Fire Hydrant of Freedom

By MICHAEL BOSKIN AND JOHN COGAN
California's fiscal and governance crisis careens from bad to worse. The latest blow: a 70% increase in the state's projected budget deficit in Gov. Jerry Brown's revised budget, to $16 billion from $9 billion. Meanwhile, S&P warns of a downgrade to the state's bond rating, already the lowest of any state, and the latest CEO survey ranks California's business climate dead last.

Caught in the symbiotic financial embrace of special interests—teacher and other public-employee unions, trial lawyers and environmental extremists—Mr. Brown and the state legislature repeatedly nibble around the edges of the budget broken by costly, ineffective programs, financed by an uncompetitive, volatile tax system.

Mr. Brown colorfully but correctly calls the budget, riddled with earmarks and creative accounting, a "pretzel palace of incredible complexity." He and the state legislature are choking on the pretzel. They've lost credibility by offering hopelessly optimistic projections; diverting revenue earmarked for other purposes (such as funds meant to help homeowners from the national bank-mortgage settlement) to the general fund; and gambling on Silicon Valley to produce more revenue from capital gains and stock options. Call it casino budgeting.

The governor describes his budget and November tax-hike ballot initiative as "real increased austerity" while calling on voters to "please increase taxes temporarily." Cutting through the shifting numbers and fanciful assumptions, what is actually proposed is closer to a permanent tax hike and modest temporary budget cuts to fund a permanent spending increase.

Mr. Brown's original bad idea, raising the state's top marginal tax rate of 10.3% to 12.3% for five years, is now even worse: a highest-in-the-nation 13.3% on individuals and small businesses for seven years retroactive to Jan. 1, 2012, and a small increase in the sales tax for next year.

While the governor proposes cuts in social services, higher education and the courts, total spending nevertheless goes up to $91.4 billion in fiscal year 2013 from $86.5 billion in 2012, a 6% increase. Spending on K-12 education alone rises beyond constitutional requirements to $38.5 billion from $34 billion, a 13% increase.

In the past, Californians have supported more education spending on the assumption it would improve education outcomes. It hasn't. Sadly, the state has an elementary and secondary school system that ranks in the bottom fifth of all 50 states in math scores, and a high-school dropout rate that's soared relative to other states, especially for African Americans and Hispanics.

The prison system spends $45,000 per year per inmate—about equal to the median take-home pay of American families. Welfare and MediCal (the state's Medicaid program) caseloads are vastly in excess of national averages.

Mr. Brown does have some good proposals. He's bringing the state's welfare-to-work program in line with federal rules, and he's called for small Medicaid co-pays, which the Obama administration foolishly blocked. But his bad ideas far outweigh the good, including restricting the use of private contractors on public projects and a $68 billion high-speed rail proposal that would drain revenues from higher priorities for decades.

The governor's one innovative program is "realignment" between the state and counties, especially of the state's overburdened prison system. But counties worry that costs of the permanent shift of convicts from state prisons to county jails will eventually fall to them.

Unlike other governors from both parties who pushed overdue reforms, opposed by public-employee unions, through their legislatures—Wisconsin's Scott Walker, New Jersey's Chris Christie and New York's Andrew Cuomo, to varying degrees—Mr. Brown has not even pressed the Democratic-controlled legislature to pass his own sensible pension proposal.

He is seeking a deal with the unions that only temporarily reduces wages and work hours by 5% each, saving 0.4% of the budget. Usually a pay cut refers to working the same hours for less pay, not a forced, unpaid vacation. Mr. Brown has not made it clear whether the reduction is for one year or longer, or even whether the compensation would be paid back later (if so, it amounts to a paid vacation, not a pay cut).

The governor has reduced the workforce by 2% and proposed further, gradual reductions. But this represents a failure of imagination. The state should replace half of the sizable number of workers who will retire in the next 10 years with technology and at the same time institute performance pay, saving a bundle and improving service delivery.


Meanwhile, Mr. Brown forges ahead with his proposal for higher taxes despite considerable evidence that states with lower tax rates grow faster than states with high tax rates. Higher marginal tax rates will speed the exodus from the state, which has a 10.9% unemployment rate, the country's third-highest.

California's casino-like budget reflects its highly volatile revenue system. In good times it collects almost half its income taxes from the top 1% of the population, relying heavily on capital gains, taxed at ordinary income rates, and stock options. This exposes the state to dramatic revenue collapses during recessions and stock market declines.

The state lurched from income tax growth of 54% in the two years from 1998-2000—money that was spent and built into the permanent budget base line—to a collapse that erased these revenue gains the next two years. This dysfunctional swing was repeated in the recent housing bubble and bust. Mr. Brown's tax initiative would exacerbate the volatility.

To remedy this and other problems, two recent bipartisan California Tax Reform Commissions, one on which we served in 2008-09, recommended the state combine a broader tax base of economic activity with much lower marginal tax rates, modeled on the landmark 1986 tax reform of President Ronald Reagan and Sens. Bill Bradley and Bob Packwood—the exact opposite of Mr. Brown's proposal.

Absent real reform, there is little likelihood the long-run budget will be balanced, and a high likelihood the "temporary" tax hikes will not only become permanent but form the new base from which even higher taxes are demanded.

California still leads the world in technology, agriculture and entertainment, but politicians in Sacramento are headed in the opposite direction from growth, prosperity and effective, affordable government. They have so far refused to live up to the demands of, let alone seize, the moment. Instead, like their counterparts in Greece and other bankrupt European nations, they seem intent on continuing the broken high-tax-and-spend welfare state experiment as long as they remain in office.

Messrs. Boskin and Cogan are, respectively, professors of economics and public policy at Stanford University, where they are both senior fellows at the Hoover Institution.

Ah.  I was wondering if the reason was to give the impression of toughness on Iran by Baraq i.e. he sacrificed national security for his perceived political benefit.

http://www.righttoworkcommittee.org/facebook/mulhallb.htm

I am thinking for voting FOR the expansion of term limits from 6 to 12 years; the idea being that 6 years is not enough for the development and transmission of institutional memory with the result that the elected official tends to be even more at the mercy of his staff and lobbyists.

http://www.dickmorris.com/origins-of-the-welfare-state-dick-morris-tv-history-video/

Karma can be a real bitch sometimes , , , 

"And therefore, I do not think that it is bad thing that a 16 year old be put into an adult prison."

Is this what you mean to say?

"I am not saying that joining a treaty is necessary to change policy, but I whole heartedly approve of the point of joining this treaty."

By which you mean you disagree with treating juvenile killers as adults?   

