Some non-partisan background on Sarah Palin

I'm not even sure that I can be classified as a "Palin fan", but I am kind of an observer. An old school buddy of mine has worked within the Alaska legislature for the last twenty years or so. He's a registered Democrat and has worked on projects that allowed him to cross paths with her going back when she was a city commissioner, as the mayor, and as the governor.

He told me that the picture painted of her as a mindless ideologue is about 180 degrees off base. He said that over the years, he'd probably dealt with her a couple of dozen times and that her input and/or decisions were always supported by law and not by personal beliefs.

The thing he told me about her that really peaked my interest of her was her ability to process information and then to quickly forge a plan with the information she was given. He said she was a living, breathing CPM chart. He said he had seen her on multiple occasions on a variety of subjects instantly absorb input from others and then respond with cogent solutions to problems. He said if you put her in a room with a bunch of people, the chances would be great that she'd be the smartest one in the room.

He told me that when he saw her debacle with Katie Couric, his first thought was, "who is that Sarah Palin imposter?" He said that was not the Sarah Palin he had worked with for years. He was sure that the interview was highly edited. It came out later that there was almost six hours of the interview that people didn't see.

He told me that if I really wanted to get a feel of who she is and how she dealt with powerful people, I should read the book, "Sarah Takes On Big Oil". It was released in October, 2008 and written by two of the state's top oil & gas editors. The lady they described had no fear to stand toe-to-toe with heavyweights and leave them slinking away with their tales between their legs. She told them that she was the advocate of the citizens of Alaska and there would be no deal making that would adversely affect them. The big boys at Exxon-Mobile and BP folded like a cheap suit.

One other thing he told me that still amazes him was how she managed to get people to work together. According to him, she could take two people with opposing opinions, sit down with them, listen to them, offer her solutions, and both guys would leave happy and not feeling that they had compromised their position at all.

He laughed at the "she doesn't read" meme. He said it is well known in the capitol that she was a voracious reader. She truly did read most of the national mags and newspapers, mostly on line, as well as a dozen or so energy trade magazines. According to him, there were stories about how she would take home stacks of papers and reports to prepare for a next-morning meeting and it was as if every word of those reports were stamped into her brain when she sat down at the meeting.

He told me not to be fooled by her syntax or her colloquialisms because they were not a fair barometer of her smarts. He said if people would just listen and not try to read between the lines, she was easy to understand. He said he'd love to see her and Obama in a debate about energy or even healthcare. He said she'd clean his clock. He even said that if she were given a day or two to prepare for a debate on foreign affairs, his money would still be on her.

He said she was the epitome of a leader. She assembled her staff, listened to their advice, allowed opposing ideas to be heard, and then acted accordingly. As a manager, she advocated making a plan based on the best info available, budgeting the plan, working the plan, measuring results, and quickly adjusting the plan if it was determined it wasn't working as expected. She believed in the First Law of Holes.

He thought her biggest struggles in the 2008 campaign were the product of trying to endorse McCain's positions on issues. She was able to voice her dissenting opinion on ANWR because her views were known, but on everything else she was expected to toe the McCain line. He said that she lacked the ability to shovel crap and sell it as perfume.

He reminded me that anyone who denies the accuracy of her "death panel" metaphor should go back and read her exact words, both her initial FB post and her rebuttal of Obama's attack on her words. He said "read what she wrote, not what someone wrote or said what she wrote". Her words in those posts have already been proven to be true.

He said that "divisive" is not a word that should be used to describe her. He said that was just a simple use of Alinsky's rule #13. He said, "look at all the issues. Her position is in line with the majority on virtually all of them".

He told me she wasn't perfect, but if I read something or heard something that was negative, I should check it out a little closer. He shared a lot more, but I'm afraid I've already rambled on for too long.

Should she run in 2012? I really don't know. Would I vote for her? It depends who she's running against. Will she drive the agenda if she doesn't run? Yes, for a long time.

SOURCE

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Trouble in Welfare-State Paradise: France, Sweden and Cuba

Welfare states are unstable, and tend either to give way to free market reforms and liberalization, to collapse under their own weight, or to fall down the slippery slope of interventionism and degenerate into authoritarian regimes.

For as long as I can recall, and certainly for decades before I was born, the American left had a romantic attachment to the welfare states of the rest of the world. Unsatisfied with America’s own burgeoning 20th-century entitlement systems, left-liberals would point to the more domestically interventionist governments abroad as examples showing that some form of social democracy, or even outright socialism, was preferable to the United States’s alleged free market. In these more civilized countries, so goes the progressive narrative, health care and jobs are provided by the government, no one has to pay personally for anything that’s really important — a “safety net” would prevent people from growing old without financial support or getting sick without the comfort of subsidized health care.

This narrative typically neglects America’s own history with welfare, which demonstrates that the market and voluntary community will produce a far better, more humane, efficient and reliable, safety net than anything we can expect from the state. Instead, we were supposed to look to places like France or Sweden as inspiration of what government could do here in America. We should even look to Cuba, where something akin to mild communism was allegedly working well.

Well, in France, the government is on the brink of raising the retirement age to 62, much to the impassioned cries from the French left. Much as in the case of America’s own socialist retirement program, the accounting never adds up as promised. Idealists protest this effective cut in government benefits, but such cuts cannot be avoided forever. Meanwhile, another news story illustrates the fact that welfare states, even admired and civilized ones such as France, tend to have a police state side.

The issues are connected, as a government that cares for all cradle to grave, a state that acts as a parent, must also exercise control over its subjects, and show a great interest in who is coming into the country or leaving, and what they are doing with their lives and bodies. So France is in hot water for its round ups and deportation of Gypsies. The nation’s leaders understandably resent the comparisons to the Nazis being thrown around. The Nazis did, in fact, go much further in their brutality. And they also went further in their welfare statism and economic regulation—a truth often forgotten.

As an aside, anti-immigration voices in the U.S. often point out that most other countries have even more severe border controls and immigration policies than are found in the United States. But do we want to be more like France, either in immigration policy or welfare policy? It is revealing that in American history, the further we have moved from free markets and limited government, the more anti-immigration scapegoating has been manifested in actual crackdowns.

We used to have more open immigration and less welfare. The more America becomes a full-blown welfare state, the more pressure there is for America to resemble the rest of the welfare states in their exclusion of immigrants. There is a logic here for the left to consider: If you champion the human rights of immigrants, rethink your devotion to the inherently nationalistic welfare state. If we go the route of France in terms of entitlements, increased social tension and worse nativism will be on their way.

Looking over to Sweden, we see this left-liberal utopia on the verge of major privatization plans. Their system, too, is unsustainable as it is. And their welfarism has also bred police state approaches to immigration, drugs and other social issues.

The very far-right anti-immigration party has been gaining ground, and it looks like the center-right coalition will have a firm grasp of the state after the elections next week. The greens and social democrats are teeming up with former communists to try to maintain power. But the center-right, which has been running the government and whose tax cuts and reform approach to welfare have been associated with improvements for the economy, looks like a shoo-in. As the AP puts it:

Swedish politics used to be like a long marriage with brief spells of infidelity.

Voters always returned to the long-governing Social Democrats – guardians of the Nordic country’s high-tax welfare state – after short-lived flirts with center-right coalitions.

That love story, it appears, may be coming to an end as Sweden heads into national elections Sept. 19.

Update: The conservative coalition fell just short of an overall majority and the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats gained an unprecedented 20 seats, making them the kingmakers. The socialists lost big-time -- JR

But what about Cuba? The more daring progressives have always pointed to this purported example of even something resembling communism working. Well, although he has apparently retracted his statement somewhat, Castro himself admitted publicly that the Cuban model is a failure. He has also apologized for his regime’s unspeakably brutal treatment of gays. This raises another point for the left to consider. The regime they have long defended as enlightened and progressive had some of the most notoriously cruel policies toward gays—but this is often shrugged off as irrelevant to the question of Cuba’s political economy. If George W. Bush had been 1/10 as criminal in enforcing policies against gays, it would have been held up as a prime example of the inhumanity behind his entire alleged ideology of compassionate conservatism. If an American conservative were as bad on homosexual rights as Castro was, he would not be embraced by practically any leftist, no matter what else he stood for. But the Cuban regime has long gotten a pass, because of its free health care system.

