From the Right...
July 06, 2009
by HARLEY
For quite some time both Israel and Saudi Arabia have been very nervous about Iran Obtaining a nuclear weapon, so much so, both have made diplomatic moves, and have threatened action against the facilities.
they do have every right to be concerned, the current regime in Iran does want to displace Saudi Arabia as the political and military power in the region. The leadership has threatened to use it nuclear power to destroy Israel and establish its own control over the Mideast. However both Israel and Saudi Arabia have a historical enmity between them, to say the lest, so it is quite uprising to see that Saudi Arabia might have given Israel the green light to attack Irans nuclear facilites.
The head of Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence service, has assured Benjamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, that Saudi Arabia would turn a blind eye to Israeli jets flying over the kingdom during any future raid on Iran’s nuclear sites.
Earlier this year Meir Dagan, Mossad’s director since 2002, held secret talks with Saudi officials to discuss the possibility.
The Israeli press has already carried unconfirmed reports that high-ranking officials, including Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister, held meetings with Saudi colleagues. The reports were denied by Saudi officials.
“The Saudis have tacitly agreed to the Israeli air force flying through their airspace on a mission which is supposed to be in the common interests of both Israel and Saudi Arabia,” a diplomatic source said last week.
WOW Israeli warplanes in Saudi Airspace attacking Iran................. sounds like so whacked out version of Tom Clancy or Stephen Coontz.
May you live ins interesting times......
The next few weeks are gonna be critical.
I wonder which way the Obama administration will come down on this, any takers?? LOL
July 06, 2009 04:02 AM
July 05, 2009
by Hal_10000
It’s been a while since we had an Iranian thread. But there seems to be plenty going on. The regime has apparently gotten hold of the standard Communist Insurrection Playbook, replaced “Communist” with “Islamist”, and is following to the letter.
First step—denounce dissenters as western agents.
A top aide to Iran’s supreme leader called the country’s main opposition figure a U.S. agent and said in an editorial Saturday he should be tried for committing crimes against the nation.
While hard-line figures had previously demanded Mir Hossein Mousavi to be prosecuted for describing Iran’s June 12 elections fraudulent and leading demonstrations afterward, the editorial was the first public declaration that the opposition leader was a foreign agent.
After quashing the post-election street demonstrations, Iran’s leadership has been trying to erase any lingering doubts about the legitimacy of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election by portraying the unrest as sparked by foreign meddling.
“It has to be asked whether the actions of (Mousavi and his supporters) are in response to instructions of American authorities,” said Hossein Shariatmadari in an editorial appearing in the conservative daily Kayhan.
Mousavi is a life-long devotee of the regime who believes in Iran’s nuclear program, as do most of his followers. Having him as our agent would require a subtlety and intelligence that has been completely absent in Washington for some time.
Next step, show trials:
A powerful cleric said Friday that Iran will put British Embassy staffers on trial for fomenting postelection turmoil, a step that would likely increase Iran’s isolation and alienate Western nations that have been trying to keep options open with Tehran despite its crackdown on protesters.
The announcement fueled calls in Europe for tougher action against Tehran. Britain is pressing for members of the European Union to pull their ambassadors out of Tehran to protest the staffers’ arrests last week.
Just to clarify—these are Iranian staffers, not British ones. But I suspect we are headed toward a 1979 situation, in which the people will “spontaneously” seize the embassy of the nations supposedly causing the unrest.
There is one thorn in the regime’s side however. Not everyone is on board:
The most important group of religious leaders in Iran called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate on Saturday, an act of defiance against the country’s supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country’s clerical establishment.
A statement by the group, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, represents a significant, if so far symbolic, setback for the government and especially the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is supposed to be final. The government has tried to paint the opposition and its top presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, as criminals and traitors, a strategy that now becomes more difficult — if not impossible.
This is at the same time Mousavi is providing hard evidence of electoral fraud. The Supreme Council’s claim to rule by divine will has already taken serious body blows. But open defiance by religious forces makes it even harder for them to maintain the lie that they are merely acting out God’s will.
This isn’t over.
July 05, 2009 10:24 PM
There Are No Permanent Majorities In America
Permanent Majorities are Almost Non-existent in American History. If a party attains “permanent majority” status, we would expect that party to dominate both Houses of Congress and the Presidency for an extended period of time, perhaps twenty to thirty years.
But such periods of dominance are rare. Consider the following chart. It measures Republican strength in the White House and House of Representatives by averaging the party’s percentage of the popular vote in the most recent Presidential election with the party’s percentage of seats won in the most recent House of Representatives election. It begins with the formation of the modern Republican party and continues to the present day. Senate seats are ignored for two reasons: (1) Senators were not elected by popular vote until the early 1900s (the exact date varies by state); and (2) only 1/3 of the Senate (give or take a seat) is up at any given time, so including Senate membership would necessarily serve as an artificial dampener on the partisan swings in the country (both toward Republicans and Democrats).
Notice how noisy the chart is. If there were stable, permanent majorities being formed at any time, we would expect to see long periods of time where Republicans are consistently well above the 50% threshold or consistently well below the 50% threshold. But the longest unbroken period of time we ever see for partisan control of Washington is the time of Republican dominance from just before the Civil War to just before Reconstruction ends. Of course, when most of your political opponents consider themselves a part of a different country and/or are not allowed to vote, it is easy to build a massive majority.
Even if we dampen the effect of outliers somewhat by charting a 3-year rolling average, we still see quite a bit of movement, which is inconsistent with permanent majorities:
Instead of a permanent Democratic majority from 1932-1968, and a Republican majority from 1968-2008, what we see is this: Republicans get whacked after the depression, but the American public quickly pulls them back to parity. Then the recession of 1958 hits, and Republicans get knocked down again. The American people pull them back to parity, then the Watergate scandal hits. The American people pull the Republicans back to parity, then the recession of 1990 hits. All of this is consistent with minority status driven by events and Republicans either holding the Presidency at inopportune moments or being incompetent, depending on your viewpoint.
Much more HERE
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Spendthrift Sunbelt States
Arizona, Florida, and Nevada have run through the riches of their boom and are starting to look more like cash-strapped New York.
If states were airlines, New York and California would be Delta and United. Even when competently managed, they must shoulder the institutional inheritance of decades of other people’s decisions, good and bad. They must bear the heavy cost of legions of retired government workers. And they carry billions of dollars of debt that backs expensive, complex infrastructure.
Over the last few decades, when New Yorkers and Californians tired of paying high taxes to fund big government, they tended to migrate to what we might call the JetBlue states: Arizona, Florida, and Nevada. In those three low-tax refuges, the construction industry swelled to build houses for the new residents. And the construction workers themselves needed houses, providing jobs for still more construction workers. All the new people needed new places to shop, as well as new doctors, dentists, and restaurants. The local financial industry also grew and grew, filling office parks with the folks who did the back-office work for all the mortgages that New York bankers were eagerly approving. The result: double-digit population growth.
But during the boom times, elected officials in Arizona, Florida, and Nevada took a page out of the old states’ playbook, driving up spending at an unsustainable pace. Now that the growth of the low-tax states has hit a wall, shattering revenues, they face a tough choice: they can raise taxes to fund permanently higher costs, or they can aggressively cut spending. So far, it’s proving surprisingly easy for them to choose Option One, taking a small step toward transforming themselves into the high-tax states that so many of their own residents have fled.
More HERE
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Can California Be Sold On Ebay's Former Leader?
California's campaigns introduce candidates not only to the state's voters but to its immensity. In Bakersfield, Meg Whitman, 52, the former CEO of eBay who is campaigning for the 2010 Republican gubernatorial nomination, learned about carrots.
In 1968, the Grimm brothers were selling vegetables at a roadside stand in Anaheim. They moved to Bakersfield and today Grimmway Farms and one rival provide 80 percent of the nation's carrots, partly because the brothers figured out how to make the vegetables pleasingly uniform in shape.
Who knew? Whitman didn't, and the story, which she tells enthusiastically and at length, delights her because it confirms her conviction that California "was built by intellectual capital," and not just the Hollywood and Silicon Valley sort.
California's cascading crises prefigure America's future unless Washington reverses the growth of government subservient to organized labor. The state cannot pay its bills, poorly educates its young, and its taxation punishes whatever success that its suffocating regulatory regime does not prevent.
Whitman, a Roman candle of facts and ideas, insists, "We do not have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem of epic proportions." Twenty-five percent of California's revenues come from income taxes paid by the 144,000 richest taxpayers, so "if one of them leaves, it's a really bad thing." Lots have left. Some never really arrive. Pierre Omidyar, after founding eBay in San Jose, resided in Nevada, which has no income tax.
Whitman says 50 percent of California's spending on education, grades K through 12, goes into overhead, not classrooms, compared to 20 percent in, for example, Connecticut. The public education lobby likes it that way, but because California elementary school students rank 46th among the states in math, 48th in reading, 49th in science, it is, Whitman says tersely, hard for defenders of the status quo to "hide behind the results."
