A small grumble

There are times when I wish I could leave politics alone and concentrate on something more intelligent -- such as medieval theology. Medieval theology was brilliant. The name of Aquinas still resounds in the Christian world and the name of Rashi still resounds in the Jewish world. By comparison current politics seem utterly juvenile, with Nancy Pelosi denying that she heard what she was told about waterboarding and Al Gore refusing to debate anybody who knows anything about climate.

But I cannot leave politics alone. I first realized the importance of politics in my teens, when I read in Thucydides about how the demagoguery of Alcibiades led Athens into the disastrous Sicilian expedition -- which greatly weakened Athens and sowed the seeds for its decline.

But the importance of politics was most brought home to me when I took a vacation in California in the '70s. At one stage I decided to visit Tijuana in Mexico just to see what it was like. I drove down the big 8-lane concrete highway from Los Angeles to San Diego and thence to the border. As soon as I got through the border control, I found myself in Mexico -- not on 8-lane concrete highway but on a barrel-lined dirt track. The transition was shocking. I assume the road on the Mexican side of the border has improved since then but to me at the time it told me how important politics is. The landscape on both sides of the border was much the same. What differed was the politics. In the USA politics were governed at that time by Anglo-Saxon values of individual liberty; in Mexico there was typical Latin-American Fascism. The consequences of that political difference were huge and omnipresent.

So that is why I still write about the vast politial follies that I see about me.

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Another pathetic attempt to explain away the black/white gap in academic achievement

An excerpt from another skeptic:

Today’s New York Times column by David Brooks touts a new study by Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) Promise Academy charter schools, two celebrated schools in Harlem. Fryer and Dobbie’s finding that the typical eighth-grader was in the 74th percentile among New York City students in mathematics leads Brooks to state that HCZ Promise Academy eliminated the black-white achievement gap. He’s so dumbstruck by this that he says it twice. Brooks takes this evidence as support for the “no excuses” model of charter schools, and, claiming that “the approach works,” challenges all cities to adopt this “remedy for the achievement gap.”

Coming on the heels of yesterday’s release of the 2009 New York State English Language Arts (ELA) results, in which the HCZ schools outperformed the citywide white average in grade 3, but were well behind the white average in grades 4, 5 and 8, skoolboy decided to drink a bit more deeply from the datastream....

It’s true that eighth-graders in 2008 scored .20 standard deviations above the citywide average for white students. But it may also be apparent that this is a very unusual pattern relative to the other data represented in this figure, all of which show continuing and sizeable advantages for white students in New York City over HCZ students. The fact that HCZ seventh-graders in 2008 were only .3 standard deviations behind white students citywide in math is a real accomplishment, and represents a shrinkage of the gap of .42 standard deviations for these students in the preceding year. However, Fryer and Dobbie, and Brooks in turn, are putting an awful lot of faith in a single data point — the remarkable increase in math scores between seventh and eighth grade for the students at HCZ who entered sixth grade in 2006. If what HCZ is doing can routinely produce a .67 standard deviation shift in math test scores in the eighth grade, that would be great. But we’re certainly not seeing an effect of that magnitude in the seventh grade. And, of course, none of this speaks to the continuing large gaps in English performance.

But here’s the kicker. In the HCZ Annual Report for the 2007-08 school year submitted to the State Education Department, data are presented on not just the state ELA and math assessments, but also the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Those eighth-graders who kicked ass on the state math test? They didn’t do so well on the low-stakes Iowa Tests. Curiously, only 2 of the 77 eighth-graders were absent on the ITBS reading test day in June, 2008, but 20 of these 77 were absent for the ITBS math test. For the 57 students who did take the ITBS math test, HCZ reported an average Normal Curve Equivalent (NCE) score of 41, which failed to meet the school’s objective of an average NCE of 50 for a cohort of students who have completed at least two consecutive years at HCZ Promise Academy. In fact, this same cohort had a slightly higher average NCE of 42 in June, 2007.

So what we have is a truly laughable attempt to generalize from a single aberrant instance. The first thing you learn in Statistics 101 is that you CANNOT generalize from a single instance. That the unusual result was "fudged" in some way would be the most rational conclusion. Teachers "helping" students do tests in various ways is reported from time to time.

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The elite versus the people

Who says socialists and liberals can’t learn? With just a bit over 100 days of the Obama regime behind us, the Hard Left is realizing one of the great truths of American politics; a hard fact that conservatives have known and suffered under for quite a long time.

When all is said and done, there are no “Democrats” or “Republicans” or “liberals” or “conservatives” in Washington, D.C. There are only those “in” and those “not in.” The establishment structure is no more concerned with petty differences of ideology or party labels than they are with adhering to the Constitution. For them, such considerations are plebian and only useful to keep the rabble confused and diverted.

The Left is getting a full taste of this truth. By now, everyone knows that Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania “switched” from being a Republican to being a Democrat. It means absolutely nothing. The fact is Republicans were ready to draw and quarter Specter. He had zero chance of keeping power with the GOP label. So, he changed labels. Nothing more to it.

Within days of his big switch, Specter had voted against his new Party on two big issues. He is still what he has always been; a shill for the establishment. He represents established interests, not the People of Pennsylvania and never has.

The Left sees clearly that Specter brings nothing to their side of the debate. In fact, he is now the same problem and distraction for them that he has been for conservatives for the last 30 years. And, as conservatives tried to rid themselves of the pest through primaries, so too do leftists want to primary Specter for the Democratic nomination.

And just like when he was a Republican, Specter has the White House coming to his aid to defend him and get him passed a primary challenge. What is it about this guy? We all know he was the fool who came up with the magic bullet theory in the Kennedy assassination investigation. Did he keep a copy of the pictures? Does he know something that those in power just can’t allow to become public knowledge? We’ll leave such questions to Oliver Stone to explore.

But the fact remains. Honest people who embrace ideological positions out of deep commitment—leftists embracing socialism and conservatives advocating the Constitution and individual liberty under the rule of law—are blocked at every turn from getting honest representation by an establishment that stacks the deck, blocks primary challenges and denies real choice to the voters.

David Sirota of Open Left calls this an entitlement mentality on the part of the D.C. insider elite. He is getting closer to the truth but he is not there yet. Scott Rasmussen has been showing graphically for more than a month the stark difference between the governing class and the People. His polls on a range of issues have shown that those in power, those that actually run the country are radically different from what most people think and believe.

Want to bet whose views prevail—the positions of the overwhelming majority of Americans or the views of the insider elite? The safest bet in town is to bet on the establishment. They don’t care what the public thinks or wants. And worse still, they cynically use the public’s own desires and positions to divide and divert the voters from making truly radical change.

It is encouraging for those of us who are pledged to the restoration of the Constitution to see people like Sirota start to realize the truth of the situation. I would be hard pressed to find anything on which I agree with him. But on this fundamental process point, we are in complete and total agreement. The politicians and those that control them feel they are entitled to their office and their perks. They become angry and confused and hostile if their “right” is challenged in any way.

And that is exactly why it is so vital that they be challenged at every turn. We need a real debate in America, not the phony stacked deck we have suffered for far too long. Obama vs. McCain a real contest between competing views of government? Please! Give me a break. That deck was stacked from the get-go. And when it looked like the American people might not go for the Obama scam, McCain did everything in his power to throw the race, to ensure his own defeat.

What Sirota and others on the Hard Left are starting to realize is that the entitlement mentality is destructive and harmful to the political process, just as it is in the economic or social realm. It needs to be attacked, debunked and overturned. Once we can get agreement on that fact, we can turn to a real debate on the role of government and whether the government rules the People or the People rule the government.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Liberty creates order: "David Brooks, the New York Times’s resident neoconservative, delights in peddling a false alternative: freedom or social order. His latest column hawking this snake oil comes in the form of advice to the struggling Republican Party: ‘If the Republicans are going to rebound, they will have to reestablish themselves as the party of civic order.’ In other words, give up freedom.”

