Another lie

In his appearance before spanish language Univision today the President told another grand lie when he said that the Fast and Furious gun-walking scheme was a "field initiated program started under the previous administration."  This is an out and out lie since the program started in October 2009, nine months AFTER Obama was inaugurated.  Let's see in the coming days if any of the MSM will hold him accountable for this outright, blatant lie.  If one looks for one reason why politicians are held in such disrupt, here it is.  Like Clinton, Obama lies repeatedly and because he has the media covering his backside, there are never consequences.

David Gerlernter -- a conservative academic.

From inside the walls and halls of academia, the bastion of liberal thought and inspiration, there is at least one brave and committed conservative voice:  David Gerlernter  professor of computer science at Yale and the author, most recently, of America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats), just published byEncounter Books.  He asks this question to introduce the themes of this new book:

There is a mystery about this election.  The slanted national press and Romney’s weaknesses are well understood, but a large gap separates these explanations from the fact that needs explaining: this election will be close.  How is that possible when Obama has shown himself to be the worst president in modern history?  And when Romney (on the other hand) is unexciting but safe, serious, solid—just the right sort of man to shelter all sorts of tempest-tost Americans in a storm?

Indeed!  Maybe there isn't a mystery about this election.  Maybe we are simply seeing the fruits of a massive breakdown in our society.  The end of the can-do, self reliant individualism philosophy that  built the country and  the morphing to a welfare statism, collectivist philosophy that levels incomes and results in a"fairer" society premised on social justice.  This is an important election.

The redoubtable Thomas Sowell

The Occam's Razor of journalism has to be Thomas Sowell who has perfected two techniques over the years:  Common sense and cutting to the chase.  Both on display here as he explains and dismisses the fatally flawed concept of redistribution.  Those who espouse this idea are unread in history, and are unable to reason logically.

The willing suspension of disbelief

Quinn Hillyer of American Spectator magazine asks the question how anyone, anyone, could vote for Obama after reviewing his record over the past four years.  The answer to that question, of course, is the phenomenon of the willing suspension of disbelief.  It is the only explanation for this incredible record of abject failure:

How can any cogent American citizen possibly even consider voting for Barack Obama now? That's what lots of conservatives and moderates are asking each other, again and again. It's completely baffling, to those who grew up with any sort of sense of what America means and what the American character traditionally has been, that anybody can look at the man's record and want more of the same.

Almost the entirety of the Muslim world is now rioting against an American president who promised that his olive branches to Muslims would secure peace. Like Jimmy Carter, Obama has only shown a weakness that has emboldened the Islamist haters. Meanwhile, our closest ally in the region, Israel, a stable representative democracy led by an American-educated, America-loving prime minister, has repeatedly been insulted, abandoned, and undermined. In short, the United States is in worse position with all sides in the Middle East/northern Africa. We are embarrassed, feckless, wounded... and in four tragic cases, dead.

Allies in Poland and the Czech Republic have been repeatedly let down and sometimes insulted. The "re-set" with Russia earned us only Russian contempt. China and Russia ignore our entreaties around the world, with absolute disdain for our wishes, our olive branches, or Obama's supposedly Nobel-worthy and messianic genius for diplomacy.

Domestically, our debt has increased by 50 percent in just four years, by some $5 trillion, with not a single observable benefit from the spending. Our bond rating already has been downgraded by one agency, and another major agency threatens to downgrade us. Our unemployment rate has never been beneath 8 percent since Obama's first month in office, even though his economic team said his outrageously expensive "stimulus" package would ensure that it would never rise above 8 percent, and indeed that it would drop below 6 percent within four years.

Our politics is more fractured, less civil, than ever -- and as Bob Woodward, of all people, indicates in his new book, this is largely the fault of Obama. He has been the first president in history to push through a major new program without a single vote from the opposing party -- and while refusing to incorporate a single major idea from the other party, while ignoring overwhelming public sentiment to pass it, and while bending the rules in multiple ways to force it through Congress. Meanwhile, on the real business of Congress, his Senate allies have ignored longstanding law by refusing to pass a budget for three years now, while twice rejecting the president's own pitiful budget proposal by unanimous votes.

