A puzzle solved

During my 20 year career doing survey research, the topic I looked at most often was authoritarianism -- or something allegedly related to it.  As a libertarian, authoritarianism is anathema to me and I wanted to know why authoritarians are like that. See here.

It was of course obvious to anyone with an awareness of history that Leftism was by far the chief source of authoritarianism in our society. Leftists never stop telling other people what to do and the authoritarian governments of the 20th centuty all had socialist inspirations, with THE great authoritarian regime of the 20th century -- the Soviet Union -- being undisputably Leftist. 

The most frequent authoritarian regimes were however Fascist, regimes that combined socialism with some form of nationalism -- Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Peron etc.  Even the South American military dictatorships were Bolivarist, which was an early form of Fascism. Bolivar believed that the masses need to be "educated" and generally dominated by a self-chosen elite.  Bolivarism emphasizes the common good over the individual. And the remaining explicitly Bolivarist regime -- Venezuela today -- is virtually and disastrously Communist.

So with the obvious leaning towards authoritarianism among Leftists, one would have expected that in their answers to my questionnaires Leftist would have heartily endorsed statements praising authority and authoritarianism.  But they did not.  They were mostly middle of the road in their responses about authoritarianism.

That is no surprise to any psychologist.  The attitude/behaviour gap is very well known among psychologists. And I think we all know of people who say one thing and do another.

But what was the mental process behind that sort of thing?  HOW do people manage to say one thing and do another?  Psychologists would normally suspect social desirability responding or "faking good".  Authoritarianism has a bad name so people would be reluctant to endorse it.  It is a conscious avoidance of sounding bad.

But psychologists can detect that.  They have sets of questions that normally reveal that social desirability responding is going on.  And I of course included such questions in my surveys.  So did the Leftists show high levels of social desirability responding?  They did not. It looked like they were expressing an honest opinion.  But their behaviour reveals what they actually think so how come?

I used to explain it by saying that they know that their real thoughts are so dismal that they dare not admit them -- but it was still a puzzle that they scored normal on the social desirability measures.  I now think I know why.

It goes back to the nature of Leftism.  The are ALWAYS acting a part.  They are always claiming compassionate and tolerant values while boiling with hate inside.  They have to do that in order to get any kind of support.  Hate is not attractive to most people. But that hate does overflow into view at times.  The abuse and punitiveness directed towards politically incorrect people is a major case in point.  And the most politically incorrect person on the planet is undoubtedly President Trump.  And the incessant and seething rage directed towards him is now a wonder.  It reveals the Left as very worrying people.  And they never cease looking for ways in which they might unseat him.

So presenting as kind and compassionate what is in fact rage-motivated is a pretty tough requirement and it is only by a lifetime of pretence that it can be to some extent achieved.  And that habit of self presentation extends easily into answering political questionnaires.  What they are doing in answering the questionnaires is normal for them and is probably perceived as virtuous.  It requires no special pretence or effort. It is normal. It is a habit to them to misrepresent their aims and thoughts.

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‘Trumpism’ may be a myth but grassroots contempt for the elites is real

Does Donald Trump’s movement exist outside of Donald Trump himself?

It’s a question on the minds of many ever since Trump confirmed he was serious about running for president in early 2015. Some questioned whether any such movement ever actually materialized but after two years of  Donald Trumpseeing Trump on TV at all hours of the day and witnessing him improbably (to some) win America’s quadrennial national election last year it’s safe to say Trump is the real deal.

Of course the president is just the stylized living embodiment of what he represents, which is essentially the issue portfolio of the Tea (Taxed Enough Already) Party uprising of 2010 and through extension, the conservative movement. It’s a bit odd to say so considering Trump himself is no ideological conservative and seems much more enthralled with breaking the system (a.k.a. draining the swamp) and taking names than he does with making government smaller and less intrusive.

Regardless of the status of Trump, many wonder whether the movement he created carries over to other politicians or if it’s entirely confined to him. After last week’s Alabama GOP primary run-off (won by Judge Roy Moore) some believe Trump the man may not matter as much anymore.

W. James Antle III wrote at the Washington Examiner last week, “If Luther Strange hadn't accepted Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley's appointment to the Senate seat once held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, there's a good chance he or someone else might have beaten Roy Moore in the Republican primary runoff Tuesday night.

“The perception, fair or not, that there was some sort of corrupt bargain between Bentley and Strange loomed larger in the race than any grand ideological struggle between nationalists and globalists. So in that sense, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon's victory lap is premature.

“But there are signs that ‘the populist nationalist conservative revolt’ Bannon describes is starting to exist independently of President Trump, even if it is too early to determine whether it will ever take hold of a significant section of the Republican Party. Some of them are popping up in unusual places.”

In other words, Antle implies Moore may not have beaten a less tarnished opponent if Trump’s distinctive transformation of conservative political culture had never taken place. The president’s endorsement (of Strange) obviously didn’t sway the results of the contest but the passion for overturning the proverbial tables of the ruling class money-changers was so strong that people set aside their common sense to elevate a revolutionary take-no-prisoners conservative crusader like Roy Moore.

Would they have done so even if Trump had never entered politics? I think yes.

It’s all too easy to forget that the movement people now label “Trumpism” launched long ago, perhaps as early as the financial crisis of 2008 when GOP presidential nominee John McCain abruptly suspended his campaign and all-but handed the presidency to a first-term lightweight Democrat senator from Illinois with a golden speaking voice and a penchant for dribbling lofty rhetoric such as “Hope and Change.”

Upon further consideration the voter angst could’ve even begun the year before when wishy-washy Republicans led by John McCain and George W. Bush cut an amnesty deal with Teddy Kennedy and the congressional Democrat majorities that if enacted would have opened the floodgates to an avalanche of both legal and illegal immigrants. This seemed to be the point where the grassroots really began stirring, a restlessness that remains in evidence today.

That “bipartisan” sellout was enough to get people to consider active participation in politics as a necessity, not a privilege. 2007’s amnesty push also shattered the falsely advanced notion that “bipartisan” cooperation always produces good legislation and happy outcomes. Far from it. A lot of Republicans learned an important lesson from those days roughly a decade ago (and there was also a good deal of opposition to the amnesty effort from leftist unions as well).

But regardless of the movement’s founding point, Trump recognized there was a huge opening for someone outside the political system to come in and break the gridlock. Hence the New York real estate developer and reality TV star began his campaign by hammering both parties and the ruling class in Washington. Trump’s was just as much of a battle against the GOP elites as the Democrats and the people understood it.

It was clear from the outset that Trump’s wasn’t a purely Republican undertaking – it was an effort predicated on confronting the Washington establishment and ruling class. Judging by the elites’ reaction to Trump and his supporters, the contempt was mutual. Poor Crooked Hillary Clinton got caught up in the massive food fight over the status quo in government. As a leading representative of the privileged she had no strategy other than to propose dumping more money into various programs, advancing the liberal social agenda and dividing the nation into subgroups who hated each other.

Hillary bet her subgroups were bigger than Trump’s. She might’ve been correct with the popular vote but not where it counts in the Electoral College. Divide and conquer for Hillary resulted in her guzzling lots of chardonnay after the election and writing a book that no one likes.

As for the Republicans, everyone’s speculating who’s now in control of the party.

Caitlin Huey-Burns reported at Real Clear Politics, “Polling bears out Trump's influence. A recent survey by NBC/Wall Street Journal found a significant divide between Republican Party supporters and Trump supporters. For example, while 51 percent of party supporters are satisfied with GOP leaders, only 27 percent of Trump supporters are satisfied with them. Just 36 percent of party supporters had a positive view of Mitch McConnell, but only 13 percent of Trump supporters viewed him positively.

“’Its deep, vitriolic and abiding,’ says one conservative operative about this dislike. ‘I've never seen the gulf this deep or this broad between Republican leadership and the rank-and-file Republican voter. It's a dramatic break.’”

Again, the rift between the grassroots and the GOP congressional establishment has endured for years but the media and Republican leaders talk as though it’s sprung up only on Trump’s watch.

Perhaps the first manifestation of it (at least in recent times) was in 2010 when Utah Republicans took it upon themselves to nominate Mike Lee for senate rather than honor the re-election bid of establishment Senator Bob Bennett at the state party convention. Then, in 2012, long-time Republican “bipartisan” collaborator Senator Dick Lugar of Indiana was voted out in a primary.

