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31 October, 2004

LOOK AT WHOM A WIN BY GWB WOULD SHAFT!

This article gave me a laugh

I have to say it is his enemies who most justify Mr Bush's re-election. The list of those whose world could be truly rocked [by a Bush win] on Tuesday is just too long and too rich to be ignored. If you think for a moment about those who would really be upset by a second Bush term, it becomes a lot easier to stomach.

The hordes of the bien-pensant Left in the universities and the media, the sort of liberals who tolerate everything except those who disagree with them. Secularist elites who disdain religiosity except when it comes from Muslim fanatics. Europhile Brits who drip contempt for everything their country has ever done and long for its disappearance into a Greater Europe.Absurd, isolationist conservatives in America and Britain who think the struggles for freedom are always someone else's fight. Hollywood sybarites and narcissists, self-appointed arbiters of a nation's morals.

Soft-headed Europeans who think engagement and dialogue with mass murderers is the way to achieve lasting peace. French intellectuals for whom nothing has gone right in the world since 1789.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Psychologist Tanya Dineen thinks that GWB has got more EQ (emotional intelligence -- ability to relate to other people emotionally) and Kohn Kerry has got more IQ. On the evidence I have seen, she is wrong. GWB has got more of both. It's silly to think that the two are very different anyhow. IQ helps you to solve ALL problems -- including how to relate to other people. That's what IQ is: General problem-solving ability -- and figuring out how to get on well with other people is one of the most important things to solve that there is. And it always amuses me when people say GWB is stumble-tongued and inarticulate. We had a guy like that as Premier of my home State of Queensland not too long ago. And how long did he stay in power? 20 years! He won election after election. He got up to 59% of the popular vote. For ordinary sensible people, genuineness trumps a slick tongue every time.

Steve Sailer's careful study of the IQ of both Bush and Kerry got so much publicity that it was even reported in the New York Times. Having ANY mention of IQ in the N.Y. Times has greatly miffed many Leftists. The very idea of IQ is a frontal assault on their "all men are equal" gospel. Note how this Leftist site treats the matter. There is not even a shred of discussion of the evidence Steve presented. It is all an ad hominem attack: Sailer is a bad man so what he says cannot be right. And the evidence for Sailer being a bad man? He is RIGHT WING! That proves it! Ad hominem attacks, of course, have no scholarly merit whatsoever and this particular one is particularly stupid. It completely closes off debate by inviting the obvious riposte: "I am going to believe nothing that YOU say because you are LEFT WING! But I guess that Leftists WANT to close of debate. Full consideration of the evidence on something is always dangerous for them.

I note that the same site is boycotting (or girlcotting) Paypal. Apparently Paypal has been acting high and mighty with Leftists too. The Bill Quick affair has soured conservative bloggers on Paypal so one wonders whether Paypal wants any business at all. It's all good news for Amazon's alternative service.

A scientist involved in embryonic stem cell research nails John Kerry's lies about the matter.

In case there are one or two readers of this blog who have not yet heard of the way legalized abortion is giving conservatives the victory of the cradle (more conservatives than Leftists being born), there is a useful summary of the matter here. The article plays safe by saying that it is only "socialization" that causes children to have similar politics to their parents but the fact of the matter is that genetics is an even bigger influence in that direction. Your politics are largely inborn -- probably because high ego-need (Leftism) is inborn.

Krauthammer has an excellent article about America's victory in Afghanistan -- that everyone seems conveniently to have forgotten when they predict the impossibility of converting Iraq to democracy. One quote: "John Kerry has managed to transform our Afghan venture into a failure -- a botched operation in which Bush let Osama bin Laden get away because he "outsourced" bin Laden's capture to "warlords" in the battle of Tora Bora..... "Outsourcing" is a demagogue's way of saying "using allies." (Isn't Kerry's Iraq solution to "outsource" the problem to the "allies" and the United Nations?)".

There is a good article here showing that the Left have been against the normal two-parent family at least as far back as Karl Marx -- without any evidence to support their criticism of it and without any real alternative to it. The evidence shows of course that children raised in two-parent families do significantly better in all sorts of ways than do children reared under other arrangements. So it again just boils down to Leftists hating normal people.

Front Page Magazine have a good "War Blog" covering current issues in the Presidential election.

GWB as a boon to culture? "He's the least culturally savvy US president of the modern era. And the least articulate. But somehow the 43rd leader of the world's only superpower has detonated a global explosion of creativity." [A leftist version of "culture", anyway]

There is a fun story here of how one of the "Nigerian" email scammers met his match. The "Nigerian" scam is an old one now but it just keeps rolling along.

Keith Burgess-Jackson has just put up some good thoughts about the blogosphere.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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30 October, 2004

SOME ECONOMICS

The U.S. economy grew at 3.7% p.a. in the most recent quarter. Compared to the near-zero growth in Europe and most of the rest of the world, that is an outstanding performance that any government would be pleased about. The USA is already much richer than any other large country and is continuing to pull further ahead! Cause to congratulate both the businesspeople and technologists of America whose innovations made it happen and a President whose policies gave them an encouraging framework for it.

How the media spins the economy. It depends on who's President: "Summer was proclaimed a time of 'strong economic growth and low unemployment' by Jerry King of ABC's World News Tonight. King was right. Declining unemployment, low inflation and landmark homeownership all point to great news for the economy. There's just one problem: King wasn't talking about this summer. That story aired on Aug. 4, 1996. ... Business Week chief economist Michael J. Mandel made an excellent case that 'today's economic environment looks positively rosy' in the magazine's Sept. 6 issue. Mandel argued that there are strong similarities between the summer of 1996 and 2004. Both had incumbent presidents running for election. Both saw declining unemployment, an increase in jobs, and strong economic growth. Some of the numbers are so similar it's eerie. Yet the major media covered those two time periods as differently as night and day."

Sounds good to me: "With all the hoopla over the presidential election, gone almost unnoticed are measures that will be on ballots all over America next Tuesday to limit or roll back property taxes. It's the biggest tax revolt since the 1970s. No wonder. Property taxes across America have been soaring -- according to Deloitte and Touche, by an average of more than 10 percent between 2001 and 2003 alone. They're rising mainly because more and more responsibility has been heaped on towns and cities -- which rely on property taxes to pay for a lot of things that states and the federal government used to help pay for. Call it trickle-down taxes. The federal tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 left a big hole in the federal budget, meaning that the feds can't or won't fully fund programs like No Child Left Behind, which requires schools to take sometimes expensive steps to improve themselves. Federal support for states has also dropped, so there's less state aid to towns and cities. Well, someone's got to pay for schools and roads and parks and public safety. So by default, the tax burden has fallen to the bottom of the food chain. Local property taxes have borne a lot of the brunt."

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ELSEWHERE

Steve Sailer has an extensive article which punctures pretty well the Democrat claim that their Presidents are bright and GOP Presidents are dumb. Looks like it is the other way around. So we have another example of that pervasive Leftist "projection".

Will Wilkinson summarizes the voter fraud situation. GOP hyper-vigilance is made necessary by deliberate Democrat attempts to rig the results. You have to do something to stop all those dead people voting: "Lindsay bitches about GOP voter suppression in Ohio. I don't believe I remember her complaining (correct me if I'm wrong) about DNC voter suppression (successful or not) in every state in which they tried to cripple democracy by sueing Nader off the ballot. (If I ever hear high-toned democracy rhetoric from Larry Tribe, I'll throw up a little in my mouth.) Second, Lindsay simply assumes that stationing people in polling places to challenge fraudulent voters from voting is an ploy to suppress Democratic votes. But why not assume instead, or in addition, that the huge Democratic voter-registration drives really were riddled with malfeasance. Indeed, I assume both. The Democrats have been signing up dead people, felons and non-citizens in an attempt to steal the vote. The Republicans want to stop Democrats from stealing the vote, and so want to guard against dead and illegal voters, and, as a bonus, to suppress the legitimate Democratic vote--in an attempt to steal the vote. Now, I want to emphasize that I don't think any of these shenanigans even approaches the seriousness of the DNC's effort to make it impossible for American citizens to vote for a candidate who represents their views".

Kerry's Tax hypocrisy: "Sen. John Kerry keeps telling us that 'the rich' need to pay more in taxes. The senator and his wife are among the 400 richest Americans. He says that he has 'a plan to tax the rich.' Under the senator's tax plan, what percentage of the Kerrys' income do you think they would pay the IRS? (a) 50 percent, (b) 40 percent, (c) 30 percent, (d)15 percent. The correct answer is (d) 15 percent. According to an analysis by the Argus Group, a well respected tax law and economics firm, the Kerrys' average tax rate would only increase by 1.8 percentage points to 15.2 percent under the senator's plan, while many small business people would see their average rate rise by 4.0 percentage points, resulting in effective rates as high as 35 to 40 percent, including certain deduction phase-outs."

There is a new blog which has up a comprehensive account of the New Age nuttiness preached by Mrs Heinz-Kerry. Apparently "alternative" health fads will solves all our problems: "If you have a child who eats the wrong things, is denied adequate health care and is deprived of a stimulating environment, it follows of necessity that he will turn out to be a criminal or other form of psychopath, sociopath or mental defective, Teresa teaches. From this she believes it follows naturally that if society seriously intends to prevent criminality and all other forms of social pathology, then all we have to do is provide our children with the right nourishment and sunlight and stimulation-and, poof!, instantly you have healthy and well-adjusted children who grow into intelligent, law-abiding and well-adjusted adults".

The Yes Bush Can site and its accompanying mailouts would seem to be the latest bit of Democrat play-acting. It may now have been taken down. It was allegedly by a group of Bush supporters who had switched to Kerry. It might fool some people, I guess. But after the biggest bit of play-acting of all -- "John Kerry as war-hero" -- it is pretty last-ditch.

Chez Joel has a very amusing post about how to talk to terrorists. He's not being sarcastic or anything!

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with its big range of select reading.

Wicked Thoughts has put up a very wicked post about Yasser Arafat

I have just put up on LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS some excerpts from a good article by V.D. Hanson which says which says that elitism is now the main thing that undergirds Leftism. A post on the megalomaniac Soros too.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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29 October, 2004

FROM BROOKES NEWS

John Kerry brings in former communist agent to slime Vietnam vets and smear Sinclair Broadcast Group John Kerry asked Lerach to deal with Sinclair and the vets. He did. He brought a former paid communist agent to the dirty deed
George Soros' slimy attack on President Bush The sooner the Americans wake up to this bargain-basement Machiavelli and the sleazy political ambitions of his super rich mates the safer they will be
John Kerry moves to censor the Sinclair Broadcast Group Despite the lying propaganda that the John Kerry campaign and its media lackeys are spreading the Sinclair documentary did contain dissenting views
The 2004 Nobel prize in economics: getting it wrong Since the Great Depression of the 1930's and until the early 1970s most economists viewed economic fluctuations as the outcome of shocks to aggregate demand. They are wrong
John Kerry tries to censor Vietnam vets and former POWs John Kerry sent in his attack dogs to intimidate Sinclair Broadcast Group and slime Vietnam vets who had been POWs
Another Murdoch journalist bends the facts to support John Kerry Why do so many people despise George Bush while supporting John Kerry? I believe the problem lies with the mass media, meaning journalists
Libertarian Party endorses President Bush There is a belief that a Bush administration would be undesirable. Such a notion could not be farther from the truth, or potentially more harmful to the cause of liberty
Indigenize Iraq's reconstruction The brutal violence in Iraq requires not only accelerating the training of indigenous security forces, but giving the Iraqi people responsibility for their own communities' reconstruction

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

Great news: My home State of Queensland has just delivered control of our Senate for the next six years to Australia's conservative government.

Vietnam peaceniks ride again: "On Sunday, the New York Times featured a political ad counseling defeatism in Iraq – a counsel that has become commonplace in its pages. It was sponsored by an organization called "Church Folks for A Better America," and based in Princeton. The signatories included the same "church folks" – among them William Sloane Coffin Jr., Robert Drinan, and Robert Edgar (National Council of Churches) who counseled defeat in Indo-China, aided the torturers of American POWS in North Vietnam, and fronted for the Soviet dictatorship’s "nuclear freeze" campaign".

This article points out that the dreaded neoconservatives were major advocates of American intervention in Muslim Bosnia and Kosovo --- interventions which are now generally applauded. That rather puts the lie to the constant Leftist claim that the neocons are just lackeys of Israel.

Glenn Reynolds has rather cleverly managed to get one of his articles into The Guardian -- an article in which he extolls the Anglosphere and says that the French hostility towards America relects osssified French fear of American dynamism.

Peg Kaplan has found more Leftist "projection": "In November of 1938, through a carefully orchestrated plan that included support from both newspapers and radio, Germany's Nazi leaders touched off an outburst of violence throughout the regime aimed at destroying Jewish property and facilitating the implementation of Hitler's "final solution." It is perhaps the ultimate irony that the American left, which has long excoriated conservatives by comparing them to the Nazis, has so completely aligned itself with Hitler's methods and his totalitarianism".

An amusing feminist screech at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Club. All abuse. No facts. Excerpt: "Across the ocean, another generation of poorly paid, satin-eared bunnies is suiting up to serve drinks and dodge the roaming hands of boozy middle-aged men, and the nepotistically appointed Christie Hefner chairs an otherwise all-male board of directors".

Jeff Jacoby: "Kerry is a liberal Democrat, but in this campaign he is running as a reactionary: as one who wants to reverse course, to go back to the attitudes and practices that guided US policy when Clinton and the elder George Bush were in office. The younger Bush may be a Republican, but he is running this year as a radical. Profoundly transformed by 9/11, he sees the old playbook as feckless and dangerous, and is determined to set a revolutionary new course."

African Anglicans think homosexuality is an abomination and they have not hesitated in saying that to their alleged co-religionists among American Episcopalians and members of the Church of England. We see at the end of this article the response of the Western Anglicans: "We will cut off your funding". Apparently, catering to homosexuals matters more than spreading the Christian gospel in Africa.

Pygmy remains discovered in Indonesia (just North of Australia). It rather fits in with the pygmy element still alive in Northern Australia but nobody seems to want to make that connection. The reconstructed picture of the Indonesian pygmies tooks a lot like the Tasmanian Aborigines, who also seem to have had pygmy (negrito) ancestry: "This hobbit-sized creature appears to have lived as recently as 18,000 years ago on the island of Flores, a kind of tropical Lost World populated by giant lizards and miniature elephants". See also here. And see here for why the Australian Left try to hide the very existence of Australia's pygmies.

Some recent articles on Think Israel:
JIHAD, APOCALYPSE, AND ANTI-SEMITISM: An Interview with Richard Landes
THE NEW ANTI-SEMITISM
A CLOSER LOOK AT EGYPT
SAUDI ARABIA'S RELIGIOUS HATRED
THE NEW NEO-COLONIALISM: The Arab-Moslem Invasion Of France
UNITED NATIONS VOTE PRESAGES STATE SPONSORED GLOBAL ANTI-SEMITISM
IS ISRAEL'S LEGAL SYSTEM ACTING ILLEGALLY?
GETTING GAZA WRONG
ARAB TIME BOMB: The Demographic Argument
THE PEOPLE, THE PEOPLE'S ARMY, THE STATE AND THE REGIME

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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28 October, 2004

MONSIEUR JEAN KOHN KERRY

Traitor Kerry: "The nation's most highly decorated living veteran told a hometown audience in Sioux City, Iowa, Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry "will go down in history as the Benedict Arnold of 1971." Col. George "Bud" Day, an Air Force pilot who spent 67 months in a North Vietnamese prison and was awarded the Medal of Honor among other decorations, visited Sioux City to campaign against Kerry. "The notion that his guy would think he is qualified to be president of the United State when he has already pledged his allegiance to North Vietnam makes absolute zero sense,'' Day told the Sioux City Journal. "My view is he basically will go down in history sometime as the Benedict Arnold of 1971.'' "

Jeff Jacoby has a good article on how much John Kerry has usually given to charity: NIL. His "compassion" only extends to giving other people's money away.

Jeff Jacoby is also having a laugh at John Kerry's sudden discovery of religion.

The liars' liar: "Since his very first appearance on the national scene - as a water carrier for the communists of North Vietnam - Kerry has continuously LIED and EXAGGERATED. And he's been caught, over and over and over again... He slandered the US military in 1971; he lies about being at World Series games, about meeting with foreign leaders or UNSC members, about being in Cambodia - to name just a few! Yet his LYING has not ever hurt him. WHY? HOW? Because since WW2 the Leftist meme has included a basic tenet of the post-modernist meme: a belief that there is no such thing as REAL TRUTH; they believe that truth is just subjective or culturally relative. People who do not believe in truth have no problem lying or voting for liars if it advances their cause. The Leftist cause is as it has always been: making the state bigger; having the state run by elites"

Kerry a N. Vietnamese stooge: "I think what we've discovered is a smoking gun," Corsi said. "We knew when we wrote 'Unfit for Command' that Kerry had met with Madame Binh and then promoted her peace plan. "This document enables us to connect the dots," he emphasized. "We now have evidence Madame Binh was directing the antiwar movement ... and the person who implemented her strategy was John Kerry."

Mark Steyn: "There are legitimate differences of opinion about the war, but they don't include Kerry's silly debater's points. On the one hand, the Tora borer drones that Bush "outsourced" the search for Osama bin Laden to the Afghans, though at the time he supported it ("It is the best way to protect our troops," he said in December 2001. "I think we have been doing this pretty effectively."). But, on the other, he claims he's going to outsource Iraq to the French and the Germans, though neither of them wants anything to do with it. As for this Bush-failed-to-get-bin-Laden business, 2-1/2 years ago I declared that Osama was dead and he's never written to complain. There's no more evidence for his present existence than there is for the Loch Ness monster, which at least does us the courtesy of showing up as a indistinct gray blur on a photograph every now and again. Osama is lying low because he's in no condition to get up".

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ELSEWHERE

A good summary: "The liberal base hates George Bush for one reason; they know he places American interests first. The interests of France, Germany, Russia and the whole Hee Haw gang at the U.N. place a far distant second. It is no surprise then that so many of the left will cast their vote for John Kerry, a man who as a Senator has consistently voted against ANY military action that might safeguard American soil. It is no surprise that they applaud a man who believes that Europe is always superior to America, a man whose character was no doubt formed during the halcyon summers of his childhood spent mostly at the Forbes family chateau in France. It is no surprise they grovel at the feet of a man whose entire career has revolved around taking food from the mouths of those that work, sweat and produce, and giving it to bums and parasites. Kerry's dream world is that of a welfare state presided over by a collection of tin-pot foreign dictators in K-Mart suits. He is the champion of those who are incapable of making a decision, who wish to be cared for from cradle to grave".

Florida voting myths: "During a speech, September 11th, John Kerry implied that Republicans will keep blacks from voting in November. "We are not going to stand by and allow another million African American votes to go uncounted in this election," ... Kerry said that the Democrats prepared to monitor the polls on election day. "What they did in Florida in 2000, some say they may be planning to do this year," The flaw in Kerry's and the Democratic Party argument is that there was no policy to prevent blacks from voting. There was no such policy by the Republican Party or the Florida government.... the final report by the USCCR stated the Commission "does not find that the highest officials of the state conspired to disenfranchise voters. Moreover, even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred." .... The report pronounced, "Disenfranchised voters are individuals who are entitled to vote, want to vote, or attempt to vote, but who are deprived from either voting or having their votes counted." Using this standard then, military personnel and Republican voters in the Florida panhandle were the voters who were disenfranchised. However, the USCCR made no mention of them in their report.."

Marxism in academe: "Marxism is an emotional disorder, not a political philosophy. Wealthy people sometimes accept Marxism, not because it has ever worked, but because they feel guilty about having more than other people. But, more often, it is accepted by those with less who are angry, usually because they lack the talent and drive to succeed in a capitalist society. This realization often occurs at a ten-year high school reunion after they see people with less schooling and fewer degrees but with more money than they have. They don't want to compete with these people. They just want the IRS take their wealth and "redistribute" it against their will under the threat of incarceration."

