That's not what I said. That's what Obama's campaign manager said.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Iran Tested Nuclear Warhead Design
The Global Warming Cult
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted 10-1 to advance their cap and tax plan. All Republicans boycotted the vote. Interestingly enough, Al Gore stands to profit substantially from his fear-mongering about global warming. Finally, a British judge ruled that belief in climate change is the same as religious faith. I made the same point several times already.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Obama Lost the 2009 Elections
Any Democratic spin about how yesterday's elections do not reflect a repudiation of Obama must contend with the Democratic Party's own propaganda, Obama's historic decline, and the Gallup poll's conclusion that if current trends continue, Republicans will retake the House of Representatives next year. These facts must weigh heavily on those Democrats who entertain dreams of another term. That in turn will further hamper Obama's radical agenda.
There is no chance for the GOP to retake the Senate next year. To do so, they must win 11 seats. My guess is that they will win 4-7. Even the minimum number should be sufficient for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to filibuster anything that moves.
In related news, the conservative group FreedomWorks is working to purge the GOP of its moderates and liberals.
Federal Government Wastes More Money
The Obama Administration spent $2.3 billion to bailout CIT Group. The corporation collapsed anyway. The Senate voted unanimously to extend unemployment benefits for another 20 weeks and to extend more home buyers credits. The former measure will simply encourage people to stay unemployed and the latter was one of the causes for the housing market collapse. It represented the naive belief that the government can manipulate the housing market any way it wants. There are more errors detected regarding the number of jobs supposedly created by Obama's $787 billion pork-barrel spending bill in Colorado and Illinois. Apparently, some of the fraudulent reporting involved counting jobs that received increases in salary as jobs saved.
Obama is With the Iranian Theocracy
Iranian regime protesters launched their largest public protest against their theocracy in 2 months, chanting: "Obama, Obama, you are either with them, or with us." Of course, Obama is with the mullahs. He never demonstrated much sympathy toward the regime protesters when they were brutally crushed 2 months ago. There is no reason to expect change now.
A Meaningful Verdict
An Italian court sentenced 23 CIA agents for extraordinary rendition. There is no possibility of the US extraditing the agents for their sentence. This sentence is meaningful because every time a court verdict goes contemptuously ignored, it undermines that court's standing. The Italian legal system successfully undermined itself in this case.
Free Speech Clause Triumphs Over the Pro-Abortion Agenda
I am pleased to report that the 3rd Circuit Court struck down a Pittsburgh ordinance that restricted the free speech rights of pro-lifers near abortion clinics. The Supreme Court precedent mentioned in the article is Hill v. Colorado. The Court's membership changed since the case was decided and I'm very confident that if the city appeals to the Supreme Court, the precedent will be overturned. Justice Kennedy is not much of a wordsmith and I have numerous disagreements with his jurisprudence. But I will always remember his very moving dissent in that case:
There runs through our First Amendment theory a concept of immediacy, the idea that thoughts and pleas and petitions must not be lost with the passage of time. In a fleeting existence we have but little time to find truth through discourse. No better illustration of the immediacy of speech, of the urgency of persuasion, of the preciousness of time, is presented than in this case. Here the citizens who claim First Amendment protection seek it for speech which, if it is to be effective, must take place at the very time and place a grievous moral wrong, in their view, is about to occur. The Court tears away from the protesters the guarantees of the First Amendment when they most need it. So committed is the Court to its course that it denies these protesters, in the face of what they consider to be one of life's gravest moral crises, even the opportunity to try to offer a fellow citizen a little pamphlet, a handheld paper seeking to reach a higher law.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Party of Corruption, Part 83
The [House] ethics committee announced Thursday it would examine whether [Rep. Laura] Richardson [Democrat, California] should have included the foreclosure information regarding her Sacramento home in her financial disclosure forms and whether her lender offered preferential treatment in how the home was eventually returned to Richardson's ownership.
"Empire of Lies"
The Business Roundtable whose members employ 12 million people are condemning the Democratic government health care plan for potentially increasing the cost for both employers and employees. Another study suggests that the House Democrats' health care plan will cost $1.2 trillion. The plan represents the liberal ideology of hating the rich. It imposes an extra 5.4% tax on individuals who make $500,000/year. Furthermore, as this tax is not indexed to inflation, it will gradually ensnare more people. Democrats are now conceding that there will be no completed health care bill this year, a week after Obama claimed that he intends to sign one this year.
