Tax Status of Media Mutters should be re-examined

HazzzMat has a good piece on the reaction to the ho hum news that David Brock, the phoney gay conservative who did an Andrew Sullivan and launched toward the home of paraphiliacs---the Demonrat sewers of political discourse---has announced that the sole future of Media Mutters will be to attack Fox News. David Weigel made the same kind of move and it seems that every Log Cabin Republican might be suspect if this sort of switcheroo---Arianna did it for social-climbing reasons---that keeps happening as Manchurian Candidate gays defrock themselves leftward.

There is a serious tax issue involved. Brandon Kiser is quoted by HazzzzMat thusly:

The cutesy-sounding mission of Media Matters to “correct conservative misinformation” is no longer even remotely appropriate. No, MMFA is a political group with $10 million-plus in annual funding designed to wage war against Fox News, and in their eyes the GOP and conservatives as a whole.

Because of this, Media Matters should reconsider their 501(c)(3) status which is designated for religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes. MMFA no longer meets any of these qualifiers (it’s arguable they never [sic] did) and under the banner of waging a war against Fox News and the GOP puts them in an entirely different zip code.

Indeed it does, and HazzzMat and Kiser go on to make an excellent analysis of the parasitic beasts hiding under tax free status that are eating away at the very underpinnings of democracy. What used to be called "the marketplace of ideas" is now undercut by a constant barrage against the good faith of the opponent---often accusing Fox, for instance, of slanting the news the way the three alphabet networks tend to do [when they can get away with it, an important qualifier].

HazzzMat didn't emphasize the battalions of legal organizations which are quick to subpoena e-mails and sue GOP politicos---a multi-pronged attack which drove Sarah Palin from office and I wonder if the tax status of these organizations makes them exempt. Another example: a lawsuit demanding Gov. Walker's e-mails was instigated with full hue and cry. A few days later, a Univ. of Wisconsin professor's e-mails were also subpoenaed after a partisan attack on Walker on the NYT Op-Ed page. The hypocrites on the left immediately shrieked about academic freedom, seemingly oblivious to the double standard that the Left has toward advancing its agenda. Gramsci is a good place to start and the ancient Alinsky's code, which Hillary Clinton did her senior thesis on at Wellesley, should also be memorized by every thinking Republican. Remember that the Republican Party is still the party of principles, [at least in theory]. and ideas---the Democrats have only hysteria and special pleading and moving goalposts in their court. Subterfuge is their chief skill and the average American isn't cynical or perceptive enough to not take them at face value.

Indeed, if the Democrats didn't have double standards, they'd have no standards at all.

The only conspiracy out there is the one where Democrats create disinformation out of whole cloth to slander Fox which they accuse of spreading "misinformation." Misinformation implies wrong, but no intention. "Disinformation" from the Demonrat agitprop battalions of the MSM and Soros

Bill Keller Approaching the Haywire Stage

Managing Editor Bill Keller shows that the whines can be so fine in the New York Times.

I think a little of the assertive defensiveness of Keller’s self-serving Apologia in this week's Sunday Magazine comes as a result of the hemorrhaging of New York Times paid circulation. Since the onset of his arrival three years ago as Managing Editor, the paid circ has gone down 21% and profits 57%. The NYT was put in the embarassing situation of having to get temporary financing from Carlos Slim, the Mexican superbillionaire, until they got through a particularly rough patch. And the way things are spiraling downward, it’ll be hard to pull the NYT out of terminal nosedive, say, five years out, despite their lucrative media holdings in Yankee and other broadcasting rights.

Also, Keller has gone so far as to enter the marketplace of ideas by a direct assault on his most successful competition. When he attacks Fox News in public, as happened recently, he is really attacking Murdoch, whose brilliant acquisition of the Wall Street Journal has completely flummoxed the Times. The WSJ recently became the highest paid circ newpaper in the country when it passed USA Today. The WSJ is gaining paid circ despite keeping most of its articles off-line. The NYT, whose paid circ is around 40% of the WSJ’s, is now reduced financially to adopting the Journal’s pay-to-see online format.

With Keller, methinks the gentleman doth protest too much. He’s in trouble and so is the NYT. And his Olympian pretenses continue, so that the comment section of the paper online is shut down by the time the non-early bird reader wants to pen a response. Opacity no longer implies veracity.

NSC Chief Donilon the Ultimate Eff-Up in the Libya Fiasco?

Actually, I combine stupidity and stubbornness to equal degrees...a perfect bureaucrat!

PJM's Richard Pollock has a very good takedown of the complete fool in charge of the NSC, a political operative along the lines of Sandy Berger of National Archive document-stealing fame.