Fraudulent American historians: "In his new book, "Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud -- American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin" (PublicAffairs), Hoffer contends that his profession "has fallen into disarray" and aims a polemical blast at his fellow historians for condoning sloppy scholarship and an anything-goes ethical climate.... Hoffer accuses the American Historical Association (AHA), where he has served as an adviser on plagiarism and a member of its professional standards division, of abdicating its responsibility to enforce basic scholarly principles in both realms... But Hoffer reserves his bitterest jibes for the AHA, which last year gave up adjudicating cases of scholarly misconduct"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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27 October, 2004

ECONOMIC ISSUES

Astute Blogger has a good short post on the idiocy of farm subsidies -- pointing out that when New Zealand abandoned its subsidies, it actually gave New Zealand agriculture a new lease of life.

Lawsuit industry has hurt America "Americans are concerned about where the good jobs are going to come from -- and about their health coverage. These are understandable concerns. They should prompt voters to take a closer look at which would-be presidential administration is likely to take the nation in which direction. One of the things that is clearly hurting American manufacturing is litigation. Not only must U.S. companies compete in a tough world marketplace, they must constantly defend themselves here at home."

The aging "problem": "While the pessimists fret about the problems to come as if ageing is some new challenge, they ignore the fact that this has been a remarkably constant feature of industrialised countries since the latter part of the nineteenth century, and societies have had no difficulties 'coping' with it in the past.

Health, wealth and happiness : "How do we know when we're happy? Strange as it may seem, this philosophical question could come back to haunt you one April 15. Psychologists and 'happiness researchers' are using the finding that Calcutta slum-dwellers and Masai nomads are as happy as American businessmen to argue not only that wealth doesn't necessarily make you happy, but that this shows that investment in economic growth should be replaced by social programs. The trouble is that one conclusion doesn't necessarily lead to the other." [See also my post of Sept. 14th]

UK invents another way to discourage people from employing anybody: ""The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, is attempting to block a new law that would punish negligent employers with heavy fines or imprisonment in cases of deaths or injury at work. The Guardian has obtained details of a letter sent by Mr Straw 10 days ago to John Prescott, deputy prime minister and chair of the domestic affairs cabinet committee. In it, the foreign secretary casts doubt on the need to create a new crime of corporate manslaughter. ... The unexpected intervention into a domestic controversy will infuriate trades unions which have been campaigning for the reform for many years. The commitment for a draft bill was a cornerstone of the agreement between the government and unions reached at this summer's crucial Warwick forum."

What's the answer for high gasoline prices? Nothing: "What, if anything, should government do about the sustained increase in gasoline prices? Not a thing. For both practical and theoretical reasons, politicians and regulators should resist the temptation to monkey around with fuel markets. No matter how well intentioned, intervention to protect consumers will only make matters worse."

Stupid socialists: "A wave of regulation is burdening Britain's financial services industry and threatening its ability to compete internationally, the UK's biggest business group has said. In the next two years, more than 20 European Union measures will be imposed on companies, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) said in a report on Monday. The CBI called for a moratorium on new rules, to let firms concentrate on their businesses. "Companies are being battered by the impact of relentless new legislation," CBI Deputy Director John Cridland said in a statement. "It's forcing a dramatic and wasteful diversion of effort away from the daily battle to keep the UK ahead of its competitors." Britain's finance industry employs more than 1 million people and contributes 5.3 percent to gross domestic product, the CBI said."

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ELSEWHERE

The Islamicist/Nazi connection: "It should be pointed out that National Socialism had a profound impact on the political philosophies of many radical Islamic political organization, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in Egypt in 1928), Nasser`s Young Egypt movement, the Social Nationalist Party of Syria founded by Anton Sa`ada, and the Ba`ath Party of Iraq. One of the main leaders of the 1941 pro-Nazi coup in Iraq was Khairallah Tulfah, the uncle and guardian of Saddam Hussein. When Saddam failed in his attempt to assassinate the Iraqi leader Abdel Karim Qassim in 1959, he fled to Egypt where he was given protection by Grand Mufti-protege Nasser and ODESSA-connected former Nazis. The rest, as they say, is history."

There is a painful letter from Iran here about the tyranny inflicted on innocent Iranians by the Muslim theocracy there.

Media silence about Kerry: "Here we are, on the brink, possibly, of electing a self-confessed war criminal to the Oval Office -- a man who, as an American officer, parlayed with the enemy, and... nothing. No questions, no stories. No thoughts, no curiosity. We contemplate a new wartime leader whose political epiphany -- the famous Christmas in Cambodia, "seared, seared" into Mr. Kerry's memory -- never happened. Questions, stories in the MSM? Not a one. We consider trusting our very lives to a man who has consistently hewed to the wrong side of history, favoring appeasement and disarmament over democratic principle and strength, but we know nothing of his current thinking on those old positions."

Why Howard Stern got outsourced: "I'm not sure about this, but judging from the college students I teach, few people know why Howard Stern decided to leave the country and send us his show from 'abroad' -- he is moving to satellite radio. Most folks do not realize, I think, that this country has a socialist broadcast system."

Blogger "Let's Try Freedom" used to be "pro-choice". Having seen ultrasound pictures of his daughter in the womb, he is now pro-life. He also has a good post on why all Americans now must be citizen-soldiers.

One of my Australian readers has got very irritated at the pro-Palestinian slant of our television. She wrote our "60 Minutes" program a letter of protest. You can read the letter here

Wayne Lusvardi says that it was FDR who originally got America involved in the Middle East.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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26 October, 2004

SOME HISTORY

American Leftists claim to be deathly afraid that a second term for GWB will allow him to appoint Supreme Court judges who uphold the constitution instead of making the law up as they go along. I would like to think it is true but from the way the Senate Democrats recently filibustered Estrada, I fear it is unlikely. And you don't always get what you expect with judicial appointments. Power can easily go to the head of the enthroned one. We might recollect the time when a Republican President appointed a Republican governor to the court and the nation got out of it one of its most determined judicial dictators -- Earl Warren.

Condemnation of the President: "What has [the president done] to entitle him to re-election? We contend he has done nothing to earn this high distinction but that, on the contrary, in the conduct of the war, his deplorable mismanagement of our most important armies, with the disastrous and alarming consequences, have furnished evidence sufficient to convince the country he is not the pilot to carry us through the perils of this war..." But the President concerned was Lincoln, not Bush.

"Neocons" in 1944: "Jewish government officials secretly manipulating the president? That accusation, heard recently in connection with the decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein, was also raised sixty years ago, in the heat of the 1944 presidential race. The lightning rod for criticism in 1944 was Sidney Hillman, a prominent labor leader and aide to President Franklin D. Roosevelt."

There is some discussion here of how the welfare state "colonised" Britain's formerly self reliant and mutually supporting working class: "the extensive culture of privately run working-class schools was destroyed by the board-schools founded by the 1870 Education Act, which were not free, but were effectively subsidised to a point where they put their private competitors out of business. All of this was part of a process in which 'the working classes are firmly tagged as the patients, never the agents.'... The state,... by taking away the working classes' means of providing for themselves, and especially by creating catastrophic "Downer" ghettos in housing estates, has created a culture of dependency.

Some interesting statistics about the lead-up to World War II from Jim Lindgren: A Gallup poll taken in 1938 showed that the support for an anti-Jewish campaign was quite low in America but that Democrat voters were 50% more likely to support such a campaign than were Republicans (14.7% versus 9.8%). Those "racist" conservatives again!

"Genghis Khan may not sound like a compassionate conservative, but Weatherford argues that his subject was a great deal more tolerant and far-sighted than his barbaric reputation suggests. Suborned peoples, of all creeds and cultures, were permitted to conduct their affairs autonomously - so long as they recognized his paramountcy. He was the first of the great free traders, a meritocrat, and, by the lights of his time, a nicely enlightened despot. You could do worse than being ruled by Genghis Khan, and many did".

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ELSEWHERE

In academe, Brian Leiter is probably second only to Noam Chomsky for half-truths and twisted reasoning. Because he seems to be widely-read, it is probably time someone took on the job of shooting him down regularly -- as various people do for Chomsky. Being a humble psychologist rather than a high-flying lawyer, I am not the man for the job but even I am tempted to point out the odd bit of shallow rhetoric emanating from him. Take this post. He says the very name "Constitution Restoration Act" is Orwellian. The U.S. constitution is Orwellian? How twisted can thinking be? The provisions of U.S. constitution are about as opposite to a socialist dictatorship (which is what Orwell describes) as you can get! And restoring elements and assumptions of that constitution that have been eroded by an arbitrary "progressive" judiciary must surely be similarly anti-Orwellian. So it is Leiter who is Orwellian. He is calling black white. Once again we note that familiar Leftist "projection" -- seeing your own faults in others. Leiter also heads up his discussion of the Act as "Theocracy anyone?" -- implying (apparently) that the Act concerned is designed to introduce some sort of Christian dictatorship. The whole point of the Act, however, is simply to protect people from being harassed in the courts just because they are Christians. So in Leiter's strange world protecting people from official harassment is equivalent to setting up a dictatorship! Again, he claims something is the opposite of what it is. With scholarship as atrocious as that, it is clear that Leiter's popularity derives from his Leftist ideological correctness rather than any intellectual stature. His reasoning is such garbage that I suppose it is no wonder that nobody bothers to critique it regularly.

The poll of conservative bloggers says that George Bush will defeat John Kerry hands-down.

Another stupid (psychopathic) lie: "U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq."

The myth of the disenfranchised: "Already, in state after state, the Democrats have said that voter confusion over how to vote constitutes voter disenfranchisement. But, as George Will recently noted, disenfranchisement is something the government does to you. It's not something you do to yourself. If you can't figure out how to fill in the ovals or punch the chads -- and some minority of voters will always botch it -- that doesn't mean your right to vote was rescinded. It means that you didn't take your right to vote seriously enough to pay attention to the instructions."

Sweden "As early as 1977, Swedish relative income fell below the average for the twenty-three rich OECD countries. Swedish economic growth has been below the OECD average since 1970. The accumulated effect of the slower growth rate is large. From 1970 to 1998, fifteen countries surpassed or caught up with Sweden in terms of GDP per capita, while Sweden did not overtake a single one.... In the early 90's Sweden's extensive sick-leave system resulted in 30% of the working population being "sick" at any point in time. Unemployment rose to 13%. Taxes rose to 55% of GNP, with deficits of 15% of GNP.... It isn't difficult to conclude that Sweden took a resource-rich land, a hardy and resourceful citizenry, avoided the expense and destruction of wars, and then proceeded to smother those advantages with a socialistic welfare state. It's hard to imagine a more ideal testing ground for an ideological experiment, yet socialism has failed there as well".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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25 October, 2004

UNIONS VERSUS THE WORKERS

A good email from Australian philosopher/economist Rafe Champion below:

"With John Howard's recent victory in the elections, the stage is set in Australia for a re-run of all the arguments about the use and abuse of trade union [labor union] power and influence. As I write, I hear the voice of former Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke pleading to save the priviliges of the trade unions on the specious argument that giving the workers more power over their own pay and conditions is confrontational and divisive!

The late Bill Hutt is one of the most important writers on these matters and some of his work can be found on line. For an overview of Hutt's career, see here. Below is an extract from Hutt's book on collective bargaining where he draws upon statements from the working class leaders to indicate that the combinations of workers at that time generally disadvantaged the mass of workers. He wrote:

"This should not allow the modern student to ignore the fact that the interests of the unionists were almost universally antagonistic to those of the labouring masses. Had historians of the trade-union movement been orthodox economic theorists they might have laid the strongest emphasis on this point. As it happens, however, they have been practically without exception persons with an undisguised hostility to orthodox theory; and this may account for their failure to stress what might have struck other economists most forcibly. The Webbs frankly admit the frequent existence of monopolistic tendencies on the part of unions, but the general impression they leave is misleading for they have obviously written as union advocates."

One of Hutt's major books was The Strike Threat System which is the history of the trade union use of strike action to undermine the rule of law and disadvantage the poor and indeed all of society apart from the favoured few in the most powerful and reckless unions. The paradigm case in Australia is the waterside workers (longshoremen). Central to the trade union defence is the myth of the "bitter struggle" that workers had to fight against capital and management to get a fair go. This myth is subjected to devastating historical appraisal in this chapter from the book. The chapter begins with some turgid prose, but do persist!"

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I have just put up on LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS a few comments about the British journalist who has recently called for President Bush to be assassinated.

The Left have recently put out another "survey" that purports to prove that GOP voters live in fantasyland and Kerry supporters are realists. Evangelical Outpost demolishes it nicely. The whole thing was blatantly rigged of course. Distortion is just normal for the Left. The straight truth would be too awkward for them.

A ringing endorsement of GWB from a newspaper in the heart of the Left Coast. A small excerpt: "This election year, America is at a crossroads. Under the current president, we forwarded America's duty to both beat back the forces that would end democracy here and abroad and sent a strong message to those who would destroy our way of life: "Don't tread on me.'"

If anyone is an intellectual, it would have to be David Gelernter (He is a professor of computer science at Yale University, among other things, and in German/Yiddish his surname even means "learned"!) yet he is voting for GWB because he sees Bush as having a sense of humour where Kerry has none. He sees humour as humanizing and as a sign of genuine humility.

Fun: "A report recommending English become a compulsory subject in all schools in France has raised the ire of teachers' unions and supporters of linguistic diversity. Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin is said to back the proposal, which was put forward a week ago by a commission looking into the future of France's education system, according to Le Monde. Such a move would help French pupils catch up with their counterparts in other EU countries who enjoy a big lead in using what the commission's report called the language of "international communication"."

Australia's Cardinal Pell sums it up: "Recently, I was interviewed on radio about the role of religion in public life. The suggestion seemed to be that if you were irreligious, that was okay, that being secular meant you were fair and reasonable, but religious principles should not intrude into public affairs. I pointed out that Christians had the same rights as anyone else in our democracy and could propose whatever policies they chose. If people didn't like their policies, they could vote for another party. The interviewer professed to be scared of the prospect of Christian political parties, although he didn't say why. He then moved on to George W. Bush who, he claimed, not only set out to do God's will, but claimed to be given special godly instructions or revelations. I do not claim that all President Bush's policies are prudent and right. They may or may not be. But he must not be condemned simply because he's a serious Christian. The interviewer conceded there was no evidence that Bush was claiming to hear voices, and lapsed into silence when I explained that for me, it was a consolation if a world leader was trying to do God's will rather than setting out to do whatever he could get away with. Isn't it better, I asked, to have a leader who believes that in the next life, he will have to answer for the decisions he makes in the here and now?"

Satanic Presbyterians: "I am neither an 'end-timer' nor a messianic, but these groups do have the most accurate way of describing recent events. And who knows, maybe they're right. This week, a group that does not follow the core precepts of Christianity yet call themselves 'Christians' had a friendly meeting with one of the most heinous Islamist terror groups on the planet. Those people who call themselves 'Christian' yet ignore a very core belief of that religion are the Presbyterians, and the group they had a comfy sit-down with is Hizbollah."

Although the U.S. Congress defeated the U.S. military in Vietnam, Lancelot Finn has got a good argument to say that the larger strategic objectives of that war were still attained. In the big picture, America did win.

A good comment on the recent conservative victory in the Australian elections: "I was once a bit concerned about bookshops flooded with tottering towers of tomes attacking the Howard Government and the Bush Administration. I have since come to the conclusion that seeing large bundles of them unopened, unsold and unread in the bookshops might actually be the best possible outcome".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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24 October, 2004

FROM BROOKES NEWS

The hatred and loathing that the media are expressing for President Bush has astonished many people. This week's issue reproduces seven articles from the 2000 election. These articles show that media hatred of Bush goes back many years. We believe that this hatred stems from a hatred of America. It is, in fact, the brutal end product of several decades of vicious anti-Americanism that has corrupted the media to the extent that their dishonesty and ideologically driven reports and commentary now threaten the democratic process.

Another Rupert Murdoch journalist maligns Bush and his record Susan Mitchell is another particularly nasty example of that breed of leftwing reporters who makes no attempt to hide the hate and sneering loathing she feels for George Bush
A Borgia journalist strikes at Bush The US election has helped expose just how bigoted and dishonest many of our journalists really are, which brings me to the 'The Australian Financial Review'
Murdoch's Australian roots for Gore again Cameron Forbes' squalid and bigoted report on the Florida recounts
Murdoch journalist libels Bush and his Texas record The malevolence of the Australian press toward Bush is striking in its intensity. One is even tempted to call it pathological
Aussie journalist joins Gore's election campaign Roy Eccleston, from Rupert Murdoch's 'Australian' railed against Republican demonstrators, falsely accusing them of intimidation
Media hack spins for Gore The American election has provided graphic and somewhat sickening examples of just how ideologically corrupt most of our journalists are
Al Gore's shameless journalists Leftwing journalists are relentless. No matter how much one exposes their political bigotry and hypocrisy they still continue to push the party line. And that brings me back to Gay Alcorn, 'Sydney Morning Herald'

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

There is an article here reporting the ongoing claims by psychologists to the effect that conservatives are nutty --- yet another example of Leftist "projection" of course. The spotlight this time is on claims by a buffoon called Altemeyer. Altemeyer's claims were demolished academically long ago but that is conveniently ignored. See here. Psychologists have always been good at ignoring their own literature if it suits them. See here and here.

I mentioned yesterday an ignorant Leftist "intellectual" who thought that conservatives want to abolish all government. A reader commented: "I took at look at that Matt Young post on "The Panda's Thumb" ... oy vey. More straw men than in your average Nebraska wheatfield"

Such "loving" relationships! "The Gay and Lesbian Medical Association is launching a first-of-its-kind "LGBT Relationship Violence Project" to educate medical professionals about domestic violence in lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender communities.... "Domestic violence is a hugely ignored health issue in the LGBT communities, affecting one in three LGBT relationships," said Susan Holt, an expert on LGBT domestic violence prevention.... The upcoming presentations in Palm Springs will "mark the beginning of GLMA's essential work to educate the medical community about the often-hidden but brutal reality of <> relationship violence," said GLMA President Kenneth Haller, MD.

Great to be welfare dependant: "A woman stayed on hold for more than six hours when she rang her benefits office. Patricia Pattison, 54, clung on to the phone while doing housework, chatting to a friend and having her nails painted. The Leicester grandmother said: 'They said they were busy but I'm not looking forward to my phone bill. The Department for Work and Pensions has apologised.'"

ADHD is genetic too: "Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the controversial "bad behaviour" syndrome, are suffering from a medical condition linked to abnormal development of the brain, scientists said yesterday. Brain scans of children with the disorder - which some critics allege has been invented or exaggerated by drug companies seeking lucrative markets - have revealed a common pattern of changes, providing evidence that ADHD is a genuine biological phenomenon. According to studies, its origins are largely genetic and it is not the result of poor parenting. Growing up in a "chaotic environment", to which parents with poor skills can contribute, may trigger the condition among children who are already genetically susceptible. The condition, which involves restlessness, impulsive behaviour and a short attention span, is thought to affect up to one in twenty British children"

Lancelot Finn on Andrew Sullivan. One excerpt: "If you have guessed by now that the reason I am bringing up Judas Iscariot in an essay about Andrew Sullivan is because Sullivan has turned against Bush, that's not quite it. For one thing, George W. Bush is certainly not Jesus Christ, nor did Sullivan's support for Bush ever amount to discipleship, nor should it have. But when I think about my erstwhile hero Andrew Sullivan, the rock star of the blogosphere, it seems that he and Judas Iscariot share certain fatal flaws. Each was too impetuous, too willful. Each seemed idealistic, principled at any given moment, yet in the end his path was zig-zagging and contradictory and led him nowhere. Judas destroyed the cause he believed in. Andrew Sullivan may yet do so".

Libertarian Party stalwart, Prof. John Hospers has endorsed President Bush on the grounds that America is in great danger and that Kerry cannot be relied upon to act decisively. I actually met Hospers once. He seemed very level-headed. He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California and was also for 17 years a professor of astronomy

About flaming time! "Federal prosecutors charged three Kansas City-area residents Thursday with using fraudulent records to vote in both Kansas and Missouri in the Nov. 5, 2002, general election."

A nasty one for the Democrats. It seems that Kerry has a lower IQ than GWB

The best conservative site in Portuguese now has an English version. For anyone who wants the truth about what is going on in Brazil...

