US military jury clears SEAL in Iraq abuse case

BAGHDAD (AP) — A U.S. military jury cleared a Navy SEAL Thursday of failing to prevent the beating of an Iraqi prisoner suspected of masterminding a 2004 attack that killed four American security contractors.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/04/22/seal-trial-jury-deliberates-iraqi-abuse-case/

The next 2 SEALs in this case will be released too. The prosecution of our military for piddly crap is ridiculous. Remember the prosecution of the Marines accused for the killings in Haditha?

As Government Expands, Beware the Post Office Example - by Byron York

Back when Barack Obama was pushing for a public option in the new national healthcare system, he raised eyebrows with an out-of-nowhere remark about the U.S. Postal Service.

It happened last August at a town hall in Colorado. Obama claimed Americans shouldn't be afraid of a government insurance company -- the public option -- competing against private insurers, because even though the government has vastly more resources than any individual company, "You've got a lot of private companies who do very well competing against the government -- UPS and FedEx are doing a lot better than the post office."

Obama apparently liked the point, because he made it again at another town hall around the same time. "Private insurers should be able to compete," he said Aug. 11 in New Hampshire. "They do it all the time. I mean, if you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? It's the post office that's always having problems."

It was a jarring moment. Here, Obama was trying to promote a huge expansion of government involvement in the health system, and he pointed to a sprawling, unresponsive and insanely expensive government bureaucracy. (It's also one that nearly every American knows from firsthand experience.) Not exactly the best case for government effectiveness.

Obama's words are coming back now, with news that the U.S. Postal Service is in even more of a mess than we thought. Without serious reform, it's set to lose $7 billion this year and $238 billion over the next 10 years, and a new report from the Government Accountability Office says the post office's business model is "not viable" given current business conditions. The report makes the post office sound like a government version of General Motors, if General Motors itself weren't already a government version of General Motors.

Demand for snail mail has been falling in recent years -- the GAO notes that first-class mail volume has declined 19 percent since its peak in 2001 -- and though the post office has cut some staff, it hasn't done nearly enough to keep up. The post office is supposed to pay for itself, but in recent years has been covering its losses by borrowing from the Treasury. But now, GAO notes, the post office "is nearing its $15 billion borrowing limit with the U.S. Treasury and has unfunded pension and retiree health obligations and other liabilities of about $90 billion."

Labor costs are killing the post office. Wages and benefits make up 80 percent of its expenses. About 85 percent of its employees are covered by union contracts, and many receive benefits beyond those of other federal workers. Union agreements force the post office to maintain more full-time employees than it needs; deny managers flexibility in assigning tasks, like having a retail clerk deliver mail; forbid the post office from outsourcing any city delivery routes; give about 500,000 employees total protection from layoffs; and "require (the post office) to pay a more generous share of employees' health and life-insurance premiums than most other agencies," according to GAO.

The post office operates under restrictions that do not burden private businesses. It has a legal monopoly on some types of letter mail, but it's also required by law to deliver mail to every address in the United States. Over the years, Congress has authorized the construction of too many post offices and the hiring of too many postal employees, and those are hard numbers to bring down. Altogether, it is a shining example of what happens when the government tries to operate like a business, only not really.

If it stands, the new healthcare law will establish government offices and agencies to create and run healthcare exchanges, to closely regulate insurance companies, to establish standards of care, to determine what are appropriate levels of coverage, to ensure compliance with the law -- it goes on and on. It is, well, a huge expansion of government involvement in the health system. And there is little doubt that many of its backers in Congress want to expand it further in the coming years. Some envision a day when the government, which already runs Medicare and Medicaid, runs health care entirely.

What could go wrong? It turns out Barack Obama has already told us: Just look at the post office.

Obama's Plan to Humble America - by Ben Shapiro

On April 6, 20-year-old Ty MacDowell led a march in Portland, Maine, designed to raise awareness of sexism. She did this by walking bare-breasted down the street with two dozen fellow women. MacDowell was shocked to learn that far from decreasing sexism, revealing her bosom drew hundreds of men with cameras. "I'm really upset by the men," she moped, "watching it like it's a parade."