Donilon is portrayed by Bob Woodward as an opinionated oaf far out of his depth in the opinion of his predecessor James Jones and SecDef Gates. But as the most politicized and corrupt presidency in US history since Warren Harding, Donilon fits right in, with ties to serial-gaffer Joe Biden that are secured with hoops of steel. The fact that the brewing crisis in Libya did not avert Obama's "trade-mission tour" to Brazil is simply astounding, as silly as this pickininny's addiction to golf when the going gets tough.

Tom Donilon’s other major liability is his long-time reputation as a harsh political operative. He learned the art of sharp elbowed politics as a 23-year-old assistant to Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan. Jordan dispatched him to the 1980 Democratic National Convention to do President Carter’s dirty work. He successfully shot down Senator Ted Kennedy’s challenge to the president.

But Donilon may be best-known as the chief lobbyist for government-backed mortgage giant Fannie Mae — just before it imploded. For six years he was a fierce fighter at Fannie Mae, fending off reform efforts by Republicans to rein in the federal agency. He also was deceptive about the agency’s troubles. According toABC News, he painted a rosy picture of the agency while it was going south:

Donilon is described as someone who lobbied for and helped paint a rosy picture of Fannie Mae’s financial health to the company’s board. He did so at a time when Fannie Mae faced accusations that it was misstating its earnings from 1998 to 2004.

A 2006 federal investigation caught Donilon as part of a group of Fannie Mae executives who exchanged “scripts” in advance of meetings of the agency’s independent compensation committee. When Fannie Mae’s independent regulator — the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight — sought to investigate Fannie Mae, Donilon aggressively attacked it. David Frum wrote: “Donilon is the ultimate Democratic Party politico.”

But why is Donilon the NSC Chief in the first place? Is this another example of Demonrat wrongheaded politics overn foreign policy? Why are certifiable buffoons like Donilon and Clapper remaining on the job while steady-as-they-go types like Jones and Gates looking to exit this sinking ship? Why is Obama looking to appoint a certifiable politico embroiled in the DOJ scandal of keeping FBI & CIA from each other, the ineffable insufferable Jamie Gorelick, as FBI Director? Gorelick went from the DOJ to Fannie Mae to collect a cool $30 million while a corrupt and mindless lamestream media looked the other way.

The well-connected Donilon initially served as Obama’s transition chief at the State Department, and hoped to land a top job there. His controversial role at Fannie Mae convinced Obama that Donilon would never receive Senate confirmation, so he landed at the NSC.

A number of State Department officials have told PJM that when they see what looks like seat-of-the pants management, it looks like Donilon’s work: “This is pure Tom Donilon,” a USAID official told told PJM. “He makes it up as he goes along.” The official spoke to PJM on the condition of anonymity.

On the conservative side of the fence, the analysis about Donilon isn’t much better. Andy McCarthy of the National Review Institute told PJM the administration’s Libyan operation “looks like what you would expect it would look like if they didn’t have a plan going in and they didn’t have an objective.”

As the Libya adventure goes south, Washington seems to be entering the fingerpointing stage. Even now, so early in the deployment, many issues seem to point to strategic military and diplomatic blunders, and much of them fall onto Tom Donilon’s desk.

For example, few are clear even now whether the U.S. military mission is to protect Libyan civilians or to topple the regime of Col. Muammar Gaddafi. The NATO alliance itself appears to be fracturing. From the NATO command in Brussels there is reported criticism of the “hastily improvised nature of the military coalition.” The German military now has entirely pulled out its military forces from the Libyan coalition. The Brits and Americans are in a public brawl as to whether or not Gaddafi should be assassinated. Turkey has tried to exercise a veto about NATO leadership.

And there is near universal uncertainty about whether the continuing military action will be directed by the U.S., NATO, or a new unspecified international coalition. “The NSC is kind of the hub that’s the intersection between intelligence, national security and the military,” McCarthy says. “It seems to be a failing of arriving at a coherent strategy from all those different components of government.” This is all Donilon’s portfolio.

The verdict from the State Department and Congress is unequivocal:

And how could Donilon permit President Obama to take a whirlwind tour of Latin America as a major wartime mission was getting underway? The State Department source called it “purely astonishing.”

There also is the rupture with Congress and liberal Democrats. Donilon, a consummate political operative, should have foreseen the need to formally notify Congress under the War Powers Act, which requires formal notification of Congress when military hostilities begin. And the White House did not reach out with kid gloves to the party’s left wing, who are enraged by the use of military force in a third Muslim country.

Certainly there is enough blame to go around, from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Secretary Gates and President Obama. But the nexus of the entire operation is Thomas Donilon, and fingers seem to be pointing at him as the possible fall guy.

