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.

--

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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.

Tea Party Message to Morgan Freeman: 'My Name Is Ali Akbar'

Tea Party Message to Morgan Freeman: 'My Name Is Ali Akbar'

via The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog by Robert Stacy McCain on 9/28/11

Photo: Ali Akbar and Doug Hoffman
Whenever I introduce Ali Akbar to friends, I usually feel compelled to add the explanation that he's a Southern Baptist from Texas, which leaves him to relate the backstory: His African-American mother was a college student in Texas when she met and married an Arab exchange student, who subsequently abandoned his wife and son to return to his native country. Given the events of recent years, it is perhaps somewhat ironic that Ali grew up to become a Republican campaign strategist.
Ali's specialty is New Media, which explains how I met him in October 2009 during Doug Hoffman's historic third-party congressional campaign in New York's 23^rd District. It was my second trip to the district, and I arrived in the wee hours of Oct. 30 at a rental house in Lake Placid, N.Y., where I had been granted sofa-crashing privileges. The crew in the house were Eric Odom, Steve Foley and Ali -- who were working on the Tea Party news site 73Wire -- and Yates Walker, who had been brought in by Dan Tripp to run the Hoffman campaign's Plattsburgh office. There was pizza and beer and we talked until nearly dawn, then got up a few hours later for a trip to Plattsburgh, where Hoffman met at a diner with the mayor who endorsed him. As I said, it was "like reporting a hurricane from the eye of the storm." RINO Dede Scozzafava quit the race on Halloween morning, and the next day Ali rode with me for the high-speed 120-mile drive westward along Highway 3 to Watertown, N.Y. By the time we arrived, Dede had endorsed the Democrat, Bill Owens. On Election Day, Ali and I repeated our high-speed drive in the opposite direction to arrive at the Hotel Saranac for what we expected to be a victory celebration. It was a tearful moment when Hoffman conceded a narrow defeat, but as he said, it was "worth the fight."
NY-23 was, as several people said at the time, the "template" for a new kind of campaign operation that combines volunteer grassroots energy with New Media messaging and social networking. Through the subsequent careers of those who joined Hoffman's crusade (see "Battle Cry in the North Country"), you can trace a straight line from that against-the-odds Tea Party campaign to the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts, Marco Rubio's defeat of Charlie Crist in Florida, the GOP mid-term victory in 2010, and on into this year's special-election victory in NY-9 and the 2012 Republican presidential campaign.
Over the course of the past two years, Ali and I have crossed paths in Boston, Alabama, Nevada, Georgia, Ohio and D.C., and shared a hotel suite during my recent visit to Tampa, Florida, for the Sept. 12 presidential debate. All of which is a preamble necessary to explain that when actor Morgan Freeman accused the Tea Party of racism, my friend Ali was hurt and offended and felt compelled to write an open letter:

Dear Mr. Freeman,
My name is Ali Akbar. I'm a 26 year-old African-American small business owner and a tea party activist. . . .
I idolized you as a boy. Growing up without a father, you were one of the strong black men in my life who gave me a model to follow. Each of the characters you played had dignity and confidence. I tried to emulate the strength you projected. . . .
I've attended dozens of tea party events. I've helped organize them, and I've even spoken at a few. The tea party is not what is often depicted in the news. It is people of all colors who are terribly concerned about the direction that America is heading. We don't trust big government to make decisions for us. And we fear that the present administration's spending is going to lead our country down a path to insolvency, much like what Greece is currently facing. . . .
I'm hoping that you'll come to a tea party in Tennessee - the place of your birth. Really anywhere in the country that works for you; I'll set it up with the one of the thousands of activists I know around our great country. I'd be delighted to introduce you to good people who will welcome you with open arms, disagree with you, and then feed you some of the best barbeque you've ever tasted. . . .

Read the whole thing. And if anyone has any doubts about Ali's Tea Party bona fides, tell them to get in touch with me -- or Doug Hoffman.

