Obama is a psychopathic liar

In addition to the events discussed below, see here

This past Sunday, the Washington Post ran a lengthy front-page article on Obama's machinations during the debt ceiling debate last summer. See here. Rush Limbaugh spent a considerable amount of his on-air time Monday discussing one of the highlights of the piece: Barack Obama deliberately lied to the American people concerning the intransigence of the Republicans in the House of Representatives. The fact that a pillar of the sycophantic mainstream media would publish a story claiming that their hero lied is amazing.

In the United States there is great deference paid to the occupant of the White House. Justifiably so, as that person is the chief operating officer of the country and, more importantly, the head of state, representing the nation around the globe. His actions and demeanor set the tone for not only the political class, but the country as a whole. Over the centuries there have many exceptional but also a few inept men to hold the office of president.

Today, so much power is vested in the office of president that honor and integrity must be hallmarks of a president's character. Unfortunately, they are not with Barack Obama -- he may well be the most dishonest and disingenuous occupant of the Oval Office in history, and he will do more damage to the nation than all his predecessors combined.

His failings can no longer be excused by this historical deference or timidity fostered by race with the euphemisms of spin, obfuscation, fabrication, or politics being used to avoid the truth. Obama is extremely adept at exploiting the celebrity culture that has overwhelmed this society, as well as the erosion of the education system that has created a generation or more of citizens unaware of their history, culture, and the historical ethical standards based on Judeo-Christian teaching.

While the future of the country depends on dramatically altering the economic and governing landscape, it cannot do so unless the opposition politicians and average citizens forcefully challenge and respond to the lies and machinations of Barack Obama and his allies without fear of what may be said about them or to them.
The reality is that to Barack Obama. lying, aka "spin," is normal behavior. There is not a speech or an off-the cuff comment since he entered the national stage that does not contain some falsehood or obfuscation.

A speech on energy made last week and repeated on March 22 is reflective of this mindset. He is now attempting to portray himself as being in favor of drilling in order to increase oil production and approving pipeline construction, which stands in stark contrast to his stated and long-term position on energy and reiterated as recently as three weeks ago. This is a transparent and obvious ploy to once again fool the American people by essentially lying to them.

The performance by Barack Obama last August as referenced by the Washington Post was such an obvious and egregious falsehood that it could no longer be ignored. Yet there has been five years of outright lies and narcissism that have been largely ignored by the media, including some in the conservative press and political class who are loath to call Mr. Obama what he is, in the bluntest of terms, a liar and a fraud.

That he relies on his skin color to intimidate, either outright or by insinuation, those who oppose his radical agenda only adds to his audacity. It is apparent that he has gotten away with his character flaws his entire life, aided and abetted by the sycophants around him; thus, he is who he is and cannot change.

SOURCE

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

An ignoramus leading ignoramuses

Pew Research: Republicans More Knowledgeable Than Democrats

In the latest survey...Republicans outperformed Democrats on every single one of 19 questions. So Republicans are more knowledgeable than Democrats, contrary to what many would like to believe.

According to whom? None other than the Pew Research Center, a left-of-center organization. Moreover, Pew’s latest survey only reaffirms previous surveys demonstrating the same result.

In fact, the results weren’t even close. In a scientific survey of 1,168 adults conducted during September and October of last year, respondents were asked not only multiple-choice questions, but also queries using maps, photographs and symbols. Among other subjects, participants identified international leaders, cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, nations on a world map, the current unemployment and poverty rates and war casualty totals.

In a 2010 Pew survey, Republicans outperformed Democrats on 10 of 12 questions, with one tie and Democrats outperforming Republicans on just 1 of the 12. In the latest survey, however, Republicans outperformed Democrats on every single one of 19 questions.

Amusingly, the Pew report attempted to soften the stark partisan knowledge disparity:

“Republicans generally outperformed Democrats on the current quiz. On 13 of the 19 questions, Republicans score significantly higher than Democrats and there are no questions on which Democrats did better than Republicans. In past knowledge quizzes, partisan differences have been more muted, though Republicans often have scored somewhat higher than Democrats.”

“Generally outperformed?” “Somewhat higher?” That’s a curiously charitable way to describe the surveys, which went from previous blowouts to a complete shutout in the latest edition.

Those Pew results are confirmed by some surprising other sources. According to a New York Times headline dated April 14, 2010, “Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated.” Shattering widespread myths, that survey revealed that Tea Party supporters were more likely to possess a college degree than their counterparts (23% to 15%), and also more likely to have completed post-graduate studies (14% to 10%). Tea Partiers were also more likely to have completed “some college” by a 33% to 28% margin, and substantially less likely to have not completed high school than non-supporters (3% versus 12%), or to possess only a high school degree (26% versus 35%).

Those results will probably come as a rude awakening to supporters of Barack Obama, but it won’t to anyone paying attention. As just the latest example, consider the cheap laugh line that Obama keeps repeating on his current reelection tour thinly disguised as an energy policy apologia. As gasoline prices continue to rise due in part to his agenda, Obama likens anyone critical of his failed energy decisions to a modern-day “Flat Earth Society” in speech after speech.

The problem for Obama is that his attempted slur betrays historical illiteracy, as summarized nicely by conservative blogger Clayton Cramer:

“Now, if you attended high school, or college, you would know (or should know) that there was no educated European who thought the Earth was flat. None. The dispute that made it hard for Columbus to get funding was that he insisted the Earth was 18,000 miles in circumference, so the Indies were a plausible voyage west from Spain. The experts who told the various governments of Europe that Columbus wasn’t going to be successful thought the Earth was closer to 25,000 miles around – and sailing west to the Indies was going to be a failure. Had there not been the Americas in the way, Columbus and crew would have died of thirst.”

On his current tour, Obama also inaccurately maligned former President Rutherford B. Hayes as disdainful of the telephone. As Mona Charen also noted this week, Obama also “told us that America invented the automobile and that John F. Kennedy had met with Nikita Kruschev when we were on the brink of nuclear war,” when in fact the automobile was invented in Germany and Kennedy actually met Kruschev one year prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

This is the same President who referred to “57 states,” misstated the Citizens United decision in an address to the nation, pronounced Navy “corpsman” as “corpse-man” and blatantly misrepresented that Japanese automobiles now average 45 miles per gallon to our 27.5 standard.

Meanwhile, gas prices continue to break records while the Trash-Talker-in-Chief trots out fraudulent “flat earth” and “Rutherford B. Hayes” rhetoric.

None of this disparages anyone of any educational pedigree. It does, however, once again debunk the notion among preening liberals that they collectively maintain a knowledge or educational superiority.

SOURCE

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

The Death of Trayvon Martin: Is There Nothing Progressives Won’t Exploit?

A 17-year-old kid is shot dead. Police are investigating…and progressives see an opportunity. The Trayvon Martin case, in addition to being a tragedy, is a case study in political exploitation and progressive tactics.

The shooting death of a 17-year-old is horrible, whatever the circumstances and no matter their race. But progressives seem to care about this case only because of the race of the victim. There are thousands of murders that don’t “fit the bill” for exploitation and thus are ignored by these self-appointed “justice seekers.”

What happened that night? I don’t know. But neither do any of the race hustlers, such as Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, who speak of it as if they are clairvoyant. They care deeply about Trayvon’s family… as long as there are cameras around.

This lack of actual knowledge doesn’t stop progressives – many of whom call for due process rights and the presumption of innocence for terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay – from demanding the head of George Zimmerman, the shooter in this case. The hypocrisy runs deep.

I understand the tragedy here but not the selective outrage. There are thousands of murders in this country each year. How many have you heard of? A large percentage of those murder victims are younger than 30. How many have you heard of? Only a few.

How many cause people to take to the streets in protest? How many occupy a large portion of cable news? How many do these progressives screaming for the head of George Zimmerman ever mention on their TV or radio shows? You know the answer.

For progressives to care about someone who has been killed there must be an ulterior motive. In the case of Trayvon Martin, there are many.

First, race. That news outlets can’t talk about this case without mentioning Trayvon’s race is a testament to how successful progressives have been in instilling a segregationist mindset in the media. That they rarely mention the shooter’s race is a testament to just how far progressives will go to exploit tragedy to advance their divide and conquer agenda. Zimmerman is Hispanic, not white, as originally thought. Since the race-hustling machine was already in motion and impossible to stop, they and their fellow travellers in the media simply ignore it.

Bill Maher, HBO’s resident crap-flinging monkey, tweeted, “No probable cause in #TrayvonMartin murder? If a dead unarmed teen and an angry racist with a smoking gun is too subtle a clue, what isn't?”

Is Zimmerman a racist? I have no idea (his father and neighbor say no), but I do know Bill Maher has no idea either. But that doesn’t stop progressive Maher from making a definitive statement on the issue. Facts don’t matter in pursuit of the agenda.

Second, policy. Progressives always have hated Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law. This case offered an opportunity to demonize it, and they took it – even though it does not apply to this case. Zimmerman wasn’t “standing his ground;” he was following Martin. Whatever happened when they engaged in their confrontation is a separate matter.

But again, facts don’t matter. The fascist progressives blame the law, almost as much as the shooter, for Martin’s death. Before any investigation is complete, calls for repeal (which were there before the shooting) are getting louder and louder. Mindless media drones and the professionally outraged progressive mob are calling for repeal. Screw facts; they demand action.

Third, politics. The one thing progressives value above all else is political power. They will dance on Trayvon Martin’s grave to keep people divided into the groups and sub-groups they’ve worked so hard to create and manipulate.

