No Oil for Pacifists

The total outstanding debt of the United States government, over the past three years, in trillions of dollars:


source: Bloomberg (vertical line is Obama's inauguration)

The current figure is $13.5 trillion.

The liberal media and progressives have long preferred to push policies through the judiciary, as opposed to democratic popular sovereignty. Now, they're going nuts because the electorate's trying to reclaim its right to govern.

The current controversy was prompted by mass outbreaks of judicial activism. One was opposition to the Iowa supreme court's decision mandating same-sex marriage. Varnum v. Brien, 763 N.W.2d 862 (Iowa 2009). Another was generated by various Colorado supreme court rulings allowing tax hikes without the required voter approval. Several citizens groups and politicians have campaigned to oust judges in those two states, where they are elected or subject to voter "retention."

The media reports the efforts as an attack on democracy: "the peril of subjecting judges to voters' whims" (WaPo); "public opinion can’t decide court cases" (Des Moines Register); "judicial retention system is "under attack" and its future may depend upon the efforts of supporters who want to keep the courts insulated from political influences" (Globe Gazette); "outside forces mix money and message" (Quad-City Times); "GOP's war on courts could result in partisan judges" (Iowa Independent). But the mother of all scare stories was in Saturday's New York Times:

Around the country, judicial elections that were designed to be as apolitical as possible are suddenly as contentious as any another race. . .

Supporters of the judges, including most of the legal community here as well as a number of prominent Republicans, describe the campaign as punitive and suggested that if voters want to abolish same-sex marriage they should call a constitutional convention, a matter that is also on the ballot, or pressure the legislature to amend the constitution.

As usual, the media have it backwards. The issue is whether the judges substituted their own views for the mandate of the relevant law or constitution. New policies are supposed to be passed by the legislature or, in referendum states, the people, not by fiat of the judiciary. Yet many on the left prefer elite compulsion to electoral choice.

Regardless of one's view on gay marriage or other current controversies, with certain narrow exceptions, they should be decided by majority vote, not law suits. The Times bemoans transforming judges into politicians. Well, whose fault was that? As Matthew Franck says on Bench Memos:

This is what happens when the judges cease to be apolitical--the case of Iowa, at the center of the Times story, is a clear instance. When the judges betray their trust, the people should remove them. What is either surprising or alarming about this?

Kevin Williamson on The Corner:

The difference between communism and socialism: Under communism, politics begins with a gun in your face; under socialism, politics ends with a gun in your face.

Critique in the Economist here; response here.

David Green is a Research and Policy Specialist at the University of Illinois's Institute of Government & Public Affairs. He's also the author of this September 15h letter to the editor of the Daily Illini, reproduced in full:

The vast majority of 9/11 observances in this country cannot be seen as politically neutral events. Implicit in their nature are the notions that lives lost at the World Trade Center are more valuable than lives lost in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and elsewhere; that the motives of the 9/11 attackers had nothing to do with genuine grievances in the Islamic world regarding American imperialism; and that the U.S. has been justified in the subsequent killing of hundreds of thousands in so-called retaliation.

The observance at Saturday’s football game was no different. A moment of silence was followed by a military airplane flyover; in between, Block-I students chanted "USA, USA." This was neither patriotism nor remembrance in any justifiable sense, but politicization, militarism, propaganda and bellicosity. The University is a public institution that encompasses the political views of all, not just the most (falsely) "patriotic." Athletic planners should cease such exploitation for political purposes. They might at least consider how most Muslim students, American or otherwise, would respond to this nativist display; or better, Muslims and others that live their lives under the threat of our planes, drones and soldiers.

The overwhelmingly white, privileged, Block-I students should be ashamed of their obnoxious, fake-macho, chicken-hawk chant, while poverty-drafted members of their cohort fight and die in illegal and immoral wars for the control of oil. University administrators need to eliminate from all events such "patriotic" observances, which in this country cannot be separated from implicit justifications for state-sponsored killing.

I've previously shown the illogic of the "chicken-hawk" claim, the fallacy of assuming that the military recruits from the less-wealthy or -educated population, and the inconsistency of flag-hating while eliding, if not supporting, totalitarian murder and, at the same time, flag-waving for Democrats. Green's ignorance of the facts is more confirmation of the biased leftist take-over of academia.

To slow your heart rate, it's worth scanning the comments on Green's letter; a typical one reads:

This is the kind of person Orwell must have been thinking of when he said, "There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them."

The phrase "poverty-drafted members" in reference to the military only reveals two things about your steaming horse sh*t beliefs. One, that you haven't the remotest idea what you're talking about beyond what groupthink you like-minded types pass around to each other as reality. Two, that you also can't be arsed to do even a little honest research before forming a strong opinion on something. Way to represent academia!

Congratulations to Mr. Green for greatly exceeding the point of diminishing returns in high education.

Agreed.

From Yaakov Kirschen's Dry Bones:


source: September 27th Dry Bones

Two weeks ago, Bob in LA posted about media slant in reporting on . . . well . . . everything. Bob gave particular prominence to press bias in articles about Glenn Beck's August 28th "nonpolitical" Washington rally dedicated to "Restoring Honor" to America. He linked to a Puffington Host report -- sans photo -- spotting a pamphlet supposedly depicting President Obama with a "Hitler-style mustache."

The online magazine Slate, owned by the Washington Post, has not been kind to "Tea Party" conservatives. In April, Slate writer Ron Rosenbaum asserted the Tea Party was founded on "fraudulent history and distorted language." Earlier this month, Slate Group editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg described Tea Party types as advocating "anarchism." And David Weigel seriously debated whether they were "more angry or more gullible."

