Oct 12 2008

Teddy Roosevelt: not a saint, a prophet, or particularly good role model

Category: election 2008,McCain,politicsharmonicminer @ 9:19 am

Knowing a bit more about Teddy Roosevelt than the whitewash they teach in the public schools, I’ve gotten just a bit tired of hearing McCain constantly refer to him as an icon worthy of emulation. So I was especially glad to read George Will’s take on TR, and whether he’s the model for McCain. Speaking of TR, Will writes:

He was an individualist who considered the individualism of others an impediment to the social unity required for national greatness. Having read Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” at age 14, and having strenuously transformed himself from an asthmatic child into a robust adult, he advocated “warrior republicanism” (Hawley’s phrase). TR saw virtue emerging from struggle, especially violent struggle, between nations and between the “Anglo-Saxon” race and lesser races. Blending “muscular Christianity,” the “social gospel” — which sanctified the state as an instrument of moral reclamation — and Darwinian theory, TR believed that human nature evolved toward improvement through conflict.

Continue reading “Teddy Roosevelt: not a saint, a prophet, or particularly good role model”

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Oct 10 2008

From Isaiah chapter 5

Category: politics,theologyharmonicminer @ 9:18 am

Things are looking tense around here.

15 So man will be brought low
and mankind humbled,
the eyes of the arrogant humbled.

16 But the LORD Almighty will be exalted by his justice,
and the holy God will show himself holy by his righteousness.

17 Then sheep will graze as in their own pasture;
lambs will feed [f] among the ruins of the rich.

18 Woe to those who draw sin along with cords of deceit,
and wickedness as with cart ropes,

19 to those who say, “Let God hurry,
let him hasten his work
so we may see it.
Let it approach,
let the plan of the Holy One of Israel come,
so we may know it.”

Maybe we aren’t supposed to be trying to create the perfect society after all?

20 Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter.

That’s pretty clear. Isn’t it?

Continue reading “From Isaiah chapter 5”

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Oct 08 2008

Obama the radical socialist. Literally true, it seems.

Category: election 2008,Obama,politics,socialismharmonicminer @ 10:16 pm

Many of us have commented that many of Obama’s policies and plans are essentially socialist, whether his campaign likes the term or not. However, I didn’t know that Obama had literally been a member of a socialist political organization in the 1990s until I read this article at Power Line. Here’s a teaser, but you should really read the entire article at Powerline (which includes archived web pages showing Obama’s relationship to the socialist “New Party”), then return here for my doubtless brilliant comments.

In June sources released information that during his campaign for the State Senate in Illinois, Barack Obama was endorsed by an organization known as the Chicago “New Party”. The ‘New Party’ was a political party established by the Democratic Socialists of America (the DSA) to push forth the socialist principles of the DSA by focusing on winnable elections at a local level and spreading the Socialist movement upwards. …

After allegations surfaced in early summer over the ‘New Party’s’ endorsement of Obama, the Obama campaign along with the remnants of the New Party and Democratic Socialists of America claimed that Obama was never a member of either organization. The DSA and ‘New Party’ then systematically attempted to cover up any ties between Obama and the Socialist Organizations. However, it now appears that Barack Obama was indeed a certified and acknowledged member of the DSA’s New Party.

On Tuesday, I discovered a web page that had been scrubbed from the New Party’s website. The web page which was published in October 1996, was an internet newsletter update on that years congressional races. Although the web page was deleted from the New Party’s website, the non-profit Internet Archive Organization had archived the page.

Powerline thinks it is inconceivable that the American people would elect a socialist President.

Sadly, I don’t.  That has been the trendline in the Democrat Party for decades, and we now have two radical Leftists leading the Senate and the House.  The energy in the Democrat Party has been on the Left for a long time, not anywhere near the “moderate center”.  The Democratic Leadership Council (nominally moderate, though its members all vote in lockstep with the Left) is moribund, energy-wise.  If Obama wins, it will be due to organizations like ACORN and the DailyKos/Soros crowd, combined with the racial politics of the NAACP and others.

It is no secret that Hamas essentially endorses Obama.  Shoot, the Communist Party USA endorses him.  The nominal opposite of the Communist Party USA (if you buy into the far left/far right dichotomy between Communists and Nazis), the Nazi Party, is no fan of McCain/Palin.  Check their site.  They don’t like anyone who supports Israel.  They call Palin a liar on their site.

