In this video published on Dec. 17, 2015, Bill Whittle explains why Planet Earth and humans may be more rare than we previously thought, and will give you a whole new appreciation for the full moon due before Christmas.
Bill Whittle gives another explanation as to
Alleged Syrian refugees, or asylum-seekers, fleeing to Europe. (Photo: The Clarion Project)
The number of so-called migrant refugees to Europe in 2015 reached one million, according to the latest data from the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
The number of refugees is roughly four times the total from last year and only half are even from Syria. More than 800,000 traveled from Turkey to Greece and almost all traveled by sea, though the figures tracked numbers from Greece, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, Malta, and Cyprus.
Hungarian President Viktor Orban, the one leader who has been consistently pushing back against the unfettered migrant policy, is now moving to take action to stop the flow.
“A modern day mass migration is taking place that could change the face of Europe’s civilization,” Orban said. “If that happens, that is irreversible. There is no way back from a multicultural Europe. If we make a mistake now, it will be forever.”
With domestic populations across Europe increasing against further migrations, a sentiment that is being largely ignored by the media, Hungary and Slovakia are now taking legal action at the European Court of Justice to challenge EU plans to share asylum seekers across EU states.
While conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan are widely reported to be fueling the wave of people, 20% are coming from Afghanistan and 7% from Iraq. European countries have struggled to handle the influx. Macedonia has tightened its border with Greece, and restricts passage to people from war zones. The EU agreed last week to send more border agency officials to Greece. Germany alone has received one million migrants and refugees, but the number will be far greater, as more than 1 million registrations in Germany’s “EASY” system that counts new arrivals ahead of them claiming asylum–including roughly 40% of people from the Balkans–are not included in UNHCR figures.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has doubled-down on taking in Muslim refugees even as she faces rising opposition within her own political coalition. Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU), sister party of Merkel’s CDU, is in full-blown rebellion. But that isn’t stopping the pro-migrant crowd, who have made a concerted effort to completely overlook the burden to the generous welfare states in the EU and public outcry.
“We must also act. Migration must be legal, safe and secure for all — both for the migrants themselves and the countries that will become their new home,” said William Lacy Swing, IOM’s director general. The IOM says 3,695 died trying to make the crossing in 2015.
The number of migrant refugees to Europe
Photo Right: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump greets supporters during a campaign rally at the American Airlines Center on September 14, 2015 in Dallas, Texas. Photo Left: Michael Moore. (Photo: Tom Pennington/Getty/Facebook)
Michael Moore, Hollywood’s favorite leftist movie-maker – mostly because he brings political lies to life on the big screen that the like-minded can then point to as truths – posted on Facebook a curiously scathing rant about Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, calling him out as a “fraidey-cat” for saying borders ought to be shut to Muslims.
Moore then made this ridiculous pronouncement, underscored by a photograph of himself touting the same while standing, alone no less, with a cardboard sign outside Trump Tower in Manhattan: “We are all Muslim.” Only he put it in all caps, the figurative equivalent of shouting.
Here’s an all-cap response, worthy of Twitter: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Are we really all Muslim, Mr. Moore? And is that the next plan of attack against Trump – to mimic the first lady’s famous 2014 response to the Boko Haram terrorist kidnappings of 200-plus Nigerian girls, with a hashtag tweet to “Bring Back Our Girls?” Now comes Moore, with the similarly pithy, and ridiculous, plea for tolerance.
It must be nice to be a liberal where we all get along – where, as Moore writes, we’re not simply all Muslims, but also all Jews and Catholics and Mexicans (is that a religion?), and children of God and/or nature, pick your preference. We’re also, according to Moore, all white and black and every shade in between,” simply all “part of the human family.” In other words, we’re all everything – meaning, ultimately, nothing. His logic being: So what’s there to fight about?
Well, somebody tell the Muslims, particularly the radicalized ones, or the one about to be radicalized. That would seem a message they need to read, particularly before the next bombing, or the planning for the next bombing.
Moore’s post, meant to mock Trump, is just so ripe for mocking itself. It not only opens with his recollection of his 1998 television green room meeting with Trump where he had to supposedly calm the billionaire and assure that he wasn’t going to “pick on” him – a remarkable story that reads like a fourth-grade nerd’s fantasy win over his real-life bully. But Moore then slams Trump as a coward for wanting to temporarily shut borders to Muslims – a ban the billionaire called for as a means of protecting American citizens from harm from terrorists.
Moore’s words, directed at Trump: “You need to go to the time-out room in any one of your Towers, sit there, and think about what you’ve said. And then leave the rest of us alone so we can elect a real president who is both compassionate and strong – at least strong enough not to be all whiny and scared of some guy in a ballcap from Michigan [himself] sitting next to him on a talk show couch. You’re not so tough, Donny … We are all Muslim. Deal with it.”
Like or hate Trump, Moore’s post is far off the mark. We are not all Muslim. We are not all the same skin color. We don’t all think the same things, believe the same things, or want the same things. And most importantly, in this day and age of terrorism realities, we don’t all want to bomb or shoot things that make us mad. Why can’t leftists understand that key point?
Moore also writes, “If you want to ban Muslims, you are going to have to ban me.”
What is that — is that supposed to be a threat? Sorry, Moore, that’s the sound of Donald Trump’s Muslim ban receiving more rings of endorsement.
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Michael Moore, Hollywood’s favorite leftist movie-maker, went
Internal Revenue Service (IRS) headquarters building in Washington D.C. (Photo: AP)
The government once again closes out another year at its best. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) distributed over $46 million in tax refunds accidentally due to what they claimed to be another computer glitch.
“TIGTA identified that because of a programming error, over $27 million of refunds were erroneously issued for 13,043 Tax Year 2013 tax returns,” the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) audit said. “The programming error is overriding the IRS’s two-week processing delay on some refund tax returns that are identified by the IRS as potentially fraudulent.”
However, this so-called glitch–which is more a policy than a glitch–is going to be a painful one for millions of Americans. The mistake could potentially cost taxpayers up to $230 million over the next five years, and possibly delay expected future tax refunds in order to avoid making similiar mistakes.
The IRS gaffe was fueled by ineffective fraud monitoring and internal oversight. The TIGTA said thousands of returns were flagged for claiming a “questionable tax credit” but were automatically issued before the IRS could complete its verification process. They also said their audit shows investigators uncovered 3,910 potentially fraudulent tax returns totaling roughly $19 million.
The millions of taxpayers who look forward to that end of the year refund may have to just wait a bit longer than usual.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) distributed over
US national debt piles up next to the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., where no one has the political courage to rise to the challenge of staving off the coming crisis.
Because of the budgetary implications, I think it’s more important to deal with Medicaid and Medicare than it is to address Social Security. If left on autopilot, Social Security will eventually consume an additional 2% of the private economy. That’s not good news, but Medicaid–which now includes a big chunk of ObamaCare–and Medicare are much bigger threats.
Hopefully, though, we don’t need to engage in fiscal triage and we can reform all the big entitlement programs. So let’s look at why Social Security needs to be modernized.
First and foremost, the programs is about $40 trillion in the red. And that’s after adjusting for inflation!
Moreover, the longer we wait, the more difficult reform will be. I don’t always agree with the policy prescriptions of the Committee for a Responsible Budget, but they are very sober-minded in their analysis. And this chart from one of their recent publications shows that waiting until 2026 or 2034 will require more radical changes.
So it should be obvious we need reform, but now the question is what kind of reform.
Some people think the key goal is making the program solvent, but that’s the wrong focus. Sort of like making balance the goal of budgetary policy.
Instead, the goal should be creating a freer society and smaller footprint for government. And that’s why I think personal retirement accounts are the right goal.
And to understand the implications, consider these excerpts from a column in today’s Wall Street Journal. Professor Jeremy Siegel of the University of Pennsylvania explains how the Social Security system has made his retirement less comfortable.
