Happy Birthday, Fox News

by Bill O'Reilly

Big birthday this week: Fox News Channel is 13 years old. I was there on Oct. 7, 1996, when the channel was launched with about 15 million subscribers. Now we have about 90 million. Back then, if "The Factor" received 50 e-mails a day we were happy. Now, we average about 2,000 electronic letters daily. FNC is perhaps the biggest media success since the networks were formed in the 1940s. Fox News is a billion-dollar enterprise that dominates cable news ratings and is consistently in the top five of all cable programs. Simply put, FNC is on fire even after all these years.

There are two compelling questions on our birthday. First, why the big success? Second, why do many media people despise us?

The success part is two-fold. There is no question that FNC leans to the right, because it gives conservative voices a prominent place on the air. No other TV news operation does this. So, logically, conservative Americans tune in for long periods of time.

Also, Fox News is not boring! This, I believe, is the biggest reason for our success. Like us or not, we move things along. We have lively people on the air. We take chances and do things differently. In primetime especially, Americans do not want dull programming. Many news programs simply recite the day's events. That will not cut it anymore. You have to give viewers something unique and entertaining. FNC does.

That makes our competitors and the ideologues running many of the nation's newspapers furious. They don't like the traditionalism of Fox News, and they seethe at our success. Thus, on any given day, you can view scathing personal attacks against FNC anchors. Think about it: Why the rage? Nobody is forced to watch Fox News. If you don't like Beck, Hannity or O'Reilly, watch the Food Channel.

The hysteria over Glenn Beck is a great example of why Fox News dominates. Here is a guy with an opinion. He has a television show. That's it. Beck freely admits he's not a newsman in any sense. He's just a guy who loves his country and wants to talk about it. Apparently, that is driving the intelligentsia insane. They can't stand a guy like Beck mouthing off. But why? Last time I looked, Beck held an American passport. So he's entitled to speak his mind. A big corporation is smart enough to pay him to do that, and millions watch. Isn't the USA a great country?

Obviously, I'm happy to be celebrating 13 years on Fox News. When I took the job, I was just looking to make a nice living and have a little fun. But now, "The O'Reilly Factor" is part of the American fabric, a broadcast that actually influences the debate in this country. Way back in 1996, who knew?

SOURCE

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Media not biased enough for Obama

There was never a single moment when White House staff decided the major media outlets were falling down on the job. There were instead several such moments. For press secretary Robert Gibbs, the realization came in early September, when the New York Times ran a front-page story about the bubbling parental outrage over President Obama's plan to address schoolchildren — even though the benign contents of the speech were not yet public. "You had to be like, 'Wait a minute,'" says Gibbs. "This thing has become a three-ring circus."

For deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer, the more hyperbolic attacks on health-care reform this summer, which were often covered as a "controversy," flipped an internal switch. "When you are having a debate about whether or not you want to kill people's grandmother," he explains, "the normal rules of engagement don't apply."

And for his boss, Anita Dunn, the aha moment came when the Washington Post ran a second op-ed from a Republican politician decrying the "32" alleged czars appointed by the Obama Administration. Nine of those so-called czars, it turned out, were subject to Senate confirmation, making them decidedly unlike the Russian monarchs. "The idea — that the Washington Post didn't even question it," Dunn says, still marveling at the decision.

All the criticism, both fair and misleading, took a toll, regularly knocking the White House off message. So a new White House strategy has emerged: rather than just giving reporters ammunition to "fact-check" Obama's many critics, the White House decided it would become a player, issuing biting attacks on those pundits, politicians and outlets that make what the White House believes to be misleading or simply false claims, like the assertion that health-care reform would establish new "sex clinics" in schools. Obama, fresh from his vacation on Martha's Vineyard, cheered on the effort, telling his aides he wanted to "call 'em out."

The take-no-prisoners turn has come as a surprise to some in the press, considering the largely favorable coverage that candidate Obama received last fall and given the President's vows to lower the rhetorical temperature in Washington and not pay attention to cable hyperbole. Instead, the White House blog now issues regular denunciations of the Administration's critics, including a recent post that announced "Fox lies" and suggested that the cable network was unpatriotic for criticizing Obama's 2016 Olympics effort.

White House officials offer no apologies. "The best analogy is probably baseball," says Gibbs. "The only way to get somebody to stop crowding the plate is to throw a fastball at them. They move."

The general in this war is Dunn, 51, a veteran campaign strategist who arrived at the White House in May... Since her arrival, the communications operation has been tightly refocused, with greater emphasis on planning ahead to shape the news cycle and controlling staff contacts with the press.

More HERE

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A hiring tax credit returns from the dead

The White House is finally coming to realize that taxes affect job creation. Terrific. Its solution seems to be to bribe employers for hiring new workers, albeit only for a couple of years. Less than terrific.

Alarmed by the rising jobless rate, Democrats are scrambling to "do something" to create jobs. You may have thought that was supposed to be the point of February's $780 billion stimulus plan, and indeed it was. White House economists Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein estimated at the time that the spending blowout would keep the jobless rate below 8%.



The nearby chart compares the job estimates the two economists used to help sell the stimulus to the American public to the actual jobless rate so far this year. The current rate is 9.8% and is expected to rise or stay high well into the election year of 2010. Rarely in politics do we get such a clear and rapid illustration of a policy failure.

This explains why political panic is beginning to set in, and various panicky ideas to create more jobs are suddenly in play. The New York Times reports that one plan would grant a $3,000 tax credit to employers for each new hire in 2010. Under another, two-year plan, employers would receive a credit in the first year equal to 15.3% of the cost of adding a new worker, an amount that would be reduced to 10.2% in the second year and then phased out entirely. Why 15.3%? Presumably because that's roughly the cost of the payroll tax burden to hire a new worker.

The irony of this is remarkable, considering the costs that Democrats are busy imposing on job creation. Congress raised the minimum wage again in July, a direct slam at low-skilled and young workers. The black teen jobless rate has since climbed to 50.4% from 39.2% in two months. Congress is also moving ahead with a mountain of new mandates, from mandatory paid leave to the House's health-care payroll surtax of 5.4%. All of these policy changes give pause to employers as they contemplate the cost of new hires—a reality that Democrats are tacitly admitting as they now plot to find ways to offset those higher costs.

Alas, their new ideas are little more than political gimmicks that aren't likely to result in many new jobs. Congress doesn't want to give up revenue for very long, so it would make the tax credits temporary. Thus anyone who is hired would have to be productive enough to justify the wage or salary after the tax-credit expires—or else the job is likely to end. An employer would be better off hiring a temp worker and saving on the benefits for the same couple of years.

More here

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The Disincentive to Work

When a recession hits, the first number everyone keeps a close eye on is the unemployment rate. Every American can relate with those who lose their jobs since it puts both their family and their career in jeopardy.

But what the government does to try to combat this invariably fails on pretty much every level. Not to mention, it was largely the government intervention that artificially created a false market, propped up inefficient industries, and spawned the inevitable unemployment in the first place.

And now what the recession is doing in the economy is shifting capital and resources to more efficient uses. That means those people who left their jobs to go pursue this false market (that the government calls “booming” industry) must now be laid off. And that also means fixing the problems that government first created.

For example, that is exactly what was seen in the recent housing bubble. People left their jobs to become real estate agents or building contractors. And now that the housing market was flooded with supply under the government-created guise of a false demand, some of those people must return to find efficient jobs in limited growth sectors.

So how does the government respond? Do the politicians whose errant policies spawned a recession admit their malfeasance and let the private sector correct its course? No, they pen H.R. 3548 the “Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2009.”

This act would extend unemployment benefits to “50 percent of the total amount of regular compensation” or “13 times the individual's average weekly benefit amount” for the year in the 29 states that have unemployment 8.5% or higher. And Congress has decided to pay for this by raising the IRS surtax on the employers that will, in turn, either raise prices or lower wages for all states.

And that’s not all. Economists R. Mark Gritz and Thomas MaCurdy found in their paper “Measuring the Influence of Unemployment Insurance on Unemployment Experiences” that “an individual who collects UI [Unemployment Insurance] is likely to experience a longer spell of nonemployment, at least to the exhaustion of UI benefits.”

