Scott Spiegel

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Recently Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney criticized fellow contender Rick Perry for labeling Social Security a Ponzi scheme.  Romney extolled the virtues of the soon-to-be-bankrupt program and vowed to support its continuance unconditionally if elected.

A Ponzi scheme, so named after white-collar criminal Charles Ponzi, involves a huckster collecting money from numerous investors who are promised a high or reliable return on their investment, with payments being made by future investors lured in by similar promises of financial gain.  The scheme is unsustainable, because dividends received are not actually invested, and are not equaled by the dividends promised to investors.  Earlier investors fare better than later investors, who lose their money once the scheme collapses.

Sound familiar?

Social Security, signed into law by white-collar criminal Franklin Delano Roosevelt, involves the federal government collecting money from all working citizens, who are promised a reliable pension when they retire, with payments being made by subsequent generations who are dragged into the program.  The system is unsustainable because, due to slowing population increases and politicians raiding the Social Security Trust Fund, most payroll taxes received are not actually invested, and are not equaled by the payments promised to retirees.  Earlier generations fare better than later generations, who will not receive benefits once the system collapses.

The history of Social Security’s establishment and implementation reveal that Governor Perry is wrong about the program’s being a Ponzi scheme.  It is much worse.

Social Security is bigger, by many orders of magnitude, than any Ponzi scheme ever enacted in human history.  It is the largest government program in the world, and the biggest component of U.S. federal expenditures.  Social Security is to the average Ponzi scheme what the Great Pyramid of Giza is to a traffic cone.

Social Security is involuntary, whereas Ponzi schemes are at least voluntary.  Though applying for a Social Security number is not technically mandatory to live and work in the U.S., the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies require it, which forces everyone to participate in the program, or makes their lives very difficult if they don’t.

Social Security is better disguised than a Ponzi scheme, and thus more insidious.  Unlike a Ponzi scheme, the true nature of Social Security is hidden in broad daylight, which lulls ordinary citizens into thinking it couldn’t possibly be as fraudulent or unsustainable as it is.

Social Security is longer-lasting than any real-life Ponzi scheme.  Whereas most Ponzi schemes are lucky to survive a few months, Social Security has continued for over 75 years.

Social Security’s insolvency won’t affect young, naïve, retrainable investors, but rather elderly people at the potentially neediest and most vulnerable stage of their lives.

All of the above negative consequences of Social Security are a direct result of its being administered by the federal government.

Government has access to billions of participants, trillions of dollars in capital, and decades of time to continue the ruse.

Government forces all citizens to participate, even if they’d rather keep their money, invest as they choose, and take their chances later in life.

Government gives Social Security its imprimatur—whatever that’s worth these days.  Most members of both major political parties approve of continuing Social Security more or less as is.  The program is referred to as the “third rail” of politics, meaning that if you touch it, you die politically.  It is as though Bernard Madoff were a major donor to both parties, and Congress refused to question his investment strategies because Madoff were considered the “third rail” of politics.

Government designed Social Security to increase its ability to control the populace, by forcing them to pay in when they’re young and healthy and then meting out or scaling back benefits when they’re old and infirm.  (By “government,” of course, I mean Democrats.)  The Supreme Court actually ruled, in Flemming v. Nestor (1960), that the Social Security Administration is not legally required to pay benefits to retirees who have contributed to the system their whole lives, if it finds itself in a pinch: “To engraft upon the Social Security System a concept of ‘accrued property rights’ would deprive it of the flexibility and boldness in adjustment to ever-changing conditions which it demands…”  Would that everyday businesses were afforded the same “flexibility” and “boldness” to decide not to honor their contracts in order to better adjust to “ever-changing conditions.”

Supporters of Social Security only wish it had the air of respectability of a garden-variety Ponzi scheme.  Then we could send the fraudulent originators to jail, cut our losses, and start over.

Instead, we’re saddled for eternity with the mother of all entitlement programs, the granddaddy of confidence games, the oldest relic of the Seven Entitlement Wonders of the Modern World.  Even supposedly conservative presidential candidates—including, sadly, Rick Perry—are now duking it out to show how badly they want to preserve this fraud.



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What have we learned in the 10 years since Islamic terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?  Several lessons spring to mind:

1. There is nothing President George W. Bush could have done to prevent terrorist acts in his first eight months in office, of which his post-9/11 critics would have approved.  Even after 9/11, liberals have loudly disapproved of profiling at airports, surreptitiously monitoring terrorist communications, and fighting al-Qaeda militarily abroad.  Imagine how they would have reacted if Bush had attempted any of these strategies pre-9/11.

2. Poverty does not cause terrorism; it is both unnecessary and insufficient to the task.  Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up Northwest Flight 253, was the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker.  American Taliban John Walker Lindh went to high school at a “California Distinguished School” in SoCal.  In contrast, poor people the world over—rice farmers in China, untouchables in India—do not rise up en masse to wreak havoc in suicide bombings.  Modern-day terrorism is caused by individuals’ adherence to an ideology that encourages terrorist acts against innocent civilians—an ideology that usually happens to be Islamist.  Not all Muslims are terrorists, but almost all modern-day terrorists are Muslims.

3. Liberals have amassed a formidable glossary of imprecations they invoke whenever commentators scrutinize the radical nature of Islam: alienating Muslims, being at war with Islam, being Islamophobic, demonizing the other, engaging in inflammatory rhetoric, hijacking a peaceful religion, singling out people because of their religion.  None of these terms is objective enough to mean anything.