This is called the law of unintended consequences. Anyone with half a brain could foresee the consequences of MacDowell's march -- there's a reason men spend years of their lives perusing the Internet for booby shots.

There are other applications of the law of unintended consequences, however, that are less obvious.

In the 1960s, liberals dramatically expanded the welfare state under the banner of Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society. Johnson and his liberal allies created Welfare, the Job Corps, the Model Cities Program, Head Start, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Medicare, Medicaid and many other governmental make-work, pay-the-poor programs. Johnson referred to these programs as a "beautiful woman." (Johnson was a serial womanizer, so that was his dearest metaphor.)

At the same time, Johnson was escalating spending in Vietnam; from 1965 to 1968, Johnson augmented the military budget by 25 percent. This frightened Johnson to no end. According to historian Robert D. Hormats, "Johnson frequently remarked to his assistant Joseph Califano that the massive financial demands of World War II had killed the New Deal and the increase in funding for the Korean War had killed Truman's Fair Deal, and he was concerned a similar fate would befall the Great Society." Vietnam was, in Johnson's word, a "bitch."

The beautiful woman and the bitch were fighting over the same tax dollars. Eventually, LBJ was forced to raise taxes dramatically in order to curtail the budget crisis that was destroying the dollar. In 1968, the same man who had created the massive social safety nets, comprising a huge portion of the federal budget, suddenly called for "fiscal restraint" and "responsible fiscal policy." Not coincidentally, in that same speech, LBJ announced he would not run for re-election. Only a few years later, Democrats in Congress refused to fund the Vietnam War, instead choosing to continue funding the social programs LBJ had instituted.

In short, LBJ's Great Society had two major short-term unintended consequences: First, the Great Society weakened us on the home front by foisting tax hikes and unsustainable debts on the American people; second, the Great Society weakened us abroad by sucking up cash needed to win the Vietnam War. The Great Society forced a choice between guns and butter, and the Democrats chose increasingly expensive butter, paid for by productive Americans.

LBJ could honestly claim that he had no idea his programs would do such immediate damage to the financial and military status of the country. After all, LBJ bought the Keynesian myth that FDR's programs had spurred the economy and made us stronger on the military front.

President Obama knows better.

Obama's decision to incur unthinkable new debts via gargantuan entitlement programs, to raise taxes in the midst of a depression, to intensify inflation to catastrophic proportions, is specifically calculated to effect the exact same two consequences as LBJ's Great Society program. First, Obama wants to weaken us on the home front by "spreading the wealth around" in the name of equality. Second, Obama wants to use that aggravated economic weakness to undermine America's foreign policy standing around the world.

First, Obama's real domestic agenda. He doesn't care about economic expansion -- this week, even as economic reports intensified general gloom, his economic hit man, Paul Volcker, talked about instituting European-type "value-added tax" (VAT). VATs are merely a long-winded way of dramatically exacerbating sales taxes, which would raise prices. Basic supply and demand dictates that raising prices will lower demand, leading to yet another economic spiral. That's Obama's goal -- as Rahm Emanuel put it so succinctly, Obama is not one to let a good crisis go to waste.

Second, Obama wants to use our economic weakness to undermine our military status in the world. Obama believes the greatest threat to international security is American brutishness. He seeks to alleviate that brutishness by unilaterally cutting our nuclear arsenal, removing honest phrasing like "Islamic radicalism" from our national security documents, and setting egg timers for troop surges.

President Obama does not want a greater, more powerful America; he wants a smaller, more humble America. And he knows how to achieve it. He is not acting out the law of unintended consequences -- he strives for the consequences. Unlike LBJ, Obama acts not out of ignorance, but insidiousness. Like LBJ in 1968, he must be made to pay the price.

