Much ado about Bibi and Barack
by Jeff Jacoby
WHEN ALL WAS SAID AND DONE, much more was said than done during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's high-profile visit to Washington. But once all the words were spoken, what was left behind?
For the better part of a week, Netanyahu and President Barack Obama engaged in a fraught pas de deux, beginning with the president's speech on Middle East policy at the State Department the day before Netanyahu arrived and culminating in the prime minister's address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday. It was indisputably a riveting encounter, but there was no consensus on what it meant.
By the time Netanyahu's visit ended, he was being variously blamed (by Eliot Spitzer in Slate) for having picked "a useless, counterproductive fight with the president" and hailed (by Edward Morrissey in The Week) for having established himself "as the real statesman in the conflict." No one could deny the rapturous enthusiasm with which Congress received Netanyahu -- senators and representatives gave him more than two dozen standing ovations -- but did such pro-Israel passion risk "undermining America's long-term interests in the region" (as Michael A. Cohen charged in Foreign Policy)? Or did it signal the creation of "a significant new political dynamic in the United States" (as former UN Ambassador John Bolton wrote for Fox News)?
But such analyses strain too hard to assign a consequence to Netanyahu's trip to Washington. The interplay among Obama, Netanyahu, and Congress made for an interesting show, but it changed nothing important on the ground. The US-Israeli relationship was and is strong. The Israeli-Palestinian "peace process" was and is fruitless. Those realities are no different today than they were last month.
If anything, Netanyahu's visit and its attendant fireworks served mostly as a reminder of two political axioms: (1) It takes more than Congress to change a president's foreign policy. But (2) it takes more than a president to change a fundamental US relationship.
For better or for worse, presidential attitudes shape US foreign policy, and it is clear that the current president, unlike his two predecessors, feels little instinctive warmth for Israel. In his address last week to AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, Obama described America's commitment to Israel as "unwavering," "ironclad," "unbreakable," "profound," and several other synonyms for "strong" -- which it is. He also described himself as a friend of Israel, which is not so clear. Between picking fights over housing starts in Jerusalem or insinuating that Israeli policy in Gaza endangers US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the president seems at times to go out of his way to telegraph an aloof coolness toward the Jewish state.
That was why Obama's talk of an Israeli retrenchment to the pre-1967 lines, even with "mutually agreed swaps," provoked such a strong reaction. It reinforced what many see as Obama's lack of empathy for Israel's security predicament, and suggested that he is more interested in getting Israel to change its shape than in getting the Palestinians to change their behavior. Obama later backtracked, and his apologists have been arguing that his words were misconstrued. But the president knew those words would spark a firestorm, and he insisted on saying them anyway. Clearly he intended to intensify the pressure on Israel.
Yet even the president of the United States is limited in the amount of pressure he can put on an ally with which the American people feel such a powerful affinity.
There are many illustrations of American exceptionalism, but surely one of the most striking is the solidarity with Israel that is such an abiding feature of US opinion. That solidarity is deep-rooted and durable; it cuts across age and sex and party line; and it is mirrored in the views of America's elected officials.
The thunderous reception Prime Minister Netanyahu received on Capitol Hill last week was as heartfelt as anything in American politics can be. It reflected the kinship of common values that links the greatest liberal democracy in the world with one of the smallest -- and that has done so since Harry Truman recognized the embattled state of Israel within minutes of its birth 63 years ago this month.
Israel is still embattled, and its enemies hate Americans as much as they hate Jews. That too helps explain the bond that Americans feel for Israel.
"Israel has no better friend than America," Netanyahu rightly told Congress, "and America has no better friend than Israel." The truth of those words is something most Americans know intuitively. No wonder Congress cheered.
SOURCE
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The GOP's New York Spanking
Republicans need to go on offense against Mediscare
We hope Republicans don't believe their own spin that their candidate lost Tuesday's special House election mainly because of a third party candidate or because New York state is hostile territory. They lost because Democrats ran a Mediscare campaign, and the GOP candidate lacked an adequate response.
Democrat Kathy Hochul, the Erie County clerk, won 47% of the vote in a district that was one of only four in New York that John McCain won in 2008. She ran a one-issue campaign against Paul Ryan's Medicare reform, and she had the advantage of not having voted for ObamaCare's $500 billion in Medicare cuts. Ms. Hochul also caught a big, late assist from Newt Gingrich and his own-goal attack on Mr. Ryan's plan.
Republican Jane Corwin, a state legislator, won 43% after saying she would have voted for the Ryan plan but then devoted most of her time to deploring Mediscare tactics rather than fighting back. Ms. Corwin admitted Monday that she let the attacks go unanswered until the last minute, and the House GOP campaign committee was remarkably unprepared for what everyone knew was coming.
An imposter on the tea party line received 9%, but the most important political story is that Ms. Corwin lost the economically downscale voters who swung to the GOP in 2010. Those voters are susceptible to unrebutted claims that they might lose health-care coverage in retirement.
The GOP consultant class is already taking the media's lead and urging the GOP to flee Mr. Ryan's plan and abandon any serious entitlement reform. But a GOP panic will only compound the losses. All but four House Republicans have already voted for the plan, and they will see Mediscare ads from here to November 2012 no matter what they say. They need a better explanation for the Ryan plan, but more than that they need a strategy to go on offense.
One place to start is by attacking the Democratic plan to cut Medicare via political rationing. Mr. Ryan's budget had the virtue of embarrassing President Obama's spend-more initial budget, and the White House responded by proposing to increase the power of the new Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) to decide what, and how much, Medicare will pay for. The ObamaCare bill goes to great lengths to shelter this 15-member, unelected board from Congressional review, with the goal of letting these bureaucrats throw granny over the cliff if Medicare isn't reformed. Yet few Americans know anything about IPAB or its rationing intentions.
More broadly, reformers can't let Democrats separate Medicare from the larger issue of exploding debt and economic prosperity. Republicans will lose an entitlement debate every time if it's only about austerity. They need to link Medicare reform, and spending cuts generally, to faster growth and rising incomes. The greatest threat to Medicare and Social Security is a debt-laden, slow-growth economy like the current 1.8% recovery.
The biggest failing of House and Senate Republicans this year has been their emphasis on budget accounting more than growth economics. This is understandable given the tea party's 2010 electoral influence, the magnitude of the deficits, and Mr. Obama's fiscal abdication. But it has too often made the GOP come across as bookkeepers.
Assuming they get some spending cuts and budget reform as part of the debt-limit talks, Republicans would be wise to focus most of their legislative attention on raising growth to 4% or 5% of GDP. This is the least the U.S. should be growing after the deep recession of 2007-2009, and the failure to do so is Mr. Obama's biggest political vulnerability.
The tragedy of the modern entitlement state is that it has become too big to afford but also too entrenched to easily reform. (See Greece, riots in the streets.) Republicans can't give up the cause, but New York is a warning that they need to pursue it as part of a larger agenda that restores the American middle-class's economic hope.
SOURCE
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Tax orgy planned -- by Guess Who?
A 62% Top Tax Rate? Democrats have said they only intend to restore the tax rates that existed during the Clinton years. In reality they're proposing rates like those under President Carter
Media reports in recent weeks say that Senate Democrats are considering a 3% surtax on income over $1 million to raise federal revenues. This would come on top of the higher income tax rates that President Obama has already proposed through the cancellation of the Bush era tax-rate reductions.
If the Democrats' millionaire surtax were to happen—and were added to other tax increases already enacted last year and other leading tax hike ideas on the table this year—this could leave the U.S. with a combined federal and state top tax rate on earnings of 62%. That's more than double the highest federal marginal rate of 28% when President Reagan left office in 1989. Welcome back to the 1970s....
Taxes on investment income are also headed way up. Suspending the Bush tax cuts, which is favored by nearly every congressional Democrat, plus a 3.8% investment tax in the ObamaCare bill (which starts in 2014) brings the capital gains tax rate to 23.8% from 15%. The dividend tax would potentially climb to 45% from the current rate of 15%.
Much more HERE
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A strange picture of Broke Britain
See EYE ON BRITAIN for the true picture
Last week David Brooks, the faux-conservative columnist at the New York Times penned a column extolling the British national political system. The piece, written to coincide with President Obama’s visit to Europe, praised Britain for moving to social democracy in the early Twentieth Century. He concedes that overt socialism nearly wrecked the British system during the 1960s and 70s, but maintains, quite sensibly, that the estimable Margaret Thatcher tackled Britain’s problems (although the New York Times roundly chastised her) and that subsequent governments, both Conservative and Labor, consolidated those gains. Brooks waxes rhapsodic about the end result: A Britain that has moved "from a centralized, industrial era state to a networked, postindustrial one" whatever that means.
In praising the British system and the politicos who work the levers Brooks inadvertently reveals a number of biases of his own and reveals weaknesses as a theorist of reputedly conservative leanings. Brooks lavishes praise on the British system as "a picture of how politics should work." He doesn’t bother with the fact that many Britons do not work; he only claims that British politics function. In this broad claim he misses the point that political life is not synonymous with a national culture.
Britain today suffers from most of the same ills plaguing America, often to a greater extent. British illegitimacy rates have soared to 70%, their welfare dependency rate exceeds ours, and Britons seem to accept 15% unemployment rates as the new normal. Certainly, Britain suffers from unchecked third-world immigration, and the Islamic terror threat is a daily reality, as anyone who has passed through Heathrow Airport in the last six years can attest (your humble TH columnist was instructed to arrive at Heathrow at 3:15 AM for an 8:00 AM flight during the summer of 2006). Still David Brooks tells his readers that Britain works, and Mr. Brooks is an honorable man.
After singing the praises of the British system, David Brooks cannot help himself but to take potshots at the American scene. He mentions, "…Britain is also blessed with a functioning political culture. It is dominated by people who live in London and who have often known each other since prep school." Are we so different? American national politics are dominated by people who live in Washington and have known each other since they were elected. Never mind that they are the same people who got us into this mess in the first place.
Mr. Brooks goes on to state, "…the big newspapers still set the agenda here, not cable TV, or talk radio." He clearly tips his hand here, showing his frustration that the public no longer pays attention to the NYT anymore and prefers Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. One wonders if Brooks and his fellow center-right Anglophiles favor the heavy-handed Britons efforts to squelch popular conservatism such as declaring the American radio personality Michael Savage a “purveyor of hate” and refusing him entry to Britain?
The next target on Brooks' little list is American politics and, of course, politicians. He claims, "…the quintessential American pol is standing in his sandbox screaming affirmations to members of his own tribe, the quintessential British pol is standing across a table arguing face-to-face with his opponents." Brooks apparently doesn't care for representative democracy, if one takes his comments seriously. He goes on to state, "…British leaders and pundits know their counterparts better. They are less likely to get away with distortions and factual howlers. They are less likely to believe the other Party is homogeneously evil." Oh, really? This would come as news to Dame Margaret Thatcher, who endured abuse, slander, libel, and relentless character assassination during her storied tenure as Prime Minister.
After establishing the superiority of the British chattering class, he briefly touches on a number of subthemes such as a British tendency to eschew moralism and dogmatism in politics and the overall superiority of British public life. He finishes with a flourish: "as President Barack Obama visits London, we will get a glimpse of the British political culture. We Americans have no reason to feel smug or superior." One gets the distinct impression that Mr. Brooks wishes that he could import some of the civilized nature of British conservatism to America and that he feels much more at home with the British Tories instead of the yahoos who populate conservative circles in America, people who write columns for Townhall, and even worse, the people who read those columns.
The reader might be grudgingly tempted to agree with David Brooks that a little bit of English virtue might be helpful today. The old British stiff upper lip in the face of personal adversity would constitute a definite improvement over the new American cultural ideal of pouring one's deepest troubles while sitting on a couch next to a tearful Oprah Winfrey. Likewise, a dollop of Edwardian-era certitude concerning culture, duty, honor and moral clarity would be welcome today. Unfortunately, David Brooks will have none of it. His writings have resonated with great admiration for the British cradle to grave welfare state and his "conservatism" exists primarily as a sort of altruistic Disraeli-Beaconsfield attitude of noblesse oblige, leading the masses where they need to be taken.
An alternate reading of British history should serve as a warning to Americans and jolt us out of an anglophile fog. Many British commentators like Paul Johnson and Auberon Waugh have noted that the building of a welfare state in Britain paralleled, almost precisely, the decline of Britain as a world power. This began in 1906 and picked up speed after World War I. The British governments appeased the working class with cheap beer and the dole. They financed these extravagances by cutting the defense budgets, leaving themselves dangerously vulnerable to German and Japanese aggression. Britain staved off defeat and disaster with Russian and American help. They then washed their hands of empire and international leadership. Today the Tory Party leader David Cameron is the Prime Minister of a third-rate power.
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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Sunday, May 29, 2011
Saturday, May 28, 2011
The Scots-Irish Voting Bloc
When national campaign strategists consider targeting an ethnic voting bloc to swing results in their direction, they typically consider blacks or Hispanics. Yet, an ethnic group they often overlook -- the Scots-Irish -- are the voters the Republican Party convinced in 2010 to swing back to GOP candidates, after they swung toward the Democratic Party in 2006, experts say.
As the 2012 election approaches and both parties eye the White House and U.S. House and Senate seats, strategists from both parties say the Scots-Irish again could be critical to winning.
"They could be the margins in a tight race," said Tom McMahon, a Washington strategist who was executive director of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 through 2009. The DNC, he said, wanted to ensure these voters "would be open-minded to voting for a Democrat,” because many are respected in their communities and could influence others.
"We found that when we talked about our core values as a party -- equality, fairness, social justice -- and how that applied to issues, we immediately made a connection to these voters,” he said. Democrats have not been effective with the Scots-Irish voting bloc during the past two years and might need to employ that approach again, McMahon believes.
The Scots-Irish apparently became voters to watch and court without knowing it.
“If they did know they were being focused on as part of a swing vote, they would probably vote in the exact opposite direction,” said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist in Washington.
Several hundred thousand Scots-Irish, primarily Presbyterians and other Protestants from the Irish province of Ulster, came to North America during the colonial era. Fiercely independent, clannish and skeptical of government, many settled in Pennsylvania and helped shape its industrial growth. They understood hardship and hard work.
"By the end of the 17th century, this became the largest migration from Europe to America,” said F. Thornton Miller, a professor of U.S. history at the University of Missouri.
These settlers preferred the hill country to coastal areas, building frontier communities across the ridges of the Allegheny Mountains, moving from Pennsylvania into Ohio, and then south into West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Arkansas, Georgia and Alabama. Often they became squatters, said Miller.
"They were known for fighting Indians, distilling and drinking whiskey. ... They became known as hillbillies," who didn't want to pay for land or to pay taxes, he said.
Today, political strategists might have some difficulty identifying these voters. Many don't identify with their ethnicity, and if they do, they are so distrustful of joining anything that they are hard to pin down, said McMahon and Todd.