Anyway, is this really the point of joining the Treaty?  I strongly suspect not.  I suspect it is more more a matter of a backdoor to establishing progressive entitlements (a.k.a. "rights") that have nothing to do with the point that Morris, who lets face it is not very precise in some of his thinking, is raising here as a "And furthermore" type of point.  Yes?

The United States of America has a black President whose chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Eric Holder, is also black. They have a lot of political power. So how are they using it? Well, one way is to assert to black audiences that voter ID laws are really attempts to disenfranchise black Americans. And liberals think Donald Trump's birther fantasies are offensive?

"In my travels across this country, I've heard a consistent drumbeat of concern from citizens, who—often for the first time in their lives—now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up to one of our nation's most noble ideals," Mr. Holder said Wednesday in a speech to the Council of Black Churches. Voter ID laws and white discrimination, he added, mean that "some of the achievements that defined the civil rights movement now hang in the balance."

That's right. The two most powerful men in America are black, two of the last three Secretaries of State were black, numerous corporate CEOs and other executives are black, and minorities of many races now win state-wide elections in states that belonged to the Confederacy, but the AG implies that Jim Crow is on the cusp of a comeback.

It's demeaning to have to dignify this argument with facts, but here goes. Voter ID laws have been found by the courts not to be an undue burden under the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution. The landmark Supreme Court opinion, upholding an Indiana law in 2008, was written for a six-member majority by that noted right-winger, John Paul Stevens.

Enlarge Image

CloseAssociated Press
 
Attorney General Eric Holder
.Black voter turnout increased in Georgia and Indiana after voter ID laws passed. Georgia began implementing its law requiring one of six forms of voter ID in 2007. According to data from Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the black vote increased by 42%, or 366,000 votes, in 2008 over 2004. The Latino vote grew by 140% or 25,000 votes in 2008, while the white vote increased by only 8% from four years earlier.

No doubt Mr. Obama's presence on the ballot helped drive that turnout surge in 2008, but then the black vote in Georgia also increased by 44.2% during the midterm Congressional races of 2010 from 2006. The Hispanic vote grew by 66.5% in 2010 from four years earlier. Those vote totals certainly don't suggest that requiring an ID is a barrier to the ballot box.

As for public opinion, an April 2012 Fox News survey found that a majority of Democrats (52%), Republicans (87%) and independents (72%) support voter ID laws. This is no doubt because Americans understand intuitively that ballot integrity is as important as ballot access to democratic credibility. Everyone's franchise is devalued if an election turns on the votes of the quick and the dead.

All of this honors Mr. Holder too much because the real key to understanding his speech is to think lower. A May 4 story in the Washington Post got to the heart of the matter: "The number of black and Hispanic registered voters has fallen sharply since 2008, posing a serious challenge to the Obama campaign in an election that could turn on the participation of minority voters."

In the 2008 heyday of hope and change, strong minority turnout helped push Mr. Obama to victory, especially in such swing states as Virginia and New Mexico. But as another election approaches, the minority thrill is gone. According to the Census Bureau, Hispanic voter registration has fallen 5% across the U.S., to about 11 million. The decline is 28% in New Mexico and about 10% in Florida, another swing state. Black registration is down 7% across the country.

The likeliest explanation is economic, as job losses and mortgage foreclosures lead to dislocation and migration to new areas. But it's also possible that many minorities are as disappointed as everyone else with the lackluster recovery. For all of Mr. Obama's attempts to portray Mitt Romney as out of touch, no one has suffered more in the Obama economy than minorities.

Which explains Mr. Holder's racial incitement strategy. If Mr. Obama is going to win those swing states again, he needs another burst of minority turnout. If hope won't get them to vote for Mr. Obama again, then how about fear?

Mr. Holder's Council of Black Churches address is merely the latest of his election-year moves that charge racial discrimination of one kind or another. These include voting-rights lawsuits to block voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina, intervention in immigration cases in Arizona, and various housing and lending discrimination suits. Whatever the legal merits of these cases, their sudden proliferation in an election year suggests a political motivation.

The courts will eventually expose much of this as meritless, but it's a shame the media won't call Mr. Holder on this strategy before the election. Imagine the uproar if a Republican AG pursued a similar strategy. It's worse than a shame that America's first black Attorney General is using his considerable power to inflame racial antagonism

- Cato @ Liberty - http://www.cato-at-liberty.org -
 
Apple: Too Big Not to Nail
 
Posted By David Boaz On May 29, 2012 @ 10:56 am In General,Government and Politics,Telecom, Internet & Information Policy | Comments Disabled
 
In Sunday’s New York Daily News, I deplore [1] the efforts of politicians and regulators to drag successful companies into the parasite economy of Washington, the most recent example being Apple. As the article says,
 
    Heard of “too big to fail”? Well, to Washington, Apple is now too big not to nail.
 
I was prompted to these reflections by a recent article [2] in Politico. The Wall Street Journal used to call itself “the daily diary of the American dream.” Politico is the daily diary of the rent-seeking class. And that class is very upset with Apple for not hiring many lobbyists, as illustrated by Politico‘s front-page cartoon:
 
The story [2] begins:
 
    Apple is taking a bruising in Washington, and insiders say there’s a reason: It’s the one place in the world where the company hasn’t built its brand.
 
    In the first three months of this year, Google and Microsoft spent a little more than $7 million on lobbying and related federal activities combined. Apple spent $500,000 — even less than it spent the year before.
 
The nerve of them! How do they expect lobbyists to feed their families? Then comes my favorite part:
 
    The company’s attitude toward D.C. — described by critics as “don’t bother us” — has left it without many inside-the-Beltway friends.
 
“Don’t bother us”—yes! Don’t tread on me. Laissez nous faire. Leave us alone. Just let us sit out here in Silicon Valley, inventing cool stuff and distributing it to the world. We won’t bother you. Just don’t bother us.
 
But no pot of money can be left unbothered by the regulators and rent-seekers.
 
    Apple is mostly on its own when the Justice Department goes after it on e-books, when members of Congress attack it over its overseas tax avoidance or when an alphabet soup of regulators examine its business practices.
 
And what does the ruling class say to productive people who try to just avoid politics and make stuff? Nice little company ya got there, shame if anything happened to it:
 
    “I never once had a meeting with anybody representing Apple,” said Jeff Miller, who served as a senior aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee for eight years. “There have been other tech companies who chose not to engage in Washington, and for the most part that strategy did not benefit them.”
 
