Progressives don't really get progress, but the American people do
Progressives claim to have a monopoly on progress – designed by intellectuals who 'know better' and brought about by a big, beneficent government. But Americans voted in last week's elections that this brand of progress actually impoverishes, and that a free market is much smarter
By Donald J. Boudreaux
President Obama and other progressives attribute the Democrats’ electoral shellacking last week to their failure to communicate with ordinary Americans. The implication is that most Americans are too slow to appreciate the noble and courageous government programs that progressives enacted for the public good. Another implication is that progressives are unusually smart and visionary.
The very label “progressive” suggests a forward-looking intelligence – a desire to progress past present superstitions and misinformation into a future enlightened by ideas rather than benighted by ignorance.
And because, for progressives, progress is believed always to involve a larger role for the state, the hallmark of progressive thinking is the outpouring of ideas about what government can do. Anyone objecting to the implementation of these ideas is, therefore, a nonprogressive – someone content to allow past habits and irrational notions to interfere with big, bold, collectively imposed ideas for improving society.
Trouble is, progressives’ understanding of the source of progress is regressive. It reflects an outmoded belief that society advances only if it is consciously designed by well-meaning and smart intellectuals and steered by a beneficent and powerful government.
Free markets regulate themselves
No one more famously exposed the wrong-headedness of this belief than did Adam Smith way back in 1776. Leave individuals free to pursue their own goals as they each see fit, said Smith in effect, and the result will be an orderly, prosperous, and growing – a progressing! – economy that no one did or could design.
Since Smith, generations of economists have refined our understanding that a decentralized, free-market economy is far smarter than is even the best set of ideas concocted by the world’s most brilliant intellectuals.
When markets are free – when individuals are prohibited only from violating the property rights of others and from breaking their contractual promises – the economy swarms with countless ideas. Countless entrepreneurs generate creative ideas for supplying new goods and services that consumers will value; legions of engineers work to develop techniques for producing outputs more efficiently; armies of attorneys devise new ways for contracting parties to better reduce and share risks; bankers around the globe each work to improve methods of getting liquidity into the hands of borrowers who can use it most effectively.
These ideas, constantly bubbling up from millions of different minds, compete with each other. Each of these ideas is tested in the real world, but without being forced on anyone. Also, the feedback on these ideas’ usefulness comes not from seminar participants, but from millions of actual producers and consumers putting their own money on the line. Ideas that actually work survive. Ideas that don’t, don’t.
One size doesn't fit all
Here’s an even better part. In markets, one size does not fit all. Ideas that work for, say, consumers with traditional tastes will survive for the benefit of those consumers, but will not crowd out very different ideas that work for consumers with tastes that are avant-garde. A billion flowers bloom. And as Matt Ridley points out in his book “The Rational Optimist,” these many different ideas will often cross-pollinate with each other, giving birth to yet another generation of ideas – a generation that exists only because of the large and diverse number of ideas that preceded them.
Contrast the multitude of different market-generated and voluntarily adopted ideas with the ideas of progressives – for example, progressives’ idea that government must regulate the fat content of foods.
Each of us can decide how much we value, say, juicy burgers and double-dark chocolate ice cream compared to how much we value a trim waistline and longer life expectancy. And each of us values these benefits differently. The dietary choices that I make for myself are right for me, but I cannot know if they are right for anyone else. Progressives, in contrast, falsely assume there’s a single correct metric, for the whole country, that determines for everyone how to trade off the satisfaction of eating tasty but fatty foods for the benefit of being healthier.
It’s in this way that progressives’ ideas are indeed big and bold – for these ideas are about how millions of other individuals should live their lives. In practice, these are ideas about how one group of people (the politically successful) should engineer everyone else’s contracts, social relations, diets, and even moral sentiments.
'Big Ideas' are big mistakes
Progressives’ ideas, then, are about replacing the market’s unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas – each one individually chosen, practiced, assessed, and modified in light of what Austrian economist and free-market philosopher F.A. Hayek called “the particular circumstances of time and place” – with a relatively paltry set of Big Ideas. These Big Ideas are politically selected and centrally imposed. And they are enforced not by the natural give and take of the everyday interactions of millions of people but, rather, by political authority.
What’s worse, this political authority rests with those whose overriding “idea” is among the most simple-minded and antediluvian notions in history – namely, that those with the power of the sword are anointed to lord it over the rest of us.
In this respect, progressive attitudes aren’t limited to Democrats. Republicans have fallen prey to the notion that Americans would be better off if only the power of the big, federal government could be marshalled for conservative purposes. How else to explain Republican support for such policies as No Child Left Behind or government funding to promote “healthy marriage” and “responsible fatherhood”?
Far from paving a path to prosperity and progress, progressives’ ideas are a recipe for impoverishment and regression.
The good news is that voters in America seem to get that. As pollster Scott Rasmussen noted last week, “voters don’t want to be governed from the left, the right, or even the center. They want someone in Washington who understands that the American people want to govern themselves.”
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ELSEWHERE
Zogby Interactive: Obama Approval Slips to 42%: "President Barack Obama's approval rating among likely voters has slipped after the mid-term elections, and is now at 42% compared to the 45% approval a Zogby Interactive poll found on the day before elections. The President's approval rating held steady at 38% among independent voters, but fell six percentage points from Nov. 1 among Democrats, 87% to 81%. The poll conducted from Nov. 8-10, 2010 also found the percentage of voters saying the nation was on the wrong track increasing to 63%, compared to the 58% found on Nov. 1."
Iraq: Christians fear they could be wiped out: "In the flickering candlelight of Our Lady of Salvation Church, Nagam Riyadh sits against a pillar singing Ave Maria, her voice rising to the shrapnel-marked rafters. ‘We are singing the hymns we couldn’t finish on Sunday,’ says Ms. Riyadh, who was in the choir on Oct. 31 when gunmen stormed the church in an attack that has traumatized the Christian community here and raised questions about its future. On the first Sunday mass after the attack, Nov. 7, she’s one of hundred of survivors and mourners who have gathered here. They light candles in the shape of a cross on the marble floor next to the names of more than 50 dead. At the top are photographs of the two slain priests. ”
The injustice of domestic violence policies: "October was Domestic Violence (DV) Awareness month, but the flurry of articles, speeches, and calls for increased funding omitted crucial data. Current DV arrest policies are blatantly unjust and need to be reinvented. Every year, an estimated one million Americans are arrested on DV charges. Typically they spend several days in jail. According to the Criminal Justice Review, only 30.5 percent of those arrested are convicted.”
The 2010 union pension bailout bills: "Get ready to give some of your hard-earned cash — again — to the cronies of Congress who are pushing for yet another bailout. Two bills in Congress propose using taxpayer dollars to bailout private union pension funds. If either one becomes law Congress for the first time will allow the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC) to use public funds — the money you earn and pay to the government — to shore up horribly mismanaged union pension plans. Estimates for the current shortfall go as high as $165 billion.”
Deficit panel offers “painful” program for US politicians: "The chairmen of President Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission on Wednesday outlined stark recommendations they say are necessary to secure the nation’s fiscal standing, including reforms of the tax code and entitlement programs that would likely spark opposition from lawmakers and interest groups. … Proposed changes to Social Security — the so-called ‘third rail’ of American politics — may be particularly challenging to enact. The draft proposal suggests raising the retirement age, altering the formula for cost-of-living increases, and raising the payroll tax threshold.”
Cut more spending!: "A draft from the Congressional Deficit Commission that Obama appointed came out today, and it actually has a lot to like. For instance: — Raising the retirement age …. reducing foreign aid by $4.6 billion — freezing federal salaries for three years — eliminating popular tax breaks, such as mortgage interest deduction — cuts in farm subsidies — cuts in the Pentagon’s budget … That sounds like a lot of spending cuts — and it would be a good start — but it’s still not nearly enough to get around Medicare’s $38 trillion unfunded liability. So the Deficit Commission also proposes tax increases.”
Iraq: PM to stay on as political deadlock ends: "Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will return to power for another four-year term after Iraqi lawmakers working late into the night Wednesday agreed on a tentative deal to form a new government, lawmakers said. The deal breaks an eight-month impasse that paralyzed the government, encouraged insurgent attacks and rattled potential foreign investors.”
Dinner with the militia: "The story of a female grad student who aspires to do refugee work with children in war torn countries, who is a daughter, a girlfriend, a friend, and is also a member of the local militia, might sound strange to most. Once you understand the truth about militias, my life doesn’t seem strange at all. Militia members are normal everyday people. We are just like you, and some of us may be your neighbors, your friends, and your family.”
Market alternatives for food safety: "Most Americans go about their daily lives convinced that the Federal government, through the auspices of the Department of Agriculture, protects them from eating poisoned food. If not for the USDA or the Food and Drug Administration, they imagine, every food item on the store shelf would be suspect. Restaurateurs would unwittingly sell E. coli-infected meat and produce to their customers on a daily basis, and the simple act of eating would become like a game of Russian roulette. But what if that protection was largely an illusion? What if there were other simpler, quicker, and more efficient alternatives to food safety than the USDA?”
Joe Biden’s weak case for government meddling: "Joe Biden believes that government played a large role in the success of railroads in the 19th century. In this video, Don Boudreaux points out that that isn’t actually true. There were four transcontinental railroads. Three of them received subsidies. The fourth was the Great Northern Railway, founded by Canadian immigrant James J. Hill. He alone rejected any special government favors.”
The election’s over, so let’s get back to business: "President Obama recently warned that the current high unemployment could be ‘a new normal’ in the United States. If his administration doesn’t change course on policies, he may be right. Myriad policy options — from deregulating and cutting taxes to slashing the size of the federal government — remain untried. Add to that mix fostering entrepreneurship by letting foreign entrepreneurs come to the U.S.”
Congress should “shellack” the president’s executive orders: "‘Stroke of the pen, law of the land — kinda cool’ — that’s how Paul Begala described rule by executive order back in 1998, as his boss President Clinton prepared a passel of them, the better to bypass an uncooperative Congress. After last Tuesday’s ’shellacking,’ it’s a fair bet President Obama will find rule by decree kinda cool as well."
Besmirch and divert: "If Mr. Obama and his acolytes cannot produce anything that’s better than charges of racism and bigotry against their political or intellectual adversaries, they are in effect admitting that their viewpoint is bankrupt. No one with even a modicum of merit to his or her argument will resort to ad hominems. The arguments being advanced are supposed to carry the weight of the position and there would be no need for trying to discredit with smears those who oppose it.”
Big government’s final frontier: "It is time for conservatives to recognize that Apollo is over. We must recognize that Apollo was a centrally planned monopolistic government program for a few government employees, in the service of Cold War propaganda and was therefore itself an affront to American values. If we want to seriously explore, and potentially exploit space, we need to harness private enterprise, and push the technologies really needed to do so.”
Competitive trash pickup under fire: "It seems that Fountain Hills, AZ had competitive trash pickup, and the city council wanted to bid out trash pickup as a single-provider city service instead. The people of Fountain Hills reacted like a bunch of 1950’s anti-communists, calling it socialism and likening it to Obamacare. John Cole and his comment section went ape-shit, in the original post and follow-ups here and here. Quite a few commenters suggested that if we don’t have municipal trash collection, we’ll look like third-world countries where people just bury, burn, or leave their trash out on their property to rot. Strangely, I hadn’t heard a single report of uncollected trash in Fountain Hills leading to this change.”
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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Thursday, November 11, 2010
Sarah hits the nail on the head
She sees how destructive is Obama's orgy of printing new money
"We don't want temporary, artificial economic growth brought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings," the former GOP Vice Presidential nominee said. "We want a stable dollar combined with real economic reform. It's the only way we can get our economy back on the right track."
Mrs. Palin's remarks may have the beneficial effect of bringing the dollar back to the center of the American political debate, not to mention of the GOP economic platform. Republican economic reformers of the 1970s and 1980s—especially Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp—understood the importance of stable money to U.S. prosperity.
On the other hand, the Bush Administration was clueless. Its succession of Treasury Secretaries promoted dollar devaluation little different from that of the current Administration, while the White House ignored or applauded an over-easy Fed policy that created the credit boom and housing bubble that led to financial panic.
Misguided monetary policy can ruin an Administration as thoroughly as higher taxes and destructive regulation, and the new GOP majority in the House and especially the next GOP President need to be alert to the dangers. Mrs. Palin is way ahead of her potential Presidential competitors on this policy point, and she shows a talent for putting a technical subject in language that average Americans can understand.
More HERE
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Political Judges
Thomas Sowell
The runaway arrogance that politicians get when they have huge majorities in Congress is a more or less common arrogance among federal judges with lifetime tenure or state judges who are seldom defeated in elections to confirm their appointments to the bench.
It was a surprise to many-- and a shock to media liberals-- when three judges on Iowa's Supreme Court were voted off that court in the same recent elections in which a lot of politicians were also sent packing.
These judges had taken it upon themselves to rule that the voters of Iowa did not have the right to block attempts to change the definition of marriage to include homosexual couples. Here again, the particular issue-- so-called "gay marriage"-- was not as fundamental as the question of depriving the voting public of their right to decide what kinds of laws they want to live under.
That is ultimately a question of deciding what kind of country this is to be-- one ruled by "we the people" or one where the notions of an arrogant elite are to be imposed, whether the people agree or not.
Those who believe in gay marriage are free to vote for it. But, when they lose that vote, it is not the role of judges to nullify the vote and legislate from the bench. Judges who become politicians in robes often lie like politicians as well, claiming that they are just applying the Constitution, when they are in fact exercising powers that the Constitution never gave them.
If they are going to act like politicians, then they should be voted out like politicians.
Media liberals, who like what liberal judges do, spring to their defense. The media spin is that judges were voted off the bench because of "unpopular" decisions and that this threatens judicial "independence."
Since this was the first time that a justice of the Iowa Supreme Court was voted off the bench in nearly half a century, it is very doubtful that there was never an "unpopular" court decision in all that time. The media spin about "unpopular" decisions sidesteps the far more important question of whether the judges usurped powers that were never given to them by the Constitution.
As for judicial "independence," that does not mean being independent of the laws. Being a judge does not mean being given arbitrary powers to enact the liberal agenda from the bench, which means depriving the citizens of their most basic rights that define a free and self-governing people.
While removing three state Supreme Court justices at one time in Iowa is news today, the very same thing happened in California back in the 1970s. Every single death penalty imposed by a trial court in California was overturned by the state Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Rose Bird voting 64 times in a row that there was something wrong with the way each trial had been conducted. That was world-class chutzpah.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that Arizona does not have a right to require proof of citizenship before someone can vote. Where does it say that in the Constitution?
The time is long overdue to stop treating judges like sacred cows, especially when they have so much bull
More HERE
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No Illegal Alien Pilot Left Behind
Michelle Malkin
Chalk up another Code Red Elmo moment for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. While Islamic terrorists groom suicide bombers starting in kindergarten, the grownups in charge of protecting America can't seem to reach an elementary level of competence.
More than nine years after the 9/11 jihadist attacks, untold numbers of high-risk flyers have been able to board, ride and pilot American planes -- some with Transportation Security Administration approval to boot.
Outside Boston, one shady flight school provided single-engine pilot lessons to at least 33 illegal immigrants from Brazil. But clear counter-terror rules ban illegal aliens from enrolling in U.S. flight schools. Clear counter-terror regulations require TSA to run foreign flight students' names against a plethora of terrorism, criminal and immigration databases. Head-scratching airport security officials were at a loss last week to explain how dozens of these illegal alien students eluded their radar screen when the agency "performs a thorough background check on each applicant at the time of application" and checks "for available disqualifying immigration information," the Boston Globe reported.
A cluebat for the Keystone Kops: No matter how DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano might spin it, the "system" is not "working" in any sense of either word.
