Anything the government spends has to be taken from citizens.
Jim Lacey
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Last week, a number of economics blogs fell all over themselves in a rush to post an article by Kash Mansori. In it, he creates a country called Austerityland, a tiny nation (GDP: $100) that decides to take dramatic action (a $5 cut in government spending) to reduce its budget deficit ($10), and doesn’t get the results it was hoping for. To show us why, Mansori treats us all to an Econ 101 lecture, which unfortunately leaves a few things out.
Mansori trots out one of the fundamental and most revered of economic formulas: GDP = C + I + G + (X − M). Please do not desert me, as this really is important. In this equation, a nation’s GDP equals the total of its consumption (what its people spend), investment (how they use their savings), government spending, and net exports (exports minus imports). Any reduction in any one of these will reduce GDP, thereby reducing the country’s wealth and overall wellbeing.
So, according to Mansori, cutting government spending by $5 causes an automatic $5 fall in Austerityland’s GDP. Worse, because the government is no longer handing out as much money as previously, people will now have less in their pockets for consumption or investment. Thus every dollar in spending cuts takes about $1.50 out of GDP, a phenomenon known as the “multiplier effect.” And it gets even worse: As GDP falls there will be less money for the government to collect in taxes, and revenues will plunge. That, of course, sends Austerityland into a death spiral, as reduced revenues force ever-greater budget cuts, with all the attendant knock-on effects. All told, the $5 cut in government spending brings the deficit down by only about $3 while decreasing GDP by $7.50. For Mansori, anyone failing to see this — he names NRO’s own Douglas Holtz-Eakin as an example — is at best a fool.
Poppycock!
Mansori left out something truly important: Governments have no money. Anything the government spends has to be taken from citizens. (I thought about mentioning businesses as well, but they just pass their tax costs on to the citizenry.) So whenever G increases, the additional money has to come from C and I — that is, out of our pockets. The government may take our money before spending it, or it may borrow the money and take it from us later to pay off the debt — but either way, government spending comes out of C and I eventually. Further, if the government reduces spending, and thus confiscates less money from its citizens, the reverse is true: With more money in their pockets, Austerityland’s citizens will increase both C and I.
This is why the “multiplier effect” does not exist. Harvard economist Robert Barro eviscerated that concept some time ago, showing that every dollar the government spends in fact destroys 20 to 40 cents of wealth.
Still, if the Republicans get their way and dramatically cut spending, there is a major pitfall ahead. Adjustments often take time. For examples of what will probably happen, one only has to look at what took place after our major wars and the ensuing peace. Every large American conflict has seen a dramatic increase in government spending followed by a dramatic spending decrease at war’s end. Unfortunately, the fall is never as dramatic as the increase — wars have a way of putting governments on a permanently higher spending plateau.
In any event, the dramatic reversal in government spending has always led to a sharp post-war recession that takes a few years to reverse. After World War I, it took several years for the Roaring Twenties to get underway. Likewise, after World War II, several years of doldrums passed before the great boom of the Fifties and Sixties. Too many Republicans are neglectful of these examples and are promising that Nirvana will arrive as soon as the government reduces spending. That is not going to happen.
Rather, there is every likelihood that deep cuts in spending will bring about a short but sharp recession as consumers and businesses adjust to the new circumstances. When G is cut, C and I will take up the slack and then some — but it will not happen overnight. If Republican officeholders fail to alert their constituents to the likelihood that large spending cuts will bring about a recession, they risk a backlash that could propel us back toward ruinous deficits. To reduce the chance of such a recession, or at least greatly reduce its length and intensity, any budget cuts must be combined with a pro-growth agenda and hopefully be timed in such a way as to allow C and I to advance rapidly into the gap.
With cash in their pockets, and in full faith and confidence in America’s economic future, Americans will be poised to take part in another great economic expansion. The only thing that can get in the way is folks like Mansori, who continue to insist that the government can spend and invest your money better than you can.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Obamacare for Israel
We have seen this Obama two-step before.
Andrew C. McCarthy
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
The message for Israel is simple: Enjoy your Obamacare!
The past week’s presidential aggression-and-retreat two-step — amid indignant protestations that there had ever been any aggression in the first place — perfectly fit Obama’s pattern, which is already shopworn less than three years into his term. To cite the classic case, who could forget the single-payer shuffle?
“I have not said that I am a supporter of a single-payer system,” declaimed Mr. Obama in 2009, as reported by National Review’s Jim Geraghty. The president’s assertion was an insult to the public intelligence, no matter how credulously the Obamedia repeated it. Out here in YouTube world, it was readily demonstrated that Obama had long been a dogmatic adherent of socialized medicine — meaning a complete government takeover of the health sector, destroying the private insurance industry and rationing care as if it were a corporate asset to be doled out by bureaucrats rather than a matter of personal choice in a free market.
“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health-care program,” Obama said in 2003, before denying that he’d said any such thing a few years later. He was a state senator then, reelected in one of the country’s most left-wing districts and speaking comfortably in his element — activists for socialized medicine. Those who heard him speak his mind found his sentiments pedestrian, the sort of thing he said all the time. “A single-payer health-care plan, a universal health-care plan,” he’d elaborated, “that’s what I’d like to see.”
It was no surprise to people who actually knew Obama, such as Dr. Quentin Young, an Obama supporter from their Hyde Park neighborhood and the head of a socialized medicine lobby, Physicians for a National Health Program. Dr. Young argued that the dastardly private insurers were swimming in “profits that are breathtaking and obscene.” As Dr. Young recalled, Obama’s comments were “his categorical response,” something the state senator often repeated among constituents.
Obama is an Alinskyite, though, a practical radical. Ineffective radicals are so blinded by ideology, so intoxicated by their own sense of righteousness, that they refuse to gauge the public sensibilities. Alinskyites are no less committed to their ideology; indeed, only a person who has completely bought into his ideology can maintain the patient discipline necessary to implement his utopia incrementally. That discipline is what makes the Alinskyite effective. Such an operator understands that you must always check the public pulse: Figure out how far you can push people, but never push so far that you lose political viability. Without power, radicalism is a dead end. The race is not to the swift but to the electable.
So Obama tweaked his health-care positions, pretending he’d never said the things he’d said, massaging his message depending on the sensibilities of his audience. He shrewdly banked on a press corps willing to be enlisted to his purposes, and on the natural tendency of decent people to give likeable politicians the benefit of the doubt, to assume they are not being lied to.
The public did not want an all-out government takeover, so Obama claimed that wasn’t where he was coming from. The public does not want to underwrite insurance for illegal aliens, so the number of uninsured Americans described in Obama speeches suddenly shrank by 10 or 20 million when people started to catch on to his ambitious intentions. The public is far more worried about costs than about the uninsured, so Obama couched his plan’s astronomical spending in the rhetoric of fiscal discipline — presto, tens of millions of people would get a new entitlement that would somehow cost Americans less money. The public was promised a workable, affordable system, so the administration now issues thousands of waivers from Obamacare’s onerous terms, lest the dreaded emperor-has-no-clothes moment come before the 2012 election.
