French voters swing Right

French voters dealt a severe blow to the Socialist government in Sunday's municipal elections, but the party saved face by retaining the crown jewel, Paris, which got its first female mayor.

The anti-immigration far right, which claims that France's large Muslim population is "Islamicizing" the nation, made solid advances, fulfilling National Front promises to begin building a grassroots base.

Socialist leaders conceded defeat in the final round of the voting seen as a referendum on unpopular President Francois Hollande, who was expected to reshuffle the Cabinet in an effort to give the government a boost. Hollande has earned record-low poll ratings for his failure to cure France's flagging economy or cut into the jobless rate, which hovers around 10 percent.

Interior Minister Manuel Valls announced deep losses for his Socialist Party, saying it lost to the mainstream right some 50 cities of more than 30,000 it had held previously, and about 155 towns and cities of all sizes. Toulouse, France's fourth-largest city, moved to the right.

The far right may win up to 15 towns in the voting, Valls said before results were complete. Party leader Marine Le Pen said the performance amounted to "an incontestably great success" that will give her National Front more than 1,200 local councilors — surpassing her goal.

"This vote is a defeat for the government and the (Socialist) majority," said Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault. "This message is clear ... The president will draw conclusions, and he will do so in the interest of France," he added, in a clear reference to a Cabinet reshuffle. It was unclear when a new government might be announced, or whether Ayrault would keep his job.

Paris also gets a new look, as Anne Hidalgo defeated conservative right candidate Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet. Hidalgo, 54, spent 13 years as deputy to outgoing Mayor Bertrand Delanoe. She was able to profit from popular programs he initiated such as the Velib bike-sharing and Autolib auto-sharing services, and the creation of a beachfront each summer on the banks of the Seine.

"I am the first woman mayor of Paris. I am aware of the challenge," Hidalgo said in a victory speech.

The Socialists also managed to save Lyon, France's third-largest city, from the conservative right UMP party of former President Nicolas Sarkozy, as well as large cities like Strasbourg and Montpellier. Significantly, the Socialists took the southern town of Avignon from the UMP and prevented a far-right victory in the town known worldwide for its summer theater festival.

Le Pen's National Front was using the two-round elections to sink local roots around France in view of national voting, including the 2017 presidential vote and May's European parliamentary elections. The party won the blighted northern town of Henin-Beaumont in last week's first round.

The far right took the Cote d'Azur town of Frejus and notably won the 7th district of Marseille, France's second-largest city with a large percentage of residents of immigrant origin, many from Muslim North Africa. The district's population is about 150,000 — the party's biggest win.

However, Marseille stayed in the hands of conservative right Mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin.

Le Pen said her party has ended "bipolarization" of French politics in which the traditional right and left divvy up votes.

"A third political force has been born," she said, adding that the party, which wants France to withdraw from the European Union, would begin campaigning immediately for elections for the European Parliament, where she is a deputy.

SOURCE

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The Problem Is Liberalism, Not Racism

Star Parker

When Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif, went off on Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis, for his remarks that “We have got a tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work,” the wrong part what she had to say got all the attention.

The big buzz that Congressional Black Caucus member Lee generated was her accusation that Ryan’s remarks were a “thinly veiled racial attack.”

But the part of her remarks I found most interesting was “…Mr. Ryan should step up and produce some legitimate proposals on how to tackle poverty and racial discrimination in America.”

Paul Ryan has been one of the most creative and courageous policy thinkers in Washington in recent years.

Ryan sat down with me for an interview shortly before he ran for Vice President in 2012 (the interview is on my organization’s website www.urbancure.org). His thoughtfulness and compassion came through loud and clear and he zeroed in on the core of a problem I have been talking and writing about for more than 20 years – government programs that not only do not solve problems but make problems worse.

I stepped into this whole business of public policy from my own experience with welfare. I saw that the welfare program, which operated in this country from the 1960’s until it was reformed in 1996, that required women to not work, not save, and not get married in order to qualify for their welfare checks was a most efficient mechanism to destroy family and perpetuate poverty.

So it should come as no surprise that single parent black households tripled as a percentage of all black households from the 1960’s to today.

Where Barbara Lee is right is that this is not about race. What it is about is liberalism.

The racial aspect comes into play in that black political leaders, like Congresswoman Lee, overwhelmingly embrace liberalism, progressivism, welfare statism – whatever you want to call it – that has failed and caused untold damage in the very communities they claim to want to help. And they refuse to ever learn. Their answer to every problem, despite prior experience, is more government, more taxpayer’s dollars.

When real reformers like Paul Ryan come along, they get branded racist.

In a column I wrote a couple years ago, I pointed out that the 41 member Congressional Black Caucus were uniformly Democrats, had a 100% reelection rates, and the average poverty rate in these Congressional Black Caucus districts was 20.3% and the average child poverty rate 28.8% - both well above national averages.

Economist Walter Williams has pointed out that, in America’s top 10 poorest cities with populations more than 250,000, “…for decades, all of them have been run by Democratic and presumably liberal administrations. Some of them – such as Detroit (now the largest municipal bankruptcy in the nation’s history), Buffalo, Newark, and Philadelphia, haven’t elected a Republican mayor for more than half a century. What’s more is that, in some cases for decades, the mayors of six of these high-poverty cities have been black Americans.”

Again, the point is not that the mayors of these cities are black. It is that they are liberals. And black politicians, like Congresswoman Barbara Lee, overwhelmingly are liberals, and they remain liberals, despite a long and consistent track record of failure.

When welfare was reformed, liberals like Barbara Lee fought it.

It is pure self-absorption for any interest group to think it is all about them. America is in real trouble today and we’re all in this together.

Ms. Lee talks about “code words.” Her code word is “racist”, which means someone, like Paul Ryan, who wants to make Americans of all backgrounds better off by giving them more freedom, more choice, more responsibility, and less government.

SOURCE

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Northwestern University football players to receive maternity coverage under Obamacare
 
Some weekends, the stories just seem to write themselves. You probably heard by now that the National Labor Relations Board (NRLB), in their infinite wisdom, put the stamp of approval on college football players being treated as full time employees with the right to unionize. Well, I suppose everything comes with a few unintended consequences, as reported by Rare.

Northwestern University became the first school in the nation to deem its football players full-time employees, thus making them eligible for union representation and health insurance benefits including maternity coverage.

On Wednesday, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Region 13 director Peter Sung Ohr approved the players as employees of the school based on four prerequisite clauses. The team will now have the opportunity to vote on whether they want to unionize and join the College Athletes Players Association, according to Sports Blog Nation.

The kicker is that under Obamacare, the Evanston, Ill.-based team, comprised of more than 50 “employees,” is considered a “large employer” and Northwestern must provide pregnancy-related health care for the all-male team.

This is just fabulous. Of course, we probably should have anticipated that things like this would begin cropping up the moment we decided to take college students and transfer their status to that of employee because the college might be profiting from their activities. Sally Jenkins approaches the question from the 10,000 foot level.

Colter and his peers aren’t laborers due compensation; they are highly privileged scholarship winners who get a lot of valuable stuff for free. This includes first-rate training in the habits of high achievement, cool gear, unlimited academic tutoring for gratis and world-class medical care that no one else has access to. All of which was put into perspective by Michigan State basketball Coach Tim Izzo when he was asked about the ruling at the NCAA tournament East Region semifinals in New York.

“I think sometimes we take rights to a whole new level,” Izzo said. “ . . . I think there’s a process in rights. And you earn that. We always try to speed the process up. I said to my guys, ‘There’s a reason you have to be 35 to be president.’ That’s the way I look at it.”

Other questions remain to be answered. If the field hockey team has less than fifty players, does that make them a small business? If so, they may already qualify for some sort of exemption or mandate delay from Barack Obama. (Or, if not, one should be coming along shortly.) But the field hockey team doesn’t generate any money, so maybe that makes them a non-profit corporation. In that case, the IRS should be checking into their status shortly and denying them a needed classification.

And what of the cheerleaders? They’re probably as much a part of the “team” as anyone else out there, and they are almost entirely women. Sure, they might be able to use the Obamacare maternity services a bit more, but now we have to discuss the unpleasant fact that cheerleaders are making WAY less than 77 cents on the dollar compared to the male players when they both reach the NFL.

