Which was worse, WWI or WWII?

I understand that the death toll in WWI was greater than WWII but I am not going to base anything on that. Instead I want to submit that the major tragedy of WWI was the Bolshevik revolution and that the major tragedy of WWII was the holocaust.  That is of course arguable but, given that, I think the answer is clear.

But first let me spell out why the Bolshevik revolution was attributable to WWI.  There are two reasons.  The first is that Germany deliberately and with malice aforethought transported the exiled Lenin in a sealed train across Europe to Russia.  The German High Command rightly assessed Lenin as a major threat to the Russian war effort and therefore facilitated his trouble-making in that country as part of their own war effort.

Secondly, before the Bolshevik takeover, Russia had become a real parliamentary democracy.  The Mensheviks were democrats who believed in elections.  The overthrow of the Mensheviks during the war  by the Bolsheviks was therefore a violent overthrow of democracy -- which resulted in many millions of deaths both then and across the next 70 years -- and also condemned the world's largest country to tyranny and poverty for all that time.

I am the last to minimize the death of 6 million Jews. But it seems clear to me that the Bolshevik revolution was much more widely harmful.

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A leftist mind on display



Feel the hate.  The image is from Australia.  Tony Abbott is the conservative Prime Minister of Australia

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Western press hasn’t noticed Israel’s rapidly growing clout around the world

“Two years from now, Obama will be gone, to be remembered as the worst president in American memory”

Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s triumph in Israel’s election this week, so shocking and appalling to the Western press, is many other things, too.

It is a recognition by Israelis of Netanyahu as the Churchill of our times, a statesman who stands apart from virtually all other Western leaders who, whether out of cravenness or wilful blindedness, downplay the gathering storm from Iran.

It is a repudiation by Israelis of those same Western leaders, who funded the “anyone-but-Netanyahu” campaign that tried to install in his place a compliant Jew to endorse their policies of appeasement.

And it is a back of the hand to monopolies and other special interests that oppose Netanyahu’s march to freer markets. At root, Israelis understand that they’re better off with Bibi.

Israel under the rule of socialist parties, which dominated the country’s first half century of existence, was a country of heavy handed state control and of Big Labour — the Histradrut labour federation represented 85 percent of all wage earners in the 1980s. Under Netanyahu’s influence, starting in the late 1990s with his first term as prime minister, Israel systematically began dismantling the welfare state, tackling both the social safety net and the vested corporate interests.

He sold off Israel’s interests in state enterprises, abolished foreign exchange controls and otherwise liberalized the economy, attracting foreign capital and turning Israel into an entrepreneurial marvel that, according to The Economist, has the world’s highest density of startups and, next to Silicon Valley, the largest number of startups. High tech companies now beat a path to this Start-Up Nation’s door — an astonishing 250 from the U.S. alone have made Israel home to their R&D centres.

2014 set records for Israeli high-tech and biotech startups — 52 Israeli startups sold to the tune of some $15-billion plus 18 IPOs worth another $10-billion — according to end-of-year reports by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ethosia Human Resources, who expect 2015 to be even bigger. This January alone saw foreign giants such as Microsoft and Amazon shell out $900-million for companies rich in Israel’s only abundant renewable resource: ingenuity.

The Western press, operating as it does from its echo chamber, likes to describe Israel as increasingly isolated in the world due to its supposed failure to make peace with the Palestinians. Israel has never been less isolated, never been more embraced. In its immediate neighbourhood, Israel for the first time has de facto allies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the leaders of the Arab Sunni world.

In black Africa, Israel now is tight with countries such as Nigeria, Kenya and Rwanda. In Asia, Israel is becoming tight with India, the world’s largest democracy, and with China, the world’s second largest economy, both of which are establishing free trade deals with Israel. Israel has been expanding trade with Japan, the world’s third largest economy. And Israel has close relations with countries of the former East Bloc, including Russia, once a Cold War adversary, now a partner in countering Islamic terrorism.

The watchful Arab press knows exactly why Israel has become so welcome around the world, even if the blinkered Western press doesn’t. As explained earlier this year in Al-Araby al-Jadid, a London-based Qatari daily, “Israel’s advanced technology developments have become its most prominent soft power tool for boosting diplomatic ties and improving its position in the world, enhancing its own security in the process.”

Because of Israel’s prowess in both military and civilian fields, it explained, China is cozying up to Israel, India is relying on Israeli instead of U.S. weaponry, and African countries are supporting Israel at the United Nations. Also because of this prowess, Al-Araby al-Jadid expects to see countries that once diplomatically sided with the Palestinians to flip and take pro-Israeli positions.

Israel’s technological prowess, and thus the welcome mat it now enjoys in ever-growing regions of the world, comes as a byproduct of Netanyahu’s dismantling of the welfare state. That dismantling may now accelerate because in this week’s election another dismantler shone — Moshe Kahlon, the Kulanu party leader who ran on an unabashedly pro-business, pro-competition “economic freedom” platform predicated on downsizing government while breaking up Israel’s remaining public monopolies and private oligopolies. The Western press may be surprised to learn that Kahlon, who is widely expected to become Netanyahu’s next finance minister, is considered centrist in Israeli politics.

Israel, once the darling of the Socialist Internationale, is fast becoming the darling of all but Socialist-leaning Europe, Iran and the ISIS wannabe set. Australia is stalwartly in Israel’s corner; Canada’s commitment to Israel is at an all-time high; America’s remains as strong as ever, President Obama and the American left notwithstanding.

Two years from now, Obama will be gone, to be remembered as the worst American president in memory. Prime Minister Netanyahu will remain in power and on the world stage, to be seen as one of Israel’s greatest prime ministers and one of the world’s few true statesmen.

SOURCE

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Sanctimony and Grandstanding Are More Fun Than Free Speech

By Ann Coulter

After police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown last summer in Ferguson, Missouri, the media erupted in terror at the prospect of young black men being gunned down by over-excitable white cops.

After two separate, wide-ranging, phenomenally expensive, months-long investigations, including one by Eric Holder’s Justice Department, it turned out: Brown had attacked Officer Wilson, he did not have his hands up, he was charging the officer when he was shot, and Wilson acted in justifiable self-defense.

Frustrated at their inability to locate evidence of the endemic racism in America we keep hearing so much about, liberals have turned with a vengeance on the kids. Instead of armed policemen gunning down blacks, we got a secretly recorded video of few drunk 19- and 20-year-olds at the University of Oklahoma singing the n-word. (Everyone assumes the students were racists, but my theory is they were trying to record their own rap video.)

Apparently, the new national sport is destroying the lives of young people.

Today’s adults are held responsible for nothing. The president and attorney general aren’t held accountable for ginning up frenzied mobs based on a lie, leading to two cops being assassinated in New York City and two cops being shot in Ferguson, in addition to the $250 million in property damage.

Hillary Clinton isn’t responsible for Americans being murdered at our embassy in Benghazi as a result of her incompetence.

Democratic senators aren’t accountable for passing Obamacare without reading it, and Republican senators aren’t accountable for promising voters they’d stop Obama’s amnesty and then voting to fully fund it.

Even people who commit violent crimes are given a second chance – especially if they’re athletes at the University of Oklahoma, as the Daily Caller has reported.

But 19- and 20-year olds must be punished without mercy for their drunken song using an ugly word. To quote Hillary Clinton, WHAT DIFFERENCE, AT THIS POINT, DOES IT MAKE?

Mr. Third Chance, David Boren, president of the university, proudly rushed to violate the First Amendment rights of these students. Even observers who condemned Boren’s laughably unconstitutional move felt compelled to vilify the louts.

Protesters have shown up at the kids' homes in Texas to rail against their parents. (As always, I marvel at the protesters' ability to get so much time off of work.)

I don’t remember adults caring this much about what college kids said when we were trying to get their attention with pompous editorials, manifestos and lists of demands. This wasn’t a college thesis – and even a college thesis wouldn’t be worth so much national angst. This was drunk college kids singing on a bus.

Is this the kind of society we want to live in, where a student can record his intoxicated friends singing a nasty song, and the whole country applauds the Nazi block-watcher and joins in the denunciation of his marks?

Liberals were hopping mad about Linda Tripp secretly recording Monica Lewinsky, but at least she was exposing the wildly felonious obstruction of justice by the president of the United States in a sex discrimination case. She wasn’t recording Monica to prove the president had used a bad word.

But no one objects to the aspiring Stasi member recording his friends' drunken song, then broadcasting it to the world, allowing us a joyous round of universal condemnation.

Instead of judging society by the inebriated songs of 19- and 20-year olds, perhaps we should judge it by how cultural and political elites treat their young people.

