A revolution begins

By Boston Herald Editorial Staff

It was - for the second time in Massachusetts history - the shot heard round the world, or at the very least from coast to coast and surely in the halls of Congress. Scott Brown won this one fair and square with his down-to-earth charm, his hard work and his forthright position on issues - and with the help of that much-disparaged by the opposition pick-up truck.

But it is also true that Brown was the right candidate at the right time with the right message. And it’s that message that the White House and congressional Democrats can no longer ignore. After all, if the people of Massachusetts can send a Republican to the U.S. Senate to fill the seat Ted Kennedy had a lock on for 47 years, then the revolution has indeed begun. And like that battle in Concord more than two centuries ago, this is only the opening round.

Her fellow Democrats will attempt to blame the loss entirely on Martha Coakley, her inability to connect with voters, her verbal blunders and on assuming her primary victory was all she needed. Much of that is true, but it is also true that Coakley promised to be simply more of the same. And voters here are tired of more of the same.

They don’t see the point of an expensive new health care bill that threatens to damage the health care industry here, disrupt service to Medicare recipients and tax us all - especially when we already insure 97.4 percent of our people.

They don’t see the point of paying higher and higher energy costs, when the world’s pollution is not our fault.

They don’t see the point of growing the deficit so that our children and grandchildren will be paying for today’s policy mistakes - including a $787 stimulus bill that didn’t.

Most of all they are simply tired of the kind of Washington arrogance that says “don’t worry, we know what’s best for you.” Voters of Massachusetts wanted to take back the power that has been so sorely abused. Yesterday they did.

SOURCE

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A blessing in disguise for the Democrats?

By Jeff Jacoby

IT REALLY IS the people's seat, and on Tuesday the people of Massachusetts took it back. But in electing Scott Brown instead of Martha Coakley to replace Ted Kennedy in the US Senate, the Bay State's voters did more than hand the GOP its most improbable and thrilling come-from-behind victory in a generation. They did more than embrace a charismatic, upbeat Republican and reject a dour, gaffe-prone Democrat. And they did more than prove that no political party has a permanent lock on any state's electoral loyalties.

They also gave President Obama and the Democratic left a blessing in disguise -- if only they are wise enough to recognize it.

Brown ran explicitly against Obama's polarizing domestic agenda -- especially the radical health-care overhaul that the president has made his No. 1 priority. Not long ago, such a campaign strategy would have been dismissed as suicidal. But the harder the administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress have pushed their health legislation, the more unpopular it, and they, have grown. At a Coakley rally in Boston on Sunday, it spoke volumes that Obama made not a single direct reference to the health-care bill he has championed -- and that Brown promises to be the 41st vote against.

Politically, ObamaCare has backfired. No president in the modern era has ended his first year in office with disapproval ratings so high. Much of the goodwill with which he entered the White House has been squandered, and any effort to try to force the health bill through Congress now would drive what's left of that goodwill right over a cliff.

But that isn't going to happen. Brown and the voters of Massachusetts have killed ObamaCare for good. In so doing they have given the president a priceless second chance to adjust his political course, move toward the center, and deliver at least some of the bipartisan cooperation that was at the heart of his once-enormous appeal. They have given him that chance, moreover, nearly 10 months before the 2010 midterm elections. If Obama seizes the opportunity that Massachusetts and its likable senator-elect have just given him, those elections need not be a calamity for his party. With some restraint and wisdom now, the brightest days of his presidency may be still to come.

SOURCE

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A blue collar approach pays off for GOP

Republican Scott Brown shocked the nation and turned Massachusetts politics on its head. But how did he do it? A Suffolk University poll taken Nov. 8 showed Democratic candidate Martha Coakley leading by 31 points -- a staggering advantage most political observers believed could not be surmounted by Brown, one of just five Republicans in the Massachusetts state Senate.

But a series of factors conspired to allow Brown to do what seemed impossible in November, and his luck began to change right after the state's Democratic primary that month, when Coakley made what many now view as an unwise decision to take a break from campaigning.

Brown, on the other hand, hit the ground running, going door to door in working-class neighborhoods across the commonwealth in his old pickup truck, delivering a populist message that resonated with people suffering under the state's sour economy. Brown talked about job creation, the deficit and overspending in Washington. And he pledged to put the brakes on the unpopular Democratic plan to reform health care. "He's been going door to door, town to town," said Brown backer Shawn Littlehale, of Norwell. "Martha Coakley has been hiding."

Brown also put out a series of well-received ads, including one in which he seemed to appear in a campaign ad produced by John F. Kennedy when he ran for the same seat in the 1950s and promised a tax cut. Brown also used social media like Facebook, Twitter and text messages to supporters to get voters to the polls and for a massive rally to counter a Sunday appearance by President Obama.

While Brown capitalized on Coakley blunders that became almost too numerous to count, it was his substance and style that eventually won over voters, even in the face of an onslaught of negative campaign ads put forward by the Democratic National Committee. "Brown focused the discussion on the issues that really matter in Massachusetts," Ron Kaufman, former adviser to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, told The Examiner. "And it connected with the voters in a big way."

Voters said that aside from his political stance, they liked Brown's low-key, authentic style, which contrasted to what many perceived to be an aloof and out-of-touch Coakley. His appeal was so great, even Coakley volunteers were swayed by him, including phone bank worker Carol Caryl, 70. "He has a certain amount of charisma, driving that truck," Caryl said.

SOURCE

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Can You Say "Lame Duck"?!

Albert Einstein, whom even the most zealous Obamatons would have to admit was at least a trifle smarter than their own icon, once defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Mr. Obama, welcome to your padded room. We trust you will find the straight-jacket more than comfortable.

Even as Scott Brown was obliterating Martha Coakley in the race for "Ted Kennedy's seat," a typically petulant Barack Obama was sending out the word that he was right, the American people were wrong – and they had better change their ways. As the popular Washington newspaper Politico reported just before the results begin pouring in: "President Barack Obama plans a combative response if, as White House aides fear, Democrats lose Tuesday's special Senate election in Massachusetts, close advisers say."

So, there you have it. And one is reminded of the late Dick Tuck's concession speech after his loss in the 1966 California State Senate election: "The people have spoken, the bastards."

Make no mistake about it: The Coakley defeat in Massachusetts was an outright and utter rejection of Barack Hussein Obama and his entire leftist agenda. He can twist and spin it anyway he wants; he can bob and weave, shuck and jive, attempt to end run the legislative system, and attack the American people as much as his unrepentant heart desires.

But, the fact is: Denial is not just the name of a river in Egypt. Martha Coakley ran as an Obama Democrat. She embraced his every deficit spending spree, tax increase, and Big Government takeover scheme – just as she embraced the man, himself, when he journeyed north to give her his ringing endorsement. That endorsement was supposed to turn the tide. It was supposed to make people's eyes once again glaze over and prompt them to pull the leftwing lever as they had done for the Wizard of Ooze barely a year ago.

But something has clearly changed – and that something is the view the American people now have towards a president who openly rejects their values, cynically denigrates their mores, and angrily denounces their "trifling" objections to his overriding will.

So, now, over the next four to five days, the world will watch while Barack Obama makes a decision that will fix his place in history: will he reorder his steps and work the people's will – or will he double down on insanity? Let's put it this way: If the smart money could talk, it would likely query, "Can you say "lame duck"?

SOURCE

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White House Hopes for Economic Growth But Wont Change Its Counterproductive Policies

Yeah, well, good luck with that! The irrational policies coming from this administration couldn’t be more wrong. If they were truly trying to promote an economic expansion, without a doubt they would change them. The tried and true methods to promote economic growth don’t include any of the following: tax hikes, a weak dollar, trade wars, additional regulatory burdens, increased energy costs or a takeover of the health-care industry.

Only a year ago, Democrats were mouthing phrases denoting the sheer folly of raising taxes in a recession. Having passed their massive public spending free for all they called a “stimulus” and wasting a mountain of taxpayer dollars are results that are, at best, unimpressive. It has resulted in the creation of a large number of bogus jobs but very few real ones. But it has been fairly good at increasing the wages of public sector employees (people who are already employed) and building a few skate parks.

Now their sensible tone along with any notion that fixing the economy as job one is gone. The Obama Administration, along with Congress, has been thrown under the progressive bus in favor of their standard class warfare vernacular, an ideology they are much more comfortable articulating. Once again they’ve wrap themselves in the mantle of public savior, guarding the poor and saving the planet and the workingmen and women of America from evil capitalists and business owners everywhere. Righteous crusaders, who but for the lack of an extra trillion or so more tax dollars can make all of our wildest dreams come true.

It is the focus of their ire, businesses and the rich whom I call capitalists (you know, the ones with capital) who will actually lead us out of this economic malaise. Whether the time is right for them to lead is dependent solely upon their own very rational assessment of the business climate going forward, and that outlook is not promising. The President and his advisers hope that browbeating bankers will lead to more business borrowing to expand output and create additional jobs. He acts as though CEO’s will plow ahead, willy nilly, borrowing and investing no matter how many additional burdens he and his political allies on the hill ask them to bear.

As far as private sector job creation goes, the Obama has missed the point entirely. This is quite possibly because very few of his advisers know anything about the private sector, as most of them have never worked in it. So I’m going to let him in on the dirty little secret of job creation, one that those of us out here in the real world already know. Businesses borrow money only so that they can earn additional profits, jobs that are created are really incidental to their focus, which is to grow the bottom line. Many of the policies the President promotes serve only to diminish the ability of a business to earn a profit. No Profit! No Growth! No Jobs!

