Tag Archives: Government

News

Round-up of stories on fiscal, social and foreign policy

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Gateway Pundit reports that the Democrat government has raised the average wage of government employees by over $2600 during a recession caused by the Democrat’s own policy of forcing private banks via regulation to make risky loans to Democrat special interest groups.

Excerpt from the CBS article:

President Obama’s call last year for “shared sacrifice” doesn’t extend to federal employees, at least based on the details of his administration’s 2010 budget released this week.

At a time when the official unemployment rate is nearing double digits, and 6.35 million people are receiving unemployment benefits, the U.S. government is on a hiring binge.

Executive branch employment — 1.98 million in 2009, excluding the Postal Service and the Defense Department — is set to increase by 15.6 percent for the 2010 fiscal year. Most of that is thanks to the Census Bureau hiring 102,000 temporary workers, but not counting them still yields a net increase of 2 percent in one year.

There’s little belt-tightening in evidence in Washington, D.C.: Counting benefits, the average pay per federal worker will leap from $72,800 in 2008 to $75,419 next year.

So much for communism, the economic system of those who are unable to revise their beliefs in the face of reality and history. I recommend that those who voted for Obama read Robert P. Murphy’s “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism”, the best economics book for complete beginners. I wonder why American atheistic leftists are still living in the capitalist USA instead of in North Korea or Cuba? Oh, I know: hypocrisy!

And then there is the story of 5 of the 6 wannabe-Jihadists from a Miami terror cell were finally convicted for their part in a plot to attack the Sears Tower in Chicago.

The Jawa Report cites this Chicago Tribune article:

Ringleader Narseal Batiste, 35, was the only one convicted of all four terrorism-related conspiracy counts, including plotting to provide material support to terrorists and conspiring to wage war against the U.S. Batiste, who was on the vast majority of hundreds of FBI audio and video tapes, faces up to 70 years in prison.

Batiste’s right-hand man, 29-year-old Patrick Abraham, was convicted on three counts and faces 50 years behind bars. Convicted on two counts and facing 30 years are 24-year-old Burson Augustin, 25-year-old Rotschild Augustine and 33-year-old Stanley Grant Phanor. Naudimar Herrera, 25, was cleared of all four charges.

Jihad Watch notes some bias in the coverage by AP, where they leave the identity and motives of the attackers to the last few paragraphs.

…Prosecutors Richard Gregorie and Jacqueline Arango focused on the group’s intent as captured on dozens of FBI audio and video recordings. Batiste is repeatedly heard espousing violence against the U.S. government and saying the men should start a “full ground war” that would “kill all the devils.”

“I want to fight some jihad,” Batiste says on one tape.

A key piece of evidence is an FBI video of the entire group pledging an oath of allegiance, or “bayat,” to al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden in a March 16, 2006, ceremony led by an Arabic-speaking FBI informant posing as “Brother Mohammed” from al-Qaida. Testimony also showed the men took photographs and video of possible targets in Miami, including the FBI building, a courthouse complex and a synagogue.

Oooh, but there’s no such thing as media bias! The media is certainly not an arm of the Democrat party that covers their every policy blunder. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Remember, the media elite has to cover for the Democrats. Who else would give them a bailout of taxpayer money?

News

Are Obama’s bailouts just pay-offs to left-wing special interest groups?

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We looked at whether Al Gore’s global warming alarmism was just a scam to increase his already considerable wealth by misleading people desperate to find meaning in life with a bunch of faith-based lies. This time, let’s take a look at Obama’s bailout activities and see whether the the bailouts are to stimulate the economy, or to reward people who voted for him.

For instance, California recently cut $74 million from its state budget by lowering the salaries of unionized workers. How did Obama respond? By threatening to withhold stimulus money unless the unions got the money back.

The radically leftist Los Angeles Times has the story. (H/T Hot Air)

Reporting from Sacramento — The Obama administration is threatening to rescind billions of dollars in federal stimulus money if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers do not restore wage cuts to unionized home healthcare workers approved in February as part of the budget.

Schwarzenegger’s office was advised this week by federal health officials that the wage reduction, which will save California $74 million, violates provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Failure to revoke the scheduled wage cut before it takes effect July 1 could cost California $6.8 billion in stimulus money, according to state officials. …

The wages at issue involve workers who care for some 440,000 low-income disabled and elderly Californians. The workers, who collectively contribute millions of dollars in dues each month to the influential Service Employees International Union and the United Domestic Workers, will see the state’s contribution to their wages cut from a maximum of $12.10 per hour to a maximum of $10.10.

And we know from Michelle Malkin that Obama is pressuring private companies to shaft their shareholders in order to give his union buddies a better deal than they deserve.

Greed is good – until it gets in the way of a union-friendly restructuring deal. President Obama, generous recipient of Wall Street largesse, angrily derided a group of hedge fund managers this week as “speculators.” The miffed president suggested that uncooperative firms were selfish for holding out on the government’s Chrysler bankruptcy plans and refusing to make “sacrifices” to benefit the United Auto Workers.

The “sacrifices” involved Chrysler debt holders agreeing to sell the debt to the government at prices determined by union-beholden bureaucrats instead of bankruptcy courts. The hedge firms balked. Obama sneered that the dissenters were looking for “unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.” But the holdouts never took banking bailout funds from Washington. And the targeted financial executives were simply doing what good money managers are supposed to do: put their clients’ fiduciary interests first.

Michelle Malkin also reports on how Obama wants another $19 billion for his peeps at Fanie Mae. Remember, democrats caused this recession by forcing banks via regulations to make loans to Democrat voters against all common sense. Obama gets happy leftist feelings of superiority by redistributing wealth from the producers to the victims. And he thinks that if you went to expensive private schools and Harvard thanks to a rich grandmother, then you would feel good about him redistributing your money, too.

The story from Yahoo News Michelle links to says:

Fannie Mae (FNM.P), the largest provider of U.S. home mortgage funding, said on Friday it needs more capital from the U.S. Treasury after a $23.2 billion loss in the first quarter, and warned government housing programs would cut deeper into its profitability.

The government-controlled company said its regulator requested $19 billion from the Treasury under a funding commitment that on Wednesday was doubled to $200 billion. The credit, in the form of senior preferred stock purchases, was established as soaring losses led the government to push the company into conservatorship in September.

As the nation’s housing market reels in its worst downturn since the 1930s, credit-related expenses accounted for the majority of Fannie Mae’s loss, at $20.9 billion. It also took a $5.7 billion loss on mortgage securities.

Provisions for credit losses soared 85 percent as the U.S. economy faltered, expanding delinquencies — which have wreaked havoc on the entire financial system — to consumers with better credit, it said.

Oh, and here is news of a prospective bailout of Obama’s buddies in the left wing media.

Inquisitr.com and Free Republic reported: (H/T Gateway Pundit)

At the annual White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington DC Saturday evening (May 9), President Barack Obama ended on a serious note, pledging his undying support for journalists and specifically newspapers.

President Obama spoke about media job losses and changes in the industry, then quoted Jefferson, “if he had the choice between Government with newspapers or newspapers without Government, he’d choose the latter.” The gushing was perhaps understandable at a press function, but it’s what he said next that foretold of a newspaper bailout.

Obama told the crowd “Your ultimate success is essential to success of our democracy” before shortly saying “Government without a tough and vibrant media is not an option for the United States of America.”

The notable thing in context is that Obama primarily in the speech talks about newspapers, with other media outlets being mentioned second (collectively), or when making a joke (for example, noting that Jefferson hadn’t seen Cable News.) It would appear from the speech clearly that Obama holds the mainstream media, and particularly newspapers above online media. It is clear that when he talked about “tough and vibrant media” that he is referring to mainstream media, and newspapers in particular.

He concludes with the line that the problems in the media industry are “problems worth solving,” which sounds an awful lot like the final word that there’s going to be a newspaper bailout.

And remember I blogged recently about Michele Bachmann’s effort to prevent taxpayer money from going to ACORN while they are facing criminal charges.

It’s like Bush and Haliburton. Only that Bush stuff never actually happened, but this Democrat stuff is actually happening. Everything the Democrats hated about Bush? Like opposing dissent and free speech? Bush never did any of it. Democrats are the ones who are authoring hate crime bills and criminalizing blogging. Yeah, fascism is a solely a phenomenon of the left. Always has been, always will be.

Polemics

Why Democrat policies discourage men from marrying, part 3

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This article is the third of a three-part series on how Democrat policies discourage marriage and child-rearing. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.

How no-fault divorce discourages men from marrying

This time we’ll look at my favorite argument against marriage. Today’s article is from Dr. Stephen Baskerville, author of the amazing book “Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family”. I own two copies, one for me and one to lend out.

Let’s get a look at the problem posed to marriage by the Democrat policy of no-fault divorce:

…80 percent of divorces are unilateral. Under “no-fault,” divorce becomes a power grab by one spouse, assisted by judicial officials who profit from the ensuing litigation: judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, and social workers. Involuntary divorce involves government agents forcibly removing innocent people from their homes, seizing their property, and separating them from their children. It requires long-term supervision over private life by state functionaries, including police and jails.

…Invariably the first action in a divorce is to separate the children from one parent, usually the father. Even if he is innocent of any legal wrongdoing and does not agree to the divorce, the state seizes his children with no burden of proof to justify why. The burden of proof–and financial burden–falls on him to demonstrate why they should be returned.

