Christmas tomorrow

Not sure how much I will be posting for the next few days  but even on Christmas day I usually put something up.  I am looking forward to a big traditional family Christmas dinner with about 20 adults and six kiddies

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De-Federalize welfare -- hand it all over to the States

Americans need government for some things but no American needs TWO governments for anything

The welfare state is a nightmare.  Programs such as Medicaid are fiscal catastrophes. The food stamp program is riddled with waste. The EITC is easily defrauded, even sending checks to prisoners. And housing subsidies are a recipe for the worst forms of social engineering.  The entire system should be tossed in the trash.

Why not take all income-redistribution programs, put them into a single block grant, and then transfer the money - and responsibility - to state governments?  Here's my argument for decentralization and federalism.

 In an ideal world, the block grant would gradually diminish so that states would be responsible for both the collection and disbursement of all monies related to welfare. But that's a secondary issue. The main benefit of this federalist approach is that you stop the Washington-driven expansion of the welfare state and you trigger the creation of 50 separate experiments on how best to provide a safety net. Some states might choose a basic income. Others might retain something very similar to the current system. Others might try a workfare-based approach, while some could dream up new ideas that wouldn't stand a chance in a one-size-fits-all system run out of Washington, DC. And as states adopted different systems, they could learn from each other about what works and what doesn't work. And since it's easier to influence decisions that are closer to home, taxpayers at the state level almost certainly would have more ability to impact what happens with their money.

Last but not least, I'm just a policy wonk, but I think the federalism strategy also has political appeal. As just noted, it worked with welfare reform. And I suspect a lot of non-libertarians and non-conservatives will intuitively understand that you'll get better results if you allow diversity and experimentation at the state level.

P.S. There would be some bad news if we decentralized the welfare state. It could mean an end to the Moocher Hall of Fame.

P.P.S. Replacing the welfare state with a (hopefully shrinking) block grant only addresses the problem of "means-tested" programs. If you also want to solve the problem of old-age entitlements, that requires Medicare reform and Social Security reform.

SOURCE

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The antisemitic Left is back again

From Karl Marx on, the Left has been antisemitic.  They had to can it for a while after their socialist friend in Germany went too far for the kindly people of America to tolerate, but they could not suppress it forever. Hate is what Leftists do

Every week brings a wealth of stories about new cases of aggressive anti-Israel activism. At the University of Michigan last week, thousands of students were sent fake eviction notices from the university's housing office. A pro-Palestinian group distributed them in dorms across campus to disseminate the blood libel that Israel is carrying out mass expulsions of Palestinians.

At Swarthmore College, leftist anti-Israel Jewish students who control Hillel are insisting on using Hillel's good offices to disseminate and legitimate anti-Israel slanders.
And the Left's doctrinaire insistence that Israel is the root of all evil is not limited to campuses.

At New York's 92nd Street Y, Commentary editor John Podhoretz was booed and hissed by the audience for trying to explain why the ASA's just-announced boycott of Israel was an obscene act of bigotry.

Many commentators have rightly pointed out that the ASA and the NAISA are fringe groups. They represent doctorate holders who chose to devote their careers to disciplines predicated not on scholarship, but on political activism cloaked in academic regalia whose goal is to discredit American power. The ASA has only 5,000 members, and only 1,200 of them voted on the Israel- boycott resolution. The NAISA has even fewer members.

It would be wrong, however, to use the paltry number of these fringe groups' members as means to dismiss the phenomenon that they represent. They are very much in line with the general drift of the Left.

Rejecting Israel's right to exist has become part of the Left's dogma. It is a part of the catechism. Holding a negative view of the Jewish state is a condition for membership in the ideological camp. It is an article of faith, not fact.

Consider the background of the president of the ASA. Curtis Marez is an associate professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, San Diego. His area of expertise is Chicano Film and Media Studies.

He doesn't know anything about Israel. He just knows that he's a Leftist. And today, Leftists demonize Israel. Their actions have nothing to do with anything Israel does or has ever done. They have nothing to do with human rights. Hating Israel, slandering Israel and supporting the destruction of Israel are just things that good Leftists do.

And Marez was not out of step with his fellow Leftists who rule the roost at UCSD. This past March the student council passed a resolution calling for the university to divest from companies that do business with Israel.  Why? Because hating Israel is what Leftists do.

The Left's crusade against the Jewish state began in earnest in late 2000. The Palestinians' decision to reject statehood and renew their terror war against Israel ushered in the move by anti-Israel forces on the Left to take over the movement. And as they have risen, they have managed to silence and discredit previously fully accredited members of the ideological Left for the heresy of supporting Israel.

This week, Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz retired after 50 years on the law faculty. His exit, the same week as the ASA and the NAISA announced their boycotts of Israeli universities, symbolized the marginalization of the pro-Israel Left that Dershowitz represented.

For years, Dershowitz has been a non-entity in leftist circles. His place at the table was usurped by anti-Israel Jews like Peter Beinart. And now Beinart is finding himself increasingly challenged by anti-Semitic Jews like Max Blumenthal.

The average voter is not in a position to change the positions of his party or the dogma of his ideological camp. He can take it or leave it. With rejection of Israel now firmly entrenched in the Left's dogma, and with the Left firmly in control of the Democratic Party under President Barack Obama's leadership, for those who care about Israel, the Republican Party is a more natural fit. So, too, the ideological Right is far more congenial to the Jewish state than the Left.

While the most sensible place for supporters of Israel to be today is on the political Right, it is also true that it is neither smart nor responsible to abandon the Left completely. Jews should be able to feel comfortable as Jews, and as supporters of Israel everywhere. Ideological camps that castigate Jews for their pride in the accomplishments of the Jewish state, and for their support and concern for its survival and prosperity, are camps in desperate need of fixing.

But we should not fool ourselves. Challenging the likes of Marez, or the Swarthmore students, or Max Blumenthal or Peter Beinart to a reasoned debate is an exercise in futility. They do not care about human rights. They do not care that Israel is the only human rights-respecting democracy in the Middle East. They do not care about the pathological nature of Palestinian society. They do not care about the Jewish people's indigenous rights and international legal rights to sovereignty not only over Tel Aviv and Haifa, but over Hebron and Ramallah.

Being hypocrites doesn't bother them either.  You can talk until you're blue in the face about the civilian victims of the Syrian civil war, or the gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia and the absence of religious freedom throughout the Muslim world. But they don't care. They aren't trying to make the world a better place.

Facts cannot compete with their faith. Reason has no place in their closed intellectual universe. To accept reason and facts would be an act of heresy.

While the ASA and its comrades are on the fringes of academia, they are not fringe voices on the Left. The Left has embraced the cause of Israel's destruction.

SOURCE

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Abandoning Our Liberties And Livelihoods: Lessons From The Obamacare Debacle

Doctors are the losers from socialized medicine too

You've got to hand it to President Obama's partisans among the pundits: they won't be deterred, no matter how bad the President's policies prove to be.

Even as Mr. Obama himself continuously alters and delays implementation of his own healthcare agenda (all without congressional participation), his faithful followers in the media insist that "the law is more resilient than you think" and "Obamacare death spiral worries are overblown."

Meanwhile the rest of us across the country find ourselves on the run from our government, hoping and praying that we don't need serious medical care anytime soon or that our insurance plans and jobs don't both get "cancelled." Even the New York Times had to admit in a news story this weekend that, because it raises taxes and drives up the cost of every facet of healthcare, the Obamacare agenda is hammering middle class Americans who "aren't poor enough" to qualify for the president's healthcare subsidies.

What can we learn from this debacle? In the interest of not repeating the same mistakes, consider this:

We should all stop believing in the magical promises of politicians: President Obama promised that his legislation would produce better quality health care for more people, and that it would cost less money. But how could that have ever been a realistic promise? Goods and services have to be paid for somehow. The President's rhetoric was the economic equivalent of alchemy - the mythical chemical process of turning fecal matter in to gold.

Arguably, the American people were duped by this. Not once, but twice did we vote to make the man with specious claims our President. And along with Barack Obama's magical promises about health care are his and congressional members' agendas for reducing the cost of higher education, even as student loan debt among college graduates is at an all time high.

The modern-day liberal political agenda promises a government program to meet every human being's needs at every stage of life. Americans need to sober-up and realize that there is no government program that can substitute for hard work, frugality, stewardship and productivity. And the more we vote for our government to meet our needs, the more we are subject to the whims of politicians and bureaucrats.

We should all begin to understand the basic economic dynamics of our professions and industries: It is sad to realize how many highly-trained and well educated professionals don't understand basic cash flow issues at their place of employment. Ask them "how do you get paid?" and you're likely to hear "through automatic deposit" or "I get a check every 2 weeks."

The insurance industry thought the Obamacare agenda was great at first - if the federal government uses its power to mandate that people buy your product (insurance) what could possibly go wrong? - but now finds itself a servant to the federal government, and reliant on the government's ability to operate websites and process subsidy applications properly. In short, the insurance industry is now, by law, an extension of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the presidential administration.

And then there are the medical doctors among us. There was a day when the American Medical Association officially opposed Medicare, the federal healthcare program for retirees and the disabled, because physicians feared "too much government meddling" in their practices. But soon after the program launched, the AMA fell in love with Medicare because it created continuous revenue streams in to doctor's offices.