The Business world is totally different than the political world. Companies don’t have to expand. Investors don’t have to risk their capital. They only do so when the conditions in place enable them to forecast an increased profit. When CEO’s look at projections showing a bottom line that is shrinking, their thoughts are not of expansion and job creation, but rather they work nonstop trying to rationalize their cost structures to insure profitability, enabling them to survive the downturn. Labor savings is at the top of the heap when it comes to cutting expenses.

The good news is that an accelerated recovery can get underway any time the administration wants, but it will require them to make that hard pivot they have been talking about. They need to turn away from raising taxes, encourage the production of our domestic energy resources and stabilize the value of the dollar.

Domestic drilling will directly create thousands of jobs in US oil fields and have the added benefit of reducing energy prices, enabling a more robust economic recovery and the jobs that come along with it. The prospect of lower taxes and a stable dollar will renew the incentive for investors and their capital who are clearly watching from the sidelines to get back into the game of providing the fuel for economic growth. The nightmare of a health care bill, which seeks to punish healthy people with higher premiums and younger folks with fines for being young needs, to be scrapped in order to promote an economic environment that is, if not employer friendly, at least not hostile.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Stealth propaganda: "An obscure 2008 academic article gained traction with bloggers over the weekend. The article was written by the head of Obama’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein. He’s a good friend of the president and the promoter of the contradictory idea: ‘libertarian paternalism.’ … Obama’s Regulation Czar is so concerned about citizens thinking the wrong way that he proposed sending government agents to ‘infiltrate’ these groups and manipulate them. This reads like an Onion article: Powerful government official proposes to combat paranoid conspiracy groups that believe the government is out to get them … by proving that they really are out to get them.”

Russia diversifies into Canadian dollars: "Russia’s central bank announced on Wednesday that it had started buying Canadian dollars and securities in a bid to diversify its foreign exchange reserves. Analysts said the move could be a sign of increased diversification of emerging market central bank assets away from the dollar and into investments denominated in other commodity-linked currencies, such as the Australian dollar. Adam Cole at RBC Capital Markets said if taken in isolation, Russia’s announcement that it was buying Canadian dollars was not significant, but if it was part of a broader trend, then it was an important step. “If it is a barometer for the activity of other central banks, then its is structurally positive for the currencies of countries like Canada and Australia that have a commodity bias in their economies,” he said. Although not officially confirmed, traders said that other emerging market central banks, including some in Asia which hold large foreign exchange reserves, have also been active in the foreign exchange market in recent weeks buying both Canadian dollars and Australian dollars. [Obama's red-hot printing press has destroyed confidence in what was for many years the world's most trusted currency -- the U.S. dollar]

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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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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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A kick in the teeth for Obama, Reid and Pelosi

The Massachusetts Senate result has shown that lies and fancy talk might get you into office but in the USA you still have democracy to deal with -- and arrogance will get you nowhere there.

Scott Brown is every American conservative's hero today.

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‘Barack Obama made a lot of promises but they meant nothing’

Voters in Massachusetts cast their votes yesterday amid freezing temperatures and falling snow. They provided a window to America’s sour mood, even in this traditional Democratic stronghold.

Voters spoke of disappointment that President Obama had not made good on his soaring rhetoric. Pat Tobin, a saleswoman who voted Republican yesterday, said: “When people say ‘change’ there should be something behind it. Obama made a lot of promises of ‘change’ but I don’t think it meant anything.”

Craig Provost, an industrial designer who voted Democrat, said: “I think there is a backlash against Obama because he has not fulfilled all his campaign promises. But I think he is doing a good job.”

Voters in traditionally Irish-American South Boston, known as “Southie”, backed Mr Obama by 59-40 per cent over John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. But the area is more conservative than Boston as a whole. It is these “Reagan Democrats” — white working-class voters who defected to the Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1980s — who are now having second thoughts about Mr Obama and the Democrats.

During the campaign, Scott Brown, the Republican candidate, a lawyer, state legislator, US Army National Guard officer and former model, aired an advert showing himself strolling around “Southie” shaking hands. Martha Coakley, his opponent, alienated many white working-class men by failing to know her baseball facts and mocking her opponent for campaigning in the cold outside Fenway Park baseball stadium.

Jean Holland, an accountant who voted for Mr Brown yesterday, said she felt let down by Mr Obama. “I really thought when Obama got in he would be more for the working class people,” she said. “He’s not doing much right now. He’s dragging his feet. He has got a lot going on with the wars.”

Matthew Gagliano, a mechanical engineer, also voted for Mr Brown. Many voters voiced deep misgivings about the Democrats’ healthcare reform proposal, saying neither the country nor they could afford it. “Obama is doing a good job but I don’t like the healthcare situation,” he said. “It’s too much government control. I do not want taxes to go up.” Christine Creed, a bank worker who voted for Ms Coakley, said: “A lot of people are afraid of healthcare reform. People are nervous. But there is hope. In 2010 the economy should pick up.”

SOURCE

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Why is academe so Leftist?

The NYT has just come out with some half-reasonable thoughts on that and I have added a few comments in my leading post today on EDUCATION WATCH. For readers in a hurry, however, I will repeat below my preamble to the article:

There is much that is reasonable in the NYT article below but it ignores the numerous reports from conservative academics of the discriminatory treatment that they have received in their workplaces. My own experience is typical. Probably because I was an obvious high-flyer from the beginning, I was APPOINTED (at age 27) with tenure. I didn't have to wait for tenure. So when they found out that I was a conservative, they could not kick me out. But they COULD block my promotion. And they did. Although I was in some years getting as much published in the journals as the whole of the rest of the Department put together, I only ever managed to get one step up the ladder. With the amount I was getting published, I should have FLOWN up the ladder.

Another thing the article below ignores is that the unrealistic ideas of Leftists make them unsuitable for work in business. My realistic conservative ideas meant that I did well in both business and academe but the only Leftist I know who went into business eventually went broke. Academe is a refuge for dreamers who couldn't make it elsewhere. I look at the issues concerned in greater detail here

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Republicans learn to play the technology game

A year ago, many journalists and political pundits believed that a paradigm shift had occurred in the 2008 election. In electing the first black president, Democrats won states that had been out of reach for decades (Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana) and showed surprising strength in the reddest of red states (Montana, North Dakota, and Arizona). There was considerable sentiment on the Left that like 1968 or 1932, Obama’s win in 2008 had been a realigning event. John Judis of the New Republic and other liberal political analysts believed the election, held amid an economic meltdown, had sped up emerging trends and would give Democrats the upper hand for years to come.

Democratic success among Latinos, urban professionals, and women had helped build a new coalition that would endure as white males receded like mastodons at the end of the Pleistocene epoch. As Washington Post columnist Harold Myerson gushed after Obama’s win: “The future in American politics belongs to the party that can win a more racially diverse, better educated, more metropolitan electorate. It belongs to Barack Obama’s Democrats.”

Except in Virginia, and New Jersey and maybe Massachusetts. And to the 60 percent of respondents in the latest National Journal poll who thought that things would be the same or better if John McCain had been elected in 2008. Democrats argue that these are only bumps in the road – that George W. Bush had been even worse than they said (which hardly seems possible) and that it will take a couple of years for the transformation to take hold.

But the liberal euphoria was based on two erroneous assumptions: First, that the Republicans would be frozen in time on the day after the election; second, that Barack Obama would govern as he campaigned, as a cool, competent centrist open to new ideas. President Obama has wielded power awkwardly and behaved like an unimaginative partisan. Watching clips of the candidate talking about televising the health-care negotiations on C-SPAN reminds us how much difference there has been between the dream and the reality of Obama. But even if Obama rediscovers the magic that made Myerson and Judis believe that a new era of Democratic dominance had arrived, the question of how the GOP would react was still to be settled.

When the Franco-Prussian War began in 1870, the French believed the outcome would be the same as it had been in previous generations: an easy victory over a weak Germanic foe. Instead, France rushed into war and swiftly lost 140,000 men to Kaiser Wilhelm’s army and, perhaps, the national will to fight. The French mistake was to believe that their old enemy had stayed the same.

Of all of the rhapsodies composed by journalists about the 2008 Obama campaign, some of the most fervent were devoted to technology. Obama was the guy with Scarlett Johansson’s e-mail on his BlackBerry. John McCain thought that Google had a definite article. Obama had a YouTube channel with 1,110 videos, 13 million names on an e-mail list and his own social networking site (MyBO). Obama’s foot soldiers were mobilized by texts sent directly to their smartphones, and more than a half-billion dollars came in from online contributors.

New York Times media columnist David Carr sneered at the “crude and expensive” networking technology of the Bush administration, and suggested that Obama might use the new technologies of the Facebook and Twitter era to transcend party politics. “Political parties supply brand, ground troops, money and relationships, all things that Mr. Obama already owns,” Carr wrote. It turns out that Obama’s network has had limited value since he took office, in no small part because his digital army includes many of the young voters likely to be disillusioned by his old-fashioned approach to governing.

Even so, Republicans learned some valuable lessons during the campaign. GOP members of Congress have more than twice as many Twitter followers than their Democratic counterparts and tweet five times more often. Minority Leader John Boehner may look like a character from Mad Men, but the Don Draper of the House has a “director of new media” and more than 30,000 Facebook fans – almost four times as many as Nancy Pelosi.