Whistleblowers have warned for years about the gaping holes in both the TSA's and the Federal Aviation Administration's foreign pilot screening systems. In 2005, aviation safety inspector Edward H. Blount of the Alabama Flight Standards District Office sent a letter to the TSA warning of federal policies that were "fostering illegal flight training by foreign individuals" in the U.S. on improper visas. Blount reported that he and another investigator were told by a TSA official that the agency was "not going to look at the visa status" of pilot applicants.
In 2008, ABC News discovered that thousands of foreign nationals were able to enroll in flight schools despite the strict flight security rules. "Some of the very same conditions that allowed the 9-11 tragedy to happen in the first place are still very much in existence today," one regional TSA officer warned. "TSA's enforcement is basically nonexistent," former FAA inspector Bill McNease told the network. The matter was kicked upstairs to DHS higher-ups in Washington. And there it gathered dust.
Compounding those persistent gaps are the myriad ways the open-borders lobby has undermined secure identification. Homeland security officials were warned years ago about the use of bogus Mexican matricula consular cards by illegal aliens boarding planes. American banks have pandered to the pro-amnesty lobby in search of illegal alien customers; the financial industry championed the use of the matricula consular cards as identification despite widespread fraud, inability to verify validating documents and lack of any central database. Dozens of municipalities have incorporated consular cards as "valid" ID for illegal aliens, and three states still issue driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. Open-borders ideologues populate every corner of the Obama administration, from DHS to the Department of Justice, where civil rights division head Thomas Perez has long crusaded for illegal alien licenses.
These comprehensive failures are partly attributable to incompetence, partly attributable to industry pressure and partly attributable to the intentional undermining of the very immigration laws Congress passed after 9/11 -- laws specifically designed to prevent future alien hijackers like the 9/11 monsters from so easily exploiting the homeland security lapses that allowed them to live and train here for years unencumbered even after their temporary visas had expired.
More HERE
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The media were not defeated by the mid-terms
Now Obama, Pelosi and their troops in the media are going to turn to the proposition that the House Republicans must be defeated. Oh, the irony. Weren't their knickers in the tightest of knots when Rush Limbaugh stated he wanted Obama to fail?
Trying to reduce our $3.5 trillion annual budget by $100 million, liberals now insist, is "impossible." So said morning host Harry Smith on CBS. But Team Obama adding $2.7 trillion to the deficit over the last two years was a piece of cake.
The insatiable left is defining as "realistic" anything that keeps the gravy train rolling, and trying to slow it down is utterly unthinkable. Smith wouldn't be caught dead reading a new study from the Heritage Foundation showing how to cut $343 billion per year in federal spending, or more than one-fourth of the 2010 deficit, as a down payment toward a balanced budget.
Despite controlling only one house of Congress, the GOP has been handed all the accountability for government spending by the press. In every interview, the media are pounding tea party politicians to announce where they're going to cut. Liberals are never challenged to put forth specifics when they genuflect at the altar of fiscal responsibility because everyone knows they really mean tax hikes.
So most Republicans are avoiding specifics like the Heritage plan because they know that for any spending cut they propose, the media will go hunting for potential victims of alleged Republican viciousness. They remember 1995, when ABC was doing stories on the brief government shutdown with tear-jerking lines about poor bureaucrats, like "Joe Skattleberry and his wife, Lisa, can't afford a Christmas tree."
It's as simple as this: Reporters don't want the budget to be cut. That's why a look at the Big Three network newscasts by the Media Research Center from Sept. 1 through Oct. 25 found the networks repeatedly telling the voters they faced a choice between reasonable Democrats and freakishly far-right Republicans.
There were 35 evening news stories that conveyed the message that conservative and tea party candidates were "extreme," "fringe," or "out of the mainstream." But there was not a single network story that spent one second of time to suggest that the conservatives asserted the Obama/Reid/Pelosi Democrats, responsible for the most radical legislative agenda in history, were "out of the mainstream."
When the voters went to the polls and rejected the Democrats, they were rejecting the Old Media as well.
Network reporters consistently implied or stated that Obama was already in the center of the political conversation, and the GOP was off-the-charts conservative. They applied 62 ideological labels, and 77 percent were aimed at conservatives, and only 23 percent were for liberals. Both Delaware's Christine O'Donnell and Alaska's Joe Miller were tagged as "ultraconservatives"; apparently, that's a synonym for the tea party, but no Democrat -- not one -- was ever branded an "ultraliberal."
In the Pennsylvania Senate race, CBS called Republican Pat Toomey "conservative," but Democrat Joe Sestak (American Conservative Union rating: zero) was not a "liberal." CBS stooped lowest by airing an entire story on loud-mouthed loser Alan Grayson (another ACU zero), but never called him a "liberal," despite his claim that the Republican health care motto was "Die Quickly." To the liberals in denial at CBS, Grayson wasn't "extreme" on anything, but they felt it necessary to tag his opponent Daniel Webster as "conservative."
More HERE
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The Bashing of American Exceptionalism
Daily Beast columnist Peter Beinart railed against the GOP's "lunatic notion" of America's exceptionalism. In particular, Beinart was infuriated by Senator-elect Marco Rubio's claim that "America is the single greatest nation in all of human history." Doesn't the Florida politician know, Beinart wonders, that China and Brazil are opening opportunities to their citizens too? According to Beinart, Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles, is too ideologically blinkered to know that "the American dream of upward mobility is alive and well, just not in America."
What's bizarre about Beinart and Kinsley's rendition of American exceptionalism is that it hinges on the premise that the idea of American exceptionalism is an artifact of right-wing jingoism, xenophobia or ignorance. Even Obama flirts with this sort of thing every time he chalks up opposition to his agenda to the fear, bigotry or small-mindedness of the "bitter" souls "clinging" to their antiquarian beliefs.
Forget that every Fourth of July we celebrate the fact that we fought the Revolutionary War to become an exceptional nation. From their dismissive condescension, you'd think these three educated men didn't know that American exceptionalism has been a well-established notion among scholars for more than a century.
"The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in "Democracy in America," "and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one." Ever since, historians have argued that America's lack of a feudal past, its Puritan roots, the realism of its revolutionary ambitions and many other ingredients contributed to America's status as the "first new nation," to borrow a phrase from Seymour Martin Lipset, who spent his life writing about American exceptionalism....
Now that Europe has turned its back -- at least temporarily -- on lavish Keynesian spending, folks like Beinart must turn to developing countries such as China and Brazil for inspiration. Countries that pay millions of workers pennies a day are not normally role models for the left. But, hey, if it makes Republicans appear backward, they'll give it a shot.
Ultimately, it's not that liberals don't believe in American exceptionalism so much as they believe it is holding America back, which might explain why they're lashing out at the people who want to keep it exceptional. But that too is nothing new. "The Coolidge myth has been created by amazingly skillful propaganda," editorialized The Nation in 1924 about the unfathomable popularity of Calvin Coolidge. "The American people dearly love to be fooled."
For the record, I'm with Rubio. America is the greatest country in the world. That doesn't mean it's perfect. But it is, and remains, the last best hope of Earth.
But, by all means, Democrats, listen to the sophisticates who chortle at the idea that there's anything especially good about America. That will solve Obama's "communication problem."
More HERE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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She sees how destructive is Obama's orgy of printing new money
"We don't want temporary, artificial economic growth brought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings," the former GOP Vice Presidential nominee said. "We want a stable dollar combined with real economic reform. It's the only way we can get our economy back on the right track."
Mrs. Palin's remarks may have the beneficial effect of bringing the dollar back to the center of the American political debate, not to mention of the GOP economic platform. Republican economic reformers of the 1970s and 1980s—especially Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp—understood the importance of stable money to U.S. prosperity.
On the other hand, the Bush Administration was clueless. Its succession of Treasury Secretaries promoted dollar devaluation little different from that of the current Administration, while the White House ignored or applauded an over-easy Fed policy that created the credit boom and housing bubble that led to financial panic.
Misguided monetary policy can ruin an Administration as thoroughly as higher taxes and destructive regulation, and the new GOP majority in the House and especially the next GOP President need to be alert to the dangers. Mrs. Palin is way ahead of her potential Presidential competitors on this policy point, and she shows a talent for putting a technical subject in language that average Americans can understand.
More HERE
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Political Judges
Thomas Sowell
The runaway arrogance that politicians get when they have huge majorities in Congress is a more or less common arrogance among federal judges with lifetime tenure or state judges who are seldom defeated in elections to confirm their appointments to the bench.
It was a surprise to many-- and a shock to media liberals-- when three judges on Iowa's Supreme Court were voted off that court in the same recent elections in which a lot of politicians were also sent packing.
These judges had taken it upon themselves to rule that the voters of Iowa did not have the right to block attempts to change the definition of marriage to include homosexual couples. Here again, the particular issue-- so-called "gay marriage"-- was not as fundamental as the question of depriving the voting public of their right to decide what kinds of laws they want to live under.
That is ultimately a question of deciding what kind of country this is to be-- one ruled by "we the people" or one where the notions of an arrogant elite are to be imposed, whether the people agree or not.
Those who believe in gay marriage are free to vote for it. But, when they lose that vote, it is not the role of judges to nullify the vote and legislate from the bench. Judges who become politicians in robes often lie like politicians as well, claiming that they are just applying the Constitution, when they are in fact exercising powers that the Constitution never gave them.
If they are going to act like politicians, then they should be voted out like politicians.
Media liberals, who like what liberal judges do, spring to their defense. The media spin is that judges were voted off the bench because of "unpopular" decisions and that this threatens judicial "independence."
Since this was the first time that a justice of the Iowa Supreme Court was voted off the bench in nearly half a century, it is very doubtful that there was never an "unpopular" court decision in all that time. The media spin about "unpopular" decisions sidesteps the far more important question of whether the judges usurped powers that were never given to them by the Constitution.
As for judicial "independence," that does not mean being independent of the laws. Being a judge does not mean being given arbitrary powers to enact the liberal agenda from the bench, which means depriving the citizens of their most basic rights that define a free and self-governing people.
While removing three state Supreme Court justices at one time in Iowa is news today, the very same thing happened in California back in the 1970s. Every single death penalty imposed by a trial court in California was overturned by the state Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Rose Bird voting 64 times in a row that there was something wrong with the way each trial had been conducted. That was world-class chutzpah.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that Arizona does not have a right to require proof of citizenship before someone can vote. Where does it say that in the Constitution?
The time is long overdue to stop treating judges like sacred cows, especially when they have so much bull
More HERE
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No Illegal Alien Pilot Left Behind
Michelle Malkin
Chalk up another Code Red Elmo moment for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. While Islamic terrorists groom suicide bombers starting in kindergarten, the grownups in charge of protecting America can't seem to reach an elementary level of competence.
More than nine years after the 9/11 jihadist attacks, untold numbers of high-risk flyers have been able to board, ride and pilot American planes -- some with Transportation Security Administration approval to boot.
Outside Boston, one shady flight school provided single-engine pilot lessons to at least 33 illegal immigrants from Brazil. But clear counter-terror rules ban illegal aliens from enrolling in U.S. flight schools. Clear counter-terror regulations require TSA to run foreign flight students' names against a plethora of terrorism, criminal and immigration databases. Head-scratching airport security officials were at a loss last week to explain how dozens of these illegal alien students eluded their radar screen when the agency "performs a thorough background check on each applicant at the time of application" and checks "for available disqualifying immigration information," the Boston Globe reported.
A cluebat for the Keystone Kops: No matter how DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano might spin it, the "system" is not "working" in any sense of either word.
Whistleblowers have warned for years about the gaping holes in both the TSA's and the Federal Aviation Administration's foreign pilot screening systems. In 2005, aviation safety inspector Edward H. Blount of the Alabama Flight Standards District Office sent a letter to the TSA warning of federal policies that were "fostering illegal flight training by foreign individuals" in the U.S. on improper visas. Blount reported that he and another investigator were told by a TSA official that the agency was "not going to look at the visa status" of pilot applicants.
In 2008, ABC News discovered that thousands of foreign nationals were able to enroll in flight schools despite the strict flight security rules. "Some of the very same conditions that allowed the 9-11 tragedy to happen in the first place are still very much in existence today," one regional TSA officer warned. "TSA's enforcement is basically nonexistent," former FAA inspector Bill McNease told the network. The matter was kicked upstairs to DHS higher-ups in Washington. And there it gathered dust.
Compounding those persistent gaps are the myriad ways the open-borders lobby has undermined secure identification. Homeland security officials were warned years ago about the use of bogus Mexican matricula consular cards by illegal aliens boarding planes. American banks have pandered to the pro-amnesty lobby in search of illegal alien customers; the financial industry championed the use of the matricula consular cards as identification despite widespread fraud, inability to verify validating documents and lack of any central database. Dozens of municipalities have incorporated consular cards as "valid" ID for illegal aliens, and three states still issue driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. Open-borders ideologues populate every corner of the Obama administration, from DHS to the Department of Justice, where civil rights division head Thomas Perez has long crusaded for illegal alien licenses.
These comprehensive failures are partly attributable to incompetence, partly attributable to industry pressure and partly attributable to the intentional undermining of the very immigration laws Congress passed after 9/11 -- laws specifically designed to prevent future alien hijackers like the 9/11 monsters from so easily exploiting the homeland security lapses that allowed them to live and train here for years unencumbered even after their temporary visas had expired.
More HERE
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The media were not defeated by the mid-terms
Now Obama, Pelosi and their troops in the media are going to turn to the proposition that the House Republicans must be defeated. Oh, the irony. Weren't their knickers in the tightest of knots when Rush Limbaugh stated he wanted Obama to fail?
Trying to reduce our $3.5 trillion annual budget by $100 million, liberals now insist, is "impossible." So said morning host Harry Smith on CBS. But Team Obama adding $2.7 trillion to the deficit over the last two years was a piece of cake.
The insatiable left is defining as "realistic" anything that keeps the gravy train rolling, and trying to slow it down is utterly unthinkable. Smith wouldn't be caught dead reading a new study from the Heritage Foundation showing how to cut $343 billion per year in federal spending, or more than one-fourth of the 2010 deficit, as a down payment toward a balanced budget.
Despite controlling only one house of Congress, the GOP has been handed all the accountability for government spending by the press. In every interview, the media are pounding tea party politicians to announce where they're going to cut. Liberals are never challenged to put forth specifics when they genuflect at the altar of fiscal responsibility because everyone knows they really mean tax hikes.
So most Republicans are avoiding specifics like the Heritage plan because they know that for any spending cut they propose, the media will go hunting for potential victims of alleged Republican viciousness. They remember 1995, when ABC was doing stories on the brief government shutdown with tear-jerking lines about poor bureaucrats, like "Joe Skattleberry and his wife, Lisa, can't afford a Christmas tree."
It's as simple as this: Reporters don't want the budget to be cut. That's why a look at the Big Three network newscasts by the Media Research Center from Sept. 1 through Oct. 25 found the networks repeatedly telling the voters they faced a choice between reasonable Democrats and freakishly far-right Republicans.
There were 35 evening news stories that conveyed the message that conservative and tea party candidates were "extreme," "fringe," or "out of the mainstream." But there was not a single network story that spent one second of time to suggest that the conservatives asserted the Obama/Reid/Pelosi Democrats, responsible for the most radical legislative agenda in history, were "out of the mainstream."
When the voters went to the polls and rejected the Democrats, they were rejecting the Old Media as well.
Network reporters consistently implied or stated that Obama was already in the center of the political conversation, and the GOP was off-the-charts conservative. They applied 62 ideological labels, and 77 percent were aimed at conservatives, and only 23 percent were for liberals. Both Delaware's Christine O'Donnell and Alaska's Joe Miller were tagged as "ultraconservatives"; apparently, that's a synonym for the tea party, but no Democrat -- not one -- was ever branded an "ultraliberal."