The point?  This is not a case of the far Lefties endorsing the candidate closest to them on the political spectrum, with the same thing happening on the Right.  This is a matter of the far Left recognizing a more-or-less fellow traveler, while the Nazis know that McCain/Palin will be no friend of theirs, in any way, at any time.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the main stream media to pay any attention to this.  Expect the Obama campaign to cry “foul” and “personal attack!” and “politics of personal destruction!” and the like.  But imagine:  what if John McCain had been a member of, say, the KKK or the Nazi party or something similar in the 1990s?  What if he had even been ENDORSED by one of those groups, even if he wasn’t a member?  What if there was a webpage archive showing his relationship to such an organization?

You get the idea.  But the double standard is in full flower.

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Sep 17 2008

More Palin-phobia

Category: election 2008,media,Palin,politics,Uncategorizedharmonicminer @ 9:43 am

Now they’re accusing Palin of making rape victims pay for their own rape kit.

At the link above, you can read all about it, and about what was omitted from the USA Today story that made the charge.

The USA Today story continues the pattern of the NYTimes, of quoting Palin enemies in Alaska, without counterbalancing perspectives, and leaving out essential facts.

Continue reading “More Palin-phobia”

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Sep 17 2008

What Obama doesn’t want you to know: part 1

Category: election 2008,Obama,politicsharmonicminer @ 9:02 am

Obama, as a community organizer, wants to have everyone volunteer. In fact, he has to take credit for inventing a new oxymoron, “Universal Voluntary Public Service”.  Let’s see:  universal, but voluntary.  I guess that means he plans to make you really, really want to volunteer.

Investor’s Business Daily has several cogent observations about an organization Obama helped to start in 1992. Significant excerpts:

The pitch Public Allies makes on its Web site doesn’t seem all that radical. It promises to place young adults (18-30) in paid one-year “community leadership” positions with nonprofit or government agencies. They’ll also be required to attend weekly training workshops and three retreats.

In exchange, they’ll get a monthly stipend of up to $1,800, plus paid health and child care. They also get a post-service education award of $4,725 that can be used to pay off past student loans or fund future education.

But its real mission is to radicalize American youth and use them to bring about “social change” through threats, pressure, tension and confrontation, the tactics used by the father of community organizing, Saul “The Red” Alinsky.

“Our alumni are more than twice as likely as 18-34 year olds to . . . engage in protest activities,” Public Allies boasts in a document found with its tax filings. It has already deployed an army of 2,200 community organizers like Obama to agitate for “justice” and “equality” in his hometown of Chicago and other U.S. cities, including Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Washington. “I get to practice being an activist,” and get paid for it, gushed Cincinnati recruit Amy Vincent.

Charming.

But it turns out that there are other things going on:

Not all the recruits appreciate the PC indoctrination. “It was too
touchy-feely,” said Nelly Nieblas, 29, of the 2005 Los Angeles class.
“It’s a lot of talk about race, a lot of talk about sexism, a lot of
talk about homophobia, talk about -isms and phobias.”

One of those -isms is “heterosexism,” which a Public Allies training seminar
in Chicago describes as a negative byproduct of “capitalism, white
supremacy, patriarchy and male-dominated privilege.”

The government now funds about half of Public Allies’ expenses through
Clinton’s AmeriCorps. Obama wants to fully fund it and expand it into a
national program that some see costing $500 billion. “We’ve got to have
a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as
strong, just as well-funded” as the military, he said.

We heard that quote before about a “civilian national security force”.  Now we know what it means.

A gentler, kinder re-education camp.

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Sep 16 2008

Defending Sarah Palin

Category: election 2008,McCain,media,Obama,Palin,politicsharmonicminer @ 9:21 am

The Bidinotto Blog has a nice summary of the failure of the mud-slinging by the Left at Sarah Palin.

A sure sign that the pro-Obama camp’s quiver has run out of arrows is that its partisans are desperately stooping to pick up mud.

It’s worth a read, and has links you can follow up, if you doubt the accuracy of his presentation.

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Sep 15 2008

If only reporters understood economics

Category: economy,election 2008,McCain,media,Obama,Palin,politics,taxesharmonicminer @ 3:57 pm

Sarah Palin criticizes Obama’s tax plans, and the AP seems to think it has corrected her, by stating an irrelevant piece of data. (not to mention a largely wrong one)

Campaigning on her own, the Alaska governor also said Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama “wants to raise income taxes and raise payroll taxes and raise investment income taxes and raise business taxes and raise the death tax.

“But John McCain and I know that’s not the way you grow the economy,” she added.

In fact, independent groups such as the Tax Policy Center have concluded that four out of five U.S. households would receive tax cuts under Obama’s proposal, which include higher income and payroll taxes only for the wealthiest wage-earners.

Note that Palin did not say that Obama was going to raise everyone‘s taxes.  But the AP responds with a “fact check” from the Tax Policy Center that implies she did.  Surely this is simple failure to understand plain English. 