In other words, unemployment insurance does not help alleviate unemployment. It exacerbates it. And that is simply because when people get paid to not work they do not try to find a job as that would result into a loss in benefits.

Once again this is a case where government means do not achieve the required (and often falsely touted ends. The politicians claim they are attempting to lower unemployment, which in turns increases production but what they end up doing is redistributing money from those who are employed (or in some case consumers, which includes unemployed) and incentivize the unemployed to stay that way through a direct redistribution of wealth.

A better plan would be to give businesses permanent tax cuts so that they can expand production and hire more people. That is the real plan that would reduce unemployment, increase productivity, and not create yet another large government program adding even more red tape to already overburdened businesses.

But don’t hold your breath: after all, creating and extending government programs is how politicians keep their jobs!

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Amusing: Truth Serum has "interviews" with newsworthy figures showing what might happen if the interview subject were on truth serum. It is headlined as The Conservative Comedy Cure For That Painful Liberal Hangover.

Iran: Regime to murder three for protesting election theft: "Three Iranians have been tentatively sentenced to death in connection with post-election protest activities, according to semi-official state media. The three — who were identified only by initials — were accused of contacts with opposition groups, the semi-official ISNA news agency reported Saturday. … Tens of thousands of Iranians took to the streets in protest following the country’s contested June 12 presidential election. Incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won a second term despite widespread fraud accusations by supporters of opposition candidates.”

In deadly ’08 Afghan battle, US weapons failed: "It was chaos during the early morning assault last year on a remote U.S. outpost in Afghanistan and staff Sgt. Erich Phillips’ M4 carbine had quit firing as militant forces surrounded the base. The machine gun he grabbed after tossing the rifle aside didn’t work either. When the battle in the small village of Wanat ended, nine U.S. soldiers lay dead and 27 more were wounded. A detailed study of the attack by a military historian found that weapons failed repeatedly at a ‘critical moment’ during the firefight on July 13, 2008, putting the outnumbered American troops at risk of being overrun by nearly 200 insurgents.” [People have been warning about this for years]

Chronic depression: "The authorities still do not understand what is going on. They are used to fooling most of the people most of the time. They think they can dupe them again — with bailouts and boondoggles. But real demand has vanished as households try to pay down their debt. That is not going to change anytime soon. Not while the federal government is sabotaging a genuine recovery. It’s savings — capital — the US economy needs. A capitalist economy in which the capitalist have no capital won’t work. Why is there no capital? Because the feds take it.”

Less religion means more government: "Soviet communism adopted Karl Marx’s teaching that religion was the ‘opiate of the masses’ and launched a campaign of bloody religious persecution. Marx was misguided about the role of religion but years later many communists became aware that turning people away from religious life increases dependence on government to address life’s problems. The history of government coercion that comes from turning from religion to government makes a new study suggesting a national decline in religious life particularly alarming to those concerned about individual freedom.”

Property rights are human rights: "A sad confusion that has once again made its way into general circulation is that the right to private property is a mere invention designed to legitimate greed and obscene riches. Actually, this is like claiming that the right to life is a mere invention designed to legitimate crude selfishness and unrestrained personal ambition. And actually there is something to this but nothing insidious, nothing bad in the end. One’s right to one’s life is indeed a moral and political bulwark against others making use of one against one’s will. The right to life is the principle by which slavery and involuntary servitude are morally and politically rebuffed, so they ought to be part of the legal system of any civilized, just human community even if they can be unwisely, imprudently applied by some.”

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

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

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

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In Defense of Glenn Beck

by Jonah Goldberg

For a self-described rodeo clown who frequently admits he isn't that bright, Glenn Beck must be doing something right. A de facto leader of the populist backlash against President Obama, he made the cover of Time magazine, with his tongue sticking out no less. His books are immediate best-sellers. His radio and TV shows have stratospheric ratings. His one-man comedy performances draw packed audiences, and the proceeds from his numerous ventures have him making north of $20 million a year.

But perhaps his most impressive feat is his ability to unite a broad coalition of liberals, media scolds and conservatives under the single banner of Beck-hatred.

Now, before I proceed, I should disclose the fact that I like Beck personally and that his support for my book "Liberal Fascism" was a huge boon, helping to push it to No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list. As a Fox News contributor, I have appeared regularly on his show. Whether that gives me more, or less, credibility when I say I cannot defend some of the things he says is for others to decide.

Still, much of the anti-Beck backlash (He's an extremist! He's paranoid! He's hate-filled!) from the left is hard to take seriously. First, this is a crowd that lets Michael Moore and Janeane Garofalo speak for them, and that celebrated the election of unfunny man Al Franken to the Senate. If you think it's racist to oppose Obama's health care reform efforts, it goes without saying that you'll think Beck is an extremist. This is what liberals always say about popular right-wingers, including Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley. For over 20 years liberals, including Presidents Clinton and Obama, have insisted that Rush Limbaugh is everything from an unpatriotic hatemonger to an enabler of domestic terrorism. It makes sense that they'd give Beck the same business.

Or consider Jon Stewart, the legitimately funny host of "The Daily Show." Stewart is reminiscent of Will Rogers -- a humorist who was nonetheless anointed by the National Press Club as the "ambassador at large of the United States." The liberal establishment swoons over him. The Television Critics Association bequeathed its award for outstanding achievement in news and information to a show that isn't even a news show. Times columnist Frank Rich seems to have a man-crush on the Peabody comedian, while Bill Moyers of PBS insists that "you simply can't understand American politics in the new millennium without 'The Daily Show.'" The hosts of NPR's in-house press watchdog show, "On the Media," claim Stewart as their role model!

Stewart's M.O. is to launch lightning attacks as a left-wing pundit and then quickly retreat to his haven across the border in Comedystan, but Beck must be pelted from the public stage for blurring the line between theater and punditry? Really?

Over at MSNBC, which until recently floated no end of paranoid theories about neoconservative plots, Beck is boogeyman for his sometimes bombastic rhetoric about fascism and whatnot. Some complaints have merit, but this is the same network whose favorite conservative pundit is the populist Pat Buchanan, not even a Republican, who has written a book explaining why World War II was a mistake and how Hitler craved peace. Meanwhile, Keith Olbermann's shtick is far more dishonest: He pretends he's Edward R. Murrow reincarnated when he's really Al Franken with more important hair.

The conservative criticism has more bite. Many conservatives believe Beck is undermining conservatism with his often goofy style and his sometimes outlandish and paranoia-tinged diatribes. In an ode to conservatives such as William F. Buckley, my friend Charles Murray writes, "Don't tell me that we have to put up with the Glenn Becks of the world to be successful. Within living memory, the right was successful. The right changed the country for the better -- through good arguments made by fine men." Murray is nostalgic for conservative leaders who were, like Murray himself, soft-spoken intellectuals.

There are problems with such nostalgia. First, there has always been a populist front on the right, even during the "glory days" when Buckley was saying he'd rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phonebook than the faculty at Harvard. Moreover, whatever Beck or Limbaugh's faults, they are more cheerful -- and more responsible -- warriors than the populist right-wingers of yesteryear. The Tea Partiers may be rowdy and ideologically diffuse, but their goals -- like Beck's -- are indisputably libertarian. And from a conservative perspective, popular libertarian uprisings should be preferable to the sort of statist populism so often celebrated on the left.

Most important, popularity is what the intellectuals were fighting for: to create a conservative culture (Americans describe themselves as conservative over liberal 2-1 ). By definition, making conservatism popular means making it less stuffy and intellectual and more accessible. Not only is Beck good at that, he actually gets people to read serious books in ways Buckley never could. Why defenestrate him from the house of conservatism merely to preserve the rarefied air?

Besides, why should conservatives support an unfair double standard? Liberals never see the antics of their more flamboyant celebrities as an indictment of liberalism itself. Perhaps it's time conservatives adopted a more liberal standard.

SOURCE

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Crime, Census and Censorship

There are serious problems with the administration of the U.S. census. Americans have good reason to be wary of the stranger's knock on the door. Unfortunately, anything critics say about the federal census can and will be used against them in the court of left-wing opinion.

