The Fundamental Flaw in Liberalism...

Let me ask an honest question.

Do you really believe that the vast majority of people (your neighbors and co-workers, etc.) are motivated by malice...or even ethnic animus?

If they are, what accounts for more Asians per capita getting into Colleges and Universities than their white counterparts?

What accounts for the fact that West Indian blacks, in Queens NY, earn more than their white neighbors in that same borough?

And what accounts for the fact that black women, on average, earn more than white females?

The view that “people are basically bad or debased and without government watching over them would revert to their basest natures” is a horrifically misanthropic, not to mention elitist one, for those who claim that, ALWAYS exclude themselves from such vile characterizations and almost always include the benign caveat, “present company excluded.”

See?

The implication is, “You and I may not be bad people, but pretty much everyone else is.”

Well, if we accept that “you and I aren’t bad people,” why do we propose that most others ARE “bad people?” On what grounds do we make such a malignant presumption?

I have a hard time believing that any decent, caring person could honestly hold to that basic outlook.

Still, that seems to be the basis for so much of the Liberal/Left-wing outlook – “People (that is, OTHER people) are scum.”

I don’t see things that way and I don’t view others that way at all. In fact, I’ve always said that “some of the best and worst people I’ve ever met are of (give ANY group),” and THAT’S the human condition.

I absolutely reject the notion that people are generally “bad,” “debased,” or “inclined toward evil,” and “need strict government supervision.”

That viewpoint is completely antithetical to America’s Founding design and is, at its core, a prescription for the worst kind of tyranny.

I believe in a free and open market and the cut-throat competition it breeds. I believe in the natural right to violent self-defense, whenever necessary to defend one’s life OR property and I believe in it with regard to criminal justice – the government/police should react to and punish those guilty of felonious crimes, NOT seek to anticipate them and restrict people’s free movement in the name of “suspicious activity.”

Basically and fundamentally, I, like most conservatives, believe that the vast and overwhelming majority of people are good and decent and like myself, and I presume yourself, try to do the most good and the least harm they can each day. I don’t innately mistrust other people and know few other people who do. Of course, I know few real Liberals.

The bottom line is that Conservatives have faith in the basic goodness and innate abilities of people and Liberals do not and THAT is the fundamental flaw of the Liberal/Left-wing ideology.

Why Equalizing People Always Fails...

“...the more money a populace has, the more undue influence the wealthy have on what should be democratic decisions.”

Actually, the more money that individuals have the better the quality of life that society enjoys. Likewise, the more money that government has, the more intrusive that government becomes and the lower the quality of life for that society.

“The people,” (the electorate) has no right to make things more “egalitarian” economically.

A free market values some skills more than it foes others. That’s why rare and hard to master skills are often rewarded far greater than more mundane skills.

Stock brokers and surgeons who work long hours on skills that require painstaking attention to detail and constant and continuing education are rewarded many hundreds, often thousands of times more than an unskilled laborer and there’s neither any reason, nor any right that we, as citizens to try and equalize those disparities

The fundamental flaw of Marx’s inane “FROM each according to his abilities, TO each according to hiss needs,” is that such a dictum undeniably and inevitably results in a country filled with overweight gluttons, with bad backs, or in the Marxian vernacular, “No-work fat bastards.”

Why?

Because we always get MORE of what we reward and when high needs and indolence are rewarded, as they are with Marxism/socialism, the result is economic disaster.

Are people who earn huge incomes more worthy than those who don't?

Certainly the market attests that their skills are, so who are WE to disagree?

Two More GREAT Ones From the Captain...

Two of my favorite bloggers are Barry over at Cynical Nation and the Captain over at Captain Capitalism...there are many other must reads, but these are two of my all time favorites

The Captain always comes up with some economic gems, like this one (http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2008/07/week-of-oil-charts-4-you-are-big-oil.html) on the not so widely reported fact of WHO OWNS “Big Oil.”