4. The criticism that the U.S. shouldn’t be vocal in our support of Israel is specious.  In supporting Israel, our anti-terror stance gains consistency and moral credence to reformists in hostile regimes who are potentially open to our ideas.  Israel is also the U.S.’s front line in the war on terror, and, if supported, may have the guts to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities if we don’t get around to doing it.

5. Announcing that we are at war with Islam does not constitute recruitment propaganda for the enemy.  Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. House, declared, “I don’t want [al-Qaeda] to be able to stand up and claim… ‘America is at war with Islam.’  That’s one of their main recruiting arguments.”  Actually, one of al-Qaeda’s main recruiting arguments is, “The infidel is wicked, and his weakness and inability to stand up to us prove that our cause is just.”  An argument that would hurt recruiting would be, “America is at war with Islam, and you are going to get blown to smithereens if you fight for us.”

6. Waterboarding isn’t torture—it’s a resistance training technique routinely carried out on U.S. special operations forces, and leaves no permanent physical or psychological damage.  Waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques have been spectacularly successful in uncovering imminent terrorist plots and killing 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

7. Troop surges are a winning strategy, as demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Libya.  As John McCain noted in his support for the second Afghanistan surge, half-measures in war “lead to failure over time and an erosion of American public support.”  We should never again fail to send an adequate number of troops to get the job done, as soon as they are needed.

8. Bush had to withhold from the public reams of documents about chilling terrorist threats we faced; when newly sworn-in President Obama was briefed on this intelligence, he suddenly did an about-face on almost every campaign promise he had made to reverse his predecessor’s policies.  In just his first 100 days in office, Obama implemented a surge in Afghanistan (followed by a larger surge later that year), asked Congress for $83 billion more for Iraq and Afghanistan without funding benchmarks, stepped up Predator drone attacks in Afghanistan, supported renewal of the Patriot Act, invoked the state secrets doctrine, reversed his opposition to rendition, rejected Democrats’ call for a Truth Commission, filed a brief claiming the U.S. can indefinitely hold anyone who supports Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, supported denial of habeas corpus to Bagram prisoners, revived military tribunals at Gitmo, opposed release of Abu Ghraib photos, and failed to do anything to close Gitmo.  It seems as though Commander-in-Chief Bush knew better than Alinskyite community organizer Obama did after all.

9. War is less expensive than Democrats’ wasteful domestic social programs.  Eight years of the Iraq War—including training and preparation for the 2003 invasion—cost less ($709 billion) than Obama’s useless stimulus bill ($787 billion).  U.S. involvement in the Libyan conflict cost the same ($1 billion) as the first 48 hours of Obama’s failed Cash-for-Clunkers program.  Defense spending constitutes 20% of the federal budget, and foreign aid just 1%, whereas entitlement spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid make up 43%.

10. Liberals have learned absolutely nothing since 9/11, except that Islam is much more peaceful, tolerant, and pro-U.S. than they’d ever dreamed; KSM should be tried in the same court as people who eat trans fats while drinking Four Loko and smoking in bars; and Muslims were the real victims of 9/11.

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No longer content to compare global warming skeptics to mere Holocaust deniers, Al Gore recently implied that climate doubters will someday be seen as this generation’s Klansmen.

In an interview with the Climate Reality Project, Gore declared that the civil rights and climate change movements are similar in that both harbor a profound moral component.  (Honestly, Gore’s new comparison lacks the punch of “Today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin.”)

The bloated old walrus offered his awestruck, rosy-cheeked interviewer a two-pronged strategy that global warming believers should adapt from anti-racism protestors to “win the conversation.”  First, global warming fanatics should persuade non-believers through facts; second, they should confront “inappropriate” statements by expressing loud disapproval just as if they were racial slurs.

I could be wrong, but I think in order to “win the conversation,” you have to actually have a conversation first, at least one in which both sides are allowed to speak.  Yet the Goracle is notoriously reluctant to accept invitations to debate climate change skeptics such as brilliant mathematician and former Margaret Thatcher advisor Christopher Monckton—probably because he knows Monckton has enough logic and facts at his disposal to mop the floor with Gore.

In his Climate Reality Project interview, Gore claims that it is no more difficult for warming adherents to “win the conversation” on global warming than it was for pro-equality Southerners to “win the conversation” on racism.  In other words, put Gore on record as stating that it’s no more accepted fact that people should be judged by the content of their character than it is that the folks who overestimated the impact of Hurricane Irene on New York City by an order of magnitude can tell us how many degrees warmer the planet will be in 100 years.

Gore also chides Texas Governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry for claiming that the world’s scientists are in on a vast conspiracy to profit from preventive actions to halt climate change.  In fact, Perry said no such thing.  What Perry said is that climate change has become a politicized issue—which it has—and that key researchers have been caught shielding data from the public—which they have.  Perry also noted that scientists have been stepping forward en masse to express skepticism about climate change science—which is true.

It is also true that a prevailing orthodoxy has set in regarding climate change, such that skepticism is discouraged, and only research expected to confirm the outlines of preordained alarmist conclusions is deemed fundable by government agencies and even most private foundations.  It’s unlikely that scientists the world over think as objectively about climate change as they would if there were equally large gobs of money for research opposing the notion of manmade global warming.

