CNN's ugly trick interview with Palin

The interviewer, Drew Griffin, took a comment from Byron York, where he reported some of the complaints about Palin within a longer piece basically praising her, then tells her on camera, a conservative has written it about her. Well, true, Byron York is conservative but the reviewer has turned his words inside out and upside down to throw her off. Really foul. Or fowl, as in "chicken" since this guy didn't seem able to get her on her policies and ideas. So I wrote CNN a complaint. They replied:

This auto reply is to thank you for commenting on CNN’s 2008 Election Coverage.

While we are unable to personally reply to every e-mail, your comments are important to us, and we do read each and every one. Comments become part of the viewer response report that is prepared and made available each day to our producers and senior management.

You betcha I won't be watching and waiting. Nor will I be watching election coverage by CNN now that I've seen how they lie. It's one thing to be in bed with Obama, but it's another to make us watch the love making.

Here's Byron's assessment of Palin:

". . . a look at Palin’s 20 months in power, along with interviews with people who worked with her, shows her to be a serious executive, a governor who picked important things to do and got them done — and who didn’t just stumble into an 80 percent job-approval rating."

He then went into great detail outlining her accomplishments and challenges. But according to the CNN interview, she's just a rube from the sticks.

The Obama Money Machine--Where's it coming from, where is it going?

African Americans were asking this question even before he was the chosen one. Video of Cornel West at Tavis Smiley Presents.



Comments at "The Empire and Inequality Report" via Black Agenda Reports, where it was noted that when he doodled waiting to give his speech, he drew a picture of himself.

Obama's power-worshipping campaign book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006) - the book to which Obama refers reporters asking him for policy specifics behind his often vague statements - refers to the United States' rapacious, savagely unequal and fundamentally "materialist" capitalist economy as the nation's "greatest asset."

Audacity absurdly praises the "American system of social organization" and "business culture" on the grounds that U.S. capitalism "has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative and efficient allocation of resources" (8). It commends "the need to raise money from economic elites to finance elections" for "prevent[ing] Democrats...from straying too far from the center" and for marginalizing "those within the Democratic Party who tend toward zealotry" and "radical ideas" (like peace and justice). It praises fellow centrist Senator and presidential rival Hillary Clinton (D-NY) for embracing "the virtues of capitalism" (9) and applauds her "recognizably progressive" husband Bill Clinton for showing that "markets and fiscal discipline" and "personal responsibility [are] needed to combat poverty" (10) - an interesting reflection on the militantly corporate-neoliberal Clinton administration's efforts to increase poverty by eliminating poor families' entitlement to public cash assistance and privileging deficit reduction over social spending.

Obama's badly mis-titled book audaciously lectures poor people on their "duty" to feel "empathy" for wealthy oppressors (12) - including Bush and Cheney, who are "pretty much like everyone else"(13) - and on their need to understood how well off and "free" they are compared to their more truly miserable counterparts in Africa and Latin America (14). It deletes less favorable contrasts with Western Europe and Japan, the most relevant comparisons, where dominant norms and institutional arrangements produce significantly slighter levels of poverty and inequality than what is found in the hierarchical U.S (15).

Paul Street's article appears in Black Agenda Report --I couldn't get the link to the notes to work, put I've left in the numbers. You know how librarians swoon over bibliographies.

Headline gets it wrong

"Markets fall as fears of slump span world"No, it's fears of Obamanomics--higher taxes, more trade restrictions, more powerful unions and more environmental regulations. If you are wealthy, better to sleep on your cash in the "mattress" and sit this one out until your well-paid accountantants and lawyers can find the loopholes. Investors and money managers aren't stupid. A president like FDR who took a struggling market in 1932 and artificially inflated it with more government programs but no real job growth, extending the Depression another decade, is not building confidence. Even if Obama and the American voter haven't read history, chances are there are some out there in Japan and Germany who have.

Ode to a very bad plan
by Norma Bruce

Capitalists and Socialists alike
around the world
invested in our bad mortgages
bundled by our biggest banks
backed by our GSEs
promoted by our Congresses
protected by our Democrats
on the banking and finance committees
handing out with a wink big grants
to community organizers threatening
the writers of the mortgages
to fund the dream that
every Joe the Plumber
and each Maria the Barista
should have a PMI
they couldn't possibly afford
when the bubble burst
as all bubbles do.

