I see they censored Michelle Malkin regarding her coverage of Rappers still using the "N" and "H" words. I also see the "I Hate America except I still Live here wing" Democrats are trying to link abortion funding to every bill passed from Congress. When will these commies give up? Socialism doesn't work and listening to Soros, Sheehan, and Micheal Moore is bad for all of us.
Chairman, I am not a John Cox supporter, but was wondering why he was left out of the MSNBC debate? Less active people were included, such as Paul and Hunter...do you know the criteria used to invite debate participants?
Germany booted out the liberal socialists and elected a conservative (a woman, by the way).
The liberal/socialist Canadians elected a conservative president
Tony Blair became a conservative and thus is basically booted out of his liberal party. He was quite Thatcher like in his "getting it" about what is going on.
In Israel, they are getting ready to rid themselves of their fatally ineffective liberal government, replacing it with conservatives
Conservatives won the government in Japan
The prime minister of the very liberal Netherlands just changed to the conservative party leader.
France is getting ready to elect a conservative. Yes, even in France, the people are gettin it on some level that Western Civilization is at risk and they want their government to fight instead of hide.
Once again, we have no good example of liberalism working anywhere in the world.
Conservatives believe in the power of the people to do the right thing rather than the power of the government to do the right thing.
In country after country, the people are taking back their power and installing conservative governments.
That makes me believe that people at ground level are serving their countries and fighting this war in their own way in the only way they can. They are ridding themselves of the ruin of liberalism and getting serious about sustaining our common culture.
That is hopeful for us in 2008. All over the world the regular folks are gettin it.
This is an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal editorial:
France is a good test case. Its socioeconomic troubles are nothing unusual for Old Europe--from stagnant growth to a debt-ridden welfare state to restive, underemployed young Muslims.
But the political barriers to tackling these problems are highest in France. The presidential election, pitting center-right Nicolas Sarkozy against Socialist Ségolène Royal, might provide a mandate for change.
According to an Ipsos survey on the day of the first round of voting April 22, the three main issues were unemployment, purchasing power and economic insecurity.
In the runoff, Ségo and Sarko have proposed very different solutions. Ms. Royal would bump up the minimum wage, already the highest in the OECD, by 20% and spend lavishly on social programs.
She wants to make life easier for business, but the bulk of her program is old school Socialism.
If Ms. Royal is the vision of a reassuring but untenable past, Mr. Sarkozy promises an uncertain, tumultuous, possibly brighter future. He mixes free markets and protectionism, yet emphasizes "action" and "rupture."
The conservative/capitalist wants to shake France out of its doldrums, the liberal/socialist to softly nudge.
For Labour, the awfulness of these shambles of a Super Thursday was nowhere more cruelly betrayed – though unwittingly – than by the party’s own chairman, Hazel Blears. To the shambles, and Scotland, in a moment, but first to Ms Blears’s curious admission.
Trying to explain the loss of a Cardiff seat, she was reported as protesting that the seat was, after all, “an affluent, middle-class” area.
Precisely.
And it has been by winning affluent middle-class support that Labour has governed Britain these past ten years. When that goes, its predominance goes. The party is back to bedrock.
Support from about one voter in four must be pretty close to bedrock. If, as Tony Blair claimed yesterday, these election results were “a springboard for victory”, then show me a springboard for defeat.
These were dreadful results for the Labour Party. No ifs, no buts, no “not as bad as we feared”. Just dreadful.
It is always possible for party spin-doctors to spread the idea that they were braced for something even worse; that old trick should fool nobody, though elements within the BBC appear to have been taken in.
To register some 27 per cent support nationally, when your principal challengers are registering around 40 per cent, to hear your First Minister in once-impregnable Wales declare that “we haven’t won but we haven’t exactly lost”, to be chased out of councils across those swaths of England that Ms Blears would no doubt write off as “middle class” – to be chased even out of Birmingham – is dismal.
For the Liberal Democrats I believe these results are worse than dismal. I have argued that Labour is down to bedrock; but Labour does have a bedrock, and bedrock is firm.
Liberal Democrat support is soft almost all the way through. For this party momentum is everything: an impression of motion can be the most exciting thing about a small party.
The laws of gyroscopics dictate both to spinning tops and to Liberal Democrats that if you stop moving you may fall over. Caught between two main parties in close contention for government, the Liberal Democrats could sink at the next general election.
To run out of steam, mid-term, when the ruling party is plumbing near-record depths of unpopularity must be deeply worrying for Sir Menzies Campbell.
It will worry Labour, too, who are the beneficiaries of Lib Dem raids into Tory territory.
As for the Tories, David Cameron’s description of the results as “stunning” overstates. They are less than that but they are pretty good. Before yesterday Labour was putting it assiduously about that anything less than a 600-seat gain for the Tories should be counted a failure. That was never true – but in the event the Tories have done a great deal better anyway.
Across what we might call natural Conservative terrain in England the party has come close to cleaning up.
The Tories have strengthened a little in Wales. Across those parts of northern England where they want to conquer new territory their advance has been patchy, with some disappointments and some encouraging successes; but if I hear one more BBC voice announcing that the Conservative Party “haven’t got a single seat in Manchester or Liverpool” I shall scream. If “Manchester” means the city – a small area with quite a small population – then it’s true there are no Tory seats, but citadels like that would only tumble in a landslide.
