Culture Still Matters

By Victor Davis Hanson

May 31, 2012 12:00 A.M.

Rudesheim, Germany — This week I am leading a military-history tour on the Rhine River from Basel, Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You can learn a lot about Europe’s current economic crises by ignoring the sophisticated barrage of news analysis and instead just watching, listening, and talking to people as you go down river.

Switzerland, by modern standards, should be poor. Like Bolivia, it is landlocked. Like Italy, it has no real gas or oil wealth. Like Afghanistan, its northern climate and mountainous terrain limit agricultural productivity to upland plains. And like Turkey, it is not a part of the European Union.
Unlike Americans, the Swiss are among the most homogeneous people in the world, without much diversity, and they make it nearly impossible to immigrate to their country.
So Switzerland supposedly has everything going against it, and yet it is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Why and how?
To answer that is also to learn why roughly 82 million Germans produce almost as much national wealth as do 130 million Greeks, Portuguese, Italians, and Spaniards. Yet the climate of Germany is also somewhat harsh; it too has no oil or gas. By 1945, German cities lay in ruins, while Detroit and Cleveland were booming. The Roman historian Tacitus remarked that pre-civilized Germany was a bleak land of cold weather, with little natural wealth and inhabited by tribal savages.
Race does not explain present-day national wealth. From 500 B.C. to A.D. 1300, Switzerland and Germany were considered brutal and backward in comparison to classical Greece and Rome, and later, to Renaissance Venice and Florence.
Instead, culture explains far more — a seemingly taboo topic when economists nonchalantly suggest that contemporary export-minded Germans simply need to spend and relax like laid-back southern Mediterraneans, and that the latter borrowers should save and produce like workaholic Germans to even the playing field of the European Union.
But government-driven efforts to change national behavior often ignore stubborn cultural differences that reflect centuries of complex history as well as ancient habits and adaptations to geography and climate. Greeks can no more easily give up siestas than the Swiss can mandate two-hour afternoon naps. If tax cheating is a national pastime in Palermo, by comparison it is difficult along the Rhine.
I lived in Greece for over two years and often travel to northern and Mediterranean Europe and North Africa. While I prefer the Peloponnese to the Rhineland, over the years I have developed an unscientific and haphazard — but often accurate — politically incorrect method of guessing whether a nation is likely to be perennially insolvent and wracked by corruption.
Do average passersby throw down or pick up litter? After a minor fender-bender, do drivers politely exchange information, or do they scream and yell with wild gesticulations? Is honking constant or sporadic? Are crosswalks sacrosanct? Do restaurant dinners usually start or wind down at 9 P.M.? Can you drink tap water, or should you avoid it? Do you mostly pay what the price tag says, or are you expected to pay in untaxed cash and then haggle over the unstated cost? Are construction sites clearly marked and fenced to protect pedestrians, or do you risk walking into an open pit or getting stabbed by exposed rebar?
To put these crude stereotypes more abstractly, is civil society mostly moderate, predicated on the rule of law, and meritocratic — or is it characterized by self-indulgence, cynicism, and tribalism?
The answers to these questions do not hinge on race, money, or natural wealth, but they do involve culture and the way average people predictably live minute by minute. Again, these national habits and traditions accrued over centuries, and as much as politics or economics, they explain in part why Bonn is not Athens, and Zurich is not Naples, or for that matter why Cairo is unlike Tel Aviv or why Mexico City differs from Toronto.
There is one final funny thing about contemporary culture. What people say and do about it are two different things. We in the post-modern, politically correct West publicly pontificate that all cultures are just different and that to assume otherwise is pop generalization, but we privately assume that you would prefer your bank account to be in Frankfurt rather than Athens, or the tumor in your brain to be removed in London rather than Lisbon.
A warm sunset with an ouzo on a Greek-island beach may be more relaxing than schnapps on the foggy Rhine shore, but to learn why Greeks will probably not pay back what they owe Germany — and why they do not believe that they should have to — take a walk through central Athens and then do the same in Munich.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.

Are Liberals Immoral?

By Jeffrey Folks

Yes, liberals are immoral.  The liberal power elite are selfish, hypocritical, arrogant, self-righteous, and, worst of all, destructive of those around them.  They are willing to saddle everyone else with rules and regulations that do not apply to them, and with higher taxes that they somehow escape paying.  The Buffett Rule might sound like a great idea, but it would never apply to the Buffetts of this world.  Or the Kerrys, Kennedys, or any other left-wing billionaire.
Liberal do-gooders are always coming up with lovely schemes for redistributing other people's money and managing other people's lives.  The problem is that all of these schemes do more harm than good.  Welfare, which redistributes wealth to those who cannot work but also to those who avoid working or underreport income, is funded on the backs of those who actually do work.  "Saving the planet" costs jobs but never actually saves anything.  Killing fossil fuels increases energy costs and triggers inflation across the board.  Yet the liberal elite blithely support every cause that comes along with no consideration of the cost to ordinary people.  In doing so, they pad their already inflated sense of self-importance, and at no cost to themselves.
Scratch the surface of the liberal elite, and you will find a monstrous contempt for those "beneath" them.  Liberals like Barack Obama live and breathe in a realm of utter disdain for ordinary Americans, including congressmen who hail from what the president likes to call "Palookaville."  It is not just that they are out of touch; it is that they despise what is normal and decent.  They would no more live in the heartland or send their kids to a public school than they would forego an exemption engineered solely to save them money -- the same tax break for the rich that they publicly decry as soooo unfair.  It's no surprise that several prominent liberal Democrats made their fortunes as slum lords and ambulance-chasers.  Others just married their money.
There's nothing wrong with making money, of course.  Mitt Romney earned every penny of his fortune, and to his credit he has never apologized for his success.  But the liberal game -- the Kennedy game -- is to pretend to side with the poor and, by doing so, gain political power so as to further line one's own pockets.  In all of this, the liberal elite are utterly cynical.  I didn't notice any bottle-washers or cleaning ladies admitted to George Clooney's $40,000-per-person fundraiser for President Obama, nor any middle-class Americans, either.  The liberal elite's contempt for the rest of us was palpable when Nancy Pelosi noted that "every week we don't pass a Stimulus bill, 500 million Americans lose their jobs," or when in 2004 Teresa Heinz Kerry called Elizabeth Edwards a "mother earth person" who still had a brain.
It's not just that liberals don't know much about those "500 million" Americans.  They despise them the way they despise Walmart and NASCAR and the American Legion.  What it all boils down to is an appalling contempt for life.  As long as Obama can keep his nose elevated at a 45-degree angle, and get re-elected, he is happy.  Happy, even if 25 million Americans remain out of work as a result of his environmental pipe dreams, happy if millions of seniors just go away and die, as his former Medicare director Donald Berwick suggested ("they just need the morphine and counseling that have been around for centuries").
The liberal elite appear callous even when the lives of those close to them are at stake.  In a sad footnote to the Kennedy family legacy, Mary Richardson Kennedy, the 52-year-old estranged wife of Robert Kennedy, Jr., was found dead on May 16, an apparent suicide by hanging.  One's sympathy goes out to Mrs. Kennedy's family and particularly to her four children.  One can only imagine the degree of anguish that would lead an individual to commit such a horrific act.  Daughter of a wealthy northeastern family, Mrs. Kennedy was part of the liberal elite culture from birth.  Yet despite all her gifts and her privileged lifestyle, something went wrong, as it does so often for those in her social milieu.  Reportedly, Mrs. Kennedy had become dependent on prescription drugs and alcohol.  As for her husband, who lists no profession other than "environmentalist," there was a record of heroin possession, and there were rumors of infidelity during the years of his marriage.  In many ways, the contrast between his selfless public persona and dubious personal behavior fits the mold of the classic liberal player.
I have no desire to single out Mary Kennedy as an example of the damage of the liberal elite.  In any case, there are plenty of other examples, both within the Kennedy clan and beyond, of just how destructive the self-indulgent liberal ethos can be.  There was the case of John Kennedy, Jr., killed along with his wife Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette in 1999.  Kennedy was piloting a small plane that went down with a probable cause of pilot error, according to the NTSB.  There was Joseph P. Kennedy II, whose car crash injured his younger brother and permanently paralyzed his passenger Pam Kelly.  Kennedy was cited for reckless driving.  There was David Kennedy, who died of a drug overdose in a Palm Beach hotel in 1984.
And then there was Ted Kennedy, who left Mary Jo Kopechne in the water overnight while he debated whether to report the accident.
So why is it that the Kennedys of this world think they have the right to tell the rest of us how to live?  That is clearly the implication of the frequency with which they run for public office, pass legislation regulating the behavior of others, and lobby for higher taxes on the middle class.  Do they imagine that they actually inhabit Camelot (which, by the way, was an absolute monarchy, not a democracy)?  Far from it, the Kennedys and the rest -- the Roosevelts, the Kerrys, the Clintons, and the Obamas -- are actually examples of how not to live.
My guess is that every member of the little church where I hang out here in Palookaville knows more about the virtuous life and how to live it than does any member of the liberal elite.  My Baptist brothers and sisters -- as our president has said -- "cling to" their religion, and their religion nurtures and protects them.  It teaches the importance of fixed opinions, clear moral values, respect for others, and, above all, faith in a loving and redemptive God.
I have yet to hear the Kennedys, the Kerrys, or the Obamas, or any member of the liberal elite, speak with anything but disdain for the faith-centered life.  I wish it were not so, but that is why it really does not surprise me that so many of them come to a bad end.  If allowed to continue governing, they will bring the country to a bad end as well.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

