This economy is definitely not Obama’s recovery

By Stephen Moore

Trump better take advantage of Obama's underwhelming return
Barack Obama is trying to take credit for the booming economy under President Trump. “When you hear how great the economy is doing right now,” Obama said on the campaign trail for Democratic candidates a few days ago, “let’s just remember when this recovery started.”

By this logic, the Kingston Trio laid the groundwork for the Beatles.

But the contrast in economic performance between the two presidents is undeniable. Obama’s multitrillion-dollar spend-and-borrow policies produced 2 percent growth. In his final year, Obama handed off to Trump an economy that was limping at 1.6 percent.

After only 18 months in office, Trump has elevated growth to 3 percent on an annual rate and the latest projections are that the growth rate for the second and third quarter (which ends Sept. 30) will be over 4 percent. One might say all it took to get the economy really crackling was getting Obama out of office.

Obama is right that this has been a long recovery — beginning in June 2009. But the real economic boom started almost the day after the election in 2016 with the surge in small business, investor and consumer confidence.

No one on the left, least of all Obama, thought this was remotely possible.

Two years ago, Obama famously ridiculed Trump’s campaign promise of faster growth and a comeback in manufacturing jobs by saying this could only happen if Trump was waving “a magic wand.” Obama’s first chief economist, Larry Summers, proclaimed to the world that 2 percent was the best we could hope for. Other liberal economists were so disdainful of Trump’s tax cuts, deregulation and energy development that they predicted Trump would crash the world economy and the stock market.

It’s a little early to be declaring Trump’s policies a “miracle,” as Trump has boasted. All we can say is whatever he’s doing, it’s working.

And that Obama’s economic experiment of Keynesian economics on steroids was a profound disappointment. It began with the $830 billion stimulus plan, and then cash-for-clunkers, bailouts, ObamaCare, tax hikes on the rich, minimum-wage hikes and a wave of financial and economic regulations. All told, the national debt nearly doubled in eight years.

Meanwhile, the Obama recovery was remarkably flimsy. In 2015, the Joint Economic Committee of Congress found that compared to the eight previous post-recession events, “the Obama recovery was the weakest on record.”

The recovery was so shallow that had Obama merely achieved a normal pace of recovery, personal income in 2014 would have been $3,200 higher. If the economy had matched the Reagan trajectory, GDP in 2016 would have been almost $3 trillion larger (equivalent to the combined GDP of Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania).

Even as measured by the left’s favorite metric, “economic fairness,” the policies failed. The index of income inequality rose nearly every year under Obama.

While Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Washington, DC, Wall Street and the energy states did spectacularly well (thanks to shale oil and gas), in the Rust Belt regions of the country — from upstate New York to Ohio and Wisconsin, West Virginia and Kentucky — family incomes remained flat at best. On the campaign trail, I often asked folks in small towns across the Midwest about the Obama recovery, and their response was: What recovery?

Trump didn’t just run against Hillary Clinton and her closet overflowing with scandals, but the meager Obama economy as well. He ran against the runaway costs of ObamaCare. He ran against the regulatory assault, the tax hikes, unpopular trade deals and climate-change fanaticism. He ran against hopelessness, against opioid addiction, the $10 trillion rise in the national debt and income stagnation.

One time during the campaign, Larry Kudlow, Steve Miller and I held an impromptu discussion with Trump about economic strategy. Miller summarized the game plan to Trump succinctly: “Donald, just look at all the things that Obama has done on the economy over the past eight years, and then do just the opposite.”

Trump has done pretty much just that — which explains why the Trump boom is an everyday reminder of the Obamanomics failure.

SOURCE 

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Trump To Test Emergency Alert System This Week And Some Are Already Freaking Out

I love this story

The batty members of The Resistance are putting on their tinfoil hats once again after it was reported that President Trump would be testing the new national emergency alert system this Thursday.

Any user of a modern cell phone is probably already familiar with the feature in which authorities are able to push through severe weather warnings as well as the AMBER Alerts that are sent out when a child goes missing and the new system which is under the jurisdiction of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) gives the president a way to communicate with the entire nation in a time of national emergency.

The system was authorized by Congress and implemented under Barack Obama but has never undergone a real national live test.

That test is scheduled to take place on Thursday.

All major wireless firms and more than 100 mobile carriers are participating in the new Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) program that allows for presidential alerts, FEMA wrote in a Thursday statement.

“The EAS [Emergency Alert System] is a national public warning system that provides the president with the communications capability to address the nation during a national emergency,” FEMA said in a statement.

Compatible cell phones will receive a text message that reads “Presidential Alert” and “THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed.”

The EAS is also used with radio and television broadcasters, cable systems, satellite radio and television providers, and wireline video providers, the agency said.

The WEA system is already used to warn the public about missing children, dangerous weather and other vital information, FEMA said.

The national test of the presidential alerts will use the same tone and vibration associated with other WEA alerts such as tornado warnings or Amber Alerts.

It makes sense right? It should, at least to sane people whose frontal lobes haven’t been turned into mush by the insane paranoia and hysterical overreaction by many to a lost election.

The moonbat fever swamps are absolutely boiling over on Twitter

It will only get crazier as the big day approaches and the lunatics get more restive.

SOURCE 

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Almost Half of Venezuela’s Stores Close After Socialists Win Huge Min Wage Hike

The already-rocky Venezuelan economy is nearer to collapse after President Nicolás Maduro raised the nation’s minimum wage by 3,500 percent, triggering runaway inflation and mass closings of Venezuelan businesses.

Nearly 40 percent of all Venezuelan stores have closed, some forever, according the National Council of Commerce and Services of Venezuela. “It is a perfect storm,” said María Carolina Uzcátegui, president of the council, according to the Miami Herald. “These decisions are leading many business people to say, ‘No, I can’t do it any more.’”

She said government edicts require businesses to sell below cost while employee salaries are skyrocketing. “We have inspections, and they force us to sell at last month’s prices,” she said. “That takes money away from the business because of the hyperinflation, when you can’t even sell at yesterday’s prices because you lose money.”

She said arguing with the government is a one-way trip to prison.

“And anyone who protests against these measures runs the risk of going to jail, without the right to appeal, without the right to anything, simply because the official whose turn it was to inspect the store just felt like arresting you. He did it, and that’s all,” she said.

Inflation is nothing new to Venezuela. The August rate set a new national record as 225 percent, and the current estimate is that inflation for 2017 will hit a rate of 1 million percent, The Washington Post reported.

Ricardo Cusanno, vice president of Fedecamaras, the main business federation in Venezuela, called the government economic policies “the worst of all possible worlds.”

“Maduro raised the (minimum) salary, which was necessary, but announced a series of punitive measures that create no incentive for investment and no trust, and are set to decrease production.”

Maduro has promised to right the nation’s economy, but it keeps getting worse.

“I have never seen an economic plan fail so miserably so fast,” said Victor Maldonado, former director of the Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce, who said over the past 20 years, 75 percent of the country’s private companies closed. “Of the 140,000 left, I’m afraid that we’ll count by thousands the ones that will close after these measures,” he said.

Economist Orlando Ochoa said the system conspires against small businesses.

“The government sector has the monopoly on imports, the currency market is dysfunctional and there’s hyperinflation,” said Ochoa. “So, if salaries are increased by decree, and the commercial and industrial sectors cannot sell their products because of these problems, and on top of that because of electricity blackouts, infrastructure problems and the loss of qualified personnel, which is leaving the country, then it’s easy to understand that many may prefer to close.”

Francisco Ibarra, director of the Econometrica company, said the wage increase was not a standalone action, but the straw that broke the backs of many companies.

“If you already have a demand that has been falling across all Venezuelan sectors, and you have this kind of increase in salary, and then you don’t have any way of adding these costs to the prices, and you also don’t have access to bank financing, and the company already was not generating significant profits, it’s obvious then that what’s happening is that the company is dying,” said Ibarra.

Venezuela’s crisis is so bad that people are abandoning their beloved pets. Unable to afford dog food, families are sending their pets to shelters or onto the street.

As the economy teeters, talk of military action is rife.  Organization of American States Secretary General Luis Almagro on Friday said military action might be the only way to end Maduro’s socialist “dictatorship.”

“With respect to a military intervention to overthrow Nicolas Maduro’s regime, I don’t think any option should be ruled out,” Almagro said, according to ABC.

“What Nicolas Maduro’s regime is perpetrating are crimes against humanity, the violation of the human rights and the suffering of people that is inducing an exodus. Diplomatic actions should be the first priority but we shouldn’t rule out any action.”

SOURCE 

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Cruz Reveals Why Texas Senate Race Is So Close – ‘The Far Left Have Lost Their Minds’

Sen. Ted Cruz is making the rounds in Texas to persuade voters to give him another term in the Senate and says that the people working hardest against him are not the ones with sense, but with dollars.

“We’ve got a race on our hands,” Cruz said, according to Fox News. “If you’re a wealthy liberal sitting in New York City or Massachusetts or San Francisco right now and you could defeat one Republican in the country, it’d be me, that’s why the money is flowing in here.”

In fact, Democrat candidate Beto O’Rourke just tapped New York City wallets for his campaign with a Wednesday fundraiser that charged $500 just to get in the door, CNBC reported.

Donations from outside of Texas are one reason O’Rourke has around $14 million to spend as the campaign winds down while Cruz has $9.3 million, Fox News reported.

Cruz has no illusions about what he is up against. “Despite the fact that he is hard, hard left, he’s the number one Democratic fundraiser in the country, and he is outraising our campaign substantially,” Cruz said.

“With the election of Donald Trump, the far left has lost their minds,” he continued. “The extreme left, they are energized, they’re angry and they have a lot of hatred for President Trump.”