SOURCE

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Malfunctioning Asylum System Fosters Fraud

Executive action, agency inaction, and judicial activism at fault

The erosion of checks and balances in the U.S. asylum system, designed to prevent fraud, has led to the nearly tripling of claims for asylum. A Center for Immigration Studies report examines the increased applications as well as the rubberstamping of these applications. The number of applicants passing the preliminary “credible fear” test nearly tripled from 2012 to 2013, and has increased nearly 600 percent since 2007. Once the applicant receives asylum, they receive access to all major welfare programs.

Fraud accounts for much of the increase. According to a DHS internal report, 70 percent of asylum applications examined were fraudulent or had strong indicators of fraud. With such a high rate of fraud, it is alarming that DHS statistics show a positive credible fear finding in 92% of all cases decided on the merits. The CIS report finds that the Senate comprehensive immigration bill would do much to exacerbate the existing problem. Among the list of changes would be the allowing of previous asylum fraudsters to re-apply and allowing asylum to be granted instantly upon application, before any vetting occurs.

View the entire report here

Dan Cadman, author of the report and fellow at the Center, said, “Many illegal immigrants have learned how to game the system by applying for asylum as a means of prolonging their time in the United States. If a claimant can pass the preliminary credible fear test they can buy themselves months, often years, living and working legally in the United States. A system designed to stem fraud and abuse has been undone by executive action, agency inaction, and judicial activism.”

Cadman provides nine recommendations of how Congress and the Department of Homeland Security can curb abuses, and set the asylum program on track to function as it was intended. He endorses, for example, a program of routine audits of both credible fear findings and formal asylum grants, which would include investigations of cases found to involve fraud or the withholding of material information.

Press release from CIS

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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The religious roots of the elite liberal agenda: Today's liberal crusades are yesterday's Christian anxieties

For nearly 80 years, social critics of the Right and far Left have been trying to understand American liberalism by studying a specific social class. These critics share a belief that liberal ideas of a certain type dominate American life, and that they emerge from a social caste produced by American meritocracy. It's a class that sets the moral tone and imperatives for our society, that shapes our tastes and conversation.

One of the first attempts to dissect this tribe came from former Marxist turned conservative James Burnham, who theorized about an emerging "managerial class" that existed between capital and labor, and was made up of professionals, corporate executives, and executive administration officials. Like a good historical materialist, Burnham believed that material ambitions generated ideology. Using this as his guiding light, he hoped to understand and reveal the character of America's new elite, as well as determine what would happen to a country ruled by them.

In the 1960s and ’70s, neoconservative thinkers like Daniel Bell wrote about the "New Class," which was slightly less expansive in scope and focused mostly on professors and social scientists. A little later, the populist and left-leaning social historian Christopher Lasch wrote The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, slashing at the educated classes for abandoning socialist economics in favor of the politics of cultural revolution.

These theorists were offering a critique of the educated and liberal classes, with neoconservatives and socialists both lamenting the betrayal of older liberal ideas about the economy or about America's role in the world.

All three of these diverse theories have had a deep influence on modern conservative thinking in America. Many of my peers were influenced by Bell and Lasch, and I primarily by Burnham. But with the publication of Joseph Bottum's new collection, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, I wonder if these earlier thinkers haven't all been surpassed.

Bottum's thesis is that there really isn't a new American caste. This "class" that has outsize influence on America's moral and spiritual life is roughly the same class that has always had it: Mainline Protestants, only now without the doctrinal Protestantism or the churchgoing.

Of course, on one level, the startling truth about the past 50 years of American social life is the collapse of Mainline Protestantism. In 1965, more than 50 percent of Americans belonged to the country's historic Protestant congregations. Now less than 10 percent do, and that number continues to drop. But Mainline Protestantism long existed as a column of American society, able to support the American project and criticize it prophetically at the same time. It would be even more startling if the spiritual energies it captained, and the anxieties it defined, ceased to exist the moment people walked out the door.

In Bottum's revisionist account, Protestant preacher Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) looms as the figure who most succinctly defined the spiritual mission of 20th-century Mainline Protestantism and its heirs. He put "social sins" at the front of the Mainline imagination. "The six social sins, Rauschenbusch announced, were bigotry, the arrogance of power, the corruption of justice for personal ends, the madness of the mob, militarism, and class contempt," Bottum writes. These six would fittingly describe an enemies list for liberals today: racists and homophobes, hedge-funders who claim to be victims, the Koch brothers, the Tea Party, Dick Cheney and the neocons, and the Koch brothers again.

Not all of Bottum's post-Protestants are directly descended from Mainline members. Jews, Catholics, and even atheists join this unofficial spiritual-but-not-religious tribe, just as before many Jews, Catholics, and nonbelievers joined Mainline churches as a way to signal their arrival in a new, important social class. For Bottum it isn't quite right to define these post-Protestants as an elite — many of them are not at all wealthy, and do not have direct social power. Instead, they are an "elect" class, so named because they seem to constitute a churchly class: moralistic, possessed of self-superiority, and drawn from across economic classes, a mingling of poor artists, middlebrow activists, and rich benefactors.

For Bottum, what is remarkable is the way the spiritual experience of Rauschenbusch's "social gospel" is so like the experience of modern liberalism. According to Rauschenbusch, one opposes these social sins through direct action, legislative amelioration, and simply recognizing their effect and sympathizing with their victims. Rauschenbusch wrote, "An experience of religion through the medium of solidaristic social feeling is an experience of unusually high ethical quality, akin to that of the prophets of the Bible."

The post-Protestants Bottum identifies have just that, "a social gospel, without the gospel. For all of them, the sole proof of redemption is the holding of a proper sense of social ills. The only available confidence about their salvation, as something superadded to experience, is the self-esteem that comes with feeling they oppose the social evils of bigotry and power and the groupthink of the mob."

With the proper feeling comes a proper sense of guilt, and a missionary's zeal to correct wrongs. Over a century ago Rauschenbusch wrote, "If a man has drawn any religious feeling from Christ, his participation in the systematized oppression of civilization will, at least at times, seem an intolerable burden and guilt." Bottum deftly notes that in theological terms this signals "a nearly complete transfer of Christian fear and Christian assurance into a sensibility of the need for reform, a mysticism of the social order — the anxiety about salvation resolved by ecstatic transport into the feeling of social solidarity."

Can we not hear in the progressive's soul-searching examination of his own "privilege," as well as his unconscious participation in structural injustice, an echo of Rauschenbusch's words? Whereas Catholics make an examination of conscience before confession, and confess their personal sins before promising to amend their life, today's progressives examine their place in the social structure of oppression, and then vow to reform society. That is what it means to have a "social gospel without the gospel" — to be motivated by religious impulses, but believe it is entirely secular.

Bottum's theory also makes sense as theological-political genealogy. Rauschenbusch's main theological opponent was John Gresham Machen, a champion of Reformed Protestant theology, who founded Westminster Theological Seminary, one of the most important institutions informing conservative Evangelical life and thought. It makes sense that nearly 90 years later, conservative Evangelicals along with Catholics are still providing the lion's share of the moral and philosophical opposition to the heirs of this Mainline tradition. Then, as now, our political arguments are fed by a reservoir of religious and spiritual anxiety.

Besides providing an interpretive guide with great explanatory power for understanding modern American liberalism, Bottum's theory offers suggestions for further exploration. In an offhand way, Bottum notes that the more utopian and radically democratic impulses behind Occupy Wall Street would be recognized by any religiously literate age as those that lay behind the Radical Reformation. One can speculate that many of Occupy's members were once more-conventional liberals. Perhaps if the reformist impulses of our post-Mainline liberals continue to be frustrated, their spiritual longing for redemption will impel them toward radicalism as well.

SOURCE

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There's Always the Lawless Approach to Immigration



With approximately 12 million illegal aliens living, working and receiving taxpayer-paid benefits within U.S. borders, immigration reform has long been the perpetually unfulfilled promise. In 2008, Barack Obama pledged to make it a “top priority” in the first year of his first term. Four years later, he promised to tackle it in the first year of his second term. Perhaps third time's the charm, but no thanks. As Obama morphed from a candidate who feigns belief in Rule of Law to a president who openly believes in rule of one man – himself – his approach to immigration has changed.

In November of last year, for example, he pretended to be constrained by law in acting on immigration reform. Responding to a request that he issue an executive order on immigration, Obama said, “If, in fact, I could solve all these problems without passing this through Congress, then I would do so. But we're also a nation of laws. That's part of our tradition.” The irony here is that he had already begun disregarding the law long before. Indeed, in 2012, he issued an executive dictum ordering Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to halt certain deportations.