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The Origins of Leftist Racial Orthodoxy

By Michael Filozof

If "diversity" is good, why do liberals congregate in lily-white enclaves like Vermont (the whitest state in the Union, according to the Census) and Marin County, California?  White liberals hector others incessantly about the need for "diversity," but most have no interest in living in neighborhoods with large numbers of blacks.  The ideal society in the liberal mind always seems to be a Scandinavian socialist one (which is to say that liberals strive to make the U.S. more like some of the most uniformly white nations in the world).
The liberal enforcers of racial correctness are quick to decry the evils of racism, yet they are quite willing to practice it themselves in the form of affirmative action -- and they are strangely silent when blacks engage in "hate crimes" against whites.  Conservatives have been increasingly willing to point out these and other hypocrisies of our racial orthodoxy, but they invariably fail to understand its true origins.
What drives our contemporary racial orthodoxy?  Many conservatives mistakenly believe that liberals obsessed by race are afflicted with "white guilt."  Not so.  The truth about racial matters in the U.S. is this: racial issues are not actually about race.  In the hands of the progressive left, race is a tool used by powerful whites against other whites; specifically, race is a weapon used by liberals to bludgeon conservatives and delegitimize conservative, patriotic values.
But it has not always been so.
Prior to World War II, progressives and leftists -- like Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger -- viewed blacks as inferior human scum who should be eliminated through eugenic hygiene.  But after World War II, "progressive" thinking about race underwent an astonishing metamorphosis.  The American left forged a strategic alliance with blacks, using race to attack the core values of an American society they had now come to despise as the ultimate evil.
The dominant theme of the literature of the postwar era -- which 76 million Baby Boomers absorbed as the first generation to attend college en masse -- was the moral equivalence between the United States and the totalitarian regimes it had just fought.
In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, the founder of the modern American feminist movement, wrote that the American suburb was a "comfortable concentration camp" for women.  (Friedan, a Jew, wrote this in 1963, less than 20 years after the liberation of Auschwitz.)
In The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger's protagonist Holden Caulfield (narrating the story from an asylum after having been driven insane by the "phoniness" of American life) says of his brother D.B., a World War II veteran, "I really think he hated the Army worse than the war ... [h]e said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were."
In Kurt Vonnegut's semi-autobiographical novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the real enemy is not Adolf Hitler or the Nazis, but the American military, the American officer corps, and American society.  Vonnegut's character Billy Pilgrim is a WWII vet who survives the bombing of Dresden as a POW; after the war, he becomes a respected citizen and a financial success.  Pilgrim absorbs conservative American values right down to the "Impeach Earl Warren" bumper sticker on his car -- and goes insane, just as his fictionalized son patriotically heads off to Vietnam.
But the author who provided the direct link between left-wing America-hatred and race was Norman Mailer, also a disillusioned WWII veteran.  In his 1957 essay "The White Negro," Mailer equated the atomic bomb with the concentration camp and urged whites to identify with black social outcasts as a means to escape the "totalitarian tissues of American society."  The "hipster" should encourage the "psychopath" within himself and "absorb the existentialist synapses of the Negro."  The white "hipster" would follow psychopathology-as-liberation "along the road of the homosexual, the orgiast, the drug-addict, the rapist, the robber and the murderer..."
"[W]hat makes [the "hip" ethic] radically different from Socratic moderation with its stern conservative respect for the experience of the past[,]" Mailer wrote, "is immoderation[.] ... [T]he nihilism of Hip proposes ... that every social restraint and category be removed[.]"  (Emphasis mine.)
The White Negro is perhaps the most important work of literature in postwar America.  It provided a blueprint for the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and in hindsight, it explains nearly all left-wing, anti-conservative behavior since.  If blacks were social outcasts in American life, then the white enemies of traditional American values would align with them.  An immoderate drunk like the late Sen. Edward Kennedy -- who was kicked out of Harvard for cheating, then killed a young girl he was presumably cheating on his wife with, and got away with it -- could not possibly point the finger at blacks and tell them to be honest, chaste, and sober.  He could, however, falsely accuse Judge Robert Bork of wanting blacks to "sit at segregated lunch counters" to deflect attention from his own behavior.  And it worked.  (Today, following the same "enemy of my enemy is my friend" strategy, leftists align themselves with Islamic terrorists and radicals, under whose rule they would never actually want to live.)
When white Americans finally began to see the justice of Martin Luther King's cause and the injustice of Jim Crow, leftists pushed harder and harder to include items under the rubric of "civil rights" that King, a preacher of the Gospel of Jesus, would never have approved of.  "Civil rights" became a foot-in-the-door that leftists used to attack and destroy all "social restraints and categories" in American society.
Want to kill your unborn baby?  That's a "civil right."  Marry another man?  "Civil right."  Dress in drag and use a woman's bathroom?  Another "civil right."  (It is hardly a surprise that while King remains a revered figure on the left, his Christianity has been airbrushed from his legacy.  He is almost always referred to as "Dr." King today -- rather than "Rev." King, a Man of God.)
The anti-conservative alliance between the left and blacks as described by Mailer neatly explains why Tea Party whites who admire the likes of Herman Cain and Allen West are nonetheless tagged as "racists" by the left.  It explains why Democratic Party leftists welcomed former KKK member Sen. Robert Byrd into their fold while slandering former Sen. Trent Lott as a "racist."  It explains why the Republican Party, founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party, routinely loses 95% or more of the black vote; it explains why the conservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas is the most hated man in black America -- hated more than the reprehensible O.J. Simpson.
It explains the virulent left-wing racial demagoguery surrounding the Trayvon Martin shooting.  Everyone knows that blacks are not being profiled and victimized by white "vigilantes," as the politically charged indictment against George Zimmerman alleged.  But the shooting provided a perfect platform for white liberals like Michael Bloomberg and Charles Schumer to attack the traditional, conservative American institutions of gun ownership, the National Rifle Association, and the right of self-defense by smearing these things as "racist."
Most importantly, it explains the thinking of Barack Obama, a man thoroughly steeped in the culture of 1960s anti-American radicalism.  It explains why Obama made a fetish of race in his autobiography and joined Rev. Jeremiah Wright's anti-white, racist "church" -- despite the fact that not only Obama was well-treated by whites his entire life, but he was given preferential treatment by whites.  Obama's racial thinking is inexorably linked to his hatred of capitalism, his denial of American exceptionalism, his countercultural drug use, and his support for radical abortion rights and gay rights. 
Left-wing racial rhetoric about "fairness" and "equality" and "non-discrimination" has been used to conceal a subterranean leftist agenda of anti-Americanism and anti-conservatism for over fifty years.  Conservatives persist in stupidly taking this rhetoric at face value; hence, they always find themselves on the racial defensive.
Conservatives need to stop being suckered by this leftist con game, and they need to do it before November.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/05/the_origins_of_leftist_racial_orthodoxy.html at May 31, 2012 - 09:24:47 AM CDT