Turns out, YES. it’s YOU and I, with some 29.5% owned by various and widely popular Mutual Funds, 27% owned by pension funds, another 14% owned by IRAs – totaling a whopping 70.5% OWNED by investment vehicles regular working people almost universally and very heavily depend upon for their retirement funds.

Of the remaining nearly 30%, well, 23% of that is owned by individual investors, the bulk of whom are regular working people, like you and me. Another 5% are owned by “other institutional investors,” likes banks and 457s and 401Ks, leaving a paltry 1.5% owned by (gulp) “Corporate insiders).

Check out Captain Capitalism’s piece, it has charts to go along with his colorful commentary on this.


While there, check out the piece on the Starbucks Solution (http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2008/07/starbucks-solution.html) as well. It’s priceless.

Seems that Starbucks is in the process of closing some 600 underperforming (less profitable) stores, in order to consolidate during the current economic turbulence.

Nothing strange there.

But the reaction of its “customers” (for the Starbucks crowd, that term must be used very loosely, as sitting and reading for four hours while nursing a single cup a Joe, isn’t exactly a “customer”) has been to...yup...start a petition drive to keep those stores open!

As the Captain wryly notes, the solution obviously lies in “a free-market solution like BUYING MORE FREAKING COFFEE!!!!”

Check out Captain Capitalism. He’s always worth the read!

Gasoline Prices Continue Their Fall...

As oil sank to its lowest point in weeks, many investors are still questioning whether crude oil has cooled enough to reflect the serious deterioration in demand. China has stopped its stockpiling of oil as the Olympics near and the price crunch has reduced the global demand somewhat.

Unleaded gasoline prices eased to nearly $4 a gallon, and AAA said a gallon of gas could cost as much as 25 cents less by Labor Day.

Light, sweet crude for September delivery fell $2.23 to settle at $123.26 a barrel in on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Earlier the contract dropped as far as $122.50, its lowest point since June 5.

The U.S. continues to sit on hundreds of billions of untapped oil reserves as OPEC nations continue to demand that America start tapping some of those reserves before demanding increased output from OPEC.

The Supreme Court and Texas Get This One RIGHT!

This past Wednesday, July, 16th, the HAGUE - The U.N.'s highest court, ordered the United States to stay the executions of five Mexicans on Texas death row pending review of their cases. Including that of Jose Medellin (pictured above), scheduled to be executed within a couple of weeks.

John Bellinger III, the U.S. legal adviser, told the UN that the federal government had gone to "extraordinary lengths" to carry out the World Court's directive and to intercede with the state courts.

Earlier, President Bush issued a directive to the state courts to abide by the decision and also asked Texas specifically to review Jose Medellin's case ahead of his planned Aug. 5 execution.

Those steps were "highly unusual," Bellinger said. "It almost never happens that the federal government enters an appearance in state court proceedings."

However, Texas refused, and in March the U.S. Supreme Court ruled by a 6-3 vote that Bush lacked the authority to compel state courts to comply with the judgment from The Hague.

Wednesday's ruling comes less than three weeks before the first of the death row inmates, Jose Medellin, is scheduled for execution by lethal injection in Texas for taking part in the gang rape and murder of two teenage girls 15 years ago.

In 1993, two young girls, 16 y/o Elizabeth Pena and 14 y/o Jennifer Ertman took a shortcut home and came upon a gang initiation involving Jose Medellin, Efrain Perez and Raul Villarreal. The three gang members raped and sodomized them both and when they were finished they beat and kicked them both to death.

Both Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Attorney General Michael Mukasey have jointly written to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, urging him to review Medellin's case, Bellinger said.

The Hague is informally known as “the World Court,” and the tribunal is the U.N.'s judicial arm for resolving disputes among nations, and although its decisions are supposedly binding and final, but it has no enforcement powers.

As Al Gore once famously said, “There is NO overriding legal authority (for U.S. law).”

Commodities Prices Pointing Toward a Coming Recession???

