Just amazing: Executing Child Rapists is a "cruel and unusual punishment"?

Yet it is OK to execute murderers?

Sorry Justice Kennedy, but rape, especially the rape of a child, IS comparable to murder. Today's Supreme Court opinion, in another 5-4 decision, in Kennedy v. Louisiana demonstrates the fragility of the balance on the Court as we approach this year's election, meaning our choice matters. The five justice majority ruled it was unconstitutional to apply the death penalty to a child rapist. From the dissent authored by Justice Alito:

"The Court today holds that the Eighth Amendment categorically prohibits the imposition of the death penalty for the crime of raping a child. This is so, according to theCourt, no matter how young the child, no matter how many times the child is raped, no matter how many children the perpetrator rapes, no matter how sadistic the crime, no matter how much physical or psychological trauma is inflicted, and no matter how heinous the perpetrator's prior criminal record may be. The Court provides two reasons for this sweeping conclusion: First, the Court claims to have identified "a national consensus" that the death penalty is never acceptable for the rape of a child; second, the Court concludes, based on its "independent judgment," that imposing the death penalty for child rape is inconsistent with "`the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.'" Ante, at 8, 15, 16 (citation omitted). Because neither of these justifications is sound, I respectfully dissent."

And, the dissent concludes:

"In summary, the Court holds that the Eighth Amendment categorically rules out the death penalty in even the most extreme cases of child rape even though: (1) This holding is not supported by the original meaning of the Eighth Amendment; (2) neither Coker nor any other prior precedent commands this result; (3) there are no reliable"objective indicia" of a "national consensus" in support of the Court's position; (4) sustaining the constitutionality ofthe state law before us would not "extend" or "expand" the death penalty; (5) this Court has previously rejected the proposition that the Eighth Amendment is a one-way ratchet that prohibits legislatures from adopting new capital punishment statutes to meet new problems; (6) theworst child rapists exhibit the epitome of moral depravity; and (7) child rape inflicts grievous injury on victims and on society in general."

The dissent accurately portrays the activism of the majority and the imposition of those justices' policy positions over the reasoned choices of the other branches in the state and federal governments.

Source

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AP's weird perspective on warfare in Afghanistan

The news agency which does not want to be quoted will be today. In a story in which 22 enemy are killed and the remaining enemy flea to Pakistan and no Afghan or coalition troops are killed the AP says:

Fighting between Taliban-led militants and security forces is surging, clouding hopes that the six-year, multibillion-dollar effort to stabilize the country will succeed any time soon.

The problem with this perspective is that it is divorced from the reality of warfare. Fighting is why it is called a war. What should be blazingly obvious is that the Taliban are losing this fight and every other engagement with coalition forces. The AP has this weird perspective that violence is the enemy of peace. They divorce the concept from the fighters. They made similar mistakes in Iraq where violence was used as a metric disembodied from keeping score on casualties and more importantly who controlled the real estate.

Any fair observation of the conflict in Afghanistan would note that the Taliban do not control real estate or people and they are losing all the fire fights. Because they are fighting an insurgency, the war may drag on, but the outcome is clear if we stay with it.... In contrast the Reuters story points to an even larger defeat for enemy forces.

U.S.-led coalition and Afghan forces killed up to 35 Taliban insurgents after the militants attacked two towns in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border overnight, a police chief said on Wednesday.... About 100 Taliban insurgents attacked the towns of Gomal and Sarobi in Paktika province overnight, but fled when they were engaged by Afghan police supported by coalition troops, said provincial Police Chief Nabi Jan Mullah Khail.

Source

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Brookes News Update

The Democrats' socialist lunacy: Democrat congressmen Maxine Waters and Maurice Hinchey revealed their socialist agenda by calling for the nationalization of the oil companies. According to the ideology of this extreme leftwing duo nationalization would give the state the power of controlling prices
Inflation and wages - another dangerous economic fallacy : Money is not neutral. This means is that attempts by central banks to stabilise prices distort the pattern of production and trigger off the so-called boom-bust cycle. From this we can deduce that even when the CPI is apparently stable inflation can still be rampant beneath the monetary surface. Those who think otherwise have not learnt the fundamental lesson of the 1920s
The market created money, not the state : On the day a commodity becomes money it already has an established purchasing power or price in terms of other goods. This purchasing power enables us to set up the demand for this commodity as money. This in turn, for a given supply, sets its purchasing power on the day this commodity starts to function as money
Green Oil : A study by LSU's sea grant college shows that 85 percent of Louisiana's offshore fishing trips involve fishing around these structures. The same study found 50 times more marine life around an oil production platform than in the surrounding mud bottoms
Return of the dupes and the anti-anti-communists : The irony of journalists like Dana Milbank is that while they are laughing at the anti-communists, they seem to have no idea that the loudest howls of laughter have always come from the communists who see such journalists as dupes
Unshackle American enterprise to increase oil supplies : Democrats and other leftists seem incapable of learning simple economic facts and continue to resist and oppose all efforts to make America oil self sufficient and independent of foreign sources controlled by our enemies
The flawed and costly war : Barack Obama is out on the stump using the skills he learned as a 'community organizer' to try and woo support while talking about little of substance. He has the liberal psychobabble down pat and uses tried and true tactics any time someone levies any criticism against him
Hugo Chavez, Colombia, and FARC : For months, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) were the darlings of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
From coal to fuel to oil : Apart from engendering economic turmoil and worries of many kinds, the skyrocketing price of oil has also done something momentously beneficial: It has created conditions for America's oil independence by making it economical to extract fuels from coal, our most abundant energy resource

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ELSEWHERE

Another characteristically humorous article from London Mayor Boris Johnson here. Another indication of why he is arguably the second most popular man in Britain (Jeremy Clarkson obviously comes first). If you are familiar with British doings, there is a good article ABOUT Boris by humorist Anne Treneman here. I am a great lover of British humour but I think you may have to know Brits well to "get" it.

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

For more postings from me, see OBAMA WATCH, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Is there such a thing as a good phone company?

What I hear about American and British phone and cable companies is pretty appalling and my experience with such companies here in Australia is similar. I have put online some of my correspondence with three such companies as follows: TELSTRA, OPTUS, VODAFONE. I rather foolishly hope that others might learn from my bad experiences with the companies concerned and avoid some of the pitfalls. I have sometimes gone to quite extraordinary lengths to get the companies to address problems but even that has not always worked.

A story I heard today from my local cellphone retailer leads me to believe that the equipment providers are just as bad as the service providers. He tells me that some time ago he returned a cellphone to Nokia for repair under warranty. Rather incautiously, however, he left the memory stick in it when he sent it in.

When he got the phone back the memory stick had vanished. He asked for it back but was told it had been destroyed. Nokia had destroyed someone else's private property! He asked why. He was told that they did not inspect the content on the stick concerned but some sticks can have pornography on them so it is company policy to destroy the lot!

He took great umbrage at that and kept kicking at Nokia over it. Initially they would not even replace the stick pace any content on it. He eventually contacted the State Sales Manager, however, and pointed out that he was a retailer who did not HAVE to stock Nokia products. That breached the dam. They replaced the stick. It took him half a dozen calls over a period of months to get that result however.

Imagine how far up the creek you would be if you were just an ordinary customer who did not have a retailer onside! No apology for the lost content on the stick was ever received, of course.

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A wise decision

Jared Gray is an 18-year-old high school student who works as a janitor for Southern Utah University. One day he found a bag of cash lying in the parking lot, obviously one of the school's deposit bags. The bag was labeled with the amount: $108,000. Jared didn't hesitate to return the cash, saying he was raised to be honest. To express their gratitude, SUU officials will give him a scholarship if he attends the university.

Most people would applaud Jared's honesty. Sadly, though, not everyone. A number of people, posting to the CBS News website, called the young man a "loser" or "stupid" for not keeping the dough. Apparently, they assume it's reasonable to steal whenever one is unlikely to get caught. If so, wouldn't it also be reasonable actively to pursue such opportunities - in short, to become a career criminal? That makes we who work "suckers."

