U.S. State Dept. Tells U.N. We Are Guilty of Many, Many Human Rights Violations

In an early move to placate the international community, Obama had the U.S. join the U.N. Human Rights Council.  The current member nations of this august body of human rights exemplars include:

Angola
Egypt
Nigeria
South Africa
Zambia
China
Kyrgyzstan
Pakistan
Saudi Arabia
Russian Federation
Argentina
Bolivia
Cuba

The U.S. just delivered a 29-page report to the Human Rights Council in which the State Department said that some Americans were still victims of discrimination.  In particular, blacks, Latinos, Muslims, South Asians, Native Americans, and gays are victims of high unemployment, hate crimes, poverty, poor housing, lack of access to health care, and discriminatory hiring practices.

The report welcomed "observations and recommendations that can help us on that road to a more perfect union."  The American Civil Liberties Union approved of the Obama administration's submission to the U.N. Human Rights Council, but decried the fact it did not address the issues of "inhumane prison conditions, racial disparities in death penalty cases, and abuses in the immigration system."  The director of the ACLU's human rights program said, "It is time for the U.S. to match its human rights rhetoric with concrete domestic policies and actions and create a human rights culture and infrastructure that promote American values of equality and justice for all."

OK, you have been wondering when I was finally going to step in here and punch this Progressive viewpoint in its sniveling nose.  Did you notice that human rights are always referred to by statists and not individual rights?  They ought to be the same thing, but somehow they never are.  Human rights are always take to include the obligation of some individuals to serve others, usually in some collective group.  So, to be clear and differentiate my viewpoint from the Progressive idea of human rights, I will address these issues on the basis of our individual rights.

Individuals have the right to freedom of association and they have the right to discriminate.  They are not required to choose who they associate with or how they discriminate on a rational basis.  What is more, government would hardly be the agent anyone rational would turn to for the purpose of determining who each individual shall associate with and to dictate to each individual how they should discriminate.  These issues are much too complex for government, which is incredibly simple-minded and totally lacks the knowledge of how each American individual is differentiated and what their values are.  Individuality and those differing values require individuals to discriminate among those with whom they will choose to associate.  What is more, we should have learned long ago that no good comes of individuals forfeiting their own independent judgment to government beyond those basic protections which government provides by preventing itself and individuals from initiating the use of force against one another. 

If I were to refuse to hire any black Adventist person, let us say, that is within my rights, as long as mine is a private company.  The government, on the other hand, cannot refuse to hire Adventist blacks.  Why?  First, because government must treat every individual equally before the law.  Second, government is the only agent in our society allowed to use force against individuals.  That use of force must be tightly controlled to prevent its abusive use.  One of the most important controls is that it must be applied equally to all citizens, so that the majority of citizens will be inclined to feel the need to protect those who have become the victims of government discrimination on the basis of race, religion, peaceful creed, employer or employee, income, or property.  It is government that proves to be the monolithic rights violator because it has a monopoly on the use of force in a society.  Therefore, legitimate government, as defined in our Declaration of Independence, has the sole function of protecting the equal, sovereign rights of every individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

That being the case, it is very irrational that this report did not bemoan the fact that the government discriminates against people who are more productive and those who earn more income.  When the ACLU calls upon the American values of equality and justice, where is their outcry against the progressive income tax code?  Or, where is the acknowledgment by the government that it has no right to discriminate against hiring white males for government positions.  Where is the acknowledgment that government cannot claim to treat Americans equally and with justice when it discriminates against firms owned by white males when it lets contracts for goods and services?  Where is there condemnation of the fact that employers are forced to keep employee income and tax records and submit reports to governments without just compensation?

While these awful infractions of unequal and unjust discrimination by the U.S. government go unmentioned, the ACLU bemoans the conditions of prisoners, who are treated better here than almost anywhere in the world.  And what are the immigration abuses they are talking about?  Apparently, our policy is only to deport people who are felons, while illegal border crossings and misdemeanors are ignored.  Where is the abuse in that?  When we provide most government services and force many private companies to provide free charity work to illegal immigrants, it is a puzzle to me that we can be said to be abusive.

It may be true that more blacks receive the death penalty, but that may be less because they are black than because of a combination of the nature of the crimes and their likely being poorer and less able to obtain the services of the better lawyers.

We shall have to wait with bated breath for the constructive comments to come from Cuba, China, the Russian Federation, Zambia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan on how the U.S. might achieve an admirable human rights record.  Do you suppose any of them will do what the ACLU failed to do?  Will they point out that the primary abuses of human rights in the U.S. are due to our government's failure to govern in accordance with our own Declaration of Independence and our Constitution?  Will they point out that our progressive income tax system is a violation of every individual's equal rights to life, the pursuit of happiness, and property?  Do you suppose they will demand that the U.S. government stop its baleful discrimination against the white male minority or the employer minority?

Rasmussen Defines the Political Class

John Fund interviewed pollster Scott Rasmussen after he gave a speech at the American Legislative Exchange Council.  Rasmussen notes that he takes care to define whether his polled people belong to the Political Class or to the Mainstream Public.  The Political Class favors government in at least two of the following three questions:

1. Whose judgment do you trust more, that of the American people or America's political leaders?
2. Has the federal government become its own special interest group?
3. Do government and big business often work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors?

My answers to these questions are:

1. The American people, unless we mean the Founding Fathers and the Framers of the Constitution.
2. The federal government is a voracious special interest group.
3. Big business is often happy to use the force of government to protect itself from competition and to harm small business.  Politicians are often happy to offer big business and labor unions plums for their contributions upon which the public is choked.

The Political Class has shrunk since the recession began hurting Americans in late 2008, while the Mainstream Public has grown slightly.  I find it puzzling that still more people have not lost their faith in government, but faith in government is a stubbornly held religion.  Strangely enough, a majority of Democrats, of Republicans, and of independents are Mainstream Public.  The Political Class believe or favor these views:

• 67% believe the U.S. is moving in the right direction.
• They overwhelmingly support the bailouts of the financial and auto industries, ObamaCare, and suing the state of Arizona on its immigration bill.

84% of the Mainstream Public believe the U.S. is moving in the wrong direction!  The Mainstream Public intensely oppose the bailouts, ObamaCare, and suing the state of Arizona.

On the Democrat congressional agenda:

• 91% of Political Class think it mainstream
• 70% of Mainstream Public think it extreme

On the Republican congressional agenda:

• 81% of the Political Class think it extreme
• 53% of Mainstream Public find it mainstream

Rasmussen points at polling questions from the Political Class that make no sense to the Mainstream Public.  An example is "Should policymakers spend more to improve the economy or reduce spending to cut the deficit?"  Rasmussen says 52% of Americans think more government spending hurts the economy, while only 28% think it helps.  Consequently, while the pollster thinks he is asking for a trade-off, the public only sees the reduction in spending as good.

The week the bailout plan passed Congress, 62% of the voters wanted more tax cuts and less government spending.  They understood from the beginning that spending bailout was unlikely to succeed in helping the economy.  When Obama told Americans that ObamaCare would reduce health care spending and cut the deficit, most Americans already knew otherwise.  60% thought it would increase the deficit and 81% thought it would be more expensive than the Congressional Budget Office numbers said it would be.  The Mainstream Public is much harder to make fools of than is the Political Class.

Rasmussen noted that the American people voted against the party in power in the last three elections.  While Republicans will gain from this in November, 75% of Republicans say the Republicans in Congress are out of touch with the party base.  Rasmussen says Republican leaders will have to move quickly after the election to convince Republicans that they have regained contact with and understanding of the party base.

Democrat Unemployment Policy Rewards Immoral Mooching

The Emergency Unemployment Compensation program of 2008 was initially funded by the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2008.  Since then, it has been extended or expanded 7 times.  The most recent extension was on 22 July 2010.  It now consists of:

• Tier 1:  Up to 20 weeks of benefits in every state.
• Tier 2:  Up to 14 additional weeks of benefits in every state.
• Tier 3:  Up 13 additional weeks of benefits in states with a:
• 13-week insured unemployment rate of at least 4.0%; or
• 3-month seasonally adjusted total unemployment rate of at least 6.0%
• Tier 4:  Up to 6 additional weeks of benefits in states with a:
• 13-week insured unemployment rate of at least 6.0%; or 
• 3-month seasonally adjusted total unemployment rate of at least 8.5%.

Since all but 4 of the states in June 2010 had unemployment rates of 6.0% or higher, all but the states of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, and New Hampshire may qualify for Tier 3 unemployment benefits.  Qualification for Tier 4 benefits is harder to get the data on, but it appears that slightly more than half the states presently qualify for Tier 4 benefits.  Thus, half the states are subsidizing the other half, as some unemployed people pick up unemployment benefits for as long as 53 weeks.  Curiously enough, people may qualify from as early as May 2006, or well before the recession, until as late as 30 November 2010, or conveniently after the upcoming elections.

