"but the top earners pay most of the taxes today--so you shouldn't raise their rates"

Every time anyone brings up the T word, Republican shills promptly quote the bogus statistic that the rich pay most of the taxes now, so how dare you propose socialist income redistribution?

First, they don't--you only get that stat by only considering the federal income tax--not state and local taxes, and not all those little items that are withheld from workers' paychecks. When you put everything together it turns out that most Americans pay a similar % of taxes. That is, we actually have a flat tax--we just get it from sleight of hand and loopholes and of course the corporate gains tax that lets billionaires pay lower taxes than their secretaries.

Second, they pay "so much" taxes because they have grabbed so much of America's economic output for themselves. From the end of WWII into the 1970s, big corporation CEOs got about 20X what their peons earned. Now it's over 400X--unlike that of any other rich country, but similar to countries like Mexico and Russia.

That's the "income redistribution" and "class war" that has been going on since Reagan's presidency.

Lastly, the Republican's tax theology is supported by bullhorning. For example, today on Fox News Sunday they had a Democratic and Republican junior Congressman on debate taxation. Fair enough. Only the moderator allowed the the Republican Congressman to constantly interrupt and talk over the Democratic Congressman, sometimes even double-teaming her.

So Anti-Tax Theology  is reinforced in the public forums by rhetorical dirty tricks.

Who plays the race card?

I was listening to one of the right wing radio stations in our area this morning and they were going on--and on, and on--about how Chris Mathews had said Newt Gingrich was a racist for calling Obama our first "food stamp president"--and how ridiculous and contemptible Chris Matthews was for saying that.

Well, Matthews was right--and BTW he didn't call Gingrich a racist per se but made a more nuanced statement about Gingrich playing a coded race card. However, even though he was right, so-called Liberals do play the race card wrongly every day--especially when they brand as "racist" anyone who dares to complain about illegal immigration.

This is a situation where two wrongs make two wrongs.

So-called Conservatives have been making coded racist statements ever since they found it unproductive to make uncoded racist statements, sometime back in the late 1960s--early 1970s. White Southern pols would say in their stump speeches "Y'all know whut ah stayund foah." And the audience did.

But the coded speech has a backup, which is to feign outrage if someone interprets the coded speech as conveying a racist message. Apparently Conservatives believe there is no such thing as innuendo. They live in a hard, bright, clear black and white world where you are totally not racist unless you say "I believe Negroes are inferior to Whites." Short of that, when you talk about welfare mothers and food stamp presidents and imply that Obama got into Harvard because of affirmative action not because he's smart and hard working and that he must have been born in Kenya and all the rest of that stuff--well, no racism can possibly be implied here.

And that too has a backup, which the general public never sees--which is the aggressive campaign the Right Wing Noise Machine mounts against anyone in the mainstream media who accuses any right wing pol or pundit of racism. Right wing websites marshal the troops, and the offending media outlet gets a torrent of letters and phone calls and emails to the offender, his boss, the advertising manager of the medium, and the advertisers/sponsors as well. This doesn't always work, but it does so often that many media figures privately admit they're daunted by it, and walk on eggshells around issues like accusing so-called Conservatives of coded race-baiting.

Meanwhile so-called Liberals race-bait anyone who opposes illegal immigration and various social welfare programs, along with inner city schools. And they do tend to have the sympathy of mainstream reporters, who generally vote Democrat themselves. Special interest groups with racial agendas--most notably The Race, an organization promoting advantages for people who regard themselves as Mexicans--play the race card daily.

Even media that steer clear of editorializing outside the editorial pages can be found advocating for the Leftists side when racial issues become involved. That's why so-called Liberals abandoned talking about overpopulation, from the 1970s onward.

The main difference between partisans of Right and Left is that the ones on the Right has a much bigger bullhorn, thanks to the billionaire class being on that side.

So--both sides play the race card incessantly; and both use it to shortcircuit debate by using race-baiting in personal attacks instead of dealing with the facts and logic involved in the actual issue.

Scoffing at the very idea that any so-called Conservative could possibly have any racial motives is just one part of this unsavory stew.

Why independents who don't love Obama should vote for him in 2012

Suppose the GOP manages to cough up a non-crazed candidate--someone like Mitt Romney, or Mitch Daniels. And say you're interested in fiscally responsible government.
Moreover, let's say you agree with the punditocracy that the GOP will cement its control of the House Representatives and will also get not just a majority in the Senate but a filibuster-proof majority.

If all of these things still seems likely in November of 2012, you should vote for Obama, for the simple reason that the Republican Party has proven repeatedly that it spends like a drunken sailor when it's in power across the board--and only Obama can keep the GOP from doing exactly what it did in the Bush era: actually increase the size of government and government spending and put it all on the national credit card.

They say this time it's different. And the wife-beater claims this time time it's different if she's just take him back. But the siren call of lobbyists offering a cushy future for retired Congressmen if they just cut special deals for the lobbyists' special interests is still there--in fact, since the Supreme Court nuked the dam that controlled campaign spending, lobbyists will have even more power than they did.

What Republican president will be able to veto his own party's bills? None that have a prayer of getting nominated.

Meanwhile none of Obama's legislative initiatives will be enacted--of that you can be 100% sure. Because the GOP hates him with a visceral fury you might not even be aware of unless you watch Fox News--as I do regularly--or listen to the AM radio political talk shows. I'm sure their biggest regret is Obama's marital fidelity--so unlike the wayward ways of so many Republican congressmen (and several presidential aspirants as well). There will be no Monica Lewinskys in Obama's life that they can use as a pretext to impeach him. So he'll be there--if you vote him a second term--to play the role of the corporate CFO, keeping the megalomaniacs in Sales, Marketing, Manufacturing etc. from going nuts on the company dime.

Even if you want a hyper-conservative Supreme Court like we have now, a second Obama term won't change that, because the conservative majority is relatively young and healthy. The only Supremes likely to retire or die are the less conservative minority, and replacing those won't be a game-changer--especially since the coming Republican Senate will block any nominations that even slightly left of center. They might even block any nominations he makes period, as they've been doing with so many presidential appointments.

