Why are webhosts so ill-mannered?

The internet and books have opposite vices and virtues. Books are highly permanent (we have some copies from a couple of thousand years ago) but are not readily accessible. You generally have to take a trip to a library if you want to access one. The net on the other hand is instantly and very conveniently accessible but it is also evanescent. A file of writings or a picture on the net can disappear in an instant and maybe never be found again. And the vanishing act is often the fault of the webhost rather than anything that the writer or photographer concerned has done. Many newspaper sites, for instance, seem to have a policy of deleting their own articles after quite short periods of time.

But I like to keep all the files of my writings publicly available regardless of what any individual webhoster or bloghoster might do. So I try to address the big weakness of the net by following the systems theory axiom that redundancy is the path to systems reliability. In other words, I keep multiple copies of my files up -- so that if one copy disappears, there will be others to be found. As a result, I have had a lot of dealings with the various webhosts where I place copies of my files/writings. And it is truly amazing how many webhosts I have gone through over time. Whether "free" or paid, there are at least a dozen (maybe 20) locations where my files were once found which no longer host my files. Some webhosts have simply gone bust and disappeared altogether and others have decided that my files are "incorrect" in some way and have deleted or blocked them.

And I am not complaining about that. It is precisely because I expect such impermanence that I keep multiple copies of my files online. What I DO object to, however, is that NOT ONCE have the webhosts concerned had the manners to email me in advance and warn me or consult me about what is going to happen. It is always a case of "shoot first; ask questions later".

It is actually a rather common event for webhosts to be "down" for various periods -- sometimes for a week or more. One would think that on such occasions, they would email their users and say something like: "We are having problems. Don't go away. We expect to be back up in a couple of days". But that never happens. The site eventually comes back online with no explanation or apology. Even sites that boast that they talk to their users are the same. And some sites of course NEVER come back up and you are left to figure that situation out. Even if you email them to ask if the cessation of service is temporary or permanent, you never get a reply.

And the Blogspot subsidiary of Google (which hosts this blog) is as bad as any of them. You would think that a big company like Google would be conscious of PR but it is not so. They too act first and ask questions later. I have lost track of how many times my blog sites have been blocked by them -- and never after any advance warning. Usually, I can fill out a form, the form gets acted on, and the site is unblocked but NEVER have I received an explanation as to why the block was put on. And sometimes the block lasts for over a week: At which point I tend to move to another bloghost, which is part of the reason why I now have two blogs hosted on Wordpress and two on blognow.com.au. That comes at some cost as I lose my old page ranking, so if anyone reading this has a site of their own it would help if they put up a link to my new POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH site.

And sometimes filling out the Google/Blogspot form does you no good at all. The obstruction is permanent and repeated requests for review of the block are ignored -- again without explanation. No manners or anything else much there.

I have become VERY wary about such shenanigans over the years, however. I don't blame anybody for thinking that I have gone overboard but at the moment I have my files spread over ELEVEN different webhosts. None have all my files but between them all there are usually three copies of any file available. I realize that I must sound slightly mad but I think that if you had had my experiences with webhosts you might be nearly as bad or mad. The way I have it set up, if one host goes down, I have to reload only a subset of my files, not the whole lot. Even that can be pretty pesky, though. And I have various pages -- including this one -- which have sufficent links to lead you to ALL my files (writings), regardless of where they are hosted.

So what is the answer to the question I ask in the heading above? I can only see the answer as lying with the general lack of civility these days. Under the influence of the prevailing Leftist gospel that "There is no such thing as right and wrong", people who can hide behind anonymity see no reason for civility. Maybe there is a Christian webhost somewhere who has higher standards than that but I have yet to find one.

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McChrystal Slams DoD Bureaucracy

The commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan bitterly complained in an interview Sunday about the Pentagon bureaucracy that he said was hampering his efforts to fight insurgents. In a profile on CBS television's "60 minutes," Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal said he faced pressure to move quickly from Defense Secretary Robert Gates while the Pentagon had moved slowly to get officers assigned to his staff.

"The secretary talks in terms of 12 to 18 months to show a significant change and then we eat up two or three months just on sort of getting the tools out of the tool box," McChrystal said, according to a transcript of the show to air later Sunday. "That really hurts," said McChrystal, shown in a video conference with the Pentagon.

The four-star army general, who was appointed to lead U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan in June after the previous commander was sacked, demanded the Defense Department had to move with more urgency. "The average organization when someone asks when you want something, they pull out a calendar," he said. "But in a good organization, they look at their watch and we really got to get that way."

McChrystal said he was slightly surprised by the strength of the insurgency when he took over his post. "I think that in some areas that the breadth of violence, the geographic spread of violence -- places to the north and to the west -- are a little more than I would have gathered," he said.

He also repeated his warning that if the NATO-led mission was perceived as an occupier that posed a threat to civilians, the war would be lost. "If the people view us as occupiers and the enemy, we can't be successful and our casualties will go up dramatically," he said. McChrystal said 265 civilians had been killed by U.S. or allied forces in the past 12 months.

In a quarterly report released Saturday, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said 1,500 civilians had died between January and August, with August the deadliest month so far this year.

Military officials have credited McChrystal with reducing civilian casualties in recent months by ordering a change in tactics, including scaling back the use of air strikes and artillery fire, as well as requiring soldiers to exercise more caution when driving on Afghan roads.

SOURCE

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Obama and the General

The White House finds a four-star scapegoat for its Afghan jitters



Democrats have found someone worth fighting in Afghanistan. His name is Stan McChrystal. The other night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went after the commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, "with all due respect," for supposedly disrespecting the chain of command. Around the Congressional Democratic Caucus, we're told Members refer to General McChrystal as "General MacArthur," after the commander in Korea sacked by Harry Truman.

White House aides have fanned these flames with recent leaks to the media that "officials are challenging" his assessment asking for more troops. In the last two days, the White House National Security Adviser and the Secretary of Defense have both suggested that the general should keep his mouth shut. President Obama called him in Friday for a talking-to on the tarmac at Copenhagen airport.

Though a decorated Army four-star officer, the General's introduction to Beltway warfare is proving to be brutal. To be fair, Gen. McChrystal couldn't know that his Commander in Chief would go wobbly so soon on his commitment to him as well as to his own Afghan strategy when he was tapped for the job in April. We're told by people who know him that Gen. McChrystal "feels terrible" and "had no intention whatsoever of trying to lobby and influence" the Administration. His sense of bewilderment makes perfect sense anywhere but in the political battlefield of Washington. He was, after all, following orders.

Recall that in March Mr. Obama unveiled his "comprehensive new strategy . . . to reverse the Taliban's gains and promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government." The Commander in Chief pledged to properly resource this "war of necessity," which he also called during the 2008 campaign "the central front on terror." The President then sacked his war commander, who had been chosen by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in favor of Gen. McChrystal, an expert in counterinsurgency.

Upon arriving in June, Gen. McChrystal launched his assessment of the forces required to execute the Obama strategy. His confidential study was completed in August and sent to the Pentagon. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Michael Mullen told Congress that more troops would be needed, and a figure of 30,000-40,000 was bandied about. The figure has clearly spooked the Administration".

More here

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ELSEWHERE

It's Official! Iran Publicly Says it Fooled U.S. and Europeans in Geneva, Offered Nothing: "And now it's official! Iran's Supreme National Security Council has announced that the main "concession" it supposedly made in the Geneva meeting with the United States never happened. It has no intention of sending off its enriched uranium to Russia to be turned into someting fit only for medical research at all. This supposed pledge made by Iran was the alleged big development that set off so much optimism after Iran met with the United States along with China, France, Germany, Russia, and England). No, says the Iranian government. This is merely an old idea--Tehran offered the same plan back in 2007 and then, after using it to stall for months, rejected it-- which it has been planning to discuss on October 18 in yet another meeting with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Not only did it not offer anything new in Geneva, the Iranian government maintains it offered nothing at all."

Senate passes Pentagon budget, war funding: "The Senate has passed a $626 billion Pentagon funding bill that would bring the tab for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to more than $1 trillion. The measure passed by a 93-7 vote. It would also ban outright any transfer of accused enemy combatants from the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility into the United States. Current law permits transfer of detainees to face trial or go to prison.”

Firefighters lose large FEMA grant to ACORN: "Nearly $1 million in Homeland Security funding typically earmarked for fire departments has been awarded to ACORN, despite a clear signal from Congress that it intends to cut off federal funding to the embattled group. The grant to ACORN's Louisiana office became public on Oct. 2, less than three weeks after the House and Senate voted to cut off ACORN funding after employees were caught on video advising a fake prostitute and pimp on scams. It was one of only three such grants issued to the state and made up almost 80 percent of the firefighting money earmarked for Louisiana, prompting one of the U.S. senators from the state to demand that the funds be taken back. "I request that you rescind this grant based on a history of abuse of federal dollars by ACORN and their clear lack of expertise in this area," said Sen. David Vitter, Louisiana Republican. Mr. Vitter, who was routinely notified of the grant before it became public, sent his letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Sept. 22, saying the money should be given "to a more deserving group of first responders." One such group might have been the St. Tammany Parish Fire District No. 3, which applied for a $120,000 grant to purchase smoke alarms for low-income families after a January fire killed four children in a home that had no working detectors."

