The Davids, Torn Asunder, Settlement Near

The match made in heaven between George David, the former CEO of United Technology, and Marie Douglas David, a Swedish princess, has now been torn asunder.

Their divorce hearing was being held in a Hartford court presided over by Judge Steven Frazzini and a pack of lawyers representing both parties.

Several media outlets had been drawn to the scene of the dissolution for reasons having to do with money and dramaturgy. The persistent refrain of most news reports had been: How low the mighty have fallen.

The Davids, in more amicable days, together signed a post nuptial agreement limiting any post marital bloodletting to about $50 million, much of which was in stocks. Ms. David and her layer wanted about twice that amount, and Mr. David understandably had been offering a stiff resistance to the demands, which he considered unreasonable. The pair having been married for seven years, the settlement represented a yearly salary for Ms. David of about $7,142,913, not a niggardly piece of the marital pie.

The principle question to which the court should have address itself is: Does contract law mean anything at all in this the age of celebrity divorces?

However, this question usually gets booted to the back of the room when one or both of the two marital parties is plunderable and the other is insatiable. In truth, the answer to the question above usually depends on the depth of the celebrity’s pockets.

The $50 million David agreed to surrender to his wife upon the breakup of their marriage certainly had purchased a good deal of gold-plated legal representation. In her effort to force David to part with an additional $50 million, well beyond the amount stipulated in their less than iron-clad post nuptial agreement, Ms. David hired New York celebrity attorney William Beslow, who has been indispensable in helping such luminaries as Robert De Nero, Patricia Duff, Mia Farrow, Demi Moore, Tatum O’Neil and Harvey Keitel retain or lose money in domestic battles.

Recent indications, including a get-together of the disputants at the offices of Connecticut’s former chief state’s attorney Austin McGuigan, suggest an end to the legal bickering may be at hand.

LEVIN ATTACKS STATISTS

The Statist urges Americans to view themselves through the lenses of those who resent and even hate them. He needs Americans to become less confident, . . . and to accept the status assigned to them by outsiders—as isolationists, invaders, occupiers, oppressors, and exploiters. The Statist wants Americans to see themselves as backward, foolishly holding to their quaint notions of individual liberty, private property, family, and faith, long diminished or jettisoned in other countries. . . . -- Mark R. Levin

Mark Levin in his book, "Liberty and Tyranny, A Conservative Manifesto," demonstrates the tyranny of Statists by their positions on current issues. According to Levin on his radio show, he wrote 98 percent of the book before Barack Obama became President. Obama’s name appears only twice, but his positions are apparent on many of the issues discussed.

How does the Statist operate? He attacks the Founding Fathers as slaveholders, and he favors revolutions because they cleanse “society of religious dogma, antiquated traditions, backward customs, and ambitious individuals who differ with or obstruct the Statist’s plans.” He favors the progressive income tax (Marx would endorse, Adam Smith would oppose). He creates more agencies (Retrofit for Energy and Environmental Performance is in the Cap-and-Trade bill, Consumer Financial Project Safety Commission surfaced last week).

The Statist is a master of the public vocabulary. Challenged on Global Warming, he accuses the skeptic of being a “denier,” of favoring corporate polluters, of being “against saving the planet.” He takes up issues that threaten liberty and prosperity, like Cap-and- Trade. Those who disagree with his immigration policy are “exclusionists, nativists, xenophobes, or even racists.” The Conservative believes that immigration is good if it contributes to the “social cohesion of the civil society.”

Levin shows how the housing subprime fiasco came about in which “the Federal Reserve Board’s [hurtful] role cannot be overstated.” It provided bailout funds to financial institutions and then acquired equity in private corporations. (pp.68-71; there is no index).

Levin turns to the Great Depression, in which the Presidents raised taxes and invented new agencies to dictate production and pricing. Not once during Roosevelt’s terms did unemployment fall below 14%. “His ill-conceived stimulus policies” retarded growth, extending the Depression by seven years, according to a report by two UCLA economists. (No bailouts then.)

Hoover, amidst rising unemployment, raised the income tax from 24% to 63%, and FDR raised the top rate from 79% to 90%. Industrial production fell 25% in the six months after Roosevelt introduced the NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act), which forced companies into cartels and set up a government bureaucracy of two million firms and 22 million employees to control the economy.

He gives a clear, brief history of how global cooling is being dealt with as Global Warming, of Cap-and-Trade, CAFÉ standards, and DDT. The killers of DDT, which had saved millions of lives of World War II forces from malaria, William Doyle Ruckelshaus and Rachel Carson, today are honored. “The Enviro-Statist position is now law.”

Treaties that do not improve and preserve civil society, Levin says, are useful to lock in the Administration’s position. Subjects like weakness on foreign policy (Law of the Sea Treaty hasn’t yet come up), national security (civil rights used to weaken it); criminalizing war, global citizenship.

