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Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Forbidden Discussion
In the liberal-progressive-socialist religion, evidence (or lack of evidence) that calls into question any of its tenets is to be dismissed as non-scientific.
Liberal-progressive-socialism and its handmaiden, the Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis, claim the mantle of science. But, as there is exactly zero proof of their doctrine, and judging from the intense, irrational passion with which their believers attack all questioners, we can conclude that liberal-progressive-socialism and Darwinism are not science, but aspects of a religion.
Responding to Hillary Clinton, Racist Fellow-Traveler, Bob Sorensen emailed me this link to one of his postings. As he said in his message, “Long ago, I learned that if
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Monday, April 27, 2009
The Fed Plans Deliberately to Steal Your Savings
The Federal Reserve’s policy target of 2% annual inflation, recently proclaimed by Vice Chairman Donald Kohn, will reduce the purchasing-power value of your savings 15% every decade. Inflation is, in the liberal-progressive-socialist religion, believed to be essential to insure full employment. Because of it, thirty six years from now, when you hope to bequeath something to your children or grandchildren, your savings will be worth only half what they are worth today.
What the Fed’s socialist planners are doing in reality is supporting the Democrat/Socialist Party’s labor union voting bloc. Unions have cost-of-living adjustment clauses in their labor contracts, so they don’t suffer from inflation. The vast majority of American workers, who are not unionized, are paying for non-competitively high union wages and gold-plated health and retirement benefits with inflation, which amounts to an unlegislated tax on everyone but the labor unions who supply the money and free manpower to elect Democrat/Socialists.
Read John Tamny’s Forget Inflation Targets, Go For Dollar-Price Stability on the Forbes Magazine website.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Hillary Clinton, Racist Fellow-Traveler
Secretary of State Clinton’s praise of Margaret Sanger was an endorsement for the doctrine that Hitler used to justify the Holocaust.
One of the most horrendous doctrines to emerge from Charles Darwin
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Friday, April 24, 2009
When The Government Runs the Economy
When Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd call the shots, government regulators demand that nominally private companies lie to the public.
In its headline story for the April 23, 2009, edition, the Wall Street Journal reports:
Lewis Testifies U.S. Urged Silence on Deal
Bank of America Chief Says Bernanke, Paulson Barred Disclosure of Merrill Woes Because of Fears for Financial System
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Department chief Henry Paulson pressured Bank of America Corp. to not discuss its increasingly troubled plan to buy Merrill Lynch & Co.—a deal that later triggered a government bailout of BofA—according to testimony by Kenneth Lewis, the bank’s chief executive…
As part of his testimony, a transcript of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Lewis said the government wanted him to keep quiet while the two sides negotiated government funding to help BofA absorb Merrill and its huge losses.
Under normal circumstances, banks must alert their shareholders of any materially significant financial hits. But these weren’t normal times: Late last year, Wall Street was crumbling and BofA faced intense government pressure to buy Merrill to keep the crisis from spreading. Disclosing losses at Merrill—which eventually totaled $15.84 billion for the fourth quarter—could have given BofA’s shareholders an opportunity to stop the deal and let Merrill collapse instead.
Maggie’s Farm website provides a link to a similar story of government regulators’ pressure to lie to the public, pressure which may have played a role in the suicide of Freddie Mac’s CFO:
Freddie Mac CFO found hanged in basement of his VA home
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Retrograde Sensitivity
ScrappleFace describes the new interrogation techniques.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Oil Price Main Recession Culprit?
Onset of the worldwide recession correlates with the timing of oil price increases, but that’s only part of the story.
My thanks to David Airth, a frequent poster of comments on this website, for bringing to my attention an interesting analysis that was reported in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
That article describes the contention of economist Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Cato Institute, that neither the housing bubble, nor Wall Street greed was the main effectuator of the economic downturn besetting the world. He notes, instead, that our current recession and others since the end of World War II have been triggered by price increases in oil, which simultaneously affect the entire economy.
While not disagreeing with Mr Reynolds about the negative impact of oil price increases, I would step back a few paces to examine what induced the postwar increases in oil prices. In every case, oil price increases were preceded, and by implication, caused in major part, by surges in the dollar money supply.
OPEC was formally organized in 1960 after President Eisenhower imposed import quotas on oil from Venezuela and the Persian Gulf. The punishing oil shortage imposed by OPEC in 1973 was both a political move to undercut American foreign policy support for Israel, and a reaction to the inflation-caused declining purchasing power of the dollar, the currency in which most overseas producers were paid.
Measured in 2008 dollars (i.e., adjusting for inflation), the price of oil was very stable, around $15 to $20 per barrel, from 1931 until 1971, when the inflationary effect of President Johnson’s Great Society socialist welfare-state entitlements programs began to manifest itself. The same pattern was exhibited in the oil price spike beginning in 2005, as the Fed continued to keep the money-supply spigot wide open.
In addition to inflation-induced declines in the value of the dollar, of course, oil prices were pushed upward by surging consumption in China and by the uncertain availability of Persian Gulf oil supplies because of the Iraq War and rising tensions with Iran.