Obama campaigned with a promise to rein in abuses of executive power, but instead he increasingly rules by executive decrees of dubious constitutionality. Congress won't pass cap-and-trade, so he orders it anyway. Congress won't pass amnesty for illegal immigrants, so he orders it anyway. Congress won't undermine the work requirement in the welfare system, so he guts the work requirements by executive order. And on and on go the abuses.

His Justice Department is flagrantly corrupt and racialist. It told a black majority town in North Carolina that it could not holdnonpartisan elections because voters would fail to elect the black "candidates of choice" if the candidate weren't identified as Democrats. It intervened against the heroic Fire Department of New York to push racial hiring quotas on the department so outrageous that it would force admittance into the fire academy of candidates who missed as many as 70 percent (!!!) of the questions on a simple entrance exam; and, in blocking all applicants expected to be hired under the previous exam, it prohibited a number of black applicants who actually had met standards from being hired. So outrageous was this abuse that even the leftist Village Voice ran a long feature story taking up for the qualified black applicants whose chances for employment were dashed.

And, of course, DoJ ran an idiotic gun-running program on the Mexican border that led to the deaths of two American agents and countless Mexicans while drawing a rebuke from the Mexican ambassador, and then covered up and even lied about its actions. Also, infamously, it dropped already-won cases against New Black Panther thugs for flagrant voter-intimidation outside a Philadelphia polling place in 2008 -- dropped the cases, indeed, just in time, meaning four days in advance, for one of those thugs again to serve as an official Democratic Party poll-watcher in municipal elections in 2009.

Gasoline prices are twice what they were when Obama took office -- and rising again. The housing market remains in the doldrums. Food stamp use is by far at the highest level in history, and poverty is markedly up. Food prices are markedly higher. Small businesses are jettisoning the health-insurance benefits they offered employees until Obamacare made it prohibitively expensive. Doctors are retiring in record numbers rather than face Obamacare's scourges -- and most of the law hasn't yet taken effect. Coming soon are new taxes on medical device manufacturers: Patients will pay more for wheelchairs, prosthetics, insulin pumps, asthma inhalers, pacemakers, and other essential fruits of modern medical technology.

Taxpayers are on the hook for huge losses from the auto bailouts, even as most of GM's new jobs have been created overseas rather than here, and even as auto dealerships across the nation were shut down by administration fiat on political bases rather than on the basis of which ones were profitable. Taxpayers are on the hook for politically inspired "investments" to Obama cronies in failing businesses such as Solyndra. Taxpayers are on the hook for higher electricity prices due to a backdoor cap-and-trade scheme imposed by (illegal) administrative fiat.

Religious liberties, meanwhile, are under repeated and sustained attacked from an administration openly hostile to traditional faith. And the president even refuses to defend in federal court laws duly passed by Congress and signed by former President Clinton.

The parade of abuses, incompetencies, extravagances, and illegalities goes on and on. The record of improvements in any sector of American life is… well, nil. Nothing is better, not a single thing, at home or abroad. And Obama has offered no recognizable plans, no new proposals, no substance at all, for making things better in a second term.

This presidency is a disaster. Reasonable people are gobsmacked at the possibility that it could somehow be allowed to continue its degradations of American society.

According to Hoyt

Grownups In the Mist

Posted on September 18, 2012 | 47 Comments

Grownups are a vanishing breed, creatures half-glimpsed in the mist who disappear when we try to follow with our cameras and get a picture to prove they exist.

Part of the reason for this is very good.  No?  Try reading the biographies of people in centuries past.  You don’t have to go as far as the sixteenth or seventeenth century, though if you do you will find stuff that will make your jaw drop.

You know how proud you are your five year old can read and write?  Well, in the past, your five year old – from an educated family – might have known the rudiments of Latin and Greek as well.  And if you were a colonial farm family, he might well have work-duties around the farm, which might be relatively light or very hard.

But you don’t have to go that far back.  The early twentieth century – and in places of the world, the mid to late twentieth century – will do.  Some people in this blog have talked about watching their siblings when they were little more than children themselves and when by the law of my state, at least, they wouldn’t even be allowed to be left alone.  I remember seeing a lot of such families, usually in markets, while the mother was doing the selling the older daughter would be in the background, helping, and often the next older daughter would be carrying around a baby almost as big as herself and keeping order over two or three unruly little boys maybe a couple of years younger than her.

