Patrick Fucile's Weblog

Glenn Beck Vs. The Left

Patrick Fucile — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 03:58:11 +0000

Of all the details surrounding the liberal mob attack on Glenn Beck and his family in New York’s Bryant Park last Monday night, one element stands out. “No, it won’t be like that, Dad,” his daughter said when Beck questioned the wisdom of attending a free, outdoor movie showing in a New York park. People who have never been set upon by a mob of liberals have absolutely no idea what it’s like to be a publicly recognizable conservative. Even your friends will constantly be telling you: “Oh, it will be fine. Don’t worry. Nothing will happen. This place isn’t like that.” Liberals are not like most Americans. They are the biggest pussies on Earth, city-bred weaklings who didn’t play a sport and have never been in a fight in their entire lives. Their mothers made excuses for them when they threw tantrums and spent way too much time praising them during toilet training. I could draw a mug shot of every one of Beck’s tormentors, and I wasn’t there. Beck and his family would have been fine at an outdoor rap concert. They would have been fine at a sporting event. They would have been fine at any paid event, mostly because people who work for the government and live in rent-controlled apartments would be too cheap to attend. Only a sad leftist with a crappy job could be so brimming with self-righteousness to harangue a complete stranger in public. A liberal’s idea of being a bad-ass is to say vicious things to a conservative public figure who can’t afford to strike back. Getting in a stranger’s face and hurling insults at him, knowing full well he has too much at risk to deck you, is like baiting a bear chained to a wall. They are not only exploiting our lawsuit-mad culture, they are exploiting other people’s manners. I know I’ll be safe because this person has better manners than I do. These brave-hearts know exactly what they can get away with. They assault a conservative only when it’s a sucker-punch, they outnumber him, or he can’t fight back for reasons of law or decorum. Liberals don’t get that when you’re outnumbering the enemy 100-1, you’re not brave. But they’re not even embarrassed. To the contrary, being part of the majority makes liberals feel great! Honey, wasn’t I amazing? I stood in a crowd of liberals and called that conservative a c**t. Wasn’t I awesome? This is a liberal’s idea of raw physical courage. When someone does fight back, liberals transform from aggressor to victim in an instant, collapsing on the ground and screaming bloody murder. I’ve seen it happen in a nearly empty auditorium when there was quite obviously no other human within 5 feet of the gutless invertebrate. People incapable of conforming to the demands of civilized society are frightening precisely because you never know what else such individuals are capable of. Sometimes — a lot more often than you’ve heard about — liberals do engage in physical violence against conservatives … and then bravely run away. That’s why not one person stepped up to aid Beck and his family as they were being catcalled and having wine dumped on them at a nice outdoor gathering. No one ever steps in. Never, not once, not ever. (Except at the University of Arizona, where college Republicans chased my assailant and broke his collarbone, God bless them.) Most people are shocked into paralysis at the sight of sociopathic liberal behavior. The only ones who aren’t are the conservative’s bodyguards — and they can’t do anything without risking a lawsuit or an arrest. My hero Tim Profitt is now facing charges for stopping a physical assault on Senate candidate Rand Paul by a crazed woman disguised in a wig. But the disturbed liberal whose assault Profitt stopped faces no charges — she instigated the entire confrontation and then instantly claimed victim status. In a better America, the cop would say, “Well, you provoked him.” Kentucky prosecutors must be very proud of how they so dutifully hew to the letter of the law (except in the case of Paul’s assailant). Maybe they wouldn’t be such good little rules-followers if they ever, just once, had to face the liberal mob themselves. But if Beck’s own daughter can’t imagine the liberal mob, I suppose prosecutors can’t be expected to, either. Michael Moore and James Carville can stroll anywhere in America without risking the sort of behavior the Beck family experienced. But all recognizable conservatives are eternally trapped in David Dinkins’ New York: Simply by virtue of leaving their homes, they assume a 20 percent chance of being assaulted. As long as liberals can’t be normal and prosecutors can’t be reasonable, how about a one-punch rule against anyone bothering a stranger in public? Then we’ll see how brave these lactose-intolerant mama’s boys are. Believe me, liberal mobbings will stop very quickly after the first toilet-training champion takes his inaugural punch.

