Body Parts

Why Do Liberals and the Left Seek To Destroy Sarah Palin? To Hide the Truth About Obama.

They seek to destroy Sarah Palin, so that she cannot be compared to Barack Obama. Why should they have feared such a comparison during the campaign and now when he is President? For a simple reason. She is the genuine article. He is an affirmative action phony. She is an authentic populist conservative seeking to promote the good of the people. He is a product of the affirmative action machine that dominates America's universities and its governments.

Obama is groomed, polished, and was, as a candidate, inexperienced. Affirmative action gave him a pass without looking closely at his substance. His substance was simply mimicry talk. He parrots the party line from the Liberal Left professoriate at his colleges and Harvard. For all his advantages he was astonishingly thin on accomplishment. It's not clear how much of his books he wrote. For all his putative brightness, he published almost nothing of intellectual substance. He has made not a single original intellectual contribution to any academic or professional field.  His record of accomplishment as a lawyer, as a state legislator, as a US Senator, was thin. His main qualifications were that he is a modestly handsome man who looks good in expensive clothes and speaks well when following a prepared script; in other words, he fits the affirmative action profile. He acts the part well and wasn't embarrassing to his sponsors.

The charade would only be revealed by comparison of Obama to an authentic person with populist political intuition. So his promoters had/have desperately to prevent that comparison. And such is typical of affirmative action. As the legal departments of universities will acknowledge, affirmative action/diversity students and faculty (for instance) are "protected" classes. The rules and standards that apply to others, for purpose of a meritocracy, cannot be applied to affirmative action individuals if their application would result in detrimental judgment. Obama, the affirmative action persona, must be "protected". To prevent the comparison with Palin, a genuine outsider in politics, Palin had/has to be destroyed. Dead would be best for the purposes of Obama sponsors. For the Liberals and Left, it was and remains all about hiding the truth about our President.

How To Evaluate Household Consumption In US--Hint ... Obama and His Advisors Have It Wrong

Household consumption, in quality and quantity, is directly tied to the life course of the heads of the household. Consumption and saving vary with each stage of each individual's life course, from setting up the first household with or without a cohabitant, through new households to accommodate families, to new households for empty nesters to reduce domicile size to meet needs and income, to saving for retirement, to the last households. You cannot evaluate the effect of a governmental  "stimulus" in stimulating household spending without analyzing the household stages and demographics of consumers. Life course economic analysis is standard fare for scholars; it's not an off the wall suggestion. Taking a simple cross-sectional portrait of amount of spending will not reveal the situational readiness of consumers to spend, on what they need to spend, and on their saving needs.

One over-arching framework for a life-course analysis of consumption readiness and need is the enormous percentage of American households whose wage-earners have been approaching retirement. We have already argued that the extraordinary readiness of these households to accept outsized risk in investment during the dot com bubble era and the housing bubble era was directly related to the need of these boomers, approaching retirement, to build up sufficient nest eggs to support a prolonged retirement (as life spans have increased). What is the situation of boomers now? They have had their retirement investments liquidated in housing and in stock and bond markets. Even boomers in unions with union pensions and in government service with government pensions are facing diminishment of their pensions, as their pensions were similarly devastated; and few people believe everybody else will agree to increased taxes to pay over-promised pensions for union members and government employees. So boomers are re-evaluating their retirement plans in light of this financial debacle. An ultimate life course squeeze. This debacle and the re-evaluation of boomers is the source of the reluctance of boomers to undertake big spending right now.

Another over-arching framework for analysis is the work and career course of generation X households. Their spending is a function of their evaluation of their needs as their children grow up. Their spending is also a function of their evaluation of the job market. And here things don't look good for these households who are not employed in the governmental sector. Wage earners face the possibility of career changes and paying for retraining. They face prolonged unemployment as they maneuver the job market. They face a structurally shifting economy, in which industrial manufacturing is continuing to decline and nonprofessional levels of white collar jobs are being proletarianized. They see a lot of dead ends. They are going to be reluctant to undertake big spending while under the looming shadow of those dead ends.

