Pat Condell: The great Palestinian lie

Pat Condell: The great Palestinian lie

via Jihad Watch by Robert on 10/6/11


"This is not about territory, and it certainly isn't about justice or human rights, because Arab societies don't know the meaning of those words. It's about Jew-hatred, as mandated by the Qur'an and as preached in the mosques and taught to the children in Arab countries day in and day out, generation after poisoned generation."
Be sure to watch it all. There is a special note for pro-Palestinian Leftists toward the end. (Video thanks to Cheryl.)

The genesis of Occupy Wall Street distilled to two words: student loans

Read the last paragraph.

The genesis of Occupy Wall Street distilled to two words: student loans

via Bookworm Room by Bookworm on 10/6/11

I hated UC Berkeley.  Loathed it.  Despised it.  Couldn't shake the dust off my feet fast enough after I graduated.  But graduate I did, and pretty well too, if my Phi Beta Kappa key has anything to say about it.  Knowing my feelings about UCB, my daughter asked a good question:  "Why didn't you transfer out?"
I had an equally good answer, although one that was virtually impossible for a well-to-do suburban kid, in a day and age of vast student loans, to understand:  "I didn't have the money."  My parents had no wealth; I had no wealth; my scholarships were real, but small; and — this is the important point — my student loans were minimal.  The latter reflected the fact that, because I knew that my parents had no wealth, I had no wealth, and my career options as a history major were limited, I was unwilling to hunt around for a different school that would, inevitably, have been more expensive.
It never occurred to me to take on a debt load that I might not be able to repay.  My college choice and student loans were calibrated to my expectations.  I even chose an affordable (albeit marvelously wonderful) law school.  By the time I graduated, after 7 years of higher education, I had only $15,000 in debt, which I paid off within three years.
For me, being prudent in my financial obligations was a no-brainer.  I mean that.  My brain never raised the possibility of taking on a larger debt load than I could reasonably handle.  Instead, when I needed more money for pesky little things like tuition and textbooks, I got a job.  Several jobs.  Summer jobs.  School year jobs.  Evening jobs.  Whatever.  I also lived at home when I could, which wasn't fun (although my Mom, bless her heart, did my laundry).  My parents charged me rent (don't ask), but I paid them less than I would have a third party landlord.  All in the name of going to school the old-fashioned way:  affordably.
Nowadays, of course, student loans are de rigueur.  How do I know that?  Because it seems as if every one of the loopy Occupy Wall Street dudes and dudettes interviewed complains about those students loans.  (See here, for example.)  Two out of thirteen of the demands on the Occupy Wall Street website focus on student loans:

Demand four: Free college education.
[snip]
Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the "Books." World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the "Books." And I don't mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

It's pretty clear that a core issue animating these protesters is the ridiculous debt obligations that they voluntarily assumed.  It's therefore almost funny to see the working class union types leaping on board to help out kids whose demands, if acceded to, will pile ever greater debt on the ordinary working stiffs in America.
Student loans started out as a good idea.  The GI Bill got the whole thing started, by having the government create a program that provided higher education for those who would otherwise be unable to afford it.  The end result was a dynamic, educated group of former military people (trained, disciplined, seasoned and responsible) who helped sweep the country to great prosperity during the 1950s and early 1960s.
What most people forget now is that the GI Bill was payment for services rendered.  In that way, it differed dramatically from student loans, which are payments for . . . what?  It's questionable whether those students currently getting "educated" at America's top propaganda institutions . . . er, colleges and universities, will contribute anything to the economy — and we know that render any services to the American people, in the cause of American freedom, in exchange for those cash handouts.
Nor are student loans analogous to any other types of loans, all of which require security, in the form of a tangible item (your house, your car, your engagement ring) or in the form of a guarantee from someone other than the federal government.  Guarantees from someone other than the federal government mean that some knows the borrower really well, and is willing to gamble on the debtor's success and integrity.
In addition to sending a message to the lender ("this person is a good risk for loan purposes"), personal guarantees also impose a moral obligation on the debtor, who might well feel constrained to pay back a loan before the bank takes Mom's house away.  By contrast, those federal government guarantees are nothing more than debt shifting.  Just as the navel-gazing student feels no obligation to pay back the bank, he doesn't feel any obligation to pay back the government, either.
Free money for entitled young people has created all sorts of problems.  First, of course, it's driven up college tuition costs.  With the government writing the check, there's no reason not to have creeping tuition inflation.
Second, the student loan program has given young people the completely unfounded and unreasonable belief  that their current economic situation and future earning potential are irrelevant to their academic choices.  You can just see them thinking "So what if I'm broke now and am going on to become a womyn's study or GLBT major and future barista.  Society still owes me $200,000 to enjoy a few years at Harvard."
Third, the loans have expanded greatly the number of young people who can be indoctrinated in Marxist crap by grossly overpaid professors at America's "finest" schools.  On that subject, the Occupy Wall Street demand I referenced above is a perfect example of the product emerging from these overpriced academies of indoctrination.  The demands are unicorn and fairyland stuff, made possible only by immersion in the academic world of Marxist fantasy.
And fourth, the loans have created a self-entitled group of people who, rather than pay off their debt, feel that it's totally appropriate for them to attack others' financial livelihood, as they're doing now when they try to interfere with our nation's economic core.
Here's something to think about when you think of those college and post-college debtors swarming America's financial centers:  Back in the 1960s, college campuses were awash with anti-War protesters.  They spoke, yelled, and screamed about American imperialism, about downtrodden Vietnamese villagers, and about blood-thirsty American soldiers.  These vehement, and often violent, protests ended abruptly in 1973.  In a way, this was rather surprising, because American imperialism, downtrodden Vietnamese villagers, and blood-thirsty American soldiers were still topping the nightly news.  What changed, though, was that the college kids no longer had skin in the game:  the draft had ended.
Just as the Vietnam war protests had nothing to do with actual principles, and everything to do with a spoiled generation's fear of the draft; so too do today's protests in America's financial centers have nothing to do with concerns about America's economy, and everything to do with deadbeat kids who willingly took on an unreasonable amount of debt, and are now facing the financial consequences for their cupidity and stupidity.

Davis execution

http://www.redstate.com/erick/2011/09/21/there-is-no-travesty-of-justice-in-georgia-executive-troy-davis/

http://ftp.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/52/52.F3d.907.94-8224.html
is the holding in a federal appeals case, not trial transcriptsor the record of the FOIA

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Two types of (fiscal) crazy

http://reason.com/archives/2011/08/10/two-types-of-crazy

The first was short-term and charged by contemporary partisanship—a sort of temporary political insanity. Debt limit brinkmanship from both parties revealed exactly how difficult it would be for America's political system to resolve even the most basic fiscal policy disputes, much less make substantial fiscal changes. When debt deal talks began, S&P announced that it expected Congress to work out a deal worth a minimum of $4 trillion in deficit reduction—the minimum necessary to stabilize the country's debt over the medium term. But after months of bickering, Congress only managed to come up with about $2.5 trillion in cuts—and only at the very last minute. Which explains why S&P now believes that "the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges."

But the S&P's downgrade notice also pointed to a more fundamental form of crazy: the long-term build-up of federal debt scheduled to come from America's entitlement system—and the broad refusal to do anything about it. It's not just that the deal failed to knock the minimum dollar-figure off the deficit. It's that it failed to address its root cause: "The plan envisions only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability." Entitlements—and their unsustainable financing systems—in other words, are the core of the long-term problem.

