The Right Lane update 7.17.13

The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, freedom and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

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Gallup: Fox Is America's Main Source For News By Noel Sheppard

This will REALLY make liberal heads explode! A Gallup poll released moments ago found more Americans consider Fox News their main source for news than any other news outlet in the nation:

Television is the main place Americans say they turn to for news about current events (55%), leading the Internet, at 21%. Nine percent say newspapers or other print publications are their main news source, followed by radio, at 6%. Fox is considered the number one news source by eight percent of respondents. CNN was second at seven percent. Meanwhile, look at ABC, MNSBC, NBC, and PBS with only one percent, and CBS below that. As far as other media, eighteen percent of respondents said "Internet/Computer/Online (non-specific)." Only six percent said newspapers with the New York Times getting only one percent. Yes, eight times as many respondents declared Fox News as their main source of information as compared to the Times. This is true of NPR which also garnered only one percent. Liberal heads are going to spin! And who came in first amongst television news providers?

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Rand Paul suspects Hillary lied under oath Calls out former secretary over her testimony on Benghazi

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told a radio interviewer today he doubts former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s claims about not having knowledge of weapons transfers when asked about the matter during sworn testimony in a Senate hearing on Benghazi.  During the hearing in March, in response to a question from Paul, Clinton stated she did not know whether the U.S. mission in Libya was procuring or transferring weapons to Turkey and other Arab countries.

Those weapons transfers were allegedly intended to arm the rebels fighting in Syria. Yet a New York Times report claimed that since early 2012, the CIA has been helping Arab governments and Turkey obtain and ship weapons to the Syrian rebels. “I’m concerned about the veracity of how she responded,” Paul told “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on New York’s WABC Radio. The alleged arms transfer actually mirrors one the Times reported in February as being proposed by Clinton herself. The Times described Clinton as one of the driving forces advocating for arming the Syrian rebels via Turkish and Arab cutouts.

The Times reported Clinton and then-CIA Director David Petraeus had concocted the plan, which called for vetting rebels and arming Syrian fighters with the assistance of Arab countries. If Clinton knew about the arms transfers at the time of the hearing, she may have committed perjury during her Benghazi testimony.

Paul told Klein the Times article shows “Hillary Clinton was the big cheerleader for arming Syria when there [were] two factions within the Obama administration arguing this. Hillary Clinton was the one cheering them on to get weapons. “She was the hardliner that wanted to get involved in the war in Syria, and yet in the hearing she says, oh, she never heard of this,” Paul said. “I find that hard to believe.”

Continued Paul: “And after Clapper’s coming to Congress and lying because he said it was classified, my question to Hillary Clinton is, ‘Did you lie to Congress simply because it was a classified program, or were you telling the truth?’ And I really kind of doubt the secretary of State has no knowledge that the CIA is facilitating weapons to Syria.” Listen to Paul’s interview with Klein below:

·       In the hearings over the Obama administration’s handling of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Paul asked Clinton: “Is the U.S. involved with any procuring of weapons, transfer of weapons, buying, selling, anyhow transferring weapons to Turkey out of Libya?”

·       “To Turkey?” Clinton asked. “I will have to take that question for the record. Nobody has ever raised that with me.”

·       Continued Paul: “It’s been in news reports that ships have been leaving from Libya and that may have weapons, and what I’d like to know is the annex that was close by, were they involved with procuring, buying, selling, obtaining weapons, and were any of these weapons being transferred to other countries, any countries, Turkey included?”

·       Clinton replied: “Well, Senator, you’ll have to direct that question to the agency that ran the annex. I will see what information is available.”

·       “You’re saying you don’t know?” asked Paul.

·       “I do not know,” Clinton said. “I don’t have any information on that.”

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The road to a socialist paradise By PETER MORICI, UPI

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has convinced financial markets easy money policies will continue as long as needed. That may be forever and those policies place U.S. prosperity and sovereignty at grave risk. The economy is as sick today as it was prior to the financial crisis and Great Recession. Those were caused by fundamental dysfunctions that remain unfixed.

China, Japan and Germany -- the three largest economies after the United States -- pursue cheap currency and protectionist growth strategies. Each amasses trade surpluses with the United States to prop up domestic employment. U.S. consumer dollars that buy their products but don't return home to purchase U.S. exports tax demand and push up unemployment. But for easy money those would throw the United States into a depression.

During the Bush prosperity, China printed yuan to purchase dollars and U.S. securities. Those drove down interest rates on bank loans and mortgages, helping bankers trade in derivatives, inflate housing prices and keep consumers piling up debt until the house of cards collapsed. Nowadays, the Fed helps Beijing pass out the drugs. It buys $85 billion in Treasury- and mortgage-backed securities each month. Those finance Wall Street speculators in the housing marketing and another epidemic of derivatives trading.  Sooner or later the new housing and derivatives bubbles will pop and America will be back in the soup -- but it will be a lot hotter this time. Cheap credit is driving up prices for farmland and propping up businesses that should fail. Securities dealers are hoisting junk on retired investors who can't get any interest on certificates of deposit.

