Crypto-fascism under Obama

The shiny luster is beginning to fade off Barack Obama. The man who rode a huge wave of momentum and change is showing us how creepy that change can be. What has Barack Obama done with his presidential honeymoon period you ask? Spend billions to nationalize, take 90% of the bonuses that people legitimately earned because others in the company messed up, and now, he has fired a CEO of a private company. What’s next? Executions in the public square?

Ok well that won’t happen. But a media lynching from the President on down is just as bad as a public execution. A person can’t make a living if he/she has been singled out as a pariah and part of “what caused the mess.” Obama is doing exactly that. He’s singling out people be it in AIG, GM, etc. etc. It used to be that liberals were relentless in their war on profit. Turns out they’re even worse when they’re in power and everybody’s losing money.

Obama’s mark on the country is very fresh and yet it is quite a scarier place already. If you are a money-losing bank, insurance company or auto-maker, you’re in the President’s radar screen. He may be your president but he’s also your worst enemy.

When it comes to the companies that require bailouts, I say that necessity is the mother of invention. These companies will invent ways to stay in business because it’s their livelihood. They don’t need Obama to decide what money has to stay in their coffers and who among them should keep working.

These companies have the solutions but they go against everything Obama and his buddies have fought to get and retain for years. The solutions involve tearing down the union structures and eliminating the revolving door mortgage policy. And most of all getting government’s hands off their operations. Part of the solution also involves radically reducing corporate income tax rates.

Since these things go against what Obama stands for, he’s resorted to fascist tactics: singling out honest hard-working people in order to distort from real solutions.

It’s time to call him on it!

America is ruining Soccer

America is ruining soccer by failing to understand the sheer beauty of the game. Soccer is a game of tactics and hard work both individually and as a team. It is a game where a team is only as good as its weakest link but where true superstars can shine.

Stephen H. Webb in his column in the Wall Street Journal demonstrates this failure to appreciate soccer. First, he finds something fundamentally wrong with the fact that people only kick the ball or use their heads in soccer. In fact, hands are quite important in the game. You use your hand to push a defender as you try to charge by him. But in any case, there are more spectacular things you can do with your feet than your hands. Try a 30-yard banana kick that goes over a defensive wall of players and fools the goalkeeper. You can also deke a defender and make them look amazingly foolish. Both are a rush I can't even explain.

Can't do those with your hands!

Second, Webb argues that kids aren't broken down by soccer. That it is egalitarian and that failure is hard to spot. Maybe for a little while. But if you take soccer seriously, you will be easily spotted as the weakest link. The coach will yell at you and bench you. If that is not happening, then kids shouldn't play soccer at a young age when their parents can intervene on their behalf or parents shouldn't be allowed to intervene at all.

I know a father who has a kid in an Ajax Amsterdam development team. He is 11 and they mould him like a little soldier. At any age, this kid can be sent home packing. Perhaps the game isn't broken Professor Webb. America just lacks the boot camps that are European pro clubs.

Third, Webb argues that the better you get in soccer, the less you score. Tell that to Liverpool FC who sparked 14 goals in a recent three-game span! But yes, there are many games that end low scoring because the defence, goalkeepers and midfield of both teams are just that good. But those are often the best games to watch. Such games still provide much action in the form of opportunities and near opportunities. It symbolizes a heavyweight fight that ends in a draw. Each team desperately looking for ways to punch holes in the defensive wall of the other. Soccer is often a war that stretches even to the stands.

Yes, goals are nice. But soccer isn't a sport meant for ESPN Sportscenter. It's not a game where you can just find out the score after the fact. You need to watch a game and you gain appreciation from understanding how a result became 0-0 and not simply that it did.

Webb also mocks the penalty shootout since it's so easy to score. What the shootout tests are the nerves of the teams' shooters. Often the player who misses is the one who gets nervous when he gets up there. Penalty shootouts are dramatic to watch because you never know when a miss will happen but you know that there will be a miss. Some people argue there are better ways to decide a game. But after 2 hours of play, there is not much separating the teams. That is the equivalent of a completed triple overtime in hockey or roughly six overtimes in basketball. Soccer is a thinking man's game played by brutes. The fouls can be nasty sometimes with very nasty injuries. The tactical aspect of the game is too wide to fit in a blog post. It's not just about running around. Often the team that wins is the one that does the least running but simply has the right players at the right positions and masters ball control. Position, like in battle, is huge in soccer.

It's sad that Prof. Webb calls it a foreign invasion as if Americans cannot appreciate a sport enjoyed around the world. I believe they can and if they took soccer more seriously, they might come to like it after all.

