PROBLEMS

My internet connection (cable) has been "down" since midday to my blogging today is much disrupted. Some blogs are up as usual while others have reduced or absent posts. It's the obnoxious Telstra/Bigpond again. Their's is the only cable that passes my door so I have to put up with their contempt for their customers. If their service gets any worse I may add a wireless connection via another provider. I am posting this at a friend's place.

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Money DOES make you happy

Or so a large recent survey seems to show

Objective Confirmation of Subjective Measures of Human Well-Being: Evidence from the U.S.A.

By Andrew J. Oswald and Stephen Wu

A huge research literature, across the behavioral and social sciences, uses information on individuals’ subjective well-being. These are responses to questions—asked by survey interviewers or medical personnel—such as, "How happy do you feel on a scale from 1 to 4?" Yet there is little scientific evidence that such data are meaningful. This study examines a 2005–2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System random sample of 1.3 million U.S. citizens. Life satisfaction in each U.S. state is measured. Across America, people’s answers trace out the same pattern of quality of life as previously estimated, from solely nonsubjective data, in one branch of economics (so-called "compensating differentials" neoclassical theory, originally from Adam Smith). There is a state-by-state match (r = 0.6, P < 0.001) between subjective and objective well-being. This result has some potential to help to unify disciplines.

Science 29 January 2010: Vol. 327. no. 5965, pp. 576 - 579

More detail here. The study actually shows that people are happier if they live in more pleasant places but more pleasant places are of course in general more expensive so money buys you happiness by giving you better location choices.

One would think that location choice was only a small factor in the many things that can affect one's happiness but the authors report a remarkably high correlation of .6 between happiness and the "amenity" of where you live. The correlation is however an "ecological" one (involving grouped data) in statistical terms and such correlations are often inordinately high so can be generalized from only weakly.

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Richard Nisbett’s Leftist account of IQ is as crooked as one would expect

I had several shots at Nisbett's nonsense last year (e.g. here) so it is good to see a demolition of his claims from someone at the cutting edge of IQ research -- Professor J. Philippe Rushton (below)

In his book, Intelligence and How to Get It, Richard E. Nisbett, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, asserts that cultural factors alone are sufficient to explain all the race differences to be observed in IQ and educational achievement.

Nisbett [Email] criticizes the nature + nurture model Arthur Jensen and I presented in 2005 in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. . [Thirty Years Of Research On Race Differences In Cognitive Ability (PDF)] Nisbett claims the heritability of IQ is lower than assumed, that Blacks have substantially narrowed the gap on Whites, that any remaining differences can be eliminated through educational and social intervention, and that any assertion of a mean IQ of 70 for sub-Saharan Africans is “desperately wrong”.

The dust jacket blurb puts Nisbett’s book in the tradition of Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man (1981, 1996). What is striking, however, is how much ground the egalitarians have given since Gould’s effort to debunk race, genetics, and IQ.

Nisbett concedes that general intelligence exists, that IQ tests predict success at both school and work, that scores are influenced by genes, and that in White populations, genes contribute to social class differences. He even accepts that IQ is related to brain size and that “Blacks are sometimes found to have smaller brains than Whites”. Gould must be spinning in his grave!

Such is the state of expert opinion today that Nisbett simply had to make these concessions lest his book be disqualified as serious scholarship. But while he admits that genes play a role in accounting for within-group differences, he still maintains they play no significant part in between-group differences.

Nisbett acknowledges that measured group differences exist: Jewish (mean IQ = 113), East Asian (107), White (100), South Asian (87), Hispanic (87), African American (85), and sub-Saharan African (70), although he erroneously claims that South Asians score as highly as East Asians. But Nisbett asserts that family pressure for success leads East Asians and Jews to high levels of achievement, while low expectations and a lack of opportunity lead Hispanics and Blacks to much lower levels of achievement.

Jensen and I have provided a long point-counterpoint review of Nisbett’s book in The Open Psychology Journal. [Race and IQ: A Theory-Based Review of the Research in Richard Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It(PDF)] We found much that was admirable and informative in it, such as the cost-benefit survey of the literature on educational interventions and what can be done to increase school performance. But, sadly, we concluded it was mainly a work of advocacy, not scholarship.

Nisbett misrepresents much of the available information using highly selective reviews of the literature. Especially egregious are his many errors of omission. For example, while complaining of unrepresentative samples in a 1991 review paper by Richard Lynn, Nisbett side-stepped the very much larger compilation of data in Lynn and Vanhanen’s 2006 book. Nisbett completely ignores the adoption studies of East Asians, as well as those on brain size showing a genetic contribution to their high achievement.

According to Nisbett, Blacks closed the IQ gap by 5.5 points (35%) between 1970 and 1992. At the same time, Blacks narrowed the gap in educational achievement by a commensurate 35%. Nisbett argues that educational interventions such as the Milwaukee project, the Abecedarian project, and the Infant Health and Development Program, imply the gap could be eliminated altogether.

Contra Nisbett, however, Jensen and I found that IQ differences between Blacks and Whites have been steady for nearly 100 years, at between 15 and 20 points (about 1.1 standard deviations). After re-analyzing the data on which Nisbett relied, we found that the most optimistic assessment of the Black IQ gain was 2.1 points (14%). Using a wider array of tests, we found no narrowing at all. [See The Black-White Test Score Gap and the New Math Results By Charles Murray, AEI blog, October 15, 2009]

Nor has there been much (if any) narrowing on tests of educational achievement. Furthermore, the most powerful intervention strategies result, at best, in moving people from the 16th to the 25th percentile at the cost of millions of dollars per person.

Nisbett reviews several adoption studies to demonstrate the power of environmental intervention on IQ. He claims that poor children adopted into wealthier homes made huge gains—between 12 and 18 points. But he omitted to mention the finding that by late adolescence, these effects have dissipated.

Nisbett’s tendency to omit crucial information is particularly apparent in his discussion of the well-known Minnesota Trans-Racial Adoption Study in which White, Mixed-Race, and Black children were raised by upper-middle-class White parents in Minnesota. This was the largest study of its kind ever undertaken, and the only one with a longitudinal follow-up component, testing the same children at 7 years (in 1975) and 17 years (in 1986).

Nisbett describes how adopted White children averaged an IQ of 112 at age 7, but he omits that on follow-up at age 17, the IQ of these White children had fallen to 106. He did note that the Black children on follow-up had dropped from a mean IQ of 97 to one of 89—which he attributes to the psychological disturbance and “identity problems” they suffered from being raised by Whites!

Compounding his sins of omission, Nisbett neglects to mention three trans-racial adoption studies of East Asian children. In contrast to the Black children, the East Asian children adopted by White parents, despite being malnourished at birth, grew to excel in both intelligence (mean IQ = 108) and educational achievement......

Our conclusion: Predictions that the Black-White IQ gap will narrow are acts of blind faith. A much stronger dose of skepticism is required than Nisbett manifested in regard to the power of educational and social interventions.

Much more HERE (See the original for links)

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Less Economic Freedom = Fewer Jobs for Americans

What does America’s declining economic freedom mean for you? It means that America will create fewer jobs. And that means that Americans will be poorer, as well as less free. A statement last week by Graham Mackay, the head of SAB Miller, one of the world’s largest brewers (they make, among many other beers, Miller Lite), explains how and why this will happen.

In 1999, SAB Miller moved its headquarters to London, attracted, Mackay said, by “the liberal and predictable tax regime.” But since the mid-2000s, the UK has been losing economic freedom. In fact, in 2010, the UK fell out of the top ten for the first time, just as the U.S. dropped into the ranks of the ‘mostly free’ in the Index of Economic Freedom. The UK’s ranking has now declined for four consecutive years, and the level of economic freedom in Britain is now as low as it has been since the Index began to measure it in 1995.

