Being a progressive: The benefits
It must be nice being a progressive. You live in a never-never adolescent world of blithe intellectual freedom. You can take one position after another, with nary a thought to the consequences nor to any principles.
First of all, there are those very names; progressive and also liberal. They have such a nice, kind ring to them. Isn’t everyone in favor of progress? And liberals are so open-minded; you certainly don’t want to be thought of as closed minded, now do you?
Those are the first steps in their deceptions. Progressives are the true regressives for they believe in stifling the human spirit and liberals are not open-minded. They have no interest in freedom. It’s hard to discern any true principals that guide liberals. As William F. Buckley, Jr. once observed, he’d read many histories of liberalism and its development but never a set of principles. Quite so. Liberals just are interested in dreaming up government solutions to problems, whether they exist or not. Thus, Hillary Clinton warned us about ‘the silent crisis’ of daycare; so silent no one knew it existed but it required a federal solution and Lyndon Johnson was able to ram Medicare through Congress despite scant evidence that the elderly were wanting for medical care.
For any kind of a problem, liberals and progressives immediately develop a solution. Their solutions always require funds and personnel for the original purpose and then expand from there. Along the way, they look for other related problems for intervention. Thus, schools and medical care, inevitably require intervention in books, buildings, food and various equipment, just for starters. Eventually, nothing will be beyond their purview.
Of course, since problems are part of the human condition, intervention is open-ended but liberals exhibit no concern about that; they relish it. They are empowered with the endless expansion. And they will also not admit that the end point is government control of all aspects of society, as in communism.
Buckley also wrote a column mentioning The Communist Manifesto and I realized that I had never read it. So, I borrowed a copy from the library and read it. It was a revelation. Today, I have my own copy on a bookshelf and thumb through it from time to time but only when necessary.
Anybody who’s ever read it is impressed that anyone has ever read it. It is a plodding, numbing, sure-fire cure for insomnia, screed. I am an avid reader but it is a chore with not one rhetorically interesting passage. About two thirds of the way through it, is Marx’s ten point agenda for the communization of society. This is it:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of wasteland, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc., etc.
I was astonished when I realized that every single last one is in place in this country, to a greater or lesser extent.
Here in Jacksonville, Florida, I developed an e-mail list of progressives from local hosts of a progressive talk radio station. I sent them that list of Marxist proposals and asked them which, if any, they disagreed with. Only two of them rejected one plank each. When I requested they reject another, I received no responses.
I have no doubt that no progressive will reject more than one of these yet, if you suggest the obvious conclusion, namely that in his heart, he agrees with communism, you will be met with howls of indignation and accusations of McCarthyism. Yet the conclusion is inescapable.
Despite their sensitivity to this, they never hesitate to call those who disagree with them the worst names. Thus, fascist, racist, greedy, insensitive and Nazi are just a few of the choice adjectives they use in their opprobrium. This has been noted by Thomas Sowell in a recent column wherein he writes, “Anyone who studies the history of ideas should notice how much more often people on the political left, more so than others, denigrate and demonize those who disagree with them - instead of answering their arguments.”
One problem with their labels is that the Nazis were really progressives in every sense of the word, yet today’s progressives never admit it. Adolf Hitler’s party was The National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Nazi was a contraction of nationalsozialistischer, the German word for national socialist and socialists or progressives they were.
Further, although today’s progressives vaunt their wellspring from the early decades of the twentieth century, none talk about those progressives’ enthusiasm for Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini; with a very few exceptions, they were unanimous in their admiration for those three demigods of brutality and butchery. Hitler to them was another great new leader to admire for the brave new world of the great new progressive century which, not coincidentally, went on to be the bloodiest in history.
Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a raging racist yet that is all forgotten and she is prominent on the list of influential progressives of the twentieth century, as compiled by Peter Drucker in The Nation magazine. She and many on her original board were open admirers of Adolf Hitler, including his eugenics work that led to the Holocaust, yet, you cannot get any liberal to admit that she was both a racist and progressive.
Progressives are shielded, immunized, forever from their associations. Thus two of the most reprehensible radicals from the 1960s were Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. At the time of the Tate-LaBianca murders, Dohrn said this about the Manson cult members, “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!” If it was Sharon Tate’s stomach, that fork might have penetrated the eight-month fetus she was carrying. Ayers has often said that his only regret over the violence he was part of at that time, was that he had not done more!
Dohrn was Ayer’s paramour and is now his wife. Barack Obama initiated his first political campaign in their living room, yet was not challenged once on it by the media. These two people are among the vilest in America. No conservative or libertarian would ever have been let off the hook that easily.
When I circulated that quote from Dohrn to the hosts of that Jacksonville progressive talk radio station, with that fact and the comment that progressives are such wonderful people, I received a demand from one of the hosts to be removed from the mailing list. Mind you, it wasn’t a rebuttal, or a rejection; he simply didn’t confront the issue, as Sowell noted is the propensity of progressives.
And finally, they always elude any responsibility for their failures. Like Stalin, they know the shortcomings must be the fault of others who are insufficiently committed the mission.
And so it goes. Progressives continue to lecture the world and be our conscience. Their programs and they themselves, are never failures; they shift the blame to others. And when the horrors emerge, as with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc., they blame that on someone else. Heads they win, tails their opponents lose.
It must be so nice to be a progressive and a liberal.
SOURCE
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Islamist hatred for Jews and new dangers to Israel
The Muslim Brotherhood did not initiate the current upheavals in the Middle East, but the Islamist parties in Egypt, as in Tunisia and Libya, have been the chief beneficiaries of the collapse of long-standing authoritarian repressive regimes across North Africa.
In Egypt itself, the two largest Islamist groups (the Brotherhood and the Salafists) won about three quarters of the ballots in the second round of legislative elections held in December 2011, while the secular and the liberal forces took a battering. The Brotherhood (which garnered over 40% of the votes) is an organization founded by an Egyptian schoolteacher, Hassan el Banna, back in 1928. It has never deviated from its founder’s central axiom: “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Koran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
It is this radical vision which animates all those in the region who seek a fully Islamic society and way of life.
The Muslim Brotherhood has always been deeply anti-Western, viscerally hostile to Israel and openly anti-Semitic - points usually downplayed in Western commentary on the “Arab Spring.” Indeed, the anti-Jewish conspiracy theories promoted by the Brotherhood and its affiliated preachers are in a class of their own.
This is especially true of Egyptian-born Yusuf al-Qaradawi, undoubtedly the most celebrated Muslim Brotherhood cleric in the world. The still vigorous 84-year-old, often misleadingly depicted in the West as a “moderate,” flew in from Qatar to Cairo’s Tahrir Square on February 18, 2011 to lead a million-strong crowd in Friday prayers, thereby ending 50 years of exile from his native land. He called for pluralistic democracy in Egypt while at the same time offering the hope “that Almighty Allah will also please me with the conquest of the al-Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem.)”
Two years earlier, in a notorious commentary on Al-Jazeera TV, the “moderate” Qaradawi had provided religious justification for both past and future Holocausts:”
“Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the Jews people who would punish them for their corruption…The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them - even though they exaggerated this issue - he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them…Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers.
In other words, the loathing of Jews, the Holocaust and the destruction of Israel by Muslims were linked by Qaradawi as things mandated by God himself.
‘Kill all Jews’
Regarding Israel and the Jews, fundamentalist Muslim attitudes have never deviated since the 1940s. Islamist ideologues, despite their virulent anti-Westernism, have had no problem in drawing on Western sources for their radical anti- Semitism – whether these libels come from Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery, Henry Ford’s The International Jew, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, fantasies about Judeo-Masonic plots, or have their origin in Christian anti-Talmudism, medieval blood-libels and the slanders of contemporary or Holocaust deniers in America and Europe.
The current swelling of Islamist ranks within Egypt and across the Arab world has hardly improved matters. At a vocal Muslim Brotherhood rally in Cairo’s most prominent mosque on November 25, 2011, Islamic activists ominously chanted “Tel Aviv, judgment day has come,” vowing to “one day kill all Jews.”
The rally, which sought to promote the “battle against Jerusalem’s judaization,” was peppered with hate-filled speeches about the “treacherous Jews.” There were explicit calls for Jihad and liberating all of Palestine as well as references to a well-known hadith concerning the future Muslim annihilation of the Jews. Dr. Ahmed al-Tayeb, the head of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University (the most senior clerical authority in Sunni Islam) even claimed that Jews throughout the world were seeking to prevent Egyptian and Islamic unity, as well as trying to “Judaize al-Quds (Jerusalem).”
This kind of incitement and the pressure from the Egyptian street does not mean that the fragile peace treaty with Israel will be cancelled overnight. But calls for such a step have been repeatedly heard in recent months even from the “liberal” and more “progressive” sectors of the political spectrum as well as from the Islamist parties.
Dr. Rashad Bayoumi, the deputy leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, bluntly told the Arabic daily al-Hayat on the first day of 2012 that his organization will never “recognize Israel at all”, whatever the circumstances. Israel, he emphasized, was a “criminal enemy” with whom Egypt should never have signed a peace treaty in the first place. If this treaty is not to be abrogated, much will depend on the United States making clear to Egypt how dire the economic and political consequences for its wellbeing would be.
It is particularly chilling to note that the Islamic wave already dominates not only in Iran, which is on the verge of nuclear weapons, but also in Turkey, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, the Gaza Strip under Hamas and the Lebanese state, currently in the iron grip of Hezbollah.
Apart from seeking to impose Sharia law, and to further downgrade the status of women – while repressing Copts and other non-Muslim minorities – the neo-Islamist movements and regimes remain as determined as ever to wipe out Israel and to radically reduce American influence in the region. Needless to say, like the Brotherhood itself, Islamists consider themselves to be the sole authentic interpreters of the divine will.
In the face of this mounting fundamentalist danger, Israel has no choice but to consolidate its deterrent capacity, close ranks and treat with the upmost skepticism any siren voices calling on it to take unreasonable “risks for peace." At the same time it will have to develop a new regional strategy that takes into account the seismic changes currently shaking the Middle East.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
MLK’s public philosophy of freedom: "The free society as understood by classical liberals stresses the protection of the freedom of the citizenry with a suitably framed legal system, while the society fashioned by modern liberals stresses government’s providing to people what they are said to need by way of confiscatory taxation for this purpose. It seems to me that Dr. King was talking about the former kind of freedom, freedom from the oppressive acts of most whites toward most blacks, for example."
NH: Same-sex marriage faces repeal test: "The same-sex marriage movement is about to face a critical test, as New Hampshire lawmakers prepare to vote on a proposal to repeal the state's 2009 gay marriage law. With a vote expected on the House floor as early as Wednesday, foes and supporters of the law are clashing in a battle over whether New Hampshire will be the first state to reverse the tide of same-sex marriage with a legislative vote."
The War on Drugs is “the new Jim Crow”: "Blacks are hit harder by the War on Drugs at least partly because their drugs of choice are more likely to be illegal. Tossing back a couple of shots of bourbon is an adult thing to do. Smoking a joint is a crime. I think the racial profiling argument has merit too. Despite the title of Alexander’s book, many people aren’t colorblind, and that includes people in law enforcement"
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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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Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
My take on an ancient controversy
The Roman Catholic church claims special authority for itself on account of the alleged fact that the disciple Peter was the first Bishop of Rome and that Christ had given Peter special powers that Peter passed on to later bishops of Rome. The Bishop of Rome is these days referred to as the Pope, which simply means "father". So there are 3 claims there in need of validation.
1). There is no mention in the NT that Peter was ever in Rome. It was Paul who went to Rome according to the NT. But could Peter have followed on later? If so, such an important event would surely have been noted somewhere at the time in the 1st century. The Catholic Encyclopedia can rustle up just 3 alleged 1st century references:
It should be obvious that these are all weak reeds to lean upon.
What did Clement mean by "amongst". That it meant "in Rome" is just one interpretation. Since Clement was bishop of Rome, however, it may be this selfsame sly allusion that gave rise to the later belief that Peter reached Rome. As Bishop of Rome, Clement would have an obvious interest in fostering such a myth.
I pass over the second "reference" in polite silence.
The third reference asserts that there were no Christians in Babylon at the time. But there certainly were Jews and the famous Babylonian Talmud eventually emerged as the product of their deliberations. So it is entirely plausible that Peter did go there in an attempt to make converts and had some success. So this passage too is no proof of anything.
I would have entertained the idea that "Babylon" was symbolic if the reference had come from a sometimes gnostic writer like St. John but Peter writes a perfectly straightforward book of instructions. I think we must take him at his word. He went to Babylon, not Rome.
2). Special powers conferred? The basis for this claim is the passage in Matthew 16:18. "And Jesus answering said to him: Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona: because flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in heaven. And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven."
Transliterating the relevant Greek of the original we get: "ou ei petros kai epi tautee tee petra oikodomeeso mou teen ekkleesian". That shows that Christ was using two different words for Peter and the rock upon which he was to build his "church'. He was making a distinction, not an equation. I go into more detail about the Greek passage here
An issue seldom addressed, however, is that Christ spoke Aramaic, not Greek. So what we read in Matthew is itself a translation. So what was Christ most likely to have been saying in Aramaic?
Alfred Persson has done the most extensive exploration of the Aramaic background to the text but he really rambles on so I will try to summarize: He points out that "petros" is the Aramaic word for "firstborn" but that it was also known at the time (educated Israelites at the time spoke Greek, as indeed did educated Romans) that the same word in Greek meant "rock". So Jesus was using that known double meaning to make a point vivid.
What point? What was the rock upon which he would build his group of followers? That is no mystery at all. There are numerous references in the NT which equate Jesus's TEACHINGS with a rock -- e.g. Matthew 7:24; 1 Corinthians 10:4. So Jesus expected his teachings to form the foundation of a new group. He was certainly right about that! To encourage his followers, Jesus then goes on to say that the wisdom he imparts is very special indeed. It will give his followers entry into the kingdom of heaven. So the new group will be a privileged one indeed. Orthodox teachings among the Israelites at the time foresaw a resurrection to life on earth, not a transformation into spirit beings.
But what about: "And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven."? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Catholics claim that the passage gives Christians on earth the power to control events in Heaven. But that is surely absurd. Christ was surely saying that his teachings are an accurate guide to what has already been bound or loosed in Heaven.
3). But say we ignore all of the above and concede that Peter was given some special power. Where is there any statement or evidence in Christ's words that this power could be passed on? There is none. So all three of the Roman claims are mere assertions with no obvious truth value.
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Where Have All the Liberals Gone
Where are two conservatives for every liberal in America. That's the message of a recent David Brooks column as well as a Gallup survey. I think the imbalance is much starker. I would guess there are four conservatives for every liberal. Maybe even more.
Here's a test I invite you to take. Watch C-Span's morning call-in show and listen to what people who phone in on the "Democrat" or "liberal" line have to say. When is the last time you heard a caller say, "We should all pay higher taxes so that the government can provide us with universal day care"? Or how about, "We should all pay higher taxes so the government can provide us with universal long term care"? I bet you can't remember ever hearing that.
Here is what I suspect you will hear: Teachers complaining that teachers aren't paid enough. Union members complaining about competition from workers overseas. Senior citizens whining about the meagerness of Social Security or Medicare benefits. Minority callers advocating more affirmative action. And what is the common denominator of these comments? Self-interest.
Yes, I know. Special interests are in both parties. Why wouldn't they be? Yet as I wrote in my analysis of "progressivism," the left in America has elevated special interest privilege to an art form.
Here's the point: people wanting more, more, more are nothing more than people pursuing their own self interest in politics. They are not in principle different from any other special interest group. Importantly, they have nothing in common with what we normally have in mind by the term "liberalism."
There is a reason for that. There are very few people around who want to give government more power over their money, their property or their lives. And Brooks is probably right about the reason why: Most people don't trust government. In fact, only 10 percent trust the government to do the right thing most of the time, according to opinion polls.
Here is a second test. Keep watching C-Span. After the outside callers are gone, most days you get to watch Congress in action. Have you ever watched a series of speeches on the House floor? Have you ever watched a real Congressional debate? Try it some time. Then ask yourself this question: Do you trust the people you are watching on TV to manage your retirement pension? Or do you have more confidence in your employer or Fidelity or even Merrill Lynch? Do you trust the people on the House floor to manage your health care? Or do you have more confidence in your employer or even UnitedHealthcare or Aetna?