Though many American doctors complain about the FDA's slow process of approving drugs, it is actually, on average, a year faster than the European Medicines Agency. The tremendous American advantage in drug innovation is attributed to lack of price controls. The highest cancer survival rate in Europe is 57.9% for French woman. For Americans, it is 62% for men and 63.5% for women. While Democrats want to degrade American health care to the level in Europe, Britain is developing more appreciation for private health care. The British government plans to move patients who are on waiting lists for 18 weeks to private health care. It is only government deception that convinces Europeans that somehow they enjoy better health care. Britain's National Health Service is spending millions of pounds trying to buy off whistleblowers who may expose the NHS's problems. Just like the Soviet Union, government health care can be considered an "empire of lies."
Marine Corps' Opposition to Homosexuals Serving in the Military
It says much about how seriously Clinton bungled the affair that it now takes a Congressional statute to repeal the ban. It used to be simply a bureaucratic rule. By raising public awareness of the issue, Clinton only succeeded in leading Congress to pass the rule as a Congressional statute. As a bureaucratic rule, Clinton could have repealed it using his authority as commander-in-chief just as President Truman imposed racial integration in the military with his pen. Thanks to Clinton's bungling, repealing the rule is now harder than it was. Nobody says that the Law of Unintended Consequences always yields negative results.
Another Frivolous Law Suit Dismissed
I am delighted to report that the 2nd Circuit Court ruled by 7-4 to dismiss a law suit filed by a Canadian who was subject to extraordinary rendition in 2002.
Another Example of Obama's Ineptitude
The Palestinians are now complaining that the Obama Administration is responsible for killing off the peace process. This is amusing because the Obama Administration started off by demanding total Israeli settlement freeze in the West Bank, thus raising unrealistic Palestinian hopes. It also helped unite the Israeli people behind PM Netanyahu who rejected this absurd demand. After a few months of dawdling, the Obama Administration had to back down and pretend that they endorse natural settlement growth all along. While the Palestinians are guilty of naivete and opportunism, they are not entirely wrong in suggesting that the Obama Administration completely bungled this affair.
In related news, the Israelis found out about the Syrian nuclear site they destroyed in 2007 by planting a Trojan horse virus in the computer of a Syrian official. The terrorist group Hamas tested a missiel that can reach Tel Aviv, the largest Israeli city.
The Importance of a Confession
Iranian dissidents will apologize for the seizure of the US embassy in 1979. This demonstrates the maturity of the Iranian opposition. The high hopes of the 1979 revolution ended in a disastrous war with Iraq and a cruel theocracy. By repudiating what the theocracy considers to be a high point of their reign, the opposition is making a decisive break with the 1979 revolution. It's a pity that this mature act comes during the Obama Administration which is determined to kowtow to Tehran, no matter the cost. A much more realistic administration would take advantage of this opportunity.
No Vicious Dictatorship Left Behind
The Obama Administration is reaching out to the government of Burma. This comes months after the revelation that the Burmese government is working on a nuclear program and is consistent with Obama's naive effort of reaching out to Iran.
Making Criminals Pay
The sheriff of Bristol County, Massachusetts want criminals to pay rent, haircuts, health care, and education. This is only fair. It was not the state that encouraged these thugs to commit the crimes that caused them to be imprisoned in the first place. There is no reason why the taxpayers should foot the bill.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Obama Discovers Usefulness of State Secrets Privilege
The Obama Administration invoked the state secrets privilege to dismiss a law suit relating to the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretap program. In related news, the 16 US intelligence agencies received $49.8 billion in FY2009.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Obama's Top Fundraisers Received Government Posts
US GDP Grew by 3.5% in Q3
The depression officially ended. In related news, the "cash for clunkers" program cost the federal government $24,000/new car sold to administer even though the subsidy to car buyers was only $4,500. Once again, we have the legendary inefficiency of the federal government at work. In addition, the $787 billion stimulus package led to plenty of misleading, erroneous, or downright fraudulent reporting. The federal government also subsidized the average Amtrak passenger by $32 in 2008. All these economic blunders certainly hasn't stopped the Obama Administration from wanting to expand control over more businesses.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
UN Making a Pest of Itself Again
UN whines that US use of unmanned drones to carry out targeted attacks on terrorists may violate international law. Though I regard this as complete nonsense, it does pose a very interesting issue for the Obama Administration. Apparently, VP Biden has been advocating increased use of such targeted attacks. Perhaps he should be considered a war criminal?
North Dakota's Oil Wealth
North Dakota produced 6.38 million barrels of crude in May, edging Louisiana, which had 6.34 million barrels for the month. Oklahoma was ranked fifth, at 5.7 million barrels for that month....
North Dakota averaged 206,000 barrels daily in May, compared with 205,000 barrels for Louisiana.
