A Case Study In Incompetence

(Or was it cowardice -- fear of offending Muslims?  Better for Americans to die?  Appeasement? -- JR)

Myriad are the failures of the Obama administration, but none is more tragic, or more frightening, or more foreboding of catastrophe than the appalling mishandling of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi.

Details continue to leak, but it’ll be hard to top the bombshell from Fox News at week’s end reporting that repeated urgent requests for military help during the attack were summarily denied — for hours.

In those hours, former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods was killed after he chose to disobey an order to “stand down” — and rushed to aid his fellow Americans.

This is not explained by the “fog of war” excuse so lamely offered by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — or the “Monday-morning quarterbacking” whining of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

It’s well established that the Benghazi consulate had been denied adequate security in the days leading up to the attack. But the new report suggests an astonishing lack of competence, or maybe it was cowardice, as a US ambassador and his team were coming under a well-coordinated terrorist attack.

Jennifer Griffin, a veteran Fox News defense correspondent, reported Friday that there were two urgent requests — hours apart — for help during the attack.

Special-ops teams and air cover were readily available, and could’ve been on the scene in less than two hours. (The attack lasted for more than six hours.)

In fact, two surveillance drones were deployed — both capable of relaying real-time visuals of what was happening.  But urgent requests for help were rejected — even when Woods and two others radioed that they had a laser fixed on the terrorists who were firing mortars and called in their coordinates.

Woods and another former SEAL, Glen Doherty, were killed by a mortar shell about six hours after the initial assault began.

“My son . . . responded to the cries for help and voluntarily sacrificed his life to protect the lives of other Americans,” says his father, Charles Woods.  “This has nothing to do with politics,” he added. “This has to do with integrity and honor. My son showed moral courage.”

True enough, surprise attacks happen.  But the failure to respond — leaving an American diplomat and his security team to their fate — defies comprehension.

This, even as e-mails show the State Department and White House Situation Room knew within the first couple of hours that an al Qaeda affiliate was publicly claiming responsibility.

But how could that be?  Hadn’t al Qaeda been defanged by SEAL Team 6 when it took out Osama bin Laden — and didn’t the president have the victory laps to prove it?  Well, apparently not.

So Obama & Co. stuck with the untenable claim that the Benghazi strike wasn’t a terrorist attack at all, but a “spontaneous” mob assault prompted by that anti-Muslim video.

Indeed, says Woods, Clinton vowed to him at a White House meeting that “we’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.”  And don’t you just know, the “person . . . that did the video” is in jail, on a very dubious probation-violation charge. (So it seems the administration can follow through on some things when it chooses.)

Equally offensive was the bizarre remark at the same event by a “loud and boisterous” Vice President Joe Biden, who reportedly asked Woods, “Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?”  This man is a heartbeat away?

Compare that crudity with Charles Woods’ outraged dignity: “I wish that the leadership in the White House had the same level of moral courage and heroism that my son displayed.”  He wants “the person or persons who made the decision to sacrifice my son’s life to stand up” — and accept responsibility.

Not going to happen.  Not in this administration.  Acknowledging what really happened in Benghazi would mean confessing to hubris, incompetence, amateurism and deceit.  These are, sadly, Obama hallmarks.

So, what does the president have to say for himself?  “Well, we are finding out exactly what happened,” Obama told a reporter Friday.  Forty-seven days late and four lives short, sad to say.

So add cluelessness to the bill of Obama particulars — which goes a long way toward explaining the clouds of acrid smoke hanging over the entire Middle East.

As does nature, statecraft abhors a vacuum. When one develops, adventurers and advantage-takers appear in short order.

Iran continues to build its bomb; Syria burns; Turkey awaits its fate, and Egypt is looking at a Muslim Brotherhood-enforced Sharia state.  Think of it as Benghazi writ large.

Time to evict the deceiving amateurs.

SOURCE

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Obama’s False Jobs Creation Claims

President Obama has lately been touting the amazing claim that he’s created 5.2 million new jobs as President. His fantastic claim is featured in a new TV. But FactCheck.org says, not so fast. Those claims are “inflated,” to say the least.

FactCheck notes that the 5.2 million claim is accurate, such as it is. But what makes it “inflated” is that the jobs number refers only to jobs created after 2010 and does not include the 4.3 million that were lost earlier in Obama’s term.

Further, according to FactCheck, Obama’s number counts only private-sector jobs and does not include the “continuing losses” of jobs in the government sector as state and local jurisdictions find their budgets so over spent that pink slips have resulted.

FactCheck goes on to note that far from an actual gain of 5.2 million, once earlier losses are removed, Obama has in fact only realized some 967,000 jobs which includes a credit of 453,000 private-sector jobs which will be added through the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) benchmarking process.

FactCheck also slaps Obama for his website claim that Mitt Romney said he thought the end of the war in Iraq was “tragic.” Romney did not actually say this at all. What Romney actually said was that the pace of Obama’s troop withdrawal was tragic. He never said ending a war was tragic.

Here is what Romney actually said:

"The precipitous withdrawal is unfortunate. It’s more than unfortunate. I think it’s tragic. It puts at risk many of the victories that were hard-won by the men and women who have served there. I hope the risk is not realized. I hope instead that the Iraqis are able to pick up the baton, and despite the fact that we will have walked away on a too-rapid basis."

Even The New York Times has this fact correct.

These aren’t the only outright lies Obama has been repeating ad nauseum both on the campaign trail and in his TV ads. Obama continues, for instance, to claim that Mitt Romney has proposed a “$5 trillion tax cut for the wealthy.” This is, of course, an outright fantasy as Patrick Brennan reported earlier this month.

That isn’t all. Obama has issued a passel-full of lies about Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform proposals, as well.

For more, John Nolte has also explored Obama’s constant campaign trail lies about Mitt Romney.

It seems it’s been one lie after another for team Obama since the beginning.

SOURCE

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Obama Calls Mitt Romney a BSer? Now That’s Funny!



Doug Giles

You know what’s funny? In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Obama called Mitt Romney a “bullsh*tter” … that’s what’s funny.

Now, it’s not funny in a ha-ha sense but funny in a you-gotta-be-kidding-me sense of the word. Obama accusing Romney of bunkum? Talk about the putz calling the kettle black.

Obama’s entire life and rise to power have been nothing more than a Texas-sized stockyard of ripe and foul compost. This man makes Machiavelli look lame. Hussein trades so heavily in BS that the Oxford Dictionary has now included his last name as a synonym for bollocks. I also hear OJ take notes when Obama speaks.

In addition, I’ve learned from reliable sources that a Las Vegas-based energy company is at work now trying to convert Obama’s gaseous rhetoric, his scat-laced hollow promises and his abysmal jobs record into an alternative fuel source to light up the Strip.

So exactly what is this thing called “bullsh*t” of which Obama is a ninja? Well, you can call it BS, bull crap, or the nicer sounding Latin term “stercore tauri,” or simply bull, bull roar, bull-pucky, bovine scat, horse feathers, horse hockey, poppycock, cow dung, Chris Matthews, bollocks, gobbledygook, gibberish, humbug, fisk, nonsense, evening news, tall tale, pseudo-intellectualism, propaganda, fiction, lie, bunkum, spin, or truthiness.

Whatever you want to call it, BS can be defined as communications in which reality and truthfulness aren’t nearly as vital as the ability to manipulate the audience to get it to do whatever one wants done. And here’s where Obama rocks with the tofu-brained masses.

BS is essentially all skewed, spun, knowingly dubious, carefully framed, pretentious, misleading or vacuous statements. Now, “BS” does not necessarily have to be a complete fabrication; with only basic knowledge about a topic, BS is often used to make the audience believe that one knows far more about the topic by feigning total certainty or making probable predictions. It may also merely be “filler” or nonsense that, by virtue of its style or wording, gives the impression that it actually means something:

    "In popular explanations of philosophy, the word “bullsh*t” is used to denote utterances and speech acts which do not add to the meaning of the set of sentences uttered, but which are added purely to persuade goobers of the validity or importance of other utterances.

    The accuracy of the information is irrelevant whilst “bullsh*tting.” Whether true or false, BS is the intention to distort the information or to otherwise achieve a desirable outcome, making BS a close cousin to rhetoric as Plato conceived it" (paraphrased from Harry Frankfurt’s book, On Bullsh*t).

Do you need a few examples of how Obama has piled it high, wide and deep on Americans’ noggins? You do? Check out these smelly bullet points from our innovative BSer-In-Chief from a recent email I received …

Obama’s the first President to:

    - Apply for college aid as a foreign student, then deny he was a foreigner.

    - Have a social security number from a state he has never lived in.

    - Go on 17 lavish vacations, including date nights and Wednesday evening White House parties for his friends paid for by the taxpayer.

    - Preside over a cut to the credit-rating of the United States.

    - Have 22 personal servants (taxpayer funded) for his wife.

    - Keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000 a year at taxpayer expense.

    - Repeat the Holy Quran and tell us the early morning call of the Azan (Islamic call to worship) is the most beautiful sound on earth.

    - Violate the War Powers Act.

