Sanctions Won't Work Against Iran

The mullahs are addressing their vulnerability to a gasoline shortage

By JOHN BOLTON

Last week, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Mohamed elBaradei attempted to whitewash Iran's nuclear weapons program by issuing a report ignoring substantial information about weaponization activities and downplaying continued noncooperation.

Even the Obama administration apparently now understands that resuming the long-stalled "Permanent-Five plus-one" negotiations (the U.N. Security Council's permanent members plus Germany) with Iran is highly unlikely to halt Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Accordingly, President Obama is readying two alternatives. One is to characterize "freezing" Iran's nuclear program at existing levels as a "success." However, this less than complete termination of Iran's nuclear program would run contrary to years of determined clandestine efforts. Such a freeze is utterly unverifiable and amounts to surrender. This will result in a nuclear-armed Iran.

The other Obama administration ploy is "strong sanctions" imposed by the United States and other countries. This will also be a "success" only in the sense that it will allow the administration to claim a win. It won't actually prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

One idea for robust sanctions now before Congress is to prohibit exports of refined petroleum products—such as gasoline—to Iran. Today, Iran imports 40% of its daily refined petroleum consumption. Other proposals include international financial and insurance-related sanctions.

These ideas are well-intentioned and worth pursuing. If imposed, they will create shortages that will likely increase internal dissatisfaction with Iran's regime, thereby hopefully contributing to its ultimate demise. But no one should believe that tighter sanctions will, in the foreseeable future, have any impact on Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Six years ago more stringent measures against Iran might have worked, but today they are an idea whose time has come and gone. Their inadequacy stems from several causes.

First, the U.N. Security Council is no more likely now to approve strict sanctions against Iran than in the past. The prospects for Russian and Chinese support are between slim and none, since endorsing sanctions would harm their own economic and political interests in Iran. The most to expect from the council is a fourth sanctions resolution, as weak and ineffective as its predecessors, and only after weeks or months of agonizing negotiations.

Second, for those who understand the Security Council reality, most talk of enhanced sanctions envisages a coalition of the willing, consisting essentially of America, Japan and the European Union. But the EU's record to date, and Japan's likely policy under its new government (soon to be run by the Democratic Party of Japan), are hardly likely to produce a stiff, serious and sustained effort. Iran itself will offer countless reasons why sanctions should be suspended, reduced or ignored, and a disquieting amalgam of Western governments, businesses and commentators will agree at every step. It is very likely that EU resolve will fracture and Japan will follow suit. Moreover, many other countries will use the lack of a Security Council imprimatur to conduct business with Tehran, shredding the coalition's sanctions, and thereby weakening EU resolve still further.

Third, Iran is hardly standing idly by while sanctions that target its refined petroleum products are debated by the U.S. and other countries. Tehran's leaders are acutely aware of their vulnerability and are moving to address it. Iran, with extensive Chinese involvement, has already begun building new refineries and expanding existing facilities with the aim of approximately doubling domestic capacity by 2012. This will more than compensate for its current refining shortfall. Whether Iran can complete these projects on schedule remains to be seen, but the level of effort is intense and serious.

Tehran is also eliminating government subsidies that make retail gasoline cheaper than it otherwise would be. This will raise prices and thereby reduce consumption. Slashing consumer benefits is rarely popular, but this step alone will substantially reduce the pressure on Iran's refineries to produce. One can also be sure that the Revolutionary Guards' access to gasoline will not be diminished. Iran claims to have substantially increased its strategic gasoline reserves over the past year (though that increase has not been confirmed).

Most significantly, Iran's estimated natural gas reserves (948 trillion cubic feet in 2008) are second only to Russia's, and more than quadruple the U.S.'s. Here is "energy independence" for Iran that would make T. Boone Pickens envious, since relatively small capital expenditures can refit large motor-vehicle fleets (such as Iran's military and security services) to run on compressed natural gas. Iran also plans to increase subsidies for natural gas, thus diminishing consumer anger over lost gasoline subsidies.

For Washington, the question should not be whether "strict sanctions" will cause some economic harm despite Iran's multifarious, accelerating efforts to mitigate them. Instead, we must ask whether that harm will be sufficient to dissuade Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons. Objectively, there is no reason to believe that it will.

Adopting tougher economic sanctions is simply another detour away from hard decisions on whether to accept a nuclear Iran or support using force to prevent it.

SOURCE

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The "Animal Rights Czar" spells potential trouble for American farmers



One of the most effective ways a President influences public policy and law in a lasting manner is through regulatory actions taken by the federal government. It's not an area that typically garners substantial media attention because regulatory work is generally a highly technical matter performed by policy wonks largely unknown to the public.

Yet, despite their general obscurity, federal regulations have a substantial impact on virtually every facet of society. And the personnel who oversee the regulatory process have far greater influence than most would imagine.

Chief among the personnel who oversee the regulatory process is the administrator of an unheralded office within the White House's Office of Management and Budget called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). The administrator is also known as the "Regulatory Czar." Earlier this year the President nominated Cass Sunstein to run this office. Sunstein's nomination is now pending before the full Senate. A vote on his nomination is expected next week....

Some of Mr. Sunstein's views are troubling to say the least. He is on record supporting rights for animals including giving standing to private persons to sue on behalf of animals under existing laws. He has also stated that he believes there should be more regulation in the area of animal rights.

This is slippery slope to say the least. What will happen if he is presented with a regulatory situation where he is free to “follow the law” as well as advance his own personal views at the same time? And what if he uses the power of this office to influence the law he then eagerly follows?

In my own past work experience, I’ve had substantial firsthand experience with OIRA. The office can be a bear to deal with since it has life and death power over regulatory actions. And I have seen how the personal views of OIRA staff can become dangerously problematic, as the regulators attempt to push the law in one way or another because they are in a position to affect (or even craft) law, not just follow it.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

I have just put up a couple of "off the beaten track" posts on my Paralipomena blog -- which may particularly interest readers who take an interest in history.

Mike Adams has up a sampling of his hate mail -- together with his mocking replies. Rather fun. I receive very similar outbursts of ignorance from the Left myself. Are there any Leftists who can spell?

In his usual articulate way, Buchanan argues persuasively that Britain and France should not have interfered with Hitler's Drang nach Osten and that Hitler's aims fell well short of world conquest. He certainly was not prepared for the war he provoked. But in the end I still think Churchill was right and that Hitler would have used "salami tactics" to slice off the rest of the world bit by bit and that he had to be stopped before he grew powerful enough to do that.

Hoyer has rowdy Townhall: "House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told cheering and jeering constituents Tuesday he still supports a public health insurance option as part of a health care overhaul. Previously he's said there's room for compromise. At a packed high school gym, Hoyer, D-Md., was shouted down repeatedly during a town hall meeting where a crowd of 1,500 appeared to be evenly split between supporters and opponents of the health care overhaul effort. One woman pressed the Democratic leader on whether he'd give in on the public option if Republicans refused to compromise. "If the question is do I plan to vote for a public option with or without Republican support, the answer is yes," Hoyer said."

Obama's Shameless 'Torture' Prosecution Reversal: "President Barack Obama is either extraordinarily politically tone-deaf or arrogant beyond bounds, as indicated by his relentless pursuit of policies strongly rejected by the American people. His decision or acquiescence in the Department of Justice's decision to reinvestigate CIA terrorist interrogators is the latest outrage. Obama's approval ratings have cratered even further since my most recent column, and he's either Mr. Magoo, driving along in blissful oblivion, or Fearless Leader, who will do what he wants, American people be damned. Based on Obama's oft-articulated mindset -- "I won, so the other side should just quit talking" -- I think it's safe to say he's closer to dictator than to Magoo. Besides, Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to begin a new investigation of the CIA interrogators has Obama's national security-emasculating fingerprints all over it".

Obama praises barbaric 7th century ignorance at Ramadan dinner: "US President Barack Obama praised Islam as an integral part of America, as he feted prominent US Muslims at an Iftar dinner marking the holy fasting month of Ramadan. "For well over a billion Muslims, Ramadan is a time of intense devotion and reflection," Mr Obama said, in remarks welcoming his guests in the State Dining Room of the White House. "Tonight's Iftar is a ritual that is being carried out this Ramadan at kitchen tables and mosques in all 50 states," he said. "Islam as we know is part of America. Like the broader American citizenry, the American Muslim community is one of extraordinary dynamism and diversity. "On this occasion, we celebrate the holy month of Ramadan and we also celebrate how much Muslims have enriched America and its culture in ways both large and small,'' he said."

