'Green chemistry' is California's new job-killer Hugh Hewitt Columnists Washington Examiner
By: Hugh Hewitt
"Green chemistry" isn't just a slogan. It is a full employment concept for government regulators and private-sector lawyers that will have the effect of costing American business billions even as it produces minimal benefits for consumers. Just like "global warming" and "clean energy," "green chemistry" is a phrase containing worlds within it, almost all of them dangerous or downright deadly to market-driven innovation and productivity. We are entering the third decade of the "green chemistry" movement, and a handy guide to its history is in Katharine Sanderson's article in the Jan. 6 issue of Nature.
The would-be regulators of all chemistry have not had an easy time of it these past 20 years. Anderson quotes a proponent of the movement as telling her that "a mention of green chemistry in a gathering of chemists can still provoke sighs and eye-rolling."
Among government bureaucrats eager to expand their regulatory reach, however, that mention is likely to produce clasped and rubbing hands, while manufacturing executives reach for the aspirin and their lawyers reach for the time sheets. "Green chemistry" got a toehold in California and from there will climb its way on to the backs of the rest of America.
Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a pair of bills into law in September 2008 that together are known as California's "Green Chemistry Initiative." In June of last year, California's Department of Toxic Substances Control released a draft set of regulations that according to the department "sets forth a process for the design of safer products," while creating "a systematic, science-based process to evaluate chemicals of concern in products." The regulations mandated that "manufacturers seek safer alternatives to toxic chemicals in their products, and create tough governmental responses for lack of compliance."
The proposed rules were then massaged and reworked, and when the 92-page final set of commands was issued in November, the "green community" was disappointed with the "green initiative," and demanded a rewrite with tougher requirements.
In late December, Team Arnold caved and postponed issuance of the new regs, saying in a letter to the key legislator, California Assemblyman Mike Feuer, that the department "has agreed to take additional time to be responsive to the concerns raised and revisit the proposed regulations."
Now the new governor, Jerry Brown, will superintend the rules that almost certainly will mandate testing and labeling changes on tens of thousands of products and almost certainly trigger a new generation of product recalls.
"Take the most onerous regulatory regimes you have heard of," Liz McNulty, one of my law partners, told me, "like those associated with the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act or the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act.
"Take whatever you think is the worst regulatory regime out there, and expand it exponentially," she continued, "and then you get a glimpse of what is coming to California."
McNulty is already a guru on California's costly Proposition 65, which spawned a million useless warning signs around the state, but now her office light is on late figuring out what California will do next to manufacturers.
With taxes already sky-high and the regulatory environment among the worst in the nation, some manufacturers will simply join the exodus of job creators to Texas and elsewhere. But the long arm of California's regulatory zealots won't let them go at the state border -- not if their products are going to circulate in the Golden State.
For a state with 12 percent unemployment, the zeal for new job-killing laws and rules seems insane, but proponents have told themselves the new dictates are "technology-forcing" and thus job creators.
California has had two decades of such "job creators," and the consequences are obvious. A dead economy is apparently also a "green economy."
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/01/green-chemistry-californias-new-job-killer#ixzz1DUoDoeGb
Friday, February 11, 2011
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Was 2010 the Warmest Year Ever?
Was 2010 the Warmest Year Ever? by John Hinderacker
It is widely being reported that, based on surface-temperature data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 2010 was tied for the warmest year on record. What is not so widely reported is that those surface temperature data have been so shamelessly manipulated by climate alarmists that they are entirely unreliable. For a short course in one of the great scientific scandals of all time, go here.
There are a number of things wrong with the data produced by NOAA and NASA, but one of the most basic involves the urban heat island effect. It it commonly understood that cities are warmer than the surrounding countryside; you see that every day in weather reports. Thus, weather stations located in urban areas, as many of them are, tend to show increasing temperatures as urbanization and changing land use make the immediate area of the weather station warmer. One study indicated that even a tiny village of 1,000 people can warm temperatures by up to 3.8 degrees F.
NOAA and NASA used to acknowledge the urban heat island effect and try to correct for it, but that didn't produce the sort of alarming temperature increases that warmists are looking for. This is how NOAA depicted US temperatures from 1880 to 1999, as posted on NASA's web site in 1999; click to enlarge:
James Hansen, the head of NASA's climate unit and one of the worst of the alarmists, said truthfully in 1999:
The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934.
That didn't get the warmists where they were trying to go, so they have now changed the data by eliminating or drastically reducing the urban heat island effect. NASA now shows very different data for the period 1880-1999 from what it published in 1999. This animated GIF shows how the alarmists changed their own data to create the false impression of a climate crisis: (Use link below to see the animated difference in the 2 graphs)
You probably assume that NOAA and NASA have made their raw data available to independent researchers, along with explanations of the adjustments they have made. But no--those agencies have resisted Freedom of Information Act requests for the original, raw data. One of the most important things the new Congress can do is to force these government agencies to level with the American people and explain the manipulations to which they have been subjecting weather data for years.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/01/028246.php
It is widely being reported that, based on surface-temperature data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 2010 was tied for the warmest year on record. What is not so widely reported is that those surface temperature data have been so shamelessly manipulated by climate alarmists that they are entirely unreliable. For a short course in one of the great scientific scandals of all time, go here.
There are a number of things wrong with the data produced by NOAA and NASA, but one of the most basic involves the urban heat island effect. It it commonly understood that cities are warmer than the surrounding countryside; you see that every day in weather reports. Thus, weather stations located in urban areas, as many of them are, tend to show increasing temperatures as urbanization and changing land use make the immediate area of the weather station warmer. One study indicated that even a tiny village of 1,000 people can warm temperatures by up to 3.8 degrees F.
NOAA and NASA used to acknowledge the urban heat island effect and try to correct for it, but that didn't produce the sort of alarming temperature increases that warmists are looking for. This is how NOAA depicted US temperatures from 1880 to 1999, as posted on NASA's web site in 1999; click to enlarge:
James Hansen, the head of NASA's climate unit and one of the worst of the alarmists, said truthfully in 1999:
The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934.
That didn't get the warmists where they were trying to go, so they have now changed the data by eliminating or drastically reducing the urban heat island effect. NASA now shows very different data for the period 1880-1999 from what it published in 1999. This animated GIF shows how the alarmists changed their own data to create the false impression of a climate crisis: (Use link below to see the animated difference in the 2 graphs)
You probably assume that NOAA and NASA have made their raw data available to independent researchers, along with explanations of the adjustments they have made. But no--those agencies have resisted Freedom of Information Act requests for the original, raw data. One of the most important things the new Congress can do is to force these government agencies to level with the American people and explain the manipulations to which they have been subjecting weather data for years.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/01/028246.php
Civility Update: House Democrats 'Target' 19 Vulnerable Republicans
Civility Update: House Democrats 'Target' 19 Vulnerable Republicans
Civility Update: House Democrats 'Target' 19 Vulnerable Republicans By Noel Sheppard/Newsbusters
Within minutes of the tragic shootings in Tucson, the Left and their media minions were sure that violent rhetoric and gun imagery were responsible for inciting Jared Lee Loughner to that heinous act.
Now, just 23 days since that horrible event and after all kinds of calls for a toning down of such rhetoric, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has issued a press release entitled "DCCC Launches 'Drive to 25' Ad & Grassroots Campaign in Targeted Districts" (image courtesy World Net Daily:
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) today announced it is launching a paid advertising and grassroots campaign to hold 19 vulnerable House Republicans accountable for choosing a partisan plan that will cost jobs and make America less competitive over the President’s common sense solutions to create jobs and get the economy moving again. As part of the “Drive to 25,” the DCCC will be running radio ads, web ads, automated phone calls, live phone calls, and e-mails in targeted districts throughout the week.
The Washington Post reported the news at its website Monday with the headline, "DCCC Targets 19 With First Media Offensive":
In the first major media salvo of its effort to reclaim the House in 2012, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is launching an advertising campaign against 19 targeted Republican incumbents.
Hmmm. "Targeted Republican incumbents."
I guess it's okay to do this 23 days after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was shot, but it was completely inappropriate for Sarah Palin to do virtually the exact same thing months before last year's midterm elections.
But the Post wasn't done, for another headline at its website Monday read "Democrats' Ad Campaign Targets Hurt":
The 2010 elections happened just three months ago, but the 2012 ad battle is already heating up -- and Rep. Robert Hurt (R-Va.) is right in the middle.
The Post wasn't the only newspaper missing the hypocrisy Monday:
•Dems train early gun on Heck - Las Vegas Review-Journal
•Democrats' ad targets Cravaack - Minneapolis Star Tribune
•DCCC targets Rep. Joe Heck in campaign to regain House - Las Vegas Sun
•Election barely over, Dems target Reichert - Seattle Post Intelligencer
•Dems target Allen West in ad campaign - Sun Sentinel
Well, I guess this kind of rhetoric is only violent when aimed at Democrats.
Go figure.
Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2011/01/31/civility-update-house-democrats-target-19-republicans#ixzz1D9GtM4ji
Civility Update: House Democrats 'Target' 19 Vulnerable Republicans By Noel Sheppard/Newsbusters
Within minutes of the tragic shootings in Tucson, the Left and their media minions were sure that violent rhetoric and gun imagery were responsible for inciting Jared Lee Loughner to that heinous act.
Now, just 23 days since that horrible event and after all kinds of calls for a toning down of such rhetoric, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has issued a press release entitled "DCCC Launches 'Drive to 25' Ad & Grassroots Campaign in Targeted Districts" (image courtesy World Net Daily:
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) today announced it is launching a paid advertising and grassroots campaign to hold 19 vulnerable House Republicans accountable for choosing a partisan plan that will cost jobs and make America less competitive over the President’s common sense solutions to create jobs and get the economy moving again. As part of the “Drive to 25,” the DCCC will be running radio ads, web ads, automated phone calls, live phone calls, and e-mails in targeted districts throughout the week.