What are some of the effects of such long-term unemployment benefits?  Here are a few: 

• The unemployed
• wait longer to look seriously for a new job.
• refuse to take lower paying jobs.
• continue to look for a job much like their old job.
• do not start their own business in order to create their own new job.
• do not move to states where jobs are more plentiful in general or for their job specialty.
• Employers
• cannot find as many qualified applicants as they would like for lower pay jobs.
• find their qualified applicants will not move to the job.
• cannot find people for training positions, even if post-training pay will be comparable to the unemployed person's previous employment pay.
• sell fewer goods and services because people will not buy due to the uncertainty created by high unemployment.
• have to pay higher unemployment taxes to the states due to the high unemployment, making it more expensive to hire anyone.
• generally are hit with more taxes by local, state, and federal government because their expenses are up and the tax base is depressed.
• watch the Federal Reserve print money, which will not circulate, but lurks about to create future investment hazards due to inflation.
• watch anti-business tirades, legislation, and regulations as desperate and befuddled government tries to find someone else to blame for its mistakes.
• cannot get business loans because financial companies are afraid of the unknown and there is much unknown.
• Employed taxpayers
• generally are hit with more taxes by local, state, and federal government because government expenses are up and the tax base is depressed.
• are more likely to become unemployed as higher taxes drive more businesses out of business.
• are more likely to become unemployed as desperate government scares, more heavily regulates, and burdens businesses with more paperwork, such as 1099s galore.
• are more likely to become unemployed as the recession drags on since the unemployed are not working productively and are dragging the economy down.
• suffer stagnant salaries and wages as recovery is delayed.
• watch the investments made for their retirement dwindle
• worry about the debt piled upon their children and grandchildren.
• worry about the many lost freedoms as governments meddle with and take over the private sector to give the appearance of having new ideas and responding to needs.

I am sure that I could go on and on with direful consequences of the unemployment benefit extensions, but we are all surely tired of bullets by now.  How many reasons does it take to establish that something is a bad policy after all?

It is sad to see many people, who were once productive workers, now out of work.  Very many of them lost their previous jobs through no fault of their own in this government-induced and prolonged recession.  But, there comes a time, rather quickly, when someone unemployed either finds new employment or they create their own job by starting their own business, unless they are immoral.  There are unemployment programs based upon unemployment taxes.  I do not think government has the right to impose such taxes, but they do and those taxes will support a rather brief unemployment period as the unemployed transition to new jobs.  But, presently, there is little such transitioning going on.  This is due to wrongheaded government meddling in the private sector and these extensions of unemployment benefits are one of many boneheaded actions by the government to prolong this recession.  In very many ways, the Obama administration is mimicking the Roosevelt administration in the folly, erratic, and threatening nature of its economic policies.

The Tier 3 and Tier 4 unemployment benefits are analogous to the Thompson administration in Atlas Shrugged deciding to drain the wealth of burgeoning Colorado to keep going a bit longer in what is clearly a death spiral.  Mooch off  Ellis Wyatt with his new oil fields, Nielson Motors, and Hammond Cars so the unproductive can go on a few more days even at the expense of destroying the last healthy part of the country.  This is a great way to prolong a recession which should be over by now.  This unemployment compensation makes the states with fewer anti-business policies bear the costs of supporting the larger numbers of unemployed generally found in the states with poor business policies.  It takes those companies and industries which are stronger throughout the country and makes them weaker to support those who will not take the personal responsibility of moving to where the jobs are, of taking a lower paying job, of learning a new profession, or creating their own job.  It is often said that Obama is the second coming of Carter, but he is more like the transformation of Thompson from fiction to life.

Justice Department Claims Taxing Power is Constitutionally Unlimited in Defense of ObamaCare

U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson ruled in Richmond, VA on 2 August that the Virginia attorney general lawsuit claiming that ObamaCare was unconstitutional had enough merit that he would not stop it from moving to a trial in October in Richmond.  The Virginia legislature has also passed a law protecting its citizens from being forced to buy health insurance by the federal government.  Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said, "The government cannot draft an unwilling citizen into commerce just so it can regulate him under the commerce clause."  Foolishly, the state of Virginia's lawyers have conceded that the federal government has broad powers to impose a tax, but they claim it has less power to impose a penalty. 

The Justice Department claims that Congress has broad authority to regulate private decisions on health care since those decisions affect the health care system and therefore interstate commerce.  They also claim the power to tax people who refuse to join mandated programs.  In fact, they go so far as to claim that the "courts are without authority to limit the exercise of the taxing power."

Now, the Justice Department is insanely wrong on both claims it is making.  This is not to say that they will not carry the day in court, but they are clearly making two unconstitutional arguments at the core of their case. 

First, they are claiming that anyone who does not purchase a health insurance plan acceptable to the federal government is affecting the health care system because at some time they will need to use the health care system.  This in turn means it affects interstate commerce.  So, a person is to be forced to buy a particular, mandated health insurance policy or one of a few such policies so that he will be forced to affect interstate commerce.  Well, actually, this may not be true at all.  First, some people will actually die without getting health care, though we do not know who they will be.  Second, some people are so wealthy that they have no need to purchase insurance to provide for their own health needs.  It is clear that the Obama faction want to force such people to buy policies which will subsidize others with less income, but such wealthy people are not evading a personal responsibility as the Justice Department argues they are.  Third, the policy best suited to some individuals will surely be different than the government mandated policies.  Fourth, it is a novel legal claim to force people to buy a product so that they have been forced to participate in commerce they did not want to participate in.  Fifth, that commerce still may not truly be interstate commerce since health plans are to be formulated and administered state by state.

Recall that Congress voted for ObamaCare while claiming that it did not represent a tax, which was a point Obama was very insistent upon.  But now, in the face of the challenge by the state of Virginia, and a separate lawsuit by the attorney generals of 20 other states, which is coming up for a similar ruling on whether it will be allowed to proceed, the Justice Department is claiming that Congress has the authority to pass ObamaCare based on its taxing power.  In fact, it has no such power since the taxing power only exists for the purpose of exercising the strictly enumerated powers in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, where there is no mention of caring for the medical needs of the People.  This inconvenient fact has long been ignored, however.

The current Justice Department claim goes even further than this usual usurpation of power by Congress.  It claims that the courts have no power to limit the taxation power!  Why is this going much further?  Because the Constitution places a further restriction on what Congress can do beyond enumerating its powers.  It says that Congress must legislate in such a way that it does not harm the General Welfare.  So, if ObamaCare is not consistent with the General Welfare, then it is unconstitutional.  Some will debate whether it is or not, though most of the American People have concluded that it is harmful to them.  What cannot be debated is this:  The taxing power of Congress is limited by the General Welfare and therefore it is a serious usurpation of power by Congress and the Justice Department to claim that power is unlimited.  This is clearly the claim of megalomaniacs.  There can be no question that if Congress levels a tax of 100% of income upon any American citizen, it has fundamentally violated his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The power to tax must have limits.  It cannot be unlimited.  If Congress were not to have enough sense to recognize this, then the courts would have to step in and declare the excessive taxes unconstitutional.

Judge Hudson recognized some of these problems.  He said, "Never before has the [Constitution's] commerce clause and associated necessary and proper clause been extended this far."  Indeed, if they are extended so far, then there are no limits to the power of the federal government except the few among the many rights still protected in the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment.  We can then be forced to participate in any market for any good or service and then be controlled by regulation.  We can be taxed in any way to any degree by government so that it can acquire all of our income and wealth, leaving us even homeless, without clothing, and without food.  Clearly, it is the job of the federal courts to squash these hugely inflated claims of power made by the Obama Justice Department in the name of the Democrat Congress.  Your life is at stake in this.  This is a claim of a right to tyrannical rule which King George III would not have attempted.

Now that the Justice Department has claimed that ObamaCare actually invokes taxation, let us examine the evolving size of this tax.  The Kaiser Family Foundation survey of employers in 2009 found that the average premium for employer-provided family policies was $13,375.  This is the kind of policy that ObamaCare is expected to mandate, when the bureaucrats come forth with their mandates.  This is 26% of the median household income of $52,000.  ObamaCare will provide some subsidies for incomes up to $88,000, but this is still a massive tax on many earning less than $88,000 and the subsidy cost will be shifted to everyone making more than $88,000 and fall back in increased prices for all goods and services upon those who are subsidized as well.  The new tax on a family with a household income of $88,000 will be 15.2%!

It gets worse.  The Arizona Republic said in July that "State and university employees with families can expect to see their monthly health insurance costs rise as much as 37% next year."  The reason for the increase is ObamaCare!  If this kind of severe health insurance premium increase continues into 2014 when ObamaCare requires everyone to purchase the federally mandated health insurance policies, then this tax upon the People will be the most gigantic tax ever in the history of the United States!  Obama and the Democrat Congress have foisted the highest tax increase in our history upon us in a law most Americans clearly opposed then and continue to oppose today.

Throw these tyrannical bums out of office as a matter of self-preservation!  Meanwhile, we must hope the federal courts have enough sense to declare ObamaCare unconstitutional.  It clearly is.

