An Investor’s Business Daily editorial lists some of Obama’s far left appointees, and asks: “Does he have any friends who aren’t crackpots?”

But the question that arises from the list is: Has Obama any friends – has he ever had any friends – who aren’t communists?

America is a country of 320 million people, most of them holding to traditional values. Yet President Obama keeps mining the fringes for his hires. Does he have any friends who aren’t crackpots?

Seriously. The president keeps saying he champions the middle class and its values. But his choices of people to help him run the country are the most extreme in U.S. history, and his second-term nominations are more radical than the first.

No sooner had even some Senate Democrats joined Republicans in voting down a cop killer-coddler for civil rights chief, Debo Adegbile, than Obama sent up a 2nd Amendment-basher for U.S. Surgeon General. Dr. Vivek Murthy advocates doctors asking patients if they keep guns in the home, a shocking invasion of privacy.

Murthy may also have a rocky path ahead of him, but other extreme-left nominees are getting confirmed.

Last year, Obama tapped former Congressional Black Caucus chief Mel Watt as, of all things, head of the federal agency regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which together underwrite 90% of all new-home loans. Republicans blocked his confirmation. But thanks to Democrats invoking the “nuclear option” and ending the filibuster, one of the most radical lawmakers in Congress is now effectively running America’s mortgage industry.

Meanwhile, radical racialist Tom Perez runs the Labor Department, where he’s threatening to sue employers who don’t hire minority felons, just like he sued bankers who didn’t make prime loans to un-creditworthy minority borrowers when he was civil rights chief.

You have to be a Kremlinologist to keep track of all the communist-sympathizing cronies orbiting this White House.

Obama’s previous appointees include:

• Valerie Jarrett, his closest White House adviser, whose father-in-law worked closely with Obama mentor and Communist Party leader Frank Marshall Davis in a number of front groups during the Cold War.

• David Axelrod, Obama’s political aide, whose mother worked for a communist organ in New York and whose mentor was Soviet agent David Canter.

• Van Jones, an admitted communist hired by Jarrett as Obama’s green jobs czar.

• Anita Dunn, former White House communications director and Obama’s 2012 foreign policy debate coach, who listed communist dictator and mass murderer Mao Zedong as one of her two favorite philosophers whom “I turn to most” when questions arise.

The other was Mother Teresa. The message: Torture, kill, pray.

• Cass Sunstein, Obama’s regulatory czar who wrote a socialist “bill of rights” and who advocates redistributing wealth through climate-change policy.

• Samantha Power, ambassador to the United Nations, a 9/11 apologist who advised the president to follow a “doctrine of mea culpa” and literally bow down to foreign leaders as atonement for America’s “sins.”

• Anne-Marie Slaughter, former State Department policy chief, who advised the president to apologize for the War on Terror.

• Rashad Hussein, Obama’s Mideast envoy, who once defended a convicted terrorist (then got caught lying about it), and drafted the president’s Cairo speech apologizing for the War on Terror.

• Rose Gottemoeller, Obama’s Soviet-sympathizing chief nuclear arms negotiator, who thinks America is a global “bully” and must unilaterally disarm for the sake of world peace.

• John Trasvina, assistant HUD secretary for fair housing who once headed the radical Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, whose co-founder made racist statements about whites.

• Cecilia Munoz, head of White House domestic policy who used to work for La Raza, the militant Latino group that advocates illegal immigrant rights.

• Erica Groshen, Bureau of Labor Statistics chief who sends her children to Camp Kinderland, aka “Commie Camp,” a communist-founded institution where kids during the Cold War sang Soviet anthems.

• John Holdren, Obama’s science czar, who’s advised surrendering U.S. sovereignty to a “Planetary Regime” that will redistribute the West’s wealth to underdeveloped countries and who once advocated “adding a sterilant to drinking water” to control population.

• Harold Koh, former State Department general counsel who believes in “trans-nationalism” and sees nothing wrong with Shariah law in U.S. courts.

• Tony West, associate attorney general who oversees Gitmo policy, even though he defended al-Qaida and Taliban terrorists including John Walker Lindh, who pleaded guilty to aiding the enemy and fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

So what? In Washington, personnel are policy. These people make the rules we have to live by, from health care to home loans to homeland security.

And these radical political appointees hire other radicals at the bureaucratic levels, where they’ll become entrenched as career federal employees.