But after two and a half decades or so of financial bliss, things began to change. Back in the 90's the federal government began telling physicians, in essence, "we don't care what your `billing rate' is for any particular service - we'll pay you what we think your service is worth." As a result many physicians try to limit the number of Medicare patients they see today, because dealing with Medicare is financially a "loser."

Having still not learned their lesson, the AMA then began an "on again - off again" flirtation with President Barack Obama. In 2009 the group tacitly opposed Obamacare; then in 2010 they said they were "open to it;" and in 2012 - in the final few weeks of the presidential re-election cycle - they officially opposed it again. Without any clear understanding of the economic dynamics of their profession, today physicians are losing their jobs in some regions of the country and having their wages cut in others, because the Obamacare law drives up the operational costs of hospitals and clinics, making physicians' salaries unmanageable.

Have Americans sobered-up and are we willing to assume responsibility for our own needs? Or are we still looking for a savior in the White House and in Congress, and willing to believe more empty promises? The 2014 elections should help answer these questions.

SOURCE

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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Researchers say our genes shape our political views

I have been pointing out evidence to that effect for years  -- since the '80s -- but it is good to see that the evidence keeps coming -- JR

Biology may not be destiny but it does shape who we vote for. A new study has found that our political attitudes are hard-wired into our DNA, with 56 per cent of each belief influenced by our genes.

Individual experiences, upbringing and other social influences explain the remaining variation in our left or right-wing orientation, according to the study.

'We've tended to think of political attitudes and behaviors as being rooted in the environment,' study co-author Dr. Kevin Smith, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told HuffPost Science.

'What our study shows along with a number of other studies is that they seem to be at least partially rooted in our biology.

'I know people get bent out of shape about this. The environment is important, it's just not everything. 'You can talk about biology and you can talk about the environment. Who we are is a combination of both.'

For the study, published in this month's Political Psychology journal, researchers surveyed 682 pairs of middle-aged twins, all recruited from a large database called the Minnesota Twin Registry.

Half of the twins were identical (monozygotic), sharing all of the same genes. The other half were fraternal, sharing about 50 percent of their genes.

The twins were asked about their attitudes to a range of political issues including gay marriage and egalitarianism.

The research found the identical twins' political views were consistently more similar than those of the fraternal twins, with further statistical analysis revealing the differences were due to genetic influences.

The study also revealed about half (48 percent) of the difference in extreme authoritarian beliefs is inherited, while 50 percent of egalitarian views are encoded in our genes.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln co-author Dr. John Hibbing said the research could offer insights into how to ease political tensions.

'Some observers have the idea that if people just talk about politics long enough, everybody will come to agreement,' he told HuffPost Science.

'Our research, as well as that of others in the field, indicates that political differences run deep, are biological, and affect the way the world is perceived and processed.

'It is pleasant to believe our political foes are merely uninformed but often times (not always) they are well-informed but just have different predispositions.'

SOURCE

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A&E Fires Phil

“Duck Dynasty” star and patriarch Phil Robertson came face to face with the political correctness police at A&E again this week when he dared to go “off script” during a GQ interview.

Last May, the network requested that the #1 show in cable TV history eliminate its references to God and guns, but Phil said no: “God and guns are part of our everyday lives [and] to remove either of them from the show is unacceptable. If we can't pray to God on the show, then we will not do the show.”

Responding to a question about sin in the current edition of GQ, Phil replied in his colloquial manner, “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there.” He then paraphrased 1 Corinthians: “Don't be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers – they won't inherit the kingdom of God. Don't deceive yourself. It's not right.”

The reaction from the two most infamous proponents of gender confusion and homosexual normalization was swift and predictable. The so-called “Human Rights” Campaign  protested, “Phil Robertson's remarks are not consistent with the values of our faith communities or the scientific findings of leading medical organizations. We also know that Americans of faith follow the Golden Rule – treating others with the respect and dignity you'd wish to be treated with. As a role model on a show that attracts millions of viewers, Phil Robertson has a responsibility to set a positive example for young Americans.”

Well, we think Phil did set a positive example for young Americans!

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (contact) complained, “Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil's lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe. He clearly knows nothing about gay people or the majority of Louisianans … who support [them].” They accused Robertson of “vile and extreme stereotypes” and “hateful anti-gay comments.”

As for “the majority of Louisianans,” Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal clarified, “Phil Robertson and his family are great citizens of the state of Louisiana. The politically correct crowd is tolerant of all viewpoints – except those they disagree with. I don't agree with quite a bit of stuff I read in magazine interviews or see on TV. In fact, come to think of it, I find a good bit of it offensive. But I also acknowledge that this is a free country and everyone is entitled to express their views. In fact, I remember when TV networks believed in the First Amendment. It is a messed up situation when Miley Cyrus gets a laugh, and Phil Robertson gets suspended.”

When it comes to opposing the homosexual agenda, Christians are now routinely condemned for speaking their beliefs. But the tyranny of political correctness is anathema to America itself, and enslaving all of us to a particular code of thought deemed acceptable to leftists is no different from any other kind of slavery.

If you'd like to let A&E know what you think, send an email to feedbackaetv@aenetworks.com. (Keep it clean.)

Memo to A&E: Civil Rights Act of 1964: DISCRIMINATION BECAUSE…RELIGION…, SEC. 703. (a) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer – (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;

More HERE

We also read:: "But the vicious backlash from Robertson's supporters has unnerved executives at A+E Networks, who have been on the receiving end of death threats. And the company has hired extra security for its Manhattan headquarters. No further announcements are expected over the holidays but the Robertsons and A+E remain in talks."

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The Snowden Chronicles and Another NSA Smackdown

A series of chain reactions that began in May with the release of highly classified information by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden continued this week. Snowden's leaks have revealed the sheer ubiquity and volume of information gathered and stored by the government, and this latest backlash arrives in the form of a stunning collective setback for the intelligence community, notably, the National Security Agency (NSA). Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, issued a preliminary injunction barring the agency's bulk collection of phone records, specifically, the so-called “metadata” associated with an individual phone call.

Metadata includes such information as the phone number called, the time the call was made, the duration of the call and, potentially, the location from which the call was made. Judge Leon ruled that the NSA's metadata collection violates the Fourth Amendment's proscription on unreasonable searches. However, the judge hedged his decision somewhat by staying his injunction order, pending an almost certain government appeal on the case.

By way of background, Congress first authorized bulk collection of phone records through the Patriot Act, which it passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Although special “FISA” courts were later established in 2006 to provide judicial oversight and authorization for intelligence collection operations, the enormity of the data collected renders this oversight largely moot: A single “authorization” to collect data can render millions upon millions of metadata records.

The controlling law up to this point has been the Supreme Court's 1979 opinion in Smith v. Maryland, in which the court ruled that collection of metadata regarding a phone call did not violate the Fourth Amendment's bar to unreasonable searches. Accordingly, critics complain that Judge Leon failed to follow the Supreme Court by not recognizing that metadata falls outside the Fourth Amendment's “unreasonable search” prohibition, as annunciated in that decision, and that the judge is employing judicial activism in his ruling. One critic – a former assistant U.S. attorney – even went so far as to call the judge's ruling “comically lawless.”

However, Judge Leon's central point – roughly paraphrased – is that the methods, conditions and assumptions that rendered Smith are apples-and-oranges apart from today's “privacy-expectation” landscape, and that the Smith court – which decided a case involving a single phone record on a single individual – could not possibly have foreseen the ways in which aggregate metadata is currently being used to violate all of America's “reasonable expectation of privacy,” and thus Smith is largely useless in determining the constitutionality of a governmental action fundamentally different from the one in that landmark case.

Additionally, where Smith gave the government authority to access metadata only in a limited manner (“limited data on outgoing calls”) on one individual in a single case, the government has extended that authority over the years – especially after the Patriot Act – so that it has no limits, has a duration of at least several years and extends to every person in the U.S. Information gathered from billions of cross-referenced data files is of a fundamentally different quality and character from data gathered from a single-line “pen register,” as in Smith.

Moreover, the NSA and other intelligence agencies have even further extrapolated the authority granted in Smith by dragooning every major phone company into involuntary service. To quote Judge Leon, “It's one thing to say that people expect phone companies to occasionally provide information to law enforcement; it is quite another to suggest that our citizens expect all phone companies to operate what is effectively a joint intelligence-gathering operation with the Government.” Indeed, in Judge Leon's mind – and ours, for that matter – there is only one word for this constitutional overreach: unsatisfactory.

Finally, we note that the most tangible result of Snowden's intelligence leak has been this: The leak, along with the government's subsequent damage-control reaction, has resulted in the tacit acknowledgement that metadata is almost certainly being collected on every phone in America. Thus the government has inadvertently conferred standing upon every U.S. citizen to levy a constitutional suit against it. Accordingly, expect a lot more of these types of suits in the future, independent of Judge Leon's controversial decision.

SOURCE

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George Zimmerman and his girlfriend pick up their guns from Seminole County Sheriff

George Zimmerman picked up his guns yesterday. It really is a non-story on the one hand, and yet there is this:

"Zimmerman, 30, whose arsenal was confiscated in November following a domestic dispute with his girlfriend, picked up his four firearms, including a shotgun and an assault rifle from the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office in Sanford, Fla., this week.

