The influential affirmative action duo

Two major public figures,  General Powell and Mayor Bloomberg of NYC, have announced their support for Barack Obama for a second term.  Powell is a Republican Party member who served as the armed forces Chief-of-staff under Bush I and Secretary of State under Bush II.  He is black and he is a supporter of affirmative action, the single most un-American Executive Order ever signed by a President in this case JFK in 1961.  Lyndon Johnson took the concept to another level in 1965 by extending affirmative action to employment in the private sector.  Those in the private sector of business, and those in the higher education like Ward Connerly former member of the California Board of Regents, the governing body of the California higher education system,  know how and why affirmative action is counter productive no matter  what its supporters like Powell and Obama say.

In his autobiography, Powell attributes his successful military and government careers to affirmative action.   In his educational path Obama unquestionably received several boosts along the way from affirmative action.  These two guys want people to continue to be judged and promoted based on their skin color, rather than the content of their character, as Martin Luther King asked.  It bears pointing out that both Powell and Obama have spent almost all of their careers employed by the government.  It is obvious they view themselves as beneficiaries of big government.  Sadly they have an influence on many who cannot and do not think for themselves.  Such influence does not bode well for the Republic and free enterprise going forward.

Crazifornia-- formerly Valhala

Ah yes, California is in such good hands.  Herewith a few of the reasons the sun has set on this now benighted state, from Victor Davis Hanson:

Did California’s redistributive elite really believe that they could all but shut down new gas and oil production, strangle the timber industry, idle irrigated farmland, divert water to the delta smelt, have 37 million people use a highway system designed for 15 million, allow millions of illegal aliens to enter the state without audit, extend free medical programs to 8 million of the most recent 11 million added to the population, up taxes to among the highest in the nation, and host one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients — and not have the present chaos?

The California schools — flooded with students whose first language is not English, staffed by unionized teachers not subject to the consequences of subpar teaching, and plagued with politicized curricula that do not emphasize math, science, and reading and writing comprehension — scarcely rate above those in Mississippi and Alabama. Did liberals, who wanted unions, a new curriculum, and open borders, believe it was good for the state to have a future generation — that will build our power plants, fly our airliners, teach our children, and take out our tumors — that is at the near-bottom in national test scores?

Do Bay Area greens really believe that they that will have sufficient water if they blow up the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir?Did Barack Obama think that the Keystone pipeline or new gas and oil leases in the Gulf were superfluous, or that we do not need oil to make gasoline, wheat to make flour, or to cut timber to produce wood?

Did liberals (and their hand-in-glove employer supporters who wished for cheap labor) think that letting in millions from Central Mexico, most without legality, English, or a high school education (and in some sense at the expense of thousands waiting in line for legal admission with capital, advanced degrees, and technological expertise), was not problematic and that soaring costs in law enforcement, the criminal justice system, the schools, and the health care industries were irrelevant?

What, then, are the motivations that drive so many to such absurdities? Note here that I am talking of the architects of liberalism, not of those who receive generous entitlements and whose desire for bigger government is thus existential and elemental.

Equality of result

The entire VDH article is here.

Yea, Schuyler -- left footed no less!

This is an athlete in action.

The Peoples' Republic of California

Anyone looking for reasons California is losing businesses and jobs to neighboring states, especially Texas, it's all here in this City Journal article..   Essentially the article confirms California as  "a state that has the highest corporate income-tax rate in the western U.S.; that the Tax Foundation ranks as 48th in the nation for its business tax climate; that the American Tort Reform Foundation ranks second from the top in its list of “judicial hellholes”; and that CEO Magazine has named for eight years running the worst state in the nation in which to do business".  Not exactly a calling card list of pluses for attracting job producing companies to  the state.  Bottom line, California has a dysfunctional political system at all levels; it has a corrupt and inept media; it has runaway public employee unions; it has a broken education system; and an inadequate infrastructure.  That's the short list.  It does have the best weather in the country and maybe the world.

