Apology to commenters

Most of my blogs are set up to require a word-matching task before a comment is accepted.  There is too much automated comment spam otherwise.  The character matching task is however run by Google and is presumably the same on all blogspot blogs.

I tried today however to leave a comment on a hate-filled rant from libertarian Timothy Taylor and found that no matter how many attempts I made my character matching was rejected.  As Taylor's blog is also a blogspot blog, that suggests to me that the whole system is faulty at the moment and may affect this blog too.

Neither I nor Taylor can do anything about it but I do (unlike Taylor) give my email address  at the foot of each post so if the comment system has bugged you, feel free to email me.

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Will Big Bird ever leave the government nest?



If Sesame Street is not commercially viable, then nothing is, and we should just cut to the chase and bail out everything

By MARK STEYN

Apparently, Frank Sinatra served as Mitt Romney's debate coach. As he put it about halfway through "That's Life":

"I'd jump right on a big bird and then I'd fly ... ."

That's what Mitt did in Denver. Ten minutes in, he jumped right on Big Bird, and then he took off – and never looked back, while the other fellow, whose name escapes me, never got out of the gate. It takes a certain panache to clobber not just your opponent but also the moderator. Yet that's what the killer Mormon did when he declared that he wasn't going to borrow money from China to pay for Jim Lehrer and Big Bird on PBS. It was a terrific alpha-male moment, not just in that it rattled Lehrer, who seemed too preoccupied contemplating a future reading the hog prices on the WZZZ Farm Report to regain his grip on the usual absurd format, but in the sense that it indicated a man entirely at ease with himself – in contrast to wossname, the listless sourpuss staring at his shoes

Yet, amidst the otherwise total wreckage of their guy's performance, the Democrats seemed to think that Mitt's assault on Sesame Street was a misstep from whose tattered and ruined puppet-stuffing some hay is to be made. "WOW!!! No PBS!!! WTF how about cutting congress's stuff leave big bird alone," tweeted Whoopi Goldberg. Even the president mocked Romney for "finally getting tough on Big Bird" – not in the debate, of course, where such dazzling twinkle-toed repartee might have helped, but a mere 24 hours later, once the rapid-response team had directed his speechwriters to craft a line, fly it out to a campaign rally and load it into the prompter, he did deliver it without mishap.

Unlike Mitt, I loathe Sesame Street. It bears primary responsibility for what the Canadian blogger Binky calls the de-monsterization of childhood – the idea that there are no evil monsters out there at the edges of the map, just shaggy creatures who look a little funny and can sometimes be a bit grouchy about it because people prejudge them until they learn to celebrate diversity and help Cranky the Friendly Monster go recycling. That is not unrelated to the infantilization of our society. Marinate three generations of Americans in that pabulum, and it's no surprise you wind up with unprotected diplomats dragged to their deaths from their "safe house" in Benghazi. Or as J. Scott Gration, the president's Special Envoy to Sudan, said in 2009, in the most explicit Sesamization of American foreign policy: "We've got to think about giving out cookies. Kids, countries – they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes." The butchers of Darfur aren't blood-drenched machete-wielding genocidal killers but just Cookie Monsters whom we haven't given enough cookies. I'm not saying there's a direct line between Bert & Ernie and Barack & Hillary ... well, actually, I am.

Okay, I may be taking this further than Mitt intended. So let's go back to his central thrust. The Corporation of Public Broadcasting receives nearly half-a-billion dollars a year from taxpayers, which it disburses to PBS stations, who, in turn, disburse it to Big Bird and Jim Lehrer. I don't know what Big Bird gets, but, according to Sen. Jim DeMint, the President of Sesame Workshop, Gary Knell, received in 2008 a salary of $956,513. In that sense, Big Bird and Sen. Harry Reid embody the same mystifying phenomenon: they've been in "public service" their entire lives and have somehow wound up as multimillionaires.

Mitt's decision to strap Big Bird to the roof of his station wagon and drive him to Canada has prompted two counter-arguments from Democrats: 1) half a billion dollars is a mere rounding error in the great sucking maw of the federal budget, so why bother? 2) everybody loves Sesame Street, so Mitt is making a catastrophic strategic error. On the latter point, whether or not everybody loves Sesame Street, everybody has seen it, and every American under 50 has been weaned on it. So far this century it's sold nigh on a billion bucks' worth of merchandising sales (that's popular toys such as the Subsidize-Me-Elmo doll). If Sesame Street is not commercially viable, then nothing is, and we should just cut to the chase and bail out everything.

Conversely, if this supposed "public" broadcasting brand is capable on standing on its own, then so should it. As for the rest of PBS's output – the eternal replays of the Peter, Paul & Mary reunion concert, twee Brit sitcoms, Lawrence Welk reruns and therapeutic infomercials – whatever their charms, it is difficult to see why the Brokest Nation in History should be borrowing money from the Chinese Politburo to pay for it. A system by which a Communist Party official in Beijing enriches British comedy producers by charging it to American taxpayers with interest is not the most obvious economic model. Yet, as Obama would say, the government did build that.

(Full disclosure: Some years ago, I hosted a lavish BBC special, and, at the meeting intended to sell it to PBS, the executive from "Great Performances" said he could only sign off on the deal if I were digitally edited out and replaced by Angela Lansbury. Murder, he shrieked. Lest I sound bitter, I should say I am in favor of this as a more general operating principle for public broadcasting: for example, "A Prairie Home Companion" would be greatly improved by having Garrison Keillor digitally replaced by Paul Ryan.)

The small things are not unimportant – and not just because, when "small" is defined as anything under 11 figures, "small" is a big part of the problem. If Americans can't muster the will to make Big Bird leave the government nest, they certainly will never reform Medicare. Just before the debate in Denver, in the general backstage melée, a commentator pointed out Valerie Jarrett, who is officially "Assistant to the President for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs," a vital position which certainly stimulates the luxury-length business-card industry. Not one in 100,000 Americans knows what she looks like, but she declines to take the risk of passing among the rude peasantry without the protection of a Secret Service detail. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has a private jet to fly him home from Washington every weekend.

The Queen of the Netherlands flies commercial, so does the Queen of Denmark. Prince William and his lovely bride, whom at least as many people want to get a piece of as Valerie Jarrett or Leon Panetta, flew to Los Angeles on a Royal Canadian Air Force boneshaker. It is profoundly unrepublican when minor public officials assume that private planes and entourages to hold the masses at bay are a standard perk of office. And it is even more disturbing that tens of millions of Americans are accepting of this. The entitlements are complicated, and will take some years and much negotiation. But, in a Romney administration, rolling back the nickel'n'dime stuff – ie, the million'n'billion stuff – should start on Day One.

Mitt made much of his bipartisan credentials in Denver. So, in that reach-across-the-aisle spirit, if we cannot abolish entirely frivolous spending, might we not at least attempt some economies of scale? Could Elmo, Grover, Oscar and Cookie Monster not be redeployed as Intergovernmental Engagement Assistant Jarrett's security detail? Could Leon Panetta not fly home on Big Bird every weekend?

And for the next debate, instead of a candidate slumped at the lectern like a muppet whose puppeteer has gone out for a smoke, maybe Elmo's guy could shove his arm up the back of the presidential suit.

SOURCE

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Some profound Leftist ignorance

 Tim Worstall

A very puzzling call contained in the latest little pamphlet from Compass. You know the sort of thing, the call to arms about what we must do to make this a more caring, sharing and wondrous society. And yes, I read these things so you don't have to.

They insist that there should be a European minimum wage: "Europe should therefore move towards a continent wide minimum wage, based on the respective average income."