Media Matters, a fascistic group of anti-First Amendment progressives whose mission is allegedly to correct conservative bias in the media, has been promoting the Trayvon Martin story. What bias is there in this case? No one, right or left, doesn’t consider this a tragedy. It’s just that some don’t want to call for more blood without an investigation. But when Media Matters is involved, you can bet the Democrat Party is pulling the strings.

Enter MSNBC. MSNBC’s lineup is a who’s who of detestable bigots and professional hatemongers whose only goal in life is to advance the progressive agenda at all costs. Rather than focus on the life of Trayvon or the tragedy of his death, MSNBC had a segment entitled “The GOP agenda that produced ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws.” The dots were laid out so plainly even most of their intelligence-challenged audience could connect them – GOP pushed Stand Your Ground, Stand Your Ground is responsible for Trayvon’s death, therefore the GOP is responsible for Trayvon’s death.

Since many of the uninformed who watch MSNBC need things spelled out for them because they’re too busy trying to figure out why they can’t eat tomato soup with a fork, fill-in host and noted idiot racist Karen Finney went all-in. Mimicking the time progressives blamed Sarah Palin for the tragic Tucson shooting, only to have the insane man behind it be exposed as an anti-war, anti-Bush leftist, Finney blamed Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney for the death of Trayvon.

The only thing more disgusting than Finney knowingly (and believe me, she knows) exploiting the death of a 17-year-old for political purposes, or a “news” organization broadcasting that on their network is knowing of the other deaths and murders they willingly ignore because the victims, the perpetrators or both have the incorrect skin pigment to advance their agenda.

A human life is a human life to everyone – well,, to everyone but progressives. To them, a human life is a tool, a toy, a means by which their anti-liberty, anti-American agenda can be advanced, provided those involved in taking it have the correct type and order of melanin, genitals or any other subdividing characteristics they deem worthy of outrage. The rest? The thousands who don’t fit their mold? They can rot. They can rot just like those who fit the mold in the past, served their purpose and are now forgotten for new pawns.

The death of Trayvon Martin is a tragedy, just as the death of every person who passes in such a matter is a tragedy. How it came to be will be determined in the due course of an honest investigation, not by exploiting a family’s tragedy for votes and ratings.

The only way to give Trayvon justice, for non-progressives still interested in such things, is to let the investigation lead where it goes, not pass the same prejudgment on George Zimmerman progressives accuse him of passing on Trayvon. It’s time for progressives to stop dancing on Trayvon Martin’s grave, to stop dancing on the graves of all the victims they exploit, take off their bigoted blinders and join the rest of society.

They won’t. They can’t. It’s who they are. So it’s up to the rest of us to help them at the ballot box by continually rejecting any and everyone who would seek to abuse victims for political gain. Especially when that trail leads to the White House.

SOURCE (More commentary on GUN WATCH)

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

ELSEWHERE

Liberating The Hunger Games: "As legions of fans descend on theaters this March to watch the The Hunger Games, I wonder how many will have also recognized in her books another theme that may well give her trilogy a shelf life equal to that of that of another great social critic, George Orwell. While Suzanne Collins’ story includes most of the critical elements needed to fit the sensibilities of modern movies -- the ever present potential of its teenage protagonist’s death, oppression by a barbaric central government, and a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting -- another theme is equally and perhaps more important: The quest for personal liberty."

Jump-start the economy with tax relief, not tax reform: "What this country needs is tax relief, not tax reform. All you have to do is look at American history to see the proof of this. When taxes are reduced, and the nation is at peace, the economy thrives and people prosper. When taxes are raised, and the nation is at war, the economy stagnates. There is no escape from these simple economic realities."

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. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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)

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

Romney, Republicans, and the young

by Jeff Jacoby

"I don't mean to be flip with this," said Mitt Romney during a Q-and-A with students at the University of Chicago last week. "But I don't see how a young American can vote for a Democrat." He cheerfully apologized to anyone who might find such a comment "offensive," but went on to explain why he was in earnest.

The Democratic Party "is focused on providing more and more benefits to my generation, mounting trillion-dollar annual deficits my generation will never pay for," Romney said. While Democrats are perpetrating "the greatest inter-generational transfer of wealth in the history of humankind," Republicans are "consumed with the idea of getting federal spending down and creating economic growth and opportunity so we can balance our budget and stop putting these debts on you."

The government's record-breaking debts "are not frightening to people my age, because we'll be gone," Romney argued, but "they ought to be frightening to death to people your age!" He regretted not doing a better job of getting that message across to younger voters. "You guys ought to be out," Romney insisted, "working like crazy for me and for people like me: conservatives, who want to keep the cost of government down and give you a brighter future."

About one thing Romney is surely correct: Washington's staggering spending binge is entailing a burden of fearsome proportions on the millennial generation -- voters in their late teens and 20s. With the government more than $15.5 trillion in debt and continuing to borrow 40 cents of every dollar it spends, Generation Y is in for a prolonged economic beating. The national debt now exceeds the entire annual output of the US economy. Millennials will be paying for it through higher taxes, slower growth, reduced public services, fewer jobs, lower incomes, and a more uncertain future than their parents or grandparents confronted.

But that debt wasn't piled up without plenty of Republican help. During George W. Bush's presidency, annual federal spending skyrocketed from $1.8 trillion to $3.4 trillion, and $4.9 trillion was added to the national debt. Bush left the White House, in fact, as the biggest spender since LBJ. Granted, the profligacy of Barack Obama has outstripped even Bush's bacchanal: CBS reports that Obama has added more to the national debt in just three years and two months than Bush did in his entire eight years. Still, younger voters can hardly be blamed if they haven't noticed that Republicans are "consumed with the idea of getting federal spending down."

In any case, even persuasive economic arguments don't always sway voters. Romney's lament that twentysomethings aren't "working like crazy" for Republicans like him mirrors the frustration of liberals like Thomas Frank, whose best-selling "What's the Matter With Kansas?" made the case that heartland Americans hurt their own interests by not supporting Democrats. It takes more to win voters' loyalty than just appealing to their pocketbooks. Romney may be right about millennials' economic interests, but so far they've been voting like lockstep Democrats. They went two-to-one for Obama over John McCain, and backed John Kerry over Bush in 2004. Their enchantment with Obama may have fallen off -- according to the Pew Research Center, just 49 percent of young voters approve the president's job performance, a sharp drop since 2009 -- but they are still more likely than any other age group to describe themselves as Democrats.

It is common for voters to lean leftward when young and incline to the right with age. In a major report on "The Generation Gap and the 2012 Election," Pew notes that members of the "Silent Generation" -- those born before 1945 -- were once one of the most Democratic cohorts, but today are the most Republican. Baby Boomers, too, are moving rightward. Of voters born between 1946 and 1964, Pew finds, far more identify themselves as conservative than as liberal: "A majority of Boomers now favors a smaller government that provides fewer services. When they were in their 20s and 30s, Boomers were more supportive of big government."

But while "young = liberal" may be a familiar equation, it isn't chiseled in granite. Indeed, it wasn't all that long ago that the nation's youngest voters solidly backed the most influential conservative in modern American politics. In 1984, voters under 30 supported Ronald Reagan by a whopping 20-point margin. Not until Obama's election 24 years later would young voters so strongly line up behind any presidential candidate.

SOURCE

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

A Bad Economy's Silver Lining

The Economist hits the nail on the head - albeit a nail that has been well hit by many in the free market movement already. In the latest issue, they correctly observe that an ailing economy presents a golden opportunity to roll back economic restrictions and increase liberty. Whether it's gambling, alcohol, or another "sin" product or service, the case for easing restrictions on the sale and consumption of these "vices" is very tempting, in particular if the case can be made that such changes will increase potential tax revenue and/or create jobs.

As those who follow my weekly "Alcohol Regulation Roundup" series may have noticed, the "good" news has increased with each passing month. Southern states are trying to make it easier for brewers to operate, Northeastern states are increasing the hours and days liquor stores can operate, and dozens of states are considering privatizing state-run alcohol distribution or sales. It isn't just alcohol; gambling is a booming industry in more and more states. Some are increasing the places allowed to offer slots and another dozen states are considering legislation to legalize online gambling, casinos, or slots. We've even seen some smoking bans overturned! But with the economy heading towards a much needed recovery, there's still a lot more work to do. As noted in the Economist article:

.despite all these initiatives, many parts of America are still lumbered with a bizarre and complex array of restrictions on drinking, gambling and the like that seem entirely out of keeping with a country that proudly calls itself the land of the free. Even after Washington leaves the club, 17 states will still maintain a government monopoly on either the sale or distribution of spirits, or both .There are over 4,000 state and federal laws concerning alcohol, says Mr Coleman of DISCUS, and another 1,900 were proposed in 2008 alone. Rules about gambling are an equally perverse mix. Only 12 states have no casinos of any sort. But several more allow them only on boats or at racetracks. Another 12 limit gambling to Indian reservations. And four states still ban fireworks of all kinds.

Yes, this expansion of liberty is the silver lining of a terribly rough economic depression. And it's a silver lining that very likely will last into the economic recovery. Sure, with more people back to work and fewer complaining there will be a smaller number of legislators keen on expanding alcohol or gambling in their state. However, the work done by state-based and national groups such as DISCUS, The Brewers Association, Free The Hops, OpenTheTaps, CEI, The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, The Commonwealth Foundation, the Washington Policy Center, and many others will not be forgotten. We have shown that people want more freedom, choices, and better service. We have shown that liberty really does increase wealth, and enlightened many lawmakers to the idea of free market enterprise. So long as we keep chipping away at the roadblocks, we can continue to increase consumer and business freedom - regardless of the economic atmosphere.