He was eligible to retrieve the weapons since Dec. 11 when assault charges against him were dismissed.

Zimmerman, perhaps Florida’s most notorious gun owner, picked up the weapons on Tuesday and Wednesday and returned to the sheriff’s office  on Thursday with girlfriend Samantha Scheibe, 27, because she also had to retrieve a handgun police seized during the same incident in November.

Returned to Zimmerman were an Interarms .380-caliber handgun, a Glock 19 handgun, a Kel-Tec 12-gauge shotgun and an AR-15 assault rifle.

Scheibe picked up her Taurus 9mm handgun."

I’m particularly amused by their description one rifle, one shotgun, and two pistols as an “arsenal,” and want to point out that we are only now discovering that gun number five, the Taurus 9mm, belonged to Scheibe, not Zimmerman.

The media enjoyed protraying her as the poor, defenseless victim, and it was only after she dropped the charges and they came to pick up their respective firearms as a couple that we find out that she was armed as well.

Stay classy, mainstream media!

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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A new and dangerous attempt by the IRS to prevent free speech

An email from illegal immigration critics Numbers USA:

IRS would make us take down grade cards and faxes! Please help us STOP them.

We are especially proud of our grade cards that, for the past 17 years, have tracked most actions in Congress that impact overall immigration numbers. Our grade cards are widely sourced and often used by activists to paint a clear picture of how a Member of Congress has acted on immigration.

But if the Internal Revenue Service has its way, we'll be forced to shut down our grade cards and many of the other features on our website in the months leading up to federal elections.

The IRS has proposed a new rule for non-profit organizations that is supposedly meant to respond to a recent political scandal. But instead of focusing on the rather narrow types of organizations and activities reflective of the scandal, its rule appears ready to punish all 501(c)4 non-profit organization and would cripple organizations whose primary mission is to educate the public on various issues in Congress.

The rule would prohibit the simple mention of a candidate's name within 60 days of a general election or 30 days of a primary - even if the mention has nothing to do with the election! If your Member of Congress introduces a great immigration bill or a terrible amnesty bill within 30 days of his/her primary, under the proposed rule, we wouldn't be able to tell you about it.

The IRS thinks it's shutting down inappropriate electioneering by certain 501(c)(4) groups, but in reality, it's granting elected officials immunity from public accountability. Non-profits like NumbersUSA, the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association, the League of Conservation Voters, and even the pro-amnesty National Council of La Raza would all be silenced, and we're all speaking out against it.

We've joined a small coalition of groups that have launched the website ProtectC4FreeSpeech.com. This site provides additional background on the rule, links to relevant news stories, and a way to submit public comments to the rule.

Under federal law, the IRS needs to read and respond to every unique comment made to a proposed rule, so our goal is to send them more than 1 million comments!

Email from Numbers USA

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Paglia: Duck Dynasty uproar ‘utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist’



The suspension of Phil Robertson from A&E’s Duck Dynasty is outrageous in a nation that values freedom, according to social critic and openly gay, dissident feminist Camille Paglia.

“I speak with authority here, because I was openly gay before the ‘Stonewall rebellion,’ when it cost you something to be so. And I personally feel as a libertarian that people have the right to free thought and free speech,” Paglia, a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, said on Laura Ingraham’s radio show Thursday.

“In a democratic country, people have the right to be homophobic as well as they have the right to support homosexuality — as I one hundred percent do. If people are basing their views against gays on the Bible, again they have a right of religious freedom there,” she added.

Robertson has been suspended from Duck Dynasty due to comments he made to GQ that have been deemed “anti-gay.” According to Paglia, the culture has become too politically correct.

“To express yourself in a magazine in an interview — this is the level of punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist, OK, that my liberal colleagues in the Democratic Party and on college campuses have supported and promoted over the last several decades,” Paglia said. “This is the whole legacy of free speech 1960’s that have been lost by my own party.”

Paglia went on to point out that while she is an atheist she respects religion and has been frustrated by the intolerance of gay activists.

“I think that this intolerance by gay activists toward the full spectrum of human beliefs is a sign of immaturity, juvenility,” Paglia said. “This is not the mark of a true intellectual life. This is why there is no cultural life now in the U.S. Why nothing is of interest coming from the major media in terms of cultural criticism. Why the graduates of the Ivy League with their A, A, A+ grades are complete cultural illiterates, etc. is because they are not being educated in any way to give respect to opposing view points.”

“There is a dialogue going on human civilization, for heaven sakes. It’s not just this monologue coming from fanatics who have displaced the religious beliefs of their parents into a political movement,” she added. “And that is what happened to feminism, and that is what happened to gay activism, a fanaticism.”

 SOURCE

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Judge: Obama Administration Assisted in Criminal Conspiracy to Smuggle Illegal-Alien Children into U.S.

In a court order, Federal District Judge Andrew Hanen accused the Department of Homeland Security of helping to smuggle an illegal-alien girl into the U.S. to live with her mother. Judge Hanen said this was the fourth recent case in which the Border Patrol apprehended a “coyote” smuggling a child, then delivered the child to illegal-alien parents. In each case, taxpayers covered the expense.

In the case, Patricia Elizabeth Salmeron Santos, an illegal alien, paid a coyote to smuggle her 10-year old daughter from El Salvador to Virginia, where she resided. When Border Patrol Agents apprehended the smuggler and the girl, they prosecuted the smuggler but brought the child to the mother, who they knew was an illegal alien.

Judge Hanen wrote, "Salmeron Santos admitted that she started this conspiracy by hiring alien smugglers to transfer her child from El Salvador to Virginia. She agreed to pay $8500 for these human traffickers to smugger her daughter. The criminal conspiracy instigated by Salmeron Santos was temporarily interrupted when Nava-Martinez was arrested. Despite this setback, the goal of the conspiracy was successfully completed thanks to the United States Government. This Court is quite concerned with the apparent policy of the Department of Homeland Security completing the criminal mission of individuals who are violating the border security of the United States.”

Judge Hanen continued, "The DHS could reunite the parent and child by apprehending the parent who has committed not one, but at least two different crimes. It would be more efficient for the Government to arrest the individuals who are not only in the country illegally, but while in the country illegally are also fostering illegal conspiracies. It would also be much cheaper to apprehend those co-conspirators and reunite them at the child's location. Yet it neither prosecutes nor deports the wrongdoer."

“The DHS, instead of enforcing our border security laws, actually assisted the criminal conspiracy in achieving its illegal goals,” Judge Hanen wrote. “It completed the mission of the conspiracy initiated by Salmeron Santos. In summary, instead of enforcing the laws of the United States, the government took direct steps to help the individuals who violated it. A private citizen would, and should, be prosecuted for this conduct…The DHS is rewarding criminal conduct…More troubling, the DHS is encouraging parents to seriously jeopardize the safety of their children.”

“In the last year, this Court has seen instances where aliens being smuggled were assaulted, raped, kidnapped and or killed. Time and again this Court has been told by representatives of the Government and the defense that cartels control the entire smuggling process. These entities are not known for their concern for human life....The Government is not only allowing them to fund the illegal and evil activities of these cartels, but is also inspiring them to do so,” the order states.

The Washington Times reports that border crossings by “unaccompanied alien children” are a growing problem. Between 2010 and 2012, apprehensions of these children increased 81 percent. That suggests that more illegal-alien parents are risking the lives of their children to bring them into the U.S., perhaps to qualify for the Administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program or in anticipation of a congressional amnesty.

Since Homeland Security officials told Judge Hanen that the drug cartels control smuggling operations, he said the department’s actions are helping the criminal entitles they are trying to disrupt. “The big economic losers in this scenario are the citizens of the United States who, by virtue of this DHS policy, are helping fund these evil ventures with their tax dollars,” the judge wrote.

Judge Hanen’s order also addressed the plight of Border Patrol Agents under the Administration's prosecutorial discretion policy. “These men and women, with no small risk to their own safety, do their best to enforce our laws and protect the citizens of the United States,” Judge Hanen wrote.” It seems shameful that some policymaker in their agency institutes a course of inaction that negated their efforts. It has to be frustrating to those that are actually doing the work of protecting Americans when those efforts are thwarted by a policy that supports lawbreakers …To put this in another context, the DHS policy is as logical as taking illegal drugs or weapons that it has seized from smugglers and delivering them to the criminals who initially solicited their illegal importation/exportation. Legally, this situation is no different.”

 SOURCE

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Some thoughts in this Holy season

By Rich Kozlovich

Here is the correct response to questions about evolution and creation:

“I wish to state categorically that I believe in the Theory of Evolution because that theory presents clear and incontrovertible scientific evidence there must be an Intelligent Designer!” Wow! I’m willing to bet that’s a shocker for many – on either side of the aisle - so let’s explore this?

For years I’ve been saying; “everything is the basics”. What does that mean? It means that in order to understand anything we must explore the foundational thinking of what it is we’re trying to understand. If the foundation is flawed, then the entire structure of thinking that it’s built on is a false premise, and will collapse under scrutiny from its own weight; that is if we wish to really see the truth. And that is the crux of the matter isn’t it?