Cruz noted that liberal gushing over O’Rourke never gets to what matters: the issues. “Their favorite adjective is Kennedyesque,” Cruz said. “They all talk about his hair and his teeth, they talk about no substance, nothing about his record, they don’t talk about his being open to abolishing ICE; they don’t talk about his wanting to impeach the president.”

The Real Clear Politics average of polls shows Cruz leading O’Rourke 44.5 percent to 41.3 percent. All of the latest polls show Cruz leading, with margins that vary from one to six percentage points.

Although the race may be close, in one community there is no contest. The Reno City Council passed a resolution against kneeling during the national anthem and criticized O’Rourke for his support of anti-anthem protests by NFL players.

“The City Council has declared that it is disrespectful toward, and dishonors the sacrifice of our veterans, service members, and first responders of the United States of America to kneel during the National Anthem, a time during which all should stand to recognize and honor the sacrifice they have made to our country,” the resolution stated, according to a report from McClatchy DC.

“Non-violently, peacefully, while the eyes of this country are watching these games, they take a knee to bring our attention and our focus to this problem to ensure that we fix it,” O’Rourke said. “I can think of nothing more American than to peacefully stand up, or take a knee, for your rights, anytime, anywhere, or any place.” The Reno City Council labeled that perspective as “false.”

“The Reno City Council considers kneeling during the National Anthem of the United States of America not only un-American but to be one of the highest forms of disrespect anyone can show to the sacrifice and service of our country’s military members, veterans and first responders,” the resolution said.

SOURCE 

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EPIC FAIL: $52,000 Curtains In New York Times Hit Piece Were Bought By Obama Regime

The New York Times continues to show just how abysmal that “journalism” has become in the modern era with a production line of fake news, anonymously sourced hit pieces and outright smear campaigns.

Thursday’s bombshell tale about those $52,000 curtains in U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s apartment was all three rolled into one big smelly ball of BS from the “gray lady” that has gone from the nation’s “paper of record” to the toilet paper of record.

The original title of the article was “Nikki Haley’s View of New York is Priceless. Her Curtains? $52,701” and even though it was noted that the extravagant expense for the mechanized curtains was approved by the smug Obama regime which like the NYT believed there was no way that Hillary would lose the election, it was buried deep in the piece with the misleading headline fingering Haley.

The curtains were likely intended for Samantha Power who would have been a good bet to have retained her job had Mrs. Clinton not choked like a dog in the Rust Belt.

Hours after posting an online smear of Ambassador Nikki Haley, The New York Times on Friday afternoon corrected the article to make it clear she had nothing to do with the decision to spend $52,000 on mechanized curtains in her official New York residence. Hours of criticism had left the Gray Lady no other choice.

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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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“The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist. We must take a lesson from Hitler”

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing was the beginning of the Democrat 2020 primaries, and the winner was the Senate Democrat who yelled the worst possible thing.

That was Senator Cory Booker.

Unlike some Senate Dems, Booker didn’t just confine his attack to Brett Kavanaugh, a mild-mannered man widely beloved by both the Democrats and Republicans who worked with him, he went for broke.

The Founding Fathers were racist geniuses, Booker insisted. Their constitution was flawed. Originalism, interpreting the Constitution as it was written, rather than whatever social justice activist the Dems had managed to plant on the bench, is going to be racist and sexist, because its authors were deplorables.

“Native Americans were referred to as savages, women weren’t referred to at all, African Americans were referred to as fractions of human beings. As one civil-rights activist used to say ‘constitutu, constitu, I can only say three-fifths of the word,’” Booker bloviated.

Who is this “civil rights activist”? A violent racist who had called Adolf Hitler “the greatest white man”.

You can see why Booker might have hesitated a bit when using him to bolster his claim that the Founding Fathers of this country were flawed racist sexist men. Even though, unlike Booker’s civil rights hero, they didn’t admire Hitler or call for the mass murder of Jews.

Senator Cory Booker doesn’t yawn without first rehearsing it before three staff members and two consultants to extract the maximum amount of pathos from each fake gesture. He had been regularly delivering the same attack on the Constitution as a stump speech. You can find Senator Cory Booker bleating the same basic remarks last March at SXSW before a much friendlier lefty audience.

“Look, our founding documents are saturated — unfortunately — are scene with replete through them, these examples all those darker strains of human nature,” Booker held forth at SXSW. “Native Americans are referred to as savages, women aren’t referred to at all. Blacks are, you know Stokely Carmichael used to say, constitute constitute I can only say three fifths of the word.”

Booker appeared to have also quoted Carmichael in June of last year and again in July of this year.

There are examples going back several years, with Booker saying, “Stokely Carmichael said it best: we are the leaders we’ve been looking for.”

In a July interview this year, his Stokelyite attack on the Constitution was even harsher. “Yeah, if you read the Declaration of Independence now, you see the Native Americans referred to as “savages.” And women are clearly, by their omission, a second-class citizenry. Stokely Carmichael — I love how he used to always say, ‘Constitu-, constitu- — I can only say three-fifths of the word.’”

But the sneering line about the Constitution isn’t Stokely’s most famous quote.

Two others are way ahead of it: “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist we must take a lesson from Hitler” and “The only position for women in SNCC is prone."

Anti-Semitism has become socially acceptable among Democrats, but the party that sent in activists to scream that Brett Kavanaugh was a horrible sexist and a sexual harasser by association is okay with Stokely’s sexism and Booker’s admiration of him. The left’s standards, like its vision, are all double.

Stokely Carmichael, better known as Kwame Ture, was a leftist bigot who had called for racist violence.

Black Panther Mark Essex burst into a New Orleans hotel, shouting, “I want the whites!” He murdered a young honeymooning couple, hotel guests and staff members, and a number of police officers. Stokely Carmichael praised Essex, saying, “We should study and learn from the actions of Brother Essex. We should understand that Brother Essex carried our struggle to its next quantitative level, the level of science.”

Carmichael had also declared, “I’ve never admired a white man, but the greatest of them, to my mind, was Hitler.”

"Go home and get your guns," Carmichael had urged after Martin Luther King’s death, "When the white man comes he is coming to kill you. I don't want any black blood in the street.”

"We are preparing groups of urban guerrillas for our defense in the cities," he warned in Communist Cuba. "It is going to be a fight to the death."

Stokely Carmichael burned through the SNCC and moved on the Black Panthers, but his violent hatred of white people proved to be too much even for the black nationalist hate group. But Booker’s hero nurtured a particular hatred of Jews. And his anti-Semitic threats led to actual anti-Semitic attacks.

Nor did Carmichael have any objection to that.

“Zionist pigs have been harassing us everywhere,” he warned at the University of Maryland, “And when this anger rises, will snap our fingers and finish them off." It was 1990.

Senator Booker has repeatedly quoted a violent racist. At the Kavanaugh hearing, he cited an attack on the legitimacy of our founding documents from an advocate of a socialist black nationalist revolution through mass murder, a supporter of Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi and assorted murderous dictators.

And yet there’s nothing extraordinary about it.

Carmichael’s anti-Semitism had been defended in the past by Rep. Keith Ellison, the number two man at the DNC and Dem nominee for Minnesota Attorney General. He was attended by Rep. Maxine Waters.

Americans are treated to non-stop lectures about racism from top lefties like Cory Booker. But they are the ones who are the most in need of those hectoring lectures about the evils of racism.

When former president Barack Obama, former president Bill Clinton and Eric Holder, a top DOJ official in both administrations, have been caught hanging around with Farrakhan, there’s a racism problem.

When Senator Booker casually quotes a violent anti-Semitic racist, there’s a serious racism problem.

It’s a problem of black racism. And until it’s taken seriously, there are no other conversations about racism worth having. When the top figures in the Democrat party are okay with anti-Semitism and racism, then their political faction and its media apparatus has no right to lecture on racism.

In October 2016, Booker tweeted a photo commemorating Farrakhan's Million Man March. "May the unity and spirit of the march continue to live on," he wrote, over a photo of a marcher brandishing a poster that included Louis Farrakhan. No complex interpretation of hand gestures is needed here.

Farrakhan, like Stokely Carmichael, is a racist and anti-Semite who admires Hitler. And he’s a pal of presidents and politicians. Including the men who lecture us on how racist the Founding Fathers were.

There is a deep racist and anti-Semitic disease in the leadership of the Democrats. As Senator Cory Booker brings his hatred for the Jewish State to the Senate, he should be asked whether he agrees with his hero, “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist we must take a lesson from Hitler”.

SOURCE 

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Taco Bell employee fired for refusing to serve English-speaking customer

America's future?

A Spanish-speaking Taco Bell employee in Florida was let go by the fast food chain after a video circulating on social media this week showed her refusing to serve an English-speaking customer.

The video shows the employee at the restaurant’s Hialeah location appearing to become annoyed when customer Alexandria Montgomery tried placing her order in English, the Miami Herald reported.

After getting nowhere, Montgomery asks to speak with a manager.

The employee, who identifies herself in the video as Luisa, replies in Spanish: “She is in her house sleeping,” in a dismissive tone before saying “Honey, I have a car behind you," and closing the window.

She then threatens to call the police. “Can you move, please? I have an order behind you," she says. “There is no one who speaks English. This is Hialeah, I’m sorry.” Hialeah is located north of Miami International Airport and is predominantly Latino.

“I’m trying to order and she’s telling me I can’t order because she doesn’t speak English. Who’s wrong?,” Montgomery responded.

The video shows two other Taco Bell employees coming to the drive-thru window, but neither helps Montgomery place her order.

The customer ultimately leaves without making a purchase. No other employees in the restaurant at the time spoke English, the employee said.

