In his second hour Glenn had more fun with a handful of the 512 comments left at a Huffington Post review of the newly released trailer promoting Glenn's book "The Overton Window" due out five days from now.
Glenn knows that anything with his name attached to it will attract derisive comments. And it certainly did, with most of the brainiac commenters on the Left mocking the rhyme used in the book's trailer. But what these people who are so arrogant in their ignorance didn't know is that the words are from the pen of Rudyard Kipling. And Glenn does a masterful job of explaining it in the context of today. Perfection! Well, almost. Glen thinks that the "Gods of the Copybook Headings" mentioned in the poem are the progressives of Kiplings time pushing left wing ideas to children in their copy books. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Copybook Heading are held up by Kipling as the great universal truths being left behind by people following the "Gods of the Marketplace, i.e., pop culture and the media. Other than that, he was great. The left has long despised Kipling without reading his works, as they despise any other knowledge not written by their own kind.
AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
"The Gods of the Copybook Headings" is a poem published by Rudyard Kipling in 1919. The central message of the poem is that basic and unvarying aspects of human nature will always re-emerge in every society. The copybook headings to which the title refers were proverbs or maxims printed at the top of 19th century British schoolboys' notebook pages. The students had to write them by hand repeatedly down the page.
#1
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
That's pretty much the gist of the current economic crisis.
#2
I have always adored Kipling - as a writer he is so up there. As the poet of brutal experience and reality, there is none better.
I know - he has been so unpopular among the very modern canon - but for someone who wrote about people who went and did very boring,yet necessary jobs, and could tell a ripping good story (TheMan Who Would Be King)
And his range and voice when it came to telling stories by various characters was perfectly breathtaking. He has astonishing applicability now and over the last hundred years.
He and Mark Twain are my personal gods and guides when it comes to telling a story.
#3
Just remember the death penalty is carried out every day around us, in our streets, in our cities and towns, without any due process or appeal. Why do we lock our windows and doors? Why do we avoid certain parts of towns? Why do worry, when night sets in, where our children are at? Don't tell me the death penalty doesn't alter behavior because I still remember a time when the aforementioned questions needn't be asked.
#4
If the States continue their momentum to reestablish their authority in the face of the federal government, I hope that some State proposes to restore hanging as a form of execution, with the proposition that it is not a federal judges decision that they should be allowed to, or how they carry out executions.
If they're dead within a minute, that is good enough. If they're uncomfortable during that minute, too bad. It's not like they're going to remember.
#5
Agreed P2K. The death penalty in nature is the norm. The difference between the norm and the Death Penalty in the court system is that the sentence is weighed and contemplated by a number of individuals in a rational non-mob setting, and is not taken lightly in a civilized society.
It needs to be emphasized that alternatives to a death penalty are the norm in our epoch, but that the option is there; that is extrajudicial deaths without the threat of death itself do not necessisarily encourage, but undeterred will not alter behavior. And for those who do such heinous acts against innocents without thought of their own punishment and/or lives there is no going back, let'em appeal their case before Peter.
...anyone remember that jackass in Spain who, after serving his time, was walking the street and grabbed the ass of the girl he violently raped; she grabbed a can of petrol and burned him alive at the bar...the death penalty Option prevents a widespread execution of street justice by dads and other relatives.
#2
First you'll be beheaded!
Then hanged!
Then spitted on hot stakes!
Then bound, and burned, and drowned, and finally skinned!
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart put all that in one of his operas. I have misunderestimated the fellow. O, the stuff I have learned on the 'Burg!
#3
He's done his homework. Turkish Islamism is a lot more dangerous than I thought: it has the potential to disrupt Central Asia and southern Russia as well as the middle east.
We've all been sleeping, and it's time to get serious about closer ties with Russia. Let them have Ukraine, and let's get serious about joint US-Russian military exercises in the Black Sea + advanced missile installations in Azerbaijan.
We should be making common cause with Russia against the neo-Ottoman and neo-Persian imperialists. And buy more of our oil from Russia instead of from Saudi while we're at it.
#4
I guess we have it all wrong: ISTANBUL (AFP) Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered reassurance on Thursday that his country is not turning away from the West, calling such charges "dirty propaganda". Somehow I'm not reassured one bit
#5
We've all been sleeping, and it's time to get serious about closer ties with Russia.
But will Russia see it the same way, lex? They've been busily selling nuclear power plants and anti-aircraft missiles to Iran, and that anti-aircraft system to Syria that the Israelis so neatly crawled inside... not to mention they are in the process of building a pipeline to carry natural gas to Europe via Turkey. As I understand it, Russia still sees itself as fighting with America over the world, just less directly than when it was the USSR.
#6
Well, lots of work that needs to done wrt overcoming Russian suspicion/greed/opportunism. Obviously they will ask a tall price of us. But if we're to have a replacement for Incirlik, and an end to Russian mischief with Iran, then we have to start thinking about what price we'll pay, in which areas.