Obama pleases nobody some of the time: A president is going to be smacked around from the moment he takes office and the uplifting rhetoric of campaign rallies meets the gritty reality of governing. But the criticism of Barack Obama has turned strikingly personal as some of his liberal media allies have gone wobbly on him. After playing a cheerleading role during the campaign, some are bluntly questioning whether he's up to the job. If Obama is losing Paul Krugman, can the rest of the left be far behind? "I'm concerned as to whether, in trying to reach out to the middle, he is selling out his base," says Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page. "I find myself saying, 'Where's that well-oiled Obama machine we saw last year?' . . . Maybe he's being a little too cool at this point." David Corn, a blogger for Politics Daily, says that despite a reservoir of support for the president, some of his policies "have caused concern, if not outright anger, among certain liberal commentators and bloggers. It's been a more conventional White House than many people expected or desired. . . . He's made compromises that have some people concerned about his adherence to principle." Perhaps that's why a recent Frank Rich column in the New York Times was headlined, "Is Obama Punking Us?"

Rasmussen poll: "Looking back, after the initial euphoria of inauguration day, the President’s ratings slipped a bit but remained steady and positive from February thru May. In June, the numbers began to move down a bit, still remained generally positive. July and August were less positive months for the President. Overall, the number who Strongly Approve has fallen from 43% in January to 30% in August. During that same time frame, the number who Strongly Disapprove has grown from 20% to 39%. Those numbers translate to a Presidential Approval Index that has declined from +23 in January to -9 in August. Also in August, the President’s total approval fell below 50% for the first time. While opposition to the President’s proposed health care reform is partly responsible for the declining approval ratings, the numbers reflect a broader level of frustration. Last fall, during the Bush Administration, voters overwhelmingly opposed the bailout plans for banks but the bailout went ahead. Earlier this year, voters overwhelmingly opposed the federal takeover of General Motors and Chrysler, but they went ahead as well. Two-thirds of American voters (64%) support a law requiring the federal government to sell its interest in GM within one year. Currently, Republicans have a modest lead on the Generic Congressional Ballot."



Two deadly truck bombers were recently freed by Obama admin.: Two truck bombers who killed 95 people in devastating attacks on the Iraqi finance and foreign ministries were recently released from US custody, a senior interior ministry official said on Sunday. "The suicide bomber who blew himself up at the ministry of foreign affairs was released three months ago from Camp Bucca," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity, referring to the US jail near Basra. "The suicide bomber who blew himself up outside the ministry of finance was also released a few months ago from the same jail." The August 19 attacks in Baghdad also wounded 600 people in the worst day of violence to hit the country for 18 months."

French coverup: "Air France pilots yesterday accused accident investigators of trying to cover up the cause of the Airbus crash off the coast of Brazil in June that killed 228 people after officials appeared to blame the crew for the disaster... Mr Arnoux, an Airbus captain, said that the BEA was trying to overcome its previous failure to act on known faults with speed sensors, known as pitot tubes, on Airbus aircraft. “The architecture of the Airbus systems is in question,” he said. The families have accused Air France and the BEA of dishonesty. Christophe Guillot-Noël, who heads an association of victims’ families, said that Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, the airline boss, was privately blaming the pilots. The BEA report was shaped by politics, he said. A new deep-sea search is to start this month for the flight recorders, but data sent in the moments before the aircraft disappeared has offered an outline of the chain of events. Faulty speed readings, apparently caused by ice, prompted erratic behaviour by the automated flight system. Flying by hand, and without key data, the two pilots were unable to keep control. In a preliminary report in July, the BEA said that the speed sensors were “a factor, but not the cause” of the crash. In late July, the European Aviation Safety Agency ordered replacement of the French-made pitots with American ones on all long-range Airbuses. Suspicion has fallen on the highly automated design of the Airbus flight systems."

Freedom Communications enters bankruptcy protection: "Freedom Communications Inc., the owner of more than 30 daily newspapers including the Orange County Register in California, sought bankruptcy protection after print advertising revenue declined. Freedom, the owner of eight television stations, has assets of as much as $1 billion and debt of more than $1 billion, it said today in Chapter 11 papers in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware. The Irvine, California-based company said it filed after a majority of Freedom’s lenders agreed to support a plan to restructure its debt.”

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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Iranian Nuclear Threat Targets U.S. as well as Israel

And they don't need missiles to deliver it. Put the bomb on a ship manned by "martyrs" and sail it into New York harbour and Bingo! That way you will have shown "The Great Satan" a thing or two! And think how many Jews you would pop off at the same time! Any NY Jew who supported Obama is an imbecile. New York is the obvious target of first choice for the mad mullahs. Wasn't 9/11 warning enough?

The Islamic republic has test-fired missiles capable of reaching Israel, southeastern Europe, and U.S. bases in the Mideast — and published reports say Iran is within a year of developing its own nuclear bomb. Security experts warn that even one nuclear device in the hands of a rogue nation could be used against the United States in a devastating electromagnetic pulse attack, an intense burst of energy from an exploding nuclear warhead high above the Earth.

So why isn't the Obama administration doing more to prevent a nuclear nightmare? “I get very, very nervous about it,” Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., told Newsmax.TV's Kathleen Walter. “I think Iran will have a nuclear weapon. I think now it's only a question of when.”

The United States is caught in the middle of a Mideast faceoff between one of its strongest allies, Israel, and Iran. Iran has threatened to wipe Israel off the map, and Israel refuses to rule out a preemptive strike against its adversary, while insisting that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. If the United States tries to prevent Iran from making nuclear weapons, its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has vowed a campaign of bloody revenge.

Iran's hatred of Israel “is rooted in ideology,” said Walid Phares of Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The Iranian regime is jihadist, and they do not acknowledge nor accept the idea that a non-Islamic, non-jihadist state could exist in the region.”

Although Iran is thousands of miles from America's shores, its belligerent actions could have far-reaching repercussions. A regional war or nuclear attack could cause an already shaky U.S. economy to collapse.

Even scarier is the growing threat of an electromagnetic pulse attack, security analysts say. Such an attack could destroy all electronic devices over a massive area, from cell phones to computers to America's electrical grid, experts say. “Within a year of that attack, nine out of 10 Americans would be dead, because we can't support a population of the present size in urban centers and the like without electricity,” said Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy. “That would be a world without America, as a practical matter. And that is exactly what I believe the Iranians are working towards.”

President Barack Obama has committed the U.S. government to a diplomatic approach for resolving the high-stakes nuclear dispute, but Iran has rebuffed Obama's overtures. Meanwhile, Congress is working on legislation to grant Obama the power to impose crippling sanctions on Iran if the talk-first approach doesn't work.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., says such sanctions are long overdue. “A nuclear Iran is a threat to the Iranian people, to Israel, to the Middle East, to the national security of the United States. And what is Congress doing about it? Nothing. We have proposed legislation time and time again to have real, substantial sanctions leveled against Iran. Now, we like to point fingers and say the U.N. has not done enough, but really we should be pointing the fingers at ourselves.”...

“Eventually the Iranian regime, if not reformed from the inside, is going to get the nukes, is going to use them in a deterrence fashion, and eventually if there is a confrontation it may use them for real,” Phares said. “This revolt of Tehran may well become another Iranian revolution. Now its success is conditioned by how far the United States and the international community go in assisting this democratic movement.”

The more time Obama devotes to the diplomatic approach, critics warn, the more time Iran has to realize its nuclear ambitions and even sell its technology to other nations or terrorists. “I think the president's learning a lesson,” Hoekstra said. “I mean, the president was brutal on the previous administration on foreign policy, saying, you know, 'Your policy on North Korea is bad; your policy on Iran is bad.' Everywhere and anything the former president did in foreign policy was terrible [according to Obama], and he was going to come in and fix it. I think he's finding out that foreign policy is hard.”

