Google update

It is looking as if Google is going to bar me permanently from updating two of my blogspot sites so I may have to shift them to Wordpress. My Immigration Watch blog is on Wordpress so I know my way around there. Meanwhile the following mirror site links will enable you to read the latest posts on the two blogs concerned.

Political Correctness Watch

Eye on Britain

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Corporate Shills for Hope and Change

by Michelle Malkin

Money from pharmaceutical firms and health care companies is dirty, evil and corrupting -- except when key members of Team Obama are pocketing it. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs derides grassroots opponents of socialized health care as industry-funded lackeys with questionable motives and conflicts of interest. But what about the corporate shills at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

Two weeks ago, the White House embraced $150 million in drug industry ads supporting Obamacare. This week, Bloomberg News reported that White House senior adviser and chief campaign strategist David Axelrod's former public relations firm, AKPD Message and Media, has raked in some $24 million in ad contracts supporting Obamacare -- along with another PR firm, GMMB, run by other Obama strategists.

The ads are funded by Big Pharma, the AARP, AMA and the powerhouse Service Employees International Union (whose Purple Shirts dumped $80 million in independent expenditures to get Obama and the Democratic majority elected). In trademark Axelrod style, the special interest coalition adopted faux grassroots names -- first under the banner of "Healthy Economy Now" and more recently as "Americans for Stable Quality Care."

Because, well, "Corporate Shills for Hope and Change" doesn't have quite the same ring of authenticity.

Axelrod was president and sole shareholder of AKPD from 1985 until last December, when he resigned to take his White House position. His son, Michael, works there. So does former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe.

More here

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The myth of America's manufacturing decline

During the past few years, America has grown increasingly averse to trade. This trend is the product of myths perpetuated by campaigning politicians, captured policymakers, TV charlatans, and woefully ill-informed newspaper columnists. Harold Meyerson always comes to mind as emblematic of this last category, so his fallacy-laden diatribe about the decline of U.S. manufacturing in Wednesday’s Washington Post is par for the course.

Meyerson makes a few claims that cannot be allowed to stand. For example, he asserts: “We don’t [make things] any more — at least, not like we used to. Since 1987, manufacturing as a share of our gross domestic product has declined 30 percent.”

First of all, note that Meyerson’s second sentence does nothing to support his first. A decline in the manufacturing sector’s share of the total economy can result from growth in other sectors, rather than from a decline in total manufacturing output, and that’s what’s happening in the U.S.

According to data from the 2009 Economic Report of the President, as gathered and reported recently by George Mason University economics professor Don Boudreaux, since 1987, real U.S. manufacturing output has increased by 81 percent. And as reported by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, American real manufacturing value-added — the market value of manufactured goods, over and above the costs that went into their production — reached a record-high level in 2007 (the last year for which final data are available), breaking the record set in 2006, which broke the record set in 2005, which broke the record set in 2004. Notwithstanding the recent recession that has affected all sectors of the economy, U.S. manufacturing has been thriving in recent years.

If Meyerson isn’t intentionally misleading Washington Post readers, he is simply unqualified to be rendering conclusions about the state of manufacturing. A basic look at the history of the statistic he used shows its uselessness to the point he wants to make. Manufacturing as a share of gross domestic product peaked in 1953 at about 28 percent of the economy — well before the period of U.S. industrial prowess Meyerson yearns for — and has been trending downward ever since. Today manufacturing accounts for about 12 percent of our services-dominated economy, but manufacturing output and value-added are higher than ever in real terms.

Second, if the United States doesn’t “make things anymore,” nobody does. According to data from the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, U.S. factories are the world’s most productive, accounting for 25 percent of global manufacturing value-added. By comparison, Chinese factories account for 10.6 percent.

That may be hard to fathom, given that U.S. factories tend not to produce the sporting goods, toys, tools, and clothing found in Wal-Mart and other retail outlets nowadays. But U.S. factories make pharmaceuticals, chemicals, technical textiles, sophisticated components, airplane parts, and other products. American factories have moved up the value chain.

Contrary to this last point, Meyerson asserts, “The long-term decline of American manufacturing has depleted our high-tech, cutting-edge industries as much as it has our more venerable sectors.” To support his claim, he cites the value of our “high-tech” exports falling behind China’s beginning in 2004. By “high-tech,” Meyerson means computers, iPods, and other consumer electronic gadgets so ubiquitous nowadays. But in reality, the percentage of Chinese value-added in these so-called high-tech exports is quite small. Economists at the U.S. International Trade Commission estimate that only about 50 percent of the value of U.S. imports from China is actually Chinese value-added; the rest is value added in other countries and embedded in the components, design, engineering, and labor.

For iPods, the Chinese value-added is a few dollars on a product that costs $150 to produce and retails for $299. So, as China’s “high-tech” exports leave America’s “in the dust,” their sale in the United States and elsewhere supports high-paying American engineering, marketing, and logistics jobs, while providing Apple with the profits to conduct R&D to employ more engineers and keep the virtuous circle going.

The factory floor has broken through its surrounding walls and now traverses borders and oceans. What we have now is a world in which it is no longer “Us versus Them,” but rather “Us and Them,” a formulation that has been helping U.S. manufacturing to thrive. Without complementary Chinese and other foreign labor, far fewer American manufacturing ideas would come to fruition.

American manufacturing is by no means in decline. What should be is Meyerson’s myopic way of seeing things.

SOURCE

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Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are threatening to derail housing recovery

They are making it virtually impossible to buy and sell many properties

According to the Community Associations Institute, nearly 60,000,000 people live in shared ownership communities in the United States -- condominiums, co-ops and planned developments governed by a homeowner's association (HOA). When these "new neighborhoods" are first built, there are often various common construction defects.

In an ideal world, every developer would stand by their product, either repairing the defects or giving homeowners enough money to fix the defects themselves. But when this doesn't happen, community associations are forced to file lawsuits against developers to convince them to repair construction flaws.

It is the legal duty of a board of directors to protect owners' interests in the property, and if negotiations with a developer fail, a lawsuit may be the only available option. Nearly 100 percent of new developments have warranty issues with their developer, and almost a quarter of those are forced to file litigation.

In January of 2008, after the housing crash decimated the market for thousands of recently-constructed homes, Freddie Mac quietly added the following regulation to its lending guidelines: A project is ineligible for financing if "the homeowners' association is a party to current litigation, arbitration, mediation or other dispute resolution process and the reason for the dispute involves the safety, structural soundness or habitability of the project."

Of course, this language is broad. It encompasses almost every lawsuit ever filed against a developer, for almost any construction defect.

Fannie Mae, in an even broader exclusion, declares as ineligible "any project for which the homeowners' association or co-op corporation is named as a party to current litigation." This is a gross restriction of the basic right of any corporation to protect its interests through the legal system. And, because many banks use the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac guidelines as the basis for their own lending policies, loans in newly constructed neighborhoods have become extremely difficult to secure.

If a developer refuses to repair a roof, the board of the association chooses to sue the developer, hoping to recover enough money to make repairs. But under the new guidelines, that lawsuit means that very few banks will lend money to new buyers in the building, bringing unit sales to a halt.

Property values in the condominium crash (if you can't sell your home, it's not worth anything). Owners are then left with a property worth a fraction of its actual value, and have only two options--drop the lawsuit and accept that the developer has sold them damaged goods (and try to collect enough money from assessments to make the repairs), or continue the lawsuit while their development stagnates and shrivels.

The long-term health of shared ownership communities, and by extension all American neighborhoods, depends on a robust market for home sales. Current lending guidelines are stagnating that market.

It is critical that federal legislators press Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to revise their guidelines to allow community association boards, tasked with the legal obligation to protect owners' interests, to file legitimate lawsuits against developers for construction defects without restricting the ability of banks to lend money to new owners. Otherwise our housing recovery, reliant on clearing overstock from these new developments, will falter.

SOURCE

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Zogby Interactive Poll: Obama's Job Approval Sinks to Record Low 45%

President Barack Obama's job approval rating has sunk to a record low of just 45%, the latest Zogby Interactive poll shows. Fifty-one percent of likely voters now say they disapprove of the President's job performance.