Deceit, Delusion, Denial and the Moral Decay of the West

Dr. Sanity

DECEIT, DELUSION, DENIAL AND THE MORAL DECAY OF THE WEST

This comment made by Wretchard on one of his posts a few weeks ago struck me forcefully and I have been thinking about it ever since. I think the reason I cannot get it out of my mind is because it encapsulates the sense of despair that I feel at the moral disintegration of western civilization and all that it once stood for. I am reproducing the entire comment:

The West because of its higher culture and acceptance of the Scientific Method has a significantly more sophisticated military technology than the Islamic World. However this enabling higher culture normally compels the West to observe niceties like the Geneva Convention and the Judeo-Christian concept of honor and decency. The Islamic world lacks sophisticated military technology and is compelled to use relatively ineffective military methods such as IEDs, suicide bombs, human shields, etc.

And who creates this split-level morality? Well there’s a paper describing the Taliban’s “tactical innovation” of using five year old soldiers.

The Taliban is teaching five year old boys to kill British troops. The children are being converted into soldiers at an al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan. The terrorist group turns boys into fighters, human shields, and suicide bombers (Owen 2008). …

The Viet Cong used children as spies (Peer 1970), suicide bombers, and sappers …

The most significant finding is that Libya is the major hub in the CST network. Numerous groups have passed through the training camps, representing Africa, the Middle East, South America and Europe. Except for the absence of Asia, this correlates with the regional spread of child soldier using groups in armed conflicts from 1987-2007 …

I believe child soldier use is a tactical innovation (McAdam1982, 1983). The practice is a fairly new method that developed in response to large-scale social forces and the ground-level needs of guerilla fighters. This paper outlines the historical foundations of child soldier use, locates the point of origin, and provides a skeletal view of how the tactic has diffused via terrorist training camps.

So in our current world, if the Taliban use child soldiers, it’s a tactical innovation. But if American soldiers pick up a Koran without white gloves, it’s a war crime. What is wrong with this picture? What is wrong if you accept this picture?

No doubt teaching five year olds to kill British soldiers is a tactical innovation, objectively speaking. But it is also something that has to be seen for what it is: a moral abomination. Let me go a step further and call it the blackest sort of sin. For it is written, “Let the little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

There are some who would find even the use of those words, spoken by Him, hateful as perhaps Dracula finds certain symbols repugnant. But that judges Dracula more than what repels him. We live in an era where right and wrong, good and evil have been inverted. We kill babies and call it choice. We spare murderers and call it enlightenment. We see how the Taliban corrupt children and admire them for their cleverness. There is, if you don’t mind my saying so, something in that attitude which condemns its adherents even more than the object of the observation.

We are sick, sick to our core and it is not just the Taliban or the Viet Cong or the Libyans or North Koreans who are loco in the coco. There is a madness, indeed, an evil abroad in Western capitals that masquerades as humanitarianism, personates high-mindedness and makes a mockery of any sort of decency. And they have the temerity to call themselves human rights guardians?

I do not think that these people have the moral high ground. Although some people are doubtless well meaning, many individuals in the “human rights industry” are nothing more than spokesmen and apologists for groups that would make the old time Nazis seem like Boy Scouts.

The original post at Belmont Club was about Former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez' claim that Nancy Pelosi lied when she said she had not been briefed about waterboarding.

Have a little sympathy for former Speaker Pelosi. Like every other politician she has to square a circle. On the one hand she has to tell her liberal constituency that violence accomplishes nothing. On the other hand she has to make sure that nobody disturbs the illusion of a safe, gun-free environment by taking over a shopping mall and holding every one in it hostage.

People must never be told that upholding a high moral standard may be costly; that you may have to risk danger by refusing to resort to certain measures. No. The candidate must describe a world in which you can have your own cake and eat it too. It’s a world in which B-17s didn’t have to fly straight into flack to accurately bomb a target and not hit civilian targets. It’s a world in which you don’t have to make a choice between invading Japan and killing 5 million civilians and bombing Hiroshima and killing 70,000 civilians.

That’s the perfect world.

And, isn't that exactly what the left claims it wants? A perfect world? A perfect, socially just, egalatarian, peaceful, "we are all brothers" world?

Unfortunately, the only way to get from this world, the real and imperfect world, is through deceit, delusion, and denial. Take your pick. Any one of the three will blur reality; make it more palatable; and, most importantly, make those who desperately desire utopia feel lots lots better.

The moral decay of the west is the direct consequence of the need to embrace the delusions and fantasies of the political left, both here in this country and around the world. Why? Because to embrace the delusion, one must abandon reality, truth, reason, and logic. Once must blind one's self to the unpleasant sights of the world and place hands over ears to escape the unpleasant sounds. One must pretend that everything is always AOK; and dismiss all evidence to the contrary. One must denounce and demonize the "naysayers" because they tell the truth. In short, one must mentally live in another dimension from the one we actually live in.

And the only way to succeed in believing in this dimension is to abandon the moral system that depends on reality and our perception of it. It goes sort of like this:

REALITY----->HUMAN PERCEPTION OF REALITY -----> HUMAN ACTION BASED ON REALITY

There is a hierarchical relationship implied here. First, there is REALITY, or existence. The study of the nature of existence is called Metaphysics. Next is our knowledge of REALITY through the mind and the senses, which while they may be imperfect sources of information at times, we must strive to optimize their function as if our lives depended on it (which they do). The study of knowlege and how we know about reality is called Epistemology. And finally, the last link in the chain is the actions we choose to take, based on our knowledge of what is real.

This last part is where Ethics, or a moral code, comes into play.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKE CHOICES WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO HAVE KNOWLEDGE IF YOU CANNOT, OR WILL NOT, FACE REALITY.

The "logic" of the fantasy left (I have always thought if rather fascinating that they insist on calling themselves the "reality-based community"--as if the words make it so) goes like this:

REALITY----> HUMAN EMOTION<---->HUMAN ACTION BASED ON WHIM

Reality is messy. It needs to be eliminated--either through deception, delusion, or denial. The deceivers and liars know exactly what they are doing since they do it consciously and deliberately. The deluded deniers DON'T WANT TO KNOW what they are doing because they feel better that way.