As a result, Mackay pointed out, the conditions that drew SAB Miller to Britain no longer exist:

Today the tax system is not predictable and there have been numerous increases, particularly when it comes to personal taxation. This means that as a global company we are no longer able to attract our best global talent to the UK. Why would someone move from Hong Kong where the marginal tax rate is 15 per cent and come to the UK where it is closer to 52 per cent. Taxation was a key part of our decision to locate a new global procurement business not in the UK but in Zug in Switzerland.

That single decision lost Britain 400 jobs. And SAB Miller is not the only company to flee the increasingly unfree economy of Britain. The damage goes far beyond the banking and financial sector: firms such as Vodafone, the cellular provider, have also departed.

And where have they gone? SAB Miller is worried about drawing talent to Britain (ranked eleventh in the Index) from Hong Kong (ranked first) and instead set up its new business in Switzerland (ranked sixth). Vodafone went in part to Ireland (ranked fifth). This is a competitive world, and businesses have choices. If the U.S. continues to fall behind in economic freedom, some businesses – as the example in Britain of SAB Miller shows – will make a rational decision to move elsewhere, and others will have less money to pay workers because they will be giving more to the taxman.

In his State of the Union address, the President stated that “And to encourage these and other businesses to stay within our borders, it’s time to finally slash the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas and give those tax breaks to companies that create jobs in the United States of America.”

But they’re not “our jobs” by eternal right. They are jobs created by private enterprise, within the context of the burdens imposed by the federal government. And as those burdens get heavier, the number of jobs on offer in this country shrinks. If the President is serious about job creation, he will address the real threat to it: the policies of his administration, and of past ones, that reduced the willingness of companies to invest and their ability to grow by restricting our economic freedom.

SOURCE

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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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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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A constitutional lawyer (guess who?) who doesn't know the difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence

The media constantly overlook that this guy is a DUMMY

In last night's State of the Union Address, President Obama said: "We find unity in our incredible diversity, drawing on the promise enshrined in our Constitution: the notion that we are all created equal...."

Um, wrong founding document, Mr. President. It is in our Declaration of Independence that we read: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"

Remember when we were force-fed by many in the media articles about the storied legal career of Barack Obama? The first black President of Harvard Law Review (who never wrote a signed legal opinion; nor released his transcripts) and the teacher of Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago. He was our last best hope to restore respect for the Constitution in the Oval Office.

If George Bush or any Republican had made the same mistake can you imagine the media firestorm? I still recall that the New York Times ran a series of photos on the front-page when George Bush tried to open the wrong door while he was on a diplomatic visit to China. This is leagues above that simple faux pas.

I recall a New York Times article portrayed Obama's years as a constitutional teacher at the University of Chicago Law School that may relate to his problems understanding the basic principles of our founding documents. The article noted he avoided legal discussions with fellow teachers: "The Chicago law faculty is full of intellectually fiery friendships that burn across ideological lines. Three times a week, professors do combat over lunch at a special round table in the university's faculty club, and they share and defend their research in workshop discussions. Mr. Obama rarely attended"

Now maybe we know why. He just has no idea how the Constitution works. And a President pledges to the best of his ability "to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Of course, he also misread the Supreme Court decision on campaign speech. He has a long history of misunderstanding basic principles of law.

More HERE (See the original for links)

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The Public is Not Buying the Spending “Freeze”

During his State of the Union address, President Obama talked about a proposed spending freeze (underwhelming, as it is) and how such action can save money and get us out of debt. Well, the good news is that no one is buying it. Virtually no one believes that the spending freeze will do anything to have an impact on the deficit.

According to Rasmussen Reports, only 9% of the population think that the proposed spending freeze will have a big impact on the deficit. Forty-two percent believe that it will have no impact. However, there is a majority in support of a spending freeze, but there is a slightly larger majority in favor of reduced spending in government — a message that the Obama administration clearly is not getting. Obama is giong to grow the deficit by $13 trillion over the next ten years while having a freeze of $447 billion with only 15 billion to be saved.

Although it sounds like a large number (and 447 billion is certainly nothing to sneeze at), it is only a very small portion of federal spending. As we stated in our reaction to the State of the Union Address, it is only about 1/8 of all spending. They would not freeze all of government spending, just those that won’t “create” jobs. Aside from the obvious problem that the government cannot create jobs, it would cut costs from programs like the Judiciary, but others such as the Department of Education would see increased spending.

So with all of President Obama’s campaigning during the State of the Union address for his spending freeze, the public seems largely unimpressed. The Obama Administration needs to start realizing that the public is not buying their failed policies, and they should look in a new direction. We have a few good ideas here at Heritage.

SOURCE

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Why Obama's Proposals Are Close to Worthless

The incoherent State of the Union address this week only reinforced what is becoming painfully obvious to any observer--President Obama's proposals are more confusing than clarifying, they pretend to do something big but don't achieve it, and they seem desperately out of touch with the average American.

How else can one explain that following his involvement in the campaign, he helped lose a Senate seat in Massachusetts that had belonged to his party since before his own birth? "But," you may argue, "the State of the Union was last week, what about his accomplishment since?"

Ok. I'll take the bait. Let's just deal with the past 24 hours. On the road in Florida, and in conference with Republican congressional representatives, the President still could not come up with coherent, sound ideas for resolving unemployment, or re-reforming a health care proposal that few in the nation like--on the left or right. In the conference with House Republicans he even went so far as to reassert his oft repeated lie that the GOP had not put forward any ideas in the Health Care debate. Understandably Mike Pence, Dr. Tom Price, and Paul Ryan all seemed to strenuously object and attempted to hold Obama's feet to the fire. Obama literally bristled on camera while being held to such open accountability before the watching television eye....

Then there's the proposed "freeze on spending" that the White House revealed more details concerning. Twenty billion is all they plan to address. Twenty billion? Twenty billion? Tarp was $350 billion x 2. Stimulus was $800 billion on paper. And the proposed budget Obama asked for topped out at $3 trillion. Don't get me wrong--I'd be thankful for a liberal to ever admit they will curb any amount of spending, but Obama's macho bravado on being fiscally sound doesn't resonate with his policies.

Thus is the state of things with Barack Obama. 400 speeches didn't "explain health care enough" to the American people, and spending freezes that begin in 2011 and consist of roughly 00.58% are supposed to be like a wave of the magic wand and cause people to fall back into their wonder-lust with the man who speaks hope and change.

But wasn't that kind of indicative of what we ended up getting all of Obama's first year? He was willing to ignore the increasing unemployment while the rates ballooned to over double what they were on average under Bush, but moved heaven and earth to get the himself overseas to campaign for the city of Chicago to score the Olympics.

He knew that 1 in 10 Americans are without jobs, and 1 in 5 families don't make enough to pay their bills with the work they have, but played more rounds of golf in his first year than Bush did in all eight.

He pushed the domestic "criminal" trials of hardened terrorist animals upon the city that suffered the most on 9/11, but held 9 cabinet level meetings to decide to follow through on his own plans to try to win in Afghanistan. He accepted the Nobel prize for peace... for doing nothing... and then sent 30,000 troops to attempt a strategy that military leaders said would work best with 80,000.

And best of all at the State of the Union, he claimed that the science is settled on "climate change" when the world had seen its fraud exposed, and even this weekend has had more evidence of the manipulation of that fraud come to light, but he pushed for the job killing, tax implementing cap and trade bill anyway.

From purely a strategic perspective, Obama has failed even himself. There is nothing for him to fall back on. It's all on his shoulders. His lies, as reported by... CNN. His plans, as he states them for himself. His terms, because he refuses to offer the other side a place at the table to discuss. President Obama is utterly out of touch with real people. And his worthless policy priorities demonstrate that better than any opposing strategist could ever devise.

SOURCE

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The Era of Laissez-Faire?