The latest attack on Michelle Bachmann

One of my Facebook contacts posted a link to a piece from the L.A. Times blogs.  It referred to the New Yorker piece.  If she hadn't posted that link and suggested sterilization for Evangelical Christians, I would not have been primed to follow the link below.

Good work, Bachmann haters!

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/08/a-journalism-lesson-for-the-new-yorker

Lesson #1: Make sure your quotes say what you claim they say — If you put words in quotes and credit them to a speaker, make sure you understand the context.

Lesson #2: Ensure that you use reliable sources — As I mentioned, Schaeffer has been the subject of numerous studies. There are dozens of qualified and reputable scholars who would be willing to explain his thought and influence. Unfortunately, while Lizza did find a PhD to provide a quote, he chose one that is known for being an unreliable source.

Lesson #3: If you claim something is said in a book, make sure it is said in that book — This is related to Lesson #1. It's not that hard to track down sources when they are in print.

Lesson #4: Don't rely on fact-checkers to save you – If you lack journalistic integrity and basic research skills, even the world-renowned New Yorker fact-checking department can't save you from embarrassing yourself.

Steve Jobs Succumbs to Alternative Medicine

Steve Jobs Succumbs to Alternative Medicine

via Skepticblog by Brian Dunning on 10/6/11

I'm sad that today I'm adding a slide to one of my live presentations, adding Steve Jobs to the list of famous people who died treating terminal diseases with woo rather than with medicine.
Seven or eight years ago, the news broke that Steve Jobs had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but considering it a private matter, he delayed in informing Apple's board, and Apple's board delayed in informing the shareholders. So what. The only delay that really mattered was that Steve, it turned out, had been treating his pancreatic cancer with a special diet and other alternative therapies, prescribed by his naturopath.
Most pancreatic cancers are aggressive and always terminal, but Steve was lucky (if you can call it that) and had a rare form called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which is actually quite treatable with excellent survival rates — if caught soon enough. The median survival is about a decade, but it depends on how soon it's removed surgically. Steve caught his very early, and should have expected to survive much longer than a decade. Unfortunately Steve relied on a naturopathic diet instead of early surgery. There is no evidence that diet has any effect on islet cell carcinoma. As he dieted for nine months, the tumor progressed, and took him from the high end to the low end of the survival rate.
Eventually it became clear to all involved that his alternative therapy wasn't working, and from then on, by all accounts, Steve aggressively threw money at the best that medical science could offer. But it was too late. He had a Whipple procedure. He had a liver transplant. And then he died, all too young.
My whole family loves Apple devices. Steve made our lives better, and I think I can say that pragmatically and without any Apple heroin in my veins. Note only that, he created my profession.
His lifelong friend Bill Gates tweeted:

For those of us lucky enough to get to work with Steve, it's been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely. b-gat.es/qHXDsU

I saw another tweet today from @DamonLindelof that I thought was beautifully worded:

Steve Jobs. On behalf of every dreamer sitting in his or her garage who is crazy enough to try to change the world, you will be missed.

We can't say for sure that Steve would still be alive and making lives better were it not for the alternative therapy, but the statistics suggest it very strongly. If you insist on unproven therapies, fine; but also try the proven ones. Nobody likes to either write or read a post such as this one.

A pyromaniac in a field of straw men

A pyromaniac in a field of straw men

via PrairiePundit by Merv on 10/6/11

George Will:

Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and former Obama administration regulator (for consumer protection), is modern liberalism incarnate. As she seeks the Senate seat Democrats held for 57 years before 2010, when Republican Scott Brown impertinently won it, she clarifies the liberal project and the stakes of contemporary politics.

The project is to dilute the concept of individualism, thereby refuting respect for the individual's zone of sovereignty. The regulatory state, liberalism's instrument, constantly tries to contract that zone — for the individual's own good, it says. Warren says:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own

. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. . . . You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."

Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts. Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context. This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.

...

There is much more.

The thing I do not like about Warren is that she is a control freak.  She has the same view of business as the fascists .  She is worse than a socialist who wants to own all the business enterprises.  She is content to let others own the businesses as long as she is allowed to run them.  That si the Obama Dodd-Frank model.

They Were Never Really My Friends: Facebook Revelations

They Were Never Really My Friends: Facebook Revelations

via Big Government by Lawrence Meyers on 9/5/11

"There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin." – Linus van Pelt in "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown"
Facebook has been great for me.  I've reconnected with many people I haven't seen in years, made many new friends, and have found yet another method of procrastination.  The downside — or maybe it's an upside — is that it's revealed some very troubling things about the social media platform, and personal relationships.
I refer to the not-yet-codified protocol for political posts.

If a friend posts something political, you might reasonably assume that (absent prior agreements not to discuss politics), that dissenting views are welcome.  After all, this is your friend.  Friends can, and often do, disagree.  If your friend only wanted to hear views that concur with her own, then one might reasonably assume that she would announce this.
So imagine my surprise, and subsequent disappointment, that twelve Facebook friends have de-friended me because I dared disagree with their posts.  Now, in real-life, when I have disagreements with friends on matters of politics, we may yell and scream and jump up and down, but when all is said and done, we pat each other on the back and say, "I don't agree with you, but I love you.  Let's not discuss politics anymore", and we have a beer.
But in cyberspace, there is a dual sociological phenomenon at work.  The first was posited by Dr. Stanley Milgram in his famous obedience experiment, which effectively showed that one is able to do something they might not normally do if they can do it anonymously.  While de-friending is not exactly an anonymous act, the fact that it can be done remotely, without warning, without hearing an appeal, demonstrates how cyberspace contributes to the dehumanization of mankind.   A de-friended friend is not a person.  They are nothing more than a button that can be pressed and — POOF — they're gone.
Can you imagine a more cowardly act?  Before Facebook, before Email, if you got angry with a friend, you would actually have to have a conversation with them.
But now?  Poof!


The second sociological phenomenon is discussed in David Mamet's The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. Mr. Mamet reminds us that we are quite like rats in a lab experiment. When asked a question or given a task by an authority figure, a correct answer or action yields a reward.  Perhaps the reward is praise, or a coin, or approval from a parent, or a pellet of food, or status, or position.  Once we leave the lab, or "college", and enter the real world, we come to prize the idea whose repetition rewards.
The reward in the real world, Mr. Mamet posits, is safety in the group.
I give you the Liberal.
Or, rather, I give you my de-friending Liberals.  Because there are people of all political persuasions who unwittingly engage in the same behavior.  The point is the same: do not leave the herd!  To leave the herd is to risk status and position!

Thus, when my de-friending friends are confronted with a dissenting opinion, they are placed in a pickle.  For the most part, Liberals are not capable or interested in hearing dissenting opinion.  They prefer to quash it altogether.  Barring that, the cognitive dissonance engendered by a reasonable and logical analysis of a Liberal's unsupportable position, is often too great to bear.  Rather than admit to the fact that their dearly-held world view may actually not hold up, and therefore face the horrible thought of leaving the herd, they instead rush back into the stampede, joining the clown car of Keynesians over the Cliffs of Insolvency.
However, there is an even greater impetus at play.  The herd witnesses that an outsider strolls among them — He of The Dissenting Opinion.  The herd stares disapprovingly at the One Who Invited The Dissenter.  Sensing his status in the herd threatened, the Inviter assassinates the interloper.   "There, see, I don't like him.   I killed him."   Status secured.

