The Media's co-ordinated attack on Sarah Palin

On Thursday, the Daily Caller published exchanges from a private forum called JournoList that showed how 400 top mainstream reporters and their activist buddies conspired in an attack against Palin the minute she entered the presidential race.

Wrote Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation: "This seems to me like an occasion when the nonofficial campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official (Obama) campaign shouldn't say — very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here (on JournoList) — scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia (sic) wing-nut a heartbeat away."

"What a joke," added Jeffrey Toobin, a staff writer at the New Yorker and a senior analyst at CNN.

Ryan Donmoyer of Bloomberg News warned the forum bloggers that Palin's decision against aborting her baby with Down syndrome represented a threat to Obama because it was a "heartwarming" story. Politico's Ben Adler (now at Newsweek) said Palin should be criticized because campaigning would take her away from her baby.

Instead of calling Adler out on his 1970s-grade sexism, Human Rights Watch's then-chief of operations, Suzanne Nossel, suggested that McCain be called the sexist: "I think it is and can be spun as a profoundly sexist pick. Women should feel umbrage at the idea that their votes can be attracted just by putting a woman, any woman, on the ticket no matter her qualification or views."

"OK, let's get deadly serious, folks," wrote Ed Kilgore, managing editor of the Democratic Strategist. "Grating voice or not, 'inexperienced' or not, Sarah Palin's just been introduced to the country as a brave, above-party, oil-company-bashing, pork-hating maverick 'outsider.' What we can do is expose her ideology?"

And so it went — journalists from the Nation, Mother Jones, Time, Politico, Bloomberg cooking up approaches, arguments, "narratives" and templates to paint a false picture of the candidate.

There are so many things wrong with this, we hardly know where to start. Nominally competitors, these supposedly impartial media mavens colluded in a way that would put airline or insurance officials in the dock for anti-competitive practices. They engaged in activism instead of fact-finding and mixed incestuously with activists whom they also should have been covering impartially.

Worst of all, they deprived millions of Americans of the information they needed to size up this new face on the political scene and determine if she really was a candidate who represented their interests. That still remains to be done — and the country is poorer for it.

More HERE

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Too many laws, too many prisoners

Never in the civilised world have so many been locked up for so little

THREE pickup trucks pulled up outside George Norris’s home in Spring, Texas. Six armed police in flak jackets jumped out. Thinking they must have come to the wrong place, Mr Norris opened his front door, and was startled to be shoved against a wall and frisked for weapons. He was forced into a chair for four hours while officers ransacked his house. They pulled out drawers, rifled through papers, dumped things on the floor and eventually loaded 37 boxes of Mr Norris’s possessions onto their pickups. They refused to tell him what he had done wrong. “It wasn’t fun, I can tell you that,” he recalls.

Mr Norris was 65 years old at the time, and a collector of orchids. He eventually discovered that he was suspected of smuggling the flowers into America, an offence under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. This came as a shock. He did indeed import flowers and sell them to other orchid-lovers. And it was true that his suppliers in Latin America were sometimes sloppy about their paperwork. In a shipment of many similar-looking plants, it was rare for each permit to match each orchid precisely.

In March 2004, five months after the raid, Mr Norris was indicted, handcuffed and thrown into a cell with a suspected murderer and two suspected drug-dealers. When told why he was there, “they thought it hilarious.” One asked: “What do you do with these things? Smoke ’em?”

Prosecutors described Mr Norris as the “kingpin” of an international smuggling ring. He was dumbfounded: his annual profits were never more than about $20,000. When prosecutors suggested that he should inform on other smugglers in return for a lighter sentence, he refused, insisting he knew nothing beyond hearsay.

He pleaded innocent. But an undercover federal agent had ordered some orchids from him, a few of which arrived without the correct papers. For this, he was charged with making a false statement to a government official, a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Since he had communicated with his suppliers, he was charged with conspiracy, which also carries a potential five-year term.

As his legal bills exploded, Mr Norris reluctantly changed his plea to guilty, though he still protests his innocence. He was sentenced to 17 months in prison. After some time, he was released while his appeal was heard, but then put back inside. His health suffered: he has Parkinson’s disease, which was not helped by the strain of imprisonment. For bringing some prescription sleeping pills into prison, he was put in solitary confinement for 71 days. The prison was so crowded, however, that even in solitary he had two room-mates.

Justice is harsher in America than in any other rich country. Between 2.3m and 2.4m Americans are behind bars, roughly one in every 100 adults. If those on parole or probation are included, one adult in 31 is under “correctional” supervision. As a proportion of its total population, America incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany and 12 times more than Japan. Overcrowding is the norm. Federal prisons house 60% more inmates than they were designed for. State lock-ups are only slightly less stuffed.

The system has three big flaws, say criminologists. First, it puts too many people away for too long. Second, it criminalises acts that need not be criminalised. Third, it is unpredictable. Many laws, especially federal ones, are so vaguely written that people cannot easily tell whether they have broken them.

In 1970 the proportion of Americans behind bars was below one in 400, compared with today’s one in 100. Since then, the voters, alarmed at a surge in violent crime, have demanded fiercer sentences. Politicians have obliged. New laws have removed from judges much of their discretion to set a sentence that takes full account of the circumstances of the offence. Since no politician wants to be tarred as soft on crime, such laws, mandating minimum sentences, are seldom softened. On the contrary, they tend to get harder.

Some criminals belong behind bars. When a habitual rapist is locked up, the streets are safer. But the same is not necessarily true of petty drug-dealers, whose incarceration creates a vacancy for someone else to fill, argues Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University. The number of drug offenders in federal and state lock-ups has increased 13-fold since 1980. Some are scary thugs; many are not....

Severe drug laws have unintended consequences. Less than half of American cancer patients receive adequate painkillers, according to the American Pain Foundation, another pressure-group. One reason is that doctors are terrified of being accused of drug-trafficking if they over-prescribe. In 2004 William Hurwitz, a doctor specialising in the control of pain, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for prescribing pills that a few patients then resold on the black market. Virginia’s board of medicine ruled that he had acted in good faith, but he still served nearly four years....

Much more HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Modern political prisoners in America: "When I was growing up, I learned in school that one of the reasons the United States of America was better than the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was because we didn’t hold political prisoners in our jails. That was something the bad, bad communists did. That was something that was done in communist countries to keep dissidents in line and to silence them. Such a thing could never be done in America. I don’t know if this is still taught in the schools, but if it is then I believe our children are being grossly misinformed. The United States of America has become the leading nation when it comes to jailing its citizens, and the vast majority of them have been jailed for non violent crimes. We are, in effect, being jailed by the political class for disobeying rules they have deigned necessary, not for actions that have harmed another human being or his property. Most of those jailed are, in effect, political prisoners.”

A law to prevent government bungling! (If only ...) "President Barack Obama will sign legislation today to limit erroneous payments by the government and announce a new goal of reducing improper payments by $50 billion before 2012, a White House official said. The Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act will help limit improper payments to individuals, organizations and contractors, according to the administration official. The White House said that in 2009 a record of almost $110 billion was paid by the government to the wrong person, in the wrong amount or for the wrong reasons."

A Russian milestone: First black elected to office: "People in this Russian town used to stare at Jean Gregoire Sagbo because they had never seen a black man. Now they say they see in him something equally rare — an honest politician. Sagbo last month became the first black to be elected to office in Russia. In a country where racism is entrenched and often violent, Sagbo’s election as one of Novozavidovo’s 10 municipal councilors is a milestone.”

US deficit heads toward record $1.47 trillion: "There is some good economic news. The red ink the US is swimming in is not as bad as projected in February. Yes, at $1.471 trillion, it’s still huge — 10 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product — but an improvement of $84 billion from earlier estimates. But bad news still looms large. In the next fiscal year, according to the mid-season review released by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Friday, the US deficit will be $150 billion more than earlier projections. It is expected to come in at $1.416 trillion, or 9.2 percent of GDP. The White House, which released the change in budget estimates, was careful not to overplay the changing numbers. ‘These are not substantial changes and nothing we want to make too big a deal about,’ said Peter Orszag, director of the OMB in a press call with reporters. ‘The economy remains weaker than we would like and the unemployment rate higher than we would like.’”