All of these were tactical maneuvers, not strategic ones. This is the thing to understand about Obama’s vaunted pragmatism. The president is not pragmatic in a free-wheeling sense, but pragmatic within the framework of leftist ideology. In the case of health care, the goal — unmistakable to anyone willing to gaze at the horizon instead of today’s talking points — is fully socialized medicine, the most practical route to a socialist economy in the United States. Each tactical adjustment is made with the ultimate goal in mind. Whether the moment’s politics call for galloping or inching along, the end is always in sight.
That is the formula for understanding Obama on Israel. In the hard-core Left from which the president hails, Israel is no less reviled than the health-insurance companies. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proudly boasted in his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, “America has no better friend than Israel.” That would be reason enough for those consumed by a blame-America-first mentality to loathe Israel. Palestinian Muslims live on global largesse and complain that it’s not enough, epitomize the culture of victimhood, and lionize terrorist “martyrs” who are no more savage (though a good bit more competent) than the iconic Bill Ayers and his Weather Underground. In short, the Palestinians check all the Left’s boxes. Even if Obama’s circle of Chicago friends did not include the rabidly anti-Israel Ayers and former PLO mouthpiece Rashid Khalidi, there would be little mystery about who is assigned the hero’s role and who is the villain in the president’s estimate of this long-running drama.
But Obama could not say such a thing and remain politically viable. He knows that. Anyone who watched the rousing bipartisan ovation that washed over his bête noire, Netanyahu, in Congress on Tuesday would know that. This is an ardently pro-Israel country, and Obama’s Palestinian sympathies are no more representative of where Americans stand than is the longing for single-payer health care. Just like leading from the rear, governing from the fringe is a skill. It is necessary to dissemble.
The 1967 borders the president floated last week are the single-payer of American Middle East policy. Just as single-payer is code for socialized medicine, the ’67 borders are code for an indefensible Israel that cannot survive as a Jewish state. Such an Israel is the dream of every leftist who has deluded himself into believing that Israel is a guilt-induced mistake of the post-Holocaust era, and that Israel’s continued existence as an outpost of Western liberalism in the Islamic world is the cause of Muslim animus and terror. You’ll never hear Obama or the Left say that. They will repeat the mantra that America’s bond with Israel is unbreakable, just as they repeated the mantra that the goal of “reforming” health care is to “control costs” (as opposed to controlling Americans). But it is what they really think, just as they really think health care should be nationalized to promote their idea of social justice, regardless of how much it costs.
By dilating on the ’67 borders, a practical radical gauges how far he can push the public without saying outright what his goal is. That is what Obama tried to do last week. He appeared to qualify the call for retrenching Israel’s boundaries with an allusion to land “swaps” — just as he frequently caveats his support for single-payer with hollow words about adjusting it to the private system we have, or about its being what he’d design on a clean slate but not necessarily what he seeks now.
In the case of Israel, the practical radical miscalculated. American Jews and other friends of Israel know that retreat to the ’67 borders is the Arab premise, not the premise from which all interested parties begin settlement discussions. The American and Israeli position has long been that those borders are implausible. Consequently, for an American president to utter “1967 borders,” with or without “swaps,” was a seismic shift.
Obama’s error was to wager that it would be a shift to which the public would be open, or at least indifferent. He has made the same sort of mistake before, confounding the unpopularity of the war in Iraq with what he hopefully took to be the unpopularity of Bush counterterrorism in general — a miscalculation that has led him into embarrassing reversals on commitments to close Gitmo, end military commissions, and return counterterrorism to the law-enforcement model.
This time, the blowback was immediate and instantly complemented by a dressing down from Netanyahu, a stunningly deft combination of eloquence, passion, and steely defiance cloaked in diplomatic respect. In what seemed like the blink of an eye between Thursday’s State Department speech and Sunday’s AIPAC speech, Obama went from asserting, “We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps,” to risibly claiming that he’d said Israel and Palestine “will negotiate a border that is different from the one that existed on June 4, 1967.” He went from trying to dictate the course of future events to laughably insisting that all he’d meant was that Israelis and Palestinians would have to negotiate settlement terms on their own.
No one should be fooled, and no one was. Obama beat a breakneck retreat precisely because both his fans and his detractors realized he had tried to do something bold, his pretense to the contrary notwithstanding.
The solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is straightforward, just as fixing what ails the health-care system is simple. The former requires Arab and Muslim concessions that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, that terrorism is an unacceptable tactic for resolving political differences, and that Israel will not be engulfed by floods of “refugees.” The latter needs an acknowledgment that health care is no more a corporate asset than private property is and that a real market — one that eliminates third-party payers and turns users into sentient consumers — would drive down prices.
Of course, neither of these scenarios is acceptable to the Obama Left, so we’ll continue to see bobbing and weaving about 1967 borders and land swaps and preexisting conditions and end-of-life counseling and similar head-spinning esoterica. Always remember that these are just chess moves. Obama eyes the whole board, and he makes the occasional blunder, but he never kicks over the table: He keeps his eyes on ultimate goal. To beat him, it is necessary to know that — and make sure America knows it. The next time around, there’d be no reelection to worry about.
Andrew C. McCarthy
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
The message for Israel is simple: Enjoy your Obamacare!
The past week’s presidential aggression-and-retreat two-step — amid indignant protestations that there had ever been any aggression in the first place — perfectly fit Obama’s pattern, which is already shopworn less than three years into his term. To cite the classic case, who could forget the single-payer shuffle?
“I have not said that I am a supporter of a single-payer system,” declaimed Mr. Obama in 2009, as reported by National Review’s Jim Geraghty. The president’s assertion was an insult to the public intelligence, no matter how credulously the Obamedia repeated it. Out here in YouTube world, it was readily demonstrated that Obama had long been a dogmatic adherent of socialized medicine — meaning a complete government takeover of the health sector, destroying the private insurance industry and rationing care as if it were a corporate asset to be doled out by bureaucrats rather than a matter of personal choice in a free market.
“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health-care program,” Obama said in 2003, before denying that he’d said any such thing a few years later. He was a state senator then, reelected in one of the country’s most left-wing districts and speaking comfortably in his element — activists for socialized medicine. Those who heard him speak his mind found his sentiments pedestrian, the sort of thing he said all the time. “A single-payer health-care plan, a universal health-care plan,” he’d elaborated, “that’s what I’d like to see.”
It was no surprise to people who actually knew Obama, such as Dr. Quentin Young, an Obama supporter from their Hyde Park neighborhood and the head of a socialized medicine lobby, Physicians for a National Health Program. Dr. Young argued that the dastardly private insurers were swimming in “profits that are breathtaking and obscene.” As Dr. Young recalled, Obama’s comments were “his categorical response,” something the state senator often repeated among constituents.