If you're going to live a moral life, it's common sense to live it on principle. This means you don't become an entirely different person, a crook, when it's allegedly "easy" to do so. Easy, that is, for a person of poor character. Starting life as a crook would have blighted Jared's whole life. Instead, now he'll always be able to recall his easy good deed with pride; and, happily, people who know him will be able to trust him . . . stuff that's more valuable than money itself.

Source

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ELSEWHERE

Nixon in retrospect: "It is not mentioned that only Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in more daunting circumstances than Nixon. Four years later, he was reelected by 49 states and a plurality of 18 million votes, because he stopped the assassinations, race riots, anti-war riots, skyjackings, inflation, extracted the U.S. from Vietnam without losing the war, opened relations with China, warmed up relations with the U.S.S.R., negotiated and signed the greatest arms control agreement in history, started a Middle East peace process, founded the Environmental Protection Agency, vastly expanded the national parks system, pioneered welfare reform and fiscal decentralization, reduced the crime rate, eliminated the draft, and ended school segregation without recourse to the court-ordered nostrum of transporting millions of schoolchildren all around the cities of America by bus to effect racial balance. He was overwhelmingly reelected because he was an excellent president, not because of dirty tricks and the ineptitude and hypocrisy of his feckless opponent, George McGovern."

The Forgotten Refugees: "Few remember that there were more Jewish refugees from Arab countries than of Palestinians from Israel. In 1948 there were 856,000 Jews living in Arab countries. By 2005, only about 5,000. This Monday, through Wednesday, in London a cooperative of 77 Jewish communities and organizations in 20 countries, Justice For Jews, will hold a conference and briefing to Parliament on the plight of these Jews."

The Ukrainian genocide: "Grigori Garaschenko remembers seeing his classmates starve slowly to death in a famine that killed millions of people in Ukraine. A neighbour driven mad by hunger killed her six-year-old daughter and began to eat her, he said, after Soviet soldiers confiscated all the food in their village during house-to-house searches. Mr Garaschenko, 89, is one of the few remaining survivors of the famine of 1932-33. Now, 75 years on, Ukraine wants the world to recognise that what it calls the Holodomor was a deliberate act of genocide by Stalin's Soviet Union."

Ireland faces first recession since 1983: "Ireland's economy will fall into a recession this year for the first time in more than two decades, the Economic and Social Research Institute said, slashing its forecasts for construction, exports and consumer spending. Gross domestic product will drop by 0.4% this year, the Dublin-based institute said, having predicted growth of 1.8% in March. Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said the economy is facing a ``serious problem.'' The economy's first full-year contraction since 1983 would follow a decade-long boom sparked by exports in the mid-1990s and then extended by record homebuilding. Higher borrowing costs and the credit squeeze have already curbed construction, pushing unemployment to a nine-year high of 5.4% and dragging consumer confidence to a record low. ''The decline in housebuilding has had a dramatic impact,'' Lenihan said on RTE Radio. ''It's compounded by international factors in relation to a non-availability of credit, by the increase in oil prices and food prices. All those factors are coming together.''

For more postings from me, see OBAMA WATCH, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

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

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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2nd Intifada forgotten

The second Intifada, which started in October 2000 and ended in October 2004, is barely being discussed or written about. It has been marginalized and pushed out of public discourse. Books about it are hidden away at bookstores. Political journals barely mention it. The media forgot it. Cultural institutions ignore it. The amnesia in relation to the second Intifada is surprising in the face of its high casualty toll and the heavy price it exacted from Israel's society and economy, as well as the ruin it brought to Palestine and the Palestinians. What then is the reason for this amnesia, which borders on denial? The human desire to ignore a sequence of events that undermines and breaks away from convention. Once it's over, we all rush to repress it from our consciousness and return to the comfort of the familiar, acceptable, predictable, and normal.

The second Intifada contradicted and disproved two basic assumptions, axioms almost, which were commonly accepted at its outset and end. The first one: Economic prosperity brings peace. The second one: Terrorism cannot be defeated by force. Both these arguments were and still are deeply rooted in our collective perception and instigate the leading narrative when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both axioms are politically correct and provide an orderly doctrine for analysis and interpretation.

Bidding these arguments farewell means abandoning viewpoints we have become accustomed to and heading into the unknown. Therefore, so many prefer to forget that there was ever an Intifada here and ignore its lessons. However, that which is repressed will resurface - it always does.

The second Intifada broke out at the zenith of Palestinian economy prosperity. The fruit of the Oslo Accords finally started trickling down to the poor and neglected strata in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian standard of living skyrocketed, money was readily available, tourists flocked to the whole of the Holy Land, foreign investors discovered cheap and skilled Palestinian labor, and Palestinian merchants discovered the purchasing power of Israeli consumers. These achievements were erased on one clear day in October 2000. The second Intifada cost the Palestinians an economic loss of a generation. It will take at least 10 to 15 years before the per capita income in Palestine will return to its level on the eve of October 2000. ...

And what for? For nothing. After all, there is no arguing that Israel scored an overwhelming and unpredictable win in the second Intifada. Hundreds of articles written in its midst warned Israel's leadership against attempting to fight terror by force, because the failure is guaranteed: The regular army of a democratic state would never defeat terror-resistance-guerilla groups that operate within oppressed civilians like fish in water. This is what we learned from Cuban genius Che Guevara and Vietnamese genius Ho Chi Minh.

In the absence of any other choice, Israel ignored the strategic warnings. In an integrated move, which included assaults on urban terror headquarters, assassinations of the most senior terror leaders, and the extensive deployment of human and technological intelligence means, Israel defeated its enemies. The unbelievable happened - and was repressed after it happened, particularly after Ariel Sharon's hospitalization.

Meanwhile, the false conviction that "a terror organization cannot be defeated" has paralyzed the Israeli government ever since Hamas came to power; at the end, we shall be forced to recognize the state of Hamastan, instead of Hamas recognizing us. Did the Intifada ever happen, or was it just a bad dream?

More here

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ELSEWHERE

77 % of Israeli Arabs want to stay in Israel : "Seventy-seven percent of the State of Israel's Arab citizens would rather live in the Jewish state than in any other country in the world, according to a new study titled "Coexistence in Israel". The survey was conducted by the John Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University with the assistance of researchers from Haifa University."

A good start: "Republican Sen. John McCain: Quit taxing ethanol gasoline from Brazil at $20+ a barrel. Corn ethanol is over-subsidized and protected by a protectionist tariff on sugar ethanol from Brazil of 54› a gallon. At 42 gallons a barrel, that works out to $22.68 a barrel. McCain wants to stop that. In addition to a prize of $300 million for the person who comes up with a way more efficient car battery for plug-in cars, McCain wants to drop the duty on sugar ethanol. It's called free trade"

Bigoted NYT: "The New York Times loves to review porno books, while ignoring best-selling conservative authors. The Encounter Books publishing house will no longer send advance books for review to the New York Times. Encounter publisher Roger Kimball wrote: "Of course, the editors at the Times are welcome to trot down to their local book emporium or visit Amazon.com to purchase our books, but we won't be sending gratis advance copies to them any longer." The reason? Despite having several best-sellers, the NYT never reviews an Encounter book. Or Mark Steyn, for that matter."

