Russia calls on Ukraine to become a federation of states (Like some other countries I know)



This is actually a moderate and compromising stand from Putin.  He clearly wants to avoid any war.  His ultimate aim is to reunite all the Russian speaking people of Eastern Europe under Russian rule and the Russian-speaking half of Ukraine is the big prize there.  But having Russian Ukraine substantially independent of the rest of Ukraine and free to develop closer ties with neighboring Russia would be a good compromise

Russia's foreign ministry is calling on Ukraine to become a federal state and call fresh elections.

In a statement posted on Monday the ministry urged Ukraine's parliament to call a constitutional assembly which could draft a new constitution to make the country federal, handing more power to its regions.

The foreign ministry said the proposals are part of its efforts to ease the tensions in Ukraine by diplomatic means.

Moscow insisted that Ukrainian regions should get broader autonomy and that the country should adopt a "neutral political and military status."

SOURCE

NOTE: The attitude of Ukrainian-speakers towards Russia is similar to the attitude of Canadians to the USA, to the attitude of New Zealanders towards Australia to the attitude of the Scots  towards England and the attitude of Koreans to Japan:  They don't like their big neighbor.  In the Ukrainian case that dislike is much multiplied by Russia's tendency  towards tyranny.  The ferocity of that dislike could be seen in the demonstrations that recently toppled their pro-Russian president.  Yet all of the pairs mentioned have a lot in common  -- a clear refutation of the Leftist "one world" dream.  Differences matter, even small ones

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Ukraine's economic problems

Still too Soviet;  Still poor

The dramatic events in Ukraine the past few weeks were ignited when Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, a Russian ally, said he would suspend efforts to bring Ukraine closer to the EU and thousands took to the streets to protest. Clearly, the threat of Russian political oppression was in the minds of the protesters, but the economic stakes were enormous as well. Indeed, a look at the data suggests that Yanukovych’s act was against the economic interests of his own people.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, former Soviet and Eastern Bloc countries chose between two distinct paths. Ten Central and Eastern European nations (the so-called CEE-10) made integration with the European Union a top priority. The rest, like Ukraine, moved much more slowly toward Western standards, and some even settled under a new Russian umbrella.

Prior to the breakup, Eastern Europe was underdeveloped relative to the West, mostly because of the failure created by central planning. When a market economy is unleashed in such a setting, “convergence” of the standard of living to that of the developed world can be quite rapid. If the U.S. wants to grow sharply, it needs to push the very frontier of what is possible farther out. A former Soviet or Eastern Bloc country, on the other hand, could grow rapidly simply by copying the developed world. Some did.

A large academic literature has emerged analyzing the impact of “going west.” The literature documents that those nations that assimilated into the EU saw dramatic economic growth. A recent EU study co-authored by Ryszard Rapacki and Mariusz Prochniak of the Warsaw School of Economics, for example, concluded that full convergence of the CCE-10 is so far along that it might be complete in as little as eight years.

The countries, like Ukraine, that failed to take that path have stagnated. The nearby chart documents how radically different their experience has been. The chart plots real per capita GDP (in 2005 dollars) for former Soviet and Eastern Bloc countries other than Russia. The purple and dark blue lines on the top illustrate the findings of the study just mentioned. Income per capita has grown sharply since the mid 1990s, more than doubling for the former Soviet countries, and increasing about 50 percent for the Eastern Bloc countries (such as the Czech Republic) that have joined the EU.



The three lines on the bottom of the chart depict what has happened to those nations that have not joined the EU. Each of these countries has stagnated, seeing a standard of living that has barely budged since the fall of the USSR. The experiences have been so different that the increase in welfare for citizens in former Soviet countries that have joined the EU is larger than today’s level of welfare for countries that have not.

Vladimir Putin’s desire to maintain a zone of influence has had a dramatically negative effect on the economic well-being of citizens of the affected countries. It is hard to imagine how anyone could look at such data and not conclude that Putin supporters outside Russia are traitors, if not to their nations at the very least to their compatriots’ prospects of economic security and prosperity

SOURCE

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The Tea Party Isn't Dying – The GOP Establishment Is

If the conservative insurgency has been crushed, why was Mitch McConnell walking around onstage at CPAC with a musket? He couldn’t have sucked up to the right any harder if he wore a tri-corner hat and had the Gadsden flag tattooed on his rear.

The death of the conservative revolution, the Tea Party, or whatever you call it, has not merely been greatly exaggerated. It’s been flat-out lied about.

It isn’t dead. It just changed, from a shoestring operation to one with real clout. And it’s well on its way to doing what it set out to do – arm-twist a flabby, comfortable GOP into fighting for conservative values instead of just talking about them at election time.

We conservatives have two very different opponents, opponents who sometimes operate in concert. After all, they both want us gone.

The first opponent is the left. They still call us the “Tea Party,” though we rarely use that term anymore. It’s fun to hear the liberals say it – it’s like listening to grandparents trying to sound cool. Yeah, those hepcats are sure hip with their cool jive, daddy-o.

Every day, the lefty punditry opines about the Tea Party’s death spiral. And every day, the Tea Party refuses to crash and burn.

These clowns really believe that we are a racist movement devoted to the beliefs of the late Democrat icon and KKK kleagle Senator Robert Byrd. It’s hard to imagine a bigger misunderstanding of one’s opponent.

The left is battling not the opponent it is facing but the opponent it wants to face. It’s so much easier to fight straw men than to address the fiasco of Obamacare, the zombie economy or the endless war on women waged by their horny Democrat heroes.

They just don’t get what we are about or what we want, which they will find is a problem. Take it from someone with a little bit of military experience – you really should try to understand your enemy. It helps keep you from being, say, humiliated in a Florida special election.

And that advice isn’t coming from some dead white male – Sun Tzu was saying it 2,000 years ago. So lefties should at least listen for the sake of diversity, but they won’t. They’re too invested in their unearned smugness. And they’re obviously racist.

We conservative insurgents have another opponent, but this opponent recognizes us for exactly what we are – a dangerous, existential threat. This opponent is the GOP Establishment, and its members hate and fear us for entirely different reasons.

The problem with the GOP Establishment is not its ideology – most of its members, in the abstract, probably generally agree with our positions. What they hate is that we intend to utterly upend their world. They have spent years in the Beltway, climbing the ladder, building careers, all within the system as it exists today. They are invested in that system just like the liberals, regardless of superficial differences over mere policy preferences.

They want to gather power within Washington then redistribute it after they take their cut. We want to re-wire the system so that Washington is left off the grid to wither back down to the miserable backwater it used to be – and should be.

D.C. is awesomely wealthy, full of fine clothes, sumptuous food, gleaming restaurants, and much more attractive people than when I interned there in 1986. The recession missed Washington, a town that produces nothing except problems for the rest of America yet is better off than anywhere else in America.

We want to end that. That we want to destroy the cushy status quo is why the GOP Establishment hates us. That we can influence elections is why it fears us.

There is a lot of propaganda about how the Tea Party ruined the GOP’s chances to take the Senate. There’s never any recognition of how conservatives are solely responsible for taking back the House. No one ever talks about the Establishment candidates who failed in places like North Dakota and California.

If the Establishment had its way, we’d have Senator Crist instead of Senator Rubio. Hell, if Crist turns back Republican next week, they’ll probably start backing him for president. That is, unless surefire winner Jeb Bush decides to run.

You always hear about a few eccentric Senate candidates the Tea Party gave us, like the Delaware sorceress and the Indiana gynecology professor, but you don’t hear about how their loser GOP primary opponents supported the Democrats in the general. So we should have supported clowns who turned traitor the moment they didn’t get their way? No thanks. If the Establishment wants loyalty, let’s see it show some.

We conservatives are forcing the GOP Establishment to at least start pretending to act conservative. Mitch McConnell didn’t shake his blunderbuss at CPAC because he loves mixing with peasants; he did it because he’s scared, and he should be. The surrender caucus didn’t retreat on guns and amnesty because they wanted to get slammed by the mainstream media. They did it because we’ll primary them at the drop of a hat.

And some of them – not all, but some – should be primaried. If Pat Roberts can’t deal with the fact that he’s not in Kansas anymore in the primary, he might lose in the general. If Thad Cochran can’t hold his Mississippi seat against an upstart after being a senator for a zillion years, then he doesn’t deserve six more.

Time is on our side. The old GOP is passing away into history. The energy, intellect and grit is all with us conservatives – anyone out there ever see a passionate squish? We’re pushing the party, kicking and screaming, to the right.

And, surprise, surprise, it looks like we conservatives are going to clean their pinko clocks in November, just like we conservatives did in 2010. Not too bad for a movement that’s been crushed.

SOURCE

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Government rail at work again

The multiple folds of irony are all most too much to handle. The nation’s government-run passenger rail service – which has never once in more than four decades turned a profit and relies on perpetual taxpayer handouts - plans to start offering free rides to writers. The idea, which stemmed from a New York-based writer’s tweet, will launch an official residency program for writers on its long-distance routes, coincidentally the least cost-efficient and most heavily subsidized in the Amtrak system. Amtrak is a perpetual loser, and it’s unlikely that this writers-ride-free gimmick will have a happy ending.

