Shelby Steele on American anti-Americanism

Among today's liberal elite, bad faith in America is a sophistication, a kind of hipness. More importantly, it is the perfect formula for political and governmental power. It rationalizes power in the name of intervening against evil—I will use the government to intervene against the evil tendencies of American life (economic inequality, structural racism and sexism, corporate greed, neglect of the environment and so on), so I need your vote.

Very well observed within an article on the upcoming “Referendum on the Redeemer.” (Which you should read in full.)

More Patting Ourselves on the Back

Hello, readers.

Do you remember a recent post in which the Czar predicted that the Tea Party seems to be implementing a new phase of attack? This one, we thought, would be aimed at Republicans, not Democrats, and that the GOP would be well-advised to live up to its promises immediately upon election...and that failure to do so, according to growing rumblings, could easily result in the destruction of the Republican Party.

Well, now, Michael Tanner over at The Corner is picking up on this as well. And Rush Limbaugh is now echoing this, as is the great Mark Steyn. Thanks to Ed Driscoll for finding more exmples.

As we predicted. Take heed, Republicans. The Czar doubts that one slip up in the next few months will result in your instant eradication. What you will do is give legitimacy to all sorts of oddball third parties, and ensure that you will never gain another majority again, until, by 2020, you are non-existent.

You will be seeing more and more stories like this in the press...until people start believing it: and perception in politics is indistinguishable from reality.

Sorry About That, Chief

President Obama cast his absentee ballot today at the White House.

A slightly awkward moment for His Excellency, as he moved to vote for Illinois governor and was shocked to see Harry Reid’s name already filled in.

Eight False Things the Liberals Think They ‘Know’ Before Election Day

I saw on the interwebs a blog posting entitled “Eight False Things the Public ‘Knows’ Before Election Day”. It is hosted on a liberal leaning site and the bent can clearly be seen. I thought, for fun, I’d do a rebuttal of sorts. So here is my “Eight False Things the Liberals Think They ‘Know’ Before Election Day” responses:

1) President Obama tripled the deficit.
Reality: Bush's last budget had a $1.416 trillion deficit. Obama's first budget reduced that to $1.29 trillion.

First, one must understand the difference between “debt” and “deficit” as they pertain to the federal government. The deficit is the difference between the “revenue” that the federal government takes in for a particular fiscal year and the amount of outlays (payments) it makes in the same fiscal year. Second, one must understand some basic civics: the budget that gets passed is largely a construct of the Congress and not the President. Before the first Monday in February (later in administration changeover years), the President submits a budget request to Congress. From there, Congress takes over and the House & Senate Budget Committees draft budget resolutions. This is the real beginning of the annual budget that becomes reality after reconciliation and a vote (unless it’s Rep. Pelosi’s Congress then they try to abdicate this responsibility). Read more here.

So now that the problem is framed, let’s rephrase and expand upon the perceived falsehood:

Reality: The Democrat controlled Congress had a $1.416 trillion deficit (The FY07 deficit was roughly $200B, a reduction from the all-time largest dollar deficit of $413B in FY2004 and rolling forward starting in FY08 – when the Democrats controlled Congress, the deficit increased each year to FY09). Looking forward to a difficult mid-term elections and hearing from constituents over the past two years, Congress has focused on more fiscal responsibility and cut the deficit back. However, the CBO projections for Obama’s policies clearly show that he is playing a shell game where taxes and other incomes hit early and the spending impacts aren’t felt for later years.  So the bottom line is that the Democrat controlled Congress tripled the deficit. We’ll touch on this again towards the end.

2) President Obama raised taxes, which hurt the economy.
Reality: Obama cut taxes. 40% of the "stimulus" was wasted on tax cuts which only create debt, which is why it was so much less effective than it could have been.

