George Stephanopoulos is a left wing operative and not a real journalist: I'm shocked, shocked I tell you!

By Rich Kozlovich

To quote a man who – if he had really lived – would have to be considered one of the world's unique moralists, Captain Renault, played by Claude Rains in Casablanca as he’s ordered to close Rick’s American Café for political reasons:

Renault: I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
Employee of Rick's: [hands Renault money] Your winnings, sir.
Renault: Oh, thank you, very much. Everybody out at once!

On May 16, 2015 Onan Coca posted an article titled, “MediaRealizes that Stephanopoulos May Actually be a Liberal Activist and Not a Journalist!” She starts out saying:

“The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple says what everyone else is thinking when it comes to George Stephanopoulos’ recent interview of Clinton Cash author Peter Schweitzer. Instead of simply being a good interview about an important book at the start of a Presidential election campaign… perhaps the interview was actually an attempt by a liberal activist and Clinton ally to put out a fire before it began raging. We’re all talking about this media stuff. But, yes, I think that when George Stephanopoulos goes on with a major figure and talks about, you know, the “Clinton Cash” book or whatever, I could sense that he was going after Peter Schweitzer. At the time, it looked like legitimate journalism. In retrospect, it looks like activism”.

Steve BreenAnd everyone's shocked?  Over the weekend a number of Fox News shows had their talking heads (for clarity sake, I actually like some of the talking heads) do some commentary on this issue. I might point out since it wasn’t corruption by a conservative the MSM pretty much ignored the issue. But there’s no liberal bias….or it’s very limited....Right?  After all….there’s no such thing as a conspiracy. Right? Of course there are those small minded individuals who will wonder if it’s possible there’s a bigger reason why there’s so little coverage by the left wing media. Is it possible this is a deeper story than just good old George? Is it possible they’re all guilty of this kind of stuff? Nah, that can’t be true! They’re full of liberal purity, like the Clintons, and the Kennedy’s.

There were two things that I found amazing.

First off, it amazes me just how many people actually watch this guy. Oh, I know the numbers on the MSM are dwindling, but he’s still has quite a following. I never watched him for more than a few minutes total since his very first show. Why? Because he made his bones as a Clintonista left wing operative and a spin master. It’s part and parcel of who he is. Why would anyone think he would change? He just gets paid a whole lot more from ABC for spinning the truth than he did when he was paid by the Clinton administration for spinning the truth.

Secondly, it never ceases to amaze me how many in the media, including Karl Rove, who attempted to claim Stephanopoulos had made the transition in everyone’s mind from a Democratic activist to a journalist. It reminds me of a time when conservative commentators– perhaps I should say seeming conservative commentators - were crying crocodile tears a few years ago because of the New York Times financial problems, fearing the Old Gray Hag would go out of business. All that hand wringing irrespective of the well known historical facts showing the NYT has been a left wing treasonous canker sore on the butt of journalism since the Roosevelt administration. One reader pointed out his operative status was only a “secret from other media types, which explains why you can't trust any of them, because at best they're only a 5 watt bulb, when a 100 watt bulb is what is needed for that type of job”.

Greg Gutfeld – one of Fox’s talking heads I like – is quoted in the article as she says:

“there is even more reason for concern for ABC. Because on the heels of the Stephanopoulos – Schweitzer interview, the Clintons used the piece to try to discredit the book and its author. They sourced each other, that’s the great thing. It’s like the Clinton campaign fact checks Schweizer’s book, and then Stephanopoulos uses that in the interview and then Clinton goes back to the Stephanopoulos interview and says,“see.” So it’s this little circle of sourcing each other. It’s like two criminals providing each other an alibi.”

But as for the rest of them - I guess they’re just “shocked, shocked” to find there’s corruption going on here, even as they attempt to find reasons to allow these people to continue in their corruption. Apparently they also need to go along to get along in order to play the game.

Here’s another interesting quote from Casablanca I find applicable.

Renault: Rick, there are many exit visas sold in this café, but we know that you've never sold one. That is the reason we permit you to remain open.
Rick: Oh? I thought it was because I let you win at roulette.
Renault: That is another reason.

Nothing is ever as it seems, except to remember that corruption is always part of the human equation. However, since leftism has no moral foundation we should expect higher levels of corruption in everything they do. In their case it’s not a conspiracy. It’s intrinsic to leftist character! Here's one more quote that could help define most of the media, conservative and liberal:

Renault: I have no conviction, if that's what you mean. I blow with the wind, and the prevailing wind happens to be from Vichy.

The difference between Captain Renault and the media? He was honest about his corruption! Now we have clarity!

SOURCE

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Obama's Casual Slander of American Christians

Earlier this week, Harvard professor Robert Putnam did a Q&A with Washington Post religion reporter Michelle Boorstein, headlined "Have faith groups been too absent in the fight on poverty?" Here is Putnam's answer to that question:

The obvious fact is that over the last 30 years, most organized religion has focused on issues regarding sexual morality, such as abortion, gay marriage, all of those. I’m not saying if that’s good or bad, but that’s what they’ve been using all their resources for. This is the most obvious point in the world. It’s been entirely focused on issues of homosexuality and contraception and not at all focused on issues of poverty.

That the venerable author of Bowling Alone would say this, let alone declare it "the most obvious point in the world," is a good reminder of that even the most brilliant social scientists are, more often than not, demonstrably full of it. There's a  damning retort to this by Rob Schwarzwalder and Pat Fagan at Religion News Service. Just to give you an idea, a single Christian Charity, World Vision, spends about $2.8 billion on anti-poverty efforts. "That would rank World Vision about 12th within the G20 nations in terms of overseas development assistance," World Vision President Richard Stearns noted in Christianity Today a few years back.

Fagan and Schwarzwelder do a lot more number crunching, but the upshot is that Christians spend billions and billions fighting poverty. Even the most generous estimates of the resources devoted to pro-life causes and organizations defending traditional marriage are just a few hundred million dollars. By contrast, the budget of Planned Parenthood alone is just over a billion dollars. I don't know what the Human Rights Campaign's budget is, but if I've walked by their impressive building in Washington many times and I suspect they could marshall the resources of a small nation.

Now, this is bad enough. But Putnam also recently appeared on a panel at the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty at Georgetown University discussing this very topic with columnist E.J. Dionne, American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks, and, yes, Barack Obama. The president himself joined in the mendacious chorus:

“Despite great caring and concern,” [Obama] said, “when it comes to what are you really going to the mat for, what's the defining issue, when you're talking in your congregations, what's the thing that is really going to capture the essence of who we are as Christians, or as Catholics, or what have you, that this”—fighting poverty—“is often times viewed as a 'nice to have' relative to an issue like abortion.”

Nice to have? What would be nice to have is a president who's not so divorced from the reality of American Christians that he thinks he has the moral authority to more or less slander millions of well-intentioned Christians. Their lives and the things they care about could not be more different than how it is casually being characterized by a president who has apparently turned the White House into an Ivory Tower.

What about the inner city pastor who wakes up in the middle of the night everytime there's a knock on the door and rummages through his own fridge to feed the homeless guy on his step? What about the ladies of the church Golden Group who spent the last week turning old colorful pillowcases and bits of ribbon into dresses to send to young girls in Haiti who literally have nothing to wear? What about the six-year-old who comes to school with a spare toothbrush and their birthday money because the teacher at her Lutheran School told her that the Orphan Grain Train is helping people in Nepal who lost everything in an earthquake? What about the accomplished professional who drives across town once a week to tutor poor kids, even though he's got more lucrative things on his schedule, just because it's what he believes Jesus Christ wants him to do?

I didn't make up these examples. I know these people. This is my reality as a weekly churchgoer in America, and there are millions and millions of us.

But because presumably some of these same Christians believe that every child is a gift from God, and that abortion is a grave evil up unto the point that they cheerfully and gladly volunteer to take care of as many needy kids as they can, the president himself disingenuously suggests their concern about poverty is relative and inadequate. This is the same president, mind you, that went out of his way to force a legal battle with Little Sisters of the Poor over subsidizing contraception and abortifacients. Based on the name of the organization, I'm guessing these nuns had better things to do than defend their conscience rights from a president who stood by and shrugged at the last Democratic convention where delegates booed God and stripped the "safe, legal and rare" language out of the party platform. And now Obama has the temerity to say that it's Christians who are making abortion too much of a priority.

