The Objective Eye

On the Lighter Side

2011-09-05T16:20:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Michael Grossman....

The recession has hit everybody really hard...

My neighbor got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.

CEO's are now playing miniature golf.

Exxon-Mobil laid off 25 Congressmen.

A stripper was killed when her audience showered her with rolls of Pennies while she danced.

I saw a Mormon with only one wife.

If the bank returns your check marked "Insufficient Funds," you call them and ask if they meant you or them.

McDonald's is selling the 1/4 ouncer.

Angelina Jolie adopted a child from America.

Parents in Beverly Hills fired their nannies and learned their children's names.

My cousin had an exorcism but couldn't afford to pay for it, and they re-possessed her!

A truckload of Americans was caught sneaking into Mexico.

A picture is now only worth 200 words.

When Bill and Hillary travel together, they now have to share a room.

The Treasure Island casino in Las Vegas is now managed by Somali pirates.

... finally, ....

I was so depressed last night thinking about the economy, wars, jobs, my savings, Social Security, retirement funds, etc., I called the Suicide Hotline and got a call center in Pakistan. When I told them I was suicidal, they got all excited, and asked if I could drive a truck.

Millionaires Go Missing

2011-08-18T07:16:00.000-07:00

This is a repost from an Aug 17 2011 WSJ opinion piece. The numbers don't lie...

Millionaires Go Missing
There is nothing like a recession to level incomes.....

Speaking of "millionaires and billionaires" (see above), the real tax news is that there are fewer of both these days. This month the IRS released more detailed tax data for 2009, and the nearby table records the decline of the taxpaying rich.

In 2007, 390,000 tax filers reported adjusted gross income of $1 million or more and paid $309 billion in taxes. In 2009, there were only 237,000 such filers, a decline of 39%. Almost four of 10 millionaires vanished in two years, and the total taxes they paid in 2009 declined to $178 billion, a drop of 42%.

Those with $10 million or more in reported income fell to 8,274 from 18,394 in 2007, a 55% drop. As a result, their tax payments tanked by 51%. These disappearing millionaires go a long way toward explaining why federal tax revenues have sunk to 15% of GDP in recent years. The loss of millionaires accounts for at least $130 billion of the higher federal budget deficit in 2009. If Warren Buffett wants to reduce the deficit, he should encourage policies to create more millionaires, not campaign to tax them more.

The millionaires who are left still pay a mountain of tax. Those who make $1 million accounted for about 0.2% of all tax returns but paid 20.4% of income taxes in 2009. Those with adjusted gross income above $200,000 a year were just under 3% of tax filers but paid 50.1% of the $866 billion in total personal income taxes. This means the top 3% paid more than the bottom 97%. Yet the 3% are the people that President Obama claims don't pay their fair share. Before the recession, the $200,000 income group paid 54.5% of the income tax.

Editorial writer Mary Kissel on how Obama's taxes on "millionaires and billionaires" would hurt the middle class. Also, Bartley Fellow Charlie Dameron on Texas Governor Rick Perry's liabilities as a GOP presidential candidate.

For the past three decades, the political left has obsessed about income inequality. As the economy experienced one of the largest and lengthiest economic booms in history from 1982-2007, the left moaned that the gains went to yacht club members.

Well, if equality of income is the priority, liberals should be thrilled with the last four years. The recession and weak recovery have been income levelers. Those who make more than $200,000 captured one-quarter of the $7.6 trillion in total income in 2009. In 2007 the over-$200,000 crowd had one-third of reported U.S. taxable income. Those with incomes above $1 million earned 9.5% of total income in 2009, down from 16.1% in 2007.

It's an old story: The best way to produce income equality is to destroy trillions of dollars of wealth. Everyone loses, but the rich lose relatively more than the poor and the middle class. By that measure, if few others, Obamanomics has been a raging success.

Will it make news, or be buried....

2011-07-28T14:51:00.000-07:00

A post like the one below, from Yahoo via Forbes via Nasa, is too important to be buried. However, I expect it to be buried. Basically, it is being reported that new NASA data directly refutes the whole theory of Global Warming via trapped greenhouse gases. I find this not suprising because the science around "global warming" (or do I need to say "Climate Change" so some can cover their basis) has had all the patterns of fake, phony, political and FAST. My number on data point is the violent reaction of any when you simply ask for the proof and data. "We are beyond that" they scream and assume my truth seeking is politically motivated (how?). Truth seeking is what we need to get beyond partisanship. I don't see any truth seeking from environmentalists. I also see the motive for "global warming" advocates, it gives them a) the key then need to promote big controlling government and b) a religion to help them deal with their secularism (fyi, I am not religious -- at least in a traditional sense). What do you think?

http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-global-warming-alarmism-192334971.html

The BEST take on the "debt crisis" I have heard

2011-07-15T17:07:00.000-07:00

I have spent a lot of time watching and listening to the debate on the disagreement surrounding raising the debt limit. This is the best, short, analysis I have heard. This is Krauthammer, who gets it.

-- Storm

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/07/12/krauthammer_obamas_sudden_interest_in_cutting_debt_a_farce.html

Happy Birthday Brokistan!

2011-07-05T15:06:00.000-07:00

Great piece I saw in OC Register around Independence Day by Mark Steyn.

Dozens of countries have “Independence Days.” Nov. 25, for example: Independence Day in Suriname. In that instance, as in most others, the designation signifies nothing more than transfer of de jure sovereignty and de facto operational control from a distant European capital to a more local regime. 1975 in Suriname's case. They had the first military coup seven years later.

But in America “Independence” seemed as much a statement about the character of a people as a designation of jurisdictional status. The first Americans were British subjects who had outgrown a British king as benign and enlightened as any ruler on the planet. They demanded “independence” not from foreign rulers of another ethnicity but from their own compatriots with whom they had a disagreement about the nature of government. Long before the Revolutionary War, small New England townships governed themselves to a degree no old England towns did. “Independence” is not about the replacement of a king in London with a president in Washington but about the republican virtues of a self-reliant citizenry free to exploit its own potential.
Please, no snickering. The self-reliant citizen? In the damning formulation of contemporary American vernacular, he's history – as in over and done with, fuhgeddabouttim. What's left of that founding vision on this less than Glorious Fourth of July 2011 in the Brokest Nation in History? “You go talk to your constituents,” President Obama taunted Republicans on Wednesday, “and ask them are they willing to compromise their kids' safety so that some corporate jet owner continues to get a tax break?”

In the Republic of Brokistan, that's the choice, is it? Give me safe kids or give me corporate jets! No corporate aviation without safe kiddification! In his bizarre press conference on Wednesday, Obama made no fewer than six references to corporate jet owners. Just for the record, the tax break for corporate jets was part of the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” – i.e., the stimulus. The Obama stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Democratic Party stimulus that every single Republican House member and all but three Republican senators voted against. The Obama-Corporate Jet stimulus that some guy called Obama ostentatiously signed into law in Denver after jetting in to host an “economic forum.”

Charles Krauthammer did the math. If you eliminate the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Corporate Jet Tax Break, you would save so much dough that, after 5,000 years, you would have clawed back enough money to cover one year of Obama's debt.
I see some leftie at MSNBC has just been suspended for characterizing the president's performance Wednesday as that of a demotic synonym for the male reproductive organ. So I shall be more circumspect and say only that even being a hollow unprincipled demagogue requires a certain lightness of touch Obama can't seem to find.

Speaking of corporate jets, did the president fly commercial to Denver? Oh, but that's different! He's in “public service.” A couple of weeks before he flew Air Force One to Denver, he flew Air Force One to Williamsburg, Va. From the White House (well, via Andrews Air Force Base). That's 150 miles, a 30-minute flight. He took a 747 for a puddle-jump across the Potomac.

Oh, but it was for another “economic forum.” This time with House Democrats – the ones who voted for the Obama Corporate Jet Tax Break. “Economic forums” are what we have instead of an economy these days.

Aside from the Sultan of Brunei and one or two similar potentates, no other head of state goes around like this. In a self-governing republic, it ought to be unbecoming. But in the Brokest Nation in History it's ridiculous. And the least the beneficiary of such decadence could do is not lecture those who pay for their own transportation. America's debt is an existential crisis, and playing shell games with demonizable irrelevancies only advertises your contempt for the citizenry.
By the way, one way to cut back on corporate jettage would be to restore civilized standards of behavior in American commercial flight. Two weeks ago, a wheelchair-bound 95-year-old woman at Northwest Florida Regional Airport flying to Michigan to be with her family for the final stage of her terminal leukemia was made to remove her adult diaper by the crack agents of the Transport Stupidity Administration. George III wouldn't have done this to her.

Oh, c'mon, do you want to compromise your kids' safety in order to give grope breaks to dying nonagenarians? A spokesgroper for the Transport Stupidity Administration explained that security procedures have to be “the same for everyone” – because it would be totally unreasonable to expect timeserving government bureaucrats to exercise individual human judgment.
Oddly enough, it's not “the same for everyone” if you're Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi from Nigeria, who on June 24 got on a flight at JFK with a college ID and an expired boarding pass in somebody else's name. Why, that slippery devil! If only he'd been three-quarters of a century older, in a wheelchair and dying of leukemia, we'd have got him! He was arrested upon landing at LAX, and we're now going to spend millions of dollars prosecuting him. Why? We should thank him for his invaluable expose of America's revolting security theater, and make him head of the TSA.

What else isn't “the same for everyone”? A lot of things, these days. The president has a point about “tax breaks”. We have too many. And on the scale of the present tax code that's a dagger at the heart of one of the most basic principles of free societies – equality before the law. But, of course, the president is not opposed to exemptions and exceptions and special privileges on principle: After all, he's issued – what is it now? – over a thousand “waivers” for his own Obamacare law. If you knew who to call in Washington, maybe you got one. If you didn't, tough.
But that's the point. Big Government on America's unprecedented money-no-object scale will always be profoundly wasteful (as on that Williamsburg flight), stupid (as at the TSA) and arbitrary (as in those waivers). But it's not republican in any sense the founders would recognize. If (like Obama) you're a lifetime member of the government class, you can survive it. For the rest, it ought to be a source of shame to today's Americans that this will be the first generation in U.S. history to bequeath its children the certainty of poorer, meaner lives – if not a broader decay into a fetid swamp divided between a well-connected Latin-American-style elite enjoying their waivers and a vast downwardly mobile morass.

On Independence Day 2011, debt-ridden America is now dependent, not on far-off kings but on global bond and currency markets, which fulfill the same role the cliff edge does in a Wile E Coyote cartoon. At some point, Wile looks down and realizes he's outrun solid ground. You know what happens next.
That's all, folks!
©MARK STEYN

Can We Have Clarity Over Where We Disagree?

2011-07-05T12:45:00.000-07:00

In the past I have made the claim that tyranny is all around us and that our freedoms are being eroded in a thousand little ways. Please watch the following. This is a fascinating back and forth on a congressional inquiry panel as broadcast on CSPAN. I don’t know who this congressman is (I assume he is a congressman) but he just became my favorite. A calmer Governor Christie. Note that the EPA (I assume) policy maker either A) did not understand the question or B) she refused to speak her truth. Either case is troubling. She started jibbering some answer that referenced bi-partisan backing and a partnership between the executive and legislative branches.(???). She missed it. What she should have said is that “we believe that if we let people do what they want they will make choices that we think are bad for society or the environment or both and we therefore think it is appropriate and better to forcefully limit the choices of the populace for the betterment of all — as to be determined by us — unelected officials of government agencies.” At least if she said that we could have clarity of disagreement and begin an important debate that this country so very much needs.

http://videos2view.net/smackdown.htm

Off the Cliff With No Skidmarks

2011-06-15T18:12:00.000-07:00

I had a recent debate with a friend who claimed that it was unassailable that BHO is "smart." Smart means context and wise choices, particularly important for a leader. Certainly a gifted orator who can read an audience and who has been well educated, in BHO I see a terribly misguided intelligence -- where I would take ANY of the republican contenders, RIGHT NOW, to better guide our country and its course. What does "smart" mean when it is a thinking and actions wheeling off course in increasing fashion. I am sure some of history's most awful tyrants and dictators were "smart" as they rose to power and were able to influence and audience and read and play emotions. I am not looking for these traits in a leader, I am looking for someone to represent my values and those of my country.

The following piece from today's National Review by Mark Steyn is a great, long, read. It represents information in context, and a real reading of the tea leaves. It is classic Steyn - choc full of facts and analysis amid the frolicking sarcasm of a sober observer watching a world gone mad.

TOO BIG TO WIN
Steyn on America
WEDNESDAY, 15 JUNE 2011
Why can’t America win wars? It’s been two-thirds of a century since we saw (as President Obama vividly put it) “Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.” And, if that’s not quite how you remember it, forget the formal guest list, forget the long-form surrender certificate, and try to think of “winning” in a more basic sense.

The United States is currently fighting, to one degree or another, three wars. Iraq — the quagmire, the “bad” war, the invasion that launched a thousand Western anti-war demonstrations and official inquiries and anti-Bush plays and movies — is going least badly. For now. And making allowances for the fact that the principal geostrategic legacy of our genteel protectorate is that an avowed American enemy, Iran, was able vastly to increase its influence over the country on our dime.

Afghanistan? The “good war” is now “America’s longest war.” Our forces have been there longer than the Red Army was. The “hearts and minds” strategy is going so well that American troops are now being killed by the Afghans who know us best. Does being murdered by the soldiers and policemen you’ve spent years training even count as a “combat” death? Perhaps that’s why the U.S. media disdain to cover these killings: In April, at a meeting between Afghan border police and their U.S. trainers, an Afghan cop killed two American soldiers. Oh, well, wild country, once you get up near that Turkmen border. A few weeks later, back in Kabul, an Afghan military pilot killed eight American soldiers and a civilian contractor. On May 13, a NATO “mentoring team” sat down to lunch with Afghan police in Helmand when one of their protégés opened fire and killed two of them. “The actions of this individual do not reflect the overall actions of our Afghan partners,” said Maj. Gen. James B. Laster of the U.S. Marine Corps. “We remain committed to our partners and to our mission here.”

Libya? The good news is that we’ve vastly reduced the time it takes us to get quagmired. I believe the Libyan campaign is already in The Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest quagmire on record. In an inspired move, we’ve chosen to back the one Arab liberation movement incapable of knocking off the local strongman even when you lend them every NATO air force. But not to worry: President Obama, cooed an administration official to The New Yorker, is “leading from behind.” Indeed. What could be more impeccably multilateral than a coalition pantomime horse composed entirely of rear ends? Apparently it would be “illegal” to target Colonel Qaddafi, so our strategic objective is to kill him by accident. So far we’ve killed a son and a couple of grandkids. Maybe by the time you read this we’ll have added a maiden aunt or two to the trophy room. It’s not precisely clear why offing the old pock-skinned transvestite should be a priority of the U.S. right now, but let’s hope it happens soon, because otherwise there’ll be no way of telling when this “war” is “ended.”

According to partisan taste, one can blame the trio of current morasses on Bush or Obama, but in the bigger picture they’re part of a pattern of behavior that predates either man, stretching back through non-victories great and small — Somalia, Gulf War One, Vietnam, Korea. On the more conclusive side of the ledger, we have . . . well, lemme see: Grenada, 1983. And, given that that was a bit of post-colonial housekeeping Britain should have taken care of but declined to, one could argue that even that lone bright spot supports a broader narrative of Western enfeeblement. At any rate, America’s only unambiguous military triumph since 1945 is a small Caribbean island with Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. For 43 percent of global military expenditure, that’s not much bang for the buck.

Inconclusive interventionism has consequences. Korea led to Norks with nukes. The downed helicopters in the Iranian desert led to mullahs with nukes. Gulf War One led to Gulf War Two. Somalia led to 9/11. Vietnam led to everything, in the sense that its trauma penetrated so deep into the American psyche that it corroded the ability to think clearly about war as a tool of national purpose.

For half a century, the Cold War provided a kind of cover. At the dawn of the so-called American era, Washington chose to downplay U.S. hegemony and instead created and funded transnational institutions in which the non-imperial superpower was so self-deprecating it artificially inflated everybody else’s status in a kind of geopolitical affirmative-action program. In the military sphere, this meant NATO. If the rap against the U.N. Security Council is that it’s the World War II victory parade preserved in aspic, NATO is the rubble of post-war Europe preserved as a situation room. In 1950, America had a unique dominance of the “free world” and it could afford to be generous, so it was: We had more money than we knew what to do with, so we absolved our allies of paying for their own defense.