Leszak Kolakowski, a Polish philosopher expelled from the Communist Party in 1968 for his heretical views makes the following keen observation about the morality of socialism (from My Correct Views on Everything, reviewed in The Weekly Standard) :

Socialism as a social or moral philosophy was based on the ideal of human brotherhood, which can never be implemented by institutional means. There has never been, and ther will never be, an institutional means of making people brothers. Fraternity under compulsion is the most malignant idea devised in modern times; it is the perfect path to totaltarian tyranny.

The social engineers of the left, motivated as they are by their creative utopian aspirations--expressed by the desire to impose (forcibly, if necessary) universal peace, social justice and brotherhood upon humanity--are completely oblivious to the malignant, and extremely immoral, side of their own natures. This is what enables them to masquerade as humanitarians, personify high-mindedness and make a mockery of any sort of decency.

Their anti-individualism, anti-capitalistic, anti-wealth, and fundamentally anti-human and anti-life agenda is made possible only if they are able to disconnect REALITY from the human mind and from human actions.

The postmodern political left is constitutionally unable to appreciate it, but both they and the greedy capitalist entrepreneurs of the right who they sdespise so vehemently, are driven by the same dark human emotions: envy, greed and a need to dominate others.

However, there is an extremely crucial difference.

The do-gooder leftist in all the various ideological incarnations--the antiwar crowd, the environmental crowd, the communists, socialists, and assorted collectivists and utopians--each offer the rationale that he does what he does for the "common good" and for "social justice", "peace" and "brotherhood". His high-minded, self-righteous rhetoric justifies (to him anyway) imposing his will and beliefs on others for their own good; and he will not hesitate to use whatever coercive capablity he has at hand to get others to do what he wants and what he says.

The evil capitalist, on the other hand, is overtly out to pursue his own selfish profi;, and understands he must use persuasion. That is, he must convince people that his ideas and the products of his mind are better than all the rest so that they will be willing to part with their hard-earned money to possess them. His desire for power over others is manifested in an indirect manner because people must wnat what he has to offer and believe that they will benefit from an interaction with him.

There is no parallel social limitations on the behavior of the do-gooder leftist. This tyrant wannabe does not feel the need to convince others of the veracity or even the effectiveness of his ideas; nor does he accept defeat when others are not interested or resist their implementation. He knows in his heart what is best for everyone, and he will use coercion if necessary. He will not allow options; nor will he permit others do do what they think is right for themselves. Their feelings or concerns are a matter of complete indifference to him. Only his own matter.

The leftist's desire for power is direct and absolute; and is an inescapable psychological consequence of his utopian ideology.

And there is no area of your life which will escape his intrusive psychopathology, because he justifies it by saying he is really doing it for your sake.

The clever deceiver on the left always manages to hide these darker motivations--the envy, greed, and desire for power--and pretend they don't even exist--even to himself. He tells himself he does not possess such dark motives; that his motives are pure and uncontaminated by the kind of self-serving goals those on the selfish, money-hungry right pursue. The banal platitudes and silly slogans he chants during his protest marches make him feel oh so good about himself; and experiencing too much knowledge and insight about his inner state would make him extremely uncomfortable; perhaps even causing him to question some of his basic assumptions about himself or his beliefs.

This is the dilemma faced by all utopians. Thus, if they do not consciously decide they are going to do evil; or, if they are not entirely cynical; they must escape into delusion or denial in order to continue to function.

They see themselves as so pure and righteous; so correct and virtuous; how is it possible that their beautiful utopian dreams always turn into such horrible human nightmares? How can they possibly explain all the unpleasantness and evil away, like they do.

Well, speaking as a psychiatrist, I can tell you that there is no limit to how much self-delusion is possible in our species. People who are grossly psychotic, like many that I see every day, at least have a biological short circuit in their hard wiring as an excuse. But even without the biological propensity, human being are quite capable of self delusion, fantasy, and disconnecting themselves from reality.

You can count on the "true believer" to close his eyes not only to his own internal reality, but also to the external reality that proves the uselessness of his beliefs in the real world.

Few on the left have ever acknowledged the nightmare of the Soviet gulag; or Lenin's purges; or China's crackdowns. Few have ever even accepted the incredible human cost their ideologies have taken on humanity; the death the suffering and misery. Even today, they actively support all the future Stalin's (like the thug Chavez) in their grabs for unparalleled power. Chavez, of course, follows the pure utopian aspirations of the typical leftist and is only allowing himself to become "dictator for life" because he wants to help his people--just like Saddam did; just like Qadaffi did; just like Assad is doin; just like the Mullahs are doing.

Uh-huh. Right.

We live in an era where right and wrong, good and evil have been inverted. We kill babies and call it choice. We spare murderers and call it enlightenment. We see how the Taliban corrupt children and admire them for their cleverness. There is, if you don’t mind my saying so, something in that attitude which condemns its adherents even more than the object of the observation.

While societies that operate under the rule of law have all the necessary checks and balances that prevent the capitalist from cheating or robbing his clients and hold him to account if he does; civilization has been fooled repeatedly throughout history by the virtuous, self-righteous, anti-capitalist robbers and cheaters of the left who simply disguise their robbery and fraud behind the stated purity of their motives.

The stink of the left's piety is nauseating. Just ask Cory Booker, who accidentally told the truth and now must pretend that he didn't--or perhaps he simply slipped back into Democratic denial.

Today's new and improved political left promises the redistribution of wealth, "fairness", social justice, peace and brotherhood. What they deliver will be what they have always delivered: stagnation, poverty and misery; injustice, decline and death.

That is what happens when reality is not part of your moral equation

Dr. Sanity

‘Meaningful Work’

By Thomas Sowell

‘Education” is a word that covers a lot of very different things, from vital, life-saving medical skills to frivolous courses to absolutely counterproductive courses that fill people with a sense of grievance and entitlement, without giving them either the skills to earn a living or a realistic understanding of the world required for a citizen in a free society.

The lack of realism among many highly educated people has been demonstrated in many ways.
When I saw signs in Yellowstone National Park warning visitors not to get too close to a buffalo, I realized that this was a warning that no illiterate farmer of a bygone century would have needed. No one would have had to tell him not to mess with a huge animal that literally weighs a ton, and can charge at you at 30 miles an hour.
No one would have had to tell that illiterate farmer’s daughter not to stand by the side of a highway, trying to hitch a ride with strangers, as too many college girls have done, sometimes with results that ranged all the way up to their death.
The dangers that a lack of realism can bring to many educated people are completely overshadowed by the dangers to a whole society created by the unrealistic views of the world promoted in many educational institutions.
It was painful, for example, to see an internationally renowned scholar say that what low-income young people needed was “meaningful work.” But this is a notion common among educated elites, regardless of how counterproductive its consequences may be for society at large, and for low-income youngsters especially.
What is “meaningful work”?
The underlying notion seems to be that it is work whose performance is satisfying or enjoyable in itself. But if that is the only kind of work that people should have to do, how is garbage to be collected, or how are bedpans to be emptied in hospitals, or jobs with life-threatening dangers to be performed?
Does anyone imagine that firemen enjoy going into burning homes and buildings to rescue people trapped by the flames? That soldiers going into combat think it is fun?
In the real world, many things are done simply because they have to be done, not because doing them brings immediate pleasure to those who do them. Some people take justifiable pride in working to take care of their families, whether or not the work itself is great.
Some of our more utopian intellectuals lament that many people work “just for the money.” They do not like a society where A produces what B wants, simply in order that B will produce what A wants, with money being an intermediary device facilitating such exchanges.
Some would apparently prefer a society where all-wise elites would decide what each of us “needs” or “deserves.” The actual history of societies formed on that principle — histories often stained, or even drenched, in blood — is of little interest to those who mistake wishful thinking for idealism.
At the very least, many intellectuals do not want the poor or the young to have to take “menial” jobs. But people who are paying their own money, as distinguished from the taxpayers’ money, for someone to do a job are unlikely to part with hard cash unless that job actually needs doing, whether or not that job is called “menial” by others.
People who lack the skills to take on more prestigious jobs can either remain idle and live as parasites on others or take the jobs for which they are currently qualified, and then move up the ladder as they acquire more experience. People who are flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s on New Year’s Day are seldom flipping hamburgers there when Christmastime comes.
Those relatively few statistics that follow actual flesh-and-blood individuals over time show them moving massively from one income bracket to another over time, starting at the bottom and moving up as they acquire skills and experience.
Telling young people that some jobs are “menial” is a huge disservice to them and to the whole society. Subsidizing them in idleness while they wait for “meaningful work” is just asking for trouble, both for them and for all those around them.
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2012 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Obama Is Literally Exhausting...

