Leftism as the politics of hate

The article below is from a few years back but it is a vivid confirmation "from the inside" of all I have been saying about  Leftist hate and elitism

Danusha V. Goska lists "Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist"

How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying "Eat the Rich." To me it wasn't a metaphor.

I voted Republican in the last presidential election.

Below are the top ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. This is not a rigorous comparison of theories. This list is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and intuitive. It's an accounting of the milestones on my herky-jerky journey.

10) Huffiness.

In the late 1990s I was reading Anatomy of the Spirit, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.

Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors' meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!

Myss was flabbergasted. Mary could have simply said "Yes" or "No."

Reading this anecdote, I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. I did not want to live that way anymore. I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God. I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.

I recently attended a training session for professors on a college campus. The presenter was a new hire in a tenure-track position. He opened his talk by telling us that he had received an invitation to share a festive meal with the president of the university. I found this to be an enviable occurrence and I did not understand why he appeared dramatically aggrieved. The invitation had been addressed to "Mr. and Mrs. X." Professor X was a bachelor. He felt slighted. Perhaps the person who had addressed his envelope had disrespected him because he is a member of a minority group.

Rolling his eyes, Prof. X went on to say that he was wary of accepting a position on this lowly commuter campus, with its working-class student body. The disconnect between leftists' announced value of championing the poor and the leftist practice of expressing snobbery for them stung me. Already vulnerable students would be taught by a professor who regarded association with them as a burden, a failure, and a stigma.

Barack Obama is president. Kim and Kanye and Brad and Angelina are members of multiracial households. One might think that professors finally have cause to teach their students to be proud of America for overcoming racism. Not so fast, Professor X warned.  His talk was on microaggression, defined as slights that prove that America is still racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, that is, discriminatory against handicapped people.

Professor X projected a series of photographs onto a large screen. In one, commuters in business suits, carrying briefcases, mounted a flight of stairs. This photo was an act of microaggression. After all, Professor X reminded us, handicapped people can't climb stairs.

I appreciate Professor X's desire to champion the downtrodden, but identifying a photograph of commuters on stairs as an act of microaggression and evidence that America is still an oppressive hegemon struck me as someone going out of his way to live his life in a state of high dudgeon. On the other hand, Prof. X could have chosen to speak of his own working-class students with more respect.

Yes, there is a time and a place when it is absolutely necessary for a person to cultivate awareness of his own pain, or of others' pain. Doctors instruct patients to do this -- "Locate the pain exactly; calculate where the pain falls on a scale of one to ten; assess whether the pain is sharp, dull, fleeting, or constant." But doctors do this for a reason. They want the patient to heal, and to move beyond the pain. In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest, from one's history of incest to the inability of handicapped people to mount flights of stairs.

9) Selective Outrage

I was a graduate student. Female genital mutilation came up in class. I stated, without ornamentation, that it is wrong.

A fellow graduate student, one who was fully funded and is now a comfortably tenured professor, sneered at me. "You are so intolerant. Clitoredectomy is just another culture's rite of passage. You Catholics have confirmation."

When Mitt Romney was the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, he mentioned that, as Massachusetts governor, he proactively sought out female candidates for top jobs. He had, he said, "binders full of women." He meant, of course, that he stored resumes of promising female job candidates in three-ring binders.

Op-ed pieces, Jon Stewart's "Daily Show," Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon posts erupted in a feeding frenzy, savaging Romney and the Republican Party for their "war on women."

I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I'm not saying that that outrage does not exist. I'm saying I never saw it.

The left's selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. It's an "I hate" phenomenon, rather than an "I love" phenomenon.

8.) It's the thought that counts

My favorite bumper sticker in ultra-liberal Berkeley, California: "Think Globally; Screw up Locally." In other words, "Love Humanity but Hate People."

It was past midnight, back in the 1980s, in Kathmandu, Nepal. A group of Peace Corps volunteers were drinking moonshine at the Momo Cave. A pretty girl with long blond hair took out her guitar and sang these lyrics, which I remember by heart from that night:

"If you want your dream to be,

Build it slow and surely.

Small beginnings greater ends.

Heartfelt work grows purely."

I just googled these lyrics, thirty years later, and discovered that they are Donovan's San Damiano song, inspired by the life of St. Francis.

Listening to this song that night in the Momo Cave, I thought, that's what we leftists do wrong. That's what we've got to get right.

We focused so hard on our good intentions. Before our deployment overseas, Peace Corps vetted us for our idealism and "tolerance," not for our competence or accomplishments. We all wanted to save the world. What depressingly little we did accomplish was often erased with the next drought, landslide, or insurrection.

Peace Corps did not focus on the "small beginnings" necessary to accomplish its grandiose goals. Schools rarely ran, girls and low caste children did not attend, and widespread corruption guaranteed that all students received passing grades. Those students who did learn had no jobs where they could apply their skills, and if they rose above their station, the hereditary big men would sabotage them. Thanks to cultural relativism, we were forbidden to object to rampant sexism or the caste system. "Only intolerant oppressors judge others' cultures."

I volunteered with the Sisters of Charity. For them, I pumped cold water from a well and washed lice out of homeless people's clothing. The sisters did not want to save the world. Someone already had. The sisters focused on the small things, as their founder, Mother Teresa, advised, "Don't look for big things, just do small things with great love." Delousing homeless people's clothing was one of my few concrete accomplishments.

Back in 1975, after Hillary Rodham had followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, she helped create the state's first rape crisis hotline. She had her eye on the big picture. What was Hillary like in her one-on-one encounters?

Hillary served as the attorney to a 41-year-old, one of two men accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. The girl, a virgin before the assault, was in a coma for five days afterward. She was injured so badly she was told she'd never have children. In 2014, she is 52 years old, and she has never had children, nor has she married. She reports that she was afraid of men after the rape.

A taped interview with Clinton has recently emerged; on it Clinton makes clear that she thought her client was guilty, and she chuckles when reporting that she was able to set him free.  In a recent interview, the victim said that Hillary Clinton "took me through Hell" and "lied like a dog.""I think she wants to be a role model… but I don’t think she’s a role model at all," the woman said. "If she had have been, she would have helped me at the time, being a 12-year-old girl who was raped by two guys."

Hillary had her eye on the all-caps resume bullet point: FOUNDS RAPE HOTLINE.

Hillary's chuckles when reminiscing about her legal victory suggest that, in her assessment, her contribution to the ruination of the life of a rape victim is of relatively negligible import.

7) Leftists hate my people.

I'm a working-class Bohunk [central European]. A hundred years ago, leftists loved us. We worked lousy jobs, company thugs shot us when we went on strike, and leftists saw our discontent as fuel for their fire.

Karl Marx promised the workers' paradise through an inevitable revolution of the proletariat. The proletariat is an industrial working class -- think blue-collar people working in mines, mills, and factories: exactly what immigrants like my parents were doing.

Polish-Americans participated significantly in a great victory, Flint, Michigan's 1937 sit-down strike. Italian-Americans produced Sacco and Vanzetti. Gus Hall was a son of Finnish immigrants.

In the end, though, we didn't show up for the Marxist happily ever after. We believed in God and we were often devout Catholics. Leftists wanted us to slough off our ethnic identities and join in the international proletarian brotherhood -- "Workers of the world, unite!" But we clung to ethnic distinctiveness. Future generations lost their ancestral ties, but they didn't adopt the IWW flag; they flew the stars and stripes. "Property is theft" is a communist motto, but no one is more house-proud than a first generation Pole who has escaped landless peasantry and secured his suburban nest.

Leftists felt that we jilted them at the altar. Leftists turned on us. This isn't just ancient history. In 2004, What's the Matter with Kansas? spent eighteen weeks on the bestseller lists. The premise of the book: working people are too stupid to know what's good for them, and so they vote conservative when they should be voting left. In England, the book was titled, What's the Matter with America?

We became the left's boogeyman: Joe Six-pack, Joe Hardhat. Though we'd been in the U.S. for a few short decades when the demonization began, leftists, in the academy, in media, and in casual speech, blamed working-class ethnics for American crimes, including racism and the "imperialist" war in Vietnam. See films like The Deer Hunter. Watch Archie Bunker on "All in the Family." Listen to a few of the Polack jokes that elitists pelted me with whenever I introduced myself at UC Berkeley.

Leftists freely label poor whites as "redneck,""white trash,""trailer trash," and "hillbilly." At the same time that leftists toss around these racist and classist slurs, they are so sanctimonious they forbid anyone to pronounce the N word when reading Mark Twain aloud. President Bill Clinton's advisor James Carville succinctly summed up leftist contempt for poor whites in his memorable quote, "Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find."

The left's visceral hatred of poor whites overflowed like a broken sewer when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in 2008. It would be impossible, and disturbing, to attempt to identify the single most offensive comment that leftists lobbed at Palin. One can report that attacks on Palin were so egregious that leftists themselves publicly begged that they cease; after all, they gave the left a bad name. The Reclusive Leftist blogged in 2009 that it was a "major shock" to discover "the extent to which so many self-described liberals actually despise working people." The Reclusive Leftist focuses on Vanity Fair journalist Henry Rollins. Rollins recommends that leftists "hate-fuck conservative women" and denounces Palin as a "small town hickoid" who can be bought off with a coupon to a meal at a chain restaurant.

Smearing us is not enough. Liberal policies sabotage us. Affirmative action benefits recipients by color, not by income. Even this limited focus fails. In his 2004 Yale University Press study, Thomas Sowell insists that affirmative action helps only wealthier African Americans. Poor blacks do not benefit. In 2009, Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford demonstrated that poor, white Christians are underrepresented on elite college campuses. Leftists add insult to injury. A blue-collar white kid, who feels lost and friendless on the alien terrain of a university campus, a campus he has to leave immediately after class so he can get to his fulltime job at MacDonald's, must accept that he is a recipient of "white privilege"– if he wants to get good grades in mandatory classes on racism.

The left is still looking for its proletariat. It supports mass immigration for this reason. Harvard's George Borjas, himself a Cuban immigrant, has been called "America’s leading immigration economist." Borjas points out that mass immigration from Latin America has sabotaged America's working poor.

It's more than a little bit weird that leftists, who describe themselves as the voice of the worker, select workers as their hated other of choice, and targets of their failed social engineering.

6) I believe in God.

Read Marx and discover a mythology that is irreconcilable with any other narrative, including the Bible. Hang out in leftist internet environments, and you will discover a toxic bath of irrational hatred for the Judeo-Christian tradition. You will discover an alternate vocabulary in which Jesus is a "dead Jew on a stick" or a "zombie" and any belief is an arbitrary sham, the equivalent of a recently invented "flying spaghetti monster." You will discover historical revisionism that posits Nazism as a Christian denomination. You will discover a rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western Civilization and American concepts of individual rights and law. You will discover a nihilist void, the kind of vacuum of meaning that nature abhors and that, all too often, history fills with the worst totalitarian nightmares, the rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem.

5 & 4) Straw men and "In order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs."

It astounds me now to reflect on it, but never, in all my years of leftist activism, did I ever hear anyone articulate accurately the position of anyone to our right. In fact, I did not even know those positions when I was a leftist.

"Truth is that which serves the party." The capital-R revolution was such a good, it could eliminate all that was bad, that manipulating facts was not even a venial sin; it was a good. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. One of those eggs was objective truth.

Ron Kuby is a left-wing radio talk show host on New York's WABC. He plays the straw man card hourly. If someone phones in to question affirmative action – shouldn't such programs benefit recipients by income, rather than by skin color? – Kuby opens the fire hydrant. He is shrill. He is bombastic. He accuses the caller of being a member of the KKK. He paints graphic word pictures of the horrors of lynching and the death of Emmett Till and asks, "And you support that?"

Well of course THE CALLER did not support that, but it is easier to orchestrate a mob in a familiar rendition of righteous rage against a sensationalized straw man than it is to produce a reasoned argument against a reasonable opponent.

On June 16, 2014, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank published a column alleging that a peaceful Muslim was nearly verbally lynched by violent Islamophobes at a Heritage Foundation-hosted panel. What Milbank described was despicable. Unfortunately for Milbank and the Washington Post's credibility, someone filmed the event and posted the film on YouTube. Panel discussants, including Frank Gaffney and Brigitte Gabriel, made important points in a courteous manner. Saba Ahmed, the peaceful Muslim, is a "family friend" of a bombing plotter who expressed a specific desire to murder children. It soon became clear that Milbank was, as one blogger put it, "making stuff up."

Milbank slanders anyone who might attempt analysis of jihad, a force that is currently cited in the murder of innocents -- including Muslims -- from Nigeria to the Philippines. The leftist strategy of slandering those who speak uncomfortable facts suppresses discourse and has a devastating impact on confrontations with truth in journalism and on college campuses.

2 & 3) It doesn't work.  Other approaches work better.

I went to hear David Horowitz speak in 2004. My intention was to heckle him. Horowitz said something that interrupted my flow of thought. He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership.

Ouch.

I grew up among "Greatest Generation" Americans who had helped build these cities. One older woman told me, "As soon as I got my weekly paycheck, I rushed to Main Ave in Paterson, and my entire paycheck ended up on my back, in a new outfit." In the 1950s and 60s, my parents and my friends' parents fled deadly violence in Newark and Paterson.

Within a few short decades, Paterson, Camden, and Newark devolved into unlivable slums, with shooting deaths, drug deals, and garbage-strewn streets. The pain that New Jerseyans express about these failed cities is our state's open wound.

I live in Paterson. I teach its young. My students are hogtied by ignorance. I find myself speaking to young people born in the U.S. in a truncated pidgin I would use with a train station chai wallah in Calcutta.

Many of my students lack awareness of a lot more than vocabulary. They don't know about believing in themselves, or stick-to-itiveness. They don't realize that the people who exercise power over them have faced and overcome obstacles. I know they don't know these things because they tell me. One student confessed that when she realized that one of her teachers had overcome setbacks it changed her own life.

My students do know -- because they have been taught this -- that America is run by all-powerful racists who will never let them win. My students know -- because they have been drilled in this -- that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.

As Shelby Steele so brilliantly points out in his book White Guilt, the star of the sob story my students tell in exchange for favors is very much not the black aid recipient. The star of this story, still, just as before the Civil Rights Movement that was meant to change who got to take the lead in American productions, was the white man. The generous white liberal still gets top billing.

In Dominque La Pierre's 1985 novel City of Joy, a young American doctor, Max Loeb, confesses that serving the poor in a slum has changed his mind forever about what might actually improve their lot. "In a slum an exploiter is better than a Santa Claus… An exploiter forces you to react, whereas a Santa Claus demobilizes you."

That one stray comment from David Horowitz, a man I regarded as the enemy, sparked the slow but steady realization that my ideals, the ideals I had lived by all my life, were poisoning my students and Paterson, my city.

After I realized that our approaches don't work, I started reading about other approaches. I had another Aha! moment while listening to a two minute twenty-three second YouTube video of Milton Friedman responding to Phil Donahue's castigation of greed. The only rational response to Friedman is "My God, he's right."

1) Hate.

If hate were the only reason, I'd stop being a leftist for this reason alone.

Almost twenty years ago, when I could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist, I joined a left-wing online discussion forum.

Before that I'd had twenty years of face-to-face participation in leftist politics: marching, organizing, socializing.

In this online forum, suddenly my only contact with others was the words those others typed onto a screen. That limited and focused means of contact revealed something.

If you took all the words typed into the forum every day and arranged them according to what part of speech they were, you'd quickly notice that nouns expressing the emotions of anger, aggression, and disgust, and verbs speaking of destruction, punishing, and wreaking vengeance, outnumbered any other class of words.

One topic thread was entitled "What do you view as disgusting about modern America?" The thread was begun in 2002. Almost eight thousand posts later, the thread was still going strong in June, 2014.

Those posting messages in this left-wing forumpublicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn't hold any anti-war rally, because you didn't hate Obama.

I experienced powerful cognitive dissonance when I recognized the hate. The rightest of my right-wing acquaintances -- I had no right-wing friends -- expressed nothing like this. My right-wing acquaintances talked about loving: God, their family, their community. I'm not saying that the right-wingers I knew were better people; I don't know that they were. I'm speaking here, merely, about language.

In 1995 I developed a crippling illness. I couldn't work, lost my life savings, and traveled through three states, from surgery to surgery.

A left-wing friend, Pete, sent me emails raging against Republicans like George Bush, whom he referred to as "Bushitler." The Republicans were to blame because they opposed socialized medicine. In fact it's not at all certain that socialized medicine would have helped; the condition I had is not common and there was no guaranteed treatment.

I visited online discussion forums for others with the same affliction. One of my fellow sufferers, who identified himself as a successful corporate executive in New Jersey, publicly announced that the symptoms were so hideous, and his helpless slide into poverty was so much not what his wife had bargained for when she married him, that he planned to take his own life. He stopped posting after that announcement, though I responded to his post and requested a reply. It is possible that he committed suicide, exactly as he said he would -- car exhaust in the garage. I suddenly realized that my "eat the rich" lapel button was a sin premised on a lie.

In any case, at the time I was diagnosed, Bush wasn't president; Clinton was. And, as I pointed out to Pete, his unceasing and vehement expressions of hatred against Republicans did nothing for me.

I had a friend, a nun, Mary Montgomery, one of the Sisters of Providence, who took me out to lunch every six months or so, and gave me twenty-dollar Target gift cards on Christmas. Her gestures to support someone, rather than expressions of hate against someone -- even though these gestures were miniscule and did nothing to restore me to health -- meant a great deal to me.

Recently, I was trying to explain this aspect of why I stopped being a leftist to a left-wing friend, Julie. She replied, "No, I'm not an unpleasant person. I try to be nice to everybody."

"Julie," I said, "You are an active member of the Occupy Movement. You could spend your days teaching children to read, or visiting the elderly in nursing homes, or organizing cleanup crews in a garbage-strewn slum. You don't. You spend your time protestingand trying to destroy something -- capitalism."

"Yes, but I'm very nice about it," she insisted. "I always protest with a smile."

Pete is now a Facebook friend and his feed overflows with the anger that I'm sure he assesses as righteous. He protests against homophobic Christians, American imperialists, and Monsanto. I don't know if Pete ever donates to an organization he believes in, or a person suffering from a disease, or if he ever says comforting things to afflicted intimates. I know he hates.

I do have right-wing friends now and they do get angry and they do express that anger. But when I encounter unhinged, stratospheric vituperation, when I encounter detailed revenge fantasies in scatological and sadistic language, I know I've stumbled upon a left-wing website.

Given that the left prides itself on being the liberator of women, homosexuals, and on being "sex positive," one of the weirder and most obvious aspects of left-wing hate is how often, and how virulently, it is expressed in terms that are misogynist, homophobic, and in the distinctive anti-sex voice of a sexually frustrated high-school misfit. Haters are aware enough of how uncool it would be to use a slur like "fag," so they sprinkle their discourse with terms indicating anal rape like "butt hurt." Leftists taunt right-wingers as "tea baggers." The implication is that the target of their slur is either a woman or a gay man being orally penetrated by a man, and is, therefore, inferior, and despicable.

Misogynist speech has a long tradition on the left. In 1964, Stokely Carmichael said that the only position for women in the Civil Rights Movement was "prone." Carmichael's misogyny is all the more outrageous given the very real role of women like Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Fannie Lou Hamer.

In 2012 atheist bloggers Jennifer McCreight and Natalie Reed exposed the degree to which misogyny dominates the New Atheist movement. McCreight quoted a prominent atheist's reply to a woman critic. "I will make you a rape victim if you don't fuck off... I think we should give the guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow… Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole… I'm going to rape you with my fist."

A high-profile example of leftist invective was delivered by MSNBC's Martin Bashir in late 2013. Bashir said, on air and in a rehearsed performance, not as part of a moment's loss of control, something so vile about Sarah Palin that I won't repeat it here. Extreme as it is, Bashir's comment is fairly representative of a good percentage of what I read on left-wing websites.

I could say as much about a truly frightening phenomenon, left-wing anti-Semitism, but I'll leave the topic to others better qualified. I can say that when I first encountered it, at a PLO fundraising party in Marin County, I felt as if I had time-traveled to pre-war Berlin.

I needed to leave the left, I realized, when I decided that I wanted to spend time with people building, cultivating, and establishing, something that they loved.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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Taxes on Unhealthy Food Are Ineffective and Hurt the Poor: They come at the expense of the most vulnerable segments of society

The authors make good points below but they could have gone further by questioning the whole notion of healthy food.  Official advice on what is healthy frequently undergoes large changes, even U-turns, so if there is such a thing as healthy or unhealthy food there is no certainty about what that is.  Fat was demonized for decades but it suddenly became good for you recently.  Eat what you like and ignore the food nannies!

Over the past decade or so, paternalistic objections to fat, sugar, and salt have gained traction among policymakers, mostly at the state and local levels of government. Predictably, new taxes have been proposed and imposed on foods and beverages containing those ingredients. For elected officials, the prospect of addressing health concerns while raising new tax revenue is nearly irresistible.

It’s certainly intuitive that taxing sugary soda and bad-cholesterol-ridden potato chips will prompt consumers to buy fewer of those items—and that people will substitute healthier alternatives. But it turns out that consumers’ buying habits do not change markedly in response to the higher prices, and that the burden of those taxes falls most heavily on the low-income, who allocate larger shares of their budgets to food than wealthier people do. Together with our coauthors Adam Hoffer and Regeana Gvillo, we describe these effects in more detail in a new paper published in the Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy.

In assessing these kinds of taxes, it’s critical to understand the consumption choices people have available. Many programs have tried to address unhealthy eating, but individuals eat junk food not just because they enjoy it, but also because of a complex web of eating habits, accessibility of stores, cooking abilities, and time pressures. Even when consumers in lower-income neighborhoods want to buy healthier foods, their options are limited.

High-sugar and high-fat foods are shelf-stable, making them more convenient than food that spoils quickly and giving them a much lower price per calorie consumed. The absence of healthy options in so-called urban food deserts means that taxing junk food will disproportionately harm the people living there. Also, as everyone who has bought food from a vending machine knows, the combination of accessibility and hunger can trigger the purchase of unhealthy food.

Moreover, diet is only one component of a healthy lifestyle. The other components, such as regular exercise and adequate sleep, are not directly related to tax policy.

But the most important, though less obvious, point is worth repeating: expenditures on the items we studied don’t vary much with income, meaning that the poor spend a higher share of their income on these products—making taxes on them regressive.

People do tend to buy more expensive, higher-quality versions of alcohol, tobacco, and some foods as their incomes rise. The largest effect reported in our paper was for alcohol: a household that makes 1 percent more income spends, on average, 0.31 percent more on alcohol. (For the average household, this means that if income goes up by $428 per year, alcohol spending goes up $1.) But the quality of things like soda and potato chips does not scale up, and so expenditures remain basically constant regardless of income.

It is widely accepted that eating better enhances health, lowers health-care expenditures, and improves the quality of life. The problem is that the link between taxes on unhealthy food and the consumption of such food is weak, and that those taxes come at the expense of the most vulnerable segments of society.

SOURCE

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The genius of Trumpism

Julius Krein sits in a cafe on the ground floor of his office building in downtown Boston, wearing a green corduroy blazer and a neat part in his hair.

He’s just launched a tweedy magazine called American Affairs, and the press has dubbed it “the intellectual journal of Trumpism.”

It’s a useful label, in some respects. “Frankly,” Krein says, poking at an apricot tart, “it gets me a lot of clicks.” But it’s also made the magazine a target for criticism.

Trump, as one skeptical columnist put it, is a “deeply flawed tribune” for an intellectual movement — an anti-intellectual, a former reality television star who changes positions at the speed of Twitter.

Can there really be a Trumpism, the skeptics ask, in the face of Trump’s flip-flops? How do you reconcile the president’s many, glaring contradictions?