But 1950 ended. The Continental economies recovered, Europe got wealthy, and so did Japan and later the Asian tigers. And in Washington nobody noticed: We continued to pay, garrisoning not remote colonies but some of the richest nations in history. Thanks to American defense welfare, NATO is a military alliance made up of allies that no longer have militaries. In the Cold War, that had a kind of logic: Europe was the designated battlefield, so, whether or not they had any tanks, they had, very literally, skin in the game. But the Cold War ended and NATO lingered on, evolving into a global Super Friends made up of folks who aren’t Super and don’t like each other terribly much. At the beginning of the Afghan campaign, Washington invested huge amounts of diplomatic effort trying to rouse its allies into the merest gestures of war-making: The 2004 NATO summit was hailed as a landmark success after the alliance’s 26 members agreed to commit an extra 600 troops and three helicopters. That averages out at 23.08 troops per country, plus almost a ninth of a helicopter apiece. Half a decade of quagmire later, Washington was investing even larger amounts of diplomatic effort failing to rouse its allies into the most perfunctory gestures of non-combat pantywaist transnationalism: We know that, under ever more refined rules of engagement, certain allies won’t go out at night, or in snow, or in provinces where there’s fighting going on, so, by the 2010 NATO confab, Robert Gates was reduced to complaining that the allies’ promised 450 “trainers” for the Afghan National Army had failed to materialize. Supposedly 46 nations are contributing to the allied effort in Afghanistan, so that would work out at ten “trainers” per country. Imagine if the energy expended in these ridiculous (and in some cases profoundly damaging) transnational fig leaves had been directed into more quaintly conventional channels — like, say, identifying America’s national interest and pursuing it.

The Cold War casts other shadows. In Korea, the U.S. forbore even to cut its enemy’s Chinese supply lines. You can’t win that way. But in the nuclear age, all-out war — war with real nations, with serious militaries — was too terrible to contemplate, so even in proxy squabbles in Third World backwaters the overriding concern was to tamp things down, even at the price of victory. And, by the time the Cold War ended, such thinking had become ingrained. A U.S.–Soviet nuclear standoff of mutual deterrence decayed into a unipolar world of U.S. auto-deterrence. Were it not for the brave passengers of Flight 93 and the vagaries of the Oval Office social calendar, the fourth plane on 9/11 might have succeeded in hitting the White House, decapitating the regime, leaving a smoking ruin in the heart of the capital and delivering the republic unto a Robert C. Byrd administration or some other whimsy of presidential succession. Yet, in allowing his toxic backwater to be used as the launch pad for the deadliest foreign assault on the U.S. mainland in two centuries, Mullah Omar either discounted the possibility of total devastating destruction against his country, or didn’t care.

If it was the former, he was surely right. After the battle of Omdurman, Hilaire Belloc offered a pithy summation of technological advantage:

Whatever happens
We have got
The Maxim gun
And they have not.

But suppose they know you’ll never use the Maxim gun? At a certain level, credible deterrence depends on a credible enemy. The Soviet Union disintegrated, but the surviving superpower’s instinct to de-escalate intensified: In Kirkuk as in Kandahar, every Lilliputian warlord quickly grasped that you could provoke the infidel Gulliver with relative impunity. Mutually Assured Destruction had curdled into Massively Applied Desultoriness.

Here I part company somewhat from my National Review colleagues who are concerned about inevitable cuts to the defense budget. Clearly, if one nation is responsible for near half the world’s military budget, a lot of others aren’t pulling their weight. The Pentagon outspends the Chinese, British, French, Russian, Japanese, German, Saudi, Indian, Italian, South Korean, Brazilian, Canadian, Australian, Spanish, Turkish, and Israeli militaries combined. So why doesn’t it feel like that?

Well, for exactly that reason: If you outspend every serious rival combined, you’re obviously something other than the soldiery of a conventional nation state. But what exactly? In the Nineties, the French liked to complain that “globalization” was a euphemism for “Americanization.” But one can just as easily invert the formulation: “Americanization” is a euphemism for “globalization,” in which the geopolitical sugar daddy is so busy picking up the tab for the global order he loses all sense of national interest. Just as Hollywood now makes films for the world, so the Pentagon now makes war for the world. Readers will be wearily familiar with the tendency of long-established pop-culture icons to go all transnational on us: Only the other week Superman took to the podium of the U.N. to renounce his U.S. citizenship on the grounds that “truth, justice, and the American way” no longer does it for him. My favorite in recent years was the attempted reinvention of good ol’ G.I. Joe as a Brussels-based multilateral acronym — the Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity. I believe they’re running the Libyan operation.

An army has to wage war on behalf of something real. For better or worse, “king and country” is real, and so, mostly for worse, are the tribal loyalties of Africa’s blood-drenched civil wars. But it’s hardly surprising that it’s difficult to win wars waged on behalf of something so chimerical as “the international community.” If you’re making war on behalf of an illusory concept, is it even possible to have war aims? What’s ours? “[We] are in Afghanistan to help the Afghan people,” General Petraeus said in April. Somewhere generations of old-school imperialists are roaring their heads off, not least at the concept of “the Afghan people.” But when you’re the expeditionary force of the parliament of man, what else is there?

War is hell, but global “mentoring” is purgatory. In that respect, the belated dispatch of Osama bin Laden may be less strategically relevant than the near-simultaneous exposé by 60 Minutes of Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea. This is the bestselling book the Pentagon gives to Afghan-bound officers, and whose celebrity author has met with our most senior commanders on multiple occasions. And it’s a crock. Nevertheless, it’s effected a profound cultural transformation — if only on us. “It’s remarkable,” an Indian diplomat chuckled to me a while back. “In Afghanistan, the Americans now drink more tea than the British. And they don’t even like it.” In 2009, remember, the Pentagon accounted for 43 percent of the planet’s military expenditures. At this rate, by 2012 they’ll account for 43 percent of the planet’s tea consumption.

Nation building in Afghanistan is the ne plus ultra of a fool’s errand. But even if one were so disposed, effective “nation building” is done in the national interest of the builder. The British rebuilt India in their own image, with a Westminster parliament, common law, and an English education system. In whose image are we building Afghanistan? Eight months after Petraeus announced his latest folly, the Afghan Local Police initiative, Oxfam reported that the newly formed ALP was a hotbed of torture and pederasty. Almost every Afghan institution is, of course. But for most of human history they’ve managed to practice both enthusiasms without international subvention. The U.S. taxpayer accepts wearily the burden of subsidy for Nevada’s cowboy poets and San Francisco’s mime companies, but, even by those generous standards of cultural preservation, it’s hard to see why he should be facilitating the traditional predilections of Pashtun men with an eye for the “dancing boys of Kandahar.”

Which brings us back to those Three Cups of Tea. So the Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity is building schoolhouses in Afghanistan. Big deal. The problem, in Kandahar as in Kansas, is not the buildings but what’s being taught inside them — and we’ve no stomach for getting into that. So what’s the point of building better infrastructure for Afghanistan’s wretched tribal culture? What’s our interest in state-of-the-art backwardness?

Transnational do-gooding is political correctness on tour. It takes the relativist assumptions of the multiculti varsity and applies them geopolitically: The white man’s burden meets liberal guilt. No wealthy developed nation should have a national interest, because a national interest is a selfish interest. Afghanistan started out selfishly — a daringly original military campaign, brilliantly executed, to remove your enemies from power and kill as many of the bad guys as possible. Then America sobered up and gradually brought a freakish exception into compliance with the rule. In Libya as in Kosovo, war is legitimate only if you have no conceivable national interest in whatever conflict you’re fighting. The fact that you have no stake in it justifies your getting into it. The principal rationale is that there’s no rationale, and who could object to that? Applied globally, political correctness obliges us to forswear sovereignty. And, once you do that, then, as Country Joe and the Fish famously enquired, it’s one-two-three, what are we fighting for?

When you’re responsible for half the planet’s military spending, and 80 percent of its military R&D, certain things can be said with confidence: No one is going to get into a nuclear war with the United States, or a large-scale tank battle, or even a dogfight. You’re the Microsoft, the Standard Oil of conventional warfare: Were they interested in competing in this field, second-tier military powers would probably have filed an antitrust suit with the Department of Justice by now. When you’re the only guy in town with a tennis racket, don’t be surprised if no one wants to join you on center court — or that provocateurs look for other fields on which to play. In the early stages of this century’s wars, IEDs were detonated by cell phones and even garage-door openers. So the Pentagon jammed them. The enemy downgraded to more primitive detonators: You can’t jam string. Last year, it was reported that the Taliban had developed metal-free IEDs, which made them all but undetectable: Instead of two hacksaw blades and artillery shells, they began using graphite blades and ammonium nitrate. If you’ve got uniformed infantrymen and tanks and battleships and jet fighters, you’re too weak to take on the hyperpower. But, if you’ve got illiterate goatherds with string and hacksaws and fertilizer, you can tie him down for a decade. An IED is an “improvised” explosive device. Can we still improvise? Or does the planet’s most lavishly funded military assume it has the luxury of declining to adapt to the world it’s living in?

In the spring of 2003, on the deserted highway between the Jordanian border and the town of Rutba, I came across my first burnt-out Iraqi tank — a charred wreck shoved over to the shoulder. I parked, walked around it, and pondered the fate of the men inside. It seemed somehow pathetic that, facing invasion by the United States, these Iraqi conscripts had even bothered to climb in and point the thing to wherever they were heading when death rained down from the stars, or Diego Garcia, or Missouri. Yet even then I remembered the words of the great strategist of armored warfare, Basil Liddell Hart: “The destruction of the enemy’s armed forces is but a means — and not necessarily an inevitable or infallible one — to the attainment of the real objective.” The object of war, wrote Liddell Hart, is not to destroy the enemy’s tanks but to destroy his will.

Instead, America has fallen for the Thomas Friedman thesis, promulgated by the New York Times’ great thinker in January 2002: “For all the talk about the vaunted Afghan fighters, this was a war between the Jetsons and the Flintstones — and the Jetsons won and the Flintstones know it.”

But they didn’t. They didn’t know they were beaten. Because they weren’t. Because we hadn’t destroyed their will — as we did to the Germans and Japanese two-thirds of a century ago, and as we surely would not do if we were fighting World War II today. That’s not an argument for nuking or carpet bombing, so much as for cool clear-sightedness. Asked how he would react if the British army invaded Germany, Bismarck said he would dispatch the local police force to arrest them: a clever Teuton sneer at the modest size of Her Britannic Majesty’s forces. But that’s the point: The British accomplished much with little; at the height of empire, an insignificant number of Anglo-Celts controlled the entire Indian subcontinent. A confident culture can dominate far larger numbers of people, as England did for much of modern history. By contrast, in an era of Massively Applied Desultoriness, we spend a fortune going to war with one hand tied behind our back. The Forty-Three Percent Global Operating Industrial Military Complex isn’t too big to fail, but it is perhaps too big to win — as our enemies understand.

So on we stagger, with Cold War institutions, transnational sensibilities, politically correct solicitousness, fraudulent preening pseudo–nation building, expensive gizmos, little will, and no war aims . . . but real American lives. “These Colors Don’t Run,” says the T-shirt. But, bereft of national purpose, they bleed away to a grey blur on a distant horizon. Sixty-six years after V-J Day, the American way of war needs top-to-toe reinvention.

from National Review

Class Warfare, the latest version...

2011-06-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

Expect our media to fall right in line on pitting "millionaires and billionaires" against everybody else as the Democrats try to shift blame to the Republicans over the coming debt limit showdown. The Great Uniter -- he is not.

Biden Digging for Tax Hike Deal
By Chris Stirewalt
Published June 15, 2011
| FoxNews.com

Dems Try to Retake High Ground on Economy

“The ‘Affordable Health Care Act’ was not as affordable as we expected.
The ‘Open Government Initiative’ was not as open as we expected.
The ‘stimulus’ was not as stimulating as we expected.”

-- Suggestions from the office of Speaker John Boehner for follow up “jokes” to the one President Obama made in North Carolina Monday that “‘shovel-ready’ was not as ‘shovel-ready’ as we expected.”

The lousy economy has helped push Democrats to the negotiating table in a bid to cut a deal to increase the federal government’s $14.3 trillion borrowing limit, but the blue team is still hoping to gain some leverage from the nation’s economic woes.
In order to keep their party’s rank and file on board, Democratic negotiators, led by Vice President Joe Biden, need to offer some kind of a tax increase as part of a package of cuts being negotiated with Republicans.
But if the deal includes a tax hike on incomes above $200,000, or anything else, Republicans won’t be able to deliver the seven Senate votes and 24 House votes needed to pass a plan that had unanimous Democratic support.
The gambit from the administration now is to offer an extension and expansion of President Obama’s payroll tax cut in a bid to spur hiring and to offer Republicans a trade off in favor of a tax hike on high-income earners.
An aide to one senior House Republican described the possibility of a tax rate increase in exchange for the extension of a temporary tax break on payrolls as “a non-starter,” but the administration is desperate to get a deal and look active on the economy.
The Republican complaint about the Obama payroll tax break is that it is too small to jolt the economy back on the wrong track. Obama has long favored the imperceptible tax break, like the one in his 2009 stimulus that put another $6 in the weekly paychecks of most workers. The theory is that the money is spent quickly helping the economy.
Republicans, meanwhile, favor low rates overall and lean toward shock and awe when it comes to tax cut stimuli. Recall that one Republican plan for the 2009 stimulus was to simply zero out the payroll tax for the remainder of that year, rather than a small adjustment.
Biden’s group meets again today. While there is new optimism about the size of the cuts that can be achieved, the looming question remains about taxes.
With Democrats taking a pounding over the condition of the economy and Republicans still denouncing Obama’s joke about the failures of his stimulus package, Democrats may eventually be convinced to drop calls for a tax hike.
But for now, the White House is still looking for a trade off. The president’s chances for getting his hike will be enhanced if Democrats can’t paint Republicans as protecting “millionaires and billionaires” while opposing a little more pocket change for the middle class.
The Democratic counterattack begins anew today.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/06/15/biden-digging-for-tax-hike-deal/#ixzz1PMOkl5vP

Republican Debate

2011-06-14T11:31:00.000-07:00

CNN should not be allowed to run a debate. They don't understand the issues facing the country, just their NY/Beltway narrative from a political framework. Mark Steyn penned this just after the debate ended....and I agree..... (courtesy www.steynonline.com)

Re: This or That
June 13, 2011 10:33 P.M.
By Mark Steyn
The trouble is it’s all “This or That”. As Newt pointed out, most of the questions posit ridiculous choices: Are you in favor of amnesty for illegal immigrants or are you in favor of deporting 20 million people? Are you in favor of seizing private property in New Hampshire for a Hydro Québec power line or are you in favor of continued oil dependency on psychotic dictators? The remainder fall into cutesie-pie stuff that John King lacks the personality to pull off, and the last embodied in its perfect post-modern stupidity the awfulness of these “debates”: “What have you learned during the past two hours?”

Hmm. What I learned is that John King makes Tim Pawlenty look like Lady Gaga. Other than that, I also got the distimct impression that this season’s debates seem unlikely to be effective forums even for acknowledging the profound and existential crises facing the nation, never mind addressing them.

But I agree with Rich that Michele Bachmann was very strong. (Here’s my favorite picture of her – I hope it doesn’t ruin her campaign.) I also agree that the answers on Afghanistan about deferring to the commanders in the field were pathetic – for a couple of reasons:

First, as I said in NR a couple of issues back, you can’t win a war unless you have war aims – and war aims are determined by a nation’s civilian leadership. So, if Romney & Co mean what they say, it helps explain why America has nothing to show either for a decade in the Hindu Kush or for three months over Tripoli.

Alternatively, if they don’t mean it, then they’re just pandering in a bumper-stickerish “I So Totally Support Our Troops I’ll Take My Orders From Them” kind of way. And this political season ought to be one not for panderers but for tellers of hard truths.

Peggy Noonan's Insight

2011-06-09T11:18:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, Peggy Noonan wrote an interesting column on the skills and orientation of the President. As usual, it was insightful, and worthy of a re-post. She has high skill on her ability to read poeple...

To Lead us Out of Debt Crisis, President Will Need to Learn New Skills.
By Peggy Noonan from WSJ 6/5/11

The debate in Washington is serious as a heart attack: whether the United States should raise its debt ceiling so it can borrow more money to stay afloat. The statutory ceiling on our national debt—our legal borrowing limit—is $14.3 trillion. That limit was reached, according to the Treasury Department, on May 16. Treasury says it can make do until early August, when the ceiling must be raised by $2.4 trillion.