But reality much be catching up to Slate reporters. In Friday's Slate, Angela Tchou and David Weigel published "Tea Party Agitprop," a slide-show of "anti-Obama T-shirts and posters from this month's Tea Party protest in Washington." Though Slate seemingly would have the incentive to reproduce the most radical and/or racist photos, the 16 images were legitimate criticism mostly centered on the President's high-cost/low-return economic policies. None were remotely close to the standard "Bush-is-stupid," Bush-is-Hitler" nonsense that dominated progressive protests against the previous President. The most risque images in Slate's slide-show were variations on last-year's Obama "Joker" poster which, few remember, was created by a bored college history major, not a right-wing racist.

To be fair, Weigel previously concluded that Tea Party activists were not racists--sort of:

It's a phenomenon that some activists call "nutpicking"--send a cameraman into a protest and he'll focus on the craziest sign. Yes, there are racists in the Tea Party, and they make themselves known. But Tea Party activists usually root them out.

But if Tchou and Weigel's most recent post re-published "the craziest sign[s]," the Tea Party's not radical, or nutty, at all. Rather, that role is played by the mainstream media.

(via reader Warren, American Prospect)

From former Prime Minister Tony Blair's "A Journey" (2010) at 171:

On one visit to Northern Ireland, I saw a remarkable demonstration of how the culture of opposition is enforced. Sinn Fein had invited the Palestinians to town. As I landed to stay overnight, I saw the Palestinian flag displayed along the Republican roads of Belfast, to welcome their guests. Next day I drove through the town to leave, and I saw arrayed along Unionist enclaves the white-and-blue flags of Israel. How they had got them, and how they had put them up overnight, I'll never know, but the moment those Palestinian flags went up, Unionist solidarity with Israel was total.

As reported in Sunday's Australian News:

The United Nations was set today to appoint an obscure Malaysian astrophysicist to act as Earth's first contact for any aliens that may come visiting.

Mazlan Othman, the head of the UN's little-known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), is to describe her potential new role next week at a scientific conference at the Royal Society’s Kavli conference centre in Buckinghamshire.

She is scheduled to tell delegates that the recent discovery of hundreds of planets around other stars has made the detection of extraterrestrial life more likely than ever before -- and that means the UN must be ready to coordinate humanity’s response to any "first contact".

During a talk Othman gave recently to fellow scientists, she said: "The continued search for extraterrestrial communication, by several entities, sustains the hope that some day humankind will receive signals from extraterrestrials.

"When we do, we should have in place a coordinated response that takes into account all the sensitivities related to the subject. The UN is a ready-made mechanism for such coordination."

The U.N. is a "toothless talking forum" that couldn't run a one-car funeral, much less something truly tricky such as the arrival of Kang and Kodos. If and when Michael Rennie appears asking "take me to your leader," Ban Ki-moon isn't the answer.

(via The Corner)

From the September 17th Independent (U.K.):

Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.

Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known".

Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million. . .

Between 1958 and 1962, a war raged between the peasants and the state; it was a period when a third of all homes in China were destroyed to produce fertiliser and when the nation descended into famine and starvation, Mr Dikötter said.

His book, Mao's Great Famine; The Story of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, reveals that while this is a part of history that has been "quite forgotten" in the official memory of the People's Republic of China, there was a "staggering degree of violence" that was, remarkably, carefully catalogued in Public Security Bureau reports, which featured among the provincial archives he studied. In them, he found that the members of the rural farming communities were seen by the Party merely as "digits", or a faceless workforce. For those who committed any acts of disobedience, however minor, the punishments were huge.

State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death.

Liberals love communism -- but only from afar, and without crediting the advances of the anglosphere.

(via Ann Althouse)

Charles Kesler in the Claremont Review of Books:

[C]onservatives' resolve to repeal the health care act induces apoplexy among liberals. Conservatives are supposed to be good losers, resigned to the Left's control over the steering wheel and accelerator but cheerful about getting to apply the brakes (not too suddenly or firmly, please) in the curves. The notion that the clock could be turned back, that some limit to the state's growth could be discovered and enforced, that the people would hold in their hands, inspect carefully, but at last reject the Holy Grail of welfare state programs, for which the Left has been questing, just as Obama said, for a hundred years--why, the liberal mind reels. Even more than Reagan's victories, or Clinton's ignominious failure to pass nationalized health care, this reversal would raise doubts in the liberal mind about the liberal project.

Losing Obamacare after winning it would, at the least, be a serious blow to liberalism's sense of its own inevitability--the quasi-religious faith so central to all progressivism, and so crucial in disarming the Left's opponents. So conservative resistance to Obamacare must begin by confronting the historical voodoo by which liberals will try to frighten the Right into believing that resistance is futile, that repeal is doomed. These gestures are best understood as a kind of war dance, like the Haka performed by New Zealand's rugby team before a match, designed to intimidate the opposing players. But nothing is inevitable in politics, at least nothing of this sort; and conservatives should laugh at this attempt to get them to cooperate in their own defeat.

See also last year's National Review.

Progressives have perfected pessimism. The earth, they say, is dying; we should be pursuing "gross national happiness" not capitalism or democracy.

Nonsense, confirms a study in the latest "Perspectives on Psychological Science":

Data from representative national surveys carried out from 1981 to 2007 show that happiness rose in 45 of the 52 countries for which substantial time-series data were available. Regression analyses suggest that that the extent to which a society allows free choice has a major impact on happiness. Since 1981, economic development, democratization, and increasing social tolerance have increased the extent to which people perceive that they have free choice, which in turn has led to higher levels of happiness around the world.

That's because wealth increases choice; money may not be able to buy happiness, but it can help set you free.

Headlines last week bemoaned the recent rise in U.S. poverty levels. I don't for a moment minimize the hardships suffered by many in this recession. But poverty in America reflects not a permanent underclass but a dynamic escalator that carries most up over time, while attracting immigrants at the start of the stairs. And even today's poor are better off than their predecessors (plus poverty metrics omit many huge government transfer payments).

They'd be better still were we not whacking the most productive parts of our society at the cost of individual economic freedom. Which, the above-cited study suggests, won't make Americans happy.

