Rules changing in favour of the GOP?

Jonah Goldberg

For nearly a century now, the rules have said that tough economic times make big government more popular. For more than 40 years it has been a rule that environmental disasters -- and scares over alleged ones -- help environmentalists push tighter regulations. According to the rules, Americans never want to let go of an entitlement once they have it. According to the rules, populism is a force for getting the government to do more, not less. According to the rules, Americans don't care about the deficit during a recession.

And yet none of these rules seem to be applying; at least not too strongly. Big government seems more unpopular today than ever. The Gulf oil spill should be a Gaiasend for environmentalists, and yet three quarters of the American people oppose Obama's drilling ban. Sixty percent of likely voters want their newly minted right to health care repealed. Unlike Europe, where protestors take to the streets to save their cushy perks and protect a large welfare state, the Tea Party protestors have been taking to the streets to trim back government.

But even on the continent the rules are changing. European governments have turned into deficit hawks to the point where the American president feels the need to lecture them on their stinginess.

Of course, he increasingly feels the same need here at home as our out-of-control debt is becoming a live issue, despite the fact that voters should be clamoring -- according to the rules -- for more taxpayer-funded jobs.

Barack Obama recently recruited Bill Clinton to stump for the Democrats as a surrogate because the former president is more popular than the current one. It's ironic because candidate Obama had once disparaged the Clinton presidency as not ambitious enough. Obama wanted to be a liberal Reagan who would reverse the rising conservative tide in American politics (just as he would reverse the rise of the oceans), not be the sort of president who accepted the tide and merely navigated its currents.

But is it really so outlandish to imagine that Bill Clinton, a creature spawned from politics like a golem from clay, had a better sense of political reality than the ivory tower intellectual currently occupying the White House? Clinton proclaimed the era of Big Government was over, and left office quite popular.

Barack Obama said, in effect, "Oh no it's not" and his presidency and his party are in freefall, despite an economic climate that, according to the rules, says he should be not only running the table but be popular for it.

As a conservative, I'm very reluctant to believe that the rules change easily or often. And there's no end of explanations for the political climate that would leave the rules intact. But it's just becoming harder and harder to shake the feeling that something bigger than politics as usual is at work.

More HERE

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Voting fraud is real and can make a difference

Senator Al Franken likely owes his Senate victory to felons. With a razor thin victory over Senator Norm Coleman in 2008 of just 312 votes, felons convicted of crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assaults may have given Democrats the filibuster proof sixtieth vote that allowed Obamacare to be passed. Americans have good reason to ask how this could happen. Consider this:

--A conservative watchdog group Minnesota Majority has gone through voting records reportedly finding that at least 341 convicted felons voted illegally in just two of Minnesota's 87 counties during the 2008 general election. Undoubtedly other felons voted illegally in other counties.

-- After culling through 500 initial allegations of felons illegally voting, the Ramsey County Attorney's Office told The Minneapolis Star Tribune Monday that they are seriously investigating about 180 cases. Another 28 felons have already been charged. Hennepin county, which includes Minneapolis, winnowed 451 initial cases down to 216 that they are still looking at. Some other felons have already been charged. Both the Ramsey and Hennepin county attorneys are Democrats.

Whether one believes that those two counties account for 341 or possibly well over 400 felons illegally voting, the 2008 Senate vote was so close and research finds that felons vote so overwhelmingly for Democrats that the odds are quite likely that felons from those two counties gave Al Franken the election.

Even if no other felons voted in any other county, 341 votes and 96 percent of felons voting for Democrats would have given Franken the election. In fact, more than 96 percent of felons probably vote for Democrats (see here).

How can so many felons break Minnesota's law and vote? The problem is that voter registration lists are a mess. States are mandated under Section 8 of the "Motor Voter" law to periodically purge voter rolls -- to remove dead people, felons, illegal voters and those who have moved out of state.

But many states, including Minnesota, have refused to check these rolls, making it easy for felons to vote and for other vote fraud to occur.

The Bush administration had tried to force states to address these concerns. In 2005, one-third of Missouri counties refused to purge voter roles, leaving more registered voters than voting age residents.

The Democratic Secretary of State Robin Carnahan refused to enforce the federal law, and the Bush administration sued. Yet, in March 2009, the Obama administration dropped the case and it has not brought any others.

Worse, there is some evidence that the Obama administration doesn't want to stop voter fraud. J. Christian Adams, a former career Justice Department lawyer, told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights last week that Obama's Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes ordered Justice Department lawyers to drop all these cases. According to Adams, on November 30 last year Fernandes told 40 Justice Department lawyers: "We're not interested in those kind of cases. What do they have to do with helping increase minority access and turnout? We want to increase access to the ballot, not limit it."

For those who claim that vote fraud isn't a problem, Al Franken's election to the Senate demonstrates not only that vote fraud exists but also that it can alter elections and indeed the laws of the country.

Murderers, rapists, and robbers may not be the people we want providing the crucial votes that determine what America's laws should be.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Health insurance premiums to rocket: "The White House on Wednesday issued new rules requiring health insurance companies to provide free coverage for dozens of screenings, laboratory tests and other types of preventive care. The rules will eliminate co-payments, deductibles and other charges for blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol tests; many cancer screenings; routine vaccinations; prenatal care; and regular wellness visits for infants and children. Other services that must be offered at no charge include counseling to help people stop smoking; screening and counseling for obesity; and tests for infection with the virus that causes AIDS."

Obamacare begins — in Idaho: "When the Regime sets prices, this is called ‘applied compassion.’ When producers organize to complain about price controls, and then freely decide not to offer their services at the artificially low price, this is called ‘a criminal conspiracy to fix prices.’ This is the central claim of the ‘consent decree’ inflicted, at gunpoint, on a group of Idaho orthopedic surgeons by the Obama Regime — with the eager collaboration of the Idaho State Attorney General. Under the terms of that extorted agreement, it would be tantamount to a criminal offense for a doctor to complain to his peers about regulatory actions that may drive accomplished medical specialists out of business.”

Dems Have Lost Voters' Policy Support: "The Democrats got an earful from voters over the long Fourth of July recess, reinforcing internal party polls showing they have lost the nation's support for their big spending, welfare-state agenda. The boiling point came last Tuesday in a closed-door party caucus meeting of House Democrats in the Capitol, where rank-and-file members vented their anger toward a White House that seemed to be doing nothing to defend them and their "walk the plank" votes on everything from a failed trillion-dollar stimulus, Obamacare and energy taxes to excessive financial regulation reform."

Majority math: "Ok, so I’m hearing a lot of noise from people on the right and libertarian side of the aisles that ‘the dems are going to lose everything this election and we can undo everything Obama has destroyed yaaaay!!!!’ Yeah … No. Not Gonna Happen.”

Obamaland pension meltdown update: "And so it was prophesied: Illinois is headed into a public-pension death spiral even sooner than predicted. The Land of Obama leads the way. The state of Illinois — broke, overleveraged, and still refusing to get its accounts in order — is up to something interesting: selling bonds to meet its pension obligations.”

Pathetic spies: "Some of the commentary on the Russian agents recently captured by the FBI has centered on the fact that Moscow was spying on the United States while President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev celebrated their nuclear and diplomatic partnership at Ray’s Hell Burger, or on the evolving focus of Russia’s intelligence services. But all of this misses the real point: how much the mediocrity of the spy ring reveals about the decadence of present-day Russia.”

How about a triple-dip recession: "The politicians think they have discovered the magic cure. It’s called quantitative easing, or just plain printing money, but it’s the same the world over. When the economy looks bad, create more of those greenbacks. Whip your interest rates down. Then suddenly, instead of being strapped for cash, everyone’s wallowing in the stuff, and the low interest rates make it cheap to borrow for that new home, that new machine or factory, and indeed just to go on a shopping trip. The trouble is that, before long, people begin to realise that this is all just funny money. As the spending boom goes on, shopkeepers, property sellers and equipment manufacturers all put up their prices, so the big spenders are no longer any better off. They’re just deeper in debt. So then you dip down again, and off we go.”