Republican voters in these election years also chose conservative challengers in Colorado, Nevada, Delaware and Missouri – fine people who would’ve made excellent senators if only the party ruling class had supported them in their general election contests instead of sanctioning the media and Democrats to tear them to shreds. Think of how large the Republican senate majority would be today if only more of a “team” endeavor had been waged on their behalf back then.

Senator Ted Cruz is now in Washington because he waged his own grassroots-based campaign in Texas in 2012. Cruz defeated establishment Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in one of the year’s biggest primary upsets and went on to convincingly win the general election as well.

Cruz’s second-place finish in the 2016 GOP presidential campaign was also almost entirely fueled by grassroots efforts to allow him first to separate himself from the pack and then compete head-to-head with Trump late into the season. Together with fellow outsiders Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina the non-establishment candidates attracted a fairly consistent two-thirds of the Republican primary vote.

Cruz’s conservative campaign generated the same kind of anti-establishment enthusiasm as Trump’s and most of the senator’s supporters easily made the transition to the outsider nominee for his battle against Hillary.

Cruz himself underestimated the depth of grassroots anger at the establishment when he initially refused to endorse Trump at the party convention last year, perhaps thinking that maybe the nasty campaign and differences in personality would allow him to maintain a separate political identity from what was taking place all around Trump.

He couldn’t. The train went forward and Cruz eventually jumped onboard. Trump was elected. The movement carried the day.

Now commentators are saying the voters got exactly what they bargained for in Trump. Jim Geraghty wrote at National Review, “His quick agreement with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi on the debt ceiling was allegedly driven by spite for Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and House speaker Paul Ryan. Is it really surprising that a figure so erratic and temperamental would be unsuccessful in persuading the likes of John McCain, Rand Paul, and Susan Collins to accept a compromise [on healthcare]?

“Trump’s specialty is ‘fighting’ — that is, lashing out at perceived slights, insults, and criticism. It doesn’t change law, set policy, or last much longer than a news cycle. But it sure makes for good television, and it probably makes a lot of Trump’s supporters feel good. From their perspective, after all, he’s doing just what he said he’d do.”

Geraghty’s is an awful cynical view of Trump for what has turned out to be an unquestionably substantive administration on a number of fronts. But yes, Trump’s figure is at the center of it.

Clearly the answer to the “Trumpism” question is yes, the movement could exist outside of Trump; but it wouldn’t be nearly as successful without his compelling personality to drive it. History suggests voters were ready for Trump even before he climbed into the political ring and they’ll stay motivated until the ruling class is destroyed and the Constitution once again reigns supreme.

Trump will be around a while longer; but the movement will last indefinitely.

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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Does smoking cannabis make people more violent?

The article below summarizes an academic study which claims to show that smoking marijuana causes people to beome more violent.  But I don't think the authors concerned have remotely proved that.  I myself have never smoked anything and I don't intend to so I have no dog in that fight.

I have read a great deal of the studies of the subject and I am reasonably certain that cannabis promotes psychotic delusions --    but violence is another matter.  My experience is that stoned guys are most likely to sit around passively and make profound remarks like: "Wow, man, like wow!"

So what is wrong with the study below?  Mainly the sampling -- or lack of it.  It was a study of patients released from psychiatric hospitals.  Generalizing from very ill people to normals is simply invalid, to put it mildly.

It's a common comment that any correlation between cannabis use and mental illness may simply show that mentally ill people like cannabis.  Mentally ill people are heavy users of tobacco so that is not an unreasonable view.  The patients are simply trying to self-medicate in both cases.

The authors of the current study, however, claim that they can disprove that theory and show that cannabis sends you mad, not the other way around.  But that too is an absurd claim. You can demonstrate cause only by way of a carefully controlled before and after study and that was not done on this occasion. Instead some statistical jiggery pokery was used.  But that finding too is derived from their non-sample so is again overgeneralizing.  The bottom line is that they have no data proving the matter either way.

A final concern is that the authors mainly seem to concern themselves with "skunk" cannabis, which is much stronger than other forms of cannabis and so should be studied separately.  Skunk does indeed appear to be of concern but what is true of it may not be true of all cannabis.  As toxicologists say, the toxicity is in the dose.

The academic article is Persistency of Cannabis Use Predicts Violence following Acute Psychiatric Discharge


Cannabis users are more likely to commit violent crime, pioneering research has shown. It warned those who smoke the drug regularly run an increased risk of using violence against others.

The project is the first to demonstrate that cannabis is not only linked with violent crime but is the cause.

Violent incidents monitored by the study based on the lives of more than 1,100 American psychiatric patients included assaults, attacks with weapons and rapes.

Researchers said that cannabis causes violence and they found no evidence that the link is the other way round – ie that violent people are more likely to use cannabis.

There was no support, they added, for theories put forward by campaigners anxious to free the drug from the taint of links with crime.

The academics said the effect of cannabis use was clear and not diminished by other factors such as patients who were heavy drinkers of alcohol.

The study comes after a series of American states have decriminalised cannabis – despite it being stronger and more potent than the hash smoked by hippies in the Sixties – or made it available for medical use.

The latest study by five researchers from institutes based in Montreal, Canada, examined the lives of 1,136 men and women who were patients at psychiatric hospitals in Missouri, Pittsburgh and Massachusetts.

Records were gathered from interviews carried out every ten weeks for a year after their discharge.

It said patients who were using cannabis at each of these five checks were nearly two-and-a-half times more likely to have turned to violence than those who had not used the drug.

The study pointed to ‘significant findings regarding the adverse effects of cannabis use on violence’.

It found there was a ‘more constant relationship’ between cannabis and violence than between alcohol or cocaine use and violence. The researchers said the link between cannabis and violence was not two-way but ‘uni-directional’.

Contrary to claims that violent people were drawn to use cannabis, researchers found ‘it was cannabis use that predicted future violent behaviour’.

The academics said psychiatrists and medical staff should watch for cannabis users among those who had been in hospital for mental health problems. The team, led by Dr Jules R Dugre, said existing evidence on the links between cannabis and violence was ‘limited’ but their project had ‘clinical and violence risk management implications’.

Kathy Gyngell, a fellow of the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank, welcomed the ‘definitive study’ and called for official action. ‘Government has been seriously negligent,’ she said.

‘Where is the public health campaign on the risks of cannabis? If ministers had any sense they would know that we cannot afford this public health and safety crisis.

‘It must lead the Government to review their community care policy for such potentially violent individuals to better protect the public.’

The study in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry flies in the face of claims of former drugs tsar Professor David Nutt.

He was sacked by the Labour government in 2009 for opposing the decision to reclassify cannabis from Class C to Class B. Prof Nutt has long argued that alcohol was ‘considerably more dangerous’ than the drug.

More than 20 US states have in recent years legalised cannabis for medical purposes.

Four – Colorado, Alaska, Oregon and Washington – have allowed its recreational use.

After the relaxation in 2012 in Colorado, cannabis use by students aged 12 to 18 has become the highest in the country. Figures show 57 per cent tested positive in high school tests.

SOURCE 

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The media is missing the Republican takeover in New England

In this part of the US, people are rooting for Trump more than ever

On Sept. 19, Politico congressional reporter Burgess Everett tweeted that he suddenly “[Remembers Vermont has a Republican governor].” His tweet prompted Seung Min Kim, a fellow Politico reporter who covers the US Senate, to reply that she “[Learns Vermont has a Republican governor].” That, in turn, instigated a response by Wall Street Journal congressional reporter Byron Tau: “[Googles the name of Vermont’s Republican governor].”

To which Phil Scott, Vermont’s Republican governor, responded that he “[Is Vermont’s Republican governor].”

The moment was comical but also insightful, underscoring just how little Washington’s political class knows about who holds the executive power in the Northeast.

Here’s the surprising truth: It’s not the Democrats.

Last November, while most of the country was either cheering Donald Trump’s presidential win or making an appointment with their therapist about how to cope with the results, New Englanders in four out of the region’s six “blue” states — Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maine — woke up the next morning with four Republican governors.

Two of those governorships flipped from blue to red. It was a trend that the Northeast had not seen for a generation, but it received little national attention. (Connecticut and Rhode Island hold their governorship elections in 2018.)

If the reverse had happened, and four Democrats had won governorships in deep red states last year, the news would have been treated quite differently, said Brad Todd, a Washington, DC-based GOP strategist.