One of the established memes about the financial crisis is that it demonstrates the failure of unfettered capitalism, the dog-eat-dog, laissez-faire environment that prevailed in the West over the last few decades, all driven by the ideology of “free-market fundamentalism.” This seems to be a truism among most of the Commentariat. Of course, as pointed out repeatedly on this blog, the truth is virtually the opposite: there was never any “deregulation,” the Bush Administration spent public money like a drunken sailor, and government continued to expand as it always does. But a picture is worth a thousand words, so try these on for size. (US data)



One response I sometimes hear is “Sure, there are more regulations and more government spending, but the set of things that should be regulated and the amount of government spending the economy needs are growing even faster!” This is essentially the Krugman-DeLong view about the stimulus: it just wasn’t big enough. Or they say that financial markets were “deregulated,” de facto, because the number of regulations and regulators increased more slowly than the number of new financial instruments and new markets. I wonder, though: are these falsifiable propositions? No matter how big the government is, if there are any problems, it’s always because the government isn’t big enough!

More charts HERE

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ELSEWHERE

White House: US government deficit to hit all-time high: "As President Obama prepares to unveil his $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal year 2011, which begins Oct. 1, the White House is projecting the current fiscal year will end with a $1.6 trillion deficit, congressional sources confirmed to Fox News. Next year’s budget will have a nearly $1.3 trillion debt, according to those sources, dropping to just over half that — $700 billion in fiscal year 2013 — before jumping back up to $1 trillion in 2020, the furthest out that budgeters will predict. A $1.6 trillion deficit would represent more than 10 percent of the gross domestic product, but the White House says over the next 10 years, the average deficit will represent only 4.5 percent of GDP annually.”

No sanctions for “waterboarding” lawyers: "Bush administration lawyers whose secret memos approved waterboarding of terrorism suspects will not face sanctions, U.S. officials said. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded John Yoo and Jay Bybee used poor judgment but will not be referred for disciplinary action, a legal source who was not publicly identified told The Washington Post in a story published Sunday.”

Tough fight set for homosexuals in the military: "President Obama's pledge to lift the military's ban on openly gay service members this year seems at best headed for extremely close votes in the House and Senate, according to Congress watchers. The president's proposal needs 218 votes in the House. A bill to repeal the policy known as "don't ask, don't tell" has fewer than 190 co-sponsors. What's more, a number of Democrats representing conservative districts, led by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton of Missouri, are set to buck the president and vote against repeal. In the Senate, senators who support the ban could filibuster the 2011 defense authorization bill if it contains a repeal, giving opponents of the ban an uphill task of gathering 60 votes."

CBO chief warns of long, slow recovery: "The director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had little but bad news on the economy for Congress. The pace of the U.S. economic recovery will be "slow in the next few years," and the unemployment rate will average 10 percent through the end of fiscal 2011, while the annual budget deficit will likely remain above $1 trillion, CBO chief Douglas Elmendorf told the House Budget Committee on Wednesday. The CBO chief told the congressional panel that he expected economic growth in fiscal 2010, which ends Sept. 30, will be just 1.6 percent, and the unemployment rate will average 10.2 percent. The outlook for fiscal 2011 is not much better, he warned, saying that growth in the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) will barely accelerate to 1.8 percent and the unemployment rate barely budge, averaging 9.8 percent for the year. Mr. Elmendorf, citing another in the string of forecasts that his well-respected nonpartisan office had developed, also warned that annual budget deficits are likely to top $1 trillion for this year and next and remain at stratospheric levels for years. The resulting public debt will make up a huge share of the overall economy and remain a constant threat to economic growth for the foreseeable future."

Palin’s PAC raised $2.1 million in 2009: "Sarah Palin raised $2.1 million through her political action committee in 2009, POLITICO has learned, putting the former Alaska governor’s take on par with those of her potential 2012 Republican presidential primary contenders. Palin took in $1.4 million of her total in the last 6 months of the year, after she resigned as governor on July 3. Heading into 2010, SarahPAC, had $900,000 in the bank after contributing $64,600 to dozens of candidates and beefing up its staff from just a handful of operatives.”

Obama has more in common with Fascism than Communism: "If we don’t get the analysis right, we won’t get the response right. Despite what some popular right-wing talk-show hosts claim, Obama is not pushing Marxism, revolutionary or otherwise. The threat is not from socialism in the sense of State ownership of the means of production, much less a proletarian uprising. Rather, he’s pushing good old American progressive-corporate elitism, or corporatism. (Some would simply call it capitalism.) It is anti-free market, but not anti-business.”

The Obama Boondoggle Express: "President Obama is taking his 8 billion State of the Union job-creation stimulus bucks on the road. Railroad, that is. Specifically, he wants to build high-speed rail in 13 major corridors across the country, including a 220-mile-per-hour bullet train in California and a pokey 168 mph Tampa to Orland run in Florida. In case you think this politically motivated bank-busting grandiose ‘vision thing’ is a swell idea, here are a few libertarian-eye-view reasons why it isn’t..... It won't create any new jobs; it will merely create different jobs. The money from profits that millions of business operators would have used to expand their businesses, thereby creating new jobs and hiring more employees, will instead be siphoned off by politicians"

Don’t blame Proposition Thirteen: "The real reason there is a budget crisis is because those in government are unwilling to control their spending. The situation in California is identical to a person who continuously lives beyond his means and then blames his employer for not giving him enough money once the credit card bill is due. If an individual makes that argument, the absurdity of the claim is readily apparent. But when a government official makes that claim, for some reason people actually take it seriously.”

Why has Hollywood forsaken conservatives?: "I don’t know what my butcher’s political beliefs are, and I don’t want to know. I pay him for his services and we are both happy. I want the same arrangement with my entertainers. If my butcher constantly mocked my values, I’d soon take my business elsewhere. Yet Hollywood regularly mocks conservative values. … The entertainment industry’s depictions of various characters and values add up to one message: Conservatives are bad for our country. What does that teach our children about respecting the right to hold dissenting opinions?”

Crisis of the government party: "Obama’s dilemma, evident in his State of the Union, is that the progressives, who were indispensable to his victories over Hillary, now feel betrayed, especially with apparent abandonment of health insurance reform, while conservative Democrats and independents, who were indispensable in giving Obama his November victory, are angry and alienated and disposed to vote Republican to stop what they see as America’s plunge into socialism. The non-negotiable demands of these two essential elements of Obama’s coalition are in irreconcilable conflict.”

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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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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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“Turkeys voting for Christmas”

That's what the intellectual elite think of working class conservative voters. They think that voting Left is OBVIOUSLY in the best interests of the workers and cannot understand that the base of support for the GOP is mainly among the less affluent. They think that working class people are cutting their own throats by voting conservative. It's an old claim but an extended version of it has just appeared -- where else? -- on the BBC.

So what is the reason for this incredible folly among conservatives? Mental illness, emotional disturbance etc., of course. I can't be bothered to excerpt any of the nonsense this time. Suffice it to say that Drew Westen and Thomas Frank -- the usual suspects -- are trotted out to give their versions of the "explanation". How the BBC missed out on getting a comment from George Lakoff is the only mystery.

To give the author -- David Runciman -- his due he does point to the elitism and arrogance of the Democrats as a reason why ordinary people might not vote for them and he does reject the old but very extreme Hofstadter claim that it is all "paranoia". But, even, so, the explanation he gives is that conservatives are voting with their emotions and not their reason.

I am confident that in ten minutes I could give Runciman enough reasons for the rationality of conservatism to jar even him but why stray into politics when we are discussing political psychology -- which is my academic specialty? As some measure of how long Runciman's nonsense has been around my paper on the subject dates back to 1972! and it appeared in The British Journal of Political Science. So if Runciman -- who claims to be a political scientist -- were a competent scholar he would already be aware of it and would mention the evidence in it. But what Leftist is bothered about evidence?