Go See U.N. Me — Now

By Nathaniel Botwinick

 

Dziga Vertov, one of the world’s first and finest documentarians, defined the goal of documentary film as showing “life as it is.” Ami Horowitz’s U.N. Me accomplishes this and more — it is a detailed exposé of the failures of the United Nations. This film could have sunk into a dreary, depressing recital of the various horrors perpetrated under the U.N.’s watch (Darfur, Rwandan genocide, etc.), but Ami Horowitz skillfully weaves a narrative that strikes a careful balance between humor and information.

Horowitz is not your typical documentary filmmaker, and his regular, unpretentious charm sets the tone of his film. He began his life as a banker, until one night he had an epiphany. He was drifting off to sleep while watching Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine when he suddenly realized that this was the medium for him. The result was U.N. Me.
But what is U.N. Me? According to Horowitz, it’s “a love letter” to the United Nations, albeit a love letter with “constructive criticism.” But if U.N. Me is a love letter, then it’s the letter you write to a significant other threatening a break-up. You want the relationship to work, but there have to be some major changes. The movie recounts several of the major failings of the United Nations over its history: the sexual abuses and massacres committed by U.N. peacekeepers, the failure to stop Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, the U.N.’s inability to curb terrorism, the Oil-for-Food program, the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur, and the United Nation’s failure to support human rights across the world. Not exactly the most uplifting material. But U.N. Me is more than a recitation of the United Nation’s misdeeds; instead, it delves deeper into how the culture and the structure of the U.N. led to such debacles.
The best moments in the film consist of Horowitz’s interviews with various ambassadors and U.N. officials, whereby he reveals their corruption. His particularly wry sense of humor both exposes the obfuscations of his interviewees and satirizes their views. Horowitz credits Sacha Baron Cohen, Michael Moore, and Howard Stern for inspiring his interviewing style, but his own comedic voice is more serious and drier than theirs. “Writing comedy is hard,” he says. “It’s difficult getting the balance between pathos and humor.” A prime example of this problem occurs when Horowitz confronts an Iranian senior official over the hanging of homosexuals in Iran. Through his careful mocking, he exposes the insanity of the Iranian position.
Horowitz plays a key role in a number of dramatic moments throughout the film, and one can only gasp at his audacity in setting up these encounters. Not surprisingly, those were the most difficult parts of the film for him: “[The] hardest part [was] getting the balls to do certain things. It’s really hard to do that physically. Just to convince your legs to get up and do this. You’re sitting in the Sudanese or Iranian Embassy, and you have to confront these guys where anything could go wrong.” None of this trepidation comes across on the screen. He manages to stand up to the corrupt officials and display to the world their ineptitude and malevolence. Such pluckiness leads to several of the film’s better moments. Early in the movie, stonewalled by U.N. bureaucrats who refuse to allow him to meet with a high-ranking official of the Ivory Coast, Horowitz impetuously charges a military checkpoint. Eventually, he connives his way into his long-sought meeting by hiding in a group of other officials.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. U.N. Me ends with a message of hope. In Horowitz’s view, the U.N. is an organization that can be saved, but it must enforce its own charter and set aside the unworkable ideal of universality. The United States and North Korea will never agree on human rights, and Israel and Iran can’t agree on the right of Israel even to exist. Yet the United Nations operates under the assumption that all these nations should receive equal treatment, which inevitably leads to a system failure of the entire institution. The U.N. must begin the hard work of reform, Horowitz argues, before it can get back on the path of preserving human rights across the globe.
This movie is a beachhead for openly conservative documentaries. Waiting for “Superman” paved the way for documentaries presenting an arguably conservative viewpoint, but U.N. Me could be the first successful documentary acclaimed as frankly right of center by many viewers. It will open in theaters across the country on June 1 and be available simultaneously on video-on-demand. Horowitz, who is currently focused on promotional activities for U.N. Me, does not yet have any future projects planned, but he promises to continue making movies. “I’ve gotten the bug,” he says. Let’s hope that he continues, because in him we have a top-notch, conservative documentary filmmaker.
— Nathaniel Botwinick is an editorial intern at National Review Online.

DOJ pressures university to allow 38-year old man access to women’s restrooms

11:03 PM 05/23/2012

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Watch out, you ladies at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith: Those feet under the stall next to you might just belong to a 38-year-old man.
Despite opposition from female students, UAFS has decided on “advice of counsel” to allow a 38-year-old anatomically-male, transgendered student access to the women’s bathrooms on campus.
According to a report from the conservative Campus Reform, the university decided to reverse its transgender policy after receiving a letter from the Department of Justice. The school’s initial solution was to allow the man to use gender-neutral bathrooms instead of the women’s restrooms, and to offer to convert more bathrooms into gender-neutral areas.
“Because of the stance we took, the individual filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Justice,” Mark Horn, vice president of university relations, told Campus Reform.
Jennifer Braly, the 38-year-old male student who was not satisfied with the university’s policy, filed a complaint with the Justice Department and sued.
“I am frustrated and highly depressed about all of these unfair restrictions,” Braly explained in an online appeal for sex-change surgery donations. “I live as a woman full time and have been for a year and a half now. I have natural breast development bigger than some normal girls from the hormone treatment. The only thing restricting me is what’s between my legs. Everyone is so concerned with what’s between my legs. I am just as much woman as anyone else.”
According to Campus Reform’s interview with Horn, it was a letter from the Department of Justice that led to the bathroom policy change that allows Braly to use women’s restrooms.
“[T]he office of civil rights basically made its expectations through the attorney and the decision was made to respond to that direction,” Horn said. “[T]he DOJ complaint caused revisiting of our thinking. … In the eyes of the law, this individual [Braly] is entitled to use the bathroom that she identifies with.”
Neither DOJ nor UAFS have released the letter in question. DOJ explained to Campus Reform that the records “pertain to a currently active Civil Rights Division enforcement and access to the records should therefore be denied pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(A) since disclosure thereof could reasonably be expected to interfere with Civil Rights Division enforcement proceedings.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/23/doj-pressures-university-to-allow-38-year-old-man-access-to-womens-restrooms/#ixzz1vn46ezzO

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Apparently there is no limit to this administration.