SOURCE

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Finally, A Bank Stands Up To Obama's Shakedown

After 16 banks caved in to White House demands to refund billions in losses to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, one outlier remains unrepentant. Nomura Holdings refuses to succumb to the political shakedown.

The Japanese bank's U.S. unit won't give in to the extortionist regulators protecting Fannie and Freddie who claim it hoodwinked the toxic twins into buying pools of subprime mortgages, like it claimed Bank of America, JPMorgan and other U.S. banks did in the run-up to the mortgage crisis.

The government demands $1 billion in damages. Nomura says it won't give a dime toward the $18 billion ransom the feds already have shaken out of other banks who settled with the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Instead, it will make government prove it in court.

In opening arguments this week, the defendants argued Fannie and Freddie bought the mortgages knowing they were subprime and did so to meet "affordable housing" quotas of their political masters at HUD.

Unfortunately for Nomura, the game is rigged. The federal judge hearing the case — Clinton appointee Denise Cote — is a ringer for the administration.

In recent filings, Cote has shown extreme prejudice in her decisions — virtually all rendered against Nomura.

Even though she concedes that, in buying subprime securities from Nomura, "Freddie Mac considered the extent to which the underlying mortgage loans satisfied these housing goals," Cote claims such evidence is "immaterial" to the case. She argues the regulatory mandates, purchasing quotas and other political pressures heaped on Fannie and Freddie were merely "idiosyncratic" and therefore irrelevant.

Please. The HUD goals are highly relevant to this case. Internal documents from both HUD and Fannie and Freddie show the goals were driving them deeper into the subprime securities market and both complained about a growing risk of losses. So clearly, they understood the risks. There was no "misrepresentation."

And if they failed to perform the proper due diligence, it's because it wouldn't have mattered — they had to buy risky subprime securities to meet HUD quotas for loans to low-income borrowers with bad credit. They were culpable in the recklessness, and therefore culpable in the losses they suffered when those loans defaulted. Nomura shouldn't be on the hook for those losses.

In its defense, Nomura plans to call former Fannie and Freddie officials, including former Fannie CEO Daniel Mudd, to testify about how it was Fannie and Freddie who on orders from HUD lowered underwriting standards, not Nomura.

SOURCE

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Guess What Canada’s Oh-So-Wonderful Single-Payer System Doesn’t Cover?

Canadian Alheli Picazo is a writer and former elite gymnast who has suffered from a severe digestive tract problem. Her condition caused her to suffer “from severe acid reflux. This wore down the enamel of her teeth and caused the equivalent of osteoporosis in her oral cavity.

The 30-year-old needs urgent oral surgeries, including bone and tissue grafts, to remove and replace what she described painfully as ‘the increasingly diseased bone.’”  Unfortunately, “Picazo has to wait until she can amass the $100,000 needed to pay for the procedures” because Canada’s system does not cover dental care.

The article, which appeared in Vox, noted that “This is similar to a gap in Obamacare: health plans on the exchange aren’t required to offer dental coverage.”  Guess what? There is another plan in the U.S. that doesn’t cover dental care.  Here’s a hint: it’s the program that activists point to when they want to promote single-payer here in America.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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 very good sign

Google have put some sort of caution on access to A WESTERN HEART.   It must be causing heartburn where I want it to cause heartburn!

Fun!

JR

A problem vocabulary -- and a partial solution

Many stages in my life have added to my vocabulary.  I was born into an Australian working class home so I speak the vivid Australian slanguage with joy -- but I don't usually write it.

And I am basically a literary type so I know the difference between a dactylic and an anapaestic rhythm.  And neither "eleemosynary" nor "emoluments" are mystery words to me

And I have studied 3 languages so have many words from them in my brain. For instance, I can use Volk and Reich with accuracy and sometimes use words of Latin origin in their Latin meaning.  And a lot of people don't like the ungracious English name "Eggplant" for a rather desirable fruit so call it by the French name instead:  "Aubergine".  But I don't like much about the French but do rather like Italians.  The vastly "incorrect" Silvio Berlusconi is something of a hero of mine.  So I call the vegetable "Melanzane", which is both the Italian word and a version of its botanical name (Solanum melongena).

My odd food words mostly oppress Anne, the lady in my life.  But she has got used to them and even makes her own Liptauer these days -- and has even tried to make cevapi. But she and I share similar geographical and social  origins so I can talk to her in broad Australian -- which is pleasing to us both. When I call someone a "galah" or a "drongo" she knows what I mean.

And my early very intensive studies of the Bible have left me with an extensive knowledge and appreciation of the wonderful words and phrases of the King James Bible, plus a knowledge of theology and textual criticism.  So I know what Masoretic and paraclete means.

And at university I did some studies in linguistics and came out of that with an appreciation of both Old English and Middle English.  So I occasionally use constructions from those sources.  One of my favourite proverbs in fact uses Middle English:  "If ifs and ans were pots and pans, there'd be no room for tinkers" ("an" means "if" in Middle English).  And I am prone to reciting Chaucer in the original Middle English.

And my doctorate in the social sciences has left me with a useful statistics vocabulary -- so I am inclined to talk about "orthogonal" factors and "leptokurtic" curves, for instance.

So with that wonderful treasure of words available to me, I am inclined to use it, where appropriate. The big problem with that, however, is that if I used my vocabulary as I am inclined to do, I would render a lot of what I write barely intelligible a lot of the time.  Most people have backgrounds quite different from mine.

So what I have long done is to write something out fairly spontaneously and then go back through it replacing the uncommon  words with simple words of mainly Anglo-Saxon origin.  And I am pleased to say that such simplification often clarifies my thought and rarely obscures it.

But I am getting old and no longer have the time and energy I once did so lately I have tended on some occasions to let my original words stand rather than revise them.  And that will probably get gradually worse as time goes by.

So this is just an apology if what I write is not immediately clear.  I am however consoled by the thought that everybody has Wikipedia and various online dictionaries at their fingertips these days so can clarify any obscure words with considerable celerity (Latin: "celer" = "quick").

Just for fun, here are a few odd words I have been using lately -- either in writing or in speech:  narthex, vietato, endorheic, spinto, exegesis, rhotic.

Another small matter:  Most of what I put up on my various blogs is articles from others that say something I like.  Most days however I also write my own comments on some subject.  It is unpredictable on which blog I will burst into prose, however, so lately I have been putting up on A WESTERN HEART the stuff that I have currently been writing -- regardless of which blog was its originally intended home. So if you want to see what I personally have been writing lately, you only have to go to one place.

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Another exoneration for aspartame

The bad effects were found to be all in the mind of the food-freaks concerned.  I had a considerable correspondence once with the anti-aspartame brigade and they were definitely a kooky lot

Aspartame, the controversial sweetener linked to a range of health problems, does not cause harm.

A study commissioned by Britain’s food watchdog found eating the sweetener had no impact on the body or behaviour of people who claimed to be sensitive to it.

The artificial sweetener, used in fizzy drinks and diet products, has been at the centre of critical reports dating back decades linking it to everything from cancer to premature birth.

Despite this, it has been ruled a safe food ingredient by food watchdogs in Britain, the EU, the USA and around the world.

These assurances have failed to convince many people, who continue to report adverse reactions, such as headaches and nausea after consuming foods containing the sweetener.

As a result, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) commissioned experts from Hull York Medical School to examine people who reported just such problems to establish if their fears were backed up by medical evidence.

The trial involved 48 people who self-reported as being sensitive to aspartame and another 48 control participants who have never had any problem.

All received two specially prepared cereal bars, one of which contained aspartame, on two separate sessions at least one week apart.

The human guinea pigs were put through a series of biological and psychological tests, which included taking blood and urine samples.

Participants rated a range of 14 symptoms over four hours after eating the bars, including headache, mood swings, hot or flushed sensation, nausea, tiredness, dizziness, nasal congestion, visual problems, tingling, bloating, hunger and thirst.

Participants were also asked to rate levels of happiness and arousal, which are the two main dimensions of their mood.

Today, the FSA said: ‘The study concluded that the participants who were self-diagnosed as sensitive to aspartame showed no difference in their response after consuming a cereal bar, whether it contained aspartame or not.’

The experts who carried out the research suggested those people who were self-reported aspartame sensitive (SRAS) tended to be more emotional.

SOURCE

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Ruinous 'Compassion'

It is fascinating to see brilliant people belatedly discover the obvious – and to see an even larger number of brilliant people never discover the obvious.

A recent story in a San Francisco newspaper says that some restaurants and grocery stores in Oakland’s Chinatown have closed after the city’s minimum wage was raised. Other small businesses there are not sure they are going to survive, since many depend on a thin profit margin and a high volume of sales.