All around “Manchester” the Conservative Party is on the advance. And Liverpool is by no means an example of “the kind of place where the Tories need to make inroads”. It isn’t; they won’t; and that doesn’t really matter.
Vivid – even gripping – as these events may seem to some of us at the time, it’s as well to remember that even for anoraks like me, local government elections do tend to fade quite fast in the memory, all merging into each other. Scotland, however, will not fade.
Clinton and Obama's Great Feminist Pander By Rich Lowry
The frontrunners in the Democratic presidential race have discovered the power of an idea whose time has passed: socialism in women's wages. Its power is in pandering to feminist voters, and its time passed because it never made any sense even when it was a bright, shiny, new bad idea some 30 years ago.
It deserved its place on the junk heap, given that women have been improving their place in our economy without far-reaching governmental intervention.
Nonetheless, Hillary Clinton has renewed her push for her Paycheck Fairness Act, and Sen. Barack Obama has endorsed the Fair Pay Act.
Whenever the word "fair" features so prominently in Democratic legislation, the odds are that it is economically illiterate, and this legislation doesn't disappoint.
Discrimination against women is already illegal, and employers have to give women equal pay for equal work.
What Clinton and Obama want to establish is the more nebulous concept of "comparable worth," or equal pay for different work in female- and male-dominated professions.
The Obama-endorsed bill mandates equal pay for "equivalent jobs," while Clinton's bill would establish voluntary "guidelines to enable employers to evaluate job categories" -- all in the cause of increasing wages in female-dominated jobs beyond that determined by the market.
This intervention is supposedly so urgent because women make only 77 percent of what men do.
Feminists believe that this wage gap is caused by The Man -- and that's not just a metaphor: He's really a man -- who carefully sets women's wages to keep them below that of members of the patriarchy in good standing.
Never mind that the 77-percent figure is, in the words of Hudson Institute economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth, "flawed and bogus," failing to account for the most basic variables.
CHRISTOPHER ORR riffs on Rudy Giuliani's waffle over abortion in the Republican debate last night. Mr Giuliani has said he would appoint "strict constructionist" judges. And last night, he said
It would be OK to repeal [Roe v Wade]. It would be OK also if a strict constructionist judge viewed it as precedent and I think a judge has to make that decision.
Mr Orr says this is incoherent becuase "strict constructionist" is "code for pro-life". I agree that it certainly is; pro-lifers loathe the fact that judges found the right to abortion in the constitution. But is "strict constructionist" only code for pro-life? I have the impression that conservatives dislike judges finding all kinds of other things in the constitution not exactly envisioned by the framers. They think that "strict constructionists" would allow people to keep pretty much any weapon they want with no restrictions, that the federal government should be stripped of huge amounts of its regulatory power arrogated by the expansion of the "commerce clause"*, and so on. Am I wrong? And what else might "strict constructionist" be code for?
(* The constitution gives fairly little power to the federal government on paper, but the provision giving Congress the power to "regulate interstate commerce" has been used to justify gajillions of federal measures having little to do with interstate commerce. )
By chance, would intellectual arrogance fall under said definition? Is it a protected weapon? And under whose administration would it be protected?
The "Wage Gap" Hillary and Obama tout is from a NOW affiliated organization that has found the same results in various forms since their inception back in 1922. It should be pointed out their research has never survived independent replication and has been strongly discredited as a farce.
If David Duke came out with a study saying Black People make more money would you believe him or your lying eyes? Especially if you found out David Duke's study (and I am being hypothetical here) equated a Rap Singer's wealth vs. an office manager. See the way the study can be skewed? The feminazis do the same but then again, I would expect anyone but a fool (Obama) and a feminazi (Hillary) to know the difference between propaganda and reality.
The American Association of University Women (AAUW) is the name of the NOW affiliate putting out these trash studies. Small wonder Basu and other feminazis leave out the full name of this sham organization.
Hillary will continue to show her true feminazi leanings as we go through this campaign season. I can't wait to find out which restaurants in Iowa start giving a discount to women to make up for their "wage gap" so I can avoid those restaurants.
Edwards continues try to pander his poverty message that is about 40 years too old. He's stuck in Viet Nam with a serious case of Viet Nam disease.
This is from RealClearPolitics.
May 7, 2007
Edwards' Poverty of Information Posted by TOM BEVAN
I'm not cynical enough to question John Edwards' commitment to addressing the issue of poverty, but it certainly doesn't reflect well that he's been working almost exclusively on the issue for the last two years as the head of the newly established Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina but didn't realize that one of the proposals he's pushing has already been a pilot program at HUD for over a decade and has generated mixed results at best:
If there is a personal imprint on Edwards's plan, it is his argument for reducing racial and economic segregation -- that, as he put it in one speech, "if we truly believe that we are all equal, then we should live together, too."
To achieve this, Edwards proposes doing away with public housing projects and replacing them with 1 million rental vouchers, to disperse the poor into better neighborhoods and suburbs, closer to good schools and jobs.
The idea sounds bold, but it faces a deflating reality:
A major federal experiment conducted for more than a decade has found that dispersing poor families with vouchers does not improve earnings or school performance, leaving some economists puzzled that Edwards would make such dispersal a centerpiece of his anti-poverty program. Edwards said he was unaware of the experiment.
Later in the article reporter Alec MacGillis provides more details:
But there is extensive evidence that it is going too far to expect that replacing public housing projects with a million new vouchers will alleviate poverty.