Seeking empathy on the court: “We might as well start with the handicapping and explain the reasons later. Barack Obama could easily surprise us, but if I were laying odds today I would say the leading candidates to be the next Supreme Court justice are Judge Diane P. Wood, 58, of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago; Sonia Sotomayor, 54, of the 2nd Circuit court in New York; and Elena Kagan, 49, currently solicitor general and formerly dean of the Harvard Law School. Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, 50, a Harvard law graduate and former assistant U.S. attorney, and Kim McLane Wardlaw, 54, of the 9th Circuit court in San Francisco figure as long shots. You probably noticed that all those named are women and all relatively young.

How Ford restructured without federal help: “While General Motors and Chrysler will emerge from the government restructuring wringer with significantly reduced debt, Ford will still likely be obliged to repay its lenders. This could put Ford at a competitive disadvantage — an unfortunate irony for the one Detroit car company that has gotten the decisions mostly right in the last few years. … Ford is like a homeowner who planned prudently and can pay his mortgage, while his spendthrift neighbors get their mortgage reduced by some new federal program.”

Beyond the paleos: "There is a flavor of conservatism that has not been discredited by the events of the past eight years. If anything, its criticisms of loose monetary policies, overconsumption, reckless private and public borrowing, uncontrolled immigration, and foreign adventurism now seem prescient. It is a conservatism unburdened by the Iraq War, the ‘heckuva job’ response to Hurricane Katrina, and the financial meltdown, which are really the biggest contributors to the GOP’s decline. Most of all, it is a conservatism that does not need to rehabilitate the Bush legacy since its leading exponents were never full-time Bush apologists. An objection is likely to enter even the minds of sympathetic readers. This sounds a lot like paleoconservatism, whose adherents are too quirky, too cantankerous, and too small in number to put together an effective political movement. But we needn’t call it ‘paleo’ anything. It’s the ideas that matter. Not so long ago a platform along these lines — limited government, decentralism, a national interest-based foreign policy, and resistance to multiculturalism — would have been considered conservatism without the prefix. And is it really that outlandish compared to the leading alternatives?”

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Obama's dangerous African values

What anthropologists call "tribal values" are very widespread in the world: in Africa, the Middle East, Melanesia etc. They dictate ethical relativism. You have different standards of justice and morality towards people according to whom that other person is. Members of your tribe are treated much differently from non-members, for instance. Such morality is wholly antithetical to Western society, however, as Jeff Jacoby explains below.

It could be argued that Mr Obama's elevation of emotion over law is not, as I suggest, African but simply Leftist. It could be argued that what we see in him is the moral "flexibility" that characterizes Leftists generally. But I know of no previous Democrat President who has argued that the rule of law should be subordinated to emotional considerations. And there is a good reason for that. Any such advocacy could cause laws favoured by the Left to be disregarded too. It seems that only Mr Obama is so dumb as not to have figured that out yet -- despite his alleged qualifications as a lawyer. His law degree may be purely an "affirmative action" one

JUDICIAL DISPASSION -- the ability to decide cases without being influenced by personal feelings or political preferences -- is indispensable to the rule of law. So indispensable, in fact, that the one-sentence judicial oath required of every federal judge and justice contains no fewer than three expressions of it: "I . . . do solemnly swear that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me . . . under the Constitution and laws of the United States, so help me God."

There are biblical echoes in the wording of that oath -- a reminder that the judge's obligation to decide cases on the basis of fact and law, without regard to the litigants' wealth or fame or social status, is a venerable moral principle.

"You shall not show partiality in judgment; you shall hear the small and the great alike," says Moses in Deuteronomy, instructing the Israelite judges. "You shall not distort justice; you shall not respect persons, and you shall not take a bribe." Elsewhere they are reminded that it is not only the rich they are forbidden to favor. "Neither shall you be partial to a poor man in his dispute," Exodus firmly warns. Judges may not bend the law, not even to help the underprivileged.

Without judicial restraint there is no rule of law. We live under "a government of laws and not of men," to quote John Adams's resonant phrase, only so long as judges stick to neutrally resolving the disputes before them, applying the law and upholding the Constitution even when doing so leads to results they personally dislike. That is why the judicial oath is so adamant about impartiality. That is why Lady Justice is so frequently depicted -- as on the sculpted lampposts outside the US Supreme Court -- wearing a blindfold and carrying balanced scales.

And that is why President Obama's "empathy" standard is so disturbing, and has generated so much comment.

Time and again, Obama has called for judges who do not put their private political views aside when deciding cases. In choosing a replacement for Justice David Souter, the president says, he will seek not just "excellence and integrity," but a justice whose "quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles," would be "an essential ingredient" in his jurisprudence. In an interview last year, he said he would look for judges "sympathetic" to those "on the outside, those who are vulnerable, those who are powerless."

When he voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice John Roberts in 2005, Obama declared that the "truly difficult" cases that come before the Supreme Court can be decided only with reference to "the depth and breadth of one's empathy," and that "the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge's heart."

But such cardiac justice is precisely what judges "do solemnly swear" to renounce. Sympathy for others is an admirable virtue, but a judge's private commiserations are not relevant to the law he is expected to apply.

If Obama means what he says, he wants judges who can be counted on to violate their oath of office.

"We need somebody who's got the heart -- the empathy -- to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom," he told a Planned Parenthood conference in 2007. "The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."

With such criteria, what would remain of the rule of law? What would happen to "Equal Justice Under Law," which is carved above the Supreme Court's entrance? What would be left of the 14th Amendment's guarantee of "equal protection of the laws" to every citizen?

Lady Justice wears a blindfold not because she has no empathy for certain litigants or groups of people, but because there is no role for such empathy in a courtroom. "Our constitution is color-blind," wrote Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, in his great dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, "and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." Harlan had supported slavery; he believed whites were superior to nonwhites. He had his empathies, but he confined his judging to the law.

SOURCE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)

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YOU HEARD ABOUT THE ~400 CIVILIANS KILLED LAST NIGHT...RIGHT?

AT LEAST 378 CIVILIANS" KILLED OVERNIGHT--NO JOOOOOOS INVOLVED, SO NO PROTEST MARCHES. What the AP story below carefully omits is that the Tamil Tigers are extraordinarily brutal Communist terrorists who make HAMAS look like amateurs and whose chief victims are other Tamils. They have repeatedly undermined all offers of peace. An indication of their mentality: India has a large Tamil population and the Tigers thought that India should support them. They conveyed that message by assassinating the Prime Minister of India. The result was of course the opposite of what they sought. None of that would of course undermine Leftist support for them if it were opportunistic to do so. Witness the past Leftist support for the Soviet regime or their present support for the Palestinian terrorists. Though it must be admitted that Leftists have never seemed much interested in dark-skinned people being ghastly to one another. Their obvious but unspoken attitude is that dark-skinned people are an inferior race from whom not much good can be expected

A massive barrage of artillery in Sri Lanka's northern war zone killed at least 378 civilians and wounded 1,100 overnight, a government doctor said Sunday, calling it the bloodiest day he had seen in the government's offensive against the Tamil Tiger rebels.

V. Shanmugarajah, a physician working in the war zone, said he feared many more may have been killed since some bodies were being buried on the spot without being brought to the makeshift hospital he runs. "We are doing what is possible. The situation is overwhelming; nothing is within our control," he said. Mr. Shanmugarajah described seeing shells fly through the air, with some falling close to the hospital, sending many to take shelter in bunkers.

The rebel-linked TamilNet Web site accused Sri Lankan forces of launching the attack, a charge the military denied. Military spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara said it was only using small arms in its effort to wipe out the Tamil Tiger rebel group and that there "is no shelling taking place."

The government vowed two weeks ago to cease firing heavy weapons into the tiny coastal strip that remained under rebel control in an effort to avoid civilian casualties. However, medical officials in the area have reported that airstrikes and artillery attacks have continued unabated, despite the presence of an estimated 50,000 ethnic Tamil civilians in the tiny conflict zone.

Reports of the fighting are difficult to verify because the government bars journalists and aid workers from the war zone. U.N. figures compiled last month showed that nearly 6,500 civilians had been killed early this year as the government renewed its efforts to end its 25-year civil war with the rebels.

