Category Archives: Media

UPDATED: Deadend Debates (& State Death Squads)

Constitution, Education, Ilana Mercer, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Journalism, Justice, Law, Media, Military, Political Philosophy, Reason, The Zeitgeist

Be they pundits, politicians, government watchdogs, and other dogs (no offense to the canine community), most “critics” of our ever-accreting Nanny State don’t pose the right questions. This is because they appear to lack the requisite philosophical (constitutional or other) and logical frameworks. Unless these players begin directing the arrows in their quiver at the philosophical issues—what is the proper role of the state in this republic, RIP—we will be left with the silly, “To Spend of Not to Spend” debate. (Lackluster logic is harder to fix.)

One example is this Drudge headline (click “Go Back One Page” to view actual headline): “FEDS SPEND MILLIONS STUDYING SHRIMP ON TREADMILLS?? ‘GELATIN WRESTLING’ IN ANTARCTICA??” All the screeching CAPITAL LETTERS and question marks in the world will not fill in the blanks: Is the objection to this particular spending based on considerations of frugality? Or is Drudge’s outrage over the flouting of the Constitution by Feds? A better headline would begin to steer the Idiocracy in the right, critical direction.

The founders bequeathed a central government of delegated and enumerated powers. Intellectual property laws are the only constitutional means at Congress’s disposal with which to “promote the Progress of Science.” (About their merit Thomas Jefferson, himself an inventor, was unconvinced.) The Constitution gives Congress only 18 specific legislative powers. Research and development spending—even for crucial matters as “Jell-O wrestling at the South Pole” and the “shrimp’s exercise ability”—are nowhere among them.

Rights and the Constitution aside, once we we begin to focus on the right issues and questions, the right answers will be likelier to present themselves.

Take the fuzzy discussion facilitated by Neil Cavuto, today, with two mushy-headed women about the right of a school to fine parents for pupil tardiness.

Lis Wiehl, a lawyer no less, was of one (mushy) mind with the other guest, a mother. Both believe that it’s simply unfair, in these tough times, for schools to penalize busy parents when kids are late for school.

The question here is, of course, not only about pedagogic purview; it’s about individual responsibility. Kids of a certain age ought to be responsible for their actions. Teachers are supposed to be able to enforce minimal attendance standards. If a child in high-school is tardy, he or she ought to be punished, not his parents.

But pedagogues, parents, pundits and most politicians are all-over-the-map—incapable of articulating the simple issues at hand. If thinking is so disordered and illogical, solutions will be no better. (In the last example: teachers should wait for better economic times before they fine parents for the actions of their kids.)

UPDATE (May 27): STATE DEATH SQUADS. With grim determination William N. Grigg dogs the perps in Police State America. Here they are breaking and entering and, then, killing the occupant of the invaded private property. Look at the goons! Talk about “The Myth of Posse Comitatus.” What is this if not the deployment of the US military against the people?

A YouTube poster appended an excerpt from our dead-letter Constitution: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The speedy execution of Jose Guerena (“it’s complex,” say officials) was mislabeled by our official cognoscenti. FoxNews bobbleheads debated whether this bloodbath amounted to the use of excess force, and entertained an apologist for the SWAT fucks who shed tears over the split-second decisions these, our great defenders, undertake in the course of defending us against alleged tokers.

The only relevant debate here is: whose property is it anyway? Does a man have the absolute right to defend his abode from invaders whomever, however? The only answer: “YES, YES, YES.” If you’re vaguely compos mentis, this is the only debate you should dignify.

[For those of you who await the weekly, WND.COM column: it will be back next week. I’ve been under the weather.]

European By Any Other Name

America, Europe, Journalism, Media, Socialism, The State, Welfare

The stock characters we see on TV have certain stock phrases. Triteness goes with the Talker’s territory. A variation on a theme is as follows: “We want to avoid becoming a welfare state like the European states.” Obama is “converting America into a European style social-welfare state.” This, in the teeth of a 160 percent debt to GDP, a figure easily arrived at by adding to US liabilities, not only the paltry “$14.5 trillion in federal debt,” but the $2.7 trillion in state and local debt, “plus the $6.5 trillion federal mortgage guarantees to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”

These figures, cited here, don’t, I believe, fully account for the promises made on the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security fiscal fronts.