    - Be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

    - Defy a Federal Judge’s court order to cease implementing the Health Care Reform Law.

    - Require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party.

    - Spend a trillion dollars on “shovel-ready” jobs when there was no such thing as “shovel-ready” jobs.

    - Abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters.

    - Bypass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat.

    - Order a secret amnesty program that stopped the deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S., including those with criminal convictions.

    - Demand a company hand over $20 billion to one of his political appointees.

    - Terminate America’s ability to put a man in space.

    - Arbitrarily declare an existing law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.

    - Threaten insurance companies if they publicly speak out on the reasons for their rate increases.

    - Tell a major manufacturing company in which state it is allowed to locate a factory.

    - File lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN).

    - Withdraw an existing coal permit that had been properly issued years ago.

    - Fire an inspector general of AmeriCorps for catching one of his friends in a corruption case.

    - Appoint 45 czars to replace elected officials in his office.

    - Golf 73 separate times in his first two and a half years in office (100+ to date).

    - Hide his medical, educational and travel records.

    - Win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing NOTHING to earn it.

    - Go on multiple global “apology tours.”

    - Take a 17-day vacation.

And Romney’s a bullsh*tter? Please. Go sell crazy somewhere else. Even Letterman called him on it this week.

A juicy whopper missing from that list is how Obama loves the woman voter and yet strangely voted “present” (read against) in ‘99 for a bill that would protect sexual assault victims from having the details of their cases revealed publicly.

And lastly—and most ghastly—regarding how Obama has lied what’s left of his backside off to we the people comes the Benghazi massacre, which keeps growing grosser, more malevolent and insidious with each passing day.

For Barack to say Romney is a bullsh*tter in light of Obama’s own weapons-grade bullsh*t is, well … bullsh*t.

SOURCE

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, 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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The ugly face of Leftist Jew-haters



Yes, this cartoon is of a Jewish banker – as tired as it is poisonous. The caricatured features remind one of Nazi newspapers or any number of modern Arab publications. But, actually, this one wasn’t found in any of the obvious places. It was posted to a Facebook page set up to support Occupy Wall Street.

Remember those idiots? Naive, grubby, pathetic – but anti-Semitic as well? The answer is that, no, most of the Occupy activists were raging smelly bores rather than racists; but a minority did have a thing about Jews, and still do. In fact, if you search YouTube, you can find videos of protesters saying things like: “Those Zionist Jews that run our big banks? They need to be run out of this country.” Funnily enough, though, the Occupy-friendly mainstream media soft-pedalled this one.

SOURCE

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America's  Liar President

Dorothy Rabinowitz, one of the best writers of our time, encapsulated the Obama Presidency perfectly in Monday's Wall Street Journal. She wrote:

In the 1967 film "A Guide for the Married Man," a husband, played by a peerless Walter Matthau, is given lessons in ways to cheat on his wife safely: "Deny! Deny! Deny!" -- no matter what. In an instructive scene, he's shown a wife undone by shock, and screaming, with good reason: She has just walked in on her husband making love to a glamorous stranger. "What are you doing," she wails, "who is that woman?" "What woman, where?" the husband serenely counters, as he and the tart in question get out of bed and calmly dress.

So the scene proceeds, with the distraught wife pointing to the woman she clearly sees before her, while her husband, unruffled, continues to look blankly at her, asking, "What woman?" Confused by her spouse's unblinking assurance, she gives up. Two minutes later she's asking him what he'd like for dinner.

That is the Obama White House communications strategy exactly. I don't want to call the President a liar. I have used the term "Calculated Deception" many times before to describe it. But now it has come to the point where history will remember him as "the Liar President." That is not my fault. I am only discussing reality.

Dereliction of Duty

We can see this in the debates. In the second debate, he told the American people with a straight face that he had confessed the very next day in the Rose Garden that the murder of the Libyan ambassador and four other Americans in Benghazi was a terrorist attack. Obama told the American people, with his straight Walther Matthau face, "The day after the attack, Governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people in the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened. That this was an act of terror and I also said that we're going to hunt down those who committed this crime."

But the truth is that the State Department, the CIA, and the White House itself all had access to real time video of exactly what happened. No doubt as word spread as to what was happening, the top levels of the Administration all tuned into the events, watching them all unfold in real time. So why is he telling us in the debate that "we are going to find out exactly what happened?" Intelligence made a full report within 24 hours.

An incredulous Mitt Romney exclaimed, "I think [it's] interesting the President just said something which -- which is that on the day after the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said this was an act of terror." "That's what I said," Obama lied in response. Romney seeing the discrepancy with reality, noted "I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the President 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror." Obama replied, "Get the transcript."

Then, as if in a pre-arranged ambush, the supposed moderator "Candy" Crowley piped up and said to Romney "He did in fact, sir." To further demonstrate his mastery over the Democrat party-controlled media, Obama ordered live in the debate for every American to see, "Can you say that a little louder, Candy?" Crowley stood at attention and reported "He did call it an act of terror."

The reason this was so obviously pre-arranged is that the transcript in fact does not back up what Obama fantasized and Crowley "reported." The transcript shows Obama mentioned terrorism in regard to 9/11, not Benghazi. Talk about calculated deception!

It took Romney alone among the three to correct the record, saying, "The Administration indicated this was a reaction to a video and was a spontaneous reaction.... It took them a long time to say this was a terrorist act by a terrorist group."

Obama interrupted, appealing for a further bailout, by his plant, "Candy?" But Romney cut off his interruption, "Excuse me. The ambassador of the United Nations went on the Sunday television shows and spoke about how this was a spontaneous..." But Obama interrupted again to appeal for help, "Candy, I'm happy to have a longer conversation about foreign policy." Crowley took her cue again, "I know you, absolutely, but I want to move you on...." For the first time honestly, a relieved Obama said, "OK. I'm happy to do that too."

We all saw for 14 days with our own eyes not only Obama but his whole Administration perpetuating the fairy tale that the Benghazi murders were all due to some amateur 14 minute film trailer on YouTube, just as Matthau's wife in the movie saw him in bed with another woman. We saw Obama's UN Ambassador Susan Rice repeat this myth on five Sunday talk shows almost a week after the event. We saw Obama at the UN telling the whole world that the attack was a spontaneous reaction to a previously unknown amateur video.

Obama continued his prevarication on this tragedy in the third debate Monday, saying about the Benghazi murders, "With respect to Libya, as I indicated in the last debate, when we received that phone call, I immediately made sure that, number one, we did everything we could to secure those Americans still in harm's way...." We could use the White House phone logs on that one. Because while the attack that culminated in the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens went on for hours, the U.S. Air Force was just one hour flight time away, in Sicily. But it was apparently too much to rouse them for a rescue, attacking and scattering the terrorist attackers.

Moreover, whatever President Obama did order in response, it was not only way too little, but way too late, because the Administration had been receiving requests from the Ambassador for additional security in an increasingly dangerous environment since February. But the requests were denied. Even on the anniversary of 9/11, when the heightened danger should have been obvious, no additional security was provided. Obama and the liberal softies in his Administration did not want to offend Muslim sensibilities with additional show of force. That is why the American guards were denied even ammunition for their guns, and the Administration was relying on Libyan security, even when Ambassador Stevens had reported that government security forces were outmanned and outgunned by the Islamist extremists.

Ambassador Stevens and the Marines and other American personnel killed with him volunteered to serve their country. They did not volunteer to be abandoned and murdered. President Obama's failure to provide the requested security, or roust available U.S. forces for a rescue, can only be described as dereliction of duty.

Unilateral Disarmament

In Monday's debate, President Obama says that Governor Romney "wants to spend another $2 trillion on military spending that our military's not asking for." But the leaders of the military he is talking about serve at his pleasure, or may even have been appointed by him.

Romney again corrected the record, saying the under Obama's defense policies our Navy will be "smaller than any time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission. We're now down to 285. We're headed down to the low 200s if we go through with sequestration." Moreover, under Obama's policies our Air Force will be "older and smaller than any time since it was founded in 1947." In addition, "Since FDR...we've always had the strategy of saying we could fight in two conflicts at once. Now we're changing to one conflict." The problem with only being able to fight in one conflict at a time is that once America is embroiled in a conflict, it is vulnerable to attack on a second front from anyone else. That is why that policy has not been followed since America became a superpower.

But Obama countered:

You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship where we're counting ships. It's what are our capabilities.

Notice that Obama here did not deny that our Navy under his policies is down to the lowest level since 1916. But he fails to see that Navy ships do not hold the status in today's military of horses and bayonets. Under his policies, moreover, we will have fewer aircraft carriers as well.

The military does not want any more ships than we had in 1916? That is not what both of Obama's Secretaries of Defense have said. They both said that Obama's defense cuts would be devastating to our nation's defenses. That goes for an Air Force that is older and smaller than at any time since our Air Force was founded in 1947.

But even more scary is President Obama's plans for unilateral nuclear disarmament. Most people do not know that President Obama has asked the Pentagon for plans to cut America's remaining nuclear deterrent by up to 80%. I say remaining because that is from what is left after President Obama's disastrous nuclear arms treaty with Russia last year.

