SNAP Theatrics Fall Flat

It has become a set piece of political theater for liberal Democrats, carried out in recent weeks by everyone from New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner to Connecticut senator Chris Murphy and a bevy of congressmen: attempting to eat on the $4.50-per-day food budget supposedly provided by the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the program formerly known as “food stamps.” While always good for a headline, and generally accompanied by amusing photographs of the bizarre meals the politicians cobble together on their meager budget, the so-called SNAP challenge is also arrant nonsense.

To start with, virtually no one in America actually has to eat on just $4.50 per day. That number is derived by simply dividing the SNAP program’s budget by the number of recipients, arriving at an average benefit of $133.44 per month, or roughly $4.45 per day. However, that doesn’t tell us much about the size of the benefit that most families actually receive. For instance, SNAP benefits increase with family size. Thus, a family of four would receive $668 in benefits.

More important, the SNAP payments are not intended to be a family’s sole food income. As Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler pointed out, in pulling out a pair of Pinocchios for the SNAP challenge: “Note that the name of the program refers to ‘supplemental’ assistance.” SNAP benefits vary with income. Individuals with low incomes receive much higher SNAP benefits. Conversely, those individuals receiving the lowest benefits — say, $4.50 per day — are doing so precisely because they have other sources of income.

Indeed, the poorest SNAP recipients are almost universally receiving other welfare benefits, especially Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Medicaid. We should remember that there are actually 126 separate federal anti-poverty programs, and while no one receives benefits under every one of those programs, most poor people are eligible for benefits under multiple programs. SNAP isn’t even the only federal food program: There are currently 21 different programs providing food or food-purchasing assistance, administered by three different federal departments and one independent agency.

The latest dustup over SNAP was spurred by $20.5 billion in cuts to SNAP over the next ten years that were included in the late, unlamented farm bill. Democrats complained that those cuts were “a poison pill” that forced them to vote against the bill. Their votes, together with those of anti-spending Republicans, killed the farm bill, in a major setback for House Speaker John Boehner. Granted, the farm bill, a bloated and costly giveaway to special interests and one of the wealthier segments of society, should have been poisoned; but the Democratic objections to SNAP cuts were much ado about nothing.

The proposed SNAP cuts would have eventually reduced spending on the program all the way back to levels slightly higher than those of 2010, a year not particularly noted for mass starvation, and still higher than those of any year before that.

Indeed, few welfare programs have grown faster in recent years than SNAP. As with most federal spending, the increase started under President Bush, then escalated rapidly under President Obama. Since 2000, spending on SNAP increased from just $17 billion per year to more than $78 billion in 2012, a greater than fourfold increase. The increased spending was driven both by an increase in the number of recipients (a surge from 17 million in 2000 to more than 48 million today) and an average benefit per person that has almost doubled. Today, nearly one out of every six Americans receives SNAP.

Of course, some of this increase could be considered countercyclical, because welfare programs automatically expand during economic downturns, such as in the recent recession. However, increases in both participation and spending were bigger during this recession than in previous ones. For example, during the 1980–82 recession, enrollment in food stamps increased by only 635,000, and spending rose by just $124 million (in constant 2012 dollars). During the 1990–92 recession and jobless recovery, enrollment increased by 5.2 million, and spending rose by $9.1 billion. During the current recession (over a comparable three-year period), enrollment increased by 12 million people, while spending increased by $30 billion, which suggests that much of the increase was due, not to the economy, but to deliberate policy choices.

Moreover, looking forward, the Congressional Budget Office projects that both enrollment and spending will remain above pre-recession levels, even as the recovery limps along and unemployment declines. According to CBO, spending will never fall below $73 billion per year over the next decade and enrollment will remain above 34 million (enrollment will also still be as high as 45 million in 2016).

In fact, SNAP’s eligibility requirements have been significantly relaxed. This is no longer a program targeted at the poorest Americans who may need some temporary help, but has become part of an ever-growing welfare state. Nearly 17 percent of SNAP households have incomes above the poverty line. Almost 4.5 million recipients are able-bodied adults without children, more than 10 percent of the beneficiaries.

Especially in conjunction with other welfare programs, SNAP helps breed dependency and undermines the work ethic. Like much of the American welfare state, it is designed to make poverty a little more comfortable, not to get people out of poverty.

SNAP suffers from numerous other problems as well. The program’s administrative costs are extremely high, as much as $4.5 billion per year. Additionally, SNAP has a high rate of fraud and abuse. According to the Department of Agriculture, food-stamp fraud costs taxpayers at least $750 million annually, much of it committed not by recipients but by vendors.

Largely because of the switch from cash benefits to EBT cards, the fraud rate has improved somewhat in recent years; but because the program has ballooned in size during that same time period, the amount of money lost to waste and fraud is still significant.

And, finally, it should be noted that SNAP frequently subsidizes unhealthy food. At a time when obesity is a major national problem, should the federal government really be subsidizing the purchase of “soft drinks, candy, cookies, snack crackers, and ice cream,” as noted by the DOA? Before we ban sodas for the rest of us, shouldn’t we stop forcing taxpayers to buy them for other people?

Backers of SNAP argue that food stamps have had a long history of bipartisan support. Indeed, they have. Liberal Democrats have unsurprisingly backed an expansion of the welfare state, while farm-state Republicans have been happy to have government-subsidized purchases of their states’ products. But “bipartisan policy” and “good policy” rarely mean the same thing.

No American should ever go hungry. But the best solution to poverty remains a growing economy that produces jobs and prosperity, not poorly targeted, bureaucratic welfare programs.

Perhaps Democrats worried about poverty should drop the stunts, have themselves a good meal, and do something to cut taxes, reduce debt, and revive economic growth.

SOURCE

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The challenge to Turkey's Islamists depends on the economy

REBELLION has shaken Turkey since May 31. Is it comparable to the Arab upheavals that have overthrown four rulers since 2011, to Iran's Green movement of 2009 that led to an apparent reformer being elected president last week, or perhaps to Occupy Wall Street, which had negligible consequences?

The unrest marks a deeply important development with permanent implications. Turkey has become a more open and liberal country, one in which leaders face democratic constraints as never before. But how much it changes the role of Islam in Turkey depends primarily on the economy.

China-like material growth has been the main achievement of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the party he heads, the AKP. Personal income has more than doubled during his decade in power, changing the face of the country. As a visitor to Turkey since 1972, I have seen the impact in almost everything, from what people eat to their sense of Turkish identity.

That impressive growth explains the AKP's increased share of the national vote in its three elections, from 34 per cent in 2002 to 46 per cent in 2007, to a shade under 50 per cent in 2011. It also explains how, after 90 years of the military serving as the ultimate political power, the party was able to bring the armed forces to heel.

But two vulnerabilities have become more evident, especially since the June 2011 elections, jeopardising Erdogan's domination of the government.

One is dependence on foreign credit. To sustain consumer spending, Turkish banks have borrowed heavily abroad. The resulting current account deficit creates so great a need for credit that the private sector alone needs to borrow $US221 billion ($240bn) this year, or nearly 30 per cent of the $US775bn gross domestic product. Should the money stop flowing into Turkey, the party (pun intended) is over, possibly leading the stockmarket to collapse, the currency to plunge and the economic miracle to come to a screeching halt.

The other is Erdogan's sultan-like understanding of his democratic mandate. The Prime Minister sees his election in 2011, when the AKP won half the popular vote, - as a carte blanche to do whatever he pleases until the next vote. He indulges his personal emotions (recall his confrontation with Shimon Peres in 2009), meddles in the tiniest matters (his decision on a different use for a city park prompted the present turmoil), attempts social engineering (telling couples to bear three or more children), involves Turkey in an unpopular foreign adventure (Syria) and demonises the half of the electorate that did not vote for him (calling them beer-guzzlers who copulate in a mosque).

This attitude has won the fervent support of his once-downtrodden constituency but wrought the fury of the growing numbers of Turks who resent his authoritarianism, as well as the criticism of Europe leaders. German Chancellor Angela Merkel pronounced herself "appalled" by the police crackdown.

These two weaknesses point to the importance of the economy for the future of Erdogan, the AKP and the country. Should Turkey's finances weather the demonstrations, the Islamist program at the heart of the AKP's platform will advance, if more cautiously. Perhaps Erdogan will remain leader, becoming the next president, with newly enhanced powers; or perhaps his party will tire of him and - as happened to Margaret Thatcher in 1990 - push him aside in favour of someone who can carry out the same program without provoking so much hostility.

But if "hot money" flees Turkey, if foreign investors go elsewhere and if Persian Gulf patrons cool on the AKP, the demonstrations could end AKP rule and rupture the drive towards Islamism. Infighting within the party, especially between Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, or within the Islamist movement, especially between the AKP and Fethullah Gulen's powerful movement, could weaken the Islamists. More profoundly, the many non-Islamist voters who voted for the AKP's sound economic stewardship may abandon the party.