"None of these numbers looks counter-intuitive to me. Gallup, NBC, and Pew all have Obama at record lows. Rasmussen also shows low approval. Things are volatile out there and news travels fast. There is a lot of anxiety over healthcare," said Zogby International President and CEO John Zogby. "The President let it get away from him and voters are scared right now. They are experiencing sacrifice overload and feel more threatened than empowered. The President is being forced to play defense and he is much better when he is in possession of the ball. But do not underestimate Obama. Last August he was toast."

While this latest poll shows Democrats continue to overwhelmingly approve of Obama's job performance (84%), just 6% of Republicans say the same. Most independents (59%) now disapprove of the job the President is doing.

"He has lost support among political independents, that's the biggest change from our last survey. He is also starting to lose support he had picked up among investors and frequent Wal-Mart shoppers -- who both are on the conservative side but where Obama had been making gains," Zogby said. "Remember, Zogby polling has generally been ahead of the curve during the past three administrations."

More HERE

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BrookesNews Update

The US economy ain't looking too bright : The Keynesian key to unlocking demand is to inflate it by expanding the money supply. And this is where the banks come in. If we were living in normal economic circumstances the banks would be holding about $60 billion in reserves. They are in fact holding about $800 billion and Bernanke and Obama want them to unleash them. If this pair succeed in opening the floodgates Americans will be facing surging inflation
How can the Fed prevent asset bubbles?: All that aggressive Fed policies have actually achieved is weakening of the process of real wealth formation. This, in turn, has only weakened the economy's ability to grow. The only reason why the US economy didn't fall into a depression is because the pool of real savings is still holding its ground. The best way to prevent the emergence of asset bubbles is to stop the Fed from pushing massive amounts of money to the economy
Australia: The economic outlook is not as bright as the Reserve predicts : Despite the Reserves and the Treasury's Pollyanna predictions there are still dark clouds hanging over the future of the economy. IMF predictions for the capital stock suggest a fall in real wages is a distinct possibility
God would not endorse Obamacare: Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is one of the masterminds behind Obama's health care proposals. According to Emanuel those who are unable to become 'participating citizens' should be denied medical care until they die. Apart from the definition of 'participating' - which could be easily expanded to fit just about any circumstances - what is clearly missing from Emanuel's proposal is any sense of humanity or common decency. People are to be disposed of because they cannot 'participate'. What about the fact that they are still human beings. Ezekiel Emanuel should change his name to Josef Mengele
Australia: The Government's insane alternative energy scheme: The government's scheme to impose so-called alternative energy sources on the country would devastate the economy and slash living standards. The idea that "tax swaps" could offset the massive costs to this destructive scheme is a fantasy
Media bigotry: dishonest reporting and the US economy: The only thing Obamanomics has stimulated is the Obama cheerleaders still left in the media who haven't joined his administration Democrats' new slogan:
Protest for Me, But Not for Thee : The Democrats envisioned the middle-class welcoming, with spread-wide-open arms of gratitude, these new power plays that would put more control into the hands of their beneficent bureaucracy. Instead, the Alinskyites are being met with 1776 Redux, and all they can do is yell "Fascist" at the top of their lungs, just as they've been doing for 40 years. But who are the real fascists?
Obama has saved America!: President Obama claims that he valiantly brought America back from the brink of the economic chaos that was caused by his predecessor. But as is often the case with Obama, the devil is in the details
Obama's big brother-care looms large: Obama's proposal to nationalise American health cars consists of nearly 1,100 pages of wonderfully ambiguous little nuggets that grant politicians and bureaucrats unlimited loopholes to do whatever it pleases them with the lives and well-being of Americans

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog 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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Google update

Of the four sites that they originally blocked me from updating, two have now been unblocked. So you will need the following mirror site links to read the latest on the remaining two. That all four have not been unblocked seems rather ominous.

Political Correctness Watch

Eye on Britain

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Why America Will Lead the 'Asian Century'

By Dr John Lee

The decline of American influence in Asia is exaggerated. True, power and influence are built on the back of economic success, and the Chinese and India economies have been doubling in size every 10 years since 1978 and 1991 respectively. But America has two important advantages in Asia.

First, even if China continues to grow at double-digit rates, in terms of economic and military power, the United States will remain dominant by any measurement of raw power for several more decades.

Second, Asia has a unique kind of hierarchical security system which will likely entrench America leadership well into this century. Let me explain.

Despite the fact that America spends more on defence than the next 10 powers combined, it actually relies on the cooperation of other states to remain dominant. Without cooperation from allies such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and the Philippines, the United States cannot retain its forward military positions in the West Pacific. Likewise, it needs the cooperation of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand to host its critical radar infrastructure.

On top of this, America requires other key states and regional groupings such as ASEAN to acquiesce in its security relationships. Therefore, there is broad-based regional approval of US alliances with Japan, South Korea and Australia as well as with partners such as the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and India.

Importantly, this interdependent relationship means that the United States – as a foreign power – is not so powerful that it can readily ignore the wishes of key states, making America the overwhelmingly choice as leader in Asia now and in the future. If an Asian country like China were to rise to the top, it would not need the same level of regional cooperation and acquiescence to maintain its position and military footholds. If China were to make a bid for regional hegemony, it would find it difficult to resist the structural constraints placed on it by other states within this hierarchy.

Therefore, despite justifiable talk of this century being an Asian Century, US leadership in the region will remain remarkably resilient.

The above is a press release from the Centre for Independent Studies, dated August 21st. Enquiries to cis@cis.org.au. Snail mail: PO Box 92, St Leonards, NSW, Australia 1590. Telephone ph: +61 2 9438 4377 or fax: +61 2 9439 7310

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A New Hampshire Senate hopeful in the mould of Sarah Palin

She’s been labelled folksy, gutsy, pro-gun and anti-abortion. She honed her political philosophy as a bus girl in a small-town restaurant where she learnt that “listening is the most important thing to serving your customers well”. She’s a mom to a fresh faced brood and wife to a real dude who’s back from serving in Iraq and founded his own snowplough business. She’s just announced a premature end to her state office, allowing her to consider a political rocket-launch out of relative obscurity.

Sound familiar? It did to the New Hampshire Democrats. Soon after Kelly Ayote resigned as New Hampshire attorney general to consider running for US Senate, they released the ad above. "Did Kelly "Cut & Run" Ayotte just pull a Sarah Palin" it asks, pointing out that she's "broken her pledge to the public in order to advance her own political career."

Strong words. They, at least, are taking her challenge seriously. But could Republicans really put their money on a repeat formula, given Palin's own disastrous polling? Yes, according to a Washington Times profile. "I think she will be a great candidate, though she is a new candidate, having never run before. But her instincts are very good," they quote Sen. John Coryn of Texas as saying.

And with recent polls showing the Democrats' grip over New Hampshire's top offices weakening, looks like hockey moms are back in the game.

More HERE

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If the Bush Administration Had Done It…

"If the Bush Administration had done it, there would be national outrage." This phrase seems to be thrown about a lot recently with regard to the new administration and its ever-deepening slough of gross misconduct. Whether it's Obama asking people to snitch on their neighbors to "flag@whitehouse.gov", mocking the Special Olympics on prime time television, or issuing an ill-founded DHS memo targeting "disgruntled veterans" as possible terrorists, the president and his lieutenants have gotten away with record scandal in record time.

In fact, Barack Obama has received a pass from the Mainstream Media "Obamatons" the likes of which George W. Bush and his predecessors never would even have dreamed possible. Well, one can now modify the aforementioned statement and likewise conjecture: "If Karl Rove had done it…"

In brief, David Axelrod, Barack Obama's Senior Advisor, is up to his neck in corruption, which, not surprisingly, has been largely ignored by liberal news outlets—i.e., the Obamatons en masse. As Kenneth P. Vogel of Politico reports, AKPD Message and Media, a firm founded by Mr. Axelrod that currently employs his son, was awarded a significant $24 million advertising contract by Obama Administration allies in the Healthcare Reform debate. Conveniently enough, AKPD also owes Mr. Axelrod $2 million in severance dollars.

AKPD and another firm were contracted by a coalition of liberal groups and other entities—among them PhRMA—to produce and air two separate $12 million ad campaigns designed to bolster support for Barack Obama's government-run healthcare plan. Mr. Axelrod's close ties to both AKPD and the groups pushing Obama-care is raising a lot of eyebrows.

