Category Archives: Democrats

Quote of the Day: Modern Day Witch Hunts Edition

Constitution, Crime and Punishment, Culture, Democrats, Economics, History, Individual Rights, Legal, Look About, Quote of the Day, Sex

If you haven’t been over to The Agitator recently to read what Radley Balko’s guest bloggers have been writing in his absence over the last several weeks, you are missing some grade A quality posts. This post from William Anderson “Costs and Benefits of Modern ‘Sex Crime’ Witch Hunts” is the creme de la creme.

In this post, Anderson details how easily innocent people can be charged, tried, and convicted of sex crimes due to federal laws such as the Child Abuse Protection and Treatment Act of 1974 (A.K.A. the Mondale Act) and rape shield laws which disadvantage the accused by lowering the normal criminal standard of proof guilty beyond a reasonable doubt to a preponderance of evidence. Not only does the accused have to try to prove a negative (ex: that s/he did not sexually assault the accuser) but also pay out of pocket for legal defense that can cost in the millions of dollars to do so (meanwhile, the state can easily bear the costs of prosecuting the case with taxpayer money).

People who are accused [of sex crimes] either must depend upon a public defender or must pay for legal representation from their own resources, and it does not take long for the money spigot to run dry. Tonya Craft literally had close to a million dollars to spend on her defense, and she still ran out of funds before the case even came to trial. In the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case, each of the three defendants had to spend more than $1 million apiece just to try to debunk what were transparently-false charges.

[…]

The costs can be substantial. I know one attorney who specializes in such cases who requires a down payment up front of $100,000. Since few people keep $100K in spare change, getting the funds is very, very difficult. Then there a experts in forensics, interviewing, and the like who also do not testify for free. One of the reasons that so many people plead to something in such cases is that they do not have the personal resources to fight the charges.

Surely, this could not have been the criminal justice system the founders of this country envisioned!

Stephen Littau
http://fpffressminds.blogspot.com/

What if President Obama Told Michael Phelps “You Didn’t Win That”?

Culture, Democrats, Election '12, Politics, Republicans, Taxation, Theory and Ideas

Like many people, I found the idea that athletes for Team USA receiving a tax bill for any prize money that goes along with a gold, silver, and bronze medal an outrage. These athletes worked very hard to get where they are. They made sacrifices. They spent many hours getting their bodies in shape so they might one day stand on the podium. Why should the IRS get one cent from any of this?

When I first learned of the bipartisan effort to correct this outrage with a bill dubbed the Olympic Tax Elimination Act, a tax cutting measure President Obama actually says he will sign, my first thought was that this is something all Americans should support. After giving this some additional thought, however; I couldn’t help but think of President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” line when he was extolling the virtues of government and how those who have been successful are only successful because “somebody else helped out along the line.”

If President Obama was being consistent, rather than supporting the Olympic Tax Elimination Act, he would say something like the following:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great coach somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to reach your athletic potential. Somebody invested in roads and bridges that your parents drove on to take you to practices and competitions. If you’ve got an Olympic medal, you didn’t win that. Somebody else made that happen.

Notice, the above sentences are exactly what Obama was saying about successful business people except I replaced the business references with athletic references. Now imagine the president actually saying that these world class athletes didn’t earn these medals and that someone else “made that happen.” How would most logical thinking people respond to such a nonsensical statement? Even in this “everyone gets a trophy because everyone’s a winner” culture we have now, I would expect that most people would be put off by the president’s lack of appreciation for all the hard work that goes into becoming an Olympian who has reached the full potential of human athleticism.

What the president and his supporters fail to understand is that it’s not just Olympic athletes who work very hard to be the best at what they do. Businessmen and businesswomen who aspire to achieve the American dream make sacrifices, spend many hours educating themselves, and take risks so they might someday be financially secure. Why aren’t these job creators worthy of being celebrated like athletes representing Team USA? Why don’t these entrepreneurs deserve a tax break?

While I still support the Olympic Tax Elimination Act, I would prefer to one day see an Income Tax Elimination Act in my lifetime. No one should be taxed on earnings regardless of whether the earnings come from cleaning a swimming pool or from cleaning up with gold medals at the London Olympic Games in most of the swimming events.