I was pampered, as my family was thoroughly middle class, if not upper middle class (It’s hard to tell such distinctions in what would have been, for the US, a poor village – for Portugal where it actually was, it was a relatively prosperous one – but we had indoor plumbing, after a fashion, we never missed a meal, and the kids went on to high school and college, without having to enter a factory at ten.)  But most of my classmates started working at ten and worked full shifts in the textile factory down the street (yes, yes.  Child labor is illegal in Portugal.  Portugal was one of the first countries to ban child labor.  That meant that parents went to the doctor who signed a paper saying their child was uneducable and mentally retarded, and then they could work, under the heading of “professional training” or something.  I WISH people would stop legislating economics.  It does about as good as legislating the amount of rainfall.  Child labor stopped, or at last mostly stopped when most people stopped needing it.)  And most of the farm kids were considered adults for the purpose of work at eight or ten.  And I had household duties my kids would find back breaking.

Bah.  Economic facts.  It is a good thing we no longer have kids performing that kind of labor for the very simple reason that we no longer need them to.  That means that as far as our species goes, we are wealthy/easy enough that kids don’t need to work and we can afford to grant them what to our ancestors would have been an extended infancy  (Since childhood involved some work.)

Am I not equating adulthood with the amount of work you can do or perform?

Yeah.  I kind of am.  The reason for this is that work matters.  Put it another way: everything works.  Animals work for a living.  It’s just their work is chasing down and eating other animals…  Or plants or whatever.  But everything works for a living.

Everything but the young of any species, who rely on mom and dad to do the work for them.

The work you do for a living matters at the most basic form of nature living (Not the one you engage in when you go back with your ripstop tent and your thinsulate jackets, okay?) if you don’t work you don’t eat, which eventually means you die.

It matters even at the level of people in the early twentieth century if a kid doesn’t do his share of work in his family it will affect the rest of the family and eventually family survival.

Even we who are adults or technically adults don’t have that level of immediate pay-back in our society.  If you slack off and the bathroom doesn’t get cleaned one week (my least favorite chore) it’s not going to affect your family survival (probably.  We’re assuming it’s somewhat clean anyway, meaning you wipe down the sink and stuff everyday, of course.)

Our kids, therefore, don’t get that work-to-adulthood ratio.

I read something this week about how millenials work harder but fewer hours and expect faster promotion.  Please.  Millenials are overgrown infants – like, to an extent almost everyone in our society.

See, we’ve got to the point that growing up requires an act of will.  I know forty and fifty year olds still living off their parents’ “help.”  Not occasional (we all need occasional help.  Well, look at the economy) hand up when things get really tough, but continuous “I’ll pick up the tab for your house/food/clothing indefinitely” type of help.  Most of those “adults” who live that way do so in order to “pursue their dream” – being people I know, this dream is mostly becoming writers, but there are others, including perpetual students.  And some live with the help of societal help structures and not their parents.

This is what I have against the “you must pursue your dream” or “you must do what you love” speeches at graduations (and occasionally cons.)

Do I have room to talk?  Heck, no.  I took 13 years to sell a short story, and I’m still barely making a living wage eleven years later – and not every year, at that – but here’s the thing: although I’m aware I couldn’t have done it without a husband who brought home the money for roof and meals, at least I TRIED to pull my weight.  This means on top of the trying to break in, I worked to do many of those things my friends in two-income families shelled out money for.  And while I sort of enjoy refinishing furniture, there was stuff I enjoyed far less.  For a while, for instance, I made a lot of my own (and some of the kids’) clothes.  I cooked almost every day unless there was an emergency.  I cleaned (even the bathroom.)

In other words, in return for the flexibility to “pursue my dream” I worked d*mn hard to give us the same life level as our peers without the money to do so.  That meant I sacrificed mostly time and sleep.  It was worth it.  (I am now at the level that, given a bit more income – please G-d.  Let me show You it wouldn’t spoil me – I’d pay someone to do some of it, in return for time to push on the career now, when it might make a difference.)

I was trying to be an adult.  As an adult, you pay for what you want to do.  And that’s what I’m trying to get at.

It doesn’t matter if your parents or a governmental agency or your significant other or a trust fund are willing to pay for you to “pursue the dream” – chances are neither the dream nor you, yourself, will ever reach full “adulthood” in the sense our ancestor knew it, unless you, yourself, pay for what you want.