Obama is an Alinskyite, though, a practical radical. Ineffective radicals are so blinded by ideology, so intoxicated by their own sense of righteousness, that they refuse to gauge the public sensibilities. Alinskyites are no less committed to their ideology; indeed, only a person who has completely bought into his ideology can maintain the patient discipline necessary to implement his utopia incrementally. That discipline is what makes the Alinskyite effective. Such an operator understands that you must always check the public pulse: Figure out how far you can push people, but never push so far that you lose political viability. Without power, radicalism is a dead end. The race is not to the swift but to the electable.
So Obama tweaked his health-care positions, pretending he’d never said the things he’d said, massaging his message depending on the sensibilities of his audience. He shrewdly banked on a press corps willing to be enlisted to his purposes, and on the natural tendency of decent people to give likeable politicians the benefit of the doubt, to assume they are not being lied to.
The public did not want an all-out government takeover, so Obama claimed that wasn’t where he was coming from. The public does not want to underwrite insurance for illegal aliens, so the number of uninsured Americans described in Obama speeches suddenly shrank by 10 or 20 million when people started to catch on to his ambitious intentions. The public is far more worried about costs than about the uninsured, so Obama couched his plan’s astronomical spending in the rhetoric of fiscal discipline — presto, tens of millions of people would get a new entitlement that would somehow cost Americans less money. The public was promised a workable, affordable system, so the administration now issues thousands of waivers from Obamacare’s onerous terms, lest the dreaded emperor-has-no-clothes moment come before the 2012 election.
All of these were tactical maneuvers, not strategic ones. This is the thing to understand about Obama’s vaunted pragmatism. The president is not pragmatic in a free-wheeling sense, but pragmatic within the framework of leftist ideology. In the case of health care, the goal — unmistakable to anyone willing to gaze at the horizon instead of today’s talking points — is fully socialized medicine, the most practical route to a socialist economy in the United States. Each tactical adjustment is made with the ultimate goal in mind. Whether the moment’s politics call for galloping or inching along, the end is always in sight.
That is the formula for understanding Obama on Israel. In the hard-core Left from which the president hails, Israel is no less reviled than the health-insurance companies. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proudly boasted in his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, “America has no better friend than Israel.” That would be reason enough for those consumed by a blame-America-first mentality to loathe Israel. Palestinian Muslims live on global largesse and complain that it’s not enough, epitomize the culture of victimhood, and lionize terrorist “martyrs” who are no more savage (though a good bit more competent) than the iconic Bill Ayers and his Weather Underground. In short, the Palestinians check all the Left’s boxes. Even if Obama’s circle of Chicago friends did not include the rabidly anti-Israel Ayers and former PLO mouthpiece Rashid Khalidi, there would be little mystery about who is assigned the hero’s role and who is the villain in the president’s estimate of this long-running drama.
But Obama could not say such a thing and remain politically viable. He knows that. Anyone who watched the rousing bipartisan ovation that washed over his bête noire, Netanyahu, in Congress on Tuesday would know that. This is an ardently pro-Israel country, and Obama’s Palestinian sympathies are no more representative of where Americans stand than is the longing for single-payer health care. Just like leading from the rear, governing from the fringe is a skill. It is necessary to dissemble.
The 1967 borders the president floated last week are the single-payer of American Middle East policy. Just as single-payer is code for socialized medicine, the ’67 borders are code for an indefensible Israel that cannot survive as a Jewish state. Such an Israel is the dream of every leftist who has deluded himself into believing that Israel is a guilt-induced mistake of the post-Holocaust era, and that Israel’s continued existence as an outpost of Western liberalism in the Islamic world is the cause of Muslim animus and terror. You’ll never hear Obama or the Left say that. They will repeat the mantra that America’s bond with Israel is unbreakable, just as they repeated the mantra that the goal of “reforming” health care is to “control costs” (as opposed to controlling Americans). But it is what they really think, just as they really think health care should be nationalized to promote their idea of social justice, regardless of how much it costs.
By dilating on the ’67 borders, a practical radical gauges how far he can push the public without saying outright what his goal is. That is what Obama tried to do last week. He appeared to qualify the call for retrenching Israel’s boundaries with an allusion to land “swaps” — just as he frequently caveats his support for single-payer with hollow words about adjusting it to the private system we have, or about its being what he’d design on a clean slate but not necessarily what he seeks now.
In the case of Israel, the practical radical miscalculated. American Jews and other friends of Israel know that retreat to the ’67 borders is the Arab premise, not the premise from which all interested parties begin settlement discussions. The American and Israeli position has long been that those borders are implausible. Consequently, for an American president to utter “1967 borders,” with or without “swaps,” was a seismic shift.
Obama’s error was to wager that it would be a shift to which the public would be open, or at least indifferent. He has made the same sort of mistake before, confounding the unpopularity of the war in Iraq with what he hopefully took to be the unpopularity of Bush counterterrorism in general — a miscalculation that has led him into embarrassing reversals on commitments to close Gitmo, end military commissions, and return counterterrorism to the law-enforcement model.
This time, the blowback was immediate and instantly complemented by a dressing down from Netanyahu, a stunningly deft combination of eloquence, passion, and steely defiance cloaked in diplomatic respect. In what seemed like the blink of an eye between Thursday’s State Department speech and Sunday’s AIPAC speech, Obama went from asserting, “We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps,” to risibly claiming that he’d said Israel and Palestine “will negotiate a border that is different from the one that existed on June 4, 1967.” He went from trying to dictate the course of future events to laughably insisting that all he’d meant was that Israelis and Palestinians would have to negotiate settlement terms on their own.
No one should be fooled, and no one was. Obama beat a breakneck retreat precisely because both his fans and his detractors realized he had tried to do something bold, his pretense to the contrary notwithstanding.
The solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is straightforward, just as fixing what ails the health-care system is simple. The former requires Arab and Muslim concessions that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, that terrorism is an unacceptable tactic for resolving political differences, and that Israel will not be engulfed by floods of “refugees.” The latter needs an acknowledgment that health care is no more a corporate asset than private property is and that a real market — one that eliminates third-party payers and turns users into sentient consumers — would drive down prices.
Of course, neither of these scenarios is acceptable to the Obama Left, so we’ll continue to see bobbing and weaving about 1967 borders and land swaps and preexisting conditions and end-of-life counseling and similar head-spinning esoterica. Always remember that these are just chess moves. Obama eyes the whole board, and he makes the occasional blunder, but he never kicks over the table: He keeps his eyes on ultimate goal. To beat him, it is necessary to know that — and make sure America knows it. The next time around, there’d be no reelection to worry about.
Were the Interrogations That Led to Bin Laden's Capture "Enhanced"?
By Elisabeth Meinecke
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Like the accounts of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the narrative of whether enhanced interrogation helped find him has top figures contradicting one another.
