Without much fanfare, the Scandinavian country has been moving away from socialism.
Duncan Currie
Thursday, September 30, 2010
There is something about Sweden that provokes a mix of envy, horror, and bewilderment among American observers. Liberals have traditionally celebrated its cradle-to-grave safety net, while conservatives have disparaged its high taxes and centralized health-care regime. Yet both groups have generally agreed that Swedish-style socialism is a far cry from rough-and-tumble U.S. capitalism.
In fact, contemporary Sweden is much less socialist than many Americans realize. Since the early 1990s, when it suffered a painful financial crisis, the Scandinavian country has deregulated key industries (such as airlines, telecommunications, and electricity), lowered its overall tax burden, established universal school vouchers, partially privatized its pension system, abolished certain government monopolies, sold a number of state-owned enterprises (including the parent company of Absolut vodka), and trimmed public spending. Several years ago, it eliminated gift and inheritance taxes. The World Economic Forum now ranks Sweden as the second-most competitive economy on earth, behind only Switzerland. According to the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom (compiled by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation), Sweden offers greater business freedom, trade freedom, monetary freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom, freedom from corruption, and property-rights protection than does the United States.
Since taking office in 2006, the center-right administration of Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has reduced income and corporate taxes, repealed a longstanding wealth tax, tightened unemployment and sick-leave benefits (which are still exceedingly generous), and privatized various state assets. On September 19, Reinfeldt became the first conservative premier in modern Swedish history to win reelection, though his government apparently fell just short of securing a parliamentary majority. The once-mighty Social Democratic party captured less than 31 percent of the vote, its worst performance in nearly a century. Meanwhile, the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD) — a populist-nationalist party critical of Muslim immigration — finally gained entrance into the Riksdag, picking up a remarkable 20 seats (out of 349) and virtually doubling its vote share from 2006.
Both the ruling coalition and the left-wing opposition have rejected an alliance with the SD, whose impressive electoral showing hit Sweden like an earthquake. The party has neo-Nazi roots, but it has worked hard to purge members with Nazi ties, rebrand itself, and achieve greater respectability. Its growing influence reflects widespread anxiety over the sluggish pace of Muslim assimilation — anxiety that the mainstream parties have failed to address. This failure has given the SD a boost, especially in southern Sweden around Malmö, the country’s most Muslim city.
The broader story of the 2010 election is the collapse of Sweden’s old political order, which was dominated by the Social Democrats (who held power for all but nine years and a few months between September 1932 and October 2006). “There is a general change in Swedish society,” Stockholm University political scientist Jenny Madestam told the New York Times prior to the vote. “Social-democratic ideas are losing their grip on Sweden, and we are getting more and more individualistic.” Indeed, the country is a far more market-friendly place today than it was 20 years ago, thanks in part to reforms implemented by the Social Democrats themselves. Over the past two decades, it has been one of Western Europe’s most energetic liberalizers — cutting taxes, loosening regulatory shackles, and increasing competition.
Bolstered by prudent economic stewardship and a relatively conservative financial sector, Sweden entered the global recession on a sound footing. While it endured a nasty spike in unemployment, its export-driven recovery has been so vigorous that the central bank is now concerned about inflation risks. In the second quarter of 2010, Sweden posted a 4.6 percent annual growth rate, prompting the Wall Street Journal to hail it as “the biggest success story in post-recession Europe.” It currently has the lowest deficit-to-GDP ratio in the entire European Union. Before the election, Swedish finance minister Anders Borg announced plans to privatize another $14 billion worth of state assets. “If we get a surplus in place,” Reinfeldt told a Reuters interviewer, “we will deliver on tax cuts for 6.1 million workers and pensioners.” (The total Swedish population is roughly 9.4 million.)
To be sure, Sweden won’t look like Hong Kong or Singapore anytime soon. It still has a lavish welfare state, and its aggregate tax burden is still quite heavy. The top marginal income-tax rate is 57 percent in Sweden, compared with 35 percent (for now) in America. On the other hand, a 2008 OECD study found that household taxes are substantially more progressive in the U.S. than they are in Sweden, even after we control for America’s higher level of income inequality. Sweden has a much lower average statutory corporate-tax rate than the U.S., and also a much lower effective corporate-tax rate on new capital investments (according to University of Calgary economists Duanjie Chen and Jack Mintz). Its tax structure is made even more regressive by a 25 percent value-added tax on consumption of most goods and services.
Which brings us to a common misconception about the Swedish system — that it takes from the rich and gives to the poor. Actually, says Lund University economist Andreas Bergh, “the majority of the taxes you pay are given back to you during your life cycle.” Thus, “if you pay more when you work, you will also get more when you retire.” Even upper-class Swedes enjoy bountiful government largesse.
Another popular myth would have us believe that Sweden’s wealth was somehow created or facilitated by social democracy. In reality, “Sweden’s prosperity is the result of well-functioning capitalist institutions,” says Bergh, author of the new Swedish-language book The Capitalist Welfare State. As Cato Institute scholar Johan Norberg explained in a 2006 National Interest essay, the relative “success” of the country’s social-democratic model “was built on the legacy of an earlier model: the period of economic growth and development preceding the adoption of the socialist system.”
During the first half of the 20th century, Sweden benefited enormously from its non-participation in the two world wars, which devastated Europe’s major industrial powers. Blessed with abundant natural resources, it was a staunch defender of property rights and a robust advocate of free trade. Cultural homogeneity, a strong legal framework, and a lack of corruption promoted famously high levels of trust and social cohesion. Sweden had a welfare state, but it also had an open, free-market economy. “As late as 1950,” Norberg observed, “the total tax burden was no more than 21 percent of GDP, lower than in the United States and Western Europe.”
In other words, Sweden became a fantastically rich country before it started greatly boosting taxes, spending, and regulation during the 1970s. Cleveland Fed economist Emre Ergungor has noted that “the marginal income tax rate on full-time workers earning the average hourly wage increased from 35 percent in the second half of the 1960s to 65 percent in 1976.” Soaring taxes funded a dramatic expansion of government: The public sector accounted for 20 percent of total Swedish employment in 1965 and 38 percent in 1985.
At the start of the 1980s, Sweden was grappling with persistently high inflation. Over the course of that decade, its financial markets experienced a rapid burst of liberalization that led to massive credit growth, which in turn spawned a real-estate bubble. Meanwhile, the country continued to maintain a fixed exchange rate. Crunch time arrived in the early 1990s, writes Ergungor, when the reunification of East and West Germany drove up German interest rates. This fueled a sharp rise in Swedish interest rates, as did Stockholm’s efforts to defend an overvalued krona (the national currency). The government eventually adopted a floating exchange rate, but not until November 1992.
By that point, Sweden’s asset bubble had imploded. The fallout was disastrous: Housing prices plunged, nonperforming loans accumulated, and the economy sank into a deep recession. This had a severe impact on the country’s relative wealth: According to a McKinsey & Co. analysis of per capita GDP and purchasing-power parity, Sweden went from being the fifth-richest OECD member in 1970 to being the 16th-richest in 1998. Since then, propelled by ambitious free-market reforms, it has regained much (though not all) of the ground it lost. Private-sector productivity growth has been vigorous, and Sweden now boasts “a near-perfect pension system,” says economist Anders Åslund of the Peterson Institute.
Yet certain aspects of the old Swedish model have proved stubbornly resistant to change. For example, the government-run health-care system remains plagued by long waiting times, and onerous labor regulations make it very difficult for companies to hire or fire workers. Labor-market rigidity has contributed to a yawning employment gap between natives and immigrants, which has retarded the process of integrating Swedish Muslims.
Decades ago, Stockholm chose to embrace liberal asylum policies, thereby inviting future waves of refugees from the Middle East, the Balkans, East Africa, and elsewhere. In a country once known for its homogeneity, the foreign-born population share is now approximately 14 percent. Unfortunately, Sweden has not made the labor-market adjustments necessary to accommodate mass immigration. The ghettoization of Muslim communities in poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods has inflamed cultural tensions and heightened fears over the sustainability of the welfare state. Sweden has “essentially imported an underclass,” says UCLA historian Peter Baldwin, a scholar of contemporary Europe. “It’s a huge social problem just waiting to explode.”
Solving that problem will require more than simply enhanced labor flexibility. It will also require government officials to move away from multiculturalism and rethink their basic approach to assimilation. After witnessing the recent electoral success of far-right populists, the Swedish establishment may finally be shocked into taking constructive action. That should be the hope, anyway, of liberal and conservative Swedes alike.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Americans Still Cling to Ignorance
Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, September 30, 2010
The bookish, twice-unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once sighed that if most thinking people supported him, it still wouldn't be enough in America because, "I need a majority."
For some reason, Democrats have chosen to follow the disastrous model of Stevenson and not that of feisty man-of-the-people Missourian Harry Truman -- though the former nearly wrecked the party and the latter got elected.
Former President Jimmy Carter likewise seems to feel that he's still too smart for us. Carter, who turns 86 on Friday, is hitting the news shows to explain why he remains America's "superior" ex-president -- and why more than 30 years ago he was so successful yet so underappreciated as our chief executive.
Most Americans instead remember a very different President Carter who finished his single term with 18 percent inflation, 18 percent interest rates, 11 percent unemployment, long gas lines, and a world in chaos from hostage-taking in Teheran and Soviet communist aggression in Afghanistan and Central America.
Now, John Kerry -- who failed to win the presidency in 2004 and recently tried to avoid state sales taxes on his new $7 million yacht -- is voicing similar frustrations about Americans' inability to fathom what their betters are trying to do for them. He is furious that an unsophisticated electorate might not return congressional Democratic majorities in 2010. Kerry laments that, "We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on." Instead it falls for "a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what's happening."
In 2006, Kerry warned students that if they did poorly in school, they could "get stuck in Iraq." He apparently had forgotten that soldiers volunteer for military service, and are overwhelmingly high school graduates.
In the 2008 campaign, Michelle Obama at one point said of her husband's burden, "Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics."
That sense of intellectual superiority was channeled by Barack Obama himself when he later tried to explain why his message was not resonating with less astute rural Pennsylvanians: "And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
During the recent Ground Zero mosque controversy, Obama returned to that Carter-Kerry-Obama sort of condescension. When asked about the overwhelming opposition to the mosque, the president felt again that the unthinking hoi polloi had given into their unfounded fears: "I think that at a time when the country is anxious generally and going through a tough time, then fears can surface, suspicions, divisions can surface in a society."
The president often clears his throat with "Let me be perfectly clear" and "Make no mistake about it" -- as if we, his schoolchildren, have to be warned to pay attention to the all-knowing teacher at the front of the class.
Disappointed progressive pundits also resonate this angst over having to deal with childlike Americans. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recently psychoanalyzed the falling support for the president by claiming that "The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats."
Thomas Frank's best-selling 2004 book "What's the Matter With Kansas?" lamented that uninformed voters were easily tricked into voting against their "real" economic interests.
When America votes for a liberal candidate, it is redeemed by the left as intelligent -- and derided as dense when it does not. We were told not to worry that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner did not pay all his income taxes since we were lucky to have someone so well educated and experienced in high finance.
Note that few Democratic candidates are running on the health-care bill they passed, promising at the time that it would be appreciated by a suspicious American public. More federal borrowing and amnesty are still pushed under the euphemisms "stimulus" and "comprehensive immigration reform." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed that the Tea Party was merely a synthetic Astroturf movement. Professors and preachers may like such sermonizing, but for politicians it's a lousy way to get elected. Again, compare the relative fates of the patronizing Adlai Stevenson and the plain-speaking Harry Truman.
For many of today's liberals, the fact that the president has to deal with so many Neanderthal know-nothings explains why he can't, as promised, close Guantanamo, end "don't ask, don't tell," or do away with Bush-era renditions, tribunals wiretaps, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But current polls suggest that these clueless and unappreciative Americans apparently believe that an elite education does not ensure their officials can balance a budget, pay their own taxes or speak candidly.
What an outrageous "How dare they!" thought.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
The bookish, twice-unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once sighed that if most thinking people supported him, it still wouldn't be enough in America because, "I need a majority."
For some reason, Democrats have chosen to follow the disastrous model of Stevenson and not that of feisty man-of-the-people Missourian Harry Truman -- though the former nearly wrecked the party and the latter got elected.
Former President Jimmy Carter likewise seems to feel that he's still too smart for us. Carter, who turns 86 on Friday, is hitting the news shows to explain why he remains America's "superior" ex-president -- and why more than 30 years ago he was so successful yet so underappreciated as our chief executive.
Most Americans instead remember a very different President Carter who finished his single term with 18 percent inflation, 18 percent interest rates, 11 percent unemployment, long gas lines, and a world in chaos from hostage-taking in Teheran and Soviet communist aggression in Afghanistan and Central America.
Now, John Kerry -- who failed to win the presidency in 2004 and recently tried to avoid state sales taxes on his new $7 million yacht -- is voicing similar frustrations about Americans' inability to fathom what their betters are trying to do for them. He is furious that an unsophisticated electorate might not return congressional Democratic majorities in 2010. Kerry laments that, "We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on." Instead it falls for "a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what's happening."
In 2006, Kerry warned students that if they did poorly in school, they could "get stuck in Iraq." He apparently had forgotten that soldiers volunteer for military service, and are overwhelmingly high school graduates.
In the 2008 campaign, Michelle Obama at one point said of her husband's burden, "Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics."
That sense of intellectual superiority was channeled by Barack Obama himself when he later tried to explain why his message was not resonating with less astute rural Pennsylvanians: "And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
During the recent Ground Zero mosque controversy, Obama returned to that Carter-Kerry-Obama sort of condescension. When asked about the overwhelming opposition to the mosque, the president felt again that the unthinking hoi polloi had given into their unfounded fears: "I think that at a time when the country is anxious generally and going through a tough time, then fears can surface, suspicions, divisions can surface in a society."
The president often clears his throat with "Let me be perfectly clear" and "Make no mistake about it" -- as if we, his schoolchildren, have to be warned to pay attention to the all-knowing teacher at the front of the class.
Disappointed progressive pundits also resonate this angst over having to deal with childlike Americans. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recently psychoanalyzed the falling support for the president by claiming that "The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats."
Thomas Frank's best-selling 2004 book "What's the Matter With Kansas?" lamented that uninformed voters were easily tricked into voting against their "real" economic interests.
When America votes for a liberal candidate, it is redeemed by the left as intelligent -- and derided as dense when it does not. We were told not to worry that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner did not pay all his income taxes since we were lucky to have someone so well educated and experienced in high finance.
Note that few Democratic candidates are running on the health-care bill they passed, promising at the time that it would be appreciated by a suspicious American public. More federal borrowing and amnesty are still pushed under the euphemisms "stimulus" and "comprehensive immigration reform." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed that the Tea Party was merely a synthetic Astroturf movement. Professors and preachers may like such sermonizing, but for politicians it's a lousy way to get elected. Again, compare the relative fates of the patronizing Adlai Stevenson and the plain-speaking Harry Truman.
For many of today's liberals, the fact that the president has to deal with so many Neanderthal know-nothings explains why he can't, as promised, close Guantanamo, end "don't ask, don't tell," or do away with Bush-era renditions, tribunals wiretaps, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But current polls suggest that these clueless and unappreciative Americans apparently believe that an elite education does not ensure their officials can balance a budget, pay their own taxes or speak candidly.
What an outrageous "How dare they!" thought.
Youth of America: Stop Drinking Obama’s Kool-Aid
Katie Pavlich
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
If America’s youth want any chance at having a stable economic future, free from total government control, I suggest they put down the Kool-Aid and start drinking some tea.
In 2008, then-candidate Obama ran on a theme of “Hope and Change.”
In an attempt to get his young and impressionable base to “buck up,” President Obama spoke at a rally held for University of Wisconsin students in Madison yesterday.
“Now, two years ago, you defied the conventional wisdom in Washington. The message out there was, no, you can’t. No, you can’t overcome the cynicism of our politics. No, you can’t overcome the power of special interests in Washington. No, you can’t make real progress on the big challenges of our time. No, you can’t elect a skinny guy with a funny name, Barack Hussein Obama. They said, no, you can’t. But what did you say, Wisconsin?” the president said after joking about sports teams.
“Yes we can!” responded the audience.
President Obama went on to slam big corporations and “rich” people while failing to mention that those evil people and corporations give recent college graduates jobs, a very rare thing this day in age.
“The basic theory of the Republican leadership was you cut taxes mostly for millionaires and billionaires. You cut regulations for special interests, whether it’s the banks or the oil companies or health insurance companies,” he said. Hopefully none of the students in the audience were going to school to get their engineering or finance degree.
According to the Economic Policies Institute, unemployment among people 16-24 years old is 18.9 percent and on top of that, a majority of college graduates have been so discouraged looking for full employment that they have stopped looking altogether. Youth fortunate to actually land a job after graduating may not have one on January 1, 2011, due to President Obama and Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to extend the Bush tax cuts, leading to the biggest tax hike in American history. More taxes equal less money to pay workers, especially in the middle of a recession. Without this tax-cut extension, employers will be forced to cut employees along with salaries, and lucky recent graduates will be first ones the chopping block.
In addition to cutting jobs, the Obama administration and liberal politicians have further burdened employers and individuals with higher health insurance premiums thanks to the passing of ObamaCare. Obama touted to UW students that young people can now stay on their parents’ insurance plan until the age of 26, but what happens when those parents can no longer afford health insurance due to heavy government regulation and involvement?
President Obama continued his speech by condemning the previous administration, repeating over and over again what happened before he took office, naturally painting himself as the victim of the economic crisis. Although he was speaking to college students, he sounded more like a child pointing his finger at the kid next to him in order to avoid getting placed in timeout.