Churches Debate Troy Davis

Churches Debate Troy Davis

via The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog by Mark Tooley on 10/3/11

Georgia's recent execution of convicted police-killer Troy Davis activated many religious death penalty opponents. But there was significant dissent from the claims that Christianity uniformly opposes capital punishment. The 16 million Southern Baptist Convention, America's largest Protestant communion, specifically affirms it. And its most prominent theologian defended it amid the Davis controversy.

"The death penalty is intended to affirm the value [and] sanctity of every single human life, and thus by the extremity of the penalty to make that visible and apparent to all," declared Louisville-based Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler, who presides over his church's largest seminary. "There is something within us that cries out for the fact that murder must be punished and that the lives of the innocent, in terms of being the victims of these crimes, must indeed be vindicated."

Mohler warned that the "general trend of secularization and moral confusion has undermined the kind of moral and cultural consensus that makes the death penalty make sense." And he observed: "We really do not now have the bedrock shared consensus that every single human life is a life made in the image of God and that every single human life at every stage of development is to be honored and protected and preserved."

As Mohler pointed out in his podcast, Georgia's execution of Davis inflamed thousands of protesters. But the execution on the same day of a far less appealing Texas white supremacist who brutally dragged to death a black man did not arouse the same fury. "It seems that even those who oppose the death penalty outright believe there are some cases that ought to be opposed more than others," Mohler said. Of course, some of Davis' advocates insisted he was actually innocent of gunning down a police officer who was defending a homeless man in a Burger King parking lot amid multiple witnesses, though the courts rejected appeals across 20 years.

"It is precisely because the taking of one human life by another means that the murderer has effectively, morally and theologically, forfeited his own right to live," Mohler explained. "The death penalty is intended to affirm the value [and] sanctity of every single human life, and thus by the extremity of the penalty to make that visible and apparent to all."

The official Southern Baptist stance on capital punishment cites the divine command to Noah after the flood, as recorded in Genesis: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man." Unlike the punishments instituted later under the Mosaic code for the Hebrew theocracy, this command is considered by Southern Baptists and many Christians as still universally binding. They also cite St. Paul's admonition in Romans that government is divinely ordained to "wield the sword" against the wicked.

In a resolution Southern Baptists approved in 2000, they declared they "support the fair and equitable use of capital punishment by civil magistrates as a legitimate form of punishment for those guilty of murder or treasonous acts that result in death." They also emphasized that the death penalty is right only "when the pursuit of truth and justice result in clear and overwhelming evidence of guilt."

Contrastingly, and speaking for liberal Protestants, the 7.7 million U.S. member United Methodist Church declares that "when governments implement the death penalty then the life of the convicted person is devalued and all possibility of change in that person's life ends." Emphasizing "reconciliation," the denomination's Social Principles insist: "We oppose the death penalty and urge its elimination from all criminal codes." Methodism has opposed capital punishment since 1956. Similarly other liberal governed denominations such as the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterians have also opposed it since the late 1950's. Although not addressing the Troy Davis case, the National Council of Churches has opposed capital punishment for over 40 years.

The more conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod declares that "that capital punishment is in accord with the Holy Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions." Although more liberal now and rarely discussing it, the National Association of Evangelicals still has a 40-year policy noting that "if no crime is considered serious enough to warrant capital punishment, then the gravity of the most atrocious crime is diminished accordingly." It supports the "death penalty for such horrendous crimes as premeditated murder, the killing of a police officer or guard, murder in connection with any other crime, hijacking, skyjacking, or kidnapping where persons are physically harmed in the process."

Roman Catholicism's teaching on capital punishment is more complex but popularly portrayed as uniformly opposed. The late Avery Dulles, an American Cardinal and highly respected teacher, was a key interpreter of his church's stance. "Self-defense of society continues to justify the death penalty," Dulles said in 2002. "One could conceive of a situation where if justice were not done by executing an offender it would throw society into moral confusion," he said. "I don't know whether that requires any more than that it remain on the books, symbolically, that it be there for society to have recourse to." A year earlier, he noted that capital punishment's decline in the West reflected an "evaporation of the sense of sin, guilt, and retributive justice, all of which are essential to biblical religion and Catholic faith."