Speaking of "safe, legal, and rare", I noted that the moderator of this discussion on Christians and poverty was E.J. Dionne, who who worked tirelessly to sell his fellow Christians on Obama. Let's revist this 2008 column of his:

Of course, President-elect Barack Obama's most urgent task is to repair an ailing economy. But one of his important promises was to end the cultural and religious wars that have disfigured American politics for four decades.

Obama, who has shown he can draw lessons from Bill Clinton's presidency, can find one on this issue. Picking up on the pro-choice movement's most popular slogan, Clinton declared during his 1992 campaign that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare."

Abortions did become rarer during Clinton's time in office, dropping by 11 percent. But since Clinton made no major public moves on abortion reduction, many pro-lifers who had been inclined his way felt he ignored the third word in his motto. There's no reason for Obama to make the same mistake -- and no reason for advocates of abortion rights to get in the way of his trying to build a new consensus. He should not lose his chance to make cultural warfare a quaint relic of the past.

Well, after six years of Obama, it seems he didn't exactly live up to his promise to make cultural and religious warfare is a thing of the past. Instead, he deliberately exacerbated the conflict again and again. We're at the point where the man well-intentioned liberal Christians like Dionne said could end the culture wars makes a flatly wrong and objectionable assertion that fighting poverty is an afterthought for Christians too often obsessed with abortion, and nobody bats an eye. Of course, it's been just over two weeks since Obama's solicitor general warned the Supreme Court that if the White House gets its way on gay marriage, churches could be stripped of their tax exempt status. This would have devastating ramifications for the efforts of churches combatting poverty, but when the White House is so engaged in projection that they think that all churches care about is abortion, it starts to explain how they could do something so obviously damaging to the poor and still live with themselves.

It seems obvious that Obama, Putnam, and the liberal elites they speak for want to believe that American Christians are narrow-minded and obsessed to the point of being uncaring. This is an utterly delusional way of discounting the tremendous, literally and figuratively livesaving work of American Christians. But to think about them any other way would be to actually wrestle with the fact that, while we're all imperfect, any political disagreements Christians have be over hot button cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage might actually be motivated by genuine concern and compassion. Those are, not coincidentally, the same reasons that have made fighting poverty one the church's most vital and important missions for millennia.

SOURCE

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Patriot Act's most controversial section fades to black

by Jeff Jacoby

SECTION 215 of the Patriot Act will not survive another month. The most controversial piece of the post-9/11 law that broadly expanded the federal government's surveillance powers is set to expire on June 1, and the House of Representatives on Wednesday gave its overwhelming approval to a far less sweeping replacement. On a 338-to-88 vote, Republicans and Democrats registered broad support for the USA Freedom Act, which will end the National Security Agency's bulk collection of "metadata" from millions of Americans' phone records.

The legislation faces some opposition in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pushing to extend the Patriot Act with no changes. That won't happen. Other Republican senators, including at least two who are running for president, want Section 215 scrapped or curtailed, and the political tides are with them.

Some ardent civil libertarians opposed the Patriot Act from the outset, insisting, somewhat wildly, that it would leave the Bill of Rights in tatters and turn the president into a dictator. Most Americans knew better. In the wake of the terrorist attacks, it seemed only prudent to expand the government's counterintelligence capabilities, and to change the rules that had prevented investigators from "connecting the dots" that could have alerted them to the jihadists' plans. The hysterical alarums about dissenters being rounded up and America turning into a fascist police state gained little traction. For all the controversy they fueled, the law's key provisions — including Section 215 — were extended in 2005, 2010, and 2011.

But as September 11 recedes, the pendulum has shifted from the single-minded focus on counterterrorism and toward a heightened concern with civil liberties.

More HERE

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 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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Leftist ego

The recent British election and its aftermath have really put Leftist self-love and arrogance on display.  Below are two excerpts from recent British reports.  I am putting the full reports up on  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH.

The incredible sulk: All week, the Left have been frothing with fury that their fellow Britons could be so wicked and stupid as to vote in the Tories

Nothing better shows their contempt for ordinary people

Just over a week has passed since perhaps the most extraordinary General Election result of modern times, and at last the dust is beginning to settle.

In Westminster, David Cameron’s new all-Conservative government has settled down to business, while a succession of ambitious contenders have set out their stall for the Labour leadership, most of them insisting, not entirely plausibly, that they never agreed with a word Ed Miliband said anyway.

Yet in one strange corner of Britain, the campaign is far from over. This is a world in which we are forever poised on the brink of Socialist conversion, the only obstacles are the Right-wing press and the brainwashed masses, and Ed Miliband was the greatest prime minister we never had.

This is the world of old-fashioned union leaders, liberal Twitterati and Left-wing academics, who have spent the past week in a laughably self-pitying sulk.

For while most commentators, whatever their political allegiances, saw the election as proof that Britain remains at heart a deeply pragmatic, even conservative country, the self-righteous moralists of the bien-pensant Left have drawn a very different conclusion.

Like Mr Miliband, they can’t accept they lost the argument and burn with pious indignation at the supposed stupidity of the ordinary voters who let them down.

Take, for example, the Anglican canon Giles Fraser, darling of the metropolitan chattering classes.  Four years ago, he resigned as chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral in protest at plans to remove forcibly the anti-capitalist protesters who had set up a ‘shanty town’ camp outside, saying he could not support the possibility of ‘violence in the name of the Church’.

‘Right now I feel ashamed to be English,’ began his column for The Guardian last weekend. ‘Ashamed to belong to a country that has clearly identified itself as insular, self-absorbed and apparently caring so little for the most vulnerable people among us.’

From this you might think that Mr Cameron and his colleagues were committed to abolishing the NHS, scrapping foreign aid and slashing welfare to the bone.  In fact, the Tories are committed to spending £11 billion a year on foreign aid, £111 billion a year on welfare and an extra £8 billion on the NHS.

You might disagree with some of the Government’s choices. Fair enough. But given the facts, Rev Fraser’s analysis had all the rigour and proportion of a toddler’s tantrum.

SOURCE

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Leftist delusions of grandeur



The comic saga of the elusive ‘Edstone’ took another turn last night after it emerged Ed Miliband considered an even more bizarre plan during his doomed Election campaign – carving his party’s pledges on a cliff face.

Party sources have told The Mail on Sunday that only after the ‘Mount Rushmore’ plan had been abandoned it was decided six key promises would be chiselled into the widely mocked stone slab instead.

The revelation came amid claims yesterday that the stone had finally been found abandoned in a south London warehouse.

According to the source, Labour chiefs initially looked at carving the promises at a site such as Cheddar Gorge: ‘The idea was to find somewhere in the country where we could carve the pledges, like a big gorge or cliff where people could see it. But they couldn’t find anybody to do it.’

SOURCE

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Forget Taxes, Obama's Regulations Are Strangling the Nation

The wild creation of regulations by the Obama administration has stalled economic growth and made the nation’s rulemaking the responsibility of unelected bureaucrats. Two reports released this week show the staggering extent of how debilitating these regulations are. Every year, the Competitive Enterprise Institute releases its report on the nation’s “Ten Thousand Commandments.” This year, Clyde Wayne Crews, the vice president for policy for CEI, reports that the regulatory burden averages out to $14,976 per American household. If America’s regulations were a country, it would have the 10th largest economy, beating out India.

Barack Obama has tied the country in red tape because, while 224 laws were passed in 2014, the government plastered up 3,554 regulations. Furthermore, “A problem with cost-benefit analysis is that it relies primarily on agency self-reporting. Having agencies audit their own rules is like asking students to grade their own exams. Regulators are disinclined to emphasize when a rule’s benefits do not justify its costs,” CEI’s study says.

These regulations make the federal deficit unmanageable, and The Wall Street Journal pins the problem of America’s stalled economy on too much regulation in the system. Meanwhile, a Heritage Foundation study finds that Obama’s major regulations cost Americans $80 billion a year — and there’s more regs in the works, such as another redesign of the light bulb. To fix the problem, Congress needs to insist that it is the lawmaking body of the country, not nameless bureaucrats in the executive branch.

SOURCE

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It Takes a Good Guy with a Gun to Defend Freedom of Speech

When two terrorists in body armor and carrying assault rifles came for a roomful of cartoonists and fans of freedom of speech in Texas, the media took the side of the terrorists.

CAIR, a Muslim Brotherhood front group with ties to terrorists, spun the attack by claiming that the contest had been intended to "bait" the terrorists. The media quickly picked up the "bait" meme.