There's an awful lot of weight that rests upon that word "respective". There are two possibilities. One is that there should indeed be a European minimum wage. One single rate that applies to all jobs in the EU. Which would be either irrelevant or entirely crazed. If it's based on some sort of average of European wages then just about every job in the poorer countries would disappear overnight. Insisting on, say, 50% of German wages in Romania when that's some multiple of average wages in Romania would indeed be crazed. Insisting that Germany meet the Romanian minimum wage would simply be irrelevant.

The other meaning possible is that they think that there should be a minimum wage in each country, based on the relevant wages for that country. The problem with this is the following:

Germany, Cyprus and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia have statutory minimum wages that do not apply to all or the large majority of employees but are restricted to specific groups which are defined e.g. by sectors or by professions. These are excluded from the data collection. Also excluded are countries where there are no statutory national minimum wages: Denmark, Italy, Austria, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland. In these countries, wages are either determined by negotiations between the social partners, at company level or at the level of each individual contract. Typically, sectoral level agreements are widely applied and have erga omnes applicability, thus constituting de facto minimum wages.

Insisting on a statutory minimum wage in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Finland.....what effect does anyone think this will have in any manner at all?

Which leaves me really rather puzzled. I'm not sure which box to put Neal Lawson and his band of merry social democrats in. It could be that they're simply ignorant, in that they don't know that there are already minimum wages in most EU countries. It could be that they're stupid in that they don't realise that having them where they do not already exist isn't going to make a damn bit of difference as the same end is achieved in other ways.

Or it could be that they really are crazed loons and that they want to impose a minimum wage based on some average of European wages. Which would immediately close down large parts of the economies of the poorer countries.

Which leaves me even more puzzled. Given that these are the only three boxes that they can be put in as a result of this call then why is it that anyone pays any attention to them at all?

SOURCE

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Twitter Explodes After Black Actress Endorses Romney as the ‘Only Choice for Your Future’‏



Actress Stacey Dash, who has starred in everything from the 90′s hit Clueless to CSI, prompted a firestorm on Twitter after publicly endorsing Republican nominee Mitt Romney, and then standing by her opinion.

“Vote for Romney. The only choice for your future. @mittromney @teamromney #mittromney #VOTE #voteromney,” Dash wrote on her official Twitter page, accompanied by a photo of herself with an American flag.

Not long after, presumed Obama supporters began insulting Dash for her opinion, saying she isn’t “black” enough, several even asking if the actress would just “kill herself.”

One man wrote: “This hurts but you a Romney lover and you slutting yourself to the white man only proves why no black man married u @REALStaceyDash.”

But Dash was apparently undeterred by the cruel reaction, and sent a number of sarcastic responses to the worst offenders, wrote a tweet reminding that she is entitled to her own opinion, and– to top it off– re-tweeted a Romney campaign message.

“Women have had enough of @BarackObama’s disappointment. We need new leadership to get our economy growing again…” the re-tweeted message reads.

More HERE (Including tweets)

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The inverted racism of Elizabeth Warren draws attention to the enduring racism of "affirmative action"

For months [Massachusetts] Republicans have had a field day with Warren's claim to be Cherokee on the strength of unverified "family lore" about her great-great-great grandmother. Brown's TV spot milks the "Fauxcahontas" angle with clips of news stories reporting on the story. "Warren admitted to identifying herself as Native American to employers," one broadcast journalist says. "Something genealogists said they have zero evidence of," intones another.

None of this would matter if it weren't for the fact that nearly half a century after the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, racial discrimination – in the form of affirmative action – is entrenched in American society.

Warren insists that she "never got any benefit because of my heritage," and that the only reason she listed herself as an American Indian in professional law-school directories was to be invited to lunches "with people who are like I am." Her explanations provoked so much ridicule because they were ridiculous. Everyone knows that minority status can confer serious advantages when employers place a premium on "diversity," and use racial preferences and set-asides to achieve it.

Martin Luther King memorably dreamed of a nation in which people would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, and in much of American life his dream has become a reality.

But not within the contemporary diversity industry, where individual men and women are first and foremost members of categories, to be grouped by race, by ethnicity, by color. That's the logic behind a directory of "minority law teachers." It was also the mindset behind Jim Crow and "separate but equal."

The real significance of Warren's supposed Native American heritage isn't that she lacks proof that one of her 32 great-great-great grandparents was a Cherokee. It isn't that she believes the stories she was told as a girl. It isn't that by identifying herself as a racial minority she may, in Brown's words, have seized "an advantage that others were entitled to."

It is that in 21st-century America, no such advantage should exist. Racial preferences should by now be artifacts of history, not tools for hiring law professors. Two generations ago Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP declared that "classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society."

More HERE

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

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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 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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Anti-Israel, Pro-Hamas Muslim Leader Is US Delegate to Warsaw Human Rights Conference

His most infamous statement was during a radio interview on September 11, 2001, accusing Israel of the attack on the WTC

Great teeth

For two weeks every year, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe holds what it refers to as the world's largest human rights and democracy conference, called the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting.  Organized by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, this year's meeting is taking place in Warsaw, and it began last week.  Special attention is focused this year on freedom of religion and belief, the rights of Roma (formerly called gypsies) women and the rights of national minorities in OSCE countries.

The head of the U.S. delegation to the conference this year is Ambassador Avis Bohlen, a retired foreign service officer whose career included serving as Ambassador to Bulgaria from 1996 - 1999.

There are three public members of the U.S. delegation.  Nida Gelazis, of the Woodrow Wilson Center, is a scholar of  international human rights, international law and citizenship policies and protection of national minorities.

Dr. Ethel Brooks, professor of sociology at Rutgers University, is the second representative of the U.S.  at the conference. Brooks has published many articles on her research areas which include child labor in third world countries, globalization and political economies.

The third public member chosen to attend the human rights conference as a representative of the U.S. is Salam Al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

While two out of three of the U.S. representatives are scholars whose fields suggest expertise in human rights and democratization, and are entirely consistent with the themes of the OSCE and, specifically, human rights and democracy, Al-Marayati's appointment raises serious questions.

Counter-terrorism expert Steve Emerson told The Jewish Press that

Al-Marayati's appointment is not just scandalous but also does incalculable damage to our values as a nation whose core principles categorically reject the legitimization of a racist supporter of terrorism, and an incendiary proponent of paranoid conspiracies that provides the motivation for radical Muslims to carry out terrorism.

Al-Marayati is not a scholar.  His only graduate degree is in business and his undergraduate degree is in science.  He has been involved with MPAC since its founding in 1986.  Without any scholarly article to his credit, his expertise is in matters concerning the role of Islam and Muslims in America and elsewhere.

SOURCE 

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Jobs, Taxes, Oil, Investment and Debt

This week Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post writes that cutting taxes has no effect on economic growth. Hit the rich she says. Larry Kudlow of National Review writes that cutting taxes expands economic growth and creates jobs through private investment. Who is right?

Kudlow. Hands down. Slam dunk.  Ms. Marcus fails to examine a simple proposition: when did the past four recoveries begin, when did tax rate cuts kick in, and how many jobs were thus created by new private investment.

Mr. Kudlow connects the job growth with the tax rate cuts and makes the case.  Let's look it up.

In 1983, Reagan's tax rate cuts fully kicked in. Private investment soared to $177 billion or by 33%, and exceeded the previous four years by a factor of ten. 4.9 million Jobs were created over the next year. 11 million over 3 years. Government spending was kept at 20% of GDP. Reagan eliminated price controls on oil and prices dropped $17 a barrel.

In 1997, the Clinton administration cut taxes on capital gains, increased the child tax credit, reformed welfare and adopted a plan to cut government spending to 18% of GDP and balance the budget. In 1997, private investment increased by $148 billion, the largest amount in the eight years of the Clinton administration. 3.3 million jobs were created that year. Oil production increased and oil prices averaged $16 a barrel.

In 2003, President Bush secured a cut in tax rates, with 80% of the cuts occurring in that year. Private investment into the economy soared to $250 billion, a record, and next year 2.3 million jobs were created. By 2009, spending was 21% of GDP, at the historical average.