Reality: This is kind of mixed. Did President Obama raise taxes – sure, one can find individual tax items (i.e. Tanning Beds) that were taxed but that’s not the point here by the author. Instead, the author equates tax cuts with creating debt and that’s bad. For a very illuminating chart go to this site and set the date range (bottom left of main chart) to 2000-01 to 2010-09. Look at the inflection point for where the debt starts increasing faster. Then look at who controls Congress. Make no mistake, I’m not arguing that the GOP, both President Bush and those in Congress, were fiscally sound, but I think the resulting chart tells a lot. Back on the Stimulus: the $787B Stimulus had much more waste – consider the following:

• $5 million to create a geothermal energy system for a failing shopping mall in Tennessee.
• $1.57 million to Penn State University study fossils in Argentina
• $100,000 to a puppet theater in Minnesota
• $2 million to build a replica railroad in Carson City, Nev.
• A boat cruise company in Chicago got almost $1 million to “combat terrorism”
• $500,000 went to Arizona State University to study ant genetics
• Another $450,000 went to University of Arizona to study ants
• $5,000 a person tax rebate if you buy a new electric golf cart.
• Up to $1 million went to prisoners in $250 stimulus checks
• $54 mil to a New York Indian tribe to run its casino
• $15 million to back-road bridges that get little traffic in Wisconsin
• $3.4 million for an animal walk way under a road in Florida
• $1.15 million to install a guard rail for a lake that doesn’t even exist in Oklahoma
• $10 million to renovate a rail station that has stood unused for a decade
• $2 million to build a new fire house in a Nevada town that has no firemen
• North Carolina schools got $4.4 million for literacy and math coaches for their own teachers!
• $54 million for a railroad project in Napa Valley went to one company who then hired a local construction company for half the price, pocketing the rest

The author’s belief that short-term, government projects will stimulate the economy is flawed. True growth, as the President himself has said, comes from the private sector. Companies will be reluctant to hire (read: grow) for short-term projects when there isn’t a future in sight for that employee or the work. Tax cuts do not create debt. Debt is caused by the federal government borrowing money to pay for programs in the budget. Rather than point at failures, waste, and abuse in the federal budget and the programs it supports, the author wants to point at tax cuts reducing the level of “revenue” available to the government. The problem here is with growing unemployment, we have fewer contributors to that pot of money, which in itself appears as a “tax cut” to the federal government. So the natural reaction (as many states did with the “millionaire tax”) and that of President Obama (see all the taxes that come with the Healthcare Reform Act) is to raise taxes.

3) President Obama bailed out the banks.
Reality: While many people conflate the "stimulus" with the bank bailouts, the bank bailouts were requested by President Bush and his Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson. (Paulson also wanted the bailouts to be "non-reviewable by any court or any agency.") The bailouts passed and began before the 2008 election of President Obama.  

Reality: This is true (TARP) and many, including some of us here, feel that it was a mistake.

4) The stimulus didn't work.
Reality: The stimulus worked, but was not enough. In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus raised employment by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs.

Reality: The stimulus didn’t work. We’ve covered it a number of times (search the site using the Stimulus Package tag or the Pork Filled Stimulus Bill tag). But maybe the best rebuttal is the video below deconstructing Mr. Goolsbee’s propaganda piece. In the end, one cannot prove that the stimulus created or saved any jobs. And in many cases, based on the data available at this administration’s Recovery.gov site, the government paid an incredible amount per job created or saved.

5) Businesses will hire if they get tax cuts.
Reality: A business hires the right number of employees to meet demand. Having extra cash does not cause a business to hire, but a business that has a demand for what it does will find the money to hire. Businesses want customers, not tax cuts.

Reality: true, tax cuts don’t cause businesses to hire. But the underlying falsehood here is that businesses pay taxes or get “tax cuts”. They don’t. Tax implications to businesses are passed along to the customer. Fewer taxes on businesses could mean greater ability or benefits to their employees (a good thing) or lower cost of doing business and therefore the ability to cut the price of their goods or services resulting in a savings to the consumer (a good thing).  So tax cuts frees up money to the individual to invest (through investment or purchasing goods and services) in private sector companies.

6) Health care reform costs $1 trillion.
Reality: The health care reform reduces government deficits by $138 billion.

