Fox’s Chris Wallace: If Ron Paul Wins In Iowa, It Will Discredit The Iowa Caucuses

Fox's Chris Wallace: If Ron Paul Wins In Iowa, It Will Discredit The Iowa Caucuses
by Jon Bershad | 5:37 pm, December 14th, 2011


With the Iowa caucuses right around the corner, some people are saying that the victor may actually end up being Ron Paul. Yeah, you know, the guy who's had steady numbers in the polls this whole time despite some people seeming to want to ignore that fact. So, what does that mean if he wins? Well, according to Fox News' Chris Wallace, it will "discredit the Iowa caucuses."

Huh. Well, at least people are talking about you Ron.

RELATED: TheGrio Editor Goldie Taylor: 'Ron Paul Has A Real Shot At Iowa'

Wallace's comment came during an appearance, from Iowa, on Your World with Neil Cavuto. Cavuto asked Wallace what he thought the takeaway would be from a Ron Paul victory.

"Well, and the Ron Paul people aren't going to like me saying this, but, to a certain degree, it will discredit the Iowa caucuses because, rightly or wrongly, I think most of the Republican establishment thinks he is not going to end up as the nominee. So, therefore, Iowa won't count and it will go on."

There's a moment, right as Wallace begins to answer the question, where hesitates for a second and then looks right in the camera. In that moment, you can see a man realized he's about to incur the wrath of half the Internet, think about it, and then proceed to say what he was thinking anyway.

One could say that Wallace just meant it would discredit the caucuses in other people's eyes, right? Right?

…Oh, well. I tried, Chris.

God speed, Mr. Wallace. God speed.

UPDATE: It should also be noted that Wallace will be one of the moderators at tomorrow's Fox News debate in Iowa.

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/chris-wallace-if-ron-paul-wins-in-iowa-it-will-discredit-the-iowa-caucuses/

Pretending That Ron Paul Doesn't Matter Won't Make Him Go Away

Pretending That Ron Paul Doesn't Matter Won't Make Him Go Away
By Conor Friedersdorf
Dec 15 2011, 8:06 AM ET

Like the mainstream media and Fox News, a dismissive National Review refuses to engage his arguments about non-interventionism on the merits

In a mostly brave, mostly sensible editorial posted Wednesday evening at National Review Online, the editors of the conservative movement's flagship magazine took an emphatic stand against the rise of Newt Gingrich, listing his specific character flaws, laying out how he has demonstrated them recently, and explicitly urging GOP primary voters to back a different candidate. Who? The editorial argues that Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum are all worth another look, meanwhile making brief cases against the remaining Republican candidates.

Rick Perry "has seemed curiously and persistently unable to bring gravity to the national stage," the editors argue, while Michelle Bachmann has demonstrated poor judgment with some of her rhetoric. And the brief against Congressman Ron Paul? Here's the whole argument: "Representative Paul's recent re-dabbling in vile conspiracy theories about September 11 are a reminder that the excesses of the movement he leads are actually its essence."

It nearly made me spit out my drink.

The implication is that Rep. Paul is a 9/11 truther -- you'd think, reading that one sentence, that Paul stated or implied the U.S. government either orchestrated or had foreknowledge of the attacks. In fact, Rep. Paul responded to the September 11 attacks by voting to authorize an actual war against its perpetrators; and as anyone who is even passingly familiar with his worldview knows, his controversial opinion is that Islamist terrorists attack the United States partly because they are furious about the quasi-imperial role America plays in their countries. The blow-back theory is itself controversial, but it is obviously different from 9/11 Trutherism.

As it turns out, the editorial was misleadingly alluding to something Paul said a few days ago in Iowa, when he was talking about the Iraq War and his fears that we're headed for a war with Iran. "Just think of what happened after 9/11," Paul said. "Immediately before there was any assessment, there was glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq. So the war drums beat." Contra Paul, I don't think it's fair to attribute "glee" to the Bush Administration. I presume even the most Machiavellian among its officials were horrified by the attacks. It is nevertheless true that longtime proponents of invading Iraq exploited 9/11 to urge a war. The Project for the New American Century is not a conspiracy theory. Nor are quotes like this one, spoken by Newt Gingrich on September 19, 2001: "If we don't use this as the moment to replace Saddam after we replace the Taliban, we are setting the stage for disaster."

Vice President Dick Cheney certainly felt the same way.

Conservatives in general and National Review in particular are perfectly within their rights to find Paul's views about blow-back, non-interventionism, and the undue bellicosity of the establishment wrongheaded, and to argue against his libertarian take on foreign policy. In the editorial above, however, Paul's actual views are egregiously obscured, and the editors seem to reach the transparently absurd conclusion that the popularity his foreign policy message has found is grounded in a conspiracy theory about 9/11 rather than understandable disgust at the actual foreign policy decisions made in response to it. 

The evasive treatment of Paul's views and popularity is of a piece with the general refusal among movement conservatives to logically rebut critiques of American foreign policy made by libertarians and paleocons. The crank card and the 9/11 card are often the extent of their response.

