PK'S NOTE: OMG, using children for political gain anyone? Politicizing the tragic murder of children by an insane man? They won't let a good crisis go to waste, quote unquote.

The White House has invited children for President Barack Obama's gun control roll out, which is scheduled for tomorrow.

"Tomorrow the president and vice president will hold an event, here at the White House, to unveil a package with concrete proposals to reduce gun violence and prevent future tragedies like the one in Newtown, Connecticut," announced spokesman Jay Carney. "They will be joined by children from around the country who wrote the president letters in the wake of that tragedy, expressing their concerns about gun violence and school safety, along with their parents."

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-invites-children-gun-control-roll-out_696042.html

Obama owns the debt now

President Obama, the Democrats, and plenty of Republicans in Congress, would like it if you'd spend the next few weeks talking about gun control. That's because when you are, you're not talking about the country's financial situation.

And, as the graph included here, taken from OMB budget data, illustrates, the situation is dire. Spending keeps going up. Revenues, however, are not. And, since we're borrowing the difference, President Obama has what Politico is calling a debt problem: "The staggering national debt — up about 60% from the $10 trillion Obama inherited when he took office in January 2009 — is the single biggest blemish on Obama's record, even if the rapid descent into red began under President George W. Bush. Obama has long emphasized Bush's role in digging the immense hole. But he owns it now."
Well, things did start to go south under Bush. But look at that graph more closely. In 2003, when we invaded Iraq (one of those "two wars on the credit card" that Obama likes to blame for the debt), and when we passed the Bush tax cuts (the other thing Obama likes to blame for the debt) revenue actually started to climb. The revenue and spending lines start to converge, and, as they head up to 2006 it actually looks as if the two might cross, with revenue outpacing spending.

Even the New York Times noticed, spotting unexpected increases in revenue in 2005, and in 2006 noting that a "surprising" increase in tax revenues was closing the budget gap. The heady possibility of surpluses was in the air. But -- look at the graph again -- everything changes in 2007.

What happened in 2007? The financial crisis hadn't struck yet. But we did elect a new Democratic Congress, with Democrats controlling both houses for the first time in over a decade. The trend immediately reversed, and became much worse with President Obama's election in 2008 and inauguration in 2009. (In fact, despite talk of "wars on the credit card," we could save a lot of money by cutting defense spending back to where it was in 2007.)

So does that mean that the ballooning debt is all Obama's fault? No. Most of those spending bills got Republican votes, too. But it does mean that, as Politico notes, Obama now owns the 60% increase in the debt that has occurred on his watch, and can no longer credibly blame Bush (under whom plenty of Democrats voted for spending bills).

Economist Herbert Stein observed that something that can't go on forever, won't. The United States can't go on forever increasing its debt by 60% every four years. Therefore, it won't. The only question is how things will stop -- smoothly or catastrophically.

As we head into the next debt-ceiling debate, it's worth considering these words from a patriotic senator concerned with America's future:

"The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. . . . It is a sign that the U.S. government can't pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government's reckless fiscal policies. … Leadership means that 'the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America's debt limit."

The senator? Sen. Barack Obama, in 2006.

I wish that guy was President now.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/01/14/debt-deficit-obama-congress/1830363/

Picking Losers

Lawsuit accuses Obama Energy Department of cronyism in green energy loan program, leaked patented technology

A high-tech electric car manufacturer and its related battery manufacturer are suing the Department of Energy, alleging the department improperly denied the companies a loan and leaked patented technology to competitors.

Cause of Action, a government watchdog group, is representing XP Vehicles and Limnia Inc. in two separate lawsuits in two different courts against the Department of Energy, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, and director of the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing [ATVM] loan program Lachlan Seward.
The Department of Energy is guilty of an implied breach of contract and unconstitutional taking of private property and of violating a federal statute protecting confidential information, constitutional due process protections, and the Administrative Procedures Act, the plaintiffs allege.

Dan Epstein, executive director of Cause of Action, said XPV was an “innovative start-up company” with the potential to reshape the American automobile market that had suffered “severe due process violations” at the hands of the government.

