Why Winners Win

by Rich Tucker

Nice to see someone else unwinding Gladwell's popular but simplistic formulas below. I have had a few shots at the Gladwell fantasies myself -- e.g here

Fortune, it is said, favors the bold. And best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell is certainly bold. In his latest chart-topper, “Outliers,” Gladwell sets out to change our perception of success by showing that we must “appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.”

Throughout the book, Gladwell does an entertaining job of peeling back the onion. Bill Gates is a success not simply because he’s smart, Gladwell writes, he’s a success because of when and where he was born, because he had access to an early version of a computer. Because companies in his area needed help programming their mainframes. And on and on and on.

Gladwell digs into the lives of successful people and shows how someone’s life can be changed by when they’re born, by what their parents do for a living, even by the culture they’re raised in. But what’s surprising is that he omits the most important factor: The negative effect of government on people’s lives.

For example, he writes about the importance of being born at the “right” time, and shows that hockey and soccer players born early in the year have big advantages. Fair enough. Then he lists the 75 richest people in human history, and adds that almost a fifth come from “a single generation in a single country,” all born in the United States in the 1830s.

These men came of age “when all the rules by which the traditional economy had functioned were broken and remade,” Gladwell writes. And that’s true. But they were also the last generation to come of age when they were allowed to keep all the money they earned. Congress passed an income tax in the 1890s, and an amendment to the Constitution in 1913 made income taxes a permanent feature of the landscape.

As conservatives have long understood, the heavier you tax something, the less you get of it. Our nation decided to tax economic success, so we shouldn’t be surprised that we’ve produced fewer successful people than we once did.

He also writes about the success of Silicon Valley in its early days, noting that computer programming “was a wide-open field in which all participants were judged solely on their talent and their accomplishments.” That was true in 1976, of course, but not as much today. In the late 1990s the government sued Microsoft for antitrust violations, and today’s Silicon Valley companies hire plenty of lobbyists who attempt to use the power of the federal government to swat down other companies.

Gladwell also takes on the American educational system without zeroing in on the true culprits. Summer vacation, he writes, “is considered a permanent and inviolate feature of school life” even though he cites a study showing it harms lower-income children. “The only problem with school, for the kids who aren’t achieving, is that there isn’t enough of it,” he writes.

Well, the Japanese school year runs 243 days. The South Korean school year lasts 220 days. Why can’t the U.S. expand its 180-day school year to match the Asian tigers? Because American schools are run by the government, and the government is swayed by the lobbying efforts of teacher’s unions.

Most parents would love a longer school year; my children certainly get bored in mid-August. But unions exist to limit the amount their members are forced to work, and teacher’s unions would never approve of adding weeks to the school year.

The interesting thing is that the United States is itself an outlier. The book “The Size of Nations” points out that of the 10 richest countries, only one has a large population. The U.S., now with some 300 million people, is miles ahead of Switzerland, the next largest with a mere 7 million. It’s a lot easier for nations (the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom) to break up than for them to remain united and succeed.

In the past our federal government mostly stayed out of the way, allowing the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Gateses to build huge companies and deliver products and services that benefit all of us. But over the decades it’s become more intrusive through higher taxes and regulations. Year by year it’s eroding the traditional advantages of being an American.

“To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success,” Gladwell writes, “with a society that provides opportunities for all.”

Very true, but we’re going in the wrong direction. The government is buying and propping up failing companies, instead of encouraging innovation. It dominates the housing market, the financial market and the insurance market. It aims to annex health care and subject Americans to European-level taxation.

Soon fortune won’t favor the bold, it’ll favor those with the best lobbyists. Maybe that changing landscape should be the topic of Malcolm Gladwell’s next expose.

SOURCE

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Destroying America's financial capital

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Florence, Genoa, and Venice were the financial capitals of the Western world. When they declined, financial leadership shifted to Amsterdam, then to London, and finally to New York, whose supremacy went unchallenged from 1945 until the end of the twentieth century. In the new millennium, however, it is showing cracks. A decade ago, companies fought for the privilege of being listed on the New York exchanges, but interest has dropped significantly since the bursting of the tech bubble in 2000. The credit crisis has only made things worse. Will the city be able to retain its title as the world's finance king? What will Wall Street look like in 2015?

Geography alone guarantees that New York will remain one of the world's financial leaders. A globalized economy spanning 24 time zones offers room for at least three major financial centers. With one center likely in Europe or the Middle East and a second in East Asia, New York would be the natural third pillar in a hemisphere that offers little competition for the job.

If we look beyond the Americas to the broader world, however, New York's enduring supremacy is not a foregone conclusion. Besides the power of inertia--people like to trade where others trade, so they trade in New York--the city has benefited from three comparative advantages in the past: a sophisticated and well-trained workforce, reliable but not intrusive regulations, and (at least since Ronald Reagan's presidency) a favorable tax and political environment. All these advantages have shrunk, if not vanished.

New York's skills advantage eroded long before the 2008 crisis. Thanks to its early deregulation of brokers' commissions in 1974, New York took the lead in the quality and reliability of trade. Global companies came to the city to be traded and judged by New York's analysts. But during the 1990s, most European stock exchanges caught on. Their tardiness allowed them to adopt the most recent trading technology easily, and they moved faster and more decisively into electronic trading, creating markets that were at least as liquid as the traditional exchanges. Most of the daily trading in cross-listed companies--companies traded on both the traditional and electronic exchanges--moved back to the country of origin, eliminating one of New York's advantages.

Over the last 20 years, American business schools also helped close the knowledge gap between New York and the rest of the world by admitting more students from abroad, to the point that over 30 percent of the schools' populations were foreign-born. Most of these students chose to return to their home countries after they finished school, bringing new ideas and techniques with them. The financial crisis has only accelerated this process. Restrictions against hiring foreign workers imposed by the federal government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) ensure that a larger flow of talented people will head back to their native countries, further reducing the skills gap between America and the rest of the world.

New York's competitive advantage has also eroded on the regulatory front. For financial markets to work properly, the regulatory regime must strike a delicate balance between preventing fraud and abuse, on the one hand, and jeopardizing the freedom to innovate, on the other. For many years, the United States appeared to have achieved this balance. No longer. From Enron and WorldCom to Bernie Madoff and the subprime meltdown, the Securities and Exchange Commission's reputation as an effective enforcer is in tatters. Once, foreign companies were happy to list in New York because subjecting themselves to American regulators signaled to investors that they were transparent companies with reliable accounts. But what's the certification value of being listed on a New York exchange if the New York policers don't detect fraud? Meanwhile, the restrictions imposed ex post facto on TARP recipients, Congress's confiscatory tax on executive bonuses, and contemplated populist financial! reforms have made clear that regulators will heavily interfere with private business. In fact, from both a political and a regulatory perspective, the United States of the future will look like a continental European country. That's not an environment conducive to financial innovation.

Finally, the crisis will have major effects on New York's competitive edge in the tax area. Despite New York City's and New York State's heavy taxes, the federal government's low top tax rate and favorable treatment of hedge-fund income long made New York an attractive place for financiers to live and work. Prospective tax increases (at both the federal and state levels) and the likely closing of tax loopholes will make New York very unattractive, especially for resident aliens who can avoid higher taxes by moving abroad. New York's main consolation is that the United Kingdom's fiscal deficits will prevent the British from competing too aggressively on the tax front. But new financial centers, such as Singapore or Dubai--or even old ones, like Zurich--could become a real threat.

One might argue that New York maintained its world dominance during the high-tax years of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, so higher taxes can't hurt more. But the delocalization of trade brought about by technology and the Internet has made global competition much more intense than it used to be. Bermuda, the capital of reinsurance, could easily become the capital of the hedge-fund industry as well.

The biggest threat of all to the Big Apple's financial supremacy, however, comes from Washington. The Founding Fathers wisely decided that the nation's political capital should be separate from its financial capital (in both senses of the word). Now this splendid segregation has ended. If the outcome of the Chrysler bankruptcy is any indication, Washington is willing to flex its muscle in financial decisions, altering the substance of contracts freely agreed to by private parties. In so doing, the national government has undermined the certainty of the rule of law, which was the American capital market's strongest asset.