The Fed's printing press is propping up an already anemic economy. Since October, gross domestic product growth has barely averaged 1 percent. Americans are taking on too much debt to buy cars. The Detroit Three can credit their financial recovery to replacing cars worn out during the Great Recession with options-laden, expensive replacements. U.S. President Barack Obama has pushed down unemployment by persuading young people to earn degrees that provide no gateway to good jobs. In the end, consumers laboring to pay car loans and mortgages on overpriced homes will cut back spending elsewhere, students and weak businesses will fail on loans and banks will need another bailout.

The economy will collapse again and then what will the Fed do? The only thing it has left -- enable more federal stimulus by printing even more money. Hyperinflation and unemployment above 15 percent could easily follow. America, welcome to the Weimar Republic -- Germany in the 1920s!  It may go better -- the economy just slogs along at near zero growth, Americans continue to borrow and sell its prime assets to Chinese, Japanese and German investors and becomes a pitiful recreation of the Middle Kingdom at the time of the Boxer Rebellion. All as the Obama administration uses the IRS and other federal agencies to target political opponents and relies increasingly on executive orders to get around a Congress that smells something terribly rotten -- a president dictating the change he can't win through popular support.

There are better ways. Obama could stand up to China, Japan and Germany about mercantilism but he appears to have another agenda. In 2016, voters in economic crisis will be much more receptive to Hillary Clinton than a Republican preaching personal responsibility and limited government. Democrats will scapegoat Wall Street and the Left's socialist paradise will be at hand. Remember socialism -- the system that makes everyone equally miserable.

(Peter Morici is a professor at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland School, and former chief economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission. Follow him on Twitter: @pmorici1)

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Howard Dean: Hillary Will Face Primary Challenge By Wanda Carruthers

Hillary Clinton's apparently inevitable victory in the Democratic presidential primaries could hit a roadblock due to her age, former White House candidate Howard Dean says. "She's of my generation, not of the new upcoming generation out of the Barack Obama generation," said the former Vermont governor who was, for a time, front-runner for his party's nomination in 2004. "That's the only weakness she's really got." Dean told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that he believes Clinton, who will be 69 by the 2016 election, will face a primary battle and not be crowned as nominee. He said Govs. Martin O'Malley of Maryland and Andrew Cuomo of New York are both likely candidates. O'Malley will be 53 by November 2016, and Cuomo will be 58. But he still thinks the former first lady, senator, and secretary of state will prevail.  "I love Hillary, and I can't imagine anybody coming between her and the presidency this time," he said. "But, you know, there's a long, long way to go. "The difference, though, is I don't think there's a Barack Obama who's going to emerge, a flaming supernova if you will, to come on to the scene and sort of steal her moment.

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Mises vs. Mises: The Death of Socialism Written by Gary North on July 16, 2013

The most influential thing that Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) ever wrote was a brief article in 1920 on socialist economic calculation. He argued that socialist central planning is impossible, because without a system of free markets, nobody knows what anything costs, and therefore nobody knows what anything is worth.  That argument convinced a whole generation of young men to abandon socialism. F. A. Hayek was one of them. Wilhelm Roepke was another. There were dozens of them, and for a time they became pioneers of Austrian school economics. But, one by one, they abandoned the position. There were various reasons, but none of the recruits of the early 1920s remained a supporter by 1950. Hayek stuck with more of it than most of them did and so did Roepke. They ceased to be Austrian school economists.

In 1950, Mises gave a lecture, and that lecture became an article. The article was widely read in Misesean circles, which were outside of academia. It was a great article. It had a great title. In fact, it probably was best title he ever came up with. It was even a great marketing title. Here was the title: “Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism.” The article was published in a collection of articles written by Mises and collected by Mises: Planning for Freedom. It was published in 1952. It was the most effective book Mises ever wrote in terms of getting his ideas across to laymen. The lectures were easy to understand, and the book sold pretty well. I am not saying it was his greatest book, but I think it is probably the best book for somebody with no training in economics to be introduced to Austrian school economics. The Mises Institute makes available both the book and the article.

Let me summarize it for you:

·       Mises argued that state intervention distorts the free market economy. These distortions lead to public complaints by voters that the economy is not working properly. The voters pressure the government to fix it, so the government passes another law. Law by law, distortion by distortion, the economy gets worse. The society does not start out on a path to socialism, but the interventions of the market expand the state’s power, so the result is ultimately the establishment of a socialist economy. He wrote: “The middle-of-the-road policy is not an economic system that can last. It is a method for the realization of socialism by installments.”