Hope, Change, and the Occasional Sex Dream

Patrick Fucile — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 03:48:19 +0000

Liberals have all the earmarks of mob psychology. Their myths, slogans, demands for immediate action, messianic goals, demonization of opponents, creation of political idols and occasional resorts to violence — all this is classic herd behavior. Because mobs are irrational, immature, subject to wild passions and infatuations, they cannot be reasoned with. And they are always dangerous. The mob attributes of liberals we will review this week are a crowd’s inability to perceive contradictions and its tendency to form an infatuation for an individual. Consider just one blinding contradiction recently embraced by liberals. Immediately after Jared Loughner’s shooting spree in Tucson, Americans were lectured on civility by the likes of Keith “the leading terrorist group in this country right now is the Republican Party” Olbermann. Two days after the shooting, The New York Times ran an op-ed by former Democratic congressman Paul Kanjorski (Pa.) calling for “an atmosphere of civility” to eliminate a “fear of violent confrontation.” Only months earlier, Kanjorski had said of the Republican candidate for governor in Florida (now governor), Rick Scott: “They ought to have him and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him.” But the media turned to one man more than any other to discuss how rhetoric can lead to violence: Al Sharpton — someone whose rhetoric actually had inspired violent mobs. In addition to libeling innocent men in the Tawana Brawley hoax, ginning up angry mobs outside the Central Park jogger’s rapists’ trial, whipping up mobs after a car accident in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood killed a black child and a rabbinical student was stabbed to death, Sharpton famously incited an anti-Semitic pogrom against a Jewish-owned clothing store in Harlem, saying, “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.” Someone who was listening to Sharpton later decided to storm the store and start shooting, wounding several employees, and setting a fire that killed seven people. Of course, after all this, Sharpton became a pariah — oh wait! In the opposite of being exiled, he became famous, ran for president as a Democrat and Al Gore kissed his ring, after these events. In January of this year, Sharpton was repeatedly rolled out as the expert commentator on civil discourse — on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” NPR, CNN and MSNBC. As MSNBC’s Ed Schultz said in introducing him, “Al Sharpton is on a crusade against hate speech on talk radio.” In light of Sharpton’s history, you’d think that, in the middle of the Arizona shooting being blamed on “rhetoric,” someone in his organization might have said: “Boss, I’d keep a low profile for the next couple of weeks. We just don’t want you to be on TV right now because someone is going to say — ‘Hey, how about Freddy’s? What about Gavin Cato’s funeral? Weren’t you the guy stirring up the violent rabble at the trial for the Central Park jogger’s rape?’”They needn’t have worried. No one brought up any of the mayhem that had followed Sharpton’s speeches. As Gustave Le Bon, the father of groupthink, explains: A crowd’s “complete lack of critical spirit does not allow of its perceiving these contradictions.” Second and most obviously, liberals fanatically worship their leaders. FDR, JFK, Clinton, Obama — they’re all “rock stars” to Democrats. They’re the Beatles, Elvis, Abraham Lincoln or Jesus, depending on which cliche liberals are searching for. Nearly seven decades after FDR was president and five decades after JFK was, we still have to listen to liberals drone on about their stupendousness. It’s as if Republicans demanded constant praise for Calvin Coolidge. Even Republicans are forced to pretend to admire these profligate Democrats in order to court Democratic voters. Republicans don’t mention Reagan as much, and he was a better president.

Margaret Thatcher’s Rule

Patrick Fucile — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 04:38:58 +0000

Margaret Thatcher had a rule, “First you win the argument. Then you win the vote.” The budget deal forged by Speaker Boehner and the Democrats is evidence that conservatives have won the argument about the dire need to stop the out of control spending in Washington. How else to explain the fact that President Obama, who just a few months ago was ferociously arguing that more federal spending was necessary to promote job growth, praised the deal as “the largest annual spending cut in history.” Winning the Argument and the Ryan Budget, In the spirit of a thrilling Masters Golf tournament this weekend, think of last week’s budget deal for the rest of fiscal year 2011 as a birdie on the opening hole. It’s a significant achievement that advances you toward victory, but there is much more work to be done. While the nearly $40 billion reduction for the remainder of this year is a fairly small amount of money when compared to our $1.4 trillion projected deficit, the deal sets the stage for the much larger battles ahead over increasing the debt ceiling and the 2012 budget. Now that the argument has been won about the need to reduce spending and get our deficit under control, the next argument to be won is about how to do it. On this question of “how,” Paul Ryan’s budget proposal for 2012 is the most serious attempt by an elected official to rethink our public finances and the modern welfare state in a generation. The plan reduces spending by over $6 trillion from President Obama’s proposed budgets for the next ten years. It will bring federal spending as a percentage of GDP, projected to be nearly 25% this year, back to the postwar norm of under 20%. By 2022, this budget will shave $4.4 trillion off the federal debt. That’s because Ryan’s plan boldly tackles entitlement reform, which the president’s budget studiously avoided despite the fact that entitlement programs make up the largest share of the federal budget. It also fundamentally reshapes the tax code to make America more competitive in the world market. Returning to the golf metaphor, you might think of the boldness of this plan as Ryan’s eagle building upon Boehner’s birdie. Now, the other players are forced to play more aggressively to catch up.