Congressional Republicans have made their stand clear: They will agree to raise the limit only if it is accompanied by spending cuts or reforms.

The Democrats want to raise the ceiling, period.

The Republicans are being hard-line because of the base, and the base is hard-line for two reasons. First, we are in an unprecedented debt crisis. Second, the past 40 years have taught them that if dramatic action is not taken to stanch spending, Congress will spend more. Something is needed to shock the system.

If Republicans can get the White House to cut where the money is—Medicare—then Medicare, and all controversy over the Ryan plan, will be taken off the table as an issue in the 2012 election. This would not be good for Democrats. Democrats in turn would likely make some cuts in spending if Republicans agree to some tax increases. But that would take a great Republican issue off the table.

This week the House voted 318-97 against raising the ceiling without cutting. The president and a group of House Republicans met this week to talk about the apparent impasse. There is a chance they won't come to any agreement by August.

If no agreement is reached, what happens? Nobody knows, because it's never happened before. But economists warn: The dollar could crash, interest rates spike, equity markets melt. Foreign investors would lose confidence that America is worth risking their money and that Washington is able to face and handle a crisis.

Princeton economist Alan Blinder has noted in these pages that the bills for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense and interest on the national debt amount to about two-thirds of all federal outlays. "At some point [Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner could wind up brooding over horrible questions like these: Do we stop issuing checks for Social Security benefits, or for soldiers' pay, or for interest payments to the Chinese government?”

All of this sounds fairly catastrophic, especially considering this week's evidence that America's economic recovery is stalled. Housing prices are down, job creation weak, manufacturing growth slowed, factory activity down. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 280 points on Wednesday.

So this would seem to be a bad time to be playing chicken.

Democrats think if push comes to shove and an agreement is not reached, public opinion will go against the Republicans. This may be true. Republicans think if agreement is not reached, responsibility will redound on the president. They may be true too.

But again, this isn't a good time to play Let's Find Out.

Democrats are right that the debt ceiling must be raised. Republicans are right that the decision to raise the debt ceiling must be accompanied by reforms or cuts to spending that equal or exceed the amount of the raise, $2.4 trillion. Here's why.

Default is unthinkable. We are the United States of America, and we pay our bills.

Raising the ceiling without attempting to control spending is a depressing and wearying thought. It will avert crisis, yes, but there would be no gain in it beyond that. It would demonstrate to the world that we are not capable of taking necessary steps to dig our way out of the spending mess. It would mean things just continue as they are.

But cutting and reforming—showing we can make tough decisions in a crisis—will reassure the world, and our creditors. It will increase faith in the United States, and increase an American sense of well being: "We can do this, we can make it better." It would be very good to leave the world saying, "My God, the Americans are still competent."

Washington should forget taxes for now—fight that out later. The polls are all over the place, and no feasible amount of new revenue is going to make a difference. Cutting is what matters. And the president could play it so that he doesn't lose. A crisis would have been averted—on his watch. He could claim to have been conciliatory, looking out for the national interest. The left won't like it, but the center will. And he will have shown he can work closely and in good faith with Republicans, who control the House.

On that, a word. Talks on the debt ceiling will no doubt continue, but there is an Obama problem there, and it's always gotten in the way. He really dislikes the other side, and can't fake it. This is peculiar in a politician, the not faking it. But he doesn't bother to show warmth and high regard. And so appeals to patriotism—"Come on guys, we have to save this thing"—ring hollow from him. In this he is the un-Clinton. Bill Clinton understood why conservatives think what they think because he was raised in the South. He was surrounded by them, and he wasn't by nature an ideologue.

He absorbed not the biases of his region but of his generation and his education (Ivy League). He had ambition: Liberalism was rising and he'd rise with it. And on the signal issues of his youth, Vietnam and race, he thought the Democrats of the 1970s were right. But that didn't mean he didn't understand and feel some sympathy for conservatives, and as a political practitioner he had a certain sympathy for the predicaments of his fellow pols. That's why he could play ball with Newt Gingrich and the class of 1994: because he didn't quite hate everything they stood for. He had a saving ambivalence.

Barack Obama is different, not a political practitioner, really, but something else, and not a warm-blooded animal but a cool, chill character, a fish who sits deep in the tank and stares, stilly, at the other fish.

He doesn't know how to confuse his foes with "outreach," with phone calls, jokes, affection. He doesn't leave them saying, as Reagan did, "I just can't help it, I like the guy." And because he can't confuse them or reach them they more readily coalesce around their own explanation of him: socialist, destroyer.

This isn't good, and has had an impact on the president's contacts with Republicans. And it's added an edge to an emerging campaign theme among them. Two years ago I wrote of Clare Booth Luce's observation that all presidents have a sentence: "He fought to hold the union together and end slavery." "He brought America through economic collapse and a world war." You didn't have to be told it was Lincoln, or FDR. I said that Mr. Obama didn't understand his sentence. But Republicans now think they know it.

Four words: He made it worse.

Obama inherited financial collapse, deficits and debt. He inherited a broken political culture. These things weren't his fault. But through his decisions, he made them all worse.

Is Winning Winning?

2011-06-03T12:28:00.000-07:00

Many Republicans are pontificating on how their nominees should win the election. In Today's WSJ Dorothy Rabinowitz writes that we need to move away from "ideals" and get to "pragmatic" concerns like creating jobs. The article is well written and has some good thoughts. And, it might even be correct. However, I disagree.

I am not in favor of pragmatism or the number “jobs” created by the next executive branch. As a Republican, Libertarian and Tea Party member I am most concerned with what we choose to be our philosophy and concept of government, and want the debate to be about what is the proper long term role for the master -- and correspondingly whom will be the fodder. This is all I care about. Business cycles will come and go, and I continue to believe that separation of state and economy is best and that the debate has to be about the size and role of government. For, if you win on a “pragmatic” message, how do you have any authority to do any good? This was the problem with the last set of Republicans to control the White House and legislature. How soon we forget that a very short time ago Republicans were in total control of the government.

"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
-- Thomas Jefferson

Here is Article from Dorothy....

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ (WSJ June 2011)

To win the presidency in 2012, the Republican candidate will require certain strengths. Among them, a credible passion for ideas other than cost-cutting and small government. He or she will have to speak in the voice of Americans who know in their bones the extraordinary character of their democracy, and that voice will have to ring out steadily. That Republican candidate will need, no less, the ability to talk about matters like Medicare and Social Security without terrorizing the electorate.

Americans already have plenty of cause for fear. They have on one side the Obama health-care plan now nearly universally acknowledged as a disaster. A plan that entails huge cuts in health care—$500 billion cut from Medicare—that will nevertheless cause no pain, according to its architects. As the polls on ObamaCare show, this grand scheme appears mostly to have alarmed Americans.

From the Republican side comes an incessant barrage of doomsday messages and proclamations that the nation is imperiled by the greatest crisis in a generation—not, as we might have supposed, by our ongoing, desperate unemployment levels, but by spending on social programs. No sane person will deny the necessity of finding ways to cut the costs of these programs. But it's impossible not to hear in the clamor for boldness—for massive cuts in entitlements—a distinctly fevered tone, and one with an unmistakable ideological tinge. Not the sort of pragmatism that inspires voter confidence.

Thinking about all this, a physician friend recalls a lesson that experienced doctors learn: A patient comes in with symptoms—is it angina? Will it lead to a heart attack? Patients whose doctors show deliberation and care in the choice of their treatment, he observes, tend to have increased faith both in the treatment and the doctor. That is a point of some relevance to politicians.

The Republican who wants to win would avoid talk of the costs that our spendthrift ways, particularly benefits like Social Security, are supposedly heaping on future generations. He would especially avoid painting images of the pain Americans feel at burdening their children and grandchildren. This high-minded talk, rooted in fantasy, isn't going to warm the hearts of voters of mature age—and they are legion—who feel no such pain. None. And they don't like being told that they do, or that they should feel it, or that they're stealing from the young. They've spent their working lives paying in to Social Security, their investment. Adjustments have to be made to the system, as they now know. Which makes it even more unlikely they'll welcome handwringing about the plight of future generations.

The Republican who wins will have to know, and show that he knows, that most Americans aren't sitting around worried to death about big government—they're worried about jobs and what they have in savings.

The candidate would do well to give time and all due detail—the material is rich—on the activities of the Justice Department under President Obama, the most ideologically driven one in U.S. history. He would make the connection between the nature of this Justice Department and the president's view of the American nation.

That view was made clear early, in candidate Obama's repeated reference to that happy time ahead when America would once again be worthy of respect—which we had presumably lost through our immoral policies—and when we would regain the trust of friends and allies around the world. That vision, still alive and well two and a half years into his administration, has been nowhere clearer than in Attorney General Eric Holder's determined effort to give 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the benefit of a trial in an American court, with full constitutional protections. Only with such a trial, Mr. Holder argued, could America prove to the world the fairness of its justice system.

The Republican candidate would have to make clear just how far removed from reality, how alien to the consciousness of most Americans, is this reflexive view of the nation as morally suspect, ever obliged to prove its respectability to a watching world. The attorney general still refuses to drop charges against two CIA employees accused of using enhanced interrogation techniques to extract information from terrorists—notwithstanding the recommendations of investigators looking into the case that the charges merited no prosecution.

The candidate will have to speak clearly on foreign policy—and begin, above all, by showing he actually has one. The near silence on the subject among Republicans consumed by domestic policy battles has been notable. Not till President Obama delivered his speech relegating Israel to pre-1967 borders did outraged Republicans come to roaring life—as Democrats, too, largely did—about a foreign policy issue.

The Republican candidate might bear in mind, for use on the campaign trail, the grand irony in the spectacle of candidate Obama holding forth on the stump about our friends and allies whom the United States had so alienated under George W. Bush—allies who would have to be won back. Fast forward to September 2009, when the Obama administration virtually overnight cancelled the planned missile defense system that was to be established in Poland and the Czech Republic—a shock to both allies but a gift to the Russians. The Kremlin was indeed grateful.

In March 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton let it be known that the United States no longer supported the British in the matter of the Falkland Islands, which have been British territory since 1833, and that "negotiations" with Argentina were in order. P.J. Crowley, then the State Department's spokesman, expressed the new neutral stance of the U.S. by referring to the Falklands and then adding, with his usual ostentation, "or the Malvinas"—the Argentinian name—"depending on how you look at it."

The Republican who wins the presidency will have to have more than a command of the reasons the Obama administration must go. He will have to have a vision of this nation, and its place in the world, that voters recognize, that speaks to a sense of America they can see and take pride in. He can look at the film of the crowds, mostly of young people, who gathered at the White House to wave the flag of the United States when bin Laden was captured and killed. Faces of blacks, whites, Asians—of every ethnic group.

At Louisiana State University not long after that, a student who planned to burn an American flag had to be rushed from the campus for his safety, much to his shock. Students by the hundreds had descended on him in rage, waving their own banners and roaring "USA! USA!" at the top of their lungs. It was a shout that spoke for more than they could say.

After all the years of instruction, all the textbooks on U.S. rapacity and greed, all the college lectures on the evil and injustice the U.S. had supposedly visited on the world, something inside these young rose up to tell them they were Americans. That something lies in the hearts of Americans across the land and it is those hearts to which the candidate will have to speak.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of The Journal's editorial board.

HealthCare -- What is quality?

2011-05-31T14:03:00.000-07:00

It should be amazing that the following is not discussed more often. It is a meaningful, and perhaps the most meaningful measure of "quality of healthcare." Too often "life span" is a measure, but convenience has to be more relevant measure.

In addition I often hear "16% of GDP is too much to spend on healthcare!" Too much for whom? By what measure? What is the appropriate amount? Is 16% too much of a spend for flat screen TVs or electronics? What about transportation? Education? -- Blank out. No Answer, just ignore the obvious question. No questions from our journalistic 'watchdog' media.

A recent "Investor's Business Daily" article provided very interesting statistics from a survey by the United Nations International Health Organization.

Percentage of men and women who survived a cancer five years after diagnosis:

U.S. 65%
England 46%
Canada 42%

Percentage of patients diagnosed with diabetes who received treatment within six months:

U.S. 93%
England 15%
Canada 43%

Percentage of seniors needing hip replacement who received it within six months:

U.S. 90%
England 15%
Canada 43%

Percentage referred to a medical specialist who see one within one month:

U.S. 77%
England 40%
Canada 43%

Number of MRI scanners (a prime diagnostic tool) per million people:

U.S. 71%
England 14%
Canada 18%

Percentage of seniors (65+), with low income, who say they are in "excellent health":

U.S. 12%
England 2%
Canada 6%

Republican Budget Items

2011-05-31T12:23:00.000-07:00

I think this list needs some more detail to be considered legitimate, but I assume it is close. (i.e. what it needs is to clarify how much savings over what time frame, which is offered for some items but not for all).

These are all the programs that the new Republican House has proposed cutting. Read to the end.
· Corporation for Public Broadcasting Subsidy. $445 million annual savings.
· Save America 's Treasures Program. $25 million annual savings.
· International Fund for Ireland . $17 million annual savings.
· Legal Services Corporation. $420 million annual savings.
· National Endowment for the Arts. $167.5 million annual savings.
· National Endowment for the Humanities. $167.5 million annual savings.
· Hope VI Program.. $250 million annual savings.
· Amtrak Subsidies. $1.565 billion annual savings.
· Eliminate duplicative education programs. H.R. 2274 (in last Congress), authored by Rep. McKeon, eliminates 68 at a savings of $1.3 billion annually.
· U.S. Trade Development Agency. $55 million annual savings.
· Woodrow Wilson Center Subsidy. $20 million annual savings.
· Cut in half funding for congressional printing and binding. $47 million annual savings.
· John C. Stennis Center Subsidy. $430,000 annual savings.
· Community Development Fund. $4.5 billion annual savings.
· Heritage Area Grants and Statutory Aid. $24 million annual savings.
· Cut Federal Travel Budget in Half. $7.5 billion annual savings
· Trim Federal Vehicle Budget by 20%. $600 million annual savings.
· Essential Air Service. $150 million annual savings.
· Technology Innovation Program. $70 million annual savings.
· Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) Program. $125 million annual savings.
· Department of Energy Grants to States for Weatherization. $530 million annual savings.
· Beach Replenishment. $95 million annual savings.
· New Starts Transit. $2 billion annual savings.
· Exchange Programs for Alaska , Natives Native Hawaiians, and Their Historical Trading Partners in Massachusetts. $9 million annual savings
· Intercity and High Speed Rail Grants. $2.5 billion annual savings.
· Title X Family Planning. $318 million annual savings.
· Appalachian Regional Commission. $76 million annual savings.
· Economic Development Administration. $293 million annual savings.
· Programs under the National and Community Services Act. $1.15 billion annual savings.
· Applied Research at Department of Energy. $1.27 billion annual savings.
· FreedomCAR and Fuel Partnership. $200 million annual savings.
· Energy Star Program. $52 million annual savings.
· Economic Assistance to Egypt . $250 million annually.
· U.S. Agency for International Development. $1.39 billion annual savings.
· General Assistance to District of Columbia . $210 million annual savings.
· Subsidy for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. $150 million annual savings.
· Presidential Campaign Fund. $775 million savings over ten years.
· No funding for federal office space acquisition. $864 million annual savings.
· End prohibitions on competitive sourcing of government services.
· Repeal the Davis-Bacon Act. More than $1 billion annually.
· IRS Direct Deposit: Require the IRS to deposit fees for some services it offers (such as processing payment plans for taxpayers) to the Treasury, instead of allowing it to remain as part of its budget. $1.8 billion savings over ten years.
· Require collection of unpaid taxes by federal employees. $1 billion total savings.
· Prohibit taxpayer funded union activities by federal employees. $1.2 billion savings over ten years.
· Sell excess federal properties the government does not make use of. $15 billion total savings.
· Eliminate death gratuity for Members of Congress.
· Eliminate Mohair Subsidies. $1 million annual savings.
· Eliminate taxpayer subsidies to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. $12.5 million annual savings
· Eliminate Market Access Program. $200 million annual savings.
· USDA Sugar Program. $14 million annual savings.
· Subsidy to Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). $93 million annual savings.
· Eliminate the National Organic Certification Cost-Share Program. $56.2 million annual savings.
· Eliminate fund for Obamacare administrative costs. $900 million savings.
· Ready to Learn TV Program. $27 million savings..
· HUD Ph.D. Program.
· Deficit Reduction Check-Off Act.