Speaking of plain English, four out of five U.S. households cannot receive income tax cuts, because two out of five U.S. households pay no income tax at all.  The last time I looked, two plus four does not equal five, a fact that apparently escapes both the AP and the Tax Policy Center.  Giving “tax cuts” in the guise of “refunds” to people who would not pay tax anyway is not a tax cut, it’s welfare, plain and simple.  It’s old fashioned socialistic confiscation/redistribution.

Speaking of the “independent” Tax Policy Center, while it is not directly affiliated with either party, it is most assuredly Left leaning, and usually favors Democratic policies.  They are sometimes subtle about it (although not in this case, calling a give-away a “tax cut”), but they are not possessed of Olympian detachment.

It would be more impressive (as journalism goes) to match the perspective of the Tax Policy Center with one from the Club for Growth, or the CATO Institute.  Both of these are also “independent” and “nonpartisan”, but simply more likely to lean Right. 

You can form your own opinion about why the AP would not seek their input in interpreting Palin’s statements.  I have mine.

In the meantime, what Palin said, quite clearly, is that if all of Obama’s tax plans are carried out, regardless of whether low-tax payers and non-tax payers get a short term “tax cut”, the economy is far less likely to grow vigorously than under McCain’s plan.  That economic growth would provide much more benefit to low- and non-tax payers than a single short term check, whether “tax cut” or “welfare”.

Go back and read her quote.  The APs rejoinder, masked as input from an “independent” think tank, is completely irrelevant to the point.

Embarrassingly, the AP seems not to know that.

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Sep 13 2008

First, Do No Harm

Category: election 2008,Obama,politicsharmonicminer @ 8:54 am

Being a politician, and especially being President, has aspects in common with being a parent, and with being a physician.

Good parents, first and foremost, need to avoid damaging their children.  Maybe I have low standards for parenting.  But if you can raise a child to the age of 18 or so, and have helped them avoid doing damage to themselves (they aren’t substance abusers, high school dropouts, criminals, etc.), and if they know you love them, and they love you, you’ve probably won.  Sure, there are tons of nice things to try to do, but they depend at least as much on the nature of the child as on parenting magic.  The point: you are to raise the child, help where you can, not go against the fundamental nature of the child by trying to get things from them they can never do or simply hate (and you’ll have to be somewhat sensitive while discovering the child’s nature), and avoid messing the child up.  Everything else is gravy, and we all know how bad that is for your health, in excess.

There is a similar principle in medicine, sometimes attributed to Hippocrates, “First, do no harm.”  It means, generally, that if you can’t fix it, at least don’t make it worse, or create a new problem.  Medical doctors used to attach leeches to “bleed” patients to remove “ill humors” that were making them ill.  Of course, they were simply weakening their patients, in most cases.  Thalidomide babies of 1950s helped lead to the creation of the modern FDA drug approval process (which has created its own problems), another example of doctors causing harm while trying to do good.

What has this to do with politics?  It’s pretty simple: some problems are very complex, and are rooted in human nature and individual choice.  The attempt to use governmental power to “fix” them is likely to create new problems, frequently without making a serious dent in the old ones, and sometimes making the old ones worse.

So: beware of the politician who promises things that have never been, that sound too good to be true, that depend on very complex systems managed by governmental power and oversight, and that create incentives for individuals and organizations to behave in ways counter to the intent of the new program or policy.  Raise taxes on the rich, and they’ll change their behavior in ways that don’t lead to economic growth, and you’ll actually reduce tax receipts to the government.  Offer benefits to unwed mothers, and you’ll have more unwed mothers.  Fix prices at some “fair” level, and you’ll have shortages.  Provide “free” or “cost controlled” healthcare, and you’ll soon run out of healthcare services….  a special case of price fixing, in essence.  And so it goes.

I think it’s very likely that Obama plans huge, radical changes which will have unpredictable effects, not solve the problems he claims the changes are aimed at (or make them worse), and create new ones.  The article at the previous link makes it clear that the danger of Obama’s election is not that he won’t keep his promises; it’s that he will.  What else can you expect from someone whose ideological hero’s manifesto is titled Rules for Radicals?  And he is likely to appoint judges who have similar intentions, to make sure his radical changes are declared to be “constitutional”.