Price #1: we offer them military cooperation and maybe some technology sharing in exchange for an airbase in Azerbaijan, with some sharing of technology re. missile defense-- maybe the base would be jointly operated by us and the Russians.
Price #2: we pull back on NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia in exchange for a Russian support on, and a united front against, Iran.
Price #3: we offer to shift oil and energy purchases from OPEC to Russia, and offer potential market access in other areas as well.
Bottom line, we need to recognize that NATO is worthless against the threats that really matter, all of which originate outside the European theatre, and that we and the Russians are better off making common cause against a) the islamists, including Turkey and Iran, and b) the Chinese.
Different century. We need non-asian friends against asian threats. If we could drive toward an alliance with Russia from the north and India from the south, we'd be in an excellent geostrategic position.
In 1974, when Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan was president of the Istanbul youth group of the MSP (the Islamist National Salvation Party), he wrote, directed, and starred in a play called Mas-Kom-Ya, which addressed subversive elements in Turkish society: masons, communists and yahudi (Jews). This very same performer has managed to convince gullible Western politicians that Turkey is committed to EU membership. Equally convincingly, he has played to the Arab gallery since his AKP (Justice and Development Party) came to power in 2002.
Erdogan's tirade against Shimon Peres during a panel discussion at last year's World Economic Forum in Davos you know very well how to kill' earned plaudits all around the Arab world. The Lebanese daily Dar A-Hayat suggested that Erdogan should restore the Ottoman Empire and be the Caliph of all Muslims. By some accounts, this has been identified as the driving force behind Turkey's expansionist foreign policy, which has been dubbed neo-Ottoman.'
This new course obviously played out in Turkey's role in the Gaza flotilla incident. According to Debka (an open source intelligence website) the flotilla was personally sponsored by Erdogan, and according to the same source, he is even prepared to sail aboard the next flotilla himself. Some awareness of the consequences must have been know, as a week before the flotilla sailed, Ankara threatened Israel with reprisals if it was impeded.
And now, with video of the unloading of the weapons hidden aboard, we know why.
The connection between the flotilla's organizer, the Turkish-based IHH (Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief), and Hamas is well documented, and it created a stir when Hamas leader Khaled Mashal was officially invited to Ankara in 2006.
Ankara's support for Iran's nuclear program, ostensibly for peaceful purposes, is likewise a cause for concern in the Western world, and President Abdullah Gül has admitted in an interview with Forbes magazine that it is their final aspiration to have a nuclear weapon in the end.'
Turkey and Syria have agreed on a long-term strategic partnership and Erdogan continues to defend Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir (who is on the International Criminal Court's wanted list) with the claim that a Muslim can never commit genocide.'
Also alarming is the secret meeting between Prime Minister Erdogan and a Sudanese financier, Dr. Fatih al-Hassanein, during an Arab League summit in Khartoum in 2006. Dr. al-Hassanein is believed to have ties with al-Qaeda and other Islamist movements (e.g. in Bosnia).
What has caused another stir is the friendship between Prime Minister Erdogan and a Saudi businessman, Yassin al-Qadi, who, according to the U.S. Treasury and the United Nations Security Council, is a major financier of Islamic terrorism. Erdogan's advisor and co-founder of the AKP, Cüneyd Zapsu, was also al-Qadi's partner.
See Mr. Zapsu's indignant response in the comment thread at the link.
Erdogan defended al-Qadi publicly on Turkish television, declaring: I trust him the same way I trust my father.' And a case against al-Qadi was dropped when in 2006 the Chief Public Prosecutor decided: Al-Qadi is a philanthropic businessman and no connection has been found between him and terrorist organizations.'
That's because a Muslim can never commit terror as he can never commit genocide.
The truth is beginning to catch up with Erdogan. Last week, in an interview given to the Wall Street Journal, Fethullah Gülen, who, although a resident in the USA, is reckoned to be Turkey's most influential religious leader, criticized the Gaza flotilla. He also commented: .. some people in the United States consider Turkey as sitting at the epicenter of radicalism.'
Robert Ellis is a regular commentator on Turkish affairs in the Danish and international press.
Posted by: ed ||
06/10/2010 00:36 ||
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[Asharq al-Aswat] The country of the wonderful "Ottoman Sultan" has strong political, economic and military ties with Israel to the extent that observers considered Turkey the Muslim state with the strongest ties to Israel. He is the same "Ottoman Sultan" who, through actions and not words or slogans, sent his humanitarian fleet to break the Gaza blockade. He is also the same Sultan who explicitly and courageously declared in the Turkish city of Konya that he told the US that he never accepted classifying Hamas as a terrorist organization. As for the rest of his comments, it was as if they were made by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed al Fatih, rather than by a Turkish leader who rules a country where all aspects of life are dominated by Ataturk's extremist secular regime. Erdogan said, "Ramallah, Nablus, Rafah, Khan Younis, Bethlehem and Jenin are not separate from the Turkish city of Konya."