SOURCE

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Feds find little fraud at big Wall Street firms

While the American public and Capitol Hill lawmakers appear to blame wrongdoing on Wall Street as the primary cause of the global financial crisis, federal law enforcement agencies have had little success in finding and prosecuting instances of fraud at the nation's major investment firms. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.s testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission last week, while boasting of thousands of cases against small-time defrauders running mortgage scams, was notable for the absence of a single example of successful prosecution of crimes by the big firms on Wall Street.

The Justice Department last year lost the only case it has brought against Wall Street executives involving suspected fraud in connection with risky subprime mortgage securities. A U.S. District Court last year acquitted two Bear Stearns hedge fund managers whom the government accused of fraud.

The Justice Department and other federal agencies have beefed up the administration's financial crimes task force to ferret out more wrongdoing, but the cases thus far overwhelmingly target small, local operators — including mortgage brokers, appraisers and real estate agents — as well as borrowers who lied to get home loans. The department has opened 2,800 investigations of mortgage fraud throughout the country. Hundreds of cases are pending in states that were tied to the housing bubble, such as Florida and California. Criminal charges have been filed against 826 suspects, but only two of whom — the Bear Stearns traders — worked on Wall Street.

While public outrage has largely targeted Wall Street, the government has consistently said that fraudulent operations were spread across the country and encompassed every sector related to housing and mortgage finance. "Mortgage fraud has swept through our economy," Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer told the commission, and it has continued in the aftermath of the financial crash. New scams, he said, are taking advantage of people who are in default on their mortgages and in danger of losing their homes to foreclosure.

Steven Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said the department's findings show that pervasive cheating helped create the housing crisis. Some borrowers, he said, lied to obtain loans or took on risky mortgages to make quick profits but walked away from their obligations when the market turned. "During the housing bubble, cheating became so commonplace that those who did it were barely considered to be engaging in fraud," he said. "It is possible that hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of borrowers, brokers and salespeople cheated over the space of just a few years, helping to bring down themselves and an entire industry, and contributing mightily to the economic and fiscal predicaments in which we find ourselves."

The public frenzy against Wall Street has resulted in proposals in Washington for hefty new taxes on bonuses and securities transactions and for breaking up the biggest financial firms....

More here

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Kangaroo court for the banks

The big banks were bit players compared to what the politicians and "regulators" did

As a general rule, diagnosis should precede treat -ment, but last week, we saw in both the legislative and executive branches examples of the treatment-before-diagnosis" mentality. In Congress, the first hearing of the congressionally created Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was held under the chairmanship of Phil Angelides, former California treasurer and former chairman of the California Democratic Party. The commission was "mandated" by law to report back to Congress by December 2010 "with a series of conclusions about what occurred, and recommendations as to how to avoid future market breakdowns.

Mr. Angelides led off his first hearing, to which he had called the chief executives of some of the leading New York banks with a demand that they accept blame for the financial crisis, by saying he was "troubled by [the bankers'] inability to take responsibility." With the chairman having decided on the first day that the bankers were responsible for the financial meltdown, what is the point of the commission? Can't they even bother to fake an intent to carry out their responsibilities as the law requires?

Even weirder, the Democratic leaders have made it clear that they plan to pass their financial re-regulation act before the November elections - even though legally they call for recommended changes from the commission to be reported back to them after the election - in December.

Sadly, Mr. Angelides' kangaroo-court attitude does not seem to be an aberration. On Saturday, President Obama, in the words of The Washington Post, "unleashed a verbal barrage against the nation's largest banks, accusing them of wanton selfishness by refusing to accept new regulations he and his party are proposing, and for fighting a new tax that Obama wants to impose."

The president proposes enacting a Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee, which would be a $90 billion tax leveled against the 50 largest banks, which, according to the Post "Obama called responsible for pushing the nation into economic crisis. By paying the tax, the nation's largest banks would settle their debt to taxpayers." That the banks paid back, with interest, the money lent to them by the taxpayers does not excuse them from this new tax.

Note that not only are the president and the commission chairman assuming they know the cause that the commission is assigned to find, but also that this new tax would establish a precedent that any person or business can be taxed or fined for any harm Congress thinks he or it did to the economy.

On this theory, everyone who contributed to the real estate and stock market bubbles, the breaking of which "caused" the crisis, could be taxed for the "effects" of their economic conduct. Under that theory, everyone who bought real estate or a stock after, say, 2005, should be taxed for a crime against society. Perhaps the Democrats would apply this theory to education. They could tax the teachers' unions and their members for "causing" generations of ill-educated children.

But beyond such foolishness, the fundamental danger of this mentality is that if they are wrong that the banks caused the crisis, their remedies in the form of new regulations and taxes may not make the economy safer. Rather, they may needlessly encumber and tax our financial institutions and drive financial business to unregulated Asia - and with it, our future prosperity....

Three-quarters of a century later, serious economists are still vigorously debating the causes for the Great Depression and its persistence. Wouldn't it be wise to spend at least a few months trying to find out the real causes of our current economic crisis before committing major surgery on a financial system that has over the past century permitted the United States to become the greatest economic engine in human history?

More here

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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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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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Don't trust the knowalls

The examples below are from business but in politics it is always the Left who think they have all the answers -- with results as bad as knowalls in business. Even "experts" are often wrong and Leftists tend to be profoundly ignorant of most of the things they discuss -- such as economics

IN DECEMBER 2008, two seemingly unrelated events occurred. The first was the release of Stephen Greenspan’s book, Annals of Gullibility: Why We Get Duped and How to Avoid It. Greenspan, a professor of psychology, explained why we allow other people to take advantage of us and discussed gullibility in fields including finance, academia, and the law. He ended the book with helpful advice on becoming less gullible.

The second was the exposure of the greatest Ponzi scheme in history, run by Bernard Madoff, which cost its unsuspecting investors in excess of $60 billion. A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent operation in which a manager uses funds from new investors to pay off old investors. Since there is no legitimate investment activity, it collapses when the operator can’t find enough additional investors. Madoff’s scheme unraveled when he couldn’t meet requests for redemptions from the investors stung by the financial meltdown.

The irony is that Greenspan, who is bright and well regarded, lost 30 percent of his retirement savings in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. The guy who wrote the book on gullibility got taken by one of the greatest scammers of all time. In fairness, Greenspan didn’t know Madoff. He invested in a fund that turned the money over to the scheme. And Greenspan has been gracious in sharing his story and explaining why he was drawn to investment returns that looked, in retrospect, too good to be true.

If you ask people to offer adjectives they associate with good decision makers, words like “intelligent” and “smart” are generally at the top of the list. But history contains plenty of examples of intelligent people who made poor decisions, with horrific consequences, as the result of cognitive mistakes.

Odds of success are poor, but not for me

Corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are a multitrillion dollar global business year in and year out. Corporations spend vast sums identifying, acquiring, and integrating companies in order gain a strategic edge. There is little doubt that companies make deals with the best of intentions. The problem is that most deals don’t create value for the shareholders of the acquiring company (shareholders of the companies that are bought do fine, on average). In fact, researchers estimate that when one company buys another, the acquiring company’s stock goes down roughly two-thirds of the time. Given that most managers have an explicit objective of increasing value-and that their compensation is often tied to the stock price-the vigor of the M&A market appears moderately surprising. The explanation is that while most executives recognize that the overall M&A record is not good, they believe that they can beat the odds.

“A high-quality beachfront property” is how the chief executive officer of Dow Chemical described Rohm and Haas after Dow agreed to acquire the company in July 2008. Dow was undaunted by the bidding war, which had driven the price premium it had to pay to a steep 74 percent. Instead, the CEO declared the deal “a decisive step towards establishing Dow as an earnings-growth company.” The enthusiasm of Dow’s management had all the hallmarks of the inside view. When the deal was announced, the stock price of Dow Chemical slumped 4 percent, putting the deal on top of a growing pile of losses suffered through acquisitions.

Basic math explains why most companies don’t add value when they acquire another firm. The change in value for the buyer equals the difference between the increase in cash flow from combining the two companies (synergies) and the amount over the market value that the acquirer pays (premium). Companies want to get more than they pay for. So if synergies exceed the premium, the price of the buyer’s stock will rise. If not, it will fall. In this case, the value of the synergy-based on Dow’s own figures-was less than the premium it paid, justifying a drop in price. Glowing rhetoric aside, the numbers were not good for the shareholders of Dow Chemical.

What’s in it for me?

Incentives matter, as economists have argued quite compellingly. An incentive is any factor, financial or otherwise, that encourages a particular decision or action. In many situations, incentives create a conflict of interest that compromises a person’s ability to properly consider alternatives. So when you evaluate your own decisions or the decisions of others, consider the choices that the incentives encourage.

Dr. Katrina Firlik, a neurosurgeon, shared an example: at conference dealing with spine surgery, a surgeon presented the case of a female patient with a herniated disc in her neck and pain that was caused by a pinched nerve. She had already failed typical conservative treatments such as physical therapy, medication, and waiting it out.

The surgeon asked the audience to vote on a couple of choices for surgery. The first was the newer anterior approach, where the surgeon removes the entire disc, replaces it with a bone plug, aim fuses the discs. The vast majority of the hands shot up. The second choice was the older posterior approach, where the surgeon removes only the portion of the disc that is compressing the nerve. No fusion is required because the procedure leaves most of the disc intact. Only a few audience members raised their hands.