More here

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FDR is an unfortunate model for today's Leftists

As another example of our creative powers of memory, take the controversy around the federal government's frantic, improvised responses to the global financial crisis. Since most of those who experienced the Depression are dead, we're free to invoke the imagined spirit of the dole queue, or Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, without fear of contradiction. Yet even a casual student of the 1930s would have to admit, if they put their hand upon their heart, that the legislative response to the Depression in the US was at least as arbitrary, opportunistic and ill thought through as anything our own would-be FDRs could possible envision.

Roosevelt, who nowadays has come in some circles to assume the character of a saint, was in life as crafty and temporising a politician as was ever born. His economic policies (what his earliest and most un-illusioned biographer, James MacGregor Burns, described as the economics of the "broker state") required endless doses of improvisation, along with "a host of energetic and ill-assorted government programs and economic betterment without real recovery". And his governing style involved balancing the interests of the strongest interest groups at the expense of the weaker ones, in the process buying "short-term political gains at the expense of long-term strategic advance". None of this is exactly unfamiliar.

Like the democratic cynics of our own day, FDR happily pursued at all times, with almost geometrical precision, a path calculated to secure the maximum political advantage for every dollar of economic stimulus spent, all the while harmonising the electoral cycle to the fiscal one.

But then, what should we expect? As the era's sage, J.M. Keynes, happily pointed out, the good fortune of the slump was to have made economic expansion and political expediency into siblings.

In one sense, the chief economic legacy of the Depression to us is merely that hard times can be made to license a species of policy exuberance that might in other times be labelled as carelessness.

It was FDR's great advantage over our would-be FDRs that his programs really were nation building, in a practical and material sense. Then there were roads where roads had never been, while dams brought electricity to candle-burners.

Our would-be FDRs, by adopting the mantle of nation-building without really comprehending its original purpose, have in effect played a joke upon themselves and us.

No school is going to turn down a learning centre (whatever exactly that may be) or a technology hall. But they would probably rather have teachers who were once the stars of their own schools, and literature set texts that have some standing as works of literature. And in that regard, sad to say, the generation of the 30s do seem somehow to have stolen a march on us.

More here

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Wackjob science czar to appear on David Letterman

According David Letterman’s website, wackjob science czar Dr. John Holdren is scheduled to appear Wednesday night, September 2. Holdren has been a guest on Letterman before. He visited in April 2008 to ply global warming scare propaganda. Not a peep from Letterman about Holdren’s spectacularly wrong predictions and irresponsible alarmism.

And we certainly won’t expect a peep from Letterman about Holdren’s extremist musings on forced abortions, mass sterilizations, and undesirables. Wouldn’t want to be accused of “defamation” by the left-wing blogs, eh, Dave?

Holdren’s office has gotten away with stonewalling questions about the science czar’s promotion of his colleague and mentor, eugenicist Harrison Brown. These are the questions I asked last month — and which many readers also asked of Holdren’s office to no avail:

1) Does Dr. Holdren disavow the population control extremism of his intellectual mentor and colleague, Harrison Brown or not?

2) Does Dr. Holdren also view the world population as a “pulsating mass of maggots?”

3) Was Dr. Holdren unaware of Harrison Brown’s views when he paid homage to him at the AAAS keynote address in 2007?

Internet investigative blogger Zombie spotlighted copious passages from one of Holdren’s favorite books by Harrison Brown, The Challenge of Man’s Future, which openly advocates a “broad eugenics program” — and also featured Holdren’s own praise for the book:

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Zogby Interactive: Loss of Democrats' Support Helps Bring Obama Job Approval Down to 42%‏: "President Barack Obama's job approval rating is down to 42%, with a decline in approval from Democrats the leading factor. The latest Zogby Interactive poll of 4,518 likely voters conducted from August 28-31 found 48% disapprove and 42% approve of the job Obama is doing. The poll found 75% of Democrats approve of Obama's performance, a drop of 13 points among Democrats from an interactive poll done July 21-24 of this year. That same poll found 48% of all likely voters approving of Obama's job performance, and 49% disapproving. In the most recent poll, 8% of Republicans and 37% of Independents approve of Obama's job performance. Both are down slightly from six weeks ago; two points among Republicans and three among Independents".

A Democrat royal succession?: "With Massachusetts having paid its final respects to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the politics of succession begins in earnest this week — candidates will emerge, a race will take shape, and the Kennedy clan will have to reveal whether it wants to keep the seat in the family. All eyes now are on Joseph P. Kennedy II, the former US representative, with family members and political allies expecting him to make a decision very shortly on whether to enter the Democratic primary. No other Kennedy of his generation with the political stature to step into the role has signaled interest in it, according to Democratic insiders and people close to the family. And Victoria Reggie Kennedy, the senator’s widow, who many expected would be a likely candidate, so far has indicated she is not interested in succeeding her husband.”

Equal treatment for Congresscritters: "What this country needs, in addition to the good five-cent cigar, is a simple amendment to the Constitution decreeing that every law enacted by Congress will apply to members of Congress in the way it applies to everyone else. No more platinum-plated retirement plans for members of Congress, no more cut-rate haircuts and shoeshines, and most important of all, no more health-care plans specifically for the men and women who get to tell the rest of us what's good for us: "Just give us what you get." If Congress keeps its cut-rate haircuts, then every visiting Toyota mechanic just off the bus from Topeka, with his locks curling over his collar, is entitled to visit the congressional barber shop for a cut-rate cut, too. And a manicure. He wouldn't want dirt under his fingernails when dining at the Palm or the Jockey Club".

Band-Aids for the recession: “A recent poll shows that most economists now believe that the recession, which began in December 2007, will end in the third quarter of 2009. There’s been an uptick in manufacturing and consumer confidence, and the decline in housing prices appears to be flattening out. Unfortunately, the return to positive GDP will likely be short-lived. The current surge in production is mainly the result of President Obama’s fiscal stimulus and the rebuilding of inventories that were slashed after Lehman Bros defaulted in September, 2008. These factors should boost GDP for two or perhaps three quarters before the economy lapses back into recession. The most serious problems facing the economy have not yet been addressed or resolved. Consumer spending and bank lending are still contracting, and the banks are buried beneath $1.5 trillion in toxic assets and non-performing loans. Also, the wholesale credit system, (securitization) which provided up to 40 per cent of the credit flowing into the economy, is barely operating. No one really knows whether the system is salvageable or not. On a fundamental level, the financial system is broken and neither the Fed’s zero percent interest rates nor Obama’s gigantic fiscal stimulus has reversed the prevailing downward trend. Capital has stopped moving; the velocity of money has slowed to a crawl. It’s true, things are getting worse slower, but the signs of ‘recovery’ are as faint and irregular as a dying man’s breath.”

A path to fiscal sanity: "Estimates from the Social Security and Medicare trustees and the Congressional Budget Office, academic studies, and other reports suggest that the total federal fiscal imbalance amounts to 8 percent of future U.S. productive capacity. Since only about one-half of the nation’s total income is subject to taxes, Americans would have to immediately and permanently devote another 16 percent of their taxable incomes toward resolving it. Is this a feasible solution? Probably not. It’s unlikely that Americans are willing to bear the additional tax burden. Also, tax increases tend not to increase government savings; Congress quickly dissipated post–Cold War budget savings through tax cuts and rapid growth in government spending. And higher taxes would significantly erode individuals’ incentives to work and save, start and expand businesses, hire workers, and so on. If tax increases aren’t the answer, reduced government spending has to be.”

What’s $2 trillion among friends?: "$2,000,000,000,000. That’s the amount by which the Obama administration raised its ten-year estimate of the nation’s budget deficit from the one it made only a few months ago. Now, $2 trillion is a lot of money. But even more significant is the fact that this revision represents almost a 30 percent increase — no tiny percentage of the earlier $7 trillion figure. It seems that expenses are higher — up 24 percent this year, the largest increase since the height of the Korean War — than originally estimated, and revenues are lower. The resulting deficit, says Peter Orszag, Obama’s budget director, is ‘higher than desirable.’ He might have added that the administration’s critics had it right when they claimed that the earlier estimate represented a turn around the dance floor with that old seductress, Rosy Scenario.”

