Monday, April 30, 2012

Sitting Out Obama

By Victor Davis Hanson
Sunday, April 29, 2012

We recently saw lots of sit-down strikes and demonstrations — the various efforts in Wisconsin, the Occupy movements, and student efforts to oppose tuition hikes. None of them mattered much or changed anything. There is a sit-down strike, however, that has paralyzed the country and has been largely ignored by the media.

Most economists since 2009 have been completely wrong in their forecasts, reminding us that their supposedly data-driven discipline is more an art than a science. After all, a great deal of money is invested and spent — or not — based largely on perceptions, hunches, and emotions rather than a 100 percent certainty of profit or loss.  And the message Americans are getting is that the Obama administration is hostile to investment and business, and thus should be waited out.

Barack Obama’s original economic team — Austan Goolsbee, Christina Romer, Larry Summers, Peter Orszag — have long fled the administration, and have proved mostly wrong in all their therapies and prognostications of 2009. Despite the stimulus of borrowing over $5 trillion in less than four years, near-zero interest rates, and chronic deficits, the U.S. economy is in the weakest recovery since the Great Depression and mired in the longest streak of continuous unemployment of 8 percent or higher — 38 months — since the 1930s. The Mexican economy is growing more rapidly than is ours. Why did not massive annual $1 trillion–plus deficits spark a recovery, as government claimed an ever larger percentage of GDP, and new public-works projects were heralded by the administration?

Much of the answer is found in the collective psyche of those Americans who traditionally hire, purchase, or invest capital. An economy is simply the aggregate of millions of private agendas, of people sensing and reacting to a commonly perceived landscape. Yet since January 2009, that landscape has been bleak and foreboding.

Take the debt. The problem is not just that Obama has borrowed $5 trillion in less than four years, but also that he has offered few plans to reduce the ongoing borrowing and none at all to pay down the debt. Instead, he has demonized as heartless anyone who opposes his serial $1 trillion annual deficits. That demoralizes the public, who privately know that they cannot buy everything they might wish, and who expect that government will not, either. In the business community, there is the unspoken assumption that, at some point very soon, either taxes will have to rise, the currency will have to inflate radically, or debts will have to be renounced — all equally foreboding for those with capital. Some even believe that Obama is not a haphazardly profligate spender but a deliberate one who welcomes the radical measures on the horizon to stave off bankruptcy as laudable in themselves.

Take energy. We are reminded that the ANWR field in Alaska — and others far greater there — are still off limits. So too are over 25 million barrels off the California coast. Federal leases have been vastly curtailed in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Eastern Seaboard, and in the American West. The cancellation of the Keystone pipeline, which would have kept billions of U.S. petrodollars inside North America, coupled with Solyndra-like federally subsidized solar and wind boondoggles, sent the message that the government would oppose energy that was profitable and subsidize sources that were not.

Worse still, in less than four years, we have now an entire corpus of Obama-administration quotations blasting fossil-fuel energy. The president himself promised skyrocketed energy prices with his now-stalled cap-and-trade proposals. He mused that new regulations might bankrupt coal-burning companies. He ridiculed the idea of increasing oil and gas supplies by more drilling and instead pointed to the importance of proper tire pressure and regular tune-ups and spoke of tapping America’s vast algae resources. Secretary of Energy–designate Steven Chu mused that he wanted gas to reach European price levels, apparently in hopes of curbing fossil-fuel consumption while making alternative sources of energy more competitive. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who as a senator had claimed that even $10-a-gallon gas would not prompt him to open up federal lands for oil and gas leases, shrugged that there is no way of knowing whether $9-a-gallon gas is on the horizon. More recently, it was disclosed that an EPA regional administrator, Al Armendariz, had bragged of trying to “crucify” and “make examples” of gas and oil companies in the manner that the Romans did to conquered peoples.

The current renaissance in American oil and gas production is primarily a private effort to drill on private land, despite rather than because of the Obama administration. That the Obama administration takes credit for private companies’ finding new sources of low-priced oil and gas, despite government hopes that they would fail, only heightens the sense of private-sector cynicism and pessimism. The result is that “speculators” do not believe the oil companies will be given access to enormous energy reserves on public lands — and that, to the degree they drill new wells on private lands, a horde of apparatchiks from academia such as Mr. Armendariz will make life difficult for them.

Take also new mandates. The problem with Obamacare is not just that it represents a vast new entitlement at a time of record annual deficits, but that no one knows how much it will cost employers to enroll their employees. Potential hirers instead suspect only that their health-care expenses will spike, and those who are politically connected for that very reason have sought and obtained exemptions from the Obama administration: All companies, liberally owned or not, want out, not in — exactly the opposite of what the administration forecast. The public likewise suspects that Obamacare will come to resemble the hated TSA they see at airports — lots of employees milling around, little guarantee that the job at hand is done well, and an evident resentment of federal employees toward the public they serve. Will X-rays for our kidneys resemble the sort of scanning process and pat-downs we endure at airports? And the more the government seems to take over private enterprise — the car bailouts, the mortgage industry, student loans, wind and solar partnerships — the more private enterprise is frightened of being the next small guitar company or the next Chrysler creditor. Government seems now to be not only incompetent but arrogant, as if its vast recent growth ensured its impunity from oversight — whether in the GSA scandal, the Secret Service debacle, or the Fast and Furious mess.

Take wealth. There is a crass war against wealth. Obama has ridiculed those who have done well as the one-percenters, the fat cats, the corporate-jet owners, and the ones who don’t pay their fair share or don’t know when to stop making money. But the problem with this boilerplate populism is that it does not emanate from the muscular classes and is not aimed uniformly at the proverbial rich. The first family vacations in Martha’s Vineyard, Costa del Sol, Vail and Aspen, not at Camp David; and the lieutenants in this class warfare are themselves one-percenters, an Al Gore, John Kerry, or Nancy Pelosi. Likewise, who determines whether to go after the Koch brothers or Warren Buffett; is this week’s enemy to be Exxon or Google? Why is the non-income-tax-paying GE under Jeffrey Immelt apparently approved, while a CEO on Wall Street is deemed a fat cat? Is it give to Obama and you are canonized; give to Romney and your name is posted on an enemies-list, pro-Obama website?

The only thing more discouraging to investors than class warfare generally is a certain type of class warfare: a hypocritical crusade that emanates from the upper classes and selectively targets enemies on the basis not of wealth, but of the degree to which they have failed to buy exemptions with their wealth. Meanwhile, on the other end, the message is more weeks of unemployment insurance, vastly more food-stamp recipients, and constant promises of mortgage-debt relief, credit-card-debt relief, and tuition-debt relief. If one were to dream up a perfect way to destroy incentives on both the top and bottom ends, one could do no better than what we have seen since 2009.

The net result is that those with capital, even if they are small businesses, do not believe that the Obama administration likes them. They feel that regulations will increase, that taxes will increase, that energy costs will increase, and that as they pay more to government and keep less, government will nevertheless become even more arrogant and inefficient — and they will become even more demonized. When people pay over 50 percent in payroll, federal, state, and local taxes and are still caricatured as “not paying their fair share,” a sort of collective shrug follows and bodes ill for the economy at large. One need not be liked to make money, but the constant presidential harangues finally take their toll in insidious ways.

Countless times each day, a contractor chooses to hire only a part-time electrician, a CEO hoards cash rather than opens a new plant, a renting family declines to buy a reasonably priced new house, an indebted graduate heads home to kick back and wait until “something turns up,” and an unemployed worker wonders whether it is not wiser to receive all two years of federal benefits before reentering the work force.

I don’t know whether Mitt Romney’s economic package will bring instant prosperity. But I suspect that the fact alone that it is not what we have seen and heard for the last four years will unleash a pent-up energy of the sort we have not seen in a long time. In short, President Obama has achieved the impossible — he has convinced millions of rational, profit-minded Americans eager to invest, buy, and hire that he doesn’t worry much whether they do.