Erdogan is not responsible for the establishment of diplomatic and military ties with Israel, nor was he the one who planned and implemented the strategic coalition that linked his country to the US and NATO. These thorny and complicated files are the legacies of his ancestors, the guardians of the Ataturk regime. In fact being subjected to any of these dangerous "mines" at this particular stage might thwart his plans to allow Turkey to take on the appropriate international role. With the wisdom of an experienced statesman, Erdogan managed to shift his country's complicated relations with Israel, the US and NATO from pressure tools being used against him into pressure tools of his own for his political project. For this reason, when Arab and Islamic nations noticed the development and political leaps taken by Erdogan's Islamist government, they realized how wisely he dealt with such thorny issues. Unlike some depressing Arab "revolutionary" models, neither Erdogan nor any of his government members issued ostentatious statements or made empty threats against Israel or its US ally by threatening to throw the former into the sea or cut off the latter diplomatically. Rather, he used a more effective tactic that had a greater impact. The sending of a humanitarian flotilla was a "masterstroke" that struck Israel, the US, Western states and Iran.
Patrick Cockburn who writes for the Independent said that the recent Israeli confrontation ended with a victory [for the convoy's organizers] beyond their wildest dreams, as the Israeli blockade became the focus of the world's attention, and so international calls to end it heightened after the world's interest in this issue had dwindled. His colleague Adrian Hamilton asked whether the attack on the humanitarian aid ships to Gaza will mark a turning point in history as the moment when the international attitude towards Israel began to change and when the Israeli government could no longer rely on the West [to see through right and wrong].
As for the US, it was unfortunate that the Zionist criminal blunder against the humanitarian flotilla took place on the eve of the first anniversary of Obama's speech at Cairo University in which he sought to establish new relations with the Islamic world based on respect and partnership in the hope that he may be able to repair the damage caused by his predecessor George W. Bush. However, Obama's popularity has declined dramatically due to the lack of any slight positive change especially with regards to the pivotal Palestinian cause. The recent Israeli attack on the Turkish flotilla and the shameful negative US position towards this crime was the straw that broke the back of Obama's project to change the stereotypical image of the US in the Arab and Muslim mindset.
The Turkish President or the "Ottoman Sultan" Recep Tayyip Erdogan is like the famous Turkish sweet, Turkish Delight. For the first time, the nations of the Islamic world tasted the special and unique taste of the Turkish confectionery and wished these kinds of sweets would spread all over the Islamic and Arab world.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/10/2010 00:00 ||
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#1
For crying out loud, read some of the remarks to that piece. One guy is warning about the death of most life forms on the planet due to the gulf spill. Now I realize it's a bad deal, but that seems a little over the top to me. :/
Posted by: Jefferson ||
06/10/2010 15:15 Comments ||
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#2
I heard an unconfirmed report that at least one fisherman was denied BP benefits because he could not produce income tax returns showing earnings for the past three years. I suspect he may not be alone.
#3
This spill is bad, but if you average the amount spilled by human production vs natural seepage per year, it is not that big of a spill. What it is, is really bad news in the Gulf because of the currents and prevailing winds which are spreading it around to the various coastal habitats. It is going to have a very negative impact on fisheries and the shrimping industry in the Gulf.
#4
"at least one fisherman was denied BP benefits because he could not produce income tax returns showing earnings for the past three years"
I'd deny his claim too if it was on nothing but his say-so.
I realize you don't have to be highly educated to run a fishing boat, but you do have to pay taxes (or have your non-payment come back to bite you in the ass).
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
06/10/2010 20:27 Comments ||
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#5
A LOT of fishermen underpay their income taxes on a routine basis. I have no sympathy for BP, and do for the fishermen, but this seems like a choice the fishermen made and now have to live with. I don't like to, but I pay my taxes (so far - that could change, I suppose....)
#6
It is going to have a very negative impact on fisheries and the shrimping industry in the Gulf.
I seriously doubt it, I asked Red Lobster Personnel on my last visit if the Gulf oil spill would hurt them, they said No, all their shrimp come from factory farms in China.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
06/10/2010 23:17 Comments ||
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Running for Congress in 2000, Mark Kirk told a Chicago Tribune reporter he had almost drowned in Lake Michigan as a teenager. "I should be at the bottom of that lake, but I was given a rare gift of a second life," he confided. "And to be given a second chance means it has to mean something. For me, that means making a difference through public service, and it all comes from the lake."
This brought to mind what Oscar Wilde said of one of Charles Dickens' scenes: "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing." After Kirk's earnest tale, no one should have been surprised that he has a genius for creative self-promotion.
