Kerry On Taxes

Kerry On Taxes

Senator Jim DeMint has captured the essence of John Kerry and, presumably, the rest of the democrats explaining how much he believes the American people are too stupid to know how to spend their own money. There is no guarantee, he says, that we will invest the government's money in the right things. Under a minute, this should not be missed.

About Bernie, and the Rush to Judgement

About Bernie, and the Rush to Judgement

I am always amazed when people I consider intelligent accept a prosecution side of a story without even considering that the defense has yet to be heard from. The only words you have heard from Bernie Madoff come from a prosecutor's office, which is imbued, as all prosecutors offices are, with an overpowering urge to win. Any lawyer's argument will be convincing. That is why we must presume some amount of innocence is possible in every case, at least until we hear the other side.

No doubt Bernie is guilty of something here, but exactly what happened and why, we do not know. He clearly did not steal the money, since he does not have it. We think we know that he lost it, and failed to notify his investors of that. Beyond that, you do not really know anything much at all. All we can do is surmise.

Before you make pronouncements of guilt you need to at least hear the other side. Otherwise, you are only passing along accusations. If that is the purpose of our debate, you should label it as such.

Beyond that, there has been little examination of the culpability of those who invest millions of dollars in a single fund, with the promise of very high and regular returns. My grandmother told me that we should never invest all our hopes in a single basket. Those who do have failed in their fiduciary responsibilities.

More Reasons to Hate the Fraudulus Bill

More Reasons to Hate the Fraudulus Bill

The more we read, the more reasons we find to hate this monstrous bill. On Bloomberg today, Betsey McCaughey writes about one of the health provisions of the bill. This small piece of the proposed law places much of the pain we all will have to bear on the elderly. Give it a few years, and that will include me. The references to Tom Daschle in the piece refers to his book, that is apparently the genesis of this proposed provision. A sample:

Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt.

Medicare now pays for treatments deemed safe and effective. The stimulus bill would change that and apply a cost- effectiveness standard set by the Federal Council (464).

The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.

In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision.

Hidden Provisions

If the Obama administration’s economic stimulus bill passes the Senate in its current form, seniors in the U.S. will face similar rationing. Defenders of the system say that individuals benefit in younger years and sacrifice later.

The stimulus bill will affect every part of health care, from medical and nursing education, to how patients are treated and how much hospitals get paid. The bill allocates more funding for this bureaucracy than for the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force combined (90-92, 174-177, 181).

Hiding health legislation in a stimulus bill is intentional. Daschle supported the Clinton administration’s health-care overhaul in 1994, and attributed its failure to debate and delay. A year ago, Daschle wrote that the next president should act quickly before critics mount an opposition. “If that means attaching a health-care plan to the federal budget, so be it,” he said. “The issue is too important to be stalled by Senate protocol.”

Read the whole thing.

Similarly, another piece of this puzzle rolls back Clinton's welfare reform, by removing the work requirement from AFDC payments. The New York Times especially likes this. This will return us to the day when government paid any woman who had a child out of wedlock, whether she had a job or not. I can well remember what the ghetto looked like back then. Why in the world would American blacks do not cry out for this provision to be left out is beyond my ken.

All we citizens can do is sign the online petition to stop the bill from passage. It is the least we can do, and we can all do it. If you have not already done so, do it now.

Obama's Drug Policy

Obama's Drug Policy

President Obama made statements during the campaign about states with legal medical marijuana provisions. He said these states should be allowed to pursue their medical policy unimpeded by federal interference. So far his DEA has continued to raid legal clinics, particularly in California. Maybe his dope cops have not gotten the message yet, but that remains to be seen, especially since he has already broken so many of his campaign promises in the first few weeks of his nascent presidency. But beyond merely leaving decision making to others, maybe "The Won" should reexamine feseral drug policy in general.

Back to basics - a zero base examination of the drug situation in the U.S.A.

There needs to be a dichotomy in the way we perceive and deal with the issue of drug use. We need to discern between the two effects of drug laws, the first being the consequences of drug use upon individuals, and the other being the consequences of public policy toward substance distribution and use. Tobacco, alcohol, heroin, cannabis, and other substances have both good and bad effects on people, and create social and health sequelae on users and their associates. Harm reduction efforts should be undertaken where appropriate.

But laws have consequences as well as the substances themselves, mostly in the areas of driving up the price and the need for incarceration. Is there any doubt that criminal gangs garner their income directly from the prohibition of the substances? Where taxed, a substance provides money to government. Where prohibited, a substance provides profit to black market providers and exact costs on government. The fact of prohibition itself creates the price so high, the profit margins and therefore the excesses of the drug cartels so massive, that their murderous carnage becomes so much a part of the way they do business.

Maybe this is one place where our new cigarette smoking, coke sniffing, Wagyu Steak eating, pot smoking president can actually be effective. The first thing he can do is live up to his promise to stop federal law enforcement from overruling state law about medical marijuana. After that, if the lost "war" on drugs can be shifted towards a harm reduction paradigm from the current prohibition paradigm, the nation can shift untold resources toward real crime and away from the self perpetuating policies of the past.

Does No Earmarks Mean No Pork?

Does No Earmarks Mean No Pork?

Words have meaning. They must, or effective debate is impossible. But as all students of Newspeak know too well, words can be twisted to convey meanings that are not in evidence. Thus "The One" and his minions feel free to state that the fraudulus bill contains no "earmarks," and thus insinuate, and even claim, that it contains no pork. So we need to define our terms.

An earmark is an item in an appropriations bill (or law) that states exactly what money is to be spent on and who will get it, and how. In Wikipedia it is defined as "In US politics an earmark is a congressional provision that directs approved funds to be spent on specific projects..."

Pork is money conveyed to favored constituents in an appropriations bill (or law). Again from Wikipedia "Spending that is intended to benefit constituents of a politician in return for their political support..."

See the difference? No? Well, these are terms of art, as strange as that shows the art to be. A discussion on NPR tries to make sense of the distinction, coming up with this:

When congressional leaders began to assemble the mammoth economic stimulus bill, top Democrats and the Obama administration decided that there would be no earmarks: no "special projects," no pork-barrel spending. In so doing, they gave up some control over how the money is spent, leaving the decision to public servants around the country.

"Someone has to decide how money gets spent. It's either going to be Congress or the executive branch or states or municipalities," says Fred Wertheimer of the congressional watchdog group Democracy 21.

Lawmakers had good reasons for stripping earmarks from the bill, Wertheimer says, because "they are simply going to become huge targets for attacking the credibility of the package, and they may very well end up as abusive earmarks."

It was a wise political decision, he says. But pulling earmarks out of the bill changes the balance of power in the government. If members of Congress aren't writing into the bill how the money will be spent, then someone else must make those decisions — or, in this case, a lot of people.

"Because there is so much money here, and in so many different forms, there is no single pathway for the money to go out to states and localities," says Sarah Binder of the Brookings Institution.

'This Is An Emergency'

When this bill passes, a Niagara Falls of money will flow out of Washington and into the accounts of state highway commissioners, governors and legislatures, local school boards, county executives — even mayors, Binder says.

"It raises a whole host of questions about how efficiently money can be spent, how effectively it will be spent, how quickly money can be spent, just because there's no set process here for determining how money will get out the door to create jobs or, as the president said, to save jobs," she says.

U.S. Rep. David Obey (D-WI), the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, helped write the bill and says he doesn't like being asked about earmarks.

"We simply made a decision, which took about three seconds, not to have earmarks in the bill," he says. "And with all due respect, that's the least important question facing us on putting together this package."

Leaving out the earmarks does mean Congress will have less control over how the money is spent. But, Obey says, "So what? This is an emergency. We've got to simply find a way to get this done as fast as possible and as well as possible, and that's what we're doing."