Believing takes on many forms. For some it has to do with a higher power. For others it can take on the worship of oneself, for others it can take on the worship of some philosophy or other; but humanity has the desire to look to some higher explanation for existence, and human existence in particular. But one thing seems clear; ‘believing’ is inherent to our genetic code. Otherwise how can anyone explain why so many have believed so much over so long a time of human history, and in so many different cultures? Of course, the problem for the unbelievers among my readers with this explanation is that they would then have to explain how that genetic code was designed in that manner - or designed at all for that matter - if there is no higher power.

I do find it fascinating how some can believe that Intelligent Design is “a pig that won’t fly”! The design is so complicated that it defies explanation as to how infinitely small mutations over millions of years could bring us (and all else in the universe) to what now exists. Whether one disagrees or agrees with evolution, I question how anyone can say that there is no designer. Some feel that an intelligent designer used evolution. Some feel evolution is a mistake constantly making more mistakes and changing everything all the time all by accident. I wonder how anyone can explain how this can happen by accident and develop successful organisms since "geneticists estimate that 99 out of 100 mutations are harmful, and about 20 out of the 99 are lethal."

Then there are those who state there is so much “statistical data that they were at last able to confirm what they had suspected all along: Mutations were not 99 percent harmful to the DNA and the organism; they were 100 percent harmful! It was discovered that in EVERY instance, mutations caused some kind of damage—always! Out of it all, the researchers learned that DNA coding in the genes simply will not tolerate much change. More than just the slightest amount will ruin the code and the organism will be greatly weakened.”

According the Theory of Evolution life started when electricity, in some form such as lightening, charged some molecules existing in a chemical rich ocean soup and thus became cellular life. There is absolutely no evidence that this ever occurred, and there is no evidence that it can occur since no one has been able to duplicate this mythical event in a lab - ever. They have been able to get molecules to group together, but it isn’t life, especially since no one has ever been able to generate more than four of the twenty amino acids needed for life. These “cells” are all lacking in all the things that make life possible,including a DNA molecule which can’t form without a preexisting protein. Protein molecules are amazingly complex, and are absolutely necessary for life.

Furthermore, in order for a cell to function it takes 2000 protein enzymes. If life started in the ocean in some chemical rich soup, through some accidental electrical discharge; how did that cell, or group of cells, survive long enough to replicate themselves?

Evolutionally thought would require millions of years of mutations before the next step to propagation would come into being. If that’s so - how did they replicate? If we are to believe what proponents of evolutionary theory claim, then we have to recognize that these mythical cells would have died within seconds, minutes or days; but they would have ceased to exist long before they could have reproduced.

Much more HERE

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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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A libertarian case for immigration control

(Most libertarians advocate open borders)

I know a nice libertarian-socialist fellow named Mophery Rurbt. He has a household, let us imagine, consisting of three wives (well, he is a Mormon, and the Supreme Court has legalized polygamy), and four children.

One day at his door he finds a small Bangladeshi child, looking hungry, and saying he is come all the way across the world from Bangladesh, and has no place to stay. Mophery's family all consult together, and decide they can take him in. The little Bangladeshi child is overjoyed and becomes part of the Rurbt household.

One thing he does after joining that household is Facebook message all his friends back in Bangladesh, and tell them about this generous American who will take people in. Well, they Facebook message their friends, and so on, and about a week later...

Mophery wakes up in the morning to find Bangladeshis on his lawn. And beyond his lawn. In fact, as far as the eye can see (and this is pretty far, since Mophery lives on a tall hill) darn Bangladeshis struggling to advance towards his home. He learns that every single one of them expects him to take them in.

He locks his door, and shouts out the window that he will call the police if the horde tries to force its way in.

All, but now his fellow libertarian socialists hate him. "You're telling these people where they can go at the point of a gun."

The problem is that they don't see private property as legitimate, and thus don't see Mophery's efforts to stop his home from being overwhelmed and destroyed as a useful dwelling as legitimate. But Mophery has had a sudden awakening, and realizes that his household, to be a functioning unit, has to be able to control who may or may not join. If those who are not invited to join try to force their way in anyhow, the initial quote aggression" is on their part, not on his household's.

Nation-states, too, are functioning social units. If they are to remain functioning social units, they have to be able to regulate the influx of new members. It takes an ideology to occlude this rather obvious point, and make it look as though a group declining to invite someone in is somehow threatening them "at gunpoint."

SOURCE

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How to Get Real and Affordable Health Insurance Without Obamacare

What if we told you there are ways you can buy real health insurance, and more importantly, more affordable health insurance, than you can get from either the federal government's or your state government's health insurance "marketplaces"?

By now, you are likely very well informed about how President Obama's lies andmultiple broken promises have produced an even more broken system for buying individual health insurance coverage. Coverage that has become bothmore costly and of lower quality than what you may have had before because of all the useless bloat that has been added to it by President Obama and his bureaucrats who have put their politics ahead of people.

Sean Parnell, who helped us with the development of our "Obamacare: Should You Pay the Premium or the Tax?" tool, has been working on how to get effective and affordable health insurance coverage without dealing with Obamacare. At all. And best of all, in describing how to opt out of Obamacare, he explains you can get the kind of unbloated coverage that might make the most sense for you:

1. "Join a health care sharing ministry. These are voluntary, charitable membership organizations that agree to share medical bills among the membership. They function similar to insurance, and are probably the best alternative to conventional health insurance. There are four of them, at least that I know of. Three are open only to practicing Christians (Samaritan Ministries, Christian Healthcare Ministries, and Christian Care Ministry***) while a fourth, Liberty HealthShare, is open to anyone who agrees with their ethical commitment to religious liberty. They operate entirely outside of Obamacare’s regulations, and typically offer benefits for about half the cost of similar health insurance. Members are also exempt from having to pay the tax for being uninsured.

2. Buy a short-term health insurance policy. These policies usually last between 1 and 11 months (6 months seem to be standard) and are not regulated under Obamacare, and therefore don’t offer the same high level of benefits that can drive up costs. Deductibles are available that are higher than what is allowed with Obamacare-compliant health insurance, leading to further savings. They can typically be renewed at the end of the policy, although it is a new policy that won’t cover any conditions that occurred under the previous short-term policy. Another limitation is that they often can’t be renewed over and over again, it looks like 3 years of coverage is about the maximum. But they are much less expensive than conventional health insurance, and can be a good option for covering major medical expenses.

3. Buy alternative insurance products like fixed-benefit, critical illness, or accident insurance. These policies pay cash in the event you are diagnosed with cancer, spend a night in the hospital, or need some other medical treatment. They cost a fraction of what health insurance costs under Obamacare, and by giving you cash directly you aren’t locked in to any particular provider network. Another thing to do is to max out your medical and uninsured/underinsured driver coverage amounts under your auto insurance policy, which can pay medical bills if you are hurt in a car accident.

***UPDATE #2: I listed four health care sharing ministries above, including Christian Care Ministry. What I forgot to mention is that they operate under the name Medi-Share, which many of you may be more familiar with."

He also goes on to describe how to get lower cost health care (not just lower cost health care insurance), so you can get more bang for the bucks you do spend on health care, at least as compared to what someone who signs up for an Obamacare policy will get.

The short-term policies are more like traditional health insurance coverage, which makes them ideal for only paying for the kind of unbloated coverage you need. A good portion of your premiums for an Obamacare policy is actually going to pay for out-of-pocket health care expenses that President Obama's political supporters would like to not have to pay for themselves, which is one reason why their premiums are so much higher than what typical premiums were before the law's implementation.

One downside to the short-term policies is that they don't automatically cover pre-existing conditions, so if you develop a condition that requires extended treatment during the term of one of these policies, you may not be able to renew that coverage. A good way to get around that limitation though is to time the coverage period of your short-term policies during the year so that they go through December, where you could have the option to then get Affordable Care Act coverage during its next enrollment period if you do develop a condition that requires extended treatment. You could then drop the expensive Obamacare policy after you no longer need it in favor of the less costly short term policies again, as would be your right as an honest tax-paying American citizen.

If that describes your situation, when you do "opt-in" to Obamacare, it will be to your advantage to select a "Gold" or "Platinum" level plan, where instead of a high deductible that can require you to pay thousands of dollars out of your own pocket before you even get any meaningful benefit for having health insurance coverage, as is the case for both "Bronze" and "Silver"-level plans under the terms of the Affordable Care Act. We have previously found that people with expensive chronic or short-term, but costly health conditions will almost always pay less for their health care by selecting an Obamacare plan with minimal deductibles.

In fact, we could tell if Obamacare has developed an adverse selection problem simply by looking at the percentage of each kind of "metal" plan that its enrollees have selected, which is perhaps a very big reason why the Obama administration has refused to provide that information to date.

The fixed-benefit and accident insurance coverage would be beneficial as gap filling coverage, which is a means of covering thecost gap if you choose a policy that has a high deductible.

Of course, these kinds of policies would also make sense for people who can only afford Bronze or Silver-level health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act, but the difference is that those people will also be paying higher premiums, and are therefore less likely to have the money to pay for the kind of insurance that might actually reduce their out-of-pocket costs for health care.

SOURCE

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The CoveredCA.com Collapse: How Many California Democrats Does It Take With It?

Peter Lee is going to need a copy of The Happiest Life, and very soon, because his 2014 looks like it will be miserable, though not as miserable as he will have made the start of the new year for hundreds of thousands of Californians whom Lee has failed.

