When I heard this on the radio this morning, I was stunned:

Jeremiah Wright. William Ayers. Van Jones. Where does the rogues’ gallery of Barack Obama’s radical friends end? These people are not liberals. They are not “progressives.” They are radicals who hate America and in many cases have advocated or even perpetrated violence in an effort to destroy it.

Thanks to Glenn Beck, the American public has now been introduced to yet another radical member of Obama’s inner circle: Anita Dunn, Interim White House Communications Director, former top advisor to Obama’s political campaign, and wife of Obama’s personal lawyer, Robert Bauer.

In a speech before high school students last June, Dunn spoke passionately about her two favorite political philosophers, “the two people I turn to most” for answers to important questions like “how to do things that have never been done before.” Who are these paragons? One was Mother Teresa. Dunn didn’t have much to say about her. Most of her enthusiasm was lavished upon her other favorite fount of political wisdom: Mao Tse-Tung.

I’ve heard the audio (which you can listen to in the link). Its not out of context, its not something which can be explained away – the lady thinks that Mao is an admirable person we can learn from. She made the remarks at a high school graduation – which means she thinks that the kiddies should emulate the Great Helmsman.

As I said, I was stunned – Mao was a psychopath; a murderer; a thug. In plain fact, the man was no different from Stalin, Lening, Pol Pot, Hitler or any one of a score of the 21st century’s bloodthirsty tyrants. His name is an abomination and should be held up as precisely what no person should follow – but here comes Anita Dunn, Obamaniac, lauding him for his persistence. That he was persisting in evil designs doesn’t register.

In my view, the reason Dunn says what she says – and why other liberals have, at times, praised other tyrants – is because they earnestly wish they had that sort of power. There is really no other explanation possible, outside of sheer stupidity, for praising men who were simply vile in their actions. And now, with Dunn, we can see that the infiltration of such junior-league communist apparatchiks in to government is not just some isolated instances – there are too many such cases under Obama. This amounts to a take over of the reigns of power by people who hate democracy…who think it a hindrance in the pursuit of their ideals.

UPDATE: Roger Kimball gives a run-down on damage control:

Damage control time!

–She didn’t mean it.

–She was only quoting a Republican operative.

–Fox News is mean to Democrats.

–Glenn Beck is an extremist.

–The President is trying to clean up a big mess left by George Bush.

–Can’t we just change the subject?

When Glenn Beck aired a video of White House Communications Director Anita Dunn praising Chairman Mao — one of her “two favorite political philosophers” — in front of an audience of high school students, the conservative blogosphere lit up like a non-denominational sustainably harvested Kwanza tree.

And the left swung in to action – and Kimball seems to not have been hit with the “she was just being ironic” meme some lefty’s have tried here.

She did mean it, she wasn’t quoting a Republican, how Fox News views Democrats is irrelevant, Glenn Beck’s views are also irrelevant, President Bush didn’t bring the Maoists in to the White House and no, we’re not going to change the subject.

Fascinating article about how “the commons” are best preserved by people at the local level who actually use the commons, rather than having distant bureaucrats oversee use, as our enviro-fascists and sundry liberal totalitarians wish. From the article:

…In the interview at the Mercatus Center, she explained the advantages of trusting locals:

The strength of polycentric governance systems is each of the subunits has considerable autonomy to experiment with diverse rules for a particular type of resource system and with different response capabilities to external shock. In experimenting with rule combinations within the smaller-scale units of a polycentric system, citizens and officials have access to local knowledge, obtain rapid feedback from their own policy changes, and can learn from the experience of other parallel units.

Which is one of the biggest “no duh” moments in history. I do appreciate the Dr. Elinor Ostrom, the author of the italicized quote, for her clear thinking on the matter. But she’s discovering what everyone knows – or, at least, what everyone knew before half-educated dimwits came along and decided that they were smart enough to sit in judgment on 20 centuries of human effort. Everyone who thinks about it for a moment knows that the people concerned are always best equipped to figure out the best solution to the local problem. Outside forces can help – but unless the help is freely granted with no strings attached, it is apt to hinder.