More HERE
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ELSEWHERE
Zero money down, not subprime loans, led to the mortgage meltdown: "What is really behind the mushrooming rate of mortgage foreclosures since 2007? The evidence from a huge national database containing millions of individual loans strongly suggests that the single most important factor is whether the homeowner has negative equity in a house -- that is, the balance of the mortgage is greater than the value of the house. This means that most government policies being discussed to remedy woes in the housing market are misdirected. Many policy makers and ordinary people blame the rise of foreclosures squarely on subprime mortgage lenders who presumably misled borrowers into taking out complex loans at low initial interest rates. Those hapless individuals were then supposedly unable to make the higher monthly payments when their mortgage rates reset upwards. But the focus on subprimes ignores the widely available industry facts (reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association) that 51% of all foreclosed homes had prime loans, not subprime, and that the foreclosure rate for prime loans grew by 488% compared to a growth rate of 200% for subprime foreclosures."
Feds OK seizure of extremist assets: “The Obama administration on Thursday authorized the seizure of assets belonging to an extremist organization in Iraq and an Iranian backer of insurgents, saying both are responsible for deadly attacks in Iraq. The Treasury Department is targeting Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and the Iraq-based group Kata’ib Hizballah for committing, directing or supporting acts of violence in Iraq against U.S. and Iraqi forces.”
FL: Supreme Court says Crist can’t reject judge nominees: “The Florida Supreme Court says Gov. Charlie Crist can’t reject an all-white list of appeals court nominees, even though he wants to appoint someone who will make the judiciary more diverse. The justices unanimously ruled Thursday that the Florida Constitution leaves Crist no choice but to pick one of the six white candidates submitted by a judicial nominating commission.”
How to encourage software piracy: "Adobe Systems is facing massive customer service delays worldwide, with some phone calls taking 40 minutes to answer. The company apologised for the inconvenience but said it would take at least a month to fully rectify the situation. One local customer told The Australian he faced registration difficulties last week after purchasing the Adobe Student package at $529. Like all vendors, Adobe requires student status to be validated. The company takes three days to process student software registrations as it is a manual exercise. After the wait time, the customer still hadn't received a registration key. He was finally told that other people had been waiting for over a week for theirs. When contacted, Adobe admitted its customer care division for consumer clients had been hurt by a change in vendors. Unfortunately there's been an extended wait time for student registrations and phone calls," Mr Frazer said. Adobe exceeded the three-day target for student registrations but customers trying to contact the company via telephone fared far worse. Mr Frazer said some calls took more than half an hour to answer while other callers hit a brick wall. "We had some customers waiting for about 40 minutes and some calls couldn't get through," the Singapore-based executive said." [People who have honestly paid a lot of money for something they could have got from a pirate source should not be subjected to this]
Another charming Muslim: "Music star Cheb Mami has been sentenced to five years in jail for trying to make a former lover undergo a forced abortion, despite pleading for forgiveness at his trial near Paris. Wearing a white shirt, the star, whose real name is Mohamed Khelifati, showed no emotion as the verdict was read out, before being escorted from the courtroom in Bobigny, outside Paris, and remanded in custody. The victim, a 43-year-old photographer whose name was withheld, was sequestered and drugged in Mami's villa in Algiers in the summer of 2005 after revealing she was pregnant with his child. Two women and a man then tried to carry out an abortion on her. Returning to France, the woman learned her pregnancy had not been terminated and went on to have the child - a girl - now three years old. "They insulted me. They threw me on the mattress and tore off my pants....I was given three shots with needles, one woman pressed against my stomach and the other put her hand in my vagina and started scraping," she told the court. The victim was not present to hear the verdict but her lawyer, Marie Dose, said her client was "relieved to see that the court understood the violence she was subjected to," and hoped her young daughter "can forgive her father". During his testimony, Mami broke down in tears and pleaded for the woman's forgiveness, admitting he made a "serious mistake" but saying he did not love her and felt "trapped" when she told him she was pregnant. "I was ashamed to have an illegitimate child. A child should be born from a union. I didn't want this child," said the singer."
Consumers likely to find increased bank costs: "An array of government-created insurance agencies — which have long charged bargain-rate premiums to banks, credit unions, and brokerages — are seeking to make up for massive shortfalls in their insurance funds by raising fees and premiums, many of which are likely to be passed on to consumers. The billions of dollars in new fees are the result of decisions by Congress and the agencies to allow the insurance funds and premiums to be capped at levels that proved far too low, according to Jeffrey R. Brown, a finance professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has studied the issue. ‘This is what happens when you put the government in charge of an insurance program,’ Brown said. ‘Politically, they don’t run them the way the need to be run.’”
Life, liberty, and property are inseparable: “Life, liberty, and property were the central, inalienable rights that formed the foundation of the great experiment in self government called the United States of America. The founders of our country never broke apart this sacred triumvirate, because each one of these rights is inextricably bound to the other. No one of these three can exist without the other. Moreover, when all three are secured, it is almost impossible for injustice to exist. Wherever one does find injustice, one invariably finds a violation of one of these three basic rights at its root.”
Wal-Mart tired of abuse so joins the corrupt system: “The Wall Street Journal explains Wal-Mart’s motivation in benign-sounding terms: ‘Wal-Mart — which provides insurance to employees’ — ‘wants to level the playing field with companies that don’t.’ This is a sugary way of saying that Wal-Mart wishes to use the aggressive controls of the state to force firms smaller than it to provide what they may or may not have the resources to provide. Those firms that are unable to continue operating under the state’s new regulations will, of course, be forced to go out of business (unless they’re able to procure bailouts — this is also problematic), thus leaving less firms with whom Wal-Mart will need to compete. This is bad not only for workers but also for consumers. We shouldn’t really be surprised by Wal-Mart’s recent move. As Mr. Lew Rockwell reported in 2005, Wal-Mart called for an increase to the minimum wage so as to impose a higher cost on smaller competitors.”
Why I’m lucky to be an American: "“It is true that genuine scarcity can exist in some regions afflicted by drought or other natural disaster. Scarcity can affect individuals through random crime, disease, or accident. For the most part, however, scarcity is created by governments. That is true of the United States government. Government policy created and prolonged the Great Depression. It caused stagflation in the 1970’s. It is behind the current depression. Nevertheless, I feel fortunate to be an American. For it is the American experience which proves that scarcity need not exist.”
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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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by JR (jonjayray@gmail.com) on July 05, 2009 12:40 PM
July 04, 2009
by HARLEY
I wanted to post something poignant and meaningful for today, but i just dont have it in me today.
So with that, i thought i just provide a link, Who were the Founding Fathers,
Take time out today, between the Beer, fireworks and food, to think about those who started the noble endeavor.
They stood against the most powerful empire in the world and challenged it. these men were not saints, they were very much Human as the rest of us, but in a way were so every bit special.
It is too bad that such men no longer exist.
July 04, 2009 11:51 PM
by Hal_10000
No idea how long HBO will let this stay up, but it’s the high point of their John Adams miniseries and never fails to get me choked up.
When I look back over the last 233 years, what I see is the slow steady triumph of what these courageous men put their trust into—the American people. It is precisely the pig-headed, cantankerous, rebellious American character that has made us the great nation we are today. And against that unstoppable force, no object has yet stood up. The most powerful empire in the world failed—twice—to bring us to heel. The combined might of two titans of fascism fell. Even communism, with a philosophy that still suckers in the college students and once controlled half the planet, failed to stop us.
We can’t even stop ourselves. We make wrong turns and dumb decisions. We elect fools and poltroons and get swept up in panics. But in the end we—haltingly, argumentatively, slowly but surely—find our way to doing the right thing. We abolished slavery. We broke the barriers of discrimination. We survived the Great Depression. We even managed to stop the spread of disco.
That’s why—most of the time—I remain optimistic about the future. If the Soviet Union, with its mighty army and fearsome nuclear arsenal, couldn’t beat us, what chance do a bunch of bearded lunatics in caves have? If we could survive Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter—when everyone knew that capitalism was a failure—we can survive George Bush and Barack Obama.
It won’t be easy. It never is. But we will move forward. We always do.
Have a Happy Fourth.
July 04, 2009 10:32 PM
by candcrules@gmail.com
I wish everyone a safe and happy 4th as we celebrate the anniversary of the Declaration that brought about the greatest country in the world. Happy 4th everyone!
PS: I’m sure Hal with his extraordinary writing skills will have a more in depth and philosophical thread at some point and as always won’t disappoint. No pressure though :)
July 04, 2009 09:39 PM
Rally for the people of Iran a week from now
If you live in NYC or thereabouts, Sunday 7/12 from 2 PM -5PM there will be a big anti-regime rally in front of the UN headquarters. Many Iranians are expected to attend but all are welcome.
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Sarah Palin hints at White House bid by quitting as governor of Alaska
The blogs are overflowing with comments on the Palin announcement but no-one really knows where it is leading. The following article from the "Times" of London probably represents mainstream thinking at the moment, however
Sarah Palin set off a storm of speculation about an imminent White House bid when she said yesterday that she was stepping down as governor of Alaska. Americans were stunned by the surprise announcement, made from her home in Wasilla, Alaska, on the eve of Independence Day celebrations.
There has been intense speculation in recent weeks that Mrs Palin was considering running for the Republican nomination in 2012, bolstered by heavy hints she dropped earlier this week in the guise of an interview about jogging. Few expected her not to see out her first term as governor where, despite her polarising effect, she was seen as a shoo-in for re-election.