Payroll employment is down by 5 per cent. Real consumer spending in this year's first quarter fell by 2 per cent over 2012. Since the demonstrations started, the Istanbul stockmarket is down 10 per cent and interest rates are up about 50 per cent.

To assess the future of Islamism in Turkey, watch the economic indicators.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Immigration bill shifts to US House after Senate OK:  "Attention is shifting to the House and its conservative [sic] majority after the Senate passed a landmark [sic] immigration bill opening the door to U.S. citizenship to millions while pouring billions of dollars into securing the border with Mexico. The bill’s prospects are highly uncertain in the Republican-led House, where conservatives rule"

Watchdog: Liberal groups not targeted by IRS: "The government watchdog that exposed IRS targeting of conservative groups gave a blunt response to Democrats' claims that the agency also targeted liberals: It never happened. 'We found no indication in any of these other materials that 'Progressives' was a term used to refer cases for scrutiny for political campaign intervention,' IRS Inspector General J. Russell George wrote in a letter to Democrats. Democrats have since turned on the IG's office, claiming it is only telling half the story."

Spy, monsignor and banker arrested in Vatican bank fraud “plot”:  "An Italian spy, a Vatican official and banker have been arrested on suspicion of corruption and fraud involving an alleged plot to bring 20 million euros in cash into Italy from Switzerland aboard a government plane. The arrests come just two days after Pope Francis appointed a special commission to oversee the Vatican's scandal-plagued bank, which is known officially as the Institute for Religious Works."

NY: Bloomberg to urge Cuomo to veto bill to allow sparkler sales outside of NYC over terror target fears:  "It could spark terrorism! Mayor Bloomberg will urge Gov. Cuomo to veto legislation that would legalize the sale of sparklers outside New York City, arguing that terrorists could resort to using even kiddie fireworks to ignite a bomb. And that’s a risk not worth taking, City Hall officials said. The mayor opposes the measure, which the Legislature passed last week, even though it wouldn’t apply to the five boroughs, where a ban on sparklers -- and all other fireworks -- would remain in effect. The bill would allow the sale of sparklers and other small 'novelty' fireworks only in counties outside the city."

Jesuits, and failed Jesuits:  "Don’t you hate it when people say, 'Let me be clear on one thing ... Let me make this perfectly clear?' Don’t you think, 'So, you’ve been unclear about all those other things, and you knew it, but you went on being unclear anyway?' Don’t you immediately conclude that these people are about to tell you some enormous lie? President Nixon was always talking in the 'clear' mode. He was always 'making one thing perfectly clear.' Now, President Obama has become an addict to the same approach."

Don’t tax my credit union:  "While the big banks have abandoned small businesses in droves because they just can't make enough money, credit unions promote their small business members in a struggling economy by providing low cost credit alternatives. This credit union investment means millions of jobs across America. Unfortunately, the big banks and some in Congress want to raise taxes and impose new fees on 96 million credit union members who represent 40% of all Americans, yet represent only 6% of the assets in financial institutions. And, they want to do this despite the fact that credit unions are not-for-profit and meeting their core mission every day."

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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 and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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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France, Homofascism, and the End of Freedom

If you want to know what the end of freedom looks like, simply look at France. With the ruling elites aligning themselves with the radical homosexualist agenda, they have declared war on their own citizens. Things are very dark right now in France, all because the militants have gotten in bed with the powers that be.

It is quite shocking to see a homo-police state emerge right before our very eyes, but that is what we have in France. Millions upon millions of ordinary French citizens are protesting the out-of-touch government and its sell-out to the radical homosexual lobby.

Plenty of recent reports about this have appeared, so let me cite some of them. Legal expert J.C. von Krempach puts it this way: “It is as foreseeable as it is unavoidable: a government that abuses its power to impose absurd and counter-natural laws such as on same-sex ‘marriages’ will soon face massive protest. And given that such laws cannot be defended with rational arguments, those in power take recourse to violence and blatant human rights abuse.

“Sadly, France is now in such a downward spiral. All those among us who believe in human rights and civil liberties should closely watch what is going on in this country, which once proudly thought of itself as the place where human rights originated, but which is now turning into something like a dictatorship in which gender-theory and homosexualist ideology hold sway, while human rights defenders are persecuted and the freedom of opinion is trampled upon.

“There is now a first victim to deplore. His name is Nicolas, a 23 year old student from Angers, who was arrested while peacefully protesting against the absurd re-definition of marriage and family by his country’s government. He has now been sentenced to one month of imprisonment for ‘rebellion’.”

“Rebellion.” Did you get that? All dictatorships of course hate any form of resistance and disagreement to the state. He continues, “This judgment apparently is intended as a clear message to all citizens that still dare to oppose the new gay-fascism: we are not going to listen to you, nor engage in any rational argument about the meaning of marriage and the family, but we will simply put you in jail. Dissident opinions will be silenced at all costs.

“Meanwhile, disturbing video footage has emerged on the internet. It shows how policemen mingled among the peaceful crowd that protested peacefully in favour of marriage and family on 26 May. These ‘agents provocateurs’ had the task of artificially provoking the violent ‘incidents’ that Manuel Valls, the French Minister of the Interior, had ‘warned’ against prior to the demonstration. The use of ‘agents provocateurs’ is a feature that is typically used by totalitarian regimes. It shows how far the gay lobby in Europe is prepared to go to push through its agenda.”

And a recent report documents all this. As Hilary White states, “A report will be presented today at a hearing at the Council of Europe detailing systematic use of excessive and violent police actions by France’s socialist government to suppress opposition to the same-sex ‘marriage’ law. The report on the French ‘Manif pour Tous and its police repression’ will be presented in conjunction with today’s session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and will be presented to the United Nations in Geneva.

“Since late 2012, millions of French citizens have participated in peaceful protests throughout France defending the natural family and the rights of children against the French government’s new gay ‘marriage’ law. The ECLJ says that in sheer numbers, this is the largest mass social movement in France since the epoch-making demonstrations of May 1968….

“The report records that from the 24th to the 26th of May, ‘around 350 people were arrested and held in custody for up to three days’. Of these 350 people, only seven were convicted, and received only light sentences. ‘The other arrests were arbitrary and were aimed to stop the social movement, in violation of fundamental freedoms of expression and manifestation,’ the report says.

“In addition to the 350 arrests, hundreds of people were arrested and detained for several hours under the pretext of identity checks.

Another write-up says this: “An international lawyer has filed complaints against France in the UN Human Rights Council for brutalizing peaceful demonstrators. Videos show French police beating marriage demonstrators, using tear gas and clubs against women, men, elderly and children.

“Homosexual marriage and adoption became law in France on May 18. But a movement numbering millions of French citizens is determined to change that. La Manif Pour Tous, which means ‘demonstration for all’, is not relenting despite the government’s attempts to intimidate and violently repress them. Since the law passed, La Manif has followed French President Francois Hollande with colorful demonstrations characterized by clean-faced youth, families, and elderly who believe children have a right to a mother and a father.

Included in those roughed up by police has been Christine Boutin, former Cabinet Minister for the Sarkozy government who was tear-gassed, and Jean-Fredrick Poisson, a Member of the French National Assembly.

SOURCE

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Appeals Court: Hobby Lobby Can Challenge Contraception Mandate, And Will Likely Win

An appeals court said Thursday that Hobby Lobby and a sister company that sells Christian books and supplies can fight the nation's new health care law on religious grounds, ruling the portion of the law that requires them to offer certain kinds of birth control to their employees is particularly onerous, and suggesting the companies shouldn't have to pay millions of dollars in fines while their claims are considered.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver said the Oklahoma City-based arts and crafts chain, along with Mardel bookstores, not only can proceed with their lawsuit seeking to overturn a portion of the Affordable Care Act, but can probably win.

The judges unanimously sent the case back to a lower court in Oklahoma, which had rejected the companies' request for an injunction to prevent full enforcement of the new law.

"Hobby Lobby and Mardel have drawn a line at providing coverage for drugs or devices they consider to induce abortions, and it is not for us to question whether the line is reasonable," the judges wrote. "The question here is not whether the reasonable observer would consider the plaintiffs complicit in an immoral act, but rather how the plaintiffs themselves measure their degree of complicity."

Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., Mardel Inc. and their owners, the Green family, argue for-profit businesses — not just religious groups — should be allowed to seek an exception if the law violates their religious beliefs. The owners approve of most forms of artificial birth control, but not those that prevent implantation of a fertilized egg — such as an IUD or the morning-after pill.