SOURCE

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

GOP Will Lose the Future by Dissing College Grads

The angry, populist tone of the seemingly endless battle for the GOP presidential nomination may cripple the Republican Party in building a long-term connection with the fastest growing group of swing voters in the overall electorate: college graduates.

While the candidates focus their attention on the white working class as the key battle ground in their frantic struggle for advantage within the GOP, it’s actually more privileged voters who’ve earned four year college degrees who will play the key role in defeating or re-electing Barack Obama.

In 2008, an unprecedented 44 percent of all voters held bachelor degrees or higher, compared to just 28 percent of the electorate in Ronald Reagan’s landmark victory of 1980.

The Gipper, however, crushed Jimmy Carter among college grads (52 to 35 percent) while John McCain lost this segment of the population to Barack Obama (45 to 53 percent). In other words, the Republican candidate went from a seventeen point advantage (in both ’80 and ’84, as it turns out) to an eight point loss among those who completed college—a crippling swing of 25 full percentage points. George W. Bush represented something of a mid-point in this alarming decline in Republican appeal to the most educated element of the electorate, splitting college grads evenly with both Al Gore (2000) and John Kerry (2004).

Projections indicate that the segment of the population with undergraduate and advanced degrees will continue to rise sharply in 2012, and could conceivably represent a majority of all voters in 2016. This growth in the proportion of university-educated adults extends to every ethnic group in the country and represents inarguable good news for the American economy, but bad news for clumsy and misguided Republicans who seem determined to hand Democrats the advantage when it comes to educational issues.

Rick Santorum provided only the most egregious example when he went out of his way to insult college educated voters by questioning the value of their university experience and attacking President Obama as a “snob” for seeking to open higher education to more of our fellow citizens. No wonder Mitt Romney soundly defeated Righteous Rick among college graduates in hotly contested Ohio, winning their votes 43 to 35 percent. And even in the famously blue collar Buckeye State, college grads represented a full 45 percent of the GOP primary electorate.

Those with postgraduate study also amounted to a surprisingly significant voting bloc in Ohio – 18 percent of all Republican voters. And this nearly one-fifth of the electorate tilted even more decisively against Santorum – preferring Romney by a margin of 46 to 36 percent.

Appealing more successfully to the most educated segment of the population need not undermine the efforts of Rick Santorum or any other candidate to rally support among blue collar urbanites, ethnic minorities, farmers or anyone else. More than half of American adults may currently lack college degrees but virtually all of them want such credentials for their children.

In his stump speech, Romney has been trying out a good line about seeing the success of others as a spur to “ambition, not envy” and that formulation should apply to educational as well as economic success. After all, achievement in higher education correlates powerfully with performance in the workplace. Recent numbers indicate that those with university degrees face only one-fourth the unemployment rate of those with no high school diploma (4 percent to 16 percent).

Ironically, this field of Republican contenders amounts to the best educated crop of major candidates in the history of American politics: each of the Final Four holds at least one prestigious post-graduate degree. Dr. Ron Paul earned his MD from Duke and Dr. Newt Gingrich won a PhD from Tulane; Mitt Romney holds both law and business degrees (JD and MBA) from Harvard, while Rick Santorum got the same two degrees from Dickinson School of Law and University of Pittsburgh, respectively.

What’s more, Santorum’s family background shows the profound value of education in lifting the disadvantaged into the middle class and beyond. Contrary to the deliberately misleading impression that he grew up in the “coal fields of Pennsylvania,” young Rick actually came of age as the son of a father who earned a PhD and worked as a clinical psychologist while his mother toiled outside the home as well-credentialed administrative nurse; it was his immigrant grandfather who worked the coal mines.

It makes no sense for the former Senator to downplay or denigrate his own family’s success story because his parents’ progress exemplifies the sort of achievement that all mothers and fathers want for their children. Sure, it’s important to talk about protecting and growing manufacturing jobs because so many hard-pressed people depend on them, but those same workers dream that the next generation can do even better than industrial employment.

By the same token, when Newt Gingrich rails endlessly about malevolent “elites” he seems to deny his own elite educational background as a college professor and historian. It’s neither an accident nor an embarrassment that an America eagerly embracing meritocracy has elected four presidents in a row with degrees from either Yale or Harvard (or, in the case of George W. Bush, from both venerable institutions).

The American people instinctively respect elite achievement in academia at the same time they admire elite achievement in the world of business. Just as wealth creation by corporate leaders harms no one and promotes prosperity for the nation at large, so too advanced learning at top universities serves to open, rather than close off, opportunities for the populace. Republicans rightly slam Democrats for “class-warfare”--spreading resentment rather than respect for those Americans who achieve economic success. It makes no sense for those same GOPers to turn around and promote “anti-intellectualism” – encouraging similar spite for those who compile enviable educational records.

The GOP can’t possibly build a winning coalition by appealing only to the rich, but Republicans can definitely prevail by connecting with all those who want to get rich. Those who earn over $100,000 a year represented only 26 percent of the electorate in 2008 but those who intend to earn at that level at some point in the future could easily comprise a majority.

On a similar note, people with their own college degrees don’t yet dominate the voting public, but families willing to save and sacrifice to provide such credentials for their children surely constitute an overwhelming majority.

Appealing to such aspirations, rather than ignoring or dismissing them, will enable conservatives to honor the best American traditions of upward mobility and self-improvement. And with more and more of our fellow citizens seeking and completing college degrees, it’s also the only way that Republicans can win.

SOURCE

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

ELSEWHERE

Could the JOBS Bill Make Matters Worse for Job Creation? "You’ve probably seen the headlines - the J.O.B.S. bill passed in the Senate. So that means more “jobs” in the American economy, right? As President Obama and a large portion of the Congress run for re-election, Washington is obsessed with this rather illusory concept of “job creation.” And the “J.O.B.S.” Act, named with an acronym that stands for “Jumpstart Our Business Startups,” is the latest legislative effort to stimulate business startups, and thus, to entice job creation. The bill actually resembles a hodgepodge of several different legislative agendas. And even if the bill accomplishes what its supporters claim, it is probably still several steps removed from actual “job creation.” It may also be yet another governmental wet blanket thrown on top of an economy that is ready to catch fire."

TN: Bill protects teachers allowing evolution debate: "The Tennessee Senate approved a bill Monday that would encourage teachers and students to debate evolution in the classroom, setting aside complaints that the measure would drag the state back onto the battleground over the teaching of creationism. Senators voted 24-8 to pass a bill that says schoolteachers cannot be punished for 'helping students to understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories' taught in public schools."

Good Samaritan laws in a stranger danger society: "Via Radley Balko comes the news story of a father of three who, so he claims, attempted to be a good samaritan and offer two teenage girls caught out walking in a snowstorm without protection a lift home only to be charged with disorderly conduct for his trouble. The girls, you see, were 'alarmed and disturbed' by the offer."

MN: Man arrested for siding code violation: "A Burnsville man on his way to work was arrested and thrown in jail without bond, and then subjected to electronic home monitoring. But it wasn’t for drugs or a DWI or some other major crime. Burnsville city leaders say Mitch Faber’s dealings with the law all stem from his failure to properly put up siding on his house.”

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

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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)

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

Happy days are here again; The sky is blue, let's cheer again!

The sort of election result that conservatives can normally only dream about has just happened in my home State of Queensland. The conservatives obliterated the outgoing Leftist government -- with a provisional 75 seats in the parliament for the conservatives versus only 6 for the Leftists.

Much was owed to the charismatic leader of the conservatives, Campbell Newman. I know him slightly and have always been impressed by his helpful attitude. He is a former military man too, a graduate of Duntroon, Australia's equivalent of West Point. He reached the rank of major during his service. So he knows about decisiveness and leadership.

My State is now in good hands. It is bigger than California and Texas combined so it is of some significance. It has gigantic natural resources, particularly coal

The first thing Newman said in his victory speech was "Thank you for voting for change" So much for the puerile Leftist claim that conservatives are opposed to change. It is only Leftist changes that they oppose.

The land of the subjugated

Is a new American revolution needed?

What would you do if you came across someone on the street that had not had anything to eat for several days? Would you give that person some food? Well, the next time you get that impulse you might want to check if it is still legal to feed the homeless where you live. Sadly, feeding the homeless has been banned in major cities all over America. Other cities that have not banned it outright have put so many requirements on those that want to feed the homeless (acquiring expensive permits, taking food preparation courses, etc.) that feeding the homeless has become “out of reach” for most average people.

Some cities are doing these things because they are concerned about the “health risks” of the food being distributed by ordinary “do-gooders”. Other cities are passing these laws because they do not want homeless people congregating in city centers where they know that they will be fed. But at a time when poverty and government dependence are soaring to unprecedented levels, is it really a good idea to ban people from helping those that are hurting?

This is just another example that shows that our country is being taken over by control freaks. There seems to be this idea out there that it is the job of the government to take care of everyone and that nobody else should even try.

But do we really want to have a nation where you have to get the permission of the government before you do good to your fellow man?

It isn’t as if the government has “rescued” these homeless people. Homeless shelters all over the nation are turning people away each night because they have no more room. There are many homeless people that are lucky just to make it through each night alive during the winter.

Sometimes a well-timed sandwich or a cup of warm soup can make a world of difference for a homeless person. But many U.S. cities have decided that feeding the homeless is such a threat that they had better devote law enforcement resources to making sure that it doesn’t happen.