Railways inadequate in the home of railways: "Passengers face acute overcrowding on key railway routes because capacity will be exhausted many years before any new lines could be built, according to Network Rail. The infrastructure company is to commission a study into the costs and benefits of new lines on five inter-city routes. But it admitted that a high-speed network was unlikely to be built soon because of funding constraints and environmental concerns. The company is expected to focus on a few short stretches of track operating at conventional speed to relieve the worst pinch points on long-distance routes, including London to Peterborough, Rugby and Swindon. Iain Coucher, the chief executive of Network Rail, said that the Government's plan for expanding rail capacity by 22.5 per cent by 2014 would be inadequate on some routes, which are growing by 10 per cent a year. He said: "Clearly some routes will grow more than that and there may be a problem. The most congested parts of the network are about 80 miles out of London. People used to be prepared to travel for 45 minutes and now it's an hour and a quarter." The high cost of housing in London and fuel prices were two of the factors contributing to the continuing strong growth in demand for rail travel."

Krugman gets something right: "The New York Times economics columnist is right about universal home ownership: It burst the housing and lending markets, and it made no sense. OK. So Paul Krugman is taking a swipe at President Bush for saying, in 2002, "Owning a home lies at the heart of the American dream." Fine. But in the hands of the government, dreams become nightmares. Pushing uncreditworthy people - the irresponsible - to buy houses at low-interest rates did 2 things. It drove up demand for houses, which shot housing prices up. It imperiled the lending industry. In his column today, Krugman asked the pertinent questions: "Why should ever-increasing homeownership be a policy goal? How many people should own homes, anyway?" Some people are meant to be renters, he wrote. True. Some of us no more want home-owning responsibilities than we do root canal"

For more postings from me, see OBAMA WATCH, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

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

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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The Democrat lurch Leftwards

The New Democrats were born in the 1980s, in response to Ronald Reagan's triumphs. Prominent Democrats worried the party was out of touch, and created the Democratic Leadership Council. Its members were foreign-policy hawks, unafraid of cultural conservatism, and preached economic centrism. Their poster boy: Bill Clinton. The 1990s were their midlife heyday, though even then the New Dems struggled. Party liberals despised Mr. Clinton's embrace of free trade, hated his accommodation of welfare reform, cringed when he pronounced "the era of big government" over. But no one could deny his success at giving the party its first two full terms in the White House since FDR. So they shut up and went along.

When Mr. Clinton left, so did the most prominent New Democratic voice. Party liberals have been reasserting control ever since. Howard Dean's 2004 consolation prize was the Democratic National Committee. Nancy Pelosi became House Speaker in 2006, and gave back committee chairs to the old 1960s liberal bulls. And now comes Mr. Obama, the party's most liberal nominee since Hubert Humphrey.

What's left of the New Democratic agenda? On foreign policy, Bill Clinton engaged in Bosnia, and as recently as 2004 John Kerry saw the wisdom of running as at least a moderate hawk. But today's unpopular war has only emboldened the party to revert to its antiwar comfort zone. Mr. Obama calls for an immediate pullout of troops from Iraq, no matter what the consequences. His foreign policy, to the extent it is one, flows not from strength, but from greater American accommodation in the name of diplomacy. Mrs. Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have together held some 72 votes on Iraq, most devoted to cutting off troop money, blocking the surge, or forcing a pullout. Last year, all but 10 House Democrats voted for a withdrawal timeline.

Economic centrism? What's that? Even Mr. Clinton's wife disavowed his New Democratic legacy by trashing free trade and Nafta. Mr. Obama raised her bet, aligning himself with leftist trade populists. The Democratic leadership has held up deals with Colombia, Peru and South Korea. Big Labor is calling the shots, and Big Labor will suffer no new trade.

Mr. Obama is hawking a tax policy that would take the nation back to the effective marginal tax rates of the Carter days. He wants to further tax income, payroll, capital gains, dividends and death. His philosophy is pure redistribution. Congressional Democrats voted for a budget that includes the largest tax hike in American history.

About all that remains of the New Democratic economic agenda is the mantra of "fiscal discipline." But since taking power, Democrats have passed spending bills far beyond President Bush's limits, and broken their own "pay-as-you-go" rules. The party's Blue Dogs have fought its leaders on some spending, though not when it risks derailing, say, farm bills. Mr. Obama recently revealed that his plan for economic recovery was to spend the nation out of its doldrums.

The one place where New Democrats have made a more lasting mark is on the culture. The party leadership has seen the wisdom of relaxing litmus tests on guns and abortion, a change that in 2006 let them field candidates who won conservative districts. But even here, Mr. Obama is a skeptic. He's said he'd repeal the Defense of Marriage Act - which Bill Clinton signed. He's criticized the Supreme Court for upholding the partial-birth abortion ban.

More here

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Tax dangers

Robert Mundell isn't in the habit of making fruitless policy recommendations, though some take a long time ripening. Nearly four decades passed between his early work on optimal currency areas and the birth of the euro in 1999 - the same year he received the Nobel Prize for economics....

Democratic nominee Barack Obama regularly professes disdain for the Bush tax cuts, suggesting that those growth-spurring measures may be scrapped. "If that happens," Mr. Mundell predicts, "the U.S. will go into a big recession, a nosedive." One of the original "supply-side" economists, he has long preached the link between tax rates and economic growth. "It's a lethal thing to suddenly raise taxes," he explains. "This would be devastating to the world economy, to the United States, and it would be, I think, political suicide" in a general election.

Should taxes instead be cut again, I ask him, to stimulate the sluggish economy? Mr. Mundell replies that he favors a ceiling of 30% on marginal rates (the current top rate is 35%). He recounts how the past century experienced a titanic struggle over whether tax rates are too high or too low: from a 3% income tax in 1913; up to 60% during World War I; down to 25% before Congress and President Herbert Hoover raised taxes back to 60% in 1932 and "sealed the fate of our economy for a long, long time"; all the way up to 92.5% during World War II before falling in three steps, reaching 28% under President Ronald Reagan; and back to nearly 40% under Bill Clinton before George W. Bush lowered them to their current level.

In light of this fiscal roller coaster, Mr. Mundell says, "the most important thing that could be done with respect to tax rates now is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Eliminating that uncertainty would be more important than pushing for a further cut - in the income tax rates, anyway." One tax that he would cut, to 25%, is the corporate tax rate. "It could be even lower," he says, "but I think it would be a big step to lower it to 25% . . . I made that proposal back in the 1970s."

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Peace activist finally encounters reality: "Somali gunmen shot dead a peace activist and kidnapped a senior UN official, while a roadside bomb killed three policemen in the anarchic Horn of Africa country today, witnesses said. In Beledweyne, central Somalia, assailants assassinated the regional head of respected local non-governmental organisation Centre for Research and Dialogue. "Men armed with pistols killed Mohamed Hassan Kulmiye in front of a cafeteria," said resident Ismail Farah. "They shot several bullets in the head. He died on the spot. The men ran away and we do not know who they were."

The networks unilateral withdrawal from Iraq : "According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been "massively scaled back this year." Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The "CBS Evening News" has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC's "World News" and 74 minutes on "NBC Nightly News." (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.) CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed. Paul Friedman, a senior vice president at CBS News, said the news division does not get reports from Iraq on television "with enough frequency to justify keeping a very, very large bureau in Baghdad.".... Interviews with executives and correspondents at television news networks suggested that while the CBS cutbacks are the most extensive to date in Baghdad, many journalists shared varying levels of frustration about placing war stories onto newscasts. "I've never met a journalist who hasn't been frustrated about getting his or her stories on the air," said Terry McCarthy, an ABC News correspondent in Baghdad."

What the left does not know about warfare : "Working out last Monday, I heard a campaign flunky on TV insist that progress in Iraq is an illusion. "The war isn't over until all of the troops come home!" she grumped. Guess we're still at war with Germany. And Japan. Even Italy. Oh, and let's not forget all of our military bases occupying the Confederacy. The poor woman knew nothing about warfare, history - or Iraq. She just wanted to see her candidate win in November and wasn't going to let reality get in the way. And one look told you she didn't even know any "troops."

For more postings from me, see OBAMA WATCH, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

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

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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IQ and ideology: A little puzzle

This is a bit of an old chestnut: Are Leftists more intelligent than conservatives? Leftists often assert that Leftists are brighter. Conservatives tend to see it otherwise. As Wray Herbert points out, it would be surprising if one did not see one's own views as more intelligent. So who is right? Is there a real difference?