This U.S. Citizen

Shameless Bias by Omission

By Brent Bozell

5/23/2012

 

You'd think the largest legal action in American history in defense of religious liberty would be a major news story. But ABC, CBS and NBC don't judge news events by their inherent importance as relates to the future of our freedoms. They deliver the news according to a simple formula: Does it or doesn't it advance the re-election of Barack Obama?

If it doesn't, it isn't news.
On May 21, 43 Catholic dioceses and organizations sued the Obama administration over its ridiculously narrow idea of how a "religious institution" can be defined under the Obamacare law. Never has the Catholic Church -- or any order, for that matter -- undertaken something of this magnitude. It's truly jaw-dropping that ABC and NBC completely ignored this action on their evening newscasts, while "CBS Evening News" devoted just 19 seconds to this historic event.
No, let's be blunt: They spiked the news.
This is the worst example of shameless bias by omission I have seen in the quarter-century history of the Media Research Center. We recall the Chinese Communists withholding from its citizenry for 20 years the news that the U.S. had landed on the moon because it reflected poorly on their government. Never, never would the U.S. "news" media behave thusly -- they just did.
This is not an honest mistake. It was not an editorial oversight by the broadcast networks. It did not occur too late for the evening deadline. This was a deliberate and insidious withholding of national news to protect the "Chosen One" who ABC, CBS and NBC have worked so hard to elect and for whom they are now abusing their journalistic influence. Even when CBS mentioned the suit -- ever so briefly -- like so many others, they deliberately distorted the issue by framing it as a contraception lawsuit when it is a much broader religious freedom issue -- and they know it.
This should be seen as a very dark cloud on Obama's political horizon. The Catholic Church, with 60 million Americans describing themselves as Catholic, has unleashed legal Armageddon on the administration, promising "we will not comply" with a health law that strips Catholics of their religious liberty. If this isn't "news," then there's no such thing as news.
This should be leading newscasts and the subject of special, in-depth reports. So what trumped this story? ABC led their evening broadcast and devoted an incredible 3 minutes and 30 seconds to the sentencing of the Rutgers student who spied on his gay roommate with a web camera. NBC aired an entire story on a lunar eclipse. Both CBS and NBC devoted their first 3 minutes and 30 seconds to prostate-cancer screening.
Catholic taxpayers who help fund National Public Radio were also ignored on the evening newscast with that sad joke of a title -- "All Things Considered."
If only some deceased priest had been accused to sexual improprieties in 1953 ... then Catholics would be seen as newsworthy. These "news" operations can't argue these are more important stories than the loss of religious freedom in America.
The print press isn't much better. For the Washington Post, there was a little one-column story buried on page A6. That fish wrap known as USA Today had a really tiny headline and 128-word item at the very bottom of A2. The New York Times had a perfunctory 419-word dispatch on page A17.
Two pages later, the Times defined as "news" what it prefers to report on Catholics: "2 Philadelphia Priests Punished in Sexual Abuse Cases." The paper noted one priest has been suspended from ministry for two years and the other had been placed on leave in December based on abuse that occurred about 40 years ago. This wasn't really "news" as a current matter, but this is always and everywhere the bigoted narrative the Times prefers to perpetuate.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops used the word "horror" to describe what Team Obama is mandating. On the only broadcast show to give him coverage, CBS "This Morning" anchor Charlie Rose asked Dolan if the White House misled him on this issue. Dolan began by saying he hesitated to question the president's sincerity -- even though anyone who heard Obama's 2009 commencement speech at Notre Dame about "honoring the conscience" of his opponents on abortion has proven he is completely insincere.
The cardinal said, "I worry, Charlie, that members of his administration might not particularly understand our horror at the restrictive nature of this exemption that they're giving us, that for the first time that we can remember, a bureau of the federal government seems to be radically intruding into the internal definition of what a church is. We can't seem to get that across."
He's not finding much help getting anything across from those supposed "mediators" of the national press corps.

Brent Bozell

Founder and President of the Media Research Center, Brent Bozell runs the largest media watchdog organization in America.

A Book for Republicans

By Thomas Sowell

The "tax cuts for the rich" demagoguery collapses like a house of cards when you subject it to logic and evidence.

Democrats have been having a field day with the cry of "tax cuts for the rich" -- for which Republicans seem to have no reply. This is especially surprising, because Democrats made the same arguments back in the 1920s, and the Republicans then not only had a reply, but one that eventually carried the day, when the top tax rate was brought down from 73 percent to 24 percent.
What was the difference then?
The biggest difference is that Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon took the trouble to articulate the case for lower tax rates, in articles that appeared in popular publications, using plain language that ordinary people could understand. Seldom do Republican leaders today even attempt to do any such thing.
In 1924, the ideas from these articles were collected in a book which Mellon titled "Taxation: The People's Business." That book has recently been reprinted by the University of Minnesota Law Library. Today's Republicans would do well to get a copy of Mellon's book, which shows how demagoguery about "tax cuts for the rich" can be exposed for the nonsense that it is.
People in the media could also benefit by seeing how the "tax cuts for the rich" demagoguery collapses like a house of cards when you subject it to logic and evidence.
Those who argue that "the rich" should pay a higher tax rate, and that the revenue this would bring in could be used to reduce the deficit, assume that higher tax rates equal higher tax revenues. But they do not.
Secretary Mellon pointed out that previously the government "received substantially the same revenue from high incomes with a 13 percent surtax as it received with a 65 percent surtax." Higher tax rates do not mean higher tax revenues.
High tax rates on high incomes, Mellon said, lead many of those who earn such incomes to withdraw their money "from productive business and invest it in tax-exempt securities" or otherwise find ways to avoid receiving income in taxable forms.
That is even easier to do today than in Andrew Mellon's time. The very same liberals who complain that Mitt Romney -- among thousands of others -- puts his money in the Cayman Islands nevertheless act as if raising the tax rates automatically raises tax revenues. It can instead drive money out of the country and drive jobs out of the country with it.
The United States has long been a place where foreigners from around the world have sent their money to be invested, more than offsetting the money that Americans invested abroad. But, in recent years, the net flow of investment is out of America to places overseas that don't tax as much.
Mellon cited statistics that showed the opposite of what the high-tax advocates claimed. Although incomes in general were rising from 1916 to 1921, the taxable income of people earning $300,000 and up dropped by about four-fifths.
That didn't mean that "the rich" were becoming poor. It meant that they had arranged to receive their incomes in forms that were not taxable. Mellon asked where the money of these high income earners went. He answered: "There is no doubt of the fact that much of it went into tax-exempt securities." In today's global economy, much of it can also easily be sent overseas -- much more easily than workers can go overseas to get the jobs this money creates in other countries.
After Mellon finally succeeded in getting Congress to lower the top tax rate from 73 percent to 24 percent, the government actually received more tax revenues at the lower rate than it had at the higher rate. Moreover, it received a higher proportion of all income taxes from the top income earners than before.
Something similar happened in later years, after tax rates were cut under Presidents Kennedy, Reagan and G.W. Bush. The record is clear. Barack Obama admitted during the 2008 election campaign that he understood that raising tax rates does not necessarily mean raising tax revenues.
Why then is he pushing so hard for higher tax rates on "the rich" this election year? Because class warfare politics can increase votes for his reelection, even if it raises no more tax revenues for the government.
COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

About the Author

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is http://www.tsowell.com/. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at http://www.creators.com/.