How European is America? Peter Ferrara at Forbes.com has grappled admirably with a reality ordinarily avoided in our mummified media. “America’s welfare state is not a principality,” he writes. “It is a vast empire bigger than the entire budgets of almost every other country in the world.”

Hey, just like our military, which, as I’ve contended, “works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government.”

Back to the “welfare/entitlement empire“:

Just one program, Medicaid, cost the federal government $275 billion in 2010, which is slated to rise to $451 billion by 2018. Counting state Medicaid expenditures, this one program cost taxpayers $425 billion in 2010, soaring to $800 billion by 2018. Under Obamacare, 85 million Americans will soon be on Medicaid, growing to nearly 100 million by 2021, according to the CBO.

But there are 184 additional federal, means-tested welfare programs, most jointly financed and administered with the states. In addition to Medicaid is the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Also included is Food Stamps, now officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Nearly 42 million Americans were receiving food stamps in 2010, up by a third since November, 2008. That is why President Obama’s budget projects spending $75 billion on Food Stamps in 2011, double the $36 billion spent in 2008.

But that is not the only federal nutrition program for the needy. There is the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), which targets assistance to pregnant women and mothers with small children. There is the means tested School Breakfast Program and School Lunch Program. There is the Summer Food Service Program for Children. There are the lower income components of the Child and Adult Care Food Program, the Emergency Food Assistance Program, and the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP). Then there is the Nutrition Program for the Elderly. All in all, literally cradle to grave service. By 2010, Federal spending for Food and Nutrition Assistance overall had climbed to roughly $100 billion a year.

Then there is federal housing assistance, totaling $77 billion in 2010. This includes expenditures for over 1 million public housing units owned by the government. It includes Section 8 rental assistance for nearly another 4 million private housing units. Then there is Rural Rental Assistance, Rural Housing Loans, and Rural Rental Housing Loans. Also included is Home Investment Partnerships (HOME), Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), Housing for Special Populations (Elderly and Disabled), Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA), Emergency Shelter Grants, the Supportive Housing program, the Single Room Occupancy program, the Shelter Plus Care program, and the Home Ownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere (HOPE) program, among others.

READ ON. And don’t listen to anything that comes out of the mouths of America’s Sino– and Europhobic bobbleheads, whose grasp of reality is tenuous at best.

Steve Forbes: Johnny-Come-Lately To Gold

Debt, Economy, Elections, Federal Reserve Bank, Media, Ron Paul

The mummified media, the financial press included, called Rep. Ron Paul a lunatic when he explained again and again that “a return to the gold standard by the United States would help the nation solve a variety of economic, fiscal, and monetary ills,” created when President Richard Nixon abolished the Gold Standard.

“Such a move would help to stabilize the value of the dollar, restore confidence among foreign investors in U.S. government bonds, and discourage reckless federal spending. … With a stable currency, it is ‘much harder’ for governments to borrow excessively. … Without lax Federal Reserve System monetary policies that led to the printing of too much money, the housing bubble would not have been nearly as severe.”

You don’t say?!”

Actually, these are Steve Forbes’ words, not Paul’s. Forbes is currently singing from the Paul hymn-sheet, and it is music to the ear.

Of course, this is not to say one should embrace Paul’s political opponents, just because they’ve arrived at the correct economic conclusion, now that it’s probably too late.

Goldbugs know that gold is a necessary financial hedge in the survival on the road to serfdom.

Watch out! Gold is bad for government health. Remember Executive Order 6102? FDR, idolized by BHO and many a Republican alike—by almost all offshoots of the duopoly, in fact—forbade “the Hoarding of Gold Coin, Gold Bullion and Gold Certificates” at pains of punishment: a fine of “not more than $10,000, or “imprisoned for not more than ten years or both.”

On The Mike Church Show

Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Media, South-Africa

On Monday morning, May 9, at 8:05 ET, I will be talking to the King Dude, the one and only Mike Church. Much marginalized by the “DeceptiCONS,” as he calls the custodians of allowable opinion in contemporary America, Mike is “a man, a myth and a machine of clear Constitutional thought.”

Topics: We’ll touch on my new book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa. You can pre-order the book from the publisher. In about 10 days, it will be available from Amazon too. If you pre-order from the publisher, shipping is free, where ever you live (South Africa included).

Praise for Into the Cannibal’s Pot is here.

We will be discussing the bin laden orgy too.

I hope I am compos mentis at 5:05AM PT.