The dubious "firsts" president

A partial ist of "firsts" for Obama:

• "Quit Trashing Obama"
  
  Quit trashing President Obama's accomplishments. He has done more than any other President before him. He has an impressive list of accomplishments:
  
  First President to apply for college aid as a foreign student, then deny he was a foreigner.
  
  First President to have a social security number from a state he has never lived in.
  
  First President to preside over a cut to the cr
  edit-rating of the United States.
  
  First President to violate the War Powers Act.
  
  First President to be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
  
  First President to require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party.
  
  First President to spend a trillion dollars on 'shovel-ready' jobs when there was no such thing as 'shovel-ready' jobs.
  
  First President to abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters.
  
  First President to by-pass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat.
  
  First President to order a secret amnesty program that stopped the deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S., including those with criminal convictions.
  
  First President to demand a company hand-over $20 billion to one of his political appointees.
  
  First President to tell a CEO of a major corporation (Chrysler) to resign.
  
  First President to terminate America 's ability to put a man in space.
  
  First President to cancel the National Day of Prayer and to say that America is no longer a Christian nation.
  
  First President to have a law signed by an auto-pen without being present.
  
  First President to arbitrarily declare an existing law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.
  
  First President to threaten insurance companies if they publicly spoke-out on the reasons for their rate increases.
  
  First President to tell a major manufacturing company in which state it is allowed to locate a factory.
  
  First President to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN).
  
  First President to withdraw an existing coal permit that had been properly issued years ago.
  
  First President to actively try to bankrupt an American industry (coal).
  
  First President to fire an inspector general of Ameri-Corps for catching one of his friends in a corruption case.
  
  First President to appoint 45 czars to replace elected officials in his office.
  
  First President to surround himself with radical left wing anarchists.
  
  First President to golf 73 separate times in his first two and a half years in office, 102 to date.
  
  First President to hide his medical, educational and travel records.
  
  First President to win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing NOTHING to earn it.
  
  First President to go on multiple global apology tours and concurrent insult our friends tours.
  
  First President to go on 17 lavish vacations, including date nights and Wednesday evening White House parties for his friends paid for by the taxpayer.
  
  First President to have 22 personal servants (taxpayer funded) for his wife.
  
  First President to keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000 a year at taxpayer expense.
  
  First President to repeat the Holy Quran & tell us the early morning call of the Azan (Islamic call to worship) is the most beautiful sound on earth.
  
  First President to tell the military men and women that they should pay for their own private insurance because they volunteered to go to war and knew the consequences. Then he was the first President to tell the members of the military that THEY were UNPATRIOTIC for balking at the last suggestion.
  
  First President to side with a foreign nation over one of the American 50 states ( Mexico vs. Arizona ).
  
  How is this hope and change working out for you? THERE'S AN ELECTION COMING UP...I HOPE YOU REMEMBER THIS LIST WHEN YOU VOTE!

The entitlement-welfare state is dead

George Will's Wapo column this week produced some frightening statistics that anyone considering a vote for Obama should study and think about the consequences of their vote.  As Will points out the actual growth rate of the dependency culture entitlements has grown faster under Republican administrations than Democrat ones.  Thus those of us who have reflexively voted Republican over the years on the grounds that while Republicans are also guilty of supporting big government policies, they were the lesser of two evils in that they didn't espouse as many big government programs as Democrats, have been wrong.  As it turns out we have been on a path to collapse, at least in recent years, since Hoover and FDR launched government intervention in the market big time in the 1930s.  It is painfully clear that we've reached the tipping point of  the ability of the government to fund entitlements and the welfare state.  Collectivism and the welfare state stop working when, as Margaret Thatcher said, "eventually socialists run out of other people's money".  And so now we have to either tax the few with any wealth left to the point we are all equally poor, or we have to roll back the entitlement state,  rekindle real capitalism and the incentives to work.  While the Romney-Ryan ticket is Republican, one has to hope they mean it this time and do intend to reign in the welfare state, offer pro business incentives and let the free market provide opportunities for people to find work.  There doesn't seem to be any other choice as Obama wants to continue expanding the role of government by taxing the rich.  Here are a few choice stats from Will's article:

Beginning two decades after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, who would find today’s government unrecognizable, government became a geyser of entitlements. In 2010, government at all levels transferred more than $2.2 trillion in money, goods and services to recipients — $7,200 per individual, almost $29,000 per family of four. Before 1960, only in the Depression years of 1931 and 1935 did federal transfer payments exceed other federal expenditures. During most of FDR’s 12 presidential years, income transfers were a third or less of federal spending. But between 1960 and 2010, entitlements exploded from 28 percent to 66 percent of federal spending. By 2010, more than 34 percent of households were receiving means-tested benefits. Republicans were more than merely complicit, says Eberstadt:“The growth of entitlement spending over the past half-century has been distinctly greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones. Between 1960 and 2010, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential — but in any given year, it was on the whole over 8 percent higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat. . . . The Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George W. Bush administrations presided over especially lavish expansions of the entitlement state.”Why, then, should we expect Romney to reverse Republican complicity? Because by embracing Paul Ryan, Romney embraced Ryan’s emphasis on the entitlement state’s moral as well as financial costs.As evidence of the moral costs, Eberstadt cites the fact that means-tested entitlement recipience has not merely been destigmatized, it has been celebrated as a basic civil right. Hence the stunning growth of supposed disabilities. The normalization and then celebration of dependency help explain the “unprecedented exit from gainful work by adult men.”Since 1948, male labor force participation has plummeted from 89 percent to 73 percent. Today, 27 percent of adult men do not consider themselves part of the workforce: “A large part of the jobs problem for American men today is not wanting one.” Which is why “labor force participation ratios for men in the prime of life are lower in America than in Europe.”One reason work now is neither a duty nor a necessity is the gaming — defrauding, really — of disability entitlements. In 1960, an average of 455,000 workers were receiving disability payments; in 2011, 8.6 million were — more than four times the number of persons receiving basic welfare benefits underTemporary Assistance for Needy Families. Nearly half of the 8.6 million were “disabled” because of “mood disorders” or ailments of the “musculoskeletal system and the connective tissue.” It is, says Eberstadt, essentially impossible to disprove a person’s claim to be suffering from sad feelings or back pain.“In 1960,” Eberstadt says, “roughly 134 Americans were engaged in gainful employment for every officially disabled worker; by December 2010 there were just over 16.” This, in spite of the fact that public health had improved much, and automation and the growth of the service/information economy had made work less physically demanding. Eberstadt says collecting disability is an increasingly important American “profession.”For every 100 industrial workers in December 2010, there were 73 “workers” receiving disability payments. Between January 2010 and December 2011, the U.S. economy created 1.73 million nonfarm jobs — but almost half as many (790,000) workers became disability recipients. This trend is not a Great Recession phenomenon: In the 15 years ending in December 2011, the United States added 8.8 million nonfarm private sector jobs — and 4.1 million workers on disability rolls.The radiating corruption of this entitlement involves the collaboration of doctors and health care professionals who certify dubious disability claims. The judicial system, too, is compromised in the process of setting disability standards that enable all this.America’s ethos once was what Eberstadt calls “optimistic Puritanism,” combining an affinity for personal enterprise with a horror of dependency. Nov. 6 is a late and perhaps last chance to begin stopping the scandal of plundering our descendants’ wealth to finance the demands of today’s entitlement mentality.

Outrage over events in Libya

Clarice Feldman, in this column, has captured the feelings of any Americans who have followed events in Libya.  The behavior of all members of the Obama administration who had any responsibility for the deployment and safety of Americans serving their country in any capacity abroad, was simply unconscionable at every level.  The outrage expressed in her column is exactly the appropriate response to the malfeasance of all the participants whose politically motivated action and inaction caused the unnecessary deaths of four Americans.  No matter the outcome of the presidential race coming to a close, those responsible for this atrocious behavior should be exposed and publicly shamed, at the very least.