Perhaps no government program has embodied bureaucratic waste and inefficiency quite like passenger rail travel in the United States – a taxpayer-funded gravy train that has received $40 billion in federal subsidies, has never once made it out of the red, and entered last year well over a billion dollars in debt. Worse, the service asked for another $2.6 billion in federal funding for fiscal year 2014, and yet has the audacity to offer “free” rides to writers.

“I wish Amtrak had residencies for writers.” A simple tweet at the agency’s social media account is all it took for the service to offer the writer a free trip from New York to Chicago and back. According to CNN, up to 24 writers will be chosen, and all will be offered trips on “undersold long-distance routes.” The Northeast Corridor is only profitable portion of Amtrak in the entire country – leaving many options for the writers in which to get the creative juices flowing.

The service has resorted to offering free tickets, a bed, desk, outlets, “and a window to watch the American countryside roll by” to a lucky few, perhaps hoping to drum up a little positive copy for the increasingly unpopular and expensive rail service. Each writers package has an estimated at a retail value of about $900 – not exactly chump change. Needless to say, the prospect for return on investment is slim – and that shouldn’t be a surprise to most taxpayers. After all, this is an agency that managed to lose $834 million on food sales alone in the past decade.

Thankfully, some in Congress have taken notice. Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) penned an open letter to Amtrak President Joseph Boardman, questioning the logic behind the move.

“We are certain that there is considerable demand for free Amtrak tickets in any number of venues,” the lawmakers wrote. “Unfortunately, given Amtrak’s prodigious annual taxpayer subsidies, this plan raises multiple red flags…revenue from ticket sales was insufficient to even cover Amtrak’s operating expenses.” Hoping for return on investment on thousands of dollars-worth of free trips to help bridge this gap seems like a dubious plan, to say the least.

Amtrak offering free rides, with no metric by which to judge the success of the program, embodies perfectly the systemic problems with this government-run railroad.

Taxpayer-funded projects like Amtrak have no profit motive, no inclination to increase efficiency, and every incentive to continue shoveling taxpayer money into the proverbial firebox. That’s because for more than 40 years, Amtrak’s funding has been all but guaranteed regardless of performance.

Instead of expanding taxpayer subsidies even further and driving Amtrak even further off the rails of solvency, policymakers should be looking for ways to put a stop to what has become a Handout Express to the tune of $15 billion a year.

Not only should Amtrak begin to live up to its promise of getting back on stable financial footing by cancelling the free ride program, Congress should consider not re-authorizing the service at all – ending Amtrak’s free ride at our expense.

SOURCE

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

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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Putin is more democratic than John Kerry

Failed Presidential candidate John Kerry seems to have been left in charge of American policy in Ukraine by virtue of the black jellyfish in the White House being afraid to do anything at all.  I would argue however that in this case the jellyfish is right.

After the democratically elected president of all Ukraine was ousted by Ukrainian thugs, Putin has stepped in to enable the people of Crimea to democratically divorce themselves from unstable  Ukraine.  So who is the democrat here?  John Kerry is supporting the undemocratic Ukraininan thugs and resisting democracy in Crimea.  Putin is the good guy.

And Putin had previously made no moves to get Crimea back into union with Russia  -- even though Crimea had been Russian for hundreds of years.  The only thing that severed Crimea from Russia was a decree from Soviet dictator Khrushchev.  So is Kerry supporting the ideas of a Soviet dictator?

There is no doubt that Crimea will vote for a reunion with Russia and it is a credit to Putin that he waited for Ukraine to become ungovernable before he put those wheels into motion.

The basic aim of Putin's policy so far seems to be motivated by Russia's demographic decline.  Russians are dying out and Putin want to bring Russian populations everywhere back into Russia's embrace and thus protect Russian power.  He accepted some returns of ethnic Russians from the Baltic States for that reason and he also chipped off Georgia's Russian-speaking regions for that purpose.  Crimea is simply the next obvious step in rejoining Russians to Russia

Given that basic aim, it seems likely that Putin will not stop at Crimea.  Large areas of Ukraine are Russian speaking so it seems very likely that Putin will give support for the partition of Ukraine into East and West.  And given the precedent in Crimea, that will most likely be done democratically.  There is no doubt that the respective populations would support such a partition.

And what is wrong with partitioning Ukraine?  Britain is at the moment agonizing over whether Scotland should be partitioned off from England and no-one is calling that undemocratic  --JR.

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Henry Thomas Schäfer

Some years ago I was given a framed print of a famous painting by Schäfer.  I like it and have it on my wall to this day.  And I am not alone in liking it.  Thousands of such prints seem to have been made.  Schafer has been a very popular artist.

So I was surprised that when I Googled his name, I could find out virtually nothing about his life.  I gather that his art is seen as "chocolate boxy" and hence below the notice of anybody seriously interested in art.  I of course deplore such elitism so would like to put a decent biography of him online if I can get more information on him.  I reproduce below the only two biographical notes I could find and hope that there might be a reader of this blog who can tell me more.


"Henry Thomas Schafer was born in the Lake District in England during the mid 19th-century. His exact birth date is unknown; however, his work was most well known from 1873 - 1915. Both a painter and an accomplished sculptor, Schafer exhibited his figurative studies at the Royal Academy in London in 1875, receiving the prestigious Academia award for excellence. Schafer's signature style was his study of women dressed in "goddess-like" classical vestments. It is for these portraits that he is best remembered."

"Henry Thomas Schäfer (British, 1854?-1915).  Henry Thomas Schäfer is a British Victorian-era genre painter and sculptor, elected in 1889 to the Royal Society of British Artists. He exhibited at the Royal Society, the Royal Academy, the Royal Scottish Academy, and other galleries starting in 1873. Several of his paintings have been widely reproduced and distributed in the form of posters."

Below is the picture that hangs on my wall


A Time of Roses

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Dupes and Hypocrites: Communism’s Fellow-Travellers in the West

“Tomorrow I leave this land of hope and return to our Western countries of despair,” declared British playwright Bernard Shaw, as he embarked on his return journey from the Soviet Union in 1931.1 American writer and critic Edmund Wilson expressed similar sentiments in 1936: “. . . you feel in the Soviet Union that you are at the moral top of the world where the light never really goes out . . .”

It is astonishing that such comments could have been made about Soviet Russia at a time when Stalin, its bloodiest-ever dictator, was murdering millions of people in internal repression. But these statements reflected the mindset of all too many pro-Communist, Western intellectuals of that period. Referring to Stalin’s multiple purges, British historian George Watson wrote in 1973, “Between 1933 and 1939 many (and perhaps most) British intellectuals under the age of fifty, and a good many in other Western lands, knowingly supported the greatest act of mass murder in human history.” Other scholars have reached similar judgements about the culpability of Communism’s “fellow-travellers” in the West. From the 1920s to the 1980s, at least two generations of leftist intellectuals embraced one oppressive Communist regime after another, whilst remaining fiercely critical of their own imperfect but free societies.

It should be noted, though, that their zeal had its limits when it came to their personal fortunes. Of this type of tourist, American writer Eugene Lyons wrote, “They guarded their foreign passports like the apple of their eye while sizzling with enthusiasm over this ‘new Soviet civilization.’” It was also reported that “another ardent fellow-traveller, Lion Feuchtwanger, was once asked why he didn’t move to the country he praised so regularly [i.e. the Soviet Union]; and the novelist replied, ‘What do you think I am—a fool?’”

This recurring pattern of hypocrisy and double standards first raised its head in relation to Soviet Russia, but as disillusion with Russian Communism at last set in during the 1950s, it did not result in leftist intellectuals’ abandonment of Communism. They merely transferred their emotional allegiance, and their double standards, to a new set of Communist countries in the 1960s and 1970s: Red China (“The Maoist revolution is on the whole the best thing that has happened to the Chinese people in many centuries . . .”); Cuba (“[T]he first purposeful society that we have had in the Western hemisphere for many years—it’s the first society where human beings are treated as human beings, where men have a certain dignity, and where this is guaranteed to them.”); and North Vietnam (“[A] humane socialism . . . was evident in the unembarrassed handclasps among men, the poetry and song at the center of man-woman relationships, the freedom to weep practiced by everyone…as the Vietnamese speak of their country.”).

How is it possible that so many highly intelligent people could be hyper-critical of their own societies and yet totally wedded to the advancement of totalitarian socialist revolutions responsible for some of the greatest crimes against humanity in history? Certainly, their rejection of Christianity was a major factor, and it manifested itself in several unfortunate ways: (1) contempt for Western society in general, which is built largely within a Christian worldview; (2) indifference to God’s law, which forbids much of what drives and sustains totalitarian regimes—covetousness, theft, and even murder; and (3) substitution of a manmade “workers’ paradise” for the kingdom of God, for which their hearts long, but whose Lord they cannot tolerate. Communism, then, became their new faith, one fiercely held. As Gustave Le Bon observed as early as 1899, “Thanks to its promises of regeneration . . . Socialism is becoming a belief of a religious character.”  History, though, has used Communism to teach once again that when men promise “heaven on earth,” the result is something more nearly akin to hell.