What Was Obamacare Really About? - by Byron York

It hasn't attracted much notice, but recently some prominent advocates of Obamacare have spoken more frankly than ever before about why they supported a national healthcare makeover. It wasn't just about making insurance more affordable. It wasn't just about bending the cost curve. It wasn't just about cutting the federal deficit. It was also about redistributing wealth.

Health reform is "an income shift," Democratic Sen. Max Baucus said on March 25. "It is a shift, a leveling, to help lower-income, middle-income Americans."

In his halting, jumbled style, Baucus explained that in recent years, "the maldistribution of income in America has gone up way too much, the wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy, and the middle-income class is left behind." The new healthcare legislation, Baucus promised, "will have the effect of addressing that maldistribution of income in America."

At about the same time, Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman and presidential candidate, said the health bill was needed to correct economic inequities. "The question is, in a democracy, what is the right balance between those at the top ... and those at the bottom?" Dean said during an appearance on CNBC. "When it gets out of whack, as it did in the 1920s, and it has now, you need to do some redistribution. This is a form of redistribution."

Summing things up in the New York Times, the liberal economics columnist David Leonhardt called Obamacare "the federal government's biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago."

Now they tell us. For many opponents of the new legislation, the statements confirmed a nagging suspicion that for Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress, the health fight was about more than just insurance -- that redistribution played a significant, if largely unspoken, part in the drive for national health care.

"I don't think most people, when they think of the healthcare bill, instantly think it's a vehicle to redistribute wealth," said pollster Scott Rasmussen. "But we do know that people overwhelmingly believe it will lead to an increase in middle-class taxes, and we do know that people are concerned that it will hurt their own quality of care, so I think their gut instincts point in that direction."


By talking openly about redistribution, Baucus and others have gone seriously off message. Democrats knew there was no way they could ever sell a national healthcare bill to a skeptical public by basing their case on income inequality. That's one reason they went to such lengths to argue -- preposterously, in the view of most Americans -- that the bill could cover 32 million currently uninsured people and still save the taxpayers money.

After Baucus' statement, I asked a Democratic strategist (who asked to remain nameless) whether fighting income inequality was one of his goals in supporting the legislation. Never, he said. "That's what the tax code is for."

"It was not to take something away from rich people; it was to provide something to people without coverage," he continued, making a distinction between striving for universal coverage and seeking to redistribute income. But he quickly saw that Democrats talking about redistribution could be politically damaging, echoing the controversy that erupted when candidate Obama famously told Ohio plumber Joe Wurzelbacher, "When you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

"'Redistribution' is an easy charge to make," the Democrat said. "I'm not surprised that it's an argument critics make; what I'm surprised at is that Democrats are making it."

This week, the DNC group Organizing for America offered a commemorative certificate to supporters who helped pass the healthcare bill. The certificate said, "We achieved the dream of generations -- high-quality, affordable health care is no longer the privilege of a few but the right of all."

The privilege of a few? It is widely accepted that about 85 percent of all Americans have healthcare coverage, and the overwhelming majority are happy with it. There's simply no way anyone could plausibly claim that health coverage is the privilege of a few.

And yet that is the bedrock belief of some who supported the healthcare makeover. So it's no wonder that we're hearing about health care as the redistribution of income. Of course, we're only hearing it after the bill has passed.

Lower Prices and More Foreclosures Will Solve Housing - by Larry Kudlow

With everybody focused on Obamacare, and its new entitlement spending and taxing, the administration has tried to sneak in yet another bailout for housing. Yet again, Team Obama is rewarding reckless behavior, punishing the 90 percent of responsible homeowners who are making good on their mortgages, and setting up a greater moral hazard that will surely lead to an expansion of bailout nation.

I'm talking about an add-on to HAMP, the $75 billion Home Affordable Modification Program, which has been a dismal failure. In fact, the entire foreclosure-prevention effort -- including forgiveness of mortgage-loan principal -- has been a failure.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency reports that nearly 60 percent of modified mortgages re-default within a year. And now comes a new brilliant idea that if you live in your main residence, have a mortgage balance of less than $729,750, owe monthly mortgage payments that are not affordable (meaning greater than 31 percent of income) and demonstrate a financial hardship, the government will subsidize you by offering TARP money to banks and other lenders to reduce your outstanding mortgage balance.