The government has brushed off international calls for a humanitarian cease-fire, saying the beleaguered rebels would use any pause in fighting to regroup. It has accused the rebels of using civilians in the north as human shields, and Brig. Nanayakkara said the insurgents shot families who tried to escape the war zone Saturday, killing nine people.

The rebels have been fighting since 1983 for a separate state for minority Tamils, who have suffered decades of marginalization at the hands of governments controlled by the Sinhalese majority.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

The Weasel animal (Wieseltier) does give me a laugh. I have outlined his odious character on Feb. 25 but he still seems to have a perch as "Washingtom Diarist" at TNR. He has literary pretentions so I was amused to note in reading his latest effusion that he seemed to feel a need for an excursion into a foreign language. But rather than Latin, French or Greek, all he could come up with (for no obvious reason) was the Spanish word for "opening": abertura. Poor weasel! The funniest thing about his article was however his condemnation of Hillary Cliton and Obama on the grounds that their policies have no grounding in morality or principle! That the accusation was an example of the pot calling the kettle Afro-American was shown by the fact that the weasel made no attempt to specify what those morals and principles should be! He is as morally bankrupt as they are.

When emotions take over, logic flies out the window: “Here is a paradox in the position being championed by several commentators on a prominent anti-vivisectionist website: If other animals may kill and maim fellow animals, and if human beings aren’t significantly different from other animals, why are human beings derided for killing and maiming other animals just as those kill and maim other animals? All those pictures of animals that have been hurt by people could be matched by pictures of animals that have been hurt by non-human animals. Nature is replete with cases of that kind. Some defenders of non-human animals claim that humans are not all that different from other animals; if this is so, why do they demand that humans treat non-humans so differently from how non-humans treat other non-humans? This paradox is a serious one and it requires an answer from those who condemn human beings for treating non-human animals hurtfully! But there are others, too, that are worth mentioning.”

China recovering: "It is now clear that Beijing was right and global markets were wrong on China's ability to quickly overcome its extraordinary economic collapse in the second half of last year. Last week the closely watched CLSA purchasing managers index, a gauge of manufacturing activity, catapulted into expansion territory, matching an earlier jump in the official purchasing managers Index. While inventory adjustments continue to be wild (electricity generation, a proxy for heavy industries like steel, fell 3 per cent from March to April) the latest official and anecdotal reports are mostly strong. "April was another record for us," the China representative for an international car company told me at the weekend. "Our wealthy car clients are back - they never really went away but they were waiting for the economy to turn - and the new thing is that truck sales are soaring." [And they did it by going all out to encourage business. Obama take note]

The fruit of Leftist moral relativism: "A "decade of yobbery" under Labour has seen the number of persistent young offenders plaguing Britain's streets increase by 60 per cent while the number of crimes they commit has almost doubled. In one police force they account for one in seven offences brought to justice while another saw the number of problem offenders more than treble. A persistent young offender is anyone aged 10 to 17 who is guilty of at least one offence on four or more separate occasions within a set number of years. The figures show the problem is growing suggesting a new generation of serial criminals committing more and more crime. David Ruffley, the Conservative police reform minister, said: "These new figures show that Labour Ministers have presided over a decade of yobbery, fuelled by massive increases in the number of repeat young offenders. "These figures make a mockery of Labour's promises to tackle youth crime. There have been 46 Labour strategies since 1997 to try and tackle youth crime and it's now clear they have failed."

British Labour party response to fraud revelations? A coverup: "A Labour plot to suppress the future release of MPs’ expenses has been uncovered by The Times. As the frenzy over MPs’ claims continues into a fourth day, senior figures from all parties will meet this morning to discuss how to salvage Parliament’s battered reputation and it emerged that the tax authorities are expected to investigate whether MPs have breached the law. Plans to bring in a private-sector company to run the expenses department have raised fears, however, that the move is being used as a smokescreen to suppress future embarrassing revelations."

Gangster government gave Chrysler to the UAW: “So reads the Washington Examiner’s editorial today about how Obama effectively gave ownership of Chrysler to the United Auto Workers Union (which spent millions electing Obama), rather than taxpayers (who have spent billions to bail out Chrysler) or the institutions that lent money to Chrysler based on the legal right and expectation that they would receive its assets before the UAW union would. Veteran political commentator Michael Barone also calls it ‘gangster government.’”

Libertarian accusations: “Libertarians say ‘we have no desire to take from you what is yours’ and are called ‘greedy.’ Libertarians say ‘we have no desire to run your life for you’ and are called ‘arrogant.’ Orwell would be proud of modern political debate because it so closely mirror the doublespeak he wrote about in 1984. Libertarians are constantly accused of saying the exact opposite of what libertarians actually are saying.”

Obama hearts Big Labor: “The Obama administration has delivered a strong message to crooked union bosses everywhere: happy days are here again. On Thursday President Obama, who has pledged to usher in a new era of fiscal responsibility, touted $17 billion in proposed cuts to his $3.4 trillion budget. The media noted that about half of the reductions came out of the defense budget, but lost in most reports is the fact that the administration also slashed funding for the only entity in government tasked with policing unions.”

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Presidential Sleight of Hand

A journalist tells her boss how hard it is to keep up with Obama

I planned to write more about Obama's search for housing for Guantanamo detainees. But, before I could get my computer booted up, Obama changed his mind and decided, rather than simply releasing them as he had said in his campaigning days, he would instead allow military tribunals for them and see how that goes. Ok, so I switched gears and started to write about that. He said one thing when campaigning; he does another when he gets to the White House.

Then Monday morning, Obama dropped another bomb – he proposed a $190 billion tax increase on American companies. You're aware that Coke has bottling facilities everywhere but on the moon and that may yet happen, if we decide to develop a program of some sort there. Anyhoo, Coke has plants all over the world and they are run by citizens of the countries they are in. For instance, the companies operate as local businesses in local communities across Japan. The workers are Japanese, the managers and owners are Japanese. The profits are, mainly, Japanese.

Obama and his cronies want to tax Coke for the money made in the Japanese market. That's 'taxes' as in 'extra taxes' as in 'we-want-more-of-your-profits taxes.' Coca-Cola already pays taxes in Japan for a product made in Japan, delivered to stores in Japan and sold to the people of Japan. Obama wants Coke to pay US taxes on top of the Japanese taxes, which will make the price of Coke more expensive in Japan and they will sell less.

Also on Monday, Iran threatened to wipe Israel off the map. Well, that's nothing that hasn't happened many times in the last few months but, this time, they went even farther and admitted that their nuclear program is designed for that purpose – to wipe Israel off the map. Israel, concerned over heightened threats from Iran, recently issued a deadline to Palestinians to leave their houses. On Sunday, Ahmadinejad reiterated his call for the end of Israel. As usual, Obama said nothing and the press all but ignored the story.

I looked around the 'tubes on that one for a while and found somebody saying that Obama wants to have Turkey, Syria and Lebanon side with us in dealing with Iran. Several sites emphasized how Israel will work to get around needing America's help in dealing with Iran. It seems that Israel takes Ahmadinejad at his word and fully expects him to deliver on his promise. President Bush backed Israel. I can't find any comment by Obama indicating he feels the same. However, I did see where Rahm Emanuel met secretly with Israeli leaders to reassure them of our continued support. At least, we will support them if the Jews stop dodging Palestinian rockets long enough to go back into peace talks with the Palestinians. If they will do that, Emanuel promised that Obama would do his part to stop Iran's march to achieve their very own nuclear weapons.

Knowing that Iran has been gunning (pardon the pun) for Israel for over 30 years, and knowing that, if the Jews come out of hiding, the Palestinians will just lob more rockets straight at them, maybe it seems logical that Israel would warn the Palestinian people to leave their homes under the possibility of war if something doesn't happen for the better – and soon. Politics is all about 'tit for tat' you do this for me and I'll do this for you. This was no tit nor was it tat. Emanuel threatened the tiny little country of Israel. Now the question is, who does that tiny little country fear more - Iran or Obama?

Why did the press ignore that story? Because, on Sunday evening, Barack and Michelle held hands and walked around the White House. Sorry Boss, but I didn't pick up on that quick enough to get an exclusive for The Observer.

