All Government Policies Succeed in the Long Run

By Robert Higgs

A crazy claim you are probably thinking after reading my title. After all, “failed policies” are a staple of discussions and debates about government actions in the United States. Everybody, regardless of political preferences, has a list of what he regards as the most glaringly failed policies. This way of looking at the matter, however, is all wrong.

People label a policy as a failure because it does not bring about its declared objective. For example, drug policies do not reduce drug use; educational policies do not educate children better; national-security policies do not make Americans more secure; and so forth. The mistake is to take seriously the announced policy objectives, to forget that virtually everything the government does is a fraud. The best way to document the government’s nearly unblemished record of policy success is to follow the money. With very little trouble, you will be able to follow the trail to the individuals and groups who benefit from the policy. Occasionally the true beneficiaries do not benefit in the form of augmented income or wealth, but in other forms of reward, yet the principle remains the same.

When I first studied economics and began to practice as an economist, back in the sixties and seventies, I learned how markets and the market system as a whole operate. With this understanding in mind, I was able to identify a number of reasons why a particular policy might fail: it might be based on insufficient or incorrect information; it might give rise to unintended consequences; it might receive inadequate funding for its implementation; it might be based on unsound theory or mistaken interpretation of historical experience; and so forth.

Analysts who approach the question of failed policies along these avenues can rest assured that they will never lack for new studies to perform and new measures to propose to legislators, regulators, administrators, and judges. For example, if government fiscal or monetary policy fails to stabilize the economy’s growth because it derives from unsound macroeconomic theory, then the analyst attempts to identify the ways in which the received theory is unsound and to formulate a sounder theory, on the basis of which a more successful policy may be carried out. This sort of back and forth between theoretical tinkering and policy appraisal fills many pages in mainstream economics journals.

But it’s all a waste of time insofar as the attainment of the ostensible policy objectives is concerned, because these objectives are not the policy-makers’ real objectives, but only the public rationales they use to disguise their true objective, which invariably is to bring about the enrichment, aggrandizement, and other benefit of the politically potent individuals and interest groups that pack the decisive punch in the policy-making process—for example, those who can most effectively threaten legislators with affirmative punishments or the withdrawal of financial support for the legislators’ reelection if the string pullers’ interests are not served.

Almost twenty years ago, I wrote an article on this subject called “The Myth of ‘Failed’ Policies,” commenting briefly on how seven different areas of important, obvious policy failure illustrate my thesis. Looking back at my 1995 article, I can say now that in each case the apparent “failure” and the actual success have only grown. In each case, much more money is being poured down the rat hole of a failed policy now than was being poured down it then—which is only to say that the American political process is at least as corrupt now as it was then, and probably even more so. Despite various surface changes in policy details, none of the ostensible “failures” has been repaired in the least, even though the apparent failure has become only more blatant and undeniable.

Many people, for good reason, have concluded that the surest test of whether a politician or public official is lying is to ask, Are his lips moving? An equally simple test may be proposed to determine whether a seemingly failed policy is actually a success for the movers and shakers of the political class. This test requires only that we ask, Does the policy remain in effect? If it does, we can be sure that it continues to serve the interests of those who are actually decisive in determining the sorts of policy the government establishes and implements. Now, as before, “failed” policies are a myth in regard to all policies that persist beyond the short run. The people who effectively run the government, whether from inside or outside the beast, do not run it for the purpose of hampering the attainment of their own interests; on the contrary. Everything else in the policy process is, as Macbeth would put it, “a tale told by an idiot [augmented by economists, lawyers, and public-relations flacks], full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

SOURCE

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‘Almost Everything You Think You Know About the Matthew Shepard Narrative is False’

The death of 21-year old Matthew Shepard in 1998 launched yet another attempt by the MSM to attack the right; which in retrospect perfectly fits the template employed by the left in recent years to politicize the shootings of Gabrielle Giffords and Trayvon Martin:

Almost immediately Shepard became a secular saint, and his killing became a kind of gay Passion Play where he suffered and died for the cause of homosexuality against the growing homophobia and hatred of gay America.

Thanks to a new book by an award winning gay journalist we now know that much of this narrative turns out to be false, little more than gay hagiography.

As gay journalist Aaron Hicklin, writing in The Advocate asks, “How do people sold on one version of history react to being told that the facts are slippery — that thinking of Shepard’s murder as a hate crime does not mean it was a hate crime? And how does it color our understanding of such a crime if the perpetrator and victim not only knew each other but also had sex together, bought drugs from one another, and partied together?”

This startling revelation comes in The Book of Matt to be published next week by investigative journalist Stephen Jiminez, who over the course of years interviewed over 100 people including Shepard’s friends, friends of the killers, and the killers themselves.

No wonder “More than half of Democrats, according to a neutral survey, said they believed Bush was complicit in the 9/11 terror attacks,” according to JournoList member Ben Smith. From the cause of the Kennedy assassination to their fever swamp fantasies regarding presidents Nixon and Reagan to their multiple conspiracy theories of the 1990s, the left had been taking national news stories and overlaying on them their most lurid thoughts about the right.

The template the left uses to take already horrific incidents such as the Giffords shooting (in which a judge appointed by Republican George H.W. Bush was killed), Travyon Martin’s attempt to bash in George Zimmerman’s skull (which might also involve homophobia, according to Martin’s associate Rachel Jeantel on CNN), and the killing of Matthew Shepard and turn the amps up to 11 to politicize them is fairly predictable. Also predictable is that it won’t be too long before another crime is politicized by the left to score cheap points. And while the right has talk radio, Fox, and the Blogosphere, the left still has a much, much louder megaphone, including both the “news” media and pop culture.

The next sucker punch is surely coming. How does the right fight back?

SOURCE

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Andrew Breitbart’s Sweet, Sweet Victories



I still think it is improbable that Breitbart's premature death was natural.  Was he given something to bring on a heart attack?  It did not appear to be a normal heart attack

Somewhere, up there, Andrew Breitbart is celebrating. On September 10, 2013, the legendary gadfly whose huge heart gave out far too soon chalked up a three more big wins in his campaign to take America back from the hypocritical liberal snobs he despised.

In New York, a Democrat electorate soundly rejected Anthony Wiener’s creepy comeback bid. And in Colorado, an enraged citizenry defied everything the liberal establishment could throw at them and tossed out a pair of Democrat state senators who thought they could trample on the basic civil right to keep and bear arms. Neither victory would have been possible without Andrew.

Before Andrew came along, we all knew that Democrat politicians were feminists on the podium and leering letches everywhere else. Yet from Ted Kennedy leaving a young woman to drown to Bill Clinton soiling the Oval Office with the ghastly evidence of his out-of-control libido, Democrats got away with posturing as the protectors of womankind from the ravages of the misogynist GOP.

Without Andrew Breitbart, no one would have ever known about Anthony Weiner’s bizarre predilections except Huma Abedin. She understood perfectly that the role of a male Democrat politician’s wife is to ignore her hubby’s seedy abuse of individual women so he can focus on cultivating women as a collective Democrat constituent group. And if she kept quiet, maybe she could be a senator herself. It had happened before.

Andrew broke the silence, not only pushing the story of Weiner’s genital selfies but refusing to let the mainstream media rule the story beyond the pale and ignore it. Then Andrew commandeered Weiner’s own press conference, launching into a glorious tirade and growing from raconteur to legend. Weiner slunk out of Congress and didn’t dare raise his head again until Andrew had passed. But he didn’t count on the fact that Andrew’s spirit remained.

Andrew was born and raised a liberal. He stopped being a liberal precisely because he believed in the things that liberals claimed they believed in – that all individuals should be treated with respect regardless of race or creed, that they should have a voice in their government, that civil rights matter, and that hypocrisy is wrong. It was his epiphany that liberals actually believe the opposite of what they preach that drove him out of the liberal camp. His incredible honesty and his refusal to accept the snobbery and lies that characterize liberalism made him liberalism’s Public Enemy Number One.

Don’t believe me? Scroll down to the comments. Give it a couple hours and you’ll see gleeful celebrations of Andrew’s premature passing from the members of the party of tolerance and compassion. Remember that when a liberal puts a “COEXIST” sticker on his Prius, he isn’t talking about people like us.

Anthony Wiener is gone now, swept away because Andrew refused to let the mainstream media enablers cover for him. Without Andrew, it would be Mayor Weiner, or perhaps even Senator Weiner. The mind recoils at the thought of the personal “filibustering” photos the Distinguished Gentleman from Twitter would be texting to barely legal teens.

In Colorado, a young plumber who had never been involved in politics was refused entry into his state senator’s town hall meeting. The senator didn’t feel like answering the questions the plumber and other voters had about the unconstitutional gun laws she and her fellow Democrats were shoving down Coloradans’ throats. That young plumber decided to make sure she heard him anyway, and on September 10th the entire liberal establishment heard him and other regular Americans roar as their shoestring campaign recalled two liberal senators.

That proud American probably never met Andrew, but he received a lot of help from people and organizations Andrew worked with during his years as a driving force in the Tea Party. Andrew believed that every American has a right to be heard, and he hated the pretension and snobbery of the liberal elite who think regular Americans should sit quietly and obey their masters.

Andrew was not much for sitting quietly.

He flayed the entertainment industry with Big Hollywood, the media with Big Journalism and the government – the last refuge of otherwise unemployable liberals – with Big Government. He confronted snobbery – we can only imagine Andrew’s delight in initiating a Twitter strike on the liberal who lamented the recall blowout by tweeting, “1) NRA money 2) Voter suppression (no mail-in) 3) Huge Amendment 2-like blow to Colorado economy as creative class recoils.”