Take the example of Las Vegas – we’ve got this sprawling metropolis out here suffering close to 14% official unemployment. What are we built on out here? Gambling and the California housing market. Gambling because its just what we started going back in the 30’s, and housing because California’s housing prices rose so fast that you could sell a shack in Los Angeles and buy a mini-mansion here in Las Vegas on the proceeds. So, we had people coming to gamble which provided money and then we had people moving to Las Vegas because you could buy a lot more house for the money…and it became a circle. As more people came, more gambling was done and more houses were built and more people came and more gambling was done and more houses were built…until the housing market died and now we’ve got ever more empty houses and less and less gambling going on. My fear for Las Vegas is that it will by and large die away – not Strip; that is too much an international tourist destination – but that the rest of the city will die. If no one can buy more houses and there is no market for local gambling, what are we here for?

Why did this happen? Because most of our land is held by the federal government – close to 85% of Nevada is owned by Uncle Sam. Which means that bureaucrats and politicians in DC decide what is to be done with the land. Who do you think had the ear of the distant government: regular folks, or those who represented casinos and home builders? We got more and more land out of Uncle Sam – at a price, naturally – but only to build more houses and more casinos. Where are the farms? (yes, I know, we live in a desert, but there are things which can be done agriculture-wise…example being a local pig farm which feeds the hogs off the refuse from the casino kitchens…naturally this one non-casino, non-housing enterprise had been under fire from government officials who want it gone…so they can build more houses and casinos on the land) Where are the factories? Where are the mining operations? All we’ve got is glittering casinos and houses worth 50% or less of their mortgage amount. Oh, and a few preserves and parks as a sop to the environmentalists…but still not usable to the locals, except to look at…

I’m not saying that if we, the people of Nevada, had full control that this would paradise – but I’ll bet that we wouldn’t be caught in an economic vise where we now have to try to figure out ways and means of diversifying our economy when all we’ve got are houses and casinos – and with still almost all the land not developed held by Uncle Sam, who doesn’t just want us to build a future on the land…that land is only to be used as part of political back-scratching, you fool! As an object lesson in why locals should rule, Las Vegas is perfect – and keep this sort of thing in mind as people propose to allow the same distant bureaucrats to run health care for the locals.

Caroline Glick has a very informative article detailing how Turkey, step by step, moved away from the West and in to the arms of the Islamist enemy. Its a sad tale of misunderstanding and blindness, and there is blame aplenty to spread around. I recommend reading the whole thing. With that, however, what do we do now?

Turkey is officially a NATO ally and a candidate member of the EU – but Turkey’s alliances with Syria and Iran make nonsense of NATO, while Turkey’s growing Islamic radicalism would make it a poison pill in an EU already under the Islamist gun on the internal front. We must adjust ourselves to that fact that the secular, Turkish State founded by Ataturk in the 1920’s is gone and that the Turkish government is decidedly an enemy of the United States, our allies and our interests. This will require some shifts on our part.

First and foremost, we must strengthen our alliances with Greece, Bulgaria and Georgia – the three western nations which border Turkey. All these of these nations cannot withstand Turkish pressure without our help – and an increasingly Islamist Turkey will eventually start pressuring its non-Moslem neighbors. Secondly, we must officially expel Turkey from NATO, so that they will it will no longer be privy to our military plans and capabilities. Finally, we should start to support secularist, democratic movements in Turkey, as well as Kurdish and Armenian separatism.

It is sad; but it might be just the way things work out. Maybe no one is to blame for what happened with Turkey – other than that basic of human nature, the ability we have to choose wrong, and the eagerness with which we do so. Perhaps this might work out, in the end: I, for one, would be delighted if some time before I leave this world, if a Mass could be, once again, heard in St. Sophia. Maybe this is just the first step in a re-alignment of the world…

And good for him:

An Arizona sheriff known for cracking down on people who are in the country illegally launched a crime and immigration sweep in northwestern metro Phoenix on Friday, a half day after officials in Washington limited his powers to make federal immigration arrests.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose sweeps have led to allegations of racial profiling, said the rebuff from Washington won’t stop him. He said he can still arrest immigrants under a state smuggling law and a federal law that gives all local police agencies more limited power to detain suspected illegal immigrants.

“It doesn’t bother me, because we are going to do the same thing,” said Arpaio, whose deputies had arrested 16 people by Friday evening on unspecified charges. “I am the elected sheriff. I don’t take orders from the federal government.”