One of those miffed is House Republican Conference spokesman Matt Loyd, who had the following to say regarding the situation: "Let me get this straight: Out of all the firms Pharma could choose to do their media work, they choose David Axelrod's firm, which still maintains Axelrod's son on the payroll and owes Axelrod himself $2 million. How can the public be assured that David Axelrod isn't influenced by any of this in the course of the health care debate? For an administration that promised 'change' and to be above even an appearance of impropriety this does not even come close to passing the smell test."

If Karl Rove had done something like this, at least one head would have rolled —his— and possibly more. And, as Mr. Vogel reports: "On his first day in office, Obama unveiled a strict ethics policy barring officials from working on issues 'directly and substantially related' to their former clients or employers for two years." Apparently, that strict injunction did not apply to the man who put Obama in office and carries his water on a daily basis.

Corruption, ethics —and boldfaced lies— notwithstanding, the hypocrisy regarding the Obama regime's view of America's healthcare system and the "moral imperative" they so proudly proclaim is this Administration's most egregious sin.

On one hand, Mr. Obama and other Democrats in Washington argue passionately that America's health care industry is no place for the greedy pursuit of profits. Morality dictates that people come before profits, they continually intone. Meanwhile, David Axelrod has no qualms about pocketing a few million bucks through his "directly and substantially related" ties to his own advertising firm.

Karl Rove may have been the architect, but David Axelrod is clearly the engineer —engineering corruption and hypocrisy in the nation's highest office while smarmily proclaiming his personal piety. Have these people no shame?

SOURCE. More on Axelrod corruption here

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ELSEWHERE

Polls: Opposition to Obamacare on the rise: “Public doubt about health care reform has grown as the debate’s raged this summer, with a rise in views it would do more harm than good, increasing opposition to a public option — and President Obama’s rating on the issue at a new low in ABC News/Washington Post polls. Fewer than half of Americans, 45 percent, support reform as it’s been explained to date, while 50 percent are opposed — with many more ’strongly’ opposed than strongly in favor, 40 percent vs. 27 percent. Support’s at just 36 percent among independents, the crucial political center.”

Dealers stiffed as clunkers pile up: "Some New Mexico auto dealers have backed out of the cash-for-clunkers program and more may do so as the federal government takes its time providing cash reimbursements. Dealers across the state are owed more than $3.6 million, according to a dealers' group which says that so far Uncle Sam has only written three checks totaling about $14,000. Cash for clunkers--officially its the Car Allowance Rebate System--allows consumers to trade their gas guzzlers for a more fuel-efficient rides while earning up to $4,500 toward the purchase price. Dealerships put up the cash for the rebates after being told by the Obama administration they would be paid back within 10 days of the sale."

Official: “Significant” hike in US poverty anticipated: "“The ranks of poor and uninsured Americans are likely increasing — with more than 38.8 million believed to be in poverty. Rebecca Blank, the Commerce Department’s undersecretary of economic affairs, spoke to the Associated Press in advance of next month’s closely watched release of 2008 census data. Noting the figures are not yet final, Blank said the numbers likely will show a ’statistically significant’ increase in the poverty rate, to at least 12.7 percent. That would represent a jump of more than 1.5 million poor people compared with the previous year. ‘There’s no question that 2008 economically was a much worse year than 2007,’ she said Wednesday. ‘The question is how much and how bad.’ The number of uninsured also is expected to increase, due to rising unemployment and the erosion of private coverage paid for by employers and individuals, but Blank declined to say by how much.”

Obama backs off attack on whistleblowers: "White House attorneys have backed away from an effort to weaken legal protections for FBI whistleblowers in a bill now before Congress, according to advocacy groups in negotiations with the Obama administration. Officials from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Government Accountability Project (GAP) and Project on Government Oversight (POGO) said this week that they were given guarantees that protections for FBI whistleblowers - federal employees who uncover fraud and waste - would be restored in a Senate bill when Congress returns in September. The shift follows a report in The Washington Times earlier this month about the uproar among civil liberties groups and past FBI whistleblowers about proposed changes in the bill, which critics said would strip existing rights for FBI whistleblowers who expose fraud or misdeeds."

Lutherans abandon the Bible: "Conservatives at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's churchwide assembly here were still reeling Thursday from losing -- by one vote -- their battle to defeat a new social statement that gives validity to same-sex relationships."

Mexico enacts “personal use” drug law: “Mexico has enacted a controversial law that decriminalizes possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine and heroin. The law defines ‘personal use’ amounts for those drugs, as well as LSD and methamphetamines. It says people found with those amounts will not face criminal prosecution, but that if caught a third time they will be required to complete treatment programs, though no punishment is specified to enforce that.”

Why did Obama's Justice Department dismiss a clear case of voter intimidation?: "President Obama's Justice Department continues to stonewall inquiries about why it dropped a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party. The episode—which Bartle Bull, a former civil rights lawyer and publisher of the left-wing Village Voice, calls "the most blatant form of voter intimidation I've ever seen"—began on Election Day 2008. Mr. Bull and others witnessed two Black Panthers in paramilitary garb at a polling place near downtown Philadelphia. One of them, they say, brandished a nightstick at the entrance and pointed it at voters and both made racial threats. Mr. Bull says he heard one yell "You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!"

California awash in unlicensed drivers: "Sobriety checkpoints set up in Bakersfield in recent months haven’t nabbed huge numbers of drunken drivers. But they’re netting unlicensed drivers by the dozens — with 92 cited at a checkpoint in east Bakersfield last month. There’s little doubt that the number of unlicensed drivers on Kern County’s roads is way up, and that means more drivers with no insurance — and higher costs and higher risks for the rest of us.... Authorities say many of those who drive without a license are undocumented immigrants who cannot legally obtain a California driver’s license. But drivers can have their license suspended or revoked for a number of reasons, including multiple DUIs, nonpayment of traffic fines and even failure to pay child support. Timothy Lemucchi, a longtime Bakersfield attorney who handles accident and personal injury cases, said the growing problem of unlicensed and uninsured drivers potentially affects all of us. He cited the Insurance Research Council’s findings that estimate one in five California drivers have little or no automobile insurance. And in places with high unemployment rates like Kern, the ratio may be closer to one in four, Lemucchi said. The repercussions are often heartbreaking for motorists who are injured when they collide with an uninsured driver. Loss of income combined with large medical bills can ruin families financially."

How ethics disappear: "Gosh, what a surprise: A committee of their fellow senators has decided that Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad did nothing unethical when they took out loans from Countrywide Financial on the kind of favorable terms not available to us mere mortals without their financial or political standing – or a personal connection to the head of Countrywide. The very Select Committee on Ethics did recognize that the whole deal looked bad, and gave its colleagues a gentle pat on the wrist for creating "the appearance that you were receiving preferential treatment based on your status as a senator." But in the end one hand washed the other, if not very well."

GM's $4,000 Car We Won't Get: "Now, the $4,000 car is a fine idea. It represents a return to economic sanity. It would be simple and affordable. No six year payment plan. No $40,000 "investment" (like the completely insane Volt electric car) that will depreciate to less than half original MSRP sticker price by the time it's finally paid off. No GPS, closed-circuit cameras, power parallel parking systems, multiplexed seat heaters or built-in coffee pots. Just, you know, basic transportation. But, here's the catch: GM won't be able to sell the $4,000 car in the United States. Because in the United States, new cars must be "government approved" before they can be approved by consumers. And to be approved by government, a new car must be fitted with a horn o' plenty of government-mandated safety and emissions control equipment. "Safety" and "low emissions" may be laudable, but they aren't free. The federal requirement that each new car be equipped with multiple air bags is alone worth an estimated $1,000-$1,500 per car -- or one-third to nearly one-half the projected final cost of the GM $4k car. In so-called "developing countries," there are not (yet) such requirements (which explains why they are still developing while we are treading water and about to go under). And it explains why GM will be selling its $4k car in such countries rather than in this country."

Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian: "My purpose today is to make just two main points: (1) To show why Nazi Germany was a socialist state, not a capitalist one. And (2) to show why socialism, understood as an economic system based on government ownership of the means of production, positively requires a totalitarian dictatorship... The basis of the claim that Nazi Germany was capitalist was the fact that most industries in Nazi Germany appeared to be left in private hands. What Mises identified was that private ownership of the means of production existed in name only under the Nazis and that the actual substance of ownership of the means of production resided in the German government. For it was the German government and not the nominal private owners that exercised all of the substantive powers of ownership: it, not the nominal private owners, decided what was to be produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to be distributed, as well as what prices would be charged and what wages would be paid...."

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog 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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Google update

At the time of writing, Google is still blocking me from putting up new posts on three of my blogs. So go instead to the mirror sites for the latest posts. As under:

Political Correctness Watch

Food & Health Skeptic.

Eye on Britain

Update:

Google have just taken the lock off FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC. Let's hope that small bit of sanity spreads

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Israeli government Minister: Some of Obama's policies are 'borderline anti-Semitic'

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will reject US President Barack Obama's request for a freeze on natural growth in Judea and Samaria, Habayit Hayehudi head Daniel Herschkowitz said Sunday, based on conversations with Netanyahu. In an interview with the science and technology minister at his Jerusalem office, Herschkowitz told The Jerusalem Post that he did not believe Netanyahu would cross any red lines of Habayit Hayehudi, the most right-wing party in his coalition.

"From my own talks with the prime minister, I can say confidently that I don't think he will freeze natural growth in the settlements," Herschkowitz said. "I am sure he is in favor of allowing natural growth, but he must navigate smartly and walk between the rain drops to ensure that he will get along with the American administration."

Herschkowitz suggested that an arrangement could be found that could allow construction in the settlements to continue without public acknowledgment. He said this would be preferable to the opposite scenario of press reports of settlement construction when in fact there is none.

A former resident of Madison, Wisconsin, where he was a mathematics professor at the University of Wisconsin, Herschkowitz did not hold back criticism for Obama, especially his decision to grant the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former UN human rights commissioner and longtime Israel basher Mary Robinson. "I am disappointed in Obama's policies," Herschkowitz said. "Some of the steps he has taken, like giving a medal to Mary Robinson, are borderline anti-Semitic. Israel is an independent state. Relations with the US are important, but relations must go both ways. I don't know if Obama understands it, but most Americans believe that Israel is their only anchor in the Middle East."

Herschkowitz has been criticized by the Right for praising Netanyahu's June 14 policy address at Bar-Ilan University's Begin-Sadat Center in which he conditionally endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state. He said he himself opposed a Palestinian state, but a prime minister had to speak differently than the average politician. "It was a good speech, because he shifted the ball to the other side by setting important conditions," Herschkowitz said. "If they can't accept recognizing a Jewish state and the end of the conflict, it shows their real face. But if they would have, there would have been something to talk about. A leader must say yes, and not just no, so it's ideal to say yes while shifting the ball back to the other side."

The Habayit Hayehudi leader said there was a consensus that Israel did not want to control the Palestinians. He said a demilitarized Palestinian state as Netanyahu outlined it would not be that different from the autonomy the overwhelming majority of the Palestinians already had.

But Herschkowitz said he did not think a peace agreement could be reached. "It is clear that there is no partner," Herschkowitz said. "Every diplomatic plan, even the most conservative one, is wishful thinking, because there is no plan that both sides would accept."

SOURCE

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Where Are The Cost Cuts Going To Come From?

Your Only Options Are Less Care, Less Incentive To Become A Caregiver, Or The Magic Secret Formula For Super-Cost-Efficient Government. Excerpt below

One of the central selling points used by President Obama to push the Democrats’ health care plan is the notion that a comprehensive overhaul of the health care system will reduce costs. But costs to who, and how? Let’s step back a minute and try to figure out how Obama’s cost-cutting argument could possibly be so.

Prologue: Tax That Man Behind The Tree

First, a quick reminder of two reasons why cost-cutting is such an important selling point.

Number one, the core of what the Democratic base, in particular, wants from health care “reform” is universal coverage. You often hear statistics thrown around about there being 30 or 35 or, last I heard, 47 million people without health insurance, and the implication that these people are receiving zero or negligible healthcare. Debunking those statistics and assumptions is itself a cottage industry, but let’s leave that aside for the moment, because the fact of the matter is that in a country of 300 million people, when you strip out the people who

(1) already have health insurance and expect to continue having it,

(2) don’t especially want to buy health insurance,

(3) are only briefly without health insurance and not worried about it, or

(4) don’t or can’t vote,

what you end up with is a very small slice of the electorate that would benefit from getting health insurance they currently lack or fear lacking. Now, voters don’t only vote their own self-interests on any issue - but the fewer people who benefit directly from legislation, the harder it is to drum up public support for a bill that may threaten the self-interest of others. So, it becomes politically necessary, if the bill is to be as sweeping and ambitious as most of the versions circulated have been, to sell it to the public on the basis of some argument above and beyond insuring the uninsured. That’s doubly so because if your goal was solely to insure the uninsured, much of what is in the various bills would be unnecessary.

Second, specific to the issue of saving money for the federal government, the Obama Administration and the Democrats have already severely tried the electorate’s appetite for massive expansions of federal spending, especially deficit spending. The explosion of new spending, most notably the pork-laden “stimulus” bill, makes prior complaints about spending under Bush look like complaints about the deck chairs on the Titanic and flatly contradicts Obama’s read-my-lips pledge during two of last October’s debates that his proposals would result in a net reduction of federal spending. The voters have noticed that they’re not getting anything resembling what they were promised. Thus, Obama has repeatedly pledged, with the same assurance as his campaign pledge on spending, that the health care bill would be “deficit neutral.” The Congressional Budget Office, typically a liberal redoubt, has repeatedly thrown cold water on the claim that any of the proposals on the table would be deficit-neutral. Clearly, to get there, cost savings would need to be found somewhere to completely offset outlays.

How’s that gonna work?

Let’s review the options. The Democrats’ main argument is that restructuring the entire health care sector will reduce the nation’s total (public and private) outlay for health care. When you boil it down, though, there are only three variables you can cut: reduce the amount of medical care provided; reduce what providers of medical care earn for their products and services; and reduce intermediary costs. All are problematic.

I. Less Medical Care

The most obvious way to cut spending on medical care is to buy less of it. That’s at the crux of the public’s worry about “death panels” cutting off care, about rationing; it’s why so many of the people showing up agitated at town halls are senior citizens worried about getting less medical care.

The “death panel” phrase was shorthand, of course, but it neatly captured the core of the problem: government already rations care, albeit not very efficienctly, in programs like Medicare and Medicaid (see, e.g., here - then again, the failure to do more rationing explains those programs’ exploding, budget-busting costs) and the end-of-life consulting procedures criticized by Palin and subsequently dropped by chastened Democrats are not the only way in which government incentives could or would be brought to bear on physicians to push patients from consuming health care to preparing for death or assisted suicide. More here, among many other places. But you don’t have to be looking at the end-stage to see that any plan premised upon cost-cutting by reducing the amount of care provided would, well, reduce the amount of care provided. And if the costs being cut are taxpayer costs, the power to do so would end up being vested in some sort of governmental entity, likely a panel of government-appointed “experts,” as Mickey Kaus notes was alluded to by President Obama himself back in April

More HERE

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Free Speech And Yoo

"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism," those on the left were fond of saying when President Bush was in office. Today, with a Democratic president in power, we're finding out what a cynical pose that is. That can be seen in the sad case of John Yoo, a brilliant law professor from the University of California at Berkeley known for his staunch support of the Constitution.

Yoo, working for the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003, allegedly wrote what the left absurdly calls the "torture memos," which justified the kind of tough, coercive interrogations the military used to break up a number of terrorist plots after 9/11. Yet today, for rendering his honest legal opinion to President Bush, Yoo finds himself vilified and attacked by the left — with loud calls for Berkeley's Boalt Hall Law School to fire him.

The campaign of harassment and intimidation against Yoo is sickening. Yoo and his family have been verbally assaulted, spat upon and threatened. On Monday, returning to school, he was met with shouts of "war criminal" by "war protesters" — those who yelled similar things at President Bush but who now under a Democrat utter nary a peep of protest.

