Proof that liberals are sheep
My heading above is mainly spin. I put it up to counter the Leftist spin that has been put on the findings below. Several interpretations are possible but by far the safest conclusion is that it needs much more research before we do ANY generalizing from the admittedly rather striking set of findings below. There is a considerable history of perceptual findings such as those below not generalizing at all, the research on perceptual "rigidity", for instance
It goes without saying that conservatives and liberals don't see the world in the same way. Now, research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln suggests that is exactly, and quite literally, the case.
In a new study, UNL researchers measured both liberals' and conservatives' reaction to "gaze cues" -- a person's tendency to shift attention in a direction consistent with another person's eye movements, even if it's irrelevant to their current task -- and found big differences between the two groups.
Liberals responded strongly to the prompts, consistently moving their attention in the direction suggested to them by a face on a computer screen. Conservatives, on the other hand, did not.
Why? Researchers suggested that conservatives' value on personal autonomy might make them less likely to be influenced by others, and therefore less responsive to the visual prompts.
"We thought that political temperament may moderate the magnitude of gaze-cuing effects, but we did not expect conservatives to be completely immune to these cues," said Michael Dodd, a UNL assistant professor of psychology and the lead author of the study.
Liberals may have followed the "gaze cues," meanwhile, because they tend to be more responsive to others, the study suggests.
"This study basically provides one more piece of evidence that liberals and conservatives perceive the world, and process information taken in from that world, in different ways," said Kevin Smith, UNL professor of political science and one of the study's authors.
"Understanding exactly why people have such different political perspectives and where those differences come from may help us better understand the roots of a lot of political conflict."
The study involved 72 people who sat in front of a white computer screen and were told to fixate on a small black cross in its center. The cross then disappeared and was replaced by a drawing of a face, but with eyes missing their pupils. Then, pupils appeared in the eyes, looking either left or right. Finally, a small, round target would appear either on the left or right side of the face drawing.
Dodd said the participants were told that the gaze cues in the study did not predict where the target would appear, so there was no reason for participants to attend to them. "But the nature of social interaction tends to make it very difficult to ignore the cues, even when they're meaningless," he said.
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Obama nominee says: "We are coming for the media and that’s not all"
Blatant totalitarian thinking from Van Jones. Commentary on it below. Video at link below
Tell me something I don’t know. The big take-away that people are getting from this is how they want to take over the media. We already know that Al Not-So-Sharpton is meeting with the FCC soon to put pressure on them to create new ways of regulating talk radio for the explicit purpose of taking down Rush Limbaugh. It’s all about baby steps, and this is one of them. Once the new regulation is in place, then they will use it against those whoever they want to shut down, like Rush, Hannity, Levin, Beck, and so on. And part of that process will be figuring out a way to regulate cable, i.e. Fox News, so they can do the same with that.
Look, anyone who doesn’t think they are serious about this is foolish. But this is about much more than the media.
Honestly, the part that I thought was most important from this wasn’t about the media, but what he says about the next two years. They are gaming, and gaming hard to win the hearts and minds of the public. Think about it. Every time they mention Republicans behind a microphone they are demonizing them as racists, terrorists, hostage-takers, selfish white men, slurpee-drinking incompetent boobs, etc. And for the next 2 years, who will they say is governing? We all know that Republicans can’t pass major legislation because they don’t have the Senate or the Executive, but the Democrats will do their damnedest to make it look like the Republicans are so extreme that they can’t get anything done. They will work even harder to paint Republicans as extremists and will say they can’t work with them because they are outside the mainstream.
Mark Levin is so dead on the money with this that it’s pathetic. The radical message is being set up to be the moderate mainstream message, which will leave the conservative message looking extreme, especially to those who aren’t paying attention. This is why we need the Republicans to stop behaving passively like gentlemen opening the door for a nice lady, and to put on the camo and arm themselves with message cannons. The only way the public will resist this radical message is if Republicans give them a choice and start calling these people out for who they are, and with a very loud voice.
You may be thinking right now that they have the media and how can we overcome that? Well I would say just look at Chris Christie and tell me that his message hasn’t gotten out there in New Jersey. A lot of people nowadays are wanting to beat up on him because he continues to use his loud voice to tell the truth. Just look at the media, as they are trying to paint him as a bully. But the man knows what he is doing and is not going to let them control the debate. He will continue to hammer his message, that the Unions are corrupt and are stealing money from the citizens of New Jersey, and that a more fiscal, smaller government is the only way to get out of this mess. And that’s what we need in DC.
Look, we’ve done a great job so far over the last 2 years with the Tea Parties, but if we relax now because we have a Republican House, then we risk losing everything we’ve worked for. The next 2 years are the most crucial if we want to get our country back and we MUST carry the torch for freedom even higher. We must force the Republicans to use every available chance to hammer home the message that the radicals are in DC and they are trying to steal our liberty, our country. And we must fight them off. That means calling the President out for who he is to, because he is one of them.
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America must not follow the British example
Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, picked the wrong moment to drive down Regent Street in London en route to a Royal Variety performance the other night. Several hundred protestors attacked their car and cries of “off with their heads” and “Tory scum” were heard. Scary stuff. The images coming in from across the pond—images of violent protests in London—are disturbing to most Americans. But if some are tempted to find comfort in the idea that what is going on over there could never happen here, they should think again.
At issue in the United Kingdom is the announced policy change, more than a year under discussion and review, to subsidize less of the college tuition of students. In the recent past, the top amount (calculated here in dollars) a student would pay for a year’s tuition is $4,800. The proposed new cap is $14,500. Bear in mind that this is a system that subsidizes tuition at both public and private colleges, though our cousins have their “private” and “public” labels reversed, much like their driving lanes.
That’s right, the idea is that to go to “Oxbridge” (Oxford or Cambridge—think Harvard or Yale) will now cost a maximum of $14,500—a great deal by American standards. Though admittedly it was an even better deal at $4,800. Of course, the rest of the real cost was being paid by the taxpayer.
As a reference point, the current average cost of a year’s tuition at a private college in the United States is $27,293—nearly twice as much as the new British cap.
The current turbulence in Great Britain is a case study about what happens when a society tries to take from people something they have grown to see as part of what they are owed: an entitlement. The fact that the overwhelming majority of the protestors are young people accents this point. This is a generation that has no reason to see it any other way. They are already a generation removed from that era of electoral and cultural sanity in the realm known as the age of the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher.
Though she is in the twilight of her days, her very funeral plans being a national discussion, she must be aghast at what she is viewing on the “Telly.” But something she said long ago is very much at play right now in her nation, across the continent of Europe, and wherever the seeds of entitlement-driven protest are sown, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” Indeed.
One of the saddest recent reports I’ve seen is one about a student urinating on the Winston Churchill statue in Parliament Square. The statue has also been defaced with graffiti calling the great man various names, most too ugly to print. This is what happens when self-absorption reaches cultural critical mass. The lessons of the past are forgotten, and the keys to a good future are forsaken, all in a cult of “me-ism.”
Never mind that these bums (to use a Nixon term that just seems to fit) wouldn’t have a park to piss in if not for people like Mr. Churchill. He rallied a nation, including those college age at the time, to save the world. But back then, the people he worked with had been through the fiery trial of Great Depression-driven deprivation and likely had little of the sense of entitlement of subsequent generations. He once said: "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery." Welcome to misery 101.
Writing in the U.K.’s Guardian, Gary Younge (a writer based in the U.S.) has suggested that current and recent student revolts around the world are a good thing. He wants that “their energy, enthusiasm, militancy, rage and raucousness might burn in us all.”
Younge sees the protests as nothing surprising because, “More than one in five people under the age of 25 in the EU is unemployed. In Spain the figure is 43%; in Greece 30%; in Italy 26%. Meanwhile the principle that education is a public good, to which all are entitled, all contribute, and all benefit through a more competitive economy, is in its death throes.” Did you catch that? The issue is that education is a basic good or right “to which all are entitled.”
Let’s think about this. If someone tries to take, say, your freedom of speech or worship away, would you fight for it? Yes. These are rights—rights that imply responsibilities. If someone tries to take your car away, would you resist that? Sure. It’s your property. It’s the natural response to something unfair and unjust. So it is logical that those protesting see what is being taken from them in the same way. Not saying they’re right—just conceding that they have no reason to think or feel otherwise. In a sense, they are entitled to their sense of entitlement. And that’s the root problem.
This is the long-term damage socialism does. It gets under the cultural skin and in its DNA and becomes part of the mix of life itself. Which is why Americans should be vigilant at this hour to make sure the recent turn away from this path to decadence becomes a significant directional cue for our immediate and long-term future. Because we, too, are at least a generation removed from the last time socialism was successfully stigmatized and marginalized in the age of Reagan.
Long before Ronald Reagan became our 40th President, while he served as Governor of California, he had his own encounter with student protestors at the University of California at Berkeley. Were he around today, he’d likely reprise what he said back then for the benefit of college students in the U.K and everywhere else: “Higher education is a privilege and not a right so these hoodlums should be thrown out. They are spoiled brats who do not deserve to be at a great state university.”
Now, that’d be a cool sound bite.
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ELSEWHERE
More Democrat corruption: "The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) today reacted with disgust to reports regarding a surreptitious move by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to legalize online gambling for just poker. The attempt is an abuse of the legislative process to benefit one of Sen. Reid’s largest campaign contributors, Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc., in Las Vegas... Both Politico and The Wall Street Journal have reported on Reid’s attempts to attach language to the tax bill that would legalize only online poker, which would benefit casinos in the state of Nevada disproportionately, and Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc. in particular, since the company owns the World Series of Poker."
SSI: Another do-gooder program with unintended side effects: "A Globe investigation has found that this Supplemental Security Income program — created by Congress primarily to aid indigent children with severe physical disabilities such as cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, and blindness — now largely serves children with relatively common mental, learning, and behavioral disorders such as ADHD. It has also created, for many needy parents, a financial motive to seek prescriptions for powerful drugs for their children. And once a family gets on SSI, it can be very hard to let go. The attraction of up to $700 a month in payments, and the near-automatic Medicaid coverage that comes with SSI approval, leads some families to count on a child’s remaining classified as disabled, even as his or her condition may be improving.”
Bureaucracy makes new drugs difficult to develop: "Make no mistake about it: we had more potential products than the company could put on the market. Development programs took over a decade, involved people from all over the company, and doctors from all over the world. Development was very, very expensive. Upjohn could only have about 20 compounds in development at any one time, and we were probably over-extended with that number.”
The Fed vastly expands moral hazard: "When the government bails out banks with shaky loans, it’s providing insurance after the fact. The banks expected it. They expect it in the future. The moral hazard persists and grows larger. They respond by maintaining and making more risky loans. The government promises all sorts of payoffs and wealth transfers that insure various groups. These all encourage greater risk-taking, which is the effect of the moral hazard.”
Six companies that haven’t wussed out of working with WikiLeaks: "Giants like PayPal, Amazon.com, Visa and MasterCard almost instantly crumbled under government (and p.r.) pressure to drop WikiLeaks, depriving the site of vital funding sources and online platforms. But other companies, some of them small, independent start-ups, have decided to risk the wrath of Joe Lieberman, the State Department, and their European counterparts and help keep WikiLeaks afloat by providing funding sources (yeah, you can now donate to WikiLeaks even if you only have Visa or MasterCard) and hosting the site. Here’s a list of companies that have stood by WikiLeaks …”
“F” as in Fed: "The Federal Reserve, America’s fatally conceited monetary central planner, is not terribly popular these days — which is cause for hope — and now we have a report card on the entire Fed era that strongly supports the view that we’d be better off without it. At the very least, as the authors suggest, the burden of proof is squarely on those who would retain the central bank.”
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Monday, December 13, 2010
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Sweden's reward for pandering to Muslims
Suspected suicide bomb in central Stockholm injures two and panics shoppers
A suspected terrorist blew himself up in an apparent suicide bomb attack in central Stockholm which left two injured and caused panic among Christmas shoppers. Two explosions rocked the busy shopping street of Drottninggatan among the afternoon crowds.
A Swedish news agency said it had received messages about 10 minutes before the blasts in Arabic and Swedish, warning of unspecified “action”. The email warning, 10 minutes before the bombs, protested about the country’s presence in Afghanistan, where it has a force of 500 soldiers, mainly in the north of the country.
“Our acts will speak for themselves,” the agency quoted the message as saying. “Now your children, your daughters and your sisters will die as our brothers, our sisters and our children are dying.” The email had sound files in Swedish and Arabic.
The agency said the warning, which was also sent to Sweden’s Security Police (SAPO), also referred to caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed by the Swedish artist Lars Vilks.
Petra Sjolander, a police spokesman, said the first explosion was in a car containing gas canisters. The dead man was found at the site of the second blast about 300 yards away.
According to reports, the man was carrying pipe bombs, as well as a backpack full of nails. He shouted Arabic slogans before setting off the explosion.
Police were last night investigating whether other, unexploded bombs were on the scene.
Police spokesman Ulf Johansson said: “We need more investigation and of course we need more witnesses. The car exploded with a series of minor explosions and there was also some kind of explosion close up to where we found the dead man.”
SOURCE
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Iceland offers lessons for Ireland -- and the USA too?
Iceland has finally emerged from deep recession after allowing its currency to plunge and washing its hands of private bank debt, prompting an intense the debate over whether Ireland might suffer less damage if adopted the same strategy.
The Nordic economy grew at 1.2pc in the third quarter and looks poised to rebound next year. It ends a gruelling slump caused largely by the "New Viking" antics of Landsbanki, Glitnir and Kaupthing, the trio of lenders that brought down Iceland's financial system in September 2008.
The economies of the two "over-banked" countries have both contracted by around 11pc of GDP, but Iceland has achieved it with inflation that devalues debt, while Ireland has done it under an EMU deflation regime that raises the burden of debt.
This has led to vastly different debt dynamics as they enter Year III of the drama. Iceland's budget deficit will be 6.3pc this year, and soon in surplus: Ireland's will be 12pc (32pc with bank bail-outs) and not much better next year.
The pain has been distributed very differently. Irish unemployment has reached 14.1pc, and is still rising. Iceland's peaked at 9.7pc and has since fallen to 7.3pc.
The International Monetary Fund said Iceland has turned the corner, praising Reykjavik for safeguarding its "valued Nordic social welfare model".
"In the event, the recession has proved shallower than expected, and Iceland’s growth decline of about minus 7pc in 2009 compares favorably against other countries hard hit by the crisis," said Mark Flanigan, the IMF's mission chief for the country.
Total debt will peak at 115pc, before dropping to 80pc by 2015 in what the IMF called "robust debt dynamics". Meanwhile. Ireland's debt will continue rising for another three years to 120pc of GDP. The contrast will be very stark by the middle of the decade. Iceland may have a lower sovereign debt than Germany by then.
Iceland's president, Olafur Grimsson, irritated EU officials last month when he said his country was recovering faster because it had refused to bail out creditors – mostly foreigners.
"The difference is that in Iceland we allowed the banks to fail. These were private banks and we didn't pump money into them in order to keep them going; the state should not shoulder the responsibility," he said.
The comments came just as the EU authorities were ruling out investor "haircuts" in Ireland, making this a condition for the country's €85bn (£72bn) loan package.
Dublin has imposed 80pc haircuts on the junior debt of Anglo Irish Bank but has not extended this to senior debt, viewed as sacrosanct.
The Irish press reported that EU officials "hit the roof" when Irish negotiators talked of broader burden-sharing. The European Central Bank is afraid that any such move would cause instant contagion through the debt markets of southern Europe.
Comparisons between the Irish and Icelandic banks must be handled with care. Iceland is tiny. It could walk away from liabilities equal to 900pc of GDP without causing a global systemic crisis.
Ireland is 12 times bigger. The balance sheets of Irish banks are $1.3 trillion (£822bn). The interlocking ties with German, Dutch, Belgian, and British banks create a nexus of vulnerability. Bondholder defaults would risk contagion to Spain and Portugal, where the banks rely heavily on foreign capital markets.