Andrew would have savaged the bogus “NRA money” narrative by pointing out the ginormous dollar dump from liberals Mike Bloomberg and Eli Broad, and he would have mocked the “voter suppression” meme. But he would have saved his best for the “creative class” comment, a statement packed full of pretension and condescension toward the people who actually built this country and who make it function. That 29-year old plumber does more useful work for our country fixing pipes than a dozen “creative class” hipster doofuses twirling their goatees as they brew batches of undrinkable, cutesy-named, locally-sourced “craft brews.”

Andrew grew up with smug, smarmy liberals. He knew them. He was of them. That made his betrayal all the more intolerable. It made him dangerous.

And right now, as Weiner and the two ex-senators from Colorado try to find jobs in the Obama economy, Andrew is up there laughing his head off.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The Other 9-11—When Commies Tasted Their Own Medicine

It should be noted that Marxist President Allende won power in Chile with just a little over one third of the vote.  The anti-communist vote was split between two parties  -- JR

On September 11, 1973 the Chilean military led by General Augusto Pinochet slapped Fidel Castro so smartly that his Stalinist regime (and its dutiful U.S. Media minions) are still sniveling and sniffling and wiping away tears of shock, pain and humiliation.

True to form, The New York Times leads the sniveling. They just published an article decrying the Chilean “tragedy” (i.e. Chile saving itself from Castroism with a military coup and today the richest and freest nation in Latin America.) The article’s author Ariel Dorfman is a former advisor to Chile’s Marxist president and Castro acolyte Salvador Allende. This same “columnist,” by the way, proclaimed Che Guevara as “Hero and Icon of the Century!” for Time magazine back in 1999.

"We’re following the example of the Cuban Revolution and counting on the support of her militant internationalism represented by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara!” boasted Chilean president Salvador Allende’s minister Carlos Altamirano in January 1971. “Armed conflict in continental terms remains as relevant today as ever!" he declared.

And he wasn’t bluffing. By the time of Pinochet’s coup, an estimated 31,000 Cuban and Soviet bloc operatives and terrorists infested Chile, including Castro’s top KGB-trained terrorist spymasters, Antonio De La Guardia and Manuel "Barbarroja" Pineiro." Among the hundreds of Soviet personnel were KGB luminaries Viktor Efremov, Vasili Stepanov and Nikolai Kotchanov.

By 1973, 60% of Chile’s arable land had been stolen by Allende’s Marxist regime, often with the aid of Cuba-trained death squads. "In the final analysis only armed conflict will decide who is the victor!" added Allende’s governmental ally, Oscar Guillermo Garreton. “The class struggle always entails armed conflict. Understand me, the global strategy is always accomplished through arms!"

Allende’s deputy economic minister, Sergio Ramos, didn’t mince words either: "It’s evident," he proclaimed in mid-1973, "that the transition to socialism will first require a dictatorship of the proletariat!"

"Stalin was a banner of creativity, of humanism and an edifying picture of peace and heroism!" declared Salvador Allende during a eulogy in 1953 to the Soviet mass-murderer whose crimes left Hitler’s in the dust. "Everything he did, he did in service of the people. Our father Stalin has died but in remembering his example our affection for him will cause our arms to grow strong towards building a grand tomorrow—to insure a future in memory of his grand example!"

In September 1973 General Augusto Pinochet, his military colleagues and a majority of the Chilean people (Allende had won in 1970 with a slight plurality not a majority of the Chilean vote) failed to recognize Stalin’s Great Terror as a “grand example.” The Chilean legislature and Supreme Court had already declared Allende’s Marxism unconstitutional.

So with the clock tickling ominously toward irreversible Castroism, Chile’s traditionally un-political military made a (genuine) pinprick strike against Allende and his Stalinist minions.

Allende and Castro’s media minions claim 3000 people were “disappeared” during this anti-Communist coup and its aftermath, collateral damage and all. Well, even if we accept the Castroite figure, compared to the death-toll from our interventions/ bombing- campaigns in the Mid-East (that have yet to create a single free, peaceful and prosperous nation) Pinochet’s coup should be enshrined and studied at West Point, Georgetown and John Hopkins as the paradigm for effective “regime–change” and “nation-building.” Granted, Pinochet had much better raw-material to work with.

But the Castroite –MSM figure is mostly bogus, as many of those “disappeared” kept appearing, usually behind the iron curtain.

More importantly, Pinochet and his plotters were scrupulous in keeping U.S. State Dept. and CIA “nation-builders” and other such egghead busybodies out of their plotting loop. (This probably explains Pinochet’s success.) Then two years after the coup they invited Milton Freidman and his “Chicago Boys” over for some economic tutelage. And as mentioned: today Chile is the freest and richest nation in Latin America.

Oh, I know, I know, whenever you read about Pinochet’s coup in the media you read how it was “U.S.-backed,” and by the diabolical Richard Nixon, no less. Unrepentant apologist for Communism Christopher Hitchens did much to perpetuate the worldwide leftist whine-fest over Castro and Brezhnev’s humiliation in Chile. “1968 actually began in 1967 with the murder of Che,” recounted Christopher Hitchens in A New York Times article on the 30th Anniversary of Che Guevara’s death. “His death meant a lot to me. He was a role model.”

Hitchens’ book turned BBC documentary titled “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” remains the international Left’s “Nixon and Pinochet for Dummies.” But long- declassified U.S. documents publicized by Marc Falcoff in Frontpage Magazine expose the Castro-Hitchens-MSM version for the fairy-tale anti-Communist Chileans recognized from the get-go.

"We had nothing to do with it," Kissinger told Nixon over the phone on June 1973 after an earlier (and botched) coup attempt against Allende. “It came as a complete surprise to us." Added Assistant Sec. of State Jack Rush. “My firm instructions to everybody on the staff are that we are not to involve ourselves in any way,” reported U.S. ambassador Nathaniel Davis, who kept hearing coup rumors from his Chilean contacts.

Then on September 16, five days after Pinochet’s successful coup Nixon asked Kissinger: "Well, we didn't--as you know--our hand doesn't show on this one though?"

"We didn't do it,” replied Kissinger. “I mean …we helped create the conditions."

SOURCE

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Why Do Liberals Believe What They Believe?

John C. Goodman

Do you know of any place you can go to find a rational, well-thought out economic argument for liberalism? I can't. And that's really strange considering the degree to which this political philosophy dominates our culture.

By the term "liberalism" I mean the intellectual effort to apologize for and defend economic programs primarily associated with Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. There are four main ones:

 * The substitution of regulation for markets,

 * The substitution of social insurance for private provision,

 * The nationalization of welfare, and

 * The manipulation of the economy by the government.

It is difficult to exaggerate how completely this intellectual movement dominated thinking in the post-World War II period. During the 1950s and 1960s there was virtually no book, no journal, and no college campus where you could find a serious competing point of view.

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas in the 1960s, there were only two people on the entire liberal arts faculty who you could describe as right of center — a moderate Republican in the English department and a libertarian in the Political Science department. And this was a campus with 27,000 students!

Then in 1962 Milton Friedman wrote Capitalism and Freedom. Friedman called himself a "classical liberal" and his book was a wholesale assault on modern liberalism and all its major programs. In place of Social Security, Freidman proposed private savings accounts. In place of the income tax system, a flat tax. In place of a monopoly public school system, educational vouchers. In place of the welfare state, a negative income tax. And so forth.

Whether you agree or disagree with Friedman, the book represented a coherent statement of a political philosophy. From cover to cover, you could see how it all fit together. Starting from a few simple values, you could see how the entire set of recommended polices cohered.

So here is the obvious question: Where can one find the counter to Friedman? Where is there a book that makes the case for modern liberalism as persuasively and as coherently as Friedman's critique?  I can't find any.

How could so many people hold a viewpoint that has never been written down, explained and defended? Hold that thought for a moment.

Since I can't cover everything in a single article, let's stick with regulation. There are three things you need to know:

1.Virtually every federal regulatory agency created in the 20th century came into existence at the request of the regulated industry.

2.In virtually every case the regulatory body viewed maintaining industry profitability as its most important goal.

3.In almost every case the bulk of the agency's time was spent not protecting consumers from price gouging, but protecting the industry from "ruinous competition."

However, to get economic favors from government, the industries were expected to make a devil's bargain. Since the Republicans mainly believed in hands off government, the producers had to give political support to Roosevelt and other Democrats who were granting the favors.

This approach started with the progressives, who were the forerunners of modern liberalism. They were not the first to pass special interest legislation, of course. But they were the first to give an intellectual justification for the rejection of free markets while they were doing it, a justification that often belied their real intent.

For example, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) — our first federal regulatory agency — was ostensibly established to protect the general public from greedy robber barons. But, as the leftist historian Gabriel Kolko has documented, the ICC was primarily dominated by, and served the interest of, the railroads themselves.

The Meat Inspection Act of 1906 was passed ostensibly in order to protect the public from bad meat — exposed, for example, by the novelist Upton Sinclair. However, the regulatory apparatus the act created served the interests of large meatpackers instead. Safety standards were already being met — or were easily accommodated — by the large companies. But the regulations forced many small meatpackers out of business and made it difficult for new ones to enter the industry.

This same pattern — of regulatory agencies serving the interests of the regulated — was repeated with the establishment of almost all subsequent regulatory agencies. For this reason, Kolko called the entire Progressive Era the "triumph of conservatism."

As I reported previously, in the Franklin Roosevelt era, the ICC became a cartel agent for the trucking industry as well as the railroads. The Civil Aeronautics Board became a cartel agent for the airlines. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) became a cartel agent for the broadcasters.