At an angry meeting between local small business owners and city officials, the local organization that had campaigned for the higher minimum wage was absent. They were probably some place congratulating themselves on having passed a humane “living wage” law. The group most affected was also absent – inexperienced and unskilled young people, who need a job to get some experience, even more than they need the money.

It is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge that minimum wage laws reduce employment opportunities for the young and the unskilled of any age. It has been happening around the world, for generation after generation, and in the most diverse countries.

It is not just the young who are affected when minimum wage rates are set according to the fashionable notions of third parties, with little or no regard for whether everyone is productive enough to be worth paying the minimum wage they set.

You can check this out for yourself. Go to your local public library and pick up a copy of the distinguished British magazine “The Economist.”

Whether it is the current issue or a back issue doesn’t matter. Spain, Greece and South Africa will be easy to locate in the table near the back, which lists data for various countries. Just look down the unemployment column for countries with unemployment rates around 25 percent. Spain, Greece and South Africa are always there, whether or not there is a recession. Why? Because they have very generous minimum wage laws.

While you are there, you can look up the unemployment rate for Switzerland, which has no minimum wage law at all. Over the years, I have never seen the unemployment rate in Switzerland reach as high as 4 percent. Back in 2003, “The Economist” magazine reported: “Switzerland’s unemployment neared a five-year high of 3.9% in February.”

In the United States, back in what liberals think of as the bad old days before there was a federal minimum wage law, the annual unemployment rate during Calvin Coolidge’s last four years as president ranged from a high of 4.2 percent to a low of 1.8 percent.

Low-income minorities are often hardest hit by the unemployment that follows in the wake of minimum wage laws. The last year when the black unemployment rate was lower than the white unemployment rate was 1930, the last year before there was a federal minimum wage law.

The following year, the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 was passed, requiring minimum wages in the construction industry. This was in response to complaints that construction companies with non-union black construction workers were able to underbid construction companies with unionized white workers (whose unions would not admit blacks).

Looking back over my own life, I realize now how lucky I was when I left home in 1948, at the age of 17, to become self-supporting. The unemployment rate for 16- and 17-year-old blacks at that time was under 10 percent. Inflation had made the minimum wage law, passed ten years earlier, irrelevant.

But it was only a matter of time before liberal compassion led to repeated increases in the minimum wage, to keep up with inflation. The annual unemployment rate for black teenagers has never been less than 20 percent in the past 50 years, and has ranged as high as over 50 percent.

You can check these numbers in a table of official government statistics on page 42 of Professor Walter Williams' book “Race and Economics.”

Incidentally, the black-white gap in unemployment rates for 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds was virtually non-existent back in 1948. But the black teenage unemployment rate has been more than double that for white teenagers for every year since 1971.

This is just one of many policies that allow liberals to go around feeling good about themselves, while leaving havoc in their wake.

SOURCE

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Minimum wage folly in Britain too

We’ve the sad news that the minimum wage is being raised yet again: "The national minimum wage will increase by 20p an hour to £6.70 from October, the government has announced. The changes will benefit more than 1.4 million workers."

And will disbenefit some unknown number of workers who will lose their jobs. True, a modest rise will leave only a modest number losing their jobs but as they therefore lose 100% of their income that’s still quite a large effect. However, we also have another report today:

"The number of young people from ethnic minority backgrounds who have been unemployed for more than a year has risen by almost 50% since the coalition came to power, according to figures released by the Labour party. There are now 41,000 16- to 24-year-olds from black, asian and minority ethnic [BAME] communities who are long-term unemployed – a 49% rise from 2010, according to an analysis of official figures by the House of Commons Library."

The effects of a minimum wage will be hardest felt where that minimum wage actually binds. Among the young and untrained and among those who are unfavoured for any other reason (like, here, perhaps ethnicity for all that we would desire that there is no such discrimination). Which make this news about the new minimum wage even worse:

The hourly rate for younger workers will also rise, and for apprentices it will go up by 20% – or 57p – to £3.30 an hour.
Yes, of course the correct minimum wage is a rate of zero. But we’re unlikely to win that argument but at least we can argue for a rate that doesn’t do so much damn damage to the least favoured portions of our society. The minimum wage discriminates against those black, asian and minority ethnic youths. Indeed, such discrimination was a stated reason for the introduction of the minimum wage in the United States back in the times of Jim Crow. It’s actually a racist government policy. We should therefore end it.

Every time the NMW increases, another rung is cut from the bottom of the societal ladder leaving more people out in the cold.

SOURCE

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Twenty Blacks Victimized in Shootings

You’ve probably heard about the 20 black victims in numerous shootings between Sunday afternoon and Monday morning. The violence helped propagate the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative and further riled Barack Obama, Eric Holder and their co-conspirators in the Leftmedia, all of whom raised alarm over the recent deaths of blacks involving white police officers.

Well, the first part is true anyway – though you’d be forgiven for having no idea what we’re talking about. The shootings, all of which took place during a 24-hour period, bloodied the streets of Chicago but were largely absent from the headlines.

Obama hasn’t said a word about these deaths, probably because it was black-on-black crime, which doesn’t translate into political constituency race-bait like a good cop killing a street thug does.

Here’s what we know about Chicago murder rates from the latest year of data: The black murder rate was approximately 34 per 100,000, the Hispanic rate was 11 per 100,000, and the white rate 3 per 100,000. Translation: This isn’t a “gun problem”; it’s a young black male problem. And it’s a cultural epidemic the mainstream media largely ignores.

Of course, if this recent black-on-black bloodletting had instead been white-on-black crime, Al Sharpton and Co. would be there faster than you can say “Racist!”

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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 disgusting Leftist media again -- campaigning hard against the Prime Minister of Israel  -- but Bibi had the last laugh

MSNBC Denounces Netanyahu as a 'Panicking' 'Racist'



Reporting live from Tel Aviv and campaigning hard against the re-election of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on her MSNBC show on Tuesday, host Andrea Mitchell invited on one guest after another to denounce the Likud party leader.

Turning to New York Times Tel Aviv bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, Mitchell declared of Netanyahu: "He's clearly fearing that this center-left coalition and the prominence of, for the first time, a united Arab voting policy, Arab-Israelis who can vote, might make a difference."

Rudoren replied: "This morning he posted on his Facebook a video saying that Arabs were flocking to the polls and he called on right-wing supporters to come out and block them. And the left came and said that that was a racist remark, sort of comparing it to suppressing African-American votes in the United States. So it's been a very provocative and ugly last few days..."

Moments later, Mitchell spoke to former Congresswoman and president of the liberal Wilson Center Jane Harman:

Let's talk about what Netanyahu has done in the last forty-eight hours, which is to reverse decades and decades of U.S./Israeli policy, which is negotiations towards a two-state solution. A Palestinian homeland and of course Israel. And by reversing that, if he sticks – let's say he wins – and he sticks with his commitments of the last forty-eight hours, there'll be hell to pay.

Harman said of the Jewish leader: "I would call it a Hail Mary pass."

In a separate segment later on the program, Mitchell brought on former Israeli General Danny Yatom and touted his opposition to Netanayhu: "You are one of more than a hundred retired generals who came out against Netanyahu because you don't think that his positions are good for security....You just said to me he's panicking."

Yatom argued: "Yes, it looks to me that he feels as if the polls that were published until two days ago are real, realistic, and that he's going to lose....So it looks as if I don't have any other explanation but to say that probably he's caught in panic."

Mitchell then teed up James Zogby, president of the Arab-American Institute: "I know that you've been a long proponent of having a two-state solution....What is going to be the reaction in the Palestinian community – let's say that Netanyahu is elected or is in part of a unity government, a coalition government – to the end of any hope of having their own state?"  Zogby ranted:

"In the animal kingdom there's nothing more dangerous than a panicked politician and Netanyahu is panicking. And so he's scaring people about foreign conspiracies, about security threats, and about the Arabs. And if you take his words about the Arab vote and translate it into American politics and call it "the black vote," you see how racist this is. And it's – it's, I think, a very difficult problem right now for Israel is to deal with this bigotry towards the Arab population, which is just 20% of the country"

SOURCE


Not a quote but maybe a thought

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The courts will again strike down attempts by the FCC to regulate the internet

It's just another attempt by the Obama administration to do an end-run around Congress

This FCC Title II legal case and process is an obvious mess. It is the functional legal equivalent of a parent getting caught doing something wrong and then scolding an inquisitive child with “because I say so” answers — over and over again.

In a nutshell, the FCC’s core purpose for asserting Title II authority is to permanently ban any price/compensation for edge downstream Internet service, which is illegally confiscatory. And the FCC’s Title II legal case is built upon de facto claims of legal immunity to disregard due process, the law, facts, definitions, precedents, fair notice, reliance interests and proportionality.