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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23 October, 2004

ELECTION FRAUD

Voter registration in chaos: "In New Mexico, Albuquerque police officer Glen Stout became concerned when his 13-year old son received a voter registration card -- as did one of his son's 15-year old friends. What that means is that Stout's son and the 15-year old neighbor are legally entitled to vote in the State of New Mexico without the fear of being challenged since a law pushed through that State's Democratically-controlled legislature and signed into law by Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson earlier this year prevents precinct workers at any of New Mexico's polls from asking for any form of identification from any voter, or asking their age -- even if fraud is obvious."

Leftists abuse voter registration: "America Votes, a 32-member coalition of anti-Bush organizations - led by such groups as George Soros' MoveOn.org, America Coming Together and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees - is spending $100 million on a campaign that voting officials say has resulted in a massive increase in voters nationwide. The aim of this door-to-door voter-registration drive is to identify undecided and potential Democratic voters in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and 11 other battleground states. One member of the coalition, a left-wing activist group known as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), claims to have registered 1 million new voters since July 2003. The problem is that at least some of these were fraudulently registered.... Authorities in several states are investigating whether thousands of voter registrations have been fraudulently submitted - many of them by members of the America Votes coalition. In Florida, the Justice Department and state authorities are investigating charges by a former ACORN field director that workers for the organization routinely withheld Republican voter registrations, while thousands of invalid voter registration cards were submitted in their place.

And here is an hilarious example of Leftist "projection" (seeing your own faults in others). If you want to know what is true of Leftists, the simple rule is to look at what they say of conservatives! Excerpt: "The Republicans are out to steal the 2004 election -- before, during, and after Election Day. Before Election Day, they are employing such dirty tricks as improper purges of voter rolls, use of dummy registration groups that tear up Democratic registrations, and the suppression of Democratic efforts to sign up voters, especially blacks and students. On Election Day, Republicans will attempt to intimidate minority voters by having poll watchers threaten criminal prosecution if something is technically amiss with their ID, and they will again use technical mishaps to partisan advantage. But the most serious assault on democracy itself is likely to come after Election Day. Here is a flat prediction: If neither candidate wins decisively, the Bush campaign will contrive enough court challenges in enough states so that we won't know the winner election night."

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ELSEWHERE

There is a good example here of the utter depth of Leftist political ignorance. The author somehow believes that all conservatives are anarcho-capitalists, the most extreme form of libertarian -- who don't believe in any government at all! Libertarians would certainly be staggered to hear that. It shows what an airtight little intellectual cocoon the author lives in. Conservatives of course do believe in quite a lot of government, though not as much as Leftists do. We would scarcely have President George W. Bush otherwise. I guess the author is another exemplar of that simplistic, "black-and-white thinking" that is so characteristic of Leftists and which they often therefore "project" onto conservatives. Razib gives the ignoramus a good serve too. Needless to say, all the commentary and analysis that flows from such a warped definition of conservatism can safely be ignored. An intellectual who cannot even define his terms accurately is no intellectual at all.

What it means to be a Republican. Well worth reading. Another stereotype-buster for lockstep Leftists.

Bill Vallicella has a post saying that the Left are insensitive to danger. He says this is why they are always pretending that human nnature is good and ignoring the fact that some people can be evil and dangerous. I think it is a bit worse than that. I think Leftist ideologues don't care about reality at all. That's one reason why they often claim that reality does not exist. They are so preoccupied with puffing up their own image and self-esteem that everything else just has to go hang. And anything that threatens that image will simply be denied. They will do and say ANYTHING in order to sound good. Clinically, it is called "Narcissism" and in more extreme cases, it is part of "Psychopathy".

Leftist "principles" are a joke: "I have long insisted that the problem of radical Islam is not a liberal or conservative issue; it's a human rights issue. The unfortunate fact, however, is that largely it is only conservatives who care about it. In the face of the global jihad, the left is strangely silent: no protest marches, no angry full-page ads in the New York Times. When the Left does notice an adulterous woman being stoned to death under Sharia law, or some other outrage in the Islamic world, it is usually dismissed as an aberration or somehow blamed on their all-purpose bogeyman: the United States government.

Good comment on the so-righteous Giving Tree: "In giving to the boy-man at every opportunity, the tree thought it was doing right. Instead, it created a dependency relationship in his human friend that lasts his whole life and that leaves both impoverished. This is not a quality one would wish for a friend, and even more so, for one’s son or daughter"

There is a huge site here which completely demolishes the Leftist chant that Saddam "had no links to terror"

Lawrence Auster has a very comprehensive article here arguing against America's current de facto policy of allowing millions of illegal immigrants to flow into the country. Australia has a high immigrant inflow too but we insist on choosing whom we allow in. As a result we mainly get high-quality (hard-working, law-abiding) immigrants from East Asia. We were getting a rash of illegal Muslim immigrants for a short while but Australia's conservative government put a stop to that -- to great public acclaim.

White House chickens out on illegal immigration: "The White House yesterday asked Congress to reject an attempt by Republican House leaders to load an intelligence reorganization bill with measures designed to prevent illegal immigration. The White House is making the request because Democrats won't support the bill if it has the immigration measures. The administration wants 'an effective bill that both Houses can pass and the president can sign into law as soon as possible to meet the nation's security needs,'

I have put up a couple of posts on LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS recently.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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22 October, 2004

SOME AUSTRALIAN NEWS EXCERPTS

A big difference to the way American schools treat innocent kids: "A teenager who sparked a gun scare at his high school sat patiently in a classroom as the drama unfolded, unaware he was the person police were scouring the school for. The school, north of Brisbane, went into lockdown late yesterday morning after the boy was seen entering school grounds with what appeared to be a gun... A police spokesman said it appeared charges would not be laid against the boy with the toy gun. "He was going to the school to pick up some school work and had bought the toy as part of a Halloween costume," he said. "He was taking part in the lockdown. He didn't even realise it was a result of his actions."

An excellent satire on the New York Times here. A small excerpt: "The international community is bracing for an influx of political refugees following the collapse of democracy in Australia. Last night the UN Security Council was in emergency session on the situation in Australia, where John Howard seized power in a bloodless election on Saturday. The defeat of democracy had been long foreshadowed by the country's artists and intellectuals, as well as by some prominent columnists..."

Australian Left jolted rightwards by the election: "Mark Latham has promised to push ahead with a more aggressive pro-market reform agenda as he admitted that Labor had not done enough to win voter trust on economic management..... In his first post-mortem on the election, Mr Latham championed the need for a new wave of economic reforms - admitting Labor had to do more to enhance its "economic credentials" with the public... During a sometimes candid interview on the ABC's 7.30 Report, he signalled plans to press ahead with policies on further changes to competition laws and opening up the economy - even if it came at the expense of alienating some of his colleagues and the union movement. "We have to move forward with a new agenda for economic reform consistent with those values about competition, about productivity, about growing the market economy and building incentive and participation into the Australian economic framework," Mr Latham said."

Hooray! "The Government's grip on a historic Senate majority is tightening, with National Party candidate Barnaby Joyce steaming away in the count for Queensland's final Senate seat."

Antisemitism in the Australian Left too: "Former Bob Hawke government minister Barry Cohen has launched a stinging attack on critics of Israel within the Labor Party, saying anti-semitism is now rampant in the ALP. He said the number of Labor MPs who supported Israel were increasingly being drowned out by members of the party's hard left, whom he accuses of making exaggerated claims about the nation... Mr Cohen said his life and character were shaped by the anti-semitism he experienced in his youth. "I was proud to belong to a party [the ALP] that fought all forms of prejudice. Not any longer," he wrote."

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ELSEWHERE

Good to hear: "For the first time in the Iraq war, according to military officials, US aircraft last week directly bombed a mosque. The airstrike northwest of Ramadi ended an intense firefight in which insurgents, holed up inside the shrine with heavy weapons, held off the US Marines for three hours. Precision-guided munitions set the Sharqi mosque ablaze, but left it standing. 'The Marines couldn't even get close to the building to do anything because of the firepower that was coming out of there,' making the mosque a legitimate target, says a senior military official in Baghdad. 'The only way to stop this was with a strike.' The incident illustrates how US and Iraqi forces over the past three months have adopted increasingly tough tactics against a dug-in insurgency: raiding mosques, dropping bombs and firing rockets in cities, and conducting large-scale infantry sweeps into urban 'no-go zones.'"

This article sees Islamic terrorism as the last desperate gasp of a defeated civilization: "The madness of the Islamists' spectacular attack on the World Trade Center is self-evident; its despair lies in its inevitably annihilating impact on the plotters and perpetrators themselves, world Islamism in general, and the al Qaeda networks, organizations, and systems of support in particular (including the Taliban regime in Afghanistan).... Today the hard-core Islamists' spectacular terrorist violence reflects a no less desperate attempt to break out of the historical impasse and terminal structural crisis reached by the world Islamist movement in the second half of the 20th century. I predict this violence will be the prelude to the dissipation and final demise of militant Islamism in general. Like the armed factions in Europe who had given up on society, political parties, reform, proletarian revolution, and traditional communist organization in favor of violent action, militant Islamism has given up on contemporary Muslim society".

One result of favouring "minorities" in hiring. Loss of standards: "Five police officers in Los Angeles stand accused of pursuing a four-year armed robbery spree, using squad cars, uniforms and badges to make the brazen heists look like official raids. At least two men were shot with stun guns during the robberies, while another was beaten with a police baton, had a gun stuffed into his mouth and was burnt with a cigarette lighter. The five men, working with as many as fifteen accomplices, including a professional female boxer, stole 320kg (700lb) of marijuana and 50kg of cocaine, as well as cars, firearms and jewellery. The gang used Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) surveillance tactics to keep a look out for police or witnesses, and restrained victims with standard-issue handcuffs." See also here.

British socialism shoots itself in the foot: "Warnings that Gordon Brown will be forced to raise taxes quickly in the event of a victory in next year's general election increased yesterday after the emergence of the worst monthly public finance figures on record. Much weaker than expected tax revenues meant that government borrowing last month set a September record of ś4.8 billion, almost double the figure for the same month last year. The bleak September data was blamed by the Treasury on erratic factors affecting spending. But the bad news from last month ended a highly disappointing first half to the financial year, during which the Government borrowed ś22.75 billion - more than two thirds of the Chancellor's ś33 billion full-year forecast".

There is an article here pointing out at length that with John Kerry, what you see is NOT what you get. He will say and do anything to gain power -- even imitate 95% of GWB's policies -- but his voting record reveals him for the far-Leftist he is.

Good augury for GWB: "In a March 2003 speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen dismissed worries that the American public would lose heart if there were too many casualties in the then-imminent Iraq war. "All the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war. . .," Ledeen declared. "What we hate is not casualties but losing.""

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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21 October, 2004

BIG MAL IS JEWISH

I am a great fan of Professor Bunyip. His use of humour to deflate Australian Leftists is something that I can only aspire to. I note however that he seems to concur with the usual view among Australian conservatives that Malcolm Fraser was our worst Prime Minister in living memory. Fraser was in his younger days known as very Right-wing and as a fan of Ayn Rand but in office he did very little to introduce market-oriented reforms. These days he is best remembered for losing his trousers on a hot night in Memphis, Tennessee! Courtesy of Michael Darby, I once met Big Mal for a brief chat and it was a great struggle to keep the word "trousers" out of the conversation, I can tell you!

I agree that the Fraser years (1975-1983) were "lost years" as far as most market reforms were concerned but Fraser does have some reasonably good conservative credentials nonetheless. It is often forgotten that he was ahead of Margaret Thatcher in rolling back socialism -- in that he started de-nationalizing Australian health-care in 1976 (though the present dual system was not fully in place until 1981). Margaret Thatcher, of course, first came to office in 1979. And Fraser was a strong supporter of the United States and its policies -- and he also cut back government spending, which is more than G.W. Bush can claim.

And doing nothing whilst in office is not an entirely inappropriate thing for a conservative Prime Minister to do anyway. It beats constant government meddling and multiplication of laws! Australia's most revered conservative Prime Minister -- Sir Robert Menzies -- is also remembered for the paucity of his "initiatives" and the stability of Australian life during his long term in office.

On anything to do with race and ethnicity, however, Big Mal rivals the Left for "correctness" -- and he bears some responsibility for the installation of the ghastly Robert Mugabe as ruler of the unfortunate people of Zimbabwe. The reason behind that, however, seems never to be mentioned. Fraser is technically Jewish. Although his own religion is nominal Protestant, his mother was Jewish -- which makes Fraser Jewish under Jewish law. And Jews are of course understandably hypersensitive about matters to do with race. It is however remarkable testimony to the very low level of antisemitism in Australia that a man can become Prime Minister of Australia without his Jewishness ever even being mentioned. I think it also shows how "racist" Australian conservatives are that they chose Fraser to lead them -- rather like those "racist" British conservatives who chose Benjamin Disraeli to lead them in the 19th century and Michael Howard to lead them in the 21st.

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ELSEWHERE

Maybe some hope for the British Tories after all: "Michael Howard has recruited the man who helped his namesake, John Howard, win four elections in Australia to head his campaign for the general election expected next May. The Tories claimed they had pulled off a coup by appointing Lynton Crosby as their election campaign director".

United Nations corruption (1): It not only refused to prosecute one of their staff who took part in the Rwandan genocide, but paid him handsomely as well.

United Nations corruption (2): "This month, the United Nations Security Council voted to condemn terrorism. The resolution was introduced by Russia, still grieving over the terrorist attack on a school in Beslan, and perhaps the unanimous vote will give it a measure of solace. But the convoluted text and the dealings behind the scenes that were necessary to secure agreement on it offer cold comfort to anyone who cares about winning the war against terrorism. For what they reveal is that even after Beslan and after Madrid and after 9/11, the U.N. still cannot bring itself to oppose terrorism unequivocally. The reason for this failure is that the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which comprises 56 of the U.N.'s 191 members, defends terrorism as a right".

It looks like the bombing of the Atlanta Olympics was the work of Islamic terrorists and that the Clintons covered that up.

Homosexuals are great demanders of tolerance but don't seem so tolerant themselves. The "Log Cabin Republicans" (an allegedly conservative homosexual organization) have "excommunicated" one of their chapters because it dared to endorse GWB!

The EU is showing how tolerant it is too -- doing its best to block a traditional Italian Catholic from taking a high office in its administration.

Not all Democrats are out of touch with reality. This one is voting for GWB because he alone takes the Islamic threat seriously. Apparently even 9/11 in their own backyard was not enough to shake the appeasement delusions of most New York City Democrats.

Fabian's Hammer has been blogging up a storm about China recently. An important country to know about.

A rather amusing post on Che Guevara here.

Conservative Brazilian blogger Luis Afonso has started a blog in English here. The English is a bit fractured but is perfectly understandable. He wants people to know of the "Red Tide" that is washing over Brazil at the moment.

Let's Try Freedom has some evidence that Andrew Sullivan is on the slide. Sullivan's twisted attitude to his British homeland put me off him long ago so I think he deserves to be taken less seriously. Taranto noted his prejudiced attitudes recently too. And Keith Burgess-Jackson thinks Sullivan argues disreputably.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with its usual selection of the best of the blogosphere.

I have a big post on the flu vaccine crisis up on SOCIALIZED MEDICINE.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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20 October, 2004

SNERDS

Ian McFadyen has an excellent analysis of what the calls the "Snerds" or "sneering classes" -- educated Leftists who dominate the media and cultural institutions. Some excerpts: "It is not a snobbery based on wealth or aristocratic origins. It is the snobbery of people, usually from modest backgrounds who have created sense of class superiority for themselves on the basis of possessing the right attitudes rather than property or wealth. It is a snobbery based on being "well informed", of being "concerned" and "having a sense of social morality."... What makes this class of people snobbish rather than simply pretentious is their tendency to sneer. It is a tone which implies that certain thing in life are so axiomatic that no discussion of them is necessary or even possible...

What is difficult about conversing with a Snerd is the degree to which their attitudes are locked down.... Any such challenge to the basic tenets of their beliefs will simply be sneeringly discarded and the questioner relegated to one of the baskets of ratbag, fascist, racist, right wing reactionary, capitalist, Philistine or ill-informed... The inflexibility of the Snerd arises from a personal arrogance that he or she is a well-educated, well-informed and intelligent person who has "worked all this out" and come to - what they believe to be - the only possible solution. Snerds are characteristically blind to the fact that their belief systems are based, not on an independent intellectual of the issues, but on attitudes received from a very narrow range of sources, and shaped by the prejudices of a sub-culture.....

When they express opinions on a matter they do so more to define the boundaries of their own class than to actually change anything in the community..... Thus, while Snerds are quick to opinionate in areas which they feel will enhance their image as culturally superior - politics, law, the arts, they have no opinions at all on, and are careful not to get involved with, matters which they consider down-market like agriculture. Primary production, manufacturing and manual labour simply do not exist in the Snerd universe.

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ELSEWHERE

There was some crap science reported last year that encouraged older women to give up HRT. The science was crap because the differences between groups that it relied on were not statistically significant. See my post of October 27 last year. Nonetheless, everybody hates drug companies so doctors everywhere jumped on the bandwagon and tried to get women off their pills. We now see how dangerous crap science is. It looks like the advice could have killed a lot of women. Read this report: "Hormone replacement therapy significantly increases the life expectancy of older women, but only if they begin taking the drugs soon after the onset of the menopause, a major review of the evidence has found. A new analysis of 30 trials involving a total of 26,708 women has revealed that the benefits of the treatment substantially outweigh the risks, so long as it is started before a woman reaches the age of 60. In women who started HRT at 56, the risk of death from all causes was cut by 39 per cent". I had a big post on crap science on GREENIE WATCH yesterday too.

Leftists like those Chads! Should we hang him? "A Defiance County man has been arrested for allegedly filing more than 100 false voter registration forms in exchange for crack cocaine from a Toledo woman working on behalf of the NAACP's voter registration drive. Chad Staton, 22, of Stratton Ave., faces a fifth-degree felony charge of false registration after sheriff's deputies said he filled out the registration forms by himself -- using either fictitious names or addresses -- and gave them to Georgianne Pitts, 41".

Kerry excommunicated: "An unusual letter from the consultor to a Vatican agency rules that Catholic politicians who support abortion rights have already excommunicated themselves by their actions - a message that suggests Sen. John Kerry is no longer a member of the church. The Rev. Basil Cole, a Dominican theologian and consultor to the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, wrote the letter to Marc Balestrieri, a Los Angeles lawyer of canonical law... Catholic World News reported the letter potentially undercuts the entire debate over denying Communion to politicians who support abortion. An excommunicated Catholic may not receive any of the sacraments of the church, including the Eucharist, marriage and even Christian burial. According to the news service, the type of excommunication outlined in the new information is called latae sententiae, which means that it occurs automatically and does not require a formal pronouncement by any church official."

Belmont Club has a good post on the disgusting European attempt to avoid acknowledging Saddam's mass-murders.

An amusing account of the European far-Left at work here

Jeff Jacoby on why the definition of marriage should not be left to judges: "Bush is right: It is not in our national interest for so grave a question to be decided by judicial diktat. Far better that it be decided openly and fairly, with public debate and the participation of Congress and the states. Anything else would be profoundly undemocratic -- and unwise."

Discrimination in Hollywood: "For years, the actor Ron Silver was a partisan Democrat - a one-time president of the Actors' Equity union and co-founder, with colleagues like Susan Sarandon and Christopher Reeve, of the Creative Coalition, which encouraged left-leaning political activism among celebrities.... Everything changed for Silver after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Now he calls himself a "9/12 Republican." A strong supporter of Israel and the war in Iraq, Silver spoke at the Republican National Convention in New York and is featured prominently in a new documentary, "FahrenHYPE 9/11," a searing indictment of Michael Moore's blockbuster film. Silver says his political change of heart and outspoken support of President Bush has exacted a high professional cost in Hollywood, where Republicans are a decidedly rare breed. "It's affected me very badly. I can't point to a person or a job I've lost, but this community is not very pluralistic," Silver said. "I haven't worked for 10 months.""