Unfortunately, since Washington is the source of the problem, New York City can do little by itself to defend its position. Perhaps the city's best bet is to offer favorable tax treatment to the financial industry--but to do that, it had better first put its finances in order.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Rasmussen: 80% Say Wall Street, Not Taxpayers, Benefited More From Bailout - As Goldman Sachs Announces Record Profit: "Eighty percent (80%) of Americans now say Wall Street benefited more from the bailout of the financial industry than the average U.S. taxpayer. Only eight percent (8%) of adults say the taxpayer benefited more, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Twelve percent (12%) are not sure. This marks a notable increase in skepticism from October when 63% saw Wall Street as the chief beneficiary as the first bailout of the financial industry was working its way through Congress. In February when the Obama administration announced another bank bailout plan, 67% said Wall Street would benefit more than taxpayers. Goldman Sachs, one of the Wall Street recipients of a bailout, repaid that money in June. The firm, which also has benefited from cheap government financing, is now reporting a record profit for the last quarter and has announced plans for billions in employee bonuses."

From a time when the Episcopal church was still Christian: "On Sunday July 20, 1969 the first people landed on the moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were in the lunar lander which touched down at 3:17 Eastern Standard Time. Buzz Aldrin had with him the Reserved Sacrament... Later he wrote: “In the radio blackout, I opened the little plastic packages which contained the bread and the wine. I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine slowly curled and gracefully came up the side of the cup. Then I read the Scripture, ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit.’ …Eagle’s metal body creaked. I ate the tiny Host and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquility. It was interesting for me to think: the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the very first food eaten there, were the communion elements.” NASA kept this secret for two decades. The memoirs of Buzz Aldrin and the Tom Hanks’s Emmy- winning HBO mini-series, From the Earth to the Moon (1998), made people aware of this act of Christian worship 235,000 miles from Earth."

Obama's hatred of small businesses on display: "The White House on Wednesday blasted growing, bipartisan congressional efforts to aid closed auto dealers but stopped short of threatening a veto. An amendment to put dealers back in business survived a challenge in the House Rules Committee on Tuesday and is to be voted on as part of the financial services appropriations bill this week. The Obama administration said reversing dealer closings would set a "dangerous precedent, potentially raising legal concerns, to intervene into a closed judicial bankruptcy proceeding on behalf of one particular group at this point." The statement is consistent with the administration's position during the bankruptcies of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, in which the automakers shed more than 3,000 dealerships. Nonetheless, battle lines are being drawn as a number of high-ranking congressional Democrats back a measure opposed by a president of their own party." [Obama likes big businesses only -- ones he can more easily control]

Seattle boondoggle finally operational: "Thousands of people enjoyed free rides Saturday on the first day of service for Seattle's new light rail line. After more than four decades of political wrangling and financial struggles that ran transit rail plans for Seattle off the tracks, trains are finally running. Sound Transit officials estimated more than 30,500 riders had used the new light rail line as of Saturday afternoon. A soccer game and a popular food festival were expected to add to those numbers as the day progressed. The agency offered free rides Saturday, and will do so again on Sunday for the opening weekend of the new line... A dozen two-car trains ran at 7 1/2-minute intervals. Two more trains were in reserve, along with seven other rail cars that also could be used."

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

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray in full). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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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Marginalizing Sarah Palin

by Bill O'Reilly

About a month ago, in this space, I told you The New York Times had rigged a poll about Americans wanting to pay higher taxes to fund government-run health care. The Times poll said 57 percent were willing to pay more tax and 37 percent were not willing to do so. But what the Times did not tell its readers was that 48 percent of those polled voted for Barack Obama. Only 25 percent supported John McCain. Of course the poll results would skew left.

Now we have another media deceit. The most recent edition of Newsweek magazine includes a nasty hatchet job on Sarah Palin by a guy named Rick Perlstein. The piece is presented as hard news -- not an opinion column -- and basically says that the governor is a moron who is supported by dimwitted conservatives at odds with smart Republicans. Perlstein also submits that I and other Fox News people lead the dumb GOP folks.

Anyone reading the story would think that a Newsweek correspondent put it together -- the magazine has a staff of trained journalists to do its reporting and analysis. But Perlstein is not a Newsweek correspondent and is identified only as an author at the end of the piece. Strange.

But it gets even stranger. Turns out that Perlstein is a far-left zealot who blogs for a liberal site called "Campaign for America's Future." He lists one of his "interests" as "conservative failure." In 2007, Perlstein wrote: "I've just become a proud Fox (News) attacker. Now, you can, too. It's not a boycott. It's simply calling advertisers and informing them what Fox says. Fox can't survive that."

So Newsweek hired a far-left loon to do a hit piece on Palin, conservatives and Fox News, and did not inform its readers of his dedicated point of view. Newsweek editor Jon Meacham basically tried to disguise an ideological attack as news coverage.

Newsweek magazine is in dire financial trouble and is seeking to survive by cultivating a liberal, urban audience. There is nothing wrong with that as long as the editors are upfront about it. But this sneaky media stuff is harming America, and it must be unmasked.

With Barack Obama in the White House, the country is facing profound change. America is already on the verge of bankruptcy, and federal intrusion into private business, health care and the environment is unprecedented. The far left aims to create a huge federal apparatus that will promote income redistribution and "social justice." They also see a major opportunity to knock out Judeo-Christian traditions, replacing them with a secular philosophy.

In order to accomplish this, leftwing media are marginalizing people like Palin who oppose the strategy. Under the guise of hard news reporting, the media are pushing rank propaganda on the citizenry. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, successfully developed this tactic in the 1930s. Americans need to wake up and smell the corruption. If crazy ideologues have infiltrated the news business, we need to know about it. And now you do.

SOURCE

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Krugman gets something right

Sometimes the distinguished economist emerges from within the Leftist ideologue -- see below

The American economy remains in dire straits, with one worker in six unemployed or underemployed. Yet Goldman Sachs just reported record quarterly profits — and it’s preparing to hand out huge bonuses, comparable to what it was paying before the crisis. What does this contrast tell us? First, it tells us that Goldman is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America.

Second, it shows that Wall Street’s bad habits — above all, the system of compensation that helped cause the financial crisis — have not gone away.

Third, it shows that by rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact, has made another crisis more likely.

Let’s start by talking about how Goldman makes money. Over the past generation — ever since the banking deregulation of the Reagan years — the U.S. economy has been “financialized.” The business of moving money around, of slicing, dicing and repackaging financial claims, has soared in importance compared with the actual production of useful stuff. The sector officially labeled “securities, commodity contracts and investments” has grown especially fast, from only 0.3 percent of G.D.P. in the late 1970s to 1.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2007.

Such growth would be fine if financialization really delivered on its promises — if financial firms made money by directing capital to its most productive uses, by developing innovative ways to spread and reduce risk. But can anyone, at this point, make those claims with a straight face? Financial firms, we now know, directed vast quantities of capital into the construction of unsellable houses and empty shopping malls. They increased risk rather than reducing it, and concentrated risk rather than spreading it. In effect, the industry was selling dangerous patent medicine to gullible consumers.

Goldman’s role in the financialization of America was similar to that of other players, except for one thing: Goldman didn’t believe its own hype. Other banks invested heavily in the same toxic waste they were selling to the public at large. Goldman, famously, made a lot of money selling securities backed by subprime mortgages — then made a lot more money by selling mortgage-backed securities short, just before their value crashed. All of this was perfectly legal, but the net effect was that Goldman made profits by playing the rest of us for suckers.

And Wall Streeters have every incentive to keep playing that kind of game. The huge bonuses Goldman will soon hand out show that financial-industry highfliers are still operating under a system of heads they win, tails other people lose. If you’re a banker, and you generate big short-term profits, you get lavishly rewarded — and you don’t have to give the money back if and when those profits turn out to have been a mirage. You have every reason, then, to steer investors into taking risks they don’t understand.

And the events of the past year have skewed those incentives even more, by putting taxpayers as well as investors on the hook if things go wrong. I won’t try to parse the competing claims about how much direct benefit Goldman received from recent financial bailouts, especially the government’s assumption of A.I.G.’s liabilities. What’s clear is that Wall Street in general, Goldman very much included, benefited hugely from the government’s provision of a financial backstop — an assurance that it will rescue major financial players whenever things go wrong.