Who Is 'Racist'?: Part II

By Thomas Sowell
Monday, April 30, 2012

Around this time of year, I sometimes hear from parents who have been appalled to learn that the child they sent away to college to become educated has instead been indoctrinated with the creed of the left. They often ask if I can suggest something to have their offspring read over the summer, in order to counteract this indoctrination.

This year the answer is a no-brainer. It is a book with the unwieldy title, "No matter what ... they'll call this book Racist" by Harry Stein, a writer for what is arguably America's best magazine, "City Journal." In a little over 200 very readable pages, the author deftly devastates with facts the nonsense about race that dominates much of what is said in the media and in academia.

There is no subject on which lies and half-truths have become so much the norm on ivy-covered campuses than is the subject of race. Moreover, anyone who even questions these lies and half-truths is almost certain to be called a "racist," especially in academic institutions which loudly proclaim a "diversity" that is confined to demographics, and all but forbidden when it comes to a diversity of ideas.

The ultimate irony is that many of those who publicly promote or accept the prevailing party line on race do not themselves accept it privately. A few years ago, when a faculty vote on affirmative action was proposed at the University of California at Berkeley, there was a fierce disagreement as to whether that vote should be taken by secret ballot or at an open faculty meeting.

Both sides understood that many professors would vote one way in secret and the opposite way in public. In short, hypocrisy is the norm in discussions of race -- and not just at Berkeley. Moreover, it is the norm among blacks as well as whites.

Black civil rights attorneys and activists who denounce whites for objecting to the bussing of kids from the ghetto into their neighborhood schools have not hesitated to send their own children to private schools, instead of subjecting them to this kind of "diversity" in the public schools.

As for whites, author Harry Stein says that many white liberals "give blacks a pass on behaviors and attitudes they would regard as unacceptable and even abhorrent in their own kind." This, of course, is no favor to those particular blacks -- especially those among young ghetto blacks whose counterproductive behavior puts them on a path that leads nowhere but to welfare, at best, and behind bars or death in gangland street warfare at worst.

In the introduction to his book, Stein says that his purpose is "to talk honestly about race." He accomplishes that purpose in a fact-filled book that should be a revelation, especially to young people of any race, who have been fed a party line in schools and colleges across America.

He looks behind the highly sanitized picture of Al Sharpton, as a civil rights statesman with his own MSNBC program and his designation as a White House adviser, to the factual reality of a man with a trail of slime that has included inciting mobs, in some cases costing innocent lives.

Positive news also receives its due. Some readers of this book may be surprised to learn that the ban on racial preferences in the University of California system did not lead to a disappearance of blacks from the system, as the supporters of affirmative action claimed would happen.

On the contrary, more blacks graduated from the system after the ban -- for the very common sense reason that they were now admitted to University of California campuses where they qualified, rather than to places like UCLA and Berkeley, where they had often been admitted to fill a quota, and often failed.

Stein's book is also one of the few places where many young people will see the actual words of people like Bill Cosby, Shelby Steele, Pat Moynihan and others who have opposed the fashionable platitudes that confuse racial issues.

Whether those words convince all readers is not the point. The point, especially for young readers in our schools and colleges, is that this may be one of the few times they will ever encounter a fundamentally different set of views on race -- views that they have only heard referred to as coming from "Uncle Toms" or "racists."

Obama Losing Rock-star Status Among Young Voters

By Michael Barone
Monday, April 30, 2012

Last week, Barack Obama delivered speeches at universities in Chapel Hill, N.C., Iowa City, Iowa, and Boulder, Colo. The trip was, press secretary Jay Carney assured us, official government business, not political campaigning.

It's part of a pattern. Neil Munro of the Daily Caller has counted 130 appearances by the president, vice president, their spouses, White House officials, and Cabinet secretaries at colleges and universities since spring 2011.

Obviously, the Obama campaign strategists are worried that he cannot duplicate his 66 to 32 percent margin among young voters back in 2008.

Recent surveys of young people show inconsistent results. Gallup's tracking shows Obama leading Mitt Romney 64 to 29 percent, and a Harvard Institute of Politics poll shows him leading Romney 43 to 26 percent among those who said they had an opinion.

But a March survey of 18- to 24 year olds by the Public Religion Research Institute showed Obama ahead of "a Republican" by only 48 to 41 percent. Only 52 percent had favorable opinions of Obama, and 43 percent had unfavorable opinions.

Where the surveys seem to be in accord is that young voters are less engaged, less likely to vote and less enthusiastic about Obama than in the days when he was proclaiming, "We are the change we are seeking."

Gallup shows only 56 percent of Americans under 30 saying they definitely will vote. Among older Americans, the figure is over 80 percent. The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed only 45 percent of young people taking a big interest in the election, down from 63 percent in 2008.

Hispanics and blacks make up a larger share of the Millennial generation than of older Americans, and Obama's support among them seems to remain high. But the Harvard survey shows that only 41 percent of white Millennials approve of Obama's job performance, significantly lower than the 54 percent who voted for him in 2008.

Obama's decision to campaign -- er, conduct official business -- on university campuses last week was not surprising. According to exit polls, there was no surge of young voters in 2008. They made up 18 percent of voters, compared to 17 percent in 2004.

But close inspection of the election returns showed that the Obama campaign did a splendid job of ginning up turnout in university and college towns and in singles apartment neighborhoods in central cities and close-in suburbs, like Arlington, Va., across the Potomac from Washington.

Consider the counties where Obama spoke last week. In Orange County, N.C., Obama won 72 percent of the vote. He did better in only one of the state's 99 other counties, Durham, which has a large black population plus Duke University.

Obama carried Johnson County, Iowa, with 70 percent of the vote, more than in any of Iowa's other 98 counties. He carried Boulder County, Colo., with 72 percent, a mark exceeded in that state only in Denver, one rural Hispanic county and two counties with fashionable ski resorts (Aspen, Telluride).

What Obama doesn't seem to have done in 2008 is mobilize more economically marginal and educationally limited young people, except perhaps among blacks.

His problem this year is that there are a lot more economically marginal young people, including many who are not educationally limited.

Young people are notoriously transient, and it's hard for political organizers to track them down. Harder perhaps this year, with many recent college graduates unable to find jobs and a rising percentage of young people moving in with their parents.

Few young Americans bothered to vote in Republican primaries, and young people's attitudes toward Mitt Romney seem frosty. They still know little about him.

That gives him a chance to argue that Obama's economic policies have failed and that his policies can spark an economic revival that will provide myriad opportunities for the iPod/Facebook generation to find satisfying work where they can utilize their special talents.

In his campus speeches, Obama stumped for keeping low interest rates on student loans. But young people may be figuring out that colleges and universities are gobbling up the money government pours in, leaving them saddled with debt.

It's a side issue. The Harvard survey showed 58 percent of Millennials saying the economy was a top issue and only 41 percent approving Obama's handling of it. Like Romney, they seem to be saying, "It's the economy, and we're not stupid."

Why Your Doctor Secretly Hates Obamacare

By Katie Kieffer Monday, April 30, 2012

Your doctor won’t tell you this when you’re sitting in his office, so I will: He hates Obamacare. It’s time you know why your doctor is concerned about Obamacare.

Doctors already live in constant fear of malpractice lawsuits. The last thing they want to do is stick their necks out and publicly attack Obamacare. Doctors also do not have an effective D.C. lobby group or public advocate.

A 2011 survey by Jackson and Coker reports that most doctors believe the mega-lobbyist group, American Medical Association (AMA), fails to represent docters’ interests on Capitol Hill. Forbes reports: “Much of that dissatisfaction stems from the organization’s support for President Obama’s contentious health care reform package. … [The AMA] has backed a law that would force some physicians to work longer hours for less pay and others to operate in perpetually overcrowded emergency rooms.”