Cardinal Dulles, who died in 2009, wrote that the early church and doctors of the church were "virtually unanimous in their support for capital punishment." He insisted that Roman Catholicism has "never advocated unqualified abolition of the death penalty" and there is "no official statement from popes or bishops, whether in the past or in the present, that denies the right of the State to execute offenders at least in certain extreme cases." Dulles observed that Pope John Paul II taught that "as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system," cases mandating execution "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent." He explained that the Pope, with the church's bishops, had concluded that modern states, although rightly authorized to execute the guilty, should mostly avoid it, "if the purposes of punishment can be equally well or better achieved by bloodless means, such as imprisonment."

Dulles perceptively explained that modernity is confused over capital punishment because it wrongly interprets it as the angry popular will enacting vengeance. But historic Christianity has understood capital punishment as the state acting as God's instrument for justice. Absent a few voices like Mohler's, such careful reasoning rooted in Christian tradition is mostly absent in today's' religious debates over the death penalty and likely will remain so.

Joe Thornton beats on Behe

Joe Thornton beats on Behe

via The Panda's Thumb by Richard B. Hoppe on 9/30/11

Joe Thornton is a distinguished researcher who works on reconstructing ancient biomolecules to study how they evolved into their present forms. Recently ID creationist Michael Behe has commented on Thornton's work, interpreting it to mean that the molecules couldn't have evolved. On Carl Zimmer's Loom Thornton eviscerates Behe's misintepretation. A couple of quotes to give the flavor:

Behe contends that our findings support his argument that adaptations requiring more than one mutation cannot evolve by Darwinian processes. The many errors in Behe's Edge of Evolution – the book in which he makes this argument – have been discussed in numerous publications.

and

Behe's discussion of our 2009 paper in Nature is a gross misreading because it ignores the importance of neutral pathways in protein evolution.

and

This brings us to Behe's second error, which is to confuse reversal to the ancestral sequence and structure with re-acquisition of a similar function.

and

Behe's argument has no scientific merit. It is based on a misunderstanding of the fundamental processes of molecular evolution and a failure to appreciate the nature of probability itself. There is no scientific controversy about whether natural processes can drive the evolution of complex proteins. The work of my research group should not be misintepreted by those who would like to pretend that there is.

Read the whole thing. (And don't miss Matheson's remarks on natural selection at the link below.)
Hat tip to Steve Matheson for calling my attention to Thornton's piece..

Rick Perry is not a Racist Despite WaPo Smear

Rick Perry is not a Racist Despite WaPo Smear

via Big Journalism by Ali A. Akbar on 10/3/11

Governor Perry, my Governor, is no racist.
I suppose there's a first time for every baseless accusation, it's just hard to understand why it always must come from Newsweek, Huffington Post, The New York Times, or, in this case, another usual suspect, The Washington Post.

Crooked River Ranch is the place in question. Apparently at one time the word, Lord forgive me, "niggerhead" was written on a rock at one of the entrances. The word is offensive, terrible, and has no place there or anywhere. The Washington Post wants you to believe that Perry drew the word itself—on his property—and is now trying to hide his white robe.
But facts are stubborn but neutral things.
Perry and his family never, not ever, owned the property. This is a 42,000 acre ranch is owned by the Hendricks Home for Children, a west Texas charity.
About the charity:

Since 1939, Hendrick Home for Children has been a safe and loving "home" for thousands of children after living their early lives in poverty, abuse and neglect.

Perry's father reportedly painted over the offensive language on the rock in question soon after leasing the 1,000 acre parcel in the early 1980s. Seriously. A 1,000 acre rental on a 42,000 acre ranch owned by a West Texas charity that assists homeless children. The Washington Post literally took an inch and made it a mile.
When Perry became a party to the hunting lease from 1997 to 2007, the property was described as northern pasture. His campaign told the press that the Governor hasn't even been to the site since 2006. And Hugh Hewitt gets it right, "many, many people were interviewed for the story. Only seven recall seeing the rock, and not one of them connect Rick Perry to it, nor do any of the people …"
That's not journalism.