The speaker then asked the audience, which was almost entirely male, “What if this patient is your wife?” The show of hands was reversed for the same two choices. The main reason is that the amount surgeons are paid for the newer and more complicated procedure is typically several times what they’d receive for the older procedure.

The expert squeeze

Accurately projecting holiday sales is a crucial task for retailers. A forecast that is too low leaves shelves bare and profits lost, while too much optimism leads to dusty inventory and pressure on profit margins. So retailers have a great incentive to come up with a precise sales estimate. To do so, most merchants rely on experts—individuals in the organization who gather information, study trends, and make predictions.

The stakes are especially high for consumer electronics firms because they generate so much of their revenue during the gift-giving season and the value of their inventory depreciates rapidly. The pressure is really on the internal experts at consumer electronics giant Best Buy, one of a multitude of retailers that rely on specialists. So you can imagine the reaction when James Surowiecki, author of the best-selling book, The Wisdom of Crowds, strolled into Best Buy’s headquarters and delivered a startling message: a relatively uninformed crowd could predict better than the firm’s best seers.

Surowiecki’s message resonated with Jeff Severts, an executive then running Best Buy’s gift-card business. Severts wondered whether the idea would really work in a corporate setting, so he gave a few hundred people in the organization some basic background information and asked them to forecast February 2005 gift-card sales. When he tallied the results in March, the average of the nearly two hundred respondents was 99.5 percent accurate. His team’s official forecast was off by five percentage points. The crowd was better, but was it a fluke?

Later that year, Severts set up a central location for employees to submit and update their estimates of sales from Thanksgiving through year-end. More than three hundred employees participated, and Severts kept track of the crowd’s collective guess. When the dust settled in early 2006, he revealed that the official August forecast of the internal experts was 93 percent accurate, while the presumed amateur crowd was off by only one-tenth of 1 percent.

Best Buy subsequently allocated additional resources to its prediction market, called TagTrade. The market has yielded useful insights for managers through the more than two thousand employees who have made tens of thousands of trades on topics ranging from customer satisfaction scores to store openings to movie sales. For instance, in early 2008, TagTrade indicated that sales of a new service package for laptops would be disappointing when compared with the formal forecast. When early results confirmed the prediction, the company pulled the offering and relaunched it in the fall. While far from flawless, the prediction market has been more accurate than the experts a majority of the time and has provided management with information it would not have had otherwise.

More HERE

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Israel in Haiti

Israel’s relief efforts to Haiti include the following:

* A field hospital, the only hospital in operation, with 40 doctors, 25 nurses, paramedics, a pharmacy, a children's ward, a radiology department, an intensive care unit, an emergency room, two operating rooms, a surgical department, an internal department and a maternity ward. The hospital can treat approximately 500 patients each day, and in addition will perform preliminary surgeries.

* A search-and-rescue team, which has rescued about five people from under the rubble.

* 220 personnel in total

* Dozens of truckloads of medical and logistical equipment

Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, one of the richest countries in the world, has sent a message of condolence to Haitian President René Préval. Some Arab countries have “pledged” help, such as $1 million pledged from both Kuwait and Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates says it will “shortly” send a plane with humanitarian assistance. Qatar, with the third largest gas reserves and the second highest GDP per capita in the world, has dispatched 50 metric tons of aid to the hundreds of thousands of homeless and injured Haitians.

Latest reports are that the IDF Medical Corps have treated some 200 injured people in Haiti, performed ten life-saving surgeries and saved the lives of 140 others. On Sunday night, a resident of Port-au-Prince gave birth to a boy at the Israeli field hospital. In appreciation and gratitude, his mother decided to name her new son “Israel” in honor of the country that helped her.

The director of the Haiti field hospital, Col. Dr. Itzik Reis, explained that the IDF delegation is also giving assistance "to people from emergency crews from all over the world, who simply are not capable of dealing with everyone who needs help and giving them treatment. For example, when we understood that the Dominican team is not set up to provide full treatment, we created an order by which they stabilize the patients and we give them the remainder of the treatment.”

Other Israeli relief operations in Haiti include:

* A six-man ZAKA rescue unit, which worked for 38 consecutive hours and succeeded in pulling eight students alive from the rubble of the collapsed university.

* IsraAID, which sent a planeload of food and medical equipment.

* "Latet" (To Give) – a 15-member mission to Haiti, including three physicians, three nurses, and three paramedics.

SOURCE (Videos here)

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ELSEWHERE

A Word of Caution: "Like so many others, I am praying for a Scott Brown victory and am incredibly heartened by the many accounts of support for him from unexpected sources. But I think it's important to remember that this is a blue state with a very powerful, well-oiled machine. The Democrats, from President Obama on down, are aware of what a Brown victory means for them and their agenda, and they are going to be willing to do (almost) anything to defeat him. And experts I trust (like Dan Schnur) remain actually somewhat pessimistic about the possibility of Brown pulling off an upset. Really, it's far from impossible that Coakley's people could find every stray Democrat vote around and drag their voters to the polls. Democratic partisans like Ed Schultz have admitted they'd be willing to cheat in order to keep the seat in Democrat hands (nice guy for the Dems to try to recruit themselves for the Senate, isn't he?). It's far from over. But there's solid reason for hope, and as Hugh Hewitt once put it in the title of a book, "If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat."

Communities put a halt to red-light cameras: "Red-light cameras that have been gaining a foothold in many states face a growing public backlash and outright removal. The cameras, billed as safety devices since their introduction in the USA nearly 20 years ago, are increasingly viewed by many motorists as unreasoning revenue generators for hard-up local governments.”

TX: Protesters converge on new Planned Parenthood center: "Thousands of demonstrators gathered in southeast Houston today to protest the opening of a new Planned Parenthood clinic. The building is located on the Gulf Freeway near the University of Houston. Protestors are calling it an ‘abortion super center.’”

TN: Chattanooga hospital ends hiring of tobacco users: "Officials at a Chattanooga hospital have decide to stop hiring tobacco users. Memorial Hospital Vice President Brad Pope told the Chattanooga Times Free Press the decision is an extension of the hospital’s commitment to health and is not based on potential healthcare cost savings. Any form of nicotine will make an applicant ineligible to be hired — even nicotine gum or a patch. The new hiring rule will not affect current employees of Memorial. Information posted on the hospital’s Web site states testing for nicotine will be added to an already-required screening for illegal drugs and will disqualify applicants who test positive.”

1989 San Francisco earthquake: "From the Marina District I could see the smoke from the fires that had broken out. The fire department simply couldn’t respond that day. All the official reports I read later spoke of the hundreds of citizens who started battling fires before any official help arrived. Throughout the city, the reports later showed, individuals, untrained in rescue work, climbed into buildings and brought out the wounded or helped those just too shaken up to know what to do. The police, who apparently had time to roust gay men from the bars in the Castro, said they were spread too thinly to help the public very much. That help came from the people of the city, not from those who rule them.”

The new paternalism: "We’ve all heard about this new paternalism, haven’t we? You know, Cass Sunstein and ‘Nudge’ seems to have got David Cameron all excited, there are even those calling the whole idea libertarian paternalism. We. the populace, are such confused little baa lambs that we need the wise and the good to tell us what to do. But instead of actually insisting we do something we’ll just get a few nudges from taxation or regulation to get us through the right five bar gate. You know the sort of thing, maybe the collie dog will bark at us, perhaps even nip our heels, but we won’t be forcibly beaten into our pens.”

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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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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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12 Signs That 2010 Is Going To Be A Really, Really Bad Year For The Democrats And The Obama Administration

Guest post below from "Michael The Patriot" of The Truth

The 2010 election is still almost 10 months away, but already every indication is that if the election was held today, the Democrats would suffer a crushing defeat. So will things get better for the Democrats by the time election day rolls around? Well, actually the truth is that things are only likely to get worse for the Democrats and the Obama administration in 2010. As the U.S. economy continues to fall apart, and as health care and national security continue to take center stage on the national scene, an increasing number of voters are likely to become disenfranchised with the Democratic Party. The following are 12 signs that 2010 is going to be a really, really bad year for the Democrats and the Obama administration.

#1) Health care "reform" has been a total nightmare for Obama and the Democrats. The majority of Americans have been horrified to learn that the plan put forward by the Democrats will make purchasing health insurance mandatory, will raise taxes, will give the government unprecedented control over health care decisions, will result in much fewer health care choices for the average American and will push U.S. government deficits through the roof. Approval ratings for the health care "reform" bill have been hovering in the 30s, and considering that this is the centerpiece of the Democratic agenda, this is a really, really bad sign for Obama and the Democrats.

#2) In fact, more Americans than ever are sick and tired of the financial mess that the U.S. government is getting us all into. The truth is that the U.S. government is drowning under an absolute mountain of debt and all of the spending that Barack Obama is doing is only making it worse. To finance this debt, the U.S. Treasury has been forced to issue so many new bonds that the rest of the world cannot possibly buy them all. So who is buying them all up? The Federal Reserve. In fact, the Fed is now purchasing approximately 80 of all new U.S. debt.

#3) But even with all of this reckless government spending the unemployment situation in the U.S. is still absolutely brutal. When even Wal-Mart is closing stores you know things are really bad. Wal-Mart just announced this past week that it will close 10 money-losing Sam's Club stores and will cut 1,500 jobs in order to reduce costs. So if even Wal-Mart has to shut down stores, what chance do other retailers have?