Doctors question how the AMA can represent them in D.C. while cutting back-door deals with the government. Doctors have been effectively forced to fund the AMA by purchasing Medicare and Medicaid billing code books. Dr. Jane Orient, a privately practicing doctor in Arizona, blew the whistle when she discovered that, beginning in 1998, the Health Care Financing Administration gave: “… the AMA the exclusive copyright on the codes…” reports The New American.

Since the AMA does not speak up for doctors, I will try to be a voice for doctors. Here are two primary reasons why your doctor hates Obamacare:

1.) Doctors Need Ownership

Dagny Taggart is the heroine of Ayn Rand’s novel, “Atlas Shrugged.” At one point, Dagny asks a renowned medical doctor named Dr. Hendricks why he left the medical practice. He says: “I quit when medicine was placed under State control … Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquiring that skill [performing brain surgery]? …I would not let them [politicians] dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors. … Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”

Obamacare removes ownership from the medical field. An individual doctor no longer owns his education, career or even day-to-day lifestyle choices. Under Obamacare, he goes from feeling a sense of caring ownership for his patients and his craft to feeling over-worked, under-paid and micro-managed.

Obamacare effectively steals from doctors by confiscating the skills, energy and time they have devoted to medicine. When you steal a man’s life-long passion; his hard-won goal; his lifestyle—do not expect him to be happy or to maintain his conscientious passion for practicing medicine.

2.) Doctors Need Motivation and Compensation

A better name for Obamacare is the “16.7 Percent Paycut,” because that is what it means for doctors. In order to “save” Medicare, Obamacare asks doctors to take a 16.7 percent paycut. And, guess what? Patients will suffer, not just doctors. Patients will suffer because smart and caring young men and women will forfeit their dreams of entering the medical profession and choose alternate careers that promise less stress and higher pay.

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to visit my brother at his medical school and meet some of the other medical students. They were intelligent and hard-working individuals who clearly cared about helping people. I did not get the sense that money was their primary motivation in becoming doctors.

Indeed, 60 percent of doctors are concerned that Obamacare will diminish their ability to care for patients, finds a Feb. 29, 2012 survey completed by The Doctors Company Market Research, America’s largest surgeon and physician medical liability insurer.

Money simply allows smart young Americans, like my brother and his peers, to justify spending an additional four-to-ten years after college holed up in a library just to graduate with $160,000 in debt (the median debt load for medical school grads according to a 2010 Mayo Clinic study).

There are 70 million baby-boomers out there who will be looking for geriatricians soon. But there is only one geriatrician for every 2,600 Americans over the age of 75, according to the American Geriatrics Society. Why is this? Money. Geriatricians made a median salary of $183,523 in 2010, reports the Medical Group Management Association. America desperately needs more geriatricians, but young doctors are choosing to specialize in other areas because they can earn two-to-three times more.

Money is a suitable incentive, especially when you are asking people to give up their youth studying while amassing debt. But Obamacare removes the practical “profit motive” of capitalism and replaces it with the idealistic “poverty motive” of socialism.

A Better Way

I think trying to save something that is hopelessly broken, like Medicare, is a mistake. Ultimately, I think it’s a choice between complete government control over limited medical care resources or a more freedom-based system where prices are lower because competition exists and health insurance is actually insurance (now, insurance covers basic, common care which is ridiculous and causes overall healthcare costs to rise). Insurance should only be involved in major medical care; otherwise, it’s not insurance, it’s maintenance.

When it comes to medicine, you get what you pay for. As patients, I think we should be willing to pay a little more in exchange for the highest quality of care. Sorry, President Obama, but your plan is “JurassicParkCare”—doctors go extinct and their patients go untreated while your buddies in Hollywood cheer.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Are We Still Serious About Our Republic

By Austin Hill Sunday, April 29, 2012

"...Are you serious?"

Those are three simple words that form one simple question.  And the question has led us to this moment in time.

Recall in October of 2009, when then-Speaker of the U.S House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi was asked about the formulation of the Obamacare bill, and she asked that very question of a reporter.  “Madam Speaker,” a reporter from CNSNews.com said to her, “where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?”

Ms. Pelosi seemed surprised.  Her indignant “are you serious?” response was followed with a slight bit of nervous laughter, as she then repeated herself. “Yes,” the reporter answered Ms. Pelosi, “yes I am."

Pelosi’s Press Secretary Nadeam Elshami stated that the reporter’s inquiry was “not a serious question,” Pelosi shook her head in disbelief, and they both moved on to address another reporter, completely ignoring the question about “constitutionality.”

And after ignoring concerns about constitutionality for over three years, Democrats are now watching the Administration of their party Leader, Barack Obama, struggling to answer serious questions before the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. The left’s disregard for the limitations of government has been apparent for decades – President Obama himself was on record years before his election lamenting that the Constitution only stipulates what the government cannot do to you, instead of specifying what the government should do for you.

But now a moment of truth is staring all Americans in the face, as the Supreme Court will soon determine if the government can force you to buy something, along with determining whether or not the distinction between “citizen” and “non citizen” (as in Arizona’s illegal immigration law) matters any longer. As President Obama’s former Pastor Jeremiah Wright once famously said, “America’s chickens… are comin’ home to roost..”

The fact is that when Presidents and members of Congress dismiss the Constitution as Mr. Obama and his party have, the only thing standing between the individual citizen and the raw, brutal force of governmental power is the Supreme Court itself.  The American founders understood some things about the history of the world, as it existed leading up to our nation’s birth, and they recognized the natural human tendency of those in power to control and ultimately brutalize those beneath them.  This is why our Constitution stipulates that we are governed by three co-equal branches of government (not just one or two), and why those branches intentionally create a “check and balance” between each other.

So what if the Supreme Court says that Barack Obama is wrong?  What if the Justices collectively determine that our government cannot force the individual citizen to buy something, and that the distinction between being a citizen and an illegal immigrant is real? The Democrats would prefer a Supreme Court stacked with Obama appointees, who would then presumably approve of everything that Obama wants, but (thankfully) they haven’t achieved this yet.

If Democrats must campaign for the final months of this year’s election against a backdrop of Obama failures at the Supreme Court, we may see a well-financed P.R. assault against the Supreme Court Justices themselves.  History provides a lesson about this matter, becausePresident Obama is not the first White House occupant to desire more power than the Constitution allows.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, angered when the Supreme Court overturned some of his “new deal” (read “big government”) programs that he believed were unquestionably necessary to save the country, famously began maligning the Justices of the Supreme Court, publicly labeling them as the “9 Old Men.” Additionally, as a means of overcoming the “separation of powers” obstacle, he proposed to “reform” the old, antiquated Supreme Court system by adding up to six new justices – justices that would all be selected and appointed by himself.

Thankfully FDR didn’t get his way.  The Congress rejected his court reform legislative proposal (the checks-and-balances phenomenon worked again), and the American people took a dim view of Roosevelt trying to circumvent the Constitution.

But that was the America of 1937.  Today, it’s not difficult to imagine that President Obama could curry the favor of millions of Americans, if he chose to campaign against the Justices who may vote to overturn his all-important “Obamacare” law.

Who would stand with Obama in a campaign of Supreme Court bashing?  Start with the entire AFL-CIO. Then add the entire “occupy” movement, and the burgeoning “99% Spring” uprising, and eventually one could include all the prevailing powers of the Democrat Party.

Put them all together, and you’ve got a critical mass of Americans who neither care nor understand a wit about history, “limited government,” the U.S Constitution, or the Separation of Powers.  They want “stuff” – “free” healthcare, education, or whatever – and they want raw power in Washington to deliver that stuff to citizen and non-citizen alike, and by whatever means.

So is America serious about a constitutional government?  Many of us are far more serious about receiving “things” from our government than the idea of a constitutional republic.

Depending on how the high court rules this summer, we may see Democrats campaigning on an agenda of “constitutional and judicial reform” before November arrives.