The Washington Post reported the news at its website Monday with the headline, "DCCC Targets 19 With First Media Offensive":
In the first major media salvo of its effort to reclaim the House in 2012, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is launching an advertising campaign against 19 targeted Republican incumbents.
Hmmm. "Targeted Republican incumbents."
I guess it's okay to do this 23 days after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was shot, but it was completely inappropriate for Sarah Palin to do virtually the exact same thing months before last year's midterm elections.
But the Post wasn't done, for another headline at its website Monday read "Democrats' Ad Campaign Targets Hurt":
The 2010 elections happened just three months ago, but the 2012 ad battle is already heating up -- and Rep. Robert Hurt (R-Va.) is right in the middle.
The Post wasn't the only newspaper missing the hypocrisy Monday:
•Dems train early gun on Heck - Las Vegas Review-Journal
•Democrats' ad targets Cravaack - Minneapolis Star Tribune
•DCCC targets Rep. Joe Heck in campaign to regain House - Las Vegas Sun
•Election barely over, Dems target Reichert - Seattle Post Intelligencer
•Dems target Allen West in ad campaign - Sun Sentinel
Well, I guess this kind of rhetoric is only violent when aimed at Democrats.
Go figure.
Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2011/01/31/civility-update-house-democrats-target-19-republicans#ixzz1D9GtM4ji
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Poll: 71% of Americans want the GOP to listen to the tea party
Poll: 71% of Americans want the GOP to listen to the tea party by Laura Ingraham Staff
Gallup reports:
About 7 in 10 national adults, including 88% of Republicans, say it is important that Republican leaders in Congress take the Tea Party movement's positions and objectives into account as they address the nation's problems. Among Republicans, 53% rate this "very important."
These results are from a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted Jan. 14-16, prior to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address.
Although few Democrats (6%) are supporters of the Tea Party or even have a favorable view of it (11%), more than half say it is important that the Republican Party take the Tea Party's positions into account. Why this is the case is unclear, although Democrats may simply feel that the opposing party should pay attention to all of its constituencies.
http://www.lauraingraham.com/b/Poll:-71-of-Americans-want-the-GOP-to-listen-to-the-tea-party/-638055495507191483.html
http://www.gallup.com/poll/145838/Americans-Believe-GOP-Consider-Tea-Party-Ideas.aspx
Gallup reports:
About 7 in 10 national adults, including 88% of Republicans, say it is important that Republican leaders in Congress take the Tea Party movement's positions and objectives into account as they address the nation's problems. Among Republicans, 53% rate this "very important."
These results are from a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted Jan. 14-16, prior to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address.
Although few Democrats (6%) are supporters of the Tea Party or even have a favorable view of it (11%), more than half say it is important that the Republican Party take the Tea Party's positions into account. Why this is the case is unclear, although Democrats may simply feel that the opposing party should pay attention to all of its constituencies.
http://www.lauraingraham.com/b/Poll:-71-of-Americans-want-the-GOP-to-listen-to-the-tea-party/-638055495507191483.html
http://www.gallup.com/poll/145838/Americans-Believe-GOP-Consider-Tea-Party-Ideas.aspx
Left wing climate of hate and assassination
Left wing climate of hate and assassination Jack Cashill
Successful propaganda is composed of equal parts deception and suppression, and the apparatchiks in the mainstream media are much better at the latter.
They may have erred in pushing the Arizona assassination attempt beyond its ideological limits last week, but they succeeded brilliantly a few months earlier in suppressing news of a nearly lethal attempt by a genuine leftist.
In September 2010 Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon was scheduled to speak at Penn Valley Community College in Kansas City.
At some point, wearing black clothes and a bullet-proof vest, 22 year-old Casey Brezik bolted out of a classroom, knife in hand, and slashed the throat of a dean. As he would later admit, he confused the dean with Nixon.
The story never left Kansas City. It is not hard to understand why. Knives lack the political sex appeal of guns, and even Keith Olbermann would have had a hard time turning Brezik into a Tea Partier.
Indeed, Brezik seems to have inhaled just about every noxious vapor in the left-wing miasma: environmental extremism, radical Islam, anti-capitalism, anti-Zionism and Christophobia, among others.
In his "About Me" box on Facebook, Brezik listed as his favorite quotation one from progressive poster boy, Che Guevara. The quote begins "Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism" and gets more belligerent from there.
On his wall postings, Brezik ranted, "How are we the radical(s) (left) to confront the NEW RIGHT, if we avoid confrontation all together?"
As good as his word, Brezik's marched on Toronto in June 2010 to protest the G20 Summit, where he was arrested, charged, and deported. "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED," he boasted.
Like many on the left, Brezik seemed to have found religion.
In reference to an article about Terry Jones and his proposed Quran burning, Brezik posted on the day before his planned assault, "This is now a Holy war. Scriptures have been desecrated. War U can't handle. Make a choice and quick."
No doubt, Brezik is something of a whack job, but the various rages that he acquired -culminating in Sudden Jihadi Syndrome - are those to which our students are exposed on a daily basis. For the last century or more, it is the progressive fever swamps that have nurtured most of the world's hate and virtually all of its violence, including, paradoxically, radical Islam.
As Casey Berzik cried out with multicultural flair, "El Futuro es La REVOLUCION!" But if an assassin strikes in a media vacuum, and no one hears him, can there ever be a revolution?
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/01/left_wing_climate_of_hate_and.html
Successful propaganda is composed of equal parts deception and suppression, and the apparatchiks in the mainstream media are much better at the latter.
They may have erred in pushing the Arizona assassination attempt beyond its ideological limits last week, but they succeeded brilliantly a few months earlier in suppressing news of a nearly lethal attempt by a genuine leftist.
In September 2010 Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon was scheduled to speak at Penn Valley Community College in Kansas City.
At some point, wearing black clothes and a bullet-proof vest, 22 year-old Casey Brezik bolted out of a classroom, knife in hand, and slashed the throat of a dean. As he would later admit, he confused the dean with Nixon.
The story never left Kansas City. It is not hard to understand why. Knives lack the political sex appeal of guns, and even Keith Olbermann would have had a hard time turning Brezik into a Tea Partier.
Indeed, Brezik seems to have inhaled just about every noxious vapor in the left-wing miasma: environmental extremism, radical Islam, anti-capitalism, anti-Zionism and Christophobia, among others.
In his "About Me" box on Facebook, Brezik listed as his favorite quotation one from progressive poster boy, Che Guevara. The quote begins "Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism" and gets more belligerent from there.
On his wall postings, Brezik ranted, "How are we the radical(s) (left) to confront the NEW RIGHT, if we avoid confrontation all together?"
As good as his word, Brezik's marched on Toronto in June 2010 to protest the G20 Summit, where he was arrested, charged, and deported. "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED," he boasted.
Like many on the left, Brezik seemed to have found religion.
In reference to an article about Terry Jones and his proposed Quran burning, Brezik posted on the day before his planned assault, "This is now a Holy war. Scriptures have been desecrated. War U can't handle. Make a choice and quick."
No doubt, Brezik is something of a whack job, but the various rages that he acquired -culminating in Sudden Jihadi Syndrome - are those to which our students are exposed on a daily basis. For the last century or more, it is the progressive fever swamps that have nurtured most of the world's hate and virtually all of its violence, including, paradoxically, radical Islam.
As Casey Berzik cried out with multicultural flair, "El Futuro es La REVOLUCION!" But if an assassin strikes in a media vacuum, and no one hears him, can there ever be a revolution?
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/01/left_wing_climate_of_hate_and.html
Obama uttering more unbelievable blather
Samuelson: Obama's empty evasion by Laura Ingraham/Staff
Robert Samuelson writes:
It was a teachable moment -- and Barack Obama didn't teach. Unless public opinion changes, we won't end our budget deadlock. As is well-known, Americans want budget deficits curbed. In a Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 54 percent urge Congress and the president to "act quickly" and 57 percent prefer spending cuts to tax increases. But there's little support for cuts in Social Security (64 percent opposed), Medicare (56 percent) and Medicaid (47 percent), approaching half of federal spending. The State of the Union gave Obama the opportunity to confront the contradictions and educate Americans in the unpleasant realities of uncontrolled government. He declined.
What we got were empty platitudes. We won't be "buried under a mountain of debt," Obama declared. Heck, we're already buried. We will "win the future." Not by deluding ourselves, we won't. Americans think deficits are someone else's problem that can be cured by taxing the rich (say liberals) or ending wasteful spending (conservatives). Obama indulged these fantasies.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/01/27/obamas_empty_evasion.html
http://www.lauraingraham.com/b/Samuelson:-Obamas-empty-evasion/440884851417710697.html
Robert Samuelson writes:
It was a teachable moment -- and Barack Obama didn't teach. Unless public opinion changes, we won't end our budget deadlock. As is well-known, Americans want budget deficits curbed. In a Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 54 percent urge Congress and the president to "act quickly" and 57 percent prefer spending cuts to tax increases. But there's little support for cuts in Social Security (64 percent opposed), Medicare (56 percent) and Medicaid (47 percent), approaching half of federal spending. The State of the Union gave Obama the opportunity to confront the contradictions and educate Americans in the unpleasant realities of uncontrolled government. He declined.