Hobby Lobby is the largest and best-known of more than 30 businesses in several states that have challenged the contraception mandate. A number of Catholic-affiliated institutions have filed separate lawsuits, and the court suggested faith-based organizations can follow for-profit objectives in the secular world.

"A religious individual may enter the for-profit realm intending to demonstrate to the marketplace that a corporation can succeed financially while adhering to religious values. As a court, we do not see how we can distinguish this form of evangelism from any other," they wrote.

A majority of judges couldn't decide whether the Oklahoma court had sufficiently addressed two parts of Hobby Lobby's initial complaint and sent them back for further review at the local level.

Throughout a ruling that covered more than 160 pages, the judges noted Hobby Lobby faced a difficult choice — violate its religious beliefs, pay $475 million in fines for failing to comply with the law (a $100 fine per day for each of its 13,000 workers), or pay $26 million to the government if it dropped its health care plan altogether.

Hobby Lobby and Mardel won expedited federal review because the stores would have faced fines starting Monday for not covering the required forms of contraception. The 10th Circuit judges said the Oklahoma court was wrong to not grant the companies an injunction in the face of serious financial penalties.

Hobby Lobby and other companies challenging the contraception mandate say the morning-after pill is tantamount to abortion because it can prevent a fertilized egg from becoming implanted in a woman's womb. The 10th Circuit heard the case before eight active judges instead of the typical three-judge panel, indicating the case's importance.

The U.S. Department of Justice argued that allowing for-profit corporations to exempt themselves from requirements that violate their religious beliefs would be in effect allowing the business to impose its religious beliefs on employees. In its ruling, the 10th Circuit cited a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court conclusion that for-profit corporations have rights to political expression.

"We see no reason the Supreme Court would recognize constitutional protection for a corporation's political expression but not its religious expression," the judges wrote.

Hobby Lobby calls itself a "biblically founded business" and is closed on Sundays. Founded in 1972, the company now operates more than 500 stores in 41 states and employs more than 13,000 full-time employees who are eligible for health insurance.

SOURCE

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Radical Muslims post bounty on bloggers, Facebook users

An Islamic jihadist website, Islamic Socialist NetWork (ISN), based out of the U.K. was found on Tuesday where Muslims in the U.K., Australia, and Canada posted cash bounties on some operators of counter-jihad bloggers and Facebook users for speaking out about Islam.

On their website, photos of Facebook page administrators on “Wanted” posters were posted along with cash rewards in various amounts of up to a million dollars for personal information such names and addresses of where the operators reside.

The web site was first revealed by Schuyler Montague of Sharia Unveiled, an educational organization that teaches the truth about radical Islam, Sharia law, and history, while they were researching a story on the recent removal of Counter-jihad pages by Facebook.

Montague said, “While researching our story yesterday on the recent removal of Counter-jihad pages by Facebook, we uncovered some very disturbing information. In an attempt to locate the source of the Islamic onslaught against the freedom of expression, we ventured down the rabbit hole of Islamic hate… and what we discovered when we got there, tucked away in a dark corner, was a website operated by a terrorist organization called the Islamic Socialist Network.”

“It appears that the Islamic Socialist Network has created a “Hit List” of Counterjihad webpages to attack. And, if this wasn’t bad enough, we discovered this hit list also extends to the administrators of these web pages, as well.”

On the Islamic Socialist NetWork, one of the Jihadist posted, “Islamic socialist network has just started to name some of the most paranoid and filthy website who use [sic] “divide and rule strategy” in order to stop the message of Islam which is for all people, for those who love it like Muslim comrades and for those who are interested in this religion. This is a message for all people as well as all Muslim brother [sic] and sister (comrades).”

Then they placed a quote that said, “The goal of Islamic community [sic] is defeating their enemy. The unity of Islamic community [sic] is the first step to reach this goal.” The comment was in reference to Qur'an (3:151) "We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve"

One of the web site operators who has a $500,000 bounty threat launched against him is Jeremy Silbert, creator of the Ban Islam Facebook page, which was removed recently by Facebook due to complaints by ISN. Since that time, Silbert has since posted a video explaining his side of the story and his thoughts on having a death threat against him.

“The implications and intent of this terrorist organization and their website should be very clear. To offer such high amounts of money reflects their seriousness, their willingness to do harm and obvious financial backing with deep pockets,” Montague said.

“How many other sites are out there doing the same thing or worse? We are taking this very seriously.”

SOURCE

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Another White House Play Date with Muslim Jihad

Michelle Malkin

Forget Paula Deen. There are far more dangerous bigots and poisonous haters spoiling the American landscape. They cook up violent rhetoric and murderous plots against our troops, our citizens and our allies 24/7. And they have direct access to the White House.

Earlier this week, the indefatigable Investigative Project on Terrorism blew the whistle on the Obama administration's latest flirtation with Muslim jihad. Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah bragged on his website that he had met with Team Obama on June 13. IPT reported that bin Bayyah was invited by National Security Council official Gayle Smith "to learn from you and we need to be looking for new mechanisms to communicate with you and the Association of Muslim Scholars."

Someone associated with bin Bayyah deleted his website reference to the meeting, but the Internet is forever. The White House has now 'fessed up to the confab. According to Fox News, a senior official spun the troubling event as a discussion about "poverty, global health efforts and bin Bayyah's own efforts to speak out against al-Qaida."

Bin Bayyah's moderate Muslim costume shouldn't fool anyone. This sharia thug, who has worked with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to boost his progressive-friendly cred, lobbied the United Nations to outlaw all mockery and criticism of Allah. He raised money to benefit the terror group Hamas. He is a top lieutenant of Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf Qaradawi, who exhorts followers to kill every last Jew; sanctioned suicide bombings and the killing of our soldiers; expressed support for executing apostates and stoning gays; and declared that the "U.S. is an enemy of Islam that has already declared war on Islam under the disguise of war on terrorism and provides Israel with unlimited support."

As jihad watchdogs have reported, the administration has rolled out the red carpet for dozens of Muslim Brotherhood officers, flacks and sympathizers. IPT noted last year: "White House visitor logs show that top U.S. policy-makers are soliciting and receiving advice from people who, at best, view the war on terrorism as an unchecked war on Muslims. These persons' perspectives and preferred policies handcuff law enforcement and weaken our resolve when it comes to confronting terrorism."

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 and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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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Homosexual "marriage"



The SCOTUS verdict recognizing homosexual "marriage" shows clearly how a self-selected liberal elite can run roughshod over the will of the people.  Effectively striking down a referendum result in California was particularly objectionable.  It is clearly the whims of a very unrepresentative Supreme Court that are sovereign in the USA, not the people or the States.

As a libertarian conservative, I think that marriage is no business of the State.  It should be a matter of private contract or a religious arrangement.  As it is however, the issue has become one of homosexual acceptance and the SCOTUS verdict has enforced that acceptance.  Again as  a libertarian conservative, I think such acceptance or non-acceptance should be a private matter, not one officially endorsed.

If homosexuals can find a church (Hint:  Episcopalians) that will let them wear pretty clothes and perform a ceremony it calls marriage, let them go for it  -- but leave the rest of us out of it.  As it is, we now have an official declaration that a union between two sodomites is equivalent to something which is basic to the survival of the human race -- a union between a man and woman.  And that surely disrespects and cheapens the standing of traditional marriage. Karl Marx would be pleased.

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A shameful day for France:  A second Dreyfus case

The French establishment convict the innocent again.  And once again it is all about "The Jooos"

A French media analyst was convicted today of defamation for accusing a state television network of staging a video that depicted a Palestinian boy being killed in a firefight between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces.

The footage more than a decade ago galvanised anti-Israeli sentiment, and shaped perspectives of the Mideast conflict during the second Palestinian uprising.

The al-Dura case has long stirred emotions in Israel, tapping into a larger sense of the Jewish state being victimised in the media.

The footage by France-2 broadcast on September 30, 2000, showed the terrified boy, Mohammed al-Dura, and his father amid a furious exchange of fire in the Gaza Strip.  It then cut to the motionless boy slumped in his father's lap. The report blamed Israeli forces for the death.

In a report issued in 2004, Philippe Karsenty said the footage was orchestrated and there was no proof that the boy had been killed.

France-2 sued for defamation, and after a long legal battle, a Paris court fined Karsenty £6,000 today. He called the verdict 'outrageous'.

Over the past decade Karsenty has amassed hours of video about the day of the shooting. At the heart of his claim is the fact that, according to the reporting by France-2, father and son were hit by a total of 15 bullets but in the video, neither appears to be bleeding.

He says the firefight is real, but the shooting of the man and boy was staged for the camera.

'I am serene because I know the truth will come out,' Karsenty said. 'Despite 15 bullets not one drop of blood was on their clothes, their bodies, the wall they were leaning against.'