SF's Political Correctness Takes Mirkarimi Prisoner

By Debra J. Saunders Sunday, April 29, 2012

Former San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Brown is appalled. He didn't vote for Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, and he isn't his biggest fan. But when he considers the prosecution of Mirkarimi for bruising his wife's arm during a New Year's Eve argument, he is appalled. People lose sight of what types of cases should be prosecuted, Brown told me Tuesday, and Mirkarimi's case is not one of them.

"Sometimes you have to break it off," Brown said, as "Cyrus Vance did in New York City." The Manhattan district attorney dropped rape charges against former International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn last year because prosecutors didn't have a solid case.

San Francisco City Hall does not have a solid case against Mirkarimi, either.

For those of you who missed it, on New Year's Day, Mirkarimi and his wife, Eliana Lopez, got in a fight. He grabbed her arm and bruised it. Lopez complained to a neighbor, who videotaped her. Days later, the neighbor contacted police.

The episode unleashed the hounds of political correctness in San Francisco. Domestic violence advocates saw an opportunity to strike a blow for female empowerment. San Francisco police and City Hall didn't want to appear soft on domestic abuse by an elected official. A city that doesn't let government into the bedroom watched, even applauded, as the criminal justice system divided a family that wanted to stay together.

(Mirkarimi didn't help his situation by not cooperating with a police investigation. Then again, as a gung-ho progressive, he never has been a favorite of local law enforcement.)

San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon charged the sheriff with three misdemeanor counts: domestic violence, child endangerment and dissuading a witness. To my mind, Gascon should have dropped the charges. Grabbing your wife's arm and bruising her does not constitute domestic violence -- especially when the wife never pressed charges and denied that her husband abused her. The child endangerment count was ludicrous -- based on the fact that the couple's son was in the car during the fateful fight. Ditto the dissuading a witness charge -- because Mirkarimi allegedly tried to stifle Lopez.

Gascon also filed a court order that forced Mirkarimi to move out and not speak to his wife. Eventually, the court allowed Mirkarimi visitation with his son.

In the meantime, as Mirkarimi's reputation eroded and his legal bills mounted, he did what smart people do. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of false imprisonment. He believed the plea would allow him to keep his gun (and his job) and, if he stuck to a counseling regimen, reunite with his family.

But Mirkarimi was wrong. Even though the fight occurred before Mirkarimi was sworn in as sheriff, Mayor Ed Lee suspended Mirkarimi for "official misconduct" from his job and his pay.

The whole setup is "designed to break you along the way," Mirkarimi told me. Until he fights back and wins, he has lost the elective office he worked hard to win. The courts won't let him talk to his wife, who -- this is ironic, as her declared wish to visit her native Venezuela with her son started the fight -- took their son to Venezuela while she visits her sick father. When she returns in June, they will have been apart for five months and still will not be able to talk to each other.

Again, Brown is appalled at a system that would tear a family apart against its will, ostensibly for its own good. "A person charged with murder gets to see his wife," Brown railed. "Dan White"-- who murdered Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978 -- "had conjugal visits."

As I sat through Monday's hearing of the San Francisco Ethics Commission, once again I was struck at how flimsy City Hall's case is. When a man hurts his wife, there is a body of evidence -- such as medical records and neighbors who heard things firsthand.

Yet Deputy City Attorney Peter J. Keith was angling for the ability to get Lopez to testify that Mirkarimi once told her that he was "powerful" as he tried to warn her against taking the couple's son to Venezuela without his consent. The mayor actually included this exchange in his "official misconduct" complaint.

Mirkarimi denies that he told Lopez he is politically powerful, but who cares? San Francisco tax dollars shouldn't be used to investigate what a couple said during an argument. The commission's work is going to go on for months. Ethics Commission Chairman Ben Hur -- yes, that's his name -- announced his panel won't issue the rules for a mini-trial until May 29.

If San Francisco can do this to its sheriff -- for an arm bruise -- San Francisco can do this to anyone. I asked Mirkarimi whether he feels ravaged by the excesses of San Francisco's political correctness. He answered warily, "In some ways, San Francisco has a very inflated image of itself being politically correct."

20 Phenomenal Fringe Benefits Of Being A Liberal

By John Hawkins
Friday, March 30, 2012

You have to give liberalism a certain amount of credit. It doesn’t work, destroys lives, and pits people against each other, but that's not to say that there are no advantages to being a liberal. Sure, you may end up sleeping in a tent in Zuccotti Park, reading Noam Chomsky's laughably ignorant books, or having to watch Rachel Maddow babble incoherent nonsense on MSNBC, but the fringe benefits cannot be beaten!

1) If you're a politician, no matter how dumb you are or how poor your decision-making is, the press will still never question your intelligence.

2) You can claim to personally speak for everyone in your gender or racial group, like you're their leader, and the press will take you seriously.

3) You can feel completely superior to people who are more admired, more influential, richer, happier, more successful, and just generally better than you in almost every way (like Sarah Palin) because they’re conservatives.

4) You can declare that other people should have their money taken away and given to the government and still get credit for being "compassionate" even if you give nothing yourself.

5) You can leave a woman to die at the bottom of a tidal pool, use crack, or have a gay prostitution ring run out of your apartment and other liberals will STILL vote for you.

6) You can suggest that black Americans are too incompetent to handle something as simple as getting a photo ID without being called racist.

7) You can use capitalism to make huge piles of money and then turn right around and score brownie points with your fellow liberals by ripping an economic system that made it possible for you to actually become filthy rich writing, making music, or acting for a living.

8) No matter how many insults you lob at people you disagree with or how determined you are to refuse to listen to their arguments, you will never feel as if you're being uncivil or close minded.

9) You can be a white man who calls himself the first black President without getting in trouble with Al Sharpton and be a serial adulterer who even cheats with an intern without getting in trouble with NOW.

10) You can go an entire lifetime without having a single kind thing to say about America and still consider yourself to be patriotic.

11) Similarly, you can disregard the Bible, ignore slurs aimed at Christianity, and mock people who take their religious beliefs seriously and still consider yourself to be a Christian.

12) You can be perfectly fine with cheating on your own taxes while you call other people "greedy" for not wanting to pay higher taxes themselves.

13) If you're a minority, you can actually hold a prominent media job centered around regularly accusing other people of being racists.

14) You'll be considered "courageous" by your left-wing friends when you get up in front of a group of liberals and say things that all of you believe to be true.

15) If you run for office, you'll get questions like, "(Do you think your opponents are) uninformed, out of touch, or irresponsible?" from the media while your opponents will be getting asked questions that start with the presumption that they hate half the country or their economic policies couldn't possibly work.

16) You can be a former KKK member who drops the N-bomb on TV and people will still deny you're a racist.

17) You can ride around in an SUV, fly on a private jet, and have a mansion while you lecture other people about the importance of having a small environmental footprint and other liberals won't have a problem with it at all.

18) You can claim to hold the exact same position as conservatives on gay marriage and you won't be called a homophobe.

19) You can regularly call conservative women sluts, whores, tw_ts, and even the C-word and still call yourself a feminist without other people laughing out loud.

20) You get to feel comfortable with lying to other people because you know what's in their own best interests better than they do and if they were a little more enlightened -- like you -- they'd thank you for misleading them into doing the right thing!

Friday, April 27, 2012

My Papers? No Thank You

By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, April 27, 2012

With the Supreme Court taking up Arizona's "show me your papers" immigration law, we're once again thrust into a useful debate over the role of the government and the obligations of the citizen -- and non-citizen. Rather than come at it from the usual angle, I thought I'd try something different.

If there were one thing I could impress upon people about the nature of the state, it's that governments by their very nature want to make their citizens "legible."

I borrow that word from James C. Scott, whose book "Seeing Like a State" left a lasting impression on me. Scott studied why the state has always seen "people who move around" to be the enemy. Around the world, according to Scott, states have historically seen nomadic peoples, herdsmen, slash-and-burn hill people, Gypsies, hunter-gatherers, vagrants, runaway slaves and serfs as problems to be solved. States have tried to make these people stay in one place.