As I noted in the Daily News, back in 1998 Microsoft was in the same situation—a successful company on the West Coast, happily ignoring politics, getting too rich for politics to ignore it—and a congressional aide told Fortune‘s Jeff Birnbaum, “They don’t want to play the D.C. game, that’s clear, and they’ve gotten away with it so far. The problem is, in the long run they won’t be able to.” All too true.
 
Watch out, aspiring entrepreneurs. You too could become too big not to nail.
 
Article printed from Cato @ Liberty: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org
 
URL to article: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/apple-too-big-not-to-nail/
 
URLs in this post:
 
[1] deplore: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/a-bite-apple-article-1.1084829?localLinksEnabled=false
 
[2] recent article: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76073.html
 
Click here to print.
 
Copyright © 2009 Cato-at-liberty. All rights reserved.

A very long piece:



http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120601

Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: June 1, 2012 55 Comments
•   
WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.
At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.

Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium.

This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts. None would allow their names to be used because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day.   (However they did consider it even more important that US voters know how tough President Obama is and so they blab to the press despite the cost to US security)

These officials gave differing assessments of how successful the sabotage program was in slowing Iran’s progress toward developing the ability to build nuclear weapons. Internal Obama administration estimates say the effort was set back by 18 months to two years, but some experts inside and outside the government are more skeptical, noting that Iran’s enrichment levels have steadily recovered, giving the country enough fuel today for five or more weapons, with additional enrichment.

Whether Iran is still trying to design and build a weapon is in dispute. The most recent United States intelligence estimate concludes that Iran suspended major parts of its weaponization effort after 2003, though there is evidence that some remnants of it continue.

Iran initially denied that its enrichment facilities had been hit by Stuxnet, then said it had found the worm and contained it. Last year, the nation announced that it had begun its own military cyberunit, and Brig. Gen. Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization, said that the Iranian military was prepared “to fight our enemies” in “cyberspace and Internet warfare.” But there has been scant evidence that it has begun to strike back.

The United States government only recently acknowledged developing cyberweapons, and it has never admitted using them. There have been reports of one-time attacks against personal computers used by members of Al Qaeda, and of contemplated attacks against the computers that run air defense systems, including during the NATO-led air attack on Libya last year. But Olympic Games was of an entirely different type and sophistication.

It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives. The code itself is 50 times as big as the typical computer worm, Carey Nachenberg, a vice president of Symantec, one of the many groups that have dissected the code, said at a symposium at Stanford University in April. Those forensic investigations into the inner workings of the code, while picking apart how it worked, came to no conclusions about who was responsible.

A similar process is now under way to figure out the origins of another cyberweapon called Flame that was recently discovered to have attacked the computers of Iranian officials, sweeping up information from those machines. But the computer code appears to be at least five years old, and American officials say that it was not part of Olympic Games. They have declined to say whether the United States was responsible for the Flame attack.

Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons — even under the most careful and limited circumstances — could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks.
(Which makes the leakers even more irresponsible , , ,)


Page 2 of 5)

“We discussed the irony, more than once,” one of his aides said. Another said that the administration was resistant to developing a “grand theory for a weapon whose possibilities they were still discovering.” Yet Mr. Obama concluded that when it came to stopping Iran, the United States had no other choice.
Multimedia

If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.

A Bush Initiative

The impetus for Olympic Games dates from 2006, when President George W. Bush saw few good options in dealing with Iran. At the time, America’s European allies were divided about the cost that imposing sanctions on Iran would have on their own economies. Having falsely accused (well “mistaken accused due to SH’s efforts to pretend he had a program in order to bluff the Iranians would be more accurate, but that would not serve the purposes of Prada on the Hudson) Saddam Hussein of reconstituting his nuclear program in Iraq, Mr. Bush had little credibility in publicly discussing another nation’s nuclear ambitions. The Iranians seemed to sense his vulnerability, and, frustrated by negotiations, they resumed enriching uranium at an underground site at Natanz, one whose existence had been exposed just three years before.
Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took reporters on a tour of the plant and described grand ambitions to install upward of 50,000 centrifuges. For a country with only one nuclear power reactor — whose fuel comes from Russia — to say that it needed fuel for its civilian nuclear program seemed dubious to Bush administration officials. They feared that the fuel could be used in another way besides providing power: to create a stockpile that could later be enriched to bomb-grade material if the Iranians made a political decision to do so.

Hawks in the Bush administration like Vice President Dick Cheney urged Mr. Bush to consider a military strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities before they could produce fuel suitable for a weapon. Several times, the administration reviewed military options and concluded that they would only further inflame a region already at war, and would have uncertain results.

For years the C.I.A. had introduced faulty parts and designs into Iran’s systems — even tinkering with imported power supplies so that they would blow up — but the sabotage had had relatively little effect. General James E. Cartwright, who had established a small cyberoperation inside the United States Strategic Command, which is responsible for many of America’s nuclear forces, joined intelligence officials in presenting a radical new idea to Mr. Bush and his national security team. It involved a far more sophisticated cyberweapon than the United States had designed before.

The goal was to gain access to the Natanz plant’s industrial computer controls. That required leaping the electronic moat that cut the Natanz plant off from the Internet — called the air gap, because it physically separates the facility from the outside world. The computer code would invade the specialized computers that command the centrifuges.

The first stage in the effort was to develop a bit of computer code called a beacon that could be inserted into the computers, which were made by the German company Siemens and an Iranian manufacturer, to map their operations. The idea was to draw the equivalent of an electrical blueprint of the Natanz plant, to understand how the computers control the giant silvery centrifuges that spin at tremendous speeds. The connections were complex, and unless every circuit was understood, efforts to seize control of the centrifuges could fail.

Eventually the beacon would have to “phone home” — literally send a message back to the headquarters of the National Security Agency that would describe the structure and daily rhythms of the enrichment plant. Expectations for the plan were low; one participant said the goal was simply to “throw a little sand in the gears” and buy some time. Mr. Bush was skeptical, but lacking other options, he authorized the effort.

Breakthrough, Aided by Israel

Page 3 of 5)

It took months for the beacons to do their work and report home, complete with maps of the electronic directories of the controllers and what amounted to blueprints of how they were connected to the centrifuges deep underground.

Then the N.S.A. and a secret Israeli unit respected by American intelligence officials for its cyberskills set to work developing the enormously complex computer worm that would become the attacker from within.

The unusually tight collaboration with Israel was driven by two imperatives. Israel’s Unit 8200, a part of its military, had technical expertise that rivaled the N.S.A.’s, and the Israelis had deep intelligence about operations at Natanz that would be vital to making the cyberattack a success. But American officials had another interest, to dissuade the Israelis from carrying out their own pre-emptive strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities. To do that, the Israelis would have to be convinced that the new line of attack was working. The only way to convince them, several officials said in interviews, was to have them deeply involved in every aspect of the program.

