Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Kerry to sign UN arms treaty
Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to sign an arms trade treaty opposed by the Senate and the gun lobby as early as Wednesday, and Republicans aren’t happy about it.
Kerry’s plan to sign the treaty on the margins of the U.N. General Assembly in New York this week has sparked immediate criticism from GOP opponents.
“This treaty is already dead in the water in the Senate, and they know it,” said Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services. “The Administration is wasting precious time trying to sign away our laws to the global community and unelected U.N. bureaucrats.”
A majority of Senators oppose the treaty because it covers small arms, making ratification impossible in the short term.
Kerry had already announced in June that the administration would sign the treaty as soon as it was satisfied with its translations into the different official U.N. languages. Reuters reported that he is likely to sign the treaty this week.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Saving the Ludwig von Mises Papers: How the Holocaust Museum Helped Uncover a Nazi Treasure Trove in Moscow
Although the Gestapo failed to nab Mises, who had escaped to Switzerland, they ransacked his apartment at 24 Wollseile, confiscating his manuscripts, articles, university lectures and extensive correspondence with many of the greatest thinkers of his time.
The Nazis were after Mises not only because he was Jewish, but because he was a brilliant, outspoken opponent of social engineering and central planning. Mises championed a free-market economy as the best way to protect individual liberties, spur innovation and raise living standards. He argued that Germany’s spiraling inflation was a result of government mismanagement of monetary and banking systems. As a result, Ebeling notes, “both fascists and communists hated him.”
Mises founded the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research in 1926, with a young Friedrich A. Hayek as its first director. As a senior economic analyst for Vienna’s Chamber of Commerce, Mises railed against waves of interventionist and socialist legislation implemented by the Austrian parliament. Mises held salons at his home that brought together the best young minds in Vienna to discuss the dangers of socialism for European economies and for human liberty. Mises was an advocate of entrepreneurship who argued that entrepreneurs created much of society’s wealth. No wonder Hitler was threatened by him!
In 1940, Professor Mises emigrated to the United States, where he taught at New York University until age 87 and wrote many influential articles and books, including his masterpiece Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Sadly, Mises died believing his papers had been destroyed by the Nazis.
Miraculously, though, his long-lost papers were discovered in a secret Moscow archive in 1996 by American economist and Mises scholar Richard Ebeling — who has been my friend for 30 years.
One man’s ObamaCare nightmare
Andy and Amy Mangione of Louisville, Ky. and their two boys are just the kind of people who should be helped by ObamaCare. But they recently got a nasty surprise in the mail.
“When I saw the letter when I came home from work,” Andy said, describing the large red wording on the envelope from his insurance carrier, “(it said) ‘your action required, benefit changes, act now.’ Of course I opened it immediately.”
It had stunning news. Insurance for the Mangiones and their two boys,which they bought on the individual market, was going to almost triple in 2014 — from $333 a month to $965.
The insurance carrier made it clear the increase was in order to be compliant with the new health care law.
“This isn’t a Cadillac plan, this isn’t even a silver plan,” Mangione said, referring to higher levels of coverage under ObamaCare.
“This is a high deductible plan where I’m assuming a lot of risk for my health insurance for my family. And nothing has changed, our boys are healthy– they’re young –my wife is healthy. I’m healthy, nothing in our medical history has changed to warrant a tripling of our premiums.
“Well I’m the one that does the budget,” said his wife. “Eventually I’ve got that coming down the pike that I gotta figure out what we’re gonna cut what we’re gonna do, to afford a $1,000 a month premium.”
Monday, September 23, 2013
MARYLAND PARENT ARRESTED FOR CHALLENGING COMMON CORE
At a Towson, Maryland school board meeting on Thursday, a parent attempting to ask questions about Common Core was arrested and charged with second-degree assault of a police officer. The event was recorded by another parent, and later related by yet another to Michelle Malkin. Robert Small focused on the lowering of educational standards in his complaint, saying “You are not preparing them for Harvard,” but rather a community college.
The meeting was a question-and-answer session organized by Superintendent Dallas Dance, but – as is becoming increasingly common – questions were submitted on paper and select questions were answered, rather than allowing parents to stand up and speak. This format allows for the censoring of questions, and indeed the questions answered by the meeting’s panel were, according to the person videotaping, “softball” questions.
“In a nutshell, it was an hour and a half long and the first hour was Dallas Dance, Lillian Lowery, a PTA leader, and a teacher from Cantonsville High School basically tell us how great this was going to be.” Multiple parents in the room had already shown frustration at the question selection when Small stood up and began to ask challenging questions. He spoke briefly before being escorted out by security and arrested. “He was just a dad trying to get some information about his children’s education and ended up in jail for not sitting down and shutting up,” the letter said.
Common Core has been the subject of increasing scrutiny in recent months as it grows closer to being implemented in most states in the country. The federal system of education standards was always criticized for being unconstitutional, and was thrust upon states in a manner completely lacking transparency or accountability, but it was only recently that the problems with the curriculum itself have been revealed.
The NSA Review Panel Is An Even Bigger Joke Than We Previously Thought
Today the AP reported that President Barack Obama’s promised NSA review panel is channeling the entity that it is supposed to inspect, hiding behind layers of government bureaucracy and obfuscating its work.
The AP states that the review panel is lodged in offices provided by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Even more, the DNI is running its media strategy, vetting requests through its own press office. Any whiff of independence that the group might have hoped to engender is now certainly gone.
Not that it got off to a good start. The panel was stacked with, as I reported in late August, ”a slurry of insiders, former insiders, and a previous colleague of the president.” So, it was hardly the “high-level group of outside experts” that the president had promised.
Now, ensconced inside the entity that it is supposed to vet, surrounded and apparently managed by those very organs, the panel is rapidly approaching punchline status.
The AP has more, almost comically. I quote to preserve the dryness of its writing:
James Clapper, the intelligence director, exempted the panel from U.S. rules that require federal committees to conduct their business and their meetings in ways the public can observe. Its final report, when it’s issued, will be submitted for White House approval before the public can read it.