Taxpayers At The Bargaining Table?

Patrick Fucile — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 04:34:28 +0000

When Wisconsin Democrats fled the state in order to avoid voting on splendiferous public sector union contracts, did they happen to notice that the rest of the country is in the midst of a massive recession? For years, Democrats have been using taxpayer money so that their buddies in public sector unions never have to know when there’s a recession. People who are already suffering have to suffer more so that those who are doing pretty well don’t have to suffer at all. The high salaries and magnificent benefits paid to government employees are used to fund the public sector unions, which then funnel a portion of that money back to the Democrats, who vote for the pay packages of government workers. The unions function as a pass-through from the taxpayers straight to Democrats running for re-election. As a result, taxpayers are paying people to continually raise their taxes. In 2010, three of the five top campaign contributors to the Democrats were public sector unions. Service Employees International was No. 2 at $11.6 million in campaign contributions to Democrats, the National Education Association was No. 3 at $8 million, and the American Federation of Teachers was No. 5 at $7 million. (To put that in perspective, that’s even more than the $1 million given to Obama in 2008 by his second-largest contributor, Goldman Sachs!) Liberals don’t love big government because they think it’s efficient, compassionate, fair or even remotely useful. They support big government because they are guaranteed the support of nearly everyone who works for the government. Public sector employee contracts are written by the union and rubber-stamped by Democrats — and the taxpayers only find out years later that public school teachers are allowed to get a full year’s pay for 30 days’ work over three years after they retire — as is the case in Green Bay, Wis., where one out of every 12 teachers retired this year to take advantage of the “emeritus” scam. This is what all the commotion is about in Wisconsin. Republican Gov. Scott Walker isn’t even trying to eliminate collective bargaining for government workers’ salaries. He only wants to eliminate collective bargaining over their conditions of employment, which has led to massive inefficiencies. Thanks to union grievance procedures, the union representing school crossing guards filed a formal complaint over a sweet old man volunteering to get the kids across the street in Wausau, Wis. Warren Eschenbach, an 86-year-old retiree, had been volunteering each morning as a crossing guard at a school near his home. But according to the union, only a highly paid government employee should be permitted to do that job. Fifth-grader Megan Sichterman, told WAOW, an ABC affiliate, “I was really sad because all the kids really like him. He’s really nice to everybody, and I was kind of scared at the same time that we wouldn’t see him on the corner anymore.” Even in the middle of the battle over collective bargaining rights for government unions, just last month the snowplow operators’ union filed a grievance against Racine, Wis., to demand paid days off for snowplow operators … after a snowstorm. After a massive storm shut down the city for two days, snowplow operators thought they deserved two paid days off on account of all the snow, like other government employees got. But with government, the consumer has no choice: We have to buy from the company store. Government employees will always have more passion and commitment about increasing their own salaries and perks than will the taxpayers, who have to worry about their own jobs and salaries. The public — especially the taxpayer — will always lose. That is simply a fact about government jobs that can’t be avoided. What doesn’t make sense is to implement a system that invites this kind of mutual back-scratching between the Democrats and public sector unions — to wit, collective bargaining where there is no “management,” but only co-conspirators against the taxpayers on both sides of the bargaining table.

Humanitarian??

Patrick Fucile — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 04:22:37 +0000