Why I don't gamble

The odds of winning big in gambling are slim enough as they are. Now it turns out that even when you win, the house can decide that you actually didn't.

Here is a story that actually happened. A man from Wasaga Beach, ON went to play the slots at Georgian Downs and settled on a machine called "Buccaneer." After numerous failed attempts, he managed to hit the jackpot and the machine went crazy with bells and whistles. According to the machine, he won $42.9 million. But when he went to collect, the staffers told him the machine had malfunctioned (without providing evidence as such) and they would not be paying him. They then stated that the maximum the machine could pay was $9,000.

Their compensation to the man? A free dinner for four at one of the casino's buffet restaurants. Lame at best.

Maybe the corporation did make a machine error. It is up to them to fix it before somebody plays and gets the impression that they have won big. Bottom line is that the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. (OLG) needs to pay up and pay up big. The man is right to sue and he should at least been offered what the machine would have paid otherwise for a jackpot win.

The house rakes in so much money from gamblers. They can afford to pay up when they make a mistake like this and they should. Who knows how much revenue has been lost due to the negative PR this has caused? If the OLG was smart, they would pay up and show the gambling public that what the machine reads is what they will get in the end. After all, isn't that how it's supposed to work?

Instead, now everytime someone will play a slot machine and see the machine go berzerk, they will wonder if they had really won.

Thank goodness for Research in Motion

In the midst of a mountain of doom and gloom, Research in Motion is showing us how it's done. They are taking advantage of the economic slowdown to hire thousands of tech-savvy people laid off from their competitors.

This is precisely the strategy I would follow if I knew I could withstand a drop in demand. RIM's blackberry has slowly become a staple of business so they could easily ride this out. They can afford to invest and it appears they have deep pockets. They even managed to wrest control of U2 from Apple and are going to sponsor their upcoming tour.

Expect more companies to follow suit. You will see a slow trickle of investment, be it manpower or machine. Investment is cheap right now. And then once we have ridden out this downturn, the more heavily invested companies will reap the benefits handsomely.

Paging Michael Moore

Germany just had its own Columbine.

Yep. The enlightened social-demoratic country of Germany with restrictive gun laws. This was not meant to happen right? Only in the US right? Wrong!

Gun shooting sprees happen in Toronto too. Google C.W. Jefferies and you'll get quite a few results. Google Jane Creba. Despite the socialist Toronto mayor's assertions that all the crimes were committed by guns smuggled from the US, it is not truth. Gun crimes happen everywhere. It can't be legislated out.

Yet more proof that the only thing gun control does is employ extra bureaucrats. A killer can emerge at any time from anywhere.

Restricting guns is not a bad idea but it is not a solution on its own. I don't know how this could have been prevented. But it is misleading to tell people that all that needs to be done is to take guns from innocent people altogether and then there won't be gun crimes.

Breaking - Peter Shurman not to run for Ontario PC Leader

CFRB's Silvana Aceto reports that Peter Shurman won't seek the Ontario PC nod.

The news of my MPP not seeking the top job saddens me. I think he would have been an underdog but he would have added colour to the race. He would have been the Chris Stockwell of 2009.

Open Letter to John McCain

Dear Senator McCain,

I know this is a bit late but better late than never. First, I want to congratulate you on your hard-fought run for the Presidency. One can look back and say that you did it with a lot of grace and dignity. You ignited the base by choosing a wonderful conservative in Sarah Palin. All in all, you gave it your best and you are to be commended for it.

I am a conservative living in Canada who has always been interested in American politics. If I was an American, I would vote Republican all the time. I was active in defence of your campaign on the internet, which brings me to this letter.

I am writing to you because of the way you changed my life in an indirect way. I met the love of my life and the woman I'm going to marry on a facebook group devoted to your run for the presidency. Our paths crossed because she was active posting on your behalf and she caught my eye. She is a passionate conservative from Indiana and she was defending you with sharp replies to baseless liberal-biased smears. Sparks flew shortly after we met and we are inseparable. Your campaign made it happen.

So if you can take anything from this campaign, know that you brought two passionate lovers together. If you want an invitation to the wedding, I am sure Krystle and I have zero objections to that. It would be really amazing actually. Make sure to book sometime to be in Indianapolis in the fall of 2010.

Thank you again sir.

Reflections on John Tory

I never had much faith that John Tory could passionately ignite center-right voters. My impressions when I met him the night he won the leadership was that he was a nice man but not conservative enough to jazz up the base and not charismatic enough to get anyone else. He did well in a small crowd of mostly Red Tories by the Esplanade that night, but that's a biased crowd. How would he fare in a general election?