In 1994, the Department of Housing and Urban Development launched a program called Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing, under which 1,820 families living in public housing in five cities were given housing vouchers that they were required to use in low-poverty neighborhoods.
The results startled researchers. Most notably, the families did not fare better economically, nor did their children's school performance improve.
Duncan brought up the findings at Edwards's November 2005 symposium; according to a transcript, no one responded.
It would be a gaffe for any politician to unknowingly propose an idea that's already in place as a government program, but it's even more embarrassing and less forgivable when it's a person who has spent the last couple of years devoted to a particular issue and makes that issue the centerpiece of their campaign for President of the United States.
It would be a gaffe for any politician to unknowingly propose an idea that's already in place as a government program, but it's even more embarrassing and less forgivable when it's a person who has spent the last couple of years devoted to a particular issue and makes that issue the centerpiece of their campaign for President of the United States.
Women voters shun Liberal/Socialist Segolene Royal
By Kerstin Gehmlich Reuters -(Reuters)
Liberal Socialist Segolene Royal failed to win over a majority of women voters in France's presidential election and may have paid a price for focusing too much on her gender at the expense of promoting her policies.
Only 48 percent of women voted for the liberal Royal, while 52 percent supported rightist rival and overall winner Nicolas Sarkozy.
The weak female support is a bitter personal blow for the liberal, Royal, who had played up her feminist credentials throughout the campaign, frequently defending policies she would want "as a mother" and accusing critics of male chauvinism.
"The reason she did not have the female vote is not because there was no solidarity but because she was not up to it," said Tita Zeitoun, founder of the Action de Femme group which fights to get more women into top business positions.
"Just because you're a feminist, you don't vote for a women who does not have the ability. We're talking about the presidential election here ... It's too serious to link this to a phenomenon of femininity or feminism," she said.
Royal had campaigned on leftist economic plans, including an increase in the minimum wage. She also pledged to make France a fairer place, saying she would promote the equal treatment of men and women and to fight violence against women.
Even the liberals in France weren't enticed to vote for the latest liberal even though she proposed a 20% in the minimum wage!! How high do our liberals wish it to go?
"Just because you're a feminist, you don't vote for a women who does not have the ability. We're talking about the presidential election here ... It's too serious to link this to a phenomenon of femininity or feminism," she said.
Royal had campaigned on leftist economic plans, including an increase in the minimum wage.
She also pledged to make France a fairer place, saying she would promote the equal treatment of men and women and to fight violence against women.
Born within six months of each other, Sarkozy (French conservative)and Merkel (German conservative, and a woman, by the way) are outsiders who overcame strong opposition from within their own parties to reach the pinnacle of European politics -- she as a pastor's daughter from communist East Germany and he as the son of a Hungarian immigrant who fled communism.
The two conservatives are united in their support for closer ties with Washington and in their opposition to Turkey's bid to join the EU -- clear departures from the stances of their predecessors Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder.
Both are advocates of reforming the European welfare state.
John Edwards believes a new labor movement is the answer to the country's great divide. Should corporate America be afraid of him?
by Nina Easton, Fortune Washington bureau chief May 7 2007: 5:53 AM EDT
(Fortune Magazine) -- No one was paying much attention to John Edwards in February 2006, when a historic contest for control of Congress was getting underway and the 2008 presidential race was still a sliver of light on the horizon.
But Danny Glover was.
At the time, Glover was the veteran of poverty politics; Edwards was still a rookie in training.
So Glover, who prides himself on his ability to sniff out poseurs and users, warily scrutinized the carefully coifed politician from North Carolina. "There's real humility and false humility," Glover says. Which was Edwards?
The rich lawyer with the soft Southern accent bonded comfortably with this unseen servant class.
Here was a man, too, who was discovering the key to his second presidential bid.
That three-day campaign for the hearts of America's hotel workers was at the center of a broader two-year process that transformed Edwards into the 2008 race's chief proponent of a hotly contentious view - that America's economic salvation lies in millions more Americans paying union dues.
Edwards brings to the contest a core belief that expanding organized labor - which now accounts for just 12 percent of the workforce, down from 20 percent in the early 1980s - is the way to reduce poverty, expand the middle class, narrow the nation's income gap and make globalization less painful.
"The difference between union and non-union is literally the difference between poverty and middle class," Edwards told Fortune.
Courting the labor vote is standard procedure for Democratic presidential candidates, but Edwards goes well beyond the usual union-friendly rhetoric; he has aggressively lobbied on behalf of legal changes to make it easier for labor to organize.
The testimonials have already begun: "I'm 61, and in my lifetime I don't recall any candidate for President who articulated a belief not just that unions are good, but that they are necessary for what ails society," says John Wilhelm, president of the apparel, textile and hospitality workers' union Unite Here.
That three-day campaign for the hearts of America's hotel workers was at the center of a broader two-year process that transformed Edwards into the 2008 race's chief proponent of a hotly contentious view - that America's economic salvation lies in millions more Americans paying union dues. --- I don't recall any candidate for President who articulated a belief not just that unions are good, but that they are necessary for what ails society,"
An unabashed admirer of America, Sarkozy, 52, had a special message for the United States, which has had troubled relations with France under President Jacques Chirac, who led international opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq.
"I'd like to appeal to our American friends to say that they can count on our friendship," he said.