Even the pretense of consumer protection was blatantly tossed aside with the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act. The goal of the NIRA was to allow each industry to set its own prices, set its own wages and control its own output. Had Roosevelt gotten his way, we would have had predatory monopolies in every market.

What was happening at the national level during the 20th century was replicated in spades at the local level. Virtually every professional licensing requirement in the country was requested not by consumers, but by people in the trade. Today, almost one in every three jobs requires a license.

Where can you find an intellectual defense of all this? You can't. What I'm describing contradicts not only Adam Smith, but also almost all of modern economics. Special monopoly privileges designed for one group create benefits for that group, but harm everyone else. And the harm to society as a whole is inevitably much greater than the benefits to the special interests.

So back to the question posed earlier: why do so many intellectuals apologize for and defend the indefensible? The only answer I can think of is that what we call liberalism is not an ideology at all. It's a sociology. And that would be okay, if it were comparable to one's preference for natural food or artsy movies.

It's not okay when it imposes costs on millions of innocent people.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

I’ll gladly cost you your job on Tuesday for my pay raise today:  "On Aug. 29, hundreds of fast-food workers in dozens of cities across the United States (including Saint Louis) walked off their jobs in protest. The focus of their discontent is the minimum wage, currently $7.25. Arguing that this wage simply isn’t enough, they demand that their employers increase the entry-level wage to $15. Economists of all stripes recognize the impacts that imposing such a wage on these employers would have. Most notably, it would reduce the number of jobs available for entry-level, unskilled workers."

The state as an attractor for sociopaths:  "If the state is defined in terms of its enjoying a monopoly on the use of violence, what is the character of people who would be attracted to the use of its violent tools and practices? What sort of people would be attracted to careers that gave them the arbitrary power to force others to their will; work premised on the imperative of obedience? It is almost amusing to see legislators conducting hearings on the problem of bullying in schools: I often wonder whether these politicians are projecting their own 'dark side' forces onto others; using playground ruffians as scapegoats for the more widespread bullying that is the raison d'etre of politics. Or might these solons simply be trying to eliminate competition, in much the same way that local governments war with the street-gangs that violently dominate urban neighborhoods, a role to be monopolized by the state’s police system?"

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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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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5 People Who Were Murdered For Being White in America

"Kill these racist honkeys, these crackers, these pigs, these pink people. It has been long overdue!" -- The New Black Panther Party

Liberals work hard to sow discord between black and white Americans, encourage divisiveness and discord at every turn, and regularly attribute run-of-the-mill political disagreements to racism. People like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Toure, Melissa Harris-Perry, Michael Eric Dyson, Tavis Smiley, and Ben Jealous make a living convincing black Americans that whites hate them and it's time they were called out on all of the lives they destroy in the process.

Not only are there a lot of decent black Americans who give up on having a good life because they're falsely convinced that the deck is stacked against them, but there are even people who die because the Left has embraced crying racism as a political tactic. The more the Left screams that everyone who opposes Obama is racist, that Republicans want to put black Americans back in chains, that conservatives want to lynch black Americans, that it's Birmingham, Alabama all over again, the more people on the fringes take liberals seriously and act out violently as a result.

Does anyone on the Left ever take responsibility for this? Do liberals ever say, "Gee, I guess I was wrong about that person being racist" or "Maybe we should tone down the rhetoric to make sure we're not getting people killed?"

No, they don't.  If a few white people have to die so Al Sharpton can have a nicer house and Democrats can increase African-American turnout by 1%, that's a small price to pay.

Unless you're one of the people who ends up dead.

1) "I Hate White People!" (New York, New York, 2013): Earlier this month, Lashawn Marten yelled out, "I hate white people," and started punching people around him in New York City’s Union Square. One of the people he assaulted was 62 year old Jeffrey Babbitt, the sole caretaker for his sickly 92 year old mother. Babbit was initially walking around, but he slipped into unconsciousness. Babbitt went into a coma and was pronounced braindead. A few days afterwards, Babbitt died.

2) They wanted to rob a white person (Denver, Colorado, 2010): The Denver Crips gang had been specifically targeting white people to rob. They had robbed and attacked dozens of people because they were white. They went out specifically looking for another white person to rob and found 23 year old Andrew Graham. Graham, who had just been accepted into a Master's program for mathematical engineering, was walking home. Five members of the Crips followed him for two blocks before they confronted Graham, murdered him, and left his corpse lying in the front yard of a home in a residential neighborhood.

3) "90 percent of white ppl are nasty. #HATE THEM." (Duncan, Oklahoma, 2013): Twenty two year old Australian baseball player Chris Lane was jogging when he was shot in the back by James Edwards. Edwards said he did it "just for the fun of it," but his racist tweets suggest that he shot Lane because he was white. Edwards tweeted, "Ayeee I knocced out 5 (pecker)woods since Zimmerman court! :)" He also wrote, "90 percent of white ppl are nasty. #HATE THEM."

4) Shot dead for $10 and a sandwich (Wilmington, N.C., 2012): Four thugs were looking for white people to rob. After failing to break into a house and catch a woman they were stalking, they came upon a 20 year old college student, Joshua Proutley. They took ten dollars, a cell phone, and a sandwich before they shot him in the head and killed him.

5) "Who are those crackers walking past the park?" (Sarasota, Florida, 2011): Two British tourists got lost and wandered into the wrong part of town. They caught the attention of Shawn Tyson, who said, "Who are those crackers walking past the park?" Tyson tried to rob the men, but they said they had no money. Tyson responded by saying, “Well, since you ain’t got no money, I got something for your ass." He then shot the men to death as they pleaded for their lives.

Most Americans are good and decent people. However, that doesn't mean that the Left can relentlessly encourage racial division without consequence. The real danger of telling black Americans that those who oppose liberal policies secretly hate them is that some people may believe those lies and act on them. That sort of violence and hatred isn't good for anybody and liberals should stop tacitly encouraging it by treating allegations of racism as just another political tactic.

SOURCE

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The British "nudge" system

Intended to steer people towards better decisions, the ideas of Nudge theory are meant to offer choices, while still getting us to do what the government thinks is best. Its pioneers, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, authors of Nudge, say they advocate for "soft paternalism."

Since July 2010, the U.K.'s Behavioral Insights Unit (or "Nudge Unit"), which puts their theories into practice, has merely allowed the state to expand its reach.

On this side of the Atlantic, we were told Nudge offered "encouraging, supporting and enabling people" through improved "choice architecture." If that sort of language doesn’t set all kinds of alarm bells ringing, then perhaps the unit’s track record will.

The Behavioral Insights Team boasts that it helps people make better decisions about their health. In order to do so, the unit has introduced a raft of measures to restrict consumer choice.

Bans on shop displays of tobacco products, cited as a success of the team in their 2010–11 annual report impose severe costs on smokers. Customers find it hard to determine which shops sell their preferred cigarettes at a glance and asking the cashier for your favorite brand takes on the feel of a back alley deal.

These anti-smoking interventions are justified on the grounds of cost saving, but the evidence suggests that smokers cost the U.K.’s healthcare system far less than non-smokers. Phony arguments about cost serve as excuses to victimize people trying to engage in a legal activity.

The next year, the unit began to focus on alcohol use and patted themselves on the back in their 2011–12 annual report. The team congratulated itself for trying to understand the "longer term effects of alcohol marketing … particularly on young people" and exploring the "impacts of different prices" on alcohol consumption.

While plans for a minimum price on alcoholic products have been shelved, the government is now likely to prevent liquor being sold below cost. Simultaneously, the government has reduced duties on beer,  while upping the rates on higher strength drinks. You’re free to drink, but do try to drink what the bureaucrats prefer you to.

Don’t think that food is untouched either. The Nudge Unit has been getting supermarkets to cooperate in reducing the salt content in many of its meals. It’s worth remembering that these agreements are far from voluntary—any business that does not comply may face a regulatory penalty as a result.

When it comes to what we eat, interference is inescapable. You can avoid alcohol and tobacco, but food is somewhat more essential. Governments have already shown their incompetence with their adherence to poorly formulated food pyramids, which take no account of how different individuals are affected by dairy or grains.

Federal advice often lags well behind the nutritional evidence, and neglects the important debates between scientists. This is convenient for bureaucrats, who don’t want to admit that such controversy exists. If experts can’t agree on what works, then how can the state pick a winner? The health lobby consensus may be wrong on salt as well.

A more troubling thread runs through each of these interventions. The Nudge team has completely disregarded the enjoyment that customers get from tobacco, alcohol, and salt. It’s crass to suggest that people aren’t aware of associated health risks.

Here the standard liberal arguments apply. Even if the government can engineer our choices, are bureaucrats well-placed to make decisions for us? Probably not.

If those behind Nudge are serious about reducing the burden of "hard" paternalism imposed on us, then they should be supporting a scaling back of the state. While the UK unit makes nods towards the government’s declared deregulation agenda, known as "the Red Tape Challenge," their work is increasing the size of the state, not freeing us up.

For all their praise of trial and error, the Nudge Unit wishes to steer us down a path to uniformity. Having identified what they think are the best choices for us, and recognizing the hostility to state control, social scientists now believe they can nudge us into conforming with their idea of the good life.

This is no surprise. It’s well know that social scientists fail to be objective and their work often expresses their own ideological biases. Some in the US may even be happy with a less dictatorial method to get us to comply. Yet in the U.K., Nudge–think has begun to permeate government structures, and brings with it a sour taste. We’ve not just been nudged, we’ve been pushed.

SOURCE

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Hope 'n' Change: Playing by the Same Rules

A level playing field?

