Confirmed: Australian leader invited to Royal wedding, but not the Obamas
This will burn Mrs. Obama up. Sarko and Carla won't be very happy either
Invites to April's royal wedding are in the mail - first-class of course - and while the gold-embossed, thick white cards have started to arrive in Europe, at least two Australians still eagerly await the postie's visit. Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her partner Tim Mathieson are on the official guest list of 1900 for the April 29 Westminster Abbey wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.
Although the list hasn't been released publicly by the palace, a spokesman for Ms Gillard on Sunday confirmed that Australia's prime minister and Mr Mathieson are awaiting their invitation. "The Prime Minister looks forward to receiving and responding to the formal invitation," he said. Governor-General Quentin Bryce will also receive an invitation, according to media reports, as one of several Commonwealth governors-general on the guest list.
Forty international crowned heads have been personally invited by the Queen to attend the wedding, including the Emperor of Japan, the King of Malaysia, the King of Thailand, the King of Jordan, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, and the Sultan of Brunei, London's The Mail newspaper reported yesterday. However, US President Barack Obama and French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy are understood not to have been invited, the paper added.
More than 1000 of the guests will be friends of the prince, 28, and his princess-to-be, 29, and will stretch to celebrities including David and Victoria Beckham. The prince has also invited around 80 guests linked to organisations for which he is either patron or president, including the UK Football Association, Centrepoint (the homelessness charity for which his mother was patron), and wildlife conservation group, the Tusk Trust.
The gilt-edged invitations, stamped with a gold "EIIR", which begin "The Lord Chamberlain is commanded by The Queen to invite ..." were sent out on last week.
Some guests will attend only the 11am ceremony, while 600 have been invited to a lunchtime reception at Buckingham Palace, before a more intimate family and friends affair - dinner for 300 - at the palace, for which a separate invitation will be issued.
The invitation asks that men wear "uniform, morning coat or lounge suit" to the ceremony.
More HERE
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March of the Medical Marxists
I'm just like everybody else. For months I listened to and watched "town meetings", originally cobbled together in the home districts of senators and representatives, simply and transparently for the purpose of rubberstamping Barack Obama's obsessive Marxist lust (an obsessive lust he shares with Hillary Clinton and many another tired, threadbare old collectivist) to nationalize an institution that they refer to as "healthcare".
Somehow, astonishingly, those town meetings didn't go quite the way our elected representatives (and I use both terms loosely) had expected they would. People showed up by the tens of thousands to deliver a message the politicians didn't want to hear, and it quickly became clear that a vast majority of individuals in this country don't want the government to have anything to do with where, how, or from whom they get medical attention or anything else, a message that the other side ignored, causing an historically unpreceented electoral upset.
It would seem even more astonishing if observers and commentators on both sides of the issue recalled that public speaking and personal confrontation invariably show up on surveys as items that the average individual fears more than death. The citizens who spoke out had to overcome both fears to face the politicians and tell them where to get off. Frankly, I didn't know we still had it in us, as a people.
And yet—because the politicians invariably pay less attention to historians than they do to politically trendy scientists, and even less attention to the voters who placed them in office and pay their salaries—despite widespread vocal opposition, despite a century of embarrassing miserable failure, despite immeasurable human suffering and conspicuously needless death everywhere else on this glorified mudball, like it or not, America is going to try medicine socialist style.
"But why would anybody want to do an idiotic thing like that?" I pretend to hear you asking. Well, partly because there's mountains of cash—uncountable trillions, potentially—and job security in it for properly-connected accomplices to this gangster government who can afford to fly themselves and their families somewhere else for medical treatment. Somewhere that doesn't have medicine socialist style.
Let's stop saying "socialized medicine". Let's be more specific. Let's be more accurate. Let's be more precise. Let's be more truthful. Let's call the thing exactly what it is.
What is it? Well, back when she was Queen, Hillary Clinton wanted to jail you for paying your doctor privately. That's right, part of her marvelously "humane" healthcare plan was to have you kidnapped by uniformed thugs if you made your own arrangements with a physician. If we'd made her Empress, she assured us, you wouldn't be allowed to work—when the flaming hell did we start needing goverment permission to work?—if you couldn't produce documents proving you were legally insured.
Obamacare, of course, will be completely different. It will be the warmly beloved IRS who leans on those miscreants who are willfully non-compliant.
So let's not call it socialized medicine. Instead, let's call it beat-you-up-and-kill-you-if-you-won't-go-along, coercive medicine. (Although how anybody can call it "medicine"—if they beat you up and kill you if you won't go along—I haven't quite figured out. And apparently neither have they.) Let's agree to call it medicalized Marxism.
For decades I had been saying that there's huge and terrible anger simmering just below the surface of American life. Year after year, decade after decade, century after century, the Productive Class have labored to supply everything necessary and good in our society—from diesel fuel to lemon meringue pie, from the wheels that take us from one place to another, to our homes where we find refuge and comfort—only to have the rewards of their labor snatched away by rapacious parasites intent on controlling every moment and aspect of their lives.
Yet it is the same Productive Class who are the first to be blamed—by elements of a Non-Productive Class that couldn't tell a cotter pin from cottage cheese—for everything, real and imagined, that is said to be wrong with that society, from bad taste in color, cars, and clothing, to acid rain, air pollution, depleted ozone, and global warming.
To the average politician, newspaper columnist, hairsprayed TV commentator, or Hollywood airhead, suburbia is a kind of despicable, disgusting, fetid swamp to be crawled out of, rather than as close to Utopia as humankind has ever come, the locus of all the wishes, hopes, and aspirations of a people whose only wish is to be left the hell alone.
And all these idiots—congressthings and others of the so-called "dominant culture" who believe they own us—can think of is how to suppress that anger for another year, another decade, another century. They desperately want to deny that their opposition is significant and serious. They want to dismiss it as stupidity, right-wing racism, and childish ingratitude. Or the result of having attended all the wrong schools. It never occurs to them to consider what that anger might really be about, or that it might be justified. They simply want it managed. It's probably too late for that, but they'll be the last to know.
As I've also been saying for more than 40 years, as frequently and loudly as I can, America's Productive Class has always been compelled to suffer for its excessive—and suicidally self-destructive—politeness. Perhaps that era is at long last ending.
I've listened to conservative talk radio every day since Barack Obama was elected, not just to Rush Limbaugh, but some of the others, as well. Along the way, I've noticed one element astonishingly absent from their arguments against Obama and his Marxist cohorts trying to regiment medical practice—and, through that, everything else—in America. That element is individualism.
The arguments I hear from them are utilitarian and collectivist in character: socialized medicine is bad for the economy; socialized medicine is bad for society; socialized medicine is bad for families; socialized medicine is bad for doctors and nurses; socialized medicine is bad for small business; socialized medicine is bad for hypothetical Grandma in her steam punk iron lung, and for poor old Cousin Wilbur, whose intellectual elevator never quite made it to the top of the building.
I guess it shouldn't surprise me. Thanks to Robert LeFevre, I've been calling conservatives by their proper name—right-wing socialists—for decades. But it does surprise me, and makes me a bit sad.
The first mistake that they make (and they always make it) is that they accept the enemy's premises and vocabulary, giving up half the battle before it's even fought. It is not "socialized medicine" that we're up against here—to many a misguided individual, ignorant of history, that makes it sound kind of warm and fuzzy—but government control, through brute force and the threat of brute force, of those ultimately personal, private acts of seeking and delivering medical attention.
Your doctor often knows things about you that you wouldn't want anybody else—possibly including your own family—to know. But for nasty, perverted reasons all their own, having mostly to do with their psychopathological desire to control every aspect of everybody's life, the Obamas, Reids, and Pelosis of this world are eager to stick their noses in your intimate orifices and learn everything your doctor knows about you. As a human being, you are entitled to more privacy than that.
But mostly, as many pundits have been saying, it's about power at the lowest, minutest zit-squeezing level conceivable. It might be difficult for a normal individual to understand why somebody would yearn for complete control over every aspect of another human being's life, but there you are: sooner or later, a lens behind every bathroom mirror.
Make no mistake about it, this heartfelt yearning for absolute control is psychosexual in character, and about as sick and perverted as it can be. Every stuttering, broken-voiced pencil-neck who ever got turned down by a cute cheerleader, every pimply-faced fat girl who ever imagined she was being laughed at by the captain and his whole football team, these are the mental midgets and moral cripples who are looking forward, from under the rocks they currently inhabit, to ruling us tomorrow. You've seen plenty of their species already, down at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Get ready to see a lot more of them.
All political jargon to one side, however, medicalized Marxism is unsatisfactory if for no other reason than this: I don't want it. It violates my unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human rights.
Medicalized Marxism is wrong because it forces me to do what I don't want to do. It keeps me from doing what I do want to do. It imposes duties on me that I don't want imposed. It denies me (and you, and everybody else, too) the uncountable advantages of acts of capitalism between consenting adults.
There's nothing wrong with medicine that can be fixed by "single payer" healthcare and I don't know anyone I respect who wants it. Let's make a better start, calling it by its right name: compulsory, collectivist, going-through-the-motions medicine. I've seen how it "works" in other countries, and in the US military. It is an evil and deceptive program the real objective of which is to give very bad people complete, minute control over every moment and detail of our lives.
They want to live their lives through ours, beginning with the splendid and absolutely limitless excuses that medical Marxism provides.
Believe me, I grew up with it in the American military, and I've seen it in full flower in England, as well. It isn't about providing you with services, it's about denying you services, since that's the cheesy little thrill that is all many bureaucrats ever get out of life. People want power over the lives of others not because they believe themselves uniquely capable of directing those lives, but because they know they're incapable of directing their own lives and find it easier in this culture to try directing the lives of others, instead.
More HERE
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ELSEWHERE
Are the Wisconsin protests backfiring?: "Protests in Wisconsin over public sector compensation cuts have been the big story this week. Over at The Daily Caller, I explain why some of the tactics that union members and supporters are using are actually backfiring. The teacher sickout is classic bad PR. The parents who have to find and pay for last-minute daycare are now less likely to side with teachers’ unions, not more"
Excuse notes from docs at protests draw scrutiny: "Doctors who wrote medical notes over the weekend excusing protesters at the Wisconsin Capitol from work are getting slammed with angry phone calls and profane e-mails from people telling them they deserve to be thrown in jail, one doctor said Sunday. The physicians wore lab coats Saturday as they stood on a street corner and offered medical notes to the tens of thousands of protesters who paraded past them."
Business bans TSA agents — will more follow?: "KC McLawson works for a cafe near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and since the body-scan and patdown controversy last November, her boss has taken extraordinary measures to ensure the TSA knows of his displeasure. 'We have posted signs on our doors basically saying that they aren’t allowed to come into our business,' she says. 'We have the right to refuse service to anyone.'”
Denmark: Court rules against hippie enclave: "The Danish government yesterday won a legal battle against a freewheeling neighborhood that has remained largely self-governing since its creation by hippie squatters four decades ago. ... The decision ends a six-year legal standoff and means the government can go ahead with plans to 'normalize' the neighborhood and tear down scores of ramshackle homes built at the site without permits."
The truth about housing prices: "The idea that economic recovery can’t happen unless our housing prices return to pre-recession levels makes no sense. First, as the chart below shows, for most of American history housing prices grew at a relatively slow rate. It was only in the last 15 years that prices exploded. The factors behind this sudden change are a mixed bag of government policies that encouraged homeownership and cheap interest rates and a willingness by banks to lend to people who could only realistically afford to pay if housing prices doubled every two years."
A “right” to healthcare requires force: "The notion of a 'right to healthcare' is the boldest and most fundamental claim offered in defense of the new federal healthcare law. Indeed, Obamacare should be judged by whether it is consistent with the protection of rights. If the law cannot pass that test, the debate should end –- and it must be repealed as an unjust means of striving to satisfy other social, economic or political agendas."
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, February 21, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Unions' Fight in Madison Is a Disgrace
The Democratic/government-union days of rage in Madison, Wis., are a disgrace. Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan calls it Cairo coming to Madison. But the protesters in Egypt were pro-democracy. The government-union protesters in Madison are anti-democracy; they are trying to prevent a vote in the legislature. In fact, Democratic legislators themselves are fleeing the state so as not to vote on Gov. Scott Walker's budget cuts. That's not democracy.
The teachers' union is going on strike in Milwaukee and elsewhere. They ought to be fired. Think Ronald Reagan PATCO in 1981. Think Calvin Coolidge police strike in 1919.
The teachers' union on strike? Wisconsin parents should go on strike against the teachers' union. A friend e-mailed me to say that the graduation rate in Milwaukee public schools is 46 percent. The graduation rate for African-Americans in Milwaukee public schools is 34 percent. Shouldn't somebody be protesting that?
Governor Walker is facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit, and he wants state workers to pay one-half of their pension costs and 12.6 percent of their health benefits. Currently, most state employees pay nothing for their pensions and virtually nothing for their health insurance. That's an outrage.
Nationwide, state and local government unions have a 45 percent total-compensation advantage over their private-sector counterpart. With high-pay compensation and virtually no benefits co-pay, the politically arrogant unions are bankrupting America -- which by some estimates is suffering from $3 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
Exempting police, fire, and state troopers, Governor Walker would end collective bargaining over pensions and benefits for the rest. Collective bargaining for wages would still be permitted, but there would be no wage hikes above the CPI. Unions could still represent workers, but they could not force employees to pay dues. In exchange for this, Walker promises no furloughs for layoffs.
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is also pushing a bill to limit the collective-bargaining rights of teachers for wages and wage-related benefits. Similar proposals are being discussed in Idaho and Tennessee. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich wants to restrict union rights across-the-board for all state and local government workers. More generally, both Democratic and Republican governors across the country are taking on the extravagant pay of government unions. Why? Because taxpayers won't stand for it anymore.
In an interesting twist on this story, even private unions are revolting against government unions. Private unions pay taxes, too. And they don't have near the total compensation of the public unions. It's no wonder they're fed up.
So, having lost badly in the last election, the government-union Democrats in Wisconsin have taken to the streets. This is a European-style revolt, like those seen in Greece, France, and elsewhere. So it becomes greater than just a fiscal issue. It is becoming a law-and-order issue.
President Obama, who keeps telling us he's a budget cutter, has taken the side of the public unions. John Boehner correctly rapped Obama's knuckles for this. If the state of Wisconsin voters elected a Chris Christie-type governor with a Republican legislature, then it is a local states' rights issue.
But does President Obama even know that the scope of collective bargaining for federal employees is sharply limited? According to the Manhattan Institute, federal workers are forbidden to collectively bargain for wages or benefits. Instead, pay increases are determined annually through legislation.
Meanwhile, Gov. Scott Walker said it would be "wise" for President Obama to keep his attentions on Washington, not Wisconsin. "We're focused on balancing our budget," he said in a television interview. "It would be wise for the president and others in Washington to be focused on balancing their budget, which they're a long ways from doing."
Amen.
Obama should stay out. And Governor Walker should stand tall and stick to his principles. A nationwide taxpayer revolt against public unions can save the country. Otherwise, the spiraling out-of-control costs of state public-union entitlements will destroy the local fisc, just as surely as the unreformed federal entitlements of Social Security and health care are wrecking our national finances.
SOURCE
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An Assault on Taxpayers by fat-cat unionists
Where can one find a safe environment for children? As political props for union activists, of course, holding prefabricated signs demanding the state go broke funding increasingly inferior yet increasingly costly education. OK, by education I mean pensions. But isn't it nice to see kids thinking for themselves?
Now, as easy as it is to blame unions, it's not enough. We have a bigger problem, and that's monopoly. Every year government grows, each time a state assigns itself new duties, the monopoly expands. Education is just the worst example.