May 8 04:17 PM US/Eastern By NEDRA PICKLER Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - AP Video
Democrat John Edwards said Tuesday that he worked for a hedge fund between presidential campaigns to learn about financial markets and their relationship to poverty—and to make money too.
Asked if he had to join a hedge fund to learn about financial markets, Edwards replied, "How else would I have done it?"
Presented with the suggestion that he could have taken a university class instead, he said, "That's true."
"It was primarily to learn, but making money was a good thing, too," the 2004 vice presidential nominee said
Hedge funds, traditionally cater to the rich.
Fortress was the single biggest employer of Edwards donors during the first three months of the year.
Donors who listed "Fortress" as their employer contributed $67,450 to Edwards' campaign and supporters who identified their employer as "Fortress Investment Group" gave $55,200 to the campaign, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Edwards said it's fair to ask questions about whether there is a contradiction between campaigning against poverty while working for a hedge fund designed to make rich people richer.
I'm off to Paris! I hereby revoke every churlish remark I've ever made about those lovely Gallic people. (But in light of former New Jersey governor and current "gay American" Jim McGreevey's latest career move, I redouble everything I've ever said about the Episcopalians.)
With Nicolas Sarkozy's decisive victory as the new president of France, the French have produced their first pro-American ruler since Louis XVI.
In celebration of France's spectacular return to Western civilization, I bought a Herve Leger dress on Monday, and we're having croissants for breakfast every day this week. This delicate French pastry, by the way, is in the shape of a crescent to commemorate the Crusaders' victory over Islam. Aren't the French just peachy?
"Sarkozy the American," as he is known in France, called Muslim rioters "scum." Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
He explained his position on Muslim immigrants in France, saying: "Nobody has to, I repeat, live in France. But when you live in France, you respect its rules. That is to say that you are not a polygamist. ... One doesn't practice female genital mutilation on one's daughters, one doesn't slit the throat of the sheep, and one respects the republican rules."
Sarko never issued an apology or entered rehab. To the contrary, he said: "I called some individuals that I refuse to call 'youth' by the name they deserve. ... I never felt that by saying 'scum' I was being vulgar, hypocritical or insincere."
Is there a single American politician who would speak so clearly without then apologizing to Howard Dean?
It looks like the Democrats are going to have to drop their talking point about Bush irritating the rest of the world. Evidently not as much as Muslim terrorists irritate the rest of the world. The politicians who hate Bush keep being dumped by their own voters.
At the Democratic presidential debate a few weeks ago, B. Hussein Obama carped that Bush had "alienate(d) the world community" and vowed that he would build "the sort of alliances and trust around the world that has been so lacking over the last six years."
Democrats are terrific at building alliances. Remember how Jimmy Carter won the love of the world by ditching our ally the Shah of Iran, allowing him be replaced by a string of crazy ayatollahs? Since then, we haven't heard a peep from that area of the world.
The smartest woman in the world sniped that she would "create alliances instead of alienation."
Yes, it was spellbinding how her husband charmed North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung and his sociopathic son Kim Jong Il by showering them with visits from Jimmy Carter and gifts from love-machine Madeleine Albright. And that was that: No more trouble from North Korea!
As I understand it, the center of the supposedly America-hating world is France. But now it turns out even the French don't hate America as much as liberals do.
Au contraire! (We can say that again!) Our Georgie is the most popular American with the French since Jerry Lewis.
All over the civilized world, voters are turning terrorist-coddling liberals out of office and voting for politicians friendly toward Bush, the world's sworn enemy of Islamic fascism.
Those foreign leaders so admired by Democrats for hating George Bush and loving Saddam Hussein are being replaced by rulers who pledge their friendship to the United States.
Retrospectively, B. Hussein Obama's answer about our most important ally being "the European Union" may eventually become true, thanks to Bush's ceaseless ally-making.
In Germany, pro-American Angela Merkel crushed the mincing anti-American chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in 2005.
Last year, conservatives swept Canada, making Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper the prime minister. I haven't loved Canadians this much since the New York Rangers won the Stanley Cup.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard is both the longest-serving Australian prime minister and — by his own account — the most conservative. As The New York Times rooted for his defeat in 2004, claiming Australians were furious with him for his support of the Iraq war, he won a historic third term.
Along with Howard, Bush's staunchest ally in the war on terrorism has been Britain's Labor Party leader Tony Blair. He's about to leave office — only to be replaced by a leader from the even more pro-American Conservative Party.
American celebrities who threaten to move out of the country every election rather than live under a conservative leader are running out of countries to move to.
Only Spain remains a nation of women. As long as Spain exists, it will not outlive the shame of its gutless capitulation to terrorist bombings in 2004. It is worse than Sweden's neutrality toward Hitler.
But France! Until this week, France seemed a less likely place to find someone who supports America than a meeting of Democrats.
Apparently, even the French prefer Western civilization to clitorectomy-performing, car-burning savages.
The Democratic Party is now officially the only organization on Earth that does not take the threat of Islamic fascism seriously. Between the Democrats and the media, America has gone from its usual position as the world's last hope to radical Islam's last hope.
20 comments:
I see they censored Michelle Malkin regarding her coverage of Rappers still using the "N" and "H" words. I also see the "I Hate America except I still Live here wing" Democrats are trying to link abortion funding to every bill passed from Congress. When will these commies give up? Socialism doesn't work and listening to Soros, Sheehan, and Micheal Moore is bad for all of us.