The author has fallen for a number of liberal falsehoods again. First, the Healthcare Reform Act was packaged together with some student loan reforms which account for $19B over the ten years. Then one should account for the CLASS Act trickery which really reduces any savings by the Healthcare Reform Act to around $49B. But in reality, the reform act is increasing spending and, as we learned above, that drives up the deficit – but is offset by a series of...wait for it....wait for it...yes, new taxes. A simple search on the internet will show that the debate is still raging over whether the country will realize any deficit reductions as a result (doubtful) and whether citizens will see a net benefit as a result (doubtful).

7) Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, is "going broke," people live longer, fewer workers per retiree, etc.
Reality: Social Security has run a surplus since it began, has a trust fund in the trillions,is completely sound for at least 25 more years and cannot legally borrow so cannot contribute to the deficit (compare that to the military budget!) Life expectancy is only longer because fewer babies die; people who reach 65 live about the same number of years as they used to. Everyone knows the deficit was caused by tax cuts for the rich and the huge increases in military spending.

Wow. Ok, after a few deep breaths, let me dissect this one. According to a report by the Social Security Trustees, the Social Security fund “will continue to take in more money than it pays out until the year 2018; however, after this date, benefit payments will be larger than the revenue”. As the large contingent of Baby Boomers hit retirement age, the payouts will increase beyond its intakes. After the year 2018, the federal government will need to use reserves to supplement Social Security. This is the “trust fund” the author refers to above. However, and this fact is quite alarming, all of the money which has been put aside following the 1983 tax increase during the Reagan administration “has been embezzled and used for other purposes; thus, there is not a single dollar of cash in these reserves” (Baker, Dean. Social Security: The Phony Crisis. University of Chicago Press, 1999). Maybe the author should listen to the Treasury Secretary or read CNN’s report based on Fortune’s analysis.

8) Government spending takes money out of the economy.
Reality: Government is We, the People and the money it spends is on We, the People. Many people do not know that it is government that builds the roads, airports, ports, courts, schools and other things that are the soil in which business thrives. Many people think that all government spending is on "welfare" and "foreign aid" when that is only a small part of the government's budget.

Reality: Listen, Geither gets it: “The government can help but we need to make this transition now to a recovery led by private investment.” And President Obama in the past has echoed similar statements (whether he puts his effort behind it may be another question). Yes, the government “builds” roads, schools, etc. by spending money contractually to do so. The problem is that once built the job is done. The road is built. The school is open. Growing the economy and adding to the GDP is done through investment and innovation by private sector companies. Government spending will not move the needle over the long term. And as far as welfare being a “small part of the government’s budget” – how about these numbers for 2010 (Obama’s budget):

• Government Pensions $770B
• Healthcare $830B
• Defense $890B
• Welfare $560B

Welfare is no small part and when one considers that $120B of the Defense budget goes to Veterans programs and $50B go to Foreign Aid, the Defense budget (as targeted by the likes of this author) is closer to $720B.

This stuff really matters.

If the public votes in a new Congress because a majority of voters think this one tripled the deficit, and as a result the new people follow the policies that actually tripled the deficit, the country could go broke.

So now the author equates all the good things Obama has done (look back and try to find him pointing to the Democrat-led Congress) with voting in a “new Congress” (read: a GOP led Congress). With a week left before the midterm elections, people really need to consider their civics lessons and what this Congress that it’s leader self-proclaimed as the “most honest, open and ethical” Congress has done for the past 4 years since they’ve controlled it – to the point of being able to override the filibuster and other minority party maneuvers.

Mail..uh...mail thing... errr... Mail Bag, man! That's it!

Ah, always good to get an email from DT of the 1st Myrmidion.

Oh Most Hoopy of the Froods, the Czar:

This morning, while conducting opposition research as leader of the First Gormogon Myrmidon Division , I came across an article discussing CA’s Proposition 9 on NPR. As you know, Prop. 9 considers the legalization, licensing, and taxation of medicinal marijuana, and is likely to pass if the hippies remember on which day they need to vote.

In any event, I found the article quite amusing, as the hippies were mostly against the law, as the taxes and regulations that would be piled on the growers would cut profits and stop innovation in the field. Imagine that! Who could imagine that government bureaucracies bring more than just unicorns and rainbows?