In the Pennsylvania Senate race, CBS called Republican Pat Toomey "conservative," but Democrat Joe Sestak (American Conservative Union rating: zero) was not a "liberal." CBS stooped lowest by airing an entire story on loud-mouthed loser Alan Grayson (another ACU zero), but never called him a "liberal," despite his claim that the Republican health care motto was "Die Quickly." To the liberals in denial at CBS, Grayson wasn't "extreme" on anything, but they felt it necessary to tag his opponent Daniel Webster as "conservative."
More HERE
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The Bashing of American Exceptionalism
Daily Beast columnist Peter Beinart railed against the GOP's "lunatic notion" of America's exceptionalism. In particular, Beinart was infuriated by Senator-elect Marco Rubio's claim that "America is the single greatest nation in all of human history." Doesn't the Florida politician know, Beinart wonders, that China and Brazil are opening opportunities to their citizens too? According to Beinart, Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles, is too ideologically blinkered to know that "the American dream of upward mobility is alive and well, just not in America."
What's bizarre about Beinart and Kinsley's rendition of American exceptionalism is that it hinges on the premise that the idea of American exceptionalism is an artifact of right-wing jingoism, xenophobia or ignorance. Even Obama flirts with this sort of thing every time he chalks up opposition to his agenda to the fear, bigotry or small-mindedness of the "bitter" souls "clinging" to their antiquarian beliefs.
Forget that every Fourth of July we celebrate the fact that we fought the Revolutionary War to become an exceptional nation. From their dismissive condescension, you'd think these three educated men didn't know that American exceptionalism has been a well-established notion among scholars for more than a century.
"The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in "Democracy in America," "and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one." Ever since, historians have argued that America's lack of a feudal past, its Puritan roots, the realism of its revolutionary ambitions and many other ingredients contributed to America's status as the "first new nation," to borrow a phrase from Seymour Martin Lipset, who spent his life writing about American exceptionalism....
Now that Europe has turned its back -- at least temporarily -- on lavish Keynesian spending, folks like Beinart must turn to developing countries such as China and Brazil for inspiration. Countries that pay millions of workers pennies a day are not normally role models for the left. But, hey, if it makes Republicans appear backward, they'll give it a shot.
Ultimately, it's not that liberals don't believe in American exceptionalism so much as they believe it is holding America back, which might explain why they're lashing out at the people who want to keep it exceptional. But that too is nothing new. "The Coolidge myth has been created by amazingly skillful propaganda," editorialized The Nation in 1924 about the unfathomable popularity of Calvin Coolidge. "The American people dearly love to be fooled."
For the record, I'm with Rubio. America is the greatest country in the world. That doesn't mean it's perfect. But it is, and remains, the last best hope of Earth.
But, by all means, Democrats, listen to the sophisticates who chortle at the idea that there's anything especially good about America. That will solve Obama's "communication problem."
More HERE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
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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Wednesday, November 10, 2010
That old hatred of IQ again
It's seldom that I laugh out loud while reading a bit of Left-leaning, do-gooder nonsense but I have just had that experience.
I don't know how the editor of the Green/Left "New Scientist" (Roger Highfield) got to write for the generally conservative "Daily Telegraph" but it has happened -- but not in a good way. After a series of dogmatic and unreferenced assertions in which he pours out contempt and contumely on conventional IQ tests, he then says that there is a new type of test which is much better. He then however goes on to admit that he doesn't know if the new test works!
Highfield has obviously drawn his conclusions before he has seen the evidence -- which is exactly the opposite of what scientists do. But that is just standard Leftist practice so we must not be at all surprised.
The only further comment I would make is that it is quite an absurd assumption to say that a good measure of intelligence should use as many areas of the brain as possible. The brain does many things and problem solving is only one of them. That problem solving ability should involve only a few parts of the brain would seem a much more reasonable expectation.
********************
Death panel convening already
Federal officials are conducting an unusual review to determine whether the government should pay for an expensive new vaccine for treating prostate cancer, rekindling debate over whether some therapies are too costly.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which dictate what treatments the massive federal health-insurance program for the elderly will cover, is running a "national coverage analysis" of Provenge, the first vaccine approved for treating any cancer. The treatment costs $93,000 a patient and has been shown to extend patients' lives by about four months.
Although Medicare is not supposed to take cost into consideration when making such rulings, the decision to launch a formal examination has raised concerns among cancer experts, drug companies, lawmakers, prostate cancer patients and advocacy groups.
Provenge, which was approved for advanced prostate cancer in April, is the latest in a series of new high-priced cancer treatments that appear to eke out only a few more months of life, prompting alarm about their cost.
"This absolutely is the opening salvo in the drive to save money in the health-care system," said Skip Lockwood, who heads Zero - the Project to End Prostate Cancer, a Washington-based lobbying group. "If the cost wasn't a consideration, this wouldn't even be under discussion."
More HERE
***********************
Barack Obama joined Muslim prayers at school, teacher says
AS a schoolboy in Jakarta, Barack Obama attended Muslim prayer sessions with his classmates against the wishes of his mother.
The US President's former grade three teacher said that Mr Obama - who was known as "Barry" when he attended the Menteng One school in Jakarta - studied the Koran and went to classes on Islam, despite the objections of Ann Dunham, a Catholic.
The teacher's recollections will add to speculation about Mr Obama's links to Islam during his much-anticipated visit to Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, as part of his ten-day tour of Asia.
His middle name, Hussein, and the fact that his stepfather was a Muslim, have combined to perpetuate rumours about Mr Obama's religious leanings. The number of Americans who think that he is a Muslim has grown since his inauguration to one in five.
Mr Obama moved to Indonesia with his mother and Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, when he was 6, and lived there for four years. In his memoirs he recalled his time in the country as the "bounty of a young man's life" and there is affection and pride among Indonesians for the boy who ended up as President of the United States.
The teacher, Effendi, who taught at Menteng One for 29 years, remembers Mr Obama as a "fat, curly-haired, curious boy". The school had an international mix of pupils, including Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims.
Mr Obama attended classes on Islam while the Christians attended classes on Christianity, said Effendi. Barry, he said, was alone among the pupils in that he insisted on attending both.
"His mother did not like him learning Islam, although his father was a Muslim. Sometimes she came to the school; she was angry with the religious teacher and said 'Why did you teach him the Koran?'" said Effendi. "But he kept going to the classes because he was interested in Islam. He would also join the other pupils for Muslim prayers."
More HERE
*************************
SIEU thugs again
Obama's "friends"
Two employees who voiced support for a rival union were wrongfully dismissed during contract negotiations with a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) affiliate, according to a complaint issued by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
According to the complaint, the SEIU-affiliated Rochester Regional Joint Board of Workers United carried out unfair labor practices by “negotiating to insert new language in a labor contract that reduced the pay and work opportunities of the employees,” The Examiner reports. Both dismissed individuals were employees of Sodexo who worked in cafeteria and catering jobs in New York.
The SEIU affiliate reportedly also demanded that catering assignments be based on seniority, reducing the work opportunities and pay of one of the anti-union employees.
The SEIU-affiliated union — not the Sodexo company — must answer to the complaint by Wednesday and an NLRB Administrative Law Judge will rule in a hearing on the complaint in January.
SOURCE
************************
Prosecutors who attended GOP election party dismissed from Dallas County DA's office
Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins dismissed two prosecutors after they attended a party where Republican candidates and supporters were watching results on Election Day.
But the DA's office on Monday denied that the two were related. "The District Attorney's Office does not comment on personnel matters; however, your information is wrong," Watkins' spokeswoman Jamille Bradfield said in an e-mail. "It is not true that anyone was let go because they attended the Republican election night party."
After a bitter campaign, Watkins narrowly defeated Republican Danny Clancy on Nov. 2 to be elected to a second term. The Republicans, including Clancy, gathered at the Hotel Palomar at Central Expressway and Mockingbird Lane to watch election results come in.
Grau and Nowak declined to comment about their dismissals but both said they are looking for other work. Nowak said he is "hopeful" he will find another job as a prosecutor. Grau, who marked 25 years as a Dallas County prosecutor last week, was the chief prosecutor in one of the felony courts. Grau is eligible for retirement later this month and may be able to take vacation days or sick time until then. Nowak, who joined the district attorney's office in 2005, was a child abuse prosecutor.
Clancy, a defense attorney and former judge and prosecutor, said he was "saddened" by the dismissals. "Dallas County has lost two great prosecutors," Clancy said. "I'm saddened that it appears as though their termination was directly linked to their showing of support for the Republican Party." ....
"She said, 'We all serve at the pleasure of the DA,' and I think that's right," Neerman said. "They're not protected under any kind of civil service" laws.
More HERE
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ELSEWHERE
What Republicans can — and can’t — do about ObamaCare: "So as Republicans celebrate and Democrats pick through the electoral rubble, what can we expect to happen next with health care? The new Republican House majority will undoubtedly schedule a quick vote on repealing the health care law, perhaps as early as January. It will pass the House quite easily; not only will every Republican vote for repeal, but there are still a dozen Democrats in the House who voted no last March. But that is as far as repeal is likely to go.”
The price of power: "The Tea Partiers are demanding drastic change in Washington. They want an immediate end to all wasteful federal spending. Let us all applaud this goal, and then lament its improbability. The fact is, the Republicans will never touch the majority of the federal budget.”
Election opens up a gaping divide: "This year’s tumultuous midterm election cycle cut deeply into the ranks of moderates on Capitol Hill, helping usher in a Congress that scholars say could produce the most partisan voting pattern since the Civil War era. The lack of moderate voices has led to fears that lawmakers will be deadlocked over an array of issues, even though a large swath of voters tell pollsters they want compromise — and progress. ‘It will be increasingly difficult because of the divided nature of Congress and the extreme polarization that exists between the two parties,’ said Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, a leading moderate Democrat who did not seek reelection. ‘There is also a complete lack of tolerance for any deviation from party orthodoxy on both sides.’"
Liberals, conservatives, and libertarians: What’s the difference?: "People sometimes ask what the differences are between liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. The primary differences are moral and philosophical. Libertarians believe that people should be free to live their lives any way they choose, so long as their conduct is peaceful.”
Obama’s radical agenda dead, for now: "Supporters of fiscal responsibility, lower taxes and smaller government have something to celebrate after Tuesday’s GOP landslide. Republicans, who all too often do not fall into the above category, should start worrying. The American people have spoken loud and clear, again, that they want politicians who will stop spending money we don’t have and burdening our grandchildren with insurmountable debt. Americans have been demanding this for decades and the political class just can’t seem to understand.”
Who are the true exploiters?: "Was it the ‘free market’ that exploited Japanese Americans in World War II? Was it ‘capitalism’ that drafted thousands of young men to be sent off to Vietnam, with many to return in body bags? Is it the free market that implements mandatory wage and price controls, takes a third of each American’s income, and leeches money to politically connected corporations? Who is the true exploiter, free markets or government?”
GOP won on economy, so focus on it: "It always feels great to win an election. But the real job for fiscal conservatives and smaller-government advocates starts now.”
TSA is evil AND stupid: "Richard Reed tries to smuggle explosives in his shoes. The TSA, after hundreds of thousands of committee man-hours, finally grinds out a policy requring everyone to take off their shoes …. Someone (maybe) tries to smuggle liquids on planes. Hundreds more committee man-hours …. Someone straps explosives to his leg. … Someone smuggles explosives on a Fed Ex package. … I wonder how long it will be before someone in al Qaeda smuggles explosives onto a plane in his rectum — and deliberately lets himself get caught — so the entire civil aviation system will be effectively shut down by TSA’s new mandatory cavity searches for everyone.”
USDA puts fox in charge of guarding the hen house: "I’ve learned about some troubling new regulations on the livestock industry proposed by the USDA’s Grain Inspection, Packers & Stockyards Administration (GIPSA). GIPSA may not be as sexy a regulator as PCABO or NHTSA, but this is one more example of obscure regulatory agencies run amok. What makes this particular proposal especially problematic is that the GIPSA Administrator, a former trial lawyer named J. Dudley Butler who made his bones suing poultry producers, seems to have intentionally introduced a level of vagueness into the rule that, in his own words, makes it a “plaintiff lawyer’s dream.”
Should Britain rediscover private toll roads?: "One result of the Comprehensive Spending Review is that there are more opportunities for private investment to provide what the government can no longer afford. One project to be cut is a proposed relief road in the Midlands, which was meant to ease pressure on a key artery linking the region with Felixtowe. However, the Department of Transport describes the scheme as unaffordable. Cue a sensible alternative — a private toll road.”
There is a BIG new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
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)
****************************
It's seldom that I laugh out loud while reading a bit of Left-leaning, do-gooder nonsense but I have just had that experience.
I don't know how the editor of the Green/Left "New Scientist" (Roger Highfield) got to write for the generally conservative "Daily Telegraph" but it has happened -- but not in a good way. After a series of dogmatic and unreferenced assertions in which he pours out contempt and contumely on conventional IQ tests, he then says that there is a new type of test which is much better. He then however goes on to admit that he doesn't know if the new test works!
Dr Owen is part of the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. With his colleague, Adam Hampshire, he has devised the ultimate intelligence test. Drawing on data from brain scans, his test – featuring a dozen tasks – triggers as much of the brain's anatomy as possible, combining the fewest tasks to cover the broadest range of cognitive skills.
For example, spot-the-difference puzzles boost activity in a range of areas at the back and bottom of the brain. Similarly, when you navigate your way around an unfamiliar supermarket, you rely on visuospatial working memory, which is linked to activity in the ventrolateral frontal cortex behind the eyes and the parietal lobe at the back and on top of the brain. However, as the questions become more complex, demanding more use of strategies and stored memories, broader regions of the frontal and parietal lobes become active – in particular, the large area behind the temples known as the dorsolateral frontal cortex.
Adrian and Adam regard this as the ultimate intelligence test – so all that is left is to find out whether it works. To that end, New Scientist has put it online, in a joint project with the Discovery Channel. If you have a half-hour to spare, and want to put your brain through its paces while advancing the cause of neuroscience, have a go here.
More HERE
Highfield has obviously drawn his conclusions before he has seen the evidence -- which is exactly the opposite of what scientists do. But that is just standard Leftist practice so we must not be at all surprised.
The only further comment I would make is that it is quite an absurd assumption to say that a good measure of intelligence should use as many areas of the brain as possible. The brain does many things and problem solving is only one of them. That problem solving ability should involve only a few parts of the brain would seem a much more reasonable expectation.
********************
Death panel convening already
Federal officials are conducting an unusual review to determine whether the government should pay for an expensive new vaccine for treating prostate cancer, rekindling debate over whether some therapies are too costly.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which dictate what treatments the massive federal health-insurance program for the elderly will cover, is running a "national coverage analysis" of Provenge, the first vaccine approved for treating any cancer. The treatment costs $93,000 a patient and has been shown to extend patients' lives by about four months.
Although Medicare is not supposed to take cost into consideration when making such rulings, the decision to launch a formal examination has raised concerns among cancer experts, drug companies, lawmakers, prostate cancer patients and advocacy groups.
Provenge, which was approved for advanced prostate cancer in April, is the latest in a series of new high-priced cancer treatments that appear to eke out only a few more months of life, prompting alarm about their cost.
"This absolutely is the opening salvo in the drive to save money in the health-care system," said Skip Lockwood, who heads Zero - the Project to End Prostate Cancer, a Washington-based lobbying group. "If the cost wasn't a consideration, this wouldn't even be under discussion."
More HERE
***********************
Barack Obama joined Muslim prayers at school, teacher says
AS a schoolboy in Jakarta, Barack Obama attended Muslim prayer sessions with his classmates against the wishes of his mother.
The US President's former grade three teacher said that Mr Obama - who was known as "Barry" when he attended the Menteng One school in Jakarta - studied the Koran and went to classes on Islam, despite the objections of Ann Dunham, a Catholic.