If it’s a trust fund, at least, you’re not taking from anyone else, but both with government support and with support from your parents or even your significant other…  You’re taking what someone else accrued, in order to “chase the dream.”

Again, we’re not talking about a hand up, or a temporary help.  My parents have given me that in emergencies and I’ve been grateful.  We’ve never taken governmental aid, but that’s because we were willing to skip a few meals – give us one more kid and a little more trouble and we might have once or so.  What we’re talking about are “adults” quite willing to be supported by family or strangers, so they can do what they really want to.

What makes you such a special snowflake?  What gives you the right to take the living someone else earned in order to pursue your “dream.”  Do others have dreams, also?

Shouldn’t you at least do something to “pay” for it: even if it is taking an extra burden in the family, or doing things you’d otherwise have paid for?

If not, why not?  Because you believe all the movies about how geniuses need support and might never be commercial?  Let me tell you, those movies for the most part lie.  And those geniuses are very rare.  And it’s unlikely you’re one of them.

Being an adult these days requires a conscious decision – “I’m going to pay my way if it kills me.”  It might never be achievable, not at the level our ancestors were adults and understood the link between work and survival.

But as weak and flailing as my own attempts have been, I can tell you that making the attempt is worth it.  It will put everything in perspective: the dream as well as the living.

Yes, it takes almost a miracle, a decision, a strength.  Yes, it hurts like living h*ll, as all emotional growth does.  But it might just be worth it.

So, on the count of three, let’s try it, shall we.  Small steps.  Try to figure out if anyone is carrying your burden and what you need to do to lighten it.

It might mean postponing the dream.  But when you get it it will taste all the sweeter.

A message to the Muslim rioters

To all Muslims around the world and to their defenders and apologists in the Democrat Party, that includes the State Department and White House occupiers.

Why is it OK to mock one religion but not another?

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'Hasa Diga Eebowai" is the hit number in Broadway's hit musical "The Book of Mormon," which won nine Tony awards last year. What does the phrase mean? I can't tell you, because it's unprintable in a family newspaper.

On the other hand, if you can afford to shell out several hundred bucks for a seat, then you can watch a Mormon missionary get his holy book stuffed—well, I can't tell you about that, either. Let's just say it has New York City audiences roaring with laughter.

The "Book of Mormon"—a performance of which Hillary Clinton attended last year, without registering a complaint—comes to mind as the administration falls over itself denouncing "Innocence of Muslims." This is a film that may or may not exist; whose makers are likely not who they say they are; whose actors claim to have known neither the plot nor purpose of the film; and which has never been seen by any member of the public except as a video clip on the Internet.

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Associated Press/Boneau/Bryan-Brown

'The Book of Mormon' performed at New York's Eugene O'Neill Theatre

No matter. The film, the administration says, is "hateful and offensive" (Susan Rice), "reprehensible and disgusting" (Jay Carney) and, in a twist, "disgusting and reprehensible" (Hillary Clinton). Mr. Carney, the White House spokesman, also lays sole blame on the film for inciting the riots that have swept the Muslim world and claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff in Libya.

So let's get this straight: In the consensus view of modern American liberalism, it is hilarious to mock Mormons and Mormonism but outrageous to mock Muslims and Islam. Why? Maybe it's because nobody has ever been harmed, much less killed, making fun of Mormons.

Here's what else we learned this week about the emerging liberal consensus: That it's okay to denounce a movie you haven't seen, which is like trashing a book you haven't read. That it's okay to give perp-walk treatment to the alleged—and no doubt terrified—maker of the film on legally flimsy and politically motivated grounds of parole violation. That it's okay for the federal government publicly to call on Google to pull the video clip from YouTube in an attempt to mollify rampaging Islamists. That it's okay to concede the fundamentalist premise that religious belief ought to be entitled to the highest possible degree of social deference—except when Mormons and sundry Christian rubes are concerned.

And, finally, this: That the most "progressive" administration in recent U.S. history will make no principled defense of free speech to a Muslim world that could stand hearing such a defense. After the debut of "The Book of Mormon" musical, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints responded with this statement: "The production may attempt to entertain audiences for an evening but the Book of Mormon as a volume of scripture will change people's lives forever by bringing them closer to Christ."