In the last section, he denied that socialism is inevitable. But his article offered only evidence to the contrary. He lamented:

"Even in this country which owes to a century of “rugged individualism” the highest standard of living ever attained by any nation, public opinion condemns laissez-faire. In the last fifty years thousands of books have been published to indict capitalism and to advocate radical interventionism, the welfare state and socialism. The few books which tried to explain adequately the working of the free market economy were hardly noticed by the public."

He ended the essay with this:

"The impact of this state of affairs is that practically very little is done to preserve the system of private enterprise. There are only middle-of-the-roaders who think they have been successful when they have delayed for some time an especially ruinous measure. They are always in retreat. They put up today with measures which only ten or twenty years ago they would have considered as un-discussable. They will in a few years acquiesce in other measures which they today consider as simply out of the question. What can prevent the coming of totalitarian socialism is only a thorough change in ideologies. What we need is neither anti-socialism nor anti-communism but an open positive endorsement of that system to which we owe all the wealth that distinguishes our age from the comparatively straitened conditions of ages gone by."

In a related development, another economist from Austria, although not an Austrian school economist, Harvard professor Joseph Schumpeter, delivered a speech in late 1949 titled “The March into Socialism.” It was not the same thesis that Mises argued, but its conclusion was much the same. It was much more pessimistic than Mises’s speech, and Mises’s speech was very pessimistic. In early January, Schumpeter was revising the speech. He died at his desk. He planned to complete it the next day for publication. Fortunately, it was in good shape, and it was published as the final chapter in the third edition (1950) of his 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

What was wrong with all this? This: it ignored Mises’s original article. Mises showed in 1920 that all socialist economic planning is irrational. It cannot come to fruition. It must break down. That should have been the most optimistic single call to intellectual arms of the 20th century. It did convince a lot of young men, including Hayek, that socialism could not work.

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Journalist Virginia Heffernan Admits She’s a Creationist and Drives Evolutionists Crazy  by Gary DeMar

In the midst of the George Zimmerman “not guilty” verdict, rioting, beatings, threats of violence, calls for “checking your white privilege,” and demands that we “give money to the Dream Defenders, to the Urban League, to the Southern Poverty Law Center ... because racism is a natural disaster just like hurricanes and bombings and shootings are,” there’s a story going around about  journalist Virginia Heffernan who admits she’s a creationist.

The liberal disdain for Virginia Heffernan is thicker than quick-drying cement. Here’s just one example, written by Laura Helmuth at Slate:

“This is all just to say that I am trying to sympathize, I really am, with Virginia Heffernan. Heffernan is a writer for Yahoo News, formerly of the New York Times and formerly-formerly a TV critic for Slate. Last week she published an essay in which she revealed that she is a creationist. I’m not exaggerating. The essay is titled ‘Why I’m a Creationist,’ and she wrote: ‘Also, at heart, I am a creationist. There, I said it.’”

The article drips with disdain but does not offer a single verifiable scientific fact supporting how nothing became something.

Evolutionists can ridicule all they want (it’s all they have left), but they can’t prove that inorganic matter evolved into organic matter that evolved into the complex life forms we are and see around us. Evolutionists can’t get from atoms to people. It’s even worse for them since they can’t account for the original matter or the organized information necessary to organize the matter. To believe in evolution is to believe in magic — literally. At least stage and street magicians start with a deck of cards, a coin, or a rabbit. Magicians can’t really make something appear out of thin air. But that’s exactly what evolutionists claim for evolution. When I say exactly, I mean exactly. Here’s an example found in the prestigious Scientific American:

“It is virtually impossible to imagine how a cell’s machines, which are mostly protein-based catalysts called enzymes, could have formed spontaneously as life first arose from nonliving matter around 3.7 billion years ago.”

It’s impossible to imagine because it’s impossible, but that’s what evolutionists believe. One of the first scientific truths a biology student learns is that spontaneous generation is not science, and yet in order to be an evolutionist, you must believe in it even though it’s contrary to logic, experience, and experimentation. Did you notice that the authors describe cells as “machines”? When has a machine ever spontaneously come into existence? Never! “But there was this time 3.7 billion years ago. . . .” Helmuth writes, “Whatever levels of analysis you care to use, from molecular to planetary, they all mutually reinforce the discovery that all living things evolve through a process of natural selection. Absolutely nothing in the 154 years since Origin was published has undermined the theory.” “Absolutely nothing”? Do I detect a hint of desperation and fear? OK, Laura, like you, I started with the molecular. Using observation (no one was around 3.7 billion years ago and no one has seen nothing become something) and experimentation (no one has been able to produce life in the lab), demonstrate to us how evolution took place. Don’t theorize. Don’t assert. Don’t propagandize. Show us. You can’t and neither can Richard Dawkins or any other evolutionist living or dead.

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