From Gateway Pundit:
You just can’t make this stuff up. Barack Obama will officially launch his 2012 re-election campaign on Karl Marx’s birthday. Freedom Post reported:
Obama will officially launch his 2012 re-election campaign, and no I’m not kidding, on Karl Marx’s birthday, May 5th!
And, Gateway Pundit has this Hitler Youth song translated:
Via HotAir
Rep. Chaka Fattah’s assertion on Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show last night has received plenty of derision. Instapundit calls it “banking on the moocher vote,” and Twitter pundit Keder derisively notes, “Democrats would rather give you freebie ‘benefits’ then do anything useful that might actually help you find a job. I know this may be hard for @TheDemocrats to understand, but the unemployed don’t want ‘benefits.’ They want jobs.” Unfortunately, that may all be true, but that doesn’t make Fattah wrong, either:
The American Spectator has this:
Is Your Vote for Sale?
Obama campaigns as if he is certain that your vote is for sale, and all he has to do is come up with some taxpayer-financed freebies for you. First it was free contraceptives for everyone, as if your vote could be bought by a condom. Then it was cut rate student loans, which was always a fraudulent issue. It was the Democrats that provided for the interest rates to double on new student loans issued after July of this year, years ago when they had majority control of Congress. House Republicans already voted through a bill to continue the lower rates, financed by cutting government spending elsewhere. But Obama and Senate Democrats have refused to consider any House passed bill financed by reduced government spending, defining the difference between the two parties today. The Democrats demand record taxes or record borrowing to finance record spending, which is what we have got today.
If you are in need of basic necessities with no immediate alternative, then taking public assistance from a safety net program is not morally objectionable. Or if you have paid into a program over the years in return for the benefits, as with Social Security and Medicare, then you cannot be faulted for taking the benefits. But selling your vote to whoever promises you the most free benefits at taxpayer expense is a perversion of democracy, really just a sophisticated version of organized crime. You should not be living at the expense of the taxpayers or your neighbors if you are not in serious need.
That is not what American democracy has been all about. Our Founding Fathers emphasized repeatedly that a functional democracy required a virtuous people. This is what they were talking about, people having the virtue and good sense not to look to sell their vote to whoever bid the most freebies at taxpayer expense for it. They knew that politicians campaigning on free bread and circuses at someone else’s expense had historically been the downfall of democracies in the past. And we are on track for that today as well, if we fall for Obama’s Third World vision of democracy as voter bribery.
What students need more than a cut rate student loan is a job that will enable them to pay back the loan. But over half of recent college graduates do not have jobs. What young working people need is not a free condom but the freedom to pursue the American Dream and traditional American prosperity. They will not get that, however, from Obama’s Hugo Chavez economy.
[….]
The 99 Percent vs. The 1 Percent
Since when has it been considered just for the bottom 99 percent to say to the top 1 percent, “We can outvote you to take your money”? That is a politics of piracy and theft, with no roots in American history.
Sure the richest can be validly asked to bear proportionally more of the overall tax burden because they can do so with the least harm. But before President Obama was even elected, official IRS data shows that in 2007 the top 1 percent of income earners paid 40.4 percent of all federal income taxes, almost twice their share of adjusted gross income. The top 5 percent paid 60.6 percent of all federal income taxes, while earning 37.7 percent of adjusted gross income. The top 10 percent paid 71.2 percent of all income taxes, while earning 48 percent of adjusted gross income.
By contrast, the bottom 95 percent of income earners paid 39.4 percent of all federal income taxes. That means the top 1 percent of income earners paid more federal income taxes than the bottom 95 percent combined!
Moreover, in 2007, again before President Obama was even elected, the bottom 40 percent of income earners as a group paid no federal income taxes. Instead, they received net payments from the income tax system equal to 3.8 percent of all federal income taxes. In other words, they paid negative 3.8 percent of federal income taxes. The middle 20 percent of income earners, the actual middle class, paid 4.7 percent of all federal income taxes.
What this adds up to is that even before President Obama was elected America already maintained the most progressive income tax system in the western world, maybe the entire world. Moreover, that was the result of almost 30 years of Reagan Republican supply-side economics that began with Reagan and Jack Kemp in the 1970s and 1980s, continued through Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America, and further played out with the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. When President Reagan brought his supply-side economics to Washington in 1981, the share of federal income taxes paid by the top 1 percent was 17.6 percent. After a quarter century of rate cuts, that share had more than doubled by 2007 to 40.4 percent, as noted above. That is because with the lower tax rates, incomes boomed along with the economy, and high income taxpayers had the incentives to pull their money out of tax shelters and invest it in the real economy, fueling the boom while increasing their reported income. But so-called Progressives (we should start calling them throwbacks instead) can’t understand these dynamics of modern capitalism.