You can argue that such rescues are necessary if we’re to avoid a replay of the Great Depression. In fact, I agree. But the result is that the financial system’s liabilities are now backed by an implicit government guarantee.

Now the last time there was a comparable expansion of the financial safety net, the creation of federal deposit insurance in the 1930s, it was accompanied by much tighter regulation, to ensure that banks didn’t abuse their privileges. This time, new regulations are still in the drawing-board stage — and the finance lobby is already fighting against even the most basic protections for consumers.

If these lobbying efforts succeed, we’ll have set the stage for an even bigger financial disaster a few years down the road. The next crisis could look something like the savings-and-loan mess of the 1980s, in which deregulated banks gambled with, or in some cases stole, taxpayers’ money — except that it would involve the financial industry as a whole.

The bottom line is that Goldman’s blowout quarter is good news for Goldman and the people who work there. It’s good news for financial superstars in general, whose paychecks are rapidly climbing back to pre-crisis levels. But it’s bad news for almost everyone else.

SOURCE

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Consequences of the Liberals' Death Wish

by Emmett Tyrrell

Witnessing the current attempt by liberal Democrats in Congress to investigate CIA officers and possibly prosecute them for a covert initiative allegedly undertaken in time of war (a war that still is going on) inspires a happy thought. Perhaps these liberals have a death wish. The American people do not want another 9/11 attack on our shores. They approve of operations against al-Qaida, covert or otherwise. If the liberals continue in their harassment of the CIA for its efforts to protect American national security, for a certitude the electorate will turn these liberals out. Sayonara, my liberal friends!

If the liberals' death wish only extends to themselves, they have my full support. Yet it is conceivable that their death wish extends to the country itself. They rarely have anything very complimentary to say about their homeland. President Barack Obama talks about the United States as though it were a failed state. Liberals in general talk about the United States as though it were the provenance of slavery, bigotry, male chauvinism and -- oh, yes -- cowboy diplomacy. The only favorable thing about America that I have heard from the liberals recently is that America was the birthplace of Michael Jackson. In Congress, they observed a moment of silence to commemorate his assuming room temperature.

The liberals' present furor over the CIA's covert operations against al-Qaida suggests that they harbor a death wish not only for themselves but also for the whole country. Nations at war are not supposed to divulge military or intelligence operations. Often they keep them confidential for generations. British historian David Reynolds, in his superb book about Winston Churchill's World War II memoirs, tells us that both Churchill and the Labour government kept state secrets hidden from the British public and from the world years after the war had ended. Reynolds relates in "In Command of History" how Churchill's famous Nobel Prize-winning memoirs abound with evasions and inaccuracies, for instance, Churchill's silence about cracking the Nazi code (Enigma) and Churchill's true assessments of Dwight Eisenhower and Josef Stalin. Had Churchill been forthright on those matters, the Labour government might never have allowed the volumes to be published.

Today's liberals in Congress are demanding the investigation and threatening the prosecution of intelligence officers who are rumored to have undertaken a secret initiative to assassinate al-Qaida leaders. The initiative supposedly was authorized by President George W. Bush immediately after 9/11. It is not clear whether the initiative ever got beyond the planning stages. Reportedly, it envisaged sending hit teams into al-Qaida territory to do what our Predator and Reaper drones are doing now: kill our enemies. Naturally, much about the initiative is shrouded in secrecy. Yet by charging that Congress should have been informed of the initiative, liberals are making a colossal fuss. They claim that the diabolical Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to keep Congress in the dark and that the initiative was illegal. They want the whole shocking scheme out in the open. Doubtless, al-Qaida does, too.

There are serious consequences to this sort of harassment of intelligence operations. Over at the CIA, there are professionals today who are fearful that they may be forced to hire lawyers soon to defend them against the politicians' investigations. Uncertain as to whether the Obama administration will protect them, they are distracted and hunkering down. Ongoing operations are being affected.

Right now, very reliable sources tell me that the CIA is aware of the presence of al-Qaida leaders in Somalia and possibly Yemen. The terrorists have moved operations there from Pakistan, but the CIA is reluctant to take action against these brutes out of fear that they will not be supported by the government and may be exposed on Capitol Hill.

Such are the consequences of our liberals' death wish. As I say, I do not mind them imperiling their own existence. But when they imperil our intelligence community's ability to prevent another 9/11, it is no joke.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

An excellent meditation on the meaning of Romans chapter 13, where Christians are required to submit to secular authorities.

Fired inspector general files lawsuit: "The inspector general President Obama fired last month filed a lawsuit Friday to get his job back, claiming the firing was politically motivated and broke a 2008 law governing how watchdogs can be dismissed. Gerald Walpin, inspector general of the Corporation for National and Community Service, was removed June 10. In a letter telling Congress of his decision, Mr. Obama said he no longer had confidence in Mr. Walpin, but did not elaborate. Mr. Walpin says he was fired because he targeted an Obama supporter, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, in a successful investigation that resulted in Mr. Johnson and an academy on which he formerly served as executive director repaying half the $847,000 it received in government grants. He also said in its haste to dump him, the administration never interviewed him or any of his staff - an omission Mr. Walpin said in his lawsuit violates a 2008 law meant to protect government watchdogs."

A small reprieve. Cardcheck is dead: "Organized labor is nearing a deal to salvage legislation that could aid the union movement, but it had to drop "card check" -- a key component of the original bill that would allow workers to form a union by signing cards instead of holding a secret ballot vote. While giving up on card check is a setback for organized labor, a reworked bill would still offer a major overhaul of labor laws to help unions sign up more members. The bill calls for binding arbitration within 120 days if a new union and management can't agree on a first contract and stiffens penalties on businesses that threaten or intimidate workers trying to form a union... Businesses groups that have spent millions on ads and lobbying campaigns railing against card check say its removal would not change their position. While card check has dominated the debate, business leaders say they were always more concerned about binding arbitration."

Taxpayer-subsidized automobiles coming: "On June 1, GM Vice President for Global Manufacturing Gary Cowger announced as part of the company's bankruptcy filing that it would close the Orion facility in its drive to become a "leaner, stronger and more flexible" company. Though still a relatively modern facility making midsize Chevy Malibu and Pontiac G6 sedans, Orion's once 5,000-strong labor force had shriveled to 1,200 as the recession ravaged sales and the company planned to eliminate its Pontiac brand and consolidate Malibu production at a Kansas City facility. But a few weeks later, the company reversed course. GM now says it will retool Orion to make compact, gas-sipping cars. The change of heart says a lot about how GM's new owners -- the federal government owns 60% of the company and the United Auto Workers (UAW) owns 17% -- are making considerations other than profitability a top priority for the auto maker.... However, there is one way to make building small cars in America pay off -- through government subsidies."

Germany believes Iran could have nuclear bomb within 6 months: "Iran is capable of assembling an atomic bomb within six months, German intelligence analysts told the German weekly newsmagazine Stern. "If they want to, they will be able to set off a uranium bomb within six months," an analyst with Germany's intelligence service, Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), told the magazine. German intelligence officials told Stern believe Iran has "mastered" every stage of uranium enrichment and that they have activated enough centrifuges to produce sufficient quantities of weapons-grade uranium for at least one atomic bomb. "Nobody would have thought this possible some years ago," an intelligence official told Stern."

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray in full). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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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Hitler's propaganda

I am reproducing the article from the WSJ in full below because it is generally accurate as far as it goes. I was slightly amused by the comment that the exhibition the author is reviewing doesn't say much about the reactions of the German people. Since Hitler was virtually worshipped by many Germans that is of course a tactful omission. The "variety of positive appeals" that Hitler used are also far from fully detailed. That socialism was one of them could not of course be mentioned. I and many historians agree, however that "the German populace was ultimately more indifferent to the fate of European Jews than rabidly interested in their destruction". Hitler's view of the Jews was fairly incidental to his overall appeal to Germans. After all, practically everyone was antisemitic to some degree in those days. Even the man who eventually declared war on Hitler -- Neville Chamberlain -- had some antisemitic views.