XPV had developed an all-electric powered car that used “polymer plastics and skinned expanded foam pressure membranes to replace metal doors, body panels, hoods, and roofs on a lightweight alloy frame,” according to the complaint filed in the Court of Federal Claims. The car was designed to be extremely light and affordable.

The ATVM loan program was ideal for XPV and Limnia as it allows the government to take “very high risks” on innovative companies who would have trouble accessing capital in the market, Epstein said.
XPV applied for an ATVM loan late in 2008 and Limnia in early 2009. The DOE’s “own Excel comparison matrices … placed XPV in the top 5 percent of all applicants,” the complaint states.

XPV’s loan was delayed and eventually denied despite assurances that the loan application was on track. Limnia’s loan was denied just over two months after it applied.

ATVM loan recipients Fisker Automotive and Tesla Motors received special help from the Department of Energy on their applications, with Fisker getting free use of DOE conference rooms and “extraordinary access to DOE staff time,” according to the complaint. Fisker has since experienced financial and supply-chain troubles that have delayed its manufacturing.

Fisker and Tesla received help and ultimately their loans because they were politically connected to the government, the suit alleges.

XPV and Limnia sought explanations from the DOE after their loan applications were denied.
According to the complaint, the explanations the department provided are inadequate and misleading. For example, the department cited the fact that XPV’s all-electric SUV did not use E85 gasoline as one reason for denying its application.

The DOE’s decision was “arbitrary and capricious” and in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, Epstein said.

XPV and Limnia argue that their applications’ denial along with the success of their competitors’ applications demonstrates political cronyism.

“In truth, DOE’s ATVM Loan Program was nothing more than a veil for political officials to steer hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to government cronies, including Tesla and Fisker,” states the complaint.
The Department of Energy did not return a request for comment.

XPV and Limnia also allege that the Department of Energy leaked their patented technology to competitors General Motors and Ford.

XPV and Limnia transferred so-called “protected information” to the Department of Energy through Sandia National Laboratories multiple times between 2002 and 2009. The information included patented energy-storage and pressure membrane technology. The department was bound by law to keep this information confidential.

Nevertheless, an XPV representative touring Sandia in September 2008 spotted a presentation for General Motors that incorporated Limnia’s energy-storage technology.

“When Sandia scientists Chris Moen and Daniel Dedrick were informed of this discovery, they admitted that there might be ‘a problem with that’ and suggested XPV and Limnia contact GM for a ‘partnership’ so that ‘there was no acrimony,’” the suit states.

A Sandia spokesman said Sandia does not discuss “pending litigation as a matter of policy.”

XPV and Limnia also discovered late last year that Ford had incorporated their patented technology into its own plans without their knowledge. The DOE is “the only plausible conduit through which Ford obtained” Limnia and XPV’s patented and legally protected information, according to the suit.

Ford received $5.907 billion in loans from the DOE, more than 70 percent of the total amount loaned through the ATVM program.

GM did not return a request for comment.

The loans were competitively awarded, Ford spokeswoman Christin Baker said.

“Ford and Nissan were among the first companies selected to participate in the DOE program after meeting a stringent financial viability test. Ford entered into a loan agreement with DOE in 2009 and the company will pay back the entirety of this loan—with interest,” she wrote in an email to the Free Beacon.

William Yeatman, an energy policy expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said the lawsuit illustrates the dangers of cronyism.

“Whenever the government engages in industrial policy (i.e., whenever the government tries to create industries out of whole cloth, like the ‘green energy’ industry), politics invariably corrupts the process,” Yeatman wrote in an email.

Citing Peter Schweizer’s book Throw Them All Out, Yeatman noted “$16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted by the stimulus-created loan guarantee program ‘went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers.’”

Cause of Action’s Epstein said the lawsuit shows “what happens when you have the government picking winners and losers.”

Limnia and XPV were an “ambitious small business enterprise effectively being destroyed by the federal government,” he said.

http://freebeacon.com/picking-losers/

No Impact from Head Start

Since its creation in 1965, Head Start, the federal program designed to provide comprehensive child development services to low-income preschoolers, has cost American taxpayers almost $200 billion. Now, in a December 21 Friday night document dump, the Department of Health and Human Services made public the results of an Impact Study completed in 2008.