In 2008, before Obama was nominated, we warned about his radical associations, including his ties to Davis — a hardened communist with a thick FBI file — at his Honolulu home. His defenders wrote off this Marxist indoctrination as youthful experimentation.

When we pointed out Obama spent 20 years in the pews of an America-bashing preacher, his apologists argued he was merely attending Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church to burnish his urban bona fides.

When we noted Obama launched his political career in the living room of an unrepentant communist terrorist, his defenders argued Bill Ayers had blossomed into a respected professor, that his days of cheering on the Vietcong and bombing the Pentagon were behind him.

We were told the parade of anti-American subversives Obama came in contact with throughout his life amounted to ancient history. But now we have this roster of radical appointments, a current record that’s harder to explain away and which raises the indefeasible question of whether they’re a reflection of himself.

Only there can be no question about it. He and they are birds of a feather.

The enemy has gained the commanding heights of power.

A majority of those who live in the Crimea have voted to join Russia.

They will likely be the poorer for their decision.

If what remains of Ukraine were to become – as many Ukrainians wish it would – more integrated with the West, it would likely be much better off.

Here is a table, from Wikipedia, comparing average monthly wages. For us, it contains some surprises, eg that Austria (at $3,437) has a higher average wage than the US (at $3,263), and that Germany ($2,720) has a lower national wage than Ireland (at $2,997).

The average wage in the Russian Federation, at $1,215, is lower than that of bankrupt Greece, at $2,300.

It’s a rough figure based on data from 72 countries, omitting some of the world’s poorest nations. All figures are adjusted to reflect variations in the cost of living from one country to another. [PPP = Purchasing Power Parity] 

rank	Country	Monthly average wage $PPP
1	Luxembourg	$4,089
2	Norway	$3,678
3	Austria	$3,437
4	United States	$3,263
5	United Kingdom	$3,065
6	Belgium	$3,035
7	Sweden	$3,023
8	Ireland	$2,997
9	Finland	$2,925
10	South Korea	$2,903
11	France	$2,886
12	Canada	$2,724
13	Germany	$2,720
14	Singapore	$2,616
15	Australia	$2,610
16	Cyprus	$2,605
17	Japan	$2,522
18	Italy	$2,445
19	Iceland	$2,431
20	Spain	$2,352
21	Greece	$2,300
22	New Zealand	$2,283
23	South Africa	$1,838
24	Malta	$1,808
25	Israel	$1,804
26	Czech Republic	$1,786
27	Croatia	$1,756
28	Turkey	$1,731
29	Qatar	$1,690
30	Hong Kong	$1,545
31	Poland	$1,536
32	Slovakia	$1,385
33	Hungary	$1,374
34	Republic of Macedonia	$1,345
35	Bosnia & Herzegovina	$1,338
36	Estonia	$1,267
37	Russian Federation	$1,215
38	Jamaica	$1,135
39	Lithuania	$1,109
40	Argentina	$1,108
41	Latvia	$1,098
42	Serbia	$1,058
43	Chile	$1,021
44	Botswana	$996
45	Malaysia	$961
46	Belarus	$959
47	Romania	$954
48	Bahrain	$917
49	Panama	$831
50	Mauritius	$783
51	Brazil	$778
52	Macau	$758
53	Kazakhstan	$753
54	Bulgaria	$750
55	Colombia	$692
56	Ukraine	$686
57	China	$656
58	Mexico	$609
59	Georgia	$603
60	Azerbaijan	$596
61	Egypt	$548
62	Thailand	$489
63	Armenia	$471
64	Dominican Republic	$462
65	Moldova	$438
66	Mongolia	$415
67	Syria	$364
68	Kyrgyzstan	$336
69	India	$295
70	Philippines	$279
71	Pakistan	$255
72	Tajikistan	$227

Other tables on the page give OECD statistics, and official national statistics. They demonstrate that the US and western Europe – including almost all the EU’s eastern European affiliates – plus Japan, Israel and South Korea, are doing best; better than Russia and very much better than China and India.

There’s a great deal more to be discovered from the figures. They reward examination. (Eg the average gross monthly wage in Cuba is $19!)

But our concern at present is with Russia and Ukraine. We are not above outbursts of Schadenfreude, and we expect to find occasion to indulge in it when the Ukrainians who voted to join Russia complain about their comparative poverty. We confess that we look forward to it.

The institution of marriage throughout the civilized (ie Western) world is on a steep decline from which there is probably no recovery.