Dismissing the burgeoning number of Americans on the right who are suspicious of interventionism and hawkishness is intellectually suspect and unwise. A majority of Republicans now think that the Iraq War was a mistake. The general non-interventionist impulse on the right has never completely gone away. Paul is by no means the ideal vehicle for non-interventionism. But insofar as he plays a significant role in the GOP primary, it will be partly due to the fact that the legitimate concerns he articulates are taken up by no other viable candidate. One needn't be an ardent Paul supporter to suspect that National Review would rather that no viable GOP candidate spoke up to challenge the hawkish impulses on the elite right .

The conservative movement would rather ignore Paul on domestic issues too, for reasons that Ross Douthat identifies in a recent column. "Paul, for all his crankishness, is the kind of conservative that Tea Partiers want to believe themselves to be: Deeply principled, impressively consistent, a foe of big government in nearly all its forms (the Department of Defense very much included)," Douthat writes. "Gingrich, on the other hand, is the kind of conservative that liberals believe most Tea Partiers to be -- not a genuine 'don't tread on me' libertarian, but a partisan Republican whose unstinting support for George W. Bush's deficit spending morphed into hand-wringing horror of 'socialism' once a Democrat captured the Oval Office."

Douthat is exactly right. Paul's very presence in the race, and especially his strong showing in Iowa polls, puts every Tea Party voter who supports any other candidate in the uncomfortable position of voting against the more principled, consistent proponent of small government, and for the guy they regard to be more electable, or partisan, or better at formulating zings against liberals.

There is nothing inherently wrong with factoring electability into the candidate one votes for in a primary, or backing a candidate who is less conservative on domestic policy because one agrees with his foreign policy views. But these are the sorts of tradeoffs and compromises that many Tea Partiers have spent a lot of time disparaging when other people were making them. A vote against Paul requires either cognitive dissonance -- never in short supply in politics -- or a fundamental rethinking of the whole theory of politics that so recently drove the Tea Party movement.

Ironically, by ignoring Paul so transparently and absurdly, the conservative movement is behaving a lot like the one institution it hates more than any other -- the establishment media. As Jon Stewart put it months ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viDKeTzSLf4&feature=player_embedded

And again this week (toward the end of this next clip):

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-december-12-2011/indecision-2012---abc-news-gop-debate

In the course of endorsing Ron Paul in the GOP primary, Andrew Sullivan put it this way:

The constant refrain on Fox News that this man has "zero chance" of being the nominee is a propagandistic lie. Nationally, Paul is third in the polls at 9.7 percent. In Iowa, he may win. In New Hampshire, it is Paul, not Gingrich, who is rising this week as Romney drifts down. He's at 19 percent, compared with Gingrich's 24. He is the third option for the GOP. And I believe an Obama-Paul campaign would do us all a service. We would have a principled advocate for a radically reduced role for government, and a principled advocate for a more activist role. If Republicans want a real debate about government and its role, they have no better spokesman.

What National Review wants is a Republican who can beat Barack Obama. But I don't think it or anyone else can prevent a reckoning with the libertarians in the right's coalition, so long as the rest of the Republican field persists in demanding more defense spending, fewer civil liberties, and war without end.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/12/pretending-that-ron-paul-doesnt-matter-wont-make-him-go-away/250035/

Obama Caves in, Agrees He Is All-Powerful

Obama Caves in, Agrees He Is All-Powerful
By Anthony Gregory | Thursday December 15, 2011 at 11:34 AM PST

The House has overwhelmingly passed HR 1540, frightening legislation that codifies the president's totalitarian power to detain militarily terrorist suspects indefinitely without meaningful due process, including U.S. citizens captured on American soil. This legislation has many other horrible war-on-terror provisions, but the solidification of the Bush-Obama claim of imperial prerogative over imprisoning any soul in the world the president chooses has got to be the worst.

Originally, the administration hinted it would veto the legislation -- for the laughable reason that it represented overreach by Congress into the proper domain of the executive. Here is an analogy. It would be akin to Parliament affirming the power of the King to do whatever he wanted to anyone in his kingdom, and the king saying he cannot accede to such a proclamation because it is not up to Parliament to define what the King's power is in the first place. It is not a perfect analogy, since no King ever had the power over his subjects, the technological capacity to destroy lives and liberties, or the effective jurisdictional reach, that our president enjoys.

Now the president has "backed down" and agrees to support the legislation. How magnanimous of him. This would be like the King saying, "Oh, you know what? I was too hasty to reject Parliament's declaration of my royal prerogative. I will humbly accede to this august body's determination that I have infinite sovereignty over my realm."

Again, not a perfect analogy, since the president is in practice much more powerful than the king. The president can order any country bombed, for example, and has much more access to resources to finance his bidding. The king had to court other wealthy and powerful interests in his kingdom. Obama simply orders a war started, and it is paid for one way or another.