Battle over Bush tax cuts looms in Washington: "An epic fight is brewing over what Congress and President Obama should do about the expiring Bush tax cuts, with such substantial economic and political consequences that it could shape the fall elections and fiscal policy for years to come. Democratic leaders, including Obama, say they are intent on letting the tax cuts for the wealthy expire as scheduled at the end of this year. But they have pledged to continue the lower tax rates for individuals earning less than $200,000 and families earning less than $250,000 — what Democrats call the middle class. Most Republicans want to extend the tax cuts for everyone, and some Democrats agree, saying it would be unwise to raise taxes on anyone while the economy remains weak. If no action is taken, taxes on income, dividends, capital gains, and estates would all rise.”

Liberal tax revolt game-changer?: "The liberal tax revolt, as the Wall Street Journal is calling it, is a very important topic — especially for investors and small-business entrepreneurs. And for new jobs. The so-called revolt is comprised of three Democratic senators: Kent Conrad, Evan Bayh, and Ben Nelson. They want to extend all the Bush tax cuts. That includes taxes on the wealthy, or the top personal tax rate, the investment taxes on capital gains and dividends, and the estate tax. So is this revolt a game-changer, or merely wishful thinking?”

Doctors fleeing faster from profession, Medicare: "The exodus of doctors from Medicare (and, likely, from private practice altogether) is accelerating. The signs are undeniable: A 2008 poll by an independent Medicare commission found that 28 percent of seniors had trouble finding a primary-care doctor, up from 24 percent the year before. In Texas, 38 percent of primary-care doctors will take new Medicare patients. The Mayo Clinic is opting out of Medicare in several locations because the low payment rates don’t allow the organization to provide the quality care its culture demands. One financial planner reported that well over half of his physician clients have asked him to restructure their finances so they can retire in 2013 — the year before the main provisions of the new health overhaul law take effect.”

Abolish the Agriculture Department: "Amidst the big dispute between liberals and conservatives over race in the Shirley Sherrod controversy, I’d like to make a libertarian point: Rather than give Sherrod her job back at the Department of Agriculture, let’s instead simply abolish the Agriculture Department, along with all the socialist programs that enable those welfare-state bureaucrats to dole out other people’s hard-earned money to farmers.”

Money dominates: "Financial panics are usually followed by sharp economic snap backs. The post-Panic of 2008 has failed to follow this typical ‘V-shaped’ economic recovery pattern. After almost two years, the U.S. economy remains mired in an anemic recovery, with a current 2.4% year-over-year rate of growth. This paltry growth rate doesn’t even reach the U.S.’s long-term trend rate, and is well below the sizzling growth rate we should be observing (6%-7.5%). The picture is much the same in Europe, where growth is even more anemic. The fiscalists have reached for their standard elixir — larger government deficits.”

Bureaucratic brownies: "The Pentagon’s brownie recipe is 26 pages long. Among the ingredients: water that conforms to the ‘National Primary Drinking Water Regulations (Copies are available from the Office of Drinking Water, Environmental Protection Agency, WH550D, 401 M Street, S.W., Washington, DC 20460),’ eggs in compliance with ‘Regulations Governing the Inspection of Eggs and Egg Products (7 CFR Part 59),’ and baking soda ‘which meets the requirements of the Food Chemicals Codex.’”

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, 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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It needs an all-out battle to stop the frauds who are destroying America

When will Republicans get it through their head that this in no longer a conflict of ideas played by gentlemen rules? The Obama/Pelosi/Reed triumvirate has already taken control of automotive, insurance, housing, healthcare, student loans, and finance industries. Soon they’ll take control of the energy and telecommunications industries. They’ve usurped state authority with unfunded mandates on an unprecedented level (heath care). They've wreaked state budgets with stimulus dollars that come with more strings than a marionette. And they even refuse to allow Arizona to take reasonable actions to protect itself against rampant illegal immigration. That giant sucking sound you hear is power being vacuumed up from all points on the compass to settle in Washington DC, so it can be ceremoniously transferred to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

This cabal is intent on changing the country in a direction that will cause misery for generations of Americans. Socialism? No, I never feared that this administration would take us into a European-style socialist state. I believe that would be bad, especially for the people struggling to get a foothold on life, but it would not be the annihilation of everything I hold dear. No, my fear is closer to home, right here in this hemisphere. What they have in mind starts with crony capitalism and corrupt dealings between big government and big business. Once this is taken a few more steps, it's more properly called fascism—the government control of private enterprise and suppression of all opposition.

So, quit playing nice. These people are committed to winning, and they use Chicago-style tactics—rock you back on your heels, and then they embrace you in a warm hug. But make no mistake, as soon as they're done with you, they will viciously attack your character, beliefs, and faith until they destroy your will to fight. There are crucial battles ahead. You've lost a lot already, but the war is still raging. Open your eyes. Don't obsess on the current battle, and nip around the edges of their latest assault. Always remember the long string of double-crosses that have come before. See their intent for what it really is, not for what you hope it is. Your mantra must be to watch what they do, not what they say.

Here’s one piece of good news for you: The people have caught on. The bellicose accusations the administration throws at opponents are falling on deaf ears—at least out here in the real world.

Our salvation will only come when enough people stand with courage and yell NO! Instead of being intimidated, wear the Party of No badge with pride. Do not give in. Do not grant them legitimacy because they won the last election—they won under a false flag. The country did not vote for this, they voted for bipartisan, post-racial leadership that would extend wellbeing to more of our people while protecting the liberty of all.

SOURCE

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Bernanke Says: Keep Bush Tax Cuts

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke favors the continuation of the Bush tax cuts, which would allow Obama to avoid implementing the biggest tax hike in history under his name.

The Obama, Reid and Pelosi power trip wants to raise taxes on "the rich," but fails to understand that those lumped into that category include small businesses, which employ over 70 percent of Americans. More taxes equals less money to pay more employees, resulting obviously in even higher unemployment.

The battle lines are clearly drawn. Obama, Reid and Pelosi on one side, Bernanke and small business on the other.

SOURCE

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The failures of Obama and his Congressional poodles were inevitable

Most of the progressive criticism of the Obama Democrats seems to take-on one of either a couple different themes. First, there’s the theme that “Obama should have focused more on job creation” during his first two years in office, rather than spending so much time and energy on healthcare legislation. Progressive pundit Arianna Huffington has been sounding this alarm for at least the last nine months, recognizing before many others that, yes, even Barack Obama needs to preside over a flourishing economy if he’s going to retain any political clout.

The other theme of criticism among progressives is that “Obama hasn’t gone far enough.” His approach to “reforming” healthcare should have been to completely shut-down any private sector involvement in the healthcare industry and the medical profession, and to place it all under the auspices of government-run enterprise. Similarly, he should have put “big oil” in its place by now, and should have already legislated a reduction in petroleum consumption while “creating” a “green energy industry.”

Both of these lines of reasoning are fraught with naivety, and false assumptions. And they are both grounded in a enormous misunderstanding of basic economics, and human nature.

Consider the assumptions about economics, and human nature, entailed in these remarks from Paul Waldman, writing in the July 20th edition of the American Prospect: “It wasn't supposed to be this way. Remember when Barack Obama's presidency was going to wash over the capital like a cleansing tide, renewing both the government's ability to accomplish great things and restoring the people's faith in that ability? It seems so much longer than a year and a half ago…The broader frustration is with a system whose dysfunction and corruption seem worse than ever -- one that seems like it's designed to stop progressive change…”

Indeed, the corruption and dysfunction of the Obama Democrats are bringing so-called “progressive change” to a halt. But why would Waldman – and the progressives, generally – ever think that concentrating more and more economic resources into the hands of fewer and fewer people (this is what happens when government takes-over huge chunks of the private sector economy, as Obama has been doing) would NOT lead to more corruption?