Stephen Littau
http://fpffressminds.blogspot.com/

Reinventing Newspeak – The Fatal Error at the Heart of The Little Blue Book

Book Reviews, Culture, Democrats, Doublespeak, Political Correctness, Theory and Ideas

Most people who are passionate about politics wish to convince others to see things their way. To that end, the world-famous linguist and partisan Democrat George Lakoff has written the Little Blue Book:

Voters cast their ballots for what they believe is right, for the things that make moral sense. Yet Democrats have too often failed to use language linking their moral values with their policies. The Little Blue Book demonstrates how to make that connection clearly and forcefully, with hands-on advice for discussing the most pressing issues of our time: the economy, health care, women’s issues, energy and environmental policy, education, food policy, and more. Dissecting the ways that extreme conservative positions have permeated political discourse, Lakoff and Wehling show how to fight back on moral grounds and in concrete terms. Revelatory, passionate, and deeply practical, The Little Blue Book will forever alter the way Democrats and progressives think and talk about politics.

from publisher’s description.

At first blush this seems like a great idea to the passionate person – they’re sure to win all the arguments if they follow the books recipe! But the book’s recipe is not a recipe for winning arguments, but rather a recipe for preventing the reader from losing arguments – from being convinced by the person they are arguing with. How? By preventing them from actually being able to consider the opponents’ arguments by removing the opponents’ language from the reader’s brain.

The book starts off from a profound starting point, that people make decisions based on their moral frames of reference. But then it goes in a very unexpected direction. It instructs the reader to completely ignore the interlocutor’s own moral frames.

  • Use your own language; never use your opponent’s language
  • Be aware of what you believe and repeat it out loud over and over; never repeat ideas that you don’t believe in, even if you are arguing against them.

Let’s contrast these instructions with those of the late Dr Covey who has a great video that starts from the same premise – but argues that to communicate, you must adopt your interlocutor’s frame of reference and to try to understand where they are coming from.

As a method of convincing people, this book is a disaster; it purposes shouting down the non-progressive by denying them any legitimacy to their ideas. One the interlocutor figures out that what he is saying is being ignored, he will probably reciprocate by not listening to anything the reader has to say.

So what benefit is there to the reader to refuse to think like the person they are arguing with? George Orwell explained:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression  to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.

The Principles of Newspeak – An Appendix to 1984 by George Orwell

The book is not a recipe on how to convince, but in fact is a recipe teaching the reader how to be intolerant and closed-minded.

Interestingly, this should not be a surprise. In a study of people’s ability to articulate political arguments, progressives had the worst performance when it comes to being able to articulate the ideas of people they disagree with. If you were to ask a Goldwater-conservative to provide you with the argument for Single-Payer Health-Care, he is far more likely to be able to do so than a progressive will be able to make the argument for a free market in health-care.

This book continues the trend, and if adopted by progressives will ensure the continued inability to attract new supporters to their movement… which is a very good thing.

tarran
I am an anarcho-capitalist living just west of Boston Massachussetts. I am married, have two children, and am trying to start my own computer consulting company.
https://thelibertypapers.org/author/tarran/

Gov. Deval Patrick Vetoes Bipartisan Bill that Would Prohibit EBT Card Fraud and Abuse

Democrats, Dumbasses and Authoritarians, Government Regulation, Government Waste, Politics, Republicans, The Welfare State

In Massachusetts people can purchase guns, porn, jewelry, get a manicure, or get a tattoo with an EBT card (i.e. food stamps). Understandably, this upsets some Massachusetts residents and the state legislature passed a bipartisan bill which would prohibit use of EBT cards for these non-food related items. You would think that such a common sense reform embraced by Republicans and Democrats alike would easily be signed into law regardless of the party affiliation of the governor but you would be wrong.

Chris Cassidy for The Boston Globe reports:

In a veto statement yesterday, [Gov. Deval] Patrick slammed his reform-intent rivals for “political grandstanding” with their efforts to ban EBT buys of guns, porn, tattoos, jewelry and manicures, insisting reforms were already on track without the Legislature’s meddling. That drew return fire from irate lawmakers.