“It would have been on the front pages of every major newspaper in the country. And debated for weeks about how it spells the demise of the Republican Party,” Todd said.

Vermont’s Scott won in a landslide, defeating his Democratic opponent by 9 percentage points while facing two political fronts that should have knocked him out of contention: the candidacy of Trump, who was so unpopular in Vermont, he got crushed there by 29 percentage points; and the popularity of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s sitting US senator.

Interestingly, if you drove through Vermont last year, it was not uncommon to see yard signs for both Scott and Sanders in the same yards.

Meanwhile, on a trip to Cambridge, Mass., last month, I couldn’t find anyone who didn’t approve of their Republican Gov. Charlie Baker. From the leafy halls of Harvard to locals grabbing lunch at Charlie’s Kitchen on Eliot Street, everyone I talked to was a Democrat — and everyone gave him high marks as the state’s manager.

It’s not just anecdotal. Polling has consistently shown Baker is the most popular governor in the country; the most recent survey done by Morning Consult in July showed that 71 percent of Massachusetts voters are happy with the job he is doing. Meanwhile, Republican Chris Sununu holds New Hampshire’s governor’s office, while Maine has voted for Paul LePage twice to hold their executive’s suite.

The Republican Party is the only party that is a national party.

In the aftermath of the 2016 electoral — but not popular-vote — win of Trump over Hillary Clinton, Democrats have spent endless time bemoaning their inability to capture the Electoral College. They blame it on a so-called antiquated system that gives greater weight to the states populated by more cows than people. But it really is a symptom of a bigger problem for the Democrats: The Republican Party is the only party that is a national party.

Republicans, at some level, are competing in every state up and down the ballot, while Democrats are not competing anywhere but on the coasts and in the big cities. In short, they are a regionalized party, confined to the most densely populated parts of the nation — more cut off and compartmentalized than the GOP.

But if you read reports by national political reporters, you would assume that progressivism dominates the country’s landscape. “The decision makers, who are close to culture and news, live in places where the Democratic Party’s last bastions are, encased in a bubble that believes everyone thinks like they do and votes like they do,” said Todd.

“Those noncompetitive deep-blue places are the only places they have left where they dominate, but it also happens to be the only places where cultural and media institutions are headquartered,” he added.

Seven years after the Republicans won the House and three years after they gained the US Senate majority, the media/entertainment complex still fails to accept or understand that the majority of this country is center-right. Until these institutions grasp this fact, they will continue to see their viewership drop and their trust erode.

There is a reason this year’s Trump-bashing Emmy Awards saw viewership figures tank for the second year in a row (11.38 million views — down 5 percent from 2015). You can’t expect to hold onto the middle of the country when you spend four hours mocking the choice many of them made for president.

And you can’t expect anyone to trust your sense of judgment and fairness if you treat a GOP winning streak in the Northeast as if it never happened.

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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Use of Firearms in Terrorist Attacks: Differences Between the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand

Below is an article just out in JAMA, a medical journal.  It is typical Leftist bilge.  It describes something troublesome without looking at WHY that bad thing happens.  They have of course not looked at race or race-denominated crime-rates.  Countries with and without large black minorities are in entirely different situations so they are not comparing like with like.  Depending in part on where they live, prudent Americans HAVE to own guns to protect themselves from home invasions and other crimes committed by blacks. So firearms are widely available.  And where they are widely available they will be used


By Robert A. Tessler et al.

Although firearms are used in only a small proportion of terrorist attacks, these highly publicized events shed light on access to weapons and mass shootings. The sociopolitical and cultural context surrounding firearms, including the proportion of individuals owning guns, varies between countries.1 The United States has a higher rate of firearms deaths than other high-income countries.2,3 We compared the proportion of terrorist attacks committed with firearms in the United States with the proportion in other high-income countries. We also compared the lethality of attacks with firearms to those by other means.

Methods:
We queried The Global Terrorism Database from 2002 to 2016.4 Maintained by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, this database incorporates a methodology that includes both machine learning and manual review to abstract high-quality information from more than 1 million daily media reports published worldwide in over 80 languages. The database defines a terrorist attack as the “use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation.”4 For each attack, the location, type, and number of fatalities are collected. The database categorizes weapons as biological, chemical, explosive, fake weapons, firearms, incendiary (eg, arson), melee, sabotage equipment, vehicle (nonexplosive), other, and unknown.

To avoid calculating proportions in countries with few data points, we calculated the proportion of attacks involving firearms among countries in the top 75th percentile (10 attacks or more) over the study period. The number of fatalities per attack was calculated by weapon type. Of the 23 countries with at least 1 attack, 17 were in the upper 75th percentile of total attacks; the countries are listed in footnote “d” in the Table. We estimated incidence rate ratios (IRRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) per fatality in the attack with a Poisson distribution for attacks using firearms, vehicle/melee, incendiary, or biological/chemical weapons compared with explosives.

Results:
From 2002 through 2016, the database captured 2817 terrorist attacks in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, of which 2403 (85.3%) were in Western Europe and 329 (11.7%) in the United States. The Table details the count of attacks by weapon used in country or region and year. Nearly all attacks (n = 2788, 99.0%) occurred in countries with 10 or more attacks. The types of attacks were as follows: explosives (n = 1379, 49.0%), incendiary (n = 1015, 36.0%), firearms (n = 260, 9.2%), vehicle/melee (n = 151, 5.4%), and miscellaneous (n = 88, 3.1%). In 2015 and 2016, compared with earlier years, there were notable increases in attacks involving vehicle/melee in the United States and Western Europe.

The Figure, A shows the proportion of firearms attacks among countries with 10 or more attacks, with the United States at 20.4% (n = 67) followed by the Netherlands at 14.3% (n = 3) (χ2 for all countries, P < .001). In the 2817 attacks, there were 1031 fatalities, of which 566 (54.9%) were attributed to firearms. The Figure, B shows the number of fatalities per attack by weapon type. Among all weapon types compared with explosives, the IRR per fatality was 4.75 (95% CI, 4.18-5.39) for attacks with firearms, 1.21 (95% CI, 0.91-1.59) for vehicle/melee, and 0.05 (95% CI, 0.03-0.08) for incendiaries.

Discussion:
Although firearms were used in fewer than 10% of terrorist attacks between 2002 and 2016, they accounted for about 55% of the fatalities. Among countries with 10 or more attacks, the proportion involving firearms in the United States was higher than in any other nation. Moreover, the risk of fatality was considerably higher in attacks committed with firearms than in attacks using other weapons.

In the United States and other countries, government policies and legislative efforts to protect citizens from terrorism should consider the proportions and lethality of terrorist attacks committed with firearms.

JAMA Intern Med. Published online October 6, 2017. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2017.5723



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Illegal Immigration Costs U.S. Taxpayers a Stunning $134.9 Billion a Year

Illegal immigration costs American taxpayers a mind-boggling $134.9 billion annually, according to a detailed analysis of federal, state and local programs that include education, medical, law enforcement and welfare. Conducted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a Washington D.C. nonprofit dedicated to studying immigration issues, the in-depth probe reveals that state and local taxpayers get stuck with an overwhelming chunk-$116 billion-of the burden. State and local expenditures for services provided to illegal aliens total $88.9 billion and federal expenditures $45.8 billion, the analysis found. For those who claim illegal immigrants contribute by paying taxes, government figures show that only $19 billion was recouped by Uncle Sam.

"A continually growing population of illegal aliens, along with the federal government's ineffective efforts to secure our borders, present significant national security and public safety threats to the United States," the FAIR report states. "They also have a severely negative impact on the nation's taxpayers at the local, state, and national levels. Illegal immigration costs Americans billions of dollars each year. Illegal aliens are net consumers of taxpayer-funded services and the limited taxes paid by some segments of the illegal alien population are, in no way, significant enough to offset the growing financial burdens imposed on U.S. taxpayers by massive numbers of uninvited guests." This defies a myth, long promoted by influential open border groups, that illegal aliens pay their fair share of taxes.

More than 12.5 million illegal immigrants and their estimated 4.2 million citizen children benefit from the U.S. government's generosity. The biggest expenditure ($17.14 billion) on the federal level is for medical services, which include uncompensated hospital costs, Medicaid births, Medicaid fraud and Medicaid benefits for U.S.-born children (anchor babies) of illegal immigrants. The second-largest federal expenditure is law enforcement and justice ($13.15 billion), which includes incarceration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations and an alien assistance program. The feds spend $8 billion on general government programs and $5.85 billion on welfare, which consists of free school meals, food stamps, a supplemental nutrition program known as Women Infants and Children (WIC) and temporary assistance for needy families. FAIR points out the profound impact that illegal immigration has on programs intended to provide services exclusively to low-income Americans.