Because of the nature of the electoral system, the coming Congressional majority may well not represent a majority of Americans--remember, Idaho gets just as many Senators as Texas, and the Electoral College gives one Montana Republicans the same voting power as four California Democrats. So Obama may be all that stands between minority rule and us.

Moreover, even if you're big on states' rights, remember that the Republican Party has no respect for states' rights as a principle--only in specific areas that advantage it. So even there you'll probably get more actual states' rights from a divided federal government than from a monolithic Republican one.

The one thing you'll get from a monolithic Republican government in 2012 is the repeal of healthcare reform--in fact they might be able to override a presidential veto on such a repeal anyway--which will be replaced by the past status quo of the past 100 years.

And then there's Social Security, which is solvent on the books for the next 40 years--all the government has to do is return the monies it "borrowed" from the Social Security trust fund, as it is legally required to do. Here again a monolithic Republican government will do everything it can to repeal Social Security and privatize it. The rank and file may thwart it, but it won't be for lack of trying.

Lastly, the GOP is now, to a remarkable extent, a captive of radicals who are so in love with their ideology that they don't care what the consequences are. This happened during the Iraq reconstruction, when the people sent there to administer the country were chosen strictly for their ideological credentials, with disastrous results. The current stated willingness of the GOP members in Congress to not raise the debt ceiling is a case in point. The worldwide consequences of defaulting on our legal obligations would cause a worldwide crisis, with one result being America losing its position as the center and the bedrock of the world economy. Yet you have a remarkable number of Congressmen saying they don't care.

You could argue that the Democrats are being equally mulish, refusing to cut two trillion dollars in Federal spending as the price of GOP cooperation. But wait'll you see the country we get if we're forced to do that.

So I put it to you that Obama is the most small-c conservative choice for President in 2012, given the coming Republican big majority Congress.

PS--that big majority is to a striking degree the product of the GOP promoting baldfaced lies by the dozens, amplified by a billion dollar propaganda campaign. There are legitimate differences between the parties, but they aren't the basis of the current GOP gains. Look at Factcheck.org and Politifact.com and see.

Vaccines cause autism! Cellphone towers cause cancer! Nuclear powerplants kill people!

Today Fox News is touting a story that the Federal government has been handing out huge rewards to families whose kids got vaccinated, then became autistic.

Parents who believe this kind of witch doctor medical conspiracy theorizing are using this fact to "prove" that vaccines cause autism. Rational people are using it to prove that the federal government is succumbing to sob stories with vast handouts of other people's (yours and my) tax dollars.

If I drink a glass or orange juice, then get a heart attack, it doesn't "prove" that orange juice causes heart attacks. Kids get vaccinated before signs of autism become obvious. Yet again people are connecting the dots--only the dots aren't actually connected.

Isn't it strange for conservatives to hate the federal government?

Conservatives are our Tories. They revere law and order, authority, orderliness, respect for tradition. So you'd think, being the closet monarchists they are, that Conservatives would adore the majesty and puissance of our Federal Government.

They usually say well, it's the state governments they revere, but whenever they gain control of the federal government they invariably work to expand its authority over our lives--running roughshod over "States Rights" in the process--in all those areas social conservatives care about--homosexuality, abortion, gun rights yada yada.

So the question remains--whence this hatred of the Federal Government. What group of American conservatives has such an intense grievance against our Federal Government that it overrides their respect for authority?

Southern Whites, that's who. For many of them, the Federal Government is still seen as a foreign occupying force, much as Iraqi Shiites might look upon American troops in Baghdad.

Especially since the South won the Civil War after one of their own assassinated Lincoln and he was replaced with a Southerner who hated Reconstruction. The South was able to replace slavery with virtual serfdom until the late 1960s--so it was only in the 1970s that the Union actually won the Civil War. Meaning the wounds are fresh, and the gutter triumphalism of the rap culture rubs salt in those wounds daily, despite the balm (for Southern Whites) of putting so many Black males in prison that it has practically become a rite of passage for a significant portion of American black males.

This, finally, makes sense of the apparent paradox of Conservative hatred of Federal gummint.

This also makes the Libertarian stance (the Soviets confiscated Ayn Rand's parents' lands, therefore all government is evil) nothing more than convenient window dressing for the real reasons most anti-Federal government Conservatives harbor. It gives them ideological cover. Then they don't have to talk about Blacks.

At the recent Fox News Presidential Debate in South Carolina, the winner of the debate among the audience and the South Carolinan focus group was a Black libertarian businessman. And no wonder. The 1% of American Blacks who are Republican are treasured by Southern Whites, because they give them plausible deniability for their racism.

The Antebellum South had its House Negroes--Blacks who got to dress nicely and live near Massa and his family instead of living in dirt floor shacks with the field hands.

If the shoe fits...

And who gives these Southern revanchists their giant bullhorn in the media?

The other group that hates the federal government: billionaires. For them as a group, every cent the Feds spend on social services is stealing from them to give to the undeserving poor. And every federal regulation is seen as an attempt to enslave them. So they're delighted to give their fake thinktanks and sock puppet pundits marching orders to provide ideological cover for their Southern voters.

Who killed Bin Ladin?

Last Sunday Navy commandos snuck into Pakistan and killed Osama Bin Badin in the expensive home he'd been living in a few miles from Pakistan's capital.

This gave rise to dueling headlines.

The Democratic headline: Obama as Commander In Chief orders successful raid on Bin Ladin's hideout, gets the man responsible for 9/11.

The Republican headline: George Bush as Commander In Chief gets Bin Ladin through policies he set in place and which were continued by the Democrat president who succeeded him.

The Libertarian headline: Bin Ladin's dead. Let's immediately withdraw from Afghanistan, Iraq, Europe, Japan, and anywhere else we have bases abroad.

The Tea Party headline: Obama the Foreigner botches description of Navy raid that killed Bin Ladin, proving once more that he's an incompetent bungler.