As always, I remain your most humble myrmidon,

D. T.

JTS on Ricky Hendon

Posted without comment.

At first I thought it was a slow news day at the Sun-Times, when I saw this headline Sunday morning: "State Senator Ricky Hendon calls Republican candidate for Governor Brady "idiotic, racist, sexist and homophobic.” Hmmm, I said to myself, they couldn't get a reporter to stop by the local ice-cream parlor for a quote from little Timmy: "10-year old calls chocolate ice-cream the best flavor ever"; or maybe they were too busy to ring up some tweens for a Justin Bieber quote: "He's so dreamy".

But then when you read the story, you realize that even for the low standards of Ricky Hendon, who is probably one of the top three stupidest and most self-serving politicians in the City of Chicago, there are some unique gems:

"I've never served with such an idiotic, racist, sexist, homophobic person in my life," Hendon said before introducing Gov. Quinn. "If you think that the minimum wage needs to be three dollars an hour, vote for Bill Brady. If you think that women have no rights whatsoever, except to have his children, vote for Bill Brady. If you think gay and lesbian people need to be locked up and shot in the head, vote for Bill Brady."

Since I've been following Illinois politics for years, I remember well when Senator Brady was one of the crucial votes that almost passed the "Lock up homosexuals and shoot them in the head bill". I also remember when Senator Brady introduced his bill that would strip all Illinois female citizens of their State rights and require women over the age of 16 to sleep with the Senator if he wanted to have more children. I supported that bill and continue to support Senator Brady in his bid for Governor.

Mind you, the above quote was right before he introduced the current Governor to a get out the vote rally on the West Side. Only after the rally when reporters confronted the Governor did he try and distance himself from the Senator's remarks. Pathetic. I can't wait to retire Governor Quinn from public service on November 2nd.

Scriptsit JTS

Other Illegal Aliens

Where are the most woo-woo places in the US?

You know, the place where you get all funky with crystal healing, spiritual chakras, and so on? Los Angeles, right? San Francisco? Seattle, maybe?

The Czar will shock and delight. His vote goes to Arizona and Colorado. The former is a hive of New Age weirdness, from Roswell, Area 51, to the mysterious energies of the Sedona area. And the latter is also a mind-boggling nest of weird beliefs.

So the Czar, for one, is not surprised by something handed to him by Dr. J.

If my tax dollars were going to be wasted, this is how I would love to see them flushed....

It's the absurdity of it that I love.

Does a municipality actually think that an interstellar race would be interested in local issues?

One just needs to watch any Star Trek TNG first contact episode to know that they care not one bit for local issues.

There has been a spate of UFO-related bits in the news lately. Jupiter is prominent in the SE skies this fall, so a lot of people are phoning him in for following their car along a deserted roadway and twinkling at them. And some balloons welcoming in the Spanish ambassador got released in New York City recently, causing a bunch of people to phone those in as weird, hovering objects Of No Human Design.

Denver, you see, has a lot of air traffic there—both commercial and military. Pilots are everywhere. Also, you may not know, professional pilots are an odd bunch of folk. In some cases, you can rely on them the least when it comes to accurate reporting of events. So in addition to the Czar not being surprised to see that Denver wants to establish a formal, paid extraterrestrail affairs commission, he also suspects that the woo crowd out there will vote yes on that proposition.

But Dr. J raises a better question with regard to what would really be expected. Should extraterrestrials come to Earth, they will not arrive at Gate 13 and ask where in Denver their luggage wound up on that conveyor thing. The sheer energy required to move a spacecraft within a reasonable distance of earth would be like a 747 sneaking up on you. You would know.

Because it would either take years for it to approach us—and believe me, we would see it against the backdrop of the stars—in which case they would eventually arrive here dead or extremely old, or they would need some trans-Einsteinian technology to get here quickly without being crushed by their own mass. In that sense, there would be a massive series of explosions we would see as they punched in and around the mesh of space.

Yet, what if the Czar is wrong about physics. Let us say they have technology so advanced that they can move faster than light without a massive expenditure of energy; further, they can easily sneak right up to our surface without us spotting them well in advance. Would their first stop be Denver?