Lee is the number one guy at what may prove to be the biggest failure of many big failures in the state Obamacare exchanges. He is the executive director of CoveredCA.com, Obamacare's poster-child for state exchanges which is slowly but surely being exposed as an enormous and costly flop. A year ago, Lee was the Sacramento Business Journal's "executive to watch" in 2013. Now he's hiding from the press and his agency is hunkered down amid a growing storm of bad news, broken promises, and unmet goals.

Exchanges in Oregon, Minnesota and Maryland are getting most of the bad press --with Jim Geraghty noting today that Maryland is getting close to folding its tent and giving up-- but for sheer size of failure given ambitions-not-met and budget-spent, Lee's CoveredCA.com has got to be number one.

When enrollment opened, CoveredCA.com came up with a magic number of 487,000 subsidy-eligible enrollees by 4/1/14 as a bare minimum success number. That could only have been a very low bar arbitrarily set to guarantee "success" given that the national goal is 7 million enrollees. Even that low bar is proving too high, though, and sooner or later the real reporters are going to start digging into this epic failure and the man atop it.

The "progress" towards that minimum number of 487,000 subsidized enrollees cannot be known since the exchange's refusal to publish timely updates on enrollment data is pronounced. But we do know that the wizards at CoveredCA.com have sent out 114,000 error-filled notices to potential enrollees.

This latest snafu comes weeks after the Los Angeles Times reported that "California's health exchange has given insurance agents the names and contact information for tens of thousands of people who went online to check out coverage but didn't ask to be contacted."

Lee's supporters keep hoping the woefully unqualified nice guy somehow manages to turn things around, but this is the easiest part of the process. When small businesses get their coverage cancelled next year and are then thrown on to CoveredCA.com, the California nightmare will hit stage two,three and beyond --right in the middle of Jerry Brown's re-election campaign, and those of every other state wide official and all of the state's Assembly, half of its State Senate, and more than a few wobbly Democratic Congressional incumbents.

California's insurance commissioner Dave Jones estimated last month that more than a million Californians had had their health insurance cancelled because of Obamacare. Hard to imagine many Democrat votes from among those folks and their family members.

Nor is CoveredCA.com helping to fill the gap that the Obama-Reid-Pelosi troika created and which Jerry Brown and Peter Lee manage. In October and November, 777,000 applications were begun on the website, according to CoveredCA.com, but less than 110,000 people actually "enrolled." (And who knows how many will make a payment, even if today's bungled letter-to-enrollees melt down is corrected quickly.) It is a long way from 110,000 to the bare minimum of success at 487,000, and time has all but run-out, which explains the panicky Tweet that issued from CoveredCA,com today urging people to pay attention to the lateness of the hour.

SOURCE

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Director of Minnesota's Troubled Obamacare Exchange Resigns Following Tropical Vacation

Guy Benson

A follow-up to a story we mentioned yesterday. Like her failed Obamacare colleague in Maryland, Minnesota's embattled exchange director has stepped down. April Todd-Malmlov decided it would be a good idea to take a lengthy holiday in Costa Rica as the state's new healthcare system -- for which she was responsible -- was still failing many Minnesotans. Until recently, Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton defended Todd-Malmlov's "right" to take this sunny two-week getaway, but public outrage hasn't subsided. She's out:

"MNsure executive director April Todd-Malmlov left her $136,000-a-year post during a closed-door meeting with the program’s executive committee...Todd-Malmlov’s abrupt departure comes as thousands of Minnesotans scramble to enroll in the state’s online insurance marketplace by Jan. 1. The implementation of Minnesota’s program has gone more smoothly than in other states, but it still has been marked by countless technical glitches, delays and frustrated consumers...The outrage over Todd-Malmlov intensified following revelations that she and state Medicaid director James Golden took a nearly two-week tropical vacation late last month, even as the program was swamped with problems. According to Star Tribune records, the two live together and have worked closely on the implementation of the new exchange. Todd-Malmlov did not respond to repeated requests for comment."

These two incompetent lovebirds flitted off to paradise, leaving behind thousands of ordinary people to grapple with the consequences of their failures. That's what being a public servant is all about, dontcha know? The governor's stance, incidentally, has shifted from asserting Todd-Malmlov's "right" to a wildly ill-timed and undeserved vacation, to declaring the whole situation "unacceptable." Smooth work, gov. Here's a nifty companion piece to Todd-Malmlov's departure:

"Minnesota’s health-care exchange is asking about 1,000 applicants to reapply so they can receive insurance premium subsidies. MNsure had issues computing those subsidies earlier; the problem only applies to those who applied for insurance but didn’t enroll and don’t have a family member on a government health program such as Medicaid. The exchange is calling this group to inform them that they must reapply. Meanwhile, the exchange’s website, which recently eliminated a security vulnerability, was down Monday for people applying for new coverage."

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 Scrooge of 2013



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All the News That’s Fit to Print

I have met people who believe that we are visited by UFO’s. And I have met people who deny that there is a Leftwing media bias.

The difference between the two is that life could possibly exist on other planets, sufficiently advanced to be able to cross the interstellar void, so that the UFO believers have some basis, no matter how tenuous, to give their belief system some partial and tenuous relation to reality.

The other belief system has none. Did you read about the shooting in Colorado in the news today?

... take a look at the Denver Post’s extraordinary behavior this week after the shooting at Colorado’s Arapahoe High School. In the original story on the event, a student at the school describes his disgraced classmate as “a very opinionated Socialist”; in an updated version of the Post’s story, the shooter was not a socialist, but merely “very opinionated.” Why?

This is not the first time, nor the second, nor the third.

Nice, concise list compiled by Ace I reprint it here as a teaching aid to those who cannot see the pro-Left bias in the media.

* Sept 2009: census-taker Bill Sparkman found hanged in rural Kentucky. Media speculated it was Tea Party. (He killed himself.)

* Feb 2010: Joe Stack flies small plane into an IRS building. Anti-tax TP rhetoric blamed. (He quoted from the Communist Manifesto. Several media outlets simply scrubbed Stack’s quotation from the Communist Manifesto out of their publications of his suicide screed.)

* Feb 2010: Amy Bishop shoots colleagues at University of Alabama faculty meeting. Gun-loving Tea Party suspected. (She was an Obama voter. Dr. Amy Bishop turned out to be a potential serial killer after scrutiny revealed the unusual shotgun killing of her brother decades earlier. She was also a registered Democrat suffering from suicidal thoughts related to her failure to obtain tenure.)

* March 2010: John Patrick Bedell shot two Pentagon security. A right-wing extremist, media asked? (A registered Democrat and 9/11 Truther. To this very day, if you type “John Patrick Bedell” into Google, the very first autofill suggestion is “John Patrick Bedell tea party.” That’s not deliberate malice from Google. The predictive search is based on how often a word or phrase was searched. In other words, folks were so desperate to find out if Bedell was a tea partier, they taught Google to watch for it.)

* May 2010: massive Times Square car bomb found. Bloomberg speculates it’s someone upset about ACA. (Actually, plain vanilla jihadist scum. Mayor Bloomberg, without any information about the bomber at all, decided to speculate that it was someone upset about the new healthcare law. And nobody thought to question him on that.)

* August 2010: Amid GZM debate, Muslim cabbie stabbed in NYC. Media speculates: a RWNJ? (Actually, a Lefty art student off his meds. Even better: the Lefty art student off his meds had actually done some work for the PR firm hired to promote the Ground Zero Mosque.)

* Sept 2010: James Lee takes hostages at Discovery Chan HQ. Media speculates: climate change denier? (An environmentalist who hates humans. Lee was a particularly toxic example of leftwing nutbaggery. He was once convicted for smuggling illegal aliens into the United States. He wrote in his manifesto that he wanted to save the planet by “stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies!”)

* Dec 2010: Clay Duke shoots at FL school board. Mike Malloy blames Glenn Beck. (Actually, Media Matters among his fav sites.)

* Jan 2011: Jared Lee Loughner shoots up campaign event of Rep. Giffords. Media: TP rhetoric is to blame. (An apolitical conspiracy theorist.)

* July 2012: James Holmes shoots up theater in Aurora, CO. Brian Ross suggests he’s a TPer on live TV. (Just another unmedicated nutter.)

* Aug 2012: Floyd Lee Corkins shoots up @FRCdc based on @SPLCenter’s “target list.” Media: [crickets]. h/t @JammieWF (This was the case of the media that didn’t bark. A politically-motivated shooting in the media’s own backyard. They grudgingly covered the shooting itself, but were curiously quiet about Corkins’ motive in targeting FRC, which he explicitly said was based on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s target list.)

* April 2013: Tsarnaev bros bomb Boston Marathon. Media suggests RWNJ commemorating “Patriot’s Day.” (Actually, just more jihadist scum…. that should have been “Obama-voting jihadist scum.” Good point. The Tsarnaev’s had the whole profile of modern American mass killers: jihadists, leftists, nutters.)

* Oct. 2013: Media retroactively blames right wing for JFK assassination, calling the State of Texas a bastion of rightwing hate. (Actually, Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist defector.)