Former attorney general Michael B. Mukasey, under fire from Sen. John McCain for his description of the events that uncovered the name of bin Laden's courier, did not back down Monday at an AEI panel from his description of how the information was obtained. Mukasey said the fact is Khalid Sheik Muhammed underwent enhanced interrogation, and after undergoing enhanced interrogation, he mentioned the courier's nickname and also the false information that the courier had left al Qaeda. The CIA, when they went back and checked their files, found the name already mentioned, but the information was insignificant, Mukasey said, until it came from KSM himself. When the CIA later matched the information that the courier had left al Qaeda with newer developments, it became clear that KSM was covering for him, another "very significant" fact, according to Mukasey.
Last week, however, Sen. McCain declared, and quoted CIA Director Leon Panetta, that the name of the courier who led the United States to Osama bin Laden was not learned as a result of waterboarding or any enhanced interrogation technique in U.S. custody. The information was part of a broader point McCain made that the United States should not engage in enhanced interrogation.
"All we learned about Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti [the courier] through the use of waterboarding and other ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ against Khalid Sheik Mohammed was the confirmation of the already known fact that the courier existed and used an alias," McCain said. “I have sought further information from the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and they confirm for me that, in fact, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee – information describing Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti's real role in Al-Qaeda and his true relationship to Osama bin Laden – was obtained through standard, non-coercive means, not through any ‘enhanced interrogation technique.’"
But Mukasey's fellow panelist, Marc Thiessen, provided further clarification, stating that the report McCain referred to was, in fact, only discovered after CIA detainees coughed up the name and the CIA did a "deep dive" into their analysis to find any information they might already have on this person. But the report, when they found it, remained insignificant, since it contributed nothing new to what the CIA had already learned from its own interrogations.
The hinge point seems to be a misrepresentation of how enhanced interrogation works: it's is not used to obtain information at the moment of interrogation, explained Thiessen. It's used on uncooperative detainees to make them cooperative. KSM, in fact, would taunt his interrogators while being waterboarded--since he knew they could only perform the process for a certain amount of time--by counting the seconds on his hands, according to Thiessen.
Questions are then asked of the detainee that CIA knows the answers to. When it's determined the detainee is finally getting truthful, EIT stops, the detainee goes into standard interrogation, and there the questioning resumes. Thiessen also emphasized that EIT is effective, but it's not a truth serum (which is, in fact, illegal and therefore is not used during enhanced interrogations, Mukasey volunteered), so it's not surprising that KSM gave false information along with legitimate items.
Thiessen also unequivocally states that the EIT program was not torture, and Mukasey vouches that the program did not violate the torture statute. Waterboarding itself is not designed to cause pain. It simply heightens the level of CO2 in the blood, and is thus designed to cause panic.
Other panelists at the AEI event were less clear. John Rizzo, former acting general counsel of the CIA, said he didn't think there could be any real, factual argument that the program yielded huge benefits in terms of intelligence, but he also said that what the administration has in place now doesn't "come close" to producing the kind of intelligence the previous program produced.
What the administration has in place now, described fellow panelist Elisa Massimino of Human Rights First, is a high-value interrogation group which includes representatives from the FBI, CIA, and the military. Obama ended enhanced interrogation techniques when he became president.
Thiessen said one of the most important elements of any program handling detainees and interrogations going forward is making sure terrorists don't know what techniques the U.S. uses so they can't train for resistance to it. He said it could be as simple as a blank page annexed to the Army field manual, as long as it's classified. It's the element of the unknown that helps make the program successful.
Mukasey recommended an interrogation program that was lawful, classified, and run by the CIA, although Rizzo was hesitant to have the CIA in charge of the interrogation because of the backlash it's taken in the past. He said the men and women of the agency deserved a consistent policy with adequate legal authority.
Mukasey also wants a consistent policy on detainees, and he wants a solution other than civilian courts and military commissions for which to try detainees.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Like the accounts of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the narrative of whether enhanced interrogation helped find him has top figures contradicting one another.
Former attorney general Michael B. Mukasey, under fire from Sen. John McCain for his description of the events that uncovered the name of bin Laden's courier, did not back down Monday at an AEI panel from his description of how the information was obtained. Mukasey said the fact is Khalid Sheik Muhammed underwent enhanced interrogation, and after undergoing enhanced interrogation, he mentioned the courier's nickname and also the false information that the courier had left al Qaeda. The CIA, when they went back and checked their files, found the name already mentioned, but the information was insignificant, Mukasey said, until it came from KSM himself. When the CIA later matched the information that the courier had left al Qaeda with newer developments, it became clear that KSM was covering for him, another "very significant" fact, according to Mukasey.
Last week, however, Sen. McCain declared, and quoted CIA Director Leon Panetta, that the name of the courier who led the United States to Osama bin Laden was not learned as a result of waterboarding or any enhanced interrogation technique in U.S. custody. The information was part of a broader point McCain made that the United States should not engage in enhanced interrogation.
"All we learned about Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti [the courier] through the use of waterboarding and other ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ against Khalid Sheik Mohammed was the confirmation of the already known fact that the courier existed and used an alias," McCain said. “I have sought further information from the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and they confirm for me that, in fact, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee – information describing Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti's real role in Al-Qaeda and his true relationship to Osama bin Laden – was obtained through standard, non-coercive means, not through any ‘enhanced interrogation technique.’"
But Mukasey's fellow panelist, Marc Thiessen, provided further clarification, stating that the report McCain referred to was, in fact, only discovered after CIA detainees coughed up the name and the CIA did a "deep dive" into their analysis to find any information they might already have on this person. But the report, when they found it, remained insignificant, since it contributed nothing new to what the CIA had already learned from its own interrogations.
The hinge point seems to be a misrepresentation of how enhanced interrogation works: it's is not used to obtain information at the moment of interrogation, explained Thiessen. It's used on uncooperative detainees to make them cooperative. KSM, in fact, would taunt his interrogators while being waterboarded--since he knew they could only perform the process for a certain amount of time--by counting the seconds on his hands, according to Thiessen.
Questions are then asked of the detainee that CIA knows the answers to. When it's determined the detainee is finally getting truthful, EIT stops, the detainee goes into standard interrogation, and there the questioning resumes. Thiessen also emphasized that EIT is effective, but it's not a truth serum (which is, in fact, illegal and therefore is not used during enhanced interrogations, Mukasey volunteered), so it's not surprising that KSM gave false information along with legitimate items.
Thiessen also unequivocally states that the EIT program was not torture, and Mukasey vouches that the program did not violate the torture statute. Waterboarding itself is not designed to cause pain. It simply heightens the level of CO2 in the blood, and is thus designed to cause panic.
Other panelists at the AEI event were less clear. John Rizzo, former acting general counsel of the CIA, said he didn't think there could be any real, factual argument that the program yielded huge benefits in terms of intelligence, but he also said that what the administration has in place now doesn't "come close" to producing the kind of intelligence the previous program produced.
What the administration has in place now, described fellow panelist Elisa Massimino of Human Rights First, is a high-value interrogation group which includes representatives from the FBI, CIA, and the military. Obama ended enhanced interrogation techniques when he became president.
