Candidates Vie to Be The Anti-Lobbyist
Obama Cites Conflicts in McCain Camp

BILLINGS, Mont., May 19 -- Sen. Barack Obama accused Sen. John McCain on Monday of running a presidential campaign bought and paid for by lobbyists and criticized the presumptive Republican nominee for waiting more than a year to address the conflicts of several key advisers.

During a speech at a high school here, Obama said voters should be concerned that "after nearly three decades in Washington, John McCain can't see or won't acknowledge what's obvious to all of us here today -- that lobbyists aren't just part of the system in Washington, they're part of the problem."

McCain's campaign shot back quickly, challenging Obama to "shed light on the long list of federal lobbyists advising him on policy issues" and accusing him of diverting attention from more serious matters.
There are two important points to make regarding demonization of lobbying.

Point #1: Whether you philosophically agree with it or not, and whether you like it or not, the US constitution protects lobbying. Period. There's no debate on this, and so race to see which politician lobbys the least is a collossal waste of time. The First Amendment gives the "right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Petition the government for a redress of grievances is what we today call "lobbying."

Point #2: We don't need more regulation because of lobbying. Rather the reverse is true: We have a lobbying juggernaut exactly because the government interferes so much and so often in the private sector. The day that government butts out of commerce is the day that companies and businesses don't find it necessary to spend so much of their precious resources "petitioning the government"!

You don't like lobbying, Sens. McCain and Obama? Then get the heck out of our lives!

Labels: Congress, government, mccain, Obama

Great commentary by Dan Henninger.

Among the Western intellectual classes in the U.S. and Europe, there is no idea more routinely mocked than George Bush's proposition that what the world needs today is more democracies. Much of this has to do with the Iraq war and the apparently bottomless, neurotic antipathy to Mr. Bush. But make no mistake: The steady stream of pushback against "exporting democracy" as quixotic or inappropriate has gone far toward throwing out the democratic baby with the Bush bathwater.

Tectonic plates in motion don't distinguish between democracies and autocracies, but the record shows that getting hit by an earthquake or cyclone in an authoritarian government is a high-risk proposition for the survivors.

Communist China's Tangshan earthquake of 1976 was the 20th century's most devastating, killing 255,000. (All data here from U.S. Geological Survey.) Managua under the Somoza dictatorship in 1972: at least 5,000 dead and most of the city destroyed.

Mexico City's 1985 earthquake under the one-party PRI government killed 9,500 according to government estimates, but the toll is believed to have been much higher. Soviet Armenia 1988: 25,000 dead. In 2003 an earthquake in mullahfied Iran destroyed the ancient city of Bam and killed at least 31,000.

Common to all is that their governments never held real elections. In such places, after nature kills people, delay and incompetence kill the rest. Set aside idealism and the flowery rhetoric that must accompany a statement like the 2002 Bush Doctrine. The bottom line is accountability. In democracies, even poor or imperfect ones, public pressure, even outrage, pushes elected officials to act. In nondemocracies, the politicians don't give a damn because they don't have to.

Bureaucracies anywhere are lumpen, but in nondemocracies their sloth can be lethal. Their political masters, in office in perpetuity, are often corrupt, and so too are they. This, not poverty, is mainly why buildings like the Juyuan Middle School collapsed this week. In Bam just five years ago, many died because they were trapped beneath crude houses. Cement up to code isn't that expensive.

Bad people and bad cement exist everywhere. When they kill people in a democracy, the pressure of public outrage calls for heads to roll. After the fiasco of Hurricane Katrina, the head of FEMA went to the block, George Bush's approval rating collapsed and has never recovered. Arguably, one can divide the Bush presidency's status to before and after Katrina.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, who saw his fill running Doctors Without Borders, suggested last week that disaster aid to Burma's government would be ripped off. Paul Wolfowitz, a democracy-addicted neocon, came to the World Bank arguing that authoritarian corruption was at the center of many developing-nation horrors. The Bank's bureaucracy drove him out. One wonders how many shoddy buildings their corrupt borrowers have tossed together.