Mrs Palin’s announcement that she will stand down on July 25, handing the reins to the state’s Lieutenant Governor, had some commentators questioning whether another scandal surrounding herself and her family was about to break, after the 2008 campaign revelations about the pregnancy of her teenage daughter and an embarrassing ethics investigation into allegations she sacked a state official over a family feud.
The first investigation by the state legislature into the scandal — popularly known as Troopergate — found her guilty of breaching ethics, prompting Mrs Palin to order a second investigation by a special counsel which cleared her of wrongdoing.
The resignation also sparked a flurry of speculation that she might seek a Senate seat in 2010 as a prelude to a White House run in 2012. Critics branded it a high-risk strategy for a future in public life, inviting criticism that she is not capable of finishing the job she started. Mrs Palin has a reputation for doing things her way and refusing to take advice of more experienced political operatives.
Much of the criticism that dogged her during her vice-presidential campaign in November centred on her parochialism and lack of national and international experience — something she might seek to improve on a national stage. In a pointed reference to her recently expanded international experience, she said that her decision had been bolstered by a trip to visit American troops serving in Kosovo, and to the US military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where wounded servicemen and women from Iraq and Afghanistan are treated.
Her announcement came days after the publication of a damning Vanity Fair profile in which McCain campaign workers turned on her, blaming her “narcissistic personality disorder” for sinking the campaign. Todd Purdum, the author, described Mrs Palin’s public life as “an unholy amalgam between Desperate Housewives and Northern Exposure”, a cult Nineties comedy about Alaska and mocked her for once saying: “Believe me, Alaska is a microcosm of America.” “Believe me, it is not,” he wrote.
Her voice shaking Mrs Palin told journalists that she was stepping down for the good of Alaskans, expressing her anger at the battering the state has taken in the press as a by-product of her governorship. “I’m not going to put Alaskans through that,” she said. “That’s not what’s best for Alaskans. She addedthat she believed she could be more effective “outside government”. She later corrected her remarks to “outside the governor’s office”, leaving the door back to public life ajar.
Mrs Palin has courted so much attention on the national stage of late — leading parades and appearing on national talk shows — that she has attracted criticism in her home state for failing to serve their needs. The former Alaskan governor, Wally Hickel, Mrs Palin’s mentor, broke with his protegee over what he saw as her over-arching personal ambition. “When Governor Palin was elected in 2006 we believed she would put Alaska first. But once elected, she put Sarah first,” he said in a statement last month. “Because of her national ambitions she is promoting an agenda that will allow outside corporations to dominate Alaska’s resources, including our energy and the jobs it provides.”
Mrs Palin said her decision had been made with the encouragement of her family. “Much of it had to do with the kids seeing their baby brother Trig mocked by some pretty mean-spirited adults,” she said, a reference to her youngest child who suffers from Down’s syndrome.
SOURCE
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Why the Left hate Sarah Palin
By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday night on Hugh's program, we discussed the Vanity Fair article about Sarah Palin and why, eight months after the election, Palin still arouses such fury amongst liberals and so many rank-and-file Democrats.
My first thought was that it tied heavily to her appearance. In liberals' minds, conservatives are supposed to look like the couple from the painting American Gothic: Dour and joyless, aged, spartan and frail. Political leaders aren't supposed to be young, really good-looking women, full of energy, smiles, and winks.
Hugh suggested it tied to the contrast between her lifestyle and her critics: "She is the embodiment of the anti-choice, the opposite of every choice that lefty elites have ever made — as to going back home instead of moving to the west coast, having children, having a child with Down's, staying married to one man the whole time, choosing rural or suburban over urban and living a generally conservative lifestyle, working with her hands . . . That everything she is is the antithesis of everything that liberal urban elites are, so it's not just enough to say, 'I disagree with you,'; she has to be repudiated and crushed."
And now, I would submit a slight refining of that idea, that the seeming happiness of Palin's life is a 24-7 irritant because it challenges the way some liberals see the world.
Liberals believe that their ideas, philosophy, worldview, and policies liberate believers, and that the conservative equivalents limit people. Liberals see themselves as rejecting outdated beliefs and obsolete ideas, overturning established orders, and discarding traditions established by superstitious and ignorant forebears who weren't as enlightened as we are. Conservatives, in their minds, are runaway cultural superegos, always wagging their fingers about individual responsibility, dismissing excuses, reminding people that they can't always do what they want because of the consequences to themselves and to others.
Conservatism, they suspect, will leave you in a marriage that doesn't satisfy you, burden you with children you don't want, repress your passions, and trap you in a empty, boring, and unfulfilled life, with no hand of government able to help.
Today almost everyone faces some sort of challenge in balancing work and family; I don't know too many people who believe there are sufficient hours in a day. And then along comes this woman who's made all of these "conservative" choices and now has an amazing career, a supportive husband, a beautiful family, and great health and appearance, and she bears it all, including the inevitable hard times, with pluck and a smile, as far as we can tell. (For all we know, perhaps behind closed doors, Sarah Palin screams into a pillow when it all gets to be too much. But what we know about her suggests she relieves her stress by shooting moose.)
A short while back, Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum suggested, only half-jokingly, that actress Angelina Jolie's "entire Oscar-winning, serial-adopting, Brad Pitt-snagging, plane-piloting, unattainably hot-looking existence makes women around the world feel hopelessly inadequate and therefore unhappy." Perhaps Sarah Palin is the Angelina Jolie of the political world.
In her opponents' minds, Palin's made all the wrong choices, and cannot, they insist, be very bright. Yet she's happy and successful. She is an anomaly that invalidates their worldview, and for that, they attempt to immiserate her — regardless of whether she wishes to run for national office again.
SOURCE
Carol Platt Liebau adds:
Governor Palin has been attacked with the kind of ferocity that few people in the public eye have ever experienced -- except, perhaps, for Justice Thomas and (to a lesser extent) Joe the Plumber. Why does the left reserve their most vicious derision for these three, and those like them? As I wrote last fall in a Townhall column:
Justice Thomas, Governor Palin and Joe the Plumber have one thing in common: Their lives make a mockery of the Democrat Party’s raison d’etre – its foundational assertion that minorities, women and “regular guys” can get a “fair shake” in America only through government action. What’s more, all three of them have made it clear that they don’t want the government’s “help.” For that apostasy, and for their sheer ingratitude – after all, aren’t the Democrats the ones who “care” about blacks, women and “working men”? – the left has tried to destroy them.
SOURCE
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Ol' Stupid begins to notice things
Too bad for Barack Obama and the Democrats, but George W. Bush is the shrinking man of American politics, growing ever smaller on the far horizon. Merely invoking his name will soon no longer frighten women and horses.
The not-so-new president has treated his predecessor as his training wheels, invoking his presence every time (which is often) the ground trembles, a dog barks, the wind blows, the rain falls and he threatens to topple over. We were promised nirvana, or at least a lollipop, if only we could banish George W. and the inept and evil Republicans. Banish we did, and the messiah from the South Side of Chicago has been practicing miracle-working for five months. Alas, there's no sign of clearing skies.
Five months is not very long, of course, and it's unreasonable to expect nirvana so soon, but that's the nature of the impatient American public. Reason, like love, has nothing to do with it. With every nightfall, the news gets worse, or at least not any better, and growing numbers of Americans are beginning to doubt that he has all the answers he so confidently insisted he did. The public-opinion polls clearly show deteriorating public confidence in the confidence man. Worse than not having the answers is the growing suspicion that Mr. Obama and his wise men even understand the question.
The unemployment numbers, the closely watched benchmark by which presidents are judged, stood at 7.2 percent when Mr. Obama took his oath, and Thursday, it inched up to 9.5 percent. The average workweek subsided in June to 33 hours, lowest since the feds began keeping such records in 1964. Cutting hours and freezing pay has spread even to companies awash in profits, with managers, never wanting to waste a crisis and looking to an uncertain future, are taking advantage now, just in case. "We are in some very hard and severe economic times," Labor Secretary Hilda Solis told an interviewer in the wake of the new bad news. "The president and I are both not happy. I do think the public needs to be patient. We know they are hurting."
The president is saying the things every president says when recession hits and panic and depression threaten. Some of the president's friends insist they see "tiny green shoots" on the landscape, promising prosperity soon. The president himself concedes the economy is in a hole and blames the man who preceded him. His predecessor's policies "have left us in a very deep hole," he says, "and digging our way out of it will take time, patience and some tough choices." The secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, likes the shovel-ready metaphor, too. "You know," she told a television interviewer the other day, "we are in just so many deep holes that everybody had better grab a shovel and start digging out."
What "somebody" should do is hide those shovels from "everybody." If you're in a hole, as any ditch digger could tell you, the only thing you can do with a shovel is dig yourself a little deeper into the hole. Not a good idea. A speechifyer such as Barack Obama is expected to be more careful with his metaphors (Hillary gets a pass), and the president's growing problem is that growing numbers of voters who imagined he was "the one" now think he's in that hole and over his head.