But as Scott examined "sedentarization" (making mobile people settle down), he realized this practice was simply part of a more fundamental drive of the state: to make the whole population legible to the state. The premodern state was "blind" to its subjects. But the modern state was determined first to see them, and then organize them. This is why so many rulers pushed for the universal usage of last names starting around 1600 (aristocrats had been using family or clan names for centuries already). The same goes with the push for more accurate addresses, the standardization of weights and measures, and of course the use of censuses and surveys. It's much easier to collect taxes, conscript soldiers, fight crime and put down rebellions if you know who people are and where they live.

Perhaps the most obvious means of making the populace legible is the identity card or internal passport. The history of the identity card is a fascinating and shockingly complex one. For instance, did you know that identity cards were seen as a war on bigamy in many countries?

Opponents of the Arizona immigration law like to conjure scenes from Nazi Germany, with the Gestapo asking, "Ihre papiere, bitte" ("Your papers, please"). And it's indisputably true that police states, from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union to Castro's Cuba and the North Korea of the Kims, have a deep relationship with the identity card for obvious reasons. But German officials were saying "Ihre papiere, bitte" long before anyone heard of the Nazis.

The United Kingdom has debated the merits of identity cards several times over the generations. During World War I, Britain's National Registration was hugely controversial because it was seen as too "Prussian." A generation earlier, the Prussians, under Otto von Bismarck, had famously created the first modern administrative state, which included the precursor to America's Social Security system and what today might be called "jobs programs." The Prussians also pioneered the public school system in order to make the people more legible to the state -- imposing common language, political indoctrination and the like.

A system of reliable ID was necessary for conscription and internal security -- government's top concerns -- but it was also necessary to properly allocate the benefits and jobs the state doled out in order to buy popular support, and to enforce school attendance.

And this brings me to our current debate over Arizona's immigration laws. Opponents like to conjure the police-state association of "Ihre papiere, bitte." I think that's wildly exaggerated (and so do several Supreme Court justices, apparently). But as someone who's against a national ID card, I'm sympathetic to the concern nonetheless. The Constitution lists three federal crimes -- treason, piracy and counterfeiting -- but today we have more than 4,500 federal crimes, all because the government in Washington wants to make the American people more legible. I don't want to make that easier with a national ID card.

But what I wish liberal opponents would understand is that in a society where the government "gives" so much to its citizens, it's inevitable that the state will pursue ways to more clearly demarcate the lines between the citizen and the non-citizen.

Most (but by no means all) conservatives I know would have few problems with large-scale immigration if we didn't have a welfare state that bequeaths so many benefits on citizens and non-citizens alike. I myself am a huge fan of legal immigration. But if you try to see things like a state for a second, it's simply unsustainable to have a libertarian immigration policy and a liberal welfare state. Ultimately, if you don't want cops asking for your papers, you need to get rid of one or the other.

Voters Understand the Immigration Debate; Politicians Don't

By Scott Rasmussen
Friday, April 27, 2012

As the U.S. Supreme Court wrestles with the Obama administration's challenge of Arizona's crackdown on illegal immigration, the overall issue of immigration remains misunderstood by both political parties in Washington.

Many Washington Republicans confuse voter opposition to illegal immigration with opposition to all immigration. Their remarks often contain an ugly tone toward those who want to come to America.

Many Washington Democrats confuse public respect for hardworking immigrants with a belief that borders and immigration laws don't matter. Their remarks often contain an ugly tone toward those who believe the nation's immigration laws should be enforced.

On the issues before the court, most voters tend to side with the state of Arizona rather than the federal government. Fifty-nine percent of voters nationwide, for example, agree with one of the law's most controversial provisions, that police officers should routinely check the immigration status of those they pull over for other violations. Most voters would like to have a law like Arizona's in their own state.

But that says more about voter respect for the law than it does about the immigration issue. Voters figure if there's a law on the books, the government should enforce it.

That's why, among voters who are angry about the immigration issue, 83 percent are angry at the federal government rather than the illegal immigrants themselves. It's also why two-thirds of voters think those who knowingly hire illegal immigrants are a bigger problem than the people they employ. Simply put, most Americans are angry at those who would entice others to break the law. They're not angry at people who are willing to work hard to provide for their families.

It's a little bit like the public desire to go after drug pushers rather than occasional users of illegal drugs.

Still, there's another reason for the disconnect between official Washington and the American people on immigration.

In Washington, the entire focus of the immigration debate is on how to deal with those already living here illegally. For voters, this is a secondary concern. The bigger concern is how to secure the border so future immigrants enter the county according to the rules. Routinely, in surveys for years, 60 percent or more of voters say securing the borders is a higher priority than legalizing the status of the illegal immigrants who are here now.

Once voters are convinced that illegal immigration is a thing of the past, it will be easier to address the status of those in the country already.

But voters don't believe the federal government has any interest in securing the border. In fact, most believe the policies of the federal government are designed to encourage illegal immigration. This offends voters who want to respect the rule of law. If immigration laws -- or any laws -- are routinely ignored, then the government loses credibility.

If the laws are enforced, 61 percent of voters favor a welcoming policy that lets anybody come to America except national security threats, criminals and those who would live off the U.S. welfare system. All who would like to work hard and pursue the American Dream are welcome.

The bottom line is that voters remember what many in Washington often forget: America is a nation of immigrants -- and of laws. The American people want both traditions to be honored.

Atlas Shrugged: Is American Business Going on Strike?

By Wayne Allyn Root
Friday, April 27, 2012

The U.S. economy is crumbling. Businesses are collapsing in record numbers. The real unemployment rate approaches 15% (or higher). 45 million Americans are on food stamps. Over 10.8 million Americans are on the Disability rolls. Tax revenues are down dramatically. All this while Obama has added thousands of new IRS agents, added over 60,000 new mandates, rules and regulations, turned the National Labor Relations Board over to radical union hacks, passed rules to satisfy radical extremist environmentalists, and chooses to target, demonize, and punish the wealthy. Coincidence? Or are these tragic situations related?

Everything happening today under Obama resembles the storyline of Ayn Rand’s famous book Atlas Shrugged. Rand prophesized a country dominated by socialists, Marxists and statists, where looters, free loaders and poverty promoters live off the productive class. To rationalize and justify the theft of the money and assets of business owners, the looter class demonizes the wealthy. Sound familiar?

The central plot of Atlas Shrugged is that in response to being demonized, over-taxed, over-regulated, and punished for success, America’s business owners go on strike-- dropping off the grid, and refusing to risk their hard-earned capital and work long hours away from their families in order to support those unwilling to put in the same blood, sweat and tears. Because of that storyline, the original proposed title of the book was actually “The Strike.”

The business class went on strike to teach us that civilization cannot survive when people are slaves to government. That without a productive class of innovative business owners willing to risk their own money to start businesses, there are no jobs and no taxes to pay for government. Author Ayn Rand believed if you demonized and punished the wealthy, you would kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Jobs would disappear forever. In Obama’s America, fiction is becoming fact.

The lesson of Atlas Shrugged is that without the $250,000 income earners paying into Social Security, there are no pensions for the poor and lower middle class. Without the wealthy owners of million-dollar mansions paying $25,000 annual property tax bills, there is no funding for public schools. Without the wealthy paying into Medicare, there is no “free” healthcare for the elderly. Without capitalists motivated by profit, there are no discoveries to eradicate polio, or create miraculous cancer and AIDS drugs. Without capitalists motivated by profit, there are no jobs, period! That is what happens when the producers of society go on strike to protect themselves from the looters.

Ayn Rand was warning the looters that there are consequences to their overzealous actions. She was warning that if the productive classes felt used, ripped off, and taken for granted, they would go on strike -- stop working, retire early, go underground, or move to places where achievement is celebrated and they feel appreciated.