Simply the FCC seeks an illegal end via multiple illegal means, and serial sweeping “Chevron Deference” to evade legal and constitutional accountability. Multiple wrongs do not make a right.

The rest of this analysis will answer three questions central to anticipating the likely legal outcome of the FCC’s assertion of Title II authority. How could this FCC legal charade happen? Why is the FCC’s core purpose illegal? And what are the FCC’s Title II serial ends-justify-the-means violations of due process?

How could this FCC legal charade happen?

This is actually not the third, but the FCC’s fourth proposed legal theory to assert direct authority to regulate the Internet. The first three cases, by three different FCC Chairman and their General Counsels — Martin in 2008, Genachowski in 2010, and Wheeler initially in early 2014 — all decided that Title II reclassification was not likely a legally sustainable source of FCC authority.

The first two legal cases failed in court, Chairman Martin’s in Comcast v. FCC in 2010, and Chairman Genachowski’s in Verizon v. FCC in 2014.

Many forget that the third proposed FCC legal case was Chairman Wheeler’s in February of last year.

In response to the FCC’s loss in Verizon v. FCC, FCC Chairman Wheeler stated February 19, 2014 that the FCC would not appeal and would accept the Court’s “invitation by proposing rules that will meet the court’s test for preventing improper blocking of and discrimination among Internet traffic…” under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Thus Chairman Tom Wheeler and his General Counsel Jonathan Sallet originally did not believe that Title II reclassification was a legally sustainable legal alternative to solve the FCC’s net neutrality legal authority problem. In late April 2014, FCC Chairman Wheeler continued to reject Title II reclassification as a source of FCC legal authority in his proposed draft NPRM for his fellow commissioners’ review.

However, after a widely-reported lobbying campaign for Title II reclassification of broadband, the FCC passed an NPRM 3-2 in May 2014, which included consideration of Title II reclassification as a potential source of FCC legal authority.

In a November 2014 public call for FCC regulation of the Internet as a utility, President Obama publicly and specifically urged: “I believe the FCC should reclassify consumer broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act,” which is exactly what the FCC majority dutifully voted to do February 26th.

Simply, the FCC decided to reclassify the Internet as “telecommunications” not based on its independent, objective, expert legal opinion, but based on outside political pressure.

Here is the crux of my 90% confidence that the FCC’s legal case will crumble under scrutiny in court.

The FCC’s decision to reclassify is wholly predicated on the FCC political imperative (or “end”) to find some new assertable FCC legal authority to ban paid prioritization or fast-lanes (i.e. economically impose a permanent “price of zero” for edge downstream traffic without cost recovery). That’s because Verizon v. FCC (page 60) ruled that the FCC did not have authority under Section 706 “to impose per se common carrier obligations.”

Political pressure to turn currently-illegal zero-price regulation into legal anti-discrimination regulation without the involvement of Congress or new legislation, created immense political pressure for FCC lawyers to justify using most any “means” necessary to justify the desired political “end.”

Thus whenever the FCC encounters a fact, definition, precedent, law or constitutional principle that contradicts or thwarts the FCC’s desired end, the FCC serially dismisses them with claims of agency discretion allowed by various court precedents.

However, the FCC’s expectation of deference in this case is so cumulatively serial and sweeping — in reversing a plethora of legally-settled findings of fact, definitions, precedent, law and constitutional interpretation — that a court could ask sarcastically what role the FCC believes remains for the Judicial Branch to adjudicate?

Much more HERE  (See the original for links)

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Obamacare’s Second Open Season: Average Premium Up 23 Percent – After Subsidies

With enrollment data through February 22, the administration finally declared Obamacare’s second enrollment season closed and released its report on the results. (Although, people who have to pay Obamacare’s mandate/penalty/fine/tax as a result of information disclosed in their 2014 tax returns will have a special open enrollment in April).

Obamacare’s supporters cheered that enrollment hit 11.7 million people, exceeding the low-ball estimate of 9.1 million the administration made last November. Lost in the enthusiasm for Obamacare’s new high-water mark are a few uncomfortable facts.

First, the average premium — net of subsidies — has jumped 23 percent from 2014. In both years, insurers covering almost nine in ten Obamacare subscribers received subsidies to reduce premiums. The average monthly premium, before insurers receive subsidies, across all “metal” plans, is $364 in 2015. The average subsidy is $263, resulting in a net premium of $101 (Table 6). In 2014, the administration reported an average premium of $346, less an average tax credit of $264, for a net premium of $82 (Table 2). Therefore, the gross premium increased 5 percent but the subsidy declined by a scratch. Due to the power of leverage, this resulted in subscribers seeing an average premium jump of 23 percent.

Second, Obamacare continues to “churn” peoples’ insurance coverage. Like last year, we can expect a significant share of this year’s 11.7 million enrollees will never pay a premium, often because they will receive employer-based coverage if they move up in the world, or fall into Medicaid dependency if they drop.

For the states using healthcare.gov, only 4.2 million of the 8.8 million 2015 enrollees were enrolled at the end of 2014. After Obamacare’s first open season closed, the administration reported that 5.4 million of the 8.1 million enrollees had signed up through healthcare.gov (Table 1). (That figure was later revealed as somewhat contaminated by the inclusion of standalone dental plans.).

So, over one fifth of those who were enrolled by April 2014 had vanished from Obamacare by February 2015. Maybe some of them did re-enroll for 2015: Someone could have signed up in April 2014, dropped out during 2014 and signed up again this time around. This fragmentation of coverage in working and lower middle-class households is surely frustrating to them and harms the quality of care.

Third, a loss for the administration in the Supreme Court’s King vs. Burwell lawsuit will deal a mortal blow to Obamacare. This is the lawsuit asserting what the Administration is paying out of subsidies to insurers in state-based exchanges is illegal. Of the 11.7 million new enrollees, 8.8 million enrolled through healthcare.gov and only 2.8 million through state exchanges. The Supreme Court is expected to make a decision by July. If the administration loses, three quarters of Obamacare beneficiaries will be in states in which insurers lose their subsidies. To resolve the resulting inequity between states, Congress will have to respond with amendments to the Affordable Care Act that President Obama will sign.

Third, Obamacare subscribers are less satisfied with their plans than beneficiaries of other government or private health plans are:

The 29 percent of re-enrollees who switched plans is higher than that seen in other programs. For example, studies show approximately 13 percent of Medicare Part D enrollees change plans in a given year; 12 percent of those active employees with Federal Employee Health Benefit Plan coverage switch plans each year and only about 7.5 percent of those with employer sponsored coverage switch plans for reasons other than a job change during a given year. (p. 6)

Fourth, both the Obamacare subsidies and the Affordable Care Act’s big increase in Medicaid spending are higher than necessary to get people covered. Although the average net premium jumped 23 percent, subscribers were nevertheless willing to pay up for a higher level of coverage. While 77 percent of the 7.65 million subsidized subscribers who used healthcare.gov could have bought plans for less than $50, only 38 percent did. While 89 percent could have bought plans for less than $100, only 63 percent did (Table 7). Obamacare subscribers have enough discretionary income to pay for health insurance and need not be so dependent on taxpayers.

This is strikingly apparent among low-income households, which are eligible for Medicaid in states that chose to expand that type of welfare. (Medicaid is a joint state-federal welfare program that provides health coverage.) Table 5 (page 14) shows the income distribution of households enrolling in Obamacare, broken down into states that did or did not expand Medicaid.HA

Two cells are highlighted: Households between 100 percent and 150 percent of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) in states that expanded Medicaid dependency, and those that did not. Many of the latter would be in Medicaid if their states had expanded the program. In such states, only 47 percent of Obamacare enrollees are within this income range, versus only 22 percent in states that expanded Medicaid. This indicates that Medicaid expansion has trapped people into complete government dependency for health care, who would be able to buy private health insurance with some government subsidy.

Despite a successful headline number of subscribers, Obamacare is still deeply flawed.

SOURCE (See the original for links and graphics)

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Seattle Eateries Are Dying and Minimum Wage Killed Them

It’s just going to be that much harder to get some authentic Seattle salmon. Due to the city’s minimum wage hike that’s set to slam the city April 1 (April Fools!), Seattle restaurants are closing because they can’t pay workers the $15 an hour minimum wage.

Seattle Magazine reports, “Washington Restaurant Association’s [Anthony] Anton puts it this way: ‘It’s not a political problem; it’s a math problem.’ He estimates that a common budget breakdown among sustaining Seattle restaurants so far has been the following: 36 percent of funds are devoted to labor, 30 percent to food costs and 30 percent go to everything else (all other operational costs). The remaining 4 percent has been the profit margin, and as a result, in a $700,000 restaurant, he estimates that the average restaurateur in Seattle has been making $28,000 a year.”