We must remember that it is big governments—almost always with the bought support of the people through welfare-state handouts—that segregate, crack down, round up, deport, torture, mass murder and exterminate. It is not usually small governments that do these things. Just as with every socialist state in the modern era, Cuba’s welfarism and its police statism are inextricably linked.

But there is hope for Cuba, that it will liberalize and its socialism will give way to something more humane and economically manageable. Castro seems to be speaking out of both sides of his mouth, but you don’t have to take his word for anything. Actions speak louder than a dictator’s utterances. Cuba is cutting one million public sector jobs—a significant and clear reduction in the size of government, especially considering the nation’s entire population of about eleven million.

The age of the modern entitlement state appears to be in a transition period—and maybe, let’s hope, its final stage. It looks like most of the welfare states around the world are changing, either giving way to rightwing politics, for better and worse, liberalizing voluntarily, or otherwise demonstrating the unsustainability of their current forms. Sweden is no longer a social democratic model. France is turning toward conservatism. Cuba is slashing government. Moreover, there have been welfare riots and strikes throughout much of Europe. And of course China, while still nominally communist, has been liberalizing radically ever since the Mao years—providing the world with perhaps the most inspiring modern example of a nation moving from enslavement under the total state toward freedom, and particularly when we consider how many people’s lives are at stake.

But one country is not moving toward liberalization and free markets, and that is the United States. While the world’s socialist and welfare states are retreating from the politics of entitlement, the U.S. is still on its century-long course in that dismal direction. Last year, Putin famously warned Obama not to travel down the road of socialism, which had brought so much misery to the Russian people. And it’s not just Democrats getting such embarrassing warnings. After the 2008 financial bailouts, Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chavez backhandedly called President George W. Bush his “comrade” who was “to the left of me now.”

Let us hope things turn around sooner rather than later. The U.S. welfare state will give way eventually, but it will be none too pretty should the collapse of the U.S. entitlement state be delayed much longer.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Russia signs $3.7 billion deal for 50 Boeing 737s: "A Russian state-owned company said Friday it will pay $3.7 billion for 50 new Boeing 737 Next Generation airliners that will then be leased to the national carrier Aeroflot. Russian Technologies, which manages the government’s stakes in a dozen regional airlines, said in a statement that the deal includes an option to buy a further 35 jetliners.”

Old theory of Keynesian stimulus comes up against hard new facts: "The Republican alternative to more fiscal stimulus says [Dana] Milbank, is for government to ‘do nothing, and let the human misery continue.’ Any doubts about the efficacy of fiscal stimulus, he argues, were discredited by the remarkable discovery that recessions still happen: ‘Economists offering alternatives to Keynes devised mathematical models showing how markets would behave efficiently. But those ideas collapsed along with everything else in 2008.’ This is ignorant nonsense. Efficiency never meant markets can’t be surprised and crash. Besides, academic criticism of fiscal stimulus is mainly based on fact, not theory.”

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

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

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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An inspiring and famous poem you are unlikely to have encountered at school

Why? Because it is patriotic, though in an understated British way. It is about the attitudes that built the British empire. It points out the transferability of attitudes learnt in elite private school sport (in this case cricket) to the wider world. The allusion to a Gatling (an early machine gun) probably places it in the days of the Boer war. In one word, it is about doggedness or "sticking to it" in the face of difficulty: Never give up. I hope some readers like the poem as much as I do. It is at least a glimpse into another world

Vitai Lampada

("They Pass On The Torch of Life")

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night --
Ten to make and the match to win --
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote --
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

The sand of the desert is sodden red, --
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; --
The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the School is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind --
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

By Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938)

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Rise and Fall of the Fourth Amendment

Turning to the Fourth Amendment itself, we read: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

This sounds pretty good, doesn't it? And solid, like it might actually mean something. Alas, no such utopian state of affairs actually obtains. It is possible of course that my elementary school teachers just plain lied to us when they spun golden tales about American freedoms.

Yet surely there is more to it. But if so, what doom befell the Fourth Amendment? We might try looking at various eventful periods when governments-state and federal-felt unusually strong needs to arrest, search, and seize, such as the Civil War, Reconstruction, World War I, Prohibition (see Lacey, in works consulted below), World War II, the Cold War, and (naturally) the war on drugs. It seems, however, that long-running negligence, evasion, and misinterpretation have done more harm to the Fourth Amendment than have various short-run authoritarian panics. Central to this slow but continuous process was the rise of modern policing in the nineteenth century, creating a new institution not foreseen in American constitutions (state or federal) and therefore largely incompatible with them and unaddressed by them (see Roots).

Gradualism and crisis, always headed the same way, have yielded a constitutional trail of tears catalogued in American state and federal case law. The U.S. Supreme Court hardly noticed the Fourth Amendment until the twentieth century. In the Prohibition-era case Carroll v. U.S. (1925), the Court sanctioned searches of private automobiles on the rather forced analogy of ships at sea. (The next time cops pull you over and search your car, you may blame Chief Justice William Howard Taft.) But the amendment's core meaning survived awhile longer in areas where it was thought to have always applied.

Meanwhile, emboldened by the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court undertook to supervise state police practices from the late 1940s on; it would decide if the states were following the Fourth and other amendments. This new project annoyed the states but did little enough for the public. Examining federal search practices in U.S. v. Rabinowitz (1950), the Court declared the word "unreasonable" the key to the Fourth Amendment. Henceforth the Court would philosophize on the "reasonableness" of searches ("in the circumstances") and periodically announce our ever-waxing-and-waning rights on the accordion model of civil liberties. Warrants pretty much disappeared.

We have been saddled with this unsatisfactory outcome ever since. The subjectivity of judicial balancing acts, along with fluctuating judicial moods, has made the Court's understanding of "reasonable" rather less stable than that of the Oxford English Dictionary. The war on drugs has rendered the Court (particularly "conservative" justices) unsympathetic to complaints about searches. The upshot is that the Fourth Amendment is now mostly just another empty marker at which American politicians, bureaucrats, and ideologues can wave when praising the precious freedoms that supposedly cause Americans to be hated.

In constructing the above account, I have relied heavily on the work of Thomas Y. Davies, professor of law at the University of Tennessee. (The rhetoric is mine.) In essays running from 1999 to 2007 Davies painstakingly reconstructed the late eighteenth-century context of the Fourth Amendment, accounted for its later reinterpretation, and thus described its effective demise. ...
With common-law rules in view, Davies sees the whole point of the Fourth Amendment as control of warrants to be achieved by defining them strictly. In the common-law environment of the late eighteenth century, warrantless searches-or arrests-were rare and subject to strict conditions. Thus confined, these few warrantless actions hardly threatened public liberty. Let us see why.

First of all, no one-constable or freeman-could arrest or search someone merely for looking "suspicious." Accusers (public or private) had to have a case before applying for any kind of warrant. To have a case, an actual crime had to have been committed already. An accusation also had to include sworn testimony of one or more witnesses asserting direct, personal knowledge supporting the belief that a named defendant had done the deed. Strung-out informants selling hearsay "evidence" about crimes that might occur in the future were not consulted, although hearsay could be admitted to establish background facts. Judicial action-indictment, issue of warrants-rested on the kinds of evidence described above. Arrest warrants did not normally issue for misdemeanors. The defendant remained at large but would be wise to attend his trial. A search warrant gave permission to look only for the specific things named.

Further, a defendant never appeared as a witness, but could, with or without counsel, impeach the evidence against him and cross-examine witnesses. Accordingly, the rule against self-accusation (self-incrimination) did not protect a defendant's trial rights, but meant instead that his diary, calendar, papers, and effects-as extensions of himself-were not subject to general ransacking and fishing expeditions. The other side had to make its case without such modern conveniences. Only Parliament claimed to be able to license fishing expeditions (such as the "general warrants" that so nettled colonial Americans) and mainly in the narrow areas of "treason," customs, and revenue. (The last two items came under admiralty law with its civil [Roman] law rules.) The Fourth Amendment sought to limit the ability of Congress to play such games.

There was a short list of warrantless arrests and searches allowed under common law. An officer or freeman who saw a misdemeanor underway in his presence (affray or breach of the peace) could make an arrest. Someone traveling at night could be detained overnight to account for himself. In "hot pursuit" of a fleeing felon who had committed an actual crime, an officer or freeman could "break" (into) a house. Here again is the combination of actual crime and personal knowledge. There were a few other complications, but they and the above-mentioned practices were rooted in common sense and had definite boundaries.