Most violence happens by those pushing a leftist ideal. Conservative violence is almost unheard of! Why? There is a goal of a perfect world being created in the here-and-now, and this naturally leads to organizations that encourage protest and violence. The most recent example of this are the Cleveland Bridge Bombers. The first player in this group of douche-bags looking to hurt and maim people and property is Brandon L. Baxter. On his FaceBook he has quite a few organization listed that he likes.
….Facebook profile, he lists his political views as “anarcho-communist,” and lists “#OccupyCleveland” as his employment.
also, in his “liked” section just a few organizations he apparently endorses:
Doug “liked” { A.C.A.B } • All Cops Are Bastards
Tony liked some extreme or liberal interests/orgs as well:
….Joshua Stafford, 23, again lists “#OccupyCleveland” as his occupation. He also likes to smoke weed, according to his activities.
An older video but relevant for the violence we are seeing is this from occupy L.A. said violence and bloodshed is necessary:
From HotAir:
The weekend produced a spate of dang-this-is-bad articles on the economic situation in California. Steven Greenhut’s for the Orange County Register is entitled “California to middle class: drop dead.” At The Daily Beast, Joel Kotkin laments that “As California Collapses, Obama Follows its Lead.” (H/t – and a “Read it, people!” shout-out – to Ed Driscoll at PJM.)
But what does all this look like in terms of numbers? What’s the how much and where and whom of the Golden State collapse? Perhaps the most interesting and telling thing is that it really is as bad as it looks. And the reasons are pretty much what you’d expect. Here’s the California story, in numbers.
According to a March 2012 report, 855,000 is how many private-sector jobs California has lost since the recession started four years ago. (H/t: California Political News & Views.) The state today enjoys an unemployment rate of 11%, compared with the official national average of 8.3%
Texas, by contrast, has added 139,800 jobs, posting the biggest absolute gain among the 50 states. (California’s is the biggest absolute loss.) Texas’ unemployment rate is 7.1%.
[….]
But we were talking about California. How does California rank in terms of the average state and local tax burden? According to the Tax Foundation, in 2009, California had the 6th heaviest tax burden in the nation, at 10.6%. (New Jersey was #1, followed by New York at #2.) That’s the in-state tax burden, of course. Federal taxes are on top of that.
Of course, business climate comprises more than the average individual tax burden. The Tax Foundation looks at five forms of taxation – corporate tax, individual income tax, sales tax, property tax, and unemployment insurance tax – to index the business climates of the 50 states. By this combined measure, the Tax Foundation ranks California 48th in business climate. (New York is 49th, and New Jersey 50th.)
State regulatory environment? George Mason University’s Mercatus Center ranks the Golden State 48th in the nation. New Jersey and New York are numbers 49 and 50, respectively.
How about other business costs? California had the 5th highest state premium ranking for worker compensation insurance costs in 2010 (although the state’s position improved slightly in 2011 due to other states raising their state premiums).
California ranks 7th highest in electric utility costs, with Hawaii being the highest, followed by Connecticut and Alaska.
According to the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, California has the third-highest per-gallon gasoline tax (Connecticut and New York are #1 and #2) and by far the highest tax on diesel, at 52.5 cents per gallon. (Some numbers below also come from the SB&EC report.)
California perennially has the second-highest gasoline prices at the pump (Hawaii is #1), although the state has regularly been ranked 3rd or 4th in oil production in recent years. (In the past week the statewide average was $4.15 for a gallon of regular, down from $4.36 a month ago.) In spite of having the third largest oil and gas reserves of any state in the nation, California is ranked dead last among all US jurisdictions for global oil investment. The fact that California hasn’t issued a new offshore drilling permit for over 30 years is undoubtedly a factor, as is the fact that the Monterey Shale Oil Field, which holds 64% of all the recoverable shale oil in the United States, is hamstrung by lawsuits, a typical condition in the state for both drilling and refining operations.
In spite of the state’s natural bounty, California produces only 37% of its statewide oil consumption. The rest comes from other states and countries, at added expense.
In terms of the employer burden of health-insurance mandates, California is 9th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia. (Rhode Island, Maryland, and Minnesota have the highest burdens.)
Meanwhile, California ranks 4th highest in state and local government spending per capita. The District of Columbia is the highest, followed by Alaska, Wyoming, and New York.