“What we found when we arrived in Washington was the rawest kind of politics. What we confronted was an opposition party that was still stuck on the same failed policies of the past, whose leaders in Congress were determined from the start to let us deal with the mess that they had done so much to create,” the president said. “They realized that Obama was walking in and we had just lost 4 million jobs in the six months before I was sworn in.”
Well yes, that is precisely why young people elected President Obama along with other Democrats, to fix the problem which has only gotten worse through the continuation of reckless government spending. Dare I say a domino affect from TARP, which was put into place by President Bush?
John Kerry told a group of reporters in Boston recently, “We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what's happening.”
When talking about the youth vote in 2008, John Kerry is correct. Our nation’s youth were not informed about real issues and what liberal polices would mean for their future. Instead of relying on facts, they fell for a man with a teleprompter and a simple slogan of “Hope and Change.”
Well here are the facts:
Under the Obama administration, overall unemployment has been hovering just below 10 percent, the president spent more money his first year in office than any other U.S. president (totaling $3.5 trillion), the deficit expanded to $1.3 trillion, and his new healthcare overhaul is already increasing health insurance premiums for individuals, families and employers.
Youth smell what Barack has been cooking, and they don’t like it.
Now, what does the tea party have to offer? It is simple. The tea party offers young people freedom and opportunity from government control, giving everyone the right to economic liberty and individual choice. Why is it that young people want to be free and independent, without anyone telling them what to do, but yet they vote for liberal politicians and policies, giving the government more control of their lives? Only the individual can fulfill their own dreams. America’s youth must take responsibility for their future.
“The other side would have you believe this election is a referendum on me or a referendum on the economy,” the president said.
President Obama is in charge and has been in charge with a majority in the House and Senate. America’s economic situation is his responsibility.
So youth voters have a choice to make on November 2: Tea or Kool-Aid?
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
If America’s youth want any chance at having a stable economic future, free from total government control, I suggest they put down the Kool-Aid and start drinking some tea.
In 2008, then-candidate Obama ran on a theme of “Hope and Change.”
In an attempt to get his young and impressionable base to “buck up,” President Obama spoke at a rally held for University of Wisconsin students in Madison yesterday.
“Now, two years ago, you defied the conventional wisdom in Washington. The message out there was, no, you can’t. No, you can’t overcome the cynicism of our politics. No, you can’t overcome the power of special interests in Washington. No, you can’t make real progress on the big challenges of our time. No, you can’t elect a skinny guy with a funny name, Barack Hussein Obama. They said, no, you can’t. But what did you say, Wisconsin?” the president said after joking about sports teams.
“Yes we can!” responded the audience.
President Obama went on to slam big corporations and “rich” people while failing to mention that those evil people and corporations give recent college graduates jobs, a very rare thing this day in age.
“The basic theory of the Republican leadership was you cut taxes mostly for millionaires and billionaires. You cut regulations for special interests, whether it’s the banks or the oil companies or health insurance companies,” he said. Hopefully none of the students in the audience were going to school to get their engineering or finance degree.
According to the Economic Policies Institute, unemployment among people 16-24 years old is 18.9 percent and on top of that, a majority of college graduates have been so discouraged looking for full employment that they have stopped looking altogether. Youth fortunate to actually land a job after graduating may not have one on January 1, 2011, due to President Obama and Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to extend the Bush tax cuts, leading to the biggest tax hike in American history. More taxes equal less money to pay workers, especially in the middle of a recession. Without this tax-cut extension, employers will be forced to cut employees along with salaries, and lucky recent graduates will be first ones the chopping block.
In addition to cutting jobs, the Obama administration and liberal politicians have further burdened employers and individuals with higher health insurance premiums thanks to the passing of ObamaCare. Obama touted to UW students that young people can now stay on their parents’ insurance plan until the age of 26, but what happens when those parents can no longer afford health insurance due to heavy government regulation and involvement?
President Obama continued his speech by condemning the previous administration, repeating over and over again what happened before he took office, naturally painting himself as the victim of the economic crisis. Although he was speaking to college students, he sounded more like a child pointing his finger at the kid next to him in order to avoid getting placed in timeout.
“What we found when we arrived in Washington was the rawest kind of politics. What we confronted was an opposition party that was still stuck on the same failed policies of the past, whose leaders in Congress were determined from the start to let us deal with the mess that they had done so much to create,” the president said. “They realized that Obama was walking in and we had just lost 4 million jobs in the six months before I was sworn in.”
Well yes, that is precisely why young people elected President Obama along with other Democrats, to fix the problem which has only gotten worse through the continuation of reckless government spending. Dare I say a domino affect from TARP, which was put into place by President Bush?
John Kerry told a group of reporters in Boston recently, “We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what's happening.”
When talking about the youth vote in 2008, John Kerry is correct. Our nation’s youth were not informed about real issues and what liberal polices would mean for their future. Instead of relying on facts, they fell for a man with a teleprompter and a simple slogan of “Hope and Change.”
Well here are the facts:
Under the Obama administration, overall unemployment has been hovering just below 10 percent, the president spent more money his first year in office than any other U.S. president (totaling $3.5 trillion), the deficit expanded to $1.3 trillion, and his new healthcare overhaul is already increasing health insurance premiums for individuals, families and employers.
Youth smell what Barack has been cooking, and they don’t like it.
Now, what does the tea party have to offer? It is simple. The tea party offers young people freedom and opportunity from government control, giving everyone the right to economic liberty and individual choice. Why is it that young people want to be free and independent, without anyone telling them what to do, but yet they vote for liberal politicians and policies, giving the government more control of their lives? Only the individual can fulfill their own dreams. America’s youth must take responsibility for their future.
“The other side would have you believe this election is a referendum on me or a referendum on the economy,” the president said.
President Obama is in charge and has been in charge with a majority in the House and Senate. America’s economic situation is his responsibility.
So youth voters have a choice to make on November 2: Tea or Kool-Aid?
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Liberals Confuse Me
Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Christine O'Donnell, U.S. Senate candidate from Delaware, has faced considerable criticism and news media attention about her youthful association with witchcraft. Have we seen similar news media attention given to other politicians who have made bizarre remarks that border on gross stupidity -- possibly lunacy?
During a congressional Armed Services hearing in March, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., expressed concern that stationing 8,000 Marines and their equipment on Guam, our Pacific territory, could cause the island "to become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize." Such a remark is grossly stupid but the liberal press didn't give it anywhere near the amount of attention and derision that they gave Christine O'Donnell.
On the campaign trail in March 2008, then-presidential candidate Obama told his Beaverton, Ore., audience, "Over the last 15 months, we've traveled to every corner of the United States. I've now been in 57 states? I think one left to go." Whether Obama misspoke or not, that's a grossly stupid remark, but white liberals among the intellectual elite and the liberal news media all but ignored it. Of course, when former Vice President Dan Quayle misspelled "potatoe," they pounced upon it and had a field day.
So what might explain the liberals giving Hank Johnson and Obama a pass whilst playing up the perceived shortcomings of Christine O'Donnell and Dan Quayle? The answer might be as simple as just looking at the colors involved. O'Donnell and Quayle are white and Johnson and Obama are black. That means the white liberal vision comes into play where to openly oppose, criticize and ridicule blacks is racist. The key term is openly. I bet that when alone, in trusted company, white liberals crack up over the things that some black people say and do. The white liberal vision holds one set of standards to which white people are obliged and another that's lower for blacks. I don't believe that white liberals are racists in the sense that Klansmen and neo-Nazis are; however, their paternalistic and demeaning attitudes toward blacks are far more debilitating.
There needs to be a bit of elaboration of the statement that to openly oppose, criticize and ridicule a black is racist. If the black in question is a conservative, possibly Republican, then any sort of criticism and treatment is acceptable. This was seen in the criticism and ridicule of Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" cartoon featured President Bush referring to Secretary Rice as "brown sugar." Pat Oliphant showed her as a parrot with big lips and Ted Rall's cartoon had Miss Rice proclaiming herself Bush's "House nigga." Don Wright's cartoon depicted Justice Thomas as Justice Scalia's lawn jockey. These cartoons were carried in major newspapers nationwide. Ask yourself what would happen to a nationally syndicated cartoonist, and the newspaper that carried it, depicting President Obama as a wide-eyed, fat-lipped monkey.
Racial double standards are nothing new. It has been the currency on jobs and college campuses where there is an acceptance of behavior by blacks that would be condemned if done by whites. Often misguided white liberal professors, in the name of making up for injustices of the past, give black students grades they didn't earn. Being 74 years old, I have frequently told people that I'm glad that I received just about all of my education before it became fashionable for white people to like black people. That means I was obliged to live up to higher standards.
More blacks need to be bold and challenge the demeaning attitudes of white liberals. During the early years of the Reagan administration, I had a number of press conferences in response to a book or article that I had written. At several of them, I invited the reporters to treat me like a white person -- just ask hard questions.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Christine O'Donnell, U.S. Senate candidate from Delaware, has faced considerable criticism and news media attention about her youthful association with witchcraft. Have we seen similar news media attention given to other politicians who have made bizarre remarks that border on gross stupidity -- possibly lunacy?
During a congressional Armed Services hearing in March, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., expressed concern that stationing 8,000 Marines and their equipment on Guam, our Pacific territory, could cause the island "to become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize." Such a remark is grossly stupid but the liberal press didn't give it anywhere near the amount of attention and derision that they gave Christine O'Donnell.
On the campaign trail in March 2008, then-presidential candidate Obama told his Beaverton, Ore., audience, "Over the last 15 months, we've traveled to every corner of the United States. I've now been in 57 states? I think one left to go." Whether Obama misspoke or not, that's a grossly stupid remark, but white liberals among the intellectual elite and the liberal news media all but ignored it. Of course, when former Vice President Dan Quayle misspelled "potatoe," they pounced upon it and had a field day.
So what might explain the liberals giving Hank Johnson and Obama a pass whilst playing up the perceived shortcomings of Christine O'Donnell and Dan Quayle? The answer might be as simple as just looking at the colors involved. O'Donnell and Quayle are white and Johnson and Obama are black. That means the white liberal vision comes into play where to openly oppose, criticize and ridicule blacks is racist. The key term is openly. I bet that when alone, in trusted company, white liberals crack up over the things that some black people say and do. The white liberal vision holds one set of standards to which white people are obliged and another that's lower for blacks. I don't believe that white liberals are racists in the sense that Klansmen and neo-Nazis are; however, their paternalistic and demeaning attitudes toward blacks are far more debilitating.
There needs to be a bit of elaboration of the statement that to openly oppose, criticize and ridicule a black is racist. If the black in question is a conservative, possibly Republican, then any sort of criticism and treatment is acceptable. This was seen in the criticism and ridicule of Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" cartoon featured President Bush referring to Secretary Rice as "brown sugar." Pat Oliphant showed her as a parrot with big lips and Ted Rall's cartoon had Miss Rice proclaiming herself Bush's "House nigga." Don Wright's cartoon depicted Justice Thomas as Justice Scalia's lawn jockey. These cartoons were carried in major newspapers nationwide. Ask yourself what would happen to a nationally syndicated cartoonist, and the newspaper that carried it, depicting President Obama as a wide-eyed, fat-lipped monkey.
Racial double standards are nothing new. It has been the currency on jobs and college campuses where there is an acceptance of behavior by blacks that would be condemned if done by whites. Often misguided white liberal professors, in the name of making up for injustices of the past, give black students grades they didn't earn. Being 74 years old, I have frequently told people that I'm glad that I received just about all of my education before it became fashionable for white people to like black people. That means I was obliged to live up to higher standards.
More blacks need to be bold and challenge the demeaning attitudes of white liberals. During the early years of the Reagan administration, I had a number of press conferences in response to a book or article that I had written. At several of them, I invited the reporters to treat me like a white person -- just ask hard questions.
Taxing The Rich
John Stossel
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Progressives want to raise taxes on individuals who make more than $200,000 a year because they say it's wrong for the rich to be "given" more money. Sunday's New York Times carries a cartoon showing Uncle Sam handing money to a fat cat. They just don't get it.
As I've said before, a tax cut is not a handout. It simply means government steals less. What progressives want to do is take money from some -- by force -- and spend it on others. It sounds less noble when plainly stated.
That's the moral side of the matter. There's a practical side, too. Taxes discourage wealth creation. That hurts everyone, the lower end of the income scale most of all. An economy that, through freedom, encourages the production of wealth raises the living standards of lower-income people as well as everyone else.
A free society is not a zero-sum game in which every gain is offset by someone's loss. As long as government keeps its thumb off the scales, the "makers" who get rich do so by making others better off. (When the government allocates capital or creates barriers to competition, all bets are off.)
Of course, this is not the prevailing view among the intelligentsia. Columbia University Professor Marc Lamont Hill tells me, "Those who have more should pay more."
But is there a point where they stop producing wealth or leave altogether?
"The rich have always cried wolf like that," Hill says.
But the wolf is here. Maryland created a special tax on rich people that was supposed to bring in $106 million. Instead, the state lost $257 million.
Former Gov. Robert Ehrlich, who is running again for his old job, says: "It reminds me of Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown was always surprised when Lucy pulled the football away. And they're always surprised in Washington and state capitals when the dollars never come in."
Some of Maryland's rich left the state. "They're out of here. These people aren't stupid," Ehrlich says.
New York billionaire Tom Golisano isn't stupid, either. With $3,000 and one employee, he started a business that processes paychecks for companies. He created 13,000 jobs.
Then New York state hiked the income tax on millionaires.
"It was the straw that broke the camel's back," he says. "Not that I like to throw the number around, but my personal income tax last year would've been $13,800 a day. Would you like to write a check for $13,800 a day to a state government, as opposed to moving to another state where there's no state income tax or very low state income tax?
He established residence in Florida, which has no personal income tax.
Now Gov. David Paterson may have even seen the light.
"We projected that we would get $4 billion, and we actually got well short of it," he says.
Art Laffer, the economist who has a curve illustrating this point named after him, isn't surprised.
"It's just economics," he says. "People don't work to pay taxes. People work to get what they can after tax. They'll change where they earn their income. They'll change how they earn their income. They'll change how much they earn, when they receive the income. They'll change all of those things to minimize taxes."
We can see it in the statistics. In 1960, federal revenues were 18.6 percent of total output. Over the next 50 years, that percentage has rarely exceeded 20 percent or fallen below 17 percent. As Laffer says, people adjust their activities to the tax burden.
Donald Trump, who knows something about making money, says of course the rich will leave when hit with higher taxes. "I know these people," he told me. "They're international people. Whether they live here or live in a place like Switzerland doesn't really matter to them."
You haven't left, I told him.
"I haven't left yet. ... Look, the rich people are going to leave. And other people are going to leave. You're going to end up with lots of people that don't produce. And then that's the spiral. That's the end."
And that's another good reason for us to get on with reducing the size of government.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Progressives want to raise taxes on individuals who make more than $200,000 a year because they say it's wrong for the rich to be "given" more money. Sunday's New York Times carries a cartoon showing Uncle Sam handing money to a fat cat. They just don't get it.
As I've said before, a tax cut is not a handout. It simply means government steals less. What progressives want to do is take money from some -- by force -- and spend it on others. It sounds less noble when plainly stated.
That's the moral side of the matter. There's a practical side, too. Taxes discourage wealth creation. That hurts everyone, the lower end of the income scale most of all. An economy that, through freedom, encourages the production of wealth raises the living standards of lower-income people as well as everyone else.
A free society is not a zero-sum game in which every gain is offset by someone's loss. As long as government keeps its thumb off the scales, the "makers" who get rich do so by making others better off. (When the government allocates capital or creates barriers to competition, all bets are off.)
Of course, this is not the prevailing view among the intelligentsia. Columbia University Professor Marc Lamont Hill tells me, "Those who have more should pay more."
But is there a point where they stop producing wealth or leave altogether?
"The rich have always cried wolf like that," Hill says.
But the wolf is here. Maryland created a special tax on rich people that was supposed to bring in $106 million. Instead, the state lost $257 million.
Former Gov. Robert Ehrlich, who is running again for his old job, says: "It reminds me of Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown was always surprised when Lucy pulled the football away. And they're always surprised in Washington and state capitals when the dollars never come in."
Some of Maryland's rich left the state. "They're out of here. These people aren't stupid," Ehrlich says.
New York billionaire Tom Golisano isn't stupid, either. With $3,000 and one employee, he started a business that processes paychecks for companies. He created 13,000 jobs.
Then New York state hiked the income tax on millionaires.
"It was the straw that broke the camel's back," he says. "Not that I like to throw the number around, but my personal income tax last year would've been $13,800 a day. Would you like to write a check for $13,800 a day to a state government, as opposed to moving to another state where there's no state income tax or very low state income tax?
He established residence in Florida, which has no personal income tax.
Now Gov. David Paterson may have even seen the light.
"We projected that we would get $4 billion, and we actually got well short of it," he says.
Art Laffer, the economist who has a curve illustrating this point named after him, isn't surprised.
"It's just economics," he says. "People don't work to pay taxes. People work to get what they can after tax. They'll change where they earn their income. They'll change how they earn their income. They'll change how much they earn, when they receive the income. They'll change all of those things to minimize taxes."
We can see it in the statistics. In 1960, federal revenues were 18.6 percent of total output. Over the next 50 years, that percentage has rarely exceeded 20 percent or fallen below 17 percent. As Laffer says, people adjust their activities to the tax burden.
Donald Trump, who knows something about making money, says of course the rich will leave when hit with higher taxes. "I know these people," he told me. "They're international people. Whether they live here or live in a place like Switzerland doesn't really matter to them."
You haven't left, I told him.
"I haven't left yet. ... Look, the rich people are going to leave. And other people are going to leave. You're going to end up with lots of people that don't produce. And then that's the spiral. That's the end."
And that's another good reason for us to get on with reducing the size of government.