But oil prices reached $145 a barrel in 2008 and as Secretary of the Treasury Geithner explains, that killed the US economy. Fracking technology was just beginning to take hold but not soon enough to rescue the US economy.

In 2009-10, private investment into the US economy increased only a combined $100 billion. Government spending soared to 25% of GDP, far above the historical average. Since the June 2009 recovery began, a paltry 100,000 jobs a month have been created over three years. If one combined 1983, 1997 and 2004, job creation hit 11.5 million, more than three times faster than 2009-12.

Oil production on Federal lands declined 40%. Yet state and private lands-using American fracking technology-- have doubled gas production.

But the regulators want to kill fracking. And fracking is banned on Federal lands. Trillions of barrels of oil remain right beneath our feet and we cannot touch it. And oil tops $100 a barrel, an increase of $70 since January 2009.

The n Senator Obama campaigned in 2008 in Ohio and charged the Bush administration was immoral to have increased our debt by $4 trillion and cut household income $2000. He said we were buying too much oil from overseas. And thus no Republican deserved to be elected to the White House.

Since the 2009 recovery began, US household income is down 8% or over $4000. The national debt has climbed nearly $6 trillion. Oil has averaged near $100 a barrel, nearly triple what it was in 2009, and we are sending $300 billion overseas to buy it. While OPEC is getting rich, we are going broke.

The administration's policies are driving spending up to trillions of new debt. Today's spending of $3.8 trillion is projected to rise to $5.5 trillion in ten years. This is driven in part by Obama Care, which will cost $2.7 trillion, with only $500 billion in new taxes to pay for it. Yet 30 million will remain uninsured.

By 2020, deficits remain over $1 trillion according to the administration's own budget numbers. Oil and energy costs are being deliberately increased, because this administration believes we consume too much energy. His Energy Secretary wants the US to have European gas prices-that's $10 bucks a gallon.

More people have been added to the welfare and poverty rolls since 2009 than have been put to work. 591,000 people left the work force last month, giving up looking for work, losing hope.

The President says the private sector is doing fine. He says the deficit is only a problem for the "long term". He says "shovel ready"" jobs really were never available.

Washington Post writer Bob Woodward says that we are in a period of maximum peril, that our debt is "beyond unsustainable", and the President remains ambivalent even though his Treasury Secretary warns him "You have to fix it".  There was a bipartisan deal on the table in 2011, but the President said no.

Under the President's own rules he used in the 2008 campaign, his policies have failed, they have not worked. Doing over the next four years what he has done in the past four years will not turn failure into success. As his Secretary of the Treasury said to Congress: "We have no plan but we do not like yours".

SOURCE 

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Government training , included exercise in which employees were told to chant "our forefathers were illegal immigrants."

The U.S. government paid a Chicago consultant hundreds of thousands of dollars to put on diversity training workshops that, according to one watchdog, included an exercise in which employees were told to chant "our forefathers were illegal immigrants." 

Conservative group Judicial Watch made the claim this week as it released a handful of documents pertaining to the program -- and alleged that the sessions held by the Department of Agriculture ended up enforcing political views more than promoting tolerance. 

"Instead of being diversity-oriented or tolerance-oriented, it's more about adopting a mindset," said Lisette Garcia, a senior investigator with the group. "It seemed to go so far as to encourage illegal immigration." 

But the USDA denied that the workshop was anything more than a training exercise to "examine stereotypes."

"Participants did not chant during these workshops," a department official said. "In one portion of the session, the presenter had participants repeat provocative and potentially offensive phrases as part of an exercise to examine stereotypes. The statements were not reflective of USDA or its policy."

Judicial Watch began to investigate the sessions earlier this year after being approached by a tipster at USDA who was "offended" by them, Garcia said. Judicial Watch claims it has identified at least $200,000 spent by the USDA over the last two years on the company Souder, Betances & Associates. 

The USDA later confirmed that amount.   

The tipster, Garcia said, described one session in which the speaker led workers in chanting "our forefathers were illegal immigrants" while pounding on the table and getting others in the room to join in.  "How does that fit into the USDA mission at all?" she said. "The price tag makes it more egregious." 

SOURCE 

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‘Mainstream’ Media Making A Desperate Last Stand?

In a particularly noxious September 30 article entitled "Tired Cries of Bias Don't Help Romney," New York Times columnist David Carr made a ludicrous effort to deflect conservative animosity towards the "mainstream" media. He contended that it is misplaced, and likely just an outgrowth of the frustration ostensibly felt by those on the right who want to see Barack Obama defeated in November. Carr attempts to make a case that the abundance of modern alternative media somehow negates the total lack of objectivity by "reporters" in the nation's major newspapers and on the nightly news. But by his very methodology in articulating his case, he proves the indictment of the decidedly liberal press.

Nor is Carr alone. On a PBS broadcast the following day, commentators Mark Shields and Nina Totenberg did their best to ridicule anyone who would dare contend that liberal bias exists among prominent media figures. Their scorn (embellished with forced laughter), represented a flailing version of the standard Alinsky tactic of mocking an argument that cannot be substantively refuted. This approach has often worked in the past. Act like it is an absurd point, and that those who ascribe to it are dim-witted, and hopefully others will be dissuaded from publicly agreeing with them.

Unfortunately for leftists, the ruse is no longer even remotely credible. Their attempts to execute a preemptive strike are becoming embarrassingly obvious. A pattern is emerging of media liberals seeking to bolster their integrity in the midst of a presidential campaign in which they have been anything but believable. Like the proverbial kid who cries out from the rear of the classroom with an unsolicited declaration of his total innocence, the rising fervor with which they try to exonerate themselves makes them look increasingly guilty. Indeed this is an old debate, but it is one that liberals are dredging up with a degree of coordination suggesting an agenda.

Even a cursory glance at the New York Times' evaporating circulation yields ample evidence that the numbers who find Carr, Shields, and their kind believable are dwindling. Yet this is a critical time for those on the left, who consider this November's elections to be game, set, and match. A loss by Barack Obama will represent an absolute repudiation of every aspect of the liberal/socialist utopia that society's most gullible have been eagerly anticipating since the days of Karl Marx. An electoral rout will put liberals in full retreat, not only on the political front, but in the ideological and philosophical realm as well. It is not surprising that, with so much at stake, they are making every effort to sway the outcome in their favor, and in particular, they are working overtime to thoroughly control the flow of information to the public.

Nevertheless, to their dismay, the conservative media flourishes. Though it takes more effort to root out information on the Internet or other alternative sources, for those who are sufficiently motivated, the avenues to truth exist. So it is incumbent upon the liberal/Democrat political propagandists to rail and accuse with sufficient volume to drown out all other information among those who still passively receive their daily news and accept it at face value.

That liberal "journalists" are able to engage in such behavior while professing, with totally straight faces, to embody objectivity and professionalism is a testament to their consuming devotion to their real cause, which is a wholly political one. They simply cannot be so pathologically naive or delusional to not recognize the bias that permeates every sentence they utter. So they must be deliberately and purposefully lying.

Entire organizations, such as Reed Irvine's "Accuracy In Media" and Dr. Brent Bozell's "Media Research Center" have been established for the purpose of calling the "mainstream news outlets" to account. And the incriminating evidence of their shady reporting exists in abundance. Yet they still cling tenaciously to their assertions of neutrality, and caterwaul with indignation at the merest suggestion that they might be less than such.

Though it may be stating the glaringly obvious to assert liberal media bias, their constant professions of angelic innocence must be countered. The many successes of the liberal propaganda onslaught during the last several decades  has inarguably proven that a lie incessantly repeated must be just as diligently refuted, or it will eventually be accepted as "self-evident" truth. So a few examples of their ongoing moral and ethical bankruptcy should serve to remind Americans of just who they are, and more importantly, what manner of leaders they consider worthy to govern the nation.

