A few months ago, a picture appeared in The Denver Post. On a local college campus -- an alleged stronghold of free inquiry and debate -- a leftist student, protesting some perceived injustice, was holding a sign that argued:
"Hate speech is not free speech!"
Perhaps this earnest 20-something had not fully thought through her illiberal position on "tolerable" political speech. Perhaps she was part of that broader movement that sees "hate" everywhere among its ideological opponents. Either way, it's tragic that so many young people misunderstand the idea of open debate -- or simply devalue liberty.
Some people accept that certain things cannot -- rather than should not -- be said. Beyond the worrisome assaults on free speech (fairness doctrines, higher education, etc.) there is a slipperier concern. Which brings me to Helen Thomas' now infamous and career-ending comment, in which she helpfully suggested that the Jews get "the hell out of Palestine."
True, I find some comfort in knowing that this unprofessional crackpot never will haunt a president, common sense or the public again. But I wince at the rapidity of her demise. And I feel a nagging anxiety about a journalist's losing her job over nothing more than a controversial statement.
"She should lose her job over this," former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said before Thomas gave in to a forced retirement. "As someone who is Jewish and as someone who worked with her and used to like her, I find this appalling."
Cliff May, president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former roving reporter for Hearst (which syndicated Thomas' column), in a letter urged the company "strenuously" to "cut all ties" with Thomas "as quickly as possible."
It seems an odd reaction, especially for conservatives, who are accused regularly of thought crimes and hate speech by outfits like Media Matters, which are in the business of smearing and discrediting those who disagree with them.
But an opinion -- in Thomas' case, an ugly opinion that in all probability is more common than some people might believe -- is no more than the strength of the logic behind it. As a regular defender of the moral right of Israel to fight the theocrats and fascists whom Thomas embraces, I never thought she was very credible or articulate on the topic, and she is unworthy of the over-the-top reactions of critics.
Nevertheless, at this point in her career, the 89-year-old was still a columnist for Hearst newspapers. A columnist offers provocative views. You don't have to like Thomas, and you don't have to read her columns, but having a disdain for Jews in general or Israel in particular is hardly the most offensive thought that's kicking around.
Though I don't hold an earthly stake in debates over God, Bill Maher's ludicrous anti-Catholic rants or a tome from a polemist like Christopher Hitchens (who condemns all religion as a dangerous farce) might be "appalling" to rather large swaths of the public. Are certain topics off the table?
Of course, I am not suggesting that Thomas has a birthright to sit in the front row at a White House news conference (a situation that hasn't made sense for at least three decades) or that anyone has an inalienable right to pontificate about the world for a newspaper chain or anyone else.
And no, I can't mourn the loss of Helen Thomas' detestable opinions. But at the same time, I can't help but feel some trepidation about the ease in which some voices -- in this case, one voice that is probably more honest than others of similar ideological disposition -- can be expelled from the conversation simply for offending.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Helen Thomas and Free Speech
I agree with Harsanyi, Thomas may be a horrid old windbag who should've been put out to pasture long ago, but to fire her for expressing an opinion, even a detestable one, demonstrates the increasingly little respect paid to traditions of freedom of speech in America. Her comments should have been answered and refuted as they were, very effectively, by folks like Jonah Goldberg and Richard Cohen without demands that she be fired for them.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
This is the kind of classy guy we elected...
Obama Seeking "Ass To Kick" Over Oil Spill
He states in the interview that allowing drilling closer to shore would have made the leak something that could be handled quickly and more efficiently. Suggesting that if it had been on land, it wouldn't have been a problem at all.
It's the only answer they have and they use it for everything.
Democrats propose further tax hike on offshore oil
Will the proceeds of this tax be immediately turned over to Brazil to help with their offshore drilling?
Monday, June 7, 2010
Slaves of the Ethereal Machine
Another excellent essay from Doc Zero:
The rest here.
As reported by MoneyNews.com, investment guru Warren Buffett is worried about a “meltdown” in municipal debt:
The Pew Center on the States recently estimated that as of the end of 2008 budget years, states had $1 trillion less than needed to pay for future pensions and medical benefits. And that number doesn’t even reflect much of the losses suffered by pension fund investments in the second half of 2008.
“There will be a terrible problem, and then the question becomes will the federal government help,” Buffett said at a hearing of the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in New York, Bloomberg reports.
“I don’t know how I would rate them myself. It’s a bet on how the federal government will act over time.”
I wouldn’t want to take that bet. Of course, I have no choice but to take it, and neither do you.
In May, Buffett said the feds may end up having to bail out some states from their extreme financial woes.
“It would be hard in the end for the federal government to turn away a state having extreme financial difficulty when they’ve gone to General Motors and other entities and saved them,” Buffett said at Berkshire’s annual meeting, Bloomberg reports.
I don’t doubt Buffett’s predictions. They illustrate a terminal, and utterly inescapable, flaw in socialist governments. The same fate awaits every last one of them, around the world and across all of history.
The socialist racket operates by concentrating benefits and diluting costs. The benefits go to loyal constituencies, while the costs are spread across the population. A dwindling percentage of that population pays direct income taxes to state and local governments, but much of the tax burden is hidden, and paid by nearly everyone. Some taxes are pulled quietly out of our paychecks, before we ever have a chance to bank a dime of our money. Others are levied against businesses, which pass them along to us by folding them into the prices we pay for goods and services.
The government also extracts resources from the private sector through regulations and command economics, such as the political imperatives which led to the subprime mortgage crisis. The costs of such regulations are ultimately paid by individual citizens, in the form of opportunity costs. For example, massive resources were shifted into new home construction during the boom created by the subprime mortgage market. The ultimate cost of the ensuing financial crisis was more than just the staggering sums of money poured into bailouts. It also includes the lost opportunities that could have been exploited with the resources we plowed into the foreclosed homes littering our landscape.