That doesn't mean Congress will be responsible if the money is spent badly, he says.

"The person who spends the money badly will be responsible. We are simply trying to build as many protections in as possible," Obey says.

Now we know. Not using earmarks, a decision which took "about three seconds," merely means that congress has less control over how the funds are being spent. So nameless and faceless bureaucrats are now in control of the uncountable "Niagara Falls" of cash. And this is a good thing?

Next Up: Regulating Salaries

Next Up: Regulating Salaries

Barney "Blowhard" Frank has revealed his leftist zeal and intent to control the means of production. In a Financial Week article reports that:

Congress will consider legislation to extend some of the curbs on executive pay that now apply only to those banks receiving federal assistance, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said.

“There’s deeply rooted anger on the part of the average American,” the Massachusetts Democrat said at a Washington news conference today.

He said the compensation restrictions would apply to all financial institutions and might be extended to include all U.S. companies.

The provision will be part of a broader package that would likely give the Federal Reserve the authority to monitor systemic risk in the economy and to shut down financial institutions that face too much exposure, Mr. Frank said.

While restricting tax deductibility of salary over, say, a half million per year, which Geithner said at his confirmation hearing he might do for bailed out financial firms, might make higher salaries more expensive for companies, may force some sort of profit-based dividend compensation scheme for these firms, Barney wants to ban higher compensation for all financial firms, and beyond.

Barney pushed lending institutions into making more high risk loans, and thus helped to create the difficulties we are currently in, but he is apparently not satisfied. Now he wants to use the real or imagined power of "The Won" to really get down to micro-managing companies on an unprecedented scale."Hope and Change" may soon turn into "Fear and Loathing." Just you wait.

Our new president has boldly stated that "We won - I will trump you on this." Compare that with Ronald Reagan's Initial Actions Project: “The election was not a bestowal of political power, but a stewardship opportunity for us to reconsider and restructure the political agenda for the next two decades. The public has sanctioned the search for a new public philosophy to govern America.” In other words, "we're going to need to argue for our program."

Obama seems to feel that the argument is over. He may soon find that the argument has barely begun.

Eco-fraud on Forests

Eco-fraud on Forests

Today's WaPo has an article on how the poor defenseless forests in The Amazon basin are being burned down by marauding farmers who want the land to selfishly produce food and shelter for the undeserving people of Brazil. Very sad story, all about how mere human hunger is allowed to destroy beautiful forests and drive innocent Beetle species into extinction. Nice.

But, just a few days ago the NYT reported on an amazing fact - that for each acre of forest destroyed worldwide, thirty acres of previously cleared land returns to the forest state. It seems that advances in agriculture and demographic changes are reducing pressure on forests everywhere.

Mere facts will not deter the Eco-fraudsters, however, probably due to the fact that theirs is a political movement, concerned chiefly with the attainment of power. Fooling their constituency, through placement of articles such as these, is merely the means to that power.

Federal Self-Stimulation

Federal Self-Stimulation

Today our fearless leader has posted an Op-Ed in the Wapo, claiming that the sky will fall if congress does not give him another trillion dollars immediately. Democrat chicken littles in the Senate have taken up this clarion call to decisive action. Apparently the reason for the brinksmanship is that more and more of We the People are deciding the bill is a bad idea every day. And with good reason.

In today's Wall Street Journal Daniel Henninger offers his take on the bill and its concentration on giving most of the money to themselves. A sample:

Check your PC's virus program, then pull down the nearly 700 pages of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Dive into its dank waters and what is most striking is how much "stimulus" money is being spent on the government's own infrastructure. This bill isn't economic stimulus. It's self-stimulus.

(All sums here include the disorienting zeros, as in the bill.)

Title VI, Financial Services and General Government, says that "not less than $6,000,000,000 shall be used for construction, repair, and alteration of Federal buildings." There's enough money there to name a building after every Member of Congress.

The Bureau of Land Management gets $325,000,000 to spend fixing federal land, including "trail repair" and "remediation of abandoned mines or well sites," no doubt left over from the 19th-century land rush.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are getting $462,000,000 for "equipment, construction, and renovation of facilities, including necessary repairs and improvements to leased laboratories."
The Opinion Journal Widget

The National Institute of Standards gets $357,000,000 for the "construction of research facilities." The Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration gets $427,000,000 for that. The country is in an economic meltdown and the federal government is redecorating.

The FBI gets $75,000,000 for "salaries and expenses." Inside the $6,200,000,000 Weatherization Assistance Program one finds "expenses" of $500,000,000. How many bureaucrats does it take to "expense" a half-billion dollars?

The current, Senate-amended version now lists "an additional amount to be deposited in the Federal Buildings Fund, $9,048,000,000." Of this, "not less than $6,000,000,000 shall be available for measures necessary to convert GSA facilities to High-Performance Green Buildings." High performance?

Sen. Tom Coburn is threatening to read the bill on the floor of the Senate. I have a better idea: Read it on "Saturday Night Live."

This is no laughing matter though. It is nothing less than a bald-faced plan to take an immense amount of power from us and empower the Faceless Federals, far beyond what the constitution allows and in a way that the founders most feared. These self serving myrmidons of power fully intend to get themselves past the tipping point, and make more than half the electorate directly beholden to them, with jobs or checks "refunding" taxes they never paid. Prior to the founding of this great nation philosophers debated the very idea of a large nation operating under a system of republican democracy, and some believed that no democracy could survive beyond the point that a majority found that it could vote itself largess from the treasury. We are at that point today. If this monstrous idea is enacted, if this bill passes in its present form, we will have passed that point.

SCHIP Passes, Cigar Retailers Die

SCHIP Passes, Cigar Retailers Die

So our new president has violated another of his campaign promises. He promised to wait five days before signing any new legislation, so that We the People can review and comment. Another layer of the lies of "The One" has been revealed. Almost without notice, the cigar industry has been decimated.

Every cigar retailer must now pay tax on each cigar in inventory. Many smaller shops will be forced to close. This is without hope, but it is a significant change. The economy may be in trouble, but nowhere is it in more trouble than for families that depend on cigar sales as part of their income. The tax provision in the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) bill will have devastating, unintended consequences.

No family-owned cigar-related business will be able to sell enough at the increased price to remain open, and their employees will become unemployed. The brutal tax burdens from SCHIP will crush the small cigar businesses and the roll-your-own cigarette businesses. Thousands of American jobs in the myriad of support businesses such as tobacco growing, tobacco processing, package manufacturing, transportation and sales operations will be lost. Bush vetoed the last iteration of this travesty, but Obama has no such concerns for the family owned businesses that will be affected by this new tax.

Hope and change, here we come!

The Future of the Turkish State

The Future of the Turkish State

A little discussed linchpin of the Middle East is Turkey, a nation your reporter knows well and remembers fondly. Standing between the West and the East, with a government subject to the shrouded power of its military, Turkey is a beacon to the larger Muslim world. The balance in Turkey between the secularists and the Islamists allows this economic and military powerhouse to be allied with Israel while maintaining its street cred with the Arab masses.

George Freidman of Stratfor has a piece on the geopolitics of the Turkish situation, reprinted here with permission. Friedman's take on the situation differs, as always, from the conventional wisdom, but, as usual, it makes much more sense.


Erdogan's Outburst and the Future of the Turkish State
By George Friedman

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan exploded during a public discussion with Israeli President Shimon Peres at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week. Erdogan did not blow up at Peres, but rather at the moderator, Washington Post columnist and associate editor David Ignatius, whom Erdogan accused of giving more time to Peres. Afterward, Erdogan said, “I did not target at all in any way the Israeli people, President Peres or the Jewish people. I am a prime minister, a leader who has expressly stated that anti-Semitism is a crime against humanity.”