Peacenik (Euro and American) headline: Imperialist American president orders invasion of sovereign country and the murder of an alleged criminal, proving once more America's disregard for rule of law.

Pakistani headline: same as above, plus "and proving that Pakistan's civilian government are Stooges of the West."

Indian headline: Pakistan's promotion of terrorism demonstrated once more by discovery that it was harboring world's worst terrorist.

Afghan headline: Same.

Chinese headline: there is no headline, because no Chinese were killed by Bin Ladin, so it doesn't matter.

Russian headline: Bumbling American imperialists lose helicopter while violating a sovereign nation's territory.

Brit headline: Obama nails Bin Ladin. Brits give Obama heartfelt thanks. 

Arab headline: noble defender of Muslims martyred by Americans in their war on Islam; Americans also invaded a Muslim country in doing so [note that many Muslims were relieved that we killed him--but they're not the ones who usually get to write the headlines]

What Lara Logan's gang rape at the hands of 200 Egyptians means

Women in Egypt--from devout Muslim women shrouded from heat to toe to Western women in Western garb, young and old, have been complaining for many years about their appalling treatment at the hands of Egyptian men on the street. Individual complaints to the police are useless. Complaints on behalf of the women are equally useless, met either with bland denials or claims that the women in question were only Western women dressed like--from the Egyptian viewpoint--prostitutes. A recent study revealed, however, that veiled women got sexually harassed/assualted just like Western-dressed women.

Such behavior isn't unknown in the West. Gang rapes occur, at the hands of football teams (recently, in my area), or half a dozen black loiterers near a high school dance (also recently in my area), or the Central Park jogger in NYC, at the hands of several dozen blacks. The Jodie Foster movie "Accused" retells the true story of a party girl gang-raped by Portuguese-Americans in New England. With a little research you can find gang rapes by every major American ethnic group's members.

But I don't recall reading about a women being sexually assaulted by a mob of over 200 men in a public area in a city--ever in our history. Nor do I recall reading about such a thing in Europe, or in Japan.

I have heard about women getting touched/fondled in Japanese trains and busses and on the streets in Italy and Greece and suchlike.

All of which is to say that it's not a black and white situation--but the Arab world does appear to be in a class by itself when it comes to treating women like objects.

Lara Logan--despite the 40 minute sexual assault she suffered in Cairo--probably can't say "Arab society treats women like things." Note that I didn't say it was misogynistic--that would mean the men hate the women. That doesn't seem to be the case. More that women are simply treated the way American sociopaths treat everyone.

So it's no wonder Arab society has such strict rules about not wanting women in one's own household to go out and about by themselves. If I lived in an Arabl country I'd feel that way myself--because Arab men represent such a clear and present danger to women who aren't guarded by a phalanx of family members.

Islamic Sharia law forbids gang-raping women, to be sure, but it also enshrines treating women as lesser creatures than men--for example, via the rules of testimony in court, in which a man's word counts for more than a woman's word.

Of course Arab society isn't the only one that treats women like property. And we shouldn't forget that women have had the vote in America for less than a century. OTOH a century ago women may not have had the vote but the didn't risk being gang-raped on the street by hundreds of male citizens either.

Arabs would hotly deny the idea that Arabs themselves see men as brutes menacing all women who aren't being actively protected by others--their apologists say that women need to be protected from themselves. That's certainly the rationale behind female genital mutilation--done to many millions of Muslim girls in Africa (including Egypt). But individual Arabs surely realize how much Arab male attitudes and behavior endanger women.

I don't think any of this has much to do with Arab-Western "clash of civilizations." It's a feature of Arab society--one of the things that marks it as backwards, having much more in common with rural Indian, sub-Saharan African and Chinese societies than with modern Western ones.

Though even those areas don't gang-rape women in public by large crowds of men as far as I know. Nor is "honor murder" of one's own children remotely as common.

None of these are universals. 200 men gang-raped Laura Logan--but many other Egyptian men surely wouldn't have done so in the same circumstances. But while such behavior isn't universal in Arab countries--it's much more common there.

That's my point and my indictment.

So is America a "nation of immigrants" or not?

Here's a succinct argument for us being a nation of immigrants, posted by Steve in response to an earlier piece of my mind:

>>America is a nation of immigrants. In many more ways than one. It is such a nation in the sense that immigration is an important factor of its history. America was built to its current glory by the back-breaking hard work of immigrants seeking to make a new, better life for themselves. Immigration ties in with American values - the basis of the American dream, the promise of the possibility of success and prosperity stems from the efforts of America's immigrants.

>>Even now, 10% of America's population are immigrants - that's an astounding amount. Around another 10% have been raised by immigrants and as such are influenced by the phenomenon of immigration. That's 1/5 Americans that are drastically affected by immigration.

>>Whether you like it or not, America is a nation of immigrants.

>>The Mental Tome <<









Let's look at each argument here, because this does pretty well sum up the liberal argument, I think.

1. "immigration is an important factor of its history."

Well, more than Iceland, to be sure. But really, since the human race originated somewhere in SubSaharan Africa, most nations are "nations of immigrants." The only difference is how far back you have to go.
But today, with native-born population growth declining rapidly in the rich nations, the level of immigration in many other nations is catching up with us.

That's true even if you just look at multicultural/multracial immigration. Australia used to have an English speaking Whites-only policy, but that's long gone. Now Sydney and other cities there are getting to look like American cities.

Right now European nations are in a tizzy about immigration, because they've belatedly realized that there's no such thing as guest workers. Mainly they stay, and if they're left unassimilated, trouble follows soon after.

Even Japan is having trouble with 100% Japanese-blooded immigrants from Brazil--because culturally they're loud, rowdy, funloving, somewhat felonious Brazilians.

Libya's in an even tougher spot because Qaddafi encouraged immigration of black Africans to Libya from surrounding countries so he could form a mercenary army loyal only to him. You should see what actual Libyans think of this.

Very few nations in 2011 can state that they aren't a "nation of immigrants."

