Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Subsidizing the continuating of the privatized welfare state is just about the worst thing we can do, on health care, or things like pensions, etc.
Your logical frame for discussion of health care benefits is misleading, and incorrect I think. We exempt health care benefits from taxation, a relic of the WWII era labor unrest of wage-price problems, where companies could deal with wage restraints by creating these fringe benefits, as they came to be called. They're still compensation, no matter what way you slice it. There is a cash value to it that is essentially deferred or foregone income. We are not looking at potential taxation of health care benefits as a new tax, but instead the ending of an exemption.
Want to make health care work? Tax whatever companies are paying in health care benefits and watch them clamor for a publicly-funded program real quick.
Cost of Health Care X Rising Cost of Health Care +Taxation of Health Care = Companies Loving Universal, Single Payer Health Care Program.
It turns out the Gordon Brown's party lost 300 local council seats in Labour's worst electoral blowout in thirty years.
But its not just Labour Party corruption in Britain that explains the wipeout. Social Democrat parties in Europe are facing rejection by voters. And this is counterintuitive. Marxist scholars have argued that the current economic crisis makes socialist policies more vital than ever. But perhaps not, actually. Take a look at today's Wall Street Journal, "Across Europe, Left-Leaning Parties See Clout Faltering":
The economic recession should have meant easy votes for Europe's left-wing movements, longtime critics of unchecked capitalism.
Yet as Europe goes to the polls, left-leaning parties across the continent are looking likely to falter. That's true both for those in government, such as in the U.K. and Spain, and in the opposition -- such as France, Germany and Italy.
France's Socialist Party is trying hard to rally voters ahead of Sunday's European parliamentary elections. "Let's unite with all the French who contest free market, unfair policies that aim at deregulating everything," party leader Martine Aubry urged at a pre-election rally.
Yet less than 20% of voters say they plan to cast their ballot for the Socialist Party, according to recent surveys. That would be a weak performance considering France's main opposition party got 29% of the votes in the last European parliamentary elections.
In Germany, the Social Democrats are expected to get only around 26% on Sunday, consistent with their low opinion-poll ratings ahead of Germany's national elections in September. Italy's center-left Partito Democratico is expected to get a similar percentage.
One reason is that as Europe tipped into recession, the right moved left -- appropriating some of the left's long-standing economic policies, including nationalizations and bailouts.
French conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, helped recapitalize French banks, earmarked six billion euros for the auto sector and lashed out at "rascal bosses" with huge pay packages.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has planted her conservative camp firmly in the political center. Ms. Merkel has largely given up her former program of market-oriented reforms, and has gradually approved various kinds of state intervention to protect workers during the current recession, from bailing out carmaker Opel to subsidizing payrolls at companies whose export orders have collapsed.
Even before that, right-wing parties across the continent began offering more pragmatic approaches to policy than they had traditionally done. In the past decade, conservative parties introduced competition or privatized some public services in France, Germany and Italy -- but they refrained from dismantling the health-care and public transport services cherished by voters.
In the past, there was a clear fault line between Europe's left-wing and right-wing parties. The left called for more social welfare programs and public spending. The right wanted the state not to interfere in market forces.
The Washington Postreports that dilation-and-extraction fetal-termination procedures (late-term abortions) have come under increased scrutiny following the death of George Tiller. The Wikipedia entry, clinical as it may be, provides a grisly description of the operation: "Forceps are inserted into the uterus through the vagina and used to separate the fetus into pieces, which are removed one at a time." I truly shudder at the thought.
The Washington Post has an article on late-term abortions which basically allows Warren Hern, Leroy Carhart and the National Abortion Federation's Vicky Saporta to make a number of unsubstantiated claims about the women who come to them for post-viability abortions and the only response is a couple of short quotes from Operation Rescue.
Why couldn't the Post find a pro-life doctor who specializes in helping women who want to carry their children with fetal anomalies to term?
The author, Dana, is really irked by all the focus on late-term abortions. So, with reference to the chart above, she provides this analysis:
I have little to say on the murder of Dr. Tiller than hasn’t been covered adequately elsewhere (e.g.). But two persistent points have been getting on my nerves regarding late-term abortion in which Dr. Tiller had specialized. So let’s have some data.