And so the Liberal becomes subservient to the group.  He has handed over his power to others — answered correctly and been rewarded with a food pellet.  The homogenous ideology takes even firmer root.  All dissension shall be eliminated.  The group shall be pure.
The final irony, thus, is that the Liberal who fears a totalitarian assault by the Right has created his own, from within, by his own actions.
So to my defriending Facebook friends — the one who defriended me because you asked what I though of Elizabeth Warren and I told you; because you attacked Rick Perry's faith and I challenged you; because I told you that all Americans got a tax cut under George Bush when you said only the rich did; because you said my posts were alienating your other friends; because you think Israel sits on occupied land and I suggested that wasn't the case; because you said collective bargaining is a right and I said it was a privilege; because you said the Tea Party is racist and I asked for proof; because you said the most vile and hateful things about a woman and I chastised you for your hateful rant –
You aren't my friend.  You were never my friend.
Because if you really were my friend, we'd yell and scream and jump up and down, but when all was said and done, we pat each other on the back and say, "I don't agree with you, but I love you.  Let's not discuss politics anymore", and we'd have a beer.  And you'd be fine with that.
Because you know this is America, where we encourage debate and free speech, not shut it down.
So if you're going to stick up a political post on Facebook, then be ready to hear another side.  Otherwise, let us all know ahead of time that you only want to hear praise, approval, and get a food pellet.

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Another successful Indian tribe membership drive

Steve Sailer makes an interesting point.
Years ago, I had an extended online argument with a sweet young thing who was irate about the US Government's "genocide" against Native American tribes. How was this "genocide" being effected? By redefinition.
In order to be counted as a Native American for one government program, a person had to be able to trace at least 12.5% his ancestry back to a recognized tribe. And furthermore, all 12.5% had to be one tribe. So someone who was one eighth, say, Navajo, one eighth Pueblo, and one eighth Hopi was not considered Native American.
The Sweet Young Thing objected vigorously when I suggested it had to be about the benefits handed out by the Government, otherwise why in the world would she care what some desk jockey in Washington called her (or anyone else)?

Another successful Indian tribe membership drive

via Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog by Steve Sailer on 9/10/11

Bob Hope once said of his hyper-exclusive Cypress Point Golf Club in Pebble Beach, CA, "One year they had a big membership drive at Cypress. They drove out 40 members." American Indian tribes, especially since Congress gave each tribe the right to one (but only one) casino, tend to hold similar views of what comprises a successful membership drive. Thus, from today's Washington Post:

One of the nation's largest American Indian tribes has sent letters to about 2,800 descendants of slaves once owned by its members, revoking their citizenship and cutting their medical care, food stipends, low-income homeowners' assistance and other services. 

The Cherokee Nation acted this week after its Supreme Court upheld the results of a 2007 special vote to amend the Cherokee constitution and remove the slaves' descendants and other non-Indians from tribal rolls. 

You'll note that when it comes to defining who gets access to racial/ethnic privileges, Indians behave the opposite of blacks and Hispanics, tending to define access narrowly. Only a handful of blacks, such as Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier, have complained about people (like Barack Obama) with no family ties to American slaves benefiting from affirmative action for blacks. (And Gates and Guinier appear to have avoided mentioning their complaints in connection with Obama.)

How come?

Unlike casino benefits, which are extremely finite legally, affirmative action benefits for blacks and Hispanics have no theoretical limits, so black and Hispanic leaders tend to have expansive views of who should be eligible for quotas as being black or Hispanic. The more who benefit from affirmative action, they reason, the more supporters for affirmative action in the political arena.

Of course, if anybody stopped to think about it, they'd realize that the more beneficiaries of affirmative action, then the higher average costs imposed upon each benefactor, which would tend to increase political resistance among nonbeneficiaries. So, conceptually, it's not obvious that the black/Hispanic approach to winning political battles over racial preferences is a clear-cut winner.

But ... that's racist! So, nobody thinks about it. The easiest way to win political debates is to not hold them because you've redefined thoughts you don't like as crimethink.

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Friedman's Four Ways

Friedman's Four Ways

via The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog by Ron Ross on 10/5/11

Sometimes the explanation for vexing problems is clear as can be after you see it. A perfect example is an observation made by the late Milton Friedman in a 2004 interview with Fox News:

There are four ways to spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why you really watch out for what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well then, I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else's money on myself. And if I spend somebody else's money on myself, then I'm going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it costs, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government. And that's close to 40 percent of our national income.

It would be nearly impossible to exaggerate how many of our current economic problems are explained by Friedman's four ways of spending money. Think of the four ways in the order they're presented as S1, S2, S3, and S4. As Friedman explains, the effectiveness of how money is spent declines inexorably as you move from S1 to S4.
The important demarcation line in ways money can be spent is between S2 and S3. In other words, the issue that matters most is your money versus someone else's money. If you're spending your own money on someone else, your spouse or children, for example, you still take the expenditure seriously. You still pay a price if you don't look for bargains.
A new Gallup survey finds that "Americans believe, on average, that the federal government wastes 51 cents of every tax dollar, similar to a year ago, but up significantly from 46 cents a decade ago and from an average 43 cents three decades ago." This is a good example of "the wisdom of crowds." The trend shows that the crowd is wising up regarding the implications of gargantuan government.
The survey respondents are correct in their assessment of how government spends money, and you need go no further than Friedman's distinctions of how to spend money in understanding the source of the problem.
My guess would be that many of the respondents would think the government doesn't necessarily need to waste half the public's money. The problem, however, is it's the nature of the beast. Because of the realities Friedman refers to, the government will never be able to spend money as effectively as the private sector.
The problems associated with how the government spends money are not the result of who's running the government. The problems are systemic. Unless government is seriously downsized, waste and inefficiency will remain problems no matter which party is in power.
The source of the problem can be further clarified by keeping in mind the observations of another economist, Steven Landsburg: "Most of economics can be summarized in four words: People respond to incentives." (That's the first sentence in his excellent book, The Armchair Economist.)
The incentives for spending money wisely and efficiently are simply too weak when it's not your own money. It's no skin off your nose if the benefits of the expenditure are a small fraction of the costs. When it's your own funds being used, you will not only restrict your expenditures to things having more benefits than costs, you will choose the ones you think will have the highest ratio of benefits to costs.
When it's your own money you're spending, it costs you something when you spend it foolishly. That's not to say that we never spend our own money foolishly, but it comes out of our own hides when we do. When we spend our own money foolishly, we're left with less money to spend well. It's a self-policing structure. Of course, your incentives are even stronger when you worked hard for the money in question.
When a politician or bureaucrat spends taxpayer money it's treated essentially a freebie. It's only natural that taxpayer money gets treated like monopoly money. Politicians and bureaucrats have virtually no incentive to care about the value of an expenditure or its cost. This is a profound disadvantage of public spending that will never, ever go away.
Contrary to the straw-man accusations of some liberals, conservatives do not advocate zero government expenditures. Conservatives definitely are not anarchists. Nevertheless, the inherent and inescapable inferiority of spending someone else's money on someone else is a strong argument for minimizing the size of government. The public's opinion that the amount of government waste has been increasing parallels the exponential growth of government.
The Solyndra fiasco is another recent confirmation of Friedman's observations. Despite alarm bells going off, the Obama administration pushed the doomed endeavor forward. Why not? It wasn't their money, after all. Because it has now becoming so notorious, it appears the administration may pay a political price. Nevertheless, half a billion dollars of taxpayer money has gone down a rat hole. Unfortunately, Solyndra is the rule, not the exception. Absurdly generous public employee pension plans are another predictable result of spending someone else's money.
Friedman said that the fourth spending alternative is how we spend forty percent of GDP. He was, I think, referring only to budgetary expenditures. Forty percent is a lot. Unfortunately, it understates the full extent of the problem.
The vast regulatory apparatus of the government is basically a system of spending someone else's money on someone else. It is estimated that government regulations currently cost the economy $1.7 trillion a year. For example, requiring a private business owner to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to comply with the American with Disabilities Act is a clear case of spending someone else's money on someone else. Requiring a private business to spend a million dollars doing an "environmental impact report" is a clear example of spending someone else's money on someone else. Spending a million dollars or more on an EIR, in fact, is an example of spending someone else's money for no one and for nothing. Minimum wage laws likewise are a case of spending someone else's money on someone else.
The billions of hours Americans spend each year preparing their tax returns is a case of spending someone else's time on someone else. Time is money, as they say, and most people I know complain a lot more about a scarcity of time than they do of money.
When you spend your own money (or time) on yourself, or for your loved ones, the process is essentially self-regulating. The incentives are automatically aligned with waste minimization. When such incentives are not present, elaborate and complex systems of rules and artificial punishments must be put in their place. There can never be enough rules and regulations to match the effectiveness and elegance of the self-regulating market.