This is so twisted. In America today, you need a “permit” to do almost anything. We are supposed to be a land of liberty and freedom, but these days government bureaucrats have turned our rights into “privileges” that they can revoke at any time.

The bureaucrats are officially out of control. In America today, it seems like almost everything is illegal. One church down in Louisiana was recently ordered to stop giving out water because it did not have a government permit.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I sure am going to give a cup of cold water to someone if they need it whether I have a permit or not. It is as if common sense has totally gone out the window in this nation.

Over in New Hampshire, a woman is being sued for planting flowers in her own front yard.

This is the kind of thing that makes me glad that I have moved to a much more rural location. People in the country tend to be much more relaxed.

Sadly, those that love to micro-manage others continue to get the upper hand in America. Back in January, 40,000 new laws went into effect all over America. The politicians continue to hit us with wave after wave of regulations and laws with no end in sight.

All of this is making America a very unpleasant place in which to live.

More HERE

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

Troubling Provisions Being Added to the Violence Against Women Act: Due Process Rights Threatened

Provisions are being added to the 1994 Violence Against Women Act that could undermine due process on campus and in criminal cases, as civil liberties groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and civil libertarians like former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer have noted. The changes are contained in a reauthorization of the act that is likely to pass the Senate over objections from some Republican senators like Charles Grassley of Iowa, who has also objected to the lack of safeguards against fraud in the law and the misuse of millions of dollars in taxpayer money. (Even if the Senate’s reauthorization does not pass the House, programs set up by the 1994 law will continue to operate.)

William Creeley of FIRE, and Wendy Kaminer, say that the Senate reauthorization would effectively result in a form of double jeopardy for accused students. Moreover, they point out, it would implicitly reinforce Education Department “guidance” demanding that colleges water down due process protections in campus disciplinary proceedings (a demand criticized by lawyers like Robert Smith, Jennifer Braceras, Ilya Shapiro, and Harvey Silverglate; leading law professor and former University of Chicago law dean Richard Epstein; the American Association of University Professors; and many civil libertarians and journalists. I am a former Education Department attorney who practiced education law for years, and I discussed why the Education Department’s guidance was legally unjustified under Title IX and federal court rulings here, here, here, here, here, and here).

One provision they do not address, but which Senator Grassley understandably objects to, is a provision in the VAWA reauthorization that would subject non-Indians to Indian tribal courts in domestic violence cases. Historically, Indian tribal courts have only had jurisdiction over members of their own tribe. Moreover, defendants in tribal courts are not constitutionally entitled to the protections of the Bill of Rights, unlike state or federal courts (see Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez ) — although tribal courts have, in theory, been subjected to some of the strictures of the Bill of Rights pursuant to the Indian Civil Rights Act. As lawyer John Hinderaker notes, courts have ruled “that tribal governments are not bound by the Constitution’s First, Fifth, or Fourteenth Amendments.”

Federal judges have lamented the bias shown by some Indian tribal courts against non-Indians, as in cases where Indian tribal courts imposed hundreds of millions of dollars in damages on railroads over personal injury cases resulting from railroad tracks running through reservations that ordinarily would lead to damages only in the low thousands, suggesting a flagrant violation of Supreme Court decisions like BMW v. Gore. (See Judge Andrew Kleinfeld’s dissent in Burlington Northern Railroad Co. v. Red Wolf, dealing with a $250 million judgment imposed on a railroad by a tribal court.)

Given that courts sometimes issue unfounded domestic violence sanctions on people who don’t even live in their jurisdiction — as was illustrated by a New Mexico judge’s restraining order erroneously issued against David Letterman after a local woman falsely accused him of harassing her across the country through his TV show — giving a tribal court jurisdiction over outsiders raises serious questions of due process and jurisdictional overreaching.

Even the original 1994 version of the Violence Against Women Act had its problems, suggesting inadequate vetting. It contained a provision struck down by the Supreme Court because it exceeded Congress’s powers under the Fourteenth Amendment and the Interstate Commerce Clause. That invalid provision created a tort remedy for gender-motivated domestic violence that essentially duplicated state laws (all states ban domestic violence, and take such crimes seriously).

VAWA also contains another provision that appears to violate due process (see, e.g., 8 U.S.C. 1367(a)). It lets certain immigrants receive specified government benefits by making a “prima facie” allegation of domestic violence, an allegation that the accused is expressly forbidden to rebut; the Vermont immigration office reviews and approves all such applications for benefits, as long as the allegations are sufficiently specific as to constitute a “prima facie” case, which is the legal term for allegations, regardless of their truth or falsity, which are sufficiently detailed and internally consistent to adequately allege a legal violation (the “evidence” that demonstrates a prima facie case is generally just the complainant’s detailed allegation).

As Natasha Spivak noted in Roll Call, under VAWA, the federal immigration agency “Citizenship and Immigration Services deems a person accused of domestic violence to be a ‘prohibited source.’ So the CIS, in Kafka-esque manner, refuses to accept any documentation that might reveal the immigrant to be a criminal, welfare cheat or perjurer.”

When such benefits are granted, the government can then proceed under other provisions of federal law to recover the cost of such benefits from the accused. But as cases like Sacharow v. Sacharow and Tyree v. Evans illustrate, the government cannot award benefits at the expense of a private party without giving that party a subsequent opportunity to defend himself. In the Sacharow case, the New Jersey Supreme Court, which is perhaps the most sympathetic court in the nation to domestic violence complainants, nevertheless ruled that a father accused of domestic violence had a right to defend himself before his ex-wife was put into the Address Confidentiality Program, which would have made it more difficult for him to maintain his relationship with his child. In Tyree v. Evans, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that a man was entitled not only to the opportunity to defend himself against domestic violence charges before a year-long restraining order could be granted to his accuser, but also the ability to cross-examine her, before the court could impose a Civil Protection Order against him.

These flaws in the statute may reflect lawmakers’ reluctance to scrutinize its provisions due to its crowd-pleasing name (no one wants to be perceived as soft on criminals who commit “violence against women”). Many counterproductive laws come with appealing names that are designed to shut down debate and prevent careful evaluation of their provisions — like laws named after dead children. Veteran civil-liberties lawyer and former ACLU board member Harvey Silverglate says that “Any time you have a statute named after a victim, it’s not a good law.” “In order to get it passed, you have to depend on sympathy for somebody rather than seeking to remedy a real problem in the system.”

Some have argued that VAWA promotes inflexible mandatory arrest and prosecution policies that backfire on women by taking away their ability to obtain police assistance in situations where the victim does not want a formal prosecution because it could result in job losses or other economic injuries. Harvard University’s Radha Iyengar and Jeannie Suk have concluded that mandatory arrest and prosecution policies result in more deaths among women.

One women’s group cites Harvard’s Iyengar for the proposition that “Intimate partner homicides increased by about 60% in states with mandatory arrest laws.” The group Stop Abusive and Violent Environments argues that mandatory arrest laws lead to higher fatalities here, citing a Harvard study that “found enactment of state mandatory arrest policies increased intimate partner homicides by 57%. ”

(If a wife fears calling the police for help in a domestic dispute because her husband, the family breadwinner, will automatically be arrested and prosecuted regardless of her wishes or the lack of physical injury, it may be that she will never call the cops, leading to domestic violence escalating over time. As Carol Iannone noted at National Review, a wife who understandably called police during a domestic dispute involving her husband, a deputy mayor, regretted doing so because police arrested him and caused him to lose his job, resulting in enormous embarrassment for her family. People like that may be less likely to seek police help in cooling down a domestic situation that might otherwise escalate if they fear they will lose all control of the consequences).

SOURCE

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

ObamaCare’s 5,931 Pages Of Regulations. Happy 2nd Anniversary!

And you thought the actual legislation was a tome. But the number of pages of regulations being released due to ObamaCare is beginning to make the initial bill look like a pamphlet. By IBD’s count, the regulations are up to 5,931 pages.

That includes small, two-pagers that counsel employers to give sufficient break time for nursing mothers, to the recent 644-page behemoth on the health insurance exchanges.

A few thoughts:

First, Obama told us that his reform would make health care more accessible and affordable. Lucky for him he didn’t say it would result in less paperwork.

Second, as this blog recently noted, ObamaCare requires private insurers to make sure the information about their policies runs no more than six pages. Clearly, this is more proof government doesn’t have to follow the rules it sets for everyone else.

Finally, a great deal of frustration and worry must be in store for physicians, nurses, hospitals, and many other providers. After all, it’s not that hard to be in violation of at least a few rules when there are over 50,000 pages of them.

Indeed, we’ve already seen what trouble these regulations can cause with the recent kerfuffle over birth control. One can only wonder what else will eventually emerge.

Or, you can try to find out for yourself. Here is the list of the regulations that IBD has compiled. All except the first one (the 644-pager on exchanges) can be downloaded at the Federal Register.

SOURCE

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

Obamacare, Two Years Later

This week marks two years since of the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and if the Obama administration has chosen to all but ignore the second anniversary of Obamacare, the rest of us should pause and reflect on just what a monumental failure of policy the health-care-reform law has been.

What’s more, it has been a failure on its own terms. After all, when health-care reform was passed, we were promised that it would do three things: 1) provide health-insurance coverage for all Americans; 2) reduce insurance costs for individuals, businesses, and government; and 3) increase the quality of health care and the value received for each dollar of health-care spending. At the same time, the president and the law’s supporters in Congress promised that the legislation would not increase the federal-budget deficit or unduly burden the economy. And it would do all these things while letting those of us who were happy with our current health insurance keep it unchanged. Two years in, we can see that none of these things is true.