Chairman,
I am not a John Cox supporter, but was wondering why he was left out of the MSNBC debate? Less active people were included, such as Paul and Hunter...do you know the criteria used to invite debate participants?
your loyal Polk county servant,
I strongly agree about John Cox. He very much should have been included.
They had no criteria.
Since 9-11,
America relected their conservative president.
Australia re-elected their conservatives.
Germany booted out the liberal socialists and elected a conservative (a woman, by the way).
The liberal/socialist Canadians elected a conservative president
Tony Blair became a conservative and thus is basically booted out of his liberal party. He was quite Thatcher like in his "getting it" about what is going on.
In Israel, they are getting ready to rid themselves of their fatally ineffective liberal government, replacing it with conservatives
Conservatives won the government in Japan
The prime minister of the very liberal Netherlands just changed to the conservative party leader.
France is getting ready to elect a conservative. Yes, even in France, the people are gettin it on some level that Western Civilization is at risk and they want their government to fight instead of hide.
Once again, we have no good example of liberalism working anywhere in the world.
Conservatives believe in the power of the people to do the right thing rather than the power of the government to do the right thing.
In country after country, the people are taking back their power and installing conservative governments.
That makes me believe that people at ground level are serving their countries and fighting this war in their own way in the only way they can. They are ridding themselves of the ruin of liberalism and getting serious about sustaining our common culture.
That is hopeful for us in 2008. All over the world the regular folks are gettin it.
This is an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal editorial:
France is a good test case. Its socioeconomic troubles are nothing unusual for Old Europe--from stagnant growth to a debt-ridden welfare state to restive, underemployed young Muslims.
But the political barriers to tackling these problems are highest in France. The presidential election, pitting center-right Nicolas Sarkozy against Socialist Ségolène Royal, might provide a mandate for change.
According to an Ipsos survey on the day of the first round of voting April 22, the three main issues were unemployment, purchasing power and economic insecurity.
In the runoff, Ségo and Sarko have proposed very different solutions. Ms. Royal would bump up the minimum wage, already the highest in the OECD, by 20% and spend lavishly on social programs.
She wants to make life easier for business, but the bulk of her program is old school Socialism.
If Ms. Royal is the vision of a reassuring but untenable past, Mr. Sarkozy promises an uncertain, tumultuous, possibly brighter future. He mixes free markets and protectionism, yet emphasizes "action" and "rupture."
The conservative/capitalist wants to shake France out of its doldrums, the liberal/socialist to softly nudge.
From The TimesMay 5, 2007
Super Thursday - Labour’s springboard to calamity
Matthew Parris London Times, May 5, 2007
For Labour, the awfulness of these shambles of a Super Thursday was nowhere more cruelly betrayed – though unwittingly – than by the party’s own chairman, Hazel Blears. To the shambles, and Scotland, in a moment, but first to Ms Blears’s curious admission.
Trying to explain the loss of a Cardiff seat, she was reported as protesting that the seat was, after all, “an affluent, middle-class” area.
Precisely.
And it has been by winning affluent middle-class support that Labour has governed Britain these past ten years. When that goes, its predominance goes. The party is back to bedrock.
Support from about one voter in four must be pretty close to bedrock. If, as Tony Blair claimed yesterday, these election results were “a springboard for victory”, then show me a springboard for defeat.
These were dreadful results for the Labour Party. No ifs, no buts, no “not as bad as we feared”. Just dreadful.
It is always possible for party spin-doctors to spread the idea that they were braced for something even worse; that old trick should fool nobody, though elements within the BBC appear to have been taken in.
To register some 27 per cent support nationally, when your principal challengers are registering around 40 per cent, to hear your First Minister in once-impregnable Wales declare that “we haven’t won but we haven’t exactly lost”, to be chased out of councils across those swaths of England that Ms Blears would no doubt write off as “middle class” – to be chased even out of Birmingham – is dismal.
For the Liberal Democrats I believe these results are worse than dismal. I have argued that Labour is down to bedrock; but Labour does have a bedrock, and bedrock is firm.
Liberal Democrat support is soft almost all the way through. For this party momentum is everything: an impression of motion can be the most exciting thing about a small party.
The laws of gyroscopics dictate both to spinning tops and to Liberal Democrats that if you stop moving you may fall over. Caught between two main parties in close contention for government, the Liberal Democrats could sink at the next general election.
To run out of steam, mid-term, when the ruling party is plumbing near-record depths of unpopularity must be deeply worrying for Sir Menzies Campbell.
It will worry Labour, too, who are the beneficiaries of Lib Dem raids into Tory territory.
As for the Tories, David Cameron’s description of the results as “stunning” overstates. They are less than that but they are pretty good. Before yesterday Labour was putting it assiduously about that anything less than a 600-seat gain for the Tories should be counted a failure. That was never true – but in the event the Tories have done a great deal better anyway.
Across what we might call natural Conservative terrain in England the party has come close to cleaning up.
The Tories have strengthened a little in Wales. Across those parts of northern England where they want to conquer new territory their advance has been patchy, with some disappointments and some encouraging successes; but if I hear one more BBC voice announcing that the Conservative Party “haven’t got a single seat in Manchester or Liverpool” I shall scream. If “Manchester” means the city – a small area with quite a small population – then it’s true there are no Tory seats, but citadels like that would only tumble in a landslide.