Pig-Headed EPA Proceeds with Power Grab

Last Thursday, the evil EPA rejected the petitions of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and nine other petitioners and announced that it intends to proceed with the development of regulations to control CO2 emissions based on claims by the UN IPCC that they are dangerous to the public health and the environment.  As regular readers of this blog know, this is a perfectly unproven claim and even a known false claim.

The court order that the EPA was following to produce an evaluation of whether man's CO2 emissions were a "public endangerment" under the Clean Air Act required it to examine the science on the issue of catastrophic man-made global warming and make a determination on public endangerment.  Instead, the EPA turned to the now discredited UN IPCC reports and used them as its authority on the science.  The UN IPCC, however, is a political body of nation states and not a scientific institution.  It is not qualified to make such a determination.  The EPA also claimed the scientific backing of the National Academy of Sciences, but that organization has never made any comprehensive assessment of the causes of global climate change, though it has made pronouncements on the issue.  The EPA thus failed to accomplish its court-chartered task.

The legislative Cap and Trade approach to taxing energy and mandating energy use reductions, has run into a roadblock due to the upcoming elections and its lack of support from the People in these difficult recessionary times.  The EPA will now proceed with draconian regulations on CO2 emissions which will not in fact be compatible with the Clean Air Act.  If the courts refuse to recognize the violation of the Clean Air Act and the implied usurpation of power from Congress by the EPA, then the 2011 Congress will have to defund the EPA so it is unable to enforce whatever regulations on CO2 emissions it produces.  Obama and a Democrat Senate will not be able to prevent this defunding of the EPA.  If this is not done, the EPA regulations will greatly extend the recession.  In fact, coupled with the end of the Bush tax cuts, the moratorium on deep water drilling, and ObamaCare costs, these anti-CO2 emissions regulations may convert the recession into a depression.  Even before the regulations are in hand, the uncertainty of their effects will slow down any possible recovery and any hiring.

Uncertainty is the chief enemy of business.  Uncertainty is a form of lawlessness in and of itself.  It was never just the destruction that Attila the Hun did when he swept through a village, but it was the uncertainty caused by the fact that he might do so, which made life nasty and brutish in Eastern Europe during his time.  Obama and his Democrat followers, socialists all, are the Hun hordes of our day.

My apologies to pigs.  It is the nature of pigs, who are rather intelligent animals, to be pig-headed.  It is supposed to be the nature of man to use his superior rational faculty.  The EPA's failure to do so, should not cast aspersions upon useful pigs.  I love that kind of pork, even as I loathe Congressional pork.  A useful animal should be given a measure of respect, even as a wrongheaded, and destructive, EPA gains only our disdain.

Fear Makes Money and Credit Scarce

Steve H. Hanke, professor of Applied Economics at The Johns Hopkins University and Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute, wrote an interesting article entitled Money Dominates.  He notes there is a controversy going on in which some in the government or among Obama's advisors favor more government stimulus and some want an end to very high rates of government spending and so are considered to be for "austerity."

The stimulus spenders include Prof. Paul Krugman, Prof. Lawrence Summers (Dir. of the National Economic Council), Prof. Christina Romer (Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers), and Treasury Sec. Tim Geithner.  The austerity side is represented by Obama Senior Advisor David Axelrod, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and Dr. Peter Orszag (Dir. of the Office of Management and Budget).  Germany and most of the other G20 countries are now favoring austerity.

The Keynesians believe government deficit spending will be stimulative whether the spending is done by printing money or by borrowing.  Monetarists, such as Milton Friedman was, hold that government spending is stimulative when it is done with printed money, but may not be stimulative if financed with borrowing.  Usually, government deficit spending is done with a combination of printed and borrowed money, so it is hard to test who is right.  However, the Japanese experience of the 1990s did separate the two sources of deficit spending with only borrowed money and the economy continued throughout to drag and sink.  The other example was from 1992 - 1997 in the U.S.  The deficit spending was based on printing money then and the economy expanded.

Hanke notes that Prof. Tim Congdon studied a 28-year period for the U.S. and found that the number of years that the economy behaved as the Keynesians claim it should was half the number of years in which it did not perform as they claim it should.  So, it is clear the Keynesians are wrong and the monetarists are at least less wrong.  In our present recessionary case, broad measures of money have fallen.  This is why the $862 billion stimulus of February 2009 was so ineffective.  This is why the U.S. and Europe are stuck with sub-normal growth rates and will remain so for some time.

The money supply situation is given in the following table:

Several measures of the money supply are given and these become broader and broader as one goes down the rows.  In August of 2008, before the recession in the U.S., the Federal Reserve deposits were $0.84 trillion, but in June of 2010, it had increased this greatly to $1.9 trillion, or by a factor of 2.25!  Yet, M2, the measure of money representing the traditional bank deposit liabilities was a mere $8.6 trillion, rather than the $17.6 trillion that would have been the case if the same M2 multiplier to the Federal Reserve deposits applied as had in August 2008.

At least the M2 value had increased, but as we go to wider and wider measures of the money and credit supply, we find that the measures have shrunk instead of grown!  The shadow bank liabilities are those of investment banks, private equity pools, mortgage finance companies, and structured investment vehicles.  They are down.  The international positions of banks holding U.S. dollars are also down.  Finally, over-the-counter derivatives are down in value.  Money and credit are in short supply.

What has caused this decrease in the effective money supply for doing business?  Fear and uncertainty.  When FDR said that all the American People had to fear was fear itself, he was being much less than honest.  Those who understood business and the economy had much justification for fearing FDR and his arbitrariness, his mad experiments, his general ignorance of economics and business, and his disdain for business.  So to do today's businessmen have good reason to fear Obama and his Democrat Congress and for the same reasons.  The bankers and financiers are especially frightened and uncertain in the face of the new regulatory legislation which actually tosses most of the regulations into the lap of the bureaucracies to formulate over the next few years.  It will be some time before the bankers and financiers have knowledge once again on how they may and may not act.  For a long while they will have difficulty calculating the return of investments and loans, so they are sitting on more of their money until they can figure out what the future holds for them.  This is the rational thing to do.  Meanwhile, the recovery will be, at best, at very slow growth rates and little hiring will be done.  This is the consequence of fear and uncertainty.

Many Doctors Do Not Want to Be Obama's Slaves

Grace-Marie Turner wrote a good summary of doctor's reaction to the onslaught of ObamaCare for The Orange County Register.  Here is a summary of her summary:

• 28% of seniors had trouble finding a primary care doctor in 2008 compared to 24% in 2007.
• Only 38% of primary care doctors in Texas will take a new Medicare patient.
• The Mayo Clinic has stopped taking Medicare patients at several locations.
• The postponed 21% cut in doctor payments, will now have to be 30% in January.
• The American Osteopathic Association says only 40% of doctors will be able to continue seeing Medicare patients after the cut occurs because they will lose money on each patient.
• ObamaCare requires a big investment in information technology.
• ObamaCare requires more paperwork and cookbook medicine, eliminating individual tailoring.
• A simple error can result in a $10,000 fine.
• 70 million Baby Boomers are about to go on Medicare.
• The American Association of Medical Colleges projects a 150,000 shortfall of doctors by 2025.
• Longer waits for treatment and more emergency room visits will result.
• There is no increase in the number of residencies to train more physicians.
• 13% of internists will not treat Medicare patients at all.
• A financial planner with many doctor clients says half of them want to retire in 2013, just before the worst of ObamaCare takes effect in 2014.

This is just as one would expect.  Why would highly educated and dedicated professionals submit to the Obama slavery?  Would you really want one of the physicians who would accept slavery to perform an operation on you?  I would much rather have a proud professional, so when the time comes, I will just have to scrape up the money to pay one of the doctors who will not take Medicare patients.  There just isn't a free lunch when it comes to quality medical care. 

Well, maybe there sometimes was when the doctor had the freedom to donate his services for people really in need, but now that everyone simply plans to take advantage of him with the ObamaCare thugs pointing a gun at him, it is not likely he will be feeling charitable.  All you proud and capable doctors have little choice but to refuse Medicare moocher patients.  Better to refuse them than to spit on them.

Of course, if we are not a nation of voting fools, we will so throw the rascals out of Congress and the White House that we can repeal the ObamaCare nightmare with all its intended slaves and moochers.

Ruling Against Arizona Immigration Law Would Set Broad Precedent Against State Assistance to Federal Law Enforcement

U. S. District Judge Susan Bolton asked Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler, "Why can't Arizona be as inhospitable as they wish to people who have entered or remained in the United States?"  I assume in the context it was clear she was talking about those here illegally.  The Obama Justice Department is arguing that the Arizona law be declared unconstitutional because it is preempted by federal law because immigration enforcement is an exclusive federal prerogative.  The judge seems critical of this preemption argument in her questioning.  She is being asked to grant a preliminary injunction against the Arizona law to keep it from taking effect while the federal challenge in the courts proceeds.