These diluted costs are largely invisible to the average citizen. Most of them scarcely bother to glance at their paycheck stubs. Many of them believe in fairy tales about their employer “paying half their FICA” or “matching their Medicare contribution.” Every penny of those employer “contributions” is coming out of your pocket. It makes little difference to the employer if those thousands of dollars per year are paid to you, or handed over to the government. In fact, they’d really prefer to give them to you, because the paperwork would be a lot simpler.
The rest here.
For the world Judenhass is more important then the rule of law
Charge the Real War Criminals
By Joel B. PollakThe organizers of the Gaza-bound flotilla that Israel intercepted last Monday morning accused Israel of "war crimes," blaming it for the deaths that occurred aboard one of the six ships. Yet Israel acted within international law. It may enforce international sanctions when Hamas continues to import weapons for use against civilians. It may board ships in international waters if they refuse to stop. Its soldiers may fire if met with deadly force.
There were war crimes committed last Monday, however: They were committed by those who organized and sponsored the flotilla itself. International law forbids using civilians to achieve a military purpose. It prohibits using civilians as human shields. It outlaws launching an attack when it is clear that doing so will cause excessive civilian casualties. And it denies protected status to civilians who choose to become combatants.
The flotilla advertised itself as a humanitarian mission, but it is clear that at least some passengers set out to "break the blockade" as their primary goal. That is a military aim, not a civilian one. Indeed, when Israel made clear it would allow the flotilla to deliver humanitarian cargo at the nearby Israeli port of Ashdod, the organizers refused. They continued onward, with hundreds of civilians aboard, to provoke a military confrontation.
It is likely, given that five of the six ships yielded to Israeli forces, that at least some of the civilians did not intend to start a fight. They may have believed their mission was truly a humanitarian one, with a strong political message. The organizers used these civilians as human shields, whose presence would either deter Israel or embarrass it. And they knowingly placed these civilians at risk when they attacked the boarding party.
Some of the civilians knew very well their purpose was a military one. That is certainly true of the passengers who brought weapons on board and attacked the Israeli soldiers. It is also true of those who joined the flotilla to break the blockade rather than to deliver aid. Those passengers -- some of whom have ties to terrorist groups -- became illegal combatants who broke international law by disguising themselves among civilians.
International treaties like the Fourth Geneva Convention were crafted to prevent exactly the kind of clash the leaders of the Gaza flotilla sought. Though the terror groups who sponsored the flotilla, and the activists who joined it, are not parties to these treaties, they are bound by their provisions as customary international law. And Turkey, which supported the flotilla, bears indirect responsibility for war crimes the flotilla committed.
The question is why no one -- not the U.S., not even Israel -- has accused the organizers and patrons of the flotilla of war crimes. Perhaps there is little chance such charges would be taken up by the U.N. Security Council, which rushed into action against Israel, though it still has not condemned North Korea for killing 46 South Korean sailors in an unprovoked attack at sea last month. Yet the case is very strong, and it ought to be made.
Israel seems to have prepared a legal defense, but not a legal attack. One of the first videos available on the Israel Defense Force's YouTube channel after the event, for example, was a justification of the use of force to stop ships from reaching Hamas-controlled Gaza. That is where the debate remains -- whether Israel was right or wrong. The Obama administration, regrettably, supports international calls for an investigation.
Instead, the U.S. and Israel ought to go on the legal offensive. We should accuse the Gaza flotilla and its sponsors -- certainly Hamas, and perhaps Turkey -- of war crimes. We should lay out the case, clearly and concisely, that the Gaza flotilla used civilians for a military purpose, and that at least some passengers forfeited their protected status as non-combatants. We should demand that the world's leaders condemn these violations.
Addressing the war crimes committed by the Gaza flotilla and its supporters would put them on the defensive and shift the debate. It would also restore the critical distinction between soldier and civilian that world leaders have labored for more than a century to enforce, and which terrorists are determined to destroy. For the good of the U.S., Israel, and the entire free world, we must point accusations of war crimes where they belong.
Dysfunctional law enforcement
Jailed illegal immigrants pose policy dilemma
A U.S. program to check the immigration status of everyone booked into jail runs into local rules against such actions.
By Ken Dilanian, Tribune Washington Bureau
Mwenda Murithi, the Kenyan-born leader of a notorious Chicago street gang, was arrested 26 times after his student visa was revoked in 2003. Charged with at least four felonies, he served 30 days in the Cook County Jail for a 2007 drug violation. By law, he could have been deported immediately.
But Chicago officials did not report him to immigration authorities because city and county ordinances prohibit them from doing so.
Not long after he got out of jail, Murithi ordered a gang hit that resulted in the death of 13-year-old Schanna Gayden, struck by a stray bullet as she frolicked at a playground.
Murithi, now serving 55 years, is just the sort of person U.S. immigration officials say they want to target under a program known as Secure Communities, which seeks to match the fingerprints of everyone booked into jail against immigration databases.
But the program, launched by the Bush administration and continued under President Obama, has become entangled in the suspicions and recriminations that characterize the debate over immigration policy.
Critics of the program say that turning illegal immigrants over to federal authorities would undermine the efforts of local law enforcement to win cooperation from immigrant communities. And they worry about providing immigration authorities with the fingerprints of those arrested on petty charges.
"I'll be reporting minor offenders, misdemeanants, people who are arrested on a traffic fine that they fail to pay," San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey said. "I think that this throws too broad of a net out over the residents of my county."
David Venturella, who runs the program for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, or ICE, said minor violators are not a priority unless they also have more serious criminal histories.