What we got were empty platitudes. We won't be "buried under a mountain of debt," Obama declared. Heck, we're already buried. We will "win the future." Not by deluding ourselves, we won't. Americans think deficits are someone else's problem that can be cured by taxing the rich (say liberals) or ending wasteful spending (conservatives). Obama indulged these fantasies.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/01/27/obamas_empty_evasion.html
http://www.lauraingraham.com/b/Samuelson:-Obamas-empty-evasion/440884851417710697.html
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Labor Force Participation Plunges To Fresh 26 Year Low
Labor Force Participation Plunges To Fresh 26 Year Low by Tyler Durden
At 64.2%, the labor force participation rate (as a percentage of the total civilian noninstitutional population) is now at a fresh 26 year low, the lowest since March 1984, and is the only reason why the unemployment rate dropped to 9% (labor force declined from 153,690 to 153,186). Those not in the Labor Force has increased from 83.9 million to 86.2 million, or 2.2 million in one year! As for the numerator in the fraction, the number of unemployed, it has plunged from 15 million to 13.9 million in two months! The only reason for this is due to the increasing disenchantment of those who completely fall off the BLS rolls and no longer even try to look for a job. Lastly, we won't even show what the labor force is as a percentage of total population. It is a vertical plunge.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/labor-force-participations-plunges-fresh-26-year-low
At 64.2%, the labor force participation rate (as a percentage of the total civilian noninstitutional population) is now at a fresh 26 year low, the lowest since March 1984, and is the only reason why the unemployment rate dropped to 9% (labor force declined from 153,690 to 153,186). Those not in the Labor Force has increased from 83.9 million to 86.2 million, or 2.2 million in one year! As for the numerator in the fraction, the number of unemployed, it has plunged from 15 million to 13.9 million in two months! The only reason for this is due to the increasing disenchantment of those who completely fall off the BLS rolls and no longer even try to look for a job. Lastly, we won't even show what the labor force is as a percentage of total population. It is a vertical plunge.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/labor-force-participations-plunges-fresh-26-year-low
New CBO Numbers Re-Confirm that Balancing the Budget Is Simple with Modest Fiscal Restraint
New CBO Numbers Re-Confirm that Balancing the Budget Is Simple with Modest Fiscal Restraint
Posted by Daniel J. Mitchell
Many of the politicians in Washington, including President Obama during his State of the Union address, piously tell us that there is no way to balance the budget without tax increases. Trying to get rid of red ink without higher taxes, they tell us, would require “savage” and “draconian” budget cuts.
I would like to slash the budget and free up resources for private-sector growth, so that sounds good to me. But what’s the truth?
The Congressional Budget Office has just released its 10-year projections for the budget, so I crunched the numbers to determine what it would take to balance the budget without tax hikes. Much to nobody’s surprise, the politicians are not telling the truth.
The chart below shows that revenues are expected to grow (because of factors such as inflation, more population, and economic expansion) by more than 7 percent each year. Balancing the budget is simple so long as politicians increase spending at a slower rate. If they freeze the budget, we almost balance the budget by 2017. If federal spending is capped so it grows 1 percent each year, the budget is balanced in 2019. And if the crowd in Washington can limit spending growth to about 2 percent each year, red ink almost disappears in just 10 years.
These numbers, incidentally, assume that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are made permanent (they are now scheduled to expire in two years). They also assume that the AMT is adjusted for inflation, so the chart shows that we can balance the budget without any increase in the tax burden.
I did these calculations last year, and found the same results. And I also examined how we balanced the budget in the 1990s and found that spending restraint was the key. The combination of a GOP Congress and Bill Clinton in the White House led to a four-year period of government spending growing by an average of just 2.9 percent each year.
We also have international evidence showing that spending restraint – not higher taxes – is the key to balancing the budget. New Zealand got rid of a big budget deficit in the 1990s with a five-year spending freeze. Canada also got rid of red ink that decade with a five-year period where spending grew by an average of only 1 percent per year. And Ireland slashed its deficit in the late 1980s by 10 percentage points of GDP with a four-year spending freeze.
No wonder international bureaucracies such as the International Monetary fund and European Central Bank are producing research showing that spending discipline is the right approach.
This video provides all the details.
(The source is essential for all links) http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/new-cbo-numbers-re-confirm-that-balancing-the-budget-is-simple-with-modest-fiscal-restraint/
Posted by Daniel J. Mitchell
Many of the politicians in Washington, including President Obama during his State of the Union address, piously tell us that there is no way to balance the budget without tax increases. Trying to get rid of red ink without higher taxes, they tell us, would require “savage” and “draconian” budget cuts.
I would like to slash the budget and free up resources for private-sector growth, so that sounds good to me. But what’s the truth?
The Congressional Budget Office has just released its 10-year projections for the budget, so I crunched the numbers to determine what it would take to balance the budget without tax hikes. Much to nobody’s surprise, the politicians are not telling the truth.
The chart below shows that revenues are expected to grow (because of factors such as inflation, more population, and economic expansion) by more than 7 percent each year. Balancing the budget is simple so long as politicians increase spending at a slower rate. If they freeze the budget, we almost balance the budget by 2017. If federal spending is capped so it grows 1 percent each year, the budget is balanced in 2019. And if the crowd in Washington can limit spending growth to about 2 percent each year, red ink almost disappears in just 10 years.
These numbers, incidentally, assume that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are made permanent (they are now scheduled to expire in two years). They also assume that the AMT is adjusted for inflation, so the chart shows that we can balance the budget without any increase in the tax burden.
I did these calculations last year, and found the same results. And I also examined how we balanced the budget in the 1990s and found that spending restraint was the key. The combination of a GOP Congress and Bill Clinton in the White House led to a four-year period of government spending growing by an average of just 2.9 percent each year.
We also have international evidence showing that spending restraint – not higher taxes – is the key to balancing the budget. New Zealand got rid of a big budget deficit in the 1990s with a five-year spending freeze. Canada also got rid of red ink that decade with a five-year period where spending grew by an average of only 1 percent per year. And Ireland slashed its deficit in the late 1980s by 10 percentage points of GDP with a four-year spending freeze.
No wonder international bureaucracies such as the International Monetary fund and European Central Bank are producing research showing that spending discipline is the right approach.
This video provides all the details.
(The source is essential for all links) http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/new-cbo-numbers-re-confirm-that-balancing-the-budget-is-simple-with-modest-fiscal-restraint/
Monday, February 7, 2011
The Politics of Bloodlust
The Politics of Bloodlust
Barbara Ehrenreich, Hendrik Hertzberg and the left's disturbing preoccupation with violence. By JAMES TARANTO
America's liberal left is preoccupied with salacious fantasies of political violence. These take two forms: dreams of leftist insurrection, and nightmares of reactionary bloodshed. The "mainstream" media ignore or suppress the former type of fantasy and treat the latter as if it reflected reality. This produces a distorted narrative that further feeds the left's fantasies and disserves those who expect the media to provide truthful information.
In a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece, socialist author Barbara Ehrenreich defends socialist sociologist Frances Fox Piven, who has recently been criticized, most prominently by Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck, for advocating violence in the service of left-wing aims.
Ehrenreich claims that Piven was merely urging "economically hard-pressed Americans" to "organize a protest at the local unemployment office." In fact, as we noted Monday, what Piven urged in the pages of The Nation was--these are her words--"something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece."
Glenn Reynolds has repeatedly reminded us what those Greek riots looked like, quoting a Wall Street Journal account from last May:
At the same time, tens of thousands of protesters marched through Athens in the largest and most violent protests since the country's budget crisis began last fall. Angry youths rampaged through the center of Athens, torching several businesses and vehicles and smashing shop windows. Protesters and police clashed in front of parliament and fought running street battles around the city.
Witnesses said hooded protesters smashed the front window of Marfin Bank in central Athens and hurled a Molotov cocktail inside. The three victims died from asphyxiation from smoke inhalation, the Athens coroner's office said. Four others were seriously injured there, fire department officials said.
Ehrenreich was writing for the L.A. Times's opinion page, and she is entitled to her opinion, but she is not entitled to her own facts. The heading "opinion" is not a license to tell outright lies.
The dishonesty of Ehrenreich's piece is shocking, but it isn't even the most bizarre thing about it. She begins by bemoaning the absence of grass-roots activism in America:
Why are Americans such wusses? Threaten the Greeks with job losses and benefit cuts and they tie up Athens, but take away Americans' jobs, 401(k)s, even their homes, and they pretty much roll over. Tell British students that their tuition is about to go up and they take to the streets; American students just amp up their doses of Prozac.
Ehrenreich's explanation is America has become "a tyranny of the heavily armed." Americans don't get politically involved because they're afraid of getting shot. The implication is that if only the government would take away Americans' guns, Americans would be able to grab their Molotov cocktails and rise up against the government, or for the government, or something.
But wait. How has it escaped Ehrenreich's notice that the past two years have seen the greatest flowering of grass-roots democracy in America since the civil rights movement? We refer, of course, to the Tea Party movement. To be sure, you won't see any Molotov cocktails at a Tea Party gathering. You may see some guns--a normal part of life in most of America--but they will be borne lawfully and not used violently.
Since the Tea Party advocates individualism and not socialism, we may assume that Ehrenreich strongly disapproves of it (as does her pal Piven). But to bemoan the dearth of grass-roots activism in America without even acknowledging the Tea Party's existence suggests a detachment from reality bordering on the clinical.
Even odder, many on the left have advanced a false narrative in which the Tea Party is violent. The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg did so in a column last week, in which he was still trying to justify the media's falsely blaming the right for the attempted murder of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
Hertzberg claims that the shooting "took place amid a two-year eruption of shocking vituperation and hatred, virtually all of it coming from people who call themselves conservatives," and that "these realities, and not the malevolence of liberal opportunists, were why, in the immediate aftermath of the crime, the 'national conversation' focussed on the nation's poisonous political and rhetorical climate."
This is bunk. The "two-year eruption of shocking vituperation and hatred" is a media myth, promulgated in two primary ways:
The first is by seeking out the most extreme expressions by Tea Party activists and sympathetic politicians and portraying them as if they were typical. This is in sharp contrast to the way left-wing political rallies are covered. Extreme and violent rhetoric is at least as easy to find there if you look--Michael Bowers has put together a photo gallery of "Left-Wing Hatred"--but the mainstreamers seldom look. During the Bush years, "antiwar" rallies were routinely depicted as nothing more than forums for wholesome, patriotic dissent.
