The Red Pill

Researchers at the University of California Berkeley have discovered what makes a Conservative. After reading this I can't believe that these "researchers" were unbiased and didn't have an agenda. They consider "Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan" to have been of the same mold? After reading this I did some Googling and discovered that, with respect to Hitler, there seems to be a lively debate whether he was Left-wing or Right-wing. I guess neither side wants to be associated with a fascist. So far, I'm more convinced he was Left-wing fascist.

Here's some reaction from Cal Thomas:

Like I'm psychologically disturbed
Cal Thomas
Liberal denial about all things conservative has passed the bizarre and arrived at the absurd.

The American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin has published a study of why conservatives are the way they are. The study was conducted by four researchers, who, according to a press release from the University of California at Berkeley's (UCB) media relations office, "culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism." (Two of the researchers are professors at UCB, which apparently remains imprisoned in '60s dysfunctionality.) The researchers conclude that conservatives suffer from a disease or malady that makes them think the way they do.

"At the core of political conservatism," says the press release about the study, "is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality." Well, yes, conservatives are resistant to change for the sake of change, believing that certain ideas about life, relationships and morality are true for all time regardless of the times.

Some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism, according to the study, include fear and aggression; dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity; uncertainty avoidance; need for cognitive closure; and terror management.

On this last point, the researchers wrote that post-9/11 many conservatives "appear to shun and even punish outsiders and those who threaten the status of cherished world views." Conservatives would like to do more than punish "outsiders" if they come to our nation in order to do harm to us who are inside. They would like to keep them from getting here in the first place and arrest or expel those who make it through with plans to kill us.

Most conservatives welcome "outsiders" so long as they are seeking to become insiders - that is, Americans - and not to undermine our way of life.

A second "key dimension of conservatism," says the UCB press release about the study, is "an endorsement of inequality, a view reflected in the Indian caste system, South African apartheid and the conservative, segregationist politics of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.)."

Get it? Conservatism equals racism, xenophobia and all sorts of other unappealing traits. In case the point is not clear, the press release says the researchers put some familiar faces on those they consider to be conservative icons: "Hitler, Mussolini and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form." The authors commented in a published reply to the article that "talk show host Rush Limbaugh can be described the same way."

The researchers must have missed the name of Hitler's political party, the National Socialists (emphasis mine). There is nothing "conservative" about his beliefs. Eliminating the unwanted is a liberal position, as in abortion, infanticide and euthanasia. That some of the world's greatest modern tyrants are linked to Reagan and Limbaugh tells us much about the political leanings of the authors.

What amazes about this "research" is the incredible bias against anything regarded as conservative. There is the presumption that no conservative idea is even worth considering and that to be conservative is to be psychologically disturbed. These guys seem to think conservatism is a dormant affliction, ready to break out into a plague at any moment.

This is a view held by most liberals, although they express it in different ways. Anyone who does not subscribe to the liberal catechism is, by definition, flawed and sick and something to be "studied," like Joseph Mengele "studied" Jews, Gypsies and twins for his own twisted and demented purposes.

I suppose conservatives can take some solace in the study's conclusion that while conservatives are less "integratively complex" than others, said one researcher, "it doesn't mean that they're simple-minded." No, but anyone who would study conservatism as if it were a social disease is simple-minded. Who's funding all this research?

The only advantage I see from this study is that it might result in the finding that conservatism is a disability. If that happens, maybe I'll be able to park in the handicapped spaces at the mall.

Once again, the Democrats and Bush-haters can't understand what it means to be a liar. Worse is that in attempting to make their point they are themselves reduced to lying. A lie of ommission is no less a lie. In fact taking pieces of quotes or taking quotes out of context seems to be a favorite tool of the media. But they're not bias, oh no. But Fox News, now that's supposed to be bias. This is getting away from the main point, but I watch both CNN and Fox and I can more easily detect liberal bias in CNN's news than on Fox. There is certainly conservative bias to be found on Fox - BUT it is CLEARLY identified as such, e.g. Hannity and Colmes has both a conservative and a liberal. Even my favorite show - Special Report w/Brit Hume - has clear conservative leanings at the end of the show during the panel discussion. But it is not hidden or passed off as news - it is clearly opinion. CNN on the other hand presents their liberal bias as though it were straight news. The good news is that CNN seems to be learning from Fox - more often now I see two experts being interviewed, one liberal and one conservative - they used to only have one expert (liberal) who was never identified as being liberal.