Obama is the one who is stuck in a Cold War mentality, still negotiating arms deals with the Russians as if we were still in a bipolar world. Under Obama's New Start Treaty with Russia, America's nuclear forces are slashed to 1500 warheads, with essentially no cuts from Russia in return, because after the Soviet Union's collapse and disintegration, it cannot maintain nuclear forces even close to the limits allowed. What was smart about that? Another cut of 80% would reduce total warheads to 300, little more than Great Britain.

But that is in a context where Russia is not the only potential foe that we must deter. China is rapidly developing a more modern nuclear force. Proliferation is spreading from Pakistan to North Korea to Iran. Once Iran gets a nuclear weapon, we can expect Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and probably Egypt will as well. Even Russia is rapidly modernizing a threatening nuclear force.

Moreover, with just 300 warheads left, are we enticing a first strike to remove the remaining nuclear assets? Our nuclear strategy has always been based on the Triad concept, with nuclear forces on land on missiles, at sea on ships, and in the air through aircraft bombers. But just 300 warheads can be deployed on just 30 missiles with modern, multiple warhead technology.

Reagan gave us Peace through Strength. War threatens America with War through Weakness. Indeed, what exactly did Obama mean when he told former Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev to tell Russian strongman Vladimir Putin that he would have more flexibility after the election? Is that why Putin has endorsed Obama for re-election?

You Didn't Build That

In the debates, Obama has repeatedly bragged that under his leadership America has increased production of oil and natural gas to record levels, while "we've cut our oil imports to the lowest level in two decades." But Romney pointed out that the oil and gas production gains had nothing to do with Obama's energy policies, which had aimed at just the opposite results. Those gains all came on state and local lands, where Obama's policies could not stop them.

Romney charged in the second debate, "In the last four years, you cut permits and licenses on federal lands and waters in half." "Not true Governor Romney. The production is up," Obama replied. Romney responded, "Production on government land of oil is down 14%, and production of gas is down 9%." Romney here was just citing accurately official U.S. government statistics from Obama's own Administration. But that did not stop Obama from saying in response, before the whole nation, "What you're saying is just not true. It's just not true."

What else can be said about this dishonorable display of dishonesty before the American people, other than that Obama is The Liar President. As the  Wall Street Journal  said on October 18:

The problem for the President is that a government outfit called the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) compiles these statistics. That's where Romney got his accurate figures on oil and gas production on government land and permitting in Obama's first term. The EIA also reports that total fossil fuel production in public areas -- oil, gas and coal -- has plunged to a nine year low, to 18.6 quadrillion BTUs, from 21.2 quadrillion in 2003.

The real problem is not President Obama. It is his supporters and contributors who are willing to blindly support this dishonesty, after four years of accelerating decline and failure, which will only continue in the second term. Obama is Marxist royalty by heritage, born and bred. Check the public record. Under his leadership, the Democrat party has become a Marxist party as well. Is that what a majority of Americans want? Despite the lies, so well supported by the Democrat-controlled media, the American people seem to be waking from their dangerous slumber.

SOURCE

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Expensive welfare:  Over $60,000 in Welfare Spent Per Household in Poverty

Handing out other people's money is an expensive business

New data compiled by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee shows that, last year, the United States spent over $60,000 to support welfare programs per each household that is in poverty. The calculations are based on data from the Census, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Congressional Research Services.

"According to the Census’s American Community Survey, the number of households with incomes below the poverty line in 2011 was 16,807,795," the Senate Budget Committee notes. "If you divide total federal and state spending by the number of households with incomes below the poverty line, the average spending per household in poverty was $61,194 in 2011."

This dollar figure is almost three times the amount the average household on poverty lives on per year. "If the spending on these programs were converted into cash, and distributed exclusively to the nation’s households below the poverty line, this cash amount would be over 2.5 times the federal poverty threshold for a family of four, which in 2011 was $22,350 (see table in this link)," the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee note.

To be clear, not all households living below the poverty line receive $61,194 worth of assistance per year. After all, many above the poverty line also receive benefits from social welfare sprograms (e.g. pell grants).

But if welfare is meant to help bring those below the poverty line to a better place, it helps demonstrate that numbers do not add up.

As for the welfare programs, the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee note:

A congressional report from CRS recently revealed that the United States now spends more on means-tested welfare than any other item in the federal budget—including Social Security, Medicare, or national defense. Including state contributions to the roughly 80 federal poverty programs, the total amount spent in 2011 was approximately $1 trillion. Federal spending alone on these programs was up 32 percent since 2008.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that almost 110 million Americans received some form of means-tested welfare in 2011. These figures exclude entitlements like Medicare and Social Security to which people contribute, and they refer exclusively to low-income direct and indirect financial support—such as food stamps, public housing, child care, energy assistance, direct cash aid, etc. For instance, 47 million Americans currently receive food stamps, and USDA has engaged in an aggressive outreach campaign to boost enrollment even further, arguing that “every dollar of SNAP benefits generates $1.84 in the economy… It’s the most direct stimulus you can get.” (Economic growth, however, is weaker this year than the two years prior, even as food stamp “stimulus” has reached an all-time high.)

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS 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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American exceptionalism

To me it is glaringly obvious that the USA is exceptional.  It is overwhelmingly the world's predominant military power and also the source of most of the world's innovations.

So the interesting question is not "if" but "why".  WHY is America so dominant?  In a recent article Podhoretz sets out most of the usual reasons, starting from the foundation of the USA in an independence revolution.  He sees the principles set out by the revolutionaries at that time as having had an enduring influence.

I imagine that they did have an influence for a long time but only conservative intellectuals and activists seem to know of them now.  Thanks to the Leftist takeover of the schools, the average American these days knows nothing substantial about the American founding, if anything at all.  How much does the average black or Hispanic know?  Yet they all have votes  -- and there's a lot of them.

And America is now very socialist.  As Romney rightly if imprudently pointed out, around half of the population now depend on government handouts.  Not much rugged individualism there!   Given the huge and unfunded Federal spending now happening, it could in fact be argued that America is in the midst of a socialist meltdown right now.  Nothing Romney has proposed is capable of reining in the overspend.

But if none of the usual explanations of America's exceptionalism now work, what can it be that makes America so powerful in every sense?  I think it is both extraordinarily simple and much more enduring than all of the other influences that have come and gone:  The fact that there is a national election every two years.  If the ruling party goes off the rails you only have to wait two years to give them a boot up the backside  -- as we vividly saw in the 2010 mid-terms.  There is only so much damage you can do in two years so the damage done by political folly is much less in America.  Most governments are still getting into their stride at the two-year mark and they have to take into account the forthcoming election long before that.

Other countries have three or four year terms before a national government has to face a new election and Britain has horrific five-year terms.  And huge messes can be created, and have been created, in five years. Just look at the problem created by the last British Labour Party government's "open door" immigration policy.  Britain is now lumbered with millions of welfare-dependent parasites who have to be supported by the staggering British taxpayer. At least most of America's "illegals" come to work.

If ever the American socialists (so-called "liberals") wake up to the fact that two-year terms are their enemy, America might have a problem but until then there is hope.  And even liberals might have difficulty in arguing that frequent elections are "unfair".

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The more we learn about Benghazi...



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Chick-fil-A laughing all the way to the bank

To misquote Liberace



Three months after Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy voiced his support for 'Biblical families' - prompting one of the most intense and negative campaigns the fast food chain has ever seen - it has been revealed that the restaurant's bottom line couldn't be better.

Research specialist Sandelman & Associates report that customer numbers are up, profits are healthy, and media awareness of the brand is at an all-time high.

So much for the negative publicity. It seems that the months of protests, kiss-ins, calls for boycotts and fighting talk from both sides of the fence have actually been one big free advertisement for the company.

Sandelman figures showed consumer use of the chicken sandwich chain was up 2.2 per cent, compared with the same period in 2011, market share was up 0.6 per cent, and brand awareness was up 6.5 per cent.

The research firm interviewed more than 30,000 fast-food consumers in markets where Chick-fil-A is located.

Jeff Davis, president of Sandelman, told USA Today: 'There was a lot of talk that this would hurt Chick-fil-A, but it actually helped the brand.

He added that, during the third quarter of this year, Chick-fil-A broadened its regular customer base in 28 of 35 media markets.

More HERE

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Obama debates truth

Thomas Sowell

It was a little much when President Barack Obama said that he was "offended" by the suggestion that his administration would try to deceive the public about what happened in Benghazi. What has this man not deceived the public about?

Remember his pledge to cut the deficit in half in his first term in office? This was followed by the first trillion-dollar deficit ever, under any president of the United States – followed by trillion-dollar deficits in every year of the Obama administration.

Remember his pledge to have a "transparent" government that would post its legislative proposals on the Internet several days before Congress was to vote on them, so that everybody would know what was happening? This was followed by an Obamacare bill so huge and passed so fast that even members of Congress did not have time to read it.