Rather, what would likely happen is a careful approach that would take them to the far side of our Moon, where they would ever so slightly edge out to watch us. Unmanned (or unaliened) probles would study and map our terrain because you do not spend billions of quatloos on a hare-brained scheme without knowing exactly what you are getting into (unless, God help us, they’re democrats, too).

Once they have us figured out, and realized there are several approaches to take in communicating with us, the result will not be pretty. Roughly a fifth of our population will go ecstatic, chanting hope and change, and line up to receive their miracle cures and limitless free energy. Another tenth of us will go berserk, firing willy-nilly at the sky; the rest of us will go about our jobs as we usually do.

Science fiction has this generally correct based on sociological studies of what happens when very different levels of technology meets each other. Either we will be taken over War of the Worlds style, we will screw the whole thing up for our benefactors (The Day the Earth Stood Still, District 9), or we will slowly lose our way of life and adopt their customs in order to take advantage of their technology (real life). Either way, it ain’t great for us.

Fortunately, Gormogon members know exactly what will happen. We will eventually discover reasonable proof of life through chemical analysis of a far off planet as it transits its star. And we will get all excited for about a week, until we realize that (a) they cannot or choose not to communicate with us, (b) it will take us 60 years to send and receive a hello, and (c) the next five generations of people on this planet will never have the technology to see what their world looks like, get a probe that can get there in less than a thousand years, or find out anything about them other than they like nitrogen a lot. And then we will lose interest, the Church will refuse to comment officially on the nature of their spirituality, Muslims and Texas Board of Education members will deny their existence, and several diverse groups of Christians will set about trying to convert them into paying churchmembers. An American pop star will write a hit song about how they are probably just like us, cry, and love their children, a German pop star will write a nihilist song that they (and we) are all dead anyway, and a British group will write a song about getting pissed on pints with ‘em as they’re all Arsenal fans.

And life will be the same with our neighbors who live very far away that we never see.

Note: Alert nihil obstat EC writes in to remind the Czar that since 1912, Arizona is a delineated state and that neither Roswell, NM, nor Area 51, NV, are in Arizona. The Czar admits the errors, and aims to look at a map to see exactly how they laid that state out. Sedona, though, he evidently got right.

Down goes Goolsbee! Down goes Goolsbee!

Just a wonderfully brutal take down of some sleight-of-hand with charts.

Gosh, They Miss Nixon

The increasingly shabby New York Times, in an effort to show the world it can reduce news stories ad absurdum like Time or Newsweek, has prepared a pretty good proof that their junior editors can be just as shoddy as anyone else.

Case in point, a little piece called “The Things They Said, which manages to find a way—with an upset election only about a week away—to link all five columns to conservative stupidity! Of course, this is not done without unintended irony.

• On the Juan Williams embarrassment, the NYT said “Like most news organizations, NPR expects its journalists to keep personal opinion out of their reporting.” Instead, the NYT recommends you merely used blatant bias slanting in your topic selection like they do.
• A quick recap of Mrs. Thomas’ demand for Ms. Hill to apologize for her false charge of sexual harrassment against Justice Thomas. But in case you miss the point, they title this column “About an Old Battle.” You know, in case you thought this was important in any way.
• The NAACP calls Tea Party members racists again. The NYT mentions that that Tea Party members deny this, but does not bother to mention that the charges were thoroughly debunked several times by independent review. Because that would be telling.
• Crazy Sharron Angle! She can’t tell the difference between Latinos and Asians! Hah! Also, she has an ad that shows “several dark-skinned people” climbing fences. Boy, is she racist. Shame there was no space to comment on Harry Reid’s claim that he saved the world from a depression, which has further dropped him in the polls, or on the other fifteen dumbass comments he made in the last seven days.
• Stupid Christine O’Donnell! She thinks the First Amendment does not provide for separation of church and state! Hah! Boy, these conservatives are fools. Wait—the First Amendment doesn’t establish a separation of church and state? Well, she must be wrong for something else, then. Maybe...well...she doesn’t know that the First Amendment does not provide for separation of church and state. There. Much better.

When do they get around to that “All the News” bullcrap, instead of this drivel?