The New York Times, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Dallas Morning News, CNN and even FOX News all accused the cartoonists of "baiting" the poor Muslim terrorists into attacking them. The actual attempt at mass slaughter was dismissed as the terrorists "taking the bait" from the cartoonists who had been fiendishly plotting to be mass slaughtered by them for the publicity.

The Washington Post not only stated that the contest was "bait", but its headline huffed, "Event organizer offers no apology after thwarted attack in Texas." And why won't the 9/11 dead apologize?

Journalists often tell us that a free press is the best defense for a free society. Every major newspaper and news network once again proved them wrong. The best defense for freedom of speech came not from the journalists or the civil rights groups, from the speechmakers or the activists. It came from an off-duty traffic cop working security outside the event targeted by Muslim terrorists. His partner, an older guard, didn't even have a gun, and took a bullet to the leg.

He could have pulled back and let the terrorists have a clear path. No doubt he had a family and plenty of reasons to live. Like so much of the media, he could have disguised this cowardice by blaming the cartoonists for bringing the attack on themselves. Instead he held the line. The traffic cop with a pistol took on two terrorists in body armor, armed with assault rifles and extra ammo. And when it was over, two Muslim terrorists were dead and freedom of speech was alive.

"He had two people shooting at him, plus he's trying to take out two targets. And if he had to make headshots," Mark Sligar, a firearms instructor, said, "That's awesome shooting. And look at the people's lives he saved, just because he was able to take care of that."

Like Kevin Vickers, the retired 58-year-old Sergeant-at-Arms, who armed with a 9mm handgun stopped Muslim terrorist Zehaf-Bibeau from carrying out a massacre of Canadian parliamentarians, the unnamed older police officer did more to protect freedom than all the self-styled defenders of freedom ever have.

And he did it with the tool that many of those defenders of freedom want to outlaw; a gun.

The left promises us collective security through civil rights while taking away our freedom. Their idea of collective security is disarming the citizenry, then disarming the police and then appeasing the killers. There will be more murders than ever, but at least those carrying them out will be representatives of oppressed groups, such as inner city drug dealers and ISIS terrorists, ‘punching up' at the privileged.

We've already seen how worthless collective security is. In Baltimore, the Democratic mayor turned over the city to rioters and looters. Every Democrat who was at all involved in fighting crime, from Bill Clinton on down, is frantically apologizing to the social justice mobs for daring to protect Americans. The media is busy explaining why the looters were right and the lootees were in the wrong.

After the Texas shootings, the media popped up to blame the attacks, not on the attackers, but on those who came under attack. CAIR's "bait" meme, adopted by the media, reverses responsibility. It contends that anyone shot at by a Muslim terrorist has to prove that he didn't intend to provoke the terrorists.

Despite the impeccable left-wing credentials of Charlie Hebdo, the PEN gala came under fire from authors denouncing the French cartoonists for provoking their disenfranchised and oppressed minority ISIS killers. And when the ISIS killers came for the Hebdo cartoonists, unarmed police officers ran for it.

A wounded French cop raised his hands and begged for his life, before the terrorist finished him off with a shot to the head. It's not the first time that a disarmed West has been helpless in the face of Muslim terrorism.

During the Munich Olympics, German police provided security by handing out candy and flowers. An informant had passed along word that an attack was being planned, but nothing was done. The resulting massacre of Israeli athletes by Muslim terrorists was partially covered up by the German government which released three of the captured terrorists a month later and whose foreign minister met with the planners of the massacre to "rebuild trust".

Just like Argentina and Iran, after the bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, a dirty deal was struck behind the scenes and the terrorists got what they wanted.

When Israel independently targeted the terrorists, the German ambassador to Lebanon blasted Israel for killing the most "rational and responsible" members of the PLO.  The Israelis had killed the terrorists, he accused, because they did not want peace.

But a bunch of good guys with guns had settled the issue of whether Israeli athletes should be able to compete in the Olympics even though the UN Security Council passed a resolution condemning the Israeli "act of aggression" and the "loss of human life"; particularly that of terrorist boss Abu Jihad.

The Israelis, not the Muslim terrorists or the collaborationist German government, were the villains for forcing the terrorists to do what they did. If only Israel had surrendered to the PLO, the attacks would not have happened. Once Israel did surrender in the 90s and the attacks escalated, then it was Israel's fault for not surrendering enough. It's never the fault of the terrorists or their collaborators.

The accusations are all familiar. Bosch Fawstin, Charb, Pamela Geller, Theo van Gogh, Mark Basseley Youssef, Salman Rushdie, Molly Norris and a hundred others are at fault for provoking the terrorists.

There are lectures on "responsible speech". The targets are accused of "hiding" behind freedom of speech and of deliberately planning to be killed for the publicity.

During WW2, Gandhi urged the Jews and the British to surrender to the Nazis.  "This manslaughter must be stopped. You are losing; if you persist, it will only result in greater bloodshed. Hitler is not a bad man. If you call it off today, he will follow suit," he whined to the Brits.

"I want you to fight Nazis without arms or... with non-violent arms. I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity," he suggested in another missive.

He also had some advice for the Jews. "If only the Jews of Germany had the good sense to offer their throats willingly to the Nazi butchers' knives," he mused.

That is where the insane mantra of non-violence and appeasement, the exploration of root causes and winning hearts finally leads, to mass graves and victorious mass murderers.

And everyone who refuses to take their suicidal advice is blamed for provoking the killers.

We can either live in a paranoid politically correct world frantically trying not to offend the Hitlers and Mohammeds, and blaming their victims when they kill, or we can be free men and women who have chosen to take the power to defend our rights into our own hands. While a thousand organizations use the Holocaust as a platform for speeches about tolerance, Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors is conducting firearms training. While Big Media attacks a free press in the name of the free press, a small group gathered in Garland and an off-duty cop helped keep it free.

The unnamed traffic cop who stood up to two offended killers did not follow Gandhi's advice; he refused to lay down his arms or try to fight them with non-violent arms. His heroism reminds us that freedom is not defended with empty idealism easily perverted into appeasement of evil, but with the force of arms.

Gandhi and his Western disciples were wrong. The soldiers who fought Hitler did far more to save humanity than Gandhi ever did. A single traffic cop with a gun has had more of a positive impact on freedom of speech in this country than all the journalists of the free press fighting against freedom.

It takes a good guy with a gun to defend freedom of speech.

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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Shy Tories key to UK poll

Lessons for the USA as well

The most uninspiring UK election campaign of recent times culminated last week in the most extraordinary result.  Eleven opinion polls conducted the day before reported Labour and Conservatives neck and neck, yet the Conservatives beat Labour 37% to 30% and won an overall majority of 12 [seats].

How could every poll have got it so wrong?  The answer being touted by the pollsters is 'shy Tories.'

Socialists are often proud of their allegiance.  They believe they occupy the moral high ground, so they have no problem telling pollsters how they intend to vote.  They think voting Labour shows they are decent people who care about others, so they put posters in their windows and banners in their gardens.  It's what James Bartholomew calls 'virtue signalling.'

Many Conservatives, however, seem ashamed.  After telling pollsters they didn't know how they would vote, they crept into the polling stations, marked their crosses, and slunk out again like dirty old men buying pornographic magazines.

It's not the first time this has happened: in 1992, when all the polls predicted a Labour victory, the Conservatives [under John Major] won more votes than any party in British history.

Why are socialists proud of their beliefs while Conservatives seek to hide them?  Because there is a widespread belief that state socialism equates with virtue.  People understand that capitalism delivers material growth and prosperity, but they feel bad voting for it.  They worry that lower taxes mean not caring about the poor, and that free markets reward selfishness.

Yet the core case for capitalism is an ethical one: accepting responsibility for creating wealth rather than demanding that others give you theirs.  This is a moral argument that has to be spelled out clearly and repeatedly if people are to feel good about voting for parties advocating free markets and a limited state.  This is why think tanks are so crucial in the battle for hearts as well as minds.

SOURCE

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Israel tells its African migrants: ‘Take £2,000 and a one-way ticket out of here or face indefinite stay in jail

Israel is telling African refugees to accept a £2,000 cash offer and a one-way ticket out of the country or face an indefinite stay in a desert prison.

The Eritrean and Sudanese migrants have been sent letters giving them 30 days to accept the offer of the cash and a ticket home or to another African country.

Last month, a statement from the interior ministry's population and immigration authority said Israel would identify qualifying migrants who cannot return home, inform them of their proposed 'safe third-party' destination and pay for their plane ticket and hotel there.