Welcome University of Florida Facebook Friends

It was late when I noticed your visits (well, late for me anyway--about 9 p.m.), so maybe you've all come and gone. Look around, visit my other blogs, and my set-aside topics like family memories and poetry. I also have a special collection on finances, something you might want to consider as you prepare to launch yourselves to change the world. And thanks for the uptick on the stats!

Does Obama include himself in the draft proposal?

"But it’s also important that a president speaks to military service as an obligation not just of some, but of many. You know, I traveled, obviously, a lot over the last 19 months. And if you go to small towns, throughout the Midwest or the Southwest or the South, every town has tons of young people who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s not always the case in other parts of the country, in more urban centers. And I think it’s important for the president to say, this is an important obligation. If we are going into war, then all of us go, not just some."
Link

It's bad enough that the military has been forced to be a laboratory test tube for gender equality. Apparently he forgets that these young people have chosen to enlist, since we have an all volunteer, outstanding military. Young people in metropolitan areas have the same opportunity. And has he ever really looked at the data? Is he aware that rural schools have higher graduation rates than the city schools of Detroit or Cleveland or Columbus, and our military requires people of higher achievement? There are probably 25 year olds in the military who have more "leadership/executive" experience than he does. Does he know that the young people in the military are better educated and wealthier than a comparable group of young people in the civilian population? Or is he just again showing his elitist, liberal, smug opinion of people who choose to serve in the military, combined with his "clinging to guns and religion" bias toward fly-over country Americans.

. . . each year shows advancement, not decline, in measurable qualities of new enlistees. For example, it is commonly claimed that the military relies on recruits from poorer neighborhoods because the wealthy will not risk death in war. Our review of Pen­tagon enlistee data shows that the only group that is lowering its participation in the military is the poor. The percentage of recruits from the poorest American neighborhoods (with one-fifth of the U.S. population) declined from 18 percent in 1999 to 14.6 percent in 2003, 14.1 percent in 2004, and 13.7 percent in 2005.

. . . in the most recent edition of Population Representation in the Military Services, the Department of Defense reported that the mean reading level of 2004 recruits is a full grade level higher than that of the comparable youth population.[8] Fewer than 2 percent of wartime recruits have no high school creden­tials. Table 2 shows the breakdown for the educational attainment of the war­time recruit cohorts. The national high school graduation rate taken from the Census 2004 ACS is 79.8 percent." Link "Who are the recruits?"

Opposing evil and doing good are essential obligations

"Some argue that we should not focus on policies that provide help for pregnant women, but just focus on the essential task of establishing legal protections for children in the womb. Others argue that providing lifeaffirming support for pregnant women should be our only focus and this should take the place of efforts to establish legal protections for unborn children. We want to be clear that neither argument is consistent with Catholic teaching. Our faith requires us to oppose abortion on demand and to provide help to mothers facing challenging pregnancies."
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

"Barack Obama and John McCain differ on many important issues about which reasonable people of goodwill, including pro-life Americans of every faith, disagree: how best to fight international terrorism, how to restore economic growth and prosperity, how to distribute the tax burden and reduce poverty, etc.

But on abortion and the industrial creation of embryos for destructive research, there is a profound difference of moral principle, not just prudence. These questions reveal the character and judgment of each man. Barack Obama is deeply committed to the belief that members of an entire class of human beings have no rights that others must respect."
Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Princeton University

Joe Biden My Time

USAToday finally mentioned his speech warning us that Obama would be tested (he did this in 2 planned speeches, so I guess it doesn't qualify as a gaffe, which is usually unplanned) on 5A today (5 days after the fact), but they never quoted him or gave any details. The reporter only referred to "test" predicted by Biden, assuming I suppose that there was no need to report his alarming message. In the same article, the writer devoted 2 paragraphs to McCain's World Series comments.

Then I turned the page to 6A and at the bottom there was a tiny article on Palin

The Alaska governor raised the idea of a "looming crisis" in response to Democratic rival Joe Biden's remark at week-end fundraisers that obama would face a generated crisis within 6 months of taking office.

Well, yes, Palin did respond, but he's the one who caused the puzzlement--is he just a gossip and is reporting what he's been told? Does he think our 7 years of no attacks under Bush has been a fluke? I still didn't see any mention in WSJ, although James Taranto covers it in the online version.