The NYT "Ethicist" is a comedy writer!: "Randy Cohen has written humor articles, essays and stories for numerous newspapers and magazines. His first television work was writing for "Late Night With David Letterman," for which he won three Emmy Awards. His fourth Emmy was for his work on "TV Nation." He received a fifth Emmy as a result of a clerical error, and he kept it. For two years, he wrote and edited News Quiz for Slate, the online magazine. Currently he writes The Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine. Each week, in Moral of the Story, he will examine a news story from an ethical perspective."

WI: “Prayer death” parents sentenced to probation, jail time: "A judge sentenced a Wisconsin couple to 10 years probation and 30 days a year in jail for the next six years [stayed pending appeals] for praying instead of seeking medical care for their dying 11-year-old daughter. … The girl died of complications from undiagnosed diabetes on the floor of the family’s home while people around her prayed. Someone called an ambulance after she stopped breathing.”

Pepsi, the homosexual drink: "God hates Diet Pepsi!’ A group advocating ‘traditional family values’ claims it has the signatures of 500,000 people who have pledged to boycott Pepsi over what it says are the company’s activities promoting gay rights. The American Family Association (which boasts ‘2.5 million online supporters’) ‘asked PepsiCo to be neutral in the culture war and not support the homosexual agenda,’ it said in a press release Tuesday. ‘PepsiCo refused. The company continues to give financial support to homosexual organizations.’ The AFA launched its boycott campaign in January over PepsiCo’s ‘continued support of same-sex marriage and homosexual advocacy.’”

Consensus. Margaret Thatcher in a 1981 speech: "For me, pragmatism is not enough. Nor is that fashionable word "consensus."... To me consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects—the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner "I stand for consensus"?

“Death tax” destroys wealth: "The politicians in Washington impose double taxation on interest, dividends and capital gains, but the ‘death tax’ wins the prize for being the most self-destructive part of the internal revenue code. Adding an extra layer of tax when someone dies is an unsavory combination of bad economics and immoral grave robbing. The current policy is especially foolish since every economic theory — even Marxism — agrees that saving and investment are the keys to long-run growth and higher living standards.”

Fascism: Why can’t it happen here?: "Recently I saw Ed Schultz on MSNBC, in the context of a story on the murdered census worker in Kentucky, running a clip of Michelle Bachmann’s comments. She claimed that census data had been used by the government in the past to round up American citizens (namely the Japanese-American Nisei on the West coast in early 1942). ‘The government rounding up American citizens?’ Schultz asked incredulously. ‘That goes beyond psycho talk.’ Now, I’ll be the first to stipulate that Michelle Bachmann goes beyond psycho. But Schultz acted as though the idea of the U.S. government rounding citizens up was so ludicrous, on its very face, as not to deserve refutation. Why? Because the U.S. government is run by the kinds of angels that James Madison wrote of? Because the American people are uniquely predisposed to resist authoritarianism? Or just because there’s something ‘different’ about the American genetic makeup, or maybe something different in the water here? The idea of the U.S. government as an object of fear, that its growing police state powers might be used against the American people for the wholesale suppression of dissent, is hardly a right-wing preserve, as Schultz seems to suggest.”

Why Chile is more free than the United States: "In the 2009 Economic Freedom of the World Report, Chile is now #5, one place ahead of the United States. In 1975, of 72 countries, Chile was No 71. How did this happen? The explanation lies in what I call the ‘Chilean Revolution,’ because it was as important and transformative to my country as the celebrated American Revolution that gave birth to the United States. The exceptional political circumstances of this period have obscured the fact that from 1975 to 1989 a true revolution took place in Chile, involving a radical, comprehensive, and sustained move toward economic and political freedom (from a starting point where there was neither one nor the other).” [It was a great start for Chile when Pinochet cut the bureaucacy in half]

NYC: Big Brother Bloomberg is watching you (even more closely): "On the heels of breaking up an alleged bomb terror plot, New York is planning to place high-tech security cameras, license plate readers, and ‘weapons sensors’ in midtown Manhattan. Office workers and tourists — and possible terrorists — will have cameras watching their every move as they visit Macy’s, shop for diamonds at Tiffany & Co., or gawk in Times Square. … Sensors will try to detect chemical, biological, and radiological threats. But some terrorism experts have questioned whether a camera network will deter terrorists. They also say that sensors are known to give off ‘false positives.’ Meanwhile, civil rights organizations are concerned that the project will be another encroachment on civil liberties.”

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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Zelenka

I imagine that there must be a few people who read this blog who share my love of Baroque music. So for them some news: I have just discovered the music of Zelenka, a Czech contemporary of Bach whom Bach thought highly of. I am listening to one of his Kyrie Eleisons as I write this. It is marvellous. What a wonder that the Baroque period is still yielding up forgotten treasures for us! I have also just heard on the radio one of his oratorios: "Penitents at the tomb of the Redeemer". It grabbed me immediately.

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A Poisonous Cocktail: Expanding the Community Reinvestment Act

The White House and Congress want to expand a 30-year-old law--the Community Reinvestment Act--that helped to fuel the mortgage meltdown. What the CRA does, in effect, is compel banks to seek the permission of community activists to get regulatory approval for bank expansions and mergers. Often this means striking a deal with activist groups such as ACORN or unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and agreeing to allocate credit to poor and minority areas that are underserved.

In short, the CRA encourages banks to make loans they would not ordinarily make. What's more, these agreements often require that banks offer no-money-down mortgages and remove caps on how much debt a borrower can take on. All of this is done in the name of "financial democracy."

Liberals pooh-pooh the idea that a 30-year-old law could have contributed to the current subprime crisis and credit crunch. But what they ignore is the massive expansion of CRA-commitments forced on banks in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis.

According to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, in the first 20 years of the act, up to 1997, commitments totaled approximately $200 billion. But from 1997 to 2007, commitments exploded to more than $4.2 trillion. (Keep in mind this is more than four times the size of the current health bill being debated in Congress.) The burdens on individual banks can be enormous. Washington Mutual, for example, pledged $1 trillion in mortgages to those with credit histories that "fall outside typical credit, income or debt constraints," and was awarded the 2003 CRA Community Impact Award for its Community Access program. Four years later it was taken over by the Office of Thrift Supervision. In 2004 Bank of America agreed to provide $750 billion in CRA loans to applicants with poor credit who had previous difficulty obtaining a mortgage. By 2008 Bank of America was reporting that CRA loans represented only 7% of its portfolio but 29% of its losses. Numerous large banks are now in the middle of enormous CRA commitments. In 2004 J.P. Morgan Chase agreed to provide $800 billion of such loans over the course of 10 years.

For all the talk of unsold condos in Miami and foreclosed McMansions in California, the epicenters of the mortgage crisis are inner-city urban areas--precisely those areas where the CRA was most applicable. As the Boston Federal Reserve put it in a massive 2008 study, "In the current housing crisis foreclosures are highly concentrated in [urban] minority neighborhoods." The study found that borrowers in these areas were seven times more likely to be foreclosed on than the general population. Analysis by the Pew Research Center and another by The New York Times found that mortgage holders in these areas had foreclosure rates four times higher than the national average. In short, the CRA is compelling banks to make trillions in loans to individuals who have poor credit and who often can't or won't make their payments.

Now comes Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, and 50 other co-sponsors (all Democrats) of H.R. 1479 the "Community Reinvestment Modernization Act of 2009," who want to expand the CRA to include not just banks but also credit unions, insurance companies and mortgage lenders. Congressman Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has supported the idea in the past. The SEIU and ACORN, along with a host of other activist groups, are also behind the effort.

More HERE

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Stimulating Our Way to Depression

In 1932, FDR had an opportunity to change the conventional way that governments deal with a recession. His predecessor, Herbert Hoover, who also had a tendency towards central planning, had started the process. Instead of allowing markets to correct themselves as they had in all the previous panics, as depressions were then called, both men instituted programs of government intervention.

Hoover signed the Smoot Hawley tariff even after many of the leading economists of the time personally implored him not to sign it. A tariff would help improve farm prices, which was a cornerstone of the progressive movement. He asked businesses not to lower wages, as had been done in previous panics. Wages remained high but unemployment soared.

Although Roosevelt had campaigned on a platform of balanced budgets, once in office things changed. Many of his advisors were college professors and writers from within the progressive movement. Very few were trained economists, but several had been to Russia and seen Stalin’s central planning first hand. Others had an admiration of Benito Mussolini’s nationalization of industry in Italy. Once FDR was in office they were determined to apply what they had seen in America.

The utility industry had been one of the most highly leveraged industries to be affected by the Stock Market Crash, and was essential to industrial production. The newly developed utilities were grossly overvalued similar to the internet companies of the 1990’s or the housing industry of early last year. By 1932, utility stocks were worth a mere fraction of their 1929 value. FDR began to plan how the government would replace private utilities as a large scale electrical power producer. This would also enable him to take credit for providing thousands of construction jobs and control energy production. The first government utility was the Tennessee Valley Authority. It would provide power in the Appalachian region rather then allow private industry to electrify the area.