The verdict: a program set up to give disadvantaged kids a boost before they hit kindergarten has not only squandered billions, but any gains made by three and four year olds virtually disappeared by the time the little ones entered school. According to Fox News:

Not only were the third-grade evaluation results poor, so was the department's handling of the study. HHS sat on the results for four years. All that time, taxpayers were kept in the dark while their tax dollars continued to fund a completely ineffective program.

HHS had finished collecting all the data in 2008. Despite persistent prodding by members of Congress, the Department did not make the report (coyly dated October 2012) public until the Friday before Christmas. The timing couldn't have been better if your goal is to get minimal attention.

Surely HHS was not eager to release yet another report showing that the feel-good Head Start program doesn't work. But numbers don't lie.

The third-grade follow-up study found that access to Head Start had no statistically measurable effects on cognitive ability, including numerous measures of reading, language and math ability.

The evaluation also examined the program's effect on social-emotional development. It found that children in the 4-year-old group actually reported worse peer relations in third grade than their non-Head Start counterparts.

In his 2008 third presidential debate Obama told the moderator he would get rid of "giveaways" like insurance company subsidies that "don't help seniors get better... I want to go through the federal budget line by line, programs that don't work, we cut."

If the newly elected President meant what he said why did HHS led by Kathleeen Sebelius not only hide a report for four years but pour $2.1 billion dollars of stimulus monies into Head Start and Early Head Start in 2009 -- a year after the data had been compiled?

Just recently another $100 million to Head Start was included in the Hurricane Sandy relief bill. The learning program's failure to achieve its goal of preparing low-income children for elementary school and closing the achievement gap for poor students has not deterred our government from funding this travesty.

Why should they? "It's for the children" has been a very lucrative marketing ploy for liberal Democrats. Progressives have amassed gobs of money using the underclasses as bait.

In the early 1970's at the time Marian Wright Edelman, an enthusiastic supporter of Head Start, set up the Children's Defense Fund, she openly admitted progressives like herself had gotten all the mileage they could out of "racial justice" issues, so it was time to target the children.

From David Horowitz's Discover the Networks:

When you talked about poor people or black people you faced a shrinking audience... I got the idea that children might be a very effective way to broaden the base for change.

Almost 50 years later, Edelman, Obama and their progressive ilk have created an endless network of entitlements to keep themselves in business while they have enslaved taxpayers and held us hostage to a socialist welfare state.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/01/no_impact_from_head_start.html

A Conspiracy So Immense

Column: What will it take for the mainstream media to cover the progressive movement?

Let’s pretend that in the spring of 2012 Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, John Engler of the Business Roundtable, Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity, and Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association began to organize an assembly of right-leaning groups.

Let’s pretend that in the months since there had been not one but two meetings where these luminaries joined with representatives of Christians United For Israel, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Tea Party Express, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and the American Petroleum Institute to discuss strategy and promote a series of “structural reforms” that would make it easier for them to advance conservative goals in Congress.

Let’s pretend that by the time of the second meeting, which was held within sight of the White House, the coalition had grown to encompass some 36 different interest groups pledging millions of dollars.
How much press coverage would be devoted to this fictive cabal?

It is impossible to say. But is it not unreasonable to assume that our pretend meeting of the vast right-wing conspiracy would attract far more scrutiny than was devoted to the actual, real-life, believe-it-or-not inaugural meetings of the progressive “Democracy Initiative”? After all, no one seemed to know anything about those meetings, held in June and December 2012, until a writer for Mother Jones named Andy Kroll broke the story on Wednesday. As of this writing exactly two other people, a blogger for the Washington Monthly and a blogger for The Ed Show, have picked up Kroll’s story.

The rest of what is too generously called the “mainstream media” has not said a word. Instead the campaign finance reporter of the New York Times, who used to work at the Washington Monthly, had a long investigative piece on the various conflicts-of-interest associated with advocates of pro-growth tax and entitlement reform. (Spoiler: They’re in it for themselves.) Slate meanwhile asked the pressing question, “Why Do the Rich and Famous Always Sunbathe Topless?” Other outlets were distracted by the glitzy baubles of nomination fights and gun control. About this major story of coordination and concerted spending among powerful lobbies, however, the press had little to say.