“They have maintained their non-conformist nature all through the generations. ... This culture is the bellwether of change in this country, for either party,” said Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va. Considered an authority on the Scots-Irish, Webb recently completed a documentary, “Born Fighting,” for the Smithsonian Channel and wrote several books on the subject.
Scots-Irish himself, Webb practices that non-conformist way of life: he was a Republican, and then ran as a Democrat for his Senate seat in 2006. He announced this year he would not seek reelection.
Todd determined the Scots-Irish were swing voters by poring over mapping data after the 2008 presidential election. He found a distinct voting pattern: people who rejected President Barack Obama, choosing Hillary Clinton in the primary election and Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona in the general election.
“When I looked at that map, I realized I was looking at where the Scots-Irish had settled, starting with Pennsylvania and Ohio (and moving) diagonally south along the spine of Appalachia,” said Todd, who knows a little about these finicky voters because of his own Scottish and Irish bloodline.
He decided as a strategist that it made sense to target House seats Democrats held in areas settled by Scots-Irish families -- even if those congressional seats were considered to be "safe" Democratic incumbents.
His theory worked.
Republicans won eight of the 12 seats they targeted. Two GOP losses were in Pennsylvania, where Democratic Reps Jason Altmire of McCandless and Mark Critz of Johnstown held onto their seats by putting forth a message of maintaining independence from the Democratic Party and government regulation in Washington. That platform appealed to the populist nature of Scots-Irish voters in their districts.
“I campaigned on the same values that my constituents have," said Critz. "That independence from Washington resonates around here. We believe if government leaves us alone and doesn’t bother us, we will get the work done.”
Seventeen U.S. presidents are of Scots-Irish descent, including Obama, who visited with distant Gaelic relatives in Ireland this week -- perhaps because his strategists are beginning to realize he should not ignore these voters.
SOURCE
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Mr. President, Put Less Pressure on Israel, More (Some) on Her Enemies
In recent months, Israel's struggles to negotiate with a Palestinian Authority have been marred by Palestinian decisions. Chief among these challenges is the decision by the Palestinian Authority to bring Hamas representatives into their leadership. If that did not present enough challenges, last week President Obama increased the pressure on Israel by unleashing new parameters for Israel-Palestinian negotiations based on pre-1967 borders. All supporters of Israel have to be alarmed and concerned at this new explicit position the U.S. has taken.
Following Obama’s expression that negotiations be based on pre-1967 borders, supporters of Israel from across the political spectrum have condemned the idea. Despite the caveats President Obama portends to place on these factors, this is no place to start a negotiation.
President Obama insists that the parameters of pre-1967 borders were always a starting point for prior U.S. administrations pointing to the Clinton administration. This is nonsense. Obama’s declaration last week was the first explicit statement by a U.S. President that pre-1967 borders would be the parameters of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Perhaps Prime Minister Netanyahu’s terse phone call with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton prior to Thursday’s speech should have tipped the President off that this indeed would be viewed as new ground.
Further, Israel would be foolish to accept these conditions and rightly rebuked Obama for his position. Israel would be foolish to give up the Golan Heights along the Syrian border, foolish to pull its military presence out of the West Bank, and foolish to walk into a negotiation under the unnecessary pressures and concessions President Obama chose to place on the only true democracy in the Middle East. As the Prime Minister aptly put it, the pre-1967 Israeli borders, “were not the boundaries of peace; they were the boundaries of repeated wars, because the attack on Israel was so attractive from them.” Never again, will Israel return to these indefensible borders regardless of the unnecessary pressure President Obama chooses to place on Israel.
In early 2008, President Obama called for the U.S. to preside over a Muslim Summit including leaders of Syria and Iran, not understanding that elevating their criticism of Israel with a United States moderator would have been a dangerous development for Israel. Recently, Obama’s Secretary of State Clinton referred to Syrian President Assad as a “reformer”. In April 2011, Assad’s regime fired live ammunition on protesters. And Assad has repeatedly supported Hamas and Hezbollah in fomenting violence towards Israel. With reformers like Assad, who needs reform?
Mr. President, I would ask you to stop putting unnecessary pressure on Israel and start demanding more of these autocratic regimes that stifle democracy and threaten the only democracy in the Middle East—Israel. I would ask you to start resembling your recent predecessors who had both actions and words which carried an unwavering support for Israel. Each and every day, Israel remains on the frontline along with the United States in the War on Terror and is nothing but an unabashed ally of pro-democratic and pro-American policy. Mr. President, stop putting undue pressure on Israel and start providing more support.
SOURCE
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The Great Liberator: Remembering Ronald Reagan at 100
Nile Gardiner
I had the privilege of attending the Ronald Reagan Centennial Gala in Washington earlier this week. Superbly organised by the Reagan Presidential Foundation, it was a truly magnificent event remembering the greatest American president of the last 100 years. Lech Walesa, the brave Polish freedom fighter who stood up to Communist tyranny, received the Reagan Centennial Freedom Award, and former First Lady Nancy Reagan delivered a moving message by video from her home in California.
Another highlight of the evening was the brilliant speech by British Defence Secretary Liam Fox, who paid tribute to the powerful partnership between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, an unbreakable alliance that defeated the Soviet Empire and won the Cold War. Dr. Fox, who has been the star performer of David Cameron’s cabinet and for decades a true friend of the United States, declared to much applause:
These are wise words that politicians on both sides of the Atlantic should heed, at a time of towering public debts, economic uncertainty, and mounting threats to the security of the free world. In her eulogy for President Reagan at his memorial service in Washington National Cathedral in June 2004, Lady Thatcher referred to her close friend as “the great liberator”, a leader who had freed hundreds of millions from tyranny in Europe, as well as offering renewed hope for the American people after a period of decline. In the words of the Iron Lady:
SOURCE
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Pay Freedom Forward, Properly Arm Our Armed Forces
As Americans begin the Memorial Day weekend, we remember those who have given their lives to defend the freedoms and way of life that we enjoy. The Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano writes in The Sacramento Bee that as we honor them, we must also “do our utmost not to add to their ranks”:
Carafano writes that adequately funding defense is among America’s greatest challenges, and it is one that must be addressed:
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)
****************************
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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When national campaign strategists consider targeting an ethnic voting bloc to swing results in their direction, they typically consider blacks or Hispanics. Yet, an ethnic group they often overlook -- the Scots-Irish -- are the voters the Republican Party convinced in 2010 to swing back to GOP candidates, after they swung toward the Democratic Party in 2006, experts say.
As the 2012 election approaches and both parties eye the White House and U.S. House and Senate seats, strategists from both parties say the Scots-Irish again could be critical to winning.
"They could be the margins in a tight race," said Tom McMahon, a Washington strategist who was executive director of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 through 2009. The DNC, he said, wanted to ensure these voters "would be open-minded to voting for a Democrat,” because many are respected in their communities and could influence others.
"We found that when we talked about our core values as a party -- equality, fairness, social justice -- and how that applied to issues, we immediately made a connection to these voters,” he said. Democrats have not been effective with the Scots-Irish voting bloc during the past two years and might need to employ that approach again, McMahon believes.
The Scots-Irish apparently became voters to watch and court without knowing it.
“If they did know they were being focused on as part of a swing vote, they would probably vote in the exact opposite direction,” said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist in Washington.
Several hundred thousand Scots-Irish, primarily Presbyterians and other Protestants from the Irish province of Ulster, came to North America during the colonial era. Fiercely independent, clannish and skeptical of government, many settled in Pennsylvania and helped shape its industrial growth. They understood hardship and hard work.
"By the end of the 17th century, this became the largest migration from Europe to America,” said F. Thornton Miller, a professor of U.S. history at the University of Missouri.
These settlers preferred the hill country to coastal areas, building frontier communities across the ridges of the Allegheny Mountains, moving from Pennsylvania into Ohio, and then south into West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Arkansas, Georgia and Alabama. Often they became squatters, said Miller.
"They were known for fighting Indians, distilling and drinking whiskey. ... They became known as hillbillies," who didn't want to pay for land or to pay taxes, he said.
Today, political strategists might have some difficulty identifying these voters. Many don't identify with their ethnicity, and if they do, they are so distrustful of joining anything that they are hard to pin down, said McMahon and Todd.
“They have maintained their non-conformist nature all through the generations. ... This culture is the bellwether of change in this country, for either party,” said Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va. Considered an authority on the Scots-Irish, Webb recently completed a documentary, “Born Fighting,” for the Smithsonian Channel and wrote several books on the subject.
Scots-Irish himself, Webb practices that non-conformist way of life: he was a Republican, and then ran as a Democrat for his Senate seat in 2006. He announced this year he would not seek reelection.
Todd determined the Scots-Irish were swing voters by poring over mapping data after the 2008 presidential election. He found a distinct voting pattern: people who rejected President Barack Obama, choosing Hillary Clinton in the primary election and Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona in the general election.
“When I looked at that map, I realized I was looking at where the Scots-Irish had settled, starting with Pennsylvania and Ohio (and moving) diagonally south along the spine of Appalachia,” said Todd, who knows a little about these finicky voters because of his own Scottish and Irish bloodline.
He decided as a strategist that it made sense to target House seats Democrats held in areas settled by Scots-Irish families -- even if those congressional seats were considered to be "safe" Democratic incumbents.
His theory worked.
Republicans won eight of the 12 seats they targeted. Two GOP losses were in Pennsylvania, where Democratic Reps Jason Altmire of McCandless and Mark Critz of Johnstown held onto their seats by putting forth a message of maintaining independence from the Democratic Party and government regulation in Washington. That platform appealed to the populist nature of Scots-Irish voters in their districts.
“I campaigned on the same values that my constituents have," said Critz. "That independence from Washington resonates around here. We believe if government leaves us alone and doesn’t bother us, we will get the work done.”
Seventeen U.S. presidents are of Scots-Irish descent, including Obama, who visited with distant Gaelic relatives in Ireland this week -- perhaps because his strategists are beginning to realize he should not ignore these voters.
SOURCE
*************************
Mr. President, Put Less Pressure on Israel, More (Some) on Her Enemies
In recent months, Israel's struggles to negotiate with a Palestinian Authority have been marred by Palestinian decisions. Chief among these challenges is the decision by the Palestinian Authority to bring Hamas representatives into their leadership. If that did not present enough challenges, last week President Obama increased the pressure on Israel by unleashing new parameters for Israel-Palestinian negotiations based on pre-1967 borders. All supporters of Israel have to be alarmed and concerned at this new explicit position the U.S. has taken.
Following Obama’s expression that negotiations be based on pre-1967 borders, supporters of Israel from across the political spectrum have condemned the idea. Despite the caveats President Obama portends to place on these factors, this is no place to start a negotiation.
President Obama insists that the parameters of pre-1967 borders were always a starting point for prior U.S. administrations pointing to the Clinton administration. This is nonsense. Obama’s declaration last week was the first explicit statement by a U.S. President that pre-1967 borders would be the parameters of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Perhaps Prime Minister Netanyahu’s terse phone call with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton prior to Thursday’s speech should have tipped the President off that this indeed would be viewed as new ground.
Further, Israel would be foolish to accept these conditions and rightly rebuked Obama for his position. Israel would be foolish to give up the Golan Heights along the Syrian border, foolish to pull its military presence out of the West Bank, and foolish to walk into a negotiation under the unnecessary pressures and concessions President Obama chose to place on the only true democracy in the Middle East. As the Prime Minister aptly put it, the pre-1967 Israeli borders, “were not the boundaries of peace; they were the boundaries of repeated wars, because the attack on Israel was so attractive from them.” Never again, will Israel return to these indefensible borders regardless of the unnecessary pressure President Obama chooses to place on Israel.
In early 2008, President Obama called for the U.S. to preside over a Muslim Summit including leaders of Syria and Iran, not understanding that elevating their criticism of Israel with a United States moderator would have been a dangerous development for Israel. Recently, Obama’s Secretary of State Clinton referred to Syrian President Assad as a “reformer”. In April 2011, Assad’s regime fired live ammunition on protesters. And Assad has repeatedly supported Hamas and Hezbollah in fomenting violence towards Israel. With reformers like Assad, who needs reform?
Mr. President, I would ask you to stop putting unnecessary pressure on Israel and start demanding more of these autocratic regimes that stifle democracy and threaten the only democracy in the Middle East—Israel. I would ask you to start resembling your recent predecessors who had both actions and words which carried an unwavering support for Israel. Each and every day, Israel remains on the frontline along with the United States in the War on Terror and is nothing but an unabashed ally of pro-democratic and pro-American policy. Mr. President, stop putting undue pressure on Israel and start providing more support.
SOURCE
**********************
The Great Liberator: Remembering Ronald Reagan at 100
Nile Gardiner
I had the privilege of attending the Ronald Reagan Centennial Gala in Washington earlier this week. Superbly organised by the Reagan Presidential Foundation, it was a truly magnificent event remembering the greatest American president of the last 100 years. Lech Walesa, the brave Polish freedom fighter who stood up to Communist tyranny, received the Reagan Centennial Freedom Award, and former First Lady Nancy Reagan delivered a moving message by video from her home in California.
Another highlight of the evening was the brilliant speech by British Defence Secretary Liam Fox, who paid tribute to the powerful partnership between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, an unbreakable alliance that defeated the Soviet Empire and won the Cold War. Dr. Fox, who has been the star performer of David Cameron’s cabinet and for decades a true friend of the United States, declared to much applause:
It is impossible to assess the contribution of Ronald Reagan to the history of the 20th century without considering another political giant of the era- Margaret Thatcher- his friend, ally and intellectual soul mate.
…. At a time when leadership was so needed they brought values, vision and valour. The Cold War did not end. It was won. It was not an accident. It came about because the leadership of the free world was committed politically, militarily, and morally to the defeat of totalitarian ideology and the triumph of liberty and freedom.
It was not an exercise in expediency but the application of conviction. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher understood that our strength lay in people not governments and that liberated from the dead hand of the state -of the self perpetuating bureaucracy- the innovation and drive of free people would triumph. They believed that competition is to be welcomed not feared- that it is the means by which we judge our talents, one against the other, without recourse to conflict.
They understood that there is a difference between tolerance and surrender and that the moral relativism that blurs the distinction between right and wrong needs to be confronted. They knew what they believed to be right and had the courage to say so- and they knew what they believed to be wrong and had the fortitude to confront it.
They knew that in a free society the market works – that the combined wisdom of millions of individuals, acting in their own interests, is always likely to trump the wisdom of the self selecting elites of government.
They were giants of history when history needed giants. We may never see their likes again in our lifetime. But living and nurturing their legacy is the greatest honour that any of us can do for their dreams, their endeavours and their hopes. Let us not let them down.
These are wise words that politicians on both sides of the Atlantic should heed, at a time of towering public debts, economic uncertainty, and mounting threats to the security of the free world. In her eulogy for President Reagan at his memorial service in Washington National Cathedral in June 2004, Lady Thatcher referred to her close friend as “the great liberator”, a leader who had freed hundreds of millions from tyranny in Europe, as well as offering renewed hope for the American people after a period of decline. In the words of the Iron Lady:
Ronald Reagan carried the American people with him in his great endeavours because there was perfect sympathy between them. He and they loved America and what it stands for: freedom and opportunity for ordinary people.