START I expires on December 5, 2009. President Obama has returned from Russia with a new treaty. He says he will preserve some START provisions by Executive Order if the Senate has not acted upon them, which may be unconstitutional.

We constitute a fifth of the world’s population but use most of the world’s resources, so we are expected to shrink our economy, according to the Statist-global governance and Socialist International’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society.

“Henceforth, Mother Nature’s doings will be mankind’s responsibility,” says Levin, “no matter what science reveals. The Enviro-Statist has declared war on the civil society and he is impatient.”

A pending fiscal disaster is cost of entitlements Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Medicaid subsidizes low-income, pregnant, and disabled people—one fourth of the population. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that, if nothing is done to stop the inclining trend, those who now pay 10% in income tax will, by 2082, pay 25%; those who pay 25% will pay 63%; the highest bracket now paying 35% will pay 88%.

Social Security was started by Roosevelt. These days, the government regularly sends the individual “the false impression that his payroll taxes have been set aside for his use upon retirement.” We have been deceived by the Statist to believe that the government has been prudent in managing his accumulated pension investment in Social Security.

There is no “Social Security trust fund.” So virtuous is its purpose that no one dares betray the fraud. Economist-journalist Martha Derthick wrote about it and Medicare and Medicaid 25 years ago: “Economic analysts who exposed . . . the myth of social security learned to expect a swift and vigorous response from program executives especially if critics were liberals”—heretics endangering the system. Social Security is not a program, it is a religion observes Levin.

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are built on a family of frauds—the fraudulent concealment of material facts, the fraudulent representation of material facts, and the fraudulent conversion of one’s money for another’s use. . . .

What should conservatives do? See Levin’s Epilogue.

By Natalie Sirkin
c2009

The Nation on Obama’s War Of Choice

Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation, the county's premire leftist magazine, has weighed in on the Vietnam-like war in Afghanistan:

Where is the US nightly television (broadcast and cable) coverage of our service people returning in coffins? Where are the brutal and honest images of Afghanistan--of Afghan women and children killed, of US soldiers in the hell of combat. Where is the coverage of the staggering increase of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, traumatic brain injuries and suicides among the many 1000s of service members who've already paid a price for Iraq and Afghanistan? Have the networks and cable channels spent so much of their budgets covering Michael Jackson's untimely death and star-studded memorial, Sarah Palin's ramblings and Mark Sanford's personal and political derelictions that they can't give us the real news we need if we're to be a democracy informed about what our country is doing in our name?

Top Secret Budgets: Crisis, What Crisis?

Every time politicians gather together in secret sessions, journalists the world over feel a floppy emptiness in the pit of their stomachs, perhaps because they realize the justice of George Bernard Shaw’s remark: Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.

Professional politicians are the conspirators; journalists, on the other hand, like to think of themselves as representatives of the laity.

This rule – that the public business must be conducted in the naked public square, where the tribunes of the people can keep a watchful eye on the conspirators and report back to the laity– is generally waved in around budget time. Here in Connecticut, final budgets are hammered out not in open sessions but in formerly smoke filled rooms where politicians practice their profession, the second oldest profession.

This year, as in most years, Republicans, Democrats and the reigning governor have not been able to fashion a budget while under close scrutiny by the fourth estate. There are many reasons for this, principle among them that politicians, fearful of an excess of light, like to work after hours in the dark.

Michele Jacklin, once the chief political reporter for the Hartford Courant, Connecticut’s only state-wide newspaper, who left the ink-stained wretch business to work on John DeStefano’s fruitless campaign for governor, returned to her old haunt some time ago and suggested – nay, demanded – that Gov. Jodi Rell, who claims to want to put the lid on spending, and free falling, free spending Democrats in the legislature should be put together in some formerly smoke filled room, far from the madding crowd of journalists who dog their every step, so that the warring parties may hammer out a budget acceptable to the conspirators.

No one blinked an eye at the suggestion.

And that is what is now coming to pass.

The conspirators this year have assembled at the governor’s mansion; the doors have been locked and barred; pizza has been ordered.

A monstrous combination, a cross between donkey and an elephant, will emerge at the end of these sessions. Of course, no one will like the product, no one -- not the assembled Democratic leaders, not the Republicans in the room, not Governor Jodi Rell, not the tribunes of the people, not the taxed to death laity, not even Michele Jacklin.

A “compromise” budget will be produced, a perfect conspiracy. Rolls will be reversed. Republicans will say, “We didn’t want to tax you, but we produced a pragmatic budget.” Democrats will say, “We did not want to cut necessary programs, but we have given you a pragmatic budget.” The members of some editorial boards, wearing pasteboard frowns, will say, “It had to happen this way. No one likes taxes. No one likes spending.”