Student loan fix will prove costly: "America is teetering on the edge of an $11.6-trillion abyss called the ‘national debt,’ a financial chasm that threatens to swallow our economic future whole. And what are our leaders doing about it? If a bill working its way through Congress is any indication, they’re insisting that they’re pulling us away from doom, while they quietly expand the monstrous hole. The bill is the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA), the focal point of which is elimination of the Federal Family Education Loan program — which uses federal bucks to back student loans from private lenders — and replacement with lending straight from Uncle Sam. But that’s hardly all it would do.”

WA: Domestic partnership referendum makes ballot: "A referendum that could overturn Washington state’s ‘everything but marriage’ domestic partnership law has qualified for the November ballot. The secretary of state’s office said Monday that sponsors of Referendum 71 had 121,486 valid petition signatures — enough to put the newly expanded domestic partnership law to a public vote. A secondary check of rejected signatures was not complete, so the number could increase. The new law was supposed to take effect July 26 but was delayed until the signature count was complete. Now, it won’t take effect unless it is approved in the Nov. 3 election. The measure would expand existing domestic partnerships to give gay and lesbian couples all the state-provided benefits that married heterosexual couples have.”

Britain: New “booze Asbos” come under fire: “New powers to impose Drinking Banning Orders — dubbed ‘booze Asbos’ — on people who behave anti-socially while drunk have come under fire. From Monday, police and councils in England and Wales can seek such an order on anyone aged 16 and over. Offenders must stay away from pubs, bars, off-licences and named areas for up to two years or face a £2,500 fine. However, the Magistrates Association said trying to ban people from all licensed premises was ‘nonsense.’”

Germany: Hoarding "energy-guzzling" bulbs ahead of EU ban: “Germans, who sometimes see themselves as guardians of the environment, are hoarding energy-guzzling incandescent light bulbs ahead of a looming European Union-wide ban, the GfK market research agency said. The Nuremberg-based GfK reported sales of incandescent bulbs had soared about 35 percent in the first half of the year ahead of a ban that starts Tuesday — even though it was proposed by German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel in 2007. Some German retailers said they have seen sales of 100-watt incandescent bulbs soar 600 percent since the end of July.”

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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America once had two constructive political parties

HIS NAME WAS KENNEDY. He was the pre-eminent figure in the Democratic Party. And he was a resolute supply-side tax-cutter. "It is a paradoxical truth," he once told the Economic Club of New York, "that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now." What he had in mind, he said, was not "a 'quickie' or a temporary tax cut." He wanted nothing less than "an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes."

Would he be a Democrat today? Those were not the words of Senator Edward Kennedy. The speaker – in December 1962 -- was President John F. Kennedy, and his ringing call for tax cuts was no anomaly. In a televised address from the Oval Office four months earlier, JFK had called high tax rates a danger to "the very essence of the progress of a free society: the incentive of additional return for additional effort." In his 1963 State of the Union message, he said his first priority was "the enactment this year of a substantial reduction and revision in federal income taxes." In the speech he was scheduled to deliver to the Texas Democratic State Committee on Nov. 22, 1963, Kennedy planned to report proudly: "We have proposed a massive tax reduction, with particular benefits for small business."

In recent days, Ted Kennedy has been justly acclaimed as a lion of the Democratic Party. But how different the party mourning Kennedy today is from the one that first nominated him in 1962!

The reversal on taxes is one vivid example. When Ted Kennedy entered the Senate in 1963, JFK was leading a campaign for sweeping tax relief that would eventually slash the top marginal rate by a huge 21 percentage points, from 91 to 70. But Democrats have long since become the party that resists lower taxes. In our era, it has been Republicans like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush who have championed JFK-style rate cuts -- cuts that Democrats now condemn as "tax breaks for the wealthy."

On civil rights, too, there has been a sea change.

Liberal Democrats in the 1960s upheld the colorblind ideal -- the conviction that Americans should be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Far from supporting racial quotas and preferences, civil-rights Democrats of that generation flatly rejected them. Senator Hubert Humphrey famously vowed that if anyone could find anything in the 1964 Civil Rights Bill that would compel employers to hire on the basis of race or national origin, "I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there." In a 1963 press conference, President Kennedy explicitly opposed racial preferences: "We are too mixed, this society of ours, to begin to divide ourselves on the basis of race or color."

But in the years that followed, as such preferences became entrenched in hiring and education, liberal Democrats became their doughtiest supporters. Senator Kennedy was "a leader in congressional efforts to preserve federal affirmative action," his Senate website notes. When the Supreme Court ruled against the racial classification of schoolchildren in a 2007 case -- "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," the court frankly advised -- Kennedy blasted the decision as one that "turns back the clock on equality."

Especially dramatic has been the Democratic Party's metamorphosis on foreign affairs.

"There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future: Let them come to Berlin," declared President Kennedy, a staunch Cold Warrior, in his great Berlin Wall speech in 1963. "There are some who say, in Europe and elsewhere, we can work with the Communists: Let them come to Berlin." But by 1987, when another American president journeyed to Berlin to challenge Moscow to "tear down this wall," such muscular anti-Communism had all but vanished from Democratic Party thinking.

JFK likewise spoke for mainstream Democrats when he asserted that America would "pay any price, bear any burden" to spread freedom and democracy in the world. He was a hawk who pressed for higher defense spending and American military superiority. The Democratic Party of more recent years -- the party of "come home, America" and a nuclear freeze -- was one he wouldn't have recognized.

All political parties alter over time, of course. Today's Republican Party is not a carbon-copy of Eisenhower's: It is more internationalist, more religious, more Southern. But a resurrected Eisenhower would still recognize the GOP, and still command its esteem.

The Democrats' transformation has been much more profound. Over the course of Ted Kennedy's long Senate career, his party's ideological center shifted hard to the left. It goes without saying that a JFK today could never be the Democrats' candidate for president. The question is, would he still be a Democrat?

SOURCE

And why have the Democrats drifted so far Left? Because they no longer need the support of mainstream Americans. They are now the party of the minorities and the haters -- and with their unwavering support for illegal immigration, they hope to entrench that -- JR]

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His monument stands all around us

By VIN SUPRYNOWICZ

The most revealing moment in Edward "Ted" Kennedy's political life came Nov. 4, 1979, just three days before he would officially launch his challenge to a sitting president of his own party, Jimmy Carter. In a televised interview, CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd asked the already stout Massachusetts senator a "giveaway" question, a question about as tough as a quiz show host trying to help break the ice with a nervous contestant by asking, "What color is grass?" Roger Mudd asked: "Why do you want to be president?"

Ted Kennedy, 47, was about to challenge an incumbent president of his own party, with whom his ideological differences were minimal. Why not wait just four years more? Dividing one's own party in such a way must always weaken the party, creating an opening for the other party's challenger in the general election (Ronald Reagan, in this case) no matter who wins the primary.

Any mature politician considering such a move -- any thoughtful man who had seen two elder brothers assassinated for their trouble in seeking that office -- would have asked himself, not once or twice, but a hundred times, "Do I really want to do this? Is seeking the White House -- heck, even winning the White House -- the best thing for my family, my country, my party, for me? What can I accomplish that Jimmy Carter cannot, and how important is it?"

Instead, Ted Kennedy was caught flat-footed when Mudd asked him why he wanted to be president. This was not merely a "bad moment." His rambling, directionless answer -- vague bromides about the European nations doing better on energy policy and on fighting inflation -- made it clear he was merely being swept along by those who wanted to benefit from installing him in the seat of power. He was running because it was "his turn" ... or something.

The little boy who had always been overshadowed by his big brothers; the spoiled brat who was kicked out of Harvard for paying someone else to take his Spanish exam for him; the confused, panicked drunk who returned to the party and left Mary Jo Kopechne to drown in his car as it sank into the waters off Chappaquiddick Island (unless we choose to give the event a more ominous interpretation -- Gene Frieh, the undertaker, told reporters death "was due to suffocation rather than drowning"; John Farrar, the diver who removed Kopechne from the car, claimed she was "too buoyant to be full of water"; there was never an autopsy) was finally on his own, asked a question that any thoughtful man would have been rehearsing in his own mind for months.