For example, we now know that, contrary to claims made when the bill passed, the law will not come close to achieving universal coverage. In fact, as time goes by, it looks as if the bill will cover fewer and fewer people than advertised. According to a report from the Congressional Budget Office released last week, Obamacare will leave 27 million Americans uninsured by 2022. This represents an increase of 2–4 million uninsured over previous reports. Moreover, it should be noted that, of the 23 million Americans who will gain coverage under Obamacare, 17 million will not be covered by real insurance, but will simply be dumped into the Medicaid system, with all its problems of access and quality. Thus, only about 20 million Americans will receive actual insurance coverage under Obamacare. That’s certainly an improvement over the status quo, but it’s also a far cry from universal coverage — and not much bang for the buck, given Obamacare’s ever-rising cost.

At the same time, the legislation is a major failure when it comes to controlling costs. While we were once told that health-care reform would “bend the cost curve down,” we now know that Obamacare will actually increase U.S. health-care spending. This should come as no surprise: If you are going to provide more benefits to more people, it is going to cost you more money.... This failure to control costs means that the law will add significantly to the already-crushing burden of government spending, taxes, and debt....

Next week, Obamacare will slouch its way to the Supreme Court. How the justices decide will be based on questions of constitutional law. Their decision will set a crucial precedent in setting the boundaries between government power and individual rights. But regardless of whether the Court upholds Obamacare or strikes it down, in whole or in part, we should understand that, simply as a matter of health-care reform, Obamacare is a costly and dangerous failure.

More HERE

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

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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)

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

Is America run by psychopaths?

The writer below used the more "correct" term "sociopath" but I prefer the older term "psychopath" because I believe that the psychopath really does have something missing in his brain. In one of my academic papers on the subject, however, I pointed out that the attribute almost certainly exists on a continuum from mildly psychopathic to criminally psychopathic and that most psychopaths ("sub-clinical" psychopaths) manage to get by without falling foul of the criminal justice or mental health systems.

Knowing psychopathy as I do, however, it seems clear to me that both Bill Clinton and Obama are sub-clinical psychopaths and other Leftist leaders are too. I look at that in detail here.

The writer below, however believes that psychopathehy is a much more dominant influence in society than that. I fear that he may be right. The way the Obama administration picks and chooses which laws (including constitutional ones) it will obey (e.g. here) is not only of concern in itsef but is also of concern in that people mostly seem to accept such behavior

In this article, I'm going to argue that the US government, in particular, is being overrun by the wrong kind of person. It's a trend that's been in motion for many years but has now reached a point of no return. In other words, a type of moral rot has become so prevalent that it's institutional in nature. There is not going to be, therefore, any serious change in the direction in which the US is headed until a genuine crisis topples the existing order. Until then, the trend will accelerate.

The reason is that a certain class of people – sociopaths – are now fully in control of major American institutions. Their beliefs and attitudes are insinuated throughout the economic, political, intellectual and psychological/spiritual fabric of the US.

What the ascendancy of sociopaths means isn't an academic question. Throughout history, the question has been a matter of life and death. That's one reason America grew; every American (or any ex-colonial) has forebears who confronted the issue and decided to uproot themselves to go somewhere with better prospects. The losers were those who delayed thinking about the question until the last minute.

I have often described myself, and those I prefer to associate with, as gamma rats. You may recall the ethologist's characterization of the social interaction of rats as being between a few alpha rats and many beta rats, the alpha rats being dominant and the beta rats submissive. In addition, a small percentage are gamma rats that stake out prime territory and mates, like the alphas, but are not interested in dominating the betas. The people most inclined to leave for the wide world outside and seek fortune elsewhere are typically gamma personalities.

You may be thinking that what happened in places like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia and scores of other countries in recent history could not, for some reason, happen in the US. Actually, there's no reason it won't at this point. All the institutions that made America exceptional – including a belief in capitalism, individualism, self-reliance and the restraints of the Constitution – are now only historical artifacts.

On the other hand, the distribution of sociopaths is completely uniform across both space and time. Per capita, there were no more evil people in Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, Amin's Uganda, Ceausescu's Romania or Pol Pot's Cambodia than there are today in the US. All you need is favorable conditions for them to bloom, much as mushrooms do after a rainstorm.

Conditions for them in the US are becoming quite favorable. Have you ever wondered where the 50,000 people employed by the TSA to inspect and degrade you came from? Most of them are middle-aged. Did they have jobs before they started doing something that any normal person would consider demeaning? Most did, but they were attracted to – not repelled by – a job where they wear a costume and abuse their fellow citizens all day.

Few of them can imagine that they're shepherding in a police state as they play their roles in security theater. (A reinforced door on the pilots' cabin is probably all that's actually needed, although the most effective solution would be to hold each airline responsible for its own security and for the harm done if it fails to protect passengers and third parties.) But the 50,000 newly employed are exactly the same type of people who joined the Gestapo – eager to help in the project of controlling everyone. Nobody was drafted into the Gestapo.

What's going on here is an instance of Pareto's Law. That's the 80-20 rule that tells us, for example, that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your salesmen or that 20% of the population are responsible for 80% of the crime.

As I see it, 80% of people are basically decent; their basic instincts are to live by the Boy Scout virtues. 20% of people, however, are what you might call potential trouble sources, inclined toward doing the wrong thing when the opportunity presents itself. They might now be shoe clerks, mailmen or waitresses – they seem perfectly benign in normal times. They play baseball on weekends and pet the family dog. However, given the chance, they will sign up for the Gestapo, the Stasi, the KGB, the TSA, Homeland Security or whatever. Many are well intentioned but likely to favor force as the solution to any problem.

But it doesn't end there, because 20% of that 20% are really bad actors. They are drawn to government and other positions where they can work their will on other people and, because they're enthusiastic about government, they rise to leadership positions. They remake the culture of the organizations they run in their own image. Gradually, non-sociopaths can no longer stand being there. They leave. Soon the whole barrel is full of bad apples. That's what's happening today in the US.

It's a pity that Bush, when he was in office, made such a big deal of evil. He discredited the concept. He made Boobus americanus think it only existed in a distant axis, in places like North Korea, Iraq and Iran – which were and still are irrelevant backwaters and arbitrarily chosen enemies. Bush trivialized the concept of evil and made it seem banal because he was such a fool. All the while real evil, very immediate and powerful, was growing right around him, and he lacked the awareness to see he was fertilizing it by turning the US into a national security state after 9/11.

Now, I believe, it's out of control. The US is already in a truly major depression and on the edge of financial chaos and a currency meltdown. The sociopaths in government will react by redoubling the pace toward a police state domestically and starting a major war abroad. To me, this is completely predictable. It's what sociopaths do.

Sociopaths completely lack a conscience or any capacity for real regret about hurting people. Although they pretend the opposite.
Sociopaths put their own desires and wants on a totally different level from those of other people. Their wants are incommensurate. They truly believe their ends justify their means. Although they pretend the opposite.

Sociopaths consider themselves superior to everyone else, because they aren't burdened by the emotions and ethics others have – they're above all that. They're arrogant. Although they pretend the opposite.

The fact that they're chronic, extremely convincing and even enthusiastic liars, who often believe their own lies, means they aren't easy to spot, because normal people naturally assume another person is telling the truth. They rarely have handlebar mustaches or chortle like Snidely Whiplash. Instead, they cultivate a social veneer or a mask of sanity that diverts suspicion. You can rely on them to be "politically correct" in public. How could a congressman or senator who avidly supports charities possibly be a bad guy? They're expert at using facades to disguise reality, and they feel no guilt about it.

Political elites are primarily, and sometimes exclusively, composed of sociopaths. It's not just that they aren't normal human beings. They're barely even human, a separate subspecies, differentiated by their psychological qualities. A normal human can mate with them spiritually and psychologically about as fruitfully as a modern human could mate physically with a Neanderthal; it can be done, but the results won't be good.

It's a serious problem when a society becomes highly politicized, as is now the case in the US and Europe. In normal times, a sociopath stays under the radar. Perhaps he'll commit a common crime when he thinks he can get away with it, but social mores keep him reined in. However, once the government changes its emphasis from protecting citizens from force to initiating force with laws and taxes, those social mores break down. Peer pressure, social approbation and moral opprobrium, the forces that keep a healthy society orderly, are replaced by regulations enforced by cops and funded by taxes. Sociopaths sense this, start coming out of the woodwork and are drawn to the State and its bureaucracies and regulatory agencies, where they can get licensed and paid to do what they've always wanted to do.

It's nonsensical to blather about the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave when reality TV and Walmart riots are much closer to the truth. The majority of Americans are, of course, where the rot originates – the presidential candidates are spending millions taking their pulse in surveys and polls and then regurgitating to them what they seem to want to hear. Once a country buys into the idea that an above-average, privileged lifestyle is everyone's minimum due, when the fortunate few can lobby for special deals to rake something off the table as they squeeze wealth out of others by force, that country is on the decline. Lobbying and taxation rather than production and innovation have never been able to sustain prosperity. The wealth being squeezed took centuries to produce, but it is not inexhaustible.

With sociopaths in charge, we could very well see the Milgram experiment reenacted on a national scale. In the experiment, you may recall, researchers asked members of the public to torture subjects (who, unbeknownst to the people being recruited, were paid actors) with electric shocks, all the way up to what they believed were lethal doses. Most of them did as asked, after being assured that it was "all right" and "necessary" by men in authority. The men in authority today are mostly sociopaths.