Created by technical writer Phil Levy after being "really irritated about the grandiose foolishness of automobile and other bailouts in 2008":


source: Phil Levy

Agreed--because of the large costs of such bailouts. Though, when I was a kid, I wanted a Studebaker Avanti. Levy is selling the stickers at his website.

A magnetic sticker with the same sentiment but in the shape of the Studebaker logo:


source: Studebaker Drivers Club forum

Unfortunately, I can't find the latter for sale on-line.

(via Jay Nordlinger's Impromptus)

I'm off on a business trip abroad. So little/no posts for a week.

The Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration publishes an "Annual Energy Outlook" containing projections and analysis of US energy supply, demand, and prices. The 2010 edition was released in May and includes predictions of the average national levelized costs for various electric generating technologies in 2016. (For the curious, levelized costs "represent the present value of the total cost of building and operating a generating plant over its financial life, converted to equal annual payments and amortized over expected annual generation from an assumed duty cycle.")

The non-profit Institute for Energy Research graphed the results (post updated with 2010 figures):


source: IER via DOE/EIA data

Renewable energy simply simply isn't superior to fossil fuels. And when and if it becomes better, the market will ensure renewables are available.

Uh, where have I heard this before? Oh yeah--this blog, several times over.

No wonder the White House's policy is 'renewables for thee but not for me.'

1) WaPo columnist Harold Meyerson's September 15th rant about China's exchange rate policies:

This week, committees on both sides of Capitol Hill will plumb the conundrum of Chinese currency manipulation. The conundrum isn't that -- or why -- China is manipulating its currency: By undervaluing it, China is systematically able to underprice its exports, putting American (and other nations') manufacturing at a significant disadvantage. The conundrum is why the hell the United States isn't doing anything about it.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will march up to the Capitol to explain the administration's position, which, thanks to increasing pressure for action, may be growing tougher. There are certainly plenty of senators and congressmen -- and Main Street Americans -- who'd like to see the White House place some tariffs on the underpriced Chinese imports. If the administration doesn't act, Congress may just consider mandating some tariffs on its own.

2) Econ prof/blogger Mark Perry's hilarious "redline" edit of Meyerson:

This week, committees on both sides of Capitol Hill will plumb the conundrum of Chinese currency manipulation. The conundrum isn't that -- or why -- China is manipulating its currency: By undervaluing it, China is systematically able to underprice its exports, putting American (and other nations') manufacturing consumers and businesses that purchase China’ cheap imports at a significant disadvantage. The conundrum is why the hell the United States isn't doing thinks it should do anything about it.

There are certainly plenty of senators and congressmen -- and Main Street Americans U.S. producers that compete with China -- who'd like to see the White House place some tariffs taxes on American consumers and businesses who purchase the underpriced low-priced Chinese imports. If the administration doesn't act, Congress may just consider mandating some tariffs punitive taxes against American consumers and business on its own.

3) See also Scott Grannis:

[E]ven if the yuan were chronically "too weak", what's the problem anyway? If the Chinese want to sell us cheap goods, that's to our advantage. True, some manufacturers here might go out of business as a result, but all consumers would benefit. Why should we pursue a policy--forcing the Chinese to appreciate their currency even more than they already have--that would disadvantage every single one of us--because a stronger yuan/weaker dollar would make Chinese imports more expensive--in order to protect a small number of businesses that are forced to compete with Chinese imports?

Agreed. Years ago, when I did some "anti-dumping" work, I used to say, "If the Japanese want to sell us below-cost televisions, I'll take four." Same here--if China's exchange rate impoverishes their workers but results in cheaper products for sale here, I'll take 'um.

Emmy Award-winning TV anchor/reporter Doug McKelway worked for WJLA-TV, the ABC affiliate in Washington, for nearly nine years. No more. Last week, he was fired--seemingly for being insufficiently liberal.

As reported in Friday's Washington Post:

McKelway was placed on indefinite suspension in late July after his run-in with ABC7's news director and general manager, Bill Lord. In a letter to McKelway this week, the station said it was terminating his contract immediately, citing insubordination and misconduct.

Amid the ongoing BP oil spill in July, McKelway covered a Capitol Hill demonstration by environmental groups protesting the influence of oil-industry contributions to members of Congress.

In his piece, McKelway said the sparsely attended event attracted protesters "largely representing far-left environmental groups." He went on to say the protest "may be a risky strategy because the one man who has more campaign contributions from BP than anybody else in history is now sitting in the Oval Office, President Barack Obama, who accepted $77,051 in campaign contributions from BP."

After a brief taped segment updating efforts to cap the BP well, McKelway added that the Senate was unlikely to pass "cap-and-trade" legislation this year, because "the Democrats are looking at the potential for huge losses in Congress come the midterm elections. And the last thing they want to do is propose a huge escalation in your electric bill, your utility bill, before then."

Lord took exception to McKelway's reporting and asked to meet with him, according to several station sources who were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive personnel matter. A shouting match between the two men ensued, leading to McKelway's suspension, sources said.

McKelway's reporting was factually correct. But accuracy is no defense to non-conformity, says Paul Chesser at the American Spectator:

WJLA news director Bill Lord cited "insubordination" and "misconduct" in McKelway's firing. Maybe that was the case, if McKelway's response crossed the line, but the fact is he was called into the boss's office for the type of reporting the formerly mainstream media does all the time.

WJLA, by the way, is owned by Allbritton Communications, which also owns the liberal Politico website (and newspaper). As GayPatriot says, "Pravda is alive and well in our nation’s capital."

(via Berman Post)

I've previously shown that -- by failing to control costs or increase health insurance coverage -- Obamacare is "the worst of all possible worlds." That's because the road not taken -- increasing insurance competition and greater reliance on market forces -- would be much more effective. Probably because they never read the bill, Democrats disagreed.

