The 'BBC Left' is using Murdoch hacking to get revenge

Left-wing politicians and broadcasters do not want to debate ideas but they do want to remove their opponents

By Janet Daley (An American-born journalist writing from Britain)

It was a broadcasters' event some years ago. I had been invited to speak on a favourite subject: the BBC hegemony in broadcast news and the risk that its own package of tendentious assumptions – that Euroscepticism was a lunatic fringe irrelevance, that anyone who expressed concern about immigration was a bigot, etc, etc – was going unchallenged in the mass media. After I had said my piece, a BBC producer in the audience asked whether, since I was so concerned about the dangers of large media organisations, I did not have the same objection to the existence of the "Murdoch empire".

"No-o-o," I replied patiently, I did not have the same objection. If I did not wish to support Mr Murdoch's enterprises I could refrain from buying his newspapers or subscribing to his television service – and no one could threaten me with arrest and imprisonment for so doing. This was, I suggested, a rather significant difference between the two media corporations.

In the startled silence of his response, I assumed that it had never occurred to him (as I say, this was some years ago) that anyone could question the justification for the legally enforced licence fee since it was clearly, for him, rooted in the inherent moral goodness of the BBC – and by implication of the ethical standards which it purveyed. The BBC may be trying to inculcate a bit more self-critical awareness among its personnel now but that smug righteousness of the Left-liberal media class has not gone away. It is, as you may have noticed, in something of a triumphal frenzy at the moment.

This has gone way, way beyond phone hacking. It is now about payback. Gordon Brown's surreal effusion in the House last week may have made it embarrassingly explicit, but the odour of vengeance has been detectable from the start: not just from politicians who have suffered the disfavour of Murdoch's papers, or the trade unions (and their political allies) who have never forgiven him for Wapping, but from that great edifice of self-regarding, mutually affirming soft-Left orthodoxy which determines the limits of acceptable public discourse – of which the BBC is the indispensable spiritual centre. The influence of the BBC as a monitor of what is politically admissible is almost incalculable: the entire Tory modernisation project was effectively made necessary (as its chief architects often admit) by the need to get a fair hearing on its news coverage.

But the power of the BBC – and its historical hatred for the "Murdoch empire" – is just one aspect of a larger battle which has now leapt across the Atlantic, where the target is not newspapers which can be legitimately charged with having committed unconscionable acts, but Fox News. Its offence is to have filled such a huge gap in the market for television news and current affairs that it has swept all before it. Its raucous Right-wing orientation is, in fact, matched by an equally raucous Left-wing equivalent in the cable news channel MSNBC, so why should anyone who believes in open and free debate among news providers object to this?

The problem is that Fox's audience share is enormous, by far the largest of any cable news channel, whereas MSNBC's is tiny, the smallest of any cable news channel. People are voting with their remotes for the kind of opinions they want to hear and the result is infuriating for the Left-liberal axis – and particularly for the Obama White House, which has made no secret of its desire to shut Fox News down.

There is, incidentally – contrary to the conjectures of some excitable commentators – no possibility of the "Murdoch empire" spawning a British version of Fox News. By law, broadcast news in Britain must be impartial. That is why all television news organisations in this country subscribe to pretty much the same soft-Left rendition of neutral reporting (in which Euroscepticism was, until very recently, treated as a lunatic fringe irrelevance, etc). And just the sort of liberal received opinion that now dominates television news because the tight regulation of licensed broadcasters demands it, could prevail in newspapers if the press were regulated (which is to say, licensed to operate) "in the same way that broadcasting is" – a suggestion which is being uttered in precisely those words even by Conservative politicians.

In fact, a similar rule of enforced neutrality applies in the US on network news programming: all news which is transmitted "over the airwaves" must be impartial (which there, too, means Left-liberal). It is only by the technical fluke of their being relayed by cable that the newer news channels such as Fox and MSNBC can show partisanship. Result: network news in the US is haemorrhaging viewers and cable news is hugely influential.

The cable news channels now play roughly the role in American politics that politically aligned newspapers do in Britain. To start regulating (licensing) the press would mean that we would have no frankly, vividly, politically potent news medium to counter whatever conventional wisdom was ordained by the self-appointed "enlightened" class of the day.

It is worth asking in both the British and American contexts why people who regard themselves as believers in free speech and liberal democracy can be so openly eager to close off – silence, kill, extinguish – different political views from their own. This is the question that is at the heart of the matter and which will remain long after every News International executive who may possibly be incriminated in the current scandal has been purged.

There is scarcely any outfit on the Right – be it political party, or media outlet – which demands the outright abolition of a Left-wing voice, as opposed to simply recommending restraint on its dominance (as I am with the BBC). That is because those of us on the Right are inclined to believe that our antagonists on the Left are simply wrong-headed – sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes malevolent but basically just mistaken. Whereas the Left believes that we are evil incarnate. Their demonic view of people who express even mildly Right-of-centre opinions (that lower taxes or less state control might be desirable, for example) would be risible if it were not so pernicious.

The Left does not want a debate or an open market in ideas. It wants to extirpate its opponents – to remove them from the field. It actually seems to believe that it is justified in snuffing out any possibility of our arguments reaching the impressionable masses – and bizarrely, it defends this stance in the name of fairness.

SOURCE

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The Ideologue in the Oval Office

Jonah Goldberg

"I think increasingly the American people are going to say to themselves, 'You know what? If a party or a politician is constantly taking the position my-way-or-the-highway, constantly being locked into ideologically rigid positions, that we're going to remember at the polls,'" President Obama said at his Friday news conference.

I know everyone is sick of hearing about the debt-limit negotiations. Lord knows I am. When I turn on the news these days, I feel like one of the passengers seated next to Robert Hays in the movie "Airplane!" By the time we get to the phrase "in the out years," I'm ready to pour a can of gasoline over my head.

Still, regardless of how things turn out with the negotiations, what we are witnessing is the rollout of the Obama re-election campaign's theme: Obama is the pragmatic voice of reason holding the ideologues at bay.

So it's worth asking, before this branding campaign gels into the conventional wisdom: Who is the real ideologue here?

The president, we are told, is a pragmatist for wanting a "fair and balanced" budget deal. What that means is tax increases must accompany spending cuts. Any significant spending cuts would be way in the future. The tax increases would begin right after Obama is re-elected.

Now keep in mind that tax hikes (or what the administration calls "revenue increases") are Obama's idee fixe. He campaigned on raising taxes for millionaires and billionaires (defined in the small print as people making more than $200,000 a year or couples making $250,000).

During a primary debate, he was asked by ABC's Charles Gibson if he would raise the capital gains tax even if he knew that cutting it would generate more revenue for the government. The non-ideologue responded that raising the tax, even if doing so would lower revenue, might be warranted out of "fairness." As he said to Joe the Plumber, things are better when you "spread the wealth around."

Earlier last week, referring to the fact that he is rich, the president said: "I do not want, and I will not accept, a deal in which I am asked to do nothing. In fact, I'm able to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income that I don't need."

Leaving aside the fact that the man lives in public housing and has a government jet at his disposal -- so his definition of "need" might be a bit out of whack -- what is pragmatic about this position?

Obama says that Republicans are rigid ideologues because they won't put "everything on the table." Specifically, they won't consider tax hikes, even though polls suggest Americans wouldn't mind soaking "the rich," "big oil" and "corporate jet owners."

But Obama hasn't put everything on the table either. He's walled off "ObamaCare" and the rest of his "winning the future" agenda.

If Obama believes the American people are the voice of reason when it comes to tax hikes, why does their opinion count for nothing when it comes to ObamaCare, which has never been popular? (According to a RealClearPolitics average of polls, only 38.6 percent of voters favor the plan.) Why not look for some savings there?

Consider the frustration of the supposedly ideologically locked-in GOP Congress. In 2008, the national debt was 40 percent of GDP. Now it's more than 60 percent, and it is projected to reach 75 percent next year, all thanks to a sour economy the GOP feels Obama made worse with incontinent spending.

Republicans won a historic election last November campaigning against the spending, borrowing, tax hikes and ObamaCare. Yet Obama's position is that the Republicans are deranged dogmatists because they don't want to raise taxes or borrow more money to pay for spending they opposed. And Obama is flexible because he refuses to revisit a program that has never been popular.

