Dennis Kucinich is a Dweeb!

All UFO believers should report to Internships Available at the Dennis Kucinich campaign. This is too rich that he admitted to seeing UFOs! And he defended his position by that Jimmy Carter saw one also. Well for most people that carries as much weight as for me to say I saw one also. (PS: I never allowed myself to be either that tired or that much under the influence of substances.)

I really did not know this about the Gollum Democratic Candidate for President believed such things. I can see why he is so far out there. Did Dennis Kucinich See a UFO?

Did Congressman Dennis Kucinich see a UFO?

A new book soon to be released says he did.

The book is written by one of Kucinich's closest friends, actress Shirley MacLaine, who attended his wedding in Cleveland in 2005.

I guess at least he is now a leader for the wackos that believe in UFOs:

Leave Dennis Kucinich alone!
Last month, following an Exopolitical X-Conference symposium at the National Press Club in Washington, hopes were raised that presidential contender Dennis Kucinich might be the guy to advocate government declassification of UFO material on the campaign trail. Guess that's the load you tote when you're the most progressive candidate in the field. But a Washington Post query to the congressman's office drew a churlish buzzkill. "If you have a serious question," responded Natalie Laber, "just ask me. If not, just keep your silly questions to yourself."

But that was so four weeks ago.

Kucinich should've informed Laber he'd actually seen a UFO in Washington state once upon a time with his pal Shirley MacLaine. At least, that's what she claims in an upcoming book called "Sage-ing While Age-ing." He was visiting her Pacific Northwest home when a huge, noiseless, triangular-shaped craft hovered for about 10 minutes before vanishing. "Dennis," writes MacLaine, "found his encounter extremely moving."

And on MSNBC after the debate Bill Richardson when being interviewed by Chris Matthews, he started talking about how the Federal Government is covering up the Roswell UFO incident.

Well I conclude: "I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat."
I might just add: Democrats do not belong to a organized party unless it is Martians.

I forgot that Loganthor had sent me the following link earlier Kucinich Questions Bush's Mental Health.

Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich questioned President Bush's mental health in light of comments he made about a nuclear Iran precipitating World War III.

"I seriously believe we have to start asking questions about his mental health," Kucinich, an Ohio congressman, said in an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer's editorial board on Tuesday. "There's something wrong. He does not seem to understand his words have real impact."

Yes and we have to wonder about this Dweebs mental health also. Well I am thankful that he has a snowballs chance...

HT: Dick Feagler: So Dennis Kucinich saw a UFO; what's the big deal? Just that I fart in the general direction of Dick also...

Dean Baker is a Dweeb!

Dean Baker has again shown his lack of understanding inTell McCain: Cap and Trade Is a Carbon Tax.

The NYT had an article today on the Republican candidates positions on global warming. At one point it reports that Senator McCain has supported a cap and trade system, but opposes a carbon tax. According to the article, Mr. McCain said that he opposed a carbon tax because he "opposed new taxes but that he also believed that poor workers who tended to commute to work longer distances would be disproportionately affected."

OK, seems reasonable to me.

A cap and trade system would create a certain number of tradable carbon emission permits which can be auctioned off or distributed through some other mechanism. This would lead a price to associated with carbon emissions just as a tax would. A poor person commuting to work would pay more for their gas because the oil carbon had to buy carbon permits just the same as if they had to pay a carbon tax. From the standpoint of commuters and the economy there is no obvious difference between the impact of a cap and trade system and carbon taxes, if they are set at a level where they bring the same reduction in emissions.

So, one key here is that the method of distribution. Many C&T schemes give away the credits as the grandfathered polluters get the credits since that is the status quo and not distorting the market on the first round. But as he defines the "tax" it is simply a transfer from least efficient to most efficient polluters which by McCains standard is revenue neutral with regard to Federal Taxes. The poor person commuting to work even if the cap and trade filtered down to his level on commuting allows him to choose more efficient suppliers than less. Any way you slice it the more efficient polluters would be favored over the less. Most carbon taxes translate to gas prices and as such his commute would be taxed directly unless he could find alternatives.