I also said that such flaws would be apparent to voters, who would punish Democrats on election day. Democrats again disagreed, predicting that Obamacare "would become more popular after it passes, giving those who voted for it time to herald some of the changes." Liberal media pundits said the same.

Such prognostication is testable over time. So, six months after the statute was signed, what's happened?

Well, according to a USA Today/Gallup survey published September 13th, 56 percent of Americans don't like Obamacare, compared to 39 percent who approved (the remaining 5 percent had no opinion). And last week's Politico published an even more telling statistic:

Democratic candidates are spending three times more advertising against the health reform law than they are in support of it.

Since the beginning of Congress’s August recess, Democratic candidates have poured $930,000 into ads deriding the health overhaul but just $300,000 in pro-reform spots, according to Evan Tracey at Kantar Media.

"Go back to 2006, and even before that, and Democrats used health care as their No. 1 issue," Tracey said. "They had a villain in the pharmaceutical industry. Now that they passed this law, it’s almost disarmed them rather than given them an opportunity."

Conclusion: I'd previously thought Obamacare exclusively relied on centralized fiat rather than free markets. I was wrong. Rather, public confidence in the law is the sole market Democrat healthcare reform created.

The market sees Obamcare as the new New Coke. Watch for the product to be pulled from the shelves starting November 2nd. As Charles Kesler says in the Claremont Review of Books, "Either government will yield, or the people will."

(via The Corner)

Another day of rest.

From former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. (under George W. Bush) John Bolton in the September 16th LA Times:

Successive U.S. administrations have proved unable or unwilling to slow Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's descent into authoritarianism. . .

Despite a tradition of a free press and competitive politics, a cosmopolitan elite and extensive natural resources, Venezuela is increasingly a case study in how to lose political and economic freedom.

The stakes are especially high in light of evidence consistent with an emerging Venezuelan nuclear weapons program. Ironically, Chavez's frequently clownish behavior protects him, camouflaging the seriousness of his potential threat to U.S. security and to democratic societies throughout Latin America.

Washington, under Republican and Democratic administrations, has proved unable or unwilling to slow Chavez's descent into authoritarianism. Unlike coups by prior caudillos in the Americas, the situation in Venezuela today is like a slow-motion train wreck, which makes it all the more frustrating. A lack of international outrage is discouraging pro-democracy Venezuelans across the ideological spectrum. They worry they have been forgotten, especially by an Obama administration that finds foreign policy a distraction. . .

President Obama and other freely elected Western Hemisphere leaders at a minimum need to tell Chavez clearly that his disassembling of Venezuela's democracy is unacceptable. This is very nearly the exact opposite of current White House policy, which attempts to appease Chavez, Castro and other leftists, as it did by joining them against the democratic forces in Honduras.

Unfortunately, with our own elections approaching in November, it is hard to get Obama's attention directed to Latin American affairs, or foreign policy generally. But make no mistake, if Chavez can intimidate his domestic opposition, manipulate election laws and extend his authoritarian control, Venezuela will increasingly be a global menace.

Agreed--several times.

(via reader Warren)

The FBI has spoken--violent crime in America is still slowing:


source: FBI Crime in the U.S. 2009, figues

This despite the fact that a record 14 million guns were sold that year.

The fact that violent crime is down despite the recession and despite higher gun sales should make liberals' heads explode. Too bad it won't.

Last month, somewhere between "hundreds" (Associated Press) and "thousands" (Detroit News) of postal workers marched through downtown Detroit decrying the proposal to stop Saturday mail delivery and eliminate up to 40,000 postal jobs nationwide. (As I have observed, the post office, an agency of the U.S. Executive Branch, is in terminal decline.) One protester, Kim Sauceda, a 34 year-old Tallevast, Florida, postal "custodian" (whatever that is), was quoted in a Detroit Free Press story complaining:

People have gone from being very confident and sure that this is a lifetime career to now not being so sure.

What--a unionized government worker might be subject to the discipline of the market? Shocked, I'm shocked! As Peter Bella said in a different context:

Government service, on any level, is a privilege not a right. One does not have an inherent right to government employment, especially lifetime government employment.

Just as few employees in the private sector, says Warner Todd Huston at Right Wing News, "have the luxury of staying with the same job for years on end."

Just don't tell any USPS "custodians"--they might go postal.

Everyone knows the globe is warming, right? Well, how much? Didn't they just announce that, in the U.S., 2010 was the fourth warmest summer ever?

That's true, but we had an unusually cold winter, so the 12-month period ending in August was the second coldest since 1998:


source: NOAA data for year-to-date since 1998; average line 1900-2010

Notice that U.S. temps have been declining for over a decade, and are only a bit above their 110-year average.

Luboš Motl of The Reference Frame calculates that there's only a 16 percent probability that 2010 will end up warmer than 1998. So it's too soon for certainty. But if the 5:1 odds don't pay off, Motl asks:

If 1998 remains the warmest year on record, you may wonder what is the appropriate global warming definition or the meaning of global warming that is consistent with the likely fact that 1998 will fail to be surpassed 12 times in a row.

Previous post in the series here.

Press partisanship is, of course, the longest-running, under-reported mainstream media story. Remember in 2004 Newsweek editor Evan Thomas admitting that liberal media bias was "worth maybe 15 points" to the Kerry/Edwards campaign? (Thomas later labeled his concession "a stupid thing to say," because the slant only was worth "maybe" 5 points at the polls.)

More recently, Dr. Krauthammer affirmed that "our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary" do a great disservice to this country by making false charges about the majority of America and Americans. Especially making false and "promiscuous charges of bigotry." Let's identify the chief culprits.

First, there's Timothy Egan, who wrote provocatively on the New York Times’ Opinionator blog, that the democrats "have been terrible at trying to explain who they stand for and the larger goal of their governance." Terrible at trying to explain who they stand for? Excuse me -- ah... Mr. Egan... hello? The Democrats have excelled at explaining who they stand for -- they stand for President Obama. They have passed his socialist agenda, including socialist health care. The American People know exactly who the democrats stand for, they stand for Barack Obama.