“This incident happened Wednesday night around 10:30 p.m.,” Montgomery told El Nuevo Herald. “I contacted the manager and after explaining to her what happened all she did was apologize and say 'thank you,' and the call was disconnected.”

In a statement, Taco Bell said, “This individual no longer works for the brand.” A spokesperson told the EL Nuevo Herald that “this does not meet our customer service expectations” and “We have worked quickly to resolve with the customer to ensure this doesn’t happen again

Montgomery’s Facebook post garnered over 4,000 comments as of Friday. Most were in support of her.

“Hialeah is still part of Florida and, as far as I remember, correct me if I’m wrong, Florida is part of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, it’s a country where English is the language we speak. This is a shame for the Hispanic / Latino community," commented a Facebook user.

I’m sorry here in America we speak English! You can speak any kind of language you want but if you want to live here, I’d expect you to at least learn our language,” another wrote.

According to the 2010 census, around 89 percent of Hialeah residents speak Spanish as their first or second language and more than 94 percent identify as Hispanic or Latino.

SOURCE 

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It’s against Facebook’s “community standards” to try to stop Jihadist attacks on Americans

Facebook's Unholy Alliance masters are, without doubt, accelerating their totalitarian suffocation of free thought and expression. it is no surprise, therefore, that Frontpage's editor, and host of The Glazov Gang, was suspended from Facebook for 30 days yesterday, on September 11, after posting his article, 9 Steps to Successfully Counter Jihad. Glazov believed that the article was more relevant and urgent than ever due to the skyrocketing Jihadist stabbings in Europe -- and to the 17th anniversary of 9/11 that was approaching the next day.

But it appears that daring to give suggestions on how our civilization can stop Jihadist attacks and another 9/11 is against Facebook’s ‘community standards’. Frontpage's editor posted a screenshot of the reprimand that Facebook sent him and then tweeted about it. (See Below).

The article itself outlined nine ways in which Jihad can best be countered. The steps include:

1. Label the Enemy and Make a Threat Assessment, 3. Stop “Partnering” With Muslim Brotherhood Front Groups, and 5. Launch Our Own Counter-propaganda Campaign.”

Glazov's advice also involves the promotion of supporting moderate Muslims -- a move that is, clearly, horrifying to Facebook's masters and therefore also violates their "community standards."

No doubt, Glazov's consistent campaigning on behalf of Muslim women and girls in his efforts to protect them from FGM, Honor Killings and other Sharia barbarities, has gained him the anger and hatred of Facebook's guardians -- who are clearly on the side of the Sharia enforcers and oppressors of Muslim women and girls.

Glazov is no stranger to censorship on social media -- especially of the insane variety. In April earlier this year, he was suspended from Facebook for posting screenshots of a Muslim's threat to him on the platform.

Then, in May, his Twitter account was temporarily suspended and he was forced to delete tweets he posted which directly quoted Islamic religious texts. His account was suspended for violating Twitter’s rules relating to “hateful conduct.”

It is "hateful conduct", apparently, to reference what Islamic texts themselves say. Indeed,  Frontpage's editor had simply referred to Sahih Bukhari’s texts discussing Mohammed’s marriage to Aisha when she was six years old (7.62.88) and to Qur'anic Suras that mandate the Hijab for women (24:31; 33:59) and sanction sexual slavery (4:3; 33:50).

Glazov has also attempted to write to Facebook to ask what it is specifically that violates Facebook's "community standards" when a person gives advice on how to best defend American lives from Jihad. But when he tries to send his inquiry, a Facebook announcement appears telling him that his "request" cannot be processed. It appears, therefore, that when you are languishing in the Facebook Gulag, not only are you imprisoned without understanding why, but there is also no way and no one to ask about your fate.

Islamic blasphemy laws are here -- and coming to a neighborhood near you.

SOURCE

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Trudeau wants to change Canadian laws to accommodate Muslim crimes

“This fall the Liberals are bringing forward Bill C75, which will change the range of penalties for a long list of serious crimes in Canada.” The three that are enumerated here all involve Islam: someone who abducts a 13-year-old girl will not face prison. This will give free rein to Muslim rape gangs. So will the relaxation of penalties for human trafficking. Then there will also be relaxed penalties for participating in a terrorist group. Trudeau seems to be paving the way for making Canada into a sharia state. These are the first steps toward accepting Islamic law.

“Dangerous Changes Coming to our Justice System,” by Ted Falk, MySteinbach, September 9, 2018 (thanks to Armaros):

Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Government want to change our criminal justice system again. This latest move shows just how soft on crime this government really is.

This fall the Liberals are bringing forward Bill C75, which will change the range of penalties for a long list of serious crimes in Canada.

For example, let’s say someone is convicted of abducting a 13 year old girl? Once he’s convicted, straight to prison right? Not necessarily. Under Justin Trudeau’s new proposed sentencing changes, a judge will now be allowed to consider the sentence as a summary conviction, instead of an indictable offence.

Summary conviction means that rather than serving jail time, a simple fine could be imposed. If that happens, the offender is right back out on the streets.

Or, let’s say someone is convicted of benefiting from human trafficking? Surely that person will go to prison, right? Again, not necessarily under this new legislation. A fine would now be an option for this offence.

A third example – A person is convicted of participating in a terrorist group. Just like the first two examples, I think everyone can agree that jail time is appropriate. However, if the new Liberal legislation is passed, judges again will have the ability to impose a fine on these offenders as well….

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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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All people who shout "Allahu Akbar" while attacking people are mentally ill

That tired old coverup is trotted out yet again below to explain the latest attack.  "No, no, it's not terrorism" we are expected to believe.  They are probably just Presbyterians having a bad day, I suppose. The fact remains however that they are Islamically-motivated attacks and it is about time these puerile attempts to pretend otherwise were abandoned. There have been three attacks in France this week by men described by police as mentally disturbed

A motorist injured two people when he drove into a crowd shouting “Allahu akbar” in the southern French city of Nîmes in the early hours of this morning.

The man was overpowered by members of the public and arrested after his white Peugeot hit security barriers. He had aimed at a café terrace at 1am.

The barriers were in place to prevent such attacks and prevented greater casualties, local security officers said. The two people injured were not in serious condition.

Local prosecutors said that the man was suffering from “relative mental confusion” and had been taken to hospital. The anti-terrorism police were not involved in the investigation at this stage, they said. The man was not known to police for suspected radicalisation.

SOURCE

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TVA: Deception, Theft, and the Golden Rule
   
Oftentimes in life, the values we claim to hold are tested in ways that may not always be apparent. But when those tests come, it may reveal that the values we lay claim to are often not the ones we put into practice. (Sadly, I know this to be true in my life all too often, when I’m honest enough to acknowledge it.)

This truth has been playing out in our community for the last couple weeks in a way that perhaps you’ve never fully considered. The issue at hand is an effort by TVA to “appropriate” private land for its “greater” use. For those who are not familiar, TVA is a nearly 90-year-old federal agency that provides electricity to nine million customers across seven states and operates annually with a multibillion-dollar budget.

The controversy involves TVA seeking to extend an electrical service line across the land of a personal friend and local businessman, Greg Vital. Amongst Greg’s many business holdings is farmland in Georgetown, Tennessee, which is home to his buffalo operation.

What is unknown by many is the fact that TVA purchased a parcel of land over a year ago. TVA’s plan at the time targeted Mr. Vital’s property as the route to extend its power lines to reach its newly purchased parcel. But only in the last couple weeks did TVA finally inform the public, including Mr. Vital, of its plans to appropriate his land for its proposed project.

If ever there was a David vs. Goliath battle, this is it.

At a public meeting this last week, I had the opportunity to meet with several TVA representatives to ask questions as well as express my objections to the manner in which they had contrived their plans. While the TVA reps were pleasant, it was clear that they were less than forthcoming with some of their answers.

The concept of eminent domain is one that most Americans are familiar with, but it’s likely the majority of us have seldom been confronted with such a threat. To have an entity that is all-powerful, both economically and politically, confront the little guy, simply because he owns something it wants, is an intimidating and often overwhelming struggle. But in such battles, Goliath is typically the victor and David more often than not walks away with a few stones in his pocket.

Most of us know the Golden Rule, and we would likely claim it as a guiding force in our lives.

“Treat others the way you’d like to be treated.”

But there is sadly another rule that involves gold as well. It’s this one:

“He who has the gold, rules.”

These two “Golden Rules” are clashing head-to-head in the TVA controversy at hand.

Back to the meeting this last week. As I was pressing the TVA folks about their proposed project, the Golden Rule, as taught by Jesus, popped into my mind. So I asked them a simple question: “Are you a Christian?”

They replied “Yes.”

I then asked them if they believed in the Golden Rule as taught by Jesus, which teaches to treat others the way they wanted to be treated.

“Yes” was again their answer.

So I then asked, “Well, if you believe in the Golden Rule, does it only apply in your personal life? Or do you also believe it is a principle we should practice in our professional lives as well? Would you want someone to treat you the way you are proposing to treat Mr. Vital?”

Silence met my answer. I don’t know if the silence was because they truly did not know the answer, or if it was the reality that the rule they claimed to embrace was being violated by the agency for which they worked.

As I pressed them further, I asked them if they would ever consider going onto their neighbor’s land with the intent of taking a portion of his land for their own personal use, particularly if that neighbor objected. Their answer was an obvious “NO,” and it illustrated how at odds their personal beliefs were with the TVA plan they were supporting and leading.