Krein’s answer: You don’t. Instead, you cut right to the bracing argument at the heart of Trump’s campaign — that it’s time to pull back from the globalism that’s served coastal elites and turn to a vigorous, new nationalism that puts ordinary Americans first.

It’s “ism” as game-changer, as once-in-a-generation challenge to political orthodoxy. And while it’s not clear that Trump himself will stay faithful to Trumpism — he’s already broken from it in some big, public ways — Krein is betting that the idea will survive nonetheless, that the energy the president unleashed will re-order public life in important ways.

Trump’s wild swings are a blow to Trumpism. They may be fatal in the end. But the bet here is that “isms” are built more on the salience of the big idea than the intellectual purity of its namesake; that a malleable “ism” isn’t doomed to irrelevance, but equipped to endure; that you start with a big personality and a big moment, and you go from there.

History suggests that’s a pretty good bet.

SOURCE

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Financial security versus independence

The changing face of the United States should be viewed as an opportunity

James E. Smith and Alex Hatch

In 2015, the Bureau of Labor (BLS) Statistics released the results of a study dubbed the “National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979.”  This survey observed the employment habits of nearly ten thousand men and women of various groups over a 30-year period. Of all the data presented by the study, two numbers most characterize the evolution of the American job market: 11.7 and 93.7.

The former represents the average number of jobs a person will work between the ages of 18 and 48; the latter the percent of people age 30 to 34 who will spend less than 15 years with any single employer.

These numbers reflect the downward trend, if not the death, of the one-time American ideal of being a “company man.”  The average American no longer aspires to grind through a nine-to-five job in his or her perfect first employment scenario. If they did initially, the volatility of the current job market seems to force a more thorough review of reality.

At the very least, they certainly don’t expect to be rewarded with a mantle clock or gold watch after thirty-plus years of faithful service. Even in their early to mid-thirties, an age when most people begin to settle down and raise a family, the average American is still willing to change careers and locations repeatedly to further their long-term economic viability.

In most cases a planned career change provides an improvement in living and working conditions, as well as a boost in income. For most, these improvements are reflected in the standard of living enjoyed, and also with measureable improvements in future financial security, improved net value, greater liquidity, and larger retirement benefits.

For some, the correct choices may also provide the ability to cross the threshold where financial security becomes financial independence: defined as the ability to continue the same, or better, lifestyle without a job; the much-heralded early retirement.

The frequency for this likelihood increases for the case where workers take greater personal and financial risks early in their career by investing in additional retirement plans, stocks and bonds or, more significantly, by contributing their time and future income to innovative technologies and start-ups.

Accordingly, spurred on by the age of the internet, numerous opportunities have sprung up in the last 30 years, resulting in a more than eight-fold increase in millionaires. That demographic can be used here to illustrate the number of people who have become financially independent.

More specifically, in 1988 there were only about 1.5 million millionaires in the United States. By 2017, this number had increased to 10.8 million, showing that, as investment savvy workers and the innovations they support have grown, so too have the number of financially independent Americans.

By and large though, employer mobility, as enjoyed by American workers, has often come at the cost of their financial security.  According to the BLS study, during the 30-year period the bureau analyzed, the subjects spent a total of 22% of their time from age 18 to 48 either unemployed or out of the workforce.  This means that they were out of the working world for nearly seven years during what should be the most productive portion of their lives.

While a good portion of this time was likely related to the pursuit of higher education and training, the result is still the same: the average American now spends more than half a decade out of the workforce during their working careers. This results in years of lost wages and promotions for the individual, lowering their future earnings potential and seniority in a position, in many cases affecting their job security.

In a broader sense, this also means that there are fewer citizens who can make positive contributions to the local economy, as well as to the government in the form of taxes. Today’s employee knows that stability in a career is not a given, and there is very little chance that the government will provide any kind of substantial fallback for them should their employment situation change. Thus, their historically strong employer loyalty has given way to increased financial depth.

The days when Social Security and even company pension plans would provide for future living conditions and survival security are long gone.  Even with all the optional retirement vehicles, the reality is that the American workers must again secure their own future financial security, independent of government-mandated programs that may work initially but can never keep pace with changing economic, demographic, longevity and life-style realities.

Workers must invest in their own future, first through education and training and then by investing in public and private markets, as well as in innovation and entrepreneurial opportunities, not to mention second jobs or the equivalent from their spouses and other family members.

According to the 2016-17 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report, there has been a significant uptick in entrepreneurial activity in the last decade. Most notably, in 2016, 13.6% of all American adults ages 18 to 64 were involved in either the creation or the operation of businesses that are less than 42 months old.  Thus, millions of Americans have decided to dedicate at least part of their time and financial security to the pursuit of innovation and wealth creation, instead of working exclusively in the corporate world.

While entrepreneurship entices Americans with the promise of great wealth, it is important to note than 90% of all startups fail. For the sake of financial stability, Americans must understand that the social safety nets currently in place simply cannot support entrepreneurs who fail in their endeavors. They must have their own savings and safety nets to help them survive any failures they may encounter.

We are ultimately responsible for our current situation, and more so for the future, since we have time to make the plans necessary for that future lifestyle we have set as our goal. It also means we can bet the house on one throw of the dice. Proper planning is essential and even risk taking must have a safety net.

For these and numerous other reasons, it is important for the stability of our citizens and the social welfare system we enjoy that we take charge of our own financial security and not expect to find the solution to our lack of personal planning during the eleventh hour of our working careers. Programs are in place to provide the fundamental mechanisms for wealth accumulation. We just need the discipline to take advantage of them.

More importantly, with that same discipline and a proper outlook to the future, there appears to be a plethora of ideas that will allow the transition from hand to mouth to financial security and possibly to financial independence. The data show that the United States is primed to make innovation another way to create security and independence. It is our responsibility to make it happen.

Via email

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Fascism and Communism Were Two Peas in a Pod

Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini have become, for many of us today, mere Hollywood villains – generic personifications of evil or (in Mussolini's case) buffoonish authoritarianism. Yet their ideologies were rooted in specific philosophical ideas – ideas which had many respectable adherents in their day.

Dictator Fanboys

Many in the vanguard of progressive thought were enamored of Mussolini and even Hitler, considering their dictatorships a useful “social experiment.”

One person who understands this is Jonah Goldberg, author of the 2007 book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Ten years on, the book still holds up. Goldberg argues, provocatively, that fascism shared roots in common with what we call modern liberalism or progressivism.

People often argue over whether Hitler and Mussolini were “right wing” or “left wing.” More to the point is that both men's ideologies had roots in the Progressive movement of the turn of the 20th century.

The Progressive movement was closely tied to the philosophy of Pragmatism: the belief that thought is a tool for action and change. In contrast to the ancient and medieval philosophers, for whom philosophy was the contemplation of reality, the Progressives were animated by the desire to mold reality and to harness knowledge for social betterment. Many in the vanguard of progressive thought initially were enamored of Mussolini and even Hitler, considering their dictatorships a useful “social experiment.”

H.G. Wells, the popular science fiction writer, was one. In a number of speeches and books he praised the militaristic social mobilization in the new fascist regimes: an entire society moving as a single unit under the rule of a Nietzschean superman.

Complete state control of all aspects of life was seen as highly pragmatic and scientific by many. Nationalism and militarism – elements commonly associated with the Right – were actually key components of the Progressive Era, flourishing in particular under President Woodrow Wilson, as Goldberg documents.

Ideological Twins

Hitler and Mussolini's ideologies grew out of the avant-garde progressive and pragmatic philosophies of the late 19th century.

Popular wisdom holds that Fascism and Communism were diametrical opposites. Actually, the two ideologies were (and are) so similar that they had to define themselves in opposition to each other in order to survive. At the very least, both were socialistic in origin: Mussolini was immersed in socialism by his father, and the name of Hitler's party – National Socialist German Workers' Party – speaks for itself.

These regimes fostered hostility to traditional religious beliefs and morality (both men despised Christianity), “salvation by science” (as shown, for example, in the Nazi's racist eugenics movement), and state-controlled health and environmental projects (as shown in a Nazi slogan, “Nutrition is not a private matter!”).

All of these elements grew out of the “scientific” progressivism of the early 20th century. Even the Nazis' vÖlkisch ideology—with its nationalist and traditionalist overtones – was at heart a secular religion-substitute which enshrined the Will of the People, a concept which Goldberg traces to the French Revolution.

It would seem undeniable that Hitler and Mussolini, like the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin, were revolutionaries and in no sense conservatives or traditionalists. Their ideologies grew out of the avant-garde positivist, progressive, and pragmatic philosophies of the late 19th century.

A Progressive Moment

The point here is not to engage in “left wing”/“right wing” name calling. Rather, it is to realize that all these political movements were tied up in a historical moment – Goldberg calls it the “fascist moment” of Western history – which originated in the French Revolution and came to fruition in the 20th century.

This moment was “progressive” in that it signaled the abandonment of the West's moral and philosophical traditions. And it was embodied, philosophically, in the turn away from the contemplation of truth to “action, action, action.”

SOURCE

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Hannity Is Fighting ‘Coordinated Attempt to Silence...Every Outspoken Conservative in This Country’

In his opening monologue Monday night, Fox News’s Sean Hannity addressed the “well-orchestrated effort by the intolerant left in this country,” which is trying to “silence every conservative voice,” including his.

Following the ouster of Fox New’s Bill O’Reilly, Hannity appears to be the next target at Fox News. He said he has hired lawyers and will challenge his “serial harasser” – an individual he did not name -- in court.

“In this fiercely divided and vindictive political climate, I will no longer allow slander and lies about me to go unchallenged, as I see this now to be a coordinated effort afoot to now silence those with conservative views. I will fight every single lie about me by any and all legal means available to me as an American,” Hannity said.

But he also said this isn’t just about him: “I’m speaking out tonight so that you, our audience, will understand what is really happening and what is really at stake when it comes to freedom of speech in this country.”

Hannity noted that he has worked in radio or television for 30 years, 21 of them at Fox News.

“And during this time, there  have always been efforts and attempts to smear and slander and besmirch me and other conservatives, but it has never been as intense and completely insane as it is right now.”

Things got much worse after the election, said Hannity, who is and has been an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump.

“This is not about Sean Hannity, or one person,," he continued. "There is now a coordinated attempt to silence the voice of every outspoken conservative in this country. If we don't stop it right now, there won't be any conservative voices on radio or television left.

“Now I'm not the only one that these liberal fascists routinely target. Like me, conservatives are monitored on radio and TV, every word they say.”

He continued:

“Liberal fascism is alive lie and well in America today. Their goal is simple. They want to shut up and shut down, completely silence all conservative voices by any means necessary. Here’s the difference. Unlike the left, I don't have any problem with what the other side says. If you want to listen to liberals on radio or TV, read their articles, follow them on social media, go for it.

Now, I’ll call them out for their bias. I’ll explain why they’re wrong. I’ll debate them but I’ll never, ever say they should be silenced. And I won't support boycotts to attack their advertisers, a roundabout way of silencing them.

So let me be clear tonight. Everyone who publicly supported President Trump is a target. This is very political. We have seen repeatedly that the left knows no limits in these efforts. They have gone after and attacked the first lady; they have attacked members of the president's family, every White House advisor. They've even attacked his daughter and his 10-year-old son.

Now ultimately, their goal is to cause as much collateral damage as they can to anybody who supports the president. They have tried to undermine the outcome of this election since November 9th.

Please note, this isn’t about me. This is about the left, concocting boycotts, all in an attempt to silence prominent conservative voices. If we don't take a stand now, if we allow this to happen now, I'm telling you, America as we know it -- freedom of speech as we know it -- is over. Let's stop the boycotts – let’s stop silencing opposition voices. Let all Americans make their own decisions.

SOURCE

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Do Black Lies Matter? Do All Lies Matter? 

No, there’s no typo. These are not rhetorical questions. Do black lies matter? Do all lies matter?

The answers to these questions are important not only to Kamal Dhimal, a legal U.S. citizen from Bhutan, whose Charlotte, North Carolina, market was torched by an incendiary device with a note left at the scene threatening his life. These questions are important to every law-abiding American who is watching a grievance industry create chaos and violence to destroy our nation.

On Sunday, April 9, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police arrested the perpetrator of an arson that was being investigated as a hate crime. The Central Market in east Charlotte was the target of a homemade ignition contraption flung through the door after a glass window was busted out. The responding law enforcement found, as hoped, a typed letter addressed to “Business Owner” — who fled from the subcontinent of India. The proclamation was signed in bolded larger font, “White America.”

The neatly yet grammatically erred writing was left by the front door. It read:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Our newly elected president Donald Trump is our nation builder for white America. You all know that, we want our country back on the right track. We need to get rid of Muslims, Indians and all immigrants. Speci[fic]ally, we don’t want business run by refugees and immigrant anymore.

We are ready to wake up some of our great state including North Carolina and we will take care of the country. Immigrants and refugee are taking our job[s], doing our business and leaving us standard. So, you are not allowed to do business any more.

We know you are one and many of other immigrant[s] doing business here. This is our warning. Leave the business and go back where you came from.

If you don’t follow this warning then we are not responsible for the torture starting now.

God bless America

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Obviously, the intent of the arsonist was to portray the crime as one committed by a racially driven loyalist of President Donald Trump. You know, like the ones regularly contrived among the national media who can’t get over the fact that Hillary Clinton lost.

As defined by the FBI, a hate crime “is a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias.” North Carolina officials proceeded with the information at hand, both objective and subjective, to investigate an assailant who had inflicted a crime against the person and property of an individual based on an element of bias or prejudice.

Members of the grievance industry like Eric Levitz, writing for New York Magazine, have postulated that such incidents of hate crimes have directly “coincided with a GOP presidential primary” that featured a candidate supposedly fueled by the prejudices and nativist hatred of immigrants coupled with Islamophobia. Whether peddling conjured-up racism, sexism, gender-bias or “White Privilege,” the new cause célèbre is victimhood at the hands of some conservative Christian or member of the working class.

In the case of the Charlotte shop, the hate crime was supposedly performed by “White America.” Unfortunately for the Presstitutes selling their cheap, adulterated storylines, it was committed by Curtis Flournoy, a 32-year-old black man with five previous arrests in Mecklenburg County.

The problem, as the North Carolina law enforcement experts exposed, was the hate crime was not borne out of politics of the Right, white privilege or any other manufactured demon oft-cited by the Left as they hail and regale victims. The Charlotte crime was an act of hate fueling a lying narrative.

According to a website built on the published work, “Crying Wolf,” by Laird Wilcox, an astounding 80% of hate crimes reported on the confines of a college or university campus are fake. So, of the 10 hate crimes reported on campuses of higher education, only two of those were truthfully crimes based on bias or prejudice.

So, back to the premise of discussion: Do all lies matter?

In 2017, truth has been abandoned for a poisonous recipe filled with substitutes. The modern culture embraces popular, yet uninformed opinion instead of fact, repeats propaganda fit for any Marxist, socialist or statist and honors the celebrity of victimhood rather than integrity and personal achievement.

Indeed, all lies matter. These lies are the lifeblood of the political Left and those who despise American exceptionalism.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Racism -- in the Leftist sense -- is normal

In Leftist usage, "racist" is a very rubbery term.  Any mention of race can cause that mention to be categorized as racist. And consciousness of racial differences is an abomination to the Left.  One would hope that the term were used to describe only those people who propose some sort of adverse discrimination against others solely because of their race but that is clearly not to be.

But it has been known in the psychology textbooks for many decades that some sort of consciousness of one's own group and loyalty to it is in fact just about universal. For instance, Brown in his 1986 introductory social psychology textbook also describes ethnocentrism, racism and their associated phenomena as "universal ineradicable psychological processes".

So Leftist usage flies in the face of psychological reality.  We are ALL racists in the Leftist sense, Leftists themselves included.  The Left are in fact obsessed with race, as their incessant campaigning for "affirmative action" shows.

So it is pleasing to see the latest bit of research that shows we get on best with members of our own group.  See below:


Identity and Bias: Insights from Driving Tests

By Revital Bar and Asaf Zussman

Abstract

How does one's identity affect the evaluation of others? To shed light on this question, we analyze the universe of driving tests conducted in Israel during 2006-2015, leveraging the effectively random assignment of students and testers to tests. We find strong and robust evidence of both ethnic (Arab/Jewish) in-group bias and gender out-group bias: a student is 15 percent more (or less) likely to pass a test when assigned a tester from the same ethnicity (gender). We show that these patterns are consistent with a utility-based interpretation, along the lines of Becker's (1957) taste-based discrimination model.

SOURCE

REFERENCE:  Brown, R.(1986) Social psychology (2nd. Ed.) N.Y.: Free Press.

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Identifying ill-intended refugees

President Donald Trump's first executive order on "Protecting the Nation from Terrorist Attacks by Foreign Nationals," has been met with objection, which grew into hysteria, by opponents on the Left and some on the Right, at home and abroad. The opponents turned to friendly courts, which halted the President's orders.

The opponents of the immigration executive orders vehemently oppose the new American president and his actions to protect the country, as he promised to do. The Left joined by pro-Muslim organizations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood's affiliated Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), have been protesting the suspension of U.S. visas to Muslim refugees and travelers from only seven out of fifty Muslim-majority countries.

The first order suspended immigration from seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. All have been identified by the Obama administration as Islamic-terrorist prone countries. The second EO omitted Iraq, after arrangements were made to increase the country's vetting of applicants for U.S. visas.

Trump's first executive order proclaims: "The United States must be vigilant during the visa issuance process to ensure that those approved for admission do not intend to harm Americans and that they have no ties to terrorism. In order to protect Americans, we must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes towards our country and its founding principles. Section 2 of the active order states that the policy of the U.S. is

"(a) protect our citizens from foreign nationals who intend to commit terrorist attacks in the United States, and (b) prevent the admission of foreign nationals who intend to exploit United States immigration laws for malevolent purposes"

To prevent such individuals from entering the U.S., the executive order requests the development of a uniform screening program, which in fact would reinforce requirements that have been deliberately ignored by the Obama administration.

The virulent criticism against the EO began with a deliberate disinformation campaign that Trump has issued a ban on Muslims. While he mentioned such a ban before his election, the EO he issued calls for suspension, not a ban.

A major problem with the EO, as some pointed out, was the signaling out of those seven countries, because radical-Islamic terrorists are not limited to the countries listed. There are unknown numbers of ISIS volunteers who returned to Europe and other Western nations, which the new EO exempts. But even if the screening is done by the book, and all necessary documentation has been obtained and verified, and the applicant declares he holds no ill intentions toward America and Americans, nothing efficient is available to the screeners today that would easily reveal that he or she is lying.

An effective way to find out the applicant's intentions would be screening through an efficient, unbiased, and non-intrusive system.  Such a system was developed by an Israeli company with a grant from the Department of Homeland Security, which the Obama administration refused to utilize.

The Suspect Detection System (SDS) has developed counter-terrorist and insider-threat detection technology named COGITO.  This technology enables law enforcement agencies to rapidly investigate U.S. visa applicants (and other travelers) entering the country, insider threats among employees, etc.

COGITO technology is an automated interrogation system that can determine in 5-7 minutes if an individual is harboring hostile intent.  The system interviews the examinee with up to 36 questions while measuring the psychophysical signals of the human body.  The system has 95% accuracy and has helped security agencies globally to catch terrorists and solve crimes.

According to the company's website, the SDS allows the screening of a large number of people in a short time. It "does not require operator training. One operator can handle simultaneously ten stations.  It has a central management and database system that allows storing all tests results, analysis, and data mining, and is deployed and integrated with governmental agencies."

Using this system would eliminate the need to use often biased U.S. Consulate employees.  Moreover, the SDS uses an automated decision-making system, which is "adaptable to a variety of different questioning contexts, different cultures, and languages. The examination lasts 5 minutes when there are no indications of harmful intent, and 7 minutes to ascertain it (with only 4% false positive, and 10% false negative)."

The COGITO is used in 15 countries including Israel, Singapore, China, India, and Mexico.  U.S. airlines operating in Latin America are using COGITO to check their employees.

But last year DHS refused to use the SDS, claiming that it "would constitute an intrusion on the privacy of those screened by the system" and "[i]t may reflect on VISA applicants or Immigrant's civil rights." However, foreigners applying for a U.S. visa are not protected by American laws.

SDS capability to detect intent seems to fit President Trump's promise of "extreme vetting" of Muslim refugees from high-risk regions.  This and other similarly objective systems would not only assist in making America safer but also be in keeping its policy and tradition of accepting refugees who do not wish us harm.

SOURCE

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Wait, Tariffs Cost Consumers Money?

When Democrats propose health insurance mandates, or a carbon tax, or a higher gas tax, or energy regulations, or a minimum wage hike, or a tax increase on “the wealthy” (i.e., small business owners), or any number of other burdensome costs on the economy, the Leftmedia can only coo about how fair and good those things are. But when Donald Trump slaps a tariff on Canadian lumber, the Leftmedia blares headlines about how much it’s going to cost American homebuilders — between $1,200 and $3,000 per house.

Now, to be clear, they’re not wrong about the cost, but these fair-weather free marketeers are profound hypocrites.

Whenever you tax or regulate something, and a tariff is a tax, the price of that thing goes up and the consumer pays more. This is economics 101. Yet leftists only see this when Trump’s at work.

So what’s going on here? First of all, Trump has long argued that NAFTA is a terrible trade deal for the U.S. and needs to be renegotiated. Without going through the whole history of that deal, suffice it to say that he has a point about other nations not always trading fairly — and there’s definitely a difference between free and fair. For example, Canada and Mexico both subsidize goods more than the U.S. does, which undercuts American producers.

In this case, Canadian lumber is subsidized, and it’s a dispute that has been ongoing since the early 1980s. Trump’s Commerce Department calculated its tariff rates on how much various Canadian lumber producers are subsidized. But the tariff also has to do with Canada’s own tariffs on imported dairy products, which the Trump administration argues particularly hurts Wisconsin dairy farmers. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said, “The Trump administration has been much more focused on enforcement than had been true previously.”

And whether it’s trade or immigration or foreign policy, Trump the dealmaker is all about sending signals that he means business. Yes, this lumber tariff will cost Americans money, and we’re not arguing in favor of tariffs. But Trump has set about to seek what he believes are fair trade terms. Don’t think Mexico and China aren’t also getting the message.

SOURCE

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Energy Economy Challenges Elitist-Centralized Wealth

It’s easy to understand why there exists an elitist bubble in Washington, DC, and other metroplexes in the Northeast. The nation’s capital and its surroundings have a long history of attracting wealthy individuals. In terms of adjusted gross income, the District is second only to Connecticut. At number three, four and five are Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. While riches aren’t indubitably a bad thing, the old adage is true: Money begets power. And power corrupts — particularly when that power is put into the hands of lawmakers and their lobbyist cohorts. That’s why Thomas Jefferson in 1821 warned, “[W]hen all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another.”

So those of us in flyover country won’t be shedding tears over the accumulation of wealth in more middle class areas of the country. Thanks to the fracking revolution, the Lone Star State is quickly climbing the ranks on the list of highest county-specific wealth. Time magazine reports, “What’s most surprising is that a state that used to never figure in at the top now dominates the top 10 — including the overall #1 spot on the list. According to [the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse], McMullen County, Texas, which lies in the heart of the Eagle Ford shale patch south of San Antonio, now has the highest average adjusted gross income in the U.S.: $303,717. At #4 is Texas’s Glasscock County ($181,375), which sits in the equally productive Permian Basin in west Texas. And #10 is Texas’s La Salle County ($146,991), which neighbors McMullen County, to the southwest of San Antonio. In 2005, no Texas county was ranked among the top 30 most wealthy in the U.S.”