So now Mr. Egan wants to distance the Democrats from Barack Obama, who has lost the trust of so many people. Like David Letterman, formerly a huge fan, who now mocks him as a "one term president." For another, ultra-liberal Garrison Keillor, who dedicated almost an entire show to President Obama on the occasion of his inauguration. If you heard that show, you heard a series of songs and skits celebrating Obama's Presidency and even bashing the outgoing president. A bit of this can be seen in the flowery rhetoric here. However, Mr. Keillor, like Mr. Letterman, is now slipping in anti-socialist rhetoric into his weekly show. The September 4th show includes a sketch about the absurdity of socialist judges out of a county fair "trying to correct the injustices of the world", after they spent their judicial prowess awarding prizes to the 'deserving' losers who otherwise wouldn't ever win anything.

When liberals like Keillor and Letterman abandon President Obama, he's in serious trouble. The same trouble that eventually faces all socialist ideologies. Initially, there is hope in socialism, people believe 'perhaps there will be something for me'. Yet, socialists fail to win the hearts and minds of the people over the long term, as the reality of socialism takes form, and everyone is a loser. That is why the list of 'formerly socialist' countries dwarfs the list of 'currently socialist'.

Barack Obama is like one of the flashes in the pan that ignite people's hopes. Hopes that there might be something in it for them. Something, if they just give up a little freedom, give a more power to the omnipotent, all knowing leader, well their lives will be better. They never are.

That is also the case here, the press thinks there is something in it for them. Still. With socialism. Be clear, the press has an agenda in supporting socialism. With socialists are in power, they will need a big propaganda mouthpiece, like the main stream media in place to keep America quelled. And that is absolutely true. That is why the MSM supports bigger government and socialism. They yearn for a bigger piece of the pie, and being the mouthpiece for the government is a pretty big piece. Unfortunately, like all those who bring bigger government to power, the press will be consumed by socialism.

Glenn Beck's August 28th "nonpolitical" Washington rally dedicated to "Restoring Honor" to America brought out bushels of bias. An example is this piece by Phillip Elliot, which he published in advance of the rally. The media is keen to portray Beck as a bigot, so the begin the press well ahead. Phil Elliot attempts to lead the reader away from the Beck agenda by painting Beck and tea-partiers as racists, activists, a vocal but unimportant bigoted minority.

He makes references to supposed racist signs seen at tea party events, yet there never are any. For his event, Beck specifically asked attendees not to bring signs. Easy for the media to fabricate non-specifics; easier still for them to attribute some stray and unsanctioned signs to Beck.

The 'reporter' calls Beck a "popular figure among tea party activists." Pillip Elliot is lying through omission. Glenn Beck is much more than popular with a few activists, he is (with Bill O'Reilly) the most popular TV personality in the country. Among Americans. Not just tea party activists, Glenn Beck is more popular than all the liberal television personalities, combined. That is a fact that Phil Elliot does not want you to know. Instead, the clearly stated position Mr. Elliot takes is that Beck has no business speaking on the national mall, not now, not ever, his face does not belong next to Lincoln's face. Especially not on the anniversary of an important MLK speech.

The truth is this: In 1963 the MLK agenda was rightfully one of the most important issues of the day. Yet, America is today struggling to maintain the values that make it a place people want to live -- a place where opportunity and hard work bring rewards. Today, in 2010, the agenda Beck and the Tea Party have, well, it is among the most important issues for America's future. And these issues deserve a hearing.

After the rally, Phillip Elliot follows up with an article that continues his false charges. First, by giving equal billing to the tiny handful of people objecting to the rally. Ah, shouldn't that just be a separate story? Where is the story on the couple hundred thousand people? Mr. Elliot also goes out of the way to call it a 'predominantly white crowd' in the first paragraph. The author's transparent attempts to discredit Beck, and to credit racist bigots like Sharpton, make him an enemy of the country -- an unpatriotic socialist. In fact, Phillip Elliot has a mile-long liberal-assault rap sheet. He honored President Obama as "fact checker in chief." Yet, his false charges of bigotry, and his introduction of racist accusations do nothing to advance the search for truth, only his socialist agenda.

Anything these propagandists can do to discredit America and Americans, they will do. They put President Obama on a pedestal. When that fails, they attempt to distance the democratic party from president Obama. When that fails, they begin a mud-slinging campaign against the tea-party opposition. The liberal assault on America is in full swing. These left-wing mainstream reporters and the left-wing mainstream media believe in socialism. They and socialism are bad for everyone in this country.

Conclusion: Sorry Liberal Media -- The majority of people in America are not violent, they are not racist bigots. They are just not silent. Not anymore.

As reported by AFP:

The director general of the BBC admitted Thursday that his organisation had been guilty of a "massive bias to the left" but said "a completely different generation" of journalists now works at the broadcaster.

Mark Thompson told the right-of-centre Spectator magazine that there was an institutional bias when he joined the organisation, reinforcing the findings of a 2007 internal report which concluded that greater efforts were required to avoid liberal bias.

"In the BBC I joined 30 years ago, there was, in much of current affairs, in terms of people's personal politics, which were quite vocal, a massive bias to the left," Thompson said.

"The organisation did struggle then with impartiality. And journalistically, staff were quite mystified by the early years of Thatcher. "Now it is a completely different generation. There is much less overt tribalism among the young journalists who work for the BBC," he added.

Better late than never, I guess. More cautious is Powerline's John Hinderacker:

I like that phrase, "overt tribalism." It's a nice way to refer to the Journolist mentality. It leaves open, of course, the question whether left-wing bias at the BBC has been eradicated or has merely gone underground.

I agree with Hinderacker--much press bias is endemic and cultural, and masquerades as objectivity. Boasting self-elimination of lefty leanings simply isn't credible.