For state and local governments education is by far the largest expense, an eye-popping $44.4 billion that goes mostly to K-12 public schools nationwide, though over a billion of it is spent on college tuition assistance. General public services, described as expenses associated with garbage collection, fire departments and other locally-funded services total $18.5 billion for illegal aliens, the analysis found. Medical expenses came in third ($12.1 billion) for state and local governments and law enforcement ($10.8 billion) in fourth. FAIR researchers determined that a large percentage of illegal aliens work in the underground economy and frequently avoid paying income tax, leaving law-abiding, taxpaying Americans to foot the exorbitant tab for public services. The report also breaks down expenditures by state, with the top four spenders to provide illegal alien benefits California ($23 billion), Texas ($10.9 billion), New York ($7.5 billion) and Florida ($6.3 billion).

Over the years Judicial Watch has reported on a variety of studies and assessments involving the huge cost of supporting illegal immigrants, but this appears to be the most thorough and alarming in recent memory. The breakdown by category, state and federal services offers an incredibly detailed account of a major crisis perpetuated by a famously porous southern border. As FAIR writes in its report, it's not just about money though the cost of supporting illegal immigrants should outrage every legal U.S. resident and American citizen.

"A continually growing population of illegal aliens, along with the federal government's ineffective efforts to secure our borders, present significant national security and public safety threats to the United States," FAIR writes. Judicial Watch has also extensively covered the dire national security crisis along the Mexican border, including an investigative series documenting how Islamic terrorists have joined forces with Mexican drug cartels to infiltrate-and attack-the United States.

SOURCE

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U.S. Army STILL hasn't booted communist soldier

In recent weeks, photos of Army 2nd Lt. Spenser Rapone promoting communism in uniform began circulating the internet.

Typically barred from promoting political affiliations while in uniform, Rapone's actions were a major departure from acceptable military conduct. Even worse, the ideology he espouses is not only dangerous, but a moral enemy of the country he swore to protect.

Rightfully, many military leaders condemned the photos. For their part, West Point and the Army opened up an investigation into Rapone's conduct.

However, one GOP U.S. Senator is among many who don't think this is enough. In fact, Florida Senator Marco Rubio is demanding that the Army immediately revoke Rapone's commission.

    Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is demanding West Point officials revoke the commission of an officer who posted photos of himself with pro-communist messages hidden under his graduation uniform, calling it an "extreme embarrassment" for the military.

    In a letter to acting Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy Tuesday, the Republican senator also questioned whether service officials ignored signs of misconduct and potential insubordination during the cadet's time at the U.S. Military Academy.

    "It is extremely concerning that someone who so often expressed such hostile views towards the United States' system of government was able to obtain a commission," he wrote. "(His) revolutionary ideas were harbored long before he was commissioned as an Army second lieutenant. Were West Point administrators or faculty aware of his views and behavior?"

    "Posts on social media by Rapone broadcast his devotion to the communist cause and his plans to infiltrate and sabotage the military," the senator wrote. "His conduct, writings, and sympathies for American adversaries predates his commission in the Army.

    "Therefore, I respectfully request the United States Army immediately nullify Rapone's commission and pursue all available disciplinary options under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Rapone should be required to pay back in full the cost of his education, and the United States Military Academy should consider revoking his degree."

In addition, Rubio also demanded that West Point release "all relevant information regarding West Point's efforts to ensure cadets who actively support the destruction of our government do not waste more taxpayer funds or prevent a more worthy candidate from attending" the academy.

Of course, there's little doubt this issue hits closer to home for Rubio. Being of Cuban descent, Rubio's parents fled their home country in response the the communist takeover by the Castro regime. Perhaps being more conscious of the dangers of communism than most, Rubio is rightfully demanding the Army take appropriate action.

Since the story originally broke last month, it has also come to light that one of Raport's closest mentors at West Point Military Academy,  Dr. Rasheed Hosein, a Middle East history professor, has been placed on administrative leave. We may soon learn if he had a role in Rapone's radicalization, though one of the professor's Facebook posts may hold a clue. It's a picture of him standing next to Rapone, who's in a colored turban and white tunic. Underneath, the professor wrote: "The brothers are gonna work it out."

Whatever the case, Rapone has no business serving in the United States military, let alone as a commissioned officer in charge of troops. With Senator Rubio weighing into the controversy, hopefully Rapone's days as a member of the Army are numbered.   

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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Congress Could Let All Patients Have the 'Right to Try' Without Going Through the FDA's Complicated Application Process

It is a rare thing to see Congress pass a law that increases personal freedom.

Yet that is exactly what it could do later this fall if the House follows the Senate's lead on a so-called "Right to Try" bill. The law would allow individuals with terminal illnesses, without having to first get permission from the Food and Drug Administration, to try drugs that have not been approved. Since 2012, 37 states have adopted "right to try" laws, giving patients to access experimental treatments that have cleared the first phase of the FDA's trials, with the permission of a doctor.

Passing a law at the federal level would be important for residents of those remaining 13 states, but would also help steer FDA policy, advocates say.

"Right to try is about the terminal patients who don't fit into a control group, who can't afford to travel or move to another country, and who simply want permission to seek the same treatments that other patients—sometimes patients in the same medical facility—are already receiving," says Naomi Lopez Bauman, director of healthcare policy for the Goldwater Institute, an Arizona-based free market think tank that has largely spearheaded the state-level Right to Try movement.

The U.S. Senate in August passed—by unanimous consent—Senate Bill 204, a right to try bill sponsored by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. That bill, and a similar proposal sponsored by Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., were the subject of a hearing hosted Tuesday by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. There is no immediate timetable for either bill to receive a vote on the House floor, and Tuesday's hearing made clear that right to try legislation faces more opposition in the lower chamber than it did in the Senate.

"The legislation being proposed could expose critically ill patients to greater harm," worries Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., minority chairman of the committee. Other Democrats expressed similar worries, even while expressing sympathy for patients who are asking little more than for government to get out of the way during the final days of their lives. There are "very legitimate frustrations with the current system," for allowing patients access ot non-FDA-approved drugs, admitted Rep. Gene Green, D-Texas. But those problems are not a good reason to remove the FDA from the process, Green said.

Currently, the FDA runs a so-called "expanded access" program for terminally ill patients who cannot get into drug trials for various reasons. According to a Government Accountability Office report published in July, FDA had approved 99 percent of the 5,800 requests made from 2012 through 2015 by patients seeking access to the program.

Lack of access, then, is not the problem, but time is. Patients with terminal illnesses can wait as little as a few hours to as long as 30 days for the FDA to respond to a request to try a new drug, according to the GAO, and that wait could ending any slim hope of finding a successful treatment. If you think dealing with bureaucrats is awful when you're standing in line at the DMV or applying for a passport, imagine having to go through that same process when your life is on the line.

Under Scott Gottlieb, the newly appointed commissioner of the FDA, the administration has moved to slash the amount of paperwork necessary to get patients enrolled in expanded access programs. Earlier Tuesday, Gottlieb announced further reforms to streamline the experimental treatment review process for patients and doctors. The FDA "believes difficult decisions about individual treatment are best made by patients with the support and guidance of their treating physicians," Gottlieb told the committee Tuesday.

Those welcome changes do not accomplish as much as a federal right to try law, in part because the FDA's statistics are something of an illusion. Gottlieb says the FDA accepts 99 percent of all applicants, ignoring how many patients don't bother going through the process in the first place.

About 500,000 Americans die of cancer each year, but the FDA receives only 1,200 applications from all terminally ill patients for its expanded access programs. The gap suggests a large number of patients who aren't asking for access to experimental drugs because they either don't know about the FDA's programs or don't care to navigate the system.

If nothing else, the recent groundswell of support for state-level right to try laws suggests the status quo isn't working for many patients.

Advocates for right to try also point out that the FDA has only gotten its act together because of pressure applied by the widespread adoption of right to try laws in the states. It wasn't until last year that the FDA announced it was creating a web portal to help guide patients through the expanded access application process. The website is only now being rolled out for public use.

