Card Check Dead, But Not the Rest (and Worst)

In its original form, the mendaciously misnamed and thoroughly anti-democratic Employee Free Choice Act would strip American workers of the right to conduct secret-ballot elections on the question of whether to organize a union. In place of a traditional one-man/one-vote secret ballot, the EFCA would impose a regime of union-boss thuggery known as “card-check,” wherein labor organizers (who may also be the employees’ supervisors) pressure workers to sign off on a union-organizing petition, a much easier way to reach a serviceable majority. Democrats have now signaled their willingness to remove the card-check provision from EFCA but, as in the case of the cap-and-trade legislation, the marquee proposal is only one poison arrow in a quiver full of venom...The content is pure Kafka. The worst provision — worse, in fact, than the card-check gambit itself — would allow the National Labor Relations Board to impose contracts on businesses that cannot come to an agreement with a union. If a union enters the picture and the owners of a business are unable to negotiate a satisfactory contract, then the NLRB is empowered to impose “binding arbitration,” meaning that the government will write the contract and force the firm to abide by its terms. This amounts to extortion...Card Check is a Trojan Horse, The Editors, National Review, 7/21/2009,

It's worse than extortion. It's a government takeover of the management of a private business. If this is passed, the best thing to do if a union gets a foothold is to close the company and move to China or Mexico. It won't have any major effect; an enforced government "contract" will drive such companies out of business soon enough.

Luther

NASA Old Boys: Where's the Imagination, the Daring, the Profitable?

The U.S. investment in the Apollo space program, which landed men on the moon, paid off handsomely, unlike the $100 billion plowed into the International Space Station, Apollo's pioneering astronauts said on Monday..."We opened the door to future of exploration by touching down on another body," Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, said at a press conference commemorating the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing...NASA is finishing construction of the station, a $100 billion project of 16 nations, and plans to retire the shuttle fleet next year. After that, the United States plans to pay Russia to ferry crews to the outpost, which orbits 225 miles (360 km) above Earth..."We've spent a lot of money up there for almost nothing. It's almost a white elephant," Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell said. "Until we can really get a return on our investment on that particular project, then it was money wasted."....Apollo Astronauts Bemoan State of US Space Program, Reuters, 7/20/2009

The 40th anniversary of the first moon landings has come and gone, and with it what has become a depressingly familiar litany by former astronauts: what happened to the adventure, the exploration, the innovation? It seems that on every additional decade's celebration of Apollo 11 we hear the same story. NASA probably doesn't like it. But, what can one say about a project like the ISS that cost $100 billion and will be dumped in seven years?

The original American and Soviet programs, largely canceled or radically transformed in the early 1970s, had detailed plans for permanent lunar bases, Mars missions, and Mars bases by the 1980s. All of that was dropped. No human being has set foot on another planet, or moon, in three decades. In not very long, there won't be any capacity by NASA to put astronauts in space. The organization that put human beings on the moon will be in the same position as any other petitioner for seats on a rocket leaving the earth. "Pretty please?" is a poor substitute for "Tranquility Base Here, the Eagle Has Landed."

The robot missions that explored the planets, Hubble, and the rovers on Mars have been, and continue to be, magnificent missions. Hubble in and of itself has advanced astronomy by a century or more. But, where's the beef with human exploration? For the price of another ISS, we could build a permanent base on the moon, go to Mars, or both. Robert Zubrin has shown the way. So have others. Maybe if NASA can't do it, a consortium of private companies could.

Luther

Senator Boxer Discovers Not all African-Americans are Leftists

Barbara Boxer, the far left U.S. Senator from California, was given a stern face-to-face reprimand by the president of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Harry Alford, for trying to pit one black group against another instead of addressing issues on their merits. It’s about time...Mr. Alford...believes in free enterprise — something that seems to elude Boxer. “It is all right for black folks to begin building wealth in this country,” Alford once said. “It is not against the law, and it certainly is more enjoyable than poverty.”...In this case, instead of dealing substantively with Mr. Alford’s criticisms of the current Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade energy bill, Ms. Boxer tried to discredit Alford by pointing out how black groups such as the NAACP and “100 Black Men of Atlanta” were allegedly supporting the bill....Senator Boxer's Race-Baiting Backfires, Joseph Klein, Newsreadblog, 7/21/2009

How long is it going to take the rest of African-Americans to notice an attitude among Democrat leaders that seems more in line with plantation owners than politicians in a republic? Good for Harry Alford, who presented himself exceptionally well on Hannity (ABC Radio) last week. Alford's description of a real energy policy, based on worldwide travels, most recently to Brazil, was a whole lot of fresh air. Develop our own! We have the resources. Wow, it's such a pleasure to hear common sense.