It would be easy to blame this controversy on a multi-lettered government agency. But the truth is government agencies are made up of individuals. Each individual has his or her own set of values. If our values are deeply rooted, then they should surface in every area of our lives. So when we see the strategy of “appropriating” the property of others via eminent domain (another word for theft), and then that strategy is hidden for over a year (another word for deception), one must wonder what values drive the TVA employees who are overseeing and approving of such strategies. Can they profess their personal dedication to the Golden Rule, integrity, and transparency, while ignoring or contradicting those values professionally?

There’s a story in the Old Testament that deals with eminent domain and it involves King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. This husband and wife pair were two evil peas in a pod and they regularly defied God and His values throughout their lives. One day Ahab wanted to purchase a plot of land from a local farmer. But the man did not want to sell it. So Ahab’s wife used the most extreme kind of eminent domain. Jezebel had the farmer killed and then gave his land to her husband, King Ahab. Ahab got what he wanted while the citizen not only lost his land but also his life. But that very day God pronounced a fateful judgement on both Ahab and Jezebel. (Read I Kings 21.)

Of course, no one is accusing TVA of threatening an American citizen with loss of life. But there is no question that TVA is conniving to take the personal property of an American citizen.

America’s forefathers each pledged their “lives, fortunes and sacred honor” to defend the values of liberty and personal property. When a government agency uses eminent domain, secrecy, and deception to secure private land from an unwilling party, there is no greater threat to the values for which our founding fathers fought.

I’ve often heard it said by critics of biblical conservatives that they should check their values at the doors when they leave their church or personal residence. But this debacle at TVA should teach us otherwise. If we claim certain values are deeply rooted convictions, then they should flow over into every area of our lives. Otherwise these values are merely preferences and have little affect in guiding our behavior in all scenarios.

So time will tell which Golden Rule prevails in the “TVA vs. Vital” matter. Will it be the rule taught by Jesus, or the one too many of the elite of our world love to impose on their neighbors — the power of force and intimidation to gain what the one with the gold desires?

SOURCE

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‘Socialist’ Ocasio-Cortez Wears $3,500 Outfit For Embarrassing Photo With Construction Workers

Leaders  in socialist countries always live high on the hog while everybody else struggles to get by

Socialists claim to want the everybody to get everything, but only after they get what they want first.

New York Democratic candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims to be “for the people,” yet the 29-year-old socialist recently posed for a photo with construction workers while wearing a $3,500 outfit.

In a photo shoot for Interview Magazine, Ocasio-Cortez was pictured wearing a $1,990 Gabriela Hearst blazer, Gabriela Hearst pants that cost $890,  and a pair of fancy Manolo Blahnik shoes that run for $625.

Wow, that’s some expensive taste for a socialist.

The story scorched across Reddit, where a slew of users unloaded on the socialist for being a complete hypocrite. Here are a few responses from Reddit users:

“I’ve never met a socialist who had the faintest idea of redistributing a penny of their own money. They’re all about taking all the time.”

“As a barmaid she took all $500 of the tips after a holiday night at the bar, stiffing the waitresses with only $50. She is only a socialist if she can take as much as she wants and leave the scraps for everyone else.”

“No, she’s a real socialist. This is what socialism is. You tell the people that they deserve more, and those stinky ‘rich’ people aren’t paying their fair share. Then you join the ranks of the elite, bu[y] expensive clothes, lake houses, Audis, etc., and you’re set. This is socialism. This is literally what it is.”

Friday’s catastrophically embarrassing photo and outfit combo is hardly the first time the socialist candidate has come under fire for bizarre comments and controversial actions.

Last month, she was excoriated online for accusing Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro of being sexist and “catcalling” her when he offered to donate $10,000 to her campaign or a charity if she debated him.

Prior to that, she claimed the Democratic Party deserves credit for the 1969 lunar landing. At that time, President Richard Nixon was in office, and he was a Republican.

Before that, she randomly argued that her “Medicare For All” idea — which studies show will cost $218 trillion over 30 years — would be a great idea of America.

Last month, she claimed to be a “girl from the Bronx,” but was exposed for growing up in a wealthy New York City suburb.

In a previous interview, she stuttered herself into embarrassment on ABC’s “The View” when asked to explain the difference between socialism and being a Democrat. She had nothing.

Her inability to answer basic questions about policy warrants scrutiny, as the ideas she wants to implement would literally bankrupt America over time. She shouldn’t make so many embarrassing comments if she doesn’t want to be criticized.

And now, the socialist is wearing $3,500 outfits and smiling for the camera as if she is better than everyone else.

SOURCE

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The Dalai Lama: REFUGEES Should Return ‘To Their Homelands’

During a press conference in Sweden The Dalai Lama said: ““Europe belongs to the Europeans”, maintaining that refugees should be repatriated so they can rebuild their homelands.

“Receive them, help them, educate them… but ultimately they should develop their own country,” said the 83-year-old Tibetan.

“I think Europe belongs to the Europeans,” he added, stressing that countries like Germany and Sweden should make clear that refugees must “return to their homelands and rebuild them”.

He was Visiting the country to celebrate the 80th anniversary of its international anti-poverty efforts just three days after Sweden’s general election in which the Sweden Democrats — a party known for its opposition to mass migration — gained a record share of the vote.

Breitbart Reported:

Speaking in the multicultural city of Malmö, where nearly half of residents are of foreign background, with Iraqis making up the largest single group, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism said Sweden is seen as “a peaceful, generally prosperous country” with a relatively small gap between rich and poor.

“Spontaneously”, reports Norrköpings Tidningar, the Dalai Lama then “moved on to talk about one of the biggest issues in the Swedish election — the reception of refugees”.

Noting that a large number of immigrants have settled in Europe from the Middle East and elsewhere, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning spiritual leader said it was good for nations to help “a refugee really facing danger against their life”.

“Receive them, help them, educate them… but ultimately they should develop their own country,” said the 83-year-old Tibetan.

“I think Europe belongs to the Europeans,” he added, stressing that countries like Germany and Sweden should make clear that refugees must “return to their homelands and rebuild them”.

The Dalai’s comments are not the first time the Buddhist icon has commented on migration politics in Europe, previously emphasising the importance of maintaining the continent as a homeland for its native people’s “from a moral point of view too.”

SOURCE

UPDATE:  Some on the Left are now calling the Dalai "Far Right" -- showing how rigid and super-simplistic their minds are.  Quite childish, in fact

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A Federal Court Just Limited Your First Amendment Right to Freely Associate

The 9th circus again

Should you be forced to disclose your charitable donations to the government? Is it an invasion of your privacy and a violation of your First Amendment rights if the government requires nonprofit membership organizations that you join and contribute to—such as the NAACP, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the National Right to Life Committee, or Americans for Prosperity—to send your name to the government?

Unfortunately, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sees nothing wrong with such invasive mandates in a dubious decision that threatens the ability of Americans to support the causes and organizations they believe in that are an integral part of how our democracy works.

On Sept. 11, in Americans for Prosperity v. Becerra, the 9th Circuit threw out an injunction issued by a district court and reinstated a California law that requires nonprofit organizations soliciting donations in the state to disclose to the state attorney general all of their members who have donated more than $5,000—regardless of whether they are even residents of California.

The plaintiffs, Americans for Prosperity Foundation and the Thomas More Law Center, were both found in violation of California’s mandatory disclosure provision.

Many have questioned the right of the IRS to ask for such donor information, since it is not needed for tax purposes. In fact, the Trump administration has recognized that, and in July, the IRS announced that it will no longer require many nonprofits to file Schedule B forms.

Would you donate to a nonprofit whose donors are reviewed by California’s attorney general, especially an extreme partisan such as Harris, now a Democratic senator from California, or current state Attorney General Xavier Becerra?

Would you donate to a nonprofit if your name could potentially be released to the public, making you subject to harassment, intimidation, and potential economic harm through your job or business?

This was a bad decision by the 9th Circuit that hopefully will be appealed and overturned.

More HERE

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Obama wisdom



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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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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George W. Bush Decides To Help Save The Senate, House

Notoriously silent since leaving office, W. dipped his toe back in the political arena as his brother, former Florida Governor Jeb! Bush ran for the 2016 GOP nomination for the presidential race. He went on the record admitting that he left the top race on the 2016 general election ballot blank and he made a veiled reference to Trump in a 2017 speech. Now, however, as top Republicans get a bit edgy about the impending (maybe) blue tsunami or wave or ripple, Bush is hitting the campaign trail to raise some money.

“While he prefers to consider himself retired from politics, President Bush recognizes how important it is to keep the Senate and decided to help a few key candidates,” said Freddy Ford, a Bush spokesman.

This morning he did a closed-door event for Rep. Will Hurd who is in a district that swings back and forth between parties. Trump lost Hurd’s district in the 2016 election. Then Friday Bush heads to Florida for two events benefitting Governor Rick Scott now running against Democrat Senator Bill Nelson. Next week he will be in Fort Worth for North Dakota candidate Kevin Cramer, challenging current Democrat Senator Heidi Heitkamp. And the last event announced is in Dallas for Texas Rep. Pete Sessions.

The district Sessions represents is the one in which Bush lives and also home to the George W. Bush Presidential Library. It is a race that the Democrats had in their sights when the national party originally listed seven or so districts for flipping in 2018.

George W. Bush has drawn criticism among Texas Republicans since leaving office and essentially turning his back on Republicans trying to change course from the eight disastrous years of Barack Obama. While it is admirable for former presidents to remain on the sidelines and not criticize the current president – as Barack Obama did last weekend – it is quite another matter when he admits not supporting the party’s nominee for President. In this case, Trump won and Jeb! flamed out very early in the primary process. The Bushes, like many of us (yes, especially me) didn’t understand the full extent of the dissatisfaction most Americans felt towards standard candidates from both parties. The voters were looking for something completely different and that is why both Trump and Bernie Sanders rose in popularity. Yes, Bernie is a career politician but he was able to capture the imagination of the new direction of the Democrat Party as it lurches towards socialist dreams.