Wards of the state: "The best book on Obama’s America has already been written. The president has two more years in office, six if he’s lucky, but already we know enough about the contours of his mind, his governing instincts, to predict that the volume in question will not be bettered. This is a large claim for a book that never once mentions Obama or America or the gushing wells of oil and words that seem to be, so far, his chief gift to us. Written in 1912 by Hilaire Belloc, an Anglo-Frenchman whose true home was the Middle Ages, The Servile State is an unlikely vade mecum for 21st-century Washington. Yet men with French names have a way of understanding the inner life of this country.”

Shocking the bourgeoisie: "Marx invented a world-historical role for them, Flaubert set out to disconcert them, and Matthew Arnold denounced them as the ‘Philistine class.’ They were the perfect foil for wit, exuberance, and iconoclasm, and for a hundred years following The Communist Manifesto of 1848 they filled an evident dramatic need. For the bohemian artist the bourgeoisie were visible, shockable, and obviously bad. They justified art as no class before had justified it, by being the defenseless target of abuse and satire. For the last 50 years, however, the bourgeoisie have been slipping quietly away.”

Terrorist-loving Leftist lawyer gets 10 years: "Radical lawyer Lynn Stewart is to be sentenced to 10 years and a month in prison — a new penalty that could keep her behind bars until she turns 80, a judge said Thursday. Stewart, 70, wiped tears and her supporters in Manhattan Federal Court started sobbing as the judge made his annoucement ahead of the formal sentence expected later Thursday. The controversial civil rights attorney was convicted in 2005 of helping bomb plotter Omar Abdel Rahman pass messages from prison to his terror cohorts in Egypt.”

In defense of payday lenders and their customers: "Almost 40 years ago Walter Block wrote a fun little book called Defending the Undefendable. In it he explicated the libertarian arguments in defense of all sorts of people and practices that most observers would find objectionable: drug dealers, pimps, and the like. One such group he defended was loan sharks, who charge high interest rates, normally on short-term loans.”

FTC wants to eliminate competition with government courts: "Yesterday the Federal Trade Commission staff issued a report declaring the nation’s debt collection system ‘broken.’ The staff concluded this because ‘consumers are not adequately protected in either debt collection litigation or arbitration.’ The staff is particularly down on arbitration, which is understandable. Arbitration competes with government-run courts, and the last thing the FTC — the agency charged with protecting and promoting competition — would want is to promote competition for the resolution of consumer credit disputes.”

NBC, CBS Reject Anti-Ground Zero Mosque Ad: "CBS and NBC have refused to air a provocative ad from the confrontational, well-funded National Republican Trust PAC that calls on Americans to oppose the building of a mosque two blocks from the World Trade Center site. The ad — which has about 100,000 views on YouTube — intersperses some of the most horrifying images from the Sept. 11 attacks with the sounds of Muslim prayer and images of Muslim militants. It focuses on what’s become a divisive — and partisan — issue in New York state, the erection of a Muslim cultural center on Park Place, in the neighborhood near the fallen towers."

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

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

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

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Hillary Supporters Shocked at Obama Tactics

Politics makes for strange bedfellows, all right. In light of appalling revelations of the fraud and intimidation Obamunists used to steal the Democrat nomination from Hillary, her own supporters — left high and dry by a mainstream media that is for all intents and purposes part of the Obama machine — are appealing to patriots to get their message out. From HillBuzz:

Here's filmmaker Gigi Gaston on Fox & Friends this morning, calling for an investigation into the fraud and voter intimidation Obama and his campaign engaged in back in 2008.

This is how Obama took the nomination from Hillary Clinton, and he used these same thug tactics in the general election to intimidate voters. He will be using the same playbook in 2012 as well, unless he and the DNC are stopped.

In this FOX clip, it's noted that Gaston is the granddaughter of a former Democrat governor … and she's now dedicated her life to exposing the DNC for the cesspool of corruption, fraud, and illegal activity that it is. That is the same boat all of us here are in as well: until 2008, we were all lifelong, unquestioning, party loyal Democrats who never in our lives dreamed our party would be responsible for thuggery like this.

The best way we can describe the feeling we have when we think about the DNC is to remember what the human characters on the TV show "V" felt like when they saw the masks ripped off the "Visitors", revealing them to be lizard people underneath. Even people who had been helping the Visitors, and trying to convince others that they were really here to "serve the human race" in the non-cook book sense were instantly transformed into Resistance fighters when they saw what really lurked behind those masks.

So it is for many lifelong Democrats out there, including such prominent names as Lynn Forester de Rothschild as well, who will never look at the DNC the same way again … not after its mask has been ripped off so spectacularly.

We need to find as many creative and engaging ways as possible to get conservatives and independents out there, who did not pay attention to the Democrat primaries in 2008, to know the story Gigi Gaston has told so well in We Will Not Be Silenced 2008.

It's the only way to stop the lizards at the DNC from doing all of this again in 2012.

Hillary Dems tacitly acknowledge that the establishment media isn't only vociferously partisan; it is sectarian. The DNC subsidiary known as the MSM decided the Manchurian Moonbat should be President. Otherwise, his minions' dirty tricks would have been plastered across the news from the beginning. This is why Shrillary supporters are counting on conservatives and independents to spread the word on Obama's Third World tactics.

Apparently even authoritarian collectivists advocate clean elections when dirty tricks leave them shafted. Here's where everyone but the most fanatical Obamunists can agree: Obama's tactics in the 2012 election, after he's had four years to load the system with ACORN/New Black Panther types, are going to create a stink that will make even his prototypes Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe wrinkle their noses in disgust. The dinosaur media will again be complicit.

SOURCE (See the original for links)

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Liberals analyze their Obama 'despair'

For many liberals, this is the summer of their discontent. Already disappointed with President Barack Obama’s ability to deliver on campaign promises, they now contemplate a slowing economic recovery and a good chance of Republican gains in November — two developments that could make enacting Obama’s agenda even more difficult.

Two recent essays framed the debate raging within the progressive community over why the promise of Obama’s candidacy has not lived up to their expectations — and how liberals should proceed in what they fear will be difficult months ahead.

In a 17,000-plus-word piece published in The Nation on Thursday, journalist Eric Alterman calls the Obama presidency “a big disappointment” for progressives and blames a broken system in Washington that he says allows the minority party to rule with impunity — and special interests and big money to dictate legislative policy.

“Face it,” he concludes, “the system is rigged, and it’s rigged against us.” His essay is subtitled: “Why a progressive presidency is impossible for now.”

But writing in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, editor Michael Tomasky counsels patience, arguing that American history has shown that change always takes time and continued effort against entrenched conservative opposition.

“The changes we want to see won’t happen in 18 months, or in two years, or four, or probably even eight,” he concludes in his article, “Against Despair.”

The essays suggest it is a time of reckoning for a liberal community whose relationship with Obama has had a series of ups and downs since the moment of hope and expectation when he claimed the presidency in Chicago’s Grant Park on Nov. 4, 2008.

“It’s not just really about Obama; it’s about the state of our country. Every day, you have a sense that people are wondering where this country is headed,” says Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation.

The elation of that night in 2008 quickly gave way to the realization that the No. 1 issue, the economy, and the ensuing fight over an $800 billion stimulus bill, would make Obama's agenda different from the one he had described in his campaign.

From the beginning, the stimulus bill was viewed as containing too many compromises in a futile attempt to garner Republican support. Economist and columnist Paul Krugman led the charge, arguing that the bill was not ambitious enough, containing too many tax cuts and not enough funding for infrastructure projects.

But the bill’s $800 billion price tag created a toxic environment for congressional Democrats when they began the long debate over health care, and many liberals viewed Obama’s compromises on the legislation as a betrayal. The low point may have been after the special election victory of Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) in January, when the possibility of any health care legislation seemed lost.

“It’s open season on Obama, whom so many hoped would lead us out of the neoliberal wilderness,” Firedoglake blogger Les Leopold declared not long afterward. “He once was a community organizer and ought to know how working people have suffered through a generation of tax breaks for the rich, Wall Street deregulation and unfair competition. When the economy crashed, he was in the perfect position to limit the unjustified pay levels on Wall Street.