But back to Gore’s ludicrous race-climate comparison: Since he brought it up, it’s worth noting that most climate change skeptics these days are Republicans.  In contrast, the most recalcitrant racists from the 1950s and 1960s were Southern Democrats—like Gore’s father, Al Gore Sr., who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Bull Connor, whom Gore cites for his brutal act of turning fire hoses on protestors.  So comparing Republicans to civil rights opponents may not be Gore’s best rhetorical move.

Meanwhile, noted climatologist Paul Krugman advances the skeptic-bashing on another front by sneering that Republicans are “anti-science,” “anti-knowledge,” and “anti-intellectualism.”

Let’s see: What does the science tell us about climate change?  For one thing, it tells us that there has been no statistically significant rise in global temperature over the last 16 years, even though CO₂ emissions have increased.  It tells us that there has even been evidence of global cooling over the last 11 years.

The science tells us that 9 out the past 11 winters have delivered above-average snowfall and below-average temperatures to North America, Europe, and Asia.

The science tells us that H₂0, not CO₂, is by far the biggest greenhouse gas—though I don’t recall Democratic politicians’ calling for a ban on sprinklers watering the neatly manicured lawns at their beachfront resorts.

If all of this were really about the science, then climate “scientists” would be aggressively working to falsify accepted hypotheses, challenge conventional knowledge, and test the rigor of their models—not toadying up to politicized government funding agencies that hand out taxpayer-funded research money like candy.

Far from resembling Gore’s smear of narrow-minded segregationists, climate change skeptics have demonstrated abundant open-mindedness and courage in their willingness to confront institutionalized wrongheadedness and public acceptance of falsehoods.  These qualities suggest that, if right, global warming skeptics will someday be seen as this generation’s moral heroes.

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Liberal hack and annoying twerp Ezra Klein recently posted a lament for the president’s waning popularity titled “What could Obama have done?”

Klein’s query is just an updated iteration of an eternal, intractable, metaphysical question for the left: How can Democrats govern like liberals for any extended period of time and generate good results so they can maintain their favorable ratings?

To conservatives (and Bill Clinton), the answer is obvious: You can’t.  Liberal policies don’t work.  Any goodwill remaining toward you from your base for remaining a stubborn ideologue in the face of contrary evidence is overshadowed by widespread revulsion toward the disastrous consequences of your policies.

In other words: Conservatives are never going to like you, a few crazy liberals always will, but a large number of independents, moderates, and center-left voters will abandon you if you don’t give up on your leftist policies after the public realizes you are not a magician.

Since Klein asked, here’s what Obama could have done to enjoy a successful presidency and retain the sky-high favorability ratings he held in those blissful few minutes after he was sworn in before the trouble began.

Let’s start with the good news—things Obama did and should have done (hurry back from the fridge, right-wingers; this won’t take long!):

He didn’t get in the way of the Navy SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden.  He voiced support for the protestors in Egypt’s Tahrir Square calling for the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak.  He joined a coalition of nations in materially aiding the Libyan rebels who took down Gaddafi.  He signed the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  He extended the Bush tax cuts and argued for their utility during a recession.

Also, a few things Obama shouldn’t have done and didn’t:

He gave up on closing the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay.  He reversed his pledge to hold a civilian trial for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  He supported renewing the Patriot Act, thus abandoning his campaign promise to end warrantless wiretaps of those with terrorist connections.  He never pushed through global warming legislation imposing caps on carbon dioxide emissions.

Much longer is the list of things Obama did and shouldn’t have done:

He shouldn’t have signed the $1 trillion stimulus bill, which had a trivial impact on job growth, did nothing to stop the rise of unemployment, and exploded the national deficit.

He shouldn’t have signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which infringes on individual liberties, raises the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars, and implements none of the free-market reforms House Republicans proposed.

He shouldn’t have signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which gave two of the architects of the subprime lending-induced financial crisis the power to impose massive, vague, disruptive regulations on the banking industry, without even revoking the much-hated principle “too big to fail.”

He shouldn’t have signed Congress’s August 2011 bill raising the debt ceiling, which was both unnecessary and insufficient to prevent an S&P downgrade, and whose spending cuts are miniscule in the short-term, dependent on the caprice of a bipartisan “supercommittee” in the medium-term, and likely to be overturned by future Congresses in the long-term.

He shouldn’t have authorized rounds one and two of quantitative easing, which have led to rising inflation.

He shouldn’t have created a botched fund to prevent home foreclosures, one of many examples of his administration’s propensity to reward failure.

He shouldn’t have supported the National Labor Relations Board’s decision to prevent Boeing from relocating part of its operations from a unionized state (Washington) to a right-to-work state (South Carolina).

He shouldn’t have taken over the nation’s largest car companies and signed into law the wasteful Cash for Clunkers program.

He shouldn’t have showily banned waterboarding as an enhanced interrogation technique, insisted that Israel return to its pre-1967 borders, demanded premature troop withdrawal in Afghanistan independent of the advice of generals running the war, or bowed to the British Queen, the Saudi king, and every other world leader he could.

Finally, he shouldn’t have blamed George W. Bush, the Republican minority in Congress, the Tea Party, the BP oil spill, the Arab Spring, the Japanese tsunami, ATMs, corporate jet owners, Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, a butterfly flapping its wings in Tobago—anything but his own policies—for the country’s economic woes.

And here are the things Obama didn’t do but should have:

He should have demanded that Congress pass budgets for fiscal years 2011 and 2012.

He should have made the Bush tax cuts permanent.

He should have supported free-market health care reforms, such as allowing the sale of insurance across state lines, expanding health savings accounts, and enacting malpractice tort reform.