Imagine how devastating Barack Obama's "You didn't build that" comment would be to his reelection efforts, if the nightly news anchors had delivered it with even a fraction of the fervency and outrage with which they relentlessly excoriated Mitt Romney for his "Forty Seven Percent" remark. Yet the major networks were at first virtually silent on Obama's outlandish assertion, though later, upon realizing how severely Real America was outraged by it, they felt compelled to defend their dear leader on the standard grounds that he was "taken out of context."

Going all the way back to Nancy Reagan's tenure as First Lady, the press has kept a sharp eye on Republican Presidents' wives and children, gleefully informing the public of any supposed lapses in decorum. In Nancy Reagan's case, a huge and ongoing "controversy" was concocted after her decision to upgrade White House dinnerware, as if that episode constituted an unforgivable breach of the public trust. In contrast, the lavish and exorbitantly expensive lifestyle enjoyed by Michelle Obama, involving innumerable vacations with enormous supporting "staff," are rarely discussed by liberal "reporters."

What if the media were to pursue the truth of the "Fast and Furious" disaster and the obvious complicity of Attorney General Erik Holder with a determination similar to their efforts to indict George Bush advisor Karl Rove over the manufactured Valerie Plame ruckus? It is noteworthy that Rove was fully exonerated of any wrongdoing in the affair. Yet in the wake of his acquittal, those "unbiased" news reporters refused to accept such a verdict. In contrast Holder, and indeed the entire Obama Administration, have clearly stonewalled every effort to get to the bottom (or, more accurately, the "top") of Fast and Furious. This time however, the media yawns.

Only the constraints of space impose a limit on the number of other examples that could be given, though a cursory mention of the treasonous Benghazi cover-up, and its implications to national security, is definitely warranted. In short, an unbiased media, primarily concerned with honestly informing the American people, would long ago have declared Obama's tenure in office a dismal failure. Instead, they rally to him and in the process make his shortcomings their own.

The people of the Heartland are correct to recognize that the dangers posed to them by a deceitful press are no less grave than those of an unscrupulous and ideologically blinded leftist administration whose sedition is empowered by their media minions.

 SOURCE 

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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 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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IQ linked to levels of happiness

This is to be expected when we realize that IQ is a measure of GENERAL problem solving ability.  High IQ helps with just about everything.  More speculatively, it is consistent with high IQ being one aspect of general biological good functioning

People with lower intelligence are more likely to be unhappy than their brighter colleagues, according to UK researchers.

Their study of 6,870 people showed low intelligence was often linked with lower income and poor mental health, which contributed to unhappiness.

The researchers are calling for more help and support to be targeted at people with lower IQs.

Their findings were published in the journal Psychological Medicine.

The researchers, at University College London, analysed data from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey in England.

One of the questions was: "Taking all things together, how would you say you were these days - very happy, fairly happy or not too happy?" People's verbal IQ was also assessed.

The highest proportion saying they were "very happy" was found in people with an IQ between 120 and 129 - 43% said they were very happy.

However, the highest proportion saying "not too happy" - 12% - was found in people with an IQ between 70 and 79.

Dr Angela Hassiotis said: "People in the lower end of the normal spectrum are more likely to consider themselves not happy."

The study said lower intelligence was linked to lower income, worse health and needing help with daily life, such as shopping or housework - all of which contributed to unhappiness.

Dr Jonathan Campion, a consultant psychiatrist and director of public mental health at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, said: "The study suggests that higher IQ appears to be associated with improved wellbeing, but that this relationship between IQ and wellbeing is partly due to higher IQ being linked with better income, health and less mental illness."

SOURCE

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Job increase mainly part-timers  -- if you can believe it at all

Is this the Obama October Surprise?  Only in an era of depressingly diminished expectations could the September jobs report be called a good one. It really isn’t. Not at all.

1. Yes, the U-3 unemployment rate fell to 7.8%, the first time it has been below 8% since January 2009. But that’s only due to a flood of 582,000 part-time jobs. As the Labor Department noted:

   The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) rose from 8.0 million in August to 8.6 million in September. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.

2. And take-home pay? Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have risen by just 1.8 percent. When you take inflation into account, wages are flat to down.

3. The broader U-6 rate — which takes into account part-time workers who want full-time work and lots of discouraged workers who’ve given up looking — stayed unchanged at 14.7%. That’s a better gauge of the true unemployment rate and state of the American labor market.

4. The shrunken workforce remains shrunken. If the labor force participation rate was the same as when President Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be 10.7%. If the participation rate had just stayed steady since the start of the year, the unemployment rate would be 8.4% vs. 8.3%. Where’s the progress? Here is RDQ Economics:

   Such a rapid decline in the unemployment rate would be consistent with 4%–5% real economic growth historically but much of the decline is accounted for by people dropping out of the labor force (over the last year the employment-population ratio has risen to only 58.7% from 58.4%).  We believe part of the drop in the unemployment rate over the last two months is a statistical quirk (the household data show an increase in employment of 873,000 in September, which is completely implausible and likely a result of sampling volatility).  Moreover, declining labor force participation over the last year (resulting in 1.1 million people disappearing from the labor force) accounts for much of the rest of the decline.

5. As the chart at the top of the post shows — a chart originally produced by Team Obama — even the artificially depressed 7.8% unemployment rate is way above the 5.6% unemployment rate the White House predicted for September 2012 if Congress passed the $800 billion stimulus package back in 2009.

6. The 114,000 jobs created would have been a good number … but for 1962, not 2012. The U.S. economy needs 2-3 times that number every month to close the jobs gap (which is the number of jobs that the U.S. economy needs to create in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while also absorbing the people who enter the labor force each month.) At 114,000 jobs a month, the jobs gap would not close until after 2025, according to the Hamilton Project.

7.  We are still on pace to create fewer jobs this year than last year. In 2012, employment growth has averaged 146,000 per month, compared with an average monthly gain of 153,000 in 2011.

8. White House economist Alan Krueger says the jobs numbers are ”further evidence” the economy is healing. But he’s wrong.

The employment-population ratio, which merely shows how many folks have jobs as a share of the civilian population, was 58.7%. Now that’s up from last month. But it is still far below where it was in June 2009, 59.4%,when the recession officially ended. And it’s even further below the 63% level before the downturn.

Bottom line: The U.S. labor market remains in a deep depression with virtually no recovery since the official end of the Great Recession. But the Long Recession continues unabated.

SOURCE

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Obama’s 13 million jobs gap

In this recession, the economy has lost a net 3.4 million jobs from its 2008 peak that have not yet been recovered. Meanwhile the working age population has grown by more than 11.1 million since then — creating a 13.5 million and widening jobs gap that will not be filled easily no matter who wins the election on Nov. 6

At the Oct. 3 presidential debate, Barack Obama tried to put a nice spin on this dismal situation, claiming millions in private sector jobs growth in the past 30 months. But this is false comfort.

Since the job market’s bottom in Dec. 2009, the meager jobs growth we are currently seeing at about 150,000 a month is still not keeping up with population growth of about 200,000 a month.

Therefore, it is had little effect on the unemployed rate, which had been above 8 percent for 43 straight months, the longest period of sustained high unemployment since the Great Depression. 7.8 percent is still not where we need to be.

For new entrants into the workforce, the hiring prospects out there are particularly grim, especially for recent college graduates, about half of whom alarmingly cannot find work according to a Rutgers study.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data bears this out. Since Jan. 2009, the labor force participation rate of college graduates has dropped significantly — from 77.6 percent to about 75.9 percent today. That accounts for about 1 million graduates who should have entered the labor force upon graduation, but didn’t.

Another 1.58 million with some college or an associate’s degree who should have also entered the labor force are nowhere to be found.