And the second-term senator was revealed to have the quality of intellect we'd expect from some babbling beauty contestant, a creature whose life and purpose and ambition were, to be as kind as possible, unexamined.

Oh, some will moan, you're just concentrating on the bad parts. The man's body is barely cold, for heaven's sake. Can't you talk about his achievements, all the good he did?

Read the paeans from the left, praising him as a "lion of the Senate." They speak of his endless concern for the "underprivileged," though they're woefully short on specifics.

The socialists and redistributionists always seek forgiveness for their errors and excesses -- the policies that have driven this country to the brink of bankruptcy and hyperinflation -- in terms of what they meant to accomplish for "the poor and the downtrodden." But who suffers worst in the hard times their policies have brought about? The hardworking poor, who find their jobs gone, their mortgages upside down, the once-proud currency in which their savings and investments are denominated increasingly worthless.

The welfare classes will do all right -- for a while. But what favor have the condescending handouts of the Ted Kennedys of Washington done them, by locking them into multiple generations of fatherless, spiritless, smoldering angry dependence, while gradually sapping and enervating the larger, entrepreneurial, once-vibrant free market economy that could have offered them real opportunity?

More HERE

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Another Democrat crook



Rep. Charles Rangel failed to report as much as $1.3 million in outside income -- including up to $1 million for a Harlem building sale -- on financial-disclosure forms he filed between 2002 and 2006, according to newly amended records. The documents also show the embattled chairman of the Ways and Means Committee -- who is being probed by the House Ethics Committee -- failed to reveal a staggering $3 million in various business transactions over the same period.

This week, Rangel filed drastically revised financial-disclosure forms reflecting new, higher amounts of outside income and numerous additional business deals that had not been reported when the reports were originally filed. In 2004, for instance, Rangel reported earning between $4,000 and $10,000 in outside earnings on top of his $158,100 congressional salary. But the amended filings show that after the sale of a property on West 132nd Street, his outside income that year was somewhere between $118,000 and $1.04 million. The forms filed by House members provide for a range of value on such transactions, so the precise number isn't publicly known. Rangel also lowballed his income by as much as $70,000 in 2002, $46,000 in 2003 and $117,000 in 2006, records show. Only in 2005 did Rangel reveal his total outside income.

Members of Congress are required to disclose all their assets and outside income in an effort to expose possible undue influences. Rangel's office insists the Harlem Democrat did not conceal any outside income from the IRS and is paid up on his taxes.

The Post revealed yesterday that Rangel is in arrears on New Jersey property taxes -- for property that for more than 15 years he failed to disclose to Congress and the public. Another area of wide discrepancy in his financial-disclosure forms is where he's required to list financial transactions. Every year between 2002 and 2007, Rangel failed to include all his deals for the year, according to records. On his 2002 and 2003 financial-disclosure statements, Rangel did not include any transactions whatsoever, according to papers on file with the House clerk. But the amended records filed this month show as much as $310,000 in business deals in 2002 and up to $80,000 in transactions in 2003.

In 2004, Rangel left off his disclosure form as much as $430,000 in stock transactions, amended records show. One of those deals he did include as a transaction on his original disclosure was the sale of the brownstone on West 132nd Street. But in the same report, Rangel failed to include proceeds from that sale as outside income. That has been revised in the amended report. Despite the reported sale, city records still show Rangel is the owner of that property. His nephew, Ralph, who appears to live in the building, wouldn't answer questions yesterday. Rangel's office declined numerous requests yesterday for explanation.

The problems with Rangel's 2004 disclosure report were so glaring that apparently they caught someone's attention, forcing Rangel to write a letter correcting his failure to fully disclose transactions that year. "I listed only the real-estate transactions in which we were involved in calendar year 2004 on the transactions schedule because I was not aware of such details as the date and magnitude of the transactions involving our securities holding in the Merrill Lynch account," he wrote in a May 2006 letter to House Clerk Karen Haas.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

House will pass “audit the Fed” bill: "Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA), one of the most unabashed liberals in the U.S. House of Representatives, told a Massachusetts town hall recently that Texas Republican Congressman Ron Paul’s bill to audit the Federal Reserve will clear his chamber by October. Over half of the House members, most of them Republican, have signed on to the bill, H.R. 1207. Though Frank disagrees — as many proponents of the bill contend — that the Fed is the cause of the U.S. dollar’s shrinking value, he told a Massachusetts audience that he’s been a proponent of greater transparency at the nation’s central bank for some time.” [Anything to distract attention from the role of Congress itself]

Taiwan: Dalai Lama visits, Chicoms throw usual tantrum: “The Dalai Lama has arrived in Taiwan on a visit that has been denounced by China as being likely to destabalise improving ties with Taipei. The Tibetan Buddhist leader landed at Taoyuan International Airport on Monday for what he called a ‘purely humanitarian’ trip aimed at comforting victims of Typhoon Morakot. He has been exiled from Tibet for more than half a century following China’s invasion of the then-state and labelled a separatist by Beijing, for promoting initially independence and now autonomy for the region.”

NV: LVRJ “bullied” by Reid?: “The publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Sunday accused Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [D-NV], of ‘bullying’ his newspaper by telling an employee he wants the [paper] shut down. Sherman Frederick alleged in a column in his newspaper that the ‘full-on threat’ was made during a brief exchange between Reid and the newspaper’s advertising director Wednesday at a luncheon for the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce. Frederick said that as Reid shook the employee’s hand, he said, ‘I hope you go out of business.’ … It’s unclear whether Reid’s comment was meant in jest.”

TN: Nashville parks enforce bicycle speed limit: “A clash between ‘Tour de France wannabes’ and ‘iPod-deaf roadblocks’ has park police warning cyclists to slow down and walkers to stay in the slow lane on Nashville’s greenways. Park police trained radar guns on cyclists on three greenways Saturday. They weren’t there to write speeding tickets, says Capt. Rich Foley, park police commander. The aim is to teach riders about the new 15 mph speed limit on the walk/bike paths and encourage riders and walkers to share the space. Conflicts between cyclists and pedestrians are a big issue and seem to be on the rise, Foley said.” [People have been killed by speeding cyclists]

Diversity Czar: End run around the Fairness Doctrine?: “The premise for ending the stranglehold on the talk radio genre by conservatives is that too much conservative talk and not enough liberal talk is bad for American democracy because it’s anti-diversity. Yet it’s diversity that gave rise to conservative talk radio in the first place. In a free society with free people freely tuning their freely purchased radios to freely sponsored programs and freely listening to whom they damn well pleased, free people voted with their ears to listen to conservative yak rather than liberal lip. But of course when progressives talk about diversity they don’t mean individual diversity, they mean politically correct ideologically-defined government-imposed ‘group diversity.’ They mean a diversity of people who believe exactly as they believe.”

Free the mails: “Yet another giant company has plunging sales, soaring debt, and is weighed down by massive labor costs. Will taxpayers have to pay for another federal bailout? Alas, it’s already in the cards because this company is the U.S. Postal Service, which has estimated losses of $7 billion this year. With email grabbing ever more market share from snail mail, USPS’s finances are steadily deteriorating. What should federal policymakers do? They can’t give USPS the General Motors treatment and nationalize it, because it’s already government-owned. And they can’t reform postal markets with a ‘public option’ because that’s what the USPS already is. Instead, Congress and President Obama should deregulate postal markets and privatize the USPS.”

Caving to trial lawyers: "We’ve always suspected that fear of angering trial lawyers was the only reason President Obama refused to embrace tort reform as a crucial part of achieving his goal of reduced health care costs. Now we know for sure. A moment of candor by Howard Dean, the former chairman of the DNC and an enthusiastic backer of Obama’s health reform initiative, confirmed our suspicions. ‘The reason that tort reform is not in the bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers in addition to everyone else they were taking on,’ Dean said at a town hall meeting in Virginia last week. So much for Obama’s insistence that cutting costs is dear to his heart. He’s rejected, for purely political reasons, one of the most effective tools for containing medical costs. It would upset a special interest group — well-heeled plaintiff’s lawyers — that is one of the biggest funders of the Democratic party.”