· TOTAL SAVINGS: $2.5 Trillion over Ten Years

I think this shows how things get into the budget. Something as small as $10MM dollars is not taken seriously. That, in addition to the process in Washington, means this is how our rulers play the game. They play power politics with our money. Think about the taxes you paid last year -- would you be pleased to know that your entire tax bill went to pay for a subsidy to Ireland?

Mark Steyn on Demographics and Decline

2011-05-24T07:34:00.001-07:00

This post from Mark Steyn caught my eye. Enjoy.

Steyn on Culture
TUESDAY, 24 MAY 2011
Mitch Daniels has wrapped up his "To be or not to be" routine, and, according to Paul Rahe, left the GOP looking like a hamlet without a prince. Paul is upset. I'm less so. As I said on the radio some months back, one should never underestimate the Republican Party's ability to screw up its presidential nomination. The GOP had a grand night last November only because the entire party establishment was more or less absent from the 2010 election dynamic. It would be unreasonable to expect that luck to hold, and a presidential year requires a single frontman for the party that makes election season less friendly to decentralized insurgency Tea Party-style.

And in any case doesn't last November seem an awful long time ago? A transformative Tuesday night, followed by an entirely untransformed Wednesday morning after. There is the Paul Ryan plan, but last year's hero Scott Brown has come out against it. And he won't be the last if NY-26 goes south. And the Ryan plan itself is, in the grand scheme of the looming abyss, extremely minimal and cautious.

Governor Daniels' long tease over the Presidential race will be remembered mainly for one thing - the "truce" he called for over so-called "social issues". This was depressing on two fronts: First because Republicans spend too much time pre-emptively conceding and agreeing to play on the left's turf - and, if ever there were an electoral cycle when that should be unnecessary, it's this one. And secondly because the social issues are not separate from the debt crisis. The collapse of the American family is a fiscal issue: Unwed women are one of the most reliable voting groups for big government.

Steven Hayward suggests Daniels proposed the wrong truce, and that the one implicit in the Ryan plan is closer to what's needed: Both Republicans and Democrats accept the current obligations of the welfare state, and figure out a way to make them work. I'm inclined to agree with Michael Tanner at the Cato Institute - that the GOP would get suckered:

T]here is no evidence that if conservatives agree not to try to roll back the welfare state, liberals will agree to restrain its growth. More likely, conservatives will simply become involved in a bidding war, in which they will inevitably look like the less caring party.

You don't need to hypothesize about that. In essence, it's the "truce" accepted by so-called "right-of-center" parties (Jacques Chirac) in post-war Europe. And all it means is that the troika of permanent bureaucracy, government unions, and a vast dependency class gets to carry on bankrupting the nation even under nominally "conservative" government.

Out there in Insolvistan life goes on. Detroit, a city that has the functioning literacy rate of a West African basket case, has just renovated its library with designer chairs from Allermuir costing $1,000 apiece. Any books to go with the chairs? Who cares? "How about the young mother with several children that looks forward to a weekly trek through the snow/sleet to improve their reading skills and are hopeful that a spot near the fireplaces will be open, because the warmth provided is greater than what they experience at home?" argues Allermuir sales rep Paul Gingell in a Dickensian vignette that warms the heart of my bottom almost as much as his chairs do. God forbid any Detroiter should be required to "improve their reading skills" without a thousand-dollar seat to sink their illiterate posteriors into. What matters is to keep spending at all costs. Three chairs for Detroit!

Who will pay for Detroit, and California, New York and the rest? New Hampshire? Wyoming? Mitch Daniels can demand a "truce" from conservatives on social issues, and Democrats can demand a truce from Republicans on the welfare state, but the real fault-lines on which this nation will fracture are not half so clubbable. How many citizens of the remaining relatively solvent states are prepared to pick up the tab for Detroit's Allermuir chairs for the privilege of keeping 50 stars in the flag? The spendaholics are setting up conditions for serious secession movements.

What of those states that feel at home in a spendaholic America? Mainly as a result of government policy, the south-west has undergone one of the fastest and most dramatic demographic transformations ever seen in a settled, self-governing nation. As a consequence, there is a widening divergence between young and old in states such as California: The old are very white (with some black), and the young are very Hispanic (with some Asian). The principal beneficiaries of the mid-20th century entitlement programs are honky geezers. The fellows expected to fund them are increasingly Latino. That doesn't sound a recipe for social tranquility. The welfare state developed in small ethnically homogeneous northern European nations with a strong sense of intergenerational solidarity. That model applies less and less on an Islamizing Continent, and it makes just as little sense for southern California. When the Democrats' dependency culture collides with their immigration policies, it isn't going to be pretty. Eighty-three per cent of Medicare recipients are white; 70 per cent of births in Dallas' biggest hospital are Hispanic. The speed of transformation represented by those numbers would be difficult to manage at the best of times. In the brokest nation in history, the chances of pulling it off smoothly are zero.

Daniels' "truce" is irrelevant measured against the likelihood of any truce between solvent and insolvent states, young and old, private sector and government retiree. We're approaching the point of no return. If you scuttle the Ryan plan, the next one will be far more convulsive. Assuming there is a "plan" at all, rather than simply societal disintegration. From Scott Brown to Mitch Daniels, from the post-November business-as-usual to a potential Democrat upset in NY-26, it's starting to look as if the political institutions of the republic are impervious to course correction. I always cite the Milton Friedman argument: What matters is not electing the right people (Scott Brown was "the right people" just a year ago), but creating conditions whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right thing - ie, whatever squishes and opportunists emerge as the Scott Browns of November 2012, we've moved the meter sufficiently in the broader public discourse. Otherwise, the president who takes office in January 2013 will be presiding over the early stages not of American decline but of collapse.

Brilliant Post on Brown

2010-01-25T11:46:00.000-08:00

This post from Krauthammer is worth re-reading (thanks to the "Sting of the Lash" blog for alerting me). In particular I am really suprised by the over-reaching of the left since 2008. Many said that the left had become a platform of "anti-bush" only. Many said they would over-reach fast and furious. I thought such views were wrong, but they were correct. Read on.....

What Scott Brown's win means for the Democrats

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, January 22, 2010; A21

On Jan. 14, five days before the Massachusetts special election, President Obama was in full bring-it-on mode as he rallied House Democrats behind his health-care reform. "If Republicans want to campaign against what we've done by standing up for the status quo and for insurance companies over American families and businesses, that is a fight I want to have."

The bravado lasted three days. When Obama campaigned in Boston on Jan. 17 for Obamacare supporter Martha Coakley, not once did he mention the health-care bill. When your candidate is sinking, you don't throw her a millstone.

After Coakley's defeat, Obama pretended that the real cause was a generalized anger and frustration "not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years, but what's happened over the last eight years."

Let's get this straight: The antipathy to George W. Bush is so enduring and powerful that . . . it just elected a Republican senator in Massachusetts? Why, the man is omnipotent.

And the Democrats are delusional: Scott Brown won by running against Obama, not Bush. He won by brilliantly nationalizing the race, running hard against the Obama agenda, most notably Obamacare. Killing it was his No. 1 campaign promise.

Bull's-eye. An astonishing 56 percent of Massachusetts voters, according to a Rasmussen poll, called health care their top issue. In a Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates poll, 78 percent of Brown voters said their vote was intended to stop Obamacare. Only a quarter of all voters in the Rasmussen poll cited the economy as their top issue, nicely refuting the Democratic view that Massachusetts was just the usual anti-incumbent resentment you expect in bad economic times.

Brown ran on a very specific, very clear agenda. Stop health care. Don't Mirandize terrorists. Don't raise taxes; cut them. And no more secret backroom deals with special interests.

These deals -- the Louisiana purchase, the Cornhusker kickback -- had engendered a national disgust with the corruption and arrogance of one-party rule. The final straw was the union payoff -- in which labor bosses smugly walked out of the White House with a five-year exemption from a ("Cadillac") health insurance tax Democrats were imposing on the 92 percent of private-sector workers who are not unionized.

The reason both wings of American liberalism -- congressional and mainstream media -- were so surprised at the force of anti-Democratic sentiment is that they'd spent Obama's first year either ignoring or disdaining the clear early signs of resistance: the tea-party movement of the spring and the town-hall meetings of the summer. With characteristic condescension, they contemptuously dismissed the protests as the mere excrescences of a redneck, retrograde, probably racist rabble.

You would think lefties could discern a proletarian vanguard when they see one. Yet they kept denying the reality of the rising opposition to Obama's social democratic agenda when summer turned to fall and Virginia and New Jersey turned Republican in the year's two gubernatorial elections.

The evidence was unmistakable. Independents, who in 2008 had elected Obama, swung massively against the Democrats: dropping 16 points in Virginia, 21 in New Jersey. On Tuesday, it was even worse: Independents, who had gone 2-to-1 Republican in Virginia and New Jersey, now went 3-to-1 Republican in hyper-blue Massachusetts. Nor was this an expression of the more agitated elements who vote in obscure low-turnout elections. The turnout on Tuesday was the highest for any nonpresidential Massachusetts election in 20 years.

Democratic cocooners will tell themselves that Coakley was a terrible candidate who even managed to diss Curt Schilling. True, Brown had Schilling. But Coakley had Obama. When the bloody sock beats the presidential seal -- of a man who had them swooning only a year ago -- something is going on beyond personality.

That something is substance -- political ideas and legislative agendas. Democrats, if they wish, can write off their Massachusetts humiliation to high unemployment, to Coakley or, the current favorite among sophisticates, to generalized anger. That implies an inchoate, unthinking lashing-out at whoever happens to be in power -- even at your liberal betters who are forcing on you an agenda that you can't even see is in your own interest.

Democrats must so rationalize, otherwise they must take democracy seriously, and ask themselves: If the people really don't want it, could they possibly have a point?

"If you lose Massachusetts and that's not a wake-up call," said moderate -- and sentient -- Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, "there's no hope of waking up."

I say: Let them sleep.

New Media

2010-01-05T11:58:00.000-08:00

If you have not yet checked out PajamasTV please go to PJTV.com and take a look. In particular, Bill Whittle is a real gem, and here is a link to his recent video post if you have 10 min. this is becoming my main source of "video" news.....

Storm

http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=video&video-id=2907

Steyn Online

2010-01-04T17:51:00.000-08:00

This guy is too quick and too funny not to be repeated. Reposted with the (implicit) permission of Mark Steyn....

The Joke¹s on Us

WE ARE THE LAUGHING STOCK OF THE WORLD

January 02, 2010, 7:00 a.m.

The Joke’s on Us
The Pantybomber wasn’t the big joke. We are.

By Mark Steyn

On Christmas Day, a gentleman from Nigeria succeeded (effortlessly) in boarding a flight to Detroit with a bomb in his underwear. Pretty funny, huh?

But the Pantybomber wasn’t the big joke. The real laugh was the United States government. The global hyperpower spent the next week making itself a laughingstock to the entire planet. First, the bureaucrats at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) swung into action with a whole new range of restrictions.

Against radical Yemen-trained Muslims wearing weaponized briefs? Of course not. That would be too obvious. So instead they imposed a slew of constraints against you. At Heathrow last week, they were permitting only one item of carry-on on U.S. flights. In Toronto, no large purses.

Um, the Pantybomber didn’t have a purse. He brought the bomb on board under his private parts, and his private parts weren’t part of his carry-on (although, if reports of injuries sustained in his failed mission are correct, they may well have been part of his carry-off). But no matter. If in doubt, blame the victim. The TSA announced that for the last hour of the flight no passenger can use the toilets or have anything on his lap — not a laptop, not a blanket, not a stewardess, not even a paperback book. I can’t wait for the first lawsuit after an infidel flight attendant confiscates a litigious imam’s Koran as they’re coming into LAX.

You’re still free to read a paperback if you’re flying from Paris to Sydney, or Stockholm to Beijing, or Kuala Lumpur to Heathrow. But not to LAX or JFK. The TSA were responding as bonehead bureaucracies do: Don’t just stand there, do something. And every time the TSA does something, you’ll have to stand there, longer and longer, suffering ever more pointless indignities. Last week, guest-hosting The Rush Limbaugh Show, I took a call from a lady who said that, if it helps keep her safe, she’s happy to get to the airport “four, five, whatever hours” before the flight. Try to put a figure on “whatever” and you’ll get a sense of where America’s transportation system is headed. Ten years ago, you got to the airport 45 minutes, an hour before the flight. Now, thanks to the ever more demanding choreographers of the homeland-security kabuki, it’s two, three, four, whatever. Look at O’Hare and imagine the size of airport we’ll need. And by then the Pantybomber won’t even need to get on the plane; he can kill more people blowing up the check-in line.

And remember, this was a bombing mission that “failed.” With failures like this, who needs victories?

Joke, joke, joke. The only good news was that the derision was so universal that the TSA promptly reined in some of their wackier impositions a couple of days later. But by then Janet Incompetano, the homeland-security secretary, had gone on TV and declared to the world that there was nothing to worry about: “The system worked.”

Indeed, it worked “smoothly.” The al-Qaeda trainee on a terrorist watch list, a man banned from the United Kingdom and reported to the CIA by his own father, got on board the plane, assembled the bomb, and attempted to detonate it. But don’t worry ’bout a thing; the system worked.

Twenty-four hours later, Secretary Incompetano was back on TV to protest that her words had been taken “out of context.” No doubt, the al-Qaeda-trained CIA-reported cash-paying crotch-stuffed watch-list member’s smooth progress through check-in was also taken “out of context.”

But by then the president of the United States had also taken to the airwaves. For three days, he had remained silent — which I believe is a world record for the 44th president. Since Jan. 20, 2009, it’s been difficult to switch on the TV and not find him yakking — accepting an award in Oslo for not being George W. Bush, doing Special Olympics gags with Jay Leno, apologizing for America to some dictator or other . . . But across the electric wires an eerie still had descended. And when the president finally spoke, even making allowances for his usual detached cool, he sounded less like a commander-in-chief addressing the nation after an attempted attack than an assistant DA at a Cook County press conference announcing a drug bust: “Here’s what we know so far. . . . As the plane made its final approach to Detroit Metropolitan Airport, a passenger allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device. . . . The suspect was immediately subdued. . . . The suspect is now in custody and has been charged.” Etc, etc, piling up one desiccated legalism on another: “Allegedly . . . ” “suspect . . . ” “charged . . . ” The president can’t tell an allegedly alleged suspect (which is what he is in Obama fantasy-land) from an enemy combatant (which is what he is in cold hard reality). But worse than the complacent cop-show jargonizing was a phrase it’s hard to read as anything other than a deliberate attempt to mislead the public: The president referred to the Knickerbomber as an “isolated extremist.” By this time, it was already clear that young Umar had been radicalized by jihadist networks in London and fast-tracked to training in Yemen by terror operatives who understood the potentially high value of a Westernized Muslim with excellent English from a respectable family. Yet President Obama tried to pass him off as some sort of lone misfit who wakes up one morning and goes bananas. Could happen to anyone.

But, if it takes the White House three days to react to an attack on the United States, their rapid-response unit can fire back in nothing flat when Dick Cheney speaks. “It is telling,” huffed the president’s communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, “that Vice President Cheney and others seem to be more focused on criticizing the administration than condemning the attackers.”

“Condemning the attackers”? What happened to all the allegedly alleged stuff? Shouldn’t that be “condemning the alleged isolated attacker”? The communications director seems to be wandering a bit off-message here, whatever the message is: The system worked, so we’re inconveniencing you even more. The system failed, but the alleged suspect is an isolated extremist, so why won’t that cowardly squish Cheney have the guts to condemn the attacker and his vast network of associates?

The real message was conveyed by Fouad Ajami, discussing the new administration’s foreign policy in the Wall Street Journal: “No despot fears Mr. Obama, and no blogger in Cairo or Damascus or Tehran, no demonstrator in those cruel Iranian streets, expects Mr. Obama to ride to the rescue.” True. Another Iranian deadline passed on New Year’s Eve, but the United States will set a new one for Groundhog Day or whenever.

And, just as the thug states understand they now have the run of the planet, so do the terror cells. A thwarted terror attack at Christmas is bad enough. Spending the following week making yourself a global joke is worse. Every A-list despot and dimestore jihadist got that message loud and clear — and so did American allies already feeling semi-abandoned by this most parochial of presidents. Expect a bumpy twelve months ahead. Happy New Year.

Uhhh Ohhhh......

2009-12-16T23:00:00.000-08:00

Help…….Poll numbers sinking………fast……..am losing control of media………….getting bad advice from people who surround me………….they are on to me………..must get a legislative win on the board……….Help…..Dirty politics not working as planned……..Harry Dean is against me……..Help…………..