There is an appalling story here about pervasive antisemitism in the Swedish media. The President of Sweden's Association of Journalists once wrote that Saddam Hussein's prisons were 'better than Swedish apartments'. What a sad apology for a human being he must be!

There's a good spoof of the New York Times here.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************



19 October, 2004

ECONOMICS AGAIN

"The Antitrust Paradox" continues: "Specifically, Judge Bork explained that the overzealous application of the antitrust laws and the resulting intervention into otherwise free markets did not maximize consumer welfare by ensuring lower prices, as is the purpose of antitrust policy. Instead, such an approach achieved the opposite effect by sacrificing potential consumer savings in order to level the playing field between admittedly unevenly matched competitors. In other words, the economic reality of antitrust enforcement is to prevent consumers from reaping the benefits of lower prices ..."

Globalization: "Why Globalization Works is one of the best books within the huge literature on globalisation. Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times and avid free marketer, sets out to demolish the arguments of the 'anti-globalisation' campaigners. He has several advantages over the anti-globalisation campaigners. Perhaps most important is his belief, stated at the beginning of the book, that ideas matter. He is fully immersed in the literature on globalisation, from technical economic texts to anti-globalisation tracts, and even quotes Marx and Lenin. He also has an excellent empirical grasp of the world economy, a quality authors on globalisation frequently lack".

Crazy: Borrowing to put off cutbacks: "Conservative activists vowed Thursday to sue the state if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proceeds next week with his $920 million, 20-year borrowing plan to pay off part of one year's pension obligations. Attorneys for the Pacific Legal Foundation said Schwarzenegger's widely expected move would violate a state constitutional ban on governments borrowing more than $300,000 without a popular vote. The foundation represents a Fullerton taxpayers group aiming to derail the idea..... This, said Thom Babcock, an Orange County business owner and president of the Fullerton Association of Concerned Taxpayers, is "the Enronization of California. They're borrowing money to pay daily debts. It's not for a single purpose, to build freeways, hospitals or bridges. It's borrowing to pay daily bills."

Globalization gives prosperity AND peace: "Critics of globalization forget that free trade fosters prosperity and know almost nothing about its most important benefit-its tendency to prevent war. Quantitative studies have shown that trade fosters peace both directly, by reducing the risk of military conflict, and indirectly, by promoting prosperity and democracy." [And it is poor nations that desperately need it]

U.S. poverty is mostly among illegal immigrants: "Many middle-class families achieved large income gains in the 1990s and -- despite the recession and halting recovery -- have kept those gains... The increase in poverty in recent decades stems mainly from immigration. Until our leaders acknowledge the connection between immigration and poverty, we'll be hamstrung in dealing with either. Let's examine the Census numbers. They certainly don't indicate that, over any reasonable period, middle-class living standards have stagnated. Mostly, the middle class is getting richer"

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Mark Steyn has a very complimentary article about Australian Prime Minister John Howard. I liked this line: "Howard's a more consequential figure in world affairs these days than Chirac". Steyn has however fallen for the Leftist slur that Howard is short. He is not. He is 5'10" tall. Steyn does however rightly mock the Leftist spin that the Iraq war was not an issue in the election. The promise by the Left to get the troops out by Christmas was all over the papers. Can you imagine the Left NOT making a big issue out of Iraq? One generally overlooked factor in Howard's appeal is his characteristic humility -- a big contrast with Leftist arrogance. See here for instance.

How times change: "Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned terrorist attacks in Iraq and around the world will increase if George W Bush is not re-elected in next month's presidential poll. The Russian leader's comments are a tacit endorsement of his American counterpart. Mr Putin says the terrorist attacks in Iraq are aimed personally at President George W Bush. He says international terrorist groups want to cause maximum damage to the American President's campaign for re-election and prevent him from winning the November 2 poll".

Why Kerry is bad for Israel: "So why am I still exercised about John Kerry? It's the ramifications of his foreign policy in general, especially his fixation on the United Nations as the arbiter of international legitimacy, proctor of that "global test." Save for the U.S. veto in the Security Council, Israel loses every struggle at the U.N. against lopsided majorities. In the General Assembly and the Human Rights Commission, Muslim states trade their votes to protect aggressors and tyrannies from censure in exchange for libels against the Jewish state. The body's bloated and dishonest bureaucracies are no better, as evidenced most recently by the head of the U.N. Palestine refugee organization, who defended having Hamas militants on his staff. I've searched to find one time when Kerry - even candidate Kerry - criticized a U.N. action or statement against Israel. I've come up empty"

Social Security. Lying Leftists again: "First, the NY Times ran a Bush quote from an event the reporter did not attend, then within hours of the piece running, the Kerry campaign managed to put an ad together and have the press releases done and all the media reporting on it. "New Kerry Ad Exposes Bush's January Surprise - Social Security Privatization...." There's only one problem. The reporter in question, Ron Suskind, did not attend the event he got the quote from. Further, it was not televised, it was a private event and there were no transcripts available. Yet he reports the quote as fact.... For their part, the Bush campaign is denying the quote and some even claimed Suskind made the quote up from whole cloth. In the end, it is of little use, the media is running wild with the story, facts be damned". More here.

In case you have not seen it already, the email about Iraq that George Soros first posted and then deleted is still up here. Clearly, George saw that he had lost the argument.

There's nothing new under the sun. Further to my lightbulb story yesterday, a reader tells me: "Queensland had a light globe changing organisation over a decade ago. It was called Many Hands and was operated by Adrian Collings, a former postmaster from Fernvale. It was started primarily to service high rise rental properties on the Gold Coast but also serviced pensioners, handicapped and anyone else who required it".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************



18 October, 2004

SOME MORE ECONOMICS

The real job figures: "U.S. job creation continued to move ahead at a steady pace with the announcement Friday that 96,000 non-farm payrolls were added to the economy. Over the past thirteen months 1.9 million new jobs have been created. The unemployment rate stands at a historically low 5.4 percent"

Sowell: "Those who vote on the basis of what the government can do for them are especially short-sighted during a war against worldwide terror networks. What good would it do to get free prescription drugs forever if your forever is likely to be cut short by more attacks like those on September 11, 2001?"

Myths about U.S. workers: "The claim that a large part of the American population can make ends meet only with the help of moonlighting falls on fertile ground among pundits and politicians who promote the view that something is profoundly wrong with U.S.-style capitalism. As John Kerry put it at the Democratic convention in Boston: "People are working weekends; they're working two jobs, three jobs, and they're still not getting ahead.... Also ignored is that only one-in-four multiple jobholders in America says he actually needed more than one job to meet expenses or pay off debt. This point is reinforced by the fact that the higher your formal education, the more likely you are to take a second job. Among Americans with a Master's degree or a Ph.D., multiple jobholding is almost three times as common as it is among high school dropouts."

Minimum wage myths : "Of all the economic myths my students bring to the first day of class, perhaps the most prevalent is that the minimum wage is desirable because, without it, employers would pay substandard wages. My new students -- by and large the products of public education -- have not yet had the benefit of being taught to think economically. If they had any economics education at all in high school, it involved being bombarded with graphs, charts, and curves, the meaning of which they never really were taught, perhaps because their teachers had never been taught either."

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ELSEWHERE

Another marvel of capitalism: "Hot on the heels of dog walkers, personal shoppers and errand runners, Queensland now has its first domestic light-bulb changing service.... For $44 - plus the cost of the bulb - one of four technicians from the Light Globe Doctor will come to your home. "My elderly grandmother couldn't change her lightbulbs and that's what gave me the idea for the business. "When I first started, I thought I'd be going around to little old ladies houses to change their bulbs for them. But since we started 12 months ago, I've only had a couple. "We've been doing about 180 jobs a week and a lot of my customers are just too busy making money at work and doing other things to change them. "Rather than going to the shop, finding the right light-bulb and then changing it, they call me to do it. "I've even been doing jobs after hours. People get home from work, find the light has blown and give us a call. "I did a job for a lady recently who only wanted the one bulb changed."

Leftist hate backfired in Australia: "Above all, what the federal election reaffirmed is that the public, in general, recoils from the rhetoric of hate. Latham, no matter how much he sought to sanitise his image, is an old-fashioned factional headkicker. So is Bob Brown, in his own way, despite being beatified by the media. But the leader of the Greens is the most uncompromising party leader in federal politics, along with the rest of the Permanently Outraged. In short, the progressive movement suffered a meltdown in the election.... All those people who went around Sydney painting signs, "Howard war criminal" and "Howard lies", and all the secular fundamentalism from Brown, and all those loud and proud Howard haters in the media, have yielded a bitter harvest. The public, in its totality, does not reward the rhetoric of hate. And hate is the only word for the undisciplined partisan bile that has spewed from people who should know better."

Privatizing local government works brilliantly: "Crestwood, Illinois [is] being billed as the best run town in America because it operates like a business. This article pointed out that Crestwood, Illinois, with a population of about 12,000, is run so efficiently that the citizens that year were to receive a 26% rebate on their property taxes. Wow! The town is so well off that residents over age 55 get free household repairs, their shrubs cut for free and the goal of this super efficient government was to one day totally eliminate property taxes altogether".

Voter turnout: "Every election year there are great alarms in the media that not enough Americans vote. Supposedly this shows that there is something wrong at the core of our society. In reality, societies where different groups are at each other's throats often have high voter turnout, as each fears the worst if some other group gains political power. Polarization is a high price for high voter turnout. But there are already efforts to scare old people that their Social Security is threatened in order to get out their vote. ... It is young people who are likelier to find their promised pensions are not there when they get old -- unless they get some private pension in the meantime, with or without Social Security privatization. Since 90 percent of the black vote goes to Democrats, it is especially important for Democrats to scare blacks, to get a large turnout."

There is now a book out called The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century . It shows why the English-speaking nations as a whole (including Israel) are likely to continue their cultural and intellectual dominance of the world.

Well-said: "Pardon our populism, but we're a lot more impressed by the views of millions of ordinary voters than by those of all the academics in the world. Democracy and human rights are safer in the hands of people who directly benefit from them, soberly appreciate their value and rightly fear the alternatives than they are in the hands of overpaid, overfed, overpraised intellectual snobs who take their considerable safety and excessive comfort for granted, and spend far too much of their time sneering at those who don't belong to their self-regarding little subculture, but are expected to pay their salaries nonetheless".

Maverick philosopher: "I've said it before, and I'll say it again: It is is a mistake to suppose that the only support for an anti-abortion position must rest on religious premises. Senator John Kerry made this mistake last night during his third and final 'debate' with President Bush" [I agree. I view abortion with horror, even though I am an atheist].

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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17 October, 2004

SOME ECONOMICS

Reduce poverty by reducing government: "The enemies of capitalism and economic freedom shed crocodile tears over poverty. Their policies do not alleviate it but worsen it. They deprive many workers of the very possibility of working, and when those workers are permitted to work, compel them to be confronted with the needless competition of other workers driven from other lines of work by the same kind of policies. And they compel all workers, especially the poorest, to pay needlessly higher prices: all are compelled to pay higher prices insofar as the productivity of labor is held down; and the poorest in particular are compelled to pay higher prices as the result of the same monopolistic privileges that drive their wages down. As I have shown, economic freedom, not government interference, is the means of overcoming poverty"

Moronic "activists": "The Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC) has joined up with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to launch a nationwide boycott of Yum Brands Inc. Yum Brands is the owner of many successful fast food chains including; Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, A&W Root Beer, and Taco Bell. TacoBell is where CIW seems to have their beef with Yum Brands. Taco Bell is the largest purchaser of tomatoes from farms in Immokalee South Florida. These farms utilize local migrant laborers to harvest different crops of vegetables including, cucumbers, watermelon, and tomatoes. Most of the migrant laborers are not legal citizens and do not fall within the confines of minimum wage requirements and typical employment regulations. They receive per bushel wages rather than hourly or salaried compensation. For each bushel picked a migrant worker receives an average of 45 - 50 cents. .... Staging a boycott against Taco Bell does not change the guided self interest of taco eating teenagers. In the short run it has the exact opposite effect of its intended purpose. Boycotting Taco Bell lowers the demand for tacos, which in turn lowers the demand for the inputs required to make them, which in turn lowers the prices for wages paid to migrant workers needed to pick tomatoes."

The welfare state rewards liars: "Many bad things can be said about the welfare state -- the political arrangement, as the 19th-century French liberal Frederic Bastiat wrote, by which 'everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.' But one largely unnoticed feature is that it rewards people for suspending their moral sense. Frankly, it makes winners out of liars."

Outsourcing: "What you won't find on the Kerry website are any references to serious studies of outsourcing. The reason is that they all find the issue to be seriously overblown: Outsourcing is responsible for a trivial amount of job loss at most, and is generally a positive for the U.S. economy. Serious studies of outsourcing include ones by former Democratic administration officials."

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ELSEWHERE

The New York Sun Endorses GWB: "By all these measures Mr. Bush strikes us as the far better candidate - more intelligent, more principled, more trustworthy." Good to have a loud conservative voice in NYC.

Holocaust deniers are now welcome in Germany. Muslim ones, that is. See here.

He's probably pissing into the wind but the ideas are good: "Tony Blair demanded an end to the decades-old Franco-German domination of Europe yesterday as he called for the EU to forge a "common agenda" with the United States to solve the world's problems. He suggested there was a danger that this year's eastward enlargement of the EU could open fresh divisions if the community's founding members did not accept new countries from the former communist east as equals.... Mr Blair told a conference of centre-Left leaders in Budapest that it was essential to build an outward-looking Europe of "equal partners" which regarded America as an ally rather than a "rival"..... Allies of Mr Blair said he wanted to ensure that the 10 new member states who joined the EU in May - eight of them former communist nations - felt part of a pro-Atlanticist club and not inferiors in an elitist inward-looking community. Mr Blair also chose the Budapest meeting to demand that the EU modernise its economy and abandon its reliance on heavily regulated labour markets based on the post-war social model".

A good comment from "Bag of Worms": "For craftsmen [mediocre professors], colleges and universities are models of the collectively organized, subsidized, noncompetitive welfare state endorsed by radical politics. Craftsmen professors live a middle class life without having to work hard for it. No doubt some professors do work hard; it is necessary, if a professor desires to be a star, to work 60 hours week. If the professor has no desire to be a star, she can work a 30 hour week; so many professors simply coast. They have nine-month contracts. They supplement their income with junior level administrative jobs that could be done by a community college graduate. A significant portion of the craftsmen professor's career is thereby subsidized like welfare. In this situation, the political affiliation of professors is not the result of their special insight about America. Their affiliation does not spring from supposed gifts of natural genius. College professors align themselves with the Democratic Party simply as an expression of their self-interest in enjoying a welfare state.

Another comment on the most famous book about IQ: "Most of TBC consists of summaries of research in the field of psychometry - that is, the measuring of various attributes of the human mind. The rest is thoughtful commentary on the possible implications of those results for the future of American society. The authors take a broad and humane point of view on this latter topic, arguing that a good society is one in which every person, even a person of limited intellectual powers, can live a useful and satisfying life. They assert that present-day U.S. society is trending away from this ideal, towards a sort of oligarchy dominated by a "cognitive elite" of intellectually gifted lawyers and administrators, ruling over and practicing a sort of smug paternalism toward those less successful than themselves in the meritocratic rat race".

Feminist dogma on partner abuse: "October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, which should be an opportunity for some meaningful and informative discussion of how to deal with this important issue. Unfortunately, it looks like we are going to get a lot of boilerplate rhetoric that will generate far more heat than light. ... Once again, partner violence is being defined exclusively as male victimization of women and as a society-wide epidemic. In fact, the National Violence Against Women Survey conducted for the National Institute of Justice in 1996 found that about 22 percent of women had been physically assaulted by an intimate partner -- mostly pushed, grabbed or slapped -- at least once in their lifetime. By these standards, I am a 'victim' too: Some 20 years ago, during a tumultuous breakup, my then-boyfriend slapped me. Of course, by these standards, I am also an 'abuser,' since I had slapped him first. I'm not especially proud of it, and neither, I'm sure, is he; but this is not the kind of problem societal resources should be marshaled to combat."

For a variety of reasons I have always liked Iceland (though I have never been there). This post reinforces my views. It shows how well Iceland is doing despite its poor natural resources. Why? Mainly because of less bureaucracy combined with a Norse population.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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16 October, 2004

SANCTIMONIOUS GARBAGE FROM A PROFESSOR OF "PEACE STUDIES"

"And, perhaps most importantly, the consequences of a failed U.S. policy in the Middle East are much greater. While U.S. policy in Southeast Asia was responsible for enormous human suffering, the costs of that failed policy to the United States - despite the loss of over 50,000 soldiers, the drain on the economy, and the enormous divisions in the body politic that are yet to heal - were relatively small by comparison. Indeed, it is important to remember that, despite all the heinous crimes the United States committed against the people of Vietnam, the Vietnamese never flew airplanes into buildings"

More here.

Wayne Lusvardi comments: "This is the kind of Leftist counterfactuals and historical revisionism that is spewed forth on Libertarian websites regarding American intervention in Vietnam as the alleged forerunner of the current Iraq War. Prof. Zunes states that even though the U.S. committed "heinous" crimes against the people of Vietnam, the Vietnamese never flew airplanes into buildings." As a former member of the U.S. 25th Infantry Division, Cu Chi, South Vietnam, I found the above statements to be patently false. I assisted the Division psychiatrist in conducting psychiatric clearances for dishonorable discharges and for alleged war crimes. The U.S. "atrocities" in Vietnam paled by comparison to those of the Viet Cong and were immediately brought to justice. I witnessed "VC" tactics firsthand. First they would murder the Buddhist priest, then the Catholic priest, and then the school principal to subjugate a village. Even Communist double agent Truong Nhu Tang in his book "A Vietnam Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and its Aftermath" documents how after the Americans pulled out of Vietnam that there was a reign of murder and gulag camps that made even Communist sympathizers in the South regret kicking the U.S. out. Even anti-war and peace activist Tang had to flee Vietnam as one of "boat people." One needs to go to a university to learn such propaganda?"

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

John Howard's triumph is a victory in the war on terror Howard fought a clean election and won it fair and square, regardless of what our leftwing journalists and self-appointed intellectual elites think
Marian Wilkinson distorted facts about President Bush and the Florida vote Like the vast majority of leftwing journalists the Bush-hating Marian Wilkinson cannot contain her political bigotry
Long memories helped bury Mark Latham and the Labor Party I believe that the electorate's memory of Keating's high interest rate regime played a significant role in Mark Latham's defeat
Marian Wilkinson distorts Edwards-Cheney debate Reading Marian Wilkinson makes one realise why journalism stinks. Her report on the Cheney-Edwards debate could have come straight from the Democratic National Committee"
Channeling Bush: Saddam and OJ Put yourself in the Chief Executive's place. What if OJ Simpson were the dictator of Iraq?

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

Internet threatened: A recent federal court ruling says the FEC must extend some of the nation's new campaign finance and spending limits to political activity on the Internet. Long reluctant to step into online political activity, the agency is considering whether to appeal. But vice chairwoman Ellen Weintraub said the Internet may prove to be an unavoidable area for the six-member commission, regardless of what happens with the ruling.'I don't think anybody here wants to impede the free flow of information over the Internet,' Weintraub said. 'The question then is, where do you draw the line?'"

Wow! Hotmail have just upgraded their mailboxes to 250mb

The third Presidential debate : "Spinning facts and figures is as old as politics itself, but last night, Sen. John Kerry marshaled a mountain of distortions in his indictment of the Bush administration. Here's the rundown, reserved for purposes of clarity and brevity to the areas of economy and jobs, health care, and college costs ..."

Oil: "Ignoramuses of Left and Right can effortlessly pawn themselves off as sophisticates in any discussion of events of the Middle-East or central Asia by simply declaring that "it's all about oil." Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya. it doesn't matter -- if it's east of Egypt and west of India, we're assured that it's about oil.... Or, as John Kerry has put it, has George W. Bush "sided with the big oil companies" against the people? Not according to the data.... The fact is that the president's interests run directly counter to those of oil companies. In fact, the worse things go for George W. Bush, the better they go for Chevron. That's because the president has tied his political fortunes to the democratization and modernization of Middle Eastern dictatorships, which means that he has set the world on a course towards lower oil prices. It should go without saying, but unfortunately it doesn't, that oil companies benefit from higher oil prices".