Now we learn that Kirk, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Illinois and a member of the Navy Reserve, made unfounded claims to have been the Navy's intelligence officer of the year, commanded the Pentagon war room, come under fire in Iraq and served in both the 1990-91 and the 2003 Iraq wars. But even now, he can't give straight, believable answers about his embellishments.
The congressman has never been one to minimize his talents. Once, in a candidate debate, he responded to a question about immigration reform by announcing grandly, "I could answer that question in Spanish, since I attended Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico." Kirk finds himself amazing and expects you to agree.
But his resume inflation has given voters a powerful reason to abandon him in a race that should have been idiot-proof. This year is shaping up to be a Republican bonanza, Kirk is moderate enough to appeal beyond his own party, and his Democratic opponent, state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, has all the heft of a helium balloon.
Maybe this seat, like the Cubs, carries some curse. It was once occupied by Democrat Carol Moseley Braun, whose ethical controversies led to her defeat in 1998 by Republican Peter Fitzgerald. He was so honest and capable -- I'm not joking here --that the Illinois Republican Party found him impossible to bear, inducing his retirement after one term.
In the next election, one serious contender was accused of physically abusing his wife, another allegedly asked his wife to have sex with him in front of strangers at sex clubs and a third moved abruptly from Maryland to enter the race. Prevailing over them all was Barack Obama, who showed little interest in being a senator and decided he would rather be president.
After Obama departed with two years left in his term, an egotistical mediocrity named Roland Burris took over. He was appointed by Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, whose alleged efforts to auction off the seat led to the federal corruption trial that began this week.
But with the incumbent unwilling to take his chances with the voters, the office will fall to either Giannoulias or Kirk, who seem to be determined to raise our opinion of Burris.
Giannoulias ran for treasurer in 2006 on the strength of his experience as an officer at Broadway Bank, which it turned out made loans to convicted felons while he was there and was closed down by the government in April. Now he indicates he was fetching coffee when all the bad decisions were made.
By this point, the average Illinoisan, ordered at gunpoint to choose between the two, would reply, "Shoot." It's a familiar dilemma in a place where state government has four branches: executive, legislative, judicial and correctional.
What is it about Illinois? The state has a history of corruption and self-dealing so extensive that it perpetuates itself. Many honest, well-meaning people avoid our political arena for the same reason they avoid swimming in the sewer: It's nasty, and their presence doesn't make it smell any better.
Kirk was notable for avoiding any hint of ethical scandal, but his very distance from the usual muck may have led him astray. He was not satisfied being smarter and better than your run-of-the-mill Illinois politician. He had to make himself out to be a combination of Superman and Beaver Cleaver.
But voters are not expecting greatness or nobility from their senator. They only ask the political gods to send someone who doesn't lie, steal or bargain with corrupt officeholders.
The political gods have given their answer to that prayer: Ha. Ha. Ha.
#2
I live here. I know him, and support him, but this is deep into embarrassing uselessness, as Steve Chapman notes.
What he doesn't note is the remaining distinction between Kirk and Alexi - namely the flat out criminal negligence.
Lexi's family coincidentally paid themselves $80+ million in dividends before the recent economic turn, only for the feds to arrive and demand a capital infusion of . . . guess what, $80 million if they want to keep the bank.
They chose the cash.
At least Kirk's not in our pockets for that much, so far as any of us know, yet.
He should still win, unless the POTUS fires US Atty Fitzgerald and shuts down the Blago trial.
The good news for Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina here in California was that they won their Republican primaries. The bad news was that they had to run in Republican primaries.
Whitman, now the GOP nominee for governor, and Fiorina, the GOP nominee for senator, dispatched their nearest primary rivals by margins of better than 2 to 1. Each spent a queen's ransom to do so -- in Whitman's case, close to $80 million of her own money -- but both former CEOs have plenty left over to take on their Democratic opponents this fall: in Whitman's case, Jerry Brown, the once and, he hopes, future governor; in Fiorina's case, incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer.
But California Republican primaries have a nasty habit of rendering their winners unelectable in November, and this year's contest looks like it will be no exception. To win, Whitman and Fiorina -- conventional conservative business Republicans both -- had to take positions so far to the right that their chances of winning a state in which Barack Obama commands a 59 percent approval rating are slim. During one debate with her Republican opponents, Fiorina affirmed the right of suspected terrorists on no-fly lists to buy guns, presumably lest the gods of the National Rifle Association strike her dead on the spot. At a campaign event at Los Angeles International Airport on Saturday, Boxer, never one to let a hanging curveball go unswatted, contrasted Fiorina's guns-to-terrorists stance with her own co-authorship of a law allowing pilots to carry guns in cockpits.