Showing that Arpaio understands our system of government better than people at Justice and DHS do – this is a federal Republic, and its not for Uncle Sam to tell local sheriffs how to do their job. Unless a sheriff is violating a federal statute, the federal government has no business there, at all…and even if there is a suspicion of law breaking, then it is up to the federal government to prove it in court beyond a reasonable doubt. Asinine accusations of “racial profiling” are just a means whereby the government is trying to demonize the sheriff – to make public support flee from him, so that his power to carry out his job will be hamstrung.

Stand firm, sheriff – and know that millions of your fellow Americans have got your back.

Because the economy is collapsing – but government (and major financial institutions) haven’t fully figured this out yet – from Seeking Alpha, quoting Comstock Funds:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently announced that they will be making downward benchmark revisions to past monthly nonfarm employment data that casts doubt on the validity of the recent figures as well. As we will explain, it is highly likely that substantially more jobs are now being lost than is currently reported.

The BLS makes annual revisions to the previously announced payroll reports to account for job increases or decreases that were not picked up in the initial data. The main reason for the differences in the preliminary and final reports is the difficulty in getting numbers from the many small and medium sized business and accounting for new startups and firms going out of business. To make an educated guess at the data that they are missing, the BLS uses something called the ARIMA time series model (commonly called the birth/death model) to estimate employment changes resulting from business births and deaths that are not accounted for by other methods. The model is based on the actual births and deaths over the five prior years.

As you can imagine, when the prior five years were a period of economic expansion, the application of these numbers to a period of recession can result in a substantial overestimation of job changes, and that is evidently what happened recently…

…In the current instance the BLS announced that preliminary tabulations indicated they would have to reduce the estimate of total nonfarm employment by about 824,000 for the year ended March 31, 2009. On average, therefore, employment for the period was overstated by about 68,000 per month. Interestingly enough, the birth/death adjustment had added about 717,000 jobs during the same period. So it’s apparent that the benchmark revision will more than wipe out the entire amount added by the model.

What does this mean for the period following March 31, 2009, which will not be revised until next October? For the six months since March 31st the birth/death adjustment has added 815,000 jobs, an average of 135,000 per month. Since small and medium sized firms are suffering from severe credit restrictions, they are much more likely to have reduced employment significantly rather to have added that many jobs. That means current monthly job losses may be running as much as 135,000 higher than is currently being reported…

Mish’s has been on this, from what I can tell, for years now…but the most recent noting of the flawed “birth/death” figure is right here. Essentially, what the BLS has been doing is pretending that we’re creating jobs – and thus when BLS says we shed 263,000 jobs in September of 2009, its a bogus number. That number would be correct if we were creating 135,000 jobs per month…but as we’re probably creating only a tiny fraction of that number, we have to figure that the real number of jobs lost in September might have exceeded 350,000. This might help you make sense of the fact that after weeks of BLS saying 400,000 or so new claims for unemployment were made, that the total jobs lost for the month was 200,000 or so.

This recession is nothing of the kind – it is a Depression. The government and the banks (and stock marketeers playing the “greater fool” theory of investment) are talking up recovery…and, of course, the numbers we’re about to get will almost certainly show that the recession “ended” in the late Spring. But it simply isn’t true – and won’t be true until we start creating wealth. Our first step in this will have to be getting liberals – from Obama on down – to understand that money isn’t wealth. You can spread money around all you like, but until people actually get to work making, mining and growing things, no wealth is being created. Once you realize what wealth is, then the policies needed immediately present themselves – cut taxes, cut regulations, provide credit and then get the heck out of the way.

But I don’t hold out much hope for a swift education of our liberal friends – and so, the next crash is almost inevitable. And it will be quite a mess…the continuing financial crisis on steroids as all that government fiat money light an economic conflagration not seen in 75 years, if ever.

UPDATE: Wages plunge.

Its not money we need, but wealth:

…If … we measure a thing or commodity by something which is not its end, we do not give its absolute value, but only its relative value. Yet how many modern minds, when asked the value of a commodity, think in terms of the end of the commodity? If we are asked, ‘ What is the value of a hundred-weight of wheat?’ we naturally say ‘Eight, ten, or twelve shillings.’ We do not say ‘A hundredweight of wheat will support a man’s life for six months.’ In other words, by expressing a hundredweight in terms of currency we gave, not its value, but only its money-value. No wonder that minds accustomed to the atmosphere of currency find themselves in an intellectual money-muddle…

…How great the plight must sooner or later befall a people that has lost the art of giving things their real value, and has entrusted the commonweal to the muddled judgment of men who are experts only in money value. – Fr. Vincent McNabb

