op ed review 2/24
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
The recession has caused new retirees to be worse off
financially than their parents when they finally leave the workforce. It is the
first time since the Depression in the 1930s that America´s elderly have less
to look forward to than earlier generations.
Universal Orlando
plans to stop offering medical insurance to part-time employees beginning next
year, a move the resort says has been forced by Obamacare.
“Here´s a trend you´ll be reading more about: part-time
"job sharing," across different businesses. It´s already happening
across the country at fast-food restaurants, as employers try to avoid being
punished by Obamacare…..a local McDonalds has hired employees to operate the
cash register or flip burgers for 20 hours a week and then the workers head to
the nearby Burger King to log another 20 hours..”
“You knew it was coming. Scientific American — which often
pushes cultural agendas as much as scientific ideas — has an article informing
us that polyamorous people have so much to teach the rest of us about life.”
The Obama administration outlined its argument on Friday why
the U.S. Supreme Court should strike down a federal law that defines marriage
as between a man and woman.
President Obama called Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at
approximately 10 p.m. on the night of the terrorist attacks on the U.S.
facilities in Benghazi…That was more than six hours after the attacks started…..about
the same time that Clinton first released a statement linking the attacks to
“inflammatory material posted on the Internet..”
Al Gore reached a new low at the Clinton Presidential Center
in Little Rock this week as he compared the U.S. building
the Keystone pipeline to a junkie shooting up drugs. “Gore then told the
audience that his speech was sponsored by the oil emirate of Qatar.”
“US tire boss mocks ‘crazy’ French unions.” The head of US tire manufacturer Titan
International told the French government Wednesday that his firm will not take
over a loss-making Goodyear factory because the unions there are “crazy” and
its employees “only work three hours a day”. “How stupid do you think we are?”
“They get one hour for breaks and lunch, they talk for three and they work for
three. I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me
that’s the French way!”
NBC and MSNBC announced that they hired President Obama´s
senior strategist David Axelrod as a "senior political analyst" to
appear exclusively on their networks.
Senator Marco Rubio recovers from the “catastrophic gaffe”. “Sweating under the lights in a television
studio, the darling of the party right suddenly bent down and reached over
awkwardly to grab a bottle of water and take a desperate swig.” But Rubio has now shown a canny political
instinct in handling the crisis……After the speech was over he tweeted out a
picture of the water bottle and then noted that he had attracted thousands of
new followers…He poked fun at himself in interviews and even used the incident
as a fundraising tool, offering to sell water bottles branded with his name for
$25. "Send the liberal detractors a message that not only does Marco Rubio
inspire you … he hydrates you too."
A potentially explosive report has linked the resignation of
Pope Benedict XVI to the discovery of a network of gay prelates in the Vatican, some
of whom – the report said – were being blackmailed by outsiders.
Firearms owners and gun rights advocates are heading to
local coffee shops to celebrate
“Gun Owners Support Starbucks Day.”
Teddy Turner wants Republican voters in South Carolina to know that it was actress
Jane Fonda who turned his father, billionaire CNN founder Ted Turner, into a
tree-hugging liberal. Turner, a 49-year-old high school economics teacher in Charleston, is currently
running on a conservative platform for South Carolina´s 1st Congressional
District.
_____________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Thomas Sowell
2/15
A nation's choice between spending on military defense and
spending on civilian goods has often been posed as "guns versus
butter." But understanding the choices of many nations' political leaders
might be helped by examining the contrast between their runaway spending on
pensions while skimping on military defense.
Huge pensions for retired government workers can be found
from small municipalities to national governments on both sides of the Atlantic. There is a reason. For elected officials,
pensions are virtually the ideal thing to spend money on, politically speaking.
Many kinds of spending of the taxpayers' money win votes from the recipients.
But raising taxes to pay for this spending loses votes from the taxpayers.
Pensions offer a way out of this dilemma for politicians. Creating pensions
that offer generous retirement benefits wins votes in the present by promising
spending in the future. Promises cost nothing in the short run — and elections
are held in the short run, long before the pensions are due.