“A lot of people in the Legislature, and a lot of taxpayers for that matter, believe there are a lot of problems with our EBT system,” said state Sen. Robert Hedlund (R-Weymouth). “Some of us have worked hard to try to address those problems. Some of us actually take our jobs seriously, and to be accused of political grandstanding, I think it’s irresponsible and immature of the governor to speak that way.”

[…]

Patrick denied he’s opposed to EBT reforms.

“Nobody is more concerned about fraud than we are,” Patrick said at a press conference yesterday.

His veto rejected bans on the use of EBT cards for tattoos, guns, porn, body piercings, jewelry, fines and bail. However, he left standing bans of the use of EBT cards in tattoo parlors, gun shops, casinos, cruise ships, strip clubs and adult entertainment centers, saying the independent EBT Card Commission had ruled out the idea of banning specific products “for reasons of feasibility, enforceability (and) cost.”

For the purpose of this discussion, let’s put aside whether or not government at any level should give food stamps to those who would otherwise have difficulty feeding their families. Can we not all agree, whether your Libertarian, Republican, Democrat, Socialist, Communist, Nihilist, or whatever, that if the state has determined that taxpayers will help the needy via food stamps or EBT cards that at the very least the recipients of these cards buy FOOD with them rather than guns, porn, jewelry, body piercings, manicures, or tattoos?

Gov. Patrick, this shouldn’t be a difficult issue. You say that banning specific products from being purchased with food stamps is problematic but let me suggest one simple answer: limit the purchases to food only.

Really, how hard was that?

Stephen Littau
http://fpffressminds.blogspot.com/

FactCheck.org Debunks Obama Campaign’s “First Law” Ad Concerning the Gender Pay Gap

Culture, Democrats, Economics, Election '12, Politics

If you live in a swing state like I do, you have probably seen the ad from the Obama campaign entitled “First Law.” The claim in this ad is that women are “paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.” This claim (a real pet peeve of mine) is nothing new; the Obama campaign is repeating the same myth that Leftists and so-called feminists have been making for years.

Here is the ad:

The researchers at FactCheck.org concluded that the claim that women are being paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the “same” work isn’t true and to the extent there is a gap has little to do with discrimination on the part of employers.

Breaking last year’s figures down by occupation, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research showed women doing the “same work” (that is, within the same occupational groupings) often make much more than 77 percent of their male counterparts’ median weekly earnings. The IWPR is affiliated with the graduate program in Public Policy and Women’s Studies at the George Washington University and says it seeks “to address the needs of women.”

The IWPR study found that “median earnings are lower than men’s in nearly all occupations.” But for the most part, the gap for “the same work” is not as wide as Obama’s figure suggests. Of the 36 different occupational categories in the study, in only seven were women paid 77 percent of the pay of men or less.”

[…]

Economists have identified a host of factors — other than discrimination by employers — that lead to lower earnings for women. These include such things as women choosing to work fewer overtime hours, choosing jobs that offer more “family friendly” fringe benefits in lieu of higher pay, and choosing to leave the workforce for years to rear children. Whether these choices are voluntary, or unfairly forced on women by society, is a good question. But they are not discrimination by employers.

All the researchers at FactCheck.org did was determine an apples to apples comparison rather than lump all occupations men and women have and calculate an average. This may be a difficult concept for the Occupy crowd and Leftists in general but I do not want to live in a society where doctors and lawyers make the exact same money as janitors and store clerks. As pointed out in the article, the reason that women on average make less than men is because they choose not to work in the higher paying career fields, don’t work as much overtime, and generally have larger and more frequent gaps in their employment histories than men.

Let me break this down even more. Person A who has been an engineer for 10 years with few or no gaps in his or her employment history is probably going to make more than Person B who has been out of work for years at a time over the same period. Could we really say that Person B is doing the “same work” as Person A since both are engineers? I would have to say no. Person A has more job experience as an engineer than Person B. Person A should be paid more because of the additional job experience (provided that Person A is a more competent engineer than Person B).

Consider the above next time you hear someone complaining that women should be paid equal for equal work. More often than not, the “work” isn’t actually equal to begin with.

Related:
Gender Pay Gap for Democrat Senate Staffers > Gap Supporters of the “Paycheck Fairness Act” Aim to Close

The Absurdity of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act

Stephen Littau
http://fpffressminds.blogspot.com/
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