2. "Immigration ties in with American values - the basis of the American dream, the promise of the possibility of success and prosperity stems from the efforts of America's immigrants."
Success and prosperity for whom? Even liberal economist Paul Krugman admits that massive immigration of uneducated people drives down wages for our blue-collar workforce--and has brought it down from "barely getting by" to "starvation wages."

So as we middle class Americans enjoy the American dream, and middle class immigrants do too where they're needed, the vast mass of unskilled immigrants are achieving their dream at the cost of killing the dreams of America's own unskilled workforce. I find it monumentally patronizing of educated American leftists to blithely overlook this fact, which they can only afford to do because they aren't unskilled laborers.

3. "Even now, 10% of America's population are immigrants"
This means the 90% of America's population isn't. Even if you add in second-generation immigrants--which I'll revisit in a sec--that still makes this 80% a nation of natives--not immigrants.

So using this stat, even if true, as the basis for saying "this is a nation of immigrants" makes as much sense as saying "this is a nation of atheists" because 10% of the population lacks a firm belief in God. And as one of that 10% I can assure you from a lifetime of experience that this is no such nation. Instead we're the most overtly religious rich country on Earth.

4. "Whether you like it or not, America is a nation of immigrants."
I don't know when America's liberal movement morphed into the Borg, but this trope sounds an awful lot like "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."

In 1940 America was .5% Hispanic--one half of one percent. Today it's 14%. This didn't just happen. It came about as the result of policies adopted by the American government and the Mexican government--neither with any public referendum, even a nonbinding one.

If not for American government policies encouraging this vast change, America would today still be .5% Hispanic. We aren't talking about laws of nature here. We have a border. We have immigration laws. It's just that, over the last several decades, we haven't chosen to guard the former or enforce the latter effectively.

Today it's within our technical capability to make it impossible for an illegal immigrant to collect a paycheck or use any social services. We don't because of an unholy alliance of Right and Left wing politicians and partisans.

The Left wants unchecked immigration because it believes that anything else would be racism, and they'd rather see this nation destroyed or morphed into something unrecognizable by our grandparents than be accused of that.

The Right doesn't want unchecked immigration but it keeps voting for pols who do, regardless of the speeches they make, because corporate America loves illegals--they keep profits high by keeping wages down and destroying unions.

Look what the Right did about illegal immigration during its economically disastrous eight years in power: pretty much nothing, except for an abortive amnesty bill that the Republican Party's paymasters wanted but which so many Republican voters hated that they stopped it. Apart from that, mostly they've diverted funds away from border enforcement, universalizing e-Verify, and doing nothing whatsoever about a nationwide biometric ID database.

Meanwhile the Left has been captured by Mexicanist demagogues like "The Race" and similar organizations, while Republicans are terrified of Mexicans voting against them as well.

Yet every poll says what I'm saying here--by a whopping majority of most Republicans and over a third of Democrats. Even a quarter of Americans of Hispanic heritage oppose illegal immigration but they don't dare say anything except at the ballot box.

Meanwhile Republicans refuse to discuss the fact that they want America to stay as Anglo as it was in 1940, and Democrats refuse to discuss why they believe we should have to aborb Mexico's excess population--a population that boomed from 20 million in 1940 to over 100 million today. Somehow liberals believe that, I guess, American agents burglarized every Mexican home's bedroom and stole their condom and forced them to have unprotected sex at gunpoint, then bombed all their abortion clinics.

But no, the plain fact is that Mexico has five times as many people as its economy can employ and feed due to Mexican policies conceived and executed by Mexicans. This happened long before NAFTA. American policies and laws and statecraft had zero impact on the fact of Mexico's overpopulation. Yet liberals continue to believe that this overpopulation is somehow our fault.

We. Didn't. Do. It.

There is no rational reason for us import unskilled labor--not with Amercian citizen unskilled labor unemployment above 20%.

If 20% of Americans being immigrants/kids of immigrants makes us a "nation of immigrants" then why not say that 10-20% unemployment (depending on job skills and age) makes us a "nation of out of work folks?"

The ONLY reason illegal immigration--especially of unskilled laborers and their families--especially from Mexico and parts south--is not stopped, and those here forced out by denying them illegal work--is that our government refuses to respect the will of the people, plainly expressed in poll after poll.

California will be majority Mexican by 2040. The school already are. This isn't some people from various cultures coming here. The is the large-scale replacement of multicultural American society with Mexican society across large swaths of the Southwest. I speak Spanish and understand Mexican culture, so this is no skin off my nose. But I find it outrageous that both parties believe they can get away with ignoring the lawful, Constitutional wishes of most Americans, year after year after year, until people who see themselves as Mexicans comprise a voting majority and Americans become a minority in their own country.

And it's not even the sophisticated Mexican doctors, lawyers, businessmen and artists I knew in Mexico city. We just get Mexico's peasants, and the Mexican culture that's replacing American culture is Mexican peasant culture.

.

New religion being promoted on the downlow by the GOP

GOP pols and pundits proudly declare that "America is a Christian nation" frequently. Great message for Jewish Republicans there BTW.

But this obscures the fact that the GOP has actually created a new religion on the sly--one that dare not speak its name, but which GOP leaders promote in every speech.

Since they won't name it, I will: it's "Billionairism."

It's a religion because its tenets are presented as unchallenge-able (which is why Communism was the Soviet Union's state religion). But because it's a shadow religion, none of its tenets are ever stated explicitly. You have to infer them from the actions and coded statements of its adherents.

If it were stated baldly, here's what you'd get once you sweep away the camouflage:

Tenet #1: Billionaires are the pinnacles of virtue. This is why the GOP invariably refers to them as "job creators" (I assume that's counting all the jobs they've created in China, Malaysia, the Marshall Islands etc. after destroying those jobs here in America), and refers to their wealth as money they've "earned."

This is like referring to John Dillenger's loot from his bank robberies as "earnings."

Tenet #2: Because Billionaires are pinnacles of virtue, all government efforts to regulate their economic activities is evil--the code word is "socialist." Socialism used to mean the government owning the country's major businesses. Now it means, thanks to the GOP, all regulation of business.