SOURCE

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Black skin trumps all else?



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POLITICO Doesn’t Know Much About Conservatism

POLITICO, Allbritton Communications’ flagship web, video and print outlet has, in seven short years, become the preferred media of the DC elite. However, despite the stellar resumes of POLITICO’s journalists, a recent article titled “Right-left immigration alliance fraying,” by assistant editor Seung Min Kim, constituted such an egregious act of journalism malpractice that it shows the writers at POLITICO don’t really know jack about conservatism and the conservative movement.

Miss Kim’s error was to identify the US Chamber of Commerce and other backers of amnesty for illegal aliens as “conservatives” and to claim that a broad coalition of such “conservatives” backs amnesty and the outrage the Senate passed in the Rubio – Obama immigration “reform” bill.

The notion that the US Chamber is “conservative” is such a gross mischaracterization of what it means to be a political conservative today that it must be seen as wilful ignorance of the history of the conservative movement and POLITICO’s own reporting about the civil war in the Republican Party.

What Miss Kim, who has a Masters in Journalism, apparently missed in all of that education is that the US Chamber and other members of the Big Business – Big Government axis are among the interests opposed by the conservative movement, and particularly by the limited government constitutional conservatives who are today the movement’s most active grassroots adherents.

Divide the pros from the cons in any of the major Capitol Hill legislative battles since the Tea Party wave election of 2010 and you will find the US Chamber on one side and movement conservatives on the other.

Cut, Cap and Balance back in 2009 – conservatives were for it, Big Business was opposed.

Keeping the sequester caps? Conservatives wanted to keep them, Big Business wanted more spending.

The fight over defunding Obamacare and spending that shutdown the government? The US Chamber was and is always opposed when the House acts to use the power of the purse that the Constitution gives it to rein-in an overweening executive branch.

Indeed, a couple of years ago US Chamber President Tom Donohue had the gall to tell conservative opponents of raising the debt ceiling to raise the debt ceiling or we, meaning the Chamber, will get rid of you.

As for the idea that there is a “center-right coalition” led by the Chamber behind the push for amnesty for illegal aliens that is the central premise of Miss Kim’s article, we’d like to have a list of organizations that movement conservatives identify as “conservative” that have signed-on, because we can’t find any.

Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum? Opposed to amnesty.

The Heritage Foundation? Opposed to amnesty.

Richard Viguerie’s ConservativeHQ.com? Opposed to amnesty.

The major Tea Party movement groups? Opposed to amnesty.

RedState, Human Events, WND? All opposed to amnesty as far as we can tell.

And the major media voices on the right, such as Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin to name but a few; all opposed to amnesty.

As for the legislators who Miss Kim cites as making up the “conservative” supporters of amnesty, such as California Republican Congressmen David Valadao and Jeff Denham, neither of them even broke 40% on the Heritage Action for America scorecard, placing them well behind conservative members of Congress such as their fellow Californian, and Chamber political target, Tom McClintock’s 96% rating.

But we can’t lay the blame on Miss Kim entirely.

The experienced establishment journalists in the top echelons of POLITICO, such as Jim VandeHei (formerly of The Washington Post) and Rick Berke (formerly of The New York Times) should know better than to allow a writer to call the US Chamber "conservative," but apparently they too missed how conservatism has defined itself over the past fifty years, nor are they apparently reading their own team's reporting on the movement conservatives versus Big Business civil war in today’s Republican Party.

In the days prior to World War II when major business leaders, such as Henry Ford, advocated a non-interventionist foreign policy, it might have been credible to argue that the American “business community” as represented by the US Chamber was “conservative,” but those days are long gone.

The fault line in today’s politics isn’t between Democrats and Republicans. It is between advocates of Big Government in both major parties and conservative proponents of limited constitutional government.  When viewed from that perspective, the US Chamber isn’t conservative; it is one of the leading impediments to the conservative governance of America, and the journalists at POLITICO and other establishment media outlets ought to be clued-in to conservative politics enough to understand that and report the news that way.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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Are conservatives more emotional?

That good ol' projection again.  As a pretty good general rule, if you want to know what is true of liberals, just look at what they say about conservatives.  Seeing your own faults in others is not only good  psychological defence but it's a pretty good political tactic too.  If one side of politics is (say) full of hate, constant accusations from that side accusing others of hate may well cause uncommitted voters to say, "A plague on both their houses" and believe that both sides are equally haters.  So the constant accusations from liberals that conservatives are guilty of hate speech and racism makes good tactics.

And if there is one thing we know about liberals it is that they are always on the boil.  They are always outraged about something and are constantly protesting.  They are clearly the more emotional side of politics.  You just have to note the utter rage that pours out from Leftists in the comments they leave on conservative sites and on Twitter in replying to conservative tweets.  And their use of foul language is also hugely disproportionate.  And, as has often been said, bad language is the attempt of a weak mind to express itself forcefully.

So the piece of research below is very predictable.  On the basis of the flimsiest evidence, they assert that it is conservatives who are more emotional.

Their evidence is that in portraits of themselves most people show the left side of the face but there is a slight tendency for conservatives to show that side more often.

I could go on but such hugely silly "evidence" just doesn't seem to warrant any further bother.  Leftists will clutch at anything to discredit conservatives.


Right-Wing Politicians Prefer the Emotional Left

Nicole A. Thomas et al

Abstract

Physiological research suggests that social attitudes, such as political beliefs, may be partly hard-wired in the brain. Conservatives have heightened sensitivity for detecting emotional faces and use emotion more effectively when campaigning. As the left face displays emotion more prominently, we examined 1538 official photographs of conservative and liberal politicians from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States for an asymmetry in posing.

Across nations, conservatives were more likely than liberals to display the left cheek. In contrast, liberals were more likely to face forward than were conservatives. Emotion is important in political campaigning and as portraits influence voting decisions, conservative politicians may intuitively display the left face to convey emotion to voters.

SOURCE

A good summary of the boiling hate continually emanating from the Left is here

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Obamacare's famous "mandate" disappears

A central part of Obamacare abolished by the Obama adminstration

ObamaCare's implementers continue to roam the battlefield and shoot their own wounded, and the latest casualty is the core of the Affordable Care Act—the individual mandate. To wit, last week the Administration quietly excused millions of people from the requirement to purchase health insurance or else pay a tax penalty.

This latest political reconstruction has received zero media notice, and the Health and Human Services Department didn't think the details were worth discussing in a conference call, press materials or fact sheet. Instead, the mandate suspension was buried in an unrelated rule that was meant to preserve some health plans that don't comply with ObamaCare benefit and redistribution mandates. Our sources only noticed the change this week.

That seven-page technical bulletin includes a paragraph and footnote that casually mention that a rule in a separate December 2013 bulletin would be extended for two more years, until 2016. Lo and behold, it turns out this second rule, which was supposed to last for only a year, allows Americans whose coverage was cancelled to opt out of the mandate altogether.

In 2013, HHS decided that ObamaCare's wave of policy terminations qualified as a "hardship" that entitled people to a special type of coverage designed for people under age 30 or a mandate exemption. HHS originally defined and reserved hardship exemptions for the truly down and out such as battered women, the evicted and bankrupts.

But amid the post-rollout political backlash, last week the agency created a new category: Now all you need to do is fill out a form attesting that your plan was cancelled and that you "believe that the plan options available in the [ObamaCare] Marketplace in your area are more expensive than your cancelled health insurance policy" or "you consider other available policies unaffordable."

This lax standard—no formula or hard test beyond a person's belief—at least ostensibly requires proof such as an insurer termination notice. But people can also qualify for hardships for the unspecified nonreason that "you experienced another hardship in obtaining health insurance," which only requires "documentation if possible." And yet another waiver is available to those who say they are merely unable to afford coverage, regardless of their prior insurance. In a word, these shifting legal benchmarks offer an exemption to everyone who conceivably wants one.

Keep in mind that the White House argued at the Supreme Court that the individual mandate to buy insurance was indispensable to the law's success, and President Obama continues to say he'd veto the bipartisan bills that would delay or repeal it. So why are ObamaCare liberals silently gutting their own creation now?

The answers are the implementation fiasco and politics. HHS revealed Tuesday that only 940,000 people signed up for an ObamaCare plan in February, bringing the total to about 4.2 million, well below the original 5.7 million projection. The predicted "surge" of young beneficiaries isn't materializing even as the end-of-March deadline approaches, and enrollment decelerated in February.

Meanwhile, a McKinsey & Company survey reports that a mere 27% of people joining the exchanges were previously uninsured through February. The survey also found that about half of people who shopped for a plan but did not enroll said premiums were too expensive, even though 80% of this group qualify for subsidies. Some substantial share of the people ObamaCare is supposed to help say it is a bad financial value. You might even call it a hardship.