SOURCE

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California Union Pays Only 1.7% of Income in Taxes, Yet Demands Corporations "Pay Their Fair Share"

Are government employee unions any less of a leech on society than corporations?

The malcontents with the California Federation of Teachers apparently think so. As a part of the recent public school “Day of Action” – a milder, more geriatric version of the 1960s “Days of Rage” – unionists in San Francisco staged a shouting protest in front of the Westfield Mall. The chanters demanded the corporations headquartered inside the mall “pay their fair share.”

Watch the video here.

The hypocrisy comes with the fact that they want others to pay more taxes, while they themselves pay so little.

The CFT’s 2013 LM-2 financial report reveals the union received $21,866,549 in “total receipts.” That type of annual revenue is probably on par with a lot of big corporations. And the union certainly acts like a corporation in the manner in which it compensates top employees:

    ·Jeffery Freitas, Secretary-Treasurer - $166,664
    ·Daniel Martin, Executive Director - $150,557
    ·Kenneth Burt, Political Director - $140,102
    ·Fred Glass, Communications Director - $139,456

Yet the union only paid $371,150 in “direct taxes.” Labor unions are categorized as non-profits by IRS rules and therefore are immune from income taxes.

So these numbers reveal the union paid 1.7 percent of its income in “direct taxes.” Does that qualify as its “fair share?”

Us poor folks who comprise the 99 percent would like to know why this super wealthy organization, which wields as much political clout as most private companies, is allowed to skate away without contributing a “fair” amount to the high cost of government, particularly when it constantly lobbies on behalf of expensive and wasteful social programs.

SOURCE

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Inequality: Locomotive of Progress

by ALEXANDER G. MARKOVSKY

Throughout the history of civilization people have been dreaming about a perfect world: full employment, fair distribution of wealth, full satisfaction of material and intellectual needs, and equality-only to discover, to their disappointment, that this utopian system does not exist on this side of the grave.          

Given President Obama's political persuasion, his obsession with inequality should surprise no one. In numerous speeches he has emphasized the alleged dangers of inequality, including his 2012 State of the Union Address, where he elevated the subject into "the defining issue of our time.... No challenge is more urgent. No debate is more important." Or, as he recently declared, "The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American dream." He has never defined his own interpretation of equality or offered his vision of the American dream.

But to someone who had firsthand experience with Marxism-Leninism and is able to decipher the genuine meaning of the president's words, the message is loud and clear: in order to preserve the American dream we have to take from the rich and give to everybody else. It is that  simple. Unfortunately, Obama's historical memories do not seem to include the lessons of his Soviet ideological predecessors. How did this magic economic formula work out for them?          

To sell the ideology, President Obama and his Democrat supporters insist they have no intention of creating an egalitarian society; they just want to reduce the gap between rich and poor. The elusive meaning of the term "reduce," however, leaves it open to endless interpretation, especially since they have failed to express their concept in numbers. Should the gap be a thousandfold, a hundredfold, tenfold-where does it stop? Furthermore, whether we shrink the gap a thousandfold or tenfold does not change the philosophical argument. The truth is that as long as there is a gap at all, the Left will try to shrink it down to meet its ultimate objective, so unambiguously expressed in the communist slogan of the Soviet Union: "Economic Equality and Justice for All."            

Economic equality and justice sound so appealing that true believers do not even notice they are mutually exclusive because economic equality is in itself an intrinsically unjust concept. The source of all wealth is the product of man's God-given ability to innovate. This ability has not been distributed equally. As Aristotle observed 2,400 years ago, "The worst form of inequality is to make unequal things equal." If society equates the extraordinary contributions of great innovators such as Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs with those of millions of individuals not so gifted and talented, the enormous upward mobility of the last 200 years will immediately cease. Freedom enables people to use their ingenuity to generate wealth, whereas coerced economic equality suppresses the very freedom required to innovate and begets poverty.

This is the reason the magical distribution formula did not work for the Bolsheviks and will not work for the contemporary proponents of the egalitarian dream; liberals, social justice supporters, social democrats, and a few remaining communists, who refused to accept the immutable fact that freedom, inequality, hard work and wealth are interdependent. Capitalism, which embraces all these qualities, created more overall wealth during the last 200 years than was created over the preceding 7,000 years of human civilization. Capitalism elevated the lumpen proletarians (poor laborers), who, according to Karl Marx, had "nothing to lose but their chains," into a bourgeoisie or middle class, and in doing so, materialized the American Dream.          

The president's policies, such as the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank Act, and new environmental regulations, are supposedly aimed at addressing the "fundamental threat to the American dream." But regardless of the positive spin Obama uses to sell these policies, they are not about freedom and creation of wealth, which is capitalism; they are about suppression of freedom and redistribution of wealth, which is socialism. Passed over by the public and barely debated in the media, "the defining issue of our time" speech was in fact Obama's mission statement declaring his strategic imperative: economic equality via distribution of wealth.          

In his quest for the egalitarian dream the president may choose to ignore the millennia of Aristotle's reality, but he cannot change it. Inequality emanating from free enterprise is the ultimate expression of freedom and is the locomotive of progress. It gives poor, rich, and everyone in between something to strive for.

This powerful locomotive has been pulling our economic wagon from the Industrial Revolution through modern-day free-market capitalism toward what Alexander Hamilton described as "Greater perfection and happiness than mankind has yet seen."          

Paradoxically, the Founding Fathers and President Obama both aspired to equality. The Founding Fathers envisioned equality in liberty, while our president is driving the country into equality in poverty.

SOURCE

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Federal Judge Calls Obamacare "Totally Ineffective" While Striking Down Contraception Mandate

Yesterday, Judge Brian Cogan of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, not only struck down Obamacare's contraception mandate as applied to religious non-profit organizations, but also sent a strong signal that federal courts were losing patience with President Obama's many stitches of executive power.

Previous courts had ruled against President Obama's contraception mandate as applied to for-profit entities (see Sebelius v Hobby Lobby), but this was the first court to hold that participating in Obama's scheme to provide free birth control is a substantial burden on the free practice of religion (specifically the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and its affiliate organizations).

Finally, the court also rejected the government's argument that Obama's failure to convince Congress to "fix" Obamacare authorized him to enforce his contraception mandate in the manner he did:...

Considering how often Obama has justified his expansion of executive power on Congress' failure to do his bidding, yesterday's ruling was not only a huge victory for religious liberty, but a huge win for limited government in all spheres as well.

More HERE

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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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Obamacare: A death panel for the rule of law

Barack Obama is in a box: He repeatedly promised “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan,” but his socialized medicine monstrosity has cost millions of people their coverage. It’s also become painfully clear Obama knew this was going to happen as early as March 2010 — yet kept regurgitating his false promise.

Obamacare also has a bigger problem: As written, the law’s key mechanism for issuing subsidies to state exchanges is legally enforceable in only one third of the country — meaning the only way to pay for its nationwide dependency expansion is new deficit spending. This would clearly violate another oft-repeated Obama promise: That his law would not “add one dime” to the federal deficit (well, beyond the $6.2 trillion identified in this 2013 GAO report).

What’s an administration to do, right?

That’s easy: Change the law.  “As we implement this law, we have and will continue to make changes as needed,” senior administration official Valerie Jarrett wrote this summer.

And so Obama has shredded the Constitution in favor of the “Easy Button,” arbitrarily remaking entire sections of the health care law that deal with its employer mandate, its deductible and co-payment limits, its coverage requirements and — more disturbingly — its power to subsidize health insurance in more than thirty states.

Consider this: Obamacare itself contains 906 pages and approximately 380,000 words. But the regulations promulgated in support of the law total 10,535 pages and approximately 11,588,500 words.

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) hit the nail on the head earlier this year in responding to this systematic obliteration of our nation’s constitutionally prescribed separation of powers.  “The president doesn’t get to write legislation, and its illegal and unconstitutional for him to try and change legislation by himself,” Paul told Fox News.

He’s right. Yet sadly this sort of crass usurpation is nothing new for Obama – whose contempt for the rule of law is unprecedented in American history. For example, after multiple Congresses (including a Democratically controlled Congress) refused to enact his proposed energy tax Obama went over their heads.

“If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will,” he said in his 2013 State of the Union address. “I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take.”

Last month he made good on that threat — forming a new Democratic-controlled environmental panel designed to “skirt legislative oversight” and “push a federal agenda on states” as part of a “sweeping overhaul” of American environmental policy, according to one report.

After Congress refused to pass Obama’s DREAM Act in 2011 Obama unilaterally imposed the measure himself — effectively granting legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants.

Without Congressional approval Obama’s administration pledged last month to indefinitely extend America’s failed military intervention in Afghanistan — one of several foreign lands where Central Intelligence Agency operators have conducted extralegal killings (the evidence of which has been kept hidden from taxpayers).

Just as egregiously, Obama’s Internal Revenue Service unfairly discriminated against his political opponents in the years leading up to his reelection — illegally targeting them for “added scrutiny” and then covering up the scandal until after the election.

Last month Obama applauded Sen. Harry Reid’s decision to undo two centuries of democratic tradition in the U.S. Senate — part of a crass effort to further radicalize the federal government by eliminating a critical check on executive overreach (one Obama previously embraced as a member of the U.S. Senate).