One reason why the Leftist accusation that conservatives are dumb gains some weight is the great preponderance of Leftists among professors. That overlooks, however, that the situation was not always thus. Up until the 1960s, the professoriate was in general politically moderate. There were of course exceptions. The elite universities have always tended Left. The best known examples of that are England's two great universities, Oxford and Cambridge. We have all I think heard of the Cambridge spies (Philby et al.), and the Bloomsberries were far Left too. Such leftism can perhaps most economically be described as a "spoilt brat" syndrome. Less well known is the prewar fascination of Harvard with Nazism -- which was a popular form of socialism in its day.

The general moderation of the pre-1960s professoriate was however its undoing. Precisely because of its moderation, it came under ferocious attack from the 1960s student radicals and it responded in a typically moderate way -- apologetically. Curricula were revised in response to the radical demands and more and more Leftists were hired and promoted. And when in the course of time the radical academics so appointed rose in seniority and power, they behaved in a typically unscrupulous way and used their power to squeeze out as many conservatives from academe as they could. So smart conservatives these days go on to get rich in business while the Leftist academics fume away in their ivory towers!

Perhaps most amusingly, however, it should be noted that the Dems and the GOP split the college-educated vote about equally in the 2004 Presidential election. In other words, about half of the people whom the Leftist professors themselves have certified as academically able in fact vote GOP!

But education is not IQ so do we have more direct evidence on the question? Has anybody correlated IQ scores and politics in the general population?

For a long time the only study I knew of which did so was one that I myself helped to write up in the 1970's: Martin's study. That study looked at clearly Leftist attitudes such as the following:

* Most people who are leaders in the world today got there by crooked or sneaky means.
* There isn't really very much your parents or older people can tell you that will help you get along in the world nowadays.
* The best school system is one that is democratic and treats all the pupils exactly alike.
* Complete freedom is the best way to bring up a child if you want it to be free and active.
* Most so-called "juvenile delinquency" is really just "youthful exuberance" and should not be punished.
* One of the best attitudes a young person can learn is that "nothing is sacred."

So who tended to agree with statements like that? The smarties or the dummies? It was the dummies!

Time marches on, however, and another study has recently emerged which looks at the same question. Deary et al. (2008) did quite a powerful study of a British population which came to exactly opposite conclusions. Wray Herbert sums up the study in layman's language.

So how come? A clue is to be found in the fact that the Deary et al. study reported that education was a major factor in the relationship. It was the fact that more intelligent people had more education that produced the relationship. It was education that made you Leftist, not IQ. Anybody who knows how Leftist the educational system is these days will not be surprised to hear that all that Leftist brainwashing had some effect.

But education was not the whole of the story. There was still some effect on attitudes due to IQ alone. But what the education results alert us to is the importance of the overall mental environment of the people surveyed. Deary's sample were all born in 1970. The Martin sample was interviewed in the early 1960s and covered a representative age range but would on average have been born in the mid-1930s. That is a very different group of people -- people who have grown up into very different mental environments. And just the difference in interview dates -- the early 1960s versus the early 2000s -- would account for a lot. A lot has changed over the last 40 years.

In particular, the great attitudinal upheaval of the late 1960s had not happened for Martin's sample and the very expression "political correctness" would have been incomprehensible to them. In short, the cultural attitudes of the modern day world are very different from the attitudes that prevailed before the upheavals of the '60s. I was there in the 60s. I remember the upheavals concerned very well. And the defeat of Soviet Communism ratcheted up the cultural changes even further. When it became clear that Leftists had lost the economic argument (over socialism versus capitalism), they turned their energies onto cultural questions -- promoting homosexuality, attacking marriage etc. The end result is that we now live in a world where the prevailing cultural attitudes are MUCH more Leftist than they once were.

So it is clear why the Martin and the Deary results differ. Smarter people are more aware of the values that are regarded as "correct" in the world about them. What smarter people said in the 60s was conservative because conservative values were the default assumption then. What smarter people said in the 2000s was Leftist because Leftist values have now become the default assumptions in conversations about such things -- and the default assumptions in the media most particularly.

So what the Deary results show when taken in conjunction with the Martin results is not that smart people are Leftists but rather that smart people are more sensitive to the thinking of people around them.

Update:

Is the short list of attitudes from Martin's study above really Leftist? Libertarians would also agree with some of the statements listed. Libertarians are however only a tiny fraction of the population and libertarianism was essentially unknown in Australia at the time. It still largely is, in fact. So a libertarian influence on the results can be excluded.

The statements listed are very similar to other statements that were characteristically Leftist at the time. The underlying theme of the items was intended by their author to be a rejection of authority and it should be noted that another Australian questionnaire which systematically surveyed attitudes to authority in 1969 found that attitude to authority correlated even more strongly with political party choice (r = .43) than it did attitude to innovation (.33). Supporters of Australia's major Leftist party were, in other words, even more likely to be anti-authority than they were likely to be in favour of change. In the same study attitudes to authority also correlated very highly (.73) with a collection of radical attitudes generally. Leftists reject all authority that they do not themselves control and that rejection is a central part of their thinking.

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ELSEWHERE

War tech benefits civilians : "Although Hugh Herr was a respected professor at Harvard Medical School, he says finding someone to bankroll a new prosthetic knee project was tough before the Iraq war. He could get funding from the prosthetic industry, but government sources showed little interest. But a year and a half after the invasion of Iraq, the tides turned. The United States Department of Veterans Affairs provided the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and several other institutions with $7.2 million to study artificial arms and legs for amputees. The money, along with key technological innovations, has helped Dr. Herr, now an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, create a powered ankle and knee, the next generation of prosthetics."

Obama alienating the media?: "For most voters, Barack Obama's shift away from public financing is not as big a deal as the mounting death toll in Iraq, surging gas prices - or even what they're going to make for dinner tonight. But Obama's announcement Thursday that he would become the first candidate to opt out of the public financing program for the general election was a big deal for some of the nation's most influential newspaper editorial boards, which have long been ardent champions of campaign finance reform and which had thought they'd found a kindred spirit on the issue. Friday morning, scathing editorials in many top broadsheets characterized Obama's move as a self-interested flip-flop, dismissed his efforts to cast it as a principled stand and charged that Obama wasn't living up to the reformer image around which he has crafted his political identity. The scolding could mark a turning point in what has been, on balance, fawning treatment of Obama"

Facts are inconsistent with Democrat Iraq narrative : "In January 2007, when George W. Bush ordered the surge strategy, which John McCain had advocated since the summer of 2003, Barack Obama informed us that the surge couldn't work. The only thing to do was to get out as soon as possible. That stance proved to be a good move toward winning the presidential nomination -- but it was poor prophecy. It is beyond doubt now that the surge has been hugely successful, beyond even the hopes of its strongest advocates, like Frederick and Kimberly Kagan. Violence is down enormously, Anbar and Basra and Sadr City have been pacified, Prime Minister Maliki has led successful attempts to pacify Shiites as well as Sunnis, and the Iraqi parliament has passed almost all of the "benchmark" legislation demanded by the Democratic Congress -- all of which Barack Obama seems to have barely noticed or noticed not at all. He has not visited Iraq since January 2006 and did not seek a meeting with Gen. David Petraeus when he was in Washington."

For more postings from me, see OBAMA WATCH, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Lakoff reinvents the wheel

Poor old George Lakoff. There is a review of his latest book here. He is a linguist by trade but nobody takes him seriously there so he has for some years now been trying his hand at political psychology -- which happens to be my particular area of academic expertise.