To prevent wages from going down in response to the demand for labor, FDR instituted the National Industrial Recovery Act, which allowed large business to form cartels in exchange for allowing unionization of their plants. This helped large businesses that had lower costs absorb the additional costs of unionization but was very damaging to small businesses. Wage rates were 25% higher than they should have been, but so was unemployment. Prices for goods were also 25% higher then they should have been.

When unemployment failed to go down as the result of the NIRA programs and the associated unionization, FDR instituted numerous make work programs through out America. These programs employed not only construction workers but also actors, artists and writers. These programs also greatly increased government expenditures and the national debt.

FDR and his progressive advisors generally resented those people that earn more then their college professor salaries, especially industrialists. They blamed industrialists for not hiring more people to reduce unemployment. This gave progressives justification to raise the marginal tax rates on the wealthy from 26% to above 90%. The wealthy responded by investing in other types of investments and their share of the total tax revenue actually fell during the Depression.

Even though the ideas and programs that FDR and the progressives instituted were not effective in preventing the stock market crash of 1929 from turning into the Great Depression, they were effective in creating a loyal voting base. By demonizing the wealthy, FDR was able to take credit for the government jobs his programs created at the expense of jobs in private industry that the provisions of the NIRA took away. FDR learned by 1935 that a crisis should never go to waste.

If this narrative sounds familiar, it should. The progressives of the 1920’s that had been shut out of politics since Wilson’s administration needed a crisis to return to power and institute their ideas of central planning in America. Today liberals are trying to do the same. Progressives of the 1930’s stifled industrial production with regulation and unionization and today they want to do the same. During the Depression, progressives wanted to control the production of energy, today they propose cap and trade to do the same thing.

Socialists then and now rely on the writings of the economist, John Maynard Keynes to justify large government spending programs to stimulate the economy. However, Keynes himself wrote to FDR in 1938 questioning his spending programs and why FDR would use only one aspect of his economic theories. The answer is very simple: government programs create the illusion of improving the economy. People only see the jobs created by government programs, never the jobs that are lost in the private sector to create them. Programs focus on the benefits that will be provided to a particular segment of society, never to who pays for those benefits. Progressive solutions buy votes but not economic prosperity.

SOURCE

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McChrystal’s critics are wrong — very wrong — to suggest he has gone PC

By Frederick W. Kagan

The politicization of the analysis of American generalship is one of the worst consequences of the partisan excesses of the past several years. Whether it was Gen. David Petraeus in 2007 or Gen. Stanley McChrystal today, far too many commentators on both sides of the aisle have become comfortable saying that commanders who offer recommendations the critics don’t like are doing so because they have become captive of some ideology. Petraeus was charged with carrying water for the Bush administration’s supposed crusade to spread democracy throughout the world. Now McChrystal is accused of committing the soldiers under his command to needless death and maiming out of a misplaced sense of political correctness inspired by Barack Obama.

The reality is that America’s commanders over the last eight years have consistently given their best professional military advice, making the recommendations they thought would achieve the goals set for them by their political masters. That includes all of our commanders: Tommy Franks, Ricardo Sanchez, John Abizaid, George Casey, David Barno, Karl Eikenberry, Dan McNeill, David McKiernan, David Petraeus, Ray Odierno, and now Stan McChrystal. Some of them were right, some were tragically wrong. But not a single one of them made a recommendation to his superiors or gave an order to his soldiers that he did not think would lead to the success of his mission. American commanders simply do not do such things, and it is time to stop trying to avoid serious discussions of strategy by claiming that they do.

General McChrystal and the team that drafted his assessment and policy recommendations (full disclosure: I was a member of that team in June and July) may be wrong, of course. War is extremely complex, and no one is infallible. But before consigning the McChrystal assessment to the dust-bin of history, we owe it to such a commander to consider carefully the possibility that the sophistication in the document is not simply pseudo-intellectual code for political correctness. It may in fact represent an attempt to grapple with the real complexities of the situation on the ground as seen by officers who have spent years of their lives operating in Afghanistan against our enemies — something that none of their defenders or critics among the chattering classes (myself included) can say.

Andy McCarthy’s attack on McChrystal in this regard is particularly odd. McChrystal should be Andy’s hero: As commander of U.S. special-forces efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than four straight years, McChrystal is responsible for killing and capturing thousands of Islamist terrorists. As the recent 60 Minutes interview revealed, McChrystal has personally accompanied his soldiers on some of those raids. He’s met the enemy fighters Andy so rightly wants to target — met some of them rather personally. This war has not been a clinical or theoretical exercise for McChrystal, nor has it been the stuff of Foreign Affairs essays. It has been as dirty and bloody as anything Andy McCarthy or Ralph Peters could desire. One thing no one can say about McChrystal is that he has a problem killing the enemy.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Obama's big money-printing splurge has destroyed confidence in the value of the dollar: "In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading. Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar. Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars. The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years."

Sanctions are a stupid idea: "President Obama has vowed to keep the pressure on Iran over its nuclear program after last week’s meeting in Geneva, and his advisers said the United States was intensively recruiting other nations to join in a harsher economic embargo against Tehran should diplomacy fail. But as the focus on sanctions intensifies, a review of the United States’ experiences in enforcing its own longstanding restrictions on trade with Iran suggests it would be difficult to truly quarantine the Iranian economy. Black market networks have sprouted up all over the globe to circumvent the sanctions. A typical embargo-busting scheme was detailed in a plea agreement filed in federal court here on Sept. 24, the day before Mr. Obama and European allies announced the existence of a previously undisclosed Iranian nuclear enrichment facility near Qum. In the court filings, a Dutch aviation services company and its owner admitted that they had illegally funneled American aircraft and electronics components to Iran from 2005 to 2007..."

Lawmaker calls on Obama to fire official in gay sex ed controversy: "Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King is calling on President Obama to fire gay activist Kevin Jennings, the controversial head of the Education Department's Office of Safe & Drug Free Schools. Although Jennings has come under heavy criticism from social conservatives in recent months, King is the first member of Congress to call for his ouster. King says Jennings has no background in anti-drug work, and his experience in education has focused not on the issue of school safety but on introducing the topic of homosexuality into the classroom, including in elementary schools. "The totality of his life has been the promotion of homosexuality, and much of it within education," says King. "He has focused on nothing else during the last two decades, and that is not the focus that our schools need to be on."

The Republican revival: "Ignore anyone who says Republicans have no chance of winning 40 seats in next year’s midterm elections and grabbing control of the House of Representatives. A landslide of that dimension is quite possible. All it would take is for current political trends to continue. If that happens, Republicans will win the House in a landslide. The Senate is another story. The deep trouble that’s beginning to engulf Democrats is now an inescapable fact of political life. With the congressional election 13 months away, Democrats have time to halt their decline and prevent a Republican surge. But they’ve shown no signs of reversing their slide. In 2006 and 2008, they were on offense. Today they’re stuck on defense.”

Irwin Stelzer on the revival of the right: "A funny thing happened on the way to the collapse of market capitalism in the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It didn't. Indeed, in Germany voters relieved Chancellor Angela Merkel of the necessity of cohabiting with a left-wing party, allowing her to form a coalition with a party favouring lower taxes and free markets. And in Pittsburgh leaders representing more than 90% of the world's GDP convened to figure out how to make markets work better, rather than to hoist the red flag. The workers are to be relieved, not of their chains, but of credit-card terms that are excessively onerous, and helped to retain their private property—their homes. All of this is contrary to expectations. The communist spectre that Karl Marx confidently predicted would be haunting Europe is instead haunting Europe's left-wing parties, with even Vladimir Putin seeking to attract investment by re-privatising the firms he snatched. Which raises an interesting question: why haven't the economic turmoil and rising unemployment led workers to the barricades, instead of to their bankers to renegotiate their mortgages? All of those factors contribute to the unexpected strength of the right in a world in which a record number of families are being tossed out of their homes, and jobs have been disappearing by the million."

GOP to gain many seats in '10: "Following major setbacks in 2008, the national political landscape for Republicans has improved so dramatically in recent months that election analysts say the only remaining question is how deep the Democrats' losses will be in the 2010 congressional midterm races. President Obama's approval rating has fallen to 51 percent in the Gallup tracking survey. A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that voters were nearly evenly divided on which party should control Congress, with Democrats edging Republicans by just three points, down from a seven-point lead in July, and election analysts have moved nearly two dozen Democratic House seats into "competitive" rating columns benefiting the Republican Party... Longtime elections handicapper Charlie Cook agrees that the national political movement has turned decidedly away from the Democrats at this point in the two-year election cycle. "As the political environment for Democrats has turned ugly, it is widely assumed the party will sustain losses in next year's midterm elections. The operative question is: How bad will those losses be?" he said in a recent analysis for Congress Daily".

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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Letterperson

THE future of top-rating TV comedian David Letterman is uncertain as the CBS Network that airs his Late Show contemplates investigating his past relationships with female staff, following a bizarre extortion plot. Letterman stunned his audience last week when he revealed on his nightly program that he was the victim of a $2million blackmail attempt.