Everyone will be shatteringly displeased. The last time in Connecticut the legislature and governor gathered together to discharge multi-billion dollar deficit, the laity was whacked with an income tax.

Everyone frowned for a full month.

This ancient show, this grand posturing, is beginning to wear thin, which is why tea parties and other mini-revolts are springing up everywhere in the state. The tea parties are small crucibles of people who have had enough of taxes and just aren’t going to take it any more. Connecticut, last in job growth for the past decade, is a magnet for discontent. While California’s deficit is higher, $26 billion to Connecticut’s puny $8 billion, the nutmeg state is number one in per capita debt. California’s debt will cost every person in that state around $712, New York about $918. The comparable figure in Connecticut is a crushing $2,513, according to the Institute of Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, known for many years here in the Job Bleeding State as Taxachussetts.

Expropriating taxes from plundered quarter-millionaires, a vanishing species, the application of the usual bromides, and Band-Aid solutions ain’t gonna patch together this shattered Humpty Dumpty.

Neda and Obama’s Witness

The name Neda, here in the United States and in the world, has become pretty much a synonym for the Iranian resistance, now in a pause mode.

Neda Agha-Soltan was the beautiful young Iranian, not yet wrapped in a burka, shot by a sharpshooter in Iran, whose gruesome death was caught in a brief video seen by millions, including the president of the United States, Barack Obama.

It was that death and the iron fist of the leaders in Iran pummeling unarmed protestors that tore from Obama’s bosom this piece of prose: “The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people.”

And then Obama reached for his Martin Luther King: “Martin Luther King once said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’ I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now we are bearing witness to the Iranian people’s belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.”

We have in Obama a referential president: These few lines contain references, obvious and implied, to Martin Luther King, protests during the Vietnam War – “The whole world is watching” – and, possibly, the Christian Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, whose name will forever be associated with the expression “witness to the truth.”

It would have been a grand idea had Obama reached for his Kierkegaard before using the words “bearing witness” and “truth” in the same sentence.

When those words were used by a eulogist in connection with a Danish bishop who had just died, Kierkegaard exploded in indignation, because he knew witnessing to the truth was a Christian category that pointed directly to the cross. Peter, crucified upside down because he felt he was not worthy to die upright in the manner of Jesus, was a witness to the truth. The bishop, whose witness consisted entirely in words – pretty and, at least in connection with Christian witnessing, entirely false -- was not. Paul, who suffered martyrdom, was a witness to the truth. The bishop, whose rhetorical witness, uncrowned with the wreath of suffering, paled in comparison with that of the early Christians, was not.

Neda, an innocent victim whose blood was poured out, was a witness to the truth; Martin Luther King was a witness to the truth.

Witnessing can never be a passive act, particularly when one is witnessing injustice. Surely, that is what Martin Luther King meant when he said the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. One bends towards justice because witnessing injustice demands a response that is clear, unambiguous and virtuous. Words, in these circumstances, are valuable as a prelude to action. But if they do not lead to corrective action, they are worse than useless. One does not bend towards justice by impassively delivering pretty speeches from one’s easy chair.

To bend towards justice is to honor justice through virtuous action. Originally, the word “virtue” pointed to moral strength, manliness, valor and worth, from the Latin root “vir,” which meant “man.” The phrase “by virtue of” preserves the word’s medieval sense of “efficacy.” It is right action that bends the moral universe into a bow.

Nothing could be plainer than the truth: the withering away of jihadism in the Middle East is in the interest not only of the United States but of the Islamic and Non-Islamic world. That is a truth to which Obama has closed his eyes, because if the truth struck him with the force of a thunderbolt, he would be spurred to action – and action involves hard choices.

The palpable truth, Thomas Jefferson said, is that “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

How Much?

According to a story in the Hartford Courant, the state’s US House delegation, all Democrats, voted in favor of climate change legislation that will increase the average American family’s yearly expenses by $1,500. The federal congressional budget office and the US Environmental Protection Agency estimate the yearly rise at $80 - $175 per year.

Asked to clarify the gap between the widely divergent estimates, spokesman for United Illuminating Al Carbone said "From our initial review, we don't think it's going to decrease rates. Let's put it that way.”

Let's put it this way: All regulations involve hidden costs passed along to consumers in the form of price increases. In this way regulatory costs are like business taxes, and business taxes passed along to consumers are destimulants.

What the government gives with the right hand it takes away with the left, leaving taxpayers, to quote an old saw, "holding the bag."

Bill Offered To Repeal Gravity, Colin Powell Offers A Rebuke

Last week it was reported, incorrectly as it happened, that President Barack Obama wished to pass through the US Congress a bill reversing the rotation of the earth on its axis because it had been brought to his attention, by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi some thought, that water in the toilet bowel revolves when flushed in a counter clockwise direction.

