Monthly Archives: January 2012

A View of Fairness

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Spiegel Online International reports that the Italian Pime Minister Mario Monti wants his participation prize for the austerity measures the Italian Parliament talks about enacting.  And this prize ought to be in the form of Europe lending him yet more money, this time disguised as Euro bonds—for which Monti expects Germany to put up the lion’s share.  After all, goes his argument

Germany is benefiting from the crisis—interest rates on German bonds are way down and the weak euro favors German exporters—and should therefore share its favorable interest rates with its partners[.]

This is like arguing that, because I ruined my credit rating with profligate spending and irresponsible borrowing, which makes the sound credit rating you built with discipline and care seem even better, you, neighbor, owe me access to your credit card.

Moreover, Monti’s threatening to stage a temper tantrum, if his new-found “austerity” isn’t properly funded with other people’s money.

If this strong movement towards discipline and stability is not recognized as taking place, and a certain approach to financial aspects does not gradually evolve, then there will be a powerful backlash in the countries which are being submitted to a huge effort of discipline[.]

A discipline that other nations have been applying as a matter of course.

Hmm….

Keystone XL: Too Many Jobs

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Take some of them out.  President Obama has chosen to kill the Keystone XL pipeline project, which aside from contributing to reducing our dependence on overseas (literally—and so especially vulnerable) oil, would have generated some 20,000 jobs in the near term and a few hundred thousand long term jobs from work in follow-on and associated enterprises.

Naturally, it’s those evil Republicans, who imposed an arbitrary deadline on his “environmental” assessment process, that are to blame, he says.  Of course, he ignores the fact that the environmental assessment—which had already taken three years—was complete, and that’s why it was in the State Department’s hands in the first place last fall, when he first tried to duck the question.  What’s arbitrary is his decision to cancel the project, a decision that he thought needed to be delayed for more than a year that has now been made fully a month ahead of a deadline set solely to stop his stalling.

It’ll be interesting to see the justification Obama is required by law to provide Congress to explain his decision (which explanation he would have been required to provide had he approved the pipeline, also).

In the meantime, we have these Alinsky-esque obfuscations to keep us distracted.

When President Obama took office, the United States imported 11 million barrels of oil a day. The President has put forward a plan to cut that by one-third by 2025 by…transitioning to a wide range of clean energy technologies [among other means].

and

[T]he Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Guarantee Program has already supported more than 40 clean energy projects….

Clean energy projects like Solyndra, Beacon, Evergreen Solar, AES Eastern Energy LP.

The White House goes on:

[T]wo of the Administration’s programs – the DOE Loan Guarantee Program and the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards – will create more than 10 times the amount of jobs generated by the Keystone XL pipeline, which will only generate a few thousand temporary jobs.

The DoE’s Loan Guaranty Program’s effectiveness can be seen above.  The EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards already are costing jobs as coal-fired electricity generating plants are shut down, eliminating jobs permanently in those closed plants.  The EPA’s program also is costing jobs at the small businesses that depended on those plants for their power.  These jobs are lost, at best, for the intermediate term, until the businesses can restart when new plants come on line in a few years—for those businesses that can restart.  Yes, the EPA’s Standards will provide jobs for the conversion and compliance tasks mandated—but it’s these jobs that are the temporary ones.

Obama has opened another front in his class warfare election campaign: this time between his overzealous “green” backers and (erstwhile) working Americans.

First Racism, Now Bullying

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Apparently, disagreeing with a Progressive Politically Correct position is bullying, when it’s not racist.

A Wisconsin high school invited debate on the subject of gay couples and adoption, and then they censored the debate when some debaters actually came out in opposition.  The original debate was in the form of a “pro” essay and an “anti” essay in the high school’s student newspaper.  It seems, also, that the “anti” student grounded his/her argument in religious theory.

Having found some folks in their high school with the temerity to oppose the idea, the school and school district administration have fallen all over themselves to apologize for those unruly students who took the idea of open debate seriously.

Offensive articles cultivating a negative environment of disrespect are not appropriate or condoned by the Shawano School District.  We sincerely apologize to anyone we may have offended and are taking steps to prevent items of this nature from happening in the future.

Todd Carlson, the Superintendent of the school district, went further:

We do apologize.  We have a responsibility as a school district to make sure we create a positive school climate and culture. This article probably didn’t go along with the policies and the guidelines and the practices that we have as a school district.

And the pièce de résistance.  Carlson added:

It is a form of bullying or disrespect to a group of people – that’s right.

Of course the bullying and disrespect to another group of people—those opposing gay couple adoption—doesn’t enter into it.

This is bad enough, but the school not only has objected to just one side of the students’ debate, it has also refused to comply with requests of outside journalists to read the entire essay (and so I cannot offer anything from the offending essay, either, beyond the brief snippet cited at the link above).