Of course, banks are only half the story. Nobel economist Paul Krugman said Iceland has been able to eke out recovery sooner because it never joined the euro. "Iceland devalued its currency massively and imposed capital controls. And a strange thing has happened: although it experienced the worst financial crisis (anywhere) in history, its punishment has been substantially less than that of other nations," he said, referring to Baltic states pegged to the euro.
Two years later, the krona is down 30pc, aluminium smelters are firing on all chimneys to meet export demand and local produce has displaced imports, including such exotica as vegetables and tomatoes grown in greenhouses.
Lars Christensen from Danske Bank said Iceland had come through "relatively unscathed" given the devastation of its banks but warned that it is still too soon give the all clear. "Iceland is a frozen crisis, and I am still worried what will happen when they lift capital controls," he said.
There is a better model for Ireland than Iceland, according to Mr Christensen. "People should be looking at Kazakhstan, which didn't bail out any creditors and let the three biggest banks fail, yet avoided a recession by letting the currency plunge and using monetary stimulus," he said.
Whether Ireland can learn anything from the Kazakh solution is a neuralgic issue. Ireland cannot resort to exchange and monetary stimulus without leaving the euro, which would be traumatic for all kinds of reasons, and illegal according to the ECB.
Ireland's EMU membership is not an economic policy. It is part of Ireland's larger strategy to escape Britain's shadow and build a different kind of country.
With a highly open economy, it has attracted investment from US and European companies precisely because it is fully committed to the EU Project.
Yet the underlying tale of Ireland and Iceland, and the tale of the 1930s, is that a devaluation shock may cause a violent crisis – that looks and feels terrible while it happens – but the slow-burn of policy austerity and debt deflation does more damage in the end.
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Why do the liberals rage about Obama's tax-cut agreement?
by Jeff Jacoby
LIBERALS AND DEMOCRATS have been melting down, blowing up, and freaking out over President Obama's agreement with Republican leaders to extend Bush-era tax rates for another two years. "An absolute disaster," fumes Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in an interview on MSNBC. "Anger of House Dems boils over," Politico reports. "An Odious Tax Deal," editorializes The New York Times. "Moral corruptness," seethes Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.
"No amount of lipstick," roars a headline at Democratic Underground, "can make this pig of a deal acceptable."
Why is the left so furious?
I realize, of course, that liberals were against the Bush tax cuts from the start. I know that Obama vowed time and again to let those tax cuts expire for households earning more than $250,000 a year. He made that pledge as a candidate for president, and he was still making it on the campaign trail this fall. "We are ready . . . to give tax cuts to every American making $250,000 or less," the president said in Cleveland on Sept. 8. "For any income over this amount, the tax rates would just go back to what they were under President Clinton."
But Obama swore to end plenty of other Bush policies that nevertheless remain intact. Why aren't Democrats in a blind rage over the tens of thousands of US troops still deployed in Iraq? Or his extension of the Patriot Act? Or the ongoing rendition of terror suspects to third countries for interrogation?
Roll Call reported last week that liberal activists angry about Obama's compromise on tax cuts "crashed two phone lines at the White House" and are planning to do the same to the Senate. Why have they never overloaded the White House switchboard with calls protesting the continued use of the presidential signing statements for which Bush was so sharply criticized? Or warrantless wiretapping? Or the fact that Guantanamo still hasn't been shut down?
Of all the ways in which "George W. Obama" (as a Village Voice headline dubbed him in January) has disappointed his ideological supporters, why is it the prospect of not raising taxes on the wealthy that drives them into such a frenzy?
After all, it isn't as though Obama's deal with the GOP singles out the rich for a windfall. It is simply an agreement not to single them out for a loss. And it isn't as though the affluent don't already shoulder an income-tax burden disproportionately higher than their share of the national income. In 2008, the top 1 percent of tax filers accounted for 20 percent of all income earned that year, yet they paid 38.0 percent of all federal individual income taxes. The top 5 percent -- anyone making $160,000 and up -- earned 35 percent of the nation's personal income, but paid 59 percent of the taxes. Federal income tax rates are progressive to a fault. So why are "progressives" spitting nails at the thought of leaving those rates where they are?
In an interview on Tuesday, NBC's Andrea Mitchell demanded to know how Senator Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican, could "justify going along with a larger tax cut, for those who really don't need it." Gregg replied: "Well, my view is: It's their money."
That would be my view, too -- and the view of most Americans, who are not conditioned to equate wealth with dispossession, and have not been raised to resent the rich. It's their money. Congress doesn't have to "justify" letting them keep it; it has to justify taking more of it away. The premise of Mitchell's question -- that government has the strongest claim on money the affluent "really don't need" -- strikes most non-liberals as not just wrong, but pernicious.
But to the left, the opposite is true. "We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one," Ronald Reagan, a recovered liberal, said in a famous speech, "without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one." As long as there are have-nots, therefore -- and there will always be have-nots -- it is pernicious for government not to confiscate more wealth from the haves.
This envy and resentment, which liberals think of as sensitivity and compassion, are at the very core of the liberal conception of good government. That is why "tax cuts for the rich" gets them so emotional and angry -- and it only deepens their outrage that most Americans don't think the way they do. Hence the Democrats' apoplexy. And hence their unbridled fury at Obama for agreeing to a compromise that a majority of voters seem to like.
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Welfare has its limits
Tis the season to be jolly, but you can forget about that in political circles. The current angst about the economy and taxes is so intense that even Santa's reindeers are spooked. Speaking the other day on a cable news program, liberal Congressman Jim McDermott put it this way: "This is Christmastime. We talk about Good Samaritans, the poor, the little baby Jesus in the cradle and all this stuff. And then we say to the unemployed we won't give you a check to feed your family. That's simply wrong."
As I wrote in this space a couple of weeks ago, the liberal agenda in America is expanding and now includes demands for guaranteed jobs at good wages for all who want to work. Unemployment benefits were extended again this year, and if the Obama tax compromise is passed, $150 billion more will be added to the deficit. Adding it all up, the total debt of the United States will soon exceed $14 trillion.
By invoking the baby Jesus, McDermott puts an important question in play: What does a moral society owe to the have-nots? How much public money should go to those in financial trouble?
Many liberals believe there should not be any limits. Just this week, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency because his state is bankrupt. The liberal legislature in Sacramento has spent so much money on entitlements for the poor and state union workers that it owes an astounding $158 billion.
If the wild spending continues on the federal level, the entire country will be adversely affected. Right now, the financial future of most Americans hinges on the dollar retaining its dominant position in the world. But if our currency collapses under unpaid debts, so will personal assets.
There comes a time when compassion can cause disaster. If you open your home to scores of homeless folks, you will not have a home for long. There is a capacity problem for every noble intent.
America remains the land of opportunity, but you have to work for it. The unemployment rate for college graduates is 5 percent. For high-school dropouts, it is 16 percent. Personal responsibility is usually the driving force behind success. But there are millions of Americans who are not responsible, and the cold truth is that the rest of us cannot afford to support them.
Every fair-minded person should support government safety nets for people who need assistance through no fault of their own. But guys like McDermott don't make distinctions like that. For them, the baby Jesus wants us to "provide" no matter what the circumstance. But being a Christian, I know that while Jesus promoted charity at the highest level, he was not self-destructive.
The Lord helps those who help themselves. Does he not?
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Suspected suicide bomb in central Stockholm injures two and panics shoppers
A suspected terrorist blew himself up in an apparent suicide bomb attack in central Stockholm which left two injured and caused panic among Christmas shoppers. Two explosions rocked the busy shopping street of Drottninggatan among the afternoon crowds.
A Swedish news agency said it had received messages about 10 minutes before the blasts in Arabic and Swedish, warning of unspecified “action”. The email warning, 10 minutes before the bombs, protested about the country’s presence in Afghanistan, where it has a force of 500 soldiers, mainly in the north of the country.
“Our acts will speak for themselves,” the agency quoted the message as saying. “Now your children, your daughters and your sisters will die as our brothers, our sisters and our children are dying.” The email had sound files in Swedish and Arabic.
The agency said the warning, which was also sent to Sweden’s Security Police (SAPO), also referred to caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed by the Swedish artist Lars Vilks.
Petra Sjolander, a police spokesman, said the first explosion was in a car containing gas canisters. The dead man was found at the site of the second blast about 300 yards away.
According to reports, the man was carrying pipe bombs, as well as a backpack full of nails. He shouted Arabic slogans before setting off the explosion.
Police were last night investigating whether other, unexploded bombs were on the scene.
Police spokesman Ulf Johansson said: “We need more investigation and of course we need more witnesses. The car exploded with a series of minor explosions and there was also some kind of explosion close up to where we found the dead man.”
SOURCE
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Iceland offers lessons for Ireland -- and the USA too?
Iceland has finally emerged from deep recession after allowing its currency to plunge and washing its hands of private bank debt, prompting an intense the debate over whether Ireland might suffer less damage if adopted the same strategy.
The Nordic economy grew at 1.2pc in the third quarter and looks poised to rebound next year. It ends a gruelling slump caused largely by the "New Viking" antics of Landsbanki, Glitnir and Kaupthing, the trio of lenders that brought down Iceland's financial system in September 2008.
The economies of the two "over-banked" countries have both contracted by around 11pc of GDP, but Iceland has achieved it with inflation that devalues debt, while Ireland has done it under an EMU deflation regime that raises the burden of debt.
This has led to vastly different debt dynamics as they enter Year III of the drama. Iceland's budget deficit will be 6.3pc this year, and soon in surplus: Ireland's will be 12pc (32pc with bank bail-outs) and not much better next year.
The pain has been distributed very differently. Irish unemployment has reached 14.1pc, and is still rising. Iceland's peaked at 9.7pc and has since fallen to 7.3pc.
The International Monetary Fund said Iceland has turned the corner, praising Reykjavik for safeguarding its "valued Nordic social welfare model".
"In the event, the recession has proved shallower than expected, and Iceland’s growth decline of about minus 7pc in 2009 compares favorably against other countries hard hit by the crisis," said Mark Flanigan, the IMF's mission chief for the country.
Total debt will peak at 115pc, before dropping to 80pc by 2015 in what the IMF called "robust debt dynamics". Meanwhile. Ireland's debt will continue rising for another three years to 120pc of GDP. The contrast will be very stark by the middle of the decade. Iceland may have a lower sovereign debt than Germany by then.
Iceland's president, Olafur Grimsson, irritated EU officials last month when he said his country was recovering faster because it had refused to bail out creditors – mostly foreigners.
"The difference is that in Iceland we allowed the banks to fail. These were private banks and we didn't pump money into them in order to keep them going; the state should not shoulder the responsibility," he said.
The comments came just as the EU authorities were ruling out investor "haircuts" in Ireland, making this a condition for the country's €85bn (£72bn) loan package.
Dublin has imposed 80pc haircuts on the junior debt of Anglo Irish Bank but has not extended this to senior debt, viewed as sacrosanct.
The Irish press reported that EU officials "hit the roof" when Irish negotiators talked of broader burden-sharing. The European Central Bank is afraid that any such move would cause instant contagion through the debt markets of southern Europe.
Comparisons between the Irish and Icelandic banks must be handled with care. Iceland is tiny. It could walk away from liabilities equal to 900pc of GDP without causing a global systemic crisis.
Ireland is 12 times bigger. The balance sheets of Irish banks are $1.3 trillion (£822bn). The interlocking ties with German, Dutch, Belgian, and British banks create a nexus of vulnerability. Bondholder defaults would risk contagion to Spain and Portugal, where the banks rely heavily on foreign capital markets.
Of course, banks are only half the story. Nobel economist Paul Krugman said Iceland has been able to eke out recovery sooner because it never joined the euro. "Iceland devalued its currency massively and imposed capital controls. And a strange thing has happened: although it experienced the worst financial crisis (anywhere) in history, its punishment has been substantially less than that of other nations," he said, referring to Baltic states pegged to the euro.
Two years later, the krona is down 30pc, aluminium smelters are firing on all chimneys to meet export demand and local produce has displaced imports, including such exotica as vegetables and tomatoes grown in greenhouses.
Lars Christensen from Danske Bank said Iceland had come through "relatively unscathed" given the devastation of its banks but warned that it is still too soon give the all clear. "Iceland is a frozen crisis, and I am still worried what will happen when they lift capital controls," he said.
There is a better model for Ireland than Iceland, according to Mr Christensen. "People should be looking at Kazakhstan, which didn't bail out any creditors and let the three biggest banks fail, yet avoided a recession by letting the currency plunge and using monetary stimulus," he said.
Whether Ireland can learn anything from the Kazakh solution is a neuralgic issue. Ireland cannot resort to exchange and monetary stimulus without leaving the euro, which would be traumatic for all kinds of reasons, and illegal according to the ECB.
Ireland's EMU membership is not an economic policy. It is part of Ireland's larger strategy to escape Britain's shadow and build a different kind of country.
With a highly open economy, it has attracted investment from US and European companies precisely because it is fully committed to the EU Project.
Yet the underlying tale of Ireland and Iceland, and the tale of the 1930s, is that a devaluation shock may cause a violent crisis – that looks and feels terrible while it happens – but the slow-burn of policy austerity and debt deflation does more damage in the end.
SOURCE
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Why do the liberals rage about Obama's tax-cut agreement?
by Jeff Jacoby
LIBERALS AND DEMOCRATS have been melting down, blowing up, and freaking out over President Obama's agreement with Republican leaders to extend Bush-era tax rates for another two years. "An absolute disaster," fumes Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in an interview on MSNBC. "Anger of House Dems boils over," Politico reports. "An Odious Tax Deal," editorializes The New York Times. "Moral corruptness," seethes Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.
"No amount of lipstick," roars a headline at Democratic Underground, "can make this pig of a deal acceptable."
Why is the left so furious?
I realize, of course, that liberals were against the Bush tax cuts from the start. I know that Obama vowed time and again to let those tax cuts expire for households earning more than $250,000 a year. He made that pledge as a candidate for president, and he was still making it on the campaign trail this fall. "We are ready . . . to give tax cuts to every American making $250,000 or less," the president said in Cleveland on Sept. 8. "For any income over this amount, the tax rates would just go back to what they were under President Clinton."
But Obama swore to end plenty of other Bush policies that nevertheless remain intact. Why aren't Democrats in a blind rage over the tens of thousands of US troops still deployed in Iraq? Or his extension of the Patriot Act? Or the ongoing rendition of terror suspects to third countries for interrogation?
Roll Call reported last week that liberal activists angry about Obama's compromise on tax cuts "crashed two phone lines at the White House" and are planning to do the same to the Senate. Why have they never overloaded the White House switchboard with calls protesting the continued use of the presidential signing statements for which Bush was so sharply criticized? Or warrantless wiretapping? Or the fact that Guantanamo still hasn't been shut down?
Of all the ways in which "George W. Obama" (as a Village Voice headline dubbed him in January) has disappointed his ideological supporters, why is it the prospect of not raising taxes on the wealthy that drives them into such a frenzy?
After all, it isn't as though Obama's deal with the GOP singles out the rich for a windfall. It is simply an agreement not to single them out for a loss. And it isn't as though the affluent don't already shoulder an income-tax burden disproportionately higher than their share of the national income. In 2008, the top 1 percent of tax filers accounted for 20 percent of all income earned that year, yet they paid 38.0 percent of all federal individual income taxes. The top 5 percent -- anyone making $160,000 and up -- earned 35 percent of the nation's personal income, but paid 59 percent of the taxes. Federal income tax rates are progressive to a fault. So why are "progressives" spitting nails at the thought of leaving those rates where they are?
In an interview on Tuesday, NBC's Andrea Mitchell demanded to know how Senator Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican, could "justify going along with a larger tax cut, for those who really don't need it." Gregg replied: "Well, my view is: It's their money."