First, the disturbing news about the government's most recent census travails: According to a new General Accounting Office report, botched fingerprinting by ill-trained employees led to the hiring of some 36,000 census workers with insufficient background checks. "More than 200" of those workers may have had serious criminal records, according to the GAO. The investigators revealed that: "…of the prints that could be processed, fingerprint results identified approximately 1,800 temporary workers (1.1 percent of total hires) with criminal records that name check alone failed to identify. Approximately 750 (42 percent) (of those) were terminated or were further reviewed because the Bureau determined their criminal records -- which included crimes such as rape, manslaughter and child abuse -- disqualified them from census employment."

Gulp. This comes on the heels of the Census Bureau's admission that it is uncertain of the final cost of the 2010 decennial census, and that it faces ongoing problems with handheld computers used to collect data. The failure of the handheld devices will increase census costs by up to $3 billion, officials told a House subcommittee last month. On top of that, NewMajority.com blogger Tim Mak points out, the bureau is grappling with cost overruns of nearly $90 million related to verifying its address list.

Then there's the troubling alliance between the Census Bureau and the aggressively partisan Service Employees International Union -- whose many leading officials and organizing tactics are inextricably intertwined with the disgraced personnel and methods of the ACORN community organizing racket.

GOP Congressmen Peter Roskam, Patrick McHenry and Mark Kirk pointed out in a letter to Census Director Robert Groves that the SEIU donated more than $4 million to ACORN in 2006-07. ACORN founder Wade Rathke, who covered up his brother's million-dollar embezzlement of ACORN funds, is the "Founder and Chief Organizer" of SEIU Local 100. In Chicago, SEIU Locals 1 and 880 have contributed $230,000 to ACORN groups in Illinois and Texas. Many of their offices are co-located.

Given "SEIU's intimate financial relationship with ACORN," which the Census dropped from its partnership contracts after last month's prostitution sting video fiasco, "you should take action to protect the public from the corruption of the 2010 census," the GOP critics wrote. Their warning has gone unheeded.

Instead, Groves, the SEIU and several pro-illegal amnesty groups recently launched "a historic campaign" to target "the estimated 50 million Latinos living in the United States." Inclusion of the massive illegal alien population has resulted in a radical redrawing of the electoral map. More people equals more seats. More illegal immigrants counted equals more power -- for ethnic lobbyists, Big Labor and the Democratic Party.

Alas, watchdogs can't call attention to the politicization of the census enumeration process and its bureaucratic woes too loudly.

Three weeks ago, a part-time census worker was found murdered in rural Kentucky. Bill Sparkman was tied to a tree by the neck (his feet touching the ground when discovered), and the word "fed" had been scrawled on his chest with a felt-tip pen. Police are still investigating and haven't ruled out three possibilities: suicide, accidental death or homicide. "We're not responding to any of the speculation, the innuendo or the rumors," Don Trosper, spokesman for the Kentucky State Police, told the Christian Science Monitor last week. "The Kentucky State Police concerns itself with facts."

But this hasn't stopped rabid opportunists from convicting outspoken conservatives in the media of the unresolved crime/non-crime/incident. The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan immediately fingered "Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk-radio cohorts." Author Richard Benjamin acknowledged that the area where Sparkman died is an infamous drug haven, but zeroed in on "anti-government bile" as his favored culprit. Benjamin singled out GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota for her criticism of ACORN and the Census.

"Progressive" talk-show host Stephanie Miller blamed the Tea Party movement for inciting violence. Echoing the unhinged liberal base, New York magazine indicted conservative talk-radio giant Rush Limbaugh and other "conservative media personalities, websites and even members of Congress."

They did this with abortionist George Tiller's shooting in Kansas, the Holocaust Museum shooting in Washington, D.C., and the Binghamton immigration center shooting in New York. Motives had yet to be determined and bodies were still warm, but that did not stop the liberal stampede from redefining conservative political expression as an incitement to violence.

This cynical move to demonize criticism of the census is part of a larger drive by the left to muzzle limited-government advocates at every opportunity. Who needs the Fairness Doctrine? The criminalization of conservative dissent is well underway.

SOURCE

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BrookesNews Update

What is really happening to the US economy? : The administration's attempts to revive the US economy by encouraging consumer spending will fail. If consumer spending were to rapidly expand the result will be a highly unbalanced recovery that will keep the higher stages of production depressed resulting in another 'rustbelt'. It is now self-evident that the administration is at a complete loss as to the recession
Can an increase in spare capacity reduce the rate of inflation? : Given large idle capacity and still growing unemployment most experts are of the view that the Fed can pursue aggressive monetary pumping without igniting the rate of inflation. This is an extremely dangerous error
Are increased savings prolonging the US recession? :The recession has America's economic commentariat lamenting the 'problem of insufficient consumer demand' and the rise in savings. What they are giving us is the paradox of thrift, one of the oldest and gravest fallacies in economics
Unmasking Obama:It is now abundantly clear that the image of Barack Obama sold to the American electorate was tightly edited, air-brushed, and exaggerated. He has worn a series of masks - eloquent orator, brilliant scholar, centrist, and literary sensation. All of these masks are coming off as he copes with a job for which image will not suffice
Stop the spending and cut the taxes : There was a $787 billion stimulus package, $700 billion in TARP funds and a variety of Treasury and Fed initiatives that, according to Bloomberg News, add up to $11.6 trillion in taxpayer exposure - all as part of an effort to revive the economy. And what does the US have to show for it? 10 per cent unemployment
Barack Obama's dance with despots : We have a President most avid plaudits come from two-bit, tin-horn Marxist dictators who have spent their entire adult lives imprisoning, murdering, and maiming their enslaved minions. And to make matters worse, that President - Barack 'Sorry-to-be-an-American' Obama - is in lockstep agreement with all of what Castro says and much of what Castro does
Why I Became A Conservative : Becoming a conservative in Liberal Land has its costs: ' I lost my husband. I no longer speak with my feminist mother and my liberal siblings. Eight years after my epiphany, and 33 years after moving to Los Angeles, I sold my home and business. I said good-bye to the few friends and family I still had, and left Los Angeles for good

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ELSEWHERE

Obama Should Keep Bush Tax Cuts to Get Presidency Back on Track: "President Obama may have bigger problems on his hands than reforming healthcare. For the first time, the Washington Whispers poll tested the public's appetite for continuing the Bush tax cuts, which start expiring next year, and it topped healthcare reform as the No. 1 idea that could help Obama reclaim his presidency. Over one third of those in the poll from Synovate eNation said keeping the tax rate low will help the president, just edging out his top priority at 33 percent: doing whatever it takes to reform healthcare. But continuing the cuts doesn't seem likely, since he campaigned against them and ridiculed them in his recent healthcare speech to Congress. The findings in our poll are similar to others recently that show Americans eager to keep taxes low while they wait out the recession."

Double-dip recession may be ahead: "A "V" recovery is one in which a sharp drop is followed by an equally sharp rebound. The dreaded "W" describes an economy that plunges, then recovers, luring investors into the market and businessmen into new investments, only to drop again before a final recovery, with substantial losses all around for the prematurely optimistic. The optimism engendered by soaring share prices in the quarter just ended came to a screeching halt when the Labor Department issued a jobs report so grim that the Lindsey Group consultancy warned its clients not to read it "without a bottle of Prozac handy." A spate of bad news followed. Factory orders down year-on-year by some 20 percent; a mortgage market functioning only because the government is guaranteeing about 80 percent of those written; consumer credit so tight that it is falling at the fastest rate since the crisis began two years ago, and credit increasingly unavailable to small businesses; Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner forced to be economical with the truth lest the dollar collapse and proclaim that a strong dollar is "very important to this country;" Goldman Sachs predicting that high unemployment will drive down wages and purchasing power. And that's only in the short run...."

Antisemitism at Britain's major Leftist newspaper: "Here is a little quiz. The Guardian has posted up a list here of everyone who has won the Nobel Peace Prize since its inception. Q: Which three names are omitted from the Guardian list (even though they do appear on the Nobelprize.org list which the Guardian has purportedly reproduced)?*** A: Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. And what is the common link between these three names? Precisely. It appears someone at the Guardian actually went to the effort of removing the names of the three Israeli statesmen who won the prize. Facts are sacred? ***Update, 1650: Lo and behold, the three Israeli names have now been added to the Guardian list."