The second is by presenting innocuous rhetoric from the right as if it were something sinister or dangerous. The most famous example--cited by Hertzberg, naturally--is the SarahPAC map of targeted districts, including Giffords's, which many on the left hoped had incited the man who shot her. Palinoiacs denounced the map as "violent" when it first came out last March, notwithstanding that the visual metaphor of a target is about as common in political campaigns of both parties as cartoons on the pages of Hertzberg's magazine.
Similarly, as we noted Jan. 12, Paul Krugman, the New York Times's most dishonest columnist, characterized as "eliminationist rhetoric" Rep. Michele Bachmann's comment that she wanted her constituents to be "armed and dangerous." In context, it turned out that she wanted them to be "armed" with information--a poor choice of words, but no more eliminationist than Barack Obama's comment in June 2008: "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun." At the time, the New York Times characterized this as part of "Mr. Obama's efforts to show he can do more than give a good speech."
Hertzberg is saying no more than that liberal journalists like himself are justified in perpetuating the myth of conservative violence because they promulgated it in the first place.
Perhaps he is right that it is not the product of opportunism but rather of sincerely held prejudice. But would it be a defense of, say, Theodore Bilbo or Joseph McCarthy to say that they sincerely believed the prejudices and falsehoods they espoused? What's more, Bilbo and McCarthy were politicians. Why is it so hard for journalists to remember that their job is to tell the truth?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704268104576107823888846928.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion
Barbara Ehrenreich, Hendrik Hertzberg and the left's disturbing preoccupation with violence. By JAMES TARANTO
America's liberal left is preoccupied with salacious fantasies of political violence. These take two forms: dreams of leftist insurrection, and nightmares of reactionary bloodshed. The "mainstream" media ignore or suppress the former type of fantasy and treat the latter as if it reflected reality. This produces a distorted narrative that further feeds the left's fantasies and disserves those who expect the media to provide truthful information.
In a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece, socialist author Barbara Ehrenreich defends socialist sociologist Frances Fox Piven, who has recently been criticized, most prominently by Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck, for advocating violence in the service of left-wing aims.
Ehrenreich claims that Piven was merely urging "economically hard-pressed Americans" to "organize a protest at the local unemployment office." In fact, as we noted Monday, what Piven urged in the pages of The Nation was--these are her words--"something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece."
Glenn Reynolds has repeatedly reminded us what those Greek riots looked like, quoting a Wall Street Journal account from last May:
At the same time, tens of thousands of protesters marched through Athens in the largest and most violent protests since the country's budget crisis began last fall. Angry youths rampaged through the center of Athens, torching several businesses and vehicles and smashing shop windows. Protesters and police clashed in front of parliament and fought running street battles around the city.
Witnesses said hooded protesters smashed the front window of Marfin Bank in central Athens and hurled a Molotov cocktail inside. The three victims died from asphyxiation from smoke inhalation, the Athens coroner's office said. Four others were seriously injured there, fire department officials said.
Ehrenreich was writing for the L.A. Times's opinion page, and she is entitled to her opinion, but she is not entitled to her own facts. The heading "opinion" is not a license to tell outright lies.
The dishonesty of Ehrenreich's piece is shocking, but it isn't even the most bizarre thing about it. She begins by bemoaning the absence of grass-roots activism in America:
Why are Americans such wusses? Threaten the Greeks with job losses and benefit cuts and they tie up Athens, but take away Americans' jobs, 401(k)s, even their homes, and they pretty much roll over. Tell British students that their tuition is about to go up and they take to the streets; American students just amp up their doses of Prozac.
Ehrenreich's explanation is America has become "a tyranny of the heavily armed." Americans don't get politically involved because they're afraid of getting shot. The implication is that if only the government would take away Americans' guns, Americans would be able to grab their Molotov cocktails and rise up against the government, or for the government, or something.
But wait. How has it escaped Ehrenreich's notice that the past two years have seen the greatest flowering of grass-roots democracy in America since the civil rights movement? We refer, of course, to the Tea Party movement. To be sure, you won't see any Molotov cocktails at a Tea Party gathering. You may see some guns--a normal part of life in most of America--but they will be borne lawfully and not used violently.
Since the Tea Party advocates individualism and not socialism, we may assume that Ehrenreich strongly disapproves of it (as does her pal Piven). But to bemoan the dearth of grass-roots activism in America without even acknowledging the Tea Party's existence suggests a detachment from reality bordering on the clinical.
Even odder, many on the left have advanced a false narrative in which the Tea Party is violent. The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg did so in a column last week, in which he was still trying to justify the media's falsely blaming the right for the attempted murder of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
Hertzberg claims that the shooting "took place amid a two-year eruption of shocking vituperation and hatred, virtually all of it coming from people who call themselves conservatives," and that "these realities, and not the malevolence of liberal opportunists, were why, in the immediate aftermath of the crime, the 'national conversation' focussed on the nation's poisonous political and rhetorical climate."
This is bunk. The "two-year eruption of shocking vituperation and hatred" is a media myth, promulgated in two primary ways:
The first is by seeking out the most extreme expressions by Tea Party activists and sympathetic politicians and portraying them as if they were typical. This is in sharp contrast to the way left-wing political rallies are covered. Extreme and violent rhetoric is at least as easy to find there if you look--Michael Bowers has put together a photo gallery of "Left-Wing Hatred"--but the mainstreamers seldom look. During the Bush years, "antiwar" rallies were routinely depicted as nothing more than forums for wholesome, patriotic dissent.
The second is by presenting innocuous rhetoric from the right as if it were something sinister or dangerous. The most famous example--cited by Hertzberg, naturally--is the SarahPAC map of targeted districts, including Giffords's, which many on the left hoped had incited the man who shot her. Palinoiacs denounced the map as "violent" when it first came out last March, notwithstanding that the visual metaphor of a target is about as common in political campaigns of both parties as cartoons on the pages of Hertzberg's magazine.
Similarly, as we noted Jan. 12, Paul Krugman, the New York Times's most dishonest columnist, characterized as "eliminationist rhetoric" Rep. Michele Bachmann's comment that she wanted her constituents to be "armed and dangerous." In context, it turned out that she wanted them to be "armed" with information--a poor choice of words, but no more eliminationist than Barack Obama's comment in June 2008: "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun." At the time, the New York Times characterized this as part of "Mr. Obama's efforts to show he can do more than give a good speech."
Hertzberg is saying no more than that liberal journalists like himself are justified in perpetuating the myth of conservative violence because they promulgated it in the first place.
Perhaps he is right that it is not the product of opportunism but rather of sincerely held prejudice. But would it be a defense of, say, Theodore Bilbo or Joseph McCarthy to say that they sincerely believed the prejudices and falsehoods they espoused? What's more, Bilbo and McCarthy were politicians. Why is it so hard for journalists to remember that their job is to tell the truth?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704268104576107823888846928.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion
Himalayan glaciers not melting because of climate change, report finds
Himalayan glaciers not melting because of climate change, report finds
Himalayan glaciers are actually advancing rather than retreating, claims the first major study since a controversial UN report said they would be melted within quarter of a century.
The key factor affecting the advance or retreat of the Karakoram glaciers is the amount of debris strewn on their surface. The Passu glacier in the Karakorum region of Pakistan Photo: ALAMY By Dean Nelson, New Delhi and Richard Alleyne 6:00AM GMT 27 Jan 2011
Researchers have discovered that contrary to popular belief half of the ice flows in the Karakoram range of the mountains are actually growing rather than shrinking.
The discovery adds a new twist to the row over whether global warming is causing the world's highest mountain range to lose its ice cover.
It further challenges claims made in a 2007 report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the glaciers would be gone by 2035.
Although the head of the panel Dr Rajendra Pachauri later admitted the claim was an error gleaned from unchecked research, he maintained that global warming was melting the glaciers at "a rapid rate", threatening floods throughout north India.
The new study by scientists at the Universities of California and Potsdam has found that half of the glaciers in the Karakoram range, in the northwestern Himlaya, are in fact advancing and that global warming is not the deciding factor in whether a glacier survives or melts.
Dr Bodo Bookhagen, Dirk Scherler and Manfred Strecker studied 286 glaciers between the Hindu Kush on the Afghan-Pakistan border to Bhutan, taking in six areas.
Their report, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, found the key factor affecting their advance or retreat is the amount of debris – rocks and mud – strewn on their surface, not the general nature of climate change.
Glaciers surrounded by high mountains and covered with more than two centimetres of debris are protected from melting.
Debris-covered glaciers are common in the rugged central Himalaya, but they are almost absent in subdued landscapes on the Tibetan Plateau, where retreat rates are higher.
In contrast, more than 50 per cent of observed glaciers in the Karakoram region in the northwestern Himalaya are advancing or stable.
"Our study shows that there is no uniform response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change and highlights the importance of debris cover for understanding glacier retreat, an effect that has so far been neglected in predictions of future water availability or global sea level," the authors concluded.
Dr Bookhagen said their report had shown "there is no stereotypical Himalayan glacier" in contrast to the UN's climate change report which, he said, "lumps all Himalayan glaciers together."
Dr Pachauri, head of the Nobel prize-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has remained silent on the matter since he was forced to admit his report's claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was an error and had not been sourced from a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It came from a World Wildlife Fund report.
He angered India's environment minister and the country's leading glaciologist when he attacked those who questioned his claim as purveyors of "voodoo science".
The environment Minister Jairam Ramesh had cited research indicating some Himalayan glaciers were advancing in the face of the UN's claim.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/8284223/Himalayan-glaciers-not-melting-because-of-climate-change-report-finds.html
Himalayan glaciers are actually advancing rather than retreating, claims the first major study since a controversial UN report said they would be melted within quarter of a century.