SOURCE

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Brent Bozell: Corrupt Democrats Are Not 'News'

When seeking to demonstrate the degree to which the "objective" news media act like Democratic partisans, the best place to start is scandals, as in "Have you heard all about the latest Republican scandal?" versus "What Democrat scandal?"

On Aug. 8, Republican congressman Chris Collins of the Buffalo, New York, suburbs was indicted for insider trading and lying to the FBI.  ABC, CBS and NBC played this story to the hilt, with 18 minutes and 24 seconds of coverage in just the first 24 hours, according to the Media Research Center. CBS devoted the most coverage, pounding away for 7 minutes and 6 seconds. ABC came in second, offering 5 minutes and 41 seconds, and NBC was right behind, with 5 minutes and 37 seconds.

On Aug. 21, prosecutors indicted California Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter on charges of wire fraud and campaign finance violations. The morning and evening newscasts on ABC and CBS spent a total of 4 minutes and 44 seconds covering the story in the first 36 hours. In contrast with Collins, Hunter was "lucky" that there was breaking anti-Trump news — the conviction of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and the guilty plea of former longtime Trump confidante and lawyer Michael Cohen to charges of campaign finance violations.

It thrilled the networks that these two men, Collins and Hunter, were the first congressional endorsers of Donald Trump for president. That multiplied the "newsworthiness" for them.

Now wait a minute! Why, that's such a loaded, unsubstantiated conclusion!

Except it isn't. Look what happens when a Democrat is indicted. And tried. And convicted. And sentenced.

These very same three networks, these champions of public integrity, were bored to tears by the indictment and trial of former Democratic Congressman Chaka Fattah of Philadelphia. During the year and a half between his 2015 indictment and 2016 conviction and sentencing for misappropriating hundreds of thousands of dollars of federal, charitable and campaign funds, the ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening programs offered a measly 68 seconds of "news."

In other words: Collins received 16 times as much coverage as Fattah in just one day. But wait. It gets worse.

There's former Rep. Corrine Brown of Florida, who was sentenced to five years in prison in 2016 for using an alleged children's charity called One Door for Education as a personal slush fund for herself and several aides. She used it for more than $300,000 in personal expenses, including tickets for NFL games and a luxury box for a Beyonce concert. "Brazen barely describes it," the judge, Timothy Corrigan, said of Brown's sham charity. Never heard of her? There's a reason.

Network coverage: Zero. Zilch. Nada.

Both Fattah and Brown were members of the Congressional Black Caucus and were defeated in 2016 primaries by other black Democrats after the national whisper of their indictments. Both had been in Congress for two decades and faced no serious general-election opposition for most of that time.

There are other House Republican scandals the networks have noticed since Fattah and Brown. On Dec. 13, 2016, NBC's "Today" featured a nearly two-minute-long report on former GOP congressman Aaron Schock's arraignment on corruption charges in federal court.

Even after they leave office, Republicans garner more attention than incumbent Democrats.

On Oct. 5, 2017, when pro-life Republican Congressman Tim Murphy from Pennsylvania resigned after the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported he had urged his mistress to get an abortion (she wasn't actually pregnant), all three broadcast evening shows ran reports on it. It added up to more than 6 1/2 minutes of coverage in the morning and evening, and almost 5 minutes of it aired on NBC.

Think of this, and then feel free to laugh at NBC's Chuck Todd, who proclaimed on Sunday's "Meet the Press" that charges of a liberal bias in the media are an old Roger Ailes tactic "not based in much fact."

SOURCE

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Kavanaugh hearing antics showed Dems’ contempt of Congress

Democrats like to pillory President Trump for destroying American institutions and breaking the norms of conduct. Yet, during the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Democrats blatantly and flippantly violated Senate norms, rules and traditions — and inflicted in the process considerable damage on the institution.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) interrupted the very first sentence of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley’s (R-Iowa) opening statement. Protesters constantly interrupted questions asked by senators of both parties, as well as Kavanaugh’s answers; they were challenged only by Republican senators. But even in this chaotic atmosphere, Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-N.J.) decision to violate the committee’s confidentiality agreement with the executive branch, pursuant to which the committee received documents that otherwise would have been withheld, was particularly egregious.

On Wednesday night, Booker asked Kavanaugh about an email exchange dating to the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks. He quoted a committee confidential document — that is, a document that no senator had the authority to make public, and which Kavanaugh did not have in front of him.

Early Thursday, to ensure that  Kavanaugh and the American public would be able to see the emails for themselves, Grassley worked with the Department of Justice and former President George W. Bush’s attorney to release several committee confidential documents, including the one Booker had quoted. They were taken off the “committee confidential” roster at 4 a.m.

Despite the accommodation extended to him by Grassley and the Trump administration, Booker proceeded to engage in a display of remarkable grandstanding. On Thursday morning, he announced he would release the documents marked committee confidential. “This is about the closest I’ll ever have in my life to an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment,” he said — even though the documents had already been released.

Booker’s performance is stunning, in large part because he could have had the emails released well in advance of the hearing. As Grassley often made clear, senators were given the opportunity to request the public release of documents that were initially marked committee confidential, but only Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) did so. It seems that Booker decided to put his presidential ambitions ahead of Senate protocol and transparency.

Booker’s flouting of committee confidential protocol is more than a violation of the Senate rules. What he did is also truly destructive for the legitimacy of the Senate itself, given the fact that the documents at issue were provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee based on an assurance to the executive that they would be treated in accordance with certain procedures. Given this precedent, this administration and its successors will be much more reluctant to provide documents to the Senate based upon assurances that they will remain confidential, thereby impairing the Senate’s oversight and legislative functions.

All of this underscores the low esteem in which the Senate Democrats hold their own institution. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that the email string that precipitated all of this sound and fury does not contain anything particularly dramatic or support what Booker implied: rather than seeming like someone who approved of racial profiling, even in the tense post-9/11 days, Kavanaugh makes clear that he “favor[s] effective security measures that are race-neutral.”

In marked contrast to the poor behavior of some senators, the nominee behaved with remarkable patience and thoughtfulness. Kavanaugh answered questions fully, effectively and fairly, while showing himself to be a fair and impartial judge. He declined to answer questions about cases that might come before the court and he avoided being brought into current political debates; doing either of those things would have undermined his appearance of impartiality. In so doing, he followed what is known as the Ginsburg Standard.

As Andrew Grossman and I recently argued in The Wall Street Journal, all judicial nominees must follow the rule, invoked by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during her confirmation hearing in 1993: “A judge sworn to decide impartially can offer no forecasts, no hints, for that would show not only disregard for the specifics of the particular case — it would display disdain for the entire judicial process.” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) once called this approach a “grand tradition,” and Kavanaugh upheld it by declining to answer questions about issues that might come before him, including abortion.

Meanwhile, Harris sought to pull Kavanagh into a political discussion of last year’s Charlottesville, Va., riots, and attempted to probe his view of how President Trump handled the situation. Kavanaugh responded, “I am not here to assess comments made in the political arena, because the risk is I'll be drawn into the political arena.” With this answer, he again echoed Ginsburg, who refrained from answering political questions that were “not relevant to the job for which you are considering me, which is the job of a judge.”

Booker’s action has injured the Senate as an institution and merits an appropriate institutional response. Indeed, only the Senate has the constitutional authority to deal with this matter and, with this power, comes responsibility. Under Supreme Court precedent, Gravel v. United States (1972), Booker’s actions were clearly covered by the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. Gravel, which involved the senator who made public during a committee hearing the top secret “Pentagon Papers,” teaches that senators are not subject to executive branch investigative or prosecutorial action in these circumstances, leaving the Senate as the only entity that is empowered to take any disciplinary action.

Whatever the nature of Booker’s action or his justification for it might be, the Senate is entitled to censure him, and that censure itself is immune from judicial review, as the D.C. Circuit made clear in Rangel v. Boehner (2015). There, a House member challenged his censure, and the court ruled that the judiciary had no power to inquire into congressional disciplinary actions because of the immunity conferred by the Speech and Debate Clause.

Kavanaugh showed respect for the Senate, the judiciary and the hearing itself. The same cannot be said for many of the senators asking him questions.

SOURCE

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Construction of California’s Stonehenge Costing $3.1 Million Per Day

Historian Victor Davis Hanson coined a great nickname for California’s Bullet Train construction project, calling it “California’s Stonehenge.” The project is proving to be a very costly monument to the ego of state politicians.

How costly? California’s high-speed rail project is back in the news thanks to the Los Angeles Times‘ Ralph Vartabedian’s reporting on the ever-escalating cost of the troubled project, where the construction bills are now topping $3.1 million per day:

The California bullet train project has cost state taxpayers an average $3.1 million a day over the last year—a construction spending rate higher than that for the Bay Bridge, Boston’s Big Dig or any U.S. transportation project in recent history.

But still it’s not enough, planners say. Yikes! How much would be enough for the planners?

In order to hit its 2033 deadline and $77-billion budget, the California High Speed Rail Authority will have to increase daily spending by up to nine times over the next four years or risk putting the already-delayed system further behind.

If that seems crazy, that’s because it is. At least, according to some professional civil engineers.

“That burn rate is ludicrous,” said civil engineer James Moore, director of USC’s transportation engineering program. “It is so far outside standard experience that it doesn’t make sense to assume it will occur.”