This is the free market in action. As a caveat, the large conglomeration of wealth in DC isn’t exactly dwindling. It has been ranked as the second-highest “state” in adjusted gross income since 2011, and Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York have all occupied the top five list since 2012. However, the finer details show that middle America is experiencing an influx of cash flow. That’s great news. The better news will be if the trend continues. And the best news? That would be when all extravagant wealth is driven out of Washington, DC.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Capitalism comes naturally; equality (Communism) does not

That is the implication of a recent big paper that looked at all the psychological research on whether or not people prefer equality.  They do, but only where the two parties really are  the same.  When one does more work, people think they should get more for it.  That is a simple summary of the paper excerpted below


Why people prefer unequal societies

Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin & Paul Bloom

Abstract

There is immense concern about economic inequality, both among the scholarly community and in the general public, and many insist that equality is an important social goal. However, when people are asked about the ideal distribution of wealth in their country, they actually prefer unequal societies. We suggest that these two phenomena can be reconciled by noticing that, despite appearances to the contrary, there is no evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself. Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness. Drawing upon laboratory studies, cross-cultural research, and experiments with babies and young children, we argue that humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality. Both psychological research and decisions by policymakers would benefit from more clearly distinguishing inequality from unfairness.

Fairness in the lab

How can this preference for inequality in the real world be reconciled with the strong preference for equality found in laboratory studies? We suggest that this discrepancy arises because the laboratory findings reviewed above—which report the discovery of egalitarian motives, a desire for more equality, or inequality aversion—do not in fact provide evidence that an aversion to inequality is driving the preference for equal distribution. Instead, these findings are all consistent with both a preference for equality and with a preference for fairness, because the studies are designed so that the equal outcome is also the fair one. This is because the recipients are indistinguishable with regard to considerations such as need and merit. Hence, whether subjects are sensitive to fairness or to equality, they will be inclined to distribute the goods equally.

This idea is supported by numerous studies, including follow-ups of the experiments described above, by the same researchers, in which fairness is carefully distinguished from equality. These studies find that people choose fairness over equality.

For example, in the study in which children had to award erasers to two boys who had cleaned up their room and chose to throw out the extra eraser, both boys were described as having done a good job. But when children were told that one boy did more work than the other, they awarded the extra eraser to the hard worker28,40. In fact, when one recipient has done more work, six-year-olds believe that he or she should receive more resources, even if equal pay is an option26,41,​42,​43. Likewise, although infants prefer equality in a neutral circumstance, they expect an experimenter to distribute rewards preferentially to individuals who have done more work35.

This preference for inequality is not restricted to situations where one person has done more work, but also extends to rewarding people who previously acted helpfully or unhelpfully. When three-year-olds witnessed a puppet help another puppet climb a slide or reach a toy, they later allocated more resources to the helpful puppet than to a puppet that pushed another down the slide, or hit him on the head with the toy44.

As a final twist, consider a situation with two individuals, identical in all relevant regards, where one gets 10 dollars and the other gets nothing. This is plainly unequal, but is it fair? It can be, if the allocation was random. Adults consider it fair to use impartial procedures such as coin flips and lotteries when distributing many different kinds of resources. Children have similar views. In the erasers-for-room-cleaning studies described above, if children are given a fair ‘spinner’ to randomly choose who gets the extra eraser, they are happy to create inequality46. One person getting two erasers and another getting one (or ten and zero for that matter) can be entirely fair and acceptable, although it is clearly not equal.

Fairness in the real world

It follows, then, that if one believes that (a) people in the real world exhibit variation in effort, ability, moral deservingness, and so on, and (b) a fair system takes these considerations into account, then a preference for fairness will dictate that one should prefer unequal outcomes in actual societies. The ideal distributions of wealth proposed by participants in the Norton and Ariely study, then, may reflect how fairness preferences interact with intuitions about the extent to which such traits vary in the population.

Tyler uses a related argument to explain why there is not a stronger degree of public outrage in the face of economic inequality. He argues that Americans regard the American market system to be a fair procedure for wealth allocation, and, accordingly, believe strongly in the possibility of social mobility (see Box 1). On this view, then, people's discontent about the current social situation will be better predicted by their beliefs about the unfairness of wealth allocation than by their beliefs about inequality.....

We have argued that a preference for fair outcomes is early emerging and universal. But it is also clear that people differ in their intuitions as to which resources should be distributed on the basis of merit. Most Americans now believe that a fair system is one in which every adult gets a vote, but this is a relatively modern intuition. In our own time, there is controversy over whether fairness dictates that everyone should have equal access to health care and higher education. Put differently, there is some disagreement over what should be a right, held equally and unchanged by any sort of variation in merit.

Nature Human Behaviour 1, Article number: 0082 (2017)
doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0082

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How Trump’s Tax Plan Would Affect High-Tax States Like California, New York

Crimping California's power to tax sounds a lot of fun

High-income earners in high-tax states would see a federal tax rate cut, but may pay more in the end if they’re unable to deduct state and local taxes under President Donald Trump’s tax reform proposal announced Wednesday.

The White House released the contours of his tax reform proposal that would lower tax rates and reduce the number of tax brackets. However, the plan would also reduce the number of tax deductions.

When a reporter asked if deducting taxes on state and local income taxes would also be eliminated, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin answered, “Yes.”

“We are going to eliminate on the personal side all tax deductions other than mortgage interests and charitable deductions,” Mnuchin said at a White House press conference Wednesday.

House Republicans were already reportedly considering eliminating the deduction on state and local taxes, which could disproportionately affect wealthy people in high-tax blue states such as New York and California.

This federal deduction basically encouraged states to hike taxes, said Jonathan Williams, the chief economist for the American Legislative Exchange Commission, a state-centric public policy organization.

“The current policy subsidizes high-tax states,” Williams told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. “Using that revenue to pay for cutting rates across the board is a step in the right direction.”

The Trump tax plan would reduce the number of tax brackets from seven to three brackets of 10 percent, 25 percent, and 35 percent. The plan would not tax the first $24,000 in income for a couple, which is double the current standard deduction.

The Trump plan would repeal the alternative minimum tax, phaseout the death tax, and repeal the 3.8 percent surtax on investment income used to fund Obamacare.

On the business side, the corporate tax rate will be cut to 15 percent, from 35 percent. Also, the government would only tax a business’s income from inside the United States, not income from abroad. This is common in other countries and is known as a “territorial tax system.”

Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council and Trump’s chief economic adviser, told reporters tax reform is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to do something really big.”

The last sweeping reform came in 1986.

“This isn’t going to be easy. Doing big things never is. We’ll be attacked from the left. We’ll be attacked from the right,” Cohn said. “But one thing is certain. I would never, ever bet against this president.”

Cohn added:

In 2017, we are still stuck with a 1988 corporate tax system. That’s why we are one of the least competitive countries in the developed world when it comes to taxes. So tax reform is long overdue.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the plan is the “same trickle-down economics that undermined the middle class,” and said the president should work on a fiscally responsible bipartisan plan with Democrats.

“Instead of focusing on hardworking families as he promised, President Trump’s tax outline is a wish list for billionaires,” Pelosi said in a public statement. “What few details are here overwhelmingly cut taxes for the richest and do little for middle-class Americans and those trying to get there. Besides which, nowhere does President Trump indicate how his deficit-exploding tax plan will actually be paid for.”

Adam Michel, a tax policy analyst with The Heritage Foundation, said he believes the proposal shows Trump is serious about reform:

For too long, America’s out-of-date and overbearing tax system has put a damper on economic growth while punishing savings and investment. The president’s plan is a great starting point. Now, the president and Congress must work together to finally update our broken tax system. True reform should apply the most efficient and least economically destructive forms of taxation, have low rates on a broad base, and be as transparent, predictable, and simple as possible.

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, praised Trump’s proposal.

“President Trump has re-energized the drive for fundamental tax reform that creates growth and jobs,” Norquist said in a public statement. “The plan cuts taxes for businesses and individuals and simplifies the code so Americans can file on a postcard. Reducing taxes on all businesses down to 15 percent will turbocharge the economy.”

Mnuchin called the current 35 percent corporate rate “perhaps the most complicated and uncompetitive business rate in the world.”

He said he anticipates the proposal would return the U.S. to greater than 3 percent growth without an adverse impact on the debt or revenue. Throughout most of the Obama administration, economic growth didn’t surpass 3 percent in a single year.

“This plan will lower the ratio of debt to [gross domestic product]. The economic plan under Trump would grow the economy, will create massive amounts of revenues,” Mnuchin said.

The plan is a net tax reduction, Williams said, and fundamental reform takes cronyism out of the tax code, which could help Trump keep another promise.

“Draining the tax code swamp is a good way to go about getting rid of all those special interest loopholes,” Williams said.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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13 Ways Trump Has Rolled Back Government Regulations in His First 100 Days

As the 100 days roll around, the Left are saying that Trump has not kept his promises.  And they criticize and condemn him for that.  But hang on a minute!  They don't WANT him to do what he has promised.  So they should be praising him for not doing things rather than criticizing him


As President Donald Trump reaches his 100th day in the White House on April 29, he will have worked with Congress to rescind more regulations using the Congressional Review Act than any other president.

“We’re excited about what we’re doing so far. We’ve done more than that’s ever been done in the history of Congress with the CRA,” Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., told The Daily Signal in an interview, referring to the law called the Congressional Review Act.

The Congressional Review Act, the tool Trump and lawmakers are using to undo these regulations, allows Congress to repeal executive branch regulations in a certain window of time.

“Under the Congressional Review Act, Congress is given 60 legislative days to disapprove a rule and receive the president’s signature, after which the rule goes into effect,” Paul Larkin, a senior legal research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, wrote in a February report. The 60 days begins after Congress is notified that a rule has been finalized.

Once the House and Senate pass a joint resolution disapproving of a particular regulation, the president signs the measure.

Passed in 1996 in concert with the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act and then-Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America reform agenda, the Congressional Review Act is what the Congressional Research Service calls “an oversight tool that Congress may use to overturn a rule issued by a federal agency.”

The law also prevents agencies from creating similar rules with similar language.

Until this year, the law had been used successfully only once—in 2001, when Congress and President George W. Bush rescinded a regulation regarding workplace injuries promulgated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration during the Clinton administration.

Here’s a look at 11 regulatory rollbacks Congress has passed and Trump has signed:

1. Regulations governing the coal mining industry (H.J. Res 41).

Mandated by President Barack Obama and finalized in  2016, these regulations “threatened to put domestic extraction companies and their employees at an unfair disadvantage,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said.

The resolution, signed by Trump in February, repealed the rule and “could save American businesses as much as $600 million annually,” Spicer said.

2. Regulations defining streams in the coal industry (H.J. Res 38).

“Complying with the regulation would have put an unsustainable financial burden on small mines,” Spicer said.

The so-called Stream Protection Rule included “vague definitions of what classifies as a stream,” Nick Loris, a fellow in energy and environmental policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email, and undoing it does away with ambiguities:

    For many regulations promulgated by the Obama administration, they fundamentally disregarded the nature of the federal-state relationship when it comes to energy production and environmental protection.

    The Stream Protection Rule … removed flexibility from mining steps and simply ignored that states have regulations in place to protect water quality. State and local environmental agencies’ specific knowledge of their region enables them to tailor regulations to promote economic activity while protecting the habitat and environment.

3. Regulations restricting firearms for disabled citizens (H.J. Res 40).

This rule, finalized during Obama’s last weeks in office, sought to “prevent some Americans with disabilities from purchasing or possessing firearms based on their decision to seek Social Security benefits,” Spicer said.

The repeal protects the Second Amendment rights of the disabled, Senate Judiciary Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said.

“Those rights will no longer be able to be revoked without a hearing and without due process. It will take more than the personal opinion of a bureaucrat,” Grassley said on the Senate floor.

But Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif.,  said the regulation didn’t cover “just people having a bad day,” adding:

These are not people simply suffering from depression or anxiety. These are people with a severe mental illness who can’t hold any kind of job or make any decisions about their affairs. So the law says very clearly they shouldn’t have a firearm.

4. A rule governing the government contracting process (H.J. Res. 37).

Undoing the regulation will cut costs to businesses and free federal contractors from “unnecessary and burdensome processes that would result in delays, and decreased competition for federal government contracts,” Spicer said.

5. A rule covering public lands (H.J. Res. 44).

The rule gave the federal government too much power “to administer public lands,” in the words of the official website of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told The Daily Signal in an interview that the Bureau of Land Management’s rule restricted the control that states and their citizens had, especially in the West.

“The Obama administration wanted to shift land policy from local governments with specific expertise to the federal government, basically shifting even more of the land management policy away from those affected by it,” Lee said.

“Repealing this harmful rule will go a long way toward empowering local stakeholders and ensuring that Arizona’s cattlemen, miners, and rural land users have a voice in the planning process,” Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said in prepared remarks.

6. Reporting requirements regarding college teachers (H.J. Res. 58).

The rule mandated annual reporting by states “to measure the performance and quality of teacher preparation programs and tie them to program eligibility for participation in the Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education grant program,” Spicer said.

Anne Ryland, a research assistant in education policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email that the rule “gave the federal Department of Education power to evaluate teacher preparation programs at universities, and to link college students’ access to federal financial aid in the form of TEACH grants to the rating of the programs.”

“University programs,” Ryland added, “would be rated based on the effectiveness of their teaching graduates, with effectiveness determined by elementary and secondary students’ test scores and achievement gains.”

7. Regulations on state education programs (H.J. Res. 57).

Congress and Trump rescinded federal rules that “require states to have an accountability system based on multiple measures, including school quality or student success, to ensure that states and districts focus on improving outcomes and measuring student progress,” Spicer said.

The repeal is the first step in “a reconceptualization of Washington’s role in education,” Ryland said.

“These regulations were prime examples of federal micromanagement,” she said. “They were highly prescriptive and highly complex, serving only to put more power in the hands of bureaucrats and to distract schools and teachers from the work of educating students.”

8. Drug-testing requirements (H.J. Res 42).

Spicer said the regulation mandates an “arbitrarily narrow definition of occupations and constrains a state’s ability to conduct a drug-testing program in its unemployment insurance system.”

Four Republican governors—Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Greg Abbott of Texas, Gary Herbert of Utah, and Phil Bryant of Mississippi—wrote Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, to ask that states be allowed to implement their own policies.

“We believe this rule should be replaced with a new rule that allows increased flexibility for states to implement … drug testing that best fits the needs of each state,” the governors said in the February letter.

9. Hunting regulations for wildlife preserves in Alaska (H.J. Res 69).

These regulations restricted Alaska’s ability “to manage hunting of predators on national wildlife refuges in Alaska,” Spicer said.

In a formal statement, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, called the rule “another example of the federal government’s determination these past eight years to destroy a state’s ability to manage their wildlife.”

10. Internet privacy rule (S.J.Res. 34).

Published during the final months of Obama’s presidency, the rule sought to force “new privacy standards on internet service providers, allowing bureaucrats in Washington to pick winners and losers in the industry,” Spicer said.

Flake, who sponsored the resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act, said repeal helps keep consumers in charge of how they share their electronic information.

“My resolution is the first step toward restoring the [Federal Trade Commission’s] light-touch, consumer-friendly approach,” Flake said. “It will not change or lessen existing consumer privacy protections. It empowers consumers to make informed choices on if and how their data can be shared.”

11. Rule for logging workplace injuries (H.J. 83).

This rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration sought to squelch a more lenient one from the Labor Department. Spicer said the rule “disapproved” of a Labor regulation “extending the statute of limitation for claims against employers failing to maintain records of employee injuries.”

“This OSHA power grab was completely unlawful,” said Rep. Bradley Byrne, R-Ala., chairman of the House workforce protections subcommittee. “It would have done nothing to improve workplace safety while creating significant regulatory confusion for small businesses.”

Through extensive use of the Congressional Review Act, Collins said, Trump is establishing a “legacy” of deregulation.

“I think there’s really a legacy really to be had here,” the Republican congressman from Georgia said.

Congress, with backing from Trump, is making good on promises and saying, “We’re not going to allow our jurisdiction and our constitutional authority to be overrun by the executive branch,” Collins said.

Past administrations from both parties, he said, have not been so devoted to deregulation.

“There was a definite disconnect between the previous administration, and even previous Republican administrations, on doing things on their own and not going through the proper legislative process,” Collins said.

12.  Rule preventing states from withholding funds from Planned Parenthood (H.J. Res 43).

By undoing this rule, Congress and the president allow states to opt out of letting federal funds go to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider.

“This resolution that [Trump] signed today overturns a regulation that was put in place by the previous administration on their way out the door that would have taken away the right of states to set their own policies and priorities for Title X family-planning programs,” Spicer said Thursday.

Undoing this regulation–which became effective days before Obama left the White House–allows states, if they choose, to withhold federal family planning funds or Title X monies from Planned Parenthood clinics and disperse them instead to other health providers.

Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., hailed the change.

“I am proud to support the sanctity of life and to continue to be a strong voice for the right to life,” Roe said in a statement. “States will now no longer be forced to use Title X money to fund Planned Parenthood or other entities that provide abortions.”

“Reversing this will mean that states can continue prioritizing taxpayer dollars for providers who offer real health care to women–not abortions,” Melanie Israel, a research associate at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email.

13. Rule on retirement savings (H.J. Res 67).

The rule allowed state governments “to trap individuals’ savings in accounts that individuals cannot access or control,” Rachel Greszler, a research analyst at The Heritage Foundation, said.

Promulgated during Obama’s last full month in office, the rule allowed states to create public retirement funds. However, it also eliminated protections from those public plans that initially were covered under a law that set standards for private sector employee pension and health plans.

Critics said the rule removed protections from employees and encouraged employers to drop employees from retirement plans–and put them on the government-run plan–because of high costs.

“Any new employer that’s just starting up is never going to set up their own plan now because why would they do that when they have a cost-free, liability-free option,” Greszler said, adding:

There are costs associated with [creating retirement accounts for employees] and there’s the legal liability with it. So they’re probably going to shift their employees into these plans that have no protections; they can’t make contribution into them … it’s like the Obamacare for savings.

Repealing the Obama-era rule safeguards the retirement funds of individuals who work in the private sector, Rep. Francis Mooney, R-Fla., said.

“This last-minute regulatory loophole created by the previous administration would have led to harmful consequences for both workers and employers,” Rooney said in a formal statement. “Hardworking Americans could have been forced into government-run plans with fewer protections and less control over their hard-earned savings.”

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Democrats say they now know exactly why Clinton lost

They are beginning to accept that they have lost the workers

A group of top Democratic Party strategists have used new data about last year's presidential election to reach a startling conclusion about why Hillary Clinton lost. Now they just need to persuade the rest of the party they're right.

Many Democrats have a shorthand explanation for Clinton's defeat: Her base didn't turn out, Donald Trump's did and the difference was too much to overcome.

But new information shows that Clinton had a much bigger problem with voters who had supported President Barack Obama in 2012 but backed Trump four years later.

Those Obama-Trump voters effectively accounted for more than two-thirds of the reason Clinton lost, according to Matt Canter, a senior vice president of the Democratic political firm Global Strategy Group. In his group's analysis, about 70 percent of Clinton's failure to reach Obama's vote total in 2012 was because she lost these voters.

Canter and other members of Global Strategy Group have delivered a detailed report of their findings to senators, congressmen, fellow operatives and think tank wonks — all part of an effort to educate party leaders about what the data say really happened in last year's election.

"We have to make sure we learn the right lesson from 2016, that we don't just draw the lesson that makes us feel good at night, make us sleep well at night," Canter said.

His firm's conclusion is shared broadly by other Democrats who have examined the data, including senior members of Clinton's campaign and officials at the Democratic data and analytics firm Catalist. (The New York Times, in its own analysis, reached a similar conclusion.)

Each group made its assessment by analyzing voter files –– reports that show who voted in every state, and matching them to existing data about the voters, including demographic information and voting history. The groups determined how people voted — in what amounts to the most comprehensive way to analyze the electorate short of a full census.

The findings are significant for a Democratic Party, at a historic low point, that's trying to figure out how it can win back power. Much of the debate over how to proceed has centred on whether the party should try to win back working-class white voters — who make up most of the Obama-Trump voters — or focus instead on mobilizing its base.

Turning out the base is not good enough, the data suggest.

"This idea that Democrats can somehow ignore this constituency and just turn out more of our voters, the math doesn't work," Canter said. "We have to do both."

Democrats are quick to acknowledge that even if voters switching allegiance had been Clinton's biggest problem, in such a close election she still could have defeated Trump with better turnout. For example, she could have won if African-American turnout in Michigan and Florida matched 2012's.

They also emphasize the need for the party to continue finding ways to stoke its base. Democrats can do both, said Guy Cecil, chairman of Priorities USA, a super PAC that backed Clinton last year and now is trying to help Democrats return to power.

"I really do believe that we should reject this idea that if we just focus on turnout and the Democratic base that that will be enough," he said. "If that really is our approach, we're going to lose six or seven Senate seats in this election. But, I also believe that just talking about persuasion means we are not capitalizing on an enormous opportunity."

Priorities USA released a poll last week, conducted in part by Cantor's firm, that found the Democratic base — including voters who usually sit out midterm elections —unusually motivated to participate in the next election. The group have said in recent months that Democrats can both reach out to white working-class voters and their base with a strong message rooted in economic populism.

Still, the data say turnout was less of a problem for Clinton than defections were. Even the oft-predicted surge of new voters backing Trump was more myth than reality. Global Strategy Group's review of Ohio, with Catalist, found that Clinton won a majority of new voters in the state. (Global Strategy Group examined North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada as part of its analysis).

Belief that turnout was the main reason Clinton lost, however, remains a prominent theory among Democrats.

"There's an active conversation within the party about whether persuasion was the problem or turnout," said Lanae Erickson Hatalsky, vice president for social policy and politics at Third Way, a center-left Democratic think tank.

That debate is complicated because some Democrats think winning over voters is already a lost cause, Hatalsky said.

"There's still a real concern that persuasion is harder and costs more than mobilization, so let's just triple down on getting out the people who already agree with us," she said. "And I think there's a lot of worry that we don't actually know how to persuade anymore, and so maybe we should just go talk to the people we agree with."

A conversation about where Democrats go next as a party inevitably turns into a discussion about whether it should embrace a form of economic populism similar to one pushed by Sen Bernie Sanders, or move instead to the political middle.

Canter argued that Trump's president's "special sauce" combines his economic populism with a political populism that vilifies both parties.

SOURCE

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It Will Take An Ax, Not A Scalpel, To Control Federal Spending

The federal government once again hit the debt ceiling. The ceiling limits the amount of money the federal government can borrow — a number that was set at $20.1 trillion.

Although the issue should have been dealt with in 2015, then-Speaker John Boehner capitulated to President Obama and postponed the debt limit until March 16, 2017. Since then, the federal debt has grown by $1,414,397,000,000 — more than one trillion in less than two years.

President Trump promised during his campaign to bring back American prosperity and make Washington work for everyone — not just for the small group of Washington elite inside the Beltway.

His recently released budget decisively delivers on these promises and deserves its title: "America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again." It recognizes that federal spending is out of control and represents the first serious attempt to tame it in decades.

Although the budget does grant significant increases to Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, it is more remarkable for the significant cuts that it makes. The EPA received a 31% cut. It cuts the Agriculture budget by 21% and the State Department budget by 28%.

The plan also cuts funding entirely to several smaller federal programs, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Between these cuts, the freeze on federal hiring and President Trump's executive orders on regulation, government and its stranglehold on American industry will loosen.

Judge Neil Gorsuch's nomination also helps in this respect: He is an avowed opponent of Chevron deference, the court ruling that allows agencies to irresponsibly interpret laws as they please if there is no clear mandate from Congress.

Companies will soon be free to spend money on new initiatives and on hiring, rather than paying lawyers to help them steer around increasingly extensive and arcane regulations.

However, as helpful as these cuts are, they represent only a fraction of what the federal government spends every year. They come out of the nondefense discretionary spending budget (NDD) which is just a drop in the ocean of our trillions of dollars of debt. NDD only comprises roughly 30% of federal spending — the other two-thirds go to entitlements and defense.