That would be my view, too -- and the view of most Americans, who are not conditioned to equate wealth with dispossession, and have not been raised to resent the rich. It's their money. Congress doesn't have to "justify" letting them keep it; it has to justify taking more of it away. The premise of Mitchell's question -- that government has the strongest claim on money the affluent "really don't need" -- strikes most non-liberals as not just wrong, but pernicious.
But to the left, the opposite is true. "We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one," Ronald Reagan, a recovered liberal, said in a famous speech, "without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one." As long as there are have-nots, therefore -- and there will always be have-nots -- it is pernicious for government not to confiscate more wealth from the haves.
This envy and resentment, which liberals think of as sensitivity and compassion, are at the very core of the liberal conception of good government. That is why "tax cuts for the rich" gets them so emotional and angry -- and it only deepens their outrage that most Americans don't think the way they do. Hence the Democrats' apoplexy. And hence their unbridled fury at Obama for agreeing to a compromise that a majority of voters seem to like.
SOURCE
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Welfare has its limits
Tis the season to be jolly, but you can forget about that in political circles. The current angst about the economy and taxes is so intense that even Santa's reindeers are spooked. Speaking the other day on a cable news program, liberal Congressman Jim McDermott put it this way: "This is Christmastime. We talk about Good Samaritans, the poor, the little baby Jesus in the cradle and all this stuff. And then we say to the unemployed we won't give you a check to feed your family. That's simply wrong."
As I wrote in this space a couple of weeks ago, the liberal agenda in America is expanding and now includes demands for guaranteed jobs at good wages for all who want to work. Unemployment benefits were extended again this year, and if the Obama tax compromise is passed, $150 billion more will be added to the deficit. Adding it all up, the total debt of the United States will soon exceed $14 trillion.
By invoking the baby Jesus, McDermott puts an important question in play: What does a moral society owe to the have-nots? How much public money should go to those in financial trouble?
Many liberals believe there should not be any limits. Just this week, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency because his state is bankrupt. The liberal legislature in Sacramento has spent so much money on entitlements for the poor and state union workers that it owes an astounding $158 billion.
If the wild spending continues on the federal level, the entire country will be adversely affected. Right now, the financial future of most Americans hinges on the dollar retaining its dominant position in the world. But if our currency collapses under unpaid debts, so will personal assets.
There comes a time when compassion can cause disaster. If you open your home to scores of homeless folks, you will not have a home for long. There is a capacity problem for every noble intent.
America remains the land of opportunity, but you have to work for it. The unemployment rate for college graduates is 5 percent. For high-school dropouts, it is 16 percent. Personal responsibility is usually the driving force behind success. But there are millions of Americans who are not responsible, and the cold truth is that the rest of us cannot afford to support them.
Every fair-minded person should support government safety nets for people who need assistance through no fault of their own. But guys like McDermott don't make distinctions like that. For them, the baby Jesus wants us to "provide" no matter what the circumstance. But being a Christian, I know that while Jesus promoted charity at the highest level, he was not self-destructive.
The Lord helps those who help themselves. Does he not?
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
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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Why Constitutional Conservatism Is Ascending
If 2009 was the year of birth of the Tea Party movement, 2010 was the year of ascendancy of constitutional conservatism. In many ways, the movements are the same -- except, perhaps, that the Tea Party is a movement of political activism by people who weren't traditionally activists, and constitutional conservatism represents an awakening about the way back to American exceptionalism.
For conservatives to emphasize constitutionalism is nothing new. The greater emphasis, however, is a bit of branding that helps distinguish them from establishment Republicans who stole the brand "conservative," or those whose policies are constitutionally limited only some of the time.
You know constitutional conservatism is on the right track when the liberal literati (Lincoln Caplan) and dimwiterati (Randi Rhodes) criticize it.
More than ever, people now sense that the country is in decline because America has moved away from its true constitutional structure of government. As stated previously, the Constitution is the law that governs government. It is a limitation on government power as much as a grant of certain power.
It is the limitation part that is the Constitution's core, which is why liberals and the ruling class can't or won't wrap their heads around constitutional conservatism. The Democratic Party, taken over by social Democrats, and the Republican Party, whose leaders like to call themselves Reagan conservatives but became the old Democratic Party, failed to honor the limitations.
Federal agencies were given power to intrude on private property rights in the name of regulation for the public good. Free markets ceased to exist and were replaced by crony capitalism partnered with big government. The nonprofit sector, religious organizations, and other institutions became additional partners with government, and they had little or no regard for the Constitution except as it protected them -- and even then, they were willing abettors in its erosion.
The ascendancy of constitutional conservatism is a result of people's belief that restoring the Constitution is the only way we can save the country from becoming like the European nations.
Gordon Wood's The Creation of the American Republic, 1776 - 1787 is a marvelous depiction of the formation of the American Constitution as a response to the ruling-class nature of Europe at the time. Angelo Codevilla's brilliant book and article, America's Ruling Class, show that we've become much like the Europe of the time of our nation's constitutional creation.
We have watched more or less passively for decades as government has broken the law that governs it. Constitutional conservatives understand that America's exceptional nature is a direct result of the principles of our Declaration of Independence and the structural safeguards of our Constitution. We now understand that many or most of our national deficiencies can be attributed to the government's having broken our paramount law.
The divisions of power created by the Constitution were designed to provide a system of order that protects freedom. As importantly, the divisions of power were intended to protect private property rights and the bounty that flows from private property. The erosion of the Constitution as a strict structure has resulted in a loss of rights that are the key to our moral and financial well-being. A return to American exceptionalism requires a return to our constitutional structure.
Constitutional conservatism means that powers not delegated expressly to the federal government are indeed reserved to the states or to the people, which means that even conservatives must be restricted in the agendas they wish to accomplish at the federal level.
It means that constitutional conservatives will look to scale back government that has exceeded its legal limits -- first by reducing the powers of federal branches and agencies to their rightful places, and then by eliminating agencies not consistent with powers authorized by the Constitution and returning those controls back to the states.
Conservatives, including our best leaders, may not always articulate these notions perfectly, which is why the liberal literati are tempted to be derisive. With the national debt and the decay of our institutions, however, we are insolvent. The solution to insolvency is to restructure. The Constitution provides the structure for a return to exceptionalism.
The steps won't always be clear, certain or without dispute and debate, but as long as the direction is true, it can be done.
Fortunately, discussions of constitutionalism are no longer restricted to the writings of law professors or debates among lawyers. Books like Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny and Who Killed the Constitution? by Thomas Woods and Kevin Gutzman helped popularize the notion that the country's current downward path is directly attributable to the deterioration of our constitutional structures and protections.
Americans are reading, discussing, and emphasizing the Constitution like never before. They are, so to speak, forcing it upon elected officials, who despite their oaths to uphold the Constitution, often considered it as an afterthought or inconvenience.
Liberals and social Democrats understand, of course, that constitutional conservatism threatens their paradigm, which is why they attempt to mock it as akin to and, in their world, as dangerous as religious fundamentalism.
This is why we need even more elected officials who articulate the vision of constitutional conservatism and what impact it will have. The 2010 election was a bit of a hastily designed test run. If in the 2012 election conservatives become more facile in their explanations of constitutionalism and how it will help America return to exceptional status, then we will truly see an autopsy of liberalism.
SOURCE
************************
Obama's love-letter to the UAW
Several recent revelations bring home just what a cesspool of crony capitalism the American auto industry has become. The Obama administration and the UAW (Obama's major financial and political supporter) are running the show.
First is the news that the "new" GM walked away from the crony bankruptcy proceedings with a huge tax break -- one worth up to $45 billion. It was revealed in the paperwork filed for its IPO that the Obama administration gave the new GM a sweetheart deal: it will be allowed to carry forward huge losses incurred by the "old" GM prior to its bankruptcy. Of course, the IRS doesn't allow the new companies that emerge from bankruptcy to write off their old losses. But the feds decided to waive that rule for companies bailed out by TARP.
Thus, the new GM will save about $45.4 billion in taxes on future earnings, which may allow it to escape taxes for the next twenty years. This "tax-loss carry-forward" is a huge plum, an asset most of GM's rivals don't have, and one that no doubt led to its artificially high IPO stock price.
This brings up the second revelation: namely, the machinations by the Obama administration during the IPO that consciously helped the UAW make out like bandits.
The UAW was given a big chunk of new GM in the crooked bankruptcy settlement. To be precise, the very monster that drove GM off the cliff -- the UAW -- received 35% of the stock in the new company. With the sale of the stock in the new GM, the UAW earned an immediate $3.4 billion in selling about one third of its shares.
Moreover, if the UAW can get $36 per share for the other two-thirds of its shares, it will walk away breaking even -- meaning it will walk away with its outrageously bloated pension and health care fund fully intact. The taxpayer, on the other hand, hasn't fared well at all.
In fact, the Obama administration screwed the taxpayer just as thoroughly as it pampered the UAW. The taxpayer put $49.5 billion into GM in the bankruptcy, not to mention all the funds shoveled at the company prior to that. The Treasury recouped only a wretched $13.7 billion in the IPO, mainly because the Obama administration -- in yet another unprecedented gift to the union -- announced publicly that it would not sell any more stock for the next six months. This enables the UAW to dump its shares whenever it wants at a much higher price than it could get if the Treasury were also selling. The taxpayers will almost certainly get a lower payout, and they will never recoup their forced investment in these dinosaurs -- all to enable the UAW to walk away made whole.
Screwed even worse were the old secured creditors -- you know, the ones near the front of the line in bankruptcy filings way back when America was governed by the rule of law. The bondholders in the old GM have bonds as useful as scratch paper. (I won't mention the stockholders in the old GM, because stockholders -- who are only the legal owners of a company! -- typically got nothing in bankruptcy.)
The Obama administration car czar, who engineered the crony bankruptcy -- the aptly named Steve Rattner -- claims that the secured creditors would have received nothing in a standard bankruptcy anyway. But his claim is ludicrous on its face: in a regular bankruptcy, the union contracts that caused GM's and Chrysler's failure would have been nullified, and the substantial assets of the companies (plants, inventory, receivables, land, patents, etc.) would have been worth a substantial amount to other automakers and investment companies. The proceeds would have gone to satisfy the bondholders at least to a fair degree.
The third recent revelation about the U.S. automakers was the news that the Obama administration changed the purchasing of vehicles for the federal fleet dramatically; again, apparently to benefit its supporters.
It turns out that the administration itself has purchased a huge, unprecedented chunk of American-made hybrid cars assembled since it took over two of the loser companies. This has propped up the sales of hybrid cars in the face of widespread consumer indifference.
More HERE
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Let's not settle for the big-government status quo
By SARAH PALIN
The publication of the findings of the president's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was indeed, as the report was titled, "A Moment of Truth." The report shows we're much closer to the budgetary breaking point than previously assumed. The Medicare Trust Fund will be insolvent by 2017. As early as 2025, federal revenue will barely be enough to pay for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on our national debt. With spending structurally outpacing revenue, something clearly needs to be done to avert national bankruptcy.
Speaking with WSJ's Jerry Seib, Congressman Paul Ryan (R, WI) insisted that the deal between Republicans and the White House on the Bush Tax Cuts was not a second stimulus and that the agreement would promote growth despite adding to the deficit.
The commission itself calculates that, even if all of its recommendations are implemented, the federal budget will continue to balloon—to an estimated $5 trillion in 2020, from an already unprecedented $3.5 trillion today. The commission makes only a limited effort to cut spending below the current trend set by the Obama administration.
Among the few areas of spending it does single out for cuts is defense—the one area where we shouldn't be cutting corners at a time of war. Worst of all, the commission's proposals institutionalize the current administration's new big spending commitments, including ObamaCare. Not only does it leave ObamaCare intact, but its proposals would lead to a public option being introduced by the backdoor, with the chairmen's report suggesting a second look at a government-run health-care program if costs continue to soar.
It also implicitly endorses the use of "death panel"-like rationing by way of the new Independent Payments Advisory Board—making bureaucrats, not medical professionals, the ultimate arbiters of what types of treatment will (and especially will not) be reimbursed under Medicare.
The commission's recommendations are a disappointment. That doesn't mean, though, that the commission's work was a wasted effort. For one thing, it has exposed the large and unsustainable deficits that the Obama administration has created through its reckless "spend now, tax later" policies. It also establishes a clear bipartisan consensus on the need to fundamentally reform our entitlement programs. We need a better plan to build on these conclusions with common-sense reforms to tackle our long-term funding crisis in a sustainable way.
In my view, a better plan is the Roadmap for America's Future produced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.). The Roadmap offers a reliable path to long-term solvency for our entitlement programs, and it does so by encouraging personal responsibility and independence.
On health care, it would replace ObamaCare with a new system in which people are given greater control over their own health-care spending. It achieves this partly through creating medical savings accounts and a new health-care tax credit—the only tax credit that would be left in a radically simplified new income tax system that people can opt into if they wish.
The Roadmap would also replace our high and anticompetitive corporate income tax with a business consumption tax of just 8.5%. The overall tax burden would be limited to 19% of GDP (compared to 21% under the deficit commission's proposals). Beyond that, Rep. Ryan proposes fundamental reform of Medicare for those under 55 by turning the current benefit into a voucher with which people can purchase their own care.
On Social Security, as with Medicare, the Roadmap honors our commitments to those who are already receiving benefits by guaranteeing all existing rights to people over the age of 55. Those below that age are offered a choice: They can remain in the traditional government-run system or direct a portion of their payroll taxes to personal accounts, owned by them, managed by the Social Security Administration and guaranteed by the federal government. Under the Roadmap's proposals, they can pass these savings onto their heirs. The current Medicaid system, the majority of which is paid for by the federal government but administered by the states, would be replaced by a block-grant system that would reward economizing states.
Together these reforms help to secure our entitlement programs for the 21st century. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Roadmap would lead to lower deficits and a much lower federal debt. The CBO estimates that under current spending plans, our federal debt would rise to 87% of GDP by 2020, to 223% by 2040, and to 433% by 2060. Under Rep. Ryan's Roadmap, the CBO estimates that debt would rise much more slowly, peaking at 99% in 2040 and then dropping back to 77% by 2060.
Put simply: Our country is on the path toward bankruptcy. We must turn around before it's too late, and the Roadmap offers a clear plan for doing so. But it does more than just fend off disaster. CBO calculations show that the Roadmap would also help create a "much more favorable macroeconomic outlook" for the next half-century. The CBO estimates that under the Roadmap, by 2058 per-person GDP would be around 70% higher than the current trend.
Is Rep. Ryan's Roadmap perfect? Of course not—no government plan ever is. But it's the best plan on the table at a time when doing nothing is no longer an option.
Let's not settle for the big-government status quo, which is what the president's commission offers. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to make these tough decisions so that they might inherit a prosperous and strong America like the one we were given.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
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)
****************************
If 2009 was the year of birth of the Tea Party movement, 2010 was the year of ascendancy of constitutional conservatism. In many ways, the movements are the same -- except, perhaps, that the Tea Party is a movement of political activism by people who weren't traditionally activists, and constitutional conservatism represents an awakening about the way back to American exceptionalism.
For conservatives to emphasize constitutionalism is nothing new. The greater emphasis, however, is a bit of branding that helps distinguish them from establishment Republicans who stole the brand "conservative," or those whose policies are constitutionally limited only some of the time.
You know constitutional conservatism is on the right track when the liberal literati (Lincoln Caplan) and dimwiterati (Randi Rhodes) criticize it.
More than ever, people now sense that the country is in decline because America has moved away from its true constitutional structure of government. As stated previously, the Constitution is the law that governs government. It is a limitation on government power as much as a grant of certain power.
It is the limitation part that is the Constitution's core, which is why liberals and the ruling class can't or won't wrap their heads around constitutional conservatism. The Democratic Party, taken over by social Democrats, and the Republican Party, whose leaders like to call themselves Reagan conservatives but became the old Democratic Party, failed to honor the limitations.