It said the measure would apply to migrants currently at the southern Holot detention centre 'who infiltrated Israel and cannot be expelled to their country of origin'.

Although the third-party countries were not named, media and some charities said they are Rwanda and Uganda.

The Washington Post has reported that the first of 45,000 refugees have received an offer of the cash as well as the one-way ticket. The location of the alternative - a stay in prison - has been revealed as Saharonim prison.

The letter reads: 'Money will be given to you at the airport in a secure manner. When you arrive at the third country, people will receive you at the airport and give you information about life in the country and other important information.'

The Washington Post said Israeli officials do not tell the refugees where they will be going until they are given their plane ticket on the day.

Last month's statement from interior ministry read: 'An infiltrator who agrees to this procedure will begin the preparations for leaving, an infiltrator who refuses will face a hearing following which it will be decided whether they will be imprisoned.'

Interior Minister Gilad Erdan said the measure would 'encourage infiltrators to leave Israel in a safe and dignified way, and will be an effective tool to upholding our commitment to return life to normal in Israel'.

However, international rights groups protested against the plans, claiming Rwanda and Uganda are not safe and that migrants who arrive there are stripped of their cash and documents.

Israel - a state built by refugees - has previously offered cash stipends to African migrants in return for them leaving the Jewish state.

Last year, Israel began sending of African migrants to Uganda - giving them a one-way ticket and a stipend.

The interior ministry said that since last year, 1,500 migrants 'wilfully left to a third country, in addition to 7,000 who left for their country of origin'.

While Israel is trying to rid itself of African refugees, Jewish emigration is still being encouraged.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: 'To the Jews of Europe and to the Jews of the world I say that Israel is waiting for you with open arms.'

SOURCE

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Obama’s Home State To Shut Down State-Based Obamacare Exchange Over Lack of Funds

President Barack Obama’s home state of Hawaii is shutting down its state-based health care exchange, the Hawaii Health Connector (HHC), due to incurring debts and the unwillingness of state legislators to put more taxpayer money into the struggling operation, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported Saturday.

Established in 2011, the non-profit organization is Hawaii’s state-based health exchange for the President’s Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. There are currently about 37,000 Hawaiians enrolled in health care plans through the exchange, far short of the roughly 70,000 needed to raise enough money to sustain it, the article reports.

Officials with the exchange released a report to its board of directors on Friday declaring that the state-based marketplace simply does not have the money to continue operations, the article stated.

"Now that it is clear that the state will not provide sufficient support for the Hawaii Health Connector's operations through fiscal year 2016 (ending June 30, 2016), the Connector can no longer operate in a manner that would cause it to incur additional debts or other obligations for which it is unable to pay," the report read, according to the article.

The HHC will halt all new enrollments on Friday, May 15, the article reported. The organization will also discontinue outreach services on May 31 and officially transfer to a temporary state-run system by Sept. 30. The organization’s 32 current employees, 29 temporary staff, and 12 full-time contractors will all lose their jobs by Feb. 28 of next year.

To date, the Hawaii Health Connector has received $204.3 million in federal grants to build and sustain the exchange, of which it has spent all but $70 million, according to reports.

The HHC also only received $2 million of the $5.4 million it had requested from the state legislature last Tuesday, the Star-Advertiser explained in an article published on May 8. The state government’s decision not to fulfill the HHC’s total request followed previous unsuccessful proposals for the state to back about $28 million in loans or bonds, the article added.

According to reports, the federal government told the HHC in March that the exchange was out of compliance with Obamacare because it was not financially self-sustainable. According to the new federal law, all state-based health care exchanges were required to secure sufficient funding to be self-sustainable by 2015.

The federal government then declared its intentions to take over the state-based marketplace if it could not secure the funds it needed to operate from the state government, the Star-Advertiser reported back in April. At that time, HHC Executive Director Jeff Kissel was asking for between $9 million and $10 million in state funding to keep the exchange up and running, the article stated.

In addition to the cost of transferring policyholders over to the federal health care system – estimated to be around $30 million, according to the Star-Advertiser – some state legislators are also reportedly worried that a federal takeover of the state’s health insurance system could weaken Hawaii’s Prepaid Health Care Act.

Enacted in 1974, the law requires employers in Hawaii to offer health insurance coverage to employees who work at least 20 hours per week, whereas Obamacare sets a 30-hour-per-week threshold. If the federal law preempts the 40-year-old state requirements, employees working less than 30 hours per week could lose their coverage, some Hawaii lawmakers say.

"I can't quite figure out what the deal is because the federal exchange doesn't really have an excellent track record. And if we were to migrate even pieces of our exchange to the feds, we put our Prepaid Health Care Act at risk. I’m not willing to do that," said Sen. Rosalyn Baker (D-Maui), the Star-Advertiser reported.

According to the most recent data by the U.S. Census Bureau, Hawaii already had an uninsured rate of 6.7 in 2013, lower than any state besides Massachusetts.

Under a potential “contingency plan” currently in the works by Hawaii Gov. David Ige, Hawaiians enrolled in the current HHC exchange would be transferred to a federal grant-backed, state-run system for the remainder of the year to avoid losing coverage. They would then need to enroll in healthcare.gov next year during open enrollment.

SOURCE

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The elite got it wrong

Unexpected victories for conservatives in both Israel and Britain

The media elite have a preeminent place in our politics, allegedly with the knowledge to declare what is politically feasible and what is not, including which candidates have a chance at winning and which do not. Before we head into a presidential primary season, it's time to insist that these "experts" don't know any better than the rest of us.

And sometimes their biases so heavily shade their predictions as to keep themselves in the dark about reality.

Take the elections in Israel in March. The manufactured conventional wisdom and polling predicted a tight race and rough sledding for conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. When instead the conservative won easily, our media exploded in the usual sore-loser outbursts about how Mideast peace was dead. An Obama campaign stalwart (2012 field organizer Jeremy Bird) enriched himself but ended up on the losing side. This wasn't depicted as a bad sign for President Obama or his political team.

Now take the British elections on May 7. On "Meet the Press" on May 3, host Chuck Todd proclaimed the race between Conservative Party Prime Minister David Cameron and Labour Party leftist Ed Miliband "too close to call." Naturally, Todd declared, "There's been commentary that if Cameron loses, the Republican Party ought to learn something from that."

On Thursday, as the Brits voted, MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell brought on "senior political analyst" David Axelrod to make a fool of himself. "I think that the polls are accurate. This is a very, very close race, highly likely that this drama extends beyond tonight."

Incorrect on both counts. Cameron defied the "experts" and won a clear majority in Parliament.

Axelrod added: "One thing seems clear is that there's going to be a progressive majority in Britain after this election. Unless there's a huge surprise today, it's really hard to see how David Cameron puts together a majority." Axelrod was paid nearly a half-million dollars to advise Labour. Yet again, no one on television seemed saw this as a bad sign for Obama or the Democrats.

In fact, ABC never noticed the election results. They didn't involve royal babies. NBC gave it 42 words.

The print media also flunked at predictions. The Washington Post's top political correspondent Dan Balz warned on May 3 that Cameron was "buffeted by many of the same problems and pressures that afflict and divide the GOP in the United States." He quoted Peter Kellner from the polling firm YouGov, said of the Conservatives: "They have not shifted their brand from an out-of-touch party of the rich. The Tories have to persuade people they are determined to make the lives of ordinary people better ... not unlike the Republicans."

Just as the tea party "ruins" the GOP, Balz suggested the U.K. Independence Party and their "anti-immigration, anti-Europe message" moved Cameron's party to the right, alienating moderate and independent voters.

Balz concluded: "Almost any outcome would remind Conservatives, the most dominant political party in Britain over the last century, of how far short they have fallen over the past 18 years. Even if they win on Thursday, this would mark the fifth consecutive election in which they have failed to capture a majority of seats."

Balz is eating his crow well-done. Who exactly is the out-of-touch party?

These elections should be a clear warning to Republicans, and the American people as a whole headed into 2016: Don't let journalists tell you who can win and who doesn't stand a chance. Their feeling that conservatives should lose every race gets in the way.

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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Understanding Russia

The ghastly Soviet episode is all that most Westerners know about Russia. But Russia is much more than that. And a broader understanding of Russia is surely important now that the appalling  Cold War with Russia has resumed.

To understand Russia,  you need to understand Russians.  You need to understand a people hardy enough to endure the terrible winters that grip most of the country -- and who flourish in that environment.  Such people are never going to be soft. And, more than that, you need to know something about Russian history and geography.