A legally unimpeachable parent can thus be arrested for seeing his own children without government authorization. He can be arrested through additional judicial directives that apply to no one but him. He can be arrested for domestic violence or child abuse, even without evidence that he has committed any. He can be arrested for not paying child support, regardless of the amount demanded. He can even be arrested for not paying an attorney or psychotherapist. There is no formal charge, no jury, no trial, and no record.

When I was a student in graduate school, I used to hate going out the door and leaving my pet parrot behind with my brother. I did not believe then, and do not now, that anyone in the world is capable of taking care of my bird except me. I felt awful leaving the house, and I would call home between classes just to check on him. That is how parents feel.

I could go on and on about the way that I have bonded with that little creature. And this is basically why marriage is a virtual impossibility to me, given the divorce laws enacted by Democrats and their special interest groups, (trial lawyers, feminists, academic elites, etc.). I do not think I could survive being separated from my children for years by lawyers and courts.

To justify this, the divorce machinery has generated hysteria against parents so inflammatory that few dare question it: child abuse, wife-beating, and nonpayment of “child support”–all propagated by feminists, bar associations, and social work bureaucracies, with federal funding. The accused parent loses his children and is abandoned by friends, family members, parishioners, and co-workers–all terrified to be associated with an accused “pedophile,” “batterer,” or “deadbeat dad.”

Each of these figures is largely a hoax. There is no evidence of large numbers of fathers abandoning their families, beating their wives, and molesting their children. Divorce courts separate parents from their children, with false accusations as a rationalization.

Child abuse and domestic violence have no precise definition. They are not adjudicated as assault, and accused parents do not enjoy the constitutional protections of criminal defendants. Allegations are “confirmed” not by juries but by judges or social workers. Domestic “violence” need not be violent or even physical. Official definitions include “extreme jealousy” and “constant criticizing.”

Child abuse is itself the creation of welfare bureaucracies. An intact family is the safest place for women and children, since child abuse overwhelmingly occurs in single-parent homes from which the father has been removed. Britain’s Family Education Trust reports that children are up to 33 times more likely to be abused in a single-parent home than in an intact family. Domestic violence too is far more likely with the breakup of a marriage than among married couples.

Yet trumped-up accusations are rampant in divorce courts, usually to eliminate fathers. Elaine Epstein of the Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association writes that “allegations of abuse are now used for tactical advantage” in custody cases, a trend documented in the Illinois Bar Journal, Yale Law Review, Rutgers Law Review, and others.

The principal impediment to child abuse is thus the father. “The presence of the father placed the child at lesser risk for child sexual abuse,” concludes a study in Adolescent and Family Health. By eliminating fathers, officials pose as the solution to the problem they themselves create. Appalling as it sounds, we have created a massive army of officials with a vested interest in child abuse.

And it’s not just the separation, the legal fees, the false allegations and the criminal record. It’s the fact that I would be driven into poverty by the courts.

The “deadbeat dad” is another creation of divorce machinery. He is far less likely to have voluntarily abandoned offspring he callously sired than to be an involuntarily divorced father who has been, as one attorney writes, “forced to finance the filching of his own children.”

Originally justified to recover welfare costs, child support has become an entitlement for all mothers, regardless of their behavior, and a subsidy on middle-class divorce. It allows the mother–simply by divorcing–to confiscate her husband’s income. It is tax-free to the recipient, and nonpayment means incarceration without trial. The Journal of Socio-Economics notes that child support serves as an “economic incentive for middle-class women to seek divorce.” Economist Robert Willis calculates that one-fifth to one-third of child support payments are used for children; the rest is profit for the custodial parent.

State governments also generate revenue from child support, giving them a financial incentive to make it onerous and to encourage divorce. Federal taxpayers subsidize this family destruction scheme with about $3 billion annually. Officials have admitted that the arrearages are far beyond the parents’ ability to pay.

Government’s divorce apparatus has become a machine for destroying families, seizing children, and incarcerating parents without trial. It is the most repressive government machinery ever created in the United States.

So, the creation of no-fault divorce, an intrusion by the state on private contracts, makes marriage impossible for rational men. The stakes are just too high to be taking chances.

You can hear Dr. Baskerville on the radio with Dennis Prager and Milt Rosenberg in podcasts linked here.A more complete version of the article can be found here in Touchstone Magazine. I highly recommend the more complete version. If you are a single man, or you have male children, you really need to read it. Dr. Baskerville wrote recently about marriage and the Christian church here.

This series on Democrat’s opposition to marriage and family is now complete. If you absolutely, positively have to have more on marriage, then you can read one of my most popular posts about an ideal marriage I know about, or some guest posts from my very happily married friend Andrew on marriage, here and here.