Luther

White House Budget Report Delayed: It Depends on What You Mean by Transparency?

With economic recovery nowhere in sight and its fiscal policies increasingly called into question, the Obama administration yesterday revealed that it would not be releasing its expected mid-year budget review until next month. Although the administration insisted this was a mere bureaucratic formality, critics were quick to note that the delay would help bury some politically unpalatable news about the budget, including its projected rise of the 2009 deficit...The CBO wastes little time getting to the bad news, noting that “Under current law, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path...as a result of those deficits, federal debt held by the public will soar from 41 percent of GDP at the end of fiscal year 2008 to 60 percent at the end of fiscal year 2010.”...Burying the Budget, Vasko Kohlmeyer, Front Page, 7/21/2009,

Cabinet appointees who don't pay taxes, taxes that aren't really taxes, stimulus that isn't really stimulus, and now a budget that's not really visible -- it looks like a government from the shadows, more of the Chicago style. When Congress goes on its break, raise hell in your constituent offices.

Luther

Republican Health Plan Chart: What Democrats Don't Want You To See

Here it is, folks, the map to your doctor's office -- or maybe the map to your hospital -- no, maybe it's really a road map to the White House picket line, where you can beg for aspirin while you wait for treatment.

Democrats won't allow Republicans to send this to their constituents. See Drudge today, 7/23/2009

Luther

Destroying the Global Village In Order to Save It?

President Barack Obama is very insistent on the need to “save American jobs.” The spending and the Buy American provisions of his massive stimulus package, approved by Congress in February, were meant to “create or save” millions of U.S. jobs. “Saving jobs” was also the stated goal of his recent pledge to eliminate tax advantages for companies that do business overseas. But instead of saving American jobs, Obama’s new corporate tax is apt to worsen what is already the highest unemployment since 1983 and make America’s companies even less competitive in the global marketplace....Destroying Jobs In Order to Save Them, Veronique de Rugy, Reason, August/September 2009

Reason's writers, such as de Rugy, clearly believe that logical argument makes a difference in the world. And, it does. It would be impossible for a researcher to produce a working vaccine against a virus without following a precise, orderly examination of both the virus and its targets in the human body to see how they interract. Only then could the researcher design a vaccine. It would be impossible for an auto manufacturer to operate in the world without a mix of engineering expertise and execution, a comprehensive understanding of material and labor sourcing, and marketing research to discover if what was to be offered had any likely market.

In looter politics, if I can borrow one of Reason's likely favorite phrases, logic has no place. Reason is what's attacked by the looter as "heartless". We don't need Ayn Rand to tell us, but it bears repeating, because that wasn't a philosophically filtered observation on her part, but a direct observation based on her experience during the Russian revolution and for the first year or two of the Russian civil war. The looters took over, wrecked the old society, and created a 70-year tyranny from which Russia has yet to fully recover.

The only way to counter looter politics is to organize to turn it out of office and drive it from its power centers in bureaucracy and the judiciary. Reason will not help, except for those who are already attuned to what reason has said. You can look to Reason for that, but you'll have to look to presenting the case for ridding our politics of the looting philosophy to get any further, such as candidates, campaigns and office.

Luther

The Chicago Style in Democrat Politics

Most people do not understand the sheer magnitude of the executive branch...3 million federal employees, 99 percent of whom are career civil servants over whom the president has virtually no authority. Seventeen states have fewer citizens than the federal government has bureaucrats. There are only a few thousand positions within the federal government that...the president can fill through political patronage...it is the career civil servants who pull the millions of levers of power, not the few political appointees at the top of every agency. It is very difficult for the appointees to even keep track of the policies being implemented by the career staff, much less change them...This would not be a problem if the career ranks were really filled with nonpartisan individuals...who impartially carried out the policies of the president. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. From the State Department, to the Central Intelligence Agency, to the Department of Justice, and every agency in between, career employees are overwhelmingly partisan liberals...As Richard Perle has eloquently said, when George Bush tried to pull the levers of government, he never realized that they were disconnected from the machinery and the exertion was largely futile. The bureaucracies of these agencies have their own policies and they largely ignored President Bush’s directives and his political appointees, a problem President Obama will not have....In Washington, Conservatives Are Really Never in Power, Hans A. Van Spakovsky, Pajamas Media, 7/15/2009