It is no surprise to find that he has nothing original to say but it is sort-of sad that he gets some basic stuff ass-backwards. He buys into the compulsive Leftist myth that conservatives are "authoritarian", blithely ignoring that, from the French revolution onward, it has been Leftists (in the person of Communists like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and Socialists like Hitler and Mussolini) who have been by far the biggest authoritarians. For a quick summary of how and why Leftists sustain the myth that it is conservatives who are authoritarian, see here.

It always amuses me that even outright Marxists often identify authoritarianism with conservatism even though one of their founders, Friedrich Engels (co-author of Das Kapital) was perfectly commonsense about the matter:

"Revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon". -- from his controversy with the anarchists.

With such a wilfully blind start, Lakoff cannot possibly have much to offer. I was, however, amused by this Lakoff prescription that I found in the review above:

What should progressives say? That conservatism is "fundamentally antidemocratic."

Once again poor old George is reinventing the wheel. Precisely that assertion was an integral part of the old 1950 Adorno work that started the "authoritarian conservative" myth. I guess Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were democrats! There have been many Communist movements worldwide over the years but not one could reasonably be called democratic. So Communism is conservative? Black might as well be white. And in the Western democracies today, Leftists never stop their attempts to censor and suppress conservative speech. See my TONGUE-TIED blog for almost daily examples of that. Is that democratic? It is an attempt to hobble democracy as far as I can see.

To cap it off, the original Adorno questionnaire that was used to characterize conservatives as anti-democrratic (the F scale) was in fact a compilation of beliefs that were common in the "Progressive"-dominated America in the first half of the 20th century. See here on the nature of the F scale questions and see here for the rather surprising details of America's "Progressive" era. So if there were any ideas that were shown by Adorno to be anti-democratic, they were in fact "Progressive" ideas at the time!

Another amusing Lakoff prescription: "progressives should rely less on facts and more on images and drama". Talk about preaching to the converted! Since when did Leftists EVER rely on facts? Appeals to emotions have been their stock in trade since the year dot. If they relied on known facts they would certainly have given up very rapidly and very long ago any notion that socialism was a cure for poverty.

The reviewer (Saletan) goes on to point out more of the huge holes in Lakoff's thinking so I will not go on. I have however had a close look at Lakoff's threadbare old ideas previously. See here.

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McCain still not impressive on oil

Oil, oil everywhere and not a well to sink, because of current US policies. John McCain came out for more drilling the other day, an utterly common sense thing that is overwhelmingly popular in the polls, and he has Dick Morris swooning at his superior political judgment to Obama. Standards in politics are low, apparently. But what about ANWR? In the course of complaining about Senator McCain's inexplicable devotion to the remote, utterly unpopulated northern reach of Alaska we call ANWR, Charles Krauthammer reminds us of some history:

Gas is $4 a gallon. Oil is $135 a barrel and rising. We import two-thirds of our oil, sending hundreds of billions of dollars to the likes of Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. And yet we voluntarily prohibit ourselves from even exploring huge domestic reserves of petroleum and natural gas.

At a time when U.S. crude oil production has fallen 40 percent in the last 25 years, 75 billion barrels of oil have been declared off-limits, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That would be enough to replace every barrel of non-North American imports (oil trade with Canada and Mexico is a net economic and national security plus) for 22 years. That's nearly a quarter-century of energy independence. The situation is absurd. To which John McCain is responding with a partial fix: Lift the federal ban on Outer Continental Shelf drilling, where a fifth of the off-limits stuff lies.

This is a change for McCain, but circumstances have changed. When the moratorium was imposed in 1982, gasoline was $1.20 and oil was $30 a barrel. Since the moratorium was instituted, we've had two wars in the Middle East, and in between a decade of garrisoning troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE to preserve the peace and keep untold oil riches out of the hands of the most malevolent of our enemies.

Technological conditions have changed as well. We now are able to drill with far more precision and environmental care than a quarter-century ago. We have thousands of rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, yet not even hurricanes Katrina and Rita resulted in spills of any significance.

Krauthammer makes the common sense case that what is true offshore should obviously be true for ANWR, and chides McCain for his inconsistent stance, and that brings us to whether MCain's position is political or intellectual. For example, Paul Krugman thinks that Senator McCain's change of heart on offshore drilling is the result of cynical political calculation: "I'm reasonably sure that Mr. McCain's advisers realize that offshore drilling would do nothing for current gas prices. But they may believe that the public can be conned." Krugman's analysis and McCain's obstinance to date on ANWR raise the question of whether ANWR poll-tests poorly among swing voters, or whether McCain's stance is just uninformed and dumb.

Source

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ELSEWHERE

Another Haditha Marine Prepares to Sue John Murtha: "Cold-blooded John Murtha was wrong about the Haditha marines. In May 2006 antiwar Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) accused US marines of killing innocent Iraqis "in cold blood" after the former news magazine TIME published a piece of Al-Qaeda propaganda about an incident in Haditha, Iraq. In May 2006 antiwar Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) also announced that there was a grand coverup to to stifle the story. Today Drudge reported that another one of the exonerated Haditha marines is preparing to sue John Murtha. With most of the eight Marines charged in the Haditha, Iraq, incident now exonerated, the highest-ranking officer among the accused is considering a lawsuit against Democratic Rep. John Murtha, who fueled the case by declaring the men cold-blooded killers. The lead attorney for Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, Brian Rooney, acknowledged to (Michael) Savage it's difficult to sue a sitting congressman, but he believes it can be done".

Why can't Britain equip its soldiers properly?: "The Ministry of Defence must remove Snatch Land Rovers from operations following the deaths of four soldiers in Afghanistan this week, military experts have said. The poorly-protected vehicles, which are due to be phased out entirely later this year, have been withdrawn from use in Iraq but are still being used in Afghanistan, where it was thought that the bomb threat was less sophisticated. Three Special Forces soldiers and Corporal Sarah Bryant, the female Intelligence Corps soldier, were killed when their Land Rover was hit by a roadside explosion on Tuesday. Charles Heyman, a defence analyst and former Army major, said that the roads in Afghanistan were "too dangerous for normal troop movement." [But Britain has no shortage of money to pay clerks and "administrators", of course]



Surprise: A Jew-hating Jew is a nut: "Critics are calling for the resignation of a U.N. official who publicly supports investigating theories that the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were an "inside job." Richard Falk [pic above], the special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, investigates alleged Israeli violations of human rights law for the U.N.'s Human Rights Council. But the former Princeton professor would also like to investigate whether "some sort of controlled explosion from within" destroyed the Twin Towers, he told FOXNews.com.

Environmental wackos endorse Obama : "The NY Times reports that the Sierra Club is making its endorsement of Barack Obama official. This is not a man bites dog story. It is more of a dog licks man story. I think this is good news for Republicans. These wackos were not going to vote for McCain anyway and now they have associated their anti energy movement with the Democrat nominee it will make the attacks on his energy non policy all the more persuasive. In another shocker the United steel workers labor bosses will also endorse Obama. Whether their members will vote for him is an altogether different matter. One of Obama's real challenges this fall will be getting the blue collar vote. They are just not arugula type people nor do they shop at Whole Foods."

For more postings from me, see OBAMA WATCH, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Wouldn't It Be Nice?

Wouldn't it be nice to hear Charles Gibson on ABC World News Tonight report that "the U.S. military has succeeded in clearing 50 percent of improvised explosive devices in Iraq while simultaneously improving force protection"?

Wouldn't it be nice to hear Katie Couric on the CBS Evening News quote Maj. Marc Young, a Multi-National Force-Iraq spokesperson, saying that "With every operation Coalition Forces conduct we are further degrading and destroying the al-Qaeda in Iraq network"?

Wouldn't it be nice to hear Brian Williams on the NBC Nightly News report that the "South Baghdad economy is booming again"?

Wouldn't it be nice to hear Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi hold a press conference after these reports and thank the President for his steadfastness in leading our country in the war on terror; or maybe she could just praise the troops for the tremendous progress in Iraq?