Credit below to Jeff Schreiber....

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2009

A New Low

White House threatens Nebraska senator with closure of a crucial Air Force base in an attempt to obtain his critical vote on health care reform

First, they gave Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu $300 million in exchange for her vote in favor of Harry Reid's health care reform bill. That was bad enough. Now, the White House is playing games with our national security and using 10,000 military families as political pawns in an attempt to garner the vote of Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, who has had very public misgivings about voting for the legislation because it holds provisions which would allocate federal funds to fund abortions.

According to the Weekly Standard, the White House is threatening to place Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base, home to U.S. Strategic Command and 10,000 military families, on the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission List. From Michael Goldfarb's piece:

Offutt Air Force Base employs some 10,000 military and federal employees in Southeastern Nebraska. As our source put it, this is a "naked effort by Rahm Emanuel and the White House to extort Nelson's vote." They are "threatening to close a base vital to national security for what?" asked the Senate staffer.

Indeed, Offutt is the headquarters for US Strategic Command, the successor to Strategic Air Command, and not by accident. STRATCOM was located in the middle of the country for strategic reasons. Its closure would be a massive blow to the economy of the state of Nebraska, but it would also be another example of this administration playing politics with our national security.

This isn't the same as playing to the economic dire straits in Landrieu's Louisiana. This has gone from bribery to blackmail. It is outright dangerous, and downright treasonous. Already today, the White House provided aid and comfort to our enemies by revealing the plan to close the terrorist detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and house nearly 100 foreign terrorists in northwestern Illinois for the sake of political expediency, now they're playing games with American national security for the sake of forcing the passage of health care reform.

What gets lost in all of the left-right shuffle and the ongoing debate on the cable news networks is that the Democrats have the seats to pass anything they want. That they have not, that they have to resort to bribery and blackmail and--in the case of Sen. Joe Lieberman and his wife--the politics of personal destruction shows that this legislation is poisonous. And, as the pressure mounts, we're seeing that this administration is all too happy to administer the dose.

Great Post from George Will

2009-12-07T09:52:00.000-08:00

This piece from George Will is important for many reasons, but I think a very important reason is that all systems, not just free markets, trade in capital and incentive -- and monitoring and observing (and understanding) those incentives is the key to creating wealth and avoiding corruption in an economy. As you read Will's comments, pay special attention to the agency problems he is calling out. Agency problems are so named because when an "agent" becomes involved in the process they can often act so very different from how a "principal" would act. -- Storm

The climate-change travesty

By George F. Will

Sunday, December 6, 2009

With 20,000 delegates, advocates and journalists jetting to Copenhagen for planet Earth's last chance, the carbon footprint of the global warming summit will be the only impressive consequence of the climate-change meeting. Its organizers had hoped that it would produce binding caps on emissions, global taxation to redistribute trillions of dollars, and micromanagement of everyone's choices.

China, nimble at the politics of pretending that is characteristic of climate-change theater, promises only to reduce its "carbon intensity" -- carbon emissions per unit of production. So China's emissions will rise.

Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate-change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million Americans in 2050, so Obama's promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.

Disclosure of e-mails and documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Britain -- a collaborator with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- reveals some scientists' willingness to suppress or massage data and rig the peer-review process and the publication of scholarly work. The CRU materials also reveal paranoia on the part of scientists who believe that in trying to engineer "consensus" and alarm about warming, they are a brave and embattled minority. Actually, never in peacetime history has the government-media-academic complex been in such sustained propagandistic lockstep about any subject.

The Post learns an odd lesson from the CRU materials: "Climate scientists should not let themselves be goaded by the irresponsibility of the deniers into overstating the certainties of complex science or, worse, censoring discussion of them." These scientists overstated and censored because they were "goaded" by skepticism?

Were their science as unassailable as they insist it is, and were the consensus as broad as they say it is, and were they as brave as they claim to be, they would not be "goaded" into intellectual corruption. Nor would they meretriciously bandy the word "deniers" to disparage skepticism that shocks communicants in the faith-based global warming community.

Skeptics about the shrill certitudes concerning catastrophic man-made warming are skeptical because climate change is constant: From millennia before the Medieval Warm Period (800 to 1300), through the Little Ice Age (1500 to 1850), and for millennia hence, climate change is always a 100 percent certainty. Skeptics doubt that the scientists' models, which cannot explain the present, infallibly map the distant future.

The Financial Times' peculiar response to the CRU materials is: The scientific case for alarm about global warming "is growing more rather than less compelling." If so, then could anything make the case less compelling? A CRU e-mail says: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment" -- this "moment" is in its second decade -- "and it is a travesty that we can't."

The travesty is the intellectual arrogance of the authors of climate-change models partially based on the problematic practice of reconstructing long-term prior climate changes. On such models we are supposed to wager trillions of dollars -- and substantially diminished freedom.

Some climate scientists compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes. They seem to suppose themselves a small clerisy entrusted with the most urgent truth ever discovered. On it, and hence on them, the planet's fate depends. So some of them consider it virtuous to embroider facts, exaggerate certitudes, suppress inconvenient data, and manipulate the peer-review process to suppress scholarly dissent and, above all, to declare that the debate is over.

Consider the sociology of science, the push and pull of interests, incentives, appetites and passions. Governments' attempts to manipulate Earth's temperature now comprise one of the world's largest industries. Tens of billions of dollars are being dispensed, as by the U.S. Energy Department, which has suddenly become, in effect, a huge venture capital operation, speculating in green technologies. Political, commercial, academic and journalistic prestige and advancement can be contingent on not disrupting the (postulated) consensus that is propelling the gigantic and fabulously lucrative industry of combating global warming.

Copenhagen is the culmination of the post-Kyoto maneuvering by people determined to fix the world's climate by breaking the world's -- especially America's -- population to the saddle of ever-more-minute supervision by governments. But Copenhagen also is prologue for the 2010 climate change summit in Mexico City, which will be planet Earth's last chance, until the next one.

georgewill@washpost.com

Wretched Article in the Wall Street Journal Today

2009-11-30T12:07:00.000-08:00

In today's WSJ, Henry Mintzberg, a professor at a university, wrote a piece about how we should do away with all executive bonuses. The article made a weak effort to be fact driven and scenario driven, but ended up being illogical, unsound and wrong! I was most disturbed at how this piece, supposedly written by a scholar of business, failed to identify and address the real issues at stake. It was as if the free market had never existed, and rather that bonuses paid to date have simply been the result of some "we must pay big bonuses" government policy.

First, the reason we (the shareholders) pay performance bonuses is we believe we need to attract the best people. For a person to argue to do away with these bonuses and to NOT address the ability of companies to still be able to attract people means that this piece is not credible. I am disappointed the editors at the Journal did not insist this be addressed prior to publishing. I might as well argue for NASA to launch a space program to put a man in another galaxy without addressing whether such a mission is physically possible! The implicit assumption by Mintzberg is that these bonuses are completely optional and not needed to attract and retain these people. Really? Defend that position. I do not want to indict all of academia, but this flawed "out of market" logic is what I read all too often from those who are not in the market, insulated from the market, and who live in a world of "tenure" supported by unseen, unknown and unappreciated donors. I think the donors do more harm than good.

Second, on the dynamics Mintzberg cites regarding CEO leadership, culture building, and stock price being the best indicator of a company's health...false, false and false again. I sit on many boards, and this is not the case. A CEO sets the culture for an entire company. Implicitly or explicitly, every organization has a value system and the CEO either actively manages those values or chooses not to address them and they develop on their own -- either way a company's culture is the responsibility of the CEO. While stock price is not perfect, it is tied closest to shareholder value, and no better way has been shown to date (one suggestion, -- lengthen the measurement period to several years to better align with shareholder interests.)

Finally, the entire issue of executive bonuses is a straw man around an emotional issue to many, meant to deflect attention from the true issue. This is not about whether I "think it is fair" that some CEO make "too much" (too much according to whom? no answer). This is about whether an individual, ANY individual, and whether YOU have the ability to enter into a private contract with or without the approval of society. This is about the freedom of an individual (and private company) to have the choice and liberty to voluntary decide to trade on terms they wish to honor. The statists in our society have chosen a populist, personal issue surrounded by class warfare and the fanned flames of envy to cloud the issue. Storm

Great post from Charles Krauthammer at Washington Post

2009-11-06T15:20:00.000-08:00

I thought this was well written and well researched and represented a unique take from all the articles I have scanned. Republished with the (implied) permission of Mr. Krauthammer -- his email at the end of this post.

The myth of '08, demolished

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, November 6, 2009

Sure, Election Day 2009 will scare moderate Democrats and make passage of Obamacare more difficult. Sure, it makes it easier for resurgent Republicans to raise money and recruit candidates for 2010. But the most important effect of Tuesday's elections is historical. It demolishes the great realignment myth of 2008.

In the aftermath of last year's Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics -- most prominently, rising minorities and the young -- would bury the GOP far into the future. One book proclaimed "The Death of Conservatism," while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.

This was all ridiculous from the beginning. The '08 election was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points.

Exactly a year later comes the empirical validation of that skepticism. Virginia -- presumed harbinger of the new realignment, having gone Democratic in '08 for the first time in 44 years -- went red again. With a vengeance. Barack Obama had carried it by six points. The Republican gubernatorial candidate won by 17 -- a 23-point swing. New Jersey went from plus-15 Democratic in 2008 to minus-four in 2009. A 19-point swing.

What happened? The vaunted Obama realignment vanished. In 2009 in Virginia, the black vote was down by 20 percent; the under-30 vote by 50 percent. And as for independents, the ultimate prize of any realignment, they bolted. In both Virginia and New Jersey they'd gone narrowly for Obama in '08. This year they went Republican by a staggering 33 points in Virginia and by an equally shocking 30 points in New Jersey.

White House apologists will say the Virginia Democrat was weak. If the difference between Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds was so great, how come when the same two men ran against each other statewide for attorney general four years ago the race was a virtual dead heat? Which made the '09 McDonnell-Deeds rematch the closest you get in politics to a laboratory experiment for measuring the change in external conditions. Run them against each other again when it's Obamaism in action and see what happens. What happened was a Republican landslide.

The Obama coattails of 2008 are gone. The expansion of the electorate, the excitement of the young, came in uniquely propitious Democratic circumstances and amid unparalleled enthusiasm for electing the first African American president.

November '08 was one shot, one time, never to be replicated. Nor was November '09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm -- and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.

The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm -- deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in 12 years -- because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his "New Foundation" for America -- from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy.

Moreover, the same conventional wisdom that proclaimed the dawning of a new age last November dismissed the inevitable popular reaction to Obama's hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt -- the tea party demonstrators, the town hall protesters -- as a raging rabble of resentful reactionaries, AstroTurf-phony and Fox News-deranged.

Some rump. Just last month Gallup found that conservatives outnumber liberals by 2 to 1 (40 percent to 20 percent) and even outnumber moderates (at 36 percent). So on Tuesday, the "rump" rebelled. It's the natural reaction of a center-right country to a governing party seeking to rush through a left-wing agenda using temporary majorities created by the one-shot election of 2008. The misreading of that election -- and of the mandate it allegedly bestowed -- is the fundamental cause of the Democratic debacle of 2009.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Elevating the Debate

2009-11-04T15:56:00.000-08:00

If you are one who seeks the truth, outside of any political or politically correct narrative, then I will assume that you (also) are disappointed (or absolutely apalled) at the nature of the public debate. The liberties on logic taken by those behind the mic to make their point inspire nothing but skepticism. I am currently reading a wonderful book, Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin that (in addition to remaining as unbiased as possible) lays out in well researched detail Lincoln's rise to power and his political genius of enrolling friends and adversaries alike into his cause. Of particular note is the nature of structure, rules and logic demanded in debate by the mid 19th century public. Lincoln won points by extolling his audience to follow his logic as he deconstructed the premises of his opponents stated positions. It is hard to accept how far we have fallen in the last 150 years and that we now live in an age of short attention spans, gossip TV, one liners and 'gotchas.' Indeed, in the book Goodwin lays out a great point -- that the attention audiences invested in structured political debate in Lincoln's time is now reserved for sporting events! Finally, I thought this email, from a friend, whom I will keep anonymous, was an excellent checklist on the high side of debate....

There are very strict rules about debate and presentation of opposing views that have worked for years to keep order and to elevate the level of discourse. I would like to remind everyone about relevant rules. Not just in the Climate discussion but any time you want to elevate a dialog.

Often truth can be figured out just by judging the debate.

1. Any character assassination means the assassin immediately loses.

2. “My experts” are better than “your experts” without further definition is a waste of time and points are lost.

3. The use of “everyone agrees” when they don’t disqualifies the assertion and casts a pawl over the speaker. In general I have found that anyone using that assertion is wrong, lying, or biased and that hypothesis upon which the assertion is made is wrong and that the use of the assertion is to stop inquiry about the counter argument.

4. Always separate questions of fact from questions of belief. Facts can be verified, compared or discussed separately from belief assertions.

5. Never confuse correlation and causality. The jump from a correlation to causality is huge. Most science is involved justifying that jumping that chasm. In general the weaker the expert the easier they will make the jump. Good science is very careful about the jump.

6. Never ascribe big outcomes from small things when there are other items that are larger and more important in the same system. (This one comes from engineering training not debate but I thought I would throw it in.)

7. Announce your personal biases and examine them yourself. A good exercise is to argue for the position you do not favor and often it is amazingly enlightening.

8. Mistrust crowds, groups, committees, politicians, preachers, and the consensual agreement.

9. No one has a right to an uninformed opinion -- "what do you know and how do you know it?"

-- Storm

Front and Center Comment...

2009-10-28T10:22:00.000-07:00

I thought this comment by Julie A of AZ to my post on "reality" deserved to be front and center...

When did 'profit' become such an ugly word and misunderstood concept? And how is it that we can live in the one society that has benefited most from a capitalistic approach and not understand capitalism at all? It seems that the government can attack any industry (drug companies, insurance companies, oil companies, etc) by pointing out that they are motivated by 'profit' (boo, hiss).

Doesn't the average American realize that almost all of the drugs that exist to increase our lifespan and quality of life are there solely because it was profitable to invest in research and create them? The irony is that are people today writing and blogging about the evils of a profit driven system that would probably be deceased if creating amazing new life-extending drugs was not a profitable business (Michael Moore, perhaps?) And what about the insurance companies? Insurance has to be a profitable business for insurance companies to exist. Which of course is the true market destroying threat behind any type of government funded public health insurance option.

If the government (the universe's largest non-profit organization) offers health insurance they won't have to worry about being profitable...why should they? They obviously have no problem spending more than they have and running on a huge deficit. So in the "public interest" they will offer free or almost-free health insurance and undercut every other insurance company out there. Soon, the average insurance company won't be able to compete with the public option and still make a decent profit, so they will opt to take their business talents to a more rewarding industry and close their doors. Soon, there will be less and less insurance companies...until, all we have left are the government-tun public option and a handful of government-subsidized 'private' companies to keep up the myth of private health insurance. That is the real threat of any 'public' option.

Once you drive the profit out of an industry, you drive out innovation, talent and, eventually, the industry itself.

I Am Incredulous

2009-10-27T16:42:00.000-07:00

In today's WSJ I was shocked to read the results of an NBC/WSJ Poll that says that 73% of the populace wants "some sort of public option." (link below)

Really?

73% of the populace wants to have the government run the healthcare system in an action that will by almost all accounts either run the private insurance out of business or shift a large percentage of costs to those who wish to have private insurance? I am incredulous.

A majority wants to pattern match their healthcare on the high levels of service currently experienced by those healthcare system in the veterans administration, or the service in the US postal system or the service with Amtrak? Really?

A large majority of people are willing to let the US healthcare system "scare" away the best and the brightest, and to encourage that talent to flock to other industries, eventually putting the level of talent in US healthcare equal to the talent (and effort and incentive) put forth in the government entities mentioned above? I don't believe it.

Are you telling me that most Americans have not heard the calls for REAL healthcare reform that is tort reform and the reform of removing the government from the areas of healthcare they currently control and that these government interventions are fingered by many as being the true cause of expensive healthcare? How is this possible?

This poll is saying that most of the people that buy all types of valuable goods and services in the markets every day, including hundreds and thousands of creative and valuable insurance products that protect every item of value and every contingency in our lives, don't believe that the free market can solve the insurance for healthcare problem efficiently and justly? After all this evidence they cannot see that the free market does not solve problems only when it is blocked from doing so by agency problems and from mandated, mis-aligned incentives, usually from statists and interventionists? Again, I am incredulous.