Robins can See Magnetic Field
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Party of Corruption, Part 82
Congressmen John Murtha (Democrat, Pennsylvania) and James Moran (Democrat, Virginia) steered $12 million in federal contracts to a software company that happened to:
a) operate in their district,
b) hire their former staff as well as Murtha's brother, and
c) donated thousands of dollars to their campaigns.
Welfare Fraud is Big Business
Medicare fraud costs $60 billion/year. That's about 12% of Medicare's total spending. It's larger than Microsoft's total annual revenue. If a company regularly loses 12% of its revenue to fraud, it would be out of business a long time ago. Only the federal government can afford to keep on dumping money down this bottomless pit. In related news, doctors are continuing to opt out of Medicare. Apparently, the way foreign government health care plans treat the problem of pay for doctors is to institute price controls which will create shortages in medical personnel and also raise taxes.
Pliosaur Skull Found
Monday, October 26, 2009
Did Obama Try to Remove Afghan President Karzai?
One can understand Afghan President Hamid Karzai questioning the Obama Administration's reliability by recognizing the possibility that Obama is trying to engineer his own regime change in Afghanistan. How else to explain Democratic strategist James Carville's decision to travel all the way to Afghanistan to help one of Karzai's opponents? This certainly would not be the first time that Democrats sent their political consultants abroad to engineer regime change. In 1999, Carville also went to Israel and successfully unseated PM Netanyahu. Democrats also went to Russia in 1996 to help President Yeltsin win his election.
There is no reason for Karzai to take this attempt at regime change any better than Saddam Hussein. That may have prompted him to engage in voter fraud. I also doubt that it was an accident that the candidate Carville assisted happened to advocate a cease-fire with the Taliban. This is beginning to look like an attempt by Obama to remove Karzai and install a government that will give Obama an excuse to withdraw US troops. However, this amateurish attempt at regime change blew up in Obama's face. What he got instead is a weakened Karzai that he was compelled to support. This mess of Obama's own creation will only aid the Taliban.
Democrats seem to have a pattern of trying regime change on the cheap, only to have it backfire. Though Clinton successfully removed Netanyahu from power, he still failed to achieve lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. What he got instead was the 2nd Intifada. To go back further, it was President Kennedy who authorized the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his replacement by a military dictatorship. Let's hope Obama's bumbling in Afghanistan doesn't end as badly.
Republicans seem to prefer much more expensive options for regime change that tend to yield better results. The surge effort stabilized Iraq. President Reagan's invasion of Grenada also ensured peace for that island. In contrast, Kennedy's half-hearted effort at Bay of Pigs guaranteed communist control of Cuba for decades.
Race and IQ
Pregnant Latino women smoke and drink less than pregnant white and African American women, Latino newborns have lower infant mortality rates, and the cognitive skill of infants 9 to 15 months are about equal for white and Latino children.
But by the time they are toddlers, Latino children trail their white counterparts by up to six months in understanding words, speaking in more complex sentences and performing such simple tasks as assembling puzzles.The best that the researchers can do is to recommend something like the Early Head Start program. But interestingly enough, the article makes no effort to identify any evidence that Early Head Start works as advertised. In fact, studies on the effectiveness of early intervention programs tend to show the following:
a) The program is either completely ineffective or shows such marginal improvements (0.1-0.3 standard deviation) that call into question their cost-effectiveness.
b) The improvements tend to fade away unless there is constant reinforcement. In other words, early intervention like Head Start can never end because as soon as they do, the improvements will gradually disappear.
The history of early intervention programs is a history of false hopes. Consider the Knowledge is Power Program:
Yet as Tough appreciates, the story isn't quite that simple. He credits KIPP with having devised a genuinely successful formula for many students. But almost alone among mainstream journalists, he also points out just how much the program's success depends on superhuman commitment from its teachers, which is always going to be hard to replicate on a large scale, and on culling the best students from impoverished neighborhoods. Although its schools technically operate by lottery, researcher Richard Rothstein has shown that parents who seek out KIPP academies and other charter schools are invariably more educated and more competent than parents who don't. Indeed, according to Tough, KIPP's own internal data show that its students enter KIPP already outperforming their poor, minority-group peers. KIPP then builds, albeit more successfully than most charter programs, on these gains.Similarly, the authors of the bestseller Freakonomics concluded that IQ is strongly hereditary.
Talking about these marginal improvements, bought at great cost, only raises another, even thornier question: Why should disadvantaged children be given such assistance in the first place? After all, it's not as if somehow, such programs only work on disadvantaged children. So, why not target such programs at more gifted children who, with the help of such programs, may scale even greater heights?