“Instead, we got a multitrillion-dollar bailout for Wall Street, no health care reform, no serious financial reforms whatsoever, record unemployment and political gridlock that will be with us for years to come.”

More HERE

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Tax mad New York

And LeBron James is not the first to vote with his feet. Climate is not the only reason why the phonelines run hot between Boca Raton and NYC

A WEEK before LeBron James's announcement on ESPN that he was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to join the Miami Heat, the New York Post and Rush Limbaugh saw it coming -- and for reasons having nothing to do with sports.

"If LeBron James goes to the Miami Heat instead of the Knicks," the Post noted gloomily on July 1, "blame our dysfunctional lawmakers in Albany, who have saddled top-earning New Yorkers with the highest state and city income taxes in the nation, soon to be 12.85 percent on top of the IRS bite. There is no state income tax in Florida." Consequently, a five-year, $96 million contract (the estimated deal he could get in either city), would cost James $12.34 million in New York taxes, but nothing in Miami. "Quite a penalty for the privilege of working in Midtown."

On the radio that day, Limbaugh, an ex-New Yorker, amplified the point: "Here you have these poor schlubs that . . . own the Knicks and they're going to try to persuade LeBron James to move to New York to play for the Knicks and they gotta tell him, 'By the way, you're going to pay about 12 to 15, maybe $20 million more in taxes in New York than you would [in Florida].'" Limbaugh drolly asked his audience whether James should take the Knicks' offer "and pay the additional taxes to show his 'compassion,'" or sign with Miami and "use the additional money for his own economic stimulus."

Other armchair accountants raised the tax issue after James's announcement on July 8. The Miami Herald and CNBC pointed out that because Cleveland has a city income tax and Miami doesn't, even a Heat contract worth $29 million less than what the Cavs offered him would still leave James with $1 million more in take-home pay. The Wall Street Journal remarked that Cleveland should be used to high-income refugees fleeing its excessive tax rates, having seen half of its Fortune 500 companies -- and tens of thousands of taxpayers -- leave in recent years.

In sports as in most other enterprises, the more you tax something, the less of it you generally end up with it. World-class athletes are no more immune to financial incentives than world-class doctors, lawyers, or entrepreneurs.

On Monday, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, the world record-holder in both the 100- and 200-meter dash, pulled out of next month's Diamond League track meet at the Crystal Palace in London. The reason: Britain's exorbitant tax laws, which would force Bolt to pay more in taxes than he would earn by winning the race. Lewis Hamilton, a British Formula One racing star, moved to Switzerland after his first season in 2007. He initially said he was seeking "to escape the public eye," commented the Wheels blog at NYTimes.com, "but there's no getting around the fact that Switzerland is also a tax haven."

The first boxing event at the new Yankee Stadium in June -- a fight between Miguel Cotti and Yuri Forman for the World Boxing Association's junior middleweight title -- attracted well over 20,000 spectators. But Yankees COO Lonn Trost conceded afterward that future fights of that caliber are unlikely, since the tax on a fighter's purse in New York is much higher for non-residents than it is elsewhere. That extinguishes any hope of a Yankee stadium superfight between champions Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao. "We'd love to do [Mayweather-Pacquiao], but I believe both of them are non-residents," Trost told the New York Post, "and the tax could be as much as 13 percent on the purse, where the tax out in Vegas is zero. That's a big difference." It sure is.

Avoiding high taxes is not the only reason sports stars -- or anyone else -- move from one jurisdiction to another. Weather, family, education, love -- any of them may play a role. But it is no coincidence that far more people migrate from high-tax states (California, New York, Ohio) to low-tax states (Florida, New Hampshire, Texas) than the other way around. When tax rates bite, taxpayers and businesses are driven to escape -- or are deterred from coming in the first place. There's nothing inexplicable about the fact that people don't like paying high taxes and may change their lives to avoid them. The real mystery is why so many advocates of high taxes never seem to learn that lesson.

SOURCE

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An interesting email from Sam Wells, one libertarian who is NOT reflexively "anti-war"

As the 2010 elections approach, the pro-Democrat Party propaganda machine is in high gear and left-wing agents of disinformation are being dispatched to confuse and mislead. Much of this activity has already been going on for years; it is just on a more intense level these days.

For example, regardless of the actual historic origins of the word "neoconservative" in America, the label "neocon" has come to be used as a smear term against conservative Jews -- i.e., those independent thinkers who have chosen to leave the Democrat Party reservation and vote Republican instead of doing what they are told to do by the old-guard left-wing leaders. According to exit polls, 77% of those who identified themselves as Jewish voted for Obama in 2008. The DNC wants to keep it that way, of course, but since Obama's election there has been an increasing wave of sentiment change within the Jewish community away from the Democrat Party and toward the Republican Party or in sympathy with the tea party activities. The label "neocon" is also used by "anti-war" posturers against anyone they perceive as disagreeing with them.

At the same time, those individualist libertarians and objectivists who have warned against the trap of ethnic identity syndrome (as exemplified by the Madoff swindle cases) are targeted by whispering campaigns as "antisemitic" or worse. Genuine self esteem comes from personal efforts toward achievement of laudable goals rather than identifying oneself with a racial collective or tribal group. It is important for libertarians and conservatives not to fall for these divisive tactics of the establishment Left.

This is certainly not to say that I agree with all those who define themselves as "neoconservatives"; not at all. I have often cautioned that many of even the true neoconservatives seem to cling to some liberal-left baggage from their pasts, especially in the area of economics or domestic policy. But I am more concerned about the possible influence of populistic ideological tangents on the pro-liberty American Right.

We need all the allies we can get, it seems to me. To the extent that the neoconservative agenda (a strong U.S. military preparedness and a pro-American foreign policy) is consistent with my own pro-freedom outlook tactically and strategically, I advocate welcoming those who are relatively new allies in the fight against leftism rather than denouncing them with smear labels borrowed from the left-wing propaganda mills.

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

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

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

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The National Association for the Advancement of Coddled People

Michelle Malkin

Before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People decided to ride the anti-tea party wave back to political relevancy, its most recent activist crusade involved a silly space-themed Hallmark graduation card. Yes, the NAACP has been lost in space for quite some time now. And blaming whitey will no longer cut it.

In June, the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP demanded that the greeting card be pulled because it used the term "black holes" (which the bionically equipped ears of the p.c. police insisted sounded like "black whores"). "It sounds like a group of children laughing and joking about blackness," one NAACP official complained.

It was a group of hipster cartoon characters chattering about the universe and galaxies and wide-open possibilities to new high school and college grads. Alas, this is what has become of the once-inspired drive against racial discrimination.

In just a few short decades, the stalwart strivers for equality have turned into coddled whiners for hypersensitivity. The NAACP is a laughingstock. The group no longer represents the best interests of oppressed minorities, but the thin-skinned whims of the black elite and the ravenous appetite of the Nanny State. Establishment civil rights leaders now use their once-compelling moral authority to hector, bully and shake down corporate and political targets.

As Ward Connerly, the truly maverick opponent of government racial preferences who is black, wrote recently, "the NAACP is not so much a civil-rights organization as it is a trade association with clear links to the Democratic Party, despite the claim of its chairman that 'the NAACP has always been non-partisan.' Such a statement doesn't pass the giggle test. The NAACP uses the plight of poor black people as a fig leaf to hide its true agenda of promoting policies that benefit their dues-paying members, not black people in general or poor black people in particular."

To compensate for squandering the proud history of the civil rights organization on innocent greeting cards, NAACP leaders introduced a much-hyped resolution at their annual convention this week attacking the nation's biggest racial bogeyman: the tea party movement. It's a tried and true tactic of worn-out grievance-mongers: When you can't find evil enough enemies to blame for your problems, manufacture them. (Just ask hate crimes huckster Al Sharpton.) This is why one of the most popular signs spotted at tea party protests across the country remains the one that reads: "It doesn't matter what this sign says. You'll call it racism, anyway!"