Enlargment of government will not solve the structural problems for these huge demographic groups, unless we become a communist society in which everybody works for the government and government pays for everyone's health needs, schooling, groceries, housing, and retirement. Such a economic jump, though it might thrill Obama, would only ensure an egalitarian level of poverty for everybody. It didn't work in the Soviet Union; it won't work in the U.S.A. now. These groups--and really all Americans--need a dynamic, growing, private sector, increasing its share of the economy. They need rapidly growing industrial manufacturing; rapidly increasing entrepreneurial activity with lots of small business formation. The problem with Obama and his advisors' and the Democrats' approach to the recession is that everything they are doing damages private job formation. And damages the kind of structural economic shift that the major demographic groups need so they can earn more and feel sufficiently confident about their futures to increase their spending. They will increase their savings, but that is needed to provide investment to fuel private sector growth.  None of this will occur, however, if the Obamacrats continue their wrong-headed policies based on inadequate economic understanding of the real economy. Step away from your computer models, guys; step outside the box of Kuznets' accounting, guys. Take a hard look at who the American people are. Please. Before you destroy the economy.

Was North Korea Behind September 11, 2008, Electronic Run On US Banks?

We, meaning the American public, still do not know who was responsible for the September 11, 2008 electronic run on the American banks that precipitated the financial crash. Presumably the Federal Reserve and the Intelligence Agencies know; after all, the Fed can track the account numbers involved. Now we have hacking attacks on US and South Korean government computers and private financial institutions, beginning on July 4, rendering some of them inaccessible for several days. Evidence points to the North Koreans. Well, ask the next question, were the Norks behind the September 11 attacks? They are believed to be the world's largest counterfeiter of foreign currency, including treasury and bank notes, so they aren't unfamiliar with criminal manipulation of international currencies.  If they were responsible for these attacks, were they acting alone? Why aren't these questions being investigated by the MSM? Why isn't the US public being told?

Mourning and Celebrating Michael Jackson's Life Is A National Humiliation

American popular culture since the invention of mass media has often not been a pretty phenomenon. And the mourning and celebration of Michael Jackson is a pop phenomenon that is not pretty. It's painful to watch. American mass pop culture is far from its ethnic roots, far from the memories of foreign homelands, the lived experience of ordinary people struggling to get along, the oral tradition, the domesticity of ethnic heritage, the confusion of assimilation from non-English tongues, the succor of earned religion with institutional memories of persecution, the existential situations in which people self-invent artistic expression as a means of transcending their troubles, celebrating their pleasures, marking life's course from baptism to tossed ashes. Mass pop culture lacks, in a word, authenticity. It has given up experience for entertainment. It's easy to listen to, to follow, to hum along, to dance or swing, to recite, because it's been emptied of substantive human content. Ten year old children can become famous singing about the pain of sexual love when the words have no possible meaning to them. You don't have to know anything to put on pop culture. Its empathies are mass produced and shallow. It has been stripped of humanity and clothed in avarice.  It's about nothing but money. Its value is glitter and abstract. The popularity of pop culture is a measure of the depravity of America's street soul. And so with the celebration of Michael Jackson's life. It's painful to watch. It's a national humiliation. It's an exercise in cultural depravity.

Israel's Problem With Obama: Obama Is A Rigid, Radical Ideologue

He is not open to discussion about his radical, Leftist, post-modern beliefs, because his beliefs are delusions. They are insulated from falsification by evidence by psychological indoctrination. He doesn't care about Israel, about Jews, about Israel's security, about Jew's safety; he comes out of the most trenchantly Leftist academic anti-semitic and black nationalist anti-semitic ideological traditions in America. Put simply, he doesn't give a tinker's damn about Jews and their problems. It is his hostility with which Israel must contend. Caroline Glick rehearses the sordid facts about America's Leftist true believer President and offers some suggestions about how to avoid the squeeze play he is pressing on Israel.