The key factor affecting the advance or retreat of the Karakoram glaciers is the amount of debris strewn on their surface. The Passu glacier in the Karakorum region of Pakistan Photo: ALAMY By Dean Nelson, New Delhi and Richard Alleyne 6:00AM GMT 27 Jan 2011
Researchers have discovered that contrary to popular belief half of the ice flows in the Karakoram range of the mountains are actually growing rather than shrinking.
The discovery adds a new twist to the row over whether global warming is causing the world's highest mountain range to lose its ice cover.
It further challenges claims made in a 2007 report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the glaciers would be gone by 2035.
Although the head of the panel Dr Rajendra Pachauri later admitted the claim was an error gleaned from unchecked research, he maintained that global warming was melting the glaciers at "a rapid rate", threatening floods throughout north India.
The new study by scientists at the Universities of California and Potsdam has found that half of the glaciers in the Karakoram range, in the northwestern Himlaya, are in fact advancing and that global warming is not the deciding factor in whether a glacier survives or melts.
Dr Bodo Bookhagen, Dirk Scherler and Manfred Strecker studied 286 glaciers between the Hindu Kush on the Afghan-Pakistan border to Bhutan, taking in six areas.
Their report, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, found the key factor affecting their advance or retreat is the amount of debris – rocks and mud – strewn on their surface, not the general nature of climate change.
Glaciers surrounded by high mountains and covered with more than two centimetres of debris are protected from melting.
Debris-covered glaciers are common in the rugged central Himalaya, but they are almost absent in subdued landscapes on the Tibetan Plateau, where retreat rates are higher.
In contrast, more than 50 per cent of observed glaciers in the Karakoram region in the northwestern Himalaya are advancing or stable.
"Our study shows that there is no uniform response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change and highlights the importance of debris cover for understanding glacier retreat, an effect that has so far been neglected in predictions of future water availability or global sea level," the authors concluded.
Dr Bookhagen said their report had shown "there is no stereotypical Himalayan glacier" in contrast to the UN's climate change report which, he said, "lumps all Himalayan glaciers together."
Dr Pachauri, head of the Nobel prize-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has remained silent on the matter since he was forced to admit his report's claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was an error and had not been sourced from a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It came from a World Wildlife Fund report.
He angered India's environment minister and the country's leading glaciologist when he attacked those who questioned his claim as purveyors of "voodoo science".
The environment Minister Jairam Ramesh had cited research indicating some Himalayan glaciers were advancing in the face of the UN's claim.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/8284223/Himalayan-glaciers-not-melting-because-of-climate-change-report-finds.html
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Eliminationist rhetoric against Sarah Palin: a production of the Missoula Children's Theater
Curt Olds, the Lord High Executioner
Eliminationist rhetoric against Sarah Palin: a production of the Missoula Children's Theater.
By JAMES TARANTO
For some perspective on the recent "debate" over "civility" and "eliminationist rhetoric," let's turn to Montana, home of the Missoula Children's Theater. A recent production there gets a bad review today in a letter to the editor of the Missoulian, the local daily:
Open letter to MCT director Curt Olds:
First I would like to compliment you and the entire staff of "The Mikado" on the beautiful sets, costuming and professional performance we experienced on Sunday, Jan. 23. However, I must call you on something that was inserted into the play which I am almost positive was not in the original book.
The comments made in such a cavalier and oh-so-humorous way were uncalled for. Now, I realize you play to a mostly liberal audience in Missoula and so, I am sure, felt comfortable in your calling for the beheading of Sarah Palin. I am painfully aware that most in the audience tittered with laughter and clapped because "no one would miss her" but there were some in your audience who took great offense to this "uncivil tone" about another human being.
We are in the midst of a crisis that took place in Tucson where many started pointing fingers at that horrible right wing with all their hatred and targeting and standing for the second amendment and on and on and on. So, here we are in a lovely play with beautiful voices serenading us and we have to hear that it is okay to call for the killing of Sarah Palin because we don't like her and no one would miss her. Unbelievable.
As a professional you should be ashamed of yourself, the audience should be ashamed of themselves and I am ashamed of myself for not standing up and leaving at that very moment. I would like to see an apology from you not because I want to hinder free-speech but for the hypocrisy this so clearly shows.
Rory Page, Clinton
Well, perhaps Olds made a clerical error and one of Andrew Sullivan's works got into the Arthur Sullivan file.
In all seriousness, though, like much of what we have been writing about in the past few weeks, this incident is shocking but not surprising. For all the bogus accusations being thrown at Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, genuinely hateful political rhetoric is commonplace in the art world, even in art that is not overtly political.
The Missoula incident reminds us of an experience we had in 2005 and wrote about for The Wall Street Journal in 2008. At the invitation of our then-girlfriend, we attended a reading of poems from a book her mother had edited. The poet who served as mistress of ceremonies, Daniela Gioseffi, hijacked the event and turned it into an anti-Republican hate rally. Her rhetoric was not eliminationist--that is, she didn't call for anyone's death--but it was dehumanizing: "You can't be politically disengaged and be human."
Nor is dehumanizing left-wing rhetoric limited to the world of high art. It can be found in popular culture as well. Blogger Howard Portnoy notes a video in which Tracy Morgan, until 2006 a member of the Now Ready for Prime Time Players on NBC's "Saturday Night Live," banters with basketball sportscasters on the TNT cable network. (TNT is part of the Turner Broadcasting System subdivision of Time Warner.)
One of the hosts jocularly asks Morgan: "Tina Fey or Sarah Palin?" Fey was the former "Saturday Night Live" player who returned to the program in 2008 to perform a refulgent impression of the newly famous Palin. Another host elaborates: "Sarah Palin is good-looking, isn't she? Tina Fey is good-looking!"
The query is frivolous, but Morgan's answer is indecent: "Yo, let me tell you something about Sarah Palin, man. She's good masturbation material. The glasses, and all of that? Great masturbation material."
Portnoy observes: "For a liberal male, the degradation of Palin as sexual fodder--which frankly is about as low as one can go in degrading a member of the so-called 'fairer sex'--is a way of dismissing the fact that (like it or not) she is a difference maker in the American body politic. But why is it that the nation's most accomplished liberal females haven't spoken up against this unseemly treatment?"
The answer, as we argued last Wednesday, is that liberal women are the driving force behind hatred of Sarah Palin. But Portnoy's complaint about male liberals--the word "men" doesn't quite seem appropriate here--echoes ours: "Liberal men [sic] put down Palin as a cheap way to score points with the women in their lives, or they use her as an outlet for more-general misogynistic impulses that would otherwise be socially unacceptable to express."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703956604576110100251027150.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion
Eliminationist rhetoric against Sarah Palin: a production of the Missoula Children's Theater.
By JAMES TARANTO
For some perspective on the recent "debate" over "civility" and "eliminationist rhetoric," let's turn to Montana, home of the Missoula Children's Theater. A recent production there gets a bad review today in a letter to the editor of the Missoulian, the local daily:
Open letter to MCT director Curt Olds:
First I would like to compliment you and the entire staff of "The Mikado" on the beautiful sets, costuming and professional performance we experienced on Sunday, Jan. 23. However, I must call you on something that was inserted into the play which I am almost positive was not in the original book.
The comments made in such a cavalier and oh-so-humorous way were uncalled for. Now, I realize you play to a mostly liberal audience in Missoula and so, I am sure, felt comfortable in your calling for the beheading of Sarah Palin. I am painfully aware that most in the audience tittered with laughter and clapped because "no one would miss her" but there were some in your audience who took great offense to this "uncivil tone" about another human being.
We are in the midst of a crisis that took place in Tucson where many started pointing fingers at that horrible right wing with all their hatred and targeting and standing for the second amendment and on and on and on. So, here we are in a lovely play with beautiful voices serenading us and we have to hear that it is okay to call for the killing of Sarah Palin because we don't like her and no one would miss her. Unbelievable.
As a professional you should be ashamed of yourself, the audience should be ashamed of themselves and I am ashamed of myself for not standing up and leaving at that very moment. I would like to see an apology from you not because I want to hinder free-speech but for the hypocrisy this so clearly shows.
Rory Page, Clinton
Well, perhaps Olds made a clerical error and one of Andrew Sullivan's works got into the Arthur Sullivan file.
In all seriousness, though, like much of what we have been writing about in the past few weeks, this incident is shocking but not surprising. For all the bogus accusations being thrown at Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, genuinely hateful political rhetoric is commonplace in the art world, even in art that is not overtly political.
The Missoula incident reminds us of an experience we had in 2005 and wrote about for The Wall Street Journal in 2008. At the invitation of our then-girlfriend, we attended a reading of poems from a book her mother had edited. The poet who served as mistress of ceremonies, Daniela Gioseffi, hijacked the event and turned it into an anti-Republican hate rally. Her rhetoric was not eliminationist--that is, she didn't call for anyone's death--but it was dehumanizing: "You can't be politically disengaged and be human."
Nor is dehumanizing left-wing rhetoric limited to the world of high art. It can be found in popular culture as well. Blogger Howard Portnoy notes a video in which Tracy Morgan, until 2006 a member of the Now Ready for Prime Time Players on NBC's "Saturday Night Live," banters with basketball sportscasters on the TNT cable network. (TNT is part of the Turner Broadcasting System subdivision of Time Warner.)
One of the hosts jocularly asks Morgan: "Tina Fey or Sarah Palin?" Fey was the former "Saturday Night Live" player who returned to the program in 2008 to perform a refulgent impression of the newly famous Palin. Another host elaborates: "Sarah Palin is good-looking, isn't she? Tina Fey is good-looking!"