Ah, yes, state spending. California has by far the largest debt of any US state, at around $612 billion with state and local debt and pension liabilities included. In terms of raw numbers, New York posts a pathetic second place with only $305 billion. The size of California’s population allows the Golden State to slip to only 7th place in terms of per capita state and local debt. The District of Columbia walks off with another prize in this category, having on the books 85% more debt per capita than the 50-state average.
The California debt spiral is due in part to the steep decline in state tax revenues. The 22% year-on-year decline observed in February 2012 doesn’t tell the whole story either; California had already posted dramatic revenue losses in business and property taxes between 2007 and 2010. Business-tax revenues dropped 18% in that period, and property-tax revenues fell 30% due to the real estate market crash.
Let’s talk population trends. Many readers are familiar with the arresting Golden State statistics cited by a Wall Street Journal article in March:
….read more…
Via Independent IE “Technology” page:
….But on huge wind farms the motion of the turbines mixes the air higher in the atmosphere that is warmer, pushing up the overall temperature.
Satellite data over a large area in Texas, that is now covered by four of the world’s largest wind farms, found that over a decade the local temperature went up by almost 1C as more turbines are built.
This could have long term effects on wildlife living in the immediate areas of larger wind farms.
It could also affect regional weather patterns as warmer areas affect the formation of cloud and even wind speeds.
It is reported China is now erecting 36 wind turbines every day and Texas is the largest producer of wind power in the US.
Liming Zhou, Research Associate Professor at the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the University of New York, who led the study, said further research is needed into the affect of the new technology on the wider environment.
“Wind energy is among the world’s fastest growing sources of energy. The US wind industry has experienced a remarkably rapid expansion of capacity in recent years,” he said. “While converting wind’s kinetic energy into electricity, wind turbines modify surface-atmosphere exchanges and transfer of energy, momentum, mass and moisture within the atmosphere. These changes, if spatially large enough, might have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate.”
The study, published in Nature, found a “significant warming trend” of up to 0.72C (1.37F) per decade, particularly at night-time, over wind farms relative to near-by non-wind-farm regions.
The team studied satellite data showing land surface temperature in west-central Texas….
….According to Prinn and Wang, this temperature increase occurs because the wind turbines affect two processes that play critical roles in determining surface temperature and atmospheric circulation: vertical turbulent motion and horizontal heat transport. Both processes are responsible for moving heat away from Earth’s surface.
In the analysis, the wind turbines on land reduced wind speed, particularly on the downwind side of the wind farms, which reduced the strength of the turbulent motion and horizontal heat transport processes. This resulted in less heat being transported to the upper parts of the atmosphere, as well as to other regions farther away from the wind farms….
Via Gateway Pundit, and the part on birds is found here:
Not only do wind farms kill off high-profile bird species like golden and bald eagles and California condors, the farms also cause global warming. After hundreds of millions in blown taxpayer money and thousands of dead birds the latest research shows that wind farms cause warming. Reuters reported, via Free Republic:
Large wind farms might have a warming effect on the local climate, research in the United States showed on Sunday, casting a shadow over the long-term sustainability of wind power…
…The world’s wind farms last year had the capacity to produce 238 gigawatt of electricity at any one time. That was a 21 percent rise on 2010 and capacity is expected to reach nearly 500 gigawatt by the end of 2016 as more, and bigger, farms spring up, according to the Global Wind Energy Council.
Researchers at the State University of New York at Albany analysed the satellite data of areas around large wind farms in Texas, where four of the world’s largest farms are located, over the period 2003 to 2011.
The results, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, showed a warming trend of up to 0.72 degrees Celsius per decade in areas over the farms, compared with nearby regions without the farms.
“We attribute this warming primarily to wind farms,” the study said. The temperature change could be due to the effects of the energy expelled by farms and the movement and turbulence generated by turbine rotors, it said.
“These changes, if spatially large enough, may have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate,” the authors said.
But the Democrats will continue to dump billions into the costly energy source anyway. It makes them feel good.
‘Diversity is strength’
Affirmative action used to be defended on the grounds that certain groups, particularly African Americans, are entitled to extra help because of the horrible legacy of slavery and institutionalized racism. Whatever objections opponents may raise to that claim, it’s a legitimate moral argument.
But that argument has been abandoned in recent years and replaced with a far less plausible and far more ideological claim: that enforced diversity is a permanent necessity. Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, famously declared: “Diversity is not merely a desirable addition to a well-run education. It is as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of international politics and of Shakespeare.”
It’s a nice thought. But consider some of the great minds of human history, and it’s striking how few were educated in a diverse environment. Newton, Galileo and Einstein had little exposure to Asians or Africans. The genius of Aristotle, Socrates and Plato cannot be easily correlated with the number of non-Greeks with whom they chatted in the town square. If diversity is essential to education, let us get to work dismantling historically black and women’s colleges. When I visit campuses, it’s common to see black and white students eating, studying and socializing separately. This is rounding out everyone’s education?