"Our focus is on criminal aliens," he said.
Many major city police agencies forbid officers from inquiring into the immigration status of witnesses and suspects, a policy adopted by local officials to shield illegal immigrants from federal authorities. But the Secure Communities program has divided those cities and the politicians within them.
Houston and Los Angeles are participating in the fingerprint sharing program despite such rules, and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom opposes the efforts of the sheriff and some county supervisors to keep his city out of it.
The federal program was designed to assuage such cities, Venturella said, because it doesn't require their active cooperation. The fingerprints are shared automatically, and ICE officers arrest those they intend to deport.
This arrangement stands in contrast to a more active federal-local effort known as the 287(g) program, under which ICE signs agreements that allow local police to arrest and detain people under immigration laws. Few big cities participate in that program.
Still, out of political sensitivity, ICE currently is not matching fingerprints from counties, such as Cook County, that object to the Secure Communities program, he said.
Secure Communities is operating in 193 counties, including Los Angeles County, and ICE has checked 2.2 million sets of fingerprints submitted by local law enforcement agencies, spokeswoman Randi Greenberg said. Through April 30, there were 216,000 hits against a database of people who previously had been fingerprinted by ICE, she said.
Of that number, 24,000 had been charged with or convicted of what ICE classifies as the most serious offenses, including rape, murder and kidnapping. The remainder involved lesser offenses, ranging from bribery and fraud to petty violations, such as gambling.
ICE deported 6,100 of those charged with or convicted of the most serious offenses, and 14,300 who were charged with or convicted of lesser offenses, she said. The goal is to expand the program nationwide by the end of 2012.
Despite Venturella's assertion that ICE won't focus on people charged with lesser offenses, immigration rights activists aren't so sure.
"We think it's an ill-conceived, ill-functioning program," said Joan Friedland, a senior attorney with the National Immigration Law Center. "Regardless of how or why a person got into police custody, whether it was based on racial profiling, whether it was a minor offense, whether the person is found not guilty, they are subject to deportation."
Friedland said she would be more comfortable with referrals based on convictions, not arrests.
In Cook County, authorities can do neither. While the policies in Los Angeles and other cities allow police to notify immigration authorities about felons they suspect are illegal immigrants, Cook County forbids that, said Steve Patterson, a spokesman for the Sheriff's Office.
Asked why, Chicago Alderman Roberto Maldonado argued that the law does allow the reporting of felons to immigration authorities. "We're not protecting criminals," he said.
The text of the law, however, contains no such provision.
Asked about the case of the Kenyan gang leader, Maldonado noted that ICE, the immigration enforcement agency, routinely peruses county arrest reports. "If ICE didn't have their eyes open, that is not our fault," he said.
In Los Angeles, a case in 2008 reenergized a long-standing debate about the city's policy toward police questioning of immigrants.
Jamiel Shaw II, a 17-year-old football star who had been recruited by Stanford and Rutgers universities, was gunned down in March 2008, allegedly by gang member Pedro Espinoza. Espinoza, a 19-year-old illegal immigrant, had been released from the Los Angeles County jail a day before the shooting after serving time on a gun charge.
Although Espinoza had been in the custody of the sheriff, not the Los Angeles Police Department, activists unsuccessfully sought to use the case to overturn Special Order 40, the LAPD rule that limits the circumstances in which officers may inquire into a person's immigration status. An effort to repeal the policy by referendum failed last year when backers couldn't muster enough signatures to put the measure on the ballot.
Unlike in Chicago, nothing prohibits Los Angeles police officers from referring people they arrest to immigration authorities, said Jorge Villegas, commander of the LAPD operations office.
If police arrest a gang member who has already been deported, for example, officers notify ICE, he said.
I bet he has lots of people with guns around him
America's gun control proponents might want to consider shooting (pun intended) this memo to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley.
"Dear Mayor Daley: Please shut up. You ain't helping us."
Is there anyone doing more damage against advocates of gun control than Daley? The man is a walking billboard for right-to-carry laws. Anyone needing proof of that might want to read the statements he made in the wake of an 80-year-old Chicago man fatally shooting a career criminal who invaded his home.
The background story goes like this. The elderly man is a Korean War veteran who bought a handgun after three thugs robbed him at gunpoint in his home in late 2009. Chicago police would not reveal this elderly hero's name, but my late older sister had a nickname she would give any old-timer she ran across, Pop Bucket.
For the purposes of this story, we'll simply call the Chicago man, who defended his life, family and home in defiance of Daley's tyranny, Pistol Pop Bucket. In late May, Anthony Nelson broke into Pistol Pop's home. According to news reports, Nelson had a criminal history that included prison stints for drug and weapons convictions.
Nelson and Daley, before the incident, probably had little in common other than protoplasm and the firm conviction that Pistol Pop wouldn't have a handgun in his home, because the city of Chicago bans them. Nelson got his rude and final awakening after he fired at Pistol Pop and missed. Pistol Pop returned fire, fatally wounding Nelson.
Daley has yet to get his awakening. In fact, he's as stubbornly anti-handgun as ever. Listen to his comments about the Pistol Pop-Nelson affair, taken from the Chicago Sun-Times:
"Daley said that he 'understands the frustration' that prompted an 80-year-old robbery victim to purchase a handgun that he used this week to kill a home intruder.
"But the mayor said that does not mean Chicago's strictest-in-the-nation handgun ban is a mistake or a widely ignored charade.
"He still believes that ... access to guns kills far more people than it saves."
There are a couple of direct Daley quotes in the Sun-Times story, and believe me, they're gems. Here's the first:
"Criminals have far more access to guns today than in the history of this country and that is frightening to America. We have to do something about it. You cannot live in America as the Wild West."