Yoo's case shows how those on the extreme left deal with free speech that isn't their own. As blogger Andrew Breitbart noted, it comes straight out of radical organizer Saul Alinsky's playbook: "Rule 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

Change the target from right to left, and you'd have a phalanx of ACLU lawyers coming to his defense. Left-leaning think tanks, always keen to support "civil rights," would take up the cudgel. Not this time. Berkeley law school dean Christopher Edley Jr. rejected calls to fire Yoo, but his reason was pathetic. The university, he said, didn't have the resources to investigate Yoo's work fully.

Memo to Edley: Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution explicitly gives the president the right to "require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices . . ." It seems clear that Yoo is covered. Maybe the federal judge who recently ruled Yoo could be sued for his legal opinions by convicted terrorist Jose Padilla should also actually read the Constitution.

Sadly, Yoo isn't the only recent target of hatred and intolerance of any opposition to the left's far-reaching agenda. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey incurred its wrath by suggesting a massive government takeover of health care was a bad idea. Now, for Mackey's apostasy from liberal orthodoxy, the left is organizing a nationwide boycott of his grocery chain. This is how the left works these days. It's a sad state of affairs when those who make the greatest claims of constitutional rights for their own behavior are the least willing to grant them to others.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

There's a new conservative blog up with the ambitious title The Truth. It's got some good stuff on Obamacare. There's a BIG coverage of that issue up again today on SOCIALIZED MEDICINE too.

Princess Michele requires more than twenty attendants: “No, Michele Obama does not get paid to serve as the First Lady and she doesn’t perform any official duties. But this hasn’t deterred her from hiring an unprecedented number of staffers to cater to her every whim and to satisfy her every request in the midst of the Great Recession. Just think Mary Lincoln was taken to task for purchasing china for the White House during the Civil War. And Mamie Eisenhower had to shell out the salary for her personal secretary. How things have changed! If you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans facing certain destitution, earning less than subsistence wages stocking the shelves at Wal-Mart or serving up McDonald cheeseburgers, prepare to scream and then come to realize that the benefit package for these servants of Miz Michele are the same as members of the national security and defense departments and the bill for these assorted lackeys is paid by John Q. Public"

"Cash for clunkers" won't be running much longer, government says: "The government will announce a plan as soon as tomorrow for winding down its popular but problem-plagued 'cash for clunkers' program. The announcement by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood came as a New York dealership group said that hundreds of its members had stopped doing clunker transactions because of delays in getting reimbursed by the federal government."

Yale surrenders: "The capitulation of Yale University Press to threats that hadn't even been made yet is the latest and perhaps the worst episode in the steady surrender to religious extremism -- particularly Muslim religious extremism -- that is spreading across our culture. A book called The Cartoons That Shook the World, by Danish-born Jytte Klausen, who is a professor of politics at Brandeis University, tells the story of the lurid and preplanned campaign of 'protest' and boycott that was orchestrated in late 2005 after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a competition for cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. (The competition was itself a response to the sudden refusal of a Danish publisher to release a book for children about the life of Mohammed, lest it, too, give offense.) By the time the hysteria had been called off by those who incited it, perhaps as many as 200 people around the world had been pointlessly killed. Yale University Press announced last week that it would go ahead with the publication of the book, but it would remove from it the 12 caricatures that originated the controversy."

Hutterites steamrolled by the state: "On July 24, in a case brought by the Hutterian Brethren of Wilson Colony, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the Alberta government is entitled to require a photo on the Hutterites' drivers' licenses. 'The negative impact on the freedom of religion of Colony members who wish to obtain licenses,' the decision summary explains, 'does not outweigh the benefits associated with the universal photo requirement.' The Hutterites-a sect or a religious group as one might want to call them-refuse to have their pictures taken for their driver's licenses and for a related digital photo data bank."

Airline deregulation: "Even the partial freeing of the air travel sector has had overwhelmingly positive results. Air travel has dramatically increased and prices have fallen. After deregulation, airlines reconfigured their routes and equipment, making possible improvements in capacity utilization. These efficiency effects democratized air travel, making it more accessible to the general public. Airfares, when adjusted for inflation, have fallen 25 percent since 1991, and, according to Clifford Winston and Steven Morrison of the Brookings Institution, are 22 percent lower than they would have been had regulation continued (Morrison and Winston 2000)."

Another genuine case of a police officer "acting stupidly" (so where's Obama?) "A 38 year-old mother of three, who posed no threat the police or anyone else, was tasered right in front of her children in January of this year. Yet to my knowledge, President Obama has failed to address this genuine case of the police 'acting stupidly.' Maybe it's because Audra Harmon cannot help the president make his case about the 'history' of race relations and the police since Mrs. Harmon appears to be a Caucasian woman. No, Mrs. Harmon doesn't have the ability to claim she was racially profiled for DWB but this does not make the actions of Deputy Sean Andrews any less shameful."

The broken windshield fallacy: "When governments follow criminally stupid policies, criminals can end up improving overall welfare. This may well be the case with Germany's reprehensible cash-for-clunkers program. Germany's police union, the Bund Deutscher Kriminalbeamter, estimates that about 50,000 cars destined for the scrap yard under Berlin's trade-in scheme have been illegally resold to Africa and Eastern Europe. The government had paid around ƒ,ª125 million for these vehicles to be destroyed so that people would buy new, more fuel-efficient cars. German environmental group Deutsche Umwelthilfe predicts a doubling of illicit exports by the end of the year. It's probably only a matter of time before American clunkers will likewise find their illegal way to the streets of Mexico and beyond. And humanity would be better off if they did. Imagine if the Salvation Army were ordered to destroy all the used clothing and furniture it receives instead of distributing it to the poor. No doubt this would be considered an outrage. But it is no less economically foolish and morally repugnant to deny poor people in the developing world access to these old cars."

Promises, promises, promises -- from the British Labour party: "Over the past decade we have all felt New Labour's grip tightening around our lives, but perhaps one of the most adversely impacted demographics from their time in power are the young adults who will have to face the New Labour legacy. Throughout its time in power, New Labour has made a series of empty promises to young people in Britain putting them in an increasingly disadvantaged position. Instead of leaving them free to grow up in a more prosperous society, they are now subject to live with falling standards in youth health, rising youth crime and non-existent community cohesion. Despite Tony Blair's promise of 'education, education, education', young people now find themselves with fewer opportunities than when he came to power."

That efficient British bureaucracy again: "The Ministry of Defence has lost track of equipment worth £6.6 billion, prompting calls for a review of the department’s record-keeping. The National Audit Office (NAO) refused to approve the MoD’s accounts this summer after auditors were unable to find equipment worth £6.6 billion, including about a sixth of the vehicles, weapons and radios used by British troops. In a statement released last night, the MoD said that the figure — which is equivalent to the department’s entire annual equipment budget — was simply an extrapolation made by the Audit Office after the MoD was “unable to satisfy the NAO’s demand for paperwork from stock checking to verify their (assets) presence over the year”. This year the NAO said that the strains of war often meant that frontline units were not able to reply to the annual census of equipment, but added that there was a shortage of staff to run the complex registers that keep track of equipment used by troops."

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog 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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Wow! Google are being VERY nasty at the moment!

Google must be in a VERY bad mood over their recent court loss. Perhaps as a result, they seem to have really ramped up their blocking software. I have had THREE of my blog sites blocked from further postings in the last 10 minutes.

A few minutes ago I put up my latest post on POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH and about 5 seconds after it went up I got a message saying that all future postings to it would be blocked on suspicion that it is a "spam blog".

As the blog has been much the same for years it's all very strange. I have requested a review of the block so it should in theory be back in action in the next day or two. Last time they blocked my GREENIE WATCH blog (for the THIRD time), they removed the block after 24 hours approx. so that was not too bad.

They do sometimes fail to act on review requests, however, and my original Obama Watch blog has never had its restrictions lifted despite many requests.

So if you cannot access any further posts on POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, just go to the mirror site instead.

The second blog they have blocked is FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, which is very much a science blog. Strange indeed! Its mirror site is here.

The third site is one I just use for a scratch area so does not matter much. This site that you are now reading could be next so note its mirror site here.