I truly think Joe Biden is a scary dude! On the one hand, he seems to be saying negative things about his running mate, but on the other he appears to also be stupid, and this from the party that is so critical of Palin's intelligence and abilities. And on the flip side, McCain doesn't seem to know what to do with this--maybe he and his writers were as stunned by stupid as everyone else and haven't found an appropriate response.

The Education Debate--the transcript

Last night the candidates had stand-ins at Teachers College, Columbia University to debate their positions on education. This is a rough draft.

"Your opening question is how would Barack Obama differ from John McCain as an education president?"

The Obama representative LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND after saying we need more investment in early childhood education and healthcare and teachers’ salaries says: “So we have fallen to 35th in the world in Math, to 15th in terms of college access. And we are at a graduation rate that has been stagnant for 40 years, and others are pulling ahead.”

Call me crazy, but I think we’re talking content here, not healthcare. Drill, drill, drill is probably what's working in those other countries. And concerned parents. The best example is Cleveland and Columbus that have lower graduation rates than the district of the family in Appalachia (DeRolph v. State of Ohio) that sued the state for more per-pupil money (and won) a few years back. Now they have more computers and nicer buildings, but it didn't change the outcomes--which were already better than the big city schools because of parent involvement, not healthcare, not buildings. Now the increased property taxes they have to pay to keep up the schools is hurting their communities.

The McCain representative LISA GRAHAM KEEGAN points out McCain's support for charter schools in a bipartisan effort that included Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich and that Obama opted out of the effort, although he himself had been sent to private schools by his single mother, something Democrats deny other people‘s children.

I think the strongest case for charter or scholarship schools is that liberals, even in good districts like Springfield, VA (DC suburb) choose private schools for their kids. These schools recruit a very select, acceptable “diversity” element to look good. Keeps out the riff raff their kids might face in public school. What stops them is they are joined at the hip with teachers' unions.

Here’s the transcript, and I think the moderator was much too talky, so maybe it’s good that I didn’t get the audio (I think you can register to hear it).

Sexy Criminals

I didn't remember what Bernadine Dohrn looked like, but one of my coffee shop friends who eats a cinnamon roll every day and is a decade younger than me told me she was "hot," 'cause he remembered. He grew up in working class Philly and says that in the 60s when he was in a rock band and would pick a girl up for a date, she would either start taking her clothes off in the car, or start rolling a joint. So I guess he had an eye for "hot." Today she's just another old lady with a past, but does look good in the preview below. Here's a review of The Weather Underground, and I suppose you can get it at your public library, since they really go for that sort of thing. Barack, btw, wasn't 8 years old in 1995 when he sought out Ayers as a mentor for his career in Chicago politics. This review is from NYT which really digs the fun stuff of terrorism and calls it smart and solid, now that 9/11 has faded a bit from memory.

''THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND,'' directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel (unrated, 92 minutes). This documentary tells the story of the Weathermen, a splinter group from Students for a Democratic Society. This terrifically smart and solid piece of filmmaking lets the former members of the Weathermen, now on the downside of their 50's, speak into the camera and reveal a bit of their personal histories as well as what the peace movement meant to them. The documentary is also packed with some of the most powerful images of violence of the period, like a bound Vietnamese being shot in the head at point-blank range and the bloody bed of the Black Panther Fred Hampton after he was killed. Voluble and charismatic, the film's stars -- the members of the group determined to overthrow what they considered to be a criminal United States government that waged the Vietnam War and targeted groups like the Black Panthers -- spent a lot of time in the media spotlight. Young, white and articulate, figures like Bernadette Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Brian Flanagan and Naomi Jaffe were clearly very sexy criminals. That exuberance and incentive has been captured by the directors. Mr. Green and Mr. Siegel have made a film of passions, and they establish a context that shows what a turbulent period the late 1960's were, slyly contrasting the peace-and-love vibe with events of the time. The film doesn't let its subjects off the hook, despite apparent sympathies toward their politics (Mitchell). The preview.