The NAACP resolution calls on its chapters across the country to "repudiate the racism of the Tea Parties" and stand against the movement's attempt to "push our country back to the pre-civil rights era." Yet, it's the NAACP that lobbied the Obama White House to dismiss voter intimidation charges against the thugs of the New Black Panther Party, according to Justice Department whistleblower J. Christian Adams. It's the NAACP that opposes the 21st century school choice movement to free poor minority students from rotten government schools, as black parents in Washington, D.C., have suffered firsthand. It's the NAACP that elevates "diversity" above academic rigor as its primary education goal. And it's the NAACP that backs retrograde, race-based set-asides and classifications that encourage cronyism of color championed by their water-carriers at the Congressional Black Caucus.

And it's the NAACP that tolerates racist sneers and smears like those leveled by the St. Louis NAACP chapter against black limited-government activist Kenneth Gladney, who was derided by civil rights leaders as an "Uncle Tom" after he was beaten bloody by Service Employees International Union henchmen last summer.

Addressing the convention on Monday, first lady Michelle Obama urged NAACP mau-mau-ers to "increase" their "intensity." She's a pro at employing intense accusations of racial oppression as a defense against criticism and milking the victim-ocracy for all its worth.

At Princeton, she complained about "further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant." But rather than remaining "on the periphery," Mrs. Obama climbed the crooked Chicago ladder on a rapid ascent to the top. She hopped from Princeton to Harvard to prestigious law firms, cushy nonprofit gigs and an exclusive Hyde Park manse, before landing in the East Wing with the greatest of ease.

Question the timing of the tea party-demonizing resolution? You bet. The NAACP's man at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. finds himself radically out of step with the American mainstream in the lead-up to the 2010 midterms. He sent his wife to the convention to re-establish White House racial authenticity at a time when increasing numbers of minorities are now as fed up with massive debt, usurpation of individual liberties, corruption in Washington and chaos on the border as everyone else.

It's a black hole bonanza. Cue the distraction: RAAAACIST!

SOURCE

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Prosperity Requires Humility

In August of 2005, Houston investment banker Matt Simmons predicted in a New York Times feature article that the price of oil, then $65/barrel, would soar.

Simmons, who had written a book arguing that the world is running out of oil, was predicting oil prices “in the high triple digits.”

After reading Simmons’ prediction, John Tierney, a libertarian, who was then an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, telephoned Simmons and called him on it. He asked him if he’d be willing to put money on his prediction.

The two made a $10,000 bet. If the average oil price five years hence in 2010, adjusted for inflation, exceeded $200, Simmons would win. If not, Tierney would pocket the ten grand.

We’re now into the second half of 2010, and the average oil price, in 2005 dollars, is $70. Unless there is a remarkable explosion in the oil price for the remainder of 2010, driving it well above $300, Matt Simmons loses this bet. It was not even close.

The point here is to try and learn something from this that is relevant to what is going on today.

Simmons is an energy specialist. The company he founded advertises itself as “the only investment bank specializing in the entire spectrum of energy.”

It’s reasonable to assume that he knows a zillion times more about exploring for and producing oil than John Tierney. But Tierney didn’t make the bet because he felt he knew more about drilling for oil. He made the bet because he knows something about markets and change.

If markets are relatively free to adjust, it just doesn’t matter how smart you are, or how much you know about a particular commodity or business, you are not going to know what the world is going to look like in five years. Chances are, you are not going to know what it is going to look like in a year.

Now suppose Matt Simmons, instead of being a private businessman making bets on his convictions was, instead, a government official setting policy.

This is what we’ve got today. Pinheads with power who think they know the last detail of how the world works and what it is going to look like, not just over the next couple years – but years down the road.

For them tomorrow is simply a repeat of yesterday. The idea that life is about surprises and the unknown – that what we know is a small splotch compared to what we don’t know – takes humility. And humility is the last thing on the radar screen of power brokers who feel they know so much that they are comfortable planning and taking over the lives of their fellow citizens.

Doomsday scenarios dominated thinking about energy in the 1970’s. It led to major government interference in these markets that just made things worse.

Reagan became president in 1981, cut taxes, cut spending, and decontrolled oil prices. Within a couple years, oil prices dropped to a third of where they were, and stayed there for 15 years.

When I worked on welfare reform, doomsday sayers claimed that getting rid of perpetual government welfare would throw poor people into the street. No one wound up in the street, and many got off welfare, found work, and built new lives.

The biggest problems our country has today relate to government planning gone awry. The huge solvency problems we have with Social Security and Medicare all relate to assumptions these government planned systems were built on that turned out to be false.

Now we have only to watch and wait as the disaster that will follow our new government takeover of our heath care unfolds. Every opportunity for new, creative solutions that would emerge from a free market has been squashed. The bureaucrats now reign.

Freedom is about humility not hubris. Our nation’s current problems reflect the latter. Our only hope for renewed bounty and prosperity is to restore the former.

SOURCE

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Attacks on Freedom

John Stossel

Something's happened to America, and it isn't good. It's become easier to get into trouble. We've become a nation of a million rules. Not the kind of bottom-up rules that people generate through voluntary associations. Those are fine. I mean imposed, top-down rules formed in the brains of meddling bureaucrats who think they know better than we how to manage our lives.

The National Marine Fishery Service (NMFS) received an anonymous fax that a seafood shipment to Alabama from David McNab contained "undersized lobster tails" and was improperly packed in clear plastic bags, rather than the cardboard boxes allegedly required under Honduran law. When the $4 million shipment arrived, NMFS agents seized it. McNab served eight years in prison, even though the Honduran government informed the court that the regulation requiring cardboard boxes had been repealed.

How about this one? Four kindergartners -- yes, 5-year-old boys -- played cops and robbers at Wilson Elementary in New Jersey. One yelled: "Boom! I have a bazooka, and I want to shoot you." He did not, of course, have a bazooka. Nevertheless, all four boys were suspended from school for three days for "making threats," a violation of their school district's zero-tolerance policy. School Principal Georgia Baumann said, "We cannot take any of these statements in a light manner." District Superintendent William Bauer said: "This is a no-tolerance policy. We're very firm on weapons and threats."

Give me a break. These are just some of the stories featured in a new book, "One Nation Under Arrest". I'll discuss more on my Fox Business show Thursday night.

Here's another: Ansche Hedgepeth, 12, committed this heinous crime: She left school in Washington, D.C., entered a Metrorail station to head home and ate a French fry. An undercover officer arrested her, confiscating her jacket, backpack and shoelaces. She was handcuffed and taken to the Juvenile Processing Center. Only after three hours in custody was the 12-year-old released into her mother's custody. The chief of Metro Transit Police said: "We really do believe in zero-tolerance. Anyone taken into custody has to be handcuffed for officer safety." She was sentenced to community service and now carries an arrest record. Washington's Metro has since rescinded its zero-tolerance policy.

Keith John Sampson, a student-employee at Indiana-Purdue University Indianapolis, had the temerity to read "Notre Dame Versus the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan" during breaks on the job. One student complained because the book's cover depicted the Klan. The university then found Sampson guilty of racial harassment! Thankfully, a great organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), came to his defense and got his school record cleared.

Palo Alto, Calif., ordered Kay Leibrand, a grandmother, to lower her carefully trimmed hedges. Leibrand argued that no one's vision was obstructed and asked the code officer to take a look. He refused. Then the city dispatched two police officers. They arrested her, loaded her into a patrol car in front of her neighbors and hauled her down to the station.

In 2001, honor student Lindsay Brown parked her car in the wrong spot at her high school. A county police officer looked inside and saw a kitchen knife -- a butter knife with a rounded tip. Because Lindsay was on school property, she had violated the zero-tolerance policy for knives. She was arrested, handcuffed and hauled off to county jail where she spent nine hours on a felony weapons possession charge. School Principal Fred Bode told a local paper, "A weapon is a weapon."

Congress creates, on average, one new crime every week. Federal agencies create thousands more -- so many, in fact that the Congressional Research Service itself said that merely counting them would be impossible.