Whatever you may think of the politics of private-sector unions -- now less than 7 percent of the work force -- they function in a competitive environment. Public sectors, on the other hand, have artificial leverage that no other workers in the nation enjoy.
In Wisconsin -- where union sign wavers have yet to get the memo that Nazi imagery is no way to embrace the new era of civility -- lawmakers are attempting to reform bargaining rights of about 170,000 public-sector workers in unions. More precisely, they want to restrict union members to bargaining for wages rather than take taxpayers hostage with unsustainable pensions and benefit demands every few years.
Wisconsin's fight is just a harbinger, of course. A recent Pew poll on states found that state pension systems have a combined $1 trillion in unfunded liability. In other words, every U.S. household may have the honor of subsidizing someone else's public service an extra $8,800.
The counterargument is familiar. These folks are sacrificing healthy salaries by choosing to teach your children rather than greedily chasing riches that they would almost certainly realize if they took their talents to the private sector. (Funny, isn't it then, that when we try to inject competition into education, it's met with anger and scorn by the people who sacrifice without it.)
But according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report -- a new one is due next month -- state and local government employees, all told, are already making approximately $12 more per hour than private workers. Last year, a USA Today analysis found that federal employees' average compensation had grown to be more than double what their private-sector counterparts were making. Public service, indeed.
Immunity from economic downturns and market fluctuations is a rarity in America -- though we've been doing our best via bailouts. The problem isn't that government workers are trying to get theirs; it's that the arbitrary reward is often tied to the vociferousness of the worker's demand rather than reality.
Certainly, how Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker fares in this battle will be an important signal to the rest of the nation. Some places, such as Colorado, only recently have allowed state workers to organize. Other states are facing pension nightmares. Who knows? States may begin privatizing and allowing competitive outsourcing of jobs. States must, because nationally we're headed in the other direction.
"Some of what I've heard coming out of Wisconsin, where they're just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain generally, seems like more of an assault on unions," explained President Barack Obama, who, unlike governors, can (and does) borrow trillions. The numbers, though, tell us that public-sector unions are the ones assaulting taxpayers and brittle state economies. And the more we grow the state monopoly the worse it will get.
SOURCE
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How ObamaCare Kills Medical Innovation
Now we know what rationing will look like under Obama Care, with the FDA's decision to ban doctors from prescribing the drug Avastin to patients with breast cancer. And it's only the beginning.
This first step, impeding the use and development of life-saving medicines will lead to even more dramatic decisions to delay, prevent or withdraw care from those in real need of health care.
But, there had to be a legitimate reason for the Obama Administration's Food and Drug Administration's decision to prevent the use of Avastin, right? If rationing is a legitimate reason to you, then the answer is yes.
Ponder the FDA's justification -- there wasn't "sufficient" benefit in relation to Avastin's risks. Sufficient according to whom? For your wife, mother or daughter with terminal breast cancer, how much is an additional month of good-quality life worth? Why shouldn't she be able to spend her own money on her health care to try to go forward another day, month or year?
All new medicines are expensive. In fact, the first edition of practically every innovation is the most expensive version of whatever it is. But as long as there are risk takers and people willing to pay higher prices, why shouldn't we let these forces try to advance progress in drugs and medicine? Should we care that new drugs are so expensive? The story of the discovery of penicillin is instructive. Let's examine this FDA justification by posing the question, should we have stopped the advance of health care in 1945 when penicillin was discovered?
Talk about a decline in unit costs! Production of penicillin dramatically increased from 2 doses in 1942 to over 646 billion doses in 1945 -- just three short years. This is a declining unit cost curve in the extreme. The discovery of Penicillin is a perfect example of how future beneficiaries benefit forever thereafter from the initial high cost and complications of perfecting drugs and medicines.
Unequal outcomes are what propel economic progress in every way. The steam engine for ships and trains produced huge reductions in the cost of moving people and goods around the world or across the territory -- and unit costs are still dropping.
Unequal outcomes always result from huge increases in productivity. And, productivity always results in lower long-term costs of the produced items. Market economies create this rise in productivity and lower unit costs whereas Socialistic economies always "tax success" and destroy this process.
More HERE
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ELSEWHERE
Freshmen spur GOP-run House to big spending cuts: "The GOP-run House, jolted by freshmen determined to drive down the deficit, snatched $61 billion from hundreds of federal programs while shielding coal companies, oil refiners and farms from new federal regulations. Passage early Saturday of the $1.2 trillion bill, covering every Cabinet agency through Sept. 30, when the current budget year ends, sent the measure to the Senate, where it faces longer odds, and defied a White House veto threat. The largely party-line vote of 235-189 was the most striking victory to date for the 87 freshman Republicans elected last fall on a promise to attack the deficit and reduce the reach of government."
House votes to overthrow 'czars': "The House voted Thursday to dethrone nine White House "czars." Republicans successfully added an amendment to the continuing resolution that would leave President Barack Obama's senior advisers on policy issues including health care, energy and others out of a job. The vote was 249-179. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) offered the amendment that blocks funding for various policy advisers to combat what he called "a very disturbing proliferation of czars" under Obama.
Laws also deserve to be scrutinized: "I believe that when you are serving on a jury, it is your duty to not only judge the facts of the case (in other words, to decide if the accused person actually did what they are accused of), but also whether the law the person is accused of violating is a good law or not. This has been the cornerstone at the foundation of the legal system America inherited, whether judges like it or not."
Where's the stimulus?: "A bill to jump start the economy. That was the main idea behind the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the "stimulus bill," which became law two years ago today. However, the nation is still waiting for the bill's promised jolt. "Over the next two years, this plan will save or create 3.5 million jobs," President Obama told a joint session of Congress, a week after signing the bill in 2009. Economists have debated whether the plan actually accounted for that many jobs, but there's little doubt the economy did not get a "jump start." A stutter start would be more like it."
Congressional testimony on the stimulus: "Over the last two years, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has injected over half a trillion dollars into the US economy in hopes of spurring recovery and creating jobs. The results have been deeply disappointing."
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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The Democratic/government-union days of rage in Madison, Wis., are a disgrace. Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan calls it Cairo coming to Madison. But the protesters in Egypt were pro-democracy. The government-union protesters in Madison are anti-democracy; they are trying to prevent a vote in the legislature. In fact, Democratic legislators themselves are fleeing the state so as not to vote on Gov. Scott Walker's budget cuts. That's not democracy.
The teachers' union is going on strike in Milwaukee and elsewhere. They ought to be fired. Think Ronald Reagan PATCO in 1981. Think Calvin Coolidge police strike in 1919.
The teachers' union on strike? Wisconsin parents should go on strike against the teachers' union. A friend e-mailed me to say that the graduation rate in Milwaukee public schools is 46 percent. The graduation rate for African-Americans in Milwaukee public schools is 34 percent. Shouldn't somebody be protesting that?
Governor Walker is facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit, and he wants state workers to pay one-half of their pension costs and 12.6 percent of their health benefits. Currently, most state employees pay nothing for their pensions and virtually nothing for their health insurance. That's an outrage.
Nationwide, state and local government unions have a 45 percent total-compensation advantage over their private-sector counterpart. With high-pay compensation and virtually no benefits co-pay, the politically arrogant unions are bankrupting America -- which by some estimates is suffering from $3 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
Exempting police, fire, and state troopers, Governor Walker would end collective bargaining over pensions and benefits for the rest. Collective bargaining for wages would still be permitted, but there would be no wage hikes above the CPI. Unions could still represent workers, but they could not force employees to pay dues. In exchange for this, Walker promises no furloughs for layoffs.
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is also pushing a bill to limit the collective-bargaining rights of teachers for wages and wage-related benefits. Similar proposals are being discussed in Idaho and Tennessee. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich wants to restrict union rights across-the-board for all state and local government workers. More generally, both Democratic and Republican governors across the country are taking on the extravagant pay of government unions. Why? Because taxpayers won't stand for it anymore.
In an interesting twist on this story, even private unions are revolting against government unions. Private unions pay taxes, too. And they don't have near the total compensation of the public unions. It's no wonder they're fed up.
So, having lost badly in the last election, the government-union Democrats in Wisconsin have taken to the streets. This is a European-style revolt, like those seen in Greece, France, and elsewhere. So it becomes greater than just a fiscal issue. It is becoming a law-and-order issue.
President Obama, who keeps telling us he's a budget cutter, has taken the side of the public unions. John Boehner correctly rapped Obama's knuckles for this. If the state of Wisconsin voters elected a Chris Christie-type governor with a Republican legislature, then it is a local states' rights issue.
But does President Obama even know that the scope of collective bargaining for federal employees is sharply limited? According to the Manhattan Institute, federal workers are forbidden to collectively bargain for wages or benefits. Instead, pay increases are determined annually through legislation.
Meanwhile, Gov. Scott Walker said it would be "wise" for President Obama to keep his attentions on Washington, not Wisconsin. "We're focused on balancing our budget," he said in a television interview. "It would be wise for the president and others in Washington to be focused on balancing their budget, which they're a long ways from doing."
Amen.
Obama should stay out. And Governor Walker should stand tall and stick to his principles. A nationwide taxpayer revolt against public unions can save the country. Otherwise, the spiraling out-of-control costs of state public-union entitlements will destroy the local fisc, just as surely as the unreformed federal entitlements of Social Security and health care are wrecking our national finances.
SOURCE
*************************
An Assault on Taxpayers by fat-cat unionists
Where can one find a safe environment for children? As political props for union activists, of course, holding prefabricated signs demanding the state go broke funding increasingly inferior yet increasingly costly education. OK, by education I mean pensions. But isn't it nice to see kids thinking for themselves?
Now, as easy as it is to blame unions, it's not enough. We have a bigger problem, and that's monopoly. Every year government grows, each time a state assigns itself new duties, the monopoly expands. Education is just the worst example.
Whatever you may think of the politics of private-sector unions -- now less than 7 percent of the work force -- they function in a competitive environment. Public sectors, on the other hand, have artificial leverage that no other workers in the nation enjoy.
In Wisconsin -- where union sign wavers have yet to get the memo that Nazi imagery is no way to embrace the new era of civility -- lawmakers are attempting to reform bargaining rights of about 170,000 public-sector workers in unions. More precisely, they want to restrict union members to bargaining for wages rather than take taxpayers hostage with unsustainable pensions and benefit demands every few years.
Wisconsin's fight is just a harbinger, of course. A recent Pew poll on states found that state pension systems have a combined $1 trillion in unfunded liability. In other words, every U.S. household may have the honor of subsidizing someone else's public service an extra $8,800.
The counterargument is familiar. These folks are sacrificing healthy salaries by choosing to teach your children rather than greedily chasing riches that they would almost certainly realize if they took their talents to the private sector. (Funny, isn't it then, that when we try to inject competition into education, it's met with anger and scorn by the people who sacrifice without it.)
But according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report -- a new one is due next month -- state and local government employees, all told, are already making approximately $12 more per hour than private workers. Last year, a USA Today analysis found that federal employees' average compensation had grown to be more than double what their private-sector counterparts were making. Public service, indeed.
Immunity from economic downturns and market fluctuations is a rarity in America -- though we've been doing our best via bailouts. The problem isn't that government workers are trying to get theirs; it's that the arbitrary reward is often tied to the vociferousness of the worker's demand rather than reality.
Certainly, how Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker fares in this battle will be an important signal to the rest of the nation. Some places, such as Colorado, only recently have allowed state workers to organize. Other states are facing pension nightmares. Who knows? States may begin privatizing and allowing competitive outsourcing of jobs. States must, because nationally we're headed in the other direction.
"Some of what I've heard coming out of Wisconsin, where they're just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain generally, seems like more of an assault on unions," explained President Barack Obama, who, unlike governors, can (and does) borrow trillions. The numbers, though, tell us that public-sector unions are the ones assaulting taxpayers and brittle state economies. And the more we grow the state monopoly the worse it will get.
SOURCE
**********************
How ObamaCare Kills Medical Innovation
Now we know what rationing will look like under Obama Care, with the FDA's decision to ban doctors from prescribing the drug Avastin to patients with breast cancer. And it's only the beginning.
This first step, impeding the use and development of life-saving medicines will lead to even more dramatic decisions to delay, prevent or withdraw care from those in real need of health care.
But, there had to be a legitimate reason for the Obama Administration's Food and Drug Administration's decision to prevent the use of Avastin, right? If rationing is a legitimate reason to you, then the answer is yes.
Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration banned doctors from prescribing Avastin, a potent but costly drug, to patients with advanced-stage breast cancer. According to the FDA, the drug doesn't offer 'a sufficient benefit in slowing disease progression to outweigh the significant risk to patients . . . .'
Ponder the FDA's justification -- there wasn't "sufficient" benefit in relation to Avastin's risks. Sufficient according to whom? For your wife, mother or daughter with terminal breast cancer, how much is an additional month of good-quality life worth? Why shouldn't she be able to spend her own money on her health care to try to go forward another day, month or year?
All new medicines are expensive. In fact, the first edition of practically every innovation is the most expensive version of whatever it is. But as long as there are risk takers and people willing to pay higher prices, why shouldn't we let these forces try to advance progress in drugs and medicine? Should we care that new drugs are so expensive? The story of the discovery of penicillin is instructive. Let's examine this FDA justification by posing the question, should we have stopped the advance of health care in 1945 when penicillin was discovered?
The discovery of penicillin is attributed to Scottish scientist and Nobel laureate Alexander Fleming in 1928. He showed that, if Penicillium notatum were grown in the appropriate substrate, it would exude a substance with antibiotic properties, which he dubbed penicillin. This serendipitous observation began the modern era of antibiotic discovery . . . .
The challenge of mass-producing this drug was daunting. On March 14, 1942, the first patient was treated for streptococcal septicemia with U.S.-made penicillin produced by Merck & Co. Half of the total supply produced at the time was used on that one patient. By June 1942, there was just enough U.S. penicillin available to treat ten patients.
A moldy cantaloupe in a Peoria, Illinois, market in 1943 was found to contain the best and highest-quality penicillin after a worldwide search. The discovery of the cantaloupe, and the results of fermentation research on corn steep liquor at the Northern Regional Research Laboratory at Peoria, Illinois, allowed the United States to produce 2.3 million doses in time for the invasion of Normandy in the spring of 1944. Large-scale production resulted from the development of deep-tank fermentation by chemical engineer Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau . . . .
Penicillin production emerged as an industry as a direct result of World War II. During the war, there was an abundance of jobs available in the U.S. on the home front. The War Production Board was founded to monitor job distribution and production. Penicillin was produced in huge quantities during the war and the industry prospered.
In July 1943, the War Production Board drew up a plan for the mass distribution of penicillin stocks to Allied troops fighting in Europe. At the time of this plan, 425 million units per year were being produced. As a direct result of the war and the War Production Board, by June 1945 over 646 billion units per year were being produced....
Talk about a decline in unit costs! Production of penicillin dramatically increased from 2 doses in 1942 to over 646 billion doses in 1945 -- just three short years. This is a declining unit cost curve in the extreme. The discovery of Penicillin is a perfect example of how future beneficiaries benefit forever thereafter from the initial high cost and complications of perfecting drugs and medicines.
Unequal outcomes are what propel economic progress in every way. The steam engine for ships and trains produced huge reductions in the cost of moving people and goods around the world or across the territory -- and unit costs are still dropping.
Unequal outcomes always result from huge increases in productivity. And, productivity always results in lower long-term costs of the produced items. Market economies create this rise in productivity and lower unit costs whereas Socialistic economies always "tax success" and destroy this process.