Congress in action most days reminds us of school children insulting and taunting each other. It's like a group of adolescents desperately in need of adult supervision. It's the opposite of the civil, rational deliberation that the Founding Fathers must have hoped for.
It takes a very special kind of person to watch lunacy in action and then decide to give the lunatics more control over your life. There are such special people, of course. They are disproportionately congregated in Hollywood, on the campuses of the nation's colleges and universities and in the elite news media. What are the common characteristics all too many of them share? Arrested development (they never bothered to grow up), aversion to the rest of humanity (they really are elitists), a lack of common sense (they've never really managed anything) and a failure to master the syllogism (they approach the world emotionally, not logically).
Here is something you need to understand: liberalism is not an ideology. It's a sociology. It's not a way of thinking. It's a way of responding to the world emotionally.
What was the core issue during the dispute over the constitutionality of ObamaCare's requirement that everyone buy health insurance? It was whether there are any limits to government power. If the government can force you to buy health insurance, can it also require you to eat broccoli every day, one federal judge asked. Surprisingly, liberals in general refused to draw a line on the hypothetical broccoli mandate. They were unwilling to say that it's unconstitutional for the government to tell you what you must eat for lunch.
Then George Stephanopoulos during the Republican presidential debate the other night surprised Governor Romney with a truly off-the-wall question: Do you think state governments should be able to outlaw contraceptives? Romney was nonplused, as were the other candidates. They can be forgiven for not knowing that all true liberals believe that it is unconstitutional for government to tell you what contraceptives you can and can't use.
Think about that. It's permissible for government to tell you that you must eat broccoli, but impermissible for government to tell you that you can't have a contraceptive. Anyone who thinks this way isn't thinking at all. He's emoting.
That's why you don't find very many real liberals in places like Dallas, Cincinnati or Indianapolis. But you do find a lot of people in those cities who are self-interested. If liberals get votes in cities like these, it is only because they are appealing to self-interest.
SOURCE
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What Happened to the GOP's Free-Market Principles?
You expect Democrats to accuse former businessman Mitt Romney of “putting profits over people — making a buck or a few million of them no matter what it took or who it hurt,” as Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse did in releasing a new Web video.
But it’s sad to see the economic ignorance displayed by Romney’s Republican rivals. Rick Tyler, long the closest aide to Newt Gingrich who is now running the pro-Gingrich super PAC, Winning Our Future, declares, “His business success comes from raiding and destroy businesses — putting people out of work, stealing their health care.” The PAC’s ad calls Romney “a predatory corporate raider.”
Gingrich himself says that Romney’s work buying and selling companies at the investment firm Bain Capital was comparable to “rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company.”
Rick Perry ran TV ads in Iowa saying that Romney “made millions buying companies and laying off workers.”
In a growing economy, companies succeed and fail every day. Technology changes. Consumer tastes change. New competitors offer a better product or a better price. Raw materials or labor becomes too expensive. Some companies just aren’t viable, and some investments turn out to have been mistaken.
That’s what the “creative destruction” of a market economy is all about. Companies constantly seek to serve consumers better. And often one company’s success means that other companies fail. Manufacturers of obsolete products often go out of business. Jobs and investments are lost, but what’s the alternative? Should we be keeping the firms that once made horse-drawn buggies, gramophones, and slide rules in business? No, we understand that the process of economic change makes us all better off, even though there can be short-term pain for the owners and employees of failed firms.
Republicans are supposed to know all this. That’s why they proclaim their devotion to free markets and oppose industrial policy, government subsidies, bailouts, and other schemes to override the market process and keep current firms in business even when they’re no longer meeting consumers’ needs.
But when a businessman runs for president, all bets are off. Republicans let fly with the same denunciations of normal business practices that Democrats do.
Think back to the 2008 campaign when Romney first ran for president. During a Republican debate at the Reagan Library on May 3, 2007, Sen. John McCain derided Romney’s leadership ability, saying, “I led ... out of patriotism, not for profit.” Challenged on his statement, McCain elaborated that Romney “managed companies, and he bought, and he sold, and sometimes people lost their jobs. That’s the nature of that business.” He could have been channeling Barack Obama.
There are plenty of good criticisms of Mitt Romney. His health care mandate in Massachusetts was a model for President Obama’s national mandate. No one knows what he really thinks about abortion and same-sex marriage, after he dramatically changed his positions at age 57 as he prepared to run for president. He wants to increase military spending by $2 trillion. Many of his foreign policy advisers helped to get us into the disastrous Iraq war.
But the fact that sometimes he closed companies and laid off workers is not a good reason to criticize him. We’d never get new companies like Staples, Domino’s, Bright Horizons, and Sports Authority — companies that Romney helped fund and nurture at Bain Capital — if investment capital was locked into existing companies.
And sometimes, as the movie “Other People’s Money” demonstrated, it takes a “predatory corporate raider” to go in and shake up a company, moving the land, labor, and capital to places where they can be more productive.
Republicans should stop attacking Romney for his role in the dynamic market process and spend more time explaining how they would limit government and improve the environment for business and economic growth.
SOURCE
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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 Roman Catholic church claims special authority for itself on account of the alleged fact that the disciple Peter was the first Bishop of Rome and that Christ had given Peter special powers that Peter passed on to later bishops of Rome. The Bishop of Rome is these days referred to as the Pope, which simply means "father". So there are 3 claims there in need of validation.
1). There is no mention in the NT that Peter was ever in Rome. It was Paul who went to Rome according to the NT. But could Peter have followed on later? If so, such an important event would surely have been noted somewhere at the time in the 1st century. The Catholic Encyclopedia can rustle up just 3 alleged 1st century references:
"Earlier still is Clement of Rome writing to the Corinthians, probably in 96, certainly before the end of the first century. He cites Peter's and Paul's martyrdom as an example of the sad fruits of fanaticism and envy. They have suffered "amongst us" he says, and Weizsaecker rightly sees here another proof for our thesis.
The Gospel of St. John, written about the same time as the letter Clement to the Corinthians, also contains a clear allusion to the martyrdom by crucifixion of St. Peter, without, however, locating it (John 21:18, 19).
The very oldest evidence comes from St. Peter himself, if he be the author of the First Epistle of Peter, of if not, from a writer nearly of his own time: "The Church that is in Babylon saluteth you, and so doth my son Mark" (1 Peter 5:13). That Babylon stands for Rome, as usual amongst pious Jews, and not for the real Babylon, then without Christians, is admitted by common consent (cf. F.J.A. Hort, "Judaistic Christianity", London, 1895, 155).
It should be obvious that these are all weak reeds to lean upon.
What did Clement mean by "amongst". That it meant "in Rome" is just one interpretation. Since Clement was bishop of Rome, however, it may be this selfsame sly allusion that gave rise to the later belief that Peter reached Rome. As Bishop of Rome, Clement would have an obvious interest in fostering such a myth.
I pass over the second "reference" in polite silence.
The third reference asserts that there were no Christians in Babylon at the time. But there certainly were Jews and the famous Babylonian Talmud eventually emerged as the product of their deliberations. So it is entirely plausible that Peter did go there in an attempt to make converts and had some success. So this passage too is no proof of anything.
I would have entertained the idea that "Babylon" was symbolic if the reference had come from a sometimes gnostic writer like St. John but Peter writes a perfectly straightforward book of instructions. I think we must take him at his word. He went to Babylon, not Rome.
2). Special powers conferred? The basis for this claim is the passage in Matthew 16:18. "And Jesus answering said to him: Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona: because flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in heaven. And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven."
Transliterating the relevant Greek of the original we get: "ou ei petros kai epi tautee tee petra oikodomeeso mou teen ekkleesian". That shows that Christ was using two different words for Peter and the rock upon which he was to build his "church'. He was making a distinction, not an equation. I go into more detail about the Greek passage here
An issue seldom addressed, however, is that Christ spoke Aramaic, not Greek. So what we read in Matthew is itself a translation. So what was Christ most likely to have been saying in Aramaic?
Alfred Persson has done the most extensive exploration of the Aramaic background to the text but he really rambles on so I will try to summarize: He points out that "petros" is the Aramaic word for "firstborn" but that it was also known at the time (educated Israelites at the time spoke Greek, as indeed did educated Romans) that the same word in Greek meant "rock". So Jesus was using that known double meaning to make a point vivid.
What point? What was the rock upon which he would build his group of followers? That is no mystery at all. There are numerous references in the NT which equate Jesus's TEACHINGS with a rock -- e.g. Matthew 7:24; 1 Corinthians 10:4. So Jesus expected his teachings to form the foundation of a new group. He was certainly right about that! To encourage his followers, Jesus then goes on to say that the wisdom he imparts is very special indeed. It will give his followers entry into the kingdom of heaven. So the new group will be a privileged one indeed. Orthodox teachings among the Israelites at the time foresaw a resurrection to life on earth, not a transformation into spirit beings.
But what about: "And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven."? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Catholics claim that the passage gives Christians on earth the power to control events in Heaven. But that is surely absurd. Christ was surely saying that his teachings are an accurate guide to what has already been bound or loosed in Heaven.
3). But say we ignore all of the above and concede that Peter was given some special power. Where is there any statement or evidence in Christ's words that this power could be passed on? There is none. So all three of the Roman claims are mere assertions with no obvious truth value.
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Where Have All the Liberals Gone
Where are two conservatives for every liberal in America. That's the message of a recent David Brooks column as well as a Gallup survey. I think the imbalance is much starker. I would guess there are four conservatives for every liberal. Maybe even more.
Here's a test I invite you to take. Watch C-Span's morning call-in show and listen to what people who phone in on the "Democrat" or "liberal" line have to say. When is the last time you heard a caller say, "We should all pay higher taxes so that the government can provide us with universal day care"? Or how about, "We should all pay higher taxes so the government can provide us with universal long term care"? I bet you can't remember ever hearing that.
Here is what I suspect you will hear: Teachers complaining that teachers aren't paid enough. Union members complaining about competition from workers overseas. Senior citizens whining about the meagerness of Social Security or Medicare benefits. Minority callers advocating more affirmative action. And what is the common denominator of these comments? Self-interest.
Yes, I know. Special interests are in both parties. Why wouldn't they be? Yet as I wrote in my analysis of "progressivism," the left in America has elevated special interest privilege to an art form.
Here's the point: people wanting more, more, more are nothing more than people pursuing their own self interest in politics. They are not in principle different from any other special interest group. Importantly, they have nothing in common with what we normally have in mind by the term "liberalism."
There is a reason for that. There are very few people around who want to give government more power over their money, their property or their lives. And Brooks is probably right about the reason why: Most people don't trust government. In fact, only 10 percent trust the government to do the right thing most of the time, according to opinion polls.
Here is a second test. Keep watching C-Span. After the outside callers are gone, most days you get to watch Congress in action. Have you ever watched a series of speeches on the House floor? Have you ever watched a real Congressional debate? Try it some time. Then ask yourself this question: Do you trust the people you are watching on TV to manage your retirement pension? Or do you have more confidence in your employer or Fidelity or even Merrill Lynch? Do you trust the people on the House floor to manage your health care? Or do you have more confidence in your employer or even UnitedHealthcare or Aetna?
Congress in action most days reminds us of school children insulting and taunting each other. It's like a group of adolescents desperately in need of adult supervision. It's the opposite of the civil, rational deliberation that the Founding Fathers must have hoped for.
It takes a very special kind of person to watch lunacy in action and then decide to give the lunatics more control over your life. There are such special people, of course. They are disproportionately congregated in Hollywood, on the campuses of the nation's colleges and universities and in the elite news media. What are the common characteristics all too many of them share? Arrested development (they never bothered to grow up), aversion to the rest of humanity (they really are elitists), a lack of common sense (they've never really managed anything) and a failure to master the syllogism (they approach the world emotionally, not logically).
Here is something you need to understand: liberalism is not an ideology. It's a sociology. It's not a way of thinking. It's a way of responding to the world emotionally.
What was the core issue during the dispute over the constitutionality of ObamaCare's requirement that everyone buy health insurance? It was whether there are any limits to government power. If the government can force you to buy health insurance, can it also require you to eat broccoli every day, one federal judge asked. Surprisingly, liberals in general refused to draw a line on the hypothetical broccoli mandate. They were unwilling to say that it's unconstitutional for the government to tell you what you must eat for lunch.
Then George Stephanopoulos during the Republican presidential debate the other night surprised Governor Romney with a truly off-the-wall question: Do you think state governments should be able to outlaw contraceptives? Romney was nonplused, as were the other candidates. They can be forgiven for not knowing that all true liberals believe that it is unconstitutional for government to tell you what contraceptives you can and can't use.
Think about that. It's permissible for government to tell you that you must eat broccoli, but impermissible for government to tell you that you can't have a contraceptive. Anyone who thinks this way isn't thinking at all. He's emoting.
That's why you don't find very many real liberals in places like Dallas, Cincinnati or Indianapolis. But you do find a lot of people in those cities who are self-interested. If liberals get votes in cities like these, it is only because they are appealing to self-interest.
SOURCE
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What Happened to the GOP's Free-Market Principles?
You expect Democrats to accuse former businessman Mitt Romney of “putting profits over people — making a buck or a few million of them no matter what it took or who it hurt,” as Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse did in releasing a new Web video.
But it’s sad to see the economic ignorance displayed by Romney’s Republican rivals. Rick Tyler, long the closest aide to Newt Gingrich who is now running the pro-Gingrich super PAC, Winning Our Future, declares, “His business success comes from raiding and destroy businesses — putting people out of work, stealing their health care.” The PAC’s ad calls Romney “a predatory corporate raider.”
Gingrich himself says that Romney’s work buying and selling companies at the investment firm Bain Capital was comparable to “rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company.”
Rick Perry ran TV ads in Iowa saying that Romney “made millions buying companies and laying off workers.”
In a growing economy, companies succeed and fail every day. Technology changes. Consumer tastes change. New competitors offer a better product or a better price. Raw materials or labor becomes too expensive. Some companies just aren’t viable, and some investments turn out to have been mistaken.
That’s what the “creative destruction” of a market economy is all about. Companies constantly seek to serve consumers better. And often one company’s success means that other companies fail. Manufacturers of obsolete products often go out of business. Jobs and investments are lost, but what’s the alternative? Should we be keeping the firms that once made horse-drawn buggies, gramophones, and slide rules in business? No, we understand that the process of economic change makes us all better off, even though there can be short-term pain for the owners and employees of failed firms.
Republicans are supposed to know all this. That’s why they proclaim their devotion to free markets and oppose industrial policy, government subsidies, bailouts, and other schemes to override the market process and keep current firms in business even when they’re no longer meeting consumers’ needs.
But when a businessman runs for president, all bets are off. Republicans let fly with the same denunciations of normal business practices that Democrats do.
Think back to the 2008 campaign when Romney first ran for president. During a Republican debate at the Reagan Library on May 3, 2007, Sen. John McCain derided Romney’s leadership ability, saying, “I led ... out of patriotism, not for profit.” Challenged on his statement, McCain elaborated that Romney “managed companies, and he bought, and he sold, and sometimes people lost their jobs. That’s the nature of that business.” He could have been channeling Barack Obama.
There are plenty of good criticisms of Mitt Romney. His health care mandate in Massachusetts was a model for President Obama’s national mandate. No one knows what he really thinks about abortion and same-sex marriage, after he dramatically changed his positions at age 57 as he prepared to run for president. He wants to increase military spending by $2 trillion. Many of his foreign policy advisers helped to get us into the disastrous Iraq war.
But the fact that sometimes he closed companies and laid off workers is not a good reason to criticize him. We’d never get new companies like Staples, Domino’s, Bright Horizons, and Sports Authority — companies that Romney helped fund and nurture at Bain Capital — if investment capital was locked into existing companies.
And sometimes, as the movie “Other People’s Money” demonstrated, it takes a “predatory corporate raider” to go in and shake up a company, moving the land, labor, and capital to places where they can be more productive.
Republicans should stop attacking Romney for his role in the dynamic market process and spend more time explaining how they would limit government and improve the environment for business and economic growth.
SOURCE
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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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Monday, January 16, 2012
Obama’s Politics of Deceit
Dick McDonald
Probably 75% of Americans pay no attention to politics except for what they hear on late night comedy shows. That leaves most of them vulnerable to Hollywood-based liberal propaganda fed to them on television and in movies. Listening to the latest propaganda out of President Obama’s mouth proves his writers are nothing but clones of Aaron Sorkin and his liberal socialist “West Wing” writers spewing populist lies and deceit. We read:
Just how dumb does Obama think the American people are? Trying to steal the Republican issue of a smaller government, this arrogant community organizer plans to save 1,000 jobs after adding 200,000 new Federal jobs since he took over.
His in-house lame stream media will now have an Obama speech to publicize that he is a reformer of the bloated bureaucracy. I want to throw up – a feeling I get nightly watching Letterman, Stewart, Leno, etc.
Comment received via email
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Voter fraud: How easy it is
The New Hampshire Attorney General has launched a comprehensive review of state voting procedures, after people obtained ballots of dead voters during the presidential primary on Tuesday.
No fraudulent votes were actually cast. But in nine instances, clerks readily handed over ballots after a would-be voter implied he was the city resident, recently deceased, still listed on the voter checklist, according to a video posted on the Internet.
After receiving the ballot, the person departed without voting.
The video was produced and posted by Project Veritas, a national organization that has snared ACORN, National Public Radio and others in clandestine video recordings.
Associate Attorney General Richard Head said his office became aware of the effort on Election Day and immediately began an investigation. “That investigation is ongoing,” he said. “Based on the information received on Election Day and the information on the video, we are undertaking a comprehensive review of voting procedures with the Secretary of State.”
U.S. Attorney for New Hampshire John Kacavas said he had not heard of the video as of Wednesday. “If it's true, it's troubling to me,” Kacavas said. “I'm certainly going to look into it.”
State law makes it a crime to use a false name to obtain a ballot. State law also prohibits the audio-recording of a person without consent.
Secretary of State William Gardner, as well as city clerks in Manchester and Nashua, quickly said Wednesday that they support the idea of voter identification, but not the voter photo ID bill that Gov. John Lynch vetoed last year.
Officials in Nashua and Manchester said the filmmaker should be arrested. “They should be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. When I was in the Senate, I always heard, ‘This never happens.' This is proof this happens,” said Manchester Mayor Ted Gatsas. “People who pull stunts like this should be prosecuted,” Nashua City Clerk Paul Bergeron said.
Project Veritas released the video the day after New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation presidential primary. “With the eight-vote margin in the 2012 Iowa Caucus, it is clear that voter fraud can influence the outcome of an election and it is important to note that Project Veritas' team had the ability to cast more than a dozen votes in this latest investigation,” James O'Keefe said in a fundraising email.
Actually, the would-be voter gets his hands on ballots only nine times in the 10-minute, seven-second Project Veritas video. In one, the clerk directly asks the person if he is the man listed on the checklist. At that point, the person said he was just checking to see if the checklist designates the voter as deceased.
In another, the dead person is not on the checklist, and the clerk encourages the person to register to vote.
Another time, the would-be voter left after poll workers started asking question about the name he gave, Manchester City Clerk Matt Normand said. “It just so happens the ward moderator recognized the name as not being that person,” Normand said.
Republican House Speaker William O'Brien said Democrats have consistently maintained that no voter fraud takes place in New Hampshire. Now it's been shown that flaws exist in the system. “I'm afraid — I hope it doesn't come down to this — it challenges our first-in-the-nation primary position,” O'Brien said.
He said Republicans are open to compromise as long as the New Hampshire voting pool is not diluted by non-resident or fictitious voters.
SOURCE
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A moderate Leftist explains capitalism and Mitt Romney rather well
It’s not often that I find myself to the right of Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry. But here we are: Gingrich, Perry and their allies are attacking Mitt Romney for the fact that Bain Capital laid off workers and closed businesses when he was in charge of it.
Gingrich invented the attack in December in response to Romney’s suggestion that Gingrich return the millions of dollars Freddie Mac paid him. “I would just say that if Governor Romney would like to give back all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain, that I would be glad to then listen to him,” Gingrich said. In recent weeks he has sharpened the attack, which his affiliated Super PAC Winning Our Future lays out in detail in a twenty-eight-minute propaganda film, “When Mitt Romney Came to Town.” The movie shows cigar-smoking capitalists counting money while laid-off workers from companies Bain owned, such as the Ampad paper company and UniMac washing machines, complain of the hardships they’ve endured. The “documentary” makes xenophobic accusations that Romney took “foreign seed money from Latin America” and twice shows him speaking French. The Washington Post’s Fact-Checker column gave the movie four Pinocchios for the various misleading ways it has played fast and loose with the factual details. Now Gingrich is calling on Winning Our Future to correct the film or pull it off the airwaves. But Gingrich hasn’t retracted his argument that Romney is somehow different from, and worse than, most entreprenuers, whom Republicans such as Gingrich typically lionize.
The other Republican candidates have been repeating Gingrich’s argument. Jon Huntsman, whose campaign’s obsessive hatred of Romney seems to border on pathological, made the absurd claim that “Romney enjoys firing people. I enjoy creating jobs.” Texas Governor Rick Perry, who like Huntsman and Gingrich is normally a champion of capitalism and free enterprise, attacks Romney with the meaningless distinction between “venture capitalism and vulture capitalism.”
To say that there is something inherently wrong with Bain laying people off or closing factories to increase its profits is not a persuasive political argument in and of itself. But what anyone—Democrat or Republican—should note is that it contradicts the central rationale of Romney’s campaign. Romney has made his business background the chief selling point for his candidacy. He constantly blames President for the unemployment rate and argues that Obama’s lack of private-sector experience is the underlying culprit. Romney says that his business experience will imbue him with magical powers to lower the unemployment rate despite his poor record on employment as Governor of Massachusetts. “This president doesn’t understand how the economy works, it’s time to get a president who does,” says Romney in his stump speech.
Romney claims to have created 100,000 jobs while at Bain. This requires a lot of what George W. Bush would have called “fuzzy Washington math,” mainly because Romney takes credit for jobs that were created by businesses in which Bain was a partial investor years after the investment ended. If you used the same approach to tallying up all the job losses from companies Bain invested in and subtracted the losses from the additions, you wouldn’t find anywhere near a 100,000 net job increase. That’s why the Washington Post dubs Romney’s 100,000 jobs claim “an untenable figure.”
The other context in which it is appropriate to criticize layoffs under Bain ownership is to note that Romney opposes paying his fair share in taxes to social programs that would ameliorate the suffering he caused. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to say that one company, chosen at random, should not lay people off. That’s no way to ensure everyone in America has his or her basic needs met. Rather, it is best to allow capitalism to create the maximum wealth possible, but to impose progressive taxes to provide for people who are not adequately cared for in the free market. This, however, is a valid argument only when it comes from liberals who believe in such a system. Conservatives who advocate for low, regressive tax rates and eliminating the social safety net can’t make that argument. So instead they just attack Romney for laying people off as if that were a bad thing. It’s intellectually dishonest.
“Criticizing one businessman for one set of practices is not an assault on capitalism,” says Gingrich. But it is. And Perry’s dichotomy is false. As Matthew Yglesias explains in Slate, the entrepreneurs who start a business and add jobs to the economy are often responsible for job losses at the companies they out-compete. For every iPad designer employed by Apple, there might be someone getting laid off from a company that manufactures CDs. Ultimately, Romney was no more a force for good or ill than any other capitalist who seeks simply to create wealth. Gingrich and Perry are being opportunistic and hypocritical. That’s why Ron Paul, the only Republican candidate with consistent intellectual integrity, has called them out for betraying their supposed beliefs. “The principle of restructuring is a good thing in the marketplace,” said Paul.
Liberals, on the other hand, should raise this issue, but not merely in and of itself. Complaining that Romney was responsible for some people losing their jobs is an anti-capitalist trope that is at odds with liberal values. Liberals don’t believe there is anything wrong with companies seeking to be efficient and profitable. Rather they believe that those companies and their owners should be regulated and taxed to benefit the public good. Romney’s behavior is relevant only insofar as one is also noting that he does not couple his massive wealth creation with a sense of social obligation in public policy.
On his MSNBC program Wednesday night, Lawrence O’Donnell attempted to demonstrate the supposed distinction between Romney’s behavior and that of a virtuous capitalist by way of analogy. Even Republicans, argued O’Donnell, would agree that a stripper’s earnings are not of the same moral value as a nurse’s. But Romney was neither a stripper nor a nurse. Presumably O’Donnell would agree that running a paper company is neither good, like nursing, nor bad, like stripping, since paper is morally neutral. (That is, of course, if like O’Donnell you object to stripping: I personally think there’s nothing immoral about stripping.)
If Romney’s companies were making products that are morally neutral the question is simply about jobs. Should he have allowed inefficiencies that would reduce his profit margin? Perhaps it would have been nice of him to do so. But laying them off doesn’t make him a bad person.
“Mitt Romney fired people to make profits… massive profits,” intoned O’Donnell. That may sound unpleasant, but to argue that such behavior is immoral is to argue that capitalism itself is as well. If he didn’t fire people his competitors may have, and that would leave him with no choice but to do the same to stay competitive.
Gingrich suggests that Romney’s behavior might have been “exploitative.” Herman Cain led the National Restaurant Association (NRA), a trade group that represents the interests of the fast food industry in Washington. These companies pay their workers minimum wage or just above it, typically without benefits such as health insurance. The NRA lobbies Congress to keep the minimum wage low to keep profits high. Neither Gingrich nor Perry criticized Cain for that, because it is the nature of capitalism that companies will typically exploit workers as much as they legally can.
And that’s what gives the criticism of Romney some legitimacy, not from conservatives like Gingrich and Perry, but from liberals like O’Donnell.
It is the duty of government to protect and care for workers, to prevent exploitation and ameliorate its effects. That means allowing unions to provide a counterweight to corporate profit motives. It means imposing progressive taxes with high rates on the massive profits and of firms like Bain Capital and the large compensation packages of its top employees. And then it means using that government revenue to provide a basic social safety net. That is both a humanitarian obligation and wise investment in our labor force and future economic growth. Such a safety net would consist of affordable universal health insurance, good free public schools, adequate retirement insurance and subsidies for housing and food, among other things. That would have helped the workers in the film who complain of having lost their health insurance and their home and even skipped meals to feed their children. Unfortunately, Romney opposes this entire agenda. He wants to kneecap the National Labor Relations Board, repeal the Affordable Care Act, cut funding for Medicaid, food stamps and welfare, privatize Medicare and cut Social Security. It is this agenda that shows Romney to be greedy and heartless, not the way he made his living.
This is the essential difference between liberals and conservatives. “When Mitt Romney Came to Town” demagogues Romney’s large house, as if making money and living well is immoral. It isn’t, as liberal defenders of John Edwards pointed out when he was mocked and criticized for building a huge mansion and getting expensive haircuts. Nor was it fair for Republicans to impugn Edwards’ wealth as an ill-gotten gain because he earned it as a trial lawyer. As Republicans are so fond of arguing when it is to their political advantage, America has become such a prosperous and powerful nation precisely because we allow enterprising individuals—be they attorneys or private equity executives—to work hard and succeed.
The test of whether a wealthy person would make a good president is not whether he takes lower profits from his company to keep extra workers employed. Some commentators accused Edwards of hypocrisy because his huge house would not be energy efficient while he advocated a cap-and-trade program to limit greenhouse gas emissions. That was a stupid complaint. One rich person building a smaller house would not have appreciably slowed the rate of global warming. The entire United States accepting a cost for emitting carbon would, because the higher cost of energy would cause millions of Americans to reduce their energy consumption. But there would still be some people so rich that they would pay the cost without it affecting their behavior. Edwards was willing to pay more for energy in his house that would consume so much of it. That reflects a public spirit, not hypocrisy.
So it is fair to criticize Romney’s behavior at Bain in the context of his plutocratic policies. But since Gingrich and Perry share those policies, they are not doing so. When Rick Perry says, “When people can point to where you made a quick profit and kicked people out of their jobs, that is an issue that’s got to be addressed,” he is spouting nonsense. Of course people being unemployed and left without health insurance is a problem, but Perry, like Romney, has no plan to address it.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
NH: Same-sex marriage faces repeal test: "The same-sex marriage movement is about to face a critical test, as New Hampshire lawmakers prepare to vote on a proposal to repeal the state's 2009 gay marriage law. With a vote expected on the House floor as early as Wednesday, foes and supporters of the law are clashing in a battle over whether New Hampshire will be the first state to reverse the tide of same-sex marriage with a legislative vote."
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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)
****************************
Dick McDonald
Probably 75% of Americans pay no attention to politics except for what they hear on late night comedy shows. That leaves most of them vulnerable to Hollywood-based liberal propaganda fed to them on television and in movies. Listening to the latest propaganda out of President Obama’s mouth proves his writers are nothing but clones of Aaron Sorkin and his liberal socialist “West Wing” writers spewing populist lies and deceit. We read:
Obama asked Congress for the authority to consolidate the roles of several federal agencies which he said would lead to streamlined services and a smaller government workforce.
The proposal comes at a politically opportune moment for the president, who has faced sustained Republican criticism that his administration has failed to tame a bloated federal bureaucracy.
With an eye squarely on his reelection campaign, Obama announced that he would initially focus on merging sprawling entities that deal with small businesses in a bid to save $3 billion by eliminating more than 1,000 jobs over the next decade.
Just how dumb does Obama think the American people are? Trying to steal the Republican issue of a smaller government, this arrogant community organizer plans to save 1,000 jobs after adding 200,000 new Federal jobs since he took over.
His in-house lame stream media will now have an Obama speech to publicize that he is a reformer of the bloated bureaucracy. I want to throw up – a feeling I get nightly watching Letterman, Stewart, Leno, etc.
Comment received via email
***************************
Voter fraud: How easy it is
The New Hampshire Attorney General has launched a comprehensive review of state voting procedures, after people obtained ballots of dead voters during the presidential primary on Tuesday.
No fraudulent votes were actually cast. But in nine instances, clerks readily handed over ballots after a would-be voter implied he was the city resident, recently deceased, still listed on the voter checklist, according to a video posted on the Internet.
After receiving the ballot, the person departed without voting.
The video was produced and posted by Project Veritas, a national organization that has snared ACORN, National Public Radio and others in clandestine video recordings.
Associate Attorney General Richard Head said his office became aware of the effort on Election Day and immediately began an investigation. “That investigation is ongoing,” he said. “Based on the information received on Election Day and the information on the video, we are undertaking a comprehensive review of voting procedures with the Secretary of State.”
U.S. Attorney for New Hampshire John Kacavas said he had not heard of the video as of Wednesday. “If it's true, it's troubling to me,” Kacavas said. “I'm certainly going to look into it.”
State law makes it a crime to use a false name to obtain a ballot. State law also prohibits the audio-recording of a person without consent.
Secretary of State William Gardner, as well as city clerks in Manchester and Nashua, quickly said Wednesday that they support the idea of voter identification, but not the voter photo ID bill that Gov. John Lynch vetoed last year.
Officials in Nashua and Manchester said the filmmaker should be arrested. “They should be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. When I was in the Senate, I always heard, ‘This never happens.' This is proof this happens,” said Manchester Mayor Ted Gatsas. “People who pull stunts like this should be prosecuted,” Nashua City Clerk Paul Bergeron said.
Project Veritas released the video the day after New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation presidential primary. “With the eight-vote margin in the 2012 Iowa Caucus, it is clear that voter fraud can influence the outcome of an election and it is important to note that Project Veritas' team had the ability to cast more than a dozen votes in this latest investigation,” James O'Keefe said in a fundraising email.
Actually, the would-be voter gets his hands on ballots only nine times in the 10-minute, seven-second Project Veritas video. In one, the clerk directly asks the person if he is the man listed on the checklist. At that point, the person said he was just checking to see if the checklist designates the voter as deceased.
In another, the dead person is not on the checklist, and the clerk encourages the person to register to vote.
Another time, the would-be voter left after poll workers started asking question about the name he gave, Manchester City Clerk Matt Normand said. “It just so happens the ward moderator recognized the name as not being that person,” Normand said.
Republican House Speaker William O'Brien said Democrats have consistently maintained that no voter fraud takes place in New Hampshire. Now it's been shown that flaws exist in the system. “I'm afraid — I hope it doesn't come down to this — it challenges our first-in-the-nation primary position,” O'Brien said.
He said Republicans are open to compromise as long as the New Hampshire voting pool is not diluted by non-resident or fictitious voters.