Revised. July 8, 2009.

More 'Stimulus' For The Sick Economy Would Kill It

The rising unemployment rate has alarmed politically motivated liberal economists, such as Princeton professor Krugman, who now call for another massive fiscal stimulus. These economists, including Krugman, are in the grip of an erroneous political-economic paradigm.  They believe that putting more money into the pockets of consumers, by one means or the other, will stimulate consumers to buy, leading to increase in demand, leading to increased production. Increased production would lead companies to hire, thereby reducing the unemployment rate and stoking prosperity. Alas, nearly all their assumptions are wrong. The links in the chain are broken. American companies don't need to hire to increase production. Most of the companies that do the producing of tangible goods are not here in the states; increasing production would occur in other countries, such as China, helping lower their unemployment rate and increasing their exports, but not helping the US. Consumers will not spend most of the money put into their pockets, because they know that once it is spent there would be no more coming, so they must save most of it. Most of the stimulus money from the February 2009 act was supposed to fund "shovel ready" projects under state control; but, in fact, in governmental bureaucracies, no project is ever shovel ready. Only 10% of the funds have been expended. The main effect of the so-called stimulus has been to help states maintain their state employee rolls--teachers, bureaucrats, highway departments, and so on. It hasn't reduced the unemployment rolls at all. These employees are not productive. Their activity does nothing to increase private employment. Putting money into a reform of the national health care system would have the similar effect. Health care is not directly productive and does not directly return economic growth. Further stimulus of the sort we have already seen would only dig our economic hole deeper.

The economic hole is being dug by erroneous assumptions also about funding. The money that the feds want to spend in stimulus are simply deficit dollars, i.e., printed paper money. Printed paper money represents loans to the federal government. Those loans have to be paid for and liberal economics has only two ways to pay for them--increased taxation or inflation. If the feds increase taxes then it takes real money away from consumers, reducing their purchasing power, reducing consumption, and making worse the economic recession we are in. If the feds don't increase taxes to pay back the loans, but instead just continue to issue deficit dollars, then they cause inflation. Inflation brings not only higher prices, but also higher interest rates. With prices, but not wages, going higher, consumers can purchase less, thereby decreasing consumption, thereby perpetuating the vicious cycle of liberal depression economics.

The only way to get out of the hole we are in is through invention and innovation of new products and their production by new or expanded companies engaged in producing tangible products here in the US. These companies will hire new employees, reducing unemployment, giving consumers a cycle of employment that will give them confidence to spend, and thereby generate prosperity. We need to base our economic thinking on development economics, to think of ourselves today as from the perspective of fifty years from now, as an under-developed debtor economy.

So the real question, the key to recovered prosperity, is this: how do we encourage technological innovation, investment in research and development, innovation in  production techniques, and formation of new companies here in the US (without igniting an international trade war by legislating buy-America policies)? Put it differently, how do we reproduce something like the great industrial revolutions that gave us mass produced Bessemer method steel? The telephone? Alternating current electricity? 'The internal combustion engine? The moving assembly line? The radio and broadcast media? The computer? These great products were the basis of the infrastructure for a new economic level of production and consumption. If we want such a new level again, that's the sort of invention we need. This process is called, economic growth.

(Economic growth would increase the federal tax haul, even with greatly reduced tax rates on individuals and companies, so government programs could be funded from productive dollars rather than deficit dollars. Nearly everyone today accepts this notion; what we need to do is to conceptualize it from the point of view of the kind of technological-economic revolution we need, that is, from the depths of our need.)

Obama and the Democrats would say that their eco-green technologies will perform that role; so we should throw federal stimulus money at them. But those technologies can't. Here's why:

• First, the technologies are already developed and in the hands (i.e., patents, first producer advantage, control of foreign markets, etc.) of companies outside the US. Production of wind turbines, nuclear power, hybrid auto engines, etc., are already done and dominated by companies in the Netherlands, India, France, Japan, and so on. Without erecting barriers to trade or giving unfair subsidies to consumption of US products (both policies which would ignite trade wars), US start-ups are way behind the ball.