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

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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Amazing! "Psychology Today" has printed a condemnation of the lockstep Leftism among academic psychologists

I know it well from personal experience. An excerpt below reflecting on a one-eyed talk given at a psychology conference:

How can Drew Westen, a remarkably intelligent man, make the kinds of one-sided statements he made, and why did no one in the room question the sheer inanity of what was being presented?

My theory—call it the “Oakley effect”—is that really smart people often don’t know how to accept and react constructively to criticism. (A neuroscientist might say they “have underdeveloped neurocircuitry for integrating negatively valenced stimuli.”) This is because smart people are whizzes at problems that only need one person to figure out. Indeed, people are evaluated from kindergarten through college prep SATs on the basis of such “single solver” problems. If you are often or nearly always right with these kinds of problems, your increased confidence in your own abilities would be accompanied by an inadvertent decrease in your capacity to deal with criticism. After all, your experience would have shown that your critics were usually wrong.

But most large-scale societal issues are not single solver problems. They are so richly complex that no single person can faultlessly teach him or herself all the key concepts, which are often both contradictory and important. Yes, smart people have an advantage in dealing with such problems, because they’ve got natural brain-power that allows them to hold many factors in mind at once, bringing formidable problem-solving skills to bear. But smart people have a natural disadvantage, too: they’re not used to changing their thinking in response to criticism when they get things wrong.

In fact, natural smarties—the intellectual elite—often don’t seem to learn the art of soliciting the criticism necessary to grasp the core issues of a complex problem, and then making vital adaptations as a result. Instead, they fall in naturally with people who admire, rather than are critical, of their thinking. This further strengthens their conviction they are right even as it distances them from people of very different backgrounds who grasp very different, but no less crucial aspects of complex problems. That’s why the intellectual elite is often branded by those from other groups as out of touch.

SOURCE

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Obama's Summer of Discontent

The politics of charisma is so Third World. Americans were never going to buy into it for long

By FOUAD AJAMI

So we are to have a French health-care system without a French tradition of political protest. It is odd that American liberalism, in a veritable state of insurrection during the Bush presidency, now seeks political quiescence. These "townhallers" who have come forth to challenge ObamaCare have been labeled "evil-mongers" (Harry Reid), "un-American" (Nancy Pelosi), agitators and rowdies and worse.

A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the "loudest voices" are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.

It was true to script, and to necessity, that Mr. Obama would try to push through his sweeping program—the change in the health-care system, a huge budget deficit, the stimulus package, the takeover of the automotive industry—in record time. He and his handlers must have feared that the spell would soon be broken, that the coalition that carried Mr. Obama to power was destined to come apart, that a country anxious and frightened in the fall of 2008 could recover its poise and self-confidence. Historically, this republic, unlike the Old World and the command economies of the Third World, had trusted the society rather than the state. In a perilous moment, that balance had shifted, and Mr. Obama was the beneficiary of that shift.

So our new president wanted a fundamental overhaul of the health-care system—17% of our GDP—without a serious debate, and without "loud voices." It is akin to government by emergency decrees. How dare those townhallers (the voters) heckle Arlen Specter! Americans eager to rein in this runaway populism were now guilty of lèse-majesté by talking back to the political class.

We were led to this summer of discontent by the very nature of the coalition that brought Mr. Obama, and the political class around him, to power, and by the circumstances of his victory. The man was elected amid economic distress. Faith in the country's institutions, perhaps in the free-enterprise system itself, had given way. Mr. Obama had ridden that distress. His politics of charisma was reminiscent of the Third World. A leader steps forth, better yet someone with no discernible trail, someone hard to pin down to a specific political program, and the crowd could read into him what it wished, what it needed.

The leader would be different things to different people. The Obama coalition was the coming together of disparate groups: the white professional liberals seeking absolution for the country in the election of an African-American man, the opponents of the Iraq war who grew more strident as the project in Iraq was taking root, the African-American community that had been invested in the Clintons and then came around out of an understandable pride in one of its own.

The last segment of the electorate to flock to the Obama banners were the blue-collar workers who delivered him Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana. He was not their man. They fully knew that he didn't share their culture. They were, by his portrait, clinging to their guns and religion, but the promise of economic help, and of protectionism, carried the day with them.

The Obama devotees were the victims of their own belief in political magic. The devotees could not make up their minds. In a newly minted U.S. senator from Illinois, they saw the embodiment of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Like Lincoln, Mr. Obama was tall and thin and from Illinois, and the historic campaign was launched out of Springfield. The oath of office was taken on the Lincoln Bible. Like FDR, he had a huge economic challenge, and he better get it done, repair and streamline the economy in his "first hundred days." Like JFK, he was young and stylish, with a young family.

All this hero-worship before Mr. Obama met his first test of leadership. In reality, he was who he was, a Chicago politician who had done well by his opposition to the Iraq war. He had run a skillful campaign, and had met a Clinton machine that had run out of tricks and a McCain campaign that never understood the nature of the contest of 2008....

Now that realism about Mr. Obama has begun to sink in, these iconic figures of history had best be left alone. They can't rescue the Obama presidency. Their magic can't be his. Mr. Obama isn't Lincoln with a BlackBerry. Those great personages are made by history, in the course of history, and not by the spinners or the smitten talking heads.

In one of the revealing moments of the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama rightly observed that the Reagan presidency was a transformational presidency in a way Clinton's wasn't. And by that Reagan precedent, that Reagan standard, the faults of the Obama presidency are laid bare. Ronald Reagan, it should be recalled, had been swept into office by a wave of dissatisfaction with Jimmy Carter and his failures. At the core of the Reagan mission was the recovery of the nation's esteem and self-regard. Reagan was an optimist. He was Hollywood glamour to be sure, but he was also Peoria, Ill. His faith in the country was boundless, and when he said it was "morning in America" he meant it; he believed in America's miracle and had seen it in his own life, in his rise from a child of the Depression to the summit of political power...

In contrast, there is joylessness in Mr. Obama. He is a scold, the "Yes we can!" mantra is shallow, and at any rate, it is about the coming to power of a man, and a political class, invested in its own sense of smarts and wisdom, and its right to alter the social contract of the land. In this view, the country had lost its way and the new leader and the political class arrayed around him will bring it back to the right path...

Those protesters in those town-hall meetings have served notice that Mr. Obama's charismatic moment has passed. Once again, the belief in that American exception that set this nation apart from other lands is re-emerging. Health care is the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it is an unease with the way the verdict of the 2008 election was read by those who prevailed. It shall be seen whether the man swept into office in the moment of national panic will adjust to the nation's recovery of its self-confidence.

More here

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Speaker Of Lies

Public Trust: What did the speaker know, and when did she know it? With CIA documents contradicting Nancy Pelosi's claims on classified briefings, will a death watch begin on her leadership?

The newly declassified CIA report on the interrogation of Islamist terrorists notes "in the fall of 2002, the agency briefed the leadership of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees on the use of both standard techniques and EITs (enhanced interrogation techniques)." The CIA, according to the report, "continued to brief the leadership of the Intelligence Oversight Committees on the use of EITs and detentions in February and March 2003."

And here's the zinger: "The general counsel says that none of the participants expressed any concern about the techniques or the program . . . ." For months, Speaker Pelosi has claimed she and other high-ranking Democrats in Congress who were briefed by the CIA during President Bush's first term "were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation techniques were used."

Others present with her at CIA intelligence briefings, like former House Intelligence Committee Chairman and CIA director Porter Goss, say otherwise. Her credibility was also rattled by the revelation that Rep. Jane Harman, the California Democrat who succeeded Pelosi as ranking Democrat on the House intelligence panel, sent a classified letter to the CIA in February 2003 objecting to EITs.

Speaker Pelosi's behavior reeks of the kind of cynicism and hypocrisy Americans have become used to seeing in Washington. Her liberal instincts were to object to the CIA's tough interrogation of terrorists. But those briefings took place not long after the 9/11 attacks; the war in Afghanistan, home to al-Qaida and shelter for Osama bin Laden, was going well; and the Iraq War had not yet begun. So there was no way for an ambitious politician like Pelosi to know which way the political winds would end up blowing.