The Arizona law, SB1070, empowers police to question those they have a "reasonable suspicion" are illegal immigrants and send them to federal authorities for possible deportation.  The government argues that the supremacy clause of the Constitution requires that the Arizona law be ruled unconstitutional.  The fact that the Arizona law in no way contradicts the federal law apparently does not matter to the federal government.  The fact that the Arizona law simply has Arizona police asking the federal authorities to check to see if the person is here illegally and if they are not, they will be delivered to the federal authorities who will decide whether to deport them or not, does not matter.  Clearly, the Arizona law and Arizona police are not taking over the critical decisions of fact or interfering with the decision to deport or not.  They are simply assisting the federal decision makers.

Kneedler also argued that the Arizona law is an interference in foreign policy because it is making foreign governments mad.  Since when do foreign governments get to decide when U.S. laws will be enforced inside the U.S.? 

Kneedler also complained that federal agencies may be overwhelmed with immigration status checks and deportation requests.  The federal government is making the case that they wish to enforce federal law selectively.  That is, for person A, it will be enforced, but not for person B.  Does this mean the personal income tax should be enforced selectively also?  Perhaps the anti-trust laws should be enforced selectively?  Actually, they are.  Should the prohibition against laws abridging freedom of speech be selective?  Clearly the Democrat Congress thinks they should be.  Should the federal laws against murdering Federal judges or Congressmen be enforced selectively?  Ooopps, maybe not that one.

It is a bad principle of law when laws are not enforced equally against all lawbreakers.  If a law is a valid attempt to protect the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as all laws are in a legitimate government, then it must be equally enforced.  If it cannot be equally enforced, then it should not be law.

The Arizona law is clearly constitutional.  But, if it is determined by the courts that the law is unconstitutional, this will have a silver lining.  Basically, the finding would set the precedent that state cooperation with federal authorities to enforce federal laws is itself an interference with federal preemption!  Given that most federal laws, unlike immigration law, are unconstitutional because they are not based on powers given to the federal government, which are few and mostly pertain to foreign powers, and that many such laws are actually interferences with the state police power or the rights retained by individuals, it would be a great thing if the states and local governments could use the precedent of the overthrow of the Arizona law as justification for not assisting the federal government in any enforcement of federal law.  Federal authorities would then clearly have the books loaded with laws they could not enforce, except very selectively and infrequently.  That may result in the People understanding that these laws should not be on the books and need in most cases to be repealed.  It may result in many police powers being returned to the states and many rights violations by the federal government being ended.

How did these many federal infringements come about?  Teddy Roosevelt.  He was the first President who believed and even said that if he thought something should be done, he would do it if the Constitution did not explicitly tell him he could not do it.  Since the Constitution was written under the philosophy that the federal government had few powers and they were each carefully enumerated, there was no effort to create a list of the infinite number of powers an illegitimate government or a megalomaniac President might claim, but which were denied to them.  By inverting the purpose of the Constitution, Teddy Roosevelt gave himself a clean slate to become the tyrant he wished to become.  He observed that he saw no problem with a huge concentration of power in the hands of one leader.  Neither did Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, or Obama.

Federal Spending and Revenue

Brian M. Riedl of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation has put out a very useful report called Federal Spending by the Numbers 2010.  It is chock full of graphs of the spending and revenues of the recent past and projections to 2020.  For example:

It is interesting to note that the long term rate of federal revenues has been about 18.0% of GDP, but the federal spending rate has exceeded that level by 2.3% of GDP on average year after year.  It is clear we have long been politically unwilling to live within our means and that if we allow the Obama plan to stay in place, we will either have to tax ourselves at a much higher rate than we have historically or we will be spending at rates of about 8.3% of GDP higher than federal revenues.  Such rates of spending are unsustainable.  If taxes are increased that much, the economy will stumble and future growth in the economy and standard of living will suffer terribly.  If taxes are not increased drastically, the accumulated deficits will leave America bankrupt.  It is impossible not to see the critical necessity of drastically reigning in the Obama spending plans.

Here are two more fascinating plots from this Heritage Foundation report showing the effects of future spending on the three major entitlements:

Medicare in particular is an overwhelming spending problem.  By 2050, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will require the complete historical average of federal revenues just to fund them.  Medicare was already going to be a major problem before ObamaCare was passed to make it an even worse problem.  Note that in today's dollars, the average extra tax burden of these three entitlement programs alone will be $12,636 per household!  Do you have that much money available to give to the federal government?  Think about it.

If Falsely Accused of Racism You Had Better Not Work for Obama

A short video of Shirley Sherrod, the Georgia Director of Rural Development, made the rounds on YouTube on Monday and seemed to imply she was a racist.  She was forced to resign from the Agricultural Department on Monday as the result of three phone calls made by Cheryl Cook, the USDA's deputy undersecretary, who stated that the White House demanded her immediate resignation.  In the video, Sherrod had stated that she made less than her full effort to save the farm of a white farmer in Georgia from foreclosure.  The video was a snippet of a talk she gave to a local Georgia chapter of the NAACP back in 1986.  In the rest of the talk, she had told the story of how she had come to realize while helping the white farmer that race was not the issue.  The farmer's wife came out on Tuesday with the dismayed statement that Sherrod had played a critical role in saving their farm from foreclosure and was forever her friend.

On Monday, the President of the national NAACP, Benjamin Todd Jealous, called for Sherrod's resignation because the NAACP has a zero tolerance policy for racism.  This followed closely on the heels of Jealous calling the Tea Party movement racist.  On Tuesday, the NAACP changed its mind, when someone finally checked on the testimony of Eloise Spooner, the farmer's wife.  The NAACP blamed Fox News and Tea Party activist Andrew Breitbart for their error, despite the fact that the NAACP had the complete speech given by Sherrod in their possession and could have reviewed it before calling for her resignation.  Fox News did not have that complete video.  Finally, the media also talked to Sherrod, which the White House was unwilling to do.  But, on Tuesday, the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, defended his demands for Sherrod's immediate resignation.  He made it clear he is afraid of rumors of racism.

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, that maven of careful fact-checking of the left, laughed that Fox News had covered the Sherrod incident and had not early picked up on the problem with the out-of-context video clip.  Neither had the other news outlets who covered the story on Monday.  Yet, according to Maddow, Fox News alone caused Sherrod to be "fired."  Fox News was only one of many to initially get the story wrong.  This is not good, but neither is it good for Maddow to follow up an out-of-context story by trying to turn it into another out-of-context story.  This just makes her a laughingstock.  It is not the first time.

More damning yet, how could the White House call upon a federal employee to resign without even listening to her side of the story first?  What kind of jerk employer would call for a resignation and never bother to check into the context of an accusation?  If Fox News was at fault, at least it might have been alerting people about a matter that needed further looking into.  The White House and the Secretary of Agriculture should have done that looking into it before asking for a resignation.  And having made a colossal mistake, they should be prepared to admit it now.

Who does Shirley Sherrod blame for her "firing?"  She blames the White House and the NAACP.  Strangely enough, she is not blaming Fox News.  She says the NAACP's high profile claims that the Tea Party movement is racist caused them to prematurely call for her resignation.  One might expect that opposition to racism should be based on a concept of justice, but it is now clear that both the NAACP and the White House are sadly deficient in the concept of justice.

The Federal Lawsuit Against the State of Arizona and Immigration Reform

After Eric Holder complained that the Arizona law allowing the police to determine the immigration status of people stopped for apparent violations of the law would lead to racial profiling even before he read the Arizona law, the Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against the Arizona law.  The lawsuit makes no racial profiling claim, but instead insists that Arizona is infringing on the powers of the federal government.  In fact, the Arizona law is much more concerned than is federal law about avoiding racial profiling and in general about the rights of legal immigrants to go about their business without interference.  What is more, the Arizona law does not allow the Arizona police to make the final determination on the immigration status of those they suspect of having violated immigration laws and it does not allow them to transport such people across any borders.  Arizona police simply turn such suspects over to the federal immigration authorities.  Those federal authorities can simply release the people turned over to them, if they decide to do so.

So, if the Arizona law cannot on the face of it be held to cause undue racial profiling and the Arizona authorities will not be interfering with the federal authorities decision-making powers on immigration matters or on deportations, why is the Justice Department filing this lawsuit?  There are two principal reasons:

• As is frequently noted, the Democrats are making a play for the Hispanic vote in the upcoming elections, which otherwise appear to be a catastrophe for them.
• Present policy is for the Democrat administration not to enforce the immigration laws and the Arizona law will document the fact that the federal government is not doing so and does not want to do so.

The Arizona law was passed exactly for the reason that the federal government was not enforcing the federal law on illegal immigrants.  It was intended to put the federal government in the very awkward position of having people presented to them who had no evidence of citizenship or legal immigration and seeing what the federal government would do with them.  If the federal government simply turns them loose, the state of Arizona will be able to generate data showing how many probable illegal immigrants the federal authorities turned loose.

Eric Holder has threatened that if any future case for racial profiling can be made as the Arizona law is put into use, if it escapes the present attempted federal injunction against it, Arizona will face another federal lawsuit.  This would hold Arizona to a much higher standard than the federal government itself is held to.  Federal courts have ruled that the federal government itself is not restrained from racial profiling and federal law itself is not very concerned with a careful avoidance of restraint upon the right of legal immigrants to go about their business.  The Arizona law is a model law compared to that of federal law.  If the Democrat administration were not hypocritical, it would be acting to change federal law to make it more concerned with human rights and making it more like the Arizona law.  Any future federal lawsuit based on racial profiling will subject the federal law to an unfavorable comparison to the Arizona law and may be therefore ill-advised.

