“The refutation of Crist, Murkowski and Castle is a wonderful thing, regardless of how it plays out in November. … In three primaries Republican voters decided they didn’t like what they saw in the three candidates presented by the establishment. In all three cases, the instincts of the voters were completely confirmed — by the subsequent actions of the hacks they drummed out of the party. Crist, Murkowski and Castle have made it abundantly clear they are devoid of anything resembling principles or party loyalty. All three have made something else clear as well: contempt for the average American has revealed itself to be far more ‘bipartisan’ than ever before. Such contempt has become so transparent and pervasive that the term ‘ruling class’ resonates like it never has: many Americans have become completely alienated from their representatives, regardless of party affiliation. Here’s a scary thought for Democrats: think what’s happening to the Republican party can’t happen to yours? Think again. A Congress with an approval rating of 23.6% while your party’s in charge can’t be reassuring. In November, if the public purges Democrats from the majority less than two years after Democrat political strategist James Carville’s proclaimed they would rule for the next forty, expect the kind of finger-pointing and blood-letting that will make the current Republican purge look tame by comparison. Americans may not agree about many things but one thing is certain: they are sick to death of selfish phonies selling themselves as ‘servants of the people.'” –columnist Arnold Ahlert
Archive for the ‘News’ Category
“The Rubber Band Syndrome vs. The Mental Depth Charge”
September 28, 2010This piece from Downsizer is great!
Quote of the Day: “Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes
Surely you’ve had this experience . . .
* You marshal your evidence
* You deploy powerful arguments
* And you thereby convince a friend to drop his or her support of some government policy.
But then, you don’t see your friend for a while . . .
* He or she is left for weeks or months, swimming in the river of Statist propaganda that streams from every media outlet
* So that when you meet again you find that his or her mind has snapped back to where it was before
It’s as if the two of you had never talked. He or she has completely forgotten . . .
* The evidence you marshaled
* The arguments you used
* The fact that he or she ended up agreeing with the case you made
Jim Babka calls this the “The Rubber Band Syndrome.”
* Visualize yourself stretching a cartoon brain to a larger size
* Visualize the brain snapping back to it’s former shape as soon as you walk away
This Rubber Band Syndrome makes a mockery of our persuasion efforts. It causes us to waste time, energy, and money. But here at Downsize DC we consider it part of our mission to prevent wasted effort, to make difficult things easy, and to constantly accomplish more with less. That’s why . . .
We want to find a cure for The Rubber Band Syndrome.
Is there a cure? We think there is. In fact, we think there may be two cures . . .
Cure #1:
It seems clear to us that we have to equal the river of Statist propaganda that streams from every media outlet every day. One way to do that is something we talk about constantly . . .
Operation Everywhere.
For those who are new to this list, Operation Everywhere is our plan to reach a size that will enable us to make our ideas seen and heard by everyone, everywhere, every day. In other words . . .
We can solve the problem of minds that snap back to their previous dimensions as soon as our arguments are no longer being heard, by creating conditions under which our arguments are ALWAYS HEARD. This is clearly a full-proof solution to the problem, BUT . . .
It’s not an easy solution. Operation Everywhere will be hard to execute. It will take time to get there. So, this particular cure doesn’t meet one of our most important criteria . . . making difficult things easy. Which brings us to . . .
Cure #2:
This Oliver Wendell Holmes quote is very famous: “Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” But the experience we’ve all had with The Rubber Band Syndrome tells us that it’s actually very difficult to stretch a mind in such a way that it REMAINS EXPANDED. So what we need for Cure #2 is obvious . . .
* We need ideas that are so large and powerful that they do not allow the mind to shrink back to its former dimensions.
* We need ideas that EXPLODE the dimensions of the human mind to vast new boundaries.
* I call this kind of idea . . .
The Mental Depth Charge
You’ve probably had this experience too . . .
* You say something powerful to someone, but it seems to have no immediate effect
* Days, or months, or sometimes years pass, until . . .
* Eventually the person you said the powerful thing to comes to you and says . . . “I’ve only just now understood what you said way back when, and . . .