AttackWhine.com

From the Best of the Web, Sept 14, 2011:

"The Obama campaign is launching a new website to handle misinformation against President Obama," reports the Hill. "In an email, Obama's reelection campaign manager, Jim Messina, announced the formation of AttackWatch.com":
The site features ominous red-white-and-black graphics and a form called "Report an attack." There's also a Facebook page, which we're told is a parody, but who can tell? The whole thing is both creepily paranoid and bumblingly buffoonish, as if produced by a chimera of Richard M. Nixon and Wile E. Coyote.
And the site's substance is no less marvelously mockable than its style. The "News Feed" page rebuts three "smears" by linking to exceedingly weak left-liberal defenses.
• "Glenn Beck Twists the Facts on Israel." Apparently the Obama campaign is still watching Beck's show on Fox News Channel, even though its last episode aired June 30. AttackWatch.com links to a MediaMutters.org clip of the May 19 program, in which Beck says Obama has "betrayed our last strong ally."
"The facts," according to AttackWatch.com, are that two Israeli officials, President Obama himself, and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates have all made boilerplate statements to the effect that the Washington-Jerusalem alliance remains strong. And we have to agree, the Beck statement was hyperbolic. To say that Obama has "betrayed" Israel is at least a gross overstatement. But is he "a friend to Israel," as the site claims? In an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal, Dan Senor makes a strong case that the answer is no--and Senor's arguments go unrebutted on AttackWatch.com.
• "Romney's job chart shows flawed understanding of the facts." The source here is ThinkProgress.org, a lefty attack outfit. We hadn't even seen the chart in question until we were directed to it by AttackWatch.org. As it turns out, ThinkProgress has a point, but it's a tiny one--and the chart looks bad for Obama anyway.
Mitt Romney's chart is a bar graph showing the number of jobs lost in each recession since 1973 and the number of jobs added in the 24 months after recovery began after each recession. Both bars show that the recession of 2007-09 is an outlier. It saw by far the most jobs lost: 8.9 million, vs. between 1.3 million and 3.1 million for the other recessions.
The second bar--jobs gained during the subsequent recovery--ranges from 1.2 million to 7.0 million for earlier recessions. For the 2007-09 recession, by contrast, the number is minus 0.8 million. That is, the number of jobs continued declining even after gross domestic product started growing again.
ThinkProgress's complaint? "The chart . . . calls the period of time from 2007-2009 the 'Obama recovery,' blaming him for the poor job numbers over that three-year period. As Romney surely knows, however, George W. bush was serving as president in 2007 and 2008, and Obama did not take office until January 2009."
It's true that the chart is poorly labeled, but ThinkProgress doesn't get it right either. The period of time depicted in the chart (under the label "Obama recovery") goes from 2007 through 2011--that is, 24 months after the recession ended. It would have been more accurate to label it "Bush recession/Obama recovery." But Romney is correct to point out that the recovery, which took place entirely during Obama's presidency, saw a continued loss of jobs, unlike after past recessions.
• "Rick Perry's massive jobs lie." Here the source is PolitiFact.com, which said "pants on fire" to the Texas governor for the following statement: "[Obama] had $800 billion worth of stimulus in the first round of stimulus. It created zero jobs."
AttackWatch.com counters that PolitiFact "refers to four independent analyses by the Congressional Budget Office and three private assessments of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act to determine that anywhere between 1.3 million and 3.6 million jobs were created or saved by the stimulus—'but certainly more than zero.' "
What both sites omit is that, as we noted Sept. 2, the way these estimates are arrived at is not by counting actual jobs--of which, as the Romney chart points out, there are actually fewer than before the stimulus--but by assuming that so-called stimulus spending created jobs. That assumption may be accurate--it is possible that, as Obama and his supporters claim, even more jobs would have been lost absent the stimulus--but these estimates do not demonstrate it.
Ah, but PolitiFact does have proof that Perry's statement was false:

We even found Billy Weston, a Florida Republican who personally credited the stimulus for his new job with a private Riviera Beach pharmaceutical manufacturer.

PolitiFact lists the various estimates, then wraps up as follows:

Note the language "created or saved," which means not every one of those more than a million jobs count [sic] as "created," as Perry said.

But certainly more than zero. Ask Billy Weston.

Perry said "the first round of stimulus . . . created zero jobs." We say Pants on Fire.

Take that, Gov. Perry! The stimulus created one job! If that's the best these guys can do, we suppose we also have to give them credit for making our job easier.

Are Republicans or Democrats More Anti-Science? - Reason Magazine

Are Republicans or Democrats More Anti-Science? - Reason Magazine

On biological evolution, the survey reported that 97 percent of scientists agree that living things, including human beings, evolved over time and that 87 percent of them think that this was an entirely natural process not guided by a supreme being. Some 36 percent of Democrats believe that humans naturally evolved; 22 percent believe that evolution was guided by a supreme being; and 30 percent don’t believe humans have evolved over time. The corresponding figures for Republicans are 23 percent, 26 percent, and 39 percent, respectively.

Percent affirming	Scientists	Democrats	Republicans
Living things evolved	97	58	59
Unguided process	87	36	23
Guided by supreme being	10	22	26
Did not happen	3	30	39

On climate change, the Pew survey reported that 84 percent of scientists believe that the recent warming is the result of human activity. Among Democrats, 64 percent responded that the Earth is getting warming mostly due to human activity, whereas only 30 percent of Republicans thought so. That is truly a deep divide on this scientific issue.

Percent affirming	Scientists	Democrats	Republicans
Human activity causing global warming	84	64	30
Funding embryonic stem cell research		71	38
Favor animal research		48	62
Favor building nuclear plants	70	45	62
Think biotech foods are safe		42	48

Science and Anti-Science

Leftist anti-science

The major theme in Democrat attacks on GOP Presidential contenders at the moment seems to be that they are "anti-science". As usual, if we want to see what is true of Leftists, we just have to look at what they say about conservatives. Leftists are such good "projectors" that they would be star employees in any movie house. And the multiple fallacies in global warming theory reveal who are the religious believers and who is pro-science.