Under common-law rules arrests were few and far between. In a system based on enforcement by private parties (freemen), or by constables with few additional powers, defendants could sue for "personal trespass" anyone who brought a bad prosecution. Logically enough, a right to resist false arrest also existed. (Nowadays the concept of false arrest is nearly dead and resistance is not generally recommended.) Damages for bad prosecutions were a useful incentive for keeping peace officers and private prosecutors reasonably careful. Tightly drawn warrants, where required, actually protected officers from resistance or suit.

Since arrests were few and generally followed indictment-and that on real evidence-defendants not formally accused were seldom detained. Hence modern dilemmas involving interrogation seldom arose. Asking questions was a judicial function carried out at trial. Constables, who were considered judicial (not executive) officers, had little discretionary authority and few occasions for third-degree Q&A sessions in the back room. And of course common law had no plea bargaining, that ubiquitous, contemporary solution of "overworked" courts that Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton refer to as a form of torture.

The framers' quest to establish certain common-law rights largely failed. The disjunction between the clauses of the Fourth Amendment encouraged the leap to a "reasonableness" standard. In fact, as Davies shows, the words "unreasonable searches and seizures" were Revolutionary-era rhetoric condemning British general warrants of the 1760s and 1770s as without reason (outside of reason) and therefore illegal and unconstitutional; they were not meant to license future judicial speculation. The core ideas of the Fourth Amendment were better expressed in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 and the Ohio Constitution of 1802. Davies speculates that James Madison's innovative phrase, "probable cause," was meant to allow a little leeway for customs and revenue enforcement, which already enjoyed partial exemption from common-law rules. (A warehouse, for example, did not enjoy the same immunities from search and seizure as a private dwelling.) Still, even Madison's slightly weakened version meant something, although "probable cause" (taken by itself) had a big future as a means of reducing restrictions on power to a nullity.

Most arrests and searches today are without warrant, and getting a formal warrant is fairly easy. Concrete, sworn personal knowledge has yielded to vague ("reasonable") suspicion or whimsy as a "standard." Once we enjoyed rules that provided for concrete privacy. By the 1960s privacy seemed so imperiled that the Supreme Court with its usual jobbery was driven to invent an artificial "right of privacy" just to restore some balance.

More here

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Recovery Summer Needs Life Support

Rich Galen

A day after the national press corps proclaimed the death of the Republican party because Christine O'Donnell won the GOP primary for U.S. Senate in Delaware, some really awful numbers came out showing why the geniuses in the Obama White House have got this all wrong.

As a reminder, the Senate race in Delaware is for a seat currently held by a Democrat. In a CNN interview Wednesday afternoon I was asked if O'Donnell's nomination meant the GOP would not control the Senate next year. I looked directly into the camera and said: If, six months ago, I had told you that after the November elections the GOP would have 49 seats in the U.S. Senate you would have told the cameraman to stop the tape and you would have had me escorted out of the bureau.

This past summer had been billed as "Recovery Summer" by the Obama White House. Unfortunately for them:

- the unemployment rate has been stuck in the mid-nine-percent range, - the Dow Jones average has been stuck in the mid-10-thousand range, and

- the trade deficit (according to the AP yesterday afternoon) "grew to $123.3 billion in the April-to-June period, a 12.9 percent increase from the first quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday."

In addition to the terrible trade deficit numbers yesterday, the Obama Administration had to announce that the poverty rate had reached historic levels. According to Reuters: "The U.S. Census Bureau said 43.6 million people, or one in seven Americans, lived in poverty last year, up from 39.8 million in 2008." And USA Today's take was: "The number of people in poverty reached its highest level in 51 years."

Obama has successfully steered the economy in reverse to the point that he has equaled the poverty level not seen since the last years of the Eisenhower Administration. If that is true, then the poverty level in the U.S. is worse than it was when Lyndon Johnson declared his "war on poverty." If it weren't for the artificial effects of extending unemployment benefits and a bonus to Social Security recipients, the numbers would be even worse.

Nicely played, Mr. Obama! Well done. But wait! There's more! Also yesterday, the Obama Administration was forced to announce the first numbers following the enormous success of his highly touted health care legislation. According to AOL.com:

"The percentage of people with private coverage, 63.9 percent, is the lowest since 1987, the first year the bureau collected health insurance data. The percentage covered by government programs, 30.6 percent, is the highest since record-keeping began. "The number of children without health insurance remained at 7.5 million, or 10 percent of those under 18."

Private health care … lowest in 23 years. Government health care … highest ever. One out of ten children without health insurance. Reporter Andrea Stone wrote in her AOL piece:

The delayed benefits, combined with rising insurance rates and the president's back-tracking on how fast his plan would bring down costs, have caused widespread skepticism amid a majority of Americans who deride the law as 'Obamacare.'"

Hello, Tea Party? We are just outside six weeks from the mid-term elections. The national press corps is in an ears-back panic looking for ways to show that Republicans have overplayed their hand.

Even the most liberal of the liberal press - the NY Times and CBS News - in their current poll, have Obama's job approval at 45-47. That is not among likely voters. That isn't even among registered voters. That is among adults - typically the most Obama-favorable construct.

Finally, if you are looking for an antidote to the "Republicans are in really trouble now, boy" stories how about this one: Jimmy Carter - arguably the worst President in history - not just American history but all of history, everywhere - is going to be on 60 Minutes this Sunday saying, according to the Associated Press: "Americans could have had comprehensive health care coverage decades ago if Sen. Edward M. Kennedy hadn't blocked a plan Carter had proposed."

Whoa! Check, please. A former Democratic President dissing a Kennedy? How can this be? Won't Democrats have to choose sides? Isn't this evidence of the Democrats in disarray? Nah.

Although, when it comes to the failure of the "Recovery Summer" it looks like it's time for a voter intervention.

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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Leftist scientists want to have their cake and eat it too

Researchers raise concerns over the "commercialization" of medical innovation but ignore its huge costs. Without patent protection NO new drugs could be brought to market -- as it costs around half a billion dollars to get FDA approval for a new drug.

The article below does not concern drugs but the same principle applies. Most medical innovations are expensive and without cost recovery they would not happen

The original article is from the BMJ, which is a Leftist rag

The increasing commercialisation of science is restricting access to vital scientific knowledge and delaying the progress of science, claim researchers in the British Medical Journal today.

Varuni de Silva and Raveen Hanwella from the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka argue that copyrighting or patenting medical scales, tests, techniques and genetic material, limits the level of public benefit from scientific discovery.

For example, they found that many commonly used rating scales are under copyright and researchers have to pay for their use.

Some genetic tests also carry patents, which prevent other laboratories from doing the test for a lesser cost. Earlier this year, a New York court ruled that patents held by Myriad Genetics for the diagnosis of mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes (linked to breast and ovarian cancer) were unconstitutional and invalid.

Extreme commercialisation of science can also lead to patents on medical procedures and techniques, say the authors. However, the American Medical Association recently concluded that it is unethical for physicians to seek, secure or enforce patents on medical procedures.

The scientific community is reacting to the increasing commercialisation of science, they add. For example, all genome sequences generated by the human genome project have been deposited into a public database freely accessible by anyone, while organisations such as the National Institute of Health and Wellcome Trust insist on open access to publication resulting from research funded by them.

The fundamental philosophy of Western science is sharing knowledge and, while patenting is a useful tool for protecting investments in industry, "we need to rethink its role in science," they write.

They conclude: "Although those who consider science as a commodity are willing to invest in research and development, much medical research is still carried out by non-profit organisations using public money. It is only right that such knowledge is freely shared. This is possible because academic scientists still consider the prestige of discovery more important than monetary reward."

SOURCE

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Religious Freedom a bellwether for other freedoms

All constitutional protections are eroded if the plain intent of the 1st amendment can be so widely ignored

In America, the sunrise on tomorrow is only as sure as the state of our Constitution… and today, that state is shakier than it’s been in a long, long time.

Perhaps no element of that Constitution is more endangered than the First Amendment protections of religious liberty. That cornerstone of our nation’s freedom—the dream that brought the Pilgrims and so many of the other early settlers to our Atlantic shores—is now under direct, daily assault coast to coast.