"Shorter forms and hand-holding bureaucrats don't fix the system's fundamental flaw," Christina Sandefur, vice president of the Goldwater Institute, told Reason via email in response to Gottlieb's comments Tuesday. "It requires dying patients who have exhausted all government-approved options to beg the government for permission to obtain treatment to save their lives."

SOURCE

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Abusive gerrymandering can be stopped, but not by judges

Jeff Jacoby

Two of the oldest traditions in US political history are at the heart of Gill v. Whitford, a case now before the Supreme Court.

One of those traditions is gerrymandering — the mapping of legislative districts so that they become one-party monopolies. The other tradition is condemning such mapmaking as a cancer on American democracy.

Lawmakers have been manipulating election maps to their political advantage from the Republic's earliest days. When Elbridge Gerry (signer of the Declaration of Independence, delegate to the Constitutional Convention) was governor of Massachusetts in 1812, his allies drew the state's congressional lines to favor their party, the Republican-Democrats, stacking the deck against the opposition Federalists. Infuriated Federalists blasted the map's ungainly new districts, especially one in Essex County that resembled a salamander. A cartoonist drew it with wings and claws, and the "gerry-mander" was born.

Both parties engage in gerrymandering when it suits their interests; both parties denounce gerrymandering when it thwarts those interests. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan inveighed against the partisan cartography of California Democrats, who had "so rigged the electoral process that the will of the people cannot be heard." In the latest election, Reagan complained, Republican candidates had gotten most of the votes, yet Democrats won most of the seats.

The identical complaint, with the parties reversed, is at play in the current case. After the 2010 Census, the GOP majority in Wisconsin's legislature gerrymandered state assembly districts so effectively that, in the 2012 elections, Republicans won 60 percent of the seats despite drawing only 48.6 percent of the votes.

There is agreement across the board that gerrymandering is a bipartisan sin, one that has only grown worse with modern computer-aided algorithms and mapping software. The damage gerrymandering does to democratic accountability — to the people's right to choose their representatives — is widely resented. Polls consistently show that majorities of voters think legislative maps drawn by legislators are unfair.

Partisan gerrymanders are a large part of the reason contemporary politics have grown so toxic. As Senators John McCain and Sheldon Whitehouse argue in a friend-of-the-court brief, the proliferation of ultrasafe legislative seats has led "to a more polarized and dysfunctional political climate. In safe districts, an incumbent's biggest threat is often a primary challenge from a more extreme member of his or her own party. This threat makes legislators reluctant to work across the aisle and support bipartisan legislation."

Thanks to hyperpartisan redistricting, competitive elections for the House of Representatives have largely disappeared. About 90 percent of incumbents are routinely reelected. The average margin of victory is around 65 percent. Gerrymandering has made a sham of most congressional elections. Whatever else the House of Representatives is, it isn't representative.

The malady is easy to diagnose. The remedy is a different matter.

The plaintiffs in Gill are asking the Supreme Court to declare overly partisan redistricting unconstitutional, on the grounds that it deprives voters of the equal protection guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Heretofore, the court has resisted such pleas, considering it improper for the judiciary to insert itself into partisan skirmishing. In Justice Felix Frankfurter's formulation, "Courts ought not to enter this political thicket." That is still sound advice.

Yes, redistricting is noxious. Yes, it makes American politics worse. But not every problem is one that courts can solve. The Constitution explicitly, and wisely, leaves the details of organizing congressional elections to the political branches: "The Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations."

Political gerrymandering should be replaced with a fairer system. But it's up to the states and Congress, not judges, to make that happen. Judicial confirmation battles are already bruising and unpleasant. Imagine how much uglier they will become if judges become the arbiters of whether political maps are too, er, political.

The best alternative to gerrymandering is to take redistricting away from politicians and entrust it to an independent commission. It isn't an impossible dream: Three states (California, Arizona, and Iowa) already use such commissions. If voters elsewhere really object to gerrymandering — not just when pollsters ask about it — they have the power to force change. Let the pressure for reform grow sufficiently acute and abusive mapmaking will be curtailed. But that pressure has to come from below. This is a political ill, to be healed by political means.

SOURCE

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A Tale of Two Budgets

This week, the House is voting on a Fiscal Year 2018 budget while at the same time the Senate is debating its own version – and there are a number of stark differences. The following is a statement from Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:

For all the years of GOP lawmakers calling for balanced budgets, at least on paper, the House budget would reach balance, while the Senate budget would not.

The House also expedites an important down payment on deficit reduction by calling for over $200 billion in spending cuts from reconciliation. That’s not enough, but far more than the Senate’s minimum target of $1 billion in savings. Yes, one.

The House budget also expedites tax reform that does not add to the debt – the clearly stated past goal of the President's budget, Republican leaders, and the White House – while the Senate budget allows for $1.5 trillion in additional borrowing. (Just to restate that, the Senate would allow $1.5 trillion in tax cuts and asks for only $1 billion in spending cuts.)

Both budgets rely on vastly overstated economic growth numbers, but the Senate budget includes those assumptions in a way that will actually make the debt worse.

No independent economist or forecaster anywhere is predicting the kind of sustained economic growth that would be necessary for tax cuts to be self-financing, and Congressional leaders should not be banking on it as policy. In fact, tax cuts that add to the debt will suppress economic growth, not unleash it.

If the current Senate GOP budget – or anything close to it – becomes our fiscal roadmap, no person supporting it will be able to claim to be a fiscal conservative or supporter of fiscal responsibility.

The House budget, on the other hand, paves the way for more responsible, revenue-neutral tax reform accompanied by at least some mandatory spending reductions that are a down payment on fiscal responsibility.

If lawmakers are unwilling to pass a budget that would truly put our debt on a downward path and address both tax and major entitlement reform, Members of Congress should at least reject adding trillions to the national debt on massively exaggerated promises of economic growth and take an approach that more closely resembles the House budget.

Media release from Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (newton@crfb.org)

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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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Isis savagery horrifies Taliban fighters in Tora Bora

Osama bin Laden’s cave hideout has become the setting for an unlikely alliance

Gunfire still rolls across Tora Bora’s caves, long after peace should have come to this corner of Afghanistan. The conflict continues unabated, but today it is an Islamic State rearguard defending the ridge lines and peaks.

“Bin Laden may have gone but the ideological machinery is still in place,” Brigadier Nasim Sangin, a commander with the Afghan National Army’s (ANA) 201st Corps, said at the site of an al-Qaeda shrine below Tora Bora. He stared up into the peaks as sporadic bursts of machinegun fire echoed back and forth along the valley sides. “Unless you can remove that, and its sanctuary in Pakistan, then there will never be peace here.”

His troops have been fighting Isis in the mountains of Nangarhar province, abutting Pakistan, since the terrorist group arrived here three years ago after defeating the local Taliban fighters in a bloody turf war.

In July Brigadier Sangin’s soldiers succeeded in checking their advance and then driving them back from the lowlands below the Suleiman Khel valley — better known by its Pashto name Tora Bora, meaning “black caves” — and into the valley. Yet the ANA advance ground to a halt, leaving Isis fighters straddling a key supply route over a five-mile stretch of the Tora Bora valley all the way across the mountains into Pakistan.

“I have been stuck here for three months,” Brigadier Sangin growled as dusk fell. “My brigade have been scattered on operations across three different provinces and I haven’t got enough men to take these peaks and caves and drive Isis back over the border.”

Isis has been heavily diminished by US airstrikes, special forces raids and Afghan army operations, as well as by its battles with the Taliban, but it has defied complete defeat in Afghanistan. Its presence has caused a paradigm shift in the allegiances of regional, international and local actors in the war; the latest era of the “Great Game” — the historical confrontation over Afghanistan between Britain and Russia.

The Russians withdrew from the country in 1989 after a failed war, but since Isis’s appearance in Afghanistan they have started financing and equipping the Taliban, allegedly as a check against Isis encroachment into the Muslim population in its own central Asian sphere of interest.

“Russia’s support of the Taliban is materiel and financial,” an American official in Kabul, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Times this week. “They are concerned about the migration of Isis and believe that the Taliban can block that, though we think it’s a false narrative and is really part of a dual-track policy to give the Russians an inroad with whichever power is in place pending a peace one day.”

Iran, another historical enemy of the Taliban, has also increased its support, partly to contain the spread of Islamic State westwards toward its border but also to undermine American influence in the country.