Nevertheless, the international press focused not on the finer points of Erdogan’s reasoning, but rather on his attacks on Israeli policy in Gaza and his angry exit, which many thought were directed at Peres and Israel. The confusion, we suspect, suited Erdogan quite well. Turkey is effectively an ally of Israel. Given this alliance, the recent events in Gaza put Erdogan in a difficult position. The Turkish prime minister needed to show his opposition to Israel’s policies to his followers in Turkey’s moderate Islamist community without alarming Turkey’s military that he was moving to rupture relations with Israel. Whether calculated or not, Erdogan’s explosion in Davos allowed him to appear to demonstrate vocal opposition to Israel — directly to Israel’s president, no le ss — without actually threatening ties with Israel.

It is important to understand the complexity of Erdogan’s political position. Ever since the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, Turkey has had a secular government. The secularism of the government was guaranteed constitutionally by the military, whose role it was to protect the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk — the founder of modern, secular Turkey, who used the army as an instrument of nation-building. The Turkish public, in contrast, runs the gamut from ultrasecularists to radical Islamists.

Erdogan is an elected moderate Islamist. As such, he is held in suspicion by the army and severely circumscribed in how far he can go on religious matters. To his right politically are more hard-line Islamist parties, which are making inroads into Turkish public opinion. Erdogan must balance between these forces, avoiding the two extreme outcomes of military intervention and Islamist terrorism.

Meanwhile, from a geopolitical perspective, Turkey is always in an uncomfortable place. Asia Minor is the pivot of Eurasia. It is the land bridge between Asia and Europe, the northern frontier of the Arab world and the southern frontier of the Caucasus. Its influence spreads outward toward the Balkans, Russia, Central Asia, the Arab world and Iran. Alternatively, Turkey is the target of forces emanating from all of these directions. Add to this its control of the Bosporus, which makes Turkey the interface between the Mediterranean and Black Sea, and the complexity of Turkey’s position becomes clear: Turkey is always either under pressure from its neighbors or pressuring its neighbors. It is perpetually be ing drawn outward in multiple directions, even into the eastern Mediterranean.

Turkey has two different paths for dealing with its geopolitical challenge.
Secular Isolationism

From the army’s point of view, the Ottoman Empire was a disaster that entangled Turkey into the catastrophe of Word War I. One of Ataturk’s solutions involved not only contracting Turkey after the war, but containing it in such a way that it could not be drawn into the extreme risk of imperial adventure.

In World War II, both Axis and Allies wooed and subverted Turkey. But the country managed — with difficulty — to maintain neutrality, thereby avoiding another national catastrophe.

During the Cold War, Turkey’s position was equally difficult. Facing Soviet pressure from the north, the Turks had to ally themselves with the United States and NATO. Turkey possessed something the Soviets desperately wanted: the Bosporus, which would have given the Soviet navy unimpeded access to the Mediterranean. Naturally, the Turks could not do anything about their geography, nor could they cede the Bosporus to the Soviets without sacrificing their independence. But neither could they protect it by themselves. Thus, left with only the choice of NATO membership, the Turks joined the Western alliance.

There was a high degree of national unity on this subject. Whatever the ideologies involved, the Soviets were viewed as a direct threat to Turkey. Therefore, using NATO and the United States to help guarantee Turkish territorial integrity was ultimately something around which a consensus could form. NATO membership, of course, led to complications, as these things always do.

To counter the American relationship with Turkey (and with Iran, which also blocked Soviet southward movement), the Soviets developed a strategy of alliances — and subversion — of Arab countries. First Egypt, then Syria, Iraq and other countries came under Soviet influence between the 1950s and 1970s. Turkey found itself in a vise between the Soviets and Iraq and Syria. And with Egypt — with its Soviet weapons and advisers — also in the Soviet orbit, Turkey’s southern frontier was seriously threatened.

Turkey had two possible responses to this situation. One was to build up its military and economy to take advantage of its mountainous geography and deter attack. For this, Turkey needed the United States. The second option was to create cooperative relations with other countries in the region that were hostile to both the Soviets and the left-wing Arab regimes. The two countries that fit this bill were Israel and pre-1979 Iran under the shah. Iran tied down Iraq. Israel tied down Syria and Egypt. In effect, these two countries neutralized the threat of Soviet pressure from the south.

Thus was born the Turkish relationship with Israel. Both countries belonged to the American anti-Soviet alliance system and therefore had a general common interest in conditions in the eastern Mediterranean. Both countries also had a common interest in containing Syria. From the standpoint of the Turkish army, and therefore the Turkish government, a close collaboration with Israel made perfect sense.
Islamist Internationalism

There is a second vision of Turkey, however: that of Turkey as a Muslim power with responsibilities beyond guaranteeing its own national security. This viewpoint would of course break the country’s relationship with Israel and the United States. In some sense, this is a minor consideration now. Israel is no longer indispensable for Turkish national security, and Turkey has outgrown outright dependence on the United States. (These days, the United States needs Turkey more than Turkey needs the United States.)

Under this second vision, Turkey would extend its power outward in support of Muslims. This vision, if pursued to the full, would involve Turkey in the Balkans in support of Albanians and Bosnians, for example. It would also see Turkey extend its influence southward to help shape Arab regimes. And it would cause Turkey to become deeply involved in Central Asia, where it has natural ties and influence. Ultimately, this vision also would return Turkey to maritime power status, influencing events in North Africa. It is at its heart a very expansionist vision, and one that would require the active support of a military that, at present, is somewhat squeamish about leaving home.

Along with Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran and Egypt, Turkey is one of only five major powers in the Islamic world with enough economic and military potential to affect anything beyond their immediate neighbors. Indonesia and Pakistan are internally fragmented and struggling to hold together; their potential is largely bottled up. Iran is in a long-term confrontation with the United States and must use all of its strength in dealing with that relationship, limiting its options for expansion. Egypt is internally crippled by its regime and economy, and without significant internal evolutions it cannot project power.

Turkey, on the other hand, is now the world’s 17th-largest economy. It boasts a gross domestic product (GDP) that is larger than that of every other Muslim country, including Saudi Arabia; larger than that of every EU country other than Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands; and nearly five times larger than that of Israel. In per capita GDP, Turkey ranks much lower on the global scale, but national power — the total weight a country can bring to bear on the international system — frequently depends more on the total size of the economy than on per capita income. (Consider China, which has a per capita income less than half that of Turkey’s.) Turkey is surrounded by instability in the Arab world, in the Caucasus and in the Balkans. But it is the most stable and dynamic economy in its region and, after Israel, has the most effective armed forces.

On occasion, Turkey goes beyond its borders. It has, for example, moved into Iraq in a combined air-ground operation to attack units of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a Kurdish separatist group. But it is Turkey’s policy to avoid deep entanglements. From the Turkish Islamist point of view, however, a power of this magnitude under the control of an Islamist regime would be in a position to spread its influence dramatically. As mentioned, this is not what the army or the secularists want: They remember how the Ottoman Empire sapped Turkish strength, and they do not want a repeat.
Erdogan’s Challenge and Turkey’s Future

It is not fair to say that Turkey is a deeply divided society. Instead, Turkey has learned to blend discord. At the moment, Erdogan probably represents the center of the Turkish political spectrum. But he is stuck trying to balance three competing forces. The first is an economy that remains robust and is likely to grow further despite suffering setbacks (along with the rest of the world). The second is a capable military that does not want excessive foreign entanglements, and certainly not for religious reasons. And the third is an Islamist movement that wants to see Turkey as part of the Islamic world — and perhaps even the leader of that world.