From California courtrooms to the legislative halls of Massachusetts, our First Freedom is denounced as an impediment to those who would reinvent marriage into something it’s never been, and never can be. On university campuses, it’s all but outlawed as administrative officials segregate Christian students and their activities.

In public schools, religious freedom is ignored as educators work diligently to immerse our children in an aggressively secular world view. In hospitals and clinics and pharmacies across the country, it’s a freedom often denied to those whose religious faith prohibits their participation in abortion.

For far too many Americans, their awareness of the danger is as flimsy as their knowledge of the Constitution. For most, that understanding is limited to muddled memories from high school civics classes and a carefully orchestrated falsehood fabricated years ago by the American Civil Liberties Union and pummeled relentlessly into the public consciousness ever since: “separation of church and state.”

That so-called separation, and the growing legal assault it foments against people of faith, are both so far, far removed from any intention of those who hammered out our extraordinary, unprecedented Constitution that hot Philadelphia summer of so long ago.

Religious freedom is the thread by which hangs not only the document we commemorate today, Constitution Day, but the future of the nation to which that document gave birth. In our willingness to defend that freedom—through our decisions, through our votes, through our prayers—lies the answer to the ever-new mystery of that image carved on Washington’s chair.

Is it morning in America? Or is a great darkness descending?

More HERE

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The Money of Fools

By Thomas Sowell

Seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes said that words are wise men's counters, but they are the money of fools. That is as painfully true today as it was four centuries ago. Using words as vehicles to try to convey your meaning is very different from taking words so literally that the words use you and confuse you.

Take the simple phrase "rent control." If you take these words literally-- as if they were money in the bank-- you get a complete distortion of reality.

New York is the city with the oldest and strongest rent control laws in the nation. San Francisco is second. But if you look at cities with the highest average rents, New York is first and San Francisco is second. Obviously, "rent control" laws do not control rent.

If you check out the facts, instead of relying on words, you will discover that "gun control" laws do not control guns, the government's "stimulus" spending does not stimulate the economy and that many "compassionate" policies inflict cruel results, such as the destruction of the black family.

Do you know how many millions of people died in the war "to make the world safe for democracy"-- a war that led to autocratic dynasties being replaced by totalitarian dictatorships that slaughtered far more of their own people than the dynasties had?

Warm, fuzzy words and phrases have an enormous advantage in politics. None has had such a long run of political success as "social justice." The idea cannot be refuted because it has no specific meaning. Fighting it would be like trying to punch the fog. No wonder "social justice" has been such a political success for more than a century-- and counting.

While the term has no defined meaning, it has emotionally powerful connotations. There is a strong sense that it is simply not right-- that it is unjust-- that some people are so much better off than others.

Justification, even as the term is used in printing and carpentry, means aligning one thing with another. But what is the standard to which we think incomes or other benefits should be aligned?

Is the person who has spent years in school goofing off, acting up or fighting-- squandering the tens of thousands of dollars that the taxpayers have spent on his education-- supposed to end up with his income aligned with that of the person who spent those same years studying to acquire knowledge and skills that would later be valuable to himself and to society at large?

Some advocates of "social justice" would argue that what is fundamentally unjust is that one person is born into circumstances that make that person's chances in life radically different from the chances that others have-- through no fault of one and through no merit of the others. Maybe the person who wasted educational opportunities and developed self-destructive behavior would have turned out differently if born into a different home or a different community.

That would of course be more just. But now we are no longer talking about "social" justice, unless we believe that it is all society's fault that different families and communities have different values and priorities-- and that society can "solve" that "problem."

Nor can poverty or poor education explain such differences. There are individuals who were raised by parents who were both poor and poorly educated, but who pushed their children to get the education that the parents themselves never had. Many individuals and groups would not be where they are today without that.

All kinds of chance encounters-- with particular people, information or circumstances-- have marked turning points in many individual's lives, whether toward fulfillment or ruin. None of these things is equal or can be made equal. If this is an injustice, it is not a "social" injustice because it is beyond the power of society.

You can talk or act as if society is both omniscient and omnipotent. But, to do so would be to let words become what Thomas Hobbes called them, "the money of fools."

SOURCE

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Public Sector Workers Are the New Privileged Elite Class

Outrageous public pay, pensions, and inherent corruption are enraging private sector America

We really are two Americas, but not those captured in the stereotypical populist class warfare speeches that dramatize the gulf between the rich and the poor. Instead there is a new division in America that affronts a sense of fairness. That division is between the workers in the private sector and the workers in the public sectors. No guesses which is the more protected. A new study by the Mayo Research Institute, based in Louisiana, demonstrates that there is a striking differential in the impact of the recession. In 2009, the study found, "private-sector workers were nearly three times more likely to be jobless than public-sector workers."

Political tension is bound to grow when private sector jobs disappear faster but at the same time private sector compensation is being squeezed much more than that of the public sector. The rate of compensation for a generation of public service employees has gone up much faster than the personal income of the people who pay for these workers. The gap has widened dramatically between private sector workers at all levels of remuneration as compared to employees in federal, state, and local governments.

Once there was a time when government work offered lower salaries than comparable jobs in the private sector, a difference for which the public sector compensated by providing more security and somewhat better benefits. No longer. These days, government employees are better off in almost every area: pay, benefits, time off, and security, on top of working fewer hours. They can thrive even in a down economy. It is tantamount to a wealth transfer from the citizens to the people who serve in government. Millions of public workers have become a kind of privileged new class—a new elite, who live better than their private sector counterparts. Public servants have become the public's masters. No wonder the public is upset.

Of course public service workers should receive a fair level of pay and decent retirement and other benefits. What is galling, though, is when they routinely find ways to beef up their superior pay so as to turbocharge their pensions (typically based on a percentage of salary), while many of those in the private sector lack viable pension programs at all. This will stick future generations of Americans with higher taxes to meet these public service pension obligations and bring about reduced public services. Nice work if you can get it!

More troubling still is the inherent political corruption. Elected officials tend to be accommodating when confronted by powerful constituencies like the public service unions that agitate for plush benefits and often provide (or deny) a steady flow of cash to election campaign funds. You have a dynamic conflict of interest when the self-interest of the legislators is to appease the public service unions with pledges that won't come due until the lawmakers have left office.

Their successors will have to cope with the inherited debt burden—and ultimately the nation's taxpayers are stuck with the bill at the federal, state, and local levels.

Behold the consequences: less money for social services, libraries, road improvements, education, and other public service programs, i.e., the whole basis of the initial arguments for more public sector pay! States and localities don't have the federal government's ability to print money, and they have a much more limited capacity to borrow. The result, according to the Pew Center on the States, is that they face underfunded benefit and pension obligations that exceed $1 trillion.

That estimate was before the stock market drop in the last couple of years. Liabilities for debts for these entities have increased from an estimated 12 percent of GDP in 1980 to an estimated 22 percent this year, approaching $2.5 trillion.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

The rise of lil’ Kim in N. Korea: "The best way to understand North Korea is to think of it not as a traditional nation-state, but as a nuclear-armed organized crime family, albeit one that will soon find itself in need of a new boss.”

Two L.A. agencies get $111 million in stimulus funds but have created only 55 jobs: "Two Los Angeles departments have received $111 million in federal stimulus funds yet have created only 55 jobs so far, according to a pair of reports issued Thursday by City Controller Wendy Greuel. The reports conclude that the agencies, Public Works and Transportation, moved too slowly in spending the federal money, in part because of the time it takes to secure approval of government contracts. The two agencies plan to create or retain a combined 264 jobs once all the money is spent, according to the reports. With unemployment above 12%, city officials should move more urgently to cut red tape and spend the money, Greuel said."

A spectre is haunting Britain: "The corpse of Brownism still haunts the political debate. The 50p tax rate will stay, not because of any tangible benefit it brings, but because of ‘fairness’. Taxes will have to rise to plug the deficit, not cut to ensure growth and greater tax takes in time. Free school milk is to remain despite having no discernable health benefits because of the long shadow that Thatcher has cast over the Conservative party.”

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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Islam is what you make it?

There is a recent article in the NYT by Robert Wright, who seems knowledgeable about religion and philosophy. In it he points out that there are "good" and "bad" bits in both the Bible and the Koran. And it is undoubtedly true that the early Hebrews were stoning homosexuals to death long before Mohammed recommended it.