Understanding it changes everything.”
You see, your idea needed time to sink-in, just like a “depth charge.”
But for this to happen the idea has to be something that will actually stay in your friend’s mind for the time required, and not be popped out by The Rubber Band Syndrome.
We’ve all had these experiences. We’ve all laid mental depth charges in the minds of others, and had them placed in our minds too. Often these explosive ideas come about by accident, in the flow of conversation, but the trick we want to master is to create Mental Depth Charges by design!
This means we need a laboratory to conduct experiments, and a factory for production.
I have good news! If financing permits, we’re days away from unveiling our new factory/laboratory for creating Mental Depth Charges. This is the first of the 43 new tools we’ve promised to create, each of which is aimed at helping us to add at least 1 new net recruit per day to the Downsize DC Army. As you can see . . .
Our aims are modest. We believe this new tool can accomplish even more, but we don’t want to over-sell it. After all, it’s an experiment — a laboratory. Fortunately, it’s also something that can be funded with TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donations, because the new tool we’re about to unveil is also . . .
A new home for our non-profit educational organization, The Downsize DC Foundation!
To be clear, most days, the Downsizer-Dispatch comes from DownsizeDC.org, Inc. But this new project is part of the educational mission for the Downsize DC Foundation.
We’ve put our staff and vendors to work so that we can deliver this exiting new tool, quickly. Thus, part of the team needed to complete this project is is already hard at work. Now, we need to activate the rest of the team — and that’s YOU.
Organizational forward progress and timely delivery of this new tool requires about $6,400 in new income. Look . . .
That amounts to just twenty one cents per member of the Downsize DC Army. Or, just one person could pay it off in one big bite by contributing $6,400. More likely, we will need something like the following . . .
* 2 people to give $1,000 = $2,000
* 4 to give $500 each = $2,000, bringing us to $4,000 total
* 4 to give $250 each = $1,000, bringing us $5,000
* 10 to give $100 each = $1,000, bringing us to $6,000
* And a few dozen 10s, 20s, and 50s to round us out at $6,400
Thanks to monthly pledgers, we’re able to get started. But to keep growing, we really need 21 new pledgers. Please consider making or increasing a monthly pledge.
Can you be one of the people who make this happen?
If so, we will publicly say “Thank you,” by publishing your name in an upcoming Downsizer-Dispatch, as well as on the new website. Of course, if you wish to remain private, you can indicate so on the secure contribution form.
Thanks in advance for your confidence and support.
Perry Willis
Vice President
The Downsize DC Foundation
The brief essay contained in this message is copyrighted by Perry Willis — (c) 2010. Permission to re-distribute or reprint this message for non-profit educational purposes is granted and encouraged, as long as proper attribution is given, and you provide a link to the original source. Permission to use this message for commercial purposes is denied.
DOW RESEARCHER PRESENTS PLANS FOR MULE DEER STUDY
September 28, 2010If only other agency’s from more state’s were this thoughtful, and informed. Yes, I know, Whitetail Deer are the number one game animal hunted, but, I am, and always will be a dyed in the wool Mule Deer fan!
KREMMLING, Colo — The Colorado Division of Wildlife is preparing for a large study of buck mule deer survival in Middle Park to improve the Division’s ability to manage deer populations around the state through more informed modeling and harvest decisions.
The study plan will be explained by lead researcher Eric Bergman at a meeting of the Blue Valley Sportsman Club on Wednesday, Oct. 6. The public is invited to attend the meeting which will begin at 7 p.m. at the Blue Valley Sportsman Club.
Management of deer populations has become more complicated since the state responded to mule deer population declines by moving from over-the-counter deer licenses to limited licenses in 1999.
During the initial two to three years of the study, the Division will establish a baseline by monitoring mule deer in Middle Park. Then the Division will temporarily adjust the allocation of hunting licenses in the area in an effort to change the ratio of bucks to does in the herd. During this period, Bergman and his team of researchers will monitor the population to assess how the license allocation actually affects the population of deer in the area.
