Critical Thoughts

A Chapter from the Liberal Media’s Brave New World

2012-01-29T23:25:00.003-06:00

The Associated Press reports (link):

A jury ... found an Afghan father, his wife and their son guilty of killing three teenage sisters and a co-wife in what the judge described as "cold-blooded, shameful murders" resulting from a "twisted concept of honor" in a case that shocked and riveted Canadians.... Prosecutors said the defendants allegedly killed the three teenage sisters because they dishonored the family by defying its disciplinarian rules on dress, dating, socializing and using the Internet.... The jury [found] Mohammad Shafia, 58; his wife Tooba Yahya, 42; and their son Hamed, 21, each guilty of four counts of first-degree murder. First-degree murder carries an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.

In its 930 word report, there is no mention of Islam, leaving readers to speculate as to whether it played a role in the motivation of Mohammad and his "co-wife". The Associated Press clearly thinks not.

Also, toward the end the article eventually identifies the "three teenage sisters" as daughters of the man convicted of the "honor killings", and strongly implies that they were also daughters of the second wife. "Honor killings" are known as murders in some circles outside the Associated Press.

Not much to see here, move right along.

J Greco

Obama in the Twilight Zone

2012-01-02T12:56:00.005-06:00

We Americans start the new year with Democrat President Barack Obama continuing to show his utter disdain for truth and honesty and his inner totalitarian self.

Peter Wehner: Obama Enters the Twilight Zone (link):

... To really enter the Twilight Zone, consider these two priceless sentences from the New York Times story: “Winning a full-year extension of the payroll tax, [Obama spokesman] Mr. Earnest said, will still be a top priority. He noted that House Republicans were now also arguing that it should be extended for a year, after some initially opposed extending it at all.”

Come again? On December 13, the GOP House passed a full-year extension of the payroll tax cut – and was promptly criticized by – you guessed it — the president. Obama favored a much shorter, two-month extension. House Republicans, under intense political pressure, eventually agreed to the two-month extension. Now the White House is declaring a full-year extension is a “top priority.” Yet as recently as three weeks ago the opposition to the president’s “top priority” came not from House Republicans but from Obama himself.

We are now reaching the point in which the president is running a truly post-modern campaign, in which there is no objective truth but simply narrative. Obama’s campaign isn’t simply distorting the facts; it is inverting them. This kind of thing isn’t unusual to find in the academy. But to see a president and his campaign so thoroughly deconstruct truth in order to maintain power is quite rare. The sheer audacity of Obama’s cynicism is a wonder of the modern world.

Meanwhile, after three years into the Obama presidency, the Gitmo prison is still open. Remember liberals screaming about the "fierce moral urgency" to closing it down, which Obama promised would be one of the first things he would do if elected? I do. Where are those liberals now (link)?

And to top it off, when few were paying attention on New Year's eve Obama signed into law the controversial (link; link; link) National Defense Authorization Act which, inter alia, allows him to indefinitely detain American citizens without trial, with which I wholeheartedly disagree. Apparently it was the Obama people who insisted (link) that this power over American citizens be included in the final version of the bill, and yet upon signing it Obama professes to have "reservations" about it. He wants it both ways -- to be for it and against it at the same time. Just part of Obama's continuing assault on truth in his personal Twilight Zone.

John M Greco

Christmas Eve at Chicago’s Holy Name Cathedral

2011-12-24T16:11:00.002-06:00

It’s Christmas Eve, and my mind’s eye looks back on my many Midnight Masses of years long past. One church I’ve never seen on Christmas Eve is Chicago’s Holy Name Cathedral, home base of the Roman Catholic Archbishop.

It’s a beauty inside and out, described by Fr. George A. Lane, in his Chicago Churches and Synagogues, as a Victorian Gothic containing the official chair of a bishop, the cathedra. The building was completed in 1875 of Lemont limestone and has undergone a number of alterations and renovations since. Most striking to me is the unusual wood ceiling, described by Fr. Lane as “an elegant water-pegged black walnut ceiling, probably unique in the Chicago area.” The cathedral features five bronze panels celebrating the Holy Name of Jesus by sculptor Attilio Selva, Stations of the Cross in bronze and red marble by Goffredo Verginelli, stained glass windows from Milan, and massive bronze doors designed by Albert Friscia. Fr. Lane tells us that the wide-brimmed red hats hanging from the ceiling high above the sanctuary area are the galeros belonging to the previous cardinal-archbishops of Chicago, a custom dating to the thirteenth century; old traditions can live on in new places.

Although this is one more Christmas Eve I’ll miss Midnight Mass at the Cathedral, I hope to once again at least catch it remotely via the annual local TV broadcast.

From the Cathedral's website:

Holy Name Cathedral's website
Holy Name Cathedral at Wikipedia

John M Greco

Related Post:
Notre Dame Church in Chicago (and Christmas Eve)

Romney Looks To Be the Last Man Standing

2011-12-18T18:27:00.002-06:00

Mark Steyn writes (link) of his concern about the political conservative bona fides of Mitt Romney, and suggests Republican primary voters persist in looking to other more reliably conservative candidates. He has in the past expressed some enthusiasm for Michele Bachmann. I have better hopes for Romney, but cannot gainsay Steyn's worries or speculations about him, or about Newt Gingrich for that matter.

However, however, however, although I would vote for a diseased camel before the incumbent, my conversations with and sense of so-called independents convinces me that a social conservative cannot win. For some inexplicable reason, in a president many "independents" seem to fear social conservatism more than one who has brought, inter alia, a crushing debt load, accommodation and sympathy towards radical Islam, and a general hostility to Western culture.

That leaves out Bachmann and Santorum, who aren't strong candidates otherwise in my opinion. Gingrich is really a big government program guy, too impulsive, inconsistent, and flaky, and carries way too much baggage; moreover, he has massive negatives among those independents and Democrats who could be tempted to vote for Obama's opponent. Perry's bumblings disqualify him, and he as well appears to be a social conservative unclear about the proper role of government -- note his utter confusion in attempting to explain mandating the HPV vaccine viz-a-viz individual liberty issues. Paul is a small government guy, yes, but seriously unstable -- just the other day he appeared on the Tonight Show and said to a national audience that Bachmann "hates Muslims"; he's now the John McCain of 2011-2012 -- the Republican who seems to hate Republicans and is always good for a negative quote that liberals love and can use in political ads, playing right into the Democrat media strategy of encouraging lethal internecine fighting among duped and dopey Republican candidates.

Romney isn't my first choice by a long shot, but at this time there's simply no other electable candidate in this very disappointingly and surprisingly weak field.

John M Greco

Heisenberg Humor & Football Cheer at the University of Chicago

2011-12-05T17:13:00.007-06:00

Today is the 110th anniversary of the birth of Werner Heisenberg (link), the German physicist perhaps best known for his Uncertainty Principle (link), which boiled down to a quark says that we can’t be sure where anything exactly is.

This brings to mind a graffito not-uncommon in science building washrooms at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, slightly bowdlerized here for public consumption:

“Newton: Screw You / Heisenberg: Screw Your Vicinity

It’s pretty clever, and such is popular stuff at the U of C, even whose unofficial football cheer, also from the 1970s, is, after all, a bit on the academic side:

Cosign, secant, tangent, sine,

Three point one four one five nine

Square root, cube root, BTU,

Sequence, series, limits too. Rah.

RB

Related: All University of Chicago Posts

The Detestable Wages of Liberalism – A 7 Year Old Alleged “Sex Offender” Reported to the State by Boston School Officials; Steyn: Sometimes Societies Become Too Stupid To Survive

2011-12-03T14:29:00.005-06:00

From the Boston Globe (link):

A Boston elementary school is investigating a 7-year-old first-grader for sexual harassment after he struck another boy his age in the groin. But the mother of the accused said her son was fending off the other child, who had choked him in an altercation on a school bus….

Matthew Wilder, spokesman for the Boston public schools, declined to comment on the incident or why it has been classified as a possible case of sexual harassment…. “Any kind of inappropriate touching would fall under that category,’’ Wilder said….

The interim school principal, Leslie Gant, did not return a phone call seeking comment…. [The accused boy’s mother] spoke with Gant, who told her the school had called the state Department of Children and Families to report the incident. [The mother] said her older son came home from school with a letter from Gant, telling her that [her son] had been accused of violating codes of discipline related to sexual harassment and endangering the physical safety of another student.

[The mother] said she does not want her son to ride the bus until school officials assign an adult monitor. She said officials have told her to come in … for a hearing regarding the incident.

Mark Steyn (link):

“… a seven-year old boy is about to have his life destroyed for kicking a schoolmate in the groin – as boys have done to each other throughout human history. One can understand that a school board might wish to discourage such activity, but not that it is so irredeemably, obtusely perverse as to categorize such an act as “sexual harassment”. The response of the official school board spokesmoron, one Matthew Wilder, is not encouraging…. The mother said she spoke with the principal, Leslie Gant, who supposedly told her: “It doesn’t matter who hit who first… He said he hit him in the testicles. That’s assault. That’s sexual assault.”

If officials of the Boston public schools system genuinely believe that when a seven-year old kicks another seven-year old in the crotch that that is an act of “sexual harassment”, then they are too stupid to be entrusted with the care of the city’s children. If, on the other hand, they retain enough residual humanity to understand that a seven-year-old groin-kick is not a sexual assault but have concluded that regulatory compliance obliges them to investigate it as such, then they are colluding in an act of great evil.

Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. If you’re wondering how a candidate’s presidential campaign can be derailed by allegations of “gestures” of “a non-sexual nature” that made women “uncomfortable” two decades ago rather than by his total ignorance of foreign policy and national security, well, this stuff starts in kindergarten.

Such moronic adults are pouring acid on our culture, one no doubt they wish to corrode and reshape toward some utopian vision. Such behavior must be fought by all means possible, ridicule being one of them. Steyn offers "spokesmoron Matthew Wilder" and I raise him "interim idiot Leslie Gant".

Where do such people come from, and specifically who put them in charge of children?

John M Greco

Obama Lawyers Flesh Out the The Obama Doctrine on Overseas Assassinations & Waterboarding

2011-12-01T10:52:00.002-06:00

The Obama Doctrine: Killing American citizens in the field on the order of the President without any warning and without any due process is perfectly fine, but waterboarding an Islamist suspected-terrorist fighter captured in the field in order to obtain information about an impending terrorist attack is morally reprehensible and a war crime. We're in the best of hands.

From the Associated Press today (link):

Top national security lawyers in the Obama administration say U.S. citizens are legitimate military targets when they take up arms with al-Qaida. The lawyers were asked … about the CIA killing of Anwar al-Alwaki, a U.S. citizen and leading al-Qaida figure. He died in a Sept. 30 U.S. drone strike in the mountains of Yemen. The government lawyers … said U.S. citizens don't have immunity when they're at war with the United States. [One of the lawyers] said only the executive branch, not the courts, are equipped to make decisions about who qualifies as an enemy.

John M Greco

Obama’s Chief Lawyer: Obama Can Kill an Unarmed Terrorist Just Fine, But Waterboarding Under Bush Is Morally Reprehensible

Liberal Fraudsters

2011-11-29T13:48:00.005-06:00

I sometimes reflect on the hysteria of the Bush years, though not so often as before. I remember liberals personally expressing to me their anger and dismay over the fierce moral urgency, in their minds, of such needs as addressing global warming, closing the Gitmo detention center, withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, and revoking the Patriot Act. Now, after almost three years into Obama's tenure, the anthropogenic global warming movement has been shown to be a fraud, Gitmo is still open, the Patriot Act remains, and not only are Americans still fighting overseas but Obama actually ordered a troop surge in Afghanistan.

What happened to the outrage? Where is the anger and angst? Gone, gone to graveyards every one. We see now, and I knew then, it wasn't about the specifics, the facts -- it was cynical politics about smearing anything Bush was doing or not doing, no matter how damaging to the social and political fabric of America and its image abroad. That has changed me, raising up an anger at those who would hurt America to hurt their politcial opponents.

Where are those liberals now, those contemptible liberals, who were shouting lies about American troops at Gitmo? Where are those liberals now, those contemptible liberals, outraged just a few years ago over our foreign wars and the supposedly fascist Patriot Act? Where were they when Obama committed American troops to the recent war in Libya? Where are those liberals now, those contemptible liberals, screaming about the man-made global warming that even they by now, if they can dredge up even the slightest wisp of intellectual honesty, must know is only their unsubstantiated hope?

Victor Davis Hanson today (link) at National Review Online:

Given Climategate II, no noticeable heating of the planet during the last decade, and all sorts of questionable research … the man-made-global-warming movement is about done for now. We sometimes forget that the fad gained its traction during the Bush years …. hysteria attributable to Bush derangement syndrome. I say hysteria because, like global warming, there no longer seems to be much furor over, for example, guidelines on stem-cell research. Iraq has become one of the administration’s “greatest achievements.” Afghanistan is no longer the “good” war that we “took our eye off.” Renditions, Guantanamo, tribunals, preventive detention, Predators, and the Patriot Act are no longer destroying the Constitution. Bombing a Muslim oil-producing country is no longer a war crime.

It is as if all these -isms and -ologies of the early 21st century — and their representatives, from Al Gore to Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, and Sean Penn — were entirely ...valid simply because they were the opposite of what Bush was (or supposedly was) for or against. With Bush removed from the calculus, the progressive community is silent and sometimes even embarrassed about the issues that once inspired them…. and so the hysteria quietly subsided and is now being Trotskyized away.

John M Greco

Related Posts:

Why the Left Loves Global Warming, or, What’s It All About, Alfie?

Climategate Shows Global Warming Alarmism Is a Faith-Based Initiative

Horror in Happy Valley -- And Trustees Opt for Damage Control

2011-11-12T15:42:00.003-06:00

After I first posted the other day on the developing Penn State sex abuse scandal, I didn’t anticipate commenting a second time, and when I did I really thought that would be the last. But Penn State’s continued obliviousness draws me once again to the keyboard.

Recognizing that we have only allegations at this point, but acknowledging also that we have certain facts like a 1998 investigation of the alleged perpetrator Sandusky by multiple authorities, I have written that “my guess is that when all the facts emerge this will come out as a 15 or so year conspiracy of silence involving Paterno and many others to cover up ongoing homosexual rape and other sexual molestation of young boys at Penn State, practically in plain sight.”

For so many, I suspect the horror of the depth and breadth of the allegations and facts known so far are incomprehensible, and perhaps some resistance to objectivity on the part of some longtime Paterno and Penn State athletic boosters is understandable. But the University Board of trustees should be above that and past that.

In the wake of continued University employment of the assistant coach who testified to the grand jury that when finding a boy being raped in a Penn State athletic department shower room he neither rescued the boy nor called the police, in the wake of the trustees’ new interim football coach Tom Bradley just praising Paterno as a man who “will go down in history as one of the greatest men....", in the wake of some oblivious students rioting in support of Paterno, the Board of Trustees met and appointed someone to lead the University’s internal investigation of this whole sordid affair.

Did the Penn State Board select someone independent of the school and its culture, with a background in investigation and law enforcement? Well, by now we know the answer to expect given what we’re rapidly learning about the Penn State culture. No it did not. The Board chose a Penn State grad, an attorney, who’s an executive with a pharmaceutical firm. No reported investigative experience.

Is the Board first and foremost interested in the full truth, or some truth with a heavy dose of damage control? But it doesn’t really matter now, anyway -- the truth will come out in due course, perhaps mostly in tortuous and torturous drips and drabs.

We already have inconsistencies in the grand jury testimony of Penn State officials Paterno, Curley, and Schultz. Eventually we will find out who knew what and when they knew it. We will get answers to many questions, including these:

Why were the 1998 investigations of two child sex abuse allegations against Sandusky dropped by the county prosecutor, the local child welfare agency, and the Penn State police department?
Why did Sandusky unexpectedly retire in 1999 as one of Paterno’s chief lieutenants? Any why was a special retirement deal negotiated with him?
How many people in and around the Penn State athletic department had reasonable suspicions and concerns about Sandusky and his entourage of boys?
Why didn’t officials at the local school, at which Sandusky served as a volunteer football coach as recently as a few years ago, alert authorities when he was found in sexually suggestive situations with boys at the school?
Why did prosecutors wait until November 2011 to arrest Sandusky, the subject of an investigation for years, thus revealing then the explosive charges? Was it just coincidence that the revelation came just days after Paterno set the record for most football wins as a college coach? Who was responsible for the decision on the timing?

In the end, I suspect that the ultimate motivation for what looks like a 15+ year cover up by many adults in many different agencies and departments will be the fear of what exposure would do to their money and glory. I heard on Fox News yesterday that the CEO of Sandusky’s “charity” for young troubled boys has been paid $1.3 million since 1998, and I’ve heard it said that Penn State’s football program was one of the most lucrative in college sports.

The truth will all come out eventually, but Penn State’s reactionary Board may not be the source of much of it.

John M Greco

Prior Posts:

Paterno & Penn State Look Like Burnt Toast

Penn State Still Clueless in Happy Valley

Penn State Still Clueless in Happy Valley

2011-11-11T00:39:00.002-06:00

The Penn State Board of Trustees has just replaced football coach Joe Paterno with a guy named Tom Bradley. He's been a Paterno assistant for over 30 years, and apparently idolizes the old man.  That's the Penn State way of cleaning house.  Faced with what will likely be the biggest scandal in its history, 15+ years of child sexual abuse and its enabling and cover up by university staff and officials, the University remains blinded by the Paterno glow that is no longer seen by anyone else.

If one reads the grand jury report (link) and then constructs a simple timeline, one quickly sees that the first clear point on the public record is the 1998 investigation of defendant Sandusky by both Penn State police and the county prosecutor for allegations of child sexual abuse.  For reasons as yet unrevealed, the local county prosecutor, in a rural area dominated by the University, declined to files charges against Sandusky, the well-known, prominent football assistant coach and Paterno protege.  Hmmm.

Shortly after that, Sandusky unexpectedly retired at the very young age of 55. Hmmm. He was allowed by Penn State to keep all privilges of a retired coach, including access to athletic facilities. At that point he also had been for years the head of his own charity for troubled young boys. Hmmm. Of course this looks all the world like people at Penn State made a deal with Sandusky -- retire quietly and don't embarrass the school and football program and we'll keep quiet about you and let you keep your perks.  This certainly looks like a cover up began no later than 1998.

Four years went by during which Sandusky continued as head of his charity for young troubled boys and was seen with them around the school. Then, in 2002, a young assistant coach named McQueary comes upon Sandusky raping a young boy in the Penn State athletic facilities late one evening. He didn't stop it, he didn't save the boy, he didn't call police. Instead, he told Paterno the next day, who in turn yet another day later told the athletic director Curley and senior adminsitrator Schultz, who in turn later told university president Spanier.  None of these four called the police. They all now, of course, deny being told the specific nature of the act, and now assert they thought that the naked Sandusky was engaging in some kind of innocent horseplay with a naked young boy in a Penn State shower.  Just before he was fired the other day, university president Spanier expressed support (link) for Curley and Schultz, who are now under indictment for perjury about this whole matter. However, not one of them has yet to explain publicly his 2002 inaction in light of the 1998 Penn State university police investigation and report on Sandusky.

It is absolutely unbelievable to think that Paterno did not know, in 2002, of the 1998 child abuse allegations against Sandusky and the report of the investigation by university police. After all, who if not Paterno would know why his chief assistant coach suddently retired in 1998. In fact, it seems probable that, given his status at Penn State, Paterno played a central role in a likely cover up deal in 1998.

Because Sandusky's alleged rape in 2002 of a young boy in a Penn State shower was not reported to police, and because of earlier inaction in 1998, he remained at large with full access to Penn Sate facilities, during which time he allegedly continued to molest young boys for years after that.

Now, with the scandal finally breaking out into the open, Penn State has just fired Paterno and university president Spanier. Many more departures will follow.

Yet despite all that we now know, thousands of ignorant and misguided Penn State students have just protested Paterno's firing. And yesterday, new interim football coach Bradley, reportedly a Paterno assistant for 33 years and the man who got Sandusky's specific senior coaching job in 1999, said this (link) about Paterno: "Coach Paterno will go down in history as one of the greatest men...."

From the University president, to the coaches, to senior administrators, is there any adult at Penn State not involved in the cover up?  The Board replaces Paterno with one of his acolytes who now praises him as a great man. If the Penn State Trustees can't find responsible, sensible, and uninvolved adults to take over and clean house, then they should all resign themselves and let the state take over.

As I said in my first post about this horrific scandal (link), "my guess is that when all the facts emerge this will come out as a 15 or so year conspiracy of silence involving Paterno and many others to cover up ongoing homosexual rape and other sexual molestation of young boys at Penn State, practically in plain sight. This whole scandal looks ugly now, and will likely look many times worse before this is all over."

John M Greco

Other Posts:
Paterno & Penn State Look Like Burnt Toast

Horror in Happy Valley -- And Trustees Opt for DamageControl

The Democrat Universal Solution To All Ills

2011-11-09T00:05:00.001-06:00

New Democrat Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, formerly of the Clinton and Obama Administrations, faced with the usual big Democrat city challenges -- rising costs, decreasing revenues, and massive deficits -- stares down a massively bloated city budget, brimming with wasteful patronage jobs and drowning from an inestimable "corruption" tax, a populace still reeling from a recent straight-line Democrat-enacted state income tax hike of 67% on people and almost 50% on businesses (link), businesses feeling and threatening to flee the city and state (link), corruption everywhere with pensions and Democrat unions (link), now figures out what to do: raise taxes (link). Now that's real thinking outside the Democrat box.

Well, he could have staged a demonstration, like he's done before (link), except that Democrat-endorsed Occupy protesters are hogging all the media space.

John M Greco

Paterno & Penn State Look Like Burnt Toast

2011-11-08T00:04:00.008-06:00

Much is being written about the incredible, horrific allegations of sexual abuse of minor boys over a more than 15 year period by a prominent assistant football coach at Penn State (link; link). After reading many reports and comments to the story, the greatest focus with regard to Penn State's culpability is on the events of 2002, at which time an assistant coach alleges to have observed the defendant raping a young boy in a Penn State athletic facility shower and to have reported the observation to his boss, legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, who then in turn apparently reported it only internally to his boss, the athletic director, and a senior University administrator. Police were never called, in violation of the law, reportedly, and certainly of any sense of morality.

However, not much talked about is the fact that in 1998 the defendant was found at Penn State to have engaged in inappropriate behavior with at least one boy and investigations by University police and a prosecutor occurred. Although no criminal charges were filed, not long after that the defendant retired from Penn State. He was allowed to keep the perks of a retiree, including an office and access to University facilities, including showers in the athletic department, the site of some later abuse allegations. Notable is the fact that by this time the defendant, besides being a Penn State football coach, was well known to be the director of a youth organization he founded that brought him into daily contact with young, troubled boys, and that such boys were regularly seen in his company.

Joe Paterno, and others at the University, express shock over this whole affair and plead ignorance. Paterno specifically asserts that when informed of the 2002 allegation he did the right thing by reporting it to senior Penn State officials, and somehow feels his responsibility was limited because his longtime former assistant coach was by then not a University employee.

However, what's not at all clear is why the defendant suddenly retired in 1998 after the police investigation into abuse allegations at that time, years before the alleged 2002 incident. If even only some of these allegations are true, then it would appear to me that Paterno and others at Penn State in 1998 realized, if not before then, that the defendant was a child molester, and to avoid embarrassment to the University and the football program they let him retire. Perhaps in exchange for his silence and perhaps even for a sham promise to stop such behavior they allowed the defendant to keep his access to the facilities.

If the allegations are verified, it is impossible to believe that the defendant could have had young boys frequently in his company for over 15 years at the Penn State athletic facilities, particularly after the known sex abuse investigation of 1998, without the entire coaching staff and other university officials seeing him and suspecting what he was up to.

If the allegations are verified, Joe Paterno's name, and that of what may come to scores of other Penn State coaches and university officials, will be mud forever. My guess is that when all the facts emerge this will come out as a 15 or so year conspiracy of silence involving Paterno and many others to cover up ongoing homosexual rape and other sexual molestation of young boys at Penn State, practically in plain sight. This whole scandal looks ugly now, and will likely look many times worse before this is all over.

John M Greco

Subsequent Post:
Penn State Still Clueless in Happy Valley
Horror in Happy Valley -- And Trustees Opt for DamageControl

How Apple Killed My iPad 1, and Almost Made Me Pay To Replace It

2011-10-31T17:19:00.000-05:00

About 15 months ago I bought an original iPad that worked fine until a few days ago. Then, I connected the device to iTunes on my computer for a periodic, routine sync and check for software updates. This time there was a new version of the operating system software, and I began the upgrade and sync process.

Trouble ensued. The software upgrade wouldn’t complete, and I was prompted to restore. After a while into that process, I received an error message: “The iPad could not be restored. An unknown error occurred (1).”

I went through all the timely troubleshooting steps to no avail. Finally, I called Apple support and got a very polite support guy. After taking many steps on my desktop, we tried the upgrade on my laptop, all without success. Then he handed me off to a “senior advisor”, who told me that “this is a common problem, a hardware issue that the engineers are looking into.” I was told Apple would replace my device.