Soon the two countries had developed a complex worm that the Americans called “the bug.” But the bug needed to be tested. So, under enormous secrecy, the United States began building replicas of Iran’s P-1 centrifuges, an aging, unreliable design that Iran purchased from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear chief who had begun selling fuel-making technology on the black market. Fortunately for the United States, it already owned some P-1s, thanks to the Libyan dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

When Colonel Qaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons program in 2003, he turned over the centrifuges he had bought from the Pakistani nuclear ring, and they were placed in storage at a weapons laboratory in Tennessee. The military and intelligence officials overseeing Olympic Games borrowed some for what they termed “destructive testing,” essentially building a virtual replica of Natanz, but spreading the test over several of the Energy Department’s national laboratories to keep even the most trusted nuclear workers from figuring out what was afoot.

Those first small-scale tests were surprisingly successful: the bug invaded the computers, lurking for days or weeks, before sending instructions to speed them up or slow them down so suddenly that their delicate parts, spinning at supersonic speeds, self-destructed. After several false starts, it worked. One day, toward the end of Mr. Bush’s term, the rubble of a centrifuge was spread out on the conference table in the Situation Room, proof of the potential power of a cyberweapon. The worm was declared ready to test against the real target: Iran’s underground enrichment plant.

“Previous cyberattacks had effects limited to other computers,” Michael V. Hayden, the former chief of the C.I.A., said, declining to describe what he knew of these attacks when he was in office. “This is the first attack of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to effect physical destruction,” rather than just slow another computer, or hack into it to steal data.

“Somebody crossed the Rubicon,” he said.

Getting the worm into Natanz, however, was no easy trick. The United States and Israel would have to rely on engineers, maintenance workers and others — both spies and unwitting accomplices — with physical access to the plant. “That was our holy grail,” one of the architects of the plan said. “It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn’t think much about the thumb drive in their hand.”

In fact, thumb drives turned out to be critical in spreading the first variants of the computer worm; later, more sophisticated methods were developed to deliver the malicious code.

The first attacks were small, and when the centrifuges began spinning out of control in 2008, the Iranians were mystified about the cause, according to intercepts that the United States later picked up. “The thinking was that the Iranians would blame bad parts, or bad engineering, or just incompetence,” one of the architects of the early attack said.

CONTINUED

Pakistan's Dangerous Anti-American Game:  It's unwise to needle a superpower that you need for resources and global credibility.
By SADANAND DHUME

Last week a Pakistani court sentenced Shakil Afridi—the doctor who helped the CIA track Osama bin Laden last year—to 33 years in prison after he was accused of treason or possible ties with militants. In response, the U.S. Congress docked a symbolic $33 million from Pakistan's annual aid budget, or $1 million for every year of the doctor's sentence.

U.S. anger is understandable. In the year since bin Laden was discovered in the garrison town of Abbottabad, Pakistan has done little to dispel the widespread belief that the world's most wanted terrorist was sheltered by elements in the country's army and its spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence. Nobody has been punished for aiding bin Laden. Neither has the rogue nuclear-weapons scientist A.Q. Khan or Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, of the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

As U.S.-Pakistani relations continue to nosedive, the risks for Islamabad run deeper than a mere PR disaster. For the first time since the country came into being in 1947, Pakistan is in danger of being seen as implacably hostile to the West. Should the U.S. switch from a policy of engagement to active containment, Pakistan's economic and diplomatic problems, already acute, may become unmanageable.

Dr. Afridi's punishment is only the most recent example of Pakistan's slide away from its founding pro-Western moorings. Earlier this month, Islamabad annoyed NATO countries at a summit on Afghanistan in Chicago by refusing to reopen overland supply routes that it shut after the U.S. mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in a border clash last November. Pakistan's negotiators are reportedly demanding upward of $5,000 per supply truck.

And last week Pakistan's Supreme Court suspended Farahnaz Ispahani, a close aide to President Asif Ali Zardari and an outspoken defender of human rights, from the lower house of the legislature. Her alleged crime: having acquired a U.S. passport in addition to the Pakistani one she was born with.

Meanwhile, a Pew Research Center survey released last month shows that only 55% of Pakistani Muslims disapprove of al Qaeda. In Lebanon and Jordan that figure is 98% and 77%, respectively.

Many Pakistani elites think their compatriots' loathing of America is somehow Washington's problem, not theirs. They see Pakistan, with its nuclear arsenal and proxy terrorist groups, as too big to fail. In the final analysis, their view holds, the U.S. will always be there to prop up Pakistan's ailing economy with aid and support from multilateral agencies such as the International Monetary Fund.

A superficial reading of U.S.-Pakistani history supports this view. For the most part, Washington has not allowed episodic disagreements to get in the way of the larger relationship. Even Islamabad's clandestine acquisition of nuclear weapons in the 1980s, and proliferation to Iran and North Korea in the 1990s, did not lead to a complete rupture in ties.

Even now, only a handful of hotheads in Washington are calling for all assistance to Islamabad to be scrapped. Most responsible Pakistan-watchers, both inside and outside the U.S. government, would rather fix the relationship than scrap it.

Nonetheless, Pakistanis who expect the future to faithfully echo the past forget that their nation has never confronted the West in the fashion it is today.

The country's founders were drawn largely from the ranks of Indian Muslims who embraced Western learning and acknowledged Western power. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, instinctively understood that he could better advance his interests by coming to terms with the West than by opposing it.

Successive generations of Pakistani leaders, from Ayub Khan to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to Gen. Zia ul-Haq to Gen. Pervez Musharraf, stayed true to this belief. Even when they pursued policies at odds with U.S. interests—Gen. Zia's nuclear bomb or Gen. Musharraf's double-dealing in Afghanistan—they were careful to avoid sustained public confrontation. They knew it was counterproductive to needle a superpower that they depended on for both resources and global credibility.

Pakistan's current rulers, especially the powerful army that calls the shots on national security policy, forget this lesson at their peril. The U.S. cannot be expected to be endlessly patient.

Pakistan's dismal favorability rating in America means there's no real political cost to bringing Islamabad to heel by stepping up drone strikes, giving it a diplomatic cold shoulder and withholding financial support—all at the same time. Washington may even choose to add targeted sanctions against top ISI officials directly implicated in supporting terrorism.