The query is frivolous, but Morgan's answer is indecent: "Yo, let me tell you something about Sarah Palin, man. She's good masturbation material. The glasses, and all of that? Great masturbation material."
Portnoy observes: "For a liberal male, the degradation of Palin as sexual fodder--which frankly is about as low as one can go in degrading a member of the so-called 'fairer sex'--is a way of dismissing the fact that (like it or not) she is a difference maker in the American body politic. But why is it that the nation's most accomplished liberal females haven't spoken up against this unseemly treatment?"
The answer, as we argued last Wednesday, is that liberal women are the driving force behind hatred of Sarah Palin. But Portnoy's complaint about male liberals--the word "men" doesn't quite seem appropriate here--echoes ours: "Liberal men [sic] put down Palin as a cheap way to score points with the women in their lives, or they use her as an outlet for more-general misogynistic impulses that would otherwise be socially unacceptable to express."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703956604576110100251027150.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion
Poll: Positive views of GOP for first time since 2005
Poll: Positive views of GOP for first time since 2005 By Catalina Camia, USA TODAY
More Americans view House Speaker John Boehner's Republican Party in a positive light, a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows. CAPTIONBy Jack Gruber, USA TODAYSome good news for the Republican Party: A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds more Americans view the GOP positively than negatively for the first time since 2005.
The survey shows the GOP now has a 47% net favorable rating, following its successes at the ballot box in November when Republicans took majority control of the U.S. House, made gains in the U.S. Senate and won key governorships in states such as Ohio and Wisconsin.
By comparison, 43% of Americans have a negative image of House Speaker John Boehner's party.
Gallup's Jeffrey Jones writes that if the upward trend continues for Republicans, "this will indicate the party has completely recovered from the downturn it took beginning in 2005."
That's when public opinion about President George W. Bush soured, over the Iraq War and his administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina. Rising gas prices also didn't help.
The view of the Democratic Party, meanwhile, has improved slightly. The poll showed 46% of Americans viewed Democrats positively, compared with 47% who have a negative view.
Still, those numbers are among the worst Gallup has recorded for Democrats since 1992.
Last year, a record 54% of Americans had a negative view of Democrats, right after President Obama signed a sweeping new health care law mandating insurance coverage for all Americans.
The new survey is based on interviews with 1,032 adults taken Jan. 14-16. The margin of error is +/-4 percentage points.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2011/01/gallup-poll-republican-image-/1
More Americans view House Speaker John Boehner's Republican Party in a positive light, a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows. CAPTIONBy Jack Gruber, USA TODAYSome good news for the Republican Party: A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds more Americans view the GOP positively than negatively for the first time since 2005.
The survey shows the GOP now has a 47% net favorable rating, following its successes at the ballot box in November when Republicans took majority control of the U.S. House, made gains in the U.S. Senate and won key governorships in states such as Ohio and Wisconsin.
By comparison, 43% of Americans have a negative image of House Speaker John Boehner's party.
Gallup's Jeffrey Jones writes that if the upward trend continues for Republicans, "this will indicate the party has completely recovered from the downturn it took beginning in 2005."
That's when public opinion about President George W. Bush soured, over the Iraq War and his administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina. Rising gas prices also didn't help.
The view of the Democratic Party, meanwhile, has improved slightly. The poll showed 46% of Americans viewed Democrats positively, compared with 47% who have a negative view.
Still, those numbers are among the worst Gallup has recorded for Democrats since 1992.
Last year, a record 54% of Americans had a negative view of Democrats, right after President Obama signed a sweeping new health care law mandating insurance coverage for all Americans.
The new survey is based on interviews with 1,032 adults taken Jan. 14-16. The margin of error is +/-4 percentage points.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2011/01/gallup-poll-republican-image-/1
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Majority of Voters Oppose Federal Bailouts for States
Majority of Voters Oppose Federal Bailouts for States
While a number of states now face serious budget shortfalls, most voters continue to oppose federal bailout funding to help them out.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 26% of Likely U.S. Voters believe the federal government should provide bailout funding for states with serious financial problems. Fifty-three percent (53%) oppose individual state bailouts, and another 21% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Sixty-two percent (62%) opposed bailouts for states in July 2009 when California's severe budget woes were in the headlines, but opposition had fallen to 48% by October of last year.
Republicans (67%) and voters not affiliated with either of the major parties (66%) strongly oppose state bailouts, while Democrats by a 44% to 28% margin think they're a good idea.
Voters have consistently expressed opposition to bailouts of any kind. Fifty-three percent (53%) say, looking back, that the bailouts of banks, auto companies and insurance companies were bad for the United States.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/federal_bailout/january_2011/majority_of_voters_oppose_federal_bailouts_for_states
While a number of states now face serious budget shortfalls, most voters continue to oppose federal bailout funding to help them out.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 26% of Likely U.S. Voters believe the federal government should provide bailout funding for states with serious financial problems. Fifty-three percent (53%) oppose individual state bailouts, and another 21% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Sixty-two percent (62%) opposed bailouts for states in July 2009 when California's severe budget woes were in the headlines, but opposition had fallen to 48% by October of last year.
Republicans (67%) and voters not affiliated with either of the major parties (66%) strongly oppose state bailouts, while Democrats by a 44% to 28% margin think they're a good idea.
Voters have consistently expressed opposition to bailouts of any kind. Fifty-three percent (53%) say, looking back, that the bailouts of banks, auto companies and insurance companies were bad for the United States.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/federal_bailout/january_2011/majority_of_voters_oppose_federal_bailouts_for_states
Obama Refuses To Learn Government’s Clean Energy Failures
Obama Refuses To Learn Government’s Clean Energy Failures By David Hogberg
Here are few excerpts from President Obama’s State of the Union Speech tonight regarding “clean energy”:
* We’re issuing a challenge. We’re telling America’s scientists and engineers that if they assemble teams of the best minds in their fields, and focus on the hardest problems in clean energy, we’ll fund the Apollo Projects of our time.
* With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels, and become the first country to have 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. We need to get behind this innovation.
* Now, clean energy breakthroughs will only translate into clean energy jobs if businesses know there will be a market for what they’re selling. So tonight, I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: by 2035, 80% of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources.
Surely, Obama thinks such remarks are innovative and original. An Administration official probably thought likewise the other day when he told the Wall Street Journal, “areas such as renewable energy and scientific research are underfunded by the private sector, because returns are uncertain. These areas are vital to the nation’s long-term growth, the official said, and the state must step in when businesses don’t.”
If that’s President Obama’s notion of competitiveness, then it can be likened to flushing billions of dollars down the toilet. It would have been nice if, prior to giving his SOTU, the president had checked out a paper by Professor Peter Grossman entitled, “The History of U.S. Alternative Energy Development Programs: A Study of Government Failure.” He traces the numerous efforts our government has made at investing in alternative energy, from nuclear power in the 1950s to the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles in the 1990s, and found that none of them have worked. Reading his paper also reveals that “stepping in where the market fails” and the “private sector won’t do it ‘because returns are uncertain’” are not new justifications.
Let’s look at two examples. The Synthetic Fuels Corporation was first proposed under the Nixon Administration as a response to rising gas prices. Later, President Ford championed it. Ford’s Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller, “was explicit that such a corporation with its vast funding and power was necessary because private capital markets would not provide the money — which was in his view a matter of urgent national interest. The market was failing not because of the lack of foresight but because of the high level of ‘uncertainties that exist in this area.’”
While neither Nixon nor Ford succeeded in getting the SynFuels Corporation through Congress, the Carter Administration did. It turned out to be a disaster: over $3 billion spent with no results until the Reagan Administration ended it. There was a very good reason why the private sector was not investing in synthetic fuels:
Higher prices in 1980 were spurring companies to search for more oil and to find ways to enhance resource extraction. Arguably, the market, which was not investing in synfuels, was giving a useful and it turned out correct interpretation of future energy scarcity.
...the synfuels act of 1980 certainly cannot be said to have righted a market failure; there was no market reason to invest heavily in synfuel technology and market participants did not do so. Market failure presumes firms fail to respond to market signals. But instead, the signals market participants received were ignored by government. The market was essentially correct; government, on the other hand, appears to have failed.
The second example Grossman cites was the “Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV), a joint project of the US government and the Big Three American automobile manufacturers, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler,” put forward by President Bill Cilnton in 2003 1993. This effort would produce a car with ultra-low emissions and 80 mpg. Grossman noted, “Clinton explicitly evoked market failure as the rationale for the PNGV, but he was not explicit as to just what that failure entailed. ‘There are a lot of things we need to be working on,’ he said, ‘that market forces alone can’t do.’”
Of course, PNGV had its cheerleaders. “In a Business Week opinion piece, author Robert Kuttner described several prototypes on display at an auto show and declared that the PNGV program was ‘paying real dividends,’ was working as advertised. Moreover, Kuttner explicitly made the market failure argument. ‘Clean-engine technology is a positive externality — a social good in which industry under-invests because the private rewards are too uncertain.’”
Alas, it just didn’t work out, to the tune of about $1.5 billion. Lack of money wasn’t the problem so much as a lack of “(b)reakthrough ideas and talented people.”
Grossman notes that, ironically, where the government failed to provide a high-mileage vehicle, the market succeeded. Both Toyota and Honda, who were excluded from the PNGV, invested in cars like the Insight and Prius that got mileage in the 50-60mpg range. While they lost money at first, when the price of gas shot up in the middle of the last decade, sales of the high mileage vehicle took off.
Grossman sums up the government’s history with alternative energy succinctly:
Whether a market failure has or has not existed with respect to alternative energy technologies, it is nonetheless relevant to ask whether the government’s action creates a solution or a failure of its own. The importance of government failure has been highlighted in recent years as government efforts in some domains appear to produce far more costs than benefits, and sometimes may worsen whatever market failure they were intended to correct.