Why Obama never mentions the Annenberg Challenge

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, $49 million recruited by Bill Ayers, another $98 million added by the city, "(CAC) was an abject failure - their own research, which [Ken] Rolling recently tried to prevent the public from seeing - concluded the effort had "no effect" on student outcomes; and, of course, while sharing a fox hole with the unapologetic former terrorist Bill Ayers in the Chicago School Wars is harmless if one is planning, as Obama was at the time, on stepping into the shoes of the late black Mayor, Harold Washington, it is altogether a different matter when one is running for President of the United States." Global Labor and Politics

Chicago received $49 million from a $500 million endowment by Walter H. Annenberg, the billionaire publisher, for school reform efforts nationwide, and the city added $98 million in matching funds for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a philanthropic campaign that financed enrichment projects at a third of the city’s 600 schools.

Mr. Obama was nominated to the Challenge board and was elected chairman in 1995, said Ken Rolling, executive director of the group, which operated through 2001. Mr. Obama continued to teach law during his five-year unpaid tenure as board chairman, and he was twice elected to the Illinois Senate. NYT

I'm not sure why earlier in the NYT article the writer claims there's been a turn around, because I checked the annual reports and data sets of Catalyst Chicago, and although there were some improved teachers salaries, and some interesting things in non-red tape schools, I didn't see much else to write home about blog about.

And that's how silly you sound to value-life people. Barack Obama is deeply committed to the belief that

1. members of an entire class of human beings have no rights that others must respect


2. the smallest and most vulnerable members of the human family can be denied the basic protection of the laws


3. judges should be appointed who will support Roe v. Wade and even expand it


4. the grisly practice of partial-birth abortion is moral and right


5. a baby who survives abortion is not entitled to comfort care as she dies


6. making moral decisions about life "is above my pay grade"


7. the production of human embryos for use in scientific experimentation is not immoral


8. federal money to fund an alternative to embryonic stem cell research should be opposed.

All the above have been documented in his voting record.

Christians who think Obama's social policies will reduce the demand for abortion need to look again. Government never reduces poverty--it just expands the definition and broadens the base, taxing you more so there's less of a gap. We have far more programs in place than ever existed in the 1960s and 1970s, yet the abortion carnage continues in the millions in spite of welfare, WIC, S-CHIP, housing subsidies, school breakfasts, school lunches, summer lunches, Medicaid and a multitude of religious and non-profit organizations.

See Public Discourse

Elders to get a cost of living raise--maybe

The government giveth, the government taketh away.

KNOXVILLE, Tenn (WVLT) -- Social security checks are going up $63 a month for the typical retiree.

Nancy Walker, 87, lives in subsidized housing.
The additional $63 a month in Social Security will cause her to lose benefits.

"Means I'm gonna pay more for rent for one thing," Grace Lindsey says.
It will cost her rent to increase because her income's going up, her food stamps will decrease and she may not continue to receive 20% off Medicaid.

For all of you looking forward to Medicare, (health care and social security dwarf war costs), I had a better deal when I was working. I don't think Obama can make good his promises by just taxing the rich, so if that's your reason, think again. The Democrats took care of that last year by refusing to look into fraud in Fannie and Fred. Now the rich he wanted to tax are showing losses big time.

So, next? Step up, folks, it's just patriotic.

HT Dr. Helen.

My thoughts exactly

Yesterday I was browsing a number of college-campus, liberal websites. What handsome, adorable young people. And so bright, talented, and apparently, well-heeled. Far more so than my generation. Just like that houseful of students that invaded Columbus to steal our election during voter golden week. Much more fashionably dressed and better teeth than even the college students I used to hire in the 80s. Their parents have worked hard for them--private schools, braces and dermatologists--the best our capitalist system could buy. They are truly the spiritual children of the 1960s radicals, like Diana Oughton of Illinois whose headless body with both hands missing was found in the rubble of that Greenwich Village townhouse in March 1970 with Terry Robbins' torso, the guy from Kent State. They had enough explosives to blow up the city block, but only killed three of their own Weather People, a group founded by Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn. The unrepentant Ayers who say they didn't do enough to bring down the USA so they went into education.

Browsing the CampusProgressive.org site I noticed a review of the latest book about President Nixon, a man I never liked and never voted for, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. However, he did significantly change our relationship with Communist China and the USSR, so I'm not sure why he isn't an icon of the left. Oh well, who can fathom them? In the review I noticed this conclusion--arrived at from a different angle than my own--but everything the left wanted in the 60s they got. The right can only plug the dike from time to time but the steady stream of their views washes over us constantly.