I often wonder why people devise plans to tax the wrong actions. It is not the gas producers that are emitting the carbon but it is the consumer in this case. Now for electricity generation then yes the power companies are the emitters. The question is to who is burning the hydrocarbons?

The article should have noted this point and informed readers that Mr. McCain either does not understand his own proposal or is not being honest with voters.

Seems McCain was honest with voters. Of course does Baker expect politicians to be as versed in all aspects of every policy? I mean it seems that Baker has taken some short cuts here also. In the comments section he did state:

You charge the cap and trade the oil companies that sell the gas.
...
Barkley,
i don't have any objection to cap and trade, as long as most of the permits are auctioned off. I just think it's ridiculous for anyone to say that they would oppose a carbon tax, but they support cap and trade. I understand that McCain is doing this to please his anti-tax base, but the media are not obligated to help him in this effort at deception.

So now he tells us that cap and trade is to sell/auction off the permits which he did not start with. And do you think the reporters would have gotten the difference if McCain had talked about these points? I mean Dean Baker should know that the Press is not very savvy with respect to economic issues.

The only distortion I see here is from Baker. McCain is correct that the Cap and Trade could be revenue neutral and that and "tax" that Baker has imagined is just a transfer from less efficient to more polluters.

Let me end with one comment on Dean's Blog that explains the issues pretty well:

Dean - you misunderstand the carbon debate.

Carbon will be regulated. The cost of regulation (incl. diminished emissions) will be carried by consumers. The flavor of regulation - straight tax or cap & trade - doesn't matter from the consumer's perspective.

However, the flavor of regulation (tax v. cap™) will have a tremendous impact on business and industry. Long story short: a straight carbon tax will handicap many business and industrial activities to the point of failure, but a cap & trade framework is far more flexible (allowing business and industry to plan, adjust and eventually comply with lower emissions and higher costs).

Dean B. is correct that carbon regulation has an absolute and invariable cost to consumers. The debate/question is whether the type of regulation imposed will allow business/industry some control/flexibility on the road to compliance. Many (like McCain) believe a straight tax is far too rigid and will kill many businesses.

Plutocracy/Polyarchic Democracy

I was posting at my favorite forum and thus was thinking about the causality vs. casualty (I would say correlations) paradigms and thought I would talk about one.

Plutocracy or sometimes replaced with Polyarchic Democracy of course has been bandied around in that forum since before I even got there. But I find the causality weak at best for the basis of these theories. "In a plutocracy, power and opportunity are centralized within the affluent social class."

First how do we define the "elite"? Could I not consider Noam Chomsky as part of the elite? I mean he is a wealthy man that has has achieved success in his chosen field and is a highly regarded individual that is supposedly is the most often quoted living intellectual of our time. Could we also not say the same about Ralph Nadar?

Secondly, do people vote for losers? I mean the people that can show success in our society tend to be the cream of the crop and as such people are more inclined to look favorably on them. Success can mean many things but we live in a semi-capitalist system so it is natural that we reward those that do well in the system. I mean do we ever elect dog catchers?

Thirdly, people that are successful are also highly motivated people, thus there is some self selection process going on. Many have shown a desire for Donald Trump to enter politics. Again he has shown his skills in business and having a little necessary traits of narcissism, he could be a good candidate. He has shown his ability to adapt and to accept new challenges and even take risks that most people avoid. It seems there is an obvious risk to running for election.

This leads to fourthly, we like people that have the traits such as Donald Trump and people that are highly motivated to take office. Which was a complaint about Fred Thompson. But we do not want to feel like we were bought out. Many wealthy politicians have learned too late that just because they have money they can not buy their way in. They actually need the fund-raisers to get people excited enough to spend money and thus to create a legitimacy. So the ironic twist is that not all money is equal-as rightly it should be.

So I reject Polyarchic Democracy as a valid causality effect from nihilists.

PS: America: Land of Pessimissm? has an interesting passage that seems to go along with the above post...