“Humanitarian” seems to be the Democrats’ new word for “absolutely no national interest.” The Democrats were not so interested in a “humanitarian” intervention against a much more brutal dictator in Iraq. But, of course, taking out Saddam Hussein, a state sponsor of terrorism who harbored one of the perpetrators of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, would make Americans safer. Democrats are furious whenever American boys (girls and gays) are put in harm’s way — unless the troops are on a mission that has nothing whatsoever to do with defending the United States. Obama ignored the murder, imprisonment and torture of peaceful Iranian protesters demonstrating against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s theft of an election in 2009. But he was hopping mad about Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak getting rough with a mob in Tahrir Square with less distinct objectives. We knew what the Iranian students wanted: a stolen election overturned. What did the Egyptians want? At the time, liberals angrily cited the high unemployment rate in Egypt as proof that Mubarak was a beast who must step down. Have they, by any chance, seen the recent employment numbers for the U.S.? The only employment sectors showing any growth are Hollywood sober-living coaches and medical marijuana dispensaries. Are we one jobs report away from liberals rioting in the streets? As The New York Times recently reported, since Mubarak stepped down, the driving force in the new government is the Muslim Brotherhood. America is worse off because Mubarak stepped down, which was Obama’s exact foreign policy objective. On Monday night, Obama gave a speech intended to explain America’s mission and purpose in our new Libyan adventure. He said: “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different.” He forgot to add: “However, the United States of America will be turning a blind eye to atrocities in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, the Ivory Coast and Bahrain.” One searches in vain for a description of some American interest in supporting the rebels in Libya. True, Gadhafi was responsible for numerous terrorist acts against Americans in the 1980s, including blowing up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people, including 189 Americans. Soon after President Bush’s 9/11 speech vowing to go to war not only with terrorists, but those who supported them, Gadhafi accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and paid the victims’ families $8 million apiece. After Bush invaded Iraq, Gadhafi suspended Libya’s nuclear and chemical weapons program, inviting international inspectors to verify that the programs had been halted. A few years after that, Gadhafi paid millions of dollars to the victims of other Libyan-sponsored terrorist attacks from the ’80s. In return, President Bush granted Libya immunity from terror-related lawsuits. Only Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly thinks Obama is intervening in Libya to avenge the Lockerbie bombing. However far off the mark Gadhafi is from being the Libyan George Washington, he poses no threat to the U.S. — whereas the rebels we are supporting might. But Democrats couldn’t care less about the interests of their own country. Indeed, if there were the slightest possibility that our intervention in Libya would somehow benefit the United States, they would hysterically oppose it. The only just wars, liberals believe, are those in which the United States has no stake. Liberals warm to the idea of deploying expensive, taxpayer-funded military machinery and putting American troops in harm’s way, but only for military incursions that serve absolutely no American interest.

Yet Another B.S. Speech

Patrick Fucile — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 04:16:03 +0000

In His B.S speech…Does President Obama cite working with Congress more than working with the Arab League or the United Nations? No. President Obama mentioned Congress just once in a 3,400 word speech. In contrast, he mentioned the United Nations Security Council and Arab league eight times. Furthermore, he dedicated a significant portion of his speech to the importance of cooperation between Western and Arab allies. As I have said, I do think having allies in this effort is valuable, especially Arab ones. However, that desire must be appropriately balanced against the obligation the president has to respect Congress’ role, as well as the objectives of the mission at hand (more on this later). President Obama made it remarkably clear in his speech that he places a much higher value on gaining the approval of the United Nations and the Arab League than he does on consulting Congress. By his own account, he committed the United States to action with a United Nations resolution before consulting with Congressional leaders, which he did only just before the bombing began. The president also never seemed to consider the fact that allies – including Arab ones – could have been assembled faster in a way that bypassed the corruption of the United Nations. 2. Does President Obama define replacing Qaddafi as our clear and explicit goal? Having said Qaddafi “needs to leave” that has to be the goal of this war. No. In fact, he said quite the opposite, that our mission was to stop an imminent humanitarian catastrophe and that “broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.” There are two problems with the president’s argument. The first goes back to the disproportional value the president places on gaining the approval of the United Nations. The president tried to make the case Monday night that our military engagement was justified in order to protect human life. Yet, the first reports of Qaddafi’s forces firing on the Libyan people, including with his air force, arose in late February. On March 5th the Libyan dictator’s army fired on unarmed protesters. On March 6th, his forces laid siege to the rebel-held town of Zawiyah. The president, however, chose to wait almost two weeks, until March 19th, for a diplomatic consensus to emerge and resolutions to be passed in the U.N. Security Council before taking action. The disturbing conclusion one can draw from President Obama’s actions is that he believes the special duty he spoke of, for the United States to not turn a blind eye to atrocities committed by dictators, ranks lower on his list of priorities than gaining approval from the United Nations to do something about them. He clearly favors muddled coalition consensus to moral leadership. The second problem is that leaving Qaddafi in power will not stop the humanitarian crisis; it simply drives it underground. In the face of overwhelming military superiority, Qaddafi will most likely conclude that his best option is to retaliate in ways that cannot be stopped with air power. In fact, hearing the President of the United States publicly say he would not use the military to drive him out of power will almost certainly convince Qaddafi his best option is to dig in. The United States is signaling that all he has to do is wait it out because the president has explicitly told Qaddafi that we are not going to force him to leave power. This leaves us with an open ended commitment to enforce a no-fly zone. The Iraq no-fly zone lasted a dozen years and did not remove Saddam Hussein from power. The simple fact is that so long as Qaddafi remains in power, the people of Libya remain at risk of violence by their government. That’s why the president’s “mission accomplished” message rings so hollow. Does President Obama pledge to send a request to Congress to pay for the cost of the war so our men and women in uniform are not asked to take it out of an already stretched budget while they are still engaged in two other wars and several small campaigns? No. The president did not mention how this effort was going to be paid for. All indications are that it will come directly from the Pentagon’s budget, leaving our men and women in uniform who are already stretched with even fewer resources. What Should Have Been Done versus What Must Be Done Now…Get out and stop the B.S.