HHS is also trying to pre-empt the inevitable political blowback from the nasty 2015 tax surprise of fining the uninsured for being uninsured, which could help reopen ObamaCare if voters elect a Republican Senate this November. Keeping its mandate waiver secret for now is an attempt get past November and in the meantime sign up as many people as possible for government-subsidized health care. Our sources in the insurance industry are worried the regulatory loophole sets a mandate non-enforcement precedent, and they're probably right. The longer it is not enforced, the less likely any President will enforce it.

The larger point is that there have been so many unilateral executive waivers and delays that ObamaCare must be unrecognizable to its drafters, to the extent they ever knew what the law contained.

SOURCE

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David Horowitz Exposes Why Progressives Must Lie

In his book Disinformation, Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet Bloc official ever to defect to the United States, describes the Soviet intelligence practice called "framing" – changing someone's or something's past to suit present political needs.

The Soviets perfected this into a science. Jamie Glazov, editor of FrontPageMag.com, detailed a personal encounter with this Marxist science when he described a 1971 document KGB chairman Yuri Andropov wrote about Jamie's father, Soviet dissident Yuri Glazov:

    "Yuri Andropov is discussing the operation to put the drugs and the documents into the apartment and then five pages later is discussing my father being a drug trafficker and a spy. You see, there’s a self-intoxication here. You create the lie and then somewhere along the process you begin to believe that lie that you yourself have created, and this is a very fascinating phenomenon."

Jamie's boss, David Horowitz, lived this lie for many years. He knows that without lies, the ideology of the left would cease to exist. This is the central truth Horowitz relentlessly reinforces in Progressives, Volume II of The Black Book of the American Left.

Horowitz wastes no time defining what drives the left. On page 3, he states:

    The belief in a perfect future inevitably inspires a passionate (and otherwise inexplicable) hatred towards the imperfect present. The first agenda of social redeemers is to dismantle the existing social order, which means their intellectual and political energies are focused on the work of destruction.

With a false utopia as their goal, the left grants itself permission to commit any crime. With this is a free pass to lie about everything. In their world the victims of Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, and (today) Hamas are all airbrushed from history; the go-to source for political knowledge is Noam Chomsky, the "Guru of the Anti-American Left;" and, most importantly, any deviation is a menace to be snuffed out with an iron fist.

In one of his most revealing essays, Horowitz reviews how in one year (1999), three leading icons of the left were exposed as having crafted fake biographies for themselves:

Rigoberta Menchu – Claimed to have been a landless peasant and an innocent victim of U.S. Imperialism; was actually from a wealthy landowning family and an agent of a Soviet-backed armed gang which picked a fight with a military dictatorship, then blamed the result on America.
 
Betty Friedan – Claimed to have been an ordinary suburban housewife who realized she lived in a "comfortable concentration camp" and took action to liberate women from American home life; was actually a lifelong Communist and an activist dedicated to overturning capitalism – by overturning family values (as Marx and Engels prescribed).
 
Edward Said – Claimed to have been a refugee chased from the Jerusalem house he grew up in by a famous Jewish scholar after Israel was created; was actually only born in Jerusalem because his mother was visiting family there when her water broke and spent his entire childhood in Cairo (as Justus Reid Weiner wrote of this discovery: "On [Said's] birth certificate, prepared by the ministry of health of the British Mandate, his parents specified their permanent address as Cairo, and, indicating that they maintained no residence in Palestine, left blank the space for a local address."). Additionally, it was Said's aunt that evicted the Jewish scholar from the house – where he had been legally living with his grandchildren as refugees from Nazi Germany – and not the other way around.

To normal people, living a lie is a sickening existence. In fact, even somewhat abnormal, melancholy people like Edgar Allan Poe recognized the trouble one would have living with a Tell-Tale Heart. However, some people are so morally putrid that they can immerse themselves in a world of falsehoods and still sleep like babies. At the same time, those individuals among the left who are unwilling to be perpetually fake and hypocritical are treated like heretics.

"This tainting and ostracism of sinners is the secret power of the leftist faith," wrote Horowitz. "It is what keeps the faithful in line." The late Christopher Hitchens had longtime left-wing "friends" lining up to publicly end their friendships with him when he dared to call out the compulsive lying of Bill Clinton. For all their talk about "comrades", loyalty to friends, family, and country are secondary and sacrificial to the fib of the day.

In Andrew Breitbart and Stephen K. Bannon's film Occupy Unmasked, Horowitz explained:

    "Communism, which killed 100 million people in its course – in peacetime, not in war but in peacetime – and bankrupted whole continents, created unimaginable poverty for a billion people, artificial mass starvation where millions upon millions of people died because of government schemes that didn't work, showed that this Socialist idea is a bankrupt idea; there's nothing there."

SOURCE

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Horowitz at Heritage Foundation: 'The Communist Party Is The Democratic Party'

On Tuesday, former Marxist-turned-conservative icon David Horowitz spoke at the Heritage Foundation to mark the launch of what will be a ten-volume compendium of his writings on leftism, The Black Book of the American Left. In his wide-ranging speech, Horowitz described his transition from left to right, and discussed the shortcomings of a conservative movement unwilling to deal with the ugly realities of what the American left represents.

Horowitz began by distinguishing the David Horowitz Freedom Center from other think tanks, instead characterizing it as a “battle tank.” He labeled himself “monomaniacal” in his focus on the left and its relation to communism. “There are hedgehogs and foxes. The foxes know many things. And the hedgehogs know one thing. I am a hedgehog,” he joked.

“My parents called themselves progressives,” Horowitz explained with regard to his communist parents. “The agenda was a Soviet America...the slogan of the communist party in those days was peace, jobs, democracy. Sound familiar?”

That was the theme of Horowitz’s speech as he continued: how the communists had taken over the Democratic Party. “The communist party is the Democratic Party,” Horowitz stated. “In The Great Gatsby, [F. Scott] Fitzgerald describes the rich as people who break things and leave them for others to clean up. That is a wonderful description of the left.” Horowitz, who began as a radical Marxist, said that the modern left had learned stealth from their failures in the 1960s: “The left have learned from the 1960s...we in the 1960s didn't want to pretend to be Jeffersonian democrats...That's why we failed in the 1960s. That's why they've succeeded now.”

But the right, Horowitz pointed out, has failed to acknowledge that reality. On Obamacare, for example, Horowitz railed against the language used by the left: “single-payer.” Instead, he said, “it is communism,” pointing out that it was state ownership of the means of production. He added, “The left hate the Constitution because Madison designed it to thwart them.”

Horowitz then analyzed what he claimed were the four features of the leftist mentality. First, he said, the left and right are on opposite sides of the “fundamental divide of the modern age”: the left believes that human beings are inherently good and infinitely malleable, and so can be shaped by proper state guidance. Conservatives, by contrast, believe that human beings are responsible for social problems, and concentrating power in the hands of humans is dangerous.

Second, Horowitz said, the left are characterized by the belief that “history is a forward march.” Obama, Horowitz claimed, is a deep believer in this concept, all the way down to his carpet in the Oval Office, which assures those who enter that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. “Leftism is a crypto-religion,” he explained. “They see themselves as a savior. People who believe that redemption will take place in this life and I will be a part of it, that's Hitler. That's Mao...That's the American left.”

Third, Horowitz said that the left was characterized by “alienation from this country... What weakens America is actually good.” Horowitz cited the Obama administration’s eager withdrawal from Iraq as evidence of that proposition: “Obama betrayed every American who gave their life for the people of Iraq.” He also slammed the Obama administration with regard to Benghazi: “Benghazi is the most shameful act in the history of the American presidency.”

Finally, said Horowitz, the American left “lie. And it's not like politicians spinning...you cannot be a leftist without lying about the most basic strategic facts about who you are.”

Horowitz summed up pessimistically: “We are within reach of a totalitarian state in this country…These are very very dark days for this country.” But, Horowitz held out hope: “there's been an earthquake on the conservative side since I switched sides...the tea party is the earthquake. The best thing that Republicans can do is stop the fratricide.”

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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Hitler and the socialist dream

Many socialists before Hitler advocated genocide

George Watson

In April 1945, when Adolf Hitler died by his own hand in the rubble of Berlin, nobody was much interested in what he had once believed. That was to be expected. War is no time for reflection, and what Hitler had done was so shattering, and so widely known through images of naked bodies piled high in mass graves, that little or no attention could readily be paid to National Socialism as an idea. It was hard to think of it as an idea at all. Hitler, who had once looked a crank or a clown, was exposed as the leader of a gang of thugs, and the world was content to know no more than that.

Half a century on, there is much to be said. Even thuggery can have its reasons, and the materials that have newly appeared, though they may not transform judgement, undoubtedly enrich and deepen it. Confidants of Hitler. such as the late Albert Speer, have published their reminiscences; his wartime table-talk is a book; early revelations like Hermann Rauschning's Hitler Speaks of 1939 have been validated by painstaking research, and the notes of dead Nazis like Otto Wagener have been edited, along with a full text of Goebbels's diary.