In Chicago, for generations, it hasn't really mattered if a Mayor was capable of governing. The ward politicians and their hacks had settled the division of the wealth. If someone came in hostile to the vast machine built by the Daley mayoralty, the first one or the current one, they'd be paraded about as if they mattered. Of course they didn't. In Chicago, the ward politician and his or her patronage appointments are the only power worth writing about. Van Spakovsky is one of the first reporters to look at this in Washington, where it's just as rigid a rule: bureaucrats are the real power, in part because there's no mandatory retirement (there are still appointees from Truman, Kennedy and Johnson's Presidencies still working in DC), and in part because Republican Administrations have been unable, or unwilling, to break into the bureaucracies.

One has to suspect that part of the reason is that not many Republicans of any background want to work in a Washington bureaucracy. It is hard to imagine the editors of The Weekly Standard in their shirtsleeves at the State Department. But, the larger part is harder to prove. The writer can give a suggestive anecdote, and is sure that there are hundreds of thousands of similar stories.

One of the writer's grandfathers was a postal worker in a small city west of the Mississippi. For reasons never quite understood by his family, he refused to change party affiliations when Roosevelt was elected. His colleagues at the post office told him that he ought to do it to assure that he'd be considered when it came time to pick an assistant postmaster and, later, a postmaster for the city. He held out for integrity, a good and honorable act, but which led his career at the Post Office to stagnate until Dwight Eisenhhower became President 20 years later, by which time this grandfather's career was within seven years of ending. He did become assistant postmaster, but retired before the next step.

One can't help but think that the same applies on a scale larger than the personal in Washington, that if you don't belong to the ruling party, whether in office, or in the bureaucracy you apply to work in, that you'll never get out of the low level jobs. The ultimate result, of course, is that only one way of thinking obtains in all of the power centers in the nation's capital.

This is only one good reason to bring back the spoils system, which allowed a President and his Cabinet to reappoint the entire executive branch in one fell swoop.

Luther

Robbing the Productive: The Democrat Looter's Paradigm

Ponder a simple fact: The Obama administration is dispersing income lavishly to those who do not pay taxes and it will have to be paid for by those who do. For all the talk of that awful percentile who make over $200,000, this administration has not distinguished the hyper-rich 1% that make untold money (e.g., the Buffets, Soroses, Turners, Gateses, Kerrys, Gores, etc), from the much more demonized, larger 5% of the population whose income does not come from investments and insider influence and deal-making, but rather from providing more tangible goods and services — the family doctor, the plumbing contractor, the small lumber company owner, the car dealer, the local family-held insurance company, the airline pilot, the car-leasing firm, the patent attorney, etc...Last fall we heard that this percentile was unpatriotic, did not wish to spread the wealth around, and had made off like bandits under Bush. But the fact is, to quote Mayor Gavin Newsome’s “like it or not,” they are precisely those who decide most dynamically whether to hire, fire, expand, contract, buy/sell goods, etc...And the results of the Obama war against them are threefold: 1) in major key states, the productive minority’s state income taxes will near or exceed 10%; their federal rates will go to 40%; the abolition of caps on FICA will ensure 15% plus of most of their income will go for new Medicare and Social Security bites; and they may well be eligible for a newly proposed punitive health-care surcharge tax of 4-6%....The War Against the Producers, Victor Davis Hanson, 7/15/2009

Read all of Hanson's post. He combines a sharp awareness of contemporary facts and figures with a classical background in history and literature that combine to make him a formidable commentator. If what he describes sounds a little like Atlas Shrugged, be assured that Ayn Rand was not just expressing philosophy in that book. It remains a riveting critique of the devolution of productive society into a socialist quagmire. The difference between Rand's philosophical fiction and Hanson's contemporary narrative is uncomplicated. What Hanson's describes is what's happening now.

Luther

Private Enterprise and Space: Success or another Target for Democrat Looters?