The teacher's recollections will add to speculation about Mr Obama's links to Islam during his much-anticipated visit to Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, as part of his ten-day tour of Asia.
His middle name, Hussein, and the fact that his stepfather was a Muslim, have combined to perpetuate rumours about Mr Obama's religious leanings. The number of Americans who think that he is a Muslim has grown since his inauguration to one in five.
Mr Obama moved to Indonesia with his mother and Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, when he was 6, and lived there for four years. In his memoirs he recalled his time in the country as the "bounty of a young man's life" and there is affection and pride among Indonesians for the boy who ended up as President of the United States.
The teacher, Effendi, who taught at Menteng One for 29 years, remembers Mr Obama as a "fat, curly-haired, curious boy". The school had an international mix of pupils, including Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims.
Mr Obama attended classes on Islam while the Christians attended classes on Christianity, said Effendi. Barry, he said, was alone among the pupils in that he insisted on attending both.
"His mother did not like him learning Islam, although his father was a Muslim. Sometimes she came to the school; she was angry with the religious teacher and said 'Why did you teach him the Koran?'" said Effendi. "But he kept going to the classes because he was interested in Islam. He would also join the other pupils for Muslim prayers."
More HERE
*************************
SIEU thugs again
Obama's "friends"
Two employees who voiced support for a rival union were wrongfully dismissed during contract negotiations with a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) affiliate, according to a complaint issued by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
According to the complaint, the SEIU-affiliated Rochester Regional Joint Board of Workers United carried out unfair labor practices by “negotiating to insert new language in a labor contract that reduced the pay and work opportunities of the employees,” The Examiner reports. Both dismissed individuals were employees of Sodexo who worked in cafeteria and catering jobs in New York.
After an investigation, NLRB found there was enough evidence to support the employees’ allegations that Workers United engaged in illegal conduct against them in retaliation for their support of a rival union, Local 471-UNITE HERE. The NLRB complaint specifically alleges that during negotiations for a new contract in May 2010, Workers United, an SEIU affiliate, demanded new contract language that reduced the vacation pay of Rodrigue.
The SEIU affiliate reportedly also demanded that catering assignments be based on seniority, reducing the work opportunities and pay of one of the anti-union employees.
The NLRB alleges that the SEIU affiliate engaged in this illegal conduct to retaliate against [the two employees], who supported Local 471-UNITE HERE, and also “to discourage other employees from supporting” Local 471-UNITE HERE.
By this conduct, the union “has been restraining and coercing employees in the exercising of rights guaranteed” under federal labor laws, according to the complaint. As part of the remedy for the alleged unfair labor practices, the NLRB is seeking to have Workers United pay lost wages, with interest, to the affected workers.
The SEIU-affiliated union — not the Sodexo company — must answer to the complaint by Wednesday and an NLRB Administrative Law Judge will rule in a hearing on the complaint in January.
SOURCE
************************
Prosecutors who attended GOP election party dismissed from Dallas County DA's office
Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins dismissed two prosecutors after they attended a party where Republican candidates and supporters were watching results on Election Day.
But the DA's office on Monday denied that the two were related. "The District Attorney's Office does not comment on personnel matters; however, your information is wrong," Watkins' spokeswoman Jamille Bradfield said in an e-mail. "It is not true that anyone was let go because they attended the Republican election night party."
After a bitter campaign, Watkins narrowly defeated Republican Danny Clancy on Nov. 2 to be elected to a second term. The Republicans, including Clancy, gathered at the Hotel Palomar at Central Expressway and Mockingbird Lane to watch election results come in.
Grau and Nowak declined to comment about their dismissals but both said they are looking for other work. Nowak said he is "hopeful" he will find another job as a prosecutor. Grau, who marked 25 years as a Dallas County prosecutor last week, was the chief prosecutor in one of the felony courts. Grau is eligible for retirement later this month and may be able to take vacation days or sick time until then. Nowak, who joined the district attorney's office in 2005, was a child abuse prosecutor.
Clancy, a defense attorney and former judge and prosecutor, said he was "saddened" by the dismissals. "Dallas County has lost two great prosecutors," Clancy said. "I'm saddened that it appears as though their termination was directly linked to their showing of support for the Republican Party." ....
"She said, 'We all serve at the pleasure of the DA,' and I think that's right," Neerman said. "They're not protected under any kind of civil service" laws.
More HERE
***********************
ELSEWHERE
What Republicans can — and can’t — do about ObamaCare: "So as Republicans celebrate and Democrats pick through the electoral rubble, what can we expect to happen next with health care? The new Republican House majority will undoubtedly schedule a quick vote on repealing the health care law, perhaps as early as January. It will pass the House quite easily; not only will every Republican vote for repeal, but there are still a dozen Democrats in the House who voted no last March. But that is as far as repeal is likely to go.”
The price of power: "The Tea Partiers are demanding drastic change in Washington. They want an immediate end to all wasteful federal spending. Let us all applaud this goal, and then lament its improbability. The fact is, the Republicans will never touch the majority of the federal budget.”
Election opens up a gaping divide: "This year’s tumultuous midterm election cycle cut deeply into the ranks of moderates on Capitol Hill, helping usher in a Congress that scholars say could produce the most partisan voting pattern since the Civil War era. The lack of moderate voices has led to fears that lawmakers will be deadlocked over an array of issues, even though a large swath of voters tell pollsters they want compromise — and progress. ‘It will be increasingly difficult because of the divided nature of Congress and the extreme polarization that exists between the two parties,’ said Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, a leading moderate Democrat who did not seek reelection. ‘There is also a complete lack of tolerance for any deviation from party orthodoxy on both sides.’"
Liberals, conservatives, and libertarians: What’s the difference?: "People sometimes ask what the differences are between liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. The primary differences are moral and philosophical. Libertarians believe that people should be free to live their lives any way they choose, so long as their conduct is peaceful.”
Obama’s radical agenda dead, for now: "Supporters of fiscal responsibility, lower taxes and smaller government have something to celebrate after Tuesday’s GOP landslide. Republicans, who all too often do not fall into the above category, should start worrying. The American people have spoken loud and clear, again, that they want politicians who will stop spending money we don’t have and burdening our grandchildren with insurmountable debt. Americans have been demanding this for decades and the political class just can’t seem to understand.”
Who are the true exploiters?: "Was it the ‘free market’ that exploited Japanese Americans in World War II? Was it ‘capitalism’ that drafted thousands of young men to be sent off to Vietnam, with many to return in body bags? Is it the free market that implements mandatory wage and price controls, takes a third of each American’s income, and leeches money to politically connected corporations? Who is the true exploiter, free markets or government?”
GOP won on economy, so focus on it: "It always feels great to win an election. But the real job for fiscal conservatives and smaller-government advocates starts now.”
TSA is evil AND stupid: "Richard Reed tries to smuggle explosives in his shoes. The TSA, after hundreds of thousands of committee man-hours, finally grinds out a policy requring everyone to take off their shoes …. Someone (maybe) tries to smuggle liquids on planes. Hundreds more committee man-hours …. Someone straps explosives to his leg. … Someone smuggles explosives on a Fed Ex package. … I wonder how long it will be before someone in al Qaeda smuggles explosives onto a plane in his rectum — and deliberately lets himself get caught — so the entire civil aviation system will be effectively shut down by TSA’s new mandatory cavity searches for everyone.”
USDA puts fox in charge of guarding the hen house: "I’ve learned about some troubling new regulations on the livestock industry proposed by the USDA’s Grain Inspection, Packers & Stockyards Administration (GIPSA). GIPSA may not be as sexy a regulator as PCABO or NHTSA, but this is one more example of obscure regulatory agencies run amok. What makes this particular proposal especially problematic is that the GIPSA Administrator, a former trial lawyer named J. Dudley Butler who made his bones suing poultry producers, seems to have intentionally introduced a level of vagueness into the rule that, in his own words, makes it a “plaintiff lawyer’s dream.”
Should Britain rediscover private toll roads?: "One result of the Comprehensive Spending Review is that there are more opportunities for private investment to provide what the government can no longer afford. One project to be cut is a proposed relief road in the Midlands, which was meant to ease pressure on a key artery linking the region with Felixtowe. However, the Department of Transport describes the scheme as unaffordable. Cue a sensible alternative — a private toll road.”
There is a BIG new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
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)
****************************
Monday, November 08, 2010
More Hitler history
The account of Hitler given below is reasonable on the whole but is rather laughable in the way it reveals that none of the authors concerned seem to have actually read "Mein Kampf". They breathlessly reveal that Hitler's conversion to antisemitism did not happen until he was in Vienna in the 20s. Yet that is precisely what Hitler said of himself in "Mein Kampf".
They also seem to find it surprising or hypocritical that he had a brief flirtation with Bavarian Reds in the immediate aftermath of the war. But that should not be remotely surprising. Nazism had much in common with Marxism. Its major difference was in being a more moderate version of Marxism! Hitler rejected the "class war" ideas of Marxism in favour of a war against the Jews but that was the major point of difference.
They also say that Hitler's war service was not in the front lines and imply that it was not therefore dangerous. If so how did he get gassed?
And if they had read "Mein Kampf", they would not conclude "we still haven't answered the question of what turned Hitler into an anti-Semitic idealogue". Hitler offers a perfectly cogent explanation of that in "Mein Kampf" but they make no attempt to discuss it so clearly have not read it. See here for a summary. Whether or not one agrees with Hitler's account of how his own thinking developed, it was surely worth discussing
Incidentally, the fact that Hitler reached only the rank of "Gefreite" (corporal) in WWI was not seen by him as any embarrassment. He in fact put up posters boasting about it in his election campaigns. He saw it as credentialling himself as a plain man of the people
Translation: "The Marshall and the corporal fight alongside us for peace and equal rights"
When Nazi Germany took over Austria in March 1938, there was an outburst of not just anti-Semitism but outright sadism against the Jews. They were, among much else, made to scrub the slogans of the previous regime off walls and pavements. Then the expropriations started. An elderly Jewish couple who lost their shop appealed to Hitler in Berlin. Did His Excellency the Chancellor, they wrote, perhaps remember that as a young painter before the war selling his paintings on the corner of the Siebensterngasse, he would when it rained drop in at a certain shop and be given a cup of tea? Could he now see his way to helping the people who had treated him with such kindness? Hitler marked that the letter should be ignored, and the old couple surely went to a death camp.
We owe our knowledge of this fact to a remarkable 1999 book: "Hitler's Vienna" by Brigitte Hamann. Her extensive research revealed that Hitler was not really an anti-Semite until after World War I. What had happened in those crucial wartime years is the question that Thomas Weber now answers in "Hitler's First War." Like Ms. Hamann, he has searched out original documents and found new material. Like her, he fundamentally alters our understanding of one of the most studied figures of the 20th century.
Hitler wrote about his war experiences in "Mein Kampf" (1925), and biographers have generally relied on his account. He put himself across as a soldier-hero: a "runner" carrying messages back and forth through machine-gun fire and artillery, twice decorated with the Iron Cross for bravery, wounded and then, toward the end of the war, blinded by poison gas. He learned of the end of the war at a military hospital in Pasewalk, not far from Berlin, and he wept.
In Hitler's version, the weeping soon turned vindictive against the soft-brained academics, Jews and members of the left who, he alleged, had caused Germany to lose the war. Remaining in the army, he was sent to Bavaria to fight against left-wing revolutionaries. (And yet Mr. Weber has discovered that, briefly at the turn of 1918-19, and unmentioned in "Mein Kampf," Hitler wore a red brassard and supported the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic.) Demobilized, he became an informer for the army's propaganda unit— though whether he volunteered or was coerced because of his short-lived involvement with the Bavarian Soviet Republic, Mr. Weber admits we cannot know—and was sent to monitor a meeting of the obscure German Workers' Party, soon to be re-named National Socialist German Workers' Party. Hitler was deeply impressed by the party's hypernationalism and anti-Semitism and joined within a week of attending his first meeting. He also found that he was a tremendously effective public speaker. The speeches do not translate: What sounds superb in one language can sound plain comic in another. But desperate Germans were soon paying to hear Hitler speak, and, as the party's chief source of revenue, he took over the leadership.
How did the young Hitler—diffident, gauche, without solid political convictions—turn into the fascist demagogue of 1922? There is no simple answer to this question, but "Hitler's First War" debunks some of the standard responses. Biographers have long assumed that the war marked a turning point: the comradeship of the trenches, the common soldier's hatred of the profiteers in the rear and the sense of betrayal with the peace made in 1918. Yet there was the nagging question of why the brave, decorated soldier of "Mein Kampf" was not promoted. Hitler served more or less for the whole of the war and never rose above the rank of corporal, which, given that he undoubtedly had leadership qualities, comes as a considerable surprise.
With some luck and a lot of diligence, Mr. Weber has discovered the missing documents of Hitler's war service, and it is fair to say that very little of Hitler's own account survives the discovery. There were indeed two Iron Crosses, but his regimental runner's job was not necessarily dangerous, and he lived in relative comfort at the regimental headquarters away from the front lines. Ordinary soldiers referred to such men as Etappenschweine ("rear pigs") —all armies have such a word: "cushy number" and "base wallah" are British examples. Officers had to dish out a quota of medals, and if you did not offend them they would just put your name on the list. Hitler was not, it appears, particularly courageous. He was just there. And, as it happens, a Jewish superior officer, Hugo Gutmann, recommended Hitler for his first Iron Cross. He was not thanked for this act in later life—though his fate, emigration to the United States, was greatly preferable to that of the old couple in Vienna.
There also wasn't much comradeship. When Hitler broke surface in politics, he asked his old comrades in the regiment for support and discovered that on the whole they had not liked him one bit. Men who had fought at the front in World War I were, moreover, not at all keen on staging a second war, and extraordinarily few of Hitler's old comrades went along with Nazism. Most supported the Weimar Republic. Mr. Weber's research shows that it's not really possible to connect the brutalization of men in the trenches to the birth of National Socialism.
It is very much to Mr. Weber's credit that he has managed to dig out the details, and we can place his book together with Ms. Hamann's as a triumph of original research in a very stony field. The conclusion that might be drawn is that Hitler was far more of the opportunist than is generally supposed. He made things up as he went along, including his own past. If we still haven't answered the question of what turned Hitler into an anti-Semitic idealogue, at least attention has been shifted to the Bavarian years of 1919-22. Ms. Hamann and Mr. Weber point the way forward for the next scholar's diligent researches.
SOURCE
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Some America-hating sponsored by Obama
Obama appointed Jim Leach as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Leach is a RINO with a Master of Arts degree in Soviet politics and a series of Green/Left "achievements" in Federal politics. RINO though he is, it is hard to believe that he authorized the hate below for any other reason than to pander to Obama
In July 2010 the NEH sponsored a workshop for college professors at the East-West Center, University of Hawaii. The title of the conference was "History and Commemoration: The Legacies of the Pacific War." As one of the 25 American scholars chosen to attend the workshop, Professor Penelope Blake anticipated an opportunity to visit hallowed sites such as Pearl Harbor, the Arizona Memorial and the Punchbowl Cemetery and engage with scholars who share her interest in studying this often neglected part of World War II history.
Instead, Professor Blake was treated to the most disturbing experience of her academic career, a conference which she found to be driven by an overt political bias and a blatant anti-American agenda. Professor Blake has forwarded to us the following letter dated September 12, 2010, to Illinois Rep. Donald Manzullo, her congressman, documenting examples of what transpired at the conference. Copies of the letter were also sent to members of the NEH Council and to Leach. Professor Blake writes
Much more HERE
***********************
Race and the 2010 elections
Star Parker
Will the NAACP be celebrating the arrival of two new black faces to the U.S. House of Representatives? Don’t hold your breath. They certainly will not. These two new black congressmen are Republicans.
There’s a powerful message here that should and must be digested. We have arrived in post-racial America but establishment blacks – lodged in the political left – refuse to accept it and are doing all they can to get black citizens to refuse to accept it.