Thiessen said one of the most important elements of any program handling detainees and interrogations going forward is making sure terrorists don't know what techniques the U.S. uses so they can't train for resistance to it. He said it could be as simple as a blank page annexed to the Army field manual, as long as it's classified. It's the element of the unknown that helps make the program successful.
Mukasey recommended an interrogation program that was lawful, classified, and run by the CIA, although Rizzo was hesitant to have the CIA in charge of the interrogation because of the backlash it's taken in the past. He said the men and women of the agency deserved a consistent policy with adequate legal authority.
Mukasey also wants a consistent policy on detainees, and he wants a solution other than civilian courts and military commissions for which to try detainees.
“Georgia’s Immigration laws “Cruel and Shameful,” says Che Guevara fan Carlos Santana
By Humberto Fontova
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Multi-Grammy winner Carlos Santana received the Major Baseball League’s “Beacon of Change Award,” this Sunday during its annual “Civil Rights Game” in Atlanta. On his T-shirts, the Mexican-born Carlos Santana honors a Stalinist who abolished all civil rights in Cuba, craved to abolish them worldwide, belittled Mexicans as “a rabble of illiterate Indians,” and craved to nuke Santana’s adopted country-- the one that showered him with multiple honors and millions of dollars. (“If the missiles had remained in Cuba we would have fired them at the heart of the U.S.” Che Guevara to Sam Russell of The London Daily Worker, Nov. 1962)
Georgia’s new law that requires many American employers to check if their employees are breaking American laws was denounced by Santana as “Un-American.” “People of Arizona, and people of Atlanta, Georgia,” exclaimed Santana as the stadium crowd (initially) clapped in the Mexican immigrant’s acclamation, “you should be ashamed of yourselves!"
At a post-game press conference this guitarist who at the 2005 Oscars proudly performed the soundscore for Che Guevara’s “Motorcycle Diaries” while proudly wearing a Che shirt, elaborated that: "this law (Arizona’ and Georgia’s) is not correct. This is about fear. It's a cruel law.”
But no “cruel laws” apparently issued from the Communist who Carlos Santana celebrates in song and attire, who co-founded a regime that jailed more of its subjects than Stalin's and murdered more people in its first three years than Hitler's in its first six. In 1959, with the help of KGB agents, Carlos Santana’s t-shirt icon helped found, train and indoctrinate Cuba's secret police. "Always interrogate your prisoners at night," Che ordered his goons. "A man's resistance is always lower at night." The world's largest image of Santana’s T-shirt hero adorns Cuba's Ministry of the Interior, the headquarters for Cuba's STASI and KGB trained secret police. Nothing could be more fitting.
The man who inspired Santana’s sizzling guitar work on that Oscar night imposed and enforced laws against “Latinos” lifted word for word from those imposed and enforced against Russians by Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrenti Beria during The Great Terror. Che Guevara also cheekily signed his correspondence, “Stalin II.”
So where are the cruel laws, Mr Santana?
Why they’re in Georgia and Arizona, of course.
So who should be “ashamed” for their “insensitivity” to Latino’s suffering?
Why it’s Georgians and Arizonans, of course.
“Che Guevara is all about love and compassion, man,” Santana thus explained his Oscar night fashion-statement during a personal run-in with Babalu Blogger Henry Gomez a few years back.
“Where do you even begin with this type of hippy-dippy, space-cadet drivel?” says Henry, who in fact tried briefly and vainly.
During the mid 60’s the crime of a “rocker” lifestyle (long hair, jeans fondness for “Yankee-Imperialist” rock music) or effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked off Cuba’s streets and parks by Castro’s police and herded into prison camps at Soviet bayonet-point. “Work Will Make Men Out of You” read the sign above the camp’s gate, right next to machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The entrance to Auschwitz’, on the other hand, read: “Work Will Set You Free. The initials for Castro’s camps were UMAP, not GULAG, but the conditions were similar.
A more recent rocker- victim of Castroite repression told Mexico’s Proceso magazine that, “in Cuba freedom is nonexistent. The regime demands submission. It persecutes all hippies, homosexuals, poets and free thinkers. It employs total repression against them.”
This “roquero” divulged the truth only because he’d managed to escape the nation-prison whose co-founder and emblem Carlos Santana venerates. That escapees name is Canek Sanchez Guevara-- Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s very grandson. The regime co-founded by his grandfather jailed and tortured Canek for the crime of trying to play some rock music unsanctioned by the Stalinist authorities. Carlos Santana might profit from a “jam session” with fellow guitarist Canek Guevara.
Last year during a benefit concert for the Dolores Huerta Foundation that provides support for undocumented farm workers, Santana elaborated on his brainy worldview: "There could be peace in this world during our lifetime, you only need to change how you think. God created a world of love so we could all have a place.”
Yet his t-shirt icon helped bring the world closest to Nuclear Armageddon of anyone in history, horrifying even his Soviet patrons. “We reject any peaceful approach!“ declared Santana’s idol. “Violence is inevitable! To establish Socialism rivers of blood must flow! The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.”
And regarding Santana’s “world of love” we again find discrepancies with his t-shirt icon:
“Hatred is the central element of our struggle!” raved this icon of flower-children. “Hatred so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him violent and cold- blooded killing machine…My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any surrendered enemy that falls in my hands!”
This last portion of Che Guevara’s reverie to peace and love comes—not from plagiarizing the Beatles or the Youngbloods—but straight from his very Motorcycle Diaries. This passage somehow went unmentioned during both the movie and the Oscar ceremony hailing these diaries.
If Laura Ingraham’s admonition to “Shut up and Sing,” needs a poster-boy this month, multi-Grammy winner Carlos Santana tossed in the biggest hat.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Multi-Grammy winner Carlos Santana received the Major Baseball League’s “Beacon of Change Award,” this Sunday during its annual “Civil Rights Game” in Atlanta. On his T-shirts, the Mexican-born Carlos Santana honors a Stalinist who abolished all civil rights in Cuba, craved to abolish them worldwide, belittled Mexicans as “a rabble of illiterate Indians,” and craved to nuke Santana’s adopted country-- the one that showered him with multiple honors and millions of dollars. (“If the missiles had remained in Cuba we would have fired them at the heart of the U.S.” Che Guevara to Sam Russell of The London Daily Worker, Nov. 1962)
Georgia’s new law that requires many American employers to check if their employees are breaking American laws was denounced by Santana as “Un-American.” “People of Arizona, and people of Atlanta, Georgia,” exclaimed Santana as the stadium crowd (initially) clapped in the Mexican immigrant’s acclamation, “you should be ashamed of yourselves!"
At a post-game press conference this guitarist who at the 2005 Oscars proudly performed the soundscore for Che Guevara’s “Motorcycle Diaries” while proudly wearing a Che shirt, elaborated that: "this law (Arizona’ and Georgia’s) is not correct. This is about fear. It's a cruel law.”