More HERE
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ELSEWHERE
Freshmen spur GOP-run House to big spending cuts: "The GOP-run House, jolted by freshmen determined to drive down the deficit, snatched $61 billion from hundreds of federal programs while shielding coal companies, oil refiners and farms from new federal regulations. Passage early Saturday of the $1.2 trillion bill, covering every Cabinet agency through Sept. 30, when the current budget year ends, sent the measure to the Senate, where it faces longer odds, and defied a White House veto threat. The largely party-line vote of 235-189 was the most striking victory to date for the 87 freshman Republicans elected last fall on a promise to attack the deficit and reduce the reach of government."
House votes to overthrow 'czars': "The House voted Thursday to dethrone nine White House "czars." Republicans successfully added an amendment to the continuing resolution that would leave President Barack Obama's senior advisers on policy issues including health care, energy and others out of a job. The vote was 249-179. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) offered the amendment that blocks funding for various policy advisers to combat what he called "a very disturbing proliferation of czars" under Obama.
Laws also deserve to be scrutinized: "I believe that when you are serving on a jury, it is your duty to not only judge the facts of the case (in other words, to decide if the accused person actually did what they are accused of), but also whether the law the person is accused of violating is a good law or not. This has been the cornerstone at the foundation of the legal system America inherited, whether judges like it or not."
Where's the stimulus?: "A bill to jump start the economy. That was the main idea behind the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the "stimulus bill," which became law two years ago today. However, the nation is still waiting for the bill's promised jolt. "Over the next two years, this plan will save or create 3.5 million jobs," President Obama told a joint session of Congress, a week after signing the bill in 2009. Economists have debated whether the plan actually accounted for that many jobs, but there's little doubt the economy did not get a "jump start." A stutter start would be more like it."
Congressional testimony on the stimulus: "Over the last two years, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has injected over half a trillion dollars into the US economy in hopes of spurring recovery and creating jobs. The results have been deeply disappointing."
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)
****************************
Hatred: The Hallmark of the Progressive-Left
Frank Salvato
Just over a month ago, President Obama took to a stage in Arizona to decry what he perceived as the caustic nature of political discourse in our country. On this issue, and very few others, we agree. But Mr. Obama was delinquent in pointing out the individuals and organizations – the factions – responsible for stoking the fires of discontent and, dare I say, hatred. The unspoken reason for this omission is because most – if not all – of the caustic rhetoric – the unbridled hatred – comes from the Progressive Left and there are myriad examples to prove the point beyond argument.
Hate of the Person
Recently, amid the chaos and violence of the Egyptian upheaval, CBS News’ Lara Logan, a seasoned war correspondent, was brutally beaten and sexually assault for a period of time. It wasn’t until a group of Muslim women and approximately 20 Egyptian soldiers came to Ms. Logan’s aid that the assault was stopped. Ms. Logan was hospitalized for her injuries and evacuated to the United States where she was hospitalized further.
In the face of this unacceptable attack on a woman who was trying to report to the world the events taking place in a land in turmoil, Nir Rosen, an alleged journalist who has been published by Time Magazine, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine – liberal and Progressive publications, one and all, submitted the following “Tweets” upon hearing the news of Ms. Logan’s assault:
“Jesus Christ, at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should at least remember her role as a major war monger." “Look, she was probably groped like thousands of other women.”
Mr. Rosen, who was forced to immediately surrender his title of Fellow at New York University’s Center on Law and Security for his hatred, later offered the “Sorry, I was insensitive” defense.
The fact remains, that was the initial response by Mr. Rosen and, thus, we all must understand that his “Tweeted” sentiments are, in fact, his true sentiments. The hate – the misogynistic hate – he spewed toward a woman who was sexually assaulted and beaten at the hands of a vicious mob cannot be erased and must be recognized for what it is: It is who Mr. Rosen is, period. He is a hater...and he is a Progressive.
Recently, at a rally to protest the Koch Brothers – two people who spend a considerable amount of money to champion Conservative causes, but nowhere near what George Soros spends to advance the cause of Progressive globalism – occasional New Media Journal contributor Christian Hartsock asked people in the crowd how they felt about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Their answers demonstrated a hatred for Justice Thomas that rivaled the hatred of those who celebrated the Ku Klux Klan:
“Put him back in the field...He’s a scumbag, he’s a dumb-sh*t scumbag. Throw him back in the field.” “We cut off his toes, one by one, and feed them to him.” “I don’t know, I’m all about peace, but I say torture.” “What do we do with him? String him up! And his wife too, let’s get rid of Ginny...[Then we can] start all over...Scalia...who are the other assholes? String him up...Thomas...his wife...Scalia...Roberts, oh my god...” “Hang him.”
While these people were protesting two American citizens, natural born American citizens, who observe their right and obligation to engage the governmental process – incredible, in and of itself – they called for the lynching, torture and maiming of a United States Supreme Court Justice, his wife and his fellow Conservative Justices simply because they held a different political opinion than they did. The racial hatred speaks for itself.
I could go into every instance where the Progressive-Left smeared, defamed and lied about President George W. Bush over the years but there isn’t enough space here to do justice to the injustice incurred by Mr. Bush and his family.
The ironic thing about the hatred of the Progressive-Left is that it is the Progressive-Left that not only professes the need for tolerance (no, that’s not a laugh line) but they are the ones that insisted on advancing hate-speech legislation, yet the powers that be never inflict that non-freedom of speech on any of their transgressions.
Hate of the Country
That the Progressive-Left hates the United States of America – and everything it stands for less their right to wreck havoc over the US Constitution – is more than evident. From President Obama’s continuous apology to the world for perceived wrongs committed by our country, to the elitists in higher education who systematically brainwash as many students a possible against the opportunity presented by Capitalism and a free market system, to Progressive-Leftists like Code Pink, so devoid of reality that they believe radical Islamist violence is caused by US foreign policy (please explain the Islamist violence in Indonesia, Africa, China and Russia please), the Progressive-Left’s hatred for our country leaves at least me asking: Why the hell do you want to live here if it is so horrible a place?
The truth of the matter, when it comes to hate, is this: The Progressive-Left is very good at screaming that Conservatives or the Tea Party or people who practice their faith are budding with repressed hatred; that they are intolerant, uninformed, mean-spirited, organized and hate-filled. But over the years I have come to understand one very important thing. If the Progressive-Left accuses you of something, it is out of guilt; it is because they, themselves, are guilty of the charges. If you don’t believe me, just ask Lara Logan, Clarence Thomas, Sarah Palin or George W. Bush.
Maybe that’s why they hate religion so much...it facilitates a conscience.
More HERE
************************
Obama kowtows to China
VOA radio broadcasts to China signing off, while Beijing boosts propaganda
The Obama administration will cancel shortwave radio broadcasts by Voice of America into China this year, as Beijing is expanding its propaganda operations in the United States and around the world.
Critics of the broadcasting cuts, announced Monday, said major reductions in staff and shortwave broadcasts will sharply curtail an important outlet for unfiltered news and information for large numbers of people in China, especially areas such as Tibet and western Xinjiang province, where pro-democracy forces are opposing Chinese rule.
“This is another alarming sign that America is cowering before China‘s gangster regime,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, California Republican and member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The Chinese people are our greatest allies, and the free flow of information is our greatest weapon.”
The cuts were outlined as a cost-cutting measure in the fiscal 2012 budget report of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, VOA’s parent agency. The plan calls for shifting the focus from shortwave to digital media, such as Internet broadcasts.
If Congress approves the plan, all shortwave VOA radio and television broadcasts in Chinese, under way since 1942, will end on Oct. 1.
The U.S. government will continue to operate Radio Free Asia, a less official and smaller news operation that will continue broadcasts into China and other closed states in Asia. It also is facing budget cuts that officials say will limit its effectiveness.
However, Voice of America has a much wider audience and larger reach that will be sharply curtailed by the shift to the Internet because many Chinese in rural areas or regions facing central government punishment do not have access to the Internet or cell phones.
More HERE
***************************
The Film That's "Too Hot" for Public TV
As Congress debates federal funding for public TV and radio, Mary Grabar has written a column for Pajamas Media about how telling the truth about the Castro regime in Cuba is not an assignment that the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has wanted to take on.
She focuses on how Agustin Blazquez, a Cuban exile, ran into a series of roadblocks from PBS and its parent, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), when he requested funding for films on life under the Castro dictatorship and Castro’s murderous accomplice Che Guevara. Not only did public TV refuse to fund the anti-communist films, public broadcasting would not consider airing them.
His new documentary,“Che: The Other Side of an Icon,” also got the label “too hot” for public TV. It is a response to what Blazquez calls “the pro-Che propaganda in the popular press.” He explains, “It profiles the life of the man killed in Bolivia, as well as ‘Che,’ the icon, who lives on today. It presents the real man behind the myth, his legacy and why he has become so popular among the youth, revolutionaries and terrorists of the world. It explores the dangers of believing in Che’s carefully constructed fake public image.”
The film includes interviews with people who worked directly with Che, knew his family in Argentina and Havana, and who were knowledgeable about his personal background and philosophy. It documents how Che was not a hero but a sadistic killer.
Grabar’s column takes a look at the film and examines how Blazquez faced opposition from public TV to telling the truth about Castro’s communist revolution. She reports,
“He learned that grants and prizes for documentaries in his series ‘Covering Cuba’ would not be forthcoming. The latest, and seventh, titled “Che: The Other Side of an Icon,” was produced on a budget of $14,000. Only about $4,000 of that was from a non-profit that he had started himself. He had submitted a more typical budget of $494,000 to CPB-PBS (Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Public Broadcasting System). Blazquez had no success with the publicly supported organization, nor did he with the taxpayer-supported American Film Institute in his other projects. In fact, he could not even get an airing on POV (Point of View), the program created by PBS specifically for the purpose of airing ‘controversial’ films.”
Blazquez provided me with some additional details, saying about the Che film offering, “I mailed the 104-page proposal to CPB on Monday, April 2, 2007. On Tuesday, May 8, 2007, John Prizer from CPB called me about 6:35 p.m. to notify me that they rejected my project. The next day Prizer talked to my proposal advisor and told him, ‘PBS won’t do a project like that.’”
Grabar describes the interference he gets on college campuses. “Dead silence is what mostly greeted Blazquez when he contacted over 100 campuses for the screening of his first film,” she says. “Subtle impediments in the form of last-minute room changes and announcements torn off walls were placed in his path at the two campuses where he did manage to get permission to air his documentary.”
Disgusted by the pro-Castro bias of public TV, Blazquez has some advice, which is pertinent since taxpayer funding for public TV and radio is now a big issue on Capitol Hill. “My advice to the American public in general is not to donate a penny” to the CPB or PBS, he says, and “to demand all taxpayer funds be denied” to public broadcasting.
SOURCE
**********************
No Laughing Matter
According to Barack Obama’s ten-year budget, the $14 trillion national debt will increase every single year and never be repaid.
But don’t believe your lying eyes. When Obama delivered his budget to Congress, he boldly suggested that “[B]y the middle of this decade our annual spending will match our annual revenues. We will not be adding more to the national debt.” Everyone laughed.
A fourth grader could easily calculate that on average the White House promises to add $1.088 trillion to the national debt every year for ten straight years. It will hit $15.459 trillion the end of this fiscal year, and then rise to $26.346 trillion by the end of FY 2021. So, what is Obama talking about?
He was using an accounting gimmick, called the “primary deficit,” that does not count the average annual $572.6 billion of net interest owed on the public debt. Nor does it count the average $275.8 billion owed in interest on the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.
All told, by not counting interest, the White House is attempting to avoid talking about some $848.4 billion being added to the debt every year. Neat trick.
Of course, the only way interest payments can be avoided is if the principal balance on a debt is paid early. Otherwise, those payments are simply added to the gross debt — the total owed.
The hilarity carried forward into the White House briefing room. There, the White House’s pretense that we are not adding to the debt was easily exposed by ABC News’ Jake Tapper in an exchange with Obama’s green, new Press Secretary, Jay Carney.
Tapper said, “The president seems to think that borrowing money to pay the interest on the debt is not adding to the debt. I don’t understand that math.” He wanted Carney to explain it to him. Now, the whole White House press corps was laughing at the Administration.
Carney replied, “What the president made clear is that we need to get to a place — and his budget absolutely does this — where we are no longer spending more than we’re taking in.” Except, making interest payments is spending. Everyone knows that. It’s a real obligation that must be paid, or the nation would default.
Tapper tried again, saying, “I assume when the president calls for an adult conversation, he means that conversation should be forthright and politicians shouldn’t be hiding behind cute language such as ‘We will not be adding more to the national debt,’ even if hundreds of billions of dollars are being added to the national debt in interest — paid on debt that President Obama helped, himself, create.” Ouch.
Now, Tapper was questioning the White House’s maturity to carry on an “adult conversation” as promised with the American people. Carney dodged, simply regurgitating the tired line to Tapper that the debt “has been created over a number of years, as you know. And we came in here with an economic crisis, the likes of which, I daresay, I think nobody in this room has ever seen, and which threatened to head straight into a depression if we didn’t act.”
Now, the White House was making excuses. Carney’s very first press conference was not going well. Tapper was eating him for lunch, and then went in for the kill, finally asking of Carney, “Just to button this, you think that, ‘We will not be adding more to the national debt,’ is a statement that stands [up] to scrutiny?”
Carney quickly replied with a straight face, “Absolutely, absolutely.” Really?
More like absolutely absurd. What a lousy liar. A better campaign commercial could not have been contrived by the Republican National Committee for 2012.
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)
****************************
Frank Salvato
Just over a month ago, President Obama took to a stage in Arizona to decry what he perceived as the caustic nature of political discourse in our country. On this issue, and very few others, we agree. But Mr. Obama was delinquent in pointing out the individuals and organizations – the factions – responsible for stoking the fires of discontent and, dare I say, hatred. The unspoken reason for this omission is because most – if not all – of the caustic rhetoric – the unbridled hatred – comes from the Progressive Left and there are myriad examples to prove the point beyond argument.
Hate of the Person
Recently, amid the chaos and violence of the Egyptian upheaval, CBS News’ Lara Logan, a seasoned war correspondent, was brutally beaten and sexually assault for a period of time. It wasn’t until a group of Muslim women and approximately 20 Egyptian soldiers came to Ms. Logan’s aid that the assault was stopped. Ms. Logan was hospitalized for her injuries and evacuated to the United States where she was hospitalized further.
In the face of this unacceptable attack on a woman who was trying to report to the world the events taking place in a land in turmoil, Nir Rosen, an alleged journalist who has been published by Time Magazine, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine – liberal and Progressive publications, one and all, submitted the following “Tweets” upon hearing the news of Ms. Logan’s assault:
“Jesus Christ, at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should at least remember her role as a major war monger." “Look, she was probably groped like thousands of other women.”
Mr. Rosen, who was forced to immediately surrender his title of Fellow at New York University’s Center on Law and Security for his hatred, later offered the “Sorry, I was insensitive” defense.
The fact remains, that was the initial response by Mr. Rosen and, thus, we all must understand that his “Tweeted” sentiments are, in fact, his true sentiments. The hate – the misogynistic hate – he spewed toward a woman who was sexually assaulted and beaten at the hands of a vicious mob cannot be erased and must be recognized for what it is: It is who Mr. Rosen is, period. He is a hater...and he is a Progressive.