Remember his claims that previous administrations had arrogantly interfered in the internal affairs of other nations – and then his demands that Israel stop building settlements and give away land outside its 1967 borders, as a precondition to peace talks with the Palestinians, on whom there were no preconditions?

As for what happened in Libya, the Obama administration says that there is an "investigation" under way. An "on-going investigation" sounds so much better than "stonewalling" to get past Election Day. But you can bet the rent money that this "investigation" will not be completed before Election Day. And whatever the investigation says after the election will be irrelevant.

The events unfolding in Benghazi on the tragic night of Sept. 11 were being relayed to the State Department as the attacks were going on, "in real time," as they say. So the idea that the Obama administration now has to carry out a time-consuming "investigation" to find out what those events were, when the information was immediately available at the time, is a little much.

The full story of what happened in Libya, down to the last detail, may never be known. But, as someone once said, you don't need to eat a whole egg to know that it is rotten. And you don't need to know every detail of the events before, during and after the attacks to know that the story put out by the Obama administration was a fraud.

The administration's initial story that what happened in Benghazi began as a protest against an anti-Islamic video in America was a very convenient theory. The most obvious alternative explanation would have been devastating to Barack Obama's much heralded attempts to mollify and pacify Islamic nations in the Middle East.

To have helped overthrow pro-Western governments in Egypt and Libya, only to bring anti-Western Islamic extremists to power would have been revealed as a foreign policy disaster of the first magnitude. To have been celebrating President Obama's supposedly heroic role in the killing of Osama bin Laden, with the implication that al-Qaida was crippled, would have been revealed as a farce.

Osama bin Laden was by no means the first man to plan a surprise attack on America and later be killed. Japan's Admiral Yamamoto planned the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II, and he was later tracked down and shot down in a plane that was carrying him.

Nobody tried to depict President Franklin D. Roosevelt as some kind of hero for having simply authorized the killing of Yamamoto. In that case, the only hero who was publicized was the man who shot down the plane that Yamamoto was in.

Yet the killing of Osama bin Laden has been depicted as some kind of act of courage by President Obama. After bin Laden was located, why would any president not give the go-ahead to get him?

That took no courage at all. It would have been far more dangerous politically for Obama not to have given the go-ahead. Moreover, Obama hedged his bets by authorizing the admiral in charge of the operation to proceed only under various conditions.

This meant that success would be credited to Obama and failure could be blamed on the admiral – who would join George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton and other scapegoats for Obama's failures.

SOURCE

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Are Leftists INCAPABLE of principle or even consistency?

NYT article:

The last mistake Dan Fredenberg made was getting killed in another man’s garage.  It was Sept. 22, and Mr. Fredenberg, 40, was upset. He strode up the driveway of a quiet subdivision here to confront Brice Harper, a 24-year-old romantically involved with Mr. Fredenberg’s young wife. But as he walked through Mr. Harper’s open garage door, Mr. Fredenberg was doing more than stepping uninvited onto someone else’s property. He was unwittingly walking onto a legal landscape reshaped by laws that have given homeowners new leeway to use force inside their own homes.

Proponents say the laws strengthen people’s right to defend their homes. To others, they are a license to kill.

That night, in a doorway at the back of his garage, Mr. Harper aimed a gun at the unarmed Mr. Fredenberg, fired and struck him three times. Mr. Fredenberg crumpled to the garage floor, a few feet from Mr. Harper. He was dead before morning.

Had Mr. Fredenberg been shot on the street or sidewalk, the legal outcome might have been different. But on Oct. 9, the Flathead County attorney decided not to prosecute, saying that Montana’s “castle doctrine” law, which maintains that a man’s home is his castle, protected Mr. Harper’s rights to vigorously defend himself there. The county attorney determined that Mr. Harper had the right to fetch his gun from his bedroom, confront Mr. Fredenberg in the garage and, fearing for his safety, shoot him.
So let’s summarize – angry, drunk estranged husband of homeowner’s girlfriend charges into the home spewing threats. Homeowner responds with a trio of shots that dispatch the intruder into the next life. Frankly, I’ve got no problem with that – especially with the homeowner knowing that the intruder had a history of domestic abuse against his estranged spouse. The prosecutor was right not to bring charges in this situation.

The New York Times, of course, disagrees – as does most of its liberal-leaning commenters. That isn’t a surprise, and would not even elicit my notice However, it is the responses of those liberal commenters that are illustrative of how shallow the “pro-woman” stance taken by your average liberal really is. What I read was a veritable War on Women from the Left!  Consider this comment, from commenter Jim Jones.

Is this what some people refer to as "freedom"? She has an affair, tells her husband, proceeds to take their young children to the home of this other man, in order to spend the day there, and finally asks this other man to drive her around the neighborhood, which ensures she is seen with the other man. The Victim returns home to find his wife & young children missing. The soon to be victim then goes looking for his family in one place he probably hoped they would not be. Upon the victim's arrival, the other man runs into his home, leaving the door open, so he can grab a gun and wait for the Vic to get within range.

The Vic was baited like a bear. What a bad law. So sad, so cold, so predictable. Someone else is sure to use similar tactics in order to legally take out an adversary.
Got that – it is all the woman’s fault. How dare she spend the day with a man not her husband? She even drove around in a car with him! Sounds like Mr. Jones would prefer the much more morally sound legal code of Saudi Arabia to guarantee that such immoral behavior is properly punished. And then there’s Merlin.

As tragic as this case is, it's never a good idea to confront the man having an affair with your woman, not even on neutral ground, and worst of all in his territory. It's always the woman's fault, just as it is the man's fault when he cheats. The only time you are right to confront your woman's lover is in your own home or territory.

Got that – she’s “your woman”. Chattel. I saw any number of comments in which some liberal commenter argued that Fredenberg had every right to enter Harper’s home because Harper had “trespassed” upon Fredenberg’s “property” by having an affair with his wife. So much for the notion of “her body, her choice”! I wonder if such liberals would be taking the same position if a drunk guy who abused his wife had shown up in the garage of the local abortionist to punch him out (or worse) for aborting his child? I doubt it – they would be celebrating him and the NYT article would have presented the doctor as a hero.

The number of comments by liberals arguing that Harper –who according to Fredenberg’s estranged wife was not involved in a sexual relationship with her, only an emotional one – deserved to be assaulted because of that relationship was just astounding. All these folks showing up to argue that it was inappropriate to respond to the threat of assault with violence, and indeed arguing that the assailant had every right to commit assault. I wish someone had posted a comment asking if it would have been acceptable for Fredenberg to knock around Heather Fredenberg because of her relationship with Harper -- it would have been instructive to see how many would have recoiled at the notion that domestic violence against an estranged wife could be acceptable even as they condoned violence against the boyfriend.

And I won’t get into the number of mewling anti-gunners who called for the reinstitution of criminal laws against adultery after decades of liberal efforts to overturn laws regulating sexual morality. Don’t they realize that, having fought and won the sexual revolution, incidents like the one in the article are inevitable as men and women exercise the freedoms that sprung from it? There’s no putting that genie back in the bottle.

Oh, and as for all the comments arguing that Harper should have retreated from the garage to hide while awaiting the police instead of standing his ground in his own home, I’d like to offer this undeniably true observation about such a course of action:

"When seconds count, the police are only minutes away"

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS 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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About Those Horses And Ships and Bayonets

ALL troops still get bayonet training as far as I am aware.  I certainly did in the Vietnam war era.  Equating bayonets with horses is therefore ignorant. -- JR

At the foreign policy debate, President Obama thought he was putting something over on Mitt Romney when he acted as if the Republican was an imbecile for suggesting that the rapid decline in U.S. Naval strength was anything but a good idea:

You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.

That was quite a zinger. In one fell swoop, he portrayed the Republican as ignorant about defense issues and established himself as the competent commander-in-chief. Except for the fact that he was dead wrong and did himself far more political damage than good.

Contrary to the president’s assertion, the creation of aircraft carriers and submarines did not mean that we needed fewer ships. Quite the contrary. Aircraft carriers need just as many if not more supporting vessels than the obsolete battleships that no are no longer under commission. So do subs. The decline in naval strength compromises America’s ability to project power abroad. That is particularly true in places like the Persian Gulf, where President Obama is trying to sound as tough with Iran as Romney.

Even more foolish is the president’s attempt to portray contemporary naval vessels with cavalry horses. That says more about his own lack of understanding of the military than Romney’s. It also may cost him some votes in a state that he still hopes to win: Virginia, home of the largest U.S. Naval base in the country and hotbed of support for a stronger military.

One more point about those horses and bayonets. For all of his contempt for them, it bears remembering that horses played a not insignificant role in the armed forces’ successful fight in Afghanistan, a point that Obama should have remembered. The Army and the Marines operating Afghanistan still use bayonets in close combat.

The more you think about this supposed zinger, the more it sounds as if Obama made a fool of himself, not Romney.

 SOURCE

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Department of Labor Denied

The other week a lady from the Department of Labor decided to audit the restaurant I worked for. I say “worked” for because I recently quit that job for a completely unrelated issue. Anyways, my employers were freaking out just a little bit. And can you blame them? Even though they do everything by the book, there is always something the state can trump up to extort money from you.