All this on the day when the public option has (hopefully) died from lack of support from an independent minded senator from Connecticut?

Either the American people are a lot less wise than I thought or I WANT TO SEE THAT POLL AND THE WORDING OF THE QUESTIONS. I call on all "polls" to make transparent the nature and exact wording of the questions asked and the audience that participated -- because I cannot believe that this poll is accurate.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/10/27/wsjnbc-news-poll-public-attitudes-on-the-public-option/

Prophetic?

2009-10-20T16:45:00.000-07:00

I thought (or hoped) this post was too EXTREME when it was first posted. Now I look silly. I hope this blogger (excellent) doesn't mind me reposting what looks darn smart....

Births and Deaths: Congratulations Mr. & Mrs. GOP, it's an Objectivist....?; Conservatism R.I.P.

What we've just witnessed is sad confirmation that at least 50% of the American voting population are too stupid to value their liberty, and though I'm trying not to be too negative here, a fact is a fact. As of the year 2008, there remains no plausible excuse for an embrace of shopworn Marxism, other than a vast and comprehensive ignorance of philosophy, economics and history. But tempting though it is, I can't really tap into the newly-popular phrase "For the first time in my adult... lifetime, I'm... really ashamed of my country."

Just part of it.

Sincere congrats are due to Obama and the Democrat-Socialist Party however, for a successful campaign that, unlike the Republicans', based its success on fidelity to core principles, albeit evil ones. [Note of emphasis to the GOP "leadership": I just made an evaluation of political ideology based on Ethics. Try it sometime, presumably for what would be your very first.]

Silver linings to the 2008 McCain trouncing:

- John McCain will never be a candidate for American President again;

- The fact of President-elect Obama's ethnicity is a devastating blow to all of America's racists: Black supremecists no longer have the last shred of plausibility in claiming America is a "racist nation," and white supremecists have just gotten the mother of all body-slams. Unfortunately, racism will never be eradicated on an institutional or societal basis until there is an explicit, widespread embrace of individualism. That goal remains a long, long way off, particularly given four years ahead under an American government largely dedicated to individualism's polar antithesis, collectivism;

- The Obama Administration and the Democrat-Socialist majority in Congress face an economic debacle entirely of their own making and a geopolitical situation that can only be described as a powder keg - and have absolutely nobody else upon whom to heap blame for any of the catastrophes their policies will initiate;

- The chaos that will result from Obama's neo-Marxian economics and the certain loss of liberty under his Orwellian government model will, assuming America as a nation survives to tell the tale, bestow upon a catastrophically-maleducated generation (read on,) a gargantuan lesson in economics, politics and history that they ought to have gotten in school, but all-too-clearly did not.

As to the valuation of liberty among the general American population, you may have missed it but we all had a kind of preview or "miner's canary" bellwether back in spring of 2000 with the polls on Clinton/Reno's forced de-liberation of Elian Gonzalez. It's no stunning insight to conclude that when a majority of a nation's people no longer understand and/or value liberty in the midst of such a horrific violation of it, that that nation will likely lose it, and even vote enthusiastically for a politician sworn to the systematic destruction of it.

More to the cause of the situation America finds itself in in November 2008 is the adage that "All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." What I'm talking about here is the simple truth that a Marxist American Presidency as late as the 21st century is something that could only have happened via the intellectual default among the ostensible defenders of Americanism, the conservatives.

There is a lengthy chain here and for brevity (hah) I'm only going to touch on key links of it.

The reason more than half of the voting population of America are ignorant enough to have repeated the potentially-catastrophic choice of collectivist government is because...more than half of the voting population of America were educated in the collectivist cesspool that is American public education.

The reason that American education has become a collectivist cesspool is because the conservatives have nonchalantly conceded that entire institution's control to the hardcore Left over the last two decades. By default. Maybe it was just too much of a bother for them. As I posted earlier, if you've conceded the education of at least one entire generation of Americans to a system inundated with Leftwing ideologues from daycare classrooms up to "prestigious" post-graduate institutions, it is flatly irrational to expect that the products of that system will magically turn out to be something other than...budding Leftwing ideologues.

That vote.

That run for office.

That run newsrooms.

That print newspapers.

That run influential businesses.

That write screenplays and make movies consumed by tens of millions.

Similarly, the takeover of the Republican Party by RINOs, by 'neocons' and by 'social' conservatives more interested in theology than in the fundamentals of individual rights, was not a product of any cohesive effort, it was the filling of a void.

That void is the space where the Republican Party's core philosophy once stood. Every rank-and-file Republican I've spoken with and every one I've heard call in to talk radio and every one whose posts I've read online, has expressed a justifiable dismay at the intellectual rootlessness of today's Republican Party "leadership." Not of the GOP as a whole, mind you, but of its ostensible leaders - the ones who are running the show.

What Should Be Done

I've heard a number of commentators from within the GOP today repeating the same post-rout refocus on goals: "What should the GOP do now?"

1. Well, the first priority, clearly, is to toss out all of the current "leaders" of the Republican party's key organs - the RNC, the NRCC, the NRSC-M.O.U.S.E., etc.

2. The second priority, just as clearly, is for the GOP as a whole to perform a comprehensive head-shed and rediscover - or simply, discover - its core principles.

A mandatory springboard for that journey of discovery is an invaluable set of critiques published in the wake of the 2006 Congressional election rout, titled "Straight Talk About the Soul of the Republican Party. [Note that the "Straight Talk" title is coincidental, not to be confused with McCain's campaign slogan.] Excerpted from that booklet are some articles of vital importance to the GOP, if it is ever to regain a future as the champion of Americanism and of individual liberty:

- Edward L. Hudgins' landmark analysis The Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party;

- Robert J. Bidinotto's Folio Gold Award winner Up From Conservatism;

- Hudgins' amusing yet vital 12-Step Cure for Big-Government Conservatism.

Beyond those worthy introductions, one question looms large, and it goes just like this:

Now is it time to have a look at the philosophy of Ayn Rand?

If the Republican Party - and by extension the future of individual liberty and civilized society - are to recover, strengthen and prosper once again, they will require no less than a second Renaissance and Enlightenment, a.k.a. the intellectual context of America's Founding. To achieve this, they will of necessity need to study and adopt the key elements of objectivist philosophy, which means the explicit embrace of:

- Reason rather than faith as the bedrock of Americanism;

- the ethics of egoism rather than altruism;

- the supremacy and ethical propriety of Individualism and rejection of collectivism in politics;

- the imperative of government strictly limited to the purpose explicitly stated in the Declaration: the defense of rights;

- the moral, not merely pragmatic, defense of capitalism, together with the proper definition of capitalism as laissez faire;

- the moral and intransigent defense of America as a just, sovereign nation - as opposed to the entire edifice of "multicultural" relativism and the continuing atrocity that is the "United Nations."

- the entire philosophic chain that links all of the above into a cohesive intellectual whole, and the ability to defend it, in whole or in part, in rational debate.

The Republican Party has been in the grip of factions far removed from core American principles for at least fifteen years - chief among them that hazy fluff that calls itself "conservatism"; the gaping political void they've left where those principles and principled practice ought to have been has just been filled - by the most radical collectivist politician ever to reach the White House, backed by an equally-militant hard-Left Congressional majority.

After the blatant, altruistic cave-in by the "Freshman" GOP Congress in late 1995 over the "heartless" government shutdown; after the contemptible rewarding of Bob "What am I doing here" Dole with the GOP candidacy only months later and his subsequent trouncing by Clinton; after the steady election-by-election downward spiral of GOP Congressional numbers since, culminating in the loss of both houses to the Demo-Socialists in 2006; after the slap in the face of the GOP base that was the 2008 McCain nomination; after the shellacking of that candidate by the lunatic-fringe Left's candidate yesterday - one would hope that the message might at last have sunk in with our Party's conservative "leaders": Your habitual default on core GOP philosophy is destroying America and placing the very survival of America and of Western Civilization itself at risk.

Come to think of it, maybe you ought to just start with Rand's March 6, 1974 West Point address "Philosophy: Who Needs it?" The answer to that question ought to be amply clear at this point.

It's time for you to step down, and to return the Republican Party to... Republicans.

Fun Quote

2009-10-20T12:42:00.000-07:00

Lets get away from politics for a minute and talk about culture, at least the culture here in the US (and Europe and Canada, I suspect). This quote is attributed to Jay Leno, and I thought it had some brilliant "captures" -- I welcome your thoughts.

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED THE
1930's, 40's, 50's,
60's and 70's!!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered
With bright colored lead-base paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes,
We had baseball caps
Not helmets on our heads.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, no booster seats, no seat belts, no air bags, bald tires and sometimes no brakes.

Riding in the back of a pick- up truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and no one actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes made with Lard, white bread, real butter and bacon. We drank Kool-Aid made with real white sugar. And, we weren't overweight. WHY?

Because we were always outside playing...that's why!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on..

No one was able to reach us all day. And, we were OKAY.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps
And then ride them down the hill,
Only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem

We did not have Play stations, Nintendo's and X-boxes. There were no video games, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD's,

No surround-sound or CD's,

No cell phones,

No personal computers,

No Internet and no chat rooms.

WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We would get spankings with wooden spoons, switches, ping pong paddles, or just a bare hand and no one would call child services to report abuse..

We ate worms and mud pies
Made from dirt, and
The worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and 20 tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team.
Those who didn't had to learn
To deal with disappointment.

Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

These generations have produced some of the best
Risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever.

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. What can kids today do besides push buttons.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all..

If YOU are one of them, CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good.

While you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave and lucky their parents were.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it ?

GREAT Post from Mark Steyn

2009-10-19T13:47:00.000-07:00

OK, Mark Steyn really nailed this one (Mark, if you are reading this and I owe you money for reposting, just comment below and I am good for it). They HYPOCRISY of those in charge at this time is simply stunning.

-- Storm

Friday, October 16, 2009

Mark Steyn: Limbaugh bad, Mao good

Lies cost the talk-show host a shot at NFL ownership; a White House honcho praises a murderer of millions to schoolkids.

Mark Steyn

Here is a tale of two sound bites. First:

"Slavery built the South. I'm not saying we should bring it back; I'm just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark."

Second:

"The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Tse Tung and Mother Teresa. Not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is: You're going to make choices. ... But here's the deal: These are your choices; they are no one else's. In 1947, when Mao Tse Tung was being challenged within his own party on his own plan to basically take China over, Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army. … They had everything on their side. And people said 'How can you win? How can you do this against all of the odds against you?' And Mao Tse Tung says, 'You fight your war, and I'll fight mine.' You don't have to accept the definition of how to do things. … You fight your war, you let them fight theirs. Everybody has their own path."

The first quotation was attributed to Rush Limbaugh. He never said it. There is no tape of him saying it. There is no transcript of him saying it. After all, if he had done so at any point in the past 20 years, someone would surely have mentioned it at the time.

Yet CNN, MSNBC, ABC and other networks and newspapers all around the country cheerfully repeated the pro-slavery quotation and attributed it, falsely, to Rush Limbaugh. And planting a flat-out lie in his mouth wound up getting Rush bounced from a consortium hoping to buy the St. Louis Rams. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said the talk-show host was a "divisive" figure, and famously nondivisive figures like the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson expressed the hope that, with Mr. Divisive out of the picture, the NFL could now "unify."

The second quotation – hailing Mao – was uttered back in June to an audience of high school students by Anita Dunn, the White House communications director. I know she uttered it because I watched the words issuing from her mouth on "The Glenn Beck Show" on Fox News. But don't worry. Nobody else played it.

So if I understand correctly:

Rush Limbaugh is so "divisive" that to get him fired Leftie agitators have to invent racist sound bites to put in his mouth.

But the White House communications director is so undivisive that she can be invited along to recommend Chairman Mao as a role model for America's young.

From my unscientific survey, U.S. school students are all but entirely unaware of Mao Tse Tung, and the few that aren't know him mainly as a T-shirt graphic or "agrarian reformer." What else did he do? Here, from Jonathan Fenby's book "Modern China," is the great man in a nutshell:

"Mao's responsibility for the extinction of anywhere from 40 million to 70 million lives brands him as a mass killer greater than Hitler or Stalin."

Hey, that's pretty impressive when they can't get your big final-score death toll nailed down to within 30 million. Still, as President Barack Obama's communications director says, he lived his dream, and so can you, although if your dream involves killing, oh, 50-80 million Chinamen you may have your work cut out. But let's stick with the Fenby figure: He killed 40-70 million Chinamen. Whoops, can you say "Chinamen" or is that racist? Oh, and sexist. So hard keeping up with the Sensitivity Police in this pansified political culture, isn't it? But you can kill 40-70 million Chinamen, and that's fine and dandy: You'll be cited as an inspiration by the White House to an audience of high school students. You can be anything you want to be! Look at Mao: He wanted to be a mass murderer, and he lived his dream! You can, too!

The White House now says that Anita Dunn was "joking." Anyone tempted to buy that spin should look at the tape: If this is her Friars Club routine, she needs to work on her delivery. But, for the sake of argument, try a thought experiment:

Midway through Bush's second term, press secretary Tony Snow goes along to Chester A. Arthur High School to give a graduation speech. "I know it looks tough right now. You're young, you're full of zip, but the odds seem hopeless. Let me tell you about another young man facing tough choices 80 years ago. It's last orders at the Munich beer garden – gee, your principal won't thank me for mentioning that – and all the natural blonds are saying, 'But Adolf, see reason. The Weimar Republic's here to stay, and, besides, the international Jewry control everything.' And young Adolf Hitler puts down his foaming stein and stands on the table and sings a medley of 'I Gotta Be Me', '(Learning To Love Yourself Is) The Greatest Love Of All' and 'The Sun'll Come Out Tomorrow.' And by the end of that night there wasn't a Jewish greengrocer's anywhere in town with glass in its windows. Don't play by the other side's rules; make your own kind of music. And always remember: You've gotta have a dream, if you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?"

Anyone think he'd still have a job?

Well, so what? All those dead Chinese are no-name peasants a long way away. What's the big deal? If you say, "Chairman Mao? Wasn't he the wacko who offed 70 million Chinks?," you'll be hounded from public life for saying the word "Chinks." But, if you commend the murderer of those 70 million as a role model in almost any schoolroom in the country from kindergarten to the Ivy League, it's so entirely routine that only a crazy like Glenn Beck would be boorish enough to point it out.

Which is odd, don't you think? Because it suggests that our present age of politically correct hypersensitivity is not just morally unserious but profoundly decadent.

Twenty years ago this fall, the Iron Curtain was coming down in Europe. Across the Warsaw Pact, the jailers of the Communist prison states lost their nerve, and the cell walls crumbled. Matt Welch, the editor of Reason magazine, wonders why the anniversary is going all but unobserved: Why aren't we making more of the biggest mass liberation in history?

Well, because to celebrate it would involve recognizing it as a victory over Communism. And, after the Left's long march through the institutions of the West, most are not willing to do that. There's the bad totalitarianism (Nazism) and the good totalitarianism (Communism), whose apologists and, indeed, fetishists can still be found everywhere, even unto the White House.

Rush Limbaugh's remarks are "divisive"; Anita Dunn's are entirely normal. But don't worry, the new Fairness Doctrine will take care of the problem.

©MARK STEYN

Thinking Clearly on the Role of Goverment...

2009-10-12T13:27:00.000-07:00

Recently, the "government" (specifically the FCC and our current speech happy administration) declared 'Net Neutrality' helps the state "mandate" for increased bandwidth. "Net Neutrality" is a nice term which masks nationalism, but really is a decree that if YOU build any infrastructure your competitors can use it at any price set by the government. (wave good bye to incentives, and say hello to a new fleet of well paid lobbyists now landing inside the beltway). I recently read a dim bulb from the LA Times (Hazlitt I believe) in a piece about "how government created the Internet" which, besides from being completely untrue and juvenile, was used to defend a claim that "not everything goverment does is bad!" How inspiring!

While the US goverment, that is DARPA (defense technology spending), gets credit for funding research that lead to the pioneering work by Dr. Len Kleinrock in wide network packet protocol, that was where the research grant left off. When it comes to the Internetand all we use it for, it is a classic case of capitalism -- of innovation, copycats, efficiency improvement, competitive situations and oligopolies (mostly by delivering superior products) and most of all it is a case of progress created by capital seeking the profit motive. No profit motive = no investment (of $ or talent) = no progress.

I struggle why that is so hard to get for many. However, MR, a well-known serial entrepreneur based in San Diego CA recently had the following post in an email thread which sums it up well, at least in the telecom industry....