Individual rights vs. identity politics: "Only if you advocate group rights and reject individual ones does it make sense to cry out for sexual solidarity in voting. Ironically, such a call reverses the political trend that secured the vote to women in the first place. Namely, the demand for inclusion in human rights: The demand by women to have their rights equally recognized so they were no longer in a separate legal category 'with lunatics, idiots and criminals.'"

Steve Sailer has a good summary of the most famous book on IQ. One excerpt: ""Perhaps because I'm congenitally optimistic, I think The Bell Curve's message is already widely understood, by the American people if not by the elite. Ordinary citizens know that some people are in significant ways more intelligent than others, that only a relative few are extremely bright or extremely dull, and that intelligence bunches up at the center. They know that intelligence is not randomly distributed among members of different identifiable racial and ethnic groups. These are lessons that are taught in everyday life, and you have to undergo a pretty sophisticated indoctrination and enlist in a tightly disciplined ideological army to believe otherwise."

Buchanan: The resurrection of "America First!": "The foreign policy routinely disparaged as 'isolationism' is always on the table. It is the foreign policy most deeply rooted in America's history, heart and vital interests. It is no more going to be 'extinguished' than is Christianity. It is our oldest tradition. Though that tradition may be dismissed by our foreign policy elites as antiquated, selfish and un-idealistic, it is the elites who are out of touch. They do not know the country they live in. They do not know the American people. They never have." [Buchanan is right about isolationism being the historic policy of American conservatives but 9/11 made that policy no longer viable. Circumstances alter cases]

This made me laugh: "Marxist.org.uk was established in 1998 (initially as the British Institute of Contemporary Economic and Political Studies) to provide independent socialist analyses of national and international developments in politics, economics and culture". Marxism unmasked!

There is another amusing reflection on French "philosopher" Derrida and his ilk here.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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15 October, 2004

AUSTRALIA: ELECTION AFTERMATH

Conservatives to control Senate: "The Coalition was poised to secure a Senate majority last night after Liberal Russell Trood claimed the party's third upper house seat in Queensland and the Nationals became the favourite to win the decisive 39th seat in the 76-seat chamber."

Leftist's hatred his undoing: "The norm in Australian politics when you greet your opponent is a simple handshake, a false smile and an unmeant wish of good luck but Latham, who is 20 years younger and 20kg heavier than Howard, did something that deeply unsettled all of those who might have seen the election eve nightly news. For whatever good Latham may have done in his 10 months as leader, some of it (how much remains uncertain) was undone at the point of his encounter with Howard. As the two men met, Latham grabbed Howard's hand, aggressively wrenching a clearly unsuspecting Prime Minister towards him. False pleasantries followed, with the contact ending by a somewhat more polite pat of Latham's arm by his opponent. Yet for a moment, just for a moment, the nation got the impression Latham was attempting a physical shirt front on a man 20 years his senior. It was an unedifying and undignified incident that left those who saw it with an uneasy feeling. It was a picture that said much about how Latham and Labor think about Howard and the Coalition. It said a lot about why Labor's badly directed campaign went off the rails and allowed the Government to be returned for a fourth term. Latham and Labor's basic feelings about Howard can be summed up in one word: hatred.

Typical Leftist dishonesty. So-called historian Ross Fitzgerald says of John Howard: "In terms of actual policy performance, it's arguable that John Howard squandered his third term. The great work and family adventure, welfare and tax reform, each of these areas was left largely untouched despite the rhetoric. On the industrial front, little was achieved." Fitzgerald somehow "forgets" that Leftist obstruction in the Senate was why Howard was not able to do a lot of what he aimed at.

At least this guy admits how far-Left (sorry: "Progressive") Australia's "Greens" are: "As the weekend's election dust settles, the responsibility for carrying progressive politics forward in this country has fallen squarely to the Australian Greens. They are clearly the third force in Australian parliamentary politics".

Anti-religious media prejudice: Tony Abbott minister, and George Pell cardinal, are two of the hate figures of the Sydney media... Pell is detested because he favours a muscular Christianity, not the limp-wristed social justice variety and Abbott is detested because he wants to inject Christian values into politics and this is ultimate sin for the secular religionists. Labor's schools policy is an incendiary issue. When four Catholic and Anglican bishops, including Pell, released a statement on September 28 criticising the policy as "potentially divisive" most of the media was unsure whether to ignore or denounce it. But one thing it did know -- this was an outrageous intervention in politics. For the liberal media, bishops aren't supposed to get involved in politics, unlike greenies or film stars, unless of course the bishops are opposing a war or calling John Howard a racist in which case they are moral arbiters.... . When Jones raised the schools policy Abbott denied this was discussed and then said "I may have been seeking pastoral counselling from Cardinal Pell." This was the clincher. The idea that a Catholic minister would seek a meeting with a cardinal on a pastoral matter during an election is inconceivable within Australia's media culture."

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ELSEWHERE

Don't they realize that Leftists NEED censorship? "The Federal Communications Commission won't intervene to stop a broadcast company's plans to air a critical documentary about John Kerry's anti-Vietnam War activities on dozens of TV stations, the agency's chairman said" [Leftists cannot afford to have the full truth known on almost anything].

Amusing: "Jacques Derrida, the father of the pseudo-philosophy of "Deconstructionism", has been deconstructed into the next world. He had been conducting a terminal "narrative" with cancer. Well, at least that is the subjective unproven conclusion we have, since, after all, how do we REALLY know that death and cancer exist? .... Deconstructionism is the nonsensical infantile "philosophy" that argues that words have no meaning, there are no facts nor truth, and the only thing we can REALLY be absolutely certain about are that the US and capitalism and Israel are evil and must be eliminated."

Group of bishops using influence to oppose Kerry "For Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, the highest-ranking Roman Catholic prelate in Colorado, there is only one way for a faithful Catholic to vote in this presidential election, for President Bush and against Senator John Kerry. "The church says abortion is a foundational issue,'' the archbishop explained.... Archbishop Chaput, who has never explicitly endorsed a candidate, is part of a group of bishops intent on throwing the weight of the church into the elections. Galvanized by battles against same-sex marriage and stem cell research and alarmed at the prospect of a President Kerry - who is Catholic but supports abortion rights - these bishops and like-minded Catholic groups are blanketing churches with guides identifying abortion, gay marriage and the stem cell debate as among a handful of "non-negotiable issues."... In an interview in his residence here, Archbishop Chaput said a vote for a candidate like Mr. Kerry who supports abortion rights or embryonic stem cell research would be a sin that must be confessed before receiving Communion..... The campaign is pushing to break the traditional allegiance of Catholic voters to the Democratic Party, an affiliation that began to crumble with Ronald Reagan 24 years ago. Catholics make up about a quarter of the electorate"

Leading economists have a message for America: "John Kerry favors economic policies that, if implemented, would lead to bigger and more intrusive government and a lower standard of living for the American people." That was the conclusion released in a statement Wednesday by 368 economists, including six Nobel laureates: Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas, Robert Mundell, and - the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Economics - Edward C. Prescott. The economists warned that Sen. Kerry's policies "would, over time, inhibit capital formation, depress productivity growth, and make the United States less competitive internationally. The end result would be lower U.S. employment and real wage growth."

I have just put up here a translation from the Portuguese of an article by Brazilian blogger Luis Afonso. It was well-received in Brazilian conservative circles so I am happy to make it available in English. Its title is: "Socialism: a highway to Hell".

Michael Darby is online again with a detailed statistical summary of the recent Australian elections (PDF).

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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14 October, 2004

MORE ON ANTI-AMERICANISM

Stupid anti-Americanism goes back a long way: "Frances Trollope, author of Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), probably the single most influential person shaping European perceptions of America in the nineteenth-century, observed that the greatest difference between England and the United States was "want of refinement." In America, she explained, "that polish which removes the coarser and rougher parts of our nature is unknown and undreamed of."

European failure breeds envy: "When German politicians refer to Amerikanische Verhaltnisse - "the American way" - they do it with a sneer. Olaf Gersemann, noting the wild popularity of Michael Moore's film screeds, scolds his countrymen for naively swallowing his stereotypes and economic prejudices. This gives new meaning to the insult "Stupid White Men.".... Europe suffers from a collective inferiority complex, seeming to be helpless against the tides of the new century. Europe is heavily armed, but only with envy".

Christopher Hitchens says that the Islamic challenge has exposed the unprincipled anti-Americanism of the modern Left. A small excerpt: "He explains that he believes the moment the left's bankruptcy became clear was on 9/11. "The United States was attacked by theocratic fascists who represents all the most reactionary elements on earth. They stand for liquidating everything the left has fought for: women's rights, democracy? And how did much of the left respond? By affecting a kind of neutrality between America and the theocratic fascists." He cites the cover of one of Tariq Ali's books as the perfect example. It shows Bush and Bin Laden morphed into one on its cover. "It's explicitly saying they are equally bad. However bad the American Empire has been, it is not as bad as this. It is not the Taliban, and anybody - any movement - that cannot see the difference has lost all moral bearings." Hitchens - who has just returned from Afghanistan - says, "The world these [al-Quadea and Taliban] fascists want to create is one of constant submission and servility. The individual only has value to them if they enter into a life of constant reaffirmation and prayer. It is pure totalitarianism, and one of the ugliest totalitarianisms we've seen. It's the irrational combined with the idea of a completely closed society". There are two other Leftist commentators here who agree with Hitchens about the anti-democratic and anti-American nature of the current Left.

Germany today: "The unprecedented character assasination perpetrated by the German media since 9/11 against the President of the United States has born ample fruit. Only 4% of Germans approve of President Bush. This uniformity of opinion harkens back to Nazi times. It is an indicator that the German people have been misinformed and disinformed on a massive scale. They are the victims of a bias so large and pervasive that it has permanently damaged German-American relations".

And Daniel Pipes has some amusing quotations from the haters of other people's success:

Comte de Buffon, renowned French scientist (1749): The American "heart is frozen, their society cold, their empire cruel."
Talleyrand, French politician (1790s): It is a country of "32 religions and only one dish . and even that [is] inedible."
Alexis de Tocqueville, French social philosopher (1835): "I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion."
Sigmund Freud, Austrian psychiatrist (1930s): "America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake."
George Bernard Shaw, British playwright (1933): "An asylum for the sane would be empty in America."
Henry Miller, American novelist (1945): America is "a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen."
Harold Pinter, British playwright (2001): The United States is "the most dangerous power the world has ever known."

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ELSEWHERE

Dennis Prager: "So here's the question that apparently goes unasked of all the Democrats who are sure it is President Bush who lacks intelligence: What would Zarqawi be doing now if he were not slaughtering people in Iraq? Selling used cars in Amman? Playing cello in the Berlin Philharmonic? The president has said from the beginning that a major reason for invading Iraq was to bring the war to the terrorists, and that if we don't fight them on their soil, we will have to fight them on ours"

ABC now openly biased: "But now, the hemorrhage has gotten so bad -- Fox is now starting to beat the broadcast nets on big-news occasions -- that I believe the legacy nets have decided, "enough is enough." The people who work for the big media have figured out that if they are going to be accused of liberal bias no matter what they do -- and they can't help themselves, they are mostly liberal -- then they ought to at least go down fighting".

Recent Democrat hate crimes: Shots fired into Knoxville GOP Headquarters and 25 Staffers Avoid Injury as Huntington, W. Va. GOP HQ Fired Upon and Wash. State Re-elect Bush HQ Burglarized, Campaign Data Stolen and Protestors Ransack Bush/Cheney Headquarters In Orlando and Democrat slugs area GOP chief, GPD says. So What's going on? Why are John Kerry and John Edwards silent? How interesting that Democrats sponsored all of this hate legislation, and THEY are the ones acting out their hate. Michelle Malkin has more.

Australia: Conservative lesbians are "traitors": "One of the strangest tales I heard all week was that the "sisters" of the Valley and New Farm were mobilising against candidate Ingrid Tall in tomorrow's election. Just in case you've been living on the moon, Tall is a doctor, gay and a Liberal, although the three are not necessarily connected. Apparently, the "sisters" - politically active leftish lesbians - see the well-groomed and socially out-there Tall as some kind of gender traitor, if there is any such animal. That's pretty funny when you think about it. At a time when reasonable people increasingly see gender as irrelevant to the political process, some of those most intimately involved seem determined to turn back the clock. [Dr. Tall lost].

There is what amounts to an anti-Chomsky encyclopaedia here. None of it will bother Chomsky, however, so I think he is best dismissed as merely a well-paid entertainer for the more desperate element of the Left.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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13 October, 2004

ANTI-AMERICANISM

There is a sad article here by Carol Gould -- an American Jewish lady -- which outlines her experiences in London. I will not try to excerpt it. I think most people need to read it in full. She describes the hate that is nowadays often poured out at Americans and Jews in both Britain and Europe. I think what she describes needs to be placed in context, however, and I will try to do that. For a start, Australians often get pretty contemptuous treatment in Britain too -- and it is not new -- they always have got that. And that angers many Australians. What outsiders usually fail to realize, however, is that the British are even more mocking of other Britishers. Compared to how a middle-class Englishman from the Southeast regards Scots and anyone born North of Watford, Australians are in fact fairly well accepted. And don't even mention what Yorkshiremen think of Lancastrians! Englishmen are strongly prejudiced against other Englishmen too.

The way to deal with British prejudice against anyone outside their own circle is to return the compliment. When I am in London, I give as good as I get and that does usually defuse the prejudice. For instance, it is (or was) not uncommon for the English to make disparaging remarks about Australian wine. I reply to that as follows: "Australians are like the French. They make a lot of wine and most of it is pretty rough. And the stuff that is too rough even for them to drink they sell to the English". That always wins the bout! And another old one: "I hear that Australians are all latent homosexuals". Reply: "No. That's just a rumour put about by Australia House to attract all the English immigrants". So that is normal English prejudice and how to deal with it: Return fire!

But anti-Americanism involves something else as well: Politics -- Leftist politics in particular. And from the French revolution onwards, Leftists everywhere have always been a violent and aggressive lot. Just read the various accounts in the news (e.g. here) about various GOP offices being invaded and vandalized in the USA right now. And many American Leftists are not just anti-GOP. They are anti-American as well. Read here if you doubt it. So if Leftists in America are violently anti-American, should we be surprised to find that British Leftists are too? And Britain (unlike Australia) is undoubtedly much more Leftist than America. It was only Margaret Thatcher who put a stop to their decades of insane socialism, with the government running half of Britain's businesses. And since Carol Gould is part of the "Arts & Entertainment" world, which is violently anti-American everywhere (do I need to mention Hollywood?), she obviously was meeting Leftists all the time. And the poor soul was identifiable as part of the enemy group by her accent.

So Carol Gould had three strikes against her: She was an identifiable outsider to anyone in Britain. She stood out as a member of the "enemy" to anyone who was a Leftist. And she was a Jew. No wonder she had a hard time! Her comments about antisemitism are a bit misleading, however. She says: "England, sadly, has the distinction of being the very first country to expel its Jews". What she is referring to happened in 1290! Yes. 1290, not 1920. In more recent times, however, Britain has been a refuge from persecution for Jews who could make it to there. And Britain's Fascist leader in the lead-up to World War II used to EXPEL from the British Union of Fascists anybody who made antisemitic remarks! I kid you not. But although Britain is less antisemitic than Europe, antisemitism does exist there and presumably always will. Jews have always been the scapegoat for stupid people who do not understand what is going on.

So Britain does have a vocal anti-American Left -- particularly among the intelligentsia -- but to regard them as representing the whole of Britain would be naive.

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ELSEWHERE

Some pungent reflections on the Australian Left sent in by a reader here.

A good comment from another Australian reader: "Howard's success is partly due to his policies but also to his ongoing reliability and predictability. Whether or not you like him, most Australians could predict what he will do in any given situation, which is a lot more than could be said for Latham. To me, predictability is a major theme in successful conservative politicians and in Conservatism, and to a large degree comes from the shared values so missing amongst the Utopians".

Interesting: John Kerry's surname is an adopted one. He has no Irish in him at all. The Irish in me is glad of that! John Kerry's ancestral surname was "Kohn" (the German version of "Cohen"). In Leftist parlance, I think that makes Kerry a "neocon"!

The best poll of all: "Standing above today's proliferation of competing and contradictory political polls, there's only one type of poll that can claim near-perfect reliability going all the way back to 1884. It's probably one you aren't even looking at. And it's declaring George W. Bush the winner. The type of poll I'm talking about isn't the usual public-opinion survey. It's organized betting on the election. To participate in such a poll, you have to be willing to put your money where your mouth is".

There is an article here which foresees an imminent takeover of the U.S. Democratic party by the far-Left. I look forward to it. They won't win elections that way -- as Australia's recent example showed.

A comprehensive report of a recent "anti-war" conference here. Excerpt: "This convention was a fine Orwellian display, complete with doublespeak, ritualized hatred, and the policing of "thought crimes." All who disagreed openly were barred from the radical teach-in at the public school. I was only there because I went in "under cover."... These people want America destroyed, and are not shy about it."

Some Norwegians think the Nobel Peace Prize committee have shot themselves in the foot by awarding it for tree-planting. They think it makes the prize ridiculous. I myself think it has long ago been rendered ridiculous by giving it Yasser Arafat and other murderers. If it really were awarded for promoting peace, John Howard should have got it for liberating East Timor.

I liked this post from Roger Simon: "Bring back Lord Haw-Haw. That crypto-fascist propaganda machine known as the BBC splatters a headline this morning "Israelis force down Lufthansa jet," writing as if Israel were being war-like in requiring a plane from Frankfurt to Tel Aviv to land in Cyprus for inspection after a telephoned bomb threat. I wonder what the once-mighty Beeb would have said if the plane had exploded. The entire article is scandalous propaganda indeed worthy of Lord Haw-Haw". ["Lord Haw Haw" was of course the Irishman whom Hitler used to broadcast wartime propaganda to Britain.]

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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12 October, 2004

AN INTERESTING TALK ON FRENCH ANIMOSITY

There will be an interesting talk given at the Heritage Foundation in D.C. on Thursday 14th. The advance summary below:

In a provocative and well-researched assessment, John J. Miller and Mark Molesky debunk the myth of friendship between France and America and chronicle the rivalries and betrayals that have marked relations between the two countries over the course of history. Returning to America's earliest history, the authors relate the little-known story of the Deerfield Massacre of 1704, when a group of French and Indians massacred settlers in northern Massachusetts. They show that the French came to America's aid only at the end of the Revolution and then with the interest of harming the British; and during the Civil War, they supported the Confederacy. In the 20th Century, French demands at the Versailles Peace Conference paved the way for the rise of fascism in Germany and eventually required America to rescue France during World War II. The postwar period was also rife with disastrous actions, including Charles de Gaulle's decision to pull out of NATO and his obstruction of American efforts to turn back Soviet expansion. French imperialism also left troubling legacies in Vietnam, Cambodia and even Syria and Iraq as well.

Enquiries: (202) 675-1752

More on French wisdom:

Derrida: "One of France's best-known philosophers, Jacques Derrida, revered as the founder of the deconstructionist school, has died at the age of 74, his entourage said on Saturday. Derrida, who had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003, died in a Paris hospital on Friday night. Except for de mortius nihil nisi bonum, I would be inclined to say: "Good riddance to bad rubbish". For a short blast on postmodernist "ideas" (if you can call them that) generally see here. "Currency Lad" has a few thoughts on Derrida and the failed Australian Left at the end of his post here. Philosopher Keith Burgess-Jackson has a brief note about Derrida too. And Chirac manages to make a laughing-stock of France over Derrida: ""With him, France has given the world one of its greatest contemporary philosophers, one of the major figures of intellectual life of our time," Chirac said in a statement"

More French corruption: "Maier's satiric book, which denounces corporate culture as rigid, empty-headed, avaricious and ruthless, has zoomed to the top of the bestseller lists here, selling more than 120,000 copies at last count. In urging office workers to smile and look busy while sabotaging the system from within, she has ignited a national debate about the French work ethic - or lack thereof. "What you do ultimately means nothing and you could be replaced tomorrow by the first passing cretin," Maier writes. "So work as little as possible, and spend some time (but not too much) on 'marketing yourself' and 'building yourself a network' so you will have support and be untouchable (and untouched) in case of a restructuring".... less than one-third of the French population between 15 and 24 holds jobs - in contrast to 62% of young Americans.... France ranked eighth in a survey of job satisfaction in the 10-richest nations"

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ELSEWHERE

To make sure it remains available, I have just put up here a copy of the John Stossell program summary that was "censored" by ABC. Stossel points out the vast costs inflicted on all Americans by trial lawyers like John Edwards. One of those guys actually made a billion dollars by suing people! I have also put up there the internal ABC memo that says staff must favour John Kerry in what they broadcast.