But the article is a typical bit of oversimplified Leftist theorizing that ignores the facts. It is true that what your holy book says is not a terribly good guide to how you will behave and it is true that you could construct a Koranic religion that was peaceful and benevolent to all.

But the real-life Islam tends to follow the "bad" bits of the Koran rather than the "good" bits and that is the essence of the problem. Actually existing Islam is aggressive, intolerant and hostile to Western civilization. And all Mr Wright's theorizing won't make that go away.

But I guess that Mr Wright thinks George Bush blew up the twin towers -- JR.

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America is in deep trouble

A bloated and overpaid public sector and a government that proliferates taxes and regulations on business rather than reducing them brings its inevitable consequences.

India slashed its regulations on business in the mid 90s and has never looked back -- and the effect of China's liberation of its businessmen is legendary -- so it can be done. Sad that America has to look to India and China for a way out of stagnation, though

At the State government level, however, there are models that could be emulated by the Feds. New Jersey and South Australia come to mind as examples

In February, the board of commissioners of Ohio's Ashtabula County faced a scene familiar to local governments across America: a budget shortfall. They began to cut spending and reduced the sheriff's budget by 20 per cent. A law enforcement agency staff that only a few years ago numbered 112, and had subsequently been pared down to 70, was cut again to 49 people and just one squad car for a county of 1,900 sq. km along the shore of Lake Erie. The sheriff's department adapted. "We have no patrol units. There is no one on the streets. We respond to only crimes in progress. We don't respond to property crimes," deputy sheriff Ron Fenton told Maclean's. The county once had a "very proactive" detective division in narcotics. Now, there is no detective division. "We are down to one evidence officer and he just runs the evidence room in case someone wants to claim property," said Fenton. "People are getting property stolen, their houses broken into, and there is no one investigating. We are basically just writing up a report for the insurance company."

If a county without police seems like a weird throwback to an earlier, frontier-like moment in American history, it is not the only one. "Back to the Stone Age" is the name of a seminar organized in March by civil engineers at Indiana's Purdue University for local county supervisors interested in saving money by breaking up paved roads and turning them back to gravel. While only some paved roads in the state have been broken up, "There are a substantial number of conversations going on," John Habermann, who manages a program at Purdue that helps local governments take care of infrastructure, told Maclean's. "We presented a lot of talking points so that the county supervisors can talk logically back to elected officials when the question is posed," he said. The state of Michigan had similar conversations. It has converted at least 50 miles of paved road to gravel in the last few years.

Welcome to the ground level of America's economic crisis. The U.S. unemployment rate is 9.5 per cent. One in 10 homeowners are behind on their mortgage payments. Home sales are at record lows. While the economy has been growing for several quarters, the growth is anemic-only 1.6 per cent in the second quarter of this year-and producing few new jobs.

Cincinnati, Ohio, is cutting back on trash collection and snow removal and filling fewer potholes.

The city of Dallas is not picking up litter in public parks. Flint, Mich., laid off 23 of 88 firefighters and closed two fire stations. In some places it's almost literally the dark ages: the city of Shelton in Washington state decided to follow the example of numerous other localities and last week turned off 114 of its 860 street lights. Others have axed bus service and cut back on library hours. Class sizes are being increased and teachers are being laid off. School districts around the country are cutting the school day or the school week or the school year-effectively furloughing students. The National Association of Counties estimates that local governments will eliminate roughly half a million employees in the next fiscal year, with public safety, public works, public health, social services, and parks and recreation hardest hit by the cutbacks. A July survey by the association of counties, the National League of Cities, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors of 270 local governments found that 63 per cent of localities are cutting back on public safety and 60 per cent are cutting public works.

Jacqueline Byers, director of research for the counties association, said many local governments have yet to confront the full impact of the real estate crisis on government revenues because they do tax assessments only every third year. A fundamental transformation is under way. "When we come out of this recession we're going to see government functioning very differently," says Byers. "We are seeing more public-private partnership than we ever had for things like recreation and parks. We are seeing some of them privatize libraries. They lease the library to a private corporation that employs the workers who don't carry retirement or health benefits." Or they could wind up like Hood River County, Ore., which in August closed its three libraries altogether.

Some governments are looking for creative ways to replace plummeting property and sales tax revenues. Facing a US$1-billion budget shortfall, Montgomery County in Maryland appealed for corporate sponsors to step up and adopt porta-potties in its public parks. In the end, the privies were saved by a combination of park employees taking early retirement, a few private sponsorships, and a negotiated discount from the supplier, Don's Johns. Meanwhile, Montgomery County's school system, banking on its reputation for high standards and test scores, took the unusual step of selling its curriculum to a private textbook publisher, Pearson, for US$2.3 million and royalties of up to three per cent on sales. As part of the deal, county classrooms can be used as "showrooms"-which critics said effectively turns students and teachers into salesmen for a corporation. But the superintendent, Jerry Weast, told the Washington Post, "I tend to look at this from the perspective that we are broke."

These cuts in infrastructure and education are more than just a temporary belt-tightening in response to a recession. They threaten long-term damage to American's economic foundation-a foundation that has long been eroding. When the eight-lane Interstate 35 bridge collapsed in Minneapolis in 2009, killing 13 people and injuring 145, the American Society of Civil Engineers warned that the infrastructure deficit of aging postwar highways and bridges amounted to US$1.6 trillion. More than a quarter of America's bridges were rated structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. Steam pipes have exploded in New York City and the levees failed in New Orleans.

Meanwhile, prolonged rates of high unemployment are taking a toll on families today, and will for years to come. Studies have shown that the longer a person is unemployed, the more difficult it is to find a job-partly because skills deteriorate, and partly because employers become suspicious of why someone hasn't worked for a year. "The United States is expanding its underclass of a whole group of individuals who will become less employable, less integrated, more subject to criminal and other deviant behaviour-and probably become part of the larger problem of structural poverty in America as well," says Sherle Shenninger, director of the economic growth program at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank.

But the problem isn't simply a product of the current recession or the 2008 financial crisis. It is now well understood that for years Americans lived beyond their means on borrowed money.

The real estate bubble enabled many homeowners to borrow against inflated house prices, giving families the feeling that their wealth was increasing. It was all a mirage. Low interest rates and easy credit allowed consumers to spend enthusiastically, masking the fact that the standard of living and incomes were stagnating, and public and private investment was lagging.

Over the past decade, private sector job growth was sluggish. Combined with recession job losses, there are now only as many private sector jobs as there were in early 1999, a decade ago, while the population continues to grow. And incomes stagnated for a full decade-the longest such period since the U.S. Census Bureau has been keeping track of household income.

Clyde Prestowitz, a former Reagan administration trade official and president of the Economic Strategy Institute, says the scope of the problem came into focus for him one day last year when he read, in the same newspaper, that China was launching a new 240-mile-an-hour high-speed train, and then an article about city leaders in Pittsburgh considering a tax on university tuitions in order to fund the municipal employees' retirement pension plan. "I thought, the Chinese are building world-record trains and we're taxing kids who go to school!" says Prestowitz. "We've been in decline for quite some time-we haven't recognized it and have been fooling ourselves. But we've gotten to the point it's hard to not see."

More HERE

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Americans today starting to wise up to the liberal agenda

Walter E. Williams

Charles Krauthammer, in his Washington Post column (Aug. 27), said, "Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed," pointing out that overwhelming majorities of Americans have repudiated liberal agenda items such as Obamacare, Obama's stimulus, building an Islamic center and mosque near ground zero, redefinition of marriage to include same-sex marriage, lax immigration law enforcement and vast expansion of federal power that includes unprecedented debt and deficits.

While America's liberal elite have not reached the depths of tyrants such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler, they share a common vision and, as such, differ only in degree but not kind. Both denounce free markets and voluntary exchange. They are for control and coercion by the state. They believe they have superior wisdom to the masses and they have been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. They, like any other tyrant, have what they see as good reasons for restricting the freedom of others.

Their agenda calls for the elimination or attenuation of the market. Why? Free markets imply voluntary exchange. Tyrants do not trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrants think they should do. Therefore, they seek to replace the market with economic planning control and regulation.