At the time, President Bush was basking in popularity, and the nation was in lockstep behind his aggressive approach to waging the global war on terror — including in Iraq. For all Pelosi knew, it might stay that way for many years to come. So she stayed quiet, keeping her options open. Now, with Democrats running the whole show in Washington and a Justice Department poised to criminalize CIA interrogators in a politicized national security witch hunt, she has chosen to revert to those liberal instincts.

That means condemning a successful strategy of harsh interrogation that gleaned valuable information from high-ranking al-Qaida detainees and foiled numerous terrorist attacks. It also means turning hero interrogators, and the architects of the interrogation strategy, into scapegoats. We have long warned that the revelations of this deceit, now fully confirmed by CIA documentation, mean there's a cancer growing on the speakership. The question now is how long it will take other Democratic leaders to get out of denial and do something about it.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

A hypocrite writes to the Pope: "The contents of the letter from Senator Ted Kennedy delivered to Pope Benedict XVI by President Barack Obama in July were made public at Kennedy's burial today. Former Washington Cardinal Theodore McCarrick read excerpts from the letter and a response from the Vatican during the burial service. Despite his advocacy for abortion and homosexual 'marriage', Kennedy told the Pope: ""I have always tried to be a faithful Catholic, Your Holiness, and though I have fallen short through human failings, I have never failed to believe and respect the fundamental teachings." Kennedy also wrote that he opposed the death penalty and also that he supported conscience rights in the healthcare bill which would permit Catholic doctors to refuse to participate in abortion without sanction. "I believe in a conscience protection for Catholics in the health care field and will continue to advocate for it as my colleagues in the Senate and I work to develop an overall national health policy that guarantees health care for everyone," he wrote."

Obama admin kills investigation into corrupt NM Democrat: "Gov. Bill Richardson and “former high-ranking members of his administration” won’t be charged following the federal investigation into allegations of pay-to-play in his administration, the Associated Press is reporting today. “It’s over. There’s nothing. It was killed in Washington,” the AP quoted “a person familiar with the investigation, who asked not to be identified because federal officials had not disclosed results of the probe. The decision to kill the case was made by “top Justice Department officials,” that person told the news service. Richardson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the AP report. The governor, who is in Cuba on a trade mission, has said all along that he and his administration did nothing improper"

Israel surging ahead: "Almost every day during the six weeks that I spent in the country this summer, I experienced the vibrancy of an amazingly successful society that, in Gilder’s estimation, not only towers over all of its neighbors but invites a more ambitious comparison: “Dwarfing Israel’s own wealth is Israel’s contribution to the world economy, stemming from Israeli creativity and entrepreneurial innovation. Israel’s technical and scientific gifts to global progress loom with similar majesty over all contributions outside the United States.” Gilder makes a convincing case that American political and military support for Israel should not be seen merely as a generous gift bestowed on a deserving country that shares our democratic values. Rather, Israel is now one of America’s most indispensable allies, contributing to our own economic growth and providing critical technology breakthroughs for the U.S. military." [See also here]

Why rich kids get higher SAT scores: "The NY Times Economix blog offers us the above graph, showing that kids from higher income families get higher average SAT scores. Of course! But so what? This fact tells us nothing about the causal impact of income on test scores. (Economix does not advance a causal interpretation, but nor does it warn readers against it.) This graph is a good example of omitted variable bias, a statistical issue discussed in Chapter 2 of my favorite textbook. The key omitted variable here is parents' IQ. Smart parents make more money and pass those good genes on to their offspring. Suppose we were to graph average SAT scores by the number of bathrooms a student has in his or her family home. That curve would also likely slope upward. (After all, people with more money buy larger homes with more bathrooms.) But it would be a mistake to conclude that installing an extra toilet raises yours kids' SAT scores."

Bush Volunteered for Vietnam, CBS's Mapes Knowingly Omitted from Story: "On Tuesday, FNC's The O'Reilly Factor hosted FNC analyst Bernard Goldberg as the former CBS News correspondent highlighted a story recently posted on his Web site, BernardGoldberg.com, in which he complains of how little mainstream media attention was given to the fact that former President George W. Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam as part of his service in the Texas Air National Guard, but that he was turned down because other pilots were more experienced, and that CBS News producer Mary Mapes, even though she knew this part of the story before the report aired, did not include this important angle in the infamous piece by Dan Rather that used forged documents to paint Bush as trying to avoid Vietnam War service."

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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Google chaos

Not long after they lost a court case over abusive content hosted on their blogspot subsidiary, Google seem to have decided "never again" and unleashed a "Reign of Terror" on blogspot blogs that they thought might be dubious in some way. Four of my blogs were blocked in one day. The two that were most obviously innocuous were unblocked within 24 hours but POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN were apparently too marginal for immediate unblocking so apparently had to wait evaluation by some sort of Google High Priest. The Oracle has now spoken however and both blogs were unblocked a couple of days ago.

In the meanwhile I had of course transferred operations for both blogs to new sites here and here. And I am going to keep it that way. Once bitten twice shy. As Google has blocked those blogs once they could well do it again.

But some blogs have apparently not yet gone before the Google High Priest. He must be overworked. The following post from Wicked Thoughts suggests that:

Goodbye Google

I still think Google have the best search engine but they are woeful blog hosts. Via their blogspot subsidiary, they hosted this blog from January 2003 to July, 2009 without a single problem. Then one fine day earlier this month, they completely blocked anyone from viewing it. Why? I have no idea. What they can have against a humor blog quite escapes me. But so it was and is.

Moving my blog here seems to have worked well. I now seem to have most of my old readership back. But a niggle has been that Google has made all my past posts (archives) inaccessible too. I am pleased to say, however, that I have just completed the transfer of ALL my past posts elsewhere. So they are all generally accessible again. There are a lot of good jokes and funny stories in them so I hope a few people might browse them occasionally.

As I say in the side-column here: "The archives not stored on this site are mostly available at Wicked Thoughts Archive but the archives for April to July 2009 (incl.) are available via the Mirror Site"

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Bill would give Obama "emergency" control of the Internet

This is a disgrace. It is a major step towards a Fascist dictatorship. We have already seen how Obama abused the financial crisis in order to push through every pet project on the Democrat wish-list for the last ten years. There is no doubt that he would misuse this too. The Democrats are so full of hate that a GOP lead during a Presidential election campaign could well be seen by them as an "emergency"

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."

Representatives of other large Internet and telecommunications companies expressed concerns about the bill in a teleconference with Rockefeller's aides this week, but were not immediately available for interviews on Thursday.

A spokesman for Rockefeller also declined to comment on the record Thursday, saying that many people were unavailable because of the summer recess. A Senate source familiar with the bill compared the president's power to take control of portions of the Internet to what President Bush did when grounding all aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001. The source said that one primary concern was the electrical grid, and what would happen if it were attacked from a broadband connection.

When Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original bill in April, they claimed it was vital to protect national cybersecurity. "We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs--from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records," Rockefeller said.

The Rockefeller proposal plays out against a broader concern in Washington, D.C., about the government's role in cybersecurity. In May, President Obama acknowledged that the government is "not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions and announced that a new cybersecurity coordinator position would be created inside the White House staff. Three months later, that post remains empty, one top cybersecurity aide has quit, and some wags have begun to wonder why a government that receives failing marks on cybersecurity should be trusted to instruct the private sector what to do.

Rockefeller's revised legislation seeks to reshuffle the way the federal government addresses the topic. It requires a "cybersecurity workforce plan" from every federal agency, a "dashboard" pilot project, measurements of hiring effectiveness, and the implementation of a "comprehensive national cybersecurity strategy" in six months--even though its mandatory legal review will take a year to complete.

The privacy implications of sweeping changes implemented before the legal review is finished worry Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "As soon as you're saying that the federal government is going to be exercising this kind of power over private networks, it's going to be a really big issue," he says.

Probably the most controversial language begins in Section 201, which permits the president to "direct the national response to the cyber threat" if necessary for "the national defense and security." The White House is supposed to engage in "periodic mapping" of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies "shall share" requested information with the federal government. ("Cyber" is defined as anything having to do with the Internet, telecommunications, computers, or computer networks.)

"The language has changed but it doesn't contain any real additional limits," EFF's Tien says. "It simply switches the more direct and obvious language they had originally to the more ambiguous (version)...The designation of what is a critical infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific process. There's no provision for any administrative process or review. That's where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it."