Big Labor, Not Tea Party, Is Workers’ Worst Enemy
Michelle Malkin
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
The Service Employees International Union plans to send 25,000 rank-and-file workers on 500 buses to Washington this weekend to protest the tea party movement, Republicans and Fox News. If SEIU members had any sense, they'd be demonstrating at their own bosses' D.C. headquarters. It's the Big Labor Left, not the Tea Party Right, that is flushing rank-and-file union workers' hard-earned dues down the collective toilet in these hard times.
The co-organizer of the so-called "One Nation" protest by a coalition of progressive groups is George Gresham, president of the behemoth SEIU Local 1199 based in New York. (This is the same SEIU affiliate that employed current Obama domestic policy adviser Patrick Gaspard as chief lobbyist for nine years.) Peeved by all the attention that grassroots conservatives and limited government activists have received over the past year, Gresham spearheaded the rally plans earlier this summer to "counter the Tea Party narrative" and reclaim the voice for "working people." Perhaps Gresham should pay more attention to his workers' pensions than to tea party leaders' media appearances.
SEIU Local 1199's Upstate Pension Fund has plunged from 115 percent funded in 1999 to 75 percent funded, and its Greater New York Pension Fund was funded at only 58 percent of its future obligations as of 2007, according to Hudson Institute analyst Diana Furchtgott-Roth. The union fat cats blame Wall Street. But while the pensions of SEIU workers nationwide are in "endangered status," the pensions of SEIU top brass have been protected and remain fully funded.
The D.C.-based Alliance for Worker Freedom, which monitors labor union abuses, reported last year that 13 major local SEIU pension funds are in serious financial jeopardy. Indeed, fewer than one in every 160 union-represented workers is covered by a union pension with required assets. Local 1199 workers -- already subject to wage freezes to salvage their pensions -- might want to know how their leaders were able to pony up $1 million for Haiti earthquake relief in January while their retirement funds wither on the vine.
SEIU leaders have shown a special talent for squandering their workers' dues. They poured $10 million down the drain in Arkansas on a failed bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln. They spent $10 million on a nasty lawsuit against a competing union in California. They've burned through union dues to transport SEIU radicals to bully bank execs and their families at their private homes and to bus workers to Arizona to protest crackdowns on illegal aliens, who depress the wages of law-abiding working-class Americans.
Under former Purple Army Chief Andy Stern, the union's liabilities skyrocketed from $7.6 million to nearly $121 million. Stern burned through $61 million to put Barack Obama and the Democratic ruling majority in place. And before abruptly stepping down in April, he installed a cadre of labor management stooges embroiled in financial scandals across the country.
One of them, Stern protege and former SEIU national Vice President Tyrone Freeman, remains under FBI investigation for siphoning off hundreds of thousands of dollars in dues money for his personal enrichment and pleasure. The Los Angeles Times uncovered schemes that ranged from piping $600,000 in union contracts to his wife's video production and entertainment ventures to paying his mother-in-law $8,000 a month to babysit his daughter and other union employees' children to footing a $13,000 bill for membership at a Beverly Hills cigar club.
Another Stern underling, former SEIU leader Alejandro Stephens, is under FBI investigation, the LA Times reported this week, for $150,000 in consulting fees paid "under a confidential agreement" signed by Stern. The feds allege the money funded a no-show job for Stephens. While probing the smelly deal, the feds also stumbled upon a cozy agreement by SEIU executives to shell out $80,000 to promote a book Stern wrote in 2006. The SEIU may not have been looking after rank-and-file workers, but Stern made sure the SEIU was looking after him.
Now, Stern's profligate successors will steer an estimated $44 million in union worker dues into Democratic coffers this November -- all in the name of defeating right-wing enemies of the working people. Perhaps it's time for rank-and-file workers to stage a tea party of their own.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
The Service Employees International Union plans to send 25,000 rank-and-file workers on 500 buses to Washington this weekend to protest the tea party movement, Republicans and Fox News. If SEIU members had any sense, they'd be demonstrating at their own bosses' D.C. headquarters. It's the Big Labor Left, not the Tea Party Right, that is flushing rank-and-file union workers' hard-earned dues down the collective toilet in these hard times.
The co-organizer of the so-called "One Nation" protest by a coalition of progressive groups is George Gresham, president of the behemoth SEIU Local 1199 based in New York. (This is the same SEIU affiliate that employed current Obama domestic policy adviser Patrick Gaspard as chief lobbyist for nine years.) Peeved by all the attention that grassroots conservatives and limited government activists have received over the past year, Gresham spearheaded the rally plans earlier this summer to "counter the Tea Party narrative" and reclaim the voice for "working people." Perhaps Gresham should pay more attention to his workers' pensions than to tea party leaders' media appearances.
SEIU Local 1199's Upstate Pension Fund has plunged from 115 percent funded in 1999 to 75 percent funded, and its Greater New York Pension Fund was funded at only 58 percent of its future obligations as of 2007, according to Hudson Institute analyst Diana Furchtgott-Roth. The union fat cats blame Wall Street. But while the pensions of SEIU workers nationwide are in "endangered status," the pensions of SEIU top brass have been protected and remain fully funded.
The D.C.-based Alliance for Worker Freedom, which monitors labor union abuses, reported last year that 13 major local SEIU pension funds are in serious financial jeopardy. Indeed, fewer than one in every 160 union-represented workers is covered by a union pension with required assets. Local 1199 workers -- already subject to wage freezes to salvage their pensions -- might want to know how their leaders were able to pony up $1 million for Haiti earthquake relief in January while their retirement funds wither on the vine.
SEIU leaders have shown a special talent for squandering their workers' dues. They poured $10 million down the drain in Arkansas on a failed bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln. They spent $10 million on a nasty lawsuit against a competing union in California. They've burned through union dues to transport SEIU radicals to bully bank execs and their families at their private homes and to bus workers to Arizona to protest crackdowns on illegal aliens, who depress the wages of law-abiding working-class Americans.
Under former Purple Army Chief Andy Stern, the union's liabilities skyrocketed from $7.6 million to nearly $121 million. Stern burned through $61 million to put Barack Obama and the Democratic ruling majority in place. And before abruptly stepping down in April, he installed a cadre of labor management stooges embroiled in financial scandals across the country.
One of them, Stern protege and former SEIU national Vice President Tyrone Freeman, remains under FBI investigation for siphoning off hundreds of thousands of dollars in dues money for his personal enrichment and pleasure. The Los Angeles Times uncovered schemes that ranged from piping $600,000 in union contracts to his wife's video production and entertainment ventures to paying his mother-in-law $8,000 a month to babysit his daughter and other union employees' children to footing a $13,000 bill for membership at a Beverly Hills cigar club.
Another Stern underling, former SEIU leader Alejandro Stephens, is under FBI investigation, the LA Times reported this week, for $150,000 in consulting fees paid "under a confidential agreement" signed by Stern. The feds allege the money funded a no-show job for Stephens. While probing the smelly deal, the feds also stumbled upon a cozy agreement by SEIU executives to shell out $80,000 to promote a book Stern wrote in 2006. The SEIU may not have been looking after rank-and-file workers, but Stern made sure the SEIU was looking after him.
Now, Stern's profligate successors will steer an estimated $44 million in union worker dues into Democratic coffers this November -- all in the name of defeating right-wing enemies of the working people. Perhaps it's time for rank-and-file workers to stage a tea party of their own.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Stephen Colbert: Can’t Handle the Truthiness?
Jonah Goldberg
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Stephen Colbert's "testimony" before Congress last week was a clear sign that ironic rot (if you've got a better term, let me know) is sinking into the foundation of our political system.
Irony or post-irony or ironic post-whatever has been metastasizing through the culture for decades. The most famous example was "Seinfeld," a hilarious show that was famously "about nothing" and much-derided by earnest writers on the left and right for its detached mockery of any deeply held principle or conviction.
But it hardly began with "Seinfeld." David Letterman launched a talk show that made fun of talk shows. Before that, "Saturday Night Live" crafted brilliant fake commercials and newscasts (which, sadly, are the only reliably funny parts of the show these days).
In the 1990s, Washington fell in love with Hollywood in an unprecedented way. In countless films, politicians, reporters and pundits played themselves. There was also an influential, and occasionally funny, sitcom called "Murphy Brown" that jumped back and forth from make-believe to reality. Things got particularly confusing when Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the show for glamorizing out-of-wedlock birth, and the show's creators responded by having the fictional Murphy Brown whine about personal attacks on her lifestyle.
Things got outright weird with the creation of "The Daily Show," a fake news program hosted by Jon Stewart since 1999 that often provides some of the best (and occasionally the worst) criticism of American politics and is revered on the left as somehow newsier than news. For what it's worth, a senior Republican congressmen told me that a "Daily Show" piece on the GOP "Pledge to America" was the only one that drew blood.
"The Daily Show" begat "The Colbert Report," in which Colbert plays a jingoistic, know-it-all, borderline bigot whose standard for veracity can be summarized with the word "truthiness."
In other words, he pretends to be what many liberals claim Bill O'Reilly is. That's the joke, get it?
It was this Stephen Colbert who was invited to testify before a House judiciary subcommittee on immigration and labor. It was an excruciatingly inappropriate spectacle. "This is America," Colbert inveighed. "I don't want a tomato picked by a Mexican."
But who, exactly, is Colbert parodying here? O'Reilly doesn't talk like that. Nor does Sean Hannity or any of the usual targets Colbert's supposed to be lampooning. The real upshot of Colbert's shtick is that he's mocking people who disagree with him -- or with the left-wing base of the Democratic Party -- on the complicated issue of immigration.
This was made abundantly clear by the sober testimony of Carol Swain, a Vanderbilt University professor of law and political science, who argued quite effectively that a steady flow of cheap migrant labor depresses wages for poor blacks and other American workers while keeping working conditions grim.
Though Colbert would obviously deny it, his testimony amounted to calling Swain -- an African-American woman of very humble background -- an ignorant bigot, because her analysis runs counter to the liberal party line.
Colbert's defenders point to the fact that other celebrities have testified before Congress. "I would like to point out," Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) noted during the hearing, "that in the past the Republicans have had witnesses such as Loretta Swit, who played 'Hot Lips' Houlihan from 'MASH,' to testify on crush videos." True enough. But she didn't testify as "Hot Lips."
Colbert's testimony reduced the topic to a black-and-white issue in which people on the other side are fools or bigots worthy of cheap mockery. I thought the whole point of Colbert was to stand against that sort of thing by making fun of it, not by doing it. Are our politics really improved by making congressional hearings even more of a joke? Were they truthiness-deficient?
On Oct. 30, Colbert's "March to Keep Fear Alive" will join Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" on the National Mall. They will rationalize the stunts as send-ups and putdowns of all that is wrong with our politics. But by slowly degenerating from satire into plain old mockery, these guys are slowly becoming too-clever-by-half versions of the very people they claim to deplore.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Stephen Colbert's "testimony" before Congress last week was a clear sign that ironic rot (if you've got a better term, let me know) is sinking into the foundation of our political system.
Irony or post-irony or ironic post-whatever has been metastasizing through the culture for decades. The most famous example was "Seinfeld," a hilarious show that was famously "about nothing" and much-derided by earnest writers on the left and right for its detached mockery of any deeply held principle or conviction.
But it hardly began with "Seinfeld." David Letterman launched a talk show that made fun of talk shows. Before that, "Saturday Night Live" crafted brilliant fake commercials and newscasts (which, sadly, are the only reliably funny parts of the show these days).
In the 1990s, Washington fell in love with Hollywood in an unprecedented way. In countless films, politicians, reporters and pundits played themselves. There was also an influential, and occasionally funny, sitcom called "Murphy Brown" that jumped back and forth from make-believe to reality. Things got particularly confusing when Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the show for glamorizing out-of-wedlock birth, and the show's creators responded by having the fictional Murphy Brown whine about personal attacks on her lifestyle.
Things got outright weird with the creation of "The Daily Show," a fake news program hosted by Jon Stewart since 1999 that often provides some of the best (and occasionally the worst) criticism of American politics and is revered on the left as somehow newsier than news. For what it's worth, a senior Republican congressmen told me that a "Daily Show" piece on the GOP "Pledge to America" was the only one that drew blood.
"The Daily Show" begat "The Colbert Report," in which Colbert plays a jingoistic, know-it-all, borderline bigot whose standard for veracity can be summarized with the word "truthiness."
In other words, he pretends to be what many liberals claim Bill O'Reilly is. That's the joke, get it?
It was this Stephen Colbert who was invited to testify before a House judiciary subcommittee on immigration and labor. It was an excruciatingly inappropriate spectacle. "This is America," Colbert inveighed. "I don't want a tomato picked by a Mexican."
But who, exactly, is Colbert parodying here? O'Reilly doesn't talk like that. Nor does Sean Hannity or any of the usual targets Colbert's supposed to be lampooning. The real upshot of Colbert's shtick is that he's mocking people who disagree with him -- or with the left-wing base of the Democratic Party -- on the complicated issue of immigration.
This was made abundantly clear by the sober testimony of Carol Swain, a Vanderbilt University professor of law and political science, who argued quite effectively that a steady flow of cheap migrant labor depresses wages for poor blacks and other American workers while keeping working conditions grim.
Though Colbert would obviously deny it, his testimony amounted to calling Swain -- an African-American woman of very humble background -- an ignorant bigot, because her analysis runs counter to the liberal party line.
Colbert's defenders point to the fact that other celebrities have testified before Congress. "I would like to point out," Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) noted during the hearing, "that in the past the Republicans have had witnesses such as Loretta Swit, who played 'Hot Lips' Houlihan from 'MASH,' to testify on crush videos." True enough. But she didn't testify as "Hot Lips."
Colbert's testimony reduced the topic to a black-and-white issue in which people on the other side are fools or bigots worthy of cheap mockery. I thought the whole point of Colbert was to stand against that sort of thing by making fun of it, not by doing it. Are our politics really improved by making congressional hearings even more of a joke? Were they truthiness-deficient?
On Oct. 30, Colbert's "March to Keep Fear Alive" will join Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" on the National Mall. They will rationalize the stunts as send-ups and putdowns of all that is wrong with our politics. But by slowly degenerating from satire into plain old mockery, these guys are slowly becoming too-clever-by-half versions of the very people they claim to deplore.
If You’re Not A Leftist, Why Are You Voting Democrat?
Dennis Prager
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
All Americans, including conservatives, understand why any leftist would vote Democrat this year. The Democratic Party is now America's version of a European Social Democratic or even Green Party. In domestic policy, there is no significant difference between the American and European parties.
So there is no question as to why those on the left would vote Democrat. There is, however, a legitimate question regarding non-leftist Americans -- why would any of them vote for a Democrat this year?
The Democratic president and Democratic Party have expanded the American government to an unprecedented extent. Moreover, they have done so in unprecedented ways: Never before has such extensive society-changing legislation been passed without a single vote of the other political party; and unprecedentedly vast powers have been given to "czars" and their new federal agencies -- with no congressional oversight. Add to this a level of national debt that is unsustainable -- but meets the left's great aim of redistributing wealth -- and you have the most left-wing government in American history.
Why then would any of the vast majority of Americans who are not leftists vote Democratic this year?
The answer lies in emotion. For many non-leftist Democrats, it is emotionally impossible to vote Republican.
I can illustrate this best with a personal example that I often use in speeches to Jewish audiences.
I was raised both as an Orthodox Jew and a liberal Democrat. In my early 20s, not wanting to practice religious laws solely out of habit or fear, I experimented with religious non-observance.
I remember well the one time this yeshiva graduate ate ham. It was emotionally difficult.
I also well remember the first time this lifelong Democrat voted Republican. And it, too, was difficult. In fact, it was actually more emotionally difficult to vote Republican than to eat the ham.
Now, how could that be? How could it possibly have been more emotionally trying for a lifelong Democrat to vote Republican than for a lifelong observant Jew to eat ham? Isn't religion a far deeper conviction than politics?
The question implies the answer.
Liberalism and leftism are religions. While I felt I would be sinning against God when I tasted ham, I was certain I was sinning against both God and man were I to vote Republican.
That is how liberals, not to mention leftists, think: It is a grievous sin to vote Republican (unless the Republican is a liberal). One is abandoning their faith, values, community and very identity.
But it is more than that. What keeps most non-leftists voting Democrat (and calling themselves liberal) has been the spectacularly effective saturation of virtually all media and all educational institutions with the message that the right is mean spirited and dangerous.
One of the first books I ever owned -- in high school -- was titled "Danger on the Right." Throughout the world, people are fed the message "Danger on the Right" -- and virtually never "Danger on the Left," despite the left's far bloodier and more totalitarian record.
The majority of people who vote Democratic do not have left-wing values. Only 20 percent of Americans even consider themselves liberal. But vast numbers of people with views that are not leftist have been effectively brainwashed (one cannot come up with a more accurate word) into fearing the right when the threats to their liberty, as well as to America's standing in the world, its exceptionalism and its economic future all emanate from the left.
That is why nearly all Democratic and leftist reactions to conservatives and Republicans are to avoid argument (remember, on the issues the left has few supporters) and smear them as SIXHIRB, my acronym for "Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Racist, Bigoted." It is almost impossible to come up with the name of a leading conservative whom the dominant media have not dismissed as one or more of SIXHIRB -- and usually as a buffoon as well. This obviously serves the left and the Democratic Party in many ways. But the most important is to keep non-leftists in fear of anyone who opposes the left. In effect, the left says, and has been saying for a hundred years, "You may not agree with us, but our opponents are evil."
The Democratic appeal to black voters provides an excellent example. In nearly half a century, the left has done nothing for black America. Leftists have ruined the cities they govern and most of the public schools they control. But they have mastered one thing -- the ability to paint their opponents as racist opponents of blacks. So, blacks, many of whom have conservative values -- from opposing same-sex marriage to supporting school vouchers -- vote almost universally for the left.