If Congress and President Trump want to effect serious change and push for a balanced budget, they need to be willing to make serious cuts to entitlement programs. Reforming floundering programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security is the only real way to make a lasting impact on our federal debt.

Republicans must consider adopting a reform plan like that proposed by Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Texas, in the 114th Congress. Rep. Johnson's plan reworks how Social Security benefits are distributed and increases the age at which workers can collect benefits to 69.

Social Security will dry up in a few years with an $11.4 trillion deficit, but adopting Johnson's reforms could result in a $600 billion reserve, according to Social Security's Chief Actuary Stephen Goss.

If similar changes can be made to other entitlement programs, federal spending can be reduced in streams and not just in drops.

Republicans must also rework the current ObamaCare replacement bill, which as it is written will only deepen our debt. The bill essentially adds yet another entitlement program through its use of totally refundable tax credits, and it allows states to continue to enroll patients in Medicaid until 2020.

We need a long-term, sustainable health care program like that proposed by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., which will restore the patient-doctor relationship and not worsen our already precarious fiscal position.

Ultimately, however, one president's budget will not be enough to permanently fix the perpetual problem of the debt ceiling. It's too soon to tell how the country will vote in 2020, and we could have leadership willing to spend as blithely as President Obama did over the past eight years.

Republicans must take this unique moment of political majority to prevent raising the debt ceiling in the future. If they do not, it will inevitably happen again. No matter how staggering our debt is, Washington can always make excuses for raising the debt ceiling. Congress has raised it 74 times since 1962 and 10 times since 2001.

Politicians' usual excuse is that raising the debt ceiling does not automatically allow the federal government to spend more money. It only allows it to continue paying for already-authorized spending.

But the higher limit inevitably results in higher spending. We need to put a stop to this pattern now before we permanently cripple future generations with our profligate spending.

Congress should also consider a constitutional amendment to require balanced budgets. The majority of state governments do this, and it is absurd that the federal government is not held to the same standard.

The last time a bill proposing the amendment was on the floor, it didn't get the two-thirds majority necessary for it to go to the states.

But with Republicans controlling the House, the Senate and the White House, as well as 32 state governments, and with a strong public mandate to reduce federal spending, what was impossible in 2011 may be possible in 2017 — provided Congress can get consensus and vote this year.

One thousand FreedomWorks activists stormed Congress in March to hold their representatives to their campaign promises, and they are backed by thousands more activists across the country.

Americans want to see government spending under control, and Republicans have a perfect opportunity to break the cycle of continually raising the debt ceiling. If they act now, they can return our country's power to its proper place — the states and the people.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Israel Concludes Memorial Day, Ushering in 69th Independence Day Celebrations

Israel concluded its Memorial Day ceremonies Monday evening, ushering in its 69th Independence Day celebrations. The theme for this year's Independence Day ceremony is "Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the State of Israel and the Jewish People."

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Life among liberals -- a report from a reader

I am surrounded by liberals and people even further left. One woman I know goes around spouting liberal opinions out of nowhere. She will say, for example, “No one can live on the minimum wage. We need to immediately raise it to $10 per hour and then quickly raise it to $15 per hour in stages.

I respond with, “But don’t you listen to the news? McDonald’s and all the other fast food companies are already experimenting with touch tablet ordering to eliminate jobs and lower their cost of doing business.”

She changes the subject with, “…evil corporations.” You can’t have a conversation with a liberal because if you say something to prove them wrong, they immediately change the subject.

Another friend talks incessantly about climate change. When I ask her what she means by climate change, she changes the subject and asks me why I don’t believe in it.

Most of the time when someone asks me if I believe in climate change, I reply, “…of course. The climate is always changing. The planet is always getting hotter or colder, wetter or drier. Just look at its four billion year history.”

They will change the subject and talk about how 97% of all scientists agree on climate change.

When you present hard, cold facts to people of the left, they always change the subject. That is why here in the USA we don’t have any successful liberal talk radio stations (I don’t know about the rest of the world.). To quote Rush Limbaugh, “They can’t sustain a conversation.” If you can’t sustain a conversation, you can’t fill the airtime with talk.

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A Tale of Two Slow Economies

Why did Americans spend less money than expected in the first quarter of 2017? The low GDP growth of only 0.7% in the first quarter must be analyzed for the sake of policy, but question the Leftmedia headlines. Leftists have demonized Donald Trump incessantly during his first 100 days to further their narrative of an illegitimate president. This is just the latest episode.

The question about a decline in retail spending is being genuinely pondered among economists, politicians and others trying to understand the economic paradox of America's first quarter. High consumer confidence and an investment surge in the stock market didn't translate into strong economic growth. The optimism came in the wake created by the USS Trump throwing overboard excessive regulations with tremendous anticipation that major tax reforms are next and, hopefully, a repeal of ObamaCare. Yet consumers didn't spend money at the pace projected nor desired.

All sorts of theories exist — from a delay in IRS tax refunds due to fraud protections involving returns claiming certain Earned Income Tax Credits to the unseasonably warm weather to the March blizzard in the Northeast.

The Wall Street Journal noted Friday, "With confidence and stock prices high, gasoline prices modest and jobs and wages increasing, spending ought to be picking up." Nonetheless, the fact remains: Something prevented U.S. consumers from spending. This is critical when household consumption accounts for around 70% of the U.S. economy.

Let's state a few undeniable truths. First, the economy, while measured on specific, objective metrics, is also driven by perception — perhaps that's obvious when one of those analytics is "consumer confidence." Measuring the degree of consumer optimism about the state of their own financial health and the economy is based on the study of a consumer's intention to spend and save. That's sounds mighty precise, huh?

Second, it depends on whose economy it is as to whether the accounts of its health, failing or otherwise, are reported and how the topic is treated. We just endured eight years of the slowest recovery in American history — never reaching 3% in annual growth, while the federal debt doubled due to excessive government spending and regulation that flattened economic output and depressed wages. The Obama economy was good for the investor class but decimated the middle, working class, as evidenced by historic lows in labor participation for able-bodied adults.

On cue, in the last weeks of Barack Obama's presidency, CNBC staked out any economic good news resulting from the election upset in November — meaning the death of the Regulation-Nation — as the result of the mythical growth policies of the 44th president. Noting that Trump was "heading to the White House with a pledge to revive the U.S. economy and put millions of Americans back to work," the December 2 CNBC piece declared, "much of that goal has already been accomplished by President Barack Obama."

The national media, formerly known as journalists, clearly talked up the Obama economy, even in the waning moments of his regime. And, inarguably, the same concubines of the DNC will criticize every aspect of the Trump administration.

Back to the underlying question, but let's add a twist. Why did consumers hold onto their money despite the clear optimism of the Donald Trump presidency? Remove the Twitter posts from @RealDonaldTrump and #POTUS and his ongoing brawl with the #Presstitutes, the results of Trump's first 100 days in office prove he's keeping his campaign promises.

Remember Obama's first 100 days? By mid-February, the American Recovery Act (a.k.a. the "stimulus") was moving to distribute a trillion dollars in government spending for those non-existent shovel-ready-jobs, making the massive deficit spending program a blue state bailout. Obama then set out to heavily regulate the economy, nationalizing one-sixth of it and foisting major bureaucratic controls on the financial sector.

Unlike the Obama stimulus, the Trump administration is proposing historic corporate and individual tax cuts to prevent government from the confiscation of earned wealth that could be in the hands of its producer. Again, Democrats and their media enablers wail that these tax cuts "could cost the government $ 6 trillion."

Exactly what money does government have? And who earned the money that was confiscated via taxes? The only money the government has was taken from those of us who produce.

Thoughtful and serious economists and policymakers understand and agree that allowing consumers to maintain this hefty sum and, in turn, spend it grows the overall economy. Cutting corporate tax rates down to 15% and the pass-through taxes paid by owners of small businesses from over 39% to 15% is rocket fuel to the engine of our economy.

Meanwhile, after more than seven years of soaring rhetoric, breathless campaign promises and more than 50 repeal votes in the House during the Obama administration, ObamaCare still exists. It may be the failure thus far to repeal that monstrosity that still has the American economic engine idling at the starting line.

So to recap, when Obama entered office during a recession and drove up federal spending to unimaginable levels, proceeding to double the national debt in eight years, the media cheered the (paltry) economic growth. Now that Trump has taken office amidst slow GDP growth, his proposal to let those who earn the money keep more of it so as to jumpstart real and lasting economic growth is derided as unaffordable. The elites and the media are wrong on both counts. Keep that in mind in the days ahead.

SOURCE

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Ann Coulter: Not Building the Wall Is  a Government Shutdown

The media flip back and forth on who’s to blame for a government shutdown depending on which branch is controlled by Republicans. But the “shutdown” hypothetical in this case is a trick question.

A failure to build the wall IS a government shutdown.

Of course it would be unfortunate if schoolchildren couldn’t visit national parks and welfare checks didn’t get mailed on time. But arranging White House tours isn’t the primary function of the government.

The government’s No. 1 job is to protect the nation.

This has always been true, but it’s especially important at this moment in history, when we have drugs, gang members, diseases and terrorists pouring across our border. The failure of the government to close our border is the definition of a government shutdown.

This isn’t like other shutdowns. Democrats can’t wail about Republicans cutting Social Security or school lunches. They are willing to shut the government down because they don’t want borders.

Take that to the country!

As commander in chief, Trump doesn’t need Congress to build a wall. The Constitution charges him with defending the nation. Contrary to what you may have heard from various warmongers on TV and in Trump’s Cabinet, that means defending ourborders — not Ukraine’s borders.

Building a wall is not only Trump’s constitutional duty, but it’s also massively popular.

Although Trump doesn’t need congressional approval for a wall, it was smart for him to demand a vote. Let the Democrats run for re-election on opposing the wall.

Let Sen. Claire McCaskill explain to the parents of kids killed by illegals that she thought a wall was inhumane.

Let Sen. Angus King say to the people of Maine that instead of a wall that would block heroin from pouring into our country, he thought a better plan was to sponsor a bunch of treatment centers for after your kid is already addicted.

Let Sen. Chuck Schumer tell us why it’s OK for Israel to have a wall, but not us.

Let open borders Republicans like Sen. Marco Rubio tell African-Americans that it’s more important to help illegal aliens than to help black American teenagers, currently suffering a crippling unemployment rate.

Republicans are both corrupt and stupid, so it’s hard to tell which one animates their opposition to the wall. But the Democrats are bluffing. They’re trying to get the GOP to fold before they show us their pair of threes.

Now that Trump has capitulated on even asking for funding for a wall, the Democrats are on their knees saying, “Thank you, God! Thank you, God!”

No politician wants to have to explain a vote against the wall. What the Democrats want is for Trump to be stuck explaining why he didn’t build the wall.

Then it will be a bloodbath. Not only Trump, but also the entire GOP, is dead if he doesn’t build a wall. Republicans will be wiped out in the midterms, Democrats will have a 300-seat House majority, and Trump will have to come up with an excuse for why he’s not running for re-election.

The New York Times and MSNBC are not going to say, “We are so impressed with his growth in office, we’re going to drop all that nonsense about Russia and endorse the Republican ticket!”

No, at that point, Trump will be the worst of everything.

No one voted for Trump because of the “Access Hollywood” tape. They voted for him because of his issues; most prominently, his promise to build “a big beautiful wall.” And who’s going to pay for it? MEXICO!

You can’t say that at every campaign rally for 18 months and then not build a wall.

Do not imagine that a Trump double-cross on the wall will not destroy the Republican Party. Oh, we’ll get them back. No, you won’t. Trump wasn’t a distraction: He was the last chance to save the GOP.

Millions of Americans who hadn’t voted in 30 years came out in 2016 to vote for Trump. If he betrays them, they’ll say, “You see? I told you. They’re all crooks.”

No excuses will work. No fiery denunciations of the courts, the Democrats or La Raza will win them back, even if Trump comes up with demeaning Twitter names for them.

It would be an epic betrayal — worse than Bush betraying voters on “no new taxes.” Worse than LBJ escalating the Vietnam War. There would be nothing like it in the history of politics.

He’s the commander in chief! He said he’d build a wall. If he can’t do that, Trump is finished, the Republican Party is finished, and the country is finished.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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What is the most heartbreaking thing you have seen in the United States?

By Jacob Taylor, former petty officer in the United States Navy

I had just gotten back from a year long deployment. One year of experiencing the armpits of the world: the poverty, lack of education, fear, crimes against humanity, and the drastic lack of basic human necessities.

Right when I got back from deployment I had finished my military contract and enrolled in school. This was around the same time as the presidential inauguration.

BEFORE I GO ANY FURTHER, it's worth saying that I was unable to vote due to where I was at on deployment. Because of this fact, I am unable to bitch.

After appreciating the fact that I got to wake up in my own bed, had clean water to drink in the morning, and some fresh eggs for breakfast, I went to class. After my classes were over I went outside to go catch the train and the streets were f*cking flooded with people screaming, yelling, and arguing about the president. This isn't what was heart breaking.

I tried to walk past these people unnoticed because people in Seattle are not kind to veterans- when I noticed some people with a stack of “F*ck Trump” fliers throw more than 2,000 pieces of paper in the air.

This is a f*cking society and a community. This is where I live. This is the place I love and I thought of every day while I was gone and I'll be God damned to see it littered by worthless pieces of f*cking shit who want to “make a positive difference”, when what they're actually doing is making this country worse. They provide no use to society and I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire.

So, I began walking around and picking up the trash that they created. A group of them came up to me while I was throwing my first load in the recycling bin and said, “What the f*ck are you doing?! Are you a Trump supporter?!”

I said, “I'm just picking up the trash that you made.”

One of them fired back, “Are you saying this movement is trash? Donald Trump is a criminal!”

At which point I decided to stop talking to them and to continue cleaning up the street.

Two of them began to shove me and shout about how I was the problem and how I wasn't welcome.

…..I wasn't welcome in my own home after defending it.

I turned around and left, with a huge group of people at my back shouting about how much of a piece of shit I was, and how they should kick my f*cking ass. I sat on the train, went home, had a clean glass of water, ate fresh food, and went to sleep in my own bed.

That was the most heartbreaking thing I've seen in the United States.

SOURCE

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Nixon's Revenge: The Fall of the Adversary Press

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Saturday's White House Correspondents Association dinner exposed anew how far from Middle America our elite media reside.

At the dinner, the electricity was gone, the glamor and glitz were gone. Neither the president nor his White House staff came. Even Press Secretary Sean Spicer begged off.

The idea of a convivial evening together of our media and political establishments is probably dead for the duration of the Trump presidency.

Until Jan. 20, 2021, it appears, we are an us-vs.-them country.

As for the Washington Hilton's version of Hollywood's red carpet, C-SPAN elected to cover instead Trump's rollicking rally in a distant and different capital, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Before thousands of those Middle Pennsylvanians Barack Obama dismissed as clinging to their Bibles, bigotries and guns, Donald Trump, to cheers, hoots and happy howls, mocked the media he had stiffed:

"A large group of Hollywood actors and Washington media are consoling each other in a hotel ballroom ... I could not possibly be more thrilled than to be more than 100 miles away from Washington's swamp ... with a much, much larger crowd and much better people."

Back at the Hilton, all pretense at press neutrality was gone. Said WHCA president Jeff Mason in scripted remarks: "We are not fake news. We are not failing news organizations. We are not the enemy of the American people."

A standing ovation followed. The First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press was repeatedly invoked and defiantly applauded, as though the president were a clear and present danger to it.

For behaving like a Bernie Sanders' rally, the national press confirmed Steve Bannon's insight — they are the real "opposition party."

And so the war between an adversary press and a president it despises and is determined to take down is re-engaged.

As related in my book, "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever," out May 9, that war first broke out in November of 1969.

With the media establishment of that day cheering on the anti-war protests designed to break his presidency, President Nixon sought to rally the nation behind him with his "Silent Majority" speech.

His prime-time address was a smashing success — 70 percent of the country backed Nixon. But the post-speech TV analysis trashed him.

Nixon was livid. Two-thirds of the nation depended on the three networks as their primary source of national and world news. ABC, CBS and NBC not only controlled Nixon's access to the American people but were the filter, the lens, through which the country would see him and his presidency for four years. And all three were full of Nixon-haters.

Nixon approved a counterattack on the networks by Vice President Spiro Agnew. And as he finished his edits of the Agnew speech, Nixon muttered, "This'll tear the scab off those b———s!"

It certainly did.

Amazingly, the networks had rushed to carry the speech live, giving Agnew an audience of scores of millions for his blistering indictment of the networks' anti-Nixon bias and abuse of their power over U.S. public opinion.

By December 1969, Nixon, the president most reviled by the press before Trump, was at 68 percent approval, and Agnew was the third-most admired man in America, after Nixon and Billy Graham.

Nixon went on to roll up a 49-state landslide three years later.

Before Watergate brought him down, he had shown that the vaunted "adversary press" was not only isolated from Middle America, it could be routed by a resolute White House in the battle for public opinion.

So where is this Trump-media war headed?

As of today, it looks as though it could end like the European wars of the last century, where victorious Brits and French were bled as badly and brought as low as defeated Germans.

Whatever happens to Trump, the respect and regard the mainstream media once enjoyed are gone. Public opinion of the national press puts them down beside the politicians they cover — and for good reason.

The people have concluded that the media really belong to the political class and merely masquerade as objective and conscientious observers. Like everyone else, they, too, have ideologies and agendas.

Moreover, unlike in the Nixon era, the adversary press today has its own adversary press: Fox News, talk radio, and media-monitoring websites to challenge their character, veracity, competence, and honor, even as they challenge the truthfulness of politicians.

Trump is being hammered as no other president before him, except perhaps Nixon during Watergate. It is hard to reach any other conclusion than that the mainstream media loathe him and intend to oust him, as they relished in helping to oust Nixon.

If this war ends well for Trump, it ends badly for his enemies in the press. If Trump goes down, the media will feel for a long time the hostility and hatred of those tens of millions who put their faith and placed their hopes in Trump.

SOURCE

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Trump's "honored" comment about Kim sounded foolish, but it was meant to flatter

In an interview on Monday with Bloomberg News, Donald Trump said something that left many shaking their heads in disbelief or rolling their eyes over yet another instance of his verbal incontinence. Shocking, we know. Trump mused, "If it would be appropriate for me to meet with [North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un], I would absolutely. I would be honored to do it." He continued, "If it's under ... the right circumstances. But I would do that."

When it comes to ad-lib remarks in interviews, much like his unrefined use of Twitter (which thankfully is now subject to some moderation), Trump still is prone to forget that every word he says will be trumpeted around the world. At issue specifically was Trump's use of the word "honored" in his reference to North Korea's ruthless dictator. Once again, many pounced on Trump's words as further evidence of his supposed admiration of strong men. Coming on the heels of his promise to invite murderous Philippine dictator Rodrigo Duterte and Turkey's budding tyrant Tayyip Erdogan to the White House, this is understandable. But that's also an overly simplistic assessment that misses the purpose behind Trump's statement. Listen for what he means not what he says.

Clearly, Trump is aiming to defuse an increasingly tense situation. His offer of a conditional olive branch toward Kim — and make no mistake, any meeting is absolutely conditional on North Korea's behavior — coupled with his flatting reference to Kim as a "smart cookie," are designed to lay ground work for a potential diplomatic solution. And while Trump's words may have little impact on Kim, it plays well with China, the most important player in helping the U.S. clamp down on the despot John McCain more accurately labeled the "crazy fat kid."

Showing honor, especially to those in positions of authority, is of great importance to the cultures of the Far East. Trump's statements play to the Eastern ear as a serious and respectful expression for seeking a diplomatic solution. And while Westerners justifiably hear Trump's words as foolish, the desired aim of de-escalating the growing conflict is not so careless. It's also important to note that Trump's statements were made at the same time as the U.S. military announced that the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) Missile Shield in South Korea is now operational. That is no coincidence.

Finally, in the highly unlikely event that the Kim regime actually capitulates to the U.S. and the rest of the world's demand of nuclear disarmament, a bilateral meeting between the U.S. and North Korea would be a significant change in longstanding U.S. policy. That may end up being far more consequential than Trump's verbal blunder.

SOURCE

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Happy Loyalty Day

The radical Left was out in force Monday. It was marching in Washington, DC, in major cities across the country and around the world in May Day or International Workers Day protests. But the day has another meaning here in America.

In 1921, America tried to resist the socialist/communist fervor surrounding May Day events by proclaiming May 1st “Americanization Day.” Eventually it became known as “Loyalty Day” and every president since Eisenhower in 1955 has issued “Loyalty Day” proclamations.

Below is an excerpt of President Trump’s Loyalty Day proclamation:

On Loyalty Day, we recognize and reaffirm our allegiance to the principles upon which our Nation is built. We pledge our dedication to the United States of America and honor its unique heritage, reminding ourselves that we are one Nation, under God, made possible by those who have sacrificed to defend our liberty. We honor our Republic and acknowledge the great responsibility that self-governance demands of each of us.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Don't Just Do Something
   
The perennial desire of those in government, elected or not, is to just do something. People expect the government to act. They demand laws be passed. They want the regulatory state to work to their benefit. When the elected branches fail, people will run to the courts to just do something, or to unelected regulatory bureaucrats. Perhaps they should not.

Calvin Coolidge, the 30th President of the United States and also best president ever, had the philosophy all of us, particularly those in government, should take. “If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you,” he said. Just stand still and watch.

Instead, much of local and state government these days spend time fixing laws already passed to address the law of unintended consequences. Each tweak causes another chain of events that eventually will lead to another tweak. According to Jason Russell in the Washington Examiner, the tax code is now 74,608 pages, including both statutes and regulations. It was only 26,300 pages in 1984 — only. The United States Code, which is the body of laws passed by Congress, consists of 52 titles, bound into multiple volumes totaling more than 8,000 pages, weighing more than 25 pounds, and taking up a bookshelf. Add in the annotated version that is more commonly used and it takes up multiple bookshelves and costs over $18,000.00 to buy. The Code of Federal Regulations is even larger.

Ignorance is supposedly no defense of the law, but how anyone can be expected to keep up with so many laws and the regulations thereto is beyond me. Still, Congress passes more laws, as do states, counties and municipalities. Beyond the basic laws of public safety and the general welfare, the various legislative entities maintain archaic laws and criminalize business laws. It is, for example, against the law in Texas to carry an ice cream cone in one’s back pocket. Likewise, a Tennessee guitar manufacturer ran afoul of American criminal law by harvesting wood in Indonesia that violated a trade deal, though it was legal in Indonesia.

Perhaps the various legislative busy bodies should dedicate a few years to repealing laws instead of passing new ones. That leads me to the American Health Care Act, which the Republicans claim keeps a promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It does no such thing. Rather, it preserves Barack Obama’s signature initiative, but alters it enough that the Republicans will take ownership of all the ills of the law moving forward.

Conservatives shouldered all the blame for the American Health Care Act failing to pass Congress a month ago, but the reality is conservatives were right. The proposal broke more promises than it kept. Led by Mark Meadows, the House Freedom Caucus demanded changes to the legislation that steered it rightward and allowed states greater flexibility under Obamacare. That appears to be the best the GOP can do. They will not repeal the law, but will provide a way out of some of its major expenses.

While they contemplate that law, the Congress and president are considering a sweeping tax reform package. The United States’s tax code has not been comprehensively updated since 1986. As other nations have lowered their corporate tax rate to attract investment and fuel their economies, the United States has left its rate the same. The nation has further complicated matters by adding loopholes, regulations, and alterations through the advice and consent of paid lobbyists.

Corporate America has learned it is far better to carve out loopholes in statutes to protect themselves from competition than it is to actually innovate and compete. Why would any company spend the money to innovate when it can just hire a lobbyist to get a bureaucrat or congressman to tax and regulate the competition out of existence?