Together, that means 2.6 million Americans post-college have promptly joined the ranks of the unemployed. That’s at a rate of 59,581 a month or 714,000 young Americans a year who are falling through the cracks — creating a lost generation.

All of which means the jobs picture is simply going from bad to worse. We’re still bleeding.

To get out of this hole, the economy will need to produce in excess of 200,000 jobs a month just to begin eating into 13.5 million jobs gap and significantly reduce the unemployment rate. But this will not be easy. Even if the economy were to suddenly start creating 400,000 jobs a month, it would take nearly six years just to get back to full employment.

At the current 150,000 new jobs a month, we’ll never get there.

That is why whoever wins in Nov. will have their work cut out for them to make it more conducive for businesses to set up shop here as opposed to overseas. We’ll need to lower or eliminate the corporate tax, unwind unnecessary regulations in health care, the environment and labor, and strengthen the dollar to make it cheaper to do business here again.

In the meantime, systemic, high unemployment creates a tremendous political challenge for Obama. It is he who must face the 22.7 million Americans who can’t find full-time work at the polls, plus 5 million more who have simply given up.

These disenchanted may no longer be willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt and will likely find themselves with a little extra time on their hands on Nov. 6 to add one more person to the ranks of the unemployed.

SOURCE

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Romney left Obama on the ropes


If Obama has lost the New Yorker...

by Jeff Jacoby

BARACK OBAMA hasn't been in a high-stakes, nationally televised presidential debate in nearly four years. Mitt Romney was in plenty of them over the past 18 months. Last night, it showed.

Heading into yesterday's encounter at the University of Denver, polls showed that voters by a wide margin were expecting Obama to win the three debates that he and Romney have agreed to. But not only did the president fail to knock out his challenger last night, there were long stretches when it wasn't even clear he had remembered to lace up his gloves. On issue after issue, in exchange after exchange, Romney was focused, clear, interesting, and engaged, while Obama repeatedly came across as distracted, irritated, and vague. The former Massachusetts governor was plainly enjoying himself. The president seemed to want nothing more than to run out the clock and bring a painful evening to an end.

I didn't hear any devastating zingers, but Romney came equipped with memorable lines. The Obama economic philosophy, he said early on, amounts to "trickle-down government." The tens of billions of dollars the administration has sunk into failed "green" energy companies, he quipped, shows that "you don't pick winners and losers, you just pick the losers." To the president's repeated claim that Romney's tax proposals would inevitably result in higher taxes on middle-class earners, the GOP nominee replied affably that as a father of five sons, he was used to people saying something untrue over and over in the hope that repetition would make it more convincing.

When asked for examples of federal spending he would like to cut, he cheerfully cited subsidies for PBS. "Sorry, Jim," he smilingly told moderator Jim Lehrer, who is practically a PBS icon. "I like PBS. I like Big Bird – I even like you!" A humorless Obama, by contrast, snapped at Lehrer when he thought the moderator had cheated him out of five seconds of response time.

Romney channeled Muhammad Ali last night, floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee. He left Obama on the ropes.

SOURCE

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The Undoing Of The Storybook Man


CNN ditched coverage of the speech after Romney's line about Chicago

Jonah Goldberg

If you've seen the "Shrek" movies or the spin-off cartoon starring the storybook cat voiced by Antonio Banderas, you know what I'm talking about. Whenever Puss in Boots really needs something from someone, he flashes these enormous kitten eyes that melt anyone in their path. Whenever my daughter really wants something, she tries to lay them on me, and I have to say, "Stop trying to give me the Puss in Boots eyes ... you can't have chocolate cake for dinner."

I knew Barack Obama was miserable when he tried to give debate moderator Jim Lehrer the Puss-in-Boots eyes. "You may want to move on to another topic," Obama implored Lehrer, a bit like a motorcycle thief begging a cop to take him into custody rather than let him stay with the surly biker gang that caught him.

I expected Romney to beat expectations and win the debate (though I had no clue how decisive his victory would be), not because I thought Romney was such a fantastic debater, but because Obama is the single most overrated politician of my lifetime.

That's not to say he's a bad politician. He's not. He's fine, even pretty good. But he's not the master so many people claim he is.

The Irish have a saying: "Hunger makes the best sauce." And it's true. If you're hungry enough, roadkill will make for a king's feast. Liberals were so hungry for someone like Obama, he seemed like so much more than he really was.

You could hear indications of this fact in the way some of the more crotchety members of the Democratic establishment described Obama.

Sen. Harry Reid was blown away by the potential of this "light-skinned" African-American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

In 2007, Joe Biden said of his then-opponent, "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." He added: "I mean, that's a storybook, man."

Storybook Man, indeed.

While such comments could be described as racially insensitive, they weren't necessarily racist. They simply reflected the fact that even cynical Democrats understood that the Democratic Party -- and, to be fair, much of the country generally -- craved a mainstream black presidential candidate. Jesse Jackson was too polarizing, some would say too embarrassing, for the job. Obama, meanwhile, was "storybook, man."

The problem for Obama was that he always believed the most ludicrous version of Storybook Man. He once told a reporter, "You know, I actually believe my own [bovine excrement]."

For a guy who supposedly gives wonderful speeches, he rarely persuades the un-persuaded or inspires those he didn't already have at "hello." That's partly the fault of his speechwriters, who always did him the disservice of producing the kind of pedantic and clichéd boilerplate that Obama mistook for soaring oratory. He thought he smashed through the Democratic primaries like a battering ram through concrete when he mostly pushed on open doors.

As president, he's convinced himself that he is a policy wonk with a deeper understanding of the machinery of government and the mysteries of the economy than even his advisors. And yet he had to learn on the job that "shovel-ready jobs" were magic beans sold to him by party hacks hungry for pork. He bought a stimulus that only stimulated political cronies. In the debate, he touted windmills and solar power as the energy sources of the future as if he still honestly believes that.

The media's infatuation with Obama and/or their contempt for his critics only served to reinforce his delusions. When the press laughs at all of your jokes and takes your glib excuses as profound insights, the inevitable result is a kind of flabby narcissism. Kings can be forgiven for thinking they are the greatest poets when the court weeps at their clunky limericks.

The Obama who delivered a shockingly lackluster convention speech last month is the same man who walked into that Denver stadium in 2008 to rapturous approval. The man who lost the debate Wednesday night is the same man who never managed to make Obamacare popular after more than 50 speeches and pronouncements on it in his first year.

The key difference now is that the hunger for Obama has been replaced with the indigestion that follows after four unimpressive years in office. In sales, they say you sell the sizzle, not the steak. In 2008, the man was all sizzle, and the ravenous throng was sold. Now he must sell the steak itself, and it's full of gristle, fat and bone. He may yet still close the deal, but only if people fall for his Puss in Boots eyes.

SOURCE

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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 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 most articulate black Christian



One can only hope that his clear-thinking sincerity and true  Christianity become contagious.  He in fact has a powerful message for all Christians, black or white.  I salute him

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Univision Exposes Fast and Furious' Rising Body Count

From  ABC, CBS and NBC?  Crickets

A Univision special documents how weapons provided by the administration to Mexican drug cartels repeatedly have taken a deadly toll as families on both sides of the border wait for true answers and accountability.

We may never know how many deaths, kidnappings and other criminal activities were facilitated by more than 2,000 weapons that were allowed to "walk" into Mexico under the Obama administration's Fast and Furious program, but a Univision special aired Sunday exposes more of the carnage.

The special, put together by Univision's investigative unit and aired as a special edition of Univision's "Aqui y Ahora" ("Here and Now") identified massacres committed using guns from the ATF operation, including the killing of 16 young people attending a party in a residential area of Ciudad Juarez in January 2010.