While restaurants are not the economic lifeblood of any city, a city without good food is tasteless. This is a tangible example of what’s happening to Seattle’s economy with a government-mandated wage.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog

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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Congratulations to Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu

He has been returned to office with an increased plurality for his Likud party and should have little trouble (by Israeli standards) in forming a new governing coalition

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Breastfeeding and IQ

There is an elegantly done study just out in Lancet Which shows that, among Brazilians, children who were breastfed for some time grew up to have slightly higher IQs.  The study title is "Association between breastfeeding and intelligence, educational attainment, and income at 30 years of age: a prospective birth cohort study from Brazil".

I really hate to demolish such extensive and careful work but the study has a fatal flaw:  Maternal IQ was not measured.  And, surprising though it may seem IQ is hugely important to breastfeeding. High IQ mothers breastfeed a lot more.  And IQ is of course mainly genetically transmitted.  So all that the study really shows is that high IQ mothers have high IQ children, which is no news at all.

In the statistics section of the paper I was delighted to come  across a word that I had forgotten I knew:  "Heteroscedasticity".  I must use it sometime.

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Western civilisation at stake amid growing threats

By Greg Sheridan, writing from Australia

WESTERN civilisation is in the midst of a profound crisis. Let me tell you how I get to that ­conclusion.

The most difficult task in any serious strategic analysis is to integrate factors from wholly different spheres of activity and to see how they play on each other. A failure to recognise the depth of the old Soviet Union’s economic crisis, for example, led many traditional Western strategic analysts, accustomed to measuring Soviet arsenals against US arsenals, to miss altogether the impending collapse of the entire Soviet system.

Today, the West, of which Australia is manifestly part, is beset by intractable, diverse challenges, each one of which could provide existential threat. It is solving none of them at the moment. Each threat multiplies the force of the others. Taken together, they constitute a long, systemic crisis. The West might solve these problems. But it might not, too.

First, Islamist terrorism. There are three ways this can be an existential threat. Terrorists could get material for a mass destruction attack, either a nuclear weapon or, much likelier, a radiation weapon, a dirty bomb. So far this hasn’t happened. But a strategic threat is not the common law. It’s not governed by precedent. A lot of determined and intelligent terrorists want to do this. Their chances increase radically when terrorists control the mechanisms of a state, as they do now in parts of Iraq and Syria, and as they did once in Afghanistan. This is one reason ungoverned space is so dangerous.

Second, terrorism could cripple social cohesion in Western societies. It’s impossible to know what social effects a few mass atrocity attacks would have.

Three, terrorists could produce disorder in the Middle East so chronic and widespread that it leads to state-on-state war, pos­sibly involving nuclear weapons.

The West is not winning the war on Islamist terror. Since 9/11 al-Qa’ida has flourished in the Middle East and North Africa. It is now in danger of being supplanted by the even more murderous franchise of Islamic State. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of young men, including thousands from the West, have rallied to these banners.

The second big external threat to the West is the rise of new powers, or old powers newly emboldened, taking advantage of the weak and feckless leadership provided by Barack Obama. The US President is the de facto head of Western civilisation. Not since Jimmy Carter has there been a leader of such little strategic consequence. He is a President of fine words and strategic failure.

Russia is conquering slices of territory from its neighbours. There is no knowing what is the end of Vladimir Putin’s ambition. Reducing his “near abroad” to strategic subservience to Moscow is part of it. China is constructing military installations in disputed territories in the South China Sea hundreds of kilometres from the Chinese mainland.

Both Moscow and Beijing, and others, are testing not only American resolve but the whole efficacy of the US alliance system. China and Russia, and most nations in Asia, are ramping up military spending. In so far as there has been any principle of international security order since World War II, it has been the US alliance system.

Although the US is the leader of this system and does most of the heavy lifting, the power of its allies feeds into and magnifies US strategic power. If the US loses credibility the system becomes hollow.

The third big external threat is nuclear proliferation. There is no plausible economic justification for Iran’s big nuclear industry. Its true purpose is to acquire nuclear weapons, or the ability rapidly to produce nuclear weapons. It is about to secure relief from sanctions, already greatly watered down, in a deal with the US that will allow it to keep its nuclear establishment. Iran will get nuclear weapons in due course. Almost nothing is surer. Saudi Arabia has arrangements with Pakistan to follow suit when that happens. The governments of Egypt and some of the Gulf states will then face their own existential questions, especially if they feel they can no longer rely on the US.

Almost all the nuclear powers except the US are increasing the number of their nuclear warheads. The more these weapons proliferate, the greater the chance of their eventual use.

The fourth big external threat is the democratisation of destructive technology (beyond nuclear technology). The digital economy and all its associated inventions are a wonderful boon for humanity, not least in their applications to human health. But the power to use this technology destructively is also rising. The computing power of every smartphone in everybody’s pocket is greater than all the computing effort deployed to put a man on the moon in 1969. The most destructive people in our society so far have not been techno geniuses. But you wouldn’t need very many before terrorism and other antisocial movements switch to massive infrastructure disruption.

At the military level, asymmetry is the new reality, the power of numerically small and financially weak players to wreak enormous strategic damage. Size and money, which have traditionally helped the West, will be less decisive than they used to be, and are in any event moving against the West.

Then there are a series of internal factors that are hurting the West and its prospects. Western economies have recovered from the global financial crisis to some extent but they are not the primary sources of global economic growth. More than that, throughout the West there is an interlinked crisis of governance, budgets and social and economic sustainability.

In governance, the West is a terrible mess. Look at Europe, now a byword for chronic misgovernance and an inability to come to grips with the limitations of budgets and the excess of entitlements. Europe is one of the wealthiest regions of the planet, but its system cannot provide work for huge portions of its young ­people and cannot meaningfully integrate a large minority of immigrants. And it cannot match expenditure to income.

The US has a milder version of the same syndrome. Australia is running through prime ministers at a rate that would make postwar Italy proud.

Finally, there is this question: how long can the West live off the moral capital of religious conviction that it is now abandoning? The West is the only part of humanity abandoning religious belief. Can societies in which there is no overarching idea beyond the individual compete successfully in the long run?

Temperamentally, I’m an optimist. But no one should doubt a civilisational crisis exists.

SOURCE

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How One Man Turned Americans Against Government

Gallup conducted a poll of 1,025 Americans March 5-8 that captured the nation’s growing disgust with the federal government. But the Leftmedia stopped one question short of finding the real reason for this discontent.

“Dissatisfaction with government” now beats out concerns of the economy, terrorism, illegal immigration and unemployment, despite the direct influence of these pocketbook and kitchen-table issues. Don’t underappreciate these rankings. Survey participants most frequently respond to questions through the prism of, “I’m concerned because this issue impacts me directly.”

So why, Mr. or Mrs. American, do you have this increasing dissatisfaction with government?

It boils down to one word, and, no, it’s not racism. It’s “Obama.”

When Barack Obama declared with glee that we are “days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” most voters failed to fully realize the magnitude of his plans. Few understood that a community organizer raised on the milk of anger, hate and socialist indoctrination would so quickly shred the Constitution. But our Founders warned of such tyranny.

How many Democrats or even Republicans back in 2008 imagined Obama would so egregiously overstep the jurisdiction of the executive branch through ObamaCare’s implementation and effective amnesty? Or that today he would be on the verge of a nuclear agreement with Iran, giving the world’s leading terrorist sponsor much of what it wants?

Have you ever dined at a restaurant described as some delightful experience or marketed to fulfill your culinary dreams only to leave with an excessive tab, disastrous service and a meal you could’ve cooked better at home?

Obama marketed himself with promises of transparency, a government that serves all Americans, and all-around, feel-good “Hope ‘n’ Change™.

Yet after six years, the American people have endured lie after lie. To name but a few:

"If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

“I didn’t set a red line on Syria.”

“I didn’t call the Islamic State a ‘JV team.’”

“Republicans have filibustered 500 pieces of legislation.”

“The sequester is not something I’ve proposed.”

“Here’s what happened [at Benghazi]. … You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character who – who made an extremely offensive video directed at – at Muhammad and Islam.”

And then there was, for example, the political targeting by the IRS and the politicization of the Department of Justice by his criminal co-conspirator, Attorney General Eric Holder.

The distrust that has been sown, watered, fertilized and is now at full harvest is a testament to Obama’s successful “transformation” of America. He has left Americans with buyer’s remorse of monumental proportions. Voters didn’t bargain for this mess – even if some of us tried to warn them.

Democrats were walloped in two straight midterm elections, which served notice to everyone but a petulant Obama that his policies, his tactics and his results were rejected. Those Democrats who remain in elected office either have to distance themselves from the radical in the White House, or they represent districts where voters embrace Obama’s radical policies.

