My, Pauliac From Planet Ronulian, What A Big, Red Herring You Have!

In response to David, who wrote to remind me that William F Buckley once said:

"The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” 

Yes, he wrote that in the National Review in August 1957.  It was a horrible thing to say.   Such thoughts were disgusting and, unfortunately, quite pervasive in the day.  The following also appeared in the magasine:

"In the Deep South the Negroes are retarded. Any effort to ignore the fact is sentimentalism or demagoguery. In the Deep South the essential relationship is organic, and the attempt to hand over to the Negro the raw political power with which to alter it is hardly a solution."

- National Review, March 1960

Buckley also said:

"Some of my instincts are reprehensible."

So, yes, some of his instincts were reprehensible.  So were some of his statements; however, during the 1950s, Buckley had worked to remove anti-Semitism from the conservative movement and barred holders of those views from working for National Review.  

In 1962, Buckley denounced Robert W. Welch, Jr., and the John Birch Society, in National Review, as "far removed from common sense" and urged the GOP to purge itself of Welch's influence.

In the late 1960s, Buckley disagreed strenuously with segregationist George Wallace, who ran in Democratic primaries (1964 and 1972) and made an independent run for president in 1968.  

Buckley later said it was a mistake for National Review to have opposed the civil rights legislation of 1964–65.  He also grew to admire Martin Luther King, Jr..  Shall we review Dr Paul's newsletters on the subject of MLK?   Buckley supported the creation of a national holiday for MLK.  Shall we review what Dr Paul's newsletter said about the MLK holiday even though the good doctor voted for to make his birthday a Federal holiday in 1979?  Is he a closet racist?  Did he allow others to write such vile garbage in a cynical ploy to reap campaign dough?  Is he incapable of running a business enterprise of less than 10 people, but somehow capable of running the United States government with over 2 million employees?

The bottomline is on the Buckley & National Review issue is this:

Buckley is dead.  He ran for Mayor of New York in 1965.  He lost.  He is a non-issue.  He is not running for President of the United States of America.

Whatever was or wasn't published in the National Review in the last 5 and a half decades is irrelevant as it pertains to what was written in Dr Paul's various newsletters.  Again, no one at the National Review is running for President of the United States of America.

So, David, we are down to a quote from William F Buckley in 1957, who is dead, and newsletters bearing the name of a candidate running for the Office of the Presidency of the United States of America in 2012 dated during what time period?

Yeah, that's what I thought.  Nice try though.

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The Next Russian Revolution?

By ROBERT SERVICE

Oxford, England, 23 December 2011

TWENTY years ago, Mikhail S. Gorbachev announced the end of a huge global experiment. After seven decades, the Soviet Union would be dismantled, its 15 republics becoming independent countries, and capitalism replacing the planned Soviet economy. Lenin’s embalmed corpse was left undisturbed in the Red Square mausoleum in Moscow, but the cause for which he led the October 1917 revolution no longer held the affection of hundreds of millions of Russians and millions more around the world.

For two decades since, the Russian people have largely endured in silence the oppressive and corrupt system of power that ensued — until blatant irregularities in parliamentary elections earlier this month sent an estimated 50,000 people out in protest. These protesters have planned what is expected to be the biggest demonstration since the fall of Communism for Saturday in Moscow. Vladimir V. Putin, the once and future president, is at last facing trouble from the streets.

The terminal crisis of Communism, by contrast, was a quiet affair. The end of the Soviet Union was revolutionary, but it did not involve a crowd storming the walls of the Kremlin, an attack on the K.G.B. headquarters or calling up the Moscow army garrisons. Indeed the final days of the Communist era were remarkable for the low intensity of political activity of any kind. 

On national television, Mr. Gorbachev put on a brave face: “We’re now living in a new world,” he said during a Dec. 25, 1991, broadcast of his resignation speech. “An end has been put to the cold war and to the arms race, as well as to the mad militarization of the country.” But he could not disguise his regret that the Soviet order was about to be taken apart.

Mr. Gorbachev was paying the price for his failures. The economic laws he introduced in 1988 had weakened the huge state sector without allowing private enterprise to emerge. He had irritated the country’s dominant institutions — the Communist Party, the K.G.B. and the military — but had merely trimmed their capacity to retaliate. By widening freedoms of expression, moreover, he inadvertently encouraged radicals to denounce Communism, despite his reforms.

Mr. Gorbachev had complacently assumed that reform would release the energies of “the Soviet people.” But the truth was that no such people existed. The Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians pressed for independent statehood and chose their own Baltic patriots to lead them. The Georgians in 1990 elected a wild nationalist as president. Throughout the western and southeastern borderlands of the Soviet Union, the disintegration proceeded apace.

In August 1991, while Mr. Gorbachev vacationed in Crimea, his subordinates acted to halt his reforms by staging a coup. But the plotters overlooked the need to apprehend Boris N. Yeltsin, an ex-Communist radical who had been elected president of the Russian republic two months earlier. Mr. Yeltsin raced to the Russian White House in central Moscow. 

Standing atop a tank, he defiantly denounced the plotters. The coup was aborted, and when Mr. Gorbachev returned from house arrest, it was Mr. Yeltsin who appeared the hero. Yet Yeltsin felt he couldn’t consolidate his personal supremacy unless he broke up the Soviet Union and governed Russia as a separate state. He and his supporters saw Russia as a slumbering giant with a future of enormous potential if the encumbrance of the other Soviet republics was removed. He saw Communism as a dead end and a totalitarian nightmare. And unlike Mr. Gorbachev, he was willing to say this openly and without equivocation.