Last month, the Israeli government issued a new report on the incident that said the report was misleading, provides no evidence and was part of a smear campaign against the Jewish state.

Benedicte Amblard, a lawyer for France-2, said the verdict would allow journalists to retain confidence in their work.

France-2 Jerusalem correspondent Charles Enderlin said he and France-2 parent company France Televisions welcomed Wednesday's decision.  'Today's result is a relief,' he said, but added it did not put the matter to rest.

Enderlin, a French-Israeli national, said conspiracy theorists continue to hound them over the incident.

He said despite years of litigation and Israeli officials accusing him of fabrication, he welcomed an investigation.  'We are ready whenever Israel wants to go for a professional investigation following international standards,' he told The Associated Press.

Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said he had no comment on a case that delved into the intricacy of French defamation law. He said, however, that the Israeli position on the al-Dura case remains unchanged.

'It is improbable, not to say impossible, that the bullets which hit Jamal and Mohammed al-Dura came from the Israeli position,' he said. 'Where they did come from remains subject to many hypotheses, though none can be proven.'

SOURCE

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Played Out: the Liberal Racists' "Uncle Tom" Card

By Michelle Malkin

Meet Ryan Patrick Winkler. He's a 37-year-old liberal Minnesota state legislator with a B.A. in history from Harvard University and a J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School. He's also a coward, a bigot, a liar and a textbook example of plantation progressivism.

On Tuesday, Winkler took to Twitter to rant about the Supreme Court's decision to strike down an onerous section of the Voting Rights Act. The 5-4 ruling overturned an unconstitutional requirement that states win federal preclearance approval of any changes to their election laws and procedures. Winkler fumed: "VRA majority is four accomplices to race discrimination and one Uncle Thomas."

This Ivy League-trained public official and attorney relied on smug bigotry to make his case against a Supreme Court justice who happens to be black. "Uncle Thomas" wasn't a typo. Denigration was the goal, not an accident. It was a knowing, deliberate smear.

After being called out by conservative social media users for his cheap attack on Clarence Thomas, Winkler then revealed his true color: yellow. He deleted the tweet (captured for posterity at my Twitter curation site, twitchy.com) and pleaded ignorance.

"I did not understand 'Uncle Tom' as a racist term, and there seems to be some debate about it. I do apologize for it, however," he sniveled. "I didn't think it was offensive to suggest that Justice Thomas should be even more concerned about racial discrimination than colleagues," he protested.

Holding a black man to a different intellectual standard based on his skin color. Accusing a non-white conservative of collectivist race traitorism. Employing one of the most infamous, overused epithets against minority conservatives in the Democratic lexicon. "Apologizing," but disclaiming responsibility. Sorry ... that he got caught.

Just another day at the left-wing racist office.

Rabid liberal elitists expect and demand that we swallow their left-wing political orthodoxy whole and never question. When we don't yield, their racist and sexist diatribes against us are unmatched. My IQ, free will, skin color, eye shape, name, authenticity and integrity have been routinely ridiculed or questioned for more than two decades because I happen to be an unapologetic brown female free-market conservative. My Twitter account biography jokingly includes the moniker "Oriental Auntie-Tom"—just one of thousands of slurs hurled at me by libs allergic to diversity of thought—for a reason. It's a way to hold up an unflinching mirror at the holier-than-thou NoH8 haters and laugh.

We conservatives "of color" are way past anger about the Uncle Tom/Aunt Tomasina attacks. We're reviled by the left for our "betrayal" of our supposed tribes—accused of being Uncle Toms, Aunt Tomasinas, House Niggas, puppets of the White Man, Oreos, Sambos, lawn jockeys, coconuts, bananas, sellouts and whores. This is how the left's racial and ethnic tribalists have always rolled. But their insults are not bullets. They are badges of honor. The Uncle Tom card has been played out.

Of course Winkler didn't think it was offensive. Smarty-pants liberal racists never think they're being racist. In their own sanctimonious minds, progressives of pallor can never be guilty of bigotry toward minority conservatives. Ignorance is strength. Slurs are compliments. Intolerance is tolerance.

And when all else fails, left-wing prejudice is always just a well-intended joke. (PBS commentator Julianne Malveaux's death wish for Justice Thomas set the standard: "I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease. ... He is an absolutely reprehensible person.")

Back in her day, before the advent of democratizing social media, Malveaux and her elitist PBS friends could get away with such vile bile. But liberal crabs in the bucket, viciously trying to drag dissenters "of color" down, can no longer engage in hit-and-run with impunity. Conservatives on Twitter have changed the dynamic in an underappreciated, revolutionary way. The pushback against liberal political bigotry is bigger, stronger and swifter than it's ever been.

You can delete, but you cannot hide.

SOURCE

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The Regulated States of America

Tocqueville saw a nation of individuals who were defiant of authority. Today? Welcome to Planet Government

By NIALL FERGUSON

In "Democracy in America," published in 1833, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans preferred voluntary association to government regulation. "The inhabitant of the United States," he wrote, "has only a defiant and restive regard for social authority and he appeals to it . . . only when he cannot do without it."

Unlike Frenchmen, he continued, who instinctively looked to the state to provide economic and social order, Americans relied on their own efforts. "In the United States, they associate for the goals of public security, of commerce and industry, of morality and religion. There is nothing the human will despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals."

What especially amazed Tocqueville was the sheer range of nongovernmental organizations Americans formed: "Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations . . . but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools."

Tocqueville would not recognize America today. Indeed, so completely has associational life collapsed, and so enormously has the state grown, that he would be forced to conclude that, at some point between 1833 and 2013, France must have conquered the United States.

The decline of American associational life was memorably documented in Robert Puttnam's seminal 1995 essay "Bowling Alone," which documented the exodus of Americans from bowling leagues, Rotary clubs and the like. Since then, the downward trend in "social capital" has only continued. According to the 2006 World Values Survey, active membership even of religious associations has declined from just over half the population to little more than a third (37%). The proportion of Americans who are active members of cultural associations is down to 14% from 24%; for professional associations the figure is now just 12%, compared with more than a fifth in 1995. And, no, Facebook FB -2.43% is not a substitute.

Instead of joining together to get things done, Americans have increasingly become dependent on Washington. On foreign policy, it may still be true that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus. But when it comes to domestic policy, we all now come from the same place: Planet Government.

As the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Clyde Wayne Crews shows in his invaluable annual survey of the federal regulatory state, we have become the regulation nation almost imperceptibly. Excluding blank pages, the 2012 Federal Register—the official directory of regulation—today runs to 78,961 pages. Back in 1986 it was 44,812 pages. In 1936 it was just 2,620.

True, our economy today is much larger than it was in 1936—around 12 times larger, allowing for inflation. But the Federal Register has grown by a factor of 30 in the same period.

The last time regulation was cut was under Ronald Reagan, when the number of pages in the Federal Register fell by 31%. Surprise: Real GDP grew by 30% in that same period. But Leviathan's diet lasted just eight years. Since 1993, 81,883 new rules have been issued. In the past 10 years, the "final rules" issued by our 63 federal departments, agencies and commissions have outnumbered laws passed by Congress 223 to 1.

Right now there are 4,062 new regulations at various stages of implementation, of which 224 are deemed "economically significant," i.e., their economic impact will exceed $100 million.

The cost of all this, Mr. Crews estimates, is $1.8 trillion annually—that's on top of the federal government's $3.5 trillion in outlays, so it is equivalent to an invisible 65% surcharge on your federal taxes, or nearly 12% of GDP. Especially invidious is the fact that the costs of regulation for small businesses (those with fewer than 20 employees) are 36% higher per employee than they are for bigger firms.

Next year's big treat will be the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, something every small business in the country must be looking forward to with eager anticipation. Then, as Sen. Rob Portman (R., Ohio) warned readers on this page 10 months ago, there's also the Labor Department's new fiduciary rule, which will increase the cost of retirement planning for middle-class workers; the EPA's new Ozone Rule, which will impose up to $90 billion in yearly costs on American manufacturers; and the Department of Transportation's Rear-View Camera Rule. That's so you never have to turn your head around when backing up.

President Obama occasionally pays lip service to the idea of tax reform. But nothing actually gets done and the Internal Revenue Service code (plus associated regulations) just keeps growing—it passed the nine-million-word mark back in 2005, according to the Tax Foundation, meaning nearly 19% more verbiage than 10 years before. While some taxes may have been cut in the intervening years, the tax code just kept growing.

I wonder if all this could have anything to do with the fact that we still have nearly 12 million people out of work, plus eight million working part-time jobs, five long years after the financial crisis began.

Genius that he was, Tocqueville saw this transformation of America coming. Toward the end of "Democracy in America" he warned against the government becoming "an immense tutelary power . . . absolute, detailed, regular . . . cover[ing] [society's] surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way."