Scientific Studies…Really

Patrick Fucile — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 05:18:13 +0000

In response to some columns last week about hormesis — the theory that some radiation can be beneficial to humans — liberals reacted with their usual open-minded examination of the facts. According to Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz devoted an entire segment to denouncing it. He called those who agree with it toxic, accused of spreading misinformation and didn’t care about science. One thing Schultz did not do, however, was cite a single physicist or scientific study. I cited three physicists by name as well as four studies supporting hormesis in my column. For the benefit of liberals scared of science, I even cited The New York Times. It tells you something that the most powerful repudiation of hormesis Schultz could produce was the fact that a series of government agencies have concluded — I quote — that “insufficient human data on hormesis exists.” Well, in that case, I take it all ba -– wait, no. That contradicts nothing I said in my column. Liberals should take up their quarrel with the physicists cited by both me and the Times. I’m sure the Harvard physics department will be fascinated to discover that the left’s idea of the scientific method is to cling to their fears while hurling invective at anyone who proposes a novel thesis. The fact that liberals are so terrified of science that they chronically wet themselves wouldn’t be half as annoying if they didn’t go around boasting about their deep respect for science, especially compared to conservatives. Apparently this criticism is based on conservatives’ skepticism about global warming — despite the studies of distinguished research scientists Dr. Alicia Silverstone and Dr. Woody Harrelson. (In my case, it’s only because I’m still waiting for liberals’ global cooling theory from the ’70s to come true.) The left’s idea of “science” is that we should all be riding bicycles and using the Clivus Multrum composting latrines instead of flush toilets. Anyone who dissents, they say — while adjusting their healing crystals for emphasis — is “afraid of science.” A review of the record, however, shows that time and again liberals have been willing to corrupt public policy and allow people to die in order to enforce the Luddite views of groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists (original name, “Union of Concerned Activist Lawyers Who Took a Science Course in High School”). Both the government and the entire mainstream media lied about AIDS in the ’80s by scaring Americans into believing that heterosexuals were as much at risk for acquiring AIDS as gays and intravenous drug users. The science had to be lied about so no one’s feelings got hurt. In 1985, Life magazine’s cover proclaimed: “NOW, NO ONE IS SAFE FROM AIDS.” In 1987, U.S. News & World Report reported that AIDS was “finding fertile growth among heterosexuals.” Also in 1987, Dr. Oprah Winfrey said that “research studies” predicted that “one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years.” In 1988, ABC’s “20/20″ claimed the CDC had discovered a shocking upsurge of heterosexual infections on college campuses. It struck no one as odd that 28 of the 30 infections had occurred in men (with alphabetized spice racks and at least three cats, one named Blanche). Two years later, CNN broadcast that same 1988 study, proclaiming: “A new report from CDC indicates that AIDS is on the rise on college campuses.” A quarter-century later, and we’re still waiting for the big heterosexual AIDS outbreak. But at least science achieved its primary purpose: AIDS was not stigmatized as a “gay disease.” Scientific facts were ignored so that science would be nonjudgmental. That was more important than the truth. Liberal activists also gave us the alar scare in the late ’80S based on the studies of world renowned chemist and national treasure Meryl Streep. Alar is a perfectly safe substance that had been used on apples since 1968 both to ripen and preserve the fruit. It made fresh fruit more accessible by allowing fruit pickers to make one sweep through the apple grove, producing ripe, fresh fruit to be distributed widely and cheaply. But after hearing the blood-chilling testimony of Streep, hysterical soccer moms across America hopped in their Volvos, dashed to their children’s schools and ripped the apples from the little ones’ lunch boxes. “Delicious, McIntosh and Granny Smith” were added to “Hitler, Stalin and Mao” as names that will live in infamy. The EPA proposed banning alar based on a study that involved pumping tens of thousands times more alar into rats than any human could possibly consume, and observing the results. The rats died — of poisoning, not tumors – but the EPA banned it anyway. Poor people went back to eating Twinkies instead of healthy fresh fruit. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization advised against an alar ban and Europeans continued to eat fruit with alar in their nice warm houses powered by nuclear energy (halted in the U.S. thanks to the important work of Dr. Jackson Browne and Dr. Bonnie Raitt). But just to be safe, we all better stop driving cars, eating off of clean dishes and using aerosol sprays. Some of the other scientific studies and innovations that make liberals cry are: vaccines, IQ studies, breast implants and DDT. After decades of this nonsense, The New York Times’ Paul Krugman has the audacity to brag that liberals believe the “truth should be determined by research, not revelation.” Yes — provided the “research” is conducted by trial lawyers and Hollywood actresses rather than actual scientists.