A small Malaysian satellite was delivered to orbit late Monday night from the tiny atoll of Kwajalein far off in the Pacific Ocean and thousands of miles from the U.S. mainland...Forty years after the first moon landing and over half a century after Sputnik, the launch of small satellites has become routine. But this one was special — or rather, its launcher was. Launched two days before the fortieth anniversary of the launch of Apollo XI (the anniversary of the moon landing itself will be on Monday, July 20), it was the first satellite delivered by a privately funded liquid rocket...The event may have been a significant nail in the coffin of what many view as NASA’s current flawed plans for a return to the moon in the coming decade...It was delivered by a Falcon 1, the first rocket developed by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) of Hawthorne, California...A Giant Leap for Commercial Space Flight, Rand Simberg, Pajamas Media, 7/15/2009

This is a remarkable accomplishment reported by Rand Simberg in Pajamas Media, but one can't help but wonder how long it will be before the California Legislature passes a law regarding a heavy penalty for rocket emissions, or a new section is included in Cap-and-Cronyism that bars private developers who don't pay a billion dollar license fee to NASA.

Luther

The Only Businessperson to Decide Going Galt is Better? Don't Count On It

As a small businessperson, I -- unlike the current administration -- recognize that hope is not a business plan. I must look to the future and determine what is best for my company. I must make decisions now that reflect what my business will look like in six months and beyond. Based on proposed legislation and the current climate in Washington, and our inability to get the attention of our representatives, it is apparent that my future business opportunities lie elsewhere. The crystal ball is clouded only in more taxes, the potential of forced heath care payments for employees, excessive costs and lost business through the proposed cap and trade and a general disgust for the small businesses that provide 70% of the nation's GDP...I've been screaming, but nobody's listening. My last employee has been laid off. If the proposed cap and trade legislation is passed, it will be the death knell for me. As the great lady named Capitalism passes, so too shall my endeavor. We shall pass together, both wondering how a great nation allowed this to occur on our watch....Decline and Fall, D.L. Hammack, American Thinker, 7/15/2009

To those in Washington who think that they've got a perfect solution to keep people in business from crossing borders, they should look to Mexico, the Philippines, Singapore, Eastern Europe, Brazil. They're ready and waiting. China already does most of the world's consumer products work. If the golden egg and the hen that hatches it move away, the dollar will be worth so little than a trillion of them won't buy a bottle of aspirin. Perhaps Obama should consider offering a trillion printed dollars to every American. Just make sure mine is in cash.


Luther

Back to the 70s: Trashing the CIA to Bail Out Speaker Pelosi

Democrat Jan Schakowsky of Illinois proved last week why President Barack Obama was right to threaten to veto a bill that could give more politicians access to classified briefings about covert CIA operations...Schakowsky took to the airwaves to accuse the CIA of misleading Congress on the orders of former Vice President Dick Cheney. According to Schakowsky and a handful of other Democrats, CIA director Leon Panetta told them at a classified briefing last month that the agency had practiced "systematic deception" for years. She demanded an investigation and suggested that charges could be brought against CIA officials...But the CIA denied Panetta had made any such admission -- and even Schakowsky had to allow that Panetta's briefing concerned "one occasion." That occasion was a program, conceived in 2001 but never implemented, to track and target Al-Qaeda terrorists around the world...Protecting Pelosi, Not America, Joel Pollak, American Thinker, 7/15/2009

Excuse us if we're wrong, but didn't the current President spend a great deal of rhetorical wind upon the failure of the Bush Administration to target Al Qaeda?

Speaker Pelosi, in a well-documented lie, claimed she had never been briefed on water-boarding. Of course, she had been. She was embarrassed. Her power was threatened in the House. So, now, she and her colleagues have come up with a 1970s style show trial proposition to deal with that and, not so incidentally, put at risk any CIA operation against Al Qaeda, not to mention the agents and assets in play for such a purpose. Democrats have pulled this before, as in the hearings in the 1970s that ended with the CIA severely crippled in its intelligence-gathering capacity, a traitor (Agee) as a bestselling author, and national security undercut such that an 8th century regime in Iran was able to hold off American "power" for over a year.

Actions have consequences, Speaker Pelosi, a truism lost apparently in California, as much in its national representatives as in its state legislature.

Luther

Russian Navy Sinking? And is that good?