But as Obama’s SOTU showed, this Administration will not heed history's warning. The members of this White House are culled from the anointed, who are best suited to know when the millions of individual players in the markets who must bear the costs of their own decisions are wrong.
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/searlecenter/papers/Grossman_Alternative_Energy.pdf
http://blogs.investors.com/capitalhill/index.php/home/35-politicsinvesting/2368-obama-refuses-to-learn-governments-clean-energy-failures
Here are few excerpts from President Obama’s State of the Union Speech tonight regarding “clean energy”:
* We’re issuing a challenge. We’re telling America’s scientists and engineers that if they assemble teams of the best minds in their fields, and focus on the hardest problems in clean energy, we’ll fund the Apollo Projects of our time.
* With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels, and become the first country to have 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. We need to get behind this innovation.
* Now, clean energy breakthroughs will only translate into clean energy jobs if businesses know there will be a market for what they’re selling. So tonight, I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: by 2035, 80% of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources.
Surely, Obama thinks such remarks are innovative and original. An Administration official probably thought likewise the other day when he told the Wall Street Journal, “areas such as renewable energy and scientific research are underfunded by the private sector, because returns are uncertain. These areas are vital to the nation’s long-term growth, the official said, and the state must step in when businesses don’t.”
If that’s President Obama’s notion of competitiveness, then it can be likened to flushing billions of dollars down the toilet. It would have been nice if, prior to giving his SOTU, the president had checked out a paper by Professor Peter Grossman entitled, “The History of U.S. Alternative Energy Development Programs: A Study of Government Failure.” He traces the numerous efforts our government has made at investing in alternative energy, from nuclear power in the 1950s to the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles in the 1990s, and found that none of them have worked. Reading his paper also reveals that “stepping in where the market fails” and the “private sector won’t do it ‘because returns are uncertain’” are not new justifications.
Let’s look at two examples. The Synthetic Fuels Corporation was first proposed under the Nixon Administration as a response to rising gas prices. Later, President Ford championed it. Ford’s Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller, “was explicit that such a corporation with its vast funding and power was necessary because private capital markets would not provide the money — which was in his view a matter of urgent national interest. The market was failing not because of the lack of foresight but because of the high level of ‘uncertainties that exist in this area.’”
While neither Nixon nor Ford succeeded in getting the SynFuels Corporation through Congress, the Carter Administration did. It turned out to be a disaster: over $3 billion spent with no results until the Reagan Administration ended it. There was a very good reason why the private sector was not investing in synthetic fuels:
Higher prices in 1980 were spurring companies to search for more oil and to find ways to enhance resource extraction. Arguably, the market, which was not investing in synfuels, was giving a useful and it turned out correct interpretation of future energy scarcity.
...the synfuels act of 1980 certainly cannot be said to have righted a market failure; there was no market reason to invest heavily in synfuel technology and market participants did not do so. Market failure presumes firms fail to respond to market signals. But instead, the signals market participants received were ignored by government. The market was essentially correct; government, on the other hand, appears to have failed.
The second example Grossman cites was the “Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV), a joint project of the US government and the Big Three American automobile manufacturers, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler,” put forward by President Bill Cilnton in 2003 1993. This effort would produce a car with ultra-low emissions and 80 mpg. Grossman noted, “Clinton explicitly evoked market failure as the rationale for the PNGV, but he was not explicit as to just what that failure entailed. ‘There are a lot of things we need to be working on,’ he said, ‘that market forces alone can’t do.’”
Of course, PNGV had its cheerleaders. “In a Business Week opinion piece, author Robert Kuttner described several prototypes on display at an auto show and declared that the PNGV program was ‘paying real dividends,’ was working as advertised. Moreover, Kuttner explicitly made the market failure argument. ‘Clean-engine technology is a positive externality — a social good in which industry under-invests because the private rewards are too uncertain.’”
Alas, it just didn’t work out, to the tune of about $1.5 billion. Lack of money wasn’t the problem so much as a lack of “(b)reakthrough ideas and talented people.”
Grossman notes that, ironically, where the government failed to provide a high-mileage vehicle, the market succeeded. Both Toyota and Honda, who were excluded from the PNGV, invested in cars like the Insight and Prius that got mileage in the 50-60mpg range. While they lost money at first, when the price of gas shot up in the middle of the last decade, sales of the high mileage vehicle took off.
Grossman sums up the government’s history with alternative energy succinctly:
Whether a market failure has or has not existed with respect to alternative energy technologies, it is nonetheless relevant to ask whether the government’s action creates a solution or a failure of its own. The importance of government failure has been highlighted in recent years as government efforts in some domains appear to produce far more costs than benefits, and sometimes may worsen whatever market failure they were intended to correct.
But as Obama’s SOTU showed, this Administration will not heed history's warning. The members of this White House are culled from the anointed, who are best suited to know when the millions of individual players in the markets who must bear the costs of their own decisions are wrong.
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/searlecenter/papers/Grossman_Alternative_Energy.pdf
http://blogs.investors.com/capitalhill/index.php/home/35-politicsinvesting/2368-obama-refuses-to-learn-governments-clean-energy-failures
Gallup Daily: U.S. Unemployment really 9.9%, underemployment at 19.9%
Gallup Daily: U.S. Employment (Use link to see graph of 9.9%, 19.9% unemployment/underemployment rates)
Each result is based on a 30-day rolling average; not seasonally adjustedDownload complete trendGallup's U.S. employment measures report the percentage of U.S. adults in the workforce, ages 18 and older, who are underemployed and unemployed, without seasonal adjustment. "Underemployed" respondents are employed part time, but want to work full time, or they are unemployed. "Unemployed" respondents are those within the underemployed group who are not employed, even for one hour a week, but are available and looking for work. Results for each 30-day rolling average are based on telephone interviews with approximately 30,000 adults. Because results are not seasonally adjusted, they are not directly comparable to numbers reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which are based on workers 16 and older. Margin of error is ± 0.7 percentage points.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/125639/Gallup-Daily-Workforce.aspx
Each result is based on a 30-day rolling average; not seasonally adjustedDownload complete trendGallup's U.S. employment measures report the percentage of U.S. adults in the workforce, ages 18 and older, who are underemployed and unemployed, without seasonal adjustment. "Underemployed" respondents are employed part time, but want to work full time, or they are unemployed. "Unemployed" respondents are those within the underemployed group who are not employed, even for one hour a week, but are available and looking for work. Results for each 30-day rolling average are based on telephone interviews with approximately 30,000 adults. Because results are not seasonally adjusted, they are not directly comparable to numbers reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which are based on workers 16 and older. Margin of error is ± 0.7 percentage points.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/125639/Gallup-Daily-Workforce.aspx
Friday, February 4, 2011
Burning other people’s money--liberals wish harm on rich
The PJ Tatler » Burning other people’s money
Burning other people’s money via PJ Tatler/Dr. Helen Smith
I am reading a new book by Michael Prell called Underdogma: How America’s Enemies Use Our Love for the Underdog to Trash American Power. The title pretty much describes the book which defines Underdogma as “the reflexive belief that those who have less power (underdogs) are good, and that those who have more power (overdogs) are bad.”
The book is a fascinating look at why so many people admire the underdog and hate those who achieve or are successful. From a psychological standpoint, the chapter on “Personal Underdogma” really helped to understand the motives behind so many people’s desire to tax and take money from the so-called “rich” even if it means that their own wealth will suffer. The chapter describes a very important study conducted by a pair of economists at the Universities of Oxford and Warwick in 2001:
“Are people willing to pay to burn other people’s money? The short answer to this question is: yes. Our subjects gave up large amounts of their cash to hurt others in the laboratory. The extent of burning surprised us…Even at a price of 0.25 (meaning that to burn another person’s dollar cost me 25 cents), many people wished to destroy other individuals’ cash.”
–”Are People willing to Pay to Reduce Others’ Incomes?” Daniel John Zizzo & Andrew Oswald, July 2, 2001
Author Prell notes that the researchers called this Phenomenon “the dark side of human nature.” He calls it Personal Underdogma. Whatever name is used, it is a problem that needs a solution because as long as jealous citizens and politicians are willing to sabotage success even at expense to themselves, and thus society, losers will prosper and winners will lose. This can’t be good for any society.
http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/01/25/burning-other-peoples-money/
Burning other people’s money via PJ Tatler/Dr. Helen Smith
I am reading a new book by Michael Prell called Underdogma: How America’s Enemies Use Our Love for the Underdog to Trash American Power. The title pretty much describes the book which defines Underdogma as “the reflexive belief that those who have less power (underdogs) are good, and that those who have more power (overdogs) are bad.”
The book is a fascinating look at why so many people admire the underdog and hate those who achieve or are successful. From a psychological standpoint, the chapter on “Personal Underdogma” really helped to understand the motives behind so many people’s desire to tax and take money from the so-called “rich” even if it means that their own wealth will suffer. The chapter describes a very important study conducted by a pair of economists at the Universities of Oxford and Warwick in 2001:
“Are people willing to pay to burn other people’s money? The short answer to this question is: yes. Our subjects gave up large amounts of their cash to hurt others in the laboratory. The extent of burning surprised us…Even at a price of 0.25 (meaning that to burn another person’s dollar cost me 25 cents), many people wished to destroy other individuals’ cash.”
–”Are People willing to Pay to Reduce Others’ Incomes?” Daniel John Zizzo & Andrew Oswald, July 2, 2001
Author Prell notes that the researchers called this Phenomenon “the dark side of human nature.” He calls it Personal Underdogma. Whatever name is used, it is a problem that needs a solution because as long as jealous citizens and politicians are willing to sabotage success even at expense to themselves, and thus society, losers will prosper and winners will lose. This can’t be good for any society.
http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/01/25/burning-other-peoples-money/
Frances Fox Piven Rings in The New Year By Calling for Violent Revolution
Frances Fox Piven Rings in The New Year By Calling for Violent Revolution
She’s considered by many as the grandmother of using the American welfare state to implement revolution. Make people dependent on the government, overload the government rolls, and once government services become unsustainable, the people will rise up, overthrow the oppressive capitalist system, and finally create income equality. Collapse the system and create a new one. That‘s the simplified version of Frances Fox Piven’s philosophy originally put forth in the pages of The Nation in the 60s.