The same holds true of most American Jews. Most live profoundly conservative lives but vote left. Why? Overwhelmingly because they believe there is "Danger on the Right." It doesn't matter how anti-Israel the left is and how pro-Israel the right is, or that liberal Time magazine has a mendacious cover story on "Why Israel Doesn't Care about Peace," while every major conservative periodical is passionately protective of Israel. For most Jews, voting Republican is a far greater sin, emotionally, morally and socially than eating ham.
That is why virtually every liberal columnist at The New York Times has described political opposition to Barack Obama as racist. The left cannot win on arguments. It must demonize its opponents. From Stalin calling Trotsky a Fascist to Frank Rich labeling the tea parties as mimicking the Nazis' Kristallnacht, this has been the favored leftist method of achieving power. And that is why it remains so hard for most Democrats to vote what they believe and vote Republican -- a lifetime of demonization has worked.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
All Americans, including conservatives, understand why any leftist would vote Democrat this year. The Democratic Party is now America's version of a European Social Democratic or even Green Party. In domestic policy, there is no significant difference between the American and European parties.
So there is no question as to why those on the left would vote Democrat. There is, however, a legitimate question regarding non-leftist Americans -- why would any of them vote for a Democrat this year?
The Democratic president and Democratic Party have expanded the American government to an unprecedented extent. Moreover, they have done so in unprecedented ways: Never before has such extensive society-changing legislation been passed without a single vote of the other political party; and unprecedentedly vast powers have been given to "czars" and their new federal agencies -- with no congressional oversight. Add to this a level of national debt that is unsustainable -- but meets the left's great aim of redistributing wealth -- and you have the most left-wing government in American history.
Why then would any of the vast majority of Americans who are not leftists vote Democratic this year?
The answer lies in emotion. For many non-leftist Democrats, it is emotionally impossible to vote Republican.
I can illustrate this best with a personal example that I often use in speeches to Jewish audiences.
I was raised both as an Orthodox Jew and a liberal Democrat. In my early 20s, not wanting to practice religious laws solely out of habit or fear, I experimented with religious non-observance.
I remember well the one time this yeshiva graduate ate ham. It was emotionally difficult.
I also well remember the first time this lifelong Democrat voted Republican. And it, too, was difficult. In fact, it was actually more emotionally difficult to vote Republican than to eat the ham.
Now, how could that be? How could it possibly have been more emotionally trying for a lifelong Democrat to vote Republican than for a lifelong observant Jew to eat ham? Isn't religion a far deeper conviction than politics?
The question implies the answer.
Liberalism and leftism are religions. While I felt I would be sinning against God when I tasted ham, I was certain I was sinning against both God and man were I to vote Republican.
That is how liberals, not to mention leftists, think: It is a grievous sin to vote Republican (unless the Republican is a liberal). One is abandoning their faith, values, community and very identity.
But it is more than that. What keeps most non-leftists voting Democrat (and calling themselves liberal) has been the spectacularly effective saturation of virtually all media and all educational institutions with the message that the right is mean spirited and dangerous.
One of the first books I ever owned -- in high school -- was titled "Danger on the Right." Throughout the world, people are fed the message "Danger on the Right" -- and virtually never "Danger on the Left," despite the left's far bloodier and more totalitarian record.
The majority of people who vote Democratic do not have left-wing values. Only 20 percent of Americans even consider themselves liberal. But vast numbers of people with views that are not leftist have been effectively brainwashed (one cannot come up with a more accurate word) into fearing the right when the threats to their liberty, as well as to America's standing in the world, its exceptionalism and its economic future all emanate from the left.
That is why nearly all Democratic and leftist reactions to conservatives and Republicans are to avoid argument (remember, on the issues the left has few supporters) and smear them as SIXHIRB, my acronym for "Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Racist, Bigoted." It is almost impossible to come up with the name of a leading conservative whom the dominant media have not dismissed as one or more of SIXHIRB -- and usually as a buffoon as well. This obviously serves the left and the Democratic Party in many ways. But the most important is to keep non-leftists in fear of anyone who opposes the left. In effect, the left says, and has been saying for a hundred years, "You may not agree with us, but our opponents are evil."
The Democratic appeal to black voters provides an excellent example. In nearly half a century, the left has done nothing for black America. Leftists have ruined the cities they govern and most of the public schools they control. But they have mastered one thing -- the ability to paint their opponents as racist opponents of blacks. So, blacks, many of whom have conservative values -- from opposing same-sex marriage to supporting school vouchers -- vote almost universally for the left.
The same holds true of most American Jews. Most live profoundly conservative lives but vote left. Why? Overwhelmingly because they believe there is "Danger on the Right." It doesn't matter how anti-Israel the left is and how pro-Israel the right is, or that liberal Time magazine has a mendacious cover story on "Why Israel Doesn't Care about Peace," while every major conservative periodical is passionately protective of Israel. For most Jews, voting Republican is a far greater sin, emotionally, morally and socially than eating ham.
That is why virtually every liberal columnist at The New York Times has described political opposition to Barack Obama as racist. The left cannot win on arguments. It must demonize its opponents. From Stalin calling Trotsky a Fascist to Frank Rich labeling the tea parties as mimicking the Nazis' Kristallnacht, this has been the favored leftist method of achieving power. And that is why it remains so hard for most Democrats to vote what they believe and vote Republican -- a lifetime of demonization has worked.
What the Left is Really After
Caroline Glick
Monday, September, 27, 2010
Following the example of its counterparts in the West, for decades the Israeli Left has carefully cultivated its image as the fun side of the political divide.
In a thousand different ways, the public was told that the Left is on the side of tomorrow. It is the home of optimism. If you want a cheery future, if you want to party all night long and never get a hangover, the image-makers told us the Left is the place to be.
From the Left's perspective, the peace process between Israel and the PLO was the fulfillment of its promise. It was also its key to a permanent cultural monopoly and control of government.
Israelis who objected to handing control over the country's heartland and capital city to the PLO were nothing more than gloom and doom preaching, messianic extremists. The Right was angry. The Left was happy. The Right was the party of war. The Left was the party of peace. The Right was suspicious and tribal. The Left was optimistic and international.
The first blows to the Left's otherwise perfect narrative were cast just seven months after the moment of its greatest triumph. Just seven months after the epic handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, the first Palestinian suicide bomber made his appearance. On April 6, 1994, the bomber murdered eight Israelis on a bus in Afula.
By the time the peace process was a year old, the image of the suicide bomber had begun to eclipse the image of the balloon-festooned peace the Left sought to embody.
It was at this time that the Left could have been expected to reconsider its commitment to the peace process. But that is not what happened. The Left maintained absolute allegiance to the phony peace process. It simply ditched hope.
Quietly but relentlessly, the Left replaced hope for a better future with fear of a terrible future. Specifically, Leftist leaders like Haim Ramon began threatening their countrymen with national demographic destruction.
Ramon seized upon falsified Palestinian demographic forecasts. He and his comrades used the data - which inflated the number of Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip by 50 percent - to threaten their countrymen with encroaching demographic doom.
True, transferring land to the PLO had turned out to be a very bad idea. True life had been better and safer before the fake peace process.
But, the Left warned, if we didn't retreat to the 1949 armistice lines anyway, Jews would become a minority in our country within 15 years.
It took much longer for the demographic time bomb to be exposed as a dud than for the peace fantasy to explode. Indeed, Ramon's Kadima Party still bases its surrender platform on the phony PLO population data.
But today, with even the leftist media admitting that Israeli Jews have the highest birthrates in the Western world and that Israeli and Palestinian birthrates are rapidly converging, it has become difficult to convince Israelis that surrender is necessary on demographic grounds. Indeed, a poll taken by the post-Zionist Geneva Initiative in 2008 showed that 71% of Israelis were not concerned about losing Israel's Jewish majority.
The Left's demographic threats began unraveling just before its land surrender doctrine was wholly discredited. The American-Israeli Demographic Research Group published its initial study that exposed the Palestinian population data as a fraud just months before the August 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.
YET EVEN as its plan of surrendering land to jihadists was exposed as so much idiocy, and its demographic doomsday scenarios were proven wrong, the Left remained steadfast on its course. It simply found a new argument.
Beginning around 2006, the Left began threatening that if Israel does not remove itself from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, the US will abandon us. On Sunday night, former prime minister Ehud Olmert presented this argument in his keynote speech before the Geneva Initiative's annual conference.
Olmert claimed that if Israel does not retreat voluntarily to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, the US will force it to retreat. Israel, he said, has no choice but to voluntarily partition Jerusalem and withdraw from Judea and Samaria. Left unsaid was the assumption that such a retreat will entail turning between 100,000 and a half million Israelis who live in the areas to be ceded into homeless internal refugees.
Olmert's statement is worth considering not because he said it, but because today it is the Left's central argument for withdrawal. In analyzing this claim, lt us assume at the outset that Olmert is correct and that if Israel does not voluntarily cede Judea and Samaria and partition Jerusalem, the US will try to coerce Israel to do so.
In this scenario Israel faces two possible futures. It can withdraw or it can resist US pressure, try to remain in place and only leave when compelled to do so.
If Israel withdraws it will relinquish defensible borders and clear the way for the emergence of a terrorist-controlled area abutting all its major population centers.
At a minimum, this terror enclave will be in a de facto state of war with Israel as it cultivates warm ties with Syria, Hizbullah, Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.
In addition to its increased vulnerability to external enemies, Israel will be a society at war with itself. Its population will be deeply scarred and weakened after hundreds of thousands of Israelis are expelled from their homes.
If Israel does not withdraw, its cities will remain secure and its population will not be in crisis. But Israel will have to contend with a hostile US government threatening to take unknown steps to force it to contract to within indefensible borders.
What will those US threats involve? Washington is already arming and training a Palestinian army. It is already selling the Arabs the most advanced weapons in the US arsenal. It is already providing military assistance to the Hizbullah-controlled Lebanese army. It is already permitting Iran to develop nuclear weapons.
Would Olmert and his leftist colleagues have us believe that the US military will invade Israel to force us to exit Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem?
If that is what the Left is hinting, let us assume it is right. But if the Left is right, is Israel better off preemptively dooming itself to chronic wars and strategic vulnerability by accepting indefensible borders than by refusing to do so? At least if we refuse to stick our neck in the noose, the US government will be forced to make the case for destroying Israel to the American people.
And then there is the Left's certainty that it can foresee the future. That would be the same Left that promised us peace, demographic destruction, and that Gaza would become the new Singapore after we withdrew. But even if there is a residue of reality in its new threats, why should we squander Israel's security based on a scenario that may or may not play out?
THE FACT of the matter is that like the peace fantasy and the demographic fantasy, the international-isolation-and-war-with-the-US fantasy is pure nonsense. None of these leftist scenarios - whether rosy or bleak - have ever withstood the slightest scrutiny.
So what accounts for the Left's behavior? Why is it that intelligent people like Olmert and Kadima leader Tzipi Livni and their comrades in the Labor Party and Meretz and the Geneva Initiative are so quick to make insipid arguments? Why won't they just admit that Israel is better off remaining where it is and not contracting to within indefensible boundaries?
What do they really want?
The answer to this last question is as simple as it is insidious. What the Left truly seeks is not peace or even security. In pushing their land surrender policy in the face of a mountain of evidence that it imperils the country, leftist ideologues and political leaders are seeking to destroy their ideological rivals on the Right. That is, they wish to destroy religious Zionism.
It is religious Zionism, which looks to Jerusalem rather than to Tel Aviv, that drives the Left to distraction. It is the hope of destroying religious Zionism by destroying the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem - the Jewish nerve center of the country - that keeps the Left on its path. This truth was exposed in a Haaretz editorial published in July 2005, a month before 10,000 predominantly religious Israelis were expelled from their homes in Gaza and northern Samaria.
As the Left's mouthpiece explained, "The disengagement of Israeli policy from its religious fuel is the real disengagement currently on the agenda. On the day after the disengagement, religious Zionism's status will be different."
The editorial concluded, "The real question is not how many mortar shells will fall, or who will guard the Philadelphi route, or whether the Palestinians will dance on the roofs of Ganei Tal. The real question is who sets the national agenda."
So, too, in an interview with Yediot Aharonot in October 2006, Livni castigated religious Zionists as the odd man out that was spoiling things for the rest of the country. As she put it, "In the Israeli political system there are no real gaps concerning the [vision of a] comprehensive settlement of the conflict with the Palestinians. The dispute is between the religious public and the rest of the Israelis."
In truth, just two weeks before her interview appeared, a Maagar Mohot poll of Israeli Jews showed that 73% of Israeli Jews opposed further withdrawals. At no point has the majority of Israel's Jews ever asserted that it views religious Zionists as a threat or as the major obstacle to a better future.
Indeed, in a poll published earlier this month by Bar-Ilan University's Begin-Sadat Center, 79% of the public said they are "not at all concerned" by the consistent rise in the proportion of religious Israelis in the IDF officer corps. Only 1% of the public said it was very concerned about the trend.
What the Left's move from hope to fear in the service of its plan to destroy its ideological rival shows is that in contrast to its carefully crafted image, the Left is fundamentally out of step with the public. They are not the optimistic side on the political divide. And they are not interested in making our lives better or more fun. They are motivated by hatred of their rivals, not love of country or devotion to peace.
Perhaps the only question then is how many more times they will be allowed to lead us astray before we stop allowing them define the terms of our national debate?
Monday, September, 27, 2010
Following the example of its counterparts in the West, for decades the Israeli Left has carefully cultivated its image as the fun side of the political divide.
In a thousand different ways, the public was told that the Left is on the side of tomorrow. It is the home of optimism. If you want a cheery future, if you want to party all night long and never get a hangover, the image-makers told us the Left is the place to be.
From the Left's perspective, the peace process between Israel and the PLO was the fulfillment of its promise. It was also its key to a permanent cultural monopoly and control of government.
Israelis who objected to handing control over the country's heartland and capital city to the PLO were nothing more than gloom and doom preaching, messianic extremists. The Right was angry. The Left was happy. The Right was the party of war. The Left was the party of peace. The Right was suspicious and tribal. The Left was optimistic and international.
The first blows to the Left's otherwise perfect narrative were cast just seven months after the moment of its greatest triumph. Just seven months after the epic handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, the first Palestinian suicide bomber made his appearance. On April 6, 1994, the bomber murdered eight Israelis on a bus in Afula.
By the time the peace process was a year old, the image of the suicide bomber had begun to eclipse the image of the balloon-festooned peace the Left sought to embody.
It was at this time that the Left could have been expected to reconsider its commitment to the peace process. But that is not what happened. The Left maintained absolute allegiance to the phony peace process. It simply ditched hope.
Quietly but relentlessly, the Left replaced hope for a better future with fear of a terrible future. Specifically, Leftist leaders like Haim Ramon began threatening their countrymen with national demographic destruction.
Ramon seized upon falsified Palestinian demographic forecasts. He and his comrades used the data - which inflated the number of Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip by 50 percent - to threaten their countrymen with encroaching demographic doom.
True, transferring land to the PLO had turned out to be a very bad idea. True life had been better and safer before the fake peace process.
But, the Left warned, if we didn't retreat to the 1949 armistice lines anyway, Jews would become a minority in our country within 15 years.
It took much longer for the demographic time bomb to be exposed as a dud than for the peace fantasy to explode. Indeed, Ramon's Kadima Party still bases its surrender platform on the phony PLO population data.
But today, with even the leftist media admitting that Israeli Jews have the highest birthrates in the Western world and that Israeli and Palestinian birthrates are rapidly converging, it has become difficult to convince Israelis that surrender is necessary on demographic grounds. Indeed, a poll taken by the post-Zionist Geneva Initiative in 2008 showed that 71% of Israelis were not concerned about losing Israel's Jewish majority.
The Left's demographic threats began unraveling just before its land surrender doctrine was wholly discredited. The American-Israeli Demographic Research Group published its initial study that exposed the Palestinian population data as a fraud just months before the August 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.
YET EVEN as its plan of surrendering land to jihadists was exposed as so much idiocy, and its demographic doomsday scenarios were proven wrong, the Left remained steadfast on its course. It simply found a new argument.
Beginning around 2006, the Left began threatening that if Israel does not remove itself from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, the US will abandon us. On Sunday night, former prime minister Ehud Olmert presented this argument in his keynote speech before the Geneva Initiative's annual conference.
Olmert claimed that if Israel does not retreat voluntarily to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, the US will force it to retreat. Israel, he said, has no choice but to voluntarily partition Jerusalem and withdraw from Judea and Samaria. Left unsaid was the assumption that such a retreat will entail turning between 100,000 and a half million Israelis who live in the areas to be ceded into homeless internal refugees.
Olmert's statement is worth considering not because he said it, but because today it is the Left's central argument for withdrawal. In analyzing this claim, lt us assume at the outset that Olmert is correct and that if Israel does not voluntarily cede Judea and Samaria and partition Jerusalem, the US will try to coerce Israel to do so.
In this scenario Israel faces two possible futures. It can withdraw or it can resist US pressure, try to remain in place and only leave when compelled to do so.
If Israel withdraws it will relinquish defensible borders and clear the way for the emergence of a terrorist-controlled area abutting all its major population centers.
At a minimum, this terror enclave will be in a de facto state of war with Israel as it cultivates warm ties with Syria, Hizbullah, Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.
In addition to its increased vulnerability to external enemies, Israel will be a society at war with itself. Its population will be deeply scarred and weakened after hundreds of thousands of Israelis are expelled from their homes.
If Israel does not withdraw, its cities will remain secure and its population will not be in crisis. But Israel will have to contend with a hostile US government threatening to take unknown steps to force it to contract to within indefensible borders.
What will those US threats involve? Washington is already arming and training a Palestinian army. It is already selling the Arabs the most advanced weapons in the US arsenal. It is already providing military assistance to the Hizbullah-controlled Lebanese army. It is already permitting Iran to develop nuclear weapons.
Would Olmert and his leftist colleagues have us believe that the US military will invade Israel to force us to exit Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem?