But the issue most damaging for Whitman and Fiorina is immigration. Pressed by their GOP primary opponents and the Republican electorate to endorse Arizona's draconian new law, Fiorina proclaimed her support for it while Whitman countered the charges from her right that she was soft on immigration by affirming that she was "100 percent against amnesty" and demanding a huge increase in border enforcement. To bolster her credibility, her ads featured former Republican governor Pete Wilson -- champion of 1994's Proposition 187, which would have denied all public services, including the right to attend primary and secondary schools, to illegal immigrants.
Wilson won reelection in 1994 by backing 187, which the courts subsequently struck down. But his victory was probably the most pyrrhic in modern American politics. Threatened and enraged by 187, California's Latino immigrants began naturalizing, registering and voting in record numbers. Southern California's Latino-led labor movement -- the most energized and strategically savvy labor movement in the nation -- became particularly adept at turning out Latino voters for Democratic candidates and causes.
In the process, the California electorate has been transformed -- moving the state decisively into the Democratic column. In the 1994 election, according to the nonprofit William C. Velasquez Institute, which seeks to raise minorities' political and economic participation, Latinos counted for 11.4 percent of California voters. By 2008, they comprised 21.4 percent. And particularly when immigration is an issue, theirs is a heavily Democratic vote. "There's a whole generation of Latino voters who don't believe the Republicans look out for them," Maria Elena Durazo, who heads the Los Angeles County AFL-CIO, told me on Election Day. "We ran against Pete Wilson for years after he was out of office. And, voilà! He's back -- he's vouching for Whitman!" Labor will make sure the Latino community knows it. Already, the California Nurses Association is running an ad on Spanish-language radio that splices in a clip from a Whitman primary commercial in which she and Wilson discuss cracking down on immigration.
When your own primary ad is directed against you by your opponents in the general election, you have a fundamental problem. It's not just that Republican nativism pushes perhaps a fifth of the electorate into the Democratic column. It's that the state's Republicans are simply far to the right of the majority of Californians -- so much so that they do not have a majority of registered voters in any one of the state's 53 congressional districts.
There's a reason Arnold Schwarzenegger is the only Republican elected to a major statewide office in California since 1994 -- and it's not his celebrity status. It's because, when he was first elected governor, he did not have to run in and win a Republican primary: He was elected in a special recall election open to candidates and voters from all parties.
Whitman and Fiorina had no such luck. In winning their nominations, they said things deeply offensive to a fatally large swath of California voters. Their campaigns may be gold-plated, but they have ears of purest tin.
Posted by: Mike Hunt ||
06/10/2010 11:12 Comments ||
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#2
"offensive", "headed for defeat" - said the liberal Washington Post, from the opposite shores of the country. Finger on the pulse. "Nobody we know would vote for these Republicans"
Meh
Posted by: Frank G ||
06/10/2010 12:24 Comments ||
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#3
Oh please, this is spin from WaPo's resident far left winger, Harold Meyerson. His entire argument comes down to, The GOP pi$$ed off latinos, and now they're almost 25% of the electorate, so any GOPper is toast.
This is a perfect expression of the cynicism and corruption of our political class. Lock up the fastest-growing, and already biggest, electoral bloc by holding the state's economic future and its schools' performance hostage to millions of unskilled, semiliterate or illiterate ilegals from Mexico. Thus are great polities transformed into sinkholes.
As a result of immigration, however, by 2008 California had the least-educated labor force in the nation in terms of the share its workers without a high school education. This change has important implications for the state.
Among the changes in California:
In 1970, California had the 7th most educated work force of the 50 states in terms of the share of its workers who had completed high school. By 2008 it ranked 50th, making it the least educated state. (Table 1a)
Education in California has declined relative to other states. The percentage of Californians who have completed high school has increased since 1970; however, all other states made much more progress in improving their education levels; as a result, California has fallen behind the rest of the country. (Table 1b)
The large relative decline in education in California is a direct result of immigration. Without immigrants, the share of Californias labor force that has completed high school would be above the national average.
There is no indication that California will soon close the educational gap. California ranks 35th in terms of the share of its 19-year-olds who have completed high school. Moreover, one-third (91,000) of the adult immigrants who arrived in the state in 2007 and 2008 had not completed high school.2
In 1970 California was right at the national average in terms of income inequality, ranking 25th in the nation. By 2008, it was the 6th most unequal state in the country based on the commonly used Gini coefficient, which measures how evenly income is distributed. (Tables 2a and 2b)
Californias income distribution in 2008 was more unequal than was Mississippis in 1970. (Tables 2a and 2b)
While historical data are not available, we can say that in 2008 California ranked 11th highest in terms of the share of its households accessing at least one major welfare program and 8th highest in terms of the share of the states population without health insurance. (Tables 3 and 4)
The large share of California adults who have very little education is likely to strain social services and make it challenging for the state to generate sufficient tax revenue to cover the demands for services made by its large unskilled population.
#4
This foggy bottom snob forgets that California has at least twice voted overwhelmingly in favor of restrictions on illegal immigrants.