I then went to the Apple store. No way Apple would let me upgrade, even for a charge, to the current iPad model 2. Apple insisted on replacing my now obsolete iPad 1 version. The salesman gave me a replacement iPad 1 out of a plain brown shipping box, wrapped in thin plastic and looking new; however, it was not packaged for sale and there is no indication that this is a brand new, as opposed to refurbished or previously returned, device. The salesman told me that the store keeps a supply of replacement original iPads for this scenario.

Worse than not allowing me to buy an upgrade to the newer, current model was the fact that, had I not purchased an extended warranty plan for $99 when I bought the device, Apple would have charged me $419 to replace my now dysfunctional iPad, despite the fact that my device was working fine until it encountered Apple’s new software. So Apple caused my iPad to die, but would have charged me half the cost of my original to replace it.

I bought the extended warranty for protection against hardware failure, not against active destruction by an Apple software upgrade. What if I had not bought it? Had I not, there would have been a disturbance in the Apple store. Apple is effectively saying to its customers that they would be smart to buy an extended warranty to protect themselves from Apple’s own future malfeasance.

Hubris. Arrogance. When I next purchase a tablet, I may think different.

John Prine at 65

2011-10-24T19:41:00.008-05:00

John Prine, the pride and joy of Maywood Illinois, nearby western suburbs, and the Proviso East High School gymnastics team, leading light, along with friend and fellow postman the late Steve Goodman, of the Chicago music scene of the 1970s, also of Muhlenberg County and Route 41, poet of loss and remembrance, collector of Souvenirs, balladeer extraordinaire of his Hometown, Old Folks, Grandpa and Grandma, and Angels from Montgomery, inter alia, turned 65 years old this month, and is still going strong. One far away night in Chicago at the Earl of Old Town Goodman brought him up on the little stage and the two played together until my memory fades; I think they enjoyed jamming with each other more than we enjoyed listening, if that's possible.

Image is the cover of Prine's first album, "John Prine", released in 1971. I've read an interview in which Prine says the photo was shot in San Francisco (of all places), and that he was surprised that bales of hay were brought in for the shoot. But it all worked out.
RB

The Lost Levant

2011-10-23T22:09:00.001-05:00

John Derbyshire has an interesting review (link) of Lawrence Durell’s Alexandria Quartet in the October issue of The New Criterion – particularly interesting to me for the window the novels offer into the tragic decline of Egyptian society.

The novels are set both before and during WWII in Alexandria, one of the exotically multicultural cities with which the English fell in love. The Alexandria of those years, not so long ago, was “chaotically cosmopolitan,” says Derbyshire; “Five races, five languages, and a dozen creeds,” as Durell describes it in one of the novels.

Then it all changed. Durell returned to the city in the late 1970s and found a different place indeed. No longer palpably multicultural, he found the place, per Derbyshire, “a monochrome shadow” of its former self. By then, most Westerners had left, Christians were repressed, and non-fundamentalist Muslims had fallen in line.

Derbyshire says that “The Levant was rather rich in these commercial, cosmopolitan cities until modern nationalisms purged them.” But I must quibble with him here. I think Islamic fundamentalism has done it all in -- not pan-Arab nationalism per se but the intolerant, violent anti-Western religious fervor that has taken hold of the Muslim world. The multiculturalism that thrived under a benign and guiding British hand, in Egypt and elsewhere, was gone. In the post-war decolonization fervor, people all over the Third World thought they could do better for themselves without the Brits. History, at least up till now, has proven them quite wrong.

Photo is of King Farouk (ruled 1936-1952) of Egypt, a Westernized, non-fundamentalist Muslim; like the late Shah of Iran, just the kind of Muslim ruler the West thought everyone could do without. The West was wrong. It's been all downhill since American complicity in Farouk's overthrow and its fecklessness during the Suez crisis.

John M Greco

Annals of Inanities -- 10/20/2011

2011-10-20T12:11:00.002-05:00

Well, it's my job to prepare my Texas students for a Mexican future --
A Texas teacher named Reyna Santos, a Mexican native, "required her public high school students... to memorize the Mexican anthem and pledge and stand up and recite them in individually in front of the class.... but the school district maintains there was nothing wrong with the lesson." (link) Recital day took place on Mexico’s Independence Day. The teacher told a father who called to object that "she loves Mexico." Why she ever left Mexico is not disclosed in the news article.

Will this hurt our chances as lesbians to adopt more children?
A lesbian couple, in California of course, is giving their adopted pubescent boy medically risky hormone therapy to delay puberty in case he continues to want to become a girl (link), just like his two moms. "Obviously, when two females adopt a male child, then assert that the child is not actually male, but is, instead, actually a female -- like both of them, everyone in the family should be psychologically evaluated in a comprehensive way before a step like gender reassignment is considered,” said [psychiatrist] Ablow.

As I've said before, only a racist would object to anything I do or say --
President Barack Obama gave a partisan-tinged speech to dedicate a new memorial to Martin Luther King Jr., likening the battle for racial equality to his political struggles in a divided Washington.

We don't care much for their culture or their laws, but their welfare is great --
Well-off Muslim residents, most of whom practice polygamy and don't even speak French, on the French colony Mayotte, an island off the coast of Africa near Madagascar, have been rioting (link) to preserve and expand their special colonial status that entitles them to generous French welfare benefits. The death throes of Western welfare statism, now that it's run out of "other people's money", can be heard and seen everywhere, not just on the streets of lower Manhattan or Chicago's Loop.

It's the people who have failed me --
Barack Obama has just said "all the choices we’ve made have been the right ones" (link). Remember when George W Bush was asked whether he had made any mistakes and he was ridiculed as a fool and a jerk by the media for an admission insufficient in quantity and quality?

Maybe one day its business model won't include actually delivering mail --
The Wall Street Journal reports (link): Will the U.S. Postal Service start issuing driver's licenses and deer-hunting permits? Selling country-music CDs? How about strapping weather or air-quality monitors on mail trucks? Plummeting demand for traditional mail delivery, which funds the postal service, has created a looming fiscal crisis that has Congress, postal employees and government officials weighing a venture into non-mail business as a way to stay afloat.

John M Greco

Ryerson Physical Laboratory – “The Most Beautiful University Building in the World”

2011-10-16T23:21:00.008-05:00

I previously mentioned (link) the Kent Chemical Laboratory building at the University of Chicago, and now I get around to posting the picture of its next door neighbor and close cousin, Ryerson Physical Laboratory. I had just one class here as an undergraduate, physics of course, and a tough one it was. Rambling around inside and peering into the nooks and crannies of the beautiful, old, storied building was I think the most enjoyable part of that particular experience.

The young University’s main architect Henry Ives Cobb designed the building, which opened in 1894 and was named after Chicago lumber businessman Martin Ryerson.

At its dedication, according to Jay Pridmore’s U of C architectural Campus Guide, then university President William Rainey Harper called Ryerson “the most beautiful university building in the world,” and I’m not here to dispute that. Pridmore writes that the building “exhibits a dreamy Gothic fantasy: complicated solids and voids on the surface, with balconies, gables, and a crocketed roof line. As usual in Cobb’s buildings, the main entrance is the most elaborate part…” An annex was added in 1913, by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, “sympathetic” to Cobb’s design but “with noticeably richer ornamentation.”

Pridmore tells us that “one of the earliest denizens was physicist Albert Michelson, the first Nobel laureate among many at this university,” who was honored in 1907 for his measurement of the speed of light.

In the second post card image, the pre-annex building rear is seen from the north, with Botany Pond just to the left foreground and Hull Gate to the right, and the original Law School building in the distance.

R Balsamo

Annals of Inanities -- 10/14/11 Edition

2011-10-14T14:02:00.012-05:00

You mean, people like Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, and Herman Cain?

Obama: Republicans Don't Want A Place Where People "No Matter What They Look Like" Can Succeed

Maybe if you called them beige potatoes --
Team Obama about to ban white potatoes (link) in school breakfasts in favor of green and orange foods.

But we've got so many more friends and supporters to help --
Even after the Solyndra scandal has broke, some prominent Democrats want (link) a "national infrastructure bank" to "invest" billions of tax dollars with "special interests favored by Democrats". And, "More solar companies led by Democratic donors received federal loan guarantees."

Maybe if they bombed the Statue of Liberty and declared grievances against white America, Obama would stick up for them --
In Egypt, Obama's Muslim compatriots, whom he addressed so warmly soon after taking office, telling them "you represent the harmony between tradition and progress" (link), continue to slaughter (link) the Christian minority there.

We don't think it's relevant --
Lots of liberal media coverage of scandals omit mentioning that the malfactors are major Democrat donors -- and often major beneficiaries of Democrat corruption or forbearance -- for example, George Kaiser (Solyndra) (link), Warren Buffet (huge fed income tax liabilities; link), Bernie Madoff, Raj Rajaratnam (recent conviction for insider trading; link).

How stupid -- everybody knows only Republicans can be compared to Hitler --
Hank Williams Jr. Compares Obama to Hitler. [Also here.] And for that his music is dropped from NFL football TV shows. Meanwhile, the NFL is considering the singer Madonna for the half-time entertainment show at the next Super Bowl; in one of her videos she compared former President GW Bush to Hitler, but he's a Republican, so it's OK.

John M Greco

Writer Jan Morris Turns 85

2011-10-02T23:53:00.010-05:00

Jan Morris, the great Welsh-English poetic storyteller of our age, celebrates her 85^th birthday today. What a treasure trove she has given us, writings so capturing of time and place, so atmospheric, we can close our eyes and almost feel we’ve been there.

Her works are varied and many, but her masterpiece (writing as James Morris), in the true meaning of that now-trite word, is her trilogy on the history, ethos, and meaning of the British Empire, the “Pax Britannica” trilogy: Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (1973); Pax Britannica: The Climax of Empire (1968); and Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (1978). Run don’t walk, to get copies if you have not experienced them yet.

She writes of times and places that recede in memory, but the themes are eternal. As I wrote before (link), “sensual and rhythmic, her narrative evokes the sounds and smells of empire about you as you drift through the pages”:

"In one of the lonely cemeteries in which, buried where they died, the Anzacs lay lost among the Gallipoli ravines, the parents of one young soldier wrote their own epitaph to their son, killed so far away, so bravely we need not doubt, in so obscure a purpose: 'God Took Our Norman, It Was His Will, Forget Him, No, We Never Will' ... for all too often the sacrifices of the Great War, as its contemporaries called it, were given to a cause that was already receding into history, like those discredited grey battleships, their smoke-pall filling the sky, hull-down on the Aegean horizon."

As I wrote before: Her narrative has all the stories, the wars (some obscure, like the British invasion of Tibet), the adventures, and of course all the characters (Curzon, once Viceroy of India, "died in 1925 after a career full of irony and vicissitude."). And humour abounds, subtle and dry” -- Writing of the Fashoda Incident and the death of “Chinese” Gordon, the ‘noblest man who ever lived', and of the subsequent invasion of Sudan by Gen. Kitchener and the last cavalry charge of the British Empire (in which Churchill took part), as James Morris she wrote:

For years the Sudan had been in a state of rebellion under a fiery Sufi mystic who called himself the Mahdi, ‘the Leader’, and who formally announced the End of Time, a conception particularly unwelcome to the British just then.”

And don’t by any means skip the footnotes; describing a salute to Kitchener:

With live shot, there being no blank: the gunners aimed high over the river into the desert beyond, where nobody who mattered was likely to be.”

In her last book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, she writes:

“I write of exiles in Trieste, but I have generally felt myself an exile too. For years I felt myself an exile from normality, and now I feel myself one of those exiles from time. The past is a foreign country, but so is old age, and as you enter it you feel you are treading an unknown territory, leaving your own land behind….”

The immortal, in her native Welsh, Trefan Morys, born 85 years ago today.

R Balsamo

Dems Dissing Democracy

2011-09-30T13:27:00.004-05:00

More entries for the Annals of Inanities:

Well, if you people would just stop voting for Republicans we wouldn't have to do this --
North Carolina Democrat governor Bev Perdue proposes to "suspend" Congressional elections until Congress improves the economy (link). She was serious in tone and doesn't appear to have been joking (link). The prospect of significant Republican gains in those elections has nothing, nothing to do with her thinking. Meanwhile, "more criminal charges are expected in the investigation of Gov. Beverly Perdue’s campaign finances" (link). Perhaps she's running a distraction campaign.

Since those damn Republicans won't go along with our plans, this country really needs "less democracy" and lots of "automatic policies" --
Former Obama budget director Peter Orzag writes (link) that "To solve the serious problems facing our country, we need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic." That's right, we need to rely more on "depoliticized commissions" and "automatic policies" because those benighted voters keep electing Republican politicians who won't go along with our plans. I'm betting he's not thinking of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, or Rush Limbaugh for those "depoliticized commissions". Just a guess. Perhaps he's been talking to NY Times columnist Tom Friedman, who on occasion writes longingly of communist China's ability to get things done without all those distasteful disagreements and roadblocks that come with all this voting and democracy stuff. Actually, no doubt many Democrat elites feel the way Orzag and Friedman do. Remember "What's the Matter With Kansas?" -- the false consciousness theory is alive and well.

At least that's not how our system works right now, but we're not through yet --
"The idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. I promise you, not just on immigration reform. But that's not how our system works. That's not how our democracy functions. That's not how our Constitution is written," Obama said at the National Council of La Raza's annual conference. (link)

Addendum (10/14/11)
Constitutional limits are for Republicans --
'Illinois Democratic Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., ... said that congressional opposition to the American Jobs Act is akin to the Confederate “states in rebellion” .... and said that Obama should “declare a national emergency” and take “extra-constitutional” action “administratively” — without the approval of Congress — to tackle unemployment.' (link)

John M Greco

New Look for the Old Colony

2011-09-26T14:15:00.014-05:00

Chicago’s Old Colony building is looking better than it has in perhaps almost a century after a cleanup that has washed away layers of build-up soot. It’s one of my favorites, for its curved corners, interesting design, and appealing height, and I was delighted the other day to see it cleared of scaffolding and looking bright and clean.

Completed in 1894 by Holabird and Roche, the slender early skyscraper has a classic Chicago tripartite structure, with a distinguishable base, a plain midsection, and a defined top section, which here includes a colonnade and a projecting cornice. The most striking and unusual feature is its curved corners, and one can also see the “Chicago windows”, characterized by a large fixed pane of glass flanked on either side by narrower windows with sliding sashes that can be raised. The Old Colony sits at southeast corner of Van Buren and Dearborn streets in the south Loop, and forms with the Fisher, Plymouth, and Manhattan an interesting row of old, preserved classic Chicago skyscrapers running between Dearborn and Plymouth streets.

Judith Paine McBrien, in her Pocket Guide to Chicago Architecture, says that the Old Colony was “built on speculation by Boston lawyer Francis Bartlett” and was “named for the first English colony in America…. The building was a successful venture, offering 600 offices that were occupied by railroad, printing, and lumber interests who sought space here in the thriving printing center of the Midwest.”

Ira Bach says, in his Chicago’s Famous Buildings, that “the Old Colony is the last remaining Chicago downtown building with rounded projecting corner bays, a device often employed … to create highly desirable corner spaces on the interior and an interesting silhouette on the exterior…. [Also,] It was the first structure to employ a system of portal arches to brace it against wind loads, an innovative solution to a basic problem of tall skeleton-framed buildings.” In Chicago on Foot, authors Bach and Wolfson tell us that the building has 17 stories, ... the first four [of which] are of light-blue Bedford stone [while] the upper part pressed brick and white terra cotta.”

Finis Farr in Chicago says that “the design as a whole gave an impression of dignity and power.” Agreed. Kudos on the rehab.

The photo is taken from the west side of Dearborn street, northwest of the Old Colony; part of the Fisher Building is visible on the left, and the Chicago El tracks run on Van Buren Street between the two buildings. The postcard is postmarked November 1907 to a Miss Underwood in Dayton, Ohio. Click on an image to enlarge. A brief Wikipedia article is here.

R Balsamo

Annals of Inanities - Sept 20, 2011

2011-09-20T20:02:00.004-05:00

> Eric Holder, Obama's disastrous (link), dangerous (e.g., the Fast and Furious/Gunwalker scandal - link), and reverse-racism-obsessed Attorney General, said the other day (link) that the Obama crew still really, really, really does intend to close the Gitmo terrorist detention camp. That "fierce moral urgency" to closing Gitmo seems to have left him sometime in early November, 2008.

> Obama's rampant sexism in the way he's treated his White House staff (link; link) -- doesn't count since he's a Democrat.

> Obama blows over half a billion dollars of taxpayer money by giving it to a company, Solyndra, run by a big money man of his, despite a mound of evidence that the company was failing and despite internal warnings by members of his own team (link) -- doesn't count since he's a Democrat. Meanwhile, former Obama assistant at the time Rahm E's memory has failed on this one (link).

> Obama's urgent, urgent, urgent jobs plan, that he had announced in August that he would deliver in a September speech whenever he returned from vacation, now won't be put forward by Congressional Democrats for another month at least because they have other things to do (link) -- doesn't count since they're all Democrats.

> The Obama stimulus gave almost $800 thousand dollars to the "National Science Foundation" to spend on ....... "interpretive dance" (link). And now comes Obama to demand those remaining Americans not under his Rasputin-like spell join his acolytes in passing his half-billion dollar Son of Stimulus plan. Fat chance.

John M Greco

The Federal Reserve Continues Its Redistributionist War on Savers

2011-08-09T20:16:00.000-05:00

Today the United States Federal Reserve, according to the Wall Street Journal (link), "signaled it plans to keep its benchmark short-term interest rate close to zero for at least another two years as it sharply downgraded its view of the U.S. economy."

Who continues to benefit from this ultra-low interest rate environment? Bankers, big net Obama contributors in 2008, who can continue to borrow at near-zero rates and lend at 5-6% or better. As Larry Kudlow is wont to say on his CNBC show, "even a banker can make money this way."

Whom does this hurt? Savers. Retirees on fixed income who live off the interest on their lifelong savings. Their dollars are earning a pittance. But I don't expect AARP, the American Association of Retired Persons, to protest, since it has long ago betrayed its ostensible constituents and gotten into bed with Obama and the Democrats to protect its real source of income that supports all those AARP administrative jobs -- selling insurance to seniors, now protected if not well-advantaged by its connection with Obama and the Democrats. That is, at least for now, while Obama is in. This may change.

Who also benefits? The US federal government, which at the present politically means Obama, which pays lower interest rates on its debt.

Continued ultra-low interest rates is a hidden, sneaky redistributionist tax on wealth – a tax on those who saved all their lives who now get little interest, now accompanied by the inflation which is how the federal government will resolve its big debt. Both benefit not savers but debtors -- Obama's and his acolytes' core constituency.

John M Greco

The Obama/Democrat Spending Binge Comes Home to Roost

2011-08-08T23:55:00.001-05:00

Markets are in turmoil in response to Standard & Poor's slight downgrading of American debt. For over two years now the Democrat Party has gone on a national spending binge, with borrowed money, unprecedented in peacetime American history, most notably in the gargantuan special "stimulus", the bloated annual spending plans, and Obamacare. Republicans, after going along, begrudgingly and with occasional moderate resistance, with Democrat spending for a generation, finally said enough, voted in vain almost to a person against this Democrat spending, and have refused to agree to raising taxes to feed the bloated government beast. In response, elected Democrats, Senators representing all the citizens of their states, are throwing a tantrum -- calling those who disagree with them names like "terrorists" (link), and trying to silence them (link). Typical fascist tactics from not very nice people.

Kurt Schlichter (link): "The liberal dream of a perpetual social welfare state... is dying. There’s no doubt about that; the only question left is how long and hard the process will be as the hideous leviathan the utopian liberal establishment has created convulses and dies. It’s going to die hard. And ugly."

To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, American liberalism has just run out of other people's money.

John M Greco

Not To Miss -- Why We're Headed Back into Recession -- Victor Davis Hanson Explains It All

2011-08-02T12:48:00.000-05:00

The inimitable Victor Davis Hanson at The Corner at National Review Online explains it all to us on how Barack Obama is bringing on another recession: How to Turn a Recovery into Another Recession.

Turns out -- it's easy. Here're excerpts on how:

1. Ensure uncertainty in the private sector so that it continues to cut back and hoard cash….

2. Take both real and iconic measures that scare business and question the old rules of free enterprise, perhaps by trying to shut down a new Boeing aircraft plant or reversing the order of the Chrysler creditors or absorbing a private company or two.

3. Create a psychological climate hostile to business that either scares employers or angers them into sitting out any perceived recovery….

4. Send a message that subsidized companies, especially in so-called green industry, are noble and need help, while profit-making corporations, especially in energy, are suspect…..

5. Be selective in targeting capitalist enemies of the people….

6. Run up historical deficits in ‘gorge the beast’ style that will force at some point either massive new taxes or a Greece-like crack-up [JMG: which for Democrats, per Rahm Emanuel, would be a "crisis too good to waste"] ….

John M Greco

The Endless Run of Liberal Anti-Violence Kabuki Theater

2011-07-31T15:08:00.003-05:00

Sitting around talking and reading, my wife turns on the TV to catch the local weather; much too early, unfortunately. A segment comes on featuring the latest installment of the endless Kabuki theater that is the liberal approach to combating street violence in our "inner cities".

Chicago's new mayor, Rahm Emanuel, wants to "take back the streets", yada, yada, yada. So will he combat the astounding teen pregnancy rate, which will place yet another generation of very-lightly-reared and poorly-educated young black males on the streets, exactly the demographic causing today's violence? Will he criticize the "gangsta rap" culture, so pervasive in black neighborhoods, that glorifies and romanticizes criminal behavior and is peddled by rich liberal media executives? Will he arrest more bad guys and pressure liberal local judges to keep them in jail longer? Will he lay off the legions of useless extra workers at the core of the Chicago Democrat party patronage system and channel the savings to hire more police to better patrol the streets? Uhhh ....... Nah.

Emanuel did the only thing Democrats know how to do well -- their only trick, other than railing against guns, in their intellectually-exhausted playbook -- he held a street demonstration. Through a dangerous black neighborhood he led yet one more of the innumerable "take back the streets" marches we've seen over and over again for decades. That's their solution -- hold a demonstration, as if such will have the remotest effect on violent gang-bangers, and rail against guns, as if city kids aren't also killing each other with knives, bats, and fists, and as if white and east Asian kids across the country are also killing each other with remotely the same frequency with the guns, knives, and baseball bats to which they too have access.

Most major northern American cities have been run for a couple of generations by liberals, and they have made quite a mess of it. They've earned a fat "F" in social policy, but give them credit where credit is due -- they deserve an "A" in street demonstrations, their cynically-hollow and useless gestures that can sure draw TV cameras and whip up a crowd.

John M Greco

The Debt Ceiling Fight & Viciousness as a Liberal Tactic

2011-07-27T16:23:00.008-05:00

The political fight over whether and how to raise the US debt ceiling has become high drama in Washington, and the supposed deadline of August 2 looms. After a couple of years of an unprecedented, and, to me, reckless, harmful, and, wasteful Democrat spending orgy, the US federal government, we the people, that is, are in a big fiscal hole (link).

The Democrat plan, such as it is, is to borrow lots and lots of more money to spend much more, supposedly to reduce the debt, but in reality to perpetuate ongoing and recurring fiscal instability that would create political opportunities to hoodwink more Americans into ceding more control over our lives to liberal elites. The Republican plan, such as it is, after years of complicity as the junior partner to Democrat profligacy, is to spend less, perhaps even much less, to get us out of debt -- eventually. I'm with them.

Both political parties are apparently taking hits in the popular polls, for whatever they're worth, especially this far out from an election. But the inexorable decline in Obama's popularity and his eroding stature have been driving some liberals bonkers. For years, of course, liberals have oft repeated the tired refrain that conservatives and Republicans are ... racist, selfish, stupid, extremists, etc, etc, etc. So to keep up with the vicious side of their politics, some ultraliberals aren't missing a beat in the current crisis.

Ultra-liberal New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, winner of the increasingly left-wing Pulitzer Prize, has just referred (link) to Tea Partiers as the “Hezbollah faction” of the Republican Party; Hezbollah is, of course, a murderous terrorist group. Another ultraliberal NY Times columnist, Nobel Prize-winning Paul Krugman, just referred (link) to conservatives with different views on the debt crisis as "a cult that has really poisoned our political system." Comedian and Democrat Senator Al Franken, another vicious ultra-liberal apparently of the Stalinist mode, just debased the United States Senate by displaying (link) on its floor a poster shouting "Welcome Terrorists" in reference to those whose views differ from his. Demonize, isolate, and other moves right out of the socialist Rules for Radicals standard playbook -- for Friedman, Krugman, and Franken, just another day at the office.

As Obama sinks further in the polls and as he increasingly looks to more and more people like an incompetent, arrogant jerk, Democrat viciousness will only increase. It's all they have left.

Addendum: Jonah Goldberg wraps it all up here at National Review Online.

