evolved from the passé equality of opportunity to the promised equality of result.

But now a grouchy elite and a petulant president see that they were sorely mistaken about us, and Mr. Obama’s election was more flukish than predestined. Americans were given government takeovers of business, multi-trillion-dollar deficits, promised higher taxes, a path to socialized medicine, and an end to building the odious border fence — with, to top it all off, accusations from the likes of Van Jones and Eric Holder, apologies and bows abroad, and the beer summit. And yet the rustic ingrates are rejecting both the benefactor and his munificence.

Forgive us, Barack Obama, for we know not what we do.

SOURCE

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Tea Partiers give an answer to decades of Leftist slanders about conservatives

It will come as news to no one that conservatism has long had a PR problem. The political question of 2010 is this: do America's voters finally "get" conservatism?

For a half-century or more, conservatism's public image has covered a vast spectrum ranging from the Neanderthals on one end to Genghis Khan on the other. Conservatism has been depicted as the political doctrine of Klansmen, inbred backwoodsmen, paranoids, and religious fanatics. (Timothy McVeigh, an atheist and anarchist, is almost always characterized as a "right-wing Christian.. I know of no case where this assertion has been corrected.)

Joe McCarthy (a former New Deal liberal) added an unsavory element of power abuse, Richard Nixon (who governed as a leftist exceeded only by Barack Obama) a dank aura of personality disorder. Derived from all this was the implication, long hard-pedaled by the left, that no decent or moral person would have anything to do with such types, much less vote for them or offer moral or political support. This slur has proven effective for decades. It has acquired the status of an axiom, demanding no proof or evidence, reinforced by casual references and asides from all corners of American culture -- music, films, novels, news and commentary, and political rhetoric. It remains in force today, as the treatment of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin clearly reveal....

Leftist influence on media and education also put them in a position to debase the conservative image. "Extremist" became the term of choice. Conservative fascination with Europe enabled the left to tar conservatives with the fascist brush. A concerted effort was made in the 1961-64 period to associate the new conservatism with wild-eyed fringe types. News reports from monopoly wire services and Big Three networks featured bizarre and often fake stories about "right-wing" paramilitary groups such as the Minutemen (no relation to the current organization) and the Rangers drilling in the backwoods, spiced with conspiracy theories concerning U.S. military coup plans. All quite familiar from our vantage point, but a novelty at the time.

The American public perhaps only half-bought into all this, but they were deluged with it constantly by an unchallenged national media operating from ultraliberal New York City. On the smoke/fire principle, many thought better than to associate with such "extremists" even though the "extreme" positions were no different from those of the average American. The conservative "extremist" label was one of liberalism's most brilliant ploys, one that was to pay them enormous dividends over the ensuing half-century.

Conservatives could not shake the "extremist" label or overcome the "fascist" accusation. "Racist" soon joined the lexicon with the belated recognition of the civil rights movement by the Democrats. With such a public image, any crime was plausible -- and the left didn't hesitate to throw every possible innuendo. Many of them stuck.

As a result, the American public, though voting conservative and supporting conservative policies, could not be persuaded to openly march under the conservative banner. Such hesitation is easily understood -- who would happily accept the labels of "fascist" or "racist"? That, in large part, is how it remained until the turn of the century....

The watershed has arrived with the Tea Parties. Triggered by a single cable news broadcast, nurtured by the net and talk radio, the Tea Parties brought out tens of thousands of Americans previously uninvolved in politics, many of whom would have denied any conscious connection to conservatism. They were by no means movement conservatives, of either the Northeast or cowboy variety, but instead average Americans who saw their cherished traditions placed under threat by a runaway central government -- which plainly renders them purer conservatives than any given faction. (It's a disturbing but undeniable fact that many of the conservative East-Coast elite, such as David Brooks and Kathleen Parker, have been dismissive of the Tea Parties, to put it mildly.)

The left, working through the media, opened the customary cans of invective and innuendo on the Tea Parties, attempting to paint them with the long-established labels of "racist" and "extremist." This time, it didn't stick. Was it the waning power of the legacy media, a new maturity within the public mind, or simply the fact that most of these new activists were ordinary, everyday people? Whatever the case, the tried-and-true "extremist" shtick failed. The Tea Parties were able to operate effectively free of the "extremist" myth. For the first time in living memory, a conservative movement was allowed to establish itself through its own actions and rhetoric.

The year 2010 is likely to be a banner year for the conservative impulse in American life. The Tea Parties have already pushed aside several go-along-to-get-along Republican hacks (which in itself repudiates accusations of partisanship). The sweep of corrupt and ideologized Democrats promises to be an order of magnitude larger. But the 2010 election may well turn into no more than another good election season if we don't take advantage of the disarray in the left's messaging system.

We need to look farther and deeper than a single election. We need to bury the calumnies against conservatism that have given the left the advantage for a half-century and longer. To remove the weapon of slander from leftist hands. Elite conservatives failed to attempt this for decade upon decade. The time has arrived to see that it gets done. We must move to change the culture, to establish once and for all the truth that conservatism is a core element of American life, that it is no oddity, no perversion, no dead end. That the modernist political debate is over, with the failure of leftist progressivism manifest and undeniable, and that the game must now be played on American terms.

We will have no better opportunity than this. That most American of political phenomena, the Tea Parties, has established once and for all that conservatism is American and that America is a conservative nation. If we can build upon this, our road will be a lot smoother than it has been.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Castro: Cuban model “doesn’t even work for us any more”: "Cuban revolutionary icon Fidel Castro has joked [sic] that the ‘Cuban model doesn’t even work for us any more,’ the Atlantic magazine reported Wednesday. … Julia Sweig, a Cuba expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who was present at the meeting was quoted as saying Castro ‘wasn’t rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgement that under ‘the Cuban model’ the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country.’”

Entrepreneurs under attack: "Every day, federal, state and local governments stifle small businesses to privilege well-connected incumbent companies. It’s a system of protectionism for influential insiders who don’t want competition. Every locality has its share of business moguls who are cozy with politicians. Together, they use the power of government to keep competition down and prices high.”

Will infrastructure repairs cut unemployment?: "Whenever the economy is in recession, lots of people claim we can ‘put America back to work by rebuilding the infrastructure.’ So I am not surprised that President Obama has decided to continue the ‘infrastructure’ mantra in his latest economic plan. … The $50 billion in ‘front-loaded’ spending likely means Obama will direct money quickly to those states and congressional districts where the Democratic incumbents are in trouble.”

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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