Labels: Economics, Foreign Aid, foreign policy, government

Are conservatives happier than liberals?
Right-wingers rationalize (or reason away) nation's problems
By Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience

updated 11:39 a.m. ET, Wed., May. 7, 2008

Individuals with conservative ideologies are happier than liberal-leaners, and new research pinpoints the reason: Conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities.

Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found. Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person's tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.

The rationalization measure included statements such as: "It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others," and "This country would be better off if we worried less about how equal people are."

To justify economic inequalities, a person could support the idea of meritocracy, in which people supposedly move up their economic status in society based on hard work and good performance. In that way, one's social class attainment, whether upper, middle or lower, would be perceived as totally fair and justified.

If your beliefs don't justify gaps in status, you could be left frustrated and disheartened, according to the researchers, Jaime Napier and John Jost of New York University. They conducted a U.S.-centric survey and a more internationally focused one to arrive at the findings.

"Our research suggests that inequality takes a greater psychological toll on liberals than on conservatives," the researchers write in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, "apparently because liberals lack ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive (or at least neutral) light."

The results support and further explain a Pew Research Center survey from 2006, in which 47 percent of conservative Republicans in the U.S. described themselves as "very happy," while only 28 percent of liberal Democrats indicated such cheer.

The same rationalizing phenomena could apply to personal situations as well.

"There is no reason to think that the effects we have identified here are unique to economic forms of inequality," the researchers write. "Research suggests that highly egalitarian women are less happy in their marriages compared with their more traditional counterparts, apparently because they are more troubled by disparities in domestic labor."

The current study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Labels: government

I'm reading a book by Vincent Bugliosi titled Reclaiming History. If you don't know the name, Bugliosi was the chief prosecutor of the Charles Manson gang back in the 70s and the author of the corresponding novel Helter Skelter and many other true crime books. Reclaiming History is a 20 year research work, 1500 pages long, in which Bugliosi debunks just about every imaginable conspiracy theory regarding the JFK assassination, including an entire chapter devoted to Oliver Stone's JFK. I'm a little over a hundred pages into it and beyond the storyline it's filled with lots of fascinating footnotes, including this one regarding "that the job of the president of the United States is the most dangerous elected job in the world cannot be too vigorously contested."

Bugliosi concludes this saying, "so starting with Lincoln in 1865, approximately one out of every three presidents American presidents either has been assassinated or had an attempt on his life."

In addition to the two attempted assassinations of President Gerald Ford in 1975 (by Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme in Sacramento on September 5, 1975, and Sara Jane Moore in San Francisco on set number 22, 1975), the attempted assassination of President Richard Nixon by Samuel Joseph Byck on February 22, 1974, and the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan by William Hinckley in Washington, DC, on March 30, 1981, to other presidents were attacked before Kennedy, but the attempts failed. Additionally, attempts were made on one president elect and even one former president. On January 30, 1835, an English born house painter, Richard Lawrence, fired two pistols, both of which misfired, at President Andrew Jackson. Like William Hinckley, Lawrence was found by a jury to be not guilty by reason of insanity and died in a mental hospital 16 years later. On November 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, attempted to shoot their way into a Blair House, where President Harry Truman and his wife were temporarily residing while the White House was being repaired. Torresola was shot to death by White House guards in a hail of gunfire (one of the guards was also killed). Collazo was seriously wounded and sentenced to death, the Truman commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. President elect Franklin D. Roosevelt was shot at in his car five times at a political rally in Miami Bayfront Park on February 15, 1933 by Giuseppe Zangara, a 32-year-old brick layer and stone mason. All five of Zangara's shots missed Roosevelt. However, one of them hit Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who was riding with Roosevelt. Cermak died of his wounds on March 6, and Zangara was electrocuted on March 20, only 33 days after his attempt on Roosevelt. The former president who escaped was Theodore Roosevelt, who is running for president again as the candidate of the progressive or bull Moose party. On October 14, 1912, a German born New York bartender, John Schrank, fired one shot at Roosevelt as he entered his car outside a hotel in Milwaukee. The bullet hit Roosevelt in the chest, but a folded manuscript of the speech he was about to make in the metal case for his eyeglasses absorbed part of the bullet's thrust, and he survived. The Schrank was found to be insane and died in a mental hospital in 1943.