The Democrats diverted attention from shortcomings big and small for a decade of depression by hauling poor old Herbert Hoover out for frequent floggings, and Mr. Obama obviously thinks he can similarly use George W. Bush. But that was then and this is now; no president now can monopolize the microphone as FDR did, with his mastery of press and radio and equipped with a terrified and compliant Congress. Barack Obama once imagined he could make it so by saying it's so, but that only works for a little while. He's learning what presidents before him learned, that the job of president is harder than it looks.
As the effects of the stimulus, such as they are, begin a slow fade, the unemployment number, already the highest in 26 years, is projected to keep rising. Shrinking payrolls naturally restrain growth. A jobless recovery driven by federal spending may improve certain numbers, but "it's the economy, Stupid." Stupid, standing in the rain out there on the street will say, "Where are the jobs?" Stupid is not actually as stupid as presidents sometimes hope he is. He's not so stupid that he can't see who that is in the White House.
SOURCE
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A roundup of commentary on the economy
The 'stimulus' promised a jobless peak of 8%; it's now 9.5%: "About the best we can say about yesterday's June jobs report is that employment is usually a lagging economic indicator. At least we hope it is, because the loss of 467,000 jobs for the month is one more sign that the economy still hasn't hit bottom despite months of epic fiscal and monetary reflation. The report is in many ways even uglier than the headline numbers. Average hours worked per week dropped to 33, the lowest level in at least 40 years. This means that millions of full-time workers are being downgraded to part-time, as businesses slash labor costs to remain above water. Because people are working less, wages have fallen by 0.3% this year. Factories are operating at only 65% capacity, while the overall jobless rate hit 9.5%. Throw in discouraged workers who want full-time work, and the labor underutilization rate climbed to 16.5%. The news is even worse for young people, with nearly one in four teenagers unemployed".
Today’s employment situation: “First of all, let’s compare the current situation with employment with what the Obama Administration told us would happen if we didn’t pass the stimulus package. As has been obvious for some time now the stimulus is not — as we repeatedly predicted — substantially impacting the employment situation. Instead, employment has risen by more than 3%.”
5% unemployment: Still a decade away?: “This could become the third time in a row that Americans struggle out of recession only to find themselves in a so-called ‘jobless recovery.’ The phrase became popular back in the early 1990s, when a frigid post-recession job market paved the way for Bill Clinton to defeat incumbent George H. W. Bush in the 1992 presidential election. Then the pattern was repeated after the 2001 recession, in a more pronounced way. Despite a disappointing monthly jobs report Thursday, the good news is that economists generally expect the US economy to start growing again later this year. But the report, showing 9.5 percent unemployment in June, served as a reminder that the current environment for US workers is unusually tough.”
Texas the model: "In a time when many states are experiencing fiscal crises and economic decline, one state stands out above all others as a success story: Texas. I recently heard Governor Tim Pawlenty say that during the year or so before job growth turned negative and the country as a whole was still adding payroll jobs, 53% of all of the jobs created in the U.S. were created in one state: Texas. No wonder that Texas' government is running a surplus and its economy remains strong despite trying times."
Obama's spending blitz worries Powell: "Colin Powell, one of President Obama's most prominent Republican supporters, expressed concern publicly for the first time Friday that the president's ambitious blitz of costly initiatives may be enlarging the size of government and the federal debt too much. "I'm concerned at the number of programs that are being presented, the bills associated with these programs and the additional government that will be needed to execute them," Mr. Powell said in an interview with CNN's John King. It was released by the network Friday. Mr. Powell, a retired U.S. Army general who rose to political prominence after a long and accomplished military career, said that health care reform and many of Mr. Obama's other initiatives are "important" to Americans. But, he said, "one of the cautions that has to be given to the president - and I've talked to some of his people about this - is that you can't have so many things on the table that you can't absorb it all."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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by JR (jonjayray@gmail.com) on July 04, 2009 12:36 PM
by Hal_10000
By now you know that Sarah Palin has stepped down as Governor:
Discuss. I’m still in the mode of “WTF?!” Allahpundit tries a positive spin:
Bill Kristol thinks resigning now could actually be a bold gambit to free herself up for an intense presidential campaign, but I think she’s following more of a Nixonian strategy here. I.e. it could be she’s burned out on politics and dispirited by all the crap she’s put up with it and wants to get away at an opportune moment. If, as is likely, The One wins a second term, the GOP will be so dejected that it’ll happily give her a second look as a potential savior in 2016, much as it did with Nixon after he lost the 1960 presidential election and 1962 California gubernatorial race.
Difference: Nixon didn’t walk out in the middle of the job. Another difference: Palin sounds ... strange ... like mentally strange. I’ll have to ask Mrs. 10000 to watch it, since she’s better at reading people. But watching this press conference, I felt more like I was watching the beginning of a meltdown rather than the beginning of a Presidency.
Update: I think Ed Morrissey just had a Brownie Moment with Palin. I must say that I think I just did too.
Update: Mrs. 10000 thinks Palin sounds happy, almost giddy. “She’s got something good lined up.” We’ll see.
Update: Ambinder, usually a good source, takes her at her word:
Don’t make the mistake of assuming that Palin has a grand strategy that relies on subterfuge, prestidigitation or rhetorical concealment. She has few close advisers, and she is prone to ignore their advice. She keeps her own counsel. She believes what she says (and implies): that she is a national political figure, that her destiny (and I think she capitalizes the D) is in the continental 48, that her personal characteristics are mocked by the elite because the elite cannot understand them, that her family and children are subject to relentless, negative and highly damaging personal attacks, and that there is no longer a place for her in the Alaska government.
Read the whole thing. Short version: she wants to give up governing for politics.
July 04, 2009 09:05 AM
Adventures in socialized medicine - Buffalo, New York picks up the slack for Canada.
by Eric (noreply@blogger.com) on July 04, 2009 03:52 AM
So I've been out all day...what's going on? - Sarah Palin did what? This doesn't seem to make any sense.
by Eric (noreply@blogger.com) on July 04, 2009 03:06 AM
July 03, 2009
by Hal_10000
What better palate cleanser could you have going into the weekend than P.J. O’Rourke debunking ... the entire Obama Administration?
I haven’t heard an update about how O’Rourke is dealing with his cancer. But here’s hoping we have him around for a long long time to come.
July 03, 2009 08:36 PM
By Michelle Malkin -- The White House sure likes to put on a show. Fresh off its joint stage production with ABC News, the Obama administration broadcast another health-care propaganda play this week under the guise of a citizen "town hall."
July 03, 2009 01:08 PM
By Lawrence Kudlow -- After nine months of explosive monetary and fiscal stimulus, you'd think economic recovery would be upon us. But the June jobs report tells a much different story.
July 03, 2009 01:08 PM
By Richard Olivastro -- This year marks the 233rd anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the United States of America.
July 03, 2009 01:08 PM
By Frank Salvato -- "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." -- The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
July 03, 2009 01:08 PM
By David Limbaugh -- All right already. I won't call Obama a Marxist in this column. Instead, I'll point to some signs that indicate that Barack and Karl might well be soul mates. At least, they have similar attitudes about capital, labor and profits, er, surplus value.
July 03, 2009 01:08 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Education Secretary Arne Duncan challenged members of the National Education Association Thursday to stop resisting the idea of linking teacher pay to student achievement.
July 03, 2009 01:08 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The top Republican on the Senate committee that will consider Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court nomination says a Puerto Rican civil rights group's papers could shed light on her judicial approach, particularly her view of racial preferences in hiring.
July 03, 2009 01:08 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) - Days from his first Moscow summit, President Barack Obama declared Thursday that former Russian President Vladimir Putin "still has a lot of sway" in his nation and needs an in-person reminder the Cold War is over.
July 03, 2009 01:08 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama said Thursday the Supreme Court is "moving the ball" to limit affirmative action, but he stressed that its ruling in favor of white firefighters still allows employers and educators to take race into account in hiring, promotions and admissions.
July 03, 2009 01:08 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama said Thursday that he remains confident the economy will turn around in the short term and the nation will prosper in the long term despite another dose of bad unemployment news.
July 03, 2009 01:08 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama said Thursday he's uneasy about his own proposal to indefinitely imprison some of the most dangerous terror suspects being held now at Guantanamo Bay. He called it "one of the biggest challenges of my administration."
July 03, 2009 01:08 PM
NAWA, Afghanistan (AP) - U.S. Marines moved into villages in Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan on Friday, meeting little resistance as they tried to win over local chiefs on the second day of the biggest military operation here since the fall of the Taliban government in 2001.
July 03, 2009 01:08 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) - With concerns rising about a possible North Korean long-range missile test this weekend, two independent scientists say the regime may be using an old Soviet ballistic missile to boost a rocket capable of reaching the West Coast of the United States.
July 03, 2009 01:08 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Americans who refuse to buy affordable medical coverage could be hit with fines of more than $1,000 under a health care overhaul bill unveiled Thursday by key Senate Democrats looking to fulfill President Barack Obama's top domestic priority.
July 03, 2009 01:08 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Obama administration is moving cautiously on a new pilot program that would both detect and stop cyber attacks against government computers, while trying to ensure citizen privacy protections.
July 03, 2009 01:08 PM
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- The Florida Supreme Court says Gov. Charlie Crist can't reject an all-white list of appeals court nominees, even though he wants to appoint someone who will make the judiciary more diverse.
