January 2012

Politics and . . . pizza

by Fran Smith on November 9, 2009

in Culture, Odds & Ends, Personal Liberty

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall (see CEI’s video celebrating that), it’s interesting to note that a pizza parlor in Shirlington, VA is promoting heroes of communism and Marxism.  And the source of that information is none other than the Washington Post’s Reliable Source today, which records an email exchange between a customer objecting to posters of Vladimir Lenin and Che Guevara on the walls of Busboys and Poets restaurant and the owner’s response praising those two icons.

The customer, Bradley Blakeman, should have known that his pizza would be served with a side dish of leftist politics.  After all, the owner of B&P, Andy Shallal, makes no bones about his commitment to leftist causes on his website.  And he emailed back to his disgruntled customer (and the Washington Post) that

Guevara and Lenin “represent the struggles of working people. . . . They fought against the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few.”

To be sure, that’s a fairly narrow way of looking at both of these figures. To some prominent scholars, Che is known for his “murderous collectivism,” while Lenin is widely regarded as one of history’s mass murderers.

It doesn’t sound like Blakeman will be a repeat customer at Shallal’s restaurant, but if comments on the Post article are any indication, Shallal will have no trouble finding fellow travelers.  Here’s one, for instance:

The lives of Che and Lenin are known and respected in every town of every country in the world in spite of the millions of words written and billions spent trying to rewrite history.

And that is because the struggle they dedicated themselves to is the same struggle working people all over the world today are still fighting.

If only that poster would read a bit of that history, including what the Berlin wall represented.

Ludwig von Mises Gets Respect

by Fred Smith on November 9, 2009

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Stimulus to Nowhere

“The Man Who Predicted the Depression,” in Saturday’s WSJ explains von Mises’s interpretation of the business cycle.  To Mises, volatility was inevitable with a politically controlled money supply – given to over and under supply of money.  The Federal Reserve and central banks generally are political-indeed, the most powerful Government Sponsored Enterprises.  When they ease credit via transactions with designated banks, banks in their ambit also view themselves as wealthier, spending and investing accordingly.  When credit is tightened, the reverse occurs.  Since these are political rather than market credit signals – they create instability in the economy.  Certain sectors (does “housing” come to mind?) grow excessively resulting in collapse (house cleaners in NYC purchasing condos for “investment” is an indication).  But politicians (Barney Frank, for example) find Mises’s view distasteful-how can all citizens achieve the American Dream of home ownership unless credit is free?

Of course, as the economist, Herbert Klein, often noted:  When something can’t go on forever, it will stop! It did and von Mises warned us of that many years ago.

Buffet Displays Hope in America’s Energy Future

by Fred Smith on November 9, 2009 · 1 comment

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Environment, Global Warming, Natural Resources, Stimulus to Nowhere

Warren Buffet, one of the most respected investors in America, recently purchased Burlington Northern, one of the nation’s largest railroads with some 32,000 miles of track.  BN like almost all railroads carries coal – lots of it from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming to the nation’s electrical power plants.  But President Obama and his Green allies are trying to end the use of coal in America.  If they succeed, the rail sector will collapse.

Buffet, according to the Wall Street Journal weekend edition is “betting on good old fashioned stuff – such as grain, coal for power plants and consumer goods imported from Asia – and the need to move it.”  Let’s hope he knows something we don’t – perhaps, Obama is about to do a “Clinton” reversal.  That would be good for America, for affordable energy and (ironically) also good for the Democratic party.  We can hope.

LibertyWeek 68: Take from the Rich, Give to Yourself

by Richard Morrison on November 9, 2009

in CEI Projects, Features, Podcast, Zeitgeist

Your host Richard Morrison teams up with Jeremy Lott and Josh Barro to bring you Episode 68 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with Saturday night’s healthcare vote in the House, Freddie Mac’s losing bets and a gift card scandal in Charm City. We then move on to Andrew Cuomo’s attack on Intel in New York and Josh tells us why we can expect more tax hikes in the future.