John M Greco

Obamism as Peronism

2011-07-21T21:05:00.000-05:00

The inimitable and enthusiastic bard of hard-nosed reality John Derbyshire, a polymath whose somewhat recent book "We Are Doomed" (link) I thoroughly enjoyed, has a great post today, arguing that the model for modern liberal politics is actually Peronism. Derbyshire writes (link):

The more I look at the history of our national debt and federal spending, the more it seems to me that …. [t]he guiding spirit of fiscal management in the advanced world this past half century has in fact been Juan Perón, who ruled Argentina from 1946 to 1955…. From Paul Johnson’s Modern Times: “As President, Perón gave a classic demonstration, in the name of socialism and nationalism, of how to wreck an economy…. He created Big Government and a welfare state in one bound…. [Eventually,] He fled on a Paraguayan gunboat. But his successors could never get back to the minimum government which had allowed Argentina to become wealthy. Too many vested interests had been created: a huge, parasitical state, over-powerful unions, a vast army of public employees. It is one of the dismal lessons of the twentieth century that, once a state is allowed to expand, it is almost impossible to contract it.”

Now of course the U.S.A. is not Argentina…. We have, though, followed the same trajectory as Perón’s Argentina, albeit more slowly and gently. He got from “the minimum government which had allowed Argentina to become wealthy” to “a huge, parasitical state” with “a vast army of public employees” in just five years; it has taken us five decades. The end result for our respective peoples will be the same.

JM Greco

Investing Solo – Sweet Spot for Closed End Funds

2011-07-15T15:18:00.010-05:00

The recent Fed statement that I interpret to mean that it will not be raising the short term interest rate for the foreseeable future, coupled with the futures market projection that the first significant hike will occur in about 18 months, and a mild one at that, has led me to start raising the portion of my portfolio held in leveraged closed end funds, which can borrow at short term low rates and invest the proceeds. I’m looking to go as high as about 15%, depending on the opportunities as they arise, from a starting point of about half that.

I’m interested mostly in increasing CEFs on the debt side, with the exception of those that hold MLPs. I am skittish about stocks given the poor intermediate term outlook for the economy particularly in light of the massive federal debt and the uncertain business environment created by the Obama administration, the long term lower spending by consumers as they reduce their own debt in the face of uncertainty, and the 10-year Shiller P/E that suggests that stocks are currently overvalued. There have been long periods of time where the return on stocks has been flat or negative, inflation adjusted (e.g., roughly 1965 to 1982 and the last 10-11 years or so), and there seems to be no reason the current price stagnation can’t last for many years to come. I like investing for total return, to be sure, and I think investing for current yield is generally the best way to accomplish that.

My current CEF portfolio follows. I’ve been adding to these positions as opportunities arise – dips in price and discount, and with certain uncommon special exceptions, I'm particularly attracted to those from large, reputable portfolio managers whose trailing net investment income exceeds distribution with positive undistributed net investment income. The specific funds I have, when there are others in the category and fund family, were/are determined by the various relative metrics plus relative discounts on the day of purchase.

>> Municipal Bonds: The sweetest spot of all given the recent default fear in this market segment. Taxable equivalent yields at the 35% rate are above 10% on a slew of issues. Right now I have significant holdings of only Nuveen funds: NPM; NPF; NXZ; NVG; and NEV. I was out of muni CEFs entirely at the beginning of this year when the price drop on the default scare created bargains too good to pass on, and I now have substantial capital appreciation as well as great yield. The share prices may still have room to go if higher taxes are in the offing.

>> Mixed/go anywhere: I hold three CEFs from Pimco, whose CEFs are almost in a class by themselves given the very active portfolio management, high premiums to NAV, and significant monthly under-distribution coupled with year-end specials (link). I have significant holdings of PFN and PFL, currently distributing 7+%, which hold more corporate debt than anything else, and PKO, now at 8+%, which has more of a focus on asset-backed securities. I’m contemplating paring PFL given the large run-up in premium to NAV since Bill Gross, the port manager, mentioned it in Barron’s in June, and swapping for PKO or PFN, depending on the numbers at the time.

>> Preferreds (equity pfds & debt hybrids): Distributions are 7-8%, up to about 9% TEY, and I am holding my positions in JPS and JTP (link). I’m not adding more to this sub-class right now out of concern about the rate of redemptions coupled with the run up in price in the individual securities with which funds must deal.

>> Mortgage-back securities: CEFs vary a lot in the amount of residential agency versus non-agency, and the amount of commercial and other asset-backed debt, and of course in overall credit worthiness. My largest position is FMY, currently distributing over 9%, which is IG and mostly agency. I also hold some HTR (whose management has just also taken over FMY) and a little DMO and JLS, all currently at around 8% or better.

>> Foreign debt: I have modest holdings of GDO (more toward IG) and EHI (more junk), both over 8% right now.

>> Floating rate: This category consists of funds with floating rate senior secured bank loans, plus GFY (link) which I hold as well. I have significant holdings in JFR, BHL, and TLI, distributing now 5.5 to over 6%.

>> MLPs: I like the prospects for this group -- I have a substantial allocation to KMR, the stock version of KMP. I also hold CEFs KYN, KMF, and NTG, all now yielding 6-7%.

>> Stocks: I generally disfavor CEFs as vehicles for stocks, especially since so many follow an options writing or dividend capture strategy. I have one modest holding in this category, one which uses preferred stock for funds for leverage and holds utility stocks – UTG, currently distributing almost 6%. I also have a nominal starter set in UTF, which holds infrastructure stocks like utilities, pipelines, and toll roads, and currently yields over 8%.

>> Real Estate: I have been out of this asset class for a very long time, but on a recent dip I have just established a small starter position in the CEF IGR, whose holdings are about 45% outside the US and currently distributing about 6.5%.

Mike Parenti

All Investing Solo Posts

I’m an individual investor with no background in finance or securities, writing things down to help organize and clarify my thinking. Of course, nothing I say constitutes investment advice of any kind – merely an account of my personal observations and decisions. My core portfolio is a conservative and diversified mix of equity and debt mutual funds, ETFs, and some closed-end funds (CEFs) across investment styles, management firms, and accounts, and I invest a relatively small amount (about 10%) somewhat more aggressively in the perhaps ultimately futile pursuit of alpha.

Still Stuck in the Obama Recession

2011-07-08T15:42:00.004-05:00

After crawling out, barely and only technically, from the Great Recession, the American economy can't seem to straighten up, let alone walk. Today the news is that the unemployment rate has risen (link), and that's after a bunch of people have left the job market all together who aren't even counted. Meanwhile, Obama and his allies keep bashing Republicans with references like "gun to the head", "Taliban", and "suicide bombers". That's what passes for the new Democrat civility.

We have a horrific spending problem (link) that threatens to bring down our economy, yet the Democrats want even more government. More taxes, more stimulus, more debt. Their real aim is to turn America into a version of the socialist European Union, with its entitled ruling class, crushing government regulation, increasingly uncompetitive economies, and chronic high unemployment. They're well on their way here, and today's unemployment figure is just more proof. Obama's has been the weakest post-recession recovery, which is still ongoing, since the Great Depression.

Victor Davis Hansen in "Business Replies to Obama" (link):

The United States has tried the largest stimulus in its peacetime history, with record $5 trillion borrowing in Obama’s first three years. Yet unemployment is much higher than when he entered office. The more he talks of stimulating the economy — with subsidies to “green” industries, government take-over of private enterprise, massive annual deficits and federal hiring, cash for clunkers, etc. — the less the private sector seems to hire or invest.... Those who have saved money and in theory could invest are scared off by uncertainty over new federalized health-care costs, by massive government spending that must be paid back and will cause higher interest rates, and by all the talk of new regulation.... When a Van Jones was in charge of encouraging green job growth, the symbolism is not lost on the guy trying to keep a paving company going. The list could go on but, in short, hundreds of thousands of employers have sized up this quite extraordinary administration and concluded that it does not ... appreciate or even know much about private employers. And thus the business community has collectively decided to sit tight, keep quiet, and store up cash until this bunch in the White House leaves.... And so now the job creating community that makes America work is replying, in its stasis, that it likes Barack Obama about as much as he likes them.

John M Greco

Jamaicans to Britain: Please Take Us Back

2011-06-30T17:22:00.001-05:00

For years and years liberals have argued that the solution to global poverty is more and more free money from Western countries, despite the clear results of the bazillions already spent, rather than better governance, free enterprise, and the rule of law. More recently, some liberals mugged by reality propose such novel notions as "charter cities" in places like Haiti and Africa, paid for and administered by the "international community" (read: "The West"). Sounds like a grasp back to running colonies in the third world. Here's a good, realistic overview of the whole mess: The Global Poverty Paradox by Nicholas N. Eberstadt at Commentary Magazine (October 2010).

Now comes a report that the downtrodden people of Jamaica, largely the descendants of African slaves, see the return of the British colonizers as a solution to their chronic dysfunction (link):

Most Jamaicans believe they would be better off if they were still ruled by Britain, a poll shows. In a harsh indictment of nearly 50 years of independence, 60 per cent of those surveyed hanker for the days when the country was Britain’s biggest Caribbean colony. Only 17 per cent said the crime-ridden, poverty-stricken nation would be worse off under British rule. The depth of feeling is particularly astonishing as generations of Jamaican leaders have portrayed the British as oppressors who subjected the Caribbean to slavery. The Queen is still Jamaica’s head of state. Under the headline ‘Give Us The Queen!’, the Gleaner – Jamaica’s biggest newspaper – said its poll showed how much people had become ‘disillusioned’ with the violent and corrupt political gangs running the island.

Re-colonization by the Britain of 1897 would certainly benefit the Jamaicans, but that Britain disappeared during WWI, so too late for that. Today's Britain has neither the will nor the money to run its own island well, let alone any others.

H/t John Hinderaker at Power Line (link), who notes the wisdom of the Cayman Islanders, who voted to remain under the Brits.

John M Greco

Related Post:
Writer Jan Morris is 83 Years Old Today, Author of the Masterpiece Pax Britannica Trilogy

Time's Up in Afghanistan; Republicans Oblivious

2011-06-30T15:04:00.001-05:00

The continued strong support among Republican politicians and conservative opinion leaders for our now three foreign wars is their rapidly growing Achilles heel in the fight to regain the advantage over the socialistic, anti-anti-Islamist forces that have of late stormed over the domestic barricades. Kill the Taliban -- fine and good; attempt to build a modern nation in a backward, pre-Medieval Muslim county -- doomed to failure. Give us more time, more time, they hector and harangue, as if higher volume could convince sensible people that almost ten years of precious blood and treasure isn't time enough to train locals to protect their own people from the lethal radicals in their midst. Adequate training is the least of their problems.

After years of intense instruction and support by Americans and other Westerners, many of whom have died for the effort, when attacked by Islamist insurgents at Kabul's Intercontinental Hotel, "one of the capital’s most fortified buildings", machine-gun wielding Afghan police ran away (link). They ran away. If "moderate" Muslim Afghans by now will not defend themselves from their radical element, they won't for a long, long time, if ever. We cannot give them the will and the spine to move Afghanistan to a better place. Time as well for us to bolt the scene.

John M Greco

Economic End of the Road in the West

2011-06-28T12:31:00.002-05:00

The American economy continues to sputter along, and at least one veteran economist and market maven, Gary Shilling, is forecasting another recession next year (link). Why all this treading water, with waves crashing over our faces? My thoughts:

1. The unwinding of the massive governmental and personal debt we recklessly piled on, and the uncertainty as to how we will get it all done and what things will look like at the other end. We have been consuming too much and saving too little, and how will an economy accustomed to high personal spending adjust?

2. The fear and uncertainty as we witness the collapse of the post-war Western welfare state. The Ponzi pyramid scheme at the core is collapsing from insufficient new saps to soak. The banking system is threatened. Western socialists have run out of other people's money. The pictures, literal and figurative, from Greece, where large numbers of citizens who live off the sweat of Northern Europeans, what of that there is, are violently protesting the prospect of having to work just a bit more, are revolting but not surprising. The recent violent union behavior in Wisconsin is no different -- those who live off government demanding a better life than that of those who pay for it.

3. The utter disaster that is Obama and his team on economic policy. Victor Davis Hanson: "I think … those in business, from the small entrepreneur to the captain of industry, have decided that it is wisest to sit out what is left of this administration, and wait to hire, buy, invest, and expand until someone at the top shows a basic knowledge of finance and economics, and some sympathy concerning what those in the private sector must contend with."

John M Greco

Mexifornia Unabated

2011-06-27T13:11:00.003-05:00

I was struck by a news item that, at a big soccer game between American and Mexican Teams in Southern California, the largely Hispanic/Latino crown jeered the American team. Just one more incident in the stream of such where some Hispanics denigrate the country in which they wish to live and to prosper, while glorifying the dysfunctional, repressive, and dangerous country they have intentionally left to seek a better life. Some have quickly adopted the loathing of America modeled (e.g., "Missouri, Kansas, the middle places" -- land of "low sloping foreheads") by American ultra-liberals.

Victor Davis Hanson remarks at National Review Online in “Mexifornia, Quite Literally!”:

“I love this country, it has given me everything that I have, and I’m proud to be part of it,” said Victor Sanchez, a 37-year-old Monrovia [CA] resident wearing a Mexico jersey. “But yet, I didn’t have a choice to come here, I was born in Mexico, and that is where my heart will always be.” That’s a quote from an LA Times story on the booing of the U.S. soccer team by an overwhelmingly Latino audience during a U.S.–Mexico match at the Rose Bowl. Examine the odd logic: Mr. Sanchez is booing the country that gave him “everything” while cheering the country that apparently gave him very little…. That schizophrenia is what confuses so many about illegal immigration…. When a foreign nation is treated as the home team, and when the home team is booed in the Rose Bowl, I think we can see why the entire open-borders, non-enforcement, ‘La Raza’ paradigm of tribal chauvinism based on ethnic solidarity has been proven an abject failure….

John M Greco

Illinois Democrats Define Deviancy Down (Some More)

2011-06-26T19:20:00.006-05:00

The once great state of Illinois has been run for two generations by Democrats and a few Democrat-All-But-In-Name Republicans (notably former tax-and-spend governors Thompson, Edgar, and Ryan). It has one of the worst business climates among the states, one of the largest budget deficits and overall debt, and has the largest unfunded public employee pension system in the country. In a recent ten year period, while the state population grew about 4%, state spending grew over 40%, mostly on government employees and Medicaid recipients -- what amount to the two largest Democrat party constituencies.

To address their decade-long spending orgy, Democrats, with their huge majorities in both houses of the state legislature and the governor's chair, recently pushed through massive tax hikes -- 67% on individuals and almost 50% on businesses. And yet, the Republican state treasurer (yes, a Republican, albeit a fiscally liberal one, elected last fall) informed us (link) recently that state Democrats, rather than use that increased revenue to pay down the state debt, are spending it on themselves.

Now comes an assortment of news items that show us that just when we think Illinois Democrats couldn't get any worse, they do:

>> With the big corporate tax hike in place, they now have a real nice squeeze racket going (link), whereby big companies visit state Democrat pols to apply for special tax breaks, which are unavailable to mid- and small-sized business, in exchange for ...? Well, they don't tell us what the quo is for the quid, but we know it's something. That's the scam -- the Dems hike corporate taxes and then hand out special exemptions when they feel like it, just like Obama, Reid, and Pelosi are doing with exemptions from Obamacare for Democrat-supporting companies and unions.

>> After all the drama over the state's de facto bankruptcy, upon peeling back the obfuscation and trickery, the Illinois Policy Institute finds (link) Illinois Democrats continue to spend like drunken sailors (link). I may be going out on a limb here, but I'm thinking that all those dollars, as before, will mostly go to Democrat constituencies.

>> Today, the Chicago Tribune reports (link) that the state Democrats have been holding up distribution of charity dollars donated, some as far back as 2009, by state income tax payers at the time of their tax filing and "borrowing" those dollars for regular state spending.

>> And finally, there's a touching personal-interest story (link) in today's Tribune that involves a dedicated public servant, a lifelong Democrat politician and former Democrat candidate for governor, who in his later years has been serving, no doubt tirelessly, as president of one of Illinois' public universities, one of the many lucrative sinecures that are rewarded, like spots at Fannie Mae and Goldman Sachs, to Democrats leaving elected office. This man, the President of Southern Illinois University, is the proud grandfather of a young woman who has just been awarded one of a handful of special, all-expenses paid university "Presidential" scholarships at a school she is excited to attend. What school would that be, you wonder? Why, her grandfather's, of course! After all, this is Illinois, and as the late Democrat Chicago Mayor Richard J Daley said, roughly, when caught in a similar situation, if a man can't help his family, he should help strangers?

John M Greco

The Chicago Cubs Peaked Early

2011-06-21T20:50:00.003-05:00

The other day, June 19, was the 165th anniversary of the first baseball game, according to Wikipedia. Then today, the Wall Street Journal informs me that the first season of the National League was played in 1876, 125 years ago, and the winner of that first pennant was ...... the Chicago White Stockings, a team that eventually became the Chicago Cubs. The Cubs are one of only two remaining charter members of the National League, and the oldest professional sports team still in its original city. So how about that -- the Cubs won the first pennant of the Senior Circuit, but won their second and last World Series way back in 1908, and now have gone the longest of all teams since their last one, and in fact, again according to Wikipedia, have a longer championship drought than that of any other major North American professional sports team (link).

They peaked early.

John M Greco

ObamaCare Supporters Channel Billy Wilder

2011-06-14T20:28:00.004-05:00

In the movie Some Like It Hot, a cinematic gem (with Marilyn Monroe how could it be otherwise) and comedic classic, which unfortunately overshadows another Billy Wilder movie -- his practically unknown masterpiece One, Two, Three (link), a ruling mobster played by Nehemiah Persoff turns down his hearing aid as he responds to the George Raft character, a mobster who at the formal banquet has just had a large cake rolled out in front of him that, unbeknownst to him, contains a machine-gun wielding assassin about to spray bullets his way, and who protested suspiciously, “but it ain’t my birthday for a couple of months”, saying with false affection but malign intent, “so what’s a couple of months ... between friends?”

I was reminded of this line when reading a concise and trenchant account of the various serially flimsily specious rationales the Obama team has advanced to attempt to prove up the Constitutionality of the individual mandate in Obamacare – the ground-breaking part of the law that requires private citizens to purchase a private product from a private firm (in this case, but only as the first step down the slippery slope, health insurance). Vegetables and DVDs about ~~global warming~~ climate change are next up for federal mandates.

David B. Rivkin, Jr., and Lee A. Casey write (link) in today's Wall Street Journal:

Consistent with the fundamental principle that the federal government is one of limited, enumerated powers, more than 220 years of case law requires that exercises of the commerce power be grounded in a meaningful, judicially enforceable, limiting principle. ObamaCare's defenders can't articulate such a principle…. If ObamaCare is to be upheld, then the Supreme Court will have to abandon … precedents, along with the plain meaning of the Constitution…. Thus the administration's position comes to this: What is one unconstitutional law, more or less, among friends?

John M Greco

Headwinds for Republicans

2011-06-13T16:19:00.002-05:00

Tonight there will be a Republican presidential debate, reminding us that next year’s election is not far off. The many failures of Obama’s policies and his increasingly unattractive persona and behaviors give Republicans reason to be optimistic, but I fear that the headwinds facing further conservative resurgence are strong, stronger than many think.

Many conservatives take comfort in some polls that show more voters self-identify as conservative than liberal, but it’s hard to know what such results really mean, given my skepticism about polls in general because of the degree to which results can be manipulated by design features such as the phrasing and ordering of questions and the sampling methodology. The economy is sinking, foreign policy is a mess, and our liberties are threatened by the Obama administration (the individual mandate in Obamacare comes first to mind), yet last month in a Republican congressional district in western New York state voters in a special election elected a Democrat to replace a Republican. Yes, the Democrat ran on a scary smear of the effects on Medicare of the Ryan budget plan that the Republican House overwhelmingly endorsed, but, but, but, given the Obama record this vote shouldn’t have been close. Republicans are kidding themselves if they think that the electorate is sizably politically conservative.

Examine the realities. Almost half of federal income tax filers pay no tax, and some of those actually get refunds via the de facto welfare provisions in the tax code; another 10 percent or so pay a tax rate of only a percentage or two. More and more Americans are receiving government aid of one sort or another. And look at the escalating thuggery of government employee unions all across the country when faced with any attempt to rein in their excessive and unsustainable compensation and benefits.

Add up the growing number of voters who work for government, the growing number who live off government, and the growing number who pay no taxes to support it, and that could be a majority of voters in states with a majority of electoral votes. That’s the Democrat business model, enhanced by a systematic plan of vote fraud through encouraging and facilitating ineligible voters (e.g., Acorn; anti-voter ID) and cheating in the gathering and counting of ballots (e.g., Florida, Washington state, Minnesota). That’s some headwind. The Republican message is really aimed at adults who do not live off government but yet pay for it, an unfortunately shrinking base -- a development for which Democrats have well planned.

John M Greco

Spirit Of American Youth Rising From the Waves

2011-05-28T15:32:00.000-05:00

"Spirit Of American Youth Rising From the Waves"

By Donald De Lue

At the First Infantry Division Museum at Cantigny Park

Wheaton, Illinois, Outside Chicago

Replica of the Original That Stands In the Normandy Beachhead in France,

Honoring Young Americans Who Gave Their Lives For Their Country

Democrat Politics Ain't Beanbag

2011-05-16T15:01:00.002-05:00

Thinking about the ongoing vicious Democrat/union tactics in the recent Wisconsin supreme court election campaign and recount, and in recognition of the usually timid and accommodationist Rep. Senator Hatch's recent comments that the Democrats “play politics very, very tough, they play it well, and they don’t give a damn about what’s right and what’s wrong”, Michael Walsh at National Review Online writes (link):

For years now, I’ve been saying that the modern Democratic party is the unholy issue of thirties gangsters and sixties Marxists, a criminal organization masquerading as a political party, composed of thugs, lawyers, layabouts, and guilt-ridden dupes, and motivated entirely by a lust for power disguised as the phony virtue of “compassion.”

His comment reminds me of an interview I saw of former Republican Senator Rick Santorum, in which he talked about the astonishment felt by a couple of Democrat Senators who switched to the Republican party -- astonishment at how respectfully Republican senators were treated by their leadership behind closed doors, without the harsh, strong arm, and threatening tactics they were used to from leadership on the Democrat side. An interesting insight into comparative values and mores.

Walsh says that with the fate of the nation at stake the Republicans must adopt some of that Democrat ruthless moxie, and I couldn't agree more. I believe that the only partially-hidden agenda of the Democrat party elite -- the thinkers, the writers, the financiers, the union leaders -- is to move further toward a socialist future in which elites control all aspects of society ostensibly in the name of promoting and maintaining equality. In their quest they are aided by useful fools who swallow the equality mantra and don't realize at all the threat to individual liberty.

The only way big government can make everyone equal is by making everyone equally miserable, and equally repressed by dictatorial elites who become more equal than others. Socialism is as socialism does. All dreams of forced equality have and must destroy liberty and end ultimately in tyranny.

John M Greco

Obama’s Chief Lawyer: Obama Can Kill an Unarmed Terrorist Just Fine, But Waterboarding Under Bush Is Morally Reprehensible

2011-05-08T06:46:00.003-05:00

How deep does the moral turpitude of Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder go? How can Obama and Holder possibly reconcile killing the unarmed bin Laden with their desire to prosecute (link) Americans who waterboarded a few Islamic terrorists to gain information that helps protect Americans?

A few days ago Attorney General Holder defended (link) before a Congressional Committee the Obama Administration’s assassination of bin Laden. "It was lawful .... [and] justified as an act of national self-defense," he said.

Mind you, I am heartily pleased that American troops have killed bin Laden. But I find it despicable that Obama and Holder now try to claim that by their own legal and moral principles a targeted assassination of a foreign national in a foreign country by commandos illegally in that country is morally and legally fine, justified by their newly announced standard of “national self-defense,” while they simultaneously assert that it is morally reprehensible and illegal for American investigators to waterboard captured Islamic terrorists to obtain information that might save American lives. This is the essence of this Obama principle – OK to kill an unarmed bin Laden in cold blood but illegal and immoral to waterboard his fellow Islamic terrorist.

There is no logic to this because the bin Laden assassination reveals what many have always suspected – that all this anti-waterboarding moral posturing and threatening has been just a cynical political show to harm Bush and his supporters in the fight against Islamic terrorism. If Gitmo has been in any way a recruiting tool for terrorists, as Obama has said, it is because of the distorted, inflammatory rhetoric of Obama himself and other ultraliberals about what goes on there.

Obama and Holder are morally unfit for their offices – they must immediately stop their disgraceful political persecution of some of the brave Americans who have been fighting to keep us as safe as humanly possible from Islamic mass murderers.

Related post:
The Obama Doctrine on Countering Islamic Terrorism – Tactical Confusion and Strategic Incoherence

John M Greco

Bin Laden is Dead, But Western Civ Is Losing the Home Front

2011-05-07T15:51:00.005-05:00

Western Civilization, at least still in America predicated on individual liberty, free enterprise, the rule of self-determined law, and separation of church and state, continues to be slowly eaten alive from the enemy within -- the unholy alliance between radical Muslims and self-loathing hate-filled Westerners who agitate and conspire for socialism.

I recently commented (link) on the disgraceful behavior of Barack Obama, whose administration continues to investigate the military and CIA heroes who obtained, partially through "enhanced interrogation techniques", the very information that helped Americans locate Osama bin Laden, who Obama just ordered killed (thank God) in cold blood and with very dubious legality in an assassination raid that violated the sovereign territory of an erstwhile American ally. And how many more citizens of the world has Obama killed, whether by intent or as collateral damage, with drone missiles, which don't read Miranda rights before dispatching their targets.

The incomparable Mark Steyn rounds up some other evidence of the scope of the liberty-hating enemy-within today in a post (link) at National Review Online, including this one -- reporting on a street clash in Londinistan, a British newspaper referred to the pro-bin Laden demonstrators as his "supporters" and to the British natives who staged a counter-protest as "extremists." Says Steyn: "[W]hen even a Fleet Street tabloid covering a pro-terrorist-vs-English-nationalist protest reflexively labels the latter as the “extremists”, you know we’re losing the very language in which we can even discuss the issues.

Western Civilization has much more to fear from its enemies within than from those without.

John M Greco

The Obama Doctrine on Countering Islamic Terrorism – Tactical Confusion and Strategic Incoherence

2011-05-03T19:25:00.005-05:00

A while ago three Navy Seals were almost court martialed (link) for allegedly giving a fat lip to a terrorist, according to the latter. But now Obama sends in a Seal assassination team that kills an unarmed Osama bin Laden. So let’s see if I have the Obama operational principle now -- targeted assassinations by American troops on orders from the President are OK, fine and dandy, and legal too, but Seals must undergo the third degree about a punch alleged by a terrorist. I think I have it.

Obama has told us that Islamic terrorists have corrupted Islam and are not true Muslims, but then assures the world that bin Laden’s body was buried with respect and handled according to Muslim tradition and requirements.

As for the Seals, per the emerging Obama Doctrine they can be heroes or villains, depending on who is giving the orders. In the raid against bin Laden’s compound, which incidentally violated the territorial sovereignty of a country supposedly our ally, Obama used the very Navy Seal team that some of his supporters have called “Dick Cheney’s personal assassination squad.” But now that we have actual evidence of an assassination, one ordered by Obama and not Cheney, the Seals are heroes to the anti-military ultraliberals.

On terrorism generally, Obama and many ultraliberals assert it is primarily a law enforcement issue, and not a war. But to get bin Laden, Obama sent the military, not a gaggle of federal lawyers. Where is the anti-war left now? Where have they all gone? Did they not really believe what they were saying?

Obama has told us that enhanced interrogation techniques to discover information on Islamist terrorist activity has caused us to “lose our moral bearings”, but he uses that information, obtained at the Guantanamo Bay prison, to eventually track down and kill bin Laden and likely save many more American lives. So by the Obama Doctrine it’s bad to obtain information that way, but heroic to use it to protect Americans.

And speaking of Gitmo, ultraliberals tell us it’s a moral outrage to detain captured suspected terrorists there, and the facility serves, says Obama, as a recruiting tool for even more terrorists. But it’s fine to kill suspected terrorists in the field with drones or men (which risks the deaths of innocent bystanders as well). So by the Obama Doctrine it’s a moral outrage to capture terrorists alive and detain them, but fine to kill them, along with any unlucky bystanders, in the field without a reading of Miranda rights. Maybe one rationale, inter alia, is that killing suspects in the field rather than taking them captive avoids the liberal embarrassment of the human rights violation inherent in captivity, though it does deprive us of any chance of obtaining intelligence through interrogation (and could that be the point?). Better to kill them than to capture and question them (I wonder if all the Muslims that Obama has ordered killed with drone missiles also feel that way).

Closing the Gitmo prison for suspected terrorists is “a matter of fierce moral urgency,” says team Obama, but after two years Obama keeps it open, with no closing in sight.

In the Libyan war Obama started, Obama says we’re supporting the rebels but also says we’re “leading from behind”. We occasionally bomb something of the Qadaffi government but don’t (usually) tactically support the rebels in the field.

Thus the Obama Doctrine on Countering Islamic Terrorism – Tactical Confusion and Strategic Incoherence.

Why such? Well, it must be obvious to all that Obama, born of and raised by communist fellow travelers in an environment that was for years culturally Muslim as much as anything else, is very conflicted about all of this anti-Islamist stuff. One even wonders if his hand was forced to OK the bin Laden assassination operation – did the military come to him with a strike opportunity he could not pass on, at the risk that his refusal would eventually become public and ruin his chance for reelection? No doubt Obama does not want to see Americans killed, but by every indication to all sentient observers he has a great deal of sympathy for the anti-American point of view espoused by the Islamists – that America is a severely morally compromised power that needs to be taken down a few notches and fundamentally transformed. In other words, in that point of view, we’re getting what we deserve for our past sins, real or imagined, mortal or venial, and definitely not graded on a world curve.

John M Greco

Duped Illinois Taxpayers "Assumed" Massive Tax Hike Money Would Pay Off Bills, But Instead It Paid Off Public Employees

2011-04-27T17:17:00.005-05:00

" 'I think the public assumed...that the money would be used to pay off our unpaid bills and make us fiscally sound.... That money is gone. It's spent' on state pension payments and Medicaid, she said."

The "she" is Illinois Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka, a Republican who, per the Wall Street Journal (link), "warned [today] that the state is on track to end its fiscal year June 30 with $8.3 billion in unpaid obligations."

I have commented before on the precarious state of Illinois' finances. It is worst among states in unfunded public employee pension liabilities, and it has one of the worst business environments. Democrats, aided and abetted by some Republicans, have created this mess over many years.

This year, Democrats, who hold the governor's office and have solid control of both chambers of the state legislature, enacted massive income tax hikes of 67% on individuals and 45% on corporations, along with what to many were token and largely symbolic spending cuts.

But it's still not good enough to fill the seemingly bottomless pit that is the state's public employee pension obligations. Private workers who pay for state government took a hit during the Great Recession, but not public workers. But a day of reckoning may not be far off.

John M Greco

Related Posts:
Illinois Now Worst Among States in Risk of Default on Debt. And Illinois Voters Like It That Way. We’re Number One!

Annals of Inanities -- Obama Edition: Obama Now Predicts Republican Genocide, Obama Enriches Friends, Don't Buy Mansions & Fancy Suits, and Voters Must Think I'm a Republican

2011-04-26T00:05:00.005-05:00

* Republican Genocide?: An Obama official predicts that proposed Republican budget cuts will lead to 70,000 deaths (link). Well, two can play this game. I predict that not enacting those cuts will lead to an economic collapse that will cause 71,000 deaths. How's that?

* Obama Spreads the Wealth Around -- To His Friends:  In the first two years of Obama's presidency, "Bosses at bailed-out Fannie, Freddie were paid millions" (link). That's $17 million, to be exact. Obama doesn't hate the rich, he just hates the rich who aren't Democrats.

* Do As I Say, Not As I Do, Obama Style: Obama, who owns a mansion, once told graduating seniors not to “take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits...." (link).  Now it turns out he buys expensive suits. When will this all end? Next thing we know he'll be starting wars in Muslim countries.

*  I'm Not Unpopular, It's All Those Guys Who Just Got Elected: Ultra-liberal media talker and Obama acolyte blames Obama's unpopularity on voter unhappiness with all those Republicans it just sent to Congress (link). That's what passes now for analysis in Democrat circles.

John M Greco

Annals of Inanities -- Liberals Edition: Dissent is Now Unpatriotic, Repubs Are Always "Extreme," & Will Race Trump Sexual Tilt at McDonald's?

2011-04-25T19:06:00.001-05:00

* Republican Dissent is Unpatriotic: Remember when liberals proclaimed dissent to be the highest form of patriotism? Remember when being anti-war was the moral high-road? Remember when kinetic military actions in a petroleum-rich Muslim country was just a war for oil? Remember all the vicious anti-war protests? Well, that was during the Bush/Hitler/Darth Vader/Haliburton administration. Now wars are OK. A virulent hateful ultra-liberal speaks up (link) about Obama's Libyan war: "Republicans are attacking the Commander-in-Chief during a time of war! . . . There should be no debate: we should be kicking [Gaddafi's] ass . . . Whose side are you on, Sarah: are you with the terrorists, Sarah, or are you with the President of the United States? . . . Where's the patriotism of the Republican party? . . ." This is what liberalism is to many -- a principle-free 24/7 all-politics zone. You can't make this stuff up.

* Democrat Schumer Being Honest: Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate and a vicious liberal partisan, lets the cat out of the bag in an open mike flub, which even the liberal New York Times felt compelled to report(link): 'apparently unaware that many of the reporters were already on the line, [Schumer] began to instruct his fellow senators on how to talk to reporters about the contentious budget process.... Schumer told [fellow Democrat Senators] to decry the spending cuts that [Republican Rep. Boehner, the Speaker of the House] wants as extreme. “I always use the word extreme,” Mr. Schumer said. “That is what the [Democrat] caucus instructed me to use this week.”' Jay Homnick at The American Spectator comments (link) on Schumer: "To me he is the Bernie Madoff of moral capital. He got all the Orthodox Jews to invest their moral capital with him and he cleaned them out."

* Watch liberals' heads explode -- does race trump sexual orientation, or is it the other way around?: Black girls feel disrespected and so beat the crap out of a transgendered man (link). Although my observation in these situations is that the race card trumps the homosexual rights card, these two factors more or less cancel each other out, so that not much will come of this from the liberal grievance lobbies.

John Greco

April 12, 1861: Mystic Chords of Memory Will Yet Swell the Chorus of the Union

2011-04-12T20:54:00.004-05:00

The American Civil War began 150 years ago today.

Detail from the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Indianapolis, Indiana (click to enlarge). I see liberty, victory, longing, waiting, reunion; an African slave holding up his broken chains to Lady Liberty, the symbol of America. The monument was formally dedicated on May 15, 1902; Civil War General Lew Wallace (Indiana native and author of Ben-Hur) was the master of ceremonies.

Lincoln closed his First Inaugural Address, on March 4, 1861, with this plea:

"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

Richard Balsamo

Annals of Inanities -- Obama Edition #4

2011-04-01T00:05:00.001-05:00

* Obama's Justice Department now brings a lawsuit to force a school district to accede to a patently unreasonable demand to accomodate the Muslim faith of a teacher (link). Some religions are more equal than others.

* Obama returns from vacation in South America and is locked out of the White House (link). If this had happened to GW Bush, this story would have been headline news for weeks in the liberal media -- Bush the idiot, Bush the moron. Remember when Bush tried to open a door that was locked when he was at a meeting abroad and was ridiculed in the liberal media?  It was a momentary, meaningless incident and not even at his own house. But what's good for the goose is good for the gander. To my liberal friends -- now who's the "moron"? Remember when Obama, the Commander-in-Chief, mispronounced "corpsmen"? No, well, you're not alone, but if Bush had done that it would have been front page news for a week.  My thought -- why not stop all this nonsense.

* Do we need a Cray super-computer to understand Obama's oil exploration policy? The liberal Washington Post observes (link) in a recent editorial: "As for offshore drilling, Mr. Obama’s enthusiasm for punching holes in the ocean floor off Brazil is hard to reconcile with his decision, announced Dec. 1, to keep the waters off the East and West coasts and the eastern Gulf of Mexico off-limits to exploration indefinitely." The answer is No, we don't.  Encouraging offshore drilling in Brazil and elsewhere while blocking such in the US is not about the environment, it's about the ultraliberal goal to cut America down to size, to attenuate its strengh toward some vision of a global economic rebalancing. Obama makes perfect sense.

* The Obama team has now so expanded the definition of who is disabled that one observer speculates (link) that a majority of American adults might now be classified as disabled for purposes of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Give Obama a little more time and he'll have everyone down as disabled, for special protections and government services, except most white males of course.

* Obama is, no surprise, against Republican efforts to restore the D.C. public school choice program, even though he himself sends his children to a private school (link). That's pretty common, of course, among Democrat politicians (cf. Jesse Jackson).  Arron Goldstein at The American Spectator: "If the Obamas truly believed in public education they would send their daughters to a public school. But when it comes right down to it President Obama doesn't really believe in the efficacy of public education. His support for public education begins and ends with the teachers' unions. In the grand scheme of things, it is a classic case of public education for thee but not for me."

John M Greco

Detroit's Population Crashes as Ignorant Residents Flee the Liberal Paradise

2011-03-27T00:05:00.004-05:00

"Detroit’s Population Crashes" shouts the Wall Street Journal headline (link) the other day. For some this must be stunning and perplexing news. After being run by liberals and controlled by unions for generations, in what by now should be a worker’s paradise and the envy of the world, Detroit is in shambles and going feral (link) as most residents and businesses of past decades have fled the city.

Expressing disbelief at the data, a major liberal union leader (but I repeat myself) lashed out at those who left: “This is a great city, with great, safe neighborhoods that have wonderful schools, with honest and efficient government, and with a highly skilled and hard-working labor force that any business would be lucky to have. That people have left here just shows you how stupid the average American is, to be incapable of recognizing this city for what it really is.” This is an unconfirmed report.

Writes Steven Malanga at City Journal in "Feral Detroit" (link):

Though some blame Detroit’s population losses on larger economic forces, economists Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer argue in a groundbreaking paper that the city’s problems are mostly self-inflicted. (The paper, called “The Curley Effect,” gets its name from legendary Boston mayor James Curley, who favored Irish residents and pushed other groups out.) After winning election in 1973, Detroit’s first black mayor, Coleman Young, consolidated his power, driving white residents, who had voted against him, out of the city by withdrawing services from their neighborhoods. Eventually, Glaeser and Shleifer write, Detroit became “an overwhelmingly black city mired in poverty and social problems”—and shrinking fast.

Meanwhile, proving that stupidity is both contagious and mutually reinforcing, the recently-arrived Italians and the long-entrenched unions who now own Chrysler are actually boasting in TV commercials that their cars are made in Detroit (link) -- "Imported from Detroit" is the new tag line. Demonstrably, the Italians have actually never been there.

More from Henry Payne at National Review Online (link).

(The photo is from the poignant photo essay at the blog Sweet Juniper, also linked above)

John M Greco

Related Post:
Chrysler Boasts that Its Cars Are Made by Detroit Union Workers. Yes, That Detroit, Those Workers.

Annals of Inanities -- Obama At War Edition

2011-03-26T01:10:00.000-05:00

* On the way out of the door for yet another vacation, Obama the anti-war man and Nobel Peace Prize winner ordered the American military to attack the government of a sovereign nation in the midst of a civil war. Despite having the largest and most powerful military in the world, and being the leader of the free world, a "senior administration official" said (link): “how it turns out is not on our shoulders.” Jonah Goldberg (link): "It is bizarre beyond mortal ken the way Obama is trying to pretend that we are not leading this effort and that we are not responsible for how it ends. First of all, we run NATO, so handing this off to NATO is like GE handing off a project to a European subsidiary and then claiming it’s not their project." Reports are that Obama and his senior advisers have been huddling for days trying to figure out how to blame all of this on George Bush.

* Although the American military has been attacking Libyan government forces and installations to protect the "rebels," apparently our military is not "officially" communicating with those it's acting to protect. The New York Times reports (link): "American military officials have said there are no “official communications” with the rebels.... Contact with the rebels would reflect a direct American military intervention in the civil war of another country." So according to the Obama team, attacking militarily one side in a civil war is not "direct military intervention in the civil war." Remember when Democrats thought Obama was the smart and truthful one?

* Obama has lost his own vice-president, Joe Biden, who one in reference to Obama's race said admiringly that Obama was "clean and articulate." Biden said (link): “I want to make it clear, and I make it clear to the President, that if he takes this nation to war without Congressional approval, I will make it my business to impeach him. That’s a fact. That is a fact.” Well Obama has done just that. Now Biden said that when GW Bush was president, but what's the diff? Biden is a man of principle and I'm sure he's working to impeach Obama right this very minute.

* To fool Joe Biden, Obama and his team are not calling hostile military action against a foreign government a "war". It's a "kinetic military action" (link) or a "scope-limited action." George Orwell, call your office.

* President Barack Obama speaking to American military men and women at the Jacksonville, Florida, Naval Air Station in October 2009 (link): "I promise you this -- I will never rush the solemn decision of sending you into harm's way. I won't risk your lives unless it is absolutely necessary." So there we have it -- despite all appearances, our military intervention, excuse me, "kinetic action", in this Libyan civil war was not rushed and is "absolutely necessary."

* Where are the raging anti-war demonstrations throughout America? Surely those protesters were anti-war and not just anti-Bush? Surely they marched out of deeply-felt principle and not just anti-Bush fad and fashion? Where have they all gone? Gone to flowers everyone.

* Now Obama has outsourced the military command of American troops to the Canadians. Mark Steyn, though, thinks he can do better (link): "...as much as I like the idea of Canadian military commanders randomly invading Muslim nations, I feel the gig should have gone to a Mexican general. After all, the Administration pretty much insisted this is a job Americans won’t do."

John M Greco

Annals of Inanities -- Liberals Edition #1

2011-03-25T12:16:00.003-05:00

* The group is affluent, well-educated, and overwhelmingly white -- ergo racist according to the calculus of some modern liberals (cf. Party, Tea). But this time it's the National Public Radio audience (link) that must be racist. How unexpected.

* Yet another (link) major Democrat is outed as a tax cheat. This time it's Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri (link). Upon being caught, she says that her tax evasion makes her "sick to her stomach". Oh sure, and if you believe that I have a bridge to sell you. If you or I did this we'd be prosecuted, but if tax evasion by a prominent Democrat were a crime Obama would still be working to fill his cabinet. Democrats vote for taxes, Republicans pay them.

* A Florida judge named Richard Nielsen rules that Islamic law, rather than Florida law, must be used to settle a legal dispute between two Florida Muslim groups (link). Asked whether his ruling extends to honor killings and raping wives, the judge reportedly said: "What the hell, why not? What so big about Florida law anyway -- it's hard even for me to understand. This Muslim stuff is much simpler."

* A planned terrorist attack drill in Iowa features anti-illegal-immigration whites as the terrorists (link). The world is awash in terrorism and other violence by radical Muslims, and in Iowa liberals want to make white anti-illegal-immigration foes the dangerous, evil ones. One Doug Reed, lead exercise planner, undoubtedly struggling to keep a straight face, said "the exercise is not intended to be political."

John M Greco

Annals of Inanities -- Obama Edition #3

2011-03-22T00:24:00.001-05:00

* A few weeks ago an American Immigration and Custom Enforcement agent in Mexico was killed by drug dealers. Now we find out that our ICE agents in Mexico are unarmed by order of the Mexican government (link), and Obama is so OK with this he's sending 20 more agents in. Obama requires Border Patrol agents to use bean bag bullets on our side of the border (link); perhaps our ICE agents in Mexico could at least use the same.

* Remember when Obama referred to the "57 states" in the American union, or the "Austrian" language. If you're a liberal who gets his or her news only from the liberal media, you don't. Fair-minded people know politicians, and the rest of us, sometimes misspeak, especially when tired. Michele, Bachman, after one of those slip-ups, needed to defend herself and called out the liberal media from reporting hers but not any of Obama's. That's why it's best to think of the liberal media as the mouthpiece of the Democrat party.

* Michael Walsh at National Review Online envisions Obama's presidency as opera buffa, an art form "filled with characters like our 44th president: someone pretending to be something that — by character or temperament or work ethic or talent — he’s not. In the end, though, the mask always comes off — and sometimes, there are tears." Obama Rex.

* John Hinderaker of PowerLine blog argues that Obama, who has embraced the trappings of high office while eschewing the responsibilities of it, really aspires to be the king, as in Britain -- an adored demi-god without direct responsibility of governing: Let's Make Obama King.

John M Greco

Recent Reads of Note -- Political Edition

2011-03-21T00:03:00.003-05:00

* Stanley Kurtz, author of the recent Radical-in-Chief, writes at The National Review about Obama's radicalism and why the word fits, contra Michael Medved's opinion: Contra Medved.

* Andy McCarthy writes at The National Review about the grand alliance between ultraliberals/leftists and radical Islamists -- the social compact, the general will, submission, and other folderol: Jean-Jacques Jihad.

As a perfect illustration of McCarthy's thesis, and as if to immediately provide further evidence of this mutual support -- what David Horowitz has called the Unholy Alliance --though certainly none is needed, a now former senior executive at uber-liberal National Public Radio, one Ronald Schiller, famously caught (link; link) recently on undercover video bemoaning Jewish Zionist control of the media to radical Muslims whose donations he was seeking, is, according to Wikipedia (link), Jewish, and, according to various internet comments, gay. Gay Jews don't seem to fare well under the sharia of radical Islam, but then American liberalism's cultural self-loathing trumps all.

* Mark Steyn writes in The New Criterion on Western cultural suicide: Dependence Day: "If I am pessimistic about the future of liberty, it is because I am pessimistic about the strength of the English-speaking nations, which have, in profound ways, surrendered to forces at odds with their inheritance."

John M Greco

Obama the Anti-War Candidate Starts Another War

2011-03-20T23:47:00.008-05:00

Obama's been a busy guy. He barely had time after an invigorating 18 holes to fill out his March Madness basketball brackets before rushing off to vacation in Brazil. But while scurrying out the door he did take a moment to order the US military into yet another war against a Muslim country, our third at last count. Supposedly a big factor was the urging of the Arab League, but that bunch of upright citizens of the World definitely do not have Obama's back (link).  Another war for oil, as the liberals would say? I need to say it for them since they're not saying it now.  How many Americans might die for our intervention in a tribal civil war between bad guys and maybe, maybe not quite such bad guys? [Addendum: Per Andy McCarthy at National Review (link): "[T]he Libyan “rebels” ... refer to their battle as “the jihad” — Islamic holy war .... and, of course, screaming, “Allahu Akbar!” as they fire their guns into the air."] Why does everyone in the "Arab street" seem to hate Westerners in general and Americans in particular except when an air strike is needed against tribal enemies? The only thing, the only thing, of value I thought Obama would bring is an end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and yet not only are we still there, he's doubled down in the former.  I certainly never expected him to attack another country, and yet now we're bombing and killing people in Libya.

Obama received prior approval from the Muslim Arab League, but neither sought it nor received it from the US Congress, to launch an attack on country totally nonthreatening to the USA with no apparent national interest involved. Obama the Senator, as anti-war candidate: "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation." (link)

Well, I'm waiting for all the liberal condemnation of Obama the warmonger, starter of illegal hostilities, but I'm not holding my breath.  Bush with blood on his hands, Bush/Cheney the war criminals, BushHitler the baby killer. Impeach Bush. What about all the terrorists this will breed? What about closing Gitmo, still open over two years into the age of Obama. What about the fierce moral urgency of change?

Or was it all just political? Of course it was.

John M Greco

Annals of Inanities -- Obama Edition 2

2011-03-13T13:56:00.006-05:00

* Obama's State Department, run by one Hillary Clinton, is attacking (link) the US Military, headed by Commander-in-Chief Obama, for allegedly mistreating its prisoner Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier who allegedly leaked reams of secret, sensitive material to WikiLeaks. Now the spokesman for the Obama/Clinton State Department is taking the fall (link). Clinton and her minions keep forgetting that a Democrat is now president, not a Republican -- no need to fabricate and smear anymore.

* Everyone knows that the Social Security system is a pyramid scheme, where today's contributions from some people are used to pay today's benefits to others. There is no Al Gore lockbox, there is no money set aside -- it's all a fiction. And yet, and yet, the unserious Barack Obama's position was recently reaffirmed: there is no problem because the trust fund, which we all know does not exist, is "solvent" until 2017. This incessant effort to fool the foolable and the inattentive -- Charles Krauthammer deconstructs it here.

* Obama has just said that his administration is "encouraging offshore (oil) exploration and production" (link). No sentient being could possibly believe an ounce of this. Obama doesn't just subscribe to the Big Lie theory, he's an underwriter.

* Obama's buddy Attorney General Eric Holder, who recently referred to blacks as "his people" (link) in defending himself against serious charges of reverse racism, is now requiring the Dayton police department to lower its testing requirements so that more blacks can pass the test. Why not just eliminate testing all together? Why do policemen and other public servants need to know anything at all?

John M Greco

Recent Reads of Note -- Daniels & Steyn

2011-03-08T21:52:00.005-06:00

* In the March 2011 New Criterion, a great journal of criticism, physician and author Anthony Daniels, one of my favorites who sometimes goes by Theodore Dalrymple, writes compellingly of an experiment of his, motivated by a regret of formal training in literature, in which he somewhat randomly selected two slim books of WWII-era poetry, by two poets unknown to him and seemingly most anyone else, from a dusty shelf in an old used bookshop to see if he could discern whether the poetry was any good. He could and, by chance, it was. On the Doorstep of Valhalla. Four fragments I will return to enjoy:

One of my many regrets—and there comes a time in life when regret is almost inseparable from memory itself—is that I received no formal literary education, at least not after the age of sixteen.... Even now, nearly half a century later, as I walk through the woods around my house in France and the sunlight comes variegated through the leafy canopy, I cannot but think of the poem that begins: “Glory be to God for dappled things—/ For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow.”

To say that the verse of both men has been forgotten is not to court contradiction.... I felt slightly nervous at being moved by both, as if I lacked the discrimination to realize that they were rightly consigned to the literary equivalent of Trotsky’s dustbin of history, in other words to the shelves of the unsaleable in a shop that was destined to close when the slender resources of its new owner ran out.

It is difficult not to see in the contrast between the two poets the caesura in European culture, or rather sensibility, caused by the First World War; Elwes could not see that his generation was sacrificed for nothing; Monahan could see nothing else. Oddly enough, I find myself able to sympathize on both sides of the caesura, with both of Elwes and of Monahan—nostalgic for the past, I am immersed in the modern.

Just as Elwes saw the war in clear moral terms as Monahan did not, so too he saw love as lasting and permanent, as Monahan did not. It is as if enchantment and disenchantment were lenses through which the two of them looked at the world, each lens no doubt with its power of distortion, but each also capable of revealing truths that the other cannot.

* The inimitable Mark Steyn writes trenchantly, sarcastically, and somewhat forlornly about the recent Islamist terrorist attack on American servicemen in Germany, citing Western fecklessness and unrelenting demographic arithmetic in Arid Uka’s Gratitude. Excerpt:

According to Bismarck’s best-known maxim on Europe’s most troublesome region, the Balkans are not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Americans could be forgiven for harboring similar sentiments after the murder of two U.S. airmen in Germany by a Kosovar Muslim.... Remember Kosovo? Me neither. But it was big at the time, launched by Bill Clinton.... And the Left didn’t mind at all — because, for a modern Western nation, war is only legitimate if you have no conceivable national interest in whatever war you’re waging.... A decade on.... a young airport employee is so grateful for what America did for his people that he guns down U.S. servicemen while yelling “Allahu akbar!”

John M Greco

Obama Gets Tough on Leakers of His Team's Secrets. Surprise!

2011-03-08T00:07:00.002-06:00

Obama has been coming down very hard on federal workers who leak government secrets to the press. But remember when liberals said leaking was one of the highest forms of patriotism? Apparently only if it might embarrass Republicans.

From the liberal website Politico (link):

The Obama administration, which famously pledged to be the most transparent in American history, is pursuing an unexpectedly aggressive legal offensive against federal workers who leak secret information to expose wrongdoing, highlight national security threats or pursue a personal agenda.... That’s a sharp break from recent history, when the U.S. government brought such cases on three occasions in roughly 40 years.... But legal experts and good-government advocates say the hard-line approach to leaks has a chilling effect on whistleblowers, who fear harsh legal reprisals if they dare to speak up.

GW Bush was derelict in his failure to stifle leakers of national security secrets, intimidated, I think, by the liberal media elites. Now here's one Bush policy Obama has actually changed. Whistleblowing on Democrats can't be tolerated.

John M Greco

Annals of Inanities -- Obama Edition 1

2011-03-05T16:56:00.004-06:00

* Recently the Obama-appointed Attorney General of the United States, one Eric Holder, who happens to be black, was before a US House committee testifying on his refusal to prosecute the perpetrators in the well-documented black-on-white Philadelphia voter intimidation case. In justifying his actions, he referred to blacks as "his people." (link; link; link) Apparently whites and Asians are not "the people" of the Attorney General of the United States. That post-racial Obama stuff has always been smoke and mirrors. But my liberal friends assure me that Obama loves America and is a great patriot, so I feel better.

* Obama lieutenant Katherine Sibelius, the head of HHS who runs Medicare and is one of the point persons pushing Obamacare, has finally admitted that the Obama team's figures on the purported financial savings from their Obamacare and Medicare "reforms" are fake (link) because of double-counted "savings".   Republican Rep. Pitts said: “The same dollar can’t be used twice [in counting savings]. This is the largest of the many budget gimmicks Democrats used to claim Obamacare would reduce the deficit.” This was obvious from the very start but Obama and his minions have kept lying about it to fool the foolable and the inattentive. But my liberal friends assure me that Obama loves America and is a great patriot, so I feel better.

* When a US Border Patrol agent was shot and killed last year in an altercation with armed illegals, apparently there was speculation on the internet that BP agents are required by the Obama Administration to first use bean bag rounds (whatever those are) when force is necessary against illegals with real guns. At the time, Obama's crack Homeland Security team dismissed such (link) as "increasingly bizarre internet-fueled rumors".  Well, now the Obama team finally admits (link) that indeed our agents fired bean bag bullets while the bad guys fired real ones.  Good grief -- it's as if Obama and his acolyte Napolitano would rather our agents err on the side of getting killed rather than risk harming hostile illegal aliens armed with real guns and real bullets. But my liberal friends assure me that Obama loves America and is a great American patriot, so I feel better.

* Obama preached incessantly in his campaign about the "fierce moral urgency" to closing the Gitmo prison for Muslim terrorists and signed an order hours after becoming president to effect just that.  Though his acolytes still hope for that change, not only is Gitmo still open two years later but now Obama's appointee Eric Holder of Justice (see above) apparently feels that Muslim terrorists are also "his people" because he's keeping them around in Gitmo another year or two (link).  And our troops are still in Iraq and Afghanistan -- another signature Obama promise turned to dust.  But my liberal friends assure me that Obama loves America and is a great American patriot, so I feel better.

* A German-born Kosovo Muslim, feeling so indebted to the American military for protecting his and other Kosovo Muslim families against the Christian Serbs a few years back, showed his gratitude by opening fire on American troops in Germany, no doubt presuming they were either Christians or Jews, shouting the de rigueur "God is Great" in Arabic of which we are now so familiar. He would have killed more but his gun malfunctioned, which is why so many Muslim terrorists prefer beheadings with swords -- less prone to jamming. The American Commander-in-Chief, who grew up in some unique family cultural blend of Islamic-tinged atheistic communism, sort of a red diaper baby with a Muslim motif, announced he was "saddened" by the "tragic event."  Just as with the Ft. Hood massacre by another jihadist, the words "Islamic" and "terrorist" are not part of Obama's lexicon. The great Mark Steyn takes him down here (sample: "As any Homeland Security official can tell you, “Allahu akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here.”).  But my liberal friends assure me that Obama loves America and is a great American patriot, so I feel better.

John M Greco

Investing Solo – Preferred Closed End Funds & JPS

2011-03-02T13:28:00.005-06:00

In the last couple of months I’ve written a few posts here (link) about how I’ve been increasing the allocation to floating rate securities in my debt portfolio in anticipation of rising interest rates -- floating rate senior loans, both an unleveraged mutual fund and leveraged closed end funds, augmented with moderate positions in individual floating rate equity preferred stocks and the variable rate bond CEF GFY. My FR exposure is now about 10% of my debt portfolio.

However, since some market mavens think that the sluggish economic recovery will keep the Fed’s interest rates low for some time, perhaps years, not only am I holding firm on most of my fixed rate debt (my last post on the Pimco CEFs managed by Bill Gross is here) I’ve actually added to it a bit in the past couple of weeks. I’d like to think this approach resembles more a barbell than a dumbbell.

What continues to attract me are so-called preferred securities, a motley crew that consists of both traditional equity preferred stocks and the somewhat newer so-called hybrid preferreds, which are actually bonds, either de jure (exchange-traded bonds) or de facto (trust preferreds and trust certificates). The attraction is their high yield, pure and simple. The hybrid preferreds, what I prefer to call exchange-traded debt, are mostly fully taxable but “provide the highest yields of any investment grade fixed income security,” according to preferred fund manager Donald Crumrine in a recent interview (link) published by the Wall Street Transcript. Moreover, the equity preferreds are taxed at the qualified dividend rate, currently 15%, as are also trust preferreds from foreign banks in what appears to me to be a strange quirk in the tax laws.

There are some newer ETFs in preferreds but I prefer the CEFs for the enhanced yields that leverage provides. I figure if I’m going to take the interest rate risk of preferreds why not double down and add some leverage to juice the yields. There are three families of preferred CEFs – Nuveen, John Hancock, and Flaherty & Crumrine, each with four offerings. At my recent look at the metrics of all of them, which I array in table form, I once again find the Nuveen funds most attractive in the metrics I value, which include a high ratio of net investment income to distribution, positive undistributed net investment income worth at least a month’s distribution, sizeable discount to net asset value, moderate leverage, no destructive return of capital, and good average portfolio credit. At this point in time, I like the Nuveen trio of JTP, JPS, and JHP best, and have recently found that JPS, which happens to be the largest of the three, has had the most attractive combination of size, discount, and distribution, so it’s the one I’ve been adding to of late.

Since the relative attractiveness of the CEFs can vary over short periods of time, especially since the discount can change daily, when I decide to add to a position I might find one CEF relatively more attractive than the others on that day. In this Nuveen family, I also hold JTP.

As of yesterday, JPS sports an annualized distribution of 8.1% trading at an 8.0% discount to net asset value. This discount is well below the 5-year average, usually an attractive feature when other investment indicators are favorable. Nuveen represents at its web site that about 37% of the JPS holdings are equity preferreds, which are taxed at the 15% rate. My back-of-the-envelope calculation is that this translates to a fully taxable equivalent yield of about 9.0%. I’ve got moderate credit risk, more so on the equity preferreds, significant interest rate risk, and the looming phase-out of bank trust preferreds (which will offer capital gains to the extent that the CEFs’ cost bases are below par but reduce the investable universe of hybrid preferreds). But for the high yield, I’m staying modestly invested in this space with some alpha money.

I’m an individual investor with no background in finance or securities, writing things down to help organize and clarify my thinking. Of course, nothing I say constitutes investment advice of any kind – merely an account of my personal observations and decisions. My core portfolio is a conservative and diversified mix of equity and debt mutual funds, ETFs, and some closed-end funds (CEFs) across investment styles, management firms, and accounts, and I invest a relatively small amount (about 10%) somewhat more aggressively in the perhaps ultimately futile pursuit of alpha.

Mike Parenti

Wisconsin Public Unions vs Taxpayers -- Dispatches from the Front

2011-02-22T19:12:00.004-06:00

Reports from the front on the battle in Wisconsin between over-compensated public union workers and the over-extended taxpayers who foot the bill:

Howler. A New York Times article (link) proclaims that a new Rasmussen poll on the dispute may be biased (presumably against the union side). Yes, that New York Times, the apotheosis of bias, accusing someone else of it. Well, I guess if anyone can recognize tripe it would be a tripe peddler, although Rasmussen is about the most trusted name in polling.  The only dupes likely to relish this serving of offal are the dwindling number of readers the New York Times has left.

The difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Supporters of the union side are want to blur any distinction (link) between public and private unions -- hence the railing against "corporate power" and "big money." In fact, the differences between public and private are fundamental, significant, and in the Wisconsin dispute, dispositive (as the lawyers say).

Hmmm -- So that's why all those protesting teachers don't understand that they're grossly over-compensated:  "Only 39% of the 8th graders in Wisconsin public schools are proficient or better in mathematics, according to the U.S. Department of Education, despite the fact that Wisconsin spends more per pupil in its public schools than any other state in the Midwest." (link)

Uh-oh. The unions have lost liberal Richard Cohen writing in the liberal Washington Post (link): "It was one thing when unions went after giant corporations run by guys who played golf at restricted clubs. But when it comes to government workers, we are the boss and we pay the bill. To quote what Sam Spade told the woman he loved in the "The Maltese Falcon," "I won't play the sap for you." When it comes to public-sector unions, my sentiments exactly."

Welcome to the future -- a preview of medical care if the Democrats have their way: At least three faculty physicians from the University of Wisconsin Family Medicine Department are filmed proudly handing out confirmation of illness statements to union protesters so they could obtain excused absences from their teaching duties, all proving too much even for a big liberal writing in the liberal Atlantic (link).  Hey, who says we need to do a careful interview and physical examination of the patient to make a diagnosis? That old school stuff discriminates against doctors who can't do physical exams, or don't know how, to say nothing about how needing a doctor's statement discriminates against those who aren't actually sick. Medical ethics is a retro-capitalist construct. No doubt the UW Dept of Family Medicine is a hotbed of support for Obamacare.

So that's why our school maintainence bill is so high.  Wisconsin unionized teachers drop their garbage where they stand (link). Overheard by a mind reader: "hell, cleaning up after myself isn't in my union job description, and after all, I'm creating jobs for unionized clean up workers."

But didn't Obama say all that violent rhetoric was off limits? So much for the liberals' new age of civility -- (link).

Who are these guys? Unions to bus in outside agitators to join Wisconsin protests (link). Boy, that side really knows how to community organize.

John M Greco

Related Post:
Wisconsin = Ground Zero in the Escalating Struggle Between Hard-Pressed Taxpayers & Coddled Public Workers

Reflections on the Devolution in Chicago

2011-02-20T13:54:00.003-06:00

The Wall Street Journal reported (link) this past week on some new data from the U.S. Census Bureau:

A larger-than-expected exodus over the past 10 years reduced the population of Chicago to a level not seen in nearly a century. The U.S. Census Bureau reported … that during the decade ended in 2010, Chicago's population fell 6.9% … [to] fewer than [was] reported back in 1920…. [T]he recent recession accelerated a migration both to the metropolitan area's farthest suburbs and to the Southern U.S…. The influx of residents to outlying areas could … —particularly minorities—could make those regions more politically diverse. For instance, said University of New Hampshire demographer Kenneth Johnson, "DuPage County could become less Republican."

Chicago’s retiring Mayor Daley, a Democrat and the longest serving mayor in city history, having just surpassed his father in that regard, has been popular not so much because of what his is but rather because of what he is not – a worse alternative. One must not conflate popularity with cost-effectiveness.

Despite the Daley Democrats the steady migration to the suburbs and the South continues. Residents are voting with their feet in search of safer neighborhoods, cheaper and more honest government, better schools, more reliable services, and, of course, better job prospects in areas more friendly to the businesses that maintain and create them.

And to what new lands are these residents fleeing? To towns and states where the policies and values of Republican and conservative voters predominate. But in what should be fodder for a million PhD theses, in a triumph of will over experience, of desire over judgement, many of these refugees from failed Democrat polities don’t miss a beat and continue voting for Democrats from their new homes, against the very Republicans who made their new neighborhoods worth moving for. Validating the principle that you can fool some of the people all of the time, they continue to vote for Democrats who promise them more things with less accountability.

The foundation of a democracy rests on the wisdom of its people, and in the wisdom of such citizens lies the hope of our Republic.

John M Greco

Related post:
Democrat Voters Migrate to Republican Areas For Better Jobs, Safer Neighborhoods, and Better Services, But Then Still Vote For Democrats; Go Figure

Wisconsin = Ground Zero in the Escalating Struggle Between Hard-Pressed Taxpayers & Coddled Public Workers

2011-02-17T21:26:00.012-06:00

Wisconsin has become ground zero in the escalating struggle between private-sector taxpayers and the government workers who live large off their labors.

Study after study in recent years has shown that public sector workers not only have higher job-specific wages than their private counter-parts but have much richer benefit packages as well, including pensions that private sector taxpayers can only dream about.

States and local governments are struggling mightily in the wake of the Great Recession, and some are functionally bankrupt. The largest single driver of this crisis is well known -- wages and benefits to public workers, who are usually represented by a union.

The new Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, supported by a Republican majority in both houses of the state legislature, is finally standing up for the people who actually foot the bill for the largesse extended to government employees. He is proposing that benefits for state workers begin to come in line with those of the private workers who pay the bills.

Most private workers, the taxpayers, pay a big piece of their health care insurance costs, while I read that Wisconsin public workers, not unlike their counterparts across the country, pay little to nothing for theirs. Karl Rove states on the Hannity show that in Wisconsin “virtually every state employee pays zero” into his/her retirement plan. Meanwhile, in Illinois, a state with worse finances than Wisconsin, the number of retired public workers with pensions over $100k per year is skyrocketing. This is grossly unfair and unsustainable.

Unionized teachers are now mobbing and agitating in Madison, the state capitol, replete with ugly, violent imagery and revolting disrespect for the environment (Ann Althouse posts: link; link; link).

President Obama, now lying (link) in speeches about cuts in his new federal budget plan, is calling this attempt by Wisconsin taxpayers to save their state from destruction “an assault on the unions.” In Illinois, Democrat Gov. Pat Quinn, who made his name posing as a taxpayer advocate (falsely, in retrospect), is proposing, for the state with arguably the worst finances in the country, I kid you not, a budget for the next fiscal year with increased spending and borrowing (link), even after a recent 67% hike in the personal income tax rate. Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.

This struggle needs to come to a head, and the sooner the better for our country. It can’t go on any longer. Either the taxpayers who foot the bill or the public workers who live off their labors will be in control. With one we recover and go forward, with one we devolve into bankruptcy and chaos.

John M Greco

Related Post:
Wisconsin Public Unions vs Taxpayers -- Dispatches from the Front

Annals of Government-Run Enterprises: Why Is This Train Late?

2011-02-12T16:09:00.011-06:00

Accurate transcription of an automated announcement the other day on a Chicago Metropolitan Rail Authority commuter train on the way to the Loop:

“This train is operating approximately 30 minutes late due to late arrival of equipment due to earlier delays.”

I kid you not.

And some of us want these people run our health care system.

2/13/11 -- Addendum: Lest anyone thinks this message was a one-off, in fact it is one in the railroad's standard pre-prepared repertory that I have heard many times over the years.

2/13/11 -- Addendum 2: From the Associated Press (link): "Despite plenty of warning that last week's blizzard was on its way, officials of Metra say the Chicago-area commuter train system wasn't prepared to deal with the storm. They also told the Chicago Tribune on Friday that they didn't get the word out about reduced services and long delays."

As Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit would say -- We're in the very best of hands.

John M Greco

Does Obama Support Protestors Against a Repressive Islamic Regime? It Depends

2011-02-11T21:20:00.004-06:00

In an authoritarian Muslim country, young anti-government protesters clamor in the streets against a repressive government. Shouts for democracy are heard. Military action is feared. One side is anti-American, the other side is at least a tactical ally. Which side does Obama support?

Well, in Iran he supported the government against the protesters, and in Egypt he supported the protesters against the government. In Iran the vicious and virulent anti-American group Code Pink supported not the protesters but the hard-line Islamist Iranian regime, and even visited the country recently as guests of the ruling mullahs (who were taking a well-deserved break from their exhausting duties of hanging gays and whipping to death 14 year old rape victims); but for them in Egypt, there too it was different. Hmmm. What could be the theme?

Of course, to anyone sentient the theme is that whichever side hates the West in general and hates America and Israel in specific is the side that gets the support of Obama and Code Pink (the leaders of which have already spent a nice day at the White House visiting with their friend Obama). There’s no other way to reconcile Obama’s lack of support for anti-government protesters in Iran and support for anti-government protesters in Egypt. No other way.

Peter Kohanloo and Sohrab Ahmari comment on this inconsistency at The Weekly Standard (link):

How can self-proclaimed “progressives” support one set of Muslim reformers, while so coldly abandoning another? The contradiction is a symptom of a deeper philosophical quagmire born of a sense of guilt felt by some Westerners for past sins, both real and imagined, committed against the non-Western “other.” Western guilt yields a state of perpetual self-loathing, which in turn leads its victims to celebrate any anti-Western cause as morally worthy. Thus, when Egyptians--rightly--rebel against a pro-American autocracy, their cause is automatically perceived as just. However, if Iranians rise up in pursuit of similar goals against a far worse, anti-American and totalitarian regime--one that murders its own citizens in the name of God--Americans are asked to stay silent. After all, they have “oppressed” Iran in the past.

Obama had a chance, by supporting the anti-government protesters, to help overthrow the vicious, radical anti-American regime in Iran. He took a pass then, but now in Egypt he’s suddenly interested in the rights and safety of the young people in the streets. With Obama it’s easy to predict where he’ll stand – just find the side that’s more in our interest to support and he’ll be somewhere else.

John M Greco

Republican House Leaders Stun America in Renouncing Their Own Campaign Pledge on Spending Cuts; Say It Ain’t So Paul Ryan

2011-02-10T00:02:00.014-06:00

Republican House Leaders John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Eric Cantor, et alia, have announced their new spending plan that falls way short of the spending cuts they have been pledging for so long and are so needed to deal with the dangerous national debt level.

From Emily Miller at Human Events (link):

[Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Paul] Ryan’s budget falls short of the House Republicans’ promise to cut back to 2008 spending levels. During the midterm elections campaign season, they promised in their Pledge to America to “cut government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels, saving at least $100 billion in the first year alone." However, Ryan’s budget sets discretionary spending for FY 2011 at $42 billion higher than FY 2008.

Hugh Hewitt, as outraged as I am, has details and comments here.

How in the world could these guys have the audacity to do this, after all that has happened in the past year, after all the dire warnings about the threat of the exploding debt under Obama and the Democrats, after the Tea Party grass roots revolt against spending, and after their own promises?

Yes, I realize that they will attempt to justify their perfidy with Beltway-speak loaded with insider and technical lingo no one outside of Washington DC understands about how all this really isn’t as bad as it looks.

This is simply astounding. I read this evening that many elected national Republicans are in open revolt, and so perhaps they can bring Boehner, Cantor, and Ryan to their senses and rescue them from their own political suicide. Of course, even if honest and reality-based Republican leaders convince them to honor their word, they will remain deeply tarnished by this stunning episode.

John M Greco

Profiles in Principled Liberalism

2011-02-09T15:07:00.002-06:00

Fealty to principles versus the grasp of power to control and mold the hoi polloi?

Ultraliberal advocacy organization Common Cause in 2005 on the subject of Democrat senators possibly using the filibuster to block Republican Bush’s judicial nominees, via per Jonathan Alter at The Volokh Conspiracy (link) by way of Instapundit:

Common Cause strongly opposes any effort by Senate leaders to outlaw filibusters of judicial nominees to silence a vigorous debate about the qualifications of these nominees, short-circuiting the Senate’s historic role in the nomination approval process.

Ultraliberal advocacy organization Common Cause in late 2010 on the subject of Republican senators possibly using the filibuster to block Democrat Obama’s judicial nominees, via same source as above:

the filibuster of judicial nominees threatens to “cripple our federal judiciary”

You can’t make his stuff up.

For some, truth is not about consistency to principles or even reality but rather about whatever serves to advance the Cause.

John M Greco

Chrysler Boasts that Its Cars Are Made by Detroit Union Workers. Yes, That Detroit, Those Workers.

2011-02-07T12:13:00.007-06:00

I’m not making this up. Honest.

In a very slick and undoubtedly very expensive commercial aired during yesterday’s Super Bowl game, car-maker Chrysler boasted that its cars are made in Detroit. The tag line is “Imported from Detroit.” Yes, that Detroit. Made by those very same union workers notorious for their unique world-record-breaking ability to combine extremely high pay with extremely low quality. Made by those same workers who, along with fellow residents of similar mentality, have turned Detroit into a lower-rung third-world city right here in America. Oh yea, those are just the people I want to make the next car I drop $30 grand to buy. Sure.

Chrysler is of course now mostly owned by the unions after it was stolen from its creditors in an ersatz bankruptcy by Obama and given to them in one of the most egregious examples of political thuggery in American history. Then Obama gave Fiat what was left with the directive to work with the unions to try to make something of the corpse, no doubt to be aided with more money from Obama down the road.

The union brain trust thinks the way to induce me to buy one of their cars is to remind me, to emphasize to me, that their cars are manufactured by Detroit union workers. Of course, instead they should be doing everything they can to trick me into believing that Chrysler cars are made by someone else – anyone else. These union owners are either much dimmer than anyone had previously imagined or are certifiably delusional, and are likely both.

John M Greco

Some related posts:
The Obama Chrysler Confiscation – One Year Later
Obama-run General Motors Guilty of “Elasticizing the Reality of Things" about Repaying Its TARP Loan
Obama, the Car Companies, and the Rule of Law
Detroit's Population Crashes as Ignorant Residents Flee the Liberal Paradise

Ronald Reagan @100

2011-02-06T01:55:00.008-06:00

Today we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of America’s and Illinois’ greatest sons – Ronald Reagan.

He was born 100 years ago today in Tampico, Illinois, and grew up in various places in the northern part of the state, attending high school in Dixon and finally graduating from Eureka College with a degree in economics and sociology. After working in radio broadcasting "live" Cubs games from a studio in Iowa, Reagan moved to California to become an actor, becoming perhaps best known for his film portrayal of Notre Dame football player George "the Gipper" Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American. He was president of the Screen Actors Guild, became a Republican (“I didn’t leave the Democratic party – the Party left me”), served as governor of California for two terms, and was twice defeated for the Republican nomination for president. Then in 1980 he tried for a third time, and won at last. He became president of an America humiliated by the Iranian hostage crisis, fearful of aggressive communism, unnerved by rampant inflation, dazed by the Carter Administration, and apprehensive about the future.