The one brake on presidential power, relative to kingly power, has always been the constitution­and not so much the written one on parchment, but the one in the hearts and minds of the people. Some things the American people would not tolerate the president doing. Yet we are losing this brake on power every day. It certainly is nowhere to be found in government. When two-thirds of the opposition party in the House of Representatives­two-thirds of Republicans, who rode into control of that body of Congress bearing 2010 campaign promises of curbing political power­vote for the president to have this virtually limitless authority to detain anyone anywhere forever, we know that no effective checks and balances exist in the most crucial areas of policy.

All that remains is a public jealous of some components of their liberty. Public ideology is why we don't have a theocracy, prohibitions on alcohol, the death penalty for adultery, full socialization of industry, or other such features of other political systems. A public ideology is the main reason we're not rounded up and put into labor camps­that and the fact that politicians recognize we're more productive as relatively free-range tax livestock. Ideology is ever important, and a philosophical revolution in the population can still reverse the tide of tyranny. Yet most Americans seem unaware or uninterested in the mass destruction being done to their priceless freedom, especially since it is in the name of security and bipartisanship­two favorite refuges for scoundrels and would-be despots. How sad to report all this on Bill of Rights Day.

http://blog.independent.org/2011/12/15/obama-caves-in-agrees-he-is-all-powerful/

Fwd: [New post] Tea Party leader Meckler arrested with handgun at airport

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jeff Pelline's Sierra Foothills Report
Date: Thursday, December 15, 2011
Subject: [New post] Tea Party leader Meckler arrested with handgun at airport
To: majors.bruce@gmail.com


New post on Jeff Pelline's Sierra Foothills Report

Tea Party leader Meckler arrested with handgun at airport

by jeffpelline

"Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots and one of the most prominent spokesmen for the grassroots movement, was arrested Thursday and is being charged with illegally trying to carry a handgun onto a plane at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, NY," according to TalkingPointsMemo.com and other media outlets.

"According to the Queens District Attorney's office, Meckler arrived at the airport with the gun and ammunition locked in a safe and presented it to the flight attendant at the Delta check-in counter. He allegedly told authorities that he needed the gun for protection, but did not have a New York State license to carry the weapon. He's being charged with a second degree possession of an illegal weapon, a felony charge that carries a penalty of up to 15 years in prison.

"'Before leaving home, passengers should acquaint themselves with the weapon laws of the jurisdiction that they are visiting and comply with any and all legal requirements if they choose to travel with a weapon,' Queens DA Richard Brown said in a statement. 'Otherwise, they may find themselves being arrested and charged with a felony - as is what occurred in this case.'

"Meckler's lawyer did not dispute the basic facts of the story, but said that his client followed routine procedure for transporting a weapon. In an e-mail to reporters, attorney Brian Stapleton wrote:

"'Mark Meckler, an attorney and National Coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, who holds a concealed-carry permit from the state of California, today was charged with a firearms violation at LaGuardia Airport in New York City. While in temporary transit through the state of New York in possession of an unloaded, lawful firearm that was locked in a TSA-approved safe, he legally declared his possession of the firearm in his checked baggage at the ticket counter as required by law and in a manner approved by TSA and the airline, yet was arrested by port authority for said possession.

"A spokesman for the Queens DA, Kevin Ryan, told TPM that the legal issue wasn't whether Meckler followed airline regulations regarding safe transportation of a handgun, the issue was that he did not have a carry permit for New York state, which has strict requirements for handguns."

The full article is here.

jeffpelline | December 15, 2011 at 4:15 pm | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/pq6kF-b0W

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Military spending drains and distorts the civilian economy.

Military spending drains and distorts the civilian economy.
By Thomas E. Woods Jr.

To get a sense of the impact the U.S. military has on the American economy, we must remember the most important lesson in all of economics: to consider not merely the immediate effects of a proposed government intervention on certain groups, but also its long-term effects on society as a whole. That's what economist Frédéric Bastiat (1801–50) insisted on in his famous essay, "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen." It's not enough to point to a farm program and say that it grants short-run assistance to the farmers. We can see its effects on farmers. But what does it do to everyone else in the long run?

Seymour Melman (1917–2004), a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University, focused much of his energy on the economics of the military-oriented state. Melman's work amounted to an extended analysis of the true costs not only of war but also of the military establishment itself. As he observed,

Industrial productivity, the foundation of every nation's economic growth, is eroded by the relentlessly predatory effects of the military economy. …Traditional economic competence of every sort is being eroded by the state capitalist directorate that elevates inefficiency into a national purpose, that disables the market system, that destroys the value of the currency, and that diminishes the decision power of all institutions other than its own.

Throughout the Cold War, politicians and intellectuals all over the political spectrum could be heard warning of the catastrophic economic consequences of reductions in military spending. The radical left in particular, as part of its critique of American state capitalism (which it sometimes conflated with pure laissez-faire), lent important support to that position. As Marxists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy warned: "If military spending were reduced once again to pre-Second World War proportions, the nation's economy would return to a state of profound depression, characterized by unemployment rates of 15 per cent and up, such as prevailed during the 1930s."