If that is what the Left is hinting, let us assume it is right. But if the Left is right, is Israel better off preemptively dooming itself to chronic wars and strategic vulnerability by accepting indefensible borders than by refusing to do so? At least if we refuse to stick our neck in the noose, the US government will be forced to make the case for destroying Israel to the American people.
And then there is the Left's certainty that it can foresee the future. That would be the same Left that promised us peace, demographic destruction, and that Gaza would become the new Singapore after we withdrew. But even if there is a residue of reality in its new threats, why should we squander Israel's security based on a scenario that may or may not play out?
THE FACT of the matter is that like the peace fantasy and the demographic fantasy, the international-isolation-and-war-with-the-US fantasy is pure nonsense. None of these leftist scenarios - whether rosy or bleak - have ever withstood the slightest scrutiny.
So what accounts for the Left's behavior? Why is it that intelligent people like Olmert and Kadima leader Tzipi Livni and their comrades in the Labor Party and Meretz and the Geneva Initiative are so quick to make insipid arguments? Why won't they just admit that Israel is better off remaining where it is and not contracting to within indefensible boundaries?
What do they really want?
The answer to this last question is as simple as it is insidious. What the Left truly seeks is not peace or even security. In pushing their land surrender policy in the face of a mountain of evidence that it imperils the country, leftist ideologues and political leaders are seeking to destroy their ideological rivals on the Right. That is, they wish to destroy religious Zionism.
It is religious Zionism, which looks to Jerusalem rather than to Tel Aviv, that drives the Left to distraction. It is the hope of destroying religious Zionism by destroying the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem - the Jewish nerve center of the country - that keeps the Left on its path. This truth was exposed in a Haaretz editorial published in July 2005, a month before 10,000 predominantly religious Israelis were expelled from their homes in Gaza and northern Samaria.
As the Left's mouthpiece explained, "The disengagement of Israeli policy from its religious fuel is the real disengagement currently on the agenda. On the day after the disengagement, religious Zionism's status will be different."
The editorial concluded, "The real question is not how many mortar shells will fall, or who will guard the Philadelphi route, or whether the Palestinians will dance on the roofs of Ganei Tal. The real question is who sets the national agenda."
So, too, in an interview with Yediot Aharonot in October 2006, Livni castigated religious Zionists as the odd man out that was spoiling things for the rest of the country. As she put it, "In the Israeli political system there are no real gaps concerning the [vision of a] comprehensive settlement of the conflict with the Palestinians. The dispute is between the religious public and the rest of the Israelis."
In truth, just two weeks before her interview appeared, a Maagar Mohot poll of Israeli Jews showed that 73% of Israeli Jews opposed further withdrawals. At no point has the majority of Israel's Jews ever asserted that it views religious Zionists as a threat or as the major obstacle to a better future.
Indeed, in a poll published earlier this month by Bar-Ilan University's Begin-Sadat Center, 79% of the public said they are "not at all concerned" by the consistent rise in the proportion of religious Israelis in the IDF officer corps. Only 1% of the public said it was very concerned about the trend.
What the Left's move from hope to fear in the service of its plan to destroy its ideological rival shows is that in contrast to its carefully crafted image, the Left is fundamentally out of step with the public. They are not the optimistic side on the political divide. And they are not interested in making our lives better or more fun. They are motivated by hatred of their rivals, not love of country or devotion to peace.
Perhaps the only question then is how many more times they will be allowed to lead us astray before we stop allowing them define the terms of our national debate?
Monday, September 27, 2010
BP Spill: Numbers vs. Hysteria
Contrary to accusations by the media and environmental groups, the Coast Guard used worst-case scenarios from the start.
Lou Dolinar
Monday, September 27, 2010
The controversy over whether the Obama administration and BP conspired to hide the size of the Deepwater Horizon spill still has legs, even though, as we reported in early August, the final official numbers, up to 62,000 barrels a day, were devastating to BP. Last Thursday, independent scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty labs released a report that largely backs up the government’s final claims. Earlier, shifting estimates, including lowball numbers of 1,000 to 5,000 barrels leaking per day, provoked a lawsuit by an environmental group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. The group charged that the Obama administration and political appointees were withholding documents that would reveal why it issued that estimate.
Good luck with that lawsuit. I would never misunderestimate the stupidity or mendacity of political appointees — nor of the media. But what is striking as I’ve gone back through the record is that it was clear early on that the dispute over the size of the spill, like a lot of the coverage, was overblown by media cheap shots at changing estimates.
Why? The “official” size didn’t matter initially. The media, to coin a phrase, misundereported the fact that lowball estimates were never used in planning the response. Practically from day one, the Coast Guard’s official planning number, which led to decisions such as how much boom and how many skimmers would be needed, was 100,000 barrels a day. That’s significantly higher than the 62,000 barrels or less per day the government now says was spilled. This conservative overresourcing (for example, some areas had double and triple layers of boom) might partly account for the surprisingly light damage the spill did to wetlands, as even the New York Times is finally reporting.
The catastrophic potential of the well was never secret. The pre-drilling “well plan,” which BP was required by law to file with the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, said that up to 162,000 barrels a day could flow in a blowout. Less than a week after the rig sank, the Coast Guard put its contingency plan in place to contain up to 100,000 barrels a day, according to logs obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, even as the “official” estimate stood at 1,000 barrels. The much larger contingency estimate may well have originated with BP, which at the time was being roped into the National Incident Command system, a requirement for the “responsible party” under relevant law. Independent oil-industry sources came up with similar numbers.
As the Coast Guard morphed into the National Incident Command, press releases, including statements by President Obama, repeatedly stressed that planning was for “worst-case estimates” and was unaffected by the 1,000-to-5,000-barrel figure or by numbers emanating from the Flow Rate Technical Group. It’s hard to be sure, as much information is disappearing behind websites’ pay walls, but it appears that CNN’s Candy Crowley was one of the few who thought to ask what the “worst case” amounted to, and how it compared to the response. On May 2, both Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and National Incident Commander Adm. Thad Allen told her that100,000 barrels per day was what they were planning to contain. This wasn’t a number anyone went out of his way to publicize, but it was definitely in the public record.
The New York Times and other outlets, meanwhile, managed to write stories on May 4 about politicians excoriating BP for withholding the worst-case data; apparently these journalists didn’t notice that the response was being shaped by those very worst-case figures. And it was treated as a major scandal when, as late as June 20, Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.) announced he had subpoenaed documents in which BP estimated the spill could be as large as 100,000 barrels a day.
The president, when he addressed the nation on the subject, should have used his megaphone to emphasize the precise amount of oil in the generous planning estimate. He should have explained what the stakes were, and what the nation was up against. Failure to convey this information contributed to the public panic surrounding the spill. Scientists who were making tentative and inconclusive findings about underwater oil short-circuited peer review to warn of thousands of barrels of oil in underwater “plumes.” As one prominent scientist told me this week, that’s a scary amount of oil when it looked as if the government was bumbling its way to a 1,000-to-5,000-barrel daily budget. That the government was preparing to contain 100,000 barrels a day came as news to him. Reporters, meanwhile, amplified the concern of scientists into something bordering on hysteria.
BP, unsurprisingly, was being treated like a defendant and was acting like one. Spokesmen said as late as May 15 that they couldn’t tell how much oil was coming out of the well, and thus were sticking with their story of 5,000 barrels as the “real” output. The Miranda strategy will probably serve them well in court.
So why was the government bothering with spill estimates at all? It appears, based on published comments from Admiral Allen and others, that the National Incident Command wanted the Flow Rate Technical Group to come up with a definitive number to be used at a later date for potential litigation and to gauge how much oil was in the gulf for final cleanup. A spokesman for the group has not responded to my calls, but the new findings from Lamont-Dougherty will reinforce its position.
Lou Dolinar
Monday, September 27, 2010
The controversy over whether the Obama administration and BP conspired to hide the size of the Deepwater Horizon spill still has legs, even though, as we reported in early August, the final official numbers, up to 62,000 barrels a day, were devastating to BP. Last Thursday, independent scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty labs released a report that largely backs up the government’s final claims. Earlier, shifting estimates, including lowball numbers of 1,000 to 5,000 barrels leaking per day, provoked a lawsuit by an environmental group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. The group charged that the Obama administration and political appointees were withholding documents that would reveal why it issued that estimate.
Good luck with that lawsuit. I would never misunderestimate the stupidity or mendacity of political appointees — nor of the media. But what is striking as I’ve gone back through the record is that it was clear early on that the dispute over the size of the spill, like a lot of the coverage, was overblown by media cheap shots at changing estimates.
Why? The “official” size didn’t matter initially. The media, to coin a phrase, misundereported the fact that lowball estimates were never used in planning the response. Practically from day one, the Coast Guard’s official planning number, which led to decisions such as how much boom and how many skimmers would be needed, was 100,000 barrels a day. That’s significantly higher than the 62,000 barrels or less per day the government now says was spilled. This conservative overresourcing (for example, some areas had double and triple layers of boom) might partly account for the surprisingly light damage the spill did to wetlands, as even the New York Times is finally reporting.
The catastrophic potential of the well was never secret. The pre-drilling “well plan,” which BP was required by law to file with the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, said that up to 162,000 barrels a day could flow in a blowout. Less than a week after the rig sank, the Coast Guard put its contingency plan in place to contain up to 100,000 barrels a day, according to logs obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, even as the “official” estimate stood at 1,000 barrels. The much larger contingency estimate may well have originated with BP, which at the time was being roped into the National Incident Command system, a requirement for the “responsible party” under relevant law. Independent oil-industry sources came up with similar numbers.
As the Coast Guard morphed into the National Incident Command, press releases, including statements by President Obama, repeatedly stressed that planning was for “worst-case estimates” and was unaffected by the 1,000-to-5,000-barrel figure or by numbers emanating from the Flow Rate Technical Group. It’s hard to be sure, as much information is disappearing behind websites’ pay walls, but it appears that CNN’s Candy Crowley was one of the few who thought to ask what the “worst case” amounted to, and how it compared to the response. On May 2, both Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and National Incident Commander Adm. Thad Allen told her that100,000 barrels per day was what they were planning to contain. This wasn’t a number anyone went out of his way to publicize, but it was definitely in the public record.
The New York Times and other outlets, meanwhile, managed to write stories on May 4 about politicians excoriating BP for withholding the worst-case data; apparently these journalists didn’t notice that the response was being shaped by those very worst-case figures. And it was treated as a major scandal when, as late as June 20, Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.) announced he had subpoenaed documents in which BP estimated the spill could be as large as 100,000 barrels a day.
The president, when he addressed the nation on the subject, should have used his megaphone to emphasize the precise amount of oil in the generous planning estimate. He should have explained what the stakes were, and what the nation was up against. Failure to convey this information contributed to the public panic surrounding the spill. Scientists who were making tentative and inconclusive findings about underwater oil short-circuited peer review to warn of thousands of barrels of oil in underwater “plumes.” As one prominent scientist told me this week, that’s a scary amount of oil when it looked as if the government was bumbling its way to a 1,000-to-5,000-barrel daily budget. That the government was preparing to contain 100,000 barrels a day came as news to him. Reporters, meanwhile, amplified the concern of scientists into something bordering on hysteria.
BP, unsurprisingly, was being treated like a defendant and was acting like one. Spokesmen said as late as May 15 that they couldn’t tell how much oil was coming out of the well, and thus were sticking with their story of 5,000 barrels as the “real” output. The Miranda strategy will probably serve them well in court.
So why was the government bothering with spill estimates at all? It appears, based on published comments from Admiral Allen and others, that the National Incident Command wanted the Flow Rate Technical Group to come up with a definitive number to be used at a later date for potential litigation and to gauge how much oil was in the gulf for final cleanup. A spokesman for the group has not responded to my calls, but the new findings from Lamont-Dougherty will reinforce its position.
Who Are the Realists and Who Are the Ideologues
Star Parker
Monday, September 27, 2010
The banter continues about the Republican Party being pushed to the right by “ideologues.”
Working Americans interest in politics is motivated by how to make our lives better. They don’t care about how one set of intellectuals or pundits think the world should be against some other set of ideas of ideology. They care about the facts. How the world really is and acting accordingly.
Two principles often labeled as “right wing ideology” are that as a society we are better off with limited government and individual freedom and that as individuals we are better off being married. Is this wishful thinking of ideologues or is this reality?
Two publications just out provide factual substantiation backing up both these principles.
Economic Freedom of the World, now in its 16th edition, is an annual index published co-operatively by 70 think tanks from around the world. This team has developed measures of economic freedom and then correlates these measures with economic performance in every country in the world.
What, according to this publication, is economic freedom? The core principles are “personal choice, voluntary exchange, freedom to compete, and security of privately owned property.”
They look at five areas to measure if these conditions exist. Size of government (expenditures, taxes, and government enterprises), legal structure and security of property rights, access to sound money, freedom to trade, and regulation of credit, labor, and business.
The result of the analysis – using the measures of economic freedom and looking at 141 nations around the world to examine the correlation between economic freedom and prosperity - leads to a clear conclusion. More economic freedom correlates with more prosperity and higher quality of life.
Breaking down 141 nations into four quartiles, running from the least free quarter to the most free, shows the following: The highest quartile – the most free - has an average per capita income two and half times higher that than the average of the second quartile, four and half times higher than the third quartile, and nine and a half times higher than the least free quartile.
Average life expectancy in the most economically free nations is seven years higher than the second quartile, eleven years higher than the third, and twenty years higher than in the poorest.
The Index also shows that nations that are more economically free are more likely to be politically free – they have more political rights and civil liberties – than those not economically free. And individuals in the most economically free nations report the highest levels of “life satisfaction.”
How about marriage?
A new paper published by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation examines data in our own country and shows with clarity that the more likely a household is headed by a married couple the less likely that household will be poor.
Thirty six percent of children living in households headed by a single mother are poor. Six percent of children living in households headed by married parents are poor.
Among black families, 38% of single parent households are poor compared to 13% of households with married parents. Among white households, 22% of single parent household are poor compared to 3% of households with married parents.
As Rector notes, when President Johnson announced the War on Poverty in 1964, 93% of babies born in our country were born to married parents. Today 59% of babies born in the United States have married mothers.
If you accept my definition of ideologue, that it’s someone wedded to a set of ideas, independent of facts, who are the ideologues?
We have overwhelming factual evidence that the more economic freedom individuals have in a country, the more likely that nation will be prosperous, with a high quality of life. We also have overwhelming evidence showing that the more likely a family is headed by a single parent, the more likely that household will be poor.
Looking from the other side, we have overwhelming evidence that government spending does not reduce poverty nor does big government create prosperity.
So who are the ideologues and who are the realists?
Monday, September 27, 2010
The banter continues about the Republican Party being pushed to the right by “ideologues.”
Working Americans interest in politics is motivated by how to make our lives better. They don’t care about how one set of intellectuals or pundits think the world should be against some other set of ideas of ideology. They care about the facts. How the world really is and acting accordingly.
Two principles often labeled as “right wing ideology” are that as a society we are better off with limited government and individual freedom and that as individuals we are better off being married. Is this wishful thinking of ideologues or is this reality?
Two publications just out provide factual substantiation backing up both these principles.
Economic Freedom of the World, now in its 16th edition, is an annual index published co-operatively by 70 think tanks from around the world. This team has developed measures of economic freedom and then correlates these measures with economic performance in every country in the world.
What, according to this publication, is economic freedom? The core principles are “personal choice, voluntary exchange, freedom to compete, and security of privately owned property.”
They look at five areas to measure if these conditions exist. Size of government (expenditures, taxes, and government enterprises), legal structure and security of property rights, access to sound money, freedom to trade, and regulation of credit, labor, and business.
The result of the analysis – using the measures of economic freedom and looking at 141 nations around the world to examine the correlation between economic freedom and prosperity - leads to a clear conclusion. More economic freedom correlates with more prosperity and higher quality of life.
Breaking down 141 nations into four quartiles, running from the least free quarter to the most free, shows the following: The highest quartile – the most free - has an average per capita income two and half times higher that than the average of the second quartile, four and half times higher than the third quartile, and nine and a half times higher than the least free quartile.
Average life expectancy in the most economically free nations is seven years higher than the second quartile, eleven years higher than the third, and twenty years higher than in the poorest.
The Index also shows that nations that are more economically free are more likely to be politically free – they have more political rights and civil liberties – than those not economically free. And individuals in the most economically free nations report the highest levels of “life satisfaction.”
How about marriage?
A new paper published by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation examines data in our own country and shows with clarity that the more likely a household is headed by a married couple the less likely that household will be poor.
Thirty six percent of children living in households headed by a single mother are poor. Six percent of children living in households headed by married parents are poor.
Among black families, 38% of single parent households are poor compared to 13% of households with married parents. Among white households, 22% of single parent household are poor compared to 3% of households with married parents.
As Rector notes, when President Johnson announced the War on Poverty in 1964, 93% of babies born in our country were born to married parents. Today 59% of babies born in the United States have married mothers.
If you accept my definition of ideologue, that it’s someone wedded to a set of ideas, independent of facts, who are the ideologues?
We have overwhelming factual evidence that the more economic freedom individuals have in a country, the more likely that nation will be prosperous, with a high quality of life. We also have overwhelming evidence showing that the more likely a family is headed by a single parent, the more likely that household will be poor.
Looking from the other side, we have overwhelming evidence that government spending does not reduce poverty nor does big government create prosperity.
So who are the ideologues and who are the realists?
A Shrugged Summer
Bruce Bialosky
Monday, September 27, 2010
Whenever June comes around, summer reading lists are sure to follow. They appear from a variety of sources, each of which wishes to enlighten us on how to best spend our afternoons at the beach and our lazy summer evenings. Most lists include a popular spy/crime thriller along with other mindless diversions. But this summer, my son and I tackled a more challenging, yet vastly more fulfilling book: Atlas Shrugged.