Pakistan is playing a game of chicken without fully grasping the consequences of losing. The shrewd and practical Jinnah would have recognized the folly of this course. His successors have already betrayed his message of religious tolerance at home, and now they're on track to subvert his legacy abroad.

Mr. Dhume is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist for WSJ.com.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/muslim-journalist-challenges-sharia-gets-accused-of-hate/?singlepage=true

What Does the Syrian Opposition Believe?
A confidential survey of activists inside the country shows limited support for Islamists but high admiration for the U.S. and Turkey..Article Comments (21) more in Opinion | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ ».Email Print Save ↓ More .
.smaller Larger  By DAVID POLLOCK
There are increasing calls for international intervention in Syria after this weekend's massacre in Houla, where Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces murdered more than 100 civilians. Obstacles to intervention remain, however, especially concern that the opposition to Assad's regime is dominated by religious fundamentalists. Until recently, for example, the Syrian National Council, a group of exiled opponents of the regime, was led by Burhan Ghalioun, whose unwillingness to counter the Muslim Brotherhood was widely viewed in the West as a troubling sign of Islamist influence.

But a confidential survey of opposition activists living in Syria reveals that Islamists are only a minority among them. Domestic opponents of Assad, the survey indicates, look to Turkey as a model for Syrian governance—and even widely admire the United States.

Pechter Polls, which conducts opinion surveys in tough spots in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, completed the Syria opposition poll in December 2011. Respondents were contacted over a secure Skype connection by someone they could trust—all native Syrians—who asked them to fill out a short questionnaire anonymously in Arabic. Interviewers were selected from different social and political groups to ensure that respondents reflected a rough cross-section of overall opposition attitudes. To ensure confidentiality, the online survey could be accessed only through a series of proxy servers, bypassing the regime-controlled Internet.

Given the survey's unusual security requirements, respondents were selected by a referral (or "controlled snowball") technique, rather than in a purely random fashion. To be as representative as possible, the survey employed five different starting points for independent referral chains, all operating from different locations. The resulting sample consisted of 186 individuals in Syria identified as either opposition activists themselves (two-thirds of the total) or in contact with the opposition.

Enlarge Image

CloseAFP/Getty Images/Shaam News Network
 
Syrian anti-regime protesters waving pre-Baath Syrian flags in Talbisseh on May 25.
.What do these "inside" opposition supporters believe? Only about one-third expressed a favorable opinion of the Muslim Brotherhood. Almost half voiced a negative view, and the remainder were neutral. On this question, no significant differences emerged across regions.

Most of the survey's questions asked, "On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 means the most negative and 7 the most positive, how would you rate your opinion of X?" Answers of 1 to 3 were considered negative, 4 as neutral, and 5 to 7 as positive.

While many respondents supported religious values in public life, only a small fraction strongly favored Shariah law, clerical influence in government, or heavy emphasis on Islamic education. A large majority (73%) said it was "important for the new Syrian government to protect the rights of Christians." Only 20% said that religious leaders have a great influence on their political views.

This broad rejection of Islamic fundamentalism was also reflected in the respondents' views on government. The poll asked each respondent what country he or she would "like to see Syria emulate politically," and which countries the respondent "would like to see Syria emulate economically." The poll listed 12 countries, each with a scale of 1 to 7. Just 5% had even a mildly positive view of Saudi Arabia as a political model. In contrast, 82% gave Turkey a favorable rating as both a political and economic model (including over 40% extremely favorable). The U.S. earned 69% favorable ratings as a political model, with France, Germany and Britain close behind. Tunisia rated only 37% and Egypt 22%.

Iran was rated lowest of any country included in the survey, including Russia and China: Not even 2% of respondents had positive views of Iran as a political model. Fully 90% expressed an unfavorable view of Hezbollah, including 78% with the most negative possible attitude.

One of the surprises in the results is the scope of the opposition's network inside Damascus, despite their difficulties in demonstrating publicly. One-third of the respondents, whether activists or sympathizers, said they live in the Syrian capital. (To protect their privacy, the survey did not ask for more precise identification.)

This "inside" opposition is well-educated, with just over half identifying as college graduates. The ratio of male to female respondents was approximately 3 to 1, and 86% were Sunni Arab.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, they were ambivalent about Syrian Kurdish demands for "political decentralization" (like autonomy). Views of "Kurdish parties" were evenly divided among negative, neutral and positive. (Such feelings are evidently mutual: In the six months since the survey was completed, Syrian Kurdish organizations have increasingly decided to go their own way, separate from the other opposition groups.)

Based on a statistical analysis of the survey, most secularists among the respondents prefer weak central government, presumably as a way to safeguard their personal freedoms. On the other hand, the one-third of respondents who support the Muslim Brotherhood also tend to have a favorable view of Hamas, despite the latter movement's previous association with the Assad regime.

The survey demonstrates that the core of the Syrian opposition inside the country is not made up of the Muslim Brotherhood or other fundamentalist forces, and certainly not of al Qaeda or other jihadi organizations. To be sure, a revolution started by secularists could pave the way for Islamists to win elections, as has occurred in Egypt. But the Syrian opposition is solidly favorable to the U.S. and overwhelmingly negative toward both Hezbollah and Iran.

Mr. Pollock is senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a consultant to Pechter Polls.

http://www.radicalislam.org/analysis/nj-gov-christie-courting-islamist-cleric

The Truth
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/b/boortz.htm
The speech is from the pen of Neil Boortz and is posted on his website at www.boortz.com.

Boortz tells TruthOrFiction.com, however, that so far, it's never actually been delivered at a commencement.

He says he wrote the speech about 1997 in protest of never having been invited to give a commencement address.
It became the springboard for his first book, "The Commencement Speech You Need To Hear."
Later he produced an audio CD of the speech complete with crowd noise and applause, which has been aired on his radio program.

Boortz says that although Texas A & M is his alma mater, it is not true that he gave the speech there.

Second post of the day:


 
Neal Boortz is a Texan, a lawyer, a Texas Aggie (Texas A&M) graduate, and now a nationally syndicated talk show host from Atlanta. His commencement address to the graduates of a recent Texas A&M class is far different from what either the students or the faculty expected. Whether you agree or disagree, his views are certainly thought provoking.

"I am honored by the invitation to address you on this august occasion. It's about time. Be warned, however, that I am not here to impress you; you'll have enough smoke blown up your bloomers today. And you can bet your tassels I'm not here to impress the faculty and administration. You may not like much of what I have to say, and that's fine. You will remember it though. Especially after about 10 years out there in the real world. This, it goes without saying, does not apply to those of you who will seek your careers and your fortunes as government employees.