On Thursday, the House passed the “No Subsidies Without Verification Act,” 235-191, which would block ObamaCare insurance subsidy payouts until the Department of Health and Human Services implements a system to verify eligibility. Republicans aim to close a loophole that HHS created in July that allows people to apply for insurance subsidies without proving their income or whether their employer already provides federally approved health benefits.

HHS insists Republicans are overstating the opportunity for fraud and abuse because fear of future HHS and IRS audits will keep people honest. Yet this audit power hasn't prevented people from, for example, playing fast and loose with the Earned Income Tax Credit. The Treasury Inspector General estimates that a quarter of those credits go to ineligible recipients, and equivalent fraud in ObamaCare would mean $250 billion in wrongful income redistribution over a decade. Predictably, the Democrat-controlled Senate won't consider the House measure, though Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) introduced it, and the White House issued a veto threat. Team Obama needs the bodies to make the program work, and they don't want stricter rules blocking folks from getting their “fair share.”

In related news, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) submitted a bill to subject members of Congress to ObamaCare just like the rest of America. This summer, the Office of Personnel Management quietly issued a blanket exception that allowed Congress and congressional staffers to continue to receive their generous health benefits and be exempt from having to enroll in ObamaCare. The excuse was that if Swamp-dwellers had to contend with ObamaCare, they might leave government service and seek more lucrative employment in the private sector. Republicans, who could have used this outrageous exemption as a powerful weapon against ObamaCare, were mum until now. Given Democrats' enthusiasm for the law, it seems only logical that they be forced to enjoy it like everyone else. As for the concern about Beltway brain drain, repealing the exemption is a perfect opportunity to trim the fat – and ensuring that DC elites get a good taste of their own medicine.

SOURCE

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Census: Americans in ‘Poverty’ Typically Have Cell Phones, Computers, TVs, VCRS, AC, Washers, Dryers and Microwaves

Americans who live in households whose income is below the federal “poverty” level typically have cell phones (as well as landline phones), computers, televisions, video recorders, air conditioning, refrigerators, gas or electric stoves, and washers and dryers and microwaves, according to a newly released report from the Census Bureau.

In fact, 80.9 percent of households below the poverty level have cell phones, and a healthy majority—58.2 percent—have computers.

Fully 96.1 percent of American households in “poverty” have a television to watch, and 83.2 percent of them have a video-recording device in case they cannot get home in time to watch the football game or their favorite television show and they want to record it for watching later.

Refrigerators (97.8 percent), gas or electric stoves (96.6 percent) and microwaves (93.2 percent) are standard equipment in the homes of Americans in "poverty."

More than 83 percent have air-conditioning.

Interestingly, the appliances surveyed by the Census Bureau that households in poverty are least likely to own are dish washers (44.9 percent) and food freezers (26.2 percent).

However, most Americans in “poverty” do not need to go to a laundromat. According to the Census Bureau, 68.7 percent of households in poverty have a clothes washer and 65.3 percent have a clothes dryer.

The estimates on the percentage of households in poverty that have these appliances were derived by the Census Bureau from its Survey of Income and Program Participation. The latest report on this survey, released this month, published data collected in 2011.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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How a Philadelphia Family Lost Their Home to Asset Forfeiture

Under the legal doctrine of civil forfeiture, police can seize property tangentially linked to a crime, even if the property owner herself is innocent. As Isaiah Thompson reports in the Philadelphia City Paper, this is precisely what happened to Sandra Leino and her family:

“Long before the forfeiture action against her house would be completed, and without a judge or jury ever seeing her face, Leino would be forced from her house and made homeless along with her three children. She would lose her most precious possessions, and ultimately be deprived of her family’s most valuable asset — all without Leino ever being accused of any crime.”

But while Sandra and her children were completely innocent of any wrongdoing, her husband, Sam, was accused and arrested for selling prescription pills. (Sandra asserts Sam was legally using those painkillers for his own personal use, after he was partially disabled from a truck accident.)

Just a few months after his arrest, the Philadelphia District Attorney filed a motion to seize the Leinos’ home in May 2010—a year and a half before Sam Leino even went to trial. Later that month, the Leinos were kicked out of their own home. They tried staying at a motel, but couldn’t afford it for more than one week. With no other options at the time, they were even forced to sleep in the backwoods.

Fortunately, a relative was able to take the Leinos for five months, albeit in tight quarters. Since then, Sandra has been able to rent a new place.

“But on her own now, and unable to pay rent on top of the mortgage on the house she was barred from entering, she began missing mortgage payments. When the DA did eventually withdraw its forfeiture case against the Leinos’ house, it was only because the bank had already foreclosed.”

As for Sam, in 2012, he went to trial and was “found guilty of one count of possession with intent to distribute, and sentenced to three to six years.”

But the story doesn’t end there. Isaiah Thompson elaborates:

“Four of the police officers who surveilled and arrested Sam Leino are among a group of six narcotics officers whose credibility has been effectively dismissed by the DA’s Office itself after allegations were made in open court that they were part of a drug-dealing ring within the Philadelphia Police Department…How many times the DA’s forfeiture unit has seized property based on the testimony of these officers is not presently clear.”

So far, the Philadelphia DA has dropped almost 300 cases due to this misconduct.

Unfortunately, Sandra Leino’s story is not an isolated incident. Between 300 and 600 real-estate forfeiture cases are brought per year by the Philadelphia District Attorney. Lax laws and scant protections have created hundreds of Sandra Leinos, just in Philadelphia.

According to the Institute for Justice’s nationwide study, Policing for Profit, Pennsylvania has some of the worst civil forfeiture laws. Law enforcement agencies can forfeit property based on a mere “preponderance of the evidence,” which is a much less stringent standard than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard used in criminal convictions.

Plus, property owners have to prove their innocence, reversing both the burden of proof and centuries of jurisprudence. In other words, in civil forfeiture proceedings, property owners actually have fewer protections than accused criminals.

Not only that, under Pennsylvania state law, police can keep 100 percent of all proceeds seized from civil forfeiture. In fact, the Philadelphia DA has raked in more than $6 million a year in civil forfeiture proceeds.

Most of this policing for profit is from cash seizures. But “the average amount of cash seized by Philadelphia police was $550 — hardly the proceeds of a Pablo Escobar or a Walter White.” No wonder a Pennsylvania judge has lambasted civil forfeiture as “little more than state-sanctioned theft.”

SOURCE

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Another lying Leftist



Five days after WND first broke the news that the strategy by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Secretary of State John F. Kerry to cast members of the Free Syria Army as “moderates” among the Syrian rebel forces was the brain-child of a Wall Street Journal researcher, the analyst has been fired from a Washington think-tank for lying about her qualifications.

As WND reported, Elizabeth O’Bagy, 26, had claimed she was pursuing a Ph.D. in Arab studies and political science at Georgetown University and working on a dissertation on woman’s militancy.

In his Sept. 3 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Kerry cited O’Bagy, arguing that the war in Syria is “not being waged entirely or even predominately by dangerous Islamists and al-Qaida die-hards,” but rather the struggle is being led but “moderate opposition forces – a collection of groups known as the Free Syria Army.”

Kerry was citing an opinion piece O’Bagy wrote for the Wall Street Journal on Aug. 30 titled “On the Front Lines of Syria’s Civil War.” It ran with a tag-line “The conventional wisdom – that jihadists are running the rebellion [in Syria] – is not what I’ve witnessed on the ground.”

O’Bagy, then the Syria team leader at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War think-tank, claimed she had submitted and defended her dissertation and Georgetown University would soon confer her degree.

“The Institute for the Study of War has learned and confirmed that, contrary to her representations, Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy does not in fact have a Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University,” the Institute for the Study of War said in a statement Wednesday. “ISW has accordingly terminated Ms. O’Bagy’s employment, effective immediately.”

Upon learning O’Bagy had been fired from ISW, WND senior staff reporter Jerome Corsi, who broke the original story, said, “We investigated O’Bagy last week and reported she was a graduate student. I think it was our story that triggered the awareness by the Obama administration and Kerry and McCain that this woman was fraudulently represented herself as a Ph.D.”

He added, “We pointed out she had the associations with the radical Islamic groups that are promoting the Free Syrian Army.”

Paul Gigot, editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, told Politico, “[W]e were not aware of Elizabeth O’Bagy’s academic claims or credentials when we published her Aug. 31 op-ed, and the op-ed made no reference to them.

“We also were not aware of her affiliation with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, and we published a clarification when we learned of it. We are investigating the contents of her op-ed to the best of our ability, but to date we have seen no evidence to suggest any information in the piece was false.”

Corsi also reported that when McCain when to Iraq, O’Bagy set up interviews and provided him with a Washington operative who was in Syria.

“Basically O’Bagy made fools of them all (Obama, McCain and Kerry),” Corsi said. “They wanted so desperately to go on their theory there was a moderate force in Syria. They jumped on the bandwagon. They didn’t realize she was loading them up with radicals from the Free Syria Army.”

In his investigative piece, Corsi revealed that the O’Bagy narrative is contradicted by intelligence estimates and experts specializing in the region.

After Kerry’s testimony to Congress, Reuters reported: “Secretary of State John Kerry’s public assertions that moderate Syrian opposition groups are growing in influence appear to be at odds with estimates by U.S. and European intelligence sources and non-governmental experts, who say Islamic extremists remain by far the fiercest and best-organized rebel elements.”

