THOSE WHO WILL NOT LEARN FROM HISTORY.....

We read:

"Ned Lamont uses it in his Connecticut Senate race. President Clinton is scheduled to speak on the idea in Washington this week. Bob Casey Jr., Pennsylvania candidate for Senate, put it in the title of his talk at The Catholic University of America - then repeated the phrase 29 times. The term is "common good," and it's catching on as a way to describe liberal values and reach religious voters who rejected Democrats in the 2004 election. Led by the Center for American Progress, a Washington think-tank, party activists hope the phrase will do for them what "compassionate conservative" did for the Republicans. "It's a core value that we think organizes the entire political agenda for progressives," said John Halpin, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress."

What would Hitler have to say about that? We don't need to guess. The term can be translated into German as "Gemeinnutz" and that lovable German-speaking rogue used the term a lot -- as encapsulating what HE stood for: "Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz!" was one of his great slogans ("Common use before personal use!", literally).

And who preceded Hitler in such ideas? Friedrich Engels (Karl Marx's co-author) at one stage ran a publication called Gemeinnuetziges Wochenblatt ("Common-use Weekly"). The Democrats sure make it clear where they fit into history.

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"655,000 DEAD IRAQIS" FOLLOW-UP

Iraq Body Count have responded to the Lancet "survey" of Iraqi deaths. Excerpt: "Between January and June 2006, there were 91 violent deaths recorded by the Lancet survey. This would correspond to over 180,000 deaths in the first 6 months of 2006, and an average rate of 1,000 per day. The daily death rate over the same period based on UN reports (which sum Baghdad morgue and Ministry of Health data) is 80 violent deaths per day. Cumulated media reports provide a somewhat lower figure. If the Lancet extrapolation is sound, this would imply a further 920 violent deaths every day (1000 minus 80) which have been recorded by neither officials nor the media. As these are averages, some days would see many more deaths, and others substantially fewer, but in either case, all of them would remain unnoticed."

There is also an article by survey professional Steven Moore in the WSJ which points out how very strange the Lancet study was. Those guys were not even trying to do real research. It was just a propaganda circus. I strongly support Moore's point about the survey's lack of demographic information. That is so unthinkable in survey research that the article would never have been published in an academic journal that knew anything about survey research. The Lancet should stick to medicine.

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ELSEWHERE



If you don't believe that the above is a real situation, read this

Doug Ross has some good graphs on the effects of the Bush tax cuts. They sure gave job-creators (investors) a lot more confidence -- as the stockmarket graph below shows:



Wal-Mart does China: "America's Wal-Mart Stores has agreed to acquire a Chinese supercentre chain for about $US1 billion ($1.33 billion) in a move that would give the world's largest retailer the biggest food and department store network in China, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The deal is for the 100 Chinese supercentres owned by Trust-Mart, a Taiwanese company, the paper reported in its online edition. A Wal-Mart spokeswoman declined to comment. If approved by Chinese regulators, the deal would push Wal-Mart past Carrefour for the most supercentres in China. Supercentres, also known as hypermarkets, are giant shops that sell a wide range of general food and merchandise.... Wal-Mart has made no secret of its ambitions in China. The retailer has said that its operations there could be as big as its US business in 20 years. Wal-Mart has more than 3700 US stores but only about 60 in China."

Political theatre: "Pennsylvania Republican congressional candidate Raj Peter Bhakta, demonstrated what a joke border security is by riding an elephant across the Rio Grande - with a mariachi band! (see his Fox News interview here.) Sure it's a stunt, but stunts matter, like the College Republican affirmative-action bake sales or Horowitz's "reparations are racist" ads. The Left has been better than us at political theater for a long time; maybe we're starting to catch up."

Leftist voting fraud in Britain: "Britain is to be investigated for the first time by the Council of Europe for alleged human rights breaches because of concerns over postal voting fraud. Scandals arising from Tony Blair's strategy to improve turnouts by giving everybody the right to vote by post risk placing Britain in the same league as newly toppled dictatorships. Bridget Prentice, the Constitutional Affairs Minister who has just steered an anti-fraud Bill through Parliament, reacted angrily, saying that the move was unnecessary, unwarranted and unfair... The final straw for Britain was the decision by a judge last year that widespread voterigging by Labour in Birmingham's local elections "would disgrace a banana republic".

More Leftist deceit: "Never play poker against Claire Shipman. Anyone who can keep a straight face while claiming that 'Women's Voices. Women Vote' is "non-partisan" could surely bluff you out of a pot while sitting on a busted flush. On this morning's Good Morning America, Shipman [or shall we call her 'DC Slim'?] narrated a segment spotlighting WVWV's efforts to get single women voters to the polls. Since it is obvious that single women lean heavily Dem, voting for Democrats by a more than 2/3 margin as Dem pollster Celinda Lake acknowledged, my BS-detector started screeching when I saw a straight-faced Shipman slip in her claim that WVWB is "non-partisan.".... The clincher? WVWV is a project of The Tides Foundation, the organization founded to promote a variety of leftist causes whose driving financial force is . . . Teresa Heinz Kerry. Some further digging reveals that WVWV is directly promoting leftist politics. On its FAQ page, WVWV suggests that people who want to get involved "download the National Council of Women's Organizations voter's guide." I did, and found a predictable compendium of leftist position-mongering on everything from affirmative action to abortion. Query whether promoting a partisan voter's guide bring's WVWV's non-partisan tax-exempt status into question."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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