Meanwhile, the sole example of Obama's pragmatism -- that he has publicly acknowledged -- is his openness to means-testing Medicare, which may not be a bad idea. But Obama's support for it rests entirely on the fact that it would continue to tax upper-income people for benefits they will no longer receive. So, in addition to taxing the "rich" more, he also wants to give them less. I know why liberals would support that, but for the life of me I can't see how it's non-ideological.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Time to re-privatize fire departments: "All across America, municipal governments are awakening to the costs of overly-generous public sector compensation. In Orange County, California, the average total pay and benefits package for a firefighter is $175,000 a year. Firefighter unions say that there can be no cuts to fire department budgets without putting the safety of the public at risk. Yet for most of the nation's history, firefighting services were reliably provided by the private sector. Today, one county in Georgia is showing how that can be done again."

A glut of bureaucrats: "'I have never been in banking.' Those words sounded pretty defensive when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner uttered them two years ago. The financial crisis had left nerves raw, and Damon Silvers, my colleague on the congressional panel watching over the federal bailout, had just referred to Geithner’s supposed banking background. ... It might have been simpler if, from the beginning, Geithner had just shouted out the complete story -- 'I’m a lifetime bureaucrat!' -- and been done with it"

Israeli navy takes over Gaza-bound ship: "Israeli naval commandos on Tuesday seized control of a French ship attempting to break Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, reporting no resistance during the takeover in international waters. The navy boarded the ship after the pro-Palestinian activists on board ignored calls to change course. The military had warned it would stop any attempt to break the sea blockade of Gaza, which Israel imposed four years ago in what it says is a measure to prevent arms smuggling to Gaza's ruling Hamas militant group. It said the vessel, the Dignity al-Karama, would be taken to a southern Israeli port, Ashdod. The international passengers are likely to face deportation."

Labor’s new strategy: Intimidation for dummies: "In the past decade, unions have become increasingly desperate to obtain new dues-paying members. An example of how desperate can be found in a 70-plus-page intimidation manual from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which only recently came to light in a pending court case. The new union tactic is to use pressure on corporate boardrooms as a means of organizing entire companies nationwide rather than recruiting workers on a site-by-site basis; in short, to organize employers rather than employees."

The scourge of economic nationalism, again: "If saving is good for Americans, the nationality or place of residence of the savers whose saved resources are invested in the American economy is irrelevant. If saving is good for Americans, then given Americans’ saving rate, savings invested in the American economy by non-Americans are a blessing -- a blessing that is bigger the greater is the amount of this foreign savings and investment in the American economy."

Government spending is spending — not investment: "If government spending were actually investments, this country would be awash in surpluses and the common people would be enjoying prosperity beyond their wildest dreams. That's because the result of investment is creation of value, while the result of spending is consumption of value. So when politicians talk about spending as 'investments,' they mean precisely the opposite of what they are saying."

Some federal workers more likely to die than lose jobs: "Death — rather than poor performance, misconduct or layoffs — is the primary threat to job security at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Management and Budget and a dozen other federal operations. The federal government fired 0.55% of its workers in the budget year that ended Sept. 30 — 11,668 employees in its 2.1 million workforce. Research shows that the private sector fires about 3% of workers annually for poor performance, says John Palguta, former research chief at the federal Merit Systems Protection Board, which handles federal firing disputes."

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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The Long Retreat of Liberalism

Pat Buchanan

Though President Obama has run rings about the Republican Party in the debt-ceiling debate, that party can yet emerge victorious, if it will stick to its guns.

Clearly, the Republican strategy was not thought through, when the party chose the debt ceiling as the legislative terrain on which to fight its fiscal war.

The president had wanted a clean debt-ceiling increase, but he seized the GOP challenge with alacrity. He invited House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor down to the White House and reportedly offered $3 trillion in spending cuts for $1 trillion in fresh revenue, in a historic "big deal" to cut the deficit.

However, the cuts the president offered were, while attractive, gauzy. But the revenues -- closing "loopholes" and ending "tax breaks for the rich" -- were hard and specific. Had Boehner accepted the deal, he would not have survived as speaker. Fully 235 GOP House members signed a pledge in 2010 not to vote for any tax increase.

Thus, every day Boehner and Cantor departed the White House, having refused to accept "the deal of the century," the message that went out to the nation was that Republican intransigence, a refusal to compromise, was blocking historic deficit reduction.

Using the White House bully pulpit, Obama portrayed himself as bending over backward to do a fair deal and being forced, if the GOP continued to balk, to stop mailing out Social Security checks.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke warned of a U.S. default on its debts if there were no deal. Moody's and Standard & Poor's warned that the United States was imperiling its AAA credit rating. The big media painted the GOP as a party led by reasonable men who were hostage to fanatics being pandered to by Cantor.

Why did Boehner refuse the Obama temptation?

Had he accepted the deal, his party in the House would have split asunder. Half would have voted "no." To force its passage, Boehner would have had to collude with Minority Leader Steny Hoyer, against scores in his own caucus, to get Democratic votes.

Though House Republicans have been mussed up in the last two weeks, the White House "negotiations" now appear at an end, and a liberated Republican House is about to pass its own deficit-reduction plan.

"Cut, cap and balance" calls for cuts in federal spending to 20 percent of gross domestic product, a cap on federal programs and the enactment of a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution, which would crush federal spending to 18 percent of the economy from today's 25.

While this may clear the House, it stands little chance in the Senate. But it puts the party on the offensive. It will eat up the clock. It will put the GOP on record as to where it stands and provide the Tea Party Caucus a chance to vote its convictions.

But if the GOP House plan dies in the Senate, how does the GOP win? Again, by simply standing its ground on taxes, and waiting.

This weekend, Democrats and Republicans, Congress and the White House agreed the debt ceiling will be raised, and Obama accepted the reality that he will not be getting any new revenue.

This means that, at the end of this process, Obama will sign a debt-ceiling increase that involves $2 trillion or $1.5 trillion or $1 trillion in spending cuts, with no new taxes and no new revenues.

And that is a victory for whom, and a defeat for whom?

Republicans may have been beaten up for most of July, but come August, Democrats will be asking Barack Obama what exactly he and they got for agreeing to serious cuts in social spending, while the Republican right compromised on nothing and gave up nothing.

Obama won the public relations battle, but the Republicans, if they hold firm on no revenue enhancement and no new taxes, are fated to win the war. And not just this one.

For, from Greece to Ireland to Portugal to Italy, from California to Wisconsin to New Jersey to New York, the crisis of the West is a crisis of liberalism.

Deficits and debts that threaten to wipe out bondholders and banks, destroy currencies, bring down governments and bankrupt nations are everywhere forcing reductions in government payrolls and rollbacks in government programs.

Across the West, the public sector is under siege.

And parties of the left, be they liberal, socialist or Marxist, depend on the public sector increasing its employees, increasing its beneficiaries, increasing its share of the national wealth.

That is what they do. That is how they grow. And that is how they reach and retain power.

Bottom line. Parties of the left are on this earth to grow the government. But the West has entered a period where its economic survival and the prevention of financial collapse mandate constant and deep cuts in the size and sweep of government.

For the left, this is going to be a long decade.

SOURCE

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America's Financial Restoration vs. Obama's Ideology

There is an overarching reason we can't move toward a balanced budget, which underscores why we face ongoing stalemates over debt ceilings and continuing resolutions: President Obama doesn't want to balance the budget.

I don't say this out of extremism or to be gratuitously controversial or even provocative. It's just that his words and actions lead to the inescapable conclusion that he is unwilling to curb his appetite for big government. In the absence of any such restraint, our alarming budget trajectory cannot be reversed. The debt ceiling may be the last clear chance before the 2012 elections to force meaningful budgetary reforms.

Obama's recalcitrance is rooted in his ideology. He has been working all his adult life toward the moment that he could transform America into a fairer place. He's not about to allow an existential threat to the nation get in the way of his obsession.

Perhaps he wishes he'd acceded to the presidency when our debt picture was less calamitous. Then he might have more leeway to work his despotic magic. Then again, probably not; without the mainly Democratic-caused housing crisis falling into his lap just in the nick of time, he might not have been elected, much less positioned to make the ludicrous demand that we spend nearly $1 trillion more to "stimulate" ourselves out of debt. Alinskyite revolutionaries feed on crises, real and perceived.

Obama fundamentally rejects the American ideals of economic liberty and equality of opportunity. He's determined to use government to redistribute and equalize incomes (and wealth, truth be told), and neither the Constitution nor catastrophic debt consequences will deter him.

He doesn't even appear worried about the debt itself, only the hassle he's getting from Republicans who are getting in the way of his spending and tax hikes. When most Americans are worried sick over our nation's finances, Obama is lecturing us about people who "keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income that (they) don't need," as if the chief executive were the grand arbiter of income distribution. The Heritage Foundation reports that Obama is "creating a new 'poverty' measure that deliberately severs all connection between 'poverty' and actual deprivation." His "goal is to measure income 'inequality,' not poverty -- giving the President public relations ammunition for his 'spread-the-wealth' agenda." Just so ... just so.