What I found was that it was the working class conservatives who were "normal". It was the working class Leftists who were particularly rebellious and haters of the society in which they lived. That characterization of Leftist voters is of course not at all surprising but it does put the boot on the other foot for Runciman. It is the Leftist voters who are emotion-driven, not the conservatives. And my conclusions were based on carefully validated survey research using a representative general population sample, not the vague inferences of Thomas Frank, Drew Westen etc.

What a laugh they are!

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Obama's contempt for ordinary Americans

DENOUNCING the Supreme Court's Jan. 21 ruling in the Citizens United campaign-finance case, President Obama called it "a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics" and "a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies, and the other powerful interests." He denounced it again in his State of the Union address last week, saying it would "open the floodgates for special interests" and adding: "I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests."

The Senate's top recipient of special-interest contributions is outraged by the Supreme Court's ruling. The president's rebuke was not without chutzpah. In his 2008 White House run, he became the first candidate in the modern era to reject public financing, thereby freeing himself to amass a staggering $745 million in campaign contributions. Much of this was "special interest money" -- according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Obama's record-breaking campaign haul included $43 million from lawyers and lobbyists, $19 million from donors connected to the health-care industry, $18 million from investment and commercial banking, $10 million from real estate interests, and $9 million from Hollywood and the television industry.

Obama isn't the only critic of the high court's decision whose outrage at the thought of corporate influence in political campaigns seems a trifle ... contrived. Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, condemned the court for having "predetermined the winners of next November's elections. It won't be Republicans. It won't be Democrats. It will be corporate America." Coming from Schumer, that's a curious complaint: He is the Senate's leading recipient of campaign contributions from political action committees and other donors in nearly two dozen industries, including real estate, construction, securities, liquor, insurance, and hedge funds.

Worse than hypocrisy, though, is the condescension for voters that underlies so much of the fury aimed at the Supreme Court's ruling.

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter wailed in alarm that "if Goldman Sachs wants to pay the entire cost of every congressional campaign in the US, the law of the land now allows it." (Actually, it doesn't: The decision left intact the ban on direct corporate donations to politicians.) Alan Colmes, the house liberal at Fox News, predicted a "corporate takeover over of America." Monica Youn of the Brennan Center for Justice, writing before the ruling was handed down, warned that if the justices deregulated corporate political speech "voters will be forced into a couch-potato role, mere viewers of the electoral spectacle bought and paid for by wealthy companies."

But voters are not mindless dolts. Campaign advertising doesn't turn them into automatons, blindly voting for whichever candidates "approve this message" the most. American politics is replete with candidates and campaigns that lost handily, notwithstanding the fortune spent on newspaper ads, radio spots, and TV commercials promoting them. The court's decision simply allows corporations, like countless other associations and groups, to have their say during election campaigns. It has no effect at all on the ability of voters to ignore what those corporations may choose to tell them.

You wouldn't know it from all the hyperventilating about dastardly corporate advertising, but Americans are perfectly capable of thinking for themselves. Why do so many smart people find that hard to accept? It's an old story. In 1958, John Kenneth Galbraith published The Affluent Society, a bestseller that argued among other things that big business had grown more powerful than the laws of supply and demand, since corporate advertising could always generate the demand needed to keep production high. As it happens, 1958 was also the year that the Ford Motor Company decided to pull the plug on the Edsel, the new car model it had introduced the previous fall with great fanfare and a vast ad budget -- but that American drivers steadfastly refused to buy.

Whether corporations will walk through the door the Supreme Court has now opened for them is not clear. Many corporations will doubtless avoid taking sides in heated election campaigns for fear of antagonizing their customers; others may decide that government-relations budgets are better spent on quiet lobbying than on open electioneering.

But even those that do choose to advertise during an election cycle will not make the mistake so many of the court's detractors are making. They know that Americans are not sheep, easily herded by means of clever commercials. If corporate advertising was irresistible, after all, we'd all be drinking New Coke.

SOURCE

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Autocrats Of The World, Rejoice!

Why Obama's State of the Union has America's enemies smiling

In Beijing General Secretary Hu Jintao is sporting a big grin. Kim Jong Il is breaking out another case of his favorite Hennessy in North Korea. And in Tehran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is celebrating in, well, the way that dour theocrats kick up their heels, however they manage to do that.

The cause for all this cheer? On Wednesday Barack Obama delivered his first State of the Union message, and although he surely did not intend to do so, he essentially let these villains--and others--know they can do whatever they want. The president unfortunately will not be doing much to stop them from destabilizing the international system--or even from threatening the United States.

America, whether it should be or not, is a nation at war. There are two obvious ones, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a general struggle against Islamic fanaticism taking place across the globe. Then there are especially consequential confrontations. Two nuclear rogues--North Korea and Iran--threaten to upend everything, while others--Syria comes to mind--wait in the wings.

Finally, to take another example from current headlines, there is a silent conflict waged every day against the United States, an unprecedented program of state-sponsored cyberattacks against defense, civilian and corporate networks. This hostile and never-ending campaign gives rise--or at least should give rise--to a state of emergency. Yes, I'm referring to the People's Republic of China.

Yet in a long oration the president devoted just nine minutes--out of 69--to discussing foreign policy and external threats. In that short time, he didn't provide much assurance when it came to Afghanistan and Iraq. He wasn't even particularly candid about how long American soldiers would be in the latter country. "As a candidate, I promised that I would end this war, and that is what I am doing as president," Obama said. "We will have all of our combat troops out of Iraq by the end of this August." Yet as Larry Johnson of the No Quarter blog pointed out on WABC's John Batchelor Show just after the address ended, American soldiers are slated to remain in the country for at least another year.

With regard to nuclear rogues, President Obama is trying to both keep fissile materials out of the hands of terrorists and rid the world of its most destructive arms. "These diplomatic efforts have also strengthened our hand in dealing with those nations that insist on violating international agreements in pursuit of nuclear weapons," he declared. "That's why North Korea now faces increased isolation and stronger sanctions--sanctions that are being vigorously enforced." Unfortunately that's not true: Beijing has, especially since last October, become a sanctions buster by ramping up material assistance to Pyongyang and facilitating its arms sales, now prohibited by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874.

What about the Islamic Republic of Iran? On the most urgent and critical question facing the world today, the American people--and people around the world--got 41 words in three sentences. "They, too, will face growing consequences," Obama said. "That is a promise." That's actually more an applause line; it's certainly not a policy, something we need.

And about the emerging hegemon that is mounting attacks against us each and every hour of each and every day? There was not one word on the most extensive and continuous attempt to intrude into our computers, disrupt electronic infrastructure and steal technology and information. The president had exactly two things to say about China: "There's no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains or the new factories that manufacture clean energy products," followed by "Meanwhile, China is not waiting to revamp its economy."

Actually the Chinese are not reforming, restructuring or revamping their economy, though the U.S. should make better trains. Nonetheless we needed to hear more about the country that is supposed to replace the U.S. as the global superpower in 10 years' time, the nation his administration says is essential to the solution of every major global problem.

Maybe he thought we would not notice or would not care that he neglected China in the State of the Union. But Obama's failure to address the challenges posed by that nation and by others sends a chilling message to America's allies and friends. While the global community faces daunting tasks, Obama devoted almost all of his address to swaying a domestic audience and to scoring points against Republicans.

By doing so he told everyone beyond our borders that the U.S. was turning inward, becoming uninterested in their concerns. If the president intends to exercise global leadership or even participate in multilateral solutions, he did an excellent job in hiding his intentions. As Bill Roggio of the Long War Journal said Wednesday night on the Batchelor program, "The administration is treating these critical foreign policy issues as an annoyance."

So the world's worst leaders will see a big green light for their plans. That is the most important thing you need to know about President Obama's first State of the Union address.