Nonetheless, the dollar’s loss of purchasing power because of the Fed’s actions was a major trigger in the run-up of oil prices. Measured in ounces (actually small fractions of an ounce) of gold, the price per barrel of oil was almost exactly the same in 2007 as in 2000. During that same period, however, the price of oil in dollars leaped 250% to 3.5 times the price in 2000 (Wall Street Journal; Oil and the Dollar, January 4, 2008;
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Prosecute Nancy Pelosi for War Crimes
If war crimes were committed by the Bush administration officials who rendered legal and policy opinions regarding interrogation techniques for Islamic terrorists, then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her House committee colleagues are equally guilty. They were briefed in detail, but raised not a single objection.
Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002
In Meetings, Spy Panels’ Chiefs Did Not Protest, Officials Say
By Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers ?Sunday, December 9, 2007; Page A01
In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.
“The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.
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What a New New Deal Means For You
Socialism, the motivating ideology of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, is the opposite of the political state envisioned in the Bill of Rights. Socialism requires that your individual liberties be subordinated to the needs of the political state.
Whatever its proclaimed intentions for the betterment of society, socialism must diminish your range of individual political and economic freedoms, transferring them to state bureaucrats who promulgate regulations.
One socialist aim, for example, is to reduce or eliminate unemployment, a major concern near the end of World War II. At that time, the British socialist Labour Party was planning its takeover of government, and Friedrich Hayek wrote “The Road to Serfdom” to describe what lay ahead for the British people.
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Wednesday, April 22, 2009
America is Bad; “The One” is Good
The President seems to regard himself as a community organizer who is not a part of the community he is now engaged upon organizing. From a far off region of socialist perfection, he has come to redeem us, which explains why his wife had never been proud of the United States until its voters elected her husband.
Read Dorothy Rabinowitz’s Obama Blames America.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Ideological Civil War
Democrat/Socialists started the ideological warfare in Congress with their slanderous attacks that blocked the 1987 Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert Bork. Now they are upping the ante by considering criminal prosecutions against Bush administration officials for legal and policy opinions about interrogating captured Islamic terrorists.
The Wall Street Journal reports (Obama Open to Probe of Bush Officials Who Devised Interrogations, April 21, 2009):
President Barack Obama left open the possibility of legally pursuing the Bush administration officials who formulated the policies that led to “enhanced interrogation techniques”—which critics have called torture.
In the 1987 Senate nomination proceedings for Judge Robert Bork, liberal-progressive-socialist interest groups mounted an unprecedented propaganda campaign to block Judge Bork’s nomination. Senator Ted Kennedy led the lynching party in Senatorial hearings.
No one could challenge Judge Bork’s qualifications for elevation to the Court. He had served with distinction as a Yale law professor, as United States Solicitor General, and as a judge on the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Opposition came down to a single issue: Judge Bork was on record, in common with a very large percentage of the nation’s constitutional law scholars, that the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling was based on very shaky legal and Constitutional grounds. The Court “discovered” a hitherto unsuspected Constitutional right to unfettered abortion obscured within the penumbras of the shadows of the Constitution. Translation: a majority of the Justices, on sociological, not legal grounds, believed that there ought to be an abortion right, so they artificially implanted one in the Constitution, completely disregarding the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which historically had reserved regulation of such matters to the states and to local jurisdictions. Even liberal-progressive Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a former feminist rights attorney, wrote that the nation would have been better served had the Court left the abortion issue to state legislatures.
President Obama’s possible criminal prosecution of Bush administration officials is of the same material. Radical liberal-progressive-socialist voters and members of Congress want to criminalize honest, best efforts of the Bush administration to protect the American people from terrorist attacks such as those that destroyed the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001. They believe that, in a socialized world of “hope” and “change,” there ought to be no need for rough interrogations to elicit intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks.
Ideologically, liberal-progressives support, on the home front, any measure to promote social decadence, from drug abuse to sexual promiscuity. On the international front, they fail to understand the stark reality and necessity of protecting our national interests, often with harsh measures. For them, popularity with overseas street mobs is the only currency of worth. Hence their subordination of homeland security to feel-good overseas relations, at any price.
Because liberal-progressive-socialists believe that the Constitution is subject to a sort of Darwinian evolution under the pressure of public opinion shifts, they are comfortable with judicial activism and with ex post facto criminalization of legal and policy advice from administration officials, provided that their targets are precepts or people they don’t like: Judeo-Christian morality or conservative political officials.
If the Obama administration does elect to pursue criminal prosecutions of Bush administration officials for authorizing interrogation techniques - which, at the time, were regularly reported to and approved by the same Democrat/Socialist members of Congress who now demand the heads of those who briefed them - woe betide Democrat/Socialists when the Republicans regain the presidency and control of Congress.
Our ideological civil war has deepened in intensity and bitterness since the Democrat/Socialists started it. God, if it fits His design, can end it. Or He may be using the conflict as a way to punish all of us for becoming self-centered consumers of material goods and worshippers of the political state as our presumed ultimate source of social well being.
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