The latest U.S. Census proves Ayn Rand right. Under Obama the wealthy are striking, voting with their feet. They are moving to low-tax red states in droves, escaping from high-tax blue states where they are being demonized and punished. Over 1,000,000 citizens escaped from high-tax New York in the past decade. Over 1.3 million escaped from high-tax California in the past decade. California’s state tax authority recently reported that the number of Californians earning $500K per year (or more) dropped by almost 40%. California has lost over 440,000 high tech jobs. Over $1 trillion dollars has transferred from New York to zero tax Texas.

The Census provides evidence that Obama’s tax and spend philosophy is a dismal failure, an economic disaster killing jobs. It should come as no surprise that about two million FEWER Americans are working than before Obama’s stimulus. That over 5 million Americans have joined the Disability rolls since Obama became President. That the Disability rolls are growing twice as fast as the job rolls. That food stamp use is up 70% under Obama.

The high tech revolution has killed the progressive tax-and-spend dream. Because of the Internet, email, texting, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, iPhones and iPads, business owners can now run their business from anywhere. As a result, they are choosing to move to places where taxes are lower and the atmosphere is friendly to business. The latest census shows that the fastest growing states are all low tax or no tax states that are friendly to business: Nevada, Texas, Arizona, Florida, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Alaska, Washington, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia.

Meanwhile the states they escaped from are all big tax, big spend, big union states: California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Illinois, and Michigan. Taxpayers, business owners, and retirees with assets are all fleeing the states being run like Obama is running the nation.

Obama and his socialist cabal should be afraid, very afraid. If Obama is re-elected, these valuable job producers and taxpayers of society won't be changing states anymore, they'll be changing countries. They'll pick up and leave America altogether. There is a big world out there begging them to come. Places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Monte Carlo, Costa Rica, Panama, Bahamas, and Cayman Islands are low-tax havens that appreciate business owners and their sacrifices. They welcome wealthy ex-patriots. They celebrate individual achievement. They reward instead of punish business owners and financial risk-takers.

Even Canada is now a destination of choice for Americans searching for economic freedom. Under Obama the U.S. has dropped to number 10 on the Economic Freedom List, while Canada is now number 6. Frightening.

I am just one small businessman, but because of my background as a former Vice Presidential nominee and Tea Party Libertarian-conservative media personality, I have heard from thousands of business owners- who all have the same message. They are thinking of leaving America, or they are visiting other countries right now to decide where to go, or they are making preparations to leave in case Obama is re-elected. Just as Ayn Rand predicted, business owners are going on strike. Permanently.

 As my blue collar butcher father once told me, "I'd love to hate rich people, but no poor person has ever given me a job."

Atlas is shrugging. Ayn Rand is saying "I told you so." The Strike is on.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Decline or Decadence?

By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, April 26, 2012

Almost daily we read of America's "waning power" and "inevitable decline," as observers argue over the consequences of defense cuts and budget crises.

Yet much of the new American "leading from behind" strategy is a matter of choice, not necessity. Apparently, both left-wing critics of U.S. foreign policy and right-wing Jacksonians are tiring of spending blood and treasure on seemingly ungrateful Middle Easterners -- after two Gulf wars, the decade in Afghanistan, and various interventions in Lebanon and Libya.

We certainly have plenty of planes and bombs with which to pound Syria's Bashir al-Assad. Never in the last 70 years has the U.S. military been so lethal.

But chaos in Libya followed the death of Muammar Gadhafi, and the anti-American Muslim Brotherhood seems poised to replace Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Most Americans assume that if we were to remove the murderous Assad dynasty in Syria, the rebels would either show us no gratitude or install a replacement regime not much better.

So much of our sagging profile abroad is simply a growing realization that the Middle East is, well, the Middle East: You can change the faces, but the regimes end up mostly the same -- as innate reflections of the volatile mix of tribalism, vast infusions of oil money, radical Islam, and generations of dependency.

Can decline be better measured by our vast debt of $16 trillion, growing yearly with $1 trillion deficits? Perhaps. But Americans know that with a new tax code, simple reforms to entitlements, and reasonable trimming of bloated public salaries and pensions, we could balance federal budgets. The budget crux is not due to an absence of material resources, but a preference for not acting until we are forced to in the 11th hour.

Do high gas prices and huge imported-oil fees reflect an energy-short America? Not really. There are 25 billion barrels of oil sitting right off California's central coast, and much more in Alaska, the Midwest, the Gulf of Mexico and the Eastern shore. At some point, when gas hits $5 or $6 a gallon, a new generation of Americans will be cured of its smugness and decide to tap trillions of dollars in natural riches.

In other words, the manifest symptoms of decline -- frustration with the Middle East, military retrenchment, exorbitant energy costs and financial insolvency -- are choices we now make, but need not make in the future.

If our students are burdened with oppressive loans, why do so many university rec centers look like five-star spas? Student cell phones and cars are indistinguishable from those of the faculty.

The underclass suffers more from obesity than malnutrition; our national epidemic is not unaffordable protein, but rather a surfeit of even cheaper sweets.

Flash mobbers target electronics stores for more junk, not bulk food warehouses in order to eat. America's children do not suffer from lack of access to the Internet, but from wasting hours on video games and less-than-instructional websites. We have too many, not too few, television channels.

The problem is not that government workers are underpaid or scarce, but that so many of them seem to think mind readers, clowns and prostitutes come with the job.

An average American with an average cell phone has more information at his fingertips than did a Goldman Sachs grandee 20 years ago. Over the last half-century, bizarre new words entered the American vocabulary -- triple-dipping, Botox, liposuction, jet set, COLA (cost of living adjustment), three-day weekend, Medi-something compounds (Medicare, Medicaid, Medi-Cal) -- that do not reflect a deprived citizenry. In 1980, a knee or hip replacement was experimental surgery for the 1 percent; now it is a Medicare entitlement.

American poverty is not measured by absolute global standards of available food, shelter and medical care, or by comparisons to prior generations, but by one American now having less stuff than another.

As America re-examines its military, entitlements, energy sources and popular culture, it will learn that our "decline" is not due to material shortages, but rather arises from moral confusion over how to master, rather than being mastered by, the vast riches we have created. If decline is fighting just two wars at a time rather than three, just budgeting what we did in 2008, tapping a bit more oil offshore, or having our colleges offer more grammar courses and fewer rock-climbing walls, then by all means bring it on.

Shrinking Problem: Illegal Immigration From Mexico

By Michael Barone Thursday, April 26, 2012

The illegal immigration problem is going away.

That's the conclusion I draw from the latest report of the Pew Hispanic Center on Mexican immigration to the United States.

Pew's demographers have carefully combed through statistics compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Department of Homeland Security and the Mexican government, and have come up with estimates of the flow of migrants from and back to Mexico. Their work seems to be as close to definitive as possible.

They conclude that from 2005 to 2010 some 1.39 million people came from Mexico to the United States and 1.37 million went from the U.S. to Mexico. "The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States," they write, "has come to a standstill."

The turning point seems to have come with the collapse of housing prices and the onset of recession in 2007. Annual immigration from Mexico dropped from peaks of 770,000 in 2000 and 670,000 in 2004 to 140,000 in 2010.

As a result, the Mexican-born population in the United States decreased from 12.6 million in 2007 to 12.0 million in 2010. That decrease consisted entirely of Mexican-born illegal immigrants, whose numbers decreased from 7 million in 2007 to 6.1 million in 2010.

Mitt Romney has been ridiculed for saying that illegal immigrants should "self-deport." But that seems to be exactly what many of them have been doing. The U.S. government has been sending back more illegals lately, but most of the flow to Mexico has been voluntary.

The Pew analysts hesitate to say so, but their numbers make a strong case that we will never again see the flow of Mexicans into this country that we saw between 1970, when there were fewer than 1 million Mexican-born people in the U.S., and 2007, when there were 12.7 million.

One reason is that Mexico's population growth has slowed way down. Its fertility rate fell from 7.3 children per woman in 1970 to 2.4 in 2009, which is just above replacement level.

Meanwhile, Mexico's economy has grown. Despite sharp currency devaluations in 1982 and 1994, its per capita gross domestic product rose 22 percent from 1980 to 2010.

Mexico, like the United States, experienced a recession from 2007 to 2009. But since then, Mexico's GDP has grown far faster than ours -- 5.5 percent in 2010 and 3.9 percent in 2011.

Mexico seemed yoked to the U.S. growth rate after passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. But since the recession it seems yoked to the more robust growth rate of the state with the biggest cross-border trade, Texas.

An end to the huge flow of immigrants from Mexico has huge implications for U.S. immigration policy.

Because of our long land border with Mexico (the Rio Grande is a trickle most of the year), it has been far easier to emigrate illegally from Mexico than from any other country.

As a result, Mexican immigrants tend to be younger, poorer, less educated and less fluent in English than immigrants from other countries. They are also more likely to be illegal -- Mexicans are 30 percent of all immigrants but 58 percent of illegals -- and less likely to become U.S. citizens.

A continued standstill in Mexican immigration means that the number of illegals in the United States will probably continue to decline, even in an economic recovery. Children of illegals born in the U.S., who are automatically U.S. citizens, don't add to the illegal numbers.

And no other country has produced or is likely to produce anything close to the number or share of illegals.

The central focus of the debate over the so-called comprehensive immigration bills that came to the floor of the Senate in 2006 and 2007 was their provisions for legalization of those illegally here -- amnesty, to opponents. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama is promising to push for such legislation just as he promised in 2008.

But he didn't deliver when Democrats had supermajorities in both houses and is unlikely to get anywhere on this project in a second term.

It may not matter much. With the Mexican reservoir of potential illegals dried up, and with better border enforcement and increased use of the much improved e-Verify system in workplaces, the illegal population seems likely to decline.

The key immigration issue for the future is whether America, like our Anglosphere cousins Canada and Australia, will let in more high-skill immigrants.

Romney Doing the Job the Republican Establishment Won't Do

By Ann Coulter
Wednesday, April 25, 2012

The actual Republican Establishment –- political consultants, The Wall Street Journal, corporate America, former Bush advisers and television pundits -- are exhorting Mitt Romney to flip-flop on his very non-Establishment position on illegal immigration.

Both as governor of Massachusetts and as a presidential candidate, Romney has supported a fence on the border, E-Verify to ensure that employees are legal and allowing state police to arrest illegal aliens. He is the rare Republican who recognizes that in-state tuition, driver's licenses and amnesty are magnets for more illegal immigration.

These positions are totally at odds with Establishment Republicans who pander to the business lobby by supporting the cheap labor provided by illegal immigration, and then accuse Americans opposed to a slave labor class in America of racism. If this continues, America will become California and no Republican will ever be elected president again. Big business doesn't care and Establishment Republicans are too stupid to notice.

If you're not sure how you feel about illegal immigration, ask yourself this: "Do I have a nanny, a maid, a pool boy, a chauffeur, a cook or a business requiring lots of cheap labor that the rest of America will have to subsidize with social services to make up for the wages I'm paying?" Press "1" to answer in English.

If the answer is "no," illegal immigration is a bad deal for you. Cheap labor is cheap only for the employer.

Today, 70 percent of illegal immigrant households collect government benefits -- as do 57 percent of all immigrant households -- compared to 39 percent of native households.

Immigrant households with the highest rate of government assistance are from the Dominican Republic (82 percent), Mexico and Guatemala (tied at 75 percent), based on the latest available data from 2009. Immigrant households least likely to be on any welfare program are from the United Kingdom (7 percent).

British immigrants aren't picking the tomatoes Karl Rove doesn't want his son to pick. (That's how he justified Bush's amnesty proposal.)

You can either pay a little more for tomatoes picked by Americans or you can pay a lot more in welfare to the illegal immigrants who will pick them as well as to generations of their descendants.

Yes, many illegal immigrants work hard, but it's not our responsibility if their employers don't pay them a living wage. This is known as an "externality," which we hear a lot about in the case of greedy businesses polluting the land, but not when it's greedy businesses making the rest of us support their underpaid employees.

Romney is one of the few Republicans to recognize that there is no need to "round up" illegal aliens (in the lingo of amnesty supporters) to get them to go home. Illegal aliens will leave the same way they arrived. They decided to walk across the border to get jobs -- and welfare, apparently -- and they'll walk back across the border as soon as the jobs and welfare dry up.

Obama has a similar plan, but instead of using E-Verify to stop illegal aliens from taking American jobs, he did it by destroying the entire job market. Hmmmm, drug-war ravaged Ciudad Juarez, or Obama's America ... I'll take Juarez! It didn't take a government administrator "rounding up" foreigners and putting them on buses to get 20 million illegal aliens here, and it won't take a government program "rounding them up" to get them home.

While Romney's views on immigration are wildly popular with Americans, they are extremely unpopular with the Republican Establishment sucking up to business interests -- Bush, Rove, McCain, Huckabee, Perry, Gingrich, Giuliani, Krauthammer, Kristol, Gillespie, etc, etc.

(Maybe it's the Establishment that's been calling Romney "Establishment.")

So now the elites are demanding that Romney "moderate" his position on immigration. To justify their underpaying the maid, they claim support for illegal immigration is crucial to victory! Obama's ahead among Hispanics! How are you going to get the Hispanic vote? You've got to take Rubio as VP! And could somebody remind Esperanza to pick up little Chauncey from his play-date at 4:00 p.m.?

The truth is, a tough stance on illegal immigration can only help Romney, not only with the vast majority of Americans, but with any Latino voters who would ever possibly consider voting Republican in the first place.

As Romney said in one of the early debates, Republicans appeal to Latinos "by telling them what they know in their heart, which is they or their ancestors did not come here for a handout. If they came here for a handout, they'd be voting for Democrats. They came here for opportunity and freedom. And that's what we represent."

Romney crushed pro-amnesty Newt Gingrich in the Florida primary, winning a huge majority of that state's substantial Hispanic population. And Gingrich promised Hispanics their own moon base!

Before the primary, Gingrich played up his support for amnesty, while accusing Romney of wanting to "round up" illegal alien grandmothers. The one thing every Florida primary voter knew was that Romney said he'd veto the Dream Act, giving citizenship to illegal alien children.

And then Romney won the primary with an even larger percentage of the Hispanic vote than Florida at large. Romney beat Gingrich statewide, 46 percent to 32. But among Latino voters, Romney routed Gingrich, 54 percent to 29 percent.

It's not just Florida. In 2006, Arizona Hispanics supported four anti-illegal immigration propositions by 40 to 50 percent -- which is a lot more than voted for pro-amnesty Republican presidential candidates John McCain or George W. Bush.

Among the propositions supported by Hispanics in larger numbers than they typically vote Republican was one making English the official language of Arizona (49 percent). As governor of Massachusetts, Romney pushed English-immersion programs. That's my kind of Hispandering!

These are our Latinos -- the ones, as Romney said, who came here for opportunity and freedom. Any race-mongering, welfare-collecting, ethnic-identity rabble-rousers are voting for the Democrat.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Lie, Cheat, Steal: Save the Planet!

By John Ransom
Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Speaking of lies and the liars that spread them: In light of yesterday's column on the cottage industry of global warming hysteria and the slant they give the day's news, I got a nice email from the people at the Heartland Institute reminding me of the theft and alteration of documents from Heartland by hysterical warming apologist Professor Peter Gleick, a supposed ethics expert with the Pacific Institute.

I first covered the story as it was occuring in February, when Heartland reported the theft. Sinced then Heartland has published a list of websites and periodicals that abetted Gleick. I have have appended that list at the end of this column.     

Gleick, who was chairman of the ethics committee at the American Geophysical Union, admitted that he recently stole some documents- and he may have forged others- from the conservative think-tank. But that’s all in a day’s work for a work-a-day climate warrior. The important thing isn’t the quest for the truth in global climate research, but, as Charlie Sheen would say, winning. With winning comes cash.  

