Belmont Club: The Long Cold Civil War

Following developments in the San Bernadino attack and the upcoming elections in Venezuela, Richard Fernandez showcases a feature of leftist ideologues... an overwhelming unwillingness to change course when the facts on the ground don't support their agenda. He refers to the phenomena as a civil war with the fact-based demands of the right.

A few hours ago, president Obama was still unable to provide a probable motive for the San Bernardino attack which left 14 people dead. “At this stage we do not yet know why this terrible event occurred,” he said. Now the FBI has officially started a counter-terrorism investigation into the events.

Read more at the Belmont Club Read More......

The Inconvenient Truth about Ghetto Communities’ Social Breakdown

Among the many painful ironies in the current racial turmoil is that communities scattered across the country were disrupted by riots and looting because of the demonstrable lie that Michael Brown was shot in the back by a white policeman in Missouri — but there was not nearly as much turmoil created by the demonstrable fact that a fleeing black man was shot dead by a white policeman in South Carolina. Totally ignored was the fact that a black policeman in Alabama fatally shot an unarmed white teenager, and was cleared of any charges, at about the same time that a white policeman was cleared of charges in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.


Read more at National Review Read More......

Baltimore, a Great Society Failure

President Barack Obama responded to the Baltimore riots with a heartfelt bout of self-righteous hectoring.


Supposedly, we all know what’s wrong with Baltimore and how to fix it, but don’t care enough. Not only is this attitude highhanded, it rests on a flagrantly erroneous premise.


President Obama doesn’t have the slightest idea how to fix Baltimore. His solutions fall back on liberal bromides going back 50 years. Dating back to the Kerner Commission after the riots of the 1960s, the Left’s go-to solution to urban problems has been more social programs. Since then, we’ve gotten more social programs — and just as many urban problems.


Exhibit A is Baltimore itself. The city hasn’t been “neglected.” It has been misgoverned into the ground.


Read more at National Review Read More......

Eric Holder: Inability to Pass Gun Control My ‘Single Failure’

On Sunday, MSNBC aired Melissa Harris-Perry’s interview of Attorney General Eric Holder and he said the “single failure” of his tenure as AG was the failure to secure gun control.

In the interview, Harris-Perry looked at Holder and said, “You once said the worst day in office was the day that you had to walk through the bloodied aftermath” following the heinous attack on Sandy Hook Elementary. She said, “Children were slaughtered in their classrooms and we have not made any meaningful progress on changing the access to guns in this country. Are we a nation of cowards when it comes to guns?”

Read more at Breitbart.com Read More......

COMMENTARY: It’s time to judge forest policy by its result, not by its intent

Failed federal policies implemented by unelected agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management during the past 30 to 40 years remind me of a quote from the late economist Milton Friedman: “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

The Northwest Forest Plan enacted by President Clinton in 1994 may have had good intentions, but it has failed catastrophically.

Read more at the Register-Guard

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WSJ: Why the Stimulus Failed

New research on what actually happened to a trillion dollars - For readers who want to know, an important account is offered in a pair of new Mercatus Center working papers by the George Mason economists Garett Jones and Daniel Rothschild, who did field research on what they call the supply side of the stimulus.

The Keynesian theory was that a burst of new government spending would take up some of the slack in aggregate consumer demand. This was justified in 2008, again in 2009, and is still defended now based not on real-world observation but on abstract macroeconomic models that depend on the assumptions of the authors. The Congressional Budget Office's quarterly studies—often cited to claim the stimulus created tens of thousands of new jobs—are based on such a model. By informative contrast, Messrs. Jones and Rothschild interviewed actual people who received stimulus dollars and asked how they spent the money. Read more at the Wall Street Journal... Read More......

What is the "LEADER" trying to tell us?

Via email (Hat tip: Jerry & Cruz Jackson)

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government can not pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America ’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”
-- Senator Barack H. Obama, March 2006
Say one thing and do the other --bc

See video: President Obama's Leadership Failure Read More......

We Must End Our ‘Addiction to Economic Growth’

Posted at the CORNER by Jonah Goldberg

It's NOT about the children... it's about USING the children. --bc Read More......

Bachmann: Obama's H'care Waivers Are Admission Of Failure

(Hat tip: Daren Gardner) Read More......