Erdogan does not want to weaken the Turkish economy, and he sees radical Islamist ideas as endangering Turkey’s middle class. He wants to placate the army and keep it from acting politically. He also wants to placate the radical Islamists, who could draw the army out of the barracks, or worse, weaken the economy. Erdogan thus wants to keep business, the military and the religious sector happy simultaneously.

This is no easy task, and Erdogan was clearly furious at Israel for attacking Gaza and making that task harder. Turkey was crucial in developing the Israeli-Syrian dialogue. This means the wider world now views Turkey’s leadership as regionally engaged, something its risk-averse military is more than a little touchy about. Erdogan therefore saw Israel as endangering Turkey’s military-civilian power balance and squandering its tentative steps into the regional spotlight for what he considered a pointless operation in Gaza.

Still, Erdogan did not want to break with Israel. So he became furious with the moderator. Whether this was calculated or simply reflected his response to the situation he finds himself in is immaterial. The outburst allowed him to appear to break with Israel decisively without actually creating such a rupture. He thus deftly continued to walk his fine line.

The question is how long Erdogan can maintain the balance. The more chaotic the region around Turkey becomes and the stronger Turkey gets, the more irresistible will be the sheer geopolitical pressure on Turkey to fill the vacuum. Add to that an expansionist ideology — a Turkish Islamism — and a potent new force in the region could quickly emerge. The one thing that can restrain this process is Russia. If Moscow forces Georgia to submit and brings its forces back to the Turkish border in Armenia, the Turks will have to reorient their policy back to one of blocking the Russians. But regardless of what level Russian power returns to over the next few years, the longer-term growth of Turkish power is inevitable — and something that must be considered carefully.


For an alternate view of the event in Davos and what it means, check out Powerline's take on it.

Not Ready for Rushmore

Not Ready for Rushmore

The heady early days of the Obama administration are already coming to a close. In the beginning, there was "The One," and he was going to save us all. He ran for president presenting himself as a personality, more like Brittney Spears than Abraham Lincoln or JFK. But as he transitions from candidate to executive his cult of personality is losing members by the day, yet he is only two weeks into the actual job we hired him for.

Before he was inaugurated it was suggested that he be carved into Mount Rushmore, beside George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Teddy Roosevelt, or perhaps carve TR into a likeness of Obama. After all, went the story, he would certainly prove to be more important to that dead white guy.

OK, maybe those stories were exaggerated, or at least premature. But schools and streets have already been named after him, and Barack has become a very popular name for babies worldwide. All this over a man of little or no accomplishment, other than the mere fact of his election. That was no mean feat by itself, considering his meager beginnings, being the son of a Kenyan student and a young and apparently confused girl.

The sustaining power of the Obama euphoria is credited, in a piece by Peter Berkowitz in today's WSJ, to the obverse of Bush Derangement Syndrome, (BDS) in which:

At first glance, Bush hatred and Obama euphoria could not be more different. Hatred of Mr. Bush went well beyond the partisan broadsides typical of democratic politics. For years it disfigured its victims with open, indeed proud, loathing for the very manner in which Mr. Bush walked and talked. It compelled them to denounce the president and his policies as not merely foolish or wrong or contrary to the national interest, but as anathema to everything that made America great.

In contrast, the euphoria surrounding Mr. Obama's run for president conferred upon the candidate immunity from criticism despite his newness to national politics and lack of executive experience, and regardless of how empty his calls for change. At the same time, it inspired those in its grips, repeatedly bringing them tears of joy throughout the long election season. With Mr. Obama's victory in November and his inauguration last week, it suffused them with a sense that not only had the promise of America at last been redeemed but that the world could now be transfigured.

In fact, Bush hatred and Obama euphoria -- which tend to reveal more about those who feel them than the men at which they are directed -- are opposite sides of the same coin. Both represent the triumph of passion over reason.

Meanwhile, reality must intrude into the ruminations of those in thrall to this passion. Just as BDS will fade with time, Obama euphoria must yield to the facts and acts that are so much more persistent than campaign rhetoric. Indeed, Obama's poll numbers are already coming down to Earth. A mere two weeks in, two of the young president's top nominees have had to decline their designations, and Obama's "stimulus" plan has had to go back to the drawing board, as a less than compliant political class has revealed more than a little friction between Obama's leftist wish list and political reality.

In a campaign, it is possible to appear to be all things to all people. When faced with the realities and ambiguities of power, one must choose a side. Even in a political atmosphere as one-sided as obtained two weeks ago there are interests and proclivities that supersede mere love. Compromise in a political process can appear to some as indiscretion, or even betrayal. Not for nothing are awards for accomplishment made to wait for the aftermath. The president's poll numbers will continue to decline so long as fewer than one in five Americans approve of the way things are going. Obama himself has noted that he needs to succeed in banishing the economic storm we are sheltering from, or he could be facing a single term presidency. We shall see.

Demographic, and Immigration, Insanity

One of the very best of the Euro-Blogs, The Brussels Journal, has a series on the impending destruction of our culture by the forced infusion of Islamic culture upon the West. While this subject is well covered in Mark Steyn'e latest book, "America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It", today's installment of the series of posts in the Journal is stellar. A taste:

Question: What are these people doing in Europe? Who invited them? Who let them in? Who let them stay? What has allowed them to even dream about moving to Europe, let alone realizing a colonization plan?

In Great Britain alone, intelligence agencies are tracking 200 terrorists plots among Pakistani Brits, of whom some 2,000 are under observation. More than 400,000 Pakistani citizens of Great Britain travel every year to Pakistan – a country of 12,000 madrassas and, as of mid-2005, 55 terrorist training camps.

Why are there a million (1) Pakistanis in Great Britain? Just what has been going on in the brains of the British ruling elites these past 40 years? What has been going on in the brains of the ruled British people?

What are these people doing in the United States? We know how they came and who and what let them in, but why? The stock answer is: the left, to gain new voters; the right, to get cheap labor. But it’s not the real answer, except if this be a society of madmen.

For the rest of the story, read the whole thing.

More on the "Stimulus" Plan

More on the "Stimulus" Plan

As time goes by we are seeing many more members of the commentariat analyzing the so-called "stimulus" bill and finding more and more things wrong with it. In fact, the House today voted in favor of the bill with every single congressional republican voting against, with about a dozen democrats also displaying clear vision. Mona Charen has a lucid essay on the reason democrats are going along with Obama:

Certainly President Obama seems supremely confident that the federal government, in his own capable hands, can tackle everything from job creation to education to global warming. All that is needed is to set aside "stale" partisan arguments and salute smartly.

President Obama was a teenager when some of the smartest liberals in America (dubbed the neoconservatives) were beginning to have doubts about the power of government to do good. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer, Aaron Wildavksy, and many others observed the effects of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" initiatives and became sobered up. (A few, including Moynihan, returned to the liberal fold but most did not.) They noticed the waste and the ineffectiveness of huge government programs, but above all, they were chastened by the law of unintended consequences -- that the unforeseen or indirect effects of government policy were usually more damaging and more important than the desired effects. Minimum wage laws are a good example. Intended to help the poor earn a living wage, they instead discouraged hiring of the low-skilled. Rent control was supposed to make it easier for the poor and middle class to afford apartments but wound up making low-cost housing less available.

[snip]

It was, or should have been, frightening news that the United States is now $10.7 trillion in debt, sporting a $1.2 trillion deficit. As Mark Steyn noted, your pocket calculator doesn't have enough spaces to input one trillion dollars. The Democrats' solution is to make our deficit $2 trillion with a "stimulus" package. The Congressional Budget Office (run by Democrats) reports that -- all talk of "shovel ready" projects notwithstanding -- only about 25 percent of the new spending in the package would actually be spent by 2010. And it defies common sense to believe that transferring $100 billion from the federal government to the states to help with Medicare reimbursements will stimulate economic activity. Nor will $200 million to rehabilitate the National Mall in Washington, or $500 million to install new bomb detectors at airports, or $400 million to NASA to conduct climate change research (which several other agencies are already studying), and on and on.