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Captain Capitalism makes an interesting observation, along WITH an ACCOMPANYING CHART (see above)!

It seems that most previous recessions were preceded by rising prices in commodities and we all know that commodity prices have been rising through most of the past year.

So far, as the Captain notes, “Everything except GDP points toward recession.”

To date we haven’t even had ONE quarter of negative economic growth, if the coming quarter (ending in September) remains in the black, a second straight quarter would come, at the earliest, with end of the first quarter of the next administration.

If current falling oil prices, continue to bolster the dollar and raise stocks, while also putting a downward pressure on inflation, it’s entirely possible that we may actually see a dramatically improving economy by the end of the year...and the end of the eight year Bush administration.

THEN, the earliest we could expect the possibility of a recession would be the end of the second (June, 2009) and more likely, the third quarter (September, 2009), or even the fourth quarter (December, 2009).

Given that the “first six months of any new administration are attributed to the previous administration," THAT would bode very well for the Bush administration, as given that, the next administration would begin taking responsibility for the economy with at the end of the second quarter (June, 2009).

It would be deliciously ironic, IF the coming recession (the gathering economic storm, investors have long been warning about) coincided with an Obama Presidency, coupled with a Democratic Congress.

Beyond June of 2009, no one will want to hear about an “inherited recession, “ or even “inherited poor fundamentals.” No, with Democratic tax policies almost certainly set to re-incentivize savings (deferring more income) among the top 10% of income earners, the next major economic crisis may actually hit those who deserve it – the Liberal Democrats.

Could Barrack Obama already be poised to become “the next Jimmy Carter?”

SEE The Captain at: http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2008/07/everything-but-gdp-points-to-recession.html

Oil Under $130/Barrel! So Let’s Stop Bashing Commodities Investors/Speculators

Don’t look now, but the “oil crisis” could be just about over!

Over the past three days, oil has dropped from a high of nearly $145/barrel to under $130/barrel, an almost 12% drop in just 72 hours! WoW! Maybe now the misguided among us, will stop blaming investors/speculators who merely profit from the fluctuating supply and demand parameters, giving everyone a warning as to shortages in commodities via price increases.

The reasons appear to be two-fold, first, the U.S. which sits on at least 800 BILLION barrels in deposits is beginning to reconsider drilling, at least off its coastlines and very possibly in the oil-rich Bakken Ridge in Montana and secondly, China has begun to stop stockpiling oil, which it had been doing over the past six to eight months in preparation for the upcoming Beijing Olympics.

Today, the dollar surged and the stock market continued its rally.

Commodities analysts have long warned that the oil bubble could burst just as the previous one (1981’s) did, shortly after reaching record highs.

In fact, so many things are stacked against a continuing oil price climb, the U.S. signaling a return to domestic drilling will almost certainly do a lot to reduce futures prices, China’s halting its oil stockpiling for the upcoming Olympics as the Beijing Games approach and Oil exporting nations realizing that sky high oil prices act as an incentive for developed nations to reduce oil consumption and even switch to alternative fuels.

The FACT is that oil remains the most efficient fuel we have and we have it in abundance. The earth’s current reserves would power the planet for at least fifty years, plenty of time for a slow and steady transition to other renewable sources of energy.

Robert Anthony (Tony) Snow Passes...

...This past April (less than twelve weeks before his untimely death), Tony Snow had joined CNN as a conservative commentator. Snow, who’d spent 10 years at Fox News, left his job as White House Press Secretary last September, to deal with a medical problem that turned out to be recurrence of the cancer he’d previously battled.

Aside from his ten year stint on Fox News and speech writing duties for George H. Walker Bush, Snow was also especially noted for writing a syndicated column for Creators Syndicate between 1993 and 2000. As a nationally syndicated columnist, his commentaries appeared in more than 200 newspapers nationwide. Even in print, Snow’s down home Kentucky charm exuded through the page, as he consistently made compelling arguments for his point of view.