We’re still the only nation on earth that can will ourselves to become a different place just by changing the political scenery. It’s not so much which party comes to power as it is the feeling of turning over the sod and refreshing the soil. It’s almost as if changing the party in power gives us permission to change our outlook, to begin to look to the future again with optimism and hope. It’s happened many times before. There’s no reason to believe it won’t happen again.

While to some the differences may seem minor, in reality they can mean a difference in attitude and thus direction.

Ron Paul is a Dweeb!

Even the most educated and smart people can view events through rose colored glasses. Take for example a fellow blogger that I have met on-line that goes by the name JohnnyX. He has shown a clearness in his writings and provided some valuable information to me, but today I wanted to address one of his posts called:Wilsonian Redux.

In 1918, Presdent Woodrow Wilson committed U.S. forces to the territory north of St. Petersburg, to help fight the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. By 1919, 5,000 American troops were in the northern Russian theater, intervening on the side of the anti-Bolsheviks. The plan, of course, backfired, resulting in a hardened Bolshevik opposition.

It seems that very few people can identify as to what the anti-Bolsheviks were and how they are identified, even Socialists that know so much about the glorious "Revolution" can not identify the White movement or White Army. There was also the Green armies and the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine (Black Army). If you read through the White Army link you will see that many nations sent armies or helped the Whites in a variety of ways. As far as backfiring, we should really ask Lenin and his comrades that felt that revolution is glorious, but you really can not say this was a causality since the civil war (oppositions) was not of our doing. We could say that Wilson was actually very smart to recognize that Marxist/Communist Doctrine was not going to be a good thing for Russia or the world. And as John Maynard Keynes said:

I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas…. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil….

Now back to JohnnyX:

In June of 1919 the U.S. Senate passed a resolution asking Wilson to explain his reasons for sending troops to fight and die in Siberia. Republican (that's right, Republican) Senator William Borah exposed Wilson's strategy of sliding into war through the back door, saying that "while Congress has not declared war, we are carrying on war with the Russian people. We have an army in Russia; we are furnishing munitions and supplies." The good Senator harshly condemned what had been revealed as nothing more or less than a policy "to intervene by military force in the internal affairs of Russia and to establish a government that will be satisfactory to [allied] powers."

I have to say yes it is right that Wilson should have notified Congress of his intentions but I am sure he understood the situation in Russia a lot better than any Senator. But this passage from here:

Senator Borah in his speech said it mattered not whether the American soldiers aiding Kolchak were regulars, volunteers or drafted men, they had no business in Russia.

Which seems to contradict Ron Paul's stance that as long as people volunteer and spend their own resources they can delve in Democracy building.

Though Russia had not attacked or threatened any member of the League of Nations, the Wilson administration couldn't wait to flex its muscles alongside Britain and Japan in one of the first follies of democratic nation-building. Atrocities abounded. Russian women and children were starved by a blockade enforced by the allied governments. Madeleine Albright would have been proud.

Yes, Albright is the devil in disguise and I condemn her for thinking and then saying that 1/2 million Iraqi children dieing is worth it. But seriously that I do not see as "Nation-Building" only defending the rights of some for a true Democracy like we have. We sided on one side of a revolutionary war like the French did for us. Talk about atrocities, our little force is nothing compared to the tens of millions that died under USSR rule all we need to do is ask the Kulaks">. Well, instead of building a Democracy we allowed a Communist Regime to flourish.

"We are utterly at sea as to why our armed forces are carrying on war in Russia," the Senator lamented, "but whatever is being done in that country in the way of armed intervention is without authority. It is a plain usurpation of power to maintain troops in Russia. It breaks down and disregards every principle of constitutional government of which we can conceive."

No Bolshevik sympathizer, he nevertheless maintained that "if they see fit to have a Soviet government, it is their business." Wilson eventually yielded to public pressure and pulled the troops out. Decades later the National Review crowd would find in Soviet Russia a sinister evil of near biblical proportions, rather than a sadly errant and doomed system rotting from the inside out, as Mises and Rothbard had the wisdom to perceive.