SOURCE

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Obama's fake freeze folly



President Obama made a big deal last week about his purported federal spending freeze, but not enough has been said about how meager the supposed savings actually are. Historical context shows that any savings from this public-relations gimmick will be tiny. Frugality, apparently, is a concept Democrats have a hard time understanding.

The Obama freeze is projected to "save" $15 billion from expected spending next year. This is not a cut of $15 billion in existing spending, but only a decision not to raise spending (to match inflation) on certain accounts. Those accounts supposedly are to be frozen for the following two years as well, but they are being frozen only after a decade-long spending orgy that included an 8.2 percent increase in domestic discretionary spending this year. And they don't apply to any new purported jobs bill or to any other new item on the president's priority list.

Now, let's consider the $15 billion itself. By most people's reckoning, that's a big number. By government reckoning, it's child's play. In 1995, for instance, Congress rescinded - took back - $18.9 billion that had been signed into law but not yet doled out. Whereas the Obama plan is a mere pledge not to let government grow by $15 billion in certain programs, the 1995 rescissions actually cut about $19 billion from existing programs. And that was back when the dollar was worth far more. That $18.9 billion then would be worth $26.6 billion today.

That amount was trimmed from a budget of about $1.5 trillion, making it a real, honest cut of 1.27 percent. The Obama freeze is from a much larger budget of about $3.6 trillion, meaning a paper "savings" of barely more than four-tenths of a single percent.

Look back again to 1995 and 1996. The 1995 rescissions, combined with further cuts in domestic discretionary spending in those two years, amounted to just shy of $50 billion of honest-to-goodness debt reduction - not from projected spending levels, but from prior spending levels. Using the president's version of accounting, that Republican Congress saved almost another $50 billion - or $100 billion total - from the projected growth in spending.

Yet the cuts didn't leave little old ladies freezing in the streets, didn't leave orphans without food or water and indeed had no noticeable ill effects. In fact, as Congress moved toward a balanced budget, the nation's economy boomed and, happily, the poverty rate fell. That era of progress came without government "stimulus" or "jobs" programs or bailouts or any other central-planning flapdoodle.

What the president is proposing now has the aspect of a toddler putting a single foot beyond the water's edge at the beach for the very first time and then proudly reporting to everybody that he "swam in the ocean." If he really wants to swim with the economic tide, Mr. Obama should learn from the 1990s that government is not the engine of prosperity and that when it comes to saving taxpayer money, boldness works far better than puny half-measures.

SOURCE

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BrookesNews Update

How an American recession vindicated the Austrian School of economics : One thing is absolutely clear. America's political class and the economic commentariat have learnt precisely nothing from previous recessions. After each recession we get the same old thing: an incessant call for Keynesian nostrums, a cry for greater regulation, and the usual claim that greed-driven markets cause the boom and bust
The Australian Business Council gets it wrong on recessions : Wage rate flexibility can never stop unemployment rising once recession takes hold. From this we can see why implementing the Australian Business Council's scheme of linking wages to profitability in order to avert unemployment would have the unintended consequences of discrediting the argument for free labour markets"
Why mainstream economics is a dead end : There is no such thing as the economy which can be moved by the government and the central bank. It follows then that mainstream economists are engaging in a fiction which they are dressing up by means of various statistical artifacts like Gross Domestic Product. This results in government and its central bank policies that undermine the well-being of human beings
The Party of Abraham Lincoln v. the Democrats' hate machine : The final irony is that the vast majority of blacks have turned against the Party of emancipation and individual responsibility and now support the Party of slavery that imposes dependency and racist quotas. The same Democratic Party that tells them they cannot succeed on their own. A Party whose policies express its own deep-rooted belief that blacks are not good enough to intellectually compete with whites
What has Brown done for us? : A year ago today, Barack Obama was all too anxious to accept his victory and read deep meaning into it. Today, it appears like that is not even willing to acknowledge his incredible defeat of last night, let alone learn from this teachable moment. This is especially true as it relates to his legislative agenda
Democrats' interests are special too : The Supreme Court's decision in favour of free speech has enraged the Democrats. The are now railing against the intrusion of 'special interests'. What they really fear is that their advantage in funding from special interests will be eliminated by the Court's ruling
Scott Brown's win: Color me happy : Nancy, Harry and other political 'elites' have a terminal case of inside the beltway syndrome- also known as cognitive dissonance. They have bought into their own version of reality. A reality that doesn't allow for the possibility that their own narrow world view isn't the universally accepted view they believe it is
Obama's chump "change": "Brown's election was not as much an endorsement of him or his positions on the issues, as it was a furious and unequivocal repudiation of President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and their positions. Just look at the grassroots, conservative groundswell driving this 'throw the bums out' rejection of the Democratic juggernaut

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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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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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Newspaperwoman Regrets Voting for Obama‏

By Jill Dorson

I am a registered Independent. I voted for Barack Obama. And for that, I am sorry. I'm not sorry for you. I'm sorry for me. Because I voted for Obama for me, not for you. I voted for hope and change and all the intangibles that Obama was peddling in the wake of the financial crisis, Sarah Palin, Sept. 11 and all the other ills that shook our country in the last decade. I wanted something new. Something different. What I got was, I suppose, exactly what I voted for - a spin doctor. And not a very good one at that.

Before John McCain unwittingly picked a tabloid-magazine cover girl for his running mate, I was leaning toward going Republican this time around. I did the second time Bush was on the ballot and I very nearly did the first time, too. But as soon as Palin climbed out of her igloo and onto the national scene, well, there was no turning back for me.

You see, I felt my choice was to risk McCain dropping dead and letting the world's most well-known hockey mom run this country, or to believe that Obama would surround himself with educated people and that he was smart enough to take their advice.

I was right. He is smart enough to seek counsel. I'm just outraged at the counsel he's seeking these days. Key financial leaders who are tax cheats come immediately to mind, but as the recent terror attack made clear to me, the idea that a president of the most powerful nation in the world could think it was OK to have a Homeland Security chief with such a loose grasp of what terrorism is and how it works is troubling.

I was right there laughing when George W. Bush struggled with the names of countries around the world early in his tenure. And while my knowledge of foreign policy is limited, I thought Bush's was lousy, too. But after Sept. 11, I saw a man with no charisma step up and fight for this country, its citizens and its freedom. Bush became a leader.

Seven years later, I am ashamed to say that I was blinded by charisma. Obama was so convincing that I stopped caring about what he knew and started getting caught up in the euphoria. Imagine having a president who came from a broken home, who had money troubles, who did grass-roots community service? A young father. The first black president. It pains me to admit I got caught up in the hoopla.

But McCain made it easy. He's a smart man, I don't doubt that. But between picking Palin, suggesting that the first debates be delayed and, well, picking Palin, he made it easy for Obama to win. As Election Day drew near, all Obama had to do was keep his mouth shut to win.

All that changed when the Obama campaign became the Obama administration. I was a small business owner during 2008 election and my business ultimately failed under the weight of a horrendous economy. I am not ashamed. I worked hard. But I believed that Obama would try to level the playing field between big business and small, between thieves and honest business people, between greed and moderation. Instead, he bailed out the most wicked and left the rest of us fail.

I watched with horror as Obama followed Bush's lead in bailing out banks, auto makers, insurance companies, all of those companies deemed "too big to fail." What does that mean? My small company got thrown under the bus and my savings were ravaged - perhaps Wall Street is using them for bonuses this year.

Not to mention President Obama is recklessly spending our country's future into oblivion.

It was clear after just 90 days what a mistake I'd made. My taxes have gone up and my quality of life has gone down. Hope has given way to disgust and I see now that change is simply a euphemism for "big government."

Like many others, my view is narrow. I vote for the candidate I think will be best for me. I often define myself as a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. But above all, I want to feel safe and I don't want to feel that I am being ripped off. I want a president who inspires me and cares about my contribution to the fabric of the country. I want a president with experience and savvy, a Commander in Chief who puts our country and its citizens first. I only hope the Republicans can find him the next time around.