That was it. The People's Front for the Liberation of Provo will not be gunning for a theater near you. Is it asking too much of religious and political leaders in Muslim communities to adopt a similar attitude?

It needn't be. A principled defense of free speech could start by quoting the Quran: "And it has already come down to you in the Book that when you hear the verses of Allah [recited], they are denied [by them] and ridiculed; so do not sit with them until they enter into another conversation." In this light, the true test of religious conviction is indifference, not susceptibility, to mockery.

The defense could add that a great religion surely cannot be goaded into frenetic mob violence on the slimmest provocation. Yet to watch the images coming out of Benghazi, Cairo, Tunis and Sana'a is to witness some significant portion of a civilization being transformed into Travis Bickle, the character Robert De Niro made unforgettable in Taxi Driver. "You talkin' to me?"

A defense would also point out that an Islamic world that insists on a measure of religious respect needs also to offer that respect in turn. When Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi—the closest thing Sunni Islam has to a pope—praises Hitler for exacting "divine punishment" on the Jews, that respect isn't exactly apparent. Nor has it been especially apparent in the waves of Islamist-instigated pogroms that have swept Egypt's Coptic community in recent years.

Finally, it need be said that the whole purpose of free speech is to protect unpopular, heretical, vulgar and stupid views. So far, the Obama administration's approach to free speech is that it's fine so long as it's cheap and exacts no political price. This is free speech as pizza.

President Obama came to office promising that he would start a new conversation with the Muslim world, one that lectured less and listened more. After nearly four years of listening, we can now hear more clearly where the U.S. stands in the estimation of that world: equally despised but considerably less feared. Just imagine what four more years of instinctive deference will do.

On the bright side, dear liberals, you'll still be able to mock Mormons. They tend not to punch back, which is part of what makes so many of them so successful in life.

Debunk the lies

Thomas Sowell has a knack for cutting to the chase.  In this column he channels many Republicans' view that Democrats are allowed to get away with lying with impunity simply because they are not challenged by articulate arguments from Republicans.  He gives several examples.  Sowell raises a very good point.  In the absence of debunking these lies by Democrats the impression given is that Republicans believe them as well and therefore they must be received wisdom.  Sowell is saying is every lie should be challenged and debunked on the spot, immediately.  Now granted unlike their opposition Republicans do not have the benefit of media access, nevertheless there are ways now to get around this problem: the internet, talk radio and Fox News are three such ways.  Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie are two articulate Republicans who don't shy away from confronting the lies of the Democrats.  Unfortunately Romney seems reluctant to take them on.

Needless mistakes by Romney

So far Romney has run a disappointing campaign, not unlike McCain in '07.  He seems to provide the opposition with multiple unnecessary opportunities to attack him, and his message, by virtue of bad timing and sometimes awkwardly made points.  His criticism of the Obama administration for the conflagration in the Middle East, while correct, was too hastily rendered making him look like an opportunistic, garden variety politician instead of a thoughtful leader.  Today, at a fund raising event, he managed to describe the campaign in terms that the opposition was able to make the case that he really doesn't care about 47% of the Americans who are going to vote for Obama because they pay no taxes and are therefore dependent on the government.  This message, while perhaps true in the context of campaign strategy making sessions and as an explanation to the contributors to whom it was directed,is bound to be red meat for the opposition who can make the case that Romney doesn't care about 47% of the population.  It is a fact of political life that Republicans are up against a highly partisan, corrupt, press that is always looking for some controversial thought or idea with which to pillory them.  This is exactly what they have done with the Romney comment  "leaked" to them by someone who attended the fundraiser and video taped the remarks.  These seem liken unforced errors, and yet the candidate and his campaign keep repeating and making them over and over.  In just one week Romney's now given the opposition to big opportunities to force him off message while he defends himself.  

These charts don't lie

The unhappy conclusion to be drawn from these charts is obvious.  We are no longer in the recovery stage from recession.  We are almost certainly back into a recessionary stage.  The Federal Reserve's outrageous "new" policy of injecting ever more cash into the system tells us they feel we are in recession again.  The recent uptick in overall employment tells us the same thing.  It sure looks like the double dip has arrived.  Watch out below:



Petroleum Monthly April-May-June



Diesel Monthly April-May-June



KJet Monthly April-May-June