The statement below that the Nazis could never "win a majority in free elections" is misleading, however. In elections where there are more than two major parties, winning an outright majority of the vote is rare for anyone. Mrs Thatcher, for instance, once had large parliamentary majorities in Britain but she never went anywhere near getting a majority of the popular vote. Britain's centrist Liberal party siphons off too many voters from both Right and Left for ANY British party to have much chance of gaining an absolute majority. So Hitler's electoral achievements were actually quite good in the context of the Germany of his day. He led the party with the largest number of votes and that normally entitles a party to govern in Europe (and also in Canada, for that matter)

There is quite a good slideshow of Nazi political posters attached to the article -- though it helps if you understand German. I reproduce below one Nazi poster that I had not seen before. It is fairly crass so was probably not very effective. I reproduce some of what were probably the more effective ones here. My own much fuller account of Hitler's motives and modus operandi is here



After the fatal shooting last month of a security guard by a white supremacist, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s entrance was garlanded by a makeshift memorial of flowers, candles and condolence notes. The memorial has since been cleared away, but a visit to “State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda,” on the reverberations of hate speech, still packs an extra charge.

“State of Deception”—a special exhibition rich in content but somewhat cramped in design—follows the Nazi propaganda effort from its inception through its dismantling after World War II. With photo murals crowded with labels, vintage newsreels captioned with American newspaper headlines and oral-history interviews, the show raises questions about the links between propaganda and action. It offers insight into Nazi planning and aims. And it explores, in a fragmentary way, the German public’s response to Nazi efforts at manipulation.

Vicious caricatures of Jews, both foreshadowing and facilitating the Holocaust, are the most familiar detritus of Hitler’s propaganda machine. But “State of Deception” reminds us that the Nazis also employed a variety of positive appeals to rally support for dictatorship and European conquest.

Details and images nuance our picture of the times. One of the show’s first images, for example, is a 1932 campaign poster with Hitler’s face floating eerily against a black background, a design that evokes celebrity portraiture. The poster is book-ended later in the show by a postwar, red-on-black, anti-Nazi poster depicting Nazism as a skeletal death’s head—an apparent reference to both mass murder and the insignia of SS concentration-camp guards.

Hitler drew inspiration from effective World War I propaganda denouncing the Germans as barbaric “Huns.” One World War I poster—featuring an apelike figure, representing Germany, carrying a lovely maiden—was appropriated by a September 1939 Nazi poster to remind Germans of “the old hatred.” The regime would later argue that rumors about the gassing of Jews were akin to the fabricated tales of German atrocities during World War I.

The Nazi message first resonated in the 1920s and early 1930s against a backdrop of the Weimar Republic’s economic and social disarray. Even then, the Nazis, while preaching national unity, targeted appeals to different constituencies. Posters urged women to “save the German family” from unemployment and asked students to become “the Führer’s propagandists.” Anti-Semitic screeds were ratcheted up or down, depending on the audience.

“State of Deception” offers enticing glimpses of the regime’s myth-making apparatus. A painting by Hermann Otto Hoyer is suggestively titled “In the Beginning Was the Word” and shows Hitler enthralling a group of converts during the 1920s. Another, by Hubert Lanzinger, depicts Hitler as a medieval knight on horseback and carrying a swastika flag.

A series of black-and-white photographs by official photographer Heinrich Hoffman captures Hitler rehearsing the dramatic poses and gestures that would become his oratorical trademark. Later, we can watch a clip of Hitler rousing a crowd with an emotional fervor that no longer seems spontaneous.

Once Hitler attained the chancellorship in 1933, he made the party’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, minister of the Orwellian-sounding Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. “Enlightenment,” of course, meant book-burnings and increasingly tight Nazi control over all forms of communication and entertainment. Goebbels, we learn, sought to supplement ideological appeals with mass entertainment designed to cement the new German community.

The seductions of Nazi ritual had a certain allure even for Jewish children. Peter Feigl, who greeted Hitler jubilantly with the rest of the Austrian population during the 1938 Anschluss, was dismayed that he couldn’t participate in Hitler Youth groups, with their compelling martial music and uniforms. “All this is fascinating and hypnotizing for a young kid,” he explains in a video clip from a 1995 interview.

The exhibition doesn’t chart German reaction to Nazi propaganda in any detail, but it does argue that not every initiative was equally successful. The nasty anti-Semitic stereotypes of the 1940 pseudodocumentary “The Eternal Jew”—likening Jews to vermin—attracted few viewers. By contrast, Veit Harlan’s 1940 feature film, “The Jew Süss,” a portrait of a corrupt 18th-century Jewish court financier, was a huge hit—thanks, we’re told, to its strong storytelling and production values.

The Nazi propaganda machine even extended into the Jewish ghettos and concentration camps. Scenes from “The Führer Gives the Jews a Town,” shot at the Theresienstadt ghetto and transit camp near Prague, feature seemingly happy, well-fed Jewish children—shortly before their transport to Auschwitz.

The now-infamous 1944 documentary, never distributed, capitalized on the ghetto’s beautification for an earlier visit by the International and Danish Red Cross. Their reports demonstrated that the Nazis could bamboozle even a foreign audience. The exhibition offers excerpts of an astonishing 1979 interview, conducted by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, in which International Red Cross representative Maurice Rossel appears to blame Theresienstadt’s “prominent” Jewish residents for helping to foster the delusion of normality.

“State of Deception” adopts the view that, on the whole, the German populace was ultimately more indifferent to the fate of European Jews than rabidly interested in their destruction. It also stresses the limitations of Nazi propaganda, which could neither win the Nazis a majority in free elections nor prevent their eventual defeat.

After the war, Allied forces tried to root out the physical residue of Nazism, from street signs to school books, and try some of its surviving propagandists for crimes against humanity.

In Germany today, advocating Nazi ideology is illegal. But in the U.S. and elsewhere, balancing free speech with the desire to silence partisans of hate crimes and genocide remains a vital and troubling concern. The exhibition ends, appropriately, with this dilemma clarified but not entirely resolved.

SOURCE

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The Threat of Totalitarianism

BY HILMAR VON CAMPE

It may sound like I am exaggerating or over-dramatizing the situation, but I think that we have a repetition of Hitler's policy to get total power developing in the United States. Obama's massive expansion of the federal government will destroy the United States as a world power, make us even more dependent on our enemies, and will ruin a great part of the present population and their descendants.

I believe his real purpose is not to get the United States out of the financial mess but to set the stage for a total takeover. The liberals controlling Congress are helping him in that task.

I lived through the Nazi nightmare and my family paid dearly. My elder brother fell in Russia and my father perished in a Soviet concentration camp without having committed any crime.

The rest of the family was expelled from our home in East Germany and we came as refugees to West Germany. Everything I write or lecture about is based on my personal experiences in Nazi Germany. There is nothing theoretical about my description about what happens when a nation throws God out of government and society. I don't want my children and grandchildren to go through the same.

My writing is part of my restitution for the crimes of a godless government, of the evil of which I was a part. My restitution includes a commitment to the state of Israel and the God-given rights of the Jewish people.

Afraid Of Government

During the Nazi years people were afraid of their government. Everybody spoke practically two languages-one in public and one with close friends. Since the Gestapo always tried to find out from children what their parents were thinking, my parents like all other parents had to be careful about what they said in our presence. My father listened to the Swiss broadcasts of Beromünster late at night so that we wouldn't notice. To listen to foreign news was a crime and could lead to death.

I noticed now that here in America many people are also afraid of their government and guns sales are on the rise. Thomas Jefferson stated: when the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, then there is liberty. I hope that the new tea-party movement is successful in frightening the Washington establishment.

Something is very wrong in America and this nation is moving in the wrong direction. We are getting close to Nazi reality.

Threat To A Free Press

I am especially concerned about the dangers of a government-takeover of the media. Hitler didn't need to do that because the Nazis already controlled the media-newspapers, radio and the film industry.

We were told in the Hitler Youth and in school that we could pray and sing hymns at home or in our church as much as we liked. But the rules for the German society would come from the National Socialist Party and nobody else. They, like the Soviets, had realized that a moral authority above the government in the form of God would be a threat to their power grab.