SOURCE

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Obama's psychopathic lies never stop

President Obama has been running his mouth a lot lately. Last week, he stabbed his lobbyist friends in the back and attacked his allies in Congress as if he were an outsider. Talking smack isn't boosting his low popularity though, even among his own erstwhile supporters.

During his State of the Union address, Mr. Obama attacked "lobbyists [who] game the system." When Diane Sawyer of ABC News asked him about shady deals used to try to get government health care passed, he threw the Democrat-run Congress under the bus: "Let's hold on a second, Diane. . . . I didn't make a bunch of deals. Right, there is a legislative process that is taking place in Congress and I am happy to own up to the fact that I have not changed Congress and how it operates the way I would have liked."

Mr. Obama's chutzpah is startling even by Washington standards. He must have forgotten about his deal with pharmaceutical companies that broke his promise to allow drug reimportation from Canada. The same goes for a recent deal to save unions $60 billion in taxes that other Americans with the same insurance plans would have to pay. The White House dispatched two aides - Jim Messina and Peter Rouse - to negotiate the notorious Cornhusker kickback deal with Sen. Ben Nelson, Nebraska Democrat, to get him to break his promise not to support any health care legislation that funded abortions. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was directly involved in those negotiations too.

While Mr. Obama was bashing lobbyists during his State of the Union, his administration already had planned private briefings with powerful K Street lobbyists for the very next day. According to The Hill newspaper, the Obama Treasury Department invited lobbyists to "a series of conference calls with senior Obama administration officials to discuss key aspects of the State of the Union address."

Amber Lee Ettinger, whose racy YouTube video boosted Mr. Obama's campaign popularity, says she's disappointed with his broken promises. Comparing the president to a lying lover, the famous "Obama Girl" warns that when a boyfriend lies, "You kick him to the curb." Losing Teddy Kennedy's Senate seat didn't wake up Democrats to public outrage over their policies. Maybe losing "Obama Girl" will get their attention.

SOURCE

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Racing towards a destination unknown

So it's full speed ahead, even if nobody knows where we're going. We can console ourselves that if we're lucky we might not get there. That's the main point of President Obama's eagerly awaited assessment of the State of the Union. He said, as all presidents do, that the state of the union is pretty good on his watch, considering that George W. Bush, his favorite bad boy, bequeathed a sad-sack union.

Mr. Obama now turns to jobs, jobs, jobs, and promises to do for job creation what he did for health care reform and what he's doing to protect us from terror catastrophe. Which may not be enough, but he's doing a bang-up job of protecting the rights of terrorists.

The president displayed an unusual array of friends and enemies. He lectured the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, six of whom were seated as a group on the front row, for their decision to uphold the First Amendment as it applies to corporations (which are comprised of individual citizens). No one can remember when a president ever breached manners and protocol in such a breathtaking way. When the president inaccurately asserted that the court had "reversed a century of law," Associate Justice Samuel Alito was captured on camera mouthing the words "not true," which is apparently the judicial way of saying "you lie!" But Mr. Obama is a onetime law professor and it's possible that his lecture was kindly intended to fill in the gaps of the legal knowledge of the learned justices seated before him. Professors are always eager to display what they know, even if what they know isn't so. We should give the president the benefit of the doubt, even if the stoic justices clearly did not.

Eric Holder, his attorney general also seated among house seats, appeared to be having a high old time, laughing and smiling and basking in the synthetic admiration that high government officials are accustomed to. Mr. Holder is the author of the remarkable decision to grant Miranda rights to the man who tried to celebrate Christmas by blowing up an airliner over Detroit. (Who says radical Muslims have no respect for the holidays of other people's religions?)

President Obama boasted of how much better he is at fighting terrorism than George W. was: "In the last year, hundreds of al Qaeda's fighters and affiliates, including many senior leaders, have been captured or killed, far more than in 2008." Since neither the Bush nor the Obama administration has published body counts (that's so Vietnam War), it's a claim that even the Associated Press concedes is impossible to verify.

What is easy to verify is how soft the Obama administration continues to be on terrorists. No waterboarding (not even when a grubby bewhiskered terrorist clearly needs a bath), no harsh questioning. No fair treating such a soldier of Allah like FDR was willing to treat a soldier of the Nazis or a Shinto warrior during World War II.

It's not fashionable in certain circles to notice this, but we can be sure the Obama treatment of terrorists is taken into account in other places. British intelligence officials say that over the past week an "unusually high number" of prospective evil-doers on the airlines' no-fly list have tried to board airliners bound for the United States. As a consequence, the London government has raised the assessment of the terror threat from "severe," which means an attack is reckoned "highly likely," to "critical," which means an attack is "imminent."

The London Daily Mirror quotes British security sources that an Egyptian man tried to board an American Airlines flight last weekend in London bound for Miami. The next day a Saudi man tried to board a United Airlines flight from London to Chicago. They were sent home.

All this is enough to give Americans nightmares, particularly when it's not at all clear that the high officials of the government are taking the threat as seriously as we expect them to. When Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, told Congress that it was a mistake that FBI field agents, and not specially trained interrogators (but not waterboarders), had questioned the Detroit bomber, he retreated later in the day to say his remarks were "misconstrued." Since so much Washington talk is electronically recorded now, government officials who blurt out inconvenient truths no longer have the luxury of saying they were "misquoted." Bureaucracy has become a dangerous game.

SOURCE

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Kick out the RINOs

In an unprecedented move, the Republican National Committeeon Friday unanimously called onits chairman,Michael S. Steele, to "carefully screen" candidates for their adherence to conservative values before granting them RNC financial help. The resolution specifically calls on the national chairman to take into account the voting records and statements of all GOP candidates for evidence that they supportthe "core principles and positions" ofthe party's nationalplatform, widely regarded as a highly conservative document. "The brilliant part of the resolution is that it is tied to the party platform ... that has been thought out, debated and passed unanimously at our national convention," North Dakota GOP Chairman Gary Emineth told The Washington Times after he and his fellow RNC members passed the resolution.

There has been intense infighting for more than a month over the wording and the desirability of the resolution, even though it has no legally binding effect on Mr. Steele or on the chairmen of the GOP House and Senate campaign committees. But it does stipulate that candidates who fail the screening should not receive money and other campaign support from the RNC or its sister committees. The resolution also calls on Mr. Steele and leaders of the House and Senate GOP campaign committees to deny financial and other support support to "candidates who clearly do not support the core principles and positions" of the national platform as adopted atthe 2008 Republican National Convention.

More HERE

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Illinois, new Massachusetts setback for Obama?

If the Massachusetts special election was a kick in the shins for President Barack Obama, the political turmoil in Illinois, his home state, is a pain in the neck that never seems to go away. His former Senate seat, already stained by an ethics scandal, is a major takeover target for Republicans. So is the governor's office.

Going into Tuesday's Illinois primary, the first of the 2010 campaign season, Democrats are in disarray, with no political heavyweights in their lineup for the Senate seat that Obama gave up for the White House. Losing it would be a bigger personal embarrassment for the president than Republican Scott Brown's upset victory in Massachusetts, which took away the late Edward M. Kennedy's Senate seat.

The front-runner for the Democratic Senate nomination in Illinois, state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, describes Obama as his mentor. He is only 33 and hasn't served a full term in office, and his only previous experience was working for a family bank now in financial trouble. Mark Kirk, a five-term member of Congress who supports abortion rights and gun control, is by far the leading candidate for the GOP Senate nomination, but he has infuriated some conservative Tea Party activists.

Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn is in danger of losing in the primary because of his association with disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was expelled from office. Quinn twice ran as lieutenant governor on the same ticket as Blagojevich. He has also taken heat for proposing a tax increase to clean up the state's financial mess and for working with Obama to move terror suspects from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to an Illinois prison. His effort to cut costs by letting some nonviolent inmates out of prison turned out to include releasing violent offenders _ some of whom have been accused of serious new crimes.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Barack Bush: A remarkable table setting out how much of Obama's SOTU speech was a virtual recycling of things that GWB said. A great one to embarrass any far Leftists you know. Hilarious actually.

Latin America: After the left: "The left is in trouble in Latin America. Sebastián Piñera’s recent election as Chile’s first elected center-right president in decades owes much to the inability of the center-left coalition that governed Chile after 1990 to rejuvenate itself. Yet across Latin America there is, as the Washington Post’s Jackson Diel perceptively observes, a sense that the left’s decade of dominance is unraveling.”

Inflation — how the Fed picks your pocket and raids your bank account: "While foreign nations and investors use money that is already a part of the monetary system to buy their Treasury Securities, the Federal Reserve does not. They are allowed to create money in a means similar to the ‘Let there be light’ mode of Biblical fame. From nothing, comes dollars. Billions of them. Trillions of them. Though, in this era of electronic money transfer, it may be a good long time before these mystical, out of thin air dollars actually take the physical form of paper. However, physical dollars or not, the Federal Reserve, which made record breaking profits in 2009, ‘earns’ interest on those dollars it is Congressionally blessed with the ability to create. And, while engaged in this process of creating money and earning interest, the Federal Reserve is devaluing the cash you have in your pocket and reducing the worth of the money in your bank account.”

Killer of abortion doctor found guilty of murder: "An American man who said that he shot dead a well-known abortion doctor to save unborn babies was convicted last night of premeditated murder. The jury took 37 minutes to find Scott Roeder guilty of first-degree murder for shooting George Tiller in the head as he stood by a snack table at his church in May. Judge Warren Wilbert rejected a defence request to allow the jury to consider the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, noting that abortion is legal." [The judge undoubtedly erred in allowing only two possible verdicts. This will almost certainly go to a retrial]

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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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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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What fun! HNN has just run a "special" denying that Fascism/Nazism was Leftist!

It is Jonah Goldberg's book that has got them steamed -- and steamed is the word. Most of the "critique" is little more than abuse, liberally leavened with unsupported assertions. What has got them steamed is that a recognition of the philosophical affinities between historical Fascism and modern "liberalism" has become rather widespread among conservative writers and broadcasters. The Left tried to ignore Jonah at first but now that the cat is out of the bag they are desperately trying to stuff it back in.

I note with some amusement that Jonah seems to be the sole villain as far as the HNN writers are concerned. I have been aware since my late teens (now more than 40 years ago) that Nazism was simply national socialism whereas Stalinism was international socialism so the information has always been there for anybody who cared to look. Additionally, my monograph on the subject much preceded Jonah's book. My monograph was was originally written in the '90s and was available on the net from around the year 2000. And I noted a growing awareness among conservative writers about the Leftist nature of Fascism well before Jonah's book came out two years ago. But Jonah is a much more energetic communicator than I am so he rightly deserves pride of place in the matter.

If interested in the "debate", you can start reading here. There are five "anti-Jonah" writers and Jonah responds here. Jonah notes that there is only one substantial historian -- Paxton -- among his critics and so concentrates his return-fire on Paxton's effusions. Although Paxton knows a lot about history, however, he has always been heavily biased. He has explicitly claimed, for instance, that Hitler was "anti-socialist".

I think Jonah demolishes Paxton pretty thoroughly so will not try to add much to Jonah's remarks. I think, however, that Jonah could have said more about the American Left (the "Progressives") of the prewar era. The similarity between the American Left and the Fascists in the prewar era was crystal clear and the Progressives were actually in some ways the progenitors of European Fascism.

A knowledge of that history would go a long way towards removing what is the big stumbling block these days towards recognizing the Fascism in modern Leftism. The stumbling block is that the Nazis were white-racists, nationalists and eugenicists while the modern Left are not. So comparing the current Left with the Nazis does seem to be missing the central point of it all. But the prewar American "Progressives" WERE white-racists, nationalists and eugenicists. White racism, nationalism and eugenics are no longer central political issues. They were simply the important political issues of the prewar era. They were not of the ESSENCE of Leftism or Nazism. But when they WERE big issues, the American "Progressives" and the Nazis were on the same side.

So what is the essence that Nazism and the modern Left share? Simple: A devotion to comprehensive control of everybody and every thing important in the life of the nation -- a hatred of individual liberty and a yen for lockstep unity behind the current doctrines of the party. Hitler controlled everything in Germany by laws and regulations and that is the always-obvious aim of the modern-day Democratic party too. They positively SPROUT regulations of just about everything that moves. Hitler eventually had a party representative in every factory to make sure that everything done there was politically correct. America has not got quite that far yet but I am sure the Democrats would love to get there, given half a chance.

The lead author in the attack on Jonah was David Neiwert, also known as Orcinus. I have crossed rhetorical swords with him before and my demolition of his arguments was sufficiently savage for Instapundit to remark at the time: "Remind me never to get this guy mad at me". So I am going to be a bit self indulgent and reproduce below what I wrote back then in late November 2004:

SOME FUN WITH A LEFTIST NINNY

I am indebted to the mini-Chomsky himself, the great Brian Leiter, for a recommendation of a long article by Orcinus about the probability of America "going Fascist". Seeing Hitler was a socialist and Mussolini was a Marxist, you might think Orcinus is worried about arrogant trends in the Democratic party but, no, it is the GOP that he thinks is likely to "go Fascist". The Leftist origins of Fascism don't get a mention, in fact, so one knows immediately that the article will be low on scholarship. And its chief scholarly source for the nature of Fascism is in fact R.O. Paxton, the "historian" (much lauded in the N.Y. Times, of course) who said Hitler was an "antisocialist" -- when the very name of Hitler's political party was (translated) "The National Socialist German Worker's Party"! I think I have already at this early stage said enough about the article concerned to dismiss it for the claptrap it is but I cannot resist having a bit more fun with it.

The body of the article is in fact made up of what is actually a rather good proof of the idiocy of its conclusions. Orcinus quotes a long line of sources from the 1930s which offer all sorts of evidence for the claim that America was on the brink of going Fascist then. But it didn't happen! America did get the Mussolini-admiring FDR but thanks to the U.S. constitution and the U.S. Congress there were lots of limits placed on what he was allowed to do. So if America did not go Fascist during the Fascist era despite the many pressures towards it that Orcinus ably documents, how likely is it to go Fascist now, when Fascism is thoroughly discredited? The question answers itself, I think.

But let's have a look at a bit more weirdness. Take this Orwellian statement: "This tendency has finally metastacized into a genuinely dangerous situation, one in which the GOP has become host to a Stalinist movement that exhibits so many of the traits of fascism that the resemblance is now unmistakable." Quite aside from the fact that this great intellectual cannot even spell "metastasized", he is asking us to believe that the people who opposed Communism for decades and finally destroyed it utterly are themselves communists! I guess it's not impossible but seeing that the GOP and their Christian allies have always advocated the exact opposite of communism, the writer is clearly in cloud-cuckoo land. If you can say that free-enterprise=Stalinism, you might as well say black=white. I guess that a Leftist "postmodernist" would have no problem in doing exactly that, however.

More fun: Orcinus also looks for the day when "the attack style of politics -- in which the smearing an opponent substitutes for the lack of any substance or accomplishment -- has been relegated to the ashheap of history". Well. He got his wish. I think John Kerry has now been so relegated. Whoops! In true Leftist "projective" style, Orcinus was actually referring to the GOP rather than John Kerry, it seems!

Orcinus also deplores the way that "families, longtime friends, and communities are being torn apart by the divisive politics of resentment and accusation". He must be talking about all those guys documented at length on Leftists as Elitists! You could not conceivably get more resentment and accusation than is documented there.