July 03, 2009 01:08 PM
BEST WISHES TO ALL MY AMERICAN READERS ON THEIR INDEPENDENCE DAY
Peggy Noonan has a well-written reminder of the history behind Independence Day.
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Duke's homosexual rape case elicits silence
A professor of criminology at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington says the outrage over a homosexual statutory rape case at Duke University is a deafening sound of silence.
Frank Lombard, associate director of Duke University's Center for Health Policy, has been accused of molesting his adopted five-year-old African-American son and offering him up for sex with strangers on the Internet. Lombard's homosexual partner, who resides in the same house with Lombard, was allegedly unaware of the activities.
Mike Adams is a professor at UNC-Wilmington and has written several pieces on the case. "The conduct that he was accused of engaging in, in front of a webcam with his five-year-old son, includes molestation," Adams explains. "There was oral sex that was involved, and other very unhealthy practices that are too grotesque for me to describe...."
In a 2006 rape case involving white lacrosse players from Duke who were accused of raping a black stripper, more than 80 university officials and professors signed a statement accusing the players of racism. The players were eventually found innocent of all charges.
Adams wonders where those professors are now in this new rape case at the university. "I expect to see a continued silence on this," he relates. "I don't expect them to ever speak out on the issue -- and I expect, as a result of that, Duke University to take a severe, severe hit in the court of public opinion."
If convicted, Lombard faces up to 20 years in prison.
SOURCE
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Equality on Trial
by Thomas Sowell
For the fourth time in six cases, the Supreme Court of the United States has reversed a decision for which Judge Sonia Sotomayor voted on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. If this nominee were a white male, would this not raise questions about whether he should be elevated to a court that has found his previous decisions wrong two-thirds of the times when those decisions have been reviewed?
Is no one supposed to ask questions about qualifications, simply because this nominee is Hispanic and a woman? Have we become that mindless? Qualifications are not simply a question of how long you have been doing something, but how well you have done it. Judge Sotomayor has certainly been on the federal bench long enough, but is being reversed four out of six times a sign of a job well done? Would longevity be equated with qualifications anywhere else? Some sergeants have been in the army longer than some generals but nobody thinks that is a reason to make those sergeants generals.
Performance matters. And Judge Sotomayor's performance provides no reason for putting her on the Supreme Court. Although the case of the Connecticut firefighters is the latest and best-known of Judge Sotomayor's reversals by the Supreme Court, an even more revealing case was Didden v. Village of Port Chester, where the Supreme Court openly rebuked the unanimous three-judge panel that included Judge Sotomayor for "an evident denial of the most elementary forms of procedural due process."
Longevity is not the only false argument for putting Sonia Sotomayor on the Supreme Court. Another is the argument that "elections have consequences," so that the fact that Barack Obama won last year's elections means that his choice for the Supreme Court should be confirmed. This is a political talking point rather than a serious argument.
Of course elections have consequences. But Senators were also elected, and the Constitution of the United States gives them both the right and the duty to say "yes" or "no" to any president's judicial nominees.
It is painfully appropriate that the case which finally took the Sotomayor nomination beyond the realm of personal biography is one where the key question is how far this country is going to go on the question of racial representation versus individual qualifications. Too much that Sonia Sotomayor has said and done over the years places her squarely in the camp of those supporting a racial spoils system instead of equal treatment for all. The organizations she has belonged to, as well as the statements she has made repeatedly -- not just an isolated slip of the tongue taken "out of context"-- as well as her dismissing the white firefighters' case that the Supreme Court heard and heeded, all point in the same direction.
Within living memory, there was a time when someone who was black could not get certain jobs, regardless of how high that individual's qualifications might be. It outraged the conscience of a nation and aroused people of various races and social backgrounds to rise up against it, sometimes at the risk of their lives. Many, if not most, thought that they were fighting for equal treatment for all. But, today, too many people seem to think it is just a question of whose ox is gored-- or for whom one has "empathy," which amounts to the same thing in practice.
Clever people say that none of this matters because Republican Senators don't have enough votes to stop this nominee from being confirmed. But that assumes that every Democrats will vote for her, regardless of what the public thinks. It also assumes that alerting the public doesn't matter, now or for the future.
The standards for judging the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor are not the standards of either the criminal law or the civil law. That is, nothing has to be proven against her "beyond a reasonable doubt" or even by "a preponderance of the evidence." Judge Sotomayor is not in any jeopardy that would entitle her to the benefit of the doubt. It is 300 million Americans and their posterity who are entitled to the benefit of the doubt when the enormous power of determining what their rights are is put into anyone's hands as a Supreme Court justice for life.
SOURCE
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Taxes Or Growth?
The White House now refuses to rule out raising taxes on the middle class. Meanwhile, a top finance official in the previous Democratic White House suggests a tax hike is all but inevitable. Are we being set up? It sure looks that way. And if it happens, you can mark it down: The economy will slow to a crawl and may even relapse into a deep recession. This is a complete reversal of what was promised.
"In an economy like this," President Obama said at last summer's Democratic National Convention, "the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class." That, he said, included 95% of all families. He promised flat out that he wouldn't raise taxes on families with income of less than $250,000.
How times have changed. On Monday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, asked point-blank several times if the president's vow was still good, would say only that "we are going to let the process work its way through." "Process"? Middle class, watch out.
Actually, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on any class — lower, middle or upper. Tax hikes in a recession are plain crazy. They will inevitably crimp economic activity, slow retail sales, kill jobs and leave the government starved of revenues. A major study in 2007 looking at recent U.S. economic history found that when the government raises taxes by 1%, U.S. GDP falls by roughly 2% to 3%. As we've noted before, the only surprising thing about this study is its author: Christina Romer, President Obama's top economic adviser.
Is he still listening to her? The sweeping ambition of the White House's plans to expand government will require massive tax hikes. This is no longer in doubt, if it ever was. Just look at the tab run up so far — and some of the costs that we might soon have to pay. All told, we'll spend $13 trillion more than we'll take in through 2019. How will we pay for it all?
The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that U.S. taxes as a share of GDP would have to rise 49% by 2035 to pay for just the spending already budgeted. And these taxes will hit all Americans, not just the "rich." This is a recipe for economic disaster. "We'll have to raise taxes soon," wrote President Clinton's former deputy Treasury secretary, Roger Altman, in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece this week that sounded suspiciously like a trial balloon for Democrats in Congress and the White House.
There's a far better answer to our economic ills. At the same time the U.S. is pondering economic suicide through massive tax hikes, other countries are learning not from Obamanomics but from Reaganomics: They're pondering tax cuts. Germany's Angela Merkel wants to cut taxes, despite her country's big deficit. "How can we ensure Germany emerges stronger once the crisis is over and the cards have been reshuffled in the world? The answer is we need growth," she said this week.
Even Hungary's socialist government says the same thing. It's pushing supply-side tax cuts in 2010 to stimulate its economy. Our guess is Germany and Hungary will show more life in the next year than the U.S., unless the U.S. wakes up.
Usually at this point in the business cycle, the U.S. is the locomotive that pulls the rest of the world out of its slump. This time, the world is looking to China to get the job done. In the U.S., the rest of the world sees only a growth-killing mix of higher taxes, soaring spending, surging debt, rising inflation and growing regulation.
We could reverse this. Instead of tax hikes, we need broad-based tax cuts for families and business. But we have to act right away. After all, why let a crisis go to waste?
SOURCE
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Predicting economic collapse
It's usually a product of governments keeping interest rates artificially low
One such theory is the “Skyscraper Index.” Developed by economist Andrew Lawrence, states that when some of the tallest skyscrapers were being built, they were followed by a large economic collapse.
This may seem surprising, but the construction industry is highly correlated with the rate of interest. For example, the Federal Reserve creates a market boom with artificially loose money through low interest rates. When the interest rates adjust, businesses realize that they made a malinvestment in projects they shouldn’t have, thus causing a recession. The Federal Reserve then does it all over again to “recover” from the recession, starting the cycle all over again. This is also known as the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT).
The construction of skyscrapers is a long-term investment requiring a lot of capital, and when interest rates are low, business owners find it most attractive to get loans to buy long-term investments. This is a perfect recipe for a “Skyscraper Index.”
The evidence for the most part is clear. For example, Economist Mark Thornton finds that the index correctly predicted the Great Depression. The 40 Wall Tower, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building were all planned and begun production right before the Great Depression.
Now, the Council for Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has put the current economic recession to the “Skyscraper Test” and found that 2008 was one of the most successful years in skyscraper construction. The tallest ten buildings constructed during that year were 31 meters above the previous highest average, which includes the Shanghai World Center and the Almas Tower.
Of course, the evidence is not perfect and this doesn’t this mean that economists and investors should always look at skyscraper construction to predict recessions. As this would turn the index into a self-fulfilling prophecy much like what is believed to have happened to the “January Effect,” which begun as a stock market predictor and has now become widespread knowledge making it worthless.
What should be learned from this is that the Federal Reserve’s policy of loose credit and low interest rates causes businesses to shift into long-term investments, as the low interest rate is supposed to be a signal of increased savings by the populace. Savings is another way of saying “delayed consumption” and businesses want to prepare for this.