Last month I turned 70 and, thanks to my earnings, became entitled to Social Security’s maximum benefit, currently $3,500 a month, or $42,000 a year. And so, if I live to 90, I will receive $840,000 worth of (inflation-adjusted) benefits. Over the past 50 years, according to the Social Security Administration, the combined taxes paid into the system by me and my employers equaled $329,640. This sounds like a good deal… But the benefits are only about one-third the $2.27 million I would have accumulated had the taxes instead been invested, over time, in a stock index fund. …the benefits I would collect are even less than the $1.28 million I would have accumulated if my “contributions,” as Social Security taxes are euphemistically called, had been placed in U.S. Treasury bonds. …are affluent seniors making out like bandits? Not at all. The bandit is the federal government, which provides benefits that are millions of dollars short of what anyone whose earnings are at or above the tax cap easily could have accumulated on his own.
In effect, Professor Siegel has been forced to pay for a steak and he’s getting a hamburger. Which is a good description of how all entitlement programs operate.
And it’s not just high-income people who get a bad deal. Social Security isparticularly bad for young people. And many minorities also are disadvantagedbecause of their shorter life lifespans.
Moreover, everyone will pay more for their steak and get even less hamburger if politicians deal with the program’s giant shortfall by imposing the wrong type of reform.
But it’s not just that Social Security is bad for individuals. It’s also a burden on the overall economy.
Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute looks at how private savings is impacted by government-run retirement schemes
…fixing Social Security by raising taxes – or, going further, expanding Social Security as many progressives favor – won’t increase retirement income so much as shift it from households to government. …A new report from Canada’s Fraser Institute looks at how Canadian households’ personal saving habits responded to increases in the tax rates used to finance the Canada Pension Plan (CPP). …The Fraser study, authored by Charles Lammam, François Vaillancourt, Ian Herzog and Pouya Ebrahimi, found that for each dollar of additional CPP contributions, Canadian households reduced their personal saving by around 90 cents. As a result, total saving – and thus total future retirement income – would increase by a lot less than you’d think. Households would receive more income from the CPP but less from their own saving.
These results are similar to what’s been found in other nations.
I found a similar result across OECD countries: when a country’s government provided an additional dollar of retirement benefits, retirees provided for themselves about 93 cents less in income from savings and work in retirement. …a 2003 analysis by Suzanne Rohwedder and Orazio Attanasio which found that, for the United Kingdom’s earnings-related pension system, individuals reduced personal saving by 65 to 75 cents for each dollar of benefits they expected to receive from the government.
Here’s a very powerful chart on the relationship between private savings and government retirements benefits from another one of Andrew’s articles.
Wow, that’s a powerful relationship. And Biggs isn’t the only expert to produce these results.
All of which underscores why I think we should have a system similar to what they have in Australia or Chile (or even the Faroe Islands).
Here’s my video making the case for personal retirement accounts.
P.S. Two economists at the Federal Reserve produced a study examining why Social Security was first created. It might seem obvious that it was a case of politicians trying to buy votes by creating dependency, but they actually go through the calculations in order to explain how it made sense (from the perspective of people alive at the time) to create a program that now undermines the well-being of the nation.
A well-established result in the literature is that Social Security tends to reduce steady state welfare in a standard life cycle model. However, less is known about the historical effects of the program on agents who were alive when the program was adopted. …we estimate that the original program benefited households alive at the time of the program’s adoption with a likelihood of over 80 percent, and increased these agents’ welfare by the equivalent of 5.9% of their expected future lifetime consumption. …Overall, the opposite welfare effects experienced by agents in the steady state versus agents who experienced the program’s adoption might offer one explanation for why a program that potentially reduces welfare in the steady state was originally adopted.
Gee, what a shocker. Ponzi schemes benefit people who get in at the beginning of the scam.
Though Medicaid and Medicare are more important
Existing and pending home sales reported by the National Association of Realtors. Photo: Reuters)
The National Association of Realtors reported on Tuesday existing home sales of single-family homes tanked by 10.5% in November to an annualized rate of 4.76 million units. The NRA survey missed economists’ expectations, as the median forecast called for a rate of 5.35 million units.
“Sparse inventory and affordability issues continue to impede a large pool of buyers’ ability to buy, which is holding back sales,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist at NAR. “However, signed contracts have remained mostly steady in recent months, and properties sold faster in November. Therefore it’s highly possible the stark sales decline wasn’t because of sudden, withering demand.”