Tenet #3: Because Billionaires are pinnacles of virtue, all efforts by employees to organize so those with vast wealth don't exploit them is evil--the word "union" is now synonymous with "parasite."

Tenet #4: Because Billionaires don't need the services taxes pay for, taxation is inherently evil, and even if you as an ordinary citizen benefit greatly from those services, you should vote for pols who want to abolish them, because you want to be like Billionaires--and if you favor reasonable taxes that makes you a Socialist and you'd rather lose all those social services you use than be labeled a Socialist.

Tenet #5: America is a tribe comprising about half of the people who reside here. It's a white tribe. An Anglo tribe. A Republican tribe.

Democrats are not Americans. They belong to an enemy tribe that has occupied a small part of the American landscape (mainly in large cities and the coasts) with large concentrations of semi-humans who are not white Anglos, along with intellectual white Anglos, who are tribal traitors. These Democrats comprise, therefore, Blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, any pretty much anyone with a foreign accent and/or garb. The handful of Black Republicans and Mexicans are Honorary Whites, revered for enabling white Anglos Republicans to claim that racism has no part in their ideology.

Tenet #6: Government exists to take money and property and rights from white Anglos and give it to Blacks and Mexicans and other foreigners, and to impose Socialism on American businesses.

Therefore government is part of the enemy tribe. GOP politicians take office in order to restore government to a handful of functions--mainly to defend its borders (except for illegal immigrants, needed to keep blue collar wages low and to bust unions), and wage war abroad to justify spending tax dollars on Cold War-appropriate weapons system that are highly profitable for Billionaires.

Tenet #7: If a Billionaire does something bad, he's the exception that proves the rule; likewise a GOP politician. If a Democrat does something wrong, he's the proof of the rule. And if someone who works for a Billionaire does something wrong because the Billionaire told him to do it, it's that worker's fault, because Billionaires are the pinnacles of virtue, and the job creators, and it we fail to propitiate them properly they will take their billions to a country that appreciates them.

Tenet #8: The Judicial system should be totally blind, based on the belief that everyone is equal. If you want to sell your house to finance suing a giant corporation, you're free to, and if a giant corporation wants to use its team of dozens of staff lawyers to sue you, it's free to do that. See? Everyone's free and equal.

Tenet #9: Corporations are people, with the same rights as the rest of us but none of the responsibilities.

Tenet #10: Public opinion expresses the intelligent conclusions of The American People if it agrees with what the Billionaires want--even if most people with that opinion have rarely if ever heard an opposing view, due to the Billionaires' giant marketing bullhorns, applied 24xc7 across their corporate-owned media, fake "thnk tanks" and sock puppet politicians.

Tenet #11: Only Republicans honor the most sacred document apart from the Bible, namely the Constitution, and anything not named explicitly by politicians living in the 18th century in the rural frontier colonies that America then was....is Unconstitutional (and probably Socialistic).

This despite the fact that our Constitution is one of the shortest Constitutions on Earth, and its framers stated explicitly that it should be used as a general framework, adapted to current needs, not as a rigid set of rules.

Tenet #12: America is a Billionarian nation, but in public we'll call it a Christian nation. Christ was/is a Republican. God is a Republican. Mary Mother of Christ was/is a Republican. St. Peter, St. Paul, and all the rest were/are Republicans. Thus when Christ is quoted as saying "feed my sheep" he didn't mean Blacks and Mexicans and people so un-virtuous as to have chosen to be poor because they're lazy. "My sheep" only means "your own family."

Tenet #13: Billionaires are rich because they work harder than others, create companies, create jobs--in fact the heads of major corporates and the major stockholders deserve all gains in that company's productivity. The employees should be grateful for what they get and never complain. Thus the shift in income from CEOs making 20 times what ordinary workers get to over 400 times what ordinary workers get is a good thing, reflecting the fact that Billionaires (and some Millionaires) are worth more to a company than 400 of its worker bees, also know as BPUs (biological productivity units), who are totally interchangeable. All the company's great ideas come from the executive suite and board of directors.

Thus poor people are poor because they're lazy and immoral. They don't need a handout--they need the rod applied to their backsides.

Tenet #14: The drugs Billionaires use are OK (primarily liquor); the drugs Others use (primarily marijuana) are evil.

Tenet #15: Science is a Socialist plot because it upsets Fundamentalists and Polluters.Therefore global warming is a hoax put forth by a vast conspiracy of 98% of the world's climate scientists; the dissent of the other 2% are actually valid, and the 98% wrong, because scientists once thought the Earth was flat.

Of course the Democrats have their own set of unstated, unchallenge-able beliefs, but they aren't promoted with so much funding, over so much time.

Nobody who isn't Indian can understand Indians

This kind of logical claptrap is claimed repeatedly by practically every slice of humanity you can imagine.

Women say it to men, blacks to whites, Chinese to Westerners, Indians to Westerners.

It's a form of exceptionalism--my category is so exceptional you can't possibly understand it, you with your pathetic tiny experience of life.

But in order to claim that a member of group B can't understand a member of group A, that group B person is assuming that he understands group B well enough to know what they can and cannot know--exactly the crime he's accusing group B of when they speak about group A. Unless he feels that his group--group B--is superior to group A, such that group B understands both groups but group A only understands itself.

Either way it's a local trap. You can't tell someone else they can't understand you without assuming that you do understand them--so well that you can read their minds and know exactly what they do and don't understand.

It's arrogance pretending to be humility.

It's also splitterism. That is, people tend to be splitters or lumpers--splitters focus on differences, lumpers on similarities. So splitters see every culture, both genders, all races, as each being totally unique--lumpers, the opposite. Of course both extremes mask the confused muddle that's the truth.

Here's a physical analogy.

All of our organs are homologous with the other gender's organs. Homology means coming from the same source. Thus men's testicles and women's ovaries are homologous, coming from the same place in the embryo. Likewise bat wings, our arms and hands, whale's flippers, and fishes' pectoral fins are homologous.