Radiation… Next Cancer Vaccine

Patrick Fucile — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 04:57:36 +0000

With the terrible earthquake and resulting tsunami that have devastated Japan, the only good news is that anyone exposed to excess radiation from the nuclear power plants is now probably much less likely to get cancer. This only seems counterintuitive because of media hysteria for the past 20 years trying to convince Americans that radiation at any dose is bad. There is, however, burgeoning evidence that excess radiation operates as a sort of cancer vaccine. As The New York Times science section reported in 2001, an increasing number of scientists believe that at some level — much higher than the minimums set by the U.S. government — radiation is good for you. “They theorize,” the Times said, that “these doses protect against cancer by activating cells’ natural defense mechanisms.” Among the studies mentioned by the Times was one in Canada finding that tuberculosis patients subjected to multiple chest X-rays had much lower rates of breast cancer than the general population. And there are lots more! A $10 million Department of Energy study from 1991 examined 10 years of epidemiological research by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health on 700,000 shipyard workers, some of whom had been exposed to 10 times more radiation than the others from their work on the ships’ nuclear reactors. The workers exposed to excess radiation had a 24 percent lower death rate and a 25 percent lower cancer mortality than the non-irradiated workers. Isn’t that just incredible? I mean, that the Department of Energy spent $10 million doing something useful? Amazing, right? In 1983, a series of apartment buildings in Taiwan were accidentally constructed with massive amounts of cobalt 60, a radioactive substance. After 16 years, the buildings’ 10,000 occupants developed only five cases of cancer. The cancer rate for the same age group in the general Taiwanese population over that time period predicted 170 cancers. The people in those buildings had been exposed to radiation nearly five times the maximum “safe” level according to the U.S. government. But they ended up with a cancer rate 96 percent lower than the general population. Bernard L. Cohen, a physics professor at the University of Pittsburgh, compared radon exposure and lung cancer rates in 1,729 counties covering 90 percent of the U.S. population. His study in the 1990s found far fewer cases of lung cancer in those counties with the highest amounts of radon — a correlation that could not be explained by smoking rates. Tom Bethell, author of the “Politically Incorrect Guide to Science,” has been writing for years about the beneficial effects of some radiation, or “hormesis.” A few years ago, he reported on a group of scientists who concluded their conference on hormesis at the University of Massachusetts by repairing to a spa in Boulder, Mont., specifically in order to expose themselves to excess radiation. At the Free Enterprise Radon Health Mine in Boulder, people pay $5 to descend 85 feet into an old mining pit to be irradiated with more than 400 times the EPA-recommended level of radon. In the summer, 50 people a day visit the mine hoping for relief from chronic pain and autoimmune disorders. Amazingly, even the Soviet-engineered disaster at Chernobyl in 1986 can be directly blamed for the deaths of no more than the 31 people inside the plant who died in the explosion. Although news reports generally claimed a few thousand people died as a result of Chernobyl — far fewer than the tens of thousands initially predicted — that hasn’t been confirmed by studies. Indeed, after endless investigations, including by the United Nations, Manhattan Project veteran Theodore Rockwell summarized the reports to Bethell in 2002, saying, “They have not yet reported any deaths outside of the 30 who died in the plant.” Even the thyroid cancers in people who lived near the reactor were attributed to low iodine in the Russian diet — and consequently had no effect on the cancer rate. Meanwhile, the animals around the Chernobyl reactor, who were not evacuated, are “thriving,” according to scientists quoted in the April 28, 2002 Sunday Times (UK). Dr. Dade W. Moeller, a radiation expert and professor emeritus at Harvard, told the Times that it’s been hard to find excess cancers even from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, particularly because one-third of the population will get cancer anyway. There were about 90,000 survivors of the atomic bombs in 1945 and, more than 50 years later, half of them were still alive. (Other scientists say there were 700 excess cancer deaths among the 90,000.) Although it is hardly a settled scientific fact that excess radiation is a health benefit, there’s certainly evidence that it decreases the risk of some cancers — and there are plenty of scientists willing to say so. But Jenny McCarthy’s vaccine theories get more press than Harvard physics professors’ studies on the potential benefits of radiation. (And they say conservatives are anti-science!) I guess good radiation stories are not as exciting as news anchors warning of mutant humans and scary nuclear power plants — news anchors who, by the way, have injected small amounts of poison into their foreheads to stave off wrinkles. Which is to say: The general theory that small amounts of toxins can be healthy is widely accepted –except in the case of radiation. Every day Americans pop multivitamins containing trace amount of zinc, magnesium, selenium, copper, manganese, chromium, molybdenum, nickel, boron — all poisons. They get flu shots. They’ll drink copious amounts of coffee to ingest a poison: caffeine. (Back in the ’70s, Professor Cohen offered to eat as much plutonium as Ralph Nader would eat caffeine — an offer Nader never accepted.) But in the case of radiation, the media have Americans convinced that the minutest amount is always deadly. Although reporters love to issue sensationalized reports about the danger from Japan’s nuclear reactors, remember that, so far, thousands have died only because of Mother Nature. And the survivors may outlive all of us over here in hermetically sealed, radiation-free America.