Why liberalism has become an ugly sight, as Krauthammer claims, is because more and more Americans have wised up to their agenda.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Trouble in welfare state paradise: "The age of the modern entitlement state appears to be in a transition period — and maybe, let’s hope, its final stage. It looks like most of the welfare states around the world are changing, either giving way to rightwing politics, for better and worse, liberalizing voluntarily, or otherwise demonstrating the unsustainability of their current forms. Sweden is no longer a social democratic model. France is turning toward conservatism. Cuba is slashing government.”

Housing regulator cites doubts over federal role: "The federal regulator of mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac raised concerns on Tuesday about the Obama administration's approach toward housing, questioning whether the government should continue to play a significant role in helping borrowers get home loans.... "Recently there has been a growing call for some form of explicit federal insurance to be a part of the housing finance system of the future," DeMarco says in prepared testimony, scheduled to be delivered before the House Financial Services Committee. "The potential costs and risks associated with such a framework have not yet been fully explored."

Those who live in glass houses ...: "If you read this weekend's New York Times' hit job on would-be Speaker John Boehner and his 'lobbyist friends,' you might think, as the reporter clearly thinks, that John Boehner is cozier with lobbyists than most powerful politicians are. But did you know: · Nancy Pelosi has raised almost twice as much money from lobbyists this election as Boehner has? · At least 18 House Democrats have raised more lobbyist cash this election than Boehner has. · Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid have pocketed more lobbyist cash in the past 18 months than Boehner has raised in the past 6 elections, combined?"

Stimulus roundup: "Most people doubt Congress’ ability to spend money wisely. The stimulus has given them some proof: $800,000 for an African genital-washing program. $700,000 to create computer software that can tell jokes. $40,000 for ten trash bins.”

“A nation of dodos”: "On the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, pompous anchorman Ted Baxter once ran for the Minneapolis City Council. After his not-unexpected drubbing, he gave a concession speech in which he proclaimed, ‘The voters have spoken, and if that’s what they want — the hell with them.’ With a Democratic electoral debacle looking more and more likely this fall, Democrats and their apologists in the mainstream media appear ready to steal a page from the Baxter playbook.”

How the establishment wins: "The Tea Parties did not want to pick a fight with the Republican establishment to begin with — Tea Party Express, for example, has spent its contributors’ dollars targeting outright liberals like Lisa Murkowski and Mike Castle. It has not taken aim at John Boehner or called for Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn to step aside from their leadership positions. The Tea Parties have tried to play nice, but they now find themselves earning the ire of Karl Rove and other Republican bigwigs. The establishment doesn’t care whether a liberal Republican or a Tea Party Republican gets the nomination in a deep red state like Alaska, but nominating an almost certainly unelectable candidate like O’Donnell in a blue state threatens what Rove and company really care about: returning themselves to power.”

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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Obstacle to Deficit Cutting: A Nation on Entitlements

Efforts to tame America's ballooning budget deficit could soon confront a daunting reality: Nearly half of all Americans live in a household in which someone receives government benefits, more than at any time in history.

At the same time, the fraction of American households not paying federal income taxes has also grown—to an estimated 45% in 2010, from 39% five years ago, according to the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research organization.

A little more than half don't earn enough to be taxed; the rest take so many credits and deductions they don't owe anything. Most still get hit with Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes, but 13% of all U.S. households pay neither federal income nor payroll taxes.

"We have a very large share of the American population that is getting checks from the government," says Keith Hennessey, an economic adviser to President George W. Bush and now a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, "and an increasingly smaller portion of the population that's paying for it."

The dimensions of the budget hole were underscored Monday, when the Treasury reported that the government ran a $1.26 trillion deficit for the first 11 months of the fiscal year, on pace to be the second-biggest on record.

Yet even as Americans express concern over the deficit in opinion polls, many oppose benefit cuts, particularly with the economy on an uneven footing. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll conducted late last month found 61% of voters were "enthusiastic" or "comfortable" with congressional candidates who support cutting federal spending in general. But 56% expressed the same enthusiasm for candidates who voted to extend unemployment benefits.

As recently as the early 1980s, about 30% of Americans lived in households in which an individual was receiving Social Security, subsidized housing, jobless benefits or other government-provided benefits. By the third quarter of 2008, 44% were, according to the most recent Census Bureau data.

That number has undoubtedly gone up, as the recession has hammered incomes. Some 41.3 million people were on food stamps as of June 2010, for instance, up 45% from June 2008. With unemployment high and federal jobless benefits now available for up to 99 weeks, 9.7 million unemployed workers were receiving checks in late August 2010, more than twice as many as the 4.2 million in August 2008.
[benefitsp1]

Still more Americans—19 million by 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office—will get federal aid to buy health insurance when legislation passed this year is implemented.

Cutting spending on these "entitlements" is widely seen as an inevitable ingredient in any credible deficit-reduction program. Yet despite occasional bouts of belt-tightening in Washington and bursts of discussion about restraining big government, the trend toward more Americans receiving government benefits of one sort or another has continued for more than 70 years—and shows no sign of abating.

An aging population is adding to the ranks of Americans receiving government benefits, and will continue to do so as more of the large baby-boom generation, those born between 1946 and 1964, become eligible. Today, an estimated 47.4 million people are enrolled in Medicare, up 38% from 1990. By 2030, the number is projected to be 80.4 million.

Still, Europe does offer examples that change is possible. Germany slashed benefits for the long-term unemployed in 2004, a step that analysts credit with prompting more Germans to get jobs as well as improving the country's budget balance. Cuts to entitlements are politically possible, says Daniel Gros, director of the Center for European Policy Studies, a nonpartisan think tank in Brussels, "but societies need some time to get used to the idea."

Payments to individuals—a budget category that includes all federal benefit programs plus retirement benefits for federal workers—will cost $2.4 trillion this year, up 79%, adjusted for inflation, from a decade earlier when the economy was stronger. That represents 64.3% of all federal outlays, the highest percentage in the 70 years the government has been measuring it. The figure was 46.7% in 1990 and 26.2% in 1960.

More HERE

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GOP establishment rejects tea party candidate who won DE Senate primary

Which could make her a winner!

It was an amazing bit of television. Almost instant followed by an amazing bit of scoop. Mere minutes after Fox News had reported the victory of conservative activist Christine O'Donnell over Establishment Congressman Mike Castle in the Delaware GOP U.S. Senate primary, former Bush Deputy Chief of Staff and Fox News consultant Karl Rove was in place on Sean Hannity's TV show to analyze. Or…well…something.

What on earth was Rove thinking? He was bitter, angry, cutting, demeaning, mean-spirited…and those were the nice things he had to say about O'Donnell.

I have no idea what Karl Rove was thinking when he sat down in front of the Fox cameras to speak with Hannity. But I know this.

All by himself Karl Rove has just given Christine O'Donnell a huge leg up on this election. In seconds he has made her look like what Americans absolutely love -- the underdog who has been unmercifully unfairly treated by the powerful and well-to-do.

And now, Carl Cameron of Fox News is reporting the National Republican Senatorial Committee will not be helping the official nominee of the Delaware Republican Party for the United States Senate in her Senate campaign.

So, in other words, having helped the losing incumbent Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, the losing incumbent Robert Bennett in Utah, swallowed hard at the victories of Sharron Angle in Nevada and Rand Paul in Kentucky, the NRSC will not be helping O'Donnell because she beat the pants off a liberal Establishment Republican Congressman?

If this is true, there is but one question: Is the Republican Establishment suicidal?

More HERE

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More on GOP stupidity when tea-party candidate won DE primary

“Let’s go balls to the wall for Christine O’Donnell,” Rush Limbaugh implored listeners on his show today, but Rush knows that his listeners are the choir to which he is preaching. It’s the party establishment and the center-right commentariat that needs to hear the message, and in that vein, Rush took on Karl Rove on today’s show.

Rush demanded to know why Rove and other establishment figures want to make Christine O’Donnell’s character the issue, when it’s the character of the current administration and Democratic leadership in Congress that should get the focus. Instead of issuing self-fulfilling prophecies of doom, shouldn’t the Republican establishment start fighting for wins in Delaware? The Right Scoop got the video:



Matt Lewis joins the fray in warning Republicans about the impact of snubbing O’Donnell:

The National Republican Senatorial Committee and Castle — who withheld his endorsement of the winner — were wrong to behave as they did. Though an NRSC spokesman issued a terse congratulations to O’Donnell, word quickly leaked that the NRSC would not fund her general election race. This was a silly thing to do. Fortunately — and wisely — NRSC Chairman John Cornyn on Wednesday morning agreed to donate $42,000 toward O’Donnell’s campaign and to evaluate future funding at a later date. This was smart damage control, but to many conservatives, the damage had already been done.