Google loses in court



Vogue cover girl Liskula Cohen has won a precedent-setting court battle to unmask an anonymous blogger who called her a "skank" on the internet. In a case with potentially far-reaching repercussions, Liskula Cohen sought the identity of the blogger who maligned her on the Skanks in NYC blog so that she could sue him or her for defamation. A Manhattan supreme court judge ruled that she was entitled to the information and ordered Google, which ran the offending blog, to turn it over.

Ms Cohen, a tall, Canadian blonde who has modelled for Giorgio Armani and Versace, went to court after reading the wounding anonymous comments on Google's Blogger.com. "I would have to say the first-place award for 'Skankiest in NYC' would have to go to Liskula Gentile Cohen," the blogger "Anonymous" wrote in one posting. The blog, since removed, ridiculed the former Australian Vogue cover girl as a "40-something" who "may have been hot 10 years ago", when she was actually 36.

Justice Joan Madden rejected the blogger's claim that the blogs "serve as a modern-day forum for conveying personal opinions, including invective and ranting", and should not be treated as factual assertions.

The model was looking forward last night to discovering the identity of the alleged acquaintance who insulted her. "Everybody is waiting to see who this coward is," Steven Wagner, her lawyer, said.

Andrew Pederson, a Google spokesman, said: "We sympathise with anyone who may be the victim of cyberbullying. We also take great care to respect privacy concerns and will only provide information about a user in response to a subpoena or other court order."

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

ObamaCare protesters “racist,” including black gun owner: “On Tuesday, MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer fretted over health care reform protesters legally carrying guns: ‘A man at a pro-health care reform rally … wore a semiautomatic assault rifle on his shoulder and a pistol on his hip …. there are questions about whether this has racial overtones …. white people showing up with guns.’ Brewer failed to mention the man she described was black. Following Brewer’s report … Dylan Ratigan and MSNBC pop culture analyst Toure discussed the supposed racism involved in the protests. … Not only did Brewer, Ratigan, and Toure fail to point out the fact that the gun-toting protester that sparked the discussion was black, but the video footage shown of that protester was so edited, that it was impossible to see that he was black.”

Crowley gets ovation from officers in California: "The police sergeant who sparked a national debate on race relations when he arrested a Harvard University professor in his home received a standing ovation Monday from thousands of police officers at a Fraternal Order of Police convention. More than 3,000 officers cheered Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley when he briefly spoke to kick off the five-day meeting. Dozens left their seats to take snapshots of him on the podium at the Long Beach Convention Center. "The past month has been very difficult for my family, my friends and my colleagues back in Cambridge, and it's no exaggeration to say that it wouldn't be as easy for me to handle this without the support from the Fraternal Order of Police ... and the support that the men and women who do this job have given me," Crowley said. "Thank you very much."

Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling: "You read that headline correctly. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is financing oil exploration off Brazil. The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan. The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a "preliminary commitment" letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas. But look on the bright side. If President Obama has embraced offshore drilling in Brazil, why not in the old U.S.A.? The land of the sorta free and the home of the heavily indebted has enormous offshore oil deposits"

You can trust a liberal … to be a liberal: “The liberals are back. For proof, just check out the antics of two noted liberals, MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews and Salon.com editor in chief Joan Walsh. This week both of them went apoplectic over a libertarian’s having the audacity to exercise two fundamental rights at the same time — free speech and the right to bear arms, both of which are guaranteed by the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. What caused Matthews’ and Walsh’s apoplexy?”

The right’s rebellion: "The altarpiece of the transformational presidency, universal health insurance, is on life support, as huge crowds pour into town hall meetings to denounce it. Responding to the protests, the Obamaites have dumped the end-of-life counselors (aka ‘Death Panels’) and declared the government option expendable. But what are we to make of these ‘evil-mongers’ of Harry Reid’s depiction, these ‘mobs’ of ‘thugs’ organized by K Street lobbyists and ‘right-wing extremists’ who engage in ‘un-American’ activity at town hall meetings? Surely, all Americans must detest them. To the contrary. According to a Pew poll, by 61 percent to 34 percent, Americans think the protesters are behaving properly.”

History repeats with Obama’s anti-growth policies: “During the economic downturn from roughly 1929 to 1939, Franklin Roosevelt implemented a raft of anti-capitalist, anti-growth policies, from wage controls to higher taxes to simple badgering of businesses (especially utilities). The result was that Europe emerged from the depression sooner while Democratic economic policies turned what could have been just a bad recession into the Great Depression. The Obama Administration suffers the same fatal conceit as all socialists, namely the belief that their policies will work where similar policies have failed because now they have the right people, smarter people, implementing them with the latest scientific methods.”

TSA and its brethren: “To the public, at any rate to the many people with whom I have discussed the matter, the air of federal fear seems almost demented. I have had an (actual) TSA woman solemnly examine a pair of tweezers to determine whether they were blunt-nosed (acceptable) or pointed (posing a threat of hijacking). Do we really believe that a team of Al Quaeda terrorists are going to leap up brandishing tweezers? Equally absurd is that a woman cannot enter the US consulate in Guadalajara with her lipstick. Yes, I know it could contain a cyanide dart or a hidden vial of Tabun. So could anything.”

President Obama now looks more like symptom than cause: “Ironically, if President Obama wants to pass health insurance reform now — even with co-ops replacing the public option — he’s going to have to do something that Bill Clinton pulled off with his Sister Souljah moment. He’s going to have to tell the single-payer folks and the Deaniacs to either sign up for his compromise or get off the train. That’s the only way he wins a consistent, even if floating, 60-vote majority that holds the moderate Senators of both parties as well as the House Blue Dogs to a modified version of his social agenda. If it happens it will not be pretty, because the Dean progressives have done the most dangerous thing you can do in politics: they have started to believe their own narrative that they elected this President, and that he can’t survive or win re-election without them.”

AARP losing massive membership over “politics”: “About 60,000 senior citizens have quit AARP since July 1 due to the group’s support for a health care overhaul, a spokesman for the organization said Monday. The membership loss suggests dissatisfaction on the part of AARP members at a time when many senior citizens are concerned about proposed cuts to Medicare providers to help pay for making healthcare available for all. But spokesman Drew Nannis said it wasn’t unusual for the powerful, 40 million-strong senior citizens’ lobby to shed members in droves when it’s advocating on a controversial issue.”

Alinsky’s Rule 12: Starting to wear thin: “The left apparently thought they had been given a weapon with infinite ammunition. But it doesn’t work that way. If you go into your office today and accuse a particular co-worker of dishonesty, you’ll probably be taken seriously. If you do it with a different co-worker every week for a few months, you won’t. Everyone involved starts to realize that it’s just a tactic. Then they begin to wonder why you’re doing it. Are you trying to cover up something?”

Blacks more likely to succumb to Hep C: “Scientists say they’ve found a big reason why treatment for chronic hepatitis C infection works better for White patients than for Blacks. It’s a tiny variation in a gene. People with a certain gene variant are far more likely to respond to treatment, and that variant is more common in people with European ancestry than African-Americans, researchers report. In fact, that probably explains about half the racial disparity in treatment response, the scientists estimate in a study published online Sunday by the journal Nature. The work involved 1,137 patients who had a chronic infection with the most common type of hepatitis C virus in the U.S. and Europe, one that is less responsive to treatment than other types. They were given standard drug treatment.”

Fundamental ingredient for life discovered in comet: “A fundamental ingredient for life has been discovered in a comet sample, supporting the idea that such icy objects seeded early Earth with the stuff needed to whip up living organisms. New research firms up past suggestions of glycine, the simplest amino acid used to make proteins, inside samples from the comet Wild 2 (pronounced ‘Vilt 2′). ‘This is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet,’ said lead researcher Jamie Elsila of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. ‘Our discovery supports the theory that some of life’s ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts.’ How life arose on Earth has long puzzled scientists and philosophers alike, with possible evidence for such building blocks showing up floating about in the cosmos and even inside the mouths of volcanoes. The new finding, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science, also has implications for finding alien life.”