SOURCE

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The President’s Embarrassment

When Secretary of State John Kerry, apparently irritated by a lack of sleep, gave a snippy and what he thought was an unrealistic reply to a reporter’s question at a London press conference last weekend, he hardly could have imagined the world’s response. Asked whether there is anything Syrian President Bashar al-Assad could do at this relatively late hour to avoid an American invasion, Kerry told an international audience that if Assad gave up whatever chemical weapons his government possesses, the U.S. would forgo an invasion.

But not to worry, Kerry added. Assad is not going to do that, and we will end up invading Syria in order to vindicate President Obama’s threat to do so. For two days, Obama remained silent on this as his arch-nemesis, Russian President Vladimir Putin, grabbed the spotlight and the high moral ground.

Putin, sounding more like a Nobel Peace laureate than the killer he is known to be, offered to broker a deal whereby the Syrian chemical stockpile would be surrendered to the United Nations, the Syrian government could go about defending itself from the al-Qaida-driven effort to take it over, and the U.S. would leave Syria alone.

Obama is generally firm in his belief that he needs to vindicate the threat he made last summer when he was trying to outdo Mitt Romney on sounding tough. It was then that Obama threatened to intervene in the Syrian civil war if chemical weapons were used by the government. Nevertheless, hating the international embarrassment visited upon him when suddenly Putin seems more reasonable than he does, Obama conceded to my Fox News colleague Chris Wallace that the Kerry-inspired and Putin-pushed idea seemed worth considering. And then the Syrian government agreed.

Just last week, the president was arguing that only military force would show the world that the U.S. means what it says. Just last week, he realized that he needed political cover in order to justify an unpopular invasion, and so he asked Congress for permission to invade Syria, even while knowing that he already has the legal authority to invade on his own. Just last week, he dispatched his political team, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to argue that war is the only way to go. And just last week, he intimated that he might bomb Syria even if Congress said no.

What happened?

What happened was the president’s head counters polled their allies on Capitol Hill earlier this week and informed him that he was about to become the first American president in history to seek war-making authority from Congress and have it denied to him, including by many members of his own political party.

The president cannot even say for sure that the weapons he and his advisers claim were used were in fact deployed by the Assad regime. Nor can they state with intellectual honesty that the freedom or safety of Americans is affected by any weaponry used in this civil war 6,700 miles from our shores.

The legal linchpin of American involvement in a foreign war is not American hatred of one of the weapons systems used in the war, but the imminence of danger to American freedom and safety if we stay out. Treaties to which the U.S. is a party and the body of international law to which the U.S. subscribes make clear that the U.S. cannot lawfully use military force to punish the government of another country without first demonstrating that the other country’s military poses an immediate threat of danger to the U.S. Obama and Kerry have been unable to address this.

They also have been unable to address how the U.S. can punish Syria for using weapons that the U.S. and the U.N. have outlawed but Syria has not. Put aside the fact that Syria is a client state of Russia and hence will be protected by it at the U.N., Syria never agreed to the U.N. prohibition on chemical weapons in the first place. So the U.N. is without lawful authority to authorize any violent American intercession in Syria over the use of these weapons.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

FL: Jones arrested on frivolous charges to stop burning of Qurans:  "A Florida pastor was arrested Wednesday as he drove a pickup truck towing a large barbecue-style grill filled with kerosene-soaked Qurans to a park, where the pastor had said he was planning to burn 2,998 of the Muslim holy books -- one for every victim of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Sheriff's deputies in Polk County, Fla., arrested Pastor Terry Jones, 61, and his associate pastor, Marvin Sapp Jr., 44, each on a felony charge of unlawful conveyance of fuel. Jones had said he was heading to a nearby park in Mulberry to burn the Qurans on Wednesday, the 12th anniversary of the attacks. Sheriff's officials said that Jones was also charged with unlawful open-carry of a firearm, a misdemeanor, and that Sapp faces a charge of having no valid registration for the trailer"

Is your iPad ratting you out to the feds?:  "Your home computer—assuming you still have one, of course—should be safe from the grabby hands of public officials. In theory, at least. Law enforcement personnel are supposed to obtain a search warrant before they barge into your house and start confiscating electronic equipment. But when you're on the road and perhaps storing important documents on your laptop, tablet, or smartphone, all bets are off. Your devices are subject to seizure on the flimsiest of pretexts, and any data they hold can be pirated."

Hanauer and Liu: False premises beget false conclusions:  "Like so many others, Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu base their disdain for libertarianism on a false premise of their own devising when they write in Bloomberg, 'Libertarians Are the New Communists:' 'Radical libertarianism assumes that humans are wired only to be selfish, when in fact cooperation is the height of human evolution.' In reality libertarians understand that humans are wired to be both selfish and social, and they agree, with one caveat, that 'cooperation is the height of human evolution.'"

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The monstrous evil that is Islam

America had its nose rubbed in the insensate hate that is Islam on 9/11/2001

Just one image has brought that monstrous evil to the front of my mind today.  It is the much-reproduced image of grief below, where Carrie Bergonia looks over the name of her fiance, firefighter Joseph Ogren, during ceremonies at the 9/11 Memorial marking the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks



What I see there is a woman, perhaps in her 30s, as skinny as a rake with her big tote bag and not a lot going for her.  She probably never had a lot of good options in her life but she had finally got a break in finding her firefighter partner.  Then that rare chance for lasting happiness was taken away from her by Muslim evil.  "The poor woman! The poor woman!",  I say to myself.  I feel so sorry for her.

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Obama no longer the most powerful man in the world.  Putin is



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How Just A Few Heroes Barely Saved the Internet from Being Hijacked: Beware SOPA 2.0

Two years ago Hollywood, no kidding, masterminded a plot to, in effect, steal the Internet (by criminalizing certain conduct, booby trapping the Web in ways that few non-mega-corporations could cope with).  There are signs, as perceptively flagged by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that the perps are back at it. We should care.

This two-part column reveals an untold part of the story about how the bad guys were stopped last time.  And, if not stopped again, how it could lead to a fundamental loss of civil rights and freedom on the Internet.

The perversely named “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) itself may have been the most brazen attempted act of piracy in all recorded history.  Truth in Legislation would have required it to be named the “Ultimate Act of Online Piracy.”  Enactment effectively would have pirated the World Wide Web from a common space and converted it into the private preserve of the Big Entertainment Lobby.

The Plot to steal the Internet was foiled.  It was foiled by an “Irresistible Force” — public opinion, rallied by a twenty-something Freedom Fighter, Aaron Swartz, now dead.  This combined with an Immovable Object, the consciences of a tiny group of legislators. Together they — barely — defeated one of the meanest pieces of legislation in our lifetimes.

The “outside” story — of the late-rallying popular opposition — has been fairly extensively reported.  7,000 (some claimover 100,000) websites, including Wikipedia and other high traffic sites, were persuaded to close shop for a day.  Google draped its logo in black.  In the view of Harvard Law School professor, author, public intellectual, and co-creator of the Creative Commons Lawrence Lessig, “SOPA was stopped by the most important Internet campaign so far — lead by my (now dead) friend Aaron Swartz, and thousands of others.”

As the New York Times reported “’I think [stopping SOPA] is an important moment in the Capitol,’ said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and an important opponent of the legislation. ‘Too often, legislation is about competing business interests. This is way beyond that. This is individual citizens rising up.’”

But the “inside” story — four liberty-minded lawmakers who stood up in front of SOPA like the protestor in Tiananmen Square against the column of tanks — has remained, mostly, obscure. This tells that story.

But first.  Why should you care?  Undaunted by its 2011 failure Hollywood and the Big Record Labels are staging the sequel.  This time, the bad guys could win. The Huffington Post recently spotted the perps busy inside the federal (perhaps, more aptly, feral) bureaucracy hollowing out the Constitution:  “The [Commerce] department’s Internet Policy Task Force last week proposed making it a felony to stream copyrighted works.”

Give the Internet to Big Business?  Hollywood and the Recording Industry appear to have found a compliant handmaiden, Penny Pritzker, the new U.S. Commerce Secretary, to work the inside while they work the outside.  Pritzker’s Commerce Department employs, among other things, the risible euphemism of “improving the operation of the notice and takedown system” of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  That’s a system which is working rather beautifully for all concerned, content providers and distributors both.  Something’s extremely fishy here.

Secretary Pritzker, a billionaire heiress, recently was bragging about cavorting  with the head of the Recording Industry Association of America.  It’s not hard to imagine whose side — the rich and famous … or mere citizens like us? — she’s on.

Practical upshot?  Among much other potential damage, if Big Hollywood colluding with Big Government succeeds, it changes the very nature of the Web.  Quite possibly, for example, “SOPA 2.0? could mean the end of the Drudge Report. Drudge hardly can maintain his Report if an innocent miscall on copyright makes him subject to prosecution, by any United States attorney, for a federal felony.

Would the silencing of Drudge be an unintended consequence?  Or might it be intentional? Chairman Darrell Issa has written to Attorney General Holder: “The suggestions that prosecutors did in fact seek to make an example out of Aaron Swartz because Demand Progress exercised its First Amendment rights in publicly supporting him raises new questions about the Department’s handling of the case.”

(Matt? Meet Penny.  The new “Big Sis” candidate?)

The hero in challenging Big Hollywood’s Big Piracy Gambit in the U.S. Senate was Ron Wyden.  The main heroes in the House, reportedly, were Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), and  Jared Polis (D-CO).