Tocqueville also foresaw exactly how this regulatory state would suffocate the spirit of free enterprise: "It rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces [the] nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd."

If that makes you bleat with frustration, there's still hope.

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 and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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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Google protect crooks

I think there are some serious concerns about how Google operates.  My post on the topic is here.  In case they block access to this blog in response to my criticisms, make a note now of the address of my mirror site here.

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So Much For “Patient Privacy”…….

The Obama Administration has been getting hammered recently for their lack of preparation in the lead-up to the “official” roll-out of The Great and Powerful Obamacare on January 1, 2014.

A mere 100 days before people are supposed to start signing up to be in the government exchanges, the administration finally decided it might be time to put up a hotline for people to get more information about what it’s all about, and what they need to do.

Wanting to be helpful (no, really - I just wanted to see how efficiently my tax dollars are being used; being a pest was merely a happy little added benefit), I decided to give the folks at the hotline a call (1-800-318-2596) and see just how much help they were going to be to the unsuspecting Low Information Voter (LIV) who decided they wanted to throw some extra money the government’s way (remember, the Supreme Court said that the government cannot force the citizenry to purchase ANYTHING).

Whoo boy.

Let me just start out by saying that if the young ladies I spoke with are any indication, Obamacare is one big implosion just waiting to happen.

There are currently 30-35 states (out of 50) who took the SCOTUS at their word, and chose not to “take advantage” of the government’s poison pill for setting up their own exchanges.  So Obama’s team gets to set up exchanges in those 30-35 states (have fun with that, m’kay guys?).

Guess who has no idea who is going to be running the exchanges in those states?  Or how much a basic policy is going to cost?  Or who is going to be paying the difference between the amount a “low-income” person will have to pay and the cost of the policy? (I neglected to point out that any exchange run by the federal government will not be eligible for the subsidies promised by the President and Congress, as expressly written in the bill – didn’t want anyone’s head to explode)

The first young lady told me that “nobody” has to pay that difference – the insurance company would be paying it.  When I tried to explain to her that the insurance company most definitely DOES NOT pay for a person’s policy, she tried her best to convince me that oh, yes, they do……

These people have no idea what a bare bones policy will cost – only that there will be a Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum level of coverage.  They don’t know what the deductibles are going to be, nor do they know what the co-pays will be.  They have no idea how much of a percentage of a family’s income will be required to be shelled out for a policy premium – even though it is spelled out in black and white in the original legislation.

(She helpfully informed me that the insurance company had to pay “80/20″, but I had to inform her that the number she was quoting – per what I can only guess she was reading verbatim off of the screen in front of her – referred to the amount that had to be paid out by the company in health care costs vs. administrative costs, and had nothing to do with the cost of individual policies whatsoever).

I guess I flustered the first sweet young thing too much with my desire for explicit answers, because I was asked if I wanted to speak to an “escalation specialist” - I guess that’s the new customer-friendly term for a supervisor.

I said sure, and she asked when would be a good time for “The Escalator” to call me back.

I said I would just wait on the line – I didn’t trust them to “get back to me” otherwise.

Apparently that wasn’t something Obamabette was expecting to hear - she said “Wait a minute”, put me on hold…….and then I got disconnected.

So I called back.

I got a different Obamabette, who wasn’t any more help than the first one, but interestingly enough, she saw on her screen that I had already called in once before, and that The Escalators were scheduled to call me back – she said I should hear back from them within 2-5 business days (good thing I didn’t need a lung transplant).

She even started to call me by name – before correcting herself and calling me Ma’am.

There’s just one problem.

When Obamabette #1 asked me for my phone number, I told her I didn’t want to give it out.  I never gave her my name, either. So there should have been no way of anyone knowing anything about that first phone call when I called back the second time.

When pressed, it turned out that Obamabette #2 knew not only my name (and phone number), she knew my husband’s name as well – she even tried to tell me that perhaps my husband had also called earlier, and maybe he was the one who gave them that information.  Which he most definitely did not do, seeing as he WORKS FOR A LIVING, and therefore doesn’t deal with stuff like this (that’s my job).

When I asked her how they had gotten access to my personal information, she couldn’t give me a good explanation.

When I asked her why my information wasn’t kept private – per my explicit request – she couldn’t give me a good explanation either.

When I mentioned that a citizen might have grounds for a privacy lawsuit in light of this information, she sounded taken aback.

When I said that maybe all of the stuff that’s been reported in the media about Big Brother snooping on all of us has some merit, she got really quiet…….

Mind you, I don’t fault her for this – she’s just an entry-level employee; what bothers me is that if our government wants to make life difficult for people who are asking “inconvenient” questions, all some employee would have to do is to flag a call like mine for “further review”.

We can’t have any troublemakers in Obama’s land of Skittles and unicorns, now can we?

What happens if they look further into such an inquiry?

Will someone like me be denied coverage – even though they “promised” me that I wouldn’t be - for being obese?  For having high blood pressure?  For having high cholesterol?  For having Celiac Disease?  For having Myasthenia Gravis?

What about for voting Republican?  For supporting the Tea Party? For sending contributions to a conservative candidate’s campaign?

Will they deny my youngest daughter coverage because I didn’t have any prenatal testing done – which would have revealed her Down syndrome – and gave birth to a child who is going to be a “burden” on their system (which, I might add, we pay into quite handsomely each year)?

When I was asked for my phone number in my first call, I SPECIFICALLY stated that I did not want to give it out; I also made quite sure never to give them my name.

And yet, they had all of that information in front of them, and passed it along in a file to a supervisor.

One wonders what other information was on that computer screen – and just how they plan on using it in the future.

But no worries - The Administration promises that all of your data will be perfectly safe, and that no one will have access to your personal information unless you want them to.

SOURCE

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Americans' foreign affairs strike home

Ever since President Clinton "did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," whatever remains of standards seems to have fallen even lower among people who hold offices and positions once thought to require good behavior and strong moral character.

Last year, several Secret Service agents left the agency amid scandal after allegedly engaging the services of prostitutes while advancing a trip to Cartagena, Colombia, for President Obama.

A side note: One of the prostitutes, Dania Londono Suarez, wrote a tell-all book about the incident titled "Room Service." According to the Huffington Post's Latinovoices, she's also opening a nonprofit to "help hookers" and "has a modeling contract, plus a deal to bring her story to television." Of course, she does.

Just this week, CBS News reported that "the State Department may have covered up allegations of illegal and inappropriate behavior within its ranks." The allegations were contained in an internal Office of Inspector General memo, leaked by a former State Department investigator, which, according to CBS News, "cited eight specific examples" of impropriety, including the 2011 investigation into an ambassador who "routinely ditched ... his protective security detail" in order to "solicit sexual favors from prostitutes."

The ambassador, of course, denies the allegations. So, not surprisingly, does the State Department, which, reports ABC News, "offered a point-by-point pushback" to the memo's claims.

"We take allegations of misconduct seriously and we investigate thoroughly," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters Monday. Not so, says the memo. It alleges State Department investigations into the charges were "influenced, manipulated, or simply called off."

As if that isn't enough, the memo claims the State Department may have covered up details about an underground drug ring operating near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad that allegedly supplied security contractors with drugs.

According to CBS News, the memo also includes allegations that a State Department security official in Beirut "engaged in sexual assaults on foreign nationals hired as embassy guards" and that members of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's security details "engaged prostitutes while on official trips in foreign countries."

The solicitation of prostitutes among security details, alleges the memo, was an "endemic" problem.

This is worse than outrageous. These incidents, if proved true, are a stain on the honor and reputation of the country these people are, or were, supposed to represent.

In 1958, William Lederer and Eugene Burdick published a novel called "The Ugly American," which graphically detailed why U.S. diplomacy failed in Southeast Asia and why communism didn't. Our arrogance and boorish behavior doomed us there.

Unfortunately, the book turned out to be prophetic. Is history repeating itself, not on a military or political level, but in the destruction of what remains of our moral underpinnings?

How can the United States project its core values when people who represent it behave like out-of-control college kids on spring break?

There was a time when bad behavior carried serious consequences; a time when those who exhibited bad behavior suffered socially for their lapses. They lost jobs; they lost marriages; they lost friends.

Today, they're rewarded with book contracts and reality TV shows. What happened to doing what's right, instead of doing who's easy?

People who grew up with parents who instilled a strong moral code, attended schools that reinforced it and lived in communities that affirmed it, now find that if they question bad behavior today they're considered behind the times, even prudish.

With the media portraying all sorts of behavior as acceptable; with politicians in high places getting away with low behavior and in some cases paying little or no penalty, where are the deterrents?

Disappointing family used to be the default position for avoiding extramarital entanglements in cases where religious or ethical values did not apply.