"Just to comment on the "Obama mandate" of faster bandwidth comment. We're getting faster bandwidth every day along with faster processors, bigger storage, and better online services. There isn't a bandwidth provider who doesn't have a plan to dramatically increase bandwidth pipes. The free market is bringing this to us not a government mandate. The government will just slow down the process and make it more expensive and they surely don't deserve any of the credit for improvements in these areas."

"I know the free market and capitalism ain't fashionable but I hope people on this list have the intellectual independence to avoid the ridiculous sentiment that the government (which produces nothing) can improve the state of our nation if we only appoint a few hundred more czars who champion a few more laws declaring that everyone is a millionaire, gets 1GB net access to their home and has unlimited free health care. "

"-- MR"

Krauthammer in Washington Post Today

2009-10-09T11:28:00.000-07:00

This is apolitical, not a party thing, but really important. For all the talk this President gives to the "seriousness" of war (hooray for him), this is WIERD. Treating a war as a political plank is extremely bothersome to me. I am getting the feeling this leader is all about comforting words and inspirational speeches.....

Young Hamlet's Agony

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, October 9, 2009

The genius of democracy is the rotation of power, which forces the opposition to be serious -- particularly about things like war, about which until Jan. 20 of this year Democrats were decidedly unserious.

When the Iraq war (which a majority of Senate Democrats voted for) ran into trouble and casualties began to mount, Democrats followed the shifting winds of public opinion and turned decidedly antiwar. But needing political cover because of their post-Vietnam reputation for weakness on national defense, they adopted Afghanistan as their pet war.

"I was part of the 2004 Kerry campaign, which elevated the idea of Afghanistan as 'the right war' to conventional Democratic wisdom," wrote Democratic consultant Bob Shrum shortly after President Obama was elected. "This was accurate as criticism of the Bush administration, but it was also reflexive and perhaps by now even misleading as policy."

Which is a clever way to say that championing victory in Afghanistan was a contrived and disingenuous policy in which Democrats never seriously believed, a convenient two-by-four with which to bash George Bush over Iraq -- while still appearing warlike enough to fend off the soft-on-defense stereotype.

Brilliantly crafted and perfectly cynical, the "Iraq war bad, Afghan war good" posture worked. Democrats first won Congress, then the White House. But now, unfortunately, they must govern. No more games. No more pretense.

So what does their commander in chief do now with the war he once declared had to be won but had been almost criminally under-resourced by Bush?

Perhaps provide the resources to win it?

You would think so. And that's exactly what Obama's handpicked commander requested on Aug. 30 -- a surge of 30,000 to 40,000 troops to stabilize a downward spiral and save Afghanistan the way a similar surge saved Iraq.

That was more than five weeks ago. Still no response. Obama agonizes publicly as the world watches. Why? Because, explains national security adviser James Jones, you don't commit troops before you decide on a strategy.

No strategy? On March 27, flanked by his secretaries of defense and state, the president said this: "Today I'm announcing a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." He then outlined a civilian-military counterinsurgency campaign to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan.

And to emphasize his seriousness, the president made clear that he had not arrived casually at this decision. The new strategy, he declared, "marks the conclusion of a careful policy review."

Conclusion, mind you. Not the beginning. Not a process. The conclusion of an extensive review, the president assured the nation, that included consultation with military commanders and diplomats, with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, with our NATO allies and members of Congress.

The general in charge was then relieved and replaced with Obama's own choice, Stanley McChrystal. And it's McChrystal who submitted the request for the 40,000 troops, a request upon which the commander in chief promptly gagged.

The White House began leaking an alternate strategy, apparently proposed (invented?) by Vice President Biden, for achieving immaculate victory with arm's-length use of cruise missiles, Predator drones and special ops.

The irony is that no one knows more about this kind of warfare than Gen. McChrystal. He was in charge of exactly this kind of "counterterrorism" in Iraq for nearly five years, killing thousands of bad guys in hugely successful under-the-radar operations.

When the world's expert on this type of counterterrorism warfare recommends precisely the opposite strategy -- "counterinsurgency," meaning a heavy-footprint, population-protecting troop surge -- you have the most convincing of cases against counterterrorism by the man who most knows its potential and its limits. And McChrystal was emphatic in his recommendation: To go any other way than counterinsurgency would lose the war.

Yet his commander in chief, young Hamlet, frets, demurs, agonizes. His domestic advisers, led by Rahm Emanuel, tell him if he goes for victory, he'll become LBJ, the domestic visionary destroyed by a foreign war. His vice president holds out the chimera of painless counterterrorism success.

Against Emanuel and Biden stand Gen. David Petraeus, the world's foremost expert on counterinsurgency (he saved Iraq with it), and Stanley McChrystal, the world's foremost expert on counterterrorism. Whose recommendation on how to fight would you rely on?

Less than two months ago -- Aug. 17 in front of an audience of veterans -- the president declared Afghanistan to be "a war of necessity." Does anything he says remain operative beyond the fading of the audience applause?

Markets are markets...even when you don't want them to be...

2009-10-07T15:54:00.000-07:00

I thought the following post by Steven Malanga (posted below this commentary) is a good example of how Markets behave like markets, and always will, regardless of what people wish for or hope to regulate. Lately, some of the more Libertarian writers out there have been referring to the "pro-government" faction as "Statists" or "Interventionists" rather than as the "Right" or "Left" -- which I find to be a positive development. I believe this more clearly defines the political positions on "government regulation" as "anti-reality" or "pro-reality."

The best and brightest intellectuals out there are rapidly recognizing that markets are indeed "reality" and no matter what you throw at these markets they rapidly adjust to the new reality and remain markets, but then often trade on less transparent and more "undesireable" attributes. Part in parcel to this view is the realization that markets that have to react to less artificial variables are MORE healthy than those that have to react to more. In others words...."Perverted Markets Pervert."

Think of a marketplace as water flowing down a hillside. You can place obstacles in its path, but each action will result in a reaction as water obeys gravity -- its reality and guiding principle. All the pointificating, promoting and legislating will not, in any way, change the reality of the water's desire to flow down a hill. When a government declares that the 'minimum wage' will not be below $X, then the market reacts; by hiring less, moving to off-shore outsourcing, using consultants, etc. When the goverment decides "water is a public good, will be controlled by public utilities, and must not be allowed to take on the characteristics of a market" then the market exists, as it did before, but becomes perverted as people use much much more of subsidized, sub-market priced water (or gasoline, or electricity) and must be encouraged and threatened and fined to conserve. Properly priced markets lead to rational, efficient decisions, while perverted markets lead to the opposite. As you observe the world around you, I encourage you to hold in your consciousness the phrase famous in some of the better economic departements around the country; "There is no such thing as a surplus or shortage of anything -- just the wrong price."

Tax the Rich? How's That Working?

By Steven Malanga

When David Paterson became governor of New York after Eliot Spitzer's hooker escapades, the former state senator from Harlem shocked New Yorkers by declaring that taxes were too high and that he had many friends who had left the state because there were better opportunities elsewhere. New York had to grab control of its spending rather than continue raising taxes, said the former state senator with a long tax-and-spend track record, in what amounted to the equivalent of ideological heresy.

Still, as a political lightweight and accidental governor, Paterson quickly got rolled by the big-government wing of his own party, who passed a budget for this year with $6.1 billion in projected new taxes and fees, led by sharply higher rates starting for those earning more than $200,000 a year. Asked if the budget made sense in the recession an outgunned Paterson said, "None of this makes sense."

I suppose it is cold comfort to New Yorkers that Paterson is now giving his political enemies the "I told you so" treatment. Speaking to reporters recently in Albany, Paterson noted that revenue from tax increases was running 20 percent below projections and that, in particular, the wealthy were not paying up. So far, the state had only collected about half of an expected $1 billion in income tax revenues from the state's wealthiest residents. "You heard the mantra, 'Tax the rich, tax the rich,"' Paterson said. "We've done that. We've probably lost jobs and driven people out of the state."

In a story about New York's tax woes, the Associated Press noted that other states that had enacted so-called millionaires' taxes (most of which, like New York's, start well under $1 million in annual income) were squirming upon hearing the New York's numbers. Actually, some of these states have been squirming for a while.

New Jersey enacted its half millionaire millionaires' tax in 2004. Pitched by the state's unions as the cure for Jersey's budget woes, the state collected $9.5 billion in personal income taxes in fiscal 2005. Last year, four budget cycles later, the state collected only $10.3 billion and this year it's estimating just $9.4 billion from the same tax. Revenues have fallen so far below projections that Jersey has actually had to cut its spending (not just its rate of spending, like most states) by more than $3 billion this year despite $2 billion in federal stimulus aid for the state budget. And even so, Jersey had to skip payments to its pension system. If it were a business Jersey would be insolvent, a remarkable achievement in a place whose residents boast the highest personal income in the nation.

Maryland enacted its millionaires' tax in the fall of 2007. Earlier this year the state scrambled to enact mid-year budget cuts because of a sharp shortfall in revenues. Year-to-date personal income tax collections are off by about $650 million, and the Maryland comptroller has said, "It seems reasonable to assume...that there will be a significant decline in the number of returns with taxable income over $1 million and a substantial decline in the income reported on those returns."

In each of these states there has been a debate about whether high taxes have driven the rich to relocate. Shortly after the New York State budget passed, Tom Golisano, a former Independent Party candidate and the owner of the Buffalo Sabers hockey team, said he was moving to Florida to escape the Empire State's high taxes, which amounted to $13,000 a day in his case. The head of the Working Families Party, the New York party founded by the state's unions and Acorn that had lobbied for the tax increases, said good riddance to Golisano. The New York Times, meanwhile, observed that people don't relocate because of high taxes, although at $13,000 a day the motivation for leaving seems pretty high.

But the issue goes beyond very rich guys like Golisano with a big nest egg and lots of personal mobility. Many small and mid-sized businesses that organize as sole proprietorships, partnerships and s-corporations report their earnings through the personal income taxes of the partners or owners, and hence they pay taxes at individual income tax rates. In fact, small business owners and partners are the main target of tax increases at the top rates. A 2003 study by the Tax Foundation found that two-thirds of taxpayers in the highest tax bracket report income from businesses on their tax forms. So it's not surprising that high individual tax rates discourage entrepreneurship, reduce investment and slow hiring at small firms. You don't have to scour a state to find rich people mad enough to leave in order to understand the impact of high income tax rates on a local economy.

Still there's more bad news for the states with the highest rates, which include California and Ohio. At the very least we are about to see the top two federal brackets boosted to 36 percent and 39.6 percent, and who knows what other federal tax increases are on the way. Those rises will almost certainly depress adjusted gross income among high-earners who either seek to shelter more of their income or simply work less because their next dollar earned is being taxed at a significantly higher rate. That will make it even harder for states with high tax brackets to hit future income tax projections.

In most states with double-digit (or near double-digit) top tax brackets, the combined federal and state tax bite will thus soon reach 50 percent of income, especially when you consider that the federal alternative minimum tax excludes many deductions by higher income households (including big, fat deductions for hefty state and local taxes). Add to that the fact that some states have further raised taxes by excluding some traditional deductions (New Jersey, for instance, has eliminated the property tax deduction for most households, a cruel irony in a state with the highest property taxes in the nation), and the result is a whole new definition of what even constitutes taxable income.

The pain might not be so intense if residents of these states were getting something for all of this extra taxation. But in fact the state motto in some of these places could be "High taxes, lousy government." Jersey, with the highest state and local taxes, has one of the worst performing governments in the country, according to Governing Magazine, and it invests so little in its infrastructure its roads have been rated the worst in the nation. New York, which spends much of its state budget on a Medicaid program that is twice as large as any other, doesn't have a healthier, better-cared for low-income population. California, which spent billions of dollars to lower public school class-sizes, has seen no payoff in higher test scores or graduation results.

The really bad news, however, is that there is no easy way out of this for many of these states. Their budget problems are structural and long-term and can't be fixed merely by trimming a little waste and pork here and there. Most of these states have wracked up huge debts, for instance, so that bond payments are now weighing down their balance sheets. Their bondholders must be fed or chaos will ensue.

These states also suffer from huge public employee pension and benefits obligations that are often guaranteed by law. In fact, the pension funds of these states are so underfunded they make the Social Security Trust Fund look solvent by comparison.

These long-term structure problems are one reason why prospects for local tax revolts of the type we saw in the late 1970s and early 1990s have been slow to materialize. Any reformer who looks closely at these budgets understands that the only way out are service cuts that will be felt by virtually everyone in the state.

Faced with unpalatable choices, these states sit and hope that the answer comes in the former of even more stimulus money from the Obama administration given directly to states to spend on government operations. But rising anger from politicians and citizens in states that have been fiscally responsible will make that harder.

In the next few years, it seems, we will truly test the notion of whether people will get up and move simply because of high taxes. Oh, and bad government.

Steven Malanga is an editor for RealClearMarkets and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute

Great re-post from a friend

2009-09-29T11:40:00.000-07:00

Its hard to think of something original to write when Richard Cohen nails it....

Time to Act Like a President

By Richard Cohen

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Sooner or later it is going to occur to Barack Obama that he is the president of the United States. As of yet, though, he does not act that way, appearing promiscuously on television and granting interviews like the presidential candidate he no longer is. The election has been held, but the campaign goes on and on. The candidate has yet to become commander in chief.

Take last week's Group of 20 meeting in Pittsburgh. There, the candidate-in-full commandeered the television networks and the leaders of Britain and France to give the Iranians a dramatic warning. Yet another of their secret nuclear facilities had been revealed and Obama, as anyone could see, was determined to do something about it -- just don't ask what.

The entire episode had a faux Cuban missile crisis quality to it. Something menacing had been discovered -- not Soviet missiles a mere 100 miles or so off Florida but an Iranian nuclear installation about 100 miles from Tehran. As befitting the occasion, various publications supplied us with nearly minute-by-minute descriptions of the crisis atmosphere earlier in the week at the U.N. session -- the rushing from room to room, presidential aides conferring, undoubtedly aware that they were in the middle of a book they had yet to write. I scanned the accounts looking for familiar names. Where was McNamara? Where was Bundy? Where, in fact, was the crisis?

In fact, there was none. The supposedly secret installation had been known to Western intelligence agencies -- Britain, France, the United States and undoubtedly Israel -- for several years. Its existence had been deduced by intelligence analysts from Iranian purchases abroad, and it was pinpointed sometime afterward. What had changed was that news of it had gone public. This happened not because Obama announced it but because the Iranians beat him to it after discovering that their cover was blown. They then turned themselves in to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and, as usual, said the site was intended for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. These Persians lie like a rug.

No one should believe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran seems intent on developing a nuclear weapons program and the missiles capable of delivering them. This -- not the public revelations of a known installation -- is the real crisis, possibly one that can only end in war. It is entirely possible that Israel, faced with that chilling cliche -- an existential threat -- will bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. What would happen next is anyone's guess -- retaliation by Hamas and Hezbollah, an unprecedented spike in oil prices and then, after a few years or less, a resumption of Iran's nuclear program. Only the United States has the capability to obliterate Tehran's underground facilities. Washington may have to act.

For a crisis such as this, the immense prestige of the American presidency ought to be held in reserve. Let the secretary of state issue grave warnings. When Obama said in Pittsburgh that Iran is "going to have to come clean and they are going to have to make a choice," it had the sound of an ultimatum. But what if the Iranians don't? What then? A president has to be careful with such language. He better mean what he says.

The trouble with Obama is that he gets into the moment and means what he says for that moment only. He meant what he said when he called Afghanistan a "war of necessity" -- and now is not necessarily so sure. He meant what he said about the public option in his health-care plan -- and then again maybe not. He would not prosecute CIA agents for getting rough with detainees -- and then again maybe he would.

Most tellingly, he gave Congress an August deadline for passage of health-care legislation -- "Now, if there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town . . . " -- and then let it pass. It seemed not to occur to Obama that a deadline comes with a consequence -- meet it or else.

Obama lost credibility with his deadline-that-never-was, and now he threatens to lose some more with his posturing toward Iran. He has gotten into a demeaning dialogue with Ahmadinejad, an accomplished liar. (The next day, the Iranian used a news conference to counter Obama and, days later, Iran tested some intermediate-range missiles.) Obama is our version of a Supreme Leader, not given to making idle threats, setting idle deadlines, reversing course on momentous issues, creating a TV crisis where none existed or, unbelievably, pitching Chicago for the 2016 Olympics. Obama's the president. Time he understood that.

cohenr@washpost.com

What exactly is Freedom?