But competence and judgment skills take a back seat in this administration to the much more important qualification that Donilon enjoys:

In addition to President Obama, Donlion enjoys the confidence of Vice President Joe Biden: Donilon served as a close confidant to Biden in the late 80s. When Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Donilon was a key player in the destruction of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. He was also part of a close-knit group of advisors behind Biden’s presidential bid in 2007. Brother Mike Donilon currently serves as counselor to the vice president, and wife Cathy Russell is Jill Biden’s chief of staff. Few were willing to talk publicly about Donilon. Typical was this statement from a former political colleague:

Everybody I know who knows Tom Donilon wouldn’t say that he his unqualified — even if they believe he is. This is mostly due to the fact they are all former campaign colleagues, or they want to curry favor with him.

When you have a silly sh*thead for a protector like Joe Biden, who needs the skills required for the NSC job?

Corrupt Leftist Elites Destroy Marketplaces and Compassion

City Journal has another interesting piece by Michael Knox Beran on the methodical takeover of wealth by the nouveau riche on the Left who are now trying to deny new stakeholders from entering the marketplace after the debacle of the Fannie Mae collapse. An interesting read and Beran's call for "a revival of the agora" to forestall the centralization of the economy in the hands of incompetents makes perfect sense after reading this piece.

Reuters Calls Bus Stop Atrocity "Terrorist Attack" in Quotes!!!

Libtard Reuters prompted Jeff Goldberg to this exercise in wonderment:

This is from a Reuters story on the Jerusalem bombing earlier today:

Police said it was a "terrorist attack" -- Israel's term for a Palestinian strike. It was the first time Jerusalem had been hit by such a bomb since 2004.

Those Israelis and their crazy terms! I mean, referring to a fatal bombing of civilians as a "terrorist attack"? Who are they kidding? Everyone knows that a fatal bombing of Israeli civilians should be referred to as a "teachable moment." Or as a "venting of certain frustrations." Or as "an understandable reaction to Jewish perfidy." Or perhaps as "a very special episode of 'Cheers.'" Anything but "a terrorist attack." I suppose Reuters will mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by referring to the attacks as "an exercise in urban renewal."

The mind reels.

Oh, and I tried to comment on that Reuters article, only to find out I'd been banned for previous accuracy in my comments on their fake "journalism" concerning the Middle East. Goebbels couldn't have crafted a more malicious example of Nazi Dreck than Reuters---along with BBC & AP, three reasons for the thinking man to mourn the passing of true journalism.

I am an Arabist trained by the State Dept. and was staunchly anti-Israel until the '90s, when as an Amoco exec for New Entry Strategies, I was invited to Israel. By this time I had visited every Arab country in the Arab League except Djibouti and Libya, & also visited Israel just once in the mid-70s while studying Arabic in Beirut.

I found the atmosphere in Israel far different from what I'd imagined. Of course, I DID GET a three-hour one-on-one meeting with Shimon Peres, then Foreign Minister, who grilled me on everything I'd picked up about the Arab World and the prospects for Israel to get a water pipeline from Egypt [Amoco made the best pipelines in the world] to the Negev Desert [Nil, I told him.]

From that time forward, I was moderately in the middle, until 9/11, when the true nature of Islamic brutality showed its face. And I went to King Abdul-Aziz U. in Jeddah where Osama was studying at the very same time and encountered on a frequent basis that hatred of the West that simmers beneath the cosmopolitan surface many Arabs present to gullible Americans. Now I see that the stupidity and venality of proglodytes fit nicely with the lies and basic lack of humanity that Islam represents---almost a perfect fit.

UPDATE Reuters has another of its lying representations on the matter, as called out by Jeff Goldberg.

Bush Had Twice as Many Supporters for Iraq than Obama has for Libya

GWB was relentlessly pilloried by the corrupt MSM for "going it alone" into Iraq. Yet the US in 2003 had almost twice as many allies as the UN-supported No-Fly Zone effort voted on over the weekend.

Coalition Countries - Iraq - 2003

Afghanistan,
Albania
Australia
Azerbaijan
Bulgaria
Colombia
Czech Republic
Denmark
El Salvador
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia
Georgia
Hungary
Italy
Japan
South Korea
Latvia
Lithuania
Macedonia
Netherlands
Nicaragua
Philippines
Poland
Romania
Slovakia
Spain
Turkey
United Kingdom
Uzbekistan

[Source: US State Department]

Coalition - Libya - 2011

United States
France
United Kingdom
Italy
Canada
Belgium
Denmark
Norway
Qatar
Spain
Greece
Germany
Poland
Jordan
Morocco
United Arab Emirate

Now that the corrupt clowns in the lamestream media are trying to regroup like the preposterous libtard David Weigel and others execute what on the socialist left is known as a "corrective movement," it's good to remember facts in the barrage of disinformation and misinformation the corrupt New York Times and its Sancho Panza, the Washington Post, throw up into the air to confuse honest citizens and diminish domestic tranquillity.

UPDATEReuters has another of its lying representations on the matter, as called out by Jeff Goldberg.