The Taliban fighters on the plain below Tora Bora have agreed an informal local armistice with the Afghan army, allowing it to turn its guns on Isis, their common enemy.

“I fought the Russians, I have fought the communists, I have fought the foreigners but believe me, the Daesh [Isis] are the worst enemy of all,” said Mira Khan, a Taliban commander in the village of Nasir Khel, below Tora Bora. He handed himself and seven of his fighters over to Brigadier Sangin’s troops four weeks ago under the terms of an amnesty conditional to his service against Isis. “At least the Taliban just shoot their enemies. The Daesh chopped some of my men and family into quarters and left them scattered along the valley so we could never retrieve them.”

He claimed to have seen an Isis sniper with two prosthetic legs who had been carried to his position on a mule. “He fought and died using just his hands and eyes, with no thought of escape,” he said. “We have never seen such savagery.”

Afghan officers said that the local armistice with the Taliban did not reflect any broader change in their operations in Nangarhar. “The Taliban didn’t have much choice but to let us through their area,” Brigadier Sangin added. “They had already been beaten by Isis and the locals were begging us for help.”

Nevertheless, it was an uneasy feeling driving through the hardcore Taliban zone on the approaches to Tora Bora with a column of Afghan troops. “When things change here, they change fast,” a soldier told me, pointing to a Taliban flag that flew from a roadside tree.

The ANA’s casualties fighting in the region have been heavy. Earlier in the summer the brigadier lost 16 troops in a single Isis night attack on one of his outposts. “I received a panicked radio call from the company commander shouting ‘they are inside the compound and upon us’, and that was it,” he said. “It was all over in ten minutes. The entire post overrun, my men dead and Isis disappeared back into the night.”

The jihadists’ casualties have been far higher than the army’s. ANA intelligence intercepts from conversations between Isis commanders in Afghanistan and a logistics headquarters in Landi Kotal, a town on the western edge of the Khyber Pass in Pakistan, recorded 1,264 deaths in Nangarhar province last year and 760 in the first six months of this year.

US officers in Afghanistan claim to have killed more than half of all Isis fighters in the area since launching their campaign against them, and to have reduced the jihadists’ area of control by two thirds. The dead include each of the first three Isis leaders in the region. American officials say that the group’s latest nomination for the role of emir in Afghanistan has been sent to Syria for approval, where it is under review by Islamic State’s leadership council.

“There is an existing line of communication between Isis in Afghanistan and Isis main in Syria,” a US official involved with the operation against Isis said. “The response time gets longer and longer, reflecting the degradation of Isis in Syria and Iraq.”

US officials and Afghan intelligence officers share concerns that, despite the many casualties and setbacks on the battlefield, Isis has reverted to a new campaign of covert recruitment across Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad in 2011.

“We believe the Daesh still has nearly 1,900 men in Nangarhar, though the Americans estimate only 1,000,” an Afghan military intelligence officer said. “Their funding lines appear to remain intact, so they recruit heavily in Pakistan’s tribal areas and send them over here to replace their casualties.”

Standing by a shrine to four of Bin Laden’s fighters — remarkable among the scree-strewn slopes for the tall rock headstones and totem poles adorned by local women with brightly coloured cloths and trinkets — Brigadier Sangin cocked his head to the sound of a new burst of shooting from the shadows of Tora Bora.

“If I just get my scattered battalions back from their other operations,” he murmured ruefully. “If I could just get enough men, then I could get up the valley and annihilate the Daesh all the way to the Pakistan border before the snow comes in six weeks and I can’t move.”

SOURCE

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When Life Gives You Paul Ryan, Make Lemonade

BY: ANN COULTER

It is now clear that Republicans are incapable of giving us a free market in health insurance, so it continues to be illegal in America to buy health plans that don’t cover shrinks, domestic violence counseling and HIV screening, and perhaps always shall be.

But there are still other good things Republicans can do!

First, for fun, Republicans ought to request a Congressional Budget Office score of Obamacare. The GOP’s various replacement bills have been pilloried over their CBO scorings, showing, for example, that if given a choice, up to 20 million Americans would voluntarily choose not to buy health insurance in the year 2026. The horror.

Hey, does anybody remember how the Democrats “scored” Obamacare?

I do! Democrats gamed the numbers given to the CBO by asking it to score the first 10 years of a bill that collected taxes for 10 years, but only started paying out benefits in the last six years.

On the basis of that accounting trick, the Democrats spent months hectoring Republicans who refused to vote for the bill, saying they were against SAVING THE TAXPAYERS MONEY. Yes — we’d be SAVING MONEY by providing health care for all, especially transgenders and illegals.

Now that both parts of Obamacare are in place — the money coming in and the money going out — how about asking the CBO to score the real Obamacare?

Second, where are the hearings? The usual complaint with Republicans is that they’re all talk, no action. But when it comes to Obamacare, it’s the reverse: The GOP is all action, no talk.

I pay attention to politics. Have there been hearings I’ve missed? Republicans seem to think the Tea Party did all their work for them, so why bother losing friends by holding hearings to demonstrate what a catastrophe Obamacare is?

No, that’s not how it works. The public needs to be educated on the destruction Obamacare has wrought. Apparently, so do members of Congress, having exempted themselves from experiencing Obamacare the way the rest of us do.

Millions of Americans have been thrown off their insurance plans. Or they’re getting the exact same plan they had in 2009 — at 10 times the price. Or their so-called health insurance isn’t accepted by any English-speaking doctors.

Republicans need to put faces to Americans being whipsawed by astronomical premiums along with enormous deductibles, all to pay for useless health insurance.

We want to hear from anguished doctors whose patients are only allowed to buy plans that no longer cover anything they actually need, and can’t pay the bill when emergencies force them to seek medical care anyway.

Third and finally, if Trump wants a win, how about medical malpractice reform? That’s a fix that will instantly cut at least 20 percent off the cost of everyone’s health care.

Republicans can say, With zero support from the Democrats, we can’t pass any decent replacement for Obamacare, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop trying to improve health care for all Americans.

The whole country has been screaming for malpractice reform for decades. Democrats know how repelled the public is by lawyers making millions of dollars from obscene jury awards, but, unfortunately, their party is joined at the hip to trial lawyers.

Shyster lawyers taking 50 percent “contingency fees” off their lottery-style winnings have made health care not only a lot more expensive, but also unbelievably annoying. Patients are forced to take medicine that’s bad for them and sit in doctors’ offices waiting for pointless tests — all because the doctor doesn’t want to get sued.

The GOP should have a gigantic photo of John Edwards on display throughout the hearings. The former North Carolina senator made more than $30 million pushing a theory that we now know was bogus science. It’s as if all Edwards’ legal victories depended on the Earth being flat.

As a result of his since-disproven claim that cerebral palsy was caused by a doctor’s failure to perform a C-section, getting pregnant now is more dangerous, as doctors are forced to perform more of these riskier surgeries or stop delivering babies altogether.

“She speaks to you through me, and I have to tell you right now … I feel her. I feel her presence. She’s inside me, and she’s talking to you.” — Actual quote from attorney John Edwards to a jury of illiterates in 1985.

Let doctors testify about having to go out of business, drop practices and perform needless surgeries and tests — for the sole purpose of avoiding lawsuits.

Lawyers’ PACs will spend gobs of money fighting any limits whatsoever on malpractice suits, but so what? They’ll have a lot less money to spend against Republicans in the future. (And it might distract them from trying to bring terrorists into the country!) Even if Republicans lose, the price of Democrats going to bat for these hilarious ambulance chasers would be worth it.

If decent health insurance is off the table, we should at least demand that Republicans entertain us.

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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Envy of success

A nice looking couple from a wealthy background get married but they reveal too much of their privileged background in the wedding announcement.  In an envious world I suppose that was crass but they were just doing what was normal for them.  And why should they hide their background? Their announcement has however attracted much criticism

Envious people could perhaps reflect on John F. Kennedy Jr., a very privileged person  who married a privileged lady, Carolyn Bessette.  They became the focus of society attention, including being invited to the White House by Bill Clinton. So they surpassed the couple below in social success.  But, like many of his class, Kennedy owned a light plane that he liked to fly. On  July 16, 1999, Kennedy crashed it, killing both of them.  Carolyn was only 33 at the time.  Light planes are always dangerous and Kennedy was probably coked up when he crashed it so "privilege" is not always what it seems, is it?