As hacktivist Aaron Swartz stated in his keynote speech delivered at F2C: Freedom to Connect 2012, Washington DC, “How we stopped SOPA,” six months before Swartz/s untimely, tragic, death:

“Senator Ron Wyden, the Democrat from Oregon, put a hold on the Bill, giving a speech in which he called in a nuclear bunker buster bomb aimed at the Internet.  He announced he would not allow it to pass without changes.  As you may know, a single Senator can’t actually stop a bill by themselves.  But they can delay it. …  He bought us time.  A lot of time as it turned out.  His delay held all the way to the end of that session of Congress.  … There was probably a year or two of delay there.  And in retrospect we used that time to lay the groundwork for what came later.”

The reintroduction of this legislation came (in the Senate) as PIPA, and (in the House) as SOPA. “The introduction of the Stop Online Piracy Act and its Senate counterpart was the apotheosis of how Congress should not work,” recalls Seamus Kraft, then an Issa staff member and deeply engaged in the process. Kraft:

“Imagine the (metaphorically) smoke-filled room, special-interest authored legislation, launched without warning, without seeking input from stakeholders beyond a mere ‘sop for Cerberus’  — or, to Cyberspace: a single hearing on this bill, with five or six bigwigs from the content industry to catch softballs.  And one lower level representative from Google … to be bullied.”

“The proposed legislation was seeking to combat intellectual property theft via the internet.  The content creators wished to stop downloading of copyrighted content — especially music and movies.  That’s a legitimate goal.  But the mechanisms proposed for doing it were horrendous, a ‘kill them all, let God sort out the souls of the innocent’ strategy.”

The Web, oddly, still is a novelty to Washington, many of whose officials remain somewhat befuddled by the “interwebs” — that series of tubes  — internets and website “numbers” .  Kraft:

“This naivete left Congress vulnerable to special interests pushing a one-sided solution to an ill-defined problem.  The relevant committee proceeded without seeking the input of representatives of those who use, or whose business is, the Internet.  The most important locked-out constituency was users: you and me.”

The Internet’s precarious position then was summed up nicely by techdirt.com:

“It’s pretty much assured that VP Joe Biden is in favor of PROTECT IP/E-PARASITE/SOPA. Since the start of this administration, President Obama has delegated most copyright issues to Biden, and Biden’s general view on copyright seems to be ‘whatever makes Hollywood happier must be fantastic.’ How else do you describe his continued support of ever more draconian copyright law, contrary to the evidence suggesting that it only makes things worse? How else do you explain his claim that he got ‘all the stakeholders’ concerning copyright into a summit meeting, when it only involved government officials and the big labels and studios (no consumer advocates, no artists, no technologists, no entrepreneurs, etc.)?”

Kraft:

“Darrell Issa, a member of the Judiciary Committee, is an inventor.  He holds the most patents of anyone who ever has served in Congress.  He himself owns intellectual property — and benefits from a strong streamlined system. Here, however, the legislative proponents seemed clueless about what the heck the Internet really is.

“Even Rep. Issa did not realize the stakes were so serious until the ‘sop to Cyberspace’ hearing.  His reaction was along the lines of You guys — out of the blue — are trying to give all this power — to shut down domains, to hold Google responsible for some joker who uploads some random item — to federal bureaucrats? What is being proposed would change, fundamentally, the architecture of the best thing that has happened to humanity in the past 50 years.

SOURCE

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DNC Chairwoman: We Lost Colorado Gun Vote Because We Couldn't Cheat



Well, what Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz actually said - in a formal DNC press release – was:  "This was voter suppression, pure and simple.  Colorado voters are used to casting their ballots by mail, but because of lawsuits filed by opponents of common sense gun reform, voters were not mailed their ballots in this election… a result of efforts by the NRA, the Koch brothers and other right wing groups who know that when more people vote, Democrats win."

More of the statement is devoted to voting access than to gun control.

Wasserman Schultz is an interesting specimen because her exceptionally vicious and explicit anti-White American ethnic animosity takes very little decoding, as I noted in RNC Chairman: "GOP Natural Home Of Whites. Just LOOK At Democrats!" or sometimes none – see "New DNC Chair: More Hispanics Means We Win". My belief is that the Democratic managers try hard to keep her off the record.

But her reflexive citing of voter registration is extremely significant. The fact is voter fraud has become central to Democratic election strategy as I discussed at length in "Obama's Voter Fraud Facilitation Policy: Does The GOP Have The Courage To Resist?"

A resounding silence has greeted the totally counterintuitive news that Black turnout and vote totals are supposed to have risen substantially in 2012. Voter analysis shows Obama would have lost in 2012 if black turnout had mirrored 2008 (foxnews.com April 28, 2013). According to the US Census Bureau’s Voting Rates by Race survey (pdf) 1.7 Million or 11.04% more Blacks voted in 2012 than in 2008 when the Black vote was in turn 14.37% above the 2004 total of 14 million.

The idea that the Obama reality stimulated almost as much more enthusiasm amongst Blacks than the prospect of voting for the first time for a fellow Black for President in 2004 is simply not plausible. Especially with election night memories of stories of slow reporting from Black precincts in Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, a tell-tale sign of fraud.

Wasserman Schultz’s reaction underlines that manipulating the voting mechanism is the first order of business for Democratic operatives.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

USA ranks 17th among world’s happiest countries:  "Something to smile about? Americans are not the happiest people on earth, but we do rank a respectable No. 17, among 156 countries evaluated for a new United Nations report. The second annual World Happiness Report, released Monday, finds the highest levels of happiness in Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden, all in northern Europe. The lowest ranked were Rwanda, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Benin and Togo, all in Africa."

De Blasio takes NYC Dem mayoral primary:  "Public Advocate Bill de Blasio completed his surge from seemingly nowhere in New York City's mayoral primary Tuesday by taking a commanding lead on his Democratic opponents, hovering near the threshold needed to avoid a runoff. Former Metropolitan Transit Authority Chairman Joe Lhota easily won the GOP nomination, capping a chaotic primary to succeed 12 years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The night also marked the unceremonious end to the bid by a City Council leader trying to become the first female and openly gay mayor, and to the political comebacks of scandal-scarred candidates Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer."

Zimmerman:  "This morning FL Judge Alex Ferrer who frequently comments on legal issues gave a very unusually frank evaluation of the now ended case against GZ. Judge Ferrer flatly stated that the case should never have been brought; that the prosecution never had the evidence but brought the case only because of unjustified political pressure and in the vain hope that evidence would eventually appear; and that GZ he expects will probably bring a civil case for damages against the prosecuting local authorities. Noting that the defense barely mentioned the FL 'stand your ground' law, Judge Ferrer said it had had little relevance because the case against GZ was too weak to even require the defense to raise 'stand your ground.'"

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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Grassroots Activists Take Home Major Second Amendment Victory in Colorado, Recall TWO Anti-Gun Senators

UPDATE 12:04 am: Colorado State Senator Angela Giron has also been recalled for her gun control votes. Giron and Morse are the first Senators in Colorado history to be recalled. Both Giron and Morse have officially conceded. Both areas formerly represented by Giron and Morse are deep blue.

This is a HUGE victory for grassroots activists and the Second Amendment. These results will no doubt send a loud message nationally. Giron and Morse both voted to limit ammunition magazine capacity to 15 rounds and for expanded background checks covering online and private firearms sales.

11:40 pm: Grassroots activists in Colorado took home a Second Amendment victory Tuesday night after efforts to recall State Senator John Morse over gun control votes earlier this year proved successful. More from Colorado Peak Politics:

    "In a historic recall election Senate President John Morse was booted from office, capping the end of a long and passionate fight over gun rights in Colorado. It marks a wake-up call for Colorado Democrats, who are suddenly coming to the realization that they’re not invincible after all."

    "In a session dubbed “one of the most liberal ever” by the Durango Herald‘s Joe Hanel, Democrats sprinted to the left on gun control, and virtually every other policy in the left-wing agenda."

    "The Morse recall results are a swift kick in their proverbial nuts. A reminder to legislators that getting elected office doesn’t give you a free pass to do whatever your progressive paymasters demand of you."

    And, as the Morse recall demonstrates, it’s ultimately the voters who control a politician’s fate, despite the competing intentions of a fat walleted few."

    We speak, of course, of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has bankrolled the gun control agenda from the get-go. Even his billions can only buy so many friends…and votes."

The National Rifle Association, which helped fund the recall effort, has issued a statement.

    "A historic grassroots effort by voters in Colorado’s Senate District 11 has resulted in the recall of Colorado Senate President John Morse (D). The people of Colorado Springs sent a clear message to the Senate leader that his primary job was to defend their rights and freedoms and that he is ultimately accountable to them – his constituents, and not to the dollars or social engineering agendas of anti-gun billionaires."

    "Recall proceedings began earlier this year after Sen. Morse pushed through anti-gun legislation that restricted the ability of law-abiding residents to exercise their Second Amendment rights, including their inherent right to self-defense. This effort was driven by concerned citizens, who made phone calls, knocked on doors, and worked diligently to turn voters out in this historic effort."

    "The National Rifle Association Political Victory Fund (NRA-PVF) is proud to have stood with the men and women in Colorado who sent a clear message that their Second Amendment rights are not for sale. We look forward to working with NRA-PVF “A” rated and endorsed Bernie Herpin (R) from Colorado Springs."

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg dumped tons of cash into the recall election with hopes of keeping Morse and Giron in office. His efforts failed.

    "Recall opponents, floating on oceans of money funneled into the recall contests by billionaire New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, outspent recall backers by a whopping 7 to 1 margin."

    "The fact that turnout numbers suggest such a competitive race given the anti-recall side’s jaw-dropping financial advantage is frankly, astounding.  And the fact that so much of the money comes from out of state – the Denver Post recently reported that Bloomberg and California philanthropist Eli Broad personally stroked six figure checks – suggests that liberal elites from thousands of miles away think they can buy Colorado’s elections."