Larry Kudlow, who as a young man worked in the Reagan Administration, recounted the Reagan legacy on his show the other day:

Ronald Reagan saved America. Ronald Reagan saved the world. His economic policies of low tax rates, light regulations, and a king dollar, vanquishing inflation, firing the striking air traffic controllers, and limiting domestic spending – all that basically launched a 25 year economic boom and rescued us from the malaise of stagflation.

With his massive military buildup, his missile defense system, his tough diplomacy, and his evil empire battle cry, Reagan defeated Soviet communism forever without even firing a shot.

He was a tough minded optimist who believed in American exceptionalism and freedom. He saved our future.

Let me repeat my favorite of the Gipper’s many great lines: the best is yet to come.

John M Greco

Investing Solo – Bill Gross’s PTY and Its Sister Closed End Funds PFN, PFL, and PCN

2011-02-04T23:02:00.011-06:00

When will interest rates really start to rise? How much inflation do we really have? Read the WSJ or watch the Kudlow show and see the experts’ answers range from soup to nuts. I pay, however, particular attention to Bill Gross of Pimco, who, in the annual Barron’s roundtable interviews (link) published last month and in a recent post for Pimco investors (link), opines that the Fed will keep interest rates low for a good while longer, however injurious such rates are to savers and pensioners, in the interest of propping up assets, particularly stocks and real estate, for the benefit of banks and financiers. He advises us mere mortals to adjust to the interest rate realities and adapt our fixed income strategies. Gross: “Once [quantitative easing] disappears, how long will the federal-funds rate stay at 25 basis points?…. For a long, long time, I think. Short-term rates will stay there for at least two years and maybe three, because of high unemployment, excess capacity and, at the moment, an inherently low inflation rate. There would be no rationale for the Fed to raise interest rates other than to counter an attack on the dollar.”

To that end, in Barron’s he once again recommended one of the Pimco diversified taxable debt closed end funds (CEFs) – PTY. Gross’s argument: “[I]f you don't want to own assets [like treasuries or money market funds] yielding negative real rates [interest rates net of inflation], why don't you borrow at such rates, or find companies that do?” I own two sister funds to this one – PFN and PFL, the former of which in the June 2010 Barron’s Gross called a “look-alike” to PTY. Not unexpectedly, the price of PTY shares jumped high, while the unmentioned PFN and PFL only hopped up a bit, despite only modest to moderate differences among them and the fourth sister of the quartet, PCN. I don’t know why Gross mentions only one of them at a time in these interviews rather than discussing the quartet as a whole. In fact, the average durations of the PFN and PFL portfolios are shorter than PTY and PCN, giving them a little more safety should interest rates rise a lot from here. For me, when I first bought into PFN and PFL I liked their valuation metrics a bit better than those of PTY and PCN, and especially given the run up in share prices recently that still seems the case to me now.

All of these funds to my eyes have exceptional metrics among debt CEFs – particularly for me net investment earnings well in excess of monthly distributions, a substantial cushion of undistributed net investment income, and insignificant amounts of the subjectively valued “level 3” securities. The portfolios are mostly corporate bonds, both investment grade and high-yield, and mortgage-backed securities. All these funds are managed by Gross himself (he’s also a large personal shareholder) and have great track records, employing leverage to achieve regular distributions of well over 7% annually plus a history of special one-time year end payouts on top of that.

Of concern is the particular risk seemingly on everyone’s mind right now -- future interest rates, but again, Gross thinks they’ll stay low for quite a while longer. Also, this quartet of CEFs now trade at a premium to net asset value, but I suspect that’s because of Gross’s great track record as a fund manager and because the annualized rate of monthly distributions does not take into account special year-end distributions.

I have been taking a hard look at my fixed-rate funds not expressly intermediate-term in focus that I have left after my reallocation over the past year almost completely out of long-term funds. I look at PFN and PFL as essentially intermediate-term funds with great fundamentals, yields, and management, but with a fixed rate portfolio. After re-assessing the rewards versus risk, I’ve decided to hold firm with them despite the recent run-up in price to mild premiums over net asset value and the inherent interest rate risk.

I’m an individual investor with no background in finance or securities, writing things down to help organize and clarify my thinking. Of course, nothing I say constitutes investment advice of any kind – merely an account of my personal observations and decisions. My core portfolio is a conservative and diversified mix of equity and debt mutual funds, ETFs, and some closed-end funds (CEFs) across investment styles, management firms, and accounts, and I invest a relatively small amount (about 10%) somewhat more aggressively in the perhaps ultimately futile pursuit of alpha.

Mike Parenti

PTY profile at Nuveen’s CEF Connect web site

Related Posts:
Investing Solo – Floating-Rate Debt - GFY
Investing Solo – Floating-Rate Debt
Investing Solo in Floating-Rate Preferred Stocks

Investing Solo – Floating-Rate Debt - GFY

2011-01-28T00:39:00.007-06:00

I’ve been writing about my search for suitable floating-rate debt securities to which I can allocate a part of my debt portfolio. I’ve previously posted some thoughts about floating-rate (FR) equity preferred stocks (link), particularly MET-A and HBA-D, and exchange-traded debt securities (link), particularly the exchange-traded bond PFK and the trust preferred issue UBS-D.

I’ve come to like the closed end fund GFY run by Legg Mason. It invests, with a pledge of at least 80% of assets, in variable rate debt, such as mortgage-backed securities, IG and high yield corporate bonds, senior loans, and emerging market debt, and derivatives related to these securities; no FR equity preferred stock, however. Much of this portfolio, about 45% as of last fall, is as expected below investment grade. I like the picture from the last annual report (link), dated September 30, 2010: portfolio earned interest and dividends well in excess of the CEF’s distributions, specifically an impressive 134%; solid positive capital gains and net from derivatives; a very decent amount of undistributed net investment income on the books; and no return of capital. To my read, about 82% of its net realized gain came from portfolio interest and dividends, which I like, with only the remaining 18% from net capital gains and derivative, swap, and currency transactions. The Legg Mason GFY "Fact Card" (link) lists a security weighted average life of 5.6 years. As of yesterday it pays a monthly distribution at an annualized rate of 4.1% and trades at a very attractive 8.4% discount to net asset value. Interestingly it does not employ leverage, despite being the kind of fund -- one with a variable rate portfolio that could maintain an interest rate spread over borrowed capital as interest rates rise -- where one might expect it and like to see it. One limitation – it’s a fairly small fund with relatively low trading volume. What I see as the risk/reward ratio is attractive for a modest investment, and I’ve begun accumulating some shares on dips.

I’m an individual investor with no background in finance or securities, writing things down to help organize and clarify my thinking. Of course, nothing I say constitutes investment advice of any kind – merely an account of my personal observations and decisions; I do not vouch for the accuracy of any representation -- every investor must do his/her own due diligence. My core portfolio is a conservative and diversified mix of equity and debt mutual funds, ETFs, and some closed-end funds (CEFs) across investment styles, management firms, and accounts, and I invest a relatively small amount somewhat more aggressively in the perhaps ultimately futile personal pursuit of alpha.

Mike Parenti

Related Posts:
Investing Solo – Floating-Rate Debt
Investing Solo in Floating-Rate Preferred Stocks

The Tucson Murder Rampage, Liberal “Truth”, & Liberal Viciousness

2011-01-17T19:53:00.004-06:00

The bullets of the madman had barely stopped flying in Tucson earlier this month when many prominent liberals rushed to blame the tragedy on conservatives, despite not only the absence of a shred of evidence of such but despite early anecdotes that in fact he was an atheist, a left-wing pothead, and an anarchist, even as if had the shooter held conservative political views they could possibly be blamed for mass murder. We’ve seen this despicable tactic from liberals many times before, of course – from the recent Times Square bombing attempt, to the Oklahoma City bombing, to the assassination of President Kennedy.

This recent disgraceful behavior offers yet another clear look into the disturbed and hateful souls of so many in the intellectual vanguard of modern liberalism. Seeing their hoped-for apotheosis of liberalism, the Obama presidency, flounder and seeing most voters in the recent elections reject the liberal agenda, liberal opinion leaders are angry, desperate, and unhinged. And they are not troubled to accuse conservatives of being moral accomplices to mass murder, for facts and truth don’t matter to the socialist, collectivist cause – only that “truth” that advances their social deconstruction of an America predicated on individual liberty, personal accountability, limited government, and constitutionalism.

I’ve collected some noteworthy responses to the deranged liberal smears that can serve me as continual reminders of the true purpose and character of modern American so-called liberalism, the antithesis of what the term meant years ago and should always have stood for.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds in the Wall Street Journal (link): ‘To be clear, if you're using this event to criticize the "rhetoric" of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you're either: (a) asserting a connection between the "rhetoric" and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you're not, in which case you're just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it? … I understand the desperation that Democrats must feel after taking a historic beating in the midterm elections and seeing the popularity of ObamaCare plummet while voters flee the party in droves. But those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America's political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.”

Jay Nordlinger at National Review Online (link): ‘After the Kennedy assassination, John Tower and his family had to evacuate to a safe place. The early word was that right-wingers had killed the president. Tower was associated with Goldwater for President. There were death threats against his family. It transpired, of course, that a left-wing nutjob who had “defected,” briefly, to the Soviet Union was the killer. A liberal was quoted as saying, “Now our grief can be pure.” …. If an Islamist blows up or guns down 50 people, shouting “Allahu Akbar” as he does it, you’re not supposed to say that the act has any broad implications at all. It is simply an individual act, end of story. But if a young psychotic in Arizona kills a lot of people, we’re supposed to examine the state of Sarah Palin’s soul.’

Andrew Klavan at City Journal (link): ‘… [T]he Left’s sudden talk about incendiary political rhetoric in the wake of the Arizona shooting isn’t really about political rhetoric at all. It’s about the real-world failure of leftist policies everywhere— … leftists [are] starting to lose control of the one weapon in which they have the most faith: the narrative. The narrative is what leftists believe in instead of the truth. If they can blame George W. Bush for the economic crisis, if they can make Sarah Palin out to be an idiot, if they can call the Tea Party racist until you think it must be true, they might yet retain power in spite of the international disgrace of their ideas. .… call it Narrative Hysteria: a frantic attempt to capitalize on calamity by casting their opponents, not merely as racist or sexist or Islamophobic this time, but as somehow responsible for an act of madness and evil. Shame on them.

Roger Kimball at National Review Online (link): ‘What we have here in the tortured left-wing effort to enlist the ghastly Arizona shootings into their anti–Tea Party campaign is yet another example of political correctness on the march. The great irony … is that all this vitriol should be marching under a banner called “liberalism.” There is nothing liberal, nothing having to do with freedom, about it. It is all about control: power in the hands of a nomenklatura and submission visited upon you and me, my friends. It’s the good old strategy of Lenin, dusted off and infused with some new names.’

George F. Will at the Washington Post (link): ‘Let us hope that … [this] is the last gasp of the generation of liberals whose default position in any argument is to indict opponents as racists. This McCarthyism of the left - devoid of intellectual content, unsupported by data - is a mental tic, not an idea but a tactic for avoiding engagement with ideas. It expresses limitless contempt for the American people, who have reciprocated by reducing liberalism to its current characteristics of electoral weakness and bad sociology.’

Andy McCarthy at National Review Online (link): ‘Very simply: The Left likes Islam and sympathizes with the Islamist critique of America, while it seethes with contempt for the likes of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and any person or institution that can serve as a symbol of conservatism or bourgeois American life. Consequently, any heinous act that can be contorted, however counterfactually, into a condemnation of the Right will be exploited for that purpose. Conversely, there is to be quick rationalization for, and then studious suppression of, any shameful episode that is too clearly traceable to a leftist cause célèbre — Islam, a movie pining for George W. Bush’s assassination, ghoulish wishes that Clarence Thomas or Dick Cheney will meet swift and painful deaths, or Senate Democrats’ comparing U.S. troops to Nazis, Soviets, Pol Pot, or terrorists…. There is no point debating any of this. Two years ago, we were still being told dissent was the highest form of patriotism; now it’s the root cause of murderous rampage. Modern leftists are tacticians. They’ve convinced themselves of the rightness of their cause, obviating the need to be consistent or faithful to facts in any single episode. For them, it’s all about how the episode can be spun to help the cause. That’s worth understanding, but not debating.’

Peter Wehner at Commentary Magazine (link): ‘What is on display is a cast of mind in which facts and reality are secondary to storylines and narratives. The aim is not truth; it is to advance The Cause. It is also about cynical exploitation. As one veteran Democratic operative told Politico, the Obama White House needs to “deftly pin this on the tea partiers” just as “the Clinton White House deftly pinned the Oklahoma City bombing on the militia and anti-government people” in 1995…. It is all quite sick, really. Not a few liberals are attempting to use a human tragedy to advance an ideological agenda. They are using dead and broken bodies as political pawns. The blood was still flowing from the gunshot wounds of slain and wounded people in Tucson as liberals began an extraordinary and instantaneous smear campaign. It will end up making our political discourse even more angry and toxic. I was naïve enough to be surprised at what has unfolded in the last 48 hours. The cynicism and intellectual corruption on the left is deeper than I imagined.

Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post (link): ‘Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous and so unsupported by evidence.’

Daniel Henninger in the Wall street Journal (link): ‘What happened in November [the widespread electoral repudiation of liberal policies] has to be stopped, by whatever means become available. Available this week was a chance to make some independents wonder if the tea parties, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Jared Loughner [the Tucson mass murderer] are all part of the same dark force. Who believes this? They do. The divide between this strain of the American left and its conservative opponents is about more than politics and policy. It goes back a long way, it is deep, and it will never be bridged. It is cultural, and it explains more than anything the "intensity" that exists now between these two competing camps. The Rosetta Stone that explains this tribal divide is Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter's classic 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." After Hofstadter, the American right wasn't just wrong on policy. Its people were psychologically dangerous and undeserving of holding authority for any public purpose.’

Peter Wehner, again, at Commentary Magazine (link): ‘The left has decided to build on the slander that conservatives were moral accessories to murder. This week they are using the death of six innocent people in Arizona as a means to advance their policy agenda — even though that policy agenda had nothing on earth to do with the terrible events in Tucson .… And so the forthcoming health-care debate is now being framed in the context of the Tucson massacre (the not-so-subtle argument is that health care contributed to the “climate of hate” that the left still wants to insist contributed to the violence on that awful day)…. What we’re witnessing among some liberals are minds that are so thoroughly and completely politicized that they will use any human tragedy, create any set of arguments, and invent any narrative they can in order to advance The Cause…. [A]pparently, some on the left are so consumed by politics that it tints every lens they look through; it impacts every act in life; and it colors every living, breathing thought they have.’

John M Greco

Dem Congressman Says Republicans Are Wrong to Focus on Obamcare Rather than Jobs; Where Has He Been, in a Cave?

2011-01-03T22:58:00.002-06:00

Robert Andrews, a Democrat Congressman from New Jersey, was a guest on today's Bill O"Reilly show and was introduced as one of the "co-authors" of Obamacare. He was asked to respond to the announced Republican plan to hold a repeal vote on the law very soon as one of the first activities of the new Congress. This guy said, and I quote, "I think it's wrong to focus on healthcare rather than jobs."

This is too rich, too ridiculous. In fact, this guy had such a flat affect even he couldn't muster enthusiasm for his argument, if one can even call it that. For two years the Democrats have focused primarily on their health care scheme, to the detriment of job creation, and now this guy says it would be wrong to focus on health care rather than jobs. He avoids defending the substance of the bill -- he just doesn't want to talk about it.

For the past two years, their health care scheme was the top priority for Democrats instead of jobs, the economy, and Islamic terror, to name just a few other things, and the voters responded with the Great Repudiation of 2010. Now congresssional Republicans, many of whom were newly elected as much as anything else because of their opposition to Obamacare, want to try to repeal what they think is not only a very bad attempt at health care "reform" but a great harm to the economy and the Constitution as well, and all this guy Andrews can muster is to knock them for not focusing on "jobs".  This is appparently the Democrat approach to defending Obamacare -- change the subject to jobs. Any problems with anything we've done or haven't done -- why worry about that? Focus on jobs, jobs, jobs.

A great impediment to more job creation IS Obamacare. This Dem tactic is pathetic.  New Jersians and the rest of us deserve much more.

John M Greco

Investing Solo – Floating-Rate Debt

2010-12-29T19:50:00.007-06:00

Yesterday I posted comments (link) about my search for promising individual floating-rate preferred stocks, in the absence of any viable fund that I know of, as a hedge against rising interest rates and inflation. I thought I would add here a few comments about some other floating rate exchange-traded debt I’ve looked at. I am an individual investor with no background in finance or markets, and, of course, nothing I am about to say constitutes investment advice of any kind – merely my personal observations and decisions, and I do not vouch for the accuracy of any representation – every investor needs to do his/her own due diligence.

Most floating rate exchange-traded debt securities are traditional preferred stock issues, but there are some others, although not many. In the category of exchange-traded bonds, two are from Sallie Mae, but I am afraid of this outfit in light of what happened to Fannie and Freddie, notwithstanding a recent favorable Barron’s article. The one issue I’ve looked at is PFK, from Prudential Financial rated investment grade, paying a monthly dividend based on a CPI-derived inflation rate metric plus 2.4 percentage points with a floor of zero. At today’s close of $25.35, PFK sports an annual yield of about 3.5%. It’s trading just a bit over par of $25, and will mature in 2018, a little over 7 years from now. Reference points are that I can find currently low-IG fixed-rate exchange-traded bonds at over 7% and riskier floating-rate preferred stock with fully-taxable equivalent yields of over 5.5% at the 35% bracket. One can only guess at how fast interest rates will rise and to what levels between now and 2018 when this note matures; and I must factor in the capital loss of $0.35 at maturity, which is about 1.4% of today’s price. This security has traded as high as $26.83 in the past 12 months, which, apart from a current low interest rate, means at that price a loss of $1.83 (6.8%) in 7-8 years. It seems to me that buyers of PFK at that price were betting on a lot of inflation and relatively soon. On the other hand, PFK has traded as low as $19.36 in the past year, which would mean a capital gain of $5.64 per unit if held until maturity; as a very rough estimate, assuming 8 years till maturity, that’s a straight average base of about 3.6% per year before the variable interest payment. But that deal is now gone, and PFK is not attractive enough to me, given my guess at the size and speed of rates to come, at the current price of a little over $25.

UBS-D is a floating-rate low-IG trust preferred from UBS that pays a monthly distribution, reset monthly, at the annualized rate of 0.70% point above the one-month Libor. The issue is past call with no maturity date. The current annualized rate is a measly 1.47% at today’s close of $16.98. However, QuantumOnline’s interpretation is that this security qualifies for the 15% QDI tax rate, so, if true, the 1.47% nominal annualized yield translates to an annualized fully taxable equivalent yield of about 1.92% at the 35% rate. A little bit better but not enough for me at this time. But since this security has buyers at this price, there clearly are people whose views of the inflation risk lead them to this security at this yield.

So, as to my original challenge – finding good investments in exchange-traded individual floating-rate debt securities. So far I’ve been disappointed – there are relatively few floating-rate IG securities to begin with, and those I’ve looked at have been bid up to prices consistent with what seems to me a fairly aggressive view of the timing and height of interest rates to come. Thus for now I’ve taken only smallish positions in two floating-rate preferred stocks, which offer much better current yields than the exchange-traded debt I've looked at albeit in a more risky type of security, while I brace for interest rates to come. Given the relative paucity of floating-rate exchange-traded debt and preferreds, it seems to me that investors interested in this category must look to individual securities rather than waiting for a fund to come along.

Mike Parenti

Related posts:
Investing Solo – Floating-Rate Debt - GFY

Investing Solo in Floating-Rate Preferred Stocks

2010-12-28T18:21:00.011-06:00

I have been invited to post at this blog my current thoughts and approach to investing as an individual investor with no background in finance or securities with the thought that my experiences might be of some interest. Writing things down can also benefit me if it helps clarify my own thinking. I devote 5-10% of my savings to moderately higher-risk investing to boost overall portfolio performance and as an intellectually interesting challenge that helps keep me off the streets. Most of my portfolio is in a fairly conservative mix of stock and bond mutual funds, ETFs, and some closed-end funds (CEFs) diversified across investment styles, management firms, and accounts. Of course, nothing I am about to say constitutes investment advice of any kind – merely my personal observations and decisions.

Lately one of the areas of particular interest to me involves securities that pay a variable, or floating, interest rate. Given the widespread expectation that not only are interest rates going to rise (they can’t get much lower) but possibly rise a lot given the current global governmental fiscal debacles, floating rate debt securities are attracting a lot of commentary and interest. In addition, given the recent sell off in debt securities, there may be some bargains for investors willing to be a bit contrarian, since “buying low” usually requires the nerve to buy at a time when most others are selling.

The two largest categories of such securities accessible to the small individual investor like me are bank loans and preferred stocks; there are only a few individual floating rate securities of other types of exchange-traded debt – exchange-traded bonds, trust preferreds, and trust certificates (third party trust preferreds). Bank loans are not exchange-traded but are available via mutual funds (such as Fidelity’s FFRHX) and closed end funds (such as TLI, JFR, and BHL), and I have investments in bank loans in both investment vehicles. Bank loans are non-investment grade debt and of course as such carry a higher interest rate, but are usually relatively short-term, senior and secured, and usually have a floating interest rate.

I have had for some time modest positions in CEFs such as JPS and HPF that primarily hold preferred stock, trust preferreds, and trust certificates, but these funds are not focused primarily on floating rate debt. The one CEF that is – JFP – melted down a while back because many of the issuers of the preferred stock it held (lots of banks) stopped paying their non-cumulative dividends.

Therefore, an investor with a particular interest in preferred stocks that pay a floating dividend rate that qualifies for the 15% federal tax rate (qualified dividends) must look to individual securities. Although I generally have a strong preference for funds and only have a few individual securities in my entire portfolio, I have been looking at individual preferred floaters since I don’t have funds (other than the wounded JFP) to consider that invest primarily in them.

At QuantumOnline (quantumonline.com), considered by many who comment online to be one of the, if not the, best source of information about exchange-traded debt securities, earlier this month I found a total of 24 floating rate preferred stock issues, about 5% of the total universe of preferred stocks listed there. Of these 24, 14 were rated investment grade (most at the lowest level) by both Moodys and S&P, and another 6 had one of the two ratings at IG.

Most issuers are banks (e.g.: HSBC; UBS; Bank of America) or financial companies (e.g.: Goldman Sachs; Morgan Stanley). All but one pay dividends quarterly and those dividends are non-cumulative with all but one.

It’s interesting, and very challenging, for me to try to assess the varying market valuations based on variables such as credit rating of the issuer, chance of dividend interruption, method of calculating the interest rate, the current rate, etc. The issues I’ve looked at all are paying dividends right now at the interest rate floor, and given the variable to which the rate is pegged, commonly the 3 month Libor which is currently well under 1%, interest rates would need to rise considerably before the floating rate would rise above the set minimum.

So far I’ve settled for modest investments in two IG issues, but I am keeping an eye on the group for entry points based on share prices and the yields at those prices. The first is MET-A (or METprA) from Met Life, whose variable rate is pegged to the 3 month Libor + 1% point with a 4% floor based on a $25 par. As such, the current dividend is $1.00, which, at today’s close of $23.18, delivers a dividend yield of about 4.3% that equates to about 3.67% after federal taxes at the 15% rate. The fully-taxable equivalent yield at the 35% rate is 5.6%. So the question for an investor like me is of course whether this security offers sufficient value. Met Life seems reasonably strong to me, and although part of the attraction is that it’s an insurance company and not a bank, given what happened at AIG there's no shortage of worry. Is the current yield enough for a period of time that could be a long one -- who knows how fast interest rates will rise to eventually push the coupon above the 4% floor; but when rates do start to rise, might they rise fast and cause the price of this preferred to shoot up past a reasonable entry point at that point in time? Does buying at a price below $25 par offer a great enough chance of capital gain in addition to the dividend?

The second issue is HBA-D (or HBAprD) from a subsidiary of HSBC, a very large global bank, whose variable rate is pegged to the highest of three different US Treasury debt metrics and has a floor of 4.5% and a ceiling of 10.5% based on a $25 par. Of particular interest to me is the fact that the dividends are cumulative, offering some protection in the event they are suspended; dividends from the other two HSBC floating rate preferreds are not cumulative.

At the floor of 4.5%, the current dividend is $1.125, which, at today’s close of $24.73 delivers a dividend yield of about 4.5% that equates to about 3.87% after federal taxes at the 15% rate. The fully-taxable equivalent yield at the 35% rate is 5.95%. In my thinking, a very nice rate, provided that HSBC, a bank, keeps paying the dividends, which, though, accumulate if suspended. I am taking some comfort in the fact that, according to a recent article (November 20) in Barron’s on the ongoing issues with banks and their mortgage-related debt, HSBC was ranked 11th of 11 big banks in the estimated dollar value of the loss if bad mortgage securities are forcibly “put back” to the banks.