There's more. Obama is fond of invoking false consensuses in support of his policies, but there truly is widespread agreement that raising taxes during very tough economic times would impede recovery. Obama himself gave voice to that very axiom in 2009, saying, "The last thing you want to do is to raise taxes in the middle of a recession, because that would just suck up, take more demand out of the economy."

But now, perhaps realizing he might not get another chance to coerce the Congress into hiking taxes (as a matter of "fairness"), he's holding the debt ceiling hostage to his demands.

Worst of all is Obama's resistance to entitlement reforms. At a time when everyone acknowledges that our current entitlement programs are unsustainable, Obama refuses to offer a specific plan to reform them and adamantly opposes credible Republican plans to do so.

Also, Obama rarely speaks with any urgency about spending cuts; his emphasis is always that we can't unduly cut programs for "folks" who rely on them, flagrantly turning on its head the JFK maxim, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

While Republicans are pleading with Obama to join them on Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to cut spending and reform entitlements, Obama is clinging to his demand for the high-speed rail boondoggle. When health care costs are soaring and revised scoring of Obamacare reveals just how prohibitively costly it will be, Obama holds on to it like a life raft and pushes the rest of us off. It will destroy access, quality and cost, but he will not betray his ideology.

Just as his party abrogated its duty to propose a congressional budget for 800 days, Obama refuses to provide specifics for cutting spending and just tells us what he won't do. You can read the transcripts from his most recent two pressers and find no specifics.

As recently as 2010, Obama's budget more than doubled the national debt and pushed the fiscal year 2011 deficit to a record high of $1.6 trillion with record spending, which exceeded $3.8 trillion. His FY 2012 budget again called for doubling the national debt in five years and tripling it in 10 years -- again without even addressing entitlements.

It's simple, really. We have to have structural entitlement reform, major spending cuts and no tax increase-retardants on economic growth to reverse our current course toward national bankruptcy, but Obama steadfastly remains on the wrong side of all these solutions.

SOURCE

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Don't Forget Welfare Reform

With everyone in Washington consumed by whether and how to increase our nation’s debt ceiling, the necessity for welfare reform seems oddly absent from the negotiations.

Although the historic welfare reforms of 1996 succeeded in moving people from welfare to work, it most certainly did not “end welfare as we know. it” Amazingly, these reforms – which liberals stridently opposed – only restructured one of the more than 70 federal means-tested welfare programs run by our federal government.

That’s right, there are more than 70 separate welfare programs scattered across 13 government agencies. The Heritage Foundation ran the numbers and found these programs cost taxpayers nearly $900 billion per year. Even in this debate, that is some serious spending.

And, of course, Washington’s problem is spending. Instead of raising revenue through gimmicky fees, higher tax rates and targeted tax hikes, lawmakers should focus on growing our economy and job creation. Reforming the entire welfare system by helping to move people from welfare to work is one way to do that.

If our economy were doing better, and people were more able to find good, well-paying jobs and achieve the American dream, then they would be entering into a tax bracket and paying taxes. The recent decline in revenue is not a result of tax rates, but rather a result of anemic economic growth and a lack of job creation.

Currently, the bottom 50% of income earners pay just 3% of total income tax revenues. If we enacted policies and reforms that helped the lowest income bracket gain wealth, then our tax revenues will increase. As Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) said “we don’t need new taxes, we need new taxpayers.”

Unfortunately, thanks to over 70 different federal welfare programs, the number of people on welfare (be it food stamps, housing assistance, Medicaid, etc.) has been steadily growing, and has ballooned under President Obama. According to the Heritage Foundation:

For every $10 President Bush spent on welfare in 2008, President Obama expects to spend about $13. Far from encouraging self-reliance, the welfare state’s unrestrained growth spurt will force millions more into dependency on government.

Briefly, let’s jump back to 1996 and how these reforms actually worked. What actually happened in ’96 was the replacement of Aid to Families with Dependent Children with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Instead of sending blank checks to welfare beneficiaries, for the first time ever, welfare checks were linked to work.

No longer were recipients simply depending on the government to support them. Suddenly they had to go out and find work or at least prove that they were devoting 20 to 30 hours a week towards preparing for a job.

Just 12 years later, 2.8 million Americans, about 60% of the overall caseload, left welfare and found jobs. Imagine that!

Unfortunately, only one of the more than 70 welfare programs was reformed. Today, the success of TANF has halted. Much of it was the recession, but much of it was the massive expansion of the welfare state. Today, one in seven Americans are on food stamps, and while some are new recipients who had never applied for the program before, more than half of those on food stamps have received aid for eight and a half years or longer.

Where is the incentive to leave the program?

As with most government programs which don’t show results, Congress’s answer was to throw more money at the problem, instead of reforming the programs so that they work better. If we apply the 1996 TANF reforms to the other 70 or so welfare programs, then we could achieve real reform and help the 40 million people who currently receive government aid.

Fortunately, some solid conservatives recognize the need and are laying out a way forward.

Congressmen Jim Jordan (R-OH), Tim Scott (R–SC), and Scott Garrett (R–NJ) have introduced the Welfare Reform Act of 2011, H.R.1167. The bill expands on the success of TANF by applying the same work-oriented policy to the other federal welfare programs. A growing coalition of Senate Republicans are preparing to introduce companion legislation.

If Congress wants to do something really meaningful for the country, especially for those who are most in need, then restructuring welfare is the way to go. Not only will shifting welfare recipients from government dependents to self-sufficient taxpayers bring in new revenue and decrease the need for wasteful government spending, it will also empower them to achieve the American dream.

SOURCE

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

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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It's About Jobs, Stupid!

America has a growth deficit. As the latest job report shows unemployment reached 9.2%-- the highest rate of 2011-- investors and employers continue to react negatively to this bad news.

During the three years of the Obama administration, in this dismal economy millions of Americans have been forced to take jobs which they are overqualified for or they have simply given up looking for work entirely. If you include those workers, the real unemployment rate is higher than 16.2% by conservative estimates.

These numbers are far worse depending on geography, with the most glaring examples of misguided economic policies being in poor urban communities.

Capital always follows the path of least resistance and greatest opportunity. But not only has President Obama’s continuation of endless deficit spending not resulted in so-called Keynesian “pump priming” and economic growth, it has discouraged private investment as money continues to flow into safe havens like Treasurys.

As the debt-ceiling debate rages on and some in the Senate Republican leadership seem ready to negotiate with big-government Democrats, the proverbial 4.2 trillion dollar gorilla in the room continues to grow while trampling over our economy and the formation of small businesses. To be clear, there are two distinct paths:

We can go the route which President Obama favors, which includes an ever-increasing debt ceiling which will continue to crush economic activity.

Or, we can force government to “eat their peas” and use the force of law to handcuff legislators to policies which spur economic growth and job creation.

And the time to choose a path is today, before August 2, when the Federal government will officially run out of money to pay outstanding obligations.

According to Michael Tanner of CATO, the Treasury Department will collect roughly $203 billion in taxes during August, but have liabilities totaling more than $307 billion. You certainly could not run your family budget with this type of recklessness. And as America runs at lightning speed toward a Greek-like financial catastrophe, as our debt is on the verge of consuming our nation’s entire output.

Throughout American history, we have never failed to increase the debt ceiling. And as irresponsible politicians grow government for their own political gain, they have left us with a financial cancer which is metastasizing rapidly.

Therefore, conservatives must act boldly and proactively. Not only must we sit at the bargaining table and demand cuts, but there must be cuts in all levels of government which amount to an immediate reduction in the deficit. Anything less is unacceptable.

The second step is to use tough statuary caps which will tie the hands of future politicians from spending beyond the historical, pre-Bush average of 18% of the Gross Domestic Product. Politicians in both parties have proven themselves untrustworthy to reduce spending, so breaking that limitation would mandate simultaneous spending reductions.

And finally, we must have Congress approve the Hatch-Lee Balanced Budget Amendment Balanced Budget Amendment, and send it to the states for ratification. Not only would it mirror most states which have their own requirements for expenditures equally revenue, but it additionally requires a 2/3rds supermajority to approve tax increases. And once the amendment is official, it would be quite impossible in the modern era to ever repeal it.

These proposals would have been impossible in any previous congress, including the 1994 Gingrich Revolution. But things have changed now that every man, woman, and child in the United States owes $46,000, and with our debt on a path to double within 10 years.

Thanks to Tea Party activists providing the necessary backlash to an ever-expanding federal government, the proposals put forth in the Cut, Cap, and Balance pledge are not only entirely possible, a majority of Americans understand they are necessary to put America on a path to new jobs and prosperity.