Former Bush administration economist Keith Hennessey highlights the outrage that Team Obama would actually subsidize people making up to $186,000 a year who have a mortgage balance of over $700,000. This isn't even a middle-class entitlement. It's an upper-middle-class entitlement. Actually, at $186,000, it's virtually a top-earner entitlement, according to Team Obama's definition of rich people eligible for tax hikes.

I mean, for a measly $14,000 more in income, the White House will jack up your top personal tax rate and your capital-gains tax rate. But now, for just less than $200,000, you get a brand new spiffy forgiveness plan for your mortgage.

It's a complete outrage.

I don't want you to pay for my mistakes. And I don't want to pay for yours. That's an oft-heard Tea Party complaint, and it's a good one. Why should the 90 percent of folks who make good financial decisions on their homes have to pay for the 10 percent who did not?

Or, put it another way, just because a home loan is "underwater" -- meaning its value is lower than today's current market price -- why should a responsible person whine about it and walk away? Why not service this loan for the longer term and wait for prices to improve? That's called personal responsibility.

Bloomberg financial columnist Caroline Baum argues that lower home prices are the key to solving the housing problem. Popular blogger Barry Ritholtz says we need more foreclosures, not fewer, to solve housing. Both are correct.

Even in the foreclosure process, young families can come in and snap up cheap homes. This is a great boon to the new generation.

And take a look at places like California, Florida and Las Vegas, where foreclosure activity has been high and prices have fallen the most. What you see is a sharp pickup in home sales, which is steadily clearing away the price-depressing inventory overhang of unsold homes. In other words, market forces work.

Bouncing from pillar to post, the White House has unsuccessfully tried mortgage modifications, foreclosure abatements and tax credits. None of it has worked. But the price tag so far for these failed government interventions in the housing market is $75 billion and rising.

Applying TARP money to the housing problem -- originally meant for banks -- is an even greater outrage. TARP should be closed down, now that banks have repaid it, and turned back to taxpayers in the form of government debt reduction.

But the Obama White House rejects market forces. It rejects free-market price adjustments. As a result, it is creating a crazy subversion of normal incentives.

Obamacare -- with its unwillingness to put to work true free-market and consumer-choice competition to hold down health costs -- will turn out to be a failure. And so will Team Obama's clumsy and clunky attempts to substitute government subsidies for free-market home pricing. The failed government subsidy for housing is a leading indicator. Imagine, putting more and more middle- and upper-end income earners on the government dole.

As America's nanny state grows larger, its economy will grow weaker.

The VAT Cometh - by Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- As the night follows the day, the VAT cometh.
With the passage of Obamacare, creating a vast new middle-class entitlement, a national sales tax of the kind near-universal in Europe is inevitable.

We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that another $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks -- the unfunded $200 billion-plus doctor fix, the double counting of Medicare cuts, the 10-6 sleight-of-hand (counting 10 years of revenue and only 6 years of outflows) -- is at minimum a $2 trillion new entitlement.

It will vastly increase the debt. But even if it were revenue-neutral, Obamacare pre-empts and appropriates for itself the best and easiest means of reducing the existing deficit. Obamacare's $500 billion of cuts in Medicare and $600 billion in tax hikes are no longer available for deficit reduction. They are siphoned off for the new entitlement of insuring the uninsured.

This is fiscally disastrous because, as President Obama himself explained last year in unveiling his grand transformational policies, our unsustainable fiscal path requires control of entitlement spending, the most ruinous of which is out-of-control health care costs.

Obamacare was sold on the premise that, as Nancy Pelosi put it, "health care reform is entitlement reform. Our budget cannot take this upward spiral of cost." But the bill enacted on Tuesday accelerates the spiral: It radically expands Medicaid (adding 15 million new recipients/dependents) and shamelessly raids Medicare by spending on a new entitlement the $500 billion in cuts and the yield from the Medicare tax hikes.