“The custom of one man and one woman remaining faithful to each other all through their lives is called monotony.” So goes the schoolboy howler. And we suspect the boy was on to something.

Google “marriage in decline” and you’ll find a multitude of theories as to why fewer people are getting married these days than say fifty years ago. (None of them includes that kid’s sharp diagnosis.)

But is the decline a good or a bad thing for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

Here is an article by Professor Walter Williams, who thinks the destruction of the black family has sad consequences. He blames the welfare state, not only for that but for the spoiling of black culture generally.

Criticism of the welfare state is music to our ears, so we quote him at length.

He writes:

People in the media and academia are mostly leftists hellbent on growing government and controlling our lives. Black people, their politicians and civil rights organizations have become unwitting accomplices. The leftist pretense of concern for the well-being of black people confers upon them an aura of moral superiority and, as such, gives more credibility to their calls for increasing government control over our lives.

Ordinary black people have been sold on the importance of electing blacks to high public office. After centuries of black people having been barred from high elected office, no decent American can have anything against their wider participation in our political system. For several decades, blacks have held significant political power, in the form of being mayors and dominant forces on city councils in major cities such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington, Memphis, Tenn., Atlanta, Baltimore, New Orleans, Oakland, Calif., Newark, N.J., and Cincinnati. In these cities, blacks have held administrative offices such as school superintendent, school principal and chief of police. Plus, there’s the precedent-setting fact of there being 44 black members of Congress and a black president.

What has this political power meant for the significant socio-economic problems faced by a large segment of the black community? Clearly, it has done little or nothing for academic achievement; the number of black students scoring proficient is far below the national average. It is a disgrace — and ought to be a source of shame — to know that the average white seventh- or eighth-grader can run circles around the average black 12th-grader in most academic subjects. The political and education establishment tells us that the solution lies in higher budgets, but the fact of business is that some of the worst public school districts have the highest spending per student. Washington, D.C., for example, spends more than $29,000 per student and scores at nearly the bottom in academic achievement.

Each year, roughly 7,000 — and as high as 9,000 — blacks are murdered.

Ninety-four percent of the time, the murderer is another black person. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Contrast this with the fact that black fatalities during the Korean War (3,075), Vietnam War (7,243) and wars since 1980 (about 8,200) total about 18,500. Young black males have a greater chance of reaching maturity on the battlefields than on the streets of Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, Newark and other cities. Black political power and massive city budgets have done absolutely nothing to ameliorate this problem of black insecurity.

Most of the problems faced by the black community have their roots in a black culture that differs significantly from the black culture of yesteryear. Today only 35 percent of black children are raised in two-parent households, but as far back as 1880, in Philadelphia, 75 percent of black children were raised in two-parent households — and it was as high as 85 percent in other places. Even during slavery, in which marriage was forbidden, most black children were raised with two biological parents.

The black family managed to survive several centuries of slavery and generations of the harshest racism and Jim Crow, to ultimately become destroyed by the welfare state. The black family has fallen victim to the vision fostered by some intellectuals that, in the words of a sociology professor in the 1960s, “it has yet to be shown that the absence of a father was directly responsible for any of the supposed deficiencies of broken homes.” The real issue to these intellectuals “is not the lack of male presence but the lack of male income.” That suggests that fathers can be replaced by a welfare check. The weakened black family gives rise to problems such has high crime, predation and other forms of anti-social behavior.

The cultural problems that affect many black people are challenging and not pleasant to talk about, but incorrectly attributing those problems to racism and racial discrimination, a need for more political power, and a need for greater public spending condemns millions of blacks to the degradation and despair of the welfare state.

We took this  picture of Obama in triumph from Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute.

He writes:

I think this cartoon does the best job of capturing the destructive impact of big government on economic performance. 

When not making excuses for President Obama’s dismal economic record, liberals try to explain away Texas’ stellar growth. But … the Lone Star State proves limited government works. …

Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called it the “Texas Unmiracle.” Time magazine dismissed Texas’ burgeoning growth as mere luck. Others chimed in along the same lines, insisting that low taxes, limited government spending and a business-friendly environment couldn’t possibly have anything to do with Texas’ better-than-average growth in GDP, jobs and incomes. And so, as Krugman put it, Texas “offers no useful lessons”.

We quote from an Investor’s Business Daily report on the economic success of Texas – resulting from its “un-liberal policies”.

An article this week in Washington Monthly written by Phillip Longman and titled “Oops: The Texas Miracle That Isn’t” spends 4,700 words claiming to have exposed the miracle as a fraud. But his debunking effort turns out to be phony.