Federal agencies were given power to intrude on private property rights in the name of regulation for the public good. Free markets ceased to exist and were replaced by crony capitalism partnered with big government. The nonprofit sector, religious organizations, and other institutions became additional partners with government, and they had little or no regard for the Constitution except as it protected them -- and even then, they were willing abettors in its erosion.
The ascendancy of constitutional conservatism is a result of people's belief that restoring the Constitution is the only way we can save the country from becoming like the European nations.
Gordon Wood's The Creation of the American Republic, 1776 - 1787 is a marvelous depiction of the formation of the American Constitution as a response to the ruling-class nature of Europe at the time. Angelo Codevilla's brilliant book and article, America's Ruling Class, show that we've become much like the Europe of the time of our nation's constitutional creation.
We have watched more or less passively for decades as government has broken the law that governs it. Constitutional conservatives understand that America's exceptional nature is a direct result of the principles of our Declaration of Independence and the structural safeguards of our Constitution. We now understand that many or most of our national deficiencies can be attributed to the government's having broken our paramount law.
The divisions of power created by the Constitution were designed to provide a system of order that protects freedom. As importantly, the divisions of power were intended to protect private property rights and the bounty that flows from private property. The erosion of the Constitution as a strict structure has resulted in a loss of rights that are the key to our moral and financial well-being. A return to American exceptionalism requires a return to our constitutional structure.
Constitutional conservatism means that powers not delegated expressly to the federal government are indeed reserved to the states or to the people, which means that even conservatives must be restricted in the agendas they wish to accomplish at the federal level.
It means that constitutional conservatives will look to scale back government that has exceeded its legal limits -- first by reducing the powers of federal branches and agencies to their rightful places, and then by eliminating agencies not consistent with powers authorized by the Constitution and returning those controls back to the states.
Conservatives, including our best leaders, may not always articulate these notions perfectly, which is why the liberal literati are tempted to be derisive. With the national debt and the decay of our institutions, however, we are insolvent. The solution to insolvency is to restructure. The Constitution provides the structure for a return to exceptionalism.
The steps won't always be clear, certain or without dispute and debate, but as long as the direction is true, it can be done.
Fortunately, discussions of constitutionalism are no longer restricted to the writings of law professors or debates among lawyers. Books like Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny and Who Killed the Constitution? by Thomas Woods and Kevin Gutzman helped popularize the notion that the country's current downward path is directly attributable to the deterioration of our constitutional structures and protections.
Americans are reading, discussing, and emphasizing the Constitution like never before. They are, so to speak, forcing it upon elected officials, who despite their oaths to uphold the Constitution, often considered it as an afterthought or inconvenience.
Liberals and social Democrats understand, of course, that constitutional conservatism threatens their paradigm, which is why they attempt to mock it as akin to and, in their world, as dangerous as religious fundamentalism.
This is why we need even more elected officials who articulate the vision of constitutional conservatism and what impact it will have. The 2010 election was a bit of a hastily designed test run. If in the 2012 election conservatives become more facile in their explanations of constitutionalism and how it will help America return to exceptional status, then we will truly see an autopsy of liberalism.
SOURCE
************************
Obama's love-letter to the UAW
Several recent revelations bring home just what a cesspool of crony capitalism the American auto industry has become. The Obama administration and the UAW (Obama's major financial and political supporter) are running the show.
First is the news that the "new" GM walked away from the crony bankruptcy proceedings with a huge tax break -- one worth up to $45 billion. It was revealed in the paperwork filed for its IPO that the Obama administration gave the new GM a sweetheart deal: it will be allowed to carry forward huge losses incurred by the "old" GM prior to its bankruptcy. Of course, the IRS doesn't allow the new companies that emerge from bankruptcy to write off their old losses. But the feds decided to waive that rule for companies bailed out by TARP.
Thus, the new GM will save about $45.4 billion in taxes on future earnings, which may allow it to escape taxes for the next twenty years. This "tax-loss carry-forward" is a huge plum, an asset most of GM's rivals don't have, and one that no doubt led to its artificially high IPO stock price.
This brings up the second revelation: namely, the machinations by the Obama administration during the IPO that consciously helped the UAW make out like bandits.
The UAW was given a big chunk of new GM in the crooked bankruptcy settlement. To be precise, the very monster that drove GM off the cliff -- the UAW -- received 35% of the stock in the new company. With the sale of the stock in the new GM, the UAW earned an immediate $3.4 billion in selling about one third of its shares.
Moreover, if the UAW can get $36 per share for the other two-thirds of its shares, it will walk away breaking even -- meaning it will walk away with its outrageously bloated pension and health care fund fully intact. The taxpayer, on the other hand, hasn't fared well at all.
In fact, the Obama administration screwed the taxpayer just as thoroughly as it pampered the UAW. The taxpayer put $49.5 billion into GM in the bankruptcy, not to mention all the funds shoveled at the company prior to that. The Treasury recouped only a wretched $13.7 billion in the IPO, mainly because the Obama administration -- in yet another unprecedented gift to the union -- announced publicly that it would not sell any more stock for the next six months. This enables the UAW to dump its shares whenever it wants at a much higher price than it could get if the Treasury were also selling. The taxpayers will almost certainly get a lower payout, and they will never recoup their forced investment in these dinosaurs -- all to enable the UAW to walk away made whole.
Screwed even worse were the old secured creditors -- you know, the ones near the front of the line in bankruptcy filings way back when America was governed by the rule of law. The bondholders in the old GM have bonds as useful as scratch paper. (I won't mention the stockholders in the old GM, because stockholders -- who are only the legal owners of a company! -- typically got nothing in bankruptcy.)
The Obama administration car czar, who engineered the crony bankruptcy -- the aptly named Steve Rattner -- claims that the secured creditors would have received nothing in a standard bankruptcy anyway. But his claim is ludicrous on its face: in a regular bankruptcy, the union contracts that caused GM's and Chrysler's failure would have been nullified, and the substantial assets of the companies (plants, inventory, receivables, land, patents, etc.) would have been worth a substantial amount to other automakers and investment companies. The proceeds would have gone to satisfy the bondholders at least to a fair degree.
The third recent revelation about the U.S. automakers was the news that the Obama administration changed the purchasing of vehicles for the federal fleet dramatically; again, apparently to benefit its supporters.
It turns out that the administration itself has purchased a huge, unprecedented chunk of American-made hybrid cars assembled since it took over two of the loser companies. This has propped up the sales of hybrid cars in the face of widespread consumer indifference.
More HERE
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Let's not settle for the big-government status quo
By SARAH PALIN
The publication of the findings of the president's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was indeed, as the report was titled, "A Moment of Truth." The report shows we're much closer to the budgetary breaking point than previously assumed. The Medicare Trust Fund will be insolvent by 2017. As early as 2025, federal revenue will barely be enough to pay for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on our national debt. With spending structurally outpacing revenue, something clearly needs to be done to avert national bankruptcy.
Speaking with WSJ's Jerry Seib, Congressman Paul Ryan (R, WI) insisted that the deal between Republicans and the White House on the Bush Tax Cuts was not a second stimulus and that the agreement would promote growth despite adding to the deficit.
The commission itself calculates that, even if all of its recommendations are implemented, the federal budget will continue to balloon—to an estimated $5 trillion in 2020, from an already unprecedented $3.5 trillion today. The commission makes only a limited effort to cut spending below the current trend set by the Obama administration.
Among the few areas of spending it does single out for cuts is defense—the one area where we shouldn't be cutting corners at a time of war. Worst of all, the commission's proposals institutionalize the current administration's new big spending commitments, including ObamaCare. Not only does it leave ObamaCare intact, but its proposals would lead to a public option being introduced by the backdoor, with the chairmen's report suggesting a second look at a government-run health-care program if costs continue to soar.
It also implicitly endorses the use of "death panel"-like rationing by way of the new Independent Payments Advisory Board—making bureaucrats, not medical professionals, the ultimate arbiters of what types of treatment will (and especially will not) be reimbursed under Medicare.
The commission's recommendations are a disappointment. That doesn't mean, though, that the commission's work was a wasted effort. For one thing, it has exposed the large and unsustainable deficits that the Obama administration has created through its reckless "spend now, tax later" policies. It also establishes a clear bipartisan consensus on the need to fundamentally reform our entitlement programs. We need a better plan to build on these conclusions with common-sense reforms to tackle our long-term funding crisis in a sustainable way.
In my view, a better plan is the Roadmap for America's Future produced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.). The Roadmap offers a reliable path to long-term solvency for our entitlement programs, and it does so by encouraging personal responsibility and independence.
On health care, it would replace ObamaCare with a new system in which people are given greater control over their own health-care spending. It achieves this partly through creating medical savings accounts and a new health-care tax credit—the only tax credit that would be left in a radically simplified new income tax system that people can opt into if they wish.
The Roadmap would also replace our high and anticompetitive corporate income tax with a business consumption tax of just 8.5%. The overall tax burden would be limited to 19% of GDP (compared to 21% under the deficit commission's proposals). Beyond that, Rep. Ryan proposes fundamental reform of Medicare for those under 55 by turning the current benefit into a voucher with which people can purchase their own care.
On Social Security, as with Medicare, the Roadmap honors our commitments to those who are already receiving benefits by guaranteeing all existing rights to people over the age of 55. Those below that age are offered a choice: They can remain in the traditional government-run system or direct a portion of their payroll taxes to personal accounts, owned by them, managed by the Social Security Administration and guaranteed by the federal government. Under the Roadmap's proposals, they can pass these savings onto their heirs. The current Medicaid system, the majority of which is paid for by the federal government but administered by the states, would be replaced by a block-grant system that would reward economizing states.
Together these reforms help to secure our entitlement programs for the 21st century. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Roadmap would lead to lower deficits and a much lower federal debt. The CBO estimates that under current spending plans, our federal debt would rise to 87% of GDP by 2020, to 223% by 2040, and to 433% by 2060. Under Rep. Ryan's Roadmap, the CBO estimates that debt would rise much more slowly, peaking at 99% in 2040 and then dropping back to 77% by 2060.
Put simply: Our country is on the path toward bankruptcy. We must turn around before it's too late, and the Roadmap offers a clear plan for doing so. But it does more than just fend off disaster. CBO calculations show that the Roadmap would also help create a "much more favorable macroeconomic outlook" for the next half-century. The CBO estimates that under the Roadmap, by 2058 per-person GDP would be around 70% higher than the current trend.
Is Rep. Ryan's Roadmap perfect? Of course not—no government plan ever is. But it's the best plan on the table at a time when doing nothing is no longer an option.
Let's not settle for the big-government status quo, which is what the president's commission offers. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to make these tough decisions so that they might inherit a prosperous and strong America like the one we were given.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
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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Saturday, December 11, 2010
The conservative case for Wikileaks
No one questions that governments must maintain a certain level of secrecy, including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who told Time that “Secrecy is important for many things … [but it] shouldn’t be used to cover up abuses.” The entire premise of Assange’s whistleblower organization is this: To what degree is government secrecy justified? And when particular secrets could be damaging to the other partner in the United States government’s relationship — the American people — should these secrets be revealed in the name of protecting the public?
How often does our government use “national security” simply as an excuse to cover up questionable dealings? Reports Time: “in the past few years, governments have designated so much information secret that you wonder whether they intend the time of day to be classified. The number of new secrets designated as such by the U.S. government has risen 75% … . At the same time, the number of documents and other communications created using those secrets has skyrocketed nearly 10 times…”
To say that government must keep secrets is not to say that all government secrets must be kept.
As admitted even by Pentagon officials and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, none of WikiLeaks’ revelations do anything to compromise national security or endanger American lives — but they have wreaked havoc on political life in Washington, D.C. Americans are not supposed to know, for example, that their government bullied and threatened individuals and other governments that might have undermined the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.
The federal government attempting to squelch anyone who might undermine global-warming dogma? Do WikiLeaks’ conservative critics believe revealing this is a “national security” risk?
Americans are not supposed to know, apparently, that behind the scenes Saudi Arabia has been encouraging the U.S. to take military action against Iran. But if we end up going to war with Iran shouldn’t it be in America’s national interest, and not simply as a subcontractor for another country? Asks Fox News’ Judith Miller: “Why should Americans not know that Arab states, often at the top level, have been urging Washington to take military or other drastic action against Iran, while they publicly oppose such action?”
And when did conservatives become so protective of Hillary Clinton? What happened to the days of the “Stop Hillary Express,” when right-wing talk radio portrayed the former first lady as Satan and theorized about all the devious ways in which, if in power, she might conspire to bring down the country? When WikiLeaks revealed that Secretary of State Clinton tried to obtain DNA, fingerprints, credit-card numbers, and other private information belonging to United Nations officials, we learned that Clinton’s style was every bit as mafia-esque as her conservative critics once warned. Yet conservatives now attack WikiLeaks for revealing what they once feared.
It should also be remembered that the same conservatives now calling for Assange’s head either ignored or were sympathetic to Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame allegedly at the Bush administration’s behest — a revelation arguably far riskier to our national security than anything ever released by WikiLeaks.
But the worst hypocrisy throughout this controversy has been in conservatives reflexively defending the government and attacking WikiLeaks. Since when have conservatives believed that Washington should be able to shroud any action it likes in secrecy and that revealing government’s nefarious deeds is tantamount to treason? Isn’t it government officials who might secretly work for corporate, ideological or transnational interests — and against the national interest — who are betraying their country?
Interestingly, Wikileaks’ founder espouses the traditionally conservative, Jeffersonian view that America’s constitutional structure limits and lessens government corruption. Reported Time: “Assange appears to believe that the U.S. has not become ‘a much-worse-behaved superpower’ because its federalism, ‘this strength of the states,’ has been a drag on the combination of the burgeoning power of the central government and a presidency that can expand its influence only by way of foreign affairs.”
Decentralizing government power, limiting it, and challenging it was the Founders’ intent and these have always been core conservative principles. Conservatives should prefer an explosion of whistleblower groups like WikiLeaks to a federal government powerful enough to take them down.
Government officials who now attack WikLleaks don’t fear national endangerment, they fear personal embarrassment. And while scores of conservatives have long promised to undermine or challenge the current monstrosity in Washington, D.C., it is now an organization not recognizably conservative that best undermines the political establishment and challenges its very foundations.
SOURCE
*********************
MSNBC ignoramus fails to realize that C.S. Lewis is a noted Christian author
First they mock her for not telling them what she reads. Now they mock her for telling them exactly what she reads.
But the fact that C.S. Lewis’ works have not-so-subtle Christian undertones is apparently lost on MSNBC commentator Richard Wolffe who mocks former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for claiming his books were a source of “divine inspiration.”
Appearing on MSNBC’s “Hardball” with Chris Matthews, Wolffe expressed incredulity, noting that Lewis wrote “a series of kids’ books.”
Matthews interrupted Wolffe: “I wouldn’t put down C.S. Lewis.”
“I’m not putting him down,” Wollfe responded. “But you know divine inspiration? There are things she could’ve said to divine inspiration. Choosing C.S. Lewis is an interesting one.”
Note to Richard Wolffe: Lewis wrote much more than “a series of kids’ books.” I suggest you read some of them sometime.
SOURCE. (See the original for links & video)
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The Republican Senate
Republicans gnashed their teeth in frustration as the national tide of GOP resurgence washed up against the massive Democratic fortresses in Nevada, Washington state, Colorado and California. When they neither toppled nor faltered, most conservatives resigned themselves to a divided Congress with the Republican House and the Democratic Senate forever at war.
Not so. The vote on the extension of the Bush tax cuts reveals that the Republican Party has, in fact, gained effective control of the U.S. Senate. We are facing the same situation Ronald Reagan confronted in 1980 when his revolution brought him control of the Senate, but left the House under the nominal reign of Tip O'Neill and the Democrats. But, in fact, as the new president soon discovered, the House Democratic majority was subservient to the tide that had swept the Senate. Terrified by the Republican sweep, the Democrats were unable to muster a coherent opposition in the chamber they controlled. So it will be in 2011.