Obama knows that the debt bomb is looming, that Moody's is warning that the Treasury's AAA rating is in jeopardy, that we are headed for a run on the dollar and/or hyperinflation if nothing is done.

Hence his deficit reduction commission. It will report (surprise!) after the November elections.
What will it recommend? What can it recommend? Sure, Social Security can be trimmed by raising the retirement age, introducing means testing and changing the indexing formula from wage growth to price inflation.

But this won't be nearly enough. As Obama has repeatedly insisted, the real money is in health care costs -- which are now locked in place by the new Obamacare mandates.

That's where the value-added tax comes in. For the politician, it has the virtue of expediency: People are used to sales taxes, and this one produces a river of revenue. Every 1 percent of VAT would yield up to $1 trillion a decade (depending on what you exclude -- if you exempt food, for example, the yield would be more like $900 billion).

It's the ultimate cash cow. Obama will need it. By introducing universal health care, he has pulled off the largest expansion of the welfare state in four decades. And the most expensive. Which is why all of the European Union has the VAT. Huge VATs. Germany: 19 percent. France and Italy: 20 percent. Most of Scandinavia: 25 percent.

American liberals have long complained that ours is the only advanced industrial country without universal health care. Well, now we shall have it. And as we approach European levels of entitlements, we will need European levels of taxation.

Obama set out to be a consequential president, on the order of Ronald Reagan. With the VAT, Obama's triumph will be complete. He will have succeeded in reversing Reaganism. Liberals have long complained that Reagan's strategy was to starve the (governmental) beast in order to shrink it: First, cut taxes -- then ultimately you have to reduce government spending.

Obama's strategy is exactly the opposite: Expand the beast, and then feed it. Spend first -- which then forces taxation. Now that, with the institution of universal health care, we are becoming the full entitlement state, the beast will have to be fed.

And the VAT is the only trough in creation large enough.
As a substitute for the income tax, the VAT would be a splendid idea. Taxing consumption makes infinitely more sense than taxing work. But to feed the liberal social-democratic project, the VAT must be added on top of the income tax.

Ultimately, even that won't be enough. As the population ages and health care becomes increasingly expensive, the only way to avoid fiscal ruin (as Britain, for example, has discovered) is health care rationing.
It will take a while to break the American populace to that idea. In the meantime, get ready for the VAT. Or start fighting it.

The Fallacy of "Fairness"

The Fallacy of "Fairness"

by Thomas Sowell

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

If there is ever a contest to pick which word has done the most damage to people's thinking, and to actions to carry out that thinking, my nomination would be the word "fair." It is a word thrown around by far more people than have ever bothered to even try to define it.

This mushy vagueness may be a big handicap in logic but it is a big advantage in politics. All sorts of people, with very different notions about what is or is not fair, can be mobilized behind this nice-sounding word, in utter disregard of the fact that they mean very different things when they use that word.

Some years ago, for example, there was a big outcry that various mental tests used for college admissions or for employment were biased and "unfair" to many individuals or groups. Fortunately there was one voice of sanity-- David Riesman, I believe-- who said: "The tests are not unfair. LIFE is unfair and the tests measure the results."

If by "fair" you mean everyone having the same odds for achieving success, then life has never been anywhere close to being fair, anywhere or at any time. If you stop and think about it (however old-fashioned that may seem), it is hard even to conceive of how life could possibly be fair in that sense.

Even within the same family, among children born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, the first-borns on average have higher IQs than their brothers and sisters, and usually achieve more in life.

Unfairness is often blamed on somebody, even if only on "society." But whose fault is it if you were not the first born? Since some groups have more children than others, a higher percentage of the next generation will be first-borns in groups that have smaller families, so such groups have an advantage over other groups.

Despite all the sound and fury generated in controversies over whether different groups have different genetic potential, even if they all have identical genetic potential the outcomes can still differ if they have different birth rates.