Now, as the new year ball drops, Piven is at it again, ringing in 2011 with renewed calls for revolution.
In a chilling and almost unbelievable editorial again in The Nation (”Mobilizing the Jobless,” January 10/17, 2011 edition), she calls on the jobless to rise up in a violent show of solidarity and force. As before, those calls are dripping with language of class struggle. Language she and her late husband Richard Cloward made popular in the 60s.
“So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs?” she writes. “After all, the injustice is apparent. Working people are losing their homes and their pensions while robber-baron CEOs report renewed profits and windfall bonuses. Shouldn’t the unemployed be on the march? Why aren’t they demanding enhanced safety net protections and big initiatives to generate jobs?” [Emphasis added]
Those are the questions that frame what can best be called a roadmap for revolution. And it’s not long before those questions give way to directions. The first instruction: get angry.
“[B]efore people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity,” she writes. “They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant.”
And along with anger must come a denunciation of personal responsibility. Instead, workers must realize that others have put them in their current, uneasy situation: “[T]he out-of-work have to stop blaming themselves for their hard times and turn their anger on the bosses, the bureaucrats or the politicians who are in fact responsible.”
Only then, once their rage has been properly stoked, can the angry take action. And when they do, she says, the “protesters need targets.”
For Piven, the best “targets” are the people or organizations “capable of making some kind of response to angry demands.” Regular demands, notice, just won’t do. No, people must be fired up and not easily deterred. Angry and not quickly placated. It’s a concoction Piven has seen recently in other countries — countries such as England and Greece, which she uses as models for American unrest:
An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees.
What exactly do those strikes and riots look like? They’re violent and bloody, like this one in Greece, where rioters firebombed police and beat bloody a former government official: (Go to link for You Tubes and further text, photos)
In England they look like this, where a mob of angry students attacked the future British King and his wife and shouted “Off with their heads!” while jabbing the Duchess with a stick: (Go to link for You Tubes and further text, photos)
“What she is calling for is nothing less than the chaos and violence engulfing Europe,” writes Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Ron Radosh on his blog. “Disgruntled leftist unionists, students who expect an education without cost, and citizens of social-democratic states cannot accept that the old terms of the social contract they thought would last forever have worn out their welcome. The European welfare-state governments can no longer function with the kind of social programs that now far exceed their nation’s budgets and hence are moving their countries to the precipice of total collapse.”
But violence has always been Piven’s preferred method of collapse. In 2004, she admitted as much, saying that violence is condoned as long as it is part of a grand plan: (Go to link for You Tubes and further text, photos)
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/frances-fox-piven-rings-in-the-new-year-by-calling-for-violent-revolution/
She’s considered by many as the grandmother of using the American welfare state to implement revolution. Make people dependent on the government, overload the government rolls, and once government services become unsustainable, the people will rise up, overthrow the oppressive capitalist system, and finally create income equality. Collapse the system and create a new one. That‘s the simplified version of Frances Fox Piven’s philosophy originally put forth in the pages of The Nation in the 60s.
Now, as the new year ball drops, Piven is at it again, ringing in 2011 with renewed calls for revolution.
In a chilling and almost unbelievable editorial again in The Nation (”Mobilizing the Jobless,” January 10/17, 2011 edition), she calls on the jobless to rise up in a violent show of solidarity and force. As before, those calls are dripping with language of class struggle. Language she and her late husband Richard Cloward made popular in the 60s.
“So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs?” she writes. “After all, the injustice is apparent. Working people are losing their homes and their pensions while robber-baron CEOs report renewed profits and windfall bonuses. Shouldn’t the unemployed be on the march? Why aren’t they demanding enhanced safety net protections and big initiatives to generate jobs?” [Emphasis added]
Those are the questions that frame what can best be called a roadmap for revolution. And it’s not long before those questions give way to directions. The first instruction: get angry.
“[B]efore people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity,” she writes. “They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant.”
And along with anger must come a denunciation of personal responsibility. Instead, workers must realize that others have put them in their current, uneasy situation: “[T]he out-of-work have to stop blaming themselves for their hard times and turn their anger on the bosses, the bureaucrats or the politicians who are in fact responsible.”
Only then, once their rage has been properly stoked, can the angry take action. And when they do, she says, the “protesters need targets.”
For Piven, the best “targets” are the people or organizations “capable of making some kind of response to angry demands.” Regular demands, notice, just won’t do. No, people must be fired up and not easily deterred. Angry and not quickly placated. It’s a concoction Piven has seen recently in other countries — countries such as England and Greece, which she uses as models for American unrest:
An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees.
What exactly do those strikes and riots look like? They’re violent and bloody, like this one in Greece, where rioters firebombed police and beat bloody a former government official: (Go to link for You Tubes and further text, photos)
In England they look like this, where a mob of angry students attacked the future British King and his wife and shouted “Off with their heads!” while jabbing the Duchess with a stick: (Go to link for You Tubes and further text, photos)
“What she is calling for is nothing less than the chaos and violence engulfing Europe,” writes Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Ron Radosh on his blog. “Disgruntled leftist unionists, students who expect an education without cost, and citizens of social-democratic states cannot accept that the old terms of the social contract they thought would last forever have worn out their welcome. The European welfare-state governments can no longer function with the kind of social programs that now far exceed their nation’s budgets and hence are moving their countries to the precipice of total collapse.”
But violence has always been Piven’s preferred method of collapse. In 2004, she admitted as much, saying that violence is condoned as long as it is part of a grand plan: (Go to link for You Tubes and further text, photos)
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/frances-fox-piven-rings-in-the-new-year-by-calling-for-violent-revolution/
Thursday, February 3, 2011
How NOT To Create Jobs: Spend More Money
How NOT To Create Jobs: Spend More Money
Word is that President Obama will focus on jobs in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday. No surprise there: jobs are the American people's top public policy concern. Obama reportedly will propose new and expanded federal spending programs as the means of job creation. No surprise there either: what else do liberals have to offer?
Yet if there is one thing we know with an empirical certainty, it is that increasing federal spending will not, on balance, create more jobs. Of course, whenever the government spends money someone is employed, or, at least, gets to cash a check. This is what Obama had in mind when he said--in a moment of supreme cluelessness--"spending equals stimulus." What Obama apparently does not understand is that government spending consumes resources, often inefficiently, that could better be used elsewhere. Whenever the government wastes resources, the country grows poorer and job growth is suppressed. This, in crude terms, is why the ballooning public expenditures of recent years have not caused a boom in the job market.
To illustrate this point, I created this simple chart. It plots federal spending from 1998 through FY 2011, on a scale of $1 trillion to $4 trillion, against the total number of non-farm jobs in January of each year, in thousands, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Click to enlarge:
It is blindingly obvious that spending does not equal stimulus, and increasing federal spending will not create jobs. There are two possibilities here. One is that Obama is one of the last people in America who have not figured this out. The other is that Obama knows his proposals are dumb, from an economic standpoint, but doesn't care. The one thing that more government spending will accomplish is to slide more money to Barack Obama's cronies and to various constituencies of the Democratic Party. Maybe that is all Obama ever wanted.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/01/028194.php
Word is that President Obama will focus on jobs in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday. No surprise there: jobs are the American people's top public policy concern. Obama reportedly will propose new and expanded federal spending programs as the means of job creation. No surprise there either: what else do liberals have to offer?
Yet if there is one thing we know with an empirical certainty, it is that increasing federal spending will not, on balance, create more jobs. Of course, whenever the government spends money someone is employed, or, at least, gets to cash a check. This is what Obama had in mind when he said--in a moment of supreme cluelessness--"spending equals stimulus." What Obama apparently does not understand is that government spending consumes resources, often inefficiently, that could better be used elsewhere. Whenever the government wastes resources, the country grows poorer and job growth is suppressed. This, in crude terms, is why the ballooning public expenditures of recent years have not caused a boom in the job market.
To illustrate this point, I created this simple chart. It plots federal spending from 1998 through FY 2011, on a scale of $1 trillion to $4 trillion, against the total number of non-farm jobs in January of each year, in thousands, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Click to enlarge:
It is blindingly obvious that spending does not equal stimulus, and increasing federal spending will not create jobs. There are two possibilities here. One is that Obama is one of the last people in America who have not figured this out. The other is that Obama knows his proposals are dumb, from an economic standpoint, but doesn't care. The one thing that more government spending will accomplish is to slide more money to Barack Obama's cronies and to various constituencies of the Democratic Party. Maybe that is all Obama ever wanted.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/01/028194.php
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Dependence Day by Mark Steyn--the looming downfall of America
Dependence Day by Mark Steyn - The New Criterion
(This is an excellent longer article by the brilliant Mark Steyn. He puts the potential decline--heck, the ongoing and impending decline--of America into the context of the historical decline of the once-Great Britain. It devolves from monetary collapse and England's decline was benign only due to whom it owed the vast sums of money it had borrowed. Meaning America. Who do we owe money to? Think about it and read this opinion piece)
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Dependence-Day-6753
(This is an excellent longer article by the brilliant Mark Steyn. He puts the potential decline--heck, the ongoing and impending decline--of America into the context of the historical decline of the once-Great Britain. It devolves from monetary collapse and England's decline was benign only due to whom it owed the vast sums of money it had borrowed. Meaning America. Who do we owe money to? Think about it and read this opinion piece)
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Dependence-Day-6753
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)