Our nation has grown far more complex than our founders probably ever imagined. But that complexity has provided excuses for inaction on reform as legislators in search of money and votes scratch the itch of “just do something.” Instead, Congress should stop doing anything. We would all be better off.

SOURCE

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Continuities in Russia

The Cold War is back, but it is a different Cold War because it is a different Russia. It is important to know who the Russians are and what has shaped their worldview, including their sometimes justified suspicion and hostility toward the US.

Some features of Russian government go back to their beginnings as a country in the 10th century. Their geography places them very far north, which means that food, particularly grain harvests, are uncertain. The country has experienced more famine than feast. This is one reason for aggressively moving in on neighbors with better geography and better harvests (Ukraine and Belarus).

Their geography also places them amid several thousand miles of flat, open plains, leaving them vulnerable to attack from enemies. The only protection from this danger is to occupy neighbors and hold them as buffers against more distant invaders. This is how the Russian Empire grew, ultimately absorbing lands in 11 time zones.

Because of this geography and always imminent danger, they need stability in their governance, even when that stability is provided by a monster. Even under Ivan the Terrible or Stalin, better the devil they knew than the devil they didn't know. This explains their preference for dictators such as Assad or Ghadaffi than anarchy without them.

Unlike the way in which western Europe developed, with a basis in Roman and Church law, with charters of semi-independence given to cities and universities, with powerful guilds such as the merchants, Russia had none of these.

Because of Western Europe's geography, once Rome fell, no one country could conquer the rest. There were always multiple power centers that came and went among these countries. They warred among themselves, but one winner never prevailed.

Russia was converted in the 10th century from paganism to Byzantine Christianity (Russian Orthodox), and from the start, this religion and the Russian rulers (Tsars) functioned in unity. There was no Protestant Reformation in Russia. In the Kremlin museum, I recall seeing, side by side, the hundreds of jeweled dressed of Catherine the Great and the jeweled robes and treasures of the Orthodox Church, a troubling show of extravagance in a country where peasants froze and starved. During the Communist period, this reality was condemned and the first effort was made to create a more equal citizenry. At least, this was the theory that made Communism so appealing to idealists who never caught on until the USSR collapsed, that this was a cruel hoax.

What is perennial in today's Russia is an autocratic ruler (Vladimir Putin); seizure or domination of neighboring countries as buffers (Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus); a vicious security system that does not hesitate to use assassination; rabid propaganda system (fake news is not new; remember the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"); and distaste for western democracy. Like the late Russian Empire, the USSR, and Putin today, there is paranoia about the press, about spies, and distrust of "intellectuals."

Russia actually had a brief taste of democracy upon the fall of the USSR, but it morphed into anarchy and criminal chaos. They want no more of that. There is little difference in the way Putin rules from the rule of the Communists before him and the Tsars before them. Although monarchy has not returned, the Orthodox Church, banned during the Marxist period, has returned and is promoted.

But Putin's Russia is not a revival of the USSR. For one thing, its population has shrunk in half since the beginning of World War II and shows no signs of reviving. The fertility rate is as low as that of Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, and Greece---all of them having experienced fascism or communism in the near past.

And Putin's Russia has only a poisonous nationalism going for it, not as persuasive an ideology as Marxist-Leninist Communism. Ideologies are ideas with teeth: ideas that people can live for, or willingly die for. Today's Russia does not have that, other than greed, corruption, and efforts to destabilize their enemies. Their tenure as a major power may well melt down before this century is out.

SOURCE

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With This Budget Deal, The Swamp Wins

Big Government: You can tell whether a spending agreement is good or bad based on who is smiling: the swamp dwellers, or those who want to drain the swamp. This budget made the swamp dwellers very happy.

Shortly after announcing a $1.1 trillion — with a "t"— spending deal to fund the federal government's domestic and military programs for the next five months, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it a "very good deal for the American people."

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said it "reflects Democrats' values to protect health care, environment and education."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that "we now have an agreement that both sides should support," praising the negotiations as "bipartisan and bicameral every step of the way."

The New York Times gushed that the bill "could serve as a template for putting together the next round of spending bills."

When you hear talk like that, grab on to your wallet, because it means big-spending business-as-usual reigns in Washington, which is precisely what voters sent Republicans and Donald Trump to Washington to end.

Shorn of the gloss being put on it by lawmakers, this bill does nothing whatsoever to point the government in a new direction. If anything, it was as step in the wrong direction, with both sides bragging about the spending hikes they won.

The National Institutes of Health got a $2 billion boost. Yeah! Now it can keep funding vital research like the importance of sighs and the benefits of senior citizens joining a choir.

The bill adds $1.5 billion for border security, but prevents the money from being used to build a wall or increase deportations — in other words, things that would help secure the border.

Trump also agreed to continue to fund ObamaCare's cost-sharing subsidies. Republicans sued the Obama administration to block these payments, since Congress had not appropriated the funds as required by the law.

Naturally, the only thing that got short-shrifted was defense. While it won a $12.5 billion boost, that was half what Trump had requested. Congress approved another $2.5 billion boost on the condition that Trump comes up with a plan to defeat ISIS.

(Why isn't all federal spending conditioned on agencies' first demonstrating an actual plan to succeed at their mission?)

Beyond that, nothing of note was cut.

Which is why there is so much celebrating going on in Washington. Lawmakers always celebrate when spending is increased, because they can brag about how they're "supporting" this and "helping" that.

And while the winners are discrete and easily identifiable, the losers — that is, taxpayers — are diffuse.

This is what's led the federal government to run huge annual deficits and pile up $14 trillion in debt. And it's what will take a truly herculean effort to change.

It was too much to hope for such a dramatic reversal in this short-term spending bill, the parameters of which had been set during the Obama administration.

For fiscal hawks, the real battle will be over the 2018 budget, which is the one that Trump has targeted for steep cuts in domestic spending to pay for rebuilding the military.

The goal for that budget should be to have denizens of the swamp squealing in agony.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Was Trump right in praising the Australian healthcare system?

See the report below.  Trump took a lot of flak for his remarks but because knowledge of the Australian system is minimal in the USA, the subsequent controversy got a lot wrong.  TRUMP WAS RIGHT.  Let me say WHY the Australia system is better.  Broadly, it is better because the care you get is influenced by how much you put into the system.

At the basic level, a visit to your local doctor, the Federal government picks up most or all of the tab. So everybody has good access to a doctor of their choice.

But when the costs get big -- as in hospitalization -- a different system prevails.  Everybody is entitled to free treatment at a government hospital but the care you get there is very poor, with waiting times being very problematical.  One man once had to wait 7 years for an eye operation, during which time  he could barely see.  And even with cancer, which MUST have speedy treatment to give the possibility of recovery, the wait can be long enough to reduce significantly or eliminate survival chances.

And Australians have heard the horror stories and know that you would not wish government medical care on anyone.  As a consequence 40% of Australians have private health insurance -- which gives them access to our many world-class private hospitals, where they get prompt and effective care.  A few years ago, I went to my favourite private hospital with pain from kidney stones,  I was scanned, diagnosed and on the operating table in a matter of hours, and given the latest and greatest treatment for the problem.

So our private hospitals are as good as our public hospitals are bad.  And private health insurance in Australia is not forbiddingly expensive.  People on quite ordinary incomes can and do afford it.  I pay $215 a month for very comprehensive cover and my insurer pays 100% of my private hospital costs. Obviously, many people will have to cut back on other expenditures to afford their subscription but prudent people do just that.

On the other hand, less wise people decide that they will take their chances with the "free" system and spend their money on beer and cigarettes instead.

The upshot?  People who contribute to their own health insurance get care as good as can be imagined while those who try to parasitize the taxpayer get shithouse medical care.  That seems to me to be entirely fair.

And there is great consensus behind the Australian system.. It has been in place for many years now and neither political party wants to change it:  Very different from the USA


A comment by US President Donald Trump about Australia's healthcare system has caused a political firestorm in the US.

Mr Trump, while sitting beside Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in New York before their bilateral meeting on Thursday, praised Australia's healthcare system.

"We have a failing healthcare," Mr Trump said.

"I shouldn't say this to our great gentleman and my friend from Australia, because you have better health care than we do."

Earlier in the day the president and his Republican Party scored a victory in the House of Representatives for repealing Obamacare, although it still has to pass the Senate.

During the Republican campaign to replace Obamacare they railed against government-funded universal heath-care systems like Australia's.

US Democratic Senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, a supporter of universal healthcare, laughed during a US TV interview when he was told about Mr Trump's Australian comment.

"Thank you Mr Trump for admitting that universal health care is the better way to go," Mr Sanders later tweeted.

"I'll be sure to quote you on the floor of the Senate."

Mr Turnbull also drew criticism after he told Mr Trump in front of reporters: "Congratulations on your vote today".

Labor's shadow minister for health and Medicare Catherine King said the prime minister was praising a bill that will could lead to thousands of Americans losing their healthcare and "will take away the requirement for health insurers to cover people with 'pre-existing conditions' - such as diabetes, autism or cancer," Ms King said in a press release.

"It could also impact survivors of rape or domestic violence."

Later on Friday White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at a news briefing that Mr Trump was simply "complimenting a foreign leader on the operations of their healthcare system".

"It didn't mean anything more than that."

Ms Huckabee Sanders said Mr Trump's remarks did not mean he thought the US should adopt a similar system to Australia's.

"I think he believes that they have a good healthcare system for Australia," she said. "What works in Australia may not work in the United States."

SOURCE

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US unemployment lowest in a decade as 211,000 new jobs are added in April

Trump delivers -- only 3 months into his term

HIRING in the United States rebounded in April as employers added a brisk 211,000 jobs, a reassuring sign that the economy’s slump in the first three months of the year will likely prove temporary.

The unemployment rate dipped to 4.4 per cent — its lowest point in a decade — from 4.5 per cent in March, the Labor Department said. The figures suggest that businesses expect consumer demand to rebound after a lacklustre first quarter, when Americans increased spending at the slowest pace in seven years, and will need more employees.

SOURCE

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Other Than the Mass Murder, Communism Is Great

The NYT thinks the real victims of this evil ideology are the American communists who were shunned.

Once again proving the human mind’s capacity for willful self-deception, the New York Times recently published an article lamenting the victims of 20th century Communism.

A rational, moral, historically informed person, hearing that description of the article, would assume they were about to read an account of the more than 100 million people murdered and hundreds of millions more who suffered systemic torture, starvation, imprisonment and rape at the hands of brutal dictators like Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and the like. One would assume that such lamentations focused on Mao’s “Great Cultural Revolution” in which teachers and other intellectuals were beaten and killed by the thousands, or the “Great Purge” under Stalin, which saw the deaths of several million Communist Party members who were declared enemies of the state.

But such an assumption would be wrong.

No, the “victims,” according to Times' writer Vivian Gornick, were the thousands of American communists who “endured social isolation, financial and professional ruin, and even imprisonment” when sane Americans rebuked their murderous ideology for the unadulterated evil that it was and is.

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg (whose brilliant and insightful book, “Liberal Fascism,” outlines the history of the American progressive movement’s embrace of socialism and communism), summed it up perfectly: “It seems to me a bit sad and pathetic, that she — and at least to some extent the New York Times — thinks the most important thing to remember from this sad chapter in American life are victims — not of Stalin’s mass murder or of Soviet espionage — but the victims of their own stupidity.”

Strange indeed. Less than three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union under the moral leadership of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II, a growing number of Americans, possibly ignorant of the horrors of Communism, embrace it in principle and in name.

The great irony is this: Only through the blessings of living in a constitutional republic which guarantees their right to hold these views, and of living in a free market economy that not only sustains their basic needs but affords them a level of luxury not even enjoyed by royalty of a half century ago, can they engage in such immoral, historically uninformed indulgence.

Thus we watch in disbelief as an angry, self-proclaimed socialist septuagenarian nearly secures the Democrat presidential nomination, bolstered by throngs of progressive snowflakes who protest and riot in favor of “LGBT rights” and against income inequality and the “evils” of the free market while tweeting from their $800 iPhones, sipping $8 cups of coffee, and sporting Che Guevara t-shirts as a form of virtue signaling.

Yet how many of these socialist/communist sympathizers know their beloved Che was Castro’s enforcer and executioner? He was nicknamed “The Butcher of La Cabana” for his brutal reign over the La Cabana prison, where political dissenters, including artists and musicians like the ones who idolize him today, were tortured and killed.

How many know Chairman Mao slaughtered 10 times more Chinese peasants than the number of Jews killed by Adolf Hitler? How many know that in Stalinist Russia, homosexuality was a crime punishable by imprisonment and hard labor, or that Stalin murdered tens of millions of people?

Why, with mountains of historical evidence documenting the atrocities of these sister ideologies, do we today have millions of Americans who openly embrace them? When faced with a recitation of its evils and failures, a common refrain is that communism/socialism is the ideal form of government; it just hasn’t yet been implemented properly.

To argue that the failures of communism/socialism — nearly 170 years after the publication of Marx’s Communist Manifesto — is a failure of leadership is to argue the movement has been led by crooks or incompetents for nearly two centuries. If so, what does that say about the followers?

Interestingly, it is the clear-eyed proponents of communism/socialism who are the most truthful about what the ideologies are and are not. Friedrich Nietzsche, the nihilist German philosopher who greatly influenced Hitler and his NAZIs (an acronym for the National SOCIALIST German Workers Party), declared, “Socialism is the fantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism.”

It would seem that a large number of the Americans who embrace socialism/communism are utterly ignorant of the misery these ideologies birth. According to a recent YouGov survey, nearly half of Millennials were unfamiliar with Mao and Che (though they still wear t-shirts emblazoned with their images). A third were unfamiliar with Lenin and Marx. Of course, it doesn’t help when the nation’s “newspaper of record” has long been a journalistic fangirl for oppressive regimes.

It is such ignorance that turns out tens of thousands of progressive idealists to rallies for Bernie Sanders, a self-avowed socialist who decries the evils of capitalism despite having recently bought his third home, this one a $600,000 vacation home on the shores of Lake Champlain. One thing is for sure; he is living better in evil, capitalist American than he would in Venezuela, the socialist paradise he says we should emulate — a paradise where millions are starving and have no bread, medicine or toilet paper.

In the meantime, oblivious to the irony, good little progressives march and riot against “fascists” in America (a term they define as “anyone who disagrees with them”), demanding free speech protections even as they beat up political opponents.

We would do well to remember Thomas Jefferson’s words in an 1816 letter to his friend Charles Yancey: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Neither Hillary or the Left blame themselves for their defeat at the hands of The Donald

And the reason why they keep having to find scapegoats is clear.  Russia, the FBI, any excuse will do.  Leftist beliefs are built on sand so it needs a huge psychological investment to defend them. You have to build your mental world on fantasies not facts. So anything that undermines Leftist fantasies is very threatening to Leftists.  It calls the whole self-worth of the Leftist into question.  They need a feeling of superiority for their self-esteem and their addled beliefs feed that feeling.  So they cannot admit that they got it wrong in any way.  Setbacks are always somebody else's fault


In an interview on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton said she takes ‘absolute personal responsibility’ for losing the presidential election. She then pinned the blame for her loss on FBI director James Comey, Wikileaks and misogyny. ‘If the election had been on 27 October, I would be your president’, she said — that was the day before Comey sent his letter to Congress saying the FBI would reopen its investigation into Hillary’s emails. In other words, she doesn’t really believe she is responsible.

This is delusional. There is no evidence that these were decisive factors. Swing voters of the Rustbelt states were much more concerned with jobs than Hillary’s email server, and they could not care less about leaked emails from John Podesta (who?) and the Democratic National Committee.

As for misogyny, how do you explain that a majority of white women voted for Trump? As it happens, America was perfectly ready for a woman president – just not ready for Hillary.

Let’s be clear: Comey didn’t tell Hillary to put in a lame campaign effort in Michigan and Pennsylvania, nor did he tell her to avoid Wisconsin entirely. Vladimir Putin and Wikileaks didn’t instruct her to insult the millions of people she labelled ‘deplorable’ and ‘irredeemable’.

And neither Comey nor Putin were to blame for Clinton’s lack of message or purpose. Slogans like ‘I’m with her’ and ‘It’s her turn’ summed up the emptiness at the core of her campaign. As Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes write in Shattered, their brutal look at the Clinton campaign, ‘Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn’t really have a rationale’.

In Donald Trump, Hillary faced one of the most unpopular individuals ever to run for president. He was also one of the least informed candidates. A joke. And yet she lost to him. That’s how flawed a candidate she was.

In one sense, Clinton’s desire to blame Comey and Wikileaks is not a big surprise, given that Democrats have been pointing the finger at them for months. But hearing these excuses coming from Clinton herself was another thing. It was a grotesque display of self-pity, an attempt to drum up sympathy for herself.

Hillary’s campaign was really a bigger problem than the candidate herself. Her hollow message reflected the Democrats’ lack of purpose and vision generally. Her arrogance and sense of entitlement was indicative of an aloof political establishment and machine politics. In writing off millions as ‘deplorable’, she was only expressing a commonly held view among the elite. And now, in shifting the blame, Hillary joins many other liberals in avoiding to face up to reality, and trying to understand what is lacking in their politics.

Clinton’s remarks proved to be just another example of a truism – the Democrats’ reaction to Trump’s election shows why Trump won. Her interview was a reminder of why she deserved to lose.

SOURCE

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Hillary’s Defeat Tour Will Never End

It’s the fault of the FBI, cell phones, Colin Powell and misogyny

It’s May. The flowers are blooming. Young couples stroll through the park holding hands. And Hillary Clinton continues to tour the country explaining that she would have won if only it hadn’t been for the vast FBI-Russian-Misogynist conspiracy that shamelessly robbed her of an inevitable victory.

It’s not a campaign. It’s an anti-campaign. In our political tradition, losers go away. But the Clintons are the cockroaches of American politics. Getting nuked 306 to 232 won’t get rid of them. Instead they crawl out of the rubble, greedy antennas twitching, to cash in on their latest disaster.

Wearing one of Elton John’s used leather pantsuits, her latest act of fashion revenge on the nation that had spurned her, Hillary showed up at 583 Park Avenue in the sixth month leg of her Defeat Tour.

"If you drive around in some of the places that beat the heck out of me, you cannot get cell coverage for miles," she told a horrified Manhattan audience that included Meryl Streep and Donna Karan who can no more imagine going out without cell phone coverage than without their personal assistants.

And people without cell phone coverage, unlike Los Angeles and New York, which accounted for her "popular vote" that Hillary always brings up, don’t matter. Except around election time when even people without cell phone coverage, personal assistants and Netflix accounts are still allowed to vote.

If it’s anyone’s fault that Hillary lost, it’s the "States" part of the United States.

Is it fair that 3 million progressive Hillary voters in New York City and Los Angeles County should be outvoted by a bunch of hicks in flyover country who can’t even get 4G on their iPhone 7S?

As another defeated candidate once said, "This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That's democracy for you." That’s the position that the #Resistance, whose newest member is Hillary herself, embodies.

But as always, she was there to take responsibility. Absolute responsibility. Nothing relative about it.

"I take absolute personal responsibility," Hillary declared. Then she blamed the FBI-Russian conspiracy. Not to mention misogyny.  And lack of cell phone coverage.

Absolute personal responsibility, indeed. At this sad stage in Hillary’s career, students of the English language are forced to ponder whether she’s a liar or just doesn’t understand what words mean.

During the campaign, Hillary had taken "responsibility" for setting up a private email server full of classified emails after weeks of pressure from her people. Before blaming it on aides and Colin Powell.

She also took responsibility for Benghazi, before blaming it on lower staffers, a YouTube video and Congress. Somehow Colin Powell, cell phones and misogyny escaped the blame that time around.

For the Clintons, "I take responsibility" is one of those things you say, but don’t really mean. Like, "I want to hear everything", "Good game" or "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

Instead of taking responsibility, Hillary blames her defeat on her classified emails being found on the laptop of the husband of a close aide being investigated by the FBI for child pornography.

That is a perfectly legitimate reason to lose an election, go to prison and be hounded by dogs across upstate New York. It’s hard to think of a worse scandal than the combination of endangering national security and child pornography. It’s a scandal that would bury any merely human politician.

But Hillary isn’t really taking responsibility. She’s assigning responsibility.

Responsibility is something that Hillary takes only to pass it along to someone else. When Hillary says that she takes responsibility, she means taking on the authority to assign it to someone else.

Like Colin Powell.

"If the election had been on Oct. 27," Hillary insisted, "I would be your president."

SOURCE

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Australia: A prolonged outpouring of Leftist hate from an alleged comedian below. America's Stephen Colbert is not alone

By Ben McLeay

If we cut funding for private schools where will Australia get its arseholes from?

Malcolm Turnbull has triggered discord within the Liberal Party and among conservative voters with proposed education funding reform that would see money reduced from 24 private schools and redistributed among government schools. It’s difficult to make a case that private schools should get government funding when non-private schools exist exactly for that purpose, but there’s one thing we really need to consider here: Australia’s arseholes need to come from somewhere.

Look, I understand, your extremely precocious 6-year-old, Bartholomew, is special. He needs an education where a) they will teach him the appropriate way to address a butler and b) he won’t have to be exposed to anyone who knows what the inside of a Centrelink looks like. While government schools certainly get the job done, there’s a certain je ne sais quoi that private schools provide, specifically, the ability and inclination to use the phrase ‘je ne sais quoi’ in a sentence.

In a utilitarian sense, Australia might not strictly need people who know how to fence or speak Church Latin, but if we don’t have our private schools, who will be rude to our waiters? Who will leave one-star reviews of restaurants because the tap water tasted like it came out of a tap? Who will park their obscene Porsche four-wheel-drive partially across two parking spaces – one of which is handicapped – just to make sure that no one dings it? Who will complain about homeless people making the neighbourhood look ‘untidy’?

It might seem like all of those examples are awful things that a horrible person would do, but this country is a rich tapestry of human beings that would be far less rich if it weren’t for the sort of people who move next to an iconic music venue and try to have it shut down with noise complaints. And where do these people come from? Private schools.

Private schools aren’t just about removing your child or children from the real world and placing them in a hermetically-sealed bubble of families who all own at least a half-share in a racehorse, they’re also about teaching your child or children that they are, in every way, better than everyone else. Private schools give children the confidence and determination to demand things they are not entitled to and to be outraged at not having things they don’t actually deserve.

There’s a reason that a lot of wealthy and powerful people come from private schools and it’s because they are taught one supremely valuable thing: a complete disregard for the wellbeing and feelings of anyone who has never been to the opera or played polo. Our politicians and titans of industry are empowered to make the sorts of decisions that only benefit the wealthy and are massively detrimental to the poor because private schooling blessed them with a childhood completely free from interacting with the filthy rabble who "needed that money to eat".

An idiot would see the religious right demanding government funding for Catholic schools and the same religious right demanding the government stop funding Safe Schools because it’s "too ideological" as a hypocrisy of titanic proportions, but religious private schools are about more than just making sure children are taught creationism and evolution with equal weight. They’re also integral in raising the next generation of people who will come under fire for posting pictures to Facebook of themselves next to an endangered African animal that they shot with with a bazooka out of a helicopter.

Obviously, arseholes come from all walks of life, and not everyone that comes from a private school is an arsehole, but no other institutions in this country provide as comprehensive an introduction and indoctrination into the arsehole lifestyle as our private schools do (except maybe the university bodies involved in student politics).

As always, we must think long-term. Sure, it’s easy to defund private schools now, but in 20 years’ time, who will try and take away your penalty rates? Who will try and defund Medicare? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to have to live in an Australia where P-platers in $80,000 cars aren’t empowered to run into your car in the Woollies car park and not leave a note.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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The Dirty Red Secrets of May

American leftists celebrated the venerable Communist holiday of May Day in the traditional fashion. Portland grad students, who have never worked a day in their lives, marked International Workers Day by smashing the windows of local businesses. There's a long proud tradition of the revolutions of the working class being led by rich leftists like Marx, Engels, Lenin and Castro to whom work is an evil mystery that they spent their miserable lives resolving never to become acquainted with.