And likewise every unique feature of every culture almost certainly has something like it in other cultures.

For example, in rice farming village cultures harmony is more important than justice, because it takes a whole village to cultivate rice. Whereas in wheat farming regions justice is more important than harmony because I don't need your help to farm wheat for the most part. But rice farmers certainly understand the concept of justice, and wheat farmers certainly understand the concept of harmony. They just prioritize them differently.

Every flame in my hearth is at least a glowing ember in yours.

President Obama appears not to have read Von Clausewitz

Von Clausewitz was a 19th Prussian officer whose treatise "On War" is still used in war colleges. And one of his key principles is when you get the enemy on his back foot that's the absolutely worst time to back off. Yet just as President Bush I pulled back from the road to Baghdad in the first Gulf War, now our president appears to be duplicating that folly in Libya. Never give the enemy a chance to regroup.

I'm not advocating rashness here, or committing troops to combat in Libya. Just that we shouldn't have pulled back our side's best tactical weapons.

At the same time, none of us should assume the President's doing nothing just because he isn't stating our intentions clearly, or because we aren't seeing bullets flying out in the open. The Fog of War can be a good thing. 

I have a friend who's dead set against our going in there; he says we don't know who the rebels are, or whether we won't cause, inadvertently, more people to be killed in the long run than if we'd just stayed out of it altogether.

Of course nothing is certain. We have to make decisions before all the facts are in, all the time. But waiting for certainty is just as much a choice in the dark as acting. Most critical is to stay flexible and keep our options open, and be ready to turn on a dime as we find out new information.

The composition of the rebels includes everything from secular Libyans to Islamist radicals, to be sure. If we stay involved and help them we give the secularists spritual ammunition; if we stay aloof or help Gaddafi we just reinforce what Al Qaeda says about us.

New York Times sez bring back the A10s and AC130s to Libya

The New York Times' Friday editorial duplicates what I said a week ago: that no one else has these specialized craft, which would be uniquely useful and cost-effective in the Libyan engagement. President Obama's making a big mistake by keeping these out of the fray, though his seeking consensus about Libya was a great idea overall.

Debt!

The GOP, 2000-2008: "Deficits don't matter."
The GOP, during the House campaign, 2010: "Only Jobs matter."
The GOP, after the election to the present: "Jobs don't matter. Only deficits matter. And abortion." 

Isn't that interesting?

At least it has a precedent: it's what Hoover preached. Lessee, what was the outcome of that?

The Great Depression.

And then again in 1938, when FDR drank the Kool-Aid, and the nation sagged back into it.

Of course in the Republicans' Looking Glass World Hoover was defeating the Great Depression and FDR created it. Orwell would have loved these guys.

pulling back in Libya

The US has two weapon systems no one else does: A10s and AC130s. These machines specialize in tactical support, firing machine guns instead of missiles (though the A10 can carry missiles and bombs in addition to its tank-killer cannon).

And no other NATO nation has anything like these. We should already have the UAV equivalent of the A10, but, failing that, these are precisely the tools most appropriate to the Libyan conflict.

So I'm dismayed that we're pulling them out now, crying poor. Instead we should have pulled back the weapons systems that are duplicated by NATO's other nations but keep these two systems in the fray--especially now that Qaddafi's mercenary army is decimated rebel ranks.

The GOP criticizes Obama daily, and more often as not, for false or frivolous reasons. The tragedy is that when it does have a legitimate objection--as it does here--it's too easy for liberals and moderates to dismiss this objections because they're cried wolf--and lied about it--nonstop.

Californai--nutville or great place to live?

On an unrelated Amazon.com forum I mentioned by lifelong pleasure at being a Californian, saying (jokingly, pretty much) that "I've felt a smug sense of locational superiority to other Americans..." . I got this comment:

George says:

This is why most of Americans think that people in California are way too weird, smarmy to excess, and now they may have to bail them out from their fiscal excesses. Great people there. Every time a Californian tries to say something, no matter how refined in ability, most people in this great nation look upon them as irresponsible hippies. But that's just me talking... 

 

My response:

Actually, George, California is and has been for many years, a donor state. Which means every year we send far more money to Washington then we ever get back. That money is distributed to "conservative" states as pork, to Republican communities that never seem to object to what amounts to liberal welfare.

And most states, Red and Blue, are in deep trouble now, due to Washington trying to balance its books by withdrawing much/most of the state aid that used to go out--and to states making unbreakable pension promises to employees that are now biting them in the you-know-what. Most of those state employee unions are Democratic, but three of the biggest categories of pension pork are solidly Republican--police, prison guards, and firefighters. So it's a bipartisan fiscal black hole.

Texas, one of the most conservative states, has for years bragged about being in far better shape fiscally than California. Now it turns out the Republican state government was simply lying. So they're both fiscally profligate--like the Democrats--and serial liars--not a Republican monopoly, but, if you read www.factcheck.org regularly, you'll see that Democrats shade the truth and spin it wildly, while Republicans just lie, brazenly and repeatedly, depending on the vast financial resources of their patrons to say those lies so often and from so many paid mouthpieces that many take them for truth.

Moreover, a majority of the people living in most of California's geography--i.e. away from the coast--are actually conservative, politically and socially. And even here on the coast a substantial minority is, like my spouse, socially and politically very conservative.

Lastly, despite the looniness which abounds, to be sure, we've led in things that are now generally accepted and adopted by everyone else--such as banning smoking in public places, and setting higher emissions standards for vehicles and industry.

And we can't get our financial house in order because (1) the state's Democrats and Republicans colluded in making the state heavily gerrymandered, which has stuffed the legislature with left- and right- wing extremists who can't compromise, and (2) our supermajority rule for taxing/spending legislation has enabled one third of the electorate (the conservative third) to dictate to the rest, making for minority rule.