Then there was his statement earlier this year, when he basically announced that Congress could take a long walk off a short pier, threatening, “Where Congress isn't acting, I'll act on my own.” And of course his now infamous “I've got a pen” remark. Spoken like a true tyrant.

Turns out, however, that when it comes to immigration, Obama hasn't used a pen at all, just an eraser. And through an extra-legal policy of selective law enforcement, Obama granted de facto amnesty to virtually every illegal immigrant. According to an analysis issued by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the Obama administration has given a free pass to millions of illegal aliens – not only those in the United States today but also those who may be in the United States in the future. The reports notes that “a review of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) published enforcement statistics for 2013 reveals a shocking truth: DHS [Department of Homeland Security] has blocked the enforcement of immigration law for the overwhelming majority of violations – and is planning to widen that amnesty even further.” Specifically, ICE has stopped deportations for virtually all illegal aliens except those who are caught crossing the border, are convicted criminals, or are fugitives or habitual breakers of immigration law.

What does this mean in real numbers? According to the analysis, in 2013, ICE recorded 368,000 removals. Of these, 235,000 were border apprehensions (which are not typically counted as deportations), and 110,000 were removals of convicted criminals. Of the remaining 23,000, which are termed “interior removals” (as opposed to border removals), 13,000 were “either fugitives or habitual offenders/previous deportees.” This leaves just 10,000 – or 2% of the 368,000 removals – deported for breaking immigration law without additional demerits against them. Placed in context, those deported simply for breaking immigration law – without having criminal convictions or being habitual immigration law offenders or previous deportees – comprised a total of 0.08% of the 12 million individuals who are currently in the United States illegally.

By refusing to enforce immigration law, Obama has granted amnesty to nearly all of the illegal aliens living in the United States today and granted near carte blanche immunity (and don't forget government benefits) to the vast majority of those considering entering the U.S. illegally tomorrow.

Perhaps this is why Republicans have reined in their efforts at immigration reform. After all, even were it to pass, what good is a law in the hands of the chief lawbreaker?

SOURCE

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Democrats' ObamaCare albatross

IN SEPTEMBER 2010, six months after signing the Affordable Care Act and just weeks before his party's massive losses in the midterm elections, President Obama wondered whether the law's unpopularity might be due to a communication failure on his part. "Sometimes I fault myself," he told an audience in Virginia, "for not having been able to make the case more clearly to the country."

There was nothing wrong with the president's communication skills. The case he made for his sweeping health care overhaul was straightforward and appealing: It would make health insurance available to every American, especially the more than 40 million people who were uninsured. It would significantly reduce insurance premiums for individuals and families. It would guarantee that Americans who already had a health plan they liked, or a doctor they liked, would be free to keep them.

The case for ObamaCare was perfectly clear. But those claims rang false even before the law was passed. Nothing is left of them now — and another midterm election season is underway.

The Affordable Care Act turned 4 years old this week, as unpopular as ever. It has been underwater in hundreds of national polls, frequently by double-digit margins. Despite the elaborate and relentless marketing campaign the White House and its allies mounted in support of the law, Americans don't like it any better now than they did back when Democrats muscled it through Congress over unified Republican opposition.

By its proponents' own empirical benchmarks, ObamaCare has been a debacle. The rosy promises about no one being forced to change doctors or health plans have been ditched. So has the enticing prospect of $2,500 premium reductions for every family. Instead, the "Affordable" Care Act in most states is driving up underlying premiums, even doubling them in some parts of the country.

Voters rewarded the GOP for standing fast against the law four years ago, and there is a growing sense that they're going to do so again this fall. Obama has been warning Democrats for months that they are likely to "get clobbered" at the polls this November. It's not just widespread disapproval of the president's signature legislation that makes his party so vulnerable — it's the intensity of that disapproval. "The people who favor ObamaCare, which is a minority, aren't really that enthusiastic about it even if they favor it," says political analyst Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia. "But the majority who oppose ObamaCare are much more charged up, and they're the people who tend to turn out" for midterm elections.

It had been widely assumed on both sides of the debate that as the Affordable Care Act was implemented, the law's frontloaded benefits and subsidies would quickly become such sacred cows that repealing the law would soon be a political impossibility.

So far it hasn't worked out that way. Most Americans haven't come around to accepting the massive law and its unprecedented mandates as a permanent feature on the landscape. Ardent liberals, such as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, have been telling Democrats to run as unabashed defenders of ObamaCare, insisting "it's a winner" of an issue for them. But it proved a losing issue for Democrat Alex Sink, who was beaten in Forida's special congressional election this month by Republican David Jolly. ObamaCare was a key issue in the race, which pitted Jolly's "repeal and replace" message against Sink's "don't nix it, fix it" theme. The pro-repeal candidate won.

A single special election doesn't prove a GOP sweep is coming, but the outcome in Florida wasn't lost on Scott Brown, who knows better than most what it's like to win a special election on the strength of an anti-ObamaCare refrain. "A big political wave is about to break in America, and the ObamaCare Democrats are on the wrong side of that wave," Brown told a Republican crowd in Nashua three days after Sink's defeat. "If we don't like ObamaCare, we can get rid of it. Period."

That was probably overstating it. Politics is the art of the possible, and even with a slew of midterm pickups, it would be impossible for opponents of ObamaCare to "get rid of it — period." But there is nothing impossible about replacing the Democrats' unpopular monstrosity of a law with alternatives that expand freedom and competition in health insurance, rather than suppressing them. Four years of ObamaCare have shown what arrogance, deception, and top-down control can accomplish. No wonder voters want to see if Republicans can do better.

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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Methuselah

There is no doubt that the Bible is one of the most valuable historical documents that we have.  Textual critics date most of the OT to around the time of the great Athenians -- Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Herodotus, Xenophon etc.  But it also seems clear that the assembly of the OT did include at times much older documents.  Just which those are is of course something that textual scholars continue to debate.

For my money I see Exodus and probably Genesis as very early.  And I base that on the view of the Gods found there.  The Greek Gods were generally very powerful and effective figures.  Nobody pushed them around.  But YHWH as described in Exodus is rather pathetic, much more like the only barely effective Gods of earlier times.  He has the Devil of a time (if I may use that expression) in getting the Pharaoh to do anything and it is only after YHWH has visited plague after plague on Egypt that the Pharaoh relents a little

But that is only the start of YHWH's troubles.  Now he has to keep the Israelites in line.  And he frequently fails. They go off after other Gods all the time.  So I see Exodus as a true account of a quite primitive people  -- much earlier than the sophisticated Greeks.

And that is valuable.  We have no comprehensive account of such a primitive people from any other source.  We have a few scraps of cunieform but that is it.  So how accurate is the OT as history?  From what I see, it always has the last laugh.  Things in it that were once dismissed as myth keep being confirmed as real  by archaeological discoveries.

So what are we to make of the days of Methuselah, when some men lived to be nearly 1,000 years old?  As is usually alleged, it could simply be a mistranslation.  In earliest times there were a variety of number systems in use and interpreting numbers given in one system as if they were from another system could give absurd answers.  They could be out by a factor of 10, for instance.  That this was the mistake is now well-argued for, so instead of Methuselah living to 969 years, his age is now given by some scholars as 96.9 years -- which is very plausible.

I am reluctant however to say that anything as recorded in the Bible is wrong or mistaken. People who claim that often have to eat their words.  So I have an explanation which makes sense of the literal Bible account.

Most people these days accept it as entirely likely that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.  But they also see it as quite unlikely that we will ever get vistors from extra-terrestrials.  Why?  Because the distance between alternative biospheres is so great.  You would need to travel several lifetimes just to get from one biosphere to another.

But what is a lifetime?  I don't think it stretches credibility too far to say that there may be  some beings somewhere for whom 1,000 years is a lifetime.  And for such a people, interstellar travel may be a more attractive and plausible idea.

So Genesis chapter 5 could be seen as showing that there is such an extraterrestrial people and that they did once visit us.  And that they were humanoid is not a stretch too far.  As biologists say, form follows function.