He should have voiced greater support for Iran’s and Syria’s pro-reform protestors.

Happy you asked, Ezra?

And one more thing Obama didn’t do but should have.



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Maybe Michele Bachmann is reluctant to elaborate on her views on homosexuality with reporters because—gasp!—she doesn’t care.

On Sunday’s Meet the Press, host Dick Gregory badgered Bachmann about comments she had made seven years ago on her interpretation of the Bible’s statements on homosexuality.

Since 2004, the country has radically evolved in its understanding and acceptance of homosexuality, including its approval of same-sex couples getting married and adopting.  Gay marriage is legal in six states plus D.C. and available to 11% of the country’s population.  Gay marriage was used as a wedge issue in many states in the 2004 Congressional elections, but in 2008 it was used as such primarily in the context of California’s Proposition 8.  Prominent Republicans who now support same-sex marriage include Dick Cheney, Laura and Barbara Bush, Cindy and Meghan McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, S. E. Cupp, Margaret Hoover, Ted Olsen, and Vaughn Walker.  Countless other prominent Republicans favor gay civil unions; most didn’t back in 2004.  Even Ann Coulter was recently appointed Honorary Chair of the Advisory Council for gay conservative group GOProud.

Bachmann’s views on gay issues have also presumably evolved since 2004, or else she would have racked up a lot more anti-gay statements since then.  All of the Bachmann homosexuality quotes the media have been broadcasting appear to have emanated from just two sources: a two-part March 2004 interview she gave on the local Minnesota radio program “Prophetic Views Behind The News” and a November 2004 address she delivered at the EdWatch National Education Conference.  That’s it.  If Bachmann had truly been waging an anti-gay jihad for the past seven years, liberals wouldn’t have had to dig up archives of obscure evangelical talk shows and one-off education conferences from George W. Bush’s first term to find recordings of self-incriminating statements.

Bachmann’s position on gay marriage roughly mirrors President Obama’s.  Like Republicans Rick Perry and Herman Cain, she prefers allowing states to implement gay marriage if they choose—a position even Obama has barely uttered his support for.  She favors a constitutional amendment defining marriage as opposite-sex, which Obama opposes—though she well knows that such an amendment has little chance of becoming law.

If Bachmann weren’t too polite to share it, her response to repeated questions on her views on homosexuality would be, “Oh, God… not again.  Really?”

Bachmann clearly cares first and foremost about federal spending and national defense.  She became a conservative rock star two years ago as the most prominent elected official to spearhead the nascent Tea Party movement, with its primary goal of stopping ObamaCare and runaway government spending.  She has voiced vociferous, well-informed support of Israel and our military missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran to stop the threat of Islamic terrorism to the U.S.  These are the things that keep her awake at night—not whether Ellen DeGeneres gets a marriage license instead of a domestic partnership.

On Meet the Press, Bachmann addressed Gregory’s questions on homosexuality by insisting that she is not one to “judge” anyone.  She affirmed that she would not use sexual orientation as a criterion in hiring for positions in her administration or for judgeships.  Why wasn’t that a good enough answer for Gregory, who continued to hound her on her theory of human sexuality?  What was she supposed to do—declare herself a True Blood fan and invite Gregory out for cosmos?  Why don’t reporters grill Obama about his opposition to gay marriage, bludgeoning him with the same boring questions and refusing to accept his self-protective platitudes on his eternally “evolving” stance?

Liberals call Bachmann a hypocrite and claim they object to her “double-talk” and dodging questions.  They declare that they would have more respect for her if she simply endorsed her past statements point-blank.  What if she doesn’t quite believe them anymore?  What if the issue isn’t as important to her, or wouldn’t be a legislative priority for her if she became president?  Bachmann repeatedly responded to Gregory’s questions by reminding him that she is running for the presidency of the United States.  If she believes gay marriage should be dealt with by the states, then why would a President Bachmann staring down a $14 trillion deficit and a hostile Middle East worry about Neil Patrick Harris’s love life?

Liberals aren’t upset about a Bachmann presidency because they fear she would roll back gay rights or slow the national tide of increasing acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage.  As with Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharron Angle, the left are using a few nutty, outdated statements to stop a genuine reformer and charismatic populist, whose views on social issues are probably evolving like everyone else’s, from getting into office.  Liberals can’t stand the fact that Bachmann might effect real change on causes that are anathema to them, such as slashing unsustainable entitlement spending and stopping the worldwide spread of Sharia.



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The new meme on the left, helpfully demarcated on social media sites like Twitter via such catchphrases as #TeaPartyDowngrade, #HeckuvaJobTeaParty, and the trending #TeabaggersArePoopyheads, is that Standard & Poors’ downgrade of the U.S. long-term credit rating is due to the Tea Party’s push for spending cuts in the debt ceiling battle.

Never mind that S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch are the same agencies that thought Democrats’ Community Reinvestment Act and government-mandated subprime housing loans were a peachy idea; maintained top ratings for most securities backed by subprime mortgages; and thus contributed to the meltdown.

Never mind that S&P, headed by English lit major John Chambers, made a $2 trillion error calculating the U.S.’s debt-to-GDP ratio over time, then rewrote its justification for the downgrade to fit its already formulated decision.

Never mind that in the past five years, betting against S&P’s recommendations would have given you a better return on your investment than betting for them.

To the extent that one trusts S&P, its report gives a decidedly different impression of their reasons for the downgrade than those claimed by the left.