In the course of her audit she felt it was necessary to interrogate all of the employees. She walked into the kitchen one day, flashed her badge, and said she’d like to ask all of us some questions. She turned to me first. I politely said “one moment please.” Then I walked off and left the room. So, she began her questioning of others before she got to me. I made a B-line for my smart phone because I had zero intention of answering any of her questions. I also wanted to record the encounter.

You’ll note in this video how uncomfortable she is in front of a camera. No penalties were levied against me as a result of my refusal to participate. My employers even stayed cool. Their attitude was to just go along to get along. I made it clear to them and all of my colleagues that her job is to build a case against us to extort money, plain and simple. I think a lot of my colleagues were surprised that one could refuse to talk to the “authorities” and get away with it. I definitely see this as a victory since my colleagues have been shown, from somebody they know, that the state really is a paper tiger. Enjoy the video!



 SOURCE

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Fashion bigotry

By Bradley Scott, a young American designer from New York City

I was extremely disappointed and angry to read an article documenting a very serious controversy surrounding famed Vogue Fashion Editor Anna Wintour. It is being reported that she is discouraging designers, like myself, to stay clear of dressing Ann Romney because her politics do not align with the common place liberal beliefs in the fashion industry. That is pure discrimination which would result in a lawsuit against any employer should that be the reason behind excluding a prospective job application, or employee termination. How dare she…

It is widely known that Hollywood and Fashion take a far left position on politics and contrary to what you may believe, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, I welcome the difference in opinion because that’s the epitome of why America is by far, the greatest country in the world. We are a free people who can think and vote as we wish, without fearing professional consequences or having our freedoms being taken away.

It is these same freedoms that come under attack when people like Anna Wintour exert her pressure upon us. We should be allowed to operate our businesses, which we built, at our discretion, and under OUR leadership. Her sole job it is to promote fashion to ALL women, of every color, race, nationality, religion, etc.  Pressuring designers to turn to the evil disease of discrimination is an horrendously wrong turn for the industry.

In the most challenging times, which include global unrest, changing value of the US Dollar, shrinking profit margins to accommodate stores, and most of all, the intense effort to keep craftsmanship right here in the wonderful city of NY, we shouldn’t be dictated to by the “Queen of Fashion” that our ambition of seeing our designs on a wonderful woman like Ann Romney should be put back in our notebook as an off limits concept. How offensive!

Fox News reports: “Over the past year, the Vogue matriarch – who many say has enough power to make or break fashion careers – has become one of President Obama’s leading financiers. Wintour has raised over half a million dollars for the incumbent, hosted numerous lavish dinners in his name and even enlisted designer pals like Marc Jacobs and Thakoon Panichgul to design pro-Obama products”

It is one thing to be a fund-raiser, deploying designers to design for President Obama’s re-election bid as reported by Fox News, but it is another, to actually pressure designers to “say no” to the possibility of being honored by the possible next first lady if she should grace us with wearing something that ultimately took all our blood, sweat and tears to create.

I for one want absolutely nothing to do with this attack on women. This pressure upon designers should offend every woman in this country, not just the conservatives. Women all over should ask themselves why they read Vogue Magazine and think about why a magazine editor should be dictating who is deserving of our designs.

So I will close this op-ed by saying I hope all women, of every belief, faith and political stance, see this for what it truly is; an un-American, undemocratic, and unladylike attack upon not only Ann Romney, but the millions of American conservative women she insulted with this decree. After all, while the Devil wears Prada to cover major flaws, Ann Romney is pure class and I would be proud to have her wear my clothing, as would most other designers.

SOURCE

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Well, I never ....



About 6 soldiers pull up on a main street in Halifax , Nova Scotia on some holiday.  They're in a standard issue WWII type Willys Jeep.

In the span of about 3 to 4 minutes they completely disassemble the vehicle  And reassemble it with no power tools and drive off in it fully operable!

The idea being to show the genius that went into the making of the jeep: And its basic simplicity. Fantastic!

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Supersize This!

As everybody knows by now, it was announced earlier this month that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded to none other than the European Union.

This can only further burnish the luster added to the Prize when it was presented to Barack Hussein Obama back in 2009.

Both these momentous occasions were simply the latest in a long series of distinguished recipients, who include Al Gore (2007), Mohamed El-Baradei (2005), Jimmy Carter (2002), Amnesty International (1977), the United Nations and Kofi Annan (2001), Yasser Arafat (1994), Desmond Tutu (1984), and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (1985).

“But Baron,” you say, “none of this is news! Everyone knows the Nobel Peace Prize jumped the shark decades ago. Why, it’s become a dumping ground for progressive political hacks — as designated by progressive political hacks in Norway!”

And indeed it has. But let’s not give up on the much-maligned Prize just yet.

An unidentified entrepreneur has come up with an idea to merge Commerce with the Pursuit of World Peace ’n’ Justice:



If he’s willing to throw in a free 20-ounce Diet Pepsi, I just might take him up on the deal…

SOURCE

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‘Wastebook’ unearths government excess

When Americans go to the polls we won’t just be making a decision about what kind of government we want. We will be making a decision about what kind of government we will tolerate. In recent elections politicians from both sides of the aisle promised to go through the budget line by line and make hard choices. That hasn’t happened. The only change Washington has been interested in is in your pocket.

This week I released my annual “Wastebook” report, featuring 100 examples of mismanagement, wasteful spending and special interest deals that illustrate just how far Washington continues to go to avoid setting priorities.  Consider a few examples:

Instead of working to close the massive hole in our federal budget, our government spent $350,000 through the National Science Foundation to study how golfers are better when they imagine a larger golf hole.

While millions of Americans are struggling to put enough food on the table for their families, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) spent $300,000 to tell Americans to eat caviar, one of the world’s most expensive delicacies.

At the same time, USDA and the Department of Commerce are spending more than $1.3 million to help PepsiCo Inc., the world’s largest snack food maker, build a Greek yogurt factory in New York.

As members of Congress complain about defense cuts, Congress split a new line of Navy littoral (near shore) ships between two completely different designs, needlessly increasing costs by $740 million while undermining the Navy’s capabilities.

The biggest waste of taxpayer dollars of all, however, was Congress itself, which I listed as the #1 waste of taxpayer dollars this year. With 23 million Americans unemployed and millions of others struggling to live within a budget, the Senate didn’t even bother to pass a budget for the third straight year.

Meanwhile, Washington spent much of the year talking instead of acting to avert a debt crisis and another downgrade. While members of Congress refused to back specific reforms and cuts, they were, however, very specific about what to fund. Robotic squirrels, Watermelon Queen Tours, climate change musicals, Moroccan pottery classes and pet shampoo products all received federal funding courtesy of future generations and potential foreign adversaries who are mocking us for our recklessness.

Wasteful spending matters because history has not been kind to great powers that lived beyond their means while wallowing in gratuitous excess. In Roman times, rulers used what was called “bread and circuses” — literally cheap food and entertainment — to pacify the populace in troubled times. Today, we make food stamps eligible at Starbucks and offer tax breaks for the NFL, NHL and the PGA (but not MLB). And instead of reforming Medicare for today’s seniors and near-retirees, we spend $1.2 million to see if encouraging them to play World of Warcraft, an online video game, will help them improve their cognitive function.

The purpose of detailing this waste isn’t just to remind the American people of what they already know — that Washington is doing less with more while they are doing more with less. The point is to remind taxpayers that they don’t have to accept the status quo. Every American has an opportunity to end spending behaviors in Washington that have become not just a punch line but the source of what Adm. Mike Mullen calls the greatest threat to our national security: our unsustainable $16 trillion national debt.

As I argue in “Wastebook,” each of the 100 entries highlighted in report is a direct result of Washington politicians who are preoccupied with running for re-election rather than running the country, which is what they were elected to do in the first place.

Some politicians and pundits try to rationalize excessive borrowing and spending as necessary until the economy gets back on track. But the fragile state of our economy is precisely why Washington must be more careful how tax dollars are spent. To do this Washington must set priorities, just like every family. The problem is Washington priorities are upside down. Important programs go bankrupt while outdated and outlandish projects continue to be funded.

The fact is advanced countries and economies like ours don’t stay advanced when we tolerate such silly spending decisions. Still, I believe We the People can cheat history and force Washington to make the hard decisions today that can give you and your children a brighter future tomorrow.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Pennsylvania desperation:  ""A bill that landed on Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett’s (R) desk this week would give companies that hire more than 250 new workers a gobsmacking tax incentive: 95 percent of those workers’ state income taxes would be paid to the employer, and not the state. It’s a bizarre strategy meant to attract companies from other states, specifically designed to lure California-based software maker Oracle into Pennsylvania. It’s also, as Philadelphia City Paper put it, 'lavish corporate welfare' writ large across state government."