With the lever of American patriotism, he lifted up the world. And so today, the world – in Prague, in Budapest, in Warsaw and Sofia, in Bucharest, in Kiev, and in Moscow itself, the world mourns the passing of the great liberator and echoes his prayer: God bless America.
SOURCE
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Pay Freedom Forward, Properly Arm Our Armed Forces
As Americans begin the Memorial Day weekend, we remember those who have given their lives to defend the freedoms and way of life that we enjoy. The Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano writes in The Sacramento Bee that as we honor them, we must also “do our utmost not to add to their ranks”:
Cold gray monuments, brassy parades, majestic flyovers – they are all remembrances of those who died in the service of the nation. They are all part of our Memorial Day.
No day speaks more about American patriotism than the day we thank those who gave their lives in the fight for freedom. Yet, no ceremony, no solemnity can ever replace those we have lost . . .
So while on this day we honor sacrifice, we have a job the rest of the year as well: reminding our leaders in Washington to ensure that the troops who defend us have what they need to do the job – and come back to us. There is no better way to recognize the valor of those who serve, and demonstrate care and respect for their families, than to pay it forward – to properly arm our armed forces for the next fight.
Carafano writes that adequately funding defense is among America’s greatest challenges, and it is one that must be addressed:
After 10 years, we have put a lot of wear and tear on the armed forces. The danger that our military preparedness could plummet has never been greater.
Today, America has the smallest Navy since before World War I, and the force is aging. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the popular movie “Top Gun.” The ship featured in the film was the USS Enterprise. It is still at sea. In fact, it was commissioned in the 1960s, and is the second oldest ship in the U.S. fleet. Ships in the Navy’s sister fleet, the U.S. Coast Guard, are even older . . .
America’s Air Force has the oldest average fleet of planes and the fewest number of planes in its inventory at any time since World War II . . .
The Army and Marine Corps both have aging fleets of vehicles – and have just seen the plans to replace them pushed further down the road.
Annual spending to buy new equipment is already under-funded by about $50 billion a year. Still, there are calls to slash military spending.
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)
****************************
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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Can A Test Really Tell Who's A Psychopath?
There's a story on NPR under the above heading. It discusses the accuracy of Hare's checklist for deciding who is a psychopath. The test is now widely used in the criminal justice system to decide who can safely be released on parole. NPR opposes that, of course.
But on what grounds? Their principal ground seems to be the case of one man: A man with a long record of violent crime who scores highly on the Hare test. Rather than seeing that long record of violent crime as excellent validation of the test (proof that the test measures what it purports to measure) they say: "Aha! But that is the man of yesteryear. After many years in prison he has now reformed."
Yet what they report of his behaviour they evaluate very naively. They report that the man realized he would have to adopt different behaviour to get out of jail and worked systematically on doing that. And he has really charmed lots of people by the new and caring man that he is.
What a laugh! That's exactly what psychopaths do. They are great actors when they need to be and charming people is their stock in trade. If the NPR writers knew anything about psychopaths, they would be embarrassed to write what they did. They have actually disproved their own case.
**********************
Lone blogger calls a bureaucracy to account
Bob McCarty is a campaigning blogger. He takes on a cause and hammers it repeatedly. And there is a lot to hammer in the good ol' goldurned US of A these days.
His latest foray is to tackle some oppression emanating from the USDA. Like all bureaucracies, its first priority is to hurt people rather than help them and their latest caper is to fine a couple $90,000 for the heinous offence of selling more than $500 worth of rabbits in one year. After a lot of effort, the USDA seem to be caving. See here.
*************************
Stop the Bad Guys?
I rarely disagree with Prof. Boudreaux but I have to say that his clever little libertarian formulation below is grossly at variance with the facts. He seems to think that conservatives heart foreign wars. He is wrong. Traditionally, American conservatives have been isolationists and that strain of thought is still well represented by Pat Buchanan and his American Conservative. And Ron Paul is, after all, a Texas Republican.
It has long been Democrat administrations that have involved America in foreign wars, from Wilson, to Roosevelt, to Truman to Kennedy. And note that America's latest war abroad -- Libya -- is also the work of a Democrat President.
Conservatives will only respond to attack, which is why Roosevelt had to provoke and facilitate the attack on Pearl Harbour. And despite many previous Muslim provocations, it was only when America was genuinely attacked on 9/11/2001 that George Bush swung into action which resulted in taking down two of the three most hostile Muslim regimes. It is only a pity that he left the Iranian madmen to continue their crazy and very dangerous course
It’s not too much of a simplification to say that modern American conservatives believe the national government to be ignorant, bumbling, and corrupt when it meddles in the U.S. economy, but sagacious, sure-footed, and righteous when it meddles in foreign-government affairs.
Nor are the boundaries of acceptable simplification breached by saying that modern American “liberals” believe the national government to be sagacious, sure-footed, and righteous when it meddles in the U.S. economy, but ignorant, bumbling, and corrupt when it meddles in foreign-government affairs.
This striking contradiction in political viewpoints has not, of course, gone unnoticed.
I was prompted to ponder this contradiction not long ago after I read an op-ed in the Washington Post by the neoconservative William Kristol calling on Uncle Sam to attempt to influence the outcomes of the recent popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. My ponderings produced a hypothesis: Modern conservatives and “liberals” are obsessively fixated on bad guys (just different ones).
For both conservatives and “liberals” the world is full of problems caused by bad actors—greedy, heartless, power-hungry autocrats who deploy illegitimately acquired power to trample the rights and livelihoods of the masses. Ordinary men and women seek liberation from these tyrants, but—being ordinary and oppressed—the typical person cannot escape the overlords’ predation without help. Their liberation requires forceful intervention by well-meaning and courageous outsiders.
For “liberals” the oppressed masses consist of workers and the poor, and the oligarchs who do the oppressing are business people and private corporations. What encourages this oppression are free markets and their accompanying doctrine of nonintervention by government into the economy.
However, contrary to the “liberals,” nonintervention rests on at least three truths: First, the complexities of modern economies are so great, and hard to discern, that it is absurdly fanciful to suppose that government officials can intervene without causing more harm than good. Even the most well-meaning government is akin to a bull in a china shop: Out of its natural element, even government’s most careful actions will be so sweeping and awkward that the net result will be unintentionally destructive.
Second, even if economic intervention begins with the best of motives, it degenerates into a process of transferring wealth from the politically powerless to the politically powerful. The interventions continue to sport noble names (such as the “Great Society programs” and the “Fair Labor Standards Act”) and to be marketed as heroic efforts to defend the weak against the strong. But these, however, are nothing more than cynical and disingenuous political marketing efforts aimed at hiding from the general public the actual, unsavory consequences of these interventions.
Third, many situations that appear to well-meaning outsiders to be so undesirable that someone simply must intervene to correct them are understood by many of the people most closely affected by these situations to be superior to likely alternatives.
“Unequal income distribution” is perhaps the foremost such situation. While most “liberals” are obsessed with the “distribution” of income and believe that people of modest means must be especially disturbed by the fact that some other people earn more than they earn, in fact the typical American of modest means is far less bothered by “unequal” income “distribution” than are members of the “liberal” academy and punditry. This latter fact only further confirms to the “liberal” mind that ordinary Americans need third-party intervention to save them from their own naiveté; ordinary Americans just don’t know what glories they are denying themselves by acquiescing in the prevailing economic power structure.
Modern “liberals” dismiss these three objections to economic intervention as being fanciful excuses used by the economically powerful—and, even worse, also by the economically naive free-market faithful—to provide (flimsy) intellectual cover for predations by capitalist bad guys. The realistic assessments by modern “liberals” indicate to them that economic intervention is necessary and righteous.
A nearly identical debate plays out on the foreign-policy front, but with the sides switched.
For modern American conservatives the oppressed masses consist of foreign peoples yearning for American-style freedom and political franchise. But these unfortunate foreigners are oppressed by oligarchs who happen to control their governments. “Liberals” (and liberals) who adhere to a doctrine of U.S. government nonintervention in foreign affairs raise the same three objections that conservatives (and liberals) raise against government intervention in the economy.
First, the complexities of foreign governments’ relationships with their citizens are so great and hard to discern that it is absurdly fanciful to suppose that Uncle Sam can intervene without causing more harm than good. Even the most well-meaning intervention is akin to a bull in a china shop: Out of its natural element, even Uncle Sam’s most careful actions will be so sweeping and awkward that the net result will be unintentionally destructive.
Second, even if foreign intervention begins with the best of motives, it degenerates into a process of transferring wealth from the politically powerless to the politically powerful. The interventions continue to enjoy noble names (such as “Operation Iraqi Freedom”) and to be marketed as heroic efforts to defend the weak against the strong. But these, however, are nothing more than cynical and disingenuous political marketing efforts aimed at hiding from the general public the actual, unsavory consequences of these interventions in which corporations such as Halliburton and Blackwater rake in huge, undeserved profits at the expense of the American taxpayer and the foreign populations ostensibly being helped.
Third, many situations that appear to well-meaning outsiders to be so undesirable that someone simply must intervene are understood by many of the people most closely affected by these situations to be superior to likely alternatives. As oppressive as Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime genuinely was, it’s not at all clear that merely disposing of this particular bad guy has liberated Iraqis from oppression. Saddam’s rule was very much a result—and certainly not the principal cause—of Iraq’s anti-liberal culture and dysfunctional social institutions, not to mention earlier U.S. intervention.
Foreign countries’ political, economic, and social institutions are too complex and too deeply rooted in unique histories to be adequately grasped by American politicians and military leaders. Therefore American intervention—which is inevitably ham-fisted—adds to this mix only confusion and turmoil.
The two kinds of intervention situations aren’t analogous in all details; differences exist. But these differences are small when compared to the similarities. “Liberals’” confidence that domestic markets can be improved by battalions of bureaucrats charged with keeping bad guys in line is surprisingly similar to conservatives’ confidence that the welfare of foreigners can be improved by battalions of U.S. military troops charged with keeping bad guys in line.
SOURCE
************************
ELSEWHERE
Drug war futility: "Like the war on booze of yesteryear, today’s decades long war on drugs is claiming more lives and liberty casualties than the banned substances themselves could ever accomplish unchecked. The harder authorities crack down on traffic in recreational drugs, the more demand for them is created. Banning substances merely gives rise to more of them, including new substances yet to be banned."
Egypt to reopen Gaza border crossing: "Egypt will permanently open its border crossing with the Gaza Strip this weekend, the government announced yesterday, suggesting that military leaders are being swayed by growing sentiment here in favor of distancing the country from Israel. Opening the Rafah crossing, the only official entry point outside Israel into the Palestinian territory, would ease the blockade imposed after the militant group Hamas took control of the strip in 2007."
Edwards likely to face criminal charges: "The Justice Department plans to move ahead with criminal charges against former senator and presidential candidate John Edwards, contending that he misused campaign funds to cover up an affair with his mistress, a person close to Edwards said yesterday. 'DOJ has made its decision to move forward with charges,’ the person told The New York Times in an e-mail. 'This phase of the case is moving rapidly toward conclusion,’ the person added, but did not clarify whether that meant an indictment or a plea bargain."
AZ: Judge rules Loughner unfit for trial: "A federal judge ruled Jared Lee Loughner mentally incompetent to stand trial in the Jan. 8 shooting spree that gravely wounded an Arizona congresswoman after two medical experts agreed he suffered from schizophrenia and for several years has been troubled by delusions and hallucinations. ... The ruling came after U.S. marshals removed Loughner from the courtroom Wednesday when he suddenly started screaming."
Sunstein and Obama, deregulators? "The Bush and Obama administrations have tried fiscal stimulus to speed up economic recovery. It didn’t work. The Federal Reserve tried increasing the money supply, which they called 'quantitative easing' because it sounds much more pleasant than 'printing money.' That didn’t work. Then they tried it again. That didn’t work, either. What to do? We at CEI have been pushing a deregulatory stimulus for years. Now that all other possibilities are exhausted, the administration appears to be taking small steps in that direction."
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)
****************************
There's a story on NPR under the above heading. It discusses the accuracy of Hare's checklist for deciding who is a psychopath. The test is now widely used in the criminal justice system to decide who can safely be released on parole. NPR opposes that, of course.
But on what grounds? Their principal ground seems to be the case of one man: A man with a long record of violent crime who scores highly on the Hare test. Rather than seeing that long record of violent crime as excellent validation of the test (proof that the test measures what it purports to measure) they say: "Aha! But that is the man of yesteryear. After many years in prison he has now reformed."
Yet what they report of his behaviour they evaluate very naively. They report that the man realized he would have to adopt different behaviour to get out of jail and worked systematically on doing that. And he has really charmed lots of people by the new and caring man that he is.
What a laugh! That's exactly what psychopaths do. They are great actors when they need to be and charming people is their stock in trade. If the NPR writers knew anything about psychopaths, they would be embarrassed to write what they did. They have actually disproved their own case.
**********************
Lone blogger calls a bureaucracy to account
Bob McCarty is a campaigning blogger. He takes on a cause and hammers it repeatedly. And there is a lot to hammer in the good ol' goldurned US of A these days.
His latest foray is to tackle some oppression emanating from the USDA. Like all bureaucracies, its first priority is to hurt people rather than help them and their latest caper is to fine a couple $90,000 for the heinous offence of selling more than $500 worth of rabbits in one year. After a lot of effort, the USDA seem to be caving. See here.
*************************
Stop the Bad Guys?
I rarely disagree with Prof. Boudreaux but I have to say that his clever little libertarian formulation below is grossly at variance with the facts. He seems to think that conservatives heart foreign wars. He is wrong. Traditionally, American conservatives have been isolationists and that strain of thought is still well represented by Pat Buchanan and his American Conservative. And Ron Paul is, after all, a Texas Republican.
It has long been Democrat administrations that have involved America in foreign wars, from Wilson, to Roosevelt, to Truman to Kennedy. And note that America's latest war abroad -- Libya -- is also the work of a Democrat President.
Conservatives will only respond to attack, which is why Roosevelt had to provoke and facilitate the attack on Pearl Harbour. And despite many previous Muslim provocations, it was only when America was genuinely attacked on 9/11/2001 that George Bush swung into action which resulted in taking down two of the three most hostile Muslim regimes. It is only a pity that he left the Iranian madmen to continue their crazy and very dangerous course
It’s not too much of a simplification to say that modern American conservatives believe the national government to be ignorant, bumbling, and corrupt when it meddles in the U.S. economy, but sagacious, sure-footed, and righteous when it meddles in foreign-government affairs.
Nor are the boundaries of acceptable simplification breached by saying that modern American “liberals” believe the national government to be sagacious, sure-footed, and righteous when it meddles in the U.S. economy, but ignorant, bumbling, and corrupt when it meddles in foreign-government affairs.