Snow won numerous awards during his print career, including citations from the Virginia Press Association, the Detroit Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, The Associated Press and Gannet.

In March of 2007, Snow's malignant cancer returned and spread to his liver and elsewhere in his body. Fellow White House staffers at the time said he told them he planned to fight the disease and return to work.

"He is not going to let this whip him, and he's upbeat," President Bush said of his press secretary. "And so my message to Tony is, 'Stay strong; a lot of people love you and care for you and will pray for you.'"

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Snow, 51, had his colon removed in 2005 and underwent six months of chemotherapy after being diagnosed with colon cancer. He underwent surgery on Monday to remove a growth in his abdominal area, near the site of the original cancer.

Doctors determined the growth was cancerous and the cancer had metastasized, or spread, to the liver.

The news rocked the White House. Snow had gone into the surgery saying he felt fine, and recent blood tests and imaging scans had indicated no return of cancer. He had said he opted to remove the growth out of "aggressive sense of caution."

He had recently reached the two-year mark of being free of cancer.

"He told me that he beat this thing before," said White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino, "and he intends to beat it again."

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It is common for colon cancer patients to suffer a recurrence of cancer, particularly in the liver. Medical experts say advances in chemotherapy can allow people with the type of cancer Snow has to return to work and good health for years.

Over the past year Snow had battled cancer, but on the morning of July 12th, 2008, Tony Snow died at Georgetown University Hospital as a result of colon cancer that had spread to his liver.

The “happy warrior” is no more.

Bobby Murcer Dead at 62...

...Bobby Murcer, once the heir apparent to Yankee great Mickey Mantle, died Saturday, after a two year battle with brain cancer.

Murcer, like Mantle, a native of Oklahoma, joined the Yankees permanently in 1969 and played fourteen seasons, most of them for the Yankees, before retiring in 1983.

Murcer was a gold glove winner, five time All-Star and perennial Yankee fan favorite during his career.

Bobby Murcer who became mantle’s protégé, after “the Mick” retired, became the link to that bygone era, connecting Mantle’s legacy to that of Don (“Donnie Baseball”) Matingly’s, who in turn connected to today’s Yankee Captain, Derrick Jeter.

After retiring from baseball, Murcer became a regular broadcaster for the Yankees, working with both WPIX in the 1980s and later with the Yankees’ Yes Netowrk.

Murcer also was involved in the team as management and part-time coach as well. He was a Yankee vice-president in 1985, and individually worked with Rickey Henderson's rehab efforts when Henderson was brought to the Yankees. In 1987, George Steinbrenner hired Murcer to coach left-handed hitters. In 1989, he became part-time owner of the Class AAA baseball team in Oklahoma, the Oklahoma City 89ers.

He was also a regular at the annual Yankees Old Timer's Game, playing his last game in 2007.

Welfare Reform and Workfare Have SAVED New York!

On June 30th, 2008, New York’s welfare rolls plummeted to their lowest tally in 45 YEARS!

When Rudy Giuliani took office there were over ONE MILLION people on New York City’s welfare rolls (1,160,593), today there are under 400,000 (341,329)!

Yes, workfare helped some people get back to work, BUT what welfare reform (including workfare) really did was to eradicate the massive FRAUD and abuse that had plagued that system rooted in a failed 1960s ideology that “work is wage slavery, and we should seek to free poor people from the shackles of employment and employer abuse.”

Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute, who studies these kinds of policies, attributes all the gains made to Giuliani’s welfare reform, instituted back in 1995. "I think it's very much a product of the change in welfare philosophy that Mayor Giuliani introduced in '95," MacDonald said.

The savings to New York, at a time when tax revenues are falling due to the volatility on Wall Street, cannot be overstated. Given that the average welfare recipient in New York City costs the city at least $30,000/year, those 820,000 fewer recipients means the city is saving (at minimum) a staggering $2.4 BILLION/year! That’s got to be GREAT news for a cash strapped city like New York.