The commercial says:
"Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Bush really said:

"The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Boortz on Democrat Lies:
My outrage today is focused on this incredible television ad the Demcorats are running in Minnesota. Soon it will be seen in other major cities across the nation. The title of the commercial is "Truth." The commercial seeks to put across the point that President Bush lied to the American people in his State of the Union speech.

The "lie," of course, is supposed to be those now-famous 16 words. You probably have those words memorized, but here they are for those of you with short attention spans:

"The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

That statement is true. It is not a lie. The British government is standing by its intelligence assessment to this very day. So, the Democrats want to take a statement which has been verified as true, and somehow turn it into a lie in their TV commercial. Just how do you go about that? Easy, you just eliminate the first five words. On the Democrats television commercial you will see Bush simply say "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

This is blatantly dishonest. The Democrats are showing you that they will lie in order to gain some political advantage -- in this case, raising funds. But where is the media outrage? I can't watch every television news show, but on those that I have watched only one news program has pointed out that the Demcorats eliminated five words from this quote to completely change its meaning. That news channel was, of course, Fox News. Liberals will tell you that by showing what the Demcorats did with this quote Fox News Channel is proving its right-wing bias.

Whether you recognize it or not, America faces perilous times right now. We have the war against terrorism in the Middle East, and North Korea on the other side of the globe. The fact is, the American military does not have the manpower to face both threats. This may well lead to a form of capitulation in North Korea. (Thanks, Jimmy Carter!) While we face these difficult and dangerous times the leftist Democrats are working to use lies, half-truths and deceit to undermine the reputation and the very authority of George Bush. The Democrats are showing that not even the security of the United States ranks above their obsession over lost power. These people are dangerous. They will destroy America to regain political power. If you support them through money or votes you may well be part of the destruction of everything our founding fathers fought to create.

New York Post - The BBC's Sexy Lies:

July 22, 2003 -- Just as President Bush's critics on Capitol Hill and in America's reflexively lefty media have seized on an alleged "smoking gun" of faulty intelligence to undercut his public support, British Prime Minister Tony Blair is coming under similar assault.
The catalyst there is the suicide of Dr. David Kelly, a weapons inspector who was identified as the source of a British Broadcasting Corp. report charging that the Blair government had ordered a public dossier of Saddam Hussein's crimes "sexed up" to bolster the case for war.

Indeed, the prime minister already has found himself being taunted by reporters demanding to know "if you've got blood on your hands."

But though Blair is taking a major political hit, it's the supposedly impartial - and, by the way, taxpayer-funded - BBC that stands before the world as the purveyor of "sexed-up" information.

That is to say, disinformation.

Back in May, BBC defense correspondent Andrew Gilligan reported that "one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up the dossier" on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was charging that Blair and his aides deliberately deceived the British people by overstating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

BBC officials refused to disclose their source, but said the story was based on "one senior and credible source in the intelligence services."

An understandably outraged Blair ordered an investigation, which quickly focused on Kelly, a microbiologist involved in the search for WMD.

Ordered to testify before a House of Commons panel, he insisted he couldn't have been the source - because he hadn't said anything remotely like what Gilligan reported.

"From [our] conversation, I don't see how he could make the authoritative statement he was making," said Kelly.

But when Kelly - obviously distraught over having been thrust into the limelight - took his own life last week, the BBC confessed that he had, in fact, been the network's source.

Problem is, Kelly was never in the intelligence services. Nor was he "one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up the dossier."

And, as he himself insisted just days before his death, he'd never said what the BBC claimed he said.

Indeed, if anyone is guilty of having "sexed up" the information it gave the public, it's the BBC - not Tony Blair.

But that's hardly surprising: From the start, the network was in the forefront of those trying to rouse opposition to war with Iraq and to undermine both Blair and Bush.

Indeed, the BBC was taken to task during the war itself by one of its own front-line correspondents, Paul Adams, who wrote a blistering memo to his bosses blasting the network's coverage, which contended that the U.S.-led coalition was suffering repeated military defeats.

Even before the conflict began, the London Daily Telegraph reported, the BBC was receiving "an unprecedented number of complaints at the alleged anti-war and anti-American tone of its coverage of the Iraqi crisis."

In fact, the BBC's director-general, Greg Dyke, publicly denounced U.S. journalists for their "gung-ho patriotism," adding that he was "shocked while in the United States by how unquestioning the broadcast news media was during this war."

And yet it's Blair who, outrageously, is being made to bear the brunt of British public outrage.

It's the BBC that needs to be answering questions about its deliberately distorted political reporting.

Because, as Greg Dyke has admitted, "if, over time, we lost the trust of our audiences, there is no point to the BBC."