"It's an issue that most people are afraid to talk about. It's an issue that, politically, is incorrect. You'll defeat your career. It is something you should forget about. Let people handle these situations. But if you firmly believe that people should have access to guns at all times, then you have a totally different society."
Oh, indeed we would, Mr. Mayor. And that society would simply be called "a safer one." Notice that Daley failed to mention that if the state of Illinois had simply done its job and kept Nelson behind bars, Pistol Pop wouldn't have had to shoot him. But which political party recently has adopted the mantra that convicts are simply society's latest victims?
That would be Daley's -- the same party, for the most part, that wants to disarm law-abiding citizens.
Here's Daley's final quote, and it's another lulu:
"Access to guns will destroy America faster than any other war. Take Europe. Take Japan and other countries that don't have the access to guns. They don't have the amount of killings."
For the sake of the Pistol Pop Buckets of their city, Chicagoans need to take this pathetic excuse for a mayor and retire him from office.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
The result of decades of liberal excuse making and acquiescence
At least 5 shot, 1 dead overnight on South Side
It's not poverty or guns, it's the refusal to make punishment fit the crime . If caught most of these perps will get a lighter sentence then appropriate because of plea deals. The excuses are many, jail overcrowding, they were just teenagers, they were abused as children, but in the end criminals that follow will not feel deterred. The liberal mindset that everything can be explained and therefore acceptable to one degree or another has cost the lives of untold innocent people.
Higher education on the brink?
Glenn Reynolds: Higher education's bubble is about to burst
By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds
It's a story of an industry that may sound familiar.
The buyers think what they're buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy.
Buyers see that everyone else is taking on mounds of debt, and so are more comfortable when they do so themselves; besides, for a generation, the value of what they're buying has gone up steadily. What could go wrong? Everything continues smoothly until, at some point, it doesn't.
Yes, this sounds like the housing bubble, but I'm afraid it's also sounding a lot like a still-inflating higher education bubble. And despite (or because of) the fact that my day job involves higher education, I think it's better for us to face up to what's going on before the bubble bursts messily.
College has gotten a lot more expensive. A recent Money magazine report notes: "After adjusting for financial aid, the amount families pay for college has skyrocketed 439 percent since 1982. ... Normal supply and demand can't begin to explain cost increases of this magnitude."
Consumers would balk, except for two things.
First -- as with the housing bubble -- cheap and readily available credit has let people borrow to finance education. They're willing to do so because of (1) consumer ignorance, as students (and, often, their parents) don't fully grasp just how harsh the impact of student loan payments will be after graduation; and (2) a belief that, whatever the cost, a college education is a necessary ticket to future prosperity.
Bubbles burst when there are no longer enough excessively optimistic and ignorant folks to fuel them. And there are signs that this is beginning to happen already.
A New York Times profile last week described Courtney Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University with nearly $100,000 in student loan debt -- debt that her degree in Religious and Women's Studies did not equip her to repay. Payments on the debt are about $700 per month, equivalent to a respectable house payment, and a major bite on her monthly income of $2,300 as a photographer's assistant earning an hourly wage.
And, unlike a bad mortgage on an underwater house, Munna can't simply walk away from her student loans, which cannot be expunged in a bankruptcy. She's stuck in a financial trap.
Some might say that she deserves it -- who borrows $100,000 to finance a degree in women's and religious studies that won't make you any money? She should have wised up, and others should learn from her mistake, instead of learning too late, as she did: "I don't want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back."
But bubbles burst when people catch on, and there's some evidence that people are beginning to catch on. Student loan demand, according to a recent report in the Washington Post, is going soft, and students are expressing a willingness to go to a cheaper school rather than run up debt. Things haven't collapsed yet, but they're looking shakier -- kind of like the housing market looked in 2007.
So what happens if the bubble collapses? Will it be a tragedy, with millions of Americans losing their path to higher-paying jobs?
Maybe not. College is often described as a path to prosperity, but is it? A college education can help people make more money in three different ways.
First, it may actually make them more economically productive by teaching them skills valued in the workplace: Computer programming, nursing or engineering, say. (Religious and women's studies, not so much.)
Second, it may provide a credential that employers want, not because it represents actual skills, but because it's a weeding tool that doesn't produce civil-rights suits as, say, IQ tests might. A four-year college degree, even if its holder acquired no actual skills, at least indicates some ability to show up on time and perform as instructed.
And, third, a college degree -- at least an elite one -- may hook its holder up with a useful social network that can provide jobs and opportunities in the future. (This is more true if it's a degree from Yale than if it's one from Eastern Kentucky, but it's true everywhere to some degree).
While an individual might rationally pursue all three of these, only the first one -- actual added skills -- produces a net benefit for society. The other two are just distributional -- about who gets the goodies, not about making more of them.
Yet today's college education system seems to be in the business of selling parts two and three to a much greater degree than part one, along with selling the even-harder-to-quantify "college experience," which as often as not boils down to four (or more) years of partying.
Post-bubble, perhaps students -- and employers, not to mention parents and lenders -- will focus instead on education that fosters economic value. And that is likely to press colleges to focus more on providing useful majors. (That doesn't necessarily rule out traditional liberal-arts majors, so long as they are rigorous and require a real general education, rather than trendy and easy subjects, but the key word here is "rigorous.")
My question is whether traditional academic institutions will be able to keep up with the times, or whether -- as Anya Kamenetz suggests in her new book, "DIY U" -- the real pioneering will be in online education and the work of "edupunks" who are more interested in finding new ways of teaching and learning than in protecting existing interests.
I'm betting on the latter. Industries seldom reform themselves, and real competition usually comes from the outside. Keep your eyes open -- and, if you're planning on applying to college, watch out for those student loans.