From “Hope and Change” to … “Smirk and Disdain”:  "In the third, and mercifully last, presidential debate of this campaign, the candidates sliced razor-thin nuances in their foreign policy views. Romney was measured and presidential, and he avoided the trap being set for him as a warmonger. He actually seemed to be less interventionist than Obama, who ran against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but who has since become the sheriff from Blazing Saddles. As usual, when Obama was asked a question he would ignore it and revert to his tired talking points, mocking Romney on his foreign policy experience as governor of Massachusetts. ... Because he is losing steam, and because he is a whiner by nature, Obama attacked."

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS 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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Context, context!

As regular readers here will be aware, every now and again I get an unfortunate urge to revisit theological matters -- so I have been browsing through various scriptures today.  And in all my comments on such matters I always stress how looking at the context of a Bible passage can be very enlightening in showing what is actually meant.  And today I have noted a fairly hilarious thing that context does in Matthew 16.

Matthew 16 is of course home to the passage where Christ allegedly gave Peter keys to the Kingdom of Heaven.  Catholics base their  claims about the Pope on that passage.  I sent my son to a Catholic school so I have no animus against Catholicism but I have always seen the relationship between that passage and the Pope as poorly founded.

I have just noted, however, something that makes the Roman claim not only poorly founded but downright hilarious.  Just a few verses after the "keys" passage Jesus says this to Peter:

"But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men"

So if Peter was the first Pope, we have the authority of Jesus himself that the Pope was Satanic  -- plus some other unholy attributes!

Some old-time Protestants would agree  -- JR

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NC ROMNEY VOTER: MACHINE RECORDED VOTE FOR OBAMA, TWICE

North Carolina voters who went to vote for Mitt Romney complained electronic voting machines recorded votes for President Barack Obama instead.

According to MyFox8 in North Carolina, the problems occurred at the Bur-Mil Park polling location in Guilford County.

Voter Sher Coromalis told the station she cast her ballot for Romney, but the machine entered a vote for Obama on two straight occasions.  “I was so upset that this could happen,” Coromalis said, noting the machine correctly recorded her vote on the third attempt.

Guilford County Board of Elections Director George Gilbert told MyFox8 that such problems arise every election and can be resolved after machines are re-calibrated. “It’s not a conspiracy it’s just a machine that needs to be corrected,” Gilbert said.

Early voting in North Carolina ends November 3.

SOURCE

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Obama’s lost generation

Since Barack Obama took office, the civilian non-institutional population has increased by 8.7 million, and yet only 437,000 people have been added to the civilian labor force — i.e. those working or seeking work. That’s an awful absorption rate of new population into the workforce of just 5 percent.

This has helped to keep the unemployment rate misleadingly low at its current 7.8 percent level. If the labor force participation rate had held steady since 2009, the jobless rate today would be more like 11 percent.

This has never happened before in modern U.S. history during peacetime, according to data by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics going back to 1900. Absorption of population into the labor force has historically averaged at a 59 percent rate.

At that rate, about 5 million people should have entered the labor force since the end of 2008, but have not. The question is why.

The only time population absorption by the economy contracted was from 1940 to 1944, when the population increased by 4.3 million but the civilian labor force shrank by 1 million.

But that came in World War II on the heels of 7.5 million of previously unemployed Americans — plus another 3.5 million who had other jobs — going off to fight overseas in Europe and the Pacific. They were not counted as part of the civilian labor force during those years.

But, after the war millions of servicemen left the military and were added back into the mix. Besides then, the absorption rate of new population by the labor force had never fallen below 32 percent.

Comparably, in the past four years, there was no major war to speak of that removed millions of Americans from the labor force to account for the precipitous drop in labor force participation.

While Baby Boomers retiring would be expected to lower the labor force participation rate, the population of those 65 years and older has only increased by about 4.4 million since Obama took office. So, a retirement boom alone cannot account for the anomaly.

To find the rest, one must observe the declining labor force participation particularly amongst those with some college and with college degrees, a population that grew by 9.4 million since Dec. 2008.

Since that time, the participation rate of college graduates has dropped significantly — from 77.6 percent to about 75.9 percent today. That accounts for about 1.1 million graduates who should have entered the labor force, but didn’t.

Another 1.7 million with some college or an associate’s degree should have also entered the labor force, but are nowhere to be found as the participation rate there dropped from 71.9 percent to 68.8 percent.

In addition, another 2 million or so folks lost their jobs and eventually gave up looking for another one.

All of which accounts for the 5 million individuals who should have entered the labor force in the past four years — Obama’s lost generation. It is an appalling state of affairs, and a trend that will not easily be reversed no matter who wins the White House in November.

The fact that it has never happened before in peacetime however should give particularly supporters of Obama pause. This is the worst labor market for new job seekers in modern history. And Obama has only made it worse by increasing eligibility for welfare by millions, creating a disincentive for Americans to return to the labor force.

To get back onto solid ground, the nation needs to get back to policies that will create jobs at a rate faster than the population grows. These include reducing the tax and regulatory burden on industry and strengthening the dollar to reduce the cost of doing business in the U.S., and in the meantime substantially decreasing welfare spending that discourages job-seeking.

The alternative is to continue to follow Obama down the road to serfdom we have been on for four years now. And good luck finding work there.

SOURCE

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Can a conscientious liberal back Obama?

by Jeff Jacoby

YOU'RE A PASSIONATE and committed liberal. Four years ago, enthralled by Barack Obama's biography and inspired by his oratory, you voted for him with pride. You embraced his promise of hope and change. You were deeply moved by the racial progress he symbolized.  But above all you voted for him because he expressed such enlightened views.

You didn't just want a Democrat back in the White House, you wanted one who would bring progressive clarity to US national policy.

For eight years, you'd fumed at George W. Bush's offenses against the Constitution; now at last, you believed, you were supporting a president for whom civil liberties would be an unshakable priority. A president who wouldn't be beholden to Wall Street and its rivers of cash. Who would prosecute the war on terror without abandoning core American values or trampling basic human rights. Whose administration would function in the sunlight, a jewel of transparency, accountability, and due process.

That was the president you expected. It wasn't the president you got.

"I will make clear that the days of compromising our values are over," Obama had said in 2007 as he campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination. In an address to the Woodrow Wilson Center, he had excoriated Bush's approach to counterterrorism – the excesses of the Patriot Act, the warrantless wiretapping, the indefinite detention of terror suspects – for reflecting a "false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand." In an Obama administration, he vowed, things would be different.

Yet the president you voted for hasn't abandoned Bush's antiterror legacy, not by a long shot. Since Obama took office, warrantless wiretapping of Americans' domestic communications has skyrocketed. According to a new report by the ACLU, "more people were subjected to [electronic] surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade." Instead of repealing the Patriot Act, Obama signed a law extending it through 2015.

The president who was going to shut the US lockup at Guantanamo is now spending millions of dollars to upgrade it. Far from doing away with trials by military commission, he ordered them resumed. The eloquent progressive who vowed to roll back Bush's post-9/11 wartime excesses has become almost a caricature of what he used to condemn. He meets regularly to review a "kill list" of terrorist suspects and decide who should be targeted for death. He has drastically expanded the drone war that Bush began, raining down missiles on countries where we aren't at war, killing or maiming hundreds of innocent victims in the process. Astonishingly, he has even claimed – and exercised -- the power to order the extrajudicial killing of American citizensterrorist operatives. he believes to be

Neocon hawks may not blink at such things, but conscientious liberals like you were always appalled by them. "We have compromised our most precious values," Obama said as a candidate. Will you compromise your values by voting for him again?

And what about all those other values you counted on Obama to uphold?

On the campaign trail, his top priority was to codify Roe v. Wade. "The first thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act," he declared. Once in office, it dropped from his agenda.

You trusted Obama when he said his administration would be "the most open and transparent in history." Instead it launched an unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers and leaks, and retreated into a "bubble of non-accountability."

When you voted for Obama in 2008, could you have imagined that he would extend the Bush tax cuts? That he would commit US forces to war in Libya without the congressional approval he himself had said the law required? That he would show so little concern for pro-democracy dissidents and protesters resisting tyranny? That he would expel 1.2 million undocumented immigrants in three years, more than any president since the 1950s? That he would load his administration with so many former lobbyists – after having promised that he wouldn't?

If a Republican president compiled such an atrocious record, you would do everything you could to prevent his reelection. Can you vote in good conscience for a Democrat with such a record?

SOURCE

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Obama's Nameless War With a Nameless Enemy

In the final presidential debate on October 22, President Barack Obama spoke briefly about the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on U.S. officials and personnel in Benghazi. He outlined why the U.S. had gone into Libya before the attack. He outlined the answers he is still seeking following the attack. But he did not say why this terrorist attack had occurred or why the U.S. had been ill-prepared to meet it in what is, after all, a volatile city alive with militias recently freed from dictatorial rule. Nor did he tell us why his Administration strenuously avoided calling it a terrorist attack for two weeks, preferring instead to speak of a spontaneous assault in the course of a demonstration of Muslims offended by an anti-Muhammad video.