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Religious Liberty on Trial Before the Supreme Court/b>

The Affordable Care Act is the law that keeps on giving. Last time it was before the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts validated the horror that is ObamaCare when he declared the individual mandate penalty to be a tax, and thus within the constitutional power of Congress to create. Tuesday, the Supremes heard another challenge to the law in the form of Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Sebelius – both cases dealing with mandates and religious liberty.

Hobby Lobby is an arts and crafts chain owned by evangelical Christians. With more than 13,000 employees, the company faces potential fines of almost $475 million a year if it fails to comply with ObamaCare's demands. Conestoga Wood Specialties is a kitchen cabinet manufacturer owned by Mennonites, and, with almost 1,000 employees, it faces penalties of $35 million per year for failure to comply. The owners of both companies contend that complying with ObamaCare's mandate that employer-provided health insurance cover contraceptives – even more specifically the mandate that coverage include abortifacients – would force them to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs. More than 300 plaintiffs in over 90 lawsuits have joined them in the fight.

The suit pits the First Amendment's free exercise of religion and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) against ObamaCare. Under RFRA, the government may not substantially burden the free exercise of religion unless it can show that the burden advances a compelling interest using the least restrictive means of achieving that interest. (This is the federal law that is mirrored in Arizona, the amendment of which was the subject of the kerfuffle there last month.)

The Obama administration argues that business owners from the corner dry cleaner to corporate giants like Exxon give up their constitutional right to exercise their religion when they establish a business. And in essence, leftists want the government to stay out of their bedroom, but they want taxpayers and employers to pay for what happens in it.

The Court's female justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dominated the questioning of counsel during the oral argument, trying to make the issue one of “women's rights” instead of religious liberty. Sotomayor asked whether corporations objecting on religious grounds to providing contraception coverage might also object to vaccinations or blood transfusions. Ginsberg asserted that it “seems strange” that the RFRA could have generated bipartisan support if lawmakers thought corporations would use it to enforce their own religious beliefs.

Kagan claimed that the corporate challengers are taking an “uncontroversial law” like the RFRA and making it into something that would upend “the entire U.S. code,” since companies would be able to object on religious grounds to laws on sex discrimination, minimum wage, family leave and child labor. She complained that “everything would be piecemeal and nothing would be uniform.” Forced uniformity is the leftists' goal, after all. But if employers wanted to claim religious objections to the minimum wage, why haven't they already?

Sotomayor and Kagan each outrageously suggested that employers who have moral objections to ObamaCare mandates should drop health care coverage for their employees in favor of the tax. “But isn't there another choice nobody talks about, which is paying the tax, which is a lot less than a penalty and a lot less than the cost of health insurance at all?” Sotomayor asked.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, often the swing vote, voiced concerns both about the rights of female employees and the business owners. He asked what rights women would have if their employers ordered them to wear burkas, a full-length robe commonly worn by conservative Islamic women. Later, on the other hand, he seemed troubled by how the logic of the government's argument would apply to abortions. “A profit corporation could be forced in principle to pay for abortions,” Kennedy said. The government's “reasoning would permit it.”

The First Amendment plainly states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” And the Religious Freedom Restoration Act adds statutory backing to that liberty by protecting people and businesses against infringement of their liberty. Yet ObamaCare's entire structure is about forcing people to engage in buying health insurance while dictating what that insurance covers. In a nation of 300 million people, this is bound to cause problems beyond basic infringement of liberty.

Tragically, the Court upheld the law as a whole in 2012, but, on the bright side, it appears the contraception mandate will be struck down, and the vote against it may even be 6-3. We'll find out this June.

SOURCE

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A Costly Failed Experiment

With Sunday marking the fourth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act being signed into law, it’s worth revisiting the initial purpose of the president’s signature legislation: Universal coverage was the main goal. Four years later, not even the White House pretends that this goal will be realized. Most of those who were uninsured before the law was passed will remain uninsured, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Democrats also fixated on another goal: protection for people with pre-existing conditions. One of the first things the new law did was create federal risk pools so that people who had been denied coverage for health reasons could purchase insurance for the same premium a healthy person would pay. Over the next three years, about 107,000 people took advantage of that opportunity.

Think about that. One of the main reasons given for interfering with the health care of 300 million people was to solve a problem that affected a tiny sliver of the population.

More recently, the president has had to explain why between four million and seven million people are losing their health insurance despite his promise that they would not. The new insurance will be better, he tells us. No longer will insurers be able to cancel your coverage after you get sick. What he doesn’t say is that this practice was made illegal at the federal level by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, and was illegal in most states long before that.

While the president and his party struggle to find more convincing reasons why we need ObamaCare, three huge problems won’t go away.

* An impossible mandate. For the past 40 years real, per capita health-care spending has been growing at twice the rate of growth of real, per capita income. That’s not only true in this country; it is about the average for the whole developed world.

Clearly, this trend cannot go on forever. So what does ObamaCare do about that? It limits the government’s share of the costs while doing nothing to protect individuals or their employers.

The law restricts the growth of total Medicare spending, the growth of Medicaid hospital spending and (after 2018) the growth of federal tax subsidies in the health-insurance exchanges to no more than the rate of growth of real GDP per capita plus about one half of 1%. This means that as health-care costs become more and more of a burden for the average family, people will get less and less help from government—to pay for insurance the government requires them to buy!

* Unworkable subsidies. A family of four at 138% of poverty level is able to enroll in Medicaid in about half the states and obtain insurance worth about $8,000. Since the coverage is completely free, that’s an $8,000 gift. If they earn $1 more, they will be entitled to join a health-insurance exchange and obtain a private plan that costs, say, 50% more in return for an out-of-pocket premium of about $900. That’s a gift of more than $11,000.

At the same time, the employees of a hotel who earn pretty much the same wage as in the two previous cases will be forced to have an expensive family plan and they and their employer will get no new government help. The only assistance is the long-standing tax break that exempts employers’ premium payments from federal income and payroll taxes. Even so, the ObamaCare mandate amounts to about a $10,000 burden on these businesses and by extension their employees.

These are only a few of the many ways in which ObamaCare’s treatment of people is arbitrary and unfair.

A bigger problem is the impact these differential subsidies will have on our economy. As businesses discover that almost everyone who earns less than the average wage gets a better deal from the federal government in the exchange or from Medicaid, and that most people who earn more than the average wage get a better deal if insurance is provided at work, trends already evident will accelerate. Higher-income workers will tend to congregate in firms that provide insurance. Lower-income workers will tend to work for firms that don’t. But efficient production requires that firm size and composition be determined by economic factors, not health-insurance subsidies.

* Perverse incentives in the exchanges. Under ObamaCare, insurers are required to charge the same premium to everyone, regardless of health status, and they are required to accept anyone who applies. This means they must overcharge the healthy and undercharge the sick. It also means they have strong incentives to attract the healthy (on whom they make a profit) and avoid the sick (on whom they incur losses).

The result has been a race to the bottom in access and quality of care. To keep premiums as low as possible, the insurers are offering very narrow networks, often leaving out the best doctors and the best hospitals. By keeping deductibles high and fees so low that only a minority of providers will accept them, the insurers are able to lower their premiums, thus attracting still more healthy individuals at the expense of overall care.

So four years into this failed experiment, what are the alternatives? Getting rid of the mandates, letting people choose their own insurance benefits, and giving everyone the same universal tax credit for health insurance would be a good start. More easily accessible health savings accounts for people in high-deductible plans is another good idea.

Every provision in ObamaCare that encourages employers either not to hire people or to reduce their hours should go. Everything in the law that prevents employers from providing individually owned health insurance that travels from job to job should go. And everything that makes HealthCare.gov more complicated than eHealth (a 10-year-old private online exchange) should go.

SOURCE

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Biden Claims Illegal Immigrants are "Already American Citizens"

The millions of illegal immigrants in the United States are already American citizens, in Vice President Joe Biden’s view. At the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s 2014 Legislative Summit Thursday Biden explained:

   "You know, 11 million people live in the shadows. I believe they're already American citizens. These people are just waiting, waiting for a chance to contribute fully. And by that standard, 11 million undocumented aliens are already Americans, in my view.

    All they want—they just want a decent life for their kids, a chance to contribute to a free society, a chance to put down roots and help build the next great American century. I really believe that. That’s what they’re fighting for."

Biden referenced former President Theodore Roosevelt's 1894 speech “True Americanism” to assert that immigrants are precisely the type of courageous individuals America needs.