And in perhaps the most dangerous example of them all, Obama has empowered his National Security Agency to intercept, store and access billions of phone records, emails, text messages, website histories and online interactions of American citizens in direct contravention of their constitutional protections against warrantless search and seizure.

In each of these actions Obama’s modus operandi is clear: Centralized power, by any means necessary.

America was built on the rule of law — indispensable liberties articulated by the Magna Carta and Anglo-Saxon common law and expanded upon during the American Revolution, the U.S. Civil War and the civil rights movement. Obama’s arrogant disregard for the rule of law is destroying this shared heritage. It is breaking the bonds of civil society — fueling the very distrust and contempt for government Obama professes to abhor.

This alien ideology — which will take generations to erase from our national identity – is the true legacy of the Obama regime. And Obamacare represents its shining “achievement.”

SOURCE

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The moral superiority of capitalism

The American Right has yet to fully make the moral case for capitalism.  Too many conservative writers and politicians focus on its practical aspects, but details of order and efficiency do not sway the hearts of voters, compassion does.  Not surprisingly, the party most hostile to our founding economic principles has won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, in large part, by claiming the moral high ground for wealth redistribution and more centralized power.

Columnist Leonard Pitts recently excoriated Rush Limbaugh for calling out the Pope in the wake of his pronouncements condemning the free market.  Pitts cites the Apostle Paul who writes in 2 Corinthians 8:13-15 that it is wrong for some to live lives of ease while others struggle.  Limbaugh and others, according to Pitts, “are fine with faith as long as it speaks in platitudinous generalities… but scream bloody murder when it imposes specific demands on their personal conscience — or wallet.”

A complete theological rebuttal to Pitts’ twaddle would require space not permitted here.  Certainly God does require His followers to care for the needy.  Rush Limbaugh annually hosts a Leukemia and Lymphoma Cure-a-thon on his radio show and he proudly supports the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation, which offers scholarships to the children of fallen heroes.  The dreaded robber barons of the 19th Century gave millions to establish hospitals, universities and charitable foundations.

Still, the point is not that conservatives and capitalists do good things.  The point is that capitalism makes such giving possible.  Furthermore, the moral case for capitalism lies in the fact that it makes life better for everyone every day.  The wonders of capitalism are why people from all over the world flock to our shores by the millions.

The Reagan years, known as the decade of greed, saw average incomes for all Americans increase, according to the Census Bureau, more than 15 percent.  Unemployment was reduced considerably during the Reagan era from Carter Administration levels of more than 10 percent, and, according to surveys, charitable contributions reached an all-time high of over $120 billion.  These are the fruits of a system that should be hailed and not demeaned.

One could remind us that the Pope was merely assailing the excesses of the free market.  Pitts, in fact, began his column by stating that “I like capitalism.”  But the American left has been reining in the supposed extremes of capitalism for much of the last 100 years, and with no real successor to Reagan in over a generation, one has to wonder how many excesses could be left!

Neither Pitts nor the Pope mention that charity has no meaning if not freely given.  What they seem to advocate is wealth redistribution, the results of which, as history has shown, have been mostly disastrous.  Visit most any Democrat-controlled inner city. Statists invest faith in their own bloated vision of the benevolence of the state.  They show little faith in a free people.  Capitalism flourishes on the highest ideals of the average person.  Capitalism thrives on achievements of which the achiever never thought him or herself capable!  Socialism can’t say that.  Now tell us which system best speaks to the innate goodness and potential of the human spirit.

Unfortunately, the face of American capitalism far too often resembles Mr. Potter of It’s a Wonderful Life fame, as opposed to a true hero in the Atlas Shrugged mold.  The business world often has only itself to blame.  And conservatives and Republicans who should be hailing capitalism tend to adopt a defensive posture or promote it solely on pragmatic grounds.

Finally, the Pope above all should hail the moral superiority of a free system that allows the most humble to worship the God of his conscience and not the idol of the omnipotent state.  Statists will cite the Bible for their own purposes but they mask their own messianic worldview.  No doubt, this is not about competing economic theories, this is a moral war.  Let’s not be afraid to call it that.

SOURCE

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Obama Agenda Promotes Unfairness

by STAR PARKER

The things that increase the likelihood of improving one's life are the very things the President and his liberal friends fight

When presidents give speeches, the affair is choreographed like a Broadway production. The message is not just the words of the speech, but where it is given and who happens to be the chosen audience.

So it was not by accident that President Barack Obama chose a theater in a poor black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., where the average income is barely half the national average, to speak this week about economic opportunity and fairness.

What exactly was the President trying to achieve by sharing with a low-income black audience that "today's CEO now makes 273 times more" than the average worker?

Did he want to inspire hope that one day they can earn money like this? I don't think so. The point was to create despair and convey that America is not fair.

Even though the president doesn't deny there are many American success stories (he knows -- he raises lots of money from them), he implies that somehow they are the exceptions to the rule. His core message is that average Americans are not getting ahead, and the reason is that America is not fair.

I can't find a word in the President's remarks that would do anything but reinforce the sense of helplessness, meaninglessness, and disenfranchisement that already exists in generous doses in low-income neighborhoods.

Is this leadership?  Is this the message those trying to get their lives together really need to hear?

Maybe they do need to hear it if it is true. But it's not. There are indeed unhealthy trends in America today that undermine opportunity and the chances of many to get ahead.

But they are not the things the president talked about. In fact, the trends that are reducing opportunity are the things that President Obama and his liberal friends love to promote. And the things that increase the likelihood of improving one's life are the very things the President and his liberal friends fight.

There is today reams of data, piles of studies that show that more economically free nations grow faster and create more wealth.

What is economic freedom? It means citizens can run their lives and do their business with minimal government interference. It means keeping taxes, government spending and regulation low. It means more-powerful citizens and less-powerful politicians.
In 2000, the United States was number 2 in the world as measured by the Economic Freedom of the World Index. By 2011 it dropped to number 19.

This dramatic drop in economic freedom in America helps explain today's sluggish economy and slow job creation.

But liberals, like our president, insist that government is the solution rather than the problem. We need more of it, according to them, not less. Then when jobs disappear, they say it's not fair.

What about individual realities?

According to Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution, "Kids in single-parent families are about five times more likely to be poor as children in married-couple families. Yet the share of children in single-parent homes families has been rising for decades."

And liberal government policies have been contributing for decades to marriage breakdown.

Now Obamacare gives Americans a new reason not to get married.
Kaiser Health News reports that two low-income earners -- say one earning $30,000 and one earning $40,000 -- would each qualify for health insurance subsidies. But if they married, their combined $70,000 would disqualify them.

The president told his black audience in Southeast Washington, D.C., that "we need to set aside the belief that government cannot do anything about reducing inequality."

You're right, Mr. President, it can.  Government can start protecting rather than violating our freedoms.

And our leaders can start promoting policies consistent with, rather than in violation of, traditional biblical values like marriage and personal responsibility, so that our citizens will be in good shape to take advantage of their freedom, if we can ever get it back from our government.

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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Leftist hate is alive and well in Australia too

Andrew Bolt reports (The ABC is Australia's public broadcaster  -- predictably Leftist)

Three examples from the past week shocked me.

Example 1. The ABC's main TV news bulletin in Brisbane last Thursday showed the exterior and street number of the home of Bill Mellor, a decorated former army brigadier, and gave out his suburb.

Mellor's wife was in tears and police rushed in to secure the house.

The reason? As the ABC report pointed out, Mellor was co-ordinating the Queensland Government's war against criminal bikie gangs linked to murder, rape, drug trafficking and extortion.

Why on earth did the ABC show bikies the home of the man overseeing the fight against them that has led to nearly 400 arrests? How could his home be relevant to its report?

There may be an innocent explanation involving extreme stupidity, but Queensland Premier Campbell Newman and others, me included, also suspect bias.

We already know the ABC last month published stolen intelligence on our spying in Indonesia, damaging our national interest without exposing any sin that needed correcting. It seemed the ABC's Leftist culture made it only too keen to rock the Abbott Government. Only too ready to undermine national security.

In the Mellor case, the ABC, an eager critic of Newman's conservative Government, may have been similarly seduced into forgetting its duty even to people with whom it has no political sympathy.

Once, the ABC had little problem with Labor premier Anna Bligh having her husband made a department head or one of her wedding guests made Queensland's top public servant.

But now it's all over Mellor's new job, after Labor shamelessly claimed Premier Newman was "appointing his mates".

"We don't need the military running this state," Labor added.

All piffle, of course. Newman's "mate" was a man he'd served under at Duntroon 31 years ago. Mellor has since commanded the Australian force in Somalia, helped plan our intervention in East Timor and recently served as Queensland's flood recovery co-ordinator.

Nor is he in charge of police work. He heads a team of directors-general and senior officers to ensure government agencies work together against bikie gangs.

In any case, why show where he lives and put him in danger?

Should I now show where ABC managing director Mark Scott lives to illustrate this latest example of an ABC out of control?

Example 2. Last week, Melbourne University's Professor Thomas Reuter wrote in the Jakarta Post to accuse Australia of startling crimes against Indonesia.

Reuter told his Indonesian readers the latest spy allegations were part of our "consistent unneighbourly behaviour" which he claimed included "attempts to assassinate (former president) Sukarno".