Mitt Romney did not pursue the subject, so we got no closer to the heart of the matter, yet the implication of this apologetic gloss of the first two weeks is obvious: Ambassador Chris Stevens was not murdered by Islamists who hate America and its allies and mean to attack us again; he was the victim of the local reaction to one of the products of American freedom of speech. Once the attack was acknowledged as the handiwork of terrorists, however, followers of al Qaeda, virtually the only officially acknowledged extremists, were cited as the perpetrators. And here lies the problem: the Obama Administration will not acknowledge that an extreme and violent segment of the Muslim world ranging far beyond the confines of al Qaeda is at war with us. To do so would have required him to explain why the U.S. had been empowering Islamists, including in Libya, some of whom may have been responsible for leaking information that enabled the terrorists to locate and kill the Americans.

Just why and how has this refusal to name the Islamist enemy come to characterize the four years of Obama's presidency? Because President Obama agrees with the view that Islamists as a force in world affairs are not be shunned and that wisdom dictates coming to terms with those among them who are hot engaged in active hostilities at this moment. The idea is defective, because common to all Islamists is Muslim supremacism and the undeviating pursuit to subvert the non-Islamic world.

Yet, since Barack Obama took office, Islamist antagonists, other than those involved in active hostilities like al Qaeda and the Taliban, whose hostility cannot be denied or ignored, have gone unnamed. Presidential statements on the anniversaries of the 1983 killing of 242 U.S. servicemen in Lebanon by Hizballah or the 1979 seizure by Islamist students of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, to name two examples, failed to even mention the perpetrators of these acts, as it had become U.S. policy to propitiate both parties.

Indeed, the Obama Administration has refused to associate terrorists attacking America with Islam. Administration officials have spent four years speaking of particular terrorists at home and abroad as isolated "extremists," even when Islamist terrorist connections (for example, between Fort Hood sniper Nidal Hassan and the American-born al Qaeda in Yemen leader, Anwar al-Awlaki, who advised him) were readily traceable.

In a May 2010 hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney-General Eric Holder only grudgingly and hypothetically conceded that radical Islam could be the inspiration for some individuals involved in recent acts of terrorism, before immediately asserting that such people were acting on a "version of Islam that is not consistent with the teachings of it." Similarly, in March 2011, Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough told a Muslim audience that extremists in their midst "falsely claim to be fighting in the name of Islam." When Rep. Peter King (R-NY), chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, held hearings on homegrown radical Islam the same month, the Administration publicly opposed it.

The Administration has also expressly disavowed the use of terms like "Islamism," "radical Islam," and "jihad." In May 2009, John O. Brennan, Obama's Chief National Security Adviser for Counterterrorism, contended that use of such terms "would lend credence" to the notion "that the United States is somehow at war against Islam.… Nor do we describe our enemy as jihadists or Islamists because jihad is holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam meaning to purify oneself or one's community." Such refurbishment of the term 'jihad' -- war waged against non-believers to extend and secure the dominion of Islam, is a religious duty which, according to authoritative Muslim sources, may at least at times be waged against civilians on the opposing side -- at once sanitizes it and precludes its use. Nor has it been explained how ignoring the ideology animating the terrorists somehow renders America at peace with those jihadists who regard themselves at war with the U.S.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS 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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Democracy is at work in America

The decisions it produces are only as good as the quality of the average voter  -- and now that the voter base is on average very poorly educated the decision-making must suffer in quality.  With tens of millions of voters illiterate or barely literate, America is headed in the direction of Brazil

Elections supposedly prevent convulsions, serving as safety valves that vent social pressures and enable course corrections. November's election will either be a prelude to a convulsion or the beginning of a turn away from one.

America's public-policy dysfunction exists not because democracy isn't working but because it is. Both parties are sensitive market mechanisms, measuring more than shaping voters' preferences. The electoral system is a seismograph recording every tremor of public appetite. Today, the differences that divide the public are exceeded by the contradictions within the public's mind.

America's bold premise is the possibility of dignified self-government – people making reasonable choices about restrained appetites.

But three decades ago, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington postulated that America suffers regularly recurring political convulsions because the gap between the premise and reality becomes too wide to ignore.

Now Michael Greve, a constitutional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, argues: "We like to tell ourselves that all our constitutional stories must have a happy ending." The founders' foremost problem, Greve says, was debt. To establish the nation's credibility, they needed to replace the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution. "We," Greve says, "merely have to return to it, if we can." He wonders whether we can.

The official national debt of $16 trillion (growing $4 billion a day), plus what the government owes its various trust funds, is more than 100 percent of GDP. Ninety percent is where economic anemia seems to deepen. States' debts are about $3 trillion and their unfunded pension liabilities probably are another $4 trillion. "Debts of this magnitude," Greve says, "will not be paid."

Barack Obama's risible solution is to add 4.6 points to the tax rate for less than 3 percent of Americans. Some conservatives have the audacity of hope – expecting 5 percent economic growth (the post-1945 average: 2.9 percent) and planning to continue financing the debt by borrowing at negative interest rates. Of our long slide into financial decrepitude, Greve says: "The rate of deterioration does not correlate in any obvious way with political control over the presidency and Congress."

The housing debacle was not the result of "a spontaneous outbreak of private irresponsibility." Public institutions and policies provided occasions and incentives for the exercise of private vices. Washington pays up to 80 percent of state Medicaid expenses, so states' citizens demand more Medicaid services. Although the elderly consider Social Security and Medicare benefits earned, Greve says: "Most retirees could not have earned their expected payment streams if they had worked two or three jobs."

"Our politics," says Greve, "aims at inspiration on the cheap." We should reduce government's complicity in illusions by, for example, sending retirees "a statement showing the estimated present value of their old-age benefits; their lifetime earnings and contributions; and the earnings and contributions that it would have taken to 'earn' those benefits. We might then ask them who precisely should earn and remit the missing millions and in what sense it would be 'unfair' to modify the empty promises."

Rash promises were made, Greve says, "in an era of prosperity, when and because we thought we could afford them." Now they "are far too entrenched to be dislodged in the course of ordinary politics." Even granting Mitt Romney's embrace of something like his running mate's reforms, this year's politics are terribly ordinary. Although consensus is supposedly elusive, it actually is the problem. "Our operative consensus," says Greve, "is to have a big transfer state, and not pay for it."

Democracy is representative government, which is the problem. Democracy represents the public's preferences, which are mutable, but also represents human nature, which is constant. People flinch from confronting difficult problems until driven to by necessity's lash. The Claremont Institute's William Voegeli, commenting on Greve and the dubious postulate of continuous 5 percent growth, says: "There's good reason to fear that if the economy builds a 5 percent levee the polity will just come up with a 6 percent flood. We humans adroitly use scant and equivocal evidence to convince ourselves that the most congenial interpretation of events is also the most plausible and durable."

Writing in 1830, Thomas Babington Macaulay asked, "On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?" Greve's gloomy answer is: Because we actually see behind us protracted abandonment of the founders' flinty realism about the need to limit government because of the limitations of the people.

SOURCE

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Obama Makes False Claim About Supreme Court Decision; Leftist "Fact-Checkers" Parrot It

Reading a Supreme Court decision is so hard! If you are a fact-checker, it’s much easier just to let President Obama, a critic of a Supreme Court decision, caricature the decision and then parrot the baseless caricature as if it were fact.

The Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., said employees who want to bring a pay discrimination lawsuit under Title VII (the federal antidiscrimination law with the shortest deadline) generally have to file a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) within 180 days. But it specifically left open the possibility they could sue later on – even if they failed to file a timely EEOC complaint — if they did not discover the discrimination until later. The case involved Lilly Ledbetter, who waited more than five years after learning of a pay disparity between her and her male co-workers to file an EEOC complaint.

The White House falsely claimed “The Court ruled that employees subject to pay discrimination like Lilly Ledbetter must file a claim within 180 days of the employer’s original decision to pay them less . . . even if the employee did not discover the discriminatory reduction in pay until much later (check out Justice Alito’s arguments in the Court’s opinion).” In yesterday’s debate, Obama falsely claimed the Supreme Court said Ledbetter could not sue even if she had no way of discovering the discriminatory pay disparity. He said “the Supreme Court said that she couldn’t bring suit because she should have found about it earlier, whereas she had no way of finding out about it.”

These claims are utterly false. The Supreme Court specifically left open the possibility employees who learn of the discrimination later can sue under the “discovery rule” exception to the 180-day deadline. In footnote 10 of its opinion, the Court wrote, “We have previously declined to address whether Title VII suits are amenable to a discovery rule. . . .Because Ledbetter does not argue that such a rule would change the outcome in her case, we have no occasion to address this issue.”

Thus, since Ledbetter didn’t even claim in her lawsuit she hadn’t discovered the pay discrimination in time to sue, relaxing the deadline for her would have done her no good. In addition, if she truly had lacked knowledge of the pay disparity as a result of being deceived by her employer, she could have had the deadline extended under the Supreme Court’s doctrines of equitable tolling and estoppel, which are longstanding exceptions to the deadline that are a bit narrower than the discovery rule. But she didn’t allege either of these exceptions applied in her case.