Well in 2007, we found out, to disastrous consequences. I celebrated a minor win in Peter Shurman's election as my MPP. But the party suffered a severe blow.

Why did John Tory essentially fail? The attitude of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party under Ernie Eves was that blue Tories were in the bag. That all they had to do was go after centrist voters and win government. After all, where will the blue Tories go? Well we know where they went. They stayed home while McGuinty coasted to victory.

John Tory simply picked up where Eves left off. To great disaster. In the 2007 provincial election, he offered up a liberal platform with a big government promise to fund religious schools. It was radioactive and sometimes I fear that the party will be reminded of it in the next general election. So not only did he offer a wishy washy platform, he attached a wedge issue on top of it. No energizing the base and on top of that, alienating many potential voters who were eager to give McGuinty the boot (Tory started the election ahead in the polls). It was so bad that he lost his own Toronto riding in the election and was forced into political exile.

Then he spent 17 months trying to push one member aside so he could run. He picked one of the bluest ridings in the province. A riding that went to the PC with a 10,000+ vote margin of victory in an election that they lost everywhere else: the rural riding of Halliburton-Kawartha Lakes-Brock.

So what happened to that 10,000 vote plurality? About 9,900 of them decided not to show up. Some of the left parties' votes went the Liberals' way. Result? 900 vote Liberal victory and the leader of our party denied a seat again.

Well do you blame those 9,900? They are blue conservatives who wanted a local blue conservative to vote for. Not a red Tory from Toronto who was only running in their riding because it was just available for him to run in. No attachment to the riding. No home in the riding. And they won't vote Liberal or NDP. So why wouldn't they stay home?

You can argue that one factor is that this was a special election. Had this been a general election, they probably would have voted, but then they wouldn't have Mr. Tory has an option. But this special election had a smug feeling to it. It was all about the Red Tories saying: "we have come to cash the blank check that is our blue base." When they came, they found that the account was in NSF.

Let me tell you something about blue Tories. They think they can get along just fine without government and they'll stay home if you don't offer them a real choice. Just because you have the word Conservative in your party's name and you're the leader doesn't mean they'll get excited about you running. The blue Tories will stay home if you offer them Liberal-lite.

It's time to get back to the path Mike Harris set us on. It won back-to-back majorities. The Eves/Tory era, well, it's nothing to brag about to say the least.

Good lending eventually rescues bad lending

I write a lot about the US because their success greatly reflects on Canada's success. Let's face it. They are a significant economic engine.

I came across an interesting article that claims that countries that followed the policies of deficit spending and low-interest lending were the quickest to recover from the great depression. There is some merit in this argument. When you lend to productive ventures that yield profit, you can certainly get yourself out of a sticky rut. The entire North American economy has thrived from debt. Without debt, there would be no capital to finance productive ventures. No money would be created and for an economy to expand, money must be created.

What launches a Great Depression is a mixture of two things. A downswing in an economy combined with massive consumer default. That's what happened in 1929. That's what's happening now. It's when that which I classify as discretionary lending collapses that the trouble starts. This lending includes mortgages, credit cards and consumer lines of credits. Unproductive debt in the sense that it doesn't get invested into productive ventures like a factory or a machine. It's debt for the sake of someone collecting interest while a consumer pays the debt back.

It's this unproductive debt that aggravated the current situation. That and the decline in home values that the mortgages were meant to pay for.

Deficit spending by a government can be thought of as a loan as well. When it is put in the hands of those who can generate productivity, then it is worthwhile. The article states that deficit spending in the 30s and 40s put the unemployed to work.

However, the Democrats are taking advantage of the situation to engage in reckless spending. They are putting money into pet projects rather than providing real stimulous. An example of a real stimulous would include a zero interest loan for a number of years to any business seeking expansion in the US that would eventually employ people.

I am even ok with infrastructure projects that will employ people until things get better. Those people will have work and the accompanying experience and when the economy will rebound, there will be greater access to goods and services.

In the meantime, the government can reign in on waste. Tax and spend only what it needs to guarantee the basic provisions it is meant to give under the constitution and give some assistance in the broad economy without prejudice to one industry over another.

It is now up to productive debt to rescue its unproductive cousin. And in the future, let's hope that unproductive debt will be harder to acquire.

Something my alma-mater ought to be ashamed of

I used to attend the University of Toronto and I had a good time there. I always had the impression that I was going to a very prestigious school with a glorious history. The university goes back prior to the Upper Canada rebellion of 1837 and was established as a confederation of religion-based (St. Mike's, Trinity) and non-religion-based schools (University College, Victoria College). When you walk in the majority of the buildings at U of T, you feel you are touching history.