That, ultimately, is between the BBC and the British taxpayer.

For Americans, the lesson is that "sexing up" the news is not limited to, well, America.

WMD - already found?

OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today: 'The Bush administration may already have hard evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that it is not sharing with the public, said Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Thomas McInerney, a military commentator for Fox News,' reports the Jerusalem Post:
'The administration is willing to take the heat for now,' McInerney yesterday told The Jerusalem Post, 'then release the information next August.' Doing so would put the Democrats who have been critical of the US president's policy on Iraq at a distinct disadvange [sic] in the run-up to the presidential election in November 2004.

Democrats try to discredit America's victory.

A 'Miranda' Warning for Saddam?
BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY
Monday, July 14, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

"It's time to tell the truth," the Democratic National Committee urges in an Internet ad, complaining about something President Bush said about uranium. Yes, this is the same DNC headed by Clinton apologist Terry McAuliffe; you'd think the president proclaimed, "I did not have sex with that yellowcake."

But nothing so exciting; the ad is merely carping about the now-famous 16 words in the president's State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The White House now says this statement should not have been included; CIA Director George Tenet has said his agency erred in vetting the speech, and Democrats and other malcontents are in full cry about the president lying to build his case for war.

Now, those 16 words were entirely accurate in the sense that the British government had reached and publicized that conclusion. The media flogging the story might be more careful to tell us, too, that the British government maintains the same position today. The prime minister's official spokesman stood by the original report as recently as Friday, after remarking earlier in the week that he was "surprised that journalists had not yet picked up on what we had been saying consistently about this matter."

In testimony to a parliamentary committee on June 27 and consistently since, the British government has maintained that it reached this conclusion from "intelligence reporting from more than one source" and independent of documents that proved to be forged. It also believes it knows more than Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who debunked the allegations after the CIA sent him to Niger to investigate back in February 2002.

British intelligence has not revealed its sources, so unease naturally remains. Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee proclaimed the uranium report "very odd indeed," even while rejecting accusations of political interference and generally concluding that "Ministers did not mislead Parliament." In the end, the uranium issue seems to concern disagreement among intelligence analysts, in this case British ones and CIA ones.

Such controversies are pretty much routine after any war. The congressional hearings over the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack ran 39 volumes, for example, and the Ford administration formally chartered a "Team B" to second-guess estimates of the Soviet military build-up. Generally the losing side within the intelligence community will wrap itself in "professionalism" and charge "political interference." This is under way both in the U.S. and in the U.K., with Greg Thielmann, a retired State Department intelligence officer, joining Mr. Wilson on this side of the Atlantic.
The invocation of "professionalism," though, raises the issue of when was the last time the intelligence professionals got anything right. The professionals failed to foresee September 11, though terrorists had already attacked the same building once. They failed to warn in a persuasive way about Muslim terrorism, though I suspect that here the Clinton administration will have much to answer for. They failed to foresee the collapse of the Communist empire, though Ronald Reagan predicted it at least four times.

Intelligence professionals are entitled to our sympathy, I hasten to add, since their job is to sift for clues in inherently ambiguous signals. We shouldn't expect too much of them, and they shouldn't be surprised if policy makers decide for themselves what the signals mean.

Especially so since it frequently turns out that disagreements are above the professionals' pay grade. Mr. Thielmann, for example, concludes that "Iraq posed no imminent threat to either its neighbors or to the United States." Interesting word, "imminent." It also appears in the DNC ad and increasingly in press commentary.

The word does appear once in the president's State of the Union. To wit, "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent." He rejected this: "Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option." The whole thrust of the policy of pre-emption, after all, is that in a world of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer wait until a threat is imminent. A madman like Saddam heading a nation-state is itself an intolerable threat.

This conclusion is of course subject to debate, but it is a matter for presidents, not intelligence "professionals." As Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has tried to point out above the din, September 11 changed the American view of what threat is tolerable; hence decisions to call Saddam to account at the U.N. and to go to war if necessary. The war resolution passed the Senate by 77-23 and 29-21 among Democrats. The ayes included Senators Kerry, Lieberman, Edwards, Daschle, Dodd and Clinton. For that matter, the policy of regime change was signed into law by President William Jefferson Clinton with the Iraqi Liberation Act back in 1998.