Fort Hood’s Lessons: Treat People Equally, Without Politically Correct Double Standards

by Hans Bader on November 9, 2009

in Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Intelligence officials knew that Nidal Hasan, the soldier who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, was trying to contract Al Qaeda.  (He once attended the same mosque as 9/11 terrorists.)

Although the killer’s extremist rantings were common knowledge, “a fear of appearing discriminatory . . . kept officers from filing a formal written complaint,” reports the Associated Press.  As a result, he escaped any disciplinary action or review of his fitness.

The Fort Hood shooter had previously said that Muslims should rise up against the military, “repeatedly expressed sympathy for suicide bombers,” was pleased by the terrorist murder of an army recruiter, and publicly called for the beheading or burning of non-Muslims, talking “about how if you’re a nonbeliever the Koran says you should have your head cut off, you should have oil poured down your throat, you should be set on fire.”  But thanks to a politically-correct double standard, nothing was done to remove him from a position where he could harm others.

The lesson of the Fort Hood shootings is that applying politically-correct double standards, rather than treating people equally, can be lethal.

In a desire to curry favor with the liberal Congress that funds it, the military has increasingly adopted politically-correct policies that abandon equal treatment, such as imposing racial preferences in admissions to the military academies in the name of “diversity.”  (In practice, “diversity” seems to mean “racial proportionality:” it is harder for Asians to be admitted to the academies than for whites and Hispanics, and harder for whites and Hispanics to be admitted than for African-Americans.  Such preferences are of dubious legality under Supreme Court precedent.)

In this climate of political correctness and double standards, it is understandable that officers were afraid to file complaints about Hasan, for fear that they would incur the wrath of the “diversity” police.  Even now, the Army Chief of Staff, General George Casey, seems mainly concerned that the shootings will undermine the army’s commitment to “diversity,” rather than being concerned about the double standard that spawned this tragedy.  He seems more concerned that “diversity” will become a “casualty” of such shootings than that his soldiers will.

President Obama’s initial response to the tragedy was embarrassing, even for some liberal journalists.  Obama’s initial remarks about the tragedy came buried in the middle of a speech laced with “wildly disconnected” ramblings about an unrelated topic, starting with a “joking shout-out.”  Even the liberal Boston Globe chided the president for a speech lacking in ”empathy” for the victims.

In an absurd display of political correctness, early media reports chose to harp on the false claim that the killer had PTSD (which he didn’t: he never even served overseas) or the unsupported claim that he had been subjected to harassment (support groups for Muslim soldiers say they have received no recent reports of a Muslim soldier being harassed “simply because he was Muslim”).  They also jumped to conclusions in denying (as Atlantic Magazine’s Max Fisher did) that the shooter’s motives had anything to do with his extreme religious beliefs or “any related political causes.”

In the aftermath of the shootings, some commentators have criticized a gun-control policy that disarms soldiers while on military bases to create “gun-free zones,” leaving them defenseless in the face of an attack.  The policy succeeded in disarming the killer’s victims, but not the killer himself.

20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

by Richard Morrison on November 9, 2009

in Video, Zeitgeist

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bw5pFiTeb0 285 234]

Twenty Years have Passed: The Fall of the Berlin Wall

by Fred Smith on November 9, 2009 · 3 comments

in Culture, Features, International, Zeitgeist

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came crashing down. Today marks the twentieth anniversary of that great day – one of the greatest in the history of human freedom. Communism in Germany finally collapsed, setting off a domino effect that would reach Moscow within two years. Families torn apart for nearly three decades came together in tearful, happy reunions as the world watched. The Cold War was finally, mercifully, ending.

Many historians cite World War I as the twentieth century’s opening act. Sixteen million souls died in that war over nothing. Two of the nations it toppled became the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Communist and fascist governments would combine to kill more than one hundred million people over the next seven decades. Those needless deaths are the twentieth century’s legacy, every bit as much as the transistor or rock ‘n roll.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was that short, bloody century’s coda.