The sobering reality is that the black political establishment doesn’t want Dr. King’s dream. They don’t want an America where people are judged by the content of their character. They want an America that is Democrat and left wing and this is what they promote today under the banner of civil rights.
The campaign by the NAACP and leading black journalists – all liberals – to paint the Tea Party movement, the push back against government growth and intrusiveness over the last two years, as motivated by racism is shameful.
Shortly before the elections, the NAACP produced a tome called “Tea Party Nationalism,” alleging racist connections to the Tea Party movement. The day before the elections, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote a column suggesting that the Tea Party movement was a well funded racist pushback against President Obama which started the day of his inauguration.
Tim Scott and Allen West, our new black Republican congressmen, are both aggressive and unapologetic voices for everything the Tea Party movement stands for. They were just elected in districts that are overwhelmingly white. Both also defeated white Republican opponents in their primaries.
Scott’s district is Republican. But West’s is not. Florida’s 22nd district that just elected West voted for Barack Obama in 2008, John Kerry in 2004, and Al Gore in 2000. I guess these white Democrats and Independents didn’t get the racism memo.
The political tsunami, washing in a wave of new Republicans to Washington, was caused by a major shift in the vote of political independents, overwhelmingly white, and who largely voted for Barack Obama in 2008.
Who turned on the light after the presidential election that caused these white voters to discover that the man they voted for, to their horror according to the NAACP and Eugene Robinson, is black?
Tim Scott and Allen West won their races. But there were 14 blacks total running as Republicans in congressional races around the country, including me. We hate racism because it denies that what is in a person’s mind and heart has nothing to do with the color of their skin. Almost everyone in America today, Thank God, appreciates this truth. When will the left wing black establishment wake up to it?
More HERE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
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)
****************************
The account of Hitler given below is reasonable on the whole but is rather laughable in the way it reveals that none of the authors concerned seem to have actually read "Mein Kampf". They breathlessly reveal that Hitler's conversion to antisemitism did not happen until he was in Vienna in the 20s. Yet that is precisely what Hitler said of himself in "Mein Kampf".
They also seem to find it surprising or hypocritical that he had a brief flirtation with Bavarian Reds in the immediate aftermath of the war. But that should not be remotely surprising. Nazism had much in common with Marxism. Its major difference was in being a more moderate version of Marxism! Hitler rejected the "class war" ideas of Marxism in favour of a war against the Jews but that was the major point of difference.
They also say that Hitler's war service was not in the front lines and imply that it was not therefore dangerous. If so how did he get gassed?
And if they had read "Mein Kampf", they would not conclude "we still haven't answered the question of what turned Hitler into an anti-Semitic idealogue". Hitler offers a perfectly cogent explanation of that in "Mein Kampf" but they make no attempt to discuss it so clearly have not read it. See here for a summary. Whether or not one agrees with Hitler's account of how his own thinking developed, it was surely worth discussing
Incidentally, the fact that Hitler reached only the rank of "Gefreite" (corporal) in WWI was not seen by him as any embarrassment. He in fact put up posters boasting about it in his election campaigns. He saw it as credentialling himself as a plain man of the people
Translation: "The Marshall and the corporal fight alongside us for peace and equal rights"
When Nazi Germany took over Austria in March 1938, there was an outburst of not just anti-Semitism but outright sadism against the Jews. They were, among much else, made to scrub the slogans of the previous regime off walls and pavements. Then the expropriations started. An elderly Jewish couple who lost their shop appealed to Hitler in Berlin. Did His Excellency the Chancellor, they wrote, perhaps remember that as a young painter before the war selling his paintings on the corner of the Siebensterngasse, he would when it rained drop in at a certain shop and be given a cup of tea? Could he now see his way to helping the people who had treated him with such kindness? Hitler marked that the letter should be ignored, and the old couple surely went to a death camp.
We owe our knowledge of this fact to a remarkable 1999 book: "Hitler's Vienna" by Brigitte Hamann. Her extensive research revealed that Hitler was not really an anti-Semite until after World War I. What had happened in those crucial wartime years is the question that Thomas Weber now answers in "Hitler's First War." Like Ms. Hamann, he has searched out original documents and found new material. Like her, he fundamentally alters our understanding of one of the most studied figures of the 20th century.
Hitler wrote about his war experiences in "Mein Kampf" (1925), and biographers have generally relied on his account. He put himself across as a soldier-hero: a "runner" carrying messages back and forth through machine-gun fire and artillery, twice decorated with the Iron Cross for bravery, wounded and then, toward the end of the war, blinded by poison gas. He learned of the end of the war at a military hospital in Pasewalk, not far from Berlin, and he wept.
In Hitler's version, the weeping soon turned vindictive against the soft-brained academics, Jews and members of the left who, he alleged, had caused Germany to lose the war. Remaining in the army, he was sent to Bavaria to fight against left-wing revolutionaries. (And yet Mr. Weber has discovered that, briefly at the turn of 1918-19, and unmentioned in "Mein Kampf," Hitler wore a red brassard and supported the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic.) Demobilized, he became an informer for the army's propaganda unit— though whether he volunteered or was coerced because of his short-lived involvement with the Bavarian Soviet Republic, Mr. Weber admits we cannot know—and was sent to monitor a meeting of the obscure German Workers' Party, soon to be re-named National Socialist German Workers' Party. Hitler was deeply impressed by the party's hypernationalism and anti-Semitism and joined within a week of attending his first meeting. He also found that he was a tremendously effective public speaker. The speeches do not translate: What sounds superb in one language can sound plain comic in another. But desperate Germans were soon paying to hear Hitler speak, and, as the party's chief source of revenue, he took over the leadership.
How did the young Hitler—diffident, gauche, without solid political convictions—turn into the fascist demagogue of 1922? There is no simple answer to this question, but "Hitler's First War" debunks some of the standard responses. Biographers have long assumed that the war marked a turning point: the comradeship of the trenches, the common soldier's hatred of the profiteers in the rear and the sense of betrayal with the peace made in 1918. Yet there was the nagging question of why the brave, decorated soldier of "Mein Kampf" was not promoted. Hitler served more or less for the whole of the war and never rose above the rank of corporal, which, given that he undoubtedly had leadership qualities, comes as a considerable surprise.
With some luck and a lot of diligence, Mr. Weber has discovered the missing documents of Hitler's war service, and it is fair to say that very little of Hitler's own account survives the discovery. There were indeed two Iron Crosses, but his regimental runner's job was not necessarily dangerous, and he lived in relative comfort at the regimental headquarters away from the front lines. Ordinary soldiers referred to such men as Etappenschweine ("rear pigs") —all armies have such a word: "cushy number" and "base wallah" are British examples. Officers had to dish out a quota of medals, and if you did not offend them they would just put your name on the list. Hitler was not, it appears, particularly courageous. He was just there. And, as it happens, a Jewish superior officer, Hugo Gutmann, recommended Hitler for his first Iron Cross. He was not thanked for this act in later life—though his fate, emigration to the United States, was greatly preferable to that of the old couple in Vienna.
There also wasn't much comradeship. When Hitler broke surface in politics, he asked his old comrades in the regiment for support and discovered that on the whole they had not liked him one bit. Men who had fought at the front in World War I were, moreover, not at all keen on staging a second war, and extraordinarily few of Hitler's old comrades went along with Nazism. Most supported the Weimar Republic. Mr. Weber's research shows that it's not really possible to connect the brutalization of men in the trenches to the birth of National Socialism.
It is very much to Mr. Weber's credit that he has managed to dig out the details, and we can place his book together with Ms. Hamann's as a triumph of original research in a very stony field. The conclusion that might be drawn is that Hitler was far more of the opportunist than is generally supposed. He made things up as he went along, including his own past. If we still haven't answered the question of what turned Hitler into an anti-Semitic idealogue, at least attention has been shifted to the Bavarian years of 1919-22. Ms. Hamann and Mr. Weber point the way forward for the next scholar's diligent researches.
SOURCE
***********************
Some America-hating sponsored by Obama
Obama appointed Jim Leach as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Leach is a RINO with a Master of Arts degree in Soviet politics and a series of Green/Left "achievements" in Federal politics. RINO though he is, it is hard to believe that he authorized the hate below for any other reason than to pander to Obama
In July 2010 the NEH sponsored a workshop for college professors at the East-West Center, University of Hawaii. The title of the conference was "History and Commemoration: The Legacies of the Pacific War." As one of the 25 American scholars chosen to attend the workshop, Professor Penelope Blake anticipated an opportunity to visit hallowed sites such as Pearl Harbor, the Arizona Memorial and the Punchbowl Cemetery and engage with scholars who share her interest in studying this often neglected part of World War II history.
Instead, Professor Blake was treated to the most disturbing experience of her academic career, a conference which she found to be driven by an overt political bias and a blatant anti-American agenda. Professor Blake has forwarded to us the following letter dated September 12, 2010, to Illinois Rep. Donald Manzullo, her congressman, documenting examples of what transpired at the conference. Copies of the letter were also sent to members of the NEH Council and to Leach. Professor Blake writes
Dear Congressman Manzullo:
As one of twenty-five American scholars chosen to participate in the recent National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Workshop, "History and Commemoration: Legacies of the Pacific War in WWII," at the University of Hawaii, East-West Center, I am writing to ask you to vote against approval of 2011 funding for future workshops until the NEH can account for the violation of its stated objective to foster "a mutual respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons and groups" (NEH Budget Request, 2011).
In my thirty years as a professor in upper education, I have never witnessed nor participated in a more extremist, agenda-driven, revisionist conference, nearly devoid of rhetorical balance and historical context for the arguments presented.
In both the required preparatory readings for the conference, as well as the scholarly presentations, I found the overriding messages to include the following:
1. The U.S. military and its veterans constitute an imperialistic, oppressive force which has created and perpetuated its own mythology of liberation and heroism, insisting on a "pristine collective memory" of the war. The authors/presenters equate this to Japan's almost total amnesia and denial about its own war atrocities (Fujitani, White, Yoneyama, 9, 23). One presenter specifically wrote about turning down a job offer when he realized that his office would overlook a fleet of U.S. Naval warships, "the symbol of American power and the symbol of our [Hawaiians'] dispossession...I decided they could not pay me enough" (Osorio 5). Later he claimed that electric and oil companies were at the root of WWII, and that the U.S. developed a naval base at Pearl Harbor to ensure that its own coasts would not be attacked (9, 13).
2. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor should be seen from the perspective of Japan being a victim of western oppression (one speaker likened the attack to 9-11, saying that the U.S. could be seen as "both victim and aggressor" in both attacks); that American "imperial expansion" forced Japan's hand: "For the Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western Imperialism" (Yoneyama 335-336); and the Pearl Harbor attack could be seen as a "pre-emptive strike." (No mention of the main reason for the Pearl Harbor attack: the U.S. had cut off Japan's oil supply in order to stop the wholesale slaughter of Chinese civilians at the hands of the Japanese military.) Another author argued that the Japanese attack was no more "infamous" or "sneaky" than American actions in Korea or Vietnam (Rosenberg 31-32).
3. War memorials, such as the Punchbowl National Memorial Cemetery (where many WWII dead are buried, including those executed by the Japanese on Wake Island and the beloved American journalist Ernie Pyle), are symbols of military aggression and brutality "that pacify death, sanitize war and enable future wars to be fought" (Ferguson and Turnbull, 1). One author stated that the memorials represent American propaganda, "the right to alter a story" (Camacho 201).
4. The U.S. military has repeatedly committed rapes and other violent crimes throughout its past through the present day. Cited here was the handful of cases of attacks by Marines in Okinawa (Fujitani, et al, 13ff). (What was not cited were the mass-murders, rapes, mutilations of hundreds of thousands of Chinese at the hands of the Japanese throughout the 1930s and 40s. This issue is a perfect example of the numerous instances of assertions made without balance or historical context.) Another author stated that the segregation in place within our military and our "occupation" of Germany after the war was comparable to Nazism ('we were as capable of as much evil as the Germans") even though the author admits, with some incredulity, that he "saw no genuine torture, despite all the [American] arrogance, xenophobia and insensitivity." He attributes American kindness towards conquered Germans to our "wealth and power" which allowed us to "forego the extreme kinds of barbarism" (Davis 586). Another author/presenter compared the temporary relocation camps erected by Americans during the war to Nazi extermination camps (Camacho 206). (This is perhaps the most outrageous, offensive and blatantly false statement I have ever read in a supposedly scholarly work).
5. Those misguided members of the WWII generation on islands like Guam and Saipan who feel gratitude to the Americans for saving them from the Japanese are blinded by propaganda supporting "the image of a compassionate America" or by their own advanced age. One author/presenter questioned whether the Americans had saved anyone from anything (Camacho 177, 209), arguing that the Americans could be seen as easily and justifiably as "conquerors and invaders" (199).
Much more HERE
***********************
Race and the 2010 elections
Star Parker
Will the NAACP be celebrating the arrival of two new black faces to the U.S. House of Representatives? Don’t hold your breath. They certainly will not. These two new black congressmen are Republicans.
There’s a powerful message here that should and must be digested. We have arrived in post-racial America but establishment blacks – lodged in the political left – refuse to accept it and are doing all they can to get black citizens to refuse to accept it.
The sobering reality is that the black political establishment doesn’t want Dr. King’s dream. They don’t want an America where people are judged by the content of their character. They want an America that is Democrat and left wing and this is what they promote today under the banner of civil rights.
The campaign by the NAACP and leading black journalists – all liberals – to paint the Tea Party movement, the push back against government growth and intrusiveness over the last two years, as motivated by racism is shameful.
Shortly before the elections, the NAACP produced a tome called “Tea Party Nationalism,” alleging racist connections to the Tea Party movement. The day before the elections, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote a column suggesting that the Tea Party movement was a well funded racist pushback against President Obama which started the day of his inauguration.
Tim Scott and Allen West, our new black Republican congressmen, are both aggressive and unapologetic voices for everything the Tea Party movement stands for. They were just elected in districts that are overwhelmingly white. Both also defeated white Republican opponents in their primaries.
Scott’s district is Republican. But West’s is not. Florida’s 22nd district that just elected West voted for Barack Obama in 2008, John Kerry in 2004, and Al Gore in 2000. I guess these white Democrats and Independents didn’t get the racism memo.
The political tsunami, washing in a wave of new Republicans to Washington, was caused by a major shift in the vote of political independents, overwhelmingly white, and who largely voted for Barack Obama in 2008.
Who turned on the light after the presidential election that caused these white voters to discover that the man they voted for, to their horror according to the NAACP and Eugene Robinson, is black?
Tim Scott and Allen West won their races. But there were 14 blacks total running as Republicans in congressional races around the country, including me. We hate racism because it denies that what is in a person’s mind and heart has nothing to do with the color of their skin. Almost everyone in America today, Thank God, appreciates this truth. When will the left wing black establishment wake up to it?
More HERE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
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)
****************************
The GOP gets a second chance
by Jeff Jacoby
THE MOST encouraging thing about the Republican triumph in last week's midterm elections is that so many Republicans acknowledge that it wasn't a Republican triumph.
"We make a great mistake if we believe that tonight these results are somehow an embrace of the Republican Party," Florida's impressive senator-elect, Marco Rubio, said in his victory speech Tuesday night. "What they are is a second chance, a second chance for Republicans to be what they said they were going to be not so long ago."
The same sentiment was expressed by the likely next House majority leader, Eric Cantor of Virginia. "There isn't a lot of confidence focused on the Republicans yet," he told CBS the morning after the election. "It isn't necessarily a vote of confidence for Republican leadership."
Outside Congress, too, influential Republican strategists have been warning the victors against hubris and the temptation to gloat. "Republicans must not delude themselves," wrote political mastermind Karl Rove. "The voters didn't throw out the Democrats because they are enraptured with the GOP. . . . Republicans are on probation."
So they are. Voters have been betrayed in the past by Republicans who ran for office vowing to shrink the scope and cost and intrusiveness of government, only to end up presiding over ever-more-bloated budgets, record-setting deficits, increasingly unaffordable entitlements, and disgraceful ethical lapses.
The last time a GOP majority took control of the US House of Representatives -- under Newt Gingrich in January 1995 -- Republicans produced a list of more than 300 unnecessary federal agencies, funds, and programs that they intended to "zero out" as proof of their fiscal responsibility. Yet nearly every item on that list was still alive and well when the Republicans lost their majority 12 years later.
The tidal wave that swept so many Democrats out to sea last week was a repudiation of the extremely liberal Obama-Pelosi agenda of the past two years -- the tax increases, the massive health-care overhaul, the trillion-dollar deficits, the regulatory explosion, and the condescending, we-know-best disdain for anyone who opposed them. As the lesser of two evils, Republicans ended up the big winners on Election Day. But they will not regain the trust they squandered the last time around without proving that they deserve it.
What is it time for, then? First and foremost, it is time to reverse the destructive Obama policies that have alarmed so many voters and made businesses so uneasy. It is essential that Republicans keep tax rates from rising. They must roll back spending decisively. And they must dismantle as much of the misbegotten health-care law as a party in control of just one house of Congress can.
They must also make it clear that they have learned from the failure of the previous GOP majority. That means permanently ending the pork-and-earmark culture that has so corrupted the budgeting process. It means defunding, not perpetuating, the corporate welfare and agriculture subsidies that violate every free-market principle Republicans claim to stand for.
More HERE
**********************
Tea Party Boosted Republicans in 2010
There is no question that the tea party movement has dramatically contributed to the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and narrowing the margin in the Senate. In addition to providing boosted turnout — it helped raise turnout to an estimated 41.5 percent (some 90 million) — since early 2009, the tea parties and other citizen activists have helped to dramatically shape the debate toward limiting the size and scope of government.
In fact, the American people set the agenda in the midterms. Their staunch opposition to the failed $812 “stimulus”, ObamaCare, the carbon cap-and-tax, bailouts, and government takeovers emboldened, empowered, and encouraged Republicans on Capitol Hill to take strong a stand on their behalf.
Whoever is saying the tea parties were somehow a hindrance to the GOP in 2010 need to get their heads examined. Republicans in the House picked up the most seats of either party since 1948. To argue the tea parties were inconsequential, or an impediment, one has to maintain that such a turnaround in the fortunes of Republicans was somehow inevitable.
It was not. Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson recently wrote that Republican opposition to the Obama statist agenda “gave the American people confidence that they had representation — that they had a voice.” That was a critical development. Republicans were extremely unpopular when they were completely driven out of power in 2008.
Nor was there any guarantee after Obama was elected that the GOP would even unite against his agenda. When they did, that was when the American people responded.
Wilson called the outcome of the election “decisive,” adding that “The American people have spoken, and because of their efforts, House Republicans and a growing number of Senate Republicans have been offered a second chance to bring the nation’s fiscal house into order.”
“But the work is not over with a mere election,” Wilson added. “Now, the American people must hold the new Congress accountable for their pledges to pay down the debt, repeal ObamaCare, create jobs, and end the bailouts once and for all.”
Wilson said the early indications that Republicans are listening are “favorable,” and wrote that Boehner and McConnell “deserve praise for leading the opposition during the first two dark years of the Obama presidency.”
Certainly, it is clear that Republicans have been given a new lease on political life by the American people. This would not have been possible if Republicans were divided on Capitol Hill over whether to support the Obama agenda. That would have had the effect of sucking the energy out of the tea party movement, and would have wrecked their 2010 prospects.
At the press conference, McConnell said that Democrats “may have missed the message” of the elections. “I get the impression that they’re thinking — their view is that [Republicans] have not cooperated enough. I think what the American people were saying yesterday that they appreciated us saying ‘no’ to the things that the American people indicated they were not in favor of.”
In a speech at the Heritage Foundation, McConnell got more specific about what he means, outlining his “primary legislative goals”: “repeal and replace the health spending bill; to end the bailouts; cut spending; and shrink the size and scope of government”.
If they do indeed make good on their pledges to voters, Republicans will find that the tea party movement will be continue to be a valuable ally. Those activists who propelled them back into power will remain vital to shaping the debate and pressuring members of Congress to vote to limit government. If the American people continue to hold Congress accountable for their actions, 2010 will have just been the beginning.
More HERE
*************************
Coastal Leftism
Here's my question: If this week's election returns demonstrate that the vast majority of the country is moving to the right, why do the West Coast and the Northeast continue to embrace liberalism, especially when it has led to economic disaster?
Both California and New York are on the verge of bankruptcy and, according to Forbes magazine, are hostile to business by way of high taxation and strict regulation of commerce. California currently owes $158 billion, and New York is holding $60 billion in debt. But Sen. Barbara Boxer in the Golden State and New York Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, all big spenders, won their respective races easily.
Boxer is a classic tax-and-spend liberal who never met an entitlement program she didn't want to vacation with. So why did she coast on the Coast? The answer has to be that the "where's mine" culture has taken deep root out west; people want stuff from government, and deficits be damned.
In the Atlantic states north of the Mason-Dixon line, it is union power and Democratic machine politics that hold sway. In Philadelphia, for example, it is all liberal, all the time. Even Ben Franklin couldn't move that bunch. New York City politics and Boston politics are similar -- Democrats dominate the union vote and most ballots in the inner city.
So while the rest of the country has thrown the big-spending rascals out, the liberal power structure holds on in select areas no matter how dismal the economy is. In his press conference after the Democrats got hammered, President Obama showed some humility, but he also knows that come 2012, he'll begin with 86 electoral votes courtesy of California and New York no matter what he does.
Thus, the United States is not really united anymore. We are now a nation of coalitions. The tea party movement is largely supported outside the big cities, while the progressive base is mostly urban. If you listen closely to what the two groups are saying, there is no common ground at all. The president says he wants to work with his opponents and find policies that all can embrace. Does that seem likely to you?
More HERE
************************
Why Palin Petrifies Progressives
Doug Giles
Here’s why I believe the dour democratic dames particularly dislike Palin. Check it out:
1. Palin’s hot and can rock a pair of heels, hunting boots, or any garment she dons. And you can tell she knows it and likes it. Most of the ladies on the Left, however, cannot—and we all know how jealous and petty some chicks can be when they’re aesthetically upstaged (cat fight).
2. They hate Sarah because she’s supposedly anti-intellectual. However, I’d love to see Tina Fey, Katie Couric or Joy Behag go mano a mano with her on any given topic and see who comes off looking like Snooki.
3. The feministas don’t dig SP because she’s had five kids (one of whom has Down’s Syndrome) and has never considered offing any of them in her womb.
4. She believes in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and they hate Christians.
5. She’s a conservative, and they hate conservatives.
6. She’s insanely successful, and she did it without curtsying to their wacked weltanschauung.
7. Her husband’s not some prissy, manicured metrosexual man-child but an ass kicking Alaskan.
8. She hunts and fishes. Her motto: Shoot it. Stuff it. Hang it on a wall, baby.
9. She’s unapologetic to all of the above.
10. And finally, they know that if she ever makes it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that she’s going to hand the Dems their shriveled BB-sized cojones on a free market platter while the majority of the USA gives her a standing ovation.
And that, my children, is why Palin petrifies the paranormal progressives.
More HERE
************************
Will Obama Triangulate?
Now that President Obama has experienced the same baptism of fire as Bill Clinton did in the midterm elections, the obvious question is whether he will move to the center in a bid to save his presidency and win re-election. The move worked well for President Clinton, as he sought to combine the best aspects of each party's program in a third approach that came to be known as triangulation. Will Obama follow suit?
He won't because -- even if he wanted to -- he can't.
The issues today are very different from those that separated the parties in 1994 and do not lend themselves to common ground. Obama's programs during his first two years in office have been so radical, far reaching and fundamental that any compromise leaves the nation so far to the left of where it has always been and wants to be as to make it unacceptable to the American people.
When Obama took office, the federal, state and local governments controlled 35 percent of the American economy. We ranked 15th among the two dozen advanced countries. Now it controls 44.7 percent, ranking us seventh, ahead of Germany and Britain. So where is the compromise? Are we to raise taxes and cut spending so that government is only, say, 40 percent of our economy?
To raise taxes to cover even a part of that increase would be to lock in a level of big government that is anathema to our free enterprise system. You cannot have a free market economy with a government that big sitting in the middle of your economy, hoarding capital, pouncing on all available credit, taking away such a major portion of your national income.
While negotiation is always possible on spending cuts, raising or lowering them or redirecting their focus, the bottom line of sharp deficit reduction is not up for discussion. Both parties are locked into the need to bring down the debt before it strangles our economy. With this imperative in mind, a zero tax increase policy will require budget cuts that Obama and the left will find unacceptable. For them, the slashes in social spending will also preclude a search for middle ground.
More HERE
**************************
ELSEWHERE
Informal production of pro-social behavior: "My view has always been that what really holds a society together is not the body of law enacted by a legislature or handed down by a king, but peer pressure, social opprobrium, and moral approbation. When somebody breaks a society’s rules, a trial of some type ensues, to determine who’s right, what harm has been done, who should be compensated, and so forth. Juries are one way people have developed for helping to determine these things. But I would argue that the state is not a necessary part of any of this.”
Prince Andrew criticizes British defence chiefs: "The Duke of York has attacked the “hopeless” Ministry of Defence for failing to order armoured vehicles that could save soldiers’ lives. He accused defence chiefs of sitting on their “fat backsides” and stalling on bringing in British-built Rangers, which are said to have three times the blast resistance of troop carriers currently in use. His comments are likely to embarrass David Cameron, who has insisted that defence cuts will not compromise the safety of those serving in Afghanistan. They also amounted to a breach of protocol, which dictates that members of the Royal family should avoid expressing political views. The Duke was applauded by relatives of fallen soldiers. The 50-year-old Duke, a former Royal Navy helicopter pilot and colonel-in-chief of five Army regiments, has regularly visited Afghanistan to see the challenges faced by British service personnel."
Anglican bishops set to resign over the ordination of women: "Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury is expected to announce the resignation of two bishops on Monday, in the first of what is feared will be a wave of departures from the Church of England by traditionalists converting to Roman Catholicism. The Bishop of Richborough, the Right Rev Keith Newton, 58, is expected to become leader or the Anglican Ordinariate, set up to provide Catholic refuge to Anglicans who leave the Church of England over the issue of women bishops. The Bishop of Ebbsfleet, the Right Rev Andrew Burnham, 63, is also expected to join the Ordinariate, along with the Bishop of Fulham, the Right Rev John Broadhurst, who announced last month that he will be resigning at the end of the year."
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)
****************************
by Jeff Jacoby
THE MOST encouraging thing about the Republican triumph in last week's midterm elections is that so many Republicans acknowledge that it wasn't a Republican triumph.
"We make a great mistake if we believe that tonight these results are somehow an embrace of the Republican Party," Florida's impressive senator-elect, Marco Rubio, said in his victory speech Tuesday night. "What they are is a second chance, a second chance for Republicans to be what they said they were going to be not so long ago."
The same sentiment was expressed by the likely next House majority leader, Eric Cantor of Virginia. "There isn't a lot of confidence focused on the Republicans yet," he told CBS the morning after the election. "It isn't necessarily a vote of confidence for Republican leadership."
Outside Congress, too, influential Republican strategists have been warning the victors against hubris and the temptation to gloat. "Republicans must not delude themselves," wrote political mastermind Karl Rove. "The voters didn't throw out the Democrats because they are enraptured with the GOP. . . . Republicans are on probation."
So they are. Voters have been betrayed in the past by Republicans who ran for office vowing to shrink the scope and cost and intrusiveness of government, only to end up presiding over ever-more-bloated budgets, record-setting deficits, increasingly unaffordable entitlements, and disgraceful ethical lapses.
The last time a GOP majority took control of the US House of Representatives -- under Newt Gingrich in January 1995 -- Republicans produced a list of more than 300 unnecessary federal agencies, funds, and programs that they intended to "zero out" as proof of their fiscal responsibility. Yet nearly every item on that list was still alive and well when the Republicans lost their majority 12 years later.
The tidal wave that swept so many Democrats out to sea last week was a repudiation of the extremely liberal Obama-Pelosi agenda of the past two years -- the tax increases, the massive health-care overhaul, the trillion-dollar deficits, the regulatory explosion, and the condescending, we-know-best disdain for anyone who opposed them. As the lesser of two evils, Republicans ended up the big winners on Election Day. But they will not regain the trust they squandered the last time around without proving that they deserve it.
What is it time for, then? First and foremost, it is time to reverse the destructive Obama policies that have alarmed so many voters and made businesses so uneasy. It is essential that Republicans keep tax rates from rising. They must roll back spending decisively. And they must dismantle as much of the misbegotten health-care law as a party in control of just one house of Congress can.
They must also make it clear that they have learned from the failure of the previous GOP majority. That means permanently ending the pork-and-earmark culture that has so corrupted the budgeting process. It means defunding, not perpetuating, the corporate welfare and agriculture subsidies that violate every free-market principle Republicans claim to stand for.
More HERE
**********************
Tea Party Boosted Republicans in 2010
There is no question that the tea party movement has dramatically contributed to the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and narrowing the margin in the Senate. In addition to providing boosted turnout — it helped raise turnout to an estimated 41.5 percent (some 90 million) — since early 2009, the tea parties and other citizen activists have helped to dramatically shape the debate toward limiting the size and scope of government.
In fact, the American people set the agenda in the midterms. Their staunch opposition to the failed $812 “stimulus”, ObamaCare, the carbon cap-and-tax, bailouts, and government takeovers emboldened, empowered, and encouraged Republicans on Capitol Hill to take strong a stand on their behalf.
Whoever is saying the tea parties were somehow a hindrance to the GOP in 2010 need to get their heads examined. Republicans in the House picked up the most seats of either party since 1948. To argue the tea parties were inconsequential, or an impediment, one has to maintain that such a turnaround in the fortunes of Republicans was somehow inevitable.
It was not. Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson recently wrote that Republican opposition to the Obama statist agenda “gave the American people confidence that they had representation — that they had a voice.” That was a critical development. Republicans were extremely unpopular when they were completely driven out of power in 2008.
Nor was there any guarantee after Obama was elected that the GOP would even unite against his agenda. When they did, that was when the American people responded.
Wilson called the outcome of the election “decisive,” adding that “The American people have spoken, and because of their efforts, House Republicans and a growing number of Senate Republicans have been offered a second chance to bring the nation’s fiscal house into order.”
“But the work is not over with a mere election,” Wilson added. “Now, the American people must hold the new Congress accountable for their pledges to pay down the debt, repeal ObamaCare, create jobs, and end the bailouts once and for all.”
Wilson said the early indications that Republicans are listening are “favorable,” and wrote that Boehner and McConnell “deserve praise for leading the opposition during the first two dark years of the Obama presidency.”
Certainly, it is clear that Republicans have been given a new lease on political life by the American people. This would not have been possible if Republicans were divided on Capitol Hill over whether to support the Obama agenda. That would have had the effect of sucking the energy out of the tea party movement, and would have wrecked their 2010 prospects.
At the press conference, McConnell said that Democrats “may have missed the message” of the elections. “I get the impression that they’re thinking — their view is that [Republicans] have not cooperated enough. I think what the American people were saying yesterday that they appreciated us saying ‘no’ to the things that the American people indicated they were not in favor of.”
In a speech at the Heritage Foundation, McConnell got more specific about what he means, outlining his “primary legislative goals”: “repeal and replace the health spending bill; to end the bailouts; cut spending; and shrink the size and scope of government”.