But other economists measuring mortgage risk in the housing market are more concerned about the increased push for looser credit standards than a month’s results likely reflecting an outlier. They call Yun’s assertion that there is a shortage of credit in the market nonsense.
“The typical first-time buyer these days puts little money down and has a credit profile that is far from stellar,” said Stephen Oliner, a senior fellow at UCLA’s Ziman Center for Real Estate and codirector of AEI’s International Center on Housing Risk. “Those who assert that credit is tight are ignoring the facts.”
The composite National Mortgage Risk Index (NMRI) for Agency purchase loans released last week reflected increased risk in the housing market during the same month. The NMRI, which tracks originations to gauge market share belonging to high-risk loans following the financial crisis, inched up to 12.34% in November and 0.67% from a year earlier. The monthly composite has increased on a year-over-year basis in every month reported since January 2014.
The risk has been fueled by Agency loan originations continuing to migrate from large banks to non-banks in November. This shift in market share has accounted for much of the upward trend in the composite NMRI, as non-bank lending is substantially riskier than the large bank business it replaces. Still, the data from Agency loan originations should not support a longer-term declining trend in existing home sales, which appears to be an area of agreement on both sides.
“It’s possible the longer timeframes pushed a latter portion of would-be November transactions into December,” Yun added. “As long as closing timeframes don’t rise even further, it’s likely more sales will register to this month’s total, and November’s large dip will be more of an outlier.”
The median existing-home price2 for all housing types in November was $220,300, or 6.3% higher than November 2014 ($207,200), marking the 45th consecutive month of year-over-year gains. Inventory fell 3.3% to 2.04 million existing homes available for sale las month, and is now down 1.9% from 2.08 million on a year-over-year basis. Unsold inventory is at a 5.1-month supply at the current sales pace, up from 4.8 months in October.
Further, the Federal Reserve announced this month it approved the first interest rate hike since the Great Recession following seven years of rock-bottom, near-zero rates. The policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) voted unanimously to raise rates by 0.25% to a range of 0.25%-0.50%, a small percentage but still enough to test the weakened U.S. economy’s ability to absorb the higher borrowing costs that will follow the increase.
“The Federal Reserve’s decision this month to raise short-term rates is the first of many increases over the next couple of years,” said Yun. “Although this first move will likely have minimal impact on mortgage rates, additional hikes will push borrowing costs to around 4.50% by the end of next year. With home prices expected to continue rising, wages and new home construction need to start increasing substantially to preserve affordability.”
November existing-home sales in the Northeast declined 9.2% to an annual rate of 690,000, but are still 1.5% above a year ago. The median price in the Northeast was $254,800, which is 3.2% above November 2014.
In the Midwest, existing-home sales descended 15.4% to an annual rate of 1.10 million in November, and are now 2.7% below November 2014. The median price in the Midwest was $169,300, up 5.3% from a year ago.
Existing-home sales in the South decreased 6.2% to an annual rate of 1.98 million in November, and are now 5.7% below November 2014. The median price in the South was $189,400, up 6.3% from a year ago.
Existing-home sales in the West dropped 13.9% to an annual rate of 990,000 in November, and are now 4.8% lower than a year ago. The median price in the West was $319,700, which is 8.3% above November 2014.
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported
An NYPD detective nicknamed “Superman” by his fellow cops was one of six U.S. troops killed Monday in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan, The New York Post reported Tuesday. Detective Joseph Lemm, 45, of the Bronx Warrant Squad was killed when a bomb-laden Taliban assassin on a motorcycle targeted a location near the U.S.-run Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan on Monday, where he was serving in the Air National Guard.
“Earlier today, we lost one of our Finest in a suicide bombing in Bagram, Afghanistan,” Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said Monday night. “Detective Joseph Lemm epitomized the selflessness we can only strive for: putting his country and city first.”
Mohammad Asim Asim, governor of Parwan province, said an attacker also injured three other NATO soldiers when a motorcycle rammed a group of eight troops as they patrolled a village near Bagram Airfield, 45 kilometers (28 miles) north of Kabul.
Lemm, a 15-year NYPD veteran, native of Nebraska and a third-grade detective, lived in West Harrison in Westchester, County. He leaves behind a wife, Christine, and two children: a 17-year-old daughter, Brook, and 4-year-old son, Ryan. He was deployed three times and promoted under Bratton recently in January 2014.
Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, in a statement, called the attack “a painful reminder of the dangers our troops face every day in Afghanistan.”
US Army Brig. Gen. William Shoffner, a Pentagon spokesman in Afghanistan, said, “Our heartfelt sympathies go out to the families and friends of those affected in this tragic incident, especially during this holiday season.”
However, Secretary Carter’s comment didn’t address what is clearly a deteriorating security situation in yet another country President Obama prematurely withdrew troops from against the advice of the top brass at the Pentagon. Now, as PPD previously reported, multiple provinces that were once stable zones are now in danger of complete collapse in the face of Islamic State and Taliban forces.
While President Obama has kept roughly 9,800 troops in the country, the Pentagon released a report last week stating the security situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate in the face of a “resilient Taliban-led insurgency remains an enduring threat to U.S., coalition, and Afghan forces, as well as to the Afghan people.”
As PPD reported in May, the number of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan under President Barack Obama has now far surpassed the number killed under President George W. Bush, with ISIS essentially swallowing up Taliban forces in Kunar, Khorasan and Helmond provinces. Defense Ministry spokesman Dawlat Waziri said among the insurgent forces fighting in Helmand, which is an opium haven for Islamists, “three out of 10 are foreign fighters.”
The suicide bombing was the first major attack on a NATO military convoy since August 22, when three American contractors with the RS base were killed in a similiar suicide bombing on their convoy in Kabul. On August 7 and 8, three insurgent attacks in Kabul took place within 24 hours and left 35 people dead. One of the attacks–on a U.S. special operations forces base outside Kabul–left one U.S soldier and eight Afghan civilian contractors dead.
An NYPD detective nicknamed “Superman” by his
President Barack Obama answers reporters’ questions at a press conference at the G-20 Summit in Turkey on Nov. 16, 2015. (Photo: Reuters)
President Obama’s reckless neglect of America’s national security is a rapidly growing malignancy on this nation, and there are no signs it will get better.
Some might attribute his arrogantly inaccurate assessment of the Islamic State group as “a JV team” or his delusional assertion, hours before the terrorist massacres in Paris, that the Islamic State is “contained” to personal pride or political posturing. After all, he never admits his policies aren’t working, and he is perpetually partisan.
More careful observers, however, see something far more troubling: He simply refuses to inhabit the reality that Islamists are at war with us. Obama is not only in a hermetically sealed bubble on the Islamist threat but also entirely oblivious to the degree to which the majority of Americans disagree with him — or he outright disrespects their view.
What is his default reaction to every terrorist attack on American soil? Before he even has time to receive, much less analyze, the bulk of the evidence on such an attack, he immediately rushes to the presidential microphone and makes two equally bizarre points: that gun ownership is the principal cause of the attack and that we dare not jump to the conclusion that it was motivated by Islam or perpetrated by Islamists.
In fact, the word on the street is that he relishes these attacks — and every other mass shooting — as opportunities to rail against evil guns, their evil owners and their even more evil big-money enablers, such as the National Rifle Association. He is obviously just as adamant to deflect blame from Islamists as he is to blame American gun owners and the gun lobby.
How many times has he lectured Americans on guns after such an attack? How many times has he chided us not to presume it was committed by an Islamist? How many times has he rushed to shame us against jumping to the conclusion that Islamic violence was the culprit and then waxed eloquent about how wonderful Islam is?
His first instinct is to blame, shame and scold Americans, Christians, gun owners and Republicans and then defend Islam while warning us against Islamophobia. He never reassures Americans he recognizes the threat and is taking the important steps needed to combat it.
Just this past weekend — at a time when Americans are increasingly and rationally nervous about the Islamist threat — he made some more disturbing statements that should remove all doubt about this mindset.