So overall, the Arizona law affronts the Democrat federal administration in numerous ways:

• It pushes the federal government to enforce the federal laws when it does not want to, so it will earn more Hispanic votes in future elections.
• It documents any effort on the federal government not to enforce the immigration laws.
• It points to the hypocrisy of the federal government on racial profiling.
• It points to the long on-going failure of the federal government to create enforceable immigration laws.
• It makes it more apparent that the present large numbers of illegal immigrants are in a very undesirable state of vulnerability which could be eliminated by more rational federal laws.

We should have secure borders and we should have a very liberal immigration law which allows both more permanent residents and guest workers who intend to return to their native country in a short while or a few years.  The securing of our borders is needed to reduce the terrorism threat and to weed out criminals.  It is a fundamental duty of the federal government to provide secure borders.  On the other hand, just as we should favor free trade in general, guest workers and immigrants intending to establish resident status are simply fulfilling the right of people to pursue their happiness.  The fact that we have a welfare state and some under-educated guest workers and immigrants will put strains on it, is an awkward fact, but one which is simply a consequence of the immoral welfare state.  It is one of very many ways in which the welfare state infringes upon the rights of man, in this case to engage in free trade, to earn a living, and by redistributing income from working citizens to new immigrants and guest workers.

The fact that we prohibit the use of marijuana and other drugs has generated much of the crime that many associate with the illegal immigrants.  I am undecided about the wisdom of making many of the drugs illegal, but it is very clear to me that there is no sound argument for making marijuana illegal.  The crime due to illegal drugs would at least be diminished by legalizing marijuana.

Most people who have evaluated the work ethic of the great majority of the illegal immigrants in the U.S. have found it to be worthy of praise.  For my part, I have observed crews performing lawn care tasks which are very hardworking.  I have also observed a crew replacing sidewalks in front of my lab and doing a very capable job of it.  I do not know for certain that the crew members were illegal immigrants, but I suspect that many were.  I also have a nephew in Oklahoma who performs extensive home repair work and hires crews headed by resident Hispanic Americans.  He suspects many of the members of the crews brought in are illegal immigrants.  He has nothing but praise for their work effort, the quality of the work they do, and their initiative.  An immigration policy which allows such workers a legal status is to everyone's advantage, save perhaps a few lazy and under-educated Americans who cannot compete in the workplace, but want a free ride.

Our present immigration policy makes it very difficult for Hispanics to enter the U.S. legally.  First, the quotas are set at quite low levels.  Second, the fees to be paid may seem reasonable to Americans who are among the wealthiest people in the world, but they are very high for the under-educated and impoverished people of the countries in Latin America to our south.  The only way many such people can come up with so much money is to first enter the U.S. illegally and find work here.

The argument is often made that we should not encourage those who break U.S. laws by entering the U.S. illegally.  The argument is not without some justification.  However, we presently have immigration laws which are widely recognized as being irrational and when desperate people break irrational laws, that is morally difficult for someone who values human life to condemn.  The idea that it is immoral to break the law rests upon the assumption that the law is consistent with the protection of the rights of the individual.  When the law is not properly dedicated to that purpose, it becomes immoral.  Many, many laws in the U.S. are presently highly immoral.  There are fundamental moral reasons why the federal government is constitutionally constrained to have very few powers and those few powers were carefully enumerated.  The fact that the federal government has long ignored the severe limitations on government powers has long since removed the moral obligation of people to obey many of the federal laws.

Returning specifically to the immigration laws, it should be noted that laws which are unenforced or which are very selectively enforced, also lose their justification for calling upon a moral obligation to obey them.  The immigration laws have been ignored and unenforced by many federal administrations now, both Republican and Democrat.  The moral argument that we should not grant any form of amnesty to illegal immigrants rests upon our wish that our laws deserved to be obeyed.  It is based on the idea that our laws are rational and moral.  But when laws are not rational and moral, as many of our laws no longer are, then this prejudice in favor of the law must be set aside until we have addressed the real problem.  That real problem is that we are obligated to change the law to one that is rational and moral.  Such a program will recognize immigrants and guest workers as productive people who are making a positive contribution to our free markets and our society.

For these reasons, we should create new immigration laws after the corrupt power of the present Obama administration is constrained by a Congress with at least the House or the Senate under Republican control.  An amnesty program which imposes little in costs and inconvenience for those presently working as illegal immigrants in the U.S. should be put in place.  This program should require that illegal workers obtain recommendations from American citizens and legal residents as to their character and work ethic.  The borders should be secured with a greater effort there, but mostly the reform will be to allow much easier legal paths to permanent residence and to guest worker status.  With a rational and moral immigration and guest worker program in place, then we will be justified in believing that our laws should be obeyed.  This will require that we finally have a comprehensive reform of immigration laws, which we have not had in conjunction with previous amnesties.  Then we must evenly and equally enforce the new rational and moral law.

The Moon Effect Called the Greenhouse Effect on Earth

Despite the fact that NASA scientists are among the foremost promoters of catastrophic global warming due to man's use of fossil fuels and carbon dioxide emissions, NASA scientists have long known that the moon exhibits a warming effect which is similar to the effect which on Earth is said to be due to greenhouse gases.  Calculations in anticipation of the Moon Landings indicated that such a net warming effect should be expected and subsequent measurements on the moon's surface during landings confirmed this effect.  What is this effect due to?  We will discuss that below, but let us first examine the greenhouse effect.

It is commonly claimed that the Earth can be treated as a black body which is in equilibrium with the incoming radiation of the sun and the outgoing radiation into space from the black body Earth.  Calculations based on this simple model indicate the Earth has an average temperature 33C warmer than it should be.  It is said to be this much warmer due to its atmosphere, in particular due to water vapor primarily and other greenhouse gases such as CO2 secondarily.

A black body absorbs 100% of the energy that falls upon it and it re-emits energy based on the Stefan-Boltzmann formula.  When the black body is in thermal equilibrium, it emits energy at the same rate as energy is absorbed.  The theory assumes the outer surface of the black body is extremely thin, though this matters little to the calculation provided the underlying material has a fixed temperature gradient with the maximum temperature on the outside surface and a radiation absorption length which is extremely short.  For the surface depth to be unimportant, the amount of radiation falling on the surface should also not be changing in time.

These are not conditions satisfied by the moon or the Earth.  The moon surface heats up when radiation from the sun is incident upon it and that heat is conducted downward into the rock and dust of the moon surface.  The local topography of the surface, the distribution of rock and dust minerals, and the local particle sizes will all affect the local depth to which heat will penetrate, the absorptivity of the surface, and the emissivity of the surface.  In addition, the moon rotates so that the amount of energy from the sun, or reflected from Earth, varies over time upon a given area.  Thus, the gradient of energy below the surface will change as the surface cools when sunlight is not incident on it.  This sub-surface heat reservoir acts to warm the surface.  This introduces a heat convection source, which is not consistent with a black body radiation source.

The situation with the Earth is much worse.  All of the problems of the moon exist for the Earth.  To which are added the fact that the Earth has a substantial atmosphere in which the radiation absorption length is long.  Large thermal gradients will exist in the atmosphere even if it were of uniform composition.  It is not.  The most important way in which is not is the wide variation of water vapor in it, and still worse, the wide variations in cloud cover.  The absorptivity of the atmosphere for solar radiation varies from place to place, as does the emissivity.  Compared to the moon, the Earth's surface also has a great variability in the important properties of absorptivity and emissivity from area to area.  The South Pacific is different than the Rocky Mountains, Antarctica is different than the Great Plains, the Siberian tundra is different than the Sahara or the Amazon rain forest.  These differences alone would create great flows of heat in convection currents even if the Earth did not rotate.  In addition, there is much more variation in the depth to which heat will be absorbed in the land areas than on the moon due to more varied compositions.  Then, the oceans and water bodies hold very large amounts of energy which is absorbed to comparative large depths straight from incoming radiation and then further distributed in convection currents to great depths and over large lateral distances.  All of these large heat flows on Earth cause it to fit the requirements of a black body radiator very poorly.

Let us return to the much simpler case of the moon.  It has no atmosphere, no vegetation, and no oceans to muck things up.  There is a paper by Martin Hertzberg, Hans Schreuder, and Alan Siddons called A Greenhouse Effect on the Moon?, which Dr. Hertzberg was kind enough to draw my attention to in early June and I have had in mind discussing its very important results ever since.  The paper notes that NASA scientists needed to calculate the expected temperatures on the moon's surface prior to a landing.  Taking into account the changing radiation on a point on the surface and assuming no heat was absorbed into the surface, the first result is:

When no radiation is incident upon the spot on the surface, the temperature falls to absolute zero!  A later calculation took into account some light reflected from Earth when sunlight was not incident.  Under that condition, the low temperature was between 30 and 40 Kelvin.  But the moon does absorb heat for some depth into its surface and that heat flows to the outer surface as the outer surface cools at "night."  So, what did NASA find the temperature profile over the course of day and night to be?