So I kept watching the news and digging around and then I saw that Obama's folks were meeting with some of Chrysler's creditors and figured that was worth following. I thought Chrysler was going to declare bankruptcy and it would all be settled by an experienced bankruptcy judge in a courtroom. It looked to be heading that way until Obama's reps threatened the Chrysler creditors, telling them that he wanted the United Auto Workers Union to be given 55 % ownership of the restructured company. Any of Chrysler's creditors that hold secured loans will have to settle for about 29 cents on every dollar owed them. So, now the Union is set to own Chrysler. Gee, that President of ours sure is a jack of all trades. Who knew he knew so much about the financial workings of an auto manufacturer? He must have studied bankruptcy law when he was in college.

I started looking into Obama's college major but then I got sidetracked by a hot news story that Obama and VP Biden had zipped over to Arlington for burgers and they were yummy. Now I know why those reporters in DC get the big bucks; I sure hope someday I get a chance to report hot news like they do. Maybe Michelle will come to NC and I'll get to post a story about her and her shoes. Did you know she paid $540.00 for them? I think the store threw in the box for free.

Have you heard about this one? USCAP is an environmental group. They are helping democrats draw up the design of the cap and trade program. World Resources Institute is one of the founding members of USCAP. Guess who sits on the board of WRI? AL Gore! And, he's also a partner in Kleiner Perkins, at least since last year, anyway. KP will invest over $600 million in technologies that aim to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. Sounds like standard business practice 'til you read further and see that, under cap and trade policy, businesses will have to pay for the amount of carbon dioxide that they release during their manufacturing process. AL Gore's money will come from companies that produce products that companies can use to reduce those emissions. Al Gore is part of the group suggesting ways that the cap and trade policy can be structured. He will benefit financially from that policy. What could possibly be wrong with that?

That's when my head started pounding …

So, I took some aspirin and moved on to today's news to see what the President was up to. Remember Tim Geithner, that guy that didn't choose to pay his taxes? The one that, rather than be sent to jail, was chosen to be Secretary of the US Treasury? (I admit, I still haven't figured out what Obama had in mind when he did that but I am certain that all will be revealed at the right time.) Well, Geithner came out and stood beside the President and announced that his office now plans "to end tax loopholes which allow well-off citizens to evade the rules that the rest of America lives by." Yep, he said that, Boss. The rich man who didn't pay his taxes is going after other rich folks who don't pay taxes.

Also, he said that Obama has plans to raise taxes on US companies by $190 billion. And there's when I quit, just gave up. If Obama raises corporate taxes, who does he think will pay them? Big companies don't pay taxes. They just add them to the product they manufacture and pass it on down the line, When Wal-Mart receives that product, they add on a bit for profit and an extra bit to cover the higher cost and then stack it on the shelves. Then Susie Shopper comes along and buys it, paying the accumulated taxes along with the store's profit. Or maybe Susie doesn't buy it 'cause the extra few cents make it too expensive for her budget.

When gas was so high last year, the price of Georgia peaches went up. The price went up because the price for the gas to run the truck to bring the peaches to the grocery store went up. I knew the reason - all of us shoppers knew it. Raising prices at one end of the process simply raises the cost of the product when it gets to the consumer. It doesn't take a math genius to realize that raising taxes on companies will raise the price of the end product and consumers will have to pay that price to get the product. Maybe the President just never shopped for groceries. Maybe the President just doesn't understand how things work after all.

Maybe if the President slowed down and actually paid attention to what he's doing, he might not lead this country off a cliff. And, if he did slow down, I might be able to get that story that I promised written and emailed to you. Things are just going too fast for me to keep up, Boss. I barely get one paragraph written and Mr. Speedy has moved on to a new line of attack. I can't keep up. How does Obama expect us to? Or is that his whole point?

SOURCE

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NOT too big to fail

Washington regulators have justified several recent interventions in the financial realm by warning that firms like Bear Stearns and AIG are too big to fail. Allowing these firms to go bankrupt, the argument goes, would result in fire sales and a domino effect, which pose systematic risks to the entire economy. But Jean Helwege, associate professor of finance, writes that there is little to no evidence to support these too-big-to-fail threats of counterparty risk and fire sales.

In "Financial Firm Bankruptcy and Systematic Risk," which Helwege will present April 18 at the FDIC's annual Derivatives Securities and Risk Management Conference in Arlington, Va., she finds that cascading failures are unlikely to occur because of diversification, and that U.S. bankruptcy law allows for plenty of time to avoid fire sales and dispose of assets slowly.

When justifying bailouts or other government actions in the finance sector, regulators warn of a domino effect: One bank's failure triggers another bank's failure, which triggers other failures, and so on. But, Helwege says, this result is, at best, unlikely in reality.

"While the idea of a domino effect of one firm failing and starting a cascade of addition failures seems eminently plausible," she writes, "the empirical evidence to date suggest that no such domino effect would take place were regulators to abandon TBTF policies." Helwege cites prior research that shows that second firms rarely fail because of a first firm's failure and "that there is never a third firm involved, let alone a fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, or 10th."

"Cascades can only arise when firms' loans to other firms are very large as a fraction of their capital, a notion that is both at odds with bank regulations and good business practices regarding diversification," she writes.

Firms are more likely to be exposed to the same risk because they have made similar poor investment choices; such is the case with the current credit crisis and firms' common exposure to the subprime mortgage market. In this scenario, Helwege argues that "regulatory aid to one firm is of little use to the entire economy. Such assistance might bolster confidence, but clearly increasing confidence among all such firms is more productive than merely attempting to boost confidence in one particularly weak firm."

Helwege writes that the best policy oftentimes is to allow a portion of firms to fail without any assistance. Regulators warn that failures like this will result in fire sales, so they often force failing firms into mergers like the Federal Reserve-assisted takeover of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase. However, Helwege points out that bankruptcy law allows plenty of time for less desirable assets to be sold off slowly so that their true worth can be discerned. In fact, mergers like Bear and JPMorgan, which took place over the course of a weekend, actually allow less time for assets to be properly valued. "Mergers like the Bear/JP deal are examples of fire sales, not paths to avoiding them," Helwege writes.

She concludes that the best way to maintain stable, liquid, and orderly markets — the ultimate goal of financial regulators — is to allow individual firms to file for bankruptcy and slowly sell off their distressed assets while allowing Congress to find ways to provide more general assistance to the overall economy.

SOURCE

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Marvellous news

The Israeli organization Efrat persuades women not to abort their babies -- in part by giving them financial assistance, something that I have long advocated, so it is good to hear that it is now getting increased funding for its lifesaving work

Deputy Minister Ayoub Kara (Likud), a Druze Israeli, declared his intention to do whatever he could to assist the pro-life Efrat organization. He made the commitment following a personal tour of the organization's Jerusalem facilities on Sunday.

"I cannot believe what I see here," Kara enthusiastically said after hearing about Efrat and its activities combating what the organization sees as unnecessary abortions. "There is no other organization of this high caliber in the country. They are literally saving lives here and, in that, assisting the nation in confronting the demographic problem," he added.

"I will assist you in every possible way that I can," Kara told Efrat Chairman Dr. Eli Schussheim. "You will yet hear from me. The whole country needs to know about the great and unbelievable thing that you are doing. I am really moved by what I see here."

Efrat was established in 1977 by Dr. Schussheim, an Argentinian immigrant who served as senior surgeon in Jerusalem's Shaarei Tzedek Hospital during the Six Day War. The organization provides information on abortion that might not otherwise be seen by pregnant women, as well as financial and emotional assistance to expecting mothers who are considering terminating their pregnancies for reasons other than medical necessity.

In his presentation to Deputy Minister Kara, Dr. Shussheim discussed the database of over 4,000 Israeli women currently receiving financial aid from Efrat. The meaning of that figure, Shussheim said, is that the organization is saving the lives of over 4,000 children annually by means of economic assistance alone.