#4) In fact, some areas of the U.S. are a total economic nightmare at this point. The mayor of Detroit recently said that the real unemployment rate in his city is somewhere up around 50 percent. When things get that bad, the party out of power starts to look better and better.

#5) So just how bad are things when compared to past recessions? During the 2001 recession, the U.S. economy lost 2% of its jobs and it took four years to get them back. This time the U.S. economy has lost more than 5 percent of its jobs and there is no sign that the bleeding of jobs will stop any time soon. Those who do not have jobs are much likelier to consider voting for the party out of power.

#6) The reality is that more Americans are in financial trouble than at any point in recent times. Americans are going broke at a staggering pace. 1.41 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009 - a 32 percent increase over 2008. This is not a trend that is going to help the Democrats.

#7) We are also seeing a record number of mortgage defaults. According to a report that was just released, delinquent home loans at government-controlled mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac surged 20 percent from July to September. In fact, things are such a mess at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that the Obama administration recently removed the caps on the amount of financial assistance that the U.S. government will be giving these two entities. Whether or not Obama created this mess is not the issue. What is the issue is that an increasing number of Americans are blaming him for this mess.

#8) In fact, many analysts believe that the the housing crash is far from over. They say that a massive "second wave" of mortgage defaults is getting ready to hit the U.S. economy starting in 2010. In fact, this "second wave" is so frightening that even 60 minutes is reporting on it. When this second wave does hit, most Americans are going to place responsibility for it in the laps of the Obama administration.

#9) Now there is even concern that the recent global deep freeze could end up seriously affecting food prices in American supermarkets in 2010. As the past several decades have clearly shown, Americans tend to vote according to how their pocketbooks are doing, and if food prices shoot through the roof that will not help Obama and the Democrats at all.

#10) In addition, recent polls indicate that the majority of Americans are so concerned about terrorism that they would be willing to sacrifice certain freedoms in order to feel safer. Considering the fact that terrorism is considered to be an issue that greatly favors the Republicans, this has got to be very concerning to the Democrats.

#11) On the foreign policy front, Obama risks alienating the Jewish vote by continuing to insist that Israel give East Jerusalem to the Palestinians. The truth is that the Jewish vote is crucial for the Democrats and Obama in places like Florida, and by taking such a hardline anti-Israel position, Obama is not winning any new friends in the Jewish community.

#12) Also, Barack Obama is continuing to push for a treaty with Russia that would reduce the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal to approximately 10 percent of the size that it was at the height of the cold war. Such an irresponsible approach to national security is surely not going to win Obama and the Democrats many friends among moderate voters who are concerned about security issues.

Any way you cut it, 2010 is shaping up to be a very bad year for the Democrats. Barack Obama's approval rating has already been plummeting like a rock, and there does not seem to be much hope of that turning around any time soon. In fact, if the signs above are any indication, the 2010 election could end up being really, really good to the Republicans. But with Obama still in the White House until at least 2012, will they be able to do much to clean up the mess?

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Jihad and the Department of Dawah…er, Defense

This past Thursday (1/14/10) I attended a briefing (an early iteration of the discussion contents are available here, entitled “To Our Great Detriment”) which elucidated in irrefragable detail the Pentagon’s willful capitulation to the dictates of Islamically-correct interpretations of jihad by various Muslim Brotherhood “consultants” to the Department of Defense (DOD). While the DOD adopts the absurdly apologetic interpretation of jihad at its most “aggressive” as a bloodless missionary “striving” to promote the Religion of Peace—negating the living legacy of Jihad as a genocidal war doctrine, in practice as well as theory—the Pentagon’s Muslim Brotherhood advisors, true to the authentic doctrines of Jihad as an endless war of propaganda and deceit, continue to espouse Jihad war to their Muslim constituencies.

The result of this stunningly corrosive process has been the willful subversion of US Department of Defense policy to the ultimate goals of both cultural and violent Jihad—Islamization. More immediately, the warped, criminally negligent “rules of engagement” this DOD subversion has engendered are imposed upon our troops actually battling armed jihadism, putting their lives in danger, unnecessarily, and for precisely the wrong “cause”—alternative forms of Islamization, such as supporting Sharia-compliant regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, irrevocably hostile to Western ideals and goals.

The dangerous absurdity of DOD subversion—and its cruel, destructive impact on our troops—is self-evident in this report and accompanying commentary (from Friday 1/15/10) by Diana West:

This wasn’t supposed to happen there. According to a ‘counterinsurgency’ plan (COIN), anti-US, anti-infidel violence just wasn’t supposed to erupt in Garmsir, Afghanistan, of all places. But it did. And at least eight Afghans died in this Helmand Province district in rioting this week inspired by rumors that U.S. troops had roughed up a Koran. Somewhere between ‘one thousand’ (UPI) and ‘several thousand’ (The New York Times) Afghans converged on the central bazaar in response to these rumors. ‘The Taliban were provoking the people,’ an Afghan police official told the Times. ‘The Taliban were telling the people, ‘This is jihad; you should sacrifice yourselves.’

Jihad? What’s jihad? Among see-no-Islam Western policymakers, Islamic war doctrine is a cipher, a taboo, so policy is made in ignorance. But thousands of uneducated Afghans knew exactly what the Taliban meant. And what’s more, they acted on it. It was ‘like watching the movie Blackhawk Down,’ a Marine master sergeant told UPI, except ‘I was in it. My gunner kept yelling he had definite targets, people shooting at us but he couldn’t fire back because there were unarmed people around them.’

The contemporary willful ignorance—and subversion—of our DOD, contrasts starkly with the studious and intellectually honest approach to jihad taken by C. Snouck Hurgronje. A professor and Dutch colonial official, Snouck Hurgronje was also a pioneering and prolific Western scholar of Islam.

He visited Arabia (1884–85), including a stop at Mecca, while serving as a lecturer at the University of Leiden (1880–89). Hurgronje’s 2 vol. classic work “Mekka” (1888–89), describes the history of the city, and expounds upon Islam’s origins, and the traditions and rituals of the earliest Islamic communities. Translated into English as “Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th Century” (1931), the second volume includes many details of daily life in an Islamic culture, and also discusses the Indonesian Muslim colony at Mecca...

Although deeply respectful of Islamic religious life, as an authoritative scholar of Islamic doctrine and history, and Dutch colonial official, Hurgronje vigorously opposed Islamic jihadism. He stated plainly that all teaching with regard to the orthodox, mainstream Islamic institution of Jihad war and the establishment of a Caliphate should be prohibited in Muslim schools. But perhaps most importantly Hurgronje’s “prescription” was based on a meticulously researched, clear-eyed, and unfettered understanding of Islamic doctrine, history, and culture...

Hurgronje who spent decades studying Islam, notably years of insightful fieldwork in Indonesia researching and writing his seminal, The Acehnese, made these observations regarding the jihad from his Mohammedanism, (New York, 1916, p. 59):

…yet another duty was most emphatically impressed on the Faithful; jihad, i.e., readiness to sacrifice life and possessions for the defense of Islam, understood, since the conquest of Mecca in 630, as the extension by force of arms of the authority of the Muslim state, first over the whole of Arabia, and soon after Muhammad’s death over the whole world, so far as Allah granted His hosts for the victory.

More HERE

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Political correctness and the 21st century battlefield

The national security panel at the Reclaim American Liberty conference in New York on Wednesday considered (1) whether we have the right legal architecture for maintaining our security and (2) whether we have the right battlefield architecture for this purpose. I summarized the panel discussion regarding the first question here. Tonight I'll write about the second.

The key panelist on our "battlefield architecture" was Col. Allen West (U.S. Army, Ret.). Col. West served as a commander in Iraq and, after retiring from the Army, served as an adviser in Afghanistan.

West retired from the Army with full benefits after being accused of misconduct in connection with the interrogation of an Iraqi police officer. Information obtained during the interrogation is said to have led to the arrest of two insurgents and the cessation of attacks on West's 4th Infantry Division battalion. At a hearing, West testified that he would act as he did if he had it to do over again. "If it's about the lives of my men and their safety, I'd go through hell with a gasoline can," West said.

Not surprisingly, West was blunt about our military's rules of engagement -- they are not suited for the 21st century battlefield and they put our troops in danger. On the 21st century battlefield, our enemy has removed its uniforms and taken to hiding among the population. Our rules of engagement enable them to obtain an advantage by adopting these tactics.

West noted that in a fire-fight, our troops typically have about five seconds before the dying starts. Yet, we require them to hold their fire until the intentions of the enemy have been verified and the potential for collateral has been assessed. This can't be done in five seconds. Thus, our troops are at a significant disadvantage.

In addition, when the enemy holes up in a mosque, we cannot attack. Thus, the enemy is able to use our own "politically correct" rules against us.

West argued that "top-down" rules of engagement are inherently inadequate on the 21st century battlefield. When these rules are driven by political correctness, our ability to fight is undermined even more.

The same lesson applies to the homeland, which West correctly considers part of the 21st century battlefield. The Fort Hood massacre illustrates the point. In this instance, political correctness prevented us from dealing with the enemy before he dealt with us.

Col. West is running for Congress in Florida's 22nd congressional district. Currently, that district is represented by Ron Klein, who defeated West in 2008 by a margin of 55-45. However, the seat was held until 2006 by Republican Clay Shaw, and we have seen that making up a 10-point gap from 2008 is, in the current environment, hardly out of the question. The Weekly Standard wrote about the race here.