This striking contradiction in political viewpoints has not, of course, gone unnoticed.
I was prompted to ponder this contradiction not long ago after I read an op-ed in the Washington Post by the neoconservative William Kristol calling on Uncle Sam to attempt to influence the outcomes of the recent popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. My ponderings produced a hypothesis: Modern conservatives and “liberals” are obsessively fixated on bad guys (just different ones).
For both conservatives and “liberals” the world is full of problems caused by bad actors—greedy, heartless, power-hungry autocrats who deploy illegitimately acquired power to trample the rights and livelihoods of the masses. Ordinary men and women seek liberation from these tyrants, but—being ordinary and oppressed—the typical person cannot escape the overlords’ predation without help. Their liberation requires forceful intervention by well-meaning and courageous outsiders.
For “liberals” the oppressed masses consist of workers and the poor, and the oligarchs who do the oppressing are business people and private corporations. What encourages this oppression are free markets and their accompanying doctrine of nonintervention by government into the economy.
However, contrary to the “liberals,” nonintervention rests on at least three truths: First, the complexities of modern economies are so great, and hard to discern, that it is absurdly fanciful to suppose that government officials can intervene without causing more harm than good. Even the most well-meaning government is akin to a bull in a china shop: Out of its natural element, even government’s most careful actions will be so sweeping and awkward that the net result will be unintentionally destructive.
Second, even if economic intervention begins with the best of motives, it degenerates into a process of transferring wealth from the politically powerless to the politically powerful. The interventions continue to sport noble names (such as the “Great Society programs” and the “Fair Labor Standards Act”) and to be marketed as heroic efforts to defend the weak against the strong. But these, however, are nothing more than cynical and disingenuous political marketing efforts aimed at hiding from the general public the actual, unsavory consequences of these interventions.
Third, many situations that appear to well-meaning outsiders to be so undesirable that someone simply must intervene to correct them are understood by many of the people most closely affected by these situations to be superior to likely alternatives.
“Unequal income distribution” is perhaps the foremost such situation. While most “liberals” are obsessed with the “distribution” of income and believe that people of modest means must be especially disturbed by the fact that some other people earn more than they earn, in fact the typical American of modest means is far less bothered by “unequal” income “distribution” than are members of the “liberal” academy and punditry. This latter fact only further confirms to the “liberal” mind that ordinary Americans need third-party intervention to save them from their own naiveté; ordinary Americans just don’t know what glories they are denying themselves by acquiescing in the prevailing economic power structure.
Modern “liberals” dismiss these three objections to economic intervention as being fanciful excuses used by the economically powerful—and, even worse, also by the economically naive free-market faithful—to provide (flimsy) intellectual cover for predations by capitalist bad guys. The realistic assessments by modern “liberals” indicate to them that economic intervention is necessary and righteous.
A nearly identical debate plays out on the foreign-policy front, but with the sides switched.
For modern American conservatives the oppressed masses consist of foreign peoples yearning for American-style freedom and political franchise. But these unfortunate foreigners are oppressed by oligarchs who happen to control their governments. “Liberals” (and liberals) who adhere to a doctrine of U.S. government nonintervention in foreign affairs raise the same three objections that conservatives (and liberals) raise against government intervention in the economy.
First, the complexities of foreign governments’ relationships with their citizens are so great and hard to discern that it is absurdly fanciful to suppose that Uncle Sam can intervene without causing more harm than good. Even the most well-meaning intervention is akin to a bull in a china shop: Out of its natural element, even Uncle Sam’s most careful actions will be so sweeping and awkward that the net result will be unintentionally destructive.
Second, even if foreign intervention begins with the best of motives, it degenerates into a process of transferring wealth from the politically powerless to the politically powerful. The interventions continue to enjoy noble names (such as “Operation Iraqi Freedom”) and to be marketed as heroic efforts to defend the weak against the strong. But these, however, are nothing more than cynical and disingenuous political marketing efforts aimed at hiding from the general public the actual, unsavory consequences of these interventions in which corporations such as Halliburton and Blackwater rake in huge, undeserved profits at the expense of the American taxpayer and the foreign populations ostensibly being helped.
Third, many situations that appear to well-meaning outsiders to be so undesirable that someone simply must intervene are understood by many of the people most closely affected by these situations to be superior to likely alternatives. As oppressive as Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime genuinely was, it’s not at all clear that merely disposing of this particular bad guy has liberated Iraqis from oppression. Saddam’s rule was very much a result—and certainly not the principal cause—of Iraq’s anti-liberal culture and dysfunctional social institutions, not to mention earlier U.S. intervention.
Foreign countries’ political, economic, and social institutions are too complex and too deeply rooted in unique histories to be adequately grasped by American politicians and military leaders. Therefore American intervention—which is inevitably ham-fisted—adds to this mix only confusion and turmoil.
The two kinds of intervention situations aren’t analogous in all details; differences exist. But these differences are small when compared to the similarities. “Liberals’” confidence that domestic markets can be improved by battalions of bureaucrats charged with keeping bad guys in line is surprisingly similar to conservatives’ confidence that the welfare of foreigners can be improved by battalions of U.S. military troops charged with keeping bad guys in line.
SOURCE
************************
ELSEWHERE
Drug war futility: "Like the war on booze of yesteryear, today’s decades long war on drugs is claiming more lives and liberty casualties than the banned substances themselves could ever accomplish unchecked. The harder authorities crack down on traffic in recreational drugs, the more demand for them is created. Banning substances merely gives rise to more of them, including new substances yet to be banned."
Egypt to reopen Gaza border crossing: "Egypt will permanently open its border crossing with the Gaza Strip this weekend, the government announced yesterday, suggesting that military leaders are being swayed by growing sentiment here in favor of distancing the country from Israel. Opening the Rafah crossing, the only official entry point outside Israel into the Palestinian territory, would ease the blockade imposed after the militant group Hamas took control of the strip in 2007."
Edwards likely to face criminal charges: "The Justice Department plans to move ahead with criminal charges against former senator and presidential candidate John Edwards, contending that he misused campaign funds to cover up an affair with his mistress, a person close to Edwards said yesterday. 'DOJ has made its decision to move forward with charges,’ the person told The New York Times in an e-mail. 'This phase of the case is moving rapidly toward conclusion,’ the person added, but did not clarify whether that meant an indictment or a plea bargain."
AZ: Judge rules Loughner unfit for trial: "A federal judge ruled Jared Lee Loughner mentally incompetent to stand trial in the Jan. 8 shooting spree that gravely wounded an Arizona congresswoman after two medical experts agreed he suffered from schizophrenia and for several years has been troubled by delusions and hallucinations. ... The ruling came after U.S. marshals removed Loughner from the courtroom Wednesday when he suddenly started screaming."
Sunstein and Obama, deregulators? "The Bush and Obama administrations have tried fiscal stimulus to speed up economic recovery. It didn’t work. The Federal Reserve tried increasing the money supply, which they called 'quantitative easing' because it sounds much more pleasant than 'printing money.' That didn’t work. Then they tried it again. That didn’t work, either. What to do? We at CEI have been pushing a deregulatory stimulus for years. Now that all other possibilities are exhausted, the administration appears to be taking small steps in that direction."
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)
****************************
Thursday, May 26, 2011
For Democrats, It's All About Tax Hikes
If nothing else, last week made it abundantly clear where Democrats stand on today's most pressing issues, and the picture isn't pretty.
In case you missed it, the Democrats floated a plan for a millionaire surtax in an attempt to, as the Hill put it, "force Republicans to accept other tax increases." They tried to hike taxes on oil companies by more than $2 billion a year, because the industry is currently making big profits; and mounted a nationwide campaign to scare seniors away from Rep. Paul Ryan's Medicare reform — including a new ad that depicts Ryan tossing a senior citizen off a cliff.
Detect a theme there? On issue after issue, Republicans are putting forward serious, sober and often politically risky solutions to the nation's most pressing problems, while Democrats play class-warfare games and stoke the public's fear.
To cope with the nation's gargantuan debt, for example, the GOP issued a budget plan that focuses — correctly — on reining in the government's runaway spending. The only thing Democrats want to talk about is how all our problems can be solved if we just raise taxes on the "the rich."
President Obama wants to boost them by at least $1 trillion, and Senate Democrats promise their long-delayed budget will include $2 trillion in new taxes. That's ill-advised even if the economy were humming along, but reckless given the current state of things.
When it comes to sky-high gas prices, Republicans at least understand that the root of the problem is too little oil supply, and in the Senate this week they tried to pass a bill to boost domestic oil production, only to be blocked by Democrats.
What do Democrats do instead? Demonize oil companies for making a profit and try to squeeze them for extra tax dollars. As President Obama said, "They are making tens of billions of dollars each — huge profits — while you're struggling to fill up your gas tank."
Never mind that less oil production and more oil industry taxes are the exact opposite of what's needed to bring gasoline prices down.
And while House Republicans advocate a serious Medicare reform plan that harnesses market forces to rein in the program's costs and protect it for the future, Democrats offer only fear.
Health and Human Services head Kathleen Sebelius said Ryan's Medicare plan would cause some seniors to "die sooner," and the Democratic National Committee proclaimed in an ad that Republicans are "now for killing" Medicare. The topper came in the Ryan-pushing-grandma-over-the-cliff ad, produced by a group headed by the DNC's former deputy national finance director. What's their Medicare solution? Nothing.
Democrats might think stoking envy and fear is politically sufficient, but we give the public more credit than that.
The country faces serious problems and voters deserve political leaders willing to step up and propose serious, credible solutions. As the last week made clear, they aren't getting anything like that from the party of FDR.
SOURCE
***********************
If Obamacare is so great, why do so many people want to get out from under it?
Question: What do the following have in common? Eckert Cold Storage Co., Kerly Homes of Yuma, Classic Party Rentals, West Coast Turf Inc., Ellenbecker Investment Group Inc., Only in San Francisco, Hotel Nikko, International Pacific Halibut Commission, City of Puyallup, Local 485 Health and Welfare Fund, Chicago Plastering Institute Health & Welfare Fund, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, Teamsters Local 522 Fund Welfare Fund Roofers Division, StayWell Saipan Basic Plan, CIGNA, Caribbean Workers' Voluntary Employees' Beneficiary Health and Welfare Plan.
Answer: They are all among the 1,372 businesses, state and local governments, labor unions and insurers, covering 3,095,593 individuals or families, that have been granted a waiver from Obamacare by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.
All of which raises another question: If Obamacare is so great, why do so many people want to get out from under it?
More specifically, why are more than half of those 3,095,593 in plans run by labor unions, which were among Obamacare's biggest political supporters? Union members are only 12 percent of all employees but have gotten 50.3 percent of Obamacare waivers.
Just in April, Sebelius granted 38 waivers to restaurants, nightclubs, spas and hotels in former Speaker Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco congressional district. Pelosi's office said she had nothing to do with it.
On its website, HHS pledges that the waiver process will be transparent. But it doesn't list those whose requests for waivers have been denied.
It does say that requests are "reviewed on a case by case basis by Department officials who look at a series of factors including" -- and then listing two factors. And it refers you to another website that says that "several factors ... may be considered" -- and then lists six factors.
What other factors may be considered? Political contributions or connections? (Unions contributed $400 million to Democrats in the 2008 campaign cycle.) The websites don't say.
In his new book, "The Origins of Political Order," Francis Fukuyama identifies the chief building blocks of liberal democracy as a strong central state, a society strong enough to hold the state accountable and -- equally crucial -- the rule of law.
One basic principle of the rule of law is that laws apply to everybody. If the sign says "No Parking," you're not supposed to park there even if you're a pal of the alderman.
More HERE
*************************
How to Go to Congress and Become a Millionaire
Ever wonder how people go to Congress and become millionaires? A new academic report clears it up for us.
A report from four scholars, Alan J Ziobrowski; James W Boyd, Ping Cheng; and Brigitte J. Ziobrowski, titled Abnormal Returns From the Common Stock Investments of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives, shows that between 1985 and 2001 members of Congress enjoyed a considerable advantage over members of the public in their investment returns.
The article was published by Berkeley Electronic Press and is a follow up to a similar study done on investments by US Senators.
“A previous study suggests that U.S. Senators trade common stock with a substantial informational advantage compared to ordinary investors and even corporate insiders,” says the introduction to the report. “We apply precisely the same methods to test for abnormal returns from the common stock investments of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives. We measure abnormal returns for more than 16,000 common stock transactions made by approximately 300 House delegates from 1985 to 2001. Consistent with the study of Senatorial trading activity, we find stocks purchased by Representatives also earn significant positive abnormal returns (albeit considerably smaller returns). A portfolio that mimics the purchases of House Members beats the market by 55 basis points per month (approximately 6% annually).”
Actually 12 times .55 percent comes out to 6.6 percent annually. That .6 percent return accounts for an additional $130,000 over a 17 year period.
So how lucrative can the 6.6 percent advantage be for Senators and Representatives? A portfolio of $100,000 getting average stock market returns of 11 percent over a 17 year period would have grown to $589,000. If you were a member of the United States House of Representatives, though, enjoying the advantage that inside government information can bring you, your portfolio would have reached $1,573,000, according to an investment calculation I did using the finding from the study.
Assuming only average market returns for the next 20 years, a Representative would grow their portfolio to close to $13 million. Under the same circumstances US Senator would have grown the portfolio to $18 million.
The conclusion of the study favors some sort of reporting mechanism similar to those imposed upon corporate insiders. “We find strong evidence that Members of the House have some type of nonpublic information which they use for personal gain. That having been said, abnormal returns earned by Members of the House are substantially smaller than those earned by Senators during approximately the same time period. These smaller returns are due presumably to less influence and power held by the individual Members.”
While the sky wouldn’t fall if reporting requirements were imposed on members of Congress, the report misses the most obvious point.
Why do we have a federal government that can so substantially ensure winners and losers in investments and our economy? Isn't a system like that prone to corruption? Don't we witness the effects of that corruption in legislation like Obamacare, or the cadillac benefits offered public employees?
The report points out the even corporate insiders don’t enjoy the return advantages that members of Congress enjoy. It’s one of the most damning indications yet that the scope of government has gotten wildly out of control. It’s also another example of laws that Congress passes for the rest of us but won’t consider following. That’s a practice that must end if we want to restore confidence in government.
We can only do that by making sure that government can no longer pick winners and losers in the stock market.
SOURCE
***************************
Memorial Day Thanks and Devotion
Flip through the local paper, and you'll see that Memorial Day notices appear as sales headlines and attention-grabbers. Memorial Day Sale and Pre-Memorial Day. Pretty soon we'll see post-Memorial Day sale advertisements.
Similarly, television and radio are full of Memorial Day advertisements. I've even received a few Memorial Day Sale notices by e-mail during the time I've spent writing this column.
Sales and BBQ are the two things that many people think about when Memorial Day is mentioned. What else? Well, for many Americans, it's the weekend that the pool opens and summer begins.