Lionel Trilling: Liberal Hero or Proto Neocon?

Michael Knox Beran has a great article on Lionel Trilling:

Lionel Trilling’s 1950 book The Liberal Imagination was not a celebration of liberalism. It was an indictment of liberalism’s dependence on what we might call the social imagination—a method of studying people’s social attributes in order to understand and even to save them. Trilling believed that the human mind is too complex to prosper when it is subjected to the organizing impulses of social technocracy, and he questioned the faith in beneficent regimentation that descends from the nineteenth-century social philosophers—the belief, expressed in the 1940s by a writer in the journal Science, that “if by employing the methods of science, men can come to understand and control the atom, there is a reasonable likelihood that they can in the same way learn and control human group behaviour.”

Trilling delves deeply into that vale of tears that the French Revolution imposed on French literature with its new idea of mankind and the stringencies that one's background and "class" imposed on one's outlook and prospects for success. I am now in a course of reading as much of Balzac and Flaubert as possible, with stops in Stendhal's The Red and the Black and the great panorama of nineteenth century Paris which continues to enchant us to this day.
But Trilling has more relevance today than ever, as his misgivings about the social imagination and the social engineering that inevitably ensues are coming front and center to the American stage.

For Trilling no less than for Balzac, society fostered a perception that both reveals and distorts the character of human beings. By showing how they are “packed in strata, layer above layer, in the framework of society,” the social imagination discloses the complexity of the worlds we inhabit. But by reducing people to type—by making them creatures of the particular strata to which they belong or of the particular roles they play—the social imagination makes it easier for us to lose sight of their idiosyncratic humanity. When you affix a social or social-scientific label to a person (“bourgeois,” “anal-retentive,” “extrovert”) or classify him according to his provenance (“working-class,” “Ivy League,” “inner-city,” “WASP”), you often have the illusion that you have plucked out the heart of his mystery. It is a dangerous conceit. As soon as you have reduced a person to a type, you have begun to forget that he is human. In The Middle of the Journey, Trilling makes Gifford Maxim, a character modeled on his Columbia schoolmate Whittaker Chambers, disparage the myopia of those who have cultivated the social vision too intensely: “Social causes, environment, education—do you think they really make a difference between one human soul and another?”

Chambers great tale of defection from the youthful idealism of Stalinism in Witness should be required reading today, of a soul in distress when he realizes that the objectification of social categories carries the crushing ballast of reductionism, that reduces people to their common denominator. Only not the denominator of children of God, but of useful idiots and fellow travellers on the Journey to the End of the Night.

The social imagination in the mid-twentieth century was perhaps best pilloried by Celine in his down-to-earth ragings reminiscent of a Balzac on methamphetimines. Celine and Chambers are two bookends of the progressive insanity reduced to proglodyte ravings. Still, what has Trilling have to say to us in the 21st century? Here is Knox Beran's summary:

In portraying the novel as the arbiter of the moral world, Trilling was carrying on the work of the Victorians—Matthew Arnold, Leslie Stephen, and George Eliot, among others—who sought a secular substitute for spiritual traditions that seemed to them to have lost not only their intrinsic plausibility but also much of their moral sanction. Yet in an age of electronic pleasures and literary degeneracy, Trilling’s faith in the moral efficacy of books may be simply too remote from the way we live now to be an adequate foundation for moral culture.

The weakness of Trilling’s remedy has its origin in his own experience. In his essay on The Princess Casamassima, Trilling observed that the young man from the provinces must reject his native tradition and find a new and more urbane one. In his own journey to the metropolis, Trilling found a substitute for forsaken provinciality in the tradition of the Victorian and Edwardian moralists. He was the foster child of Arnold, James, and Forster, to whom he was closer, in style and spirit, than he was to the liberals of his own generation. He was the heir, too, of Freud, in whom he found a rejection of human perfectibility, a belief in “the ineluctability of the pain and frustration of human existence” that confirmed his own doubts about the effectiveness of social reform. Freud’s skepticism about the possibility of devising radically better social forms is, Trilling said, “profound—is, we cannot but know, entire.” Freud, for Trilling, is a prophet who insists “upon the essential unmitigability of the human condition as determined by the nature of the mind,” and his “imagination of the human condition preserves something—much—of the stratum of hardness that runs through the Jewish and Christian traditions as they respond to the hardness of human destiny.”

I find Jung much more open to human perfectiblilty than the deeply pessimistic Freud----Jung's Psychological Types and expermiments with the small group and other group therapies are beyond the rigidities and constrictions of the "liberal" social imagination's strait-jacket mindset of class and inevitable clashes. Knox Beran's final thoughts:

Yet however great the moral light an intellectual communion with authors like Forster and Freud may give, it will probably always be, in some measure, artificial if it is not supported by a living tradition, one in which art cooperates with ritual and routine to refine moral sensibility. Morals are intimately related to mores, to manners and customs, to the habits of decency inculcated by the living traditions of particular communities. Trilling perceived the weakening of the moral sense that has taken place with the growth of the social imagination, that disintegrator of tradition; he was wrong only in supposing that books could be a sufficient hedge against its dominion.