But no “cruel laws” apparently issued from the Communist who Carlos Santana celebrates in song and attire, who co-founded a regime that jailed more of its subjects than Stalin's and murdered more people in its first three years than Hitler's in its first six. In 1959, with the help of KGB agents, Carlos Santana’s t-shirt icon helped found, train and indoctrinate Cuba's secret police. "Always interrogate your prisoners at night," Che ordered his goons. "A man's resistance is always lower at night." The world's largest image of Santana’s T-shirt hero adorns Cuba's Ministry of the Interior, the headquarters for Cuba's STASI and KGB trained secret police. Nothing could be more fitting.
The man who inspired Santana’s sizzling guitar work on that Oscar night imposed and enforced laws against “Latinos” lifted word for word from those imposed and enforced against Russians by Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrenti Beria during The Great Terror. Che Guevara also cheekily signed his correspondence, “Stalin II.”
So where are the cruel laws, Mr Santana?
Why they’re in Georgia and Arizona, of course.
So who should be “ashamed” for their “insensitivity” to Latino’s suffering?
Why it’s Georgians and Arizonans, of course.
“Che Guevara is all about love and compassion, man,” Santana thus explained his Oscar night fashion-statement during a personal run-in with Babalu Blogger Henry Gomez a few years back.
“Where do you even begin with this type of hippy-dippy, space-cadet drivel?” says Henry, who in fact tried briefly and vainly.
During the mid 60’s the crime of a “rocker” lifestyle (long hair, jeans fondness for “Yankee-Imperialist” rock music) or effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked off Cuba’s streets and parks by Castro’s police and herded into prison camps at Soviet bayonet-point. “Work Will Make Men Out of You” read the sign above the camp’s gate, right next to machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The entrance to Auschwitz’, on the other hand, read: “Work Will Set You Free. The initials for Castro’s camps were UMAP, not GULAG, but the conditions were similar.
A more recent rocker- victim of Castroite repression told Mexico’s Proceso magazine that, “in Cuba freedom is nonexistent. The regime demands submission. It persecutes all hippies, homosexuals, poets and free thinkers. It employs total repression against them.”
This “roquero” divulged the truth only because he’d managed to escape the nation-prison whose co-founder and emblem Carlos Santana venerates. That escapees name is Canek Sanchez Guevara-- Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s very grandson. The regime co-founded by his grandfather jailed and tortured Canek for the crime of trying to play some rock music unsanctioned by the Stalinist authorities. Carlos Santana might profit from a “jam session” with fellow guitarist Canek Guevara.
Last year during a benefit concert for the Dolores Huerta Foundation that provides support for undocumented farm workers, Santana elaborated on his brainy worldview: "There could be peace in this world during our lifetime, you only need to change how you think. God created a world of love so we could all have a place.”
Yet his t-shirt icon helped bring the world closest to Nuclear Armageddon of anyone in history, horrifying even his Soviet patrons. “We reject any peaceful approach!“ declared Santana’s idol. “Violence is inevitable! To establish Socialism rivers of blood must flow! The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.”
And regarding Santana’s “world of love” we again find discrepancies with his t-shirt icon:
“Hatred is the central element of our struggle!” raved this icon of flower-children. “Hatred so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him violent and cold- blooded killing machine…My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any surrendered enemy that falls in my hands!”
This last portion of Che Guevara’s reverie to peace and love comes—not from plagiarizing the Beatles or the Youngbloods—but straight from his very Motorcycle Diaries. This passage somehow went unmentioned during both the movie and the Oscar ceremony hailing these diaries.
If Laura Ingraham’s admonition to “Shut up and Sing,” needs a poster-boy this month, multi-Grammy winner Carlos Santana tossed in the biggest hat.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
When It Comes to Doomsdays, the Left Shouldn't Laugh at the Religious
By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
It appears that the Rapture leading to the end of the world predicted by a Christian radio broadcaster for this past Saturday, May 21, 2011 did not take place. And the failure was covered worldwide. A Google search on Saturday evening, Pacific Time, yielded more than 32,000 articles -- in English alone -- in the world media.
The secular, especially the anti-religious, left, enjoy these spectacles of religious foolishness. They seem to confirm for them not only how absurd these end-of-days predictions are, but how absurd religion is in general.
But the left should not laugh too loudly. The religious world has far fewer doomsday predictions than the left does. At least every few years, the secular-left frightens itself -- and tries to frighten everyone else -- about another doomsday scenario.
The most obvious current example is, of course, global warming. For years now, we have been told by the world's left-wing media that scientists are united in predicting that there will be worldwide catastrophe as a result of global warming caused by manmade carbon dioxide emissions. Oceans will rise so high that they will drown many of the world's great coastal cities; entire island-countries will disappear; vast areas of the world will dry up; and countries will fight one another for the little remaining fresh water.
Compared to the global warming scenario, I'll face the Rapture -- and I'm not even Christian.
Of course, none of these global warming predictions has materialized. For example, in April of this year, Der Spiegel reported:
"Six years ago, the United Nations issued a dramatic warning that the world would have to cope with 50 million climate refugees by 2010. But now that those migration flows have failed to materialize, the UN has distanced itself from the forecasts. On the contrary, populations are growing in the regions that had been identified as environmental danger zones."
As a result of so many such false alarms, and because so many places have experienced record cold temperatures, global warming has been renamed "climate change."
But global warming is only the most recent doomsday scenario offered by the left. Here is a small sample of some others:
Recall the Time and Newsweek cover stories about how heterosexual AIDS would become a national plague -- since "AIDS doesn't discriminate." Skeptics who said at the time that heterosexual AIDS in America was largely a scare were called "anti-science." But Michael Fumento, the science writer who wrote "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS," first in Commentary Magazine and then as a book, turned out to be right. In America, it was a myth.
At the Democrat National Convention in 2000, the Democrats featured five children ages about 5 to 11 who recited lyrics about the doomsdays they could look forward to growing up in America. The first child, for example, said this:
"When I grow up ... Will I be able to see a rainbow in a smog-filled sky? Will there be any trees alive?"
In his 1968 book, "The Population Bomb," Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich wrote: "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."
Another doomsday prophecy from the left:
Two prominent feminist writers, Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf wrote in their bestselling books, "Revolution from Within" and "The Beauty Myth" -- and the news media reported -- that 150,000 girls and women per year die of anorexia nervosa. The number is actually fewer than 100.
There is one major difference between leftist and religious doomsday scenarios. The religious readily acknowledge that their doomsday scenario is built entirely on faith. The left, on the other hand, claims that its doomsday scenarios are entirely built on science.
That there is little truth to the left-wing claim is not as important as the fact that these doomsday scenarios have undermined the status of science. How many scientists have been compromised by their joining the research-money and fame bandwagons of left-wing apocalyptic predictions? And how has this affected the public's perceptions of science and scientists when it comes to contentious issues?
The left had its laugh this past weekend, but only because it's a lot easier to laugh at religious doomsdays than at leftist ones.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
It appears that the Rapture leading to the end of the world predicted by a Christian radio broadcaster for this past Saturday, May 21, 2011 did not take place. And the failure was covered worldwide. A Google search on Saturday evening, Pacific Time, yielded more than 32,000 articles -- in English alone -- in the world media.