In a state wide election where the gerrymandered districting won't skew the results, Californian will flock to the polls for someone willing to put a lid on and end the handouts to illegals.
This moonbat has no clue how angry most californians are about illegals.
Posted by: James Carville ||
06/10/2010 15:57 Comments ||
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#5
lex, this is precisely I am so furious at politicians like McCain and Fiorina. They should have been screaming bloody murder the whole time that California was being overrun by illegal aliens but instead they acquiesced to it. And now they wonder why they can't win an election here.
#6
I don't know whether Meg or Carly will dare to state the obvious: CA public schools' decline into the worst in the nation is almost entirely the result of the tsunami of illegals. Go regress the school performance data (google STAR test, California) against ethnicity, income etc and you'll see that the obvious driver of sh*tty performance is the % of hispanics-- who fail at rates in the 75-80% range-- in the school surveyed.
When more than HALF of the kids in CA are drawn from a demographic that doesn't give a $hit about academic achievement, there is no amount of increased spending, or curricular or pedagogical improvements, that can turn things around. And the hispanics' share of CA public school students is RISING at about one percentage point each year.
We in CA don't have a school funding problem, or a teachers' union problem, or a curriculum problem. We have a Mexican underclass problem.
This is an example of political decadence: a crisis that is so obvious, whose causes are so unpleasant to the reigning political mindset, that none dare call it by its proper name.
#7
So, liberals and sanctuary cities doesn't lead to prosperity? What? This is an outrage!
Posted by: Jefferson ||
06/10/2010 17:00 Comments ||
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#8
CA voters will do what they always do and vote democrat; and hope the fed bails them out before bankruptcy. Most CA voters will feel it is their only chance since most of the state is under-employeed (or unemployable based on the previous comments related to education) or they are dependent on the state for wages, pension or handouts.
The most capable have been leaving CA for years and now the great recession has just acclerated the process.
That was the message Californians sent when they voted Tuesday to radically rejigger elections in the nation's most populous state. Under Proposition 14, a measure that easily passed, traditional party primaries will be replaced in 2011 with wide-open elections. The top two vote-getters whatever their party, or if they have no party at all will face off in the general election.
Supporters argue that without parties picking candidates for the general election, moderates and independents will move to the fore, and voters will pay more attention to the electoral process.
Critics of the measure say it will give a huge advantage to candidates who have the most money or the widest name recognition.
That no one actually knows what the real effect of Proposition 14 will be seems almost beside the point to frustrated voters. What mattered, supporters said, is that something fundamental about politics anything fundamental had been changed.
As supporters celebrated, they promised to bring the so-called top two' system to a state near you, with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger leading the charge though his second term, plagued by budget meltdowns and plunging popularity, was, analysts said, one of the leading motivators for the measure.
Whether the measure will empower more independent voters who were already allowed to vote in Democratic or Republican primaries, provided they requested a ballot remains to be seen. But what did seem certain was that California was again poised to capture the mood of the country, just as it did in 1978 with Proposition 13, which distilled widespread antitax sentiment into a cap on property taxes.
This time, it is the anger of the electorate that Californians have bottled, experts said, even if they are not totally sure what they are doing.
I don't know that people really knew what they were voting for,' said Bruce Cain, director of the University of California Washington Center, based in the District of Columbia.
Mr. Cain said the state of the state high unemployment, record foreclosures and a palpable anger at legislators had primed the pump.
When people get mad,' he said, they lash out.'
But just as with Proposition 13 which required a two-thirds majority for the Legislature to increase revenue through new taxes Proposition 14 could come with a raft of unintended consequences, opponents say. They cited a potential rise in fringe candidates as well as the marginalization of small parties.
Big business and big government won yesterday,' said Christina Tobin, chair of StopTopTwo.org, a leading opponent of the measure, which was heavily outspent by the Yes' side.
One probable impact was an increase in litigation; both major parties suggested that they were weighing how to stop the implementation of Proposition 14 before its scheduled start in 2011.
Proposition 14 is based on a system in place in one other state, Washington, which the Supreme Court upheld in 2008. Louisiana uses a similar open system, but requires state and local candidates to gain a majority in primaries to win election or face a runoff.
On Wednesday, Mr. Schwarzenegger was being hailed by backers as a political winner and an agent of change, as he trumpeted Proposition 14's promise of encouraging moderates who, the argument goes, are shunned by highly partisan primary voters. He also acknowledged the rising role of independents, who now make up one in five voters in the state.
We in California have said we've got to come to the center, we've got to bring everyone together in order to solve problems,' Mr. Schwarzenegger said at a news conference in Los Angeles. And I think the rest of the nation eventually will find out this is exactly where the action is.'
What is also certain is that voters liked Proposition 14; it won in 56 of the state's 58 counties, with the only two detractors coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum: Orange, the conservative bastion in the south, and San Francisco, the liberal paradise in the north.