SOURCE
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A moderate Leftist explains capitalism and Mitt Romney rather well
It’s not often that I find myself to the right of Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry. But here we are: Gingrich, Perry and their allies are attacking Mitt Romney for the fact that Bain Capital laid off workers and closed businesses when he was in charge of it.
Gingrich invented the attack in December in response to Romney’s suggestion that Gingrich return the millions of dollars Freddie Mac paid him. “I would just say that if Governor Romney would like to give back all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain, that I would be glad to then listen to him,” Gingrich said. In recent weeks he has sharpened the attack, which his affiliated Super PAC Winning Our Future lays out in detail in a twenty-eight-minute propaganda film, “When Mitt Romney Came to Town.” The movie shows cigar-smoking capitalists counting money while laid-off workers from companies Bain owned, such as the Ampad paper company and UniMac washing machines, complain of the hardships they’ve endured. The “documentary” makes xenophobic accusations that Romney took “foreign seed money from Latin America” and twice shows him speaking French. The Washington Post’s Fact-Checker column gave the movie four Pinocchios for the various misleading ways it has played fast and loose with the factual details. Now Gingrich is calling on Winning Our Future to correct the film or pull it off the airwaves. But Gingrich hasn’t retracted his argument that Romney is somehow different from, and worse than, most entreprenuers, whom Republicans such as Gingrich typically lionize.
The other Republican candidates have been repeating Gingrich’s argument. Jon Huntsman, whose campaign’s obsessive hatred of Romney seems to border on pathological, made the absurd claim that “Romney enjoys firing people. I enjoy creating jobs.” Texas Governor Rick Perry, who like Huntsman and Gingrich is normally a champion of capitalism and free enterprise, attacks Romney with the meaningless distinction between “venture capitalism and vulture capitalism.”
To say that there is something inherently wrong with Bain laying people off or closing factories to increase its profits is not a persuasive political argument in and of itself. But what anyone—Democrat or Republican—should note is that it contradicts the central rationale of Romney’s campaign. Romney has made his business background the chief selling point for his candidacy. He constantly blames President for the unemployment rate and argues that Obama’s lack of private-sector experience is the underlying culprit. Romney says that his business experience will imbue him with magical powers to lower the unemployment rate despite his poor record on employment as Governor of Massachusetts. “This president doesn’t understand how the economy works, it’s time to get a president who does,” says Romney in his stump speech.
Romney claims to have created 100,000 jobs while at Bain. This requires a lot of what George W. Bush would have called “fuzzy Washington math,” mainly because Romney takes credit for jobs that were created by businesses in which Bain was a partial investor years after the investment ended. If you used the same approach to tallying up all the job losses from companies Bain invested in and subtracted the losses from the additions, you wouldn’t find anywhere near a 100,000 net job increase. That’s why the Washington Post dubs Romney’s 100,000 jobs claim “an untenable figure.”
The other context in which it is appropriate to criticize layoffs under Bain ownership is to note that Romney opposes paying his fair share in taxes to social programs that would ameliorate the suffering he caused. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to say that one company, chosen at random, should not lay people off. That’s no way to ensure everyone in America has his or her basic needs met. Rather, it is best to allow capitalism to create the maximum wealth possible, but to impose progressive taxes to provide for people who are not adequately cared for in the free market. This, however, is a valid argument only when it comes from liberals who believe in such a system. Conservatives who advocate for low, regressive tax rates and eliminating the social safety net can’t make that argument. So instead they just attack Romney for laying people off as if that were a bad thing. It’s intellectually dishonest.
“Criticizing one businessman for one set of practices is not an assault on capitalism,” says Gingrich. But it is. And Perry’s dichotomy is false. As Matthew Yglesias explains in Slate, the entrepreneurs who start a business and add jobs to the economy are often responsible for job losses at the companies they out-compete. For every iPad designer employed by Apple, there might be someone getting laid off from a company that manufactures CDs. Ultimately, Romney was no more a force for good or ill than any other capitalist who seeks simply to create wealth. Gingrich and Perry are being opportunistic and hypocritical. That’s why Ron Paul, the only Republican candidate with consistent intellectual integrity, has called them out for betraying their supposed beliefs. “The principle of restructuring is a good thing in the marketplace,” said Paul.
Liberals, on the other hand, should raise this issue, but not merely in and of itself. Complaining that Romney was responsible for some people losing their jobs is an anti-capitalist trope that is at odds with liberal values. Liberals don’t believe there is anything wrong with companies seeking to be efficient and profitable. Rather they believe that those companies and their owners should be regulated and taxed to benefit the public good. Romney’s behavior is relevant only insofar as one is also noting that he does not couple his massive wealth creation with a sense of social obligation in public policy.
On his MSNBC program Wednesday night, Lawrence O’Donnell attempted to demonstrate the supposed distinction between Romney’s behavior and that of a virtuous capitalist by way of analogy. Even Republicans, argued O’Donnell, would agree that a stripper’s earnings are not of the same moral value as a nurse’s. But Romney was neither a stripper nor a nurse. Presumably O’Donnell would agree that running a paper company is neither good, like nursing, nor bad, like stripping, since paper is morally neutral. (That is, of course, if like O’Donnell you object to stripping: I personally think there’s nothing immoral about stripping.)
If Romney’s companies were making products that are morally neutral the question is simply about jobs. Should he have allowed inefficiencies that would reduce his profit margin? Perhaps it would have been nice of him to do so. But laying them off doesn’t make him a bad person.
“Mitt Romney fired people to make profits… massive profits,” intoned O’Donnell. That may sound unpleasant, but to argue that such behavior is immoral is to argue that capitalism itself is as well. If he didn’t fire people his competitors may have, and that would leave him with no choice but to do the same to stay competitive.
Gingrich suggests that Romney’s behavior might have been “exploitative.” Herman Cain led the National Restaurant Association (NRA), a trade group that represents the interests of the fast food industry in Washington. These companies pay their workers minimum wage or just above it, typically without benefits such as health insurance. The NRA lobbies Congress to keep the minimum wage low to keep profits high. Neither Gingrich nor Perry criticized Cain for that, because it is the nature of capitalism that companies will typically exploit workers as much as they legally can.
And that’s what gives the criticism of Romney some legitimacy, not from conservatives like Gingrich and Perry, but from liberals like O’Donnell.
It is the duty of government to protect and care for workers, to prevent exploitation and ameliorate its effects. That means allowing unions to provide a counterweight to corporate profit motives. It means imposing progressive taxes with high rates on the massive profits and of firms like Bain Capital and the large compensation packages of its top employees. And then it means using that government revenue to provide a basic social safety net. That is both a humanitarian obligation and wise investment in our labor force and future economic growth. Such a safety net would consist of affordable universal health insurance, good free public schools, adequate retirement insurance and subsidies for housing and food, among other things. That would have helped the workers in the film who complain of having lost their health insurance and their home and even skipped meals to feed their children. Unfortunately, Romney opposes this entire agenda. He wants to kneecap the National Labor Relations Board, repeal the Affordable Care Act, cut funding for Medicaid, food stamps and welfare, privatize Medicare and cut Social Security. It is this agenda that shows Romney to be greedy and heartless, not the way he made his living.
This is the essential difference between liberals and conservatives. “When Mitt Romney Came to Town” demagogues Romney’s large house, as if making money and living well is immoral. It isn’t, as liberal defenders of John Edwards pointed out when he was mocked and criticized for building a huge mansion and getting expensive haircuts. Nor was it fair for Republicans to impugn Edwards’ wealth as an ill-gotten gain because he earned it as a trial lawyer. As Republicans are so fond of arguing when it is to their political advantage, America has become such a prosperous and powerful nation precisely because we allow enterprising individuals—be they attorneys or private equity executives—to work hard and succeed.
The test of whether a wealthy person would make a good president is not whether he takes lower profits from his company to keep extra workers employed. Some commentators accused Edwards of hypocrisy because his huge house would not be energy efficient while he advocated a cap-and-trade program to limit greenhouse gas emissions. That was a stupid complaint. One rich person building a smaller house would not have appreciably slowed the rate of global warming. The entire United States accepting a cost for emitting carbon would, because the higher cost of energy would cause millions of Americans to reduce their energy consumption. But there would still be some people so rich that they would pay the cost without it affecting their behavior. Edwards was willing to pay more for energy in his house that would consume so much of it. That reflects a public spirit, not hypocrisy.
So it is fair to criticize Romney’s behavior at Bain in the context of his plutocratic policies. But since Gingrich and Perry share those policies, they are not doing so. When Rick Perry says, “When people can point to where you made a quick profit and kicked people out of their jobs, that is an issue that’s got to be addressed,” he is spouting nonsense. Of course people being unemployed and left without health insurance is a problem, but Perry, like Romney, has no plan to address it.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
NH: Same-sex marriage faces repeal test: "The same-sex marriage movement is about to face a critical test, as New Hampshire lawmakers prepare to vote on a proposal to repeal the state's 2009 gay marriage law. With a vote expected on the House floor as early as Wednesday, foes and supporters of the law are clashing in a battle over whether New Hampshire will be the first state to reverse the tide of same-sex marriage with a legislative vote."
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
**********************
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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)
****************************
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Nostalgia for the good old coin-in-the-slot parking meter
Computerizing everything has appeal as a cost-saver to service providers but the report from Britain below says it has made life more difficult for us all. I agree. I used to be happy to park at a parking meter, drop a coin in the meter and be on my way. Such meters have now vanished from my environment. Instead there are computerized monsters with lots of buttons that I just don't get on with. I tried them a couple of times and failed to make them work for me. So I drove off and took my business to a supermarket that had free onsite parking. I always do that from the beginning now. No more parking meters for me!
And I too find voice-recognition software at the end of a phone line quite hopeless. I speak with a native Australian accent in Australia but I am still often not understood. So now I just say "bum" to every query and that usually gets me through to a human being a little faster
RICHARD WILSON
It was a freezing cold, blowy day and I had rather misjudged my outfit. My sweater was too thin and my coat not warm enough so, as I went to pay to park my car, I wanted to be as quick as possible.
It used to be simple enough. I would buy a ticket and stick it on my car windscreen; mission accomplished. Now, of course, it’s not so straightforward. Now, I have to negotiate with a computer for my ticket via my mobile phone.
First, I have to set up a credit card account but, according to the electronic apparatchik on the end of the telephone line, there’s a problem with my card. There isn’t, but it’s too late – it’s hung up on me.
I try again but press the wrong number. ‘Invalid response, please try again,’ it says. I try again. And again. Finally, I think I have beaten it, only to be told: ‘Your parking has failed.’ We have reached an impasse. The voice tells me I need assistance – even it agrees I need the help of a real person.
I am put through to a human being and my account is set up within moments and I can now finally purchase my ticket – more than 15 minutes after I first stepped out of the car.
This is just one of many services that have become mechanised in recent times. Everywhere I turn, humans are being replaced by machines. So when Channel 4’s Dispatches team asked me to help make a programme on the issue, I didn’t hesitate. What I discovered shocked me.
In truth, I found it quite sinister. Before making Richard Wilson On Hold, I had thought the amount of automation creeping into society was a bit of a worry. Now I am not just appalled at the extent of it – but at the companies that inflict it upon us.
Retailers and local authorities claim this technology is an improvement, that it provides a better service that benefits us all. But is that true? We took four automated systems – parking meters, checkouts and two different types of phonelines – and tested them to see whether they are more efficient.
I quickly discovered that cashless parking is of little benefit to me. Yet the benefits to the authorities are obvious. They don’t have to collect any money, nor do they have to count it or bank it, which saves them a fortune in administration costs.
So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that in the past five years more than 100 authorities across England – two-thirds – have adopted pay-by-phone parking. Councils in England already make nearly £1.5 billion in parking fees and fines; now they can make even more. Very often they also receive a call-handling commission from the phone service they use.
And worse, in some instances, the phone service provider receives a commission too. A percentage of the extra money the council makes is not spent on us, the taxpayer, but is passed on to the private companies which manage the parking system.
So while they make ever more money, I’m the one doing all the work, taking all the pain – and paying for the privilege.
As part of our investigation, we surveyed 2,000 people and asked them which self-service system most annoyed them. Fifty per cent said automated telephone lines were the biggest nuisance – so we set up our own call centre with nine students and five volunteers from Age UK.
One of the things I have learned is the way in which automation alienates elderly people. For a lot of them, going to the shop is the highlight of their day, but now they don’t even get to talk to the shop assistant when they’re there. They also find the increased reliance on computerised phone lines challenging. Many have problems with their hearing and for arthritis sufferers it can be difficult to keep up with all the numbers you are asked to press. Our volunteers made 400 calls over three days to eight of the country’s largest banks and utility companies. We wanted to see how long it took before each call was answered by a human voice.
In fairness, the banks performed very well. Halifax responded within 40 seconds, Barclays in 28.
The energy companies came out bottom. One volunteer had to wait nearly half an hour to speak to Southern Electric, while E.ON took 58 minutes 17 seconds to answer.
When we contacted E.ON, they said their average waiting time was 59 seconds and they provided a range of alternative helpline numbers for customers. They also said they were upgrading their entire phone network soon.
However, it’s not just the time wasted I object to – it took 14 people 27 hours and 42 minutes to make 400 calls – it’s the cost. These companies use ‘non-geographical’ numbers that may incur costs that an 0800 number would not. We estimated that the call to E.ON would have cost £4.41 on a landline, £6.96 on a mobile.
A spokesman from Which? told me: ‘The costs of calls may not be apparent to you when you pick up the phone. More and more of us are using mobile phones when we are contacting utilities, banks and so on. ‘It could be costing you 40p a minute if you are using an 0844 number. They are premium rate numbers and Which? feels strongly that they are inappropriate for customers.’
At least our volunteers got through to a human voice, albeit by an often tortuous route. The telephone system I personally find most annoying is the automated voice recognition service increasingly used by cinemas, airlines and train companies.
In the TV programme, I try to book a cinema ticket. The computer asks me which film I’d like to see.
I tell it: ‘The Adventures Of Tintin.’
‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy?’ it responds.
I repeat: ‘The Adventures Of Tintin.’
‘Johnny English Reborn?’ it asks.
I try once more: ‘The Adventures Of Tintin.’
It replies: ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin.’
‘No, we don’t,’ I say, before slamming down the phone in frustration.
Now, I know I have a Scottish accent but it is hardly broad. And I don’t think RADA would be too happy to think one of its students couldn’t make himself understood by such a thing.
I visited Martin Russell, a voice recognition expert, and he told me the system works best if it’s a voice or an accent it has heard before. He said: ‘The computer has an expectation about how every word in its vocabulary will be pronounced. It builds that expectation by listening to recordings of lots of people speaking. If all of the recordings it hears are from people in the south-east of England, then it would expect you or any other user to speak as if you came from the south-east of England.’
So now it appears that this machine might even be racist, too.
They could improve the service by increasing the database of recordings – but that would cost more and, as ever, this is all about the money.
I interviewed Rob Crutchington, sales director at Encoded, a leading provider of automated phone systems. He explained that the average salary for a phone operator is £15,000 plus a further £10,000 in recruitment and training fees. In contrast, an interactive phone service might cost £5,000 and can answer 60 to 120 calls simultaneously. The savings are substantial. Once again, the benefits for the service provider are clear, the benefits to the consumer less so.
It was a depressingly similar story when we looked at the self-service checkouts which are sprouting up in supermarkets everywhere. They were introduced in 2002 and there are now 21,000 of them. Supermarkets insist these checkouts benefit us, that they offer us a more efficient, quicker system.
We put their claims to the test, sending teams of two shoppers to four supermarkets. Each person had an identical shopping list of ten items. One went to the automated till, the other to the old-style checkout. The automated tills were slower every time, often considerably more so.
At Marks & Spencer, a self-service meltdown meant the automated checkout clocked up a time of 13 minutes – more than ten minutes longer than it took at the staffed till.Yet stores will continue to introduce more and more of them because they save money.
We spoke to a former supermarket manager from Morrisons who did not want to be named. He said that the chain had calculated it could save £5 million by introducing computerised checkouts in 120 stores. And that’s just in the first year – profits increase over time as they no longer have the cost of installing the equipment.
Automation doesn’t help us – I failed to find any benefits. If anything, it makes us miserable. Yet automated Britain will continue apace – whether we want it or not.
More HERE
************************
SOPA becoming election liability for backers
To the ranks of same-sex marriage, tax cuts and illegal immigration, add this to the list of polarizing political issues of Election 2012: the Stop Online Piracy Act.