If they do indeed make good on their pledges to voters, Republicans will find that the tea party movement will be continue to be a valuable ally. Those activists who propelled them back into power will remain vital to shaping the debate and pressuring members of Congress to vote to limit government. If the American people continue to hold Congress accountable for their actions, 2010 will have just been the beginning.
More HERE
*************************
Coastal Leftism
Here's my question: If this week's election returns demonstrate that the vast majority of the country is moving to the right, why do the West Coast and the Northeast continue to embrace liberalism, especially when it has led to economic disaster?
Both California and New York are on the verge of bankruptcy and, according to Forbes magazine, are hostile to business by way of high taxation and strict regulation of commerce. California currently owes $158 billion, and New York is holding $60 billion in debt. But Sen. Barbara Boxer in the Golden State and New York Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, all big spenders, won their respective races easily.
Boxer is a classic tax-and-spend liberal who never met an entitlement program she didn't want to vacation with. So why did she coast on the Coast? The answer has to be that the "where's mine" culture has taken deep root out west; people want stuff from government, and deficits be damned.
In the Atlantic states north of the Mason-Dixon line, it is union power and Democratic machine politics that hold sway. In Philadelphia, for example, it is all liberal, all the time. Even Ben Franklin couldn't move that bunch. New York City politics and Boston politics are similar -- Democrats dominate the union vote and most ballots in the inner city.
So while the rest of the country has thrown the big-spending rascals out, the liberal power structure holds on in select areas no matter how dismal the economy is. In his press conference after the Democrats got hammered, President Obama showed some humility, but he also knows that come 2012, he'll begin with 86 electoral votes courtesy of California and New York no matter what he does.
Thus, the United States is not really united anymore. We are now a nation of coalitions. The tea party movement is largely supported outside the big cities, while the progressive base is mostly urban. If you listen closely to what the two groups are saying, there is no common ground at all. The president says he wants to work with his opponents and find policies that all can embrace. Does that seem likely to you?
More HERE
************************
Why Palin Petrifies Progressives
Doug Giles
Here’s why I believe the dour democratic dames particularly dislike Palin. Check it out:
1. Palin’s hot and can rock a pair of heels, hunting boots, or any garment she dons. And you can tell she knows it and likes it. Most of the ladies on the Left, however, cannot—and we all know how jealous and petty some chicks can be when they’re aesthetically upstaged (cat fight).
2. They hate Sarah because she’s supposedly anti-intellectual. However, I’d love to see Tina Fey, Katie Couric or Joy Behag go mano a mano with her on any given topic and see who comes off looking like Snooki.
3. The feministas don’t dig SP because she’s had five kids (one of whom has Down’s Syndrome) and has never considered offing any of them in her womb.
4. She believes in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and they hate Christians.
5. She’s a conservative, and they hate conservatives.
6. She’s insanely successful, and she did it without curtsying to their wacked weltanschauung.
7. Her husband’s not some prissy, manicured metrosexual man-child but an ass kicking Alaskan.
8. She hunts and fishes. Her motto: Shoot it. Stuff it. Hang it on a wall, baby.
9. She’s unapologetic to all of the above.
10. And finally, they know that if she ever makes it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that she’s going to hand the Dems their shriveled BB-sized cojones on a free market platter while the majority of the USA gives her a standing ovation.
And that, my children, is why Palin petrifies the paranormal progressives.
More HERE
************************
Will Obama Triangulate?
Now that President Obama has experienced the same baptism of fire as Bill Clinton did in the midterm elections, the obvious question is whether he will move to the center in a bid to save his presidency and win re-election. The move worked well for President Clinton, as he sought to combine the best aspects of each party's program in a third approach that came to be known as triangulation. Will Obama follow suit?
He won't because -- even if he wanted to -- he can't.
The issues today are very different from those that separated the parties in 1994 and do not lend themselves to common ground. Obama's programs during his first two years in office have been so radical, far reaching and fundamental that any compromise leaves the nation so far to the left of where it has always been and wants to be as to make it unacceptable to the American people.
When Obama took office, the federal, state and local governments controlled 35 percent of the American economy. We ranked 15th among the two dozen advanced countries. Now it controls 44.7 percent, ranking us seventh, ahead of Germany and Britain. So where is the compromise? Are we to raise taxes and cut spending so that government is only, say, 40 percent of our economy?
To raise taxes to cover even a part of that increase would be to lock in a level of big government that is anathema to our free enterprise system. You cannot have a free market economy with a government that big sitting in the middle of your economy, hoarding capital, pouncing on all available credit, taking away such a major portion of your national income.
While negotiation is always possible on spending cuts, raising or lowering them or redirecting their focus, the bottom line of sharp deficit reduction is not up for discussion. Both parties are locked into the need to bring down the debt before it strangles our economy. With this imperative in mind, a zero tax increase policy will require budget cuts that Obama and the left will find unacceptable. For them, the slashes in social spending will also preclude a search for middle ground.
More HERE
**************************
ELSEWHERE
Informal production of pro-social behavior: "My view has always been that what really holds a society together is not the body of law enacted by a legislature or handed down by a king, but peer pressure, social opprobrium, and moral approbation. When somebody breaks a society’s rules, a trial of some type ensues, to determine who’s right, what harm has been done, who should be compensated, and so forth. Juries are one way people have developed for helping to determine these things. But I would argue that the state is not a necessary part of any of this.”
Prince Andrew criticizes British defence chiefs: "The Duke of York has attacked the “hopeless” Ministry of Defence for failing to order armoured vehicles that could save soldiers’ lives. He accused defence chiefs of sitting on their “fat backsides” and stalling on bringing in British-built Rangers, which are said to have three times the blast resistance of troop carriers currently in use. His comments are likely to embarrass David Cameron, who has insisted that defence cuts will not compromise the safety of those serving in Afghanistan. They also amounted to a breach of protocol, which dictates that members of the Royal family should avoid expressing political views. The Duke was applauded by relatives of fallen soldiers. The 50-year-old Duke, a former Royal Navy helicopter pilot and colonel-in-chief of five Army regiments, has regularly visited Afghanistan to see the challenges faced by British service personnel."
Anglican bishops set to resign over the ordination of women: "Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury is expected to announce the resignation of two bishops on Monday, in the first of what is feared will be a wave of departures from the Church of England by traditionalists converting to Roman Catholicism. The Bishop of Richborough, the Right Rev Keith Newton, 58, is expected to become leader or the Anglican Ordinariate, set up to provide Catholic refuge to Anglicans who leave the Church of England over the issue of women bishops. The Bishop of Ebbsfleet, the Right Rev Andrew Burnham, 63, is also expected to join the Ordinariate, along with the Bishop of Fulham, the Right Rev John Broadhurst, who announced last month that he will be resigning at the end of the year."
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)
****************************
Saturday, November 06, 2010
Global anger mounts at 'clueless' Fed actions
Obama's minions keep devaluing the dollar by printing a torrent of new dollars. They're deposits in banks etc rather than folding notes but the effect is the same
Global anger at a fresh round of liquidity injections into the US economy swelled on Friday as Germany called the move "clueless" and emerging nations protested that it will wreak havoc on them.
Harsh criticism poured in as President Barack Obama headed for Asia on a trip he had hoped to use as a springboard for pressuring China to revalue its yuan but may end up in a fractious Group of 20 leaders summit next week.
The United States has been pressing China, largely unsuccessfully, to let its yuan currency rise more quickly to reflect the strength of what is now the world's second-largest economy and help correct global trade imbalances.
The Federal Reserve's decision this week to buy $US600 billion in long-term bonds with new money to try to revive the flagging US economy have increased fears of more money pouring across borders in search of better returns.
China landed its own blows by saying a US proposal for numerical targets for surpluses and deficits - akin to a range for yuan appreciation - smacked of outmoded central planning that won't win any friends for the United States.
Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai, who is China's chief G20 negotiator, told a news briefing that he was also worried at the prospect of a flood of money pouring into global markets in search of higher yields. "They owe us some explanation," Cui said. "I've seen much concern about the impact of this policy on financial stability in other countries."
Fed liquidity creating problems in other countries
A "common theme" is emerging that "excess liquidity in the US is creating problems in other countries," Brazil's Central Bank Governor Henrique Meirelles told reporters in Chicago.
Resentment abroad stems from worry that Fed pump-priming will hasten the US dollar's slide and cause their currencies to shoot up in value, setting the stage for asset bubbles and making a future burst of inflation more likely.
"With all due respect, US policy is clueless," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told a conference. "(The problem) is not a shortage of liquidity. It's not that the Americans haven't pumped enough liquidity into the market, and now to say let's pump more into the market is not going to solve their problems."
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, speaking to students in Florida, seized the opportunity to defend the move by saying "a strong US economy, a recovering economy, is critical, not just for Americans but it's also critical for the global economy."
New US unemployment figures on Friday, showing a surprisingly strong 151,000 jobs were created in October, caused some analysts to question whether the Federal Reserve's pledge to buy up to $US600 billion of Treasury securities was even necessary. But with a jobless rate stuck at 9.6 per cent, few doubted the Fed will proceed with buying.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel will address US policy in Group of 20 discussions on exchange rates, a government source said, adding that she shared Schaeuble's criticism.
Policymakers from the world's new economic powerhouses in Latin America and Asia have said they would consider fresh steps to curb capital inflows after the Fed's move.
South African Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said Fed policy "undermines the spirit of multilateral cooperation" that the G20 had sought to achieve. The money will find its way into financial markets of emerging nations with potentially devastating impact on their exports, he charged.
Zhou Xiaochuan, China's central bank governor, said while Beijing could understand that the Fed was implementing more monetary easing in order to stimulate US recovery, it may not be a good policy for the global economy.
More HERE
**********************
Now, it is time to govern
Without specifically saying so, modern conservative leaders have moved toward a view of conservatism as a fixed political philosophy based on the principles of the Founding, themselves informed more by Locke, Hobbes and Montesquieu than by Burke. As a result, the Republican class of 2011 is positioned to advance an articulated and cohesive ideology. This class brings to office a critical mass of members who know what they think and why they think it. They will anchor Congress more firmly to the right than ever before and shift the center of gravity rightward.
The Left has always had guiding principles and that is why it has been so easy to map its direction and define its agenda. Its effort has always been the advancement of an articulated ideology. That is why it has so efficiently advanced that agenda in its inexorable march toward its ideal society. In contrast to conservatism, it has been a philosophy, not a lifestyle. For the first time, its philosophy will be challenged by an opposing philosophy rooted in a completely different philosophical tradition and based on defined first principles with very different civic goals. For the first time, the debate will force the evaluation of fundamental assumptions on both sides. This will not be political jockeying. It will be a true clash of ideas.
The evolution of conservatism from an inchoate, uneasy sense that things are just not right to a defined set of ideas, is a refreshing development. It enables conservatives to re-imagine the shape and purpose of government and lends cohesion to its approach to governance and coherence to its approach to public policy. It is no longer left “standing athwart history yelling ‘stop!’”, in Buckley’s formulation but, like the Founders, with the task of defining its idea of the proper role of government and its relationship to the citizen.
With Republican majorities so immediately looming, it is worth contemplating what conservatives should do with them. Conservative electoral victory presents peril even greater than its promise. It is important to note that the Republican Party’s electoral success came not from a turn to the middle, as urged by such as David Brooks and David Frum, but from a hard turn to the right. Republicans were urged by Colin Powell and other fair weather Republicans, to reject voices on the right that suggested that the Party’s troubles were not the result of too close an adherence to conservative principles but by the abandonment of them. So much for the received wisdom of Colin Powell.
It would be seductive for conservatives to indulge themselves in the sort of overweening triumphalism that led the left to its current state of electoral ruin. After so many years in the wilderness, leftists misread their mandate with Obama’s election. They thought their victory was an endorsement of their ideological goals. In the flush of victory and believing the nonsense of columnists who suggested they would never again face viable opposition from the right with the death of conservatism and the marginalization and imminent death of the Republican Party, they pursued a radical and comprehensive program that shocked the nation and roused the deep, abiding and fundamental conservatism of the American public. Conservatives must not make the same mistake.
Republicans need to deliver. But they cannot deliver everything all at once, as Democrats attempted to do these past two years. They should pursue an aggressive, but limited, agenda that addresses the immediate concerns of voters. They should pursue the art of the possible, understanding that they may not succeed at each effort.
People are scared. They see an economy in free fall and unemployment in double digits. They have seen their retirement accounts disappear and their home values plummet, if they still even have homes. They have seen their careful retirement planning evaporate and they suffer a deep sense of insecurity. It must be addressed and addressed boldly.
Conservatives know what it takes to revive an economy. They know that the free market has always provided the greatest good for the greatest number. They know, too, the destructive impact of government interference with the private sector. They know, then, what it will take to generate the economic activity that will prompt growth and job creation.
They must turn their attention, first, to opening up the flow of money so banks begin lending for the expansion of business activity. It is hard to feel sorry for bankers, but they are faced with an administration that demonizes them at every opportunity. They are told that they must start lending but, also, that if they make a mistake, their banks will be seized and they will see themselves on the 6 o’clock news being marched off to jail. They have been hit with regulations on regulations that have them tied in knots, assuming they have yet digested the comprehensive new rules that purport to create safety but which disincentivize them from making loans to any but the most creditworthy customers.
Entrepreneurs are seldom the most creditworthy of customers but they make up the engine of job creation. Loans with some inherent risk are the very loans necessary to get the economy moving again. Entrepreneurship is the balancing of risk to potential reward. Current regulation, in so completely limiting risk, has, at the same time, strangled the prospect of reward.
Republicans must first, therefore, take the step of cutting financial regulations and encouraging business and real estate lending by allowing bankers to loosen lending standards. Until lending starts to flow, the economy will languish.
Regulation is throttling economic growth. The new Congress should start the hard work of reviewing all federal regulations – one by one – and challenging any for which there is no effective continuing rationale. Hearings should be organized to which the industry groups of those most affected by regulation should be invited and at which they will be asked to present the impact of regulation on their businesses. They should be encouraged to specify which regulations the cancellation of which would be most likely to promote growth. Nothing should be off the table. If outright repeal is not possible, de-funding surely will be as the House, with its budgetary power, can refuse to fund any department, agency or program that stands in the way of economic expansion.
Closely related to challenges to regulation is the size and scope of government. Fewer regulations will diminish the rationale for current federal programs and, therefore, current personnel levels. Conservatives have consistently criticized the growth of government but neither Republicans nor Democrats have done anything but slow its growth. The time has come to reverse that growth; to actually reduce the size of government.
Both houses of Congress have committees for each department of government. Each should commence studies with an eye toward the elimination of programs and the actual reduction of departments by challenging, first, their continuing necessity and, second, their staffing and spending levels. Congress cannot cut government unless it knows what government is doing. The studies should be accompanied by the stated goal of actual budget reduction of at least 10%. The studies must be finished promptly so reform can be proposed within the year. They should, therefore, have short dates for the completion of work; say, summer of 2011.
The House should implement a policy of zero based budgeting, requiring that every department and program justify its budget requests not by reference to what has been spent before but by showing that the programs for which funding is sought continue to have a reason to exist.
Spending reduction must be started in earnest. This summer, it was reported that federal employees enjoy salaries and benefits that are twice those in private industry. The House can, in connection with its budgeting power, implement the indexing of federal salaries and benefits to those in private industry. That single reform would reduce federal spending by a significant percentage. After all, the single biggest governmental expense is personnel. Public employee groups notwithstanding, the work done by federal workers is completely analogous to that in private industry. Clerical staff is clerical staff. Middle management is middle management. Purchasing is purchasing. There is no reason for such a disparity in salary and benefit levels other than that successive Congresses, Republican and Democrat, have been asleep at the wheel. Republicans need not fear the wrath of federal employees. They are not a Republican constituency.