And if belief in God is anti-science, what are we to make of core Leftist beliefs such as "all men are equal"? Such beliefs are clearly false in any physical sense. They are anti-science beliefs. They are religious (metaphysical) beliefs. And even though I am an atheist I think that belief in "all men are equal" is a lot nuttier than belief in God. Anybody can see with their own eyes that the Leftist belief is false. As many have argued, Leftism is a religion too.

I am very pleased however to present a third argument that it is the Left who are anti-science. Brilliant young American philosopher Nathan Cofnas has given me permission to present a small excerpt from his forthcoming book Reptiles with a conscience. See below:

Just as some conservatives, mainly religious conservatives, are opposed to science that they perceive as threatening to their religious beliefs, many liberals are opposed to science that they perceive as threatening to their liberal beliefs.

For example, when president of Harvard Larry Summers suggested and provided evidence that innate, biologically rooted differences in aptitude between the sexes explain some of female underrepresentation in quantitative fields, two motions to censure him were introduced by two professors of humanities—anthropologist J. Lorand Matory and sociologist Theda Skocpol—and the ultimately successful movement to fire him was led almost entirely by other professors of humanities, most with no training in psychometrics.

In April 2005 I had an e-mail correspondence with a well-known critic [Nancy Hopkins from MIT] of Larry Summers' comments on women's underrepresentation in quantitative fields. Summers said that, because men have a larger variance in math ability, among those qualified to teach mathematics at top universities, which he suggested requires ability corresponding to a math IQ of 160, about 20 percent are women.

I pointed out to this critic that Summers provided data in support of his hypothesis, whereas I had not seen her provide data in any of her public rebuttals of him. She began her response to me with the statement that she is "interested only in the truth!"

She then explained that real potential in mathematics is not measured by the tests on which Summers' data were based. She wrote: "The top math students in North America are not measured by the SAT score and its tail as Summers suggested, but rather by a much more competitive test that measures the true math genius whiz kids. This test is called the Putnam competition.…

This year, 1 of the 5 Putnam Fellows is a girl. In addition, this year, 4 of the top 15 students in the competition… were women."

As politely as I could, I pointed out that one out of five is 20 percent, and four out of fifteen is about 27 percent, which is consistent with Summers' assertion that males are overrepresented at the high end of ability at a ratio of 1:5.

Her response was to tell me that I "cannot listen to the facts that are put before [me]" and that "Old folks like…[me] should retire gracefully into the sunset."

Her response was very curious to me (not just because I was a seventeen-year-old high school student at the time, which presumably she didn't know). Why, if Summers said that woman are underrepresented at the high end of ability at a ratio of 1:5, would this critic counter with evidence that confirms exactly that?

She is not stupid. She is a scientist at a top university, and entirely capable of realizing that her own data support the very hypothesis she opposes. If she has no commitment to accepting the implication of evidence, why cite evidence? And why assert interest in truth so emphatically? If she has the intellectual capacity to realize that her own argument is invalid, why would she expect that argument to convince anyone else?

I think that I now can answer these questions. Truth is a value to almost everyone. But most people have many other values to which they are more committed than they are to truth—like in this case, commitment to the belief that the male and female populations have the same distribution of all cognitive abilities and proclivities.

When truth conflicts with more important values, people do not outright deny truth or its importance; they pay as much homage to truth as possible without compromising their more important values. One way of doing this is to pretend to use the method of discovering truth—namely, appealing to empirical evidence or logical argument—to arrive at their predetermined conclusion.

--

The Wheel of the Year: Now available on Amazon Kindle

The Official Manual for Spice Cadets: Now available on Amazon Kindle

Liberal Fascism is the new black

Liberal Fascism is the new black

via Patterico's Pontifications by Karl on 10/3/11

[Posted by Karl]

Over the weekend Rep. Paul Ryan reviewed The Price of Civilization, the new book from Jeffrey Sachs, which apparently argues that America needs to adopt Euro-socialist policies, rather than learn from the misery inflicted by the worst of democratic socialism there.  Rather than rehash that debate, I want to focus on the totalitarian and liberal fascist aspects of the book Ryan mentions.

According to Ryan: "The Constitution imposes too many restrictions on government interference for Mr. Sachs, and we'd be better served if we moved toward a 'French-style' constitution that consolidated the executive and legislative branches and empowered experts to help us manage the 'complexity of our economy.' "  Ryan also notes that Sachs echoes the arguments of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham.  Ryan does not mention that Rousseau's theory of the general will is the forerunner of modern totalitarianism and Bentham's idea of Utopia was a prison under his total control.

It is worth noting that Sachs is not considered a fringe character.  He has been named one of TIME magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World" twice and Vanity Fair magazine put him on its list of 100 members of the New Establishment.  Moreover, Sachs is hardly alone in indulging these sorts of thoughts on the left.

Ed Driscoll collects a few examples.  Gov. Bev Purdue (D-NC) recently suggested "we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover."  Former Obama budget director Peter Orszag wrote a piece for TNR arguing "we need to jettison the Civics 101 fairy tale about pure representative democracy and instead begin to build a new set of rules and institutions that would make legislative inertia less detrimental to our nation's long-term health."  (Ezra Klein's defense of Orszag shows the disdain for bicameralism or checks and balances you would expect from someone who finds the Constitution too old and confusing to be anything more than a political football.)  Lastly, Driscoll recalls NYT columnist Thomas Friedman's desire that we be China for a day (a proposal that would likely ensure that we were China for a very long time).  Although Driscoll also found a tantalizing video of Pres. Obama finding tempting the idea of acting on his own, you have to read the NYT to find Obama complaining that it would be so much easier to be the president of China.

But wait… there's more.  US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) delivers a harangue that could have been titled, "All Your Wealth Are Belong To Us," and the video goes viral.  The left lapped up a relatively unvarnished argument that the people are slaves to the state.  When Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) was asked "Of every dollar that I earn, how much do you think I deserve to keep?", there is a reason she did not have an answer.  When Fareed Zakaria pines for the US to adopt a parliamentary system, he is in tune not only with Sachs, but also Woodrow Wilson, who was not a big fan of separated powers or checks and balances.  When a legion of lefty pundits argue that Republican "obstruction" of Obama's agenda shows that "the system is broken," they reveal an Orwellian contempt for the system of separated powers our Founders envisioned (and argued for in no less than five of the Federalist Papers) for the protection of our liberties.

This Fall, it seems that liberal fascism is the new black — and it likely will remain in style for the foreseeable future.  After all, progressives think they are losing and black is the color for mourning clothes.
–Karl

NYU Law School Talk on the Tea Party and Popular Constitutionalism

NYU Law School Talk on the Tea Party and Popular Constitutionalism

via The Volokh Conspiracy by Ilya Somin on 10/3/11

(Ilya Somin)
This Wednesday, I will be giving a talk at NYU Law School on the Tea Party Movement and Popular Constitutionalism. The talk will be at 11 AM in Vanderbilt Hall, Room 202. NYU Professor Roderick Hills will comment on my presentation, and there will also be questions from the audience until around 12:30 or so.


I previously wrote about the Tea Party as a popular constitutionalist movement in this article. In my talk, I will explain why the Tea Party qualifies a popular constitutionalist movement despite the fact that that concept has previously been used mostly to describe movements on the political left and assess its main strengths and weaknesses. Like previous popular constitutionalist movements, the Tea Party has not avoided such problems as the impact of widespread political ignorance.