However, Biden ignored Roosevelt’s admonition that immigrants must also embrace the principles of American speech, politics, and principles:

    "It is beyond all question the wise thing for the immigrant to become thoroughly Americanized. Moreover, from our standpoint, we have a right to demand it. We freely extend the hand of welcome and of good-fellowship to every man, no matter what his creed or birthplace, who comes here honestly intent on becoming a good United States citizen like the rest of us; but we have a right, and it is our duty, to demand that he shall indeed become so.…"

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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Screw You, Mickey Kaus

Ann Coulter

I've been thrown off my health insurance -- THANKS, OBAMACARE! -- and have spent hours and hours over the past month trying to figure out my options now that the Democrats have made my old plan, which I liked, "illegal." (I prefer to think of my plan as "undocumented.")

Whom do I bill for the hours of work Obamacare forced me to perform? How about you, Mickey? You're the smartest living liberal (faint praise), and you assured us that Obamacare was going to be fantastic.

By now, Obama has issued "waivers" from Obamacare to about 99 percent of the country. (Perhaps you've heard, there's a big midterm election this year.) As one of the few Americans not granted a waiver, I'm here to tell you: You have no idea what's coming, America.

I thought I had figured out the best plan for me a month ago after having doctors and hospital administrators look at the packets of material I was sent by my old insurance company -- the same mailing that informed me my old plan was "illegal" under Obamacare.

But when I checked online recently, I discovered the premier plan -- the "platinum," low-deductible, astronomically expensive plan that might be accepted by an English-speaking doctor who didn't attend medical school in a Hawaiian shirt and board shorts -- does not include treatment at any decent hospitals.

That's sort of unfortunate because THAT'S THE ONLY REASON I WANT INSURANCE! That's the only reason any sane homo sapiens wants health insurance: to cover health care costs in the event of some catastrophic illness or accident -- not to pay for Mickey Kaus' allergy appointments. But my only options under the blue-chip plan were hospitals that also do shoe repair.

I called Blue Cross directly to ask if its most expensive insurance plan covered the only hospital I'd ever go to in an emergency. Since that's all I wanted to know, that's what I asked. (I like to get to the point that way.)

But -- as happens whenever you try to ascertain the most basic information about insurance under Obamacare -- the Blue Cross representative began hammering me with a battery of questions about myself.

First my name. (Does that make a difference to what hospitals its plans cover?) Then my phone number. By the time he got to my address, I said, CAN YOU PLEASE JUST TELL ME IF ANY OF YOUR PLANS COVER XYZ HOSPITAL? I DON'T EVEN KNOW IF I WANT TO SIGN UP WITH YOU!

Finally, he admitted that Blue Cross' most expensive individual insurance plan does not cover treatment at the hospitals I named. Their doctors are "out of network" (and the person who designed this plan is "out of his mind").

This was the rest of the conversation, verbatim:

ME: None of your plans cover out-of-network doctors?

BLUE CROSS: No.

ME: Why is it called "Premier Guided Access WITH OUT-OF-NETWORK PLAN"?

BLUE CROSS: Where did you see that?

ME: On Blue Cross' own material describing its plans.

BLUE CROSS: Oh. I don't know why it's called that.

ME: None of your plans cover (the good hospital)?

BLUE CROSS: No.

ME: I don't know who you are, but I have a very specific set of skills that will help me find you. And when I find you, I am going to kill you. (Click.)

True conversation. Except the last sentence. That was my fantasy.

I decided to approach it from the opposite direction and called one of the nation's leading hospitals to ask which plans it accepted. The woman listed a series of plans, but she couldn't tell me if I was eligible for any of them. For that, she said, I'd have to go to the Obamacare website.

Does Obamacare cover suicide?

I went to "healthcare.gov" and -- I guess I had heard this, but had blocked it from my memory like a rape victim unable to remember her attack -- you can't even peek at the available plans until you've given the government reams of personal information about yourself.

How about they let me look at the merchandise first?

Inasmuch as the cost of health insurance under Obamacare is so high that it will generally make more sense just to pay for your own catastrophic health emergencies, I was not interested in telling Kathleen Sebelius everything about me in order to have the privilege of glancing at the government's crappy plans.

But that's the only choice. As the Obamacare website directs:

(1) Create an account. (Name, password.)

(2) Tell us about yourself and your family. (Every single thing.)

(3) Choose a health insurance plan. (That's where you finally get to see the plans.)

I wonder if other consumer-oriented businesses will start demanding names, addresses, passwords and phone numbers before the customer is allowed to browse the merchandise. Maybe Williams-Sonoma could pick up a few sales tricks from Ezekiel Emanuel! Oh, you'd like to see the bronze muffin tin? Sure, but first I'll need your Social Security number, date of birth and mother's maiden name. Sign here, here and here.

The main point of the Obamacare website is to encourage people other than me to get a government subsidy. There's also a section helping you register to vote. You just can't see the insurance plans. (Guess which one you need a government ID for?)

With zero help from the Obamacare website, I eventually figured out that there was one lone insurance plan that would cover treatment at a reputable hospital. The downside is, no doctors take it.

So my only two health insurance options -- and yours, too, as soon as the waivers expire, America! -- are: (1) a plan that no doctors take; or (2) a plan that no hospitals take. You either pay for all your doctor visits and tests yourself, or you pay for your cancer treatment yourself. And you pay through the nose in either case.

That's not insurance! It's a huge transfer of wealth from people who work for a living to those who don't, accomplished by forcing the workers to buy insurance that's not insurance. Obamacare has made actual health insurance "illegal."

It's not "insurance" when what I want to insure against isn't covered, but paying for other people's health care needs -- defined broadly -- is mandatory.

It's as if you wanted to buy a car, so you paid for a Toyota -- but then all you got was a 10-speed bike, with the rest of your purchase price going to buy cars, bikes and helmets for other people.

Or, more precisely, it would be like having the option of car insurance that covers either collisions or liability, but not both. Your car insurance premium would be gargantuan, because most of it would go to buy insurance, gas and air fresheners for other people in the plan.

If you have employer-provided health care, you may not have to make the 400 phone calls I had to, but the result will be the same: You're not getting what is commonly known as "insurance." You're getting a massive bill to pay for other people's chiropractors, marriage counselors, birth control pills, smoking cessation programs, "preventive care" appointments and pre-existing conditions.

Health insurance has been outlawed, replaced with a welfare program that has been renamed "insurance."

When Matt Drudge decided he'd rather pay for his own health care, liberals hysterically denounced him for not buying an Obamacare transfer-the-wealth, fake "insurance" plan. It used to be shameful to be a public charge. Now it's shameful to pay for yourself.

And it's shameful to work for yourself. The self-employed are currently the only Americans subjected to Obamacare. (In a way, it's lucky for the Democrats that there aren't enough of us to hurt them in this year's midterm elections!)

But we're the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. You may have an employer-provided plan now, but the waivers can't go on forever. If you live in America, your health insurance is going to disappear, too.

The government simply cannot force all insurance companies to give subsidized health care to a third of the country, to ignore the pre-existing health conditions of its customers, to pay for every little thing tangentially related to health -- like smoking cessation programs, marital counseling and pediatric dental care -- and also expect them to cover your cancer treatment.

It doesn't matter if you've been paying for insurance your whole adult life. That policy is now "illegal." Put your hands in the air, nice and easy, and step away from the policy ...

You 99-percenters still unaffected by Obamacare will blithely go to the polls this November and vote on some teeny-tiny issue, completely unaware of the total destruction of health insurance in America. The waivers have worked.

Now we'll have to wait 40 years for a future Mickey Kaus to come along and expose the disastrous consequences of this horrendous government program, just like the real Mickey Kaus did with welfare. But for now, I say: Screw you, Mickey Kaus.

SOURCE

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Massaging of Critical Data Undermines Our Society

Victor Davis Hanson

Transparency and truth are the fuels that run sophisticated civilizations. Without them, the state grinds to a halt. Lack of trust -- not barbarians on the frontier, global warming or cooling, or even epidemics -- doomed civilizations of the past, from imperial Rome to the former Soviet Union.

The United States can withstand the untruth of a particular presidential administration if the permanent government itself is honest. Dwight Eisenhower lied about the downed U-2 spy plane inside the Soviet Union. Almost nothing Richard Nixon said about Watergate was true. Intelligence reports of vast stockpiles of WMD in Iraq proved as accurate as Bill Clinton's assertion that he never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.