Iran: Israel's threats "inexplicable": "Iran's ambassador to the UN, Mohammad Khazaee, sent a letter of protest to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moonin which he wrote that "there is no explanation for Israel's continuing threats against Tehran". He was referring to an interview given by former Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh to the Sunday Times in which he said that if Iran were not further sanctioned by this Christmas Israel would attack the country. Sneh told the paper that if Israel were forced to attack the Islamic Republic on its own it would do so, remarks the Iranian ambassador deemed "irresponsible". He said he hoped the UN would take steps against such comments. "Remarks such as these, stated once in a while by Israeli leaders, are no more than sorry excuses aimed at avoiding supplying answers regarding Israel's nuclear arsenal and deflecting public awareness from the crimes and terror Israel commits in the region," he said."

No homosexual condemnation of pedophilia?: "With justification, gays frequently object to conflating their sexual preference with pederasty. But that's why it would be welcome, in the midst ofthis weekend's gay pride events, for some gays to express their opinion on whether Kevin Jennings is an appropriate choice to serve as President Obama's Assistant Deputy Secretary of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools at the U.S. Department of Education. Jennings, of course, is the man who failed to report an illicit sexual relationship between a 15-year-old student in the school where he worked, and an older man. He also wrote the forward to a book titled, "Queering Elementary Education" (read his essay here; it obviously encourages bringing sex and sexual orientation curricula into even the earliest years of school). Now, it appears, Jennings was also fan of one Harry Hay, a staunch defender of the National American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). Right. A guy with Jennings' background and associations has no place anywhere near a school -- or accepting taxpayer dollars for a post in the Department of Education. From his history, it seems that he is far, far too comfortable entertaining the possibility of adults having sex with children. Will anyone in the gay community be willing to stand up and draw the line between one's own sexual proclivities (whether straight or gay), on the one hand, and implicitly condoning the acting-out of those proclivities with children?"

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

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

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

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

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

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Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize -- What More Do You Need to Know to Understand Today's World?

Commentary below by the always insightful Prof. Barry Rubin from Israel. I would add that I personally am mostly amused by the award. The "Peace" prizes have long been an expression of Leftist politics. They are awarded by a committee of Norwegian politicians. The Nobel prizes in science are awarded by a committee of Swedish academics. The Norwegian prizes just feed off the good name of the Nobel science prizes. There is a list here of some of those who were more deserving this year. Also see here. Possibly the most deserving person ever of getting a prize for his contributions to peace was Mahatma Gandhi. But despite often being nominated, he never got one. The Norwegian politicians had other priorities. The irreverent Bob McCarty is wondering when Obama will be made Miss America. We can't be sexist about these things, can we? -- JR

The news that President Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize seems like a prize bit of satire, like Chicago getting the Olympics. “Are you laughing or crying,” wrote a reader to me. “Neither. I’m thinking about what this tells us about the world today,” I responded. Then I checked over and over and over again on the Internet and called up several people just to make sure that this wasn’t a satire, that some new type of computer virus hadn’t infiltrated my software that would make fools of anyone credulous enough to believe this hoax.

And then I realized that it makes perfect sense. It was considered a big joke when people quoted Woody Allen, the American comedian and film director, as saying, that showing up is eighty percent of success. (Allen says he doesn’t remember ever having said that.) With Obama the percentage is considerably higher.

But after all the mocking or cheering, what this shows is that we live in the world now not of realism but of imagination and wishful thinking. The Nobel Committee even said that they gave the prize not because he has done anything but that they support him. They want him to do something.

In the past, the ancestors of Westerners had to work hard, mostly live in grinding poverty, face wars and famines. Remember the proletariat? Remember the slums? But now they —or at least not only the elites who govern but also the masses of the upper middle class that make and shape the news— are living off the fat of the land. In America, even slum-dwellers usually have cars, hi-tech music devices, and expensive sports’ shoes among the young.

Is it an accident that according to the UN Human Development Index, Norway, once the home of starving farmers and fishermen, is number one in the whole world in terms of living standards. While the Norwegians did some of it themselves, a lot comes from the exploitation of oilfields off their coasts, unearned wealth.

And the left, no longer is champion of the actual poor and downtrodden, they just talk about it a lot. In good Marxian fashion they pursue their own interests: bigger government and grant programs to give them jobs and to provide for their needs; the feeling of being a good and moral person even when those they are supporting are terrorists.

To a large extent, too, those who govern—as in the times of aristocratic rule—don’t actually produce anything, or at least not anything but words, concepts, proposals, programs, and statements. The old American slang for this is that they’ve never met a payroll. Some of them have, but the money came from either government or foundations. They know about selling an idea but not manufacturing three-dimensional objects.

Meanwhile, the resource base of society is narrowing, at least in Europe, and societies are living beyond their means. Crime is rising; terrorism and mass violence is peeking out. Proportionately large sections of proportionately large immigrant populations may not want to integrate. But to adjust to these facts makes the voters unhappy and so everyone pretends otherwise. Don’t worry, be happy is a theme which wins a lot of backing.

In all of this context, feeling good is more important than doing good. Doing good may involve doing gritty things, like building factories to employ people at higher wages (uh, oh, environment, man-made global warming, nasty developers demonized in films) or to work real hard in school or start a small business and slave away at it (what are you, Asian?)

Films, music, and other forms of entertainment—the main shapers of popular ideas—portray constantly young people who have lots of money but have never worked for it. Instant success, instant fame, instant wealth. And so what better symbol for this is Barack Obama, the man who has never achieved anything except being elected president. (His earlier posts were mainly the gifts of the most corrupt political machine in America.) He talks; everyone cheers and goes home.

Listen to the words of the Nobel Committee statement: “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future."

Really? But I would say all American presidents capture the world’s attention. As for giving people hope for a better future, which people? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Hugo Chavez? Are peasants in their fields in China and India saying to their children: “Look little [insert appropriate name] Barack Obama will save us!”

It is one thing to believe in a messianic figure but doesn’t he have to do something first?

It’s more like electing someone the world’s most popular parent because he let the kids stay up all night, not do their homework, throw parties, and consume large amounts of alcohol and drugs.

And this one: "His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population."

The most obvious point is that whether he shares the values and attitudes of Americans, the country he leads, is of minor importance. But exactly what are these values and attitudes? Oh, I have it, that the United States has long been the world’s greatest villain.

And best of all, the head of the Nobel Committee stated that the prize was given, “because we would like to support what he is trying to achieve"

It’s sort of like giving the Nobel Prize for chemistry to a scientist who hasn’t discovered anything but seems like a nice person and is, after all, trying to cure cancer. So we support what he is “trying to achieve.”

But what if he is trying to achieve it badly, What if he is trying to achieve it in a way such that he is destined to fail and make things worse? By this standard British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain deserved the Nobel Peace Prize of 1938 for his efforts to achieve peace? That’s why Nobel Prizes—and sometimes presidencies—are given to people who have already done something. They have proven an ability to do so.

President Theodore Roosevelt, a man who, in comparison, makes Obama look like a microbe, received the prize for negotiating peace in the Russo-Japanese war. In comparison, Obama has helped set back the Israel-Palestinian conflict 20 years (to be fair, 18, that is before the Oslo agreement).

But yes that’s the measure of the world today: If you envision something that makes it true. If you tell a smug elite what it wants to hear, not only do they applaud but they report in all their media that everyone applauded.

The biggest problem with all this is the following: The fate of the world may depend on whether Barack Obama is capable of learning. Yet if Obama keeps getting rewarded for doing nothing or doing the wrong thing he won’t learn. And things will get worse.

Yet we live in the real world ultimately, not the world of public relations and wishful thinking. There are prices to be paid. Impractical idealists can get people killed and make big messes as much as cynics. Let me amend that: far more than cynics.

What sums up this situation best is a line from Tom Lehrer, the math professor who once wrote successful liberal satirical songs but then stopped and never did again. Asked why, he responded: When Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize it killed satire. Poor satire is really in trouble now.