And it is a major story. The brainchild of Michael Brune, Phil Radford, Larry Cohen, and Ben Jealous, the Democracy Initiative, according to Mother Jones’s Kroll, is “the first time so many groups teamed up to work on multiple issues not tied to an election.”

These guys have pull. Brune is the executive director of the Sierra Club and former executive director of the more radical Rainforest Action Network. Radford runs Greenpeace. Cohen is the president of the 700,000-member Communications Workers of America, “the largest telecommunications union in the world.” Jealous is the president and chief executive officer of the NAACP. Their “conversations in recent years” about the malign influence of conservative donors in politics developed into the “invite-only and off-the-record” meetings in June and December, where representatives of “30 to 35 groups” pledged “a total of millions of dollars and dozens of organizers to form a united front” on the issues of “getting big money out of politics, expanding the voting rolls while fighting voter ID laws, and rewriting Senate rules to curb the use of the filibuster to block legislation.” The most recent meeting was held at the headquarters of the 3-million-strong National Education Association, which is less than half a dozen blocks north of where President Barack Obama works.

That “total of millions of dollars” figure reported by Kroll is rather unspecific. In truth it will be difficult to determine how much money the Democracy Initiative is putting to work as long as mainstream reporters ignore the story in favor of following every microscopic action performed by Charles and David Koch and Sheldon Adelson. However, the most cursory glance at the list of groups in the Mother Jones story leads one to believe there should be at least two high numerals inserted before that “millions of dollars.”

Who showed up to the progressive retreat? Again, it is hard to say because Kroll does not divulge all of the participants. Can’t alert the enemy to your every move, I suppose. But here in alphabetical order are the groups he does mention: the AFL-CIO, the Center for American Progress, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Color of Change, Common Cause, Demos, the Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, Mother Jones (in a “non-editorial” capacity!), National People’s Action, the National Wildlife Federation, People for the American Way, the Piper Fund, Public Campaign, the Service Employees International Union, the United Auto Workers, and Voto Latino. Brune of the Sierra Club predicts there will be 50 participating organizations by spring.

Insiders might note that some of these groups were among those dropped from the Democracy Alliance—the secret consortium of progressive donors organized by George Soros and Rob McKay—when it opted for intervening directly in Democratic Party politics rather than seeding less partisan and more ideological institutions. So on some level the Democracy Initiative should be considered the Democracy Alliance’s younger and slightly less attractive sister. But it is also more than that.

The crack researchers at the Center for American Freedom tell me that totaling the reported revenue of only a portion of the groups participating in the Democracy Initiative gives you a figure of around $1.69 billion. Somewhat ironic, isn’t it, that an association of organizations with combined revenue of more than a billion dollars is launching a campaign to get “big money out of politics.” Like all such campaigns, of course, the Democracy Initiative is less about getting money out of politics than it is about getting the wrong sort of money out of politics—in this case, the sort of money dispensed by industries and ideologues opposed to the progressive agenda.

The Democracy Initiative will “target” Chevron, “which gave $2.5 million to a Super PAC backing House Republican candidates in 2012.” The Democracy Initiative will target Google “for its continued membership with the generally pro-Republican U.S. Chamber of Commerce.” The Democracy Initiative will target the American Legislative Exchange Council, an association of businesses and state-legislators that promotes conservative laws and has been under ferocious assault from liberals seeking to stigmatize its donors and thereby cause its collapse. “We’re going to put the pressure on ALEC even more,” Phil Radford of Greenpeace told Mother Jones. ALEC should consider itself warned.

And not only ALEC: The Democracy Initiative seems to be a fairly straightforward attempt to change the rules of the game so that greens and unions can push their agenda through the Senate. The logic here is that the Democrats have at least a chance of retaking the House in 2014, in which case Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) would be the only obstacle to in-your-face progressivism. Why else the emphasis on filibuster reform? It was the threat of a filibuster in 2009 and 2010 that prevented the Senate from considering the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade energy tax bill as well as the card-check legislation that would make it easier for unions to bolster their ranks and political power. Without a Republican House and the ability of minority parties to block legislation in the Senate, the chances of passing bills to amnesty illegal immigrants and raise taxes further would improve. Fighting efforts to restrict “voting rights” is a useful means of mobilizing the Democratic vote. One team is playing the long game, friends, and it is definitely not the conservative one.