The Democrats will keep the corner offices in the Russell, Dirksen and Hart Senate office buildings and retain their committee chairmanships, but their ability to summon a majority to sustain their president on crucial votes is gone. The defection of Sens. Jim Webb, D-Va., Ben Nelson, D-Neb., Joe Manchin, D-W.V., and independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut indicates that the 53-47 Democratic tilt of the Senate is more apparent than real.
Webb, Nelson, Manchin and Lieberman are all up for re-election in 2012. Each is very good at reading the handwriting on the wall left by Sens. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., Evan Bayh, D-Ind., Chris Dodd, D-Conn., Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., Arlen Specter, D-Pa., Bob _Bennett, R-Utah, and Russ Feingold, D-Wis., on their way out the door. It reads, "The conservatives are coming!"
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., could well afford to lose four votes while he controlled the Senate 58-42, but he can ill afford four defections when his margin is only three. And Sens. Nelson, Jon Tester, D-Mont., Bob Casey Jr., D-Pa., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. -- all from red states and all facing close re-election battles -- cannot be far behind these four in considering periodic abandonment of the ship on key votes. Only the likelihood of retirement saves Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., from a similar fate. Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Herb Kohl, D-Wis., Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Robert Menendez, D-N.J., also vulnerable in 2012, probably think they can ride out the tide in their more Democratic states. (And in any event, Brown, Stabenow and Menendez are too liberal to notice what has just happened.)
So, on key votes, the endangered Democratic senators are likely to dodge the bullets coming from the House and defect from Reid's majority. Why should they take the rap for blocking conservative legislation when they have a presidential veto backing them up at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue? "Let the president take the rap; why should I have to?" they will ask as they lend their assent to House-passed bills. The inability of President Obama to re-elect those who supported him hardly encourages others to risk their careers doing so.
Indeed, Reid can only regain his functioning majority if more Democrats choose to retire rather than face the music in 2012. If Kohl, Bingaman, Webb and Ben Nelson decide to retire after this term, the Democrats could have enough lame ducks to keep control of the Senate floor for one more cycle -- hardly a pleasing prospect for their party.
The result of the functional _Republican control of the Senate is that the forum for decision-making in a divided Washington will not be the conference committee, but rather White House negotiations between the two political parties.
It remains to be seen whether the endangered Democrats can save their Senate seats from the likely GOP tide of 2012 by switching in time to pretend to be moderates. What is clear is that they are not going to block the Republican bills coming over from the House. The Democrats will still control the committees in the Senate, but the Republicans will own the floor.
SOURCE
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Is ObamaCare Unconstitutional? Virginia Will Put It To The Test
Sometime before the end of December the Eastern District Court in Virginia will rule on the constitutionality of ObamaCare's individual mandate. Judge Henry Hudson's ruling could have huge implications for the future of not only ObamaCare, but also the relationship of the federal government to its citizens.
The mandate requires individuals to purchase health insurance or pay a fine. In May, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli filed suit against the mandate. "This is a further extension of federal power than ever before," said James Blumstein, a law professor at Vanderbilt University.
The Obama administration argues that the federal government has the power to compel people to buy insurance since it has the authority to regulate insurance under the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution.
While the government has used the commerce clause to regulate or even prevent the purchase of a product or service, this is the first time the commerce clause has been used to require individuals to purchase a product.
Virginia counters that failing to purchase insurance does not count as economic activity and thus does not fall under the purview of the commerce clause.
The case likely to loom large in Hudson's ruling is Gonzales v. Raich. The Supreme Court held that the federal government could use the commerce clause to ban the possession of marijuana that had never crossed state lines or been sold anywhere. The majority on the court reasoned that the drug could easily become part of interstate commerce, so Congress had the power to regulate it.
Thus far district courts in Michigan and Western Virginia have dismissed challenges to the individual mandate. Those courts "read Gonzales vs. Raich to mean that Congress can regulate intrastate activity if there is a rational basis to suggest that it might affect interstate commerce," said Tom Christina, an attorney at the firm Ogletree Deakins.
The question is whether failing to purchase insurance constitutes "economic activity." Christina said: "In those judges' view it's not right to characterize failing to have insurance as mere inactivity. Instead those courts have accepted the government's argument that everyone is going to eventually get sick and need medical care. According to the government, people who are uninsured are engaged in the activity of financing their future health care in one fashion vs. another."
Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, counters that Raich will not apply because it defines "economic activity as the production, consumption or distribution of a commodity. If you choose not to have health insurance, you're not producing, consuming or distributing it."
Nor does Somin agree that since everyone eventually uses health care the government can make people buy insurance. "That kind of reasoning can be used to justify anything," he said. "The government could justify a mandate to purchase cars because eventually everyone uses transportation."
More HERE
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ELSEWHERE
The cure is the disease: "Prohibition of alcohol in the United States lasted from 1920 to 1933, during that time it proved an utter failure. The Schaffer Library of Drug Policy reports that consumption increased, especially among women and children and that arrests for public drunkenness and similar alcohol related offenses surpassed pre-prohibition levels. In addition to not preventing use and abuse the Nobel Experiment enriched and empowered criminals, further corrupted politicians, and cost the tax payers millions. Today America faces similar problems caused by the War on Drugs."
Iran’s chief obstacle to nukes: Its own bad technology: "Long before the mysterious Stuxnet computer virus struck an apparent blow at Iran’s nuclear program, Tehran’s nuclear effort was being delayed by a far more mundane problem: bad technology. … The most fundamental problem with Iran’s enrichment program appears to be its own centrifuge design. Called the P-1 after a Pakistani mock-up of a Dutch design pilfered in the 1970s, the centrifuge that Iran has been attempting to operate is known to be temperamental and fault-prone.”
DADT repeal fails to make it to US Senate floor : "Despite Democratic efforts, Republicans on Thursday prevented a vote on the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, putting the repeal of a ban on gays serving openly in the military in doubt. … Republicans have vowed to block any votes until after resolving the unrelated issue of expiring tax cuts.”
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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No one questions that governments must maintain a certain level of secrecy, including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who told Time that “Secrecy is important for many things … [but it] shouldn’t be used to cover up abuses.” The entire premise of Assange’s whistleblower organization is this: To what degree is government secrecy justified? And when particular secrets could be damaging to the other partner in the United States government’s relationship — the American people — should these secrets be revealed in the name of protecting the public?
How often does our government use “national security” simply as an excuse to cover up questionable dealings? Reports Time: “in the past few years, governments have designated so much information secret that you wonder whether they intend the time of day to be classified. The number of new secrets designated as such by the U.S. government has risen 75% … . At the same time, the number of documents and other communications created using those secrets has skyrocketed nearly 10 times…”
To say that government must keep secrets is not to say that all government secrets must be kept.
As admitted even by Pentagon officials and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, none of WikiLeaks’ revelations do anything to compromise national security or endanger American lives — but they have wreaked havoc on political life in Washington, D.C. Americans are not supposed to know, for example, that their government bullied and threatened individuals and other governments that might have undermined the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.
The federal government attempting to squelch anyone who might undermine global-warming dogma? Do WikiLeaks’ conservative critics believe revealing this is a “national security” risk?
Americans are not supposed to know, apparently, that behind the scenes Saudi Arabia has been encouraging the U.S. to take military action against Iran. But if we end up going to war with Iran shouldn’t it be in America’s national interest, and not simply as a subcontractor for another country? Asks Fox News’ Judith Miller: “Why should Americans not know that Arab states, often at the top level, have been urging Washington to take military or other drastic action against Iran, while they publicly oppose such action?”
And when did conservatives become so protective of Hillary Clinton? What happened to the days of the “Stop Hillary Express,” when right-wing talk radio portrayed the former first lady as Satan and theorized about all the devious ways in which, if in power, she might conspire to bring down the country? When WikiLeaks revealed that Secretary of State Clinton tried to obtain DNA, fingerprints, credit-card numbers, and other private information belonging to United Nations officials, we learned that Clinton’s style was every bit as mafia-esque as her conservative critics once warned. Yet conservatives now attack WikiLeaks for revealing what they once feared.
It should also be remembered that the same conservatives now calling for Assange’s head either ignored or were sympathetic to Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame allegedly at the Bush administration’s behest — a revelation arguably far riskier to our national security than anything ever released by WikiLeaks.
But the worst hypocrisy throughout this controversy has been in conservatives reflexively defending the government and attacking WikiLeaks. Since when have conservatives believed that Washington should be able to shroud any action it likes in secrecy and that revealing government’s nefarious deeds is tantamount to treason? Isn’t it government officials who might secretly work for corporate, ideological or transnational interests — and against the national interest — who are betraying their country?
Interestingly, Wikileaks’ founder espouses the traditionally conservative, Jeffersonian view that America’s constitutional structure limits and lessens government corruption. Reported Time: “Assange appears to believe that the U.S. has not become ‘a much-worse-behaved superpower’ because its federalism, ‘this strength of the states,’ has been a drag on the combination of the burgeoning power of the central government and a presidency that can expand its influence only by way of foreign affairs.”
Decentralizing government power, limiting it, and challenging it was the Founders’ intent and these have always been core conservative principles. Conservatives should prefer an explosion of whistleblower groups like WikiLeaks to a federal government powerful enough to take them down.
Government officials who now attack WikLleaks don’t fear national endangerment, they fear personal embarrassment. And while scores of conservatives have long promised to undermine or challenge the current monstrosity in Washington, D.C., it is now an organization not recognizably conservative that best undermines the political establishment and challenges its very foundations.
SOURCE
*********************
MSNBC ignoramus fails to realize that C.S. Lewis is a noted Christian author
First they mock her for not telling them what she reads. Now they mock her for telling them exactly what she reads.
But the fact that C.S. Lewis’ works have not-so-subtle Christian undertones is apparently lost on MSNBC commentator Richard Wolffe who mocks former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for claiming his books were a source of “divine inspiration.”
Appearing on MSNBC’s “Hardball” with Chris Matthews, Wolffe expressed incredulity, noting that Lewis wrote “a series of kids’ books.”
Matthews interrupted Wolffe: “I wouldn’t put down C.S. Lewis.”
“I’m not putting him down,” Wollfe responded. “But you know divine inspiration? There are things she could’ve said to divine inspiration. Choosing C.S. Lewis is an interesting one.”
Note to Richard Wolffe: Lewis wrote much more than “a series of kids’ books.” I suggest you read some of them sometime.
SOURCE. (See the original for links & video)
*************************
The Republican Senate
Republicans gnashed their teeth in frustration as the national tide of GOP resurgence washed up against the massive Democratic fortresses in Nevada, Washington state, Colorado and California. When they neither toppled nor faltered, most conservatives resigned themselves to a divided Congress with the Republican House and the Democratic Senate forever at war.
Not so. The vote on the extension of the Bush tax cuts reveals that the Republican Party has, in fact, gained effective control of the U.S. Senate. We are facing the same situation Ronald Reagan confronted in 1980 when his revolution brought him control of the Senate, but left the House under the nominal reign of Tip O'Neill and the Democrats. But, in fact, as the new president soon discovered, the House Democratic majority was subservient to the tide that had swept the Senate. Terrified by the Republican sweep, the Democrats were unable to muster a coherent opposition in the chamber they controlled. So it will be in 2011.
The Democrats will keep the corner offices in the Russell, Dirksen and Hart Senate office buildings and retain their committee chairmanships, but their ability to summon a majority to sustain their president on crucial votes is gone. The defection of Sens. Jim Webb, D-Va., Ben Nelson, D-Neb., Joe Manchin, D-W.V., and independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut indicates that the 53-47 Democratic tilt of the Senate is more apparent than real.
Webb, Nelson, Manchin and Lieberman are all up for re-election in 2012. Each is very good at reading the handwriting on the wall left by Sens. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., Evan Bayh, D-Ind., Chris Dodd, D-Conn., Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., Arlen Specter, D-Pa., Bob _Bennett, R-Utah, and Russ Feingold, D-Wis., on their way out the door. It reads, "The conservatives are coming!"
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., could well afford to lose four votes while he controlled the Senate 58-42, but he can ill afford four defections when his margin is only three. And Sens. Nelson, Jon Tester, D-Mont., Bob Casey Jr., D-Pa., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. -- all from red states and all facing close re-election battles -- cannot be far behind these four in considering periodic abandonment of the ship on key votes. Only the likelihood of retirement saves Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., from a similar fate. Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Herb Kohl, D-Wis., Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Robert Menendez, D-N.J., also vulnerable in 2012, probably think they can ride out the tide in their more Democratic states. (And in any event, Brown, Stabenow and Menendez are too liberal to notice what has just happened.)
So, on key votes, the endangered Democratic senators are likely to dodge the bullets coming from the House and defect from Reid's majority. Why should they take the rap for blocking conservative legislation when they have a presidential veto backing them up at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue? "Let the president take the rap; why should I have to?" they will ask as they lend their assent to House-passed bills. The inability of President Obama to re-elect those who supported him hardly encourages others to risk their careers doing so.
Indeed, Reid can only regain his functioning majority if more Democrats choose to retire rather than face the music in 2012. If Kohl, Bingaman, Webb and Ben Nelson decide to retire after this term, the Democrats could have enough lame ducks to keep control of the Senate floor for one more cycle -- hardly a pleasing prospect for their party.
The result of the functional _Republican control of the Senate is that the forum for decision-making in a divided Washington will not be the conference committee, but rather White House negotiations between the two political parties.
It remains to be seen whether the endangered Democrats can save their Senate seats from the likely GOP tide of 2012 by switching in time to pretend to be moderates. What is clear is that they are not going to block the Republican bills coming over from the House. The Democrats will still control the committees in the Senate, but the Republicans will own the floor.
SOURCE
************************
Is ObamaCare Unconstitutional? Virginia Will Put It To The Test
Sometime before the end of December the Eastern District Court in Virginia will rule on the constitutionality of ObamaCare's individual mandate. Judge Henry Hudson's ruling could have huge implications for the future of not only ObamaCare, but also the relationship of the federal government to its citizens.
The mandate requires individuals to purchase health insurance or pay a fine. In May, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli filed suit against the mandate. "This is a further extension of federal power than ever before," said James Blumstein, a law professor at Vanderbilt University.
The Obama administration argues that the federal government has the power to compel people to buy insurance since it has the authority to regulate insurance under the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution.
While the government has used the commerce clause to regulate or even prevent the purchase of a product or service, this is the first time the commerce clause has been used to require individuals to purchase a product.
Virginia counters that failing to purchase insurance does not count as economic activity and thus does not fall under the purview of the commerce clause.
The case likely to loom large in Hudson's ruling is Gonzales v. Raich. The Supreme Court held that the federal government could use the commerce clause to ban the possession of marijuana that had never crossed state lines or been sold anywhere. The majority on the court reasoned that the drug could easily become part of interstate commerce, so Congress had the power to regulate it.
Thus far district courts in Michigan and Western Virginia have dismissed challenges to the individual mandate. Those courts "read Gonzales vs. Raich to mean that Congress can regulate intrastate activity if there is a rational basis to suggest that it might affect interstate commerce," said Tom Christina, an attorney at the firm Ogletree Deakins.
The question is whether failing to purchase insurance constitutes "economic activity." Christina said: "In those judges' view it's not right to characterize failing to have insurance as mere inactivity. Instead those courts have accepted the government's argument that everyone is going to eventually get sick and need medical care. According to the government, people who are uninsured are engaged in the activity of financing their future health care in one fashion vs. another."
Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, counters that Raich will not apply because it defines "economic activity as the production, consumption or distribution of a commodity. If you choose not to have health insurance, you're not producing, consuming or distributing it."
Nor does Somin agree that since everyone eventually uses health care the government can make people buy insurance. "That kind of reasoning can be used to justify anything," he said. "The government could justify a mandate to purchase cars because eventually everyone uses transportation."