Presidents fib. The nation gets outraged. The independent media digs out the truth. And so the system of trust repairs itself.

What distinguishes democracies from tinhorn dictatorships and totalitarian monstrosities are our permanent meritocratic government bureaus that remain nonpartisan and honestly report the truth.

The Benghazi, Associated Press and National Security Agency scandals are scary, but not as disturbing as growing doubts about the honesty of permanent government itself.

It is no longer crackpot to doubt the once impeccable and nonpartisan IRS. When it assured the public that it was not making decisions about tax-exempt status based on politics, it lied. One of its top commissioners, Lois Lerner, resigned and invoked the Fifth Amendment.

A system of voluntary tax reporting rests on trust. If the IRS itself is untruthful, will it be able to expect truthful compliance from taxpayers?

Many doubt the officially reported government unemployment rates. That statistic is vital in assessing economic growth and is of enormous political importance in the way citizens vote.

It was reported in November that the Census Bureau may have fabricated survey results during the 2012 presidential campaign, sending false data to the Labor Department that could have altered official employment statistics.

In the 1990s, the method of assessing the official unemployment rate was massaged to make it seem lower than it actually was. Rules were changed to ignore millions who had been out of work longer than 52 weeks. They were suddenly classified as permanent dropouts and not part of the idled workforce.

Does the government release an accurate report on quarterly Gross Domestic Product growth -- another vital barometer of how the economy is doing? Maybe not. Last year, the Bureau of Economic Analysis for the first time factored research and development costs of businesses into statistics on investment growth.

Suddenly, a cost became proof of business output and thus was added into the business investment contribution to GDP. That new accounting gimmick may have added hundreds of billions of dollars into the equation of figuring GDP growth last year alone. Not surprisingly, the government reported unexpectedly high 2.8 percent GDP growth after the changes.

Is inflation really as low as the government insists? In recent times the government has not just counted the increase in the prices of goods, but also factored into its calculus theories about changing consumer buying habits when prices increase. The changes have resulted in officially lowered inflation rates.

No one knows how many Americans have now bought and paid for Affordable Care Act health insurance policies. There is no accurate information about how many young people have enrolled -- critical to the success of Obamacare. Nor do Americans know how many enrollees were previously uninsured. Nor does the public know how many enrollees simply switched insurance from Medicaid to the Affordable Care Act. There is no information about how many actually have paid their premiums.

No one knows how many foreign citizens who entered the U.S. illegally were apprehended inside the United States and returned to their country of origin last year -- a figure vital for any compromise on passing comprehensive immigration reform.

The Obama administration claims near-record numbers of deportations. In fact, once again government agencies -- in this case the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) -- have mysteriously changed the way they compile statistics. The ICE now counts as deportations those foreign nationals whom the Border Patrol immediately stops or turns away at the border. Such detentions were not previously counted as deportations.

The result is that bureaucrats can report near-record numbers of deportations, while privately assuring the administration that immigration enforcement has been greatly relaxed.

There is a pattern here. Changes in data collection seem to have a predictable result: Inflation and unemployment rates become lower. Economic growth becomes greater. The IRS focuses on government skeptics. The Affordable Care Act is not in trouble. Illegal immigration is not such a problem.

If the people increasingly believe that bureaucrats try to alter reality to reflect preconceived ideologies or the goals of the particular regime in power, then America as we know it is finished.

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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Is monogamy Biblical?

It isn't.  in Old Testament times, it was perfectly normal for a man to have both concubines and several wives.  But that was no invitation to licence.  There were strict rules about how multiple wives were to be treated.  All wives had extensive rights. As it says in Exodus 21:10:  "If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights."

It is only in the NT that we see a move towards monogamy and there is is not any sort of commandment.  It is advice.  As Paul says in 1 Cor. 7 "But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband."

This made made clearer in 1 Timothy 3:  "Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach".  So it was only the officers of the church to whom the advice applied and the reason for the advice was that it made the officer look good, not that it was right or wrong.

It may be argued that in Matthew 19 Jesus commanded monogamy.  There are two objections to that.  The first is that Jesus was very clearly on that occasion aiming only to confound the Pharisees and the second is that Jesus was actually forbidding divorce, not forbidding second marriages:  "What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate." -- JR

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Obama "transparency"

The Obama administration has a standard response to all scandals: it stonewalls. Getting information from the administration is like pulling teeth, only slower. Document requests and subpoenas go unanswered, or inadequately answered, for years.

So far Obama’s stonewall strategy has worked quite well. After a year or two, a scandal is treated as old news, even though the administration has never produced the information that would allow Congressional committees, reporters or the public to evaluate it. If the administration stalls long enough, it wins.

In perfecting the art of the stall, Obama has done something that has been tried by no previous president: he has put the White House into the loop when federal agencies respond to subpoenas and Freedom of Information Act requests. A group called Cause of Action has uncovered an April 15, 2009 memo by White House Counsel Greg Craig that lays out the administration’s unprecedented stonewall strategy. Craig’s memo went to every executive department and federal agency. You can read it here. The memo says, in part:

This is a reminder that executive agencies should consult with the White House Counsel’s Office on all document requests that may involve documents with White House equities. …

This need to consult with the White House arises with respect to all types of document requests, including Congressional committee requests, GAO requests, judicial subpoenas, and FOIA requests. And it applies to all documents and records, whether in oral, paper, or electronic form, that relate to communications to and from the White House, including preparations for such communications.

The phrase “White House equities” is undefined. It is not a legal term; it cannot be found in the Freedom of Information Act. Apparently a document has “White House equities” if it potentially could embarrass the Obama administration.

Mark Tapscott reported on Cause of Action’s discovery last week in the Washington Examiner:

The FOIA requires federal agencies to respond within 20 days of receiving a request, but the White House equities exception can make it impossible for an agency to meet that deadline.

In one case cited by Cause of Action, the response to a request from a Los Angeles Times reporter to the Department of the Interior for “communications between the White House and high-ranking Interior officials on various politically sensitive topics” was delayed at least two years by the equities review.

“Cause of Action is still waiting for documents from 16 federal agencies, with the Department of Treasury having the longest pending request of 202 business days.

“The Department of Energy is a close second at 169 business days. The requests to the Department of Defense and Department of Health and Human Services have been pending for 138 business days,” the report said.

There are two problems with the unprecedented White House review that the Obama administration has instituted. The first is that it takes forever. White House lawyers can simply sit on a subpoena until a year or two have gone by, and the potentially embarrassing issue has been forgotten. But the second problem is still more diabolical. The White House is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. This means that if White House lawyers decide to cover up an Obama scandal by shredding documents that make the administration look bad, no one–no reporter, no Congressional committee, no private citizen–can serve a request that requires the White House to disclose what documents it destroyed. So adding a layer of White House lawyer review to the production of any sensitive documents–those with “White House equities”–means that inconvenient information may sink without a trace. We have no way of knowing how often this has happened over the last five years.

Which is, of course, exactly the way the least transparent administration in history wants it.

SOURCE

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Is Obama Stupid?

By Alan Caruba

No one gets elected President by being stupid, unless of course the election is stolen in cities controlled by the Democratic Party, but one must also factor in the intelligence of nearly half of the voters who pull the Democratic Party lever no matter who the candidate may be.

America is seriously divided between liberals and conservatives, but there are indications that even those who self-identify as liberals are having second thoughts as the result of the havoc Obamacare has inflicted on their lives and the economy. Voters who self-identify as “independents” are the deciding factor in most elections. They reflect disenchantment with both parties.

I have been thinking about whether Obama is stupid because he has been in Europe with the leaders of the nations who are grappling with the seizure of Crimea by Russia. I keep wondering, given his record at this point, whether they too think he’s stupid. He has taken the most powerful and respected nation in the world and reduced it to ridicule and disdain. When he leaves the room do they shake their head and roll their eyes?

The question of whether Obama is stupid would seem to be disputed by the fact that he is a Harvard Law School graduate and one has to have some degree of intelligence to navigate that. His undergraduate college is Columbia University, one of the most liberal in the nation. In neither case do we know how Obama did academically because he took care to have his records kept from public review.

Indeed, most public records regarding his life, including his birth certificate have been kept hidden. The one he provided has been deemed a forgery. There are claims as well that his Social Security number is questionable.