SOURCE

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

The Executive Order Controversy

On Friday, 3/16/2012, President Obama issued an executive order called "National Defense Resources Preparedness" (NDRP), posting it on the White House's official website. Almost immediately, the blogosphere exploded with the news. Citizens began calling their TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers, demanding coverage. At the time of this writing, the furor has yet to abate.

The NDRP traces its origin to the Defense Production Act (DPA) of 1950, which attempted to establish a framework for placing the nation on a "war footing" as quickly and in as efficient a manner as possible should events warrant. In an age of highly industrialized warfare, the basic building blocks of military success are composed of mundane elements such as supply chains, resource availability, parts, access to raw materials, and skilled labor.

Over the years, the DPA has seen many revisions, and the executive orders issued to implement those revisions presupposed an imminent threat of war. In 1994, then-President Clinton issued Executive Order 12919, which expanded the provisions of the DPA rather dramatically, declaring its applicability to peacetime.

The Executive order issued by Obama on 3/16 is largely a restatement of the 1994 Clinton order with a few functional changes. It moves the authority for implementing the provisions of the DPA from the director of FEMA to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not exist at the time of Clinton's presidency. There have been pedestrian additions of renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, to the purview of the secretary of energy (as well as a curiously specific redefinition of bottled water as a "food resource" rather than a water resource), but nothing is particularly out of step with the order Obama's EO supersedes.

So what is the problem? Well, considering that the authority of the DPA has never been meaningfully exercised, and that the pre-emption of authority claimed by the Clinton-era EO 12919 has been similarly dormant, why would the Obama administration choose this particular time to update an obscure and unused authority? It is this question many believe must be asked and answered, and sooner rather than later.

In an attempt to provide that answer, allow me to don an appropriately stylish tinfoil hat before I present a plausible scenario.

1) In early March 2012, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee that it is the position of this administration that international organizations such as NATO or the United Nations have at least as much, if not more authority to deploy U.S. troops, with or without congressional notice or permission.

2) A week later, the NAACP petitioned the U.N. Human Rights Council to involve themselves in our election process -- specifically our November presidential election, in order to monitor the vote for instances of voter suppression. It is the fantasy of the NAACP that laws requiring presentation of a photo ID to cast a ballot are in actuality thinly veiled efforts to keep the poor, elderly, and non-white populations from voting, presumably for Obama.

3) Attorney General Eric Holder has spent his tenure creating a hair-trigger system of race-conscious prosecutions, most notably in reference to cases involving voter fraud. His previous employee, J. Christian Adams, has built a second career from simply exposing the injustice of Holder's Department of Justice.

4) Most recently, Holder struck another blow against the concept of verifiable voting by forestalling Texas's proposed Voter ID law, saying it "goes against the arc of history." Aside from the attorney general basing his decisions on perceived "historical arcs" rather than clear and established law, the end result is the same: the creation of an air of uncertainty surrounding the upcoming election.

Now (as I adjust my tinfoil hat to a jauntier angle), let me tie these points together.

By employing repetitive reporting of "uncertainty about the reliability of the presidential election tally" by the major media, compounded by expressions of the same uncertainty by administration officials, the left could install that narrative amongst the segments of the population that pay little or no attention to the day-to-day practice of politics.

Could the NAACP then, with support from the Department of Justice and the administration, make the case to the U.N. that the election was in fact tainted, and subsequently persuade the member nations of the U.N. to declare the election invalid? It is possible, and such a declaration is certain to bring chaos to the streets of every major city in our country, as well as a great deal of smaller ones. To restore order, the president might need to deploy troops. Should the Congress resist the move, the administration might simply appeal to the U.N., which could request/order the deployment of troops by a willing and complicit Secretary Panetta.

And of course, President Obama would simply continue in office, for the sake of stability, until this could all be sorted out.

Perhaps it now makes sense for the administration to have updated an unused executive order, preparing their legal argument and framework for the imposition of peacetime martial law. Liberty, once lost, is seldom regained.

Yes, it is far-fetched, but it is also distressingly possible. The sad fact in America today is that we have a president so disdainful of our foundational law and freedoms as to make the far-fetched seem queasily reasonable.

The timing of this executive order is jarring, even if the specific changes to the order are not. The power it conveys is staggering and cannot be safely entrusted to a single branch of government, much less to a single man. The Congress needs to reassert control over the exercise and implementation of the Defense Production Act before it can be utilized by a power-hungry cabal of leftists eager to fundamentally transform America. There is a door no one has locked, and our home is not secure. Close the door, lock it, and throw away that key.

SOURCE

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

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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)

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

Another desperate coverup by the media

I doubt that the article below -- dated Mar. 20th. -- will stay up for long so I am pleased to reproduce exactly below its headline and opening comments. As far as I know ALL killings of Jews in recent years have been by Muslims but that must be ignored and blame must be deflected onto Nazis, who are an insignificant minority these days. We now know of course that the Toulouse killer was indeed a Muslim

French hunt school killer, suspect neo-Nazi ties

TOULOUSE, France (AP) — Police searched southern France on Tuesday for an expert gunman suspected of fatally shooting seven people in the head at close range in attacks that may have been motivated by neo-Nazi ties or grudges against minorities.

The shooter is suspected of carrying out three deadly attacks: leaving four people dead on Monday at a Jewish school in Toulouse, three of them young children; killing two French paratroopers and seriously wounding another last Thursday in nearby Montauban; and fatally shooting another paratrooper in Toulouse on March 11.

All the victims in the school attack were Jewish with duel French-Israeli citizenship, and the paratroopers were of North African or French Caribbean origin. The shots were fired at such close range that the gunfire burned the skin, prosecutor Francois Molins said Tuesday.

"We are confronted with an individual extremely determined in his actions, an armed individual who acts always with the same modus operandi," he said, "in cold blood ... with premeditated actions."

He added the crimes appear to be premeditated due to the killer's "choices of victims and the choices of his targets" — the army, the foreign origin of the victims or their religion.

More HERE

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

The True Perpetrators of the Antisemitic Attacks in Toulouse

Jew-hatred is back with a vengerance -- and not only among Muslims

by Barry Rubin

What a tragic, evil joke. A drive-by shooter in the beautiful, almost magical, city of Toulouse, France, murders three Jewish children and a teacher in front of their school. Various VIPs issue statements about how terrible is this deed, how unspeakable.

And yet at that very moment, the next round of murders, the next slanderous and inciting antisemitic lies, are being perpetrated by respectable people and institutions. There is no real soul-searching, no true effort to do better, no serious examination about how the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hysteria is paving the way for murder and fueling dreams of genocide.

The street thugs, fanatics drunk on the interpretations of Islam they are being fed, and the mentally twisted may be pulling the trigger but the distinguished, the powerful, and the honored are providing the ammunition.
Advertisement

Here are three examples of such deeds in nominally democratic countries — not Iran, not Syria, not Pakistan, where such things are even more intense — but in supposedly rational places.

1. The Turkish Editor

Meet Mahir Zeynalov, an editor at Today’s Zaman, a Turkish Islamic newspaper that is supposedly moderate. Meet the modern art of tweeting. Here is Zeynalov’s response to the murders:

"Mahir Zeynalov ‏ @MahirZeynalov: Gunmen attack Jewish school in France, vandals attack Jewish cemetery in Poland, Jews burn mosques and Quran in Tunisia. What’s wrong?"

There are two ways to read this tweet. The more outrageous is this: How can it be wrong for gunmen to murder Jewish children or vandals to attack a Jewish cemetery in Poland if Jews are burning mosques and Qurans in Tunisia? One act balances the other.

The other interpretation is this: What a world in which there is so much hatred! Gunmen murder Jewish children, vandals attack a Jewish cemetery, and Jews desecrate mosques and Muslim holy books.

Yet the second interpretation is almost as inciting to violence as the first. We know from many experiences — including Afghanistan right now — that anyone who burns or does anything to a Koran would set off massive riots and bloody killings. And as for burning a mosque, such a deed might well result in the massacre of every Jew living in Tunisia.

Tunisian Jews today are a couple of thousand terrified people who would run in the other direction if they saw a Koran in front of them lest they be accused of looking at it funny. What Zeyanlov has done is called a “blood libel,” a lie that might lead to the murder of Jews.

A Muslim taking Zeyanlov’s tweet to heart would feel justified in murdering Jews, say children standing in front of their school.

2. The Dutch Cartoonist

De Volkskrant is one of Holland’s leading newspapers, favored by the intellectual elite. Here is a cartoon that it has just run. The cartoon shows Geert Wilders, leader of the conservative party that is very critical of Islam, getting loads of cash from a hidden hand that is clearly referring to Jews or Israel. Yes, the cartoon was written with a Hebrew text balloon, helpfully translated into Dutch as Wilders saying, “Thank you very much.”

So we have here the stereotype of the Jewish money behind the scenes conspiring, in this case against Islam and against Holland. And of course it is also designed to discredit Wilders. As with the Turkish editor’s tweet above, this is based on a total falsehood. There is hardly any Jewish support for Wilders’ party, which is, by the way, a legitimate political force, and there has never been the slightest evidence — even rumor — of Jewish financing for him, or Israeli financing.

Holland is a country where two political leaders have been assassinated and Wilders needs round-the-clock protection against potential assassins.

What is the message here? That Jews and Israel are trying to destroy Islam — as in the Turkish tweet — and are nefarious plotters attacking innocent people. Isn’t it just, therefore, to murder Jews and Israelis in self-defense?