We are, not to put too fine a point on it, about to send another trillion dollars of our money into a rat hole. Permanent tax cuts, for individuals and businesses, have been proven to stimulate the economy. They worked under Kennedy and Reagan. But to point this out now is like shouting into a whirlwind.

Peter Ferrara has more details in The American Spectator on the pork within the bill. You can read the 76 page "Recovery Report" (.pdf) congressional democrats produced to outline the bill, but Ferrara gets some of the more egregious items listed, as in:

The massive $825 billion package is not even targeted on programs to stimulate the economy. Instead, it is laced with runaway government spending for increased welfare, overgrown bureaucracy, pork, political payoffs, and other waste. That runaway spending is causing record smashing deficits of $1.5 trillion or more, equivalent to over 50% of the entire federal budget for fiscal 2008.

For example, the "stimulus" package includes $50 million for the National Endowment of the Arts to help "the arts community throughout the United States." Wouldn't want our economy to get behind in the international arts competition. The government is going to borrow $50 million out of the private economy to spend on this, which will result in a net loss of economic output rather than a net gain.

Another $2.1 billion is for Head Start, another program not previously known for stimulating the economy. A further $2 billion is to be spent on Child Care Development Block Grants, which provide day care. We are going to revive economic growth through the federal government spending billions on babysitting, rather than tax cuts for capital investment. A similar initiative involves $120 million to finance part-time work for seniors in community service agencies.

Then there is $500 million to speed the processing of applications for Social Security disability claims. This has already created one net new job in the employment of a person within the Obama Administration assigned to figure out what this has to do with stimulating the economy.

Another $6 billion goes to college and universities. We already spend hundreds of billions on these schools, and such education provides valuable long-term benefits. But this is not a means to spark a booming economy in the short term. The same is true of the $13 billion in Title I grants "to provide extra academic support to help raise the achievement of students at risk of educational failure or to help all students in high-poverty schools meet challenging State academic standards," as the congressional report accompanying the bill explains. Ditto that for the $13 billion in IDEA, Part B State grants to help pay for "the excess costs of providing special education and related services to children with disabilities."

Then there is the effort to stimulate the economy by increasing welfare spending. There is $20 billion for increased food stamps, including lifting restrictions on how long welfare dependents can receive food stamp benefits. Another $1.7 billion is to be spent to help the homeless, not previously in our history a significant source of economic growth. Another $1 billion goes for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance program, to help low income families pay their heating bills, a worthy objective that has nothing to do with stimulating the economy. Still another billion goes to the Community Services Block Grant to support "employment, food, housing, health, and emergency assistance to low-income families and individuals." Another $200 million goes for senior nutrition programs, such as Meals on Wheels. Then there is an additional $200 million for AmeriCorps, to help satisfy "increased demand for services for vulnerable populations to meet critical needs in communities across the U.S." Another $5 billion is devoted to public housing. None of this increased welfare spending has anything to do with promoting economic growth. Rather, it retards growth by inducing more dependency on government.

Another $87 billion is to be spent on Medicaid, a welfare program already costing roughly $400 billion per year. Those funds would be spent in part on "family planning services," meaning contraception. Reagan created a 25-year economic boom in part by cutting top marginal income tax rates. Liberal Democrats are now going to try to do it by passing out condoms.

Medicaid is one of the major entitlement programs projected to explode to overwhelming costs in the future. Obama is assuring the more conservative Blue Dog Democrats that he will address runaway entitlement costs as soon as next month. But to start let's increase those costs by almost $100 billion right now.

Then there is the funding to maintain and expand bureaucracy and overall big government spending. The "stimulus" package includes $2.5 billion for the National Science Foundation, $2.0 billion for the National Park Service, $650 million for the U.S. Forest Service, $600 million for NASA, $800 million for AMTRAK, $276 million to the State Department to upgrade and modernize its information technology, $150 million for maintenance work at the Smithsonian Institution, $209 million for maintenance work for the Federal Agricultural Research Service, $44 million for repairs and improvements at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Department of Agriculture, and $245 million to upgrade the information technology of the Farm Service Agency. Borrowing money from the private sector to spend on these bureaucracies will not provide a boost to the economy. It will likely again produce a net loss of output.

A shocking provision provides $1.1 billion for so-called federal comparative effectiveness research in regard to health-care services. The congressional report explaining the stimulus bill says:

By knowing what works best and presenting this information more broadly to patients and healthcare professionals, those items, procedures, and interventions that are most effective to prevent, control, and treat health conditions will be utilized, while those that are found to be less effective and in some cases, more expensive, will no longer be prescribed.

But a government bureaucracy in Washington is never going to know what "items, procedures and interventions are most effective to prevent, control and treat health conditions" for each patient, regardless of how much federal research is done. This is what doctors are for. This bureaucratic initiative is really laying the foundation for the eventual health care rationing to be imposed under the new Obama "universal" health care entitlement program, which is coming soon. I told you so, in previous columns.

To call this spending economic recovery stimulus, however, is an abuse of the English language.

Another abuse is to be found in the $4.2 billion provided to the Neighborhood Stabilization Fund, which provides the funds to local governments to purchase and rehab vacant housing due to foreclosure. The congressional report accompanying the stimulus bill states, "Up to $750 million may be used for a competition for nonprofit entities to enhance the funding included under this heading through capitalization of the funds." Reportedly, this funding is intended to be siphoned off to ACORN, the far-left, rogue, lawbreaking organization prosecuted across the country in the past couple of years for voter fraud. ACORN has also used violent intimidation tactics in the past to pursue its goals, and was heavily involved in housing programs in the past that led to widespread bad loans.

Another $79 billion is to go the states to maintain their runaway government spending, particularly for such spendthrift jurisdictions as California, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. High state government spending is also not a source of economic growth.

Then there are other items in the "stimulus" package that may involve desirable government spending, but do not involve stimulating the economy, and should be subject to the normal budget process. These include $3 billion for health care prevention and wellness programs, such as childhood immunizations and other state and local public health programs, $2.4 billion for projects demonstrating carbon capture technology, $17 billion for Pell Grants, $1 billion for Technology Education, $1.9 billion for the Energy Department for "basic research into the physical sciences," $650 million for digital TV coupons to help Americans upgrade to digital cable television, $100 million to reduce lead-based paint hazards for children in low income housing, $400 million for "habitat restoration projects" of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, $1.2 billion for summer jobs for youth, $2 billion for Superfund cleanup, and others.

A massive power grab, a Trojan Horse, or however you characterize it, Peter Ferrara sums it up quite nicely:

Now what we have is not only a stimulus bill that will not work. What we have is a fraudulent bill that is not even focused on stimulus at all, but on runaway spending for liberal, big government spending programs, meaning more welfare, overgrown bureaucracy, pork, political payoffs, and waste.

I couldn't say it better than that.

Stimulate This

Stimulate This

Now that the stimulus bill is moving into final form, details are leaking out. Since most of the money will not be spent until the second and third year, it is not really a stimulus bill. It is rather more a Trojan horse bill, since it will contain quite a few special passengers. In the words of the president's chief of staff, “Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things.”