Stephanie Birkitt [above], a personal assistant to Letterman, has emerged as the woman at the centre of Robert Halderman's blackmail attempt. Halderman lived with her briefly and allegedly used some photos and correspondence involving Letterman to set up the extortion, saying he planned to write a damning screenplay unless the star paid him.

A second woman who was previously an intern on the Letterman show, Holly Hester, has came forward as another former fling. She told The New York Daily News she had been madly in love with Letterman and would have married him. "He was hilarious," she said.

After making fun of other people's wacky sex lives for years, Letterman last week said that a man had threatened to expose his past relationships with women who worked for him on the Late Show. The television comedian went out of his way to be seen to do the right thing by going straight to police and co-operating in a sting that led to the arrest of Halderman, a disgruntled network producer. Halderman, an Emmy-award winning producer for the CBS series 48 Hours, faces up to 15 years' jail after demanding money in return for keeping quiet about evidence he had of Letterman's past dalliances.

While Letterman is not accused of any wrongdoing by police, the issue has presented CBS with a conundrum. So far the network is standing by Letterman, who is enjoying a ratings resurgence since the rival Tonight Show was taken over by Conan O'Brien. Under the terms of his contract, Letterman's quaintly named company Worldwide Pants leases airtime on CBS, so he is not an employee. The network is believed to be concerned about some sections of its audience with puritanical views.

More here

Another comment on the wandering trousers: "As one of America’s most successful television comedians, David Letterman built an entertainment empire on jokes about sex — notably involving former President Bill Clinton’s trousers. Yesterday the joke was on Letterman as his own complicated sex life dominated US tabloid headlines and provided his late-night comic rivals with an irresistible source of new material including a shapely blonde, a salacious diary, mystery photographs and a peculiarly inept blackmail plot. “If you came here tonight for sex with a talk show host,” said Jay Leno, Letterman’s most formidable late-night rival, “you’ve come to the wrong studio.” For Bill and Hillary Clinton and countless other victims of Letterman’s rancid barbs — notably Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska to whom he recently apologised for off-colour jokes about her family — there may have been a certain grim satisfaction in seeing the perennially cocky comedian admitting to “creepy” behaviour."

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Barack Obama furious at General Stanley McChrystal speech on Afghanistan



The relationship between President Barack Obama and the commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan has been put under severe strain by Gen Stanley McChrystal's comments on strategy for the war. According to sources close to the administration, Gen McChrystal shocked and angered presidential advisers with the bluntness of a speech given in London last week.

The next day he was summoned to an awkward 25-minute face-to-face meeting on board Air Force One on the tarmac in Copenhagen, where the president had arrived to tout Chicago's unsuccessful Olympic bid.

Gen James Jones, the national security adviser, yesterday did little to allay the impression the meeting had been awkward. Asked if the president had told the general to tone down his remarks, he told CBS: "I wasn't there so I can't answer that question. But it was an opportunity for them to get to know each other a little bit better. I am sure they exchanged direct views." An adviser to the administration said: "People aren't sure whether McChrystal is being naïve or an upstart. To my mind he doesn't seem ready for this Washington hard-ball and is just speaking his mind too plainly."

In London, Gen McChrystal, who heads the 68,000 US troops in Afghanistan as well as the 100,000 Nato forces, flatly rejected proposals to switch to a strategy more reliant on drone missile strikes and special forces operations against al-Qaeda. He told the Institute of International and Strategic Studies that the formula, which is favoured by Vice-President Joe Biden, would lead to "Chaos-istan". When asked whether he would support it, he said: "The short answer is: No." He went on to say: "Waiting does not prolong a favorable outcome. This effort will not remain winnable indefinitely, and nor will public support." The remarks have been seen by some in the Obama administration as a barbed reference to the slow pace of debate within the White House.

Gen McChrystal delivered a report on Afghanistan requested by the president on Aug 31, but Mr Obama held only his second "principals meeting" on the issue last week. He will hold at least one more this week, but a decision on how far to follow Gen McChrystal's recommendation to send 40,000 more US troops will not be made for several weeks. A military expert said: "They still have working relationship but all in all it's not great for now." Some commentators regarded the general's London comments as verging on insubordination.

More HERE

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Brain-dead conservatives? No, it’s the elitist critics at room temperature

“Is Conservatism Dead?” screamed the headline on page one of the Washington Post’s Outlook section Sunday. Behind that headline is the photo of a nude white male body being medically resuscitated, seemingly without success, along with small black letters: “Nope. Maybe Just Brain Dead.” The article was by Steven F. Hayward, described as the F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Just a couple of days before, the New York Times’s David Brooks was flailing at conservative radio “talk jocks” Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck whose intellectual shortcomings, he charged, are the real reason behind the decline of the Republican Party. About the only place in America where there is not an unemployment problem is in the ranks of one-time conservative elitists getting checks from the liberal media —to attack conservatives. How else could Kathleen Parker be on a legitimate payroll?

What is the real sin of Limbaugh and Beck in the eyes of these liberal media darlings? Is it their ability to communicate with the American people? Is that why “tea baggers” so offend the learned Fellow Mr. Hayward?

What these elitists don’t seem to understand is that more and more people are turning to Glenn Beck because he is the best place to go for exposes on powerful forces like ACORN and Presidential Czar Van Jones. The facts speak for themselves. Day after day, Beck was reporting the facts about the corrupting political forces behind ACORN and the real Van Jones resume which should have made him unemployable to anyone outside Washington’s far left. There was nothing about ACORN or Jones in the Post or the Times whose ombudsman actually had to launch an investigation to explain how his news institution could miss the ACORN story.

But as soon as the truth behind ACORN and Jones was unearthed by Beck (with help from today’s version of Candid Camera) they overnight were as popular in Washington as a strain of swine flu. Before Beck’s reporting, ACORN had an automatic, Congressionally fueled pipeline into the federal budget —good for tens of millions. The Obama White House was pointing to Jones as a green-age prophet. After Beck’s reporting, Congress could not move fast enough to begin defunding ACORN—and Jones was run out of town in the middle of the night.

You can bet you didn’t get any reporting on these dubious characters from Brooks or the F.K. Weyerhaeuser couch at AEI. In fairness to Hayward, if you read him far enough you will find he does have some appreciation for Beck —when he is interviewing professors.

Now I am not so much of a populist as to be thrilled by Beck’s every show. Those focus groups with Mothers are too much for me, and as for Frank Luntz’s regular appearances, I can only figure he has pictures.

Sometimes when Rush has been out on golfing outings, his usually extraordinarily insightful shows don’t carry the informational punch as when he is in close touch with what is happening beyond the sunny paradise of south Florida. But in these times you can’t be in touch with what’s really happening without listening to Rush and watching Beck. That’s more than you can say about their elitist critics.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Olympic failure is Bush's fault!: "Some Chicago officials say anti-American resentment likely played a role in Chicago's Olympic bid dying in the first round Friday. President Obama could not undo in one year the resentment against America that President Bush and others built up for years, they said. "There must be" resentment against America, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said, near the stage where he had hoped to give a victory speech in Daley Center Plaza. "The way we [refused to sign] the Kyoto Treaty, we misled the world into Iraq. The world had a very bad taste in its mouth about us. But there was such a turnaround after last November. The world now feels better about America and about Americans. That's why I thought the president's going was the deal-maker."

This mission is not McChrystal clear: "Deep down, national-security conservatives know President Obama will not wage a decisive war against America’s enemies in Afghanistan. They also know that the young men and women we already have there are sitting ducks. Ralph Peters notes that our commanders, obsessed with avoiding civilian casualties, have imposed mind-boggling rules of engagement (ROE) on our forces, compelling them to retreat from contact with the enemy and denying them resort to overwhelming force — including the denial of artillery and air cover when they are under siege. As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York recently reported, even some Afghans are telling our commanders to ’stop being so fussy … and kill the enemy.’ Yet the national-security Right is urging that we up the ante and put another 40,000 American lives at risk in this hostile theater, under this commander in chief and the same military leadership that dreamed up the ROE. Why? To attempt, under the rubric of ‘counterinsurgency,’ the unlikeliest of social-engineering experiments: bringing big, modern, collectivist, secular government to a segmented, corrupt, tribal Islamic society — a society that has been at war with itself for three dozen years, which is to say, since the first futile effort to impose big, modern, collectivist, secular government ran smack into Afghanistan’s tribal Islamic ways.”

Now will Congress investigate ACORN?: "Evidence continues to accumulate from far and wide that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is lousy with corruption. The latest revelations come from Louisiana and Oklahoma. In the former, the local ACORN Housing Corp. office received contracts worth a combined $625,000 from the City of New Orleans for repairing existing low-income housing and developing new units in poor neighborhoods. The contracts were paid for with funds from federal Community Development Block Grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. An investigation by the Pelican Institute think tank of New Orleans, however, found that no work was actually performed to fulfill the contracts. Worse, Pelican couldn't talk to the ACORN official managing the contracts because he had left the organization months ago. One more thing: The office address listed on the contracts for ACORN turned out to be a vacant lot, although new plumbing connections indicated a trailer had recently been located on the site."