This gowned gaggle behind me is your faculty. You've heard the old saying that those who can - do. Those who can't - teach. That sounds deliciously insensitive. But there is often raw truth in insensitivity, just as you often find feel-good falsehoods and lies in compassion. Say good-bye to your faculty because now you are getting ready to go out there and do. These folks behind me are going to stay right here and teach.

By the way, just because you are leaving this place with a diploma doesn't mean the learning is over. When an FAA flight examiner handed me my private pilot's license many years ago, he said, “Here, this is your ticket to learn.” The same can be said for your diploma. Believe me, the learning has just begun.

Now, I realize that most of you consider yourselves Liberals. In fact, you are probably very proud of your liberal views. You care so much. You feel so much. You want to help so much. After all, you're a compassionate and caring person, aren't you now? Well, isn't that just so extraordinarily special. Now, at this age, is as good a time as any to be a liberal; as good a time as any to know absolutely everything. You have plenty of time, starting tomorrow, for the truth to set in.

Over the next few years, as you begin to feel the cold breath of reality down your neck, things are going to start changing pretty fast... Including your own assessment of just how much you really know.

So here are the first assignments for your initial class in reality: Pay attention to the news, read newspapers, and listen to the words and phrases that proud Liberals use to promote their causes. Then, compare the words of the left to the words and phrases you hear from those evil, heartless, greedy conservatives. From the Left you will hear "I feel." From the Right you will hear "I think." From the Liberals you will hear references to groups -- The Blacks, the Poor, the Rich, the Disadvantaged, the Less Fortunate. From the Right you will hear references to individuals. On the Left you hear talk of group rights; on the Right, individual rights.

That about sums it up, really: Liberals feel. Liberals care. They are pack animals whose identity is tied up in group dynamics. Conservatives think -- and, setting aside the theocracy crowd, their identity is centered on the individual.

Liberals feel that their favored groups have enforceable rights to the property and services of productive individuals. Conservatives, I among them I might add, think that individuals have the right to protect their lives and their property from the plunder of the masses.

In college you developed a group mentality, but if you look closely at your diplomas you will see that they have your individual names on them. Not the name of your school mascot, or of your fraternity or sorority, but your name. Your group identity is going away. Your recognition and appreciation of your individual identity starts now.

If, by the time you reach the age of 30, you do not consider yourself to be a conservative, rush right back here as quickly as you can and apply for a faculty position. These people will welcome you with open arms. They will welcome you, that is, so long as you haven't developed an individual identity. Once again you will have to be willing to sign on to the group mentality you embraced during the past four years.

Something is going to happen soon that is going to really open your eyes. You're going to actually get a full time job!

You're also going to get a lifelong work partner. This partner isn't going to help you do your job. This partner is just going to sit back and wait for payday. This partner doesn't want to share in your effort, but in your earnings.

Your new lifelong partner is actually an agent; an agent representing a strange and diverse group of people; an agent for every teenager with an illegitimate child; an agent for a research scientist who wanted to make some cash answering the age-old question of why monkeys grind their teeth. An agent for some poor demented hippie who considers herself to be a meaningful and talented artist, but who just can't manage to sell any of her artwork on the open market.

Your new partner is an agent for every person with limited, if any, job skills, but who wanted a job at City Hall. An agent for tin-horn dictators in fancy military uniforms grasping for American foreign aid. An agent for multi-million dollar companies who want someone else to pay for their overseas advertising. An agent for everybody who wants to use the unimaginable power of this agent's for their personal enrichment and benefit.
That agent is our wonderful, caring, compassionate, oppressive government. Believe me, you will be awed by the unimaginable power this agent has. Power that you do not have. A power that no individual has, or will have. This agent has the legal power to use force, deadly force to accomplish its goals.

You have no choice here. Your new friend is just going to walk up to you, introduce itself rather gruffly, hand you a few forms to fill out, and move right on in. Say hello to your own personal one ton gorilla. It will sleep anywhere it wants to.

Now, let me tell you, this agent is not cheap. As you become successful it will seize about 40% of everything you earn. And no, I'm sorry, there just isn't any way you can fire this agent of plunder, and you can't decrease its share of your income. That power rests with him, not you.

So, here I am saying negative things to you about government. Well, be clear on this: It is not wrong to distrust government. It is not wrong to fear government. In certain cases it is not even wrong to despise government for government is inherently evil. Yes, a necessary evil, but dangerous nonetheless, somewhat like a drug. Just as a drug that in the proper dosage can save your life, an overdose of government can be fatal.

Now let's address a few things that have been crammed into your minds at this university. There are some ideas you need to expunge as soon as possible. These ideas may work well in academic environment, but they fail miserably out there in the real world.
First is that favorite buzz word of the media and academia: Diversity! You have been taught that the real value of any group of people - be it a social group, an employee group, a management group, whatever - is based on diversity. This is a favored liberal ideal because diversity is based not on an individuals abilities or character, but on a person's identity and status as a member of a group. Yes, it's that liberal group identity thing again.

Within the great diversity movement group identification - be it racial, gender based, or some other minority status - means more than the individuals integrity, character or other qualifications.

Brace yourself. You are about to move from this academic atmosphere where diversity rules, to a workplace and a culture where individual achievement and excellence actually count. No matter what your professors have taught you over the last four years, you are about to learn that diversity is absolutely no replacement for excellence, ability, and individual hard work. From this day on every single time you hear the word "diversity" you can rest assured that there is someone close by who is determined to rob you of every vestige of individuality you possess.

We also need to address this thing you seem to have about "rights." We have witnessed an obscene explosion of so-called "rights" in the last few decades, usually emanating from college campuses.

You know the mantra: You have the right to a job. The right to a place to live. The right to a living wage. The right to health care. The right to an education. You probably even have your own pet right - the right to a Beemer for instance, or the right to have someone else provide for that child you plan on downloading in a year or so.

Forget it. Forget those rights! I'll tell you what your rights are. You have a right to live free, and to the results of 60% -75% of your labor. I'll also tell you have no right to any portion of the life or labor of another.

You may, for instance, think that you have a right to health care. After all, President Obama said so, didn't he? But you cannot receive health-care unless some doctor or health practitioner surrenders some of his time - his life - to you. He may be willing to do this for compensation, but that's his choice. You have no "right" to his time or property. You have no right to his or any other person's life or to any portion thereof.

You may also think you have some "right" to a job; a job with a living wage, whatever that is. Do you mean to tell me that you have a right to force your services on another person, and then the right to demand that this person compensate you with their money? Sorry, forget it. I am sure you would scream if some urban outdoors men (that would be "homeless person" for those of you who don't want to give these less fortunate people a romantic and adventurous title) came to you and demanded his job and your money.