More HERE
***********************
ELSEWHERE
The cure is the disease: "Prohibition of alcohol in the United States lasted from 1920 to 1933, during that time it proved an utter failure. The Schaffer Library of Drug Policy reports that consumption increased, especially among women and children and that arrests for public drunkenness and similar alcohol related offenses surpassed pre-prohibition levels. In addition to not preventing use and abuse the Nobel Experiment enriched and empowered criminals, further corrupted politicians, and cost the tax payers millions. Today America faces similar problems caused by the War on Drugs."
Iran’s chief obstacle to nukes: Its own bad technology: "Long before the mysterious Stuxnet computer virus struck an apparent blow at Iran’s nuclear program, Tehran’s nuclear effort was being delayed by a far more mundane problem: bad technology. … The most fundamental problem with Iran’s enrichment program appears to be its own centrifuge design. Called the P-1 after a Pakistani mock-up of a Dutch design pilfered in the 1970s, the centrifuge that Iran has been attempting to operate is known to be temperamental and fault-prone.”
DADT repeal fails to make it to US Senate floor : "Despite Democratic efforts, Republicans on Thursday prevented a vote on the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, putting the repeal of a ban on gays serving openly in the military in doubt. … Republicans have vowed to block any votes until after resolving the unrelated issue of expiring tax cuts.”
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)
****************************
Friday, December 10, 2010
Obamanomics Takes a Holiday
A two-year tax reprieve is better than current law but far from ideal
Does President Obama like or loathe the two-year tax deal he has struck with Republicans? It was hard to tell from his grudging, testy remarks Monday and yesterday, but perhaps that's because he realizes he is repudiating the heart and soul of Obamanomics as the price of giving himself a chance at a second term.
In accepting the deal to cut payroll and business taxes and extend all of the Bush-era tax rates through 2012, Mr. Obama has implicitly admitted that his economic strategy has flopped. He is acknowledging that tax rates matter to growth, that treating business like robber barons has hurt investment and hiring, and that tax cuts are superior to spending as stimulus. It took 9.8% unemployment and a loss of 63 House seats for this education to sink in, but the country will benefit.
In this sense, the political symbolism is as important as the policy. Mr. Obama is signaling that businesses must be encouraged to make profits again so they can hire more workers, that "the rich" he so maligns should be able to keep more of what they earn, and even that wealth built up over a lifetime shouldn't be confiscated wholesale at death. In policy if not in Presidential rhetoric, class war and income redistribution are taking a two-year holiday.
This is not to say the deal is optimal for economic growth, and Republicans should not pretend it is. A two-year reprieve is far better than an immediate tax increase amid a still fragile recovery, but it also means that the policy uncertainty is carried forward. In the Keynesian universe, "temporary" tax cuts are virtuous because they stimulate immediately while ostensibly allowing government to reclaim the revenue later when the economy is stronger.
In the real world, businesses make investments based on the estimated return on capital over time, including the expected tax rate. What matters is the overall cost of, and return on, capital. The temporary nature of the tax cuts will provide less incentive to invest than would permanent reductions in the cost of capital
The provision to allow business a 100% expensing deduction for 2011, and 50% in 2012, will help growth in those years. But it will do so in part by pulling investment forward from 2013. This is good for President Obama's re-election chances, but not so good for increasing the permanent level of business investment.
The same goes for the temporary cut in the payroll tax in the name of encouraging more hiring. The one-year cut to 4.2% from 6.2% in the employee portion of the Social Security tax increases the incentive to work. Because it doesn't favor some workers over others, it is also superior to the tax credits that Democrats wanted. But the proposal does nothing to reduce employer costs, even as ObamaCare is raising those costs as its mandates and regulations take effect.
This incentive to work also conflicts with the disincentive to work provided by another extension in jobless benefits. The deal's 13-month extension will cost taxpayers about $56 billion. As economist Larry Summers noted before he joined the White House, every jobless person has a "reservation wage," or the minimum wage he'll accept to take a job. The jobless rate will thus stay higher for longer as benefits induce some people to hold out for a better job than those that are available.
Another half-victory is the provision to set the estate tax at 35%, with an exclusion of $5 million. The rate was set to return to 55% with a $1 million exclusion on January 1, and Mr. Obama had wanted 45%. While the 35% rate also lasts only two years, the level of bipartisan support will make this rate politically difficult to increase even if Mr. Obama wins re-election...
As for Democrats, many and perhaps most in Congress will oppose this deal as an ideological betrayal by Mr. Obama, but it is really an admission of reality. Democrats lost the election because their economic policies failed. Their caterwauling now is mostly short-attention-span theater for the MSNBC crowd.
More HERE
***********************
Fascist Thinking at the FCC
A member of the Federal Communications Commission appears to want Washington in control of broadcast news. What a shame that people with such ideas are placed in positions of power.
The FCC's Michael Copps suggested last week that a "public value test" should determine who holds broadcast licenses for television and radio. Speaking at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, he said he was looking for "a renewed commitment to serious news and journalism."
So are we. We're weary of the hard-left bias ever so present in the media. We're fed up with celebrity treatment of all those on the left and contempt for all those on the right who aren't Republicans in name only. We've had enough of a press corps that makes no effort to understand economics and keeps promoting tired, freedom-choking, statist ideology.
We've been frustrated, as well, by networks that keep framing the issue — by 6-to-1, according to the Media Research Council — as a debate about "tax cuts for the rich" rather than a simple continuation of current rates.
And we're still dismayed by the media's refusal to look into Barack Obama's thin background during the 2008 presidential campaign, while digging up everything they could on Sarah Palin to portray her as an inexperienced ditz.
But there's another difference between us and Copps: We're not willing to use the police power of the state to force the outcome we prefer.
According to the Hill newspaper, Copps would issue licenses only when broadcasters: "Prove they have made a meaningful commitment to public affairs and news programming, prove they are committed to diversity programming, report more to the government about which shows they plan to air, require greater disclosure about who funds political ads and devote 25% of their prime-time coverage to local news."
Who is Copps to make such demands? And why does a man who thinks like a tyrant hold such a high-ranking position in the U.S. government?
His appetite for power isn't new. It's been simmering for some time. He has a history of campaigning against media ownership laws that advance freedom, preferring instead regulations that limit how many media outlets one owner can have in a market.
"Why does any corporate interest need to own three stations in any city, other than to enjoy the 40%-50% profit margins most consolidated stations are racking up?" he wrote in 2003 in response to a proposal to relax media ownership rules.
In a free society, it's not for Copps or anyone else to ask why any corporate interest needs to own three stations in one city. Liberty doesn't always produce the conditions we like. But it never produces results that are damaging.
If one company owned every news outlet in the country, we'd have reservations. But that situation, as uncomfortable as it might be, would not violate the life, liberty or property of a single person.
But Copps' ideas would. A company's freedom to operate without government interference is infringed upon if that company must meet any of his standards if it's to have its broadcast license renewed.
It's reasonable to ask, as Republican Rep. Joe Barton of Texas did in a letter to Copps this week, if the commissioner means to give the federal government the power to determine what content is available for Americans to consume. Frankly, it's hard to interpret his remarks any other way; they are so consistent with his history of wanting to impose his ideas on others.
Three years ago, the FCC voted to eliminate some of its statist ownership rules. Copps and another Democrat were against the change, but the proposal passed on the three GOP votes. This was not a radical change but a marginal deregulatory shift toward greater freedom in the market. And some rules remain.
They're not enough, though, for Copps and like-minded leftists. They continue to rail at large media companies and media consolidation as if they were hatched in Hades, and grumble about a lack of diversity among owners.
Absent in their rants is any concern about the dominance of left-leaning journalism that has corrupted American thinking for decades. But then, that's expected because this deeply biased state of affairs is what they're trying to protect.
More HERE
********************
Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Call Our Troops Homophobes
Ann Coulter
The Pentagon's poll on "don't ask, don't tell" is beyond idiotic. Instead of asking whether the troops support repeal of DADT, the Pentagon asked only if they can learn to play nice with the gays.
Even more absurdly, the Pentagon polled all military "personnel" -- and their spouses! Only a small portion of what is known as "the military" actually does the fighting. The rest is a vast bureaucracy along the lines of the DMV.
Today's military features "victim advocates" and sensitivity training facilitators, the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services personnel and a million other goo-goo positions. How did we ever take the shores of Normandy without a phalanx of "sensitivity training" counselors?
No one has any need to be reassured that the military's "social action" staff will enjoy working with gays. Whatever a career in "social action" entails, it better be gay-friendly. Frankly, it's appalling the Pentagon's poll of all military personnel and their families didn't produce better numbers for the gays.
We're interested in what the men who fight think. As the Pentagon study itself reports: "A higher percentage of service members in war-fighting units predicted negative effects." So gays openly serving in the military will harm the "war-fighting" part of the military, but the "social action" part will thrive!
Naturally, Marines are the most resistant to overturning "don't ask, don't tell," with 58 percent of those in combat opposed.
Who cares if the Pentagon's sexual harassment task force supports gays in the military? The combat units don't, and they're the ones who do the job. The rest of us shouldn't get to vote on gays in the military any more than we get to vote on the choreography of "Chicago."
Military combat is a very specialized field comparable to nothing in civilian life. There has to be a special bond among warriors -- and only one kind of bond. The soldierly bond gets confused if some guys think their comrades are hot or if they suspect their superior is having a relationship with a fellow soldier.
It's the same confusion that results from putting girls in the military. When an officer makes a decision, nothing should enter into it except his views on the best military strategy.
The military part of the military has valid reasons for wanting to separate the idea of martial ardor and sexual attraction. Combat units can't have anything that interferes with unit cohesion, such as, for example, platoon members who are dating one another. Racial prejudice is not the same thing as sexual attraction, so please stop telling us this is just like integrating blacks in the military.
A Military Times survey in 2005 found that nearly half of all women in the military claim to have been the victim of sexual harassment -- ludicrously more than women in civilian life. By contrast, two-thirds of minorities said they were treated better in the military than in society at large.
The Pentagon's report found that service members "repeatedly" said that allowing gays to serve openly would "lead to widespread and overt displays of effeminacy," as well as "harassment" and unwelcome advances. (To which I would add, "and the occasional leak of massive amounts of classified documents.")
Gays in the military understand this better than heterosexuals in civilian life. According to the Pentagon's survey, only 15 percent of gays currently serving said they would want their units to know they're gay. (Also, 2 percent of gays currently serving giggled when asked about their "unit," which is down from 5 percent from last year.)
There are far more discharges for pregnancy and "parenthood" than for homosexuality. In the past five years, less than 1 percent of all unplanned military discharges (i.e. not due to retirement or completion of service) were for homosexuality.
Here's a record of the discharges for 2008, according to the Defense Department:
-- Drugs: 5,627
-- Serious offenses: 3,817
-- Weight standards: 4,555
-- Pregnancy: 2,353
-- Parenthood: 2,574
-- Homosexuality: 634
The main lesson from these figures isn't that we should have gays openly serving in the military, but that we need to get girls out of the military, inasmuch as they are constantly being discharged for pregnancy, parenthood and weight issues.
According to a 1998 Department of Defense report, most discharges based on homosexuality involved "junior personnel with very little time in the military" and "the great majority of discharges for homosexual conduct are uncontested and processed administratively." More than 98 percent of discharges for homosexuality were honorable.
So gays and girls can join the military, get taxpayers to foot the bill for their education and then, when it comes time to serve, announce that they're gay or pregnant and receive an honorable discharge. Indeed, there's no proof that all the discharges for homosexuality involve actual homosexuals.
Why can't the Army and Marines have their own rules? Why does everything have to be the same? Whatever happened to "diversity"?
Most people have no clue what military life is like, least of all the opinion makers in New York, Los Angeles and the nation's capital. The military is not representative of the country at large. It is disproportionately rural, small-town, Southern and Hispanic.
We ask our troops to do a lot for very little money. Sometimes they die for us. The least Democrats could do is not pass grandstanding bills while self-righteously denouncing our servicemen as homophobes.
SOURCE
********************
ELSEWHERE
Report: 42.9 million in US receiving food stamps: "The number of Americans receiving food stamps rose to a record 42.9 million in September as the jobless rate stayed near a 27-year high, the government said. Recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program subsidies for food purchases jumped 16 percent from a year earlier and increased 1.2 percent from August, the US Department of Agriculture said yesterday in a statement on its website. Participation has set records for 22 straight months.”
Washington DC region's jobless rate falls to 5.8 percent: "The unemployment rate in the Washington region dropped to 5.8 percent in October from 6.3 percent a year ago, according to federal government data released Tuesday. Analysts credited the decrease to a rebound in the retail and restaurant segments sparked by a growing willingness among consumers to spend money. The region also led the nation in the number of jobs added in a 12-month period, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It was the second straight month in which the unemployment level dropped significantly in the Washington area. In September, the region's not seasonally adjusted jobless rate fell to 5.9 percent, from 6.2 percent the year before"
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)
****************************
A two-year tax reprieve is better than current law but far from ideal
Does President Obama like or loathe the two-year tax deal he has struck with Republicans? It was hard to tell from his grudging, testy remarks Monday and yesterday, but perhaps that's because he realizes he is repudiating the heart and soul of Obamanomics as the price of giving himself a chance at a second term.
In accepting the deal to cut payroll and business taxes and extend all of the Bush-era tax rates through 2012, Mr. Obama has implicitly admitted that his economic strategy has flopped. He is acknowledging that tax rates matter to growth, that treating business like robber barons has hurt investment and hiring, and that tax cuts are superior to spending as stimulus. It took 9.8% unemployment and a loss of 63 House seats for this education to sink in, but the country will benefit.
In this sense, the political symbolism is as important as the policy. Mr. Obama is signaling that businesses must be encouraged to make profits again so they can hire more workers, that "the rich" he so maligns should be able to keep more of what they earn, and even that wealth built up over a lifetime shouldn't be confiscated wholesale at death. In policy if not in Presidential rhetoric, class war and income redistribution are taking a two-year holiday.
This is not to say the deal is optimal for economic growth, and Republicans should not pretend it is. A two-year reprieve is far better than an immediate tax increase amid a still fragile recovery, but it also means that the policy uncertainty is carried forward. In the Keynesian universe, "temporary" tax cuts are virtuous because they stimulate immediately while ostensibly allowing government to reclaim the revenue later when the economy is stronger.
In the real world, businesses make investments based on the estimated return on capital over time, including the expected tax rate. What matters is the overall cost of, and return on, capital. The temporary nature of the tax cuts will provide less incentive to invest than would permanent reductions in the cost of capital
The provision to allow business a 100% expensing deduction for 2011, and 50% in 2012, will help growth in those years. But it will do so in part by pulling investment forward from 2013. This is good for President Obama's re-election chances, but not so good for increasing the permanent level of business investment.
The same goes for the temporary cut in the payroll tax in the name of encouraging more hiring. The one-year cut to 4.2% from 6.2% in the employee portion of the Social Security tax increases the incentive to work. Because it doesn't favor some workers over others, it is also superior to the tax credits that Democrats wanted. But the proposal does nothing to reduce employer costs, even as ObamaCare is raising those costs as its mandates and regulations take effect.
This incentive to work also conflicts with the disincentive to work provided by another extension in jobless benefits. The deal's 13-month extension will cost taxpayers about $56 billion. As economist Larry Summers noted before he joined the White House, every jobless person has a "reservation wage," or the minimum wage he'll accept to take a job. The jobless rate will thus stay higher for longer as benefits induce some people to hold out for a better job than those that are available.
Another half-victory is the provision to set the estate tax at 35%, with an exclusion of $5 million. The rate was set to return to 55% with a $1 million exclusion on January 1, and Mr. Obama had wanted 45%. While the 35% rate also lasts only two years, the level of bipartisan support will make this rate politically difficult to increase even if Mr. Obama wins re-election...
As for Democrats, many and perhaps most in Congress will oppose this deal as an ideological betrayal by Mr. Obama, but it is really an admission of reality. Democrats lost the election because their economic policies failed. Their caterwauling now is mostly short-attention-span theater for the MSNBC crowd.