3. Europe’s Foreign Minister

Exhibit three is Catherine Ashton, whose career was originally built on running the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament which favored unilateral Western disarmament in the face off Soviet tyranny. She is now the EU’s foreign minister. In response to the Toulouse shooting, she has issued a statement here that spends more time reciting the sufferings of children in the Gaza Strip than about antisemitism and the demonization of Jews and Israel.

Left out is the fact that Gaza is ruled by an organization, Hamas, that is openly antisemitic, openly preaches genocide, frequently has carried out terrorist attacks against Israelis and Jews, and then glorifies those who did the murders. Remember that the only reason Hamas can rule Gaza is that Israel voluntarily withdrew from the territory in a gesture intended to promote peace, something Ashton and much of the Western media and governmental elites usually don’t mention.

When Hamas maintains a war with Israel, firing rockets, missiles, and mortars, Israel defends itself. Hamas also deliberately sites military arsenals and weapons in residential areas. Thus, civilians and even children are accidentally killed by Israel in the fighting. This is precisely what happens in other wars, including those being waged now by EU countries.

Yet Ashton does not defend Israel or its right to defend itself. She does not take sides against the terrorists. At best we get spurious neutrality that is actually anti-Israel propaganda. Note that she even refers to Palestine as a currently existing country even though the EU recognizes no such country. So much for diplomatic responsibility. Her “apology” and “clarification” came after criticism but she meant exactly what she said and will do the same thing next time as she and other EU officials have done many times on previous occasions.

Indeed, while Palestinian children are killed during fighting in Gaza, let’s note the two most notoriously publicized examples of the last week:

–A photo sent around, in one case by a UN official, purporting to show a little girl as being injured this week was in fact a photo of a girl injured in an auto accident several years ago.

–The claim that Adham Abu Selmiya was killed by Israelis has now been shown to be false. He was killed by a bullet fired into the air by Palestinians during a funeral.

–And what of the recent photo widely published purporting to show an Israeli soldier menacing a child despite the fact that the man was wearing a concocted Israeli army uniform and carrying an AK-47, a weapon used by terrorists against Israel but never by Israeli soldiers, showing that the photo was a phony?

–The downplaying or omission of the fact that Israel was defending itself from a barrage of missiles. In one case, a prominent Dutch newspaper published a photograph with the caption that showed a rocket being fired by Israel into Gaza, instead of the exact opposite.

In short, Ashton and many others are contributing to the demonization of Jews and Israel. If Israel is so horrible that it makes little children in Gaza suffer for no reason, shouldn’t Israelis and the Jews who support them be shunned, harassed, attacked, and murdered?

These three examples are only a small sample of the hate poured out against Israel and Jews in the Middle East and elsewhere. I could go on with dozens more and so, perhaps, could you. From Sweden’s largest newspaper claiming Israel murdered Palestinians to harvest their organs to a Harvard professor’s tales of Jewish-Zionist conspiracies to control U.S. foreign policy to the dozens of “academic” conferences on Western campuses that demonize Israel, paid for by student fees.

What is needed is not more hypocrisy or professions of innocence or expensive conferences where long speeches are made about the evils of antisemitism by those who do nothing but get free plane tickets and nice hotel rooms. The real solution is a real change in the behavior of the mass media that pours out lies, the academics who slander and distort, and the governments that refuse to stand by a democratic country and people beset by terrorism and the world’s oldest hatred.

Oh, and one more thing is needed: the admission that the greatest threat of hatred, “racism,” dehumanization of the “other,” and threat of persecution today — as the statistics for Europe and North America show — is not “Islamophobia” but antisemitism.

And none of those things are going to happen because the liars, haters, apologists, and enablers will not acknowledge their own behavior while those who are supposed to supervise them will not act. Hating and lying about Israel and the Jewish people is too useful politically and too entwined with the version of left-wing ideology, not to mention Islamism and the dominant interpretation of Islam, currently so powerful in the world.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Europe is no longer a safe place for Jews to live. Yet it is accurate to say that it is becoming an unsafe place for Jews to live, and certainly for those who wish to express mainstream Jewish views and to practice their religion openly. Meanwhile, the EU and various governments dare not admit that the principal cause of antisemitic activity is radical Islam, and the principal inspiration for popular antisemitism is trendy leftist ideas that now dominate much of that continent and are spreading in North America.

Thus, Jewish children are deliberately murdered by a terrorist in the midst of France. In response, come get the formal statements and the crocodile tears. Yet at the exact same time as the bullets are entering the children’s bodies, as the victims fall to the ground, as the ambulance sirens sound, the incitement and the lies and the slanders continue, laying the groundwork for more hatred and more murder.

SOURCE

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

Human Nature: The Question behind the Culture Wars

Culture wars can produce nasty rhetoric. Political discourse quickly becomes emotionally charged and divisive. We are tempted to view those with whom we disagree as not only irrational but evil. The culture of demonization of our political opponents is what moral psychologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt seeks to dismantle with his new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Haidt, who serves as professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, believes that we demonize opponents because we do not recognize that everyone values fairness. Moreover, we justify our positions from antithetical moral foundations.

In one sense Haidt is not saying anything that religious leaders and economists haven’t been saying for centuries, namely, that at the root of our understanding of politics are fundamental beliefs about human nature and definitions of morality. In recent decades, Americans have increasingly turned to psychologists as experts on morality and human action. As such, religious and economic texts like Pope John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus, Abraham Kuyper’s Problem of Poverty, and even Thomas Sowell’s Conflict of Visions, which all explain political conflicts as extensions of antithetical views on human nature and morality, are ignored. However, now that a psychologist remixes these themes Americans are willing to listen.

Haidt’s research team identified six moral foundations to analyze and thus explain the differences between progressives (modern liberals) and conservatives: care, liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. After several years of research, Haidt’s team discovered that progressives scored high on their commitments to care, liberty, fairness, and low on loyalty, authority, and sanctity, whereas conservatives evenly care about all six. The result is that progressives and conservatives do not understand each other. They usually talk past each other because issues like welfare, universal health care, and the like, are not where the real disagreements lie. Each side fails to understand the other’s definition of fairness.

Conservatives, for example, value fairness in terms of whether or not free people are able to take advantage of the same processes made available to them in society. Progressives tend to define fairness in terms of equality of material outcome or equality of proportion. Conservatives, then, are more concerned about whether all citizens are free to exercise their gifts and talents, under the law, to meet their own needs through participation in free markets. Progressives, on the other hand, conceptualize fairness as whether people have similar incomes, whether people have the same luxuries in life. They envision a world where the force of government intervention eliminates disparities.

In a recent interview with Bill Moyer, Haidt, a self-proclaimed “centrist” confesses that, “When I began this work, I was very much a liberal. And over time, in doing the research for my book and in reading a lot of conservative writing, I've come to believe that conservative intellectuals actually are more in touch with human nature. They have a more accurate view of human nature. We need structure. We need families. We need groups. It's okay to have memberships and rivalries.” Competition creates the conditions for economic growth, Haidt says, because “cooperation and competition are opposite sides of the same coin. And we've gotten this far because we cooperate to compete.” In other words, competition has moral implications.

In the book, Haidt concludes that conservatives have an advantage in connecting with American values because conservative morality equally rests on all six moral foundations. They are more willing to embrace the reality of trade-offs and sacrifice in order to achieve “many other moral objectives.” Moral psychology, says Haidt, also explains why the Democratic Party had struggled to connect with the American people since the 1980s because Democrats have no compelling moral case for their ideas. The lopsided morality of progressives in the Democratic Party is something that Haidt hopes moral psychology can address.

If Haidt’s moral psychology research is right then progressives will be forced to reject long-held presuppositions about human nature. Perhaps moral psychology can help call a truce to the nasty culture wars so that we can stop and discuss what it means to be human—a discussion conducted in the hope that conservatives and progressives can return to sharing the moral foundations that shaped America’s liberties and prosperity.

SOURCE

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

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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)

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

FCC joins the attack on Limbaugh and other conservative broadcasters

Radio spectrum will be given to low power "local" stations which Leftists hope to dominate. They may well do so but will they get an audience? On past form it will be negligible

A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decision issued Monday (PDF) will clear the runway for hundreds of new community radio stations that broadcast on low-power FM signals, bringing progressive, community voices to urban areas that have for decades only known what's being broadcast by major corporations and America's political right.

The FCC's decision on Monday wipes away a massive backlog of applications for FM repeater stations, which are transmitters that repeat signals broadcast by corporate and religious radio operators - many of which rake in big listening audiences for right-wing syndicated talk shows.

"So, what a lot of right-wing, conservative radio stations have been able to do is expand their reach out in communities by just having these translators out in the wild, which is why Rush Limbaugh gets the type of audience that he has - because the networks take one signal and repeat it over and over and over across the dial all over the country," Steven Renderos, national organizer with the Center for Media Justice, told Raw Story on Tuesday. "They're constantly looking for opportunities to expand that, so there were a slew of these applications pending at the FCC."

And that's been the case ever since the FCC's radio spectrum auction in 2003, which has led many activists to fear they would be forever choked out and kept away from the public airwaves. But after a long battle, activists with the Prometheus Radio Project have finally won.

"Now these right-wing radio networks won't keep getting their translator applications approved," Renderos added. "That will severely limit their ability to expand."

The FCC's decision also set clear criteria for community radio stations in heavily populated urban areas, which are otherwise bombarded by the endless droning of commercial media full of snide opinion masquerading as news.

"These [new, low power] stations can only be licensed to non-profit organizations, and you can only have one per customer," Brandy Doyle, policy director for the Prometheus Radio Project, told Raw Story. "That way we won't have these big corporate chains and media networks that are taking over the rest of the media landscape moving in on low power FM service. These stations have to be local, and they have to be independent. This clears the way for a real transformation of the FM dial."