The Obama approach to elections has been to place each voter in some interest group – black, homosexual, pro-abortion, illegal immigrant, etc. – and win by mobilizing those groups nationally. Identity politics worked for Obama but failed most Americans.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that Chief Radical Obama’s failed policies have resulted in a weak bench of leftist extremists down the ballot. The Republican wave was so thoroughly successful that it wiped out vast numbers of state and local Democrats around the nation, from whom the next generation of the party’s leaders will come. It is by no means a permanent defeat, but it’s most certainly a real setback.

Americans are fed up by government because Obama overpromised and under-delivered. His solution to everything is a government program, and, increasingly, Americans are seeing that as the wrong approach.

Now, imagine a nation led by those who say what they mean, mean what they say, and follow through on principled policy. Americans want that type of government leadership and are waiting, impatiently.

SOURCE

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The apparent insanity of American liberals

Western liberals keep being so “open minded” about Muslims and Islam their brains have now completely fallen out of their heads.  They just don’t seem to get the fact they will be the first casualties of any kind of Islamic take-over anywhere in the world. As for these self-hating Jews that are part of the pseudo-religion movement of the left who continue to condemn Jews, Judaism, and Israel – what do they think would happen to them if any of the Islamic sects took over western cultures?

Since they’re all leftists they hate capitalism and will support any system that attacks the paragon of capitalism and its allies - the United States.

They work unendingly to destroy the system that gave the world the only stable moral foundation in the world. A system based on Judaic/Christian principles, which was the fertilizer for the only economic system the world ever knew that was capable of bringing so many people out of misery squalor, suffering, disease and early death – American capitalism.

They want to “fundamentally” change the only place in the world where they could spout their inflammatory nonsense without being thrown into jail or worse. I know, I know, they could spout their claptrap in many western nations, but does anyone really believe this would be tolerated anywhere else if America’s Constitution system wasn’t such a dominant force in the world? A system they’re trying to overturn.

Historically we know the concepts they believe in, subscribe to - and demand all others believe it - are worldwide failures, whether it involves religion, economics or the environment. These are concepts so stupid only intellectuals could believe in them. Is it any wonder leftism, in all of its manifestations, are the movements so heavily infested with so many intellectuals?

They reject history - they reject all the evidence of their failures and the devastatingly negative outcomes their policies have inflicted on humanity, and continue to passionately and adamantly promote those concepts! We can only conclude one thing by way of explanation.

The left must truly be insane!

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog

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 warning from the author of "The Prince"

When one considers how much corruption there was in those kings, if two or three successive reigns had continued the same way, and that corruption which was in them had spread to members of the body politic, it would no longer have been possible to reform [Rome].”

That was Niccolo Machiavelli, commenting in his Discourses on Livy published in 1517, almost 500 years ago, on what might have happened if the ancient Roman monarchy had not been overthrown by Brutus and a republic established. Although better known for his masterpiece of political violence, The Prince, here in Discourses Machiavelli’s clear preference for republican government and liberty can be found.

But, writes Machiavelli, freedom has a prerequisite, and that is virtue — a love of liberty. Lacking this virtue, then, a people become ambivalent to politics and those who wield power. Politics becomes the province of the powerful that participate, and lacking power, is something to otherwise be avoided out of fear. There are those who have access, and then there is everyone else.

If such a form of government persists for long, the freedom of the republic as a whole is ultimately lost, and the people themselves are corrupted. Not in the sense that they are accepting bribes — although public forms of subsistence duly enacted can be common in these cases to sweeten the deal of wearing a yoke — but in that inherent inability and unwillingness of the people and their representatives to affect the outcome of public decisions.

The true corruption occurs when politics only serves private or narrow interests far beyond reach, and power is concentrated into the hands of a few, and so the people only concern themselves with their private lives. This is when the people and their representatives no longer have any means of wielding true power, and thus become disconnected from the process.

Is Congress on the outside, looking in?

Today, the dust continues to settle from the Obama administration’s most recent executive action to grant unconstitutional, executive amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants without Congressional assent — and Congress’ subsequent decision to provide the public funds necessary for the executive branch to carry on its action.

Many, including this author, question openly what purpose Congress still serves, if not to make law or amend existing law. For it must be noted that this usurpation by Obama has not been limited to simply to this most recent outrage. It extends through his two terms, and through that of his predecessors.

It can also be seen in the recent move by the Federal Communications Commission to reclassify broadband Internet access as a telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act, after the agency had previously determined broadband to be exempt in 2002.

Congress’ response? So far, it has done nothing. Later this year, it will most likely continue to fund the agency. But the abdication really came when the agency’s broad powers to make such determinations were created by Congress in the first place in 1934.

Or it can be found in the administration decision to allow federal exchanges under the health care law to distribute insurance subsidies, when the law explicitly forbade it — an issue now before the Supreme Court. Or to postpone implementing the law’s employer mandate when no such exception was even considered under the law.

Here, in the latter example, the House of Representatives did file a federal lawsuit in 2014, but it has also abdicated along with the Senate by continuing to fund the law’s administration.

Or one could look at the prior Bush administration’s decision to apply $17 billion of Troubled Asset Relief Fund monies to troubled automakers GM and Chrysler when the law only ever allowed funds for financial institutions caught in the mortgage meltdown, and Congress had already explicitly rejected an auto bailout. Announcing his decision in 2008, then President George W. Bush said, “Congress was unable to get a bill on my desk before adjourning for the year. This means the only way to avoid a collapse of the U.S. auto industry is for the executive branch to step in.”

At the time, Congress did nothing to rein in the bailouts. It allowed them to continue.

Or consider the rapid expansion of so-called “affordable housing goals” by Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac through the 1990s and 2000s that helped fuel the subprime housing bubble that brought the global economy to its knees.

The companies had been given express authorization to act as they did by Congress when it passed the GSE Act of 1992. Here, the abdication had been at the outset.

Or there is also the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 carbon endangerment finding that regulated carbon dioxide as a harmful pollutant under the terms of the Clean Air Act even though the original law never contemplated such a regulation.

Congress’ response has been, again, to provide the funds necessary for the agency to continue making up rules. Yet, the original problem was really created when Congress gave the agency such vast powers to regulate when it created it in 1970.

Or then there is the outsourcing of the nation’s monetary policy to the unelected Federal Reserve, as happened 102 years ago in 1913 when the Federal Reserve Act was adopted.

In 2010, under Dodd-Frank, Congress did order an audit of the central bank’s many bailouts during the financial crisis. It even turned up some $442.7 billion of money being created and simply given to foreign banks — quite a smoking gun of crony corruption. But then Congress did nothing with the findings.

Or one might also ponder that more than 86 percent of the federal budget gets spent whether Congress votes to appropriate any monies at all, as occurred in the most recent partial government shutdown of 2013.

Here, again, is an abdication of Congress’ lawmaking and appropriating powers to an automatic, permanent funding of governmental institutions that would go on functioning if Congress was dissolved.

I could go on, but in each instance, Congress has abdicated its constitutional lawmaking powers, either outright or through tacit acceptance of each executive usurpation.

This lack of participation by the people’s representatives — who constitutionally are supposed to be the nation’s lawmaking body — and yet who appear to have little role in actually governing, is as destructive to the liberty of the polity as a whole as anything else.

Congress, like the people, are on the outside, looking in. For, what can one do but merely observe our presidential system, to look upon an executive branch that over generations has progressively been delegated the power to act independently of the other branches. If Congress is ambivalent about exercising its own constitutional power, it will surely continue to lose it.

This dilution of the separation of powers is the very loss of liberty Machiavelli warns against. Consider his description of the later republic that fell to Caesar: “Such contrasting results in the same city arose from nothing other than the fact that the Roman people were still uncorrupt at the time of the [kings], while they were most corrupt in these later times; in the early days, in order to keep the people firm and disposed to rejecting a king it was enough merely to have them swear that they would never consent to another king…”

Later, the people had been so corrupted, Caesar “was able to blind the multitude so that they did not recognize the yoke which they themselves were placing on their necks,” Machiavelli writes. Then, even Caesar’s assassination was not enough to stop what had begun. The latter Brutus who stabbed him ultimately just traded one prince for another. The reign of the emperors was solidified after years of civil war.

So, what to do?

As has been seen in history, the concentration of power seen today in the executive branch is extraordinarily dangerous in republican systems of government. So, what must be done?

The separation of powers, particularly Congress’ power to make law — all of the laws — must be restored. And it must be happen soon. No more broad grants of discretionary authority. No more lawmaking agencies. No more panels of experts. No more automatic budgets. The administrative state must be broken up.