Longman admits Texas has “outperformed the rest of the country in its growth of high-paying jobs.” That, he says, is “potentially a very big deal.” So he spends the rest of the article trying to explain it all away. He argues, for example, that the growth is almost entirely due to the boom in oil and gas production, though that industry directly accounts for just 8% of the new jobs.

In any case, he overlooks the fact that the oil and gas industry is doing well because Texas — unlike other energy-rich states such as, say, California — isn’t smothering it to death with regulations.

Longman then tries to deny the fact that people are flocking to Texas from other states in search of opportunity by citing just one year’s data on net migration — from 2010, a relatively low year for Texas.

Truth is that, since 2000, Texas has enjoyed a net migration of more than 2 million people, accounting for 40% of its total population growth, according to Census Bureau data. Between 2005 and 2012, nearly a quarter-million came from California alone.

Another way to look at it: In just five years, $14.4 billion worth of income shifted from other states to Texas, according to the Tax Foundation. Over the same years, liberal bastions such as California lost $15.8 billion, New York $21 billion and Massachusetts $4 billion.

Does that look like a “low level of net domestic migration to Texas”? Clearly, people are moving to Texas for a reason. And that mystifies those on the left because Texas has fewer government services, doesn’t try to soak the rich and spends less per student on education. Never mind that Texas students get a better education than those in big-spending California, according to a McKinsey & Co. study. Or that it has a lower poverty rate than California and New York.

And this migration trend isn’t limited to Texas. Between 2000 and 2011, the states with the biggest gains were more conservative, while the biggest losers were all liberal, according to a state freedom index report from the George Mason University Mercatus Center. …

Fact is, Texas has pursued decidedly un-liberal policies. It has one of the lowest levels of government spending, among the lowest tax burdens and consistently ranks as the most business-friendly state in the nation.

As a result, its real economy grew 13% between 2009 and 2012 — twice as fast as the nation overall. Private-sector jobs climbed 12% since Obama’s “recovery” started 4-1/2 years ago, compared with 7% nationwide. And per-capita income has been rising faster — 50% since 2000 vs. 44% nationwide. …

Texas is just an example of what invariably happens when a state, or nation, pursues free-market economic policies. And that’s why the left is so desperate to make its success disappear.

No state can have a truly free market when the federal government is regulatory, controlling, and redistributive as it is now. But Texas shows what can be done even in these trying circumstances.

Listen to Governor Perry of Texas. It’s a thrilling and rousing speech.

(Hat-tip for the video, our reader and commenter donl)

The Governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, has vetoed a bill that would have allowed business owners who held religious objections to homosexual practices to deny service to gay and lesbian customers.

The issue has been confused by debate as to whether religious belief should trump homosexual “rights”, or vice versa.

That business owners should be able to choose whom they will serve and whom they will not, should not be a question of religious freedom but simply of freedom.

They should be free to withhold their goods and/or services for any reason or none. If they act on sheer whim, that is their “right”.

And if it is because of an opinion – even an opinion that is regarded as politically incorrect – so what?

When the opinions of individuals become the government’s business, government has become totalitarian. An orthodoxy prevails. As in Calvin’s Geneva, Catholic Spain, Stalin’s Russia,  Mao’s China, Wahhabi Saudi Arabia.  The thought police are after you. They have ways of making you reveal the thoughts you are trying to keep private.

It is THE LAW that should not discriminate. Judgment in a court of law should be untainted by  pre-judgment – or “prejudice” in the true meaning of the word. (Though there are exceptions. The law rightly discriminates on the grounds of age, holding children less responsible for their actions than adults;  and on grounds of mental capacity, holding the insane less responsible than the sane.)

But individuals living  their private lives, can, do, and must discriminate in all their judgments. We are all prejudiced. Indeed, there is no way anyone could get through life without prejudices. We have numerous ways of quickly informing ourselves about other people. In a flash we have taken in his appearance, race, color, voice, accent, and so on, and in the secret chambers of our hearts and minds are bringing ready opinions to bear on him. It is a short cut without which we would be perpetually bewildered.

We all have first impressions, and what we make of them depends on our prejudices. We all find someone attractive or repulsive, interesting or dull on first acquaintance, and those first impressions are inevitably affected by prejudice. “Oh, he’s this or that, and I like it (or don’t like it).” But then you get to know him a little and find, perhaps, that he’s not this or that after all. We leap to instant judgment, but sensible people quite naturally make the reasonable decision to wait until they know the stranger better to see whether he is someone they want as a friend or employee or whatever.