A recent analysis by the authoritative Moscow-based weekly, the Independent Military Review (NVO), entitled "BMF RF (Naval Military Fleet of the Russian Federation) on Foreign Warships" states that the Russian Navy is currently in a situation of irreversible collapse...The analysis piece states the chief cause is the state of the Russian shipbuilding industry, which is incapable "of producing warships in either the quantity or at the level of quality that the navy customer requires" for the future. According to those interviewed, the Russian Navy's leadership "understands that this is a hopeless situation and are looking for a way out by considering the purchase of naval vessels from abroad."....The Fleet That Has To Die, Weekly Standard, 7/15/2009

Before the anti-Russian bloc starts to cheer, think a little. The less Russia is able to defend her frontiers and few open sea lanes, the more likely Russia will resort to much more dangerous force, including nuclear arms. This has in fact been a grave risk since the end of the Cold War.

And theirs isn't the only Navy in decline. American ships on patrol are less than half of what they were in 1988, in case you wondered why teenagers with rusty Kalashnikovs are stealing container ships off Somalia. Somebody's going to fill the gap. You don't need to look far beyond Russia's eastern border.

Luther

Governor Palin on Cap-and-Tax

I am deeply concerned about President Obama's cap-and-trade energy plan, and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy. It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage...American prosperity has always been driven by the steady supply of abundant, affordable energy. Particularly in Alaska, we understand the inherent link between energy and prosperity, energy and opportunity, and energy and security. Consequently, many of us in this huge, energy-rich state recognize that the president's cap-and-trade energy tax would adversely affect every aspect of the U.S. economy...There is no denying that as the world becomes more industrialized, we need to reform our energy policy and become less dependent on foreign energy sources. But the answer doesn't lie in making energy scarcer and more expensive!...Job losses are so certain under this new cap-and-tax plan that it includes a provision accommodating newly unemployed workers from the resulting dried-up energy sector, to the tune of $4.2 billion over eight years. So much for creating jobs...In addition to immediately increasing unemployment in the energy sector, even more American jobs will be threatened by the rising cost of doing business under the cap-and-tax plan....The Cap-And-Tax Dead End, Governor Palin, Washington Post, 7/13/2009

Gee, where's the nuance, the subtlety, the sophistication? A hardhat, gun-totin' Alaskan has anything to say?

Yep, sure does. Maybe if she quoted Hayek and Von Mises more often (hint-hint), people would pay more attention.

Luther

Immigration Law Enforcement & National Health Care

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) has insisted the Senate will deal with immigration and health reform separately. And Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D., Mont.) told the Dallas Morning News in May, “We’re not going to cover undocumented aliens, undocumented workers. That’s too politically explosive.”...But it’s hard to envision how health reform can avoid tripping the immigration booby trap. Approximately 15–22 percent of the 46 million residents of the United States without health coverage are illegal aliens. That’s about 9 or 10 million people. More generally, a third of the foreign-born are uninsured, Census data analyzed by the Center for Immigration Studies show. That means something like 12.6 million people, or more than a fourth of the total uninsured, are immigrants, both legal and illegal. Since 1989, immigration is responsible for 71 percent of the rise in those without health insurance. The fact is, the problem of the uninsured would be a more manageable one if the U.S. were not admitting millions of uninsured immigrants....Importing the Uninsured, James Edwards, Jr., National Review, 7/15/2009

Edwards has a big story by the tail. After the California court decision that decided that illegal immigrants were entitled to the same state benefits as citizens, a case not overturned by the Supreme Court, it seems very unlikely that any bill, federal or state, could have a proviso denying care benefits to the undocumented immigrant. In some parts of the country, New York, California, Detroit, Florida, Seattle, as you waited in line for your assigned physician in the government clinic, you'd have half the population of Mexico and Cuba in front of you. In Spokane and Seattle, all of those, and you, would be standing behind recent arrivals from China.