Similarly, we’re constantly told that communities are strengthened by diversity, but liberal Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam has found the opposite. In a survey that included interviews with more than 30,000people, Putnam discovered that as a community becomes more ethnically and socially varied, social trust and civic engagement plummet. Perhaps forced diversity makes sense, but liberals make little effort to prove it.
It’s a nice idea, but it’s manifestly absurd. If violence never solved anything, police would not have guns or nightsticks. Obama helped solve the problem of Moammar Gaddafi with violence, and FDR helped solve the problem — far too late — of the Holocaust and Hitler with violence. Invariably, the slogan (or its close cousin “War is not the answer”) is invoked not as a blanket exhortation against violence, but as a narrow injunction against the United States, NATO or Republican presidents from trying to solve threats of violence with violence.
‘The living Constitution’
It is dogma among liberals that sophisticated people understand that the Constitution is a “living, breathing document.” The idea was largely introduced into the political bloodstream by Woodrow Wilson and his allies, who were desperate to be free of the constraints of the founders’ vision. Wilson explained that he preferred an evolving, “organic,” “Darwinian” Constitution that empowered progressives to breathe whatever meaning they wished into it. It is a wildly ideological view of the nature of our political system.
It is also a font of unending hypocrisy. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, conservatives argued that the country needed to adapt to a new asymmetrical warfare against non-state actors who posed an existential threat. They believed they were working within the bounds of the Constitution. But even if they were stretching things, why shouldn’t that be acceptable — if our Constitution is supposed to evolve with the times?
Yet acolytes of the living Constitution immediately started quoting the wisdom of the founders and the sanctity of the Constitution. Apparently the document is alive when the Supreme Court finds novel rationalizations for abortion rights, but when we need to figure out how to deal with terrorists, suddenly nothing should pry original meaning from the Constitution’s cold, dead hands.
By the way, conservatives do not believe that the Constitution should not change; they just believe that it should change constitutionally — through the amendment process.
‘Social Darwinism’
Obama this month denounced the Republican House budget as nothing more than “thinly veiled social Darwinism.” Liberals have been trotting out this Medusa’s head to petrify the public for generations. It does sound scary. (After all, didn’t Hitler believe in something called “social Darwinism”? Maybe he did.) But no matter how popular the line, these liberal attacks have little relation to the ideas that the “robber barons” and such intellectuals as Herbert Spencer — the “father” of social Darwinism — actually followed.
Spencer’s sin was that he was a soaked-to-the-bone libertarian who championed private charity and limited government (along with women’s suffrage and anti-imperialism). The “reform Darwinists” — namely the early-20th-century Progressives — loathed such classical liberalism because they wanted to tinker with the economy, and humanity itself, at the most basic level.
More vexing for liberals: There was no intellectual movement in the United States called “social Darwinism” in the first place. Spencer, a 19th-century British philosopher, didn’t use the term and wasn’t even a Darwinist (he had a different theory of evolution).
Liberals misapplied the label from the outset to demonize ideas they didn’t like. They’ve never stopped.
‘Better 10 guilty men go free . . .’
At least until George Zimmerman was in the dock, this was a reflexive liberal refrain. The legendary English jurist William Blackstone — the fons et origo of much of our common law — said, “Better that 10 guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” In fact, this 10 to 1 formula has become known as the “Blackstone ratio” or “Blackstone’s formulation.”
In a brilliant study, “n Guilty Men,” legal scholar Alexander Volokh traced the idea that it is better to let a certain number of guilty men go free — from Abraham’s argument with God in Genesis over the fate of Sodom, to the writings of the Roman emperor Trajan, to the legal writings of Moses Maimonides, to Geraldo Rivera.
As a truism, it’s a laudable and correct sentiment that no reasonable person can find fault with. But that’s the problem: No reasonable person disagrees with it. There’s nothing wrong with saying it, but it’s not an argument — it’s an uncontroversial declarative statement. And yet people say it as if it settles arguments. It doesn’t do anything of the sort. The hard thinking comes when you have to deal with the “and therefore what?” part. Where do we draw the lines? If it were an absolute principle, we wouldn’t put anyone in prison, lest we punish an innocent in the process. Indeed, if punishing the innocent is so terrible, why 10? Why not two? Or, for that matter, 200? Or 2,000?
Taken literally, the phrase is absurd. Letting 10 rapists and murderers go free will almost surely result in far more harm to society than putting one poor innocent sap in jail.