Anonymous sources tell me that the Washington Post is dying and that race-baiting might accomplish its two objectives: 1) destroy the right-of-center movement, and 2) sell newspapers. Anonymous!
Jazz Shaw is right to call this a witch hunt and journalistic-malpractice. Stirring a division that was put out of law a generation ago and is now actively shunned both culturally and socially does nothing to fix social security, save or create jobs (whatever that means), or protect us from enemies. This is why new media is successful. This is why outlets like TPB exist. This is why American newspapers are unlike their European counterparts, who are not feeling eminent death.
We need good investigative journalism from reporters and trained professionals; we do not need hit-pieces loosely laced with the faint aura of fact.
In 1991, the Texas Legislature passed a bill to rename old, offensive site names. God Bless Texas.
I'm appalled and I believe every proud American should be too—including Perry's competitors. As a young, bi-racial (Arab and African-American) man, I see this for what it is. This is an attack on me. This is a hit piece on our ideals—the ideals shared by virtually every candidate on our side vying to challenge President Barack Obama.
Recently, I've been a race-driven crusade of my own. My open letter and invitation to Morgan Freemanto come to any tea party anywhere in the country went viral. Now we're on a mission to end the media's favorite theme: the tea party is racist. The tea party is not racist. It stops here. We're not dealing with this during the summer and fall of 2012—it stops now, right now, on our watch.
Now, fight with me to defeat this race-baiting, race-driven divide that aims only to re-elect President Obama.
Full Disclosure: I vocally supported Kay Bailey Hutchinson's bid for Governor in 2010 and opposed Perry seeking another term.

Time for Some Truth: Bill Clinton NEVER Balanced A Budget And NEVER Ran A Su...

Time for Some Truth: Bill Clinton NEVER Balanced A Budget And NEVER Ran A Surplus

via Big Government by Jeff Dunetz on 10/3/11

On Friday Former President Bill Clinton spoke at the dedication of a bridge at his Presidential library.  During his address he complained that Republicans try to take too much credit for his welfare reform legislation and for balancing the budget. The two parties can argue about who was behind welfare reform, but no one deserves credit for balancing the budget.  The truth is  the United States federal budget was not balanced in any of Bill Clinton's eight years as President. Not once!

The federal government has two types of debt public debt and intra-governmental debt.  Public debt is comprises securities held by investors outside the federal government, including that held by investors, the Federal Reserve System and foreign, state and local governments  Intra-governmental debt comprises Treasury securities held in accounts administered by the federal government, such as the Social Security Trust Fund.
Traditionally the annual federal government budget deficit or surplus is the cash difference between government receipts and spending, ignoring intra-governmental transfers. This is a trick as intra-governmental debt needs to be repaid just like the publicly held debt. This is also how Clinton claimed a surplus in three out of his last four years. (Source for all of the numbers below, US Treasury Direct).

Fiscal Year	End Date		Public Debt	Claimed Surplus
FY1997	09/30/1997		$3.789667T
FY1998	09/30/1998		$3.733864T	$69.2B
FY1999	09/30/1999		$3.636104T	$122.7B
FY2000	09/29/2000		$3.405303T	$230.0B
FY2001	09/28/2001		$3.339310T

These figures include the public debt but not the intra-governmental debt.  Its like paying off your American Express card while ignoring the fact that your Mastercard over the limit and months past due. Your Amex looks great but your budget is not balanced.

When the Treasury department reports the National Debt (now at $14.5 trillion) it counts both public and intra-governmental debt. Clinton's first full budget proposal in 1993 took effect in October 1993 and concluded September 1994 (FY1994) and his last started in October 2000 and ended in September 2001. Using those bookends and subtracting each year's national debt from prior years,  here's the national debt at the end of each year of Clinton Budgets.