So, one could argue that he was not stupid enough to let people know the truth. What we do know is that he is a complete stranger to the truth, uttering lies on a daily basis. That is a serious character flaw in anyone, but in a President it is a threat to the nation.

What we do know is that Obama is so devoted to a Marxist ideology that it warps his view of the world and that he has devoted his two terms in office to the “transformation” of America; another way of saying that he embraces issues, foreign and domestic, that do not reflect the history or values of the nation.

America has now twice elected a Communist to its highest office and the result has been a failure, deliberate or the result of his ideology, to lift the nation out of a recession by lowering taxes, reducing spending, and other means well known to previous presidents.

The result has had a cataclysmic effect on the lives of millions of Americans. What growth has occurred has not been due to anything the White House or Congress has done, but in spite of both.

The overthrow of tyrannical governments in the Middle East and most recently in Ukraine reflects a desire for democracy and justice in these nations. Obama sided with the Muslim Brotherhood during the Egyptian uprising.  One has to wonder what the king of Saudi Arabia has to say about that. His nation and others in the Middle East have banned the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. There is no nice way of describing his action or inaction regarding the Middle East and elsewhere.

The opening of negotiations with Iran and reductions of sanctions against it simply gave it more time to pursue its intent to create its own nuclear weapons. This isn’t just stupid, it’s insane. The time wasted on securing peace from the Palestinians after decades of their open hatred of Israel is also stupid.

Obama’s failure to work closely with Congress reflects his indifference to the Constitution and, having lectured on it, it cannot be said that he is ignorant of its limits on the executive office and its division of power between the three branches of government He doesn’t seem to care much what the Constitution says. That’s stupid. The result has been a very meager legislative record and that is a good thing given his ideological inclinations.

We all know of men and women in high office or CEOs of major corporations that offer ample evidence of stupidity, but the latter can be removed by their board of directors. Americans have no options for the removal of Obama. Impeachment will not likely occur even if the GOP gains control of both houses of Congress. Obamacare and the economy have been his greatest gift for their renewal of political power.

Obama’s “war on coal” and other efforts of his administration to keep America from tapping huge reserves of energy that would greatly improve our economy with jobs and exports is both stupidity and ideology. You have to be stupid to keep talking about “climate change” aka “global warming” when the only change of the past 17 years has been a planet that is cooling,

The danger the nation faces is real and present. The reduction of our military strength has not gone unnoticed by totalitarian and rogue regimes. Obama’s deliberate withdrawal of the nation from its position of global leadership is a threat of major proportions.

History hangs on questions of leadership and Obama has shown none, nor evidence of caring about the results of his failures. That’s a pretty good definition of stupid.

SOURCE

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Why are infrastructure projects so slow these days?

One of the odder aspects of modern life is that it takes forever to build infrastructure. For example, the 2.7 mile paved walking path around the beautiful Lake Hollywood reservoir (which is under the famous Hollywood Sign), was washed out in places during the 2005 rains. The loop finally reopened in 2013, over eight years later. In contrast, the sizable Mulholland Dam that created the reservoir in the 1920s was built in either 1.5 years (according to the bronze plaque on the dam) or 2.5 years (according to Wikipedia). In either case, it took at least five years less time to build the dam from scratch in the 1920s than to fix the road around the reservoir in the 2000s and 2010s.

On the other hand, as I was reading up on this dam, I saw that William Mulholland, Los Angeles's titanic chief water engineer, followed up his Hollywood dam with his nearly identical St. Francis dam out in the northern exurbs, which also built in only a couple of years.

Unfortunately, the St. Francis dam collapsed in 1928, killing approximately 600 people. So, in the 1930s, Los Angeles went back and pushed a huge amount of dirt in front of the Hollywood version of the dam to keep from losing Hollywood. I hadn't realized how tall the dam is under all the dirt until seeing this photo of the safety project from a 1934 Popular Science:



SOURCE

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Democrats turn on Nate Silver

 Democrats are turning against Nate Silver, the political data guru they touted in 2012. Two years ago he was described as soothsayer after repeatedly saying that President Obama would win a second term, accurately predicting the winner of each state in the 2012 contest.

Conservatives ripped Silver back then for his “flawed model,” with some claiming Silver was a biased liberal. Democrats loved him then, but now they’re attacking him.

The difference, of course, is that the Democrats’ political fortunes have taken a turn for the worse and Silver isn’t optimistic about their chances in November.

“We think the Republicans are now slight favorites to win at least six seats and capture the chamber,” Silver wrote, predicting Republicans could net as many as 11 seats. Silver, who pegs the chances of a GOP takeover at 60 percent, unveiled his crystal ball Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

Democrats quickly fired back.

Sen. Michael Bennet (Colo.), who heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), told The Hill, “I think he’s got his numbers wrong, which is unusual for Nate. In this case, I look forward to talking to him after the election.”

Bennet added, “He ought to go back and check what he said about [Sen.] Claire McCaskill [(D-Mo.)] and some of the other races in the last cycle.”

In August of 2012, Silver said the race was “tilting” toward then-Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), McCaskill’s opponent. McCaskill ended up winning, though this Silver analysis was written before Akin made a damaging comment about “legitimate rape,” which changed the race.

Pressed on Silver’s 2014 predictions, Sen. Mark Begich (Alaska), one of the Senate’s most vulnerable incumbents, said, “It’s very early.”

Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), whom Silver gives only a 30 percent chance of winning reelection, said, “I don’t agree with that at all.”

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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Bizarre Arguments and Behavior

Walter E. Williams

Some statements and arguments are so asinine that you'd have to be an academic or a leftist to take them seriously. Take the accusation that Republicans and conservatives are conducting a war on women. Does that mean they're waging war on their daughters, wives, mothers and other female members of their families? If so, do they abide by the Geneva Conventions' bans on torture, or do they engage in enhanced interrogation and intimidation methods, such as waterboarding, with female family members? You might say that leftists don't mean actual war. Then why do they say it?

What would you think of a white conservative mayor's trying to defund charter schools where blacks are succeeding? While most of New York's black students could not pass a citywide math proficiency exam, there was a charter school where 82 percent of its students passed. New York's left-wing mayor, Bill de Blasio, is trying to shut it down, and so far, I've heard not one peep from the Big Apple's civil rights hustlers, including Al Sharpton and Charles Rangel. According to columnist Thomas Sowell, the attack on successful charter schools is happening in other cities, too (http://tinyurl.com/nxulxc).

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recently stated that we must revisit the laws that ban convicted felons from voting. Why? According to a recent study by two professors, Marc Meredith of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Morse of Stanford, published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (http://tinyurl.com/pgolu8x), three-fourths of America's convicted murderers, rapists and thieves are Democrats. Many states restrict felons from voting; however, there's a movement afoot to eliminate any restriction on their voting. If successful, we might see Democratic candidates campaigning in prisons, seeking the support of some of America's worst people.

Decades ago, I warned my fellow Americans that the tobacco zealots' agenda was not about the supposed health hazards of secondhand smoke. It was really about control. The fact that tobacco smoke is unpleasant gained them the support of most Americans. By the way, to reach its secondhand smoke conclusions, the Environmental Protection Agency employed statistical techniques that were grossly dishonest. Some years ago, I had the opportunity to ask a Food and Drug Administration official whether his agency would accept pharmaceutical companies using similar statistical techniques in their drug approval procedures. He just looked at me.

Seeing as Americans are timid and compliant, why not dictate other aspects of our lives -- such as the size of soda we may buy, as former Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried in New York? Former U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman John Webster said: "Right now, this anti-obesity campaign is in its infancy. ... We want to turn people around and give them assistance in eating nutritious foods." The city of Calabasas, Calif., adopted an ordinance that bans smoking in virtually all outdoor areas. The stated justification is not the desire to fight against secondhand smoke but the desire to protect children from bad influences -- seeing adults smoking. Most Americans don't know that years ago, if someone tried to stop a person from smoking on a beach or sidewalk or buying a 16-ounce cup of soda or tried to throw away his kid's homemade lunch, it might have led to a severe beating. On a very famous radio talk show, I suggested to an anti-obesity busybody who was calling for laws to restrict restaurants' serving sizes that he not be a coward and rely on government. He should just come up, I told him, and take the food he thought I shouldn't have from my plate.