In addition to fueling increased gun violence in Mexico, guns from Fast and Furious previously unreported by congressional investigators found their way into the hands of drug traffickers across Latin America in countries such as Honduras and Colombia, as well as the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

Kudos to Univision, which regrettably will not have a reporter at Wednesday's presidential debate to ask the tough questions the administration's media sycophants will not, for pursuing the truth on Fast and Furious with more vigor than most American media outlets.

"I think up to 100 Mexicans might have died (in Operation Fast and Furious) and also American agent Brian Terry," Univision reporter Jorge Ramos said to President Obama during a recent interview.

"There's a report that 14 agents were responsible for the operation, but shouldn't the attorney general, Eric Holder ... have known about that? And if he didn't, should you fire him?"

We hope but doubt that President Obama will be asked such a question at Wednesday's debate by the network talking heads or that they'll be asked this challenging follow-up question by Ramos' co-host Maria Elena Salinas: "Why don't we have ... an independent investigation that is not done by the Justice Department?"

As we have noted, the recent report by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz was largely a whitewash that, while citing 14 officials as potential scapegoats and admitting Fast and Furious represented a "pattern of serious failures" by various agencies, let the buck stop short of where it belongs — with Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama White House.

Univision found 57 Fast and Furious weapons in addition to 122 specifically mentioned in a congressional report. They included weapons used in the massacre at a party just one year after President Obama's inauguration and less than a year before Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in December 2010 at the hands of an illegal immigrant working for the Sinaloa Cartel just 10 miles from the Mexican border near Nogales, Ariz.

"On Jan. 30, 2010, a commando of at least 20 hit men parked themselves outside a birthday party of high school and college students in Villas de Salvarcar, Ciudad Juarez," according to a version of the Univision report in English, on the ABC News website.

Citing a Mexican Army document it obtained and published, Univision reported that three of the high-caliber weapons were traced to Operation Fast and Furious.

The report also reveals the botched operation may have played a role in a 2009 massacre, where 18 young men were killed at a rehabilitation center also in Juarez. The massacre was reportedly ordered and carried out by Mexican hit men.

Current estimates put the number of Mexican nationals murdered by Fast and Furious weapons at 300. More such evidence will be found and the Fast and Furious body count will rise, ignored by the administration and its media protectors.

SOURCE

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Darrell Issa Does the Work American Reporters Won’t Do (again)

He pushed "Fast & Furious" to the point of a White House coverup too



Ever since the terrorist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, the Obama administration has been stalling, obfuscating and outright lying in order to avoid taking responsibility for the deaths of four Americans, including our ambassador. To a considerable degree, they have gotten away with that strategy. But Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has stepped into the breach.

Issa's committee has been approached by whistle-blowers within the State Department, and the stories they tell about the department's malfeasance are shocking. Today Issa wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, outlining information his committee has received and announcing his intention to hold hearings on what happened in Benghazi:

"Based on information provided to the Committee by individuals with direct knowledge of events in Libya, the attack that claimed the Ambassador's life was the latest in a long line of attacks on Western diplomats and officials in Libya in the months leading up to September 11, 2012. It was clearly never, as Administration officials once insisted, the result of a popular protest. In addition, multiple U.S. federal government officials have confirmed to the Committee that, prior to the September 11 attack, the U.S. mission made repeated requests for increased security in Benghazi. The mission in Libya, however, was denied these resources by officials in Washington."

This is, obviously, a bombshell. Issa goes on to itemize no fewer than 13 attacks and other incidents involving diplomatic personnel in Libya, including at least two attacks on the consulate in Benghazi.

SOURCE

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Capital Gains Taxes

 Thomas Sowell

One of the many false talking points of the Obama administration is that a rich man like Warren Buffett should not be paying a lower tax rate than his secretary. But anyone whose earnings come from capital gains usually pays a lower tax rate.

How are capital gains different from ordinary income?

Ordinary income is usually guaranteed. If you work a certain amount of time, you are legally entitled to the pay that you were offered when you took the job. Capital gains involve risk. They are not guaranteed. You can invest your money and lose it all. Moreover, the year when you receive capital gains may not be the same as the years when they were earned.

Suppose I spend ten years writing a book, making not one cent from it in all that time. Then, in the tenth year, when the book is finished, I may sell it to a publisher who pays me $100,000 in advance royalties.

Am I the same as someone who has a salary of $100,000 that year?

Or am I earning $10,000 a year for ten years' work?

It so happens that the government will tax me the same as someone who earns $100,000 that year, because my decade of work on the book cannot be documented. But the point here is that it is really a capital gain, and it illustrates the difference between a capital gain and ordinary income.

Then there is the risk factor. There is no guarantee to me that a publisher will actually accept the book that I have worked on for ten years -- and there is no guarantee to the publisher that the public will buy enough copies of the book to repay whatever I might be paid when the contract is signed.

Even the $10,000 a year -- which is less than anyone can earn on an entry level job -- is not guaranteed. If my years of work produced an unpublished manuscript, I would not even have been among the first thousand writers who met this fate.

Very similar principles apply to businesses. We pay attention to businesses after they have succeeded. But most new businesses do not succeed. Even those businesses that eventually turn out to be enormously successful may go through years of losing money before they have their first year of earning a profit.

Amazon.com spent years losing money before turning a profit for the first time in 2001. McDonald's teetered on the edge of bankruptcy more than once in its early years. Desperate expedients were resorted to by the people who ran McDonald's, in order to just keep their noses above the water, while hoping for better days.

At one time, you could have bought half interest in McDonald's for

$25,000 -- and there were no takers. Anyone who would have risked $25,000 at that time would be a billionaire today. But there was no guarantee at the time that they wouldn't be just throwing 25 grand down a rat hole.

Where a capital gain can be documented -- when a builder spends ten years creating a housing development, for example -- then whatever that builder earns in the tenth year is a capital gain, not ordinary income. There is no guarantee in advance that the builder will ever recover his expenses, much less make a profit.

There are whole industries where no one can expect to make a profit the first year -- publishing a newspaper for example. Virtually every major American airline has lost money in some years, and some of the biggest and most famous airlines have ended up going bankrupt.

If a country wants investors to invest, it cannot tax their resulting capital gains the same as the incomes of people whose incomes were guaranteed in advance when they took the job.

It is not just a question of "fairness" to investors. Ultimately, it is investors who guarantee other people's incomes in a market economy, even though the investors' own incomes are by no means guaranteed.

Reducing investors' incentives to take risks is reducing the jobs their investments are likely to create.

Business income is different from employees' income in another way. The profit that a business makes is first taxed as profit and the remainder is then taxed again as the incomes of people who receive dividends.

The biggest losers from politicians who jack up tax rates are likely to be people who are looking for jobs that will not be there, because investments will not be there to create the jobs.

SOURCE

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Obama's Old-World Arrogance

When President Obama came to the U.N. General Assembly on September 25, his arrogance was on full display. He skipped meeting any world leaders, but did find time to sit down and talk about his lover moves on ABC's "The View." Topics included how he's a "romantic husband," how he "tucks in" his wife at night and how his first kiss with Michelle is now memorialized by a monument in Chicago.

Meanwhile, Israel is preparing for war against a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. Yawn.

Obama also skipped the traditional luncheon, leaving U.N. Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon looking like "a jilted prom date," reported CNN's Anderson Cooper. "I think he must be busy with something at this moment," Moon said at the lunch, drawing laughs. "Or perhaps he must be stuck somewhere in traffic."

But the arrogance was also there in Obama's U.N. speech. In one passage, he flagrantly drew a straight line from blasphemers of Jesus Christ to his own critics, as if those two groups are similar in their willingness to offend messianic figures.

"Like me, the majority of Americans are Christian, and yet, we do not ban blasphemy against our most sacred beliefs," he declared. Then it was all about him: "As president of our country, and commander in chief of our military, I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day, and I will always defend their right to do so." Anyone who has heard him diss the Supreme Court for the Citizens United verdict, affirming political free speech, knows that's baloney.