1) The focus on late-term abortion, especially the straw-fetus of frivolous late-term abortion. The typical discussion runs as follows: a very serious person argues that while he’s personally comfortable with first trimester abortion, the thought of a woman wandering in and deciding that she doesn’t want her baby in week 35 of a pregnancy is horrifying. (e.g., makes him want to puke.) And let’s accept for the sake of argument that it is horrifying.* What can the pro-choice advocate say?
First, that late-term abortions are really, really rare. Here’s a chart from the Guttmacher Institute ....
The full document is here. The chart shows percentage of abortions by week of gestation. Note that the vast majority are in the first trimester, and over half are before 9 weeks. (The answer to “Abortion stops a beating heart” should be “Well, about that…”; the heart isn’t beating before five weeks.)
But let’s look at the late-term abortions. Only 1.1% are after more than 21 weeks. 21 weeks is about two weeks shy of the lower-end of viability. 21 weeks is still in the second trimester. We can safely assume that the number of abortions in the third trimester is even smaller, especially because abortion after 24 weeks is generally not permitted by law except in cases of danger to the health of the mother and the fetus.
Here's the link. If you're up to it, keep reading Dana's (morally bankrupt) justification for baby killing.
The basic point for Dana is that (1) dilation and extraction is "exceedingly" rare, and (2) the procedure, "We can safely assume," is necessitated by "fetal abnormalities," with Down Syndrome mentioned as the primary example.
Well, I doubt Dana's been to The Upside of Downs homepage. Aborting a Downs child is destroying a potential life. And for what? Choice? Convenience?
But more than that, let's "safely assume" that all of these abortions were purported "fetal abnormalities," or were deemed medically necessary to "save" the life of the mother.
Hello? The numbers are still staggering!
A 2008 report cited 1.2 million pregnancies that were aborted in 2005. According to the chart above, 1.1 percent of pregnancies were terminated after 24 weeks. As Dana acknowledges, that would leave a total of roughly 13,000 potential children destroyed in the maw of the pro-choice killing machine.
And the brutal truth is that untold numbers of late-term abortions, many performed by George Tiller himself, are simply "second-thought" terminations. Women have decided past the second trimester that they don't want the baby. What to do? Look up Tiller the Killer, of course.
So, back to Dana's query, "What can the pro-choice advocate say?"
They can't say anything. Choose abortion and you're going to kill a baby, plain and simple. Maybe there's some extreme case for a Solomonic judgment to save the life of the mother. And I don't think anyone, any decent, moral person, would sleep well even contemplating such a choice. The fact is that fetal brain development begins within 14 days of conception. That is, the miracle of life begins immediately. The relative moral importance of the stage of the pregnancy is really a matter of leftist propaganda. See, for example, "Miracle of Life: The Action-Packed Days of Unborn Babies." The ugly fact is that the pro-choice movement is an extremist death cult. The "rights" of women trump moral considerations on the beauty of life. Leftists just want to have their "Happy Abortion Stories." (Or, "they want to kill that baby.")
What's most sickening, ultimately, is how the left has exploited the killing of George Tiller. Perhaps in this man's death, radical leftists can revive a movement that has continued to lose public support in recent years.
So, what's happening on the radical left? How are the postmodernists framing President Hussein Obama's speech to the Muslim world. Well, a good start can be found in Rachel Maddow's positively orgasmic response to the president's speech:
So, let's take a look around the leftosphere and the liberal media for some of the postmodern commentary.
With the Bush Administration, everything always was about them. I dimly remember a news story (if you can find this and link to it, I’d be grateful) in which Condi Rice was in the Mideast, meeting with representatives of several Mideastern countries. She dictated to them what the United States expected from them, adding something to the effect of “this is what we want for you.” Someone spoke up and countered, “What about what we want for ourselves?”
Well, there you have it: The U.S. can't be expected to have its own preconditions for peace in the Middle East. And of course, it's "the Bush administration" who's the bad guy!
Bush took dishonesty in the Middle East to hallucinatory extremes, we had not been honest brokers, or willing to speak the truth, for some time before he came on the scene.
For the past 8 years, our bad attitude made us really unpopular. Unappeasable, we became like the schoolyard bully -- you give him your lunch money and he still beat you up. President Obama is out to change this reputation.