The hot-button anti-piracy legislation that sparked a revolt online is starting to become a political liability for some of SOPA’s major backers. Fueled by Web activists and online fundraising tools, challengers are using the bill to tag its congressional supporters as backers of Big Government — and raise campaign cash while they’re at it.
Among the fattest targets: SOPA’s lead author, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), and two of its most vocal co-sponsors, Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has also felt the wrath of SOPA opponents.
Even GOP presidential contenders Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum were asked by voters recently to weigh in on the bill (neither gave definitive answers, though activists have interpreted Santorum’s response as more sympathetic to SOPA than Romney’s).
It’s a stretch to think SOPA will cost any of the longtime incumbents backing the bill their seats. The legislation would give government new powers to shutter websites that peddle counterfeit products and pirated copies of movies and music.
But there are signs the issue, long the domain of think tanks and intellectual property lawyers, could become a real factor in some races.
Prominent conservative blogger Erick Erickson, for one, has promised to make life miserable for any GOP lawmaker who gets behind the bill. His first target: Blackburn.
“I love Marsha Blackburn. She is a delightful lady and a solidly conservative member of Congress,” Erickson wrote on his widely read blog, Red State. But “I am pledging right now that I will do everything in my power to defeat her in her 2012 re-election bid.”
Erickson went on to implore the left and right to “unite and pledge to defeat in primaries every person named as a sponsor” of SOPA and suggested that both sides create a fund dedicated to supporting challengers running against SOPA supporters.
“Killing SOPA is that important,” Erickson wrote.
In Ryan’s case, critics pounced after the powerful congressman issued a vague statement that they interpreted as supportive of the bill. Using the social news site Reddit, they launched an online campaign— dubbed “Operation Pull Ryan” — to unseat him.
Ryan’s Democratic opponent, Rob Zerban, seized on the uproar. After lambasting the bill during an interview on Reddit, Zerban raked in about $15,000 in campaign donations, according to campaign manager Lisa Tanner.
The uproar wasn’t lost on Ryan. On Monday, he issued a statement opposing SOPA in no uncertain terms. While the bill “attempts to address a legitimate problem,” Ryan said, it would open the door to “undue regulation, censorship and legal abuse.”
SOPA is making waves in other House races, too.
Goodlatte’s primary challenger in Virginia’s 6th District, Karen Kwiatkowski, claimed on her website that SOPA “will dramatically increase the federal government's role in our lives.” She asked people to contribute to her campaign and “send Bob Goodlatte a message.”
Kwiatkowski, who describes herself as a “conservative constitutionalist Republican,” told POLITICO that Goodlatte’s support for the bill was “bought and paid for” by content companies that “don’t want to adapt their business models [and] don’t want to invest in protection for their material.” That includes language software company Rosetta Stone, she said, which is based in the district.
She estimated that 20 percent — or roughly $5,000 — of the donations she received in December was attributable to SOPA. Kwiatkowski has raised about $30,000 total.
More HERE
*************************
Even Obama opposes SOPA
He probably sees that in a year's time there may be a Republican president who might use it against Democrats
The Obama administration said Saturday that it strongly opposed central elements of two congressional efforts to enforce copyrights on the Internet, all but killing the current versions of legislation that has divided both political parties and pitted Hollywood against Silicon Valley.
The comments by the administration's chief technology officials, posted on a White House blog Saturday, came as growing opposition to the legislation had already led sponsors of the bills to reconsider a measure that would force Internet service providers to block access to websites that offer or link to copyrighted material.
"Let us be clear," the White House statement said, "online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy." But, it added, "We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet."
The bills under consideration in Congress were designed to combat the theft of copyrighted materials by preventing U.S. search engines such as Google and Yahoo from directing users to sites that allow for the distribution of stolen materials. They would cut off payment processors such as PayPal that handle transactions.
The bills would also allow private citizens and companies to sue to stop what they believed to be theft of protected content. Those and other provisions set off fierce opposition among Internet companies, technology investors and free speech advocates, who said the bills would stifle online innovation, violate the First Amendment and even compromise national security by undermining the integrity of the Internet's naming system.
SOURCE
**********************
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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)
****************************
Computerizing everything has appeal as a cost-saver to service providers but the report from Britain below says it has made life more difficult for us all. I agree. I used to be happy to park at a parking meter, drop a coin in the meter and be on my way. Such meters have now vanished from my environment. Instead there are computerized monsters with lots of buttons that I just don't get on with. I tried them a couple of times and failed to make them work for me. So I drove off and took my business to a supermarket that had free onsite parking. I always do that from the beginning now. No more parking meters for me!
And I too find voice-recognition software at the end of a phone line quite hopeless. I speak with a native Australian accent in Australia but I am still often not understood. So now I just say "bum" to every query and that usually gets me through to a human being a little faster
RICHARD WILSON
It was a freezing cold, blowy day and I had rather misjudged my outfit. My sweater was too thin and my coat not warm enough so, as I went to pay to park my car, I wanted to be as quick as possible.
It used to be simple enough. I would buy a ticket and stick it on my car windscreen; mission accomplished. Now, of course, it’s not so straightforward. Now, I have to negotiate with a computer for my ticket via my mobile phone.
First, I have to set up a credit card account but, according to the electronic apparatchik on the end of the telephone line, there’s a problem with my card. There isn’t, but it’s too late – it’s hung up on me.
I try again but press the wrong number. ‘Invalid response, please try again,’ it says. I try again. And again. Finally, I think I have beaten it, only to be told: ‘Your parking has failed.’ We have reached an impasse. The voice tells me I need assistance – even it agrees I need the help of a real person.
I am put through to a human being and my account is set up within moments and I can now finally purchase my ticket – more than 15 minutes after I first stepped out of the car.
This is just one of many services that have become mechanised in recent times. Everywhere I turn, humans are being replaced by machines. So when Channel 4’s Dispatches team asked me to help make a programme on the issue, I didn’t hesitate. What I discovered shocked me.
In truth, I found it quite sinister. Before making Richard Wilson On Hold, I had thought the amount of automation creeping into society was a bit of a worry. Now I am not just appalled at the extent of it – but at the companies that inflict it upon us.
Retailers and local authorities claim this technology is an improvement, that it provides a better service that benefits us all. But is that true? We took four automated systems – parking meters, checkouts and two different types of phonelines – and tested them to see whether they are more efficient.
I quickly discovered that cashless parking is of little benefit to me. Yet the benefits to the authorities are obvious. They don’t have to collect any money, nor do they have to count it or bank it, which saves them a fortune in administration costs.
So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that in the past five years more than 100 authorities across England – two-thirds – have adopted pay-by-phone parking. Councils in England already make nearly £1.5 billion in parking fees and fines; now they can make even more. Very often they also receive a call-handling commission from the phone service they use.
And worse, in some instances, the phone service provider receives a commission too. A percentage of the extra money the council makes is not spent on us, the taxpayer, but is passed on to the private companies which manage the parking system.
So while they make ever more money, I’m the one doing all the work, taking all the pain – and paying for the privilege.
As part of our investigation, we surveyed 2,000 people and asked them which self-service system most annoyed them. Fifty per cent said automated telephone lines were the biggest nuisance – so we set up our own call centre with nine students and five volunteers from Age UK.
One of the things I have learned is the way in which automation alienates elderly people. For a lot of them, going to the shop is the highlight of their day, but now they don’t even get to talk to the shop assistant when they’re there. They also find the increased reliance on computerised phone lines challenging. Many have problems with their hearing and for arthritis sufferers it can be difficult to keep up with all the numbers you are asked to press. Our volunteers made 400 calls over three days to eight of the country’s largest banks and utility companies. We wanted to see how long it took before each call was answered by a human voice.
In fairness, the banks performed very well. Halifax responded within 40 seconds, Barclays in 28.
The energy companies came out bottom. One volunteer had to wait nearly half an hour to speak to Southern Electric, while E.ON took 58 minutes 17 seconds to answer.
When we contacted E.ON, they said their average waiting time was 59 seconds and they provided a range of alternative helpline numbers for customers. They also said they were upgrading their entire phone network soon.
However, it’s not just the time wasted I object to – it took 14 people 27 hours and 42 minutes to make 400 calls – it’s the cost. These companies use ‘non-geographical’ numbers that may incur costs that an 0800 number would not. We estimated that the call to E.ON would have cost £4.41 on a landline, £6.96 on a mobile.
A spokesman from Which? told me: ‘The costs of calls may not be apparent to you when you pick up the phone. More and more of us are using mobile phones when we are contacting utilities, banks and so on. ‘It could be costing you 40p a minute if you are using an 0844 number. They are premium rate numbers and Which? feels strongly that they are inappropriate for customers.’
At least our volunteers got through to a human voice, albeit by an often tortuous route. The telephone system I personally find most annoying is the automated voice recognition service increasingly used by cinemas, airlines and train companies.
In the TV programme, I try to book a cinema ticket. The computer asks me which film I’d like to see.
I tell it: ‘The Adventures Of Tintin.’
‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy?’ it responds.
I repeat: ‘The Adventures Of Tintin.’
‘Johnny English Reborn?’ it asks.
I try once more: ‘The Adventures Of Tintin.’
It replies: ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin.’
‘No, we don’t,’ I say, before slamming down the phone in frustration.
Now, I know I have a Scottish accent but it is hardly broad. And I don’t think RADA would be too happy to think one of its students couldn’t make himself understood by such a thing.
I visited Martin Russell, a voice recognition expert, and he told me the system works best if it’s a voice or an accent it has heard before. He said: ‘The computer has an expectation about how every word in its vocabulary will be pronounced. It builds that expectation by listening to recordings of lots of people speaking. If all of the recordings it hears are from people in the south-east of England, then it would expect you or any other user to speak as if you came from the south-east of England.’
So now it appears that this machine might even be racist, too.
They could improve the service by increasing the database of recordings – but that would cost more and, as ever, this is all about the money.
I interviewed Rob Crutchington, sales director at Encoded, a leading provider of automated phone systems. He explained that the average salary for a phone operator is £15,000 plus a further £10,000 in recruitment and training fees. In contrast, an interactive phone service might cost £5,000 and can answer 60 to 120 calls simultaneously. The savings are substantial. Once again, the benefits for the service provider are clear, the benefits to the consumer less so.
It was a depressingly similar story when we looked at the self-service checkouts which are sprouting up in supermarkets everywhere. They were introduced in 2002 and there are now 21,000 of them. Supermarkets insist these checkouts benefit us, that they offer us a more efficient, quicker system.
We put their claims to the test, sending teams of two shoppers to four supermarkets. Each person had an identical shopping list of ten items. One went to the automated till, the other to the old-style checkout. The automated tills were slower every time, often considerably more so.
At Marks & Spencer, a self-service meltdown meant the automated checkout clocked up a time of 13 minutes – more than ten minutes longer than it took at the staffed till.Yet stores will continue to introduce more and more of them because they save money.
We spoke to a former supermarket manager from Morrisons who did not want to be named. He said that the chain had calculated it could save £5 million by introducing computerised checkouts in 120 stores. And that’s just in the first year – profits increase over time as they no longer have the cost of installing the equipment.
Automation doesn’t help us – I failed to find any benefits. If anything, it makes us miserable. Yet automated Britain will continue apace – whether we want it or not.
More HERE
************************
SOPA becoming election liability for backers
To the ranks of same-sex marriage, tax cuts and illegal immigration, add this to the list of polarizing political issues of Election 2012: the Stop Online Piracy Act.
The hot-button anti-piracy legislation that sparked a revolt online is starting to become a political liability for some of SOPA’s major backers. Fueled by Web activists and online fundraising tools, challengers are using the bill to tag its congressional supporters as backers of Big Government — and raise campaign cash while they’re at it.
Among the fattest targets: SOPA’s lead author, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), and two of its most vocal co-sponsors, Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has also felt the wrath of SOPA opponents.
Even GOP presidential contenders Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum were asked by voters recently to weigh in on the bill (neither gave definitive answers, though activists have interpreted Santorum’s response as more sympathetic to SOPA than Romney’s).
It’s a stretch to think SOPA will cost any of the longtime incumbents backing the bill their seats. The legislation would give government new powers to shutter websites that peddle counterfeit products and pirated copies of movies and music.
But there are signs the issue, long the domain of think tanks and intellectual property lawyers, could become a real factor in some races.
Prominent conservative blogger Erick Erickson, for one, has promised to make life miserable for any GOP lawmaker who gets behind the bill. His first target: Blackburn.
“I love Marsha Blackburn. She is a delightful lady and a solidly conservative member of Congress,” Erickson wrote on his widely read blog, Red State. But “I am pledging right now that I will do everything in my power to defeat her in her 2012 re-election bid.”
Erickson went on to implore the left and right to “unite and pledge to defeat in primaries every person named as a sponsor” of SOPA and suggested that both sides create a fund dedicated to supporting challengers running against SOPA supporters.
“Killing SOPA is that important,” Erickson wrote.
In Ryan’s case, critics pounced after the powerful congressman issued a vague statement that they interpreted as supportive of the bill. Using the social news site Reddit, they launched an online campaign— dubbed “Operation Pull Ryan” — to unseat him.
Ryan’s Democratic opponent, Rob Zerban, seized on the uproar. After lambasting the bill during an interview on Reddit, Zerban raked in about $15,000 in campaign donations, according to campaign manager Lisa Tanner.
The uproar wasn’t lost on Ryan. On Monday, he issued a statement opposing SOPA in no uncertain terms. While the bill “attempts to address a legitimate problem,” Ryan said, it would open the door to “undue regulation, censorship and legal abuse.”
SOPA is making waves in other House races, too.
Goodlatte’s primary challenger in Virginia’s 6th District, Karen Kwiatkowski, claimed on her website that SOPA “will dramatically increase the federal government's role in our lives.” She asked people to contribute to her campaign and “send Bob Goodlatte a message.”
Kwiatkowski, who describes herself as a “conservative constitutionalist Republican,” told POLITICO that Goodlatte’s support for the bill was “bought and paid for” by content companies that “don’t want to adapt their business models [and] don’t want to invest in protection for their material.” That includes language software company Rosetta Stone, she said, which is based in the district.
She estimated that 20 percent — or roughly $5,000 — of the donations she received in December was attributable to SOPA. Kwiatkowski has raised about $30,000 total.
More HERE
*************************
Even Obama opposes SOPA
He probably sees that in a year's time there may be a Republican president who might use it against Democrats
The Obama administration said Saturday that it strongly opposed central elements of two congressional efforts to enforce copyrights on the Internet, all but killing the current versions of legislation that has divided both political parties and pitted Hollywood against Silicon Valley.
The comments by the administration's chief technology officials, posted on a White House blog Saturday, came as growing opposition to the legislation had already led sponsors of the bills to reconsider a measure that would force Internet service providers to block access to websites that offer or link to copyrighted material.
"Let us be clear," the White House statement said, "online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy." But, it added, "We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet."
The bills under consideration in Congress were designed to combat the theft of copyrighted materials by preventing U.S. search engines such as Google and Yahoo from directing users to sites that allow for the distribution of stolen materials. They would cut off payment processors such as PayPal that handle transactions.
The bills would also allow private citizens and companies to sue to stop what they believed to be theft of protected content. Those and other provisions set off fierce opposition among Internet companies, technology investors and free speech advocates, who said the bills would stifle online innovation, violate the First Amendment and even compromise national security by undermining the integrity of the Internet's naming system.
SOURCE
**********************
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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)
****************************
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Everything Is At Stake, All Right
On this we can agree with President Obama: Everything he stands for is at stake in 2012
Obama told 500 fawning sycophants in Chicago that he is unrepentant about his policy agenda and intends to treat us to more of the same, much more, in a second term. Obama said, "Everything that we fought for is now at stake in this election." Lest there be no mistake, he repeated the message in the smaller settings of private homes.
We can endlessly debate whether he is such a devoted ideologue that he's blind to his policy failures, whether he's willing to sacrifice the economy and the fiscal integrity of the United States for his perceived higher good of radical redistribution, or whether he really intends to do harm, but these are moot questions anymore. Under any of these possibilities, the fact remains that he is hellbent on accelerating his present course, not reversing it, on dictating, not working within his constitutional constraints, much less building a bipartisan consensus.
Hubris and defiance are his trademarks, not humility. He said, "If you're willing to work even harder in this election than you did in the last election, I promise you, change will come."