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Cloistered Media Libs Don't Get It

CNN "senior political analyst" Gloria Borger doesn't get it. Like so many cloistered mainstream media liberals, she just can't imagine why anyone would oppose Barack Obama's agenda. To her, it's all politics.

Where was Borger when Democrats, purely for partisan purposes, pummeled President George W. Bush for eight years? But let's stay focused on the present, because Republican opposition isn't about paybacks or getting even.

Borger argues that "Republicans don't really want to work with Obama" because they stand to regain congressional control simply by opposing his agenda without offering any ideas of their own. Their opposition couldn't possibly be grounded in principle because, to narrow-minded liberals such as Borger, the only legitimate ideas are liberal ones.

"In my next life," she writes, "I'd like to be an opposition party leader. What fun to go to work every day knowing you will always be right, largely because your ideas will remain untested. ... If we were in charge, you sing, the people would have tax cuts! More money in their pockets! And no deficits! But more jobs!"

Sorry, Gloria, but our ideas have been tested -- since the beginning of this republic -- and the record is pretty solid, though you might not view America's history with similar pride, given the left's revisionist mindset about America's mythical "imperialism" and capitalistic "exploitation."

As a matter of fact, reductions in marginal income tax rates have consistently stimulated economic growth without exacerbating our deficits, whose growth during the Reagan and Bush years (relatively modest, in retrospect) was attributable to unchecked government spending.

I understand that most liberals have decreed a consensus on catastrophic man-made global warming and barred further public debate despite global cooling for the past decade. But what's truly empirically indisputable is that the Kennedy, Reagan and Bush tax cuts all generated robust economic growth and yielded increases in government revenues. That may seem counterintuitive to you, but what seems counterintuitive to us are liberal plans to deliberately smother the engine of capitalism in order to imperceptibly reduce disputed global warming while other nations are prepared to "stoke their own furnaces" and offset anything we do anyway. Also counterintuitive (and nonsensical) is Obama's plan to dismantle our nukes while terrorist regimes are nuking up.

Conservative foreign policy ideas have passed the test, too. Try Ronald Reagan's "peace through strength" Cold War victory over the Soviet Union. Consider George W. Bush's phenomenally effective post-9/11 national security policies, which prevented any further attacks on American soil. How, by the way, is Obama's appeasement approach to turn us into a beloved nation by, say, our allies in France and Israel working for you? Poland? Tibet? How do you reconcile his affinity for tyrants -- such as Ortega, Chavez and Zelaya -- and his hostility toward democratic regimes in Israel and Honduras?

But if you want to talk "tested," Gloria, let's look at Obama's major domestic ideas. We have the sweep of world history as evidence that his socialistic agenda will destroy our prosperity and our liberties.

You must be impervious to socialized medicine's record of perfect failure everywhere it's been tried, including here (in part), and unwilling to take Obama at his (previous) word that his goal is indeed a single-payer system. You must also be blind to the wholesale fraud in his tested and failed Keynesian backloaded "stimulus" bills.

But how do you defend his populist campaign promises to restore transparency to government and not increase taxes on 95 percent of the American people? His cynical dismissal of claims that Obamacare could cover illegal immigrants and federally fund abortions?

The Heritage Foundation reports that Obama's no-taxes pledges for families making $250,000 a year or less "lasted exactly 15 days," as he signed a bill hiking tobacco taxes 156 percent. The House passed a trillion-dollar energy tax, and Obama is prepared to impose punitive taxes on employers and individuals who don't procure health insurance. House leaders are also threatening a national value-added tax. Of course, the dirty little secret is that with all of Obama's budget-busting programs, he'll have to pass enormous taxes on everyone just to pay the increased interest on the national debt.

Meanwhile Heritage reports that Sen. Max Baucus' health care bill would still leave 25 million Americans without insurance (kind of defeats the stated purpose, no?) and would dramatically increase the government's role in health care by expanding Medicaid. Predictably, Democrats also just rejected a Republican amendment to require any health care bill to be published online before the Senate Finance Committee votes, with nary a protest from Mr. Transparency, President Obama. Obama has also been silent in the face of congressional Democrats blocking proposed amendments to bar federal funding for abortion.

Though Gloria Borger apparently can't grasp this, conservative opposition is grounded in principle and "tested" ideas -- not primarily partisanship -- and a duty to save the nation from efforts to transform it beyond recognition.

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ELSEWHERE

Just going by averages, I know that a lot of my readers will be dog-lovers. This story is for you.

CBO math says tort reform cuts deficit: "Bolstering what's likely to be a key health care reform argument from Republicans, Congress' budget scorekeeper ruled that limiting medical malpractice lawsuits would reduce the federal deficit by $54 billion over 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office - in an analysis that projects a nearly10-fold increase in savings over its findings last year - said tort reform would cut costs by limiting the use of diagnostic tests and other services health care providers and doctors use to reduce exposure to lawsuits".

Obama Policies Turn Off Independents: "Independent voters, who have held the balance of power in recent elections, appear to be shifting to the Republican side, less than a year after they put Barack Obama in the White House. In different GOP polls released over the past two weeks, independents have shown irritation at the administration's spending policies. A recent Republican National Committee poll for GOP leadership and a Resurgent Republic survey released this week find that independents are angry at Democratic leaders and are sympathetic with the tea party tax protesters".

F.H.A. looking wobbly: "A year after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac teetered, industry executives and Washington policy makers are worrying that another government mortgage giant could be the next housing domino. Problems at the Federal Housing Administration, which guarantees mortgages with low down payments, are becoming so acute that some experts warn the agency might need a federal bailout.... some 20 percent of F.H.A. loans insured last year — and as many as 24 percent of those from 2007 — faced serious problems including foreclosure, offering a preview of a forthcoming audit of the agency’s finances.... to its critics, the F.H.A. looks like another Fannie Mae. The hearings on Thursday came on the same day that the federal agency charged with overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac provided a somber assessment of those giants’ health. In the year since the government stepped in to rescue them, the companies have taken $96 billion from the Treasury, and may need more. Since the bottom fell out of the mortgage market, the F.H.A. has assumed a crucial role in the nation’s housing market. Created in 1934 to help lower-income and first-time buyers purchase homes, the agency now insures roughly 5.4 million single-family home mortgages, with a combined value of $675 billion."

USA Today circulation down 17%: "USA Today expects to report the largest decline in circulation in its 27-year history, threatening its No. 1 position among U.S. dailies as the growth of online news and the slump in travel pummel the newspaper. While most large dailies are struggling to hold on to print subscribers and newsstand sales, USA Today is being hurt by a drop in traffic at airports and hotels, the newspaper's mainstay. It also increased the price of single copies to $1 from 75 cents in December. In a memo to staff Friday, USA Today publisher David Hunke said the average circulation at the Gannett Co. newspaper was 1.88 million from April through September. That marks a loss of 398,000 copies, or 17 percent, from the same period the year before at the newspaper, which is printed on weekdays only."

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

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

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

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ACORN Thugs Throw Out Republican Registrations

ACORN activists are famous for using your tax dollar to register characters like Mickey Mouse. But what would happen if they did something really weird — like register Republicans? As reported by Pam Geller, Black Republican Fathiyyah Muhammad of Jacksonville discovered the answer when she signed up to register voters for ACORN at $3/head.

In stark contrast to typical ACORN operatives, Muhammad is an entrepreneur who grasps the concept of economic liberty. As she puts it: "America is the place you can live your dreams if you work at it."

When potential voters didn't have a preference, she signed them up as Republicans. An apparatchik back at the ACORN office was not pleased. "I showed what I had, and he said, "No, no, you a fraud, there can't be any black Republicans,' and oh, he just kind of hung me out to dry.… But of course their main aim was to register only Democrats. They're not interested in registering Republicans."

As for the Republican registrations she collected… "They just discarded those, they weren't valid. All of the registrations… they just threw those out."

To top it off, ACORN stiffed her for the $3 per registration she'd been promised. "Everyone else got paid, all the other people got paid, but I didn't. And I didn't make a big deal about it, I just figured that it was another one of life's experiences."

Let's hope the whole country learns from its recent experiences with ACORN — and with the community activist it helped place in the White House.