The ACLU has taken up this Nazi philosophy and applied it successfully to American society. The ousting of God from our schools is far advanced and our youth are exposed to immoral and godless indoctrination instead of learning American history, our Constitution, and the concepts of our founding fathers. Our government establishment has been watching this development for decades without doing anything about it. Our enemies don't need suicide bombers to bring us down. We commit national suicide ourselves by watching the destruction of the moral and historical basis of our society.

When the Nazis took over power on January 30, 1933, they immediately set up a parallel party structure to the administration to watch over the action of the civil servants. They were responsible to Hitler. Obama has taken a similar approach and has already at the time of this writing appointed 16 czars, part of an unconstitutional governmental apparatus. It seems that their task is to watch over and interfere in the private sector. However, they report only to Obama, bypassing the Congress.

The first Hitler government had only two members of the National Socialist German Workers Party, one being the minister of interior who was in charge of the police. Obama has some Republicans in his government and he acts like a military hawk in Afghanistan. These moves are designed to fool the opposition until total power is established.

Much more HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Revenge. Army reservist terminated from civilian job after questioning Obama eligibility: The Department of Defense has allegedly compelled a private employer to fire a U.S. Army Reserve major from his civilian job after he had his military deployment orders revoked for arguing he should not be required to serve under a president who has not proven his eligibility for office. According to the CEO of Simtech Inc., a private company contracted by the Defense Security Services, an agency of the Department of Defense, the federal government has compelled the termination of Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook. Cook's attorney, Orly Taitz, wrote in her blog that Simtech CEO Larry Grice said he would try to find another position within the company for Cook, but nothing is currently available. The Department of Defense does contracting in the general field of information technology/systems integration, at which Cook, a senior systems engineer and architect, was employed until taking a military leave of absence on July 10 in preparation for his deployment to Afghanistan.

Death penalty questions for Sotomayor: “The death penalty has received little attention in the Sotomayor debate. However, when a massive 707,000 homicides in 36 years (one every 27 minutes) result in 1,136 executions (0.16%), capital punishment has been all but abolished (42-43). What remains is a costly, agonizing farce, dragging out cases for decades (48). With no end in sight to intolerable homicides, and the U.S. Supreme Court having played a major role in this fiasco, the following questions (drawn from actual cases) will have continuing relevance in illustrating the danger of confirming activist justices who abuse their power and the public’s trust.”

Pentagon considers adding 30,000 to Army: “The Pentagon is considering a plan to add 30,000 soldiers to the Army to bolster a force depleted by a growing number of troops who are wounded, stressed or for other reasons cannot deploy with their units. Struggling to wage wars on two fronts, the Army says it needs a temporary increase in order to fill vacancies in units heading to the battlefront.”

Test of Russian ballistic missile fails: “Russia’s latest test of its advanced submarine-launched ballistic missile Bulava has failed, with the missile self-destructing, the Defense Ministry said Thursday — another setback for the nation’s efforts to upgrade its aging arsenal. The failure was the seventh in 11 test launches for the Bulava, and could have consequences for Russia’s top missile designers and missile force commanders.”

Maine: Frugal before it was fashionable: “Across the country, masses of worried consumers are taking lessons in getting by with less, turning to websites like suddenlyfrugal.com and thenewfrugalmom.com, and signing up for classes in car care and cooking. But in Maine, where Yankee thrift has been a way of life for generations, and the unofficial motto is the proverb ‘use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without,’ the notion of a ‘new’ frugality is met with blank stares. … Across much of this sprawling, rural state, the art of living cheap is hard-wired into the regional DNA, a skill proudly passed down through the generations. Here, where hardened farmers and fishermen have been long battered by economic squalls, and incomes have lagged well behind the rest of New England, bargain-hunting and bartering are practices widely embraced.”

Too many bailouts, not too few: “Capitalism is a profit and loss system. The profits encourage risk-taking. The losses encourage prudence. For decades, government policy and action have discouraged prudence by bailing out or taking over virtually every significant financial institution that has acted recklessly. Five years ago, well before the crisis, Gary Stern and Ron Feldman of the Minneapolis [F]ed, wrote ‘Too Big to Fail,’ arguing that the continual rescue of debt holders and creditors was creating systemic risk in the financial system. They pointed out the crucial role that debt holders and creditors play in monitoring and restraining risky investments on the part of financial institutions. By consistently bailing out creditors, the power of that restraint was being destroyed.”

Dealing with Britain's debt: “Currently, the public sector is swelling far beyond its means. The UK is forecast to suffer a budget deficit of £170 billion later this year. This equates to every man, woman and child being in nearly £3,000 of debt. Every year, our government pays £200 billion to public sector employees and this is not sustainable. The problem with this is that the increasing deficit needs to be funded somehow. There are several ways that this can be done. One way would be to increase taxes; however an increase in tax rates reduces incentives and is therefore likely to have the adverse effect of reducing tax revenues. Alternatively, ‘quantative easing’ (glorified printing money) could be used to pay off debt. But this is highly inflationary, as resources are no less scarce, so it would reduce the value of our currency, thus making the UK less attractive for investors. Surely the best way to deal with the deficit is to reduce government spending.”

The Zimbabwe-ification of South Africa? : “‘The road ends here,’ reads a makeshift sign in the middle of the highway connecting Bulawayo with South Africa. For many miles, the once busy commercial artery between Zimbabwe’s second largest town and its main market has simply ceased to exist. Motorists have to wind their way on an improvised gravel path through the open bush. All along the route, they can observe once productive farms lying abandoned and once productive farm workers scavenging for food. The dilapidated state of infrastructure and widespread poverty are the results of the destruction of property rights and the rule of law by the government of Zimbabwe. Yet South Africa’s new Minister of Land Reform and Rural Development, Gugile Nkwinti, clearly has not been to Zimbabwe in recent years. Speaking in parliament late last month, he announced that the ANC government would scrap its current ‘willing buyer willing seller’ land redistribution policy, which allows the government to acquire land only at a market price and only with the consent of the land owner, and replace it with ‘less costly, alternative methods of land acquisition.’”

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray in full). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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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TARANTO

Well! What Sonia Sotomayor said in answers to Senator Kyl during her confirmation hearing could not be better from a conservative and constitutional point of view. She rejected "empathy" as a factor in verdicts and said that judges just apply the written law before them rather than making it all up as they go along. Refreshing! Taranto has the relevant excerpts. So she can talk the talk but will she walk the walk?

I note that elsewhere in his postings, Taranto pisses all over the idea that Obama is not qualified to be President by virtue of his having been born in Kenya -- with his birth only registered in Hawaii, as Hawaiian law allowed. Taranto is not alone in his views. Many other conservatives say likewise. I think that the reason for avoiding the question is that discovery of Obama's ineligibility would be enormously disruptive. It would invalidate his election and everything he has done since. The outcome could well be not dissimilar to what has just happened in Honduras and America needs peace at home more than it needs Joe Biden as President.

If we were judging Obama's behaviour in the way court cases are judged, however, his constant battles to prevent production of his full birth certificate would be circumstantial evidence that he is guilty as charged. Reliapundit has some pertinent comments on the matter too.

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Small-business lender CIT denied bailout

Obama is in bed with BIG business -- but most jobs are created by small business

A top source of loans for small businesses faces the likelihood of bankruptcy after the Treasury and Federal Reserve on Wednesday rejected calls for a bailout. CIT Group, which provides nearly 1 million small businesses the credit they need to get by from day to day, announced that several days of discussions with regulators failed to produce agreement on further assistance after a $2.3 billion cash infusion for the company last winter.

Trading in CIT shares was halted on the New York Stock Exchange in advance of the announcement, which increases the likelihood that the lender will fall into bankruptcy after suffering for months from the bankruptcy of Eddie Bauer and other clients.

The company has been unable to raise money in financial markets all year and had pleaded with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to approve its application for a guarantee on its debt offerings like the government provided to most banks during the credit crisis. But the FDIC, worried about the company's junk credit ratings and exposing taxpayers to the risk of an impending bankruptcy, refused to budge.

The FDIC, seeking to draw a line in the sand to discourage further bailouts, maintained that while CIT is crucial for some small businesses with shaky credit ratings, it does not play a massive or indispensable role in the financial system and should be allowed to fail. Banks and other lenders could step in to fill the void.