The late H.L. Mencken's description of health care professionals in his day is just as appropriate today: "A certain section of medical opinion, in late years, has succumbed to the messianic delusion. Its spokesmen are not content to deal with the patients who come to them for advice; they conceive it to be their duty to force their advice upon everyone, including especially those who don't want it. That duty is purely imaginary. It is born of vanity, not of public spirit. The impulse behind it is not altruism, but a mere yearning to run things."

 SOURCE




Wisconsin Success Story

Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed into law today a $541 million tax cut returning $406 million to state technical colleges to reduce their property taxes. Another $98 million will go to low-income taxpayers, reducing the state's lowest bracket from 4.4% to 4%. Walker first proposed the rate cuts in January, and the last procedural hurdle for passage was cleared this past week when the state Assembly passed the bill 61-35. That was fast.

The bill's passage barely rated 10 lines in The New York Times, which chose to bury the story deep inside the paper's A-section. Leftmedia outlets have done all they can to keep the Wisconsin success story out of the headlines as well. Walker, who survived a truly vicious recall effort after taking on the state's unions a couple years ago, has been behind a drive that has improved the state's economy, brought accountability to the school system, and pushed the unemployment rate down to 6.1%, its lowest since 2008. A recent poll reports that 95% of business owners in the state are optimistic about the future of the economy in Wisconsin.

The story of Wisconsin's recovery is one that Republicans around the country need to follow. Media outlets that care about reporting the facts should take heed as well. Walker's success has come despite the attempts of leftists to block his efforts at every turn with increasingly despicable methods. From shirking their legislative duties to preventing a vote on Walker's reforms to bussing in union thugs during the recall effort so as to shut down the capitol, Democrats have been merciless in their attempts to prevent the pro-business, small-government model from succeeding. They are particularly set on blocking it in the state that birthed the “progressive” movement a century ago.

Meanwhile, Walker's Democrat opponent, Mary Burke, is using her own underhanded tactics in an attempt to unseat the governor. She released an ad claiming that the state's unemployment rate is rising, and when she was called out on the blatant falsehood, she offered no regrets, saying in effect that the ends justify the lies. She will have a tough time convincing voters that Wisconsin is in need of new leadership, so expect the lies and mischaracterizations to keep on coming. That's the one tool that leftists know how to wield.

 SOURCE



Republicans and Blacks

Thomas Sowell

Recently former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice added her voice to those who have long been urging the Republican Party to reach out to black voters. Not only is that long overdue, what is also long overdue is putting some time -- and, above all, some serious thought -- into how to go about doing it.

Too many Republicans seem to think that the way to "reach out" is to offer blacks and other minorities what the Democrats are offering them. Some have even suggested that the channels to use are organizations like the NAACP and black "leaders" like Jesse Jackson -- that is, people tied irrevocably to the Democrats.

Voters who want what the Democrats offer can get it from the Democrats. Why should they vote for Republicans who act like make-believe Democrats?

Yet there are issues where Republicans have a big advantage over Democrats -- if they will use that advantage. But an advantage that you don't use might as well not exist.

The issue on which Democrats are most vulnerable, and have the least room to maneuver, is school choice. Democrats are heavily in hock to the teachers' unions, who see public schools as places to guarantee jobs for teachers, regardless of what that means for the education of students.

There are some charter schools and private schools that have low-income minority youngsters equaling or exceeding national norms, despite the many ghetto public schools where most students are nowhere close to meeting those norms. Because teachers' unions oppose charter schools, most Democrats oppose them, including black Democrats up to and including President Barack Obama.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's recent cutback on funding for charter schools, and creating other obstacles for them, showed a calloused disregard for black youngsters, for whom a decent education is their one shot at a better life.

But did you hear any Republican say anything about it?

Minimum wage laws are another government-created disaster for minority young people.

Many people today would be surprised to learn that there were once years when the unemployment rate for black 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds was under 10 percent. But their unemployment rates have not been under 20 percent in more than half a century. In some years, their unemployment rate has been over 40 percent.

Why such great differences between earlier and later times? In the late 1940s, inflation had rendered meaningless the minimum wage set in 1938. Without that encumbrance, black teenagers found it a lot easier to get jobs than after the series of minimum wage escalations that began in the 1950s.

Young people need job experience, at least as much as they need a paycheck. And no neighborhood needs hordes of idle young men hanging around, getting into mischief, if not into crime.

Republicans have failed to explain why the minimum wage laws that Democrats support are counterproductive for blacks. Worse yet, during the 2012 election campaign Mitt Romney advocated indexing the minimum wage for inflation, which would not only guarantee its bad effects, but would put an end to discussing those bad effects.

Are issues like these going to switch the black vote as a whole over into the Republican column at the next election? Of course not. Nor will embracing the Democrats' racial agenda.

But, if Republicans can reduce the 90 percent of the black vote that goes to Democrats to 80 percent, that can be enough to swing a couple of close Congressional elections -- as a start.

Even to achieve that, however, will require targeting those particular segments of the black population that are not irrevocably committed to the Democrats. Parents who want their children to get a decent education are one obvious example. But if Republicans aim a one-size-fits-all message at all blacks they will fail to connect with the particular people they have some chance of reaching.

First of all, Republicans will need to know what they are talking about. There are books like "Race and Economics" by Walter Williams, which show that many well-meaning government programs have been counterproductive for minorities. And there are people like Shelby Steele and the Thernstroms with valuable insights.

But first Republicans have got to want to learn, and to be willing to do some thinking, in order to get their message across.

More HERE



The Proper Size of Government

Based on a large body of empirical research examining the relationship between the size of government and economic outcomes, the United States should scale back

A large body of empirical research has examined the relationship between the size of government and economic outcomes, and based on that research, the United States has much room to scale back. In addition, and close to home, Canada's recent experience with government retrenchment is an example of a country shrinking government without a trade-off in economic and social outcomes. In fact, a smaller government could achieve better outcomes for the American people.

Di Matteo’s analysis confirms other work showing a positive return to economic growth and social progress when governments focus their spending on basic, needed services like the protection of property. But his findings also demonstrate that a tipping point exists at which more government hinders economic growth and fails to contribute to social progress in a meaningful way.

The fundamental question is at which point incremental government spending impedes economic growth and social outcomes, or achieves the latter only at great marginal cost. Government spending becomes unproductive when it goes to such things as corporate subsidies, boondoggles, and overly generous wages and benefits for government employees. In these cases, regular Americans do not see tangible benefits from additional spending.

Di Matteo examines international data and finds that, after controlling for confounding factors, annual per capita GDP growth is maximized when government spending consumes 26 percent of the economy. Economic growth rates start to decline when relative government spending exceeds this level. In other words, there is a hump-shaped relationship between the size of government and economic growth (this relationship is often referred to as the Scully Curve, named after the economist Gerald Scully).

According to OECD data, the size of government in the United States was approximately 40 percent of GDP in 2012. While Di Matteo’s estimate of the tipping point is based on international data, it suggests that President Obama should reduce government to boost the U.S. economy. This conclusion is supported by a larger literature (see here, here, here, and here) that has also found that a smaller size of government than what currently exists in the United States would translate into higher annual economic growth.

Canada as Example

For a real-life example of how scaling back government has led to positive and practical economic benefits, Americans should look north. For much of the second half of the 20th century, the conventional wisdom in Canada favored increasing the size of government. This led to significant growth in government as a share of the economy from 1970 to 1992 (see accompanying chart). Specifically, total government spending as a share of GDP went from 36 percent in 1970 (just over 2 percentage points higher than in the United States) to 53 percent when it peaked in 1992 (14 percentage points higher than in the United States).

This massive growth in government spending — along with a corresponding increase in government debt — led the country down a precarious path that attracted unwanted international attention. In fact, in a January 12, 1995, editorial, the Wall Street Journal called Canada out on its debt problem, saying it had “become an honorary member of the Third World” and warning that it “could hit the debt wall.”

Soon after, the federal and many provincial governments took sweeping action to cut spending and reform programs. This led to a major structural change in the government's involvement in the Canadian economy. The Canadian reforms produced considerable fiscal savings, reduced the size and scope of government, created room for important tax reforms, and ultimately helped usher in a period of sustained economic growth and job creation.

This final point is worth emphasizing: Canada's total government spending as a share of GDP fell from a peak of 53 percent in 1992 to 39 percent in 2007, and despite this more than one-quarter decline in the size of government, the economy grew, the job market expanded, and poverty rates fell dramatically.

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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