Moreover, the GOP has not just offended O’Donnell but has gone out of its way to offend her Tea Party supporters across the nation — folks who were already highly skeptical of the party establishment.

Similarly, Castle’s decision to withhold his endorsement was unchivalrous, and the fact that his staff continues to throw stones, referring to O’Donnell as a “con artist,” is inexcusable.

It’s not just inexcusable, it’s inexplicable. It’s as if everyone forgot why we have primaries in the first place. This has been a gut-check moment for Republican leadership, and with a few exceptions, they have failed it.

SOURCE

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Retirement Fund Trillions Lure Government Grabbers

Is the government making plans to confiscate your retirement money? The Obama administration is certainly exploring the idea.

This question no longer seems far-fetched when the group-thinkers in Washington unabashedly promote a doctrine of wealth redistribution and central planning. These Keynesian socialists know they will need vast new sources of revenues to fund their relentless spending binges to "transform" this nation. A logical next step would be to legitimize the confiscation of private retirement assets -- an idea that was contemplated in the recent past by the Clinton administration.

According to the Investment Company Institute, there was $7.835 trillion in IRA, 401K, 457, and 403b accounts in 2009. That is certainly too large a sum to be ignored by the big spending social engineers in Washington. Bureaucrats and politicians have been hard at work formulating a social justice excuse to legislate an historic seizure of private assets. This would not be the first time the statists extorted wealth from U.S. citizens on a massive scale.

The public shakedown always employs a two-step tactic to repeatedly dupe the malleable electorate. First, the statists fabricate and incessantly excoriate a contrived crisis of social injustice that is victimizing helpless and unknowing Americans. Next, they "craft" -- a term Pelosi uses again and again -- insidious legislation disguised as a necessary and compassionate solution that makes participation and universal funding compulsory by force of the law.

It is a simple and effective strategy that continues to trip up even the staunchest conservatives, who ultimately succumb to the throng of propagandized constituents demanding protection from the newly revealed threat. Patrick Heller warns:

Expect to see terms such as "retirement income protection" thrown around. It is highly likely that such a program would be implemented in steps to help overcome public opposition. The US government plan is to eventually take ownership of all assets in IRAs and 401K accounts and replace them with US government "Treasury Retirement Bonds." In the October 2008 hearings, it was proposed that these bonds pay a 3% interest rate. Another major change is that, upon retirement, the individual's retirement account would be converted into an annuity. Once the individual is deceased, the individual's heirs would not inherit anything.

Has personal responsibility and self-reliance been transformed into a perceived disadvantage? Our benevolent government seems to think so.

In February, the U.S. Department of Labor's Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA), in collaboration with the Department of Treasury, announced a "request for information" to study the Lifetime Income Options for Retirement Plans and asked "for ideas on how to help reduce the chances that workers will run out of funds during their retirement years."

This request signals the "starting point" for launching yet another spurious social justice crusade by these two agencies. The fictional victims and the offending policy have been manufactured and publicized, and now it is time to fire up the propaganda machine and work on a new, expansive social engineering plot.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Fidel Castro and American statism: "Cuba’s president Fidel Castro is surely making American liberals extremely nervous. Mugged by reality, Castro is moving his country in a direction away from socialism, at the very same time that American liberals are trying their best to move the United States further in the direction of socialism. Castro has a much firmer grip on reality than American liberals.”

Tricks against trade: "Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch is up to its tricks against trade again. Noted for its past expertise in destroying the Seattle WTO negotiations, the group is now taking a new stance against free trade agreements (FTAs), though not by their usual rhetoric that they cost jobs and a ‘race to the bottom.’ Their new approach is that FTAs actually lower exports. The group just published a ’study’ purportedly showing that exports to countries that have free trade agreements with the U.S. showed less export growth than did exports to countries that don’t have FTAs.”

What if this were Bush?: "It goes without saying that if Bush had presided over a phony end to the Iraq war, expanded the Afghanistan war, extended its reach into Pakistan, solidified the state secrets doctrine and claimed in no uncertain terms the right to assassinate American citizens without due process, the left would be up in arms. The partisan hypocrisy concerning war-related issues is clear.”

Tools for liberty-loving radicals too? "Conservatives today often denounce Alinsky as the demonic wellhead of the modern Left, a claim that’s easier to make when you don’t know much about Alinsky’s actual ideas and activities. (I have even seen efforts to link the man to Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist who plays a mysteriously large role in several contemporary conspiracy theories.) It doesn’t help that Barack Obama started his political career as a community organizer in Chicago, where he supposedly drew deeply from Alinsky’s social vision. Alinsky’s 1971 book Rules for Radicals has been studied closely by conservatives convinced that they’ve found the White House’s secret playbook. Smarter folks on the right, such as the Tea Party champions at FreedomWorks, have been reading Rules for Radicals as well, not to decode Obama’s occult intentions but in hopes of adapting Alinsky’s tactics to the fight for freer markets.”

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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More Hate Crime Hypocrisy

It's almost always blacks and Hispanics doing the crimes but twisted logic and biased reporting are used to protect blacks and accuse whites

Two recent strings of racial attacks—one black on white in Des Moines Iowa, the other black on Hispanic in Staten Island, New York—elicited very different reactions from both law enforcement and the mainstream media.

Since April, Staten Island law enforcement filed 11 “bias related” crimes committed against Mexicans, 10 of which were perpetrated by blacks. The Los Angeles Times gave an example on August 18 where, “a Mexican teen-ager was robbed by a young black man armed with a knife who used racial slurs.”

The real culprit to the liberals in New York are not the thugs who committed the crime, but conservative opponents of illegal immigration. The Times continues, Jacob Massaquoi, a leader in Staten Island's African immigrant community, said tensions had grown along with anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, something they blame on Arizona's crackdown on undocumented residents and conservative commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. "Their rhetoric is very personal, very inflammatory," Massaquoi said.

Massaquoi is just echoing Barack Obama who said in 2008 that "A certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia. There's a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year. If you have people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up, it's not surprising that would happen." Obama’s numbers, by the way are fabricated. In fact, the rate of hate crimes against Hispanics went down between 2007 and 2008.

Numbers aside, Obama and the LA Times cannot honestly believe that African Americans who are told by many of their leaders that Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck hate blacks are influenced by these shows.

When most people think of hate crimes, they think of a Klansman or a skinhead beating up a minority. Yet in Los Angeles County, 78% of Hispanic on black and 52% of black on Hispanic hate crimes are considered “gang related.”

I doubt that the Crips are tuned in to Rush Limbagh on their car radio while they commit a drive-by shooting against MS-13. What about the Hispanic on white and Hispanic on black hate crimes? The federal government does not report them! While the FBI’s hate crime reporting sheet includes Hispancs as a victim group, they do not include Hispanics as offenders, and categorize virtually all of them as white. In Los Angeles, where local police count Latinos as perpetrators, they make up 69% of all anti-black hate crimes. These are counted as white on black hate crimes by the FBI.

Thus, if the MS-13 retaliated against the Crips and yelled a racial slur in the process, this would be reported as a white on black hate crime. Sure enough, the same people who blame attacks by blacks against Hispanics on opposition to illegal immigration are blaming the supposed rash of “hate crimes” against blacks on criticism of Obama.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a “watchdog” group that paints mainstream conservatives and the Ku Klux Klan with the same “hate group” brush, anti-black hate crimes are “the result of a racist backlash to the election of America’s first African-American president.” The FBI’s website states they forged a partnership with the SPLC to “establish rapport, share information, address concerns, and cooperate in solving problems.” When Whites are the victim of race based crimes, the media and police often try to downplay any racial aspect, and silence those who notice.