Energy Necessarily Skyrocketing

Obama’s war on coal hits your electric bill

By Phil Kerpen

Published May 22, 2012

Obama’s War on Coal has already taken a remarkable toll on coal-fired power plants in America.
Last week the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported a shocking drop in power sector coal consumption in the first quarter of 2012. Coal-fired power plants are now generating just 36 percent of U.S. electricity, versus 44.6 percent just one year ago.
It’s the result of an unprecedented regulatory assault on coal that will leave us all much poorer.
Last week PJM Interconnection, the company that operates the electric grid for 13 states (Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia) held its 2015 capacity auction. These are the first real, market prices that take Obama’s most recent anti-coal regulations into account, and they prove that he is keeping his 2008 campaign promise to make electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket.”
The market-clearing price for new 2015 capacity – almost all natural gas – was $136 per megawatt. That’s eight times higher than the price for 2012, which was just $16 per megawatt. In the mid-Atlantic area covering New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and DC the new price is $167 per megawatt. For the northern Ohio territory served by FirstEnergy, the price is a shocking $357 per megawatt.
Why the massive price increases? Andy Ott from PJM stated the obvious: “Capacity prices were higher than last year's because of retirements of existing coal-fired generation resulting largely from environmental regulations which go into effect in 2015.” Northern Ohio is suffering from more forced coal-plant retirements than the rest of the region, hence the even higher price.
These are not computer models or projections or estimates. These are the actual prices that electric distributors have agreed to pay for new capacity. The costs will be passed on to consumers at the retail level.
House Energy and Power Subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) aptly explained: “The PJM auction forecasts a dim future where Americans will be paying more to keep the lights on. We are seeing more and more coal plants fall victim to EPA’s destructive regulatory agenda, and as a result, we are seeing more job losses and higher electricity prices.”

The only thing that can stop this massive price hike now is an all-out effort to end Obama’s War on Coal and repeal this destructive regulatory agenda.
The Senate will have a critical opportunity to do just that when it votes on stopping Obama’s most expensive anti-coal regulation sometime in the next couple of weeks. The vote is on the Inhofe Resolution, S.J. Res 37, to overturn the so-called Utility MACT rule, which the EPA itself acknowledges is its most expensive rule ever.
This vote is protected from filibuster, and it will take just 51 votes to send a clear message to Obama that his War on Coal must end.
Of course, Obama could veto the resolution and keep the rule intact, although that would force him to take full political responsibility for the massive impending jump in electricity prices.
I have a form set up at http://action.americancommitment.org/6675/vote-yes-on-sj-res-37-to-stop-epas-war-on-coal/ to make it easy to contact your senators on this crucial issue.
Phil Kerpen is president of American Commitment and author of “Democracy Denied.”


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/05/22/obamas-war-on-coal-hits-your-electric-bill/print##ixzz1vhmymZux

Stupid media tricks produce poll favoring Obama

Steve McCann

Polls, the mainstay of news reporting these days, are rapidly losing their luster as many mainstream media outlets not only sponsor these polls but skew them in a variety of ways in order to create news and assist their favored candidate.  The only time the pollsters who are retained by these media outlets are concerned about their reputations are within a few weeks of an election when they use much better methodology to predict the outcome.
Today the Washington Post is all but dancing in the street about the result of their recent poll showing Obama leading Romney by 2 points overall and tied with Romney relative to whom the people trust to handle the economy. 
However as Mike Flynn at Breitbart.com points out it took some heavy lifting with the numbers to get Obama up that high:

Specifically, The Post poll assumes a collapse in GOP turnout.  The partisan breakdown of the poll is D-32, R-22, I-38.  In other words, only 22% of the voters sampled were Republicans.  If only 22% of the voters in November were Republicans, it would be the lowest turnout for the GOP in modern history.
In 2010, 35% of voters were Republican.   In 2008, the year Obama swept into the White House, 32% of voters were Republican.  Even in 2006, the year Democrats took control of Congress, 36% of voters were Republican.
Remember the partisan screen on this poll isn't an accident or quirk of the sample.  It's the direct result of specific choices made by the pollster to "weight" the sample to reflect demographics and other characteristics of the electorate. If 22% of the sample is Republicans, it's because the pollster "weighted" the poll that way.
It's only May, but the media's support for Obama is already blinding them to reality. 

It also should be pointed out that this is a poll of registered voters, 40% of whom do not vote in any election.   A poll with likely voters would have much more credibility but the sample make-up as well as the phrasing of the question also enters into any poll bias.   The American public should ignore the polls until September/October, unless there are dramatic changes in polls of likely voters.
This is all part and parcel of the mainstream media's ongoing effort to prop up and support their candidate: Barack Obama, regardless of his failures or what may come out from his long overdue vetting by the alternative media.