Translation: If your company is deemed "critical," a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.

The Internet Security Alliance's Clinton adds that his group is "supportive of increased federal involvement to enhance cyber security, but we believe that the wrong approach, as embodied in this bill as introduced, will be counterproductive both from an national economic and national secuity perspective."

Update at 3:14 p.m. PDT: I just talked to Jena Longo, deputy communications director for the Senate Commerce committee, on the phone. She sent me e-mail with this statement:

"The president of the United States has always had the constitutional authority, and duty, to protect the American people and direct the national response to any emergency that threatens the security and safety of the United States. The Rockefeller-Snowe Cybersecurity bill makes it clear that the president's authority includes securing our national cyber infrastructure from attack. The section of the bill that addresses this issue, applies specifically to the national response to a severe attack or natural disaster. This particular legislative language is based on longstanding statutory authorities for wartime use of communications networks. To be very clear, the Rockefeller-Snowe bill will not empower a "government shutdown or takeover of the Internet" and any suggestion otherwise is misleading and false. The purpose of this language is to clarify how the president directs the public-private response to a crisis, secure our economy and safeguard our financial networks, protect the American people, their privacy and civil liberties, and coordinate the government's response." [Blah, blah, blah!]

SOURCE

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Artists pressured into pushing Obama's agenda

The National Endowment for the Arts initiated a "call to action" earlier this month for members of the art community to push President Obama's recovery agency through works that focus on health care, energy and the environment -- a troubling sign, one artist said

A 39-year-old Los Angeles film producer is accusing the National Endowment for the Arts of initiating a "call to action" to artists to support President Obama's domestic agenda. The film producer, Patrick Courrielche, said he was one of roughly 75 artists, musicians, writers, poets and others on an Aug. 10 conference call hosted by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement and United We Serve, a nationwide initiative launched by Obama to increase volunteerism.

Courrielche said officials on the hour-long call -- including NEA Director of Communications Yosi Sergant and Michael Skolnik, political director for hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons -- encouraged the artists on the line to create works of art in their respective fields related to health care, energy and the environment. "What I heard was a well thought-out pitch to encourage artists to create art on these issues," Courrielche told FOXNews.com. "We were told we were consulted for a reason, and they specifically stated those issues as the issues we should focus on, to plant the seed. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see what they're attempting to do."

The NEA did not respond to several requests for comment, but others familiar with the conference call dispute Courrielche's version of events, saying the purpose was a broad pitch for artworks on the theme of public service. Siobhan Dugan, a spokeswoman for United We Serve, said the call was organized by an "individual interested" in the group and was unable to provide a list of those invited to participate on the call. "The service that we are encouraging through United We Serve is taking place with no direct tie to any policy initiative, but instead focuses on the areas of the greatest need of our nation and our neighborhoods," Dugan said in a statement to FOXNews.com.

Thomas Bates, vice president of civic engagement for Rock the Vote, confirmed to FOXNews.com he was on the call, saying he was invited by officials at United We Serve. He doesn't agree with Courrielche that there was a political undercurrent. "I don't remember it that way," Bates said. "The call I was on was about engaging artists in ongoing service projects, including on Sept. 11." Bates said his participation in the call revolved around a proposed service event in Chicago that his organization had considered. He did not elaborate.

Told of Bates' denial that artists were encouraged to produce art in certain areas, Courrielche said he omitted an "essential, specific aspect" of the conference call. "The word volunteerism was never used," Courrielche said. "Service was the word being used and it was in specific areas, those being health care, energy and the environment." Courrielche said the now ubiquitous Obama "Hope" poster by artist Shepard Fairey and musician will.i.am's "Yes We Can" song and music video were offered as "shining examples" of the artist group's clear impact on Obama's landslide election.

The "potential propaganda machine," Courrielche said, is concerning on many levels. "The issue that troubles me the most is that the NEA was set up to promote the arts," he said. "If you have a meeting where you're trying to set up a machine that does your bidding, a propaganda machine, that's not what the National Endowment for Arts is for."

Moderators on the conference call did not specify whether any piece of subsequent artwork should be supportive or critical of the president's agenda in key areas like health care and the environment. "For me, it was implied," said Courrielche, adding he felt the NEA "tainted" the artistic process.

Courrielche, who said he took extensive notes during the call, recalled one particular passage he attributed to Skolink, who acted a moderator on the call. "So what I had hoped in bringing this group together," Skolnik said, according to Courrielche, "with the great hosts that again I want to thank for reaching out to their communities, was that we could begin to bring together our community in the same enthusiasm, with the same enthusiasm, and with the same energy that we all saw each other during the campaign, and we continue to work together on issues as important as United We Serve, and service, and begin here and continue to work together on other issues that we feel are important as was mentioned, some of them health care and others." Courrielche also wrote up his experiences for Big Hollywood.

Reached by FOXNews.com on Friday, Skolnik declined to comment for this story.

Dugan said the group was not aware of the conference call leading to any new artwork or campaigns. "Organizations and people from all political persuasions and beliefs continue to support community service as one part of the solution to the economic crisis and the recovery efforts," she said. "There are no government funds provided or funding incentives given to organizations or individuals to participate or encourage community service as part of United We Serve."

Courrielche, who said he felt compelled to speak out about the call, said unidentified members of the press were also on the call. "I felt like I needed to say something about it," he said. "Now I think if [a piece of art] comes out, you have to question it, did it come from this meeting? This is the exact argument for why an agency like this shouldn't exist."

SOURCE

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BrookesNews Update

The US economy: Getting there from here: More and more Americans are coming to realise that there is no quick fix for the economy. Furthermore, they instinctively feel that the Obama administration's policy of greater spending, borrowing and massive interventionism is not going to put the country on the road to prosperity. They are spot on. But how did we get here?
What is the true state of US savings and how will it affect economic recovery?: Since early 1980s and expanding money supply combined with rising government outlays have severely undermined the process of real capital formation. As a result, real savings could be in serious trouble. If this is correct then it will be very hard for the US economy to grow, for it is a growing pool of real savings that make genuine economic growth possible
More rubbish about unemployment and the recession : It's been about 70 years since the Great Depression ended and yet the lesson that government spending is not the cure for unemployment has still not been learnt. The economic fallacies that made possible the tragedy of mass unemployment are being resurrected by people totally ignorant of economic history, people like James Guest. Although these fallacies are easily stated the refutations are by necessity lengthy
The ACLU helps terrorists finger CIA agents : The leftwing American Civil Liberties Union has been secretly photographing alleged CIA agents near their homes and then passing on the photos of the agents and their addresses to terrorists suspects. This is an open invitation to terrorists to murder the family members of CIA agents. The question now is why the ACLU has not been charged with treason
Health care and the elites' meltdown :Outraged by the American people's spirited resistance to theit attempt to take over the health system the Democrats' responded with lies, libels, abuse and vicious distortions. America's deeply corrupted media joined in the mayhem, demonstrating that it is no more than the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party
Obama, Ayers and the knowledge 'too big' to handle : It is becoming clearer by the day that Obama is firmly in the anti-American camp of the left. From all evidence, even after eight months as president, it is apparent that he has fully accepted the left's relentless, anti-capitalist, anti-American agitprop as true knowledge
Don't be fooled by the co-op option of healthcare : Fanatical Democrats are determined to force private insurance out of existence leaving in its place the single-payer system created and controlled by federal government bureaucrats. As with every government-run health care system ever done throughout history, rationing and 'pulling the plug on grandma' become a vital part as costs spin higher and out of control
Democracy, when I like the outcome : Why is it Democrats who finds it so intolerable when democracy doesn't go their way? Why can only those results that support their own ideological agenda - a term Mr. Obama & Co. like to deploy when they wish to besmirch the opposition - manage to be democratic, while when the vote or the meetings go against them, something must have undermined the democratic process? My guess is that many of these folks really do not want democracy at all
U.K. on ObamaCare: Been there, done that : Why do the Democrats want to impose on the American people a medical system that has been a social disaster wherever it has been tried? The UK's National Health Service provides tragic example after example of what happens when the state takes over the medical system

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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