Wouldn't it be nice to hear Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid come out and say that although he really believed at the time that the war was lost, that he gratefully comes forward to say he was wrong and praise the great American military for a magnificent job?

Wouldn't it be nice to see John Murtha come out and apologize to the Haditha Marines for wrongly accusing them and asking for their and all Americans forgiveness? ...

Do the major three networks just not know that these things are occurring in Iraq or do they choose not to report them? Are these three politicians oblivious to the truth?... While I personally challenge the patriotism of the three news organizations and the three politicians, let's just say for argument's sake that I am out of line. Well then it is clear that all six are playing politics with this war and that means their politics come before their patriotism. Wouldn't it be nice if that were not so?

More here

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Brookes News Update

Obama's economic folly and Paul Krugman's hypocrisy: Barrack Hussein Obama's economic policy is one of incredible stupidity. He plans to bludgeon the economy with massive tax increases while flooding it with astronomical spending. Is this bloke a genius or what
Our lousy monetary policy and economic commentary: The principal reason for the lousy state of monetary management and economic commentary is due entirely to a failure of those paid to know better to comprehend the real nature of money, the true force behind inflation and the existence of a capital structure. In short, massive ignorance
Supermarkets, size and competition: Supermarkets are frequently cited as an example of anti-competitive behaviour where the big boys have used their economic muscle to squeeze out much smaller competitors. This view has given rise to three major complaints about supermarkets
Chavez decrees more Castroism - then backs off: Chavez' attempt to abolish the separation of powers, force judges and prosecutors to collaborate with the newly-decreed secret police, and impose draconian sentences on those who resisted his totalitarian law blew up in his face when the people took to the streets. And this is the brute that some in the media assert has shown 'his democratic credentials'
Will Obama be a Constitutional Obamination?: Obama believes that judges should rule according to their 'hearts (meaning they should agree with his ideology) instead of the Constitution. Only someone with complete contempt for the Constitution and the democratic process could hold such views
Post-Bush Boom: Republicans are offering voters a progressive alternative, progressive in that if it is followed, it will advance, rather than set back, the economy. With gasoline prices having gone past $4 a gallon and giving no indication they'll turn back soon, the Democratic Congress, which thinks that seizing oil companies' profits will cut prices at the pump, clearly has no answers to rising energy prices
The end of greenism: It hasn't quite hit the radar of the Liberal Democrats, but as the price of gasoline soars above $4 a gallon, and here in California it's closing in on $5, they're going to be facing a hard choice with no good options
Will political correctness destroy America?: The idea that Islam is a 'Religion of Peace' would be merely comical but for the stakes involved in underestimating the evil power of Islam. Incredibly, despite mounting evidence to the contrary around the world, there are Americans who are unable or unwilling to recognize the threat Islam presents, not just so-called 'radical Islam', but Islam in its entirety
Leftism brings economic catastrophe: It is no accident that the most poorly governed countries with the worst economic indicators are those with leftwing governments

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ELSEWHERE

EU treaty: Leaders praise Gordon Brown's courage: "European Union leaders have heaped praise on Gordon Brown's "courage" in keeping the Lisbon Treaty alive by ignoring Ireland's No vote and UK public opinion to complete Britain's ratification. The Prime Minister found himself in the uncomfortable position of being lauded for defying British opinion as EU leaders met to discuss ways to push ahead with the Lisbon treaty despite the Irish rejection. Over dinner in Brussels, EU leaders set an October deadline for the Irish government to come up with a way to ratify the treaty, which requires the approval of all 27 member-states to take effect. Despite publicly promising to respect the Irish vote, EU states led by France are leading a campaign to pressurize Ireland into agreeing a second referendum." [Ireland should threaten to join NAFTA instead. Their welcome to an economic union with the USA and Canada would be enormous]



More MSM shrinkage -- Heh!: "The McClatchy Company, one of the nation's biggest newspaper chains, said this week that it would cut its work force by 10 percent, or around 1,400 people, after having already eliminated about 2,000 jobs over 18 months. As the newspaper industry suffers through both a long-term contraction and a sluggish economy, McClatchy has been hit harder than most, because it relies heavily on the troubled California and Florida markets. McClatchy reported that for the first five months of the year, its revenue dropped 14.2 percent from the prior year, the NY Times reports. The deepest cut will hit the Miami Herald, one of McClatchy's largest papers, which told its staff that it would eliminate 250 jobs, or 17 percent of its work force.

Congressional Democrats openly endorse communism: "I thought communism was dead. But it appears to have risen like a phoenix on Dianabol -- at least in the minds of Congressional Democrats and Obama supporters. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) wants oil refineries to be "owned by the people of the United States." In other words, he'd put refineries in the hands of big government -- presumably a new agency. Say, the Department of Refinining and Gas Rationing. Interviewed on Fox, Obama supporter Malia Lazu of Oil Change International essentially stated that Hugo Chavez was on the right track when he nationalized Venezuela's oil industry. "This isn't shareholders' oil, this is our oil."

For more postings from me, see OBAMA WATCH, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

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

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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A small reflection on the constant Leftist call for unity

It is a demand for everybody to agree with them of course -- and a threat to all dissent. Obama is the most notable practitioner at the moment. So we should not be surprised that the country which invented welfare legislation -- Germany -- still focuses heavily on unity in their national anthem:

Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit (Unity and justice and freedom)
Fuer das deutsche Vaterland! (for the German fatherland)
Danach lasst uns alle streben (for that let us all strive)
Bruederlich mit Herz und Hand! (in brotherhood with heart and hand)
Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit (Unity and justice and freedom)
Sind des Glueckes Unterpfand. (Are the guarantee of happiness)

And that's the anthem of MODERN Germany, not the Nazi regime! The Nazi version was even more expansive, of course -- with "brothers standing together" etc. When the above words were written in 1841, Germany had not been united into one nation so the song was aimed primarily at agitating for such a nation. Since Germany has been a single nation since 1872, however, the words are sung today for obviously quite different reasons: Leftist intolerance of dissent and desire for power at the top. Rather different from "The land of the free and the home of the brave". Obama's ideals are German, not American.

There is an extensive commentary on Leftist calls for unity here. It notes that there are some occasions on which unity is a reasonable expectation but -- surprise! -- it is in precisely such cases that Leftists deride unity. Unity is desired as a means to Leftist power, nothing else. If it doesn't serve that, who needs it?

Rather surprisingly, the article does not mention the great Nazi slogan: "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer" (One people, one State, one leader).



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No Profits, No Oil

If a product is in short supply and if you really wanted more to be produced quickly, would you want companies to think that they could earn a lot of money making it? You would think that the answer is pretty obvious: No profits, no oil. To encourage more production, companies need to think that there are more profits to be made. With all the anger over high oil prices, more production to lower prices would seem to be a high priority. But outside of most congressional Republicans, particularly those in the Senate who successfully filibustered a new wind-fall profits tax on oil companies, no one wants to admit what profits do.

Unfortunately, both the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates are both attacking oil company profits. Barack Obama promises, "We've got to go after the oil companies and look at their price-gouging. We've got to go after windfall profits." John McCain says, "I am very angry, frankly, at the oil companies. Not only because of the obscene profits they've made, but their failure to invest in alternative energy to help us eliminate our dependence on foreign oil." Not to be outdone, congressional Democrats are just as upset. New York's Senator Chuck Schumer claimed: "Oil companies are racking up obscene profits left and right while American families are stretched to the limit by skyrocketing gas prices. It's time for Big Oil to pay its fair share . . . ."

The defense of oil companies has been much to, well, defensive. Some pundits and those in the industry point out that energy companies aren't really making that much money. While the energy companies during the first quarter of this year had an average profit margin of 7,4 percent, the average Dow Jones Industrial Average company earned 8.5 percent. For example, ExxonMobil, which Obama has singled out for particular criticism, made an "obscene" $40 billion in profit, but that is on $404 billion in sales.