More HERE
***********************
Fascist Thinking at the FCC
A member of the Federal Communications Commission appears to want Washington in control of broadcast news. What a shame that people with such ideas are placed in positions of power.
The FCC's Michael Copps suggested last week that a "public value test" should determine who holds broadcast licenses for television and radio. Speaking at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, he said he was looking for "a renewed commitment to serious news and journalism."
So are we. We're weary of the hard-left bias ever so present in the media. We're fed up with celebrity treatment of all those on the left and contempt for all those on the right who aren't Republicans in name only. We've had enough of a press corps that makes no effort to understand economics and keeps promoting tired, freedom-choking, statist ideology.
We've been frustrated, as well, by networks that keep framing the issue — by 6-to-1, according to the Media Research Council — as a debate about "tax cuts for the rich" rather than a simple continuation of current rates.
And we're still dismayed by the media's refusal to look into Barack Obama's thin background during the 2008 presidential campaign, while digging up everything they could on Sarah Palin to portray her as an inexperienced ditz.
But there's another difference between us and Copps: We're not willing to use the police power of the state to force the outcome we prefer.
According to the Hill newspaper, Copps would issue licenses only when broadcasters: "Prove they have made a meaningful commitment to public affairs and news programming, prove they are committed to diversity programming, report more to the government about which shows they plan to air, require greater disclosure about who funds political ads and devote 25% of their prime-time coverage to local news."
Who is Copps to make such demands? And why does a man who thinks like a tyrant hold such a high-ranking position in the U.S. government?
His appetite for power isn't new. It's been simmering for some time. He has a history of campaigning against media ownership laws that advance freedom, preferring instead regulations that limit how many media outlets one owner can have in a market.
"Why does any corporate interest need to own three stations in any city, other than to enjoy the 40%-50% profit margins most consolidated stations are racking up?" he wrote in 2003 in response to a proposal to relax media ownership rules.
In a free society, it's not for Copps or anyone else to ask why any corporate interest needs to own three stations in one city. Liberty doesn't always produce the conditions we like. But it never produces results that are damaging.
If one company owned every news outlet in the country, we'd have reservations. But that situation, as uncomfortable as it might be, would not violate the life, liberty or property of a single person.
But Copps' ideas would. A company's freedom to operate without government interference is infringed upon if that company must meet any of his standards if it's to have its broadcast license renewed.
It's reasonable to ask, as Republican Rep. Joe Barton of Texas did in a letter to Copps this week, if the commissioner means to give the federal government the power to determine what content is available for Americans to consume. Frankly, it's hard to interpret his remarks any other way; they are so consistent with his history of wanting to impose his ideas on others.
Three years ago, the FCC voted to eliminate some of its statist ownership rules. Copps and another Democrat were against the change, but the proposal passed on the three GOP votes. This was not a radical change but a marginal deregulatory shift toward greater freedom in the market. And some rules remain.
They're not enough, though, for Copps and like-minded leftists. They continue to rail at large media companies and media consolidation as if they were hatched in Hades, and grumble about a lack of diversity among owners.
Absent in their rants is any concern about the dominance of left-leaning journalism that has corrupted American thinking for decades. But then, that's expected because this deeply biased state of affairs is what they're trying to protect.
More HERE
********************
Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Call Our Troops Homophobes
Ann Coulter
The Pentagon's poll on "don't ask, don't tell" is beyond idiotic. Instead of asking whether the troops support repeal of DADT, the Pentagon asked only if they can learn to play nice with the gays.
Even more absurdly, the Pentagon polled all military "personnel" -- and their spouses! Only a small portion of what is known as "the military" actually does the fighting. The rest is a vast bureaucracy along the lines of the DMV.
Today's military features "victim advocates" and sensitivity training facilitators, the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services personnel and a million other goo-goo positions. How did we ever take the shores of Normandy without a phalanx of "sensitivity training" counselors?
No one has any need to be reassured that the military's "social action" staff will enjoy working with gays. Whatever a career in "social action" entails, it better be gay-friendly. Frankly, it's appalling the Pentagon's poll of all military personnel and their families didn't produce better numbers for the gays.
We're interested in what the men who fight think. As the Pentagon study itself reports: "A higher percentage of service members in war-fighting units predicted negative effects." So gays openly serving in the military will harm the "war-fighting" part of the military, but the "social action" part will thrive!
Naturally, Marines are the most resistant to overturning "don't ask, don't tell," with 58 percent of those in combat opposed.
Who cares if the Pentagon's sexual harassment task force supports gays in the military? The combat units don't, and they're the ones who do the job. The rest of us shouldn't get to vote on gays in the military any more than we get to vote on the choreography of "Chicago."
Military combat is a very specialized field comparable to nothing in civilian life. There has to be a special bond among warriors -- and only one kind of bond. The soldierly bond gets confused if some guys think their comrades are hot or if they suspect their superior is having a relationship with a fellow soldier.
It's the same confusion that results from putting girls in the military. When an officer makes a decision, nothing should enter into it except his views on the best military strategy.
The military part of the military has valid reasons for wanting to separate the idea of martial ardor and sexual attraction. Combat units can't have anything that interferes with unit cohesion, such as, for example, platoon members who are dating one another. Racial prejudice is not the same thing as sexual attraction, so please stop telling us this is just like integrating blacks in the military.
A Military Times survey in 2005 found that nearly half of all women in the military claim to have been the victim of sexual harassment -- ludicrously more than women in civilian life. By contrast, two-thirds of minorities said they were treated better in the military than in society at large.
The Pentagon's report found that service members "repeatedly" said that allowing gays to serve openly would "lead to widespread and overt displays of effeminacy," as well as "harassment" and unwelcome advances. (To which I would add, "and the occasional leak of massive amounts of classified documents.")
Gays in the military understand this better than heterosexuals in civilian life. According to the Pentagon's survey, only 15 percent of gays currently serving said they would want their units to know they're gay. (Also, 2 percent of gays currently serving giggled when asked about their "unit," which is down from 5 percent from last year.)
There are far more discharges for pregnancy and "parenthood" than for homosexuality. In the past five years, less than 1 percent of all unplanned military discharges (i.e. not due to retirement or completion of service) were for homosexuality.
Here's a record of the discharges for 2008, according to the Defense Department:
-- Drugs: 5,627
-- Serious offenses: 3,817
-- Weight standards: 4,555
-- Pregnancy: 2,353
-- Parenthood: 2,574
-- Homosexuality: 634
The main lesson from these figures isn't that we should have gays openly serving in the military, but that we need to get girls out of the military, inasmuch as they are constantly being discharged for pregnancy, parenthood and weight issues.
According to a 1998 Department of Defense report, most discharges based on homosexuality involved "junior personnel with very little time in the military" and "the great majority of discharges for homosexual conduct are uncontested and processed administratively." More than 98 percent of discharges for homosexuality were honorable.
So gays and girls can join the military, get taxpayers to foot the bill for their education and then, when it comes time to serve, announce that they're gay or pregnant and receive an honorable discharge. Indeed, there's no proof that all the discharges for homosexuality involve actual homosexuals.
Why can't the Army and Marines have their own rules? Why does everything have to be the same? Whatever happened to "diversity"?
Most people have no clue what military life is like, least of all the opinion makers in New York, Los Angeles and the nation's capital. The military is not representative of the country at large. It is disproportionately rural, small-town, Southern and Hispanic.
We ask our troops to do a lot for very little money. Sometimes they die for us. The least Democrats could do is not pass grandstanding bills while self-righteously denouncing our servicemen as homophobes.
SOURCE
********************
ELSEWHERE
Report: 42.9 million in US receiving food stamps: "The number of Americans receiving food stamps rose to a record 42.9 million in September as the jobless rate stayed near a 27-year high, the government said. Recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program subsidies for food purchases jumped 16 percent from a year earlier and increased 1.2 percent from August, the US Department of Agriculture said yesterday in a statement on its website. Participation has set records for 22 straight months.”
Washington DC region's jobless rate falls to 5.8 percent: "The unemployment rate in the Washington region dropped to 5.8 percent in October from 6.3 percent a year ago, according to federal government data released Tuesday. Analysts credited the decrease to a rebound in the retail and restaurant segments sparked by a growing willingness among consumers to spend money. The region also led the nation in the number of jobs added in a 12-month period, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It was the second straight month in which the unemployment level dropped significantly in the Washington area. In September, the region's not seasonally adjusted jobless rate fell to 5.9 percent, from 6.2 percent the year before"
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)
****************************
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
More dangerous stupidity from the military top brass
Why can't they talk to the troops before making their idiotic decisions?
By signing a memo Oct. 29, 2007, James R. Clapper Jr. exposed U.S. military personnel to greater-than-necessary danger as they served their country in Afghanistan, Iraq and other hot spots around the world.
Then an Under Secretary of Defense and now our nation's Director of National Intelligence, Clapper designated the polygraph and its hand-held cousin, the Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System, as the "only approved credibility assessment technologies" in DoD. At the same time, he sent a dangerous message to U.S. troops: "Stop using the Computer Voice Stress Analyzer."
Fortunately, some of our nation's bravest warriors sided with common sense and opted to ignore The Clapper Memo. One of those who did was, until recently, a member of the Army Special Forces whom I will call "Joe" (not his real name).
Trained in counterintelligence and as an interrogator, this former SF operator used CVSA to conduct nearly 500 interrogations of enemy combatants and third-country nationals - more than anyone in the U.S. military - while serving in Qatar, Kuwait and Iraq and regularly working 18-hour days from 2004 to 2009.
Joe agreed to speak with me on condition of anonymity about his firsthand experience with CVSA and why Department of Defense leaders are wrong to keep the technology now used by more than 1,800 U.S. law enforcement agencies out of the hands of people in uniform.
"I was still downrange when that memo came out," said Joe, who spoke with me on condition of anonymity. After learning of the memo, Joe said he went to his commander and asked one question: "You want me to stop?" His commander replied, "Hell no, don't stop! You're just not using it anymore, right?"
Despite Pentagon orders to the contrary, Joe's SF commanders wanted him to continue using CVSA for one primary reason: They knew it was far superior to PCASS when it came to dealing with various types of detainees, captured enemy combatants, third-country nationals and others who could pose threats to U.S. and allied troops in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait and Qatar.
"The craziest thing about this whole deal was that it became such a controversy that, for us to continue to go up there and continue to fight - to say, `Hey, we need to use this,'" - "we were ordered to stand down and not even mention the words anymore," Joe said.
Why the stand-down order? Because, according to Joe, someone in Army leadership was more willing to rely upon laboratory studies commissioned by officials and agencies with vested interests in the continued use of the polygraph instead of trusting operational research like that Joe conducted almost daily.
Much more HERE
**************************
The Perils Of Bailouts
The EU bailout of Ireland and its previous bailout for Greece, when examined closely, bore a distressing resemblance to the 2008 U.S. bailouts of Bear Stearns, AIG and Citigroup. The authorities poured more resources into assets that had been shown to be defective, without sufficiently enforcing the painful purging and liquidation that was necessary. By doing so, they reduced wealth, prolonged recession, and made the eventual collapse of the global financial system more likely.
The parallels between the EU financial crisis and the U.S. housing finance crisis are closer than they seem at first glance. In the Austrian economic terminology, both involved "mal-investment" –caused by excessively low interest rates or often artificial government subsidies–in assets and activities that later turned out to be worthless, or nearly so. Indeed, the parallel is increased by the prevalence of fraud and corruption in both cases. In the U.S. crisis, part of the mal-investment was in housing itself, through the encouragement of endless McMansion developments–houses that were not worth their cost the day they were built, and because of their poor construction quality will deteriorate exceptionally rapidly. The other part, in home mortgages, a substantial portion of which were obtained by fraud, has been extensively anatomized elsewhere, but it is by no means clear that the eventual losses on home mortgages will be any larger than those on the houses themselves.
In Europe, the areas of mal-investment varied from country to country. In Ireland, Spain and Britain, the problem was partly one of housing finance as in the United States. In Britain planning restrictions limited the creation of housing mal-investment directly, causing a housing price run-up even more extreme than in the U.S. In Ireland and Spain both housing and housing finance caused problems, with low interest rates on euro borrowing playing a similar role in those countries to the over-expansive monetary policies of Fed chairmen Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke. (The euro's critics here overstate their case in my view; while the euro was over-stimulative for much of the eurozone, foolish U.S. policy created interest rates that were too low for the entire United States, not just part of it.)
The Irish government, by taking the entire liabilities of the Irish banks on its books, created a funding problem for itself that it could have largely avoided. However in Spain and Greece the mal-investments were greater and more complex. In Spain the socialist Zapatero government subsidized "green" energy investments through energy tariffs to the point where the subsidies represented 24% of the nation's energy bills. Since the "green" energy production facilities now appear unlikely to be cost-competitive even by 2014-16, the investments brought to life by those subsidies represent mal-investment in its purest form.
In Greece, the gigantic subsidies poured into the place by its unfortunate EU partners since its accession to the community in 1981 have resulted in the grotesque overpricing of the undereducated, corrupt and idle Greek workforce. Essentially, pretty well all investment in Greece in the past decade or so has been mal-investment.
Much more HERE
************************
Iceland in better shape than Ireland
ICELAND has managed its economic crisis better than Ireland by not rescuing its bloated bank sector with ruinous loans, economists say. The economies of the two island nations were both booming up until the middle of the last decade but completely imploded two years apart.
Iceland was first, its economy dragged down by the collapse of its three major banks in October 2008. In a similar fall from grace, Ireland imploded a few weeks ago when its state guarantee for the banks scuttled the public finances and forced Dublin to ask for a bailout from the European Union and International Monetary Fund.
Because Icelandic banks were disproportionately large compared to the country's economy -- their assets were once worth 11 times Iceland's total gross domestic product (GDP)-- the tiny country did not have the option of bailing out the banks and had to let them fail. "That alone has made for a very different result within the two countries," said Tryggvi Herbertsson, an economics professor at the University of Reykjavik and an aide to former prime minister Geir Haarde.
"Ireland is now over-leveraged (with debt) and their banking system continually weak. The difference in Iceland is that our banking system is clean and once the debt has been written off, we have a healthy banking system but in Ireland the system is broken," he said.
Last night, Iceland -- a volcanic island of 320,000 inhabitants -- emerged from a deep and lengthy recession, with official statistics showing 1.2 per cent economic growth in the third quarter.
According to the latest European Commission estimates, Iceland's public deficit will be at 6.3 per cent of GDP this year. That compares to a whooping 32 per cent for Ireland, 20 per cent of which can be attributed to its support for the stricken banking sector. Irish national debt will in turn soar to 100 per cent of GDP, well above Iceland's.
More HERE.
Further on in the article, Krugman eats crow
*********************
Defying the will of the people, Obama governs by regulation
Sitting presidents whose agendas are soundly rejected by voters in midterm congressional elections have two options: They can either accommodate the new political reality, as President Clinton did after 1994; or they can use bureaucratic edicts to advance their unpopular programs, as President Obama is clearly doing now.
Given the historic drubbing his party just suffered at the polls, Obama's defiant strategy may prevent a second term for the man who began his first buoyed by an outpouring of good will.
Predictably, Obama's regulatory imperialism focuses on labor and environmental issues, as Big Green activists and labor unions, especially those representing government workers, are the core of support for the Democratic president and his congressional allies.
At the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example, Administrator Lisa Jackson is moving forward with a massive new program to subject the entire U.S. economy to an anti-global warming regulatory straitjacket aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Obama warned Congress last year that EPA would do this if the legislature failed to enact an Obama-supported version of cap and trade. Cap and trade passed the House in 2009 but never got out of the Senate because of intense public opposition, especially in energy-rich states like West Virginia. Now Jackson is following through on Obama's threat.