This is a bad trend. As Lao Tsu said, "The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be."

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Democrats losing Wall Street fat cat support? "At some point when your enemy continues to bash you and hurt you and cost you money, you reach the point of ‘Enough’s enough!’ It seems the power brokers on Wall Street are getting the message. Democrats aren’t their friends. … There’s a fine line here that Democrats in their hubris clearly have crossed. Wall Street, like business interests and taxpayers and any other segement of the population, can be bullied and mollified — to a point. At some point the pain inflicted exceeds the bones thrown to appease, such as cutting special tax deals for segments of the larger group, or handing out stacks of other taxpayers’ money. At some point the pain is plainly more than any perceived benefit.”

American sclerosis: "On Stuart Varney’s FBN program this morning, they debated whether the financial ‘reform’ bill will kill job creation. I can’t see how a two-thousand plus-page law ever avoids doing that. Politicians, many of whom are lawyers, share the conceit that they can manage life with paper and procedure. They don’t understand that just the quantity of their rules cause entrepreneurs to simply say: ‘I won’t even try.’ Why did German and Japan thrive after WWII? Because American bombs destroyed years of accumulated bureaucracy. Well, that’s probably one big reason. Their new governments started from scratch. With fewer rules, German and Japan prospered. America now moves in the opposite direction.”

Increasingly unpopular airport body scanners may offer false security: "USA Today documents the growing resistance to the use of body scanners at airports — a resistance that’s particularly marked in Europe. Complaints about the devices include the expected concerns about privacy, long lines, expense and potential health concerns from even the relatively low levels of radiation emitted by the machines. It should be noted in addition, however, that body scanners aren’t some kind of proven, super-secure technology that offers us a choice between guaranteed safety and keeping our naughty bits under cover. In fact, the machines may offer a false sense of security.”

Live Aid: 25 years later: "It’s been a quarter-century since the dream of Band-Aid, USA For Africa, Live Aid, and other celebrity-studded charitable means to stop the famine in Africa generally and Ethiopia particularly. But one wonders how one should send relief in an area where famine was caused in part by civil war? The relief aid would become just another target of the warring factions. Since then, little has changed on the continent.”

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

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

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

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The End of Britain as We Know It

The article below has considerable logic to it but reality can be peskily complex. Australia has had the voting system proposed for Britain for around a century now and is one of the most stable, conservative and prosperous countries in the world. It was also one of the few countries that was virtually unaffected by the global financial crisis. How about that?

Additionally it is far from a done deal that the new voting system for Britain will be approved at the proposed referendum. Britain has few referenda but Australia has had rather a lot -- and they have mostly been lost (i.e. got a majority "no" vote)

And the agreement to hold elections at strict 5 year intervals is only an agreement of the moment. It is nothing like America's 4 year constitutional requirement for Presidential elections. It can be overturned at any time by the British parliament and there are already rumbles of dissatisfaction over it. Few observers think it will outlast the present coalition government and it may not even last that long -- JR

By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

The United Kingdom, the mother of all democracies, is about to change its political system in fundamental ways -- changes that will spell disaster for the nation and for its politics. For those who love Britain, the news of these impending alterations can only cause angst and distress.

As a result of the inability of either the Conservatives or Labor to win a majority in Parliament in the recent elections, both parties had to bid for support from the Liberal/Social Democratic Party. The price the Conservatives ultimately paid was to agree to some of these changes and to refer others to the electorate for a referendum.

The changes that the parties have agreed to will transform the British government from a decisive decision-making machine into a morass of compromise, half-measures and deadlock. Gridlock will be exported across the ocean to the United Kingdom.

Right now, the prime minister can dissolve Parliament anytime he wants, forcing new elections. He is also obliged to order new elections if he loses a vote of confidence. This power holds the members of his parliamentary majority in check and restrains them from turning on their leaders since, should they succeed in a vote of no confidence, it would plunge them into the uncertainty of a new election, which would imperil their own seats.

The new rules would bar the prime minister from dissolving Parliament during its five-year term and vest that right in a two-thirds majority of parliament. In other words, Parliament would have to vote itself out of office -- something likely never to happen.

So, under the new rules, if a government loses a vote over a major legislative item -- or fails to survive a no-confidence motion -- it must resign, but there need not be new elections. Instead, Parliament can refuse to order new elections and just re-form a new government out of the old Parliament.

The effect of this rule change is likely to be that governments will rise and fall all the time since they may do so without forcing members to face new elections. Like in Italy, the new governments will just be formed by reshuffling the current parliamentary deck into new combinations and coalitions.

Whereas now, if a government falls, there is an election to decide the issue, under the new procedure, the deadlock could just go on and on without resolution.

More dangerous is the proposed new voting system that must be approved by a popular referendum. Rather than vote for one candidate for Parliament in each district, voters will be obliged to rank the candidates in their order of preference. If nobody gets a majority of first-place rankings, the candidate with the least votes drops off and his second place votes are distributed among the other remaining candidates. The Liberal/Social Democrats are pushing this change in the hopes that there may never again be a parliamentary majority for the Conservatives or Labor and that they will always hold the balance of power in a hung parliament.

And they are likely to achieve their objective if the new voting system passes. Most districts in the United Kingdom, as in the U.S., tend either to the left or to the right.

In a leftist district, for example, the Labor Party usually finishes first, the Liberal/Social Democrats second and the Conservatives third. If the Labor candidate did not win a majority of first place votes on Election Day -- and they frequently don't -- the Conservative candidate will drop off and his second-place votes will determine the winner. But what Conservative voter is going to name Labor as his second choice in the polarized politics of the U.K.? Most will name the Liberal/Social Dems as their second choice, and that candidate will win the seat. In right-wing districts, the same process will happen in reverse, again to the benefit of the Liberal/Social Dems.

That means more hung parliaments, less decisive election results and more mush compromise. Together, these changes will tend to paralyze the British government, substituting muddled, mushy compromise for decisive and bold action. We will miss the old United Kingdom.

SOURCE

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Should the U.S. Adopt Compulsory Voting?

The Author below obviously knows the Australian electoral system better than the authors above. And I agree with her. The Australian system of COMPULSORY voting would be a disaster in the USA. The conventional wisdom in Australia is that politically indifferent people who are forced to vote distribute their votes randomly so compulsion has no systematic ideological effect.

America is different, however, Blacks and Hispanics at present have very low rates of turnout and forcing them to the polls WOULD have a systematic effect. It would ensure permanent Democrat majorities

There are no similar large and disgruntled minorities in Australia -- JR

By Debra J. Saunders

California GOP gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman has been taking a lot of heat for her voting record. Or non-voting record. The former eBay CEO didn't register to vote in California until 2002. She failed to vote in the 2003 recall election. She didn't register as a Republican until 2007.

Too bad Whitman didn't spend her business-big-shot years Down Under. In Australia, it's against the law for citizens age 18 or older not to vote.

Ask Aussies about the system and they generally support it. The Australian government passed mandatory voting in federal elections after voter participation slipped to 59 percent in 1922 from an earlier high of 71 percent. In recent years, about 95 percent of Australian citizens have voted.

Besides, some Australians will note, it is not a crime to fail to vote if you are not registered. For the vast majority of those who are enrolled but do not vote, it also is easy to get out of the fine -- about $20 for a first offense -- by citing illness or another extenuating circumstance.

Then there's the phenomenon known as "donkey voting" -- or just randomly ticking off names on the ballot. Call it a protest, call it lazy. The outcome is the same.

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow William Galston has proposed that America adopt the same system to increase voter participation. In the 2008 presidential election, 61.7 percent of eligible Americans voted, according to George Mason University.

I object. For one thing, Washington should not coerce citizens by making them vote. In a free country, those who do not wish to vote should be free to abstain. For another, if people are so ill informed as to believe their votes have no import, well, they're probably right.

And while there is no proving that higher turnout means more left-leaning votes, political scientists of both stripes tend to believe that mandatory voting delivers more votes to the left than to the right. Again, quantity does not mean quality.