I have read Atlas twice before. When I proposed the idea to my son, who turned 21 years old in August, I pointed out that it was generally considered to be America’s second most influential book, after the Bible. We sent my old, worn paperback to the recycle store and ordered two beautiful new copies.
The 1,168 page tomes arrived and my boy did not flinch, even though he was staring at the longest book with the smallest type that he had ever attempted to read. Our plan was to read about 100 pages a week, after which we would meet to discuss what we had read and to share particularly moving passages.
Taking on such a challenge can be quite … challenging. As you read through what is generally regarded as Ayn Rand’s manifesto for capitalism, you must wonder how she conceived such a project. While many authors have described the process of writing a 350-page crime novel – usually how they must outline the entire story before they start – Ms. Rand’s sheer brilliance is reflected in the fact that she actually completed this project, which was both her final and her finest novel. The fact that it is written in such clear prose, and covers such essential life concepts, makes you realize why so many people are so consumed by the book.
During the summer I told some friends what my son and I were doing. Everyone had some type of reaction. The people who had not read it spoke of their desire to do so, and the others told me of how many times they had read it. I told everyone that the book is a work of science fiction, an opinion which was generally met with either a quizzical look or a sigh. I explained to them that the book, which was first published in 1957, clearly predicts our society under the Obama Administration. Veteran and virgin readers alike realized that they needed to get their nose into Atlas to gain clarity on what we are all facing as long as Obama remains in office.
If you doubt the prescience of Ayn Rand, turn to page 744 to read about a doctor who no longer practices his profession. When asked why, he replies “I quit when medicine was placed under State control many years ago. Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun.” If you don’t think vast numbers of doctors feel this way, you have not spoken to any. If ObamaCare goes into effect as passed in 2010, you will soon see droves of doctors living by this creed, and the medical care that most Americans receive will come at the hands of graduates from schools in Indonesia, Mexico, and India because America will not be able to replace the retired doctors quickly enough.
The book, which is sometimes a love story and sometimes a thriller, expresses Ms. Rand’s philosophy on the greatest issues that you will ever face as an individual, and that we will ever face as a society. Each week, my son and I cherished the opportunity to discuss issues that are timeless and yet have never been as relevant as they are today. And each week, I saw the boy who used to ride on my shoulders become a true man, not only in body and age, but in mind.
Reading Atlas Shrugged remains a daunting task. Reaching page 1,000 provides you with certain self-satisfaction, and completing the book brings a feeling of euphoria. Sharing such a vital book with a loved one made the effort totally worthwhile, and absorbing again the philosophies of Ayn Rand made this an experience that will live with me forever.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Whenever June comes around, summer reading lists are sure to follow. They appear from a variety of sources, each of which wishes to enlighten us on how to best spend our afternoons at the beach and our lazy summer evenings. Most lists include a popular spy/crime thriller along with other mindless diversions. But this summer, my son and I tackled a more challenging, yet vastly more fulfilling book: Atlas Shrugged.
I have read Atlas twice before. When I proposed the idea to my son, who turned 21 years old in August, I pointed out that it was generally considered to be America’s second most influential book, after the Bible. We sent my old, worn paperback to the recycle store and ordered two beautiful new copies.
The 1,168 page tomes arrived and my boy did not flinch, even though he was staring at the longest book with the smallest type that he had ever attempted to read. Our plan was to read about 100 pages a week, after which we would meet to discuss what we had read and to share particularly moving passages.
Taking on such a challenge can be quite … challenging. As you read through what is generally regarded as Ayn Rand’s manifesto for capitalism, you must wonder how she conceived such a project. While many authors have described the process of writing a 350-page crime novel – usually how they must outline the entire story before they start – Ms. Rand’s sheer brilliance is reflected in the fact that she actually completed this project, which was both her final and her finest novel. The fact that it is written in such clear prose, and covers such essential life concepts, makes you realize why so many people are so consumed by the book.
During the summer I told some friends what my son and I were doing. Everyone had some type of reaction. The people who had not read it spoke of their desire to do so, and the others told me of how many times they had read it. I told everyone that the book is a work of science fiction, an opinion which was generally met with either a quizzical look or a sigh. I explained to them that the book, which was first published in 1957, clearly predicts our society under the Obama Administration. Veteran and virgin readers alike realized that they needed to get their nose into Atlas to gain clarity on what we are all facing as long as Obama remains in office.
If you doubt the prescience of Ayn Rand, turn to page 744 to read about a doctor who no longer practices his profession. When asked why, he replies “I quit when medicine was placed under State control many years ago. Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun.” If you don’t think vast numbers of doctors feel this way, you have not spoken to any. If ObamaCare goes into effect as passed in 2010, you will soon see droves of doctors living by this creed, and the medical care that most Americans receive will come at the hands of graduates from schools in Indonesia, Mexico, and India because America will not be able to replace the retired doctors quickly enough.
The book, which is sometimes a love story and sometimes a thriller, expresses Ms. Rand’s philosophy on the greatest issues that you will ever face as an individual, and that we will ever face as a society. Each week, my son and I cherished the opportunity to discuss issues that are timeless and yet have never been as relevant as they are today. And each week, I saw the boy who used to ride on my shoulders become a true man, not only in body and age, but in mind.
Reading Atlas Shrugged remains a daunting task. Reaching page 1,000 provides you with certain self-satisfaction, and completing the book brings a feeling of euphoria. Sharing such a vital book with a loved one made the effort totally worthwhile, and absorbing again the philosophies of Ayn Rand made this an experience that will live with me forever.
Sociopath Professors Part III, Too Little Too Late “Punishment” for Ayers
Mary Grabar
Monday, September 27, 2010
Finally, a Kennedy has come out to denounce, albeit in a very small way, one of the privileged professors who have worked, both inside and outside the classroom, on behalf of murderous revolution.
Christopher Kennedy, chairman of the board of trustees of the University of Illinois, in a speech on September 23rd, convinced fellow trustees to deny the honorific emeritus status to recently retired education professor Bill Ayers. The reason: “a book dedicated in part to the man who murdered my father, Robert F. Kennedy” (Sirhan Sirhan). That was in 1968, when Christopher was four years old. The work in point is Prairie Fire, the manifesto of the “communist men and women” of the Weather Underground.
Citing conversations by the board last summer “on the issue of diversity,” Kennedy said, “There is nothing more antithetical to the hopes for a university that is lively and yet civil, or to the hopes of our founding fathers for their great experiment of a self-governing people, than to permanently seal off debate with one’s opponents by killing them.”
Trustees followed along in Kennedy’s call to not “celebrate political assassinations or to honor those who do so.”
Yet, there is just a little bit of irony in the action of the Democrat Kennedy. Most conservatives would have had Bill Ayers behind bars instead of polluting the minds of future teachers, while pulling a nice salary from Illinois tax payers and speaking fees from students at schools across the country. One Illinois citizen, Mark Thompson , had asked the board of trustees to investigate Bill Ayers, until he was reportedly denied the opportunity to speak by Kennedy himself. Conservatives have been railing for years, not only about Ayers’ book dedication, but other subversive statements and activities.
We can all be appalled by Ayers’ rhetorical insult, but it is conservative Cliff Kincaid who is still calling for an investigation into the group Ayers founded with his wife Bernardine Dohrn, Weatherman (later Weather Underground), for the bombing murder of San Francisco Police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell in 1970.
Kincaid has invited former FBI informant Larry Grathwohl to an upcoming conference . Grathwohl believes that a congressional committee should examine the evidence, including his own testimony that Ayers had told him that Dohrn planted the bomb that killed McConnell.
Conservatives believe that a policeman’s death should not be forgotten.
Grathwohl also knows that Weather Underground wanted to overthrow the U.S. government and then “re-educate” 100 million Americans and eliminate 25 million.
Certainly such activities would also, as Kennedy puts it, “permanently seal off debate.”
The evidence for Ayers’ aim of revolution fills his memoirs, “scholarly” writing, and speeches before dictator Hugo Chavez.
What about those writings, Mr. Kennedy?
What about 1971 photographs of Ayers’ and Dohrn’s bomb factory that give the lie to their claims that they never intended to kill anyone?
Or how about the fact that Ayers, despite all his lies, was and is a close associate of President Obama, who has blithely stated that the U.S. could “absorb” another terrorist attack? This is the thinking of a person who believes in “critical race theory,” a subject Obama taught as a professor at the University of Chicago. It’s a theory that regards justice in terms of group affiliation, in this case by race. Groups “absorb” losses; individuals don’t.
This is the kind of thinking of Ayers’ heroes, Mao Tse-Tung and Che Guevara.
Such rationalizations come from a view antithetical to that of the “founding fathers”--that our rights come from God, who values each individual (a fact that professor/president/Ayers pal Obama forgot in a recent speech).
While every conservative is outraged by the assassination of any of our political leaders, he is just as angered by a radical who murders or attempts murder of a citizen he calls a “pig.” We’re just as angered by the murder of the innocent American going to one of the Twin Towers to work, whether as a company president or cleaning lady.
But the academics in power see those tumbling bodies and crashing towers as aesthetic displays, as symbolic of the destruction of “U.S. imperialism.” Ayers defended his comrade Ward Churchill, who called 9/11 victims “little Eichmann’s.”
Christopher Kennedy is a businessman, not an academic, but as a member of The Chicago Council on Global Affairs assists in activities that further an anti-American agenda. Among the events sponsored by this organization is one that will feature Democratic activist James Zogby . According to Discover the Network, Zogby has worked on behalf of the PLO and has acted as an apologist for Hamas. He has called Israelis “Nazis” and has been critical of efforts to end funding of terrorist groups.
Another invitee is Obama economic advisor Professor Robert Reich infamous for stating that stimulus funds should not go to “white male construction workers .”
If Mr. Kennedy were truly interested in maintaining the “hopes of our founding fathers” he could have demonstrated sympathy for ALL Americans victimized by Ayers and his ilk.
He could have pointed out the destructiveness of Ayers’ past and his destructiveness in the classroom—especially in poor, inner-city schools. He could have demonstrated sympathy for children of fathers who would be discriminated because they are white construction workers.
But more importantly, he could have demonstrated sympathy for other four-year-olds who lost fathers, whether in the line of police duty or in their work day in the Twin Towers. These murdered fathers were called “pigs” and “little Eichmanns” by privileged professors. These fathers were just as important as a senator with the name Kennedy.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Finally, a Kennedy has come out to denounce, albeit in a very small way, one of the privileged professors who have worked, both inside and outside the classroom, on behalf of murderous revolution.
Christopher Kennedy, chairman of the board of trustees of the University of Illinois, in a speech on September 23rd, convinced fellow trustees to deny the honorific emeritus status to recently retired education professor Bill Ayers. The reason: “a book dedicated in part to the man who murdered my father, Robert F. Kennedy” (Sirhan Sirhan). That was in 1968, when Christopher was four years old. The work in point is Prairie Fire, the manifesto of the “communist men and women” of the Weather Underground.
Citing conversations by the board last summer “on the issue of diversity,” Kennedy said, “There is nothing more antithetical to the hopes for a university that is lively and yet civil, or to the hopes of our founding fathers for their great experiment of a self-governing people, than to permanently seal off debate with one’s opponents by killing them.”
Trustees followed along in Kennedy’s call to not “celebrate political assassinations or to honor those who do so.”
Yet, there is just a little bit of irony in the action of the Democrat Kennedy. Most conservatives would have had Bill Ayers behind bars instead of polluting the minds of future teachers, while pulling a nice salary from Illinois tax payers and speaking fees from students at schools across the country. One Illinois citizen, Mark Thompson , had asked the board of trustees to investigate Bill Ayers, until he was reportedly denied the opportunity to speak by Kennedy himself. Conservatives have been railing for years, not only about Ayers’ book dedication, but other subversive statements and activities.
We can all be appalled by Ayers’ rhetorical insult, but it is conservative Cliff Kincaid who is still calling for an investigation into the group Ayers founded with his wife Bernardine Dohrn, Weatherman (later Weather Underground), for the bombing murder of San Francisco Police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell in 1970.
Kincaid has invited former FBI informant Larry Grathwohl to an upcoming conference . Grathwohl believes that a congressional committee should examine the evidence, including his own testimony that Ayers had told him that Dohrn planted the bomb that killed McConnell.
Conservatives believe that a policeman’s death should not be forgotten.
Grathwohl also knows that Weather Underground wanted to overthrow the U.S. government and then “re-educate” 100 million Americans and eliminate 25 million.
Certainly such activities would also, as Kennedy puts it, “permanently seal off debate.”
The evidence for Ayers’ aim of revolution fills his memoirs, “scholarly” writing, and speeches before dictator Hugo Chavez.
What about those writings, Mr. Kennedy?
What about 1971 photographs of Ayers’ and Dohrn’s bomb factory that give the lie to their claims that they never intended to kill anyone?
Or how about the fact that Ayers, despite all his lies, was and is a close associate of President Obama, who has blithely stated that the U.S. could “absorb” another terrorist attack? This is the thinking of a person who believes in “critical race theory,” a subject Obama taught as a professor at the University of Chicago. It’s a theory that regards justice in terms of group affiliation, in this case by race. Groups “absorb” losses; individuals don’t.
This is the kind of thinking of Ayers’ heroes, Mao Tse-Tung and Che Guevara.
Such rationalizations come from a view antithetical to that of the “founding fathers”--that our rights come from God, who values each individual (a fact that professor/president/Ayers pal Obama forgot in a recent speech).
While every conservative is outraged by the assassination of any of our political leaders, he is just as angered by a radical who murders or attempts murder of a citizen he calls a “pig.” We’re just as angered by the murder of the innocent American going to one of the Twin Towers to work, whether as a company president or cleaning lady.
But the academics in power see those tumbling bodies and crashing towers as aesthetic displays, as symbolic of the destruction of “U.S. imperialism.” Ayers defended his comrade Ward Churchill, who called 9/11 victims “little Eichmann’s.”
Christopher Kennedy is a businessman, not an academic, but as a member of The Chicago Council on Global Affairs assists in activities that further an anti-American agenda. Among the events sponsored by this organization is one that will feature Democratic activist James Zogby . According to Discover the Network, Zogby has worked on behalf of the PLO and has acted as an apologist for Hamas. He has called Israelis “Nazis” and has been critical of efforts to end funding of terrorist groups.
Another invitee is Obama economic advisor Professor Robert Reich infamous for stating that stimulus funds should not go to “white male construction workers .”
If Mr. Kennedy were truly interested in maintaining the “hopes of our founding fathers” he could have demonstrated sympathy for ALL Americans victimized by Ayers and his ilk.
He could have pointed out the destructiveness of Ayers’ past and his destructiveness in the classroom—especially in poor, inner-city schools. He could have demonstrated sympathy for children of fathers who would be discriminated because they are white construction workers.
But more importantly, he could have demonstrated sympathy for other four-year-olds who lost fathers, whether in the line of police duty or in their work day in the Twin Towers. These murdered fathers were called “pigs” and “little Eichmanns” by privileged professors. These fathers were just as important as a senator with the name Kennedy.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Our Non-War Over Islam
Steve Chapman
Sunday, September 26, 2010
If you arrived here from Mars in the last couple of months and watched a lot of TV news, you would quickly reach this conclusion: Americans hate Muslims, and Muslims hate America.
On the one side is widespread opposition to the proposed Islamic center near ground zero in lower Manhattan, which the Republican nominee for governor of New York has promised to forcibly stop.
A Florida pastor threatened to hold a "Burn a Koran Day." Many conservatives think the country is in dire peril because Barack Obama is (in their imaginations) a Muslim.
On the other side, you have the Lebanese-born man arrested for allegedly trying to set off a bomb near Wrigley Field in Chicago and Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of killing 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood.
You also have the cleric behind the New York community center warning ominously that "Burn a Koran Day" would have "enhanced the possibility of terrorist acts against America."
There is no question that feelings on both sides are running higher than usual. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, says the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Islam, but today, the figure is 30 percent. A spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations blamed the recent slashing of a Muslim cab driver in New York on "hate rhetoric."
But all these events get attention for the same reason that airplane crashes get attention: They are unusual. Considering the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and considering the U.S. invasion of two Islamic countries, the surprise is not that feelings between Muslims and non-Muslims in this country are so bitter and angry. It's that they are so amicable.
The "ground zero mosque" has elicited a great deal of opposition -- but, for the most part, restrained opposition. A Fox News poll found that while 64 percent of Americans do not want the facility at that location, 61 percent -- including most Republicans -- say the group has the right to build it there.
Most people don't perceive all Muslims as a lurking danger. Asked whether Islam is more likely than other religions "to encourage violence," 35 percent of Americans said yes -- but 42 percent said no.
Nor is the American Muslim community a seething swamp of violent militancy. There are estimated to be at least 1.3 million Muslims in this country -- plenty to furnish an unending stream of suicide bombers, if the motivation existed. But it doesn't. If there is anything striking about the home front of the global war on terrorism, it's the extreme rarity of domestic jihadists.
Most American Muslims are about as radical as Jay Leno. A 2007 survey by Pew found that only 5 percent have a favorable view of al-Qaida -- a number that drops to 3 percent among foreign-born Muslims. Far from praying daily for the rise of Islamic extremism, 61 percent said they were worried about it.
Unlike the alienated Muslim populations of Europe, American Muslims do not feel estranged from society. "Most say their communities are excellent or good places to live," Pew discovered. Most also believe women are better off in the United States than in Muslim countries.
Their overall satisfaction with the state of the country is no different, according to Pew, from the overall satisfaction of everyone else. They don't sound like a violent cult plotting to impose Taliban-style Shariah law on the infidels who surround them. They sound strangely like ... Americans.
Which is what they are. For the most part, Muslims have achieved integration and acceptance. Only a quarter of them say they have ever suffered discrimination. Most have many non-Muslim friends.