While his electoral strategy remains popular, the success of Nixon’s ideology remains an open question. The burning issues of the 1960’s—civil rights, women’s rights, and the political agency of young people—have resulted perhaps not in complete triumph for the left, but the left’s vision has prevailed.

The whole anti-war thing, then as now, was just an excuse to get drunk, do drugs and burn a few flags before getting down to business. The problem we face in the 21st century is not the specter of a growing right wing (i.e. popularity of talk radio of Hugh Hewitt and Rush Limbaugh, according to these easily offended youngsters), but that today's students have to stretch and bend the edges and the constitution that much more than their baby boomer parents and college faculty did at the same age. They all want to out-do Dad and Mom in being big, bad liberals.

The Education Debate

Last night the Obama and McCain advisors on education had a debate. Anyone see it? Will the video, for which you had to register, be made available to the general public?

For Obama
A former public school teacher [2 years in the early 70s], Linda Darling-Hammond, Palo Alto, Calif. is a leading researcher on how improving teacher quality helps student achievement, particularly for low-income children. A Yale graduate who earned her doctorate at Temple University, she has taught at Stanford since 1998. She led the redesign of Stanford’s Teacher Education Program to better prepare teachers to work in schools with diverse student populations. She and other professors helped found a charter school in Palo Alto, and she serves as vice president of the Stanford nonprofit that runs the school. Some education reformers have criticized her negative assessment of Teach for America, a popular program that puts recent college graduates in struggling schools after a few weeks of training. Darling-Hammond has said that no matter how bright and enthusiastic, a beginning teacher needs to have extensive training and certification. In 2005, she led a study that concluded certified teachers consistently produced stronger student achievement than Teach for America recruits in Houston.

For McCain
A one-time speech pathologist, Lisa Graham Keegan, Scottsdale, Ariz. began working on education policy issues as a state legislator and in 1994, was elected to the first of two terms as Arizona’s state schools superintendent. After helping to create a controversial test that set tougher academic standards for high school graduation, she took the entire test herself and posted her passing scores. Keegan, who has a master’s degree in communication disorders from Arizona State University, has served on education policy teams for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Soon after she joined the Education Leaders Council in 2001, the group amassed more than $33 million in federal grants for a program to help states and school districts meet the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The group came under fire after news reports in 2003 questioned its financial management. Graham Keegan resigned in 2004. An investigation by the U.S. Department of Education charged that the council wasn’t fully complying with federal regulations for spending. However, after subsequent audits, grant funding was eventually restored.

These bios came from the Catalyst Chicago web site, and it's not hard to pick out the bias, but it's the only place I found all the candidates. Plus, because this site has an archive, it is interesting to scroll through 1995-2000 reports on the Annenberg Challenge (the funds which Barack Obama distributed for various projects to improve Chicago schools) and see no progress or failure. There are other ways to track the careers on the internet, so this is just a taste.

Abortion and Obama

Except for the early days of the 70s woman's movement when I attended lunch talks in the OSU library and carried my poster down at the courthouse in support of the ERA, I've met almost no women who identify themselves as "pro-abortion." They always say, "I believe in a woman's right to choose," or "I wouldn't have an abortion myself, but I want other women to make their own decision." We generally don't say that about other laws that involve killing. I try to be consistent about life and death issues without lapsing into values clarification, the parlor game liberals like to play.

I don't support the death penalty even for the most heinous crime; I believe in certain health regulations like required vaccinations and safety codes, because the lives they save are more important than the rights you choose; I wouldn't have tobacco stock in my portfolio no matter what the returns; I believe good intentions sometimes have disastrous results--like removing DDT from the international market which killed millions of Africans; I believe communism in the 20th century killed more human beings than all other despotic forms of government combined; I believe the US government and its flipped coin the anti-war movement contributed to the deaths of millions of Vietnamese when we fled our responsibilities, and we're getting pay back now from the resurrected 60s radicals. So, am I concerned about a presidential candidate who is vigorously pro-abortion? As Sarah would say, You betcha!

"Barack Obama is the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States. He is the most extreme pro-abortion member of the United States Senate. Indeed, he is the most extreme pro-abortion legislator ever to serve in either house of the United States Congress.

Yet there are Catholics and Evangelicals-even self-identified pro-life Catholics and Evangelicals - who aggressively promote Obama's candidacy and even declare him the preferred candidate from the pro-life point of view.