But since the Federal Reserve falsifies savings, it causes business owners to malinvest. Now, this does not necessarily mean that the skyscraper is necessarily a malinvestments. What it means is that artificially loose credit makes skyscrapers more attractive for capital owners who, because of the low interest rate, seek higher returns on their money. And they then build when they should be sitting on their shovels.
The “Skyscraper Index” is a step in the right direction proving that the Austrian Business Cycle Theory is accurate, which will rightly put the blame on the government and Federal Reserve for many of history’s recessions.
In short, the “Skyscraper Index” actually does more than just predict market behavior, it portends what happens when government regulators usurp free market prerogatives. As experience has taught as time and again, when that occurs, all the economists laid end to end can’t keep America’s financial edifice erect.
SOURCE
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Comments
For some time now, I have enabled comments on all my blogs. With one exception, I specify that all comments must pass "moderation" by me before they appear. And I do get comments from Leftists which I normally delete rather than publish. They are generally just too unintelligent to be worth publishing: Mostly abuse and baseless assertions with no attention to evidence at all.
Such comments do however serve to illustrate the inspissated darkness and ignorance of the Leftist mind so I am wondering if I should pass them all for publication -- just for their evidentiary value. They certainly establish clearly what dismal souls Leftists are.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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by JR (jonjayray@gmail.com) on July 03, 2009 12:41 PM
by cjmac53@aol.com
It’s not often that you see someone put on the clown makeup in real time, but bless his heart, John Cole certainly has the talent to pull it off:
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Wall Street gangs are posting record profits and handing out record bonuses, all because the American taxpayer spent trillions to shore up their recklessness. And since it cost so much, we are now being told we can’t pass another stimulus or do anything about health care. But hey- Matt Taibbi wrote a tough article and Jake DeSantis was stared at rudely once, so it all evens out.
I highlighted the sentence in the middle because it shows the attitude of the average Democrat in these times. They don’t even consider the possibility of NOT spending hundreds of billions upon trillions of dollars that we don’t have, just because it makes them feel like they care so much. Christ, Obama and his court jester, Joe Biden, have at least paid lip service to “paygo,” even if they are being completely insincere about it. Most everyone else, though, is on the “spend like it’s 2005!” wagon. Cole and his comrades aren’t worried about vastly increasing our national debt, when even the President has admitted that we can’t keep borrowing from China and that we are “out of money,” they’re bent out of shape that people don’t want to add even more debt.
A couple of posts later, the same day, Cole then burps out this gem:
No links. Just guess. Who is a big enough hack that they could write the following:
“Porkulus has utterly failed, as has the Obama administration’s fiscal policies. Businesses have conserved capital in the face of massive new taxes and costs associated with Obama’s stated fiscal policies, such as cap-and-trade, foreign-income taxation, and the higher interest rates that will spring from the massive deficits Obama plans to create. The capital necessary for growth won’t appear in the market under these conditions, as we have clearly seen. When will the media begin to hold this administration responsible for Obama’s economy-killing agenda?”
Place your guesses in the comments.
Uh, John? You might want to hold off on the gratuitous dog pics and middle-school tween-level posturing and see for yourself:
Cole’s intellectual laziness and economic myopia aside, while amusing to point out here, isn’t ultimately the whole point of this post, however--it has to do with the larger issue of unemployment. (More after the jump)
Commenters in Geoff’s post at Innocent Bystanders that I linked here have pointed out the obvious discrepancy of unemployment only going up only 0.1 percentage points, when more jobs (per raw numbers) were lost last month than in May when it went up another 0.5%. They point out the issues of people who have been kicked off the unemployment roles, people who have “given up,” and the “underemployed,” which is essentially working part-time. Throw these numbers in, and the unemployment rate hits double-digits easily, although the “actual” rate seems to run anywhere from 15% to 26% depending upon who is doing the math and the metrics they use.
If I recall, not counting these numbers as part of the unemployment rate was part of the welfare reform bill that the Republicans passed and Billy Jeff signed into law in 1996, although someone can correct me if I’m wrong. Quite frankly, this is one of the most short-sighted, dishonest ways of fudging economic numbers that exists in our system right now. Because the public looks at unemployment rates as the primary indicator of economic health or recovery, the government certainly has an interest in keeping the numbers as low as possible, but that doesn’t mean they should lie about it.
Up until about three months ago, the Air Force’s Pacific Command had a PT fail rate of about 2-3% annually, among the lowest in the Air Force. PACAF commanders finally bit the bullet on suspicions they had that the pass rates weren’t legitimate and started using civilian fitness trainers at the base gyms to actually run the PT tests (run 1.5 miles, waist measurement, push-ups, and sit-ups). The fail rates jumped to the double digits, but it showed that the PT programs in their units weren’t being adequately monitored, and PACAF commanders have taken steps to fix it. Those rates are now starting to drop again, even though they are still high.
The same transparency needs to happen with the unemployment rates. If Obama and Congress are really invested in fixing the unemployment problem, they need to bite the fucking bullet and start including the numbers of people who have been kicked off the unemployment roles or have given up looking for work. “Underemployed” should be a separate category, since this often includes college kids that are just looking for beer and condom money, but it also includes people who are working at Home Depot or Kroger’s part-time to at least keep food on their table and the wolves at bay.
Only when the government is completely honest about what the unemployment rate is (yeah, I know, stop laughing, you assholes :P) will people be able to start approaching how to solve the problem from a more practical, realistic perspective, rather than this phony-baloney crap about “saving or creating jobs.”
July 03, 2009 12:19 PM
by Hal_10000
Jesus:
Pakistan’s top Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, is buying children as young as 7 to serve as suicide bombers in the growing spate of attacks against Pakistani, Afghan and U.S. targets, U.S. Defense Department and Pakistani officials say.
A Pakistani official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said the going price for child bombers was $7,000 to $14,000 - huge sums in Pakistan, where per-capita income is about $2,600 a year.
“[Mehsud] has turned suicide bombing into a production output, not unlike [the way] Toyota outputs cars,” a U.S. Defense Department official told reporters recently. He spoke on the condition that he not be named because of ongoing intelligence efforts to catch Mehsud, a prime target for a U.S. and Pakistani anti-Taliban campaign.
The article goes on to note that the use of boy soldiers is not unusual in the region. But this is different. This is kidnapping other people’s children and tying bombs to them—an act of such tremendous encourage, it could only have come from the cowardly Taliban.
Mehsud, in case you don’t know, is the Bhutto-murdering fucker we almost got with a Predator last week. I was disappointed then but now I’m sort of hoping we’ll catch him alive. In keeping with our renewed commitments to the Geneva Conventions and the rule of law, I propose we don’t torture him. I propose we don’t even imprison him. We’ll just cut him loose on the streets of Karachi with some of the parents whose babies he bought and murdered.
July 03, 2009 09:15 AM
Leave well enough alone - The "cost of inaction" threat has been used to pass a lot of bad legislation.
by Eric (noreply@blogger.com) on July 03, 2009 04:56 AM
Everything old is new again - The blogosphere sparkle and fade, according to Apt 11D. I've never viewed my blog as a pathway to money or another career; it's just forum to vent my political views. Also, I knew my one-man, part-time status would relegate me to a low readership. But, hey, every once in a while I get a big hit and maybe somebody out there thinks about the issues I care about. So
by Eric (noreply@blogger.com) on July 03, 2009 04:40 AM
Miami looks nice - I know I should be following the news but, to be honest, I've been watching the Burn Notice marathon on USA network all day. It's like "Mission: Impossible" meets "The A-Team."
by Eric (noreply@blogger.com) on July 03, 2009 04:24 AM
Crush the competition - Why does Walmart support health care reform? For the same reasons that Philip Morris supported FDA legislation of tobacco. Wake up and smell the Marlboros.More - From the Corner.
by Eric (noreply@blogger.com) on July 03, 2009 04:17 AM
July 02, 2009
by Hal_10000
CNS News:
Despite ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ongoing violence in Iran, and an economy that Obama has described as the worst since the Great Depression, the president has golfed multiple times in the past several weeks--on April 26, May 16, May 25, May 31, June 7, June 9, June 14 and June 21.
Obama’s golf outings have generated favorable reports from the media, in contrast to his predecessor, George W. Bush.
You know where this is going. Bush was criticized in some circles for golfing during a war (a war that is still going). He then ended up in the catch-22 where he was pilloried for golfing, then pilloried again when he stopped golfing ( “That’s his idea of sacrifice, to give up golf?” said Robert Dallek). But Obama....
A search of news reports on Nexis revealed that photographers, but not reporters have access to Obama when he is on the links. But his outings have been covered, including by The Washington Post on June 9, 2009, in an article with the headline “Just the Sport for A Leader Most Driven.”
“What’s the deal? Why golf?” Post staff writer Richard Leiby wrote. “The attraction seems to be simple. It’s a great escape; the game demands such attention that nothing else matters. It’s time spent with friends, an unhurried afternoon in loose clothing (shorts seem to be Obama’s preference).”
Leiby continued, “To some, Obama’s frequent outings reflect a cool self-confidence.”
Leiby even quoted a sports psychologist who said Obama seemed able to play golf despite the grim reports by the media about the wars and the economy.