2009-09-20T20:59:00.000-07:00

I promise not to do this too often, but every once in a while I see another post, and have to "re post" it because I am so impressed with the logic and approach of the piece. Appeals to logic, and reason, seem to be in scarcity in this political environment. Sloppy definitions hurt all of us, and seemingly allow all sides to claim the mantle of our sacred cows. I thought this piece, from the "Voices of Reason" blog put out by the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, was brilliant....

Freedom is not slavery
September 18, 2009 by Don Watkins
One of the great dangers today is that political concepts such as “freedom” and “liberty” have been virtually emptied of meaning, save for some positive emotional residue left over from this country’s founding. This allows them to be co-opted by those seeking to use their positive connotations to push an anti-freedom agenda.
Exhibit A: Thomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal opinion section’s token liberal, penned a column this week urging the left to reclaim the word “freedom” from the opponents of government intervention. This is no mere academic issue, Frank assures us: the unpopularity of Obama’s health care plan, he suggests, is at least partially the result of allowing critics to portray ObamaCare as an attack on freedom (which it is).
Curiously, in a column about the proper meaning of the word “freedom,” Frank never deigns to define it. Instead, he presents in pretty vague terms two different conceptions of “freedom.” One, which he attributes to the right, regards freedom as “the absence of the state.” The other, which he urges the left to trumpet, is hazily alluded to as follows:
That our ancestors could ever have understood freedom as something greater than the absence of the state would probably strike protesters as inconceivable. But they did. You can see it in that famous Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving painting from 1943: “Freedom from Want,” an illustration of one of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms.” Strange though it might sound, this is a form of freedom that pretty much requires government to get involved in the economy in order to “secure to every nation,” as Roosevelt put it, “a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants.” The idea is still enshrined today in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
So that’s our choice, according to Frank: freedom means “anti-government,” or it means government “involvement” in the economy in the name of “freeing” us from want.
But while taking such great pains to invoke our ancestors’ understanding of freedom, Frank neglects to mention some earlier ancestors who had definite views on the meaning of freedom: the Founding Fathers.
“[A] wise and frugal government,” wrote Jefferson, is one which “shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government…”
Freedom, to the Founding Fathers, meant the ability of the individual to live his own life, to enjoy his own liberty, to acquire and use private property, to pursue his own happiness–without interference by others. It did not mean the absence of government, but a limited government whose sole purpose was to protect individual rights. (The absence of government, the Founders recognized, left man’s rights just as unguarded as under a tyranny.)
What Frank–like FDR before him–calls “freedom” is totally at odds with freedom as the Founders understood it. Freedom from “want” means that some men are to be forced to provide for the “wants” of others. The “freedom” to have health care without paying for it means that some people will be forced to pay for the health care needs of others.
The only thing that makes it possible to equate government intervention with “freedom” is widespread unclarity about what freedom actually is. But as the Founders understood, freedom does have a definite meaning. As Ayn Rand would later formulate it:
[W]hen I say “freedom,” I do not mean poetic sloppiness, such as “freedom from want” or “freedom from fear” or “freedom from the necessity of earning a living.” I mean “freedom from compulsion–freedom from rule by physical force.” Which means: political freedom.

Primetime -- "But I Want It To Be True"

2009-09-09T17:57:00.000-07:00

In the middle of the Country watching BHO deliver his primetime healthcare pitch. Three things that really standout.

1. "Just say it -- even if it ain't true." When the debate is not a debate, but a monologue, then the president (and the last president, and many presidents) choose to prey upon this format to make conclusions that just don't exist. Out of deep respect for the process, those in disagreement sit quietly, but cannot really challenge. Therefore, those behind the pulpit are prone to making wide sweeping pronouncements that simply are not true. Case in point is BHO saying tonight that the "members of the chamber are in 80% agreement on healthcare reform." Really? Since when? Explain please? From where I sit I see two fundamentally opposite points of view -- one that says government is the answer and one that says government is the problem. Tell me where is the 80%? Perhaps he meant "gettable" votes?

2. What is he really doing with this address? The bill is out of its component committees and drafted, so isn't this really about "bucking up" the legislature with pomp and rah to give them the 'courage' to defy their constituencies and vote this ugly thing into being? Isn't that what this is about?

3. The complete lack of substance and all the standing and cheering loudly reminds me of a high school pep rally where the ones with loudest contingent win the title of ASB president. No time for logic or real policy or real points -- just a world of shifting emotion with lots and lots of cheering. That seems to be the main job of the VP and Speaker in these situations -- to properly control and contort their facial expressions and then lead the congregation in cheers of glee (for the cameras) to "whip up support." I think it is an ugly way to proceed with the debate, and shameful. This behavior happens with either party in charge, but it does seem the democrats have raised the art of appearance to a new level of superficiality.

Logic Applied to Healthcare

2009-09-01T08:26:00.000-07:00

I thought the following post from ex Duke Review Editor Alex Epstein on the healthcare debate captured the essence of the premises involved in the debate. As I comment upon these issues in online circles I have become fascinated by the number of large, crucial premises that are unconsciously and inexplicitly smuggled into the healthcare debate. The different positions one may hold on these assumptions largely determines what your position on public healthcare. Alex Epstein, using his philosophical training, uncovers what I believe to be the most important healthcare premise that often goes undetected, undiscussed, and unchallenged. Whatever your stance on the issues, Alex's piece is worthwhile...

How to eliminate health care injustices (part 2)
August 28, 2009 by Alex Epstein

In Part 1, I raised the common argument that “We as a society must make ‘tough choices’ about who gets health care and who doesn’t…. Since ‘we’ have finite medical resources, we inevitably have to sacrifice some people’s care to others, whether young to old or old to young.”

No “we” don’t.

Medical care is not something that “we” collectively own, that “we” collectively have a right to receive, and therefore that “we” collectively must ration. Medical care is something that is created by individual medical professionals, who have a right to decide what to offer, how to do so, and how much to charge. And the money to pay for medical care (whether directly or via insurance) is something that must be earned by productive individuals—just as individuals must earn the money to pay for food, clothing, shelter, and everything else life requires. (Of course, medical professionals can and do give away their time and products to those who cannot afford it, just as millions in other professions generously give charity. Nevertheless, a person is responsible for his own life and health—and those of his children.)

Because health care is created by individuals, it is wrong to look at it as a finite, zero-sum pie in which one person’s kidney dialysis is necessarily another person’s untreated diabetes or uninsured child or higher tax bill; human beings can produce as much health care as people are willing to earn and pay for. Because health care is created by individuals, it is wrong to look at it as some collective good that the state has the right to control. The government has no right to dictate what services medical professionals can produce or how patients spend their money; it cannot properly force a young couple to pay for the scooter or Viagra or an MRI of an 85-year-old at the expense of their child, nor can it restrict an 85 year-old from saving his money and buying as much end-of-life health care as he can.

We can bring an end to the sacrifice and injustice in health care by recognizing that health and health care are not collective rights, but values that each individual has the right and responsibility to pursue freely. We are responsible for taking care of our bodies (and our children’s bodies) and we have a right only to the health care we can obtain in a free market—which, when it was genuinely free, included ultra-cheap, high-deductible health insurance and ample private charity.

In a free society, no one would need to sacrifice; there would be no collective health care costs that we all (resentfully) bore together as tax payers, there would only be costs that we would be responsible for as individuals. That would be real health care reform. Anything else is health care, deformed.

Credit to Alex Expstein http://blog.aynrandcenter.org/author/aepstein/

Historical time...

2009-08-25T11:26:00.000-07:00

The transition time of presidential administrations are always interesting. Our current time, August 2009, is especially historic. The pressures now building on the current administration are nothing short of fascinating. For an intelligent, and historical, outlook of what is currently happening I have reposted an editorial by Fouad Ajami (originally published in the WSJ Aug 25 2009). I very much appreciate the effort and care the author has taken to put recent decisions into historical context. It is one of the best summaries of "where we are" that I have read.....

Obama's Summer of Discontent
The politics of charisma is so Third World. Americans were never going to buy into it for long.

By FOUAD AJAMI

So we are to have a French health-care system without a French tradition of political protest. It is odd that American liberalism, in a veritable state of insurrection during the Bush presidency, now seeks political quiescence. These "townhallers" who have come forth to challenge ObamaCare have been labeled "evil-mongers" (Harry Reid), "un-American" (Nancy Pelosi), agitators and rowdies and worse.

A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the "loudest voices" are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.

It was true to script, and to necessity, that Mr. Obama would try to push through his sweeping program—the change in the health-care system, a huge budget deficit, the stimulus package, the takeover of the automotive industry—in record time. He and his handlers must have feared that the spell would soon be broken, that the coalition that carried Mr. Obama to power was destined to come apart, that a country anxious and frightened in the fall of 2008 could recover its poise and self-confidence. Historically, this republic, unlike the Old World and the command economies of the Third World, had trusted the society rather than the state. In a perilous moment, that balance had shifted, and Mr. Obama was the beneficiary of that shift.

So our new president wanted a fundamental overhaul of the health-care system—17% of our GDP—without a serious debate, and without "loud voices." It is akin to government by emergency decrees. How dare those townhallers (the voters) heckle Arlen Specter! Americans eager to rein in this runaway populism were now guilty of lèse-majesté by talking back to the political class.

We were led to this summer of discontent by the very nature of the coalition that brought Mr. Obama, and the political class around him, to power, and by the circumstances of his victory. The man was elected amid economic distress. Faith in the country's institutions, perhaps in the free-enterprise system itself, had given way. Mr. Obama had ridden that distress. His politics of charisma was reminiscent of the Third World. A leader steps forth, better yet someone with no discernible trail, someone hard to pin down to a specific political program, and the crowd could read into him what it wished, what it needed.

The leader would be different things to different people. The Obama coalition was the coming together of disparate groups: the white professional liberals seeking absolution for the country in the election of an African-American man, the opponents of the Iraq war who grew more strident as the project in Iraq was taking root, the African-American community that had been invested in the Clintons and then came around out of an understandable pride in one of its own.

The last segment of the electorate to flock to the Obama banners were the blue-collar workers who delivered him Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana. He was not their man. They fully knew that he didn't share their culture. They were, by his portrait, clinging to their guns and religion, but the promise of economic help, and of protectionism, carried the day with them.

The Obama devotees were the victims of their own belief in political magic. The devotees could not make up their minds. In a newly minted U.S. senator from Illinois, they saw the embodiment of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Like Lincoln, Mr. Obama was tall and thin and from Illinois, and the historic campaign was launched out of Springfield. The oath of office was taken on the Lincoln Bible. Like FDR, he had a huge economic challenge, and he better get it done, repair and streamline the economy in his "first hundred days." Like JFK, he was young and stylish, with a young family.

All this hero-worship before Mr. Obama met his first test of leadership. In reality, he was who he was, a Chicago politician who had done well by his opposition to the Iraq war. He had run a skillful campaign, and had met a Clinton machine that had run out of tricks and a McCain campaign that never understood the nature of the contest of 2008.

He was no FDR, and besides the history of the depression—the real history—bears little resemblance to the received narrative of the nation instantly rescued, in the course of 100 days or 200 days, by an interventionist state. The economic distress had been so deep and relentless that FDR began his second term, in 1937, with the economy still in the grip of recession.

Nor was JFK about style. He had known military service and combat, and familial loss; he had run in 1960 as a hawk committed to the nation's victory in the Cold War. He and his rival, Richard Nixon, shared a fundamental outlook on American power and its burdens.
Now that realism about Mr. Obama has begun to sink in, these iconic figures of history had best be left alone. They can't rescue the Obama presidency. Their magic can't be his. Mr. Obama isn't Lincoln with a BlackBerry. Those great personages are made by history, in the course of history, and not by the spinners or the smitten talking heads.

In one of the revealing moments of the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama rightly observed that the Reagan presidency was a transformational presidency in a way Clinton's wasn't. And by that Reagan precedent, that Reagan standard, the faults of the Obama presidency are laid bare. Ronald Reagan, it should be recalled, had been swept into office by a wave of dissatisfaction with Jimmy Carter and his failures. At the core of the Reagan mission was the recovery of the nation's esteem and self-regard. Reagan was an optimist. He was Hollywood glamour to be sure, but he was also Peoria, Ill. His faith in the country was boundless, and when he said it was "morning in America" he meant it; he believed in America's miracle and had seen it in his own life, in his rise from a child of the Depression to the summit of political power.

The failure of the Carter years was, in Reagan's view, the failure of the man at the helm and the policies he had pursued at home and abroad. At no time had Ronald Reagan believed that the American covenant had failed, that America should apologize for itself in the world beyond its shores. There was no narcissism in Reagan. It was stirring that the man who headed into the sunset of his life would bid his country farewell by reminding it that its best days were yet to come.

In contrast, there is joylessness in Mr. Obama. He is a scold, the "Yes we can!" mantra is shallow, and at any rate, it is about the coming to power of a man, and a political class, invested in its own sense of smarts and wisdom, and its right to alter the social contract of the land. In this view, the country had lost its way and the new leader and the political class arrayed around him will bring it back to the right path.

Thus the moment of crisis would become an opportunity to push through a political economy of redistribution and a foreign policy of American penance. The independent voters were the first to break ranks. They hadn't underwritten this fundamental change in the American polity when they cast their votes for Mr. Obama.

American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place. In the American tradition, the "mandate of heaven" is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics.

Those protesters in those town-hall meetings have served notice that Mr. Obama's charismatic moment has passed. Once again, the belief in that American exception that set this nation apart from other lands is re-emerging. Health care is the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it is an unease with the way the verdict of the 2008 election was read by those who prevailed. It shall be seen whether the man swept into office in the moment of national panic will adjust to the nation's recovery of its self-confidence.

Mr. Ajami teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University. He is also an adjunct fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution

2009-07-29T08:04:00.001-07:00

I received this email today from a friend. He wishes to remain anonymous. Fine.

He toured the Senate with his family. It was a private tour. He is an idealist. He wants to believe. He and I were emailing about an interview that recently surfaced with BHO, as a new Senator from Illinois, slamming the Bush administration for pushing through important legislation without a proper debate. I thought his comments were worth posting here...

"Neither party should ever slam through legislation (and I know that is the “smart” thing to do and what the ''handlers" insist you must do) and I am glad the Bush administration got “slammed” for doing so. Today we toured the Capitol and sat in the gallery watching a senator from South Dakota telling nobody but himself how this healthcare bill needs to be debated, and how it should not be rushed through. I have not been to the Capitol in a long time, and I was blown away by the aura of “royalty,” “regality” and “palace luxury” that is everywhere. Titles, plaques, gold emblems everywhere, underground subways that go 40 yards, privileged drinking fountains, restrooms, and a gazillion young (attractive) staffers looking starry eyed for anyone with a title. I can see any person here feeling “anointed” after only a short time. I cannot see anyone in that environment serving the people in any manner, unless they are a superhero. While I think the ideal of a place where all of us can come together and solve our differences peacefully is very noble, I found the implementation disgusting."

The Real Issue with Socialized Medicine

2009-07-20T20:34:00.000-07:00

So much in today's debate about a government run and dictated health system is about the costs and benefits. The argument has shrunk to one that is "utilitarian" and void of any principles. However, the issue is entirely about principles. This excerpt, from Dr. Hendricks, a minor character in Atlas Shrugged, who has gone on 'strike,' says it best...

I quit when medicine was placed under State control some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “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 could 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. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, but ‘to serve.’ That a man’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards—never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness at which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind—yet what is it they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in the operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”
-- Storm

Keeping it Logical

2009-07-17T16:39:00.000-07:00

Seeking the truth is what will unite us in this country, and in communities around the world.

Here is a video, right off of MSNBC, that does a good job highlighting what I think is the problem that many on the right have with Obama, and the way he fails to think things through.

This reporter points out the contradiction in his speech, and while I very much enjoy an articulate President, these types of statements are troubling with our current President. It is disturbing that the national networks did not call on him on this particular "positioning" speech, and I don't believe the current relationship between the President and the press is a good thing for the country. I was thinking about what would cause a leader to overlook such a contraction, and, in my opinion, this speech is the symptom of a man who “wants to believe” and “wants to be liked.”

I think the pointing out of this ability to be smoothly presidential and preposterous is particularly instructive to those who don’t understand why so very many find Obama repulsive. I believe I understand both his supporters and detractors, and I believe it is crucial that each understands what exactly is the "truth" of the other. Bush often was inarticulate. Obama is often irrational,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6-4wPVwNEM&NR=1

---- Storm