Twins have average IQs several points lower than children born singly. Whether that is due to having to share resources in the womb or having to share parents' attention after birth, the fact is what it is-- and it certainly is not fair.

Many people fail to see the fundamental difference between saying that a particular thing-- whether a mental test or an institution-- is conveying a difference that already exists or is creating a difference that would not exist otherwise.

Creating a difference that would not exist otherwise is discrimination, and something can be done about that. But, in recent times, virtually any disparity in outcomes is almost automatically blamed on discrimination, despite the incredible range of other reasons for disparities between individuals and groups.

Nature's discrimination completely dwarfs man's discrimination. Geography alone makes equal chances virtually impossible. The geographic advantages of Western Europe over Eastern Europe-- in climate and navigable waterways, among other things-- have led to centuries of differences in income levels that were greater than income differences between blacks and whites in America today.

Just the fact that the lay of the land is different in different parts of Europe meant that it was easier for the Roman legions to invade Western Europe. This meant that Western Europeans had the advantages of the most advanced civilization in Europe at that time. Moreover, because Roman letters were used in Western Europe, the languages of that region had written versions centuries before the Slavic languages of Eastern Europe did.

The difference between literacy and illiteracy is a huge difference, and it remained huge for centuries. Was it the Slavs' fault that the Romans did not want to climb over so many mountains to get to them?

To those living in Western Europe in the days of the Roman Empire, the idea of being conquered, and many slaughtered, by the Romans probably had no great appeal. But their descendants would benefit from their bad luck. And that doesn't seem fair either.

Selling & Buying a House

It is interesting the way you look at everyday things, when you actually look at the things that are going on everyday. The wife and I are in the process of selling our house, maybe not the best time to do so, but it could be. There are variety of reasons behind the move, none of which I feel like going in to - lucky you. Look at the chart below (past post) on ARMs resetting in the coming years. Home values/ prices will drop so whatever I buy now will lose value. But if I wait, I'll inevitably lose out on the great interest rates. Easy to see that a 5% mortgage rate is much better than 15% - and I'm no math major.

I don't like the idea of random folks walking through my house and critiquing it. But I guess enough folks need to like it in order to generate an acceptable offer. I guess we did a good enough job since we have a contract pending after almost no time on the market.

Another reason I don't like folks walking through my house, is simply because I don't trust people in general. "People" tend to have sticky fingers and wandering eyes. I don't like having to hide things I don't want them to see/take (now or later) in my own house.

I also don't care too much for the games of "negotiating" the purchase price - list, offer, counter, counter w/ conditions, counter the counter w/ new conditions and concessions, etc. etc.

It is pretty overwhelming at times to think that this decision on where to live will impact so many (all?) facets of your life. It is fair to say that it is something you shouldn't screw up.

Looking at a new house you obviously look at the age of the house, commute to/from work, the square footage, the school district (if applicable) foundation, number of rooms, lot drainage, morning/evening sun, yadda yadda yadda. But you may also look at storage, spare room for long term guests, extra storage space, access to grocery stores, gas stations, banks, major roads, back roads, hunting / gardening spots, access routes to friends and family, access to alternate water source, home entry/exit points, trees/shrubs near doors and windows, choke/bottleneck points in the house like long hallways, etc. etc.

As with all things in life, it is best to have a plan in place before you need to have and execute that plan. Even a quick trip to Kroger for some Early Times can turn into a life changer. So can a short ride in an antique Rolls limo across a bridge into a bassackwards state. So pay attention and have a plan. Be prepared mentally even if you aren't physically. I'm still formulating a plan on this little endevour; should have already been done, but I'm working from behind the curve a bit.

Serious, if rambling, post - but hey, no Glenn Beck clips today.

WORLDWIDE HISTORY OF GUN CONFISCATION

Found this today. Something to think about. You may not want a gun in your house, but you might be glad you neighbor has one in his.

In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
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In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
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Germany established gun control in 1938 and from 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.
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China established gun control in 1935. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
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Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
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Uganda established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
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Cambodia established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977, one million educated people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Clever