Could that be because non-Muslims do not regard them with fear and loathing? Hate crimes against Muslims do not support the charge that Americans are frothing Islamophobes. In 2008, there were only 105 anti-Muslim incidents, compared with 1,013 against Jews.
What we see in action here is the powerful influence of deeply rooted ideas about assimilation, tolerance and freedom. Americans generally see Muslims as just one more ingredient in the national melting pot. Muslims mostly identify with our way of life.
The tensions and conflicts in evidence in our public debates do exist, but they give a misleading picture of modern American society. The reality is the one proclaimed by the Founders: E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
If you arrived here from Mars in the last couple of months and watched a lot of TV news, you would quickly reach this conclusion: Americans hate Muslims, and Muslims hate America.
On the one side is widespread opposition to the proposed Islamic center near ground zero in lower Manhattan, which the Republican nominee for governor of New York has promised to forcibly stop.
A Florida pastor threatened to hold a "Burn a Koran Day." Many conservatives think the country is in dire peril because Barack Obama is (in their imaginations) a Muslim.
On the other side, you have the Lebanese-born man arrested for allegedly trying to set off a bomb near Wrigley Field in Chicago and Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of killing 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood.
You also have the cleric behind the New York community center warning ominously that "Burn a Koran Day" would have "enhanced the possibility of terrorist acts against America."
There is no question that feelings on both sides are running higher than usual. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, says the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Islam, but today, the figure is 30 percent. A spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations blamed the recent slashing of a Muslim cab driver in New York on "hate rhetoric."
But all these events get attention for the same reason that airplane crashes get attention: They are unusual. Considering the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and considering the U.S. invasion of two Islamic countries, the surprise is not that feelings between Muslims and non-Muslims in this country are so bitter and angry. It's that they are so amicable.
The "ground zero mosque" has elicited a great deal of opposition -- but, for the most part, restrained opposition. A Fox News poll found that while 64 percent of Americans do not want the facility at that location, 61 percent -- including most Republicans -- say the group has the right to build it there.
Most people don't perceive all Muslims as a lurking danger. Asked whether Islam is more likely than other religions "to encourage violence," 35 percent of Americans said yes -- but 42 percent said no.
Nor is the American Muslim community a seething swamp of violent militancy. There are estimated to be at least 1.3 million Muslims in this country -- plenty to furnish an unending stream of suicide bombers, if the motivation existed. But it doesn't. If there is anything striking about the home front of the global war on terrorism, it's the extreme rarity of domestic jihadists.
Most American Muslims are about as radical as Jay Leno. A 2007 survey by Pew found that only 5 percent have a favorable view of al-Qaida -- a number that drops to 3 percent among foreign-born Muslims. Far from praying daily for the rise of Islamic extremism, 61 percent said they were worried about it.
Unlike the alienated Muslim populations of Europe, American Muslims do not feel estranged from society. "Most say their communities are excellent or good places to live," Pew discovered. Most also believe women are better off in the United States than in Muslim countries.
Their overall satisfaction with the state of the country is no different, according to Pew, from the overall satisfaction of everyone else. They don't sound like a violent cult plotting to impose Taliban-style Shariah law on the infidels who surround them. They sound strangely like ... Americans.
Which is what they are. For the most part, Muslims have achieved integration and acceptance. Only a quarter of them say they have ever suffered discrimination. Most have many non-Muslim friends.
Could that be because non-Muslims do not regard them with fear and loathing? Hate crimes against Muslims do not support the charge that Americans are frothing Islamophobes. In 2008, there were only 105 anti-Muslim incidents, compared with 1,013 against Jews.
What we see in action here is the powerful influence of deeply rooted ideas about assimilation, tolerance and freedom. Americans generally see Muslims as just one more ingredient in the national melting pot. Muslims mostly identify with our way of life.
The tensions and conflicts in evidence in our public debates do exist, but they give a misleading picture of modern American society. The reality is the one proclaimed by the Founders: E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.
The Very Dangerous Folly Of Obamanomics
Austin Hill
Sunday, September 26, 2010
I have this certain sound byte in my computer, and I use it frequently on my daily talk shows.
The audio is over two years old -which means it might just as well be a half-century old, by contemporary electronic media standards – yet it is incredibly relevant today and will still be relevant in November.
The sound was derived from a video report of former Senator Barack Obama, campaigning for the presidency back in August of 2008. Speaking before a stadium full of energized fans and supporters, our future President begins to talk about a subject that was “top of mind” for most Americans two summers ago – the fact that the cost of gasoline was, at that time, approaching five dollars a gallon.
Shaking his head in disgust and disbelief and with a disdainful chuckle in his voice, Mr. Obama says, in part:
“…You’ve got oil companies making record profits…no… no companies in history have made the kind of profits the oil companies are makin’ right now…they..they…….one company, Exxon Mobil, made eleven billion dollars…billion, with a “b” ….last quarter….they made eleven billion dollars the quarter before that…makin’ money hand-over-fist…makin’ out like bandits…”
From here, then-Senator Obama went on to introduce his new “energy” proposal. As a remedy for rising gasoline prices, he wanted to raise taxes on oil companies, and use that “extra” tax revenue to give “working Americans” a thousand-dollar voucher that they could use to make gasoline purchases.
I played this sound byte several times on my daily talk show back in the summer of 2008, and pondered lots of questions about the Senator’s comments. “Why is Senator Obama so outraged about a company being successful and making a profit?” I asked my talk radio audience back then. “Will raising taxes on oil companies really make the price of gasoline drop, or might it make the price of gasoline rise?” “Why does Senator Obama compare the Exxon Mobil corporation to ‘bandits’– has the company stolen something?” “How will Mr. Obama define ‘working Americans,’ and how will he determine who qualifies a gasoline voucher?” “Who in America really ‘deserves’ free gasoline, and who does not?”
Back then, many Obama supporters responded to my questions about the Senator’s proposed “energy policy” with calls and email telling me that I was a “racist.” My questions and ideas obviously had no merit, and the only reason I didn’t approve of what Mr. Obama was proposing was because he is black, and I am white.
By the time Mr. Obama took office in 2009, the cost of gasoline had already begun to decline, which meant that, fortunately, discussions about his “gasoline voucher” program ended. But unfortunately for America, the same kind of illogic and childish assumptions that undergirded candidate Obama’s economic rhetoric in 2008 seem to have also guided President Obama’s fiscal and economic policies for the past twenty months. This is really “bad news” for America, and it is the reason why the Obama Democrats are so horribly disliked today.
From the campaign trail, Senator Obama liked to cast economic discussions into “the good guys versus the villains” scenarios. Thus, without any regard for what Exxon Mobil’s balance sheet looked like, with no consideration of the amount of capital that was risked and invested in any given quarter, without any consideration for the number of hours of human labor and toil deployed in any given quarter, and without any discussion about the fact that American oil companies are at the mercy of global oil prices, Senator Obama simply portrayed the Exxon Mobil company as a “villain” for earning a “record profit,” and he was going to be the “good guy” who would legislate money away from the oil company and give it to “us.”
Tragically, the rhetorical assumptions that drove Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign also seem to have driven the Obama Democrats’ legislative goals regarding healthcare. Just as candidate Obama demonized and vilified oil companies two years ago, President Obama and his party in Congress have successfully demonized healthcare providers and insurance companies, and we are now experiencing the devastating results of legislative attempts to force these allegedly villainous companies to be “nice.”
There’s no doubt that American health insurance companies can behave very badly, refusing to provide coverage to clients when they should. But the Obama Democrats have conveniently ignored the one thing that can incentivize insurance companies to behave better – if the insurance market was truly open and “competitive,” and insurance companies truly had to compete for clients, they would be forced to treat their clients better – and instead, the Party of Obama has legislated a mandate for companies to be “nice.”
The mandate to be “nice” is already driving-up the price of health insurance – insurance companies that are now forced to provide coverage to their clients’ “adult children,” are making-up for the additional costs they are incurring by charging more for all their policies. Thus, the Obama Democrats’ best effort to make health insurance “more affordable” is already failing.
Americans are learning once again that campaign rhetoric is no substitute for sound economics. And any American President who promises to make your life better by vilifying your fellow countryman, is a very dangerous character indeed.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
I have this certain sound byte in my computer, and I use it frequently on my daily talk shows.
The audio is over two years old -which means it might just as well be a half-century old, by contemporary electronic media standards – yet it is incredibly relevant today and will still be relevant in November.
The sound was derived from a video report of former Senator Barack Obama, campaigning for the presidency back in August of 2008. Speaking before a stadium full of energized fans and supporters, our future President begins to talk about a subject that was “top of mind” for most Americans two summers ago – the fact that the cost of gasoline was, at that time, approaching five dollars a gallon.
Shaking his head in disgust and disbelief and with a disdainful chuckle in his voice, Mr. Obama says, in part:
“…You’ve got oil companies making record profits…no… no companies in history have made the kind of profits the oil companies are makin’ right now…they..they…….one company, Exxon Mobil, made eleven billion dollars…billion, with a “b” ….last quarter….they made eleven billion dollars the quarter before that…makin’ money hand-over-fist…makin’ out like bandits…”
From here, then-Senator Obama went on to introduce his new “energy” proposal. As a remedy for rising gasoline prices, he wanted to raise taxes on oil companies, and use that “extra” tax revenue to give “working Americans” a thousand-dollar voucher that they could use to make gasoline purchases.
I played this sound byte several times on my daily talk show back in the summer of 2008, and pondered lots of questions about the Senator’s comments. “Why is Senator Obama so outraged about a company being successful and making a profit?” I asked my talk radio audience back then. “Will raising taxes on oil companies really make the price of gasoline drop, or might it make the price of gasoline rise?” “Why does Senator Obama compare the Exxon Mobil corporation to ‘bandits’– has the company stolen something?” “How will Mr. Obama define ‘working Americans,’ and how will he determine who qualifies a gasoline voucher?” “Who in America really ‘deserves’ free gasoline, and who does not?”
Back then, many Obama supporters responded to my questions about the Senator’s proposed “energy policy” with calls and email telling me that I was a “racist.” My questions and ideas obviously had no merit, and the only reason I didn’t approve of what Mr. Obama was proposing was because he is black, and I am white.
By the time Mr. Obama took office in 2009, the cost of gasoline had already begun to decline, which meant that, fortunately, discussions about his “gasoline voucher” program ended. But unfortunately for America, the same kind of illogic and childish assumptions that undergirded candidate Obama’s economic rhetoric in 2008 seem to have also guided President Obama’s fiscal and economic policies for the past twenty months. This is really “bad news” for America, and it is the reason why the Obama Democrats are so horribly disliked today.
From the campaign trail, Senator Obama liked to cast economic discussions into “the good guys versus the villains” scenarios. Thus, without any regard for what Exxon Mobil’s balance sheet looked like, with no consideration of the amount of capital that was risked and invested in any given quarter, without any consideration for the number of hours of human labor and toil deployed in any given quarter, and without any discussion about the fact that American oil companies are at the mercy of global oil prices, Senator Obama simply portrayed the Exxon Mobil company as a “villain” for earning a “record profit,” and he was going to be the “good guy” who would legislate money away from the oil company and give it to “us.”
Tragically, the rhetorical assumptions that drove Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign also seem to have driven the Obama Democrats’ legislative goals regarding healthcare. Just as candidate Obama demonized and vilified oil companies two years ago, President Obama and his party in Congress have successfully demonized healthcare providers and insurance companies, and we are now experiencing the devastating results of legislative attempts to force these allegedly villainous companies to be “nice.”
There’s no doubt that American health insurance companies can behave very badly, refusing to provide coverage to clients when they should. But the Obama Democrats have conveniently ignored the one thing that can incentivize insurance companies to behave better – if the insurance market was truly open and “competitive,” and insurance companies truly had to compete for clients, they would be forced to treat their clients better – and instead, the Party of Obama has legislated a mandate for companies to be “nice.”
The mandate to be “nice” is already driving-up the price of health insurance – insurance companies that are now forced to provide coverage to their clients’ “adult children,” are making-up for the additional costs they are incurring by charging more for all their policies. Thus, the Obama Democrats’ best effort to make health insurance “more affordable” is already failing.
Americans are learning once again that campaign rhetoric is no substitute for sound economics. And any American President who promises to make your life better by vilifying your fellow countryman, is a very dangerous character indeed.
Dems: We Will Hammer the Poor
Kevin McCullough
Sunday, September 26, 2010
The Democratic Leadership in the Congress made a pretty big strategic mistake on Thursday. They, for all intent and purposes, announced that they will raise your taxes on January 1, 2011. They did so plainly, and I tend to believe them. They did so without remorse. They did so acting as though no one would really care. And they did so after--for weeks--publicly discussing the possibility of retaining the current tax rates.
They did so, though they have been warned that in doing so they would deliver a crushing blow to small businesses in America. It is important to admit and to be as transparent as possible: when you hurt small business in America, you hurt the working men and women of America. You hurt families. You hurt those you care about most.
For a few weeks the Democratic leadership and the President personally had been making some rumblings about possibly extending the current tax rates into 2011 and beyond. They had mostly--at the very least--made repeated mention of how important it would be to do so for the "middle class."
Instead they opted to raise taxes on every tax-payer in America, the poor, the middle class, and the wealthy.
In doing so they punish the poor thrice. For people who pay the taxes in the bottom tax brackets, the Obama administration will be the most punitive punishing them in three ways. The administration will increase their tax burden--after pledging to not raise taxes on people earning less than $250,000. The administration will raise the increase on this group MORE than any other tax category--50%--taking their tax obligation from 10%-15%. And lastly the administration will make it harder for the poor to find work because of his punitive tax strategy against those at the top of the tax brackets: small businesses--the group that creates 2 out of every 3 new jobs will force even more massive layoffs.
For weeks on my radio show, at tea party gatherings including the 9/12 project in DC, and in multiple editorial contributions on Fox News I have implied the way to for Democrats to help themselves in these elections would be to demonstrate accountability to the tax-payer prior to the November elections. In other words, don't just talk about keeping middle class tax rates at their current place, but to pass legislation to do so.
Let's face it, because politicians should always be trusted to do the worst option possible after securing their re-election, it would seem imperative that if they wanted to genuinely let the American people know they were committed to not raising taxes to the worst degree in our history, they would work like crazy to get it done before the election. Now they "promise" to take it up after the election.
No honest person now believes they will.
On Thursday, for reasons that are almost inexplicable, multiple leaders in the House and Senate sounded the "impossibility" of being able to prevent the largest tax-hike in history for being implemented on ALL tax-payers (including the middle class.) In other words, every single person that pays income tax, be they poor, middle class, or wealthy, will receive a tax increase.
Preferring to hit the campaign trail instead of passing simple legislation, the party that is in control of the White House, the House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate are now going to the voters to ask to be re-hired for 2011.
And I'm wondering, "On what basis?"
As a small business owner, I'm all too familiar with job-performance reviews. If I hire someone, and give them a fairly short list of things to do over an extended period of time, I expect them to accomplish them all. If they can't achieve the most simple of tasks over that time, what basis would this person have in expecting me to continue their employment after a review where it was revealed as all-too-obvious that they had not done what they were hired to do?
The Democrats in Congress have had 8-10 years to prevent these tax increases from going into effect. A simple resolution stating that all federal tax rates would remain at current levels permanently (or even extended another ten years or so) is all it would've required.
Instead now they are sitting in the CEO's office, having been summoned for their job-performance review, asking the voters to "trust them" to get that simple task done, after we've re-hired them for another go round.
It's either arrogance or stupidity.
I'll let you decide.
But as their employer--either way - it's worthy of a pink slip!
Sunday, September 26, 2010
The Democratic Leadership in the Congress made a pretty big strategic mistake on Thursday. They, for all intent and purposes, announced that they will raise your taxes on January 1, 2011. They did so plainly, and I tend to believe them. They did so without remorse. They did so acting as though no one would really care. And they did so after--for weeks--publicly discussing the possibility of retaining the current tax rates.
They did so, though they have been warned that in doing so they would deliver a crushing blow to small businesses in America. It is important to admit and to be as transparent as possible: when you hurt small business in America, you hurt the working men and women of America. You hurt families. You hurt those you care about most.
For a few weeks the Democratic leadership and the President personally had been making some rumblings about possibly extending the current tax rates into 2011 and beyond. They had mostly--at the very least--made repeated mention of how important it would be to do so for the "middle class."
Instead they opted to raise taxes on every tax-payer in America, the poor, the middle class, and the wealthy.
In doing so they punish the poor thrice. For people who pay the taxes in the bottom tax brackets, the Obama administration will be the most punitive punishing them in three ways. The administration will increase their tax burden--after pledging to not raise taxes on people earning less than $250,000. The administration will raise the increase on this group MORE than any other tax category--50%--taking their tax obligation from 10%-15%. And lastly the administration will make it harder for the poor to find work because of his punitive tax strategy against those at the top of the tax brackets: small businesses--the group that creates 2 out of every 3 new jobs will force even more massive layoffs.
For weeks on my radio show, at tea party gatherings including the 9/12 project in DC, and in multiple editorial contributions on Fox News I have implied the way to for Democrats to help themselves in these elections would be to demonstrate accountability to the tax-payer prior to the November elections. In other words, don't just talk about keeping middle class tax rates at their current place, but to pass legislation to do so.
Let's face it, because politicians should always be trusted to do the worst option possible after securing their re-election, it would seem imperative that if they wanted to genuinely let the American people know they were committed to not raising taxes to the worst degree in our history, they would work like crazy to get it done before the election. Now they "promise" to take it up after the election.
No honest person now believes they will.
On Thursday, for reasons that are almost inexplicable, multiple leaders in the House and Senate sounded the "impossibility" of being able to prevent the largest tax-hike in history for being implemented on ALL tax-payers (including the middle class.) In other words, every single person that pays income tax, be they poor, middle class, or wealthy, will receive a tax increase.