The maximum temperature of the day is no longer noon, since at noon the rock and dust has not yet reached the maximum degree of sub-surface warming.  The maximum temperature is actually afternoon, just as it tends to be on Earth.  The blue areas in the graph show when the surface temperature is cooler than in the simple black body calculation in the first graph, while the orange areas show when the temperature is warmer.  Early in the day, the surface temperature is cooler because surface energy is flowing more rapidly into the cooler sub-surface rock and dust.  Late in the day and through the night, the temperature is higher than expected by the black body calculation because heat is flowing to the surface from the sub-surface.  The average temperature is raised considerably, because while there is a slight depression of the maximum temperature in the day, there is large increase in the nighttime temperature.  By day the average temperature is cooler by 20C, but at night it is warmer by 60C.  The average temperature is raised 40C!  If the moon had an atmosphere, this would be called the greenhouse effect.

Because the Earth has an atmosphere and because it has oceans over 70% of its surface and the oceans retain huge reservoirs of heat, the variation in temperature throughout a day is much less on Earth than on the moon.  But, there is still a rise in the average temperature due to heat convection on land, in the oceans, and in the atmosphere.  Heat convection in 3-dimensions creates an effect that looks like the greenhouse effect.  Similar effects are observed for all of the planets.

It appears that if any "greenhouse effect" occurs due to CO2 in our atmosphere, that effect is very small compared to the 3-dimensional effects of distributed heat with convection heat transfer.  That this is so has long been known by NASA, which nonetheless has played a very major role in the promotion of AGW alarmism on the basis of greenhouse gases!  Once again, we find that government is not worthy of our trust.  It has promoted terrible damage to our economy on the basis of this greenhouse gas catastrophic warming nonsense.  It has been willing to put companies and many employees out of business.  It has been happy to promote programs for alternative energy that greatly increase our energy costs and threaten to degrade the quality of our energy systems in use.  It has declared CO2 a pollutant and is about to start draconian regulations at great expense, with huge additions to the bureaucracy, and terrible hours of additional paperwork, expert fees, and lawyer fees for many, many companies.  Cap and trade schemes have been put forth in its name which will enrich the politically connected, while the average family sees its energy bill go up between $1,700 and $3,500 a year.  As Obama says, our energy costs will necessarily skyrocket.

Obama may be fine with skyrocketing energy costs, but you and I should be very angry about it.  Not only is the basis in CO2 greenhouse gas theory all wrong, but none of the remediation schemes are even thought likely to benefit the climate in any significant way.  Even if the greenhouse effect were substantial, which it is not, all of the energy use restrictions are all pain and no gain.  Are we all suddenly masochists?  Don't we all have lives to live, places to go, and things we want to make or own?  What is this madness that has overcome so many of us?  Well, for some it is simple robbery.  There are those who are very happy to take advantage of the fact that most people and most Americans in particular, do not know enough science to understand how badly the wool has been pulled over their eyes.  There are no two ways about this.  The catastrophic man-made global warming scare has been a massive fraud.  There are many very evil people promoting this fraud and most of the impetus for it is coming from Democrats.  It is very important to make them pay in the elections of 2010 and 2012.

Debt and Deficits in the Socialist Republic of France

France, under Nicholas Sarkozy, has a budget deficit of 8% of GDP this year.  This is second only to that of Greece in Europe, according to The Economist in the text of an article in the issue of 19 - 25 June 2010.  Unfortunately, a graph accompanying the article indicates that Spain has a deficit of just under 10% of GDP.  Uhmmm....they can't get everything right, after all, The Economist endorsed Obama in the election of 2008, is a stout defender of catastrophic man-made global warming, and loves cap and trade legislation!  It always pays to read things critically and carefully.

France's public debt is 84% of GDP.  Despite the recent surge in U.S. public debt, our public debt is currently 57% of GDP.  It is not expected to be long before our debt is as bad as that of France.  But the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is so worried about our debt that he is complaining about it, as is the Tea Party movement.  We are likely to make some substantial decreases in spending when the new Congress starts in January 2011.  The French do not seem to have the will to make substantial reductions in spending.  It starts with Sarkozy.

France is making some minor cuts.  It has raised the retirement age from 60 now to 62 in 2018.  The state pension fund shortfall in 2020 will be the equivalent of $55 billion.  It expects to save less than half that amount with the increase in the retirement age.  The top income tax rate is being raised from 40% to 41% in 2011.  In 2020, civil servants will have to contribute 10.5% of pay to their pension fund, rather than the present 8.1%.  France hopes growth will be vigorous and that will spur additional tax revenues.  Most observers believe the needed growth goal will not be reached.  Euro-rules require France to reduce its deficit all the way down to 3% of GDP by 2013. 

One of the factors making spending cuts hard and hurting growth is the fact that 20% of France's employees work for the government.  France is currently spending 56% of GDP, which is more than any other Euro-zone country.  Moody's has warned that France's rising debt may endanger its AAA credit rating.  Of course, Obama wants to duplicate these factors in the U.S.  How idiocentric is that?

Democrat House Puts Dirty Foot in Corporations' Mouths

The Democrats were furious that the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case last fall that corporations and unions could fund ads supporting or opposing candidates for federal offices during the critical periods before elections and primaries.  Facing an election bloodbath in November, they were desperate to find a way to gain some advantage.  They passed the DISCLOSE Act yesterday by a vote of 219 to 206.  Two Republicans joined the majority Democrats.  DISCLOSE stands for the Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act.  The light is only cast on corporations.  It is not cast on large unions, the NRA, the AARP, or the Humane Society.  Obama supports the bill and wants the Senate to pass it.

Democrat Representative Jared Polis of Colorado said that corporations are "zombies consuming the flesh of profit."  Therefore, corporations should forfeit their freedom of speech.  They should also understand how vehement the Democrat hatred of business activity is from this statement and from this act.  One would think that business would learn that Democrats cannot be trusted with power because they are strongly opposed to people's freedom to earn a living.

The bill requires not that disclosure of who paid for the ad be available or on file, but that the CEOs of funding companies must appear in the TV ad or talk on the radio ad and disclose their funding of the ad.  This will take so much time that 15 second ads will become useless to corporations.  The more expensive 30 second ads will have more like 15 seconds of content.  In addition, corporations with $10,000,000 of government contracts will not be allowed to run election ads at all.  Companies with 20% foreign ownership or which are 5% owned by a foreign nation also will have no freedom of speech.  It is clear that this bill is unconstitutional.

The Democrat dirty trick to remove the democratic voice of businessmen from elections, was compounded by their favorite legislative dirty trick of disclosing the content of the DISCLOSE bill only the day before the vote.  Then that dirty trick was further compounded by only allowing 1 hour for the debate on the bill on the House floor!  This, after the House allowed 41 hours of floor time for the naming of new post offices!!!!  This is a mind-boggling display of hatred for business.

The two idiot Republicans who voted for the DISCLOSE Act are Joseph Cao of Louisiana, who has a record of voting for awful Democrat bills, and Mike Castle of Delaware.  Mike Castle is running for the Senate after serving 9 terms as a Representative.  If he wins the election, he would complete the four years left on Joe Biden's seat in the Senate.  It appears that Mike Castle is a RINO, which may not be too surprising given that he runs for election in Delaware.  Suppressing freedom of speech is very popular in Delaware, as the highly restricted speech allowed at the University of Delaware makes very clear.

Never allow anyone to get away with the statement that Democrats believe in freedom of speech and Republicans suppress it.  In recent times, it has been clear that Democrats are more inclined to suppress the freedom of speech than are Republicans.  Of course, it should be so clear that the suppression of the freedom of speech is unconstitutional that no party could get away with anything like the DISCLOSE Act.  It will likely be declared unconstitutional, but the Democrats are counting on it taking too long to get to the Supreme Court for them to rule that freedom of speech will prevail in the November 2010 election which has the Democrats now shivering in their hob-nailed boots.

Dems: We Don't Need No Stinking Budget!

The Budget Impoundment and Control Act of 1974 requires that a budget resolution be produced by 15 April each year in the House of Representatives.  The Pelosi House still has not produced that required budget resolution, let alone an actual budget.  First, the Democrats are divided.  One faction wants to spend lots and lots of money, none of which is covered by tax receipts.  The other faction wants to spend a little less.  Second, neither Democrat faction wants to go on record with an actual budget deficit and thereby allow easy and definitive projection of the national debt given the upcoming fatal elections.  If they produce no budget until after the election, they hope the bloodbath for the Dems will be lessened.  This is pathetic.

The Democrat chairman of the House Budget Committee complained when the GOP did not pass a budget resolution in 2006, "If you can't budget, you can't govern."  Now he and the Democrats are proving they cannot budget and cannot govern.  Obama is calling on non-security departments to suggest 5% budget cutbacks.  A Democrat proposal in the House for a 2% budget cutback will not get a vote on the floor of the House.  Without the budget resolution, each of next year's 12 spending authorization bills will have no limits. 