• Second, these technologies cannot in the short term of ten or twenty years create an economic revolution. No one believes that more a few percentage points of US energy production can come from such technologies in that time.

• Third, as much they would "free" us from foreign oil, they would injure the economies of Canada and Mexico, who are the two biggest foreign exporters of oil to us. As they are also our largest trading partners for exports (using dollars we pay them for their oil to buy products from us), hurting their economies would hurt our economy; therefore, such "oil independence" would be an economic net wash, with small gains in one area being erased by losses in other areas.  

• Fourth, such technologies are not economic game-changers. They are simply new ways of doing old tasks. Since their justification is ultimately "health" and not efficiency, they do not increase productivity, do not earn productivity-dollars for the economy, and do not generate net savings that can be invested in other enterprises. 

• Fifth, because they require a heavy level of regulation for implementation and to compel consumption (and because they don't generate efficiencies), they are net deficits for the productive economy. Economically, they're dead ends.

The only way--and it's the best way--to effect a technological revolution as the basis to a new economic level of production and consumption is by unencumbering private enterprise in the free market to invest, to produce, and to sell. Reduce taxation, reduce regulation, incentivize investment, incentivize motivation, free markets, end government monopolization and control of markets, end labor monopolies. Let individual inventors, investors, and producers figure out how best to make lots of money from something new. In the past 200 years, this technique has always worked, whereas government control of this process has always failed.

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See also my primer on the economic crisis.

Update. July 11, 2009. Larry Kudlow explains clearly why the tax and regulation increases planned by Obama and the Democrats will harm our economy.

Palin Is Not A Defeated Woman, Not A Beaten Politician

I have now viewed the video of Palin's press conference, in which she announced her resignation, several times. I have reviewed the text of her statement, as well as the statements of the Lt. Governor and recently her attorney. I have thought about these developments in the context of her career in elected office. After the surprise of her announcement has worn off, I now see her performance and statements in a different light. She is not a defeated person, not a vanguished woman or politician.  The press conference was called quickly and her announcement unrehearsed and not read from a written script. She seems almost liberated and revived, as if the decision had liberated energy. But I think the energy that is evident in her statement is not from relief to be removed from the battlefield, so to speak, but from a change of battlefields. The attacks against her by the fraudulent ethics complaints and law suits had forced her to play defense, whereas her natural posture is positive idealism. I think it is reconnection with her deep, natural idealism, her religious faith, and her faith in populist democracy that has energized her, and I believe this is the energy we see in the press conference. Whatever her relationship to the organized political system and its political class, she is profoundly a political person, meaning that she recognizes that politics is the existential realm within which a people choose for themselves their social destiny. I think we have to go back to someone like Theodore Roosevelt to see a similar representation of youthfulness, energy, democratic political impulse, and personal connection to the frontier youthfulness of our nation itself. Note that TR ran for president in 1912 while not occupying an elected office. And note the centennial symbolism here--1912 to 2012. She has not left politics; her words state clearly that she intends to use the politics of the democratic polis to wrest democracy from the self-serving death grip of the nation's nearly hereditary political elite. Her impulse is similar to Ronald Reagan's, when he spent four years, out of office, speaking for conservatism before he won election in 1980. Her spirit, her strength, and her courage are inspiring. Let's see what happens next. I think we will see real, meaningful, "hope and change" erupt in our democracy.

Revised. July 6, 2009.

Is A Window Being Opened For Israel To Destroy Iran's Nuke Sites?

It looks like the recent election in Iran, the protests, and Ahmadinejad's attack on his losing opponents in Iran has convinced some key players in the Middle East that Iran is hardening its internal politics and international ambitions. Diplomacy cannot work with Iran on the nuke issue and the time for action is at land. Joe Biden said that Israel is a sovereign nation and will do what it wants--apparently the first time that a top US official has not said that Israel should not attack Iran. And Saudi Arabia has, reportedly, given Israel tacit approval to fly over its territory on the way to attacking Iran. The window of opportunity is not only being opened, it's being opened wide.