Despite that mandate, Ron Nehring, the chairman of the Californian Republican Party, which opposed the proposition alongside the state's Democrats and four smaller parties, said the measure would actually take power away from the mass of primary voters and hand it instead to a smaller group of party leaders and loyalists who would decide their candidates in conventions and caucuses. A single handpicked candidate would then get support, he said, while challengers would be shunned.
Ninety-nine percent of the Republicans that were involved in choosing our candidates are now excluded from choosing our candidates,' Mr. Nehring said. In the future this decision will be made by no more than a few thousand and, in most cases, a few dozen.'
California voters may not be finished with their shake-up. The November ballot, after all, will include a measure to tax and regulate marijuana, as well as possibly including proposals to eliminate the two-thirds majority for passing a budget and further limit legislators' time in office. (California was one of the first states to adopt term limits in 1990.)
All of those elections will likely pivot on the ability to draw independents, who were ecstatic about Proposition 14's passage.
There is now a new political force in California,' said Royce D'Orazio, a stand-up comic who works as the Los Angeles chapter organizer for the group independentvoice.org, who spoke at the governor's side on Wednesday. To all our brothers and sisters in states across this country, help is on the way.'
For his part, Mr. Schwarzenegger seemed pleased by his victory this is, by the way, national news,' he said but still tried to temper expectations for an electorate hungry for anything new.
It will not solve all the problems,' the governor said. But it will change a lot.'
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This is very interesting. More than anything else, I think it means that celebrities will have a much better chance of getting elected to office. While on the surface this sounds silly, celebrities actually tend to make pretty good office holders, for an odd reason.
First of all, very few are hardcore radicals, and second they don't tend to be naturally corrupt as much as many who vie for office. They lean more to real idealism, and actually want to "do good". Far more Republican actors are elected than Democrat actors.
Ronald Reagan, Fred Thompson, Clint Eastwood, Sonny Bono, all did well in office.
Democrats want money from celebrities, not to run them for office, because their insiders want those jobs for themselves.
He is a Democrat and former governor backed by the public employee unions that won the right to organize on his watch. He rails against Wall Street greed and preaches the virtues of alternative energy.
She is a former corporate executive and billionaire Republican who forged ties with investment bankers and seldom voted until she decided to run for the state's highest office, vowing to slash spending by shedding tens of thousands of workers from government.
On the core issue facing California -- finances -- the two agree in principle that the state must rein in spending. But that is where the similarities are likely to end.
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This state's public employee unions are out of control. Everybody can see that and everybody is envious of those wonderful pensions.
But here you can read about another of Brown's biggest sins and my all time pet peeve, the carpool lane. Big Brother at his worst.
You can expect Whitman to bash Brown for his opposition to California's sacred cow, Proposition 13. But don't think I'm being sarcastic when I call it a sacred cow. It really was one of best pieces of legislation we ever got. It was, of course, universally opposed by politicians because it limited their ability to tax us.
Prop 13 is one of the main examples I use in my argument that we should abolish the state legislature. All of our best laws come from ballot propositions like Prop 13 that are approved directly by the voters and almost all of these good laws are opposed by the politicians. The legislature never would have passed a law that made so much sense. All they ever do is screw us over with arcane legalese designed to serve the purposes of the unions, developers, illegal aliens and assorted other criminals and degenerates. Then they tell us we're not smart enough to make our own laws. The challenge for Whitman, if she wins, will be the same as it was for Arnold: how to deal with this collection of crooks.
Despite the slightly overwrought tone, there are nuggets of useful information about the man who financed Turkey's 'aid flotilla'.
Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi is one of those people you've never heard of who is nonetheless radically remaking your world. From his swanky home in Qatar, this Muslim Brotherhood cleric sends out millions of razor-edged tentacles designed to strangle Western civilization and usher in the glorious new age of global sharia.
As President of the European Council for Fatwa and Research he gave Muslims the "spiritual" green light to murder American soldiers and civilian contractors in Iraq, and who empowered Muslim women with the coveted right to blow themselves up as homicide bombers.
One minute, you may find him explaining on his Al-Jazeera television series that Hitler carried out "divine punishment" for the Jews, and "Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers." The next, he may be uploading his latest fatwa onto his Islam Online website, like the famous one he unleashed against "Pokémon," a kids' television show he's convinced features animated characters whispering, "Become a Jew." Or perhaps he's writing a learned chapter for his 41st book, addressing the finer points of wife-beating, child marriage, and female genital mutilation.
The man the ADL dubbed "The Theologian of Terror," the choleric cleric who's banned from entering the U.S. and England, has rocketed to the top of Hollywood's A-list. Barrie Osborne, producer of the blockbuster trilogies The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings, has hired Qaradawi to guide all aspects of his new $200-million movie on the Prophet Mohammed, which Osborne optimistically describes as "an international epic production aimed at bridging cultures." Some moviegoers might find Qaradawi's approach to "bridging cultures" a tad peculiar: "The only thing I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah's enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life in martyrdom."