While each man should be held accountable for his own behavior, the rest of us should consider what we're promoting and tolerating as a nation and the permission it gives others to follow bad examples.

Irving Berlin wrote a silly song called "The Secret Service (Makes Me Nervous)." We should all be nervous. We should also ask ourselves what we intend to do about it.

SOURCE

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Obama's disturbing, hypocritical silence on Chicago gun violence

That's what we're getting from the president of the United States in the wake of Chicago gun violence that left eight dead and 46 wounded over one weekend.

Chicago is the adopted hometown of one President Barack Hussein Obama. It is a city that has some of the most draconian gun restrictions in the nation.

The weekend that began Friday, June 14, and ended Sunday, June 16, found Chicagoans enduring three days of gun carnage. According to a story on the website abclocal.go.com, Chicago police were involved in at least three of the shootings.

That means there were no fewer than 51 incidents of civilian-on-civilian mayhem. In one weekend.

You would think, as vociferous as our president was about the need for gun control and the need to end gun violence after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that we'd hear from him about the gun violence that occurred in just one weekend back in his hometown.

But our president is no fool. He might be a smarmy, smooth-talking demagogue, but he's no fool.

He knows that saying anything about gun violence in Chicago will only highlight just how useless laws that seek to control or ban guns are.

He knows that he won't be able to make cheap, tawdry, demagogic appeals to emotion the way he did in the Newtown massacre, trotting out the parents of dead children to make the case for gun control.

He knows that probably few, if any, of the gun incidents in Chicago involved so-called assault weapons, which the Democrats howled about banning after the Newtown shootings.

And above all, the president knows this: there is no opportunity for him to be the demagogue when it comes to the Chicago shootings. There's no upside, at least not for Democrats.

Discerning Americans will note that Democrats, members of the president's party, have run Chicago for quite some time.

And those same Americans might point out that Chicago's mayor is one Rahm Emmanuel, Obama's former White House chief of staff.

You can bet that if Republicans controlled Chicago as tightly as Democrats do, and that the gun violence the city experienced in all of 2012 and just last weekend happened on the Republican watch, it would be HUGE news in the mainstream media.

And yes, there would be television and newspaper editors pointing the finger of blame for Chicago's gun violence in one direction and one direction only:  Directly at Republicans.

So lets' force Democrats -- and their esteemed leader in the White House -- to take ownership of their failure to control or even stem gun violence in Chicago.

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 and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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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New Deal Utopianism

BOOK REVIEW of Back to the Land: Arthurdale, FDR’s New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning Review by George Leef

Drive south from Morgantown, West Virginia, and you soon come to the little town of Arthurdale. At the outskirts of town, there is a roadside plaque informing those who stop to read it that Arthurdale was “Established in 1933-34 under the Federal Homestead Act.” We also learn that it was a “pet project” of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and that the town was created to “assist the unemployed through self-sufficient farming and handicrafts.”

That certainly makes Arthurdale sound wholesome and quaint — proof that the federal government has the ability to improve the nation. As usual, however, there is much more to the story, and in Back to the Land: Arthurdale, FDR’s New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning, C.J. Maloney, a writer for Bloomberg News, gives us a commendably thorough and illuminating history of Arthurdale. The town was a gigantic economic flop that was kept alive only with transfusions of taxpayer money. Far from an advertisement for the glories of government social intervention, the Arthurdale story is a testament to the social and economic damage that such intervention does.

Maloney begins with that most horrendous of all government interventions — war. World War I caused many economic changes, and one of them was that the price of coal rose dramatically, especially after Woodrow Wilson managed to drag the United States into the conflict. That led to a huge expansion of the American coal industry. Working in the coal industry paid rather well compared with the hard life of Appalachia, and many families were drawn to the “coal camps.” Coal prices remained high after the war but began to fall in 1926. Many workers left the industry, but others were “stranded” in the increasingly decrepit camps. Matters were made considerably worse by the militant posture of the United Mine Workers, which repeatedly called strikes against declining wages, refusing to recognize that consumers simply wouldn’t pay the old prices that made higher wages possible. The coal fields were riven by violence, hunger, and desperation.

As the Great Depression settled on the nation, conditions went from bad to unspeakable. Journalists wrote about the hungry, ill-clad children; the cheap, filthy houses; and the lack of sanitation. Among those who read about this extreme poverty was Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of soon-to-be president Franklin Roosevelt. She was determined to help the suffering people, and one of the earliest of the New Deal programs greatly appealed to her, namely the Division of Subsistence Homesteads (DSH). She and many other Progressives who were intent on remaking America along collectivistic lines, saw DSH as a perfect opportunity to show how wonderful things could be under their philosophy. The idea was that if people would leave cities and industrial employment and go “back to the land,” clean, moral, natural life would replace the nasty conditions under capitalism. Arthurdale (and many other planned communities) would lead the way.

Many years before, in 1911, Roosevelt himself had written a piece for the New York Globe extolling the Rousseauian notion that Americans should “return to the land” because, he claimed, those who live on farms “have more time to think and study.” He had never lived on a farm, much less done the tedious and exhausting work that farming involves. His was just a romantic notion, a yearning for an imagined golden past. He was full of such foolish ideas, and they flew out of the Pandora’s box of his New Deal like a swarm of vampire bats.

The subsistence-homesteads concept also appealed to one of Roosevelt’s top advisers, Rexford Guy Tugwell. Tugwell, trained in the Progressive economic theories of Richard Ely, had gone to the Soviet Union, and like so many other western intellectuals, came back convinced that central economic planning was the wave of the future. He was eager to show that the traditional American beliefs in individualism and free enterprise were outmoded and harmful. Arthurdale would help him prove his point that socialistic, communitarian life was far better. It just had to succeed, no matter the cost.

It is noteworthy that America had had quite a few of these collectivist/agrarian societies in its past. Maloney provides some of their history. All failed rapidly, foundering on the rocks of human nature. They did not, however, have the backing of government officials eager to spend vast amounts of money taken from taxpayers to shore up their idealistic experiments. The DSH communities would.

Funding for DSH came in a single paragraph inserted into the hastily enacted National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. It stated that $25 million was “made available to the president, to be used by him through such agencies as he may establish and under such regulations as he may make, for making loans for and otherwise aiding in the purchase of subsistence homesteads.” It did not matter that there has never been any authority under the Constitution for Congress to make such appropriations for the president to do as he pleases. Five days later Roosevelt issued an executive order placing responsibility for this program with the secretary of the interior.

Blunder after blunder

Government officials promptly went to work designing new towns. They were no good at it, of course. Why should anyone expect bureaucrats to know anything about the numerous problems and tasks building a new town entailed? Maloney recounts the numerous blunders they made, beginning with the fact that the planners chose a poor site for the farming the people were expected to do. Moreover, because of a porous rock stratum, the water supply was unsafe. Next, the prefabricated houses that an eager official purchased to get the project moving quickly would have been suitable as beach houses, but they were a lousy choice for the cold winters in northern West Virginia. The houses, once delivered, did not fit on the foundations that had been prepared for them. Many of the houses, once constructed, suffered water damage because the officials did not think to have downspouts attached. This expensive comedy of errors continued on and on.

Homes that were built in the later stages of Arthurdale’s development were much better — so much so that they put most of the other housing in the area to shame. They were faced with native stone and had all the modern amenities, which rankled people in neighboring towns who were not lucky enough to be among the favored few. Moreover, the question of exactly how the residents would pay for their houses was unsettled a year after Arthurdale was begun. Because construction was costing far more than originally estimated, officials floated the idea of selling people their houses not on the basis of what they cost, but of what purchasers could afford to pay.

And how were the residents chosen? Faculty members at West Virginia University devised an eight-page questionnaire for anyone who wanted to apply for Arthurdale. (Large numbers did.) Applicants also had to go through extensive interviews that included intimate personal questions. One of the nonpersonal questions was whether the applicant had had any farming experience, an important consideration given that the residents were to engage in subsistence farming. Of those selected, however, a large majority had no farming experience. The entire process, Maloney writes, “had a healthy dose of the subjective and arbitrary.” A federal directive instructed the local officials to favor applicants “who seem likely to welcome supervision and guidance from project administrators.” In other words, they should discriminate against self-reliant individualists.

In a way, though, that discrimination made sense because the Arthurdalians were expected to be obedient. They were not allowed to modify their homes or grounds in any way (without approval that was very hard to obtain), and they could be removed from the community if they displeased their federal overlords, as five families were. Among the things they were forbidden to do was to sell any of their crops to outsiders. That would be inconsistent with the collectivistic philosophy behind the project. Secretary of
Agriculture Henry Wallace, a committed socialist, directed that crops be grown only for “home consumption or consumption of their neighbors in the community.” Any excess was the property of the government.