The Lost 5 Million

By Jeffrey Folks

Five million Americans have been thrown under the bus.  They are walking around dazed, outcast, and defeated.  Worst of all, they are not even counted in official tallies of the unemployed.  They are those whom the Obama administration simply wishes to ignore: working-age adults who have dropped out of the labor market completely.  They are those for whom the economic recovery underway should have created jobs but has not.
Despite Obama's latest assertion of having created 4 million jobs in the last 26 months, the reality is that in the past two years, 5.4 million workers have left the job market entirely.  These are the 5.4 million whom academics like to call "discouraged workers," and as far as the administration and its media cheerleaders are concerned, they do not exist.
The fact is that these millions of Americans are not so much discouraged as they are hopeless.  They are working-age adults who, in a normal economic recovery, would have found jobs in an expanding economy.  But this recovery -- one can hardly call it that -- is not at all normal.  The U.S. economy has expanded on average at something like 2% since Obama took office, and now, with the latest GDP growth figures for the first quarter of 2012 revised downward to 1.8%, the economy seems to be slipping back toward stagnation, if not recession.
During a normal period of recovery, the economy grows at a rate of more than 4%.  This was the case during the Reagan recovery of the 1980s, the Clinton recovery of the 1990s (with a major assist on spending restraint from Newt Gingrich), and the Bush recovery of the mid-2000s.  But ever since Obama took office, the economy has suffered.  Under constant attack by a hostile administration, businesses have decided not to expand, or they have moved or expanded their operations overseas.  The result is that 4.7 million fewer jobs have been created in the past three and a half years than would otherwise have been the case -- almost enough to provide a job for every one of those who have dropped out of the labor market.
Those 5.4 million include older workers who have lost their jobs and decided to apply for disability benefits or exhaust their 401(k) savings while waiting to file for Social Security at age 62.  Many of those who retire early are now consigned to live out their lives in poverty.  For this cohort, early retirement means that they will not enjoy the golden years they had planned, and many will outlive their savings entirely.  And for this, they have President Obama to blame.
Not all of the lost 5.4 million are older workers, however.  A large number are young men and women in their teens and twenties who have never worked at full-time jobs.  They are, in many cases, well-educated young people who have completed college degrees but who are unable to find suitable employment in this stagnant economy.  In fact, 40% of young adults aged 24 to 35 (4.6 million of them) are living with their parents, according to the 2010 census.  In large numbers, those who have found employment are working at low-paying jobs in the "hospitality" sector, as the Labor Department calls it.  This has been the fastest-growing sector of the economy in recent months, and it includes food service.  Since February 2010, 576,000 jobs have been added in restaurants and bars alone.
The educated young people who fill these jobs -- and those who have no jobs at all -- are falling permanently behind in their careers.  Over the course of their lives, they will achieve less, earn lower salaries, and accumulate less in retirement savings.  Compounded over the course of a 40-year career, the effects of this slow start are significant.  For this less-than-rosy future, the young have the president to blame.
It is not as if Obama lacked the means to create more jobs.  Simply by lowering taxes and reducing regulations, President Reagan created the greatest economic boom in modern American history.  At this point during the Reagan recovery (the first quarter of the fourth year in office), the economy expanded by 7.4%.  Now, at exactly the same point in the Obama presidency, it is growing at 1.8%.  That slow growth is the reason for the lack of jobs and for the tragic loss of hope for so many Americans.
Obama had every opportunity to create jobs.  His ban on mountaintop mining in the Appalachians, a region of perennial high unemployment, has cost many thousands of good jobs.  The Environmental Protection Agency's veto of Arch Coal's Spruce Mine permit, which the American Coal Council calls "drastic and unprecedented," is just one in a series of job-killing actions taken by the Obama EPA.  Obama's closure of the Gulf of Mexico to offshore drilling and continued slow permitting has cost "tens of thousands of jobs," according to one informed source.  His refusal to approve the Keystone XL pipeline project is costing an estimated 149,000 jobs, according to TransCanada.
Furthermore, the uncertainties caused by provisions in ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank have discouraged investment, particularly among small businesses that create the lion's share of new jobs in America.  Obama's refusal to allow untaxed repatriation of overseas earnings by American corporations has blocked investment of $1 trillion in the U.S. economy.  A tax holiday for overseas earnings could add 2.9 million jobs, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, yet Obama has ruled out repatriation on ideological grounds.  It is, after all, a business-friendly measure.
Obama's threats to raise taxes on the rich have also cut jobs by precipitating capital flight on an unprecedented scale.  Affluent Americans are renouncing their citizenship and fleeing in record numbers to Singapore, the Bahamas, and other tax-friendly locales.  Each one of those wealthy citizens has taken thousands of jobs with him, and for this the president is to blame.
If the president had "focused like a laser beam" on job creation, as he promised to do in 2009, he would not have found it that difficult to create jobs.  But instead of following up on his promise, Obama treated job-creation as a mere photo op.  Having promised to focus on job-creation, he promptly forgot about it and flew off on vacation.
Had the president remained on vacation, things might have gone well.  Instead, he chose to squander nearly a trillion dollars in his 2009 stimulus bill, a fraudulent measure that has stimulated nothing except debt levels.  He then followed up with a proposal for another $447 billion giveaway, which Congress had the good sense to defeat.
Obama also had the opportunity to lower corporate taxes across the board, a measure that would have spurred job-creation, but taxes for American corporations remain the highest of any major developed economy.  Meanwhile, he has blown $100 billion in an attempt to prop up green energy companies that were supposed to create 5 million jobs.  In one case after another, however, those green companies have gone bust, and those 5 million jobs have not been created.  Instead, 5.4 million have been lost.
There can be no doubt as to who is responsible for those lost jobs, and for the lost dreams of each of those 5.4 million Americans.  For the suffering of those who have dropped out of the labor market entirely, as well as for the 21 million (14% of the labor force) who are officially counted as unemployed or underemployed, there is only one person to blame.  Come November, those 26.2 million Americans who are unemployed, underemployed, or no longer looking for work need to remember who was in charge the last four years and vote accordingly.  These people should have plenty of time to get to the polls and vote.  After all, they're not doing much of anything else.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, including Heartland of the Imagination (2011). 

Whispering the Truth in Obama's America

 

By Stella Paul

The other day, I called a friend and interrupted her mid-cry. She'd just returned from putting her only son on a plane to China, where he was moving after giving up on getting a job here.
The next day in the supermarket, I bumped into another friend, looking downcast. She told me her only son was planning his move to Hong Kong, after a fruitless year-long search for a job in the financial sector.
"Obama's destroying the economy," she told me; then she looked nervously around at our hyper-Blue State neighbors.  "I feel like I have to whisper, or they're going to come and arrest me."
Welcome to Obama's America 2012, a joy-free zone in which the best and brightest youth are flocking to a Communist dictatorship, because they see more hope of economic opportunity there.
With 1 out of 2 recent college graduates out of work, the future leaders of the nation are hanging out in Mom's basement, enjoying their parents' health insurance coverage, while nodding off in a government-induced haze.
But many of the most driven, entrepreneurial types -- the kind of unstoppable hustlers who built America -- are bolting and may never return.
Why should they when they might land a fine job with that quintessential American company, Procter & Gamble? Its beauty unit is slamming the door on Ohio, and moving its headquarters to Singapore.
Or maybe they'll get a piece of Eduardo Saverin's next venture. He's the billionaire co-founder of Facebook who just tore up his U.S. citizenship.
Back in the halcyon pre-Obama days, Saverin emigrated here from Brazil, looking for opportunity.  Well, he found it -- and now he's following it to Singapore.
Ah yes, it's the glorious age of Hope and Change -- when Americans are renouncing their citizenship faster than Obama can grab cash at a George Clooney fundraiser. In 2011, a record 1,789 Americans gave up their US citizenship, exceeding the totals from 2007, 2008 and 2009 combined.
But even though America is bleeding jobs and draining brains, talent, and opportunity, don't let Obama hear you complain.
The man gets very mad when you don't genuflect to his hokum. And if you make a big donation to Romney, expect O's wrath to pour down upon your cranium good and hard.
The Wall Street Journal tells us that Obama's campaign website publicly names and shames eight private citizens who gave to Romney.  The president's website accuses these new public enemies of living "on the wrong side of the law," where they reap illicit profits at "the expense of so many Americans, " thereby earning "less-than-reputable records."
After Obama denounced Romney donor Frank VanderSloot of Idaho Falls, Idaho, something rather curious happened. Michael Wolf, a former Democratic law clerk from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, began trolling through VanderSloot's divorce records. What a coincidence!
Yes, for the crime of donating to Obama's opponent, Frank VanderSloot is getting the full Roto-Rooter treatment, just like Joe the Plumber. Remember Joe?
When candidate Obama inconveniently told Joe that he wanted to "spread the wealth," Joe quickly became a target. Helen Jones-Kelley, head of Ohio's Department of Jobs and Family Services, authorized searches of confidential state databases, looking for Joe's child support and unemployment records.
Obey Obama, comrades, or pay the price!
But don't worry. I'm writing this very softly so Obama can't hear. Because just between you and me, I want to ask:  If Obama is pushing out our best and brightest entrepreneurs to distant shores, who's he pulling in?
Well, here's an interesting fact: a new survey reveals that the number of Muslims in the U.S. has soared 67% since the 9/11 attacks.  Thanks to our State Department's massive importation of Muslim immigrants, Islam is now the fastest growing religion in America, up from 1 million in 2000 to 2.6 million today.
What could possibly go wrong? Don't you trust the State Department to sift out wretched refuse like the Times Square bomber, and the convicted plotters against Fort Dix, the New York subway system, and JFK airport?
Driving out wealth creators and importing potential destroyers may seem like national suicide, but it's a winning formula for mansion-dwelling, Marxist politicians.   Just ask François ("3 Homes on the Riviera") Hollande, who catapulted into the French presidency by garnishing 93% of the Muslim vote. 
Now France's successful citizens are stampeding out the door, desperate to get to England, Israel, or anywhere outside his sticky clutches.  And that means more votes for François next time around!
Meanwhile, back in the former land of the free, Obama plays the same cynical game, intimidating and threatening opponents, so that even a frightened mother in the supermarket feels like she has to whisper.              
But a million whispers sounds like a roar. Let's roar.
Write Stella Paul at Stellapundit@aol.com