I would never doubt the ability of politicians determined to spend money at rates that have never before been achieved for an infrastructure project. Right now, California is trying to build the easiest part of its already-scaled back high-speed rail system, over flat land with relatively few obstacles, and it is costing California’s taxpayers over $3.1 million per day. Just imagine how big the daily bills will become once they get to the modestly difficult parts of the construction, or to the parts that will be technically challenging.

But if they cannot, all they would need is to further delay the completion date of California’s bullet train project beyond the 13 years that it has already been delayed. Or cut back the amount of track they will build even more than the 123 miles that they’ve already subtracted from the original plan in transforming it into the current scheme.

Or both. No matter what, until the project is permanently canceled, the one thing that can be guaranteed is that its cost will grow even higher than the $77 billion it is slated to cost California taxpayers today.

SOURCE

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Democrat "generosity"



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Stalin is alive and well in Britain

Hate-filled British Labour Party heavyweight John McDonnell incites harassment of Tory MPs. "I want to be in a position where no Tory MP can show their face in public without being threatened with direct action. They are social criminals & we will try them for their crimes."




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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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Only dummies use drugs

Forgive the over-simplified heading above.  I have clearly been reading too much journalism. What the article below shows is that illegal drug use is greatest in people who did poorly at school. Sadly, the authors are better at using complicated statistics than they are at thinking.  The BIG determinant of academic achievement is IQ, and yet they do not even mention IQ, let alone control for it.  They have wasted their efforts by that omission.  Low IQ would have caused both the low academic achievement and drug abuse.  The study tells us NOTHING new and skips over what was actually going on.  Sad and pathetic

Academic Achievement and Drug Abuse Risk Assessed Using Instrumental Variable Analysis and Co-relative Designs

Kenneth S. Kendler et al.

Abstract

Importance:  Low academic achievement (AA) in childhood and adolescence is associated with increased substance use. Empirical evidence, using longitudinal epidemiologic data, may provide support for interventions to improve AA as a means to reduce risk of drug abuse (DA).

Objective:  To clarify the nature of the association between adolescent AA and risk of DA by using instrumental variable and co-relative analysis designs.

Design, Setting, and Participants:  This study, assessing nationwide data from individuals born in Sweden between 1971 and 1982, used instrumental variable and co-relative analyses of the association between AA and DA. The instrument was month of birth. Co-relative analyses were conducted in pairs of cousins (263 222 pairs), full siblings (154 295), and monozygotic twins (1623) discordant for AA, with raw results fitted to a genetic model. The AA-DA association was modeled using Cox regression. Data analysis was conducted from October 2017 to January 2018.

Exposures:  Academic achievement assessed at 16 years of age (for instrumental variable analyses), and estimated discordance in AA in pairs of monozygotic twins (for co-relative analyses).

Main Outcomes and Measures:  Drug abuse registration in national medical, criminal, or pharmacy registries.

Results:  This instrumental variable analysis included 934 462 participants (478 341 males and 456 121 females) with a mean (SD) age of 34.7 (4.3) years at a mean follow-up of 19 years. Earlier month of birth was associated with a linear effect on AA, with the regression coefficient per month equaling −0.0225 SDs (95% CI, −0.0231 to −0.0219). Controlling for AA, month of birth had no association with risk of DA (hazard ratio [HR], 1.000; 95% CI, 0.997-1.004). Lower AA had a significant association with risk of subsequent DA registration (HR per SD, 2.33; 95% CI, 2.30-2.35). Instrumental variable analysis produced a substantial but modestly attenuated association (HR, 2.04; 95% CI, 1.75-2.33). Controlling for modest associations between month of birth and parental educational status and DA risk reduced the association to a HR of 1.92 (95% CI, 1.67-2.22). The genetic model applied to the results of co-relative analyses fitted the observed data well and estimated the AA-DA association in monozygotic twins discordant for AA to equal a HR of 1.79 (95% CI, 1.64-1.92).

Conclusions and Relevance:  Two different methodological approaches with divergent assumptions both produced results consistent with the hypothesis that the significant association observed between AA at 16 years of age and risk of DA into middle adulthood may be causal. These results provide empirical support for efforts to improve AA as a means to reduce risk of DA.

SOURCE 

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WH Economic Adviser Explains Why Obama Can’t Take Credit for Recent Economic Boom

Kevin Hassett, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, dispelled the notion that former President Barack Obama can claim credit for the recent U.S. economic boom that has occurred during the Trump administration.

“One of the hypotheses that’s been floating around about the economy lately is that the strong economy that we’re seeing is just a continuation of recent trends. And, you know, since we're the nerds at the White House, we decided that this is a testable hypothesis. And so what we can do is we can go out and we can estimate recent trends -- that is, trends that ran in the economy up to the point of the last election -- and then compare the latest data to the recent trends,” he said.

Hassett showed several slides illustrating economic factors like small business optimism, business investment, structures, and equipment investment. Small business optimism, he illustrated, is at near record high, second only to July 1983.

“And so, I think that if you look at this chart, you can see that the first thing is small-business optimism. The middle chart is the percent reporting now as a good time to expand. The last one is the percent expecting higher real sales in six months. I think if you look at any of those, you'd say, ‘Gee, that doesn't really look like the continuation of a recent trend,’” he said.

Business investment is up more than $300 billion over the trend, Hassett noted.

“And I think that if anyone were to assert that the capital spending boom that we're seeing right now was a continuation of the trend that President Trump inherited, then, well, you know, they wouldn't get a high grade in graduate school for that assertion.

Capital goods orders and shipments are up sharply, Hassett illustrated.

“Durable goods orders, capital goods orders -- it's a key part of the economy, and it's one of the factors that we look at most closely because it characterizes, basically, the good-paying jobs, the jobs that affects normal Americans -- blue-collar Americans,” he said.

“And the first chart is core capital goods orders, and the second chart is core capital goods shipments, and if you look at it, the blue again shows a clear downward trajectory and billions of dollars, and then that trajectory reversed itself completely when President Trump was elected. If you were going to assert that the current good news is just the extension of a recent trend, then you'd just simply be factually incorrect,” Hassett said.

Business conditions have also improved sharply, Hassett noted in his chart presentation. Furthermore, new business applications have surged.

“Now, one of the things that I can remember at the American Enterprise Institute talking a lot about before I came in here was the fact that entrepreneurship in America was falling off, and one of the ways we can measure entrepreneurship is that, if you start a new business, that you have to apply for an ID number -- a tax ID number -- for your business,” he said.

“And so, in this chart, we've plotted the EIN applications for new businesses, and if you look at the blue line, they were heading up because we were at a recovery, but there's clear upward trajectory way above the trend at the end,” Hassett said.

Furthermore, he said, prime-age workers are re-entering the labor force and finding jobs, as illustrated by his chart presentation. There’s also improvement in blue collar jobs, Hassett noted. Additionally, blue collar jobs grew 3.3 percent in the year through July, the fastest pace since 1984.

“The next chart is prime-age workers re-entering the labor force, and again, if you look at the trend, one of the things people said when we put out our growth forecast that said that we'd have 3 percent growth was we said that President Trump's policies are going to bring factories back to the U.S., give you the capital spending boom that you saw in the previous chart, and that was going to bring people back into the labor force at precisely the right time,” Hassett said.

“Once again, you can see that there's clear break in the trend, and so, if you see a break in the trend in the capital spending, the new plant formation that gives blue-collar workers their jobs ... then maybe we see a break in the trend in blue-collar workers employment as well, and so this is employment for people in goods-producing industries,” he said.

“If you look, again, at the blue part on the left, you can see that there's a clear downward trend going on in the growth rate of that for President Obama, and then a clear inflection timed almost precisely, once again, at the election. And the notion, again, that somebody might defensively attempt to assert that this is a continuation of the trend is almost laughable if you look at this chart and, you know, look at the rest of them,” Hassett said.

His final chart showed that the growth of private nonresidential fixed investment Is well above projections. It illustrated what the Congressional Budget Office predicted would happen with capital spending back in 2017, what the CBO said in April 2018, and then what actually happened.

“And so, I would assert that if you look at the collective body of evidence, the notion that what we're seeing right now is just a continuation of recent trends is not super defensible,” Hassett said.

“And I think that -- I know that we're in a political time and passions are high, but, as geeky economists, one of the things we have to do is think ahead to what historians will think when they look back at this time,” he said.

“And I can promise you that economic historians will 100 percent accept the fact that there was an inflection at the election of Donald Trump, and that a whole bunch of data items started heading north. They will, of course, argue for a long time about why that happened,” Hassett said.

“In fact, we provided estimates at the time last fall that said that capital spending this year would go up about 11 percent because of the tax cuts. So far, in the first half of the year, capital spending is up 10 percent, and so you don't have to really reach far for a theory of what happened,” he said.

“President Trump deregulated the economy; we've talked about how that affects growth. The tax cuts have had exactly the predicted effect on the economy that's brought businesses back to the U.S., factories back to the U.S., and created jobs for ordinary Americans. It’s clear in the data that there's been a trend break,” Hassett added.

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Doctor Shortages Explode Thanks To ObamaCare — Who Could Have Predicted That?

A year before ObamaCare became law, an IBD/TIPP Poll warned that it would lead to doctor shortages because many would quit or retire early. New evidence shows that our warnings were dead on.

A recent report from the Association of Medical Colleges projects doctor shortages of up to 121,300 within the next 12 years. That's a 16% increase from their forecast just last year.

Not only are medical schools having trouble attracting doctors (New York University plans to offer free tuition to its med students), but current physicians are cutting back on patient visits, retiring early or switching careers.

An article in a recent issue of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings says that nearly one in five doctors plan to switch to part-time clinical hours, 27% plan to leave their current practice, and 9% plan to get an administrative job or switch careers entirely.