November 9, 1989 was also the start of something better. It was a nation’s way of saying that it was ready to move on to better times. To a new world defined not by oppression, ideology, and servitude, but by freedom. Sweet, precious, fragile freedom. Seeing the footage on the news was like witnessing something being born. The hope and potential that surround every birth were glimmering in people’s eyes. It was beautiful.

What Berlin’s people did on that day also inspired half a continent to send the same message to their leaders. What a noble achievement. How worthy of commemoration, now that twenty years have passed.

What a shame, then, that this milestone has been treated more like a millstone by the media. Reporters more concerned with today’s news cycle are giving at best perfunctory attention to a day that showed us all that is good about humanity.

To partially right that wrong, CEI has produced a short video commemorating what the Berlin Wall’s fall symbolizes. I hope you will watch it and enjoy it. Of course, it is hard to convey in a few short minutes what the people living in that Wall’s shadow went through for 29 long years.

So put yourself in their shoes. Think what they thought. Look right in the eyes of those separated families as they try to catch glimpses of each other over that wall. And the people who risked their lives escaping. And the soldier carrying back the body of someone who didn’t make it. What was going through his mind as he carried out his grisly task? That might give you an idea of what the Berlin Wall meant.

We all need to remember the Berlin Wall. We need to say to each other, “Never again.” And we have to mean it.

House Passes Massive Health Care Bill

by Hans Bader on November 8, 2009

in Healthcare, Insurance, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Sanctimony

Just before midnight on Saturday, the House of Representatives passed a massive, 2000-page health care “reform” bill by a 220 to 215 vote. The bill, backed by the Obama administration, will raise taxes. It will also explode state and federal budget deficits and cost far more than promised. It contains special-interest pork, such as racial preferences that drew criticism from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The massive health-care bill passed by the House contains provisions sought by trial lawyers that will increase medical costs. Doctors afraid of being wrongly sued for malpractice despite providing good quality care order unnecessary tests (or defensive medicine), which wastes at least $200 billion annually.

In his 2008 campaign, Obama promised not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year. But this health care bill would impose a laundry list of new taxes on the middle class, including a tax on uninsured people. Americans for Tax Reform earlier summarized the tax increases in Obamacare: an individual mandate tax (if you don’t have health insurance); an employer mandate tax for each employee if health coverage is not offered; an “excise tax on high-cost health plans”; a “medicine cabinet tax”; capping Flexible-Spending Accounts (FSA’s); abolishing most HSAs; and increasing tax penalties for HSAs.

Flu Watch Nov. 7 – What Swine Flu Isn’t Doing This Week

by Michael Fumento on November 7, 2009

in Health and Illness, Odds & Ends

Well, what swine flu isn’t doing this week is apparently less than what it wasn’t doing last week. In other words, it appears to have peaked.

How do we know?

Here we see it’s going down the right side of the bell curve both in terms of deaths and hospitalizations.

And there’s both a massive decline in samples submitted to CDC surveillance labs and a small decline in those testing positive.

College infections have essentially gone flat.

And finally we see from the Australian swine flu data in figures 1,2, and 7 that swine flu does indeed resemble the normal epidemiological curve. Once cases start going down they keep going down.

Unfortunately, the “hysteria curve” as indicated by emergency room visits is still at the highest level in the century. You can probably credit the Obama administration declaration of a “national emergency” for that.

Soldier Kills 13 in Mass Shooting at Fort Hood: Political Correctness and Gun Control Cited by Critics

by Hans Bader on November 6, 2009 · 1 comment

in International, Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

A Muslim solder, Nidal Hasan, shot dead 13 people at Fort Hood yesterday. Hasan had earlier exhibited extremist, anti-American propensities, including applauding terrorist attacks against U.S. soldiers. There are different theories as to how this could have happened.

One school of thought attributes the tragedy to politically-correct double standards imposed on the military that kept the alarm bells from going off.

Other commentators point to a gun-control policy that disarms soldiers while on military bases to create “gun-free zones,” leaving them defenseless in the face of an attack.

These explanations are not mutually exclusive. Doubtless other factors could have contributed to the tragedy as well.

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →