Category Archives: News

Obama’s corporate tax hike would cause Microsoft to outsource jobs

This Bloomberg article may be helpful to those Democrats who voted for Obama because they hoped that Obama would stop outsourcing by taxing “the rich” and by taxing “greedy coporations”. (H/T Club For Growth)

Excerpt:

Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.

“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said in an interview. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”

…In a roundtable discussion today, Ballmer, Symantec Corp. Chairman John Thompson and the heads of smaller companies such as privately held Bentley Systems, an Exton, Pennsylvania-based maker of engineering software, said such policies would hurt domestic investment, reduce shareholder value and increase the cost of employing U.S. workers.

See, there’s a difference between what Obama thinks will happen (fantasy) and what actual will happen (reality). He is probably very surprised that corporations are responding to his socialism by shipping jobs overseas. What an unexpected surprise! Let’s recall the simplest possible economics lesson from Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson”.

From this aspect, therefore, the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Obama shows no evidence of knowing this lesson. And neither does anyone who voted for him. And it isn’t just that he and his voting bloc seem to know nothing about economics, it’s that they seem not to know anything about anything. And this, coupled with disregard for the unemployment rate, the budget deficit and the national debt, is what fuels his domestic policy.

Isn’t it mysterious that Bush cut taxes across the board, and tax revenues skyrocketed, while unemployment dove down below 5%? It’s a mystery! At least it’s a mystery to people who have never cracked open a book.

How communists operate

Here’s a preview of what we can expect from someone like Obama, who has no doubt absorbed the views of many left-wing arts professors, who, like him, have probably never run so much as a lemonade stand. Chavez doesn’t even have a college degree. (I have not seen Obama’s grades, he hasn’t ever released them – but he used alcohol, pot and cocaine).

IBD writes about Chavez:

It ought to worry people that what’s happening at GM is perfectly recognizable in Caracas.

In 2004, Chavez began by expropriating cattle ranches in Venezuela, saying he only wanted to clarify property rights, not confiscate land. End result: Virtually all productive land now is in his hands, redistributed to his loyalists in serfdom.

After that, he went after the U.S. oil industry, snagging prizes like Exxon Mobil’s $1 billion heavy-oil complex on the Orinoco River in 2007, citing a different legal issue: tax disputes.

He did similar expropriations with steel, cement, ports, banks, sugar, rice, pretty much any industry that was viable.

Running out of companies to steal, he now persecutes private media — not, he claims, to stifle dissent, but to protect children from smut, his pretense for shutting down RCTV in 2007.

For the last remaining nonstate TV station, his concern is now environmental desecration, with Chavistas using the pretense of some old antlers on the wall of a Globovision executive following an open-ended state raid as the excuse to shut down the TV station.

Whatever Chavez’s legal concerns are, the punishment is always the same: expropriation and more power to the state, the two pillars of socialism.

Read the whole thing, it goes on to juxtapose Obama and Chavez. (MP3 Podcast is here)

Michelle Malkin asks: Is an abortionist worth more than a military recruiter?

Michelle Malkin
Michelle Malkin

My friend Andrew drew my attention to Michelle Malkin’s most recent column. It’s a must-read!

Michelle starts by talking about two murders that occurred at almost the same time. Which one was more important to Obama and the left-wing media, and why?

She writes:

When a right-wing Christian vigilante kills, millions of fingers pull the trigger. When a left-wing Muslim vigilante kills, he kills alone. These are the instantly ossifying narratives in the Sunday shooting death of Kansas late-term abortionist George Tiller versus the Monday shootings of two Arkansas military recruiters.

Tiller’s suspected murderer, Scott Roeder, was white, Christian, anti-government, and anti-abortion. The gunman in the military recruiting center attack, Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad, was black, a Muslim convert, anti-military, and anti-American. Both crimes are despicable, cowardly acts of domestic terrorism. But the disparate treatment of the two brutal cases by both the White House and the media is striking.

In the column Michelle notes the following differences between the two stories:

  • Obama issued a statement condemning the murderer of the abortionist, but not the murder of the military recruiters
  • The Justice Department dispatched federal marshals to protect abortion clinics, not military recruitment offices
  • The left-wing media labeled the murderer of the abortion doctor a terrorist, not the murderer of the military recruiters
  • The left-wing media blamed conservative media for one murder, but militant Islam was not blamed for the other murders

Michelle asks what Obama had to say about the deaths of two of our brave soldiers:

…President Obama said nothing. The Justice Department was mum. And so were the legions of finger-pointing pundits happily convicting the pro-life movement and every right-leaning writer on the planet of contributing to the murder of George Tiller. Obama’s omission, it should be noted, comes just a few weeks after he failed to mention the Bronx jihadi plot to bomb synagogues and a National Guard airbase during his speech on homeland security.

She goes on to catalog some more incidents showing where the real threat of domestic terrorism lies. Most of them I had never even heard of. It just goes to show you that some victims are more equal than others, especially when you are trying to squash down the good and lift up the evil – so that the distinctions that make people able to judge others will be demolished. Abortion good, patriotism bad. Feminism good, military service bad.

Watch this video with Evan Sayet and you’ll learn how the secular-left thinks.

Another video by Evan Sayet is linked here.

We need to understand how it has become possible for the secular-left to be viewed as “moral” while faithful conservatives are viewed as “immoral”. One worldview views the universe as an accident and human rights as fictions. The other believes that God grounds human rights and that every person has a purpose that makes them valuable: to know God.

UPDATE: Nice Deb says that the anti-war left is to blame for the death of the military recruiters. Turnabout is fair play. She has a lot more at that link, too.


Are things beginning to turn around in Alberta?

Political Map of Canada
Political Map of Canada

I blogged before about the California school district that is indoctrinating 5-year olds with homosexual propaganda in kindergarten. Well, Canada had a similar problem in the province of British Columbia, where the entire curriculum was going to be designed by gay activists. Now, you might think that the Canadians would be a lot more leftist on such issues, you’d be wrong.

Alberta has a bill in the works to give rights to parents to opt out of programs like this.

Check out this story from the Globe and Mail. (H/T My friend Andrew)

Bill 44, which proposes amendments to Alberta’s Human Rights, Citizenship, and Multiculturalism Act, contains two significant changes. The first adds sexual orientation to proscribed grounds of discrimination. This would bring Alberta’s human rights legislation into conformity with a Supreme Court of Canada ruling that “read in” sexual orientation after it had been deliberately omitted three times by the Legislative Assembly in Edmonton. The amendment has been widely praised.

Section 11 of the new act is more controversial. It requires that parents be notified whenever instructional materials are taught dealing “explicitly with religion, sexuality or sexual orientation.” If parents object in writing, the student can be excused from class.

According to Rob Anderson, Conservative MLA from Airdrie-Chestermere, a riding just north of Calgary, Bill 44 “is one of the most positive and meaningful advances for human rights that this province and this country has seen for many years.” Specifically, he explained, the “parental rights clause” enshrines Article 26 (3) of the United Nations universal declaration of human rights: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” Premier Ed Stelmach added that his government “supports a very, very fundamental right and that is parental rights with respect to education.”

This article was written by a political science professor at the University of Calgary, which is the school where their prime minister Stephen Harper got both his degrees in economics. They are known for their conservative views. They even have a special name: the “Calgary School” of economics, just like you might talk about the “Chicago School” and the “Austrian School”. Awesome!

Here’s a letter to the editor from a University of Lethbridge (Alberta) professor that I found in the National Post, (H/T Blazing Cat Fur)

Bill 44 is a response to a B. C. Human Rights Tribunal decision mandating two gay activists to commandeer the Ministry of Education in that province to impose a “social justice” course into the curriculum. Parents’ rights, never mind those of local school boards, were overridden.

The B. C. example and Alberta’s Bill 44 indicate how HRCs have poisoned politics in those two provinces.

Now everyone, not just Christian preachers, has to worry about getting dragged before an HRC. A former chairman of the Calgary School Board once proclaimed the state “owns” children who must be liberated from the supposedly claustrophobic viewpoints of their parents. This goes to show how little this debate has to do with promoting critical thinking or cosmopolitanism, as the Post’s article suggests.

If there is an upside to this, perhaps now there will be sufficient support across the political spectrum to dismantle the HRCs.

Go Canada, eh?