The report cites “difficulties in bridging the gulf between the political parties over fiscal policy, which makes us pessimistic about… a broader fiscal consolidation plan that stabilizes the government’s debt dynamics…”  S&P is obviously trying to be nonpartisan and spread the blame around.  It would help if they displayed less vagueness about where responsibility lies for the U.S.’s financial problems.  But I read that last bit as clearly highlighting Congress’s refusal to cut spending on items that make a real dent in our budget, which is largely the fault of Democrats, at least this time around.

S&P notes: “We could lower the long-term rating to ‘AA’ within the next two years if we see less reduction in spending than agreed to, higher interest rates, or new fiscal pressures…”  There is nothing in there about future debt ceiling inflexibility, extremist conservative posturing, or the intransigence of jihadist Tea Partiers.

The report continues: “[W]e believe that the prolonged controversy over raising the statutory debt ceiling and the related fiscal policy debate indicate that further near-term progress containing the growth in public spending, especially on entitlements, or on reaching an agreement on raising revenues is less likely than we previously assumed.”

Any liberals looking at this stopped reading that last paragraph after they got to “prolonged controversy over raising the statutory debt ceiling.”  The Tea Party held America hostage—S&P said so!

In fact, the agency stated that the prolonged debt ceiling debate was of concern, because the gap between the parties foretells difficulty in reining in entitlement spending.

Let’s see: which party favors reducing entitlement spending, and which is reflexively, dogmatically opposed to it?  If the two parties face gridlock on the entitlement cuts S&P is eager to see, which party is therefore more at fault for Congress’s failure to cut entitlement spending?  Why, I believe that would be the Democrats!

As for the claim that S&P was upset because Congress didn’t raise taxes, the agency explicitly took no position on what combination of spending cuts and/or tax increases, if any, should be adopted.

One very specific request S&P did indicate, however, is that an ideal deficit reduction deal should cut about $4 trillion over the next decade.  The plan Congress agreed to cuts $2.4 trillion.

So Tea Partiers were pushing for bigger cuts than Democrats and even House Republican leaders were willing to consider, and S&P wanted cuts twice as big as those Congress agreed on.  How is it again that pushing for cuts was the Tea Party’s mortal sin?

The only other crime for which the Tea Party might be to blame in S&P’s eyes is “brinkmanship” in using the debt ceiling as a negotiating tool to bring down spending.  But if a good chunk of the reason for S&P’s downgrade was the U.S.’s refusal to rein in entitlement spending, and Democrats are congenitally opposed to all entitlement cuts, then what other bargaining chip did Republicans have to work with besides the debt ceiling?

Anyway, it is logically impossible for S&P to have downgraded the U.S. out of fear that the debt ceiling standoff would result in our creditors not being paid.  The U.S. spends less than 10% of its revenue servicing our debt.  We failed to raise our debt ceiling in time on nine occasions in the past, and our debtors always got their interest payments.  How could there have been even a remote chance we would have defaulted?

If S&P really thought the U.S. was at risk of default, then they owe the American people an explanation of how exactly this might have happened.  An S&P downgrade, if any, should have taken place entirely because of our enormous debt, not our debt ceiling.  The fact that S&P refuses to make it clear which one is the cause for their downgrade shreds any credibility they have.

S&P’s downgrade is either entirely the fault of Democrats who refuse to cut entitlement spending or pass a budget, or S&P’s willful obfuscation of the difference between raising our debt ceiling and servicing our debt.  Either way, the Tea Party is utterly blameless.

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Eurotrash Italophile snobs aghast over Season 4 of the MTV reality show Jersey Shore being set inside the pristine borders of teetotaling, sunscreen-loving, sexually Puritanical Italia need to get off their high horses.

Back when Season 1 aired, some reviewers of the show were appalled at the Italian-American stereotypes the Jersey clan supposedly perpetuated, including being muscular and energetic dancers (the guys), fashionable and flirty (the girls), and close-knit and family-oriented (the guys and girls).  Heaven forfend everyday folks should associate such ghastly traits with Italian Americans.

That paragon of fine Italian cuisine, Domino’s Pizza, huffily yanked its advertising from the show over feared repercussions from its silver-palated customers.

Season 4 of Jersey Shore, which premiers tomorrow night, was set in Italy, because the cast members are Italian American and the show’s producers thought it would be fun to send them abroad to learn a bit of Italian and explore their roots.

Last week, The New York Times wailed that during their stay cast members had caused Florence residents “to despair that their elegant city had irrevocably become a party town,” and compared the housemates to the “hordes of drunken American junior-year-abroad students [who] have helped transform Florence into the backdrop of a 24/7 movida, or pub crawl.”

The Times admitted that during filming, Italy was caught up in the sex scandals of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was charged with “dalliances with under-age women and hosting wild parties at his villas… in a real spectacle far more grotesque than anything to spring forth from MTV’s almost quaint cultural imagination.”  So it appears that guidos and guidettes don’t have a monopoly on bad behavior, and that libido doesn’t slow down for everyone over 30.

The Times quoted one souvenir shop owner who called critics of the show hypocrites: “Many people in Florence and in Italy have harshly criticized the city for letting the show film here…  But they forget that we have similar shows on Italian television.  What’s the difference between this show and Italy’s ‘Big Brother’ or ‘The Island of the Famous’?”

Lest we forget the disastrous economic fallout from the Jersey Shore invasion, Florentine tourism revenue supposedly doubled during the shooting of the fourth season, as eager throngs chased cast members all over the city and frequented establishments they had visited.