Even in Australia, even with compulsory voting, however, high-profile, big-money candidates with poor voting records can prevail. Peter Garrett -- you know, the tall bald singer from the rock band Midnight Oil -- ran for office in 2004. At the time, he was forced to admit that for all his politically correct lectures and exhortations for political activism, he himself had not been on the federal election rolls for 10 years.

At the time, conservative Treasurer Peter Costello told the Herald Sun of Melbourne, "If you haven't been interested enough to have registered and voted in elections, it's a bit rich to ask other people to vote for you." And: "It's like the pope saying he hadn't been to church for 10 years."

Today, Garrett is the Labor Party's minister for the environment. In both hemispheres, apparently, rich and famous count for something.

SOURCE

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Signs of the Times

Thomas Sowell

If you could spend vast amounts of other people's money just by saying a few magic words, wouldn't you be tempted to do it? Barack Obama has spent hundreds of billions of dollars of the taxpayers' money just by using the magic words "stimulus" and "jobs."

It doesn't matter politically that the stimulus is not actually stimulating and that the unemployment rate remains up near double-digit levels, despite all the spending and all the rhetoric about jobs. And of course nothing negative will ever matter to those who are part of the Obama cult, including many in the media.

But, for the rest of us, there is a lot to think about in the economic disaster that we are in.

Not only has all the runaway spending and rapid escalation of the deficit to record levels failed to make any real headway in reducing unemployment, all this money pumped into the economy has also failed to produce inflation. The latter is a good thing in itself but its implications are sobering.

How can you pour trillions of dollars into the economy and not even see the price level go up significantly? Economists have long known that it is not just the amount of money, but also the speed with which it circulates, that affects the price level.

Last year the Wall Street Journal reported that the velocity of circulation of money in the American economy has plummeted to its lowest level in half a century. Money that people don't spend does not cause inflation. It also does not stimulate the economy.

The current issue of Bloomberg Businessweek has a feature article about businesses that are just holding on to huge sums of money. They say, for example, that the pharmaceutical company Pfizer is holding on to $26 billion. If so, there should not be any great mystery as to why they don't invest it.

With the Obama administration being on an anti-business kick, boasting of putting their foot on some business' neck, and the president talking about putting his foot on another part of the anatomy, with Congress coming up with more and more red tape, more mandates and more heavy-handed interventions in businesses, would you risk $26 billion that you might not even be able to get back, much less make any money on the deal?

Pfizer is not unique. Banks have cut back on lending, despite all the billions of dollars that were dumped into them in the name of "stimulus." Consumers have also cut back on spending.

For the first time, more gold is being bought as an investment to be held as a hedge against a currently non-existent inflation than is being bought by the makers of jewelry. There may not be any inflation now, but eventually that money is going to start moving, and so will the price level.

Despite a big decline in the amount of gold used to make jewelry, the demand for gold as an investment has risen so steeply as to more than make up for the reduced demand for gold jewelry, and has in fact pushed the price of gold to record high levels.

What does all this say? That people don't know what to expect next from this administration, which seldom lets a month go by without some new anti-business laws, policies or rhetoric.

When you hire somebody in this environment, you know what you have agreed to pay them and what additional costs there may be for their health insurance or other benefits. But you have no way of knowing what additional costs the politicians in Washington are going to impose, when they are constantly coming up with new bright ideas for imposing more mandates on business.

One of the little noticed signs of what is going on has been the increase in the employment of temporary workers. Businesses have been increasingly meeting their need for labor by hiring temporary workers and working their existing employees overtime, instead of hiring new people.

Why? Because temporary workers usually don't get health insurance or other benefits, and working existing employees overtime doesn't add to the cost of their benefits.

There is no free lunch-- and the biggest price of all is paid by people who are unemployed because politicians cannot leave the economy alone to recover, as the American economy has repeatedly recovered faster when left alone than when politicians decided that they have to "do something."

SOURCE

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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)

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

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

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A lawless Federal government

Voting Section Told Not To Enforce Purging the Dead or Ineligible from Voting Rolls -- an open invitation to voting corruption, long a Democrat specialty

by J. Christian Adams

I was at the Voting Section of the Justice Department for over five years. This office is responsible for enforcing most federal election laws which do not involve criminal matters. My previous articles at Pajamas Media have spoken of the DOJ’s lawless abandonment of race-neutral enforcement of voting laws, and other outrageous conduct. I will continue to publish here at Pajamas Media more instances of failure to enforce the law equally by the Department.

One such instance relates to the Motor Voter law, and will shock Americans who care about integrity in the electoral process.

The “Motor Voter” law was passed in 1993 to promote greater voter registration in the United States. It did this — most Americans now know from visits to the DMV — by requiring states to offer voter registration materials whenever someone had contact with a variety of state offices. These included welfare offices, social service agencies, and motor vehicle departments.

A lesser-known provision also obliged the states to ensure that no ineligible voters were on the rolls — including dead people, felons, and people who had moved. Our current Department of Justice is anxious to encourage the obligations to get everyone registered, but explicitly unwilling to enforce federal law requiring states to remove the dead or ineligible from the rolls.

In November 2009, the entire Voting Section was invited to a meeting with Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes, a political employee serving at the pleasure of the attorney general. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss Motor Voter enforcement decisions.

The room was packed with dozens of Voting Section employees when she made her announcement regarding the provisions related to voter list integrity: "We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it."

Jaws dropped around the room. It is one thing to silently adopt a lawless policy of refusing to enforce a provision of federal law designed to bring integrity to elections. It is quite another to announce the lawlessness to a room full of people who have sworn an oath to fairly enforce the law.

Worse yet, it is a broken campaign promise by Barack Obama, and I’m sure he would not be happy to have heard the announcement. After all, his Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez has been traveling around the country bashing the Bush-era Department of Justice. Perez says as often as he can: "Those who had been entrusted with the keys to the division treated it like a buffet line at the cafeteria, cherry-picking which laws to enforce."

Yet at this meeting, Ms. Fernandes openly relished her time at the buffet line in the Voting Section cafeteria.

The problem with this sort of lawlessness, apart from the fact that it is becoming a trend in this administration, is that it nullifies the important compromise that Congress reached in 1993. Greater access to registration came by turning welfare agencies into voter registration offices, but the law also included provisions to ensure greater integrity. It is a dangerous development for our electoral system when one part of that compromise is tossed overboard by a bureaucrat.

It will be impossible for this purportedly transparent administration to deny this direction was given. There were dozens of good people in the room that I know care more about the truth than about saving Ms. Fernandes’ career.

Plus, the cases the Justice Department has brought — or not brought — corroborate the account: the Department has not filed a single case under the Motor Voter provision where there are problems.

Are there problems with list integrity? Yes, but that’s a story for another article. Even worse than not bringing cases, the Holder Justice Department has dismissed a case against Missouri that the previous administration had started. In many places in Missouri, there are more voters than humans with a heartbeat old enough to vote. Instead of fully litigating the case to a favorable outcome, the DOJ made it go away, nicely, quietly, completely. Sound familiar?

SOURCE

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Republicans could win control of Congress, White House admits for first time

The White House has admitted for the first time that Republicans could win control of the House of Representatives in crucial elections in November. Robert Gibbs, the president's spokesman, acknowledged that deep frustration with the economy could see the Democrats' 75-seat majority in the lower chamber wiped out.

"There is no doubt there are enough seats at play that could cause Republicans to gain control, there is no doubt about that," Mr Gibbs told NBC's "Meet the Press".

All 435 seats in the House are up for grabs in the Nov 2 election as well as 36 of the 100 seats in the Senate, which the Democrats expect to hold.

The party is considered particularly vulnerable in southern and midwestern states, districts that turned Democratic in the latter years of the Bush administration. A consensus has emerged among Washington observers that the House would be lost or the ruling party's majority reduced to a handful of seats.

Such outcomes would make it difficult for President Barack Obama to push through his agenda, which is likely to include major reform of energy and immigration. It would not augur well for his re-election bid in 2012.

In the past week Mr Obama has set out his policy for the midterm vote, trying to convince impatient Americans that his economic policies are working and that improvements will take time.