SOURCE

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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The corrupt Leftist crooks who run Britain

Despite the caution expressed below, almost all the crooks have been from the Labour party. Even the Prime Minister has been implicated. Only one Conservative member has been implicated as far as I have seen

The systematic misappropriation by MPs of the allowance paid to defray the expense of keeping a second home is one of the great scandals of modern public life. It is a story that our readers, indeed the whole country, need to be told. Now, for the first time, it can be. As The Daily Telegraph discloses today, it goes far beyond the now familiar tales of barbecue equipment, bath plugs or adult movies bought at the taxpayer's expense. Many honourable members (of all parties, because this is, explicitly, not a party political matter) have been complicit in what amounts to an officially sanctioned and sustained abuse of public funds perpetrated against their own constituents over many years.

The extent of their rapacity is astonishing; and its scale can only be fully appreciated with the disclosure of the information being published by this newspaper. It will make uncomfortable reading for the MPs, for their families and for their voters. But it is right that the public should know what has been going on. Indeed, had the House of Commons accepted a ruling by the Freedom of Information Tribunal, a body established under legislation passed by Parliament, it would already have been published....

Many have claimed tens of thousands of pounds to furnish and renovate what any reasonable person would consider to be their principal residence – the home where their families reside. A large proportion of MPs have refurbished, decorated and sold second homes at taxpayers' expense, using the allowance to pay the mortgage interest and then pocketing the profit or buying another property. Many seem to have come to regard the allowance as a basic human right to be used for the most prosaic purchase.

MPs maintain they are all acting within the rules, but that is only because they set the rules and enforce them. It is arguable that some have acted beyond the rules. Those responsible for the most egregious abuses must have known that what they were doing was far removed from the purpose of the additional costs allowance. Yet because everyone was at it, they all joined in, with few exceptions. It is clear many MPs regarded the money as theirs to be claimed whether it was proper to do so or not.

They have done so to bolster what many in the Commons consider to be an insufficient salary, currently £63,291. That may be so; and it is a matter to be considered by Sir Christopher Kelly and the independent committee on standards in public life in the inquiry now under way. This tawdry state of affairs is having a serious impact on the country's opinion of our elected representatives. A recent YouGov poll for The Daily Telegraph showed that 60 per cent of voters thought worse of MPs because of what they have discovered about the allowances system. Yet the evidence seen by this newspaper demonstrates that we did not know the full story – and nor were we going to be told it even when the receipts are officially published in a few weeks' time.

Efforts are under way to clean up this mess. Some reforms were agreed last week after a somewhat ham-fisted attempt by Gordon Brown to obtain political advantage from a scandal that afflicts every party. However, the central issue of the second-home allowance was deferred to Sir Christopher's inquiry. It is essential his committee expedites its work and comes up with its recommendations before the end of the year. In view of what we know now, there can be no doubt that the current system is rotten and cannot survive.

Any system based on an allowance that MPs are encouraged to claim in order to increase their income must be abandoned. There needs to be an independent audit of expenses that will obviate the need for future publication of receipts. If a system has public trust, it is not necessary for everyone to see what MPs claim. But in order for the Augean stables to be cleansed, it is first necessary to show how filthy they have become. Today, The Daily Telegraph does just that.

More HERE

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Deja vu

We’ve largely forgotten that Herbert Hoover, as secretary of commerce, initiated the first major Washington campaign to boost homeownership. His motivation was the 1920 census, which had revealed a small dip in ownership rates since 1910—from 45.9 percent to 45.6 percent of all households. The downturn was likely the result of a temporary diversion of resources away from housing during World War I. For Hoover, though, the apocalypse seemed nigh. “Nothing is worse than increased tenancy and landlordism,” he warned—though surely many things were worse. With little justification, he predicted that in just a few decades, three-quarters of all Americans would be renters. The press echoed the urgency. “The nation’s stability [is] being undermined,” the New York Times editorialized. “The masses [are] losing their struggle for a better life.”

Without waiting to see if postwar prosperity might solve the problem, in 1922 Hoover launched the Own Your Own Home campaign, hailed at the time as unique in the nation’s history. “The home owner has a constructive aim in life,” Hoover said, exhorting Americans to buy property. “He works harder outside his home, he spends his leisure hours more profitably, and he and his family live a finer life and enjoy more of the comforts and cultivating influences of our modern civilization.” Hoover urged “the great lending institutions, the construction industry, the great real estate men . . . to counteract the growing menace” of tenancy. He pressed builders to turn to residential construction and employers to support the cause. Some, like United States Steel and General Motors, agreed to provide parks and other amenities for the new housing developments that proliferated in response to Hoover’s call.

Hoover also called for new rules that would let nationally chartered banks devote a greater share of lending to residential properties. Congress responded in 1927, and the freed-up banks dived into the market, despite signs that it was overheating. The great national effort seemed to pay off. From mid-1927 to mid-1929, national banks’ mortgage lending increased 45 percent. The New York Times applauded the “wave of homebuilding” that “swept over” America; the country was becoming “a nation of home owners.” The 1930 census would later reveal a significant elevation in ownership rates, to 47.8 percent of all households.

But beneath the surface were disquieting signs. For as homeownership grew, so did the rate of foreclosures. From just 2 percent of commercial bank mortgages in 1922, they rose to 9 percent in 1926 and to 11 percent in 1927. This happened, of course, just as the stock-market bubble of the late twenties was inflating dangerously, making the federal housing initiative all the more hazardous. Soon after the October 1929 Wall Street crash, the housing market began to collapse, just as in today’s crisis, though the reasons were slightly different: panicked depositors withdrew money from their accounts, prompting bank runs; the banks ran out of capital and stopped making loans; and the mortgage market seized up. Homeowners, who in that era typically had short-term mortgages that required several refinancings before being paid off, suddenly couldn’t find new loans. Defaults exploded—by 1933, some 1,000 homes were foreclosing every day.

The Own Your Own Home campaign had trapped many Americans in mortgages far beyond their reach. New homeowners who had heard throughout the initiative that “the measurement of a man’s patriotism and worth as a citizen” was owning a home, wrote housing policy expert Dorothy Rosenman in 1945, had been “swept up by the same wave of optimism that swept the rest of the nation.” Financial institutions were exposed as well. Their mortgage loans outstanding had more than doubled between the early twenties and 1930—from $9.2 billion to $22.6 billion—one reason that about 750 financial institutions failed in 1930 alone. Construction firms, too, were ensnared, since they had heeded the government’s call and shifted to residential building. Housing starts jumped from about 250,000 new homes a year in the early 1920s to nearly 600,000 after the housing campaign—before slumping more than 80 percent after the crash. Construction jobs fell 70 percent from 1929 to 1933.

You might think that the Own Your Own Home campaign would have taught Washington the danger of trying to force homeownership up. Instead, the feds responded to the crisis with the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a New Deal bailout program that made government an even bigger player in the housing market. Congress designed the HOLC to buy up troubled mortgages from lenders and then let homeowners refinance the loans with the government on more affordable terms. In theory, this would both aid strapped homeowners and clear bad loans from banks’ books, allowing them to resume mortgage lending.

The HOLC was a massive new federal agency, employing at its height some 20,000 people—appraisers, loan officers, auditors. By 1936, the agency’s total payroll was $26.2 million, the equivalent of $388 million today. The HOLC eventually received 1.9 million applications for mortgages and approved 1 million. Despite the more favorable terms that the HOLC offered, however, about one-fifth of the new mortgages defaulted, a failure rate that would sink a private-sector bank. Many who failed to pay might have been able to, but chose not to work out any arrangement with the government and essentially challenged the feds to kick them out—which officials were reluctant to do in the face of public opposition. HOLC loan officers classified about 65 percent of the defaults as resulting either from borrowers’ “noncooperation” or “obstinate refusal,” according to an analysis by Columbia University economist C. Lowell Harriss. “This type of noncooperation could sometimes be attributed to a desire to obtain free housing . . . an object that, in view of HOLC’s nature, was not difficult to realize,” Harriss wrote.

Ultimately, the HOLC did file more than 200,000 foreclosure actions. And its purchase of bad loans never revived mortgage lending, which stayed flat for the rest of the decade. The nation’s economic fundamentals were so lousy that little demand existed for new home loans.