It is very presumptuous of me to address such a large topic in a short blog post, but at some risk of oversimplification, I am going to try to say something useful about all that.

Something that  most people are probably aware of in at least a dim way is the sheer size of the Russian Federation.  We all know  the strict boundaries that enclose most countries but in Russia we  have one country that spans the entire Eurasian continent -- from the Baltic to the Pacific.  And Russians are not dimly aware of it.  They are acutely aware of it. That one country could be so utterly exceptional is a matter of great and justified pride for them.  No other country is both a great European country and a great Asian country.

And Russia did not get there overnight.  It all began with Muscovy. After the curse of the Mongol domination had been thrown off, Muscovy steadily expanded.  It expanded through conquest and annexation from just 20,000 square kilometers in 1300 to 430,000 in 1462, 2.8 million in 1533, and 5.4 million by 1584.  And it didn't stop there.  Successive Muscovite leaders, not least being Ivan the Terrible, expanded and expanded again their realms.  Ivan the Terrible left his domain comprising a BILLION acres.

And they did that largely through good leadership.  As Wikipedia says of Ivan: "He was an able diplomat, a patron of arts and trade, founder of Russia's first Print Yard, a leader highly popular among the common people of Russia, but he is also remembered for his paranoia and arguably harsh treatment of the nobility"

And Russian expansion never really stopped until the end of the Soviet era.  Given Russia's incredible history of expansion, the shrinking that took place after the Soviet collapse HAS to be seen by Russians as a great humiliation.  It feels like the end of their long and glorious history.

And let me not gloss over the details of that expansion.  It was often savage.  Ivan, for instance, really was terrible.  He even had his own son and heir apparent executed in one of his rages.

 And Ivan was not alone. Even into relatively recent times Russian  mercy was often in short supply.  The conquest of the Muslim Circassians in the 19th century has led some to speak of the Circassian genocide.  The Circassians had a rather nice tract of land on the North shore of the Black Sea and Russia wanted it.  They saw all of the Black sea region (including Crimea!) as rightly theirs. So they just drove the Circassians out -- mostly to what we now know as Turkey, on the South shore of the Black sea.

Leftists tend to portray pre-revolution Russia as backward and primitive.  But that is just the sort of reality-defying propaganda that you expect from Leftists.  It is true that Russia was mostly an  agricultural country and it is true that the Duma (parliament) was relatively weak versus the Tsar.

But it is also true that Russia WAS a democracy, or, more precisely, a constitutional monarchy.  The Tsar had approved a fairly modern constitution in 1906. And it was not primitive and backward overall. The lives of the farm-workers undoubtedly were poor and oppressed but Russia was rapidly industrializing and railroads were snaking out across the land.  And, despite the difficult climate and mostly indifferent soils, the farms were very productive.  Russia was a major exporter of grain until the Bolsheviks ruined everything, the farming sector in particular.  Something as basic as feeding their people has always been a problem for Communists.


This image, taken in 1911, shows some of the power generators in the Hindu Kush Hydro Power Plant, in Turkmenistan, the largest hyro-electric plant built during the Russian Empire

So is  Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin just reviving traditional Russian expansionism?  Not really. He is just trying to get back the ethnically Russian lands that were carelessly lopped off from Russia in the chaos of the immediate post-Soviet period.  He is trying to tidy up that re-organization. The implosion of the Soviets and the prosperity of his Western neighbors has made it clear to him that there are large limits on Russian power.

How do I know that? Because he has made all his moves in the East and has limited them to areas where Russians are in the majority. There are substantial Russian minorities both to the West and the East of the Russian Federation but he has shown no interest in them.  And his moves have grown more cautious, if anything.  He sent his tanks into the Russian bits of Georgia only under severe provocation from the Georgians and, even then, he was happy for those regions to remain autonomous rather than absorbing them into Russia.

And in Ukraine he has kept his tanks at home, content to encourage and arm the ethnic Russian Ukrainian rebels. He has boasted, undoubtedly accurately, that he could have his tanks in Kiev in a couple of weeks -- but he has not done so.  He has shown admirable restraint.  He knows that the West could do nothing to stop him but has chosen great caution nonetheless.

So what should the West do at this juncture?  One thing:  Recognize the great and justified pride Russians have in their country and their people.  "We shall overcome" was the song of a self-praising 1960s American clique but it would with much greater justification be seen as the song of the Russians.

They have endured terrible oppression, a terrible climate and two terrible wars with Germany -- and yet have still come out of it with a generally modern and powerful country that STILL stretches from one end of Eurasia to the other.  Britons for long had great pride in their now-lost worldwide empire.  How much more pride should Russians have in their still intact vast empire?

Russians have many reasons for pride -- not only in terms of their phenomenal territorial reach but also in the great contributions that Russians have made to science and technology and their equally great contributions to classical music, literature and art.  In all those respects Russia is among the top few of contributing nations.  Who invented the helicopter as we know it today?  Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky.  Who invented TV as we know it today?  The world's first 625-line television standard was designed in the Soviet Union in 1944, and became a national standard in 1946. And I hardly need to mention Russian achievements in space and the great range of acclaimed Russian composers and performers.  Does the name Tchaikovsy ring a bell?

So Russians tend to feel rather aggrieved that Russia is rarely accorded the respect that they feel it deserves. The Soviet image still looms large in people's thinking about Russia.  What Russia wants is by and large simply the respect that Russians feel is their due. If Western leaders weere to start praising Russia and Russian achievements instead of condemning Russia, it would be a great leap forward for world peace.  Any Western leader who publicly praised "the great Russian people" would almost immediately have the friendship of Russia.  And the friendship of Russia is very much worth having.

So Vladimir Vladimirovich is reasserting Russian power to great acclaim in Russia.  He is doing what any Russian ruler would do.  We must be glad that he is doing it with great caution and restraint.  No Western population would agree to a war with Russia so it is only his innate caution that keeps Europe largely undisturbed.

After two ghastly world wars erupting from their lands, Europeans generally are frantic to avoid any repetition of that. And pendula are very common in human affairs.  So from the furious nationalism of 1914, Europe has swung to the artificial and absurd internationalism of the EU.  And it seems clear that Vladimir Vladimirovich has also learned from that gory lesson, but without resorting to a corrupt internationalism.  No Russian would want a re-run of WWII.

Footnote:  Why do I refer to Mr Putin as Vladimir Vladimirovich?  It's just manners. Remember them?  It's terribly old-fashioned of me even to mention them, I suppose. The polite and friendly way to address or refer to any Russian is by way of his Christan name and patronymic (father's name).  And Russia still does have Christian names.  Russia is a Christian country.  They are a branch of our people.  The gospel was never lost in Russia even in the Soviet era  -- unlike most of the Western Europe of today.

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Obama Disapproves: 'Kids Start Going to Private Schools...Private Clubs'

Obama is right that self-segregation by those whites who can afford it is rampant   -- but he ignores the cause of it.  Whites feel a desperaste need to insulate their families from black crime.  Gun deaths inflicted by whites in America approximate the European norm.  It is blacks who jack the rate sky-high.  Anybody in his right mind would want to get away from that. So Obama sees a problem (probably rightly) but ignores the cause  -- in a typically Leftist way.  Leftists are shallow thinkers about anything political.  There are ways black crime could be heavily reduced (e.g. Permanently exiling all convicted black criminals to Africa) but they are all outside the Overton Window at the moment

President Barack Obama told a gathering at Georgetown University on Tuesday that the problem isn't racial segregation, it's wealth segregation, manifested by "elites" who "are able to live together, away from folks who are not as wealthy."

"Kids start going to private schools," he said. (Just as he did and his own kids do.)

Once upon a time, the president noted, a banker lived in "reasonable proximity" to the school janitor; the janitor's daughter may have dated the banker's son; they may have attended the same church, rotary club, and public parks -- "all the things that stitch them together...contributing to social mobility and to a sense of possiblity and opportunity for all kids in that community."

But now "concentrations of wealth" have left some people less committed to investing in programs that benefit the poor:

"And what's happened in our economy is that those who are doing better and better -- more skilled, more educated, luckier, having greater advantages -- are withdrawing from sort of the commons -- kids start going to private schools; kids start working out at private clubs instead of the public parks. An anti-government ideology then disinvests from those common goods and those things that draw us together. And that, in part, contributes to the fact that there's less opportunity for our kids, all of our kids."