So starting with Lincoln in 1865, approximately one out of every three presidents has either been assassinated or had an attempt on his life.

Labels: government, JFK Assassination, statistics

When you read something like this it really drives home the point that liberals aren't so much for a separation of church and state as they are simply opposing Christianity. Every other religion is embraced as "multiculturalism," "diversity" or other such buzzword.

[WSJ] The Detroit chapter of the ACLU has scrambled to find a way to recuse itself from the matter, claiming that the footbaths qualify as secular since they could be used by non-Muslims, and therefore don't cross the group's usual bright church-state line. Further, the ACLU explains, the university's decision to take on the $25,000 expense was motivated primarily "by health and safety" because some students didn't like washing their hands in the sinks after others students had washed their feet. If that hadn't been the case, the group says this religious accommodation would surely have merited greater investigation and criticism.

Uh-huh. This is the same ACLU chapter that in 2005 objected to a high-school wrestling coach saying a prayer with his team before meets, calling the action "inherently coercive." And the ACLU of Michigan is already on the defensive for its non-action this time. In a letter explaining its silence regarding university footbaths, the ACLU notes that it "has often come to the defense of other religions when the state has attempted to interfere with their religious expression." The letter even includes a list of cases in which the group has defended Christian clients. Too bad none of the examples prove much of a parallel to the current recusal over state recognition of a religious practice.
Of course the whole issue is nonsense. "Separation of church and state" appears nowhere in the US Constitution. And if a government entity besides Congress - the only body to which the First Amendment applies - wants to put in some Islamic foot wash bins or the 10 Commandments, for that matter, it's entirely their decision and not the place of our blowhard politicians or overreaching courts to decide.

Labels: activist courts, government, separation of church and state misnomer

[World Net Daily] With summer travel in full gear and motorists more conscious of the price of gasoline than ever before, few Americans realize that up to 60 cents of the cost per gallon is the result of local, state and federal taxes.

In fact, despite allegations of price-gouging, some retailers say they are actually losing money on every gallon they pump.

State, local and federal taxes make up about 20 percent of the cost paid at the pump, according to Conoco Phillips, an international, integrated energy company.

As of March, the national average gasoline tax is 45.8 cents. New York has the highest gas tax at 60.8 cents at the pump, with Hawaii just behind costing 60.2 cents per gallon, according to the American Petroleum Institute.

Gas taxes include federal, averaging 18.4 cents per gallon; state, averaging 18.2 cents per gallon; and additional taxes costing an average of 9.15 cents per gallon. The additional taxes include applicable sales taxes, gross receipts taxes, oil inspection fees, underground storage tank fees and other environmental fees.

Labels: gas prices, government

Slightly over half of all Americans – 52.6 percent – now receive significant income from government programs, according to an analysis by Gary Shilling, an economist in Springfield, N.J. That's up from 49.4 percent in 2000 and far above the 28.3 percent of Americans in 1950. If the trend continues, the percentage could rise within ten years to pass 55 percent, where it stood in 1980 on the eve of President's Reagan's move to scale back the size of government.

That two-decade shrink-the-government trend now appears over, if for no other reason than demographics. The aging baby-boomer generation is poised to receive big payments from Social Security and government healthcare programs.
-- Christian Science Monitor

Sheesh, how can I get on such a gravy train?

Labels: government, taxes