In fact, no generalization about a person’s origins, race, nationality, descent, religious affiliation, sexual proclivity, age group, or anything else can ever reasonably be applied with certainty to any individual. But still and forever we will bring our vague associations to bear on our judgments. After that, intelligence should guide us to better judgment, because it is in our interest that it should. (Not because, for instance, some religious idealist issued an impossible-to-obey instruction to love everybody.)

Below we quote from an article by John Hawkins at Townhall, dealing chiefly with reasons why Christians who disapprove of gay marriage should not have to provide services for gay weddings. (The issue which gave rise to the Arizona bill.) But he does make a general point that people can refuse their services for any reason. 

John Hawkins writes:

Businesses should generally have the right to refuse customers: Because of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow and the other abominations Democrats forced on America, we did choose as a nation to treat race differently than most other issues. So, we do not allow businesses to discriminate based on race – and that’s a good thing. However, businesses can and do turn away customers for almost every other reason imaginable. Shouldn’t they be able to do that?

Shouldn’t the Super Bowl be allowed to decline an advertisement from a porn website? Shouldn’t the NAACP be able to turn away KKK members from a speech? Shouldn’t a movie theater be allowed to tell people who insist on using cell phones in the theater that they’re not welcome? Shouldn’t Wal-Mart be allowed to refuse to carry NAMBLA literature in its stores? Shouldn’t a nightclub be allowed to tell people wearing gang colors that they’re not welcome? Shouldn’t the Democratic Party be allowed to decline ads on its website from the Republican Party? On a personal note, at my website Right Wing News I’ve declined advertisements from porn websites, a dating service for “sugar daddies,” a dating service for people who are married, and even a t-shirt seller I considered to be homophobic. …  For every American with rudimentary common sense, these questions answer themselves.

Does the law at present allow that freedom? Surely whatever is not specifically forbidden in law is allowed. (It is obviously impossible to make a comprehensive list of everything anyone might ever do and declare that it must or must not be done.) If at present people are free, in these ever less free United States, to serve whom they will and not be coerced to serve those they’d rather not, then the law Governor Brewer vetoed was superfluous.

Customers choose which business they will patronize without having to explain why they chose that one and rejected others. Why should business not have the same freedom of choice? A businessman might be foolish to turn away someone who wants to give him dollars in exchange for the merchandise or service he deals in, but he certainly should not be forced to serve anyone against his will.

Another brilliant Michael Ramirez cartoon from Investor’s Business Daily

The State Department has spent millions of taxpayers’ dollars acquiring Art. That is to say, paying for objects that its resident or consultant aesthetes swear are works of Art, worth every penny.

The acquisitions were apparently a priority for Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State. If you would see her monument, tour US embassies and look about you.

Fashionable Art doesn’t come cheap. So there was no money left to pay for such a humdrum thing as effective protection of the US diplomatic and CIA missions in Benghazi. Denied the security they needed, four Americans, including the ambassador, were killed there by savage jihadis. Well – Hillary might say – there has to be human sacrifice on the altar of Art, it makes all the difference, and if you don’t understand that, you are a philistine bourgeois.

Look on the bright side. The Art is displayed in many a US embassy. Americans can be proud.

In London, there’s a granite wall built by Sean Scully that cost $1million. We couldn’t find a picture of it, but it’s like this one displayed in an art gallery.

Daniel Greenfield illustrates an article on the subject – which inspired this post – with these pictures of works by Cy Twombly. The  top one is at the embassy in Rome.  

From his text:   

Beijing [embassy] contains $23 million worth of art. Bern has $1.2 million and Luxembourg has $2.2 million.

And here is the grave of Ambassador Stevens, murdered at Benghazi. We don’t know how much it cost, or who paid for it.

*

Post Script: Here is some wall art that really has meaning. The wall is part of the US mission in Benghazi. The paint is blood. A hand put it there the night of the attack. It might have been the hand of Ambassador Stevens himself – or of one of his brutal killers. One does not have to read Arabic to know who signed in for the event on the other wall.

(Hat-tip: our reader and commenter donl)

Economics Professor Tim  Groseclose explains the Laffer Curve:

But 33% tax! No. A flat rate of about 10% – and government doing much less – is our wish.

Unrealistic? Yes. Unfortunately.