The secular, especially the anti-religious, left, enjoy these spectacles of religious foolishness. They seem to confirm for them not only how absurd these end-of-days predictions are, but how absurd religion is in general.
But the left should not laugh too loudly. The religious world has far fewer doomsday predictions than the left does. At least every few years, the secular-left frightens itself -- and tries to frighten everyone else -- about another doomsday scenario.
The most obvious current example is, of course, global warming. For years now, we have been told by the world's left-wing media that scientists are united in predicting that there will be worldwide catastrophe as a result of global warming caused by manmade carbon dioxide emissions. Oceans will rise so high that they will drown many of the world's great coastal cities; entire island-countries will disappear; vast areas of the world will dry up; and countries will fight one another for the little remaining fresh water.
Compared to the global warming scenario, I'll face the Rapture -- and I'm not even Christian.
Of course, none of these global warming predictions has materialized. For example, in April of this year, Der Spiegel reported:
"Six years ago, the United Nations issued a dramatic warning that the world would have to cope with 50 million climate refugees by 2010. But now that those migration flows have failed to materialize, the UN has distanced itself from the forecasts. On the contrary, populations are growing in the regions that had been identified as environmental danger zones."
As a result of so many such false alarms, and because so many places have experienced record cold temperatures, global warming has been renamed "climate change."
But global warming is only the most recent doomsday scenario offered by the left. Here is a small sample of some others:
Recall the Time and Newsweek cover stories about how heterosexual AIDS would become a national plague -- since "AIDS doesn't discriminate." Skeptics who said at the time that heterosexual AIDS in America was largely a scare were called "anti-science." But Michael Fumento, the science writer who wrote "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS," first in Commentary Magazine and then as a book, turned out to be right. In America, it was a myth.
At the Democrat National Convention in 2000, the Democrats featured five children ages about 5 to 11 who recited lyrics about the doomsdays they could look forward to growing up in America. The first child, for example, said this:
"When I grow up ... Will I be able to see a rainbow in a smog-filled sky? Will there be any trees alive?"
In his 1968 book, "The Population Bomb," Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich wrote: "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."
Another doomsday prophecy from the left:
Two prominent feminist writers, Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf wrote in their bestselling books, "Revolution from Within" and "The Beauty Myth" -- and the news media reported -- that 150,000 girls and women per year die of anorexia nervosa. The number is actually fewer than 100.
There is one major difference between leftist and religious doomsday scenarios. The religious readily acknowledge that their doomsday scenario is built entirely on faith. The left, on the other hand, claims that its doomsday scenarios are entirely built on science.
That there is little truth to the left-wing claim is not as important as the fact that these doomsday scenarios have undermined the status of science. How many scientists have been compromised by their joining the research-money and fame bandwagons of left-wing apocalyptic predictions? And how has this affected the public's perceptions of science and scientists when it comes to contentious issues?
The left had its laugh this past weekend, but only because it's a lot easier to laugh at religious doomsdays than at leftist ones.
Dependency and Votes
“Entitlement” is just another word for “dependency.”
Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Those who regard government “entitlement” programs as sacrosanct, and regard those who want to cut them back as calloused or cruel, picture a world very different from the world of reality.
To listen to some of the defenders of entitlement programs, which are at the heart of the present financial crisis, you might think that anything the government fails to provide is something that people will be deprived of.
In other words, if you cut spending on school lunches, children will go hungry. If you fail to subsidize housing, people will be homeless. If you fail to subsidize prescription drugs, old people will have to eat dog food in order to be able to afford their meds.
This is the vision promoted by many politicians and by much of the media. But, in the world of reality, it is not even true for most people who are living below the official poverty line.
Most Americans living below the official poverty line own a car or truck — and government entitlement programs seldom provide cars and trucks. Most people living below the official poverty line also have air conditioning, color television, and a microwave oven — and these too are not usually handed out by government entitlement programs.
Cell phones and other electronic devices are by no means unheard of in low-income neighborhoods, where children would supposedly go hungry if there were no school-lunch programs. In reality, low-income people are overweight more often than other Americans.
As for housing and homelessness, housing prices are higher and homelessness is a bigger problem in places where there has been massive government intervention, such as in liberal bastions New York City and San Francisco. As for the elderly, 80 percent are homeowners, whose monthly housing costs are less than $400, including property taxes, utilities, and maintenance.
The desperately poor elderly conjured up in political and media rhetoric are — in the world of reality — the wealthiest segment of the American population. The average wealth of older households is nearly three times the wealth of households headed by people in the 35- to 44-year-old bracket, and more than 15 times the wealth of households headed by someone under 35 years of age.
If the wealthiest segment of the population cannot pay their own medical bills, who can? The country as a whole is not any richer because the government pays our medical bills — with money that it takes from us.
What about the truly poor, in whatever age brackets? First of all, even in low-income and high-crime neighborhoods, people are not stealing bread to feed their children. The fraction of the people in such neighborhoods who commit most of the crimes are far more likely to steal luxury products that they can either use or sell to get money to support their parasitic lifestyle.
As for the rest of the poor, Prof. Walter Williams of George Mason University long ago showed that you could give the poor enough money to lift them all above the official poverty line for a fraction of what it costs to support a massive welfare-state bureaucracy.
We don’t need to send the country into bankruptcy — in the name of the poor — by spending trillions of dollars on people who are not poor and who could take care of themselves. The poor have been used as human shields behind which the expanding welfare state has advanced.
The goal is not to keep the poor from starving but to create dependency — because dependency translates into votes for politicians who play Santa Claus.
We have all heard the old saying about how giving a man a fish feeds him for a day, while teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. Independence makes for a healthier society, but dependency is what gets votes for politicians.
For politicians, giving a man a fish every day of his life is the way to keep getting his vote. “Entitlement” is just a fancy word for dependency.
As for the scary stories politicians tell, in order to keep the entitlement programs going, as long as we keep buying it, they will keep selling it.
Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Those who regard government “entitlement” programs as sacrosanct, and regard those who want to cut them back as calloused or cruel, picture a world very different from the world of reality.
To listen to some of the defenders of entitlement programs, which are at the heart of the present financial crisis, you might think that anything the government fails to provide is something that people will be deprived of.
In other words, if you cut spending on school lunches, children will go hungry. If you fail to subsidize housing, people will be homeless. If you fail to subsidize prescription drugs, old people will have to eat dog food in order to be able to afford their meds.
This is the vision promoted by many politicians and by much of the media. But, in the world of reality, it is not even true for most people who are living below the official poverty line.
Most Americans living below the official poverty line own a car or truck — and government entitlement programs seldom provide cars and trucks. Most people living below the official poverty line also have air conditioning, color television, and a microwave oven — and these too are not usually handed out by government entitlement programs.
Cell phones and other electronic devices are by no means unheard of in low-income neighborhoods, where children would supposedly go hungry if there were no school-lunch programs. In reality, low-income people are overweight more often than other Americans.