General McChrystal and the War in Afghanistan

I have just finished reading the Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings called The Runaway General on Gen. Stanley McChrystal, prior to yesterday, the commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan.  My sense is that Gen. McChrystal was the right man for his previous job as head of U.S. special forces operations, but was not diplomatic enough for the Afghanistan command role.  He is bright, but he too much likes kicking butt and proving he is top dog to manage the necessary cooperation of actors in Afghanistan, NATO, the Pentagon, the State Dept., the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate.  The number of interests he had to address was something like the number that Eisenhower had to address as Supreme Commander in Europe, except that Eisenhower had Gen. George Marshall to provide the interface with the Pentagon, the State Dept., the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate.  Sure, Eisenhower did have more troops to manage, but a top general should be good at that. The political management of the war in Afghanistan is a very confused and ill-manged mess.

Gen. McChrystal is more an analog to Gen. George Patton than to Gen. Eisenhower.  Gen. Patton was a great general and played a critical role in Europe in WWII, but he would have been the wrong man for Eisenhower's job.  Eisenhower had to find ways to get the most he could from Patton and from many another prickly general, many of whom were British or French.  The Rolling Stone article suggests that McChrystal simply could not get the most out of the many actors in Afghanistan, such as the U.S. Embassador Carl Eikenberry, the Special Representative to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, National Security Advisor Gen. Jim Jones, and VP Joe Biden.  Apparently, he did enjoy the support of Sec. of State Hilary Clinton.  Now, I have no doubt that he was bombarded with many a mickey mouse request, which must have been irksome for a fighting general.

This Obama administration is particularly ill-managed.  Pie-in-the-sky socialists simply wish things to be as they want them.  They wish that everyone had health insurance, so it must be made to be so, somehow, they do not care or know how.  They wish the poor had more money and better homes, so it must be made so, somehow, they do not know how or care how.  Socialism is divorced from reality.

Socialists pass two thousand page bills that legislators have not read and do not understand.  The bulk of the bill is a paper weight which is a pretense at addressing an issue the socialists want to change.  The bulk is to hide the basic fact that they have no clue on how to actually bring about any given stated desire to improve conditions for some broad interest group or other, except if the interest group is a narrow one.  The socialists disdain for management is also evident in the generally poor management of the many executive branch departments under Democratic administrations.  The terrible management under FDR and Truman, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and now Obama are symptoms of a lack of socialist concern for good management.

One indicator of this has been the reports I have from old friends I worked with in the 1980s in the Navy Department over the years.  The downward drift of the Navy Dept. management has generally been steady, but it accelerates under the more socialist administrations.  Under Obama, the mickey mouse regulations and requirements, that keep people who want to do their jobs well from doing so, has skyrocketed.  The choices for management positions are particularly poor.  The computer systems and the incredible cost of the contracts paid for the outside management of these inadequate and inefficient systems that government employees must use boggle the mind.  Showing his unsuitableness for the position he held in Afghanistan, Gen. McChrystal told the Rolling Stone reporter he had voted for Obama.  That was a sure indicator of a lack of judgment!  How he voted was also something he should not have talked about.

Such an otherworldly mentality as that of the socialists is not well-understood by most military men.  They must have some contact with reality and have a real ability to manage men and warfare, or the results are soon apparent in American deaths and a bogged down war.  Many of America's military men come from the same stock of Americans that Tea Party Americans come from.  They commonly do believe that the U.S. is exceptional and they believe that they are fighting to preserve our freedoms and our Constitution.  Military officers may, in most cases, not have a very sophisticated viewpoint on American history and of political theory, but their knowledge of both is usually greater than that of most Americans.  At least they have studied something about America's wars in many cases.  They are also people who have lived in several different states and have often been abroad and learned that most of the world suffers without the kinds of freedom we have in America.  As mentioned above, they are forced more than politicians and bureaucrats generally are to deal honestly and rationally with reality.

A theater commander for a major war effort is a man who must have very special insight and wisdom, as well as intelligence.  Apparently, Gen. McChrystal has the intelligence, but he was lacking in wisdom at the level required for the job he had.

Afghanistan is a country primitive beyond the comprehension of most Americans.  The social organization of Afghanistan is essentially pre-Medieval.  It is of the Dark Ages.  It is a land of clans, tribes, and warlords.  It is saddled with a primitive religion and particularly primitive versions of that primitive religion.  It would take decades to transform the country to anything resembling a modern country, and that supposes that the people there were interested in such a transformation.  They generally are not.  They are simply suspicious of anyone who is not of their own clan, even within their own tribe.  Then each tribe is very suspicious of every other tribe.  Force and treachery has always ruled their lives.  They have no concept of free market cooperation.  They have no concept of the rights of the individual.  These are Enlightenment ideas which it took Europe at least 800 years to develop from the time when Europe was something like Afghanistan.  Of course, with more readily available technology, communications, and travel, Afghans could make that transformation much more quickly, but it still must take a couple of generations or more.

It is not in America's interest for us to maintain a counterinsurgency or any other operation in Afghanistan for two or more generations.  Our purpose in going there was to oust Al-Qaeda and their hosts, the Taliban.  A plausible response to that need may well have been the lower level effort in Afghanistan of the Bush administration.  Though I suspect that effort had too much nation-building in it.  Strangely, the Obama administration has adopted the policy advocated by Gen. McChrystal for an even greater effort in nation-building.  Afghanistan is so much more primitive than Iraq, that I do not believe this effort is in our national interest and I do not believe there will be any chance of getting out of it in reasonable time with positive results.  Most likely our policy should be little more than to go in locally and disrupt any Al-Qaeda or other terrorist bases of operation.  The McChrystal - Obama policy is not in our national interest and it will not work, so a change of commanders may facilitate a change of policy.

While I have read and thought about war and its history since I became fascinated with history in the fourth grade, I have not carefully studied the Afghan war.  My Dad was a career naval aviator and studied and taught at the Naval War College and I enjoyed many discussions with him when growing up.  I was drafted and served in the Army in Vietnam.  I have read about the wars of the Greeks, the Persians, the Hittites, the Egyptians, the Romans, the Franks and Visigoths, the Scythians, the Israelis, the Carthaginians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Bohemians, the Dutch wars, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mongols, the Vikings, the Celts, the Angles and the Jutes, the Swedes, the Russ and the Russians, the wars of independence from Spain in Latin America, the Hundred Year's War, the Thirty Year's War, the Burgundian wars, the Polish wars, the Cossacks, the Napoleonic wars, the Prussian wars, native American wars, and all of the American wars.  I have plenty of context for war generally, but still I have not the detailed knowledge of present-day Afghanistan to be formulating the best strategy for the U.S. to follow there.  But, I am quite sure the McChrystal - Obama strategy is not in America's best interest and that we should be formulating a strategy with a much more modest goal.

Chuck Roger: "Leader with a Plan' Invites a Health Care Nightmare

Chuck Roger wrote a well-done post on American Thinker way back on 6 June 2010. Obama's man to head up the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is the Harvard professor Donald Berwick. Berwick is a romantic about the British National Health System (NHS), for which he gushes love. He also has this to say about us in Roger's words:

The American people are too simple to choose from "an array of products" in "a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do."

Roger goes on to characterize the British NHS as:

The amorous Dr. Berwick wants American health care to mimic the NHS, which, according to Cato Institute's Michael Tanner, has three-quarters of a million patients waiting to enter hospitals. The U.K. had hoped to achieve a wait time of less than eighteen weeks by 2008. The deadline now passed, the NHS hopes to improve on an abysmal 30 to 50 percent of patients seeing specialists within eighteen weeks. Shockingly, each year, 50,000 queued-up NHS patients become too sick to undergo what might have been life-saving surgeries.

In early 2009, at one hospital alone, Britain's Healthcare Commission reported 1,200 deaths attributable to "appalling standards of care," "patients left for hours in soiled bedclothes," unattended injured people "covered in blood and without pain relief," and patients receiving wrong or no medication. Also in 2009, London's Daily Telegraph documented nearly 400 deaths a year at two hospitals that lacked "basic nursing skills" and made a habit of parking untreated patients in emergency areas for ten hours.

This is how Obama and Berwick want the American health care system to work and they actually think this is an improvement.  They are both otherworldly aliens.  Remember that 50,000 NHS patients a year never get the chance to have surgeries they have long waited for because their condition deteriorated too much during the wait.  The population in the United States is about 5 times that of the United Kingdom.  The proportional number of fatal waits in the U.S. would be 250,000 people a year.  Do you want one of those people to be you or someone you love?

Of course Berwick and Obama figure that is just another dumb American dying who is incapable of managing his own health care choices.  Besides, fewer people is good for the environment according to numerous of Obama's chosen advisers.

Soros, the Podesta Brothers, BP, Petrobras, NBC, and GE

George Soros provided the money and the impetus to set up John Podesta as President of the Center for American Progress or CAP.  John Podesta used to be Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff from 1998 to 2001.  He is now a Visiting Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center.  He also was co-head of the Obama transition team and helped to select many of the top officials in the Obama administration.  Years ago he set up a lobbying company with his brother Tony.  Tony and their lobbying company The Podesta Group work for BP and for NBC, which is owned by GE.