This should send cold chills up our spines. By "change," he means more of his unpopular, failed agenda. He has repeatedly indicated that he is frustrated with the process of republican government and that he would be much more comfortable as a dictator.
He has also said many times that he believes his goals are so important that he intends to implement them with or without Congress, through executive or administrative usurpations. He has done more than talk; he has acted in contravention of the Constitution and intends to continue in that vein.
What he might do in a second term is frightening to those who believe in freedom and equality of opportunity, that our current pattern of discretionary and entitlement spending is not just unsustainable but also guaranteed to destroy the country, and that we cannot preserve our freedom if we persist on a course of unilateral disarmament.
Just consider how brazenly Obama has pursued his unpopular agenda even while facing re-election. Think how he joked about having made a hollow promise of shovel-ready jobs when there is no such thing and how he is unchastened by the colossal waste of Solyndra and pursuing more of the same. Consider how he cavalierly refuses to account for his promise to keep unemployment capped at 8 percent and how he assured us, on his honor, that his designated stimulus cop, Vice President Joe Biden, wouldn't allow a dollar of waste to go unpunished in his stimulus plan. Chew on his refusal to listen to the public when it resoundingly rejected Obamacare, rebuffing his agenda in the U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts and again in the 2010 congressional elections. Ponder his petty partisanship, bullying, demonizing and class warfare and his frequent invocation of the race card. Can you conceive of how he'd act as a four-year lame duck?
You all surely heard Obama, thinking he was speaking only to friends, boast that he was for a single-payer plan but that it might take 15 years to implement it. Remember this when his supporters tell you Obamacare won't degenerate into socialized medicine. Those waivers he unilaterally issued to buy off companies now won't be available next time around when the full force of Obamacare rains down its dark waters.
Think about his Independent Payment Advisory Board, which will have 15 bureaucrats once Obamacare is up and running, when he won't have to worry about 2016. Before you pooh-pooh this, you'd better do your research on his health care mentors' (e.g., Tom Daschle, Donald Berwick) philosophy about the macabre rationing of health care for the aged.
So, call me an alarmist if you will, but I think it's almost irrational not to be very concerned about an Obama second term. Even if you don't subscribe to some of the horror scenarios of death panels and the like, how about his intention to continue to press forward with his radical green agenda despite the fact that it won't work to reduce global temperatures and despite the public's opposition to it?
More importantly, how about his absolute refusal to restructure entitlements or his refusal to lead his party's Senate to pass a budget after 1,000 days? Or his insistence on another stimulus package when unemployment -- even using the distorted metrics the administration is now using -- is still at 8.5 percent and it would add another half-trillion dollars to the national debt?
By rights, Obama shouldn't get 10 percent of the vote in November. Even those who want to punish the "wealthy" should understand that once you completely gnaw off the hand that feeds you, you will starve, too.
SOURCE
***************************
Gingrich attacks to help Romney
Believe it or not, Newt Gingrich is doing Mitt Romney a favor. Gingrich has spent the past week attacking Romney’s tenure as the head of Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney helped found in the 1980s. Through his own words and a propagandistic documentary produced by Winning Our Future, a well funded pro-Newt Super PAC run by a former campaign aid, Gingrich has attempted to paint Romney as a heartless, out of touch, capitalist monster—the King of Bain—whose firm made millions through mass firings and layoffs.
The campaign, however, has mostly backfired. Gingrich has united the conservative chattering class against him enough that Winning Our Future's major financial backer, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has distanced himself from the documentary, and Gingrich has called for its producers to either edit the film or "pull it off the air and off the internet entirely." In the process, Gingrich has managed to generate the one thing that the Romney campaign has failed to win or buy for itself: sympathy.
But what’s good for Romney may be bad for the rest of us. Gingrich’s attacks aren’t just helping to unite conservatives in defense of Romney, they’re distracting from the very real flaws in Romney’s record.
Gingrich’s criticisms of Romney’s time at Bain Capital have backfired in part because they’re straight out of the liberal playbook. Indeed, they amount to attacks on the essence of capitalism: creative destruction. That’s especially true of Romney’s Bain Capital, which was spun out of Bain and Co., an early player in the world of high-end management consulting, in the mid 1980s. Most private equity firms at the time relied primarily on financial engineering to increase the value of the companies they worked with.
But according to Stephen Kaplan, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, Bain Capital’s innovation was marshalling the tools of management consulting in hopes of transforming companies into entities that weren’t just better financed, but better run. Private equity firms, Kaplan wrote in a 2008 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “applied performance-based managerial compensation, highly leveraged capital structures, and active governance to the companies in which it invested.” Overall, the strategy seems to have been a success: The “evidence suggests that private equity activity creates economic value on average.” For all practical purposes, Gingrich is attacking Romney for having run a business that helped create value.
The attacks on Romney aren’t just misguided; they’re also inaccurate, relying on factual errors and quotes taken out of context. Here’s just one example: The half hour documentary funded by the Gingrich-supporting Super PAC Winning the Future tells the story of UniMac, a Florida company that made laundry equipment. The documentary leads viewers to think that UniMac was bought and shut down by Bain through another firm, Raytheon, that was Bain under a different name. But as CNN Money’s Dan Primack noted earlier this week, Bain and Raytheon weren’t the same thing. Raytheon bought UniMac in 1994, then merged it with other companies. Bain didn’t buy that unit until four years later.
Even the timing and delivery of Gingrich’s attacks will likely help Romney in the long run. If Romney wins the nomination, the Obama campaign will have a harder time using Bain’s record against him. Not only will they be old news, they’ll be associated with a disreputable, discredited Republican candidate.
Meanwhile, Gingrich’s attacks have distracted people from the true problems with Romney’s record—his long history of flip-flops, his enthusiasm for technocratic fiddling, his unimpressive Medicare reform proposal, his significant role in passing the Massachusetts health care overhaul that served as the model for ObamaCare, and the weakness of his plan to undo ObamaCare through federally granted waivers to the states.
Gingrich’s suicide run ultimately tells us more about his own desperate political narcissism than it does about Mitt Romney, whose business career is the best part of his record. There are plenty of reasons to complain about Romney, but his time at Bain isn’t one of them.
SOURCE
**************************
Voter ID: Necessary or Discriminatory?
You need a proper form of government ID to drive a vehicle, buy alcohol or tobacco products, and even to apply for welfare assistance, so why not require an ID to vote?
That’s the line of thinking of South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who, along with South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, are filing suit against the U.S. Department of Justice, which recently rejected the state’s new Voter ID law, enforcing provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Last May, South Carolina state lawmakers passed a law requiring voters show a valid, state-approved photo ID before they cast a ballot. But the U.S. Justice Department rejected the law saying it discriminated against minority voters.
But when you need a valid form of government ID in so many other daily situations, how is it discriminatory to ask for one before exercising your right to vote?
States like Georgia, Indiana, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Kansas, Tennessee and, if approved by the Department of Justice, Texas, all have strict photo ID voting laws. South Carolina hopes to join them.
Supporters of voter ID say it helps to prevent voter fraud. “Voting in this country is one of our most valuable honors and rights as U.S. citizens,” says Bill Wilson, president of Americans for Limited Government (ALG). “If people lose trust in the voting system then our entire democracy and the framework of our government is lost. Requiring voters to show a valid ID is an easy step to take that keeps people’s trust in the system.”
On the other hand, many agree with the concerns coming from the U.S. Justice Department that voter ID can lead to discrimination.
When voter ID was passed in Mississippi last year, many felt it was an attack on non-whites. “Our analysis shows that Mississippi’s voter ID law is another example of a law with a racially discriminatory effect being implemented over minority voters’ strong objections,” Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told the Huffington Post. “Seventy-five percent of minorities in the state said no to having to comply with what amounts to a modern-day poll tax in order to exercise their fundamental right to vote.”
Voter ID is a contentious topic that clearly strikes a nerve with those who are adamantly against it as well as those who fully support it, which is likely why many states have no voter ID laws at all.
But despite the arguments for or against voter ID, America’s past does contain allegations and some possible shreds of proof of voter fraud.
One such controversial election was in 1984 in Indiana’s 8th district. The election battle was so tight between Rep. Frank McCloskey (D-IN) and Republican-challenger Rick McIntyre that the results were decided upon in Congress. After a recount of votes by Indiana’s Secretary of State that ruled McIntyre the winner, the Democratic-controlled House refused to seat either candidate until it conducted its own investigation. With a task force leading the investigation composed of two Democrats and one Republican, McCloskey took his seat in the House where he was claimed the winner by only four votes. Republicans temporarily left the House Chamber in protest.
In another instance, during the 1996 Congressional elections, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) came under fire of Republicans as she took her place in the House replacing former incumbent Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-CA) in California’s 46th district.
House sources to this day say former Rep. Dornan’s seat was stolen from him. The House Oversight Committee, then led by Republicans, launched an investigation into the race and found that non-U.S. citizens voted in the election, possibly attributing to Rep. Sanchez’s lead over Dornan.
Speculation still ensues over recent elections such as now Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) winning over former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) in the 2008 Senate election in Minnesota State. Also, the Washington State governor’s race of 2004 was decided by 133 votes out of 2.8 million cast. Recounting the votes a third time was the ticket for Democrat Christine Gregoire who was declared a winner by a state judge even after losing in two separate recounts against Republican Dino Rossi.
These states that want a strict voter ID law want to protect the rights of voters and the honor of the voting system. Their objective is not to discriminate.
What happens when citizens lose trust in a nation’s government is they become subjects instead of citizens. In the words of Joseph Stalin: “The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” Those words should never ring true in America.
SOURCE
Doubts about Harry Reid's most recent win might also have been mentioned above
****************************
U.S. Veteran’s unemployment rate soars above 13 percent
By Rebecca DiFede — In the 236 years since its birth, our great nation has been involved in a great many battles that have forever changed the course of history, both for us and for our allies and foes. Needless to say, America wouldn’t be what it is without the brave men and women who sacrificed everything to fight for our freedom.
Recently, President Obama ended the war in Iraq and welcomed home thousands of brave young Americans. However upon their return home and start of their transition into civilian life, they were faced with a startling realization: there are no jobs.
According to a press release from Generation Opportunity, a non-profit dedicated to helping Americans create a better future, unemployment around veterans aged 18-29 has increased to 1 in 3 for the last quarter of 2011, up from 1 in 5 in the last quarter of 2010.
The overall unemployment rate for young veterans rose to a whopping 13.1 percent at the end of December, and 43 percent of those employed are unsatisfied with their current employment. These are the people whose decision to serve helped ensure that our Constitution still has meaning, and meanwhile they struggle to find jobs in an economy that’s barely afloat.
Only 36 percent of veterans aged 18-29 believe that there is the right leadership in Washington, and a hefty 69 percent think current leadership fails to represent their interests. Yet another example that illustrates the tides of favor slowly beginning to pull away from the shores of our illustrious president.
2012 has begun, and the battle for control of the high seas of this nation is a tough one. With our captain failing to make good on his promises time and time again, it seems that the smell of electoral mutiny is in the air.
As more and more of our nation’s youths fall into unemployment — 77 percent of whom already have or will delay a major life change because of economic reasons — thus increases the already widespread dissatisfaction with the current administration.
More HERE
*************************
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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)
****************************
On this we can agree with President Obama: Everything he stands for is at stake in 2012
Obama told 500 fawning sycophants in Chicago that he is unrepentant about his policy agenda and intends to treat us to more of the same, much more, in a second term. Obama said, "Everything that we fought for is now at stake in this election." Lest there be no mistake, he repeated the message in the smaller settings of private homes.
We can endlessly debate whether he is such a devoted ideologue that he's blind to his policy failures, whether he's willing to sacrifice the economy and the fiscal integrity of the United States for his perceived higher good of radical redistribution, or whether he really intends to do harm, but these are moot questions anymore. Under any of these possibilities, the fact remains that he is hellbent on accelerating his present course, not reversing it, on dictating, not working within his constitutional constraints, much less building a bipartisan consensus.
Hubris and defiance are his trademarks, not humility. He said, "If you're willing to work even harder in this election than you did in the last election, I promise you, change will come."
This should send cold chills up our spines. By "change," he means more of his unpopular, failed agenda. He has repeatedly indicated that he is frustrated with the process of republican government and that he would be much more comfortable as a dictator.
He has also said many times that he believes his goals are so important that he intends to implement them with or without Congress, through executive or administrative usurpations. He has done more than talk; he has acted in contravention of the Constitution and intends to continue in that vein.
What he might do in a second term is frightening to those who believe in freedom and equality of opportunity, that our current pattern of discretionary and entitlement spending is not just unsustainable but also guaranteed to destroy the country, and that we cannot preserve our freedom if we persist on a course of unilateral disarmament.
Just consider how brazenly Obama has pursued his unpopular agenda even while facing re-election. Think how he joked about having made a hollow promise of shovel-ready jobs when there is no such thing and how he is unchastened by the colossal waste of Solyndra and pursuing more of the same. Consider how he cavalierly refuses to account for his promise to keep unemployment capped at 8 percent and how he assured us, on his honor, that his designated stimulus cop, Vice President Joe Biden, wouldn't allow a dollar of waste to go unpunished in his stimulus plan. Chew on his refusal to listen to the public when it resoundingly rejected Obamacare, rebuffing his agenda in the U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts and again in the 2010 congressional elections. Ponder his petty partisanship, bullying, demonizing and class warfare and his frequent invocation of the race card. Can you conceive of how he'd act as a four-year lame duck?
You all surely heard Obama, thinking he was speaking only to friends, boast that he was for a single-payer plan but that it might take 15 years to implement it. Remember this when his supporters tell you Obamacare won't degenerate into socialized medicine. Those waivers he unilaterally issued to buy off companies now won't be available next time around when the full force of Obamacare rains down its dark waters.
Think about his Independent Payment Advisory Board, which will have 15 bureaucrats once Obamacare is up and running, when he won't have to worry about 2016. Before you pooh-pooh this, you'd better do your research on his health care mentors' (e.g., Tom Daschle, Donald Berwick) philosophy about the macabre rationing of health care for the aged.
So, call me an alarmist if you will, but I think it's almost irrational not to be very concerned about an Obama second term. Even if you don't subscribe to some of the horror scenarios of death panels and the like, how about his intention to continue to press forward with his radical green agenda despite the fact that it won't work to reduce global temperatures and despite the public's opposition to it?
More importantly, how about his absolute refusal to restructure entitlements or his refusal to lead his party's Senate to pass a budget after 1,000 days? Or his insistence on another stimulus package when unemployment -- even using the distorted metrics the administration is now using -- is still at 8.5 percent and it would add another half-trillion dollars to the national debt?
By rights, Obama shouldn't get 10 percent of the vote in November. Even those who want to punish the "wealthy" should understand that once you completely gnaw off the hand that feeds you, you will starve, too.
SOURCE
***************************
Gingrich attacks to help Romney
Believe it or not, Newt Gingrich is doing Mitt Romney a favor. Gingrich has spent the past week attacking Romney’s tenure as the head of Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney helped found in the 1980s. Through his own words and a propagandistic documentary produced by Winning Our Future, a well funded pro-Newt Super PAC run by a former campaign aid, Gingrich has attempted to paint Romney as a heartless, out of touch, capitalist monster—the King of Bain—whose firm made millions through mass firings and layoffs.
The campaign, however, has mostly backfired. Gingrich has united the conservative chattering class against him enough that Winning Our Future's major financial backer, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has distanced himself from the documentary, and Gingrich has called for its producers to either edit the film or "pull it off the air and off the internet entirely." In the process, Gingrich has managed to generate the one thing that the Romney campaign has failed to win or buy for itself: sympathy.
But what’s good for Romney may be bad for the rest of us. Gingrich’s attacks aren’t just helping to unite conservatives in defense of Romney, they’re distracting from the very real flaws in Romney’s record.
Gingrich’s criticisms of Romney’s time at Bain Capital have backfired in part because they’re straight out of the liberal playbook. Indeed, they amount to attacks on the essence of capitalism: creative destruction. That’s especially true of Romney’s Bain Capital, which was spun out of Bain and Co., an early player in the world of high-end management consulting, in the mid 1980s. Most private equity firms at the time relied primarily on financial engineering to increase the value of the companies they worked with.