But it means more than that. Memorial Day began as Decoration Day soon after the Civil War. Each year on this day, the graves of the fallen soldiers were decorated to honor the memory of their sacrifice to keep our country united. They gave the ultimate sacrifice.
The holiday can be traced back to John Logan, who served as an Illinois congressman prior to the Civil War, then volunteered as a Union soldier and was promoted during the war to general. He issued an order in 1868 to honor those who died in the war. At that time, he was serving as commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization of former Union soldiers.
"The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country," stated the order. "We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance," it said, adding that their deaths were "the cost of free and undivided republic."
It was a high cost indeed. More than 600,000 American soldiers died during the Civil War, the most deadly war for Americans.
That first year, approximately 5,000 people gathered at Arlington Cemetery to decorate the graves with American flags. Since then, the custom has grown and spread.
Arlington Cemetery, located in Virginia across the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, is today the military graveyard of hundreds of thousands of United States soldiers. On a recent visit to our nation's capital, I had the opportunity to walk through the cemetery and visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Walking through the cemetery, surrounded by thousands of small, white gravestones, perfectly aligned, row after row, it is easy to remember the sacrifice that has been made on our account. Soldiers have died. Families have lost sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and friends. There are miles and miles of trails through the cemetery.
At home, at the beach or at the pool, taking time to reflect on the importance of Memorial Day may prove difficult to do amid the sales and BBQs, the day off from work. But we should all pause and remember -- to honor those who have given their lives for our country and to dedicate ourselves to living in a way that ensures their sacrifices were not in vain.
One of the most fitting tributes to American soldiers is one that was given before Memorial Day was recognized -- President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
Lincoln delivered his address at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pa., in November 1863, while the Civil War was still raging. He was not the main speaker for the day, but had been invited as an afterthought. His speech was so short (less than two minutes) that the photographer did not have time to get a picture of him delivering it.
The speech, one of my favorites, is engraved in the Lincoln Memorial, across the river from Arlington National Cemetery.
Its 278 words don't include "I" or "me," but they do take the audience from our start as a nation and the American Revolution to Lincoln's wishes for the future of our nation.
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. ... It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
This Memorial Day, let's give thanks, and increase our devotion, so that our soldiers will not have died in vain.
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)
****************************
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)
****************************
If nothing else, last week made it abundantly clear where Democrats stand on today's most pressing issues, and the picture isn't pretty.
In case you missed it, the Democrats floated a plan for a millionaire surtax in an attempt to, as the Hill put it, "force Republicans to accept other tax increases." They tried to hike taxes on oil companies by more than $2 billion a year, because the industry is currently making big profits; and mounted a nationwide campaign to scare seniors away from Rep. Paul Ryan's Medicare reform — including a new ad that depicts Ryan tossing a senior citizen off a cliff.
Detect a theme there? On issue after issue, Republicans are putting forward serious, sober and often politically risky solutions to the nation's most pressing problems, while Democrats play class-warfare games and stoke the public's fear.
To cope with the nation's gargantuan debt, for example, the GOP issued a budget plan that focuses — correctly — on reining in the government's runaway spending. The only thing Democrats want to talk about is how all our problems can be solved if we just raise taxes on the "the rich."
President Obama wants to boost them by at least $1 trillion, and Senate Democrats promise their long-delayed budget will include $2 trillion in new taxes. That's ill-advised even if the economy were humming along, but reckless given the current state of things.
When it comes to sky-high gas prices, Republicans at least understand that the root of the problem is too little oil supply, and in the Senate this week they tried to pass a bill to boost domestic oil production, only to be blocked by Democrats.
What do Democrats do instead? Demonize oil companies for making a profit and try to squeeze them for extra tax dollars. As President Obama said, "They are making tens of billions of dollars each — huge profits — while you're struggling to fill up your gas tank."
Never mind that less oil production and more oil industry taxes are the exact opposite of what's needed to bring gasoline prices down.
And while House Republicans advocate a serious Medicare reform plan that harnesses market forces to rein in the program's costs and protect it for the future, Democrats offer only fear.
Health and Human Services head Kathleen Sebelius said Ryan's Medicare plan would cause some seniors to "die sooner," and the Democratic National Committee proclaimed in an ad that Republicans are "now for killing" Medicare. The topper came in the Ryan-pushing-grandma-over-the-cliff ad, produced by a group headed by the DNC's former deputy national finance director. What's their Medicare solution? Nothing.
Democrats might think stoking envy and fear is politically sufficient, but we give the public more credit than that.
The country faces serious problems and voters deserve political leaders willing to step up and propose serious, credible solutions. As the last week made clear, they aren't getting anything like that from the party of FDR.
SOURCE
***********************
If Obamacare is so great, why do so many people want to get out from under it?
Question: What do the following have in common? Eckert Cold Storage Co., Kerly Homes of Yuma, Classic Party Rentals, West Coast Turf Inc., Ellenbecker Investment Group Inc., Only in San Francisco, Hotel Nikko, International Pacific Halibut Commission, City of Puyallup, Local 485 Health and Welfare Fund, Chicago Plastering Institute Health & Welfare Fund, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, Teamsters Local 522 Fund Welfare Fund Roofers Division, StayWell Saipan Basic Plan, CIGNA, Caribbean Workers' Voluntary Employees' Beneficiary Health and Welfare Plan.
Answer: They are all among the 1,372 businesses, state and local governments, labor unions and insurers, covering 3,095,593 individuals or families, that have been granted a waiver from Obamacare by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.
All of which raises another question: If Obamacare is so great, why do so many people want to get out from under it?
More specifically, why are more than half of those 3,095,593 in plans run by labor unions, which were among Obamacare's biggest political supporters? Union members are only 12 percent of all employees but have gotten 50.3 percent of Obamacare waivers.
Just in April, Sebelius granted 38 waivers to restaurants, nightclubs, spas and hotels in former Speaker Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco congressional district. Pelosi's office said she had nothing to do with it.
On its website, HHS pledges that the waiver process will be transparent. But it doesn't list those whose requests for waivers have been denied.
It does say that requests are "reviewed on a case by case basis by Department officials who look at a series of factors including" -- and then listing two factors. And it refers you to another website that says that "several factors ... may be considered" -- and then lists six factors.
What other factors may be considered? Political contributions or connections? (Unions contributed $400 million to Democrats in the 2008 campaign cycle.) The websites don't say.
In his new book, "The Origins of Political Order," Francis Fukuyama identifies the chief building blocks of liberal democracy as a strong central state, a society strong enough to hold the state accountable and -- equally crucial -- the rule of law.
One basic principle of the rule of law is that laws apply to everybody. If the sign says "No Parking," you're not supposed to park there even if you're a pal of the alderman.
More HERE
*************************
How to Go to Congress and Become a Millionaire
Ever wonder how people go to Congress and become millionaires? A new academic report clears it up for us.
A report from four scholars, Alan J Ziobrowski; James W Boyd, Ping Cheng; and Brigitte J. Ziobrowski, titled Abnormal Returns From the Common Stock Investments of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives, shows that between 1985 and 2001 members of Congress enjoyed a considerable advantage over members of the public in their investment returns.
The article was published by Berkeley Electronic Press and is a follow up to a similar study done on investments by US Senators.
“A previous study suggests that U.S. Senators trade common stock with a substantial informational advantage compared to ordinary investors and even corporate insiders,” says the introduction to the report. “We apply precisely the same methods to test for abnormal returns from the common stock investments of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives. We measure abnormal returns for more than 16,000 common stock transactions made by approximately 300 House delegates from 1985 to 2001. Consistent with the study of Senatorial trading activity, we find stocks purchased by Representatives also earn significant positive abnormal returns (albeit considerably smaller returns). A portfolio that mimics the purchases of House Members beats the market by 55 basis points per month (approximately 6% annually).”
Actually 12 times .55 percent comes out to 6.6 percent annually. That .6 percent return accounts for an additional $130,000 over a 17 year period.
So how lucrative can the 6.6 percent advantage be for Senators and Representatives? A portfolio of $100,000 getting average stock market returns of 11 percent over a 17 year period would have grown to $589,000. If you were a member of the United States House of Representatives, though, enjoying the advantage that inside government information can bring you, your portfolio would have reached $1,573,000, according to an investment calculation I did using the finding from the study.
Assuming only average market returns for the next 20 years, a Representative would grow their portfolio to close to $13 million. Under the same circumstances US Senator would have grown the portfolio to $18 million.
The conclusion of the study favors some sort of reporting mechanism similar to those imposed upon corporate insiders. “We find strong evidence that Members of the House have some type of nonpublic information which they use for personal gain. That having been said, abnormal returns earned by Members of the House are substantially smaller than those earned by Senators during approximately the same time period. These smaller returns are due presumably to less influence and power held by the individual Members.”
While the sky wouldn’t fall if reporting requirements were imposed on members of Congress, the report misses the most obvious point.
Why do we have a federal government that can so substantially ensure winners and losers in investments and our economy? Isn't a system like that prone to corruption? Don't we witness the effects of that corruption in legislation like Obamacare, or the cadillac benefits offered public employees?
The report points out the even corporate insiders don’t enjoy the return advantages that members of Congress enjoy. It’s one of the most damning indications yet that the scope of government has gotten wildly out of control. It’s also another example of laws that Congress passes for the rest of us but won’t consider following. That’s a practice that must end if we want to restore confidence in government.
We can only do that by making sure that government can no longer pick winners and losers in the stock market.
SOURCE
***************************
Memorial Day Thanks and Devotion
Flip through the local paper, and you'll see that Memorial Day notices appear as sales headlines and attention-grabbers. Memorial Day Sale and Pre-Memorial Day. Pretty soon we'll see post-Memorial Day sale advertisements.
Similarly, television and radio are full of Memorial Day advertisements. I've even received a few Memorial Day Sale notices by e-mail during the time I've spent writing this column.
Sales and BBQ are the two things that many people think about when Memorial Day is mentioned. What else? Well, for many Americans, it's the weekend that the pool opens and summer begins.
But it means more than that. Memorial Day began as Decoration Day soon after the Civil War. Each year on this day, the graves of the fallen soldiers were decorated to honor the memory of their sacrifice to keep our country united. They gave the ultimate sacrifice.
The holiday can be traced back to John Logan, who served as an Illinois congressman prior to the Civil War, then volunteered as a Union soldier and was promoted during the war to general. He issued an order in 1868 to honor those who died in the war. At that time, he was serving as commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization of former Union soldiers.
"The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country," stated the order. "We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance," it said, adding that their deaths were "the cost of free and undivided republic."
It was a high cost indeed. More than 600,000 American soldiers died during the Civil War, the most deadly war for Americans.
That first year, approximately 5,000 people gathered at Arlington Cemetery to decorate the graves with American flags. Since then, the custom has grown and spread.
Arlington Cemetery, located in Virginia across the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, is today the military graveyard of hundreds of thousands of United States soldiers. On a recent visit to our nation's capital, I had the opportunity to walk through the cemetery and visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Walking through the cemetery, surrounded by thousands of small, white gravestones, perfectly aligned, row after row, it is easy to remember the sacrifice that has been made on our account. Soldiers have died. Families have lost sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and friends. There are miles and miles of trails through the cemetery.
At home, at the beach or at the pool, taking time to reflect on the importance of Memorial Day may prove difficult to do amid the sales and BBQs, the day off from work. But we should all pause and remember -- to honor those who have given their lives for our country and to dedicate ourselves to living in a way that ensures their sacrifices were not in vain.
One of the most fitting tributes to American soldiers is one that was given before Memorial Day was recognized -- President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
Lincoln delivered his address at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pa., in November 1863, while the Civil War was still raging. He was not the main speaker for the day, but had been invited as an afterthought. His speech was so short (less than two minutes) that the photographer did not have time to get a picture of him delivering it.
The speech, one of my favorites, is engraved in the Lincoln Memorial, across the river from Arlington National Cemetery.
Its 278 words don't include "I" or "me," but they do take the audience from our start as a nation and the American Revolution to Lincoln's wishes for the future of our nation.
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. ... It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
This Memorial Day, let's give thanks, and increase our devotion, so that our soldiers will not have died in vain.
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)
****************************
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)
****************************
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
The tumor on America that Washington D.C. has become
Martin Hutchinson below:
I have moved from Vienna, VA., a suburb of Washington DC to Poughkeepsie NY, a semi-suburb (it’s 73 miles away) of New York. Many have clearly regarded this as an eccentric choice, and much of the motivation stems from things like hating the Washington summer more than the Poughkeepsie winter that are personal to each of us. Nevertheless, there is also a philosophical background for the move, in that I believe the rapid growth of the Washington area to be profoundly unhealthy.
Washington’s unhealthiness has been highlighted during the Great Recession, for example by the housing market. Other regions of the country suffered a severe real estate price decline in 2006-09, except for a few places such as Houston that had not previously enjoyed a boom. The Washington area enjoyed an extraordinary 150% price gain in 2000-06 according to the S&P Case-Shiller data, third after the Miami and Los Angeles areas and more than Phoenix, San Francisco or Las Vegas. Unlike those other regions, however, its price decline in 2006-09 was considerably less, 33% compared to 47% in Miami, 56% in Las Vegas and 42% in Los Angeles. Then after 2009, the recovery in Washington was considerably stronger than in other areas, with prices now up 10% from the bottom and still continuing to rise while house prices in most other areas decline.
The explanation, of course, is that Washington is not on the same economic cycle as the rest of the country. There was some pretence in the late 1990s that northern Virginia had developed a substantial tech sector, but the reality was that most of the sector was either evanescent (like AOL) or highly dependent upon government contracting or, like MicroStrategy, both. The reality is that when government expands, Washington does well, and vice versa.
You can see this in its local real estate market also. There is very little housing dating from the 1920s, a major real estate boom era around most East Coast cities, but a period of well-run, economical government. Conversely, there is a vast amount of housing, generally rather small and unattractive with very mean rooms, dating from the New Deal and wartime 1930s and 1940s. The 1960s, genesis of the two houses we lived in around Vienna, produced the Great Society and another housing boom of rather larger houses, most of them shoddily built. Then the 1980s was another period of recession, when Washington house prices were far below those around New York and little building took place. Finally the Bush years, stretching into the Obama years, saw a massive building boom and the apotheosis of the Washington area McMansion – huge, shoddily built and packed tightly together on the suddenly expensive land.
Whereas the modest and unattractive 1940s housing was inhabited mostly by government bureaucrats when first built, as were the larger 1960s offerings and some of the more reasonable sized modern housing stock, the true market for McMansions was not those working in government, let alone private sector entrepreneurs but the parasites, the swarm of lobbyists (whose numbers doubled under the supposedly limited-government Bush) and lawyers who have come to dominate the big money around Washington. Like Detroit in 1900-1915, Washington in recent years has been a boomtown, and the creaking infrastructure and monstrous traffic delays are the result of this.