Then again, almost anything would give a jolt to Italy’s stagnant, moribund joke of an economy.  (Hey—what’s a more damaging label these days: guidos or PIIGS?)

As one blogger sensibly noted, “The filming of this reality show in Florence mirrors the internationalization and evolving culture of Florence.”

The real source of all the stateside Jersey Shore angst is that American liberals are resentful of stoopid Amurricans who don’t want to live the enlightened, leisurely, contemplative, espresso-sipping, government-dependent lives of Europeans.  Though liberals are always threatening to move to Europe or Canada to get away from the fascist, corporatist, workaholic U.S., somehow they never get around to packing their bags.

Here are a few things American liberals love about Old Europe and dearly wish they could force on us here: mandated six weeks’ vacation; mandated 35-hour workweeks; universal subpar health care; tiny useless militaries; a national sales tax; draconian limits on carbon dioxide emissions; cobblestone streets that discourage driving and force you to hoof it everywhere; an indolent café lifestyle free of tacky entrepreneurs and pesky businessmen; forgiving attitudes toward marital infidelity; and a millennia-long history they had no part in creating but can coast on and use to act superior to the rest of the world.

True, Firenze gave us the Italian Renaissance, the Medicis, Florence Cathedral, Ponte Vecchio, assorted palazzi, the Uffizi, and Leonardo.  What have they given us in the last 500 years?  Benito Mussolini?  The European Social Forum?  The House of Gucci?

I’m not comparing Renaissance Florence to present-day Jersey Shore.  I’m comparing present-day Florence—or any Italian city—with any present-day major U.S. city.

Florence is a museum city in a museum country on a museum continent.  Western Europe’s glory days are long gone, best viewed from behind velvet ropes in dusty antechambers from a distance of centuries.

The U.S., even with its recent economic woes, is vibrant and dynamic and forward-looking.

Which country’s population—Italy’s or the U.S.’s—is projected to decline 25% and which to grow 25% by 2050?

Jersey Shore star and eternal optimist Snooki’s self-declared hypothetical presidential platform, declared last season, is: “The economy would rise, everyone would be tan, and all of the radios would play house music.”  Sounds a lot better than the European-style decline into impotent unexceptionalism our Socialist-in-Chief envisions for the United States.

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Random thoughts and observations on last week’s terror attacks in Norway (per Thomas Sowell):

Just when the mainstream media was finally starting to learn that virtually every ideologically motivated mass murder attempted in the past 30 years has been committed by an Islamic extremist, some anti-immigration nut in Norway has to go and spoil it.  It’ll take us 30 years to retrain them.

The mass shooting perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik that left scores dead at a children’s day camp at Utoya Island “puts the spotlight on right-wing extremism in Europe,” as the New York Times helpfully noted, and “typifies a new breed of conservative extremists,” in the Financial Times’ words.  Yet the 9/11 attacks, the London bombing attacks, the Spain bombing attacks, the Mumbai bombing attacks, and eight million other blatant, graphic examples of Islamist-fueled mass murder somehow never seem to “put the spotlight on Muslim extremism” worldwide.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg mistakenly predicted that failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad was “[h]omegrown, maybe a mentally deranged person or someone with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill…”  Attorney General Eric Holder urged us not to jump to conclusions about the ideological motivations of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hassan, who delivered a PowerPoint presentation to doctors on slaughtering infidels and roared “Allahu Akbar!” before his murderous rampage.  The Council on American-Islamic Relations sniffed that Washington, D.C. sniper John Allen Muhammad had no Muslim connection and was most likely a right-wing redneck.  But one loon in a Scandinavian village-state shoots up an island, and suddenly conservatism is on trial worldwide.

Some news outlets initially attributed the violence in Oslo to Islamic terrorists.  One such outlet was Al Jazeera.

A group called Helpers of the Global Jihad, which initially assumed the shooting had been committed by Islamic terrorists, immediately announced their support for the perpetrators of the attack before later renouncing it.

Some honest liberals are admitting that the World of Warcraft-loving, Dexter-watching, Unabomber manifesto-reading Breivik is not a stand-in for conservative thought, anti-Islamist concern, or worry about mass immigration accompanied by lack of cultural assimilation.  Froma Harrop, for example, writes, “What Breivik is not is a ‘right-winger’ in any conventional sense of the term.  Calling this crackpot such puts him on a political spectrum occupied by people arguing about real things in the current century.  Even ‘right-wing extremist’ is pushing it.  Once you place the likes of Breivik in the political debate, you distort the views of others concerned with similar-sounding issues.”

Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, to whom the Norwegian shooter has been compared, was revealed to have had Muslim conspirators, including accomplice Hussain Al-Hussaini.  Clinton’s Justice Department inexcusably declined to follow up on leads linking McVeigh to Al-Hussaini.  Perhaps it would be prudent to wait a bit to see just who or what turns up in Breivik’s checkered past.

In the last two years, the media have jumped to the following conclusions: Jarred Lee Loughner, who shot Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords, was a Tea Party fanatic; James von Brunn, who opened fire in D.C.’s Holocaust Museum, was a conservative racist; Andrew Joseph Stack, who crashed his plane into an IRS building, was an anti-federal government conservative; James Lee, who tried to blow up a Discovery building, was an anti-government militia member; John Patrick Bedell, who fired on police in the Pentagon, was an anti-Obama zealot; and Michael Enright, who stabbed a Muslim cabdriver in lower Manhattan, was a bigoted Ground Zero Mosque opponent.  In fact, these kooks turned out to be leftists (Loughner), Bush-haters (von Brunn), anti-corporatists (Stack), environmentalists (Lee), 9/11 truthers (Bedell), and Ground Zero Mosque supporters (Enright).  Given the media’s track record on predicting the ideological leanings of would-be mass murderers, it’s odd there are so few reporters humble enough to wait and find out the full story about Breivik’s motives and associates before branding him a “radical right-winger.”