“This is intolerable,” the president reportedly said.

And, according to a report by My Way news:

Colin Powell worries that President Barack Obama is trying to tackle too many big issues at one time and he offers this advice: take a hard look at costs and consider the additional red tape that will be created.

"The right answer is, 'Give me a government that works,'" the former secretary of state said in a television interview to be aired Sunday. "Keep it as small as possible," added Powell, who said he has spoken recently with Obama and stays in touch with him. Powell, a Republican, endorsed Obama last year over the GOP presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain.

Obama wants to overhaul the health care system and take on climate change while also helping the country emerge from the recession.

"I think one of the cautions that has to be given to the president - and I've talked to some of his people about this - is that you can't have so many things on the table that you can't absorb it all. And we can't pay for it all," Powell said.

"And I never would have believed that we would have budgets that are running into the multi-trillions of dollars, and we are amassing a huge, huge national debt that, if we don't pay for in our lifetime, our kids and grandkids and great grandchildren will have to pay for it."

Advisors surrounding the president deflected Powell’s criticism.

“Next up on the ‘to do’ list” said (never let a crisis go to waste) Rahm Immanuel “is the repeal of gravity.”

Palin’s Choice

Hell hath no fury like a media commentator whose narrative has been scorned.

This is the way things were supposed to go: Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin would abide the pelting of a pitiless storm of law suits filed by her political opponents in Alaska, all of which have been turned aside by the courts; then she was supposed to run either for president or for some other national office, at which point the pelting would begin all over again.

As the Fourth of July approached, Palin announced that she was retiring as Governor of Alaska, and shortly thereafter the speculation hit the fan.

Vain speculators on the left, a good many of whom apparently read Vanity Fair, thought that Palin resigned because she could not bear the heat pouring out of the political kitchen. The Vanity Fair article, ten thousand words long, drew the veil off some of the infighting that occurred in the John McCain political camp after McCain picked Palin to run as his vice presidential candidate, on the whole not a pretty picture. With the exception of a few new snark bites, there is nothing fresh in Todd Purdum's piece, much of it being warmed over vitriol. Maureen Dowd, the New York Time’s Queen of scorn, is far better at the catty putdown than Purdum.

A sampling of Dowd’s toxic bon bons: "Exquisite battiness... solipsistic meltdown so strange... incoherent, breathless and prickly... Sarah's country-music melodramas... girlish burbling."

Since the ascension of President Barack Obama, the left has found it inconvenient to write on national political issues.

Most of the chatter on television was devoted to two questions: Why had she done it, and is there political life after resignation? Running like a dark rumor through the chatter was the supposition that some unspeakable political faux pas had yet to be uncovered.

The answer to the second question was “probably not.” Some wiser heads with memories pointed out that other politicians had salvaged their careers after greater tragedies. In deference to Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, now suffering from a brain tumor, Chappaquiddick was not mentioned. In deference to Obama, the tax delinquencies of his Treasury Secretary remained in the commentary closet. As yet, there is no federal investigation of Sen. Chris Dodd's property in Ireland.

The vindictive prosecution of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens is a distant memory.

Last April, federal judge Emmet Sullivan formally accepted a motion to set aside a guilty verdict against former Sen.Ted Stevens of Alaska issued by President Barack Obama’s Attorney General. The presiding judge threw out the indictment, and called the case the worst case of prosecutorial misconduct he'd ever seen. The judge also initiated a criminal contempt investigation of six members of the prosecution even though an internal probe by the Office of Professional Responsibility was in process. Sullivan said he was not willing to trust it due to the "shocking and disturbing" nature of the misconduct.

Palin herself suggested 1) that her family had been unjustly pummeled before and after the campaign, both by vain politicians and consumers of Vanity Fair; 2) that she was spending an inordinate amount of money defending herself from unmerited prosecutions; 3) that she cared about Alaska’s future, and that resigning now would enable the Lieutenant Governor of that state to carry on after she had left and most likely win a future campaign in his own right, thus keeping her beloved state in Republican hands. She was resigning, Palin said, “ … so the administration could continue effectively” without her. Self sacrifice of this kind is unheard of in national politics. Palin also intimated she would be willing to go on the road to support the candidacy of grown up politicians in either party.

Point 1 was studiously ignored by the Vanity Fair crowd; everyone but some small minded bloggers on the left conceded point 2; and point 3 was opaque to the kind of political beltway commentator who believes that politics ends at the borders of Washington DC. Anyone who had spent any time commenting on state politics would have had no problem processing point 3.

So, here we have a politician who cares about her family, cares about her reputation, cares about her state, thinks some ideas are bogus while others are worth sacrificing for, and wanted to avoid the perils of federal politically inspired prosecutions.

How could there possibly be a place for her in Washington politics?