Yet these politicians and intellectuals were focusing on the direct effects of discontinuing a particular spending stream without considering the indirect effects­all the business ventures, jobs, and wealth that those funds would create when steered away from military use and toward the service of the public as expressed in their voluntary spending patterns. The full cost of the military establishment, as with all other forms of government spending, includes all the consumer goods, services, and technological discoveries that never came into existence because the resources to provide them had been diverted by government.


Not All Growth Is Good

Measurements of "economic growth" can be misleading if they do not differentiate between productive growth and parasitic growth. Productive growth improves people's standard of living and/or contributes to future production. Parasitic growth merely depletes manpower and existing stocks of goods without accomplishing either of these ends.

Military spending constitutes the classic example of parasitic growth. Melman believed that military spending, up to a point, could be not only legitimate but also economically valuable. But astronomical military budgets, surpassing the combined military spending of the rest of the world, and exceeding many times over the amount of destructive power needed to annihilate every enemy city, were clearly parasitic. Melman used the term "overkill" to describe that portion of the military budget that constituted this kind of excess.

By the 1960s the U.S. government, in its strategic aircraft and missiles alone, was capable of unleashing in explosive power the equivalent of six tons of TNT for every person on Earth. "Now that we have 6 tons of TNT per person in our strategic missiles and aircraft alone," Melman wondered, "have we become more secure than when we had only 1 ton of TNT per human being on earth?"

The labor, time, and other resources that were used to produce this overkill material were taxed away from the productive population and diverted from the creation of civilian goods.

The scale of the resources siphoned off from the civilian sector becomes more vivid in light of specific examples of military programs, equipment, and personnel. To train a single combat pilot, for instance, costs between $5 million and $7 million. Over a period of two years, the average U.S. motorist uses about as much fuel as does a single F-16 training jet in less than an hour. The Abrams tank uses up 3.8 gallons of fuel in traveling one mile. Between 2 and 11 percent of the world's use of 14 important minerals, from copper to aluminum to zinc, is consumed by the military, as is about 6 percent of the world's consumption of petroleum. The Pentagon's energy use in a single year could power all U.S. mass transit systems for nearly 14 years.

Still other statistics illuminate the scope of the resources consumed by the military. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, during the period from 1947 through 1987 it used (in 1982 dollars) $7.62 trillion in capital resources. In 1985, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation's plants, equipment, and infrastructure (capital stock) at just over $7.29 trillion. In other words, the amount spent over that period could have doubled the American capital stock or modernized and replaced its existing stock.


Military Corporatism

Then there are the damaging effects on the private sector. Since World War II, between one-third and two-thirds of all technical researchers in the United States have been working for the military at any given time. The result, Melman points out, has been "a short supply of comparable talent to serve civilian industry and civilian activities of every sort."

Government jobs, whose funding source­taxation­is unavailable to private firms, have been able to offer substantially higher salaries than those in the private sector. By the 1960s major companies were already complaining of being unable to meet their hiring targets for new researchers.

Meanwhile, firms servicing Pentagon needs have grown almost indifferent to cost. They operate outside the market framework and the price system: the prices of the goods they produce are not determined by the voluntary buying and selling by property owners that comprise the market, but through a negotiation process with the Pentagon in isolation from market exchange.

Beginning in the 1960s, the Department of Defense required the military-oriented firms with which it did business to engage in "historical costing," a method by which past prices are employed in order to estimate future costs. Superficially plausible, this approach builds into the procurement process a bias in favor of ever-higher prices since it does not scrutinize these past prices or the firm's previously incurred costs, or make provision for the possibility that work done in the future might be carried out at a lower cost than related work done in the past.

This is not nit-picking: advancing technology has often made it possible to carry out important tasks at ever-lower costs, yet rising costs are a built-in assumption of the historical-cost method. Moreover, if some piece of military equipment­a helicopter, plane, or tank, for example­winds up costing much more than initial estimates indicated, that inflated price then becomes the baseline for the cost estimates for new projects belonging to the same genus. The Pentagon, in turn, uses the resulting cost hikes to justify higher budget proposals submitted to Congress.

Cost-minimizing incentives that exist for civilian firms are often absent with the military-industry firm. The largest contracts are negotiated with a single supplier, and cost is not the major factor in the Pentagon's reckoning. More important is the Pentagon's confidence that the firm can deliver the product, interact with the military community, and adapt to ongoing and sometimes frequent changes to the initial design.

Even if the resulting military hardware exceeds the negotiated price by three or four times, the Pentagon will generally find a way to come up with the money. Melman also found administrative overhead ratios in the defense industry to be double those for civilian firms, where such a crushing burden simply could not be absorbed. He concluded:

From the personal accounts of 'refugees' from military-industry firms, from former Pentagon staffers, from informants still engaged in military-industrial work, from the Pentagon's publications, and from data disclosed in Congressional hearings, I have found consistent evidence pointing to the inference that the primary, internal, economic dynamics of military industry are cost- and subsidy-maximization.