SOURCE

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Skyscraper "Loophole" Creates Jobs

When Michael Moore looks at a skyscraper, he sees a bloated monument to rich investors. He becomes nauseous and his lunch floats back up into his throat as he imagines the tenants who can afford Class A rent: Tenants like a semi-retired banker and his entrepreneurial son who watch the sun rise from their 92nd floor office suite while their assistant pours cold, crystal-clear water into tall glasses holding cucumber slices.

“Hmmm, how can I knock that tower down and humble those richies?” Moore wonders to himself. “I certainly can’t push it over. I’d have to give up my breakfast of chocolate covered bacon and hit the gym every morning. Way too much work for a big boy like me. … I’ve got it! I’ll ask the President to push for eliminating the carried interest tax break!”

Moore detests buildings that stand as public monuments to capitalism. In fact, he wrapped the New York Stock Exchange building in crime-scene tape for his movie, Capitalism: A Love Story.

Hollywood elites like Moore and his fans at The New York Times imply that legitimate tax incentives for entrepreneurial risk—like the carried interest tax break—are “loopholes.”

The term “loophole” confuses Americans into thinking that wealthy entrepreneurs are cheaters on par with the 5th grade bully who brazenly steals little Ashley’s sandwich out of her hands and takes his first pilfered bite before her astonished eyes.

Rush Limbaugh explained the carried interest tax break on his July 8 talk show:

“Obama … has made this official in 2009 budget documents he’s presented that he wants to get rid of the carried interest tax break for hedge funds, private equity groups, and commercial real estate people. …essentially carried interest is profits for original investors in hedge funds, private equity firms, (and) commercial real estate that is at present taxed at capital gains levels, and they want to convert this to ordinary income, which would move it up to about 35 (percent) and then eventually 39.6 if Obama gets his tax increase wish, which would shut down commercial real estate investment.”

Limbaugh is right. Unlike other investments, commercial real estate cannot easily move overseas. U.S. developers can’t just start developing in India or China overnight. Commercial real estate investment thrives or dies here in America.

Entrepreneurial ventures such as commercial real estate developments are risky. If we want to create jobs, we must incentivize entrepreneurs to take risks.

Let’s say you want to develop an office, retail or industrial building. Before you can build, you must accept long-term, unforeseeable risks from environmental contamination, lawsuits, debts and construction delays. These liabilities mean your income stream is uncertain. You will want a financial incentive to accept these risks.

The current carried interest tax rate sits at a capital gains rate of 15 percent to incentivize general partners like developers to put their names and fortunes on the line to build projects that create countless jobs.

The commercial real estate industry directly creates white-collar jobs for leasing agents, property managers, mortgage brokers, owners, investors, bankers and asset managers. It also sustains jobs for those who depend on the health of commercial real estate such as architects, lawyers, consultants, insurance brokers, appraisers and marketing professionals. Lastly, a multitude of blue-collar resulting services such as construction and landscaping depend on commercial real estate.

The mainstream media contends that eliminating the carried interest tax break would only hurt hedge fund managers on Wall Street. Yet, the largest commercial real estate development association, NAIOP, reports U.S. Treasury data showing that over 46 percent of all partnerships are real estate partnerships, and carried interest plays a vital role in a large number of them. Furthermore, when the economy is healthy, commercial real estate creates over nine million American jobs and accounts for nearly one-third of U.S. GDP.

Sadly, June’s job report revealed that the U.S. added a meager 18,000 jobs and lost 9,000 in construction. “…with the national economy’s accelerating recession, non-residential building construction outlays fell by 20.4 percent in 2009,” explains Dr. Stephen S. Fuller in his 2010 NAIOP study on the economic contributions of commercial real estate development and construction. So why would the White House want to remove entrepreneurial incentives?

The Washington Times offers a solution: Comprehensive tax reform that improves economic performance, not arbitrary tax hikes on industries like commercial real estate just to cut a budget deal.

In Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead an entrepreneurial developer predicts: “The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.”

Americans prefer working in office towers to bat caves. It’s time for Michael Moore, journalists and politicians to acknowledge that incentives like the carried interest tax break create jobs and fuel our economy.

SOURCE

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UN-economic(s)

Can you name five formerly poor countries that have grown rich through wealth transfers from more economically advanced nations?

No? Okay, then just name one. Still stumped? As you probably suspect, not a single nation has ever grown wealthy by way of financial handouts from other, more well-to-do societies. That's worth remembering when we consider how best to pull people out of poverty.

Last week, the United Nations issued a report on its Millennium Development Goals (or MDGs, for short). One important goal is to "eradicate extreme poverty and hunger," with a chief target being to cut in half the proportion of the world's people whose income is less than $1.25 a day by 2015.

According to an article in the Vancouver Sun, The Millennium Development Goals Report 2011 "grudgingly admits" that "wealth creation and not wealth redistribution is the main driver behind reduced levels of extreme poverty around the world." Seems most of this very welcome decline has occurred in East Asia (mainly China) and in India -- areas benefitting not from foreign aid but from massive economic growth.

The findings released by the UN's Economic and Social Affairs Department show that the percentage of Chinese citizens living on $1.25 a day or less has already been reduced by more than half -- from 60 percent to just 16 percent. The report goes on to state, "The fastest growth and sharpest reductions in poverty continue to be found in Eastern Asia, particularly in China, where the poverty rate is expected to fall to under five per cent by 2015."

India's economic expansion has also had a major impact on alleviating world levels for poverty and hunger. "In that country," the document says, "poverty rates are projected to fall from 51 per cent in 1990 to about 22 per cent in 2015."

On the other hand, sub-Saharan Africa receives the largest amount of the world's overseas development aid, per capita, yet those living there in extreme poverty dropped only modestly between 1990 and 2005, from 58 percent to 51 percent.

But to Ban Ki-moon, the UN's Secretary-General, the success of homegrown economic growth means simply that, "Already, the MDGs have helped lift millions out of poverty." Shazam!

And what to make of the lackluster track record of development aid?

Secretary-General Ban and those running the United Nations continue to push for increased wealth transfers from richer to poorer nations. In 2010, wealthier countries gave $129 billion in aid. The MDG report argues this is far short of the money that should be shifted each year from rich to poor nations.

If those making a lifelong living off redistributing wealth can so cavalierly ignore their own statistics, they'll have little trouble ignoring a lifetime of work by Peter Bauer in development economics. Bauer argued that legitimate investment, rather than foreign aid, would flow in ample amounts to countries with a safe and productive climate for business.

"Development aid is . . . not necessary to rescue poor societies from a vicious circle of poverty," Bauer found. "Indeed it is far more likely to keep them in that state."

Still, another UN report issued last week provides a different rationale for taking money from rich countries to give to poor ones. The World Economic and Social Survey 2011 called for "investment" of $72 trillion over the next four decades, much of it in green technology, with most of it going to developing countries. That's five times the U.S. annual GDP of $14.7 trillion.

Animating this report is the convenient notion that the world's wealthier, industrialized nations owe a "climate debt" to less developed nations. Ottmar Edenhofer, the German co-chair of one of the working groups of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, explained:

"[D]eveloped countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this".

Neither should buyers of coal and oil. Or anyone else, since these two energy sources undergird so much of modern life and progress.

And progress -- material progress -- matters. Poverty is reduced through economic growth, not through redistributing wealth from rich to poor countries.

So of course the United Nations intends to ignore the policies that lead to economic expansion -- stable rule of law, property rights, minimal government interference in normal work and trade -- and concentrate, instead, on dramatically increasing redistribution.

SOURCE

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The SEIU NLRB Serial Job Killer

In just another example of the Obama administration making law by fiat, the National Labor Relations Board head Craig Becker is proposing new rules that would shotgun the formation of new union shops in as quick as ten days.

After the defeat of card check at the legislative ballot box, the former SEIU goon is acting creatively in order to implement portions of card check unilaterally.

What would one expect from a guy appointed to his position despite his nomination being rejected by the Senate?

“He never satisfactorily answered a series of questions that I posed to him – failing to reassure me that his years of service to labor unions would not color his decisions at the NLRB," Senator Orrin Hatch (R.,UT) said in a statement as reported by the Washington Post.

Becker couldn’t answer questions for a number of other Senators either so they scrapped his nomination.

Obama then made a recess appointment of Becker to the NLRB, the presidential equivalent of Enron accounting for political appointees.

Becker is losing no time now in answering the questions and concerns Hatch and his fellow Senators had. The answers are about as bad as they feared.

NLRB and Becker have been in the news lately because they’ve attacked Boeing for opening a plant in South Carolina, a state that is less accommodating to union employment but more accommodating to workers and management with project deadlines to keep.