Update. July 7, 2009. Nope, says Obama. Nope, Netanyahu's government says of Saudi Arabia.

Whew! We're Safe (So Far!) From Kim's Fire Works

Glad those radars and interceptor missiles are stationed off Hawaii. Sorry that we didn't get a long-range rocket from North Korea close to Hawaii to shoot down. Both the rocket and shooting it down would have helped elevate this Gilbert and Sullivan comedy to the true tragedy represented by the rogue state's acquisition of ICBMs and nukes and the failure of the US to confront and halt it.

With Pride Without Apology

Congress Motor's Designed Pelosi Auto

This auto ad is must-view political satire.

I can't get the embed to work in the blog. Here is the URL at YouTube. It works.

H/T Instapundit.

Palin Steps Down As Alaska's Governor. 2012 Election Begins?

Stepping down. Will she be leading the TEA party? Would be a natural fit. If so, then she's stepping up. Let's hope so. God bless her strength and courage.

Update. July 3, 2009. Palin's brother says the unending media attacks and the use of unfounded ethics complaints and lawsuits to destroy her have "weighed" on her. 

I have previously described the attacks of the last 10 months as a political wilding--a frenzied gang rape, beating, and murder. The press and her enemies were not simply trying to remove her from politics, they were trying to destroy her, literally, to kill her. The kind of hyperbolic malice that has typified attacks on her can only be produced by out-of-control rage. They are attacks in which any humanistic respect for the victim has been obliterated; the victim has become a vermin without right to life. Murder aforethought. So I think wilding remains the best characterization of her enemies' attacks.

I have no more right to ask her to reconsider her resignation or to step up to national politics, than I have to ask any woman, who has suffered a wilding in Central Park to put on her running shoes and try the leafy paths again. America should be ashamed. But in Obama's America, this destruction is not something Obama, its chief beneficiary, will apologize for.

Talk about bad news!

Revised. july 5, 2009.

How Does One Blog In A Storm Of Bad News?

One model of the social critic blogger is that s/he is putting a finger in the dike, or watching the weather vane and barometer and warning about the coming storm, or like a prophet castigates the backsliders for their sins, or is a political scientist, dipping litmus strips into the political soup to see if it is acid or alkaline. The assumption behind this model is that such blogging is a doable enterprise. But when the storm of bad news breaks over the nation, it becomes nearly impossible to provide original analysis of the state of affairs; there is just too much going on to single out one or a few items a day to discuss. And that is where this blogger is now. The storm has finally hit Barack Hussein Obama's presidency and the nation he presumably serves. A thousand developments need to be pointed out and analyzed. A thousand warning flags need raising.  

Using the plural to refer to the multitude of conservative bloggers, we warned that the Obama stimulus was nothing of the sort. We warned that the economy was not nearing recovery, while Obama and the soviet state press that he commands praised fictitious positive straws in the economic wind. Now the unemployment figures for June prove the economy is still falling. Economists are rethinking rosy forecasts and cautiously suggesting that the recession won't bottom out until next year.

We warned that the various financial measures undertaken since late fall to shore up the housing mortgage based financial sector were not working because they were misdirected. What needed to be done was to stop the fall in housing prices. That has not been done and housing prices continue to fall, foreclosures continue, and toxic housing assets in the banking industry remain radioactive. In some areas of the nation, housing prices are at the level of late 1980s, way below the level at which they should have stopped falling if the housing crisis were simply a "bubble". Foreclosures will continue, because a huge portion of home-mortgage holders have negative equity, due in part to the low down payment loan requirement of the Congressional policies to boost home ownership (see Stan Liebowitz, "New Evidence on the Foreclosure Crisis," The Wall Street Journal, Friday, July 3, 2009). We've argued that the economy is structurally unbalanced in its fundamentals, but nobody listens because the President's economic advisors have their computer "models" of the economy that don't even reference fundamentals.