But the company's important role helping keep small companies afloat got a more sympathetic hearing from members of Congress and some officials at the Treasury and Fed. The two agencies have set up several programs to spur lending to small businesses but they have not had much success.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, Massachusetts Democrat, helped spur rumors early Wednesday that a rescue of CIT was imminent, telling reporters that he spoke with Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner "and I understand they're working hard to try to come up with something responsible to try to prevent the failure" of the company. "I think there would be a great deal of harm to the overall economy" if CIT is allowed to fail, he said.

Rumors multiplied that the Treasury and the Fed would try to cobble together a package of short-term loans to help keep CIT afloat while it restructured to avoid bankruptcy. The Fed last winter approved CIT's bid to become a bank holding company so it could have access to Fed lending facilities, and CIT sought to build on that relationship.

Many observers thought that the White House would be sensitive to the political criticism that would result if it abandoned a small-business lender after rescuing big companies like Citigroup, General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC from bankruptcy. But the Treasury and Fed in the end sided with the FDIC in determining that the outlook for CIT was too shaky to merit another rescue.

SOURCE

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CHANGE Only an Imbecile Could Love

By Dick McDonald

Barack Obama , may his tribe decrease, awoke one night from his Kenyan peace and lo and behold he saw this land of milk and honey populated with inexperienced and uninformed citizens. So he mounted his Comrades and rode to their rescue to bring change, change and more change. So after 5 months in office and 3 years of promises this is the change he has brought to Washington.

1. He promised to save 3 or 4 million jobs – we have lost 3.5 million jobs since January.
2. He promised to hold unemployment to 8% - it is at 9.5% and skyrocketing
3. The Government’s tax receipts from corporations are down 55%
4. The Government’s tax receipts from individuals are down 27%
5. Obama passed a stimulus bill that has no chance of stimulating the economy.
6. Announced plan to tax job creators and kill old people to pay for a universal health plan no one wants
7. The deficit hit a record $1 trillion on July 14, 2009 on its way to a record $2 trillion by year end
8. The number of under-employed is at 20% and rising
9. Business is reeling from being told they will bear more of the tax burden and have reduced staff
10. Cap and Trade will add billions to the cost of all products sold in America – it will hurt the poor
11. New emission standards will add billions to transportation cost for everything
12. He has incurred more debt in 5 months than all the presidents before him (combined)
13. He has favored wealth re-distribution over job creation and economic growth
14. He bowed to a Saudi King and runs down America wherever he goes
15. He has taken sides favoring Islamic Palestinians over the Israelis
16. He funds a Gestapo-like mob of ACORN brown shirts intimidating everyone
17. He voted against strict constructionists for SCOTUS
18. He is anti-gun and for post-birth abortions
19. He attended a black separatist church for twenty years and never heard the sermon
20. He has taken over General Motors and bankrupted little old ladies that invested in their bonds
21. He gave an equity interest in General Motors to an unsecured UAW debtor as a political payoff
22. He doesn’t hold his hand over his heart for the pledge of allegiance
23. He probably is a Kenyan-born citizen of Indonesia
24. His only solutions are to tax the rich directly or the poor indirectly
25. Gives Miranda Rights to the enemy on the battlefield
26. Wants to stop the CIA from killing enemy leaders during a war
27. Hires 30 Czars to run the country without vetting by Congress
28. He is an anti-capitalist that favors a socialist big government
29. He is against increasing domestic oil drilling in ANWR and offshore
30. He is against building nuclear plants
31. Believes in the fantasy of global warming
32. His stimulus funds have all gone to save constituent’s jobs not create new ones
33. Everything is on the table to solve an insolvent Social Security except the privatization that solves it
34. His ethanol addiction has caused corn shortages that precipitated starvation in the Third World
35. Uses Democrat-controlled media and academe to silence critics

Received direct from the author. For the products of a modern education, the opening comments are a mocking allusion to Abou ben Adhem

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ELSEWHERE

2010: “Next year’s elections are going to produce a political earthquake. That is because we currently suffer the most left-wing government in our nation’s history. After just 6 months in office, the flower children that rule Washington in overwhelming numbers are already smashing through all records regarding federal taxes, spending, deficits, and debt. Obama and his ultra-left Democrats adopted a so-called stimulus bill raising spending a trillion dollars that never had a prayer of actually creating jobs and promoting long-term economic growth, because it was based entirely on old-fashioned, brain dead, proven to fail, Keynesian economics. Though we would have to double federal taxes to finance the entitlement promises we have already made, the ruling Washington Democrats completely ignore that and focus instead on adopting yet another entitlement — national health insurance — that would be the biggest of all.”

US foreclosures hit record 1.5 million in first half of 2009: “U.S. foreclosure filings hit a record in the first half, a sign that job losses and falling property prices deepened the housing recession, according to RealtyTrac Inc. More than 1.5 million properties received a default or auction notice or were seized by banks in the six months through June, the Irvine, California-based seller of default data said today in a statement. That’s a 15 percent increase from the year earlier. One in 84 U.S. households received a filing.”

Real ID Act faces repeal after outcry from Napolitano, states: “Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is asking Congress to repeal a post-Sept. 11, 2001, law that was meant to enhance the security of driver’s licenses but has elicited the wrath of governors nationwide who say it is too costly. The Real ID Act, which was passed in 2005 but doesn’t begin to go into effect until the end of the year, was the brainchild of Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Republican from Menomonee Falls who then served as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Appearing Wednesday before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Napolitano warned that millions of travelers could face increased security screening at airports next year unless Congress acts soon because few states are on track to comply with the law. She wants lawmakers to pass a new measure known as Pass ID that would increase driver’s license security but give states more leeway on how to implement the changes.”

Honduras: Government reinstates curfew, citing threats : “Honduras’ interim government has reinstated a curfew, citing threats by groups looking to provoke disturbances. The announcement of the midnight to 5:00 a.m. curfew comes on the same day that interim President Roberto Micheletti accused unspecified groups of planning an armed rebellion and handing out guns.”

Iran: Mousavi plans new political front: “Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi plans to unveil a new political grouping which will keep up a protest campaign against last month’s disputed presidential election, an aide said on Wednesday. ‘The establishment of this front is on Mir Hossein Mousavi’s agenda and we will soon announce its establishment,’ Alireza Beheshti was quoted as saying in the reformist newspaper Sarmayeh. Mousavi, a former prime minister who lost the June 12 presidential election to hardline incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has defied the regime by continuing to protest against what he charges was a rigged poll.”

Iraqis to US military: Stay on your base: “Two weeks after U.S. combat troops withdrew from Iraq’s major cities, amid sporadic outbreaks of violence countrywide, Iraqi authorities aren’t asking American forces for help. Although U.S. troops are ‘just a radio call away,’ in Baghdad and five other major urban areas, it appears the Iraqis haven’t asked even once. In Baghdad, the Iraqis also won’t allow U.S. forces on the street, except for supply convoys. The failure to trigger the ‘Onstar option’ suggests that the government of Iraq and its military think they can deal with the car bombings, homemade bombs and attacks with silencer-equipped handguns that have plagued parts of the country in recent days.”

Some Twitter staff accounts reportedly hacked : “A hacker believed to have struck celebrity Twitter accounts previously has reportedly broken into accounts of the microblogging service’s workers including co-founder Evan Williams. Data swiped from Twitter employees was shown on a French website on Tuesday and TechCrunch technology news website quoted Williams confirming the hacks in an email. Information lifted from hacked accounts was said to include resumes, salary figures, credit card numbers, message exchanges with celebrities, and a roster of employees as well as their food preferences. Also uncovered were floor plans for the firm’s new offices in San Francisco as well as mention of a possible reality television show based on Twitter. The hacker, identified by the name ‘Hacker Croll,’ claimed to be able to get into Amazon, PayPal, and other accounts belonging to Williams and other Twitter employees.”

Has Ahmadinejad lost his global following? : “For 30 years, Iran has cast itself as a leader of resistance to Israeli and Western policies, and few of its leaders have done as much for that image as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Under Mr. Ahmadinejad, Iran’s ‘resistance’ brand has gone global, challenging Western hegemony in the name of defending the globally downtrodden and winning allies from Lebanon to Venezuela while drawing harsh criticism from the United States. But analysts say Iran’s resistance image has been challenged by Ahmadinejad’s controversial June 12 reelection, after which hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the street to protest what they say is a fradulent vote.”