Now reports are beginning to emerge, and one of the most insidious little bombs is the "decoupling" provision for utility rates. What this means is there will be no further link between electric rates, say, and the amount of electricity you use. That means that, as we are forced (or choose) to use more efficient appliances and our electrical use goes down, the rates will go up to compensate. Then, when or if we buy electric vehicles, the rates will remain high. Or presumably we can ask our legislators (nicely) to pass a new law setting special rates for electrical vehicle use. But even that is dependent on the utilities installing new electric meters, so that the "special" use can be rated on the lower, politically correct rate for electric vehicles. But then the gasoline tax and road use taxes will be piled on the electric rates.

While we are on this subject of Obama "calling for forty million meters to be installed" it might be interesting to look into the Federal Energy Policy Act of 2005, which directed state utility commissions to install the new meters. But since Bush signed that legislation, Obama has "called" for exactly the same thing, so as to get the credit. "Utilities are planning to deploy more than 40 million smart meters throughout the country from 2007 through 2010, according to a report published by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission." But now that Obama wants it, and money has no real value any more, it is now for the government to pay for them, with their usual crack efficiency and timeliness.

This is pretty clear, we are getting screwed by this stimulus plan. It is the un-stimulus screw - no stimulation, no kisses, no lube.

If you have a head for details, or you think I'm kidding, you can read the report (.pdf) summarizing the bill. Not to worry, it is a mere 76 pages.

Our New Era of Responsibility

Our New Era of Responsibility

Our new president has proclaimed a "new era of responsibility" in his inaugural address. As Orwell defined Newspeak, the import of the words are exactly the opposite of what the words mean. Not to blame Barry for everything, since the situation predates Obama by decades.

Our nation's attempt to create an idiot proof society has cast us adrift from our moorings. We used to be a nation with a "can do" attitude. It was We the People who got things done, each of us, as well as all of us. Everyone believed they could make a difference, at the very least in our own lives. That valuable but not enough treasured ethic is dying, and almost dead. Our new president is going to accelerate the demise of the best of the American spirit.

This thesis is explored in today's Wall Street Journal by Philip K. Howard. A few quotes:

America achieved greatness as the can-do society. This is, after all, the country of Thomas Paine and barn raisings, of Grange halls and Google. Other countries shared, at least in part, our political freedoms, but America had something different -- a belief in the power of each individual. President Obama's clarion call of self-determination -- "Yes We Can" -- hearkens back to the core of our culture.

Americans don't feel free to reach inside themselves and make a difference. The growth of litigation and regulation has injected a paralyzing uncertainty into everyday choices. All around us are warnings and legal risks. The modern credo is not "Yes We Can" but "No You Can't." Our sense of powerlessness is pervasive. Those who deal with the public are the most discouraged. Most doctors say they wouldn't advise their children to go into medicine. Government service is seen as a bureaucratic morass, not a noble calling. Make a difference? You can't even show basic human kindness for fear of legal action. Teachers across America are instructed never to put an arm around a crying child.

The idea of freedom as personal power got pushed aside in recent decades by a new idea of freedom -- where the focus is on the rights of whoever might disagree. Daily life in America has been transformed. Ordinary choices -- by teachers, doctors, officials, managers, even volunteers -- are paralyzed by legal self-consciousness. Did you check the rules? Who will be responsible if there's an accident? A pediatrician in North Carolina noted that "I don't deal with patients the same way any more. You wouldn't want to say something off the cuff that might be used against you."

And so today we witness a high school coach being indicted for homicide for denying a player water for fifteen minutes.

All this law, we're told, is just the price of making sure society is in working order. But society is not working. Disorder disrupts learning all day long in many public schools -- the result in part, studies by NYU Professor Richard Arum found, of the rise of student rights. Health care is like a nervous breakdown in slow motion. Costs are out of control, yet the incentive for doctors is to order whatever tests the insurance will pay for. Taking risks is no longer the badge of courage, but reason enough to get sued. There's an epidemic of child obesity, but kids aren't allowed to take the normal risks of childhood. Broward County, Fla., has even banned running at recess.

So no little babies get hurted, all the others must stand around and become wimps. There is the other, related problem with the feminization of the American boys and men, but that is another, related problem. The radicals who want manly men to disappear use the courts to get their way in the schools.

The new legal order doesn't honor the individuality of human accomplishment. People accomplish things by focusing on the goal, and letting their instincts, mainly subconscious, try to get them there. "Amazingly few people," management guru Peter Drucker observed, "know how they get things done." Most things happen, the philosopher Michael Polanyi wrote, through "the usual process of trial and error by which we feel our way to success." Thomas Edison put it this way: "Nothing that's any good works by itself. You got to make the damn thing work."

Modern law pulls the rug out from under all those human powers and substitutes instead a debilitating self-consciousness. Teachers lose their authority, Prof. Arum found, because the overhang of law causes "hesitation, doubt and weakening of conviction." Skyrocketing health-care costs are impossible to contain as long as doctors go through the day thinking about how they will defend themselves if a sick person sues.

The overlay of law on daily choices destroys the human instinct needed to get things done. Bureaucracy can't teach. Rules don't make things happen. Accomplishment is personal. Anyone who has felt the pride of a job well done knows this.

But the "Hope and Change Express" promises us more rules, more bureaucracy, more destruction of personal responsibility and accomplishment. Less pride, more debt, more taxes.

When advancing the cause of freedom, law today is all proscription and no protection. There are no boundaries, just a moving mudbank comprised of accumulating bureaucracy and whatever claims people unilaterally choose to assert. People wade through law all day long. Any disagreement in the workplace, any accident, any incidental touching of a child, any sick person who gets sicker, any bad grade in school -- you name it. Law has poured into daily life.

That gets the flavor of the problem. I am not sure that I agree with Phil Howard's prescription for getting us out of this mess, but I know that we are under a desperate assault by rules and laws, and ultimately lawyers. Now that the Leftists, beholden, nay, in thrall to the lawyers, are in charge of at least two of our three branches of government, no matter that you believe we should to roll back the tide, we are certain to see the tide oncoming for quite a while.

But never be despondent! History shows that, in retrospect, everything works out for the best. The problem is, we may not live long enough to see things work out. So I have come around to the proposition that I hope for Obama's presidency to fail - to fail big, and to fail fast. Only by complete failure, and I am talking failure on the scale of a Carter, total, abject, undeniable failure, will the electorate come to understand that we need to throw all the bums out, and elect a new majority. Not an ideological majority, that would not be a zero base approach. What we need is to throw out the incumbents, whose minds and souls are poisoned from their well worn habits of taking from us and feeding their own.

Only a huge failure of our government can save us from that government. Think about it, discuss it. This is not going away by itself.

Intellectual?

Intellectual?

I have no idea where this "Obama is an intellectual" trope came from, but it is absolutely untrue. An intellectual is a person who exercises his creative and mental powers over all else. He writes, he may teach. He is surely not a pol. Let's get this trope off the table. A pol is a person who bends others to his will, his quest for power, not a man who convinces others with his ideas. Name a single new or unique idea our new leader has had, I dare you. Not an intellectual by a long shot.

While we are at it, how are we to know that this guy is so smart? I have not seen any testing on him that impresses me more than the work done to quantify the IQs of Bush and Kerry. If he is smarter than either of those, I have not seen any evidence of it - just unsubstantiated statements. And he clearly has no intellectual achievements to compare to Bill Clinton's.

Not that this means anything. Great leaders are men such as Reagan and FDR. Oliver Wendell Holmes admiringly and famously said of FDR that he had a "first rate attitude, second rate temperament." (Churchill said about the same thing substituting "attitude" for "temperament") Few would call Reagan a deep thinker, but his thinking had clarity. This nuanced thinking we get from pretenders like Kerry, and now maybe we will get much of the same from "The One," drives me to distraction. It may be possible that Obama is capable of clear thinking, but as Rush and others say, liberals will never tell you what they believe, because you would then reject them.