President Obama's two daughters attend an elite private school in Washington where tuition runs $37,750 ("includes hot lunch," the school's website notes). His wife and children ski at Aspen, an elite resort in Colorado. President Obama frequently golfs at exclusive private clubs. And the entire family takes summer vacations in a borrowed mansion in ritzy Martha's Vineyard or Hawaii.

But the president wasn't talking about himself or his family at Tuesday's Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty.

He was talking about hedge fund managers and corporate CEOS who now earn "thousands" of times more than the people who work for them. "Now, that's not because they're bad people," Obama said. "It's just that they have been freed from a certain set of social constraints."

White House spokesman Josh Earnest, asked on Wednesday morning about Obama's remark, said the president wasn't criticizing people for sending their children to private schools. "He's suggesting that all Americans need to keep in mind that it's in our collective best interests as a country and as individual citizens for us to invest in the common good -- for us to invest and make sure that we have good, quality public schools that are available for everybody."

'Who are you mad at?'

According to the president, "What used to be racial segregation now mirrors itself in class segregation and this great sorting that's taking place. Now, that creates its own politics. Right? I mean, there's some communities where...not only do I not know poor people, I don't even know people who have trouble paying the bills at the end of the month. I just don't know those people. And so there's a less sense of investment in those children. So that's part of what's happened.

"But part of it has also been -- there's always been a strain in American politics where you've got the middle class, and the question has been, who are you mad at, if you're struggling -- if you're working, but you don't seem to be getting ahead.

"And over the last 40 years, sadly, I think there's been an effort to either make folks mad at folks at the top (Obama himself has done this), or to be mad at folks at the bottom. And I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leaches, don't want to work, are lazy, are undeserving, got traction.

"And, look, it's still being propagated," Obama continued. "I mean, I have to say that if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant menu -- they will find folks who make me mad. I don't know where they find them. (Laughter.) They're like, 'I don't want to work, I just want a free Obama phone' (laughter) -- or whatever. And that becomes an entire narrative -- right? -- that gets worked up. And very rarely do you hear an interview of a waitress -- which is much more typical -- who's raising a couple of kids and is doing everything right but still can't pay the bills."

"And so if we're going to change how (Republicans) John Boehner and Mitch McConnell think, we're going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we're going to have to change how the media reports on these issues and how people's impressions of what it's like to struggle in this economy looks like, and how budgets connect to that. And that's a hard process because that requires a much broader conversation than typically we have on the nightly news."

Even before he was elected president, Obama campaigned on the promise of wealth redistribution. Throughout his presidency Obama has been a champion of the middle class and an adversary of the wealthy. When he called for tax hikes on the wealthy in September 2011, he insisted it was "not class warfare," but "fairness."

In an August 2013 speech, he railed against "entrenched interests, those who benefit from an unjust status quo, (who) resisted any government efforts to give working families a fair deal."

And since 2013, he's talked repeatedly about income inequality, calling it an "issue that we have to tackle head on" by raising the minimum 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 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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Obamacare:  A game of chicken coming up?

By Larry Levitt, writing for the AMA

 The game of chicken, which was popularized in the 1950s movie Rebel Without a Cause, has many variants, but the basic design goes like this: players involved in a conflict of some sort try not to yield in the hope that the other player will yield first. But the worst and potentially catastrophic outcome is when no one yields.

After hearing oral arguments on March 4, the US Supreme Court (aka SCOTUS) is deliberating in King v Burwell, a case that has the potential to unleash a massive game of chicken around the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

 The case centers (http://bit.ly/1FEWZu4) on circumstances related to premium subsidies under the ACA, which are now available to people with low and moderate incomes in all states. King v Burwell challenges the legality of subsidies in states where the federal government set up an exchange because the state declined to set up its own health insurance marketplace.

 The consequences (http://bit.ly/1ERCica)of a decision in favor of the challengers would be swift and severe:

Subsidies would end—likely within a month of a decision, which is expected in late June—for about 7.5 million people who now qualify for them in the 34 states not running their own marketplaces (in the 17 state-based marketplaces, nothing would change and subsidies would continue).

The premiums these 7.5 million people pay for insurance, would rise from an average of $105 (after taking the subsidies into account) to $374 per month, an increase of 256%.

People who are sick and know they need insurance would likely work hard to find a way to keep it, but those who are healthy would likely drop it. The ACA’s individual mandate—which is the stick to get healthy people to enroll, working hand-in-hand with the carrot of the subsidies—would be largely ineffective. That’s because 83% of uninsured individuals who are currently eligible for subsidies would be exempt from the requirement to have coverage because it would be unaffordable without the subsidies.

The result in affected states would be a classic “death spiral.” Premiums would rise, more healthy people would drop their coverage, and that in turn would cause premiums to rise even more. This would destabilize the whole individual market in these states because insurers are required to set premiums within a state based on their entire individual market business, not just people buying through the marketplace.

No one will want to yield in this scenario. But the consequences of no one yielding are indeed dire.

The important thing to understand about the King v Burwell case is that it does not (at least as it’s been argued before the Court) involve the constitutionality of the ACA. Rather, it’s a matter of statutory interpretation: did the Internal Revenue Service have the authority under the law to provide subsidies in all states?

That means with just a few strokes on the keyboard, Congress could clarify that subsidies should be provided to people in state-based and federal marketplaces alike. Such a swerve would avoid a catastrophe quickly and easily. But with many Republicans in Congress adamantly opposed to Obamacare, no one expects such a yield.

Enter the 34 governors and state legislatures that have not set up their own marketplaces under the ACA. If they were to yield and create state-based marketplaces, they would render moot a possible Supreme Court ruling against subsidies in states without their own exchange. To be sure, there would be strong pressure on states to take this route. Many of their residents would lose insurance if they don’t, and they would be turning their backs on about $2 billion in federal aid (http://bit.ly/1BzrP11) each month. And they would avert a destabilization of their individual insurance market.

Some states have indicated they are considering this route (http://wapo.st/1E0fGrr) However, others have said they will not participate (http://reut.rs/1vB3FSs) in the implementation of Obamacare, which remains a controversial law.

There are also substantial logistical challenges involved in creating a marketplace quickly, even for those states that want to do so. The current state-based marketplaces took years to set up, and they benefited from federal start-up grants that no longer exist. The federal government would likely make it as easy as possible within legal constraints for states to qualify, including making healthcare.gov available as an enrollment and eligibility system, much as they have done for Oregon, Nevada, and New Mexico (http://bit.ly/1935uCu). But state-based marketplaces still couldn’t spring up in time, unless the Court issued a stay—which legal experts consider unlikely (http://bit.ly/19AKxzM)—or Congress temporarily extended the subsidies (http://on.wsj.com/1FC9Opo).

A temporary extension of the subsidies would also give Congress time to consider tweaks to the ACA that it might enact in exchange for continuing subsidies permanently, or more far-reaching replacement plans (as have been floated recently by Republican leaders in the Senate (http://wapo.st/1GEv7Fq) and House [http://on.wsj.com/1EIJIAp]).

If Congress musters the votes for one of these alternative strategies, it will be up to President Obama to decide whether to allow potentially significant changes to his signature domestic achievement or keep driving straight ahead in the hopes that Congress or the states yield.

The justices will be deliberating over the next several months, with a decision expected the end of June. In the meantime, outside the courthouse, all the interested parties undoubtedly will be working to frame what a court ruling would mean and who is to blame for the consequences, trying to get someone else to swerve away first. Given the unpredictability of how this might play out, we probably won’t know who (if anyone) is going to yield until they do it.

SOURCE

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Are State ACA Exchanges Breaking the Law Just to Keep Afloat?

The 16 states with ObamaCare exchanges have each had access to hundreds of millions of dollars in grant money from the federal government to help establish a successful marketplace. And yet, many are finding themselves struggling with high deficits and low enrollment.

This has led the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to issue a warning that states may be using the federal grant money illegally. Section 1311 of the Affordable Care Act not only requires state exchanges to be financially self-sustaining this year, but it also prohibits states from covering any operational expenses with the federal grant money. But since states are facing such dismal financial conditions, the Inspector General suspects that some states have no other alternatives to keep their exchanges afloat.

California, for example, received a whopping $1 billion in “Exchange Establishment Grants,” but still faces a huge deficit and low enrollment. In total, states with an exchange received $3.9 billion in these grants for the sole purpose of achieving self-sufficiency, but at least half of them are facing severe financial conditions.