Fiscal Year	Year Ending	National Debt	Deficit
FY1993	09/30/1993	$4.411488 trillion	$346.87 billion
FY1994	09/30/1994	$4.692749 trillion	$281.26 billion
FY1995	09/29/1995	$4.973982 trillion	$281.23 billion
FY1996	09/30/1996	$5.224810 trillion	$250.83 billion
FY1997	09/30/1997	$5.413146 trillion	$188.34 billion
FY1998	09/30/1998	$5.526193 trillion	$113.05 billion
FY1999	09/30/1999	$5.656270 trillion	$130.08 billion
FY2000	09/29/2000	$5.674178 trillion	$17.91 billion
FY2001	09/28/2001	$5.807463 trillion	$133.29 billion

To be fair, Clinton's FY 2000 budget came very close, it only added about $18 billion to the national debt, but in his last budget he was back up over $130 billion.
Despite what you may hear from Democrats on the campaign trail, there were no giant surpluses that Bush squandered (Bush did overspend, but there was no surplus to squander). The myth of Clinton balancing the budget and producing surpluses belongs with unicorns and and elves, in the realm of myths. The last president to preside over a balanced budget/surplus was Dwight Eisenhower, whose government saw surpluses of  approximately $2 billion dollars in 1956 and 57.
Neither Bill Clinton nor any Republicans deserve any credit for balancing the budget in the 1990s, because the budget was never balanced.

Debunking the Palestine Lie

Debunking the Palestine Lie

via Big Government by Ben Shapiro on 9/21/11

This week, Sol Stern of Encounter Books released a broadside titled "A Century of Palestinian Rejectionism and Jew Hatred."  In it, Sol details the history of Arab rejection of a Palestinian state.  His point is well summed up in this brilliant video narrated by Bill Whittle:

Sol is very kind when he writes that President Obama's motives are unclear with regard to his ideological support for Mahmoud Abbas' odd iteration of the Palestinian state-to-be.  His motives are absolutely clear.  President Obama is not who New York Magazine pretends he is – he is our first ideologically Muslim president.

That doesn't mean he's a Muslim – far from it (he's an atheist).  He is, however, an ideological Muslim in the same way Hillary Clinton was an ideological lesbian in her college days – he believes in the geopolitical perspective of the Muslim world, namely that the United States and Israel are responsible for all evil and that if Israel had never existed, the world would be a better place.

Media Treatment and the Tea Party

 

Media Treatment and the Tea Party

via Big Government by Jason Bradley on 9/28/11

In light of a recent poll showing America's distrust of the national media, I thought I would pick a topic for a case study. What better topical study is there when exploring the media's methods and concerns than with the Tea Party?
My approach was simple. I took data from 2010 and up to this point in 2011 based off key word searches in Google. For example, In 2010 I searched "Tea Party and racists" and pulled the number given from its search engine. On a positive side, as you can see from the chart, spending was a major keyword associated with the Tea Party in 2010. My, though, how the change a year makes.
In 2011, the tea party/racists word association climbed to over one million results, an increase from the year before.
The tea party/terrorists word association increased by over 10 million results from the year before.
As one would expect, tea party/spending word association dropped from over 17 million hits in 2010 to just over 300,00 heading into the tenth month of the year.
Some limitations to my approach
As I searched through the fist couple of pages of results, it became apparent that not every headline used "racism" or "terrorists" negatively. For example a writer at National Review Online or Big Government may use those two words in a headline, but it would be so to point out some ridiculous claim made by a blogger or media personality, etc. However, the fact that it must be done, that the words "racism" and "terrorists" are so commonly associated with the Tea Party around the web, and that point become moot. Because instead of laughing the assortment of yahoos who make these claims off the planet, conservatives and civic minded people busy themselves with defending the accusations.

The Tea Party has become victim to extreme media bias. A hostile media, though unpopular, can still help shape its public image. Throw in the fact that liberal members of Congress carefully select word usage for maximum effect, which guarantees a long shelf life in the news cycle, and the Tea Party's detractors get free media to vent their disapproval.
Some of the Tea Party's recent disapproval can almost certainly be attributed to those facts.