No anti-terror groups are likely to propose building an anti-Islamic monument on Utoya Island.

It will be interesting to learn why “right-winger” Breivik blew up Oslo’s Oil Ministry and not, say, the Ministry of Children, Equality and Social Inclusion.

The Oslo attacks were swiftly condemned by the Islamic Council of Norway, a lovely, state-supported organization that favors the death penalty for homosexuals.

The entire Oslo police helicopter crew inexplicably went on vacation days before the shooting at Utoya Island, an arrangement that prevented police from getting to the shooter until 90 minutes after the shooting began.  It’s not unreasonable to suspect that the serial killer timed his attack to coincide with the helicopter crew’s vacation.

Norwegian police typically don’t patrol the streets armed with guns—or any weapons, for that matter.  It seems unlikely that Breivik would have carried out his attack with such abandon in a better-patrolled area, say, Central Park.

In a column titled “Breivik and His Enablers,” New York Times op-ed contributor Roger Cohen writes that a good way to honor the death of recently deceased “Jewish girl” Amy Winehouse is “to confront the latest iteration of a European bigotry that kills.”  And Times editors wonder why no one reads their paper anymore.

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• After Oslo: Time to Crack Down On Mossad Terrorism (tipggita32.wordpress.com)
• Thoughts on the Norway Massacre (visionsanddreams.wordpress.com)
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Last week Moody’s Investors Service threatened to downgrade the U.S.’s Aaa credit rating if the nation fails to raise its $14.3 trillion debt ceiling before August 2.  On Monday the agency counseled the U.S. to scrap its debt ceiling altogether.

Standard & Poors (S&P) and Fitch, the other two major credit rating agencies, recently echoed Moody’s warning.

Democrats pounced on Moody’s pronouncement as ammunition in Congressional budget talks, citing Moody’s as an unimpeachable source on what to do with our debt ceiling.

Why is anyone listening to what Moody’s has to say about the economy?

Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch are the same credit rating agencies that helped precipitate the subprime lending crisis of 2008.  These bureaus continued to give large financial institutions their highest ratings until the last minute, despite the flimsy cores of these firms’ collateralized debt obligations and mortgage-backed securities.  Moody’s and company thought the Democrats’ Community Reinvestment Act was a splendid idea, with the result that millions of investors lost billions of dollars and the international market collapsed.

Credit rating agencies work to offer valid, objective, neutral assessments of companies and sovereign states’ creditworthiness by systematically reducing outside influence and making their ratings as independently as possible.  However, if they hold invalid ideas about how governmental policy and economic principles interact, their predictions will be as shoddy as Paul Krugman’s.

Ratings agencies are subject to the same biases that businessmen, Wall Street investors, banks, and homeowners are.  Moody’s eight-member Board of Directors, for example, includes the following advisors: one director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, one member of The Federal Reserve Bank of New York Financial Advisory Roundtable, one director of Freddie Mac, and one director of the Dutch National Bank.  So 50% of Moody’s Board of Directors includes members who are heavily involved in central banking.

As one disillusioned former Moody’s VP lamented at Congressional hearings on the subprime lending crisis, “I had this somewhat naive idea when I joined Moody’s that it was a particular quality Moody’s was offering, and that was something that the company was going to seek to defend over time.”  Not quite.

In contrast to Moody’s and spend-happy Democrats, Republicans have been insisting that the nation has more than enough revenue to cover interest on our debt, military pay, Social Security, and other high-priority items for months without raising our debt ceiling.  There is literally no risk of the U.S. Treasury defaulting on our debt, unless petulant Democrats sabotage the process.

Because Moody’s admits it will downgrade the U.S. only if a default happens, not if we fail to raise our debt ceiling, there should be no need for a downgrade.  The U.S. failed to raise its debt ceiling on nine occasions in the past, from 1973 to 2007, with no concomitant default or credit rating downgrade.

There hasn’t been a looming catastrophe this overblown since Y2K.

The debt ceiling scenario is analogous to a hypothetical credit card holder who gets to arbitrarily raise his credit limit as often as he wants.  On August 2, the cardholder runs out of money to borrow.  He has more than enough income to pay the interest on his card and meet his basic living expenses.  Republicans are arguing that because he’s raised his limit so many times and is spiraling into a sinkhole of debt, he should cut up his card, rework his budget, and pay the card off.  Democrats are arguing that he should raise his credit limit again and charge the interest payments to his card, in case the credit card company is worried that he’ll fail to make them—as he always has before—and blow the money on a trip to Bermuda.

Can someone explain to me how the Democrats’ plan is more financially responsible and reassuring to bondholders?

Moody’s also argues that because the U.S. is one of the few nations that self-imposes a debt ceiling, yet has continually voted to raise it, this creates periodic uncertainty regarding whether the U.S. can service its debt; hence, the ceiling should be eliminated.

A debt ceiling is certainly not an essential aspect of governing a sovereign state.  But in this era of trillion-dollar deficits, doesn’t it serve the purpose of holding our politicians in check and sending the populace periodic wake-up alarms?  Shouldn’t a debt ceiling, however imperfectly administered, be recognized as a good-faith attempt to control a nation’s debt?