The people who have been telling you about all the rights you have are simply exercising one of theirs - the right to be imbeciles. Their being imbeciles didn't cost anyone else either property or time. It's their right, and they exercise it brilliantly.

By the way, did you catch my use of the phrase "less fortunate" a bit ago when I was talking about the urban outdoors men? That phrase is a favorite of the Left. Think about it, and you'll understand why.

To imply that one person is homeless, destitute, dirty, drunk, spaced out on drugs, unemployable, and generally miserable because he is "less fortunate" is to imply that a successful person - one with a job, a home and a future - is in that position because he or she was "fortunate." The dictionary says that fortunate means "having derived good from an unexpected place." There is nothing unexpected about deriving good from hard work. There is also nothing unexpected about deriving misery from choosing drugs, alcohol, and the street.

If the Liberal Left can create the common perception that success and failure are simple matters of "fortune" or "luck," then it is easy to promote and justify their various income redistribution schemes. After all, we are just evening out the odds a little bit. This "success equals luck" idea the liberals like to push is seen everywhere. Former Democratic presidential candidate Richard Gephardt refers to high-achievers as "people who have won life's lottery." He wants you to believe they are making the big bucks because they are lucky. It's not luck, my friends. It's choice. One of the greatest lessons I ever learned was in a book by Og Mandino, entitled, "The Greatest Secret in the World." The lesson? Very simple: "Use wisely your power of choice."

That bum sitting on a heating grate, smelling like a wharf rat? He's there by choice. He is there because of the sum total of the choices he has made in his life. This truism is absolutely the hardest thing for some people to accept, especially those who consider themselves to be victims of something or other - victims of discrimination, bad luck, the system, capitalism, whatever. After all, nobody really wants to accept the blame for his or her position in life. Not when it is so much easier to point and say, "Look! He did this to me!" than it is to look into a mirror and say, "You S. O. B.! You did this to me!"

The key to accepting responsibility for your life is to accept the fact that your choices, every one of them, are leading you inexorably to either success or failure, however you define those terms.

Some of the choices are obvious: Whether or not to stay in school. Whether or not to get pregnant. Whether or not to hit the bottle. Whether or not to keep this job you hate until you get another better-paying job. Whether or not to save some of your money, or saddle yourself with huge payments for that new car.

Some of the choices are seemingly insignificant: Whom to go to the movies with. Whose car to ride home in. Whether to watch the tube tonight, or read a book on investing. But, and you can be sure of this, each choice counts. Each choice is a building block - some large, some small. But each one is a part of the structure of your life. If you make the right choices, or if you make more right choices than wrong ones, something absolutely terrible may happen to you. Something unthinkable. You, my friend, could become one of the hated, the evil, the ugly, the feared, the filthy, the successful, the rich.

The rich basically serve two purposes in this country. First, they provide the investments, the investment capital, and the brains for the formation of new businesses. Businesses that hire people. Businesses that send millions of paychecks home each week to the un-rich.

Second, the rich are a wonderful object of ridicule, distrust, and hatred. Few things are more valuable to a politician than the envy most Americans feel for the evil rich.

Envy is a powerful emotion. Even more powerful than the emotional minefield that surrounded Bill Clinton when he reviewed his last batch of White House interns. Politicians use envy to get votes and power. And they keep that power by promising the envious that the envied will be punished: "The rich will pay their fair share of taxes if I have anything to do with it." The truth is that the top 10% of income earners in this country pays almost 50% of all income taxes collected. I shudder to think what these job producers would be paying if our tax system were any more "fair."

You have heard, no doubt, that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Interestingly enough, our government's own numbers show that many of the poor actually get richer, and that quite a few of the rich actually get poorer. But for the rich who do actually get richer, and the poor who remain poor .. there's an explanation -- a reason. The rich, you see, keep doing the things that make them rich; while the poor keep doing the things that make them poor.

Speaking of the poor, during your adult life you are going to hear an endless string of politicians bemoaning the plight of the poor. So, you need to know that under our government's definition of "poor" you can have a $5 million net worth, a $300,000 home and a new $90,000 Mercedes, all completely paid for. You can also have a maid, cook, and valet, and a million in your checking account, and you can still be officially defined by our government as "living in poverty." Now there's something you haven't seen on the evening news.

How does the government pull this one off? Very simple, really. To determine whether or not some poor soul is "living in poverty," the government measures one thing -- just one thing. Income.

It doesn't matter one bit how much you have, how much you own, how many cars you drive or how big they are, whether or not your pool is heated, whether you winter in Aspen and spend the summers in the Bahamas, or how much is in your savings account. It only matters how much income you claim in that particular year. This means that if you take a one-year leave of absence from your high-paying job and decide to live off the money in your savings and checking accounts while you write the next great American novel, the government says you are living in poverty."

This isn't exactly what you had in mind when you heard these gloomy statistics, is it? Do you need more convincing? Try this. The government's own statistics show that people who are said to be "living in poverty" spend more than $1.50 for each dollar of income they claim. Something is a bit fishy here. Just remember all this the next time Charles Gibson tells you about some hideous new poverty statistics.

Why has the government concocted this phony poverty scam? Because the government needs an excuse to grow and to expand its social welfare programs, which translates into an expansion of its power. If the government can convince you, in all your compassion, that the number of "poor" is increasing, it will have all the excuse it needs to sway an electorate suffering from the advanced stages of Obsessive-Compulsive Compassion Disorder.

I'm about to be stoned by the faculty here. They've already changed their minds about that honorary degree I was going to get. That's OK, though. I still have my PhD. in Insensitivity from the Neal Boortz Institute for Insensitivity Training. I learned that, in short, sensitivity sucks. It's a trap. Think about it - the truth knows no sensitivity. Life can be insensitive. Wallow too much in sensitivity and you'll be unable to deal with life, or the truth, so get over it.

Now, before the dean has me shackled and hauled off, I have a few random thoughts.

* You need to register to vote, unless you are on welfare. If you are living off the efforts of others, please do us the favor of sitting down and shutting up until you are on your own again.

* When you do vote, your votes for the House and the Senate are more important than your vote for President. The House controls the purse strings, so concentrate your awareness there.

* Liars cannot be trusted, even when the liar is the President of the country. If someone can't deal honestly with you, send them packing.

* Don't bow to the temptation to use the government as an instrument of plunder. If it is wrong for you to take money from someone else who earned it -- to take their money by force for your own needs -- then it is certainly just as wrong for you to demand that the government step forward and do this dirty work for you.