The New York Times, which has far too many of its own windows to go around smashing those of others, instead offered some sickening nostalgia for the red dead past with a little piece titled, "When Communism Inspired Americans."

Which Americans did Communism inspire? Communists and their fellow travelers. Despite the news stories cheerfully reporting on May Day protesters in the United States waving Soviet flags, there aren't very many Communists in this country. Communism is a demanding mistress. It requires knowing a whole lot, not so much about the real world, but about Communism.

Most leftists are dilettantes. They admired and admire Communism's commitment to murdering millions of people and arguing the esoteric dogmas of the party line. It's this latter that Gornick's New York Times piece bleeds with nostalgia for. She tells us, again and again, that the Communists were wonderfully inspirational because they sat around kitchen tables arguing about ideas.

So did the Nazis. But the New York Times doesn't print fond recollections of debates over whether the Japanese really counted as Aryans and how National Socialism should approach the rights of workers. Nostalgia for the Third Reich is rightly regarded as abominable. And the hobby of those who have a soft spot for its murderous totalitarian ideology.

Curiously, the left never applies this same indictment to its own fondness for Communism. Instead it traffics in nostalgia for Communism's idealism, as if its ideals were any nobler than those of Nazism. But the left believes they were. And how could it not? Communism is just the left taken to its inevitable conclusion. And so the left excuses Communism's excess of enthusiasm for the cause.

Mistakes were made. The mass murder of millions being one of them. Generations of repression being another. Forced abortions, mass starvation, forced labor, slavery, death camps, virulent racism, psychiatric torture, invasion and terrorism being a few others. But their ideals were so idealistic.

Communism didn't inspire Americans, it did inspire the left to try and turn America into a totalitarian state. It still does. This is the dirty little secret that leaks out of the left. When the media runs these evocative nostalgic pieces about Communism, it's the equivalent of a pedophile sharing snapshots of summer camp. It's the disgusting secret of truly vile people leaking out.

And the vile people are the cultural leftist elites claiming to be our moral superiors on account of their commitment to total government control of everything... for the benefit of the people.

Sound familiar?

The double standard is why Nazi historical revisionism is evil, but Communist historical revisionism gets a wink and a nod. It also makes a mockery of the conviction that the mass murder of Jews for the sake of a totalitarian ideology during the 20th century was a bad thing that we ought to deplore.

The Soviet Union began murdering Jews when the Holocaust was just an evil twinkle in a mad Fuhrer's eye. It went on murdering Jews long after he shot himself in the head. Stalin liked Hitler's Holocaust so much that he tried to plan his own version of it. He would have gotten away with it too if he hadn't died, throwing the Soviet Union and his various malicious plans into chaos with it.

The left doesn't believe that Hitler was bad because he killed Jews. Mass murder isn't a crime in the left's eyes. Just ask Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the rest of the gang of monsters whom the left defended in papers just like the New York Times until they had committed the worst of their crimes.

As long as the Hitler-Stalin pact held, leftists vehemently campaigned against war. There were plenty of "Hitler is bad, but" pieces of the sort that they're running about North Korea or Iran. Hitler only became truly irredeemable when he invaded the Soviet Union. And then everyone, except the Trotskyists, decided that Nazi Germany was utterly evil. Leftist fellow travelers went, in the span of days, from protesting "warmongering" and "militarism" to demanding action yesterday.

And that too is another dirty red secret of the left.

It's inconceivable that the New York Times or any paper would run a glowing piece titled, "When Nazis Inspired Americans". No fond recollections from participants in the Madison Square Garden rally. No fond memories of Bund camps. No sugar-coated recollections of how the Thousand Year Reich would create a better world... only to then learn that Hitler wasn't a very nice man.

But "When Communism Inspired Americans".regurgitates the same exact message. And it remains acceptable because the left feels an emotional and intellectual connection with Communists.

That is the ugly truth at the root of our conflict.

Liberalism, the old vintage that actually stood up to Communists, is as dead as the dodo. In its place are smug leftists eager to repeat the same old sins.

Nazis don't get a forum to pour out their romantic nostalgia for attending Hitler rallies. Communists do because the left sympathizes with them. It must offers occasional apologies and disavowals, but the love for a horrifying ideology that was totalitarian all the way down, whose mass murder of millions was not an accident of fate, but was always an integral part of it, tells the truth about the left.

"The party was possessed of a moral authority that lent shape and substance, through its passion for structure and the eloquence of its rhetoric, to an urgent sense of social injustice," Gornick writes.

Gornick begins with individuals and concludes with the ugly collectivist mass of the party. It is always the party in the end. The individuals are disposable. They are, as Stalin said, statistics.

The rest is tiresome. The same recitations of "We knew nothing". As if the crimes of Communism had been some sort of mystery until Khrushchev admitted them.

And what were the Moscow Trials? What were the decades of reports about abuses and atrocities?

Like Pol Pot's crimes, an outraged left denied it all.

After all the mass murders and crimes have been admitted, the left always returns to this nostalgia. To that emotional linkage to the total commitment to a totalitarian state.

To the party.

This is the left. It returns, like a dog to its vomit, to the dream of the true radicalism of a totalitarian leftist state. It occasionally deals with uncomfortable truths. Circles around them. And then it lapses back into an opium dream of Marxists sitting around a kitchen table and debating which windows to smash first and whom to shoot first.

SOURCE

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An Unhinged Left Doubles Down

Long used to congratulating themselves for their inclusiveness and tolerance, leftists are revealed as utter frauds.

Despite all the maddening uncertainty surrounding Donald Trump and the GOP, the 2016 election represented one of the most clarifying moments in American history: “Progressives,” the Democrat Party and their Leftmedia allies — long used to congratulating themselves for their inclusiveness, tolerance and fairness — were revealed as utter frauds.

“In the wake of the Trumpocalypse, many in the deepest blue cores have turned on those parts of America that supported the president’s election, developing oikophobia — an irrational fear of their fellow citizens,” writes Daily Beast columnist Joel Kotkin.

Not fear. Loathing. Loathing epitomized by “comedian” Stephen Colbert, who referred to Trump’s mouth as “Putin’s c—k holster” on his late-night TV show.

Loathing so intense, New Republic columnist Kevin Baker wants to separate “We Pay Our Own Damn Way” blue states from “poor” red states he hopes will wallow in misery without their leftist “benefactors.” “We have funded massive infrastructure projects in your rural counties, subsidized your schools and your power plants and your nursing homes, sent you entire industries, and simultaneously absorbed the most destitute, unskilled, and oppressed portions of your populations, white and black alike,” he writes. “All of which, it turns out, only left you more bitter, white, and alt-right than ever.”

More bitter than Baker himself? He and Colbert exemplify the pompous hypocrisy that animates far too many leftists. Leftists who regularly eviscerate conservatives for their “homophobia,” but will hail Colbert for his “edginess.” Leftists like Baker, et al, who tend to forget, despite Kotkin’s reminder, that “the bulk of the food, energy, and manufactured goods consumed in blue America” is supplied by those “bitter clingers” who feed what Kotkin calls the “blue bourgeoisie.” A blue bourgeoisie who “might seek to give the unwashed red masses ‘cake’ in the form of free health care and welfare,” he writes, but nothing more “than a future status as serfs of the cognitive aristocracy.”

Serfs dismissed as beneath contempt by self-serving progressives.

Historian Victor Davis Hanson aptly illuminates how that poisonous mindset affects his home state of California, where progressive coastal elites “virtue-signal from the world’s most exclusive and beautiful enclaves,” while ordinary Californians endure “another perfect storm of increased crime, decreased incarceration, still ongoing illegal immigration, and record poverty.”

Columnist Aaron M. Renn sees a bigger and far more troubling picture. “Those who are succeeding in America no longer need the overall prosperity of the country in order to personally do well,” he explains. “They can become enriched as a small, albeit sizable, minority.”

It is a minority scrupulously protected and reverently promoted by the Leftmedia. A Leftmedia that “really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008,” Politico columnists Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty reveal. “And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county — odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties.”

Leftists apparently need their media-manufactured bubble. That became evident when the New York Times published a column by newly hired conservative (and virulent NeverTrumper) Bret Stephens questioning the legitimacy of the progressive global warming agenda. After it was published, the paper was flooded with threats of cancellations by furious readers. Leftists also slammed Stephens himself via Twitter, and nearly 30,000 signed a Change.org petition demanding the Times fire him.

From whom do such “tolerant” people take their cue? President Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan “don’t give a s— about people,” newly elected DNC chairman Tom Perez has stated — on more than one occasion. On Monday Perez upped the ante on his mindlessness, insisting, “[N]o human being is illegal” during one of the many Communist Party-supported May Day protests across the nation. One suspects the families of victims murdered by MS-13 gang-bangers on Long Island — 92% of whom are here illegally — might disagree.

Perez is the tip of the iceberg. “Democrats are completely focused on placating their frothing, left-wing, anti-Trump base — and the American heartland thinks these people are insane,” writes Marc Thiessen. “They see women marching in anti-Trump rallies wearing ‘pussy’ hats. They see left-wing mobs attacking Charles Murray at Middlebury College and trying to stop Ann Coulter from speaking at the UC Berkeley. They see ‘Bill Nye the Liberal Guy’ … asking whether people should be punished for having ‘extra kids.’”

Day after day, a demonstrably unhinged army of progressive rabble-rousers reminds America they have made anger, hatred and violence their political platform.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Deceptive language about Health-Care Provision

The House of Representatives has just passed a statute it represents as “repealing and replacing Obamacare.” This legislation, now awaiting what promises to be major challenges in gaining the Senate’s approval, does amend certain aspects of the Obamacare setup, but all in all the changes are less than earth-shaking, and the previous system will continue in important regards even if the House version should gain approval in the Senate.

One critical aspect of the continuity is the requirement that, absent certain state-level options that might but need not be implemented, health-care insurers will still be forbidden to deny coverage to anyone because of a preexisting condition.

Under Obamacare, insurers had to charge people the same amount, regardless of their health status. The AHCA [American Health Care Act] would change that, allowing states to apply for waivers to charge sicker people more if those people had a gap in their insurance coverage. Those states would then get $138 billion over 10 years to help defray costs for sick people by creating high-risk pools, among other things.

The idea behind this provision is that it would make health insurance cheaper for people who are relatively healthy, while sick people would be in their own, subsidized risk pool. As they debated on the House floor Thursday, Republican members consistently assured their audience that their bill would still protect preexisting conditions.

As many knowledgeable commentators have noted over the years, forbidding insurers to discriminate among people according to their health condition (e.g., according to what types of illnesses, injuries, and risk factors they have had in the past or have currently) flies in the face of the insurance principle. Insurance is a means of pooling risks. Subscribers of an insurance policy all pay a regular premium for coverage. In the event that a subscriber happens to fall victim to a covered contingency—for example, someone develops lung cancer—that person will be eligible to make a benefit claim against the insurance to pay for care of the cancer. Such coverage can be actuarially sound because even though any one person’s coming down with lung cancer is unpredictable, the probability of someone’s coming down with this disease in a large population can be determined with a high degree of accuracy, and premiums can be set so that for the group as a whole, the premiums will suffice to cover the plan’s promised pay-outs and leave enough for the insurer to cover its costs and earn a normal return on its investment in the insurance business.

If, however, people who had not been insured could, upon being diagnosed with a particular disease, then apply for insurance covering treatment of this condition, the insurance principle would be cast into the trash bin. This feature would be similar to letting people on their death bed purchase life insurance at the same rate as healthy people, or letting people whose houses had just caught fire purchase homeowner’s insurance at the same rate as people whose houses are in sound condition. In short, requiring insurers to cover preexisting conditions at the same premium paid by covered subscribers who do not have those conditions transforms insurance into an arrangement for making healthy people pay too much for coverage in order to subsidize people who pay too little—because the law forbids insurers to charge them according to the risk of the covered contingency they actually present.

Likewise, requiring insurers to cover a wide range of conditions against which some subscribers do not wish to insure—indeed, against certain contingencies that cannot apply to them in any event (e.g., costs associated with pregnancy for male subscribers)—turns the insurance system into a complex system of overcharges and cross-subsidies, that is, turns the system into a legally prescribed welfare system rather than an insurance system.

The federal government and the state governments have intervened haphazardly in the health-care insurance business so pervasively and for so long that by now the whole setup is nothing but a gigantic mess that flies in the face of the insurance principle and dictates a host of requirements that make no sense except as answers to the prayers of special-interest groups and rent seekers. Once a net benefit has been created, however, each beneficiary group will scream to the heavens if reforms should threaten to remove its privilege, and legislators will be reluctant to buck such organized political insistence on continued subsidies and privileges no matter how irrational these interventionist distortions are as components of an insurance system. This sort of “transitional-gains trap,” which Gordon Tullock analyzed astutely in an article published almost fifty years ago, produces an inertia in the political process that makes it practically impossible to make substantial changes even as the overall system sinks into financial ruin and drags down much of the related economy with it.

A helpful first step toward actually remedying the whole ungodly mess would be to change the language we use to talk about it and to propose reforms. People would be well advised to stop using the word “insurance” to talk about what amounts to prepaid care for one and all, and to stop regarding every special-interest subsidy and privilege as if, having once been blessed by legislators, it has become an eternal “right.” If people cannot forthrightly recognize gifts financed from the public trough as distinct from real insurance payouts, there is little chance that any reforms can ever make economic sense or bring about a viable system for financing health-care expenses.

SOURCE

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Are You Ready for Single-payer Healthcare?

America is well down a slippery slope

Chalk up another victory for the elephants and one more defeat for the donkeys. Yep, the Republicans have finally managed to get a healthcare bill through the House, and depending upon who you listen to, the bill is anything from a complete Republican sellout to a major move in the direction of freedom and fiscal responsibility.

That said, let’s take a deep breath and set aside all the B.S. and talking points coming from politicians and the media and look at the healthcare puzzle like rational, grown-up folks. The fact is that we’ve had government-controlled healthcare from the time progressives first convinced a significant percentage of the population that the government had an obligation to provide medical services to all citizens. Today, of course, that belief has evolved to mean “all people living in the United States, citizens or otherwise.”

It sounds nice, but as every halfway intelligent, honest adult understands, healthcare is not a right. Every human being is born with only one natural right: the right to freedom. Specifically, that means the right to do whatever he pleases, so long as his actions do not violate the freedom of any other human being.

The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness contains two redundancies. First, technically speaking, you don’t have a right to life. If you did, you could choose to live forever. Good luck to you on your choice, but the reality is that a higher power decides the outcome of that one for you. You do, however, have a right to do anything you please to try to improve your life, which comes under the heading of freedom (or liberty, which is the word used by the Founding Fathers).

Second, the right to happiness is simply one aspect of freedom. You do not have a right to be happy, but you do have a right to pursue happiness (as in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness). The problems start when people come to believe the perverse notion that government (read, “taxpayers”) has an obligation to do whatever it takes to make them happy. Once a society crosses that line, it begins its death spiral, though it can still survive, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, until you “run out of other people’s money.”

Now, back to healthcare. In this day and age of ever-increasing lifespans, healthcare is an issue of life-and-death importance. But it’s important to understand that it has nothing to do with rights. It has to do with compassion.

This may surprise you, but, in theory, I believe in universal, or single-payer, healthcare. That’s right, if I had supernatural powers, I’d see to it that everyone, young and old alike, had access to the best healthcare possible, without having to wait weeks, or even months, to see a doctor or have an operation.

The reason I qualified my statement with “in theory” is because even though I don’t want to see any human being suffer unnecessarily or die from a lack of medical care, I also don’t want the government to be involved in any way, shape, or form in anything as serious as healthcare.

It baffles me why so many people blind themselves to the truth about government. A government is nothing more than a collection of avaricious, power- and money-hungry men and women whom we refer to as “politicians,” and we already know, through firsthand experience, that they not only are untrustworthy, they’re incompetent.

The theoretical single-payer system I envision would be run by experienced, private-industry executives and overseen by a board of directors that would consist of the most prominent accomplished, civic-minded people among us, men and women whose reputations would be beyond reproach. They would get no compensation other than reimbursement for travel and other direct expenses, so you would never need to worry about them basing their decisions on their financial well-being.

Now, back to reality: Do I believe this will ever happen? No, I don’t. The sad reality is that the United States will get single-payer healthcare in the not-too-distant future, but, unfortunately, it will be run by the same avaricious politicians who have been stealing from us since the inception of our nation.

Based on experience, we already know that everything the government touches costs more and delivers less value. Amtrak has always operated in the red. The Post Office has always operated in the red. And politicians don’t even make a pretense of wanting to adopt a breakeven budget for the United States.

Isn’t it ironic that Medicare and Medicaid are going broke (not to mention the transfer-of-wealth program known as Obamacare), yet the government arrogantly believes it can run healthcare for everyone successfully? Absurd, of course, but nevertheless government-run healthcare is on the horizon.

Obama and the rest of the Dirty Dems were well aware that the only way Obamacare could be pushed through was by telling massive lies to the public. Their strategy was that when the system collapsed, they would then make the case that the only way to save people from suffering and death would be to implement a full-blown, single-payer system run by the government. A deceitful plan, to be sure, but a very clever one.

And it was all moving along right on schedule toward its ultimate goal when Chappaqua’s most famous liar found a way to blow the presidential election and Obama’s third term against an opponent whom her supporters looked upon as nothing more than a bad joke. Whereupon the guy pulling her strings hightailed it out of town to Tahiti and began cashing in on the eight-year scam he had so successfully pulled off.

I’d like to be wrong and see the Republicans come up with a miracle and find a way to make healthcare work, but my guess is that Horrible Hillary’s gift to Republicans will only prolong the inevitable: government-run, single payer healthcare.

The irony is that the most famous government-run healthcare debacle, the VA, has been such a disaster that there’s serious talk of turning it over to the free market. I guess the message is that you have to suffer through years of government incompetency before you’re given the freedom to try and better your situation.

P.S. Allow me to close on an obvious note: Given the insoluble healthcare problems in the United States, I believe immigration (not just illegal, but legal) should be cut as close to zero as possible for at least five years. The fact is that there are simply too many people in this country, which puts a strain on all kinds of services. If we can’t afford healthcare for those already living here, why in the world should we add to the problem by bringing in even more people?

All answers to that question are welcomed.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Federal Judge Declares Constitution Void, Threatens Civil Defendant With Death

Most Americans believe that we have a reasonably fair justice system with scholarly judges at the helm. Well, how about a federal judge who suspends the Constitution, confiscates all of a litigant’s assets, orders him not to hire defense counsel, and pronounces his orders enforceable by death?

That’s exactly what federal Judge Royal Furgeson did to Internet pioneer Jeff Baron, in a case that, New York lawyer David Relkin says is “the most outrageous denial of a person’s basic constitutional and human rights in this Country since the abolition of slavery.”

In the Texas case, Judge Furgeson “sentenced” Baron to an unprecedented “human receivership” to enable the judge’s lawyers to loot Baron’s Juvenile Diabetes Research Trust.

His offense? Baron was accused of not paying his lawyers enough money — “charges” that were later proven to be completely fabricated.

The decision is historic: a human being has not been placed in a receivership since slavery ended in 1865. During one of the hearings, and prior to an appellate court ruling that Judge Furgeson “abused his discretion,” Furgeson reminded Baron of his power:

“I have the full force of the Navy, Army [and] Marines behind me.”. . . You are a fool, a fool, a fool to screw with a federal judge, and if you don’t understand that, I can make you understand it.”

Background:

Baron is an Internet pioneer who, on a shoestring budget invented technology competitive with Google during the early days of the Internet, according to The Daily Caller. He became incredibly successful and had web sites with over 1 million visitors per day and monthly traffic of 50 million. Baron earmarked nearly all of his earned wealth to finding a cure for juvenile (type 1) diabetes —  a disease afflicting Baron since early childhood.

His success attracted attention, and he was soon enticed by another investor who promised to develop a search engine that would eclipse Google if Baron would partner with him.

That relationship soured fast when the investor embezzled $8 million, prompting Baron to sue for recovery. After this, the partner employed an army of lawyers with Baron’s stolen wealth and sued Baron six times, attempting to take the rest of the company’s assets. The partner lost all six times, according to World Net Daily.

When the partner sued a seventh time, Furgeson became the judge in charge. Furgeson forced Baron to settle the case on unfavorable terms. After the settlement was completed, Furgeson held a private, off-record meeting with Baron’s adversaries where the judge inexplicably put Baron into a human receivership, seizing everything Baron owned — from his home to his cell phone. Furgeson also indefinitely suspended most of Baron’s civil liberties.

“Apparently, there is a lot of money to be had here,” Furgeson said.  “Whether it's a receiver, judgment or whatever, he's going to be accountable unless he wants to live on a desert island somewhere and escape the clutches of the U.S. Army and the Navy and the Marines and the Air Force and the U.S. Marshals.”

At another hearing where Furgeson thought that Baron might appeal his rulings, he responded with a tirade:

“You want to challenge the court order, I have the marshals behind me. I can come to your house, pick you up, put you in jail. I can seize your property, do anything I need to do to enforce my orders . . .  So any failure to comply with that order is contempt, punishable with lots of dollars, punishable by possible jail, death.”

Relkin, an accomplished New York federal attorney says, “The only accurate analogy to Baron’s situation while under the Receiver’s control is that he became an inmate at Guantanamo Bay.”

According to the appellate court, the judge’s orders were so draconian that all of Baron’s property was seized and his personal mail was diverted. Baron, a type 1 diabetic, had to obtain approval from the court before seeking medical treatment.

The result was that Furgeson illegally forced Baron to unpaid labor for years, under the cloak of absolute immunity which all federal judges enjoy.  Furgeson thundered:

“This [proceeding] is going on and on and on until Mr. Baron has nothing. I mean actually everything is depleted. I gather that Mr. Baron is worth a lot of money.  But it may be that we sell all the domain names. We may sell all of his stock. We may cash in all of his CDs, and we may seize all of his bank accounts,”
Professor Ben Stein recently commented to Fox News that Americans are becoming powerless against abuse of power by Stalinist, liberal judges who are “dictators in black robes.”

"The judiciary is out of control, not bound by anything except themselves.” said Stein. “Judges don’t have to be bound by the Constitution or the law.”

While sounding fantastic and-far fetched, Baron’s situation is becoming more commonplace, as California lawyer Conrad Herring explains: “What happened to Baron, can happen to anyone. The system is obviously broken.”

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, an authority on judicial corruption himself, called for Judge Furgeson’s impeachment, explaining:

“I’ve found case after case after case where our judiciary is being used and misused, whether it be politicians misusing the courts to stop people from giving money to campaigns, or this [Jeff Baron’s] situation where the federal government, through the federal judiciary, has illegally confiscated someone’s property and destroyed their lives because they have a vendetta against them.”

The scene of judges in Hawaii and the California 9th Circuit usurping President Trump’s power in the area of national security serves as a reminder of a much broader and increasingly growing problem.

While the president has an army of lawyers at his disposal to keep rogue and activist judges in check, most Americans are far more at risk and powerless to defend themselves when they become? targets personally.

An average American finds himself at the mercy of a radical or corrupt judge bent on inflicting harm and is stuck with the judge’s tyrannical commandments without recourse.

Conrad Herring observes:

“The judicial system is prohibitively expensive for most citizens. When a judge acts beyond his or her authority, and sometimes abuses that authority as in the case of Jeff Baron, there is often little recourse unless a lawyer is willing to work pro bono to defend and protect the citizen’s rights. The abuse in the Baron receivership case was doubly egregious because it was initiated by unethical lawyers. Rather than hold these lawyers accountable, the judge in the case allowed them to thoroughly corrupt the legal process. Baron was stripped of most of his constitutional rights without due process, and then stripped of his assets. Although Baron was successful in his appeal of the unlawful receivership order, he is still today, five years later, fighting to recover the assets that were illegally taken from him.”