The only way to beat bias is to quit buying the mainstream media. Here in America, most sensible consumers have. Unfortunately, the British public -- which pays the BBC about £150 [$225] annually per household -- remains obliged to subsidize slanted stories forever.

On Exchequer, Kevin Williamson shows off his crystal ball:

Here’s a prediction: In the final analysis, Bush’s wars will come closer to meeting their goals and will cost far less than Obama’s stimulus.

Yup. It's true so far regarding the Iraq war.

Remember when lefties and reform advocates complained about the rising costs of healthcare in America? (Though that might be a feature, not a bug.) Remember when Obamacare was supposed to slow that growth?

Neither do I--nor does anyone else. Not even President Obama. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal:

The health-care overhaul enacted last spring won't significantly change national health spending over the next decade compared with projections before the law was passed, according to government figures released Thursday.

The report by federal number-crunchers casts fresh doubt on Democrats' argument that the health-care law would curb the sharp increase in costs over the long term, the second setback this week for one of the party's biggest legislative achievements. . .

Regardless of the health law, national health spending has been rising in recent years and economists expect that to continue. In February, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services projected that overall national health spending would increase an average of 6.1% a year over the next decade.

The center's economists recalculated the numbers in light of the health bill and now project that the increase will average 6.3% a year, according to a report in the journal Health Affairs. Total U.S. health spending will reach $4.6 trillion by 2019, accounting for nearly one of every five U.S. dollars spent, the report says.


source: September 8th WSJ

"The overall net impact is moderate," said [see page 8] lead author Andrea Sisko, an economist at the Medicare agency.

Obamacare is the explanation for the increased rate of health spending growth. What were we thinking?

(via Moonbattery)

From Michael Lewis's look at the Greek meltdown in the latest Vanity Fair:

The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2007 . . . wasn’t just money, it was temptation. It offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Entire countries were told, "The lights are out, you can do whatever you want to do and no one will ever know." What they wanted to do with money in the dark varied. Americans wanted to own homes far larger than they could afford, and to allow the strong to exploit the weak. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers, and to allow their alpha males to reveal a theretofore suppressed megalomania. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish. All these different societies were touched by the same event, but each responded to it in its own peculiar way. No response was as peculiar as the Greeks’, however. . .

As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it. In just the past decade the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms--and that number doesn’t take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece’s rail passengers into taxicabs: it’s still true. "We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension," Manos put it to me. "And yet there isn’t a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay." The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland’s. Greeks who send their children to public schools simply assume that they will need to hire private tutors to make sure they actually learn something. There are three government-owned defense companies: together they have billions of euros in debts, and mounting losses. The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as "arduous" is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on. The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average--and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets. . .

Oddly enough, the financiers in Greece remain more or less beyond reproach. They never ceased to be anything but sleepy old commercial bankers. Virtually alone among Europe’s bankers, they did not buy U.S. subprime-backed bonds, or leverage themselves to the hilt, or pay themselves huge sums of money. The biggest problem the banks had was that they had lent roughly 30 billion euros to the Greek government--where it was stolen or squandered. In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks.

What happens when you grow food for oil? This:

With memories still fresh of food riots set off by spiking prices just two years ago, agricultural experts on Friday cast a wary eye on the steep rise in the cost of wheat prompted by a Russian export ban and the questions looming over harvests in other parts of the world because of drought or flooding.

Food prices rose 5 percent globally during August, according to the United Nations, spurred mostly by the higher cost of wheat, and the first signs of unrest erupted as 10 people died in Mozambique during clashes ignited partly by a 30 percent leap in the cost of bread.

"You are dealing with an unstable situation," said Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist at the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.

"People still remember what happened a few years ago, so it is a combination of psychology and the expectation that worse may come," he added. "There are critical months ahead."

Together, the ethanol lobby and the "sustainable food" movement won't be happy until we plow-under every acre of rain forest to plant corn.

(via Planet Gore, Rational Optimist)

As a follow-up to last month's post on defending the rights of Afghan women and children, the Communications Manager for CARE Canada, Kieran Green, describes a young Afghan girl who survived a recent attack on a school:

I visited the home of Sakina, one of those staff members, and met her daughter Marwa, who was one of the girls directly affected by the attack. You can just tell that Marwa is a great kid. She’s alert and attentive, and apparently very hard-working. Every morning she’s home alone until her brother comes home at 11 and it’s time for her to go to school. During that time she cleans the house, top to bottom. When she’s not cleaning, she likes to study. Marwa says her favourite school subjects are math and Dari (their first language). She’s currently the third-best student in her class. Marwa wants to become a doctor.

According to Marwa, when the attack occurred the class was in math period. She was just going to the front of the class to present her homework when suddenly she passed out. When she next opened her eyes, she was in the hospital.

Ultimately, Green contrasts what the West has wrought:

In a week or so, my own daughters will go back to school. The biggest things we’ll have to worry about are what we can and can’t put in their lunches, and if we have all the school supplies they’ll need. We don’t have to worry whether someone will spray poison gas into their classroom because they don’t think girls should have a right to go to school. So much we take for granted.

I do know this. Never again in my life do I want to hear a small girl say the words Marwa said to me today: "I’m very afraid of going back to school. Last time I became sick. Next time I think I will die."

No modern cultural relativist can claim to be indifferent between the opportunities for self-improvement and -reliance facing Marwa in Afghanistan (or some boys there) as opposed to those available to a typical Canadian school child. Marwa's better off than prior generations of Afghan women. So why not help?

(via Normblog)

Today is my parents' birthdays. Yes, plural. They're still alive, still married (to each other), and were born on the same day (though several years apart).

I don't think they read this blog. But should they today: Happy Birthday to both of you!

Los Angeles Times, September 4, 2010:

The Obama administration is considering a substantial spending increase on the Mexican drug war, the latest sign of its growing concern about the rampant violence incited by narcotics cartels in Mexico.