All around “Manchester” the Conservative Party is on the advance. And Liverpool is by no means an example of “the kind of place where the Tories need to make inroads”. It isn’t; they won’t; and that doesn’t really matter.
Vivid – even gripping – as these events may seem to some of us at the time, it’s as well to remember that even for anoraks like me, local government elections do tend to fade quite fast in the memory, all merging into each other. Scotland, however, will not fade.
May 05, 2007
Clinton and Obama's Great Feminist Pander
By Rich Lowry
The frontrunners in the Democratic presidential race have discovered the power of an idea whose time has passed: socialism in women's wages. Its power is in pandering to feminist voters, and its time passed because it never made any sense even when it was a bright, shiny, new bad idea some 30 years ago.
It deserved its place on the junk heap, given that women have been improving their place in our economy without far-reaching governmental intervention.
Nonetheless, Hillary Clinton has renewed her push for her Paycheck Fairness Act, and Sen. Barack Obama has endorsed the Fair Pay Act.
Whenever the word "fair" features so prominently in Democratic legislation, the odds are that it is economically illiterate, and this legislation doesn't disappoint.
Discrimination against women is already illegal, and employers have to give women equal pay for equal work.
What Clinton and Obama want to establish is the more nebulous concept of "comparable worth," or equal pay for different work in female- and male-dominated professions.
The Obama-endorsed bill mandates equal pay for "equivalent jobs," while Clinton's bill would establish voluntary "guidelines to enable employers to evaluate job categories" -- all in the cause of increasing wages in female-dominated jobs beyond that determined by the market.
This intervention is supposedly so urgent because women make only 77 percent of what men do.
Feminists believe that this wage gap is caused by The Man -- and that's not just a metaphor: He's really a man -- who carefully sets women's wages to keep them below that of members of the patriarchy in good standing.
Never mind that the 77-percent figure is, in the words of Hudson Institute economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth, "flawed and bogus," failing to account for the most basic variables.
We're using code
Posted by:
Economist.com | NEW YORK
Categories:
Rudy Giuliani
CHRISTOPHER ORR riffs on Rudy Giuliani's waffle over abortion in the Republican debate last night. Mr Giuliani has said he would appoint "strict constructionist" judges. And last night, he said
It would be OK to repeal [Roe v Wade]. It would be OK also if a strict constructionist judge viewed it as precedent and I think a judge has to make that decision.
Mr Orr says this is incoherent becuase "strict constructionist" is "code for pro-life". I agree that it certainly is; pro-lifers loathe the fact that judges found the right to abortion in the constitution. But is "strict constructionist" only code for pro-life? I have the impression that conservatives dislike judges finding all kinds of other things in the constitution not exactly envisioned by the framers. They think that "strict constructionists" would allow people to keep pretty much any weapon they want with no restrictions, that the federal government should be stripped of huge amounts of its regulatory power arrogated by the expansion of the "commerce clause"*, and so on. Am I wrong? And what else might "strict constructionist" be code for?
(* The constitution gives fairly little power to the federal government on paper, but the provision giving Congress the power to "regulate interstate commerce" has been used to justify gajillions of federal measures having little to do with interstate commerce. )
By chance, would intellectual arrogance fall under said definition? Is it a protected weapon? And under whose administration would it be protected?
The "Wage Gap" Hillary and Obama tout is from a NOW affiliated organization that has found the same results in various forms since their inception back in 1922. It should be pointed out their research has never survived independent replication and has been strongly discredited as a farce.
If David Duke came out with a study saying Black People make more money would you believe him or your lying eyes? Especially if you found out David Duke's study (and I am being hypothetical here) equated a Rap Singer's wealth vs. an office manager. See the way the study can be skewed? The feminazis do the same but then again, I would expect anyone but a fool (Obama) and a feminazi (Hillary) to know the difference between propaganda and reality.
The American Association of University Women (AAUW) is the name of the NOW affiliate putting out these trash studies. Small wonder Basu and other feminazis leave out the full name of this sham organization.
Hillary will continue to show her true feminazi leanings as we go through this campaign season. I can't wait to find out which restaurants in Iowa start giving a discount to women to make up for their "wage gap" so I can avoid those restaurants.
Edwards continues try to pander his poverty message that is about 40 years too old. He's stuck in Viet Nam with a serious case of Viet Nam disease.
This is from RealClearPolitics.
May 7, 2007
Edwards' Poverty of Information
Posted by TOM BEVAN
I'm not cynical enough to question John Edwards' commitment to addressing the issue of poverty, but it certainly doesn't reflect well that he's been working almost exclusively on the issue for the last two years as the head of the newly established Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina but didn't realize that one of the proposals he's pushing has already been a pilot program at HUD for over a decade and has generated mixed results at best:
If there is a personal imprint on Edwards's plan, it is his argument for reducing racial and economic segregation -- that, as he put it in one speech, "if we truly believe that we are all equal, then we should live together, too."
To achieve this, Edwards proposes doing away with public housing projects and replacing them with 1 million rental vouchers, to disperse the poor into better neighborhoods and suburbs, closer to good schools and jobs.
The idea sounds bold, but it faces a deflating reality:
A major federal experiment conducted for more than a decade has found that dispersing poor families with vouchers does not improve earnings or school performance, leaving some economists puzzled that Edwards would make such dispersal a centerpiece of his anti-poverty program. Edwards said he was unaware of the experiment.