UPDATE:
Louis Menand has a short piece on Trilling in the New Yorker.

US on the Decline? GOP Theme for 2012 Debuts in Iowa.

Obama's fecklessness across the board in domestic, foreign and budget policies has spurred the GOP to pronounce America in steep decline, especially due to the loser vibe and apology tour emitted by BHO during his first three years in office. Obama's deer-in-the-headlights response to Arab revolutions in Tunis & Cairo & his seemihg craven cowardice in Libya, disdaining to even offer a no-fly zone over that country which lacks a world-class air force----all crowd together for first place in the campaign meme of the decade. Surprisingly, the somewhat colorless Tim Pawlenty of MN has come up with the best line yet:

“Just because we followed Greece into democracy doesn’t mean we need to follow them into bankruptcy,” Pawlenty said at a presidential candidate forum near Des Moines last week.

Another immortal send-off comes from Herman Cain, the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO, with what has become his signature closing line.

“The United States of America is not going to become the Unites States of Europe!” Cain thundered, “Not on our watch.”

The Leiter Side of Union Thuggery

James Taranto appears to be working riffs with blogress Ann Althouse on a lot of issues, well, two, anyway, concerning the left's lurching once more, after calling for "civility" after the Giffords shooting, toward the violence and coercion where it finds a natural home.

Suffice it to say that the recent shakedowns by police unions on private companies have an air of mafiosi malignancy about them. Read the two articles above for the gist of the shakedown, but it seems that the criminal elements of the left are beginning to assert themselves, which always seems to occur when a Republican victory succeeds a Demonrat takeover of the public weal---as a nanny-bitch named Elizabeth Warren is trying to do under the Indonesian Imbecile's auspices.

The Republicans should defund this PMS case before she inflicts more harm on a housing economy that is still shaky. And when are the GOP going to stand up to that gibbering fool twiddling his thumbs in the Oval Office?

Scott Walker: Presidential Material???

Scott Walker is from my hometown of Wauwatosa, after Milwaukee and Madison the third largest municipality in Wisconsin, slightly larger in population than Green Bay, home of the World Champion Packers and justly noted as "Titletown" for its 13 NFL Championships. So with my own homie prejudice declared, I think that the attached Wall Street Journal article should be considered as a basis for considering Scott as POTUS potential.

The reason for this is very simple. Most GOP professional politicians are averse to rocking the boat and content to allow the steady hemorrhaging of private sector taxpayer rights as long as they themselves have access to the big-money government trough.

Walker seems to be a different breed of cat or a horse of a different color, to use metaphors that the earthy Midwesterner or two reading this might appreciate. [On the Left Coasts, animals seem to be relegated to household pet status or racetrack competitor]. Scott sums up the homely example of his brother and sister-in-law, both employed in the private sector with none of the cushy protections that the Bolsheviks in the media and Hollyweird and the academy, along with their useful idiot fellow travellers, have bestowed upon the unions over decades of Democrat racketeering [contribute to my campaign, get the cushy contract].
The Wall Street Journal seems to agree, but time will tell.

Bachmann OverKill: Her Brain's On Fire

Megan Kelly disproves the canard that a woman's looks are inversely proportional to her brains, and Sarah Palin hasn't made a major booboo like Obama's "57 states" ever.

But Michelle Bachmann sadly showed she may have dozed through high school history class on the events of 1775:

"You're the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord. And you put a marker in the ground and paid with the blood of your ancestors the very first price that had to be paid to make this the most magnificent nation that has ever arisen in the annals of man in 5,000 years of recorded history."

She was born in Waterloo, Iowa, which certainly is far from the East Coast, but throughout the speech, she kept repeating this canard. Dumber than Obama? You make the call.

Obama Doctrine: Speak with a Teleprompter & Do Nothing at All

The Wall Street Journal has an article on the feckless second-rate loser known as the Indonesian Imbecile whose main pronouncement last week was concerning how he was "bullied" as a small boy.

Is this the reason he seems to be a deer in headlights every time a foreign policy crisis lands at his doorstep? Is he a coward or a procrastinator?

Bill Clinton, who actually is rumored to have a certified pecker in his pants, is getting browned off with Obama's insipid lack of leadership skills. Clinton's call for an end to drilling moratoriums as the world faces skyrocketing oil prices shows that someone outside the White House is actually paying attention.

I wonder if Bill has a back-channel to Hillary who's following Obama's mincing two-step dance away from confronting Qadafi, and sending the human STD, Clap clap, light's out, to testify that the Libyan clown/murderer is unbeatable.