The other special feature of Washington life is the nature of its inhabitants. They have far higher academic qualifications than the rest of mankind, even those lucky residents of the up-market suburbs around New York and San Francisco. Fairfax County, Virginia has 55% college graduates, compared with 41% in Westchester County, New York and 51% in Marin County, California. Fairfax residents would argue that this factor justifies them in having the nation’s highest average household income -- $107,000, compared with a mere $79,000 in Westchester and $90,000 in Marin.
Washington area residents will argue that their greater qualifications justify their higher earnings, but from inspection the percentage of college graduates is not sufficiently higher in Fairfax than in the very affluent Marin County for any such premium to be justified. Furthermore, there is no living cost differential that would justify the income differential; indeed rather the opposite as the average owner-occupied residence in Marin is valued at $514,600 compared to $233,000 in Fairfax. Fairfax County real estate is overpriced – this was another reason for leaving the place – but is nothing like as lunatic economically as the fancier bits of California – or indeed south-east England.
As I have remarked before in these columns the Washington area is a kind of anti-Hollywood. Whereas Hollywood is full of people with room-temperature IQs but attractive looks and winsome personalities, the Washington area is full of PhD-credentialed trolls. Thus not only are the academic qualifications of Fairfax County not sufficiently superior to those of Marin County to justify their higher earnings, but Washington-area people are often seriously lacking in other qualifications that make for a commercially successful existence, such as looks, charm, salesmanship and workaholism. Plenty of insurance, real estate and used car salesmen lack substantial academic qualifications, but are nevertheless sufficiently well endowed in other respects to make very large amounts of money indeed, whatever their defects would be as GS-15s.
Washington is thus a region whose inhabitants are paid more than their qualifications are worth, do particularly well in recessions, and often lack the qualities that make them attractive to others. It is thus not surprising that they have little empathy with the travails of those outside Washington whose lives are entangled in the maelstrom of this very serious and damaging recession.
Far from maintaining sound monetary and fiscal policies, which would enable ordinary businesses to recover their footing and begin to grow again, they pursue a chimera of negative real interest rates and gigantic budget deficits that produces high bureaucrat employment, a surface health in financial markets, and long-term unemployment for everyone else.
Far from realizing that in a globalized world market, less skilled and older workers are especially vulnerable, they persistently refuse to enforce immigration laws, producing a large illegal immigrant population that can satisfy Fairfax County’s insatiable demand for maids and gardeners, while driving down wages and job opportunities for low-skill labor to Third World levels.
Far from attempting to relieve burdens on small business and allow them to produce the jobs that are needed, they produce a series of health, environmental and labor regulation schemes that impose massive additional costs on the businesses that produce the country’s wealth.
These impositions are not particularly generated by one or other political faction; they are the result of Washington’s cocooning from the rest of its countrymen. Washington insiders like Newt Gingrich, who has lived within the Beltway for thirty years, cross party lines to support these economically damaging schemes. Conversely a few “blue dog” Democrats whose ties remain outside Washington oppose them, like Joe Manchin (D.-W.Va.) who while campaigning for his West Virginia Senate seat took a shotgun to a copy of his own party’s cockamamie environmental legislation.
It is not surprising that outsiders find U.S. politics dysfunctional; it is dominated by a pampered super-class of lobbyists, lawyers, most politicians and senior bureaucrats, all of which are not only protected from the economic forces that afflict the rest of the economy but actually benefit, both relatively and in absolute terms, from hard times in the U.S. economy as a whole and the “stimulus” schemes for which they provide an excuse. The same effect can be seen in Brussels, when I knew it in the 1970s a very pleasant modestly wealthy capital of a small country with good restaurants, a fine banking system and legendarily affluent “Belgian dentists” who were the major investing force behind the early Eurobond market. Needless to say, Brussels is today richer per capita, but its wealthy now are not dentists but bureaucrats, lawyers and lobbyists, sleek, pampered and utterly cut off from the people for whom they invent damaging regulations.
The idea, pioneered by the Founding Fathers, of a capital city inhabited only by statesmen and bureaucrats, without any other significant economic base, is a very dangerous one. While government is small, it produces the quirky charm of nineteenth century Washington or 1949-99 Bonn – lacking as they did most big-city amenities, they were universally detested by their inhabitants, who left them at weekends whenever possible. However as government grows, it becomes itself a sufficiently large employer to finance a major city – with amenities like the Kennedy Center and the Washington Metro that can easily be paid for by beyond-Beltway taxpayers who gain no benefit from them. Eventually they become bureaucrat Xanadus, like Brasilia, Napyidaw (Burma) or Astana (Kazakhstan) in which government, freed from significant outside pressure, can indulge its fantasies at the expense of a people kept safely remote.
My new abode, New York’s Dutchess County, is only half as rich as Fairfax County, with commensurately lower house prices (yippee!) and only half the proportion of university graduates. While it has a couple of large businesses and several colleges, most of its richest inhabitants are successful used car dealers and realtors, whose depredations extend only to their customers. I look forward eagerly to its modest amenities.
SOURCE
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Major Israeli firm helping Iran?
You'd have to be a Clinton to think so
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday slapped sanctions on seven companies that allegedly do business with Iran – two of them companies with strong Israeli ties.
Among those singled out by Clinton for alleged business ties with Iran were the Ofer Brothers Group, controlled by Yuli Ofer, and the largest stockholder in Mizrachi-Tefachot Bank, and the Tanker Pacific group, located in Singapore and owned by Yuli's brother Sami Ofer, who also has a controlling interest in the Israel Corporation, Zim, Israel Chemicals, Dead Sea Industries, and Royal Carribean Cruise Lines.
The sanctions were imposed on shipping and utility companies suspected of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, which forbid selling ships or energy exploration equipment to Tehran. A State Department official said that the sanctions on the Ofers' companies date back to September 2010, when the companies allegedly transferred to Iran an oil tanker in a deal worth $8.65 million.
It would have been easy enough for the companies to investigate whether the people they sold the ship to were legal entities, but the fact that they did not indicates that they intended for the deal to go through, the State Department said.
In a statement, the Ofer brothers categorically denied the charges. “We have never sold ships to Iran, and well-respected Israeli officials will certify this,” the statement said.
SOURCE
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Iceland the inspiration
In April, the people of Iceland went to the polls, decisively rejecting a bailout of British and Dutch investors who lost billions in the Icesave bank in 2008. Iceland is the rare example of a nation that allowed its banks to fail in the wake of the financial crisis.
Now it appears to be an example for the whole world, and has inspired protests in Spain and Italy, a movement called M15. Some of the movement’s slogans include, “When we grow up we want to be Icelanders,” “don’t rescue the banks,” “let the culprits pay the crisis,” “banks rob us,” and “bipartisanship is dictatorship”.
While some in the media have characterized the movement as left-wing, it appears to be appealing to individuals across the political spectrum, young and old. One video promoting the movement spoke out against both of the major parties in Spain, the center-right Popular Party, and the leftist PSOE.
And dispelling the notion entirely, the group’s founding website, “Real Democracy Now,” articulates a broad message for folks of all political stripes: “Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic, and social outlook which we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.”
This all sounds quite familiar. In this narrow sense, M15 appears to at least in part resemble America’s tea party movement. It’s a revolutionary sentiment that surpasses party factions.
These protesters, like the tea party, oppose efforts to bail out international banks that bet poorly on housing and sovereign debt. They also recognize — and oppose — the tyranny of the few that has emerged in the wake of the sovereign debt crisis where financial institutions refuse to take any losses on their bad investments.
More HERE
****************************
The Left are still bashing GWB
Their "principles" are always changing but their hate is permanent
Last week I was called by Peter Stone of iWatch, the online ezine of the generally far left Center for Public Integrity. Mr. Stone asked for my opinion on the refusal of George W. Bush to attend the Obama festivities at Ground Zero after the killing of bin Laden. Mr. Stone suggested that Bush's excuse, 'other commitments,' was somehow dishonest given that he was in New York City a few days later giving several speeches at more $100,000.00 per. Stone did note as an aside that Clinton had also declined the Obama invitation citing the same excuse, and that he too was in the City shortly after giving equally lucrative speeches.
I responded that I thought it was inappropriate for Obama to be at Ground Zero considering that he had tried to get the Guantanamo prisoners, who have already admitted guilt, removed to civilian trials in Lower Manhattan. Also that Obama's self glorification was hypocritical since harsh interrogation had led to bin Ladin and Obama was still pursuing prosecutions against the very same CIA agents whose methods obtained that information.
I also emphasized to Stone that I would not want my comments to be part of a one sided denunciation of Bush, since, as he himself pointed out, Clinton was exploiting his ex-presidency in exactly the same way as Bush. Mr. Stone assured me that his piece was to be unbiased, critical of both.
Knowing the generally far left bias of Center of Public Integrity I of course had very low expectations, and I was not disappointed on reading Stone's column. His May 20 column was entitled: After Skipping Ground Zero Event With Obama, Bush Made Three Paid Speeches .
Microsoft Word informs me that Stone's article is 1051 words in length. All but three sentences of it are devoted to attacking G.W. Bush. As an additional example of 'lack of bias,' next to the column is a sidebar called "Top 10 Failures of the Bush Administration" with a live link to an article on that subject.
More HERE
****************************
ELSEWHERE
NY: Power company charges “flag fee” to town honoring war hero: "A New York community that displayed American flags on utility poles to honor a fallen hero is outraged after the Long Island Power Authority sent them a bill -- for using their poles. 'I was pretty shocked,' said Peter Reich, a councilman in the Long Island community of Shelter Island. 'It’s the most ludicrous thing.' The flags were hung last year for the funeral of Army 1st Lt. Joseph Theinert. The Shelter Island native was killed while on active duty in Afghanistan"
Will comparative effectiveness research kill more people than it helps?: "Better health care at lower cost. That's what comparative effectiveness research promises, but can it deliver? A new study argues that federal comparative effectiveness research won't generate cheaper, better medical care to the American public. Instead, it will force cuts in pharmaceutical and medical device research and development, resulting in 32 million lost years of life and economic losses totaling $1.7 trillion."
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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Martin Hutchinson below:
I have moved from Vienna, VA., a suburb of Washington DC to Poughkeepsie NY, a semi-suburb (it’s 73 miles away) of New York. Many have clearly regarded this as an eccentric choice, and much of the motivation stems from things like hating the Washington summer more than the Poughkeepsie winter that are personal to each of us. Nevertheless, there is also a philosophical background for the move, in that I believe the rapid growth of the Washington area to be profoundly unhealthy.
Washington’s unhealthiness has been highlighted during the Great Recession, for example by the housing market. Other regions of the country suffered a severe real estate price decline in 2006-09, except for a few places such as Houston that had not previously enjoyed a boom. The Washington area enjoyed an extraordinary 150% price gain in 2000-06 according to the S&P Case-Shiller data, third after the Miami and Los Angeles areas and more than Phoenix, San Francisco or Las Vegas. Unlike those other regions, however, its price decline in 2006-09 was considerably less, 33% compared to 47% in Miami, 56% in Las Vegas and 42% in Los Angeles. Then after 2009, the recovery in Washington was considerably stronger than in other areas, with prices now up 10% from the bottom and still continuing to rise while house prices in most other areas decline.
The explanation, of course, is that Washington is not on the same economic cycle as the rest of the country. There was some pretence in the late 1990s that northern Virginia had developed a substantial tech sector, but the reality was that most of the sector was either evanescent (like AOL) or highly dependent upon government contracting or, like MicroStrategy, both. The reality is that when government expands, Washington does well, and vice versa.
You can see this in its local real estate market also. There is very little housing dating from the 1920s, a major real estate boom era around most East Coast cities, but a period of well-run, economical government. Conversely, there is a vast amount of housing, generally rather small and unattractive with very mean rooms, dating from the New Deal and wartime 1930s and 1940s. The 1960s, genesis of the two houses we lived in around Vienna, produced the Great Society and another housing boom of rather larger houses, most of them shoddily built. Then the 1980s was another period of recession, when Washington house prices were far below those around New York and little building took place. Finally the Bush years, stretching into the Obama years, saw a massive building boom and the apotheosis of the Washington area McMansion – huge, shoddily built and packed tightly together on the suddenly expensive land.
Whereas the modest and unattractive 1940s housing was inhabited mostly by government bureaucrats when first built, as were the larger 1960s offerings and some of the more reasonable sized modern housing stock, the true market for McMansions was not those working in government, let alone private sector entrepreneurs but the parasites, the swarm of lobbyists (whose numbers doubled under the supposedly limited-government Bush) and lawyers who have come to dominate the big money around Washington. Like Detroit in 1900-1915, Washington in recent years has been a boomtown, and the creaking infrastructure and monstrous traffic delays are the result of this.
The other special feature of Washington life is the nature of its inhabitants. They have far higher academic qualifications than the rest of mankind, even those lucky residents of the up-market suburbs around New York and San Francisco. Fairfax County, Virginia has 55% college graduates, compared with 41% in Westchester County, New York and 51% in Marin County, California. Fairfax residents would argue that this factor justifies them in having the nation’s highest average household income -- $107,000, compared with a mere $79,000 in Westchester and $90,000 in Marin.
Washington area residents will argue that their greater qualifications justify their higher earnings, but from inspection the percentage of college graduates is not sufficiently higher in Fairfax than in the very affluent Marin County for any such premium to be justified. Furthermore, there is no living cost differential that would justify the income differential; indeed rather the opposite as the average owner-occupied residence in Marin is valued at $514,600 compared to $233,000 in Fairfax. Fairfax County real estate is overpriced – this was another reason for leaving the place – but is nothing like as lunatic economically as the fancier bits of California – or indeed south-east England.
As I have remarked before in these columns the Washington area is a kind of anti-Hollywood. Whereas Hollywood is full of people with room-temperature IQs but attractive looks and winsome personalities, the Washington area is full of PhD-credentialed trolls. Thus not only are the academic qualifications of Fairfax County not sufficiently superior to those of Marin County to justify their higher earnings, but Washington-area people are often seriously lacking in other qualifications that make for a commercially successful existence, such as looks, charm, salesmanship and workaholism. Plenty of insurance, real estate and used car salesmen lack substantial academic qualifications, but are nevertheless sufficiently well endowed in other respects to make very large amounts of money indeed, whatever their defects would be as GS-15s.
Washington is thus a region whose inhabitants are paid more than their qualifications are worth, do particularly well in recessions, and often lack the qualities that make them attractive to others. It is thus not surprising that they have little empathy with the travails of those outside Washington whose lives are entangled in the maelstrom of this very serious and damaging recession.
Far from maintaining sound monetary and fiscal policies, which would enable ordinary businesses to recover their footing and begin to grow again, they pursue a chimera of negative real interest rates and gigantic budget deficits that produces high bureaucrat employment, a surface health in financial markets, and long-term unemployment for everyone else.
Far from realizing that in a globalized world market, less skilled and older workers are especially vulnerable, they persistently refuse to enforce immigration laws, producing a large illegal immigrant population that can satisfy Fairfax County’s insatiable demand for maids and gardeners, while driving down wages and job opportunities for low-skill labor to Third World levels.