Recently, at a rally to protest the Koch Brothers – two people who spend a considerable amount of money to champion Conservative causes, but nowhere near what George Soros spends to advance the cause of Progressive globalism – occasional New Media Journal contributor Christian Hartsock asked people in the crowd how they felt about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Their answers demonstrated a hatred for Justice Thomas that rivaled the hatred of those who celebrated the Ku Klux Klan:
“Put him back in the field...He’s a scumbag, he’s a dumb-sh*t scumbag. Throw him back in the field.” “We cut off his toes, one by one, and feed them to him.” “I don’t know, I’m all about peace, but I say torture.” “What do we do with him? String him up! And his wife too, let’s get rid of Ginny...[Then we can] start all over...Scalia...who are the other assholes? String him up...Thomas...his wife...Scalia...Roberts, oh my god...” “Hang him.”
While these people were protesting two American citizens, natural born American citizens, who observe their right and obligation to engage the governmental process – incredible, in and of itself – they called for the lynching, torture and maiming of a United States Supreme Court Justice, his wife and his fellow Conservative Justices simply because they held a different political opinion than they did. The racial hatred speaks for itself.
I could go into every instance where the Progressive-Left smeared, defamed and lied about President George W. Bush over the years but there isn’t enough space here to do justice to the injustice incurred by Mr. Bush and his family.
The ironic thing about the hatred of the Progressive-Left is that it is the Progressive-Left that not only professes the need for tolerance (no, that’s not a laugh line) but they are the ones that insisted on advancing hate-speech legislation, yet the powers that be never inflict that non-freedom of speech on any of their transgressions.
Hate of the Country
That the Progressive-Left hates the United States of America – and everything it stands for less their right to wreck havoc over the US Constitution – is more than evident. From President Obama’s continuous apology to the world for perceived wrongs committed by our country, to the elitists in higher education who systematically brainwash as many students a possible against the opportunity presented by Capitalism and a free market system, to Progressive-Leftists like Code Pink, so devoid of reality that they believe radical Islamist violence is caused by US foreign policy (please explain the Islamist violence in Indonesia, Africa, China and Russia please), the Progressive-Left’s hatred for our country leaves at least me asking: Why the hell do you want to live here if it is so horrible a place?
The truth of the matter, when it comes to hate, is this: The Progressive-Left is very good at screaming that Conservatives or the Tea Party or people who practice their faith are budding with repressed hatred; that they are intolerant, uninformed, mean-spirited, organized and hate-filled. But over the years I have come to understand one very important thing. If the Progressive-Left accuses you of something, it is out of guilt; it is because they, themselves, are guilty of the charges. If you don’t believe me, just ask Lara Logan, Clarence Thomas, Sarah Palin or George W. Bush.
Maybe that’s why they hate religion so much...it facilitates a conscience.
More HERE
************************
Obama kowtows to China
VOA radio broadcasts to China signing off, while Beijing boosts propaganda
The Obama administration will cancel shortwave radio broadcasts by Voice of America into China this year, as Beijing is expanding its propaganda operations in the United States and around the world.
Critics of the broadcasting cuts, announced Monday, said major reductions in staff and shortwave broadcasts will sharply curtail an important outlet for unfiltered news and information for large numbers of people in China, especially areas such as Tibet and western Xinjiang province, where pro-democracy forces are opposing Chinese rule.
“This is another alarming sign that America is cowering before China‘s gangster regime,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, California Republican and member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The Chinese people are our greatest allies, and the free flow of information is our greatest weapon.”
The cuts were outlined as a cost-cutting measure in the fiscal 2012 budget report of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, VOA’s parent agency. The plan calls for shifting the focus from shortwave to digital media, such as Internet broadcasts.
If Congress approves the plan, all shortwave VOA radio and television broadcasts in Chinese, under way since 1942, will end on Oct. 1.
The U.S. government will continue to operate Radio Free Asia, a less official and smaller news operation that will continue broadcasts into China and other closed states in Asia. It also is facing budget cuts that officials say will limit its effectiveness.
However, Voice of America has a much wider audience and larger reach that will be sharply curtailed by the shift to the Internet because many Chinese in rural areas or regions facing central government punishment do not have access to the Internet or cell phones.
More HERE
***************************
The Film That's "Too Hot" for Public TV
As Congress debates federal funding for public TV and radio, Mary Grabar has written a column for Pajamas Media about how telling the truth about the Castro regime in Cuba is not an assignment that the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has wanted to take on.
She focuses on how Agustin Blazquez, a Cuban exile, ran into a series of roadblocks from PBS and its parent, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), when he requested funding for films on life under the Castro dictatorship and Castro’s murderous accomplice Che Guevara. Not only did public TV refuse to fund the anti-communist films, public broadcasting would not consider airing them.
His new documentary,“Che: The Other Side of an Icon,” also got the label “too hot” for public TV. It is a response to what Blazquez calls “the pro-Che propaganda in the popular press.” He explains, “It profiles the life of the man killed in Bolivia, as well as ‘Che,’ the icon, who lives on today. It presents the real man behind the myth, his legacy and why he has become so popular among the youth, revolutionaries and terrorists of the world. It explores the dangers of believing in Che’s carefully constructed fake public image.”
The film includes interviews with people who worked directly with Che, knew his family in Argentina and Havana, and who were knowledgeable about his personal background and philosophy. It documents how Che was not a hero but a sadistic killer.
Grabar’s column takes a look at the film and examines how Blazquez faced opposition from public TV to telling the truth about Castro’s communist revolution. She reports,
“He learned that grants and prizes for documentaries in his series ‘Covering Cuba’ would not be forthcoming. The latest, and seventh, titled “Che: The Other Side of an Icon,” was produced on a budget of $14,000. Only about $4,000 of that was from a non-profit that he had started himself. He had submitted a more typical budget of $494,000 to CPB-PBS (Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Public Broadcasting System). Blazquez had no success with the publicly supported organization, nor did he with the taxpayer-supported American Film Institute in his other projects. In fact, he could not even get an airing on POV (Point of View), the program created by PBS specifically for the purpose of airing ‘controversial’ films.”
Blazquez provided me with some additional details, saying about the Che film offering, “I mailed the 104-page proposal to CPB on Monday, April 2, 2007. On Tuesday, May 8, 2007, John Prizer from CPB called me about 6:35 p.m. to notify me that they rejected my project. The next day Prizer talked to my proposal advisor and told him, ‘PBS won’t do a project like that.’”
Grabar describes the interference he gets on college campuses. “Dead silence is what mostly greeted Blazquez when he contacted over 100 campuses for the screening of his first film,” she says. “Subtle impediments in the form of last-minute room changes and announcements torn off walls were placed in his path at the two campuses where he did manage to get permission to air his documentary.”
Disgusted by the pro-Castro bias of public TV, Blazquez has some advice, which is pertinent since taxpayer funding for public TV and radio is now a big issue on Capitol Hill. “My advice to the American public in general is not to donate a penny” to the CPB or PBS, he says, and “to demand all taxpayer funds be denied” to public broadcasting.
SOURCE
**********************
No Laughing Matter
According to Barack Obama’s ten-year budget, the $14 trillion national debt will increase every single year and never be repaid.
But don’t believe your lying eyes. When Obama delivered his budget to Congress, he boldly suggested that “[B]y the middle of this decade our annual spending will match our annual revenues. We will not be adding more to the national debt.” Everyone laughed.
A fourth grader could easily calculate that on average the White House promises to add $1.088 trillion to the national debt every year for ten straight years. It will hit $15.459 trillion the end of this fiscal year, and then rise to $26.346 trillion by the end of FY 2021. So, what is Obama talking about?
He was using an accounting gimmick, called the “primary deficit,” that does not count the average annual $572.6 billion of net interest owed on the public debt. Nor does it count the average $275.8 billion owed in interest on the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.
All told, by not counting interest, the White House is attempting to avoid talking about some $848.4 billion being added to the debt every year. Neat trick.
Of course, the only way interest payments can be avoided is if the principal balance on a debt is paid early. Otherwise, those payments are simply added to the gross debt — the total owed.
The hilarity carried forward into the White House briefing room. There, the White House’s pretense that we are not adding to the debt was easily exposed by ABC News’ Jake Tapper in an exchange with Obama’s green, new Press Secretary, Jay Carney.
Tapper said, “The president seems to think that borrowing money to pay the interest on the debt is not adding to the debt. I don’t understand that math.” He wanted Carney to explain it to him. Now, the whole White House press corps was laughing at the Administration.
Carney replied, “What the president made clear is that we need to get to a place — and his budget absolutely does this — where we are no longer spending more than we’re taking in.” Except, making interest payments is spending. Everyone knows that. It’s a real obligation that must be paid, or the nation would default.
Tapper tried again, saying, “I assume when the president calls for an adult conversation, he means that conversation should be forthright and politicians shouldn’t be hiding behind cute language such as ‘We will not be adding more to the national debt,’ even if hundreds of billions of dollars are being added to the national debt in interest — paid on debt that President Obama helped, himself, create.” Ouch.
Now, Tapper was questioning the White House’s maturity to carry on an “adult conversation” as promised with the American people. Carney dodged, simply regurgitating the tired line to Tapper that the debt “has been created over a number of years, as you know. And we came in here with an economic crisis, the likes of which, I daresay, I think nobody in this room has ever seen, and which threatened to head straight into a depression if we didn’t act.”
Now, the White House was making excuses. Carney’s very first press conference was not going well. Tapper was eating him for lunch, and then went in for the kill, finally asking of Carney, “Just to button this, you think that, ‘We will not be adding more to the national debt,’ is a statement that stands [up] to scrutiny?”
Carney quickly replied with a straight face, “Absolutely, absolutely.” Really?
More like absolutely absurd. What a lousy liar. A better campaign commercial could not have been contrived by the Republican National Committee for 2012.
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)
****************************
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Revolutionaries with American Passports
In the excerpt below Peter Berger attempts to explain why some Americans fall in love with authoritarian regimes. His explanation may well be part of the story but I think that for many young Leftists it is rather simple: They hate America and need to find some alternative to it. So they look to regimes that are most unlike America.
That those regimes are in most ways very unattractive explains why most American Leftists don't emigrate to their nirvana but rather remain safely at home. That way they can build castles in the air about their supposed "alternative" society without having to face all the realities of it.
The fools who do put their money where their mouth is generally don't stay for long. The famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein migrated to Soviet Russia in 1935 but lasted less than three weeks there
But why do American Leftists hate America? There are a variety of reasons which I set out here but both political stance and tendency to happiness are highly hereditary -- so many are simply born whiners whom nothing suits -- JR
For over fifty years now, cohorts of young, well-educated Americans have become supporters of a long string of bloody revolutions and tyrannical regimes, united by the two traits of socialist ideology and hostility to the United States. What is one to make of this?
Any identity is better than none.
For reasons which are not mysterious and which can be analyzed sociologically, modernity undermines taken-for-granted identities. No longer an unavoidable destiny, an individual’s identity increasingly becomes a matter of choice. This can be experienced as a great liberation, especially in its early phases. It can also be experienced as a burden. There is a deep human longing for certainty concerning the things that matter most —among which, as Immanuel Kant classically formulated it, is an answer to the question “Who am I?”
As a result, there is a market for any movement that purports to provide a certain identity, one that can be relied upon beyond the precarious products of individual self-construction. That is the great attraction of all totalitarian movements. It is the psychological benefit of all fundamentalisms —religious or secular. The promise is always the same: “Come and join us. And we will give you what you have longed for —you will know who you really are.” The promise is kept —if and as long as the individual adheres to the ideology of the movement. Part of such adherence may be the denial of realities that contradict the ideology.
I think that the psychology of the Westerners who convert to radical Islamism is quite similar to that of the leftists discussed above. Of course this type of Islamism has distinct disadvantages, not only the unpleasant possibility of being killed in Waziristan if one takes the conversion to an active conclusion, but also a rigorous sexual code that has little appeal for those raised in post-1960s Western societies.
Leftist [loyalties] rarely get you killed. Very few Americans have volunteered to join guerrillas in the jungles of Latin America. And, even while wearing Che Guevara T-shirts, these “soldiers of the revolution” can enjoy the sexual freedom allowed in Western democracies. They also have the freedom to proclaim their new identity with impunity. In important sectors of elite culture this identity can even be a passport to prestige and tenure.
Despite the poor prospects, reason should not be discarded in efforts to pry individuals out of the St. Vitus dance. It is comforting to recall Freud’s view, that “the voice of reason is quiet but persistent.” But I know of one contingency that has a good chance of de-converting these revolutionaries with Western passports —if they actually reside for a while in the totalitarian society they had admired from afar.
More HERE
********************
Mitch Daniels, Indiana's Republican governor, says what must be done to rescue America from stagnation and decline
America, he said, faces "a survival-level threat," a new "Red Menace" consisting of ink. No enterprise, public or private, "can remain self-governing, let alone successful, so deeply in hock to others as we are about to be." Some people accept or "even welcome" a "ballooning of the state" that consigns America to "a gray parity" with other profligate nations. Such people believe history is controlled by a "leftward ratchet," always -- never mind "the Reagan Interruption" -- moving toward a more powerful state.
For such people, the task now is merely defensive: The Obama administration's spending commitments -- e.g., the health care law is designed to "engulf private markets and produce a single-payer system or its equivalent" -- will produce a leviathan state and reduce the American world pre-eminence some people deplore.
Focusing on earmarks (a "pernicious practice" but a "trifle") and "waste, fraud and abuse," says Daniels, trivializes the task of administering "bariatric surgery" to a "morbidly obese" government. He favors restoring to presidents the power to impound appropriated funds ("you'd be amazed how much government you'll never miss"). But the big twofold task is to reform entitlements and produce economic growth -- "a long boom of almost unprecedented duration."
Americans must say "an affectionate thank-you" to the last century's major social welfare programs -- then sunset them, after those Americans "currently or soon to be enrolled" in them have passed from the scene. Social Security and Medicare should be updated to conform to Americans' "increasing longevity and good health." Medicare 2.0 should respect Americans' dignity and competence by empowering them to make "their own decisions" by delivering its dollars directly to individuals, and expecting them to "pay for more of their routine care like the discerning, autonomous customers we know them to be."
To spur economic growth, we must "untie Gulliver": "The regulatory rainforest through which our enterprises must hack their way is blighting the future of millions of Americans." Barack Obama's recent executive order to prune the forest was, Daniels said, akin to the world's leading rap music producer suddenly expressing alarm about obscenity. And Daniels thinks conservatives' "first thought" should be about "those still on that first rung of life's ladder":
"Upward mobility from the bottom is the crux of the American promise, and the stagnation of the middle class is in fact becoming a problem, on any fair reading of the facts. Our main task is not to see that people of great wealth add to it, but that those without much money have a greater chance to earn some."
Author of the most succinct characterization of the Obama agenda ("shock-and-awe statism"), Daniels has practiced the lean government he preaches. Under him, Indiana has its fewest state employees since 1978, the nation's lowest state government employment per capita, the lowest effective property taxes and the third-lowest per capita spending. So he has the credentials to counsel conservatives about the need to compromise in the interest of broadening the constituency for difficult reforms.
"Change of the dimension we need," says Daniels, "requires a coalition of a dimension no one has recently assembled," including people who "surf past C-SPAN to get to SportsCenter." Which may mean ideological dilution: "Purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers" and "King Pyrrhus is remembered, but his nation disappeared." Daniels has "no interest in standing in the wreckage of our Republic saying 'I told you so' or 'You should've done it my way.'"
He reminded his listeners that when he was serving Ronald Reagan, the president admonished him and others that "we have no enemies, only opponents." The case for less strident conservative rhetoric is practical: "As we ask Americans to join us on such a boldly different course, it would help if they liked us, just a bit."
Do not, Jefferson warned, undertake great departures on "slender majorities." Conservatives criticized Democrats for doing just that regarding health care. Big changes, Daniels knows, will require a broad majority, perhaps one assembled after 2012 by someone with his blend of accomplishments, aversion to pandering and low-key charisma of competence.