It looks like John Howard's victory is going to be very good for sales of Australian wine in America. Australian wine is better than that French s**t anyway. Australian wine is all produced by modern methods. A lot of French wine production is still in the Dark Ages.

Unfair? I'm betting this will be a lot fairer than Michael Moore: "A US television company is planning to run a film attacking Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry just days before the election. Sinclair TV Group's programmes reach almost a quarter of US homes. The 45-minute film criticises John Kerry's opposition to the Vietnam war in the early 1970s. In the documentary, Stolen Honor, Wounds That Never Heal, former prisoners-of-war say that Mr Kerry's claims that American soldiers were committing atrocities led to their captors treating them more harshly, and extended the length of the conflict. ... The decision to air the documentary on the 62 stations that Sinclair either owns or supplies programmes for has been criticised not only by the Kerry campaign but also by media analysts, who say showing the one-sided film so close to the election is unfair."

A step towards immigration control? "Following a recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission, the House and Senate are moving toward setting rules for the states that would standardize the documentation required to obtain a driver's license, and the data the license would have to contain".

I have commented previously on the inanities of that learned dunce, Niall Ferguson. This latest example of his wisdom now rather stands out in the light of John Howard's big triumph in the Australian Federal elections: "The leaders of the countries that stood aside when Saddam Hussein was overthrown have one obvious reason for staying on the sidelines. They have no desire to pay the domestic political price currently being paid by the leaders of the countries that gave President Bush their support". I think a lot of politicians would LIKE to pay the sort of "price" John Howard has paid for his support of America.

David Brooks: "The report by Charles Duelfer makes it clear that Saddam Hussein was an insatiable tyrant and needed to be deposed".

Leftist hackers appear to have trashed the website of the BNP -- Britain's anti-immigration party -- and the mainstream press have buried the story.

Wayne Lusvardi has just done a big comparison between John Kerry and a member of the Viet Cong.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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11 October, 2004

POST-MORTEM ON THE RECENT DEFEAT OF THE AUSTRALIAN LEFT

Various people say that Leftist leader Mark Latham lost because of his bullying personality but, seeing that John Howard is a totally colourless personality, it seems to me that neither party had much to offer in the charisma stakes. So I think it does come down to policies.

Australia is lucky that its major Leftist party (the Australian Labor Party or "ALP") is one of the most conservative Leftist parties that there are (only Singapore's P.A.P. springs to mind as a rival). The sort of pro-market, pro-free-enterprise reforms that were in the USA and the UK the work of Reagan and Thatcher were in Australia principally the work of the ALP. (Though it was John Howard who nobbled the unions via the big defeat of the maritime unions).

The Australian Left was not always like that, however. The short-lived Whitlam (ALP) government of the 1970s did a lot of damage to the economy -- mainly through amateurism rather than ill-will towards anybody, though. And even the Whitlam government had some worthwhile economic policies -- with the fact that it started the process of dismantling Australia's traditionally highly protected economy being particularly to its credit. For what I wrote on the Whitlam government at the time, see here.

The damage that the Whitlam regime inflicted on the economy (mainly through overspending, with the resultant high inflation) did great harm to the reputation of the ALP as economic managers -- so that subsequent lacklustre conservative governments won office primarily because they were not the ALP. Nobody wanted a repeat performance of the disruptions of the Whitlam years. And to this day both major Australian parties make a big thing of their committment to surplus budgets -- though few people probably remember now that the committment originated as a reaction to Whitlam's big deficits.

Principally in the person of former Rhodes scholar Bob Hawke, the ALP saw therefore that they had to take economics seriously if they were to have the lasting trust of the Australian electorate. So when the conservative coalition finally died of total inanition (principally in the person of the inert Malcolm Fraser), and the ALP finally regained power, Hawke took the opportunity to show that the ALP too could be economically rational -- by privatizing various government businesses, by reducing tariffs, by balancing the budget etc. Bob Hawke has however now long retired to private life and his legacy is beginning to wear off. And the first clear sign of that is the set of policies that ALP leader Mark Latham fought Saturday's election on. Although he has an honours degree in economics, Latham seemed to decide that it was time for the ALP to veer to the Left in many respects. He promised to get Australian troops out of Iraq "by Christmas", he shafted the forest industry workers in favour of a deep Green policy of banning the cutting down of almost all native trees, he made huge spending committments to the elderly and, most incredibly, refused to rule out raising taxes. The latter policy alone would probably have served to lose him the election.

So with all due respect to other more complex analyses (e.g. here) of the reason for the ALP's recent defeat, it seems clear to me the reason is very simple: The ALP lost simply because they were too Leftist for the Australian people. If Latham had stuck to the policies of his esteemed predecessor, Bob Hawke, he might well have won. It has often been said that Margaret Thatcher's principal asset was always the (then far-Left) British Labour Party. Similarly in Australia's recent election, Mark Latham was a considerable asset to John Howard.

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As Australia is a generally irreligious country, the major Christian party ("Family First") in the recent election had little chance of much success and in fact seems to have gained only 2% of the vote nationwide. They may well win a Senate seat in the State of Victoria, however, (thanks to a combination of proportional representation and preference deals) -- in which case they could hold the balance of power in the Senate. Despite amusing media claims that they have "no policies", their policies are in fact classic conservative ones. Just a few excerpts: "Family First believes that Government should be as small as possible and that the principle of Subsidiarity should be a foundational consideration of how or if government should act or involve itself in any matter. This principle can be summarised as stating that the level at which decisions are made and administration is carried out should be as close to the level in society at which the impact of those decisions are felt... However Family First also recognises that there are core areas of business for Government such as defence and foreign affairs, policing, security etc. Economic management is also a core responsibility of governments as is ensuring a basic level of social security is guaranteed to citizens"... Government has a clear role in provision of educational choice... Family First believes that parents have primary responsibility for the care and education of their children and no Government ought to normally usurp this authority." More here (PDF).

A defeat for the intelligentsia: "On Saturday night the giant, lumbering road train known as the will of the people, aka the democratic process, smashed through the pretensions, delusions and manipulations of the unelected and unaccountable who presume to tell Australians what to think and who to be. In short order, John Howard has decimated four Labor leaders - Keating, Beazley, Crean and Latham - and in the process decimated the hopes of the True Believers and progressive utopians, the people who dominate the milieu in which I live and work. This milieu is now in toxic shock".

Fuller Theological Seminary ain't what it used to be: "A group of Fuller Theological Seminary professors, saying they are responding to a "grave moral crisis' in America, are signing a statement opposing President Bush's alleged convergence of God, church and nation and what they call his "theology of war.' " [Note the spelling "Proffesors" in the headline: California education at work]

Stupid Leftist protectionists ignore America's success: "While regularly incurring trade gaps and budgetary deficits, our economy has grown since the early 1980s from a level, depending on dollar valuation, between one-fifth and one-fourth of global GDP to close to one-third of global GDP last year. During this upsurge entirely unexpected by the same economists now advising Sen. Kerry, U.S. per capita GDP surged from 4.7 times per capita global GDP in 1980 to 6.5 times per capita global GDP in 2003. The U.S. created some 36 million net new jobs at ever higher levels of productivity and earnings, while Europe and Japan created scant employment at all outside of government and entered a productivity slump that continues today."

Black conservatism: "The Rev. William Turner voted for Bill Clinton twice and for Al Gore in 2000. But this year he is forming a coalition of African-American pastors in an effort to re-elect President Bush, who, he says, is "acting as the voice of God' by opposing same-sex marriage. Turner, 67, is pastor of the 1,000- member New Revelation Missionary Baptist Church in Northwest Pasadena.... "All sin is against God's will but homosexuality goes beyond the sin of lying, for instance,' Turner said. "... Homosexuality is a sin against God and they want the world to accept them in their sin brag about it, boast about it and want it to become part of America's lifestyle.'"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************



10 October, 2004

I expect that American bloggers will all be writing about the second Presidential debate at the moment and most Australian bloggers (such as Mike Jericho) will be talking about John Howard's big win yesterday so I am making this blog an alternative channel today.



USING MYTHS TO SEIZE CHILDREN

Below are a few excerpts from a comprehensive article on the myth that parenting has to be "just right" or the children will be permanently damaged. Just the opposite seems to be true: Children are extremely resilient. But the myth is being used as a wedge to justify ever more government interference in family life -- with children getting taken away from "inappropriate" parents being the ultimate Orwellian aim

"Did you know that there is no such thing as a 'difficult baby', only 'difficult parents', who are either 'neglectful' or 'intrusive'? And that the consequences of poor parenting can be dramatic, making a lasting imprint on our emotional wellbeing and central nervous system? The idea that we are determined by infant experiences - which can be described as 'infant determinism' - is increasingly being promoted on both sides of the Atlantic. Back in 1997, the then First Lady and now Democratic senator for New York, Hillary Clinton, drew on developments in neuroscience to set the tone for the popular debate. At a White House conference she asserted that experiences in infancy are responsible for the development of 'capacities that will shape the entire rest of their lives', and will 'determine how their brains are wired'. Experiences in the first three years 'can determine whether children will grow up to be peaceful or violent citizens, focused or undisciplined workers, attentive or detached parents themselves'.....

It does seem to be the case that for some things - such as seeing and hearing, and maybe even first language acquisition - there are 'critical periods' for development. But they are only 'critical' in the sense that a complete absence of stimuli during this period could have irreversible negative consequences. As John Bruer, president of the James S McDonnell Foundation and author of 'The myth of the first three years', said on FRONTLINE, the US flagship public affairs series: 'what we have to realise is the kinds of experience we need during that critical period is everywhere around us. It is not something we have to go out and provide children.' Similarly, neuroscientist Steve Petersen at Washington University argues that the environment would have to be very bad to interfere with a child's normal neurological development. His tongue-in-cheek advice to parents is: 'Don't raise your child in a closet, starve them, or hit them on the head with a frying pan.'

Policy advisors have rejected recent calls to discourage parents from sending their young children to full-time day-care. But this is less a result of accepting that day-care is unlikely to do children any lasting harm, and more a result of not trusting parents themselves to meet children's emotional needs. Today's cultural outlook increasingly views adults as 'emotionally illiterate' and in need of a constant helping hand from professional advisers... We are told that parenting is too important to be left in the realm of the private and personal. Gerhardt, for instance, argues that government initiatives should be targeted 'at the point where it can make the most difference' - 'during pregnancy and in the first two years of life'.. Child protection measures proposed in the government green paper 'Every Child Matters' are less about protecting a few children from serious neglect and abuse by their carers, than ensuring all parents measure up to the government's prescribed standard of parenting."

And this is how much better than parents governments can be expected to be:

"Two months after a baby suffocated under a pile of toys in a crib at a day care center while two city inspectors ignored muffled noises, the city's Health Department yesterday issued a scathing portrait of its oversight of 9,400 day care centers in New York City, calling it a bureaucratic maze riddled with problems that spell potential dangers for children. In an extraordinary self-examination, the department said its Bureau of Day Care needed reforms to expand its staff, raise training standards, tighten inspections and improve communications among its own people as well as with day care operators, parents often left in the dark about violations, and an array of city and state agencies trying to enforce a bewildering labyrinth of regulations."

And some official child abuse is not encouraging either:

"In the face of a storm of protest from father and child advocates, Domino's Pizza has withdrawn its support from a highly publicized campaign by Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox which encourages child involvement in the collection of child support. Over the past year Cox has targeted so-called "deadbeat dads" in Michigan with punitive measures and billboards which feature large handcuffs bearing the slogan "We Never Treat Deadbeats with Kid Gloves." His recently announced billboard campaign encourages custodial parents to have their children draw billboard designs critical of noncustodial parents who are allegedly behind on their child support. Several advocacy groups.. have protested the campaign. A letter to Domino's from the ACFC notes that the billboard campaign "inflames conflict between parents and psychologically abuses children...common sense should tell you how psychologically harmful it is to children to ask them to draw a negative picture of one of their parents."

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ELSEWHERE

Andrew Bolt lists some Leftist lies: "These petitions from the Great and Good, damning John Howard, have persuaded me at last. We do indeed suffer from a culture of deceit. What finally won me was reading the name "Phillip Noyce" on the latest of these declarations -- a demand on the weekend from 40 actors, writers and directors for "truth in government". Phillip Noyce, I told my wife over breakfast. Demanding truth. Heavens. I just had to keep reading. You may have doubted that people paid to pretend or make things up are especially expert in truth, in government or anything else. But these petitioners shared no such reservations....."

Mike Tremoglie exorcises the Halliburton demon well on Front Page. One quote: "It is certainly true that during a two year period Halliburton's revenue from Defense Department contracts doubled. However, that increase in revenue occurred from 1998 to 2000 - during the Clinton administration.... In fact, the notion that Halliburton benefited from any cronyism has been poo-poohed by a Harvard University professor, Steven Kelman, who was administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy in the Clinton administration. 'One would be hard-pressed to discover anyone with a working knowledge of how federal contracts are awarded...who doesn't regard these allegations as being somewhere between highly improbable and utterly absurd,' Kelman wrote in the Washington Post last November". But Leftists are not interested in the facts, of course. They would not be Leftists if they were.

Pajamas again! One blogger has just discovered that pajamas are an unexpected hazard.

Your government will protect you: "The Food and Drug Administration silenced one of its drug experts who raised safety concerns weeks before Merck & Co. yanked the blockbuster drug Vioxx due to increased risks for heart attack and strokes, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee said Thursday. Dr. David J. Graham, associate director for science in the FDA Drug Center's Office of Drug Safety, told Senate investigators he faced stiff resistance within the regulatory agency to his findings." [Protecting their own prior approval of the drug came first, of course]

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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9 October, 2004

Well, "Biffo" (Australian Labor Party leader Mark Latham) gave a gracious concession speech -- which was a tribute both to him and to Australian democracy. John Howard's speech stressed how humbled he felt by his victory. A TV commentator noted the contrast with how Paul Keating (a former Labor party leader) responded to his victory -- by saying "How sweet it is" or some such. Keating was not re-elected. Howard has now been re-elected three times. Leftist arrogance does trip Leftists up in the end.

I can't help noting that, like Spain, Australians were attacked by Muslim terrorists just before the election. The attacks were not exactly comparable in that the attack on the Australian embassy in nearby Jakarta mainly succeeded in blowing up other Muslims but the attack did get big news coverage here nonetheless. And Australians had the same choice that Spaniards had -- a Leftist opposition that promised to get the troops out of Iraq pronto. But Australians are not Spaniards -- and it shows.



Whoopee! Australia's conservative government has just been RE-ELECTED!



SENATOR FLIP-FLOP

Amazing. John Kerry plans to draft High School students. It's on his website: "As part of his 100 day plan to change America, John Kerry will propose a comprehensive service plan that includes requiring mandatory service for high school students and four years of college tuition in exchange for two years of national service."

Carol Platt-Liebau of the amazingly blue eyes catches John Kerry out in psychological projection too. I think his most notorious bout of projection, however, was his accusation that American forces in Vietnam were all war-criminals -- when he in fact was the war-criminal there. Read Unfit for Command if you doubt it.

The Kerry doctrine: "Me": "There is only one explanation for all Kerry's inconsistencies and contradictions. It is that his first political principle is opportunism. From Vietnam to Iraq, he is hawk or dove, pro-war or anti-war, depending on the constituency he is currently courting. When he went into the service in 1966, the establishment and Democratic Party were pro-war. When he turned anti-war radical in 1971, they had turned anti-war. When America was hawkish on Iraq, Kerry was hawkish. When he needed anti-war votes to combat Dean, he became a fluttering dove, then born-again hawk in Boston, when he needed Middle America. How does he get away with it?"

But can you believe it? "As the Democratic Whoopee Brigade hailed Senator John Kerry's edge in debating technique, nobody noticed his foreign policy se a change. On both military tactics and grand strategy, the newest neoconservative announced doctrines more hawkish than President George W. Bush. First, on war-fighting in Iraq: Hard-liners criticized the Bush decision this spring not to send U.S. troops in to crush Sunni resistance in the Baathist stronghold in Falluja. American forces wanted to fight to win but soft-liners in Washington worried about the effect of heavier civilian casualties on the hearts and minds of Iraqis, and of U.S. troop losses on Americans. Last week in the debate, John Kerry - until recently, the antiwar candidate too eager to galvanize dovish Democrats - suddenly reversed field, and came down on the side of the military hard-liners".

The lawyer's party: "John Kerry's selection of John Edwards as running mate was a blunder, and not just because Kerry probably will lose Edwards' North Carolina. The Edwards selection ratifies a provocative fact: trial lawyers have become the Democrats' most important faction. This has energized small-business owners, the self-employed, doctors and others who worry that they live one lawsuit away from ruin. Such people, now aroused, may propel tort reform that will curtail the windfalls that make trial lawyers the Democrats' largest source of contributions."

No JFK Mark 2: "The Democrats' current presidential aspirant John Kerry has ambitiously modeled his political career after John F. Kennedy's. Yet their politics bear little resemblance. If Kennedy were alive today, Democrats would condemn his sweeping capital gains tax cuts as a sop to the rich. His militant anti-Communism would evoke charges of right-wing 'paranoia.' And the vow he made in his inaugural address to confront tyranny anywhere in the world would win him the label of 'neo-conservative' imperialist among today's Democrats."

In case you have not seen it already, there is an amusing "Job Application" for John Kerry here.

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ELSEWHERE

The latest Nobel Prize for literature runs true to form. It went to some weird Communist female who is so afraid of crowds she cannot go to the prize ceremony. And her works "reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power." Rah! Rah! Postmodernist claptrap, in other words. And, of course, "Her newest works are sharply critical of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq". And the "Peace" prize was awarded for tree planting! It must just have been time for a Greenie to get a turn. At least they didn't award it to Chirac!

Australia has a new and rising political party with moderate policies which is headed by a black woman. So Leftists love it, right? Surely two "minorities" in one should be irresistable? No way! The party is CHRISTIAN! So the Leftist media and Australia's far-Left Greenies are doing their best to bad-mouth it. Leftists are only in favour of "minorities" that they can use. See here

Canadian cowardice: "Concordia University in Montreal continues to promote terrorism against their Jewish students. The latest is that Concordia refuses to allow Past Prime Minister Ehud Barak from speaking on campus at a Hillel affair. They state that they cannot confirm he will be safe considering the lack of security they gave BiBi Netanyahu when he came to speak there last summer. So, their logic is "Let's not punish the perpetrators... let's punish the victim. In this case the speaker." Shouldn't they punish the Muslim thugs and violent students who come to break up these meetings when ever a Jewish speaker comes? Jail them? Expel them? However, Concordia seems to have become a base for terrorists training in Canada. It seems the only freedom of speech Concordia is promoting is Muslim freedom of speech"".

Japan: "If Junichiro Koizumi could vote in the November U.S. presidential election, the Japanese prime minister would almost certainly cast his ballot for his diplomatic soul mate, President Bush. Koizumi has closely linked his security policy to the Republican president, spending considerable political capital to back the war in Iraq and send troops there on a risky non-combat mission -- despite opposition from Japan's own voters".

Sweden: I have just put up here a translated newspaper article from Sweden showing how astoundingly little young Swedish communists actually know about communism. It doesn't say much for Swedish education (or perhaps it tells us a lot!)