West, an African-American, is quite charismatic and, if elected to Congress, would be a marvelous spokesman for the conservative cause. If you wish to donate to the campaign, you can do so here.

SOURCE (See the original for links)

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Limbaugh Lambasts the Interior Department

Another of Obama's ignoramuses doing his work of destruction

I never listen to the radio during the day, but yesterday I made an exception when blogger Bob McCarty alerted me to Rush Limbaugh's comments about the Interior Department's new rules on oil and natural gas drilling on federal lands.

Limbaugh pointed out that Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.) sent a blistering letter to Interior Sec. Ken Salazar on Jan. 7, repudiating him for his characterization of the small companies that drill for oil and natural gas. Boren took offense at Sec. Salazar's reference to drillers as the "kings of the world" during a recent conference call with reporters.

Boren said, "This kind of statement is beyond the pale when thousands of Oklahomans and people from other energy-producing states are losing their jobs due to the recession...The energy industry is overwhelmingly made-up of independent producers that drill 90 percent of the wells in the U.S...And quite frankly, they consider this brand of rancor as a slap in the face...."

Similarly, Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal took Sec. Salazar to task for handing control of oil and natural gas production "to the whims of those that profess a 'nowhere, not ever' philosophy" toward drilling. In a letter to Sec. Salazar, the governor said the Interior Department is proposing to add additional layers of analysis to the leasing process at a time when the Department needs to "get moving" on 2,000 leased parcels that have been waiting for a decision since June 2008. He added that the Department's delay is holding up about $26 million in state revenues.

"This involves families and jobs, schools and care for those on Medicaid--all at a time when our national and local economy is faltering," the governor wrote.

Rush Limbaugh had his own message to the Interior Department. "You guys say you want energy independence and you're killing the small business men and women in oil and gas production in this country who are trying to help you achieve that. It's on purpose, I'm telling you, folks, it's on purpose."

The oil and natural gas industry directly employs or supports 9.2 million American workers. If it were allowed to drill in energy-rich, non-park areas controlled by the government, it could create thousands of new jobs, generate revenues to pay for much needed services, and reduce the federal deficit. And no stimulus plan would be required.

SOURCE

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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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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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An odd old saying

There is an old tripartite saying that sticks in my mind -- mainly because I don't understand the second part, I think. It was said to be fatherly advice given by a British aristocrat to his son:

1. Never drink port after champagne.

2. Never hunt south of the Thames

3. Never give your lady one in the morning. You never know what might come up during the day.

I would be interested if anybody knows other versions of that advice and if anybody knows who first uttered it. I remember reading it long ago in a book but have quite forgotten which one.

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Under Barack Obama, US is obsessed with race but can't talk about it

Barack Obama's election did not usher in a post-racial America. Instead, speaking honesty about race is taboo

A year ago, Americans were basking in what many believed was a post-racial new dawn. The United States was just about to inaugurate its first black President. Across the world, those who had pronounced the country too mired in its past to elect an African-American were being forced to reassess.

Fast forward to last week and the American chattering classes were engaged in the kind discussion about race that makes one despair. I use the term "discussion" but that's over-egging things - it was really a mud-slinging contest in which Republicans and Democrats shouted tired old slogans at each other. The matter at issue was comments by Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, made during the 2008 election campaign. Obama was electable, Reid observed, because he was "light-skinned" and did not "speak with a Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one".

Reid knew he was in big trouble and immediately rushed out a statement of apology when his words, quoted in a new campaign book, became public. He had forgotten that race was a taboo subject. His use of the term "Negro" was a little anachronistic, though the National Council of Negro Women and United Negro College Fund still exist. But it wasn't exactly the other N-word.

Reid, who is fighting for his political life in Nevada, where polls have him trailing badly in his November re-election contest, has said many stupid things. Three years ago, he declared that the Iraq war "is lost". Last month he compared Republicans who opposed healthcare reform to those who once clung to slavery. But this time his sin was really to speak the truth. Part of candidate Obama's special appeal was that he was a black man who made white people feel exceedingly good about themselves - not least because he was half white and had been raised by a white mother and grandparents.

At the same time, Obama showed himself to be at ease among blacks who had, unlike him, lived through the civil rights area and were descended from slaves. Thus, Obama walked the tightrope between being too black and being not black enough. One of the ways he did that was to alter his tone and cadence depending on the audience he was speaking to - as many politicians do. He was elected partly because of a huge black turnout in which 95 per cent of blacks voted for him. But he also improved on the proportion of white voters who had backed the white Democratic candidate in 2004.

It was Republicans who jumped on Reid and accused him, with stultifying predictability, of being a racist. But Democrats have played the same game. Allies of the Obama campaign insinuated that Hillary Clinton was racist when she stated that it took President Lyndon Johnson to turn Martin Luther King's vision into reality. Even Bill Clinton, the much-vaunted "first black president", was branded a racist (the code used was "playing the race card") for declaring Obama's candidacy a "fairy tale".

Ditto for the Clinton operative who stated that Obama was like "your cool black friend". Ditto for the Republican congressional candidate said of Obama "you can have your Tiger Woods" (and that was when Woods was Mr Squeaky Clean). They had both broken the unspoken rule that white politicians should avoid talking about race beyond the occasional homage to "diversity".

When Congressman Joe Wilson yelled the intemperate accusation "You lie!" at Obama during a presidential speech to Congress last year, former President Jimmy Carter said that he was motivated by racism. Columnist Maureen Dowd opined that Wilson really meant: "You lie, boy!" Last July, Obama didn't exactly help matters by publicly leaping to the conclusion that a white policeman arresting a black Harvard professor was acting "stupidly".

Republican operatives confide that one of the reasons why Michael Steele cannot be ousted as party chairman just yet - despite widespread dissatisfaction with his performance - is because he is black.

So what happened to treating people not "by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character"? Ironically, Martin Luther King Day will be marked across the country tomorrow but this dream of King's is not being fulfilled. American politicians have got themselves into a real bind. They have to fret constantly about race but cannot talk honestly about it.

SOURCE

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Evil, Capitalistic, Bigoted America Comes to Haiti’s Assistance

Just as it is always ready to assist in natural disasters worldwide

Thursday morning I was watching Fox & Friends to see what was going down in the aftermath of the apocalyptic earthquake that rocked Haiti. As I sat there in my shorts drinking my coffee, I was gobsmacked as I viewed the insane carnage inflicted by the 7.0 death-dealer that crushed that little nation seven hundred miles from my Miami bunker.

As the horrendous before and after satellite images of a city flattened by mother nature rolled, I became prouder and prouder of how the U.S., our magnificent military, and a stack of high-quality Christian organizations are flying into high gear with millions of dollars and thousands of people to sacrificially help—as in risk their lives—to do whatever they can to assist during such unimaginable suffering.

Basking in the warm glow of the American spirit in such a tragic event, I started getting kinda, sorta ticked off regarding how the Lefties repeatedly pitch our nation as an evil, bigoted, greedy, capitalistic, militarily-oppressive regime that loves to squish the underdogs.

Y’know, in reality—as in a blistering, natural disaster reality—one always finds that it is America that rocks the hardest in regard to real relief. We blow away other nations. Yep, whether it is a tsunami or an earthquake, you can count on evil, mean, nasty, bigoted, murderous, Christian American men and women to be the first responders to offer no-BS help in time of need.

It’ll be interesting to see how many (and at what level) Muslim organizations and nations, atheist organizations, Code Pink, PETA punks, Chavez and Castro, GLSEN, euro-socialist dillweeds, Green Peace, and Avatar’s woodsy blue people pony up and help the Haitians through their hellish nightmare. I wonder if they’ll even come close to our American Judeo-Christian largesse?

It’s also really interesting to me how mean, white America runs to relieve a city that’s 99.9% black without blinking. At least we’re not going around like Reid, Biden and Byrd and calling them “clean Negroes” who can turn their black slang on and off.

This just in! A buddy of mine Facebooked me a moment ago about how a couple of his evil Christian friends just got back from a 10-day missions trip to Haiti and are trying to head back. He continued to say that it is, no doubt, just a show they're putting on to advance the conservative agenda and subvert the Religion of Peace.

In addition, my co-host on ClashRadio.com, Steve Pauwels sent me this note on Friday regarding his Marine son Sam saying, “We seek your prayers for our middle son, Sam, who is now awaiting his newest deployment down to Haiti … When I asked Sam how he was doing one hour ago, he said: "Fine. We just want to go." (Note; he and his unit have been back in the states for ONE MONTH after being overseas for six months).” Ah, our evil wicked soldiers, eh Lefties?

You know, at the end of the day, countries and people who need true aid and who long for authentic liberty always look to the massive helping hands of the Judeo-Christian rooted, God blessed American men, women and military—and not to secularists, atheists, Islamists and grimy hippies who regularly blather about how bad America is.

SOURCE

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Republican Brown drives hard for Kennedy's seat

During last fall's tepid GOP primary, Scott Brown's campaign was overshadowed by a feisty four-way Democratic fight _ stoking Republican fears he'd be unable to catch winner Martha Coakley during the general election for the late Edward Kennedy's Senate seat. But Brown, whose basketball skills helped him win college admission, has proved as nimble on the campaign trail as the parquet floor.