And the welfare rolls are perhaps the very best indicator of individual poverty that we have. Despite rising unemployment (the current rate has still not risen above 5%) and with many people leaving the workforce to work for themselves, the welfare rolls have, not only, not grown, they’ve continued to fall, indicating that actual individual poverty continues to fall, as well.

And that’s good news all around. No one should be mired in the generational dependancy that welfare progrmas breed, as that is the closest thing to a living death.

What if....?

What if Barack Obama picks a center-Right running-mate with proven military credentials?

Well, from here, it looks like game, set and match. With more than half the electorate still disengaged, such a move would go far to mollify the vast middle, filled with apolitical independents and even some Conservatives discouraged by McCain.

It would also be yet another wink and nod to the growing “New” (mostly Conservative/“Blue Dog”) Democrats, of whom Webb is one, and another slap at the far-Left fringe groups, like MoveOn and Code Pink that supported him through the Democratic Primaries.

It would seem that there's simply no downside to Obama’s making peace with the “Blue Dog” Conservative Democrats and moving Right toward the center, because like Conservatives with McCain, the far-Left really has nowhere else to go. They CAN’T afford to vote for anyone else, so Obama can take them for granted as easily as the GOP has taken the “Christian Right” all these years.

If Barack Obama picks someone like Jim Webb, the prospects for John McCain look very dim.

Serial Killers and the Political Class

Serial Killers are, at heart, the ultimate control freaks.

Most seem far more motivated by complete control over others, then they are by violence. That is they seem primarily motivated by CONTROL and secondarily motivated by violence.

That’s why they often target pliable, malleable victims. John Wayne Gacey sought to have complete control over young boys, whom he’d handcuff via a cheap parlor trick, leading them to believe that he was demonstrating escapable handcuffs.

Jeffrey Dahmer sought to build a harem of zombie slaves that would exist solely for his own pleasure.

The sick, perverted and vile thing that ALL serial killers have in common is that they seek complete control over others...not unlike most of those engaged in the so-called “political class.”

In fact, historically, many politicians, dictators mostly, from Stalin, to Hitler, to Mao, to Pol Pot of the past, to Mugabe and Castro of today ARE, or HAVE INDEED BEEN serial killers.

Many of the rest, simply lean toward that sick, twisted perversion of controlling others. We are all very aware and very outraged by the exploits of the most notorious serial killers, but few express the same level of outrage over their political cousins. Pol Pot killed a larger percenatage of his population than did either Hitler, Stalin or Mao. Idi Amin ran Uganda into the ground and under his rule, thousands of political opponents or "suspected" political opponents simply disappeared. Stalin and mao literally starved millions of their citizens to death (Stalin killed an estimated 50 million and Mao near 100 million people), all in effort to control, to a microscopic degree, the lives of their nations citizens. Of all the viscious political monsters only Hitler rises to anything near the outrage reserved for the likes of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacey, as he used mass murder to advance his own twisted racial theories.

Without question, the list of political murderers far surpasses the list of known serial killers, even if mass murderers, like Charles Whitman (the University of Texas sniper), Cho Seung-Hui (the Va Tech mass murderer) and Colin Ferguson (the LIRR killer) are added to that list! Perhaps that’s why America’s Founders distrusted government so much as to so severely limit government action via the First TEN Amendments (The Bill of Rights) to the U.S. Constitution.

A Burning Question

“If you believe Bush, as the commander and chief, is responsible for preventing a terrorist attack, then who should be held responsible for not preventing 9/11?” (A Liberal Questioner)


WE (the American people) ARE.

In 1993, in the wake of the first WTC bombing, America’s MSM reported what James Fox (then head of the FBI’s NY Office) said, “America’s criminal justice system is inadequate to the task of dealing with state sponsored international terrorism.”

