A silly little Leftist lady tries to "psychologize" conservatives

One does not expect much in the way of profundity from the  crusading Australian Leftist organ, "New Matilda", but a rather long diatribe just up there is particularly feeble.  Author Lissa Johnson starts out claiming that conservatives are psychopaths but gives neither reasoning nor evidence that could lead to that conclusion.  She particularly targets Tony Abbott, Australia's conservative Prime Minister.

So what psychopathic characteristics does Mr Abbott show?  Is he, for instance, extremely self centred?  Seeing Mr Abbott has for many years taken substantial time out to work hands-on in Aboriginal communities, creating and upgrading facilities for the use of the community's people, that accusation has to earn a resounding "Not Guilty" verdict.  I know of no Leftist who has shown anything like Mr Abbott's personal committment to Aboriginal welfare.  It is because of that committment that the reviled Prof. Spurr called Abbott an "Abo lover".

So what about the various other attributes of the psychopath?  Ms Johnson is a clinical psychologist so she should know them well. Which of those does she find among conservatives?  She does not say.  She offers no evidence for her assertion.  What she does do is however amusing.  She offers a survey of the psychological literature on the psychology of conservatism.  And her survey is a broadly  accurate one.  But nowhere in that literature are conservatives accused of psychopathy!  Her own literature survey refutes her opening assertion!  The evidence that Leftists are pychopathic is however abundant.

So let us look at the psychology literature Ms Johnson believes in.  The big problem with it is that it is almost  entirely written by Leftists --  with all the lack of ethics and objectivity that one expects from that.  The author in that literature most favoured by Ms Johnson is the amusing John Jost, senior author of a paper that purported to be a meta-analysis of the literature on the psychology of conservatism, and which claimed, inter alia, that Stalin, Khrushchev and Castro were conservatives!

And one of his co-authors was the anti-scientist Frank Sulloway, who tried to use litigation to suppress publication of a research report that contested one of his theories.  Leftist attempts to suppress speech that they disagree with are notorious (See TONGUE-TIED) but Sulloway stands out even in that company.

And suppressing contrary evidence was Jost's bag too.  His article purported to be a meta-analysis and should, as such, have offered a comprehensive view of the relevant literature.  It did not.  It omitted about half of the relevant research.  Which half?  The half that disagreed with his foreordained conclusions, of course!  Any hope of finding truth in the writings of Prof. Jost and his ilk is therefore highly likely to be disappointed.

And even if one conceded every claim about conservatives made by Leftist psychologists, the gruel is thin. They have such a lot of trouble finding something wrong with conservatives that they confine themselves almost entirely to cognitive style variables.  And such variables can be seen in a variety of lights. Even Jost ended up admitting that.  For instance, one of the earliest accusations hurled at conservatives was that they are "intolerant of ambiguity".  But that can equally be parsed as showing that conservatives seek order.  And seeking order in natural phenomena is precisely what real scientists do.  The idea that such a cognitive style is in any way aberrant is simply ludicrous.

I in fact have had many papers published in the academic literature on cognitive style research and repeatedly found that the measuring instuments used fell far short of accepted psychometric standards.  So even the literature that Jost & Co. reviewed was inadequate to support their conclusions.  My most recent article in that genre is here

And I would be remiss if I did not take some note of two more of Ms Johnson's academic inspirations:  Altemeyer's RWA research and the SDO scale associated with Jim Sidanius.  Both are fairly hilarious pieces of work, as I show here in the case of SDO and most recently here in the case of Altemeyer.

The unfortunate Ms Johnson is simply credulous.  But Leftists believe what they want to believe anyway, and damn the evidence

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The modern-day Left dislike patriotism

By TANVEER AHMED (An Australian psychiatrist of Bangladeshi origin)

“IT is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save the King than of stealing from a poor box.” So wrote George Orwell. His sentiments could scarcely be more applicable in modern Australia.

On patriotism, as with other national characteristics and policy strategies, Australia sits between individualist, nationalist America and collectivist, patri­otically reluctant Europe.

Recent stormy debate over a T-shirt bearing an Australian flag and the slogan ‘Love it — or leave’ illustrates how difficult it is for Australian progressives to embrace outward displays of patriotism, lest they be stained by, or confused with, chest-beating hyper­masculinity or perceived exclusion of minority groups.

Patriotism is a dirty word. Indeed, hip-hop artist Matt Colwell not only labelled the Australian flag “racist” on the ABC’s Q&A, he said later: “The way those people have used the flag has so tarnished the flag for me personally that it stands for a sort of swastika symbol in my mind.”

American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind that conservatives have a broader matrix of moral worlds than progressives, who are skewed towards caring for the weak and distributing wealth. He compiled a catalogue of six fundamental ideas that commonly undergird moral systems: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity.

When psychologists talk about authority, loyalty and sanctity, those who identify with the Left spurn these ideas as the seeds of racism, sexism and homophobia.

Two world wars left a deep scar on the European psyche, especially on the notion of nationalism, which was seen as causing the rise of fascist Italy and Germany.

This ambivalence spawned a belief that countries such as Britain should be a culturally blank canvas; that patriotism is an old fashioned trapping of empire and countries such as Britain could be shaped afresh with new cultures living side by side in unity.

While we may lack the imperial guilt, there can be little doubt this view is apparent in Australia, perhaps even more so given our relative youth and more malleable historical and cultural foundations.

Orwell made a clear distinction between nationalism and patriotism.

He qualified nationalism as “the worst enemy of peace”, the belief one’s country was sup­erior to others while patriotism was an attachment to and admiration of a nation’s way of life and “of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally”.

While Islamic terrorism is attractive to a very small proportion of the population, it highlights a weakness of liberal democracies in their lukewarm, sometimes conflicted promotion of a collective identity.

The gap for Islamists is filled by the fierce transnational identity that the Islamic notion of the ummah can build, a piety so strong they are prepared to sacrifice their lives. Macabre, evil and disgusting the actions may be, but the intensity of belief is in stark contrast to the relative apathy of mild-mannered secular atheists.

French philosopher Michel Onfray said in an interview last year on the topic of the decline of the West: “Who is ready to die for the values of the West or the values of the Enlightenment?”

Onfray questions the will of Westerners to fight for anything, believing we have been numbed by consumerism in a secular age that creates no attachment to God and country.

The strong patriotism of the US that integrates its extremely diverse population so successfully may explain why so few American-Muslims, as a proportion of the population, have gone to fight in Syria, compared with many thousands from Europe. The several hundred estimated to have travelled from Australia, as a percentage of our Muslim population, are many multiples greater than in America.

While an Australian republic is traditionally derided in conservative circles, there is a direct correlation with Tony Abbott’s Team Australia rhetoric and the intensification of patriotism a republic is likely to promote. It holds promise as a key plank in fostering a greater collective identity.

Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane championed a greater patriotism for the Left in his 2009 book Reclaiming Patriotism: Nation-Building for Australian Progressives. The reaction to a harmless T-shirt promoting love of country suggests the task has a considerable way to go.

SOURCE

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Bureaucrat Accountability 101: Retire Early



Why get fired when you can retire?  Lest you think the Veterans Affairs scandal resolved itself and corruption fled of its own accord, it didn’t. What did flee, however, are VA employees involved in the scandal. The evaded the pink slip by retiring. How convenient.

The latest case in point is Susan Taylor, a former deputy chief procurement officer and one of four VA officials “proposed for removal” due to unprofessional conduct. But removed she wasn’t. You see, when Congress passed that VA reform bill over the summer, theoretically making it easier to fire or demote senior executives for “poor performance and misconduct,” VA bureaucrats were none too pleased with the idea of accountability for employees. So the agency created another process to give advance notice to employees who may be fired. Those so notified have five days to retire or otherwise leave of their own accord instead of being fired.

Naturally, faced with getting canned or retiring with full benefits, it’s a no-brainer. So, when advised she had been “proposed for removal,” Taylor instead wrote a letter, stating, “[A]fter 29 years of federal service, I have decided to resign and retire, effective Oct. 14th.” How proactive of her.

But she’s not the only one evading accountability, and this isn't a problem limited to the VA. Remember Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the center of the Tea Party targeting scandal? She opted for a cushy retirement, too.

This problem is widespread. The government is so incapable of firing people that it’s just putting them on paid leave, in some cases for several years. According to a 62-page report published this week by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), taxpayers forked out more than $700 million to fund paid leave for some 57,000 federal employees -- just for fiscal years 2011-2013. Of these, 53,000 were on paid leave for one to three months, 4,018 for three months to one year and 263 for one to three years. Who needs unemployment benefits when you can find a job with the government and get paid to do nothing?

Here’s the clincher: Some of these employees were on paid leave because they were being investigated for alleged misconduct or criminal acts. Nothing like getting paid to stay home ... while under investigation ... for three years. Nice "work" if you can get it. What’s worse (if that's possible) is that in some cases agencies couldn’t even give a reason the employees received the amount of paid leave they did.