These incentives also supply little reason to exert the intellectual and physical effort necessary not only to control costs but also to make complex systems simpler and more user-friendly, as truly competitive firms and industries must try to do when catering to the public. "In one major enterprise," Melman reported, "the product-development staffs engaged in contests for designing the most complex, Rube Goldberg-types of devices. Why bother putting brakes on such professional games as long as they can be labeled 'research,' charged to 'cost growth' and billed to the Pentagon?"

The efforts of Boeing Vertol, Rohr, and Grumman to enter the field of mass transit are revealing. In each case, their products were simply too complex and unreliable. Boeing Vertol's trolley cars, introduced on Boston's Green Line in the 1970s, broke down regularly and were largely replaced by cars built by Japan's Kinki Sharyo. Rohr Industries' subway cars, introduced in San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system and in the nation's capital, were enormously costly and for years suffered from chronic malfunctions. Grumman buses in New York City were so unreliable that the city ended up suing the company.


War Machine Tools

The American machine-tool industry can tell a sorry tale of its own. Once highly competitive and committed to cost-containment and innovation, the machine-tool industry suffered a sustained decline in the decades following World War II. During the wartime period, from 1939 to 1947, machine-tool prices increased by only 39 percent at a time when the average hourly earnings of American industrial workers rose by 95 percent. Since machine tools increase an economy's productivity, making it possible to produce a greater quantity of output with a smaller input, the industry's conscientious cost-cutting had a disproportionately positive effect on the American industrial system as a whole.

But between 1971 and 1978, machine-tool prices rose 85 percent while U.S. industrial workers' average hourly earnings increased only 72 percent. The corresponding figures in Japan were 51 percent and 177 percent, respectively.

These problems can be accounted for in part by the American machine-tool industry's relationship with the Defense Department. Once the Pentagon became the American machine-tool industry's largest customer, the industry felt far less pressure to hold prices down than it had in the past. That decreased pressure undoubtedly contributed to the negligible investment by the machine-tool industry in modern production techniques of a kind used routinely in Europe. No longer under traditional market pressure to innovate and lower costs, the machine-tool industry saw a considerable drop in productivity.

In the short run, the American machine-tool industry's woes affected U.S. productivity at large. Firms were now much more likely to maintain their existing stock of machines rather than to purchase additional equipment or upgrade what they already possessed. By 1968, nearly two-thirds of all metalworking machinery in American factories was at least ten years old. The aging stock of production equipment contributed to a decline in manufacturing productivity growth after 1965.

Why Americans couldn't have switched to lower-cost imported machine tools as soon as prices began to rise involves the reluctance of machinery buyers to change their suppliers. Not only do they prefer to deal with established firms with good reputations, but they also want to avoid unnecessary and costly downtime, so they patronize suppliers who can perform repairs and supply spare parts on short notice. In the long run, American firms did indeed begin to shift into imported machine tools, and by 1967 the United States for the first time imported more machine tools than it exported.

The military-induced distortion of the American machine-tool industry, and the industry's correspondingly decreased global competitiveness, is not confined to the perverse incentives created by the Pentagon's cost-maximization approach to procurement. Another factor is at work as well: the more an industry caters to the Pentagon, the less it makes production decisions with the civilian economy in mind. Thus in the late 1950s the Air Force teamed up with the machine-tool industry to produce numerical-control machine-tool technology, a technique for the programmable automation of machine tools that yields fast, efficient, and accurate results. The resulting technology was so costly that private metalworking firms could not even consider using it. The machine-tool firms involved in this research thereby placed themselves in a situation in which their only real customer was the aerospace industry.

Some 20 years later, only 2 percent of all American machine tools belonged to the numerical-control line. It was Western European and Japanese firms, which operated without these incentives, that finally managed to produce numerical-control machine tools at affordable prices for smaller businesses.

The distortion of business decisions and strategy that contributed to the decreasing competitiveness of the machine-tool industry is at work in thousands of American firms in rough proportion to their reliance on Pentagon contracts.


How Much Is Enough?

We sometimes hear it said that the military budget is too low. As of this printing the Pentagon absorbs the equivalent of 3.3 percent of GDP; some say this figure should be increased to at least 4 percent. That figure sounds moderate and reasonable, especially since it has reached more than twice that level at various times in the past. But the problem with determining the adequacy of the military budget by measuring it as a share of GDP is that the two figures have no logical connection to each other. One would think, instead, that a reasonable metric for determining the military budget would involve some calculation of what expenditures were necessary to defend the United States from potential aggressors. Whatever that figure turns out to be, its ratio to GDP is of no relevance at all.

A better way to measure the U.S. government's military spending would be to compare it to that of other countries. As of this writing, the U.S. government's military expenditures equals the sum of what all the other countries in the world spend. Economist Robert Higgs wonders: "Why can't the Department of Defense today defend the country for a smaller annual amount than it needed to defend the country during the Cold War, when we faced an enemy with large, modern armed forces and thousands of accurate, nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles?"