The sort of insulated decision-making taking place was only originally ever envisioned to extend to the President’s Commander-in-Chief war powers upon a Congressional declaration of war. Now it has become an expansive executive, regulatory state with no real role for elected representatives. Sure, sometimes Congress gets a few crumbs, but for the most part, the legislative branch has become a rubber stamp in our presidential, administrative system.

All along this process, the American people have been told sit back, wait for the next presidential cycle. To be patient. There is some truth to this. It probably will take a new presidential administration to fix this. But there are a few caveats.

First, time matters, Machiavelli warns. The situation must not persist for too long, or the whole body politic will be corrupted. Meaning, whichever party wins elections, the Leviathan will continue of its own accord.

Second, not even a single president may be able to fix it: “If a city has begun to decline because of the corruption of its material, and if it ever happens to pull itself up again, this happens because of the ability of a single man living at the time and not because of the ability of the people supporting its good institutions; and as soon as that man is [gone] it returns to its former ways… unless the reformers, before passing on… have managed to bring about her rebirth.”

Meaning, winning an election will not be enough. Whoever the next president is, regardless of political party, he or she has to be dedicated to ensuring that the people’s elected representatives are the ones who make laws and appropriate funds on an annual basis.

This is not a matter of capturing the bureaucracy and governing “smarter.” It is a matter of dissolving the rulemaking bodies.

Barring that, there are few other methods under our constitutional system to restore the separation of powers. There is the Article V convention for proposing amendments by the states, and that is even being attempted now. Many states have already called for the convention. But to succeed, the movement will require leaders at the state level who, unlike Congress, are willing to exercise their constitutionally delegated powers.

If, through their own ambivalence, however, state legislators decide to take a pass on a process for restoring constitutional legislative powers to elected representatives, they will have proven themselves no better than Washington, D.C. It will be just another surrender of liberty.

Whether via the presidential process or a states-ordered convention, whoever leads this effort must have true virtue — an unshakeable love for liberty. Not just a love of individual rights, as we think of in the Bill of Rights and others retained by the people — but the determination to restore true lawmaking power to Congress. There is no greater task facing the nation.

Otherwise, as has been the case in republican systems throughout history that fall into decline, and as Machiavelli warns, “A corrupt people which lives under a prince will never be able to regain its freedom.”

That, from the author of The Prince.

SOURCE

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Campaign contributions and double standards

by Jeff Jacoby

WHAT DOES Massachusetts have against the First Amendment?

A lawsuit filed in Superior Court by two family-owned companies — 1A Auto Inc., an auto-parts vendor in Pepperell, and 126 Self Storage Inc., a storage-unit rental firm in Ashland — challenges state campaign-finance rules so crazily lopsided they should be equipped with grab bars. Massachusetts law has long banned businesses from contributing to political candidates or parties, but under rules dating back to the 1980s, labor unions are free to spend up to $15,000 per year in direct political contributions with no disclosure required. Labor unions can also set up PACs — political action committees — to funnel money to candidates and parties they support. Businesses in Massachusetts aren't allowed to do that either.

The sheer unfairness of such regulations speaks for itself. Whatever your view of unions or businesses — or of any interest group — there should be only one standard for determining whether they can engage in political expression. In 15 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, businesses and unions alike are prohibited from making direct campaign contributions. Nearly twice as many states permit both to contribute on equal terms. If you didn't know better, you might think it a no-brainer that a state like Massachusetts — a cradle of American liberty, the home of such free-speech champions as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Brandeis — would be in the second group, holding the marketplace of ideas open to all comers.

Instead Massachusetts is one of a handful of states that blatantly discriminates, blocking campaign contributions from businesses while clearing the way for unions to get involved in electoral contests. The $15,000 no-disclosure loophole is especially egregious. "More than any other state," argues Jim Manley, a senior litigator with the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, a pro-bono legal group representing the plaintiffs, "Massachusetts' campaign contribution restrictions are tilted in favor of unions and against businesses."

This isn't the first time the state has faced legal action over its disregard for First Amendment freedoms

In McCullen v. Coakley, a case decided last June, the US Supreme Court unanimously struck down the Massachusetts "buffer zone" law, which prohibited even peaceful speech or silent protest within 35 feet of abortion clinics. The justices rejected the state's claim that the sweeping ban made it easy to preserve public order. "A painted line on the sidewalk is easy to enforce," the court observed dryly, "but the prime objective of the First Amendment is not efficiency."

Massachusetts was likewise rebuked by the high court in 1995, when the justices slapped down attempts to force organizers of the South Boston St. Patrick's Day parade to include a gay and lesbian group among the marchers. Such behavior "grates on the First Amendment," wrote Justice David Souter. Government "is not free to interfere with speech for no better reason than promoting an approved message or discouraging a disfavored one."

An even earlier free-speech landmark, the 1978 case of Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, is especially relevant to the new lawsuit over contributions. Massachusetts had made it illegal for businesses to give money to ballot initiative campaigns. The Supreme Court ruled that under the Bill of Rights, no such ban could stand: There is "no support in the First or Fourteenth Amendment . . . for the proposition that speech that otherwise would be within the protection of the First Amendment loses that protection simply because its source is a corporation."

The key teaching of the Bellotti case — that the First Amendment does not allow political speech restrictions based on a speaker's corporate identity — is not one that the Supreme Court has backed away from. If anything, it is even more secure today than just a few years ago. Massachusetts cannot get away with treating political spending by organized labor as so sublime that unions can donate $15,000, no questions asked, to a single candidate, while individual donors are held to $1,000 — and businesses are deemed too impure to be allowed to donate one red cent. Nor can the state justify its green light for union-financed PACs, while it warns businesses against giving anything to a PAC, not even a business name.

"Massachusetts needs extraordinarily good reasons to discriminate against businesses' political speech," the plaintiffs' lawyers contend, "and there is no reason good enough to justify Massachusetts' total ban."

Will Beacon Hill once again dig in its heels and defend an unconstitutional law? Or will it this time defer to the Constitution — and rectify its campaign-finance injustice voluntarily, before it's forced to do so in court?

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog

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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Years of Western meddling pushed Ukraine over the edge

It is beyond wrong to hold Russia responsible for the Ukrainian instability

The current mainstream argument in the West about Ukraine is seriously misguided and dishonest. According to Western media and politicians, Russia has become an aggressive, reckless and expansionist power. Yearning for the glory days of the Soviet Union, Russia has ramped up tensions with the West with a series of bold and cunning moves directed by that inscrutable master strategist, Vladimir Putin.

Post-Cold War, so the story continues, the West had dreamed that a new and better world order was dawning, one in which the European Union and America could act as forces for good in the world, bringing order and human rights to all. But Russia squandered that opportunity. And now it is dragging Western nations back into the old world, forcing them to respond to Putin’s aggressive and reckless policies.

Virtually everything about this argument is false. The only thing that is true is that military and political tensions between Russia and the West have escalated to a level unprecedented since the end of the Cold War. But blame here lies, largely, with the West, not Russia.

The first thing to understand is that the Ukrainian crisis comes after a decade of escalating tensions. The crisis is therefore an expression of the worsening relationship between Russia and the West, rather than a cause of it. However, this worsening relationship cannot be attributed to the behaviour of Russia. In fact, it is the West that has embarked on a number of reckless and catastrophic follies that have had devastating effects on international stability.

From the 1990s onwards, Western states have promoted the idea that state sovereignty should be conditional upon a state’s treatment of its population. Under this banner, the West has embarked on several military interventions, breaching sovereignty in the name of human rights in Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo and, of course, Libya, where the catastrophic intervention of 2011 has opened Libya up to the Islamic State.

Kosovo was particularly significant. Russia had refused to support a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution supporting the intervention, arguing that allowing human rights to trump sovereignty, as US attorney Kenneth Roth put it, would permit Western states to intervene at will in weaker states. Moreover, the bombing was conducted by NATO. This marked a change in the role of NATO, from a formally defensive institution to one that could be used to engage in aggressive military operations.

Over a decade later, Russia did support UNSC resolution 1973, which paved the way for NATO to conduct a humanitarian intervention in Libya. However, NATO went beyond the mandate given by the UNSC, and aided the removal of Colonel Gaddafi from power with no thought as to what would happen next. Following this, Russia stated clearly that it would no longer support any similar Western initiatives and blocked UNSC resolutions over Syria. While many laughed when Putin cited the Responsibility to Protect doctrine when annexing Crimea, he was only reading from a script that was written in the West.