Our Obama-worshipping media played the second half of that clip as if Obama were somehow being humble, which thoroughly distorts the picture. The media coverage of Obama's speech overlooked Obama's bizarre statement that "we not only respect the freedom of religion, we have laws that protect individuals from being harmed because of how they look or what they believe."

No one in the liberal media thought it sounded ridiculous after the Obama administration doubled down on the Catholic Church with Obamacare, insisting that faithful Catholics must fund insurance coverage for contraception, sterilization and abortifacients. No one blinked after the "filmmaker" who made the Muhammad-mocking YouTube video was suddenly jailed in California (perhaps for years) for, ahem, "violating probation."

The media certainly skipped the Obama sound bite that rocketed around Twitter within minutes, the pandering passage about Muhammad. "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam," he proclaimed.

Then he did his typical triangulating with religions: "But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated or churches that are destroyed or the Holocaust that is denied."

Our media failed to report the obvious: Obama is AWOL when it comes to condemning desecrations of Christianity. Where is he with the constant, obscene attacks against Catholics at home? Where is he on the assault on Christianity all across the Muslim world? How about Israel?

Rep. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.) recently called on the president to "stand up for America's values and beliefs and denounce the 'Piss Christ' that has offended Christians at home and abroad." The urine-soaked crucifix image (funded by the National Endowment for the Arts) is once again being honored in a gallery, the Edward Tyler Nahem Gallery on West 57th Street in Manhattan, a short cab ride from the United Nations.

Obama had nothing to say. There were no calls to the gallery the way Team Obama called YouTube and asked for censorship. There were no $70,000 advertising buys in Christian countries to pacify rioters. There was just silence.

But in his speech, Obama employed New York City as a model of religious tolerance. "For as the city outside these walls makes clear, we are a country that has welcomed people of every race and every faith," except the Christians who are always fair game for mockery.

William Donohue of the Catholic League protested the exhibit at the gallery scene. He also made a video where he put a bobble-head doll of Obama in a jar with "faux feces" and asked for a federal grant like the one Andres Serrano received. ''It's brown Play-Doh," he explained. "You get the point, right? The cultural and political elite are basically secularist. They don't believe in God. This is their god. Liberalism is their god," he said, pointing at the Obama jar.

At the center of that secularist elite is our very politicized media, the ones who are rigging this election and allowing Obama to say all sorts of ludicrous things about religion and to skip all sorts of meeting with world leaders.

SOURCE

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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 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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Is Barack Obama a Compulsive Liar?

Barack Obama has lied about the terrorist attack on the American Consulate in Libya for over 15 days, even going so far as to overtly imply that this attack was prompted by an obscure internet movie trailer in his speech at the United Nations two weeks after it was confirmed the White House knew it was an Al Qaeda sponsored attack.   Additionally, during the current campaign the lies and obfuscations about Mitt Romney and the Republicans have been so fast and furious that it is nearly impossible to keep up with them.

The administration's reaction to what went on in Libya is not a surprise, as reliance on prevarications and the attendant dishonesty is part and parcel of Obama's normal behavior.  There rarely has been a speech or an off the cuff comment since he entered the national stage that does not contain some deliberate or insinuated falsehood.  This tendency is exemplified in his recent interview with Univision wherein Obama lied about why he never introduced immigration reform and when the ill-fated Fast and Furious program was raised, he began blaming the Republicans and George Bush respectively.

There is now a near universal mistrust of Obama among world leaders as well as many members of Congress who candidly admit they cannot deal with Barack Obama, as he has proven himself to be untrustworthy and unbelievable -- particularly as he refuses to accept any responsibility for the outcome of his actions and policies.  The diminished status of the United States around the globe and the greatly eroded standard of living for the vast majority of Americans are testament to these character flaws.

At times even the most diehard of his sycophants in the mainstream media are forced to report on this disturbing trait in their hero.  This past spring the Washington Post ran a lengthy front page article on Obama's machinations during the debt ceiling debate.  The highlight of the piece: Barack Obama deliberately lied to the American people concerning the intransigence of the Republicans in the House of Representatives.   It was an amazing admission for a pillar of the sycophantic mainstream media to write a story claiming that their hero lied.   A further example of the media's awakening to the deceit and fabrications of the Obama administration is the recent reporting on the Libyan scandal which is actively pursuing the lies and cover-up.

However, there has been five years of outright lies and narcissism that have been largely ignored by the media, including some in the conservative press and political class who are loath to call Mr. Obama what he is in the bluntest of terms: a liar and a fraud.  That he relies on his skin color to intimidate, either outright or by insinuation, those who oppose his agenda only adds to his audacity.  It is apparent that he has gotten away with his character flaws his entire life, aided and abetted by the sycophants around him; thus he is who he is and cannot change.

In an earlier column I asked the question is Barack Obama a compulsive liar or a sociopath?

A Sociopath:

    "A sociopath is typically defined as someone who lies incessantly to get their way and does so with little concern for others.  A sociopath is often goal-oriented (i.e., lying is focused--it is done to get one's way).  Sociopaths have little regard or respect for the rights and feelings of others.  Sociopaths are often charming and charismatic, but they use their talented social skills in manipulative and self-centered ways."

A compulsive liar:

    "A compulsive liar is defined as someone who lies out of habit.  Lying is their normal and reflexive way of responding to questions.  Compulsive liars bend the truth about everything, large and small.  For a compulsive liar, telling the truth is very awkward and uncomfortable while lying feels right.  Compulsive lying is usually developed in early childhood, due to being placed in an environment where lying was necessary."

While Barack Obama exhibits traits from both categories, it is becoming increasingly clear that he is primarily a compulsive liar.  How else to explain the lies and obfuscations that so easily come forth regardless of whom he may be talking to or the subject matter.   His sociopathic skills come to the fore in his ability to manipulate others to join him in his these prevarications, or to exploit the celebrity culture that has overwhelmed a deliberately ill-educated American society.

In the United States there is great deference paid to the occupant of the White House.  Justifiably so, as that person is the chief operating officer of the country, but more importantly he or she is the head of state representing the nation around the globe.  The President's actions and demeanor set the tone for not only the political class but the country as a whole.  Over the centuries there have been many exceptional but also a few inept men to hold the office of President.

Today so much power is vested in the Office of President that honor and integrity must be a hallmark of a president's character.  It is not with Barack Obama; he is perhaps the most dishonest and disingenuous occupant of the oval office in history, and has the potential to do more long-term damage to the United States than all his predecessor combined.

His failings can no longer be excused by this historical deference or timidity fostered by race with the euphemisms of spin or politics as usual being used to avoid the truth.  It is extraordinarily difficult to run against someone such as Barack Obama -- a stranger to truth and integrity willing to do anything to win -- but Mitt Romney must do so by candidly admitting who he is dealing with.

While the future of the country depends on dramatically altering the economic and governing landscape, it cannot do so unless the opposition politicians and average citizens recognize and forcefully challenge the lies and machinations of Barack Obama and his allies without fear of what may be said about them or to them by either the Obama machine or their sycophants in the media.

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More of Obama's effortless lies  -- swallowed whole by the media

The best response to all that's strange, mysterious or just surprising may be a smile. But the news of late has reduced me to the one-word question and expletive favored by "Mad Men's" Don Draper whenever he's confronted by anything that doesn't make sense:

What?!

Take the sheer number of fabrications Barack Obama managed to pack into one response to a simple question on CBS' "60 Minutes." To swallow them all would require a boxcar of salt. And the whole enchilada came packaged in our president's usual condescending style -- as if he were still addressing a class of first-year law students at the University of Chicago, their notebooks at the ready to capture every pearl of wisdom he might drop, however artificial.