Progressives lament the harshness and corruption of the private sector, capitalistic economy – insurance companies denying coverage or charge too much for their product are common grievances – yet they naively assume that as long as politicians and government bureaucrats control things, greedy and self-serving behaviors will disappear, and the “collective good” will reign supreme.

But there is no historical basis for this assumption. Indeed, most of the world’s roughly five-thousand years of history paint a brutal picture of government “rulers” and “ruling classes” of people, abusively lording their power over the poorer classes. This is to say that there is no one individual (not even President Obama), nor any one select group of people (like Congressional Democrats) that are so “moral” and “virtuous” that they will consistently set aside their own personal self-interests (self-interests like increasing their power and popularity), as a means of serving the collective good.

No, part of being human is to be self-interested, and the Obama Democrats have displayed in painful ways that they will do whatever they want with other people’s economic resources, so long as it makes them feel good.

This is why conservatives believe in the free-market economy. And not a free-market devoid of any and all forms of regulation (such economic systems only exist on paper). But rather, a free-market economy where market competition provides a check-and-balance to bad behavior.

SOURCE

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DISCLOSE Act Assault on First Amendment Continues

For those of you who believe in bygone notions like free speech rights and the ability to criticize politicians when they do things like nationalize 1/5 of the U.S. economy, you better taken advantage of that while you can. Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has filed for cloture on the DISCLOSE Act, S. 3628, which is intended to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United and impose burdensome new disclosure requirements. The cloture vote will probably occur next Tuesday in a move that avoids committee hearings. If Reid can get 60 votes, then the Schumer/Van Hollen Sedition Act of 2010 will proceed to a vote. At that point, he will only need 51 senators who believe Congress has the ability to circumvent and restrict the First Amendment.

Senator Schumer also introduced a new version of S. 3628 yesterday which differs slightly from the version passed in the House, H.R. 5175. For example, it drops the ban on political speech introduced by Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) by holders of oil drilling leases on the Outer Continental Shelf, which is a slight improvement over the House version. But the differential treatment between corporations and unions is still present in the new, refined, and “improved” bill, as are all of the other worst provisions of the original version.

The Center for Competitive Politics estimates that the ban on government contractors engaging in political speech will apply to over half of the fifty largest companies in the United States. The “NRA exemption” from the burdensome disclosure requirements remains in the bill as does the prohibition on speech of American companies with direct or indirect connections with foreign corporations (although unions and NGOs with foreign members are not affected). So companies owned 80% by Americans that are headquartered in the United States and whose employees are overwhelmingly American will not be able to engage in any political speech.

If this bill passes, it will become effective within thirty days, which will cause such confusion and chaos only two months before the fall congressional elections that many corporations, both profit and nonprofit, and incorporated associations, will no doubt stay out of the election and stay out of grassroots activity on other bills and issues being considered by Congress before November. But then, there is little doubt that deterring such activity that could lead to criticism of the positions and votes taken by incumbent senators and representatives is an intentional objective.

The Framers of our Bill of Rights are probably rolling over in their graves as they contemplate what may be about to happen in the United States Senate. If Daniel Webster asked “How stands the Union?’ as he did in the famous story by Stephen Vincent Benet in The Devil and Daniel Webster, it would be hard to give him the answer he would want. When members of the United States Congress believe they have the power to violate the First Amendment with impunity and censor the political speech of those who they believe should not be able to speak, then the Union no longer stands “rock-bottomed and copper sheathed, one and indivisible.”

SOURCE

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One Nation Under Arrest

If you did not know that you were supposed to affix a federally mandated sticker to your otherwise lawful UPS package, should you be arrested face down on the pavement by FBI agents training automatic weapons at you? Our hunch is that most reasonable Americans would respond with an emphatic ‘No!’ Today we are launching a series of posts based on case studies adapted from our new book, One Nation Under Arrest: How Crazy Laws, Rogue Prosecutors, and Activist Judges Threaten Your Liberty. The book includes stories of average Americans who have been arrested, prosecuted, convicted – and even imprisoned – despite the fact that they were doing their best to be respectable, law-abiding citizens. The UPS-sticker example is just one real world example we will be highlighting.

Heritage fellow Jack Park kicks off the series today. He relates how George Norris, a 67-year-old husband and grandfather, ended up spending almost two years in federal prison. Some of Norris’s paperwork for his home-based orchid business did not meet all of the technical requirements of an international treaty. None of his orchids were illegal to import, possess, or sell, but that did not stop the government from prosecuting and imprisoning him.

One Nation Under Arrest analyzes the causes of overcriminalization and offers solid proposals for reforming the law. To be solved, the problems of overcriminalization must be fully recognized and understood. Overcriminalization includes applying criminal penalties to activities that are socially and economically beneficial. Consider, for example, the obscure environmental laws that dictate what you can and cannot do in your own home even when they may not provide any clear environmental benefit.

Overcriminalization also includes creating offenses that are so vague and broad that they grant federal prosecutors a license to deem broad swaths of conduct “criminal.” The federal “honest services” fraud statute, for example, is so vague and far-reaching that even conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has written that prosecutors could use it to convict and imprison Americans who call in “sick” to attend a ballgame.

Increasingly over the past few decades, the U.S. Congress has been callously disregarding the limits the Constitution places on the federal government’s authority to criminalize otherwise innocent conduct and engaging in similarly improper criminalization. This has partially succeeded in warping Americans’ collective understanding of what should – and what should not – be the subject of federal criminal punishment.

But most Americans still have not surrendered their sound judgment that criminal punishment should be carefully limited. If you buy or sell personal shares of stock and are unaware that you are technically violating some obscure trading rule on corporate mergers and acquisitions that are conducted via tender offer (whatever that is), should you have to face the possibility of paying for your lack of knowledge by spending time in federal prison with murderers, child rapists, and drug traffickers? Anyone who has traded stock yet is not intimately familiar with the hundreds or thousands of relevant statutes, rules, and regulations would again probably say ‘No!’

Congress and state legislatures increasingly view the criminal law as the tool of choice to “solve” every problem, punish every mistake (instead of making appropriate use of civil penalties), and coerce Americans into conforming their behavior to satisfy social engineering objectives. Criminal law should be used to redress only that conduct which Americans rightly and reasonably determine is deserving of society’s greatest punishment and moral sanction. As had been the rule for centuries, no one should be punished as a criminal unless he committed a wrongful act knowing that it was illegal or wrongful – that is, unless he acted with criminal intent.

Like the stories in this Foundry series, One Nation Under Arrest highlights how criminal law and punishment today frequently transgress these boundaries and harm the innocent. If you want to know more about how overcriminalization endangers you and other honest, respectable Americans, keep checking in on this Foundry series and click below to order a copy of One Nation Under Arrest.

SOURCE

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, 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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Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege

Jim Webb, a Democrat senator from Virginia, points out something that seems unknown to most of his party: That not all whites are the same

The NAACP believes the tea party is racist. The tea party believes the NAACP is racist. And Pat Buchanan got into trouble recently by pointing out that if Elena Kagan is confirmed to the Supreme Court, there will not be a single Protestant Justice, although Protestants make up half the U.S. population and dominated the court for generations.

Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America. After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.

I have dedicated my political career to bringing fairness to America's economic system and to our work force, regardless of what people look like or where they may worship. Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived.

Lyndon Johnson's initial program for affirmative action was based on the 13th Amendment and on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which authorized the federal government to take actions in order to eliminate "the badges of slavery." Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans. This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in socio-economic terms from the Civil War and its aftermath.

The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed. But the extrapolation of this logic to all "people of color"—especially since 1965, when new immigration laws dramatically altered the demographic makeup of the U.S.—moved affirmative action away from remediation and toward discrimination, this time against whites. It has also lessened the focus on assisting African-Americans, who despite a veneer of successful people at the very top still experience high rates of poverty, drug abuse, incarceration and family breakup.

Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years.

Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse (yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them together for the purpose of public policy.

The clearest example of today's misguided policies comes from examining the history of the American South.

The old South was a three-tiered society, with blacks and hard-put whites both dominated by white elites who manipulated racial tensions in order to retain power. At the height of slavery, in 1860, less than 5% of whites in the South owned slaves. The eminent black historian John Hope Franklin wrote that "fully three-fourths of the white people in the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery."

The Civil War devastated the South, in human and economic terms. And from post-Civil War Reconstruction to the beginning of World War II, the region was a ravaged place, affecting black and white alike.

In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt created a national commission to study what he termed "the long and ironic history of the despoiling of this truly American section." At that time, most industries in the South were owned by companies outside the region. Of the South's 1.8 million sharecroppers, 1.2 million were white (a mirror of the population, which was 71% white). The illiteracy rate was five times that of the North-Central states and more than twice that of New England and the Middle Atlantic (despite the waves of European immigrants then flowing to those regions). The total endowments of all the colleges and universities in the South were less than the endowments of Harvard and Yale alone. The average schoolchild in the South had $25 a year spent on his or her education, compared to $141 for children in New York.

Generations of such deficiencies do not disappear overnight, and they affect the momentum of a culture. In 1974, a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that white Baptists nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a level almost identical to blacks' average of 10.6 years, and well below that of most other white groups. A recent NORC Social Survey of white adults born after World War II showed that in the years 1980-2000, only 18.4% of white Baptists and 21.8% of Irish Protestants—the principal ethnic group that settled the South—had obtained college degrees, compared to a national average of 30.1%, a Jewish average of 73.3%, and an average among those of Chinese and Indian descent of 61.9%.

Policy makers ignored such disparities within America's white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith. Also lost on these policy makers were the differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures. Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.

Where should we go from here? Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end.

Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white. The need for inclusiveness in our society is undeniable and irreversible, both in our markets and in our communities. Our government should be in the business of enabling opportunity for all, not in picking winners. It can do so by ensuring that artificial distinctions such as race do not determine outcomes.

Memo to my fellow politicians: Drop the Procrustean policies and allow harmony to invade the public mindset. Fairness will happen, and bitterness will fade away.

SOURCE

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Obama and his minions have been doing their best to lose white America. They may succeed

First was the startling accusation by Attorney General Eric Holder, days after Barack Obama was inaugurated in a gusher of good feeling, that we are all "a nation of cowards" when it comes to facing issues of race. A real icebreaker for a national conversation.

Second was the instantaneous verdict of the president, when asked about the arrest of Harvard's Henry Louis Gates by Cambridge cop Sgt. James Crowley. With no knowledge of what happened, Obama blurted out that the cops had "acted stupidly." It took a White House beer summit to detoxify that one.

A third was the revelation that Obama's first Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the "wise Latina" herself, had gone to extremes to see that the case of Frank Ricci and the New Haven, Conn., firefighters never got to the Supreme Court. Ricci and co-defendants had been denied promotions they had won in competitive exams solely because they were white and no black firemen had done as well.

The fourth was the Justice Department's dropping of charges against members of the New Black Panther Party, whose intimidation of voters in Philadelphia had been captured on tape. When a department official resigned in protest and went to the Civil Rights Commission to accuse officials at Justice of ordering staff attorneys not to pursue such cases, that explosive charge, too, was ignored by Justice.

Came then the NAACP smear that the tea party was harboring racists, which Joe Biden explicitly rejected on national television on Sunday, before the Monday firestorm over Sherrod.

Now, whatever one's views on each of these episodes in which race played a role, white Americans are being forced to address them. And, surely, the White House understands this is bad news for Obama and the Democratic Party.

For though the black community remains solidly behind Obama and the white majority is shrinking toward minority status by 2042 or 2050, depending on which Census survey one uses, whites in America still outnumber blacks five to one. And if forced constantly to come down on one side or the other of a racial divide, most folks will wind up with their own.

In past elections, Democrats have raised race -- allegations that black churches were being torched in the South, that George W. Bush's opposition to a hate crimes bill meant he was coldly indifferent to the dragging death of a handicapped black man -- to solidify and energize the minority vote. And, today, that vote remains solid behind Obama,

Where the erosion is taking place is in white America, among working- and middle-class folks who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries but took a chance with Obama in the fall. Now, every time some new incident erupts, these folks are being tarred.

Opposition to affirmative action is racist. Supporting the tea party gives aid and comfort to racists. Opposing health care puts you in league with folks who used racial slurs on Rep. John Lewis. To raise the issue of the New Black Panther Party is to play the race card.

One understand the bitterness of tea party folks who carry signs that read: "What difference does it make what this placard says. You'll call it racist anyway."

SOURCE

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The Washington Post Finds Waste -- in Government!

Congratulations are due to the Washington Post. "Top Secret America," its in-depth, multi-part, two-year investigation into the vast network of government security agencies and private contractors is an eye-opener -- obvious Pulitzer bait.

Reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin have revealed a "hidden world, growing beyond control." Within this "alternate geography" of the United States, they found some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies at work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. Over 850,000 Americans have top-secret security clearances. They spend "a gusher of money" that has flowed since 9/11.

And -- this will blow your socks off -- the Post found that there is tremendous waste, duplication, and lack of accountability. Really? In a government program? "Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks."

Not only that, but they aren't careful about the way they spend taxpayer dollars. "With so much money to spend, managers do not always worry about whether they are spending it effectively. ' Someone says, let's do another study, and because no one shares information, everyone does their own study,' said Elena Mastors ... 'Everybody's just on a spending spree. We don't need all these people doing all this stuff.'"

The growth of counterterrorism spending since 9/11 has been sharp and dramatic. "With the quick infusion of money," write Priest and Arkin, "military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009." These analysts and agents produce an estimated 50,000 reports per year -- most of which are never read.

So yes, bravo to the Post. Truly. But why do they tend to notice government waste only when it applies to national security? The Post and other liberal organs have been quick to record how much the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (particularly Iraq) have cost taxpayers. But they seem much less curious about waste, duplication, and even fraud in other areas of government spending.

SOURCE

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Ben Stein answers his critics: "I am guessing that the point that Mr. Crowe and his pals on the left were trying to make is that because I pointed out a truth about the unemployed I know is that I am hard hearted. This is painfully the opposite of the truth. I am 65 now, as Mr. Crowe thoughtfully pointed out (in the context of suggesting that I am either insane or demented, a very sophisticated way to begin an essay). The main reason I am not as well situated for retirement as I should be is that I support so many unemployed people — some of them writers. It is the bane of my wife’s existence that money she thinks should go to our savings goes out to help unemployed friends. My critics on the left are pretty free with words of sympathy. How many of them pay for the mortgage payments of their unemployed friends, as I do, would be an interesting thing to know.”

Suppose there were food insurance: "Suppose there were food insurance. Rather than everyone paying for food with their own money, people would pay a certain fee to their insurance company every month, and in return the insurance company would pay for all of its clients’ groceries. Sound like a good idea? Perhaps, but what do you suppose would happen if we had this kind of food insurance?”

AIDS experts: End war on drugs: "Some of the world’s top AIDS experts issued a radical manifesto this week at the 18th International AIDS Conference: They declared the war on drugs a 50-year-old failure and called for it to be abandoned.”

Memo portrays UN chief wanting control, secrecy: "A portrait of Ban Ki-moon as a secrecy-obsessed U.N. chief seeking to wrest control of internal investigations emerges from a blistering 50-page confidential memo by his former oversight chief. The unusual memo by Inga-Britt Ahlenius, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, describes Ban as more concerned with preventing news leaks than with releasing possible criminal evidence to prosecutors.”

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, 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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Are antisemites mad?

Shrinkwrapped is a very thoughtful blog by a conservative-oriented psychoanalyst in New York. From recollection, the author is Jewish. It is a generally very good blog well worth reading for those of us who are particularly interested in the psychology of politics -- which is my field of academic research.