Later in the article reporter Alec MacGillis provides more details:
But there is extensive evidence that it is going too far to expect that replacing public housing projects with a million new vouchers will alleviate poverty.
In 1994, the Department of Housing and Urban Development launched a program called Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing, under which 1,820 families living in public housing in five cities were given housing vouchers that they were required to use in low-poverty neighborhoods.
The results startled researchers.
Most notably, the families did not fare better economically, nor did their children's school performance improve.
Duncan brought up the findings at Edwards's November 2005 symposium; according to a transcript, no one responded.
It would be a gaffe for any politician to unknowingly propose an idea that's already in place as a government program, but it's even more embarrassing and less forgivable when it's a person who has spent the last couple of years devoted to a particular issue and makes that issue the centerpiece of their campaign for President of the United States.
It would be a gaffe for any politician to unknowingly propose an idea that's already in place as a government program, but it's even more embarrassing and less forgivable when it's a person who has spent the last couple of years devoted to a particular issue and makes that issue the centerpiece of their campaign for President of the United States.
Women voters shun Liberal/Socialist Segolene Royal
By Kerstin Gehmlich Reuters -(Reuters)
Liberal Socialist Segolene Royal failed to win over a majority of women voters in France's presidential election and may have paid a price for focusing too much on her gender at the expense of promoting her policies.
Only 48 percent of women voted for the liberal Royal, while 52 percent supported rightist rival and overall winner Nicolas Sarkozy.
The weak female support is a bitter personal blow for the liberal, Royal, who had played up her feminist credentials throughout the campaign, frequently defending policies she would want "as a mother" and accusing critics of male chauvinism.
"The reason she did not have the female vote is not because there was no solidarity but because she was not up to it," said Tita Zeitoun, founder of the Action de Femme group which fights to get more women into top business positions.
"Just because you're a feminist, you don't vote for a women who does not have the ability. We're talking about the presidential election here ... It's too serious to link this to a phenomenon of femininity or feminism," she said.
Royal had campaigned on leftist economic plans, including an increase in the minimum wage. She also pledged to make France a fairer place, saying she would promote the equal treatment of men and women and to fight violence against women.
Even the liberals in France weren't enticed to vote for the latest liberal even though she proposed a 20% in the minimum wage!! How high do our liberals wish it to go?
"Just because you're a feminist, you don't vote for a women who does not have the ability. We're talking about the presidential election here ... It's too serious to link this to a phenomenon of femininity or feminism," she said.
Royal had campaigned on leftist economic plans, including an increase in the minimum wage.
She also pledged to make France a fairer place, saying she would promote the equal treatment of men and women and to fight violence against women.
Born within six months of each other, Sarkozy (French conservative)and Merkel (German conservative, and a woman, by the way) are outsiders who overcame strong opposition from within their own parties to reach the pinnacle of European politics -- she as a pastor's daughter from communist East Germany and he as the son of a Hungarian immigrant who fled communism.
The two conservatives are united in their support for closer ties with Washington and in their opposition to Turkey's bid to join the EU -- clear departures from the stances of their predecessors Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder.
Both are advocates of reforming the European welfare state.
John Edwards: Union man
John Edwards believes a new labor movement is the answer to the country's great divide. Should corporate America be afraid of him?
by Nina Easton, Fortune Washington bureau chief May 7 2007: 5:53 AM EDT
(Fortune Magazine) -- No one was paying much attention to John Edwards in February 2006, when a historic contest for control of Congress was getting underway and the 2008 presidential race was still a sliver of light on the horizon.
But Danny Glover was.
At the time, Glover was the veteran of poverty politics; Edwards was still a rookie in training.
So Glover, who prides himself on his ability to sniff out poseurs and users, warily scrutinized the carefully coifed politician from North Carolina. "There's real humility and false humility," Glover says. Which was Edwards?
The rich lawyer with the soft Southern accent bonded comfortably with this unseen servant class.
Here was a man, too, who was discovering the key to his second presidential bid.
That three-day campaign for the hearts of America's hotel workers was at the center of a broader two-year process that transformed Edwards into the 2008 race's chief proponent of a hotly contentious view - that America's economic salvation lies in millions more Americans paying union dues.
Edwards brings to the contest a core belief that expanding organized labor - which now accounts for just 12 percent of the workforce, down from 20 percent in the early 1980s - is the way to reduce poverty, expand the middle class, narrow the nation's income gap and make globalization less painful.
"The difference between union and non-union is literally the difference between poverty and middle class," Edwards told Fortune.
Courting the labor vote is standard procedure for Democratic presidential candidates, but Edwards goes well beyond the usual union-friendly rhetoric; he has aggressively lobbied on behalf of legal changes to make it easier for labor to organize.
The testimonials have already begun: "I'm 61, and in my lifetime I don't recall any candidate for President who articulated a belief not just that unions are good, but that they are necessary for what ails society," says John Wilhelm, president of the apparel, textile and hospitality workers' union Unite Here.
That three-day campaign for the hearts of America's hotel workers was at the center of a broader two-year process that transformed Edwards into the 2008 race's chief proponent of a hotly contentious view - that America's economic salvation lies in millions more Americans paying union dues.
---
I don't recall any candidate for President who articulated a belief not just that unions are good, but that they are necessary for what ails society,"
An unabashed admirer of America, Sarkozy, 52, had a special message for the United States, which has had troubled relations with France under President Jacques Chirac, who led international opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq.