As for housing and homelessness, housing prices are higher and homelessness is a bigger problem in places where there has been massive government intervention, such as in liberal bastions New York City and San Francisco. As for the elderly, 80 percent are homeowners, whose monthly housing costs are less than $400, including property taxes, utilities, and maintenance.
The desperately poor elderly conjured up in political and media rhetoric are — in the world of reality — the wealthiest segment of the American population. The average wealth of older households is nearly three times the wealth of households headed by people in the 35- to 44-year-old bracket, and more than 15 times the wealth of households headed by someone under 35 years of age.
If the wealthiest segment of the population cannot pay their own medical bills, who can? The country as a whole is not any richer because the government pays our medical bills — with money that it takes from us.
What about the truly poor, in whatever age brackets? First of all, even in low-income and high-crime neighborhoods, people are not stealing bread to feed their children. The fraction of the people in such neighborhoods who commit most of the crimes are far more likely to steal luxury products that they can either use or sell to get money to support their parasitic lifestyle.
As for the rest of the poor, Prof. Walter Williams of George Mason University long ago showed that you could give the poor enough money to lift them all above the official poverty line for a fraction of what it costs to support a massive welfare-state bureaucracy.
We don’t need to send the country into bankruptcy — in the name of the poor — by spending trillions of dollars on people who are not poor and who could take care of themselves. The poor have been used as human shields behind which the expanding welfare state has advanced.
The goal is not to keep the poor from starving but to create dependency — because dependency translates into votes for politicians who play Santa Claus.
We have all heard the old saying about how giving a man a fish feeds him for a day, while teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. Independence makes for a healthier society, but dependency is what gets votes for politicians.
For politicians, giving a man a fish every day of his life is the way to keep getting his vote. “Entitlement” is just a fancy word for dependency.
As for the scary stories politicians tell, in order to keep the entitlement programs going, as long as we keep buying it, they will keep selling it.
California Teacher Fights Back Against His Union’s Support of Cop Killer
By Kyle Olson
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
A few weeks ago I brought you the story of the California Federation of Teachers passing a resolution "reaffirming" support for convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. He was convicted of killing, execution-style, Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Despite numerous appeals and efforts by far leftists to spring him from prison, he's serving a life sentence in an open-and-shut case.
The Fraternal Order of Police issued a strongly-worded letter to American Federation of Teachers' President Randi Weingarten, parent union to the CFT.
The union's absurdly radical action is now producing its consequences.
I received an email from a CFT and AFT member resigning his union membership over the kerfuffle. He wrote in part:
"Having given the matter considerable thought, I have decided to resign from our labor union, an affiliate of the CFT and the AFT. I have already instructed [an administrative staff member] in Davenport to stop deducting dues from my paycheck. I feel some responsibility for briefly explaining the reasons for this difficult decision.
"I did not especially think this faculty needed to unionize when the idea for that came forward, but I did vote in favor of it, in support of the majority of faculty that did think this worthwhile. I did so with the understanding our union would stick to our immediate educational and terms of employment issues at [our school]. Indeed, our local has pretty much done a good job of that, except for having used tactics during the last round of labor negotiations that I rejected as long ago as 1968 as a college student. No, the end did not justify the means. I will leave it at that.
"More to the point, I cannot allow my dues to support either the CFT or the AFT. The CFT recently passed a resolution supporting convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. I have attached a strong objection written by the National Fraternal Order of Police. Frankly, I have no idea whether this person did or did not kill a cop; but I do know that I do not want one penny on my union dues spent on this cause. It has nothing to do with education. Moreover, the CFT also expends considerable resources on state-level political struggles that I do not support, and in fact could bankrupt the state I live in.
"As for the AFT, it is purely and simply an organ of the Democrat party. I have attached some charts below showing that at this time it contributes almost exclusively to the Democrat party. I do not approve of this use of my dues.
"Since I continue to support the mission of our Local insofar as it involves educational issues at [our school], I will contribute 10% of what I have been paying directly to our local, through the treasurer. As the former treasurer, I believe that amount will exceed the portion of my dues that remains in our union's bank account after regular monthly payments to the CFT and AFT."
Kudos to this teacher and former union treasurer for standing up for what he believes. He now realizes that he didn't leave the labor union, the labor union left him.
Many other teachers are beginning to recognize the in-your-face radicalization of the public sector unions, and they don’t like it either. I expect we’ll be hearing similar stories from brave union members who’ve had their fill and simply say, “Enough!”
Teachers, please continue telling them.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
A few weeks ago I brought you the story of the California Federation of Teachers passing a resolution "reaffirming" support for convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. He was convicted of killing, execution-style, Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Despite numerous appeals and efforts by far leftists to spring him from prison, he's serving a life sentence in an open-and-shut case.
The Fraternal Order of Police issued a strongly-worded letter to American Federation of Teachers' President Randi Weingarten, parent union to the CFT.
The union's absurdly radical action is now producing its consequences.
I received an email from a CFT and AFT member resigning his union membership over the kerfuffle. He wrote in part:
"Having given the matter considerable thought, I have decided to resign from our labor union, an affiliate of the CFT and the AFT. I have already instructed [an administrative staff member] in Davenport to stop deducting dues from my paycheck. I feel some responsibility for briefly explaining the reasons for this difficult decision.
"I did not especially think this faculty needed to unionize when the idea for that came forward, but I did vote in favor of it, in support of the majority of faculty that did think this worthwhile. I did so with the understanding our union would stick to our immediate educational and terms of employment issues at [our school]. Indeed, our local has pretty much done a good job of that, except for having used tactics during the last round of labor negotiations that I rejected as long ago as 1968 as a college student. No, the end did not justify the means. I will leave it at that.
"More to the point, I cannot allow my dues to support either the CFT or the AFT. The CFT recently passed a resolution supporting convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. I have attached a strong objection written by the National Fraternal Order of Police. Frankly, I have no idea whether this person did or did not kill a cop; but I do know that I do not want one penny on my union dues spent on this cause. It has nothing to do with education. Moreover, the CFT also expends considerable resources on state-level political struggles that I do not support, and in fact could bankrupt the state I live in.
"As for the AFT, it is purely and simply an organ of the Democrat party. I have attached some charts below showing that at this time it contributes almost exclusively to the Democrat party. I do not approve of this use of my dues.
"Since I continue to support the mission of our Local insofar as it involves educational issues at [our school], I will contribute 10% of what I have been paying directly to our local, through the treasurer. As the former treasurer, I believe that amount will exceed the portion of my dues that remains in our union's bank account after regular monthly payments to the CFT and AFT."
Kudos to this teacher and former union treasurer for standing up for what he believes. He now realizes that he didn't leave the labor union, the labor union left him.
Many other teachers are beginning to recognize the in-your-face radicalization of the public sector unions, and they don’t like it either. I expect we’ll be hearing similar stories from brave union members who’ve had their fill and simply say, “Enough!”
Teachers, please continue telling them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)