Recently, Glenn Reynolds linked to an article by Roddy Boyd ("Killing Jews For Fun and For Profit: The Continuing American Adventures of Arab Bank") documenting a court case against an Arab Bank which illustrates how even supposedly rational and reasonable institutions, once in thrall to antisemitism, end up behaving irrationally and self destructively. Shrinkwrapped has responded with an article titled "Anti-Semitism as Thought Disorder".

To be a little crass about it, Shrinkwrapped argues that antisemitism sends you mad. That argument is of course not a new one. There are several versions of it and "The authoritarian personality" version of 1950 is perhaps the best known.

It is however basically an "armchair" theory. As far as I can tell, the people putting it forward have little if any personal knowledge of actual antisemites. For some reason, however, I have always had the compulsion to test theory against reality -- which usually does nothing for my popularity. And much of my research career was devoted to testing inferences derived from "The authoritarian personality" theory.

Readers who know my skeptical stance on global warming and health science will not be surprised to hear that I regularly found inferences from the theory not to be supported by the data.

And one of the things I did was to apply the characteristic methodology of anthropology to an examination of antisemitism. Anthropologists have the view that you can never understand a group "from the outside" -- You have to join the group and become accepted into it before you will ever have any chance of understanding it. I did that with the neo-Nazi group in my city. In other words I got out of my armchair and had a close-up look at what I was talking about. My resultant observations were published in The Jewish Journal of Sociology.

And what I found was actually something extremely common -- perfectly normal sane people who had just got hold of a wrong theory -- not unlike most Global Warmists today and not unlike the hordes of grade school teachers who think that just looking at words without any mention of phonics is a good way for kids to learn to read.

All three theories -- Jewish evil, global warming and "look and learn" have been catastrophic in different ways and illustrate the importance of getting your theories right. They also, sadly, illustrate the reluctance of people to let go of a theory they have accepted when confronted with evidence that the theory concerned is wrong.

Scientists are in fact some of the worst people at that. They cling to the theories of their youth through thick and thin and it is only the arising of a younger generation of scientists with more open minds that allows scientific thinking to advance.

So I disagree with Shrinkwrapped in seeing antisemites as being in some way psychologically abnormal. I think they are all too normal in fact. And it is precisely their normality which makes me despair of changing their views.

So in the end I am more pessimistic about antisemites than Shrinkwrapped is. He seems to think that psychological "help" could change their views whereas I doubt that anything will change their views. Israel can kill the antisemites that surround it but it will not change their minds.

Update

Shrinkwrapped has offered some polite comments on my post above. I am a bit amused by his heading. He uses the rare word "emended" -- which refers to minor textual corrections. But his post is much more extensive than that. In a nutshell, he says that antisemitism can drive a whole society mad even if all the individuals in it are sane.

That seems a stretch to me but I will think about it. I tend to agree with Margaret Thatcher's thoroughly conservative observation that there is no such thing as society, only individual people.

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The Democrats' War on America's West

Michelle Malkin

"Why do they hate us?" It's a burning question on the minds of border-dwelling taxpayers, small-business owners, farmers, and Rocky Mountain oil and gas industry workers suffering under punitive Democrat policies. Eighteen months into the Barack Obama administration, the war on the American West is in full swing.

The first battlefront: immigration. On Wednesday, Senate Democrats rejected a GOP amendment banning the use of federal funds to participate in any litigation against the new Arizona immigration enforcement law.

"Our federal government should be doing its job to secure our borders rather than trying to bully and intimidate the people of Arizona," argued Republican amendment sponsor Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina. "We should not be suing and really hassling the people of Arizona for doing what we should be doing here, and that's protecting the citizenry."

All but five Senate Democrats (Indiana's Evan Bayh took a pass and didn't vote) sided with the anti-Arizona Obama administration -- and against not only a majority of Arizonans, but a majority of Americans who support the state's effort to restore order on the chaotic southern border and protect American workers facing double-digit unemployment.

Several House Democrats have actively lobbied to boycott Arizona and crush its economy -- most notably, southern Arizona's own Democrat Rep. Raul Grijalva, who urged civic, religious and political groups to take their convention dollars elsewhere.

"Do not do business with this state," Grijalva told open-borders zealots bent on punishing law-abiding citizens to "send a message."

For its part, the Obama Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has targeted Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio for more than a year over his strict enforcement policies against illegal alien criminals. The hell-bent Civil Rights Division is helmed by veteran illegal immigration advocate Thomas Perez, who has lobbied for driver's licenses, in-state tuition discounts and blanket amnesty for millions of border-jumpers, visa overstayers and deportation fugitives.

Arizona's neighbor to the north, Utah, is under fire by a different set of left-wing bureaucrats. When Interior Secretary Ken Salazar isn't busy destroying jobs through his radical offshore drilling moratorium, he's been blocking onshore development and wreaking havoc on the Beehive State's energy industry.

Last week, Salazar defended pulling 77 oil lease contracts granted in the final days of the George W. Bush administration. Salazar's inspector general concluded that there was no evidence of any rush to auction off the parcels -- as baselessly claimed by environmental groups and Salazar himself. In fact, the leases were granted only after seven full years of rigorous study and debate.

That makes two Salazar job-destroying bans based off bogus eco-claims. (Remember: Loathsome cowboy Salazar was behind the shameless doctoring of a scientific report to bolster the Obama administration's devastating offshore drilling ban.)

Uintah County, Utah, officials have sued the Interior Department over the rescinded leases, which have cost the state untold millions of dollars and countless jobs in a tough economy. Not to mention the court expenses, legal morass and regulatory uncertainty.

Other Western states are reeling as a result of the Democrats' eco-radicalism -- and the rest of America is paying a high price, too. Salazar was a leading opponent of oil shale development when he served in the U.S. Senate for Colorado.

There are an estimated 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil shale in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone -- enough to potentially free us from Saudi oil dependence. Yet as Obama's interior secretary, Salazar has wielded his power to halt plans to lease oil shale rights in the West. In addition, Obama's Bureau of Land Management is dragging its feet on more than $100 million in unissued oil and gas leases in Wyoming. These resources remain untapped thanks to militant greenies who pay lip service to energy independence while blocking all practical means of achieving it.

At a partisan rally on Monday to crusade for endless unemployment insurance benefits extensions, President Obama lectured Republicans to "stop holding workers hostage to politics." Speak for yourself, pal.

SOURCE

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BrookesNews Update

Obama's policies are a recipe for economic stagnation : Given present conditions there is no way that Obama's policies could restore full employment without cutting real wages. And surging inflation is the only means by which he can do that, assuming Americans would stand for it. Even if full employment was restored Obama's policies would suck the life out of the economy leaving the vast majority of Americans with little hope of bettering their lives
The Australian economy is slowing, not accelerating : The Australian economy is not as healthy as it looks. Last October UBS economists predicted that the Australian economy would start accelerating in the second half of 2010. I was highly dubious then and more so now. Before long I expect certain economists to be eating crow, even if it will be in private
Why capital gains taxes retard economic growth : Capital gains taxes erect a significant barrier to the movement of savings from old established companies to newer and more innovative enterprises. In fact, they become a tax on social mobility, as does a highly progressive income tax structure
Don't believe the MSM when it says Cuba's prisons are emptying : The corrupt media are at it again. This time major outlets are covering up for Castro's Gulag. Instead of reporting on his victims these lying leftwing hacks are praising this sadistic thug for releasing a handful of political prisoners
It's the savings that fuels economic growth - not government spending : Since early 2001 the US pool of funding has been subjected to the most vicious attack in the form of the aggressive lowering of interest rates. Yet despite all the monetary pumping and the aggressive lowering of interest rates the economy has continued to struggle
Hating Jews :Jews worldwide are again under attack. The Holocaust and 6 million slaughtered Jews have been forgotten. It now appears that history is on the way to repeating itself, aided and abetted by the world press
Where does oil really come from? It remains, however, only an article of faith that oil and natural gas are biological in origin; scientific proof is absent. Recently, information from the Gulf of Mexico has caused geologists to rethink the origins of these so-called fossil fuels