But even these questions avoid the ultimate and most unspeakable question: If IQ is mostly determined by heredity and if various intervention programs are not cost-effective, then what are we supposed to do about those who are destined for a life of mediocrity? To suggest doing nothing is to suggest that people who are strongly correlated with certain racial minorities are doomed to spend the rest of their lives on the lower end of the social hierarchy, that the concept of upward mobility is a myth, that the ancient feudal idea of descendants inheriting their parents' stations in life was right all along, that the concept of Progress may apply to human civilization as a whole but not to generations of individual families and that there is such a thing as a primary engine behind Progress and that unique designation is almost exclusively confined to a few races.
Perhaps seeking refuge in the illusory hope of "an early intervention program that works" is much easier than having to deal with those issues. At least psychologically, it is more comforting than facing those unpleasant possibilities.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Another Reason Why US Should Expel the UN
The UN will be investigating affordable housing in New York City. Apparently, having affordable housing is a human right and if the city fails to provide it, that will be a human right violation. No doubt that will then be used as an excuse to increase government spending.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Obama's Dithering is Costing American Lives
Note: "Surge complete" means that all the troops earmarked for the surge effort were in place. Data taken from iCasualties.
The above two charts show the remarkable effects of the Iraq troop surge in cutting down both American and Iraqi casualties. The following is a timeline relating to Gen. McChrystal's troop request:
8/10: Member of Gen. McChrystal's assessment team suggested that 45,000 troops are needed.
9/2: Gen. McChrystal submitted his strategy plan to Obama.
9/18: Washington Post reveals that someone instructed Gen. McChrystal to delay submitting his troop request.
10/2: Senate Democrats blocked proposal to invite Gen. McChrystal to testify before Congress about his Afghanistan strategy.
10/9: Wall Street Journal reported that someone convinced Gen. McChrystal to minimize his troop request to 40,000. The maximum option is 60,000.
10/11: The Obama Administration is ignoring warnings by the military, the intelligence community, and the State Department about the problems associated with a limited targeted strike campaign.
Political influence abounds in this sorry saga. We find Democrats thwarting Gen. McChrystal at every turn. It is clear that even before he submitted his report in early September that he already knew what the troop request should be. The separation of the troop request from his strategy plan is bizarre, to say the least. After all, the extra troops are necessary in order to carry out his strategy. Why should the troop request be delayed for nearly a month after he submitted his report? We are now nearly at the 2-month mark since Gen. McChrystal submitted his report and Obama continues to dither. The 2 charts above clearly suggest that such a delay will only cost extra American and Afghan lives.
I once noted the astonishing contrast between Obama when he was campaigning for president and his position now on the issue of Afghanistan. These efforts to delay Gen. McChrystal's troop request and now to dither without reaching a decision are consistent with Obama's pattern of using Afghanistan as a political talking point. Now that he won the election, the talking point has become inconvenient and Obama is now living in denial, hoping that the issue will somehow disappear if he ignores it long enough, grasping for an alternative that the national security community already warned him is unlikely to succeed. It is politics, not strategic imperatives that drives Obama's Afghanistan policy.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Obama's Enemies List
First they went after Chrysler bondholders. Then they went after the health care industry. Then they went after the Chamber of Commerce. Now they're going after Fox News. Obama has been far tougher on his domestic adversaries than on Iran and North Korea. Apparently, he's quite willing to talk to Tehran and Pyongyang but not go for a Fox News interview.
NATO Endorsed Gen. McChrystal's Afghanistan Strategy
Further isolating the Obama Administration in their quixotic quest to consider unrealistic alternatives such as the one proposed by that great military mind, VP Biden of targeted strikes. Even the limited surge this year has already stabilized a significant part of Helmand province. The surge strategy has already been tried and succeeded in Iraq and has already met limited success in Afghanistan. It was endorsed by Gen. Petraeus, architect of the US success in Iraq; and Gen. McChrystal, an expert on counter-insurgency warfare and appointed to his position by Obama. Obama's current dithering is inexcusable.
Snapshot of Foreign Economies
British GDP declined by 0.4% in the 3rd quarter of this year, marking the 6th consecutive quarterly contraction and the longest period of economic depression for that country since 1955. But at least they haven't sunk to the level of Venezuela which is suffering from a water shortage. Meanwhile, China is claiming a GDP growth rate of 8.9% in the 3rd quarter. Finally, Japan's government debt has reached twice the size of its GDP.
Littoral Combat Ship
Sunken Treasure Near Durham Cathedral
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