It’s ridiculous, really. Because the government has a seeming inability to fire anyone, we the taxpayers keep paying their salaries. As James Sherk, Heritage Foundation Senior Policy Analyst in Labor Economics, recently testified before Congress, “Managers who wish to fire problematic employees, whether because of misconduct or poor performance, must go through draining and time-consuming procedures that take about a year and a half. Consequently the federal government very rarely fires its employees, even when their performance or conduct justifies it. In fiscal year (FY) 2013 the federal government terminated the employment of just 0.26 percent of its tenured workforce for performance or misconduct -- a rate one-fifth that of monthly private-sector layoffs.”

So because of the government’s unparalleled ineptitude and inbred aversion to accountability, incompetent and perhaps even criminal employees avoid firing, collect a paycheck while doing nothing, or write nice retirement letters.

But please don’t claim a smidgeon of corruption. No, not one smidgeon.

SOURCE

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Top Ten List of America's Stupidity

Of course we look like idiots .... because we are

Number 10 Only in America could politicians talk about the greed of the rich at a $35,000.00 per plate Obama campaign fund-raising event.

Number 9 Only in America ...could people claim that the government still discriminates against black Americans when they have a black President, a black Attorney General and roughly 20% of the federal workforce is black while only 14% of the population is black 40+% of all federal entitlements goes to black Americans - 3X the rate that go to whites, 5X the rate that go to Hispanics!

Number 8 Only in America ...could they have had the two people most responsible for our tax code, Timothy Geithner (the head of the Treasury Department) and Charles Rangel (who once ran the Ways and Means Committee), BOTH turn out to be tax cheats who are in favor of higher taxes.

Number 7 Only in America ...can they have terrorists kill people in the name of Allah and have the media primarily react by fretting that Muslims might be harmed by the backlash.

Number 6 Only in America...would they make people who want to legally become American citizens wait for years in their home countries and pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege, while they discuss letting anyone who sneaks into the country illegally just 'magically' become American citizens (probably should be number one).

Number 5 Only in America ....could the people who believe in balancing the budget and sticking by the country's Constitution be thought of as EXTREMISTS.

Number 4 Only in America ...could you need to present a driver's license to cash a check or buy alcohol, but not to vote.

Number 3 Only in America ...could people demand the government investigate whether oil companies are gouging the public because the price of gas went up when the return on equity invested in a major U.S. Oil company(Marathon Oil) is less than half of a company making tennis shoes (Nike).

Number 2 Only in America... could you collect more tax dollars from the people than any nation in recorded history, still spend a Trillion dollars more than it has per year - for total spending of $7-Million PER MINUTE, and complain that it doesn't have nearly enough money.

And Number 1 Only in America...could the rich people- who pay 86% of all income taxes - be accused of not paying their "fair share" by people who don't pay any income taxes at all.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, 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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Shoes to fill



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Liberals Push to Regulate and Silence the Conservative Movement

Joe Otto

The day has finally come… Ann M. Ravel, a Democrat and Vice Chair at the Federal Election Commission, announced her plans to begin regulating conservative websites and news sources. “A reexamination of the commission’s approach to the internet and other emerging technologies is long over due,” she said.

Here at Conservative Daily, we reach 30-50 THOUSAND people every day just by email alone. Now, I know that we are not your only source for news, but I’ve looked over the proposals and this is a serious threat to the Conservative movement as a whole!

At the heart of this is the Democrats’ desire to dismantle Conservative online news sources and regulate them whenever they support/oppose political candidates. Under the proposed rule change, the FEC would treat political content, like videos, the same as paid political television ads.

Believe it or not, this is the natural evolution of the Democrat’s War on Free Speech. Harry Reid tried to push through a Constitutional amendment to change the First Amendment and restrict political speech, but that didn’t work. So now, the FEC is doing his bidding!

This all stems from a 2006 FEC ruling on whether a free political video posted online should be regulated the same as paid political advertising. The FEC was split 3-3 on whether an Ohio anti-Obama political campaign violated campaign finance rules when it failed to disclose its finances.

Even though the First Amendment protects the rights of individuals and organizations to engage in political speech, Liberals in the FEC want to restrict and tax anytime someone uses the internet to promote the Conservative agenda!  This is absolutely criminal!

It’s not hard to figure out the natural progression of this. If a free YouTube video can be regulated the same as paid political advertising, then no form of political speech is safe!

These types of regulations don’t make the country safer… they are designed to make it as hard as possible to participate in the political process.

If Liberals in the FEC get their way, we will be out of business… All conservative online news sources will be regulated out of existence!

The only way that these Liberals can win is if they silence their opposition. This is shameful and this scheme must be stopped!

This is straight out of George Orwell’s 1984… The first step towards controlling a population is controlling the news sources they have access to.

Democrats know they can’t win the debate; they know that America cannot physically afford to implement their social engineering programs. All the polling and evidence suggests that the Democrat Party is going to get shellacked in a week and a half when Americans go to the polls.

But instead of changing their platform and adjusting to be more competitive, the Left just wants to control the debate and regulate what information you have access to on a daily basis!

This is one of the greatest threats to the republic that has emerged in my lifetime. If we don’t put a stop to this now, the entire Conservative movement could be dismantled in a matter of weeks.

No more Mark Levin or other Conservative radio shows… no more Fox News commentary… and no more Conservative Daily advocacy alerts to your inbox… This is important! We can put a stop to this right now, but you need to raise your voice and demand it.

But why stop there? What’s to say that the FEC won’t also regulate individual speech?

What’s to say you won’t be silenced because of my political beliefs or be taxed as if your political speech is a paid endorsement?

Without a serious public outcry, Obama’s lackeys in the FEC will roll out these crippling regulations. You MUST raise your voice and force Congress to intervene and stop it!  Only you can protect Conservative media and DEMAND that Congress stop the FEC from introducing burdensome regulations!

Fighting for our lives

SOURCE

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Promised savings from grouped medical practice look increasingly unlikely to occur



For several years, the Obama administration has been touting accountable care organizations (ACOs) as a big part of its proposed solution to rising healthcare costs, particularly in Medicare. Early results suggest yet another disconnect between the promise and the reality.

The basic concept of an ACO is fairly simple: A group of doctors and medical facilities agree to coordinate their efforts in an attempt to improve care while cutting costs, and they share in any savings if costs decline or grow less than expected.

In theory there's nothing wrong with this, but in today's bureaucratic, government-directed health system, as simple an idea as "doctors should work together" gets turned into a system rife with unintended consequences and poor outcomes.

As set up under Obamacare and implemented through Medicare, ACOs are in many ways indistinguishable from health maintenance organizations (HMOs). Doctors and facilities are given a limited amount of money to provide care to patients and are expected to manage treatment in order to come in under budget.

This model wasn’t very popular in the 1990s because it gave doctors and medical facilities a powerful incentive to withhold treatment or use lower-cost options than what the doctor believed was the most appropriate treatment.

Why the Obama administration and congressional Democrats jumped on the ACO bandwagon isn’t clear, but I do have two guesses.

First, it fits with their view that central planning is vital to any endeavor. Every time you hear politicians moan about “fragmented care,” what they mean is “bureaucrats aren't in charge.”

ACOs supposedly reduce this fragmentation by bringing all decision-making regarding a patient under one roof, carefully supervised by people who may not know the patient but do know what the proposed treatments for that person will do to the bottom line and their bonuses.

Second, because ACOs supposedly save money, it allowed the planners of Obamacare to spin their abacuses and proclaim the president’s health care overhaul would save billions of dollars over the long run.

Reality now intrudes. Recently released information from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services shows a wide range of results, with some ACOs showing savings of up to 7 percent while others had spending increase by 5.4 percent. Several of the ACOs that enrolled in Medicare’s Shared Savings Program have dropped out. It’s also important to note many of the ACOs enrolling in the program were among those most likely to perform best, because they had embraced the idea years ago and had experience operating under this model of care.

Another problem with the ACO concept is it is accelerating the trend of hospitals purchasing medical practices, driving up costs because insurers and government programs offer higher reimbursements for hospital-based care.

These outcomes don’t surprise most people who have closely followed ACOs. A November 2012 article in Health Affairs by researchers Lawton Burns and Mark Pauly, for example, observed, “accountable care organizations have limited and uncertain impact, especially on cost savings,” and they “provide little support” for the belief they will limit Medicare spending growth.

It may not be on the scale of “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” or the pledge families would see their health premiums fall by $2,500 per year, but it’s starting to look like the cost savings from ACOs are just as illusionary as those other promises.

SOURCE

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Federal Prosecutors Break Rules, Wreck Lives, and Get Promoted

A group of Washington overlords—federal prosecutors—sometimes break rules and wreck people's lives. President Obama may soon appoint one of them to be America's next Attorney General.

The prosecutorial bullying is detailed in a new book by Sidney Powell, Licensed to Lie. She reports that the Department of Justice's (DOJ) narcissistic and dishonest prosecutors destroy people by doing things like deliberately withholding evidence.

Remember the Arthur Andersen accounting firm? It was killed off by ambitious prosecutors who claimed the company helped Enron commit accounting fraud and then shredded the evidence.

But instead of charging people who allegedly ordered evidence destroyed, the DOJ indicted the entire company. That destroyed the accounting firm. Publicly traded companies cannot do business with companies under criminal investigation, so Andersen lost most of its clients.

The prosecutor's purpose, says Powell, was to chill resistance from other companies that might dare fight the Feds. The message: cooperate, or we will destroy you! These pressure tactics were appropriate, said one prosecutor, because shredding documents "attacks the justice system itself by impeding investigators and regulators from getting at the truth."

But who actually hid the truth? The prosecutors, writes Powell. In fact, Andersen had saved most of its documents and gave them to the government. The prosecutors simply lied to the court about it.

Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Arthur Andersen's conviction. But by then, 80,000 employees had lost their jobs—80,000 people who'd done nothing wrong.

You'd think that this would teach federal prosecutors to obey the law. Paul Kamenar of the Washington Legal Foundation said, "this decision will send a strong message to the Justice Department to stop this kind of abusive prosecutorial misconduct."

So were the prosecutors fired or jailed? No. Many were promoted. Washington's overlords protect their own.

Next, some of the same prosecutors accused four Merrill Lynch executives of falsifying Enron's books. The government lawyers told the media that Enron "conspired with Wall Street bankers to carry out a sham transaction." The Merrill Lynch executives charged with fraud got three- to four-year jail sentences.

But Powell writes that the government "failed to allege anything that actually constituted a crime by the Merrill Lynch executives. Instead it cobbled together parts of different statutes to make up some kind of new crime that didn't even make sense."

Sure enough, an appeals court tossed most of the verdict, and the Merrill executives were released. But that was after they had spent a year in jail.

Did the prosecutors hang their heads in shame? No. Far from it. Some of them then went after Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska. Stevens, the prosecutors claimed, took $250,000 in gifts from rich donors and never reported that.

But later it was revealed that the prosecutors withheld evidence that showed Stevens had not taken anything like $250,000. A judge threw out that conviction, too. But by then, Sen. Stevens had lost his Senate seat. His replacement, a Democrat, became the deciding vote for Obamacare.

So was the lead prosecutor, Matthew Friedrich, finally punished? Again, no. He took a higher-paying job at a private law firm. Leslie Caldwell, who helped destroy Arthur Anderson, got promoted to assistant attorney general at the Justice Department. Andrew Weissmann, who helped prosecute the Andersen and the Merrill Lynch employees, was made deputy director of the FBI.

Finally, prosecutor Kathryn Ruemmler, who helped manipulate the system to unfairly jail four Merrill Lynch employees, was promoted to deputy attorney general, then promoted again to White House counsel. Now Bloomberg reports that she's President Obama's first choice to replace Eric Holder!

If you find these charges as hard to believe as I did, you can read Powell's supporting documents at LicensedtoLie.com. We invited prosecutors Ruemmler, Friedrich, Caldwell and Weissmann to reply to the charges laid out in Powell's book and on my TV show, but they didn't respond.

Federal prosecutors always have a big advantage over anyone they attack. The U.S. government has endless time and money. Only multi-millionaires can afford to fight back. Most people accused, even those who are innocent, just settle with the prosecutors and get punished. Prosecutors abuse this awesome power and get promoted for it.

SOURCE

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Voter ID Laws Suppress White, Latino, and Black Voting About the Same Amount

Republicans Are Trying to Make Sure Minorities and Young People Don't Vote This November," reads a Mother Jones headline. How? MJ continues...."shorter voting hours, restrictions on voter registration drives, and the requirement that voters present a government ID or proof of citizenship to cast a ballot"

With regard to imposing voter ID requirements, a new study reports that the nefarious Republican plot is likely to fail if the goal is to suppress black and Hispanic votes relative to white votes. Researchers Rene Rocha from the University of Iowa and Tetsuya Matsubayashi from Osaka University in Japan have published an article, "The Politics of Race and Voter ID Laws in the States: The Return of Jim Crow?" in the current issue of the Political Research Quarterly.

They do find that states with relatively small minority group populations and dominated by Republican governors and legislatures have passed more voter ID requirements, both photo ID and non-photo ID, than states with larger minority group populations and/or dominated by Democrats. But what effect do such requirements have on voter turnout?

The study cited by the GAO that showed minority group vote suppression and most other prior research compared voting changes between states that had adopted voter ID requirements and those that had not. The researchers in the study Political Research Quarterly parse time series data noting changes in voting participation before and after voter ID requirements were adopted in individual states. Contrary to the earlier state-to-state comparisons, the new study using time-series data extending over the past 30 years finds:

Our primary explanatory variables, photo ID and nonphoto ID laws, have no statistically discernible relationship with the probability that whites, blacks, and Latinos voted in the general elections between 1980 and 2010 except that the nonphoto ID law has a positive and significant relationship with Latino turnout. In short, more stringent ID requirements for voting have no deterring effect on individual turnout across different racial and ethnic groups.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, 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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Obama has no love for our country



David Horowitz

Need more proof of Barack Obama's disastrous foreign policy-a foreign policy that has attacked American national security far more effectively than it has attacked America's enemies? You don't have to look further than Iraq where the most effective "state" is the brutal and bloodthirsty Islamic State (ISIS), becoming everyday larger and more powerful as a result of the President's weak and dithering response.

It took the despicable beheadings of two Americans to get Obama to pay attention to this huge and growing movement of savage jihadists who also beheaded thousands of Christians and other minorities (although not on youtube) on their victorious march from Syria, through Iraq to the Turkish border. And it's not as if ISIS wasn't clear about its ultimate target. "See you in New York," the group's leader said at the beginning of his atrocities.

The President's apathetic response is part of a pattern that has marked this administration's catastrophic record on other foreign policy issues that affect our security: Russian aggression, China's military buildup, the inexorable attack on Israel. Such a disastrous record, along with constant lectures from the White House about how America should not be regarded as exceptional, raises a question. Is this the first President in the history of the United States who doesn't love our country?

More than 3500 U.S. military men and women died in Iraq to keep a terror organization like ISIS from taking over. It is now possible that they will have died in vain because the President who tried to sabotage American troops even while he was in the Senate has not stood up forcefully to a group that even the New York Times admits is worse than al Qaeda.

There is only one word to describe Obama's policy in Iraq and that word is BETRAYAL. It is a harsh word, but it is an accurate one. The betrayal of America's security interests in the Middle East began with Obama's fellow Democrats back in 2003 when the war in Iraq was still winnable.

My book "The Great Betrayal" shows in detail that while the initial response to the attacks of 9/11 was bipartisan, the Democrats turned their backs on our troops in the field the third month of the fighting in Iraq. Taking their cue from the radical left, they betrayed a war policy they had supported a few weeks earlier and then entered a five year war of their own against the War on Terror while our military men and women were still fighting the enemy. They opposed the surge; they opposed victory.

The Democrats' great betrayal at the beginning of the war set the table for a presidency that embraced defeat in Iraq from the moment Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office. And now the final act of that betrayal takes place as the ISIS terror movement becomes the dominant power in Iraq and makes it clear that it regards Iraq as a launching pad for jihad against America.

Via email. Buy David's book here

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"Who Are the Racists: Liberals or Conservatives?"

Black Scholar Deconstructs Liberal Myths About Affirmative Action, Voter ID

Derryck Green, a member of the Project 21 black leadership network, is the newest member of the faculty of Prager University, an "online resource promoting knowledge and clarity" that partners with high schools and universities nationwide. Green's first posted lecture is "Who Are the Racists: Liberals or Conservatives?"

"In my Prager University lecture, I argue against the slander of racism that the left directs at conservatives. It's a reflexive mantra to retain power," said Project 21's Green. "Despite the fact that conservatives come in all colors and have ample compassion for blacks and others, the racism charge still hurts. I would further suggest that liberals and leftists are actually more racist. They are preoccupied by race, and they constantly inject it where it shouldn't be."

To say that racism is foolish and stupid -- not to mention evil -- is to understate the case. But, according to many of their critics, conservatives are that stupid and that evil. But, with few exceptions, conservatives are neither. So why is the charge even made? The answer is primarily political: to maintain black support for liberals and liberal policies.

Using racial preferences as an example, Green added:

Conservatives believe that blacks and other minorities are every bit as capable as whites of succeeding as policemen, firemen, businessmen, lawyers, doctors, politicians and college students. Yet, for this belief, conservatives are called racist. The irony, of course, is that those who accuse conservatives of being racist believe that blacks and other minorities are not as capable as whites of succeeding and therefore still need affirmative action almost half a century after it was first implemented.

Green also debunked liberal allegations about conservative-led attempts to protect American voters through commonsense polling place protections such as voter ID and school choice.

Prager University, founded by author and talk radio host Dennis Prager, is a web-based learning resource founded to "promot[e] knowledge and clarity" on difficult and sometimes controversial topics related to fields such as political science, economics and history.

SOURCE

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Houston story changes in fight with pastors

No stratgem is too low for Leftists trying to promote their favoured groups

Attorneys for Houston’s lesbian mayor, Annise Parker, who is defending a city ordinance granting special rights to transgenders, are insisting to the Texas Supreme Court that opponents have no claim in court, because their petition to reconsider the law was never “validated.”

The argument, however, contradicts the sworn testimony of the city secretary, who has the authority to validate the signatures and determined the petition drive met the minimum requirement.

The city’s brief to the state Supreme Court was filed by attorney Lynne Liberato in a case brought by a coalition of local organizations that had collected about 55,000 signatures, three times more than the required amount, to force the city either to repeal the ordinance or let voters decide on it.

After the city adopted the ordinance in May, the signatures were gathered, and the city secretary affirmed the minimum number had been obtained. But the city attorney then stepped in and invalidated most of the signatures.

The opponents filed suit, and a trial was set for January. In the discovery process, the mayor issued subpoenas for any statements, emails or “sermons” on the issue from five local pastors who were members of a coalition opposing the ordinance but not part of the lawsuit. In the uproar that followed, the city changed the word “sermons” to “speeches,” but attorneys for the ministers said it really made no difference.

The coalition asked the state Supreme Court to step in and order the city to follow its charter, which specifies that ordinances opposed by a certain number of residents shall be halted.

In arguing now that the state Supreme Court should keep out of the case, the city said that “because the city secretary did not validate the referendum petition, the second step of the referendum processes – the city council’s ‘immediate’ reconsideration of the ordinance or popular vote – was never triggered.”

The city’s lawyers argued the city charter “does not require respondents to act, immediately or otherwise, on an unsuccessful referendum petition.”

However, the city secretary, Anna Russell, who has served Houston for more than four decades, was asked by plaintiffs’ attorney Andy Taylor in a deposition about validation of the signatures.

Russell had explained it was her understanding “that the [city] charter provides that the city secretary determine the number of qualified voters who sign the petition.”

Taylor then asked: “And based on that understanding, you did that; and the result of your work was that 17,846 signatures had been validated. And that was more than the minimum number necessary, correct?”

“That’s correct,” she replied

Much more HERE

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Administration Freed Illegal Immigrants Charged With Violent Crimes

Illegal immigrants charged with violent crimes and serious felonies were among the hundreds of criminals the Obama administration released from jails across the country in February 2013, newly released documents show.

According to records obtained by USA Today, the government released inmates charged with offenses ranging from kidnapping and sexual assault to drug trafficking, armed assault, and homicide.

The evidence contradicts previous assurances by the administration that the 617 criminals who were released as part of a cost-cutting exercise were low-risk offenders charged with misdemeanors "or other criminals whose prior conviction did not pose a violent threat to public safety," USA Today reported.
Report: 5 Reasons to Buy Retirement Crash Insurance Now

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) admitted to the newspaper that numerous dangerous criminals had been released but denied direct responsibility.

"Discretionary releases made by ICE were of low-level offenders. However, the releases involving individuals with more significant criminal histories were, by and large, dictated by special circumstances outside of the agency's control," ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen told USA Today.

The new records obtained by the newspaper from a Freedom of Information Act request outlined previously undisclosed details about the alleged crimes of specific detainees. One person in Texas was charged with aggravated kidnapping and sexual assault of a child.

Another illegal immigrant from Florida was facing charges of conspiracy to commit homicide, according to USA Today.

Two Massachusetts detainees had been charged with aggravated assault using a weapon, while another illegal immigrant from Colorado was being held on a sexual assault charge.
Special: Drugstore Drink Stops Migraines in 5 Minutes

The Obama administration released more than 2,200 illegal immigrants from jail between Feb. 9 and March 1, 2013, as part of an effort to cut the number of prisoners due to the budget-sequester funding cuts. The detainees had been awaiting deportation or immigration hearings in a court, and the administration did not give advance notice it would be freeing them.

The releases triggered a furor in Congress and hearings with lawmakers who grilled then-ICE director John Morton.

According to USA Today, Virginia GOP Rep. J. Randy Forbes asked Morton directly, "No one on that list has been charged or convicted with murder, rape, or sexual abuse of a minor, were they?"  Morton, who subsequently resigned, answered, "They were not."

Former White House spokesman Jay Carney had also described the criminals as "low-risk, noncriminal detainees," USA Today reported.

Meanwhile, Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma demanded a formal investigation by the inspector general.  The internal audit, which concluded in August 2014, concluded that ICE broke the law in releasing the criminal illegal migrants.

"It is baffling how an agency charged with homeland security and immigration enforcement would knowingly release hundreds of illegals with criminal histories. In this single action, ICE undermined its own credibility, the rule of law, and the safety of Americans and local law enforcement," Coburn said when the audit was released.

He added, "This report provides more evidence that our nation's immigration laws are being flagrantly disregarded. Americans need to be assured the problems within ICE that led to the dangerous release of illegal aliens will be fixed, and DHS and ICE will never again violate the law by releasing known criminals into our streets."

McCain said it is "deeply troubling that ICE would knowingly release thousands of undocumented immigrant detainees — many with prior criminal records — into our streets, while publicly downplaying the danger they posed," USA Today reported.

SOURCE

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50 Percent Of American Workers Make Less Than 28,031 Dollars A Year

The Social Security Administration has just released wage statistics for 2013, and the numbers are startling.  Last year, 50 percent of all American workers made less than $28,031, and 39 percent of all American workers made less than $20,000.  If you worked a full-time job at $10 an hour all year long with two weeks off, you would make $20,000.  So the fact that 39 percent of all workers made less than that amount is rather telling.  This is more evidence of the declining quality of the jobs in this country.

In many homes in America today, both parents are working multiple jobs in a desperate attempt to make ends meet. Our paychecks are stagnant while the cost of living just continues to soar.  And the jobs that are being added to the economy pay a lot less than the jobs lost in the last recession.  In fact, it has been estimated that the jobs that have been created since the last recession pay an average of 23 percent less than the jobs that were lost.  We are witnessing the slow-motion destruction of the middle class, and very few of our leaders seem to care.

The "average" yearly wage in America last year was just $43,041.  But after accounting for inflation, that was actually worse than the year before...

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, 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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Obama and Holder follow the Stalinist model of justice

Federal Prosecutor Alleges Boss Pressured Him To Engage in 'Unethical Conduct'; Judge Calls Abuses 'Egregious,' 'Pervasive,” and “Reprehensible”

In perhaps the most stunning documentation yet of abuses by Eric Holder’s Justice Department, two former Assistant United States Attorneys spoke to defense attorneys and revealed appalling deceit and corruption of justice. This latest litigation time bomb has exploded from multi-million dollar litigation originally brought by the Department of Justice against Sierra Pacific based on allegations that the lumber company and related defendants were responsible for a wildfire that destroyed 65,000 acres in California.

In what was dubbed the “Moonlight Fire” case, the tables are now turned. The defendants have discovered new evidence and filed a stunning motion. The new evidence and disclosures are being taken seriously by the Chief Judge of the Eastern District of California—as they should be. In a shocking action, Judge Morrison C. England Jr. ordered the recusal of every federal judge in the Eastern District of California.

Sierra Pacific Industries and other defendants were compelled to pay $55 million to the United States over a period of five years and transfer 22,500 acres of land to settle massive litigation brought against them by the United States alleging that they caused a 2007 fire that destroyed 65,000 acres in California. Sierra Pacific has always maintained that the fire started elsewhere and that the state and federal investigators and Department attorneys lied. Now that settlement may go up in smoke because of the new evidence of outrageous misconduct by the federal prosecutors and the investigators from state and federal offices, as well as findings earlier this year by a state judge.

In an extraordinary development, Judge England, Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, ordered the recusal of all the Eastern District judges from the case because of serious allegations that the Court itself was defrauded by the government in the original prosecution. To avoid any appearance of partiality, he has referred the case to Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski to appoint a judge from outside the Eastern District to handle the case going forward. Judge Kozinski has excoriated prosecutors for failing to meet their legal and ethical obligations.

The order notes that the defendants filed an action this week to set aside the $55 million settlement because, as the defendants allege, “the United States presented false evidence to the Defendants and the Court; advanced arguments to the Court premised on that false evidence; or, for which material evidence had been withheld, and obtaining court rulings based thereon; prepared key Moonlight Fire investigators for depositions, and allowed them to repeatedly give false testimony about the most important aspects of their investigation; and failed to disclose the facts and circumstances associated with the Moonlight Fire lead investigator’s direct financial interest in the outcome of the investigation arising from an illegal bank account that has since been exposed and terminated.”

The Sacramento Bee reported on the Defendant’s filing. Indeed, the Defendants’ motion informs us that a former Assistant United States Attorney came forward and disclosed that he believes that he was removed from the original prosecution by “his boss, David Shelledy, chief of the civil division in the United States Attorney’s office,” because he “rebuffed” pressure to “engage in unethical conduct as a lawyer.” Of course, like other former prosecutors who were unethical, Mr. Shelledy is to receive Attorney General Holder’s highest award for excellence—this week.

The defendants also reveal that another former federal prosecutor, Eric Overby, left the Moonlight Fire prosecution team also, stating: “It’s called the Department of Justice. It’s not called the Department of Revenue.” According to the motion, Mr. Overby told defense counsel that in his entire career, “I’ve never seen anything like this. Never.”

Well, sadly we have, and we’ve been reporting on it as fast as we can. This is part of a disturbing and rapidly increasing pattern of abuses by this Department of Justice to line government coffers or redistribute the wealth to its political allies—using its overwhelming litigation might and federal agencies as a tool of extortion and wealth redistribution.

The entire original prosecution against Sierra Pacific appears to have been driven by the Department of Justice’s interest in hitting a “deep pocket” for millions of dollars of revenue. The Defendants’ motion to set aside the settlement reveals a series of fraudulent acts by federal and state authorities that defiles our system of justice.

Dick Beckler, an attorney for the company who used to be at DOJ and is now with Bracewell Giuliani, told the Observer, “Sierra Pacific is looking forward to having its day in court and proving all the facts of the government’s fraud on the court.”

A California state judge, Leslie C. Nichols, in a related state case issued orders earlier this year describing what he called “egregious,” “pervasive,” and “reprehensible” abuses in the investigation and prosecution amounting to “government corruption.” He found the state case to “betray the primary purpose of the judicial system—to reveal the truth.” He awarded $32 million in fees and expenses to the Defendants, finding as the Sacramento Bee reports, that the state agency, Cal Fire, “withheld some documents, destroyed other evidence and ‘engaged in a systematic campaign of misdirection with the purpose of recovering money’ from Sierra Pacific.”

It’s encouraging to see Judge England join Judge Emmet G. Sullivan and Judge Bates, and others, as our Article III judges begin to demand that federal attorneys and agents follow the law and their oaths of office. But there remains a lot more work to do. It’s way past time to hold Holder accountable.

When will the next litigation time bomb and scandal explode on Mr. Holder and this administration? He can’t run fast enough.

SOURCE

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TV News Blacks Out This Year’s Bad Election News for Democrats

Bad news for Democrats is no news

 In less than two weeks, voters head to the polls in midterm elections that seem certain to yield strong Republican gains, if not outright control of the U.S. Senate. Such a political sea change is big news, but a new Media Research Center study finds that, in contrast to their enthusiastic coverage of the 2006 midterms when Democrats made big gains, the Big Three broadcast evening newscasts are all but ignoring this year’s political contests.

MRC analysts studied every election story on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts from September 1 through October 20 in both 2006 (the midterm election in George W. Bush’s second term) and 2014 (the equivalent election under President Barack Obama). Even in a changing media landscape, Big Three evening newscasts are a principal news source for more than 23 million viewers, beating all of their broadcast and cable competition.

Our analysts found that, when Democrats were feeling good about their election prospects eight years ago, the CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and ABC’s World News aired a combined 159 campaign stories (91 full reports and another 68 stories that mentioned the campaign). But during the same time period this year, those same newscasts have offered a paltry 25 stories (16 full reports and 9 mentions), a six-to-one disparity.

Amazingly, since September 1 ABC’s newly-renamed World News Tonight has yet to feature a single mention of this year’s campaign, let alone a full story. In contrast, eight years ago ABC’s World News aired 36 stories that discussed that year’s midterm campaign, including a weekly Thursday night feature that then-anchor Charlie Gibson promised would look at the “critical races.”

Back then, the elections were a major news topic; this year, a regular viewer of ABC’s evening newscast would have no indication that any were even taking place.

CBS and NBC have scarcely been more comprehensive. In 2006, CBS aired a total of 58 evening news stories that discussed the campaign, while NBC Nightly News aired 65 stories. This year, those numbers have fallen to just 14 and 11 as of October 20, declines of 76% and 83%, respectively.

In 2006, with Democrats poised to make big gains, the broadcasts eagerly touted their midterm coverage. On the September 20, 2006 NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams hyped how his broadcast was beginning “a special series that will take a close look at some of the most interesting races in these upcoming midterm elections.”

This election season, Nightly News did not air its first full report on the election until Sunday, October 12. Except for a single full story on October 14 about the Kentucky Senate race (how the Democratic candidate refused to say if she had voted for President Obama), NBC Nightly News has thus far this fall provided no in-depth coverage of any specific races or candidates — merely short mentions of individual contests.

The network blackout of this year’s campaign began long before the Ebola outbreak dominated newscasts after the September 30 diagnosis of Thomas Eric Duncan in Dallas. The evening newscasts included just 12 stories about the campaign in September, vs. 13 such stories during the first 20 days of October.

And it’s not as if the Ebola story precluded substantial political coverage — in 2006, the networks also found time to cover major stories, including the war in Iraq and North Korea’s first atomic test, without bypassing politics.

Eight years ago, there was no escaping the negative news for Republicans. Not only were polls projecting a major swing to the Democrats, but a scandal involving Florida Representative Mark Foley received major attention from all three network evening newscasts. Of the 159 network evening news stories that fall, nearly two-thirds (103, or 65%) conveyed either mainly bad news about Republican candidates, or mainly good news about the Democrats, vs. just seven (4%) conveying the opposite message. (The remainder were either neutral or mixed.)

“With scandals, the war, and the President with low approval ratings, this is a very difficult environment for Republicans to run,” CBS’s Gloria Borger opined on the October 17 Evening News. The next night, October 18, NBC Nightly News led their broadcast with poll results that Tim Russert said were making Republicans “very, very nervous,” including a big lead for Democrats in the generic congressional ballot (52% vs. 37% for the GOP).

This week, NBC conducted a similar pre-election poll that found a five-point edge (49% to 44%) for Republicans in the generic ballot, comparable to the six-point edge they had going into the 1994 elections in which they seized control of both the House and Senate. But so far, the NBC Nightly News said nothing about this poll or the bad news it contained for Democrats.

This fall, estimates from the New York Times and Washington Post (as of October 21) place the odds of a Republican takeover of the Senate at between 66% and 93%, and Democrats have been encumbered by a myriad of Obama administration failures including the botched ObamaCare rollout, the Bowe Berghdahl prisoner exchange, the long delay in confronting ISIS, the Secret Service scandal and the fumbling of the Ebola response.

But Democrats have not faced the unrelentingly negative coverage that Republicans confronted eight years ago. From September 1 through October 20, our analysts found ten evening news stories (40%) contained mainly bad news for Democrats or mostly good news for Republicans, while seven (28%) emphasized bad news for Republicans or good news for Democrats.

Back on October 5, The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza wrote about the “striking” similarities between the two midterm elections: “Like Bush, this is the second midterm election of Obama’s presidency. Like Bush, Obama is not at all popular nationally....Like Republicans in 2006, the fate of Democratic control rests in the hands of a handful of incumbents...who sit in states that, at best, swing between the two parties and, at worst, are firmly Republican at the presidential level.”

It wasn’t biased for the networks to sift through polls and predict bad news for Republicans eight years ago. But now that the party labels are reversed, those same networks are showing their bias by giving so much less airtime to the bad political news for Democrats this year.

SOURCE

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Democrats push no-residency election law

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.:  Rather than admitting the failure of last year’s House Bill 13-1303 to re-write Colorado election law, Democrats have doubled down on unregulated elections by writing a new law that, among other things, eliminates residency requirements for local elections. Despite widespread opposition to their proposed new election law, House Democrats have passed it quickly, moving it forward to the senate.

The Denver Post editorialized, “…even supporters of HB 1164 ought to recognize that its rushed handling is a disservice to informed lawmaking.”

Late last week, House Republican co-sponsor Carole Murray backed out of sponsoring the bill. Said Murray, “I agreed to participate in the bill because as a former county clerk, I understand the administrative challenges of the variety of elections that we need to conduct, but as I got into being responsible for this bill, I realized that there was just no way to avoid the policy reality that we were forcing our jurisdictions in our local governments to reject a requirement for jurisdictional residency.”

Sen. Ellen Roberts (R-Durango) removed herself as senate sponsor, leaving Democrats with no cover.

Last year’s bill removed residency requirements at the state level but left unclear were the requirements at the local level. Instead of fixing the state residency requirements, Democrats have simply eliminated them at the local level as well.

The city of Broomfield has been in the spotlight after the secretary of state’s office listed alleged elections administration errors, much of which related to residency requirements. Before 2013 and the new election law, Broomfield had not been involved in any election lawsuits; now there are five. House Bill 1164 fixes that by simply stating that the Broomfield election results are confirmed—no proof or process needed.

Meanwhile, a Republican effort by Sen. Kevin Lundberg to allow citizens to opt out of mandatory mail-in ballots was killed on a party-line vote Monday evening. Even the League of Women Voters had supported the bill. This is not unusual for Republican bills: of the initial 39 bills submitted in the Colorado senate, 19 were immediately sent to the designated “kill committee” without hearings.

With no one other than radical Democrats and a few election officials supporting the new bill, Senators Kevin Grantham and Kevin Lundberg Monday submitted a compromise proposal. They were joined by Representatives Carole Murray and Libby Szabo.

Their bill will put last year’s election law (HB13-1303) on hold for two years. This would allow a bipartisan commission time to consider recommending changes to election law, instead of the “my-way-or-the-highway” approach the Democrats have used to date.

Said Lundberg, “Our bill will have a tough time gaining acceptance with this legislature, but it is still the right thing to do.”

In 1992, Edward Djerejian, then Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, characterized the goals of Islamic radicals as “One man, one vote, one time.” The phrase was resurrected in Egypt as Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Egypt. It means that your vote for a radical Islamist is your last vote.

In Colorado, radical leftist Democrats seem to be seeking the same state of affairs. The recall of two senators and the forced resignation of a third has not changed their iron-fisted control of the legislature. They do not listen to opposition, their hearings—when they are allowed—resemble “show trials,” and their legislation passes through the legislature at light speed.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, 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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Socialism at work in Wales -- yet another case of the socialist dream turning into a nightmare

Untreated patients left to die: The Labour-run Welsh health service wastes money on bureaucrats in non-jobs yet has lethally long waiting lists for the seriously-ill that would shame a Third World country.  A timely warning about where Obamacare is headed if it is not stopped

Somewhere in north-west Wales is an office occupied by one very well-remunerated employee of the Betsi Cadwaladr University Local Health Board.  At a time of supposed austerity, when the principality’s Labour government has reduced health spending by 1 per cent a year, resulting in total cuts of more than 8 per cent since 2010, he (or she) earns a £43,414 a year. In addition, their pension is topped up by £6,078.

However, this well-paid NHS staffer has no key medical role, but is instead the health board’s ‘carbon manager’.  Quite what this job actually entails (presumably it involves raising the profile of energy conservation) and what relevance it has to healthcare, is anyone’s guess.

But in the free-spending, politically-correct world of the Welsh NHS, there are other posts akin to ‘carbon manager’. Betsi Cadwaladr also pays £50,000 for a ‘head of communications’, along with £30,000 for a ‘leadership officer’, £30,000 for a ‘head of equality, diversity and human rights’, and another £30,000 for a ‘senior equality manager’.

They are part of the army of people recently identified by the Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA) pressure group as being employed in weird and unnecessary ‘non-jobs’ by the Welsh NHS last year.

In a report, which it believes exposed the tip of an iceberg of public waste, the TPA detailed the munificent pay packages, bizarre job titles and pointless remits of 43 of the Labour-run service’s non-clinical staff, who together earn a total of £1.5 million a year.

During 2013 (the last year for which the information is available), their ranks included a ‘sustainable transport manager’ in Gwent on £30,308 per year, a ‘leadership/management coach’ in Cwm Taf on £40,511 a year, and an ‘equality and diversity lead’ in Velindre NHS Trust on another £40,511.

Bear in mind their salaries while you consider the fates of some of the thousands of patients who are now stuck on the supposedly cash-strapped Welsh NHS’s lengthy waiting lists.

Take the plight of Robin Williams, 69, a grandfather of ten from Penarth in South Wales, who was recently told that he’s expected to die by Christmas. Robin tells how his nightmare at the hands of the Welsh NHS began in 2010, when he was admitted to hospital in Cardiff with heart symptoms.

Despite being in obvious pain, he was sent home without seeing a cardiologist or without being given an angiogram to discover the precise nature of his problem. He then had to wait three months before being referred to a heart consultant, and then a further six months before getting an actual appointment.

By this stage, his condition had deteriorated so far that a specialist said there was nothing they could do to cure it. Over the ensuing three years, he has edged slowly towards death.

‘Two of my arteries had become completely blocked,’ Robin says. ‘There was this third one they wanted to look at. But by the time of the appointment, it had become calcified, so they couldn’t get a stent in.

‘If they had tried six months earlier, they probably could have, and I wouldn’t be in this state now. I am just waiting to die. I recently pushed my cardiologist to say how long I am likely to last. He replied: “Christmas.” ’

Cardiff, where Robin was originally treated, was the subject of an investigation last year by the Royal College of Surgeons, who inspected its hospitals amid concerns that it has some of the country’s highest mortality rates.

They discovered ‘serious service problems’, with 2,000 operations not scheduled in the previous three months because of ‘a lack of beds’, widespread ‘failures in cleaning and sterilisation’, cancer operations ‘cancelled on a regular basis’ due to a ‘lack of capacity’, and ‘patients regularly dying on the waiting list’ for heart operations.

Concluding that ‘the Welsh government does not give leadership’, the Royal College, one of the most respected medical organisations in Britain, reported: ‘South Wales is the only part of the UK where patients are dying on Cardiac Surgery waiting lists.’

No wonder Robin Williams accuses the Labour authorities of ‘a level of incompetence I’ve not seen before in my lifetime’. He adds: “More and more heart patients are dying unnecessarily but these deaths are preventable.”

Tragically, he’s not alone in his anger. After 15 years of Labour rule, there are now nearly 1,400 Welsh NHS patients who have been waiting more than a year for treatment. In England, where the population is 17 times higher, that number is just 574.

Those still on waiting lists are fortunate in comparison with Ron Jones, who served for more than three decades as a local councillor.  He died last year, aged 78, after spending more than 15 months awaiting a major heart operation. His partner, Pam Allen, says he’d been diagnosed the previous May and later he needed a triple heart bypass.  ‘The doctor asked: “Do you have any questions?” We said: “When do we come in? Tomorrow?” He replied: “No, three to six months.” ’

The operation was then repeatedly delayed and cancelled before Ron eventually died of heart failure.  In a stern rebuke to the Welsh government, who routinely dismiss critics as Right-wing political opportunists, Mrs Allen points out that Ron was a Labour councillor and lifelong party supporter.

‘He was let down by the NHS he loved,’ she says. ‘Why did he wait so long when they knew what was wrong with him? Something has got to be done.’

Perhaps the most depressing fact about the Welsh NHS is the widespread sense of public disillusion — particularly among the elderly.

Patients needing basic operations, such as hip or knee surgery, must wait an average of 170 days in Wales — compared with 70 days in England and Scotland.

Among them is Athena Williams, 58, a mother-of-two from Pembrokeshire. After being told that she would have to wait 12 to 18 months for a hip operation on the Welsh NHS, she decided to pay £9,000 to have it done privately.

‘What makes me really cross is that my father, who lives in England, has a neighbour who waited just two weeks for their hip replacement,’ she says. ‘Also, my sister is a nurse in the Midlands and has said that waiting times there are only two to three months.

‘I don’t understand it. Why is there such a huge discrepancy? I’m lucky that I could afford to pay to go private, but I’m not going to see a penny of that money back. It’s so wrong.’

Meanwhile, Diana Hannam, 73, a former mayor of Rhyl in North Wales, faced similar difficulties.  In severe pain from a ruptured tendon in her shoulder, she waited more than a year for surgery before being removed from the waiting list in April because she had made a series of angry phone calls to staff, complaining about the excessive length of time it was taking for her operation to be scheduled.

They responded by accusing her of ‘harassment’ and telling her to go elsewhere for treatment. Diana says: ‘It’s extremely alarming that they seem to think they can do this to older people. We are not valued.

‘It’s frightening to live in Wales, and it’s affecting everyone. If what happened to me happened to an animal, they would be prosecuted for causing needless suffering.”

In August, after a total of 16 months on waiting lists, Diana finally underwent her operation at a hospital in Wrexham [North Wales].

In other cases, the stakes are even higher. For cancer victims, delays of just a few weeks can be the difference between life and death. But under the Labour-run Welsh NHS, people wait longer for a raft of crucial tests.

Indeed, roughly 50 per cent of Welsh cancer victims must wait more than six weeks for many scans and tests. In England, just 6 per cent of patients wait that long.

Beth Prout, a 57-year-old nurse from Pembroke was particularly unfortunate. She has a rare form of stomach cancer, which requires a type of operation available in just two UK hospitals (Manchester and Basingstoke).

Since both facilities are in England, the Welsh NHS must agree to pay £70,000 for her to have the life-saving treatment. Appallingly, it has yet to do that despite Beth first being told she needed the operation in June.

The Welsh NHS turned down her request for funding in August and it has yet to respond to an appeal against that decision.