It is the liberal propensity to call republicans idiots. Remember, Kerry was supposed to be some sort of a genius too. Only when he lost did the Left admit that he was a dork who ran an incompetent campaign, and research revealed his IQ to be about the same as G.W.Bush's. They said that Clinton was a genius, but at least they had a leg to stand on with that one, Rhodes Scholar and all. But he did too much of his thinking with his little head. Then they called G.H.W.Bush an idiot and a tool, Reagan an idiot and a fool, but before that Carter was called a genius nuclear engineer! All he ever did in that line was to grease the machinery in a nuclear submarine, but to the leftist media in this country, they do not need much to get off and running. Leftist guys are smart, righties are dumb. Don't you get it? This is a universal truth of the Left. Read Trotsky or Goebbels.

No. I believe that the guy who becomes president is always the guy who is an absolute genius at utilizing the tools that exist to claim power over others. That makes them smart enough to be our rulers, that's all. Any claim to higher intelligence on broader matters requires evidence - evidence that is lacking on all our presidents since Jefferson, sadly.

I rather think that Obama is a pragmatist, and when his liberalism fails him, he will change horses rather than becoming irrelevant like Carter. Time will tell. We are in deep trouble if he is an intellectual, who has pondered and decided to go all ideological on us. If so, we might just have a revolution on our hands real soon. Remember, if one and a half percent had voted the other way, we would be making fun of president McCain right now. There is scant support for another bailout, government health care for everybody and much higher taxes. Keep piling it on, and we the people will push back come election day next.

Letter From Britain to America

Letter From Britain to America

The following letter has been attributed to British sources, but I have been unable to discern its provenance. In any case, it is too good to ignore, so I reproduce it here, sadly without attribution:

Obama’s Victory

A victory for the hysterical Oprah Winfrey, the mad racist preacher Jeremiah Wright, the mainstream media who abandoned any sense of objectivity long ago, Europeans who despise America largely because they depend on her, comics who claim to be dangerous and fearless but would not dare attack genuinely powerful special interest groups.

A victory for Obama-worshippers everywhere. A victory for the cult of the cult. A man who has done little with his life but has written about his achievements as if he had found the cure for cancer in between winning a marathon and building a nuclear reactor with his teeth.

Victory for style over substance, hyperbole over history, rabble-raising over reality.

A victory for Hollywood, the most dysfunctional community in the world. Victory for Streisand, Spielberg, Soros and Sarandon.

Victory for those who prefer welfare to will and interference to independence. For those who settle for group think and herd mentality rather than those who fight for individual initiative and the right to be out of step with meager political fashion.

Victory for a man who is no friend of freedom. He and his people have already stated that media has to be controlled so as to be balanced, without realizing the extraordinary irony within that statement. Like most liberal zealots, the Obama worshippers constantly speak of Fox and Limbaugh, when the vast bulk of television stations and newspapers are drastically liberal and anti-conservative. Senior Democrat Chuck Schumer said that just as pornography should be censored, so should talk radio. In other words, one of the few free and open means of popular expression may well be cornered and beaten by bullies who even in triumph cannot tolerate any criticism and opposition.

A victory for those who believe the state is better qualified to raise children than the family, for those who prefer teachers’ unions to teaching and for those who are naively convinced that if the West is sufficiently weak towards its enemies, war and terror will dissolve as quickly as the tears on the face of a leftist celebrity.

A victory for social democracy even after most of Europe has come to the painful conclusion that social democracy leads to mediocrity, failure, unemployment, inflation, higher taxes and economic stagnation. A victory for intrusive lawyers, banal sentimentalists, social extremists and urban snobs

Congratulations, America!

Mars Gets More Interesting

Mars Gets More Interesting

A report getting play recently shows that Methane is being emitted from underground sources on Mars. Since there is no evidence of volcanic activity on the red planet, it is supposed that a biological source is possible, if not probable, for this basic building block of life as we know it. As principal investigator Michael Mumma, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said, "Suppose we put a probe into a fissure at one of the release sites site and we could get measurements from some extant life form," he said. "We could then sequence the life form and see if it had the same origins as Earth life. What could be more compelling?"

Lisa Pratt of Indiana University, who was part of a team that identified a microbe two miles down in a South African gold mine that lives entirely without drawing energy from sunlight said, "Mars just got a whole lot more interesting." Pratt called the methane find "a breathtaking discovery."

On another note, I recently saw a documentary about Venus, which has the hottest weather in the solar system. It was claimed that excessive heat is present on the surface of Venus due to the atmosphere being predominately made up of carbon dioxide. At the time I just chalked this statement up to the AGW hysteria current in Western scientific circles. What I found very interesting about that in regard to the latest findings about Mars is that, along the way, it is revealed in the articles on the methane discovery on Mars that the atmosphere of Mars is also predominately carbon dioxide. See the Goddard article which states "Mars today is a world of cold and lonely deserts, apparently without life of any kind, at least on the surface. Worse still, it looks like Mars has been cold and dry for billions of years."

Mars has no globally warming greenhouse effect, yet the ambiguity is never mentioned in any of the reports I have read. Imagine that!

Another Transition Stumble, Test

Another Transition Stumble, Test

Another stumble from the messiah-in-chief involving his pick for Treasury Secretary will test the degree of Teflon there remains on our last hope to save the world. So far Obama's pick for Commerce had a commercial problem, and now his pick to assume management of our tax system has a problem with, among other things, failing to pay taxes. He may have also employed an undocumented alien as household help. In the past, illegal maids (recall Zoe Baird, BJ Clinton's first pick for attorney general), or even providing shelter to an indigent illegal immigrant (recall Linda Chavez, Bush's original nominee for Labor secretary), have sunk cabinet nominees.

Lesser men have folded under similar circumstances. But Obama is made of sterner stuff. Plus, Geithner has two aces in the hole. One, of course, is the democrats, who want so much to recreate the nation in their own image that they will do nothing to impair the lubricant in the governmental canal that Obama is sliding into. Then we have the republicans, who seem to fear the alternative to Geithner. They have no faith in Obama, and seem to believe that this nominee is the best they will get from the new president. In that they are probably right.

What seems to have been lost here is the most simple of qualifications for public office - propriety. Congress, more than the other branches, is drunk with power. I do not use the cliche loosely. They seem to be literally drunk, no longer concerned with consequences, lurching forward with no regard to law or the constitution. They vote trillions of dollars in "bailout" funds with no regard to pretending, even, that they have a way to "pay" for it. Deficits? They don't need to worry about no stinkin' deficits. One trillion? Two? What's the difference?

What good is the rule of law when the lawmakers are lawless? Geithner is only the latest in a litany of lawless moves by the people in power. It will be a litmus test for Obama. We shall see if he sticks with his nominee, or throws him away, like Richardson, Ayers, or Wright. It would be a test for Congress as well, except there is little doubt that the democrats will confirm any nominee the chosen one wants.

Dane Dahl on Islam - Why They Fight

Dane Dahl on Islam - Why They Fight

In the not too distant future, Moslem extremists hope to involve you and your loved ones, as well as a vast number of other innocent victims in a man-made catastrophe: an organized and violent calamity of biblical proportions that is based on teachings that were deliberately added to the Koran, decades after the faith was founded.

Disregarding the social, economic, and political factors that serve as underpinnings for Islamic terrorism, I will address the more fundamental issue: the religious teachings that sanction violence against non-Moslems and AGAINST ALL WOMEN. Here are seven verses from the Koran. These scriptures have been translated into modern English.