Administration officials said internal debate on the issue continues, and they are not yet at a point where they can estimate how much of an increase may be requested. But they said the matter is considered urgent even at a time when the White House is struggling with costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The joint anti-drug effort with the Mexican government "remains a top administration priority," said a White House official who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue. "We are constantly evaluating our efforts to make sure we are doing all we can on this issue."

New York Times, September 3, 2010:

The United States will withhold about $26 million promised for Mexico’s drug war because of concerns that the country has not done enough to protect its people from police and military abuse.

It is the first time that the United States, citing human rights concerns, has held back a portion of the financing for Mexico under the Merida Initiative, a three-year-old, $1.4 billion effort to help Mexico and Central American nations fight drug trafficking organizations.

Under the program, 15 percent of the money for Mexico is allotted on the condition that the country improve the accountability of the federal and local police; ensure civilian investigations and, if warranted, prosecutions of allegations of abuse by the police and the military; and ban testimony obtained through torture or other mistreatment.

The State Department, in a report delivered to Congress on Friday, said it would release $36 million from earlier budgets. But it said it would withhold 15 percent of the $175 million allocated in the most recent budget.

So, the Obama Administration takes credit for both upping spending and being fiscally responsible; getting tough and being prudent. Good trick, that.

A day off.

Eli Lake in the Washington Times:

Much of President Obama's counterterrorism policies and his understanding of executive power closely hew to the last administration, which he criticized as a candidate for the White House.

On issues ranging from the government's detention authority to a program to kill al Qaeda terrorist suspects, even if they are American citizens, Mr. Obama has consolidated much of the power President George W. Bush asserted after Sept. 11 in the waging of the U.S. war against terror.

The continuities between the two administrations were evident this week, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit dismissed a lawsuit that five former U.S. detainees brought against a subsidiary of Boeing Co. known as Jeppesen Dataplan.

The former detainees alleged that Jeppesen Dataplan facilitated their transport to U.S. and foreign prisons, where they were tortured. The Obama Justice Department, like the Bush Justice Department before it, urged the court to dismiss the case on grounds that state secrets would be disclosed in litigation.

In a 6-5 decision, the court ruled in favor of the federal government.

Good. Contrary to the editors of the New York Times, legislating national security shouldn't be left to lawyers and judges.

I blogged on the Jeppesen case when the suit first was filed. And I give the Obama Administration some credit for taking appropriate legal positions -- here, on the State Secrets doctrine -- to keep the country safe.

Though the Administration seems to pretend that it's reversed Bush's national security policies -- and lefties, as usual, are panicked -- I'm pleased that the President's cautious reaction to genuine overseas threats often departs from the former Senator's over-heated campaign rhetoric.

(via Lawfare blog, reader Warren, National Interest)

Each year since I began blogging, I've posted carefully considered remembrance pieces on the anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks: 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. This year, the occasion is likely to be dominated by competing protests about the mosque proposed to be built near the Trade Tower site, and the coincidence of the Islamic Eid holiday that same day. Even President Obama doesn't know what to do.

Nor do I. With no disrespect to the three friends I lost that day, or the grief of other mourners, I've little more to say on the subject. Not due to doubt or diverging positions: this nation remains the best hope for peace and justice in the world. And though the President performed a policy name-change and often sounds unconvinced, he's mostly a convert to winning the war on terror Bush began. Even if the press now passes-over its former put-downs.

For now, that's enough to honor the memory of 3,000 Americans murdered nine years ago today. Requiescat in pace.

From an August 13th Washington Post editorial:

One of the principal goals of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's foreign policy is preventing governments or international organizations from telling the truth about him. Over the past couple of years, captured documents and other evidence have established beyond any reasonable doubt that Mr. Chávez's regime has provided haven and material support to the FARC movement in neighboring Colombia -- a group that is known for massacres of civilians, hostage taking and drug trafficking, and that has been designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department and the European Union. That places Mr. Chávez in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions and, at least in theory, exposes him to U.S. and international sanctions.

Unfortunately, Chávez has again bullied the truth-tellers to back down.

(via Instapundit)

The background: According to Investors Business Daily:

Fearing lawsuits over injuries, a West Virginia county is removing swing sets from elementary schools. . .

Roughly a year after a child broke his arm jumping off a swing like Superman and [as] his parents are settling a lawsuit for $20,000, Cabell County, W.V., schools are yanking swing sets from school playgrounds. The lawsuit was one of two filed in the last year against Cabell County schools over swing set injuries, the West Virginia Record reported Thursday. School safety manager Tim Stewart, who is overseeing the removal, said he sees "a high potential when it comes to swings and lawsuits."

The law: West Virginia's Code of State Rules, 126 C.S.R. § 172, Policy 6200, Section 205.01(2):

Kindergarten -- All centers housing kindergarten programs shall provide a segregated paved area and an area with climbing equipment and swings.

The outcome: According to the county school website:

Cabell County Schools has announced that it has halted its planned removal of swings from the district's playgrounds. After consulting with the West Virginia Department of Education’s Office of School Facilities, the district has discovered that, according to West Virginia Board of Education Policy 6200, swings are required at its elementary schools. . .

All elementary schools in Cabell County offer Kindergarten programs, therefore the swings must remain.

So, as the Associated Press summarizes, for now Cabell County "students can keep on swinging."

The lesson: Two, actually. First, as Pattterico says, "Civil [plaintiffs' tort] lawyers are ruining this country." But also, as W. Va. writer/blogger Don Surber observes, for once, the nanny state "just got spanked."

As reported in the Sun (U.K.):

A kinky businessman couldn't bear it when his girlfriend dumped him -- so he paid £15,000 [$23,200] to recreate her as a life-sized sex doll.

The 50-year-old man took a collection of snapshots of his ex and told adult toy maker Diego Bortolin: "I want it just like her but with bigger boobs." . . .


source: August 31st Sun

"Our normal dolls are very realistic and everything works just like the real thing.