True, the debt limit has been raised many times in the past.  But in a limited government whose constitution is suffused with checks and balances and limits on rule, is it so foolish to have one at all?

If debt limits are such a poor idea, why do credit card companies impose them on cardholders?

The problem isn’t that debt limits are bad, as Moody’s implies, but that the U.S. government has been borrowing so much for so long that it thinks it has none.

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Casey Anthony is set to be released from jail on Sunday after being found not guilty of first-degree murder, aggravated manslaughter, and aggravated child abuse, and guilty only of providing false information to police.

What was astonishing about the public reaction to the verdict last week was not that ordinary citizens were outraged, wondered whether prosecutors and jurors had done their jobs, or asked whether there were still some way to serve justice to the acquitted murderess.

What was astonishing was the instant, instinctive chorus of chronic felon-defenders everywhere that “the system worked.”

Harvard law professor and O.J. Simpson-defender Alan Dershowitz decided that this travesty of justice would be the perfect opportunity to lecture Americans, Janet Napolitano-style, that “the system worked.”  (Liberals’ sense of irony is even less developed than their sense of humor.)

Dershowitz wrote, “[A] criminal trial is not a search for truth.  Scientists search for truth…  A criminal trial searches for only one result: proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”  I suppose the hours of scientific testimony by forensic experts at the Anthony trial were provided for mere entertainment value.

Commentators everywhere chided the masses for swelling in anger over the “not guilty” verdict and portrayed them as overemotional, unthinking rubes with no respect for our legal system and a hankering for the days of vigilante justice.

In fact, a truly open-minded, thoughtful person would at least consider whether the district attorneys had failed to live up to their responsibilities, whether the twelve Floridians saddled with the responsibility of life-or-death decisions had failed to do their jobs, and whether these jurors had any biases or ulterior motives for returning a “not guilty” decision the very morning after the Byzantine, two-month trial had ended.

This supposedly objective, death penalty-qualified jury included:

• Two jurors who opposed or were ambivalent about the death penalty
• A family man raised by a single mother “like Casey” (in his words) who admitted to attorneys that although he thought Casey was guilty, “[I]f I had to return a verdict right now, I would say not guilty”
• A dishwasher salesman who repeatedly fell asleep during the presentation of scientific evidence
• A fervently religious woman who didn’t want to be on the jury because “I don’t like to judge people,” and whom Anthony’s defense lawyers fought rabidly to keep over the prosecutors’ objections

In any other area of life, a reasonable person would say, “Well, wait—we’re 99% sure that x is true, yet this body of individuals decided the opposite.  Is there even a faint possibility that these individuals didn’t do their job properly?  Is it possible that there were any flaws in the decision-making process?”

A broadminded assessment of the case would consider alternative options for pursuing a satisfactory resolution, such as a civil defamation suit against the fictional maid whose real-life counterpart Anthony besmirched (already in the works), a civil suit by the private search agency that spent thousands of dollars helping conduct a futile search for Caylee Anthony (also in the works), a civil suit against Anthony by the estate of her daughter, a boycott of publishing houses and television studios that offer the defendant money for her story, and a general banishment of Anthony from decent society like the one Simpson experienced after his verdict.  Victims’ rights advocates have also proposed Casey’s Law, which would make it a felony for a parent to fail to report the disappearance of her child in a timely manner.

But no—by mindlessly, repetitively, robotically focusing on the glory of “the system,” leftist commentators unwittingly reveal that they are concerned, not with justice, but with procedure.

Most everyday citizens were quoted by the media saying things like, “This is a terrible injustice.  I guess we have to accept the verdict, but I hope this woman pays in some way for what she did.”

Most left-wing elitists were quoted saying things like, “The system worked.  It doesn’t matter whether she’s guilty.  The jurors did their job.”  Which group of commentators sees the big picture?

Repeating “The system worked” ad nauseam after the Casey Anthony verdict is like adding 2 and 2 on a calculator and getting 5 and repeating “The calculator worked.”

Dershowitz is wrong that the purpose of the legal system is not justice but procedure.  The purpose of the legal system is justice through procedure.  If procedure yields horrific injustice, people have a right to ask whether the procedure failed or should be reexamined.  If the calculator fails, the user has a right to ask whether the battery should be changed.

Dershowitz admits that jurors are “human” and may have made a mistake in this case—but because of his belief that the jury system is sacrosanct, he considers it tacky and unenlightened for us everyday folks to question the rules of the system or the actions of these particular jurors.  We’re not supposed to care, for example, that the jury reportedly was split 6-6 on the manslaughter charge as late as Tuesday morning, mere hours before the verdict was rendered, and that the 6 “not guilty” voters—who, in the words of Juror #2, “had decided not to convict Casey Anthony of any charge in the girl’s death”—shouted down the 6 “guilty” voters.

The jurors did their duty.  Move along—nothing to see here!

If those reflexively defending the system showed a smidgen of outrage over the verdict, contemplated the possibility that jurors might not have done their job, or expressed hope that Anthony would receive justice in some other way, their obsessive focus on the system might be understandable.

But no—in soft-on-crime leftists’ backwards view, a sociopath being found not guilty, despite overwhelming evidence against her, is ironclad proof that the system worked.

The reaction to the Anthony case reveals, not everyday citizens’ contempt for our legal system, but elitists’ callous, glib indifference to justice.

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