Granny get your gun: "Crime is generally a young person’s game, but that hasn’t stopped an ever-growing number of older Americans from breaking the law. Following a decline through most of the ’90s, over the past 10 years arrest rates for those over 50 have shot up 85 percent, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Experts predict that these numbers will continue to climb well into the next decade, as 35 million baby boomers expand America’s graying population from 16 to nearly 25 percent. Is America on the precipice of a geriatric crime wave?”

Can the economy recover?: “There is no economy left to recover. The US manufacturing economy was lost to offshoring and free trade ideology. It was replaced by a mythical ‘New Economy.’ The ‘New Economy’ was based on services. Its artificial life was fed by the Federal Reserve’s artificially low interest rates, which produced a real estate bubble, and by ‘free market’ financial deregulation, which unleashed financial gangsters to new heights of debt leverage and fraudulent financial products. The real economy was traded away for a make-believe economy. When the make-believe economy collapsed, Americans’ wealth in their real estate, pensions, and savings collapsed dramatically while their jobs disappeared.” [An excessively negative view but there is something in what he says]

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray in full). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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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Most interesting

A U.S. army officer, Major Cook, rejected his deployment to Afghanistan on the grounds that Obama was not born in the USA and hence ineligible to be Commander in Chief. He was ready to go to court over it. Rather than go to court, the army backed down and cancelled his deployment order. See the backdown here. Obama is clearly desperate to avoid this matter going to court, and the affair is receiving a fair bit of press coverage. Is this the beginning of the end? The lengths that Obama has gone to in order to avoid producing his original birth certificate are quite extraordinary.

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America's travesty of democracy

Lawmakes who don't read what they vote for

by Jeff Jacoby

SAY, DID YOU HEAR THE ONE about the congressman who was asked to do his job? Talk about funny -- this'll crack you up! Well, maybe it won't. But Steny Hoyer thought it was hilarious.

Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, is the majority leader in the US House of Representatives. At a news conference last week, he was talking about the health-care overhaul now being drafted on Capitol Hill, and a reporter asked whether he would support a pledge committing members of Congress to read the bill before voting on it, and to make the full text of the legislation available to the public online for 72 hours before the vote takes place.

That, reported CNSNews, gave Hoyer the giggles:

The majority leader "found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. 'I'm laughing because . . . I don't know how long this bill is going to be, but it's going to be a very long bill,' he said."

Then came one of those classic Washington gaffes that Michael Kinsley famously defined as "when a politician tells the truth." Hoyer conceded that if lawmakers had to carefully study the bill ahead of time, they'd never vote for it. "If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn't read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes," he said.

Hoyer's words can be given two interpretations, both of which are probably accurate: One is that the health-care "reform" will be such a noisome mess that anyone who really digs into its details will be more likely to oppose it. The second is that so few members of Congress will bother to read the bill that if reading it became a prerequisite for voting on it, almost no one would qualify. Either way, the majority leader was declaring it more important for Congress to pass the bill than to understand it.

"Transparency" is a popular buzzword in good-government circles, and politicians are forever promising more of it. On his first day in the White House, for example, President Obama vowed to make his administration "the most open and transparent in history." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has boasted of the "great openness and transparency" that her leadership has brought to Congress.

But as Hoyer's mirth suggests, when it comes to the legislative process, transparency is a joke. Congress frequently votes on huge and complex bills that few if any members of the House or Senate have read through. They couldn't read them even if they wanted to, since it is not unusual for legislation to be put to a vote just hours after the text is made available to lawmakers. Congress passed the gigantic, $787 billion "stimulus" bill in February -- the largest spending bill in history -- after having had only 13 hours to master its 1,100 pages. A 300-page amendment was added to Waxman-Markey, the mammoth cap-and-trade energy bill, at 3 A.M. on the day the bill was taken up by the House. And that wasn't the worst of it, as law professor Jonathan Adler of Case Western Reserve University noted in National Review Online:

"When Waxman-Markey finally hit the floor, there was no actual bill. Not one single copy of the full legislation that would, hours later, be subject to a final vote was available to members of the House. The text made available to some members of Congress still had "placeholders" -- blank provisions to be filled in by subsequent language. . . . Even the House Clerk's office lacked a complete copy of the legislation, and was forced to place a copy of the 1,200-page draft side by side with the 300-page amendments."

Ramming legislation through Congress so quickly that neither lawmakers nor voters have time to read and digest it is a bipartisan crime; Republicans have been as guilty of it as Democrats. The 341-page Patriot Act, to mention just one notorious example, was introduced in the Republican-controlled House on Oct. 23, 2001, brought to a vote on Oct. 24, adopted by the Democratic-controlled Senate on Oct. 25, and signed into law by President George W. Bush on Oct. 26.

Such efficiency is no virtue when it comes to lawmaking, which is why every member of Congress should be pressed to sign the pledge Hoyer was asked about. It is sponsored by a grassroots conservative group, Let Freedom Ring, and is readily accessible online. Equally worthy of support is ReadTheBill.org, which is backed by a coalition of liberal organizations. Still another push comes from the libertarian group Downsize DC, which urges Congress to pass its proposed Read The Bills Act.

Senators and representatives who vote on bills they haven't read and don't understand betray their constituents' trust. It is no answer to say that Congress would get much less done if every member took the time to read every bill. Fewer and shorter laws more carefully thought through would be a vast improvement over today's massive bills, which are assembled in the dark and enacted in haste. Steny Hoyer chortles at the thought of asking members of Congress to do their job properly. It's up to voters to wipe the grin off his face.

SOURCE

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Kabuki and Sonia Sotomayor

by Jeff Jacoby

THE NOMINATION of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has generated controversy, but its outcome is not in doubt. "Unless you have a complete meltdown, you will be confirmed," South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham told the nominee when the Judiciary Committee hearings opened on Monday. It would be hard to find anyone who disagrees.

This week's hearings, then, are all that stand between Sotomayor and one of the most consequential jobs in American life. As a Supreme Court justice, she will be shaping national policy for years, perhaps decades, to come. Long after the president who nominated her has left the White House, Sotomayor will likely still be on the bench, wielding an influence on matters ranging from property rights to labor law to free speech to criminal procedure. With the other justices, she will exercise powers nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, yet by now accepted as the high court's prerogatives: to strike down state and federal laws, to bind other branches of government, to constitutionalize new rights, to have the last word on the meaning of terms like "due process of law" and "establishment of religion" -- and to do it all without being accountable to the American people or any elected official.

Before the Senate consents to investing Sotomayor with such sweeping authority, shouldn't it get some idea of how she would use it? As a matter of due diligence, don't senators have an obligation to learn Sotomayor's views on the legal and constitutional issues of the day? The stakes could hardly be greater, after all, or the public interest more intense. Would-be senators and presidents lay out their positions on current controversies, often in intricate detail. Shouldn't a Supreme Court nominee, who will never again have to submit to public scrutiny, be expected to share her thinking on important judicial and political questions? How else can the Senate, or the voters it represents, decide whether she belongs on the court?

Yet Sotomayor, like previous Supreme Court nominees, intends to tell the Judiciary Committee as little as possible about her views and intentions. In her testimony yesterday, she refused to express an opinion on contentious issues. "I come to every case with an open mind," she insisted. "Every case is new for me."

That isn't true, and everyone knows it -- just as everyone knew it when John Roberts and Samuel Alito were the nominees taking the "judicial Fifth" and politely declining to give straightforward answers when asked about their stands on key subjects. When Roberts was before the committee in 2005, then-Senator Joseph Biden voiced his frustration at "this kabuki dance we have in these hearings here," in which senators ask pointed questions and nominees give ultra-cautious replies, sidestepping any discussion of the convictions they would bring to the court.

Am I suggesting that nominees should telegraph how they would vote in any pending or probable case? Of course not. Should they make commitments to uphold or overrule specific previous Supreme Court decisions? No. But neither should they be allowed to turn the confirmation process into a grave and windy nullity on the grounds that that is what judicial impartiality requires.