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Sep 12 2008

The AP is totally in the tank for Obama

Category: election 2008,McCain,media,Obama,Palin,politics,White Househarmonicminer @ 9:35 pm

If you have any sense, you’ll simply ignore all AP reporting in this election cycle.  In what pretends to be a news article, the AP claims that McCain’s claims skirt the facts. This bit of magnificent analysis is by one Charles Babington.  The only hint given to the reader that it is mere opinion, and not NEWS, is the word “analysis” in the title. By rights, it has no place in a list of “news stories”, and should be clearly marked “editorial by left leaning writer”, but of course the AP isn’t that interested in helping you discern the difference. Here’s the first paragraph:

Republican presidential nominee John McCain, a self-proclaimed tell-it-like-it-is maverick, keeps saying his running mate, Sarah Palin, killed the federally funded Bridge to Nowhere when, in fact, she pulled her support only after the project became a political embarrassment. He said Friday that Palin never asked for money for lawmakers’ pet projects as Alaska governor, even though she has sought nearly $200 million in earmarks this year. He says Obama would raise nearly everyone’s taxes, when independent groups say 80 percent of families would get tax cuts instead.

This is risible. 80 percent of families don’t PAY income tax. About 40% of families pay no federal income tax. Obama wants to simply GIVE non-tax paying people a “tax cut” by sending them a check. In many cases of the 60% who DO pay income tax, the “tax cut” will amount to more than the taxes they pay.   He will pay for this by raising taxes on the top 5%. There are a couple of names for this: “welfare” is the polite one. Pure class-warfare socialism is another.

Further, if you ask the people in Alaska who “killed the bridge to nowhere”, they will say Sarah Palin.  Sarah Palin’s political enemies in Alaska say that she killed it.  Palin’s political friends say she killed it.  80% approval rating is hard to argue with.  But of course, Mr. Babington (one wonders if this is mispelled…  should it be Blabington?), from his olympian position as an AP flack, knows things that no one in Alaska knows, being so much smarter than the average Alaskan.

Even in a political culture accustomed to truth-stretching, McCain’s skirting of facts has stood out this week. It has infuriated and flustered Obama’s campaign, and campaign pros are watching to see how much voters disregard news reports noting factual holes in the claims.

Since this “news” story is full of factual holes, one can only hope the voters disregard it.  This diatribe goes on for a dozen more paragraphs of distortion about McCain and Palin, until at last, we get this sop to evenhandedness:

Obama, of course, has made exaggerated or questionable assertions as well. Earlier this year, for instance, he repeated a claim that more black men are in prison than in college, after news accounts refuted it. He also used a McCain remark about having troops in Iraq for “100 years” to exaggerate McCain’s proposals for being fully engaged militarily in that country.

THIS is the best this writer can find to document Obama’s false claims and questionable assertions?  What diligence.  What attention to detail.  What thorough research.

Voters are going to have to be very careful this season.  The major media are so far in the tank for Obama that they present pure opinion/spin pieces as if they are news.  A simple challenge to anyone who doubts this: try to find an AP piece, by ANY writer, ANY time in the last 6 months, that is this negative about Obama.  Since the AP seems to think it’s OK to disguise pure opinion as news, surely, if they were being evenhanded, they would publish at least ONE that was negative about Obama in the radical way that this piece is negative on McCain. 

Start looking.  I’ll check back next week to see if anyone found anything and put it in the comments area.  Oh:  and if, by some miracle, you find one, can you find another one? 

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Sep 04 2008

Universal lifestyle coverage

Category: election 2008,healthcare,humor,politics,Uncategorizedsardonicwhiner @ 8:52 am

Bluntly, the huge majority of people who “can’t afford health insurance” of any kind at any level have simply made other choices.  They need to:

1)    turn off all the devices that don’t need to be on (save money on electricity),
2)    drive less,
3)    eat at home, simply, no fast food, don’t buy expensive prepared meals from the freezer section, buy basic foods and prepare meals to a menu,
4)    turn in their cell phones back to the phone company and cancel the plan  (paying the turn off fee if they must…  they’ll still save money),
5)    cancel satellite or cable tv plan (you can live without tv if your antenna doesn’t work…  really),
6)    cancel internet service (use the library for “research” and email, listen to the radio for news),
7)    run the air conditioning in your home or apartment much less, or don’t use it at all, like the rest of humanity for all of human history,
8)    give the expensive car back to the loan company, or better yet, don’t buy it to start with…  drive a simple, reliable, middle aged car, and as little as possible,

9)    knock off the “dollar here”, “dollar there” expenditures on soda, coffee, etc.

10)    refuse to buy gadgets, trinkets, techno toys, designer clothes and shoes, etc.
11)    review all the ways they spend money, and impose some budget discipline, not spending on anything that isn’t really essential.

12)   maybe consider getting a job, if they don’t have one, and are able.

This sort of thing used to be taught in economics courses in high school, both “regular” economics and “home” economics.

Continue reading “Universal lifestyle coverage”

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