SOURCE
*************************
Liberty, 21st Century-Style
Jonah Goldberg
Finally, the national conversation about democracy is relatively mature and serious. Save for some TV news anchors, just about everyone seems to understand that democracy is a tricky thing.
That skepticism was hard earned. The last decade provided painful lessons for everyone, on both sides of the ideological aisle. Liberals, who were once naively optimistic about democracy promotion, turned dour when President Bush became naively optimistic about it. And then supporters of Bush's freedom agenda learned a tough lesson from, among other things, the disastrous-but-democratic elections that put a terrorist junta in charge of the Gaza Strip.
Hence the irony of so many small-"d" democrats quietly celebrating the fact that Egypt is living under undemocratic martial law, rather than democratic Islamic law as interpreted by a Muslim Brotherhood caliphate.
This new consensus -- that democracy is about more than mere lever-pulling on Election Day -- is progress.
Democracy is essential to a liberal order, but it is less important than the rule of law, honest courts, individual rights (including property rights), and the institutions -- legal and cultural -- that nurture them.
George W. Bush famously proclaimed that the desire for freedom burns in every human heart. I'm sympathetic to such notions and the statecraft that drives such pronouncements. But that doesn't get us very far. What drives the urge for liberty?
The notion that we all crave personal liberty is a fairly new notion, historically. Most of the calls for freedom over the centuries have been in the context of national, not personal, liberation. The 20th century began with an atrocious war allegedly fought over something called "self-determination," but the "self" in question wasn't the id, ego or super-ego, or the individual soul. The "self" in "self-determination" referred to the captive nations of Europe.
Freedom fighters have generally battled for the collective right to fly a national flag, not the individual right to burn one. Conservatives loved the movie "Braveheart," with all of its beautiful language about freedom, but it's worth remembering that the freedom the Scots fought for was the freedom to replace the authoritarian traditionalism of the English with the authoritarian traditionalism of the Scots.
The great change, as Francis Fukuyama chronicled in his book "The End of History and the Last Man," has been the evolution of individual self-determination. Fukuyama borrows a term, "thumos," from the ancient Greeks to explain the transformation. Thumos, or "spiritedness," encompasses the instinct for justice, respect, integrity.
"People evaluate and assign worth to themselves in the first instance, and feel indignation on their own behalf," Fukuyama writes. "But they are also capable of assigning worth to other people, and feeling anger on behalf of others."
Indignation, the driving passion of all revolutions, shares a root with "dignity," a person's -- and a people's -- sense of self-worth. A major cause of Middle Eastern political stagnation, for instance, has been that Arab and Muslim dictators have linked their people's self-respect with the Palestinians' plight.
More positively, in our own country, the Civil Rights movement and the women's movement were, at their core, what Harvard philosopher Harvey Mansfield calls "honor-seeking movements."
To understand continuity between the old conception of liberty and the modern one, you need to understand that freedom in the West mostly means "free to be me." Freedom in much of the rest of the world remains "free to be us."
The genius of liberal democracy is that it allows both conceptions to flourish simultaneously, often in healthy tension. Far from perfect, liberal democracy offers the most people the most respect possible.
The tumult in Egypt and throughout the Middle East is a generational conflagration between different conceptions of thumos -- old and modern, Muslim and nationalist, collective and individual. In the long run, I'm not too worried about liberal democracy's prospects in the Middle East. Modernity brings prosperity, and prosperity fuels an insatiable appetite for respect, and that demand for respect is what topples tyrannies.
I'm more concerned about what is happening here. Thumos continues to evolve in Western democracies, which is not the same thing as saying it continues to improve.
Our current fiscal woes, not to mention the riot of dysfunction that often goes by the name "political correctness" and the thumos-on-the-cheap that we call the self-esteem industry, are in no small part attributable to the perversion of our sense of self-worth. For millions of Americans, it seems that respect must be paid in the form of cash tribute. How else to explain the inviolable sanctity of our aptly named "entitlement" system?
Great civilizations die when the people believe their personal dignity demands more than the society can possibly provide. Sadly, that conversation has barely begun.
SOURCE
***********************
ELSEWHERE
Sweden overtakes US in competitiveness: "Sweden is the world’s second most competitive country, the World Economic Forum said in its annual ranking, hailing the Scandinavian country for its transparent institutions, efficient financial markets and the world’s strongest technological adoption. Switzerland topped the overall ranking in The Global Competitiveness Report 2010-2011. Sweden overtook the US and Singapore this year to be placed 2nd overall." [Sweden has had a conservative government for some time]
Poll: 51% of GOP primary voters believe Obama born abroad: "In a shocking finding, more than half of GOP primary voters believe President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, according to a new poll. Fifty-one percent of 400 Republican primary voters surveyed nationwide by Public Policy Polling said they ascribe to the controversial birther conspiracy theory — despite the fact that the state of Hawaii has posted [a computer printout of] Obama’s certificate of live birth."
Proof of government inefficiency: "Over the past 40 years, the manufacturing sector has more than doubled production while cutting one-third of the workforce, whereas government adds more and more personnel without actually making government services more effective. Imagine, then, how much money government can save, and how much more the private sector can produce, if those 12.4 million excess government workers were in the private workforce."
Obama’s sea of red: "In the days and weeks leading up to the release of his budget, President Obama and his spokesmen warned us that it would contain 'tough choices' and 'painful cuts.' Having increased government spending by 21.4 percent during his first two years in office, Obama would now be intent on imposing 'fiscal discipline.' Hah! By the administration's own estimates, Obama's $3.7 trillion budget would raise this year's budget deficit to $1.65 trillion, the largest pool of red ink since the end of World War II."
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)
****************************
In the excerpt below Peter Berger attempts to explain why some Americans fall in love with authoritarian regimes. His explanation may well be part of the story but I think that for many young Leftists it is rather simple: They hate America and need to find some alternative to it. So they look to regimes that are most unlike America.
That those regimes are in most ways very unattractive explains why most American Leftists don't emigrate to their nirvana but rather remain safely at home. That way they can build castles in the air about their supposed "alternative" society without having to face all the realities of it.
The fools who do put their money where their mouth is generally don't stay for long. The famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein migrated to Soviet Russia in 1935 but lasted less than three weeks there
But why do American Leftists hate America? There are a variety of reasons which I set out here but both political stance and tendency to happiness are highly hereditary -- so many are simply born whiners whom nothing suits -- JR
For over fifty years now, cohorts of young, well-educated Americans have become supporters of a long string of bloody revolutions and tyrannical regimes, united by the two traits of socialist ideology and hostility to the United States. What is one to make of this?
Any identity is better than none.
For reasons which are not mysterious and which can be analyzed sociologically, modernity undermines taken-for-granted identities. No longer an unavoidable destiny, an individual’s identity increasingly becomes a matter of choice. This can be experienced as a great liberation, especially in its early phases. It can also be experienced as a burden. There is a deep human longing for certainty concerning the things that matter most —among which, as Immanuel Kant classically formulated it, is an answer to the question “Who am I?”
As a result, there is a market for any movement that purports to provide a certain identity, one that can be relied upon beyond the precarious products of individual self-construction. That is the great attraction of all totalitarian movements. It is the psychological benefit of all fundamentalisms —religious or secular. The promise is always the same: “Come and join us. And we will give you what you have longed for —you will know who you really are.” The promise is kept —if and as long as the individual adheres to the ideology of the movement. Part of such adherence may be the denial of realities that contradict the ideology.
I think that the psychology of the Westerners who convert to radical Islamism is quite similar to that of the leftists discussed above. Of course this type of Islamism has distinct disadvantages, not only the unpleasant possibility of being killed in Waziristan if one takes the conversion to an active conclusion, but also a rigorous sexual code that has little appeal for those raised in post-1960s Western societies.
Leftist [loyalties] rarely get you killed. Very few Americans have volunteered to join guerrillas in the jungles of Latin America. And, even while wearing Che Guevara T-shirts, these “soldiers of the revolution” can enjoy the sexual freedom allowed in Western democracies. They also have the freedom to proclaim their new identity with impunity. In important sectors of elite culture this identity can even be a passport to prestige and tenure.
Despite the poor prospects, reason should not be discarded in efforts to pry individuals out of the St. Vitus dance. It is comforting to recall Freud’s view, that “the voice of reason is quiet but persistent.” But I know of one contingency that has a good chance of de-converting these revolutionaries with Western passports —if they actually reside for a while in the totalitarian society they had admired from afar.
More HERE
********************
Mitch Daniels, Indiana's Republican governor, says what must be done to rescue America from stagnation and decline
America, he said, faces "a survival-level threat," a new "Red Menace" consisting of ink. No enterprise, public or private, "can remain self-governing, let alone successful, so deeply in hock to others as we are about to be." Some people accept or "even welcome" a "ballooning of the state" that consigns America to "a gray parity" with other profligate nations. Such people believe history is controlled by a "leftward ratchet," always -- never mind "the Reagan Interruption" -- moving toward a more powerful state.
For such people, the task now is merely defensive: The Obama administration's spending commitments -- e.g., the health care law is designed to "engulf private markets and produce a single-payer system or its equivalent" -- will produce a leviathan state and reduce the American world pre-eminence some people deplore.
Focusing on earmarks (a "pernicious practice" but a "trifle") and "waste, fraud and abuse," says Daniels, trivializes the task of administering "bariatric surgery" to a "morbidly obese" government. He favors restoring to presidents the power to impound appropriated funds ("you'd be amazed how much government you'll never miss"). But the big twofold task is to reform entitlements and produce economic growth -- "a long boom of almost unprecedented duration."
Americans must say "an affectionate thank-you" to the last century's major social welfare programs -- then sunset them, after those Americans "currently or soon to be enrolled" in them have passed from the scene. Social Security and Medicare should be updated to conform to Americans' "increasing longevity and good health." Medicare 2.0 should respect Americans' dignity and competence by empowering them to make "their own decisions" by delivering its dollars directly to individuals, and expecting them to "pay for more of their routine care like the discerning, autonomous customers we know them to be."
To spur economic growth, we must "untie Gulliver": "The regulatory rainforest through which our enterprises must hack their way is blighting the future of millions of Americans." Barack Obama's recent executive order to prune the forest was, Daniels said, akin to the world's leading rap music producer suddenly expressing alarm about obscenity. And Daniels thinks conservatives' "first thought" should be about "those still on that first rung of life's ladder":
"Upward mobility from the bottom is the crux of the American promise, and the stagnation of the middle class is in fact becoming a problem, on any fair reading of the facts. Our main task is not to see that people of great wealth add to it, but that those without much money have a greater chance to earn some."
Author of the most succinct characterization of the Obama agenda ("shock-and-awe statism"), Daniels has practiced the lean government he preaches. Under him, Indiana has its fewest state employees since 1978, the nation's lowest state government employment per capita, the lowest effective property taxes and the third-lowest per capita spending. So he has the credentials to counsel conservatives about the need to compromise in the interest of broadening the constituency for difficult reforms.
"Change of the dimension we need," says Daniels, "requires a coalition of a dimension no one has recently assembled," including people who "surf past C-SPAN to get to SportsCenter." Which may mean ideological dilution: "Purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers" and "King Pyrrhus is remembered, but his nation disappeared." Daniels has "no interest in standing in the wreckage of our Republic saying 'I told you so' or 'You should've done it my way.'"
He reminded his listeners that when he was serving Ronald Reagan, the president admonished him and others that "we have no enemies, only opponents." The case for less strident conservative rhetoric is practical: "As we ask Americans to join us on such a boldly different course, it would help if they liked us, just a bit."
Do not, Jefferson warned, undertake great departures on "slender majorities." Conservatives criticized Democrats for doing just that regarding health care. Big changes, Daniels knows, will require a broad majority, perhaps one assembled after 2012 by someone with his blend of accomplishments, aversion to pandering and low-key charisma of competence.
SOURCE
*************************
Liberty, 21st Century-Style
Jonah Goldberg
Finally, the national conversation about democracy is relatively mature and serious. Save for some TV news anchors, just about everyone seems to understand that democracy is a tricky thing.
That skepticism was hard earned. The last decade provided painful lessons for everyone, on both sides of the ideological aisle. Liberals, who were once naively optimistic about democracy promotion, turned dour when President Bush became naively optimistic about it. And then supporters of Bush's freedom agenda learned a tough lesson from, among other things, the disastrous-but-democratic elections that put a terrorist junta in charge of the Gaza Strip.
Hence the irony of so many small-"d" democrats quietly celebrating the fact that Egypt is living under undemocratic martial law, rather than democratic Islamic law as interpreted by a Muslim Brotherhood caliphate.
This new consensus -- that democracy is about more than mere lever-pulling on Election Day -- is progress.
Democracy is essential to a liberal order, but it is less important than the rule of law, honest courts, individual rights (including property rights), and the institutions -- legal and cultural -- that nurture them.
George W. Bush famously proclaimed that the desire for freedom burns in every human heart. I'm sympathetic to such notions and the statecraft that drives such pronouncements. But that doesn't get us very far. What drives the urge for liberty?
The notion that we all crave personal liberty is a fairly new notion, historically. Most of the calls for freedom over the centuries have been in the context of national, not personal, liberation. The 20th century began with an atrocious war allegedly fought over something called "self-determination," but the "self" in question wasn't the id, ego or super-ego, or the individual soul. The "self" in "self-determination" referred to the captive nations of Europe.
Freedom fighters have generally battled for the collective right to fly a national flag, not the individual right to burn one. Conservatives loved the movie "Braveheart," with all of its beautiful language about freedom, but it's worth remembering that the freedom the Scots fought for was the freedom to replace the authoritarian traditionalism of the English with the authoritarian traditionalism of the Scots.
The great change, as Francis Fukuyama chronicled in his book "The End of History and the Last Man," has been the evolution of individual self-determination. Fukuyama borrows a term, "thumos," from the ancient Greeks to explain the transformation. Thumos, or "spiritedness," encompasses the instinct for justice, respect, integrity.
"People evaluate and assign worth to themselves in the first instance, and feel indignation on their own behalf," Fukuyama writes. "But they are also capable of assigning worth to other people, and feeling anger on behalf of others."
Indignation, the driving passion of all revolutions, shares a root with "dignity," a person's -- and a people's -- sense of self-worth. A major cause of Middle Eastern political stagnation, for instance, has been that Arab and Muslim dictators have linked their people's self-respect with the Palestinians' plight.
More positively, in our own country, the Civil Rights movement and the women's movement were, at their core, what Harvard philosopher Harvey Mansfield calls "honor-seeking movements."
To understand continuity between the old conception of liberty and the modern one, you need to understand that freedom in the West mostly means "free to be me." Freedom in much of the rest of the world remains "free to be us."
The genius of liberal democracy is that it allows both conceptions to flourish simultaneously, often in healthy tension. Far from perfect, liberal democracy offers the most people the most respect possible.
The tumult in Egypt and throughout the Middle East is a generational conflagration between different conceptions of thumos -- old and modern, Muslim and nationalist, collective and individual. In the long run, I'm not too worried about liberal democracy's prospects in the Middle East. Modernity brings prosperity, and prosperity fuels an insatiable appetite for respect, and that demand for respect is what topples tyrannies.
I'm more concerned about what is happening here. Thumos continues to evolve in Western democracies, which is not the same thing as saying it continues to improve.
Our current fiscal woes, not to mention the riot of dysfunction that often goes by the name "political correctness" and the thumos-on-the-cheap that we call the self-esteem industry, are in no small part attributable to the perversion of our sense of self-worth. For millions of Americans, it seems that respect must be paid in the form of cash tribute. How else to explain the inviolable sanctity of our aptly named "entitlement" system?