I will also suggest why its impact is likely to be a net positive on balance — including from the standpoint of the mostly left of center advocates of popular constitutionalism, a point I first developed in the article linked above. Given that it was inevitable that the combination of Obama's policies and a deep recession would produce a right-wing populist reaction, it is far better that it has produced a movement primarily focused on limiting federal power and spending than one focused on racial resentment or xenophobia, as was often the case in previous American history and in many European countries today. In addition, the movement's emphasis on limiting federal power could potentially increase democratic accountability in government — a central objective of many advocates of popular constitutionalism.


UPDATE: In this 2010 post, I discussed claims that the Tea Party's real agenda is racism.

Fig, Caramelized Onion, and Bacon Jam

Fig, Caramelized Onion, and Bacon Jam

via The Volokh Conspiracy by Eugene Volokh on 10/3/11

(Eugene Volokh)
A delicious-looking recipe from my friend Kristina Johnson (Former Chef).
10 oz of bacon, thick sliced
2 large onions, sliced thin
2 teaspoons roasted garlic
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
2 teaspoons coriander seeds, crushed
2 cups stewed figs
1/3 cup white balsamic (or any mild sweet white wine vinegar)
1/4 cup sugar
2/3 cup strong brewed coffee
1. Fry bacon carefully until brown on both sides but NOT too crisp.
2. Add the sliced onions in the bacon fat and cook until caramelized.
3. When the onions are done, add the coarse chopped bacon back in and then add in the roasted garlic, smoked
paprika and crushed coriander seeds. Cook for t 2-4 minutes. Remove from heat. Let cool slightly, about 10
minutes.
4. Put the onion/bacon mix into food processor and give it 2-4 pulses, just to chop slightly. Return the mix to the
pan.
Note; If you don’t have a food processor, you can rough chop it on a cutting board.
5. Add the well stewed figs, the vinegar, the sugar and the coffee.
6. Bring to a low simmer, cover and cook until thick, about half an hour. The jam will thicken more on cooling.
7. Cool completely in the refrigerator. Store in small air tight containers in the refrigerator. Take out a small
amount and allow to come to room temp before using for best flavor.
Yields about 3 cups.
Please note; the jam cannot be processed using water bath method because it contains meat.

The Obama Presidency, By the Numbers

The Obama Presidency, By the Numbers

via Power Line by John Hinderaker on 10/4/11

(John Hinderaker)
This ad, by Minnesota Majority, is quietly devastating. It recites the numbers that put the failure of the Obama administration in stark relief. I'd suggest circulating it to your friends:

Conservative Judo: How to Fight the Smears and Take the Offensive

Conservative Judo: How to Fight the Smears and Take the Offensive

via Big Government by Kurt Schlichter on 10/4/11

To quote someone we all know and love, let me be perfectly clear:  The mainstream media is the bought and paid for lapdog of the liberal Democrat elite.  It will not only never give conservatives a fair hearing but will actively distort, lie and slander in an effort to destroy any conservative it sees as a threat to its masters.  So why the hell do conservatives treat its members with anything other than contempt and allow it to set the agenda and exploit fault lines in the movement?
Easy – conservatives tend to be polite, reasonable people with a genuine interest in honest debate and a quaint belief in the efficacy of things like "facts" and "evidence" as a way to demonstrate the truth.  No wonder they get rolled.  The other side believes in none of those things – its only belief is that leftism must prevail and any other value is disposable if it turns into a liability.  The answer is conservative judo – understanding how the Left works and using its own weight and momentum against it.  We need to start being less like butt-kissing conservanerd David Brooks and more like butt-kicking conservastud Chuck Norris.

Conservative judo means going on the offense and keeping on the offense.  It's not about reasoning with unreasonable people; it's about using their own strengths against them to defeat them.  It has application to the GOP candidates for sure, but it also applies to those of us in the real world facing liberals every day.
The bizarre Rick Perry rock pseudo-scandal is a wonderful teachable moment for conservatives, mostly because the GOP candidates' reactions allowed this contemptible lie to gain steam.  The Washington Post ran a story that some idiot wrote a racial slur on a rock at some ranch where Rick Perry hunted.  Now, one might observe that the facts and evidence show that about 30 years ago the Perry family got a hunting lease and promptly painted over the word.  One might also note that Perry was a Democrat at the time.  Moreover, the sources who disagree can't agree on a different timeline and won't give their names – inconsistent, anonymous hearsay is apparently acceptable when it comes to conservatives.
But none of this matters.  It's not about "facts" or "evidence" or even "truth."  It's a calculated smear designed by a liberal rag to slander a leading GOP candidate.  Moreover, it is another example of a partisan political publication hiding behind the lie that it is an objective news source.  It is not.  The Washington Post, like the New York Times and the vast majority of mainstream media outlets, is an active collaborator with the liberal elite.  If it weren't, Andrew Breitbart would not be the one breaking the story of Barak Obama's game of patty cake with the expressly black supremacist New Black Panthers.
The question is, then, why the other GOP candidates tolerated this attack instead of coming to his defense – after all, this was an attack not just on Rick Perry but upon every conservative.  This was pure innuendo designed not just to trash one candidate but to feed a narrative that all conservatives are just one sheet away from an old fashioned cross burning of the kind dead Democratic icon Robert Byrd would have enjoyed in his pre-Senate capacity as a KKK Kleagle.
Herman Cain fell right into the trap.  A good man, it seems he did so here not in a short-sighted attempt to capitalize on the blow to Rick Perry but because he was genuinely disgusted with the idea that some nitwit would paint that sort of thing on a rock.  When asked about it (at the 3:42 mark) by Chris Wallace of Fox News, he responded that it was "insensitive."  Well, "insensitive" is one word for it – Cain was being kind.  My saltier characterization would have included an adjective beginning with an "F."  Cain later clarified that he was referring to the person who wrote it, and that he did not believe the Rock of Outrages represented Perry's belief.  Too late.  The damage was done.

He had reinforced the meme by not aggressively attacking it with conservative judo.  He should have said to Wallace, who himself was forced into raising the issue on his show by the fact that the Post ran a huge front page story, something like:

Chris, I read the Post's story and it was a transparent slander of a good man.  I'm not going to play that game and comment on the lies of people without the fortitude to make their accusations in public.  It was journalistic malpractice to run that story and I'm disappointed that you were forced to ask me something based on such shoddy reporting. My question is where was the Post when Barack Obama was spending 20 years listening to Reverend Wright's sick racist rants?  Where was the Post when he marched with the New Black Panthers?  Where was the Post when his Department of Justice started basing its prosecution choices on the races of the criminals?  Is the Post and it's liberal comrades covering for him on purpose?