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too. The title of National Socialism was not hypocritical.

The evidence before 1945 was more private than public, which is perhaps significant in itself. In public Hitler was always anti-Marxist, and in an age in which the Soviet Union was the only socialist state on earth, and with anti-Bolshevism a large part of his popular appeal, he may have been understandably reluctant to speak openly of his sources. His megalomania, in any case, would have prevented him from calling himself anyone's disciple. That led to an odd and paradoxical alliance between modern historians and the mind of a dead dictator.

Many recent analysts have fastidiously refused to study the mind of Hitler; and they accept, as unquestioningly as many Nazis did in the 1930s, the slogan "Crusade against Marxism" as a summary of his views. An age in which fascism has become a term of abuse is unlikely to analyse it profoundly.

His private conversations, however, though they do not overturn his reputation as an anti-Communist, qualify it heavily. Hermann Rauschning, for example, a Danzig Nazi who knew Hitler before and after his accession to power in 1933, tells how in private Hitler acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition. "I have learned a great deal from Marxism" he once remarked, "as I do not hesitate to admit". He was proud of a knowledge of Marxist texts acquired in his student days before the First World War and later in a Bavarian prison, in 1924, after the failure of the Munich putsch.

The trouble with Weimar Republic politicians, he told Otto Wagener at much the same time, was that "they had never even read Marx", implying that no one who had failed to read so important an author could even begin to understand the modern world; in consequence, he went on, they imagined that the October revolution in 1917 had been "a private Russian affair", whereas in fact it had changed the whole course of human history!

His differences with the communists, he explained, were less ideological than tactical. German communists he had known before he took power, he told Rauschning, thought politics meant talking and writing. They were mere pamphleteers, whereas "I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun", adding revealingly that "the whole of National Socialism" was based on Marx.

That is a devastating remark and it is blunter than anything in his speeches or in Mein Kampf.; though even in the autobiography he observes that his own doctrine was fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist by reason that it recognised the significance of race - implying, perhaps, that it might otherwise easily look like a derivative. Without race, he went on, National Socialism "would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground". Marxism was internationalist. The proletariat, as the famous slogan goes, has no fatherland. Hitler had a fatherland, and it was everything to him.

Yet privately, and perhaps even publicly, he conceded that National Socialism was based on Marx. On reflection, it makes consistent sense. The basis of a dogma is not the dogma, much as the foundation of a building is not the building, and in numerous ways National Socialism was based on Marxism. It was a theory of history and not, like liberalism or social democracy, a mere agenda of legislative proposals.

And it was a theory of human, not just of German, history, a heady vision that claimed to understand the whole past and future of mankind. Hitler's discovery was that socialism could be national as well as international. There could be a national socialism.

That is how he reportedly talked to his fellow Nazi Otto Wagener in the early 1930s. The socialism of the future would lie in "the community of the Volk", not in internationalism, he claimed, and his task was to "convert the German volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists", meaning the entrepreneurial and managerial classes left from the age of liberalism. They should be used, not destroyed.

The state could control, after all, without owning, guided by a single party, the economy could be planned and directed without dispossessing the propertied classes.

That realisation was crucial. To dispossess, after all, as the Russian civil war had recently shown, could only mean Germans fighting Germans, and Hitler believed there was a quicker and more efficient route. There could be socialism without civil war.

Now that the age of individualism had ended, he told Wagener, the task was to "find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution". Marx and Lenin had seen the right goal, but chosen the wrong route - a long and needlessly painful route - and, in destroying the bourgeois and the kulak, Lenin had turned Russia into a grey mass of undifferentiated humanity, a vast anonymous horde of the dispossessed; they had "averaged downwards"; whereas the National Socialist state would raise living standards higher than capitalism had ever known. It is plain that Hitler and his associates meant their claim to socialism to be taken seriously; they took it seriously themselves.

For half a century, none the less, Hitler has been portrayed, if not as a conservative - the word is many shades too pale - at least as an extreme instance of the political right. It is doubtful if he or his friends would have recognised the description. His own thoughts gave no prominence to left and right, and he is unlikely to have seen much point in any linear theory of politics. Since he had solved for all time the enigma of history, as he imagined, National Socialism was unique. The elements might be at once diverse and familiar, but the mix was his.

Hitler's mind, it has often been noticed, was in many ways backward-looking: not medievalising, on the whole, like Victorian socialists such as Ruskin and William Morris, but fascinated by a far remoter past of heroic virtue. It is now widely forgotten that much the same could be said of Marx and Engels.

It is the issue of race, above all, that for half a century has prevented National Socialism from being seen as socialist. The proletariat may have no fatherland, as Lenin said. But there were still, in Marx's view, races that would have to be exterminated. That is a view he published in January-February 1849 in an article by Engels called "The Hungarian Struggle" in Marx's journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and the point was recalled by socialists down to the rise of Hitler.

It is now becoming possible to believe that Auschwitz was socialist-inspired. The Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism was already giving place to capitalism, which must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire races would be left behind after a workers' revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age; and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history.

That brutal view, which a generation later was to be fortified by the new pseudo-science of eugenics, was by the last years of the century a familiar part of the socialist tradition, though it is understandable that since the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945 socialists have been eager to forget it.

But there is plenty of evidence in the writings of HG Wells, Jack London, Havelock Ellis, the Webbs and others to the effect that socialist commentators did not flinch from drastic measures. The idea of ethnic cleansing was orthodox socialism for a century and more.

So the socialist intelligentsia of the western world entered the First World War publicly committed to racial purity and white domination and no less committed to violence. Socialism offered them a blank cheque, and its licence to kill included genocide. In 1933, in a preface to On the Rocks, for example, Bernard Shaw publicly welcomed the exterminatory principle which the Soviet Union had already adopted. Socialists could now take pride in a state that had at last found the courage to act, though some still felt that such action should be kept a secret.

In 1932 Beatrice Webb remarked at a tea-party what "very bad stage management" it had been to allow a party of British visitors to the Ukraine to see cattle-trucks full of starving "enemies of the state" at a local station. "Ridiculous to let you see them", said Webb, already an eminent admirer of the Soviet system. "The English are always so sentimental" adding, with assurance: "You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs."

A few years later, in 1935, a Social Democratic government in Sweden began a eugenic programme for the compulsory sterilisation of gypsies, the backward and the unfit, and continued it until after the war.

The claim that Hitler cannot really have been a socialist because he advocated and practised genocide suggests a monumental failure, then, in the historical memory. Only socialists in that age advocated or practised genocide, at least in Europe, and from the first years of his political career Hitler was proudly aware of the fact. Addressing his own party, the NSDAP, in Munich in August 1920, he pledged his faith in socialist-racialism: "If we are socialists, then we must definitely be anti-semites - and the opposite, in that case, is Materialism and Mammonism, which we seek to oppose." There was loud applause.

Hitler went on: "How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-semite?" The point was widely understood, and it is notable that no German socialist in the 1930s or earlier ever sought to deny Hitler's right to call himself a socialist on grounds of racial policy. In an age when the socialist tradition of genocide was familiar, that would have sounded merely absurd. The tradition, what is more, was unique. In the European century that began in the 1840s from Engels's article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist, and no exception has been found.

The first reactions to National Socialism outside Germany are now largely forgotten. They were highly confused, for the rise of fascism had caught the European left by surprise. There was nothing in Marxist scripture to predict it and must have seemed entirely natural to feel baffled. Where had it all come from? Harold Nicolson, a democratic socialist, and after 1935 a Member of the House of Commons, conscientiously studied a pile of pamphlets in his hotel room in Rome in January 1932 and decided judiciously that fascism (Italian-style) was a kind of militarised socialism; though it destroyed liberty, he concluded in his diary, "it is certainly a socialist experiment in that it destroys individuality". The Moscow view that fascism was the last phase of capitalism, though already proposed, was not yet widely heard. Richard remarked in a 1934 BBC talk that many students in Nazi Germany believed they were "digging the foundations of a new German socialism".

By the outbreak of civil war in Spain, in 1936, sides had been taken, and by then most western intellectuals were certain that Stalin was left and Hitler was right. That sudden shift of view has not been explained, and perhaps cannot be explained, except on grounds of argumentative convenience. Single binary oppositions - cops-and-robbers or cowboys-and-indians - are always satisfying. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was seen by hardly anybody as an attempt to restore the unity of socialism. A wit at the British Foreign Office is said to have remarked that all the "Isms" were now "Wasms", and the general view was that nothing more than a cynical marriage of convenience had taken place.

By the outbreak of world war in 1939 the idea that Hitler was any sort of socialist was almost wholly dead. One may salute here an odd but eminent exception. Writing as a committed socialist just after the fall of France in 1940, in The Lion and the Unicorn, Orwell saw the disaster as a "physical debunking of capitalism", it showed once and for all that "a planned economy is stronger than a planless one", though he was in no doubt that Hitler's victory was a tragedy for France and for mankind. The planned economy had long stood at the head of socialist demands; and National Socialism, Orwell argued, had taken from socialism "just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes".