What little we know of the Democracy Initiative provides a useful lesson in the ability of fantasy to inspire political action. Progressivism sets the political and cultural and social agenda; it is embedded in Hollywood, in Silicon Valley, in the academy, in journalism, and in much of corporate America; many of the richest counties in the nation support liberal Democrats; President Obama outraised and out-spent his Republican challenger; the combined budgets of progressive interest groups and foundations and think tanks and nonprofits and community organizations is practically incalculable; the most liberal president since Lyndon Baines Johnson is barreling ahead with a confrontational and ideological approach to cabinet appointments and budget fights; Republicans and conservatives are in their greatest state of shock and disarray since 1992 and perhaps since 1964; and yet progressive elites such as the well-compensated Radford of Greenpeace still are swinging at the windmill of the “40-plus-year strategy by the Scaifes, Exxons, Coors, and Kochs of the world” to “take over the country.”

Someone needs to give the members of the Democracy Initiative a tap on the shoulder, a kick in the pants, a wonk-like nudge—anything to wake them from their fantasy of being weak and isolated and besieged, anything to alert them to the fact that it is they, not “the Scaifes, Exxons, Coors, and Kochs of the world” who actually run the country and therefore ought to be covered in a diligent, scrupulous, and adversarial fashion. One thing is for sure: It won’t be the mainstream media that holds the progressive movement to account.

http://freebeacon.com/a-conspiracy-so-immense/

Is Chicago’s Out-Of-Control Murder Rate Connected to Its Sanctuary City Policies?

There are no gun shops in Chicago, so they say, but murders are on pace to hit 730 for 2013. Guns are usually the weapons that the killers choose to use.

Two teenage boys were murdered over the weekend, and guns were the weapons used by the killers. One victim, 14-year-old Rey Dorantes, was reportedly shot while sitting on the front porch of his home. Fifteen-year-old Victor Vega was reportedly walking with another male when they were approached by an armed man who opened fire, killing Vega. In separate incidents, four other people were wounded via gunfire, and all but one of them were under the age of 17. There have been 21 homicides in Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago since the start of 2013. At least 15 of the victims were shot to death, and more than half were under the age of 30. It’s not known yet whether either boy’s murder was gang related, but Chicago police believe that the majority of murders committed within the city are the result of gang wars and gang violence.

According to a story published in March 2012, Chicago’s gang-related statistics are alarming:

Chicago is home to the largest gang population in the country, Fox Chicago reported in January. The Chicago Crime Commission reports 73 active gangs with 68,000 to 150,000 gang members in the city.

Territory issues are bound to happen with such large numbers of gangs chasing after the same profit. Uptown’s Wilson and Broadway cross section exemplifies this competition
“You look at the [Latin] Kings that tried to move into the area here,” said Pat Gordon, supervisor of the Uptown neighborhood branch of ONE/CeaseFire. “It didn’t come to fruition because there were too many gangs already in the area.”

Gordon said that the intersection is a war zone between the Black P. Stones on the West and the Vice Lords on the East – two gangs that take the profitability of that corner very seriously.

The unusual alliance between the Stones and another Chicago super gang would incite tension with the Kings, who are a cousin gang of the Stones under the Peoples Nation, according to Gordon.

ONE/CeaseFire intervened before conflict escalated. The Kings returned to their turf on Lawrence and Ashland.

“Just like a business, if you can’t bring in a profit to make ends meet at the end of the day, then it’s going to fall through,” he continued.

The primary business that the gangs engage in is illegal drug trafficking. Most illegal drugs are shipped into the U.S. from outside the country, with numerous paths crossing the border from Mexico. Mexico has seen far more than its share of gang-related violence over the past few years, with an estimated 60,000 killed in the drug cartel wars there in the past few years. That number is almost surely too low, because it does not take into account many killings that have taken place on the north side of the U.S.-Mexico border. There is strong evidence that at least some law enforcement on the U.S. side downplay cartel violence in their jurisdictions in order to make their crime statistics look better, so they can get re-elected, and keep federal crime grant money flowing their way.