Luther

Justice Bader Ginzberg And Eugenics

ere’s what Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine: “Frankly I had thought that at the time [Roe v. Wade] was decided...there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”...The comment, which bizarrely elicited no follow-up from Bazelon [the interviewer - ED] or any...other major news outlet — was in the context of Medicaid funding for abortion. Ginsburg was surprised when the Supreme Court in 1980 barred taxpayer support for abortions for poor women. After all, if poverty partly described the population you had “too many of,” you would want to subsidize it in order to expedite the reduction of unwanted populations...Left unclear is whether Ginsburg endorses the eugenic motivation she ascribed to the passage of Roe v. Wade or whether she was merely objectively describing it. One senses that if Antonin Scalia had offered such a comment, a Times interviewer would have sought more clarity, particularly on the racial characteristics of these supposedly unwanted populations....Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a Question of Ethics, Jonah Goldberg, National Review, 7/15/2009

Those who know the history of contraception advocacy in the early 20th century know that the Leftist saint, Margaret Sanger was unabashed in her desire that birth control be a means to limit minority populations, especially blacks and eastern Europeans. George Bernard Shaw, another founding socialist (or Fabian) in Great Britain, said very nearly the same thing, suggesting a more than casual relationship between socialism and the national socialism of Hitler. One hopes that a century later that a Supreme Court Justice, in expressing a similar sentiment, was only reflecting a serious illness, not her judicial opinion.

Luther

Medicare/Medicaid: Bernie Madoff Was an Amateur

Every year, criminals and cheats pilfer over $100 billion — that’s $40 billion more than Bernie Madoff scammed off his investors [in twenty years: ED.] — in federal benefits to which they are not legally entitled. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, refundable tax credits, and many other programs are targets for looting....Bigger Than Madoff, Chris Edwards & Tad DeHaven, National Review, 7/15/2009

Medicare, Medicaid are two medical programs in effect for more than thirty years. Has the government cleaned them up? If this is the result of government care for the elderly and the infirm, what can we expect from a national health-care-for-all program?

It is curious, considering how many headlines, TV stories, and blog entries have been devoted to genuine documentation of fraud in government medical care that Congress and the President are being allowed to take over the whole system. Lemmings follow the leader over a cliff. Since when has that been the case with Americans?

Luther

Republican Health Plan Chart: What Democrats Don't Want You To See

Here it is, folks, the map to your doctor's office -- or maybe the map to your hospital -- no, maybe it's really a road map to the White House picket line, where you can beg for aspirin while you wait for treatment.

Democrats won't allow Republicans to send this to their constituents. See Drudge today, 7/23/2009

Luther

Back to the 70s: NY Times: Sulzbergers Unload Classical Radio

The New York Times is unloading its classical radio station, WQXR-FM...The deal with Univision Communications and public radio broadcaster WNYC calls for WQXR to move from 96.3 FM to a weaker signal higher up the dial at 105.9 FM...Univision's Spanish-language station, WCAA, will become 96.3 FM and have a better spot in the middle of the FM band with which to serve its growing Hispanic audience in exchange for $33.5 million... The Fat Lady Sings, Holly Sanders Ware, NY Post, 7/15/2009

In the 1970s, New York's best-known conservative family, the Buckleys (William F., Jr., Senator James, etc), unloaded New York's best classical station, WNCN. NCN had always been the classical station with the weightier programming. WQXR competed 24 hours a day, but with a much lighter content. Despite public protests over the sale, the Buckleys' agent tossed NCN's classical collection into dumpsters within six months, the station becoming all-country (it has since disappeared). A similar fate met New York's only commercial jazz station, WRVR, at about the same time. Its enormous collection was also thrown into the trash and the station became all-disco (it too has long disappeared).

No one since would have ever guessed that the liberal bastion of American culture, the last place in New York for rational discussion (of fiction, one supposes), would sell off the last surviving semi-commercial classical station in the United States. But, they have, trashing an institution with 65 years on the air, much as the Obama administration is trashing America's future for immediate political payoffs to constituents.

It occurs to the writer, not for the first time, that trashing the future for immediate gain is what the Left has done best since the late 1960s. And there is no better representative of the Left in New York than the nearly bankrupt NY Times. For the better part of thirty-five years, the newspaper of record (perhaps of the Upper West Side of Manhattan) has presented politically slanted trade fiction as objective news. As a consequence, declining circulation and the recession have put them in the position where they can't fill their newspaper with adequate advertising pages to pick up the tab. To maintain membership in that special club of New York's elite which the Times has had a large role in inventing and sustaining, they're selling off their assets, sacrificing the future for dubious present gain.