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Problem Bigger Than Just ACORN

ACORN's scandals hit a nerve with conservatives. It's likely no one in the media would understand why even if they were to try. Congresswoman Michelle Bachman, however, gets right what so many people have missed, which is that the real problem with ACORN is that it's not just ACORN.

She is quoted in The Hill saying there needs to be "a ‘strong investigation' into a variety of nonprofits in the wake of political corruption allegations at ACORN," and that, "a broader investigation of other nonprofit organizations is needed because they could be using federal funds to influence the outcome of elections, like ACORN did." "No political party should be funded through a quote ‘nonprofit,'" Mrs. Bachman added.

For years conservatives have been warning that taxpayer money going to nonprofits is being used to benefit the Democratic Party. Nonprofits that are, or as they become, dependent on taxpayer money, are invariably supporters of Big Government. There are thousands of nonprofits getting taxpayer money that not only couldn't care less if a conservative ever held office, but that support Democratic policies and politicians, and are actively working to defeat conservative principles.

The Republican Party has been a big enabler of Democrats' using taxpayer money to turn cities, counties and even states bluer. It's nice to see that someone in Congress understands the bigger picture and the more troubling aspects of how too many nonprofits use taxpayer money for partisan purposes.

This is not just one nonprofit breaking the law; it's downright theft from taxpayers for political purposes, and it's Democratic political corruption that stinks to high heaven.

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Obama's anti-American blacks supporting one-another



Sometimes it's tough to tell who plays for America and who plays for ... well, the other guys. Take Mark Lloyd [above] -- the Federal Communications Commission "diversity czar" who has expressed starstruck support for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, and yet utter contempt for the U.S. First Amendment. Amazingly, Lloyd received a ringing endorsement this week from recently-appointed FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. Take a look at Clyburn sticking up for Lloyd in this exclusive interview granted to Ashley Hester of FITS News ...



As you can see in the video above, Clyburn was asked point blank if Lloyd's support of the Chavez regime and his efforts to regulate media content here in America were “in keeping with the mission of the FCC or any other U.S. government agency for that matter.”

“I will say to you that I did not read whatever his alleged statement is,” Clyburn said in a somewhat rambling response, later hinting that Lloyd may have said some things “that might have been misinterpreted.” “I know him to be a true American,” Clyburn said later in the interview. “I know him to be a lover of this country. I know him to be a committed employee. That’s the Mark Lloyd I know.”

Clearly, Clyburn doesn’t know Lloyd very well at all. While Lloyd’s love of America is dubious at best, his love of the Chavez regime in Venezuela is boundless.

“In Venezuela, with Chavez, (it) is really an incredible revolution – a democratic revolution – to begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela,” Lloyd said at a 2008 media conference. “The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela rebelled – worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government – worked to oust (Chavez). But he came back with another revolution, and then Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country.”

Indeed he did begin to “take very seriously” the media, actually shutting down a network that disagreed with him. Of course that was just one component of what Lloyd calls a “democratic” revolution that also saw the government seize private property and nationalize Venezuelan industry.

But it’s not just Lloyd’s support of Chavez that’s so disturbing – it is his radical views on the Fourth Estate here in America. “My focus here is not freedom of speech or the press,” Lloyd writes in his 2006 book, Prologue to a Farce. “This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.”

Uh, no. Freedom of speech and of the press is the only communications policy that matters. Or at least that’s the way it should be. Not to Lloyd, though. “[T]he purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance,” Lloyd writes later in his book.

Huh? Say what? The last time we checked, the purpose of free speech was to protect the democratic process from people who would seek to undermine it … people like Lloyd, quite frankly.

It gets worse, though. According to Lloyd, the best way to deal with media outlets that don’t subscribe to the government’s views is to threaten them, harass them, sue them and … if necessary … take away their licenses. He also supports forcing commercial owners who don’t tow the government line to pay fines and fee to support government broadcasting, basically replacing “dissenting” voices with government-sanctioned content.

Amazing, isn’t it? And this guy works for the American government … your government … in a position that was created especially for him by the administration of President Barack Obama. But according to Mignon Clyburn, whose job it is to regulate the marketplace of ideas in this country, we shouldn’t worry because Lloyd is a “true American” who “loves his country.” If that’s true, people, then this country is in serious, serious trouble …

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Obama Administration Defiantly Defends Another Radical Appointee

I continue to be amazed at the naivete of people who keep giving President Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt concerning his radical appointments, saying his administration isn't doing its job in vetting the appointees. When will they wake up to the reality that Obama is deliberately picking people, such as Kevin Jennings, who share his radical values?

When prescient commentators were warning of Obama's radical friends and colleagues, such as Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, during the campaign, his apologists diverted proper scrutiny, saying it's absurd to judge Obama by association. Even flawed cliches can work wonders when you have the entire mainstream media flacking for you.

Then when the radicalism of "green czar" Van Jones came to light, the left's reflexive reaction was that Jones was being victimized by an extremist element on the right and that the Internet itself had now been exposed as "an open sewer of untreated, unfiltered information." It was only when Jones' own extremism became too obvious to deny that the left shifted its line of defense to: Obama's team let him down by failing to vet Jones.

As I wrote at the time, "It's not Obama who didn't vet Jones, but the MSM who have never vetted Obama. Had they vetted Obama, they would have realized that he is Van Jones." It seems that if you wait long enough, the Obama administration will get around to vindicating its legitimate critics, such as those of us who warned that Obama was insincere when he pretended that the public option was not an indispensable component of his health care scheme. (We hear that he's recently conducted a series of secret meetings with members of Congress, trying to cobble together a majority on a bill that includes the public option.)

Indeed, with his appointment of Kevin Jennings to head the Education Department's Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools, Obama has vindicated those of us who said that the Jones selection wasn't a failure of vetting, but about Obama's appointing a like-minded radical.

Now that Jennings' radical homosexual activism has been exposed, the Obama administration hasn't said: "Oh, sorry, another one slipped through our relatively new vetting process. The president will fire him, and we'll pick someone who reflects the president's values."

The Washington Examiner's Byron York reports that Jennings seems to have the full backing of the White House. Press secretary Robert Gibbs defiantly referred Jennings' critics to the statement of Education Secretary Arne Duncan -- no centrist himself, by the way -- who stated: "Kevin Jennings has dedicated his professional career to promoting school safety. He is uniquely qualified for his job and I'm honored to have him on our team."

Well, America, are you honored to have yet another far leftist on your team and in a position to influence the education of your children, no less? Kevin Jennings' focus hasn't been safe and drug-free schools, but gay activism, which is why Rep. Steve King of Iowa has called on President Obama to fire him. According to York, King insists that Jennings has no experience in anti-drug work and that his background has not been school safety, but promoting homosexuality in public schools, including at the elementary level.

Jennings not only ran the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network but also founded it, in 1990. Sure, GLSEN purports to be primarily interested in preventing discrimination and violence against gays and lesbians in schools. But promoting homosexuality and demonizing those who don't embrace its values more fairly describes its mission. Karen Holgate of the Capitol Resource Institute put her finger on the MO of such groups when she said: "This whole movement is not about tolerance. It's about redirecting the hate towards anyone who does not agree that homosexuality is a normal, positive and healthy lifestyle."

In 2000, GLSEN, along with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, co-hosted a "Teach Out" at Tufts University, in Boston, where organizers instructed public-school teachers how to incorporate positive messages about homosexuality into their curricula. At this conference, GLSEN also led a youth workshop, "What They Didn't Tell You about Queer Sex & Sexuality in Health Class," which was advertised to "youth only, ages 14 to 21."

During the session, one instructor explained the process of "fisting" to the students. Fisting is the consensual insertion by one person of his hand and arm into another person's anal cavity. How is this instruction helpful in preventing bullying?

I'm not sure how the Obama administration will attempt to explain away Kevin Jennings' sordid associations, any more than it can rationalize his admitted failure, as a high-school teacher, to notify the parents of a 15-year-old boy who told him he had had relations with an older man, instead telling the boy, "I hope you used a condom." How much longer can Obama partisans deny who Obama really is?