The recovery that isn’t: "For those market boosters who are prattling on about the possibility of a ‘jobless recovery,’ I offer an invitation to join me for a breakfast of ‘fat-free bacon,’ ‘eggless omelets,’ and ‘no-carb bread.’ As unappetizing as such a meal may sound, it would nevertheless offer more substance than the oxymoronic concept of an economic resurgence without job creation. Those who do cling to the absurd belief that, absent exponential productivity gains, the economy can expand while workers are being laid off will undergo a massive test of their convictions now that it’s clear the employment picture is bleak.”

Revolutionary Anti-Semitism: "Meet one of Honduras's most vocal advocates for the return of deposed president Manuel Zelaya to office. He's not your average radio jock. He started in Honduran politics as a radical activist and was one of the founders of the hard-left People's Revolutionary Union, which had links to Honduran terrorists in 1980s. A few years ago he was convicted and served time in prison for raping his own daughter. Today Mr. Romero Ellner is pure zelayista, hungry for power and not ashamed to say so. This explains why he has joined Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Mr. Zelaya in targeting Jews. Mr. Chávez has allied himself with Iran to further his ability to rule unchecked in the hemisphere. He hosts Hezbollah terrorists and seeks Iranian help to become a nuclear power. He and his acolytes cement their ties to Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by echoing his anti-Semitic rants. Mr. Zelaya, recall, was arrested, deposed and deported on June 28 because he violated the Honduran Constitution. He snuck back into the country on Sept. 21 and found refuge at the Brazilian Embassy in the capital. Mr. Romero Ellner's calumny against Jews was a follow-up to Mr. Zelaya's claim that he was being "subjected to high-frequency radiation" from outside the embassy and that he thought "Israeli mercenaries" were behind it. The verbal attack on Jews from a zelayista is consistent with a pattern emerging in the region."

Iran's Big Victory in Geneva: "The most widely touted outcome of last week's Geneva talks with Iran was the "agreement in principle" to send approximately one nuclear-weapon's worth of Iran's low enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia for enrichment to 19.75% and fabrication into fuel rods for Tehran's research reactor. President Barack Obama says the deal represents progress, a significant confidence-building measure. In fact, the agreement constitutes another in the long string of Iranian negotiating victories over the West. Any momentum toward stricter sanctions has been dissipated, and Iran's fraudulent, repressive regime again hobnobs with the U.N. Security Council's permanent members."

Test of laser from C-130H melts hood of car: "New video released by the Air Force and Boeing Co. show what happens when a C-130H Hercules aims the Advanced Tactical Laser at the hood of car. In the video recorded Aug. 30 during a test flight at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., the laser melts the hood and sparks a fire. A press statement from Boeing said the laser ‘killed the vehicle.’ The weapon uses a chemical laser that fills the cargo hold of C-130 to produce a laser beam fired from a turret mounted in the belly of a C-130.”

Pakistan: Billions in US aid never reached Pak army: "The United States has long suspected that much of the billions of dollars it has sent Pakistan to battle militants has been diverted to the domestic economy and other causes, such as fighting India. Now the scope and longevity of the misuse is becoming clear: Between 2002 and 2008, while Al Qaeda regrouped, only $500 million of the $6.6 billion in American aid actually made it to the Pakistani military, two army generals tell The Associated Press. The account of the generals, who asked to remain anonymous because military rules forbid them from speaking publicly, was backed up by other retired and active generals, former bureaucrats and government ministers.”

Oppressive airport security again: "Those who do not deal with border crossings — either personally or through the movement of goods and/or services — do not understand what the establishment of Fortress America is doing to the reputation, economic well being and character of the U.S. By Fortress America, I mean the wall of aggressive bureaucratic obstruction and control over everyone and everything that enters the U.S. The most obvious examples are the U.S. airports which, from personal experience, I can attest are more totalitarian, dehumanizing and time-consuming by far than those in Communist China. One of the most common requests foreigners (that is, non-Americans) now make to travel agents is for flights that do not transfer or touchdown in the States; indeed, foreign airlines are advertising this ‘feature’ as a selling point and sometimes charge 100s more for the ’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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Amazing: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is just another self-hating Jew

One of the more appalling examples of the Jewish skill at getting themselves into prominent positions. Judge Goldstone has got nothing on this guy

He has shocked and angered the world with his calls for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth, and dismissed the Holocaust as a ''detail'' of history. But new evidence uncovered by London's Daily Telegraph suggests there may be a secret behind Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's attacks on the Jewish world.

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections last year shows his family has Jewish roots. A close-up of the document shows that he was previously known as Sabourjian, a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver. The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed their name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.

The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad's birthplace. The name derives from the Jewish for ''weaver of the Sabour'', which is the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The moniker is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews which is compiled by the country's Ministry of the Interior.

Experts last night suggested that Mr Ahmadinejad's track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past. Ali Nourizadeh, of the London-based Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies, said: ''This aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad's background explains a lot about him. By making anti-Israeli statements, he is trying to shed any suspicions about his Jewish connections. He feels vulnerable in a radical Shia society.''

A London-based expert on Iranian Jewry said the ''jian'' ending to the name specifically showed the family had been practising Jews.

More here

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You Commit Three Felonies a Day

Laws have become too vague and the concept of intent has disappeared

When we think about the pace of change in technology, it's usually to marvel at how computing power has become cheaper and faster or how many new digital ways we have to communicate. Unfortunately, this pace of change is increasingly clashing with some of the slower-moving parts of our culture.

Technology moves so quickly we can barely keep up, and our legal system moves so slowly it can't keep up with itself. By design, the law is built up over time by court decisions, statutes and regulations. Sometimes even criminal laws are left vague, to be defined case by case. Technology exacerbates the problem of laws so open and vague that they are hard to abide by, to the point that we have all become potential criminals.

Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate calls his new book "Three Felonies a Day," referring to the number of crimes he estimates the average American now unwittingly commits because of vague laws. New technology adds its own complexity, making innocent activity potentially criminal.

Mr. Silverglate describes several cases in which prosecutors didn't understand or didn't want to understand technology. This problem is compounded by a trend that has accelerated since the 1980s for prosecutors to abandon the principle that there can't be a crime without criminal intent.

In 2001, a man named Bradford Councilman was charged in Massachusetts with violating the wiretap laws. He worked at a company that offered an online book-listing service and also acted as an Internet service provider to book dealers. As an ISP, the company routinely intercepted and copied emails as part of the process of shuttling them through the Web to recipients.

The federal wiretap laws, Mr. Silverglate writes, were "written before the dawn of the Internet, often amended, not always clear, and frequently lagging behind the whipcrack speed of technological change." Prosecutors chose to interpret the ISP role of momentarily copying messages as they made their way through the system as akin to impermissibly listening in on communications. The case went through several rounds of litigation, with no judge making the obvious point that this is how ISPs operate. After six years, a jury found Mr. Councilman not guilty.

Other misunderstandings of the Web criminalize the exercise of First Amendment rights. A Saudi student in Idaho was charged in 2003 with offering "material support" to terrorists. He had operated Web sites for a Muslim charity that focused on normal religious training, but was prosecuted on the theory that if a user followed enough links off his site, he would find violent, anti-American comments on other sites. The Internet is a series of links, so if there's liability for anything in an online chain, it would be hard to avoid prosecution.

Mr. Silverglate, a liberal who wrote a previous book taking the conservative position against political correctness on campuses, is a persistent, principled critic of overbroad statutes. This is a common problem in securities laws, which Congress leaves intentionally vague, encouraging regulators and prosecutors to try people even when the law is unclear. He reminds us of the long prosecution of Silicon Valley investment banker Frank Quattrone, which after five years resulted in a reversal of his criminal conviction on vague charges of obstruction of justice.

These miscarriages are avoidable. Under the English common law we inherited, a crime requires intent. This protection is disappearing in the U.S. As Mr. Silverglate writes, "Since the New Deal era, Congress has delegated to various administrative agencies the task of writing the regulations," even as "Congress has demonstrated a growing dysfunction in crafting legislation that can in fact be understood." Prosecutors identify defendants to go after instead of finding a law that was broken and figuring out who did it. Expect more such prosecutions as Washington adds regulations.

Sometimes legislators know when they make false distinctions based on technology. An "anti-cyberbullying" proposal is making its way through Congress, prompted by the tragic case of a 13-year-old girl driven to suicide by the mother of a neighbor posing as a teenage boy and posting abusive messages on MySpace. The law would prohibit using the Internet to "coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person." Imagine a law that tried to apply this control of speech to letters, editorials or lobbying.

Mr. Silverglate, who will testify against the bill later this week, tells me he figures that "being emotionally distressed is just part of living in a free society." New technologies like the Web, he concludes, "scare legislators because they don't understand them and want to control them, even as they become a normal part of life."

In a complex world of new technologies, there is more need than ever for clear rules of the road. Americans should expect that a crime requires bad intent and also that Congress and prosecutors will try to create clarity, not uncertainty. Our legal system has a lot of catching up to do to work smoothly with the rest of our lives.

SOURCE

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Obama's Two Americas

Obama's coalition was an alliance of the upscale and downscale

Why is Barack Obama having trouble getting a health care plan through a Congress dominated by his own party? Partly because the coalition that elected him is an unwieldy blend of the rich and the poor. The two groups view the need for radical surgery on the nation's health delivery system quite differently.