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NYT not broke yet: "The New York Times Co. reported a slight increase in quarterly revenue overnight as double-digit growth in digital advertising helped offset a continued slide in print advertising. The Times Co., which owns The Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune and other newspapers in addition to the flagship New York Times, said revenue rose 1.2 per cent in the second quarter to $US589.6 million ($660 million) over a year ago. Net profit declined to $US32 million from $US39 million a year earlier when the media giant posted a large tax benefit. "These positive results continued to build on the momentum of the past few quarters as the company was able to increase revenues and decrease operating costs," Times Co. president and chief executive Janet Robinson said. [Looks like it paid off to fire all those journalists]

A real Leftist conspiracy -- among journalists: "Journolist e-mails obtained by The Daily Caller reveal what anybody with two neurons to rub together already knew: Professional liberals don't like Republicans and do like Democrats. They can be awfully smug and condescending in their sense of intellectual and moral superiority. In 2008, participants shared talking points about how to shape coverage to help Obama. They tried to paint any negative coverage of Obama's racist and hateful pastor, Jeremiah Wright, as out of bounds. Journalists at such "objective" news organizations as Newsweek, Bloomberg, Time and The Economist joined conversations with open partisans about the best way to criticize Sarah Palin."

Deliberate lies by mainstream journalists: " What is surprising is the attempt by at least one high profile lefty to smear the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes and former Bush aide Karl Rove as "racist" Former New Republic scribbler Spencer Ackerman, who is now with Wired, proposed the manufacture of just to such an attack on Barnes and Bush to the JournoList's annointed when the Jeremiah Wright story exploded in 2008. Ackerman admitted on JournoList that he wasn't interested in whether Barnes or Rove were in fact rascist, just that the charge was useful at that moment in time."

US House panel charges Rangel with ethics misdeeds: "It looks like Rep. Charlie Rangel will finally get his day in court. A House panel said Thursday that its investigative subcommittee charged the Harlem Democrat with multiple ethics violations, and it will form an ‘adjudicatory subcommittee’ to weigh the matter. ‘I am pleased that, at long last, sunshine will pierce the cloud of serious allegations that have been raised against me in the media,’” Rangel said in a statement."

US cities at long last begin grasping the benefits of privatization: "Facing a budgetary shortfall of between $56 billion to $86 billion over the next two years, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Tamara Audi (’Cities Rent Police, Janitors to Save Cash’) documents efforts by municipalities across the nation to stanch red ink by outsourcing the ‘public’ services they no longer can afford to supply. It’s about time.”

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, 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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The inimitable Pat Condell on the proposed NYC mosque



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Obama Omits Jobs Killed or Thwarted from his Tally

Can you believe they’re still touting that silly metric? When I heard last week that the White House would be announcing the number of “jobs created or saved” as a result of the 2009 American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, my first reaction was embarrassment.

Imagine how Christina Romer must feel. The chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors was dressed in a cheery, salmon-colored jacket, a complement to the upbeat news she had to deliver on July 14. The $787 billion stimulus enacted in February 2009, which subsequently grew to $862 billion, increased gross domestic product by 2.7 percent to 3.4 percent relative to where it would have been, and added anywhere from 2.5 million to 3.6 million jobs compared with an ex-stimulus baseline.

“By this estimate, the Recovery Act has met the president’s goal of saving or creating 3.5 million jobs -- two quarters earlier than anticipated,” Romer said with a straight face. (More than 2.5 million non-farm jobs have been lost since ARRA was enacted in February 2009, all of them in the private sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

How does the CEA arrive at these numbers? It uses two methods, Romer said. The first is a standard macroeconomic forecasting model that estimates the multiplier effect of fiscal policy. (The government’s spending is someone else’s income.) The second method is statistical, using previous relationships between GDP and employment to project future behavior.

Model Imperfection

These numbers might just as well have been pulled out of a hat. Recall that it was the same model and method the administration used in January 2009 to predict an unemployment rate of 7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010 with the enactment of the fiscal stimulus and 8.8 percent without. The unemployment rate now stands at 9.5 percent.

This same model convinced policy makers that the subprime crisis was contained, encouraged the rating companies to slap AAA ratings on collateralized garbage, and led banks to believe they had adequately managed their risks and reserved for potential losses.

Econometric models rely on the assumption that $1 of government spending generates more than $1 of GDP, the so-called multiplier effect. There is no allowance for the negative multiplier on the other side.

Sure the government can spend money and generate GDP growth in the short run: Government spending is a component of GDP!

What it giveth it taketh away from the private sector via taxation or borrowing. Every dollar the government spends is a dollar the private sector doesn’t spend, an investment it doesn’t make, a job it doesn’t create. This is what is unseen, as Frederic Bastiat explained in an 1850 essay.

Hiring Disincentives

“If the administration wants to take credit for ‘jobs created or saved,’ it should also accept responsibility for ’jobs destroyed or prevented,’” said Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business.

Ignoring the flaws in the stimulus for the moment, Congress raised the hurdle for hiring entry-level workers when it refused to delay the third step in a three-stage minimum wage increase last year. And the Department of Labor cracked down on unpaid internships, outlining six criteria that businesses had to satisfy in order to hire someone willing and able to work for nothing to get the experience.

For example, the employer must derive “no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees, and on occasion the employer’s operations may actually be impeded.” You can’t make this stuff up.

Recession’s Advantage

At the White House briefing last week, Romer touted the leveraging of public investment with private funds, with $1 of Recovery Act funds partnering with $3 of outside spending. Romer said this public spending “saved or created 800,000 jobs” in the second quarter alone.

Once again, what would have happened in the absence of the government’s targeted intervention?

According to a June 2009 study by the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri, well over half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list, and almost half of the fastest growing companies in America, were started during a recession or bear market. Dunkelberg calls this phenomenon “negative push starts.” People might not be willing to quit their jobs, but if they get laid off during a recession and were thinking about starting a business, they might seize the day, he said.

“When people ask me when the best time to start a company is, I tell them the day before the recession ends,” Dunkelberg said. “They can do it on the cheap, and the next day you get cash flow." Model That!

What’s more, firms less than five years old are responsible for all of the net new jobs created in the U.S., the Kauffman study found. Job creation by start-ups is more stable, less sensitive to the business cycle.

So, if the goal is to create more jobs, and start-ups are the ones that create them, why is the Obama administration partnering up with existing firms?

“Job-creation policies aimed at luring larger, established employers will inevitably fail,” said Tim Kane, Kauffman Foundation senior fellow in research and policy and author of a follow-up study released this month.

Not to worry. The White House has a model that turns failure into success.

SOURCE

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The scariest unemployment graph I’ve seen yet



The median duration of unemployment is higher today than any time in the last 50 years. That's an understatement. It is more than twice as high today than any time in the last 50 years.

SOURCE

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Obama's Anti-Business Policies Are Our Economic Katrina

His gratuitous and overstated demonization of business is exactly the wrong approach

The growing divide and tension between the Obama administration and the business world is a cause for national concern. As Clive Crook wrote in the Financial Times, Obama is "a president under business attack." He is certainly under sharp criticism and for good reason: He has lost the confidence of much of the business community, whose worries over taxes, the dramatically increased costs of new regulation, and a general perception that the administration is hostile toward them and may take yet harsher steps, are holding back investment and growth. In the midst of a weak economy accompanied by levels of unemployment unprecedented since the Great Depression, it is critical that the government in Washington appreciate that confidence is an imperative if the business community is to invest, take risks with start-ups, and altogether get the economy going again to put the millions of unemployed back to productive work.
Click here to find out more!

This is what businessmen do when they are free to conduct business. For example, in the two decades of the 1980s and 1990s, the United States created 73 million new private sector jobs—while simultaneously losing some 44 million jobs in the process of adjusting its economy to international competition. That was a net gain of some 29 million jobs. A stunning 55 percent of the total workforce at the end of these two decades was in a new job, some two-thirds of them in industries that paid more than the average wage. By contrast, continental Europe, with a larger economy and workforce, created an estimated 4 million jobs in the same period, most of which were in the public sector (and the cost of which they are beginning to regret).