It's a mystery, too, what policy the malcontents would urge instead. The complaint seems to be that President Bush didn't read Saddam his Miranda rights. Does Howard Dean want to apply to international affairs Justice Cardozo's famous observation that since the constable has blundered the criminal should go free? If the president got the uranium report wrong, should we invite Saddam Hussein to come out of hiding and resume his murderous rule? And if not, what's all the fuss about anyway?
Yes, there is some thread of an issue, since by its nature intelligence is never perfect. But more fundamentally, the uranium issue is the latest in a series of desperate efforts by critics to impugn the president's success in Iraq. As the British might say, this is very odd indeed. Usually, intelligence controversies are over who is to blame for failure; this time it seems to be about discrediting victory.

Neil Boortz discusses the lie about BUSH’S “LIE”

By far the biggest story over the weekend was Bush’s supposed “lie” in the State of the Union Speech. The Democrats obviously feel that they finally have an issue that they can use against Bush in 2004, even if it means undermining America’s victory in Iraq.

Here, for those of you who were out camping over the weekend, are Bush’s controversial 16 words.

“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Democrats and their fellow travelers in the media are saying that this was a lie. Not so. The statement was true when Bush made it, and is true today. Consider these words from Tony Blair to the British Parliament just last week:

“In the 1980’s Iraq purchased somewhere in the region of 200 or more tons of uranium from Niger. The evidence that we had that the Iraqi government had gone back to try to purchase further amounts of uranium from Niger did not come from so-called ‘forged’ documents, they came from separate intelligence.”

Blair is standing by the findings of his governments intelligence forces. This would mean that Bush’s statement which begins with the words “The British government has learned ….” is correct.

The problem is that you didn’t hear about Blair’s statement from one single major news outlet last week. Not one. CNN only started reporting it this morning.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Why would the mainstream media, which votes overwhelmingly Democrat, get in the way of a perfectly good opportunity to nail George Bush?

France and Gemany cut taxes
The question is if these tax cuts are just for "the rich"?

OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today
The Economist reports:

[Germany's] government this week approved the plans of the finance minister, Hans Eichel, to lop €22 billion ($26 billion) off income taxes from January. Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der hopes that the cuts, which should prune the average worker's tax bill by 10%, will help to fizz up the economy. . . . France is also cutting taxes, regardless of the effect on the budget deficit. President Jacques Chirac has now confirmed that he will press ahead with the 30% cut in income taxes that he promised in last year's election campaign. "Income tax has been reduced by close to 7%", he said last week, "and this reduction will continue."

Arguments for war based on lies?
So some of the information leading up to the Iraq war has been shown to be bad - fabricated even. E.g. the Uranium from Niger. Does that change the conclusion any? No, there was plenty of other solid evidence, and had been for years.

OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today: "Rather than celebrate the overthrow of a tyrant and enemy of America, they are trying to discredit it by retrospectively niggling over the nuances of the argument for war. It's as if they were defense lawyers arguing an appeal on behalf of Saddam, trying to get him off on a technicality.
The Washington Times quotes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as explaining to a Senate committee yesterday: 'The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass murder. We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light, through the prism of our experience on September 11.'
Rumsfeld is exactly right, and the Democrats will self-destruct unless they grasp the political ramifications of the national epiphany that was Sept. 11. The response that 'Iraq had nothing to do with Sept. 11,' though possibly accurate, is beside the point--the equivalent of arguing in 1942 that Germany had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor. FDR and Truman knew who America's enemies were, but many of their heirs seem not to."

About the Uranium
Says Secretary of State Powell:

Powell said the issue was "overblown." The president's remarks in January reflected the best available intelligence at the time, Powell said. He said that as he prepared his own Feb. 5 speech to the United Nations, the information on uranium "was not standing the test of time" and he decided not to use it.

"I didn't use it, and we haven't used it since," Powell said. "But to think that somehow we went out of our way to insert this single sentence into the State of the Union Address for the purpose of deceiving and misleading the American people is an overdrawn, overblown, overwrought conclusion."

Public Schools
Here's a bit from Neil Boortz about our quality public schools.

They’ve been having a bit of a problem in New York. It seems that New York government school students can’t pass that pesky math competency test. Now they’ve killed the messenger. The state’s testing director has lost her job. Now that makes sense, doesn’t it?

Here’s what an unnamed spokesman for New York education authorities had to say. 'Clearly, it is a disservice to public schools to give tests whose results imply students aren't learning essential skills. Now that the state's testing director is gone, we can offer an exam that more accurately reflects what students are really learning.”

The problem is this current test does accurately reflect what the students are learning. Little .. maybe nothing. The solution for government schools? When students can’t pass the test, fire the person responsible for the test and then make them easier. As stupid as parents are these days, they’ll certainly buy it.