Thomas Edsall, a correspondent for the New Republic, has written a provocative piece on just how different Mr. Obama's majority was last year when compared with previous Democratic victories. In 1976, Jimmy Carter won the White House while carrying voters making less than $30,000 (in today's dollars) by 18 points. Fueled by support from young and minority voters, Mr. Obama carried that demographic by a whopping 31 points. But he also carried voters earning over $200,000 by six points, a first for a Democrat. Where Mr. Obama failed to gain much traction was with middle-income voters, which he split with John McCain. In previous elections, Democrats had won by carrying a majority of moderate-income voters.

Mr. Edsall calls the Obama coalition "a successful alliance of the upscale and the downscale -- wealthy and needy marching hand in hand, sharing animosity to George W. Bush and the war in Iraq" But he also calls the Obama coalition a fragile one when it comes to economic issues. The Gallup Poll reports that voters earning under $30,000 a year wanted health care reform by a 13-point margin. But those earning over $75,000 a year opposed reform by 16 points.

The splits in the Democratic majorities in Congress reflect this tension. Health-care reform often pits members whose districts and states contain many uninsured people against fellow Democrats from wealthy districts who fear reform will squeeze research hospitals and generous health insurance plans.

Mr. Edsall sees the Democratic Party's income split as having implications for other issues such as the "cap and trade" climate tax bill. He questions "whether a long-term coalition so disproportionately reliant on the far reaches of the income spectrum is sustainable. And if it isn't? That leaves only one thing for Democrats to do: redouble their efforts to once again become the party of the middle class."

SOURCE

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Some Differences Between Left and Right

People often wonder what is the difference between a conservative and a liberal. The simple fact of the matter is that the major difference is that conservatives wonder first what it is they are responsible for while liberals wonder first what everyone else should be doing for them. Here are some brief rules of thumb:

If a conservative sees a U.S.flag, his heart swells with pride.

If a liberal sees a U.S. flag, he feels shame.

If a conservative doesn’t like guns, they don’t buy them.

If a liberal doesn’t like guns, then no one else should have one either.

If a conservative is a vegetarian, he won’t eat meat.

If a liberal is, they want to ban all meat products for everyone.

If a conservative sees a foreign threat, he thinks about how to defeat it.

If a liberal see an enemy he wonders what he can do to appease him.

If a conservative is homosexual, he’ll quietly enjoy his life.

If a liberal is homosexual, he’ll demand everyone get involved in his bedroom activities.

If a successful conservative is black or Hispanic, he’ll see himself as having succeeded on his own merits.

Successful liberal minorities still claim “racism” and want government to give them even more.

If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to work to better his situation.

A liberal wants someone else to take care of him.

If a conservative doesn’t like a talk show host, he switches channels.

If a liberal doesn’t like a radio show, he demands that the station be shut down or censored.

If a conservative is a non-believer, he just doesn’t go to church.

Non-believing liberals demand that everyone cease believing and demands churches be censored.

If a conservative needs health care, he shops for it, or chooses a job that provides it.

Liberals demand that everyone else provide him with healthcare for free.

If a conservative sees a law, he thinks long and hard before suggesting a change.

If a liberal sees a law he assumes it is just a suggestion and does what he wants anyway.

Conservatives feel there is a right and wrong.

Liberals feel that nothing is really wrong… unless it is believed by a conservative.

Conservatives believe in freedom, responsibility, tradition, and self-reliance.

Liberals believe in license, government restrictions, upending tradition, and collectives.

SOURCE

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An example of the outstanding but sometimes unrecognized quality to be found among America's military men



You're a 19 year old kid. You're critically wounded and dying in the jungle in the Ia Drang Valley , on 11-14-1965, LZ X-ray , Vietnam . Your infantry unit is outnumbered 8 - 1 and the enemy fire is so intense, from 100 or 200 yards away, that your own Infantry Commander has ordered the MediVac helicopters to stop coming in. You're lying there, listening to the enemy machine guns and you know you're not getting out. Your family is 1/2 way around the world, 12,000 miles away and you'll never see them again. As the world starts to fade in and out, you know this is the day.

Then - over the machine gun noise - you faintly hear that sound of a helicopter..!! You look up to see an un-armed Huey!! But.... it doesn't seem real because no Medi-Vac markings are on it. Ed Freeman is coming for you..!! He's not Medi-Vac so it's not his job, but he's flying his Huey down into the machine gun fire anyway. Even after the Medi-Vacs were ordered not to come. He's coming anyway.

And he drops it in and sits there in the machine gun fire, as they load 2 or 3 of you on board.. Then he flies you up and out through the gunfire to the Doctors and Nurses. And, he kept coming back..!! 13 more times..!! He took about 30 of you and your buddies out who would never have gotten out.

Medal of Honor Recipient, Ed Freeman, died on August 29, 2008 at the age of 80, in Boise, ID

It took until July 2001, some 36 years after the events above, before he was awarded his nation's highest military honor -- for actions taken on November 14, 1965. The medal was presented by President George W. Bush in a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, together with a glowing citation.

See HERE

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

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

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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Literary Lion Obama Will Roar No More

By Jack Cashill

The major media will not likely tackle the emerging evidence of Obama's stunning literary fraud, but the days of Obama's boasting about his writing skills are just as likely over. The immediate cause of concern at the White House is Christopher Andersen's largely benign new book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage.

Andersen contends that the ambitious Obama, unaware of JFK's own literary fraud, hoped to launch his own political career with a book as did John Kennedy with the discreetly ghost-written Profiles In Courage. Despite a large advance, Obama found himself "hopelessly blocked." After four futile years of trying to finish, Obama "sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers." This he did "at Michelle's urging," she being the more pragmatic half of the couple.

What attracted the Obamas were "Ayers's proven abilities as a writer." Barack particularly liked the fluid novelistic style of To Teach, a 1993 book by Ayers. This he hoped to emulate for his own family history. In fact, he had already taped interviews with many of his relatives, both African and American. The key sentence in Andersen's account is the one that follows: "These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers." Adds Andersen, "Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Book." The manuscript in question would become Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, what Joe Klein of Time Magazine called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."

From textual sleuthing, I had come to a comparable conclusion more than a year ago, namely that Obama had "turned the framework of his life over to terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers who roughed it in with his own darker sentiments and experiences."

As one example of Ayers' involvement, I had argued that Dreams' tale of Obama's year-long relationship with a rich, green-eyed lovely seemed to have mined the details of Ayers' own relationship to the late Weatherwoman Diana Oughton. From a close reading, I doubted there was such a girl in Obama's life. So does Andersen. "No one," he writes, "including his roommate and closest friend at the time, Siddiqi, knew of this mysterious lover's existence."

It did not matter, however, how accurate was my analysis. From the perspective of Obama's literary defenders, I was a barbarian who could effectively be kept in check outside the gates.

Andersen writes from within the gates. He has no agenda. His book is dispassionate, softly liberal and largely sympathetic to the Obamas, particularly to Michelle and her family. A popular celebrity journalist, he interviewed some 200 people for the book, many of them close to the Obama family. The Obamas had likely given at least their tacit blessing to the project. Given that the natural audience for his book skews female and left, Andersen had no reason to invent facts that would alienate his base. He has no track record of doing the same.

Although Andersen cites me on textual comparisons, I was clearly not the source for the personal details of Obama's life. His retelling of the story was based on what he had been told by someone very close to the action. He had access to people who would never have talked to me, quite possibly Michelle herself or even Bill Ayers.

Clearly shaken, the Obama-centric media find themselves in a fix not unlike that of medieval astronomers upon discovery of a new planet. Every time this happened, these geocentrists had to figure out a convoluted new loop to describe the planet's rotation around the earth. So it is with challenges to the Obama myth, even unwitting ones like Andersen's. Obama's acolytes must find some convoluted new explanation to account for each unexpected deviance from the mythic overview.

Defenses mustered in the last few days include a lack of attribution by Andersen, his ignorance of an imagined "computerized analysis" by an Oxford professor, the citation of me as source and/or a reliance upon me as source. Each of these explanations implies that Andersen is a fraud and a liar and that he contrived the story he told. Andersen's highly successful career as a celebrity journalist argues strongly against such an interpretation.

What impresses the reader about these defenses is how easily their architects satisfy themselves and presumably the Obama faithful with their soundness. The Washington Independent's David Weigel, for instance, is among those who dismiss Andersen's claim because he credits me as a source. To trivialize my contribution, Weigel cites one point of comparison between Obama and Ayers -- their mutual use of the phrase "behind enemy lines" to establish their place in capitalist America -- as though I had not also listed hundreds of other such comparisons, many much more compelling.

Had he read Andersen's book, which he does not appear to have, Weigel would have seen that Andersen's retelling of the story was based not on what I had written but on what Andersen had been told by someone who was on the scene. A close reading of the book, however, might have shaken Weigel's faith in his Milli Vanilli of messiahs.

"I've written two books," Obama told a crowd of students and teachers in Virginia last year. "I actually wrote them myself." The media should be able to protect his reputation among the willfully blind but don't expect to hear Obama make comparable boasts in the near future.