Another survey found that nearly two-thirds of doctors feel burned out, depressed or both.

This is already having a significant effect on patient access to doctors. A Merritt Hawkins survey of doctors in 15 metro areas found that "average new-patient physician appointment wait times have increased significantly. The average wait time for a physician appointment for the 15 large metro markets surveyed is 24.1 days, up 30% from 2014. "

Getting a new-patient appointment with a family physician, for example, went from an average 19 days in 2014 to almost 30 days in 2017. To get an appointment for a heart checkup with a cardiologist, wait times climbed from seven days in 2009 to 21 days in 2017. For a well-woman exam with an OB/GYN, they went from 17 days to 26 over those years.

This should not come as a surprise to anyone.

Eight years ago, IBD/TIPP surveyed 1,376 practicing physicians across the country, asking them what they thought about the health reform bill Democrats had been putting together.

The survey found that a surprisingly large share of doctors, 45%, "would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement" if Congress passed what ended up as ObamaCare. (To read more about ObamaCare, click here.)

The survey generated plenty of attention — most of it from Democrats and the mainstream media who desperately wanted to get ObamaCare enacted. They viciously attacked the survey, calling it "shoddy," "out of whack," "ludicrous," "not trustworthy," "shabby" and "garbage."

Turns out it was the critics of the poll who were shoddy, out of whack and not trustworthy.

Subsequent surveys proved the IBD/TIPP poll right, including one taken in 2015 by the Mayo Clinic that found 54% of doctors suffering burnout, and a 2016 survey that found just over half say they participate in ObamaCare plans.

Obama Mandates and Doctor Shortages

One of the big drivers of doctor exits, by the way, is the Obama administration's "electronic health records" mandate, which was supposed to vastly improve the quality and efficiency of care.

It's had the opposite effect. A Mayo Clinic survey found that the EHR mandate is reducing efficiency, increasing costs and paperwork hassles, and pushing more doctors to quit or retire early.

A Harris Poll found that 59% of doctors say the current EHR system foisted on them by the Obama administration needs "a complete overhaul," and 40% say it imposes more challenges than benefits.

ObamaCare continued what had been a long and sorry trend in health care. Government-imposed rules designed to fix some problem in the system instead generated mountains of new administrative work.

The result has been that while the number of physicians in the country has climbed modestly over the past three decades, the number of health care administrators exploded.

Driving doctors out of the medical profession and exacerbating doctor shortages was not what Obama promised when he started "reforming" health care. But it is what his heavy-handed government interventions are producing. Don't say we didn't warn you.

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The U.S. economy is a gift that keeps on giving

Appalachian Power recently announced utility rate cuts for more than 500,000 Americans. The West Virginia-based energy provider estimates the total rate reduction will come out to roughly $50 million, meaning customers’ monthly bills will decrease about six percent for the average residential account.

What explains the drop? The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed last December. Because of its lower federal tax bill, Appalachian Power can afford to slash rates and pass along its tax savings to working Americans who desperately need financial relief.

This story is playing out all across the country. Because of federal tax cuts, more than 665 U.S. employers can afford to help the Middle Class American workers in the form of pay raises, 401(k) increases, bonuses, and other employee benefits. Job creators are also taking advantage of their beefed-up budgets to expand hiring, extending career opportunities to thousands upon thousands of Americans who couldn’t find them years ago.

Appalachian Power’s utility rate reductions comprise only the tip of the iceberg. Wal-Mart issued a $1,000 bonus to employees. Apple will use its tax savings to hire 20,000 new employees, while Kraft Heinz plans to put $1.3 billion toward pre-funding of worker retirement benefit plans. New York-based M&T Bank Corporation focused on bumping up employee paychecks, increasing its base wage from $14 to $16 an hour.

And don’t forget the Republican tax bill’s positive impact on small business, which remains America’s most important employer. The United States is home to more than 30 million small businesses, which employ nearly 60 million workers—half of our private-sector workforce. In fact, small businesses account for 99.9 percent of all U.S. employers.

When they succeed, the U.S. economy flourishes. And they are succeeding!

Because of lower rates and increased deductions, job creators—large and small—now have more resources to invest in business expansion and job creation, bringing undeniable economic prosperity to local communities. The list of tax cut beneficiaries certainly includes America’s largest corporations, but it would be foolish to overlook the likes of neighborhood diners and community banks.

Take it from me: I’m a small business owner. As the president and CEO of Joseph’s Lite Cookies in Florida, I run a family-owned, sugar-free cookie business. We bake more than 12 million sugar-free cookies a day. And thanks to the tax cuts, we’re now experimenting with new product lines including sugar-free pancake syrup.

For years, I sent as much as 50 percent of my business income to the government—federal, state, and local. As the owner of a pass-through small business, my business income was taxed as personal income at the top federal rate of 39.6 percent, on top of the state and local tax burden.

But the future is now brighter—because of our tax savings. Thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, I not only awarded four-figure raises to key employees, but also purchased new computer systems and created new product packaging for international expansion.

The bottom line is this: When you help job creators, you are helping those who depend on them—not millionaires and billionaires, but everyday Americans in need of a leg up. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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US threatens to sanction Hague war crimes judges

The United States has said it will sanction, arrest and prosecute judges of the International Criminal Court if they charge Americans who served in Afghanistan with war crimes.

John Bolton, President Trump’s hawkish national security adviser, also vowed to punish any foreign government that helped the court to hold Americans or Israelis to account for alleged war crimes including torture.

He repeated a State Department announcement from earlier yesterday shutting the Palestine Liberation Organisation office in Washington, effectively the Palestinian embassy, as punishment for its calls for Israel to be investigated by the court in the Hague.

Judges are considering whether to open formal investigations into alleged war crimes by Israel in Gaza and Americans in Afghanistan.

“The United States will use any means necessary, including force, to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court,” Mr Bolton told the right-wing Federalist Society.

He proposed banning the court’s judges and prosecutors from entering the US, sanctioning any funds they had in the country and pursuing them through the American courts. He also called on the US to negotiate binding agreements with allies prohibiting them from surrendering Americans to the Hague and warned countries co-operating with the court that they could find American aid funds and military assistance cut off as a result.

Mr Bolton added that the US would let the court “die on its own”.

SOURCE 

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Trump administration orders closure of PLO office in Washington

The Trump administration on Monday ordered the closure of the Palestine Liberation Organization office in Washington, saying that the PLO “has not taken steps to advance the start of direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel.”

The closure was announced by the State Department shortly before White House national security adviser John Bolton, in his first major policy speech, threatened U.S. punishment for individuals and countries that cooperate with the International Criminal Court, where the Palestinians have lodged complaints against Israel.

“The United States supports a direct and robust peace process,” Bolton said, “and we will not allow the ICC, or any other organization, to constrain Israel’s right to self-defense.”

The PLO is recognized by most of the world as the “legitimate representative” of Palestinians. Its office in Washington — while not recognized as an embassy, since there is no recognition of a Palestinian state — is one of the few Palestinian vehicles for communication with the levers of U.S. power. It has survived repeated political and legislative calls to shut it down, across decades of unsuccessful U.S. efforts to forge a peace agreement between Palestinians and Israelis.

But Monday’s order to shutter it within 30 days comes amid the Trump administration’s systematic chipping way at the core tenets of Palestinian aspirations for any negotiations and its ramping up of financial pressure on the Palestinian Authority that governs the West Bank.

Late last year, President Trump declared U.S. recognition of the contested city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. This year, the State Department canceled most U.S. aid funding to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Late last month, in a move that effectively dismissed any Palestinian right of return to contested land, the administration called for a redefinition of Palestinian refu­gee status and said the United States — long the largest individual donor — would no longer fund the U.N. refu­gee aid program. Israel rejects any “right of return,” and considers the demand a main stumbling block to peace.

Last week, the administration said it would withdraw $25 million in support for six East Jerusalem hospitals that are primarily used by Palestinians. Largely church-run, they traditionally serve as the main providers of care for those referred for treatment not available in the West Bank and Gaza.

The Palestinians say those measures are designed to lay the groundwork for a yet-to-be-revealed U.S. peace proposal that they charge is already rigged in Israel’s favor. Since the Jerusalem announcement, they have refused to meet with U.S. negotiators, led by White House senior aide and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.

In its statement justifying the PLO closure, the State Department said that far from cooperating, “the PLO has condemned a U.S. peace plan they have not yet seen and refused to engage with the U.S. government with respect to peace efforts and otherwise.” Although Trump has often declared “progress” in the secretive compiling of what Kushner and others have said would be a “comprehensive” plan, its release has repeatedly been delayed.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat called the measure the continuation of a policy of “collective punishment” by the administration. “These people have decided to stand on the wrong side of history by protecting war criminals and destroying the two-state solution,” he said.

The United States, he said, is not “part of the peace process” and does not even have the right to “sit in the room” during any negotiations. Erekat dismissed U.S. officials such as David Friedman, the ambassador to Israel, as a “group of settlers” pursuing a right-wing Israeli agenda.

Numerous Palestinian officials have said that the United States can no longer be an “honest broker” for peace. Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the PLO’s executive committee, described Monday’s action as a form of “crude and vicious blackmail” and “clear proof of American collusion with Israel’s occupation.”

The White House has been “very upfront throughout the process and the fact that we want to see peace, we want to have those conversations, we want to help broker that deal,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “Certainly, we have a great deal of support with our friend and ally in Israel. But again, we are as committed today as we’ve ever been to the peace process.”

The announcement is likely to be widely welcomed by the Israeli government, which was on holiday Monday to mark Rosh Hashanah.