When Coakley faded from the campaign trail over the holidays, Brown held daily press events, then posted the first television ad of the final election stretch, comparing himself with the late President John F. Kennedy. Coakley's air of inevitability evaporated.

For Brown, the breathing room let him define himself as a truck-driving everyman, a doting father and the candidate best suited to push back against a Democratic-dominated Senate. "If you want someone to lower your taxes and bring common sense back to Washington, then join with me," Brown said in a campaign ad that showed him shaking hands in the working-class neighborhood of South Boston.

Reinvention is a skill Brown has used throughout his career, seizing opportunities where he found them. As an undergraduate, he didn't just rely on his athletic skills, but also delved into singing and acting. He traded on his matinee good looks for work as a model, and while still in law school, he posed nude for Cosmopolitan magazine _ in a photo spread with a strategically placed crease in the magazine. Later he enlisted in the National Guard and launched a political career that took him from the Wrentham Board of Selectmen to the Massachusetts House and Senate.

Brown said his dedication to hard work and family grew out of a difficult childhood. "I didn't come from a lot of money," he said in a recent debate. "My parents are divorced a few times. My mom was on welfare for a period of time. I really came from nothing and worked my way up."

That work ethic has helped Brown come within striking distance of Coakley. He's crisscrossed the state with the stamina of an athlete training for a triathlon, which Brown does between real estate closings and legislative work. On the campaign trail and in debates, Brown has drawn bright lines between himself and his Democratic opponent _ something Democrats now believe Coakley should have also been doing.

Massachusetts Democratic political consultant Mary Ann Marsh said Brown has been able to capitalize on his strengths during the brief six-week sprint to the special election in part because Coakley and her supporters sat back after she won the Democratic primary. "In a six-week race, he was given the advantage of having the field to himself for the first four weeks," she said. "He was able to define himself, define the race and define her, and nobody questioned him."

Brown, who defeated businessman Jack E. Robinson to win the GOP nomination, has vowed to be the 41st vote in the Senate against President Barack Obama's health care initiative. He's portrayed Coakley as a big-spending liberal who's naive on foreign policy and soft on the treatment of terrorism suspects. "To think that we would give people who want to kill us constitutional rights and lawyer them up at our expense instead of treating them as enemy combatants to get as much information as we can under legal means _ it just makes no sense to me," Brown said....

More HERE

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Obama's first year by the numbers

7,949.09 -- Dow Jones Industrial Average close on Jan. 20, 2009.

10,609.65 -- Dow Jones Industrial Average close on Jan. 15, 2010.

13 million -- Number of people 16 and older unemployed as of January 2009.

14.7 million -- Number of people 16 and older unemployed as of December 2009.

7.7 percent -- Unemployment rate January 2009

10.0 percent -- Unemployment rate December 2009

$787 billion -- Cost of economic stimulus approved by Congress.

$10.6 trillion -- Outstanding public debt Jan. 20, 2009.

More here

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ELSEWHERE



US Navy en route to make Haiti seaport usable: "The Navy is going to try to get the wrecked seaport in Haiti's capital up and running. A Navy commander says the salvage ship Grasp is en route to Port-au-Prince with divers and underwater construction personnel to assess the damage to piers and other port facilities. Rear Admiral Victor G. Guillory said Saturday the Navy will help build temporary piers and other facilities. Guillory is Navy commander for the U.S. Southern Command. For now, the Navy is moving supplies from the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, and sailors are helping to move supplies from Haiti's airport to distribution centers, Guillory said. Denis McDonough of the National Security Council says the destroyed port makes it harder to distribute aid.

A straw in the wind: "Just got off the phone with a friend of mine who lives near Boston. He and his wife are not Republicans (and very clear on that point!) but they are voting for Scott Brown. Why? Because they think "the whole Reid-Pelosi machine is scary." That's interesting to me. Perhaps it's not only Republicans who have looked at the way Democrats have pressed on with health care, impervious to (even contemptuous of) public opinion, and recognized the very real threat it represents to our body politic."

Ratings soar for O'Brien: "Conan O'Brien's ratings are soaring as he nears a bitter exit from NBC's "Tonight" show, his ridicule of his network executives apparently resonating in a country filled with the unemployed. His ratings Friday were 50 percent higher than they've been this season, and he beat CBS' David Letterman, according to a preliminary Nielsen Co. estimate based on large markets. In the 18-to-49-year-old demographic that NBC relies on to set advertising prices, O'Brien even beat Jay Leno's prime-time show".

Another newspaper folds for good: "The holding company for MediaNews Group Inc. newspapers, including The Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News, says it plans to file for bankruptcy protection. Affiliated Media Inc. said Friday it would file a "prepackaged" plan already approved by lenders, which should allow it to emerge from bankruptcy more quickly. It would be at least the 13th bankruptcy filing by a U.S. newspaper publisher in the past 13 months. The owners of dozens of newspapers have been pushed into bankruptcy protection as the recession and competition from the Internet have sapped advertising revenue."

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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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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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Predestination -- and a small reflection on the Calvinist culture into which I was born

"It was meant to be". "It was all planned out before we were born". Such statements are the essence of Calvinism. And I think that they are still common in at least some Christian circles. In the English-speaking world, the home of such doctrines is the Presbyterian Church -- in its various incarnations. But very few modern-day Presbyterian churches still preach it from the pulpit.

Yet it has a good foundation in scripture. See Ephesians chapter 1, for instance. And because of that foundation a very theological version of the doctrine even appears in the famous 16th century 39 "Articles of Religion" of the Church of England. There was a time when the Church of England respected scripture -- and you had to assent to the 39 articles to be an Anglican priest, in fact. These days the only faith that most of the Anglican clergy seem to have is in homosexuality and global warming.

Despite its venerable historical and scriptural roots, however, it seems to me that predestination is still not generally a well-articulated doctrine. It is more an instinct than anything else.

I was born into a family that was not at all religious but was still somehow Presbyterian. I was sent to Presbyterian Sunday School as a kid and still have the fondest memories of that time even though I have been an atheist for all of my adult life. Yet my mother and my aunties would all from time to time come out with the statements with which I have introduced this post. What is not now preached from the pulpit still survives among the people. And the lady in my life -- Anne -- who also has a Presbyterian background but is no more religious than my mother and my aunties -- also comes out with such utterances to this day.

And Islam seems to have a very similar doctrine.

So I think that we should respect religious feelings even if a searching examination of them reveals large logical difficulties. Feelings are important. Anne does not in fact appear to believe in God. Yet she believes in a planner and a purposer. I have no difficulties with that -- even though I personally do not remotely share such beliefs.

Religion is much more a matter of feeling than anything else and I am delighted that I myself once shared such feelings. People who attack religion are in my view incompletely human. I don't in fact think that a true atheist feels any need to attack religion. Crusading atheists like Dawkins seem to me to be very religious themselves. They too are feelings-driven.

And while I am about it, I want to pay tribute to the immense power of the New Testament faith. Virtually all present Christian churches stray extensively from that faith -- as my commentary on the NT sets out in great detail -- but even that fragment of the original faith that Christians generally possess has survived, flourished and conquered for 2,000 years. And I have every confidence that there is at least another 2,00 years of life in it yet. Forget church doctrine and pagan preconceptions. Just read the NT and soak in it. It probably still has the power to transform you if you let it. It has certainly been the biggest single influence on my life.

A small addendum to that: There is one large diocese of the Church of England that does still hew closely to the scriptures: The Sydney diocese of the Anglican church of Australia. And their theological seminary -- Moore college -- is overflowing with around 300 young people (male and female) studying the faith. By contrast the local Roman Catholic seminary has about six students. Getting close to the NT is the key to power in Christian faith.

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Chatting with Sarah

by Bill O'Reilly

The phenomenon known as Sarah Palin made her debut this week as an analyst on Fox News. You should have heard the braying from our competitors CNN and MSNBC. She's a dunce, they wailed, a conservative shill! Foaming at the mouth doesn't begin to describe the reaction. Here's my question: If you guys are so smart, how come your ratings are softer than Jell-O?

Palin appeared on my program and began by knocking President Obama around a bit on health care and terrorism, standard-issue right-wing stuff. But then I asked her about charges on "60 Minutes" that her frame of reference is so weak, she doesn't even understand why there are two Koreas. Palin just shook her head and said the man who made the charge, author John Heilemann, is a liberal who simply is not telling the truth. So there.

Whatever your opinion of her, you have to admit the bashing of Palin is almost unprecedented in the media. Newspaper critics and uber-liberal TV commentators are the worst. Reviewing my interview with the former governor in The New York Times, Kate Zernike wrote: "After marveling that '60 Minutes' spent eight minutes on Ms. Palin on Sunday night, Mr. O'Reilly spent about 20 with her."

Well, yeah. She's a brand-new FNC analyst and was the lead guest on my program. The “60 Minutes” story was about a book featuring dozens of politicians. Palin, however, got most of the airtime, and it was all negative. And that's the point. If you hammer Palin, the Times will have no beef. But give her a forum in which she can respond to her detractors, and watch out.

David Zurawik, television critic for The Baltimore Sun, makes that point better than I ever could. Reviewing the Palin chat, Zurawik said: "In a protected TV environment like the one Fox and O'Reilly skillfully provided for her Tuesday night, I think (Palin) could be a red-hot ratings winner. And the country and our political conversation are going to be the poorer for it. "I can only imagine what kind of power these two might come to wield in the elections of 2010."