Collapse of Chicago Climate Exchange is Personal Setback for Obama

SUITE 101, 11/12/2010 by John O'Sullivan - Republican mid-term election joy deals financial uncertainty among green investors as the Chicago Climate Exchange announces the end of U.S. carbon trading. Read more at Suite101: Carbon Trade Ends on Quiet Death of Chicago Climate Exchange

Related:
Ballot Pedia: California's Proposition 23 defeated
Western Climate Initiative (Oregon is one of eleven western states involved) Read More......

The Multicultural Cult

TOWNHALL, 10/19/2010 by Thomas Sowell - Somebody eventually had to say it -- and German chancellor Angela Merkel deserves credit for being the one who had the courage to say it out loud. Multiculturalism has "utterly failed." Read more at Townhall... Read More......

Williams: A Failed Obama Hero

TOWNHALL, Op-ed by Walter Williams - Let's think about President Obama's failed economic stimulus program. Before getting to the nitty-gritty of why stimulus packages fail, let's look at the failed stimulus program of Obama's hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR's Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, wrote in his diary: "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. ... We have never made good on our promises. ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... and an enormous debt to boot!" Read more at Townhall... Read More......

75 Percent of Oklahoma HS Students Can't Name 1st U.S. President

NEWS9,COM, 9/16/2009 - OKLAHOMA CITY: Only one in four Oklahoma public high school students can name the first President of the United States, according to a survey released today. ∴ The survey was commissioned by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs in observance of Constitution Day on Thursday. ∴ Brandon Dutcher is with the conservative think tank and said the group wanted to find out how much civic knowledge Oklahoma high school students know. ∴ The Oklahoma City-based think tank enlisted national research firm, Strategic Vision, to access students' basic civic knowledge. Read more at News9.com...

bc: Unbelievable! Read More......

IBD: Bay State Rationing

INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY/EDITORIAL, 7/16/2009 - Health Care: Massachusetts' universal medical program is no longer universal. Coverage is being dropped for 30,000 because not enough money is around to pay for everyone. There's a lesson in this for Congress.

IBD Exclusive Series: Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For Failure

Unable to pay the enormous cost of Commonwealth Care, the state's subsidized insurance plan for low-income residents, Massachusetts lawmakers are throwing legal immigrants off the rolls. The state simply does not have enough money to pay its bills, and cuts have to be made somewhere.

Three years ago, Massachusetts enacted a law that required every resident to have medical insurance. Commonwealth Care was created to subsidize those who couldn't afford to buy their own. It didn't take long for the program, which never achieved coverage for everyone, to run into trouble.

Costs soared from $158 million in the first year to $630 million in 2007, then doubled in 2009 to $1.3 billion. Enrollment in the program has also surged. It stands at roughly 181,000, up from 165,000 in the early spring, and is projected to reach 212,000 next year.

With 200,000 still uninsured — most of whom likely would be eligible for the subsidized program — imagine how much more steeply the costs would be rising if the state had met its goal of insuring everyone.

Both Democrats and Republicans hailed Massachusetts' attempt to ensure that everyone had medical insurance coverage. Some on the right even praised the state for taking a market-based approach to the issue.

A few observers, however, correctly noted that such a system cannot possibly be sustained. Demand, they said, will overwhelm it, just as demand has caused medical care rationing in Great Britain and Canada.

Eva Millona, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant & Refugee Advocacy Coalition, told the New York Times that one possible outcome of the Massachusetts situation is "the message that health care reform cannot be done, period."

Actually, that's the only message, if reform means increasing government's role. That message comes to us from across the Atlantic, from north of our border and now from within our own republic.

What Massachusetts is learning is exactly what Washington will learn if it enacts the public option legislation being debated on Capitol Hill: The taxpayers are not an unending font of dollars; their inability to float costlier statist political schemes will eventually cause deficits.

Do not put faith in promises of care for everyone at lower costs. They are false. Universal care will always increase costs and lead to rationing because it invites system overload. This is the message, and it must be spread before lawmakers do something foolish. Read More......

UAW says equity stake ties union to GM success

REUTERS, 2/28/2009 by Kevin Krolicki - DETROIT: The United Auto Workers will emerge from a General Motors Corp restructuring as the second-largest stockholder in the reorganized automaker and with a more direct stake in its success, union President Ron Gettelfinger said on Thursday. Read More......

Quote: You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it

“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.” --Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931 Read More......