SOURCE

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Wrong and Liars Too: 6 Tricks God Has Played on Liberals Since November

The last year has been highly informative for Americans who have been looking for information on hypocrisy, shabby intellectualism, broken promises, opportunism, populist dreck, and IPhones.

Since almost the moment Obama celebrated his re-election with Republican leader John Boehner by proposing to raise taxes on all of us, God has played an enormous practical joke on liberals.

In only ways He could, God has shown that liberals are wrong. Not just wrong, but really, really, seriously wrong. Demented even. And yeah, I’m talking about Ezra Klein.

No, the world really doesn’t work the way liberals want, they’ve found out, and what’s more, liberal leaders and scribblers know it. They have known it for years.

Liberals have, in 50 years, morphed from the idealism of Camelot to the reality-game show hostness of Al Sharpton.

It’s not even just that they are wrong, it’s that at the top of the liberal pyramid they are liars, intellectually bankrupt, the moral and intellectual equivalents of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, spreading a gospel which not only they don’t understand, but the they exploit for their own, and no one else’s gain.

It’s been little less than a year for people who enthusiastically voted for Obama in 2012 to find this out.

And what liberals miss in being wrong on specifics, they make up in volume. So let’s make a list, shall we?

1) Tax the Rich! Oh, and you too!

Liberals were wrong in blaming the rich for everything that was wrong with everything in the world. They got their tax increase on rich people- and poor people too- and it hasn’t ushered in period of great prosperity. In fact, research show pretty conclusively that the tax increase that liberals elected Obama on in 2012 has been bad for the economy.

Our contributor, Political Calculations has a nifty tool that can show you how quantitative easing, tax increases and government spending cuts have affected the economy.

“One thing that you'll find is that over 90% of the negative drag on GDP may be attributed to the tax hikes that took effect in 2013,” writes PC. “Less than 10% may be attributed to reductions in government spending at all levels in the U.S. Finally, if you really want to play the ‘what if’ game, try combining government spending cuts with modest tax cuts in our tool …. One may wonder why today's politicians aren't discussing implementing this particular combination of fiscal policies.”

One can wonder, but frankly the answer is easy.  Liberals are greedy for the wealth acquired by others so they can use it to keep their government-dependent constituency happy.  Which brings us to:

2) The Great Sequester Doom.

The world didn’t end because liberals were forced to agree to across-the-board spending cuts. In fact, generally speaking the world is a better place, even if across-the-board-spending cuts were the wrong way to approach spending cuts.

Economists- outside of nuts like Paul Krugman- agree that the sequester has had little impact on the economy short-term and provides a great deal of benefit long term.

Yet today the White House still says: “Harmful automatic budget cuts — known as the sequester — threaten hundreds of thousands of jobs, and cut vital services for children, seniors, people with mental illness and our men and women in uniform. These cuts will make it harder to grow our economy and create jobs by affecting our ability to invest in important priorities like education, research and innovation, public safety, and military readiness.”

The White House is publically trolling for sequester sob stories on it’s website; and in a sign that few stories exist, few stories of sequester related disasters, personal or bureaucratic, are made public by the White House.

3) IRS-NSA-MOUSE scandals.

Well at least the evil, terrible Tea Party people got what they deserved when liberals from government agencies like the IRS started recognizing the great danger they pose through tax-exempt donations that mostly measure in the tens and twenties of dollars. And just to be sure that ordinary people don’t get too carried away by that whole “freedom” thing, the government, we know now, has been reading all of your internet traffic, tracking all of your phone calls, breaking laws, even those laws promulgated by a SECRET COURT.  In the USA: A SECRET COURT. Really.

Right now as you read this, someone is watching you. Not that George Orwell predicted any of this, like the part about being constantly at war, hurling missiles at other countries in a standoff and fight war, or anything.  Because that was just fiction, right?  Which brings us to:

4) Missiles Over the Mid-East.

The president who said he was elected to bring us peace, has brought us more war, and losing war at that. Iraq, Benghazi, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt- almost- will be lost despite Obama’s chest pounding in the region. While Carter only lost a country- Iran- Obama’s set to turn over the Middle East to implacable enemies of the United States.


But what worries most people is Obama’s willingness to spin up missiles for whatever foreign policy goals he’s trying to achieve. And most people, including, I think Obama himself and even Mrs. Obama, are unaware of his foreign policy goals. Make no mistake, no matter how the Syria thing turns out eventually, Obama didn’t just tarnish his own image by amateurish foreign policy, but tarnished the United States.

A recent Fox News poll shows Obama’s problem:

Among Democrats, 25 percent say the U.S. is more respected around the world today. That’s a 27 percentage-point drop from 52 percent last year.  Twenty-seven percent of Democrats say the U.S. is less respected, up from 11 percent.

A slim 51-percent majority of Independents thinks the U.S. is less respected, up from 38 percent last year.  At the same time, the number of independents who think the country is more respected fell to just 9 percent, down from 27 percent.

While liberals will likely dispute the objectiveness of a Fox News poll, the trend is clear: Even liberals admit that Obama’s a failure if judged by the global sniff test that liberals adore.

5) Global Warming, er, Climate, uh, Change?

Yes, it seems the more things change, the more they stay the same. At least climate-wise.

When I wrote earlier this year that the UK’s official weather service had quietly and only tacitly admitted that there had been a unexplainable pause in global warming according to most climate change models, liberals predictably attacked the messengers.

The UK’s MET Office, more formally called the UK's National Weather Service, updated global temperatures for 2012 and the new dataset shows that an “unlikely” event has occurred, according to their own models: Global warming has been halted for 15 years and counting.

While the MET Office accused critics of cherry-picking a starting point and nitpicked about language-for example the Daily Mail reported that the “Met Office report [was] quietly released,” while the Met office whined they just updated the data and there was no “report” at all- they don’t dispute that from 1997 until the halfway mark in 2012 there has been no statistically significant rise in global temperatures.

But , as Forbes contributor Larry Bell relates, even as the “U.N.’s Church of the Burning Planet are scheduled to finalize their latest hellfire and brimstone sermon, a chilling development has occurred. A flood of blasphemous reports circulated among ranks of former faithful parishioners are challenging human-caused climate crisis theology.”

Turns out the UK’s MET office WAS making an admission by omission on climate, er, global, uh, stuff:

According to a recent Opinion & Comment piece titled“Overestimating global warming over the past 20 years”that appeared inNature Climate Change,the model-based fear and loathing attached to global warming may be substantially overheated. Notably, Francis W. Zwiers, one of the three authors, is a vice-chair of this relevant section for AR5.  The writers observe that whereas the global mean temperature over the past 20 years (1993-2012) rose at a rate of between about 0.14o–0.06oC per decade, average temperatures computed by 117 simulations of 37 climate models predicted a surface temperature rise of 0.30o-0.02oC per decade. The observed rate of warming was less than half of the simulated rate.

The inconsistency between observed and simulated warming was even greater over the past 15 years (between 1998 and 2012).  Here the observed trend was 0.05o-0.08oC per decade, vs. the average simulated trend of 0.21o-0.03oC. The observed trend was four times smaller. The divergence began in the early 1990s. Accordingly, evidence indicates that the group of model simulations do not reproduce observed global warming over the past 20 years, or the slowdown over the past 15 years.

So what do you do when global warming doesn’t even remotely follow your “models” and Obamacare does the same? Start a war in the Middle East?  Which bring us to:

6)Choooo, Choooo…Obamacare a’coming

Obamacare is not just everything conservatives predicted- pork-barrel, bad for health, expensive, government over-reach, bad for the economy, rationing, subject to abuse, fraud and waste- it is much, much worse than even that.

Because the guys who decided that the Tea Party was a menace- the IRS- will be enforcing provisions of Obamacare. That means that while the NSA watches my tax return as I file it electronically, the IRS on the receiving end will be making sure that I’m not supporting any patriotic un-American activities like itemizing deductions for medical expenses. And the person Obama proposed to head up the IRS enforcement arm of the government? The exact same person at the IRS who was at the center of the IRS Tea Party tax scandal.

Remember her? Lois Lerner.   She was the one who, in front of Congress, invoked her constitutional right not to tattle on herself.  She’s also invoked her constitutional right to hide from the press and the public, while being on official paid leave with the IRS.

There’s more.  With Obama there is always more.  But I’d run out of ink before I’d get through it.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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ACRU Court Victory Means Dead People, Felons Will Finally be Taken Off Voter Rolls in Mississippi County

The American Civil Rights Union landed a major victory this week when a U.S. District Judge in the Southern District of Mississippi signed a consent decree to clean up Walthall County’s voter registration rolls. Census data for the county shows there are 9,536 people over the age of 18. The problem, however, is that there are 10,078 active voters listed on official records, which prompted ACRU to sue officials in the county earlier this year.

"This is historic and should have been done 20 years ago," ACRU Chairman Susan A. Carleson said in a statement. "It's the first time since Motor Voter [National Voter Registration Act] was enacted in 1993 giving private parties the right to sue over voting irregularities that any private party has won a case to require clean voter rolls. With the Justice Department on the warpath against state election integrity laws, it couldn't come at a better time."

ACRU had to act because federal authorities have been delinquent, according to former DOJ attorneys J. Christian Adams, Christopher Coates and Henry Ross, who filed the lawsuit.

"This case should have been called United States v. Walthall County instead of ACRU v. Walthall County," Adams said in a statement. "We're doing the job that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. won't do. In fact, he's too busy suing Texas for its new photo ID law and abusing power in other ways to harass states that are trying to ensure election integrity."