SOURCE

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ACORN's Prophetic Lawyer

ACORN's lawyer warned ACORN 15 months ago to begin fixing its massive internal problems or face certain catastrophe. ACORN didn't listen. It let the problems fester. The advice from Elizabeth Kingsley of Harmon, Curran, Spielberg Eisenberg LLP came in the form of an eerily prophetic legal memo to ACORN dated June 19, 2008, the day before ACORN's national board fired disgraced founder Wade Rathke.

The memo is a kind of Holy Grail for ACORN researchers. One source of mine keeps a copy in a safety deposit box. I've lost track of how many people have asked me over the last year if I knew how to get a hold of it. One source told me yesterday that there are many people who would "kill" to gain possession of it. This is a bit of an exaggeration perhaps, but not much.

In articles by investigative reporter Stephanie Strom, the New York Times has published excerpts of the document. Incidentally, aspects of the Old Gray Lady's coverage of ACORN were top-notch last year until management made a conscious decision to suppress Strom's reporting before Election Day, apparently for political reasons.

Bearing the subject line "Initial Report on Organizational Review," the Kingsley memo is addressed to ACORN and major affiliates ACORN Beneficial Association, ACORN Housing Corp., ACORN Institute, ACORN Votes, American Institute for Social Justice, Citizens Consulting Inc., Citizens Services Inc., Communities Voting Together, Pennsylvania Institute for Community Affairs Inc., and Project Vote (formal name: Voting for America Inc.).

The complete memo will be posted at Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com later today. It consists of sequentially numbered pages, but one page -- page 14 -- is missing, so in my file page 13 abruptly jumps to page 15. My source, who insists on anonymity, says the document arrived in that form via a fax machine. I have not retouched or altered the document in any way except where I superimposed the logo of the think tank I work for, Capital Research Center.

Underscoring how important the document is to ACORN, all pages except the first page bear lawyerly caveats at the top: "Sensitive Report -- Do Not Distribute Beyond Initial Recipient List." Perhaps that's community organizer-speak for "TOP SECRET."

The Kingsley memo paints a picture of a once-proud activist conglomerate in utter meltdown and confirms some of the most serious allegations about ACORN now being heard on Capitol Hill. The problems within ACORN, she admits, are systemic. Kingsley explains that her concerns fall into four major categories: "respect for corporate integrity, the necessary separation between different types of political work, the niceties of 501(c)(3) tax compliance and accounting for those funds, and a big-picture question about organizational capacity." She goes to great pains explaining that she is not trying to single any person out, "but to point to systemic institutional concerns."

Americans who follow the news know that the activities of the ACORN network, a tangled mess of interlocking directorates and affiliated tax-exempt groups that routinely swap seven-figure checks, have long cried out for a probe under federal racketeering laws. The undercover prostitution sting videos that began popping up at BigGovernment.com in mid-September made America intensely interested in ACORN for the first time. While the mainstream media is now covering ACORN, kind of, sort of, no longer can ACORN be said to be the exclusive preserve of Fox News Channel and conservative talk show hosts.

In her reference manual for left-wing activists, The Practical Progressive, Erica Payne reports ACORN's total 2008 budget was $50 million. Surely that figure is too low.

The network has taken in at least $107 million in donations and $53 million in federal funds since 1993, yet it owes millions of dollars in back taxes and is eligible for up to $8.5 billion in federal funding this year.

SOURCE

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Recent postings on ICJS

ABC Report on Palestinian TV show

Judge Goldstone - Peace criminal

US Pledges to quash Goldstone report

Demonisation from Down Under

The BEST statistics you ever saw

The Limits of Polite Discourse Exposing People to Evil Ideas

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ELSEWHERE



I have now caught up with my "best of" picture and cartoon galleries. Selections for the first half of this year are now up. The updated index file to the galleries is here or here.

The Olympic Defeat: "The International Olympic Committee can be a fickle bunch, so there's no humiliation in Chicago's failure yesterday to win its bid for the 2016 summer games. The Windy City gave a good effort, losing out in the first elimination round to Tokyo, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro, which eventually won the nod. If Mr. Obama and the White House made a mistake, it was in their apparently boundless faith that somehow Mr. Obama's personal popularity would carry the day. As if, merely by seeing the rock star in person, the delegate from, say, Egypt would abandon his simmering dislike for America, forget all the dinners and deals cut with the Rio Committee, and reward Chicago. In that sense, the Olympic defeat is a relatively painless reminder that interests trump charm or likability in world affairs. Better to relearn this lesson in a fight over a sporting event than over nuclear missiles. Oh, and one more silver lining: This is one decision Mr. Obama can't blame on George W. Bush, though no doubt at MSNBC they will try."

Unemployment Rate Highest in 26 Years: "The recession's toll on workers rose again in September, with the unemployment rate climbing to 9.8 percent, its highest level since 1983, as the count of the nation's jobless topped 15.1 million, according to a government report released Friday. The report underscores fears that, even as some sectors of the economy have stabilized and stock markets have rallied, the prospects for workers remain bleak.

The minimum wage hike has driven the wages of teen employees down to $0.00.: "Yesterday's September labor market report was lousy by any measure, with 263,000 lost jobs and the jobless rate climbing to 9.8%. But for one group of Americans it was especially awful: the least skilled, especially young workers. Washington will deny the reality, and the media won't make the connection, but one reason for these job losses is the rising minimum wage. Earlier this year, economist David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine, wrote on these pages that the 70-cent-an-hour increase in the minimum wage would cost some 300,000 jobs. Sure enough, the mandated increase to $7.25 took effect in July, and right on cue the August and September jobless numbers confirm the rapid disappearance of jobs for teenagers. The September teen unemployment rate hit 25.9%, the highest rate since World War II and up from 23.8% in July. Some 330,000 teen jobs have vanished in two months. Hardest hit of all: black male teens, whose unemployment rate shot up to a catastrophic 50.4%. It was merely a terrible 39.2% in July."

Don't Blame Voters for California's Budget Woes: "With the Golden State still struggling to balance its books, politicians from both sides of the aisle have come up with a nifty way to avoid responsibility for the mess: Blame the voters. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, summed it up for his fellow pols recently by telling a reporter: "All of those propositions tell us how we must spend our money. . . . This is no way, of course, to run a state." State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat, has made similar comments in denouncing "ballot-box budgeting." Their indictment is false. Voters aren't tying lawmakers' hands too much, but too little... In looking for the causes of the state's budget mess, a good place to start is with the unionized public employees, who have filed their own lawsuit against the budget. Public union ranks have grown a whopping 37% since 1990 and consume about one-third of the $85 billion budget in wages and benefits. California also faces a total unfunded future liability of about $110 billion for pensions and health-care benefits."

CBS Television Spins David Letterman as Victim: "David Letterman admitted during taping of The Late Show with David Letterman yesterday that he had sex with female staffers and, later, became the target of a $2 million blackmail attempt. Immediately thereafter, it appears his handlers at CBS began to spin the talk show host as a victim, working overtime to limit the damage to their network and, possibly, save the show. In reviewing how The Early Show reported on Letterman’s infidelity this morning, I found it disgusting — but not surprising at all — how the network spin doctors cut and spliced the clips to minimize the damage. Instead of airing the entire admission, they cut the show clip after Letterman said, “…and I can prove that you do some terrible things.” Only running the entire admission segment would have revealed the full scope of his Ted Kennedy-like actions"

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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ACORN's 'Power Plan' Found in Oklahoma City

A five-year ACORN plan to "make Oklahoma a progressive state in the way it was 100 years ago" was found amid thousands of documents left behind last year in an abandoned office formerly used by the Oklahoma City branch of the controversial leftist community organizing outfit.

The tax-exempt non-profit is required by federal law to avoid partisan politics but the heart of the "Power Plan" makes clear the organization's goal of transforming the Sooner State from one of the nation's most consistently red states to the blue side of the spectrum, like California and New York:

"Therefore, the route to power is twofold: First, build powerful city organizations in Oklahoma City and Tulsa that can control these municipalities. Second, become an influential organization by shaping a handful of strategic legislative districts that, by themselves, can change who controls the state legislature. "(W)e will be seen as the force that is making Oklahoma a progressive state in the way that it was 100 years ago. "By using this power to win significant changes for working people, by the end of our 5 years, we will have legitimized the progressive takeover of the statehouse and head into 2012 with a real possibility of changing what Oklahomans look for and expect out of their Congressional delegation."

Also found among the documents, according to OklahomaWatchdog.org, was a suggested script for approaching volunteers in Houston to help ACORN recruit voters to support President Obama during the 2008 presidential election:

"Those internal documents include a sheet titled 'Canvass recruitment' a script directed towards ACORN activists in Houston which says: 'Hi, my name is ____. We are hiring Outreach Workers to remind people to get out and vote for Barack Obama in the upcoming election. One of our team members spoke to you today and you signed up for our intake tomorrow. You are interested in working with us on this important election, correct? "It continues: 'We're hiring for people to go door to door talking to registered voters in Houston to get out the vote for Barack.'"