Beth says: ‘My specialist told me after I was turned down for treatment: “You’ve got to make a fuss.”  'But it shouldn’t be that way. You shouldn’t have to go through this to be treated the same as other people living elsewhere in the UK.  ‘In the last few years, the Welsh NHS has gone downhill.’

She adds that the baby unit at the hospital where she works ‘has gone’. And she says about the service: ‘I’m really worried.’

At the same time as Welsh NHS managers are making tough decisions about what medical treatments they can afford, it is galling to discover they are paying for a small army of spin doctors.

For example, the Velindre NHS Trust, which offers specialist cancer care services, employs an astonishing eight — yes, eight — full-time staff in its press office, including a £49,492 Head of Communications, at a total annual cost of more than £250,000.

Such expenditure is unforgivable when you consider the fact that a major cause of the Welsh NHS’s lengthy waiting times for patients is down to a shortage of money. It’s a scandal that would shame even a Third World country.

Between 2010 and this year, the Welsh government has imposed cuts totalling more than 8 per cent on its NHS, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Yet in England, NHS spending has risen by one per cent above inflation each year since the Coalition came to power.

That was paid for partly by cuts in other areas of public expenditure. But in Wales, effectively a one-party Labour state, its government has shown precious little appetite for reforming the bloated public sector.

Proof is the fact that Cardiff has, for example, spent £75 million on a ‘communities first’ scheme which involved (among other things) teaching residents of Ebbw Fawr to ‘design your own tattoo’ or take part in a ‘guitar-making course’.

And an IT project named Merlin, meant to cost £220 million over a decade, has already cost the government £270 million in its first seven years.

Another £36 million was spent by Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones on a back-to-work scheme called Genesis, which was described as ‘under-performing’ when it closed in 2013, after managing to help just 800 people gain jobs. That’s £45,000 for every person it took off the dole.

Back in Newport, a 78-year-old former post mistress has particular cause to complain about Welsh government waste. June Crum has had to spend her life-savings on open-heart surgery after waiting 18 months for treatment on the Welsh NHS.  She took the decision in April after being told — despite having just been taken to hospital with heart problems — that it would be six months before she made it to the top of the waiting list.

‘My hands had turned blue and some of my fingers black. I thought I had left it too long. I was very frightened. I thought I was going to die.  ‘When I found I could be waiting until October, I took my savings out of my Isa and decided to pay for it.’

The procedure cost £19,444. In the sad parallel universe of the incompetent Welsh NHS, that’s less than half the amount Labour health tsars see fit to spend on a single health trust ‘carbon manager’.

SOURCE

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America, we need to talk about the word ‘progressive’

Comment from Britain

Thanks to a quirk of American English, it has long been difficult for people who believe in personal freedom to describe themselves without risking confusion. In Britain, the word ‘liberal’ is still more likely to evoke thoughts of liberty rather than visions of socialism, but this is being gradually worn away by the influence of political rhetoric from the US, where a tipping point occurred many decades ago.

Today, Americans who espouse personal and economic liberty have to settle for terms like libertarian, classical liberal or neoliberal. This is slightly irksome to British liberals, but we get our own back by calling private schools ‘public schools’ and talking about smoking fags. In the great scheme of things, perhaps it doesn’t really matter. We understand that liberals and conservatives are the two main factions in American politics and we can predict the views of each with reasonable accuracy.

The word ‘progressive’, however, is a different beast. In the US, it is virtually a synonym for ‘liberal’ (in the corrupted sense of the word), whereas in the UK every major political party, with the possible exception of UKIP, describes itself as progressive. David Cameron describes himself as a ‘progressive Conservative’ and Nick Clegg says that he and his coalition partners are the ‘new progressives’. The socialists, meanwhile, hope to form a ‘progressive majority’ to defeat the government. The word is near meaningless. At best, it implies a vague belief in modernity and pragmatism. At worst, it implies a self-satisfied conviction that one’s policies are the way of the future (and what politician doesn’t believe that?).

In the US, the progressive cause has a firmer definition and a longer history (a history from which policies such as prohibition and eugenics have been largely written out). To see what the word progressive means today, consider the city of Berkeley, California. According to Robert Reich, a professor at UC Berkeley, it is ‘the most progressive city in America’. It has also been described as a ‘liberal bastion’. How liberal is it? So liberal that it is illegal to smoke a cigarette in your own flat (sorry, ‘apartment’) and, at the city’s university, it is against the rules to chew tobacco or use e-cigarettes anywhere at all, including in the open air.

Berkeley is also seriously considering a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages – aka a ‘soda tax’. A public vote will settle the matter next month, and, in the view of Robert Reich, ‘if a soda tax can’t pass in the most progressive city in America, it can’t pass anywhere’.

Consider that statement for a moment. If you didn’t know what the word ‘progressive’ meant – and you knew nothing about Berkeley – what could you infer from the context? If the sentence was changed to ‘if a soda tax can’t pass in the most oppressive city in America, it can’t pass anywhere’, it would make sense. If words like ‘tax-hungry’, ‘anti-business’, ‘puritanical’ or ‘illiberal’ were substituted for ‘progressive’, it would still read correctly.

If, however, the sentence was changed to ‘if a soda tax can’t pass in the most tolerant city in America, it can’t pass anywhere’, it would be incongruous. Words like ‘permissive’, ‘libertarian’, ‘easygoing’ and ‘broad-minded’ would also be confusing substitutes for ‘progressive’ in this context, and yet these are all adjectives that appear in the thesaurus under the word ‘liberal’. From this we might conclude either that soda taxes are not terribly liberal or that progressives are not terribly liberal. Or both.

In economics, unlike politics, the word ‘progressive’ has a fixed meaning. A progressive tax is one that takes a larger share of income from the rich than from the poor. The alternative is a regressive tax, one that takes a larger share of income from the poor than from the rich. Taxes on fizzy drinks are highly and indisputably regressive, not only because the rate of tax is the same for all income groups, but also because the poor tend to consume more of them in the first place. So while it is true that Berkeley is a bellwether city when it comes to eye-catching ‘public health’ initiatives, the adoption of punitive taxes on soft drinks would be a step towards it becoming America’s most regressive, not progressive, city in economic terms.

This is what confuses us, America. If a ‘liberal bastion’ – your ‘most progressive city’ – is one in which the government effectively fines people for drinking the wrong type of soft drink, what on earth are your illiberal bastions like?

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, 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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The great phthalate scare rumbles on

The study described below is an unpublished one so is difficult to evaluate fully.  There is enough detail below to question its conclusions, however.  It is established that phthalate exposure can be increased by eating certain foods, "junk" food in particular. But since the toxicity is in the dose nobody knows if the amounts concerned are cause for alarm.

So the study below looks important.  We do appear there to have evidence of harm:  Higher levels of serum phthalates were found to go with decreased libido.

But as I have pointed out many times, correlation is not causation and the fact that it was not phthalates behind the loss of libido can very readily be inferred from the fact that working class people, particularly poor people, are much more likely to eat "junk" food than are middle class people.  And as has been shown just about whenever it is examined, working class people have poorer health.  And that loss of libido might be one aspect of poor health scarcely needs stating.

So phthalate levels were simply a proxy for social class and it was social class behind the lower levels of libido, not phthalates themselves.

All that is fairly obvious so poverty should have been the first thing controlled for in the study.  Was it?  I would be surprised.  I would be surprised if income was even asked of the patients.  We will have to wait for the study to be published before we know, however. Given the ubiquity of class effects, however, a class effect has to be the default interpretation of the results.  Evidence that phthalates are harmless is summarized here

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Chemicals found in PVC flooring, plastic shower curtains, processed food and other trappings of modern life may be sapping women’s interest in sex.

A study has linked low libido with the additives used to soften plastics which are found in every home.

Women with the highest levels of phthalates in their bodies were more than twice as likely to say ‘not tonight dear’ as those with the lowest amounts.

Phthalates are man-made chemicals thought to interfere with the natural hormones that are crucial to overall health.

They are found in everything from PVC flooring and shower curtains to car dashboards – and may also be in our food. Tiny particles can enter our systems either through breathing or eating.

Previous studies have linked them to diabetes and asthma. They have also been blamed for feminising the brains of baby boys and last year the World Health Organisation warned they have ‘serious implications for health’.

The latest research, presented at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s annual conference in Honolulu, suggests they are doing psychological, as well as physical, damage.

In the first study of its kind, Dr Emily Barrett, of the University of Rochester School of Medicine in the US, measured levels of phthalates in the urine of 360 pregnant women in their 20s and 30s.

She also asked them how often they lost interest in sex in the months leading up to their pregnancy.

Those with the most phthalates in their bodies were two and a half times as likely to say they had frequently lacked interest in sex as those with the least.

Dr Barrett suspects that phthalates interfere with the production of sex hormones oestrogen and testosterone, both of which are involved in female libido.

She said that food is a significant source of phthalates, particularly processed and highly-packaged products. It is thought to get into into food from processing equipment and from packaging.