The California Coastal Commission vs. its critics: “Richard Oshen has spent the past four years making a documentary about the California Coastal Commission (CCC), a state agency too obscure to have gathered any previous documentarian’s attention. It is, however, well known enough in the world of land-use policy to have been called, in a 2008 New York Times story, ‘the most formidable player of all’ when it comes to land use decisions in California. As Oshen learned, the CCC’s powers extend far beyond what anyone would reasonably think of as either land use or the protection of California’s coast. Coastal protection was the ostensible reason a four-year ‘Coastal Commission’ was first invented for California after 1972’s Proposition 20. The CCC was given permanent life by the California Coastal Act of 1976. Its current executive director, Peter Douglas, who is now serving his 29th year, helped agitate for and then draft the very statewide proposition that gave him his job. Oshen, meanwhile, finds himself in a legal battle with the very government agency he’s investigating. The CCC is trying to legally seize copies of much of the raw footage Oshen has shot, as well as a version of the finished product, titled Sins of Commission, prior to its official release.”

The battle of the bulb: “You can lead a horse to water, but not make it drink: except for politicians, especially in Brussels. Europe’s Finest, ever busy fixing the world, stop at nothing to force happiness upon their citizens. Who knows better what’s good for the fine citizens from Bulgaria to Portugal than the 26 commissioners sitting at the avenues de Beaulieu and d’Auderghem, and rue Belliard? This ancient complaint finds new life in Brussels’ latest, saving the planet by telling EU citizens how they may and may not illuminate their homes. Banning Edison’s light bulb proclaiming ‘inefficient!’ while ignoring the mercury-hazard of CFLs (compact fluorescents) is an absurd idea on so many grounds. Most disgracefully, it once again shows politicians don’t trust consumers to make choices. Choice, after all, is anathema for politicians, as the people easily make the wrong decisions.”

CO: Best Buy fires students after they tackle shoplifter: “Jared Bergstreser, 20, and Colin Trapp, 23, were fired Sunday, two weeks after they tried to stop two men fleeing the store at the FlatIron Marketplace. When the students saw the men fleeing with armloads of merchandise, Bergstreser tackled one of the men and Trapp came to help, but the man pulled a knife and broke free. A store manager was also involved in the Aug. 1 fracas and was cut by the shoplifting suspect, police said.”

Cash for clunkers gives GM a boost : “General Motors announced today that it will build 60,000 more cars and trucks this year as supplies have dropped and sales have spiked more than expected, in part because of the ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program. The announcement will lead to additional shifts and overtime at several factories and the reinstatement of 1,350 workers at two plants. GM said that sales in the month of July and August are between 60,000 and 70,000 units above what the company had predicted as recently as two months ago. In July, the automaker had approximately 300,000 units for sale compared to a peak level of 1.3 million vehicles available at one point in the past four years.”

Lampooning Palin — the sport of progressives: “Palin punching has been the pastime of choice for the Hollywood hordes ever since the former Alaska Governor first burst upon their free-range radars as McCain’s running mate during the last presidential follies. Professional players like Tina Fey and David Letterman have become well known Palin baiters, and William Shatner has shown up on Conan’s Tonight Show reading her resignation speech and subsequent Tweets as beat poetry, accompanied by bass and bongos. So the question that arises is this: is it an absolute ironclad requirement that everyone associated with the American entertainment industry be a political liberal?”

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog 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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Does the rally in the picture below remind you of anything?



Hitler? Obama? It is in fact a 1939 rally in London of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), led by Sir Osward Mosley.

Via Powerline, who also note that Sir Oswald was an early advocate of socialized healthcare. Mosley would no doubt be gratified by the extent to which his party's socialist vision of government control over the healthcare industry has become the policy of the current administration in the U.S.A. Note the following quote from the BUF health policy:

The voluntary hospitals which have done so much in the training of doctors, dentists and nurses, are undoubtedly finding it extremely difficult in carrying on at the highest pitch of efficiency, for financial reasons. The British Union of Fascists views with admiration the work done by the men and women who are responsible for the building up of this system, and it sees no reason for the abolition of the voluntary hospitals. On the assumption of power we envisage the appointment of a National Director of Hospitals, who would co-ordinate the working of all the different hospitals (both Voluntary and State hospitals) and who would be represented by a single nominee on the governing Committees of all the voluntary hospitals. The State would make it its duty to find the necessary additional funds for the management of the voluntary hospitals and would not interfere in their internal management.

Does that remind you of someone who repeatedly assures people that they will all be able to keep their existing healthcare insurance after his socialist plan is implemented?

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Did Krupskaya cave?

(Krupskaya was the wife of V.I. Lenin)

We have closely followed the story of Obama administration flack Linda Douglass -- a cross between Nurse Ratched and Mrs. Lenin -- and her invitation to report fishy comments on Obamacare to the flag@whitehouse.gov official email address. I thought the project was, as the liberals say nowadays, un-American, and rather obviously so. How fitting of the Obama administration to hark back to the ethos of Big Brother while promoting socialized health care.

Appropriately enough, the email address disappeared down the memory hole. The White House has apparently issued no announcement on the disposition of the email account. Many would-be informers have been left in the lurch, sadly including those of us who have taken to turning in Obama for his compulsively fishy comments on his putative program. Politico's Mike Allen reports the story without comment.

Did Krupskaya cave? Maybe, but she may also have beat a tactical retreat. Frustrated informants can still submit their neighbors' fishy thoughts on Obamacare to the White House via the "Reality Check" Web page on WhiteHouse.gov, which allows the submission of readers' comments. The Web form stresses, however, that viewers are discouraged from from submitting "any individual's personal information, including their [sic] email address, without their permission."

What can we learn from this episode? The Obama administration is sensitive to ridicule, disinclined frankly to admit error and virtually incapable of seeing itself as others see it. In the service of a radical agenda pursued with deceit and demagoguery, it will grudgingly take one step back while it rewrites its playbook to advance three or four steps forward.

SOURCE

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Finding no buyers for snake oil

Master politician that he is, Barack Obama is a lousy calculator. He spectacularly misjudged the American public's appetite for a government nanny. Or maybe he miscalculated the power of his slippery tongue to sell government snake oil. His apparent willingness to abandon the attempt - for now - to nationalize the health-care industry appears to defer the Democratic first step in remaking the home of the brave and the land of the free into Little America, cutting it down to a size incapable of intimidating the likes of Switzerland or Swaziland.

But only if the opposition keeps up unremitting pressure. The president signals a change in tactics, not objectives. His concession that the so-called "government option" is temporarily dead does not mean the dream of "postalizing" health care, of making it as responsive as the Post Office, is dead. It's merely that the tenderizing pain in certain Democratic keesters is so acute that somebody had to find a way to get a little relief. Running up a fake white flag might do it; when the opposition puts down its guns the postalizers will fire at will.

The president never actually said he would defer to public sentiment. The special gift of snake-oil salesmen is their ability to say one thing and make audiences hear something else. "All I'm saying is, though, that the public option, whether we have it or we don't have it, is not the entirety of health care reform," he told an audience on Sunday in Colorado. "This is just one sliver of it."

The leftmost fringe of his party is having none of this apparent concession to reasonableness and moderation. House Democrats recall their ecstasy of waking up on the morning after the 2008 elections, imagining that with their 78-seat margin it's now or never, and they can't wait to get started on the plastic surgery to alter the face of America the Beautiful. They've been sharpening scalpels and carving knives since.

This puts the House leaders, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her liege man, Steny Hoyer, in a particular bind. They owe their 78-seat margin to men and women moderate enough to win in conservative districts; many of these freshmen know they will never be sophomores if they vote for a health care plan that dooms the private insurance coverage that works well enough for the middle class.

One of them, Rep. Eric Massa of New York, is a confirmed nanny-state Democrat who understands what a vote for Obamacare is likely to cost him. "I will vote adamantly against the interests of my district if I actually think what I am doing is going to be helpful. I will vote against their opinion if I actually believe it will help them."

The early Democratic strategy of trying to shout down the opposition, painting critics as Nazis waving swastikas (Nancy Pelosi), as "evil-mongers" (Senate Leader Harry Reid), as "un-American" (Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas), as over-dressed snobs and bounders (Sen. Barbara Boxer of California), clearly failed.

So has the attempt to portray critics as ignorant yahoos too thick to understand how well government health schemes have worked in places like Canada and Great Britain. The more we learn about the Canadian and British schemes the less they look like models for anyone.