Much more HERE

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BrookesNews Update

Obama's economic policy is a recipe for lower living standards : America faces two enormous problems: Bernanke and Obama. Bernanke is doing what he can to flood the economy with money. This can only lead to surging inflation, rising interest rates, current account problems and depreciation. Obama's spending, taxing and regulatory policies amount to an assault on capital accumulation. Unless he abandons these destructive policies any inflationary recovery engineered by Bernanke will be short-lived and possibly followed by a distinct fall in living standards
Professor Mankiw's plan to revive the US economy with a dose of super inflation: Professor Mankiw of Harvard University has come up with a brilliant scheme to rescue the US economy — flood it with money. In addition, force people to spend by taxing their dollars. This is the kind of destructive nonsense that is being taught in the universities
The Australian economy is still tanking : It is finally being noticed — at least by some — that something is seriously wrong with manufacturing and that it does not bode well for recovery. You're damn right it doesn't
US National Security betrayed: Nancy 'Scooter' Pelosi: Pelosi lies through her teeth about an intelligence briefing while he Democratic pals out the US intelligence apparatus with total impunity. This are the same phony patriots and their media collaborators who demand that 'Scooter' Libby by hanged drawn and quartered for having a faulty memory. These Democrats, led by Obama, have demonstrated complete contempt for US national security. Liars and hypocrites, everyone of them
From General Motors to United States Motors: Crushed by a greedy and stupid union, a craven management and arrogant, bullying politicians General Motors is in reality a nationalised car company, courtesy of the brilliant Obama and his clever advisors, and a permanent drain on the American taxpayer. Mussolini must be laughing in his grave
The Democrats target the U.S. Constitution for destruction: To patriotic Americans the Constitution is a sacred document to be cherished and protected. It is a symbol of American exceptionalism and the Inalienable Rights of Man. To the Democrats it is a decaying and irrelevant document, a barrier to their lust for power that needs to be overcome
When Hatred is Common : Why does the world not react with outrage to calls for extermination of Jews from anyone other than Ahmadinejad? If the West is serious about peace, then all hatred must be condemned
Perez Hilton: The foul face of 'gay' activism : So, insofar as liberals continue to dig their own hole by defending Hilton and piling on Prejean, I submit they're doing the other 70 percent of us a favor. In their biting anger, they've cast aside the sublime mask of 'tolerance,' revealing an ugly, desperate and most intolerant countenance

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ELSEWHERE

Obama stiffs Chrysler's secured creditors: "Rebel lenders have dropped their legal fight against Chrysler's restructuring plan, increasing the carmaker's chance of a speedy exit from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Tom Lauria, of White and Case, the lenders’ attorney, said that the rebel investment funds lacked the “critical mass to withstand the enormous pressure and machinery of the US Government”. The funds will no longer oppose a restructuring plan announced by Chrysler and President Obama’s automotive taskforce last week, increasing the chance of the car group getting out of Chapter 11 within the President’s 30-to 60-day target. Oppenheimer Funds and Stairway Capital Management, the two most prominent opponents of the restructuring, dropped the fight, admitting that there was little chance of winning a better deal from Chrysler for lenders. A group of about 20 funds forced Chrysler into Chapter 11 last week when they refused to sign up to a $US2 billion ($2.6 billion) deal to wipe out the company’s $US6.9 billion debt. The debt deal was part of Chrysler’s restructuring plan, under which the United Auto Workers (UAW) union would receive a 55 per cent stake in the company in return for forgiving half of Chrysler’s $US10.6 billion liability to a workers’ healthcare fund. The funds argued that the $US2 billion deal contravened US bankruptcy law because they were being offered a lower repayment on their secured debts than unsecured creditors such as the UAW. However, they were condemned by President Obama as selfish opportunists for refusing the offer."

Congress got 40 briefings from the CIA on interrogations: "On September 4, 2002, Porter Goss, then the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Nancy Pelosi, the ranking Democratic member, were given a classified briefing by the CIA on what the Agency calls "enhanced interrogation techniques," or, in persistent media parlance, "torture." In particular, the CIA briefed the members on the use of these techniques on Abu Zubaydah, a high-ranking al Qaeda operative captured in Pakistan the previous March. These days, Speaker Pelosi insists she heard and saw no evil. "We were not -- I repeat -- were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used," she told reporters late last month. "What they did tell us is that they had . . . the Office of Legal Counsel opinions [and] that they could be used, but not that they would." That doesn't square with the memory of Mr. Goss, who has noted that "we were briefed, and we certainly understood what the CIA was doing," adding that "Not only was there no objection, there was actually concern about whether the agency was doing enough."

More Acorn Voter Fraud Comes to Light: "Democrats are split on how to deal with Acorn, the liberal "community organizing" group that deployed thousands of get-out-the-vote workers last election. State and city Democratic officials -- who've been contending with its many scandals -- are moving against it. Washington Democrats are still sweeping Acorn abuses under a rug. On Monday, Nevada officials charged Acorn, its regional director and its Las Vegas field director with submitting thousands of fraudulent voter registration forms last year. Larry Lomax, the registrar of voters in Las Vegas, says he believes 48% of Acorn's forms "are clearly fraudulent." On Thursday, prosecutors in Pittsburgh, Pa., also charged seven Acorn employees with filing hundreds of fraudulent voter registrations before last year's general election".

Italy hearts Israel: "The foreign minister of Italy said his country's "friendship with the state of Israel and the Jewish people is a key plank of our foreign policy." Speaking at the American Jewish Committee's annual meeting on Thursday evening, Franco Frattini also discussed his country's decision to boycott last month's so-called Durban II conference on racism held in Geneva. The Obama administration joined Jewish groups and several other countries in boycotting the U.N. sponsored Durban Review Conference because of the failure of organizers to persuasively disassociate the conference from its 2001 predecessor in Durban, South Africa, which devolved into an anti-Jewish and anti-Israel forum. "We could not legitimize a message of hate," Frattini said. He said his country's decision not to attend was designed to "strengthen the legitimacy" and "credibility of the United Nations." But Frattini said the conference was a "missed opportunity" because "Europe was divided and hesitant." "The European Union must learn to speak with one voice," he said. Frattini also said he hoped the United States' decision to become a candidate for membership in the UN's Human Rights Council "is a sign there could be room" for the body to improve its role and become depoliticized. He also said Israel's "right to security and to defend itself is strictly non-negotiable and that Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is "not acceptable."

Ethics complaint against Palin dismissed: "An ethics complaint filed against Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been dismissed. The Alaska Personnel Board on Friday dismissed the complaint, which alleged Palin violated ethics rules by accepting outside employment with her political action committee. Anchorage resident Sondra Tompkins, who filed the complaint in April, also alleged Palin participated in partisan activities when she spoke at an anti-abortion dinner in Indiana. An investigator hired by the personnel board to review the complaint determined the allegations did not constitute ethics violations."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Britain shows the fraud of socialism

They are purely destructive. They do no good even by their own criteria. They have been running Britain since 1997

The gap between rich and poor grew to record levels last year, official figures have disclosed. The number of children living in poverty rose by 100,000, the data showed, confirming Labour's failure to meet a promise to cut child poverty. The Department of Work and Pensions yesterday released income data for 2007/08, the last full financial year before the UK economy went into recession.

The data showed that while incomes for the better-off grew only slowly, they still increased more quickly than those of the poorest. Inflation also hit the incomes of the poorest disproportionately, eroding the value of their welfare payments. People are commonly defined as being in poverty when their income is only 60 per cent of the median salary in Britain. By that measure, the number of children, working-age adults and pensioners in poverty rose by 300,000 to 11.0 million in 2007/08 before housing costs are considered. After housing costs, the number in poverty rose by 200,000 to 13.5 million.

According to economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the figures mean that the Gini Coefficient, a measure of income inequality, is now at its highest level since they began compiling figures in 1961. Alastair Muriel, an IFS economist said: "Since the election, average incomes across the population have grown slowly, whilst they have fallen for the poorest." He added that the recession may see poorer households regain some ground if benefits grow more rapidly than the pay of the better off. Many companies are imposing pay freezes and even cuts on staff to cope with the downturn.