In reality, Ledbetter knew of the pay disparity she later claimed was discriminatory for over five years before filing a legal complaint over it, as she admitted in her deposition in her lawsuit. But later, Ledbetter falsely claimed to the contrary in a speech to the Democratic National Convention.

It’s not true, as she claimed to the Convention, that she didn’t learn of it until “two decades” after she began working at the company. She had worked for the company since 1979. She learned of the pay disparity by 1992, as excerpts from her deposition, filed in the Supreme Court as part of the Joint Appendix, make clear. In response to the question: “So you knew in 1992 that you were being paid less than your peers?” she answered simply, “Yes, sir.” (See Joint Appendix at pg. 233; page 123 of Ledbetter’s deposition.) But she did not file a legal complaint over it until July 1998, shortly before her retirement in November 1998. See Ledbetter v. Goodyear, 550 U.S. 618, 621 (2007).

Politifact parroted Obama’s false claim in an Oct. 16 commentary entitled “Obama: Mitt Romney refused to say whether he supports Lilly Ledbetter Act.” It wrote:

 In 2007, the Supreme Court had ruled in Ledbetter vs. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. that the 180-day statute of limitations started from the day an employer made the decision to discriminate — making it impossible for employees who learned of such discrimination later to get relief, such as back pay.

This is just wrong, and all PolitiFact had to do to debunk this claim was read the Supreme Court’s decision (which its commentary claims was one of the “sources” for its “fact check”), or various law review articles about it. Or just read my prior emails to them, which I sent to a legion of fact-checkers in September 2012, anticipating Obama would make this false claim, having made similar false claims in the past. This morning, I sent more emails — to each Politifact staffer listed as contributors to the Oct. 16 commentary. In response, I received an email from the principal author this morning, stating:

“Thanks for your email. I’ll look into it and talk about it with my editors. What I wrote was consistent with how we’ve described the case in the past.”

As of now, the error I identified has not been fixed. I suspect it won’t be, until it is too late to correct it in the print version of any newspaper that cites Politifact. So the error will live on in every news database as if it were fact.

More HERE

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How Leftist law has hijacked the U.S. constitution

What would those "dead white males" know?  The constitution has clear provisions for its own amendment and updating but Leftist lawyers have repeatedly managed to slide around that by contemptuous "interpretation" of it -- JR

Each September, the assumptions and methodologies of law-school curricula are handed down as if from Sinai to tens of thousands of 1Ls. They are readily accepted by the students, who are under enormous pressure to assimilate and adjust to them quickly. Students are told nothing of progressive philosophy’s origins or ultimate purposes, and notice little of its hostility to the Founders’ Constitution. Such lack of awareness is evident even among many law-school faculty members, who act as Moses without self-knowledge, sensible only of the first commandment.

For those with the passion to rule — which describes most bright twentysomethings — such a sensibility is very useful. They see themselves doing God’s work, or something like it, for they do at least know that God is banished from the public square. In his recent book Schools for Misrule, Walter Olson recounts how the dean of one of the nation’s most prestigious law schools routinely greeted incoming students by welcoming them to “the republic of conscience.”

Of course, it’s a conscience to be imposed by the cognoscenti, through the mechanism of the courts, on the unwashed masses who still conceive of politics as something to be done the old-fashioned way, i.e., consensually. What the students quickly imbibe in the law schools is uniquely well suited to breaking the constraints imposed by self-government and the Constitution.

The modern law school came into existence largely as an adjunct of progressive ideology. It was to be the training ground for progressives dedicated to overcoming early-20th-century judicial resistance to the political assault on our Constitution of limited and enumerated powers. As with the modern discipline of political science, the modern law school was built around core progressive assumptions: a philosophy of history, a faith in the power of scientific intelligence to smooth the movement of history, and a deep suspicion of existing institutional forms.

By the 1920s, leading legal scholars were confident they had discovered a new science of jurisprudence — one that would emphasize evolutionary growth rather than black-letter law or theories of law rooted in the permanent nature of human beings. This melding of social Darwinism and philosophical pragmatism animated the growing legal professoriate to direct its attention to processes, functions, and change more than principles, rules, and continuity. The new approach to the study of law had many manifestations. It defined the aspirations of important legal movements such as sociological jurisprudence and legal realism, which sought to ensure, respectively, that legal interpretation would be informed by social data, and that legal outcomes would be determined by perceived social benefits rather than the strict construction of law. The old-fashioned common lawyer was out, to be replaced by a progressive social engineer with legal training.

By the 1920s, a plethora of disciplines were deemed relevant to law in ways they had not been before. The insights, real or alleged, of all the social sciences were increasingly brought to bear on the legal curriculum. As economic, sociological, psychological, or political circumstances changed, so must the law, and it inevitably did. Curricular revisions and new faculty followed. Casebooks appeared with titles such as “Cases and Materials on X” rather than simply “Cases on X.” For example, Yale Law School in the 1930s added significant social-science material to its library holdings, hired more social scientists for its teaching faculty, and created a joint institute for the study of law and psychology. The sheer number and specialized nature of course offerings and supporting materials increased markedly at the leading realist institutions, driven by an understanding of law as inseparable from social problems — particularly those addressed by the administrative state. Through the 1930s and 1940s, courses in public-law fields, including administrative law, burgeoned, and they continued to grow throughout the postwar period.

These courses promoted a view of law as the problem-solving tool of the new age rather than a set of constraints on human conduct. Law tended to be seen as a means of social control and of dealing with corporate groups, which were to have their interests harmonized by elite mechanism rather than spontaneous activities in a large republic.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the development of the field of labor law during the 1920s. The move from “constitutional” law to “public” law in the law schools followed, paralleling the progressive mind’s shift from constitutionalism to the administrative state and the new emphasis on regulatory and entitlement politics in the regime as a whole.

Whatever the theoretical roots or disciplinary orientations of the realists, all saw the Constitution as a fundamentally flawed document and decried any efforts to interpret it on its own terms. Statutory law, and even more the Constitution, was seen as an epiphenomenon of deep class biases and social forces unrelated to principles of right or justice. At the same time, it was assumed the best and brightest could extract themselves from the influence of these social phenomena that swept others along like tiny corks on a great river. Given a clear-eyed view of what law “really” is, along with sympathetic legislatures, the right kinds of sociological arguments, and, eventually, a less conservative judiciary, they could put themselves in the vanguard of history. Healthy evolution always lay just over the horizon for most of the realists, as it had for the earlier advocates of sociological jurisprudence.

The relationship between legal ideas and legal practice was central. In 1921, while a judge on the New York Court of Appeals, Benjamin Cardozo was arguing publicly and theoretically, in his Storrs Lectures at Yale, for the centrality of sociological jurisprudence to the law. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes reduced law to questions of the management of social forces according to personal and class beliefs, academics worked out theories of the idiosyncratic role of judges. While Louis Brandeis concentrated on the role of social needs in deciding cases, Dean Roscoe Pound at Harvard formulated the same ideas in theory, writing that “the sociological movement in jurisprudence is a movement for pragmatism as a philosophy of law” and a movement away from “assumed first principles.”

By the time the New Deal hit Washington, there was a new sense of professionalism among law teachers, marked by a specialized knowledge of the new science of jurisprudence. The creation of the Association of American Law Schools at the dawn of the 20th century punctuated the importance of professionalism. Even today, the AALS website reminds students that lawyers once entered legal practice without — gasp — having gone to law school. The AALS did much to elevate the “educated” lawyer over the “trained” practitioner of yore, a key difference being the former’s knowledge of the latest trends in historicist jurisprudence.

As legal education through the 20th century transformed itself from a system of rules to be learned into principles or predictions to be gleaned from cases, and then into a vehicle for social change, American lawyers saw themselves as the facilitators of change and the formulators of public policy. Policymaking is always and everywhere a normative endeavor. It was a small step from a concern with policy to a concern with “values,” which quickly made their way into the law-school curriculum, particularly at elite institutions. This occurred largely in what is seen as the “post-realist” period commencing in the 1960s, a period better understood as an inevitable outgrowth of realism, or perhaps a realism that is simply clearer about its purposes.

Through this period and beyond, the case method persisted, but its function has come to be understood in an even more radicalized light. The inductive search for principles has fully given way to the search for strategies — rooted in various social-science disciplines — for winning policy outcomes. The “values” that guide the study and application of law come from outside the law. Law and constitutionalism itself are not to be revered for their reflection of eternal truths or their embodiment of the insights of the wise, but for what policy victories they can deliver to a variety of hungry constituencies.

Furthermore, while the early progressives concentrated on expanding the administrative state and its list of clients for the purposes of economic engineering, today’s progressives are far more enchanted by larger-scale social engineering best implemented through the prerogatives of the judicial branch. Progressive change is to be effected in courts of what now can only loosely be termed “law.”

And so it is that the chief justice of the United States [Roberts], schooled in the best “conservative” principles of today’s legally educated elites, could in good conscience declare constitutional a federal tax [Obamacare mandate] unlinked to any enumerated power that the Founders would have recognized. Careful reflection on the text and tradition of the Founders’ Constitution in its establishment of the national taxing power “to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States” might have led him to decide otherwise.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS 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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