Domine! Salve nos; perimus

That is how much it cost to make that many jobs instead larger claimed number:

Michigan received $3.7 billion is stimulus money, of which $620 million was to be used to “create and save” jobs, while the remainder will be used by Granholm to backfill the budget deficit that she has created with her overspending so that she doesn’t have to make any substantial cuts before she leaves office. When she walks away, she will have lost more than 1,000,000 jobs in a state with a population of only 10 million. A few days ago, Granholm claimed that stimulus money “created or saved” 19,500 jobs (Enron accounting: Stimulus saved or created 19,500 jobs in Michigan). Turns out, the number is an utter fabrication, as I suspected when I wrote that prior post. Fact is, that $620 million “created or saved” 397 jobs.

That works out to about $1.5 million per job – oh, and Granholm isn’t the only governor using Spendulus money to fill in the State budget…lots of States are doing it just as we here at Blogs for Victory predicted.

You poor, sad, little liberals – you thought that Obama was going to usher in a grand, new era. Well, he’s not – because he’s the product of a corrupt, Democrat machine as are all the other leading Democrats. People who rise by corruption don’t tend to be straight arrows. You’d be better off with the likes of Jerry Brown and Dennis Kucinich – you’d hardly ever win, but at least you’d have some reasonably honest (and highly entertaining) leaders. Right now, you’ve got political barnacles who are mostly interested in feathering their nests and dodging the hard choices until they are out of office, or at least in their second term.

The money is going to favored groups and individuals, for the most part, and that which isn’t being spread around as payola is being used to hide fiscal malfeasance. I hope that you eventually wake up from your stupor, but I don’t have much hope of it.

Just in case anyone out there is breaking out the champagne over DOW 10,000:

…While in absolute terms the Dow may cross whatever the Fed thinks is a necessary and sufficient mark before QE begins to taper off (Dow crosses 10k just as Treasury purchases expire), the truth is that over the past 10 years (the first time the DJIA was at 10,000) the dollar has lost 25% of its value. Therefore, we present the Dow over the last decade indexed for the DXY, which has dropped from 100 to about 75. On a real basis (not nominal) the Dow at 10,000 ten years ago is equivalent to 7,537 today! In other words, not only have we had a lost decade for all those who focus on the absolute flatness of the DJIA, but it is also a decade where the US Consumer has lost 25% of purchasing power from the perspective of stocks!…

Fiat money – ie, money not backed by a hard asset, such as gold – is the perfect invention of Big Government. Used to be, when the government wanted to debase the currency, they had to call in all the coins and re-mint them with a lower gold content…and you could dodge this by holding on to the old coins. But with fiat money, its so much easier – all that had to happen is the Fed saying, “hey, presto!” and there are several trillion more fiat dollars in circulation…which means, of course, that the dollars you foolishly saved (in a bank, in a stock fund, under your mattress: doesn’t matter) have now become worth less than they were before.

This doesn’t hurt government – in fact, it helps government: it allow government to pay us back with bad money for the good money we lent it via bond purchases. It also doesn’t tend to hurt the very rich, as they either own hard assets (which will naturally climb in value as the dollar goes down), or they get returns equal to or greater than the amount Uncle Sam is stealing from us. Since we started down the road to fiat money – in 1913, with the creation of the Fed – our dollar has lost 99% of its value; Obama and the Fed are going for broke…trying to see if they can make our money absolutely worthless, and then they’ll pay the bondholders (this is why China is rather ticked off at us, by the way).

Sheer class:

On Apologizing To Rush

No, it didn’t make me throw up in my mouth. I’m a little sick that I got it wrong, as I should be. But not sick that I have to apologize to Rush. The thing is this: I don’t think that you guys expect me to get it write right 100 percent of the time. I think you expect me to try very hard to be accurate, and immediately acknowledge when I’ve failed to do so. I don’t fear losing readers because I was wrong. I very much fear losing readers because they think I’m not being honest.

You can’t say fairer than that – all of us, I think, have sometimes rushed too quickly to seize upon something we think hurts the other side; it shouldn’t happen, but we’re human, and so it does…but what matters what you do when you make a mistake, and you know it. Ta-Nehisi shows us all how its done.

And I hesitated before bringing it up – the inhumanity of our age, as expressed by abortion, is graphically on display. Don’t read this unless you’ve got a strong stomach.