But the attack on Boeing is nothing compared to the attack that Becker and organized labor are going to launch against the rest of us starting today.

“On July 18, the NLRB is holding a hearing on its proposal to overhaul virtually the entire manner and set of rules by which union-representation elections are conducted in the workplace,” says labor expert Geoffrey Burr in the Washington Times. “To the surprise of no one who can read federal election donation reports, all of the agency’s changes appear to help union bosses at the expense of everyone else.”

First up is making sure union elections happen quickly. The longer it takes for employees to become informed, the less likely they’ll join a union.

More HERE

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

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Who Benefits From All The Obama Spending Sprees?

“Did you hear about the new ‘Obama Happy Meal Deal?’” a friend posted on Facebook earlier this week.

“You order whatever you want and as much as you want, and the person in line behind you has to pay for it….LOL!”

Americans have always enjoyed poking fun at their Presidents, and cheap jokes that illicit more groans than laughs aren’t to be taken too seriously. But, as is often the case with humor, there was a slight bit of truth entailed in this little online anecdote.

The joke suggests that, even among people who don’t think much about politics and public policy, or who don’t often utter words like ‘socialism,” “Marxism,” or “economic redistribution,” there is nonetheless a growing recognition that our President likes to spend other people’s money. And in light of this, we would all do well to ask a couple of questions.

Let’s start with this: “Where did all the stimulus money go?” What began in February of 2009 as a plan that the President said would “save or create 3 to 4 million jobs,” and what his Administration claimed would prevent our unemployment rate from rising over 8%, had an original price tag of $787 billion.

Months later the price of the “stimulus plan” had ballooned up to about $813 billion, and neither the Administration nor members of Congress could offer many details about it. By the end of 2009, both the fiscally conservative Congressman Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who voted against it, and the big government liberal Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) who voted in favor of it, both admitted that there had not been proper oversight of how this enormous amount of taxpayer money had been spent (a fact that I documented in my latest book, “The Virtues Of Capitalism”). All this, as the unemployment rate continued to rise well above the 8% watermark.

So let’s ask this next: “Who benefits from the spending?” This is an especially painful question, because it’s easier to think in terms of who is not benefiting, and who is being harmed, by the spending.

Ethnic minority groups living in America’s inner city regions are most certainly not benefiting from the President’s wealth redistribution. As much as they may have superimposed their own expectations on to the President’s promises of “hope” and “change,” non-whites living in America’s urban centers are now experiencing some of the worst fallout of an economy that won’t expand.

Just last week an editorial by writer Walter Russell Mead, published in “The American Interest,” pointed out that Black America in particular is suffering under President Obama. Noting that some of the most staunchly Democrat states in the country – including Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota – have produced some of the highest double-digit unemployment rates among Black Americans, Mead described our current era as one of “deepening alienation, anger, and despair in America’s inner cities.” Of course it is still not acceptable for elected Democrats to admit that the president’s “spending solutions” are harmful. Thus, Chicago Police Chief Gary McCarthy recently chose to blame the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution for the rising crime and unrest in his city, claiming that the right to “keep and bear arms” is an “extension of government sponsored racism.”

Americans who have maintained good credit scores and payment histories are most certainly not benefiting from President Obama’s wealth redistribution policies. The President insists that his Administration is providing “help” to borrowers who have fallen on hard times, but in reality the Administration has bailed-out banking institutions, and not individual people. We now have a financial system that is incentivized by our government to “forgive” portions of debt and to modify repayment terms for consumers with bad credit, while banks ignore credit-worthy consumers who pay their bills on time.

On the other hand, banks and the people who run them seem to be benefiting pretty well from President Obama’s spending. So do certain executive level folks at certain companies in certain other sectors of our economy. In fact, a new research project conducted by Capgemini and Bank of America shows that the world’s population of High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI) with $1 million or more in “investable assets” rose 8.3% over the previous year, to a total of 10.9 million people. This is to say that while President Obama’s policies are not “creating jobs,” a lot of personal wealth is being created for select individuals.

As much as President Obama has served up plenty of harsh criticisms for “overpaid executives” and “greedy companies” over the last three years, businesses and corporate executives that have politically allied themselves with him have, in many cases, been “blessed” by his spending of our money. For example, ABC News reported earlier this spring that “billions” of “stimulus dollars” have been handed-over to unionized construction companies, yet “shovel ready” infrastructure projects still haven’t emerged. More interestingly, many of these same companies owe the federal government unpaid taxes – but, they’re unionized.

If you’re on good political terms with President Obama, you may get to order “as much as you want.” If you’re second in line, you may have to pay for it all.

SOURCE

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The Profound Misunderstanding of money by America's Leaders

Gold isn’t money? How could America get to this point we asked in astonishment upon hearing the Chairman of the Federal Reserve proclaim, “Gold isn’t Money.”

No wonder our leaders in Washington misspend our money. They don’t even understand what it is.

For those of you without a dictionary nearby, let’s start with the Webster’s definition, which says money is “something generally accepted as a medium of exchange, a measure of value, or a means of payment.”

The Webster’s definition even though inadequate still captures the essence. Money is a store of value that was created to facilitate barter or trade. It was a store of value because a farmer would accept it in exchange for his potatoes today, and next week he could spend an equivalent value to buy a pair of overalls.

If anyone reading this column doesn’t believe that gold is a good store of value, we will happily exchange your gold for some of Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve Notes. And that is exactly what owners of Federal Reserve Notes have been doing the world over. As a result, since 2001 the cost of Gold in Federal Reserve Notes has exploded from 300 notes per ounce of Gold to 1500 notes per ounce of Gold. That is a five times increase in ten years.

This is a signal that people, businesses and governments now believe that the ounce of Gold is greatly preferred as a store of value to Federal Reserve Notes.

But the people’s preference for Gold and Silver over pieces of paper with a printed promise is, as Rep. Ron Paul told Ben Bernanke in the same hearing, "at least 5000 years old."

Money is an English word first used in the 14th Century. It has been in common usage since that time. The origins are relatively simple. Webster’s again tells us the word “is derived from the Middle English moneye, from Anglo-French moneie, from Latin moneta or mint… from Moneta, epithet of Juno; from the fact that the Romans coined money in the temple of Juno Moneta.”

Students of history can tell you that all along, the best money in history has been gold and silver. This is why the Founding Fathers expressly gave Congress the right to "coin money."

Since 1971 the link between Gold and the US Dollar has been broken. And since that time we have seen unprecedented destruction of the value of the dollar through inflation. We are old enough to remember penny candy and gasoline at 33 cent per gallon. In the 1970's, Publishers Clearing House gave away the "ultimate mansion" --and the value was $100,000 dollars.

Inflation is an ideal way for countries to tax their populations both rich and poor without admitting that they have raised taxes. Inflation is in particular a means to tax the poor and elderly on fixed or limited incomes. The most vulnerable are most effected by inflation.

The more cynical of the recent decisions made by these leaders is to actually redefine our countries measure of inflation, the consumer price index or CPI. They are so cyclical that they believe we won't notice prices going up a whopping 9 percent a year-- when they report CPI of less than half the true measure.
So we guarantee you, that an academic as schooled in economics as our Federal Reserve Chairman is, Bernanke understands that Gold is money. But he, like the rest of the Washington establishment, prefer lie to our faces about definitions. This way, they can avoid lying to us about how they have fleeced the nation to the point of our near insolvency.

SOURCE

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Not An Endgame, But the End of Beginning of the Campaign

Hugh Hewitt

President Obama unleashed his inner Alinskyite on Wednesday, storming out of a meeting with Congressional leaders and White House staff after threatening the GOP House Leader Eric Cantor with a parting "Eric, don't call my bluff."

Presidential it wasn't, and loyalists in the MSM immediately began to spread covering smoke from Obama allies like Harry Reid blaming the GOP Leader for refusing to be filibustered or bullied in the long series of pointless meetings arranged by a desperate president to try and change a political dynamic that sees his approval rating plummeting in poll after poll.

Last month in New Hampshire, would-be GOP nominee Mitt Romney pronounced this a "failed" presidency, and evidence for that conclusion is mounting daily as the president, either overwhelmed by his own incompetence or frozen by his extreme ideology --or both-- finds himself unable to lead. The petulance that marks the president whenever he is in a jam returned, and the instincts of the old "community organizer" took over, and the collision with Cantor underscored Obama's sheer inability to cope with opposition.

The GOP won the last election, of course, and in overwhelming fashion. The electorate renounced the vast spending and indiscipline of Obama's "stimulus" and Obamacare and demanded a retrenching, but not via a massive hike in taxes.