In other words, it’s clear that some states will violate the law by failing to become self-sufficient this year. It’s also likely that many of them are currently violating the law by using federal grant money in order to keep their operations funded.

Given these facts, none of the 34 states currently using a federal marketplace should even consider setting up their own. After all, the law prohibits federal grants from being made available to states after January 1, 2015. So, whereas the other states had access to $3.9 billion in federal establishment grants just to get their flimsy marketplaces off the ground, these new states would have to do so with virtually nothing from Washington DC.

And yet, there are already people urging states to set up an exchange if King v. Burwell strikes down federal subsidies to enrollees in federal exchanges. They argue that these subsidies are essential for individuals and that the only way to keep them is for states to have their own exchange.

These arguments totally overlook the fact that state exchanges are likely resorting to illegal methods (knowingly or not) just to fund their exchange’s everyday operations. In other words, setting up an exchange hasn’t exactly been the stroll in the park that these proponents like to convey. For instance, Oregon's exchange was so terrible that they passed legislation to get rid of it, and several other states appear to be on the same exact path.

The best way to fix ObamaCare is to repeal it outright. If King v. Burwell results in more states establishing an exchange, then outright repeal will become virtually impossible.

SOURCE

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Liberal Gun Control Ruins Another Life

I want to introduce you to Steffon Lamont Josey. He is a 24-year old New Jersey resident who aspires to become a police officer. He has excellent test scores that would easily qualify him to become a police officer and he is man of excellent character.

But on one fateful day two years ago, his future completely changed.

Steffon is owns a legal handgun. On September 30, 2013, he was checking his handgun in the garage when his younger sister surprised him. He instinctively put the pistol in his glove compartment so she wouldn’t see it. He always tried to keep the gun out of sight and locked away from his younger sister.

Later that day, he was driving to meet his fiancée and was pulled over by a police officer. When Josey reached to get his insurance and registration cards, he remembered: The handgun was still in the glove compartment.

In most states in the country, this wouldn’t be a huge problem. Yes, it is overall a bad idea to have a gun in the glove compartment and some states do have laws forbidding it. The last thing you want is for a police officer to see you reaching for a gun.

But in most states, it is completely legal for trained and qualified people to carry a loaded gun in the car.

At first, the police officer simply confiscated the weapon and issued Josey a summons. But when the young man went to the police station to pick up his gun, he had handcuffs slapped on his wrists. He was able to plead the charges down but Steffon Lamont Josey is still a felon and still barred from becoming a police officer. His life is ruined unless Chris Christie pardons him.

The Second Amendment is a crime in New Jersey, just like it is a crime in other liberal states.

This young man had a bright future ahead of him and because of one mistake, he is going to be a felon for the rest of his life. It’s time to put a stop to this madness. The Founders wrote that the right to “keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” and yet we continue to allow these liberal state legislatures to infringe on this fundamental right!

It may have taken 223 years, but in 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in McDonald v. Chicago that the Second Amendment applies to local and state governments just as much as the Federal government.

Yet today, more than 26.15% of all Americans live under a state regime that prohibits them from bearing arms for self-defense.

Imagine if we were talking about another Constitutional right. What do you think the reaction would be if 26% of Americans weren’t allowed to freely worship or were denied a trial by jury?

We would be up in arms. Yet when it comes to the Second Amendment, we have sat by and allowed liberal state legislators to pick away at it little by little until there’s nothing left.

New Jersey’s gun control laws resemble Nazi Germany more than they resemble Free America.

SOURCE

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A predatory Federal bureaucracy in YOUR America

Federal agents stole $16,000 from a kid on his way to Los Angeles to make a music video

Joseph Rivers is a 22-year-old who has a dream of making a music video. With help from his supportive family, he persevered and saved, raising $16,000 in cash to leave his hometown in Michigan for Los Angeles to see his dream become reality.

Rivers' dream came crashing down on April 15 when federal agents seized the $16,000 based on the mere suspicion that it was connected to drug activity. Agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) boarded the Amtrak train in Albuquerque, New Mexico and began quizzing passengers about their travel. Believing he had nothing to hide, Rivers, an African-American, answered their questions and consented to a search. Agents found the cash and seized it. Rivers tried to tell the agents his story, but his words fell on deaf ears.

"I even allowed him to call my mother, a military veteran and [hospital] coordinator, to corroborate my story," Rivers told the Albuquerque Journal. "Even with all of this, the officers decided to take my money because he stated that he believed that the money was involved in some type of narcotic activity."

Not only was his dream of making a music video destroyed by these overzealous DEA agents, the seizure of the cash left Rivers without any money to survive once he reached Los Angeles. "I told [the DEA agents] I had no money and no means to survive in Los Angeles if they took my money," said Rivers. "They informed me that it was my responsibility to figure out how I was going to do that."

Rivers was not arrested, he was never even charged with a crime. But in the eyes of the DEA agents, his money was connected to illicit activity. Although New Mexico recently banned civil asset forfeiture, requiring a criminal conviction before property can be subject to forfeiture proceedings, the law applies only to state and local law enforcement. The DEA is a federal agency, and it operates under federal civil asset forfeiture laws, a form of government overreach that often deprives innocent people of their property or cash.

The "presumption of innocence" is a bedrock principle of the American legal system. The government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an individual is guilty of a crime before meting out a punishment. This principle is reversed in civil asset forfeiture proceedings, property and cash accused of connection to a crime are presumed guilty. federal government need only meet a low standard of evidence, preponderance of the evidence. The property owner, however, must prove that the seized items are innocent to get them back. This involves a lengthy and costly legal fight from which most walk away, often allowing the government to keep a large portion of the cash as long as they can get a portion back.

Although he was defending seizures without a criminal conviction, an Albuquerque-based DEA official confirmed this perversion of the justice system. "We don’t have to prove that the person is guilty," he told the Albuquerque Journal in defense of the seizure. "It’s that the money is presumed to be guilty."

The Fifth Amendment guarantees that "[n]o person...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," but civil asset forfeiture violates this basic constitutional principle.

Rivers' lawyer, Michael Pancer, believes the actions of these overzealous law enforcement agents are predatory. "They have made a practice of doing searches without probable cause, convincing innocent people to give them consent [to search their bags],” Pancer told the ABQ Free Press. "If there is a fair amount of cash they seize it and wait to see what the person who lost it does. Some individuals they’ve taken money from are not acquainted with the legal system and they don’t know that they can try to get the money back."

Rivers' situation may not be an isolated incident for the DEA in Albuquerque. The ABQ Free Press reports that the DEA has seized nearly $1 million from Amtrak passengers over two years.

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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Leftism and the causal arrow

A group of psychologists have recently done some new research on an old topic -- status striving.  They see the desire to be thought well of by others as a basic and important human motive.  I don't argue with that as I have long argued that such a motive is what drives a lot of Leftism.  I have argued that such a need is so strong among Leftists that it borders on clinical narcissism.

So I was disappointed to see that they had correlated that need with all sorts of things EXCEPT politics.  I can't help wondering if that was deliberate -- but asking people their politics can be tricky so maybe not.

Their research rediscovered along the way something that pops up  in the medical literature almost every time it is examined: Being of lower socio-economic status goes with poorer health.  I will follow the journal abstract below with some comments about that:

Is the desire for status a fundamental human motive? A review of the empirical literature.

By Anderson, Cameron et al.

Abstract

The current review evaluates the status hypothesis, which states that that the desire for status is a fundamental motive. Status is defined as the respect, admiration, and voluntary deference individuals are afforded by others. It is distinct from related constructs such as power, financial success, and social belongingness. A review of diverse literatures lent support to the status hypothesis: People’s subjective well-being, self-esteem, and mental and physical health appear to depend on the level of status they are accorded by others.

People engage in a wide range of goal-directed activities to manage their status, aided by myriad cognitive, behavioral, and affective processes; for example, they vigilantly monitor the status dynamics in their social environment, strive to appear socially valuable, prefer and select social environments that offer them higher status, and react strongly when their status is threatened.

The desire for status also does not appear to be a mere derivative of the need to belong, as some theorists have speculated.

Finally, the importance of status was observed across individuals who differed in culture, gender, age, and personality, supporting the universality of the status motive. Therefore, taken as a whole, the relevant evidence suggests that the desire for status is indeed fundamental.