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ELSEWHERE

Obama joins Yassir Arafat: "President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," the Norwegian Nobel Committee said, citing his outreach to the Muslim world and attempts to curb nuclear proliferation. The stunning choice made Obama the third sitting U.S. president to win the Nobel Peace Prize and shocked Nobel observers because Obama took office less than two weeks before the Feb. 1 nomination deadline. Obama's name had been mentioned in speculation before the award but many Nobel watchers believed it was too early to award the president." [A great victory for hot air]

Officials: ACORN won't get grant: "Obama administration officials said Wednesday there is no chance that ACORN will get a Homeland Security grant it was awarded last month because of a provision in a bill signed into law last week prohibiting any federal funding to the controversial group. Several members of Congress said they were pleased that ACORN will not get the money, which would have come from funding typically earmarked for fire departments across the country, but they questioned why it had been awarded to ACORN in the first place. At least one also still wants official assurance of a permanent withdrawal of the $997,402 fire safety grant. "We are perplexed as to how this organization would even be considered for a first-responder grant," said a letter sent Wednesday to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano by Rep. Darrell Issa of California, ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Committee."

Hate crime laws may extend to homosexuals: "Congress is poised to expand federal hate crimes laws to include sexual orientation, attaching it to a defense bill that could still run into trouble because it tests President Obama's will to cut spending. The House on Thursday voted 281-146 to pass the 2010 defense bill, which lays out Pentagon priorities for the next year and sets the rules for thorny issues such as treatment of suspected terrorists. The Senate still needs to act, though passage is expected. "It's a very exciting day for us," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who called expanding hate-crimes laws to include sexual orientation a long-standing goal of hers. But Republican leaders said the bill criminalized "thought crimes" and complained bitterly that Democrats forced the provision through as part of the defense bill."

Why the US will survive this recession: "Over the course of two months, New York State alone lost more than $100 million. Of 850 banks in America, 343 closed. The unemployment rate for blue-collar jobs skyrocketed to 30 percent. Most agree that this incredible collapse was due in large part to banks and a system that encouraged wild speculation and extended credit beyond what could be supported. Sound familiar? This is not a description of what happened last year. Rather, it occurred during the abject and catastrophic ‘Panic of 1837.’ (New York’s losses then would be about $1.9 billion in today’s dollars.) While there is much to learn from the collapse itself, the recovery process through 1844 offers important lessons to America in 2009.”

The cost of corporate communism: "Lack of choice, lazy, unresponsive customer service, a culture of exploitation and a small powerbase formed by cronyism and nepotism are the hallmarks of a communist system that steals from its citizenry, and a major reason why America spent half a century fighting a Cold War with the U.S.S.R. And yet today we find ourselves as a country in two distinctly different categories: those who are forced to compete tooth and nail each day to provide value to society in return for income for ourselves and our families and those who would instead use our lawmaking apparatus to help themselves to our tax money and/or to protect themselves from true competition. If you allow weak, outdated players to take control of the government and change the rules so they are protected from the natural competition and reward systems that have created so many innovations in our country, you not only steal from the citizens on behalf of the least worthy but you also doom them by trapping the capital that would be used to generate new innovation and, most tangibly in our current situation, jobs.”

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

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

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

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Elites and Tyrants

by Walter E. Williams

Rep. Diane Watson said, in praising Cuba's health care system, "You can think whatever you want to about Fidel Castro, but he was one of the brightest leaders I have ever met." W.E.B. Dubois, writing in the National Guardian (1953) said, "Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. ... But also -- and this was the highest proof of his greatness -- he knew the common man, felt his problems, followed his fate." Walter Duranty called Stalin "the greatest living statesman . . . a quiet, unobtrusive man." George Bernard Shaw expressed admiration for Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin.

John Kenneth Galbraith visited Mao's China and praised Mao and the Chinese economic system. Gunther Stein of the Christian Science Monitor admired Mao Tsetung and declared ecstatically that "the men and women pioneers of Yenan are truly new humans in spirit, thought and action," and that Yenan itself constituted "a brand new well integrated society, that has never been seen before anywhere." Michel Oksenberg, President Carter's China expert, complained that "America (is) doomed to decay until radical, even revolutionary, change fundamentally alters the institutions and values," and urged us to "borrow ideas and solutions" from China.

Even Harvard's late Professor John K. Fairbank, by no means the worst tyrant worshipper, believed that America could learn much from the Cultural Revolution, saying, "Americans may find in China's collective life today an ingredient of personal moral concern for one's neighbor that has a lesson for us all." Keep in mind that estimates of the number of Chinese deaths during China's Cultural Revolution range from 2 to 7 million people. Mao Tsetung was admired by many academics and leftists across our country. Just think back to the campus demonstrations of the '60s and '70s when campus radicals, often accompanied by their professors, marched around singing the praises of Mao and waving Mao's little red book, "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung." Forty years later some of these campus radicals are tenured professors and administrators at today's universities and colleges, as well as schoolteachers and principals indoctrinating our youth.

The most authoritative tally of history's most murderous regimes is in a book by University of Hawaii's Professor Rudolph J. Rummel, "Death by Government." Statistics are provided at his website. The Nazis murdered 20 million of their own people and those in nations they captured. Between 1917 and 1987, Stalin and his successors murdered, or were otherwise responsible for the deaths of, 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, Mao Tsetung and his successors were responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese.

Today's leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from Nazism. However, there's little or no distinction between Nazism and socialism. Even the word Nazi is short for National Socialist German Workers Party. The origins of the unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the '20s, '30s and '40s. Those horrors were simply the end result of long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for "social justice." It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans, like many of today's Americans, who would have cringed at the thought of genocide, who built the Trojan horse for Hitler to take over.

Few Americans have the stomach or ruthlessness to do what is necessary to make their governmental wishes come true. They are willing to abandon constitutional principles and rule of law so that the nation's elite, who believe they are morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us, can have the tools to implement "social justice." Those tools are massive centralized government power. It just turns out last century's notables in acquiring powerful central government, in the name of social justice, were Hitler, Stalin, Mao, but the struggle for social justice isn't over yet, and other suitors of this dubious distinction are waiting in the wings.

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The Consolidators: A Western by Mark Lloyd

There can be little doubt about who wears the black hats in the new, myopically focused, socialistically inspired drama of the Old West by, and starring, FCC Diversity Officer Mark Lloyd.

The villains in Lloyd’s saga are the commercial owners of radio stations, like Clear Channel Communications, who typically have “stations in multiple markets or more than three stations in a single market.” Portrayed by him as being analogous to the cattle barons of the Old West, who greedily come into town and gobble up scarce resources and leave the local population in the lurch, these corporate station owners are represented as doing the same with the limited broadcast resources throughout the land.

And it just so happens, Lloyd’s research tells him, that the stations in the possession of these group owners “were statistically more likely to air conservative talk.” Furthermore, he claims that, in markets where there is “a clear demand and proven success of progressive talk” these dastardly bullies “still elect to stack the airwaves with one-sided broadcasting.” In short, the game plan of these feckless capitalists is to go broke. These are just some of the inane conclusions reached in Mr. Lloyd’s much discussed article, “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.”

Elsewhere, Lloyd claims to take the side of his much maligned townsfolk in a piece called “Local Media Diversity Matters.” Ostensibly defending their “Constitutional rights of free speech” he claims, “Americans’ ability to learn about and debate local, state and national issues and to monitor our representatives depends upon our exposure to news and discussion that is not controlled by a small group of mostly like-minded corporations.”

Leaving aside that he somehow forgot to add the obligatory word “evil” before “corporations,” it seemingly never occurs to him that this “small group” may, in fact, express the free-market friendly views of the many ordinary Americans who choose to listen to their radio programming. He seems to ascribe to the Marxist illusion that views supportive of free-markets can’t be the real beliefs of ordinary people.

Meanwhile, back in town, some of the citizens, meeting at the local courthouse, are calling on Marshall Lloyd to save the day by making the FCC reinstitute the “Fairness Doctrine.” Lloyd declines, explaining that he does not believe that repeal of the “Fairness Doctrine” in 1987 caused conservative radio to dominate the airwaves. So, simply reinstating it will not fix the “problem.”

What he thinks really caused the consolidation of ownership in radio stations, and the explosion in numbers of conservative talk radio stations nationwide, was an action by the FCC in 2003 “that substantially relaxed a wide range of media ownership regulations,” in part by the creation of a new Diversity Index.