When it comes to Western interventions justified in hard security terms as opposed to humanitarian terms, you do not have to be a member of Putin’s inner circle to think the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were out of control and clueless. It is clear when one looks at Iraq that the US and its allies have destroyed a country on the basis of known lies for no clear reason (Saddam Hussein did not want to stop selling oil to the West), and the consequences are only getting worse. As Patrick Cockburn points out in his excellent new book on the Islamic State, immediately after 9/11 al-Qaeda was a marginal force. Today, the al-Qaeda offshoot IS and other related jihadi groups control vast territories containing millions of people.

NATO membership has been expanded regardless of the entirely legitimate fears and interests of Russia. However, as John Mearsheimer has pointed out, when in 2008 NATO announced that Georgia and Ukraine would become NATO members, it was a step too far for Russia. The Georgian War can be understood as a direct consequence of NATO’s provocative expansion.

Ukraine is a country of particular importance to Russia. A recent House of Lords report on the Ukraine crisis says that the West constantly misread Russia and failed to understand the importance of Ukraine. Yet in fact, Russia made it very clear (as it did over Georgia) that Ukraine joining NATO or moving closer to the EU was unacceptable.

The EU deposed Ukraine’s elected head of state with no thought as to what the consequences might be in a complicated and divided nation. Speaking in November last year about the crisis, outgoing European Commission president José Manuel Barroso said: ‘We were perfectly aware of all the risks… I spoke with Putin several times, and he told us how important for him was the customs union, the specific role he saw for Ukraine.’ Thankfully, Ukraine is no Iraq, but the war there has already cost thousands of lives and destroyed thousands of homes.

In comparison, Russia’s aggressive military exploits have been very limited, and clearly linked to maintaining a buffer zone between itself and NATO. Now, one may think that this is not a good principle for international affairs and that powerful states have no right to control their neighbours. But do you think that Mexico would be free to join the Eurasian Union? Or Greece? Moreover, the real consequences of Russia’s intervention in Georgia, for example, are nothing compared to the devastating consequences of the West’s follies in the Middle East and North Africa. This is because Russian intervention in Georgia and Ukraine has been guided by a straightforward strategy: to establish control of a buffer zone.

What we have today is a strange kind of shadow of the Cold War. Tensions between the West and Russia are very high, and the current crisis in Ukraine is frightening because it creates a situation in which tensions can easily escalate. But what is lacking, certainly in the West, is any kind of public engagement with the conflict. The Cold War played a key role in both East and West in terms of giving meaning to a specific set of differing social and political arrangements; in this sense, the whole of society was involved in the conflict. Today, however, there is little evidence of such engagement.

Rather, Western policy over Ukraine seems to be conducted largely at an elite level. Cameron’s bizarre off-the-cuff decision to send 75 military advisers to Ukraine was not done in reaction to public demands, but rather in response to a House of Lords report advising Britain to take more of a diplomatic role. I do not think that many British people would support a war in Ukraine, let alone a potential war with Russia.

There have been some half-baked attempts to talk up some kind of grand moral division between Russia and the West. For example, Western politicians attempted to use the Sochi Winter Olympics as an opportunity to bash Russia over its record on gay rights. Beyond the liberal media, this narrative utterly failed to take root in people’s minds. It’s simply not enough to try to recreate the existential battle of the Cold War.

It is also unfair. For all Putin’s talk about the decline of the West and orthodox Christian values, the Russia of today is very different to the Russia of 40 years ago. It is going through rapid social changes. The BBC loves to present Russians as some kind of race apart, brainwashed by state media, listening to folk music and crying into their vodka about how great they once were. This is nonsense and should be ignored. Russians have internet access, including to the BBC (lucky them) and to international newspapers, and many more Russians speak English than Europeans do Russian.

Currently, there seems to have been a rare outbreak of common sense within the EU. It is beginning to recognise the need for a political settlement in Ukraine. Let’s hope a settlement is reached soon, one which will eventually lead to the EU and NATO limiting their ambitions in this part of the world and allowing Ukraine to decide its future for itself.

SOURCE

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What's Fair?

By John Stossel

Donald Trump’s kids and Paris Hilton’s siblings were born rich. That gave them a big advantage in life. Unfair!

Inequality in wealth has grown. Today the richest 1 percent of Americans own a third of the assets. That’s not fair!

But wherever people are free, that’s what happens.

Some people are luckier, smarter or just better at making money. Often they marry other wealthy, well-connected people. Over time, these advantages compound. Globalization increases the effect. This month’s issue of Forbes says the world now has 1,826 billionaires, and some struggle to find enough parking places for their jets.

President Obama calls inequality “the defining issue of our time.” Really? Not our unsustainable debt? Not ISIS? The president also said, “No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change!”

Politicians constantly find crises they will solve by increasing government power. But why is inequality a crisis?

Alexis Goldstein, of a group called The Other 98%, complains that corporations got richer but workers' wages “are lower than they’ve been in 65 years.”

That’s a common refrain, but it’s wrong. Over the past 30 years, CBO data shows that the average income of the poorest fifth of Americans is up by 49 percent. That doesn’t include all the innovations that have dramatically improved everyone’s life. Today even the poorest Americans have comforts and lifespans that kings didn’t have a century ago.

George Mason University economist Garett Jones says, “If I was going to be in the bottom fifth in the America of today versus the bottom fifth of America in 1970 or 1960, it’s hard to imagine that anybody would take that time machine into the past.”

And despite America’s lousy government schools and regulations that make it tough to start a business, there is still economic mobility. Poor people don’t have to stay poor. Sixty-four percent of those born in the poorest fifth of the U.S. population move out of that quintile. Eleven percent of them rise all the way to the top, according to economists at Harvard and Berkeley. Most of the billionaires atop the Forbes richest list weren’t born rich. They got rich by innovating.

Rich people aren’t guaranteed their place at the top, either. Sixty-six percent fell from the top quintile, and eight percent fell all the way to the bottom.

That mobility is a reason most of us are better off than we would have been in a more rigid society, controlled by central economic planners.

Life will always be unfair. I want to play pro basketball. It’s unfair that LeBron James is bigger and more talented! It’s also unfair that George Clooney is better looking! It’s unfair that my brother is smarter than me.

Jones points out, “I was born with an advantage, too. Being born in the United States … totally unfair.” He also has two married parents – another huge advantage.

The question is not whether people start out life in homogeneous circumstances, he adds. “The question is whether government policies that try to fix this actually make things better or worse.”

Worse, in most cases. Government “help” encourages poor people to be dependent and passive. Dependent, people stay poor. Also, most government handouts don’t even go to the poor. They go to the middle class (college loans, big mortgage tax deductions, Medicare) and the rich (corporate welfare, bailouts to banks “too big to fail”).

Instead of making government more powerful, let’s get rid of those handouts. Left and right ought to agree on that.

America has prosperity and innovation because we have relatively free markets.

Progressives say, “Keep the innovation but have government make us more equal.” But that doesn’t work. It’s been tried. Government-enforced equality – socialism – leaves everybody poor.

Equality is less important than opportunity. Opportunity requires allowing people to spend their own money and take their own risks.

Instead of talking about “fairness,” it would be better to talk about justice: respecting other people, respecting their freedom and their property rights.

Real fairness requires limiting government power.

SOURCE

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Here We Go Again: Online Sales Tax Resurrected

An online sales tax bill passed the Senate (with 27 mostly Republicans voting "no") in 2013 but flamed out in the House. Its sponsors, however, are undeterred. The Hill reports, "Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) rolled out the Marketplace Fairness Act on Tuesday, which would give states more power to collect sales taxes from businesses that don't have a physical location within their borders."

As Mark Alexander explained two years ago, the MFA is designed to force states to collect taxes for the states in which a purchaser resides, and this amounts to taxation without representation.

Clearly, politicians want this bill passed to raise new tax revenue for broken state governments facing budget shortfalls. Mitch McConnell opposed the bill as Senate minority leader. Now that he's majority leader, we'll see if he holds true.

SOURCE

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Leftists Hail Flawed Gun Ownership Survey

Anti-gun advocates hailed the findings of a new study released this week that claims firearm ownership in America is fading. NBC News writes, "According to the latest General Social Survey, 32 percent of Americans either own a firearm themselves or live with someone who does, which ties a record low set in 2010. That's a significant decline since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when about half of Americans told researchers there was a gun in their household."

If that sounds strikingly odd considering gun purchases remain near historic highs, that's because it is. Steve Sanetti, president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, says, "GSS isn't actually counting the number of firearms in each household. Rather it is counting the number of individuals willing to disclose to a stranger at their front door how many firearms they own." That's important because "it is far more likely that the political climate is driving down self-reporting."

By comparison, Gallup, which relies on anonymous phone surveys, puts gun ownership at 42%, a percentage that's more or less remained constant over the last decade. The Left is attempting to twist this survey as proof today's America just isn't that into guns. The last few election cycles suggest otherwise.

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, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog

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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