As long ago as John Milton, the concept of freely expressing disagreement with established opinion was recognized as central to individual liberty.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

Our own Declaration of Independence acknowledges that among our individual endowments of inalienable rights is the right to liberty, of which absent free exchanges of ideas—free speech—there can be none.

John Stuart Mill understood this.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.  If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth:  if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

US District Judge Roger Titus, District Court for the District of Maryland, understands in a related case,

[W]hile Mr. Cassidy’s speech may have inflicted substantial emotional distress, the Government’s Indictment here is directed squarely at protected speech: …uncomfortable…speech….

And now we have the Left’s version of free speech.  Hmm….

I’ve emailed Carlson the following questions; I’ll post again when I hear from him, or next Friday if I’ve not heard back by then.

1) The hoo-raw is about a student newspaper op-ed debate in the form of an essay supporting gay couple adoption and an essay opposing gay couple adoption.  Is this a fair characterization of the newspaper’s debate?
2) I request access to copies of the student essays written in favor of and in opposition to gay couples and adoption.
3) You are reported as saying “It is a form of bullying or disrespect to a group of people” in reference to the “anti” essay.  Is this an accurate quote?  If so, please advise how the “anti” position could have made without such bullying.  What terms and arguments would have been acceptable?

Voter Fraud

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There’s no voter fraud, insist Progressives, or at least it’s so trivial a problem that laws requiring a prospective voter to prove he is who he claims to be—so that legitimate voters’ rights aren’t destroyed by the fraud—can only be motivated by racism.

Never mind a Senator from Minnesota who won his election after multiple recounts by a margin easily reached by the lightest touch of fraud.  Never mind a Washington governor who won after demanding recounts until the right count was achieved, and then by a margin easily within reach of vote fraud.  Never mind a President of the United States who won a critical state’s electoral college votes by a similarly fragile, narrow margin.  Now there’s Rensselaer County, New York.

Michael Feit, attorney for local restaurant owner and ex-Troy, NY, city councilman Michael LoPorto, acknowledges “there is no question” that someone tried to steal the 2009 Working Families Party primary election.  He goes one, concerning the guilty pleas of others in this matter:

Jackals prey upon the weakest member of the herd.  That’s what happened here.

Apparently the present case isn’t isolated [emphasis added].

Anthony DeFiglio, a Democratic Committeeman who pleaded guilty to falsifying business records, told state police investigators that such fraud is actually “an ongoing scheme and it occurs on both sides of the aisle. The people who are targeted live in low-income housing and there is a sense that they are a lot less likely to ask any questions… What appears as a huge conspiracy to nonpolitical persons is really a normal political tactic.”

and

Anthony Renna, another longtime Democratic operative and party committeeman, admitted to forging an absentee ballot application. He said the process of handing in forged ballots and fake votes ensures that “ballots are voted correctly.”

“I knew that the actual voters had not voted the ballots or signed the envelopes, but that did not concern me. I am not the ballot police[.]”

An anecdote is not proof of the trend, but the anecdotes add up, and they all say, “Here’s a place to look seriously.”  They all say, “Voter fraud cannot be dismissed lightly.”  Voter identification laws, since they protect the sanctity of an individual’s vote without interfering with the right or ability of those eligible to vote actually to do so, can only be good.  Votes cast by the dead—or in the name of the living, before those voters actually get to the ballot box—may be the Chicago way.  It doesn’t have to be the American way.

He Must Be Doing Something Right

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According to The Wall Street Journal, our ambassador to the People’s Republic of China thinks the Chinese performance on human rights is in the wane part of a cyclical trend.

Ambassador Gary Locke told television interviewer Charlie Rose in an interview that aired on Monday that China is significantly cracking down on dissent. He said Chinese leaders were afraid they could face uprisings similar to last year’s Arab Spring.

The human-rights climate “has always ebbed and flowed in China, up and down, but we seem to be in a down period and it’s getting worse.”

Some of the renewing trends that prompted Locke’s comments include these:

[F]ollowing anonymous online calls for an Arab World-style Jasmine Revolution in China, security forces detained or confined to their homes dozens of lawyers, artists, writers and other political activists.

and

Religious followers, particularly Tibetan Buddhists, Muslims and Christians who worship in unauthorized churches, have also been targeted….

The Chinese reacted badly to this, which tells me that Ambassador Locke isn’t far wrong.  China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liu Weimin, disputed Locke’s assertion, saying in part,

Some people always take viewpoints of the minority in China as the mainstream public opinion, and I think this is entirely wrong.  If it is this way, should we take the views of those in the Occupy Wall Street movement as society’s mainstream public point of view?

As an aside, I wonder why he didn’t single out the Tea Party movement.  Maybe he understands something that our Democrats don’t….