Israeli blogger David Boxenhorn wonders why intellectuals so often arrive at stupid conclusions. The still strong support for Communism among American university professors would be a primary example of that. David offers seven possible reasons why they are so stupid but I think there is only one main reason: Arrogance. They have to be pretty bright to get to be professors so they then think they know it all. And it offends their ego to realize that they have nothing to say on the big issues other than what plain folk have been saying for years. So most of what they say is just a pathetic attempt to be clever. I go into it all in more detail here.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************



8 October, 2004

FROM BROOKES NEWS

A John Kerry ban on bunker busters would be a military victory for terrorism When John Kerry said he opposed the development of bunker-busters he not only committed an electoral gaffe he provided America with an open window into his real attitude toward the American people
Republicans' excellent record on blacks infuriates bigoted Democrats The Republicans' excellent record on civil rights for blacks has driven some Democrats to distraction
John Kerry - This Damn Spot Will Not Come Out Prior to 9-11 all of us, including John Kerry, turned a blind eye to the bombings, murders and terrorist atrocities being committed against American citizens
Doctors' wives attack forestry and its sweaty workers The Doctors' wives were photographed outside a perfectly manicured Victorian home in the leafy Melbourne suburb of Toorak, from where they can safely attack forest workers
John Howard and his spending spree If it were not for the war on terror I would be wishing for a John Howard defeat because of his spending spree

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

Leftist journalist spins like a top: "George W.Bush is now under pressure to match the debating prowess of his running mate Dick Cheney, who delivered a strong performance in a tough encounter with Democrat vice-presidential candidate John Edwards in Cleveland, Ohio, last night." So a clear Cheney win gets reported not as a win but as a problem!

I see that Keith Burgess-Jackson is threatening to write an article called "Why I am not a libertarian". I hope he mentions that there are many versions of libertarianism. Only the anarcho-capitalists -- with their desire for no state at all -- have a really definite creed but most libertarians are minimal-statists -- who want a sort of "night watchman" state. But what individual libertarians include in that minimal state is infinitely various. So a very inclusive libertarian and a very minimalist conservative could be the same thing -- which I am -- which is why I call myself a libertarian conservative. Note that Reagan said that libertarianism is the heart of conservatism -- and as the most loved conservative of the 20th century, he has some claim to authority on the matter. The thing that I add to libertarian thinking which makes me conservative is a skepticism about human wisdom and benevolence -- which in turn gives me a Burkean respect for the social systems that have evolved over time -- not particulary a respect for the ancestors but a respect for what has been shown to work well. I think Britain in the year 1900 would be close to my definition of the ideal minimal state. See my post of 5th. about that. And read this about the British Prime Minister at that time.

The Soviet candidate: "University of California employees have given more than nine times as much money to the presidential candidates this year as they did in 2000, with more than 95% of it going to Sen. John F. Kerry"

Michael Totten on the "liberal" case for Bush: "Liberation and nation-building have been crucial parts of the Democratic tradition from the reconstruction of post-war Germany and Japan to the rescue and rehabilitation of Bosnia and Kosovo. In the 1990s and early 2000s I grew accustomed to hearing conservatives scoff at Bill Clinton's efforts as "international social work." With the honorable exception of dissident neoconservatives, post-Cold War Republicans increasingly resembled their circa 1930s isolationist counterparts... The intervention against Slobo's regime in Serbia wasn't slammed as a "unilateral war." It was the Peace Corps with muscles. But when George W. Bush implemented the Clinton Administration's policy of regime-change in Iraq, democratic nation-building morphed into "imperialism." Overthrowing a totalitarian regime was deemed "reckless." What mattered most was "stability.""

The "outsourcing" myth: "Studies show that the migration of U.S. jobs overseas is a tiny factor in weak employment growth. A Labor Department study of job losses in the first three months of the year found that only 2% went overseas. Other studies have put the figure closer to 1%.... Federal Reserve Board surveys show rising medical expenses - more than 10% annually for four years running - are dampening hiring as firms worry about paying for new employees' benefits."

More Leftist "racism" accusations: "Prime Minister John Howard says Opposition Leader Mark Latham's comments on Asian immigration shows he is getting desperate on the eve of the election. The Labor leader lashed out saying that Mr Howard had walked the streets of Liverpool in the late 1980s backing an anti-Asian immigration policy. Mr Howard rejected the claims, saying Mr Latham was desperate to win. "We've run a completely non-discriminatory immigration policy," Mr Howard told the Nine Network's Today Show. "We don't discriminate against anybody in this country on the basis of their race and Mr Latham knows that".

Leftists are born thugs: "More than 50 demonstrators supporting Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry stormed a Republican campaign office in West Allis at mid-day today, trespassing, creating a disturbance through the use of a bullhorn in the office and then refusing to leave when asked.... Graber called the latest incident part of a disturbing trend of criminal conduct by anti-Bush forces in Wisconsin, pointing to an incident in Madison last week in which Bush-Cheney yard signs were stolen from the yards of three homes. The vandals then used chemicals to burn swastikas into the lawns of the homes, which were within a two-block radius of one another. In addition, reports of stolen, defaced and damaged Bush-Cheney campaign signs are surfacing throughout Wisconsin."

Australian conservatives win unionist hearts: "It was an afternoon to chill the heart of a Labor true believer as workers and capitalists united behind John Howard. In Launceston thousands of card-carrying union members hailed Comrade John as a hero of the proletariat while in Sydney the heir to Australia's biggest business fortune, James Packer, declared his support for the Prime Minister. At Launceston's Albert Hall, Mr Howard gave loggers, log-truck drivers and sawmillers the message they wanted to hear: no changes to the Regional Forest Agreement, no job losses and no inquiries. "If my Government is returned on Saturday," Mr Howard began.. "You will be," yelled one of the workers, to deafening applause. "You're the best f..king Prime Minister we've ever had," one burly timber worker declared, red-faced with emotion and delight.... As Howard walked down to the myrtle timber floor of the hall, timber workers with their wives and children lined up to shake his hand. Winnaleah logger Gene Cavins persuaded Mr Howard to sign his sweat-stained baseball cap. His mate, fellow logger and previously committed Labor voter Dale Saward, 35, of Scottsdale, said he was thinking of voting for Howard now. "You'd bloody well better," demanded another mate".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************



7 October, 2005

THE DRAFT

Sinking a Democrat deception: "Trying to quiet fears of a return of the draft, the House Republican leadership engaged in a hasty call-up of its own on Tuesday. The Republicans brought to the floor a Democratic-sponsored proposal to reinstate mandatory military service and presided over its overwhelming defeat on a vote of 402 to 2. "We're going to put a nail in that coffin," said the House majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay of Texas. He accused Democrats of generating opposition to President Bush - especially on college campuses - by raising the idea that the draft might be re-established after the November election"

Conscription fantasies: "The Wall Street Journal reported this week that a rash of e-mails have been circulating since the spring about an alleged plan by the Bush administration to resurrect the military draft as early as next spring, provided Bush is re-elected. This is nothing more than election-year posturing. Most likely it was started by Democrats eager to take one more shot at George W. Bush and at the war in Iraq. The idea of bringing back the draft is a non-starter for everyone.... Not even a second-term Bush administration would risk bringing back the draft. To begin with, they claim the military gets a better class of soldiers from volunteers. But, more importantly, an administration that's headed mostly by men who avoided the Vietnam War and that panders to the upper classes is not about to alienate its core supporters by exposing their children to a draft when we're already at war". (More here and here).

Soldiers are NOT "the poor": "A persistent myth about the All Volunteer Force is that it is made up largely of the poor and the uneducated. In fact, Wong said, the volunteer Army is more middle class than its predecessor. "We don't have the fringes any more -- the extremely rich or the extremely poor," Wong said. "We look like Middle America.""

Milton Friedman helped end the draft by pointing out that volunteers are NOT "mercenaries": "In his testimony before the commission, Mr. Westmoreland said he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. Mr. Friedman interrupted, "General, would you rather command an army of slaves?" Mr. Westmoreland replied, "I don't like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves." Mr. Friedman then retorted, "I don't like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries. If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher.""

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ELSEWHERE

More Democrat lies: "Army commanders denied allegations Wednesday that soldiers have been threatened with deployment to Iraq if they do not re-enlist. "It's just not being done," Lt. Col. David Johnson said. "We are a professional army. We want soldiers who want to be in the Army," he said. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., has demanded an investigation into claims that Iraqi war veterans near the end of their enlistments had been given a choice between re-enlisting or being sent back to Iraq. Fort Carson, with about 14,000 soldiers, including the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, claims the highest re-enlistment rate in the nation"

Edwards loses: "But the most devastating blow was struck when Edwards still wouldn't give up, and came back with the 90% casualty figure. That was when Cheney, addressing Edwards as an adult admonishing a foolish child, pointed out that our most important ally in Iraq is the Iraqis, and that by refusing to include the Iraqis' many casualties in his numbers--so as to be able to claim that almost all the casualties are American--Edwards denigrates the sacrifice of our Iraqi friends.... The second knockdown was when Cheney criticized Edwards' lackluster record as a Senator, noting that he had missed 70% of the meetings of the Intelligence Committee, of which he was a member, and that his home-town paper had labeled him "Senator Gone." That was good. But the devastating conclusion was Cheney's observation that despite the fact that as Vice-President he regularly presides over the Senate, he had never met Edwards until he walked onto the stage tonight. This fact blew me away; I wouldn't have thought it possible. It blew Edwards away, too".

Outrageous judge: "A state judge Tuesday threw out a Louisiana constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, less than three weeks after it was overwhelmingly approved by the voters. District Judge William Morvant said the amendment was flawed as drawn up by the Legislature because it had more than one purpose: banning not only gay marriage but also civil unions".

Cheney BAD for Halliburton: "Halliburton's relationship with the Bush administration is beginning to prove more problematic than it is worth. The company admitted 10 days ago that it was considering selling Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), the division carrying out billions of dollars worth of work for the US government in Iraq, in a desperate attempt to get out of the spotlight. It is considering a sale, spin-off or a separate listing for the business on the stock exchange. The company's shares have fallen from $50 when Mr Cheney first took office in the White House to the low $30s.... Mr Cheney, it turns out, may have been of little real help to Halliburton at all: KBR filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, weighed down by asbestos litigation it inherited from an acquisition the vice-president made while he was still running the firm".

Fun: "A conservative think tank says where George Soros goes, its members will follow -- at least until Election Day. The National Legal and Policy Center announced the formation of a Soros "Truth Squad" to inform the public about the background and motivation of George Soros -- a major funder of liberal, anti-Bush causes -- as he conducts a one-month speaking tour. The Soros Truth Squad, led by NLPC Policy Director John Carlisle, said it will travel to cities in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida, where Soros plans to give speeches between now and Nov. 2."

CBS producer Mapes is a Leftist fanatic: "Before she left Seattle to become a producer at Mr. Rather's "CBS Evening News," Ms. Mapes produced a sensational report on a killing of a drug suspect by police that rested on the shoulders of an unreliable source whose story collapsed under cross-examination. Sound familiar? Former colleagues of Ms. Mapes agree that she was a passionate practitioner of advocacy journalism. "She went into journalism to change society," says former KIRO anchorwoman Susan Hutchison"

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with a big range of select reading.

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************



6 October, 2004

IMMIGRATION

Turk saner than the Swedes: "An elderly Turkish immigrant in the southern town of Malmo in Sweden co-writes an article in a Social Democratic evening paper, Aftonbladet, demanding a stop to all immigration until all immigrants, who have already arrived, are working and integrated. It should have been done long ago, he says. And considering a population of nine million, of which 12 percent are born in another country, and that 400 000-500 000 are Muslim (a very recent development), he has a point. Especially since the familiar problems of crime, gang rapes and the like are abundant in the big cities.... Suad Cicek says he and friends are planning to start a one-issue-party demanding a stop to all immigration. The logic being that the present open borders-policies are a threat to both Swedes and immigrants.... Mr. Cicek boldly claims [it] is not really a real refugee problem, but rather "welfare-immigration" caused by the rumor that you can live comfortably without working in Sweden and other European countries. And, he also stresses, the ones who come are to a large extent not that poor, since they have to pay a small fortune to refugee smugglers. The really poor and needy can't afford to come here at all".

Italy copies Australia: "Italy is to send 150 police officers to Libya, along with aircraft and infra-red tracking equipment, as a first step towards the creation of holding camps for illegal migrants passing through North Africa bound for Europe. The deal between Italy and Col Muammar Gaddafi's regime is widely seen as a pilot project for a European Union policy of processing asylum seekers before they reach EU soil. This would effectively sub-contract the job of migration control to buffer states which often have a record of harsh treatment of refugees".

Italy boots them out: "Italy has defended as an "emergency measure" its draconian new policy of airlifting illegal immigrants straight back to Libya the moment they set foot on Italian soil. In an attempt to deter further waves of illegal immigration hundreds have been sent back to Libya by air during the past four days. Italian immigration officials said at the weekend that the immigrant reception centre on the tiny island of Lampedusa, designed to hold 200 people, was "packed to bursting point" with nearly 1300 migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East as smugglers took advantage of fine autumn weather and calm seas. Lampedusa, a rocky Italian outcrop, is closer to North Africa than to Italy and has become a magnet for refugees and the criminal gangs who smuggle them. Under the new law, refugees landing there are taken straight to the island's small airport to be put on aircraft".

Australia boots them out too: "The Federal Government's covert Operation Long Haul - in which 31 immigration detention centre detainees considered at high risk of escape or self-harm were forcibly removed from Australia using handcuffs, batons and restraining belts - appears to have been the flight from hell.... Almost all the detainees bundled onto the charter flight were considered "extreme high risk" and some had four guards assigned to them.... One more "multi-country" operation took place in December 2001, returning 65 detainees to 14 countries, an Immigration Department spokeswoman said yesterday.... Last financial year, 3390 people were forcibly removed from Australia".

But keeping the good guys out is a cinch, of course: "The US has immediately exhausted its annual quota of temporary visas for highly skilled foreign workers this year, making it impossible to hire engineers, mathematicians, researchers and others that US companies say are critical for their competitiveness".

I wonder why they stay? "The health of immigrant children gets worse the longer they live in the United States and become more like Americans, a study has found. When they arrive, children of immigrants - legal and illegal, who are mostly from developing countries in Latin America and Asia - have lower rates of asthma and obesity than American-born children. Children born to immigrant mothers are also less likely to have low birth weights or die as infants than children born to native mothers. But those relative strengths can dissipate by the time children of immigrants become teenagers - often because they have gone years without health insurance, adopted sedentary lifestyles and bad eating habits or become sexually promiscuous. Ellen Wu, executive director of the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network, said another reason was that American children tended to spend more time surfing the internet and playing video games than kicking soccer balls around."

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ELSEWHERE

Dennis Prager says that John Kerry's flip-flopping is clever: It convinces even people who violently disagree with one-another that Kerry is their man.

An amusing list here of the people who support John Kerry.

New documents on Saddam's anti-Americanism: "Iraqi intelligence documents, confiscated by U.S. forces and obtained by CNSNews.com, show numerous efforts by Saddam Hussein's regime to work with some of the world's most notorious terror organizations, including al Qaeda, to target Americans. They demonstrate that Saddam's government possessed mustard gas and anthrax, both considered weapons of mass destruction, in the summer of 2000, during the period in which United Nations weapons inspectors were not present in Iraq. And the papers show that Iraq trained dozens of terrorists inside its borders".

Halliburton: "A Kerry ad implies Cheney has a financial interest in Halliburton and is profiting from the company's contracts in Iraq. The fact is, Cheney doesn't gain a penny from Halliburton's contracts, and almost certainly won't lose even if Halliburton goes bankrupt." More on the demonization of Halliburton here.

Even Michael Moore was fussier than CBS: "Michael Moore, director of the movie Farenheit 9/11, said Sunday that he was given the same phony documents used by CBS News in its infamous Sept. 8 "60 Minutes" story but that he rejected them for inclusion in his film because his staff did not believe they were authentic."

Leftist Anglicans blink: "Anglican progressives were dealt a crushing blow last night when the church's General Synod rejected a bid to allow the consecration of women bishops. After a long and impassioned debate in Fremantle, delegates at first gave in-principle support to overturning the 450-year-old tradition of male-only bishops. But in a historic vote, the bill then failed to achieve the necessary two-thirds majority in the church's three decision-making bodies - the houses of clergy, laity and bishops. The result underscored the bitter rift between conservative evangelicals, with a large support base in Sydney, and progressive elements within the church. Archbishop of Sydney Peter Jensen said that at the heart of the debate was the battle over how to evangelise a church which, on his estimation, has only 30 years of life left in it."

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************



5 October, 2004

THE LEFTIST "COMMUNITY" MYTH

One of the commonest Leftist arguments in defence of big government (a sophisticated example here) is to say that the individual could accomplish nothing and would earn nothing without the community of which he forms part -- and that therefore he "owes" the community something. That is of course true. What is hilarious is that Leftists by some amazing feat of illogicality then immediately equate "the community" with "the government" -- which is in fact merely one part of the community, and a very parasitic part at that.

To see how parasitic, it is instructive to look at Britain in the year 1900. Britain at that time was the workshop of the world, had the world's largest navy, had an army that could muster half a million men if required (as it subsequently did in South Africa), had more effective policing than it has today, had justice and educational systems that were legendary for their quality, had a comprehensive welfare system and had extensive worker-protection legislation (principally introduced by the arch-Conservative Disraeli). So how much of the national income was spent by government at that time? 13.3%! Taxation there has since skyrocketed (government expenditures reaching 49.9% of the national income in 1984) and what have Britons got in return for all that extra tax? An army of clerks and petty dictators, principally. Clearly, Britain in 1900 shows that one can discharge one's obligations to "the community" without giving half of the national income to the government to squander.

The plain fact is that what we owe the community we DO pay and have ALWAYS paid -- by working and providing our services in exchange for services from others. And people co-operate to create goods and services with or without government involvement. And even if we agree that we owe the government some of our money for the services it provides, that in no way implies that we owe something to each and every member of the community, regardless of how much they contribute to the community.

There is, for instance, nothing inconsistent with my admitting indebtedness to the community and also saying that I owe hobos nothing. They have done nothing for me so I owe them nothing. I may give them something out of kindness but that is all. It is of course typically dreamy and simplistic Leftist thinking to see "the community" as some sort of undifferentiated whole when it is in fact anything but and when people in every day of their lives make sharp and important distinctions of all sorts between different members of it. Leftists have such rigid and simplistic brains that their discussions have always tended to lump people into large and overgeneralized groups. It used to be "the working class" versus "the bourgeoisie" and now it is mostly "gays", "women", "minorities" etc. They just can't handle or allow for individuals in their thinking. Individuals are just too messy and unruly for them. Straitjackets for all!

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ELSEWHERE

A surprising endorsement from Taxachusetts: "Since the devastating terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, one American leader has maintained an unbending resolve to protect our homeland and interest against Islamic savages and those foreign governments appeasing them. That leader is President Bush. While out-of-touch U.S. politicians and world leaders have attacked President Bush's tactics, they can't question his steely commitment to keep America safe".

Kerry is pro-homosexual: "Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign offers "GLBT" bumper stickers, a demonstration of his support for "gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered" activism. As WND reported, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute has declared the Edwards-Kerry presidential ticket the most "gay-supportive" in the history of the U.S.... "John Kerry believes that same-sex couples should be granted rights, including access to pensions, health insurance, family medical leave, bereavement leave, hospital visitation, survivor benefits, and other basic legal protections that all families and children need," the site proclaims. "He has supported legislation to provide domestic partners of federal employees the benefits available to spouses of federal employees. He was one of 14 senators - and the only one up for re-election in 1996 - to oppose the Defense of Marriage Act.""

Baseball Crank (Slow loading) lists 13 major issues where John Kerry has said the same as the far-Left and the Islamofascists.

Opinion Journal notes today that John Kerry has been dissed by both Poland and Iran. I have always had a soft spot for the Poles so it grieves me to see Kerry mock the Polish contribution to the Iraq war as "bribed". It is a gross insult to the heroic and very honourable Poles. No wonder the Poles are now getting tired of the whole thing.

Mark Steyn: "If I wasn't a conservative before 9/11, I'd certainly be one now. On one side I see decayed, self-absorbed passivity: citizens reduced to junkies with government as the pusher. On the other stand the gun-crazies, the religious Right, the home-schoolers, the flat-taxers and all the rest: you don't have to agree with them on everything to appreciate that, in a new war which not all of the West will survive, they have an advantage over the Swedes and Belgians. A self-reliant conservative citizenry is a better bet than the subjects of an overbearing state."