Great civilizations die when the people believe their personal dignity demands more than the society can possibly provide. Sadly, that conversation has barely begun.
SOURCE
***********************
ELSEWHERE
Sweden overtakes US in competitiveness: "Sweden is the world’s second most competitive country, the World Economic Forum said in its annual ranking, hailing the Scandinavian country for its transparent institutions, efficient financial markets and the world’s strongest technological adoption. Switzerland topped the overall ranking in The Global Competitiveness Report 2010-2011. Sweden overtook the US and Singapore this year to be placed 2nd overall." [Sweden has had a conservative government for some time]
Poll: 51% of GOP primary voters believe Obama born abroad: "In a shocking finding, more than half of GOP primary voters believe President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, according to a new poll. Fifty-one percent of 400 Republican primary voters surveyed nationwide by Public Policy Polling said they ascribe to the controversial birther conspiracy theory — despite the fact that the state of Hawaii has posted [a computer printout of] Obama’s certificate of live birth."
Proof of government inefficiency: "Over the past 40 years, the manufacturing sector has more than doubled production while cutting one-third of the workforce, whereas government adds more and more personnel without actually making government services more effective. Imagine, then, how much money government can save, and how much more the private sector can produce, if those 12.4 million excess government workers were in the private workforce."
Obama’s sea of red: "In the days and weeks leading up to the release of his budget, President Obama and his spokesmen warned us that it would contain 'tough choices' and 'painful cuts.' Having increased government spending by 21.4 percent during his first two years in office, Obama would now be intent on imposing 'fiscal discipline.' Hah! By the administration's own estimates, Obama's $3.7 trillion budget would raise this year's budget deficit to $1.65 trillion, the largest pool of red ink since the end of World War II."
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)
****************************
Thursday, February 17, 2011
The GOP's Paul problem
There's a fantastical "this can't be really happening" feeling to the continued extent and power of Ron Paul's popularity among the most dedicated young activists within the Republican Party, not only to those like me who've been largely cheering him from the margins of the margins of American political power for decades, but also for those who have been actively trying to drive him off even those margins.
Herewith, a survey of some recent flailings at Ron Paul's repeat CPAC poll victory, and the ever-larger impact of Pauls--both Ron in the House (and the prospective GOP presidential field) and now Rand in the Senate.
* Young Americans for Freedom follows in the kicking-out-of-the-Right spirit of their founding father William Buckley and boots Paul from their advisory board; as Dave Weigel notes at Slate, internal division results, including YAF's own "coordination intern" quitting, and a public dustup with rival right-youth group Young Americans for Liberty, more reliably Paulite.
* Right-wing radio dude Kevin McCullough sputters at Fox News's site about the "bizarre nature and overall oddity" of a right-wing political gathering that gave so much play to Ron Paul and Gary Johnson, accusing the libertarian leaning of disrespectfully "hijacking" CPAC's "mission," moaning about an "unabated" libertarian streak.
Look, if the excited politically motivated younger folk who actually show up at conventions about politics and activism dig Paul and Johnson, it just might behoove the GOP powers to mind them rather than distance themselves from something as apparently unconservative as limited government--but something there is about a libertarian that makes even simple political horse sense go out the window; as McCullough declares: "libertarians are the worst form of political affiliation in the nation."
* Bernie Quigley at The Hill thinks that the more palatable Johnson rather than Ron Paul will be the ultimate successful standardbearer for the libertarian tinge of the GOP on the national stage, but notes that hysterical reactions against them (though he is focusing on prog-liberal angst, the same is true of trad-right angst) are "prelude to a nervous breakdown." And he sums up the surprising rise of Paul Power:
* Right-wing thought leader Donald Trump accuses Paul of un-electability; Paul asks, how many elections has Donald Trump won? (That the anti-Ron Paul forces are actually using an argument that depends on admitting there is any scintilla of a possibility of a hope he could win the presidential nomination is kind of staggering.)
* Ron Paul makes it clear that he's more radical than the right-wing's Tea Party populist troops on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," complaining that:
* Jim Antle reported in the Guardian on the tensions between the Paulite CPACers and the others, including Paul fans booing Bush-era GOP heroes Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld:
Like I noted after his last CPAC poll victory, there's a strong likelihood that if you didn't vote for Paul, you hate him--he was likely few people's second choice (except maybe Johnson voters).
Why can't the powers that be of the Right handle Paul? I explained this last year after his unexpected first CPAC poll victory, and nothing has changed except his continued and expanding popularity, and that of his senator son, make it all the more ominous:
Matt Welch will be on MSNBC tonight about all this Ron Paul business. Nick Gillespie on libertarian power at CPAC. More from Gillespie on Paul's CPAC speech.
SOURCE
*************************
ObamaCare and the Medicaid Mess
States need relief from the program's inflexible rules and escalating costs
Facing growing resistance to Medicaid costs, the Obama administration's Health and Human Services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, sent a letter to states last week noting the "urgency of your State budget concerns" and suggesting some minor program changes to save money. They aren't enough.
At roughly 21% of total state spending, Medicaid is already the single largest item in state budgets, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers. Between 2008 and 2009 (the latest year for which figures are available), annual spending growth on the program nearly doubled, growing to 9% from 4.9%.
Medicaid currently covers 53 million people at an overall cost of $373.9 billion (states are responsible for about half). But starting in 2014, ObamaCare rules will add about 20 million more, according to Richard Foster, the program's chief actuary.
Yet state budgets are already being squeezed. Washington state, facing a $5.7 billion budget hole, has ordered the Medicaid program to cut its budget by 6.3%. The state cannot reduce eligibility to enroll without jeopardizing federal funding altogether. Its only option is to eliminate "optional benefits" (not federally required) such as dental services and speech therapy—one of the options suggested in Ms. Sebelius's letter. That sounds good, but it's not enough. "Even if we eliminate every single optional benefit, we still don't get there," Doug Porter, the state's Medicaid director, told Governing magazine.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, right, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, center, and Massachusetts Health and Human Secretary Judy Ann Bigby in Boston in 2009. The overhaul of the Massachusetts health-care system included significant expansion of Medicaid, and the overhaul is costing the state far more than expected.
In response to Arizona's projected $1.1 billion deficit, Gov. Jan Brewer has announced she will seek a special waiver from Health and Human Services allowing her state to remove 250,000 childless adults and about 30,000 parents (with incomes between 50% and 100% of the poverty line) from the 1.3 million individuals currently on its Medicaid rolls. The state estimates the savings at $545 million—assuming the feds grant the waiver.
To consider what the expansion of Medicaid under ObamaCare might do to the states, take a look at Massachusetts and Tennessee. In 2006, Massachusetts overhauled its entire health-care system, including a significant expansion of Medicaid. This expansion is costing the state far more than expected. Gov. Deval Patrick approved a record-setting $9.6 billion to cover its share of Medicaid costs last July. It wasn't enough. He's already gone back to the legislature twice, adding almost $600 million in additional funds.
Tennessee's experience is also illuminating. Between 1994 and 2004, it expanded its Medicaid program, called TennCare, to cover roughly one in four residents. The price tag reached a quarter of the state budget by 2004, and the consulting firm McKinsey projected that the program would consume 91% of state revenues by 2008. Ultimately, Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, declared the program a failure and kicked approximately 200,000 people off the rolls.
A number of Medicaid reforms are being discussed, especially replacing federal matching revenues with block grants. The grants would cover only mandatory services such as hospital and physician costs—and would come without any other federal strings attached.
Medicaid also could be transformed from a permanent entitlement into a temporary assistance program, much like the welfare reform of 1996. States could provide premium support for health insurance but put a time limit on benefits, and they could expect enrollees to prove that they are either working or on the hunt for employment.
Critically, Medicaid reform should allow states to experiment with the eligibility for and design of their health-care services. In 2007, for example, Gov. Mitch Daniels created the Healthy Indiana Plan, which funded 95% of the cost of consumer-directed health savings accounts for low-income residents. Healthy Indiana now covers about 43,000 low-income people not otherwise eligible for Medicaid under federal rules. The program is also popular among state employees. It's funded by cigarette taxes and Medicaid dollars thanks to a federal waiver. Mr. Daniels has asked the Obama administration for permission to use Healthy Indiana as a way to expand the state's Medicaid program.
Medicaid has been a joint federal-state mess for so long that we don't know exactly what states would do if allowed to innovate. But we certainly know what the consequences and the costs will be if they aren't.
SOURCE
**********************
Dead by the Hand of Labor
The long term impact of the labor movement on the U.S. economy is now becoming clearer with each passing day and it can best be described as an ugly blot on our republic. What should be evident to all is that widespread unionization of the workforce has not been a positive influence on our economy or on our political institutions. A quick inventory tells us that labor unions have all but destroyed the steel industry, the auto industry, the movie industry, the teaching profession, the construction trades, and the legal profession and have seriously damaged many others.
It’s time everyone understood that, to interfere with the smooth and efficient operation of an employer’s business is, in the strictest sense of the word, theft; that there are no constitutional protections that allow one man to acquire the property of another through coercion; that there is no right to interfere with or dictate the rules or methods by which an employer conducts his/her business; and that there is no right to cause the property of another to decrease in value through work stoppages or boycotts. If workers are unhappy with their pay or with the conditions of their employment, they do have another right to rely on… they have a right to find work elsewhere.
In his book, And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry, John Hoerr, of BusinessWeek, describes what happened to the U.S. Steel industry at the hands of I.W. Abel and the United Steelworkers of America. Hoerr tells us, “By the early 1980s, American steelworkers were the best-paid industrial workers in the world. From 1967 to 1979, total hourly employment costs in the steel industry rose 180 percent, or an annual rise of 12.1 percent, while the industry's productivity grew barely 2 percent a year. When this cozy, anticompetitive world was punctured by lower-cost foreign steel, the union had only one answer: import barriers."
Now that once-great industry, the symbol of American economic superiority, is gone, and so are hundreds of thousands of its jobs. It was strangled to death by the steelworkers union.
What steelworkers have done to the steel industry, autoworkers have done to the auto industry. As Robert J. Dewar, a former Ford Motor Company general foreman tells us in his book, A Savage Factory: An Eyewitness Account of the Auto Industry’s Self-Destruction, “the UAW arsenal easily outgunned management. Production was sabotaged. Critical employees were absent when high production was most needed. Tools mysteriously disappeared. Bad quality was run purposely. The weakest, least desirable employees were protected with the full power of the labor contract. When management and the UAW stood eyeball to eyeball, management always backed down – they had to – productivity and profitability hung in the balance.”
The only unionized sectors of our economy that have continued to grow and prosper, through good times and bad, are defense-related industries and government bureaucracy… sectors of our economy that are unaffected by the same economic realities that govern decision-making in other sectors of our economy. But there is little mystery to it.
So long as the world remains a dangerous place for freedom-loving people and the United States must maintain a prohibitive military machine, the amount of money spent to support the defense industry will remain sacrosanct and defense contractors will pay whatever their unions demand.
So long as unions continue to soak their members for hundreds of millions of dollars in dues, they will continue to purchase the loyalty of liberals and Democrats who will support every uneconomic advantage that unions demand.
So long as Democrats continue to expand the size and scope of government, expanding the bloated bureaucracy and creating jobs for hordes of unionized government workers, we have little hope of controlling spending or reducing our national indebtedness.
So long as the unholy alliance between labor unions and the Democrat Party exists, and so long as liberals and Democrats continue to put the interests of union bosses ahead of the national interest, our economy will continue to suffer and our nation will continue on the decline.
So long as the docile American taxpayer remains willing to pick up the tab for this incestuous relationship, and so long as unions are allowed to function as if they have no responsibility for the national interests, we have little chance of leaving anything of value for future generations. Unless we bring labor unions under control, as Governor Haley is attempting to do in South Carolina, the epitaph on our national tombstone will read, “Dead by the hand of labor.”
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)
****************************
There's a fantastical "this can't be really happening" feeling to the continued extent and power of Ron Paul's popularity among the most dedicated young activists within the Republican Party, not only to those like me who've been largely cheering him from the margins of the margins of American political power for decades, but also for those who have been actively trying to drive him off even those margins.
Herewith, a survey of some recent flailings at Ron Paul's repeat CPAC poll victory, and the ever-larger impact of Pauls--both Ron in the House (and the prospective GOP presidential field) and now Rand in the Senate.
* Young Americans for Freedom follows in the kicking-out-of-the-Right spirit of their founding father William Buckley and boots Paul from their advisory board; as Dave Weigel notes at Slate, internal division results, including YAF's own "coordination intern" quitting, and a public dustup with rival right-youth group Young Americans for Liberty, more reliably Paulite.
* Right-wing radio dude Kevin McCullough sputters at Fox News's site about the "bizarre nature and overall oddity" of a right-wing political gathering that gave so much play to Ron Paul and Gary Johnson, accusing the libertarian leaning of disrespectfully "hijacking" CPAC's "mission," moaning about an "unabated" libertarian streak.
Look, if the excited politically motivated younger folk who actually show up at conventions about politics and activism dig Paul and Johnson, it just might behoove the GOP powers to mind them rather than distance themselves from something as apparently unconservative as limited government--but something there is about a libertarian that makes even simple political horse sense go out the window; as McCullough declares: "libertarians are the worst form of political affiliation in the nation."
* Bernie Quigley at The Hill thinks that the more palatable Johnson rather than Ron Paul will be the ultimate successful standardbearer for the libertarian tinge of the GOP on the national stage, but notes that hysterical reactions against them (though he is focusing on prog-liberal angst, the same is true of trad-right angst) are "prelude to a nervous breakdown." And he sums up the surprising rise of Paul Power:
"What the Pauls have achieved was unimaginable just five years ago, when Ron Paul’s diatribes before Congress were dutifully transcribed only in small, esoteric libertarian journals. Today, if this week’s CPAC convention in D.C. is any indication, libertarianism is the creative rising karma in the Republican Party."
* Right-wing thought leader Donald Trump accuses Paul of un-electability; Paul asks, how many elections has Donald Trump won? (That the anti-Ron Paul forces are actually using an argument that depends on admitting there is any scintilla of a possibility of a hope he could win the presidential nomination is kind of staggering.)
* Ron Paul makes it clear that he's more radical than the right-wing's Tea Party populist troops on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," complaining that:
some Tea Partiers aren’t measuring up when it comes to the tough defense and entitlement program cuts he believes are needed to save the United States from economic cataclysm. “They don’t want you to touch Social Security. They don’t want you to touch anything but Obamacare,” Paul says. “Some of them are real Republicans and they wouldn’t dare touch Bush’s increase in medical care costs, you know, prescription health programs.” “They treat the symptoms and they don’t look at it philosophically,” he adds.
* Jim Antle reported in the Guardian on the tensions between the Paulite CPACers and the others, including Paul fans booing Bush-era GOP heroes Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld:
The event attendees were mostly social conservatives. The audience was more willing to contemplate Pentagon budget scrutiny – but still more hawkish than not and very concerned about radical Islam. The boycotts did not hurt attendance: the conference attracted more than 11,000 conservative activists and its DC venue was packed with people.
But the hostility between Ron Paul's supporters and everyone else was palpable. When Paul won the straw poll, about half the crowd shouted "Ron Paul!" – but the other half booed. When Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who is being targeted for a possible Tea Party challenge in 2012, attempted to defend his vote for the Wall Street bailout, Paulites cried out, "Liar!" This prompted a Hatch supporter to sternly remind the audience, "As conservatives, we can disagree without being disagreeable."