But let's check around further:
* Carl at The Reaction is blinded by "Obama's Defining Moment": "Wow. I mean, wow. He invokes among the most holy of passages written in the Koran and challenges the Muslim world to live up to it."
It’s crowded out there in the political blogosphere -- and there are as many ways to judge influence as there bloggers who stand ready to judge politicians.
But here’s an interesting tool I recently came across: From Wikio.com, it’s a ranking of political blogs -- emanating from everywhere from living rooms, mainstream media organizations, and the White House.
The rankings are compiled based on links from other blogs -- with extra weight given to blogs that rank higher via Wikio’s formulas, and based on how recently an item is published. Blog rolls aren’t taken into account, so only fresh postings impact the rankings. Wikio: About Us
One of the intriguing aspects of this list is that it puts everyone in the same pot. The list has mainstream media blogs -- from ABC News, CNN, The New York Times, and others -- alongside well-known partisan bloggers -- Michelle Malkin, FireDogLake -- and even government-run bloggers, like WhiteHouse.gov’s.
President Obama on Friday toured a former Nazi concentration camp that his great-uncle helped liberate, accompanied by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, perhaps the camp's most famous prisoner.
U.S. President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Buchenwald concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel and International Buchenwald Committee President Bertrand Herz walk through the former Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. Obama is visiting the site after his stop in Cairo, where in his speech to the Muslim world he made an appeal against Holocaust denial.
Worried by their prospects in the House, Democrats postponed final action on a nearly $100 billion wartime spending bill until next week so as to buy more time for talks among lawmakers and the return of President Barack Obama from overseas.
The administration remains confident it can navigate between the conflicting pressures from the right and left. But for this confident young White House, which so prides itself on juggling many balls at once, the delay is a humbling reminder of just how complex the low-profile appropriations process can be.
Obama himself faces growing criticism for piling on new requests and not doing more to support his demands. Privately, officials now concede that the budget calendar put them at a disadvantage, forcing the new administration to submit its funding requests in April, even before its policies could be fully formed.
This was most embarrassingly true in the case of Obama’s plan to close the Guantanamo detention center. But in a single stroke, the same appropriations bill affects wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new alliance with Pakistan, the threat of pandemic flu, and complex civil liberties issues, such as whether the public should have access to damaging photos of post-Sept. 11 detainees held by the U.S. military.
As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama left some fuzzy edges to his biography. He affirmed strong support for Israel but implied a strong empathy for Palestinians. His personal story played up his introduction to the black church, leaving his father's Islamic roots in the shadows.
It was a narrative designed to ease any voter concern about Obama's background and counter false Internet rumors that he was a Muslim.
But now, with Thursday's speech in Cairo, Obama is laying bare more of his sympathies and inclinations in the volatile area of Middle East politics.
Obama spoke, for example, of Palestinian "resistance" -- a word that can cast Israel as an illegitimate occupier. He drew parallels between Palestinians and the struggles of black Americans in slavery and of black South Africans during apartheid. Both references made some allies of Israel uneasy.
Moreover, in his defense of Israel's legitimacy, Obama cited the Holocaust and centuries of anti-Semitism, but not the belief of some Jews that their claim to the land is rooted in the Bible and reaches back thousands of years.
A close examination of the speech underscored how Obama, four months into his presidency and five years after stepping onto the national stage, is still introducing himself - and what he stands for - to Americans and the world.
Actually, the Times is being way too objective here.
From an Israeli perspective, Pres. Barack Obama’s speech today in Cairo was deeply disturbing. Both rhetorically and programmatically, Obama’s speech was a renunciation of America’s strategic alliance with Israel ....
The only silver lining for Israelis from the president’s speech in Cairo and his general positions on the Middle East is that Obama has overplayed his hand. Far from bending to his will, a large majority of Israelis perceives Obama as a hostile force and has rallied in support of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu against the administration. This public support gives Netanyahu the maneuver room he needs to take the actions that Israel needs to take to defend against the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran and to assert its national rights and to defend itself against Palestinian terrorists and other Arab and non-Arab anti-Semites who wish it ill.
Read Glick's entire piece, here. More analysis at Memeorandum.
The Weather Underground, a leftist terrorist group from the 1970s, played a bit role in last fall’s presidential election through the association of unrepentant former Weatherman Bill Ayers with his fellow Chicagoan, Barack Obama. That kind of connection would have come as no surprise in Germany, where the Weather Underground’s far more deadly counterpart, the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, continues to cast a shadow over the country’s politics.
In 1985, German journalist Stefan Aust published the definitive book on the RAF, The Baader-Meinhof Complex. His book has since been turned into a successful feature film of the same name, which was nominated last year for a foreign-language Oscar and is slated for U.S. release this summer. Aust, a former editor of Der Spiegel, has now reissued his earlier work, changing the title to Baader-Meinhof and updating it with information that has come to light since the end of the RAF’s reign of terror in West Germany 30 years ago. The new edition deserves attention, and not just because Anthea Bell’s deft translation preserves the dynamic, detail-rich prose that made Aust’s original read like a real-life thriller. Dense with insights into the psychology of terrorism, this history of West Germany’s struggle against RAF radicals also serves as a cautionary tale for the West in its war against the modern threat of jihadist terror.
I spent this rainy afternoon at Princeton’s Mudd archives ... reading Sonia Sotomayor’s 1976 senior thesis, La Historia CÃclica de Puerto Rico: The Impact of the Life of Luis Muñoz MarÃn on the Political and Economic History of Puerto Rico, 1930-1975.
Since I was born and raised in Puerto Rico and I am very familiar with the island’s politics in the 1970s, I thought it would be interesting to read what she had to say.
This unusual post comes courtesy of the Google ads at Three Beers Later.
Who knew that the rage in dating services is now young hotties seeking "established men" as "successful and generous benefactors to fulfill their lifestlyle needs"?
The San Francisco city bureaucracy provides a case study in how regulation kills the entreprenuerial economy. And in the case of Larry Moore, who's been homeless for six years, and hasn't had a drink of booze in 11 months, the city's policy is practically criminal:
Larry Moore wears a tie as he shines shoes at the corner of New Montgomery and Market.
He sleeps under a bridge, washes in a public bathroom and was panhandling for booze money 11 months ago, but now Larry Moore is the best-dressed shoeshine man in the city. When he gets up from his cardboard mattress, he puts on a coat and tie. It's a reminder of how he has turned things around.
In fact, until last week it looked like Moore was going to have saved enough money to rent a room and get off the street for the first time in six years. But then, in a breathtakingly clueless move, an official for the Department of Public Works told Moore that he has to fork over the money he saved for his first month's rent to purchase a $491 sidewalk vendor permit.
"I had $573 ready to go," Moore said, who needs $600 for the rent. "This tore that up. But I've been homeless for six years. Another six weeks isn't going to kill me."
The bureaucrat told Moore that she found out about his business after reading about his success in this paper.
Along Market Street, Moore's supporters are indignant. Nothing happens when mentally ill men wander the street talking to themselves and drunkards pee in the alleys. Yet Moore creates a little business out of thin air, builds up a client base, and the city takes nearly every penny he's earned.
Christine Falvey, spokeswoman for Public Works, said the department's contact with Moore was meant to be "educational."
"We certainly don't want to hamper anyone's ability to make a living," Falvey said. "Our education efforts are actually meant to support that effort by making our streets an enjoyable place for people to visit."
That is unlikely to mollify Moore's clients.
"Nothing like kicking someone when they are down," ranted attorney Loren Lopin, one of Moore's clients who donated $100 to help him get housing. "I am pissed."
Here's Liz Cheney on President Obama's speech to the Muslim world. In 2005, Ms. Cheney was appointed Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State For Near Eastern Affairs for the George W. Bush administration. And she has been closely identified with neoconservative foreign policy:
I want to give a special shout out to Melanie Phillips, one of my favorite neocons, and her post, "Obama in Cairo":
So in conclusion, yes, there was some positive stuff in this speech – but it was outweighed by the United States President's shocking historical misrepresentations, gross ignorance, disgusting moral equivalence between aggressors and their victims, and disturbing sanitising of Islamist supremacism.
In short, deeply troubling.
I don't see anything yet from Jules Crittenden, Charles Krauthammer, or William Kristol.
Interestingly, Captian Ed thought the speech was "suprisinglygood."
But for conclusive proof that Obama bombed with the neoconservative right, check Dan Frookim at the Washington Post, "Obama's Post-Neocon Appeal to Islam."
Obama says he came to Cairo to tell the truth. But he uttered not a word of that. Instead, among all the bromides and lofty sentiments, he issued but one concrete declaration of new American policy: "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements," thus reinforcing the myth that Palestinian misery and statelessness are the fault of Israel and the settlements.
**********
UPDATE II: See also the lead editorial at tomorrow's Wall Street Journal, "Barack Hussein Bush."
According to a well-informed source, Carlos Leon “Corey” Bledsoe, who changed his name to Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad after he converted to Islam, is from Memphis, Tennessee. He was a student at Tennessee State University, where he majored in business. After becoming a Muslim in 2004 at the age of 19, he quit college and embarked upon a path that ultimately led him to Yemen, where another American convert to Islam, John Walker Lindh, learned Arabic and Islam before moving on to Afghanistan, where he fought alongside the Taliban and Al-Qaeda against American troops before his capture in 2002.
Muhammad went to Yemen hoping to study with a jihadist imam, Yahya Hajoori. It is not clear at this point whether he actually studied directly with Hajoori, or with one of his students. Interestingly enough, he apparently traveled to Yemen on a Somali passport, and was jailed for a time in Yemen for doing so. In light of the recent involvement of Somali immigrants to the United States in the jihad in Somalia, it is significant that Muhammad would have this passport. Apparently this and more about Muhammad did not escape the notice of American law enforcement officials: when he returned to the U.S. from Yemen, the Joint Terrorism Task Force began to investigate him. Unfortunately, he appears to have been able to stay at least one step ahead of investigators.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media and the U.S. government have given this murder very little attention. After the murder of abortionist George Tiller last week, Barack Obama expressed his sorrow and indignation, and Attorney General Eric Holder ordered U.S. Marshals to protect abortion clinic. But so far Obama has said nothing about the murder of Private William Long, and no one has made any move to protect military recruitment centers. And NBC was sadly typical in breezing past Muhammad’s motive for committing this murder, and failing to mention his religion at all. During coverage of the murder on the Today show last Tuesday, NBC’s Ann Curry said nothing about the jihad doctrine or about Muhammad’s religion at all, failed to mention his trip to Yemen, and explained the murders by saying only that Muhammad was “upset with the military.” She acknowledged that he had “political and religious motives,” but didn’t mention what his religion was – nor did she give his name. By contrast, according to Newsbusters, “both ABC and CBS mentioned the conversion and the Yemen trip.”
Some analysts have opined that Muhammad was committing what has been described as “sudden jihad syndrome” – that is, something made him snap, and his murder was unpremeditated. However, Fox News reported Tuesday night that Muhammad was not acting alone. His act was part of a larger jihad plot to attack military personnel.
This was certainly not be the first act of jihad violence on American soil, or anything approaching the most deadly. But given the inadequacies of the response of the government and the mainstream media, it will almost certainly not be the last.
Actor David Carradine has died. The BBC has the full report, "Kung Fu Star Carradine Found Dead." "Kung Fu" aired from 1972–1975. My parents often let me and my sisters stay up to watch the show. It was always a special occasion. I loved that program. It was so idealistic, and so different from traditional Western folklore. I especially liked David Carradine himself. He seemed to really embody the spirit of peace that was found in Kwai Chang Caine."
Skinny men have new reason to celebrate. Well, kind of. Beefcakes may be able to attract women by rippling their muscles, but the downside of all that brawn is a poor immune system and an increased appetite, a new study finds.
Such evolutionary costs could explain why males of our species do not all look like He-Man, according to William Lassek, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who led the new study. "In some respects I was surprised at how big the costs were… something I hadn't anticipated," he says.
Many other studies have shown that women tend to prefer more toned men, and muscle-bound men tend to have more sexual partners than slender men, when other factors are controlled for.
Previous research has also suggested that musculature comes with a cost. Testosterone, a hormone that promotes secondary muscle growth, suppresses the immune system of all animals, including people.
Yet no one had examined both the positives and negatives of big muscles in a single population, says Lassek, who analysed data from more than 5000 men, aged 18 to 49, who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, between 1988 and 1994.
The beefier the man – measured by total fat-free mass, or arm and leg muscle mass – the more sexual partners he had, Lassek confirmed. The study also showed that more muscled men tended to lose their virginity at a younger age, compared to skinny men.
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