Unfortunately we have to small of a world to just let Genocide/Democide go unchecked. In some small way we are all at risk if tyranny rules the day. Yes, Wilson did yield to public pressure and that was the beginning of a long chain of the USA turning its back on its allies and friends. Well I guess it is Biblical Proportions when they had 40,000 nuclear devices with nuclear submarines and some of the most advanced military hardware of any country including the USA.

But a good idea has a 1000 fathers and a bad one is a bastard. It may have been doomed but when is the question?

Senator Borah saw in the entrance to the League of Nations a dangerous move away from America's traditional doctrine of armed neutrality. "We are sitting there dabbling in their affairs and intermeddling in their concerns. In other words, Mr. President—and this comes to the question which is fundamental with me—we have forfeited and surrendered, once and for all, the great policy of "no entangling alliances" upon which the strength of this Republic has been founded for 150 years."

But then Borah says the following:

You have put in here a reservation upon the Monroe doctrine. I think that, in so far as language could protect the Monroe doctrine, it has been protected. But as a practical proposition, as a working proposition, tell me candidly, as men familiar with the history of your country and of other countries, do you think that you can intermeddle in European affairs; and, secondly, never to permit Europe to [interfere in our affairs].

We can not protect the Monroe doctrine unless we protect the basic principle upon which it rests, and that is the Washington policy. I do not care how earnestly you may endeavor to do so, as a practical working proposition your league will come to the United States....

So if he is supporting the Monroe Doctrine and using that as a reason for no interference in European affairs then he is also not an isolationist as the rest of speech seems to state. So much for "no entangling alliances". Then he seems to backtrack:

He predicted, at the very outset, the sorrowful result of Wilsonianism: "We shall be a party to the rule of force. There is no other way by which you can keep people in subjection. You must either give them independence, recognize their rights as nations to live their own life and to set up their own form of government, or you must deny them these things by force. That is the scheme, the method proposed by the league. It proposes no other. We will in time become inured to its inhuman precepts and its soulless methods strange as this doctrine now seems to a free people."

But the power of the Police State creates many situations that does not allow people a choice "to live their own life and to set up their own form of government". In a perfect world there would be no Police States but in reality we still have Sudan, Burma, North Korea, Zimbabwe, etc. Borah also seems to equate nations rights with people's rights.

Foreign interventionism really began around the time that plans to annex Hawaii found their way onto the table. Their fulcrum was a renewed sense of manifest destiny, but they fizzled when President Cleveland nixed them. Yet even as the crassness of imperialism for commercial concerns (opening new markets for American business) and for the political desire to find some place in which to plow budget surpluses (naval expansion) became too obvious and thus uncomfortable for most, a new justification arose that was, as historian Ernest May put it, "clothed in the rhetoric of piety". By the time Wilson took the reigns, exporting the American brand of goodness had risen to an obsession.

I do love the way JohnnyX has a way with words. But honestly this sounds more like my lefty friends than any conservative. This does bring me back to William E. Borah- Speech On The League Of Nations:

Sir, we are told that this treaty means peace. Even so, I would not pay the price. Would you purchase peace at the cost of any part of our independence? We could have had peace in 1776– the price was high, but we could have had it. James Otis, Sam Adams, Hancock, and Warren were surrounded by those who urged peace and British rule. All through that long and trying struggle, particularly when the clouds of adversity lowered upon the cause, there was a cry of peace—let us have peace. We could have had peace in 1860; Lincoln was counseled by men of great influence and accredited wisdom to let our brothers—and, thank Heaven, they are brothers— depart in peace. But the tender, loving Lincoln, bending under the fearful weight of impending civil war, an apostle of peace, refused to pay the price, and a reunited country will praise his name forevermore—bless it because he refused peace at the price of national honor and national integrity. Peace upon any other basis than national independence, peace purchased at the cost of any part of our national integrity, is fit only for slaves, and even when purchased at such a price it is a delusion, for it can not last.