Examiner contributor Glenn Harlan Reynolds hosts "InstaVision" on PJTV.com and blogs at Instapundit.com. He is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee.
Some ways we waste our higher education money as a society: gender studies, ethnic studies, sociology, sexual orientation studies, and a handful of things we used to call liberal arts that are in actuality neither. I'm sure you can come up with your additions.
Will it? What are your thoughts...
Euro 'will be dead in five years'
The euro will have broken up before the end of this Parliamentary term, according to the bulk of economists taking part in a wide-ranging economic survey for The Sunday Telegraph.
Is this a crippling blow to the "one worlders"? I sure hope so. If memory serves, I believe John predicted this some years ago.
A Democrat legacy for our children
U.S.’s $13 Trillion Debt Poised to Overtake GDP: Chart of Day
y Garfield Reynolds and Wes Goodman
June 4 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama is poised to increase the U.S. debt to a level that exceeds the value of the nation’s annual economic output, a step toward what Bill Gross called a “debt super cycle.”
The CHART OF THE DAY tracks U.S. gross domestic product and the government’s total debt, which rose past $13 trillion for the first time this month. The amount owed will surpass GDP in 2012, based on forecasts by the International Monetary Fund. The lower panel shows U.S. annual GDP growth as tracked by the IMF, which projects the world’s largest economy to expand at a slower pace than the 3.2 percent average during the past five decades.
“Over the long term, interest rates on government debt will likely have to rise to attract investors,” said Hiroki Shimazu, a market economist in Tokyo at Nikko Cordial Securities Inc., a unit of Japan’s third-largest publicly traded bank. “That will be a big burden on the government and the people.”
Gross, who runs the world’s largest mutual fund at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California, said in his June outlook report that “the debt super cycle trend” suggests U.S. economic growth won’t be enough to support the borrowings “if real interest rates were ever to go up instead of down.”
Dan Fuss, who manages the Loomis Sayles Bond Fund, which beat 94 percent of competitors the past year, said last week that he sold all of his Treasury bonds because of prospects interest rates will rise as the U.S. borrows unprecedented amounts. Obama is borrowing record amounts to fund spending programs to help the economy recover from its longest recession since the 1930s.
“The incremental borrower of funds in the U.S. capital markets is rapidly becoming the U.S. Treasury,” Boston-based Fuss said. “Do you really want to buy the debt of the biggest issuer?”
Can there be any doubt that the radical Obama agenda is to wreck the economy so that a despotic totalitarian system can take its place. It's the Marxist way everybody has an equal share of poverty except for the government hierarchy. Obama will spend millions to party while offering a $250 check to seniors. Wait, that happening now. How about that $10 Billion loan to Brazil so they can improve their off shore drilling techniques.
Buying the lie: ‘Something for nothing’
I suppose it was just plain greed that got us to this point.
Isn’t that one of the Seven Deadly Sins? So maybe we should not be surprised to see the country brought to its knees by avarice.
But it’s not the “greedy” bankers and industrialists whom we have to blame. Remember, it’s the bankers and industrialists who create the jobs that give the rest of us an opportunity to make something of ourselves in the first place. Sure, some of them will earn their place in hell, but those few people could not bring down the whole country.
For that, we must blame ourselves.
Because it was our own greed that made us think we could get something for nothing. We fell for a fairy tale — that it was possible for everyone everywhere to have everything they need to be happy — and that the government is the fairy godmother who will make it all happen.
This guaranteed two results — it legitimized stupid greed as a way of life, and it made the government all-powerful as the arbiter of every transaction between two people.
It also put us on an inexorable path of destruction as the government bought happiness for everyone by spending someone else’s money. At first it was called a progressive income tax; then it was called borrowing; soon it will be called bankruptcy. Today it is called Greece; tomorrow it will be California.
Somewhere along the line, most people became afraid to call it what it really is — redistribution of wealth.
Of course, that sounds harmless enough, doesn’t it? Barack Obama even got elected president on a platform of “spreading the wealth around.” After all, which man wants to deny his brother if he does not have enough? So, yes, sure, take a little of mine to make the life of my brother easier.
But that is the camel’s nose under the big suffocating tent of socialism.
Everyone wants a home; therefore everyone is entitled to a house. Everyone wants an education; therefore, college should be made as close to free as humanly possible. Everyone wants to live forever; therefore, health care should be a right, not a commodity.
But if we no longer use the market system to determine the value of what we all want, then how exactly do we pay for anything? If the government pays for everything we want, then where is the government getting the money to square the account? Not from you or me! After all, why should we be the ones working for a living when our neighbor is living on the dole. What’s good for my neighbor is good for me. If he gets a handout, then I want one too, only bigger.
Mind you, no one wishes to be greedy.
No. Heaven forbid. I just want what I have coming to me, not a nickel more or less. But the problem is that what you have coming to you may not be the same as what your neighbor has coming to him. Through a variety of reasons — luck, skill, genius, hard work — each of us gains a different amount of the benefits that life offers.
In fact, you don’t really have ANYTHING material coming to you — not as a simple result of being alive anyway. You just get the right to life, liberty and the PURSUIT of happiness, as some wise men once put it. How you use your life and liberty was once the key to how successful you were in pursuing happiness, but not anymore.
Today, the government tells you what you can and can’t do, and they don’t want you to get too far ahead of your neighbor. Even the illegal neighbors from Mexico or elsewhere, we are told, have a legitimate claim to “keeping up with the Joneses.” It doesn’t matter if they earned it or not — they want it. After all, why should they look over the fence — or the border — and see things they don’t have? Why should Americans get all the breaks? Isn’t everyone entitled to a “fair share”?