Instead of slowly grinding down thousands of repeater station applications that leave no room for community radio, the FCC essentially threw most of those applications away by limiting who can apply, how many filings a single entity can make, and which markets can consider new repeaters - all of which frees up the regulatory body to examine applications for new community stations. The regulatory agency still gave some deference to corporate broadcasters, however, by allowing them one shot at revising their applications to fit the new guidelines.

More HERE

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

Race, rhetoric and reality

Thomas Sowell

One of the things that turned up, during a long-overdue cleanup of my office, was an old yellowed copy of the New York Times dated July 24, 1992. One of the front-page headlines said: "White-Black Disparity in Income Narrowed in 80's, Census Shows."

The 1980s? Wasn't that the years of the Reagan administration, the "decade of greed," the era of "neglect" of the poor and minorities, if not "covert racism"?

More recently, during the administration of America's first black president, a 2011 report from the Pew Research Center has the headline, "Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics."

While the median net worth of whites was 10 times the median net worth of blacks in 1988, the last year of the Reagan administration, the ratio was 19 to one in 2009, the first year of the Obama administration. With Hispanics, the ratio was eight to one in 1988 and 15 to one in 2009.

Race is just one of the areas in which the rhetoric and the reality often go in opposite directions. Political rhetoric is intended to do one thing -- win votes. Whether the policies that accompany that rhetoric make people better off or worse off is far less of a concern to politicians, if any concern at all.

Democrats receive the overwhelming bulk of the black vote by rhetoric and by presenting what they have done as the big reason that blacks have advanced. So long as most blacks and whites alike mistake rhetoric for reality, this political game can go on.

A Manhattan Institute study last year by Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor showed that, while the residential segregation of blacks has generally been declining from the middle of the 20th century to the present, it was rising during the first half of the 20th century. The net result is that blacks in 2010 were almost as residentially unsegregated as they were back in 1890.

There are complex reasons behind such things, but the bottom line is plain. The many laws, programs and policies designed to integrate residential housing cannot be automatically assumed to translate into residentially integrated housing. Government is not the sole factor, nor necessarily the biggest factor, no matter what impression political rhetoric gives.

No city is more liberal in its rhetoric and policies than San Francisco. Yet there are less than half as many blacks living in San Francisco today as there were in 1970.

Nor is San Francisco unique. A number of other very liberal California counties saw their black populations drop by 10,000 people or more, just between the 1990 and 2000 censuses -- even when the total population of these counties was growing.

One of the many reasons why rhetoric does not automatically translate into reality is that the ramifications of so many government policies produce results completely different from what was claimed, or even believed, when these policies were imposed.

The poverty rate among blacks was nearly cut in half in the 20 years prior to the 1960s, a record unmatched since then, despite the expansion of welfare state policies in the 1960s.

Unemployment among black 16 and 17-year-old males was 12 percent back in 1950. Yet unemployment rates among black 16 and 17-year-old males has not been less than 30 percent for any year since 1970 -- and has been over 40 percent in some of those years.

Not only was unemployment among blacks in general lower before the liberal welfare state policies expanded in the 1960s, rates of imprisonment of blacks were also lower then, and most black children were raised in two-parent families. At one time, a higher percentage of blacks than whites were married and working.

None of these facts fits liberal social dogmas.

While many politicians and "leaders" have claimed credit for black progress, no one seems to be willing to take the blame for the retrogressions represented by higher unemployment rates, higher crime rates, and higher rates of imprisonment today. Or for the disintegration of the black family, which survived centuries of slavery and generations of government-imposed discrimination in the Jim Crow era, but began coming apart in the wake of the expansion of the liberal welfare state and its accompanying social dogmas.

The time is long overdue to start looking beyond the prevailing political rhetoric to the hard realities.

SOURCE

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

Demolishing Due Process

by Ron Paul

It is ironic but perhaps sadly appropriate that Attorney General Eric Holder would choose a law school, Northwestern University, to deliver a speech earlier this month in which he demolished what was left of the rule of law in America.

In what history likely will record as a turning point, Attorney General Holder bluntly explained that this administration believes it has the authority to use lethal force against Americans if the President determines them to be a threat to the nation. He tells us that this is not a violation of the due process requirements of our Constitution because the President himself embodies "due process" as he unilaterally determines who is to be targeted. As Holder said, "a careful and thorough executive branch review of the facts in a case amounts to 'due process.'" That means that the administration believes it is the President himself who is to be the judge, jury, and executioner.

As George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley wrote of the Holder speech:

"All the Administration has said is that they closely and faithfully follow their own guidelines - even if their decisions are not subject to judicial review. The fact that they say those guidelines are based on notions of due process is meaningless. They are not a constitutional process of review."

It is particularly bizarre to hear the logic of the administration claiming the right to target its citizens according to some secret selection process, when we justified our attacks against Iraq and Libya because their leaders supposedly were targeting their own citizens! We also now plan a covert war against Syria for the same reason.

I should make it perfectly clear that I believe any individual who is engaging in violence against this country or its citizens should be brought to justice. But as Attorney General Holder himself points out in the same speech, our civilian courts have a very good track record of trying and convicting individuals involved with terrorism against the United States. Our civilian court system, with the guarantee of real due process, judicial review, and a fair trial, is our strength, not a weakness. It is not an impediment to be sidestepped in the push for convictions or assassinations, but rather a process that guarantees that fundamental right to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

I am encouraged, however that there appears to be the beginning of a backlash against the administration's authoritarian claims. Just recently I did an interview with conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham who expressed grave concern over using these sorts of tactics against Americans using the supposed war on terror as justification.

Sadly, many conservative leaders were silent when Republican President George W. Bush laid the groundwork for this administration's lawlessness with the PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention without trial, and other violations.

Similarly, as Professor Turley points out, "Democrats previously demanded the 'torture memos' of the Bush administration that revealed poor legal analysis by Judge Jay Bybee and Professor John Yoo to justify torture. Now, however, Democrats are largely silent in the face of a president claiming the right to unilaterally kill citizens."

The misuse of and disregard for our Constitution for partisan political gain is likely one reason the American public holds Congress in such low esteem. Now the stakes are much higher. Congress and the people should finally wake up!

SOURCE

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

What is Fair?

John Stossel

President Obama says he want to make society more fair. Advocates of big government believe fairness means taking from rich people and giving to others: poor people; or people who do things politicians approve of, like making "green" energy equipment (Solyndra); or old people (even rich ones) through Social Security and Medicare.

The idea that government can "make life fair" is intuitively appealing to people -- at least until they think about it. I'll try to help.

Obama says fairness requires higher taxes, but as The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore asks, "Is it fair that the richest 10 percent of Americans shoulder a higher share of their country's income-tax burden than do the richest 10 percent in every other industrialized nation, including socialist Sweden?"

Or as economist Art Laffer asked, is it fair that American corporations pay the highest corporate tax rate in the world?

Beyond taxes, again quoting Moore, "Is it fair that President Obama sends his two daughters to elite private schools that are safer, better-run and produce higher test scores than public schools in Washington, D.C. -- but millions of other families across America are denied that free choice and forced to send their kids to rotten schools?"

No. Parents ought to be able to spend their education money at any school they choose.

Big-government politicians bemoan income inequality, but would equalizing incomes make life fair?

To many, it is intuitive that such inequality is necessarily unfair. If someone makes his income by looting the taxpayers -- sure, that's unfair. His gains are ill-gotten, and honest taxpayers are out hard-earned money. But there's nothing unfair simply in making more money through productive work. People have a range of talents and ambitions. Some will serve consumers better than others and therefore make more money. Government should not worry about that.

It should spend its time abolishing political privileges so that people compete fairly -- in the marketplace.

You want to know what's unfair? Social Security. Progressives say Social Security is the best-working government program ever, but they are wrong.

"Think about Social Security in terms of what would happen if a private company came up with a deal like this," said Charles Goyette, author of "Red and Blue and Broke All Over." "The president of the company says, we've got to sell some new policies tomorrow to pay you what you're due when you cash in today. They'd lock these guys up."

Goyette was referring to the fact that your payroll taxes are not invested. The money is spent right away, and the government counts on new money from current workers to pay retirees. The touted trust fund doesn't exist.

"There's no trust. There's no fund. There's no security. And the really bad thing -- this is what's really destructive -- it has changed the propensity of the American people to save for themselves. ... We're creating a multigenerational calamity. And it's right at our doorstep."

We've taught people to be dependent. But dependence robs us of our dignity and keeps poor people poor.

Few politicians will touch the issue because seniors vote. And so trouble is not far up the road.

"We've loaded kids up with a debt that they will be burdened by for the rest of their lives," Goyette said. "What kind of people, what kind of country does something like that?"

It's even worse for Medicare. We're talking tens of trillions in unfunded liabilities. Where's that money going come from? Since seniors resist cuts, will politicians keep their promises by devaluing the currency? And why do the guardians of fairness never talk about this?

It might seem reasonable for government to make life more fair. But when it takes your money and freedom trying to do that, life becomes less fair. Everyone is poorer and less free. As government grows, individual liberty shrinks. That's not fair.

It might help if instead of talking about fairness, we talked about justice: respecting other people, their freedom and their honestly acquired belongings. Real fairness, or justice, requires limiting government power. That means the same rules for everyone. No special favors. No handouts. Or, in Frederic Bastiat's phrase, no "legal plunder."

SOURCE

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

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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)

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