…murder, crucify, or cut off the hands and feet of non-Moslems - Chapter 5 Verse 33 - The Koran
…create terror in the hearts of non-Moslems …cut off their heads - Chapter 8 Verse 12 - The Koran
…and fight non-Moslems until Allah’s religion is the only one - Chapter 8 Verse 39 - The Koran
…of all the loot you plunder from non-Moslems, 20% belongs to Allah and to Mohammed. - Chapter 8 Verse 41- The Koran (Author’s note: Loot included kidnapped female sex-slaves.)
…Take as many as four wives from the women you are sexually attracted to - Chapter 4 Verse 3 - The Koran
…God has made men superior to women… Virtuous women are obedient. If a woman becomes disobedient, beat her. - Chapter 4 Verse 34 - The Koran
…When it comes to marriage, Allah makes it legal for you to take as wives, women whom your right hand possesses. - Chapter 33 Verse 50 - The Koran (Author’s note: This verse talks about the “loot” non-Moslems call… kidnapped female sex-slaves.)

Most people in the western world have never heard of these astonishing scriptures, but they are in the Koran … along with a relatively short list of others, just like them. This is important because not all Moslems are the same; there are two very different types. Militant Moslems view these verses as commandments from their god – a primitive desert god, from an ancient land of heat, sand and scorpions. Militant Moslems think these teachings apply to life in the Twenty-first Century and they try to use them, regardless of the suffering and mayhem they create, whereas moderate Moslems ignore such verses because they were uttered a long time ago, when the Arabian peninsula, from whence Islam came, was a wild and savage place.

Historians tell us these terrorist teachings are part of a cluster of ferocious beliefs that were deliberately added to one specific part of the formerly peaceful and tolerant Koran. These startling changes were made, decades after Islam was first founded in the Arabian city of Mecca. By the time of these changes the original (and real) prophet of Islam was dead. Thereafter the religious headquarters was uprooted and moved to the city of Medina. In its new environment, with new leadership at the helm, Islam mutated; it turned cruel and predatory.

The historical record reveals that Islam didn’t simply fall from the sky as a full-blown religion, but rather evolved from a persecuted sect of Jewish-Christians. The first Moslems lived in the city of Mecca; they were actually part of a larger group of Jesus’ followers called the Ebionites.

Ebionites were peace-loving disciples of Christ, who shared their wealth with fellow believers, and taught that a man should marry only one wife.

In fact, women were much more independent in the Ebionite Jewish-Christian days of Islam. They were more influential too. I say this because my research has determined that the first prophet of Islam may have been someone other than Mohammed: I believe the first prophet was a very special Arabian princess named Khadija the Pure. Khadija was Mohammed’s first and only wife for twenty-four years. Khadija was fifteen years older than Mohammed. She was considered to be fabulously wealthy, and she was Mohammed’s employer, before she became his wife.

Mohammed on the other hand, before he became Khadija’s employee, was an impoverished youth who had been raised as an orphan. Ultimately Mohammed worked his way up to a position as Khadija’s business manager. With time, Khadija grew fond of Mohammed. She even married him. However, Khadija was a liberated woman. In fact, Khadija was the one who initiated the marriage proposal to Mohammed! And after their wedding, she never allowed Mohammed to take other wives, or have other women in her house.

Throughout her lifetime, even though Khadija had already converted to Christianity, Mohammed’s first and only wife for twenty-four years remained an important Arabian princess in the ruling family that controlled worship in the Kabba Temple, with it’s pantheon of more than three hundred pagan gods and goddesses. Clearly, in the early days of Islam, Khadija was a person of great influence in Arabian society: and clearly Mohammed, her husband… was not.

After Khadija’s untimely death from a terrible illness, Islam was hijacked by a cartel of corrupt men, headed by Mohammed himself. The faith was abruptly relocated to the city of Medina and new beliefs were added to the Koran; at the same time, old beliefs were deleted or relegated to unimportance, and the religion was changed beyond recognition. In the end, Islam abandoned many of its Ebionite Jewish-Christian teachings. Women suffered the most: they became the focus of repression, scorn, and violence.

Today, although moderate Moslems are loath to admit these ideas, and many of them are terrified to voice criticism of their militant Islamic brothers, because of fear that violence will come to them and their families, the fact remains that these added teachings are not the original beliefs of Islam; they are amendments: They are the terrorist teachings of Islam.

In the near future, militant Moslems hope to unleash a Jihad: a Moslem holy war upon the non-Moslem world; not only upon Israel, the United States and Western Europe, but also throughout parts of Asia, including India and maybe even China, and Japan. Because the terrorist teachings of Islam sanction treaty breaking, deception, and war, as well as looting, murder, kidnapping, terrorism, and human slavery (including sexual slavery), so long as these crimes are directed against non-Moslems, there is no limit to the things these fanatics can do. But the scariest part: Militant Moslems will do everything… in the name of their primitive desert god.

Once victory is attained in this violent holy war, these fanatics believe Allah will bless them with harems of kidnapped sex slaves taken from destroyed cities and nations, as well as enormous fortunes of loot plundered from the non-Moslem world. They believe this because of the terrorist teachings that were added to the Koran. These terrorist teachings even say ransoms paid to Moslem terrorists, to redeem stolen property (like hijacked oil tankers and cargo ships) as well as kidnapped men, women, and children, are part of the Islamic loot these vicious criminals are entitled to receive.

These same terrorist teachings even allow Moslem men to force their kidnapped female sex slaves to marry them in Moslem wedding ceremonies, and bear children for them: whether the women want to or not. Terrorist Moslem teachings mandate only two requirements: The women must come from Christian or Jewish backgrounds, and secondly, if the unfortunate women resist, these same terrorist teachings say the Moslem husbands must beat them, and imprison them in their own homes.

If the Moslem fanatics die while committing these crimes against humanity, as an eternal reward for their cruel deeds Islamic extremists believe their fierce desert god will admit them to paradise and bless them with luxurious palaces filled with riches and populated by seventy-two virgin brides, who are exquisitely beautiful, yet modest enough to struggle to control their unbridled lust to have sexual intercourse with a dead Moslem terrorist.

With these stinging indictments against terrorist Islamic doctrines entered into the record, it is important to remember that the majority of Moslems are moderate, decent people who love God and practice acts of charity and kindness to their neighbors, both Moslem and non-Moslem. Such moderate Moslems recognize these violent teachings as obsolete and out of place in the Twenty-first Century. In the author’s opinion, in spite of enormous cultural and ideological differences that exist between the non-Moslem world and the followers of Islam, it is with this moderate Moslem majority that any long-term resolution to the Islamic terrorism issue will ultimately be negotiated.

However, given the massive population increases taking place in the Moslem world, at a time when poverty, chaos, criminality, and religious fanaticism are burgeoning, the numbers of Moslems worldwide who declare themselves militant is increasing; the influence their growing networks of terror cells exert on Islamic governments throughout the world has reached crisis levels. Because of the terrorist teachings of Islam, modern civilization faces a nightmarish future; the attacks on Mumbai, India, the World Trade Center in New York, and the subway bombings in Spain and London are simply previews of things to come. In this ferocious Jihad, nuclear and biological weapons are almost certain to come into play.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill: The road before us will be long and dangerous and terrifying; the United States and Europe and Asia must be resolute… and take courage. We must work together to neutralize militant Islamic movements… and if necessary… wage war against the governments that sustain them. At the same time, the non-Moslem world must also nurture moderate Islamic states and establish strong alliances with them. The very survival of our civilization depends on it.

Are you are interested in learning more about an array of Islamic topics including:
1. Who are The Seventy-two Virgins of Islam and how did they become part of militant Moslem dogma?
2. What role did the Ebionites and Khadija the Pure play, in founding the original (peaceful) religion of Islam?
3. What role does militant Islam play in modern human slavery?

Visit The Moslem Institute website: TheMoslemInstitute.com

Dane Dahl
Author and Historian