There’s another name for that, of course, and it’s been around for thousands of years. When we complain about what our neighbor has — when we try to get our “fair share” that we haven’t really earned and have no right to — we have begun down the road to war, the road to pillage and the road to barbarianism. Isn’t that why the Bible warns us explicitly, “Thou shalt not covet.”
Of course, try telling that to the modern man or woman who not only thinks that the Bible is an out-dated rule book, but doesn’t even have a mind big enough to conceive of a God in the first place.
But when man makes himself God, that’s when you get systems like communism and socialism and Nazi-ism. Those are all instances of man making the rules, determining what is fair, meting out justice — and they are all examples of pure evil.
Ayn Rand, the philosopher and author who lived under the strictures of communism in her early years, somehow managed to predict the decline of America into the thralldom of socialism even when we were at the height of our economic power as an engine of capitalism.
Her descriptions of the faltering, dying gasps of American enterprise in the 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged” are so accurate that it should bring a tear to your eye. We have really made a mess of things, as we bought into the notion that work was no longer a suitable gauge of value. The words of a former worker who is now an unemployed tramp, in the latter part of “Atlas Shrugged,” sum up the horror of creeping socialism brilliantly:
“At first, I kept wondering how it could be possible that the educated, the cultured, the famous men of the world could make a mistake of this size and preach, as righteousness, this sort of abomination — when five minutes of thought should have told them what would happen if somebody tried to practice what they preached. Now I know that they didn’t do it by any kind of mistake. Mistakes of this size are never made innocently. If men fall for some vicious piece of insanity, when they have no way to make it work and no possible reason to explain their choice — it’s because they have a reason that they do not wish to tell. ...”
The reason, of course is stupid greed. Not the Horatio Alger greed of someone wanting to work hard in order to provide a better life for himself and his family, but the lazy greed of wanting to do nothing — or as little as possible — and still being given a good life by someone else’s hard work. That greed is impossible, unworkable, unsustainable — as corrupt as a Ponzi scheme, as delusional as a perpetual motion machine. But there is a sucker born every minute, as Rand explained:
“There wasn’t a man rich and smart enough but that he didn’t think that somebody was richer and smarter, and this [socialistic] plan would give him a share of his better’s wealth and brain. But while he was thinking that he’d get unearned benefits from the men above, he forgot about the men below who’d get unearned benefits, too. He forgot about all his inferiors who’d rush to drain him just as he hoped to drain his superiors. The worker who liked the idea that his need entitled him to a limousine like his boss’s, forgot that every bum and beggar on earth would come howling that their need entitled them to an icebox like his own. That was our real motive... but we didn’t like to think it, so the less we liked it, the louder we yelled about our love for the common good.”
Oh yes, the “common good.” That is the oldest trick in the con man’s repertoire — appeal to pity, appeal to humanity — dig deep into your pocket in order to help some poor starving schlep in far-away Africa or Asia, forgetting that you are only one meal away from hunger yourself. But the rhetoric falls apart when you analyze it. The common good can’t be served effectively if one man has to be impoverished in order to enrich another. Giving what is mine is called charity; taking what is mine is called theft.
Maybe that’s why millions of Americans are finally fed up. They’ve caught on to the Ponzi scheme at long last. The unfunded pensions. The shrinking Social Security fund. The endless bailouts. The billions of dollars going to Greece to ensure that Greeks can maintain their unsustainable mendicant lifestyle. The looters in government grabbing every penny that isn’t nailed down. And if you challenge them, it’s you who are the problem! It’s you who are chastised as selfish and dangerous!
“Do you care to imagine what it would be like, if you had to live and to work, when you’re tied to all the disasters and all the malingering of the globe?” asked Rand’s jobless philosopher-tramp in “Atlas Shrugged.”
“To work — and whenever any men failed anywhere, it’s you who would have to make up for it. To work — with no chance to rise, with your meals and your clothes and your home and your pleasure depending on any swindle, any famine, any pestilence anywhere on earth. To work — with no chance for an extra ration, till the Cambodians have been fed and the Patagonians have been sent through college. To work — on a blank check held by every creature born, by men whom you’ll never see, whose needs you’ll never know, whose ability or laziness or sloppiness or fraud you have no way to learn and no right to question — just to work and work and work — and leave it up to [those in power] to decide whose stomach will consume the effort, the dreams and the days of your life. And this is the moral law to accept? This — a moral ideal?”
Count me out.
It’s time for Americans to return to the principles of thrift and industry that made us great and turn our backs on the socialism, Marxism and communism that pretend to offer easy solutions to every problem. Greed in the service of hard work is one thing; greed in the service of theft is quite another.
Why Florida Republicans hate him and Obama will welcome him into the Democrat Party
Greer’s legal defense: Crist gave the okay for secret contracts
By: David Freddoso
Arrested former Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer is becoming the worst thing for Gov. Charlie Crist’s Senate campaign since his Republican opponent, Marco Rubio, entered the race and overtook him in the polls.
Greer, whom Crist installed as chairman after being elected governor as a Republican, was arrested last week for allegedly stealing money from Florida’s GOP. Greer now says he did not steal because Gov. Crist gave the go-ahead for the secret contracts he made between the party and a company he controlled:
Gov. Charlie Crist personally signed off on his former Republican Party chairman’s confidential fundraising role with the state party, according to Jim Greer’s attorney, whose allegation contradicts the governor’s statement that he “didn’t know anything” about the deal now part of a criminal investigation.
State investigators say Greer and the party’s former executive director, Delmar W. Johnson III, secretly set up a shell company called Victory Strategies to divert party money and enrich themselves. Greer was charged Wednesday with fraud and money laundering.