Qaradawi is banned from entering the U.S.. Nonetheless, Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston practically donated two million dollars' worth of public land to Qaradawi and his best buddies for a gigantic mosque in the heart of Roxbury. Now that the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center is officially open, creepy characters linked to the mosque keep getting arrested for terrorism.
Zooming higher up the political food chain, we come to Barack Obama, and the Gaza flotilla attack. Whence cometh the money for this lethal publicity stunt? From Qaradawi, as chair of the Orwellian-named Union of Good, a Saudi-based umbrella organization through which the money apparently flowed. (To be strictly fair, Qaradawi can't claim sole credit for the massacre's success. Obama pals Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn and Obama's top cash bundler Jodie Evans chipped in, too.)
Apparently, if the Q-man wants Israel's disarmament, that's good enough for Barry. So the White House quickly declared that Israel's Gaza blockade is "unsustainable" and began pressuring Israel to abandon its naval interception, thereby clearing the way for Iran to establish a Gaza port.
Think I'm overstating the case? It was Qaradawi who organized an "International Day of Rage" in response to the Danish cartoons. The subsequent carnage so spooked the American mainstream media that, to date, not one newspaper has published the cartoons. And when Yale University Press recently published an academic study of the Danish cartoon crisis, it refrained from including any images of the actual cartoons to avoid inflaming those famously "sensitive" Muslim sensibilities.
What are they all so afraid of? The fate of Wafa Sultan. Dr. Sultan, a Syrian-born psychiatrist who is now an American citizen, had the courage to speak truth to power, the power being a hard-nosed Muslim cleric on Al-Jazeera TV. The video of that incendiary 2006 exchange became a YouTube sensation, as more than a million people watched her exclaim, "Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask what they can do for humankind before they demand that humankind respect them."
Qaradawi was not happy. He took to the airwaves and thundered, "She said unbearable, ghastly things that made my hair stand on end. She had the audacity to publicly curse Allah, His Prophet, the Koran, the history of Islam, and the Islamic nation. She did not spare anything."
Shortly thereafter, Wafa Sultan went into hiding with her family. From time to time, she emerges briefly, only to vanish again underground. Even as an American citizen in America, she can't speak her mind about Islam and then live a normal life. In her new book, A God Who Hates, she writes, "Most Muslims, if not all, will condemn me to death when they read this book."
Dream on. Muslims explode into a lather at cartoons that attempt to portray 'ol Mo. Even a cardboard cutout of a bear labelled Mohammad sent thousands into Pakistan's streets. Do you really think a movie on the life of Momo is going to make the foamers happy?
an international epic production aimed at bridging cultures. A movie depicting the life of Mo, regardless of which beefy hollywood star is cast as the pedophile, is more likely to burn bridges than create them. In fact, I think I hear a fatwah coming now.
Sarah Palin's breasts are suddenly the objects of greatinterest on the left, not because of their obvious appeal, but as an opportunity to accuse her of having enhanced them with implants. This controversy follows an earlier obsession with Sarah Palin's medical care, the election-year spat over whether she is indeed the mother of her son Trig or (alternatively) was reckless in flying back to Alaska to give birth to him.
I suppose I have two small observations.
First, does the left enhance -- and I use the word advisedly -- its appeal among the electorate by suggesting that we ought to ridicule women for getting breast implants? The boobery need no further reminder that the left disdains their sense of aesthetic, but if liberals want to beat them over the head with it, fine. This may, in the end, be Palin's greatest contribution to conservative political fortunes: She suckers the chattering left in to reminding everybody that they are, well, snots.
Second, we note that privacy in medical matters is the legal foundation of the Constitutional right to abortion, per Roe v. Wade. This right to privacy is apparently so sacred that (so says the left) it is reasonable to sacrifice fetuses to defend it. One would think that the left, therefore, would be reluctant to intrude on even Sarah Palin's medical privacy. Of course, that would require some measure of intellectual honesty, which is apparently beyond the capacity of many liberals when Sarah Palin is involved. From the comments:
This is so much better than thinking about Helen Thomas.
Posted by: Mike ||
06/10/2010 14:58 ||
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Sarah's a babe, while most lefty chics are not, obviously it's bugging them. Rock on Mrs. Palin.
Posted by: Jefferson ||
06/10/2010 15:18 Comments ||
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She suckers the chattering left
And they continue to curse the darkness, hypertense, and seeth in anger. More please Governor, more, more, more!
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H. L. Mencken coined the term 'booboisie' to refer to the poorly educated & gullible class in America. The left is now re-defining the term to mean the over-educated and gullible class.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