Preferring to hit the campaign trail instead of passing simple legislation, the party that is in control of the White House, the House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate are now going to the voters to ask to be re-hired for 2011.
And I'm wondering, "On what basis?"
As a small business owner, I'm all too familiar with job-performance reviews. If I hire someone, and give them a fairly short list of things to do over an extended period of time, I expect them to accomplish them all. If they can't achieve the most simple of tasks over that time, what basis would this person have in expecting me to continue their employment after a review where it was revealed as all-too-obvious that they had not done what they were hired to do?
The Democrats in Congress have had 8-10 years to prevent these tax increases from going into effect. A simple resolution stating that all federal tax rates would remain at current levels permanently (or even extended another ten years or so) is all it would've required.
Instead now they are sitting in the CEO's office, having been summoned for their job-performance review, asking the voters to "trust them" to get that simple task done, after we've re-hired them for another go round.
It's either arrogance or stupidity.
I'll let you decide.
But as their employer--either way - it's worthy of a pink slip!
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Convenient Excuse
The assumption that every offense could cause violence insults Muslims.
Jonah Goldberg
Friday, September 17, 2010
Is Michael Bloomberg to blame for the deaths of the 18 Muslim men in Indian-controlled Kashmir who rioted over reports that someone in America burned the Koran?
Let’s think it through.
As I explained at length in an earlier column, I believe that the New York City mayor could have stopped the Park51 (“Ground Zero mosque”) project months ago, long before it became a national story. It would have taken some wheeling and dealing and a few phone calls. Instead, in his grandiose pomposity, he went a different way.
Even if you don’t buy that Bloomberg could have nipped this noxious weed in the bud, Commentary magazine editor John Podhoretz is surely correct that this wouldn’t be nearly the controversy it is today if only Bloomberg had been capable of getting the “Freedom Tower” built in a timely manner.
Enter storefront pastor Terry Jones, who introduced the idiotic idea of Koran-burning to the American people. He clearly got his inspiration from the debate over the Ground Zero mosque. He chickened out, but not before he inspired others to do something similar. Two pastors in Tennessee held a private Koran-burning, and a New Jersey transit worker tore up and burned a few pages (and was fired for it). These acts, plus the media coverage of Jones’s planned stunt, sparked the deadly riots in Kashmir.
So, should we put Bloomberg in the dock? Recall him from office? Drop him, bound and gagged, into downtown Lahore?
Alas, no. While we should criticize him for his thumbless grasp of church-state issues and his megalomaniacal incompetence, he’s not to blame for the actions of others. And it isn’t fair to hold people legally accountable for the evil or misguided deeds of others.
And the same basically goes for Jones. His plan to burn the Koran was stupid, irresponsible, and repugnant, but it’s not his fault that there are a significant number of Muslim men who are not only ready but eager to riot and kill in response to insults to Islam.
If you deny this, you are basically denying the humanity of Muslims. We take it as a given in this country that not only are all men created equal, but that each individual is responsible for his own actions. Each man and woman is a captain of his or her own self.
To say that Muslims have no choice in the matter, that they must act like animals, is to say that they are animals. If you tease a bear and he kills you, your stupidity is to blame. If you tease a man and he kills you, the murderer is to blame.
Again, I think burning the Koran is reprehensible. And I could live with a local law that banned Koran-burning (and flag-burning, Bible-burning, Torah-burning, etc.) because I think communities should be able to set standards of decency. But that hardly settles things. It’s easy to condemn Koran-burning. What about those Danish cartoons of Mohammed (that Yale University won’t even reproduce in a book on the controversy)? What about highbrow novels like The Satanic Verses? When Pope Benedict XVI delivered his Regensburg address in 2006, he suggested that Islam had a link to violence. In response, many Muslims rioted. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.
When Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer was asked in an interview about Koran-burning, he brought up former Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous comment that the First Amendment “doesn’t mean you can shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. . . . Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?”
There are a number of grave problems with the crowded-theater cliché. First, you can — even must — yell “fire” in a crowded theater. It just has to be the truth.
But more to the point, fires are not human beings. Fire has no choice but to burn because that is what fire does. Humans have choices. Yet in this formulation (from which Breyer has somewhat retreated), Muslims are akin to soulless, unthinking flames. Taken seriously, this comparison suggests rational people have every reason to fear Muslims in much the same way they fear fire.
There are complex issues here. But the simple truth is the Islamist extremists who behead and riot do have a choice. They want to murder. What they want is an excuse, and they’ll find one no matter what.
Jonah Goldberg
Friday, September 17, 2010
Is Michael Bloomberg to blame for the deaths of the 18 Muslim men in Indian-controlled Kashmir who rioted over reports that someone in America burned the Koran?
Let’s think it through.
As I explained at length in an earlier column, I believe that the New York City mayor could have stopped the Park51 (“Ground Zero mosque”) project months ago, long before it became a national story. It would have taken some wheeling and dealing and a few phone calls. Instead, in his grandiose pomposity, he went a different way.
Even if you don’t buy that Bloomberg could have nipped this noxious weed in the bud, Commentary magazine editor John Podhoretz is surely correct that this wouldn’t be nearly the controversy it is today if only Bloomberg had been capable of getting the “Freedom Tower” built in a timely manner.
Enter storefront pastor Terry Jones, who introduced the idiotic idea of Koran-burning to the American people. He clearly got his inspiration from the debate over the Ground Zero mosque. He chickened out, but not before he inspired others to do something similar. Two pastors in Tennessee held a private Koran-burning, and a New Jersey transit worker tore up and burned a few pages (and was fired for it). These acts, plus the media coverage of Jones’s planned stunt, sparked the deadly riots in Kashmir.
So, should we put Bloomberg in the dock? Recall him from office? Drop him, bound and gagged, into downtown Lahore?
Alas, no. While we should criticize him for his thumbless grasp of church-state issues and his megalomaniacal incompetence, he’s not to blame for the actions of others. And it isn’t fair to hold people legally accountable for the evil or misguided deeds of others.
And the same basically goes for Jones. His plan to burn the Koran was stupid, irresponsible, and repugnant, but it’s not his fault that there are a significant number of Muslim men who are not only ready but eager to riot and kill in response to insults to Islam.
If you deny this, you are basically denying the humanity of Muslims. We take it as a given in this country that not only are all men created equal, but that each individual is responsible for his own actions. Each man and woman is a captain of his or her own self.
To say that Muslims have no choice in the matter, that they must act like animals, is to say that they are animals. If you tease a bear and he kills you, your stupidity is to blame. If you tease a man and he kills you, the murderer is to blame.
Again, I think burning the Koran is reprehensible. And I could live with a local law that banned Koran-burning (and flag-burning, Bible-burning, Torah-burning, etc.) because I think communities should be able to set standards of decency. But that hardly settles things. It’s easy to condemn Koran-burning. What about those Danish cartoons of Mohammed (that Yale University won’t even reproduce in a book on the controversy)? What about highbrow novels like The Satanic Verses? When Pope Benedict XVI delivered his Regensburg address in 2006, he suggested that Islam had a link to violence. In response, many Muslims rioted. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.
When Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer was asked in an interview about Koran-burning, he brought up former Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous comment that the First Amendment “doesn’t mean you can shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. . . . Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?”
There are a number of grave problems with the crowded-theater cliché. First, you can — even must — yell “fire” in a crowded theater. It just has to be the truth.
But more to the point, fires are not human beings. Fire has no choice but to burn because that is what fire does. Humans have choices. Yet in this formulation (from which Breyer has somewhat retreated), Muslims are akin to soulless, unthinking flames. Taken seriously, this comparison suggests rational people have every reason to fear Muslims in much the same way they fear fire.
There are complex issues here. But the simple truth is the Islamist extremists who behead and riot do have a choice. They want to murder. What they want is an excuse, and they’ll find one no matter what.
Unintended, But Not Unforeseen
National Review Online
Friday, September 24, 2010
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, is to the law of unintended consequences what Newton’s apple was to the law of gravity: the illustration that bonks us on the head with its obviousness. Practically every week since its passage has added a new dimension of mirth to Nancy Pelosi’s punchline for the ages, that we had to pass the bill to find out what is in it. Out of the mouths of babes and clueless politicians.
And on the subject of babes, they are the latest victims of Obamacare: Health-insurance giants Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Aetna, Cigna, CoventryOne, Humana, and UnitedHealthCare have stopped writing child-only policies in those jurisdictions where they are able to do so. The reason for this is obvious: Because Obamacare forces insurance companies to accept children who are already sick with pre-existing conditions on the same terms as healthy children, parents now have a strong incentive to wait until their children are sick to buy child-only policies, making the products a guaranteed money-loser for insurers, which are not in the business of guaranteeing losses to their investors and employees. It is no accident that they stopped offering child-only policies on the very day the rule came into effect. Want to buy a child-only policy in Colorado, California, Ohio, or Missouri? Good luck with that.
The Democrats will rail in reliably demagogic fashion about the evil insurance fat cats boosting their profits, but consider this: Those losses would be passed on to health-care consumers in the form of higher premiums and reduced benefits, meaning that the mandate to cover those with pre-existing conditions will function as a tax on other insurance consumers, and those who were responsible enough to buy insurance before they got sick will be punished to bail out those who were not similarly responsible.
The Obama administration, which already has done almost everything in its power to buy off the insurance industry, announced that it would try to accommodate insurers’ concerns by allowing the use of “structured open-enrollment windows” to continue conducting business on more or less the same terms as they had been. These came in the form of what the administration calls, with exquisite bureaucratic hedging, “interim final regulations.” Interim or final? Your guess is as good as anybody’s.
Democrats of late have spent a lot of time engaged in televised scoffing at the idea that regulatory uncertainty is a major cause of our current economic malaise. They would do well to consult the insurers whose businesses they are attempting to micromanage. WellPoint had this to say about its decision to discontinue child-only policies: “Unfortunately, there remains a great deal of uncertainty as to how the rules will be implemented and what the impacts might be on participating insurers.”
Health-insurance rates already are rising even more quickly than they had been in the past because of concern about the costs that will be imposed by Obamacare. Various kinds of insurance products and services are being discontinued. Colleges have had to go begging to Washington to be allowed to continue offering the inexpensive, bare-bones coverage they make available to 18–22-year-old students who do not much need annual prostate exams or coverage for hip-replacement surgery. These consequences were unintended, but they were not unpredictable: They were, in fact, predicted by a very large number of critics, not least those writing for National Review.
Dozens of new taxes, regulatory beasties, and unlovely business outcomes have cropped up since the bill was passed. Meanwhile, the Democrats have declared war on financial reality, blasting insurance actuaries for the crime of consulting the actuarial tables when it comes to pre-existing conditions. And who can forget Rep. Henry Waxman’s fit of rage inspired by the fact that corporate accountants were following the rules of corporate accounting, inflicting massive writedowns on scores of struggling American companies forced to adjust their balance sheets to reflect the new costs and liabilities Obamacare inflicted on them?
And if you’re going to ignore a century’s worth of actuarial practice and accounting rules, why not just throw out all of economics and feign surprise at rising insurance premiums, the cancellation of services, and the discontinuation of products? Obamacare levies a 3.8 percent tax on profits from home sales — meaning they have reduced the real sales value of American homes by 3.8 percent — and Democrats act as though this will have no effect on the tanking housing market. They issue “interim final” rules that change at the whim of the administration and then deny that uncertainty is hobbling the economy. They require that every business file a 1099 for the IRS for every vendor transaction exceeding $600 — a requirement that the IRS itself confesses it lacks sufficient manpower to handle — and then promise that their program will save the country money through reduced paperwork. They add an extra layer of taxation onto investments to offset the costs of their health-care mess and then wonder that investors aren’t pouring money into new job-creating enterprises. No, neither Obamacare nor regulatory uncertainty is exclusively responsible for the poor state of the economy, the unsteady markets, or weak housing prices, but they are contributors, and their contribution is not negligible.
Meanwhile, Obamacare innovations such as the Community Living Assistance Program already are poised to far exceed the budgets established for them in the bill, and the turbocharged Medicaid provisions are threatening to bankrupt states across the country. Thanks to Obamacare, you will pay more for heart stents and other life-saving medical devices, and you’ll have less money to do so once all the additional taxes and fees with which the bill is larded up kick in.
On their own signature domestic issue, Democrats are as lost as last year’s Easter eggs. In the wake of the bill’s passage, the conventional wisdom held that Republican promises to repeal the bill in its entirety and start from scratch were wishful thinking that savored slightly of sour political grapes. But the continuing stream of noxious consequences percolating up from the murk of Obamacare make it clear that repeal is the only sensible option. The wise choice is, at the moment, also the popular choice, a rare enough concurrence, with half of the population strongly in favor of repealing Obamacare and more than half sympathetic to the idea. We propose that the next Congress adopt as House Bill 1 a single sentence: “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is hereby repealed.”
Friday, September 24, 2010
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, is to the law of unintended consequences what Newton’s apple was to the law of gravity: the illustration that bonks us on the head with its obviousness. Practically every week since its passage has added a new dimension of mirth to Nancy Pelosi’s punchline for the ages, that we had to pass the bill to find out what is in it. Out of the mouths of babes and clueless politicians.
And on the subject of babes, they are the latest victims of Obamacare: Health-insurance giants Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Aetna, Cigna, CoventryOne, Humana, and UnitedHealthCare have stopped writing child-only policies in those jurisdictions where they are able to do so. The reason for this is obvious: Because Obamacare forces insurance companies to accept children who are already sick with pre-existing conditions on the same terms as healthy children, parents now have a strong incentive to wait until their children are sick to buy child-only policies, making the products a guaranteed money-loser for insurers, which are not in the business of guaranteeing losses to their investors and employees. It is no accident that they stopped offering child-only policies on the very day the rule came into effect. Want to buy a child-only policy in Colorado, California, Ohio, or Missouri? Good luck with that.
The Democrats will rail in reliably demagogic fashion about the evil insurance fat cats boosting their profits, but consider this: Those losses would be passed on to health-care consumers in the form of higher premiums and reduced benefits, meaning that the mandate to cover those with pre-existing conditions will function as a tax on other insurance consumers, and those who were responsible enough to buy insurance before they got sick will be punished to bail out those who were not similarly responsible.
The Obama administration, which already has done almost everything in its power to buy off the insurance industry, announced that it would try to accommodate insurers’ concerns by allowing the use of “structured open-enrollment windows” to continue conducting business on more or less the same terms as they had been. These came in the form of what the administration calls, with exquisite bureaucratic hedging, “interim final regulations.” Interim or final? Your guess is as good as anybody’s.
Democrats of late have spent a lot of time engaged in televised scoffing at the idea that regulatory uncertainty is a major cause of our current economic malaise. They would do well to consult the insurers whose businesses they are attempting to micromanage. WellPoint had this to say about its decision to discontinue child-only policies: “Unfortunately, there remains a great deal of uncertainty as to how the rules will be implemented and what the impacts might be on participating insurers.”
Health-insurance rates already are rising even more quickly than they had been in the past because of concern about the costs that will be imposed by Obamacare. Various kinds of insurance products and services are being discontinued. Colleges have had to go begging to Washington to be allowed to continue offering the inexpensive, bare-bones coverage they make available to 18–22-year-old students who do not much need annual prostate exams or coverage for hip-replacement surgery. These consequences were unintended, but they were not unpredictable: They were, in fact, predicted by a very large number of critics, not least those writing for National Review.
Dozens of new taxes, regulatory beasties, and unlovely business outcomes have cropped up since the bill was passed. Meanwhile, the Democrats have declared war on financial reality, blasting insurance actuaries for the crime of consulting the actuarial tables when it comes to pre-existing conditions. And who can forget Rep. Henry Waxman’s fit of rage inspired by the fact that corporate accountants were following the rules of corporate accounting, inflicting massive writedowns on scores of struggling American companies forced to adjust their balance sheets to reflect the new costs and liabilities Obamacare inflicted on them?
And if you’re going to ignore a century’s worth of actuarial practice and accounting rules, why not just throw out all of economics and feign surprise at rising insurance premiums, the cancellation of services, and the discontinuation of products? Obamacare levies a 3.8 percent tax on profits from home sales — meaning they have reduced the real sales value of American homes by 3.8 percent — and Democrats act as though this will have no effect on the tanking housing market. They issue “interim final” rules that change at the whim of the administration and then deny that uncertainty is hobbling the economy. They require that every business file a 1099 for the IRS for every vendor transaction exceeding $600 — a requirement that the IRS itself confesses it lacks sufficient manpower to handle — and then promise that their program will save the country money through reduced paperwork. They add an extra layer of taxation onto investments to offset the costs of their health-care mess and then wonder that investors aren’t pouring money into new job-creating enterprises. No, neither Obamacare nor regulatory uncertainty is exclusively responsible for the poor state of the economy, the unsteady markets, or weak housing prices, but they are contributors, and their contribution is not negligible.
Meanwhile, Obamacare innovations such as the Community Living Assistance Program already are poised to far exceed the budgets established for them in the bill, and the turbocharged Medicaid provisions are threatening to bankrupt states across the country. Thanks to Obamacare, you will pay more for heart stents and other life-saving medical devices, and you’ll have less money to do so once all the additional taxes and fees with which the bill is larded up kick in.
On their own signature domestic issue, Democrats are as lost as last year’s Easter eggs. In the wake of the bill’s passage, the conventional wisdom held that Republican promises to repeal the bill in its entirety and start from scratch were wishful thinking that savored slightly of sour political grapes. But the continuing stream of noxious consequences percolating up from the murk of Obamacare make it clear that repeal is the only sensible option. The wise choice is, at the moment, also the popular choice, a rare enough concurrence, with half of the population strongly in favor of repealing Obamacare and more than half sympathetic to the idea. We propose that the next Congress adopt as House Bill 1 a single sentence: “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is hereby repealed.”
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