I am drawn to looking at individual relatively high-yielding debt securities as investments, of course, because of the prolonged, unusually low interest rate environment that seems to me designed by the Federal Reserve to help banks repair their balance sheets at the expense of individual savers like me – a tremendous transfer of wealth to bankers and their investors in the name of stabilizing our financial system. At least as a way to mitigate my risk somewhat in this area of investing, I wish there was a viable mutual fund or closed-end fund from a major fund manager focused primarily on floating-rate preferred stock.

Mike Parenti

Related posts:
Investing Solo -- Floating Rate Debt
Investing Solo – Floating-Rate Debt - GFY

Notre Dame Church in Chicago

2010-12-24T12:51:00.007-06:00

Quite a few years ago many a Christmas Eve found me with my family at midnight Mass at Notre Dame Church on Chicago’s near west side. It was a special yearly visit to the Italian Taylor Street “old neighborhood” of big families and special memories. I especially recall peering up into the great dome overhead and marveling at the art work so high up, and even at my age then was able to appreciate how well the church was cared for.

In Chicago Churches and Synagogues: An Architectural Pilgrimage, Fr. George Lane writes that “the words ‘Notre Dame de Chicago’ above the door … recall the illustrious French history of Chicago…. Although Notre Dame parish was founded in 1864, it was actually a continuation of an earlier French church known as St. Louis which was organized in 1850.”

Fr. Lane tells us that the beautiful church is in the Romanesque Revival style, with the main body almost circular in plan surmounted by a 90-foot dome and cupola. The high vaulted ceiling is one of the most striking features in my memory. Fr. Lane also describes “thirty-three beautiful stained glass windows, all imported from Europe, [that] decorate and illuminate the church.” In 1918, after most of the French-speaking residents were gone, the Cardinal gave the parish and church to the Blessed Sacrament fathers to run.

The Notre Dame parish has suffered some set-backs in more recent years. First, the city razed good parts of the parish for the Eisenhower Expressway just to the north, for the West Side medical center just to the west, and for the University of Illinois campus just to the east. Some other Taylor Street churches, such as St. Calistus, survived these depredations, but a special one, Guardian Angel, did not. Then, Fr. Lane relates that in 1978 the statue of Our Lady atop the cupola was struck by lightning and caught fire, causing extensive damage to the church. But through all that, Notre Dame still stands this new Christmas, on Flournoy Street at Loomis, in the heart of the old neighborhood through which so many lives have passed and become enriched.

R Balsamo

Illinois 2010 Election Results – For Republicans, A Tale of Two Electorates

2010-12-06T00:30:00.007-06:00

For Illinois Republicans, last month’s election results were a mixed bag and showed an electorate very schizoid about the two major parties.

First the good news – Republicans won the Senate seat (Mark Kirk), picked up 4 House seats, and held the one Kirk vacated to run for Senate. In Congressional Districts 8, 11, and 14, all of which begin in the Chicago suburbs and extend well into the state, Republicans Walsh, Kinzinger, and Hultgen recaptured long-held seats that had been recently lost to Democrats from inattention, sloth, ideological drift, and incompetence. In addition, Republican Schilling bumped off bumbling Democrat incumbent Hare, a protégé of the late ultraliberal Congressman Evans, in the 17th district along the Mississippi River, and Republican Dold kept Kirk’s old north suburban congressional seat in party hands. Republicans will now hold 11 of the state’s 19 congressional seats. Seven of the 8 Democrat-held districts are in Chicagoland.

But state races were a different story. In the five races for state-wide offices (candidates for governor and lt. governor run together, so voters cast only one vote for a pair of candidates), Republicans won only two, for Treasurer and Comptroller, both open Democrat seats. Incumbent Democrats won the races for Governor, Attorney General, and Secretary of State. But it wasn’t all name recognition. Republican Bill Brady, in the governor’s race, had reasonable name recognition in Republican suburban DuPage County from previous races, yet received about 17,000 votes less than Republican Dan Rutherford, unknown in the Chicago area, running for state Treasurer. In DuPage County alone, Brady received about 25,000 votes less than Republican Judy Barr Topinka in her run for her old spot as controller; Brady lost to Democrat incumbent Pat Quinn by only about 19,000 votes in the whole state. Many Republican voters split their votes.

The Brady-Quinn race illustrates the electoral challenge for Republicans in Illinois. Using the unofficial results that are available the day after the election, with 99%+ precincts reporting, Republican Brady won 99 counties versus only 3 for Quinn, but still lost because his margins of victory in all those counties could not overcome his poor showing (about 29%) in just one of the 102 – heavily Democratic Cook County. Kirk also won 99 of 102 counties, but ran just a few percentage points better than Brady in Cook County and everywhere else, and that was enough to win his Senate race.

In the state legislature races, Republicans gained some seats in both the Senate and House, but failed to take either from the Democrats, who held large majorities going in to the election.

So Illinois voters, faced with a state functionally bankrupt and run in recent years completely by Democrats, re-elected Democrats to most of the same state offices and state legislature seats, while throwing out 4 incumbent Democrat US congressmen. Hard to figure.

John M Greco

Related Posts:
Observations on the 2010 Illinois Primary Results
Illinois Republicans: Slip, Slidin’ Away

Democrats and Tax Evasion, Like Sterling and Silver -- Tax Law Writer Rangel Joins Tax Collector Geithner and Former Senate Leader Daschle in the Tax Cheaters Hall of Fame

2010-12-03T17:10:00.005-06:00

What is it about Democrat politicians and income tax evasion? Just in the last two years, we have seen a slew of prominent Democrats discovered to have evaded federal income taxes big time and then get away scot-free, suffering only the inconvenience of back payments. No jail time, and, to my knowledge, no penalties.

Obama Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, whose position includes being the head of the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service, was found upon his nomination to have evaded substantial taxes years ago. This financial expert blamed it on software miscalculations and oversights, even though he had signed papers at work documenting his understanding that taxes would be due on the extra income in question. Only when nominated did he pay the back taxes with interest, but no penalty. The head of the IRS is a confirmed income tax cheat, and the Obama Democrats are OK with that. Very symbolic.

Prominent Democrat Tom Daschle, the former Senate leader and no doubt a lover of all tax hikes, had his nomination by Obama for a Cabinet post torpedoed by the discovery that he was a tax cheat. Most other Obama tax evading nominees suffered a similar fate, but one other cheater, Katherine Sibelius, now head of HHS, somehow survived. My theory: she was discovered to be a tax evader after so many other Obama nominees had already been outed, and by then there was so much Democrat-tax-cheater fatigue among Republicans and conservative media that she slipped by. It became hard to keep all of the tax evasion stories straight from one another.

Now yet another Democrat, long-time congressman Charlie Rangel, who has been head of the House tax-writing committee for years and also a hearty supporter of tax increases for those of us who actually pay their income taxes, is found to be a long-time tax evader (17 years by reports). But he only suffers a figurative hand slap via a House censure, which House Democrats supported only for political show to hide from the public their true feelings, which were evidenced by the standing ovation they gave Rangel immediately after the public wrist-slap.

No fines, no jail for Rangel, even though the week’s news featured another income tax evader, actor Wesley Snipes, ordered off to prison for the same offense.

For these Democrat politicians, paying taxes is for Republicans, spending taxes is for Democrats. It astonishes me that rank and file Democrat voters are not angry about all this, and that all these Democrats have gotten away with crimes that for everyone else means fines and jail.

John M Greco

The Duke False Rape Scandal, Coach Krzyzewski, & Failed Character

2010-11-26T20:13:00.005-06:00

College basketball has begun anew and once again the Duke Blue Devils are top ranked, a familiar place since Mike Krzyzewski became coach. But although Coach K, as he is fondly called, may have found success as a basketball coach, to me he will forever symbolize failure, failure of character, at his moment of truth.

In 2006, in a now infamous scandal that in the end brought disgrace to many and serves as a morality tale of the evils of reverse racism and liberal cultural hatred gone amok, three white Duke University lacrosse players were falsely accused of rape by a black woman whose story was fishy, inconsistent, and implausible from the very start, and which in short order only grew more so. From the beginning of this sordid affair, three innocent students were used for nefarious political purposes by a despicably corrupt white prosecutor, a Democrat who sought to curry favor with black voters for his upcoming election bid. In his great frame-up, this man was consciously aided and abetted, for a variety of personal and political reasons, by many in the police force, in the prosecutor’s office, in the judiciary, in the liberal media, in the Duke administration, in the Duke hospital, in the Duke student body, and in the ultra-liberal Duke faculty (many of whom fanned racial grievances in promoting their anti-white narrative). In the early months, few stepped up to caution temperance, open-mindedness, and due process; few raised the obvious concerns about the weakness of the accusation and the disgraceful behavior of the prosecutor and the police. A few heroes stood up from the start for truth and justice, among them historian KC Johnson, who brought national attention through his meticulously researched blog (link) that chronicled and analyzed the unfolding events of the case, and the men and women Duke lacrosse players and their coaches. Many cowards also stand out, such as the numerous Duke professors of law who acquiesced in the gross miscarriage of justice unfolding at their own school before their very eyes, cowered by the left wing lynch-mob fervor all around them. As we all know, eventually, but not before great suffering, the students were completely exonerated, and some of the persecutors have been punished in one way or another.

Occupying a prominent place in the hall of eternal shame is the most famous Dukie of all, Coach Mike Krzyzewski. The product of a working-class Chicago neighborhood and a Catholic high school, he’s gone on to great success and fame. But for some of us there come one or two moments in our lives when we are faced with a great test of character, when we must choose to stand up for what is right or avert our gaze and shirk away. One such moment came for Mike Krzyzewski. With his national following as Duke’s most famous coach, and in a case involving Duke athletes, he could have stood strong and demanded fairness and justice for the accused. Instead, he chose to remain silent, either from indifference or cowardice. Perhaps he feared that his recruitment of black players would suffer if he spoke out.

In the end, whatever its cause, Krzyzewski's silence in the face of an unfolding great moral wrong will forever define him and will forever tarnish whatever his teams accomplish on the basketball court, and brings to mind the maxim, sometimes attributed to Edmund Burke, that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

John M Greco

Illinois Now Worst Among States in Risk of Default on Debt. And Illinois Voters Like It That Way. We’re Number One!

2010-11-22T20:20:00.000-06:00

Illinois has long had the distinction of being the state with one of the, if not the, most precarious financial positions. The formula has been simple: overspend, tax, overspend, tax, overspend, borrow, overspend, borrow, overspend, borrow. At some point, and this may be the point, the state cannot borrow enough anymore.

One of the statistics that sticks in my head is this: In a recent 10 year period, Illinois’ population is roughly flat while “spending per person, after inflation, is up almost 47% (link).” Unsustainable, of course.

Where has all the money gone? Pensions to government workers, including teachers, in a system where the pension payment is set by a formula that disproportionately weights the last year’s salary, which, of course, is artificially bumped up to astronomical levels by the politicians and their union compatriots to jack up the lifetime retiree monthly pension payments. And who pays for all this? The shrinking Illinois taxpayers.

Says (link) the Chicago Tribune to the Land of Lincoln: “You've bizarrely promised your workers some $80 billion more in pension payouts than you can afford. What's more, you've promised them additional billions that you don't have for their health care after they retire.”

And then there’s Medicaid – here’s the essence: “Medicaid spending eats up 30 percent of Illinois’s budgetary pie…. Between 2003 and 2008, [Illinois’] Medicaid enrollment grew at an average rate of 7.8 percent a year while Illinois's population only grew 0.5 percent (link). Sheesh.

Writes Amy Merrick in the Wall Street Journal (link): “Illinois's deficit through mid-2011 is estimated at $11 billion to $13 billion—close to 50% of the expected $26.7 billion in available revenue for the coming fiscal year…. That is among the worst such percentages among states…. The state pension system also is the worst-funded in the U.S. … State auditors estimate that the pension systems are underfunded by $62 billion…. Required pension contributions, including interest payments, have nearly quadrupled in the past 10 years.”

Now, in today’s Wall Street Journal, Steven Malanga writes (link) that in June 2010, based on cost of default “insurance” for holders of debt, “Illinois surpassed California as the worst credit risk among U.S. states, [and] was at greater risk of default than Iraq.” Great.

And how did Illinois voters respond this month to this historic crisis? They opted for the ostrich maneuver, re-electing the sitting Illinois Democrat governor whose plan is to cut spending a bit and raise taxes a lot, and re-elected a majority of Democrats to the Illinois House and Senate, the former presided over, seemingly forever, by a Democrat Speaker named Madigan whom many regard as the most powerful politician in Illinois and who probably more than anyone else has overseen this debt debacle.

What happened to hope and change?

John M Greco

Related Posts:

Illinois Wins a Silver Medal in Fiscal Irresponsibility, Narrowly Missing a Gold, But Beats Out New Yorkers

Illinois’ Unnecessary Budget Crisis & Irresponsible Solutions

Illinois' New Governor Proposes a 50% Tax Hike To Close Budget Gap Caused By Years of Reckless Overspending

Of Ponzi Schemes, Social Security, & State Budgets – What’s The Dif? And, Illinois in Trouble

Armistice Day, the Brits, & Lessons for Us All

2010-11-14T22:55:00.006-06:00

A few weeks back at Power Line Blog I came upon a post about a new video compilation (link) of some rarely seen WWII British home front footage, accompanied by the audio of a live performance at the British Festival of Remembrance in November 2009. The background music on the video is, what I have now come to know, a WWII-era song “There’s a Land of Begin Again”, sung (link) with great depth and pacing by a young man named Jamie Cullum, whom I had not heard of previously but whom I now read is fairly well known in some music circles. The song was recorded at the time, perhaps originally, by Vera Lynn, who is better known for another wistful war-era song “We’ll Meet Again.”

Listening to Vera Lynn sing I can just imagine the lyrics running through peoples’ heads as they huddled in air raid shelters listening to the destruction of their world above:

There’s a land of begin again, on the other side of the hill
Where we’ll learn to love and live again, where the world is quiet and still,
There’s a land of begin again, and there’s not a cloud in the sky,
Where we’ll never have to grieve again, and we’ll never say good-bye.

When all your troubles just surround you, and around you, skies are gray,
If you can only keep your eyes on, the horizon, not so far away.

It’s remarkable in some ways that the British were able to rustle up the will to fight through the Second World War, having not yet recovered from the horror, devastation, and loss of life from the First, their despair captured well by Eliot in the opening lines of his otherwise inordinately cryptic poem:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm,
Covering Earth in forgetful snow.

Armistice Day once again brings to mind many things, not the least of which such notions as the importance of early deterrence, how weakness is provocative to predators, and the illusoriness of appeasement. Despite paying a dreadful price when such lessons were forgotten, within memory history now repeats itself as tragedy.

The British mustered enough energy and purpose to lift themselves from despair and ennui, but only long enough to prevail. In the end, their reserves exhausted, most soon collapsed, perhaps terminally, into deep pacifism, apathy, and decadence, unwilling to defend their own culture against the growing depredations of socialism and Islamism in unholy alliance. Surely there are many stout Brits who will once again throw off their stupor and stand strong, but will there be enough of them this time around? And is America to suffer the same fate?

John M Greco

The Wall Street Journal Runs a Front Page Liberal Electioneering Puff Piece on the Blue Dogs; Liberal Bias?

2010-10-28T11:13:00.002-05:00

The Wall Street Journal is commonly, and mistakenly in my view, thought of as a newspaper with a “conservative” point of view, stemming, I think, first from a failure to separate and distinguish a paper’s editorial point of view from that of the “straight news” writers, and second, from unfamiliarity with the product.

The WSJ editorials are indeed conservative in point of view, but I have long been of the opinion that many if not most of the WSJ writers covering the political and economic beats are for the most part liberals. Many perhaps only mildly so, but it’s hard to tell how left they really are for their liberal slant oozes out in bits and dollops, here and there, usually restrained, in otherwise “straight” news stories. It’s in the subtleties, the different shadings sketched for liberals versus conservatives, and one has to be a regular reader to pick up on this stuff.

But here’s one sans subtlety, from the WSJ of October 26 (link). WSJ writer and columnist Gerald F. Seib has a paean to so-called “moderate,” so called “Blue Dog” Democrats and a lamentation of the bleak reelection prospects many of them are facing. This electioneering puff piece is given front page placement by WSJ editors.

The “Blue Dog” Democrats are, as is well known, Congressmen who talk like conservatives back home but vote like liberals in Washington. When their votes are not needed for passage of a liberal bill they get a pass for a “no” vote they can wave around back home to fool enough foolable voters. But their support for the ultraliberal radicalism of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi has unmasked them and destroyed the myth before suddenly attentive voters, and, as Obama’s mentor and spiritual advisor Rev. Wright famously once said, the chickens are coming home to roost.

But to Seib, on the front page of the WSJ no less, the loss of any of these so-called “moderate” Democrats is a “stark indicator” of how this election could result in a “more polarized” Congress. Apparently to him, the more Congressmen there are who oppose the ultraliberal agenda, the more polarized the Congress is. The Blue Dogs are a “human bridge” connecting Democrats and Republicans, and their loss would be a tragedy. On the Senate side, the late Ted Kennedy is held out by Seib for his ability to “cross the aisle” to “work with” Republicans, but to get them to do what I ask—of course to support the liberal agenda, and John McCain, at least until lately, is held up admiringly as one of those so snookered.

Much of the blame for the dire straits of the Blue Dogs, says Seib, goes to the “tea party movement,” which has produced a “crop” of candidates who, according to an unnamed “senior GOP House aide,” “aren’t interested in coming here to compromise.” How convenient for Seib, finding a “senior” Republican aide, rather than a Democrat one, to slam the tea party movement as loaded with rigid, uncompromising ideologues (how believable is this old bit -- using an anonymous “quote” by a Republican senior insider to slam Republicans?). Don’t you see, says Seib, even responsible Republicans think those damn tea partiers are extremists for not wanting to compromise with Democrats to support the ultraliberal agenda.

Liberals and most conservatives think the WSJ is as reliably conservative as the New York Times is reliably liberal. Would that only be so.

John M Greco

In the Bronx, Gangs Shouldn’t Be Assaulting Gays

2010-10-10T12:11:00.007-05:00

It’s one thing for a gang to abduct and torture a victim because he’s white or rich or even a snitch, but when it’s because he’s gay, now that crosses the line.

From “CBS 2/ 1010WINS/ AP”: ‘Horrifying’ Anti-Gay Attacks Stun The Bronx (link):

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the city’s highest-ranking openly gay official, called the attacks “vile” and “horrifying.” “These attacks are appalling and are even more despicable because the victims were clearly targeted in acts of hate simply because they are gay,” Quinn said.

Missing from the article: one area resident, scurrying to meet up with his parole officer, said “We have murders and rapes every day in the Bronx, but to think that a man could get beat up around here simply because he’s gay is just horrifying.” Another, somewhat distracted by a chafing electronic ankle bracelet, muttered “I’m just stunned. How embarrassing for us.”

The new quip: "The Bronx destroyed – women, minorities, and gays hardest hit."

John M Greco

Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica

2010-09-15T21:44:00.006-05:00

Some days it doesn’t take much – a comment, a picture -- to ignite old memories. Yesterday I read mention that today is the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.

Some of the clearest memories I have as a small boy are the walks from our home in Chicago straight down Jackson Boulevard to a large church I later came to know is the basilica of Our Lady of Sorrows. We didn’t go there on Sundays, for our church, Resurrection, was in the next parish over, but I knew it held special meaning for my mother. It was large, quiet, dim, and mostly empty when we would visit on days warm enough for a walk. My mother would light a candle, spend a few moments in reflection, and we would be off.

I now read that Our Lady of Sorrows is the patron saint of Slovakia, the Molise region of Italy, and the Congregation of Holy Cross order of Catholic priests, who, among other things, run the University of Notre Dame. Who knew?

In Chicago Churches and Synagogues: An Architectural Pilgrimage, Fr. George Lane writes that the church was raised to the status of basilica (one of only two in Chicago) by the Pope because the Sorrowful Mother Novena rite originated there in 1937 and subsequently spread all over the world. The building was built by the Servite friars "in pure Renaissance form" and completed in 1901 of Chicago common brick with a limestone façade. Between two 200 foot towers, a great barrel-vaulted ceiling reaches 80 feet above the marble floor, and the beautiful main altar is made of white Carrara marble. The basilica features numerous original works of art and “perhaps the oldest working pipe organ Lyon & Healy ever installed.”

Richard Balsamo

Kent Chemical Laboratory at the University of Chicago

2010-09-12T17:23:00.007-05:00

Bleary eyed, I would pack my books and papers for the day and leave Burton-Judson Courts to brave the wind gusting down the Midway Plaisance, then hustle through the Classics archway, past Bond Chapel, and across the main quad to Kent, pass through its heavy doors and on to its great octagonal lecture hall, for my first class of the day, early morning chemistry. And from an upper floor lab, as an overawed fresh undergraduate, I could wander down the hall and cross into its neighbor Jones Laboratory, and peer into the very small memorialized room where a weighable amount of plutonium was first isolated, a few months before man’s first controlled nuclear reaction was engineered in a squash court a block away.

Apparently I hadn’t had enough, for I returned the following year for an early morning class in organic chemistry, but, relievedly, from a room not so far away.

Kent Chemical Laboratory was designed by the University of Chicago’s first architect, Henry Ives Cobb, in his Chicago Gothic style and built of Indiana limestone in 1894. It anchors the north side of the main quad, alongside its close cousin Ryerson Physical Laboratory. Chicago Gothic doesn't get any better than these two.

Richard Balsamo

Related Post:
Ryerson Physical Laboratory – “The Most Beautiful University Building in the World”

The Jerry Lewises & Their Telethon

2010-09-07T12:47:00.006-05:00

Like a rock of certainty in torrrents of change, Jerry Lewis came out again this year to host his eponymous Telethon to raise money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association in its work to help and cure those with neuromuscular diseases. His 60th year, I think he said, appearing in telethons for MDA. Now old and frail, Lewis did his segments his usual way, filled with the usual, effective, it seems, bathos, 1950s-era quips, and self-adulatory riffs.

I have had many friends with MD and many friends dedicated to helping them. Many feel quite schizoid about Lewis, and one old friend even created a comedy sketch around it that might make the comedian in Lewis proud. It features Good Jerry, the man who works tirelessly to raise awareness and money, and Bad Jerry, the megalomaniac who uses the words “I” and “me” a million times in the 24-hour telethon and refers to everyone even remotely associated with the charity as “his”, as in “my kids” and “my doctors” and “my firemen”, all of whom are there to “help” Jerry win his fight against neuromuscular disease. It’s Bad Jerry’s mission, and we’re all just helpers, accessories to the great man’s work -- a touch of a creepy self-cult of personality on display. So for many, the love-hate relationship endures.

But what a sight it’s been. Good Jerry’s out there all year fundraising for a most worthwhile cause, and brings it all together once a year in a TV extravaganza. The show itself for years has featured mostly minor celebrities and not-yet-celebrities and never-will-be celebrities (now who’s that performer?) in a production that’s a parody of its former self but yet remains somewhat inexplicably compelling viewing for those with heart and an appreciation for live TV as it once was. Bad Jerry thinks the big story’s all about him.

So once again Good Jerry and Bad Jerry have teamed up for another show, in all their florid glory. I wonder if anyone under 50 years old who pauses the tuner on the channel for ten minutes has much of an idea who Lewis is, or can fathom the stale, stiff, and often anachronistic jokes: in his opening monologue, unhappy with the cameraman’s framing of him, Jerry quipped “I got this guy from the Third Reich” -- the 1950s/60s Nazi theme that Jewish comedians like himself or Rickles might quip to anyone who seems to be doing them some disservice; it’s old , stale, and perhaps unintelligible to anyone unfamiliar with borscht belt-type comedy, but I, for one, love that style, at least now for nostalgic reasons even if most of the humor has long dried up, and I must admit a "Hey Lady!" now and then would still crack me up.

Though decades have passed, Good Jerry and Bad Jerry once again capture our attention, each in his own way, to goad us to help them help their kids, always plugging the “toll free numbers listed on the screen”. Now where’s that phone?

John M Greco

The Blagojevich Verdict & On Prosecutor Fitzgerald’s Competence & Character

2010-08-18T00:04:00.006-05:00

The jury in the federal corruption trial in Chicago of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, Democrat, just returned only one verdict on 24 felony counts – guilty of lying to the FBI (link). A hung jury on all other counts, and another failure from prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. After hearing all Fitzgerald’s team had to offer, a seemingly strong case based on what the public has heard and on commentary from legal pundits, the jury couldn’t agree that any underlying crime had been committed. All Fitzgerald was able to secure was a conviction on one count of lying to the FBI during its investigation.

Perhaps we can add incompetent to what we already know about Fitzgerald – that he’s immoral and a disgrace to law enforcement and the legal profession. To begin with, he's already been in hot water for egregious and unethical public comments about this case pre-trial (see link below).

But more importantly, there's his behavior in the now notorious Plame case. Not long ago, he was appointed special prosecutor by the bumbling George W. Bush to investigate the alleged outing by someone in his Administration of the alleged covert CIA employee Valerie Plame, who, along with her now-disgraced husband, was very liberal and very anti-Bush. Very soon in his work, Fitzgerald ascertained that the leak was not illegal and that it was by Bush Administration officials Colin Powell and his lackey Richard Armitage, made presumably out of pique against Bush, with whom they had fallen out. Knowing there was no crime as well as the identities of the real leakers, Fitzgerald nevertheless kept that silent from the world and proceeded to pursue, ostensibly about the leak, Bush Administration officials Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, whom he knew were innocent of wrongdoing. Why? Well, Rove and Vice President Cheney, Libby’s boss, were targets of ultraliberal Bush haters and Fitzgerald was ready to oblige with some politically-inspired mischief. In a perjury trap set-up, he was able to gin up enough discrepancy between recollections under oath to secure an indictment only against Scooter Libby and to bamboozle a jury into finding him guilty of perjury, under extremely questionable facts, but could not convince the jury of any underlying crime. Only later have we learned of Fitzgerald’s dishonesty and of Powell’s and Armitage’s perfidy. Investor’s Business Daily called Fitzgerald’s behavior “From top to bottom, … one of the most disgraceful abuses of prosecutorial power in this country’s history.” That's Fitzgerald's legacy.

Related Posts at Critical Thoughts:
As Prosecutor Fitzgerald Pursues Blagojevich, Who Watches Fitzgerald?

Blagojevich Files Motion To Remove Fitzgerald, Citing Inappropriate Comments; Fitz Is a "Repeat Offender"

John M Greco

Jack Wallace, Actor

2010-08-17T22:45:00.008-05:00

This evening I saw a commercial on TV, for Direct TV I think, which had as a background prop an elderly silent man in a wheelchair that I believe is the actor Jack Wallace, who started out in Chicago. Very glad to see him still acting. I first and last saw him live in Chicago around 1971 at the old 11th Street Theater, just off Michigan Avenue, playing the role of McMurphy in Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I’m pretty sure W.H. Macy was also in that cast. I went with and at the instigation of my friend John Killacky, who later moved off to New York City and places beyond in the arts and arts management.

Wallace was terrific. I thought I would see much more of him, but that was not to be. I remember he had a small role, along with some other Chicago actors, in the Steven Segal Film Above the Law, which was set in and shot in Chicago. The Internet Movie Database shows that Wallace has been in many TV shows and movies (link), and I’m glad for him for that; it has just one photo of him, though -- as part of a cast group picture from the movie Boogie Nights. A great performance in Cuckoo’s Nest I still remember, these many years later.

(The nearby image I pulled off a Google search.)
Richard Balsamo

Using the Constitution: Empathy & Wise Latinas or Impartiality?

2010-07-02T17:22:00.004-05:00

This past week’s confirmation hearings for Obama Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan has once again brought contrasting Constitutional philosophies to the fore. In a nutshell, conservatives think Supreme Court Justices should be impartial umpires, while liberals think they should be empathetic super--legislators.

Conservatives ask: What are the conflicting rules (laws, interpretations, policies) at issue in the case, and how best to achieve the result most consistent with them? Liberals ask: What is the “right” thing to do, what is the best result, in light of various goals of righting past societal wrongs, protecting the “oppressed”, and moving society to a “fairer” place consistent with the liberal focus on gender, racial, class, and sexual identity?; this is Obama’s articulated “empathy” standard for SC justices.

New Obama-appointee SC Justice Sotomayor evidenced this view with her now-infamous comment: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life." Question for Sotomayor: does the Constitution have different meanings and so different outcomes for a latina woman compared to a white male? Is an apartment lease contract unenforceable by a white landlord because the defaulting tenant is a latina and, per the liberal view, a member of an oppressed class?

We have a written Constitution whose clauses have finite meaning and are not aspirational principles or general guidelines. There is no point to having a written Constitution if the words don’t mean what they say or if they can mean what they in fact don’t say. But liberals need an expansive judicial power unmoored to the Constitution’s written words (a “living” Constitution) because they been unable to achieve their societal aims entirely through legislative and executive means.

Roe v. Wade is a perfect example, wherein a majority of Justices created a federal Constitutional right to an abortion that cannot be honestly found in the clauses of the written Constitution, hence the talk of “penumbras” and such; one can certainly be “pro-choice” and nevertheless find the majority holding in the case corrosive to a Constitutional republic based on written laws. After saying such one day, I’ll never forget the emotional response I got from a very bright attorney: “So you want to go back to the days of dangerous back-alley abortions!?” For some, the written Constitution is just a procedural hurdle – one must do what is “right”, and so the end sometimes justifies the means. Have I no empathy for women, don’t I want the “right” outcome in the case? But the history of liberty is in large part the history of fair and honest legal process. An anti-impartiality “empathy” standard for deciding the competing issues in a case destroys that foundation.

Here’s a current example: liberals are relying on the Commerce Clause as the basis of federal power to require every American to purchase private health insurance from a private company. No honest person actually thinks such a federal power can be found anywhere in the Constitution, including the much-abused Commerce Clause. But Obamacare supporters think the individual insurance mandate is a necessary component of their national health care plan and therefore is the “right” thing to do. The approach: figure out what’s “right” and then find some Constitutional language, perhaps a “penumbra” or “emanation”, that will seemingly justify it to a mostly inattentive and trusting public.

Ramesh Ponnuru discussed this Constitutional interpretation in a post (link) yesterday at National Review Online titled “Umpires vs. Liberals”, and concluded with a very interesting point. He asks: “If the Constitution merely lays out several “values” to which we aspire, and does not supply the materials for determining how to resolve conflicts among these values in cases where such conflicts arise … then why should unelected lawyers instead of legislators decide how to resolve these conflicts?” The answer for liberals must be: voters, the “People,” are too unenlightened (false consciousness and all that, expressed by one exasperated liberal a few years ago as “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”) to reliably elect correct thinking legislators, and so an enlightened ruling elite, unelected by design yet ostensibly empathetic to their interests, must make the important decisions for them. A very different view of governance than that of the American system we’ve inherited.

John M Greco

The Pernicious Precedent of Obama’s Shakedown of the former British Petroleum

2010-06-19T15:00:00.004-05:00

BP must and undoubtedly will be held liable for the accidental oil spill in the Gulf. But the process should be confined to the long-established route through the judicial branch, not a new one through the executive. Obama has pressured BP into giving him $20 billion for an oil spill compensation fund. His hand-picked administrator will presumably dole out money as his boss Obama sees fit; based on Obama’s history (e.g., the Chrysler Confiscation), Democrat constituencies will primarily benefit. That seems to be the whole point. Obama has control over whether and to what extent the federal government will bring criminal charges against BP officials, a strong motive for BP to cave in to this extraordinary extra-legal demand.

Can there possibly be precedent for this, for a private company, under political pressure from a President, to give that President a humongous discretionary fund for him to dispense? No courts of law, no public processes. How possibly can this be good for the American system of law and Constitutionalism?

A Wall Street Journal Editorial (link) stated “BP's agreement sets a terrible precedent for the economy and the rule of law, particularly for future industrial accidents or other corporate controversies that capture national outrage. The default position from now on in such cases will be for politicians to demand a similar ‘trust fund’ that politicians or their designees will control…. BP deserves to pay full restitution for the damage it has caused, but it ought to do so via legal means, not under what Texas Republican Joe Barton rightly called the pressure of ‘a shakedown’….”

Why are those liberal voices so concerned during the Bush years with executive power and rule of law so silent now about this? Could it be they are concerned with such niceties only when their side isn’t in charge, now choosing power over principle?

John M Greco

Obama’s New Proposal: Much More Spending on Government Unionized Workers

2010-06-17T08:18:00.001-05:00

In spite of record-breaking peacetime American debt , massive borrowing from foreigners, economy-crushing tax and health-care policies, and near bankruptcy of hundreds of American states and cities, Obama has just proposed (link) borrowing yet more money to subsidize unionized state and local government workers -- workers who already have received a giant federal handout known as the “stimulus” spending plan (most of that federal spending went to state and local governments to support their unionized workers). Government unionized workers already earn far more in salary and benefits than private sector counterparts, but Obama wants more.

Obama doesn’t want a single unionized state and local worker given a furlough or a wage freeze just because their public employers are broke and deeply in debt, caused more than anything else by profligate spending on wages, benefits, and pensions for these employees. But unions such as SEIU make up the most powerful and dependable part of the Democrat Party and seem to provide most of the goon squad thugs who have been intimidating peaceful tea party protesters, so Obama needs them more than anyone else. In short, Obama wants to borrow money from foreigners, for which private sector workers will effectively be on the hook, to subsidize his most reliable Democrat Party members who are already substantially overpaid.

Nicole Gelinas, writer and analyst at the quarterly City Journal and the author of a recently-published terrific analysis of the causes of the recent financial crisis titled “After the Fall”, took apart this proposal of Obama’s in a commentary (link) titled “A Stimulus To Ruin”.

One more piece of evidence, as if any more were needed, that Obama’s true goal is to turn America into a European-style socialist welfare state where government has all the power and most of the jobs. His role model could be FDR, who became ever more popular while in office despite wreaking the economy via bonehead policy mistakes because he emoted well and talked up concern for the little guy; FDR let no crisis go to waste. But this time around Americans are more educated and more attuned to policy matters, and Obama isn’t getting the same widespread misplaced trust and adulation that FDR received. Even some Democrats may be waking up from the Obama spell -- Hot Air reports (link) that some Congressional Democrats may resist Obama on this one; they’ve had enough over-borrowing and over-spending. One can only hope.

John M Greco

Chicago Blackhawks

2010-06-10T00:07:00.005-05:00

National Hockey League champions, ending a 49 year wait.

The Obama Chrysler Confiscation – One Year Later

2010-06-09T21:52:00.009-05:00

June 10 is the one year anniversary of the Obama Administration’s illegal confiscation of the assets of the old Chrysler Corporation to benefit its union allies and supporters, writes Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels in a recent Wall Street Journal essay (link). It seems to me that this act has received far too little attention, although understandably somewhat lost in the crowd of countless other Obama team insults to the American system which compete for our attention.

The facts are simple. Chrysler’s secured creditors had first dibs on the assets of the company and had their own sense of what those assets would be worth in bankruptcy. Obama and his team did not want the company to enter traditional bankruptcy because it would have eradicated the cushy, dysfunctional, company-crushing agreements on union wages and workplace rules. So in a faux-bankruptcy Obama seized the company and gave most of it to the legally undeserving union and a part of what was left to a foreign company to absorb Chrysler and its union agreements. The secured creditors got the scraps. Illegal, sure. But so was the forced confinement of Japanese American citizens during WWII, but it happened and most looked the other way, because at the time it seemed expedient and the Roosevelt Administration seemed too powerful to resist. In retrospect, however, we see it for what it was – a dismal deviancy from American law. This time around, the motive for the Chrysler confiscation was far less justifiable and the circumstances far less extenuating -- profit and protection for the auto unions. The critical factor in how this theft came to pass – Nicole Gelinas, in her terrific new book “After the Fall,” explains that most of the big, secured creditor banks had earlier taken government bailout money and were strong-armed by the Obama team to accept the raw deal of the confiscation, leaving the smaller creditors politically and legally on their own. Investor’s Business Daily said (link) that this confiscation showed that “political clout matters more than rightful claims.”

Three Indiana pension funds, Chrysler secured creditors, sued in federal court to uphold their rights and interests under American law. They were rebuffed, but not on substantive grounds, writes Governor Daniels:

Bankruptcy came [for Chrysler], all right, but in a new, extra-legal form run by the federal government. The United Auto Workers, who owned no interest in the company, were simply handed a 55% interest, a gift valued then at $4.5 billion. When no one else wanted to buy the firm, Fiat was given a 20% stake for free to take it over. After this looting, the legitimate creditors were told to be happy with the remnants. For Indiana's retired teachers and state policemen, this amounted to 29 cents on the dollar, a loss of $6 million versus the purchase price and millions more below the expected value in a standard Chapter 11 [bankruptcy] proceeding. When, alone among the victims, Indiana retirees went to court, they caused a lot of discomfort but no change in the outcome. The Second District U.S. Court of Appeals declined to overturn the cramdown, but the judges refused to go within a mile of the merits. How could they? The law calls certain instruments "secured" credit for a reason, and there was absolutely zero precedent for the Chrysler confiscation. [However,] On Dec. 14, 2009, in the under-reported news story of the year, the Supreme Court granted the request of Indiana pensioners and took the case. The Court immediately ruled from the bench to strike down the decision of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, eliminating it as a possible precedent in any future proceeding.

So fortunately, this lawless act of the Obama Administration, acquiesced to by the legal establishment and the liberal media in the name of expediency and for the benefit of a major Democrat party constituency, is at least negated as precedent by the US Supreme Court. But the great theft by Obama and his minions and the receipt of stolen property by the auto unions remains on the history books and imprints an indelible stain on their already deeply tarnished legacies.

John M Greco

Related Post:
Obama, the Car Companies, and the Rule of Law

Paul McCartney, Beatle and Uneducated Ass

2010-06-03T12:21:00.005-05:00

British pop musician Paul McCartney, on a visit with Barak Obama at the White House, publicly said (link): "After the last eight years, it's great to have a president who knows what a library is."

First, McCartney felt compelled to make his small contribution to the ongoing debasement of the United States Office of the Presidency under Obama, where such slurs are made publicly in Obama’s presence in such a place of honor. The continual smearing of Bush by Obama directly or by preening surrogates with his acquiescence is way past being tasteless, counterproductive, and old -- it’s pathetic.

But as for McCartney himself, he’s clearly too stupid to know that, if you’re going to slur George W. Bush as an idiot, you should have academic credentials credibly superior to his. Bush is a graduate of Yale (with better grades than John Kerry) and of Harvard. My vague recollection is that McCartney is a high school dropout, so I did some research. McCartney’s Wikipedia entry (link) talks about his entering a secondary school, spinned as a prestigious one, but does not mention a graduation, usually a strong sign that it did not happen; and there’s no mention of college whatsoever -- by that age we know he was already involved in a music group. An entry at a Yahoo answer site (link) also goes on and on about the various secondary school exams he passed but slips in that he “left school.” Another site states that “he studied” at the school but omits mention of a graduation.

And it is patently clear that, although McCartney has composed perhaps a few catchy jingles since the breakup of the Beatles, the intellectual heft of that group, what there was, came almost entirely from John Lennon.

McCartney is poorly educated, almost certainly a high school dropout, and an ass, and a crass one at that. And Obama, well I won’t get started.

John M Greco

"Spirit of American Youth"

2010-05-30T12:11:00.003-05:00

"Spirit Of American Youth"

By Donald De Lue

At the First Infantry Division Museum at Cantigny Park
Wheaton, Illinois, Outside Chicago

Replica of the Original That Stands In the Normandy Beachhead in France,
Honoring Young Americans Who Gave Their Lives For Their Country

Obama-run General Motors Guilty of “Elasticizing the Reality of Things" about Repaying Its TARP Loan

2010-05-11T11:14:00.007-05:00

A few weeks ago, the Obama-appointed CEO of General Motors, a man named Whitacre, in a Wall Street Journal piece and in a TV commercial proudly announced that now-federal-government-owned GM, under his leadership, had repaid in full its “TARP” “loan” from the federal government. The message: all you sticklers for the rule of law and proper procedure who have been boycotting GM vehicles because of the way Obama illegally stiffed bondholders and illegally rewarded Democrat auto unions in the government takeover can now relax and buy GM once again; don’t you see, Obama said it would all come out fine and now it has, and sooner than expected too.

Obama's own Treasury Dept. itself released a statement (link) claiming that GM had "fully repaid" its TARP loan (a contention the Department later rescinded, as the linked article discusses).

However, the shameless deceitfulness of this claim was immediately recognized and widely denounced (link), since GM had “repaid” the federal TARP loan with money from another federal government loan, and not at all from profits (assuming there are any in actual fact, as opposed to Obamaccounting fact). Aside: How dumb do the Obami think everyone is?

This lie apparently has been too much even for some other Obama appointees. Yesterday, the Detroit News reported (link) that former Obama “auto czar” Steve Rattner admitted that Whitacre and GM "may have slightly elasticized the reality of things."

In Obamaspeak, a lie is now simply “slightly elasticizing the reality of things," which brings to mind Churchill's quip about "terminological inexactitude."

John M Greco

Obama Administration Assures Radical Muslims of Constitutional Protections

2010-05-04T20:54:00.003-05:00

Amid growing criticisms from radical Muslim groups about lengthening government delays in processing applications for U. S. citizenship, which would garner for them full constitutional rights and government-paid lawyers should they be arrested for acts of terrorism on American soil, today Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder sought to allay fears in a joint statement (link), published on the federal government’s web site and also broadcast in Arabic on targeted radio stations in the Near and Middle East. In that statement, they apologized for the backlog in application processing but assured Muslim groups that suspected terrorists will be afforded full American constitutional rights and government-paid lawyers if apprehended, whether or not they are American citizens and whether or not they are in this county legally.

[This is a parody, but not by much]

John M Greco

Bill Clinton & Elian Gonzalez

2010-04-22T22:59:00.004-05:00

Former president Clinton has been lecturing America about the importance of civility in public political discourse and warning against incipient conservative and Republican-inspired violence. Imagine that, as if anyone thinks of conservatives when one thinks of activists rampaging through streets and creating mayhem, or of agitators disrupting conservative speeches, or of thugs committing assault and battery at political rallies of political opponents. I think of the actual groups that do such things, like Code Pink, SEIU purple-shirted union thugs, and agitated “youth” marching through streets, not peaceful, polite tea partiers. But Clinton must deflect from the real truth, and project the behavior of liberal extremists onto mainstream conservatives to try to fool the foolable. That’s apparently what Clinton thinks his role in American society should be as an ex-president of this great Republic.

And on the subject of Bill Clinton and violence, today is the 10th anniversary of his Administration’s violent and shocking home invasion by armed federal agents to seize an 11 year old boy from loving relatives in order to return him to a brutal, communist country his mother died trying to free him from. That’s a window to Bill Clinton’s soul.

John M Greco

Democrats’ Immoral and Destructive Game of Falsely Accusing Opponents of Violence, Racism, and Sedition

2010-04-20T21:10:00.003-05:00

The tenor of American political discourse is getting ominous and deeply worrisome. Many Democrats seem to be a conscious part of a two-pronged strategy against Republicans and conservatives: first, real violence against their opponents, and second, public condemnations of those opponents based on knowingly-fabricated stories of violence and racism. All this Democrat ugliness is distressing to those who love this country, and sadly reveals the lengths, however corrosive to our Republic, that some Democrats are going to advance their partisan causes.

Actual and threatened politically-based violence has been largely a Democrat phenomenon for as far back as the eye can see. Michelle Malkin even wrote an entire book about Bush-era liberal violence titled “Unhinged.” But lately some Democrats have ratcheted it up a notch higher than I thought they would ever go.

This most recent cycle of destructive Democrat behavior I think has its genesis in the shockingly dramatic reversal in popularity and power of Obama in particular and Democrats in general as a result of what everyone has seen this past year of their true political beliefs, their arrogance, their disdain, and their hubris. The Democrats are stunned, panicked, angry, and desperate, and are lashing out.

Especially as a result of the long, revealing debate and eventual passage of the Democrat Party’s health care bill, Democrats have taken a severe hit in the polls. Their strategy after the bill’s passage has been to go on the offensive with false charges of racism and violence against those who oppose them. Whereas for Democrats rancorous political dissent, even fantasies of assassinating George W. Bush, were mainstream and asserted by them to be the highest form of patriotism during the Bush years, now, say those same Democrats, dissent of any kind against Democrat policies is dangerous, racist, and seditious. A Senate filibuster by the Democrat party minority was the last protection of virtue and democratic ideals when Bush was president, but now is an anti-democratic and racist tool when used by Republicans against the policies of Democrat party majority.

The intellectual vanguard of the Democrat party is not interested in consistency – only in results – in their efforts to discredit conservatives and Republicans among the many inattentive and easily foolable voters. Elected black Democrat leaders, within memory of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, now for political gain on issues of the day falsely charge their political opponents with racism with increasing fervor and frequency. Elected Democrat leaders, immediately after the passage of DemCare, announce they are the objects of unsubstantiated threats of violence, while Republicans like Eric Cantor and Sarah Palin reluctantly, because it is not in their characters to play the victim, come forward with countless tales of threats real and long-repeated. No one can honestly recall ever seeing or hearing about conservatives beating up opponents, but recently in New Orleans leftists targeted and severely assaulted (link) Republicans attending a party conference, and the Democrat media is silent. T-shirted SEIU union thugs beat conservative activists at a peaceful St Louis rally, and the liberal media avert their eyes. A finger of an elderly, peaceful tea party activist is bitten off at a political rally last year by an angry leftist. Then there’s harassment: an ultra-liberal student and son of a Democrat party official is about to go on trial for hacking into the email account of then vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin in an attempt to disrupt. And on and on it goes. Can such Democrats and leftists really love this country, to spread these lies and commit or condone such violence? To pour acid on the American ethic of civil discourse between people of different political beliefs for short-term political gain is despicable.

And now the other day former liberal Democrat President Clinton warns against non-existent Republican and conservative extremism on the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, perpetrated 15 years ago by two anti-government types outraged over his own administration’s bungled murderous attack at Waco, Texas, two years to the day earlier, a horrific episode of Clinton incompetence. Clinton is not a talk show host or a blogger; he is a former President of the United States and a senior member of the Democrat Party. And yet Clinton seeks to spin the whole sordid episode as a warning against Republican Party extremism. Has he no sense of decency left? Apparently he thinks that a vicious and false offense is the best defense – accuse your opponents of exactly what your side has been doing, supported by your staunch left-wing allies in the media.

In a must-read post (link), Peter Wehner at Commentary Magazine Online’s Contentions blog addresses Clinton’s rank hypocrisy:

…. It’s also worth recalling that the Clinton administration organized, coordinated, and participated in some of the ugliest rhetoric we have seen in recent American politics…. And now Mr. Clinton is preaching to us about not demonizing our opponents and about the importance of not crossing rhetorical lines. Can a Clinton sermon on the importance of fidelity and the gift of celibacy be far behind?

…. The end game for many Tea Party critics … is to discredit the movement itself. It is to silence the overwhelming number of decent people who comprise the Tea Party movement by attaching them to the hip with haters and kooks. Liberals and the Democratic Party are losing virtually every substantive debate on the issues. It is blowing their circuits. And so they are left to resort to libel…

Attorney John Hinderaker at Power Line Blog notes (link) that “It is deeply ironic that Democrats are trying to sell the idea that Republicans are somehow violent and unAmerican, when in fact, every actual violent incident is perpetrated by liberals, usually union thugs, against Republicans.”

In a post titled “Democrats Hate that Tea Parties Are Peaceful” (link), columnist Mona Charen reminds us of recent history:

….Democrats are reduced to warning that certain attitudes can lead to violence because there hasn’t been any actual violence at the tea-party rallies. All have been remarkably orderly and even friendly. You can almost feel the Democrats’frustration at this. By contrast, many, many left-wing protests and demonstrations have sparked violence. Just last year, at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, rampaging protesters broke shop windows and scuffled with police, who used batons and tear gas to subdue them. A 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle was so badly disrupted by anti-globalization fanatics who smashed windows and shut down the center of the city that the governor had to declare a state of emergency and call out the National Guard. (President Clinton failed to assail those who criticize corporations as inspiring the violence.) In 2007, several hundred protesters who descended on Washington, D.C., during the International Monetary Fund meeting turned over trash cans, smashed windows, threw bricks, and pushed a police officer off her motorcycle…. In 2008 …anti-Republican protesters at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul “threw bricks through the windows of buses, sending elderly convention delegates to the hospital. They dropped bags of sand off highway overpasses onto vehicles below.” The violence was only fleetingly covered in the press and went unmentioned by leading Democrats.

And finally, as for all the Democrat lies about tea-party racism, just the latest iteration of the standard liberal Democrat propaganda trope that conservatives and Republicans are selfish, racist, violence-prone haters, James Taranto asks and answers this question (link) in the Wall Street Journal, “Why the Left Needs Racism:”

If Republicans were able to attract black votes, the result would be catastrophic for the Democratic Party. Even in 2008, the Democrats' best presidential year since '64, if the black vote had been evenly split between the parties (and holding the nonblack vote constant), Barack Obama would have gotten about 48% of the vote and John McCain would be president. To keep blacks voting Democratic, it is necessary for the party and its supporters to keep alive the idea that racism is prevalent in America and to portray the Republican Party (as well as independent challengers to the Democrats, such as the tea-party movement) as racist. The election of Barack Obama made nonsense of the idea that America remains a racist country and thereby necessitated an intensifying of attacks on the opposition as racist.

And so it goes. The ultra-liberal gang we witness today has long ceased being “your father’s Democrat Party,” and is rapidly polarizing and angering regular Americans. They have overplayed their hand. These ultra-liberal Democrats are sowing the wind, and they will reap the whirlwind, but unfortunately for all of us not before they have destroyed some of the unique American heritage in their wake. Are there no Democrat Party American loyalists in their midst who will stand and say “enough and be gone”?

John M Greco