But according to Stephen Kaplan, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, Bain Capital’s innovation was marshalling the tools of management consulting in hopes of transforming companies into entities that weren’t just better financed, but better run. Private equity firms, Kaplan wrote in a 2008 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “applied performance-based managerial compensation, highly leveraged capital structures, and active governance to the companies in which it invested.” Overall, the strategy seems to have been a success: The “evidence suggests that private equity activity creates economic value on average.” For all practical purposes, Gingrich is attacking Romney for having run a business that helped create value.
The attacks on Romney aren’t just misguided; they’re also inaccurate, relying on factual errors and quotes taken out of context. Here’s just one example: The half hour documentary funded by the Gingrich-supporting Super PAC Winning the Future tells the story of UniMac, a Florida company that made laundry equipment. The documentary leads viewers to think that UniMac was bought and shut down by Bain through another firm, Raytheon, that was Bain under a different name. But as CNN Money’s Dan Primack noted earlier this week, Bain and Raytheon weren’t the same thing. Raytheon bought UniMac in 1994, then merged it with other companies. Bain didn’t buy that unit until four years later.
Even the timing and delivery of Gingrich’s attacks will likely help Romney in the long run. If Romney wins the nomination, the Obama campaign will have a harder time using Bain’s record against him. Not only will they be old news, they’ll be associated with a disreputable, discredited Republican candidate.
Meanwhile, Gingrich’s attacks have distracted people from the true problems with Romney’s record—his long history of flip-flops, his enthusiasm for technocratic fiddling, his unimpressive Medicare reform proposal, his significant role in passing the Massachusetts health care overhaul that served as the model for ObamaCare, and the weakness of his plan to undo ObamaCare through federally granted waivers to the states.
Gingrich’s suicide run ultimately tells us more about his own desperate political narcissism than it does about Mitt Romney, whose business career is the best part of his record. There are plenty of reasons to complain about Romney, but his time at Bain isn’t one of them.
SOURCE
**************************
Voter ID: Necessary or Discriminatory?
You need a proper form of government ID to drive a vehicle, buy alcohol or tobacco products, and even to apply for welfare assistance, so why not require an ID to vote?
That’s the line of thinking of South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who, along with South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, are filing suit against the U.S. Department of Justice, which recently rejected the state’s new Voter ID law, enforcing provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Last May, South Carolina state lawmakers passed a law requiring voters show a valid, state-approved photo ID before they cast a ballot. But the U.S. Justice Department rejected the law saying it discriminated against minority voters.
But when you need a valid form of government ID in so many other daily situations, how is it discriminatory to ask for one before exercising your right to vote?
States like Georgia, Indiana, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Kansas, Tennessee and, if approved by the Department of Justice, Texas, all have strict photo ID voting laws. South Carolina hopes to join them.
Supporters of voter ID say it helps to prevent voter fraud. “Voting in this country is one of our most valuable honors and rights as U.S. citizens,” says Bill Wilson, president of Americans for Limited Government (ALG). “If people lose trust in the voting system then our entire democracy and the framework of our government is lost. Requiring voters to show a valid ID is an easy step to take that keeps people’s trust in the system.”
On the other hand, many agree with the concerns coming from the U.S. Justice Department that voter ID can lead to discrimination.
When voter ID was passed in Mississippi last year, many felt it was an attack on non-whites. “Our analysis shows that Mississippi’s voter ID law is another example of a law with a racially discriminatory effect being implemented over minority voters’ strong objections,” Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told the Huffington Post. “Seventy-five percent of minorities in the state said no to having to comply with what amounts to a modern-day poll tax in order to exercise their fundamental right to vote.”
Voter ID is a contentious topic that clearly strikes a nerve with those who are adamantly against it as well as those who fully support it, which is likely why many states have no voter ID laws at all.
But despite the arguments for or against voter ID, America’s past does contain allegations and some possible shreds of proof of voter fraud.
One such controversial election was in 1984 in Indiana’s 8th district. The election battle was so tight between Rep. Frank McCloskey (D-IN) and Republican-challenger Rick McIntyre that the results were decided upon in Congress. After a recount of votes by Indiana’s Secretary of State that ruled McIntyre the winner, the Democratic-controlled House refused to seat either candidate until it conducted its own investigation. With a task force leading the investigation composed of two Democrats and one Republican, McCloskey took his seat in the House where he was claimed the winner by only four votes. Republicans temporarily left the House Chamber in protest.
In another instance, during the 1996 Congressional elections, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) came under fire of Republicans as she took her place in the House replacing former incumbent Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-CA) in California’s 46th district.
House sources to this day say former Rep. Dornan’s seat was stolen from him. The House Oversight Committee, then led by Republicans, launched an investigation into the race and found that non-U.S. citizens voted in the election, possibly attributing to Rep. Sanchez’s lead over Dornan.
Speculation still ensues over recent elections such as now Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) winning over former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) in the 2008 Senate election in Minnesota State. Also, the Washington State governor’s race of 2004 was decided by 133 votes out of 2.8 million cast. Recounting the votes a third time was the ticket for Democrat Christine Gregoire who was declared a winner by a state judge even after losing in two separate recounts against Republican Dino Rossi.
These states that want a strict voter ID law want to protect the rights of voters and the honor of the voting system. Their objective is not to discriminate.
What happens when citizens lose trust in a nation’s government is they become subjects instead of citizens. In the words of Joseph Stalin: “The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” Those words should never ring true in America.
SOURCE
Doubts about Harry Reid's most recent win might also have been mentioned above
****************************
U.S. Veteran’s unemployment rate soars above 13 percent
By Rebecca DiFede — In the 236 years since its birth, our great nation has been involved in a great many battles that have forever changed the course of history, both for us and for our allies and foes. Needless to say, America wouldn’t be what it is without the brave men and women who sacrificed everything to fight for our freedom.
Recently, President Obama ended the war in Iraq and welcomed home thousands of brave young Americans. However upon their return home and start of their transition into civilian life, they were faced with a startling realization: there are no jobs.
According to a press release from Generation Opportunity, a non-profit dedicated to helping Americans create a better future, unemployment around veterans aged 18-29 has increased to 1 in 3 for the last quarter of 2011, up from 1 in 5 in the last quarter of 2010.
The overall unemployment rate for young veterans rose to a whopping 13.1 percent at the end of December, and 43 percent of those employed are unsatisfied with their current employment. These are the people whose decision to serve helped ensure that our Constitution still has meaning, and meanwhile they struggle to find jobs in an economy that’s barely afloat.
Only 36 percent of veterans aged 18-29 believe that there is the right leadership in Washington, and a hefty 69 percent think current leadership fails to represent their interests. Yet another example that illustrates the tides of favor slowly beginning to pull away from the shores of our illustrious president.
2012 has begun, and the battle for control of the high seas of this nation is a tough one. With our captain failing to make good on his promises time and time again, it seems that the smell of electoral mutiny is in the air.
As more and more of our nation’s youths fall into unemployment — 77 percent of whom already have or will delay a major life change because of economic reasons — thus increases the already widespread dissatisfaction with the current administration.
More HERE
*************************
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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)
****************************
Friday, January 13, 2012
The New Authoritarianism
A firm hand for a “nation of dodos”
“I refuse to take ‘No’ for an answer,” said President Obama this week as he claimed new powers for himself in making recess appointments while Congress wasn’t legally in recess. The chief executive’s power grab in naming appointees to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board has been depicted by administration supporters as one forced upon a reluctant Obama by Republican intransigence. But this isn’t the first example of the president’s increasing tendency to govern with executive-branch powers. He has already explained that “where Congress is not willing to act, we’re going to go ahead and do it ourselves.” On a variety of issues, from immigration to the environment to labor law, that’s just what he’s been doing—and he may try it even more boldly should he win reelection. This “go it alone” philosophy reflects an authoritarian trend emerging on the political left since the conservative triumph in the 2010 elections.
The president and his coterie could have responded to the 2010 elections by conceding the widespread public hostility to excessive government spending and regulation. That’s what the more clued-in Clintonites did after their 1994 midterm defeats. But unlike Clinton, who came from the party’s moderate wing and hailed from the rural South, the highly urban progressive rump that is Obama’s true base of support has little appreciation for suburban or rural Democrats. In fact, some liberals even celebrated the 2010 demise of the Blue Dog and Plains States Democrats, concluding that the purged party could embrace a purer version of the liberal agenda. So instead of appealing to the middle, the White House has pressed ahead with Keynesian spending and a progressive regulatory agenda.
Much of the administration’s approach has to do with a change in the nature of liberal politics. Today’s progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians. Rather, they resemble the medieval clerical class. Their goal is governmental control over everything from what sort of climate science is permissible to how we choose to live our lives. Many of today’s progressives can be as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most strident evangelical minister or mullah. Like Al Gore declaring the debate over climate change closed, despite the Climategate e-mails and widespread skepticism, the clerisy takes its beliefs as based on absolute truth. Critics lie beyond the pale.
The problem for the clerisy lies in political reality. The country’s largely suburban and increasingly Southern electorate does not see big government as its friend or wise liberal mandarins as the source of its salvation. This sets up a potential political crisis between those who know what’s good and a presumptively ignorant majority. Obama is burdened, says Joe Klein of Time, by governing a “nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive,” as the title of his story puts it, without the guidance of our president. But if the people are too deluded to cooperate, elements in the progressive tradition have a solution: European-style governance by a largely unelected bureaucratic class.
The tension between self-government and “good” government has existed since the origins of modern liberalism. Thinkers such as Herbert Croly and Randolph Bourne staked a claim to a priestly wisdom far greater than that possessed by the ordinary mortal. As Croly explained, “any increase in centralized power and responsibility . . . is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy. But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition” and the fact that “the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.”
During the first two years of the Obama administration, the progressives persuaded themselves that favorable demographics and the consequences of the George W. Bush years would assure the consent of the electorate. They drew parallels with how growing urbanization and Herbert Hoover’s legacy worked for FDR in the 1930s. But FDR enhanced his majority in his first midterm election in 1934; the current progressive agenda, by contrast, was roundly thrashed in 2010. Obama may compare himself to Roosevelt and even to Lincoln, but the electorate does not appear to share this assessment.
After the 2010 thrashing, progressives seemed uninterested in moderating their agenda. Left-wing standard bearers Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation and Robert Borosage of the Institute for Policy Studies went so far as to argue that Obama should bypass Congress whenever necessary and govern using his executive authority over the government’s regulatory agencies. This autocratic agenda of enhanced executive authority has strong support with people close to White House, such as John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, a left-liberal think tank. “The U.S. Constitution and the laws of our nation grant the president significant authority to make and implement policy,” Podesta has written. “These authorities can be used to ensure positive progress on many of the key issues facing the country.”
Podesta has proposed what amounts to a national, more ideological variant of what in Obama’s home state is known as “The Chicago Way.” Under that system, John Kass of the Chicago Tribune explains, “citizens, even Republicans, are expected to take what big government gives them. If the political boss suggests that you purchase some expensive wrought-iron fence to decorate your corporate headquarters, and the guy selling insurance to the wrought-iron boys is the boss’ little brother, you write the check.” But the American clerisy isn’t merely a bunch of corrupt politicians and bureaucratic lifers, and the United States isn’t one-party Chicago. The clerisy are more like an ideological vanguard, one based largely in academe and the media as well as part of the high-tech community.
Their authoritarian progressivism—at odds with the democratic, pluralistic traditions within liberalism—tends to evoke science, however contested, to justify its authority. The progressives themselves are, in Daniel Bell’s telling phrase, “the priests of the machine.” Their views are fairly uniform and can be seen in “progressive legal theory,” which displaces the seeming plain meaning of the Constitution with constructions derived from the perceived needs of a changing political environment. Belief in affirmative action, environmental justice, health-care reform, and redistribution from the middle class to the poor all find foundation there. More important still is a radical environmental agenda fervently committed to the idea that climate change has a human origin—a kind of secular notion of original sin. But these ideas are not widely shared by most people. The clerisy may see in Obama “reason incarnate,” as George Packer of The New Yorker put it, but the majority of the population remains more concerned about long-term unemployment and a struggling economy than about rising sea levels or the need to maintain racial quotas.
Despite the president’s clear political weaknesses—his job-approval ratings remain below 50 percent—he retains a reasonable shot at reelection. In the coming months, he will likely avoid pushing too hard on such things as overregulating business, particularly on the environmental front, which would undermine the nascent recovery and stir too much opposition from corporate donors. American voters may also be less than enthusiastic about the Republican alternatives topping the ticket. And one should never underestimate the power of even a less-than-popular president. Obama can count on a strong chorus of support from the media and many of the top high-tech firms, which have enjoyed lavish subsidies and government loans for “green” projects.
If Obama does win, 2013 could possibly bring something approaching a constitutional crisis. With the House and perhaps the Senate in Republican hands, Obama’s clerisy may be tempted to use the full range of executive power. The logic for running the country from the executive has been laid out already. Republican control of just the House, argues Chicago congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., has made America ungovernable. Obama, he said during the fight over the debt limit, needed to bypass the Constitution because, as in 1861, the South (in this case, the Southern Republicans) was “in a state of rebellion” against lawful authority. Beverley Perdue, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, concurred: she wanted to have elections suspended for a stretch. (Perdue’s office later insisted this was a joke, but most jokes aren’t told deadpan or punctuated with “I really hope someone can agree with me on that.” Also: Nobody laughed.)
The Left’s growing support for a soft authoritarianism is reminiscent of the 1930s, when many on both right and left looked favorably at either Stalin’s Soviet experiment or its fascist and National Socialist rivals. Tom Friedman of the New York Times recently praised Chinese-style authoritarianism for advancing the green agenda. The “reasonably enlightened group” running China, he asserted, was superior to our messy democracy in such things as subsidizing green industry. Steven Rattner, the investment banker and former Obama car czar, dismisses the problems posed by China’s economic and environmental foibles and declares himself “staunchly optimistic” about the future of that country’s Communist Party dictatorship. And it’s not just the gentry liberals identifying China as their model: labor leader Andy Stern, formerly the president of the Service Employees International Union and a close ally of the White House, celebrates Chinese authoritarianism and says that our capitalistic pluralism is headed for “the trash heap of history.” The Chinese, Stern argues, get things done.
A victorious Obama administration could embrace a soft version of the Chinese model. The mechanisms of control already exist. The bureaucratic apparatus, the array of policy czars and regulatory enforcers commissioned by the executive branch, has grown dramatically under Obama. Their ability to control and prosecute people for violations relating to issues like labor and the environment—once largely the province of states and localities—can be further enhanced. In the post-election environment, the president, using agencies like the EPA, could successfully strangle whole industries—notably the burgeoning oil and natural gas sector—and drag whole regions into recession. The newly announced EPA rules on extremely small levels of mercury and other toxins, for example, will sharply raise electricity rates in much of the country, particularly in the industrial heartland; greenhouse-gas policy, including, perhaps, an administratively imposed “cap and trade,” would greatly impact entrepreneurs and new investors forced to purchase credits from existing polluters. On a host of social issues, the new progressive regime could employ the Justice Department to impose national rulings well out of sync with local sentiments. Expansions of affirmative action, gay rights, and abortion rights could become mandated from Washington even in areas, such as the South, where such views are anathema.
This future can already been seen in fiscally challenged California. The state should be leading a recovery, not lagging behind the rest of the country. But in a place where Obama-style progressives rule without effective opposition, the clerisy has already enacted a score of regulatory mandates that are chasing businesses, particularly in manufacturing, out of the state. It has also passed land-use policies designed to enforce density, in effect eliminating the dream of single-family homes for all but the very rich in much of the state.
A nightmare scenario would be a constitutional crisis pitting a relentless executive power against a disgruntled, alienated opposition lacking strong, intelligent leadership. Over time, the new authoritarians would elicit even more opposition from the “dodos” who make up the majority of Americans residing in the great landmass outside the coastal strips and Chicago. The legacy of the Obama years—once so breathlessly associated with hope and reconciliation—may instead be growing pessimism and polarization.
SOURCE
***********************
Cost of Obamacare Regulations Underestimated by Billions of Dollars
The Obama Administration underestimated the costs of Obamacare regulations by billions of dollars says the non-partisan Mercatus Center at George Mason University in a working paper it issued on Monday. The study examines eight Obamacare regulations issued in 2010 that became law before public comment was allowed because of the brief timeline Obamacare gave for their implementation.
Mercatus carefully studied the required cost/benefit analysis used by the Administration. And it found that the Administration’s cost estimates tended to be underestimated while its benefit estimates tended to be overestimated. The result is that the cost of implementing these eight regulations may be billions of dollars more than the Obama Administration is willing to admit.