. . . Senator Obama, despite the urging of pro-life members of his own party, has not endorsed or offered support for the Pregnant Women Support Act, the signature bill of Democrats for Life, meant to reduce abortions by providing assistance for women facing crisis pregnancies. In fact, Obama has opposed key provisions of the Act, including providing coverage of unborn children in the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), and informed consent for women about the effects of abortion and the gestational age of their child. This legislation would not make a single abortion illegal. It simply seeks to make it easier for pregnant women to make the choice not to abort their babies. Here is a concrete test of whether Obama is "pro-choice" rather than pro-abortion. He flunked. Even Senator Edward Kennedy voted to include coverage of unborn children in S-CHIP. But Barack Obama stood resolutely with the most stalwart abortion advocates in opposing it."

What is going on here?

Spotlight on Campus Freedom

The Ohio State University gets a red light! I wonder who determines what is an unwanted flirtation? Or leering? If a drunk girl sits on a guy's lap at the campus bar, has she committed sexual harassment?

"Sexual harassment is illegal. Inappropriate behavior includes: * Sexual jokes, innuendoes, gestures * Unwanted flirtation, advances, or propositions * Pressure for sex * Leering * Display of sexually suggestive objects/visuals * Display/transmission of sexually suggestive electronic content * Any unnecessary, unwanted physical contact * Sexual assault"

This page says OSU doesn't have a loyalty oath or an honor code, however, when I was re-hired in the 1970s, I'm quite sure a loyalty oath was required of employees--perhaps not for students, though. I know the Veterinary College had its own honor code.

Check your state's colleges and universities here.

Mandatory Fees aggravate conservative students

The fees that are tacked on to your child's college tuition may be going to support causes and policies you'd prefer not to underwrite--like women's studies programs, or bisexual social events. Here's a story in a Campus Magazine Online by CJ Ciaramella, Blog Editor for CAMPUS Magazine Online.

"The publication I write for at the University of Oregon, the Oregon Commentator, has been fighting the mandatory fee (known at UO as the Incidental Fee) for the better part of 20 years. In 1995, before Southworth and viewpoint neutrality, one of the members of the Oregon Commentator sued the State Board of Higher Education on the "freedom of conscience" grounds.His main objection was the previously mentioned OSPIRG, a political group that sends student money off campus for lobbying purposes. He lost, and OSPIRG still filches thousands of dollars from students. Coincidentally, the case was cited in Southworth.

Furthermore, the mandatory fee creates bad incentives in student government. For years now at the UO (and I'm sure other universities) student unions have maintained a stranglehold on the student government. With low voter turnout, student unions are able to swing elections to candidates that promise to keep the gravy train running. I won't even get into the instances of student government using I-fee money to send themselves to fancy conferences, throw parties (excuse me, "retreats"), etc."

Time to ask the university/college to explain the fees, don't you think? It's your money. Think ACORN with training wheels.

Fifty Largest cities graduation rate

The chart in today's WSJ shows Detroit at the bottom of the 50 largest cities with a graduation rate of 24.9; San Francisco is near the top with 73.1.

However, about 5 years ago the WSJ published an article, "Curse of the Creative Class" about creativity and entrepreneurship. There was a "Bohemian Index" created by one Richard Florida which showed that cities with a large gay population, many forms of entertainment and high tech companies, i.e., "the no-collar workplace" were very attractive to upwardly mobile knowledge workers and the "culture class." Guess who was at the top of that index? San Francisco, of course. The article continues about where the real growth was:

In 2001, a National Commission on Entrepreneurship study entitled "Mapping America's Entrepreneurial Landscape" ranked U.S. cities on how well they hatch high-growth companies. . .

Among major cities, Detroit--omitted from Mr. Florida's most creative cities--finished second in the commission's report, incubating about 50% more fast-growing companies than the average of all major cities, with a particular strength in nurturing high-growth manufacturing businesses. . .

The city that sits at the pinnacle of Mr. Florida's list, often jokingly referred to as the "People's Republic of San Francisco" because of its socialistic political culture, is the perfect example of what happens to cities that follow this heavy-handed governing philosophy. While San Francisco sports taxes higher than all but a few U.S. cities, and passes laws forcing business to boost wages, San Francisco's jobs economy has expanded at only one-fourth the rate of the national economy over the past 20 years.