As Paul Ryan pointed out on my program Thursday, massive tax hikes are already built into the law for 2013 thanks to Obamacare. The president's insistence on even more taxes now is simply an attempt to turn America into Western Europe, and this is not where the country voted to go. From Ryan:

Let’s never forget the fact that the first two years of the President’s presidency, they passed all these tax increases that kick in, in 2013. So people don’t know this necessarily, yet, but the U.S. economy is going to get hit starting in 2013, you know, a little more than a year from now, with about a $1.5 trillion dollar tax increase. And it’s a tax increase that uniquely hits job creators, small businesses. More than half our jobs come from successful small businesses. They file as individuals. They’re the ones that bear the brunt of this, and we wonder why we’re not creating jobs today, because we’re going to have a huge tax increase that’s already going to hit these businesses, and they’re saying yeah, we spent all this money, now help us raise some more taxes on top of this to pay for it. And we’re just not going to go down that path.

The Congressional Republicans thus have to prepare themselves for a fierce attack from the president using his pals in the White House press corps which has twice in a week refused to press a president paddling towards the fiscal falls. If indeed a default would result in four figure market drops as some analysts --not all, but some-- predict, why isn't the MSM demanding of the president details on the spending cuts he has put forward, exact outlines of his tax proposals so the public can review and pass on them?

When the president announces a willingness to cut off social security checks, how can the "press" not ask him about the concept of trust funds violated, of lock boxes broken open and of a hundred other alternatives? Would he really let granny go hungry while the EPA writes rules on carbon trading that the Congress insists not be issued?

All the GOP can do is point out the recklessness and immaturity of an in-over-his-head president and try to minimize the damage from now until January 2013. The tantrums will grow in frequency and the rhetoric in temperature from 1600, but the coolest heads ought to prevail in the GOP House Conference as they have in the Senate GOP Caucus. There is no need to match the president outburst for outburst, but just the requirement that every GOP leader repeat again and again: "We won't be raising taxes. The president needs to send us his non-defense cuts."

That's the only message the GOP needs. That and "register to vote" as the country cannot afford another term of Saul Alinksy's Amateur Hour.

SOURCE

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

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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The Expanding Catalogue of Obamacare Fables

Michelle Malkin

Is there a health insurance horror story disseminated by the White House and its allies that ever turned out to be true? Obamacare advocates have exercised more artistic license than a convention of Photoshoppers. Now, a prominent sob story shilled by President Obama himself about his own mother is in doubt. It's high past time to call their bluffs.

The tall-tale-teller-in-chief cited mom Stanley Ann Dunham's deathbed fight with her insurer several times over the years to support his successful push to ban pre-existing condition exclusions by insurers. In a typical recounting, Obama shared his personalized trauma during a 2008 debate: "For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they're saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don't have to pay her treatment, there's something fundamentally wrong about that."

But there was something fundamentally wrong with Obama's story. In a recently published biography of Obama's mother, author and New York Times reporter Janny Scott discovered that Dunham's health insurer had in fact reimbursed her medical expenses with nary an objection. The actual coverage dispute centered on a separate disability insurance policy.

Channeling document forger Dan Rather's "fake, but accurate" defense, a White House spokesman insisted to the Times that the anecdote somehow still "speaks powerfully to the impact of pre-existing condition limits on insurance protection from health care costs" -- even though Dunham's primary health insurer did everything it was supposed to do and met all its contractual obligations.

No matter. Expanding government control over health care means never having to say you're sorry for impugning private insurers. Democrats have dragged every available human shield into the contentious debate over Obama's federal takeover of health care. Personal anecdotes of dying family members battling evil insurance execs deflect attention from the cost, constitutionality and liberty-curtailing consequences of the law. The president's Dunham sham-ecdote is just the latest entry in an ever-expanding catalogue of Obamacare fables:

-- Otto Raddatz. In 2009, Obama publicized the plight of this Illinois cancer patient, who supposedly died after he was dropped from his Fortis/Assurant Health insurance plan when his insurer discovered an unreported gallstone the patient hadn't known about. The truth? He got the treatment he needed in 2005 and lived for nearly four more years.

-- Robin Beaton. Also in 2009, Obama claimed Beaton -- a breast cancer patient -- lost her insurance after "she forgot to declare a case of acne." In fact, she failed to disclose a previous heart condition and did not list her weight accurately, but had her insurance restored anyway after intense public lobbying.

-- John Brodniak. A 23-year-old unemployed Oregon sawmill worker, Brodniak's health woes were spotlighted by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof as a textbook argument for Obamacare. Brodniak was reportedly diagnosed with cavernous hemangioma, a neurological condition, and was allegedly turned away by emergency room doctors. Kristof called the case "monstrous" and decried opponents of Democrats' health care proposals as heartless murderers. The truth? Brodniak not only had coverage through Oregon's Medicaid program, but was also a neurology patient at the prestigious Oregon Health and Science University in Portland (a safety-net institution that accepts all Medicaid patients). Kristof never retracted the legend.

-- Marcelas Owens. An 11-year-old boy from Seattle, Owens took a coveted spot next to the president in March 2010 when Obamacare was signed into law. Owens' 27-year-old mother, Tiffany, died of pulmonary hypertension. The family said the single mother of three lost her job as a fast-food manager and lost her insurance. She died in 2007 after receiving emergency care and treatment throughout her illness. Progressive groups (for whom Marcelas' relatives worked) dubbed Marcelas an "insurance abuse survivor." But there wasn't a shred of evidence that any insurer had "abused" the boy or his mom. Further, Washington State already offered a plethora of existing government assistance programs to laid-off and unemployed workers like Marcelas' mom. The family and its p.r. agents never explained why she didn't enroll.

-- Natoma Canfield. The White House made the Ohio cancer patient a poster child for Obamacare in 2010 after she wrote a letter complaining about skyrocketing premiums and the prospect of losing her home. After Obama gave Canfield a shout-out at a health care rally in Strongsville, Ohio, and promised to control costs, officials at the renowned Cleveland Clinic, which is treating her, made clear that they would "not put a lien on her home" and that she was eligible for a wide variety of state aid and private charity care.

Since Obamacare passed, the amount workers pay in health care premiums has soared an average of nearly 14 percent; thousands of businesses have sought waivers in search of relief from the law's onerous mandates; medical device makers have slashed jobs and research; and the private individual health insurance market is in critical condition. Post-Obamacare truth is bloodier than pro-Obamacare fiction.

SOURCE

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The One Becomes The Jerk

Obama finally solved the budget crisis the White House really cares about yesterday when he announced that he hauled in $86 million in campaign contributions for the three months ended June 30th.

The budget crisis facing the rest of us? Obama’s really mad at the rest of us because we are all acting very immaturely by withholding a blank check for the bills he’s run up.

The White House reacted to the breakdown in budget talks at the White House yesterday in characteristically ironic fashion: They scolded Republican Whip Eric Cantor’s “juvenile behavior” after Obama stormed out of debt negotiations, saying that Cantor must "let the grown-ups get to work."

Earlier this week the Leave-it-to-Beaver president told us all we’d have to “eat our peas,” like good children, when the GOP didn’t cave in by giving him his most cherished goal: tax increases and more tax increases.

Clearly the GOP hates Santa Claus, puppies, nuns, children, all animals you can’t eat, flowers and clean running water.

Word from the White House is that Obama’s considering grounding us all and taking away our cell phones for a year to force the GOP back to the negotiating table.

If that doesn’t work, Obama has vowed that “he’ll turn this economy right around” if we don’t start sitting up straight.

“When President Obama took an active role in the talks aimed at addressing the nation’s debt ceiling, the tone he used to describe the closed-door negotiations…was a marked departure from his campaign theme of Hope and Change,” writes Steve Berglas on Forbes blog.

“Now, since realizing that the buck stops on his desk, he is chiding, critical, and quite pessimistic. Obama’s once wildly optimistic promises have been replaced by threats…. His first order of business…was to reprimand Democrats and Republicans as though they were behaving like unruly, obstreperous children, in not agreeing to a plan that would put us deeper in debt.”

Word to the O’man:

It’s one thing to try to act like an adult in the room, but when you try to act like the only adult in the room by holding your breath and stomping your feet, your cover’s been blown.

To be the kind of Eddie Haskell jerk that Mark Halperin describes Obama to be would be a big step up from the petulant, childish, temper-prone jackass he’s acted like since he became the One.

Maybe he was that way before too. He probably was, even before the mass idolatry subsumed what was left of his fragile ego that gets snappish with reporters.

But none of that should really surprise us after he literally and deliberately gave Hillary Clinton the finger in public during the presidential primary. No other American political figure has ever been granted the type of exemptions from right behavior as Obama has, not even Bill Clinton.