The United States Department of Justice began designating U.S. cities that followed certain immigration-related policies “sanctuary cities” back in the 1980s. Chicago has been a “sanctuary city” since that designation was created. “Sanctuary cities” allow law enforcement to look the other way when immigration status might come up in the course of an investigation. To put things maybe a little too simply, illegal aliens know that once they reach a sanctuary city like Chicago they are for all intents and purposes home free from questions about their immigration status. The Latin Kings, MS-13 and other gangsters can recruit and import foot soldiers south of the border and rest assured that once in Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago, the police will not query whether they are in the country legally or not. They are free to kill.
I’m not suggesting that all of Chicago’s current wave of violence is related to its sanctuary city policies. I am suggesting that some of it is, because that’s obvious. I am also suggesting that before the likes of Jesse Jackson demand “compromise” from law-abiding Americans who own guns, they should take a hard, honest look at the long-term effects of policies that they support. Sanctuary city policies exacerbate lawlessness from the border to thousands of points north. Do away with those policies and others that make our citizens and legal aliens less safe, before even thinking about cracking down on responsible Americans and their right to self-defense.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/01/14/is-chicagos-out-of-control-murder-rate-connected-to-its-sanctuary-city-policies/?singlepage=true

Liberals: The Necessary Delusion

Normally, I can't get interested in the daily liberal partisan output, but when I saw RealClearPolitics' link to Andy Kroll of Mother Jones on "Revealed: The Massive New Liberal Plan to Remake American Politics" I decided to make an exception.

Nancy Pelosi has been promising to take back the House in 2014: maybe the lefties at Mother Jones knew something I didn't know.

The "massive new liberal plan" turned out to be a meeting of all the usual suspects to commit resources and staff to a three-point plan. The plan calls for:

1. getting big money out of politics,
2. expanding the voting rolls while fighting voter ID laws, and
3. rewriting Senate rules to curb the use of the filibuster to block legislation.

Nothing new, in other words, just the usual liberal push to marginalize and demonize anyone and anything that isn't liberal.

Kroll is full of the usual rubbish about "wringing our hands over the Koch brothers" and the "40-plus-year strategy by the Scaifes, Exxons, Coors, and Kochs of the world...to take over the country."

Now I like to say that there are only five things wrong with liberal thought and politics: its cruelty, its corruption, its injustice, its waste, and its delusion. The delusion bit begins with the need for lefty-liberals like Kroll to insist that those awful Kochs and Scaifes and Exxons are trying to take over the world, so they can demonize them.

Let's stipulate that Karl Marx had a point when he worried about capitalists replacing the landed warrior class as the overlords and oppressors of the modern era. Way back then, who could tell how the power contest of the industrial era would turn out?

But the answer eventually became clear, at the very latest when the US government broke up Standard Oil a century ago. If the capitalists were really running things, why would they let the politicians smash up their capitalist corporations?

In our own time we have the recent evidence of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster. When President Obama told BP to fork out $20 billion -- before any regulatory finding or legislative action, just on his say-so -- BP merely asked whether to pay with their usual eftps.gov account. If you are not living a delusion that act has to tell you something.

This week we have the Boeing Dreamliner problem. Does Boeing tell the FAA and the flying public to go take a hike? They wouldn't dare.

The left needs the idea of vast corporate power to populate its tableau of oppression. It needs oppression to justify its lust for government power. And it needs to divide employers and employees to maintain its power.

However, advanced lefties realize that the old tableau of capitalists vs. proletarians needs freshening up. So Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their Empire-Multitude-Commonwealth trilogy declare that the capitalists are now merely surplus. In the new economy of "biopolitical production" the capitalists just get in the way of the spontaneous exchanges of the multitude, the "labor of the head and heart, including forms of service work, affective labor, and cognitive labor." Hardt and Negri call for an end of the power of both capitalists and the welfare state in favor of the spontaneity and self-governance of the multitude. But first we need a "global initiative to provide the basic means of life to all:" income, health care, and education.

Isn't it odd that a book advertising the wonders of spontaneous order among millions of "singularities" in the multitude wouldn't have one, not even one index entry for F.A. Hayek, who wrote the book on the subject.
Hardt and Negri call for revolution (of course!) to purge the "common" of its "corrupt form." They mean "the family, the corporation, and the nation."