Psychological Bulletin.  2015  Volume 141, Issue 3 (May). Pages 574-601

Something I have difficulty with are the following statements from the body of their article:

Perhaps the strongest test of the status hypothesis is whether the possession of low status impacts health. If so, this would suggest that failing to satisfy the desire for status produces consequences that extend beyond decreased levels of happiness and dampened feelings of self-worth. It would suggest that status motive is powerful enough that when it is thwarted, individuals begin to suffer from psychological and physical pathology......

Evidence from multiple research literatures suggests that low status contributes to poor health. People with low status in their community exhibit higher rates of psychological disturbances, such as depression and anxiety, and experience physical health problems, such as higher blood pressure and a greater susceptibility to infectious disease. Proxies of low status, such as lower organizational rank and the tendency to behave in deferential ways, were also linked to mental and physical illness. Taken together, the reviewed evidence suggests that being accorded low status by others not only damages subjective well-being and self-esteem, it also promotes psychological and physical pathology.

I think they have got it ass-backwards. I think the causal arrow is pointing the other way.  They propose that low status --> poor health, while I would argue that poor health --> low status (where the arrow is read as "causes").  I think it is poor health that holds you back in life and thus leads to a realistic perception in others that you are not a person of high status.  And being perceived as a person of low status will usually lead to the person concerned recognizing that he is perceived in that way.

There is no doubt that poor health DOES hold you back in various ways so Occams Razor would tell us that that is a sufficient explanation for the observed correlations.  The onus is on the researchers to show that there is some effect in the other direction.  I cannot see where they have shown that. And since they see the correlation with health as the key test of their theory we are entitled to give the old Scottish verdict of "not proven" to their overall claims.  They are probably right but have not shown it well.  They should be more careful about jumping to conclusions.  Assuming the direction of the causal  arrow is however a besetting sin in the research literature. They are far from alone in seeing only what they expect to see.

So in any future research into status striving, it would be unwise to use state of health as an index of it.

Their conclusion about health is of course classic Leftist crocodile tears: It is a variation on "Poverty hurts the poor", or, "being poor is bad for you".  Their variation is "being of low status is bad for you".  I think I have shown that such a conclusion is not warranted by their findings

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Another stupid Leftist assumption about the causal arrow

The crocodile tears never stop.  Once again we are being told that being poor is bad for you.  I will follow the article below with some comments

Stress can leave damaging and lasting imprints on the genes of the urban poor.  This is according to a new study that claims poor people's DNA is declining in quality as a result of difficult upbringings.

The results are based on the finding that people in disadvantaged environments have shorter telomeres — DNA sequences that generally shrink with age — than their advantaged peers.

Previous research has found telomere length can reliably predict life expectancy in humans.

The study found that low-income residents of Detroit, no matter their race, have shorter telomeres than the national average.

'There are effects of living in high-poverty, racially segregated neighbourhoods,' Dr Arline Geronimus, a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study said in an interview with The Huffington Post.

Within this group, how race-ethnicity and income were associated with telomere length varied dramatically.

SOURCE

There are reasons for being poor -- being dumb, being lazy, having poor social skills, being in bad health etc.  So assuming that being poor makes you dumb or unhealthy (etc.) gets it ass-backwards.  The researchers above mistake the direction of the causal arrow.  They claim poverty --> poor health, while I would argue that poor health --> poverty.

The researchers simply failed to ask WHY people are poor. They failed to look at the circumstances antecedent to their research -- a politically incorrect enquiry, I guess. Had they done that they would have seen that their conclusion is the unlikely one.

Their data show only that in poor people there is a lot of ill health -- which is in fact probably the most reliable finding in medical research.  Whatever ailment medical researchers look at, it is generally found to be most frequent among people of low socio-economic status.  But correlation is not causation so that repeated finding permits NO causal conclusions whatever.  Only looking at the big picture behind the findings can suggest causal explanations.  And that poor health is in general a considerable barrier to getting rich can hardly be disputed --- JR
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Being tall has many advantages

It has been known for over 50 years that high IQ people are taller and have better health.  So I have long argued that this is evidence of a general syndrome of greater evolutionary fitness -- of which IQ is just one marker.  The findings below are rather strong evidence in support of that.  All men are NOT equal.  Nature is in fact rather unfair.  Wise people live with that

Being tall may come with practical problems, such as the lack of legroom on aeroplanes, but there are some perks, too. Last month, researchers at Ohio State University reported that tall people are, on average, cleverer and have better social skills.

They said this could explain why studies in the past have found that tall people tend to earn more — as much as an extra £100,000 over a 30-year career.

That study followed research showing tall people are less likely to develop heart disease than short people. In fact height is now attracting a great deal of attention as a predictor of future health, affecting your risk of a range of diseases, from dementia to stroke.

A number of studies suggest that height is linked to the risk of developing dementia. Perhaps the strongest evidence for this came from a study published last November in the British Journal of Psychiatry, which analysed data from 18 studies.

The team found that men under 5ft 6in (167cm) had a 36 per cent higher risk of dementia than men over 5ft 10in (177cm).

That doesn’t mean being short causes dementia. Shorter height can be associated with certain pressures in early life, such as stress, illness or poor nutrition, which may predispose someone to dementia, says lead author Dr Tom Russ, lecturer in old age psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh.

He says early life stresses may affect a person’s cognitive reserve — the brain’s resistance to age-related damage. ‘People think of dementia as a disease of old age, but this suggests you are accumulating risk factors throughout the course of your life.’

When it comes to heart health, the news for shorter people may not be great, either. It seems they may also be more prone to heart disease, according to research published last month by the University of Leicester.

The researchers found a 5ft (153cm) tall person had a 32 per cent higher risk of heart disease than someone who is 5ft 6in (167cm).

This association isn’t new. Analysis of data from more than a million people, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in 2012, found clear links between shortness and higher risk of dying from heart disease, stroke and heart failure.

The latest research suggests the link is down to genes, rather than environmental factors such as diet. The team looked at 180 genetic variants that are known to control height, and found that those variants linked with shorter stature also had an effect on cholesterol, fat levels and overall heart disease risk.

SOURCE

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Virginia: African refugee from Togo in US for nine days before attempted rape



Tchalim Koboya Lidawo, your friendly refugee next door?  He gets only ten years for attempted rape?  If a passerby hadn’t come along it wouldn’t have only been “attempted.”

By the way, I wondered if he was a legitimate ‘refugee.’ or here through some other legal program.  So, I checked the State Department stats and was surprised to find that we do take refugees from Togo.  Why?

So much for that security screening the US State Department and its contractors are always bragging about!

Leesburg, Va. – A West African man who attempted to rape a woman just nine days after arriving in the United States has been sentenced to ten years in prison.  Tchalim Koboya Lidawo pleaded no contest to two counts of attempted rape and one count of abduction with force in connection to an incident that occurred on December 4th, 2014, the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office said.

The incident occurred at an Ashburn apartment complex, according to officials. The victim told law enforcement that she was taking out her trash when Lidawo approached her near the dumpster. He grabbed the victim and dragged her into some nearby woods, officials said.  A struggle ensued, the victim fell down, and Lidawo climbed on top of her, according to the attorney’s office said.

A passerby heard the victim’s screams and approached, causing Lidawo to get up and run into the woods. The victim provided police with a description of Lidawo, leading to his arrest.

Lidawo was sentenced to ten years with additional five years of suspended time according to officials. He must also pay a $5,000 fine.

As a native of Togo, Lidawo may be removed from the United States when he is released.  [He won’t be!]  So now we get to pay for his prison stay!

I think there should be a requirement that the US State Department and its contractors pay for the legal costs of criminal trials and imprisonment for every refugee who commits a crime.  Of course, that would still come out of our pockets (the taxpayers), but it would send a very important message to the public.

SOURCE

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Mediterranean Diet and Age-Related Cognitive Decline: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Ancel Keys' mistaken claims (from the 1950s!) about the wonders of the Mediterranean diet seem to have everlasting life so it always provokes me when they pop up anew.  But I can't justify reproducing or saying much about this study.  They found that elderly Spaniards -- who had presumably been on a Mediterranean diet anyhow -- were slightly less likely to go demented if they were given extra olive oil and nuts.  So it is not at all clear that it is a study of the Mediterranean diet. It seems to be a study of oil and nuts.

They used a large range of tests to assess mental function but the effect of the intervention on test scores was in all cases only marginally significant statistically, despite the large sample size.  Composites of the tests got much better statistical significance but the effects remained very small.  Suffice it to say that it would be incautious to draw any general conclusions from this rather idiosyncratic study.

It's all HERE

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 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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