Even Clinton’s supporters deplored his actions. Obama’s supporters just encourage him in his finger waving.

For a long time, people, especially the press- after all, they are people too, mostly- have looked at Mr. Cool as remote, often standoffish and arrogant.

But perhaps there is another explanation for his behavior.

Karl Rove tried to explain it to us back in 2008, but he narrowly missed it.

"Even if you never met him, you know this guy," Rove said, per Christianne Klein of ABC News. "He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

No; he’s not that guy exactly. He’s that guy’s son.

SOURCE

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Background to David Mamet's Conversion

Hollywood mocks capitalism, which seems odd because the people who make movies are such aggressive capitalists -- competing hard to make money. But Hollywood's message is that capitalism is shallow and cruel.

Take the 1992 movie "Glengarry Glen Ross" (based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play). It's about cutthroat real estate salesmen who work for a heartless company. It was written by the celebrated playwright David Mamet, author of "American Buffalo," "Spanish Prisoner," and more than 50 other plays and movies.

I assumed that Mamet was another garden-variety Hollywood lefty, but then a few years ago, I was surprised to see an article he wrote titled, "Why I'm No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal." Now he's followed up with a book, "The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture."

I asked Mamet what turned a "Hollywood liberal" into a conservative. Was he a brain-dead liberal? The newspaper, not Mamet, put that headline on his article. "I referred to myself as one," Mamet told me. "Political decisions I made were foolish." Foolish because he wasn't really thinking, he said. Since everybody around him was liberal, he just went along.

What changed? "I met a couple conservatives, and I realized I never met any conservatives in my life. ... (O)ne started sending me books. His books ... made more sense than my books." Mamet was suddenly exposed to ideas he had never encountered before.

"Shelby Steele's 'White Guilt,'" he said, "led me to the works of Tom Sowell and through them (F.A.) Hayek and Milton Friedman." Two things hit him especially hard: the benefits of economic competition and the limits of leaders' ability to plan society.

"If you stop licensing taxi cabs, tomorrow you will see guys and women on every street corner saying, 'Who wants to go to XYZ address?' (The cabbie) will put five people in the car and drive them to that address. ... When the guy drops them off, if he's smart, he'll say: 'Tomorrow -- same thing, right? What do you guys want to drink for breakfast?' There will be cappuccino and ice tea and glass of milk. After X months, he will have three cars; after X months, he will have a fleet. And everyone will be competing to meet the needs of the commuters, which also is going to reduce traffic. Why are they allowed to compete? Because the government got the hell out of the business."

Mamet also read Hayek's last book, "The Fatal Conceit."

"What Hayek is talking about is that we have to have a constrained vision of the universe. The unconstrained vision, the liberal vision, is that everything can be done, everything is accomplishable," he said. "We don't have the knowledge. ... There is only so much that government can do. ... It would be nice if giving all of our money to the government could cure poverty. Maybe, but giving money to the government causes slavery."

For Hayek, the "fatal conceit" is the premise that politicians and bureaucrats can make the world better -- not by leaving people free to coordinate their private individual plans in the marketplace -- but by overall social and economic planning.

Imagine trying to plan an economy, Mamet said, when we barely know enough to raise our kids. "(T)he guy in government can't know everything."

As you can imagine, when Mamet went public, he bewildered many of his showbiz peers. A Los Angeles Times critic called his book "a children's crusade with no understanding of real politics." The Nation called Mamet a "great playwright, (but a) moronic political observer."

Mamet said to his wife: 'Isn't it funny? ... The New York Times, the supposed newspaper of record that has been reviewing my plays for 40 years, isn't even going to review this book.' "She says: 'Dave, grow up. The purpose of all newspapers is political."

Maybe the Times thinks it's insignificant that a celebrated cultural "liberal" now questions his faith in the supposed healing power of government. But as we sit mired in this endless jobless "recovery," with the wreckage of government failure all around, we should ask ourselves which one is out of touch with reality.

SOURCE

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The Great Reawakening

What started as a murmur has become a media refrain: “America is in decline.” Stated euphemistically the twenty-first century will not be an American century. Based on a dispassionate analysis of conditions at the moment, this sentiment seems accurate. Debt is crushing the American economy. Unemployment is steady at near double digits. And a mood of despair has captured the national capital.

But the Cassandras in our midst invariably overlook national resilience, the ability of Americans to rise to the occasion especially when conditions are most bleak. One such American is U.S. Senator Jim DeMint, a man who looks squarely at our problems and sees solutions.

In his new book, The Great American Awakening: Two Years That Changed My America, Washington and Me, DeMint points to the grass roots movement across the nation to reclaim our principles. Tea Partiers are on the march. Despite various media efforts to besmirch this homegrown movement, these average men and women are eager to restore fiscal sanity to the nation and in the process restore hope for our children and grandchildren.

Senator DeMint explains how this movement captured him and changed the dialogue in Washington. On one occasion speaking in California, DeMint had an epiphany. Even in a state suffering from insolvency, there is hope inspired by young people viscerally opposed to the intrusiveness of big government. Reading about Ronald Reagan DeMint notes, “The longer I live, the more I believe there are no great men, only average men who occasionally do great things.” Indeed it is these average men who influenced Senator DeMint.

Of course, there are detractors, those who are committed to the status quo. When the number of state employees increases geometrically and when 49 percent of Americans do not pay personal income tax, there is a constituency that believes government should be large and taxes high. But sensible people realize this arrangement is not sustainable.

If the United States is to remain a world power offering unprecedented liberty to its citizens, responsible financial measures must be taken. Tea Partiers get it and, after the experience Senator DeMint has had over the last two years, he gets it. The task ahead for conservatives is “to restore the Republican Party to its core principles” and “reearn the trust of the American people.” This mission is the partisan stance for national restoration. And if this book is any indication Senator DeMint is unquestionably in a leadership position.

More HERE

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

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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A recovering Obama voter



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America's Leftist destruction machine grinds on regardless

The Justice Department is now extorting multimillion dollar settlements from banks, by accusing them of racial discrimination because they use traditional, non-racist lending criteria that minority borrowers are, on average, less likely to satisfy, such as having a high credit score, or being able to afford a substantial downpayment. Its Civil Rights Division chief, Tom Perez, “has compared bankers to Klansmen.” The “only difference, he says, is bankers discriminate ‘with a smile’ and ‘fine print,’” calling their lending criteria “every bit as destructive as the cross burned in a neighborhood.”

As Investor’s Business Daily notes in “DOJ Begins Bank Witch Hunt”:

In what could be a repeat of the easy-lending cycle that led to the housing crisis, the Justice Department has asked several banks to relax their mortgage underwriting standards and approve loans for minorities with poor credit as part of a new crackdown on alleged discrimination, according to court documents reviewed by IBD.

Prosecutions have already generated more than $20 million in loan set-asides and other subsidies from banks that have settled out of court rather than battle the federal government and risk being branded racist. An additional 60 banks are under investigation, a DOJ spokeswoman says. Settlements include setting aside prime-rate mortgages for low-income blacks and Hispanics with blemished credit and even counting “public assistance” as valid income in mortgage applications.

In several cases, the government has ordered bank defendants to post in all their branches and marketing materials a notice informing minority customers that they cannot be turned down for credit because they receive public aid, such as unemployment benefits, welfare payments or food stamps. Among other remedies: favorable interest rates and down-payment assistance for minority borrowers with weak credit. . .

Such efforts risk recreating the government-imposed lax underwriting that led to the housing boom and bust, critics fear. “It’s absolutely outrageous after what we’ve just gone through,” said former Rep. Ernest Istook, a Heritage Foundation fellow. “How can someone both be financially stable enough to merit a mortgage at the same time they’re on public assistance? By definition, you don’t have the kind of employment that can support such a loan.”...

In the new prosecutions, Justice acknowledges in every case it did not prove charges of intentional discrimination, while banks have denied any wrongdoing. Many, in fact, earned outstanding ratings from anti-redlining regulators enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act. Istook calls Holder’s crusade an “egregious overreach by the government.” He says many of the targets are smaller banks without the resources to fight a protracted legal battle. . .

As part of settlement deals, prosecutors have required banks to sign “nondisclosure agreements” barring them from talking about the methods used to allege discrimination. Bank lawyers contend the prosecutors are trying to hide the shaky legal grounds on which the cases are built. “It’s horrible what they’re doing at the civil rights division,” said Reginald Brown, a partner at Wilmer Hale in Washington, who has represented banks in connection to recent race-bias investigations. “They don’t have any proof, just theories.”