That was the official END of terrorism being treated as a “criminal justice” problem as James Fox (at the time, America’s leading domestic terror expert) effectively declared an UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER on the part of America’s criminal justice system. Yet, the American people not only didn’t clamor for “an all-out war against the jihadists,” we virtually INSISTED that they be ignored as so many of us were into the dot-com boom at the time. Not me, I wanted to re-enter Iraq right after the first WTC attacks in 1993!

Still, after that first WTC attack, TWO American embassies in Africa were bomber, the USS Cole was attacked, the Kobalt Towers in Saudi Arabia were bombed...each and every one of those were SINGULAR acts of war against the United States.

That’s what terrorism IS, “Unconventional warfare carried out by de facto “soldiers” without uniforms, directed against civilian populations.”

It wasn’t that the government WANTED to ignore this growing war against America and American interests, in fact, Bill Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998. Both he and Hillary Clinton rightly supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003. They understood, as most people who read anything on the subject that (1) Saddam’s Iraq apparently had little if anything to do with 9/11, (2) Saddam Hussein was a rogue state terror supporter, and (3) Saddam’s Iraq had al Qaeda camps within its borders PRE-9/11 and cooperated WITH al Qaeda AGAINST a common enemy – the Kurds.

The fact is that 9/11/01 is NOT the basis for the War on Terror (WoT), if it were then the current WoT SHOULD’VE BEEN a criminal justice one and the Patriot Act COULD BE considered superfluous overkill...and the Liberal view would have some merit.

Of course, I’m aware of absolutely no valid opinions (that is, opinions from people who have any actual expertise in the matter – law enforcement, First Responders, military or Intelligence sources) that see 9/11/01 as the focus of the WoT. It was a mere “triggering event,” an incident so large that the American people took notice and the view that “the American criminal justice can not deal with state sponsored, international terrorism, making that terrorism a military matter going forward,” became overwhelmingly accepted by the folks.

The military WoT abroad was rightfully consigned to the U.S. military, while the domestic WoT was given over to law enforcement and the DHS. Dozens of domestic attacks have been stifled and most of the jihadists have been focused on fighting either in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Regardless, America has NOT been attacked since 9/11/01 and the credit for that must go to the DHS, the Patriot Act and the many other things the current administration has done.

Jesse Helms Dies at 86...

Jesse Helms, the often notorious Senator from North Carolina died on the 4th of July, 2008 at the age of 86.

Opponents labeled Helms anti-semitic and anti-black, because of his stands AGAINST all foreign aid and AGAINST race-based preferences, but in reality Helms was ardently pro-Israel, even insisting on calling the West Bank “Judea and Samaria,” despite opposing ALL U.S. foreign aid and he supported anti-discrimination laws, EVEN laws that instituted race-based preferences, a stand that is logically consistent in every way. Though it's true that Helms supported segregation, as did many, both black (Malcolm X, Stockley Carmichael and the black nationalists) and white, it CAN'T be argued that only the whites who supported a separation of the races, as many misguided revisionists are wont to do, were "racist." If the likes of Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond were "racist," then they were no more or less so than the likes of Malcolm X (who later recanted many of his views, as did George Wallace) and other blacks who supported and STILL often prefer separation as a "viable choice."

Helms was despised by the Left, in large part because he famously refused to compromise. In a 1959 editorial he wrote, “Compromise, hell! ... If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?"

Helms and his wife, Dorothy, had two daughters and a son. They adopted the boy in 1962 after the child, 9 years old and suffering from cerebral palsy, said in a newspaper article that he wanted parents.

Long time friend and former North Carolina GOP Rep. Bill Cobey said, "He stood by the things that he believed in, and the incredible thing (that) was so wonderful about him is that he never, whether you agreed with him or not on issues, it never affected his personal relationship with you," Cobey said. "He believed he had a right to stand for what he believed in, and he believed you did, too."

Cobey added, "It's just incredible that he would die on July 4th, the same day of the Declaration of Independence and the same day that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, and he certainly is a patriot in the mold of those great men."