His opportunity for action arose on Dec. 1, 1991, when Ukrainians voted to break away from the Soviet Union. Without Ukraine, it was clear, the Soviet Union would face further secessionist demands. Mr. Yeltsin met quietly with the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus and came to an agreement to declare the Soviet Union abolished.

Mr. Gorbachev had no choice but to agree, and the vengeful Mr. Yeltsin unceremoniously bundled him out of the Kremlin. The Russian people, it turned out, preferred to watch politicians on television rather than become active participants in the country’s transformation. They had long been cynical about Communist leaders, and the trauma of the arrests and executions during Stalin’s Great Terror of the late 1930s had made them wary about taking part in politics.

Although thousands of young Russians had joined Mr. Yeltsin in defying the coup plotters in August 1991, civic activism declined as conditions worsened. As state enterprises underwent privatization, workers feared unemployment and resisted calls to go on strike. Russia’s manufacturing sector collapsed; only the petrochemical, gold and timber sectors successfully weathered the storms of capitalist development. A few businessmen became super-rich by exploiting legal loopholes and often using fraudulent and violent methods. Most citizens of post-Communist Russia were too exhausted to do more than grumble.

Public protest against the Kremlin became more difficult under Mr. Putin. Elected to the presidency in 2000, and now serving as prime minister, he has used ballot-box fraud, disqualification of rival political candidates and control of national television to stay in power. Although he gained popularity for bringing stability, his own administration is now attracting growing hostility.

Most Russians are sick of the corruption, misrule and poverty that plague their country while the Kremlin elite feasts on the profits from oil and gas exports — and who can blame them? At the turn of the millennium, 40 percent of the Russian people were living below the United Nations-defined poverty line. Rising oil prices have made poverty decline to some extent, but Mr. Putin has made no effort to eradicate it altogether.

The opposition, having suffered from years of harassment at Mr. Putin’s hands, has not yet succeeded in taking advantage of today’s unstable situation. But the recent outburst of public protest has flummoxed Mr. Putin, as he finds that his authoritarian government lacks the pressure valves that allow liberal democracies to anticipate and alleviate expressions of discontent.

Mr. Putin can no longer take his supremacy for granted. It is not yet a revolutionary situation. After all, Mr. Putin, like Mr. Yeltsin before him, can count on the money and pork-barrel politics needed to win the presidency next year; and he has no qualms about letting the security agencies use force.

But Russians, having sleepwalked away from Communism, are awakening to the idea that if they want democracy and social justice, they need to engage in active struggle. Quiescent 20 years ago during Soviet Communism’s final days, they may at last be about to stand up for their rights. 

Robert Service, a fellow at Oxford’s St. Antony’s College and Stanford’s Hoover Institution, is the author of the forthcoming book “Spies and Commissars: the Early Years of the Russian Revolution.”

The 7 Most Illuminating Economic Charts Of 2011

By James Pethokoukis

December 23, 2011, 12:11 pm

My Magnificent Seven. Some bust myths. Others highlight a reality the media is ignoring. 

Enjoy!

1. The overly optimistic unemployment forecast of the Obama White House. 

This may be the most infamous economic prediction in U.S. political history (helpfully updated by The Right Sphere). For the original January 2009 chart from White House economic advisers Jared Bernstein and Christina Romer, see here.

2.  The real unemployment rate. 

The official (U-3) unemployment rate is 8.6 percent. But the labor force has been shrinking as discouraged workers have been disappeared by government statisticians rather than counted as unemployed. But what if they weren’t? What if the Labor Department added those folks back into the numbers? Well, you would get this:

3. Middle-class incomes have been stagnant for decades—not. 

It is an oft-repeated liberal talking point, one that President Obama himself used in his populist Osawatomie Speech: The rich got richer the past 30 years while the middle-class went nowhere. In short, the past few decades of lower taxes and lighter regulation have been a failure. Or, rather, pro-market policies have been a failure … except that new research from the University of Chicago’s Bruce Meyer and Notre Dame’s James Sullivan find that “median income and consumption both rose by more than 50 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2009.”

4. Inequality has exploded—not. 

According to the MSM and liberal economists, U.S. inequality has exploded to levels not seen since the 1920s or perhaps even the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. And to prove their point—that the 1 percent has gotten amazingly richer in recent decades—the inequality alarmists will inevitably trot out a famous income inequality study from economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Pike. But why not instead look at wealth—all financial and nonfinancial assets—instead of income? It’s less volatile and a truer measure of all the economic resources at an individual’s command. Turns out that Saez has done research on that subject, too. And he even created a revealing chart documenting the ups and downs of U.S. wealth over the past century. It reveals a very different picture of inequality in America:

5. and 6. The underwhelming Obama recovery. 

When you compare the current recovery to those of the past, it looks pretty anemic. And it doesn’t matter if you look at GDP growth or unemployment (via The Economist).

7. America’s debt picture is worse than you think. 

If you factor in the long-term impact of rising federal debt on U.S. interest rates and economic growth—raising borrowing costs and lowering tax revenue—you’ll find that federal debt could be almost 50 percent higher by 2035 than the estimates usually bandied about in the media.