How could America achieve this? It is because of the get-up-and-go culture that reflects individualism, courageous entrepreneurialism, pragmatism, adaptability, and innovation. This adventurous spirit outlived the passing of the frontier and still inspires and nourishes millions, including our young and our newcomers. No other country has a population so habituated to self-help, self-improvement, and even self-renovation in a manner that carries over into business life.

The unique historical conditions of America encouraged a remarkable management culture. The anthropologist, Lionel Tiger, showed that the style of American corporate management was a response to the opportunities of a huge internal market, but also the obstacles presented by vast distances and diverse populations. We created a monetized market economy inspired by a belief in technology and scientific management, governed not by kinship and custom but by contracts freely agreed upon and law passed by assent.

Over the years, the transformation of American industry has been nothing short of phenomenal. U.S. companies replaced large, mass-produced consumer products with sophisticated goods derived from intellectual output and knowledge-based interests, the fastest-growing segment of the world's economy. Management was assisted by a level of labor flexibility that is the envy of both Europe and Asia. Europe struggles with the legacy of the steam age in the form of craft, union, and management demarcations that limit management's role. In Asia, management is often stifled by large, oligopolistic networks and government mandates.

American managers consistently led the world in investing in new technologies and providing high-tech training to exploit them. We were the first to realize the importance of computers and information technologies and invested massively in them, spending twice as much per capita on info-tech as Western European firms and more than six times the global average. In fact, U.S. companies are the major suppliers of the information age's silicon, brains, and sinews.

No other country has met the requirements of an emerging economic system that needed people to be mobile both physically and psychologically. No other country shares America's belief in numbers and statistics as a basis for rational decision-making. No other country invests so much in business training and the retraining of its people—on top of having the world's best graduate and undergraduate business schools. No other country forms as many small companies year after year that compete with flexibility, rapid response, openness, innovation, and the ability to attract the best people. And as new products and services are developed, American businesses' unique marketing and advertising skills establish their success at home and abroad. Our system, in which ideas freely percolate at all levels, is tantamount to a giant information-processing machine. It enhances our capacity to absorb, adapt, and manage ongoing revolutions in technology, information, and logistics, which are too dynamic and complex to be handled by a top-down system.

The energy in business is matched by a unique and remarkable world of finance capital that over decades has identified the multiple sources of entrepreneurial funding. For example, our IPO process provides capital to service a merit-based, diversified financial environment and to fund young talent, new ideas, and the risks associated with high-tech, high-growth, high-concept companies.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Poll: Faith in Social Security is tanking: "Middle Tennessee residents, struggling to put the recession behind them, worry they won’t have much of a future if they rely on Social Security benefits to finance their senior years. A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds that a majority of retirees expect their current benefits to be cut, a dramatic increase in the number holding that view. And a record six of 10 non-retirees predict Social Security won’t be able to pay them benefits when they stop working. ‘I’ll be working until I’m 70,’ said East Nashville resident Kenya Stevens. ‘I’m not counting on getting anything. I was raised to be self-sufficient, so even before there were problems with Social Security, I never looked forward to getting any benefits.’”

In support of speculation: "A recent World Development Movement report blames financial speculation and banks for increases in certain food prices and subsequently worsening world hunger. The report adamantly supports banking reform towards heavy regulation similar to the recent US Wall Street legislation. Prices of basic crops and food processing have indeed increased over the passed decade. The culprits however, are not speculators.”

Obamacare’s broken promises: "Does President Obama have any idea what’s in his own health-care reform law? Since he signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act a bit more than 100 days ago, the president has given a number of speeches and interviews in which he continues to say things that, well, just aren’t so.”

The boundless beneficence of Big Brother: "Officially, the Republicans do not oppose extending unemployment benefits yet again. Rather, they merely want to observe the rules Obama championed last fall. In other words, Democrats should pay for the spending by finding cuts elsewhere in the budget. What is ‘fiscally responsible’ when Obama is for it, is rank partisanship when he’s against it. But enough with the point scoring. I want to get back to Mr. Chukalas, a father of two and a diligent, decent man for all I know. Again, he says, ‘If your brother or your sister needed something, you wouldn’t say, ‘When are you going to pay me back?’’ I don’t know about the Chukalas clan, but in my family and my wife’s family, and in most families I know, asking, ‘When are you going to pay me back?’ isn’t so unimaginable."

Voters Overwhelming Oppose New Taxes on Oil and Natural Gas Industry: "Voters in 10 key states oppose higher taxes on America’s oil and natural gas industry by a 2-to-1 margin, according to a new poll released today. Both the administration and some members of Congress have recently proposed billions of dollars in new taxes on the industry. “Voters know raising taxes on an industry that provides most of their energy and supports more than 9.2 million jobs would hurt them and damage the economy,” said API President and CEO Jack Gerard."

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, 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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Who is Barack Obama?

The comparison to Reagan may give Obama cheer, but it is not really apt. For even in Reagan's darkest days when, according to Gallup, six out of 10 Americans reported that they did not like the job he was doing, an astounding six in 10 nevertheless said they liked the man himself. He was, of course, phenomenally charming, authentic and schooled at countless soundstages in appearing that way. Just as important, the public had faith in the consistency of his principles, agree or not. This was the Reagan Paradox and it helped lift his presidency.

No one is accusing Obama of being likable. He is not unlikable, but he lacks Reagan's (or Bill Clinton's) warmth. What's more, his career has been brief. He led no movement, was spokesman for no ideology and campaigned like a Nike sneaker -- change instead of swoosh. He seems distant. No Irish jokes from him. For the average voter, he casts no shadow.

Reagan, by contrast, had been around forever. He was not defined solely by gauzy campaign ads but by countless speeches, two contentious and highly controversial terms as California governor and a previous race for the presidency. There was never a question about who Reagan was and what he stood for. Not so Obama. About all he shares with Reagan at this point are low ratings.

What has come to be called the Obama Paradox is not a paradox at all. Voters lack faith in him making the right economic decisions because, as far as they're concerned, he hasn't. He went for health care reform, not jobs. He supported the public option, then he didn't. He's been cold to Israel's Binyamin Netanyahu and then all over him like a cheap suit. Americans know Obama's smart. But we still don't know him. Before Americans can give him credit for what he's done they have to know who he is. We're waiting.

More HERE

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Dealergate: Destroying Jobs on the basis of unproven government theories

Michelle Malkin

Everything you need to know about the nightmare of government-controlled businesses can be found in a damning new inspector general's report on Dealergate. The independent review of how and why the Obama administration forced Chrysler and General Motors to oversee mass closures of car dealerships across the country reveals grisly incompetence, fatal bureaucratic hubris and Big Labor cronyism. No wonder you won't hear much about the report's in-depth details in the so-called mainstream media.

But Neil Barofsky, the federal watchdog overseeing the bank-auto-insurance-all-purpose bailout fund, found that the White House auto industry task force and the Treasury Department "Auto Team" had no basis for ordering the expedited car dealership closure schedules. They relied on a single consulting firm's internal report recommending that the U.S. companies adopt foreign auto industry models to increase profits -- a recommendation hotly disputed by auto experts who questioned whether foreign practices could be applied to domestic American dealership networks.

Team Obama's government auto mechanics also ignored the economic impact of rushing those closures. According to Barofsky, they discounted counter-testimony from industry officials that "closing dealerships in an environment already disrupted by the recession could result in an even greater crisis in sales."

The inspector general also noted that "it is clear that tens of thousands of dealership jobs were immediately put in jeopardy as a result of the terminations by GM and Chrysler." After extensive investigation, the watchdog concluded that "the acceleration of dealership closings was not done with any explicit cost savings to the manufacturers in mind." Only after Capitol Hill critics -- both Republican and Democrat -- started questioning the Dealergate decisions did Obama's auto "experts" come up with market studies and estimated job loss data to assess the impact of their reckless, arbitrary orders.