George Soros funded MoveOn.Org heavily to help elect Obama.  BP and its employees have contributed over $3.5 million to candidates for federal office over the last 20 years.  It gave Obama the largest single chunk of that money during his brief four years in the Senate and during his presidential campaign.  BP also spent $15.9 million just last year on lobbying.  Much of that lobbying money was handled by Tony Podesta.  BP is also tireless in advertising how green it is.  Another company tireless in advertising how green it is, is GE.  Its organ NBC is equally tireless in promoting the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmism and whatever the latest environmental disaster is supposed to be.  GE is the biggest beneficiary of the SmartGrid idea of the power grid, which was heavily funded with stimulus money.  BP was perhaps the beneficiary of an especially light-handed regulation by the federal government, which appears to have allowed it to take many shortcuts.

Soros is heavily invested in Petrobras of Brazil and Hess Oil of the U.S.  Back in August of 2009, Soros turned his common stock in Petrobras into preferred stock, which had a lower price and offered 10% more in dividends, just a couple of days before Obama pledged $2 billion of loan money to PetroBras, the national oil company of Brazil, which produces a healthy profit most years.  This Obama pledge boosted the value of Soros' stock.  Both Petrobras and Hess Oil are heavily involved in deep water drilling along with BP.  While the Obama administration early-on put restrictions on shallow water Gulf of Mexico oil drilling, it allowed the deep water drilling being done by the big players such as Hess and BP to proceed.  Hess is expected to be dependent upon deep water drilling in the Gulf for 22% of its new oil supplies, while BP is expected to depend on it for 21% of its new oil.  Soros is also heavily invested in Canadian oil, which is not affected by the general cut-backs on oil drilling leases made by Obama. 

The most recent halt to all deepwater oil drilling would have hurt Hess Oil, but this may explain why Obama was trying to get BP to pick up all the expenses of the other companies engaged in drilling who were affected by the moratorium on drilling.  Soros had also reduced his Hess holdings in the First Quarter by 16.1%, while he increased his Petrobras holdings by 17.7%.  This was the right thing to do given the then upcoming deep water drilling moratorium in the Gulf.  Drilling platforms are now moving out of the Gulf and many are going to Brazil to drill for Petrobras.  It is reasonable to believe that Soros had plenty of warning about the upcoming moratorium given his many deep-throated allies in the Obama administration.  Soros increased his holdings in Suncor Energy, the Canadian oil sands extractor and wind power plant company, by 22.4% in the First Quarter.  Suncor Energy likes to tout its interests in sustainable energy.  The federal government prevents any American competitors with its many oil sands development restrictions, heightened by its ownership of many of the best deposits.

Given the low ethical standards of this Obama administration, we had best keep a sharp eye on George Soros, BP, Hess Oil, GE, NBC, Petrobras, and all of the subsidized and mandate-benefiting "sustainable" and "alternative" energy companies.  They have all been pitiless in taking advantage of the American People.   Fortunately, Glenn Beck is also trying to focus attention on these nefarious actors.

The Real Party of NO!!! or really of HELL NO!!!!

The Economist endorsed Obama prior to the election.  The most recent issue of The Economist, of 12 - 18 June 2010, has a cover article called The risks of "Hell, no!" and an editorial called What's wrong with America's right - Too much anger and too few ideas.  America needs a better alternative to Barack Obama.  The editorial goes on to say this:  "Many of America's most prominent business leaders are privately as disappointed by the right as they are by the statist Obama."  The editorial bemoans the fact that there is a civil war going on in the Republican party and the wrong side is generally winning.  It makes it clear that the editors detest the Tea Party movement and its affect upon the Republican party.  They are cheering for the Republican moderates, those same establishment types who just want a slower, but steady movement toward socialism, rather than the abrupt revolt and transformation of Obama and his socialist hordes.

The main article complains that not a single House Republican voted for the stimulus package in January 2009.  This was apparently a bad thing, even though it is now clear that the stimulus package was in fact just the left's wish list of new government programs designed to undermine the private sector, not to stimulate it.  It is clear that the stimulus bill discouraged the private sector from hiring.  The paltry few jobs saved or added due to that bill were almost all government jobs.  Late in the article it notes that: "Massive stimulus spending has barely dented the jobless numbers and has pushed the deficit to vertiginous heights."  One wonders where they found a dent at all.

The article complains that not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted in favor of health reform.  Apparently, the assumption is that ObamaCare, despised by most Americans, should have been supported by the opposition party, irrespective of its myriad problems, including its unconstitutionality and the fact that it did not actually even spell out a plan, having delegated much of that task to 137 executive branch departments and panels.

The article bemoans the fact that Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, says the Republican opposition is not just No, but Hell No!  It complains:

Even mainstream Republican politicians now portray themselves as the thin red line defending America's constitution, liberties and moral values from an arrogant president who is determined to appease America's enemies, drown future generations in debt and turn God's own country over to a godless socialism.

Well, yes, and this is a good thing that they have finally been forced to actually oppose socialism and to actually defend the Constitution, as those who have been in federal office or in the military previously have sworn to do.

Basically, the assumption of The Economist is, just as it is with American socialists, that doing something is a matter of giving the government a new power and having it decide what values will be allowed to be pursued and what the rules for pursuing them will be.  This is another example of the Stolen Concept.  The assumption is that nothing is being done if the government is not doing it.  The fact is that when the government takes on new powers and mandates certain actions while using force to deny other actions, it denies many more actions and choices than it enables.  Government itself is the primary agent of NO!!!!! 

When an American demands, angrily or not, that the government be legitimate and fulfill its constitutionally limited role, this is not metaphysically a fundamental statement of NO!!!  Instead, it is metaphysically and basically a statement that:

• We the People need values in order to live our own individual lives.
• We the People are capable of rationally choosing our own values.
• We the People, having freedom of conscience and the right to think for ourselves, have the right and the responsibility to choose our own values.
• We the People, each and everyone of us, has an individual character and have individual values and needs, which we assert the equal right to explore, develop, exercise, and pursue for our individual happiness.
• The individual American asserts the positive declaration that he will manage his own life.
• The individual American will cooperate with others of his own choosing in a free market of ideas, goods, services, and relationships to pursue his values for the sake of his own happiness.

Now let's examine how this positive assertion of life-living individual effort is transformed by the socialist (Democrat, Progressive, Liberal, Fascist, or Communist).   We find them making these very negative statements with strong limits on individual choice and actions.  We find that the socialist, or even The Economists moderate, is the agent of NO!!!!, or even of Hell, NO!!!!  The equivalent statements are:

• A society needs some values so that the basic needs of many can be achieved, though many of the needs of many of the people will be ignored as unimportant.
• The people are mostly ignorant and evil, so an elite of college-educated and properly indoctrinated Progressive people will determine which values the government will indoctrinate the masses in and how that government will discourage any other values the ignorant and stubborn masses may choose.
• Only society has rights and those rights are determined by the government.  Individuals are not sovereign and should not try to think for themselves, but should instead accept the indoctrinated values of the state.
• What is all this individual stuff and nonsense?  You are a Social Security number and a member of various groups.  The group of your race, the group of your gender, and the group of your income define you fully and adequately.  The state will, based on these few parameters, decide what the course of your life will be.
• The government will micromanage your life with rules too complex for you to understand, but much too simple to deal with your individual natures.
• The government will severely limit the freedom of the individual to associate with others and to trade with others in a free market of ideas, goods, services, and relationships.

The real party of NO!!!! or really of HELL NO!!!! is the party that will not allow individuals the choice of their own values, which will not allow them to explore, develop, and exercise their individual natures, which will not allow them to pursue the many rich variations of their values in free associations with others, and will not allow them the hope of individual happiness.

In life, the assertion of "YES, I can and will" requires that we act to reign in the desire of governments and our representatives in the government to expand its powers and to hold it back within its constitutionally few enumerated powers.  Thus, politically, the People must be constantly saying "NO, HELL NO!!!!!" to those many who wish to expand government and rule the People more firmly and with many more constraints.  But more fundamentally, and more metaphysically, we say that NO to government in order to preserve our individual control of our choice of values and of the many actions we will need to take to pursue those values and our individual happiness.  Living human life as self-directed individuals, is a massive assertion of YES, we are capable of living our own lives and it is our own responsibility to choose our individual values and the principles upon which we will manage our own lives.  We must throw off the excessive limits of big government in order to assert the value of our individual lives in all the richness and complexity of our choices and actions in free associations with other highly individuated people.

We must never tire of asserting that we are committed to that most fundamentally and metaphysically important recognition of the critical role and the sovereignty of the individual human being in all political discussion and decision making.  Each individual has the equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and socialism cannot recognize the nature of the individual, his importance, or his equal rights.  Socialism is necessarily the Party of NO because it denies individuality, the values of the individual, individual rights to thought and actions, and the importance of individual happiness.