We warned that Obama's foreign policy was based on ideological, postmodern fantasies and was, being  so flagrantly in contradiction of reality, doomed to rapid failure. His secret, back-channel diplomacy failed. His we're-all-pals embrace of anti-American dictators and support for anti-democratic regimes has earned only harsher expression of anti-Americanism and anti-democracy diatribes. His supplicant begging to the so-called Palestinians has immediately earned the scorn of both the "moderate" so-called Palestinian leaders as well as the dead-ender Islamists like Hamas. His praise for Islamic religion and civilization has been rewarded with confusion--even Islamic leaders know his characterizations were bogus--and derision. Meanwhile, he continues to offend our allies, so badly that the President of France has taken to releasing unsourced reports of his corrections of Obama's misinformation about the international state of affairs and his policy positions. Obama supports authoritarianism, while undermining the legitimate government of the only genuine democracy and representative of Western values in the Middle East, Israel. Administration insiders release confidential discussions of Obama and his supporters that they are trying behind the scenes, in order to to compel more Israel's concessions to the so-called Palestinians, to effect "regime change" in Israel. Obama buggers, with insulting disdain, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom by giving him childish gifts.

Meanwhile, Obama chugs along in his misdirected and obviously failing "smart" diplomacy based on "realistic" assessment of the bad guys of the world. He has no original idea of what to do about North Korea's development of nuclear weapons, or about Iran's development of nuclear weapons, or Syria's development of nuclear weapons, or about these nations' support for terrorism. It's not that it is too soon for Obama's policies to bear fruit; it's that the policies have already been rejected by the states he has targeted. Does he have a policy regarding Pakistan? Who knows? Obama appears mainly to continue Bush's policies, without acknowledgement, without even knowing what those policies were about, all the while rejecting Bush's aim (pushing political modernization of anti-democractic states with the goal of producing government based on consent of the governed). Such a strategy can no more succeed than can an archer hit a target with an arrow without looking at the target, or indeed having a target at all. Besides, Obama, for all the campaign hoopla about his being physically fit, is obviously too weak to pull Bush's "strong bow"--so much for youthful manhood.

Obama has unleashed Congress to write domestic social and economic policies that are doomed to fail, to fail expensively, and to harm and degrade the American economy. Why? Because the policies, from the stimulus, to housing, to cap and trade, to health care, are written on the basis of a political ideology that has no relation to social and economic reality. Marxism has failed, failed miserably everywhere it has been tried, failed with horrifying human devastation; yet Obama tries them again. Obama and the Democratic Party have a generation of unfulfilled, largly socialist, political goals and they intend to get them into law now. They will screw over America, because they care only about their own power as a political class, oblivious of the egregious failing of their understanding of the social and economic facts on the ground.

To cover up the stream of failures, Obama lies about everything and everybody. You can be sure that when he opens his mouth, a lie will come out. And he is abetted by a Stalinist state national press, owned and managed by him and his political handlers. So his lies go unremarked and unchallenged. There is no independenet, free news press to present "truth to power".

We are in a storm. That's about all I can say as a blogger. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, I will try to find some bits of the flying chaff to discuss; but it'll be difficult to isolate just a few. Things are going to get worse before they get better. Depending how many laws Obama and the Democratic Congress pass, things will get a lot worse or less worse; but definitely worser is our immediate future.

Federal Government Already Has Two Single Payer Health Programs

The VA is one that most people know about; its flaws and deficiencies are legendary. But the US also runs the Indian Health Service for Native Americans. It's a disaster and has long been so, compounding Native Americans health miseries. These examples should not inspire confidence in a national government health plan. KevinMD makes the point.