The new president of the Canadian Medical Association says Canadian doctors must recognize how sick the Canadian system is and figure out how to fix it. "We all agree that the system is imploding," says Dr. Anne Doig, "and we all agree that things are more precarious than Canadians perhaps realize."

Stephen Glover, a columnist for the London Daily Mail, defends Britain's National Health Service but concedes that Americans wouldn't like it. "Consult any American who has encountered the National Health Service," he writes. "Often [visiting Americans] cannot believe ... the squalor, the looming threat, the long waiting lists and especially the target that patients in 'accident and emergency' should be expected to wait for no more than four - four! - hours, the sense exuded by some medical staff that they are doing you a favor by taking down your personal details. Most Americans, let's face it, are used to much higher standards of health care than we enjoy."

Americans aren't as dumb as the politicians often think they are, and nothing educates politicians like a well-aimed two-by-four square across the noggin. That's the hard lesson of the summer of '09.

SOURCE

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Obama loses trust of Israel backers

Majority see president as 'pro-Palestinian'



President Obama's harsh criticism of West Bank settlements during his heavily publicized June speech to the Arab world in Cairo continues to reverberate here, undercutting his popularity and heightening tensions with some pro-Israel advocates in the United States. Navigating the complex relationship with Israel is a delicate task for any administration, but relations are especially delicate now as Mr. Obama is making a major push to build trust with the region's vast Muslim population and coordinate a diplomatic drive to halt Iran's nuclear programs.

During his June speech, Mr. Obama questioned the legitimacy of the settlements, saying they violated previous agreements and undermined the peace process, prompting a hawkish public response from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A recent poll sponsored by the Jerusalem Post underscored the extent of the rift: Just 6 percent of Jewish Israelis surveyed said they now consider Mr. Obama's administration to be "pro-Israel." Fifty percent said Mr. Obama was "pro-Palestinian, and 36 percent said he was "neutral."

Otniel Schneller, deputy speaker of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, warned that Mr. Obama's approach could stymie the peace process. "He doesn't understand the conflict. He thinks he understands it," Mr. Schneller told The Washington Times. "The formula is very easy. If they will continue to push us to give the Palestinians more than 90 percent of the West Bank, there will not be any peace in the future, ever."

Mr. Schneller, a modern Orthodox Jew, lives in the West Bank settlement of Ma'ale Mikhmas. He is one of an estimated 300,000 Jewish settlers, many of whom have built homes in the region as an expression of religious conviction.

The United States has always maintained close ties with Israel, an alliance strengthened during the Cold War, when Israel provided vital intelligence about Russian military capabilities to U.S. agents. Cultural and religious ties also bind the two countries.

Pro-Israel groups in the United States initially expressed concerns about some of Mr. Obama's views as he began his White House bid. However, after he secured the Democratic nomination, a number of American Jewish leaders began to coalesce behind him.

Now, several leading Republicans said they think rising anti-Obama sentiment here could translate into inroads for Republicans who have been seeking support from American Jews. Virginia Republican Rep. Eric Cantor, No. 2 in the House Republican Party hierarchy and the only Jewish Republican in an elected national position, appealed to Jewish voters in the Israeli press, telling them they have a place in the Republican Party.

Mr. Cantor earlier this month led a delegation of 25 House Republicans, many freshman members, on a one-week tour of Israel sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, an arm of the powerful lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). AIPAC maintains an annual budget of nearly $60 million and an endowment of $130 million.

Last week, 29 House Democrats were following suit, completing an ambitious schedule that included meetings with Mr. Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. "There is much discussion, I think, within the scene in American politics about the American Jewish vote, about potential gains for the Republican Party among many minorities, as well as the population as a whole," Mr. Cantor said in Jerusalem during a press conference.

The discussion of any true shift in allegiances, though, may be premature just six months into the new administration, many observers said. "I do not think that the relationship has been damaged yet," said George S. Naggiar, chairman of the American Association for Palestinian Equal Rights. However, Mr. Naggiar noted that "because the United States wants to maintain an image of power and credibility among Arabs and Muslims and because Israel's refusal to end settlements will undermine that image, such refusal has the potential to damage the U.S. relationship with Israel."

Mr. Naggiar said American Jews, while strongly linked with the Democratic Party, are not single-issue voters and only a small minority are fiercely devoted to maintaining and expanding Jewish settlements.

But Jeff Daube, director of the Zionist Organization of America's Israel office, said he thinks the president's positions have taken a toll. "There is no doubt that it has damaged the relationship," Mr. Daube said of Mr. Obama's call to halt settlements.

SOURCE

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For the Left, war without Bush is no war at all

The soap-bubble "principles" of the Left again

Remember the anti-war movement? Not too long ago, the Democratic party's most loyal voters passionately opposed the war in Iraq. Democratic presidential candidates argued over who would withdraw American troops the quickest. Netroots activists regularly denounced President George W. Bush, and sometimes the U.S. military ("General Betray Us"). Cindy Sheehan, the woman whose soldier son was killed in Iraq, became a heroine when she led protests at Bush's Texas ranch.

That was then. Now, even though the United States still has roughly 130,000 troops in Iraq, and is quickly escalating the war in Afghanistan -- 68,000 troops there by the end of this year, and possibly more in 2010 -- anti-war voices on the Left have fallen silent.

No group was more angrily opposed to the war in Iraq than the netroots activists clustered around the left-wing Web site DailyKos. It's an influential site, one of the biggest on the Web, and in the Bush years many of its devotees took an active role in raising money and campaigning for anti-war candidates.

In 2006, DailyKos held its first annual convention, called YearlyKos, in Las Vegas. Amid the slightly discordant surroundings of the Riviera Hotel casino, the webby activists spent hours discussing and planning strategies not only to defeat Republicans but also to pressure Democrats to oppose the war more forcefully. The gathering attracted lots of mainstream press attention; Internet activism was the hot new thing.

Fast forward to last weekend, when YearlyKos, renamed Netroots Nation, held its convention in Pittsburgh. The meeting didn't draw much coverage, but the views of those who attended are still, as they were in 2006, a pretty good snapshot of the left wing of the Democratic party. The news that emerged is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have virtually fallen off the liberal radar screen. Kossacks (as fans of DailyKos like to call themselves) who were consumed by the Iraq war when George W. Bush was president are now, with Barack Obama in the White House, not so consumed, either with Iraq or with Obama's escalation of the conflict in Afghanistan. In fact, they barely seem to care.

As part of a straw poll done at the convention, the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg presented participants with a list of policy priorities like health care and the environment. He asked people to list the two priorities they believed "progressive activists should be focusing their attention and efforts on the most." The winner, by far, was "passing comprehensive health care reform." In second place was enacting "green energy policies that address environmental concerns." And what about "working to end our military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan"? It was way down the list, in eighth place.

Perhaps more tellingly, Greenberg asked activists to name the issue that "you, personally, spend the most time advancing currently." The winner, again, was health care reform. Next came "working to elect progressive candidates in the 2010 elections." Then came a bunch of other issues. At the very bottom -- last place, named by just one percent of participants -- came working to end U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It's an extraordinary change in the mindset of the left. I attended the first YearlyKos convention, and have kept up with later ones, and it's safe to say that for many self-styled "progressives," the war in Iraq was the animating cause of their activism. They hated the war, and they hated George W. Bush for starting it. Or maybe they hated the war because George W. Bush started it. Either way, it was war, war, war. Now, not so much.

Cindy Sheehan is learning that. She's still protesting the war, and on Monday she announced plans to demonstrate at Martha's Vineyard, where President Obama will be vacationing. "We as a movement need to continue calling for an immediate end to the occupations [in Iraq and Afghanistan] even when there is a Democrat in the Oval Office," Sheehan said in a statement. "There is still no Noble Cause no matter how we examine the policies." Give her credit for consistency, if nothing else. But her days are over. The people who most fervently supported her have moved on.

Not too long ago, some observers worried that Barack Obama would come under increasing pressure from the Left to leave both Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, it seems those worries were unfounded. For many liberal activists, opposing the war was really about opposing George W. Bush. When Bush disappeared, so did their anti-war passion.

SOURCE

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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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