With a new day dawning in America, Baron is turning his efforts toward making America Great Again. His new Internet Freedom Project (IFP) is leading the drive to restore America’s stewardship of the Internet.

SOURCE

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Texas Takes Strong and Needed Action on Sanctuary Cities

Do you think more states should stand up to unlawful and dangerous sanctuary city policies? Let us know in the comments. – Ed.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott acted to protect the citizens of Texas on Sunday when he signed into law SB 4, a bill to punish (and deter) local cities and counties like Austin from implementing sanctuary policies.

Abbott and the legislators who sponsored this bill are trying to stop the Lone Star State from being a sanctuary for criminal aliens. They want to make sure that criminals are removed from the state and deported from the country, rather than remaining in Texas so they can victimize even more citizens of the state.

SB 4 requires local governments in the state to comply with federal immigration law. That includes 8 U.S.C. § 1373, which forbids state and local governments from preventing their officials from exchanging information with the federal government on the citizenship status of any individual.

Under the new Texas law, local governments can’t prevent their law enforcement officials from sending information to the feds on criminals they have arrested or detained.

City and county officials also can’t prevent federal immigration officers from enforcing immigration laws in local jails, and are charged with “assisting or cooperating with a federal immigration officer as reasonable or necessary” to provide “enforcement assistance.”

Further, Texas law enforcement agencies are directed to “comply with, honor, and fulfill any request made in the detainer request provided by the federal government.”

This means that local jurisdictions that fail to honor federal detainer warrants—which are requests issued by federal immigration authorities to hold illegal aliens for pickup—will also be in violation of state law.

SB 4 imposes a civil penalty on sanctuary cities of up to $25,500 for each day of intentionally violating this law. In a fitting sense of justice, the civil penalties collected will be deposited in a special victim’s crime fund set up by the state.

This means that those who have been victimized by criminal illegal aliens will be able to seek compensation from this fund. Local law enforcement officials, such as sheriffs and chiefs of police, can also be charged with a Class A misdemeanor for failing to comply with federal detainer warrants.

Finally, local officials who refuse to comply with SB 4 and who implement sanctuary policies or ordinances can be removed from office. Petitions for their removal are filed by the attorney general of Texas, and such petitions will get the same precedence as election contests under Texas law.

This ensures that such petitions will not languish in court behind other cases. And Texas courts are directed to remove that official if he or she is found guilty—judges have no discretion to keep the official in office.

Abbott said he signed this bill because public safety is his top priority: “This bill furthers that objective by keeping dangerous criminals off our streets.”

Abbott added that it is “inexcusable to release individuals from jail that have been charged with heinous crimes like sexual assault against minors, domestic violence, and robbery.”

He said that such behavior by local officials would no longer be “tolerated,” and that SB 4 was “doing away with those that seek to promote lawlessness in Texas.”

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who also supports the new law, pointed out that “in the past six years, criminal aliens have been charged with more than 566,000 crimes in Texas including kidnapping, homicide, burglary and much more.”

As he said, “there is no excuse for endangering our communities by allowing criminal aliens who have committed a crime to go free.”

Given the large number of crimes committed by recidivist criminal aliens, the claim by some in Texas that this bill will make “our communities more dangerous” defies common sense.

This is particularly true because the new law exempts an illegal alien who “is a victim of or witness to a criminal offense,” or “is reporting a criminal offense.” Thus, it will not deter the reporting of crimes.

As I have pointed out before, sanctuary policies endanger the residents of the very cities they are claimed to “help.” Criminal aliens who would otherwise be detained and removed from sanctuary cities are instead released back into the community, where they can commit more crimes.

One Government Accountability Office study of the criminal histories of 55,322 illegal aliens showed that they had been arrested 459,614 times and committed almost 700,000 offenses.

The vast majority of these crimes would never have been committed if we had a secure border that prevented these criminal aliens from entering the country in the first place, or if we had an effective policy of removing them once they did make it here, or after being detained or arrested for committing a crime.

The Texas governor and legislators are trying to protect their state’s residents from the reckless and irresponsible decisions being made by local jurisdictions to release criminal aliens and to obstruct enforcement of federal immigration law.

This is a good start and the right thing for them to do.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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America's shadow bureaucracy

Daniel J. Mitchell

As Ronald Reagan pointed out many years ago, Washington is a company town. But rather than being home to a firm or industry that earns money by providing value to willing consumers, the “company” is a federal government that uses a coercive tax system to provide unearned wealth to various interest groups.

And the beneficiaries of that redistribution zealously guard their privileges and pay very close attention to any developments that might threaten their access to the public trough.

Government Looking out for Itself

Federal bureaucrats are particularly concerned whenever there is talk about spending restraint.

They get lavishly compensated compared to folks in the private sector, so they definitely fret whenever something might happen to derail their gravy train.

A recent segment on a local station in Washington, DC, focused on their angst, and I provided a contrary point of view.

The Bureaucracy Keeps Growing

Needless to say, my friends who work for the federal government generally don’t agree with my assessment. Some of them even sent me an article from the Washington Post that claims the number of bureaucrats hasn’t changed since the late 1960s.

They claim this is evidence that the bureaucracy has become more efficient.

But they’re wrong. The official federal workforce may not have changed, but research from the Brooking Institution reveals that this statistic is illusory because of a giant shadow bureaucracy.

George Will’s latest column is about this metastasizing hidden bureaucracy, referencing author John J. DiIulio Jr. and his study on government growth:

…government has prudently become stealthy about how it becomes ever bigger. In a new Brookings paper …government expands by indirection, using three kinds of “administrative proxies” — state and local government, for-profit businesses, and nonprofit organizations. Since 1960, the number of state and local government employees has tripled to more than 18 million, a growth driven by federal money: Between the early 1960s and early 2010s, the inflation-adjusted value of federal grants for the states increased more than tenfold …“By conservative estimates,” DiIulio writes, “there are about 3 million state and local government workers” — about 50 percent more than the number of federal workers — “funded via federal grants and contracts.” Then there are for-profit contractors, used, DiIulio says, “by every federal department, bureau and agency.” For almost a decade, the Defense Department’s full-time equivalent of 700,000 to 800,000 civilian workers have been supplemented by the full-time equivalent of 620,000 to 770,000 for-profit contract employees …the government spends more (about $350 billion) on defense contractors than on all official federal bureaucrats ($250 billion). Finally, “employment in the tax-exempt or independent sector more than doubled between 1977 and 2012 to more than 11 million.” Approximately a third of the revenues to nonprofits (e.g., Planned Parenthood) flow in one way or another from government. When you add it all together, the numbers are shocking.

“If,” DiIulio calculates, “only one-fifth of the 11 million nonprofit sector employees owe their jobs to federal or intergovernmental grant, contract or fee funding, that’s 2.2 million workers” — slightly more than the official federal workforce. To which add the estimated 7.5 million for-profit contractors. Plus the conservative estimate of 3 million federally funded employees of state and local governments. To this total of more than 12 million add the approximately 2 million federal employees. This 14 million is about 10 million more than the estimated 4 million federal employees and contractors during the Eisenhower administration.
Eliminate the Waste

In other words, the federal budget has expanded and so have the number of people with taxpayer-financed jobs.

By the way, there’s nothing theoretically wrong with a government bureaucracy using non-profits or contractors. And that was the point I tried to make in the interview.

I don’t care whether the Department of Agriculture or Department of Education is filled with official bureaucrats or shadow bureaucrats. What I do care about, however, is that they are part of an agency that should not exist.

And the same is true for the Department of Energy, Department of Labor, Department of Transportation, Department of Veterans Affairs, and Department of Housing and Urban Development.

SOURCE

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At long last, Hillary Clinton got what she wanted — FBI Director James Comey, fired!

Another proof that Leftists have no principles or even any  consistency

At long last, Hillary Clinton and her Democrat legions got what they pleaded for last year — FBI Director James Comey, fired!

Remember when they wanted Comey out — before they didn't...

Just prior to the 2016 election, Senate Minority Leader-in-waiting Chuck Schumer (D-NY) declared, "I do not have confidence in him any longer," and he labeled Comey's letter about Hillary Clinton to Congress "appalling." House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) declared, "Maybe he's not in the right job."

Recall after Clinton lost, then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) protested, "This is not fake news. Intelligence officials are hiding connections to the Russian government. There is no question. Comey knew and deliberately kept this info a secret."

Most of the Demo rank-and-file followed in lock step. "The FBI director has no credibility," insisted Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA). Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) lamented, "My confidence in the FBI director's ability to lead this agency has been shaken."

Fact is, it was Clinton who, by proxy, finally fired Comey. Here's how:

Firing Comey has certainly been in the works since Donald Trump was elected. However, once the Democrats launched their post-election tin-hat diversionary assertions that Trump and Vladimir Putin conspired to steal the election from Clinton, and their mainstream media public relations outlets propagated that mind-numbing nonsense, if Trump had asked for Comey's resignation in January, that would have affirmed the Trump-Putin connection in the small Demo-constituency minds.

Of course, there is not even a puff of smoke regarding the "Trump-Putin connection" in the alleged Russian interference with the 2016 election — unless by "interference" they mean that Russian operatives may have hacked Clinton's illegal and insecure email server, where she was unlawfully maintaining official and classified communications to hide them from the public record — and they made some of those emails part of the public record...

For the record, if the Russians hacked Clinton's insecure communications, and those of the Democrat National Committee, it would have been with the objective of giving a hand up to her Socialist opponent Bernie Sanders, their preferred candidate. The fact that those communications were exposed would be retribution for the Clinton and DNC hacking and bushwacking of Sander's campaign.

But two things happened last week that opened Comey's exit door.

First would be Hillary Clinton's very public remarks, once again blaming Comey for her election loss: "If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president. It wasn't a perfect campaign, but I was on the way to winning until a combination of Comey's letter and Russian WikiLeaks. The reason why I believe we lost were the intervening events in the last 10 days."

Second would be that Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, to whom Comey directly reported, was just installed at the Department of Justice.

Tuesday, bolstered by Clinton's blame game, Attorney General Jeff Sessions endorsed a memorandum from Rosenstein that Comey should be fired based on his handling of the Clinton investigation last July and then again just before the election.

According to Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and longtime friend of Jim Comey, "The memorandum issued by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to explain Comey's dismissal Tuesday is well crafted and will make it very difficult for Democrats to attack President Trump's decision. Rosenstein bases the decision not merely on Comey's much discussed missteps in the Clinton e-mails investigation — viz., usurping the authority of the attorney general to close the case without prosecution; failing to avail himself of the normal procedures for raising concerns about Attorney General Lynch's conflict of interest. He goes on specifically to rebuke Comey's 'gratuitous' release of 'derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal prosecution.' That 'subject,' of course, would be Mrs. Clinton."

McCarthy notes, "This is exactly the line of attack Democrats have adopted since Clinton lost the election: Conveniently forget how ecstatic they were over Comey's confident public assessment that the case was not worth charging, and remember only his scathing public description of the evidence — even though both were improper. Significantly, Rosenstein avoids any suggestion that Comey was wrong in concluding Clinton should not be indicted; nor does he in any way imply that Comey's errors made it impossible to bring a wrongdoer to justice. ... Instead, Clinton is portrayed as a victim. This will appeal to Democrats — especially since it will keep alive the fiction that Comey, rather than Clinton herself, is responsible for the Democrats' stunning electoral defeat."

McCarthy is correct in his assessment of why Comey should have been fired — and indeed, by his then-boss Barack Obama, though that would have appeared like Obama was covering for Clinton (not that the mainstream media would have noticed). But the Demo/MSM alliance will have a field day insisting the firing was to subvert investigations into the alleged Trump-Putin connection.

Notably, in Trump's letter of dismissal to Comey, he wrote: "While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau. It is essential that we find new leadership for the FBI that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement mission."

Despite tying Comey's dismissal to Clinton's claims, the DemoDrama "Nixonian memo" protests were instant.

"This is Nixonian!” protested Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA).

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) declared that Trump fired Comey "in the midst of one of the most critical national security investigations in the history of our country — one that implicates senior officials in the Trump campaign and administration. This is nothing less than Nixonian."

Oh the horrors!

Thus begins a massive spin cycle to try and keep the Russian narrative alive.

But any Democrat or MSM talkinghead who mentions Trump and Russia in the same sentence is nothing more than a pandering dezinformatsiya propagandist. Clearly and demonstrably, while their socialist icon Barack Obama had a long history of ties to radical communist mentors and Marxist benefactors, Trump does not.

And a final note: There have been 11 FBI directors in its history. Only one other was fired — its fourth director, former federal judge William Sessions. He was fired by Bill Clinton in 1993, and it is no small irony that Comey's firing now is in part directly related to Bill Clinton's nefarious meeting with Obama's former AG, Loretta Lynch at the height of the Department of Justice investigation into Hillary Clinton.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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President two scoops

I have been having a great old chuckle about Mr Trump's latest appearance in the news. He put on a dinner for some "Time" magazine journalists but gave them lesser dinners than his own.  He had two scoops of ice-cream and a diet Coke whereas the journalists got only one scoop of ice-cream and only water to drink.

This utter triviality has attracted great attention, being reported even in Australian newspapers.  And what it says about Mr Trump has also generated a lot of opinion, with the most frequent opinion being that it shows Mr Trump as childish.  But that overlooks the obvious.

Leftists rarely listen to conservatives so tend to have strange and derogatory ideas about what makes conservatives tick. And on this occasion they have revealed that they don't even know the basics:  Conservatives DON'T believe in equality.  They think there never has been any equality and never will be and that seeking it is striving after wind.  So Mr Trump saw no problem in giving unequal serves of food and drink. It's as simple as that.

Because of the torrents of abuse that Leftists hurl at anyone they disagree with, it has become normal for conservatives to give lip service to Leftist beliefs.  It has become good manners not to emphasize inequality.  So any other President would have given equal serves of food and drink to both himself and his guests -- purely as a courtesy.  But Mr Trump is not any other President.  He is his own man and rewrites the rules all the time -- to the rage of Leftist journalists.  We have been living in a Leftist-dominated consensus about many things and Mr Trump has shone a light on that by violating the consensus almost daily. He has done a great service to us all by that -- JR

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Trump Defiles the Sanctity of Government, and It Drives the Center-Left Mad

Libertarian Jeffrey A. Tucker is pretty right in the excerpt below but he traces the idea of the State as a be-all and end-all only as far back as Von Mises. In truth it goes all the way back to G.W.F. Hegel, the founding philosopher of Leftism. Hegel mocked individual liberty as mere "caprice". The same concept of the state had a notable exponent in Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, famous for preaching: "Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato" (Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State)

This frenzy even has a name: Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Has the center-left ever been more apoplectic about a presidency? It can’t have been this nuts even during the Nixon presidency. Every day, their publications fill up with articles that are breathless to the point of hysteria about the disgrace that the Trump administration is bringing to the affairs of government. His incessant tweeting, his violations of protocol, his attacks on the press, and even the very existence of this administration has them in permanent meltdown.

Their complaints are contradictory. He is terrible because he is doing terrible things! He is terrible because he is not really doing anything! This presidency is destroying the world! This presidency is all sound and fury and nothing else!

The Why

It finally struck me why. For this crowd, all their hopes and dreams are bound up with particular political processes, outcomes, and institutions. The state is their favorite tool for all the good they aspire to do in this world. It must be protected, guarded, defended, celebrated. The illusion that the government is not a taker but a giver and the source of all good things must be maintained. The gloss of the democratic process must be constantly refurbished so that the essential sanctity of the public sector can be constantly cited as the highest calling.

The center-left has at least one hundred years of work and resources invested in the state’s health, well being, reputation, and exalted moral status. Nothing must be allowed to threaten it or take it down a peg or two. Any failures must be deemed as temporary setbacks. The slightest sign of some success must be trumpeted constantly. The population must be subjected to unrelenting homilies on the essential holiness of the public sector.

Their education told them this. Their degrees and ruling-class pedigree were hard earned. This is what has inspired them. They believe so strongly that they can make the world a better place through the managerial state that it has become their religion. It’s their very core!

Above all else, the president is supposed to represent. His duty is to reflect and broadcast this sensibility.

This View Has a Name

Writing in 1944, Ludwig von Mises wrote that the debate over the future of freedom is not only about beating back socialism, communism, fascism, interventionism, and so on. There is broader discussion to be had. The core problem is the ideology of statism, a word he took from the French term etatism. It identified a view that the state should always and in everything be the central power, organizing principle, and spiritual core of any society. It must be the final judge, the final arbiter, the center of our loyalties, the one indispensable institution because it alone is deserving of our highest devotion and ideal. It must be forever built, larger and larger, taking on ever more responsibility and taking ever more money and power from the rest of us.

The president is supposed to at least pretend to be the high priest of the statist religion. That's his job, according to this outlook.

Everything seemed to being going so well under the Obama administration, which was so earnest, so decorous, so civil. He was funny, smart, respectful of process, and sincere in his pronouncements. He ran on hope and change but governed as the person who kept hope for a new freedom and any radical change at bay.

Change in the Matrix

Trump has profoundly disturbed the balance. He overthrew the respective establishments of two parties, tore right into the legitimacy of the national press, humiliated every expert who predicted his demise, and is now stumbling around Washington like a bum in a jewelry store. He is not actually cutting back on the size of the state; he is doing something even more terrifying from the center-left point of view: he is ruining the mystery of the state, and thereby discrediting their holy institutions.

After the election, I wrote that this might be our 1989 [When the Soviets imploded]. What I meant is that major aspects of what we always thought would be true were suddenly not true any more. New possibilities have opened up. An older establishment has been discredited if not overthrown. What comes next is another matter.

Trump is not a liberator in any sense. His temperament suggests the opposite. It was he who famously said in the campaign: “The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony.” Moreover, and in many ways, the deep state has regrouped and bitten back to avoid losing power and influence in Washington.

Even so, he is everything that the center-left fears most, a person who works, despite himself, to discredit the thing they love the most. He has demoralized them beyond consoling. Now we are seeing talk of impeachment. This seems to be some people’s last hope for saving the old faith.

Unsustainable

But the truth is that, with or without Trump’s reign of chaos, the 20th-century project of enlightened and comprehensive statism is not sustainable for the long run. The welfare programs are drying up and their plans have constantly proven unviable and unworkable. We live in a world in which the miracles of the private commercial sector are all around us, while the failures of statism are everywhere present as well.

The old world of command and control just can’t last, not for the long run. Perhaps this is the role that Trump is inadvertently playing in this great drama of history. And this is precisely why his existence is driving the partisans of old-fashioned government planning to psychotropic drugs to control their anger and panic.

If you doubt it, I invite you to read the opinion columns of the mainstream press, tomorrow, the next day, the next day, the next day….

SOURCE

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What Do Leftists Celebrate?

By Walter E. Williams

May Day celebrations were held all across the fruited plain, with leftist radicals and unionists worshipping the ideals of communism. Communism is an ideology calling for government control over our lives. It was created by Karl Marx, who — along with his collaborator, Friedrich Engels — wrote a pamphlet called "Manifesto of the Communist Party." In 1867, Marx wrote the first volume of "Das Kapital." The second and third volumes were published posthumously, edited by Engels. Few people who call themselves Marxists have ever even bothered to read "Das Kapital." If one did read it, he would see that people who call themselves Marxists have little in common with Marx.

For those who see Marx as their hero, there are a few historical tidbits they might find interesting. Nathaniel Weyl, himself a former communist, dug them up for his 1979 book, "Karl Marx: Racist." For example, Marx didn't think much of Mexicans. When the United States annexed California after the Mexican War, Marx sarcastically asked, "Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?" Engels shared Marx's contempt for Mexicans, explaining: "In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States."

Marx had a racial vision that might be interesting to his modern-day black supporters. In a letter to Engels, in reference to his socialist political competitor Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx wrote: "It is now completely clear to me that he, as is proved by his cranial formation and his hair, descends from the Negroes who had joined Moses' exodus from Egypt, assuming that his mother or grandmother on the paternal side had not interbred with a nigger. Now this union of Judaism and Germanism with a basic Negro substance must produce a peculiar product. The obtrusiveness of the fellow is also nigger-like." Engels shared Marx's racial philosophy. In 1887, Paul Lafargue, who was Marx's son-in-law, was a candidate for a council seat in a Paris district that contained a zoo. Engels claimed that Lafargue had "one-eighth or one-twelfth nigger blood." In a letter to Lafargue's wife, Engels wrote, "Being in his quality as a nigger, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district."

Marx was also an anti-Semite, as seen in his essay titled "On the Jewish Question," which was published in 1844. Marx asked: "What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. ... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man — and turns them into commodities. ... The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange. ... The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general."

Despite the fact that in the 20th century alone communism was responsible for more than 100 million murders, much of the support for communism and socialism is among intellectuals. The reason they do not condemn the barbarism of communism is understandable. Dr. Richard Pipes explains: "Intellectuals, by the very nature of their professions, grant enormous attention to words and ideas. And they are attracted by socialist ideas. They find that the ideas of communism are praiseworthy and attractive; that, to them, is more important than the practice of communism. Now, Nazi ideals, on the other hand, were pure barbarism; nothing could be said in favor of them." That means leftists around the world will continue to celebrate the ideas of communism.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Has Judas been misunderstood?

Apologies if that heading seems flippant but it does ask a serious question. It asks a question that just about no-one normally asks:  What was Judas's motivation?  It is normally assumed that it was greed for the famous 30 pieces of silver.  But if Judas was as callous as that, why did he commit suicide when he saw Jesus executed?  And what are we to make of it that Jesus predicted to him what he would do?

No-one at this distance can get into his mind but there is one explanation for his behaviour that does make considerable sense.  Could it be that he was overawed by the miraculous powers Jesus had displayed and wanted Jesus to use those powers on a large scale -- perhaps even to drive the Romans out?  Did he think Jesus only needed a small push to get him to do that?

And when Jesus predicted to him what he would do, did he take that as a sign that Jesus actually WANTED him to do that? And was he heartbroken at the actual outcome of his actions?  Was his suicide born out of a realization that he had got it tragically wrong?

Broadly, that explanation seems to explain what actually happened. It fits better than actions motivated by mere greed.

A Christian correspondent of mine has attempted to go even deeper into the matter, however, so I reproduce below his thoughts as well:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I don’t think Jesus so much prophesied that Judas would betray him as told Judas to betray him.

I think Judas was spiritually immature, a material man, a little too hooked on the material and emotional pleasures of life. He didn’t understand Jesus’s teachings in a spiritual/heart/soul sense.

He believed Jesus should be some sort of worldly king or leader.  Judas had seen or heard of Jesus perform many miracles, healing people, walking on water, disappearing from the midst of a crowd trying to kill him, killing the fig tree by pointing at it.

Judas was enraptured by Jesus’s power and presence. He thought something like, “Just let them try to take my master, and see what happens. My master will cast them aside and destroy them like he did the fig tree.”

Jesus knew that Judas would betray him, but not betray him out of spite, but out of immature love, like the childish love a little boy has for his father, thinking his father is the strongest man in the world and can beat up any other man.

Judas not only thought that Jesus would defeat any attempt to capture him, but he also thought that an attempt to capture him would force Jesus to demonstrate his powers upon the authorities, and thus give Jesus the recognition Judas believed he deserved. Then Jesus would be elevated to some sort of leader, as Judas believed he should be.

Jesus knew that Judas thought like that.

And he let Judas go and betray him, even told him when to go.
Not that Jesus encouraged him, but knew that he could not be stopped from doing it because of his immature love for Jesus.

And Jesus knew betrayal would serve his cause, and he also knew the awful suffering that would come back upon poor Judas afterwards when we would realise what he had done.

And that came true. When Judas saw Jesus powerless and being tortured to death, Judas could not bear it, he realised his awful error and went and hanged himself.