In recent times, U of T has established a new dark chapter in its history. A stain that I believe threatens its good reputation. U of T has the dubious distinction of having hosted the first-ever Israeli Apartheid Week 5 years ago. A week-long distortive Israel hate-fest of the worst kind. Here is what I wrote about the first one which I had the (dis)pleasure of attending .

Among the things I heard then was a speaker named Mustaffa priding himself in having killed Jews in Jenin. The crowd was eating his every word up except for the few brave souls including myself, who were there on some sort of observatory role. It was very disheartening to be around such hate.

The IAW has now spread to a world-wide cancer on universities everywhere. The event is so bad that it suppresses opposing opinion to the point of bullying. My good friend Isaac was intimidated by a bouncer just for yelling at a speaker to answer a question. The question was about the hate language in Hamas' Charter. Predictably, the speaker gave a long-winded answer on how Israel is racist. The IAW also promotes violence and hate rather than offering constructive solutions on how to break the Israeli-Arab deadlock, including how Arabs could change their ways to non-violence in order to force Israel's hand to concede more. Gandhi anyone?

I'm anxiously waiting for the moment when intelligent people world-wide will conclude that only one side is interested in peace and it's time to stop stuffing it down Israel's throat. Events like these prove it. But I'm not that optimistic that the world will wake up from an event like this. I just think this event will arouse more hatred towards Israel and Jews alike.

Case in point. The supposedly moderate Fatah of Abu Mazen (the man we're supposed to get a peace deal with ) is competing with Hamas now for Gaza viewing audience with a TV station that calls for ethnic cleansing. Here's a good link about it.

But anyways, back to the topic at hand. I keep telling a fellow U of T alumnus that as long as the football team keeps handing down losing seasons that I will not donate a dime to the school. I am now throwing in another, more important condition to my money. As long as this event stays on campus, they will not see any money from me.

They allowed IAW to happen. They can now send a message by shutting it down in the place where it all started.

The Republican Road Map

Credit to freedomnation for bringing this to everyone's attention.

Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. In it, he suggested four items that would immediately tackle the economy.

• Taxes: Lower the top tax rate to 25% instead of raising it to 39.6%. Collapse the lower tax brackets to 10% (up to $100,000 for couples). Lower corporate tax rates to 25%. These will make Americans more competitive on a tax basis with their competitors.

• Sound Money: End the easy money policy of the federal reserve. Return to a sound money policy that will keep interest rates down and increase confidence in investors and entrepreneurs to take the risks required for future growth.

• Financial Sector: Avoid nationalization of the banks. Once nationalization takes place, it's hard to remove it.

• A grip on entitlements: Faced with the prospect of $56 trillion in unfunded liabilities along with a bankrupt social security, entitlements need to be addressed. Investigate why costs are exploding and take action.

These are modest proposals without much detail except for the tax reform proposal. But they are complete steps in the right direction. Pity that it took a defeat at the polls for Republicans to shift towards these sorts of policies.

The tax reform, if implemented, would represent an immediate shot in the arm for the economy. More people will flock to the US and businesses will stay. But to work, it must accompany a radical cost reduction in the federal government. These are long overdue.

Why I admire Rush Limbaugh

On Saturday afternoon at CPAC, Rush Limbaugh showed yet again why he is the leading conservative voice in America. Without question, Rush Limbaugh is the most capable of
communicating basic conservative principles. He does it with eloquence and brilliance, shooting down every liberal biased attack on what being a conservative is all about.

In his speech, Rush Limbaugh re-iterated that conservatives love people. He said that conservatives, unlike liberals, don't assume up-front that there are groups of people who could never make it in society and thus require government aid. Conservatives believe that anyone can make it if they are ambitious enough. I fundamentally agree with this. When people accept government aid, they resign themselves to being eternally poor. They never do anything with their lives. Liberals who claim to be on the side of the poor only serve to leave those people in perpetual poverty while making the rich poorer as well.

Limbaugh also went hard after President Obama in a way that few people dare to these days. He reminded the CPAC crowd that liberals have always wanted Bush to fail and now they are asking conservatives to support Obama. This hypocrisy should be countered, Limbaugh said. There is nothing for conservatives to agree with liberals about. Conservatives want the country and the economy to succeed. Liberals want the country to be weaker by virtue of their anti-capitalism and pro-government ways. Thus, Limbaugh rightly repeated that he wants Obama to fail because success for Obama is failure for the country.

This kind of courage and conviction is certainly welcome. Few people speak with the courage that Limbaugh does. He doesn't care about media scrutiny. He is his own person and nobody will get him to back down.

What an asset he is for the movement.