Hitler had already come close to socialising Germany. "Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a socialist state." These words were written just before Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union. Orwell believed that Hitler would go down in history as "the man who made the City of London laugh on the wrong side of its face" by forcing financiers to see that planning works and that an economic free-for-all does not.

At its height, Hitler's appeal transcended party division. Shortly before they fell out in the summer of 1933, Hitler uttered sentiments in front of Otto Wagener, which were published after his death in 1971 as a biography by an unrepentant Nazi. Wagener's Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant, composed in a British prisoner-of-war camp, did not appear until 1978 in the original German, and arrived in English, without much acclaim, as recently as 1985.

Hitler's remembered talk offers a vision of a future that draws together many of the strands that once made utopian socialism irresistibly appealing to an age bred out of economic depression and cataclysmic wars; it mingles, as Victorian socialism had done before it, an intense economic radicalism with a romantic enthusiasm for a vanished age before capitalism had degraded heroism into sordid greed and threatened the traditional institutions of the family and the tribe.

Socialism, Hitler told Wagener shortly after he seized power, was not a recent invention of the human spirit, and when he read the New Testament he was often reminded of socialism in the words of Jesus. The trouble was that the long ages of Christianity had failed to act on the Master's teachings. Mary and Mary Magdalen, Hitler went on in a surprising flight of imagination, had found an empty tomb, and it would be the task of National Socialism to give body at long last to the sayings of a great teacher: "We are the first to exhume these teachings."

The Jew, Hitler told Wagener, was not a socialist, and the Jesus they crucified was the true creator of socialist redemption. As for communists, he opposed them because they created mere herds, Soviet-style, without individual life, and his own ideal was "the socialism of nations" rather than the international socialism of Marx and Lenin. The one and only problem of the age, he told Wagener, was to liberate labour and replace the rule of capital over labour with the rule of labour over capital.

These are highly socialist sentiments, and if Wagener reports his master faithfully they leave no doubt about the conclusion: that Hitler was an unorthodox Marxist who knew his sources and knew just how unorthodox the way in which he handled them was. He was a dissident socialist. His programme was at once nostalgic and radical. It proposed to accomplish something that Christians had failed to act on and that communists before him had attempted and bungled. "What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish," he told Wagener, "we shall be in a position to achieve."

That was the National Socialist vision. It was seductive, at once traditional and new. Like all socialist views it was ultimately moral, and its economic and racial policies were seen as founded on universal moral laws. By the time such conversations saw the light of print, regrettably, the world had put such matters far behind it, and it was less than ever ready to listen to the sayings of a crank or a clown.

That is a pity. The crank, after all, had once offered a vision of the future that had made a Victorian doctrine of history look exciting to millions. Now that socialism is a discarded idea, such excitement is no doubt hard to recapture. To relive it again, in imagination, one might look at an entry in Goebbels's diaries. On 16 June 1941, five days before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Goebbels exulted, in the privacy of his diary, in the victory over Bolshevism that he believed would quickly follow. There would be no restoration of the tsars, he remarked to himself, after Russia had been conquered. But Jewish Bolshevism would be uprooted in Russia and "real socialism" planted in its place - "Der echte Sozialismus". Goebbels was a liar, to be sure, but no one can explain why he would lie to his diaries. And to the end of his days he believed that socialism was what National Socialism was about.

Sunday, 22 November 1998 The Independent

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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Republican Wins Bellwether Special Election in Florida

This seat was previously held by a long-serving Republican, but Barack Obama carried it twice, the Republican nominee was far from flawless, and the Democratic nominee enjoyed a wide name ID advantage from her gubernatorial run. Many experts saw this race as Alex Sink's to lose. She ran on a "fix, don't repeal, Obamacare" platform. She lost.

ABC News' Rick Klein spelled out the stakes of this races earlier today. Democrats are spinning this loss, but the can't escape certain realities:

 Tonight, it’s the Democrats with all the expectations to meet. That’s because they have more questions to answer this year, about their ability to message around Obamacare and Social Security, and make the case against Republicans in a district with divided tendencies. Democrats won’t have candidates as seasoned or well-funded as Alex Sink everywhere. And they know privately at least that they’re looking at a dismal 2014 if they can’t win districts like this one.

Polls showed a tight race with Sink leading Jolly by two points. Jolly took the race by two points, riding a double-digit election day wave that overcame Sink's modest early voting edge. This race was a referendum on Obamacare. In an Obama district. In a swing state. With a well-funded, seasoned Democratic candidate. Political handicapper Stu Rothenberg called it a "must win" for Democrats. And now we have Congressman David Jolly (R-FL). Yes, special elections can be sui generis in nature, and Democrats won a contested special in 2010 before getting swamped a few months later. But for Democrats, this result cannot be ignored.

SOURCE

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Explaining Why Obama's Poll Numbers are Close to Zero Among White Voters



Have you seen Obama’s poll numbers? They are among the lowest in history. As of last week, Obama’s approval rating is at 38%. That’s just barely above Richard Nixon. But that's not the big story here.

Keep in mind that Obama has the support of about 35% to 40% of the population that will NEVER abandon him, no matter what he does, no matter how bad the jobs numbers look, no matter how low the economy goes, no matter how much scandal and corruption is exposed, no matter how strong the facts are against him. Nothing will ever change their minds. These are the “low information voters” of the Democratic Party.

In many cases they love Obama because of the color of his skin- and nothing else. They will never abandon a black President.  Even though black unemployment is at record levels. Even though black youth unemployment is at record levels. Even though black poverty is at record levels.

Even though Obama's exact policies have been in place for over 50 years in Detroit, a majority black city run by black Democrat politicians…and the black population has been devastated, destroyed, and discarded. Left for dead in an abandoned, bankrupt city with very few street lights operating and the police leaving residents in many areas to fend for themselves.

So just think about those poll numbers for a moment. Let those numbers sink in. If 35% to 40% of the population would support a Democrat for President if he ran from a prison cell…if 35% to 40% would support Obama no matter what he does, no matter how far America sinks under his leadership, even if they have no jobs and their own lives are in total misery...how could Obama’s approval rating be at only 38%?

That means that among the rest of America, outside of loyal, lifelong, Kool-Aid drinking Democrats, Obama's ratings are nil. Among voters who don't identify as Democrat, he is the lowest-rated President in history. No numbers like this have ever been recorded, if you filter out the Kool Aid drinking low information and partisan voters.

Among the white middle class, I’m betting Obama’s ratings are in the single digits. Or lower.

Keep in mind many of the white middle class originally voted for Obama. He could not have been elected without white support.

Among those that actually own small businesses, pay most of the taxes and create most of the jobs, I'm betting Obama's ratings are in the vicinity of ZERO.

Actually if you take the white middle class and subtract out a few Ivy League intellectuals, Hollywood liberals, and pathetic Upper West Side of Manhattan Democratic zombies, there are few Obama supporters left to be found anywhere in America.

Remember that about 47% of Americans get entitlement checks from government. Obama is PAYING for their support and he still only has 38% approval. You know you're unpopular when even bribes don't work anymore!

I do want to answer my critics whose only response will be…"all of these white voters who don't support Obama are racists. It's all about race."

First of all, the very definition of racism is voting for a black candidate because...he's black. That's racism. The fact that 92% of black voters voted for Obama and 96% of black women voted for Obama is nothing but voting based on race.

As far as white voters abandoning Obama in droves, I've yet to meet one white voter who bases it on the color of Obama's skin. We all base it on the color of his policies. The color of his policies is red- as in communist red. We hate his policies, not the man and not the color of his skin.

More HERE

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Citing Liberal Bias, Investigative Reporter Sharyl Attkisson Resigns From CBS News

CBS News' Investigative Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, known during the Obama administration for her work on Solyndra, Benghazi and Operation Fast and Furious, has resigned from her position at the network.

According to POLITICO, the resignation comes as a result of frustration over perceived liberal bias at CBS News.

 CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson has reached an agreement to resign from CBS News ahead of contract, bringing an end to months of hard-fought negotiations, sources familiar with her departure told POLITICO on Monday.

Attkisson, who has been with CBS News for two decades, had grown frustrated with what she saw as the network's liberal bias, an outsized influence by the network's corporate partners and a lack of dedication to investigative reporting, several sources said. She increasingly felt like her work was no longer supported and that it was a struggle to get her reporting on air.

At the same time, Attkisson's own reporting on the Obama administration, which some staffers characterized as agenda-driven, had led network executives to doubt the impartiality of her reporting. She is currently at work on a book -- tentatively titled "Stonewalled: One Reporter's Fight for Truth in Obama's Washington" -- which addresses the challenges of reporting critically on the Obama administration.