And the demographics of this county are important to point out (via The Blaze):

Walthall County, Miss. is [a] red county in a red state, is majority white, and was carried [by] Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012, according to the Heritage Foundation. This could blunt the argument generally used by Democrats and the Holder Justice Department, that voter integrity measures harm minority voters and benefit Republican candidates.

The consent decree will force the county to clean up its voter rolls by removing dead voters, those who have moved out of the county, noncitizens, nonresidents, and convicted felons who are no longer eligible to vote.

"This is a huge victory for the American people," Carleson said. "Across the country, other counties have more registered voters than people alive. If they don't clean up their rolls, they risk litigation. Every time an illegal voter casts a ballot, it steals someone else's legal vote."

The ACRU also sued Jefferson Davis County on the same issue. A trial has been set for June 2014.

SOURCE

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Thieves Are Kindred Spirit for California Government

When someone embezzles more than $300,000 from a business, that company is not likely to hire back the embezzler and give her a promotion. But such is not the case with the state of California, which even changed the rules so the embezzler could get a new job.

As a recent report noted, Carey Renee Moore (then going by the name Carey Renee Aceves) embezzled $320,000 from the state’s Department of Child Support Services “by using her position to purchase, among other things, a television, a hot tub and gazebo and electronics, pornographic videos, handcuffs, chains and whips. Moore falsified records to cover up the purchases and sold some items to buy a $65,000 Lexus.” The California Highway Patrol said it was one of the largest cases they had uncovered.

Before the cops could close the deal, Moore transferred with the greatest of ease to the State Board of Equalization, which learned of her arrest and began termination proceedings. But the embezzler resigned from the board before those proceedings became final. Moore served two years in prison for felony grand theft but then bagged a position with the state’s High Speed Rail Authority, the so-called bullet train, a boondoggle in progress. Moore was able to get the position because the state Personnel Board removed from state job applications two questions dealing with previous convictions for misdemeanors and felonies. Moore claims she didn’t lie about that because the state didn’t ask. This is an obvious case of double standards and special treatment, but there is more going on here.

The state does not reveal how many criminals it hires, and when a Sacramento Bee reporter asked bullet-train bosses how and why they hired a convicted embezzler, they called it a “personnel matter” and would not comment. Last year it emerged that the state parks department had hidden some $54 million, which one legislator called “deceit and thievery.” It later emerged that a key figure in the scandal had an extensive criminal background. As with Moore, that proved no object to state employment, and that should come as no surprise

A state where waste, fraud and abuse are common practice is certain to have a soft spot for convicted felons and embezzlers with their hand in the till. In state government they fit right in.

SOURCE

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Under Obama: Job Growth 52% Greater for Foreign-Born Workers

Under President Barack Obama, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released today, the increase in the number of foreign-born people employed in the United States has been 52 percent greater than the increase in the number of native-born people employed.

In January 2009, when President Barack Obama first took office, says the BLS, there were 21,375,000 foreign-born people employed in the United States. In August 2013, there were 23,833,000 foreign-born workers employed in the United States. That means that since Obama took office the number of foreign-born people holding jobs inside the United States has increased by 2,458,000.

By contrast, in January 2009, there were 119,061,000 native-born Americans employed in the United States, and, in August 2013, there were 120,676,000—an increase of 1,615,000.

The 2,458,000 increase in foreign-born workers since January 2009 is 843,000 (or 52 percent) greater than 1,615,000 increase in native-born workers.

The BLS numbers are based on a survey of 60,000 households that the Census Bureau conducts each month. That survey does not distinguish between foreign-born persons who are naturalized U.S. citizens, legal permanent U.S. residents, work-visa holders or “undocumented” foreign nationals working illegally in the United States. Rather, it counts them all simply as foreign-born individuals who are in the United States and who are either working or not working. The survey focuses on persons who are 16 years old or older.

The BLS numbers also show that the labor-force participation rate for both the foreign-born and native-born population has declined under Obama, although the native-born participation rate has dropped more than the foreign-born participation rate.

In January 2009, when Obama took office, the labor-force participation rate among foreign-born persons 16 years or older was 67.2 percent. By this August, it was down 66.9 percent. In January 2009, 65.0 percent of native-born Americans 16 years or older participated in the labor force. By August, that was down to 62.8 percent.

BLS counts someone as participating in the labor force if they are 16 or older and either have a job or have actively sought one in the last four weeks.

SOURCE

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Norway has just elected a new conservative government

Some background

    "Conservative Party leader Erna Solberg — nicknamed “Iron Erna” — will become Norway’s new prime minister as the leader of a center-right coalition government likely including an anti-immigration party.

    Preliminary results from the oil-rich Nordic country’s parliamentary elections shows the Conservative Party got 26.8 percent of votes, the best result for the party in 28 years. Solberg, who will be Norway’s second female prime minister after Gro Harlem Brundtland, thanked the voters Monday for a historic victory.

    “The voters had the choice between 12 years of red-green government or a new government with new ideas and new solutions,” Solberg said. …

    The discovery of oil and gas in Norway’s waters in the 1960s turned the Scandinavian nation into one of the richest in the world, with a strong welfare system and a high living standard. The oil wealth helped it withstand Europe’s financial crisis and retain low unemployment throughout Stoltenberg’s years in power. Still, the Conservative Party has managed to attract votes amid pledges to increase the availability of private health care and cut taxes on assets over $140,000."

Although much of Europe continues to stagger beneath the tremendous weight of their own imploding welfare states and the accompanying fiscal and economic burdens, borne of their very progressive- and labor-influenced state-spending policies, Norway is still a relative island of plenty amidst that sea of European debt. Norway, too, has an extravagant welfare state, but the constant stream of wealth that comes from their nationalized system of tapping their vast reserves of oil and gas mean that they have a robust revenue stream that enables them to keep the welfare state going.

Norwegians take a lot of pride in their economic inclusiveness, and they boast some of the highest living standards in Europe with an unemployment rate of only 3.5 percent and a relatively (and I do mean relatively) good GDP growth rate of 3 percent in 2012. That 3 percent, however, is still a slowdown, and the conservative-minded politicians in the running want to avoid injecting too much public spending into the economic in the misbegotten attempt to spur growth as well as keep taxes low and business-friendly. What’s more, as the United States’ shale oil-and-gas boom continues to grow and as countries like Germany and the United Kingdom think about fracking for themselves, using oil riches to cover a full third of your country’s revenue stream isn’t necessarily a dependable plan for the future, and it sounds like they’re at least taking small steps toward a more definitely sustainable public-spending plan for the long term.

On a semi-related note concerning energy riches and Scandinavia, President Obama stopped in Sweden on his way to Russia last week and hailed the tiny country as an example to us all in bringing about the cleaner, greener future to which we should all be aspiring: “Sweden is obviously an extraordinary leader when it comes to tackling climate change and increasing energy efficiency, and developing new technologies. And the goal of achieving a carbon-neutral economy is remarkable, and Sweden is well on its way. We deeply respect and admire that and think we can learn from it.” That prompted RealClearEnergy‘s editors to wonder: …Er, Obama does know that Sweden is 40 percent nuclear, right?

SOURCE

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How Conservatives Get Revenge on the IRS

In one of the biggest political scandals of the last decade, the IRS has been exposed for politically targeting conservative organizations and preventing them from gaining tax exempt status, all while quickly approving liberal organizations.  This abuse of Federal power by the IRS threatens democracy at its core, because it uses the Federal government’s biggest weapon – taxation – to promote one political ideology over another.  It’s no wonder why conservatives have long been skeptical of the IRS and why conservatives throughout history have sought to protect their money from IRS control.  So how have conservatives gotten revenge on the IRS?  By shielding their money and wealth in the one asset class that the IRS has no legal authority to know about.

So, how are conservatives beating the IRS, not to mention the Fed?  By buying private non-reportable physical gold & silver and sitting on it.   In other words, they're getting some wealth out of the crooked casino and away from the grimy paws of the IRS.  But in order to beat the IRS at their own game, they're buying “the right gold."

First, let’s look at investing in "the wrong gold" -- gold on paper through an ETF -- and how that plays right into the hands of the IRS and Fed.  You buy $100,000 in paper gold through your broker in the form of an ETF.  Gold doubles, you sell and realize a 100k profit and now you get to send a check for $28,000 to the IRS.  That’s right, you buy gold to protect yourself from inflation, inflation happens, your paper money buys less so your gold went up but, for some crazy reason, you have to give the IRS 28% of your “growth."

This is partly why the IRS is a joke.  The central planners make inflation to get growth, and then things rise because of that inflation, but then they want some of your growth back into their own pockets?   One would argue that if the central planners are going make inflation all day by printing money that YOU should be allowed to benefit from the asset appreciation that ultimately helps YOU to counter their inflation and the rising price of the goods and services YOU need to survive.  But instead they want to ding you twice – once through an unfair tax called inflation and then again by taxing you on the asset appreciation that inflation created.

So, when we talk about the "right gold," we're talking about physical gold, which has none of the counter-party risk of ETF gold and is more shielded from the IRS.  What many conservatives are doing is removing some wealth from the fractional system controlled by criminals and into an asset that not only lives outside the insolvent banking system and outside the paper fiat currency system, but is also invisible to the IRS.  That's right, the IRS does NOT require the reporting of many types of gold and silver coin purchases and sales.  So not only are conservatives protecting their money and wealth from systematic collapse when they buy gold and silver, they are shielding themselves from IRS scrutiny.

More HERE

This is reasonable advice as long as you realize that gold prices have big ups and downs.  I prefer real estate and blue chip company shares for asset protection myself -- JR

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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