In sum, the inspector general found: "(A)t a time when the country was experiencing the worst economic downturn in generations and the government was asking its taxpayers to support a $787 billion stimulus package designed primarily to preserve jobs, Treasury made a series of decisions that may have substantially contributed to the accelerated shuttering of thousands of small businesses and thereby potentially adding tens of thousands of workers to the already lengthy unemployment rolls -- all based on a theory and without sufficient consideration of the decisions' broader economic impact."

This is no surprise, of course, considering the amount of actual business expertise among Obama's auto czars and key staff. That is: zero.

More HERE

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Stimulating Unemployment

If you can't create any jobs, pay people not to work

Presidents typically invite Americans to appear at Rose Garden press conferences to trumpet their policy successes, but yesterday we saw what may have been a first. President Obama introduced three Americans—an auto worker, a fitness center employee and a woman in real estate—who've been out of work so long they underscore the failure of his economic program. Where are his spinmeisters when he really needs them?

Sure, Mr. Obama's ostensible purpose was to lobby Congress for the eighth extension of jobless benefits since the recession began, to a record 99 weeks, or nearly two years. And he whacked Senate Republicans for blocking the extension, though Republicans are merely asking that the extension be offset by cuts in other federal spending.

But Mr. Obama was nonetheless obliged to concede that, 18 months after his $862 billion stimulus, there are still five job seekers for every job opening and that 2.5 million Americans will soon run out of unemployment benefits. What happens when the 99 weeks of benefits run out? Will the President demand that they be extended to three years, or four?

Only last week Vice President Joe Biden was hailing the stimulus for "saving or creating" three million jobs. This week the White House says we need even more stimulus, in the form of jobless checks, to make up for the jobs his original spending stimulus didn't create.

The one possibility the President and Congressional Democrats won't entertain is that their own spending and taxing and regulating and labor union favoritism have become the main hindrance to job creation. Since February 2009, the jobless rate has climbed to 9.5% from 8.1%, and private industry has shed two million jobs. The overall economy has been expanding for at least a year, but employers still don't seem confident enough to add new workers. The economists who sold us the stimulus say it's a mystery. But maybe employers are afraid to hire because they don't know what costs government will impose on them next....

Mr. Obama also claimed yesterday that he wants to cut taxes on small businesses. That's a good idea, but Mr. Obama's proposal to provide one-year temporary tax cuts, such as expensing of certain capital purchases, will be dwarfed by one of the largest tax increases on small- and medium-sized firms in history that is scheduled to hit on January 1. The increase in the capital gains tax will fall hardest on start ups and expanding businesses that need capital for growth. More than half of the "rich" who will pay higher income tax rates next year are small business owners and investors.

The President is right that "we've got a lot of work to do" to get Americans back to work and that the toll on families from high unemployment is considerable. There are few things in life more demoralizing than being unemployed for a lengthy period of time. But paying people not to work and adding $30 billion more to nearly $1.4 trillion of deficit spending is a dismal substitute for real economic growth and private job creation.

More HERE

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The destructive party

I just finished editing a book. It's called "Duped America," (dupedamerican.com is the website where it can be purchased) and it explains--in great detail--how Democrats and their media sycophants have deliberately misled the American public regarding some of the most important issues of our time.

What makes the book genuinely compelling is that its author, Richard Bernstein, is a former life-long, liberal Jewish Democrat who got his head snapped back by the atrocity of 9/11. As he watched the Twin Towers fall, he couldn't understand why Americans had never even heard of al Qaeda before that fateful day.

So he decided to do some research. Not with the original intent of writing a book, but simply to find out what's been going on in this country--without that information being filtered by Democrats and their usual mainstream media suspects. After eight years of exploration he discovered many things that both shocked and amazed him, but the most shocking was this: he realized the political party to whom he had given a lifetime of unquestioning allegiance no longer represented his interests. In fact, he discovered what a lot of Americans are discovering: not only do Democrats no longer represent the interests of the majority of Americans, they are working actively against them.

Mr. Bernstein has the facts, researched and footnoted.

Why did he write the book? For the same reason I write columns: American exceptionalism is far too valuable to be destroyed by a political party and a president who consider all countries "equally exceptional." And that's when Democrats aren't busy apologizing for our racism, imperialism, xenophobia and free enterprise. Or telling Americans wars are "lost" before they've even been fought, or "fixing" things for their cronies on Wall Street and in public sector unions. We write because we're sick of seeing our public schools turned into liberal indoctrination centers, or scientific thought being corrupted by political ideology. We write because we know appeasing terrorists and foes while we snub our allies is a fool's errand. We write to prevent an economic tsunami from engulfing us, not because one is inevitable, but because bankrupt ideologues are greasing the skids, instead of saving the country.

We write because America is a terrible thing to waste.

And yet here come Republicans, tooling along in third gear when it's clear as day it's pedal-to-the-metal time. When the country is "this" close to being turned into a socialist nightmare of big-government hacks doling out "social justice" to whomever they deem suitable. When Americans, up to their necks in fear for the future, need genuine inspiration--not tired election slogans they've heard a thousand times before.

Republicans, trust me when I tell you that your party's hour is at hand. A "strategy" of "vote for us because we suck less than Democrats" is an utter insult to the electorate. Refusing to make detailed policy statements because it might cut into your generic lead in the polls is too clever by half. If you can't defend freedom and limited government clearly and concisely, resign. If you can't forcefully attack the worst combination of a Congress and a White House in history, get the hell out of the way and make room for those of us who can.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Obama admin: Mandate is a tax after all: "Obama, in the Democratic primary, argued against the individual mandate. It was one of the key distinctions between himself and Clinton(It should be recalled that Obama, in the primary, ran ‘Harry and Louise’ ads against the Clinton Health Care plan). After he was elected, he immediately delegated the crafting of Health Care legislation to the congress, which immediately began fashioning something that resembled the Clinton plan, with mandates and all. When Obama was propagandizing the merits of the Health Care Reform Bill to the press, he bristled at suggestions that the mandate was a ‘tax.’ … Now that the individual mandate is being challenged in federal court by the attorney generals of various States, the Obama Admin has dispensed with the propaganda.”

Washington elites face reality gap on economy: "While private sector workers across the country are struggling with abnormally high unemployment rates, federal government employees in Washington are likely to be bewildered by the current economic downturn. In fact, a Politico article released today confirmed that about half of ‘Washington elites’ who live in the D.C. metro area and work in politics or policy fields claim that the country and the economy are headed in the right direction — compared to less than 25 percent of the general population.”

It’s time to shift spending to states: "Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, which currently equal about 10 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, will expand to more than 30 percent by 2085, according to recent projections from the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget. The national debt is estimated to jump from the current 60 percent of GDP to several times the GDP. The exact numbers depend on a range of assumptions. But under every plausible scenario, both debt and debt service explode under current policy. At some point, therefore, the economy is due to crash unless Washington reins in spending. One way to avoid this outcome would be to transfer entitlement programs to the states.”

Black racism embarrasses the White House -- for once: "The Obama administration quickly asked an African American official in the Agriculture Department to resign Monday after a conservative website showed an excerpt of a speech she had given in which she appeared to describe her unwillingness to help a white farmer. … the incident took place in 1986, when Ms. Sherrod was working for the farmer-aid organization’s Georgia field office. The organization was founded to help black farmers but ‘helped anyone who walked in the door,’ Mr. Paige said. Ms. Sherrod told CNN that ‘I know I didn’t do anything wrong’ and that the video excerpt did not represent the context of her remarks.”

Projection? Black racists accusing others of being racist: "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People passed a resolution at its national convention Tuesday condemning the tea party movement for tolerating racism. Is that not the pot calling the kettle black? The NAACP has to be one of the most racist organizations on the planet and its attacks on the populist tea party movement make it a hypocritical one as well.”

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, 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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