As noted above, Attkisson has been at CBS for two decades. During her time at the network, she has heavily scrutinized both Democrat and Republican administrations. Back in 2008, Attkisson debunked Hillary Clinton's infamous claim that she dodged sniper fire in Bosnia. During the Bush administration, Attkisson won an Emmy for her reporting on shady Republican fundraising. In 2012, she won an Edward R. Murrow award and an Emmy for her reporting on Operation Fast and Furious. She has been equally critical of both political parties in Washington D.C.

This is an incredible loss for CBS and no doubt another network's gain. Hopefully she'll land at a place where her important work will be aired and promoted.

SOURCE

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 CPAC 2014: Conservatism Inc. Tries To Finesse Amnesty/ Immigration Surge—But Ann Coulter Doesn’t Let Them

Thus is the state of “the movement” at the Conservative Political Action Conference 2014 Anno Domini.

Much was the same as the year before. Once again, ACU organizers did their best to prevent any dissent against their preferred policy of Amnesty. Once again, speakers used militant rhetoric on tangential issues. Once again, there were laughable efforts at minority outreach, greeted with hooting scorn by an openly hostile Main Stream Media. And once again, the only person who bluntly told the truth about the dispossession of the historic American nation was Ann Coulter.

The problem, of course: the goal posts for “racism” keep being moved. Thus the collection of clickbait clichés known as Gawker dispatched one Gabrielle Bluestone who duly kvetched that “on the second day of CPAC, all of the main speakers are white men.” [A Sea of White: Day Two at CPAC, by Gabrielle Bluestone, Gawker, March 7, 2013] (Like the demographic that created the country.)

CPAC did try its usual tactic of presenting a Great Black Hope—in this case, Dr. Ben Carson, who received a raucous reception. Conference organizers also tried to head off race-baiting stories with panels on minority outreach—unfortunately for them, no one showed up, at least not at the beginning of the panel. Thus, liberal journalists were able to write triumphalist stories about how CPAC is neglecting diversity.

The deliberate exclusion of immigration patriots was intensified this year—as Rosemary Jenks of NumbersUSA  put it, CPAC has become a “kind of the corporate elites playground instead of [about] conservative principles.

However, there was an odd defensiveness about the entire conference this year. The organizers seemed to be just phoning it in. Thus the predictably-stacked immigration panel was largely a repeat of last year’s and the response was tepid.

More important than what was said was what was not said. Last year, Conservatism Inc. was obviously backing Senator Marco Rubio as its presidential favorite for 2016, even to the point of Al Cardenas saying ludicrously that he had “literally” tied with Rand Paul when he finished a close second in the straw poll.

In contrast, this year there were very few conference attendees promoting Rubio’s run in 2016. His straw poll showing utterly collapsed, declining seventeen points and finishing at a dismal 6%, behind the likes of Chris Christie and Rick Santorum. A clearly cowed Rubio didn’t even mention immigration during his lengthy CPAC address.

More to the point, though immigration patriots were cut off, there were no explicit, enthusiastic appeals for Amnesty from any of the main speakers. Rand Paul, who is skillfully positioning himself as the 2016 favorite, stuck to safe territory of bashing eavesdropping by the NSA. Mike Huckabee talked about God, Rick Santorum talked about appealing to workers, Chris Christie faked opposition to Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich gave vague platitudes about big ideas. No one tried to position themselves as the candidate who could win Hispanic voters.

And it was still taken for granted by other speakers that opposition to Amnesty is a standard part of the conservative platform.

Sarah Palin said, “No Republican lawbreaker can get elected promising… rewarding lawbreakers—Amnesty.”

And Michele Bachmann  “Was greeted with roaring approval Saturday when she warned conservatives not to engage with Democrats seeking a bipartisan immigration plan. ‘The last thing conservatives should do is help the president pass his number-one goal, and that’s Amnesty,’ she said.”

Even Donald Trump, given (or buying?) a main stage speaking slot, ripped Marco Rubio for wanting to “let everyone in” and asserted: “Immigration. We're either a country or we're not. We either have borders or we don't.”

And finally, Ann Coulter launched a devastating attack on mass immigration that managed to get past the CPAC gatekeepers. After her performance last year, the ACU made sure that she would be forced into a debate. Luckily, her liberal interlocutor was Mickey Kaus—which allowed both panelists to laugh about the stupidity of mass immigration and how it obviously hurts the GOP.

More HERE

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Budget surplus: So Wisconsin Legislature Passes Walker Tax Cuts Package

Why, it's almost as if responsible, conservative governance works:

 Wisconsin will sell $294.8 million in general-obligation refunding bonds this week in a negotiated sale as the state projects a budget surplus of almost $1 billion. Surging tax revenue is driving improved fiscal performance in Wisconsin, with a population of 5.7 million. The improvement in the state’s tax collections ranked seventh in the nation during the 12 months ended in June, according to the Bloomberg Economic Evaluation of States. The state had originally projected a surplus of $130 million as of mid-2015.

As we noted in late January, the state's "surging tax revenue" was decidedly not precipitated by tax increases. Governor Scott Walker -- who has cut taxes several times over his first term -- urged passage of an additional tax relief package in his 2014 state of the state address, arguing that the unexpectedly large surplus ought to be "returned to taxpayers because it's their money." Last week, the Republican-held legislature complied with the governor's request, over the strident and eternally predictable objections of tax-and-spend Democrats:

 Republicans moved closer to making Gov. Scott Walker's plan to use the state's surplus to cover $504 million in tax cuts reality Tuesday, pushing the measure through the state Senate despite Democrats' complaints the proposal is just a token election-year ploy. The bill now heads to a final vote in the state Assembly. That chamber has already passed the measure but must agree with changes the Legislature's budget committee made to win a key senator's vote...Passage is all but certain. "The hardworking taxpayers of Wisconsin know how to spend their money better than politicians in Madison do," Walker said in a statement ...

Walker also introduced another bill that would use about $35 million from the surplus to fund new Department of Workforce Development job training grants, including grants to eliminate technical college waiting lists for high-demand fields, help high school students get job training for high-demand jobs and help the disabled find work. The Assembly passed that bill last week. The Senate followed suit Tuesday, approving it unanimously. That measure now goes to Walker for his signature.

Final passage is expected one week from today.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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Does a low IQ make you right-wing? That depends on how you define left and right

Michael Hanlon makes some interesting points below but overlooks the obvious:  People with high IQs are very much advantaged in the educational system and tend to stay in that system longer.  And particularly in the later years of education, the Leftist propaganda gets all but overwhelming.  So all that the research really shows is that an exposure to overwhelming Leftist propaganda does influence some people's thinking.  They adopt Leftist attitudes where they otherwise might not

So right-wingers are stupid – it’s official. Psychologists in Canada have compared IQ scores of several thousand British children, who were born in 1958 and 1970, with their stated views as adults on things such as treatment of criminals and openness to working with or living near to people of other races. They also looked at some US data which compared IQ scores with homophobic attitudes.

The conclusion: your intelligence as a child correlates strongly with socially liberal views. People with low IQs tend to be more in favour of harsh punishments, more homophobic and more likely to be racist. Interestingly, as these were IQ scores measured when young this does seem to be a measure of something innate, not merely exposure to ‘liberal’ views through education.

The inference is that what we call conservatism is a symptom of limited intellectual ability, signified by fear of the new and of outsiders, a retreat into tradition and tribal loyalty, and an unsophisticated disgust at sexual mores that deviate even slightly from the norm. Put bluntly stupidity correlates with insecurity, hatred, pessimism and fear, intelligence with confidence, optimism and trust.

Cue howls of outrage and not just from the right. In fact, left-wingers, liberals, call them what you will (and as I will argue these terms are far from interchangeable) have maintained something of an embarrassed silence about this. Liberals tend to dislike talk of innate intelligence and are distrustful of IQ tests and any hints of biological determinism. It might suit them politically to say their opponents are dim, but (they like to think) they are too polite to say so.

So what is going on here? Are conservatives really, statistically and meaningfully, less intelligent than socialists? Or is the story more subtle?

In fact there is nothing new in pointing to a link between social attitudes and intelligence. In 2010 the evolutionary psychologist Satochi Kanazawa, who works at the London School of Economics, analysed data from 20,000 young Americans and found that average IQ increased steadily from those who described themselves as ‘very conservative’ to those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal’. A study looking at British children, carried out by Ian Deary, reached a conclusion neatly summarised by the title of the paper: 'Bright Children become Enlightened Adults'. Other studies have found correlations between strong religiosity (a traditional marker of conservatism) and low intelligence.

Are socialists really more intelligent than conservatives? That depends how you define your terms

So case closed? Not really. The problem here is how we define ‘left’ and ‘right’ thinking, what this means socially and politically. A moment’s thought shows that the faultlines are not only blurred but they are legion, cris-crossing across traditional political strata and have changed through time.