He was not a betrayer so much as an immature man with a childlike love.

The lesson is that betrayal need not be consciously treacherous, it can be merely immature.

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While the Left Ignores Voter Fraud, More Evidence Mounts to Prove Them Wrong

The 2016 elections have passed, but courts still have plenty of work to do sorting out cases of voter fraud throughout the country.

Convictions have continued to roll in this spring, and The Heritage Foundation’s voter fraud database is growing longer by the day.

This week, we are adding 19 convictions, including cases from Texas, Colorado, and Illinois. These are just the latest convictions. Yet despite the overwhelming evidence, the left prefers to bury its head in the sand and refuses to acknowledge the reality of Voter fraud.

Take one example from Kansas. When Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach claimed his first conviction in a voter fraud case against a non-U.S. citizen, opponents of the conviction had no interest in dealing with the facts.

Instead, some groups on the left—like the liberal news site Think Progress—accused Kobach of “voter suppression.” Another Salon article completely dismissed Kobach without addressing the evidence he found, saying, “Someday he’ll have evidence of a problem that doesn’t exist.”

In many states, voter registration requires proof of citizenship. The left calls such policies anti-American. But is that really such a radical idea, that voters in a U.S. election would have to be U.S. citizens?

If liberals want evidence, then Heritage has it. To date, we have documented 773 confirmed criminal convictions in 492 voter fraud cases spanning 44 states.

Here are a few of the newest entries to the database:

Toni Lee Newbill, of Colorado, pleaded guilty to voting twice for her deceased father, once in the 2013 general election and again in the Republican Primary of 2016. Newbill was sentenced to 18 months of unsupervised probation, 30 hours of community service, and was ordered to pay a $500 fine and additional court fees.

Noe Olvera, of Texas, pleaded guilty to a federal bribery charge. Olvera, a postman, admitted to taking a $1,000 bribe from a paid campaign worker in exchange for a list of the names and addresses of mail-in ballot recipients on his postal route.

After a two-year investigation into local voting fraud, hidden camera footage surfaced revealing a uniformed and on-the-job Olvera “negotiating an exchange of money for mail-in voter lists.” Olvera is scheduled to be sentenced on May 25.

Steveland Kidd, of Illinois, pleaded guilty to two counts of absentee ballot abuse during a municipal election in April 2013. Kidd took possession of, and delivered, an absentee ballot to election authorities despite being legally barred from doing so.
The crime is a Class 3 felony. Kidd was sentenced to 12 days in the St. Clair County Jail and is now barred from engaging in campaign-related activities or electioneering.

Brian McDouglar, a resident of Cahokia, Illinois, was sentenced to two years in prison on charges of falsifying or tampering with an absentee ballot—a class 3 felony. McDouglar illegally took an absentee ballot from a voter he was not related to, and then placed it in the mail.

Clearly, absentee voting remains particularly vulnerable to fraud.

Simply put, in most states there are few measures in place to sufficiently verify the identity of those casting absentee ballots. Signatures can be forged—a problem that can be addressed by requiring the voter to include a photocopied valid ID along with the absentee ballot.

But more robust identification requirements would only solve part of the problem. They cannot defend against the pernicious targeting of absentee voters by pressuring, coercing, or “assisting” them in filling out their ballots in order to assure that particular candidates or causes prevail.

So long as states continue to allow the names of deceased voters and residents who have moved away to remain on their voter rolls, they are leaving the door wide open to fraudsters who are willing to take advantage of the system by voting in their names.

The Heritage Foundation published “Does Your Vote Count?,” a guide to help voters and policymakers understand the issue of election fraud. That report provides policy recommendations that states should adopt to help thwart illegal activity and ensure that the election process remains free and fair for all.

Procedures that can be implemented include requiring a photographic, government-issued ID and proof of citizenship to register to vote. In addition, participating in an interstate voter registration crosscheck program will help guarantee that people are not voting twice.

Secretaries of state should verify voter registration data with other state and federal agencies, such as the state Department of Motor Vehicles and the Social Security Administration. Such measures will offer a barrier of protection not only to eligible voters, but also to the electoral process in general.

A single fraudulent vote does more than just cancel out the vote of another American. It puts a stain on the results of the entire election.

If voters are discouraged to participate in what they perceive as a tainted process, it only empowers those who would seek to steal elections.

Instead of vilifying those who fulfill their duties to protect the electoral process, the left should embrace the facts. Voter fraud is real, and we must take seriously the task of securing the integrity of our elections.

SOURCE

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David Horowitz: 'Democrats Are Blinded By Their Hate'

Author, historian, and activist David Horowiz, a red diaper baby who turned right in the late 1970s, criticized the Democratic Party for practicing "identity politics," which he said is "racist and anti-American" and fueld by hatred.

Identity politics focuses on groups instead of individuals and principles. For instance, assuming that all women support abortion and catering to that view, or assuming that all gays back transgender bathrooms and catering to that notion is a form of identity politics -- lumping people into groups by race, gender, ethnicity, economic status, etc., and then crafting public policies that appeal to these groups.

During a May 5 interview on the Sam Malone Show, AM 1070 in Houston, Texas, Horowitz, who runs the David Horowitz Freedom Center, said, “The Democrats are blinded by their hate. It’s a party of hate. That’s all it runs on – hate and character assassination. And they lie about everything.”

Host Sam Malone then commented, “I remember when Trump was appointing people to the cabinet. Everyone was a racist, everyone was an anti-Semite, everyone was a homophobe, everyone was horrible. They had not one nice thing to say about one appointee.”

Horowitz replied, “That’s because the Democratic Party is driven by identity politics, which is racist and anti-American. They use this phrase ‘people of color.’ It’s not even English. We don’t say [garbled] of color, do we?"

"It’s an ideological term to demonize white people," said Horowitz, author of Progressive Racism.  The whole world is people of color: Maharajas in India, Islamic beheaders in Syria and Iraq. They’re all people of color."

"The only people who are not people of color, the oppressors, are white people," said Horowitz.  "It is a racist party, the Democratic Party, and America has finally gotten fed up with it.”

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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The puzzle of Matt. 5:38-41

In Matthew’s report of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,’ but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.  And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.  And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.”

Mainstream Christians essentially ignore this pretty clear instruction.  They go to war, they fight back, they sue etc.  It is only some of the smaller denominations who take it seriously: Traditional Quakers, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses etc.  I respected my Bible from an early age so, at around age 14, I became a pacifist in obedience to that scripture.  Not long after I became an atheist, I joined the army.

But the reason why the scripture is mostly ignored is that it runs against all nature.  No-one naturally behaves that way.  It is anti-instinctual.  But despite my defection from Christianity, I have always wondered if I was missing something in that teaching.  And I now think I was.

As any serious Bible student will tell you, context can be enormously important in studying scripture.  The "proof-text" approach to exegesis can easily get it wrong.  You have to study what went before and after a passage as well as the passage itself.

So what context do we need to understand Matthew 5:38ff?  Is it the commandment to love others as ourselves?  That would certainly fit as equally unrealistic. But "I came not to bring peace but a sword" (Matthew 10:34) would seem an outright contradiction.

I think the context we need is in fact the whole of the Gospels.  We have to look at the whole message of the Gospels.  And that message is that Jesus knew from the beginning he was a new and different teacher and that his difference would get him killed.  And he saw great meaning in his life and death.  And the time he spent teaching his disciples tells us that he did not see his death as the end of his message.  He wanted his teachings to survive and be passed on. And exactly that happened, of course.

But part of his foresight was that his disciples would be persecuted -- so it was important that he give them ways of surviving that.  He had to tell them to behave in a way that would protect them.  He had to give them what modern-day psychologists call "de-escalation techniques".  Above all else they had to avoid getting killed by hostile others.  And in Matthew 5:38ff he taught exactly how.  He taught his disciples to be unthreatening and even likable when confronted with hostility.  He was giving them lessons in survival against great threat -- things to do right from that point onwards, not rules for all times and all situations.  And when modern-day psychologists look at his rules they will see that his de-escalation techniques were pretty good. You can turn down hostility if you go about it the right way.

So Matthew 5:38ff was the practical aspect of his teachings.  What at first sight seems totally impractical was in fact superbly practical. The survival of Christianity attests to that. -- JR

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A totally unhinged health-care debate

by Jeff Jacoby

Democrats protest in front of a Harlem school last week before the expected visit of House Speaker Paul Ryan.
THE ANONYMOUS comment sections of many publications are notorious for their incivility and malignant smears. But in the debate over replacing Obamacare with a Republican alternative, the American Health Care Act, the online trolls and fever-swamp fanatics have been hard to distinguish from mainstream politicians, journalists, and commentators.

Listen to some what passes for political discourse these days.

"Donald Trump and Republicans just celebrated voting to let thousands of Americans die so that billionaires get tax breaks." Those are the words of a prominent US senator.
"They"— Republican House members who voted for the AHCA — "should be lined up and shot. That's not hyperbole; blood is on their hands." So fumes a professor at the Art Institute of Washington.

"I hope every GOPer who voted for Trumpcare sees a family member get long-term condition, lose insurance, and die. I want the GOPers who support this to feel the pain in their own families. . . . I want them to be tortured." Those sentiments are expressed via Twitter by a senior writer at Newsweek.
"The GOP Plan For Obamacare Could Kill More People Each Year Than Gun Homicides." That's the headline in Vox, a popular news and opinion website.

There is no shortage of additional examples, just as enraged or hysterical.

So much fury over dead Americans! So much loathing for ghouls who murdered them! A neophyte in the public square, encountering all this shrieking about blood and killing, might imagine that the nation was erupting over a military operation gone wrong, or a plot to release terrorists from supermax prisons.

But this is what discussions of public policy sound like now — even when the issues in contention are about insurance subsidies and Medicaid waivers, not war and peace. The most deranged charges are casually lobbed at political opponents, with little regard for truth. Political debate in America has grown so poisonous that it no longer comes as a shock to hear Democrats accuse Republicans of favoring changes in Obamacare because they want people to die. It isn't only nameless crazies in some unpaved alley of the internet who verbalize a desire to see conservatives "lined up and shot." Now writers for well-known newsmagazines tweet such vitriol too.

Some progressives justify the shredding of civil discourse; with Trump in the White House, they say, courtesy is a luxury the nation can't afford. "America, don't be polite in the face of demagoguery," exhorts Jessica Valenti in the Guardian. Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, is likewise unapologetic about resorting to rhetorical brutality. "This is a new time in politics where people are just blatantly lying and essentially producing policies that are going to kill people," Gallego tells CNN. "I think the old time of civility needs to go until we actually go back to the rules."

Trump's crude insults and noisome vulgarity are foul indeed. But the "old time of civility" was crumbling long before Trump entered national politics. An endless array of revolting political slanders was hurled against George W. Bush, for example — that he was a Nazi, that he ought to be assassinated, that he had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Those attacks came not just from moonbats on the far-left fringe, but from respectable, mainstream pundits and politicians.

The collapse of respectful discourse in public life began decades ago. And if for many years it was a more common phenomenon on the left, too many on the right have learned to traffic in wild accusations and hateful talking points as well.

It was a Republican, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who told senior citizens back in 2009 that if the Affordable Care Act passed, "you're going to die soon." It was Representative Michele Bachmann, another Republican, who railed on the House floor that Obamacare "literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens." It was Sarah Palin, a GOP governor and vice-presidential nominee, who warned that under the ACA, the sick and the elderly would "have to stand in front of Obama's 'Death Panel'" and have bureaucrats decide if they live or die.

If, as a liberal, you were disgusted when Republicans resorted to such toxic arguments then, you should be horrified to hear your fellow liberals resort to them now. Conversely, if you're a mainstream conservative sickened at the way Democrats now play the "death" card, did you have the same objection when the GOP was doing so during the Obama years?

There were legitimate arguments to be made for and against enacting Obamacare; there are legitimate arguments to be made for and against replacing it. There are decent ways to argue that a given bill may have grave unintended consequences.

But it is wholly illegitimate and indecent to portray those who disagree with your view as eager champions of death and suffering. It is vile beyond words to avidly wish for them to be "lined up and shot" or to "be tortured" by the death of loved ones. Such fury should be deployed against the real monsters who threaten us — not against fellow Americans guilty of only a different political outlook. If we have forgotten how to tell the difference, we are in bigger trouble than we know.

SOURCE

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Blonde in the Belly of the Beast

I like political arguments to be in writing so I rarely put up political videos.  But the young woman below is a "must" of an exception.  Just a sampling of her videos below.  Immediately below, she sees two of the layers of Leftism. I divide her group A into the purely emotional/feel good ones, and the image/status focused ones.



But she is a bit brutal. Considering what she suggests as a solution I am surprised this video of hers below has been allowed to remain on youtube.



She makes a point below that few will make. Many people side with  those who will do them most harm. Most lefties are basically cowards who lack individual initiative and principles. Therefore they will side with those who will ultimately do them most harm, not with those who are right, or who are good, or by those who would protect them and are their friends.



She has a website here with much more.  Incidentally, the "Belly of the Beast" appears to be Seattle.

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ABC Cancels hate-filled ‘Real O’Neals’

The show was bigoted, vile and unfunny. The characters were one-dimensional, the gags were as obvious as they were offensive, and the entire thing never rose above predictable anti-Catholic, pro-gay agitprop. The ratings were bad and even the critics didn’t care for it. So of course ABC went ahead with development and then gave The Real O’Neals a second season.

But there won’t be a third. According to Deadline Hollywood, “ABC has canceled sophomore [sophomoric is more like it] comedy The Real O’Neals. The family comedy showed enough promise in its midseason launch last spring to get a second season but has delivered disappointing ratings in its second year.”

Supposedly based loosely on the youth of noted anti-bullying bully, militant gay activist, bigot and sex columnist Dan Savage, The Real O’Neals centered on an Irish Catholic family and their gay teenage son. Far from being a gentle send-up, the sitcom was as nasty and contemptuous of traditional family life and religion as Savage is himself. In the first episode MRC counted 93 separate visual or verbal reminders that the show targeted Catholics, including a statue of the Blessed Virgin on the toilet back to remind the O’Neal boys to “put the seat down.”

The characters were mired in hypocrisy and thoughtless, superstitious piety. The parents were splitting up, the young teen daughter stole from the poor box and the parish priest cried poverty but drove a Lexus. Episodes discussed gay porn, chronic masturbation, underage boys using gay dating apps to pick up older men, a wedding-like divorce ceremony, God being a woman and endless derision for the Church, it’s teachings and its people.

After ABC ordered the pilot for The Real O’Neals in 2015, MRC organized a protest, along with other conservative and religious organizations. The show lost at least one sponsor during its brief run thanks to the efforts of The Catholic League. But the show collapsed under the weight of its own hatred.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Does Christ influence Leftists too?

It's unlikely that he has much effect on their behaviour but he clearly has a lot of influence on their arguments.  They work within a Christian value system.  Their devotion to political correctness, for instance, is based on an avowed aim not to hurt the feelings of minorities.  And being kind to others, in particular being kind to the disadvantaged, is a major Christian message:  "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:5).

The Left don't of course see themselves as preaching Christian values.  They think they are just appealing to what most people would agree with.  They don't look at WHERE those values come from.  And they do of course come from hundreds of years of Christian culture. Many people are no longer Christian but the values their culture gives them are of Christian origin.

A good way of seeing that is to look at our own culture before the arrival of Christianity.  There are only a few literary remnants of it left but one that we do have is revealing:  Beowulf, an epic Anglo-Saxon poem.  It takes you into a quite alien world but it is the world of the people from whom we are mostly descended.  It is unlikely that there is much genetic difference between us and them.

In Beowulf, the prime virtue is heroism in battle.  And the King is not a dictator who is always telling us how to behave.  He is simply a "giver of rings" -- someone who gives formal recognition to heroism. He does NOT reward people for being kind to the poor and lowly. Physical strength and prowess is the dominant value in that world. The meek are certainly not blessed there.  Quite to the contrary.

So the Left do pay homage to Christian values, albeit indirectly. They actually PROPAGATE Christian values, while not realizing that they are doing that.  They really do preach: "Blessed are the meek".

A Christian correspondent has further thoughts on the matter which I append below:

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Even those “spiritual” lefties who despise Christianity and like to say “I’m spiritual not religious”, in the same breath call themselves humanitarians, egalitarians, etc., thus showing they do have quasi-religious attitudes. And they all hold Christianity as their reference point from which they have conjured up their leftist alternative to Christianity, and they use all the Christian concepts like non-judgemental, caring, so they are Christianised in the sense that they are what they are because of Christianity.

They would not have their ideas if not for Jesus teaching them, and themselves perverting them into their alternative, and they have made hollow poor replicas.

Leftism/lefties are the anti-Christs that John talks about that came into the world with Jesus’s message. John said that “They went out from us but are not of us.” (1 John 2:19).  John predicted the rise of Anti-Christs: People focused on Christ but enemies of him.

Every teacher of anything cannot help but also teach the opposite concept and those with dark hearts  will get the opposite idea automatically without the teacher saying it, just because that is the way they are.

Teaching something good makes bad people worse. Just like giving cognitive behavioural therapy to psychopaths just makes them better manipulators of others. In that same way Jesus created  leftism, or rather, he brought it here as the opposite concept to his own teachings.

He certainly made leftism as extreme, cunning and powerful as it is in the West today because he divided and widened our hearts with his teachings, gave each a wider potential for good and evil, he gave our hearts their extreme left-right potential, as Socrates did our minds. That is the sword that divides us that Jesus mentioned.

Not all westerners are Christian, but all westerners are Christianised, because the wide left-right expanse of the western heart is the result of Christianity. Jesus knew what he was creating in this world. His teachings are full of advice and examples of how to differentiate between his teachings and leftism.

He used the Lefties/hypocrites of his time [e.g. the Pharisees] as examples of what not to be like, (and they were only dumb and mild ones compared to the cunning treacherous ones of today) knowing that with his teachings on love that he was widening the left-right potential of human hearts and that the future lefties would be even more left, cunning and treacherous than what they were then.  He was teaching greater love/goodness than existed at that time, and that would in turn be matched in extent on the left, for the more love/goodness existed in the world, the more love/goodness they would have to learn to fake, like a see-saw getting longer on one side must get longer on the other side to stay level.  

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Obama’s Secretary of Defense Debunks The Russian Conspiracy

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is casting doubt on the claim that former national security adviser Michael Flynn opened himself up to blackmail by the Russian government by making misleading statements about his phone calls with Russia’s ambassador.

“In all honesty, I think it’s kind of a stretch,” Gates said Sunday when asked about the Flynn blackmail theory during an interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

The claim that Flynn was a prime blackmail target of the Kremlin was made last week by former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates.

Yates testified at a Senate hearing that she warned White House general counsel Donald McGahn about Flynn and his contacts with the ambassador, Sergey Kislyak. Flynn misled Vice President Mike Pence about the calls by claiming that he and Kislyak did not discuss sanctions.

SOURCE

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Leftist Ideology's Greatest Threat: Guilt-Free Americans

"In the last 50 years of culture wars in America, there has been no stronger weapon than guilt. It is the Left's great hammer of progress."—Mark Bauerlein, Professor of English at Emory University

In an insightful column for American Greatness, Bauerlein nails the Left's fundamental reason for despising Donald Trump. "He has no white guilt. He doesn't feel any male guilt, either, or American guilt or Christian guilt," Bauerlein explains. "He talks about the United States with uncritical approval — 'America First'— and that's a thought crime in the eyes of liberals."

That particular thought crime roils leftists most, because it is the antithesis of Barack Obama's eight-year effort to "fundamentally transform the United States of America" into a nation where collective guilt would supplant American exceptionalism as society's prevailing ethos. "Donald Trump would never refer to America as beset by the original sin of racism, as Barack Obama did frequently, and that makes him worse than a conservative," Bauerlein writes. "President Trump is a bigot."

Is there a drum the Left beats louder than the assertion America is an inherently racist nation? For leftist demagogues, history is more about the failure of "dead white Europeans," a.k.a. the Founding Fathers, to eliminate slavery when it was impossible to do so, than it is about America being one of the first nations to end the worldwide-accepted practice, enduring a bloody war that cost 600,000 lives.

Moreover, more than 150 years after the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, Americans must remain guilty. Thus Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson, who accused Trump of having a "vast ignorance of black life," advocates the establishment of Individual Reparations Accounts, whereby white Americans who never practiced slavery compensate black Americans who never experienced it. In New Orleans, history itself is being eliminated, as workers remove Confederate monuments that "offend" progressive sensibilities.

All while black students demand — and receive — segregated housing accommodations on campuses across the nation.

Trump buys none of it. "When during the course of the campaign Mr. Trump refused to accept any guilt, the frustration and disbelief among the Democrats and the media were obvious," Bauerlein notes.

That's hardly surprising. Guilt — brilliantly sold as "political correctness" to make it more palatable for an unsuspecting public — has enjoyed a long and prosperous run. One that allowed leftists to dismiss every challenge to their agenda with epithets designed to simultaneously induce guilt and end debate. Americans opposed to open borders, or sanctuary cities? Xenophobes. Americans who eschew the LGBT agenda? Trans- and homophobic. Americans who question "refugees" from terror-torn nations being granted asylum? Islamophobic. And so on and so forth.

"If you can persuade an opponent that he's wrong about a political issue, you can win the day's debate," Bauerlein explains. "But if you can make him feel guilty about his opinion, you've got him on the defensive forever."

In two sentences the professor has described an eternally defensive GOP that controls Congress, the White House, and a plethora of legislative seats nationwide, yet still allows the Left to frame the agenda.

This dynamic of leftist guilt-mongering and GOP acquiescence to it set the stage for a man who "was going to shake things up, drain the swamp, expose that there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the parties, and if he offended his adversaries along the way, well, so be it," writes Washington Beacon columnist Matthew Continetti, who nonetheless believes Trump "doesn't face crises so much as manufacture them."

No doubt. But for millions of Americans those crises, and the character flaws that engender them, pale in comparison to Trump's ability to put the American Left on the defensive.

Instead of "bitter clinging" Americans in "flyover country" being forced to defend themselves, the focus shifted to bi-coastal progressive elitists with flimsy explanations regarding why "net" gains for the nation as a whole were more important than economically devastated Americans left behind by an emerging New World Order — one that disproportionately benefited the globalist-minded "progressive" elitists who championed it.

"Progressives" who couldn't imagine their systematic contempt for "deplorable" Americans would ultimately cost them the election.

"Progressives" who still don't get it. According to a PPRI-Atlantic survey, Trump voters were motivated by fears of "cultural displacement," a rationalization rightly dismissed by National Review columnist Michael Brendan Dougherty as "one of the latest attempts to assure liberals and leftists that Trump supporters are unsympathetic."

What's really wearing out millions of Americans is $20 trillion of national debt, out-of-control agencies like the NSA, DOJ, FBI, EPA and IRS, a de facto invasion by millions of illegal aliens, public schools and universities that resemble indoctrination centers, and a mainstream media virtually indistinguishable from George Orwell's Ministry of Truth.

And maybe, just maybe, the real reason Trump prevailed was an electorate faced with a binary choice decided to go with a highly problematic candidate instead of a thoroughly corrupt one — or the great unknown rather than an utterly untenable status quo.

"Donald Trump's success, then, amounts to a calamitous disarmament of the Left," Bauerlein concludes. "Not his occupation of the White House, but his termination of the game of guilt — for now, at least. Since the election, progressives have only amplified the charges. More and more, the protests look less like political speech and more like tantrums."

That's because they are tantrums, thrown by people who never imagined their "immutable truths" would be unmasked as the self-serving, guilt-inducing opinions they truly are. Moreover, leftists may be digging a much deeper hole than they realize: Trump's dismissal of leftist guilt games is hugely problematic for them. Millions of Americans dismissing a burden they never should have carried around in the first place?

For America's "social justice warriors," that's a calamitous disarmament of potentially catastrophic proportions.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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