Because for some time it’s been clear, that in the climate debate, instead of actually accomplishing something worthwhile, all the attention will be on the winners and losers. And some losers in the debate are much bigger than others.

For example:  

“In the field of climate science, when someone — especially skeptics — did something ethically questionable or misrepresented facts,” writes MSNBC, “scientist Peter Gleick was usually among the first and loudest to cry foul. He chaired a prominent scientific society's ethics committee. He created an award for what he considered lies about global warming.”

No word yet whether Gleick will create an award for forgery. I hear the pool of candidates isn’t deep this year since all of the forged data from Climategate has already gone pro.   

The authentic documents stolen from Heartland were released by Gleick, along with some documents the Heartland folks say are forgeries.

The real documents were prepared by the think-tank to counter the global warming bunk that is being taught in US schools.

I know about the global warming hysteria that is taught at the elementary and secondary level, because my kids come home everyday and instead of telling me about how they’ve learned to read and write and how great George Washington was, they instead tell me that “transfer calculations indicate that strong gradients in both ozone and water vapor near the tropopause contribute to the inversion.” Ah, huh. I think neither they, nor their teachers, nor the authors, nor myself, knows what that means.

Still I hope the question is on the ACT. But I doubt it.

This is a very serious issue.

How serious?

“Heartland has not said whether any of the documents it unwittingly released were altered,” reports the LA Times, “and Gleick said he did not change any of the material he got. But several of the key points the purported strategy document makes are backed up in the material Gleick obtained from Heartland. Most notably, in a fundraising document, Heartland identifies one of its priorities as reshaping the discussion of climate change in K-12 classrooms.” Ohmygosh!

Well let’s just say that the Heartland Institute is in BIG trouble now. 

How dare these right-wing troglodytes have a scientific position contrary to the United Nations Interplanetary Council on Wealth Transfer and Class Envy. 

No, no. no. You can’t do that. Not under an Obama administration.

Yeah sure: The UN misspends our money on their sex scandals, mismanagement of programs designed to secure peace and prosperity and engage in habitual human rights abuses by a majority of the members states who make up the one-world-government to-be. But clearly, those problems aside, they have the skill to put together a group of scientists who can report objectively on the science behind global warming; especially the part where the remedies include:

1) You footing the bill; and

2) They get your money.     

Don’t we mere mortals know that our puny powers of reason and deduction are impervious to the powers granted to the Society of Ethical Geophysicists by the government of the United Nations?

That’s why the scientist, Geophysicist Ethicist Mr. Gleick, is now being hailed by the director of research for Greenpeace, Kert Davies, as a “hero,” says the LA Times.

Most other commentary declaims Gleick's methods, while not-so subtly applauding his aims.

The Atlantic's Megan McArdle has had about the only rational response, concluding that Gleick is crazy:


And ethics aside, what Gleick did is insane for someone in his position--so crazy that I confess to wondering whether he doesn't have some sort of underlying medical condition that requires urgent treatment.  The reason he did it was even crazier.  I would probably have thrown that memo away.  I might have spent a few hours idly checking it out. I would definitely not have risked jail or personal ruin over something so questionable, and which provided evidence of . . . what?  That Heartland exists?  That it has a budget? That it spends that budget promoting views which Gleick finds reprehensible?


When conservatives question global warming, we are lying, apparently. When liberals steal in the name of global warming, it can't be a sign of desperation, poor science or character. No; they must be crazy, with due respect to Ms. McArdle, who I believe is sincere .

I guess since liberals haven't yet embraced retroactive abortions, the next, best thing they can do is label someone crazy when they want to cut them from the herd, as they did recently with Media Matter's David Brock.   

Skeptics- or rather, deniers, as we’d much rather be called- will point out that increasingly the public is distrustful of global warming science.

Despite a little bounce in the polls, 60 percent of US respondents to a Rasmussen survey don’t think that global warming is man made. “In a January survey of the top 22 policy priorities for the US,” writes Our World 2.0 “the public ranked climate change dead last, according to the Pew Research Center.”

“When government muzzles scientists for political reasons, it cuts at the fundamental principals of good science,” Stephen Hwang, professor of general internal medicine at the University of Toronto told Our World.

But when the doctors and scientists seek to muzzle the rest of us it’s all A.O.K.

And for some weird reason the public just doesn’t trust those scientists who are fully sponsored and funded by the UN, US, UK and other government grants, which in turn were funded by you.

By talking about it, you troglodytes just emit more carbon. Good going.

Your proper role is to just shut your big, fat mouth and fork over a carbon credit or cash equivalent so the truth-seeking can continue unimpeded. 

For more information you can see the Heartland's website on the scandal at Fakegate.org.

In the meantime, here's a list of publications that Heartland says is a rogue’s gallery of organizations that are willing to invade people’s privacy in pursuit of an ideological campaign called “global warming.”

Please contact them – by commenting on the posts, emailing the bloggers or webmasters, even picking up the phone or writing a letter – to insist that they (1) remove those documents from their sites; (2) remove from their sites all posts that refer or relate in any manner to those documents; (3) remove from their Web sites any and all quotations from those documents; (4) publish retractions on their Web sites of prior postings; and (5) remove all such documents from their servers.

The following Web sites and blogs posted stolen and fake Heartland documents on their own servers:

February 14 – Heartland Insider Exposes Institute’s Budget and Strategy
DeSmogBlog
Mr. Brendan G DeMelle, editor
3000 Royal Centre
1055 West Georgia Street
Vancouver, BC V6E 3R3
email: editor@desmogblog.com

February 14 – Internal Documents: The Secret, Corporate-Funded Plan To Teach Children That Climate Change Is A Hoax
ThinkProgress.com
Mr. Brad Johnson
Center for American Progress Action Fund
1333 H Street NW, 10th Floor
Washington, DC 20005
contact page
202/682-1611

February 15 – Climate Denial Bombshell (Update)
Huffington Post
Ms. Arianna Huffington, president & editor in chief
560 Broadway
New York, NY 10012
contact page
212/245-7844

February 15 – Climate Denial Bombshell (Update)
Huffington Post
Mr. Shawn Lawrence Otto, blogger
177th Street N
Marine On Saint Croix, MN 55047-9760
contact page
651-433-2982 or 651-433-3103

February 15 – Heartland burned by ‘DenialGate’ memos
Politico
Mr. John H. Harris, editor-in-chief
1100 Wilson Boulevard #610
Arlington, VA, 22209
contact page
703/647-7999

February 14 – HeartlandGate: Anti-Science Institute’s Insider Reveals Secrets
Greg Laden’s Blog
Mr. Greg T. Laden
44788 265th Lane
Aitkin, MN 56431-4807
contact: greg@gregladen.com
218/678-2743

The following organizations have condoned the theft, quoted the forged memo, or are attacking the scientists and others whose identities were revealed by Peter Gleick. Urge them to stop, retract their comments, and apologize for the damage they have caused:

Pacific Institute
654 13th Street,
Preservation Park
Oakland, CA 94612
510/251-1600
510/251-2203 (fax)
info@pacinst.org

Greenpeace
702 H Street, NW
Suite 300
Washington, D.C. 20001
202/462-1177
202/462-4507 (fax)
info@wdc.greenpeace.org

National Center for Science Education
420 40th Street, Suite 2
Oakland, CA 94609-2688
510/601-7203
800/290-6006 (toll freee)
510/601-7204 (fax)
info@ncse.com

350.0rg
155 Water St 6FL
Brooklyn, NY 11201
510/250-7860
jamie@350.org

Forecast the Facts
Blair Fitzgibbon
202/503-6141
media@forecastthefacts.org

Citizen Engagement Laboratory
2150 Allston Way
Berkeley, CA 94704
510/875-2135
info@engagementlab.org

League of Conservation Voters
1920 L Street, NW Suite 800
Washington, DC 20036
phone: 202/785-8683
FAX: 202/835-0491
kate_geller@lcv.org