He added, “They want you to sign something saying you agree, under the condition of any settlement with them, that you won’t disclose what their theories were. That’s because their theories are loopy and wouldn’t stand the light of day.” One such theory — “disparate impact” — holds that merely a difference in loan application outcomes is enough to prove racial discrimination — even if no intent exists on the part of loan officers to contrast based on the color of applicants, and even legitimate business factors — such as credit scores and down payments — help explain disparities in loan outcomes between white and black applicants.

We wrote earlier about how the Obama administration is supporting lawsuits based on a “disparate impact” theory even in circumstances when the Supreme Court has said that the theory cannot be used, using such lawsuits to pay off liberal special-interest groups and trial lawyers with millions of dollars of taxpayer money.

The Investor’s Business Daily story illustrates two outcomes of this pressure to avoid “disparate impact”: lenders will make loans to people with bad credit — increasing future default rates and harming banks’ ability to stay afloat — and will make loans to minorities on preferential terms, engaging in racial discrimination.

Such lower lending standards can have disastrous results. A recent book co-authored by The New York Times‘ Gretchen Morgenson chronicles how federally-promoted lower lending standards spawned the financial crisis, and put minority borrowers into homes they could not afford.

“This is a story, the authors say, ‘of what happens when Washington decides, in its infinite wisdom, that every living, breathing citizen should own a home.’ Encouraged by politicians to expand home lending—not least to minorities and to households with few assets—[government-sponsored mortgage giant Fannie Mae] ignored reasonable standards of underwriting and piled up fugitive profits almost as fast as it increased risk to taxpayers.

The disaster is now measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars. As for the borrowers who were supposedly to benefit from Fannie’s mortgage-industrial complex, Ms. Morgenson and Mr. Rosner write that home ownership ‘put them squarely on the road to personal and financial ruin.’”

Banks and mortgage companies have long been under pressure from lawmakers and regulators to give loans to people with bad credit, in order to provide “affordable housing” and promote “diversity.” That played a key role in triggering the mortgage crisis, judging from a story in the New York Times. For example, “a high-ranking Democrat telephoned executives and screamed at them to purchase more loans from low-income borrowers, according to a Congressional source.”

The executives of government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “eventually yielded to those pressures, effectively wagering that if things got too bad, the government would bail them out.”

Clinton-era affordable housing mandates were a key reason for the risky lending. A recent study by Peter Wallison, who had prophetically warned about Fannie and Freddie, found that two-thirds of all bad mortgages were either “bought by government agencies or required to be bought by private companies under government pressure,” a finding echoed by other recent studies.

Another law designed to prod banks to make loans in low-income communities, the Community Reinvestment Act, also contributed to the financial crisis, say the Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, bankers, and economists. Yet Obama has sought to expand its reach.

But there is another way for banks to eliminate such perceived racial “disparities”: Refusing to make loans to whites who would otherwise receive them, curtailing the flow of available credit. Given a choice between making bad loans to minorities, and refusing to make a few good loans to whites, a bank may choose the latter, since profit on a good loan is smaller than the loss on a defaulted loan. This, too, causes economic harm.

Cutting off the flow of credit to businesses can deprive them of capital needed to operate and expand, causing a recession and mass unemployment. For example, the Roosevelt Recession of 1937 is linked by some economists to the Federal Reserve’s increase in reserve requirements, which left banks with less money to lend, causing a contraction in the money supply and drying up the flow of credit for businesses that otherwise would have employed people.

(That recession was also the product of Supreme Court rulings that upheld anti-business measures passed during the New Deal, like the National Labor Relations Act, which had previously been struck down by lower courts, but which the Supreme Court upheld beginning in 1937 in cases like NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.)

Unemployment is already very high, thanks to Obama administration policies.

SOURCE

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Close the door on public-sector unions

by Jeff Jacoby

MASSACHUSETTS GOVERNMENT is almost a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party, so there was no chance that a law limiting collective bargaining for municipal employees would resemble the recent laws passed in Wisconsin and Ohio. The measure approved this week by Governor Deval Patrick and the state Legislature will hold down the cost of providing health benefits to teachers, firefighters, and other local workers by modestly curbing their unions' right to veto changes to employee health plans. For the ultrablue Bay State, that was a notable accomplishment. But it was hardly the "Union Busting, Massachusetts Style," that a Wall Street Journal headline hopefully predicted back in April.

The new laws in Wisconsin and Ohio prohibit collective bargaining over public-sector pensions and health benefits, and allow government employees to opt out of paying any union dues or fees. The Wisconsin law requires annual re-certification of all public employee unions; in Ohio, negotiated wage increases will have to be approved by voters if they would result in higher taxes. Nothing that sweeping was ever on the table in Massachusetts. Government unions may no longer have quite as much clout on Beacon Hill as they used to, but they still have enough to make Democrats think twice about confronting them.

No surprise, then, that the collective bargaining changes ultimately adopted were watered down significantly from the version approved by the state House of Representatives in April. That House vote reflected public sentiment -- a majority of Massachusetts voters believe government unions have too much power -- but in the face of union outrage, policymakers quickly promised to protect the unions' "seat at the table" and "meaningful voice" in setting health benefits for government employees. In April, the head of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO vowed to "fight this thing to the bitter end." This week, he happily acknowledged that the final language preserved "all we ever wanted, [which] was to have a voice."

That's too bad. Ensuring a "voice" for organized labor in government policymaking may sound reasonable, especially when those policies affect government workers. But collective bargaining in the public sector is in reality not reasonable at all. It is emphatically not like bargaining in the private sector, where unions representing labor contend with management representing owners for a share of the profits that labor helps create.

In the public sector, there are no profits to share. There are only taxpayers' dollars, which neither government employees nor government managers create. As for the taxpayers who do create those dollars, they have no seat at the table when public unions negotiate over wages and benefits. Instead, government sits on both sides, negotiating with itself over how to spend the people's money.

So unlike their counterparts in the private sector, public-sector unions are rarely constrained by market forces. There are limits to the wages and benefits that labor can demand from private employers. Corporations have to make a profit to stay alive, and both sides know that if costs rise too high, the results may be lost sales, eliminated jobs, or -- if worse comes to worst -- bankruptcy. Consequently, union negotiators cannot insist on the moon, and corporate managers dare not lose sight of the company's bottom line.

But that check and balance doesn't exist in public-sector collective bargaining. Teachers' or firefighters' or library workers' unions don't have to worry about jeopardizing the government's profits or driving away its customers: Government agencies can't go bankrupt, and their "customers" can't switch to a cheaper brand. So why not insist on the moon? Especially when the government managers on the other side of the table generally have little incentive to keep costs down. After all, if the pay, perks, and pensions of public workers send budgets through the roof, what choice do taxpayers have but to foot the bill?

At bottom, collective bargaining in the public sector is profoundly antidemocratic: It denies voters final say over the public policies they must live under, by forcing their elected representatives to shape those policies in concert with unions. In effect, it transfers to union officials -- interested parties not chosen by the people -- decision-making authority that they have no legitimate right to. That is why until just a few decades ago, it was universally understood that collective bargaining was incompatible with government employment.

Gradually it is becoming clear that throwing the door open to public-sector unions was a serious and costly mistake. It will take years to undo that mistake, but the process has begun. Even, if ever so slowly, in Massachusetts.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Bush years imposed crushing regulatory burdens: "Among the biggest lies told by liberals over the past few years is that the administration of President George W. Bush was some sort of deregulatory cascade, where rule after rule was rolled back, putting the public in more and more danger. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Bush years saw a massive bloating of the regulatory state, with more and more rules being issued by an out-of-control executive branch that didn't seem to care what it's only elected member thought about it."

TSA: Too Stupid for America: "Or maybe it stands for "Thousands Standing Around." Under the guise of making us safer, government has greatly expanded its role in airport security. But according a report released today, we're not very much safer. Since November 2001, there have been 25,000 security breaches in our nation's airports. And these are just the breaches that we know about. A few days ago, a man managed to fly from Boston to Newark with a stun gun. Like most failed government programs, many people think that the solution is to throw more money at the problem, even though the first version of the TSA spent far more than the private screeners they replaced, and since then the TSA's budget has increased from $4.7 billion in 2002 to $7.8 billion in 2011."

Fueling freedom: "Cries of outrage reverberated across the country when House Republicans, led by Rep. John Mica of Florida, chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, proposed a 30 percent reduction in federal surface-transportation spending. Never mind that all Mr. Mica's plan does is limit spending to no more than the gas taxes and other highway user fees that fund federal surface-transportation programs. Still, cyclists and transit advocates are having hissy fits because Republicans would reduce subsidies to their favored forms of travel — subsidies paid, for the most part, by people who rarely ride a bike or use transit."

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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