Islamic morality: "Who are we allowed to seize as hostage? Who are we allowed to kill? For the past few weeks these questions have prompted much debate throughout the Muslim world. The emerging answer to both questions is: Anyone you like!"

Catholics for Bush: "The presidential race is tightening among Roman Catholics, as national polls show President Bush cutting into Sen. John Kerry's lead among Catholic voters in recent months. The trend could help Bush in a tightening race in New Jersey, a state with 3.4 million Catholics. A poll released last week - before Thursday night's televised debate - by the Barna Research Group, which focuses on a Christian audience, showed Bush pulling ahead of Kerry among Catholic voters but it also showed Kerry gaining ground among Protestant voters".

Two of Australia's major newspapers have been sponsoring a Leftist blog run by a Chomskyite. Apparently they have become a bit embarrassed by that -- but not enough to cancel the blog concerned. They now have quite a good conservative blog up as well.

Wicked Thoughts has just put up a set of incredibly funny church announcements. The one I liked best was: "Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 PM. Please use the back door."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************



4 October, 2004

IMMIGRATION

Illegal immigration vast: "Many residents and ranchers in southeastern Arizona say they have reached a breaking point when it comes to illegal immigration. Roughly one out of every five of the 1.1 million undocumented immigrants arrested this year crossing the border came through Cochise County, population 122,000, according to the 2000 census. A handful of locals say they are so overrun that they have taken to rounding up undocumented immigrants on their own. Others plan to show their dissent at the polls in November."

A black protest: "For years, liberal policy wonks have told us that illegal immigration is good for our economy. They sit in their high-rise think tanks in Brentwood and Century City and pontificate that the benefits of immigrants' cheap labor outweigh the price we pay to have these people here. But let's open our eyes and use common sense when assessing the costs to our communities. Crowded schools, crammed emergency rooms, high-density housing, gridlocked roadways, pollution, crime, depressed wages — are they worth the extra 50 cents we might save on a head of lettuce or a bunch of grapes? I don't think so.... Democrats want to cram more bodies into steerage, give them driver's licenses and move them toward de facto legalization to swell party ranks. Republicans want cheap labor for their factories. And who suffers? We do, the working stiffs whose taxes go to pay for all these extra people".

Hilarious solution: A majority of the Detroit City Council wants to implement an economic development plan it commissioned for $112,000 that preaches racial isolation and rails against immigration in its bid to gain economic success for poor blacks. The crux of the plan is the creation of a business district -- dubbed African Town -- that would be funded in part with city money and made up of black-owned businesses catering to a black clientele. The report also complains that immigrants from Mexico, Asia and the Middle East are stealing resources, jobs and other opportunities from blacks and calls on city leaders to stop the economic shift.

Immigration "too hard": "Wouldn't you think that a public policy issue that profoundly affects homeland security, unemployment, poverty, education, health, and the environment would be a hot-button issue in the campaign? Immigration policy is just such an issue, yet we don't hear a peep out of either camp on the subject -- except for bipartisan endorsement of amnesty for illegal immigrants. How important is immigration policy? ... Why doesn't immigration surface as a major campaign issue? Powerful political and ideological forces are in play that suppress debate sustaining the inertia of a dubious policy that has huge long-run implications for the size, composition, cohesiveness, and quality of life in America.... However, surveys indicate that recent immigrants are not as enthusiastic about continuing high levels of immigration as the politicians think. After all, the newcomers will be competitors for jobs and benefits"

The Swiss are tough: "Swiss voters have turned down plans to relax the country's strict citizenship laws, referendum results show. A proposal to ease naturalisation for foreigners brought up and educated in the country was defeated after 56.8% of voters opposed it. A separate proposal to grant automatic citizenship to the grandchildren of immigrants failed narrowly, with 51.6% voting against. Being born in the country will continue to be no guarantee of citizenship".

A good comment on the Swiss result by Trifkovic. Excerpt: "Switzerland is still today what the United States had been before 1861".

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ELSEWHERE

What a silly bit of calculation: Some game-playing "scientists" have worked out that all of humanity COULD have had a common ancestor as recently as 1,500 years ago. And now people are claiming that therefore all of humanity DID have had a common ancestor as recently as 1,500 years ago! Breathtaking illogic.

Modern Democrats like old Southern Democrats: "Mr. Bush has used accountability, as well as support for vouchers for the District of Columbia, to take the moral high ground on education. The folks now blocking African-Americans at the schoolhouse door are those who support the education status quo."

What Kerry ignores: "The sanctuary of al Qaeda is drying up in Pakistan while its money sources from Saudi Arabia are under new audit. Libya has flipped. Iran is now under global examination. Syria is apprehensive. Afghanistan is free of theocracy. All this shrinks the world of the Islamic fascists, which before 9/11 was expanding."

A good question: "The level of taxation, funding and control throughout all levels of government looks like an upside down pyramid. All of the funding starts at the top (federal) and runs down to the bottom (cities and local schools). A dollar that starts at the top of this system results is a few pennies by the time it reaches the bottom. This is the hallmark of liberal thinking. Strong centralized control at the top. The very few making all of the important decisions for the many of us at the bottom. This method of government did not work for the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries... Why is this now an economic model Western Europeans, Canadians and the liberals of this country wish to pursue in the face of such historic failures?"

Wal-Mart and unions: "One writer pointed out that Wal-Mart opposes unionization of its workers and that Hitler and the Nazi Party destroyed labor unions. In the minds of some people, the fact that a business prefers to operate in a union-free environment is tantamount to Nazism, but it isn't. Even under our highly authoritarian National Labor Relations Act, companies are free to discourage their employees from unionizing. That law makes union representation a matter of majority vote and compels companies where a union is officially deemed to have won a majority to bargain "in good faith" with the union representatives.... It's important to note that there are many workers who do not want union representation.... But aren't unions beneficial to workers? Not always. Some workers wind up unemployed after union wage demands lead to lower employment by the company".

Contrary to my original expectations, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE seems to have become a daily blog -- so suggestions for postings there are particularly welcome. I have just received an email from another U.S. doctor which I expect to be putting up in the next day or so. The focus of the blog is on the wonders of government-run health-care everywhere but I also note the damage done to private medicine by a legal system that supports predatory litigation.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

********************************



3 October, 2004

THE U.S. PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE REVIEWED

I loved this "abbreviated" version of the Presidential debate. Very funny.

One Hundred Percenter argues that Jim Lehrer showed a liberal bias in the questions he asked during the Presidential debate.

Hugh Hewitt has a very good analysis of the debate -- with particular emphasis on two big blunders that he thinks Kerry made, about banning bunker busters and seeking global approval before acting in America's defence.

There is a list here or here of 16 "inaccuracies" that John Kerry uttered during the debate.

SCSU Scholars compares John Kerry's policies to the wimpish policies of the ancient Trojans in The Iliad who were eventually destroyed by the tougher Greeks.

Peg Kaplan (a Jewish girl with an Irish first name! My mother was a "Peg" too -- short for Margaret) has a heartfelt post about why the holocaust convinces her that Bush is the right man for America.

A relevant remark from Saint Augustine of Hippo: "Though wisdom without eloquence is of little service to states, yet eloquence without wisdom is frequently a positive injury, and is of service never." ("On Christian Doctrine" - Book IV, Argument).

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AUSTRALIA

Cynical Leftist hypocrisy: "Some breathtaking promises have been made in this election campaign - Medicare Gold, the 30 per cent child-care tax rebate - but nothing tops Labor's $3.7 billion-a-year tax and family plan. It's unheard of for politicians to promise tax changes that would leave some people worse off, yet that's what Mark Latham has done. What's more, apart from some well-off single-income families, the losers are the poorest families in the nation. Not a good look from a Labor leader. But the tax changes are much more than that. On the one hand they're a huge politically motivated bribe, carefully targeted at the kind of families prevalent in marginal electorates."

Another Leftist bishop: "Australia is "hell-bent on a course of disturbingly questionable morality", the outgoing head of the Australian Anglican Church said yesterday. In what many will see as an intervention in the last week of the election campaign, church head Peter Carnley made a scathing attack on the "so-called war against terrorism" and the Government's treatment of asylum seekers".

Australia's elitist Left: "Labor's electoral base is divided between a relatively small number of new-class social professionals and a relatively large number of people in traditional working-class occupations. These two groups often hold different values on political questions, such as border control, the size of the immigration program, cultural pluralism and so on. Labor candidates in federal elections are more likely to sympathise with the social professionals' values than with those of their traditional supporters".

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ELSEWHERE

Saddam and Bin Laden WERE linked: "Anyone who has actually read the report would know that the 9/11 Commission had plenty to say about the connections between al Qaeda and Iraq, but because much of its findings were beyond the scope of its charter, important details went unstated in public hearings or were buried in the minutiae of the published narrative. Virtually every reporter I have spoken to has failed to answer this basic question satisfactorily: "Have you actually read the report?" The answer is almost always a sheepish "No." Those who have only given it a cursory scan may have missed the fine-print chapter notes where explosive information about names, dates, places, and conversations concerning the Iraq-al Qaeda connection are outlined in chilling detail."

V.D. Hanson on whether support for Israel is to blame for the huge Islamic hostility towards the West: "Kuwait ethnically cleansed thousands of Palestinians and now blames us for our supposed callousness toward the West Bank. China swallowed Tibet and the world snores. By 1967 the Arab world had simply deported almost all its Jews and sent them to Israel -and few complained. The Sudanese government has killed more black Africans in a week than Israel has Palestinians in a decade, and the Arab World is silent. The first three wars between 1947-1967 were not over the West Bank. And when it is autonomous, the next one won't be either. And on and on and on"

Belmont Club has some encouraging comments about the recent recapture of an Iraqi city (Samarra) from rebels by combined U.S. and Iraqi forces. See also here for the latest.

Terrorist U.N.: "The Israel Defense Forces released video footage Friday taken by an unmanned aircraft showing what appeared to be Palestinians in the Gaza Strip loading rockets into a vehicle marked "U.N." The black-and-white footage, taken by a drone - or unmanned aircraft - flying over the Gaza Strip, showed the militants driving off in the white van, with "U.N." marked in black on its roof. The IDF is furious at the United Nations representatives in the Gaza Strip, "who continuously stress that they are an international organization and of course is not in any way involved in terrorism,""

Icelandic blogger "Willy Sutton" has a new libertarian site. He has a lot of John Stossel stuff up that everybody ought to know but which almost nobody does.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and big egos who will say anything to win applause

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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2 October, 2004

EUROPEAN DREAMS

A Jeremy Rifkin has just written a rather hilarious book called "The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream". It is amusingly demolished here.

And also here. Excerpt: "Professional worrier Jeremy Rifkin's pronouncements always remind me of the characterization by one-time Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas B. Reed of his political opponents, 'They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.' Rifkin's assertion that Americans' consumption of beef causes domestic violence were absurd. So were his claims that biotechnology threatens 'a form of annihilation every bit as deadly as nuclear holocaust,' and that a small-scale field trial of a gene-spliced soil bacterium could change weather patterns and disrupt air-traffic control. He's at it again in a completely different realm in a new book, 'The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream' ..."

There is an article here by that learned dunce, Niall Ferguson (He thinks America should become an empire!) which argues that recent Anglo/American co-operation (e.g. Reagan/Thatcher and Blair/Bush) is somehow an aberration that must soon end. He says that Britain has more in common with Europe. He notes that, like Europeans, Brits are much less religious than Americans are -- but that seems to be his only substantial point. Really important facts, like the abhorrence most Britons have of the EU, he overlooks. And on the cultural affinities that will continue to bind Britons and Americans, I can do no better than to refer readers to the Anglosphere Primer. There is a more extensive demolition of Ferguson's surprisingly ill-informed article here and other criticisms by Mark Steyn here.

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ELSEWHERE

Tom Galvin puts lots of good political pictures up on his blog -- though he is mainly concerned with the Presidential debate at the moment (like most political bloggers). He has two good pictures of union goons harassing little 3-year old Sophia Parlock. Leftists will use any violence they think they can get away with. I mention that in today's postings on EDUCATION WATCH too. Stalin and Pol Pot were no aberrations. They were just normal Leftists who managed to get unrestrained power. "By their fruits shall ye know them" (Matthew 7:20) and their deeds constantly reveal how much hate there is in Leftists.

There is a whole series here of photographs taken at various Leftist "protests" (really exhibitions) in the San Francisco area in recent times. My favourite is this series, which is prefaced by the remark: "People not from the San Francisco Bay Area often think that, when locals say such-and-such person or group is "Communist," they're being metaphorical, or McCarthyites. Far from it. Overt Communists and Marxists are commonplace around the Bay Area, especially at rallies like this". And this series probably shows best how exhibitionism is the underlying theme of Leftist demonstrating. "Look at me" is what it is all about.

Bush to support lifetime savings accounts: "President George W. Bush is expected to push for new tax-free savings accounts during the upcoming presidential race by promoting a bill by a fellow Texas Republican, Representative Sam Johnson. Under the Lifetime Savings Accounts Act of 2004, H.R. 4078, Americans would be able to contribute up to $5,000 a year to two types of savings accounts and withdraw money at any time without penalty."

Lights out on regulators: "If there's any lesson that policy makers should have learned from the electricity blackouts throughout California in 2002 and then on the East Coast earlier this year, it is that the wrong sort of electric power deregulation can cause soaring prices and leave consumers literally in the dark. In California, homeowners and businesses had to ration their electricity use, dim the lights, and turn off their air conditioners. A basic service we as Americans take for granted -- cheap and uninterrupted access to electric power for light, heat, running computers, poweringhair dryers and dishwashers, and accessing the internet -- was suddenly scarce."

Jefferson would be disappointed: "Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction." --Thomas Jefferson

The Leftist's anti-motto: "Remember that if the opportunities for great deeds should never come, the opportunities for good deeds are renewed day by day. The thing for us to long for is the goodness, not the glory." --F.W. Faber

Australia's most Leftist State government, led by Steve Bracks, wants phone-tapping powers (surprise!). Max Teichman comments: "Bracks is determined to give his Ombudsman such sweeping powers. I have little doubt George Brouwer is a man of integrity, but he could be replaced tomorrow and another government could use such powers as it saw fit. But as to this government's fitness; quite seriously, who would wish to entrust them with such powers? Amazingly, our civil libertarians who dined out on the evils of phone tapping for years, maintain a total, complicit silence. Like our feminists when the Afghan girl led her team in the Olympic parade. The first one ever. Not interested. Having screeched with the best of them about the US body bags certain to come out of Afghanistan, our feminists seem to have lost all interest when they didn't appear. Sod Afghanistan.

New search engine: The little-known United States company is taking aim at Google and other industry leaders such as Yahoo! with a new search engine called Clusty.com, due to begin this week after four years of fine-tuning. The search engine's name refers to the clustering technology that Vivisimo has refined to sort search results into different categories related to the initial search request. The technology aims to simplify online search by breaking down results into related categories instead of bunching them in a single listing that can span tens of thousands of links scattered across hundreds of Web pages... Vivisimo, a Pittsburgh company, has already has attracted a cult following". I tried it using the search-term "johnray". I liked the Google results best.

I have just put up on SOCIALIZED MEDICINE an article by a medical specialist reader who explains that the high costs of medical treatment in the USA are to a significant extent non-medical. A large part of what you pay goes to comply with purely bureaucratic requirements of the government and to line the pockets of trial lawyers.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and big egos who will say anything to win applause

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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1 October, 2004

A NEAR-FISKING

I rarely bother to fisk Leftist rubbish but there is an article here that tempts me. An evidently Leftist economist asks why the USA is more conservative (which he seems to equate -- rather narrowly -- with less welfarist) than most other countries. He says it is because the U.S. constitution makes change difficult and limits the power of the central government. He also says that Americans are less willing to spend on welfare because so many of the poor are racially different and most voters therefore have difficulty identifying with them.

The second point is undoubtedly true -- there has been research to support it -- but the rest of the article is lamebrain stuff. For a start, the author identifies the much greater Christian committment of Americans as part of their conservatism but nowhere explains how the constitution or the presence of minorities brings that about. Perhaps the great influx of Muslims into France and the Netherlands in the last 50 years has made those countries more Christian? There is no evidence of it.

And if the constitution limits the power of the central government, no-one told Abraham Lincoln. Nothing restrained him from actually making war on other Americans. And the claim that the U.S. Supreme Court tends to support conservatism would draw a horse-laugh from almost all conservatives. How many conservatives agree with the court's decisions permitting racial discrimination in favour of minorities on the specious grounds of "diversity", for instance?

The subheading of the article also proclaims that: "Europe is in the 21st century, but we remain locked in the 18th". I would have said that Europe has returned to the feudalism of the 12th century -- in that Europeans now as then are dependant on their political masters for most things -- rather than being as free to provide for themselves as Americans are.

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STRAUSS AND THE NEOCONS AGAIN

I said most of what I want to say about Straussians and the neocons on 21st. but I cannot help noting again that the "neocons" generally and Straussians in particular are everybody's favourite villain at the moment. We see here (in an article by De Lorenzo) how an attack on the Straussians by a Leftist professor is being welcomed by libertarians!

It's just scapegoating of course -- something Jews are all too familiar with. Instead of blaming a huge segment of the American people for supporting the policies of President Bush, moral cowards pick on a small group of history freaks instead. Hitler did the same. Instead of blaming the German people because so many of them went "Red" after WW1, he blamed the Jews for "manipulating" them. It's all in Mein Kampf.

One of the bones of contention between libertarians and Straussians centres around the contempt which many libertarians feel for Abraham Lincoln. I share the libertarian view. A man who brought about the death of half a million Americans in order to "free the slaves" -- when every other country in the world freed the slaves without a drop of blood being spilt -- is an utter monster in my view. Straussians however take the conventional view of Lincoln as a hero. De Lorenzo is of course one of the chief proponents of the libertarian view. There is a counterblast at him over that from a Straussian here.

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ELSEWHERE

The New Deal debunked (again): "Macroeconomic model builders have finally realized what Henry Hazlitt and John T. Flynn (among others) knew in the 1930s: FDR's New Deal made the Great Depression longer and deeper. It is a myth that Franklin D. Roosevelt 'got us out of the Depression' and 'saved capitalism from itself,' as generations of Americans have been taught by the state's educational establishment."

There is also a great cartoon here on how FDR's New Deal "helped" black Americans. A reader comments: "It reminds me of an old Al Capp "L'il Abner" cartoon strip. Abner's hero -- bumbling cop "Fearless Fosdick" -- meets some do-gooder liberals. They figure Fosdick is earning less than the minimum wage and promptly storm the police chief's office demanding an end to this illegality. The chief chews his cigar and looks Fearless up and down and says "Fosdick: scram, you're fired!". The liberals run off cheering and patting themselves on the back. Another injustice eliminated". There was a similar post on POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH yesterday, noting how feminist policies had "helped" women in Sweden.

Islamic democracy not so impossible after all? "Only six years after casting off the shackles of deeply-entrenched authoritarianism, Indonesians have gone to the polls three times in six months and elected themselves both a parliament and, for the first time in their history, a president.

Great stuff! Lawyers made to bear all the costs of a foolish lawsuit that they hoped to profit from: "Lawyers for a policeman who lost a court case in which he sought "hurt on duty" benefits were ordered not to charge their client yesterday, after the state's highest court called his appeal futile."

A defeat for the drug nuts: "The hemp food industry declared victory Monday in its three-year battle over the federal government's effort to ban sales and consumption of bread, protein powders and other food products made from the psychoactively benign botanical cousin of marijuana. Federal officials declined to appeal a February ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejecting the Drug Enforcement Administration's attempts to block sales and consumption of hemp foods.

"Children at the Australian International School in Jakarta are at risk from terrorists and the school will be forced to close unless Canberra boosts its security, according to the school's principal. School principal Penny Robertson has written to Prime Minister John Howard urgently calling for more funding for security at the school, which has been singled out for attacks in the past.... The school has been closed until after the Australian elections for fear it may be targeted by terrorists."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

**************************

That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and big egos who will say anything to win applause

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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