"This one was more expensive because we had to replicate everything, right down to the shape of her nails and teeth.

Diego defended his actions saying: "Some people say it is kinky but she is now the perfect girlfriend as far as I can see."

(via Instapundit)

In American Thinker, Scott Varland underscores the unfortunate truth that in the U.K., speech isn't free (links added):

"Here in the United Kingdom, what you just said amounts to three crimes under the Public Order Act of 1986. I refer to violations of Part 1, Section 4A (intentional harassment, alarm, or distress); Part 1, Section 5 (harassment, alarm, or distress); and Part 3 (racial hatred). If convicted, you may spend years in prison, pay a substantial fine, or both."

"Racial hatred? What are you talking about?"

"The Public Order Act defines 'racial hatred' to include a reference to the victim's nationality, citizenship, or national origin. Furthermore, if a perpetrator such as yourself insults the victim intending to stir up racial hatred, then a crime has been committed." . . .

[F]our of the most troubling cases from 2008 to 2010:

1) During the 2009 G-20 London summit, the police informed journalists that if they did not stop recording a protest, they would be arrested under Section 14 of the Public Order Act. As a consequence of the threat, the journalists retreated. The Guardian newspaper published a video of what happened. Section 14 permits a senior police officer to impose conditions on individuals participating in an assembly but makes no reference to imposing conditions on news coverage of an assembly.

2) Dale McAlpine was handing out Christian leaflets near a shopping center. A police officer approached him and said that there had been complaints about the leaflets. Furthermore, McAlpine would be arrested if he made any comments that were racist or homophobic. Mr. McAlpine replied that he was not homophobic, but the Bible taught that homosexuality was a sin.

Three other police officers approached him and asked if he had made homophobic remarks. Mr. McAlpine repeated his statement. He was arrested and detained for seven hours, during which time he was forced to provide his fingerprints and a DNA sample. He was charged with causing harassment, alarm, or distress contrary to the Public Order Act. Two weeks later, the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the charge. The chief superintendent of police said, "Our officers and staff often have to make difficult decisions while balancing the law and people's rights. This is not easy[,] especially when opinions and interpretations differ."

3) Christian hoteliers Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang heatedly debated religion with a Muslim guest, Ericka Tazi. Afterwards, Ms. Tazi went to the police to demand prosecution of the Vogelenzangs. The case went to trial before the district judge threw out the charge.

4) Henry Taylor altered published cartoons to mock Christianity and Islam and left them in the multi-faith prayer room of the Liverpool John Lennon Airport. The airport chaplain discovered the altered cartoons, felt insulted, and contacted the police. After a trial, the jury convicted Taylor of violating Part 4A of the Public Order Act of 1986. The judge sentenced him to a six-month term of imprisonment suspended for two years, subjected him to a five-year Anti-Social Behaviour Order (banning him from carrying religiously offensive material in a public place), and ordered him to perform one hundred hours of unpaid work, as well as pay 250 pounds to defray court costs.

Eugene Volokh calls this:

An appalling restriction on freedom of speech; I realize English free speech rules aren’t the same as ours, but cases such as this remind me why I like our free speech rules much better.

Alas, the land that once forged Runnymede has, like Canada, forgotten free speech.

It's not just Britain -- the E.U. is planning to pay reporters' expenses when they accompany the new European "President" on foreign trips. The E.U.'s Justice Commissioner calls it "improving the communications efforts of the Commission." Or, translated from Euro-speak, bribery.

(via Maggie's Farm, The Corner)

Two econ researchers, Danny Cohen-Zada (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) and William Sander (DePaul), report that "American women are happier going to church than shopping on Sundays." According to the New York Times, the study:

tracked church attendance and levels of happiness among Americans living in states that had repealed so-called blue laws, which once required most retailers to stay closed on Sundays.

The researchers found that allowing stores to open on Sundays was linked with a decline in church attendance among white women, which led to a subsequent decline in happiness. Among black women, the repeal of the blue laws had no measurable effect, although that may be because the sample size was too small to draw any statistically meaningful conclusions.

Notably, the finding was true only for women. For men, the repeal of blue laws didn’t seem to influence church attendance or levels of happiness.

Since the repeal of blue laws, women are about 17 percent less likely to report being "pretty happy," and more likely to report being "not happy," according to the study, which is still awaiting final publication.

"People know there is a correlation between religiosity and happiness, but there’s not conclusive evidence that there is a causal effect," said William Sander, professor of economics at DePaul. "Our paper tends to provide more conclusive evidence that religiosity among women does affect happiness."

A year-old version of the paper is here.

Where to start? Sunday closing laws are constitutional, McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420, 444-49 (1961), but are a restriction on freedom I don't favor. Although my observation is consistent with a correlation between faith and happiness, blue laws don't force anyone to attend church. And, in states without blue laws, one can attend church and still shop on Sundays. So, correlation isn't causation.

Still more striking is the Times' favorable coverage of the study. I thought "choice" was the lefty mantra. And I never expected the newspaper to be so relatively positive about religion--shouldn't it be touting First Amendment establishment clause rights?

The contrary spin reflects a larger, more threatening trend among progressives: anti-consumerism. The impact of the hit movie Avatar is one manifestation of a growing movement to roll back progress to return to a supposedly more bucolic past.

This is false and pernicious -- mistaken Malthusian run amok. Considered as a whole, life has been improved immeasurably by markets, capitalism and technology.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm not hostile to faith or church-going. I simply am suspicious when social scientists and the New York Times conspire to conclude consumerism is the culprit.

The Luddites said progress was impoverishing--and were wrong. The new economic study and the Times are too. Because there's no inconsistency between sermons and shopping, or link between shuttered stores and self satisfaction.

More simply, as law prof Ann Althouse quips in response to the NYT's cheerleading for blue laws, "Good Lord."