“It’s extremely important for managers to know if there are differences between survival rates of bucks, does and fawns when we manage herds for different objectives,” said Bergman. “For instance, in some areas we may be managing for a post hunt ratio of 45 bucks per 100 does while in other areas we may be managing for a post hunt ratio of 25 bucks per 100 does. We’ve learned that we can effectively accomplish this, but we don’t know if the over-winter survival of bucks under these two conditions is different.”
Those who are interested in hearing more about the research project are encouraged to attend the meeting on Oct. 6. The Blue Valley Sportsman Club is located 11 miles south of Kremmling at milepost 128.1 on Colorado Highway 9.
More information about the Division’s mule deer research may be found at:
http://wildlife.state.co.us/Research/Mammal/Deer/
“Nice Try, But No Cigar” For Brady Campaign’s Paul Helmke
September 25, 2010“The NRA is wrong again,” said Brady Campaign president Paul Helmke on Tuesday, in his 176th (and counting) blog post on the left-wing Huffington Post website. Helmke was upset because of three things we pointed out in our annual “More Guns, Less Crime” fact sheet and Grassroots Alert last week.
First, the number of guns has risen to an all-time high. Second, for decades Brady Campaign has repeatedly predicted with unfettered confidence that more guns would necessarily cause crime to rise. But third, the nation’s violent crime and murder rates have instead fallen to 35- and 45-year lows, respectively.
Our fact sheet and alert didn’t say that crime has gone down because the number of guns has risen. And we didn’t even mention that crime has gone down in large part because in the 1990s many states adopted laws that NRA called for, to require violent criminals to spend time behind bars, to increase the length of violent criminals’ prison sentences, and to reduce their ability to obtain parole and probation (we’ll do that in next year’s fact sheet. Thanks for the reminder, Paul).
All our fact sheet and alert pointed out was that, contrary to Brady Campaign predictions, an increase in guns didn’t cause crime to go up.
Nevertheless, Helmke whined, “The NRA is misleading again.” The NRA is trying “to wave and shout and dance and steal the credit” for crime going down. NRA’s leaders “treat us as fools.”
Helmke didn’t deny that there is less crime. And he didn’t deny that there are more guns. Instead, he paraphrased some of Violence Policy Center’s hogwash, saying, “the average number of guns per owner has gone up, but the percent of American households with a gun? That’s right: it’s gone down.”
What Helmke didn’t mention is that polls measuring the percentage of households that acknowledge having at least one gun don’t accurately measure gun ownership by household or the number of Americans who own guns.
In its 1996 National Survey of Private Ownership of Firearms in the United States (NSPOF), the Police Foundation identified one of the limits of surveys attempting to measure gun ownership by household.
“For households headed by a married couple, 49 percent of the husbands report a gun in the home, compared with just 36 percent of the wives. Since this difference is far larger than can be explained by chance, it appears that many wives either do not know about their husband’s guns or are reluctant to discuss it with a stranger. The NSPOF estimates based on a respondent’s report of all guns in the household is 107.2 million working firearms. The NSPOF estimate based on a respondent’s report of his or her own firearms is 192.1 million working firearms.”
Similarly, criminologist Gary Kleck has noted that in his and Marc Gertz’s landmark survey of defensive firearm use, “50.1% of married men reported a household gun, but only 37.4% of married women did. . . . Fourteen consecutive General Social Surveys found married women to report household guns at lower levels than married men.”
Kleck added that a person is more likely to acknowledge that he or she own guns, than to acknowledge the ownership of guns by someone else in the household, but that while “it is most commonly a male who owns the household guns . . . . [M]arried women make up around 31% of the usual adult survey samples.”
Helmke also didn’t note (but Kleck did) that the percentage of people telling pollsters that they have guns in their homes dropped precipitously during the years of the Clinton Administration’s war against gun owners, from the 40+ percentage range, down into the 30s.
And there is one other, factor that Helmke didn’t take into account: The population of the country rises by about one percent, or three million, every year. Surveys began showing a decline in “household” gun ownership in the 1980s, but since 1985, for example, the population of the country has increased 30 percent, from 239 million to 310 million. That’s more than enough to compensate for the decline in “yes” responses to pollsters asking whether people have any guns in their homes.
So, we’d say we hate to be the one to tell you, Paul, but that wouldn’t be honest. We’re glad to tell you. There are more Americans owning more guns than ever before and, as we both agree, violent crime is way, way, down.
A Tale of Two Journalists : Make fun of Christians and Jews all you want, but thou shall not inflame Muslim ire.
September 24, 2010Molly Norris used to have a life and a career in Washington, as a cartoonist for Seattle Weekly, an alternative paper. But not any longer. She has now — at the urging of the FBI — gone underground, forfeiting her identity and her job. Is Norris a criminal? No. She just had the poor judgment to draw a cartoon entitled “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day,” which led to the issuance of a fatwa — or Islamic death sentence — against her. Perhaps she had forgotten the 11th Commandment: Make fun of Christians and Jews all you want, but thou shall not inflame Muslim ire.
The fatwa was issued by imam Anwar al-Awlaki, a man The New York Times described in October 2001 as “a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West.” Al-Awlaki, who was born in the United States and headed a mosque in Virginia, is now conducting his dirty work from a hiding place in Yemen.
Barack Obama has remained silent on this matter, conspicuously so because only recently he lectured all of us on the freedoms afforded by this country. Of course that was in relation to the building of the Cordoba House mosque two blocks from Ground Zero. When it comes to the injustice that has befallen an average American like Molly Norris, he has nothing to say.
While some in the field of journalism are threatened with death for making a joke, others are rewarded for their hatred. Recall Helen Thomas, the poster child for women in journalism, who was canned after making incendiary comments at a conference celebrating Jewish heritage. Thomas’ statement that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Poland, Germany, America and “everywhere else” was caught on tape so that not even leftists could defend her.
Even after her weak apology, no one would touch her with a 10-foot pole. No one, that is, except the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Next month the 90-year-old Thomas will be given a lifetime-achievement award at CAIR’s Leadership Conference & 16th Annual Fundraising Banquet in Arlington, Virginia. Clearly, her final flourish as a “journalist” was appreciated by someone.
Profiles of Valor: U.S. Air Force CMSgt Etchberger
September 24, 2010“Plausible denial” was the word in 1968, when some U.S. military personnel were taking the battle to the communist enemy in Cambodia and Laos as “civilians.” What was undeniable, and what finally became crystal clear decades later, was the heroism and selflessness that was exhibited by one of those men, United States Air Force Chief Master Sergeant Richard Loy Etchberger. In March 1968, a remote radar site in Laos, known as Lima Site 85, was attacked and eventually overrun. Etchberger, one of the defenders at that site, remained in his position despite heavy fire that had killed or wounded most of his comrades. Fighting with everything at his disposal, including calling in air strikes, he battled back. When med-evac helos finally came, he put his wounded comrades aboard first, braving enemy fire to get them up to safety before he himself was mortally wounded. Though he had received posthumously the Air Force Cross for his actions that day, Etchberger will now receive his full due: the Medal of Honor.
Perjury in Black Panther Case?
September 24, 2010We’re closer to the next election than we are the last, but the fallout from the Black Panther case percolates on. Recall that New Black Panther Party members stood outside a Philadelphia polling place in Nov. 2008 brandishing a billy club, shouting racial epithets and otherwise intimidating white voters. This week, the watchdog group Judicial Watch obtained internal e-mail logs from the Department of Justice that suggest that senior officials had a hand in making the decision to pull the plug on the case, contradicting sworn testimony by Thomas Perez, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Perez said in May that the decision was, “a case of career people disagreeing with career people.”
While it’s doubtful that Perez will be on the rack for these allegations anytime soon, the incident reveals both the difficulty of extracting information on how a slam-dunk case was dropped and the lengths to which Attorney General Eric Holder may be going in not pursuing certain cases based on race. It took a Freedom of Information Act request by Judicial Watch just to receive the logs and a summary of what particular e-mails stated, with a court ordering the disclosure.
Democrats Run From Their Record: epic fail obama
September 24, 2010How bad is it for Democrats? They’re running against their own programs. ObamaCare, cap-n-tax, you name it, they’re against it now. This situation reached absurdity when five Democrat members of Congress ran ads claiming to have voted “no” on TARP. The five are Frank Kratovil (MD), Dina Titus (NV), Mary Jo Kilroy (OH), Kathy Dahlkemper (PA) and Glenn Nye (VA). The inconvenient truth is, according to FactCheck.org, “None of the five lawmakers who are running these ads is listed in the roll call vote. That’s because none of them had taken office yet.” But if they had been in Congress, they would have been against it. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
“I still remember Sasha, when she was three months old … had meningitis, and she had to get a spinal tap, and they had to keep her [in the hospital] for three or four days. … I still remember that feeling of just desperation, watching the nurse take her away to provide treatment for her. But I was thinking, what if I hadn’t had insurance?” –Barack Obama at a “backyard discussion” in Virginia about health care
Obama lectures the press to leave his girls alone, yet turns around and uses them as a political prop whenever it suits his own leftist policy initiatives.
However, he does “take the blame” for public opposition to ObamaCare. “Sometimes I fault myself for not being able to make the case more clearly to the country.” He may think that if only he had talked more about it, voters would get it, but as the first provisions kicked in this week, it’s more likely that voters will now blame Democrats for every health care problem.
The Recession Is Over? Yeah, right…
September 24, 2010In case you missed the news, the recession is over. As of June 2009, no less. So say the economic sages at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the arbiter of these things. According to the NBER, the recession began in December 2007 and lasted 18 months — the longest since the Great Depression. That it’s over is good news, but there’s a “but.”
“On the other hand,” writes The Wall Street Journal, “the recession was only two months longer than the 16-month downturns of 1973-1975 and 1981-82, the two other most serious post-World War II periods of falling economic growth. The 2007-2009 downturn was painful but not extraordinary in historical context. What is different about this period is the relative weakness of the economic recovery.”
For years after 1982, GDP growth was at least 4 percent. Today, GDP remains below that of the fourth quarter of 2007. One difference is that in 1983, Ronald Reagan’s cuts in marginal tax rates were taking hold, while in 2010, the economy is bracing for trillions of dollars in tax increases in January. The current administration’s “recovery” policies have also been a major drag on economic growth, no matter how they may crow about their “success.”
Since January 2009, the economy has lost 3.2 million jobs, and the current 9.6 percent unemployment rate is higher than the 9.5 percent in June 2009 when the recession supposedly ended. U.S. household net worth fell by another $1.5 trillion in the second quarter, and is now $10.7 trillion less than at its high point in 2007. Foreclosures are at record highs.
Perhaps all of this is why some of the jobs now being shed are those of Barack Obama’s economic advisers. He may say on the campaign stump that Tea Party supporters are “misidentifying who the culprits are” for this economic trouble, but heads are rolling at the White House. “This is tough, the work that they do,” Obama said. “They’ve been at it for two years, and they’re going to have a whole range of decisions about family that will factor into this as well.” As in spending more time with family.
Lawrence Summers, chairman of the president’s National Economic Council, is heading back to Harvard. Apparently, the “Recovery Summers” is over. Other recent departures include budget director Peter Orszag and head of the Council of Economic Advisers Christina Romer. Meanwhile, Herb Allison, who took charge of the Troubled Asset Relief Program in April 2009, is stepping down. That leaves Treasury Secretary Timothy “Turbo Tax Cheat” Geithner as the lone remaining member of Obama’s original economic team.
We’ll say it again: In order to generate real economic growth, tax rates must remain level (or, even better, decline), regulation must ease and, in general, government must shrink. Of course, Obama and his refurbished economic team are unlikely to come to the same conclusion.
Conservative Libertarian Outpost 