We may expect this to go much further than selling off New York's last commercial outlet for classical music. Already in Congress is consideration for bankrolling distressed newspapers like the Times, provided the editors don't advocate for or against any policy or individual in politics, while at the same time siccing the FCC on Internet blogs that offend the Left's presumptions about itself. Silencing the lambs of different views (or music), whether over the air, or on the Web, is the Left's most enduring legacy.

Luther

North Korean Cyberattack Topples Numerous Sites

Quick note which I would have sent to you earlier--except that I couldn't get through to Blogger.

In case some of you didn't notice, portions of the Internet were a disaster today through roughly 1:30 PM EDT by my reckoning. Specifically, I myself had a hell of a time accessing any kind of software that provided stock market quotes. And my Internet broker was absolutely unavailable from about 10:30 AM EDT until roughly 1:30 PM.

The likely cause: an ongoing cyberattack, more than likely from our close friends in North Korea and/or their fellow travelers in South Korea. A massive, bot-driven attack, the network carnage started--surprise--on the 4th of July holiday weekend in South Korea, overwhelming several South Korean government sites and eventually attacking over here, including the Pentagon, the White House, NSA, and, surprise, Homeland Security, portions of whose site were disabled as late as this afternoon. (I checked.) They also went after banks and the NYSE with varying degrees of success.

My friends on the left will say, oh, you have no proof. The hell I don't. According to numerous government sources, this ain't the first time these 5-star agressors have done this stuff. And just because you don't have an immediate smoking gun is no reason not to gear up to go after these criminals in some way, shape, or form.

But to be honest, the worst perps in this were the increasingly disgusting and uselesss MSM. I only became aware of this ongoing, rolling attack this morning when, after being unable to trade not long after the market open, I lost several thousand dollars because I couldn't hedge a few of my positions. If I'd known what was going on, I might not have put on the positions to begin with.

But the MSM, enmeshed in wall-to-wall suckup coverage of Michael Jackson (ratings, anyone?) never bothered to tell me or anyone else what had already been discovered in some quarters. And it took me quite a few web searches this morning to track down the likely difficulty.

The press loves to extol its virtues as our savior and protector against the Predators who run the Republican Party. But if they'd been doing our job, most of us would have known about this major cyberattack as early as Friday night or Saturday morning of last week--and we might have been able to act accordingly.

But no. The MSM--which of course, de facto, is better than you and me--spent nearly the entire weekend of valuable airtime with nonstop coverage of someone who, for all his obvious talent and weirdness--will never hold a candle to the heart surgeon in your local hospital.

Furthermore, aside from an anonymous dispatch or two from AP--never seemingly picked up by anyone--we all remained in the dark as our government sustained a massive cyberattack which today moved to damage the already damaged retirement portfolios of folks like you and me.

Small wonder these clowns are on their way out. They've turned into reliable media shills who trumpet the latest crap from New York and Hollywood. That's why the rest of us have to rely on the web and the blogosphere for our information. When the Dear Leader isn't taking it down, anyway.

Leave the Dollar Out of Trade? India Joins Japan and China

Suresh Tendulkar, an economic adviser to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, said in a July 3 interview that he is urging his nation to diversify its foreign holdings away from the dollar.
The challenge to the dollar, a linchpin of world finance and trade since 1945, underlines the shift in relative economic power toward emerging markets and away from the developed nations that spawned the global crisis...Russia, India Question Dollar Reliance..., Mark Deen & Simon Kennedy, Bloomberg News, July 6, 2009

A major diplomatic effort from the State Department in the last ten years was to turn India away from China and Russia, regarded as a huge and peaceful success story. One of the consequences of the first five and a half months of the new administration's fiscal policies may undo a decade's hard work and turn India's perception of, and relationship to, the United States upside down.

A classic blunder for an inexperienced administration is to be blind to context, to fail to see the overall effect of a given policy action. It's also a standard tactic of the Left to disregard the consequences of their actions, a perfect match between ideology and a White House proceeding with almost breathtaking ignorance abroad. When all that matters is power, who cares if it wrecks international initiatives? In this instance, however, the international initiative was to help counter the rising probability that Pakistan will turn into an outpost of Islamic fascism. India wanted this relationship too, maybe even more for self-protection, but if it can't afford it and has to turn north again, you'll know who to thank. A lesson the White House needs to learn is that in international politics, economic well-being comes before security issues. People can't fight if they haven't eaten.

Luther