Imagine the distress of Carolyn's parents -- to have seen their beautiful daughter taken to the heights of social eminence, only to die young without even leaving the consolation of a child

THERE’S a specific type of upper class New Yorker who gets their wedding announced in the New York Times. They’re usually white, blonde, Ivy League educated and very, very rich.

Grace Hays Holcomb du Pont and Conor Jackson Sutherland — yep, those are their real names — fit those criteria perfectly. She’s a teacher and he’s an investment banker.

They were married on Saturday and their hilariously obnoxious and out of touch wedding announcement in the Times went viral on the weekend.

“Nothing at all elitist about them. Just your average Americans, offspring of ordinary hardworking billionaires, falling in love and deciding to walk through life hand-in-hand together,” wrote one Facebook commenter.

Another declared it, “The greatest white person wedding announcement of all time.”

The announcement:

Grace du Pont, Conor Sutherland



Grace Hays Holcomb du Pont was married Sept. 30 to Conor Jackson Sutherland in Manhattan. The Rev. J. Donald Waring performed the ceremony at Grace Episcopal Church. The bride and groom both graduated from Princeton, she cum laude and he magna cum laude.

Mrs. Sutherland, 26, was until Thursday at Achievement First Apollo Middle School, a charter school in Brooklyn, where she worked on special projects as a member of the operations team. From 2012 to 2014, she taught sixth-grade science with Teach for America at Ranson Middle School in Charlotte, N.C. She also received a master’s degree in teaching from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

She is a daughter of Jean Young du Pont and Pierre S. du Pont V of Tarrytown, N.Y. The bride’s father is a partner, in Manhattan, at HPM Partners, an investment and wealth management firm. Her mother was until 2016 the president and chief executive of the Garden Conservancy, an organization in Garrison, N.Y., and is now a legal, strategic and development consultant. The bride is a descendant of Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, the founder of what is now known as the DuPont Company. She is also a granddaughter of Pierre S. du Pont IV of Rockland, Del., who was the governor of Delaware from 1977 to 1985, and is a great-great-granddaughter of Llewellyn Powers, who was the governor of Maine from 1897 to 1901.

Mr. Sutherland, 30, helps buy, manage and sell companies in the portfolio at Apollo Global Management, an investment firm in Manhattan.

He is the son of Denise Jackson Sutherland of Glen Cove, N.Y., and the late Donald J. Sutherland. His mother was a principal dancer with the Joffrey Ballet in Manhattan from 1969 to 1986, and served from 1987 to 2014 as a trustee of the Professional Children’s School in New York. His father was the founder and chief executive of Quincy Partners, a leveraged buyout firm that was in Glen Head, N.Y.

The couple dated at Princeton, but had met a few years earlier, in 2007, in North Haven, Me., when Ms. du Pont offered a ride to Mr. Sutherland and a friend, whom Ms. du Pont knew. The two men had just moored their sailboat and were preparing for a long row back to the dock, whereas she was piloting her family’s motorized tender. They took the ride.

SOURCE

Some wisdom from ancient times summarizes the matter: "Envy not the glory and riches of a sinner: for thou knowest not what his ruin shall be". (Sirach 9:16, Douay)

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Trump and the Pax Americana

Tom Switzer

After July's G20 summit in Hamburg, the ABC's Chris Uhlmann remarked that President Trump cast an "uneasy, lonely, awkward figure" who had "pressed fast forward on the decline of the United States as the global leader." The television clip went viral online. But was Uhlmann right?

It is certainly true Donald Trump has unnerved many people around the world. His strident 'America First' campaign rhetoric, taken together with his decisions to withdraw the U.S. from both the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris climate accords, raised doubts about the Pax Americana. The U.S. is also bogged down in a crisis of confidence, exacerbated by its toxic polarisation and hyper-partisan political culture.

But it is also true Trump has reaffirmed the security alliances with Japan, South Korea and Australia in Asia, Israel and the Saudi-led Sunni Gulf states in the Middle East and -- albeit grudgingly -- NATO in Europe. So much for withdrawing the U.S. from the world. Nor has he imposed the 45% tariffs on China or 30% tariffs on Mexico that would have pushed the global economy into recession.

Although the U.S. will not command the kind of strategic and economic pre-eminence it has held since the 1940s -- a trend  Richard Nixon recognised as early as the early 1970s -- America will remain the most powerful state in the world for the foreseeable future.

America has the largest and the most technologically superior military in the world. It has the most diverse and technologically advanced economy. Global tech platforms, such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook, are used by more than a billion people. All dominate their respective markets; all are American.

America is demographically vibrant: its fertility rates surpass those of its competitors Japan, Europe and China. It has transformed itself into an energy superpower: the shale gas 'fracking' revolution means energy self-sufficiency and independence.

To be sure, a clash is taking place between Trump (who is apparently attacking the liberal international order) and U.S. foreign-policy elites (who champion American global leadership). In the meantime, as the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer has argued, this produces an American foreign policy that is discombobulated and hard to understand. That unnerves allies.

If the U.S. is committed to keeping in check a rising China -- the only true rising hegemon capable of destabilising regional order and American primacy -- it needs a president who is thinking strategically and working closely with regional allies. But that is not happening, because Trump is widely perceived as a loose cannon and strikingly ignorant of the world -- a potentially deadly combination.

SOURCE

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The Leftmedia Love Affair With Totalitarianism

The New York Times is praising Mao Zedong for his "progress" with feminism, while ignoring his genocide.

One of the greatest benefits of living in the U.S. is the constitutional protections of individual rights and freedoms that all Americans enjoy. But it is precisely those individual rights and freedoms that place limits on officials within government. The Left views such limits to government as socially problematic rather than beneficial. Witness the growing sentiment among college and university students who are actively questioning the value of freedom of speech — not only questioning it, but even calling for it to be prevented, with violence if necessary. For these social “justice” crusaders, individual freedom should always be subservient to collectivist “progressive” values.

It is in such a climate as this that one of the primary Demo/MSM propaganda fronts, The New York Times, is promoting communism (overtly this time), in a series of praise articles including, “When Communism Inspired Americans,” “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism” and “The Little Red Book for Children.” This series, highlighting the “glory days” of communism, omits references to the countless millions of civilian men, women and children who were murdered or starved under these regimes.

The latest entry in this series purports to portray how women fared under Red China’s communist regime, asserting, “The communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big.” When it was not slaughtering them and their children, that is. It praises China’s former totalitarian strongman Mao Zedong for his efforts in promoting feminism. The author, Helen Gao, is an American of Chinese descent, and she writes glowingly of her grandmother’s opportunity to work as a journalist during the early days of the “People’s” Republic. A brief side note here. To have been a journalist at that time in China, Gao’s grandmother would have been obligated to spout Communist Party propaganda without freedom of the press protections Gao herself enjoys here in the good old U.S.A. But we digress.

Seeking to somehow dispel the obvious objections readers might raise regarding her willingness to praise the vision and efforts of a murderous tyrant responsible for the deaths of 45 million of his own people, Gao quotes her grandmother’s saying, “The communists did many terrible things, but they made women’s lives much better.” There — problem solved. Noting the absurdity, one humorist responded, “NYT next week: For all its flaws, Hitler’s Nazi movement brought healthy vegetarian meal planning to the Reich.” Except, of course, the NYT doesn’t like to highlight that the Nazis were also socialists.

Notably, this latest example of the NYT’s communist dezinformatsiya campaign comes in the midst of nuclear threats from Red China’s nuclear puppet — NoKo’s communist nut Kim Jong-un. Move on, nothing to see here!

SOURCE

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DOJ files suit against company for allegedly not hiring Americans

The Department of Justice announced Thursday it has filed a lawsuit against a Colorado corporation for allegedly discriminating against U.S. workers.

The complaint alleges that in 2016, Crop Production discriminated against at least three United States citizens by refusing to employ them as seasonal technicians in El Campo, Texas, because Crop Production preferred to hire temporary foreign workers under the H-2A visa program.

“In the spirit of President Trump’s Executive Order on Buy American and Hire American, the Department of Justice will not tolerate employers who discriminate against U.S. workers because of a desire to hire temporary foreign visa holders,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. “…

Where there is a job available, U.S. workers should have a chance at it before we bring in workers from abroad.”

This is the first complaint filed stemming from the “Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative,” which was launched on March 1.

A Civil Rights Division official told Fox News that since the initiative’s launch, the division has opened 29 investigations of “potential discrimination against U.S. workers based on a hiring preference for foreign visa workers.”