Like I noted after his last CPAC poll victory, there's a strong likelihood that if you didn't vote for Paul, you hate him--he was likely few people's second choice (except maybe Johnson voters).
Why can't the powers that be of the Right handle Paul? I explained this last year after his unexpected first CPAC poll victory, and nothing has changed except his continued and expanding popularity, and that of his senator son, make it all the more ominous:
There’s a very good reason anyone with any skin in the game of the status quo—politician, commentator, or citizen—has to find it very difficult to take Paul seriously. That so many citizens and activists in the Tea Party movement are taking him seriously is scaring the establishment for good reason.
Paul doesn’t just represent an opposition politician, he represents an absolute denial that “the system” makes any sense, has any justice, or is sustainable. It is this radical oppositionism that makes it so easy for standard issue pundits to just write his fans off as nuts and a bit scary.
Newsweek started to get at this important aspect of the Paul phenomenon, noting that “tea-partiers, Paulites, etc. seem less interested in finding practical solutions to Washington's endemic problems than in tearing down Washington itself. As the 2010 elections approach, this nihilistic feeling will only grow stronger.”
That’s because the radical solutions that the Paul worldview demands—an end to overseas military adventurism, ending government’s ability to manipulate paper currency, severe cuts in spending on all the myriad income-shifting promises Washington has made the past 80 years—don’t register as “practical solutions” to (for lack of a better word) the establishment. They seem like nihilism, though they are actually a belief in the American Constitution.
Any standard Republican or movement conservative really can’t take Paul seriously without massive cognitive dissonance. You mean, we really really have to obey the Constitution, we really can’t keep borrowing and inflating forever?
Signs like the CPAC vote of a significant number of politically active youngsters believing in Ron Paul are indeed a sign of an apocalypse of sorts for the world that most politicians and pundits know. If Ron Paul is right, then everything they know is wrong.
Matt Welch will be on MSNBC tonight about all this Ron Paul business. Nick Gillespie on libertarian power at CPAC. More from Gillespie on Paul's CPAC speech.
SOURCE
*************************
ObamaCare and the Medicaid Mess
States need relief from the program's inflexible rules and escalating costs
Facing growing resistance to Medicaid costs, the Obama administration's Health and Human Services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, sent a letter to states last week noting the "urgency of your State budget concerns" and suggesting some minor program changes to save money. They aren't enough.
At roughly 21% of total state spending, Medicaid is already the single largest item in state budgets, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers. Between 2008 and 2009 (the latest year for which figures are available), annual spending growth on the program nearly doubled, growing to 9% from 4.9%.
Medicaid currently covers 53 million people at an overall cost of $373.9 billion (states are responsible for about half). But starting in 2014, ObamaCare rules will add about 20 million more, according to Richard Foster, the program's chief actuary.
Yet state budgets are already being squeezed. Washington state, facing a $5.7 billion budget hole, has ordered the Medicaid program to cut its budget by 6.3%. The state cannot reduce eligibility to enroll without jeopardizing federal funding altogether. Its only option is to eliminate "optional benefits" (not federally required) such as dental services and speech therapy—one of the options suggested in Ms. Sebelius's letter. That sounds good, but it's not enough. "Even if we eliminate every single optional benefit, we still don't get there," Doug Porter, the state's Medicaid director, told Governing magazine.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, right, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, center, and Massachusetts Health and Human Secretary Judy Ann Bigby in Boston in 2009. The overhaul of the Massachusetts health-care system included significant expansion of Medicaid, and the overhaul is costing the state far more than expected.
In response to Arizona's projected $1.1 billion deficit, Gov. Jan Brewer has announced she will seek a special waiver from Health and Human Services allowing her state to remove 250,000 childless adults and about 30,000 parents (with incomes between 50% and 100% of the poverty line) from the 1.3 million individuals currently on its Medicaid rolls. The state estimates the savings at $545 million—assuming the feds grant the waiver.
To consider what the expansion of Medicaid under ObamaCare might do to the states, take a look at Massachusetts and Tennessee. In 2006, Massachusetts overhauled its entire health-care system, including a significant expansion of Medicaid. This expansion is costing the state far more than expected. Gov. Deval Patrick approved a record-setting $9.6 billion to cover its share of Medicaid costs last July. It wasn't enough. He's already gone back to the legislature twice, adding almost $600 million in additional funds.
Tennessee's experience is also illuminating. Between 1994 and 2004, it expanded its Medicaid program, called TennCare, to cover roughly one in four residents. The price tag reached a quarter of the state budget by 2004, and the consulting firm McKinsey projected that the program would consume 91% of state revenues by 2008. Ultimately, Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, declared the program a failure and kicked approximately 200,000 people off the rolls.
A number of Medicaid reforms are being discussed, especially replacing federal matching revenues with block grants. The grants would cover only mandatory services such as hospital and physician costs—and would come without any other federal strings attached.
Medicaid also could be transformed from a permanent entitlement into a temporary assistance program, much like the welfare reform of 1996. States could provide premium support for health insurance but put a time limit on benefits, and they could expect enrollees to prove that they are either working or on the hunt for employment.
Critically, Medicaid reform should allow states to experiment with the eligibility for and design of their health-care services. In 2007, for example, Gov. Mitch Daniels created the Healthy Indiana Plan, which funded 95% of the cost of consumer-directed health savings accounts for low-income residents. Healthy Indiana now covers about 43,000 low-income people not otherwise eligible for Medicaid under federal rules. The program is also popular among state employees. It's funded by cigarette taxes and Medicaid dollars thanks to a federal waiver. Mr. Daniels has asked the Obama administration for permission to use Healthy Indiana as a way to expand the state's Medicaid program.
Medicaid has been a joint federal-state mess for so long that we don't know exactly what states would do if allowed to innovate. But we certainly know what the consequences and the costs will be if they aren't.
SOURCE
**********************
Dead by the Hand of Labor
The long term impact of the labor movement on the U.S. economy is now becoming clearer with each passing day and it can best be described as an ugly blot on our republic. What should be evident to all is that widespread unionization of the workforce has not been a positive influence on our economy or on our political institutions. A quick inventory tells us that labor unions have all but destroyed the steel industry, the auto industry, the movie industry, the teaching profession, the construction trades, and the legal profession and have seriously damaged many others.
It’s time everyone understood that, to interfere with the smooth and efficient operation of an employer’s business is, in the strictest sense of the word, theft; that there are no constitutional protections that allow one man to acquire the property of another through coercion; that there is no right to interfere with or dictate the rules or methods by which an employer conducts his/her business; and that there is no right to cause the property of another to decrease in value through work stoppages or boycotts. If workers are unhappy with their pay or with the conditions of their employment, they do have another right to rely on… they have a right to find work elsewhere.
In his book, And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry, John Hoerr, of BusinessWeek, describes what happened to the U.S. Steel industry at the hands of I.W. Abel and the United Steelworkers of America. Hoerr tells us, “By the early 1980s, American steelworkers were the best-paid industrial workers in the world. From 1967 to 1979, total hourly employment costs in the steel industry rose 180 percent, or an annual rise of 12.1 percent, while the industry's productivity grew barely 2 percent a year. When this cozy, anticompetitive world was punctured by lower-cost foreign steel, the union had only one answer: import barriers."
Now that once-great industry, the symbol of American economic superiority, is gone, and so are hundreds of thousands of its jobs. It was strangled to death by the steelworkers union.
What steelworkers have done to the steel industry, autoworkers have done to the auto industry. As Robert J. Dewar, a former Ford Motor Company general foreman tells us in his book, A Savage Factory: An Eyewitness Account of the Auto Industry’s Self-Destruction, “the UAW arsenal easily outgunned management. Production was sabotaged. Critical employees were absent when high production was most needed. Tools mysteriously disappeared. Bad quality was run purposely. The weakest, least desirable employees were protected with the full power of the labor contract. When management and the UAW stood eyeball to eyeball, management always backed down – they had to – productivity and profitability hung in the balance.”
The only unionized sectors of our economy that have continued to grow and prosper, through good times and bad, are defense-related industries and government bureaucracy… sectors of our economy that are unaffected by the same economic realities that govern decision-making in other sectors of our economy. But there is little mystery to it.
So long as the world remains a dangerous place for freedom-loving people and the United States must maintain a prohibitive military machine, the amount of money spent to support the defense industry will remain sacrosanct and defense contractors will pay whatever their unions demand.
So long as unions continue to soak their members for hundreds of millions of dollars in dues, they will continue to purchase the loyalty of liberals and Democrats who will support every uneconomic advantage that unions demand.
So long as Democrats continue to expand the size and scope of government, expanding the bloated bureaucracy and creating jobs for hordes of unionized government workers, we have little hope of controlling spending or reducing our national indebtedness.
So long as the unholy alliance between labor unions and the Democrat Party exists, and so long as liberals and Democrats continue to put the interests of union bosses ahead of the national interest, our economy will continue to suffer and our nation will continue on the decline.
So long as the docile American taxpayer remains willing to pick up the tab for this incestuous relationship, and so long as unions are allowed to function as if they have no responsibility for the national interests, we have little chance of leaving anything of value for future generations. Unless we bring labor unions under control, as Governor Haley is attempting to do in South Carolina, the epitaph on our national tombstone will read, “Dead by the hand of labor.”
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)
****************************
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Moral conservatism makes fiscal conservatism possible
Conventional political wisdom tells us that there are social conservatives and then there are fiscal conservatives. This is a canard. Though we appear determined to learn this lesson the hard way, the tenets of conservative philosophy cannot be split down the middle.
A moral, productive people are necessary to maintain a healthy society - you cannot have one without the other. They are wholly dependent upon one another, not upon government. At the end of the day, there simply is no adequate substitute for personal responsibility. Man cannot achieve as a dependent what he can achieve for himself.
Not only are the social and the fiscal inseparable, to a large extent it is social conditions that are directly driving our economic dilemma. America has been fundamentally transformed (disintegrated) by progressive fashions and trends. Within the last several decades these trends broke up the family unit, said it wasn't needed anymore. Fathers were driven away for larger welfare payments. Mom was "liberated" and sent back to work. The stigma once connected to divorce and abortion was removed. Within all these shifts, we find the deliberate weakening of morality and an absence of personal responsibility at the heart of the matter.
With our tacit consent the progressives consequently built a dependent class, a permanent underclass demanding an ever-growing safety net. Today, the plague has grown so severe that we send children to public schools during the summers just to insure they are fed.
As a result of society's supposed "enlightenment" our families are both smaller and more fractured, increasing the demand for public care of the elderly in lieu of the greater family involvement that was instilled in the society of our past. All along the way we continue to dip into a bottomless public treasury that is non-existent.
The public education racket
Then there's the damage to our public education system. Though we have thrown unprecedented sums of money at our education problems, data proves that the more we are forced to pay the less we actually get.
The nation suffers from too much extortionist college loan debt, even though not all students should be directed to higher degrees, too many students lacking basic "life skills", and the escalating costs of remedial courses required to deal with declining skills.
Many states and locales are finally dealing with the harsh reality that there's no longer enough money to go around. Though a myriad of problems contribute to driving up costs in public education the factor that no government agency or amount of tax-dollars can overcome is the utter lack of basic values a child is taught at home.
Paying for the sins of others
We all pay more for the lack of morality exercised by a few. Many retail items we consume are necessarily marked-up to cover losses from shoplifting. Similarly, insurance premiums, credit card interest rates and banking fees are higher due to irresponsible behavior. In the financial arena everything from greedy financial executives to growing trends such as bankruptcy and foreclosure cost everyone.
Progressive trends have even pressured local and federal law enforcement to abdicate its responsibilities, leading to a nation over-run with 12 million undocumented aliens. So many that we're told we could not possibly shoulder the expense of effectively dealing with the problem. This too is a moral issue because it is a breach of social contract and public trust. Worse yet, it is the attempted removal of the stigma of illegality.
Hand-in-hand with our laze-faire attitudes on immigration we have subsequently experienced increasing demands on our systems of education, health care, law enforcement and incarceration.
America has become collectively conditioned to ignore the pain, suffering and emotional scars that come with immoral behavior. While we may have learned to bear the social costs, there are growing concerns that the accompanying economic price may prove insurmountable.
The next time someone tells you they are a fiscal conservative, ask them to explain just how that line of thinking works.
More HERE
**********************
Dodd-Frank 'help' hurts bank customers
"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Ronald Reagan called those "the nine most terrifying words in the English language" – and with good reason. Nowhere do we see good intentions go awry more regularly than in the hallowed halls of government. Case in point: bank fees. You'll likely be paying more in the coming months, if you're not already, for many ordinary transactions.
Banks are looking at how they can slap additional fees on credit cards and checking accounts, as well as ways to make more money from ATMs and debit-card purchases. Why? No, it's not old-fashioned greed. After all, these institutions are competing with each other for your business. They want to attract customers.
Unfortunately, though, they're coping with the fact that last year's much-heralded financial "reform" legislation – better known as Dodd-Frank, after its congressional champions – is dictating what they can and can't charge for certain transactions.
As part of Dodd-Frank, The Wall Street Journal recently noted, the Federal Reserve has proposed limiting what banks can charge for debit-card purchases, from an average rate of 44 cents a transaction, to seven to 12 cents – a drop of as much as 84 percent. Great, you may be saying, I'd like to pay less.
But banks can't, and won't, just kiss this revenue goodbye. The amount being reduced goes to the financial institution that issues the card, and the loss of this income may cause certain card issuers to either drop their cards or limit their availability.
That's why these institutions are looking at other ways to make up the lost funds. "We don't want to raise fees on our customers, but unfortunately, regulation is forcing us to do it," a spokeswoman for Chase bank told the Journal.
One of the stated purposes of Dodd-Frank was "to protect consumers from abusive financial services practices." Debit-card fees aren't fun, but they're hardly abusive. And even if they were, now we have government trying to "protect" us in typically inept fashion. We'll wind up paying as much as before, if not more, just at different times and for different reasons. Thanks for the "help," Uncle Sam. Government to the rescue, huh?
The problems with Dodd-Frank don't end there. The law also created a Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, which, we were told, would protect consumers from unfair practices. But the new bureau is no mere watchdog. It has broad powers to limit the financial products and services that banks can offer consumers. Yes, the government will "protect" you by limiting your access to certain financial products, even in situations where you know and understand the risks.
Making credit more expensive and harder to get is not exactly a help to consumers. But that's the practical effect of Dodd-Frank.
Worse, we won't know the full impact of the legislation for some time to come. It required nearly a dozen government agencies to write hundreds of rules, reports and studies – and, as they say, the devil's in the details.
In an effort to get some handle on the impending costs, House Republicans recently asked nine of these agencies to detail how much it will cost them to enforce Dodd-Frank. "It is our responsibility to ensure that federal agencies have the tools they need to carry out congressional mandates," House Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., and Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, told regulators. "In addition, it is our responsibility to ensure that mandates are not overly burdensome or wasteful of taxpayer money."
Indeed it is. Here's another tip: Stop being so "helpful." Our wallets really can't take much more.
SOURCE
**************************
America's nonsensical tax system
Take my situation as an example. First, in an income tax system that made sense, I would be expected to pay the same percentage of my income in taxes as everyone else. That is the only fair way to operate an income tax system in a free country where everyone is supposed to be equal under the law. If the tax rate is 10 percent, then the person making $1 million would pay $100,000 and the person making $10,000 would pay $1,000. That is called fairness.
Unfortunately, our income tax system is a so-called “progressive” system where the more you make, the higher percentage you have to pay. Not very fair, but that is what we have.
My gross salary, then, puts me in the 25 percent marginal tax bracket. In a tax system that makes sense, I would be expected to pay 25 percent of my salary in taxes.