All it took to unleash this Niagara of falsehoods was a simple question about the explosion of the national debt on this president's watch. (It's now 60 percent higher than when he took office.) The president's response went on for some time, but the biggest whopper had to be his claim that "when I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history."

What?!

The biggest annual deficit the federal government has ever run turns out to have been in 1943 in the midst of the Second World War, the next biggest in the wartime years 1944 and 1945. As the Wall Street Journal was quick to point out.

It took the Journal two whole, heavily footnoted columns to go through the various snares-and delusions contained in the president's extended answer to a simple question. And the Washington Post awarded him four Pinnochios, its Oscars for dissembling, on the basis of this performance.

Here's the text of the president's statement in all its sprawling fraudulence:

"When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history. And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90 percent of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren't paid for, as a consequence of tax cuts that weren't paid for, a prescription drug plan that was not paid for, and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

"Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10 percent of this increase in the deficit, and we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, substantially slower than the federal government grew under either Ronald Reagan or George Bush."

Beginning with that bogus claim about inheriting the biggest annual deficit in American history, the president went on to make a number of other dubious assertions that needed clearing up:

1. The Bush tax cuts actually increased government revenues, as tax cuts tend to do, rather than add to the federal deficit. Those awful Bush tax cuts worked so well that President Obama now proposes keeping them for most Americans.

2. The Bush administration's drug insurance plan under Medicare may not have been paid for, but that doesn't mean this president wants to drop it. On the contrary, ObamaCare would extend it. On a vast scale.

3. The war in Iraq was already being won by the time President Obama came into office, and American involvement there was starting to wind down -- thanks to the Surge of troops that Sen. Obama had said would never work. (So did Hillary Clinton, then a U.S. senator and now his secretary of state.) The Surge proved so successful that President Obama adopted the same tactic in Afghanistan. And if it works as well there, it will also reduce this country's military expenditures, and therefore the federal deficit -- not increase it.

4. This president was willing to take responsibility for "only" 10 percent of the federal deficit, a figure that has no discernible basis in fact. His stimulus package back in 2009 cost $830 billion, and still failed to do much to stimulate the economy. The unemployment rate remains above 8 percent. The recession formally ended in June of 2009, yet his administration has been driving up the national debt by trillion-dollar deficits every year since he was sworn in. Where he got that 10 percent figure is anybody's guess, probably his.

5. When the president says the deficit is growing at the slowest rate since the Eisenhower administration, he's just having some fun with numbers. Because he's measuring its rate of growth from the end of his first fiscal year in office -- after he had increased government spending by $535 billion a year. Given that inflated base, of course the rate of increase would appear smaller -- however ruinous.

And so trickily on. Bill Clinton did this kind of thing much better. And is still doing it much better, to judge by his ring-tailed roarer of a speech at the Democratic National Convention this year, which may have been just as deceptive but was so much slicker.

What was most remarkable about our president's extensive mix of the misleading and just plain false wasn't so much its web of falsehoods, semi-falsehoods and numbers games. Most of us are accustomed to that kind political gamesmanship by now. (Oh what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practice to deceive.)

What was unusual about his long-winded speech of an answer to a simple question was that it elicited not the slightest dissent from the country's liberal (now called progressive) intelligentsia. There's no point in looking for any criticisms of the president's preposterous claims from a columnist like, oh, Paul Krugman, to cite the most blatant example of the deterioration of thought on the American left.

Didn't there used to be a creature known as the honest liberal? What ever happened to the liberal conscience? Where are the Lionel Trillings and Murray Kemptons and Dwight Macdonalds of today? The kind of liberals who, despite their political leanings, saw through Alger Hiss' cover story from the first, and were never afraid to challenge left-wing orthodoxies in general.

Something seems to have died in the American soul. Now whatever our own presidential candidate says, no matter now outrageous, it sparks no outrage, while everything the other party's candidate says must be a lie.

What a sorry comedown for American political commentary when obvious falsehoods have to be pointed out by the fact-checking, bean-counting, Pinnochio-awarding number crunchers at the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Rather than the kind of commentators who offer thought, not just rows of figures. What has been lost is the eloquence that makes political commentary not just a public service but an art.

SOURCE

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The World's Most Dynamic Religion Is ...

For at least the last hundred years, the world's most dynamic religion has been neither Christianity nor Islam.  It is leftism.

Most people do not recognize what is probably the single most important fact of modern life. One reason is that leftism is overwhelmingly secular (more than merely secular: it is inherently opposed to all traditional religions), and therefore people do not regard it as a religion. Another is that leftism so convincingly portrays itself as solely the product of reason, intellect, and science that it has not been seen as the dogma-based ideology that it is. Therefore, the vast majority of the people who affirm leftist beliefs think of their views as the only way to properly think about life.

That, in turn, explains why anyone who opposes leftism is labeled anti-intellectual, anti-progress, anti-science, anti-minority and anti-reason (among many other pejorative epithets): leftists truly believe that there is no other way to think.

How successful has leftism been?

It dominates the thinking of Europe, much of Latin America, Canada, and Asia, as well as the thinking of the political and intellectual elites of most of the world. Outside of the Muslim world, it is virtually the only way in which news is reported and virtually the only way in which young people are educated from elementary school through university.

Only the United States, of all Western countries, has resisted leftism. But that resistance is fading as increasing numbers of Americans abandon traditional Judeo-Christian religions, lead secular lives, are educated by teachers whose views are almost uniformly left-wing and are exposed on a daily basis virtually exclusively to leftist views in their news and entertainment media.

And when there is resistance, the left declares it "extremist." Merely believing that marriage should remain defined as it has been throughout recorded history, as between a man and a woman, renders you an extremist. So, too, belief that government should be small -- the Tea Party position -- renders one an extremist. Last week, the managing editor of Time Magazine, Richard Stengel, said on MSNBC that the Salafis, the most radical Islamist sect, are "the Tea Party of Muslim democracy."

Even Christianity and Judaism, the pillars of Judeo-Christian values, the moral value system upon which America was founded and thanks to which it became the world's beacon of liberty, have been widely influenced by leftism. Many priests, ministers, rabbis and many Jewish and Christian seminaries are leftist in content and Jewish or Christian only in form.

Years ago, I debated one of the most prominent rabbis in the Conservative movement of Judaism on the issue of whether morality must be God-based. The Ivy League Ph.D., yarmulke-wearing rabbi argued that God was not morally necessary. If you want to understand why so many Jews vote left while nearly all the Western world's opposition to -- and frequently hatred of -- Israel emanates from the left, one explanation is this: For most American Jews, their religion is leftism, while Judaism is their ethnicity and culture. The Reform, and increasingly the Conservative, movements have, to a large extent, become political movements that use Hebrew and Jewish rituals to equate Judaism with progressive politics.

Within mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism, the same dominance of leftist values exists. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops largely holds the same social and economic views as the Democratic Party and The New York Times editorial page. It differs with the left with regard to same-sex marriage, abortion and religious freedom issues such as those pertaining to Catholic hospitals and government-funded contraception. As for mainstream Protestant denominations, they, too, are largely indistinguishable from leftism. Proof? Ask a liberal Protestant minister to name one important area in which he and leftism differ. Ask a liberal Reform or Conservative rabbi the same question. Their silence will be telling.

The truth is that the left has been far more successful in converting in converting Jews and Christians to Leftism than Christianity and Judaism have been in influencing leftists to convert to Christianity or Judaism.

Finally, leftism has even attained considerable success at undoing the central American values of liberty, "In God We Trust," and "E Pluribus Unum," supplanting liberty with egalitarianism, a God-based society with secularism, and "E Pluribus Unum" with multiculturalism. (I make this case at length in "Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph" [HarperCollins].)

This triumph of the twentieth century's most dynamic religion -- leftism -- is why, even in the midst of an ongoing recession, the leftist candidate may win. As I wrote in my last column, it's not just the economy, stupid.

SOURCE

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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

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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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