A Strong Work Ethic?

Patrick Fucile — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 04:47:36 +0000

As Obama rakes in historic campaign contributions from Wall Street money, liberals claim Republicans are beholden to “the rich.” However that may be, it is far more true, and far less remarked upon, that the Democratic Party is the party of public sector unions. And now, the nation watches helplessly as public sector unions and their Democratic allies say to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker: Nice state you got there, governor. Be a shame if something bad happened to it. For Democrats, the purpose of government is to generously provide jobs for people who otherwise couldn’t be hired — because their skills, attitude or sense of entitlement are considered undesirable in the private sector. And no, I’m not just talking about Barack Obama. Democrats use taxpayer money to fund a government jobs program, impoverishing the middle class and harming the people allegedly helped by the programs — but creating a vast class of voters who owe their jobs to the Democrats. This is a system designed to ratchet up costs. Look at the history of every entity where public employees have unionized, and you will find that not only are government workers paid more, but there are also a lot more of them doing a lot less useful work. There could be two students per class, and the Democrats would still be campaigning for “smaller class size,” so that the government would be required to hire more public school teachers to staff classes with one student. For Democrats, the purpose of public education in this country is not to teach children; it’s to create jobs for “educators.” Forget the nonsense about working men with dirt under their fingernails, slugging it out at dangerous jobs with a heartless management riding them to get more production at lower wages –- those guys are what liberal journalist Harold Meyerson calls “dead weight.” We’re talking about government employees, most of whom — when they show up to work at all — sit in comfortable, air-conditioned offices, kick off at 3 p.m., are entitled to endless sick days, personal days and holidays, whose performance can never be evaluated and who retire at age 50. (Again, I’m not focusing just on Barack Obama here.) Government employees are even worse than welfare layabouts. In a triple-whammy for the taxpayer, they are: (1) hideously expensive, (2) impossible to fire, and (3) doing things you don’t want done at any price. Hey, guess what? I’m from the government, and I can burn down your garage for $300! NO! I’M NOT INTERESTED! OK, fine, I’ll do it for you for $20. BUT I DON’T WANT MY GARAGE BURNED DOWN AT ANY PRICE! OK, the guys with the matches and gasoline will be by sometime between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. one day next week. As with so many other things, such as vegan restaurants and the crack epidemic, California leads the country in destruction by government unions. California’s civil service unions have employed all the usual thug techniques –- regular strikes (illegal until the California Supreme Court approved them in 1985), rolling strikes, the “blue flu” (cops and other public-safety workers calling in “sick”) — all of which are almost as harmful to the state as when they actually show up for work. While taxpayers groan under their tax burdens, one group of voters is constantly lobbying for higher taxes: government employees, who are paid by the taxpayer. When California voters approved Proposition 13 back in 1978, cutting astronomical property taxes 57 percent, the public sector unions went ballistic. Union bigwig Ron Coleman said, “We’re not going to just lie back and take it.” John Seferian, vice president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), said the union should have told politicians: “Hey, we’ll bring the roof down on you.” (Which you have to be a member of the roofers’ union to do.) Jerry Wurf, president of AFSCME, warned that the union was “prepared for confrontation.” His solution to the ballooning cost of government employees was … guess? That’s right, it was the same as it always is: Tax the rich. “Let the big shots pay!” Wurf said. Embodying the hopes and dreams of our Founding Fathers, Wurf said organizing government employees was part of his goal to “remake the economic and political system” in line with the vision of socialist Norman Thomas and the Young People’s Socialist League. Members of public sector unions see their pensions and benefits the way the Mafia views its “partnership” with a restaurant, as described in the movie “Goodfellas”: “Business bad? F–k you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? F–k you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? F–k you, pay me.”
Spoiler alert: When the restaurant owner is unable to pay his mob tribute, they burn the place to the ground.
But government employees aren’t exactly like the mob. At least the Mafia guys have a strong work ethic.