Which is true, by a "General" of Clapper's skill sets.

And yet last night I noticed the senile moron Shields pronounce WI a huge Demonrat victory. The Washington Post's house moron Dionne concurs with all 70 of his IQ points. Is there something in the water inside the Beltway?

Gallup Gives King Hearings 52% Support

Gallup leans left even when it's findings are beneficial to Republicans. In its latest poll, it headlines that "Country is Divided" over the King hearings even though a clear majority support it. And Gallup buries the negative numbers deep in the text of those who OPPOSE the hearings at 38% in the tiny box without any comment.

Downplaying anything popular with the vast majority of the country which trend center-right to right is part of Gallups corporate culture, if that's a word to describe the scanting of accrued public knowledge in one direction rather than another.

We still have nothing to hear about NPR or PBS or any public broadcasting. I think Gallup is afraid the numbers won't support their hidden agenda.

New York Public Unions Crush State Budget

William Jacobson says:

Having secured very sweet contracts for their members through political influence, the public sector unions have no incentive to change. They know from history that politicians eventually back down or move on, and the consumer of public sector services ends up paying through higher taxes and diminished services.

The current system also pits older union membership, which has vested in all these benefits, against younger members, who will bear the cost of cutbacks and likely never will see such sweet deals for themselves because there simply is not enough money.

The cause of the problem is not just the terms of a particular public sector union contract, it is the system which allows public sector unions to pass costs onto future generations of taxpayers and union members.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is correct to recognize that collective bargaining for benefits is the cause of the problem, and that it is not enough to treat just the symptoms.

Steve Malanga goes further:

When they can’t win favorable new deals from state legislatures, unions are adept at persuading lawmakers to protect the old ones, including when they’ve expired. In states like California, New Hampshire, and New York, government unions have won passage in the legislature of so-called “evergreen” clauses, which require old union contracts to remain in force until new agreements are reached. Such clauses give unions incentives to reject concessions during tough times because they can keep their old contracts active, sometimes with automatic pay increases. Last year in California, public unions used the evergreen clause of the Dills Act, which grants collective bargaining rights to state workers, to resist proposed changes to work rules. (The state’s Democrat-controlled legislature had the power to override the evergreen clause but sided with the unions.) New York’s evergreen clause, known as the Triborough Amendment, lets union members drag their feet on contract negotiations while their annual seniority-pay increases keep kicking in. So even if Governor Andrew Cuomo manages to freeze state workers’ pay this year, as he has suggested, taxpayers will still be on the hook for $140 million in seniority-pay hikes.

Read both the sites for a better understanding of the problems public unions pose to governments trying to balance budgets.

Kristof on "The Problem of Islam"

Is Islam the Problem? is the title of a Nick Kristof Op-Ed in the Sunday Times.

Randa the Egyptian girl above gave an interesting explanation of how Egyptian deelopment was retarded by British colonial policy. However, the Chinese could have made the same argument that the Sinaitic jump to warpspeed modernity was forever retarded by the Opium War and severe trading restrictions.

Jumping to the cause of the slowness of Arab Development problem from a wider perspective, the nub of Mr. Kristol's article might be summarized with one paragraph of his article:

The Muslim Brotherhood has often used the slogan, “Islam is the solution.” And to the West, the unstated feeling upon looking across the bleak Middle East landscape has often been: “Islam is the problem.” Professor Kuran’s research suggests that, at least looking forward, the more correct view is: Islam isn’t the problem and it isn’t the solution, it’s simply a religion — meaning that the break is over, there are no excuses, and it’s time to move forward again.

Kristof may have studied Arabic and he may have studied Islam, but "Islam is simply a religion" doesn't cut it for an overall explanation. To every self-righteous Muslim of the billion or so rabid members, Islam is THE religion.

Timur Kuran's studies on Islamic law might explore one corner of Islam's failure to confront modernization. As The Economist has mentioned often in the UNDP reports on Muslim
failure to modernize, there's a lot more out there to ponder about the Arabs' religion and its deleterious effect on modernity.

Wisconsin Is Front Line of GOP War on Democrats, So Where Are the National Democrats?

You're gonna lose because the sane and sober citizens of WI, of which I was formerly one, know that the state is broke and they're gonna have to fix it. And my relatives in the public service unions [teachers] are in agreement. Not everybody in the unions is a crazy marxist. You can always move to California if you don't care about budget balancing.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Pat Down of 9-year old in Train Station---another reason to avoid AmTrak

Here is another example of the lez-bean-in-chief of the TSA and her sex slaves groping ordinary citizens for using the AmTrak midnight train to Georgia.

What aspect of "unreasonable searches and seizures" is NOT covered by this Nazi bitch Napolitano's hatred of ordinary Americans. Thank God for my automobile.