"We understand people are frustrated, everybody is frustrated," Mr Gibbs said. "The president is frustrated that we haven't seen greater recovery efforts, but that doesn't stop us from doing what we know is right."

Rehearsing a line of attack that Democrats are likely to use ad infinitum, he said Americans should beware of "handing back the keys" to Republicans who had "driven the car into the ditch" when the economy crashed in late 2008.

He followed the president's lead in mocking Republican House of Representatives leader John Boehner, who criticised measures Mr Obama used to rescue the crisis-riddled economy as tantamount to using a nuclear weapon to kill an ant.

A recent Gallup poll released showed that 38 per cent of independent voters approve of the job Mr Obama is doing, compared with 81 per cent of Democratic voters and only 12 per cent of Republicans. Mr Obama's overall approval rating is 46 per cent. A year ago, his approval rating among independents was 56 per cent.

Democrats are trusting that Republicans are likely to come in for tougher scrutiny from voters in November, particularly over their record on the economy and almost total opposition to efforts by Mr Obama and the Democrats to improve it.

David Axelrod, a senior White House advisor, said: "On the other side of the ballot in November will be a party that has an economic theory, and it was tested, and it led to catastrophe.

"We lost three million jobs in the last six months of 2008. The financial market almost collapsed. They turned a $237 billion that Bill Clinton left into a $1.3 trillion dollar deficit. And they're running on the same policies."

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

The economy sure is getting Obama panicked: "President Obama, who vowed in his State of the Union address to double American exports over the next five years, said on Wednesday that he would renew his efforts to renegotiate long-stalled free trade agreements with Panama and Colombia and persuade Congress to adopt them. The two trade pacts, and a third one with South Korea, were negotiated by the administration of former President George W. Bush, but all three have languished in Congress because of deep opposition from Democrats. Mr. Obama said in Toronto last month that he intended to make a new push for the South Korean agreement, and on Wednesday he pledged to press ahead with the two Latin American pacts as well."

Obama Economy Sends Americans to Their Mattresses: "Government policies designed to stimulate the economy seem to be having the opposite effect. Consumers aren't buying, businesses aren't hiring, and those fortunate enough to have some cash on hand don't seem to be investing. I call it the mattress economy. People seem to be following this investment strategy. Step one: Go to Mattress Discounters and buy the biggest mattress you can find. Step two: Take it home, and stuff all your money in it. Step three: Lie down, and get some rest. This hurts the economy, but it's a rational response to the Obama Democrats' public policies.

Chinese credit firm says US worse risk than China: "A Chinese firm that aims to compete with Western rating agencies declared Washington a worse credit risk than Beijing in its first report on Government debt yesterday amid efforts by China to boost its influence in global markets. Dagong International Credit Rating Co's verdict was a break with Moody's, Standard & Poors and Fitch, which say US government debt is the world's safest. Dagong said it rated Washington below China and 11 other countries such as Switzerland and Australia due to high debt and slow growth. The report comes amid complaints by Beijing that Western rating agencies fail to give China full credit for its economic strength, boosting borrowing costs - a criticism echoed by some foreign analysts."

Outlawing pet sales or outlawing pets?: "The nanny statists not only want to to take care of you, they want to make sure every hamster in the world gets fair treatment. Supposedly, that’s why they proposed a ban on pet sales in San Francisco, which fortunately was voted down last night. Proponents say too many people make impulse decisions when they buy pets and, therefore, all pet sales should be illegal.”

One job forward, two jobs back: "The Great Obamanomic Job Creation Machine rumbled into action again over the Fourth of July weekend, promising to spend as much as $2 billion to support creation of 1,585 ‘permanent’ jobs by two solar energy companies. That comes to a potential cost of over $1.25 million per job. In his weekly radio address on July 3, President Obama chided the Republicans for failing to climb aboard his job-creation bandwagon, which he claims — against strong evidence to the contrary — has created or saved 2.8 million jobs over the past year. And he isn’t finished.”


Moratorium on offshore deepwater oil drilling wrong move: "Not only does the president’s moratorium on deepwater drilling fail to stop the oil leak, it costs jobs on the offshore rigs that he has shut down; reduces the amount of crude oil available for refining into gasoline, diesel fuel and heating oil; and penalizes BP’s competitors, who have been pumping oil from offshore wells responsibly for decades. Until BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, no oil had been spilled as a result of offshore drilling in U.S. waters since an accident off the coast of Santa Barbara in 1969. Without energy production from deepwater areas, a vital source of jobs and tax revenue will be lost. And if offshore rigs remain idle for long, the Gulf’s economy will wither.”

Bad news for Obama: Conservative Justice Kennedy tells pals he's in no rush to leave Supreme Court: "President Obama may get liberal Elena Kagan on the Supreme Court, but conservative swing-voter Anthony Kennedy says he's not going anywhere anytime soon. Justice Kennedy, who turns 74 this month, has told relatives and friends he plans to stay on the high court for at least three more years - through the end of Obama's first term, sources said. That means Kennedy will be around to provide a fifth vote for the court's conservative bloc through the 2012 presidential election. If Obama loses, Kennedy could retire and expect a Republican President to choose a conservative justice. Kennedy, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, has been on the court 22 years. He has become a bit of a political nemesis at the White House for his increasing tendency to side with the court's four rock-ribbed conservative justices.

Church of England rejects women bishop plan: "The Church of England was in turmoil after plans by its top leaders designed to avoid a split over allowing women bishops were voted down. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the leader of the world's Anglicans, and Archbishop of York John Sentamu, his number two in the Church of England, had put forward safeguards for objectors. They received the backing of a majority of the houses of bishops and laity of the General Synod. But the concessions did not win a majority of the House of Clergy, meaning that the proposals were lost. Anglo-Catholic objectors have warned that if their demands are not met, then "large numbers" of clergy and lay people could leave for the Roman Catholic Church under an offer for disaffected Anglicans made by Pope Benedict XVI." [This just shows how isolated from lay people the bishops are]

Why we should have a paid market in kidney transplants: "Less death, better health and all for less money, what could possibly be wrong with this idea? Well, other than the fact that the Great and the Good in our own dear Blighty seem infected with the idea that money, lucre, is just so icky and shouldn’t be used to solve some problems.”

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

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

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

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

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About Jon Jay

I have recently received some egregiously abusive email from a conservative blogger with a name rather similar to my most customary username: jonjayray. Even though I am an atheist, I have however always found Christian ethics to be the best guide to life so I am going to demonstrate Christian forgiveness by linking to his site.

He appears to be an elderly but very aggressive former military man who writes in a rather long-winded way and who is much seized by the threat of Islam. I have seen no unusual insights on his blog but from what I can make out, he appears to think that because fundamentalist Muslims have declared war on us then we should in some way take the war to them. I rather thought that George Bush did that but maybe I have missed something.

Anyway he seems much peeved that this "insight" of his has not been enthusiastically embraced by other conservative bloggers and so sent many of us a very condescending and abusive email over our perceived failings in the matter. Rather ludicrously, he even sent his screed to Dymphna of Gates of Vienna, possibly the most anti-Islamic blog in the blogosphere. She replied in rather kinder tones than Mr Jay deserved and I chipped in a few comments too. As a former military man myself who regularly blogs about the Islamic menace (See POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH), I felt that I was undeserving of his condemnation.

Anyway, some readers may find his thoughts useful. I hope so.

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Why the silent treatment?



As Scott points out in the post immediately below, the news that President Obama tasked NASA head Bolden, as perhaps his foremost mission, with raising Muslim self-esteem is entirely absent from the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as the nightly newscasts of ABC, NBC, and CBS. Why? Bill Otis argues, persuasively I think, that it's because this news is potentially devastating to Obama:

The reason the MSM has the lid on NASA's new "mission" to snuggle up to Islam (in between decapitations and floggings) is that it would be devastating to Obama if it became known. On the surface, the new NASA "mission" seems merely screwball, and thus a small story. But I think it's a good deal more than that. It shows that Obama's thinking is unrecognizable to the average person. It also shows that he's unserious -- frivolous, really -- about something that made a generation of Baby Boomers take pride in their country. How many millions of people sat in their junior high auditoriums and watched the Alan Shepherd and John Glenn launches? How many millions more were up at midnight on July 20, 1969 to watch the first human being, an American, put his foot on the moon?