He audaciously claimed that his strategy to combat the Islamic State is working and that the only problems are that saturated media coverage after the Paris attacks is fueling terror fears in the United States and that he hasn’t done enough to communicate his strategy to the people. “We haven’t, you know, on a regular basis, I think, described all the work that we’ve been doing for more than a year now to defeat” the Islamic State.
Where have we heard this type of disconnect before? Remember his reaction to his 2010 congressional defeats, largely over the public’s angst about Obamacare? He never conceded problems with Obamacare, only that he hadn’t done enough to get the message out about its gloriousness, despite his 50 speeches hammering us over the head with it. Translation: The American people are too stupid and self-centered to understand his benevolence and wisdom, so he must spend more time spoon-feeding them instead of concentrating on his wonderful policies. His bad — but not really. Actually, it’s our bad because we’re not decent or enlightened enough to have his attitude toward Islamism, and if we weren’t so bigoted, we’d realize it isn’t a major threat.
Obama also said: “If you’ve been watching television for the last month, all you’ve been seeing, all you’ve been hearing about is these guys with masks or black flags who are potentially coming to get you. And so I understand why people are concerned about it.”
So the problem is that we are creating boogeymen out of guys with masks and flags — as if they’re harmless cartoon characters. Are you serious? And “potentially” coming to get us? How about Fort Hood? Boston? San Bernardino? Terrorist dry runs on airlines, at home and abroad? Endless stories of Islamic horror around the world — persecuting and massacring Christians and Jews and militantly refusing to assimilate in Europe and instead Islamofying the receiving nations, including Britain?
Surely by now, a strong majority of Americans fully recognize just how dangerous Obama’s approach is to their (and America’s) safety and security. How could anyone deny it?
Just let him keep talking. Maybe, before it’s all said and done, he’ll give us 50 “Twilight Zone”-ish speeches on Islamophobia as he did on Obamacare, doing more to elect the next Republican president than any Republican candidate could do for himself.
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Barack Obama's reckless neglect of America's national
Socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders defends his support for raising the top tax bracket to 90% during the second Democratic debate hosted by CBS News on Nov. 14, 2015 in Des Moines, Iowa. (Photo: AP)
Hardly a week goes by without some demand for an apology populating my inbox. I have never apologized for two reasons: The usual one is that I’m not sorry. The other is that calls for an apology have become an irritating tactic in American political discourse, a kind of bullying.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t regretted things I’ve said or the tone used. I have. So here’s a compromise: I will issue one apology a year.
And the winner for 2015 is … Bernie Sanders.
Why Bernie? Some liberal friends complain that I’ve been overly dismissive of the senator from Vermont’s candidacy. They have cause.
I was especially rough in pointing out the cracks in Bernie’s self-portrait of a national force for civil rights. Perhaps I overdid it.
But the fact remains that he fled the troubled New York of the ’60s for the whitest state in the nation. It baffles that he shares his campaign stage with Cornel West, a black academic who condemns Barack Obama in nasty racial terms.
On advancing civil rights, Bernie’s been totally on board. Still, one can see why ordinary African-Americans seem to relate better to Hillary Clinton.
Bernie, you’re really good on most concerns: Reining in Wall Street’s power. Expanding Medicare to all Americans.
You also rise over conventional liberal stances, opposing gun control measures that come off as more anti-gun than pro-control. You’ve clearly been talking to hunters in your rural state.
Your views on immigration are well-nuanced. You support a path to citizenship for otherwise law-abiding undocumented people. But you oppose calls for massive temporary-worker programs that would replace American workers — and not just farmworkers — with lower-cost substitutes.
The Democratic debates have shown you at your best. On Saturday, you graciously offered … an apology … over your campaign’s breach of Clinton’s proprietary data. (Hillary responded in kind, saying it was time to move on.) That was quite noble of you in light of the Democratic National Committee’s decision to temporarily cut your campaign’s access to its voter database. The DNC has not treated you fairly.
You’ve been taking the high road in this campaign, sticking to issues and even occasionally praising Hillary. Your dismissal of the right wing’s obsessive harping over Clinton’s use of private email while secretary of state will not be forgotten.