Now Lloyd intends to rectify the situation by applying a newly developed, anti-free-enterprise formula for measuring media diversity in local communities. He holds that it will, “measure media diversity according to democratic values, not market values” (Exactly which democratic values are diametrically opposed to market values he doesn’t make clear.)

And exactly what anti-democratic values will his diversity formula overcome? Well, in an article entitled “Forget the Fairness Doctrine” he observes that, even in its heyday in the 1960s, it did not address the fact that the mainstream media was “middle-class, anti-communist, Protestant, male and white.”

His earlier research tells him, that “stations owned by women, minorities, or local owners are statistically less likely to air conservative hosts or shows.” So, he wishes to use the power of government, as embodied in his new diversity formula as a tool for wresting the licenses, and station ownership, of groups now supporting conservative talk radio so that he may redistribute them to those he considers worthy of his largesse. What a fine example of the Marxist principle of the redistribution of wealth from someone who praised Chavez’ Communist takeover of Venezuela as an “incredible revolution” and who has voiced the view that Chavez had it right when he shrewdly took over 200 stations owned by land-owners who represented his political opposition. Mark Lloyd has, it seems, learned well from his de facto mentor.

And does anyone with one iota of common sense really think that Lloyd’s planned move to squelch the Left’s conservative talk radio opposition, no matter what its ostensible justification, is anything other than the same sort of stark political power grab that Chavez master-minded in Venezuela---under the guise, of course, of helping the people?

Conservative talk radio virtually saved the entire medium of AM radio from oblivion in the 1980s. If anything, its proponents are heroes for doing so. And I don’t therefore have a very good review to write of Lloyd’s western portraying them as the villains. I also don’t view him as wearing a white hat either. It is extremely alarming that someone whose core views are so obviously antagonistic to free-market capitalism has been given such a place of prominence in the increasingly bizarre Obama Administration.

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Black "News Analyst" Labels Police as Racist Terrorists

Marc Lamont Hill, the far-left hip-hop professor and paid Fox News Channel analyst, has a record in support of cop-killers. And now we have learned that he went on "The O'Reilly Factor" to defend black militants who held a March vigil in honor of Lovelle Mixon, a suspected rapist with a lengthy criminal record, who murdered four Oakland police officers. Hill said on Fox News that the activists, many of them from a communist organization, were protesting "police terrorism."

Recall that Hill claims that cop-killer Assata Shakur, who fled to Communist Cuba after escaping from prison, is innocent. Hill has also declared his support for Mumia Abu-Jamal, another convicted cop-killer, who is on death row. Hill called him a "freedom fighter" and "political prisoner" devoted to "black liberation" and announced that the convicted killer would be contributing to Hill's website as a weekly contributor. "Welcome Brother Mumia!!!!" Hill said.

The defense of the protesters in the Mixon case adds to the growing concern about this Fox News contributor, who is paid handsomely by the channel to appear on various Fox News Channel shows and is supposed to provide the appearance of fairness and balance. But is cop-killing a matter that requires two sides of the issue?

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Clunkers in Practice

One of Washington's all-time dumb ideas

Remember "cash for clunkers," the program that subsidized Americans to the tune of nearly $3 billion to buy a new car and destroy an old one? Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood declared in August that, "This is the one stimulus program that seems to be working better than just about any other program."

If that's true, heaven help the other programs. Last week U.S. automakers reported that new car sales for September, the first month since the clunker program expired, sank by 25% from a year earlier. Sales at GM and Chrysler fell by 45% and 42%, respectively. Ford was down about 5%. Some 700,000 cars were sold in the summer under the program as buyers received up to $4,500 to buy a new car they would probably have purchased anyway, so all the program seems to have done is steal those sales from the future. Exactly as critics predicted.

Cash for clunkers had two objectives: help the environment by increasing fuel efficiency, and boost car sales to help Detroit and the economy. It achieved neither. According to Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer, at best "the reduction in gasoline consumption will cut our oil consumption by 0.2 percent per year, or less than a single day's gasoline use." Burton Abrams and George Parsons of the University of Delaware added up the total benefits from reduced gas consumption, environmental improvements and the benefit to car buyers and companies, minus the overall cost of cash for clunkers, and found a net cost of roughly $2,000 per vehicle. Rather than stimulating the economy, the program made the nation as a whole $1.4 billion poorer.

The basic fallacy of cash for clunkers is that you can somehow create wealth by destroying existing assets that are still productive, in this case cars that still work. Under the program, auto dealers were required to destroy the car engines of trade-ins with a sodium silicate solution, then smash them and send them to the junk yard. As the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic, "Economics in One Lesson," you can't raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them.

In the category of all-time dumb ideas, cash for clunkers rivals the New Deal brainstorm to slaughter pigs to raise pork prices. The people who really belong in the junk yard are the wizards in Washington who peddled this economic malarkey.

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ELSEWHERE



MI: Detroiters turn out for “free government money”: "Thousands hoping to get applications for federal help on rent and utility bills turned Cobo Center into a chaotic scene today. They came by foot, wheelchair, bicycle and car. About six left by ambulance after tensions rose and people were trampled, according to a paramedic on the scene. One unfortunate soul got his car booted. Detroiters were trying to pick up 5,000 federal assistance applications from the city at Cobo because Detroit received nearly $15.2 million in federal dollars under the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program, which is for temporary financial assistance and housing services to individuals and families who are homeless, or who would be homeless without this help. … Outside Cobo on Wednesday, some people reportedly were going through the crowd, snatching the necessary applications from those who’d already obtained them. There also was a constant din of screams from people insisting they be let inside.”

Support Is Building for a Tax Credit to Help Hiring: "The idea of a tax credit for companies that create new jobs, something the federal government has not tried since the 1970s, is gaining support among economists and Washington officials grappling with the highest unemployment in a generation. The proposal has some bipartisan appeal among politicians eager both to help their unemployed constituents and to encourage small-business development. Legislators on Capitol Hill and President Obama’s economic team have been quietly researching the policy for several weeks. “There is a lot of traction for this kind of idea,” said Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Republican whip. “If the White House will take the lead on this, I’m fairly positive it would be welcomed in a bipartisan fashion.” [This is what should have been done with the "stimulus" money]

Mobs, violent criminals turn to Medicare fraud: "Lured by easier money and shorter prison sentences, Mafia figures and other violent criminals increasingly are moving into Medicare fraud and spilling blood over what was once a white-collar crime. Around the nation, federal investigators have been threatened, an informant’s body was found riddled with bullets, and a woman was discovered dead in a pharmacy under investigation, her throat slit with a piece of broken toilet seat. For criminals, Medicare schemes offer a greater payoff and carry much shorter prison sentences than offenses such as drug trafficking or robbery.”

Arguing with the left: Some recent examples: "One man argued with me that the State must take care of everyone. I was pretty much unable to say anything in response since he tended to shout me down the moment I started to speak. I would say: ‘If you aren’t going to let me say anything then the conversation is over.’ He would insist that he’d let me speak and then halfway through my first sentence start shouting again. He finally stormed off. Now and then he’d pass by me and couldn’t resist flinging an insult each time. The oddest one was he walked past and shouted to an oncoming individual, who had no part of the previous ‘discussion,’ that: ‘Libertarians are just people who refuse to grow up.’ Considering how strenuously he was arguing that the State must care for us, due to our own inabilities to take care of ourselves, I found the argument a bit odd.”

Obama kowtows to labor unions: "Last year as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama told the Building Trades National Legislative Conference that ‘we need to make sure the government uses project labor agreements to encourage completion of projects on time and on budget.’ He complained that project labor agreements had been banned by the Bush administration. PLAs require construction firms to follow union work rules and to hire their workers through a union hiring hall. Workers hired under PLAs have to pay union dues whether they belong to the union or not. Candidate Obama’s audience knew perfectly well that his speech had more to do with their wallets than with any high-minded concern for the public interest. The real purpose of PLAs is to discourage nonunion contractors from bidding on public projects. It’s a matter of the 16 percent of construction workers who belong to unions protecting their jobs and perks from the other 84 percent.”

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

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