Everyone knows that budget reduction cannot be achieved without addressing entitlements. David Stockman has argued that unless entitlement payments are reduced (or taxes raised), the budget will never be controlled, never pausing to consider that the cost of administering entitlement programs represents an enormous percentage of the total spent. Administration can be dramatically cut without a concomitant reduction in benefits. It should be undertaken immediately. That is not to say that other reforms are not necessary. They are. But they can be addressed after less controversial reductions have been achieved and we can see the impact of those reductions.
Perhaps the most dramatic immediate reform Republicans should initiate is the streamlining of the tax system. If Republicans cannot achieve this single initiative, it is difficult to imagine their achieving anything of substance. Polling shows there is a national consensus, cutting across party lines, for a system of taxation that is fairer and flatter. Yet when Republicans had control of the legislative and executive branches of government, they never seriously considered the matter. It is time to do so. Resistance will be fierce from the left and its friends in the media. Republicans will be accused of trying to take food out of the mouths of widows and orphans. They will be accused of heartlessness. But a flatter, simpler tax can result not only in a huge saving in a much reduced bureaucracy but also in the time and attention Americans must spend in determining and paying their taxes. There is even a constituency for a flat tax among Democrats. Jerry Brown, the once and future governor or California, proposed a flat tax during his presidential runs. Elected Democrats might resist it, but their constituents will support it.
A national value added tax, combined with a repeal of the income tax and the 16th Amendment that allows it to exist, would pick up the massive underground economy and would not only yield a fairer means of taxation but would give everyone a stake in the game. It would, at once, simply the system of taxation and, at the same time, fully fund government.
Finally, Republicans should cut off the head of the snake. There is little constituency for the pensions and public sector spending that are breaking the bank other than public employee unions. Their wealth and political support have kept leftism alive well past its expiration date. Freedom to work is an important American value and the vast majority of Americans no longer see a need for supporting unions, especially public sector unions. Those unions are driving states, counties and cities to insolvency and the policies they have championed by way of bloated pensions, represent a burden on generations to come and a drag on economic growth. A national right to work law would not only implement fairness for workers but would, at the same time, reduce the impact of self-interested union political spending.
If a right to work law cannot be passed over likely Democratic opposition and the threat (or reality) of presidential veto, those instrumentalities that extend undue protection to unions, such as the plethora of programs extant in the Department of Labor, can be defunded by majority vote in the House of Representatives. That could set the stage for a compromise that would begin to move the ball toward a free market in labor.
More HERE
*********************
ELSEWHERE
People are buying stocks while their dollars are still worth something: "Stocks rallied Thursday to their highest level since September 2008. The Dow surged nearly 220-points to its highest level since September 2008 thanks to the Federal Reserve's plan to buy $600 billion in treasurys. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 219.71 points, or 1.96%, to 11434.84, its highest closing level since just before Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed. Dow components Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase and Caterpillar propelled blue chips to their fifth gain in a row and biggest climb since Sept. 1."
Unemployment not budging: “October marks the 18th straight month that unemployment has been at or above 9.4 percent—the longest period of time of sustained high unemployment since the Great Depression. That is as remarkable as it is sad for millions of American families who increasingly cannot make their mortgage payments. Foreclosures are still at all time highs, even as Barack Obama claimed that the worst of the crisis was behind us. Obama’s policies have failed to put America back to work. “It is time for the Obama Administration to change course, and for the newly elected Congress to plot a new direction. ObamaCare and its many mandates are getting in the way of hiring decisions by employers."
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)
****************************
Obama's minions keep devaluing the dollar by printing a torrent of new dollars. They're deposits in banks etc rather than folding notes but the effect is the same
Global anger at a fresh round of liquidity injections into the US economy swelled on Friday as Germany called the move "clueless" and emerging nations protested that it will wreak havoc on them.
Harsh criticism poured in as President Barack Obama headed for Asia on a trip he had hoped to use as a springboard for pressuring China to revalue its yuan but may end up in a fractious Group of 20 leaders summit next week.
The United States has been pressing China, largely unsuccessfully, to let its yuan currency rise more quickly to reflect the strength of what is now the world's second-largest economy and help correct global trade imbalances.
The Federal Reserve's decision this week to buy $US600 billion in long-term bonds with new money to try to revive the flagging US economy have increased fears of more money pouring across borders in search of better returns.
China landed its own blows by saying a US proposal for numerical targets for surpluses and deficits - akin to a range for yuan appreciation - smacked of outmoded central planning that won't win any friends for the United States.
Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai, who is China's chief G20 negotiator, told a news briefing that he was also worried at the prospect of a flood of money pouring into global markets in search of higher yields. "They owe us some explanation," Cui said. "I've seen much concern about the impact of this policy on financial stability in other countries."
Fed liquidity creating problems in other countries
A "common theme" is emerging that "excess liquidity in the US is creating problems in other countries," Brazil's Central Bank Governor Henrique Meirelles told reporters in Chicago.
Resentment abroad stems from worry that Fed pump-priming will hasten the US dollar's slide and cause their currencies to shoot up in value, setting the stage for asset bubbles and making a future burst of inflation more likely.
"With all due respect, US policy is clueless," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told a conference. "(The problem) is not a shortage of liquidity. It's not that the Americans haven't pumped enough liquidity into the market, and now to say let's pump more into the market is not going to solve their problems."
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, speaking to students in Florida, seized the opportunity to defend the move by saying "a strong US economy, a recovering economy, is critical, not just for Americans but it's also critical for the global economy."
New US unemployment figures on Friday, showing a surprisingly strong 151,000 jobs were created in October, caused some analysts to question whether the Federal Reserve's pledge to buy up to $US600 billion of Treasury securities was even necessary. But with a jobless rate stuck at 9.6 per cent, few doubted the Fed will proceed with buying.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel will address US policy in Group of 20 discussions on exchange rates, a government source said, adding that she shared Schaeuble's criticism.
Policymakers from the world's new economic powerhouses in Latin America and Asia have said they would consider fresh steps to curb capital inflows after the Fed's move.
South African Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said Fed policy "undermines the spirit of multilateral cooperation" that the G20 had sought to achieve. The money will find its way into financial markets of emerging nations with potentially devastating impact on their exports, he charged.
Zhou Xiaochuan, China's central bank governor, said while Beijing could understand that the Fed was implementing more monetary easing in order to stimulate US recovery, it may not be a good policy for the global economy.
More HERE
**********************
Now, it is time to govern
Without specifically saying so, modern conservative leaders have moved toward a view of conservatism as a fixed political philosophy based on the principles of the Founding, themselves informed more by Locke, Hobbes and Montesquieu than by Burke. As a result, the Republican class of 2011 is positioned to advance an articulated and cohesive ideology. This class brings to office a critical mass of members who know what they think and why they think it. They will anchor Congress more firmly to the right than ever before and shift the center of gravity rightward.
The Left has always had guiding principles and that is why it has been so easy to map its direction and define its agenda. Its effort has always been the advancement of an articulated ideology. That is why it has so efficiently advanced that agenda in its inexorable march toward its ideal society. In contrast to conservatism, it has been a philosophy, not a lifestyle. For the first time, its philosophy will be challenged by an opposing philosophy rooted in a completely different philosophical tradition and based on defined first principles with very different civic goals. For the first time, the debate will force the evaluation of fundamental assumptions on both sides. This will not be political jockeying. It will be a true clash of ideas.
The evolution of conservatism from an inchoate, uneasy sense that things are just not right to a defined set of ideas, is a refreshing development. It enables conservatives to re-imagine the shape and purpose of government and lends cohesion to its approach to governance and coherence to its approach to public policy. It is no longer left “standing athwart history yelling ‘stop!’”, in Buckley’s formulation but, like the Founders, with the task of defining its idea of the proper role of government and its relationship to the citizen.
With Republican majorities so immediately looming, it is worth contemplating what conservatives should do with them. Conservative electoral victory presents peril even greater than its promise. It is important to note that the Republican Party’s electoral success came not from a turn to the middle, as urged by such as David Brooks and David Frum, but from a hard turn to the right. Republicans were urged by Colin Powell and other fair weather Republicans, to reject voices on the right that suggested that the Party’s troubles were not the result of too close an adherence to conservative principles but by the abandonment of them. So much for the received wisdom of Colin Powell.
It would be seductive for conservatives to indulge themselves in the sort of overweening triumphalism that led the left to its current state of electoral ruin. After so many years in the wilderness, leftists misread their mandate with Obama’s election. They thought their victory was an endorsement of their ideological goals. In the flush of victory and believing the nonsense of columnists who suggested they would never again face viable opposition from the right with the death of conservatism and the marginalization and imminent death of the Republican Party, they pursued a radical and comprehensive program that shocked the nation and roused the deep, abiding and fundamental conservatism of the American public. Conservatives must not make the same mistake.
Republicans need to deliver. But they cannot deliver everything all at once, as Democrats attempted to do these past two years. They should pursue an aggressive, but limited, agenda that addresses the immediate concerns of voters. They should pursue the art of the possible, understanding that they may not succeed at each effort.
People are scared. They see an economy in free fall and unemployment in double digits. They have seen their retirement accounts disappear and their home values plummet, if they still even have homes. They have seen their careful retirement planning evaporate and they suffer a deep sense of insecurity. It must be addressed and addressed boldly.
Conservatives know what it takes to revive an economy. They know that the free market has always provided the greatest good for the greatest number. They know, too, the destructive impact of government interference with the private sector. They know, then, what it will take to generate the economic activity that will prompt growth and job creation.
They must turn their attention, first, to opening up the flow of money so banks begin lending for the expansion of business activity. It is hard to feel sorry for bankers, but they are faced with an administration that demonizes them at every opportunity. They are told that they must start lending but, also, that if they make a mistake, their banks will be seized and they will see themselves on the 6 o’clock news being marched off to jail. They have been hit with regulations on regulations that have them tied in knots, assuming they have yet digested the comprehensive new rules that purport to create safety but which disincentivize them from making loans to any but the most creditworthy customers.
Entrepreneurs are seldom the most creditworthy of customers but they make up the engine of job creation. Loans with some inherent risk are the very loans necessary to get the economy moving again. Entrepreneurship is the balancing of risk to potential reward. Current regulation, in so completely limiting risk, has, at the same time, strangled the prospect of reward.
Republicans must first, therefore, take the step of cutting financial regulations and encouraging business and real estate lending by allowing bankers to loosen lending standards. Until lending starts to flow, the economy will languish.
Regulation is throttling economic growth. The new Congress should start the hard work of reviewing all federal regulations – one by one – and challenging any for which there is no effective continuing rationale. Hearings should be organized to which the industry groups of those most affected by regulation should be invited and at which they will be asked to present the impact of regulation on their businesses. They should be encouraged to specify which regulations the cancellation of which would be most likely to promote growth. Nothing should be off the table. If outright repeal is not possible, de-funding surely will be as the House, with its budgetary power, can refuse to fund any department, agency or program that stands in the way of economic expansion.
Closely related to challenges to regulation is the size and scope of government. Fewer regulations will diminish the rationale for current federal programs and, therefore, current personnel levels. Conservatives have consistently criticized the growth of government but neither Republicans nor Democrats have done anything but slow its growth. The time has come to reverse that growth; to actually reduce the size of government.
Both houses of Congress have committees for each department of government. Each should commence studies with an eye toward the elimination of programs and the actual reduction of departments by challenging, first, their continuing necessity and, second, their staffing and spending levels. Congress cannot cut government unless it knows what government is doing. The studies should be accompanied by the stated goal of actual budget reduction of at least 10%. The studies must be finished promptly so reform can be proposed within the year. They should, therefore, have short dates for the completion of work; say, summer of 2011.
The House should implement a policy of zero based budgeting, requiring that every department and program justify its budget requests not by reference to what has been spent before but by showing that the programs for which funding is sought continue to have a reason to exist.
Spending reduction must be started in earnest. This summer, it was reported that federal employees enjoy salaries and benefits that are twice those in private industry. The House can, in connection with its budgeting power, implement the indexing of federal salaries and benefits to those in private industry. That single reform would reduce federal spending by a significant percentage. After all, the single biggest governmental expense is personnel. Public employee groups notwithstanding, the work done by federal workers is completely analogous to that in private industry. Clerical staff is clerical staff. Middle management is middle management. Purchasing is purchasing. There is no reason for such a disparity in salary and benefit levels other than that successive Congresses, Republican and Democrat, have been asleep at the wheel. Republicans need not fear the wrath of federal employees. They are not a Republican constituency.
Everyone knows that budget reduction cannot be achieved without addressing entitlements. David Stockman has argued that unless entitlement payments are reduced (or taxes raised), the budget will never be controlled, never pausing to consider that the cost of administering entitlement programs represents an enormous percentage of the total spent. Administration can be dramatically cut without a concomitant reduction in benefits. It should be undertaken immediately. That is not to say that other reforms are not necessary. They are. But they can be addressed after less controversial reductions have been achieved and we can see the impact of those reductions.
Perhaps the most dramatic immediate reform Republicans should initiate is the streamlining of the tax system. If Republicans cannot achieve this single initiative, it is difficult to imagine their achieving anything of substance. Polling shows there is a national consensus, cutting across party lines, for a system of taxation that is fairer and flatter. Yet when Republicans had control of the legislative and executive branches of government, they never seriously considered the matter. It is time to do so. Resistance will be fierce from the left and its friends in the media. Republicans will be accused of trying to take food out of the mouths of widows and orphans. They will be accused of heartlessness. But a flatter, simpler tax can result not only in a huge saving in a much reduced bureaucracy but also in the time and attention Americans must spend in determining and paying their taxes. There is even a constituency for a flat tax among Democrats. Jerry Brown, the once and future governor or California, proposed a flat tax during his presidential runs. Elected Democrats might resist it, but their constituents will support it.
A national value added tax, combined with a repeal of the income tax and the 16th Amendment that allows it to exist, would pick up the massive underground economy and would not only yield a fairer means of taxation but would give everyone a stake in the game. It would, at once, simply the system of taxation and, at the same time, fully fund government.
Finally, Republicans should cut off the head of the snake. There is little constituency for the pensions and public sector spending that are breaking the bank other than public employee unions. Their wealth and political support have kept leftism alive well past its expiration date. Freedom to work is an important American value and the vast majority of Americans no longer see a need for supporting unions, especially public sector unions. Those unions are driving states, counties and cities to insolvency and the policies they have championed by way of bloated pensions, represent a burden on generations to come and a drag on economic growth. A national right to work law would not only implement fairness for workers but would, at the same time, reduce the impact of self-interested union political spending.
If a right to work law cannot be passed over likely Democratic opposition and the threat (or reality) of presidential veto, those instrumentalities that extend undue protection to unions, such as the plethora of programs extant in the Department of Labor, can be defunded by majority vote in the House of Representatives. That could set the stage for a compromise that would begin to move the ball toward a free market in labor.
More HERE
*********************
ELSEWHERE
People are buying stocks while their dollars are still worth something: "Stocks rallied Thursday to their highest level since September 2008. The Dow surged nearly 220-points to its highest level since September 2008 thanks to the Federal Reserve's plan to buy $600 billion in treasurys. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 219.71 points, or 1.96%, to 11434.84, its highest closing level since just before Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed. Dow components Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase and Caterpillar propelled blue chips to their fifth gain in a row and biggest climb since Sept. 1."
Unemployment not budging: “October marks the 18th straight month that unemployment has been at or above 9.4 percent—the longest period of time of sustained high unemployment since the Great Depression. That is as remarkable as it is sad for millions of American families who increasingly cannot make their mortgage payments. Foreclosures are still at all time highs, even as Barack Obama claimed that the worst of the crisis was behind us. Obama’s policies have failed to put America back to work. “It is time for the Obama Administration to change course, and for the newly elected Congress to plot a new direction. ObamaCare and its many mandates are getting in the way of hiring decisions by employers."
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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