Arthurdale’s adults were also supposed to have work other than tending their small plots of land — after all, the growing season there was only about 130 days. But what would they do? The planners in Washington tried many different ideas but each proved to be a failure. In anticipation of the famous line from the movie Field of Dreams, (“If you build it, they will come”), DSH officials built a 10,000-square-foot factory. It wasn’t used until June 1936, when it was leased to a company that made vacuum cleaners. It provided jobs for 29 residents — until the company closed it during the sharp economic contraction (“the depression within the Depression”) that began in 1937. But the bureaucrats were undaunted. They proceeded to spend more taxpayer money to build two more, substantially larger factories. Little use was ever made of either facility.

Another financial blunder was the Arthurdale Inn, built on the site of an old mansion that Tugwell had ordered destroyed. It provided jobs for a few residents, but the only customers it had were visiting federal bureaucrats and Eleanor Roosevelt, who frequently stayed there while checking up on her “pet project.” Once again, taxpayers shelled out a lot in return for virtually no value.

Naturally, there were children to be educated. The officials in charge of Arthurdale would not allow “their” children to be schooled with other West Virginia kids. No, they wanted a school just for them and proceeded to build, at huge expense — although not very competently — a state-of-the-art school. Then they chose a woman as principal who was a true believer in progressive education theory. Education, in her Deweyesque view, was to be used to shape young minds according to the collectivist philosophy of the New Deal. She believed in “learning by doing” rather than old-fashioned “book learning” and was determined to socialize students differently than in the past. She had the students sent out into the surrounding fields when the weather was good, and when it wasn’t, the boys were sent to home economics and the girls to shop class. Grading was taboo.

Eventually the people of Arthurdale, even though they had been selected for their compliance, rebelled at the pseudo education their children were getting and demanded that the school comply with West Virginia standards. It wasn’t just the miserable education that the parents were upset about; they were equally upset over the entitlement mentality the school was fostering in their children. Maloney writes, “The settlers in Arthurdale were lucky in escaping the debilitating effects of welfare before it could become too deeply ingrained within them or their children.”

Finally, with the country’s entry into World War II, the administration’s interest in Arthurdale and the other experimental communities evaporated. The houses were sold to the homesteaders at a huge loss. They had cost on average more than $16,000 to build and were sold at prices ranging from $750 to $1,249. The factories and farmland were sold for nominal amounts — $1. Arthurdale had been a stupendous loss for the taxpayers. And yet the visionaries continued to defend their planned communities. In 1958 Tugwell gave a speech in which he argued that government was superior to private enterprise because “we provided sewer and water systems, schools, parks, and other utilities. No speculator did any of those things.”

Maloney responds to that with a devastating counterattack. In truth, many “speculators” who built homes did provide those good things, and they did so without any use of coercion to take money from unwilling people. In particular he points to James Grimes, a Pittsburgh businessman who built durable homes (and whose son was instrumental in Arthurdale). “It is men like Grimes,” Maloney writes, “who built this country and created (rather than destroyed) wealth in the process; he made a profit while making a city.” Private enterprise uses resources wisely and efficiently when the state keeps hands off. In contrast, “Those responsible for Arthurdale were like a plague of locusts, consuming far more than they gave.”

Back to the Land is a book with a message that vast numbers of Americans need to grasp: When government goes beyond its purposes of defending our liberty and property, it is certain to be wasteful, arrogant, and authoritarian.

SOURCE

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Farm Bill death is Republicans’ opportunity on food stamps

By Robert Romano

On June 20, the $939 billion so-called “farm” bill — it should really be called the food stamp bill with 80 percent of it is dedicated to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — went down in flames in the House of Representatives, failing by a vote of 195 to 234. The reason?

62 House Republicans found the cuts to food stamps, amounting to just $2 billion a year for an $80 billion a year program, to be simply too small. House Democrats, on the other hand, thought they were too much, and were also upset with an amendment to the bill that would have allowed states to increase work requirements for receiving food stamps.

Turns out when you try to please everybody, you end up pleasing nobody. In the meantime, the program is still growing out of control.

Since 2009, the amount of individuals on food stamps has soared by 15 million to 47 million on the heels of the deep recession and high unemployment, but also a 2008 sweeping expansion of eligibility for the program. That’s a 46 percent increase in the program in just four years.

For comparison, the population has only grown by 3 percent in that time to its May 2013 level of 315.7 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In 2012, Republicans routinely bashed the Obama Administration for the dramatic expansion of the program, at least implying they intended to rein it in and reform the program. Now, with the first farm bill since 2008, the House had — and still has — an opportunity to make good on its word.

The question is what lesson House Republican leadership has drawn from the farm bill’s failure. Was it that the legislation failed to attract enough Republican support? Or enough Democrats?

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor might have an answer. “I’m extremely disappointed that Nancy Pelosi and Democratic leadership have at the last minute chosen to derail years of bipartisan work on the Farm Bill and related reforms,” he said after the failed vote.

So, Republicans were counting on Democrat support — not their conservative caucus — to get the bill across the finish line, implying the goal never was to rein in the program.

Cantor further suggested that any differences between the bills, including the state-determined work requirements, would have been worked out in conference. Is that to suggest that any conservative provisions would have been simply gutted in conference?

Leaving that aside, if a conference was inevitable, what need was there to reach a “bipartisan” compromise in the House version? Why not pass something that was pleasing to the House majority to begin with?

It’s not as if the version they attempted to pass would have had a chance in the Senate anyway, despite the fact there was so little difference between the two versions. The House version would spend about $75 billion a year on food stamps, the Senate $77 billion. That’s a distinction without much of a difference.

Which is why the 62 House Republicans who broke ranks with their leadership, holding out for real reform, are to be praised. If not for their courage, the GOP would be missing yet another opportunity to take on the welfare state.

As Americans for Limited Government Vice President of Public Policy and Communications Rick Manning noted after the farm bill’s failure, “It is time for Congress to begin considering what is in the best interests of taxpayers instead of constantly doling out corporate subsidies and expanding welfare without question.”

Indeed. It is time to stop rubberstamping these government programs. It is time to take a stand.

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 and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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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A prophet who got it right

In 1884, Herbert Spencer wrote what quickly became a celebrated book, The Man Versus The State. The book is seldom referred to now, and gathers dust on library shelves — if, in fact, it is still stocked by many libraries. Spencer's political views are regarded by most present-day writers, who bother to mention him at all, as "extreme laissez faire," and hence "discredited."

But any open-minded person who takes the trouble today to read or reread The Man Versus The State will probably be startled by two things. The first is the uncanny clairvoyance with which Spencer foresaw what the future encroachments of the State were likely to be on individual liberty, above all in the economic realm. The second is the extent to which these encroachments had already occurred in 1884, the year in which he was writing.

The present generation has been brought up to believe that government concern for "social justice" and for the plight of the needy was something that did not even exist until the New Deal came along in 1933. The ages prior to that have been pictured as periods when no one "cared," when laissez faire was rampant, when everybody who did not succeed in the cutthroat competition that was euphemistically called free enterprise — but was simply a system of dog-eat-dog and the-devil-take-the-hindmost — was allowed to starve. And if the present generation thinks this is true even of the 1920s, it is absolutely convinced that this was so in the 1880s, which it would probably regard as the very peak of the prevalence of laissez faire.

Yet the new reader's initial astonishment when he starts Spencer's book may begin to wear off before he is halfway through, because one cause for surprise explains the other. All that Spencer was doing was to project or extrapolate the legislative tendencies existing in the 1880s into the future. It was because he was so clearsightedly appalled by these tendencies that he recognized them so much more sharply than his contemporaries, and saw so much more clearly where they would lead if left unchecked.

Even in his Preface to The Man Versus The State he pointed out how "increase of freedom in form" was being followed by "decrease of freedom in fact….

"Regulations have been made in yearly growing numbers, restraining the citizen in directions where his actions were previously unchecked, and compelling actions which previously he might perform or not as he liked; and at the same time heavier public burdens … have further restricted his freedom, by lessening that portion of his earnings which he can spend as he pleases, and augmenting the portion taken from him to be spent as public agents please."

In his first chapter, "The New Toryism," Spencer contends that "most of those who now pass as Liberals, are Tories of a new type." The Liberals of his own day, he points out, had already "lost sight of the truth that in past times Liberalism habitually stood for individual freedom versus State-coercion."

So the complete Anglo-American switch of reference, by which a "liberal" today has come to mean primarily a State interventionist, had already begun in 1884. Already "plausible proposals" were being made "that there should be organized a system of compulsory insurance, by which men during their early lives shall be forced to provide for the time when they will be incapacitated." Here is already the seed of the American Social Security Act of 1935.