But Greer’s attorney, Damon Chase, said Saturday that the deal giving them a 10 percent cut of party donations was legal…
“You guys work hard. You deserve it,” Chase said Greer was told by the governor as they played pool in February 2009 at a Palm Beach golf tournament.
Crist has since fled the GOP, but he won’t find it as easy to run away from the problems he created for it.
The hateful tyranny of the left
The Left and Progressively Higher Taxes
Posted 06/06/2010 ET
You can learn a lot from what the left say. And even more from what they don’t. Take taxes for instance.
Liberals have a very amorphous definition of fairness, and a very ambiguous definition of who should pay them. That is something that should leave us all very nervous.
How much, for how long, and to what end should taxes be paid? The left can not answer these questions. If they were to be honest, they would admit they have never even considered them. Still they are unshaken in their certitude of “fairness:” a progressive tax system.
According to liberals, a progressive tax system is simply one in which those making more money pay more in taxes. On its face, this would seem an acceptable standard—one few could dispute. Strangely enough though, the left themselves do not accept it.
The problem is that the standard of making more income and paying more in taxes is a very loose definition of a progressive tax system. And it certainly does not define the tax system that the left seeks.
Even under a flat-tax system, those making more in income pay more in taxes. In fact, under a pure flat tax system, people pay taxes in direct proportion to their income.
Take for example a system taxing income at a flat rate of 10%. An individual making $100,000 annually would pay $10,000 in taxes; an individual making $10,000 annually would pay $1,000 in taxes. The ratios of both income earned and taxes paid are 10-1.
This perfectly meets the left’s shorthand definition of a progressive tax system. It should make liberals very happy. However, the left despise the concept of a flat tax, despite its fitting the definition of fairness they profess.
The fact is that simply having those who make more, pay more is not what the left want at all. They want more, a lot more.
Now it is hardly unusual for the left to say other than what they mean. What they really mean is generally unpopular outside their own circles and would sound unfair by too many not of their ilk.
A truly progressive tax system is one in which those making more pay progressively higher rates—not simply paying progressively more in taxes. That’s a very big and important distinction from what the left blithely say about their tax fairness goals.
The results of such a system can be plainly seen in the U.S. tax system. According to Congress’ official and nonpartisan tax estimator, the Joint Committee on Taxation, the top 3.7% of filers earn 27.1% of the nation’s income. Yet they pay 54.8% of the total income taxes—more than double their income share. In contrast, the bottom two-fifths of earners (39.9%) earn 7.7% of the income and pay negative 2.1% of the income tax (due to government spending in the form of refundable credits).
And even this disproportionate burden, is insufficient. Liberals readily admit to wanting both higher taxes and those taxes to be focused on those earning more. Not only is this audacity of mendicancy enough to take one’s breath away, it also should take us back to the left’s fairness equation.
By defining fairness as a relation between earning and paying, it begs the question of the limits to this linkage. Is there a point at which rates, amounts, and total share in taxes could be increased to a level that liberals would deem unfair? What is the optimal point of taxation for the left?
While the left worries much about the fairness of earners not paying enough, they have apparently not given any thought at all about what too much would be.
For liberals, the system evidently just gets progressively fairer the more earners pay. Their definition of fairness is no definition at all; it is a continuum. Fairness in liberals’ terminology is not simply the definition for a progressive tax system. It is a definition for a system that progressively increases the level of taxation on everyone.
Of course, the left will never explicitly say this. Saying so would be too much of a shock—and too much of a threat—to anyone but themselves. And they really do not need to say it, their actions state it all too clearly.
Liberals have a very amorphous definition of fairness, and a very ambiguous definition of who should pay them. That is something that should leave us all very nervous.
How much, for how long, and to what end should taxes be paid? The left can not answer these questions. If they were to be honest, they would admit they have never even considered them. Still they are unshaken in their certitude of “fairness:” a progressive tax system.
According to liberals, a progressive tax system is simply one in which those making more money pay more in taxes. On its face, this would seem an acceptable standard—one few could dispute. Strangely enough though, the left themselves do not accept it.
The problem is that the standard of making more income and paying more in taxes is a very loose definition of a progressive tax system. And it certainly does not define the tax system that the left seeks.
Even under a flat-tax system, those making more in income pay more in taxes. In fact, under a pure flat tax system, people pay taxes in direct proportion to their income.
Take for example a system taxing income at a flat rate of 10%. An individual making $100,000 annually would pay $10,000 in taxes; an individual making $10,000 annually would pay $1,000 in taxes. The ratios of both income earned and taxes paid are 10-1.
This perfectly meets the left’s shorthand definition of a progressive tax system. It should make liberals very happy. However, the left despise the concept of a flat tax, despite its fitting the definition of fairness they profess.
The fact is that simply having those who make more, pay more is not what the left want at all. They want more, a lot more.
Now it is hardly unusual for the left to say other than what they mean. What they really mean is generally unpopular outside their own circles and would sound unfair by too many not of their ilk.
A truly progressive tax system is one in which those making more pay progressively higher rates—not simply paying progressively more in taxes. That’s a very big and important distinction from what the left blithely say about their tax fairness goals.
The results of such a system can be plainly seen in the U.S. tax system. According to Congress’ official and nonpartisan tax estimator, the Joint Committee on Taxation, the top 3.7% of filers earn 27.1% of the nation’s income. Yet they pay 54.8% of the total income taxes—more than double their income share. In contrast, the bottom two-fifths of earners (39.9%) earn 7.7% of the income and pay negative 2.1% of the income tax (due to government spending in the form of refundable credits).
And even this disproportionate burden, is insufficient. Liberals readily admit to wanting both higher taxes and those taxes to be focused on those earning more. Not only is this audacity of mendicancy enough to take one’s breath away, it also should take us back to the left’s fairness equation.