* Don't look in other people's pockets. You have no business there. What they earn is theirs. What you earn is yours. Keep it that way. Nobody owes you anything, except to respect your privacy and your rights, and leave you the hell alone.

* Speaking of earning, the revered 40-hour workweek is for losers. Forty hours should be considered the minimum, not the maximum. You don't see highly successful people clocking out of the office every afternoon at five. The losers are the ones caught up in that afternoon rush hour. The winners drive home in the dark.

* Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection.

* Finally (and aren't you glad to hear that word), as Og Mandino wrote,
1. Proclaim your rarity. Each of you is a rare and unique human being.
2. Use wisely your power of choice.
3. Go the extra mile, drive home in the dark.

Oh, and put off buying a television set as long as you can. Now, if you have any idea at all what's good for you, you will get out of here and get started. Class dismissed.

Yes.  The point needs to be clearly, repeatedly, and loudly made:  The DEMS controlled spending beginning in 2006.

I understand that different states have different ways and different mixes of taxes.  What I object to is calling operating with the concept of book value a "subsidy".  It is a "subsidy" if someone holds a stock which has appreciated a lot without taxing them on the appreciation?

http://www.dickmorris.com/stop-un-internet-regulation-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/

Agency Closings Pinch California Cities
By BOBBY WHITE

HERCULES, Calif.—Cities across California are grappling with the economic fallout from the state's closure of redevelopment agencies, the municipal organizations that try to turn around blighted areas. The shutdowns—aimed at aiding the cash-strapped state—have resulted in layoffs, lawsuits and the loss of millions of dollars in municipal tax revenue.

The pain is evident in Hercules, an old industrial city of about 26,000 people located 25 miles northeast of San Francisco.

For years, the Hercules Redevelopment Agency bought land and launched real-estate projects to attract restaurants and stores, financing the efforts by selling bonds. Any new property-tax revenue these projects generated went to the agency.

But Gov. Jerry Brown ordered the agencies shut last year and directed that the property-tax revenue they created be spent elsewhere. That prompted Hercules to lay off more than 40% of its city staff, or about 100 workers.

The closure left Hercules in a fiscal bind: Its redevelopment agency had racked up more than $300 million in debt to finance projects, leaving the city on the hook for about $20 million in annual debt payments.

"Now we're left with picking up the pieces," said Steve Duran, the Hercules city manager. In March, the city narrowly escaped default on its bond payments.

 .California had 425 local redevelopment agencies, which employed as many as 40,000 workers, according to state officials. Redevelopment financing generated nearly $6 billion annually for the agencies, according to an audit last year by the state controller's office.

Critics of the redevelopment agencies contend some cities used the bodies as a financial crutch and not solely for their intended purpose. "The state did not conduct audits [of redevelopment agencies], never asked for any real financial details," said Mike Oliver, a longtime municipal-finance consultant and former city manager of San Leandro.

Donald Fraser, a municipal-finance consultant in Roseville, northeast of Sacramento, said some redevelopment agencies were too aggressive with their projects and didn't take into account how those deals would be hurt by a drop in property values. He said some agencies experienced a 30% to 40% drop in revenue because of the housing collapse in recent years, and they now struggle to repay their debts.

"Some cities are down to just barely making debt payments and are staring at very troubling balance sheets," said Mr. Fraser, who estimates that 10% of the state's redevelopment agencies fit this category.

In Hercules, city officials were forced last year to unwind a $20 million youth stadium deal financed with redevelopment money after the drop in property values meant the agency no longer could afford the deal. The project experienced further trouble after city officials signed an agreement with the stadium developer without first securing the land needed to build the sports complex.

But supporters of the agencies point to redevelopment successes, including San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a popular cultural venue that helped revitalize a struggling neighborhood; Los Angeles's Plaza Pacoima, a retail complex created from a former factory site; and the overhaul of downtown districts in Pittsburg and Richmond.

The demise of California's redevelopment agencies is being watched by municipalities nationwide, which say they now may be better able to attract businesses to their redevelopment projects.

With California no longer a redevelopment player, "that gives a big boost to other states and cities," said Bob Marcusse, chief executive of the Kansas City Area Development Council, an agency that serves parts of Kansas and Missouri.

California granted its municipalities the authority to operate redevelopment agencies in the late 1940s. The agencies were allowed to keep any increase in property-tax revenue resulting from their improvements, rather than send the money to the state.

In 2010, Mr. Brown faced one of California's recurring budget deficits. He argued that the money cities dedicated toward redevelopment and the tax revenue from those projects should be used for public safety and schools instead—helping offset state funding of those activities. He proposed axing redevelopment agencies last year, and the legislature approved the move.

The pain from the closures is spreading. In Westminster, about 25 miles south of Los Angeles, the city is preparing to lay off nearly 30% of its staff, according to officials. The entire city of about 10 square miles was declared a redevelopment zone and used redevelopment money on salaries for police, managers and administrators.

"We're standing on very shaky ground," said Mark Lauderbach, an officer with the Westminster Police Department.

Meantime, many cities are attempting to unwind deals involving properties they had planned to redevelop, potentially losing money because they purchased the land when property prices were at a premium last decade.

In San Jose, about 45 miles south of San Francisco, officials plan to sell nearly three dozen properties that had been slated for redevelopment, including a vacant hotel and a parking garage. The city has a real-estate portfolio worth as much as $60 million, which city officials said they hope will help pay down the $4 billion in debt its redevelopment agency amassed. Mayor Chuck Reed said San Jose may have to sell some property at a significant loss since real-estate prices have fallen.

"We've been left with very few options to deal with this very big problem," said Mr. Reed.

Write to Bobby White at bobby.white@wsj.com

Thank you.

Sorry, not buying it.

Who knew?

Mybe not the details of what the camps were, but pretty much everyone knew what the gist of things was.  The Warsaw ghetto was known to all.  Jews having to wear armbands was known to all.  Mein Kampf was known to all.  The vile propaganda was known to all-- and believed by most.

All this and much, much more was known to all.

Thank you for that.

Not wild about the graphics, but underlining the point that Solyndra is but one of a very large and very corrupt pattern is good aggresiveness by MR.

"That said, I am not real excited about cameras, satellites, etc. recording my every move in public.  Others, like my friend argue, "Well, if I do nothing wrong, and it helps prevent crime, why not?  It won't affect me.""

Hypothetical:  How would you feel about someone following you everywhere you go in public, videoing everything you say and do?

============

Regarding Obama:  I see that he has David Axelrod in the room with him as he selects his targets.