By contrast, private insurance companies that sell annuities
are forced by law to set aside enough assets to cover the cost of the annuities
they have promised to pay. But nobody can force the government to do that — and
most governments do not. This means that it is only a matter of time before
pensions are due to be paid and there is not enough money set aside to pay for
them. This applies to Social Security and other government pensions here, as
well as to all sorts of pensions in other countries overseas.
Eventually, the truth will come out that there is just not
enough money in the till to pay what retirees were promised. But eventually can
be a long time. A politician can win quite a few elections between now and
eventually — and be living in comfortable retirement by the time it is somebody
else's problem to cope with the impossibility of paying retirees the pensions
they were promised. Inflating the currency and paying pensions in dollars that
won't buy as much is just one of the ways for the government to seem to be
keeping its promises, while in fact welshing on the deal.
The politics of military spending are just the opposite of
the politics of pensions. In the short run, politicians can always cut military
spending without any immediate harm being visible, however catastrophic the
consequences may turn out to be down the road. Despite the huge increase in
government spending on domestic programs during Franklin D. Roosevelt's
administration in the 1930s, FDR cut back on military spending. On the eve of
the Second World War, the United States
had the 16th largest army in the world, right behind Portugal. Even this small military
force was so inadequately supplied with equipment that its training was
skimped. American soldiers went on maneuvers using trucks with "tank"
painted on their sides, since there were not enough real tanks to go around.
American warplanes were not updated to match the latest
warplanes of Nazi Germany or imperial Japan. After World War II broke
out, American soldiers stationed in the Philippines were fighting for their
lives using rifles left over from the Spanish-American war, decades earlier.
The hand grenades they threw at the Japanese invaders were so old that they
often failed to explode. At the battle of Midway, of 82 Americans who flew into
combat in obsolete torpedo planes, only 12 returned alive. In Europe,
our best tanks were never as good as the Germans' best tanks, which destroyed
several times as many American tanks as the Germans lost in tank battles.
Fortunately, the quality of American warplanes eventually
caught up with and surpassed the best that the Germans and Japanese had. But a
lot of American pilots lost their lives needlessly in outdated planes before
that happened.
These were among the many prices paid for skimping on
military spending in the years leading up to World War II. But, politically,
the path of least resistance is to cut military spending in the short run and
let the long run take care of itself. In a nuclear age, we may not have time to
recover from our short-sighted policies, as we did in World War II.
_____________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“Here's what we know: The Congress
and the President are incapable of cutting anything from any program, ever. If
the only way to reduce spending is by instituting automatic cuts, then I am for
allowing the sequester to take effect and see what happens."
-Rich Galen
"[T]he emotional heart of the State of the Union comprised three issues: immigration reform, climate
change and gun control. ... How can it be springtime for liberalism when
liberalism's top priorities aren't the public's top priorities? The remainder
of Obama's agenda was fairly pathetic boilerplate. Hike the minimum wage!
Redesign America's
schools! Manufacturing hubs! Make-work programs! This is supposed to be
liberalism reborn? Lame ideas cribbed from a playbook with 60 years of dust on
it? Slogans hatched by pols who needed a few more nouns to round out Obama's
sentences? Legislative initiatives that will cost Democrats seats in 2014 and
beyond? Obama's State of the Union had the lowest ratings in 13 years for a
reason -- and it's not that America
is excited for a new golden age of liberalism. The momentum Obama feels is the
pull of gravity, as he starts his fall."
-Jonah Goldberg
__________________________________________________________________________
BOOKS, FILM
“Zero Dark Thirty,” the best- reviewed film of 2012, has
probably lost out on an Oscar because of a political backlash in left-leaning Hollywood over its
depiction of torture in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.
"Argo" claims to be a broadly accurate retelling
of real events in the Iranian hostage crisis. But it´s historic revisionism
masquerading as revelation. And that revisionism, carried out by Democrat
activists Ben Affleck and co-producer George Clooney, conveniently makes the
Democrat laughingstock of the crisis, former President Carter, look good. The
more we learn about the project, the more it smells like a bad Hollywood plot to rehab Carter´s legacy as one of the
worst presidents in history. It turns out that Carter quietly collaborated on the
film…..
_________________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
What kind of person would want to do harm to America? Well,
besides Islamists there are people that believe that "The main obstacle to
a stable and just world order is the United States." That quote is
from George Soros, who is using his billions to create a global "open
society" (more correctly called a global Marxist police state). But Soros
is just one of many who hold the same negative beliefs about America…..These
utopianists, more commonly known today as progressives, who have been active in
both of our two major political parties, are really just renamed Marxists who
seek to weaken America in every possible way in order to hasten its collapse,
and some of them have infiltrated our government at the highest levels.
Environmental groups gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Sunday and marched on the White House for a climate change rally largely aimed
at pressuring President Obama to reject the Keystone XL oil sands
pipeline. They picked a day when the
wind chill in Wash DC was 16F.
The liberal media has mounted a campaign to destroy Sen. Ted
Cruz (R-Texas). He’s a high priority target because he goes against everything
the media has said about the Tea Party, and conservatism in general. For all
the talk about the Tea Party’s anti-intellectualism, Cruz received his B.A. at Princeton University,
and his Juris Doctor at Harvard
University. He also
clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist. As George Will wrote back in June
of 2011, “By the time Ted Cruz was 13, he was winning speech contests sponsored
by a Houston free-enterprise group that gave contestants assigned readings by
Frederic Bastiat, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. In his early teens he
traveled around Texas
and out of state giving speeches. At Princeton,
he finished first in the 1992 U.S. National Debate Championship and North
American Debate Championship….”
Apparently, the Washington Post and New York Times don’t
like the idea of a non-white U.S. Senator acting all uppity. It’s fine for the lily-white Elizabeth Warren
to immediately come out guns blazing, but over the past couple of days both
news outlets ripped into in Texas Senator Ted Cruz for not knowing his place.
´I am a Socialist,´ Hitler told Otto Strasser in 1930, ´and
a very different kind of Socialist from your rich friend, Count Reventlow´. No
one at the time would have regarded it as a controversial statement. The Nazis could
hardly have been more open in their socialism, describing themselves with the
same terminology as our own SWP….Almost everyone in those days accepted that
fascism had emerged from the revolutionary Left.
____________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
The case for Carson: The buzz surrounding Dr. Ben Carson is loud
and growing...but is it merited? (Short answer, yes!)
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey delivered the opening keynote
address for the International Students for Liberty Conference this weekend.
Mackey stressed that capitalism has the power to eradicate poverty in the next
century, expressed concern over capitalism’s “branding problem”, and maintained
that “self-interest” alone is an insufficient moral foundation for the system.
“Business Has Been Hated by the
Intellectuals and Elites for All Time”
VDH: There are not
just the rich and poor any more, but now the “good rich” (e.g., athletes,
rappers, Hollywood stars, Silicon Valley
grandees, Democratic senators, liberal philanthropists, etc.) and the “bad
rich” (e.g., oil companies, CEOs, doctors, the Koch brothers, etc.). The
correct-thinking nomenklatura and the dutiful apparat versus the kulaks and
enemies of the people. The president in his State of the Union damns the
“billionaires with high-powered accountants,” as a friendly Facebook pays no
state or federal taxes, as a George Soros walks away with $1.2B in speculation
profits (in three months, no less!) by betting against the Japanese yen, and as
Jesse Jackson, Jr. gets caught stealing from a campaign fund to buy a $43,000
Rolex. I thought Soros at his age knew when he had made enough money? We shrug
at all this. A president who thunders to the nation that we must be on guard
against the “well-off and well-connected” heads south to Palm Beach to meet his
$1,000-an-hour golf pro, while Michelle and the family go west to hit the
slopes at Aspen, where no one accepts that they’ve reached a point where
they’ve made enough money, or that there was any time when it was not good to
profit. Something strange has insidiously happened to the old notion of
hypocrisy. Does it even exist any longer?