You don't acknowledge the lie.  You turn it around and attack the premise – and the bogus journalistic integrity these hacks pretend to possess in order to enhance the credibility of their smears.  It's conservative judo – you go on the offensive and make the liberal water-carries like the Post defend their failure to adhere to their supposed standards (For those Alinsky mavens out there, that's Rule No. 4).
The liberal mainstream media's power is such that they can ignite a fire storm that even fair and balanced media like Fox News must cover; conservative judo turns that into an opportunity for a counterattack.
Cain screwed up twice this weekend.  He also allowed the Obama "defense of gay soldiers" meme to take root when he said that he regretted not reacting to the booing after the gay soldier asked a question at the last debate.  Again, the facts don't matter.  That the booing was by perhaps two people out of thousands (See for yourself, which is more than the MSM will let you do) and that the booing was for the question as opposed to "the soldier" do not matter.  Not at all.
The purpose of this meme is to allow liberals, whose record of contempt for the military speaks for itself, to attempt to take the moral high ground of supporting our troops in order to divert attention from their utter failure of governance.  And Cain, by responding without challenging the premise, fell into the trap.  He's a decent guy.  Booing is not nice.  It's easy to see how he walked into the ambush his MSM interviewer, Christiane Amanpour set for him.
The proper response was:

I know what you are doing and I'm not here to allow you to divert people's attention from President Obama's track record of total failure with what you know is a bogus charge promoted by the Democrat party and its leftwing associates.  Do you really think a couple people's opinion about a debate question is more important than the pay-for-play capitalism of Solyndra?  If the Democrats really cared about the people who protect us, why are they obstructing the Fast and Furious investigation of how guns Eric Holder allowed to be sent to Mexico ended up killing to US federal officers?

Never – ever – fight on your opponents' terms.  If you do, you accept their premises, and if you accept the premises of the Democrat media complex you are already on the way to losing.
Cain is a great American but an inexperienced candidate who has not learned that he has no obligation at all to assist the press in their schemes.  The press is not some collection of neutral factfinders on a mission to provide objective truth to the American people.  It's a player, and it's on the other team.
No conservative has any moral or other obligation to answer any question from the MSM.  None.  Rejecting them drives the MSM tools nuts too, which is a fringe benefit – their egos are totally bound up in the pose they assume as Guardians of the Truth.  It crushes them to be treated like the partisan hacks they are – partisan hacks, mind you, that become less powerful each day as the circulation of their primitive newspapers shrinks down to nothing.  Employ the conservative judo, and don't let them tap out.
Cain can easily come back from this misstep; this is a learning point for a new candidate, and he remains an awesome potential nominee.  Nor is he alone.  Rick Perry made a similar mistake with his "heartless" comment.  It's pretty lame to see a dedicated conservative labeling other conservatives "heartless" because they disagree with his position – especially when that feeds the Left's larger meme of conservative cruelty.  Nor is Romney innocent with his Social Security pandering.  Both have more experience in the arena than Cain and both ought to know better.
Yeah, in the short term buying into these premises might have hurt their opponents, but in the long term it trashes the movement.  And candidates, your personal career goals are absolutely irrelevant to the movement – if you choose to harm the movement to further your own campaign you demonstrate that you are unworthy of our support.
There is nothing wrong with disagreeing, but the lazy and shortsighted tactic of jumping aboard a liberal media meme to try for a tiny bounce in the polls helps the real opposition more than the short-sighted candidate.  And it alienates conservatives who hate seeing potential candidates line up with the Left.
In everyday life, conservative judo is important too.  As a conservative, you'll be faced with all manner of liberal memes designed to shake your faith in constitutional conservatism and to reinforce the faith of liberals who look around and can't help but see their damage their idiotic policies are causing the country.  That's why liberalism's main effort today is distraction – they want to draw peoples' attention away from the wreckage of the economy and the Administration's utter failure at all costs.  "Rick Perry saw a racist rock!" is the equivalent of yelling to a Labrador retriever puppy, "Look, a squirrel!"
Don't let them get away with it.
Step One:  Recognize the tactic.  Any time a liberal mentions an issue, a controversy or some other ginned-up kerfuffle, you can be sure that the purpose is to paint conservatives as racists, sexists, homophobes, imperialists or some other "ist" that they consider bad this week.  Take up your conservative judo fighting stance!
Step Two:  Redirect the blow.  Point out exactly what is happening:

I see you are trying to imply Rick Perry is a racist because someone else did something a long time ago, but it's pretty clear what you really want to do is not talk about 9% plus unemployment under Obama.  I don't blame you for trying – with a record of failure like Obama has, I can see why you want to try and divert attention by making up stories.

Step Three:  Strike the Gut.  The staggering hypocrisy of the Left, which is more racist, more sexist, and more bigoted in general than the Right could ever be, provides a delightful smorgasbord of hypocrisy to choose from.  Find it, and slam it home:

What I want to see is the President explain why he would appear on the same stage as the New Black Panthers.  I mean, first he sits in Reverend Wright's pews for a couple decades, then he eulogizes Democrat icon and KKK kleagle Robert Byrd, and now he's marching with his pals in the Black Panthers.  If Perry did any of those things, I couldn't support him.  How can you still support Obama?

Just let them savor that for a while.  And remember, you can never reference Democrat icon and KKK kleagle Robert Byrd often enough.
Conservative judo is the synthesis of the recognition of the nature of our opponents and their favorite strategies with a fierce delight in counterattacking in order to retake the offensive and defeat their schemes.  Our candidates need to understand who they are dealing with and they need to understand that any backpedaling that accepts liberal premises simply makes the real opposition stronger.  And we need to do the same in our own lives.
Now get out there and make Chuck Norris proud!

Top 0.1 Percent Pays More Income Tax than Bottom 80 Percent

Top 0.1 Percent Pays More Income Tax than Bottom 80 Percent

via The Weekly Standard Blog by Jeffrey H. Anderson on 9/21/11

In his recently released deficit plan, President Obama lays out the "Buffett Rule" (named, of course, for Warren Buffett, the famous investor and supporter of Obama). The rule, as Obama defines it, is "that people making more than $1 million a year should not pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than middle-class families pay."
Obama's clear inference, of course, is that this otherwise happens routinely; that the rich are shirking their citizenly duties while the middle class pays. Is this inference true? Or is it simply a political fiction, a straw man from which Obama hopes to make hay in 2012? 
The Tax Policy Center (TPC), a center-left joint-creation of the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute, publishes federal tax statistics by income group (see, here, here, here, and here).  The essential funding source (at least from individuals) for most of the general functions of government — defense, roads, national parks, federal law enforcement, etc. — is the income tax. It is almost entirely through the income tax that individual citizens contribute financially to the day-to-day functions of their government.
In 2010, according to the TPC, Americans in the lowest quintile of income-earners — the bottom 20 percent — paid minus-3.8 percent of the total federal income tax burden. In other words, they got more back, in income tax credits and the like, than they paid in. Similarly, those in the second quintile paid minus-4.3 percent of the total federal income tax burden — so they, too, weren't paying into the income tax till but rather were taking out. 
Those in the middle quintile — pretty much the center of the middle class (this quintile had an average income of $44,000) — paid 3.9 percent of the total federal income tax burden (about $1 of every $25 dollars in income taxes paid nationwide). And those in the fourth quintile — whose income ranged from $58,000 to $102,000 — paid 15.1 percent of the total federal income tax burden. 
So, all told, the 80 percent of Americans whose income placed them in one of these first four quintiles of income-earners combined to pay 10.9 percent of the total federal income tax burden. Put otherwise, this 80 percent of the citizenry paid about $1 out of every $9 that was paid in federal income taxes nationwide.
Meanwhile, Americans in the highest 0.1 percent of all income-earners — these are the very rich, with incomes of at least $1.974 million — paid 16.4 percent of the total federal tax burden. Essentially, one out of every $6 paid in federal income tax was paid by this 0.1 percent of the citizenry. 
In other words, the top 0.1 percent paid more toward the workings of government than the bottom 80 percent did. That's despite the fact that the bottom 80 percent collectively made more than six times as much money as the top 0.1 percent did. 
On average, a given member of the top 0.1 percent paid $1.1 million in annual federal income tax — $1,147,616, to be more exact. That's more than 1,000 times what the average person in the middle quintile paid ($1,017). Yes, the very rich made a lot more money — but not anywhere near 1,000 times as much. In fact, only 12 percent of this gap in income-tax payments is attributable to the gap in income between the two groups. The rest resulted from the very rich paying a much higher percentage of their income — more than 8 times as high — in income tax.
Now, I don't know how much Warren Buffett pays his secretary, or how much either of them really pays in income taxes. But when 0.1 percent of the population is collectively paying more in income taxes than 80 percent of the population is collectively paying, it's clear that there's not a whole lot of need for the "Buffett Rule."
Again, the stats I've quoted — all of which are from the TPC — are for income tax.  What if we were to include all federal taxes — including payroll taxes, which people pay and then (to a greater or lesser degree) get back in direct payments for themselves in the form of Social Security or Medicare? What if we were also to include employers' share of these payroll taxes, crediting employees as if they had made these payments themselves (like the TPC does)? 
Factoring in payroll taxes in this manner, those in the top 0.1 percent no longer paid more in taxes than the bottom 80 percent did last year (although they did pay more than the bottom 40 percent did — four times as much, in fact). But they still paid much higher rates. The average total federal tax rate for those in the top 0.1 percent was 30.7 percent. (That's before factoring in any state or local taxes.)  In comparison, the average total federal tax rate for those in the middle quintile was 12.8 percent. The average rate for those in the fourth quintile was 16.8 percent. And the average rate for those between the 95th and 99th percentile (those making between $204,000 and $509,000) was 23.4 percent. So even if Buffett's secretary makes a cool half-million annually, he or she still likely pays a much lower total tax rate than the average person in the top 0.1 percent.
Certain prominent Obama supporters (Buffett, General Electric) do seem to be particularly good at avoiding paying taxes, but that doesn't mean they're the norm. The facts are clear: Our very richest citizens collectively pay for more of the day-to-day operations of our government than 80 percent of our citizens collectively do. The rich would already seem to be paying — as Obama likes to say — "their fair share."