Bernie, the poll numbers show you slipping further behind Hillary among Democratic voters. That alone is not reason enough to downplay your quest for the presidency. Candidates have come roaring back, and Hillary’s performance over the years has not been flawless.
But there’s a big question besides “can you win?” That is, What would happen if you did? For all your solid thinking, you’ve never been able to work with others in Washington, and we’re not just talking about Republicans. You often can’t get along with liberal Democrats.
Your “holier than thou” attitude, as former Rep. Barney Frank put it, has kept you from actively participating in the formation of laws. That bill you negotiated with conservatives to improve veterans’ health care doesn’t count. Helping veterans is not a hard sell.
But let’s end the criticism here. I’m glad you’re running. Without you, hardly any attention would have been paid to the Democratic side. The other remaining challenger, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, simply isn’t original enough. (Sorry, Martin. This year’s apology has just been used up.)
Finally, I never tire of hearing you describe your smart liberal ideas with force and conviction. I still don’t think you’re going to be IT. But if I ever came off as not respecting you, Bernie, I apologize.
In her first ever once-a-year apology for
The political left has been trying to run other people’s lives for centuries. So we should not be surprised to see the Obama administration now trying to force neighborhoods across America to have the mix of people the government wants them to have.
There are not enough poor people living in middle class neighborhoods to suit the political left. Not enough blacks in white neighborhoods. Not enough Hispanics here, not enough Asians there.
Nowhere in the Constitution does it grant the federal government the power to dictate such things. But places that do not mix and match people the way Washington wants them to can lose all sorts of federal money they currently receive under numerous programs.
Handing out vast amounts of the taxpayers’ money is the way the federal government has expanded its power far beyond the powers granted by the Constitution — thereby limiting the freedom of individuals, localities and states. Washington is essentially buying up our freedom with our own money, taken in taxes.
What makes this latest political crusade so ridiculous and so dangerous is that people have never been mixed and matched at random, either in the United States or in other countries around the world, or in any period of history.
We can see blacks and whites living in different neighborhoods, but many people who look the same to the naked eye also sort themselves out. Moreover, neither blacks nor whites are living at random within their own respective neighborhoods.
The upscale neighborhood called Sugar Hill in Harlem, where I delivered groceries as a teenager, was very different from the neighborhood where I lived in a tenement.
White neighborhoods also sorted themselves out. A man who grew up in Chicago said, “Tell me a man’s last name and I will tell you where he lives.” Studies of ethnic concentrations in Chicago have backed up his claim.
Back when the Lower East Side of New York was a predominantly Jewish area during the era of mass immigration from Europe, Hungarian Jews lived clustered together in a different part of the Lower East Side from where Polish Jews or Romanian Jews lived. And German Jews lived uptown.
It was the same story in Italian neighborhoods. Immigrants from Rome were not scattered at random among immigrants from Naples or Sicily. Moreover, this was not peculiar to New York.
The same clustering of people from particular parts of Italy could be found in cities across the United States, as well as in Italian communities in Buenos Aires, Toronto, Sydney and other places around the world.
The very same pattern could be found among Germans, Chinese, Lebanese and other peoples living in other countries. People of different ages, different incomes or different lifestyles likewise tend to sort themselves out.
Nevertheless the busybody left has launched a political crusade to make communities across America present a tableau that matches the preconceptions of their betters.
Nor are the true believers deterred by the failures and counterproductive consequences of their previous social crusades, such as busing children to distant schools to mix and match them with children from different racial, economic or social backgrounds.
The theory was that this would improve the education of all — through the magic of “diversity” — and promote greater understanding among different races and classes. In practice, however, compulsory busing of children to mix and match them produced more racial polarization and more educational problems.
Undaunted by reality, the left moved on to try something similar in the housing markets, by placing low-income housing projects in middle class neighborhoods and by giving housing subsidies to individual low-income families to go live in neighborhoods where they could not afford to live otherwise.
The counterproductive consequences of these efforts in the housing markets have only spurred on the busybodies of the left to try harder to force people to live their lives according to the preconceptions of the left, rather than according to their own direct personal experiences and preferences.
The busybody left has launched a political