But no. The federal government decided to use the tax code to punish those who are not married. Because I am married, I actually drop into the 15 percent tax bracket. I should be expected, then, to pay 15 percent of my gross salary in taxes.
Not so fast. There are a gazillion tax deductions, exemptions and credits. Many of these have nothing to do with sound fiscal policy and exist merely for political reasons to achieve some social engineering result, which is certainly no way to run an income tax system.
After applying all the deductions for which I am eligible, I dropped into the 10 percent tax bracket. So, again, in a fair and sane system, I should be expected to pay 10 percent of my income in taxes.
Wait, now we add in the credits, which drops my tax burden to zero. While it sounds insane that someone with my salary would not owe any federal income taxes, it gets worse.
My employer, acting as a tax collector for the federal government, took $14 out of my paycheck in 2010 to cover any potential income tax I might owe. In a sane system, I would get a check from the government for $14 and we would call it even. Not so in 21st century America.
Instead of me paying the federal government a percentage of my income, the government is sending me a check not only for the $14 it took from me but for an additional amount equal to 12.04 percent of my gross pay.
Instead of me paying 25 percent in taxes, the government is paying me 12.04 percent. That is simply backward and there are probably millions of taxpayers similarly situated as I am.
Liberals want to increase taxes on the rich. That makes no sense. According to the IRS, in 2008, the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 38 percent of all federal individual income taxes, more than the bottom 95 percent, but earned only 20 percent of adjusted gross income.
Yet, a middle-class wage earner such as myself in a household near the national median for income, netted a 12.04 percent windfall.
Where is the fairness in that?
Perhaps, instead of taking more money from the rich and giving it to workers such as myself, why not stop the tax giveaway? No matter how many credits or deductions a person has, the federal government should not be returning more than it took for that year.
It is insane for the federal government to send millions of people thousands of dollars every year as part of its tax system. It is supposed to be tax collection, not a tax giveaway.
I fear for the future of any government that thinks sound fiscal policy includes borrowing $1.5 trillion every year while passing out free money to a large percentage of its citizens.
SOURCE
*************************
ELSEWHERE
"Senior" journalist, Elizabeth Drew, has a carping article in The NY Review of Books telling us how good old sincere Obama is being persecuted by the evil GOP. Keith Burgess-Jackson takes her apart. He starts out: "Elizabeth Drew fancies herself a journalist, but she is little more than a political hack".
A reminder that most Egyptians are Muslims: "Top CBS foreign correspondent Lara Logan suffered a "brutal" sexual assault at the hands of a mob in Egypt while covering the downfall of president Hosni Mubarak, her US network says. "She and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration. It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into a frenzy," CBS said in a statement. "In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. "She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers." [Western women are fair game to Muslim extremists]
Iranian regime suppresses Communist demonstration: "Iranian riot police fired tear gas and paintballs at protesters holding anti-government demonstrations in Tehran on Monday, websites and witnesses said, while an Iranian news agency reported that a gunshot killed a bystander. The report by the Fars news agency said a number of people were also wounded by the gunfire and blamed the outlawed former rebel group, the People's Mujahedeen of Iran"
The state never apologizes: "The federal law allowing for attorney fees limits recovery to individual and corporate defendants under a certain net worth. Congress intended the law to encourage small businessmen to challenge unfair regulatory actions. The FTC’s decision in Isely’s case effectively nullifies this. ... Leibowitz’s precedent sends a clear signal that no small businessman has any hope of winning anything more than a Pyrrhic victory against the FTC: Even a person who prevails in litigation will face financial ruin to pay their attorney fees."
A growing burden: Taxes and fees on wireless service: "Wireless users across the United States continue to face excessive and discriminatory federal, state, and local taxes and fees on their wireless bills. After several years in which taxes and fees on wireless users stabilized and even fell slightly, the trend toward higher impositions resumed between 2009 and 2010. Wireless users now face a combined federal, state, and local tax and fee burden of 16.3 percent, a rate two times higher than the average retail sales tax rate and the highest wireless rate since 2005."
Secret sex offender list: Is your kid on it?: "Other sex offender lists, as horrific and unjustified as they may be, at least wait until someone is convicted of a crime, even if the law itself is ludicrous. But this list requires no conviction, only a faceless bureaucrat who thinks their conclusion is 'reasonable.'"
High-speed pork: "Far from serving 80 percent of Americans, Obama's trains will serve only about 8 percent. High-speed rail's main market is downtown-to-downtown travel. But little more than 7 percent of Americans work in big-city downtowns, and fewer than 1 percent live there. Few aside from this fairly wealthy elite will regularly ride high-speed trains. For the few who use it, high-speed rail will substitute an expensive form of travel for much more affordable forms."
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)
****************************
Conventional political wisdom tells us that there are social conservatives and then there are fiscal conservatives. This is a canard. Though we appear determined to learn this lesson the hard way, the tenets of conservative philosophy cannot be split down the middle.
A moral, productive people are necessary to maintain a healthy society - you cannot have one without the other. They are wholly dependent upon one another, not upon government. At the end of the day, there simply is no adequate substitute for personal responsibility. Man cannot achieve as a dependent what he can achieve for himself.
Not only are the social and the fiscal inseparable, to a large extent it is social conditions that are directly driving our economic dilemma. America has been fundamentally transformed (disintegrated) by progressive fashions and trends. Within the last several decades these trends broke up the family unit, said it wasn't needed anymore. Fathers were driven away for larger welfare payments. Mom was "liberated" and sent back to work. The stigma once connected to divorce and abortion was removed. Within all these shifts, we find the deliberate weakening of morality and an absence of personal responsibility at the heart of the matter.
With our tacit consent the progressives consequently built a dependent class, a permanent underclass demanding an ever-growing safety net. Today, the plague has grown so severe that we send children to public schools during the summers just to insure they are fed.
As a result of society's supposed "enlightenment" our families are both smaller and more fractured, increasing the demand for public care of the elderly in lieu of the greater family involvement that was instilled in the society of our past. All along the way we continue to dip into a bottomless public treasury that is non-existent.
The public education racket
Then there's the damage to our public education system. Though we have thrown unprecedented sums of money at our education problems, data proves that the more we are forced to pay the less we actually get.
The nation suffers from too much extortionist college loan debt, even though not all students should be directed to higher degrees, too many students lacking basic "life skills", and the escalating costs of remedial courses required to deal with declining skills.
Many states and locales are finally dealing with the harsh reality that there's no longer enough money to go around. Though a myriad of problems contribute to driving up costs in public education the factor that no government agency or amount of tax-dollars can overcome is the utter lack of basic values a child is taught at home.
Paying for the sins of others
We all pay more for the lack of morality exercised by a few. Many retail items we consume are necessarily marked-up to cover losses from shoplifting. Similarly, insurance premiums, credit card interest rates and banking fees are higher due to irresponsible behavior. In the financial arena everything from greedy financial executives to growing trends such as bankruptcy and foreclosure cost everyone.
Progressive trends have even pressured local and federal law enforcement to abdicate its responsibilities, leading to a nation over-run with 12 million undocumented aliens. So many that we're told we could not possibly shoulder the expense of effectively dealing with the problem. This too is a moral issue because it is a breach of social contract and public trust. Worse yet, it is the attempted removal of the stigma of illegality.
Hand-in-hand with our laze-faire attitudes on immigration we have subsequently experienced increasing demands on our systems of education, health care, law enforcement and incarceration.
America has become collectively conditioned to ignore the pain, suffering and emotional scars that come with immoral behavior. While we may have learned to bear the social costs, there are growing concerns that the accompanying economic price may prove insurmountable.
The next time someone tells you they are a fiscal conservative, ask them to explain just how that line of thinking works.
More HERE
**********************
Dodd-Frank 'help' hurts bank customers
"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Ronald Reagan called those "the nine most terrifying words in the English language" – and with good reason. Nowhere do we see good intentions go awry more regularly than in the hallowed halls of government. Case in point: bank fees. You'll likely be paying more in the coming months, if you're not already, for many ordinary transactions.
Banks are looking at how they can slap additional fees on credit cards and checking accounts, as well as ways to make more money from ATMs and debit-card purchases. Why? No, it's not old-fashioned greed. After all, these institutions are competing with each other for your business. They want to attract customers.
Unfortunately, though, they're coping with the fact that last year's much-heralded financial "reform" legislation – better known as Dodd-Frank, after its congressional champions – is dictating what they can and can't charge for certain transactions.
As part of Dodd-Frank, The Wall Street Journal recently noted, the Federal Reserve has proposed limiting what banks can charge for debit-card purchases, from an average rate of 44 cents a transaction, to seven to 12 cents – a drop of as much as 84 percent. Great, you may be saying, I'd like to pay less.
But banks can't, and won't, just kiss this revenue goodbye. The amount being reduced goes to the financial institution that issues the card, and the loss of this income may cause certain card issuers to either drop their cards or limit their availability.
That's why these institutions are looking at other ways to make up the lost funds. "We don't want to raise fees on our customers, but unfortunately, regulation is forcing us to do it," a spokeswoman for Chase bank told the Journal.
One of the stated purposes of Dodd-Frank was "to protect consumers from abusive financial services practices." Debit-card fees aren't fun, but they're hardly abusive. And even if they were, now we have government trying to "protect" us in typically inept fashion. We'll wind up paying as much as before, if not more, just at different times and for different reasons. Thanks for the "help," Uncle Sam. Government to the rescue, huh?
The problems with Dodd-Frank don't end there. The law also created a Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, which, we were told, would protect consumers from unfair practices. But the new bureau is no mere watchdog. It has broad powers to limit the financial products and services that banks can offer consumers. Yes, the government will "protect" you by limiting your access to certain financial products, even in situations where you know and understand the risks.
Making credit more expensive and harder to get is not exactly a help to consumers. But that's the practical effect of Dodd-Frank.
Worse, we won't know the full impact of the legislation for some time to come. It required nearly a dozen government agencies to write hundreds of rules, reports and studies – and, as they say, the devil's in the details.
In an effort to get some handle on the impending costs, House Republicans recently asked nine of these agencies to detail how much it will cost them to enforce Dodd-Frank. "It is our responsibility to ensure that federal agencies have the tools they need to carry out congressional mandates," House Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., and Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, told regulators. "In addition, it is our responsibility to ensure that mandates are not overly burdensome or wasteful of taxpayer money."
Indeed it is. Here's another tip: Stop being so "helpful." Our wallets really can't take much more.
SOURCE
**************************
America's nonsensical tax system
Take my situation as an example. First, in an income tax system that made sense, I would be expected to pay the same percentage of my income in taxes as everyone else. That is the only fair way to operate an income tax system in a free country where everyone is supposed to be equal under the law. If the tax rate is 10 percent, then the person making $1 million would pay $100,000 and the person making $10,000 would pay $1,000. That is called fairness.
Unfortunately, our income tax system is a so-called “progressive” system where the more you make, the higher percentage you have to pay. Not very fair, but that is what we have.
My gross salary, then, puts me in the 25 percent marginal tax bracket. In a tax system that makes sense, I would be expected to pay 25 percent of my salary in taxes.
But no. The federal government decided to use the tax code to punish those who are not married. Because I am married, I actually drop into the 15 percent tax bracket. I should be expected, then, to pay 15 percent of my gross salary in taxes.
Not so fast. There are a gazillion tax deductions, exemptions and credits. Many of these have nothing to do with sound fiscal policy and exist merely for political reasons to achieve some social engineering result, which is certainly no way to run an income tax system.
After applying all the deductions for which I am eligible, I dropped into the 10 percent tax bracket. So, again, in a fair and sane system, I should be expected to pay 10 percent of my income in taxes.
Wait, now we add in the credits, which drops my tax burden to zero. While it sounds insane that someone with my salary would not owe any federal income taxes, it gets worse.
My employer, acting as a tax collector for the federal government, took $14 out of my paycheck in 2010 to cover any potential income tax I might owe. In a sane system, I would get a check from the government for $14 and we would call it even. Not so in 21st century America.
Instead of me paying the federal government a percentage of my income, the government is sending me a check not only for the $14 it took from me but for an additional amount equal to 12.04 percent of my gross pay.
Instead of me paying 25 percent in taxes, the government is paying me 12.04 percent. That is simply backward and there are probably millions of taxpayers similarly situated as I am.
Liberals want to increase taxes on the rich. That makes no sense. According to the IRS, in 2008, the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 38 percent of all federal individual income taxes, more than the bottom 95 percent, but earned only 20 percent of adjusted gross income.
Yet, a middle-class wage earner such as myself in a household near the national median for income, netted a 12.04 percent windfall.
Where is the fairness in that?
Perhaps, instead of taking more money from the rich and giving it to workers such as myself, why not stop the tax giveaway? No matter how many credits or deductions a person has, the federal government should not be returning more than it took for that year.
It is insane for the federal government to send millions of people thousands of dollars every year as part of its tax system. It is supposed to be tax collection, not a tax giveaway.
I fear for the future of any government that thinks sound fiscal policy includes borrowing $1.5 trillion every year while passing out free money to a large percentage of its citizens.
SOURCE
*************************
ELSEWHERE
"Senior" journalist, Elizabeth Drew, has a carping article in The NY Review of Books telling us how good old sincere Obama is being persecuted by the evil GOP. Keith Burgess-Jackson takes her apart. He starts out: "Elizabeth Drew fancies herself a journalist, but she is little more than a political hack".
A reminder that most Egyptians are Muslims: "Top CBS foreign correspondent Lara Logan suffered a "brutal" sexual assault at the hands of a mob in Egypt while covering the downfall of president Hosni Mubarak, her US network says. "She and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration. It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into a frenzy," CBS said in a statement. "In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. "She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers." [Western women are fair game to Muslim extremists]
Iranian regime suppresses Communist demonstration: "Iranian riot police fired tear gas and paintballs at protesters holding anti-government demonstrations in Tehran on Monday, websites and witnesses said, while an Iranian news agency reported that a gunshot killed a bystander. The report by the Fars news agency said a number of people were also wounded by the gunfire and blamed the outlawed former rebel group, the People's Mujahedeen of Iran"
The state never apologizes: "The federal law allowing for attorney fees limits recovery to individual and corporate defendants under a certain net worth. Congress intended the law to encourage small businessmen to challenge unfair regulatory actions. The FTC’s decision in Isely’s case effectively nullifies this. ... Leibowitz’s precedent sends a clear signal that no small businessman has any hope of winning anything more than a Pyrrhic victory against the FTC: Even a person who prevails in litigation will face financial ruin to pay their attorney fees."
A growing burden: Taxes and fees on wireless service: "Wireless users across the United States continue to face excessive and discriminatory federal, state, and local taxes and fees on their wireless bills. After several years in which taxes and fees on wireless users stabilized and even fell slightly, the trend toward higher impositions resumed between 2009 and 2010. Wireless users now face a combined federal, state, and local tax and fee burden of 16.3 percent, a rate two times higher than the average retail sales tax rate and the highest wireless rate since 2005."
Secret sex offender list: Is your kid on it?: "Other sex offender lists, as horrific and unjustified as they may be, at least wait until someone is convicted of a crime, even if the law itself is ludicrous. But this list requires no conviction, only a faceless bureaucrat who thinks their conclusion is 'reasonable.'"
High-speed pork: "Far from serving 80 percent of Americans, Obama's trains will serve only about 8 percent. High-speed rail's main market is downtown-to-downtown travel. But little more than 7 percent of Americans work in big-city downtowns, and fewer than 1 percent live there. Few aside from this fairly wealthy elite will regularly ride high-speed trains. For the few who use it, high-speed rail will substitute an expensive form of travel for much more affordable forms."
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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