"I'd like to appeal to our American friends to say that they can count on our friendship," he said.
Edwards Discusses Time at Hedge Fund
May 8 04:17 PM US/Eastern
By NEDRA PICKLER
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - AP Video
Democrat John Edwards said Tuesday that he worked for a hedge fund between presidential campaigns to learn about financial markets and their relationship to poverty—and to make money too.
Asked if he had to join a hedge fund to learn about financial markets, Edwards replied, "How else would I have done it?"
Presented with the suggestion that he could have taken a university class instead, he said, "That's true."
"It was primarily to learn, but making money was a good thing, too," the 2004 vice presidential nominee said
Hedge funds, traditionally cater to the rich.
Fortress was the single biggest employer of Edwards donors during the first three months of the year.
Donors who listed "Fortress" as their employer contributed $67,450 to Edwards' campaign and supporters who identified their employer as "Fortress Investment Group" gave $55,200 to the campaign, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Edwards said it's fair to ask questions about whether there is a contradiction between campaigning against poverty while working for a hedge fund designed to make rich people richer.
C'EST SI BON
by Ann Coulter
May 9, 2007
I'm off to Paris! I hereby revoke every churlish remark I've ever made about those lovely Gallic people. (But in light of former New Jersey governor and current "gay American" Jim McGreevey's latest career move, I redouble everything I've ever said about the Episcopalians.)
With Nicolas Sarkozy's decisive victory as the new president of France, the French have produced their first pro-American ruler since Louis XVI.
In celebration of France's spectacular return to Western civilization, I bought a Herve Leger dress on Monday, and we're having croissants for breakfast every day this week. This delicate French pastry, by the way, is in the shape of a crescent to commemorate the Crusaders' victory over Islam. Aren't the French just peachy?
"Sarkozy the American," as he is known in France, called Muslim rioters "scum." Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
He explained his position on Muslim immigrants in France, saying: "Nobody has to, I repeat, live in France. But when you live in France, you respect its rules. That is to say that you are not a polygamist. ... One doesn't practice female genital mutilation on one's daughters, one doesn't slit the throat of the sheep, and one respects the republican rules."
Sarko never issued an apology or entered rehab. To the contrary, he said: "I called some individuals that I refuse to call 'youth' by the name they deserve. ... I never felt that by saying 'scum' I was being vulgar, hypocritical or insincere."
Is there a single American politician who would speak so clearly without then apologizing to Howard Dean?
It looks like the Democrats are going to have to drop their talking point about Bush irritating the rest of the world. Evidently not as much as Muslim terrorists irritate the rest of the world. The politicians who hate Bush keep being dumped by their own voters.
At the Democratic presidential debate a few weeks ago, B. Hussein Obama carped that Bush had "alienate(d) the world community" and vowed that he would build "the sort of alliances and trust around the world that has been so lacking over the last six years."
Democrats are terrific at building alliances. Remember how Jimmy Carter won the love of the world by ditching our ally the Shah of Iran, allowing him be replaced by a string of crazy ayatollahs? Since then, we haven't heard a peep from that area of the world.
The smartest woman in the world sniped that she would "create alliances instead of alienation."
Yes, it was spellbinding how her husband charmed North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung and his sociopathic son Kim Jong Il by showering them with visits from Jimmy Carter and gifts from love-machine Madeleine Albright. And that was that: No more trouble from North Korea!
As I understand it, the center of the supposedly America-hating world is France. But now it turns out even the French don't hate America as much as liberals do.
Au contraire! (We can say that again!) Our Georgie is the most popular American with the French since Jerry Lewis.
All over the civilized world, voters are turning terrorist-coddling liberals out of office and voting for politicians friendly toward Bush, the world's sworn enemy of Islamic fascism.
Those foreign leaders so admired by Democrats for hating George Bush and loving Saddam Hussein are being replaced by rulers who pledge their friendship to the United States.
Retrospectively, B. Hussein Obama's answer about our most important ally being "the European Union" may eventually become true, thanks to Bush's ceaseless ally-making.
In Germany, pro-American Angela Merkel crushed the mincing anti-American chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in 2005.
Last year, conservatives swept Canada, making Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper the prime minister. I haven't loved Canadians this much since the New York Rangers won the Stanley Cup.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard is both the longest-serving Australian prime minister and — by his own account — the most conservative. As The New York Times rooted for his defeat in 2004, claiming Australians were furious with him for his support of the Iraq war, he won a historic third term.
Along with Howard, Bush's staunchest ally in the war on terrorism has been Britain's Labor Party leader Tony Blair. He's about to leave office — only to be replaced by a leader from the even more pro-American Conservative Party.
American celebrities who threaten to move out of the country every election rather than live under a conservative leader are running out of countries to move to.
Only Spain remains a nation of women. As long as Spain exists, it will not outlive the shame of its gutless capitulation to terrorist bombings in 2004. It is worse than Sweden's neutrality toward Hitler.
But France! Until this week, France seemed a less likely place to find someone who supports America than a meeting of Democrats.
Apparently, even the French prefer Western civilization to clitorectomy-performing, car-burning savages.
The Democratic Party is now officially the only organization on Earth that does not take the threat of Islamic fascism seriously. Between the Democrats and the media, America has gone from its usual position as the world's last hope to radical Islam's last hope.
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