The data also dealt a heavy blow to Labour's claims on child poverty. Before housing costs are considered, the number of children in poverty remained unchanged at 2.9 million in 2007/08. After housing costs, the total increased by 100,000 to 4.0 million. In 2004/05, the figure hit a low of 3.6 million.

According to the DWP, the median weekly income in 2007/08 for a couple with two children was £601 before housing costs and £533 after housing costs. Such a couple would be considered poor if their monthly income pre-housing was £361, or £322 after housing.

The child poverty figures represent a political embarrasment for the Government and the Prime Minister. Labour in 1999 made a political pledge to eradicate child poverty, and reduce the "before housing costs" total to 1.7 billion by 2010. In 2001 Gordon Brown said to child poverty is a "scar on Britain's soul."

Ministers have already admitted that the 2010 target will be missed by around 1 million. Beverley Hughes, the Children's Minister, again admitted the target will be missed and hinted that child poverty could worsen. She said: "It is very difficult to model the impact of the recession on child poverty."

Last year's Queen's Speech promised a new legal obligation on ministers to end child poverty by 2020. Ms Hughes insisted that the government remains "absolutely committed" to that goal.

Colette Marshall, UK Director of Save the Children, said: "The Government has clearly broken its promise to lift up to three million children out of poverty in the UK. It is outrageous that so many children continue to miss out on the basic necessities most children take for granted."

Theresa May, the Conservative shadow work and pensions secretary, said: "Gordon Brown's pledge to halve child poverty by 2010 is just one of countless Labour promises that lies in tatters."

SOURCE

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MORE ON CHRYSLER'S BANKRUPTCY

By Neal Boortz

Yesterday I gave you a Boortz economic lesson in an attempt to explain what the Barack Obama administration is trying to pull in this Chrysler bankruptcy. The latest on this story ... Thomas Lauria, a lawyer for top creditors, has officially filed a motion to stop the Chrysler bankruptcy. Lauria claims that the Obama administration has violated the Constitution by trying to devalue the senior creditors' holdings on behalf of junior creditors. What does Lauria base this on? Something called the 5th Amendment. Maybe you have heard of it. Just in case, here is a little reminder:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

But wait ... as they say ... there's more! Lauria, who represents the group referred to as the non-TARP lenders, is going to ask that the bankruptcy court keep the names of his client confidential. Why would that be? Because they have been receiving threats. You can bet that some of the threats are coming from union members. These union goons like the idea of their pension debts being given priority to Chrysler's secured lenders, and I think we all know what union goons do when something happens they don't like. There was a time not too long ago when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms noted that the number one illegal use of explosives in the United States came at the hands of union members engaged in work actions.

But there's another group threatening the secured non-TARP creditors. That would be the White House. Lauria and others have claimed that people within the Obama administration have made it clear that if any of these secured lenders get in the way of Obama's gift to the unions the White House will work to destroy their reputation. Now the White House denies this. What would you expect? But listen to the language ... Obama has attacked these people in public as being "vultures" and has painted them as evil capitalists who don't want to stand by the families of Chrysler workers. If he'll do this in public, what do you think his attack dogs will do in private?

Even if you think Obama hung the moon; even if you're now calling him the best president this country ever had; you just have to recognize the danger in the precedent that's been set here. The United Auto Workers are getting priority for their unsecured Chrysler debt simply because they are political powerful. Now just how is that going to work out for us in the future? Do you want to live in a financial world where lenders base lending decision in part on the political prominence of the borrower?

Giving unsecured creditors priority over secured lenders in bankruptcy proceedings .. now that's change you can believe in.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Obama budget cuts target military funding: "President Obama has targeted the Department of Defense to absorb more than 80 percent of the cuts he has proposed in next year's budget for discretionary programs. In its "Terminations, Reductions and Savings" booklet, which the administration released Thursday, the White House highlighted the results of the president's line-by-line scrubbing of the federal budget. The administration identified $11.5 billion in discretionary program terminations and reductions for next year. The Defense Department will take a $9.4 billion hit, constituting 82 percent of the cuts. Defense accounts for 49 percent of spending on discretionary programs, which Congress must fund each year... The $17 billion in total cuts represents less than one-half of 1 percent of the $3.6 trillion 2010 budget the president proposed in February, and it is less than 1 percent of this year's budget deficit."

Britain still printing money: "The Bank of England yesterday stepped up its aggressive campaign to end Britain’s economic slump by ordering a surprise £50 billion expansion of its radical scheme to jump-start growth by “printing money”. Much of the City was wrong-footed as the Bank announced that it would immediately increase the size of its drive to pump extra cash through the economy by buying government and corporate bonds. The unexpected move will add to the Bank’s purchases so far of £46 billion of government bonds, or gilts, and corporate debt using newly created money under the £75 billion first phase of its radical “quantitative easing” scheme. It said that it would now raise the total to be spent under the plan to £125 billion. The Bank added that the measures would run for a further three months, beyond the first phase that was due to end at the end of this month, extending the unprecedented action until the end of August."

GM draws closer to bankruptcy in first quarter: “General Motors drew closer to bankruptcy Thursday, acknowledging that its revenue fell by nearly half as car buyers worldwide steered away from showrooms for fear that the auto giant would not be around to honor its warranties. The company lost $6 billion in the first three months of the year.”

The usual Illinois corruption: “Illinois State Police troopers seized a high-performance muscle car and set it aside for the personal use of an influential police official. The Associated Press reported that a suspected drunk driver in a 2006 Dodge Charger was pulled over in January 2007. The troopers used a state seizure law to confiscate the vehicle. Once the paperwork was complete, the 425-horsepower vehicle — which had an as-new base price of $38,000 — was handed over for the personal use of Ron Cooley, 56, the Executive Director of the Illinois State Police Merit Board. Taxpayers also pick up the fuel tab for gas-guzzling 6.1 liter V-8 as he drives to and from work each day and on various business trips.”

Moving toward drug legalization: “I think we’ve got a real shot at knocking out the drug war in the near future. Ten years ago, the average person would never even consider the idea, despite the fact that such notable figures as Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize winner), Bill Buckley (noted conservative), Kurt Schmoke (mayor of Baltimore), and others were calling for an end to the drug war. Today, even though there are a still plenty of people who won’t let go of the drug war, despite its manifest failure and destructiveness, everyone would concede that drug legalization is now a credible position, one that is being debated all across the country.”

Insolvent banks should feel market discipline: “Joseph Schumpeter famously argued that the essence of capitalism was creative destruction, by which new economic structures are born from the rubble of older ones. The government stress tests on the 19 largest US banks … could have facilitated this process. The opportunity looks likely to be missed. The tests, which measure how viable banks are under adverse economic conditions, have no ‘failed’ category, even if as many as 10 are reported to need additional capital. … Once again, the question will be how the near-insolvent banks can be kept afloat, to avoid systemic risk. But the question we really should be asking is: why keep insolvent banks afloat?”

Socking stocks: “Just as the economy begins showing glimmers of a turnaround, here comes President Obama with a ‘tax-reform’ effort that’s sure to sock the stock prices and after-tax profits of many of the biggest US employers. Obama’s $190 billion business-tax hike will hit Americans whose jobs and pensions depend on these companies doing well, and will increase pressure on already struggling colleges and hospitals. Why? Because millions of individual investors hold the companies’ stocks in their portfolios, mutual funds and pension funds, as do many colleges, hospitals, museums and other institutions in their endowments.”

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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That famous journalistic "fact-checking" that makes newspapers so superior to blogs

AN Irish student's fake quote on the Wikipedia online encyclopedia has been used in newspaper obituaries around the world, the Irish Times reports. The quote was attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre who died in March. Shane Fitzgerald, 22, a final-year student studying sociology and economics at University College Dublin, told the newspaper he placed the quote on the website as an experiment when doing research on globalisation.

He quoted Oscar-winning composer Jarre as saying, "One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. "When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear."

The quote was posted on Wikipedia shortly after Jarre's death and later appeared in obituaries in major British, Indian and Australian newspapers.