So Borah seems to justify the Civil War that was clearly against a collection of states that formed a Nation and thus how dare he meddle in their affairs? Was this not force to prevent a Nation and also a collection of people from governing themselves? Thus I question JohnnyX's opinions on Hawaii vs. the Civil War.

And so began our campaign to find, and measure our exuberant strength against, all manner of monsters that lurked abroad. Like Beowulf, America set out on a crusade to poke every disagreeable fiend in the eye and to settle all disputes. We did it for the "greater good", and only coincidentally in the service of "interests"—which by the way are invariably spoken of, when acknowledged at all, in the vaguest terms and usually prefaced with a meaningful pause.

I can not say that these points have no merit in that we can and do find enemies, but that is the same that seems to be happening in Europe to a bigger degree. The only difference is that we are willing to face it more directly.

Today the monster is radical Islam, and the rhetoric hasn't changed. We're battling an evil enemy bent on world domination; we're hacking it down for the benefit of the oppressed natives who will surely want to mimic us if given the opportunity; and when we fail in the first two tasks, we are compelled to stay or else there will be chaos. Even the ultimate fall-back argument against abandoning our pole-to-pole interventionism, which the Manchester Union-Leader recently invoked against Ron Paul, is stale: "A policy of isolation did well enough when we were an embryo nation," one U.S. Senator sneered in the year 1893, "but today things are different."

Yes, to deny that radical Islam is not a threat is pure illogical thinking. Have we responded more than necessary? That is a question I will leave for historians. But just listen to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to get an idea how dangerous the rhetoric is. As far as "oppressed natives", yes let them decide what they want but we should allow them the options besides the boot of the Police State pressing down on their collective necks. They may mimic a whole of Liberal Democracies maybe even God forbid Canadian Democracy!

And now responding to the last link at: I Advocate the Same Foreign Policy the Founding Fathers Would.

...second, that their political philosophy – the wisdom of the Constitution, the Declaration, and our Revolution itself – is not just a primitive cultural relic.

If I understand the editors' concerns, I have not been accused of deviating from the Founders' logic; if anything I have been accused of adhering to it too strictly.

Well in certain ways it is a primitive cultural relic based on a set of beliefs and knowledge that people over 200 years ago thought. For one thing the field of Economics is so much more advanced since then. Which is one reason that it is pure foolishness to think of eliminating the Federal Reserve System.

And now for some gratuitous pizza dancing:Ron Paul Fever: Catch It!

And lastly a funny article on the followers of Ron Paul: New York Mayor’s Worst Nightmare

White Emigre is also worth a look at.

Something to keep an eye on: 'Criminal' Botnet Stumps for Ron Paul, Researchers Allege

Links:
Ron Paul: A New Hope

Miles I fart in your General Direction!

Miles:Interestingly, Oganbrick has no problem trolling an spamming the hell out of everyone to the point of being banned (after which it took a whole lot of sucking up, primarily to Bill King, to be reinstated), but catch them in the act of socking (see above), and your in box (in my case, spam box; I don't read mail from trolls and assholes) is filled with hate mail.

Play them at their own game, and our boy loses composure.

Loganthor:Poor Miles your delusional revisionist history is sad. Your elitist, angry shithead group finally got nailed to the wall by poor old innocent me and you want to rewrite history so you guys come out on looking better then the pile of shit you guys looked like. My Letter to Sue was a Brilliant post by post timeline of how fucked in the head Andger was and how deceptively, selectively naïve Usha was. That is what got me re-instated. I understand you frustration, how many times have you been banned from sites now, 12? Your not just a troll, your King Troll. I allow Loki to exist out of sheer Pity and it qualifies as my good deed of the day.

Hey if you want to lie to yourself about reading my email. That is fine by me. The only person it hurts is you. Although I find your barely audible screams of righteousness barely entertaining. I find your forum pathetic and borderline spineless coward. You seemingly can not handle word of truth so you delete them, change them and bar them. You literally are the worst progressive EVER.