By defining fairness as a relation between earning and paying, it begs the question of the limits to this linkage. Is there a point at which rates, amounts, and total share in taxes could be increased to a level that liberals would deem unfair? What is the optimal point of taxation for the left?
While the left worries much about the fairness of earners not paying enough, they have apparently not given any thought at all about what too much would be.
For liberals, the system evidently just gets progressively fairer the more earners pay. Their definition of fairness is no definition at all; it is a continuum. Fairness in liberals’ terminology is not simply the definition for a progressive tax system. It is a definition for a system that progressively increases the level of taxation on everyone.
Of course, the left will never explicitly say this. Saying so would be too much of a shock—and too much of a threat—to anyone but themselves. And they really do not need to say it, their actions state it all too clearly.
From one of the commenter's to this article:
One of Dr. Rossiter's many comments on our present tax system in the USA:
QUOTE
Under claims of fiduciary commitment to the general welfare, liberal government consistently arrogates to itself the status of guardian over able and sovereign citizens, then dominates and exploits them through its regulations and taxes, despite the fact that the people have not been adjudicated incompetent. The government's endless intrusions under this fraudulent authority always invade the sovereignty of the competent individual, constantly restricting his freedom with obsessive regulations, and stealing his time, energy, talent and effort by means of confiscatory tax laws. All of this is done under threat of imprisonment, which if resisted, results in additional threats of bodily injury and death. All modern liberal governments thus enslave, to one degree or another, the people they serve. And all forms of enslavement, whether by individuals or governments, are evil precisely because they deny the individual's competence, invalidate his agency, and stifle his natural expressions of freedom in the sovereign and legitimate acts of choosing how to live his own life.
UNQUOTE
The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness
Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr., M.D. Page 55
Does the above sound familiar? They are not all that interested in running the country on bahalf of us, they are much more interested in running US!
QUOTE
Under claims of fiduciary commitment to the general welfare, liberal government consistently arrogates to itself the status of guardian over able and sovereign citizens, then dominates and exploits them through its regulations and taxes, despite the fact that the people have not been adjudicated incompetent. The government's endless intrusions under this fraudulent authority always invade the sovereignty of the competent individual, constantly restricting his freedom with obsessive regulations, and stealing his time, energy, talent and effort by means of confiscatory tax laws. All of this is done under threat of imprisonment, which if resisted, results in additional threats of bodily injury and death. All modern liberal governments thus enslave, to one degree or another, the people they serve. And all forms of enslavement, whether by individuals or governments, are evil precisely because they deny the individual's competence, invalidate his agency, and stifle his natural expressions of freedom in the sovereign and legitimate acts of choosing how to live his own life.
UNQUOTE
The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness
Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr., M.D. Page 55
Does the above sound familiar? They are not all that interested in running the country on bahalf of us, they are much more interested in running US!
Whhy academics make for bad leaders...especially this one.
By Colin McNickle
PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Listening to Barack Obama give a speech on economics is like listening to Jethro Bodine give a lecture on brain surgery. Both make your head hurt. And while Mr. Bodine, the fictional idiot of "The Beverly Hillbillies," didn't know any better, Mr. Obama, supposedly a real intellectual, should.
The president traveled to Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University on Wednesday to yet again tout his vision of economic renewal and to rip Republicans for their supposedly regressive opposition to his supposedly "progressive" agenda.
The rhetoric, much of it Orwellian and liberally peppered with a half-baked political screed, came straight from the dented-can section of the grocery store. Obama is an accomplished shaman of the genre. But that's not a compliment. For this president, perhaps more than any other in the modern era, is infected with the virus (and vocabulary) of what late Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek called "the fatal conceit."
"(W)hile wisdom is often hidden in the meaning of words, so is error," Professor Hayek reminded. "Naive interpretations that we now know to be false ... survive and determine our decisions through the words we use."
And many of these words, he added, carry misleading connotations. Those misrepresentations can be purposeful, ignorant or a combination of both and oftentimes count on the ignorance of the masses.
"Indeed, many words embodied in our language are of such character that, if one habitually employs them, one is led to conclusions not implied by any sober thought about the subject in question, conclusions that also conflict with the scientific evidence," Hayek said.
Here are just two of many examples from Obama's CMU speech:
• "We can't guess with 100 percent accuracy what industries and innovations will next shape our world."
Yet the federal government continues to insist that it can pick economic winners with your money. Most of these attempts at a government-directed marketplace are not sustainable for the simple reason that they do not represent the most efficient allocation of resources.
The only way they are "sustainable" is either with heavy taxpayer subsidies, the heavy hand of government manipulation, repeated misrepresentations (lies) and repeated government interventions (more lies) to mask their failure.
Think of the Obama administration's energy and environmental endeavors. Many don't pass fundamental cost-benefit analyses. Think ethanol. Think solar and wind power. Think cap and trade.
• "(W)e have recognized that there have been times when only government has been able to do what individuals couldn't do and corporations wouldn't do. ... That's how we have Social Security, a minimum wage. ... There have always been those who've said no to such protections and investments. There were accusations that Social Security would lead to socialism and that Medicare was a government takeover."
Never mind that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme (the definition of unsustainability), that wage floors constrict the number of jobs, or that Medicare -- rife with waste and fraud and facing a projected $38 trillion shortfall -- hardly is a program that should be touted as a "success."
Such sophistry hardly is new to politicians. But Barack Obama, America's sophist in chief, certainly has become its most baldfaced practitioner.
Our President's policy of appeasing Islamofascists has brought us here
Iran offers escort for Gaza ships
I suggest this was a part of a Turkish-Iranian plot all along.
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