DOJ officials also told Fox News the department has reached at least one settlement with a company discriminating against U.S. workers in favor of foreign visa workers, and distributed over $100,000.

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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Stupid Spanish machismo bad for their future


The face of modern Spain

Machismo is a personality disorder common in peri-Mediterranean lands.  It arises from the fact that most societies there are  mother-dominated or grandmother dominated.  The women concerned propagandize their sons about how much the sons owe them and insist that the sons act as "Mamma" requires.  Israel is of course a Mediterranean country and Yiddisher Mammas are well known for acting that way.  The Sheldons and Irvings of the world, however, seem to have better ways of establishing their independence and self-esteem rather than going macho.

Machismo is exaggerated displays of masculinity, toughness and  strength.  It is designed to deny that you are a "Momma's boy"  and assert your masculinity. So macho men are quick to take offence at any perceived slight.

And the Madrid government is lamentably and foolishly macho -- presumably reflecting what Spaniards tend to vote for. The folly of their approach is most easily seen in the case of Gibraltar.  It seems to be perceived by them as a wound in the body of the nation, a slight to their manliness.  So they never cease demanding that Britain cede it to them.

But they unintentionally make it easy for Britain to deny that.  The first step in "recovering" Gibraltar should surely be to get Gibraltarians on side.  Spain should make nice to Gibraltarians in every possible way, including substantial special concessions such as reduced taxes.  So does Madrid do that?  No way! They go out of their way to make life difficult on Gibraltar.  So, when given a vote on the matter, something like 98% of Gibraltarians voted to remain part of Britain.

And the shocking treatment of Catalans during their independence referendum described below is another example of stupidity inspired by machismo.

There were once some less emotional Catalans who saw advantage in remaining part of Spain.  And given a proper opportunity for discussion, they might have been in the majority.

Consider how Britain treated the call for Scottish independence.  Instead of trying to suppress a referendum they called one and enabled a proper and peaceful democratic discussion of the matter in Scotland. And despite the long-standing and vociferous calls for independence in Scotland, how did the vote turn out?  The majority of Scots voted to stay in the UK! Had Spain treated the Catalans as resctfully as the Scots were treated, the Catalan question might by now have been resolved in Spain's favour.  But brute force rather than respectful discussion is the macho way

So what will happen now?  Anti-Spanish attitudes in Catalonia will have become rock-solid and virtually universal.  And perceiving themselves as oppressed by Spain, Catalans will go down the well-trodden way to express that feeling:  Terrorism. Spain will soon have a fresh lot of domestic terrorists to deal with.  Clever!


Catalan officials claimed 90% of 2.2million voters had called for independence in an 'illegal' referendum blighted by violent scenes which left at least 888 people injured.

World leaders condemned the brutal scenes after officials revealed that hundreds of protesters have been injured so far.

Officers were seen stamping and kicking protesters as they stormed buildings and seized ballot boxes.

Footage captured in the village of Sarria de Ter in the province of Girona showed authorities using an axe to smash down the doors of a polling station where Catalan president Carles Puigdemont was due to cast his vote.

He said the region had won the right to become an independent state with the referendum results due in a few days.

And in Barcelona, the region's capital, officers fired rubber bullets at thousands of protesters demonstrating against their votes being denied.

Boris Johnson condemned the violent clashes but said that the UK saw the vote as unconstitutional.

The Foreign Secretary said: 'We are obviously worried by any violence but clearly the referendum, as I understand it, is not constitutional so a balance needs to be struck. We hope very much that things will calm down.'

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn earlier called on Theresa May to intervene with the Spanish government over the police crackdown.

Mr Corbyn condemned the 'shocking police violence' being used as he tweeted: 'I urge Theresa May to appeal directly to Rajoy to end police violence in Catalonia & find political solution to this constitutional crisis.'

Pope Francis also urged Europeans not to fear unity and to put aside nationalistic and other self-interests during a speech in Bologna in Italy.

He did not mention the police violence during Catalonia's independence referendum - but in a speech to university students, he recalled that the European Union was borne out of the ashes of war to guarantee peace.

He warned that conflicts and other interests were now threatening those founding ideals.

Francis said: 'Don't be afraid of unity! May special interests and nationalism not render the courageous dreams of the founders of the European Union in vain.'

Scotland's first minister Nicola Sturgeon – who has campaigned for independence for Scotland – tweeted: 'Some of the scenes in Catalonia are quite shocking and surely unnecessary. Just let people vote.'

European leaders also voiced their disquiet over the degree of violence used, and called for dialogue between regional and national leaders.

Belgian prime minister Charles Michel tweeted: 'Violence can never be the answer. We condemn all forms of violence and reaffirm our call for political dialogue.'

Spain's Prime Minister claimed the Catalonian referendum had been prevented amid the scenes of violent chaos across the country.

And tens of thousands of fans were banned from attending FC Barcelona's football match with Las Palmas in a protest against the violence.

Spain's Constitutional Court has suspended the referendum and the central government says it is illegal.

But regional separatist leaders pledged to hold it anyway and called on the area's 5.3million eligible voters to show up to cast their ballots. They later said 90-% of 2.2million voters had opted for an independent Catalonia.

Mr Puidgemont condemned the Spanish government's crackdown. He said: 'Police brutality will shame forever the Spanish state.'

But the Spanish deputy prime minister Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría said officers in Catalonia are acting 'in a proportionate manner'. She added that the Catalan government 'has behaved with absolute irresponsibility' by going ahead with the referendum.

Shocking footage from Barcelona shows police officers throwing voters down a flight of stairs and stamping on people as they raid a polling station.

FC Barcelona condemned the violence on the streets as it announced that its game today would be 'played behind closed doors'.

The club has long supported Catalonia's right for a vote on independence, without throwing its weight behind the yes or no camp.

It said in a statement: 'FC Barcelona condemns the events which have taken part in many parts of Catalonia today in order to prevent its citizens exercising their democratic right to free expression.

'Given the exceptional nature of events the Board of Directors have decided that the FC Barcelona first team game against Las Palmas will be played behind closed doors following the Professional Football League's refusal to postpone the game.'

The club's president Josep Maria Bartomeu said: 'It wasn't done for security, the security was guaranteed.  'We have done it behind closed doors so that everyone can see our opposition at what is happening.'

This morning in Barcelona, police forcefully removed a few hundred would-be voters from a polling station at a school.

Daniel Riano was inside when the police busted in the building's front door.

The 54-year-old said: 'We were waiting inside to vote when the National Police used force to enter, they used a mace to break in the glass door and they took everything.

'One policeman put me in a headlock to drag me out, while I was holding my wife's hand. It was incredible. They didn't give any warning.'

Ferran Miralles said a crowd scuffled with police outside as they formed a tight perimeter around the door. Miralles said: 'They were very aggressive. They pushed me out of the way.'

Elsewhere in the city, police arrested several people outside the Treball voting centre amid scuffles on the street. Officers dragged some of the protesters away and detained them.

SOURCE

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Trump's consistency over time

AN 18-YEAR-OLD newspaper clipping featuring Donald Trump, Bill and Hillary Clinton and even Al Gore has been unearthed by an internet sleuth — and much of it could have been written today.

North Korean nuclear weapons, dodgy Clinton donations and Mr Trump’s hands-on negotiation style all get a mention in the clipping from the 1 November 1999 edition of Wisconsin newspaper The Oshkosh Northwestern, which was discovered by Reddit user PresidentJohnMiller.

“It’s amazing how nothing has changed in the last 18 years,” they wrote.

The full-page “News Makers” section features a brief on Mr Trump, who at the time was considering a run for president as the Reform Party nominee, titled “Trump would be US trade rep”.

“Donald Trump said Sunday that as president, he personally would handle US trade talks and would restore respect from countries doing business with America,” it reads, adding that Mr Trump “took aim at North Korea and China for ignoring US overtures and building nuclear weapons” and “branded Cuba’s Fidel Castro as ‘absolutely a killer and should be treated as such’”.

If nothing else, the clipping highlights Mr Trump’s consistency.

As president, the billionaire has taken a hands-on approach to what he describes as “bad deals” including the Paris Climate Accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In November, the president-elect was one of the first world leaders to respond to the death of the Cuban dictator, tweeting simply “Fidel Castro is dead!”, before describing him in a statement as a “brutal dictator” whose legacy was one of “firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights”.

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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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