The documents were left behind in an office in Oklahoma City's "Little Mexico" neighborhood, according to the Red Dirt Report's Andrew Griffin, who originally broke the story. Adam Carter, the ACORN organizer running the office, apparently left town without paying rent owed for the office space.

SOURCE

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Worse off than their parents

Parents usually want their children to have a better life than they did. In the United States, the parents of today's under-30 crowd may be disappointed in that hope. Throughout last year, they were far more likely than other age groups to have reported unemployment in their households. Labor force participation for those ages 16-24 has decreased to its lowest levels since WWII as a Pew report on the graying work force notes that the recession has tilted the job market towards older workers and those with degrees.

The Pew report also says that nearly a third of the public has come to believe that a degree is necessary to get a good job, whereas 30 years ago, just under half believed that. As former President Clinton pointed out last week at a a press event, the cost of a degree has tripled in recent decades, entirely wiping out the benefits of every government assistance program for college costs.

Those college costs are usually financed instead by loans which are currently not eligible for bankruptcy protection. Loan repayment therefore eats up larger percentages of future earnings which have been plummeting for 8 years for those under 55. Bad timing for anyone who's taken out student loans in recent years in the hopes that the job market would catch up to their education expenditures, and worse luck if their parents' declining wages reduce the possibility for family assistance.

A third of adults under 27 also lack health coverage, with nearly half of those young adults earning less than $14,000 per year. Since wages for most people have been effectively stagnant, they have not kept pace with health coverage increases, and the lower you go down the economic ladder, the truer that is. Especially because there's been an ongoing decline in employer-based coverage that has disproportionately affected low-income workers and the small businesses that create the most jobs.

For another worrying indicator, an AARP poll earlier this year indicated that around a quarter of adults 18 and over are living with parents or in-laws. Another 15 percent were worried they might have to do so soon, while one in seven lived with a sibling.

I don't know about you, but the American Dream I was sold didn't include worse buying power and relative wealth than my blue-collar, high school-educated parents for myself, my peers and those who came after me.

SOURCE

The Leftist author above can see the problem but goes on to say that the solution is more factory jobs! She seems unable to see that ever more of America's wealth is being sucked up by a vast, continuously growing and useless bureaucracy that has been foisted on Americans by Democrats at Federal, State and local levels. America's vast army of paper-shufflers CONSUME wealth. They don't create it. And, to add insult to injury, they are on average paid far more than private-sector workers

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ELSEWHERE

Readers who liked my small gallery of pictures and cartoons from the first half of 2008 may be interested to know that I have now put up a gallery of pictures and cartoons from the second half of 2008. The updated index file to the galleries is here or here.

CA: Brown launches ACORN probe: "The attorney general of California has opened an investigation into ACORN and the circumstances under which its employees were secretly videotaped, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced on his Twitter page Thursday. Schwarzenegger wrote he had ‘just heard’ that the state’s attorney general, Edmund G. Brown Jr., is opening an investigation following the release of five hidden-camera videos that depicted ACORN employees offering advice to filmmakers James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, who posed as a pimp and prostitute, on how to skirt tax laws and avoid detection by authorities. ‘Just heard from Atty Gen Jerry Brown that he is opening an investigation of ACORN in Calif,’ the governor wrote. But according to a Sept. 25 letter from James Humes, California’s chief deputy attorney general, an investigation had been launched last week.”

Social Security collectors up 19%: "The number of retired workers who began collecting Social Security benefits jumped by a record 19% in the 2009 fiscal year that ended Wednesday as aging Baby Boomers and the unemployed chose to retire early. More than 2.6 million retired workers entered the Social Security system, up from 2.2 million in fiscal 2008. That’s a much bigger increase than during past recessions.”

Saturn: Why one of Detroit’s brightest hopes failed: "General Motors’s Saturn brand — touted as ‘a different kind of car company’ — had high aspirations, borrowing the Japanese manufacturing model of team production, among other things. But the Saturn experiment fell to earth with a final thud Thursday as a ‘goal-line’ deal to keep the brand alive fell apart. Saturn’s latest slogan — ‘We’re still here’ — suddenly seemed like a cruel joke as 350 dealerships are likely to close and 13,000 people face potential layoffs. True, Saturn made money in only one of its 20 years of car production. But in the end, it was internal resistance to the funky start-up and its pioneer attitude that felled it. In other words, the very qualities that Cornell labor expert Harry Katz, in his book Shifting Gears, predicted could transform Detroit’s ingrained big-car culture, doomed one of its brightest prospects.”

Poll: Abortion opposition grows: "More than four in 10 Americans favor making an abortion more difficult to have, up 6 percentage points from 2007, according to a poll released today by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The poll found that 45% of Americans favor making abortion illegal in most or all cases, up 4 percentage points from last year. The Pew analysis of past polls found that abortion is less of a critical issue for both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans than it was a few years ago; however, the drop-off in concern was more pronounced for liberal Democrats (26 percentage points) than conservative Republicans (9 percentage points).”

Government seeks ban on texting truckers, bus drivers: "The Obama administration said Thursday it will seek to ban text messaging by interstate bus drivers and truckers and push states to pass their own laws against driving cars while distracted. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said the administration also would move to put restrictions on cell phone use by rail operators, truck drivers and interstate bus drivers.” [This seems a reasonable safety measure]

The box Obama built: "Once the health care debate ends, President Obama faces another daunting challenge: curbing an unsustainable level of debt in the federal budget. This is more than next year’s problem because the two issues are also linked in a non-obvious way. Due to how Congress addresses deficit reduction, decisions on health care today will affect the White House’s fiscal policy options in the future. Few have mentioned this critical connection: health reform puts the president in a box, and the always politically risky tactic of raising taxes may be the only way out. The ghosts of the current reform effort will haunt Obama’s ability to reduce red ink for the remainder of his tenure.”

Perfect YouTube video stars Rep. Baron Hill: "During one of his recent town hall meetings, a student asked Hill why she couldn’t record the event. Hill explained that he refuses to allow videotaping because of the chance that excerpts could be put up on YouTube in a compromising position. Of course, it’s now on that Web site and I challenge anyone to find a more perfect YouTube video, at least in the political realm. He knew it was going to be difficult to control his message and tried to do it on his own terms by attempting to ban average citizens from recording the event. He even digs a deeper hole in the video excerpt when he says that it was his town hall meeting and constituents aren’t going to tell him how to run his office. So much for the humble public servant aspect of being a representative I guess. Rarely do we see so much truth packed into about 70 seconds.”

How Congress is cooking the books: "Last week, the Senate Finance Committee voted 12-11 not to wait for the Congressional Budget Office to ’score’ its health-care bill before the committee votes on it. Imagine that: Some senators actually wanted to know how much the bill costs before voting on it. Let them get away with something like that, and before you know it they’ll be demanding honest accounting practices — sending the whole legislative process to hell in a hand basket. When it comes to the health-care-reform debate, you see, honest budgeting is nowhere to be seen.”

Zero tolerance gets detention: "Horror stories related to zero-tolerance policies have grabbed headlines for as long as the rigid policies have existed. That could have been predicted by anybody with half a brain. If a policy draws unforgiving lines when it comes to ‘violence,’ ‘drugs’ and ‘weapons,’ then it’s inevitable that children will be expelled and even arrested and jailed for writing gory stories, toting penknives and sharing aspirin. As the outrage, ridicule and lawsuits in response to zero-tolerance, even the legislators and educators who’d implemented the policies to absolve themselves of the responsibility for difficult decisions began to back away from what they had wrought. Even the laziest school administrator must recoil at the response to nine- and ten-year olds hauled away in handcuffs for drawing violent pictures with crayons, if not at the reality of the incidents themselves. So, finally, we get legislation intended to alleviate the worst abuses of zero-tolerance policies.”

Britain: “Go” orders: Guilty without charge: "During the Labour party conference Home Secretary Alan Johnson revealed yet another reason to boot the party out at the next election. Renewing Labour’s pledge to ‘clampdown on crime’ (read: creating more punishments and bureaucracy under the pretence of ‘action’), he has unveiled plans to bar alleged wife beaters from their homes through the Domestic Violence Protection Order. ‘Go’ Orders can be placed on suspects, banning them from their homes for up to two weeks, while allowing victims of abuse time to consider legal action. Apparently, this has been dreamt up to close a ‘loophole’ in legislation whereby the Police can only ‘protect’ a victim of domestic violence if a suspect has been charged with a crime. This ‘loophole’ sounds horribly similar to the long-standing practice in the UK of no-one having their liberty infringed upon without sufficient evidence to suggest it is in the public interest to do so.”

Thomas Friedman’s selective history and left-wing paranoia: "The Friedmans of the world feigned no concern whatsoever about the atmosphere of hate engendered then possibly leading to violence when their ideological foe sat in the White House. They seemed to see nothing wrong with the demonization of Bush. The cries of ‘traitor,’ ‘war criminal,’ ‘liar’ and ‘loser’ apparently didn’t coarsen the dialog or create a ‘poisonous political environment’ like they do now. And the Southern Poverty Law Center had nothing to say about the virulent hate that was evident then. This demand for respect for the President of the United States we hear today wasn’t at all evident in the left’s gleeful celebration of shoes thrown at the President of the United States during a press conference, was it?”

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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