Orcinus is a real humanitarian by Leftist standards, however. He ends up conceding: "Conservative-movement adherents are still human beings, and seeing them in terms of participating in a kind of fascism should not render them into mere discardable objects". He must have written that for the benefit of those of his colleagues who still admire Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.

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The arrogant and insulting Obama

In his SOTU speech, he talked like a petulant child that is not allowed to get its own way

One strong piece of evidence to support our surmise about President Obama's character is his apparently unprecedented upbraiding of the U.S. Supreme Court, six of whose members were seated immediately in front of him (Justices John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas were absent). The occasion of this highly unpresidential outburst was last week's First Amendment victory in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission:

With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests--including foreign corporations--to spend without limit in our elections. I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people. And I'd urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems.

How can you tell when President Obama is lying? Justice Samuel Alito's lips move. The Associated Press reports that "Alito made a dismissive face and began shaking his head," and this YouTube clip shows Alito saying what looks to us to be "simply not true."

Even Linda Greenhouse, the ultraliberal former Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, admits that Alito was right:

The law that Congress enacted in the populist days of the early 20th century prohibited direct corporate contributions to political campaigns. That law was not at issue in the Citizens United case, and is still on the books. Rather, the court struck down a more complicated statute that barred corporations and unions from spending money directly from their treasuries--as opposed to their political action committees--on television advertising to urge a vote for or against a federal candidate in the period immediately before the election. It is true, though, that the majority wrote so broadly about corporate free speech rights as to call into question other limitations as well--although not necessarily the existing ban on direct contributions.

And if Obama has lost Linda Greenhouse, he's lost Middle America.

But the president's error--or lie--is worse than Greenhouse acknowledges. The laws whose provisions the court struck down, known as Taft-Hartley and McCain-Feingold, date back to 1947 and 2002, respectively. Greenhouse seems to understand him as claiming that the court had struck down a century-old law. But what he said was that the court had reversed a century of law. In the parlance of constitutional law--a subject Obama once taught--this means that the court undid its own precedent. And indeed the justices did reverse two earlier decisions, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and McConnell v. FEC, These cases, however, were less than 20 years old, having been decided in 1990 and 2003.

If the president of the United States is going to display his contempt for a coequal branch of government and the First Amendment, you'd think he could at least be troubled to get his facts straight.

SOURCE

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"Time" magazine on Obama's SOTU speech

They are grinding their teeth about GOP confidence and Democrat demoralization

President Obama spoke the first 676 words of his State of the Union address on Wednesday night before the first hand clap. His tone was so somber, and the room's mood so grave, that no one moved when Obama said, "We must answer history's call." There were no ovations when he called for "Democrats and Republicans to work through our differences, to overcome the numbing weight of our problems." He got no love for saying, "The worst of the storm has passed."

By the time he announced that "we cut taxes for 8 million Americans paying for college," Obama was forced to go off script. "I thought I'd get some applause on that one," he said, looking over to the Republicans, who were sitting on their hands. There was some giggling, and some of them relented, offering the congressional version of a golf clap.

So it went all night for the President, who a year ago came before the same body to announce, "Now is the time to act boldly and wisely." That bold wisdom has, in the course of a year, been transformed into a much more qualified vision of something short of significant legislative failure. "To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve some problems, not run for the hills," he said.

While the Democrats at times seemed to be considering the exits, the Republicans in the crowd handled the event with a renewed sense of confidence. A few minutes before Obama arrived, Republican Representative Mike Pence, standing in Statuary Hall, explained that he had turned down a chance to run for the Senate so he could help lead Republicans back to power in the House. "This is a genuine, authentic, American movement," he said of the political winds that had won Republicans statewide races in New Jersey, Massachusetts and Virginia.

Inside the chamber, the GOP did away with the pranks and gimmicks they displayed the last time Obama addressed a joint session. Eschewing paper signs or rude interruptions, they seemed content to pass the time with the sort of cool confidence that accompanies a sense of ascendancy. House minority leader John Boehner, bronzed and cocky, kept making faces and spreading his hands in disbelief at Obama's applause lines.

When Obama spoke about creating jobs for small business, Boehner spread his hands and cocked his head as if to say, "So now you're getting it." When Obama congratulated himself for not raising income taxes by "a single dime," Boehner looked incredulous — as if to say, "Really, he wants credit for that?" When Obama asked "if anyone from either party has a better approach" to health care reform, Boehner shot out of his seat and raised his hand. He was not called on....

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Obama’s campaign finance rhetoric is misleading: "Actions will always speak louder than words. For instance, President Barack Obama preaching a minimal role for corporations in funding campaigns isn’t ethical when in fact he himself was a major recipient of corporate funds leading up to his presidential election in 2008. In fact, according to The Washington Examiner, ‘Obama’s $995,000 from employees and executives at investment bank giant Goldman Sachs is the most a politician has raised from a single company since the 2001 campaign finance reform law.’”

Obama to end NASA Constellation program: "When President Obama releases his budget on Monday, there will be a big hole where funding for NASA’s Constellation program used to be. Constellation is the umbrella program that includes the Ares rocket — the replacement for the aging space shuttles. A White House official confirmed Thursday that when next week’s budget is proposed, NASA will get an additional $5.9 billion over five years. Some of that money will be used to extend the life of the International Space Station to 2020. The official said it also will be used to entice companies to build private spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the space station after the space shuttle retires.”

Zogby Interactive: 53% Would Not Eliminate Senate's 60-Vote Cloture Rule: "A majority (53%) of U.S. adults does not support eliminating the U.S. Senate rule that requires 60 votes to close debate and bring a bill to the floor for a vote. Also, when asked which statement on cloture they most agree with, 50% felt the 60-vote rule insures broader support for legislation while 28% believed the rule was undemocratic. These results were part of a Zogby Interactive survey of 2,003 adults conducted from Jan. 15-18, 2010. The Senate cloture rule requiring 60 votes has been a key issue in the Democrats' efforts to pass healthcare reform. This poll was concluded one day before Scott Brown won the Massachusetts special election to fill the late Edward Kennedy's seat, lowering the Democratic majority from 60 to 59. Since the Senate and House of Representatives have passed differing healthcare reform bills, losing that seat becomes critical to the Democrats' ability to follow the usual procedure and pass a final bill produced by a House-Senate Conference Committee."

Crisis management: "One of the more confusing aspects of the great economic meltdown of 2008-09—even more confusing than collateralized debt obligations—has been the tortured logic of the blame game: the frantic effort, on the part of politicians and pundits, to demonize Wall Street, exonerate reckless government policies and restore the big-government ideals of John Maynard Keynes and the New Deal. George Melloan is having none of it—and, to judge by the Massachusetts poll result on Tuesday, neither are many voters.”

Honduras: Zelaya flies into exile: "Toppled Honduran President Manuel Zelaya emerged from months holed up in a Brazilian embassy compound and flew into exile on Wednesday, ending a months-long political crisis as a new elected president took office. Zelaya, ousted... last June, boarded a plane that took off for the Dominican Republic shortly after opposition leader Porfirio Lobo, elected in November, was sworn in as president.”

Publishing predictions: "One of the media transformations I expect to take place over the next 10 years, if not sooner, is that book publishing will become more blog-like — that is, micropublishing, the interest of the New York houses in putting out blockbusters, and the decline of the industry (and its retail counterpart) generally will lead to a proliferation of vanity presses that will, over time, lose their stigma. Publishing is still treated as if it ought to be a mass-market industry, but it has speedily been transforming into a niche-market industry. The idea that a book has to sell thousands of copies from a major house in order to be taken seriously is going to change. ”

Libertarianism and the British Conservative Party: "Mark Wallace on ConservativeHome argues that based upon British Social Attitudes Survey the people of this country are becoming increasingly libertarian. This would certainly be a welcome development, which if it were to continue would leave the Conservative Party in need of another rebranding.”

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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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