At the Department of Labor, Secretary Hilda Solis wasted no time after taking office last year in gutting long-standing rules requiring unions to disclose important details about how they spend members' dues. Now, Patricia Smith, Obama's Labor Department solicitor general, is working with Solis to implement an unprecedented new enforcement directive designed to put businesses at the mercy of union bosses. The directive provides, according to the Wall Street Journal's John Fund, for aggressive use of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to compel business cooperation through "shaming" and to "engage in enterprise-wide enforcement."
The rest of the bureaucratic blitzkrieg will be carried out by Smith's eager staff of 400 labor lawyers. Nathan Mehrens, Americans for Limited Government general counsel, says their agenda includes:
» A focus on "cases against employers in priority industries."
» Plans to "litigate cases that cut across regions."
» Working to "identify and pursue test cases" to "challenge legal principles that impede worker protections; successful challenges will advance workers' rights, as will successful enunciation of new interpretations."
» Engaging "in greater use of injunctive relief."
Meanwhile, as Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell wrote in last Friday's Examiner, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is pushing the lame-duck Congress to pass his Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act, a laughably misnamed measure that will force public employee unions on all local and state police, fire and emergency medical technicians. Obama supports Reid's bill, but its passage is far from assured. Nobody will be surprised if, shortly after the Reid proposal fails on Capitol Hill, Obama unveils a new regulatory gambit to achieve the same end.
SOURCE
**********************
Nearly half of Democrats support Fascist economics
Democratic politicians have repeatedly stressed to the public that they are not socialists and do not believe in socialism. They may want to have a few words with some of their voters, according to a poll released over the weekend by Rasmussen Reports.
In that survey of 1,000 adults, nearly half of all Democrats, 42 percent, indicated that they believe the government should "manage the economy completely."
That viewpoint is not exactly socialism—there's a different between managing and owning after all—but it's a far cry from the free market ideology that non-Democrats favored in the poll. Just under 25 percent of independents favored government completely managing the economy.
(The Rasmussen release about the poll does not mention Republican views about this but one has to assume they're very low considering that 38 of Republicans believe government should "stay out of economic decisions.")
In total, according to the poll, just 27 percent of Americans believe government should manage the conomy. Democrats would do well to note that this small number is not possible to spin into the kind of long-term majority liberal demographers insisted was coming with the election of President Obama.
That Obama's base has such extremely high (and unreal) confidence in the ability of government to command and control the economy may also explain why some Democrats are being to sour on him.
SOURCE
***********************
Obama's latest attack on jobs
Who Pays for Jobless Benefits?
There is no such thing as a "free" government benefit. Ask small-business owners who are footing skyrocketing bills for bottomless jobless benefits. While politicians in Washington negotiate a deal to provide welcome temporary payroll, income and estate tax relief to America's workers, struggling employers wonder how long they'll have to pay for the compassion of others -- and whether they can survive.
The Beltway deal hinges on extending federal unemployment insurance for another 13 months. This would mark the sixth time that the deadline has been extended since June 2008.
State unemployment benefits last up to 26 weeks. Bipartisan-supported Washington mandates have raised that to 99 weeks. The current proposal would raise the total to 155 weeks. The cost of the joint federal-state program is borne by employers who pay state and federal taxes on a portion of wages paid to each employee in a calendar year. (At the federal level, employers must pay 6.2 percent of the first $7,000 of income to keep the system afloat.)
The combined burden of these hidden state and federal payroll taxes has exploded during the recession as President Obama's economic recovery interventions backfire and the jobless rate remains stuck near double-digits. State unemployment insurance funds have gone broke in nearly half the states. As of April 2010, unemployment tax analyst Douglas Holmes testified before the Senate, 35 states and jurisdictions had unemployment fund-related debts worth $39.5 billion. Anti-fraud efforts to prevent scams and overpayments are woefully underfunded.
In an interminable money shuffle, these bankrupt state unemployment insurance funds are now borrowing money from the feds, whose own regular unemployment benefits account and extended benefits account are both in the red. Washington is relying on transfers from the federal general revenue fund to cover loan obligations related to all these hemorrhaging accounts.
Who pays? Dentists, tavern owners, maid services, mom-and-pop shops -- small businesses that are the backbone of the American economy. In my home state of Colorado, small and mid-size firms have been saddled with eye-popping unemployment insurance bills that have doubled, tripled and more in the past year. The businesses that have the lowest claims histories are getting punished the most to make up the jobless benefits fund deficit.
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)
****************************
Why can't they talk to the troops before making their idiotic decisions?
By signing a memo Oct. 29, 2007, James R. Clapper Jr. exposed U.S. military personnel to greater-than-necessary danger as they served their country in Afghanistan, Iraq and other hot spots around the world.
Then an Under Secretary of Defense and now our nation's Director of National Intelligence, Clapper designated the polygraph and its hand-held cousin, the Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System, as the "only approved credibility assessment technologies" in DoD. At the same time, he sent a dangerous message to U.S. troops: "Stop using the Computer Voice Stress Analyzer."
Fortunately, some of our nation's bravest warriors sided with common sense and opted to ignore The Clapper Memo. One of those who did was, until recently, a member of the Army Special Forces whom I will call "Joe" (not his real name).
Trained in counterintelligence and as an interrogator, this former SF operator used CVSA to conduct nearly 500 interrogations of enemy combatants and third-country nationals - more than anyone in the U.S. military - while serving in Qatar, Kuwait and Iraq and regularly working 18-hour days from 2004 to 2009.
Joe agreed to speak with me on condition of anonymity about his firsthand experience with CVSA and why Department of Defense leaders are wrong to keep the technology now used by more than 1,800 U.S. law enforcement agencies out of the hands of people in uniform.
"I was still downrange when that memo came out," said Joe, who spoke with me on condition of anonymity. After learning of the memo, Joe said he went to his commander and asked one question: "You want me to stop?" His commander replied, "Hell no, don't stop! You're just not using it anymore, right?"
Despite Pentagon orders to the contrary, Joe's SF commanders wanted him to continue using CVSA for one primary reason: They knew it was far superior to PCASS when it came to dealing with various types of detainees, captured enemy combatants, third-country nationals and others who could pose threats to U.S. and allied troops in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait and Qatar.
"The craziest thing about this whole deal was that it became such a controversy that, for us to continue to go up there and continue to fight - to say, `Hey, we need to use this,'" - "we were ordered to stand down and not even mention the words anymore," Joe said.
Why the stand-down order? Because, according to Joe, someone in Army leadership was more willing to rely upon laboratory studies commissioned by officials and agencies with vested interests in the continued use of the polygraph instead of trusting operational research like that Joe conducted almost daily.
Much more HERE
**************************
The Perils Of Bailouts
The EU bailout of Ireland and its previous bailout for Greece, when examined closely, bore a distressing resemblance to the 2008 U.S. bailouts of Bear Stearns, AIG and Citigroup. The authorities poured more resources into assets that had been shown to be defective, without sufficiently enforcing the painful purging and liquidation that was necessary. By doing so, they reduced wealth, prolonged recession, and made the eventual collapse of the global financial system more likely.
The parallels between the EU financial crisis and the U.S. housing finance crisis are closer than they seem at first glance. In the Austrian economic terminology, both involved "mal-investment" –caused by excessively low interest rates or often artificial government subsidies–in assets and activities that later turned out to be worthless, or nearly so. Indeed, the parallel is increased by the prevalence of fraud and corruption in both cases. In the U.S. crisis, part of the mal-investment was in housing itself, through the encouragement of endless McMansion developments–houses that were not worth their cost the day they were built, and because of their poor construction quality will deteriorate exceptionally rapidly. The other part, in home mortgages, a substantial portion of which were obtained by fraud, has been extensively anatomized elsewhere, but it is by no means clear that the eventual losses on home mortgages will be any larger than those on the houses themselves.
In Europe, the areas of mal-investment varied from country to country. In Ireland, Spain and Britain, the problem was partly one of housing finance as in the United States. In Britain planning restrictions limited the creation of housing mal-investment directly, causing a housing price run-up even more extreme than in the U.S. In Ireland and Spain both housing and housing finance caused problems, with low interest rates on euro borrowing playing a similar role in those countries to the over-expansive monetary policies of Fed chairmen Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke. (The euro's critics here overstate their case in my view; while the euro was over-stimulative for much of the eurozone, foolish U.S. policy created interest rates that were too low for the entire United States, not just part of it.)
The Irish government, by taking the entire liabilities of the Irish banks on its books, created a funding problem for itself that it could have largely avoided. However in Spain and Greece the mal-investments were greater and more complex. In Spain the socialist Zapatero government subsidized "green" energy investments through energy tariffs to the point where the subsidies represented 24% of the nation's energy bills. Since the "green" energy production facilities now appear unlikely to be cost-competitive even by 2014-16, the investments brought to life by those subsidies represent mal-investment in its purest form.
In Greece, the gigantic subsidies poured into the place by its unfortunate EU partners since its accession to the community in 1981 have resulted in the grotesque overpricing of the undereducated, corrupt and idle Greek workforce. Essentially, pretty well all investment in Greece in the past decade or so has been mal-investment.
Much more HERE
************************
Iceland in better shape than Ireland
ICELAND has managed its economic crisis better than Ireland by not rescuing its bloated bank sector with ruinous loans, economists say. The economies of the two island nations were both booming up until the middle of the last decade but completely imploded two years apart.
Iceland was first, its economy dragged down by the collapse of its three major banks in October 2008. In a similar fall from grace, Ireland imploded a few weeks ago when its state guarantee for the banks scuttled the public finances and forced Dublin to ask for a bailout from the European Union and International Monetary Fund.
Because Icelandic banks were disproportionately large compared to the country's economy -- their assets were once worth 11 times Iceland's total gross domestic product (GDP)-- the tiny country did not have the option of bailing out the banks and had to let them fail. "That alone has made for a very different result within the two countries," said Tryggvi Herbertsson, an economics professor at the University of Reykjavik and an aide to former prime minister Geir Haarde.
"Ireland is now over-leveraged (with debt) and their banking system continually weak. The difference in Iceland is that our banking system is clean and once the debt has been written off, we have a healthy banking system but in Ireland the system is broken," he said.
Last night, Iceland -- a volcanic island of 320,000 inhabitants -- emerged from a deep and lengthy recession, with official statistics showing 1.2 per cent economic growth in the third quarter.
According to the latest European Commission estimates, Iceland's public deficit will be at 6.3 per cent of GDP this year. That compares to a whooping 32 per cent for Ireland, 20 per cent of which can be attributed to its support for the stricken banking sector. Irish national debt will in turn soar to 100 per cent of GDP, well above Iceland's.
More HERE.
Further on in the article, Krugman eats crow
*********************
Defying the will of the people, Obama governs by regulation
Sitting presidents whose agendas are soundly rejected by voters in midterm congressional elections have two options: They can either accommodate the new political reality, as President Clinton did after 1994; or they can use bureaucratic edicts to advance their unpopular programs, as President Obama is clearly doing now.
Given the historic drubbing his party just suffered at the polls, Obama's defiant strategy may prevent a second term for the man who began his first buoyed by an outpouring of good will.
Predictably, Obama's regulatory imperialism focuses on labor and environmental issues, as Big Green activists and labor unions, especially those representing government workers, are the core of support for the Democratic president and his congressional allies.
At the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example, Administrator Lisa Jackson is moving forward with a massive new program to subject the entire U.S. economy to an anti-global warming regulatory straitjacket aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Obama warned Congress last year that EPA would do this if the legislature failed to enact an Obama-supported version of cap and trade. Cap and trade passed the House in 2009 but never got out of the Senate because of intense public opposition, especially in energy-rich states like West Virginia. Now Jackson is following through on Obama's threat.
At the Department of Labor, Secretary Hilda Solis wasted no time after taking office last year in gutting long-standing rules requiring unions to disclose important details about how they spend members' dues. Now, Patricia Smith, Obama's Labor Department solicitor general, is working with Solis to implement an unprecedented new enforcement directive designed to put businesses at the mercy of union bosses. The directive provides, according to the Wall Street Journal's John Fund, for aggressive use of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to compel business cooperation through "shaming" and to "engage in enterprise-wide enforcement."
The rest of the bureaucratic blitzkrieg will be carried out by Smith's eager staff of 400 labor lawyers. Nathan Mehrens, Americans for Limited Government general counsel, says their agenda includes:
» A focus on "cases against employers in priority industries."
» Plans to "litigate cases that cut across regions."
» Working to "identify and pursue test cases" to "challenge legal principles that impede worker protections; successful challenges will advance workers' rights, as will successful enunciation of new interpretations."
» Engaging "in greater use of injunctive relief."
Meanwhile, as Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell wrote in last Friday's Examiner, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is pushing the lame-duck Congress to pass his Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act, a laughably misnamed measure that will force public employee unions on all local and state police, fire and emergency medical technicians. Obama supports Reid's bill, but its passage is far from assured. Nobody will be surprised if, shortly after the Reid proposal fails on Capitol Hill, Obama unveils a new regulatory gambit to achieve the same end.
SOURCE
**********************
Nearly half of Democrats support Fascist economics
Democratic politicians have repeatedly stressed to the public that they are not socialists and do not believe in socialism. They may want to have a few words with some of their voters, according to a poll released over the weekend by Rasmussen Reports.
In that survey of 1,000 adults, nearly half of all Democrats, 42 percent, indicated that they believe the government should "manage the economy completely."
That viewpoint is not exactly socialism—there's a different between managing and owning after all—but it's a far cry from the free market ideology that non-Democrats favored in the poll. Just under 25 percent of independents favored government completely managing the economy.
(The Rasmussen release about the poll does not mention Republican views about this but one has to assume they're very low considering that 38 of Republicans believe government should "stay out of economic decisions.")
In total, according to the poll, just 27 percent of Americans believe government should manage the conomy. Democrats would do well to note that this small number is not possible to spin into the kind of long-term majority liberal demographers insisted was coming with the election of President Obama.
That Obama's base has such extremely high (and unreal) confidence in the ability of government to command and control the economy may also explain why some Democrats are being to sour on him.
SOURCE
***********************
Obama's latest attack on jobs
Who Pays for Jobless Benefits?
There is no such thing as a "free" government benefit. Ask small-business owners who are footing skyrocketing bills for bottomless jobless benefits. While politicians in Washington negotiate a deal to provide welcome temporary payroll, income and estate tax relief to America's workers, struggling employers wonder how long they'll have to pay for the compassion of others -- and whether they can survive.
The Beltway deal hinges on extending federal unemployment insurance for another 13 months. This would mark the sixth time that the deadline has been extended since June 2008.
State unemployment benefits last up to 26 weeks. Bipartisan-supported Washington mandates have raised that to 99 weeks. The current proposal would raise the total to 155 weeks. The cost of the joint federal-state program is borne by employers who pay state and federal taxes on a portion of wages paid to each employee in a calendar year. (At the federal level, employers must pay 6.2 percent of the first $7,000 of income to keep the system afloat.)
The combined burden of these hidden state and federal payroll taxes has exploded during the recession as President Obama's economic recovery interventions backfire and the jobless rate remains stuck near double-digits. State unemployment insurance funds have gone broke in nearly half the states. As of April 2010, unemployment tax analyst Douglas Holmes testified before the Senate, 35 states and jurisdictions had unemployment fund-related debts worth $39.5 billion. Anti-fraud efforts to prevent scams and overpayments are woefully underfunded.
In an interminable money shuffle, these bankrupt state unemployment insurance funds are now borrowing money from the feds, whose own regular unemployment benefits account and extended benefits account are both in the red. Washington is relying on transfers from the federal general revenue fund to cover loan obligations related to all these hemorrhaging accounts.
Who pays? Dentists, tavern owners, maid services, mom-and-pop shops -- small businesses that are the backbone of the American economy. In my home state of Colorado, small and mid-size firms have been saddled with eye-popping unemployment insurance bills that have doubled, tripled and more in the past year. The businesses that have the lowest claims histories are getting punished the most to make up the jobless benefits fund deficit.
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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