He even claimed Australian soldiers were "involved in massacres" of Indonesians during their struggle for independence from the Dutch.

Not mentioned in Reuter's list of our alleged sins was our strong support for Indonesian independence, our yearly aid of $500 million or our $1 billion donation in tsunami relief.

What the hell was Reuter up to? Surely he realised the danger of preaching such anti-Australian poison days after mobs besieged our Jakarta embassy?

Still, someone of the Left may think the more trouble for the Abbott Government, the better.

But most scandalous was that Reuter's stories of Australians massacring Indonesians or trying to kill their president seem figments of imagination - of Reuter's or that of his undeclared sources. Indeed, Reuter has since withdrawn his massacre claim, at least, admitting it "cannot be verified".

So what will Melbourne University - whose vice-chancellor organised the farcical 2020 ideas summit for his friend Kevin Rudd - do about a professor who makes such baseless and dangerous claims?

Example 3. Labor's Joy Burch is Education Minister in the ACT, in charge of children's schooling.

Well, look away, children, because last week your minister fired off tweets attacking federal Education Minister Chris Pyne when she read - and retweeted - one by an abusive Leftist calling Pyne a "c---".

Burch later claimed this was an accident caused by her "poor social media skills", and, true, she soon deleted the tweet.

Yet for more than a day, she failed to apologise to Pyne.

Whatever the truth, the Left's abuse of the Abbott Government is already worse than anything complained of under Julia Gillard.

Tony Abbott has been called a "liar" by the Opposition Leader and pictured hanging from a noose on a poster at a same-sex marriage rally.

Someone operating in the Geelong Trades Hall set up a Facebook page urging Abbott's assassination, and The Age promoted "F--- Abbott" T-shirts sold by an Age columnist.

The hatred now has a dangerously violent tone, and I ask again - what does the Left want?

Bodies in the street?

 SOURCE

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Truth Slips Away in Public Debate

Suzanne Fields

The political liar has never been regarded as a mythological creature, but lying has recently grown to mythic proportions. The most prominent offender, of course, is a certain president who puts deception to work to achieve his goals, most prominently about his health care scheme.

Jon Stewart, the liberal comedian who usually defends whatever President Obama says and does, rolls out a series of video clips showing the president in numberless versions, one after the other, of repeating his statement that if you like your health insurance, you can keep it. "So, yes," the comic concedes, "the president was somewhat dishonest about the promise of his health care program." Only somewhat?

Ordinarily, quoting a comedian to make a political point is a fool's errand, but useful this time because television comedy shows are where the young and foolish get their "news." Lying can be stretched out on a yardstick, quantified and compared for laughs. According to some surveys, almost a third of Americans under the age of 40, many of whom must sign up for Obamacare to subsidize the older generations, say they get their news from pop TV like the Daily Show, the Colbert Report and Internet sites of suspect reputation.

Frank Gaffney, chairman of the Center for Security Policy, extends his analysis of the president's meretricious statements about what's actually in the Iranian agreement to halt the race to the Islamic bomb. "How do we tell the president is lying?" he asks. "His lips are moving."

A lie, goes the folk wisdom, can travel around the world before the truth gets its boots on. The congressional Democrats, whose leader told them they could find out what was in Obamacare after they passed the legislation, were still trying to tie their shoelaces when they voted for it. The Iranians cheer the lifting of sanctions and say out loud that, under the agreement, they can continue to enrich uranium, and the president says no they can't, that's not in the agreement. Who do we believe?

Lies can be merely wishes, saying what you hope is true, and if President Obama gets the benefit of the doubt he doesn't deserve, his early pledges about keeping the insurance we like may have been wishful thinking, but once the evidence was in and he continued to say it, the "misspeaking" became the willful lie.

The fact checkers at The Washington Post, which grants the president many mulligans, use symbols of Pinocchio to denote lying. This time they gave him the maximum, four Pinocchios.

It's hardly stop-press news that politicians lie, but when lies go viral on the Internet, it's difficult for the truth to survive. Just as the comedy "news" shows are not after truth, the Internet blurs fact and fiction because the gatekeepers, the crusty old city editors who wouldn't let a reporter or columnist get by with fudging facts, are mostly all dead. The new breed insists that "going viral" trumps verification, volume trumps veracity. Incentives work against truth telling in the high tech culture.

"If you throw something up without fact-checking it, and you're the first one to put it up, and you get millions and millions of views, and later it's proved false, you still get those views," Ryan Grim, the Washington bureau chief for the Huffington Post, told The New York Times, conceding that it had posted phony stories. "That's a problem."

The specific stories Huffington posted were fairly harmless. Once, a child's letter to Santa on Twitter with a detailed link to Amazon.com, was actually written by a grown-up comedian. A fight on an airliner that was reported as fact was actually pure fiction. But when truth is continually sacrificed -- whether carelessly or cravenly -- on sites that purport to offer serious news, trustworthiness is sacrificed, and the reader is confused as well as deceived. This is true when presidents do it, too.

The searchers who found the hard-to-spot Pinocchio lizard say the critters, though camouflaged, weren't hard to find "if you knew where to look." The lizard, in fact, was one up on truth in public life.

 SOURCE

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How Autoworkers Became More Equal Than Others

The Treasury Department has sold the last of its stock in General Motors Co. Even though taxpayers lost $15 billion on the auto bailout (including losses at Chrysler Group LLC and Ally Financial Inc., which offers financing for GM vehicles), the Barack Obama administration put out a statement taking credit for its handling of tax dollars and the Detroit automakers’ success.

Yet the administration shouldn’t be so quick to toot its own horn. The government didn’t need to lose any money on the auto bailout. Had the United Auto Workers not gotten special treatment, taxpayers would have come out ahead.

The administration gave the UAW billions more than bankruptcy law calls for. Typically, bankruptcy reduces union compensation packages to competitive rates. However, GM’s existing union members made few concessions on pay. As the UAW put it, the contract meant “no loss in your base hourly pay, no reduction in your health care, and no reduction in pensions.”

This virtually never happens during bankruptcies at unionized companies, as many unionized airline pilots can attest. As a result, GM still has higher labor costs than every foreign transplant automaker -- almost $60 an hour.

Bankruptcy law further stipulates that all unsecured creditors should recover their debts at the same rate. This, too, didn’t happen. Instead GM’s bondholders recovered less than 30 cents on the dollar; the UAW recovered most of the money owed its retiree health trusts. At Chrysler the UAW recovered a greater proportion of its (unsecured) debt than even secured creditors did.

GM also backstopped the pensions of union workers at Delphi Automotive Plc, its bankrupt parts supplier. New GM had no legal obligation to do this. Nonetheless the company spent $1 billion of bailout funds to preserve their benefits.

These generous subsidies account for more than the entire net cost of the GM and Chrysler bailouts. The excess funds and equity given to the union cost the Treasury $30 billion -- twice what taxpayers lost. Had the administration bailed out the automakers but treated the UAW impartially, taxpayers wouldn’t have lost anything. Instead, the union collected more than the entire U.S. foreign aid budget.

That the union received such a sum is extraordinary. Nonunion workers who were equally worthy of sympathy got far harsher treatment. Delphi’s salaried nonunion employees also had their pensions terminated. Unlike the UAW, they got nothing.

The union’s windfall makes little economic sense. It had no leverage in 2009, and it needed the bailout to survive. A strike would have liquidated the company and eliminated UAW members’ jobs. Like Sheriff Bart in “Blazing Saddles,” the union could only point a gun to its head and threaten to shoot. It had to accept any terms the administration offered.

Further, the government gained nothing from giving the UAW most-favored-special-interest status. Whatever the economic benefits of keeping the automakers afloat, inflating union compensation doesn’t help the economy. Nor did these subsidies reduce welfare costs -- things such as unemployment insurance, Medicaid or food stamps. Only workers who lose their jobs or have very low earnings are eligible for those benefits, not those whose contracts get downgraded but remain well in the middle class. This $30 billion handout provided virtually no public good.

Until recently the administration has ducked responsibility for this largesse, claiming the automakers negotiated these expensive union contracts and the White House simply signed on. To hear the officials tell it, the administration “deferred to General Motors in terms of their business judgment.”

An Inspector General report released last summer shows otherwise. The IG found that GM understood the administration’s auto task force called the shots in the bailout. During negotiations between GM and the UAW, the task force “gave the UAW additional leverage” that enabled it to extract these concessions. The task force made GM restructuring and signing a new union contract within 40 days a condition for future bailout funds. They also informed the UAW of these facts.

As the IG dryly put it: “The UAW understood that GM could not walk away from negotiations and had to reach agreement with it.” Unsurprisingly, the union used this leverage to hold out for as much money as possible.

The UAW rejected GM’s proposals for two days, knowing the company couldn’t walk away, and refused to even discuss modifying its expensive pensions. On the third day, the UAW’s president called the auto task force. The IG reports that President Obama’s auto team “actively negotiated and made the final deal,” which GM subsequently accepted -- a deal that cost taxpayers billions more than necessary to keep the automakers running.

The administration could have avoided losing money in the Detroit bailout. It only had to treat unions impartially. Instead, it gave $30 billion to a politically powerful union. With GM and Chrysler’s recovery, this handout has attracted little attention. But the administration can hardly boast of demanding “responsibility and results.”

 SOURCE

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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