Aha! Never mind that I asked Palin about the perception that her intellect is not up to presidential standards, Zurawik and his soul brothers and sisters on the left are very worried about the fact that Palin now has a place to state her case. A very well-watched place.

That presents a clear and present danger to the liberal ideologues masquerading as press people. No longer can they mock Palin with impunity. Now she can mock them back, big time, and perhaps convince open-minded folks that her message is worthy, and that she is not a reincarnation of Georgette on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Simply put, Palin has a big opportunity to balance the playing field. Boy, do her critics hate that.

SOURCE

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Phony Fruits in the Obama White House Garden

by Michelle Malkin

Hold on to your hoe. It turns out that the fruits and veggies used in a special edition of the popular Food Network TV show “Iron Chef America” featuring first lady Michelle Obama did not, in fact, come from the White House garden. Could there be a more deliciously fitting symbol of Obama White House fakery than Garden-Gate?

Some may shrug at this tempest in a colander. But as we approach the one-year anniversary of the Hope and Change inauguration, the first lady’s little horticultural hoax serves as a handy metaphor for a cornucopia of Obama fraud. They’ve stocked health care town halls with partisan goons and benefactors. They’ve provided lab coats to doctor donors to make their health care lobbying look more authentic. And they’ve treated soldiers, in President Obama’s own words, as “pretty good photo ops.”

Ringers are what’s for breakfast, lunch and dinner at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

East Wing apologists are whirling like KitchenAid salad spinners over the Iron Chef-fuffle: "Due to the production delay between the shoot at the White House and the shoot at Food Network, the produce used in Kitchen Stadium during the 'Super Chef Battle' was not actually from the White House garden," admitted a Food Network spokeswoman. But, they stress, the replacement produce consisted of the exact same types of sweet potatoes, tomatillos, broccoli and fennel purportedly picked from the White House garden.

It’s the haute cuisine version of disgraced CBS News fabricator Dan Rather’s fake-but-accurate card. But this is just the latest Potemkin produce from a Potemkin presidency.

To wit: White House number-crunchers and Democratic fuzzy mathematicians have been cooking the books on stimulus jobs numbers and government health care takeover costs. They desperately ditched the “jobs saved or created” recipe for a jobs-funded concoction to salvage the illusion of economic recovery. They’ve inflated deficit reduction estimates and downplayed doctor reimbursement cuts. And they’ve done so behind a locked kitchen door.

Candidate Obama whipped up a nutritious package of transparency pledges that has fallen flatter than a one-egg souffle. Open government, he told us, was good for Washington and good for America -- and the president promised to give us heaping doses of it on C-SPAN. But not a camera was in sight for the past week’s backroom health care negotiations among the White House, Democratic leaders and left-wing special interests.

Now, President Obama is poised to deliver juicy tax exemptions for unions while squeezing middle-class taxpayers, employers, investors and drugmakers to subsidize expanded government health care.

The liberal press became unhinged when former President George W. Bush posed with an artificial turkey on a surprise Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad in 2003. But on Thursday, when Obama served up a fake populist turkey of a $90 billion bank tax -- dubbed the “financial crisis responsibility fee” -- much of the press corps dutifully chewed and swallowed. Feigning outrage at the very financial sector that loaded his campaign coffers and provided him with crony Treasury appointees, Obama demanded “our money” back.

But the tax will not apply to the Enron-rivaling financial black holes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (it would “not be productive,” says a White House filled with Fannie- and Freddie-enriched advisers). Or to the bailed-out auto companies. Or to the bevy of non-banks that have soaked up taxpayer bailout money. Gobble, gobble, gobble.

Nor will any of the incompetent or complicit financial regulators who practiced self-admittedly “inadequate” oversight before the meltdown and during the government bailout structuring be fined or penalized. (We’re looking at you, Tim Geithner).

With Year Two of the Obama administration barely under way, even its most loyal subjects are beginning to realize that Hope and Change were phony fruits. He promised new politics. We got the same old crony capitalism. He promised public accountability. We got the back of the hand. How ya like them rotten apples now?

SOURCE

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Obama Rewards Losers, Punishes Winners

President Obama's misbegotten bank tax is precisely the wrong policy at precisely the wrong time. It will wind up backfiring across the board. Why? Because bank consumers and borrowers are the ones who will wind up paying this tax, creating an obstacle to economic recovery.

Obama is actually rewarding losers and punishing winners -- exactly the reverse of free-market capitalism. Who's being rewarded? Obama's bank-tax penalty is being used to finance the failed government takeovers of GM, GMAC, and Fannie and Freddie. And let's not forget the $75 billion failure of the so-called foreclosure loan-modification program. To this day, no one knows where that money went. But the big banks are going to be forced to finance this through a tax that will damage lending, stockholders and consumers.

This is sheer political favoritism. Crony capitalism at its worst, with a sub-theme of bailing out Obama's Big Labor political allies. It's just like his bailout of the unions by exempting them from the so-called Cadillac insurance tax until 2018, all while the rest of us may have to suffer under that tax.

Speaking of political unfairness and favoritism, mortgage giants Fannie and Freddie will not pay a nickel of this tax. These government-sponsored enterprises were at the very center of the financial maelstrom, financing the government's quotas and targets for unaffordable mortgages. Think about this for a second. President Obama is out there bashing away at excessive bonuses. And yet Fannie and Freddie's CEOs stand to make $6 million in the next year or two. Huh? These are big-government-owned bureaucrats. They ought to be paid like GS-18s.

Of course, the Federal Reserve, which is having its most profitable year ever, was probably the main culprit in all this, with its negative-real-interest-rate easy-money policy, which amounted to throwing red meat to a pack of sharks in the deepest waters. But this tax punishes and penalizes the biggest banks -- institutions that have already met their obligations by paying down TARP, with interest, and by providing taxpayers with a tidy profit on the stock warrants they held.

Now, this is not to condone the major mistakes made by the big banks. They were overleveraged, borrowed way too much and sold highly flawed mortgage bonds and other complex derivatives. And the banks should not be paying big bonuses for 2009 -- not for the period during which they were TARPed. That's their biggest mistake.

With the banks having paid down TARP, however, the U.S. government should not be waging war against them. Somebody ought to tell the White House that al-Qaida is the real enemy, not the banks.

At the same time, taxing the living hell out of the banks will not promote economic recovery and long-term prosperity.

More here

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BrookesNews Update

Things are not looking up for the US economy : Obama's borrowing and spending binge point to an eventual rise in long term interest rates severe enough that if it did not kill off investment it would severely curb it. Sustained economic recovery means capital accumulation. Obama's policies are anti-growth, whether he knows it or not. His green jobs policy is a prime example of gross economic illiteracy and amounts to nothing but a 21st century version of pyramid building that will do as much for the American economy as did the building of the Palace of Versailles for the French economy
Why Bernanke needs to change course to save the US economy : The main source of the current crisis is the Fed's own policies. Once the Fed lowers interest rates and pumps money into the economy, it enables the formation of various false activities, and sets in motion an economic boom. A reversal of the loose stance strangles non-productive activities and sets in motion an economic bust
Doyle is screwing the Liberal Party on green policies : Once again the Liberal Party reveals its total incompetence in dealing with green nonsense and economic fallacies. Robert Doyle proposes destructive green policies and Liberal politicians and their advisors are unable to figure out what's wrong with them
Another interventionist fallacy: unemployment, labour costs and the value-added fallacy : Interventionists and all manner of would-be central planners are utterly clueless about how businesses are run and how markets operate. This ignorance makes these meddlers particularly dangerous to our standard of living
Castro's Cuba: Terror sponsor : "Castro has protested being placed on the U.S. list of terror-prone nations slated for extra airport screening. This is the same murderous thug who built terrorist-training camps, sponsored individual terrorists like Carlos the Jackal, and who in 1962 plotted to blow up New York's subways with 500 tons of TNT under Bloomingdale's, Gimbel's and Macy's on the Friday after Thanksgiving. The plot was foiled by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. The same thug also attempted to blow up a Miami-area nuclear plant in 1983. No wonder the Hollywood left love him
Fidel Castro: Hollywood screenwriter : Well whaddyaknow, it turns out that the Soderbergh/del Toro biopic Che was basically written by Castro's The Cuban Film Institute with Castro having the final say on the script. What a pair of lying leftwing Hollywood creeps. They couldn't wait to grovel to the sadistic Castro while praising the equally sadistic but inept Che. Hollywood has been turned into a leftwing cesspool by the likes of the America-hating Soderbergh and stone
The Crucifixion of Brit Hume : When Brit Hume declared his faith in Christ the American left immediately went into an indescribably vile frenzy. Christians should be happy because it revealed the left's hypocrisy, its shocking intolerance of anyone disagrees with it and its pathological hatred of Christians. It also revealed that the left is the real threat to Americans' liberties
Obama: America's gift to terrorists : For al Qaeda and other terrorists across the globe, Obama is the gift that just keeps on giving. The fanatical Muslim terrorists who are intent on wiping out every man woman and child that doesn't accept Allah as God was just handed another victory by the President of the United States
Leaving the US - why and why not? : After the Bolsheviks took over Russia, many who lived there before were able to compare life before and after the Communist take-over. It became readily apparent that they had gone from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. Subsequent generations, having nothing to compare, had no idea what life could be under some other kind of government and simply accepted the regime as a way of life. Is this what will happen in the United States?

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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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

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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