Demonstrators Freak Out and Hate On Sen. Grothman

Here is video of a mob of screeching crazy freaks in Madison hating on a lone State Sen. trying to get into the locked State Capitol. Juxtaposed are the ridiculous members of the so-called Black Caucus deliberately wading through a tea party crowd obviously trying to goad them into an incident. Some of the lying crooks in Congress actually claimed they had been spit upon and were called racial epithets. Despite hundreds of video cameras, NOT ONE incident was actually recorded. Of course the Black Caucus should be in Zimbabwe where their corruption would be commensurate with their political skills.

Still, it's easy to see the gigantic lie that the elites are trying to foist on the law-abiding tea party members and the civilized majority of Americans. At the same time, the same leftists that the d-bags in the media and academy praise for their zeal in support of unions [who suck the money out of middle class taxpayers] are hating on and surrounding a legally-elected State Senator trying to harm him. He was saved only by the civility of a Democrat assemblyman who accompanied him.

Some of the "demonstrators" are from the quasi-criminal left which are pilot fish to movements like legal protests sanctioned by the local and state by-laws.

If this crowd harassing Sen. Grothman had been tea party members [impossible since tea party members are law-abiding and sane members of society fed up with fiscal harikari like the public unions commit], the MSM and lamestream operatives would be on the job 24/7 trying to goad violence and confrontation.

The use of drugs and particularly crystal meth might have something to do with the exhaustion and demented behavior of some of the protesters.

Also, being bussed in from out-of-town without local resources adequate to the upkeep of demonstrators could be another cause.

And some are just hippie, love-drug radicals left over from the sixties who have nothing better to do with their life.
UPDATE
Obama had his little SOTU squat-fit in front of the SCOTUS because his coddled public service union cash cows had been put back into a bigger herd with the other corporate people out in the USA. Now the Indonesian Imbecile sees his chances for a re-elect in '12 jeopardized by the exercise of democracy, not the corrupt skirmishes that the Democrat Party wages.

Bozell is right. The backbone of the union movement is mob violence and coercion, forced payment of union dues and closed shops----all totalitarian practices that need to be supported by union thugs, goons and criminal types across the board.

The media are part of the criminal conspiracy to subjugate workers' rights under a union dictatorship. The media, especially the lamestream losers on the old alphabet networks, are sinking into a quagmire of their own inconsistent reporting on these issues. The reason that more people watch Fox is because Fox presents more aspects of a particular issue, with representation of both sides.

Libya Gets Praised for its Human Rights--Oops, gag me with a spoon!

I'm loved, they love me, how d'ya like my threads?

The Libyan Arab Jumhurriya in its stint as head of the Human Rights Council in Geneva got these encomiums from some of the world's most wonderful countries:

31. The Sudan inquired if the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya could provide it with information about the initiative to distribute wealth to low-income families and whether the country considered this to be the best means to improve the standard of living of families with limited resources. It noted the country’s positive experience in achieving a high school enrolment rate and improvements in the education of women. The Sudan made recommendations.
32. The Syrian Arab Republic praised the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for its serious commitment to and interaction with the Human Rights Council and its mechanisms. It commended the country for its democratic regime based on promoting the people’s authority through the holding of public conferences, which enhanced development and respect for human rights, while respecting cultural and religions traditions. It asked about the social care system for the elderly and the living conditions at their special homes. The Syrian Arab Republic made a recommendation.
33. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea praised the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for its achievements in the protection of human rights, especially in the field of economic and social rights, including income augmentation, social care, a free education system, increased delivery of health-care services, care for people with disabilities, and efforts to empower women. It noted the functioning of the constitutional and legislative framework and national entities. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea made recommendations.
34. Bahrain noted that the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya had adopted various policies aimed at improving human rights, in particular the right to education and the rights of persons with disabilities. Bahrain commended the free education system and praised programmes such as electronic examinations and teacher training. It commended the country for its efforts regarding persons with disabilities, particularly all the services and rehabilitation programmes provided. Bahrain made a recommendation.
35. Palestine commended the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for the consultations held with civil society in the preparation of the national report, which demonstrated its commitment to the improved enjoyment of human rights. Palestine praised the country for the Great Green Document on Human Rights. It noted the establishment of the national independent institution entrusted with promoting and protecting human rights, which had many of the competencies set out in the Paris Principles. It also noted the interaction of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya with human rights mechanisms.
36. Iraq commended the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for being a party to most international and regional human rights instruments, which took precedence over its national legislation. It welcomed the efforts to present a comprehensive overview of the human rights situation in the country based on the unity among democracy, development and human rights. It also commended the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for its cooperation with the international community. Iraq made recommendations.
37. Saudi Arabia commended the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya’s achievements in its constitutional, legislative and institutional frameworks, which showed the importance that the country attached to human rights, and for the fact that international treaties took precedence over its national legislation. It noted that the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya had become party to many human rights conventions and had equipped itself with a number of blah blah blah blah blahs to blah blah blah into a barf bag. Venezuela acknowledged the efforts of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya to promote economic, social and cultural rights, especially those of children. . . . Cuba commended the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for the progress made. . . . Myanmar commended the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for its economic and social progress.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web pulled together this rogue's gallery of nations, some of which even Obama might hesitate to abjectly bow and apologize to, in his hilarious send-up of the ridiculous institution on Turtle Bay in NYC. Here's the naughty James at his naughtiest:

And that's far from comprehensive. Gadhafi's regime, of course, did not just start slaughtering and oppressing Libya's people last week. It has been at it for 42 years. Nonetheless, until just now the regime has been a member of the U.N. Human Rights Council. The council is a joke, and its actions should be judged by the same standard as any other joke. It ought to approve the report because that would be funnier than rejecting it.

Reply to a "Fearfully-Concerned Muslim"

PJM has a sort of stilted dialogue between a Muslim named Selim Mansur and Roger Simon, called "Letters from a fearfully-concerned Muslim to an American Jewish friend. The link provides access to the third such letter. Here is my reply to whom I consider a sincere Muslim who simply seeks a sort of Moses Maimonides and a "Guide for the Perplexed."

"I am a trained Arabist, who was taught at the Foreign Service Institute in DC & Beirut and attained a 3+ level speaking- and 4-level reading proficiency. I worked in three embassies in the Middle East in Arab countries and consider myself reasonably knowledgeable concerning the history of the Arab and Muslim peoples over the last 1400 years. Indeed, I read one of Marshall Hodgson’s books, The Gunpowder Empires, one of the three that Mr. Mansur so heartily recommends. And I did this at the recommendation of Rashid Khalidi, then a professor at the U. of Chicago where he became a confidante of our present President, and whom I count as a personal friend despite profound differences on many issues. In point of fact, Rashid got me faculty privileges at the U.of Chicago’s library, which has the most impressive collection of Islamic literature and manuscripts in the western hemisphere.

However, the atrocity of 9/11 and subsequent attempts by Muslims at special pleading and ridiculous arguments that the US somehow brought this absolute act of war and massive crime on itself was argued by persons who now have excluded themselves from the circle of civilized dialogue. To blame the atrocity on Israel or even the CIA demonstrates how demented [Charlie Sheen is a so-called 'truther' & this fits the pattern] that the insane America-haters have become. There are simply boundaries beyond which no civil dialogue can take place.

Mr. Mansur seems to be honest on the face of his arguments, but the basic and key premise of Islam is that Muhammed is the last prophet and the dialogue between God and Man cannot be further extended now that the revelation accorded to this prophet has closed the books, so to speak, on any religious development outside the extremely narrow purview of this 1400-year old “revelation.”

I’m afraid that he will be repudiated by his own kith and kin and more importantly, that he speaks only for himself when he wishes for a dialogue among Christians, Jews and Muslims, for starters.

The problem that all highly-educated Arabs will admit to in macro-historical terms lies in the simple fact that Islam has not experienced, in any real sense, the huge “transmutational experience” of the Renaissance that Hodgson refers to in his works. In a very real sense, this eliminates the basis for any true dialogue—as a real mature discussion of essential and existential conundrums facing both the West and the fractured body of Islam lack a common language. As Bernard Lewis mentions several times in his works, the inexorable rise of Salafi Islam through its Wahhabi traits has been dragging Islam back into medieval and Dark Age mindsets ever since the middle of the 18th century, when the Enlightenment was topping off many of the interesting avenues opened by the rise of science and advanced mathematics which in turn has led us to the Atomic Age.

E.M. Forster has an absorbing monograph “Alexandria” written during his World War II sojourn in that Egyptian city . Forster’s probing mind traversed the history of the city since its eponymous founder and had an interesting metaphor for the 7th c. conquest of the great city by Ibn al-Walid and his desert warriors. To paraphrase Forster: “The zealous warriors of Islam found the great library and all the other appurtenances left of what had been the highest level any city had attained in the civilized history of mankind, and like a child with a watch who knows nothing of the strange mechanics of the piece, broke it and left it broken as a child would leave a broken watch, without even knowing what he had done….”

Of course, Bernard Lewis is eloquent later on in tracing the history of science under Islam, but that historical development started in the Abbasid Dynasty and lasted until the Greek and Syriac and Persian classics on math and physics and medicine and literature had been absorbed and in some cases improved upon [logorithms & such], but then by the fall of Baghdad in 1258 with Helagu’s conquest and destruction of the first city of Islam, the poem Ozymandias became later on a symbolic objective correlative of everything lost in translation."

I wrote this early in the morning and hope it doesn't sound as disjointed as I felt writing it.