Far from attempting to relieve burdens on small business and allow them to produce the jobs that are needed, they produce a series of health, environmental and labor regulation schemes that impose massive additional costs on the businesses that produce the country’s wealth.
These impositions are not particularly generated by one or other political faction; they are the result of Washington’s cocooning from the rest of its countrymen. Washington insiders like Newt Gingrich, who has lived within the Beltway for thirty years, cross party lines to support these economically damaging schemes. Conversely a few “blue dog” Democrats whose ties remain outside Washington oppose them, like Joe Manchin (D.-W.Va.) who while campaigning for his West Virginia Senate seat took a shotgun to a copy of his own party’s cockamamie environmental legislation.
It is not surprising that outsiders find U.S. politics dysfunctional; it is dominated by a pampered super-class of lobbyists, lawyers, most politicians and senior bureaucrats, all of which are not only protected from the economic forces that afflict the rest of the economy but actually benefit, both relatively and in absolute terms, from hard times in the U.S. economy as a whole and the “stimulus” schemes for which they provide an excuse. The same effect can be seen in Brussels, when I knew it in the 1970s a very pleasant modestly wealthy capital of a small country with good restaurants, a fine banking system and legendarily affluent “Belgian dentists” who were the major investing force behind the early Eurobond market. Needless to say, Brussels is today richer per capita, but its wealthy now are not dentists but bureaucrats, lawyers and lobbyists, sleek, pampered and utterly cut off from the people for whom they invent damaging regulations.
The idea, pioneered by the Founding Fathers, of a capital city inhabited only by statesmen and bureaucrats, without any other significant economic base, is a very dangerous one. While government is small, it produces the quirky charm of nineteenth century Washington or 1949-99 Bonn – lacking as they did most big-city amenities, they were universally detested by their inhabitants, who left them at weekends whenever possible. However as government grows, it becomes itself a sufficiently large employer to finance a major city – with amenities like the Kennedy Center and the Washington Metro that can easily be paid for by beyond-Beltway taxpayers who gain no benefit from them. Eventually they become bureaucrat Xanadus, like Brasilia, Napyidaw (Burma) or Astana (Kazakhstan) in which government, freed from significant outside pressure, can indulge its fantasies at the expense of a people kept safely remote.
My new abode, New York’s Dutchess County, is only half as rich as Fairfax County, with commensurately lower house prices (yippee!) and only half the proportion of university graduates. While it has a couple of large businesses and several colleges, most of its richest inhabitants are successful used car dealers and realtors, whose depredations extend only to their customers. I look forward eagerly to its modest amenities.
SOURCE
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Major Israeli firm helping Iran?
You'd have to be a Clinton to think so
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday slapped sanctions on seven companies that allegedly do business with Iran – two of them companies with strong Israeli ties.
Among those singled out by Clinton for alleged business ties with Iran were the Ofer Brothers Group, controlled by Yuli Ofer, and the largest stockholder in Mizrachi-Tefachot Bank, and the Tanker Pacific group, located in Singapore and owned by Yuli's brother Sami Ofer, who also has a controlling interest in the Israel Corporation, Zim, Israel Chemicals, Dead Sea Industries, and Royal Carribean Cruise Lines.
The sanctions were imposed on shipping and utility companies suspected of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, which forbid selling ships or energy exploration equipment to Tehran. A State Department official said that the sanctions on the Ofers' companies date back to September 2010, when the companies allegedly transferred to Iran an oil tanker in a deal worth $8.65 million.
It would have been easy enough for the companies to investigate whether the people they sold the ship to were legal entities, but the fact that they did not indicates that they intended for the deal to go through, the State Department said.
In a statement, the Ofer brothers categorically denied the charges. “We have never sold ships to Iran, and well-respected Israeli officials will certify this,” the statement said.
SOURCE
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Iceland the inspiration
In April, the people of Iceland went to the polls, decisively rejecting a bailout of British and Dutch investors who lost billions in the Icesave bank in 2008. Iceland is the rare example of a nation that allowed its banks to fail in the wake of the financial crisis.
Now it appears to be an example for the whole world, and has inspired protests in Spain and Italy, a movement called M15. Some of the movement’s slogans include, “When we grow up we want to be Icelanders,” “don’t rescue the banks,” “let the culprits pay the crisis,” “banks rob us,” and “bipartisanship is dictatorship”.
While some in the media have characterized the movement as left-wing, it appears to be appealing to individuals across the political spectrum, young and old. One video promoting the movement spoke out against both of the major parties in Spain, the center-right Popular Party, and the leftist PSOE.
And dispelling the notion entirely, the group’s founding website, “Real Democracy Now,” articulates a broad message for folks of all political stripes: “Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic, and social outlook which we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.”
This all sounds quite familiar. In this narrow sense, M15 appears to at least in part resemble America’s tea party movement. It’s a revolutionary sentiment that surpasses party factions.
These protesters, like the tea party, oppose efforts to bail out international banks that bet poorly on housing and sovereign debt. They also recognize — and oppose — the tyranny of the few that has emerged in the wake of the sovereign debt crisis where financial institutions refuse to take any losses on their bad investments.
More HERE
****************************
The Left are still bashing GWB
Their "principles" are always changing but their hate is permanent
Last week I was called by Peter Stone of iWatch, the online ezine of the generally far left Center for Public Integrity. Mr. Stone asked for my opinion on the refusal of George W. Bush to attend the Obama festivities at Ground Zero after the killing of bin Laden. Mr. Stone suggested that Bush's excuse, 'other commitments,' was somehow dishonest given that he was in New York City a few days later giving several speeches at more $100,000.00 per. Stone did note as an aside that Clinton had also declined the Obama invitation citing the same excuse, and that he too was in the City shortly after giving equally lucrative speeches.
I responded that I thought it was inappropriate for Obama to be at Ground Zero considering that he had tried to get the Guantanamo prisoners, who have already admitted guilt, removed to civilian trials in Lower Manhattan. Also that Obama's self glorification was hypocritical since harsh interrogation had led to bin Ladin and Obama was still pursuing prosecutions against the very same CIA agents whose methods obtained that information.
I also emphasized to Stone that I would not want my comments to be part of a one sided denunciation of Bush, since, as he himself pointed out, Clinton was exploiting his ex-presidency in exactly the same way as Bush. Mr. Stone assured me that his piece was to be unbiased, critical of both.
Knowing the generally far left bias of Center of Public Integrity I of course had very low expectations, and I was not disappointed on reading Stone's column. His May 20 column was entitled: After Skipping Ground Zero Event With Obama, Bush Made Three Paid Speeches .
Microsoft Word informs me that Stone's article is 1051 words in length. All but three sentences of it are devoted to attacking G.W. Bush. As an additional example of 'lack of bias,' next to the column is a sidebar called "Top 10 Failures of the Bush Administration" with a live link to an article on that subject.
More HERE
****************************
ELSEWHERE
NY: Power company charges “flag fee” to town honoring war hero: "A New York community that displayed American flags on utility poles to honor a fallen hero is outraged after the Long Island Power Authority sent them a bill -- for using their poles. 'I was pretty shocked,' said Peter Reich, a councilman in the Long Island community of Shelter Island. 'It’s the most ludicrous thing.' The flags were hung last year for the funeral of Army 1st Lt. Joseph Theinert. The Shelter Island native was killed while on active duty in Afghanistan"
Will comparative effectiveness research kill more people than it helps?: "Better health care at lower cost. That's what comparative effectiveness research promises, but can it deliver? A new study argues that federal comparative effectiveness research won't generate cheaper, better medical care to the American public. Instead, it will force cuts in pharmaceutical and medical device research and development, resulting in 32 million lost years of life and economic losses totaling $1.7 trillion."
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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Tuesday, May 24, 2011
A small thought on automobiles
It's slightly mad but people generally seem to be saying something about themselves when they buy a partcular car. I drive a very humble 2004 Toyota Echo and I believe that says something about me -- or my Presbyterian upbringing: "Waste not, want not". I actually feel proud of my good sense in making my journeys at minimal cost in quite acceptable comfort. And the Echo is very zippy and I like zipping.
So why do people buy cars more expensive than mine that certainly get them there no faster than mine? I think ONE motive is to seek praise and admiration. An expensive car shows how rich the person is and he thinks that should be admired.
Problem. That doesn't seem to work:
So what should an admiration-seeker do? I discovered the answer to that quite by accident. As a conservative I rather like old things so some years ago I bought myself a 1963 Humber Super Snipe -- a grand old English car. It is a bit unreliable so I take it out only once a week for a longish drive but whenever I do I get heaps of praise and admiration! I get what the Ferrari driver wants! And the Humber cost way less than a Ferrari does. It just goes to show what all conservatives know: Life is complicated.
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Dependency and Votes
Thomas Sowell
Those who regard government "entitlement" programs as sacrosanct, and regard those who want to cut them back as calloused or cruel, picture a world very different from the world of reality.
To listen to some of the defenders of entitlement programs, which are at the heart of the present financial crisis, you might think that anything the government fails to provide is something that people will be deprived of. In other words, if you cut spending on school lunches, children will go hungry. If you fail to subsidize housing, people will be homeless. If you fail to subsidize prescription drugs, old people will have to eat dog food in order to be able to afford their meds.
This is the vision promoted by many politicians and much of the media. But, in the world of reality, it is not even true for most people who are living below the official poverty line.
Most Americans living below the official poverty line own a car or truck-- and government entitlement programs seldom provide cars and trucks. Most people living below the official poverty line also have air conditioning, color television and a microwave oven--and these too are not usually handed out by government entitlement programs.
Cell phones and other electronic devices are by no means unheard of in low-income neighborhoods, where children would supposedly go hungry if there were no school lunch programs. In reality, low-income people are overweight even more often than other Americans.
As for housing and homelessness, housing prices are higher and homelessness a bigger problem in places where there has been massive government intervention, such as liberal bastions like New York City and San Francisco. As for the elderly, 80 percent are homeowners whose monthly housing costs are less than $400, including property taxes, utilities, and maintenance.
The desperately poor elderly conjured up in political and media rhetoric are-- in the world of reality-- the wealthiest segment of the American population. The average wealth of older households is nearly three times the wealth of households headed by people in the 35 to 44-year-old bracket, and more than 15 times the wealth of households headed by someone under 35 years of age.
If the wealthiest segment of the population cannot pay their own medical bills, who can? The country as a whole is not any richer because the government pays our medical bills-- with money that it takes from us.
What about the truly poor, in whatever age brackets? First of all, even in low-income and high-crime neighborhoods, people are not stealing bread to feed their children. The fraction of the people in such neighborhoods who commit most of the crimes are far more likely to steal luxury products that they can either use or sell to get money to support their parasitic lifestyle.
As for the rest of the poor, Professor Walter Williams of George Mason University long ago showed that you could give the poor enough money to lift them all above the official poverty line for a fraction of what it costs to support a massive welfare state bureaucracy.
We don't need to send the country into bankruptcy, in the name of the poor, by spending trillions of dollars on people who are not poor, and who could take care of themselves. The poor have been used as human shields behind which the expanding welfare state can advance.
The goal is not to keep the poor from starving but to create dependency, because dependency translates into votes for politicians who play Santa Claus.
We have all heard the old saying about how giving a man a fish feeds him for a day, while teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. Independence makes for a healthier society, but dependency is what gets votes for politicians.
For politicians, giving a man a fish every day of his life is the way to keep getting his vote. "Entitlement" is just a fancy word for dependency. As for the scary stories politicians tell, in order to keep the entitlement programs going, as long as we keep buying it, they will keep selling it.
SOURCE
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When It Comes to Doomsdays, the Left Shouldn't Laugh at the Religious
Dennis Prager
It appears that the Rapture leading to the end of the world predicted by a Christian radio broadcaster for this past Saturday, May 21, 2011 did not take place. And the failure was covered worldwide. A Google search on Saturday evening, Pacific Time, yielded more than 32,000 articles -- in English alone -- in the world media.
The secular, especially the anti-religious, left, enjoy these spectacles of religious foolishness. They seem to confirm for them not only how absurd these end-of-days predictions are, but how absurd religion is in general.
But the left should not laugh too loudly. The religious world has far fewer doomsday predictions than the left does. At least every few years, the secular-left frightens itself -- and tries to frighten everyone else -- about another doomsday scenario.
The most obvious current example is, of course, global warming. For years now, we have been told by the world's left-wing media that scientists are united in predicting that there will be worldwide catastrophe as a result of global warming caused by manmade carbon dioxide emissions. Oceans will rise so high that they will drown many of the world's great coastal cities; entire island-countries will disappear; vast areas of the world will dry up; and countries will fight one another for the little remaining fresh water.
Compared to the global warming scenario, I'll face the Rapture -- and I'm not even Christian.
Of course, none of these global warming predictions has materialized. For example, in April of this year, Der Spiegel reported:
"Six years ago, the United Nations issued a dramatic warning that the world would have to cope with 50 million climate refugees by 2010. But now that those migration flows have failed to materialize, the UN has distanced itself from the forecasts. On the contrary, populations are growing in the regions that had been identified as environmental danger zones."
As a result of so many such false alarms, and because so many places have experienced record cold temperatures, global warming has been renamed "climate change."
But global warming is only the most recent doomsday scenario offered by the left. Here is a small sample of some others:
Recall the Time and Newsweek cover stories about how heterosexual AIDS would become a national plague -- since "AIDS doesn't discriminate." Skeptics who said at the time that heterosexual AIDS in America was largely a scare were called "anti-science." But Michael Fumento, the science writer who wrote "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS," first in Commentary Magazine and then as a book, turned out to be right. In America, it was a myth.
At the Democrat National Convention in 2000, the Democrats featured five children ages about 5 to 11 who recited lyrics about the doomsdays they could look forward to growing up in America. The first child, for example, said this:
"When I grow up ... Will I be able to see a rainbow in a smog-filled sky? Will there be any trees alive?"
In his 1968 book, "The Population Bomb," Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich wrote: "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."
Another doomsday prophecy from the left: Two prominent feminist writers, Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf wrote in their bestselling books, "Revolution from Within" and "The Beauty Myth" -- and the news media reported -- that 150,000 girls and women per year die of anorexia nervosa. The number is actually fewer than 100.
There is one major difference between leftist and religious doomsday scenarios. The religious readily acknowledge that their doomsday scenario is built entirely on faith. The left, on the other hand, claims that its doomsday scenarios are entirely built on science.
That there is little truth to the left-wing claim is not as important as the fact that these doomsday scenarios have undermined the status of science. How many scientists have been compromised by their joining the research-money and fame bandwagons of left-wing apocalyptic predictions? And how has this affected the public's perceptions of science and scientists when it comes to contentious issues?
SOURCE
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Israel has much more in common with Christian civilization than with the Muslim horror or with the impossible dreams of the Left
Israel was always one of us: a constituent member, that is to say, of the community of civilized nations. Losing Israel as a member of that community would be like losing Nebraska or Pennsylvania or Georgia. It would be far worse, indeed, than losing "people's paradises" like San Francisco or Cambridge, Mass.