US Obesity Rates Are Still Climbing, But Obesity Is Not What You Think It Is

Rates still climb in most states. Obesity is not what you are often led to think it is. It almost certainly cannot be cured in the way the medical establishment prescribes. See my 4 article discussion concerning the cause and nature of contemorary obesity.

If He Can't Zip His Zipper, Sanford Should Zip His lip

Real men don't go weeping over everybody because they had/have an affair or affairs. That behavior is simply crumbling under pressure. Presidents have to be real men (or, one of these days, women with balls). Gov. Mark Sanford's bathetic public performance over revelation of his affair disqualifies him for the presidency.  As for the governorship of South Carolina, I don't know and don't care; that's up to the state's voters. He's a pussy and should take up a career writing for a woman's magazine.

What Is The Environmental Cost Of Solar Power?

The Secretary of Interior has set aside 1,000 square miles of public land for solar power generating stations. These stations will involve hundreds of square miles, across the West, of solar panels covering the land like a blanket, or perhaps solar array reflectors distributed across tens of square miles like massive pimples. What is the environmental cost of widespread shading of the fragile arid land ecosystems? What is the asethetic cost? Can anyone doubt that the blanket of panels will blight the landscape? In northern California, where non-coal power is a religious allegiance and requirement for citizenship at any chic gathering, a massive solar panel project now in place has offended and soured support for such power generation. The solar reflector arrays will be no more popular than oil refineries. Then there are the distribution lines. Because the solar power generators will be politically unpopular, they are being located in unpopulated areas, where local opposition can be mowed over. But the electricity they generate must still be transmitted to urban areas where it will be used. Tens of thousands of miles of new power line routes must be mapped, acquired, and developed. Huge swarths of national forests and wilderness areas near suburban districts will be devastated. Protected species and their habitats will be destroyed. Wildlife corridors will be severed. The routes will scar the landscape. They will be as ugly as the blight of solar panels and reflector arrays. Then there is the issue of the cost of solar electricity generation. Solar generating equipment deteriorates quickly; the environmental conditions under which they operate are harsh. Will any of it have more than a ten-year lifespan? You'll have to convince me it will. So maintenance costs and replacement costs will be high, which will require regular increase in rates or subsidies. Solar power is an expensive, ideological vanity policy; the sooner the public becomes upset and opposes it, the better. Nuclear power, anyone? Maybe our legislators should visit, gulp!, France, where 80% of electricity is nuclear generated in standardized, cheap, safe nuclear power plants.

At What Point Does Obama's Foreign Policy Become So Anti-American That He Is A Traitor?

It is difficult to see how Obama's foreign policy is to pursue American national interests. To the contrary, his policy is to diminish American sovereignty national interest. Caroline Glick runs through the list of anti-American dictators and their anti-democratic, anti-free regimes which Obama has supported, almost in disbelief. A parade of horrors, the most recent being Obama's support for a Leftist imitator of Chavez in Honduras, who was removed from office by order of the nation's supreme court and the national congress.

Oops. An Experience-Rich Latina Judge Is Not As Wise As A Bunch Of White Male Judges

Tant pis for race-based and gender-based legal wisdom. The Supreme Court 5-4 reversed the Ricci decision in which Sotomayor had joined a panel to support race-based public policy. At least a few white male judges know there is a legal document called the "Constitution" of the United States.

It's Still Michael Jackson This, Michael Jackson That

Conservative bloggers are still talking, reminiscing about Michael Jackson. Still. Is this some kind of big generational moment? He was just a pop star, for pete' sake. A pop star. With a sad personal history, a disturbed, probably criminal, personal lifestyle, and disturbing anti-semitic opinions. He is heralded as a singer and dancer who transformed pop song and dance, nearly single-handedly inventing the video song performance. (And that was different, how, from the movie musical and live theater musical? By the difference in the technological means of capturing images and replaying them?). As with audiences who enthusiastically applaud singers on stage who sing familiar songs, I think many people are celebrating themselves as much as the life of the pop performer they enjoyed. There is a difference.