Spencer also pays his respects to the anti-libertarian implications of an increasing tax burden. Those who impose additional taxes are saying in effect: "Hitherto you have been free to spend this portion of your earnings in any way which pleased you; hereafter you shall not be free to spend it, but we will spend it for the general benefit."

Spencer next turns to the compulsions that unions were even then imposing on their members, and asks: "If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves?"

In his second chapter, "The Coming Slavery," Spencer calls attention to the existence of what he calls "political momentum" — the tendency of State interventions and similar political measures to increase and accelerate in the direction in which they have already been set going. Americans have become only too familiar with this momentum in the last few years.

Spencer illustrates: "The blank form of an inquiry daily made is — 'We have already done this; why should we not do that?'" "The buying and working of telegraphs by the State" (which already operated them in England when he wrote), he continued, "is made a reason for urging that the State should buy and work the railways." And he went on to quote the demands of one group that the State should take possession of the railways, "with or without compensation."

The British State did not buy and work the railways until 65 years later, in 1948, but it did get around to it, precisely as Spencer feared.

It is not only precedent that prompts the constant spread of interventionist measures, Spencer points out,

"but also the necessity which arises for supplementing ineffective measures, and for dealing with the artificial evils continually caused. Failure does not destroy faith in the agencies employed, but merely suggests more stringent use of such agencies or wider ramifications of them."

One illustration he gives is how "the evils produced by compulsory charity are now proposed to be met by compulsory insurance." Today, in America, one could point to scores of examples (from measures to cure "the deficit in the balance of payments" to the constant multiplication of measures to fight the government's "war on poverty") of interventions mainly designed to remove the artificial evils brought about by previous interventions.

Everywhere, Spencer goes on, the tacit assumption is that "government should step in whenever anything is not going right…. The more numerous governmental interventions become … the more loud and perpetual the demands for interventions." Every additional relief measure raises hopes of further ones:

"The more numerous public instrumentalities become, the more is there generated in citizens the notion that everything is to be done for them, and nothing by them. Every generation is made less familiar with the attainment of desired ends by individual actions or private agencies; until, eventually, governmental agencies come to be thought of as the only available agencies."

"All socialism," Spencer concludes, "involves slavery…. That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labors under coercion to satisfy another's desires." The relation admits of many gradations. Oppressive taxation is a form of slavery of the individual to the community as a whole. "The essential question is — How much is he compelled to labor for other benefit than his own, and how much can he labor for his own benefit?"

Even Spencer would probably have regarded with incredulity a prediction that in less than two generations England would have rates of income tax rising above 90 percent, and that many an energetic and ambitious man, in England and the United States, would be forced to spend more than half his time and labor working for the support of the community, and allowed less than half his time and labor to provide for his own family and himself.

Much more HERE

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Regulation nation a symptom of an incurable disease?

Niall Ferguson has a piece in the Wall Street Journal which talks about the growth of regulation within the nation.  He starts with a quote from de Tocqueville in which de Tocqueville marvels at how Americans manage to self-regulate through associations.  He then notes that de Tocqueville wouldn’t recognize the US if he were to suddenly come back.  It looks too much like Europe.  Why?

Regulation has crept in to help smother us all the while the culture has changed to where Americans seem to no longer look to each other to solve problems, but instead look to government.

Regulations are simply a symptom of this business and autonomy killing movement.  And their growth track pretty well with our demise:

As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Clyde Wayne Crews shows in his invaluable annual survey of the federal regulatory state, we have become the regulation nation almost imperceptibly. Excluding blank pages, the 2012 Federal Register—the official directory of regulation—today runs to 78,961 pages. Back in 1986 it was 44,812 pages. In 1936 it was just 2,620.

True, our economy today is much larger than it was in 1936—around 12 times larger, allowing for inflation. But the Federal Register has grown by a factor of 30 in the same period.

The last time regulation was cut was under Ronald Reagan, when the number of pages in the Federal Register fell by 31%. Surprise: Real GDP grew by 30% in that same period. But Leviathan’s diet lasted just eight years. Since 1993, 81,883 new rules have been issued. In the past 10 years, the “final rules” issued by our 63 federal departments, agencies and commissions have outnumbered laws passed by Congress 223 to 1.

Right now there are 4,062 new regulations at various stages of implementation, of which 224 are deemed “economically significant,” i.e., their economic impact will exceed $100 million.

The cost of all this, Mr. Crews estimates, is $1.8 trillion annually—that’s on top of the federal government’s $3.5 trillion in outlays, so it is equivalent to an invisible 65% surcharge on your federal taxes, or nearly 12% of GDP. Especially invidious is the fact that the costs of regulation for small businesses (those with fewer than 20 employees) are 36% higher per employee than they are for bigger firms.

Got that?  224 new regulations which will have an economic impact that will “exceed $100 million” dollars.  Negatively of course.  That was the purpose of having regulations rated like that – to understand the probable negative economic impact.  And we have 224 in the hopper, in a very down economy, which will exceed the negative $100 million dollar mark.  What are those people thinking?  Or are they?  Indications are they give it no thought when these new regulations are proffered. They just note the cost and move on. No skin of their rear ends.

And if you think that’s bad, just wait:

Next year’s big treat will be the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, something every small business in the country must be looking forward to with eager anticipation. Then, as Sen. Rob Portman (R., Ohio) warned readers on this page 10 months ago, there’s also the Labor Department’s new fiduciary rule, which will increase the cost of retirement planning for middle-class workers; the EPA’s new Ozone Rule, which will impose up to $90 billion in yearly costs on American manufacturers; and the Department of Transportation’s Rear-View Camera Rule. That’s so you never have to turn your head around when backing up.

Yes, that’s right, they’re hardly done. In fact, they’re not even slowing down. The accumulation of power within the central government – the ability to intrude in almost every aspect of your life – is attempting to reach warp speed.

To say America has lost it’s way is, well, an understatement. We aren’t close to being what was envisioned at our founding and we’re almost kissing cousins of that which our Founders attempted to keep us from becoming – today’s Europe.

Unfortunately, that ruinous drift and over reliance on government seems to be fine for all too many of those who call themselves Americans today.

SOURCE

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Trust the Constitution, not the government

Without the slightest hint of irony, President Obama said last week, "if people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress, and don't trust federal judges, to make sure that we're abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here."

Yes we are, because more and more of us don't trust government. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, "trust in the federal government remains mired near a historic low, while frustration with government remains high."

Furthermore, notes Pew, a "majority of the public says that the federal government threatens their personal rights and freedoms." What has led to this distrust?

The Benghazi cover-up, the IRS fiasco, the Justice Department's monitoring of reporters, the commandeering of phone records of private citizens in the name of national security, "data mining," the so-called "kill list," drones with the power to spy and kill, the proliferation of surveillance cameras, DNA swabs after arrests, Obamacare, unrestrained spending and unending debt. This is the federal government encroaching on our civil liberties.

The federal government long ago exceeded its constitutional boundaries. It has reached into our public schools, our colleges and universities, our wombs, our wallets; Congress banned incandescent light bulbs, Bloomberg tried to ban Big Gulps, and now government wants to insert itself into our health care. Government does few things well, but it does them at great expense.

A loss of some privacy was supposed to be the price we had to pay for security following 9/11. Obama declared the war against terrorism over, but the surveillance expanded. Now it seems there are more cameras out there then there are cicadas.

The president claims, "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls." But the government has the ability to listen. Michael Isikoff of NBC News, citing two former U.S. intelligence officials, reports, "The National Security Agency has at times mistakenly intercepted the private email messages and phone calls of Americans who had no link to terrorism, requiring Justice Department officials to report the errors to a secret national security court and destroy the data." Oops.

When I was a kid, some of my relatives had party-line telephones. People shared the same phone line but were assigned different numbers of rings so you'd know which call was yours. My cousins and I eavesdropped on other people's conversations. Will the federal government now take listening in to a new level?

We have an "on the one hand, but on the other hand" attitude about security. On the one hand we want to be safe; on the other hand we don't like government intruding on our rights because once we've lost them, they will be difficult to regain.

The notion that we should trust government is foolish and dangerous. Government officials, like all human beings, have the capacity to do wrong as well as right. That's why the Founders gave us a Constitution, to control government that "the blessings of liberty" might be secured.

Here's some history for those who missed it in history class: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution ... are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite." -- James Madison.

"Freedom is lost gradually from an uninterested, uninformed, and uninvolved people." -- Thomas Jefferson.

On this 64th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell's novel "1984," uninterested, uninformed and uninvolved Americans should consider his concocted language called Newspeak, which includes: "War is peace; freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength."

Obama is speaking in Newspeak when he says government can be trusted. Government cannot be trusted. We -- and he -- must trust the Constitution.

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 and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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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