One is reminded of Winston Churchill line that democracy was the worst form of government "except all the others that have been tried."

One day in the glorious future the history of the last century will be written as the repeated and delusional attempt by people like Andy Kroll and Hardt and Negri to force on us a society stripped of the most stunning and most beneficial forms of social cooperation ever established by settled science: the nuclear family to organize generation, the limited liability corporation to organize production and service, and the nation state to create a society based on the tie of common language rather than common blood.
It's this combination of the common in its corrupt form that got us from $1-3 to $120 per person per day in 200 years.

There will come a day when people will ask of us, as we wonder about the Romans, how could we end up so stupid, so deluded?

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/01/liberals_the_necessary_delusion.html

Liberalism Versus Blacks

There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?

San Francisco is a classic example of a city unexcelled in its liberalism. But the black population of San Francisco today is less than half of what it was back in 1970, even though the city's total population has grown.

Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. The same thing has happened in a number of other California communities dominated by liberals.

Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the level of minimum wage laws. Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment among young blacks in this country, as such laws created high unemployment rates among young people in general in European countries.

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state. Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time but most grow up with only one parent today.

Liberals have pushed affirmative action, supposedly for the benefit of blacks and other minorities. But two recent factual studies show that affirmative action in college admissions has led to black students with every qualification for success being artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with colleges for the sake of racial body count.

The two most recent books that show this with hard facts are "Mismatch" by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., and "Wounds That Will Not Heal" by Russell K. Nieli. My own book "Affirmative Action Around the World" shows the same thing with different evidence.

In all these cases, and many others, liberals take positions that make them look good and feel good -- and show very little interest in the actual consequences for others, even when liberal policies are leaving havoc in their wake.

The current liberal crusade for more so-called "gun control" laws is more of the same. Factual studies over the years, both in the United States and in other countries, repeatedly show that "gun control" laws do not in fact reduce crimes committed with guns.

Cities with some of the tightest gun control laws in the nation have murder rates far above the national average. In the middle of the 20th century, New York had far more restrictive gun control laws than London, but London had far less gun crime. Yet gun crimes in London skyrocketed after severe gun control laws were imposed over the next several decades.

Although gun control is not usually considered a racial issue, a wholly disproportionate number of Americans killed by guns are black. But here, as elsewhere, liberals' devotion to their ideology greatly exceeds their concern about what actually happens to flesh and blood human beings as a result of their ideology.

One of the most polarizing and counterproductive liberal crusades of the 20th century has been the decades-long busing crusade to send black children to predominantly white schools. The idea behind this goes back to the pronouncement by Chief Justice Earl Warren that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

Yet within walking distance of the Supreme Court where this pronouncement was made was an all-black high school that had scored higher than two-thirds of the city's white high schools taking the same test -- way back in 1899! But who cares about facts, when you are on a liberal crusade that makes you feel morally superior?

To challenge government-imposed racial segregation and discrimination is one thing. But to claim that blacks get a better education if they sit next to whites in school is something very different. And it is something that goes counter to the facts.

Many liberal ideas about race sound plausible, and it is understandable that these ideas might have been attractive 50 years ago. What is not understandable is how so many liberals can blindly ignore 50 years of evidence to the contrary since then.

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2013/01/15/liberalism-versus-blacks-n1489212/page/full/

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No joke: Obama and Karzai agree to allow the Taliban to open an office in Qatar

The Taliban confirm the new office, and are already making demands even before the Selectrics have been plugged in:

The Afghan Taliban said on Tuesday they have reached a preliminary agreement to set up a political office Qatar, and asked for the release of prisoners held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay.

New Video Game Allows Players to Murder NRA President

"A new online video game is taking political discourse to a whole new level. We already reported the death threats being received by NRA executives and now, a video game which allows users to shoot NRA President David Keene in the head, has been released. The creator of the game identified as gizmo01942 Ediot says, "Share this everywhere, especially gun-nut and anti-game websites. Also see if you can't send it in to the NRA somehow, like through the feedback on their website or something." Gizmo also provides screen shots to viewers, which can be seen below."