Much of the discussion concerning record high profits is misleading as it focuses on the dollar amount of the profits not the profit rate. As sales have also gone up over time, of course total profits have gone up, too. Nor are looking at just a couple of years particularly useful. Others point out federal, state, and local governments have made more from gasoline taxes than the large U.S. oil companies have earned in total U.S. profits.

But all this assumes that companies should prove that their profits aren't "too large." That high profits aren't good. Do customers want more gas? Higher profits increase production, driving down both prices and profits. Ironically, at the same time politicians are complaining about corporate greed, they understand the importance of incentives. If Obama didn't think that companies responded to incentives, why else would he propose that $150 billion be spent by the government on developing alternative energy?

More here

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ELSEWHERE

For the latest Associated Press humiliation, see here. No wonder they don't want bloggers to quote them! And it's even a Leftist blogger taking them to task!

McCain wants 45 new nuke reactors by 2030: "Sen. John McCain called Wednesday for the construction of 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030 and pledged $2 billion a year in Federal funds "to make clean coal a reality," measures designed to reduce dependence on foreign oil. In a third straight day of campaigning devoted to the energy issue, the Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting also said the only time Democratic rival Barack Obama voted for a tax cut was for a "break for the oil companies." McCain said the 104 nuclear reactors currently operating around the country produce about 20% of the nation's annual electricity needs. "Every year, these reactors alone spare the atmosphere from the equivalent of nearly all auto emissions in America. Yet for all these benefits, we have not broken ground on a single nuclear plant in over thirty years," he said. "And our manufacturing base to even construct these plants is almost gone."

Conservative talker locked out: "Laura Ingraham, the most popular woman on political talk radio, has been off the air for two weeks, and not by choice. Ingraham's syndicator, Talk Radio Network, barred her from her Washington studio after talks about a new contract hit a snag, and some of her fans are mounting a campaign to get her back. "The fact is, they took her off the air," says Eric Bernthal, her lawyer. "There's no doubt in my mind they did it as a tactic in contract negotiations," he told the Washington Post. Ingraham said on her website: "Rest assured, this absence is not of my choosing, nor is it health or family related. I am ready, willing and eager to continue the conversation we started seven years ago about politics and the culture ... I would never voluntarily abandon you during such a critical time for our country," she assured listeners"

Muslim pedophile caught: "Police arrested a man Tuesday in connection with an attempted child enticement case in Denver. Mohammed Al Hamdani, 39, was taken into custody after an 11-year-old girl snapped a photo of a man with her cell phone who was allegedly trying to abduct her at Bible Park in southeast Denver. It was unclear from a Denver Police Department press release whether the photo led to the arrest of the man. The 11-year-old girl told police a man approached her at the park and asked her to get in his car, MyFOXColorado.com reported. She said no, snapped a picture of the man with her cell phone and ran away from him, according to the TV station. The girl turned the cell phone image over to police, who distributed the man's photo to the public"

For more postings from me, see OBAMA WATCH, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

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

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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New Evidence on Government and Growth

In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan embraced the ideas of a small group of economists dubbed "supply-siders." They argued that lower taxes and slimmer government would stimulate growth, enterprise, harder work and higher levels of saving and investment. These views were widely ridiculed at the time, dismissed as "voodoo economics." Reagan did succeed in lowering some taxes. But a Democrat-controlled Congress weakened their impact by raising government spending sharply, resulting in large budget deficits. A quarter of a century later, many more countries have cut taxes and reined in heavy-handed government intervention. How far have they gone down this path, and with what success?

My study, "Big, Not Better?" (Centre for Policy Studies, 2008), looks at the performance of 20 countries over the past two decades. The first 10 have slimmer governments with revenue and expenditure levels below 40% of GDP. This group includes Australia, Canada, Estonia, Hong Kong, Ireland, South Korea, Latvia, Singapore, the Slovak Republic and the U.S.

I compared their records to the 10 higher-taxed, bigger-government economies: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Both groups cover a representative range of large, medium and small economies measured by their gross national incomes. The average incomes per capita of the two groups are similar ($27,046 and $30,426 respectively in 2005)...

Slimmer-government countries also delivered more rapid social progress in some areas. They have, on average, higher annual employment growth rates (1.7% compared to 0.9% from 1995-2005). Their youth unemployment rates have been lower for both males and females since 2000. The discretionary income of households rose faster in the first group. This allowed their real consumption to increase by 4.1% annually from 2000-2005, up from 2.8% in 1990-2000. In the bigger-government group, the growth of household consumption has slowed to a 1.3% average annual rate, from 2.1% during the 1990-2000 period.

Faster economic growth in the first group also generated a more rapid increase in government revenue, despite (or rather, because of, supply-siders suggest) lower overall tax burdens.

Slimmer-government countries seem to have made better use of their smaller health resources. Total spending on health programs reached 9.5% of GDP in the bigger government group in 2004, 1.6 percentage points above the average in the slimmer-government group. Yet slimmer-government countries have raised their average life expectancy at birth at a faster pace since 1990, reaching an average level of 78 years in 2005, just one year below the average for bigger spenders. Average life expectancy is now 80 years in Singapore, although government and private health programs combined cost only 3.7% of its GDP.

Finally, spending by bigger governments on social benefits (such as unemployment and disability benefits, housing allowances and state pensions) was higher (20.3% of GDP in 2006) than that of slimmer governments (9.6%). But these transfers do not appear to have resulted in greater equality in the distribution of income. The Gini index measuring income distribution is similar for both groups...

The early supply-siders were right. My findings firmly reject the widely held view that lower taxes inevitably result in cuts in public services, slower growth and widening income inequalities. Today's policy makers should take note of how tax cuts and the pruning of inefficient government programs can stimulate sluggish economies.

More here

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Congress is to Blame for $4 Gas

As oil prices head through the roof, and gasoline jumps over $4 a gallon, Americans feeling the pinch at the pump should recognize that the wealthiest nation on the planet has nothing but itself to blame for the third in a series of energy crises that began when Richard Nixon was still in office. Having largely ignored the previous two shots across the bow - the first coming in 1973 when OPEC decided to ban sales of oil to nations that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War, and the second in 1979 after the Islamic Revolution in Iran - the U.S. seems determined to repeat the mistakes of the past. Shamefully, we are once again in the position of wondering just how high energy prices can go, and at what cost to our economy.

Despite 35 years of empty rhetoric from politicians bemoaning U.S. dependence on foreign oil, legislatively enacted environmental barriers have actually resulted in a 25-percent decline in domestic production since the first '70s energy crisis - while our usage has increased 20 percent. Regardless of one's ideological proclivities, it seems logical that you can't reduce foreign-oil dependence by cutting production at the same time that demand is rising. Despite how obvious this seems, one of our nation's two major political parties stubbornly continues to ignore that logic.

What should make Americans on both sides of the aisle even more ashamed is that before the first energy crisis, the United States produced 11.428 million barrels of oil per day. This represented 66 percent of the 17.308 million barrels we consumed that year. Compare that to 2007, when America produced 8.481 million barrels per day, or only 41 percent of the 20.7 million barrels consumed. Such is the result of the so-called energy policies of seven White Houses and 17 Congresses controlled by both Democrats and Republicans.

Yet, today's politicians - mostly on the left side of the aisle, of course - have the gall to place all the blame for rising energy prices on increased demand from expanding economies like China and India. At least those countries are participating in exploration efforts to expand their own supplies. China's oil production has almost doubled since 1980, while India's has grown by an astounding 375 percent. At the same time, U.S. production has declined by 22 percent. We sure do know how to respond to energy crises in this country, don't we?...

Much more here

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ELSEWHERE

A withdrawal you did not read about in your newspapers: "U.S. President George Bush on Monday announced the withdrawal of 30,000 troops next July, highlighting that any further withdrawal of the troops will depend on the security conditions in the country. This came during a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in London. The U.S. president linked any further withdrawal of U.S. forces with the improvement of Iraqi forces' capabilities and their abilities to bear more responsibilities, as well as the economic improvement and more progress regarding political reconciliation. "This strategy aims at handing Iraqis more responsibilities," Bush said."