Mr Fitzgerald told the newspaper he picked Wikipedia because it was something a lot of journalists look at and it can be edited by anyone.

While he was wary about the ethical implications of using someone's death as a social experiment, he had carefully generated the quote so as not to distort or taint Jarre's life, he said.

Mr Fitzgerald said he was shocked by the result of his experiment. "I didn't expect it to go that far. I expected it to be in blogs and sites, but on mainstream quality papers? I was very surprised about," he said. He said the hoax remained undiscovered for weeks until he emailed the newspapers that had been deceived to tell them that they had published an inaccurate quote.

The Irish Times said that despite some newspapers removing the quote from their websites or carrying a correction and the fact that it had been dropped by Wikipedia, it remained intact on dozens of blogs, websites and newspapers.

SOURCE

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Israel savages UN report on Gaza attacks

And the UN has gone very wobbly on it

ISRAELI officials lashed out yesterday at a UN report accusing the Jewish state of "negligence or recklessness" in attacks on UN facilities in the Gaza Strip during its war with Hamas in January. "The spirit of the report and its language are tendentious and entirely unbalanced," the Israeli Foreign Ministry said.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who reportedly accused Israel of lying about the damage it caused to UN facilities in the three-week conflict, nevertheless rejected the report's call for a full and impartial investigation into the war. He tempered the report's findings by telling a press conference that Israeli communities near the Gaza Strip "faced and continue to face indiscriminate rocket attacks by Hamas and other militant groups".

The five-man inquiry commission was led by Ian Martin, a Briton who is a former head of Amnesty International. Its brief was to investigate casualties or damage involving UN facilities in Gaza but its conclusions touch on broader humanitarian issues regarding Israel's use of massive firepower in the densely populated strip.

Mr Ban refused to publish the complete 184-page report but released his own summary of it. The report accused Israel of "varying degrees of negligence or recklessness" towards UN facilities in its Gaza operation and said the deaths of civilians should be investigated under international humanitarian law...

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said the report ignored the fact that Hamas and other militants had fired about 4000 rockets and mortar shells at Israel. "After eight years, we said 'enough'. We have the most moral army in the world. Responsibility lies solely with Hamas."

A central issue in the UN inquiry was a much-publicised incident at the Jabaliya refugee camp, where more than 40 civilians were reported killed inside a UN school compound by Israeli mortar fire, according to the Palestinians. UN officials in the area initially lent credence to the report. In response, Israeli officials said the army was responding to Hamas mortar fire from the compound. It eventually emerged that no Hamas fire had come from the compound and that no Israeli shells had hit the compound...

The first of the commission's 11 recommendations was that the UN seek "formal acknowledgment by the Government of Israel that its public statements alleging Palestinians fired" from within the UN school compound "were untrue and regretted". The report, however, apparently made no mention of the initial claims that Israeli shells had hit the school, causing more than 40 civilian casualties - a claim supported at the time by a UN agency - which were also untrue...

"When we saw the summary of the report, we were appalled," said an Israeli official to the news agency YNet. "It was written as if they didn't listen, didn't understand, maybe didn't want to understand."

More HERE

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Nigel Farage, the Leader of the UK Independence Party, gets the European Parliament right

This is one of the best political speeches I have heard for a long time. Do American politicians ever speak so frankly and forcefully? I think the GOP should recruit him, myself. He is referring to the Fascistic decision by the EU parliament to act as if their huge new "constitution" had been approved by the voters when in fact majorities in France, Ireland and Nederland (Holland) have rejected it at the ballot box

He points out that abuse is all they have to offer when he points out the impropriety of their actions. Sound familiar?



"A complete shower" is British slang meaning a group of completely incompetent and useless failures. It originated in the British armed forces where its unabbreviated version was "A complete shower of sh*t". I wonder how the EU translators translated it? It probably stumped them. All of the Anglospheric countries have rich slang vocabularies that are not usually in the dictionaries and which are not fully understood even in other Anglospheric countries. If I had been giving the speech above, I might well have called the EU parliament "a mob of drongoes", which is a rough translation into Australian English of Farage's remark.

Farage's UKIP is a minor British conservative party because the mainstream Tories include a substantial number of Europe-lovers. UKIP wants Britain out of the EU. I personally think that membership of NAFTA would suit Britain better than membership of the EU.

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ELSEWHERE

Klaus vetoes Czech approval of Lisbon Treaty: “The Czech President Vaclav Klaus said he would not ratify the Lisbon Treaty after it was approved by the senate yesterday, raising a new obstacle to plans to reform the EU. Mr Klaus explained that he would not sign the treaty because of its rejection by Irish voters last year and an expected court challenge in the Czech Republic.”

Pentagon to add 20,000 more bureaucrats: “Under pressure to overhaul its troubled weapons-buying process, the U.S. Defense Department is planning to add 20,000 new federal jobs over five years to reinforce its ability to handle contracts, cost estimates and oversight, the deputy defense secretary said Wednesday. William Lynn told the Senate Armed Services Committee that as the department increases personnel, it also will move toward more fixed-price contracts, scrutinize programs more closely and link incentive payments to contractors’ performance.”

Report: FBI slow to update terror watchlist: "The FBI has been slow to update the national terror suspect watchlist — and the lapses pose real risks to U.S. security, a Justice Department audit has found. A report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, Glenn Fine, found that 12 terror suspects who were either not watchlisted or were slow to be added to the list may have traveled into or out of the United States during the period when they were not placed on the list.”

Trickle-down corruption: “The White House, as a matter of policy, is rewriting legal contracts, picking winners (mostly labor unions and mortgage defaulters) and singling out losers (evil ’speculators’), while much of the media continue to ponder whether Obama is already a greater president than FDR. If a Republican administration, staffed with cronies from Goldman Sachs and Citibank, were cutting special deals for its political allies, I suspect we’d be hearing fewer FDR analogies and more nouns ending with the suffix ‘gate.’”

Britain got there first: "General Motors is now co-owned by the American taxpayer and labor unions. As a Briton, I find this development astonishing. It repeats the mistakes of the 1970s Labor government, which essentially killed off the British auto industry. America should avoid the same mistake. By the late 1960s, most of Britain’s famous motor industry names—including Rover, Austin, Morris, Triumph and Jaguar—had consolidated into a “Big Two”: British Motor Holdings (BMH) and Leyland Motor Corporation (LMC). LMC was profitable; BMH was not. BMH was trying to sell cars that reflected the tastes of a bygone era—its Morris Minor, for example, had been designed in 1948. Foreign-owned companies were making cars in the UK that were more to the buying public’s taste, like the famous Ford Cortina, which gave much better performance and fuel economy. Sound familiar? In 1968, the Labor government encouraged the merger of BMH and LMC into British Leyland Motor Company (BL). This company maintained production of a variety of brands that competed against each other, and engaged in a research and development crash program to develop new cars that people would actually want to buy. The results were the Morris Marina, a car that my family happily bought and even more happily discarded, and the Austin Allegro. Both models sold strongly, on the basis that they were British (huzzah!), but in the end their shoddy design destroyed the reputation of British automaking.... All these struggles bought was time. The company was simply not viable. Ironically, today the most productive car plant in Europe is in my home town of Sunderland, where 5,000 workers build 330,000 Nissan cars a year. There are still around 250,000 people employed in the design and manufacture of vehicles in the UK, more than BL employed in Mrs. Thatcher’s time.

Increase trade with Korea, check China: “The People’s Republic of China is ever more confident, challenging U.S. naval ships in the South China Sea and the U.S. dollar in international forums. China has displaced America as the No. 1 trading partner with leading East Asian states. How do the Obama administration and Democratic Congress respond? By retreating economically from the region. Barack Obama called the U.S.-South Korean free trade agreement ‘badly flawed’ and urged the Bush administration not to even submit it for ratification. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk calls the agreement ‘unacceptable.’ Although increased trade with South Korea is ‘one of the biggest opportunities we have,’ he affirms that the administration ‘will step away from that if we don’t get it right.’ This policy represents economic and geostrategic folly. Washington should be expanding American investment and trade opportunities in East Asia. The starting point should be to ratify the South Korean trade agreement.”

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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