Similarly, high-tax New York has been caught in a cycle of boom and bust that has produced no net job growth in 40 years. During the mid-1990s, the city briefly got back to basics when the Giuliani administration focused on fighting crime and cutting some taxes and spending, and--presto!--for the longest period since World War II, the city's economy outpaced the nation's. However, now that the city's political culture has veered sharply to the left again, with a mayor who declares that taxes don't matter to businesses or residents, New York is once again an economic slacker, having lost 200,000 jobs, or nearly 6% of its jobs base, in the current recession.

So isn't that odd. Detroit with a dismal graduation rate seems to be an incubator for manufacturing, and San Francisco with its over regulated vegans and heavy handed government, can't catch a break on growth.

The Coming Test

“I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden said, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. This is the same Joe Biden who voted against the first Gulf War in 1990 because the US would sustain astronomical losses. So maybe we should just ignore his predictions. The same Joe Biden who voted for the Iraq War in 2002 and then took it back in 2007 when he wanted to run for President. So maybe he'll change his mind tomorrow on this threat.

Joe Biden-His-Time thinks President McCain wouldn't be tested in the first six months by these scenarios, but President Obama would. Why? Might be experience. Might be character. Might be age. Might be the stand on the Iraq War. Might be he knows something we don't?

For 22 years, Mr. McCain was an aviator in the US Navy. During the Vietnam War after a missile struck his plane in 1967, he was taken prisoner of war by the North Vietnamese. Five and a half years later, he was released. His naval honors include a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart. McCain has also coauthored five books. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. He had two terms in the U.S. House and 4 in the Senate.

Mr. Obama began his career as a community organizer in Chicago and worked there for a foundation distributing money for education projects. He has written two books about himself and his ambition. He graduated from Columbia University in New York and received his law degree from Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass. He is in his first term as a U.S. Senator, and served in the Illinois legislature.

Who knows what Joe Biden means when he rambles, wanders, wonders, and fumbles. But if Sarah Palin had said this, you can betcha it would be all over the papers and the cable channels. They would be screaming racist, bigot, fear-mongerer, stupid-in-lipstick girl-talk.

Barack Obama's relationship with the New Party.

The following appeared in the Post Journal written by Dr. Warren Throckmorton . I know nothing about either the publication or the author, but I had seen before that New Party had endorsed Obama (possibly the Illinois legislature web site).

"The New Party is a political movement aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America. The New Party actually endorsed Barack Obama's successful 1996 Illinois state Senate campaign. Obama, in turn, encouraged New Party involvement in his voter education and registration efforts. According to a 1995 issue of the Democratic Socialists of America newsletter, the New Party required endorsed candidates to sign a contract to have a ''visible and active relationship'' with the party. While the New Party's influence has waned, the Democratic Socialists of America remain an active movement.

What do the Democratic Socialists of America believe? Here is what the group's by-laws advocate:

... a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships.

Surely, we can all agree with the values of racial and gender equality and non-oppressive relationships. Free-market adherents believe in those principles as well. However, consider the group's support of income distribution. There, one can see the intellectual foundation for Barack Obama's answer to Mr. Wurzelbacher. Redistributing wealth, which is a foundational principle of socialism, is part and parcel of the Obama tax plan, even though Obama has avoided using the S-word.

And why not? Despite periodic, and hopefully temporary, interventions in free markets (such as is occurring in the financial sector), most Americans do not want to live in a socialist economy. We value the personal freedoms inherent in a free-market economy.

When the productive plumber protests that his tax burden will increase, Obama intuits the problem inherent in "equitable distribution." He says to his questioner, "It's not that I want to punish your success. ..."

Unfortunately, punished success is precisely the kind of mischief that successful Americans fear. Obama's desire to "spread the wealth around" may not come with malevolent intent, but, to be sure, such policies, which, again, are advocated by the Democratic Socialists, may result in inhibitions of initiative and innovation.
Rudolph Penner recently said on a C-Span call-in show that capitalism isn't perfect but it is better than the alternatives. Indeed, many have suggested that the current mortgage mess derives from well-intended attempts to spread the wealth around. In unraveling the causes of the housing bust, one finds multiple targets of blame. However, it seems clear that government policies which encouraged home ownership beyond a borrower's means were part of the chaos. In light of the federal government's inability to manage markets, it is a fair question to ask: Do we need more central planning or less?