Texas is also heavily gerrymandered, but rather than doing so through collusion, it was strictly designed to make Democratic voters disproportionately under-represented, using every dirty trick in the book to do so, after a state election putting Republicans firmly in charge that has now been revealed to have been accomplished through illegal corporate campaign contributions engineered by now-convicted criminal Tom DeLay.

Bottom line: California and other Democratic donor states have been carrying the Red states for decades. I will gladly listen to Red state denizens pontificating about how we should put our house in order--after, and only after, the Red states voluntarily renounce the Liberal welfare they've been receiving for so long.

Wanna take bets on the odds of the new Republican House of Representatives fixing this?

GOP propaganda tacks constantly as it strives to always fault Obama

Tom Friedman wrote a NYT column titled "Looking for Luck in Libya." It described the challenges President Obama faces, and praised him for doing as well as he has with a bad hand.


The very first comment showed what patriotic Americans are up against: millions of citizens who've swallowed the Republican Noise Machine's propaganda line, hook, line and sinker.
Here's what she said:

>>Obama does not have the temperamanet nor the good judgement to make the proper calls in regards to the war he began with Lybia. Obama is trying to pretend that he is a tough-guy cowboy , like Bush. The problem is that Obama is shallow and soft; and everyone -- including Khaddafi -- knows that to be fact. We have no Constitutional reason to be in Libya. Obama has committed an impeachable offense by going to war without congressional approval<<

My comment:

Quite a contrast to the judgment of several hundred American historians, who are polled every few years on how they'd rank all American presidents. In their last poll, done last year, they ranked President Obama a respectable #15, President Reagan a not-too-bad #18...and President Bush II 6th from the bottom--one of the six worst presidents in American history.

Yet this commentor mistakes Bush's rashness and tough-guy talk for decisiveness and courage, while assuming that if Obama isn't making a public speech he isn't lining up his ducks behind the scenes (like George Bush the 1st did with Desert Storm, in fact).

The GOP needs its followers to believe that only Republicans know anything about courage and taking the fight to the enemy. They forget who gave the Navy the go-ahead to drill the Somali pirates through the head, killing them on the spot. They forget who's been sending all those drones into Pakistan and Yemen, making our enemies terrified to take a walk in the open. They forget how Bush II botched both ward he started by doing them on the cheap, followed by a massive trillion-dollar balloon payment left to the next several presidents to deal with.

And this constant prattling about the Constitution--as if this commentor actually knows more about it than a former constitutional law professor and Harvard graduate, which is what the President is--would be funny if half the country hadn't eaten the Republicans' rat poison (tasty at first--then it kills you).

Not only that, these Tea Party types put their constitutional scholarship above that of hundreds of professional American historians. You might say they're all lib-er-ul college professors, but if they were left wing dupes they'd have given Obama a higher score than #15--and they wouldn't have put a number of Republican presidents higher than him, along with a number of Democratic presidents down in bottom-of-the-barrel Bush Country.

How do these people get the sheer gall to think they're such experts at running the United States of America and interpreting our Constitution? Do they even realize that ours is one of the shortest Constitutions on Earth because the Founding Fathers said explicitly that they expected subsequent generations to interpret it according to contemporary needs, while obeying its bedrock principles?

They do not. Reasonable people can point to Republican and Democratic presidents they respect--Eisenhower's one of my favorites,for example, even though I'm a Democrat--but these party tribalists can only see the ill one side does, and only the good the other does.


Really, I'd vote for requiring American citizens to pass the civics test given to citizenship candidates before letting them vote. That would know out a whole lotta Democrats as well as Republicans, but I think the ones left on both sides would actually be able to vote at least semi-intelligently.

I wonder if Mr. Friedman would agree with that?

Libya--not a civil war

We had a civil war, with armies of each side going at it until one won. Nazi Germany did not have a civil war with its Jews. The Nazis just butchered most of them. But what if the Jews had tried to defend themselves with old hunting rifles and kitchen knives against the Wehrmacht's Panzer divisions? Would that have made it a civil war?

Not.

What you have today in Libya is a guy and his family, aided by some tribal alliances but mostly by foreign soldiers brought into the country because Qaddafi didn't trust most actual Libyans--trying to kill everyone who complains to the guy's kleptocracy, and after the first few massacres, the massacreees-designate trying to defend themselves. from being slaughtered, as Qaddafi expressly declared he would do.

I submit that it's not a civil war when one side had nearly all the ordnance and the trained military. Otherwise using the term "civil war" dilutes its traditional meaning to the point of worthlessness. It just gives the appearance of moral cover for those who want to avoid spending money and manpower on the situation there.

It's certainly possible to argue against any involvement in Libya. But to say it's strictly an internal matter, a "civil war" is intellectually dishonest.


And it's equally dishonest to say that President Obama did something unconstitutional in intervening--that he declared war, usurping Congress's prerogative.

If he'd waited for Congress to hold hearings and debate the issue at hand--the imminent overrunning of Libya's second-largest city by Qaddafi's mercenary army--there would have been no need for the hearings, because the issue would have been moot. The thousands of people the President was trying to save would have been dead. In fact, it took so long to corral the international support he wanted that it would have been moot anyway if the French hadn't jumped in.

Sometimes there's no time to wait for every Congressman to stand in front of hundreds of empty seats while CSPAN patiently trains a camera on him and he pontificates for an hour on the subject, followed by another, and another...

Today the world community--outside its dictatorships--agrees that no nation has a right to massacre its own civilians. Nor that no nation has a right to intervene in an immediately impending massacre unless it produces and ratifies a formal declaration of war. Modern communications and military technology has seen to that.

It is also true that some massacres are easier to prevent than others. Iran has been committing judicial murder of tens of thousands of Iranian minorities, dissidents and others for decades, but it would take a major war to stop them at this point. China in Tibet is another example. Even little Ivory Coast, which is also massacring civilians, would be harder to stop, if just for logistical reasons--though it may yet be possible there.

The Libyan massacre we could and did stop, though. The fact that others are harder to stop is no reason why we shouldn't stop the ones we can. Tolstoy said "We must help those whom God has set before us."
That's not a bad way to look at it, even if you treat "God" as a metaphor in this case.