In fact, a great many military experts have begun to conclude that the enormously expensive and complicated equipment and programs that the Pentagon has been calling for would be of limited help even in fighting the Second Generation Warfare with which the American military seems most comfortable, and a positive detriment to waging the kind of Fourth Generation Warfare of which the war on terror consists. William Lind, a key theorist of Fourth Generation Warfare, says the U.S. Navy in the 21st century is "still structured to fight the Imperial Japanese Navy." As Lind puts it, the Navy's aircraft-carrier battle groups "have cruised on mindlessly for more than half a century, waiting for those Japanese carriers to turn up. They are still cruising today, into, if not beyond, irrelevance."

The Department of Defense is the only federal agency not subject to audit. The seriousness of problems with the Department's books has been acknowledged for decades. In the 1990s the Defense Department actually secured from Congress a special exemption from the general audit requirement that exists for other federal agencies. So it is not that the Department has failed an audit­meaning accountants tracked its expenditures and found its money misspent. With the Department of Defense, accountants cannot track the money in the first place.

It is not uncommon for the Pentagon not to know whether contractors have been paid twice, or not at all. It does not even know how many contractors it has. Meanwhile, so-called fiscal conservatives, who know nothing of this, continue to think the problem is excessively low military budgets. This, no doubt, is just the way the establishment likes it: exploit the people's patriotism in order to keep the gravy train rolling.

To tabulate the full amount of government expenditure on defense, it is not enough to glance at the budget for the Department of Defense. That number was $518.3 billion in 2009 and excludes hundreds of billions of dollars in additional defense-related expenditure. Higgs suggests that the real defense budget is closer to $1 trillion.

Winslow Wheeler reaches a comparable figure. To the $518.3 billion, he adds the military-related activities assigned to the Department of Energy ($17.1 billion), the security component of the State Department budget ($38.4 billion), the Department of Veterans Affairs ($91.3 billion), non-Department of Defense military retirement  ($28.3 billion), miscellaneous defense activities spread around various agencies ($5.7 billion), and the share of the interest payments on the national debt attributable to military expenditure ($54.5 billion). When we add the roughly $155 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to Wheeler's tabulation, we arrive at a grand total of $948.7 billion for 2009.

And we're worried about trivialities like "earmarks," which comprise such a small portion of spending that they barely amount to a rounding error in the federal budget?

Meanwhile, $250 billion is spent every year maintaining a global military presence that includes 865 facilities in more than 40 countries, and 190,000 troops stationed in 46 countries and territories. It is not "liberal" to find something wrong with this. Most liberals, in fact, find nothing wrong with it. Who was the last Democratic presidential candidate to call for a reduced military presence abroad?

President Obama is being portrayed in some circles as a radical who wants to gut the U.S. military. This is misleading. Obama is a center-left variant of the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus whose basic premises are shared by John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Newt Gingrich, and the Washington Post. He has no intention of withdrawing American troops from where they are stationed around the world, and in fact he is increasing military spending to levels beyond those of Ronald Reagan. Between 2010 and 2013 Obama plans to spend $2.47 trillion on the Pentagon. Were he to be re-elected, he intends to spend another $2.58 trillion. The combined total of $5.05 trillion is a whopping $840 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars more than was spent by the Gipper himself.


Real Conservatism

Out with the phony conservatives, the Tea Party movement says. We want the real thing. But the real thing, far from endorsing global military intervention, recoils from it. The conservative cannot endorse a policy that is at once utopian, destructive, impoverishing, counterproductive, propaganda-driven, contrary to republican values, and sure to increase the power of government, especially the executive branch.

The conservative temperament shuns utopian schemes, and seeks instead those finite but noble virtues we associate with hearth and home. These are the things the conservative is supposed to delight in and defend. Nathaniel Hawthorne once observed that a state was about as large an area as the human heart could be expected to love, and G.K. Chesterton reminded us that the genuine patriot boasts not of how large his country is, but of how small it is. As Patrick Henry said, "Those nations who have gone in search of grandeur, power and splendor, have always fallen a sacrifice and been the victims of their own folly. While they acquired those visionary blessings, they lost their freedom."

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/less-bang-for-the-buck/

Gingrich praised FDR, New Deal in ’95, ’06 books

Gingrich praised FDR, New Deal in '95, '06 books
Published: 11:44 PM 12/05/2011 | Updated: 12:45 PM 12/06/2011
By Paul Conner

In two books, the man who calls President Barack Obama a "food-stamp president" praised the man whose administration created the first food stamp program.

Snubbing 16 other presidents including Ronald Reagan, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called Franklin D. Roosevelt "probably the greatest president of the twentieth century" in his 1995 book To Renew America.

In a passage of the book in which Gingrich laid out examples of historical figures asking for God's help for the nation, he praised Roosevelt for "openly appeal[ing] to the nation's sense of faith and religion in summing the national will to the task" of defeating Nazi Germany.