I didn’t have a problem with Bush golfing and I don’t have a problem with Obama doing it either—not in the least because as long as he’s golfing, he can’t be fucking something else up. The list of soldiers who died while Obama was golfing is needlessly dramatic, although I did find it disrespectful when he observed a moment of silence on memorial day by pausing between holes. I like Presidents to get out of the White House once in a while because it increases the chance that may actually invest thought into their policies. So if Obama wants to hit the links a couple of times a month, I’m down with that.
But it would be nice is if we got some ... you know ... consistency on the subject.
July 02, 2009 11:25 PM
KABUL (AP) -- Insurgents have captured an American soldier in eastern Afghanistan, the U.S. military said Thursday.
July 02, 2009 01:22 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) -- One of the principal authors of health care legislation taking shape in the House accused drug companies and other medical providers Wednesday of stealing, and said they are now offering concessions in the hopes the bill that emerges will not demand too much of them.
July 02, 2009 01:22 PM
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- The Alaskan lawmaker who oversaw the Legislature's Troopergate investigation of Gov. Sarah Palin last year has signaled his interest in her job.
July 02, 2009 01:22 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama wants to produce early results after promising to reset relations with Russia, hoping to emerge from a Moscow summit next week with clear progress on reducing both nations' nuclear arsenals and changing the way the Russian people view the United States.
July 02, 2009 01:22 PM
ANNANDALE, Va. (AP) -- President Barack Obama wanted to put a human face on his plans to overhaul health care, and a Virginia supporter did just that Wednesday.
July 02, 2009 01:22 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Hardly a bank bailout hearing goes by in Congress without a lawmaker raising a question on behalf of constituent banks that have applied for federal assistance from the government's financial bailout fund.
July 02, 2009 01:22 PM
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) -- Al Franken's torn over who he'd like to see turn the parody tables on him.
July 02, 2009 01:22 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Democrats on a key Senate Committee outlined a revised and far less costly health care plan Wednesday night that includes a government-run insurance option and an annual fee on employers who do not offer coverage to their workers.
July 02, 2009 01:22 PM
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) -- The man who lost the 1998 Minnesota governor's race to pro wrestler Jesse Ventura now holds the distinction of losing his U.S. Senate seat to former "Saturday Night Live" comedian Al Franken.
July 02, 2009 01:22 PM
WATTSBURG, Pa. (AP) -- Vice President Joe Biden outlined a $4.7 billion loan and grant program Wednesday to develop the infrastructure needed to deliver broadband, or high-speed, Internet access to areas that are underserved or without access.
July 02, 2009 01:22 PM
KABUL (AP) -- Thousands of U.S. Marines and hundreds of Afghan troops moved into Taliban-infested villages with armor and helicopters Wednesday evening in the first major operation under President Barack Obama's revamped strategy to stabilize Afghanistan.
July 02, 2009 01:22 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration launched investigations of hundreds of businesses around the country Wednesday as part of its strategy to focus immigration enforcement on the employers who hire illegal workers.
July 02, 2009 01:22 PM
You may have missed it, but on Wednesday, Barack Obama held yet another so-called townhall meeting. This one was to discuss his health care plans and use the new tools of "social media" to do it. Although surrounded by a live audience, the main focus of the event was to reach people using the White House web site, Facebook, and Twitter.
The problem is that there should be some kind of standards when it comes to a townhall meeting. By labeling it as such, Americans get the impression that this is a meeting of average Joes (and Janes) -- people from all walks of life and all parts of the political spectrum -- who can throw out questions to the president. Well... not quite...
July 02, 2009 01:12 PM
Was "Ricci" really a victory?
Or was it a "no win" for employers? It may mean that there is no test at all for the competence of your local firefighters. Too bad if your building burns down because the firefighters don't know how to use their equipment properly or deal with the problem in the best way
In 2004, the City of New Haven, Connecticut, decided to throw out a job-related examination that would have qualified Frank Ricci and 17 other firefighters for promotions. Neither Ricci nor his cohorts, all eligible for promotion based on the exam results, were black. This greatly displeased the Reverend Boise Kimber, a local "community leader" who had threatened to incite race riots in the past. Given that Kimber reliably delivered a key bloc of votes to the city's longtime mayor, John DeStefano, it's hardly surprising that the mayor and his advisors immediately began working to have the test results set aside.
In Ricci v. DeStefano, its most anticipated decision of the term, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision recognizing that Ricci and his fellow firefighters were victims of race discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. (In so doing, the Court reversed an appeals court ruling joined by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's nominee to replace retiring justice David Souter.) The Court rejected New Haven's claim that had it not invalidated the test, black firefighters would have had a valid lawsuit under the Civil Rights Act's "disparate-impact" provision, which holds employers at least presumptively liable any time the racial composition of employees hired or promoted differs markedly from the pool of applicants.
While the Supreme Court's decision won relief for the sympathetic Ricci--a dyslexic who sacrificed financially to spend extra time preparing for the exam--and the majority's reading of the Civil Rights Act and its amendments is probably correct, the case highlights the bankruptcy of modern American antidiscrimination law. The ruling effectively assures that employers, both public and private, will be sued for using any neutral employment test unless all races score more or less equally on the test. The employer is caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place: if it jettisons the test, it will be sued by plaintiffs like Ricci; if it uses the test, it will be sued by members of the underperforming racial group.
That the Court's opinion found that black firefighters would not have had a plausible case against New Haven offers employers little solace. In reaching its conclusion, the Court merely determined that there was not a "strong basis in evidence" for such a claim in this case. But before any court could make such a finding in a future case, the lawyers would have to build a factual record, since the law continues to presume that racial disparities in hiring result from discrimination. Thus, no employer that adopts an employment criterion that produces a disparate racial impact can avoid depositions, discovery, motions, and the host of onerous and expensive pretrial rituals endemic to modern litigation. Moreover, because any disputed facts would require a jury's resolution, most cases would be impossible for a judge to resolve without taking them to trial.
At root, the problem rests with disparate-impact law itself. There is little reason to think that all racial subgroups should be equally prepared for any job or promotion. Consider that white players constitute 40 percent of NCAA Division I basketball rosters, but only two of the 25 collegians drafted in last week's NBA draft. It would be preposterous to assume based on such numbers that NBA franchises' decisions were racially discriminatory. It would be even sillier to subject to judicial inquiry the various job-related skills tests the NBA imposed at the draft combines--including vertical leaps and shuttle runs--and ask whether alternative tests might be equally effective and less likely to exclude prospective white players. But such inquiries are very much what the antidiscrimination laws impose on employers in hosts of other contexts, including that of New Haven's firefighters' exam.
I am hardly qualified to know whether the New Haven Fire Department chose the best possible test for assessing prospective supervisors. But I can predict that rational employers will react to Ricci by dropping such exams whenever possible, in effect capitulating to the racial bean-counters. Such an outcome is disconcerting, at least for those who believe that firefighter supervisors should have some requisite body of knowledge before sending public servants into burning buildings.
To head off this undesirable result, Congress should undo its 1991 decision to codify the disparate-impact test into the Civil Rights Act. There are cases in which it makes sense for antidiscrimination law to look beyond an employer's intent. For example, strict seniority standards for promotion--even if adopted without discriminatory motive--are hard to defend when such seniority has itself been predicated upon an employer's past discrimination. But plenty of plausible rules would capture such cases apart from a lawsuit-provoking presumption that racial discrimination accounts for any racial imbalances. Ironically, while the disparate-impact rule requires courts to reject employer tests if any alternative might suffice, it fails to meet such a high standard itself. It won't happen in this Congress, but ultimately, let's hope that disparate impact finds itself in the dustbin of history.
SOURCE
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America's Socialist Past
The perennial illusion
There seems to be a need in American society to have to relearn the same hard lessons over and over again, regardless of whether the results were seen on the other side of the planet or suffered through by our own people.
We're living in a country that elected a President that believes in redistributing wealth. He's mentioned this himself, from the "Joe the Plumber" incident[i] to his critique[ii] of the failures of the civil rights movement. Whether you call it Socialism, Communism, Marxism, or by its simpler name, theft, they are all part of the same economic system that destroys private property and puts everything in central control of the state.
The lesson we, and the rest of the world, seems to fail to learn is how socially and economically destructive this sort of system is. The problem is, these lessons don't have to be learned from studying the histories of far off lands, for we have numerous examples of collectivist/socialist experiments here at home.
In Jamestown, there was no welfare state. Originally meant to be a trading colony, too many of the original inhabitants were adventurers or people seeking to gain wealth through the export of things they could find in the new world. Preoccupied with their own ideas of fortune, they found that in the wilderness of what was North America their habit of avoiding physical labor meant life or death. It was here that John Smith proclaimed, "He who will not work will not eat."[iii] It worked...sort of. While success still eluded the colony, the mortality rate did go from 60 percent to 15 percent.
Imagine a politician on any level making Smith's proclamation today. Cities would burn. Of course, when Sir Thomas Dale arrived there in 1611, he saw "where the most company were, and the daily and usual workers, bowling in the streets."[iv] Apparently Smith's proclamation had only motivated the people enough to do the minimum. Sir Dale had to motivate the people to fix up their houses, plant corn, and secure the defenses of the fort.