Dr Barrett, who tried to avoid fast food when pregnant over fears that the chemicals it contains would harm her unborn baby, said: ‘One of the recommendations... to potentially lower your exposure is to eat less processed food and to pick fresh things without packaging.’

A spokesman for the Chemical Industries Association, which represents manufacturers, said: ‘We are not aware of any globally accepted tests which can yet measure the effect chemical exposure may have on libido.’

He added that phthalates are among the most researched chemicals and the use of any that affect fertility is restricted.

Certain phthalates are banned from use in cosmetics, toiletries and toys in the EU and further restrictions are due next year.

More HERE

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Voting Democrat Could Endanger Your Health



On Tuesday, Nov. 4, millions of Americans will head to the polls to vote in one of the more crucial elections of modern times. As we’ve witnessed the recent debacle surrounding the Obama administration’s response to Ebola, and its orchestrated dispersal of illegal alien children throughout the nation -- with support from the Democrat Party every step of the way -- one thing becomes clear: A vote for any Democrat is hazardous to your health.

Most Americans are now distressingly aware of the series of unconscionable bungles by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Nurses Nina Pham and Amber Vinson have both been infected by the late Patient Zero, Thomas Eric Duncan, and the CDC response has been pathetic. CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden first sought to blame Pham herself for a “protocol breach,” even as it was subsequently revealed such protocols were either haphazardly applied or non-existent. Even worse, Vinson was cleared to fly to Ohio and back to Texas by the CDC itself, despite reporting a temperature. As a result, the agency was not only forced to monitor more than 100 people in Ohio, but hundreds more people that flew on the same Frontier Airlines plane in subsequent flights. Another hospital worker exposed to Duncan’s medical specimens was quarantined -- on a Carnival Magic cruise ship.

There are numerous other examples of lapses committed by both the hospital and the CDC, but all of them have only happened for one overriding reason: Barack Obama refused to restrict incoming flights from Ebola-ravaged nations in West Africa. And make no mistake: Every subsequent bureaucratic failure stems from that decision.

Moreover, it is a decision on which the administration actually doubled down in August, when the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) began “waiving fees, expediting the immigration process, and allowing extensions of visas for anyone coming from the three designated Ebola-stricken countries, provided that they are in the United States,” Breitbart reports.

Obama’s fellow Democrats have supported him every step of the way. “There’s no such thing as fortress America when it comes to infectious disease,” said Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO). “The best way to stop Ebola is going to be to stop this virus in Africa.”

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) agreed. “Sealing people off in Africa is not going to keep them from traveling,” he insisted. “They’ll travel to Brussels, as one of the people did, and then into the United States.”

Animals from foreign nations are subject to quarantine, and many agricultural products and other foodstuffs are denied entry altogether. Yet Democrats not only believe applying the same rules to people is impractical, they conflate going to West Africa to fight Ebola with allowing people from West Africa to enter our country.

And why not? Democrats are equally on board with the administration’s decision to allow 66,000 illegal alien children, not only to enter our country, but be dispersed throughout it. Alien children the administration knew were coming seven months before it occurred. This government ad posted on Jan. 29, entitled “Escort Services for Unaccompanied Alien Children,” sought escort services for "approximately 65,000 UAC in total” via “local ground transport,” “ICE charter” and “commercial air.”

The all-out assault on our Southwest border occurred over the same time frame Enterovirus D-68 (EV-D68), relatively rare in the United States, began ramping up in earnest. The CDC and state authorities confirm that 691 people in 46 states and the District of Columbia contracted EV-D68 between August and October. Five children have died from it, and it is also linked to four confirmed and seven suspected cases of paralysis-like symptoms in Colorado, as well as additional cases in Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. In some cases, children have been left bound to a wheelchair, unable to speak or breathe on their own. They have little chance of full recovery, because the disease kills the connection between the muscles and the spinal chord. Stanford School of Medicine neurologist Keith Van Haren believes it's "just a matter of time before we establish a definitive link between EV-D68 and this polio-like illness that follows.”

The CDC denies any connection between the disease and the illegals. How believable is that? Doctors from the Division of Viral Diseases at the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases published a study posted on the CDC's own website. It reveals that EV-D68 "is one of the most rarely reported serotypes, with only 26 reports throughout the 36-year study period (1970 through 2006).” Thus we are expected to believe that 26 cases over a 36-year period, rising to 691 in a single year -- even as the CDC waived its own health screening regulations for entry -- is sheer coincidence.

If you believe that, by all means, vote Democrat.

Those would be the same Democrats, along with their media lapdogs, who have been decrying the “hysteria” surrounding the Ebola outbreak. Really? Nurse Vinson visited a bridal shop in Ohio and flew on Frontier Airlines. Anyone want to bet on that airline's future business prospects, or those of Texas Presbyterian Hospital, which feels like a “ghost town” according to local health care vendor Rachelle Cohorn? How many people will forego booking a cruise on any Carnival Cruise ship? Moreover, note that all of this economic upheaval has been caused by a total of four people (Duncan, the two nurses and the shipboard health worker). Imagine the economic devastation that would follow an Ebola outbreak among, say, 50 Americans, including the massive amount of time, effort and money required to track down the exponential number of people with whom they will have come in contact.

Some Democrats aren’t stupid. Some of them recognize the administration's response to Ebola and EV-D68 is toxic. Kentucky Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes and Georgia Senate candidate Michelle Nunn both declined to say they voted for Obama. Yet is there a scintilla of doubt in anyone’s mind that they and every other Democrat currently distancing themselves from the president and his policies to win an election won’t turn around and support him wholeheartedly if they win? Have modern-day Democrats ever exhibited anything other than a lemming-like loyalty to their party, even when that loyalty is detrimental to the nation?

Don’t misunderstand. Many Republicans are equally loathsome. They love the trappings of power without the responsibility that comes with it when you’re the majority party. Mitch McConnell is willing to “follow the advice of the experts” with regard to Ebola, and many other GOPers support immigration reform even though they know the promise of border control is a joke.

Yet an Obama administration that reduces everything to a political calculation, even a life-threatening, economy-killing disease, along with one that has paralyzed and killed American children, is beyond the pale. So is every Democrat who supports it. The same Democrats who will stand up and cheer when Obama unilaterally and illegally grants amnesty of millions of illegals after the election -- even as nearly 167,000 convicted criminal immigrants with final orders of removal remain at large in our nation.

Thus, the election comes down to the Stupid Party (GOP) versus the Toxic Party (Democrats). Opt for Stupid. Your life might depend on it -- literally.

SOURCE

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Obama Is Deporting Fewer, Allowing More Criminals to Stay

Total deportations by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement shrunk by 15 percent between 2013 and 2014, according to a new report by the Center for Immigration Studies.

Continuing a trend from last year, immigration enforcement activity by ICE officers has declined across the board in areas such as deportations and arrests, with some numbers dropping by more than 30 percent.

The Center for Immigration Studies, which seeks to limit illegal immigration, found in documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request that deportations from within the United States dropped 34 percent from last year and the number of criminal alien deportations declined by 23 percent.

At the same time, “the number of aliens who have received a final order of removal, but are still in the United States, has risen to nearly 900,000.” Of that number, approximately 167,000 are convicted criminals who were released by ICE.

David Inserra, a research associate for homeland security at The Heritage Foundation, said this continued decline illustrates the Obama administration’s lack of interest in enforcing immigration laws.

“It has nothing to do with a lack of resources. It has everything to do with the fact that they simply do not want to deport more people,” Inserra told The Daily Signal.

Jessica Vaughan, the report’s author and director of policy studies at the center, said the decline in enforcement activity has been exacerbated by “the implementation of so-called ‘prosecutorial discretion’ policies” developed by the Obama administration in 2011.

In June 2011, former ICE director John Morton issued a memo to agency employees to provide “guidance on the exercise of prosecutorial discretion,” which he defined as “the authority of an agency charged with enforcing a law to decide to what degree to enforce the law against a particular individual.”

Morton’s memo gave ICE the discretion to decide when or whether to: grant deferred action or parole; execute a removal order; settle or dismiss a removal proceeding; or stop, question or arrest someone for an administrative violation, among other decisions.

It encouraged decision-makers to weigh certain factors, such as whether the person or person’s spouse is nursing or pregnant; the person’s pursuit of education in the United States; the person’s ties and contributions to the community, including family relationships; and whether the person has a U.S. citizen or permanent resident spouse, child or parent.

“This really destroys the concept of discretion,” said Inserra. “It’s supposed to be used to better enforce the law, and right now it’s being used to completely ignore the law.”

According to Vaughan, “ICE deportations from the interior have plummeted from a peak of about 236,000 in 2009 to about 100,000 in 2014” since prosecutorial discretion was put in place.

“This sharp deterioration in interior enforcement has implications for public safety … a decline in interior enforcement means a decline in the number of criminal aliens deported,” wrote Vaughan.

SOURCE

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