What the Immigration Debate Needs Is -- More Discrimination

What the Immigration Debate Needs Is -- More Discrimination

via Big Lizards by Dafydd on 10/2/11

No, I am not being sarcastic; I mean that quite literally: We need to discriminate between different classes of illegal alien.
Patterico has for some time pushed -- desultorily, to be sure -- a welcome policy suggestion; he calls on the feds to "deport the criminals first."
No, he's not saying that, since all illegal aliens are by definition "criminal," we should deport them all immediately; by contrast, Patterico says that there already is a subgroup, within the larger group of illegal aliens, comprising those illegals who commit crimes apart from the crime of being here illegally (and its associated crimes of document fraud and such)... and that we should focus first on deporting those who come to this country in order to live a criminal livestyle.
We should target for deportation (after they serve their sentences here) all those illegals convicted of committing burglaries, arsons, rapes, assaults, and homicides; who are found guilty of joining criminal gangs, trafficking in narcotics, and defrauding people; who are proven check kiters or pick pockets; or who commit other high crimes and misdemeanors demonstrating criminality beyond simply wanting to live and work peacefully in America.
It makes a lot of sense, and it's a perfect example of discrimination: Patterico discriminates between illegals who want to try to fit into and contribute to American society, and illegals who see America as a vast piggy bank to be looted, abused, and despoiled.
But now, after reading a pair of posts that set me fuming, I believe such discrimination must go much further. In those posts, the first by an unnamed "long-time reader" of my favorite blog and the second by my favorite blogger at that same site, I came away with the very strong impression that the two posters, who stand representative of a very influential strain of conservatism, see very little difference at all between those who come here illegally out of desperation and want only to work and raise a family -- and those who come here illegally to vandalize, thieve, and murder.
That lack of discrimination begins to shock my conscience.
Thus I hereby initiate my own program that I believe complements Patterico's pontification noted above. He says, "deport the criminals first;" I say, legalize the most innocent first.
Who are the most innocent of all illegal aliens? Those who were brought here as little children, too young even to understand what a national border is or what it means to cross without permission, let alone mature enough to consent in an informed way to illegal entry. Such innocents need a name, so let us call them "unwitting aliens," UA -- they illegally entered the U.S. without their own consent or even knowledge.
(Do you want to call it amnesty? I don't mind; I don't even care. Does anybody deserve amnesty more than a person who never even committed the crime of which he stands convicted, since he was a little kid when it happened?)
There are a great many such UAs, in raw numbers; and for nearly all of them, the United States is literally the only country they have ever known. They grew up here, went to school here, made friends and enemies here; they are completely assimilated into American society; they think of themselves as Americans; they have no recollection of having lived in Mexico or Argentina or El Salvador; and likely in quite a lot of cases, they don't even speak Spanish or Portuguese. Their parents may have falsely told them all their lives that they were born in the United States; they may even have shown the UAs a false American birth certificate.
Should we really tell these kids that they don't deserve in-state tuition, even if they have lived in one American state all their conscious life, because they're criminals? Do we want these young men and women to be forever barred from living legally in the only home they remember, the only country to which they feel loyalty, unable to establish residency anywhere in that country because of something their parents did when the UAs were still infants? Do we for God's sake want to deport these very American "illegals?" Deport them to where -- a country they cannot even remember, whose citizens speak a language the unwitting aliens might not even know?
Most American family courts, in the case of divorce, will take the ages of the children into consideration when determining custody; when a child is deemed old enough to make an informed decision, he can decide whether to live with the father, the mother, or under some joint custody plan. Certainly any adult child (over the age of eighteen) can freely decide whether to live with one of his parents or move into his own place.
I call for the same sort of program for unwitting aliens as we have for the children of divorce: If a UA's parents are discovered and ordered deported, and if the UA is deemed old enough to give informed consent, he should be allowed to freely choose which country he will live in; and we should grant him permanent residency in the United States, if that's what he chooses.
That doesn't mean his parents get to stay as well; if they're subject to deportation, they're still subject to deportation. The UA can be raised by a legally resident relative, or in the extreme case, can be made a ward of the court and sent either to a foster home or adopted out. But any good parent should want the best for his child, correct?
If a UA comes to the authorities' attention by some other means -- say by applying for university and claiming, in all innocence, the in-state tuition of the local state university -- then the same applies: He is told that he is an unwitting alien and that he must choose.
In either case, once obtaining permanent residency, he is eligible to work towards citizenship, just as would be any other legal permanent resident.
(If such a law is passed, and a reasonable period of time elapses -- time for people to understand the system -- then UAs who don't apply for residency but instead take criminal steps to conceal their alien nationality should lose their UA status; they are no longer "unwitting;" they have become co-conspirators with their parents.)
This policy suggestion is not a solution to the problem of illegal immigration; as I have argued many times (just click the category link "Immigration Immolitions" at the top of this post), the only solution is complete reform of the legal immigration system to make it predictable, rational, and just; coupled with building a physical fence or wall entirely across both our southern and northern borders, and other vigorous security procedures -- directed against those who persist in trying to climb through the window when we have already made it realistically doable for any decent, assimilable immigrant to enter openly through the door.
But legalizing the most innocent first would certainly resolve a great potential injustice in a fair and equitable way, and one that will do no harm to United States border security. We have no more to fear from an unwitting alien than we have from a legal immigrant, or even a natural-born American citizen.