This isn't at all the way that President Obama sees things. To the president, Israel is a trouble spot -- a running sore on the international carcass. Heal the sore and you've got peace. The idea is, have Israel offer to retreat, by and large, behind its pre-Six Day War lines, making room thereby for a Palestinian state.
The improbability of that vision -- or delusion -- is to be glimpsed by looking around the neighborhood. Who is rioting or repressing? The Egyptians. The Syrians. The Libyans. This is to speak only of the currently noisier nations.
When was the last time we saw throngs of Israelis filling public squares to call for their leaders' ouster or demise? When was the last time we saw Israeli security forces shooting down unarmed demonstrators? The answer to both questions is the same: We haven't ever seen it. It hasn't happened. Massacres in the Middle East are a phenomenon we see outside Israel, not within.
"Why" isn't a question that needs to be asked or answered right now. The fact of Israel's unique standing in the Middle East is the matter in need of underscoring. Israel's and the United States' long-standing cordiality -- a condition the president is not precisely promoting by leaning on Benjamin Netanyahu instead of the terrorist gang Hamas -- is based only partly on the solidarity of American Jew with Israeli Jew. It is based only partly on the perception of particular evangelical Christians that the convergence of the Jews in Judea and Samaria somehow betokens fulfillment of biblical prophecies.
A bigger reason for the cordiality of which I speak concerns basic values. Israel's civic values are recognizable as Western values -- love of freedom, dislike of tyranny; willingness to lay lives on the line in defense of both values.
Americans who favor the Palestinian side in Middle Eastern controversies over Israeli settlements on the West Bank and the like generally belong to the political left. They don't themselves particularly like the traditional America. They less prefer the American "exceptionalism" that so much resembles Israeli "exceptionalism."
It's Israel's enemies and critics on whom we ought to keep our gaze as we evaluate the president's proposals. Not many of these critics are of the old, irrational anti-Semitic right.
More noticeable are the kind -- you see them in left-wing religious circles and in hard-core secular environments -- who rarely have a good word to say for Western history or Western values; who tend to view the United States as a sinister presence abroad, doing more harm than good.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
McDonald's Chief Exec Comes To Ronald's Defense: "During last week's annual shareholders' meeting, McDonald's chief exec Jim Skinner dismissed a letter from a group of 550 healthcare workers asking the fast food chain to stop marketing to children using methods such as toys and the clown. "Ronald McDonald is going nowhere," Skinner told the assembly. Shareholders also rejected a proposal for the company to issue a report outlining its role in childhood obesity. The board of directors opposed the motion, saying it offered a variety of food to its customers, provided nutrition information about the food, and communicated with children "in a responsible manner through age appropriate marketing and promotional activities" Skinner said, "This is about choice and we believe in the democratic process." Regarding demands that the company's clown icon be retired, Skinner added: "As the face of Ronald McDonald House Charities, Ronald is an ambassador for good and delivers important messages to kids on safety, literacy and balanced, active lifestyles"
A bigger cutter: "Republican 2012 presidential hopeful Gary Johnson believes the GOP's unpopular blueprint to replace Medicare with a subsidies system should cut even deeper, and he isn’t shy about saying so. 'As president I would sign the plan into law, because it does move forward on the issue,' the former governor of New Mexico told Raw Story in a wide-ranging interview. 'But I think it doesn’t go far enough.' So, what would Johnson do? He would do to Medicare what the House-passed plan by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) does to Medicaid: turn the program into block grants for states"
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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's slightly mad but people generally seem to be saying something about themselves when they buy a partcular car. I drive a very humble 2004 Toyota Echo and I believe that says something about me -- or my Presbyterian upbringing: "Waste not, want not". I actually feel proud of my good sense in making my journeys at minimal cost in quite acceptable comfort. And the Echo is very zippy and I like zipping.
So why do people buy cars more expensive than mine that certainly get them there no faster than mine? I think ONE motive is to seek praise and admiration. An expensive car shows how rich the person is and he thinks that should be admired.
Problem. That doesn't seem to work:
Car envy is causing bad behaviour on Queensland roads, researchers have found. A University of Queensland study revealed that nothing gets drivers' blood boiling more than the sight of someone in a fancy car trying to push into the queue.
PhD student Redzo Mujcic and economics professor Paul Frijters analysed the behaviour of 1000 Brisbane commuters at selected intersections and roundabouts. Commuters had the option to let someone from a side road enter the main road.
"People compare themselves to others and the perception of status has an impact on how commuters behave," Mr Mujcic said. "The study showed that drivers in cheaper cars were quite unlikely to stop for drivers of luxury cars."
The study found drivers of the cheapest cars were least likely to let another driver merge ahead of them, with the drivers of prestige cars only slightly more courteous. The most thoughtful drivers were those who owned vehicles of average value.
More HERE
So what should an admiration-seeker do? I discovered the answer to that quite by accident. As a conservative I rather like old things so some years ago I bought myself a 1963 Humber Super Snipe -- a grand old English car. It is a bit unreliable so I take it out only once a week for a longish drive but whenever I do I get heaps of praise and admiration! I get what the Ferrari driver wants! And the Humber cost way less than a Ferrari does. It just goes to show what all conservatives know: Life is complicated.
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Dependency and Votes
Thomas Sowell
Those who regard government "entitlement" programs as sacrosanct, and regard those who want to cut them back as calloused or cruel, picture a world very different from the world of reality.
To listen to some of the defenders of entitlement programs, which are at the heart of the present financial crisis, you might think that anything the government fails to provide is something that people will be deprived of. In other words, if you cut spending on school lunches, children will go hungry. If you fail to subsidize housing, people will be homeless. If you fail to subsidize prescription drugs, old people will have to eat dog food in order to be able to afford their meds.
This is the vision promoted by many politicians and much of the media. But, in the world of reality, it is not even true for most people who are living below the official poverty line.
Most Americans living below the official poverty line own a car or truck-- and government entitlement programs seldom provide cars and trucks. Most people living below the official poverty line also have air conditioning, color television and a microwave oven--and these too are not usually handed out by government entitlement programs.
Cell phones and other electronic devices are by no means unheard of in low-income neighborhoods, where children would supposedly go hungry if there were no school lunch programs. In reality, low-income people are overweight even more often than other Americans.
As for housing and homelessness, housing prices are higher and homelessness a bigger problem in places where there has been massive government intervention, such as liberal bastions like New York City and San Francisco. As for the elderly, 80 percent are homeowners whose monthly housing costs are less than $400, including property taxes, utilities, and maintenance.
The desperately poor elderly conjured up in political and media rhetoric are-- in the world of reality-- the wealthiest segment of the American population. The average wealth of older households is nearly three times the wealth of households headed by people in the 35 to 44-year-old bracket, and more than 15 times the wealth of households headed by someone under 35 years of age.
If the wealthiest segment of the population cannot pay their own medical bills, who can? The country as a whole is not any richer because the government pays our medical bills-- with money that it takes from us.
What about the truly poor, in whatever age brackets? First of all, even in low-income and high-crime neighborhoods, people are not stealing bread to feed their children. The fraction of the people in such neighborhoods who commit most of the crimes are far more likely to steal luxury products that they can either use or sell to get money to support their parasitic lifestyle.
As for the rest of the poor, Professor Walter Williams of George Mason University long ago showed that you could give the poor enough money to lift them all above the official poverty line for a fraction of what it costs to support a massive welfare state bureaucracy.
We don't need to send the country into bankruptcy, in the name of the poor, by spending trillions of dollars on people who are not poor, and who could take care of themselves. The poor have been used as human shields behind which the expanding welfare state can advance.
The goal is not to keep the poor from starving but to create dependency, because dependency translates into votes for politicians who play Santa Claus.
We have all heard the old saying about how giving a man a fish feeds him for a day, while teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. Independence makes for a healthier society, but dependency is what gets votes for politicians.
For politicians, giving a man a fish every day of his life is the way to keep getting his vote. "Entitlement" is just a fancy word for dependency. As for the scary stories politicians tell, in order to keep the entitlement programs going, as long as we keep buying it, they will keep selling it.
SOURCE
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When It Comes to Doomsdays, the Left Shouldn't Laugh at the Religious
Dennis Prager
It appears that the Rapture leading to the end of the world predicted by a Christian radio broadcaster for this past Saturday, May 21, 2011 did not take place. And the failure was covered worldwide. A Google search on Saturday evening, Pacific Time, yielded more than 32,000 articles -- in English alone -- in the world media.
The secular, especially the anti-religious, left, enjoy these spectacles of religious foolishness. They seem to confirm for them not only how absurd these end-of-days predictions are, but how absurd religion is in general.
But the left should not laugh too loudly. The religious world has far fewer doomsday predictions than the left does. At least every few years, the secular-left frightens itself -- and tries to frighten everyone else -- about another doomsday scenario.
The most obvious current example is, of course, global warming. For years now, we have been told by the world's left-wing media that scientists are united in predicting that there will be worldwide catastrophe as a result of global warming caused by manmade carbon dioxide emissions. Oceans will rise so high that they will drown many of the world's great coastal cities; entire island-countries will disappear; vast areas of the world will dry up; and countries will fight one another for the little remaining fresh water.
Compared to the global warming scenario, I'll face the Rapture -- and I'm not even Christian.
Of course, none of these global warming predictions has materialized. For example, in April of this year, Der Spiegel reported:
"Six years ago, the United Nations issued a dramatic warning that the world would have to cope with 50 million climate refugees by 2010. But now that those migration flows have failed to materialize, the UN has distanced itself from the forecasts. On the contrary, populations are growing in the regions that had been identified as environmental danger zones."
As a result of so many such false alarms, and because so many places have experienced record cold temperatures, global warming has been renamed "climate change."
But global warming is only the most recent doomsday scenario offered by the left. Here is a small sample of some others:
Recall the Time and Newsweek cover stories about how heterosexual AIDS would become a national plague -- since "AIDS doesn't discriminate." Skeptics who said at the time that heterosexual AIDS in America was largely a scare were called "anti-science." But Michael Fumento, the science writer who wrote "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS," first in Commentary Magazine and then as a book, turned out to be right. In America, it was a myth.
At the Democrat National Convention in 2000, the Democrats featured five children ages about 5 to 11 who recited lyrics about the doomsdays they could look forward to growing up in America. The first child, for example, said this:
"When I grow up ... Will I be able to see a rainbow in a smog-filled sky? Will there be any trees alive?"
In his 1968 book, "The Population Bomb," Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich wrote: "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."
Another doomsday prophecy from the left: Two prominent feminist writers, Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf wrote in their bestselling books, "Revolution from Within" and "The Beauty Myth" -- and the news media reported -- that 150,000 girls and women per year die of anorexia nervosa. The number is actually fewer than 100.
There is one major difference between leftist and religious doomsday scenarios. The religious readily acknowledge that their doomsday scenario is built entirely on faith. The left, on the other hand, claims that its doomsday scenarios are entirely built on science.
That there is little truth to the left-wing claim is not as important as the fact that these doomsday scenarios have undermined the status of science. How many scientists have been compromised by their joining the research-money and fame bandwagons of left-wing apocalyptic predictions? And how has this affected the public's perceptions of science and scientists when it comes to contentious issues?
SOURCE
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Israel has much more in common with Christian civilization than with the Muslim horror or with the impossible dreams of the Left
Israel was always one of us: a constituent member, that is to say, of the community of civilized nations. Losing Israel as a member of that community would be like losing Nebraska or Pennsylvania or Georgia. It would be far worse, indeed, than losing "people's paradises" like San Francisco or Cambridge, Mass.
This isn't at all the way that President Obama sees things. To the president, Israel is a trouble spot -- a running sore on the international carcass. Heal the sore and you've got peace. The idea is, have Israel offer to retreat, by and large, behind its pre-Six Day War lines, making room thereby for a Palestinian state.
The improbability of that vision -- or delusion -- is to be glimpsed by looking around the neighborhood. Who is rioting or repressing? The Egyptians. The Syrians. The Libyans. This is to speak only of the currently noisier nations.
When was the last time we saw throngs of Israelis filling public squares to call for their leaders' ouster or demise? When was the last time we saw Israeli security forces shooting down unarmed demonstrators? The answer to both questions is the same: We haven't ever seen it. It hasn't happened. Massacres in the Middle East are a phenomenon we see outside Israel, not within.
"Why" isn't a question that needs to be asked or answered right now. The fact of Israel's unique standing in the Middle East is the matter in need of underscoring. Israel's and the United States' long-standing cordiality -- a condition the president is not precisely promoting by leaning on Benjamin Netanyahu instead of the terrorist gang Hamas -- is based only partly on the solidarity of American Jew with Israeli Jew. It is based only partly on the perception of particular evangelical Christians that the convergence of the Jews in Judea and Samaria somehow betokens fulfillment of biblical prophecies.
A bigger reason for the cordiality of which I speak concerns basic values. Israel's civic values are recognizable as Western values -- love of freedom, dislike of tyranny; willingness to lay lives on the line in defense of both values.
Americans who favor the Palestinian side in Middle Eastern controversies over Israeli settlements on the West Bank and the like generally belong to the political left. They don't themselves particularly like the traditional America. They less prefer the American "exceptionalism" that so much resembles Israeli "exceptionalism."
It's Israel's enemies and critics on whom we ought to keep our gaze as we evaluate the president's proposals. Not many of these critics are of the old, irrational anti-Semitic right.
More noticeable are the kind -- you see them in left-wing religious circles and in hard-core secular environments -- who rarely have a good word to say for Western history or Western values; who tend to view the United States as a sinister presence abroad, doing more harm than good.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
McDonald's Chief Exec Comes To Ronald's Defense: "During last week's annual shareholders' meeting, McDonald's chief exec Jim Skinner dismissed a letter from a group of 550 healthcare workers asking the fast food chain to stop marketing to children using methods such as toys and the clown. "Ronald McDonald is going nowhere," Skinner told the assembly. Shareholders also rejected a proposal for the company to issue a report outlining its role in childhood obesity. The board of directors opposed the motion, saying it offered a variety of food to its customers, provided nutrition information about the food, and communicated with children "in a responsible manner through age appropriate marketing and promotional activities" Skinner said, "This is about choice and we believe in the democratic process." Regarding demands that the company's clown icon be retired, Skinner added: "As the face of Ronald McDonald House Charities, Ronald is an ambassador for good and delivers important messages to kids on safety, literacy and balanced, active lifestyles"
A bigger cutter: "Republican 2012 presidential hopeful Gary Johnson believes the GOP's unpopular blueprint to replace Medicare with a subsidies system should cut even deeper, and he isn’t shy about saying so. 'As president I would sign the plan into law, because it does move forward on the issue,' the former governor of New Mexico told Raw Story in a wide-ranging interview. 'But I think it doesn’t go far enough.' So, what would Johnson do? He would do to Medicare what the House-passed plan by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) does to Medicaid: turn the program into block grants for states"
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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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