Lord De La Warr, the first official governor of Jamestown, continued with the communal storehouse practice. This meant that no matter how hard one worked; everyone was entitled to food so nobody would (in theory) starve. It only prolonged the hardship. Seeking a way around this, the administrators began using the incentive approach (as opposed to Smith's harsh approach) and privatized land ownership. With tobacco finding a market back in Europe, the private property incentives mixed with trading allowed Jamestown to finally get over the hump and begin to prosper.[v]
The Pilgrims sought to live in a society that promoted "just and equal laws." Their first year saw the death of half of their population through disease, starvation, and malnutrition (again, thanks to communal farming). In a story that's getting more and more circulation in today's internet age (and thanks to Rush's yearly reading of the story of Thanksgiving), we learn that only when William Bradford instituted private property that people began to work harder and innovate more.[vi] Even women and children went out to the fields with their husbands, which meant more crops were planted and ultimately harvested. This led to more trade with the local tribes, earlier repayment of debt to the English sponsors, and overall prosperity of the colony.
Let's fast forward a bit.
The date is January 1, 1816, and a man named Robert Owen proposed a new type of model society. In his plans, each of these communities of 2,500 individuals would "be self-governing and hold its property in the common."[vii] So popular was Owen that when he reached America from Britain, President John Quincy Adams displayed one of Owen's architectural models for this ideal community. He established his community in Indiana, christening it New Haven in 1825. In New Haven, "not only work, but also recreation and meditation were communal and regimented."[viii] Everything was collectivized, including "cooking, child care, and other domestic work."[ix] Ironically, at least by today's "Liberal" standards, it was women that were relegated to these chores. The community lasted two years.
The term "socialism" was actually coined by Owen's followers around the time New Haven failed.
Eighteen other communities were established on the Owen collectivized model across the United States. Modern Times, the name of the community established on Long Island, was the last to fail. This was in 1863.
Charles Fourier, a French social theorist, came up with the solution to the problems associated with collectivized living: It should be done on a smaller scale. He calculated that 1,620 was the ideal population and that they should live on 6,000 acres. These were called phalanxes. In the 1840's, a man named Charles Brisbane decided to implement this idea, ultimately establishing 28 of them. All failed within 12 years.[x]
In 1804, George Rapp and six hundred of his followers came to America. They set up a community in Pennsylvania called Harmony where communal farming was practiced, but they were expecting the second coming and left for Indiana in 1814 before it could be deemed a success or failure. While in Indiana, they established another community and named it (again) Harmony, but sold it ten years later to Robert Owen (who set up New Harmony there) and moved back to Pennsylvania. These people began the petroleum industry in Pennsylvania (a move to capitalism), but eventually died out due to their celibacy and lack of recruits.[xi]
In 1841, Humphrey Noyes started the "Perfectionists", and wrote a book on his theories titled Bible Communism in 1848. Noyes took collectivism to the next level; not only was all property communal, but so were spouses. The term for this was "complex marriage" and in practice it meant, "all the men in the Perfectionist community considered themselves husbands to all the women, and each woman the wife of every man."[xii] Before coitus, and even conception, people had to have consent granted by the whole community. Economically, and with a hint of irony, they flourished by building and marketing animal traps. However, this particular communist experiment ended when they established a joint-stock company called Oneida Community, Ltd.
In showing what a great social and economic model Communism is, Harrison Berry likened it to slavery by stating in a that "a Southern farm is the beau ideal of Communism; it is a joint concern, in which the slave consumes more than the master...and is far happier, because although the concern may fail, he is always sure of support."[xiii]
George Fitzhugh, an influence on Berry, actually argued that slave labor was preferable because the slaves were ultimately free. It was property owners and free laborers that were the slaves. He advocated that taking decision-making out of the hands of individuals made the African slaves better off than free whites and claimed that not only all blacks, but most whites too, should be slaves.[xiv] His theory was ultimately squashed with the support and ratification of the 13th and 14th Amendments, which not only freed the slaves but also established they had constitutionally protected private property rights.
These few examples, and there are more out there, show how American culture even before the Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression, depending on your location) tried communal living and centrally planned economic models. Despite the good intentions of the people involved, they always fail because of the inherent flaws in Socialism. Unfortunately, given the reach of the federal government and current make-up of the executive and legislative branches, we are set to learn this lesson the hard way. Again.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Misplaced faith: “Those of us viewing the world with knowledge of Austrian Economics are watching the inevitable result of allowing politicians to print money without limit. The dramatically more popular Keynesian theorists who dominate government economic posts spew lots of comforting words that continue to prove wrong. Yet those of us trying to get friends and family to prepare for economic collapse are greeted with patient, ‘They have a lot of smart guys who know what they are doing.’ I know the discussion is over and am saddened by the tragic three assumptions embedded in their sense of security: that the manipulators are honest, knowledgeable and that they have our best interests at heart.”
Swiss banks shun American investors : "Swiss banks are shutting the accounts of Americans as the U.S. Internal Revenue Service accelerates the hunt for tax dodgers. UBS AG and Credit Suisse Group AG, the country’s biggest banks, have told Americans to move their money into specially created units registered in the U.S., or lose their accounts. Smaller private banks such as Geneva-based Mirabaud & Cie. are closing all accounts held by U.S. taxpayers. While the banks declined to say how many people are affected, more than 5 million Americans live abroad, including about 30,000 in Switzerland, according to estimates from American Citizens Abroad in Geneva. Swiss banks must register with the Securities and Exchange Commission to provide services for those customers.” [British banks are closing the accounts of Americans too. The Federal paperwork required makes it too burdensome to have American customers]
Nice to have friends in high places: "Sen. Daniel K. Inouye's staff contacted federal regulators last fall to ask about the bailout application of an ailing Hawaii bank that he had helped to establish and where he has invested the bulk of his personal wealth. The bank, Central Pacific Financial, was an unlikely candidate for a program designed by the Treasury Department to bolster healthy banks. The firm's losses were depleting its capital reserves. Its primary regulator, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., already had decided that it didn't meet the criteria for receiving a favorable recommendation and had forwarded the application to a council that reviewed marginal cases, according to agency documents. Two weeks after the inquiry from Inouye's office, Central Pacific announced that the Treasury would inject $135 million."
Crooked ACORN to be investigated: "The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, the multi-level activist organization for which President Obama worked and which now is entangled in charges of voter fraud in multiple jurisdictions across the U.S., appears to be in the bull's-eye of investigators. According to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a judge hearing a voter fraud case against an ACORN employee has suggested investigators pursue the conglomerate itself, obtaining a promise that it will be done. The exchange came in the courtroom of Senior District Judge Richard Zoller. The Tribune-Review report today said the judge told Allegheny County Detective Robert F. Keenan, "Somebody has to go after ACORN. … It's happening all over the country. All you have to do is turn on the television." Keenan responded, "We will." The local investigation into members of ACORN and their allegedly illegal voter registration actions last year remains "open and active," a spokesman for District Attorney Stephen Zappala Jr. told the newspaper. "There is quite a bit of activity aimed at determining if anyone else should be charged," said Mike Manko."
Inflation deception: "I usually have a get “prepared” to visit John Williams at his famous shadowstats.com site so that I am “feeling no pain,” and this time I was happy I was, as his headline was “Inflation, Money Supply, GDP, Unemployment and the Dollar – Alternate Data Series”. As for inflation, his calculation of the Consumer Price Index “reflects the CPI as if it were calculated using the methodologies in place in 1980”, which I note is back when inflation was a measurement of the change in prices of things that you buy, and not, as it is now after the villainous Alan Greenspan and Michael Boskin came up with their ludicrous “hedonic” measurements of inflation with which to disguise it. Anyway, Mr. Williams’ honorable and time-honored methodology shows inflation in prices running about 6%, which is a horrendous rate, which is a big shock to those who have just swallowed the government’s estimate of CPI as being a negative 1.3% over the last year!
Bloodless instability: “Your average politician will often rail against ‘political instability’ and advocate policies to keep things ’stable,’ such as subsidies, bailouts, quotas, and other forms of protectionism. But while stability certainly sounds like something positive for the economy, Joseph Schumpeter argued very persuasively that it was the ‘creative destruction’ of capitalism that facilitated innovation, and further down the line, economic growth. Simply reframe the ’stability vs. instability’ dilemma as ’scleroticism vs. dynamism,’ and Schumpeter’s logic becomes all the more easy to grasp. But what of government? While dynamism in the economy is something to be desired, dynamism in sovereignty has some obvious drawbacks. One is that transitions between sovereigns are rarely bloodless, and dead bodies littered all over the streets are hardly a boon to commerce. Another is that in the process of any conflict, capital is bound to be destroyed, so the economy will be handicapped massively. But on this last point, the data simply doesn’t work out the way you might think.”
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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by JR (jonjayray@gmail.com) on July 02, 2009 12:39 PM
![[unemployment+graph.bmp]](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_djgssszshgM/Sk1eP7Y-6TI/AAAAAAAAA-I/BnSWY08iVqM/s1600/unemployment%2Bgraph.bmp)
Seriously, though, I agree with everything he wrote in that excerpt, and the last paragraph in particular.