"With the attention of the entire nation riveted upon him, President Roosevelt did a remarkable thing," Gingrich wrote. "After telling the nation in one sentence that troops had landed, he said: 'And so in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer.'"

More recently, in his 2006 book Rediscovering God in America, Gingrich lauded FDR's national leadership and spiritual guidance during World War II.

"Many consider Franklin Roosevelt to be the father of modern liberalism, so it may surprise you that he was a man of deep religious conviction who unapologetically linked the preservation of our nation during World War II with the preservation of religion," the former House Speaker wrote.

Gingrich also commended FDR for passing the New Deal, a program many conservatives consider to be the foundation for modern liberal policy.

(RELATED: Democrats' attacks on Romney indicate they would prefer Gingrich as nominee)

"The New Deal, as it came to be know, was comprised of a series of social and employment programs, which although failing to end the Depression, provided at the very least a necessary morale boost to thousands of previously unemployed workers," he wrote.

Roosevelt, elected in 1932 as the country wrestled with the continuing effects of the Great Depression, served three full terms before dying in the early months of his fourth term. Under his administration, the Department of Agriculture instituted the Food Stamp Program in 1939. The program lasted until 1943, before being resurrected by President John F. Kennedy in 1961.

Yet in the same 1995 book in which he praised FDR, Gingrich called for "replacing the welfare state with an opportunity society," a reform he called "the greatest moral imperative we face." He laid out eight steps to do so:

• Shifting from caretaking to caring
• Volunteerism and spiritual renewal
• Reasserting the values of American civilization
• Emphasizing family and work
• Creating tax incentives for work, investment, and entrepreneurship
• Reestablishing savings and property ownership
• Learning as the focus of education
• Protection against violence and drugs

"When people tell me I am intense on this issue [of replacing the welfare state], I ask them to imagine that their children were the ones dying on the evening news and then tell me how intense they would be to save their own children's lives," he wrote. "That is how intense we should all be."

http://dailycaller.com/2011/12/05/gingrich-praised-fdr-new-deal-in-95-06-books/#ixzz1gYmqYQuf

Newt Gingrich: A leader more like Woodrow Wilson than Teddy Roosevelt

Newt Gingrich: A leader more like Woodrow Wilson than Teddy Roosevelt
By Thomas J. Whalen, Published: December 12

This piece is part of an On Leadership roundtable on Newt Gingrich's leadership style.

In recent weeks newly crowned Republican frontrunner Newt Gingrich has billed himself as the second coming of Theodore Roosevelt. While there are some superficial similarities between the former House Speaker and the boyishly exuberant 26^th president, like a tendency toward bombastic rhetoric and a narcissistic fondness for the sound of their own voices, Gingrich's political persona nevertheless more closely resembles that of another Roosevelt contemporary who went on to defeat the Rough Rider in the hotly contested 1912 presidential election: Woodrow Wilson.

Like Wilson, Gingrich spent a formative portion of his life in the deep South, drinking in that region's traditional conservative attitudes on government and culture while displaying a strong sympathy for the old Confederacy.  Both labored in the halls of higher education for several years before finally opting for a career in politics­Gingrich with a Ph.D in history from Tulane and Wilson with one in history and political science from John Hopkins.

Yet while Gingrich rose to national political prominence through the old tried and true congressional route, winning the speakership in 1995, Wilson earned his way by less conventional means. After serving a distinguished stint as president of Princeton, he successfully pursued the governorship of New Jersey in 1910, winning by a wide popular margin. This minor difference aside, both share a remarkably similar political philosophy.

They adhere to what Wilson once termed the "New Freedom," a belief that less is more when it comes to the federal government's role in an average person's life. "Do you want the court to appoint guardians for you or are you old enough to take care of yourselves?" Wilson asked. Gingrich finds no fault in this, as he commonly rails against those whom he deems as the elites and their supposedly baneful influence on economic progress and individual freedom. "You can't trust anybody with power," Gingrich once said.

 But advocating less government doesn't necessarily mean having no government. After all, Wilson is the same president who gave us the Federal Reserve Bank, the graduated income tax, the Federal Trade Commission and a ban on child labor. "We have been proud of our industrial achievements," Wilson said in his inaugural address of 1913, "but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through."

Likewise, Gingrich has not been shy about extending the long arm of federal authority when perceived necessity dictates. Just this fall, the GOP presidential hopeful had a difficult time explaining to party conservatives why he had once endorsed a cap-and-trade policy aimed at reducing carbon emissions, the believed chief cause for climate change among many in the scientific community.

Things did not end well for Wilson, of course. Seeking a "peace without victory" at the end of World War I, he tried to ramrod through the Senate the Treaty of Versailles, a game-changing diplomatic agreement that would have made the United States a charter member of a global collective security organization known as the League of Nations.

 When treaty opponents, led by Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, expressed what in retrospect appear to be modest and sensible reservations about the treaty, Wilson refused to yield ground.