Ralph Nader has a point (for once): "The Wall Street Boys, like all charlatans, develop words and phrases to dress up their megagambling practices. They say they are trying to avoid a 'crisis of confidence' when these proclaimed capitalists go to Uncle Sam for a socialistic bailout. That only increases the 'moral hazard' -- another euphemism -- and sets the stage for another round of reckless Wall Street Goliaths being deemed 'too big to fail.' One of Wall Street's sharpest analysts -- Henry Kaufman -- believes that the 'too big to fail' phenomenon undermines market discipline and encourages the smaller firms to merge with the larger companies to avail themselves of Washington's bailout criteria."

Pope wisely returning church to its roots: "Pope Benedict XVI wants every parish in the West to offer believers the Mass in the Tridentine or Gregorian Rite, the Latin-language liturgy used until the 1960s by every Catholic church in the world. The Pope wishes every parish to offer both rites for Sunday Mass, an eminent Vatican Cardinal announced in London on Saturday. Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, President of the Ecclesia Dei Commission, said: "The Holy Father is willing to offer to all the people this possibility, not only for the few groups who demand it but so that everybody knows this way of celebrating the Eucharist in the Catholic Church." It was a "gift" and a "treasure," Castrillon Hoyos said, hours before celebrating a Tridentine liturgy attended by some 1,500 worshippers at Westminster Cathedral on June 14. "This kind of worship is so noble, so beautiful - the deepest theologians' way to express our faith. The worship, the music, the architecture, the painting, makes a whole that is a treasure."

For more postings from me, see OBAMA WATCH, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

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

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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THE ALASKA WILDLIFE RESERVE AND THE OIL CRISIS

McCain expediency uncovered: "I keep hearing Mr. McCain say that he does not agree with drilling for oil in ANWR because he believes that ANWR should remain in a pristine condition, just like the Grand Canyon. But this assertion either ignores or is ignorant of a rather significant historical fact about the Grand Canyon: A private company mined uranium ore at the Orphan Mine on the south rim of the canyon from 1953 until either 1969 or 1972. (The National Park Service says mining operations terminated '69 while Arizona Radiation Regulatory Agency says '72; the link to the NPS community fact sheet on the Orphan Mine is http://www.nps.gov/grca/parkmgmt/upload/orphan1.pdf). Since a company was able to mine radioactive uranium a half century ago in Grand Canyon National Park without destroying the park's "pristine condition," I believe it is reasonable to assume that with today's significantly better technology, oil companies could drill in ANWR without destroying the refuge's "pristine condition." Moreover, I cannot believe that Mr. McCain is ignorant of the fact that uranium was mined at the Grand Canyon. He has hiked the canyon from rim-to-rim, and the old structures at the mine's entrance remain intact and are clearly visible from Bright Angel Trail"

Oil from ANWR would harm nothing: "ANWR is roughly the size of South Carolina, and it is spectacular. However, the area where, according to Department of Interior estimates, some 5.7 billion to 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil reside is much smaller and not necessarily as awe-inspiring. It would amount to the size of Dulles airport. Question for McCain: Has South Carolina been ruined because it has an airport? Most of the images of the proposed drilling area that people see on the evening news are misleading precisely because they tend to show the glorious parts of ANWR, even though that's not where the drilling would take place. Even when they position their cameras in the right location, producers tend to point them in the wrong direction. They point them south, toward the Brooks mountain range, rather than north, across the coastal plain where the drilling would be. In summer, the coastal plain is mostly mosquito-plagued tundra and bogs".

1/2 a million barrels, yes -- 1 million, no?: "I am confused: for years we were told that the projected 1 million barrels per day from ANWR would be simply too small to make much of a difference given our 20 million some barrel a day appetite - and therefore not worth the environmental risk. Now we wait in tense anticipation for a Saudi willingness to pump an extra 1/2 million per day (from where and how we apparently simply don't care), which we hope will send a message that world supply and demand might be in better sync to cut the feet out from under speculators. So how can 500,000 barrels now do what a million once could not?"

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ELSEWHERE

McCain gets something right: "With the price of gasoline surging past $4 a gallon in many parts of the country, Senator John McCain called today for the lifting of the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling for states that want to permit it. He said that he also favors giving states incentives to allow exploration, part of an energy proposal that he said would be "very helpful in the short term for resolving our energy crisis." Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, said the impact of high fuel prices was hitting Americans, not only at the pump, but also in the form of rising food prices and threats of inflation. Mr. McCain has a mixed record on the issue in the Senate. In 2001 and 2006, he voted in favor of offshore oil drilling in Florida, but in 2003 he voted against it in Florida and other states. Mr. McCain has consistently opposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge."

British PM comes through on Iran sanctions, Afghan troop increase: "There were questions surrounding Gordon Brown when he became Great Britain's Prime Minister. Taking office with echoes of "lap dog" following his predecessor Tony Blair, many wondered just how committed Brown would be to the "Special Relationship" between the US and Great Britain and whether he would initiate a more independent course in foreign affairs. Brown may yet eschew supporting the US on many issues. But on increasing sanctions on Iran and sending additional troops to Afghanistan - two things the US devoutly wished Brown would accede to - the British Prime Minister has come through."

Countrywide 'Sweetheart Loans' Tied to Legislation: "Not making many headlines because the perps are Democrats, the sweetheart loan deals that former Obama Vice Presidential vetter Jim Johnson accepted from Countrywide Chairman Angelo Mozilo have ensnared two Democratic senators; Ken Conrad of North Dakota and former presidential candidate Chris Dodd of Connecticut. Conrad's approach was outrageous."

SCOTUS: Child-abuse claims vs. parents' rights: "The US Supreme Court is being asked to determine whether procedures used in Illinois to investigate allegations of child abuse or neglect violate the fundamental rights of parents. The case arises at a legal crossroads between the government's interest in moving quickly to safeguard children from abuse or neglect and the right of parents to raise and maintain a family without undue government interference. The high court is scheduled to consider whether to take up the case, Dupuy v. McEwen, at its private conference Thursday. An order agreeing or refusing to hear the appeal could come as early as Monday."

Obama taxes: "Barack Obama plans to impose the 6.2% payroll Social Security tax on wage income over $250,000. I am blessed and grateful to earn more than that amount, but it does mean that the aggregate marginal tax rate on my wage income -- 35% federal income tax, 8.97% New Jersey income tax, 6.2% Social Security tax, and 1.45% Medicare tax -- would then exceed 51%. This is without taking into account Obama's plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts (which would move the federal income tax rate from 35% to 39%) or the impact of the higher Social Security taxes on my employer. By the time he is done the taxes on my wage income at the margin will be well north of 55%, again excluding the impact on my employer. I can already sense my ambition draining away."

The Media Primary: "The presidential primaries are finally over. We know how the candidates fared with voters but what did voters think of the news media that covered the race? If objectivity and balance are the goals, not well at all. A new Rasmussen Reports survey finds that 68% of Americans "believe most reporters try to help the candidate that they want to win." Not surprisingly, a majority of voters also thought that Barack Obama received the most favorable coverage during the primary season..."

Democrat resistance to Iraq funding crumbles: "Democrats in the Congress, who came to power last year on a call to end the combat in Iraq, will soon give President George W. Bush the last war-funding bill of his presidency without any of the conditions they sought for withdrawing U.S. troops, congressional aides said on Monday. Lawmakers are arranging to send Bush $165 billion in new money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, enough to last for about a year and well beyond when Bush leaves office on January 20. "It'll be the lump sum of money, veterans (funding) and that's it," said one House aide familiar with the negotiations on the legislation."

For more postings from me, see OBAMA WATCH, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

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

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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