Something Is Not Adding Up

Patrick Fucile — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 04:38:34 +0000

America is facing a fiscal crisis of the first order. Our national debt is spiraling to unprecedented and unsustainable levels. Earlier this month, the White House predicted that the federal government will spend nearly $4 trillion this year. Meanwhile, it will collect barely $2 trillion in revenues. After two years of profligate spending and a stunning rebuke at the polls, President Obama tried to create the impression during his State of the Union address that he was reevaluating the unchecked spending habits of his first two years in office: “But now that the worst of the recession is over, we have to confront the fact that our government spends more than it takes in. That is not sustainable. Every day, families sacrifice to live within their means. They deserve a government that does the same.” Unfortunately, the President quickly proved these were just empty words. The 2012 budget proposed by the White House is a totally unserious and insulting continuation of the reckless big spending policies of Obama’s first two years in office. Obama Can Talk the Talk, But He Can’t Walk the Walk,The talk from the White House sounds fiscally responsible, but the actual numbers show this administration is still in denial about our debt crisis. The President plans on adding nearly $5 trillion more to the debt held by the American public between now and 2016, bringing the total that we owe to creditors to over $15 trillion dollars. (For a bit of context, in 1999, the last year I was Speaker, the publicly-held debt was only $3.6 trillion, and we were in the process of paying down nearly $500 billion of our debt by balancing four consecutive budgets. The projected deficit in 2011 is nearly as large as ALL federal spending in 1999.) Nevertheless, in the press conference where he revealed his budget, the President tried to recast himself as a diligent custodian of the country’s fiscal house. He told reporters: “What my budget does is to put forward some tough choices, some significant spending cuts, so that by the middle of this decade our annual spending will match our annual revenues. We will not be adding more to the national debt. So, to use a — sort of an analogy that families are familiar with, we’re not going to be running up the credit card anymore.” This posture from the President is fundamentally dishonest. First, the numbers simply do not add up. As the President’s own Office of Management and Budget admits, in 2015 – “the middle of our decade”— the federal government will be taking in about $3.6 billion in revenues, but plans on spending $4.2 billion that year. That’s because on top of new spending, in 2015 alone, we will be paying $494 billion in interest on our debt. That means that nearly 12% of all spending, more than half of what we will spend on all national security, will go just towards paying off our creditors. Much of this interest is owed on the roughly $3 trillion in debt that the President has already incurred in only 25 months in office. Furthermore, Obama’s own budget projections show that by 2021 the annual deficit will start growing again, to nearly $800 billion. Obama’s “New Normal” Second, many of the President’s supporters have hyped the contention that this budget will aim to cut $1.1 trillion from the deficit over the next decade. This is technically true, but completely misses the point. Federal spending jumped almost 18% between 2008 and 2009 thanks to the bank bailouts and stimulus. These programs were intended to be a one-time emergency jumpstart in 2009, then spending was supposed to return to more modest levels in the following years. Instead, President Obama and his allies are treating 2009 as the “new normal,” and grown spending from that baseline ever since. Thus, these “cuts” are merely small reductions from a grossly inflated baseline. Although spending will actually drop in 2012 over 2011, it is still up a staggering 25% since 2008. The month that President Obama took office, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office predicted that spending would be $3.39 trillion in 2012. Barack Obama now proposes to spend $3.72 trillion in 2012. The President is trying to talk the talk of a fiscal hawk. But his budget shows he has no intention of walking the walk. Look to the States for Leadership,If Americans want to find spending restraint in 2011, they should be looking to state capitols. Conservatives have rightly cheered the heroic efforts of Chris Christie in New Jersey and Scott Walker in Wisconsin as they have taken on the entrenched interests in their states that are the source of all this excessive spending. Today I want to highlight two other governors you may not expect. Although I’ve previously criticized the spendthrift practices in Albany and Sacramento in this newsletter, today I would like to praise the encouraging initial efforts of two governors – both Democrats – who have just assumed office in those state capitols. New California governor Jerry Brown and new New York State governor Andrew Cuomo both gave sobering addresses when unveiling their first budgets, but, unlike Obama, proposed spending cuts to match their rhetoric. Brown proposes to reduce spending in California’s General Fund 8.2% in fiscal 2012. Cuomo’s budget reduces spending from all government funds by 2.7% for the coming year. As a comparison, if Barack Obama had followed Gov. Brown’s example and cut 8.2% out of the federal budget for 2012, this would have meant a $313 billion reduction in spending, as opposed to a mere $90 billion drop off of Obama’s already inflated 2011 numbers. It will be interesting to watch how these budget proposals from two Democratic governors are received by all the interest groups that elected them. Conservatives in these states may find themselves in the interesting situation of supporting their Democratic governors against left-wing attacks as they attempt to deal with the reality of their bloated, unsustainable budgets. Time for a Balanced Budget Amendment. Why have governors, both Republican and Democrat, confronted the need to control spending with appropriate earnestness, while the federal government continues to act as if there is no budget crisis?