He instead mounted a whirlwind speaking tour of America's heartland to sell his vision of a new global order directly to voters, thus bypassing the Senate and his main critics. But the immense physical toll associated with taking on such a high-stakes political task proved too much for Wilson. He suffered a debilitating stroke and remained in an invalided state for the duration of his presidency. He passed away in 1924, a broken and embittered man. Needless to say, the treaty he poured so much of his heart and soul into went down to flaming defeat in the Senate.

So what does this have to do with Newt Gingrich? Plenty, I'd argue.

Gingrich exhibits a singularly uncompromising "my way or the highway" governing style that would be better suited for an old school European monarchy than a modern democratic state. Furthermore, as any cursory review of his short yet controversial tenure as House Speaker makes clear (remember the 1995 federal government shutdown, anyone?), Gingrich shows little inclination to bridge the gap with representatives from across the political aisle. In fact, he goes out of his way to demonize them. Just ask retiring Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Barney Frank, who Gingrich not so magnanimously suggested be put in jail during a recent Republican presidential debate.

Even veteran members of his own party can't help but shake their heads at such impertinence. "This is a man only interested in his own grandiosity," retired Oklahoma Congressman Mickey Edwards recently told the Boston Globe.

This same take-no-prisoners approach ultimately doomed Wilson in the League fight, and it would be equally disastrous if employed by a President Gingrich in the highly charged partisan environment of our nation's capitol today. We need tolerant, broad-minded leaders who can put aside their petty differences and work together for the common good.

Recalcitrant political bomb throwers need not apply.

Thomas J. Whalen is associate professor of social science at Boston University. He is the author of several books, including A Higher Purpose: Profiles in Presidential Courage.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership/newt-gingrich-a-leader-more-like-woodrow-wilson-than-teddy-roosevelt/2011/12/12/gIQApn3dpO_story.html

CAIR spokeswoman, Noor Salahuddin, sizes up the GOP candidates…in Muslim eyes

New post on Bare Naked Islam CAIR spokeswoman, Noor Salahuddin, sizes up the GOP candidates…in Muslim eyes by barenakedislam She indicates that with the exception of Ron Paul, most of the candidates' positions on the creeping Islamization of America and Islamic terrorism, are unacceptable to Muslims. As far as BNI is concerned, the candidate who sucks the most in Muslim eyes is the candidate deserving of the most consideration from real Americans. Read more of this post barenakedislam | December 15, 2011 at 4:30 PM | Categories: CAIR Nazis | URL: http://wp.me/peHnV-DHO Comment    See all comments Unsubscribe or change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions. Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: http://barenakedislam.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/cair-spokeswoman-noor-salahuddin-sizes-up-the-gop-candidates-in-muslim-eyes/ Thanks for flying with WordPress.com

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Barak Obama Caganer

http://www.caganer.com/barak-obama-p-289.html?language=en

 

 

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Banning Sharia Law in US is offensive to Muslims

Great.  "Offending Muslims" is almost as good a hobby as "Cussin' Politicians".

New post on Fellowship of the Minds Banning Sharia Law in US is offensive to Muslims by DCG Opponents in Philadelphia say bill on Sharia law unfair to Muslims Newsworks:  A bill in Harrisburg that opponents say is targeted against Muslims has followers of that faith upset.  House Bill 2029 would ban Pennsylvania courts from considering any foreign legal code or system that isn't identical with the Constitution.  Muslim activists say that it is specifically targeted against the practice of Sharia Law--a religious code for Muslims that has the power of law in some countries.  Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Attorney Amara Chaudhry says this would block freedom of religious expression. "This is not a new faith we are not a foreign faith and yes this dangerous, clearly stated discriminatory purpose on a publicly circulated document, you just don't get any more troubling than that," said Chaudhry. Professor Khalid Blankinship of Temple University compares following Sharia to the Catholic teaching that divorce is not allowed.  "That would be like going into the Catholic Church and telling them that you can't marry people the way you want or saying you have to allow divorce of people even if the Pope ruled otherwise," said Blankinship. State Representative Rosemarie Swanger of Lebanon County, who authored the bill, says it is designed to preserve rights of liberty that do not exist in some foreign legal systems.  She has said recognizing foreign laws could allow women to be treated as second-class citizens.  In a letter she sent to colleagues, Swanger called Sharia law "inherently hostile to our constitutional liberties." I'm no legal scholar but I'm pretty sure that the US Constitution is the supreme law of this country.  And I'm pretty sure that "freedom of religious expression" doesn't include stoning of women, child rape, and honor killings - at least not here in the US (yet). No doubt CAIR is on a mission.  If the politicians cave to this PC baloney under the guise of "religion" in Pennsylvania, don't be surprised if CAIR challenges this type of legislation in every other state.  You know they will. DCG DCG | December 15, 2011 at 6:11 am | Tags: Sharia law | Categories: Culture War, Islam, Religion | URL: http://wp.me/pKuKY-bcT Comment    See all comments Unsubscribe or change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions. Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/banning-sharia-law-in-us-is-offensive-to-muslims/ Thanks for flying with WordPress.com

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Cowboys herding cats

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk7yqlTMvp8&feature=related

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