As Steven Pinker points out in The Better Angels of our Nature, his marvellous book about the history of violence, social liberalism does not equate necessarily with economic socialism. He points to a study by the economist Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University in Virginia, who found that smart people tend to think like economists, being in favour of free trade, globalisation and free markets and against protectionism and state intervention in industry. This matches other findings that show that IQ correlates not with left-wing thinking as such, but with classic Enlightenment liberalism.

So a smart person (all else being equal) will probably be in favour of capitalism generally, and free-trade in particular. He or she will distrust state intervention in the markets, probably be suspicious of welfarism and deeply dislike protectionism, union closed-shops and tariffs. The smart person will believe that the have-nots should be encouraged to become haves by dint of their own labours and by the levelling of economic playing fields, NOT by taking money off the haves and giving it to them. In other words, Thatcherism. Hardly something we equate with the left.

But there is another side to what the Smarts believe. They are pro-immigration (immigration being a form of free trade, in this case in human labour). They are impeccably socially liberal. They do not care what consenting adults get up to in bed and would legalise gay marriage without a thought. They are as near as is possible to be colour blind and strongly favour sexual equality. They are internationalist and despise petty nationalism. And they are suspicious of the war on drugs and in fact of wars in general and do not believe the public should in general be allowed to own firearms. These are the social views, then, of the British metropolitan Left. So what is it then? Are dim people right or left? Here we meet the problem of defining liberalism and left-wingery.

A belief in economic redistribution of wealth does not correlate with social liberalism. The nations of the Cold War Communist bloc were ferociously ‘Left Wing’ in terms of a belief in statism, nationalised industries, basic equality and so forth but socially and in other ways they were far, far to the ‘right’ of any mainstream European or American party. The Soviet education system was brutally elitist – no wishy-washy mixed-ability nonsense there. Militarism and conscription were the norm. Communist states had and had an attachment to capital punishment, repression of homosexuals and paid only lipservice to sexual equality (Russian women were free to work, but they had to go back and do the cleaning and cooking when they had finished).

In today’s world the most ‘right wing’ attitudes are to be found not in the American Bible Belt but in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and parts of Asia as well as Russia. Across most of Africa the majority has an eye-wateringly brutal view of homosexuality (gays face long terms of imprisonment or worse in many southern and eastern African states). If you want to see robust attitudes to crime, sexuality, feminism, immigration and religious freedom go to somewhere like Sudan or Mauritania, Uganda or even Kenya and Jamaica.

The paradox is that the political discourse in nations such as these has been dominated by a leftish post-colonialism. The epitome of this paradox is, or was (attitudes have relaxed) Communist Cuba where attitudes to gays, criminals, and people of non-European descent would have softened the heart of a Mississippi Klansman.

Historical context: Homosexuality was illegal under Clement Attlee's 'left-wing' Labour government, but not under Margaret Thatcher's 'right-wing' Conservative administration

Paradox: In terms of social attitudes, Fidel Castro's communist Cuba was more 'right-wing' than Margaret Thatcher's Conservative administration

The correlation between left-wing views, liberal social attitudes and intelligence probably has a political significance only in advanced industrial societies where the values of the liberal enlightenment (a belief in freedom, fairness, reason, science, free trade, the rule of law, property rights and gentle commerce) govern society. It is probably true to say that in Britain, France, the US, Canada and so forth there is a correlation, and an interesting one, between intelligence and sexual liberalism and openness to people from a different culture and/or race. But these views can be held by some pretty stupid people as well (the politically correct anti-christmas, coffee-with-milk, crazy-islamist-welcoming brigade).

We probably need some new words. ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ have become so tarnished by a century of propaganda and ill-advised alliances that they have become almost meaningless. We have a notionally ‘right of centre’ government in the UK and yet in its historical and geographical context the Cameron administration must be one of the most ‘left-wing’ administrations in the history of humanity – a consequence of modernity as much as anything else (under Clement Attlee gays were imprisoned, under Thatcher they were not). Increasingly, traditional right-wing views (blatant racism, sexism and homophobia) are simply seen as beyond the pale. In the US the current crop of Republican candidates mostly come across as a bunch of swivel-eyed fruitcakes to us, but none of them, from Mitt Romney downwards, would express the view that ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’ which is what the historically revered future ‘liberal’ president, Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1886.

Liberalism is a function then not only of intelligence but of modernity. Illiberal, ‘stupid’ states such as Mauritania and Saudi Arabia are, quite literally, stuck in the past (even if their citizens are not individually stupid). Plenty of bright people hold illiberal views (attitudes to violent crime do not fall into convenient left-right camps) and a few dim people are impeccably enlightened. Increasingly, clever people hold a series of views that may be construed as ‘right’ or ‘left’ simultaneously. The challenge for the political parties is to find a way of reflecting this and representing this voice on the national level. And that will require some very clever thinking indeed.

SOURCE

Note:  I have a more extensive comment on the research concerned here

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The Surge in Ruling-Class Verbal Abuse

 by K. Lloyd Billingsley

As we recently noted, deploying the IRS, NSA, ATF, EPA and now the FCC against Americans shows that ruling-class abuse has become inclusive. But some think the abuse is not quite inclusive enough, or severe enough. Consider, for example, this remark about critics of Obamacare.

“There’s plenty of horror stories being told. All of them are untrue, but they’re being told all over America.”

That is not a drunk in some waterfront bar in San Francisco, or an unemployed carnival worker in Boston. That is Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate. Reid backtracked a bit, but one gets his drift. Senator, let this writer assure you that Obamabuse has no existential problem.

Cut loose from a job after more than 13 years with no warning or severance, in a conference call, this writer had a hard time finding health insurance. But with some effort he did find a plan he liked, and he wanted to keep it. Barack Obama, President of the United States, said he could keep it, but that was a lie. Obamacare slapped this writer with a 50-percent increase in premiums for decidedly inferior coverage with ludicrous deductibles.

As Screamin’ Jay Hawkins said, “I ain’t lyin.” Neither are millions of others with Obamacare horror stories, particularly those with serious medical issues who want to keep their doctor and hospital but now find they can’t do that. The government health websites remain largely dysfunctional and insecure, and the worst is yet to come.

To charge that this is all untrue, as Senator Reid did, is verbal abuse of the highest order but it does confirm a couple of things. Some politicians nurse a grudge against reality. And some politicians recall why the American and French Revolutions actually happened. The people of that day had experienced enough ruling-class abuse for one lifetime.

Meanwhile, elimination of Obamacare horror stories is not a difficult matter.

Let all Americans choose the quality health care they want, instead of forcing on them the seventh-rate health care the government wants them to have.

SOURCE

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States Give Criminal Exemptions to Union Goons

California and others allow organizers to stalk, harass, and threaten.

Labor organizers and union enforcers are exempt from important criminal laws in some of the country’s largest states. California, Illinois, and Wisconsin are among the states that allow union members to stalk, harass, and threaten victims — so long as they are putatively doing “legitimate” union business.

As National Review Online recently reported, one such state, Pennsylvania, is pushing to repeal exemptions that give union members freedom from prosecution for stalking, harassing, or even threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction.

Other states have similar laws on the books, but unlike the Keystone State, they’re not even trying to fix this double standard.

California, for example, has a union carveout for stalking and trespassing. Those engaged in “collective bargaining, labor relations, or labor disputes” are also legally free to “willfully [block] the free movement of another person in a [public-transit] system facility or vehicle.” If an ordinary Californian did that, he or she would face a $400 fine and 90 days in prison.

The Golden State even exempts those “engaged in labor union activities” from prosecution for making “a credible threat to cause bodily injury.”

Illinois also has a stalking exemption when an individual is involved in an action related to “any controversy concerning wages, salaries, hours, working conditions, or benefits . . . the making or maintaining of collective bargaining agreements, and the terms to be included in those agreements.”

In Wisconsin, it is a felony to commit sabotage. However, Wisconsin’s penal code explicitly states that the law barring sabotage shall not be construed “to impair, curtail, or destroy the rights of employees and their representatives to self-organize, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to strike, [or] to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing.”

These are just some of the many state-level labor exemptions, Glenn Spencer, vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Workforce Freedom Initiative and author of a report on special state laws for labor unions, tells National Review Online. Pennsylvania, California, and the other states in the report “had a special status and unusual favoritism toward unions,” Spencer says.

To his knowledge, the laws above are still on the books and the existence of such state legislation shows that “while unions may have lost some of their clout on the federal level, they still have a substantial amount of influence at the state level.”

Large federal exemptions first came in the 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act, which gave union workers and bosses broad immunity from injunctions.

This was followed by a loophole in the Hobbs Act of 1946 that exempts those attempting to achieve a “legitimate union objective” from prosecution for extortionate violence. Finally, in 1973 the Supreme Court affirmed the union exemptions of the Hobbs Act in United States v. Enmons.

Individual states subsequently bolstered these exemptions with their own laws, which have allowed union activists to stalk, harass, and commit traditionally illicit acts with no punishment.

According to Spencer, Pennsylvania is the first state he knows of with an active bill in the legislature to repeal these types of labor exemptions. Republican state representative Ron Miller’s bill is currently working its way through the state house.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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