In August at the Iowa State Fair, groups of blacks attacked white fairgoers and police. According to the police report, "On-duty officers at the fairgrounds advise there was a group of 30 to 40 individuals roaming the fairgrounds openly calling it 'beat whitey night.' "

These were not just minor scuffles. One white fairgoer had two broken eye sockets. Yet many of these thugs were only given citations and released on the spot.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that these attacks were based on anti-white bigotry, Lt. Joe Gonzalez told reporters, “We don't want to jump to conclusions. It is not the standpoint of the police department right now to say that it's racially motivated."

Black on white mob attacks like this are becoming more common. “Flash mobs” where groups of teenagers text each other’s cell phones to coordinate attacks are occurring across the country.

On March 24, The New York Times reported that, “Most of the teenagers who have taken part in [flash mobs] are black and from poor neighborhoods. Most of the areas hit have been predominantly white business districts. In the flash mob on Saturday, groups of teenagers were chanting ‘black boys’ and ‘burn the city,’ bystanders said.”

Neither the flash mobs nor the attacks on whites in Iowa are being prosecuted as hate crimes. Instead of punishing the criminals, Iowa police are punishing their own for suggesting the obvious. After the attacks in Iowa, then Des Moines police spokeswoman Sgt. Laurie Lavato said “it’s very possible it has racial overtones.” Last week, Sgt. Lavorato was reassigned to the Traffic Division. Why? According to Des Moines Police Chief Susan Bradshaw, "I had some real concerns with us making that leap and making a remark like that publicly. That's a huge statement that, quite frankly, can provoke emotions on both sides of the issue.”

In Orwellian America, it is a “leap” to say it is possible that blacks yelling “beat whitey” might have racial overtones.

This twisted logic comes straight from the Obama administration. Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee that hate crimes were only meant for “protected groups” meaning “people who are African-American, Hispanic, people who are Jewish, people who are gay people.” Whatever happened to equal protection under the law?

It’s being thrown out for the purpose of silencing and demonizing white conservatives in the name of tolerance and diversity.

SOURCE

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Radical Islamism challenges notions of freedom

By Michael Nazir-Ali (A Pakistan-born former bishop of the Church of England)

IT is often thought the main threat of radical Islamism to the West and, indeed, the world, is terrorism. It is also said to be the isolation of Muslim communities, which allows extremists to recruit people to their cause.

Such views are not mistaken but they confuse effects with causes. What the world has to recognise is that we are not simply dealing with faith, but with a political, social and economic ideology. Radical Islamism is a worldview. Its nearest parallel, despite many differences, is Marxism.

Radical Islamists claim their all-encompassing program for society is rooted in fundamental Islamic sources. They reject the interpretations of Koran and sharia law offered by reformist or moderate Muslims. We must, of course, respect the faith of ordinary Muslims, but the ideology has to be met in a different way.

It is basic to Western societies that there should be one law for all. This idea emerged from the Judaeo-Christian tradition that all humans are made in God's image. It has been mediated by the Enlightenment, which emphasised not only dignity but also liberty.

The radical Islamist vision is absolutist. It applies to every area of human life, including politics, business and, above all, law itself. Recent demands by British and some Australian Muslim leaders for the recognition of aspects of sharia law should be seen in this light. Western clergy and jurists who advocate such demands fail to recognise that acknowledging aspects of sharia in public law will lead to a greater involvement with Islamic law.

A few years ago some Canadian Muslim women campaigned against the proposal to introduce Islamic law to settle family issues in Ontario. Their instincts were right. Islamic law is not just an intellectual legal tradition; it exists in highly prescriptive codes of law called fiqh. These codes differ from one another but would all be incompatible with the assumption of equality in Western law.

Muslim scholars recognise the three great inequalities of their legal tradition: between men and women, Muslims and non-Muslims, slave and free. In the case of family law, for example, there is inequality between men and women in marriage, and in provisions for divorce, custody of children, laws of admissible evidence and inheritance.

In Britain two years ago, when the then lord chief justice was arguing for recognition of some aspects of Islamic family law, the British Law Lords were ruling that a woman should not be deported to her own country because under sharia law there she would be deprived of the custody of her child. The Law Lords saw this as a violation of her basic rights.

While many predominantly Muslim countries have signed international covenants on fundamental rights, some have entered codicils declaring their adherence to these covenants must be in conformity with sharia law. The Organisation of the Islamic Conference, representing the world's Muslim countries, has issued the Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. This differs from the international declarations in a number of respects, not least in the absence of a provision corresponding to Article 18 of the UN Declaration on Human Rights, providing for freedom of expression, belief and change of belief.

In a number of Muslim countries apostasy from Islam is punishable. In some, the punishment is death. In Pakistan, the so-called blasphemy law prescribes a death sentence for insulting the prophet of Islam. Muslim commentators admit that internationally recognised commitments to personal freedoms are difficult to reconcile with sharia law.

Although punishments for apostasy and blasphemy cannot be implemented in non-Muslim countries, they do contribute to attitudes that have consequences in these contexts as well. Such attitudes have resulted in harassment and persecution of those who have given up their belief or changed their faith, even in the West. They have led to demands for laws against defamation of religion, which would effectively restrict freedom of expression.

While we should all be committed to civility in public discussion, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights already provides protection from incitement to religious hatred, which leads to discrimination, hostility or violence. To go beyond this has implications for free speech.

Muslims, like anyone else, should be free to practise and propagate their faith. They are free also to contribute to public debate. The principle of one law for all, however, cannot be compromised. Freedom of expression and the right to change one's belief must be maintained. So must easy access to the courts and police.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

The "mystery" of falling crime rates: "For the third straight year, violent crime has declined in all categories while gun sales climbed, gun ownership expanded and more citizens are carrying firearms for personal protection; proof positive that gun prohibitionists have been consistently and undeniably wrong, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today. "What the data tells us is exactly the opposite of what the gun ban lobby has predicted for several years," said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. "Their dire predictions that America's streets would run red have been shown up as a fraudulent sales pitch for public disarmament... even property crimes are down, according to this year's report."

GAO: Iraq government wants billions, sits on billions in surplus: "Back in 2003 as the invasion of Iraq was getting underway, Paul Wolfowitz famously told Congress that ‘We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.’ Last month … a House subcommittee stamped its approval on President Barack Obama’s controversial request for $2 billion in 2011 to arm and train Iraq’s military. … On top of [that], the proposed State Department budget allocates an additional $2.5 billion to step up its operations in Iraq. … But now comes word from independent US Government auditors that the presumption may be false: Iraq’s government is not broke at all.”

Privatizing the British postal service: "Two years ago Ofcom deputy head Richard Hooper reported on the Royal Mail. It was an inefficient, outdated fish in a declining pool of letters business, he concluded, and it needed an injection of private cash and partnership with a private carrier to give it the cash and expertise to survive before EU rules open the whole market up to competition. Now, another report and a change of government later, it looks as if this might actually happen.”

New Medicare chief speaks out against rationing: "The nation’s health system can’t be transformed by rationing medical care, President Barack Obama’s new Medicare chief said Monday in his first major speech. Dr. Donald Berwick’s appointment earlier this summer without Senate confirmation was contentious because some Republicans accused him of being willing to deny care to save on costs.”

California’s union war: "Voting began Monday in one of the most disputed union elections in recent years. The contest pits the powerful Service Employees International Union (SEIU) against the upstart National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), which was created last year by former officials of a SEIU affiliate in Oakland, California. Tens of thousands of workers will vote between now and October 4 on which union, if any, will represent them. At stake are 44,000 members and an estimated $40 million in annual dues.”

The Great Food Truck Lobbying Race: "The City of Emeryville, California, is looking for individuals to serve on its new `Food Truck Taskforce' - a bureaucratic reaction to the increased competition local `brick and mortar' restaurants face from mobile kitchens. Local worker Catherine Hicks tweeted, `restaurants are whining that trucks are more popular at lunch!' But the city sees this shift in lunching habits as a political problem requiring a political solution."

Lawsuits could be stake in heart of Obamacare: "A showdown looms in Florida when 20 states and a national small-business organization will argue before a federal judge that President Barack Obama's sweeping health care reform should be overturned as unconstitutional. In a hearing set for Tuesday, 20 state attorneys general were seeking to have Obamacare struck down before it goes into effect. They will be joined by lawyers for the National Federation of Independent Businesses, a nonprofit small-business organization. The legal challenges to Obamacare's unprecedented intrusion are well-founded. Ultimately, they may be more likely to prevail than even the mounting political dissatisfaction."

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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