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The myth of a New Nazism

In June, former UK prime minister and Labour leader Tony Blair warned that today’s rising tide of populism risked ‘a return to the 1930s’. He is far from alone in drawing such an analogy. Over the past two years, since the election of Donald Trump in the US, and the Brexit vote in the UK, a flurry of op-eds, endless political speeches and countless books have all made a similar claim: that just as the institutions of liberal democracy nurtured, and then fell to, Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party, so too might our institutions nurture and fall to contemporary fascists in populist clothing.

Yet just how accurate is this analogy? It certainly does a service for those seeking to delegitimise the Trump or Brexit votes, but does it do a disservice to history? To answer these questions, we decided to speak to associate professor of history Udi Greenberg, author of the superb The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War, and, with Daniel Bessner, co-author of the essay ‘The Weimar Analogy’.

spiked review: Do you think the Weimar analogy – that, effectively, today’s populists are yesterday’s fascists – obscures the historical specificity of the rise of Nazis?

Udi Greenberg: Every analogy has its limits, but that doesn’t mean analogies can’t be useful. The question is how we use it and to what purpose, and I think the usage of the Weimar analogy for our specific moment is more distracting than helpful. That is in part because the differences between the fall of the Weimar Republic and the populist surge today far outweigh the similarities.

For a start, the collapse of the Weimar Republic happened in the midst of the worst economic crisis of the 20th century, when a third of the potential workforce was unemployed. Nothing on the scale of that economic calamity is happening today. Yes, the rise of populism is still tied to important economic transformations that have happened in the past two decades, but these do not amount to anything of the order of the Great Depression.

The analogy between today and the rise of the Nazis obscures far more than it illuminates

The Weimar Republic also fell because the fascist movement used mass violence on the streets and decimated democratic and socialist, left-wing political forces. We have not seen anything similar to that today. Even the despicable violent march of white supremacists in Charlottesville in Virginia last summer, which rightfully drew so much media attention, was nothing like the violence that erupted in the streets of Germany and other European countries in the 1930s.

So it seems to me the analogy between today and the rise of the Nazis obscures far more than it illuminates.

review: Did the intense class conflict of the 1920s and 1930s not also play a considerable role? Bolshevism, in light of the Russian Revolution, was considered a real threat, certainly in light of the Munich Soviet of 1918-19. There was so much to frighten certain sections of German society towards the National Socialists.

Greenberg: That is very accurate. The politics of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe were defined perhaps more than anything by anti-Communism, by a fear of a potential popular Communist uprising, the fear of a violent transformation of society along the lines of the Soviet model. Nothing of this kind is really in operation today in our political culture. The rise of fascism was an explicitly right-wing response to the rise of militant Communism. And that makes it very, very different from the rise of populism today.

Finally, in terms of the historical specificity of the rise of the Nazis, political life in the 1920s and 1930s was shaped by the experience of mass war. Entire nations and whole generations experienced war firsthand. The formative experience of almost all the leaders of fascist movements in Germany and elsewhere was fighting as soldiers in the First World War. The leaders of populist movements today do not have any experience of military conflict. War is not an important experience for them. It is a very distant memory, if indeed it is a memory at all in our political culture today.

review: There was also the sense then that war, and not just in the context of German nationalism, was almost a spiritually rejuvenating process, wasn’t there?

Greenberg: Indeed, fascist theory glorified war as a transcendental, spiritual experience that transformed the soul. Fascists and semi-fascist art celebrated the experience of war. War was a major trope in fascist ideology, even in its depiction of a future classless society, in which the working class and the middle class worked together just as they had done during the First World War. This is something that is very foreign to the rhetoric or experiences of, say, Viktor Orban or Donald Trump, neither of whom has served in combat (or in the case of Trump, in the military at all).

review: What do you make of the argument that democracy was experienced almost as foreign imposition on the authoritarian body of German nationalism? After all, Germany’s transformation into a modern nation state in the second half of the 19th century was undertaken by Otto von Bismarck, a Prussian junker and monarchist, who famously declared ‘I am not a democrat’.

Greenberg: There is a long and very important debate among historians about how deep or shallow democratic culture was in German politics in the 1920s and 1930s. For a long time many assumed that because Germany was founded by a conservative militarist who co-opted nationalist and democratic sentiments in the 19th century, its democracy was therefore weak and easy to topple. But over the past couple of decades, an important group of scholars has challenged this narrative, arguing that Germany did in fact have a very vibrant democratic political life, with meaningful elections and parliamentary debates. And that in the late 19th century and early 20th century, people voted in very high numbers for parties that competed fairly peaceably with one another before and after the First World War. As a result, parliament became more and more important as time progressed. It is one of the reasons why, after the First World War, when the German monarchy collapsed, the expectation among Germans was that it would be replaced by a republic, not a military dictatorship. And that was because German citizens had been socialised into democratic norms, and took it for granted that that was the next step for politics.

The politics of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe were defined more than anything by anti-Communism

In some ways, scholars of this school argue that what truly made democracy in Germany so weak was that it was very polarised throughout the 1920s. The fascists and the Nazis were able to appropriate democratic language, gestures and ideas for what we would see as very undemocratic ends. So, for example, the leaders of the Nazi party all came from very humble backgrounds. They were not military generals or aristocrats. Hitler himself spoke with a working-class German accent. So much of the Nazis’ appeal rested on their claim to be the real democracy, the force that was really giving the people control over politics in a way that was dramatically different from the Prussian aristocrats and militarists of the 19th century.

So there is an ongoing debate as to how important the militarist foundations of the German state was versus how robustly democratic it was. This democratic culture, and its appropriation by the Nazis, is key to understanding the rise of fascism.

review: But that is not to say that the Nazis rose to power because of democracy, is it?

Greenberg: No. As historians know, the Nazis never actually managed to win a majority in free and open elections. The largest share of the vote they ever received, in 1932, was about a third. The reason they were able to secure power was because of the active support of conservatives, the aristocrats and militarists, who sided with them in parliament, and, most importantly, because they were using mass violence and intimidation, exiling and murdering their opponents. This is how they came to power, through ruling-class support and force, not because of free and democratic elections.

review: What is interesting about the ‘Weimar Analogy’ piece is that you were both able to bring out a far more telling analogy between then and now, and that is in the response to the rise of fascism, and the response to today’s populist revolt.

Greenberg: Yes, what prompted Professor Bessner and me to write this piece was that the over-reliance on the fascist analogy would lead us down the same path taken by pro-democratic and anti-fascist thinkers in the 1940s, like Hans Spier and Karl Loewenstein, both of whom fled Germany to the US in the 1930s. They came to the conclusion that fascism proved that democracy could not be trusted. And that for democracy to survive, the state had to curtail some freedoms.

This line of thinking, this idea of militant democracy, which proved very influential in the US, led to the creation of very undemocratic, unaccountable institutions like the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council in the US. It was an ideological tendency that also led to the dramatic limiting of political horizons in postwar Europe.

Most famously, in West Germany for example, the Supreme Court outlawed the Communist Party in 1956. And although the Communists were not a significant force in West Germany, the logic of militant democracy – and the West German Supreme Court used this very term when outlawing the Communists – rendered certain political visions illegitimate, and banished them from political discourse. And this created very elitist and what we would call anti-democratic institutions and norms in the 1940s and 1950s.

Anti-fascist political theorists in the 1940s and 1950s claimed that in order to achieve stable democracy you need to limit people’s involvement in politics

This does not mean to say that everyone who invokes the Weimar or Nazi analogy immediately ends up an anti-democrat, but Professor Bessner and me worry that we could eventually end up in a similar place. We are both scholars of the Cold War, and we both studied how political theorists in the 1940s and 1950s claimed that in order to achieve stable democracy you need to limit political activism and people’s involvement in politics. And we were worried that the same logic might lead us in the same direction today.

In our view, the right, progressive response to the contemporary moment should be a doubling down in our commitment to democracy, limiting technocracy and increasing democratic and grassroots involvement in politics.

review: Yet it does seem that the predominant response to the populist moment, certainly in left-wing and liberal circles in both the US and the UK, has been to make a stronger appeal to technocracy, to a rule by expertise.

Greenberg: That is true for some, certainly. It has actually been developing since at least the 1990s, with the so-called left moving more and more in the direction of technocracy, and trying to achieve progress through technocracy, rather than through more popular control of the economy. And I think that is born of a deep disappointment with the masses, and a belief that the masses cannot be trusted to make the right economic decisions. And that tendency developed and deepened right through to the Obama administration, which was very much defined by technocracy.

The reason this recent development on the left stood out for us was that too many on the left today make the same argument as the militant democrats – both contend that technocracy is the best means to preserve democracy. So, if the masses are not to be trusted, then you have to transfer as much power as possible into the hands of technocrats, who know what’s good for the masses, who will make the right call. And you have to shield technocrats from democratic accountability precisely to make those calls.

We have seen this logic operating in the past two decades among centrist politicians, and political elites more generally. And we were worried that the rise of populism on the right will further exacerbate and intensify this technocratic way of thinking. We believe that the left should adopt a very different model of thinking. In some ways, we believe that the logic of militant democracy and technocracy is precisely what led us to where we are now.

review: How difficult will it be for the left to embrace what used to be its own radical democratic heritage, given the extent to which it has turned away from, and often against, the masses?

Greenberg: It’s certainly not going to be easy, but democracy has never been easy. Each generation of political theorists and activists has to reimagine and rethink democracy, and chart new opportunities and possibilities. I believe the crisis of the past few years, and the rise of the radical right in Europe and the US is also an opportunity to do precisely that — to rethink the possibilities of the left. To think of its past, of what it got right, and what it got wrong, and maybe chart new possibilities. We already see it happening in grassroots politics in Britain and in the US, and we can only hope it continues to go in this direction.

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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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