___________________________________________________________________________
CONSERVATIVE STRATEGY
These days, Republican political professionals seem
to feel rather like Mikhail Gorbachev did in 1983 when he toured farms in Canada two years before he would become premier
of the Soviet Union. Stunned by how productive
a certain agribusiness was, Gorbachev asked how many farmhands had brought in
the crop. “None,” came the answer; the farm was entirely mechanized. From this one conversation, Gorbachev
instantly understood the depths of the Soviet crisis and the desperate need for
a new approach. For Republicans, the November 2012 election proved their
technical inferiority in exactly the same way — it all came home to them in one
day, Nov. 6, as President Obama’s campaign demonstrated a degree of
technological superiority above the GOP’s efforts as shocking in its way as the
mechanized agribusiness was to the hidebound ways of Soviet agriculture.
“Karl Rove Dismisses Tea Party Backlash: We Need ‘Fewer
Christine O’Donnells And More Rand Pauls’”
"I am unalterably opposed to a bunch of billionaires
financing a boss to pick candidates in 50 states. This is the opposite of the
Republican tradition of freedom and grassroots small town conservatism. No one
person is smart enough nor do they have the moral right to buy nominations
across the country. That is the system of Tammany Hall and the Chicago machine. It should
be repugnant to every conservative and every Republican."
-Newt Gingrich, commenting on Karl Rove's new PAC
“There is in fact an
argument for close examination of potential candidates to avoid another Akin --
that is, a candidate selected and supported by liberal Democrats for the sole
purpose of undercutting the GOP. But that's not how Rove chose to put it. With
his customary combination of perspicacity and class, he instead portrayed
himself as the last man on the establishment ramparts, defending traditional
blue-blazer Republicanism from the unwashed hordes in their NASCAR ballcaps.
With his rhetoric, his posturing, and his choice of a media platform (that
conservative stalwart the New York Times), Rove could not have done
more to provoke the Republican rank and file. A political technician of good
will would have reached out to the tea parties, called a conference, gone over
the problem, and presented alternative solutions acceptable to all sides of the
conservative coalition. Rove did none of those things in favor of something on
the order of a nuclear first strike carried out with the help of left-wing
media allies. Unfortunately for him, most of his missiles seem to have exploded
in their silos.
Welcome to the scorched-earth phase of the Democrats’ “war
on women” campaign, and the beginning of a ruthless offensive to hold their
Senate majority, and possibly to retake the House, in 2014. Democrats have
nearly perfected the following exercise in cynical electioneering: 1) introduce
legislation; 2) title it something that appeals to the vast majority of
Americans who have no interest in learning what is actually in the bill, e.g.,
the “Violence Against Women Act”; 3) make sure it is sufficiently noxious to
the GOP that few Republicans will support it; 4) vote, and await headlines such
as “[GOP Lawmaker] Votes No On Violence Against Women Act”; 5) clip and use
headline in 30-second campaign ad; and 6) repeat.
Politico writers Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen are on to
something with their feature published today about President Obama’s mastery of
the mainstream media. Their conclusion that the president and his staff have
broken new ground in manipulating journalists and shaping favorable coverage of
the administration is so obvious that it is almost inarguable. As I have argued
several times over the past four years, no president since John F. Kennedy has
enjoyed the sort of advantage or lack of serious scrutiny that the president
has received.
_________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
20 Of The Most Embarrassing Moments In The History Of The
Democrat Party
_______________________________________________________________________
LATE NITE
Leno: Over the
weekend, President Obama played golf with Tiger Woods. Tiger said the president
was a very good golfer for a guy who plays only five days a week…….Actually,
you know what the president's handicap is? He doesn't understand economics…..Scientists
at the University
of Maryland say they have
found a chemical that causes women to talk more than men. It's called red
wine…….According to the new study, women talk almost three times as much as
men. Well, you know why? Because they know men aren't listening the first two
times.
______________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual
debt."
-Thomas Jefferson
"The more rules and regulations, the more thieves and
robbers there will be."
-Lao-Tzu
posted by gary at
8:32 AM
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