The Supreme Court itself has said that such "impartiality" is illusory. "It is virtually impossible to find a judge who does not have preconceptions about the law," the court declared in a 2002 case. "Indeed, even if it were possible to select judges who did not have preconceived views on legal issues, it would hardly be desirable to do so."

Instead of artfully dodging them, Supreme Court nominees should be required to discuss those preconceptions, and to give substantive answers when asked about their legal worldview or their analysis of constitutional issues. In the Wall Street Journal the other day, Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett suggested some questions: "Does the Second Amendment protect an individual right to arms? . . . Does the Ninth Amendment protect judicially enforceable unenumerated rights? Does the Necessary and Proper Clause delegate unlimited discretion to Congress? Where in the text of the Constitution is the so-called Spending Power (by which Congress claims the power to spend tax revenue on anything it wants) and does it have any enforceable limits?"

It is the Senate's responsibility to check and balance the vast clout of the Supreme Court, and it abdicates that responsibility when confirmation hearings become merely an elaborate ritual for rubber-stamping judicial nominees. Too much is riding on every nomination not to demand serious answers to serious questions. Kabuki has its place, and it isn't a Judiciary Committee hearing room.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Sotomayor disavows 'wise Latina' remark: "Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor retreated from her praise of the "wise Latina," endorsed a privacy right to abortion in the Constitution and insisted she was not opposed to gun ownership during a day of questioning on a string of hot-button issues before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. In her first extended public exchanges since President Obama nominated her in May, Judge Sotomayor said her widely cited 2001 remark that a "wise Latina woman" would tend to make better judgments than a white man was a "failed rhetorical flourish that fell flat" - and not, as critics charge, evidence of racism. "The context of the words I said has created a misunderstanding," said Judge Sotomayor, the first Hispanic and the third woman nominated to the high court. "I want to state upfront, unequivocally, I do not believe that any ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in sound judgment. I do believe that every person has an equal opportunity to be a good and wise judge," she said. Republicans appeared unconvinced."

A second stimulus package? Yikes! : “Investors understand that increased government spending diverts valuable resources away from the private sector and ends up imposing even more demoralizing taxes on labor and capital. A major study of 18 large economies by Alberto Alesina of Harvard and three colleagues appeared in the 2002 American Economic Review. This paper, ‘Fiscal Policy, Profits and Investment’ found that the surest way to make economies boom can be through deep cuts in government spending — the exact opposite of the ‘fiscal stimulus’ snake oil.”

Banks winning at expense of taxpayers : “Banks surged and stocks followed yesterday, mostly on the heels of high expectations for trading firm Goldman Sachs, which really is more of a hedge fund than a real bank. Last Thursday, I said banks are my favorite stock market sector. So I got it right one time in a row. With a steep upward Treasury curve, even a banker can make money borrowing at near-zero and lending at much higher rates.”

California nightmare: “California has so degraded itself into a laughably leftist socialist commie-think nightmare that it has, as all socialist commie-think countries always do, finally bankrupted itself. As Margaret Thatcher, erstwhile UK prime minister, once said, ‘The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.’ Hahaha! Exactly! And now California has run out of money! Exactly! Now, to demonstrate their complete worthlessness as thinking, rational beings, California has decided that it will not cut expenses overmuch, but will pay for things not with money, but with IOUs! Hahaha! IOUs! Hahahaha! There is Something Beyond Surreal (SMS) about all this.”

Schwarzenegger TV spot warns of hard line on California budget: California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has hit the airwaves with a television commercial underscoring he is in no mood to compromise in talks on the state budget. The Republican governor said in the 60-second spot that he would not sign a budget that plugs a $US26.3 billion deficit if it includes higher taxes and excludes changes in state government he has said will prevent welfare fraud. "And I will not sign a budget that pushes our financial problems down the road, because the road stops here," Mr Schwarzenegger said in the commercial, which aired amid growing concerns on Wall Street about the state's finances, especially its cash account. The state government started its fiscal year on July 1, and without a balanced budget agreement it is quickly burning through its cash. That has forced finance officials, grappling with declining revenues because of the recession and rising unemployment, to issue IOUs in order to conserve cash, promising payment to taxpayers owed refunds and vendors owed money for goods and services for only the second time since the Great Depression. Mr Schwarzenegger's TV commercial came amid hope in the state capital of Sacramento that budget talks are nearing a successful conclusion after fits and starts in recent weeks. The governor and top legislators of the state's Democrat-led Legislature have essentially agreed they will balance the state's books with deep spending cuts."

Heavy reading -- but as relevant as ever: “Imagine a novel of more than a thousand pages, published half a century ago. The author doesn’t have a talk-radio show and has been dead for 27 years. As for the storyline, it is beyond dated … The prose itself is a disconcerting mixture of philosophy, industrial policy, and bodice-ripping … In short, you would think Atlas Shrugged might be long forgotten. Instead, Ayn Rand’s novel is remembered more than ever. This year the book is selling at a faster rate than last year. Last year, sales were about 200,000, higher than any year before that, including 1957, when the book was published. Atlas Shrugged is becoming a political ‘Harry Potter’ because Rand shone a spotlight on a problem that still exists: Not pre-1989 Soviet communism, but 2009-style state capitalism. Rand depicted government and companies colluding in the name of economic rescue at the expense of the entrepreneur. That entrepreneur is like the titan Atlas who carries the rest of the world on his shoulders — until he doesn’t.

Should Americans be humble? : "“After president Obama traveled abroad recently it became clear that he wanted to present himself and, indirectly, America as a nation, differently from how he believed President George W. Bush did this. In particular, Mr. Bush was generally seen by his critics as more of an ‘ugly American,’ following the character of the novel by that name, written half a century ago by Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer (who exemplified the sort of American who tended to be insensitive to the rest of the world’s population, their customs and languages, etc.). Mr. Obama seems to want to change this by appearing to be less arrogant, swagger less than Mr. Bush. Instead Mr. Obama wants to be friends with virtually everyone, even those who have no interest it being friends with America and Americans, including him.”

The Left’s dismissal of individual rights: "For those of us who have escaped Draconian tyrannies and reached America, for a long time it may be difficult to adjust to the fact that American Leftists are every bit the fascists that some claim they are. As Susan Sontag said, ‘Communism is successful fascism.’ A little inspection of modern American liberalism will also bring this to light — just consider that it was Woodrow Wilson and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. who had no patience with opponents of various public policies governments forged during their time and sent those opposed to them to prison. (It was Warren Harding, that negligible right-winger, who eventually set these dissidents free!) Today the Left’s fascistic tendencies are still quite evident, although there is often a kind of sophistication about them (e. g., via the doctrine of Communitarianism). Anyone who reads The New York Review of Books can testify to this. No matter what public policy issues is being discussed in its pages, The Review always treats the wealth of the nation as collectively owned, rejecting that quintessentially American idea of the right to private property. No, everything belongs to us all and government is to allocate the resources in line with how the elite deems proper.”

Addiction is a choice : “I read a book recently called, ‘Addiction is a Choice,’ by Jeffrey Schaler. He suggests that addiction is not a disease, and that people actually choose to use drugs. He points to the fact that although people might have a genetic predisposition to becoming addicted, some people also have a genetic predisposition to blue eyes, and having blue eyes is certainly not a disease. Schaler says that no one has been able to find a cause of the addiction disease in autopsies or medical exams. He says that one of the only treatments for the disease of addiction is therapy in the form of talking to someone. The success rate for this treatment is not much different from those who stop using drugs on their own.”

Fishy politics may harm US consumers: “The Wall Street Journal has a great editorial today on one US industry’s latest attempt to secure some protection against foreign imports, which just may spark a trade war with an important target for American exports. This time, it’s the farmed fish industry, and the imports in question are catfish from Vietnam. ”

UK: Ireland passport proposal shelved: “The government has climbed down over plans to make people show passports for travel between Britain and Ireland. There are currently no passport controls for Irish and UK citizens travelling in the Common Travel Area (CTA) between the two islandsImmigration Minister Phil Woolas had said controls should be in place to tighten security. But the House of Lords voted to remove the clause during the passage of a borders bill.”

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray in full). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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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