Let's debate this and other issues honestly, instead of throwing up fake facts and false reasoning. If someone doesn't mind thousands of civilians dying deaths we could have prevented, just say so. Don't hide behind specious arguments.

This just in: 50% of America's growth is Mexicans!

The 2010 Census reveals that 50% of America's population growth is Mexicans and other Hispanics--mainly Mexicans, though. Odds are this under-reports the actual numbers, given the reluctance of illegal immigrants to talk to census takers.

Whether you like this or not, it is a plain fact that you were not consulted about this. Our duly elected government abandoned national quotas, granted illegal immigrants--again, mostly Mexicans--amnesty (in 1986), left our southern borders with only token protection, and made only token efforts to crack down on employers of illegal immigrants. And Congress also decreed that the main purpose of legal immigration was to be "family reunification" defined as anyone related to you, however distantly, rather than prioritizing bringing people who could contribute to Ameica's economy or culture. That is, Congress tacitly decided that America's existing culture had nothing worth preserving--other cultures were welcome to come in and replace it.

And, here in the Southwest, so they did. Well, one culture: Mexico's.

Meanwhile the Catholic Church aggressively lobbied government to grant citizenship to anyone who decided to come here (it's a total coincidence that 90% of them were Catholics, of course) and commanded its members to disobey any laws that might cramp illegal immigrants' style.

And self-appointed Mexican leaders and organization arose to obtain government grants and loudly denounce anyone who objected to this culture shift as racist--despite the leading Mexican advocacy group naming itself "The [Mexican] Race." They were joined enthusiastically by America's Left, who agreed with greedy billionaires that the Mexicanization of America was a Wonderful Thing--and that anyone who opposed it didn't even deserve to be debated with. They were just ignorant racist mouthbreathers, to be dismissed out of hand.

Joining in to praise Mexicanization were economists who pointed out that without a huge influx of young workers, America would get grayer like Europe and Japan are getting, with fewer and fewer workers supporting more and more retirees. The long term downside of this short term gain...was, apparently, irrelevant.

And behind the scenes, major political donors from the corporate world quietly lobbied Congress--especially the Republicans who got most of their patronage from corporatists--and the Executive to admit illegals in huge numbers so they could use them for cheap, no-complaints labor and union-busting.

At not time was this policy--to vastly increase our population and supplant Anglo Americans with Mexicans--submitted to any kind of referendum by the American people.

So--there are two issues here, not one.

1: Should the American people be consulted about specific issues that have a major bearing on their lives? Or at least informed by our government when it's implementing a policy that will have such an effect? In this case we weren't even told. It happened on the down low. In this case, it's actually two things: should the American government have allowed America's population to double largely from immigration in the last half-century; and should have allowed that doubling to come from cultures that represented 1/2 of 1% of America in 1940?

2. Is it a Good Thing to replace American culture with Mexican culture? Interestingly, Mexico's own immigration law forbids immigration that would change Mexican culture/demographics significantly. But we're more enlightened than that. So--Mexico won't let America replace Mexican culture with American culture, but America will let Mexico replace American culture with Mexican culture. BTW they think we're chumps.

In 1940 America was over 85% Anglo. By 2040 Anglos will be a minority, if not sooner. This is what's known as cultural suicide. But it's racist to object, so resistance is futile. You will be assimilated...

Libya reveals much

 
The limited war being waged in Libya reveals several truths:

1. As I said in my last post, UAVs could have made this operation vastly cheaper and more capable.
A Tomahawk missile costs over a million dollars. Using one to take out something that isn't a million dollar target doesn't make sense. A UAV dropping smart bombs could do the same job for so much less--and with even less warning.

2. The bottleneck isn't the technology. It's the military top brass and their patrons/future employers in private industry, with a titanic vested interest in expensivo manned weapons systems and cruise missiles. The problem with UAVs is that they don't make as much profit for military contractors and they don't give pilots enough glory. Landing a plane on a carrier under combat conditions, at night, in rough seas, is one of the bravest, most skilled things I can imagine a human being doing.

Another is a President standing up to those promoting the status quo and getting our armed forces the tools and training they really need--including UAV carriers and aircraft.

That this foot-dragging is a real problem is borne out by a comment on my last post quoting Aviation Week about military aviation top brass disdaining UAVs.

3. President Obama should use the Libya incident as an excuse to light a fire under the military to greatly expand UAV roles and to hasten the development of UAV carrier systems. There's plenty of money to be made here by military contractors--just not as much.

4. For Libyan-type operations we especially need the UAV equivalent of the A-10 ground attack aircraft. Its rapid-fire cannon could kill tanks as fast as it could do attack runs on each one.

The US Navy should have had the tool Obama needs in Libya--long ago

Part of President Obama's problem is that he should have had a tool that Navy foot-dragging has denied him: UAV carriers.

Our assault carriers--much smaller than the big ones you always see on TV--are designed for choppers and Harriers, so they don't have a catapault. UAVs could fly off them just fine, and we've had the technology to mate assault carriers with UAVs for a long, long time. But flyboy top brass don't like planes without people inside them.

But imagine if we had just one assault carrier off the Libyan coast with a complement of reconnaissance and hunter/killer UAVs. Then we could make Libya a no-fly zone without risking live pilots and without having to bomb anti-aircraft emplacements (UAVs are so stealthy it's really hard to hit them--and if they do, no American pilot is lost or captured.)

Reconnaissance UAV circling high overhead can spot Qaddafi's mercenary-piloted choppers and fighter/bombers and hunter/killer models could do the rest.

We wouldn't even have to announce a policy, but just do it on the down low, like we do in Pakistan. We can even take them out on the ground when no one's inside them.

Tanks can be hit the same way. And one thing about using mercenaries--they're a lot less willing to die for you. Once aircraft and tanks start disappearing, we don't have to get them all.

That's if the Navy had done its job instead of lavishing most of its attention on manned fighters and giant carriers. Assault carriers with UAVs are far less, well...romantic.