When the domestic roots of skepticism about America (and sometimes flat-out anti-Americanism) were being laid -- in the 60's assassinations, the Vietnam War, and the exposure of the country's treatment of blacks -- the one thing in which we all took pride was the space program. So for Obama, it's now one thing that needs to be perverted. Making it a dumbed-down PR front for Islam is, in its way, a genius move for this purpose. But as the MSM recognizes by its silence, it's a bridge too far.

A lot of people out there haven't heard of "American exceptionalism," or, if they have, aren't too sure of what it means. But they have a good intuition for it: It is, among other things, but quite importantly, the excitement and pride they felt when America did something the human race had wanted to do since it looked up at the night sky. Space exploration took on added luster for our generation because it was so in keeping with the natural optimism, bravado and energy of our youth.

Under Obama, NASA has ended plans to go back to the moon, or go to Mars (something also underreported). Budgets are tight, you know. Time to hunker down and lower our sights. But we can do Muslim outreach.

This is a window on the kind of thinking Obama does. Were it widely known, it would be devastating: We will put away what has made the country a beacon, and act like the small, repentant ex-bully Obama takes us to be. Thus the rockets get mothballed as The Great Satan starts to make amends by printing comic books celebrating Arab contributions to trigonomety 4000 years ago, or whatever it was.

"You'll be able to keep your own insurance" was the most important political lie of the last year. But NASA's new mission is the most revealing truth. The MSM understands this, which is why it's been so resolute in keeping it out of sight.

SOURCE

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Fear: The real motivator behind the nanny state

In an article that really ought to be online but instead is consigned solely behind a paywall and to its print edition, National Review’s Kevin Williamson makes a point that ought to be made more often: for all that lefties love to talk about “fear-mongering” allegedly done by the right on foreign policy, when it comes to domestic policy, they really ought to look in the mirror.

Instead of being the side of optimism and reason, nanny-state advocates are actually trying to institutionalize their own personal fears about other members of society. Williamson begins with a quote from a blog post from the Washington Post’s David Ignatius reacting to recent Supreme Court rulings expanding the ability of people to own and possess guns:

My biggest worry with Monday’s Supreme Court decision is that by ruling, in effect, that every American can apply for a gun license, the justices will make gun ownership much more pervasive in a society that already has too many guns. After all, if I know that my neighbor is armed and preparing for Armageddon situations where law and order break down (as so many are–just read the right-wing blogs) then I have to think about protecting my family, too. That’s the state-of-nature, everyone for himself logic that prevails in places such as Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Williamson then begins the slicing and dicing:

Mr Ignatius here is remarkably forthcoming: He is not worried about guns in the hands of criminals but about guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens, people who are willing to apply for a permit and jump through the bureaucratic hoops required of gun buyers. His nightmare is not an America in which criminals run amok with Glocks, or even an America in which gun permits are handed out liberally, but an America in which “every American can apply for a gun license.” Nevermind the approval of licenses, the mere application gives Mr. Ignatius the howling fantods. It is wonderfully apt that he references the “state of nature” in his criticism, imagining a Hobbesian version of life in these United States: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, permeated by the aroma of cordite. Mr. Ignatius, like Thomas Hobbes, is casting his lot with Leviathan and makes no apology for it.

That is the essence of 21st-century progressivism: In matters ranging from financial derivatives to education to gun control, the Left believes that we face a choice between a masterful state and a Hobbesian war of all against all. For all of the smart set’s vaunted and self-congratulatory nuance, it is this absolutist vision, this Manichean horror, that forms the foundation of progressivism.

This, and not the threat of uncontrollable crime, is really at the hear of the suburban progressives’ abomination of firearms. [...] To use lethal force in self-defense is the ultimate declaration of independence, a kind of momentary secession from the authority of the government whose laws and prisons and police officers have, in that moment, failed the citizen. To acknowledge the right to self-defense–and the concomitant right to be forearmed against aggressors–is to acknowledge that some things are outside the state and its authority, or at least that some moments are outside the state and its authority.

The horror that progressives feel for gun owners is in many ways like the horror they feel for homeschoolers [...] Just as state schooling is not about education, but about the state, gun control is not about guns: It’s about control. A citizen who can fend for himself when the predators come or the schools fail is less inclined to look to the state for sustenance and oversight in other areas of life. To progressives, that’s an invitation to anarchy.

SOURCE

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What If Glenn Beck Said, 'I Hate Every Last Iota of a N-----! Kill Their Babies!'

Some details of what Obama is protecting

This past week more unbelievable video of the dude the DOJ’s Eric “Let’s-Cut-Terrorists-N-Racists-Some-Slack” Holder found no guilt with in the Philly voter intimidation case made its way to YouTube for the whole world to see just how insane this black dude truly is. For those who haven’t seen the vid yet, let me give you some nuggets from this New Black Panther’s noggin.

One “King” Samir Shabaz, who looks like Milli Vanilli’s angry and petite brother, head of the Philadelphia branch of the New Black Panther Party, the dude Holder dropped an open-and-shut case on, was caught on film telling us how he really feels about “white crackers” and blacks who date or marry “white cracker whores,” which I guess would include President Obama because he is “half cracker,” as Shazam (or whatever his name is) would say, seeing that Barack’s mom was Caucasian.

Anyway, Shabaz went on the record saying that he hates “every last iota of a cracker.” Honestly, when he said that I didn’t know what he was talking about. Is he talking about Saltines or Ritz or Wheat Thins? Was it one particular cracker or all the thin-toasted biscuits that he abhors? And what would make a man hate these snacks so much? I was in a quandary about his bellicosity to crispy, skinny biscuits until I saw the entire video invective.

Apparently, white people are called “crackers” by the blacks who hate them; Shabaz said, “I hate white people. Every last iota of a cracker. I hate him.” Given the context, it is easy to see that “cracker” equals white devils, and he hates “every last iota of (them).”

Now for those of you who might be laughing hysterically at King Samir’s syntax, I wouldn’t judge him too harshly because even though he might not be that good with grammar, he might be off the chain in regard to math which could qualify him to be a player in Obama’s new NASA initiative. Ya neva know.

After the bubble-off-level Shabaz blasted his hatred for crackers, he then went full retard and began to scream at blacks on the street who were trying desperately to ignore him. He was yelling that if they truly wanted to be “free” they would have to “kill some crackers.” And not just some adult crackers, oh no! He also suggested that black people kill white baby crackers (I guess you would call them “croutons”) to be free. My question, Shamwow, is … free from what? Freedom?

There’s no way in hades Beck, or you, or I could say that stupid crap and walk away from it without a 5-10 sentence. The hate crime cops would be all over us—and justly so. But it appears that blacks can get away with it when it is directed at white devils while BHO is in da House.

Where are Sharpton and Jackson condemning this racial bigotry and call to murder? When’s Obama going to come out and say that this tool acted stupidly like he did to the upstanding Boston cop in the Henry Louis Gates case? Didn’t Imus get deep fried for saying something far less egregious? And, and, isn’t Mel Gibson experiencing hell on earth right now for being caught on tape dropping the N-bomb on his Russian-ex?

To bring it home, what if, once again, a conservative or a Christian said, “I hate n------and we should kill n------ and their black babies?” Or, I know, what if one of us said we should kill women? Or homosexuals? Or Muslims? Or kitty cats? It appears that if you’re black and block voting booths and scream murderous threats to whites, that’s totally cool and that’s “progress” in Holder’s world of hate whitey.

Oh, and one more thing: The mainstream media, like with the ACORN scandal, won’t touch this. Wow. What hypocrisy. You just know if it were Beck (or some lesser conservative luminary) the MSM would be banging that drum like a coked-up Keith Moon.

SOURCE

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

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

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

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