For example, Mercatus says that, “For the ‘Early Retiree Reinsurance Program’ rule, costs were underestimated by $9-$10 billion over four years. More accurately calculated benefits might have been about one-third as high as estimated.”
This comes as no surprise to us at Americans for Limited Government. We’ve caught the Obama administration artificially inflating Obamacare’s benefits before.
For instance, on September 7, 2010 we submitted a public comment that criticized the Obama Administration for “describ[ing] [the preventive services regulation] as having a cost-savings benefit while supplying insufficient evidence to back such a claim and ignoring evidence to the contrary.”
The Mercatus study confirms our criticism: “The selective review of the literature provided in the RIA gives the uninformed reader a false impression of the extent to which preventive health services are cost-saving. Literature reviews consistently have concluded that most clinical preventive services typically are not cost-saving.”
While the Mercatus Center’s working paper does not scrutinize the paperwork burden analysis of these regulations (we hope they will consider doing so in the future), we’ve found that the Administration also underestimates how much it will cost Americans to comply with the paperwork these regulations generate.
Of the eight regulations examined by the Mercatus study, we commented on six of them, and in three of those six we flagged errors in the Obama Administration’s paperwork burden cost calculations.
One such error is the Administration’s estimate of what it costs per hour for legal services. The Administration estimates that it costs $119 per hour to hire an attorney. Using the Laffey Matrix we estimate that the average billing rate for a Washington, DC attorney is more like $427 per hour. In just one regulation this mistake could amount to tens of millions of dollars. But even the billing rate for paralegals of $155 per hour is well above the Administration’s estimate for attorneys.
By underestimating the costs of Obamacare’s paperwork burden, the Obama Administration is also underestimating Obamacare’s implementation costs which will have to be borne by the American public.
Before Obamacare’s passage Nancy Pelosi prophesized, “[W]e have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it….”
The Obama Administration can continue to paint rosy pictures of Obamacare, but the more we find out what’s in it, the more we see it for what it really is.
SOURCE
****************************
ELSEWHERE
MS: Court blocks release of inmates pardoned by Barbour: "A judge has temporarily blocked the release of 21 inmates who'd been given pardons or medical release by Republican Haley Barbour in one of his final acts as governor. ... [Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood] said he believes Barbour might have violated the state constitution by pardoning some inmates who failed to give sufficient public notice that they were seeking to have their records cleared."
NJ: Lawmaker looks to update alimony rules: "Fairness must be put back into divorce court, an advocacy group in New Jersey is arguing, pushing legislation to update what it says are antiquated alimony laws that disproportionately favor the recipients of alimony, regardless of changing circumstances. 'Lifetime alimony and the family court system in New Jersey are driving real people to the brink,' Tom Leustek, president and founder of New Jersey Alimony Reform, told FoxNews.com."
No, Bain did not get a “bailout”: "Left-wing blogs and Mitt Romney’s presidential-primary rivals -- and who can tell those apart this week? -- have charged that Bain & Company, the firm Romney once headed, was the beneficiary of not one but two bailouts: one from the FDIC, and one from the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. These allegations are nakedly false."
Hurting the poor, helping the rich: "Coming from Randian roots, I have a deep appreciation for the virtues of business, and of wealth that has been earned. I do not consider myself to be a liberal-tarian. I usually agree with the Right and disagree with the Left. But the more I look around, the more I see that socialism is really a tool by means of which millionaire elites keep the poor masses from rising up."
*************************
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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)
****************************
A firm hand for a “nation of dodos”
“I refuse to take ‘No’ for an answer,” said President Obama this week as he claimed new powers for himself in making recess appointments while Congress wasn’t legally in recess. The chief executive’s power grab in naming appointees to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board has been depicted by administration supporters as one forced upon a reluctant Obama by Republican intransigence. But this isn’t the first example of the president’s increasing tendency to govern with executive-branch powers. He has already explained that “where Congress is not willing to act, we’re going to go ahead and do it ourselves.” On a variety of issues, from immigration to the environment to labor law, that’s just what he’s been doing—and he may try it even more boldly should he win reelection. This “go it alone” philosophy reflects an authoritarian trend emerging on the political left since the conservative triumph in the 2010 elections.
The president and his coterie could have responded to the 2010 elections by conceding the widespread public hostility to excessive government spending and regulation. That’s what the more clued-in Clintonites did after their 1994 midterm defeats. But unlike Clinton, who came from the party’s moderate wing and hailed from the rural South, the highly urban progressive rump that is Obama’s true base of support has little appreciation for suburban or rural Democrats. In fact, some liberals even celebrated the 2010 demise of the Blue Dog and Plains States Democrats, concluding that the purged party could embrace a purer version of the liberal agenda. So instead of appealing to the middle, the White House has pressed ahead with Keynesian spending and a progressive regulatory agenda.
Much of the administration’s approach has to do with a change in the nature of liberal politics. Today’s progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians. Rather, they resemble the medieval clerical class. Their goal is governmental control over everything from what sort of climate science is permissible to how we choose to live our lives. Many of today’s progressives can be as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most strident evangelical minister or mullah. Like Al Gore declaring the debate over climate change closed, despite the Climategate e-mails and widespread skepticism, the clerisy takes its beliefs as based on absolute truth. Critics lie beyond the pale.
The problem for the clerisy lies in political reality. The country’s largely suburban and increasingly Southern electorate does not see big government as its friend or wise liberal mandarins as the source of its salvation. This sets up a potential political crisis between those who know what’s good and a presumptively ignorant majority. Obama is burdened, says Joe Klein of Time, by governing a “nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive,” as the title of his story puts it, without the guidance of our president. But if the people are too deluded to cooperate, elements in the progressive tradition have a solution: European-style governance by a largely unelected bureaucratic class.
The tension between self-government and “good” government has existed since the origins of modern liberalism. Thinkers such as Herbert Croly and Randolph Bourne staked a claim to a priestly wisdom far greater than that possessed by the ordinary mortal. As Croly explained, “any increase in centralized power and responsibility . . . is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy. But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition” and the fact that “the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.”
During the first two years of the Obama administration, the progressives persuaded themselves that favorable demographics and the consequences of the George W. Bush years would assure the consent of the electorate. They drew parallels with how growing urbanization and Herbert Hoover’s legacy worked for FDR in the 1930s. But FDR enhanced his majority in his first midterm election in 1934; the current progressive agenda, by contrast, was roundly thrashed in 2010. Obama may compare himself to Roosevelt and even to Lincoln, but the electorate does not appear to share this assessment.
After the 2010 thrashing, progressives seemed uninterested in moderating their agenda. Left-wing standard bearers Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation and Robert Borosage of the Institute for Policy Studies went so far as to argue that Obama should bypass Congress whenever necessary and govern using his executive authority over the government’s regulatory agencies. This autocratic agenda of enhanced executive authority has strong support with people close to White House, such as John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, a left-liberal think tank. “The U.S. Constitution and the laws of our nation grant the president significant authority to make and implement policy,” Podesta has written. “These authorities can be used to ensure positive progress on many of the key issues facing the country.”
Podesta has proposed what amounts to a national, more ideological variant of what in Obama’s home state is known as “The Chicago Way.” Under that system, John Kass of the Chicago Tribune explains, “citizens, even Republicans, are expected to take what big government gives them. If the political boss suggests that you purchase some expensive wrought-iron fence to decorate your corporate headquarters, and the guy selling insurance to the wrought-iron boys is the boss’ little brother, you write the check.” But the American clerisy isn’t merely a bunch of corrupt politicians and bureaucratic lifers, and the United States isn’t one-party Chicago. The clerisy are more like an ideological vanguard, one based largely in academe and the media as well as part of the high-tech community.
Their authoritarian progressivism—at odds with the democratic, pluralistic traditions within liberalism—tends to evoke science, however contested, to justify its authority. The progressives themselves are, in Daniel Bell’s telling phrase, “the priests of the machine.” Their views are fairly uniform and can be seen in “progressive legal theory,” which displaces the seeming plain meaning of the Constitution with constructions derived from the perceived needs of a changing political environment. Belief in affirmative action, environmental justice, health-care reform, and redistribution from the middle class to the poor all find foundation there. More important still is a radical environmental agenda fervently committed to the idea that climate change has a human origin—a kind of secular notion of original sin. But these ideas are not widely shared by most people. The clerisy may see in Obama “reason incarnate,” as George Packer of The New Yorker put it, but the majority of the population remains more concerned about long-term unemployment and a struggling economy than about rising sea levels or the need to maintain racial quotas.
Despite the president’s clear political weaknesses—his job-approval ratings remain below 50 percent—he retains a reasonable shot at reelection. In the coming months, he will likely avoid pushing too hard on such things as overregulating business, particularly on the environmental front, which would undermine the nascent recovery and stir too much opposition from corporate donors. American voters may also be less than enthusiastic about the Republican alternatives topping the ticket. And one should never underestimate the power of even a less-than-popular president. Obama can count on a strong chorus of support from the media and many of the top high-tech firms, which have enjoyed lavish subsidies and government loans for “green” projects.
If Obama does win, 2013 could possibly bring something approaching a constitutional crisis. With the House and perhaps the Senate in Republican hands, Obama’s clerisy may be tempted to use the full range of executive power. The logic for running the country from the executive has been laid out already. Republican control of just the House, argues Chicago congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., has made America ungovernable. Obama, he said during the fight over the debt limit, needed to bypass the Constitution because, as in 1861, the South (in this case, the Southern Republicans) was “in a state of rebellion” against lawful authority. Beverley Perdue, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, concurred: she wanted to have elections suspended for a stretch. (Perdue’s office later insisted this was a joke, but most jokes aren’t told deadpan or punctuated with “I really hope someone can agree with me on that.” Also: Nobody laughed.)
The Left’s growing support for a soft authoritarianism is reminiscent of the 1930s, when many on both right and left looked favorably at either Stalin’s Soviet experiment or its fascist and National Socialist rivals. Tom Friedman of the New York Times recently praised Chinese-style authoritarianism for advancing the green agenda. The “reasonably enlightened group” running China, he asserted, was superior to our messy democracy in such things as subsidizing green industry. Steven Rattner, the investment banker and former Obama car czar, dismisses the problems posed by China’s economic and environmental foibles and declares himself “staunchly optimistic” about the future of that country’s Communist Party dictatorship. And it’s not just the gentry liberals identifying China as their model: labor leader Andy Stern, formerly the president of the Service Employees International Union and a close ally of the White House, celebrates Chinese authoritarianism and says that our capitalistic pluralism is headed for “the trash heap of history.” The Chinese, Stern argues, get things done.
A victorious Obama administration could embrace a soft version of the Chinese model. The mechanisms of control already exist. The bureaucratic apparatus, the array of policy czars and regulatory enforcers commissioned by the executive branch, has grown dramatically under Obama. Their ability to control and prosecute people for violations relating to issues like labor and the environment—once largely the province of states and localities—can be further enhanced. In the post-election environment, the president, using agencies like the EPA, could successfully strangle whole industries—notably the burgeoning oil and natural gas sector—and drag whole regions into recession. The newly announced EPA rules on extremely small levels of mercury and other toxins, for example, will sharply raise electricity rates in much of the country, particularly in the industrial heartland; greenhouse-gas policy, including, perhaps, an administratively imposed “cap and trade,” would greatly impact entrepreneurs and new investors forced to purchase credits from existing polluters. On a host of social issues, the new progressive regime could employ the Justice Department to impose national rulings well out of sync with local sentiments. Expansions of affirmative action, gay rights, and abortion rights could become mandated from Washington even in areas, such as the South, where such views are anathema.
This future can already been seen in fiscally challenged California. The state should be leading a recovery, not lagging behind the rest of the country. But in a place where Obama-style progressives rule without effective opposition, the clerisy has already enacted a score of regulatory mandates that are chasing businesses, particularly in manufacturing, out of the state. It has also passed land-use policies designed to enforce density, in effect eliminating the dream of single-family homes for all but the very rich in much of the state.
A nightmare scenario would be a constitutional crisis pitting a relentless executive power against a disgruntled, alienated opposition lacking strong, intelligent leadership. Over time, the new authoritarians would elicit even more opposition from the “dodos” who make up the majority of Americans residing in the great landmass outside the coastal strips and Chicago. The legacy of the Obama years—once so breathlessly associated with hope and reconciliation—may instead be growing pessimism and polarization.
SOURCE
***********************
Cost of Obamacare Regulations Underestimated by Billions of Dollars
The Obama Administration underestimated the costs of Obamacare regulations by billions of dollars says the non-partisan Mercatus Center at George Mason University in a working paper it issued on Monday. The study examines eight Obamacare regulations issued in 2010 that became law before public comment was allowed because of the brief timeline Obamacare gave for their implementation.
Mercatus carefully studied the required cost/benefit analysis used by the Administration. And it found that the Administration’s cost estimates tended to be underestimated while its benefit estimates tended to be overestimated. The result is that the cost of implementing these eight regulations may be billions of dollars more than the Obama Administration is willing to admit.
For example, Mercatus says that, “For the ‘Early Retiree Reinsurance Program’ rule, costs were underestimated by $9-$10 billion over four years. More accurately calculated benefits might have been about one-third as high as estimated.”
This comes as no surprise to us at Americans for Limited Government. We’ve caught the Obama administration artificially inflating Obamacare’s benefits before.
For instance, on September 7, 2010 we submitted a public comment that criticized the Obama Administration for “describ[ing] [the preventive services regulation] as having a cost-savings benefit while supplying insufficient evidence to back such a claim and ignoring evidence to the contrary.”
The Mercatus study confirms our criticism: “The selective review of the literature provided in the RIA gives the uninformed reader a false impression of the extent to which preventive health services are cost-saving. Literature reviews consistently have concluded that most clinical preventive services typically are not cost-saving.”
While the Mercatus Center’s working paper does not scrutinize the paperwork burden analysis of these regulations (we hope they will consider doing so in the future), we’ve found that the Administration also underestimates how much it will cost Americans to comply with the paperwork these regulations generate.
Of the eight regulations examined by the Mercatus study, we commented on six of them, and in three of those six we flagged errors in the Obama Administration’s paperwork burden cost calculations.
One such error is the Administration’s estimate of what it costs per hour for legal services. The Administration estimates that it costs $119 per hour to hire an attorney. Using the Laffey Matrix we estimate that the average billing rate for a Washington, DC attorney is more like $427 per hour. In just one regulation this mistake could amount to tens of millions of dollars. But even the billing rate for paralegals of $155 per hour is well above the Administration’s estimate for attorneys.
By underestimating the costs of Obamacare’s paperwork burden, the Obama Administration is also underestimating Obamacare’s implementation costs which will have to be borne by the American public.
Before Obamacare’s passage Nancy Pelosi prophesized, “[W]e have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it….”
The Obama Administration can continue to paint rosy pictures of Obamacare, but the more we find out what’s in it, the more we see it for what it really is.
SOURCE
****************************
ELSEWHERE
MS: Court blocks release of inmates pardoned by Barbour: "A judge has temporarily blocked the release of 21 inmates who'd been given pardons or medical release by Republican Haley Barbour in one of his final acts as governor. ... [Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood] said he believes Barbour might have violated the state constitution by pardoning some inmates who failed to give sufficient public notice that they were seeking to have their records cleared."
NJ: Lawmaker looks to update alimony rules: "Fairness must be put back into divorce court, an advocacy group in New Jersey is arguing, pushing legislation to update what it says are antiquated alimony laws that disproportionately favor the recipients of alimony, regardless of changing circumstances. 'Lifetime alimony and the family court system in New Jersey are driving real people to the brink,' Tom Leustek, president and founder of New Jersey Alimony Reform, told FoxNews.com."
No, Bain did not get a “bailout”: "Left-wing blogs and Mitt Romney’s presidential-primary rivals -- and who can tell those apart this week? -- have charged that Bain & Company, the firm Romney once headed, was the beneficiary of not one but two bailouts: one from the FDIC, and one from the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. These allegations are nakedly false."
Hurting the poor, helping the rich: "Coming from Randian roots, I have a deep appreciation for the virtues of business, and of wealth that has been earned. I do not consider myself to be a liberal-tarian. I usually agree with the Right and disagree with the Left. But the more I look around, the more I see that socialism is really a tool by means of which millionaire elites keep the poor masses from rising up."
*************************
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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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