President Bush’s spot on next year’s Illinois ballot was threatened Friday after the state Senate killed a Democratic bid linking next year’s presidential race with a controversial plan to forgive steep election fines against scores of Democrats. […]
In order to be on the Illinois ballot, state law requires that President Bush certify his candidacy for president in late August. But he won’t be nominated by his party until Sept. 2, the last day of the Republican convention in New York City. The bill would have waived that filing deadline for Bush.
Let’s see if I have this straight. The Democratic state senators in Illinois want to cancel their own fines for violating election laws, which protect democracy, while at the same time denying the current US President a spot on the ballot. I hope they do it - President Bush isn’t going to win in Illinois anyway and it would be a truly wonderful issue for use elsewhere in the nation.
When Welsh farmers start a new line catering for West Africans’ desire for a taste of home you’d think they’d get a nice write-up in the local paper praising their enterprise and multi-cultural awareness, wouldn’t you? But the BBC seems to regard it as a problem - indeed, a whole new category of crime, “meat crime”:
Mafia-like criminal gangs are making huge profits from the illegal meat trade with little risk of being caught and punished.
Could the huge profits be because of the illegality and the smallness of the risk be because nobody but a few busybodies cares?
Wales is becoming the centre for the illegal production of so-called smokies - a delicacy made from carcasses which are primitively blow-torched.
Mmm, smokies sound pretty tasty to me, and I don’t see what’s so primitive about the carcasses being blowtorched; a thoroughly modern culinary technique if ever there was one. (How exactly does one blowtorch meat sophisticatedly, anyway?) It is odd to see the BBC, usually so careful to avoid any association of Africa with primitiveness, throwing in the word merely as insult, and illogical insult at that.
The final horror is yet to come:
Julie Barratt, CIEH director for Wales, said people resorted to meat crime - in particular producing smokies - as a means of “supplementing their incomes”.
Evil, evil. We must put a stop to that immediately.
Imagine, people in this day and age living in the UK are trying to supplement teir incomes without state approval. Truly the kind of horror the British government thought they’d gotten past.
On to happier subjects. I was delighted to hear today about an Australian report, Greening farm subsidies, which is the result of an alliance between free-market economists and the Australian World Wildlife Fund, aimed at ending harmful agricultural subsidies.
The full report points out that 80 percent of farm subsidies are perverse: they are costly to both the economy and the environment. The alliance, therefore, makes sense. Both the free market and environmental interests are served by abolishing these perverse subsidies. And it can be done with little cost. The example of New Zealand shows how slashing these subsidies (to the extent that farmers used to receive 40% of their income from the government, but now receive about 1%) was beneficial for the economy, the environment and the farmers themselves. This really is an opportunity, as the report says, for a win-win situation.
Direct government intervention like agricultural subsidies are almost inevitable harmful to the recipient and the citizenry at large. The only real beneficiaries are the rent-seekers who set themselves up as gatekeepers to other people’s money.
[source]
Germany and France have avoided the threat of sanctions from the European Commission, despite breaching strict rules on budget deficits.
Both countries look set to break deficit limits for the third year in a row in 2004. Under the agreed rules, this should result in European Commission recommendations on budget management and heavy fines if the terms are not met.
But eurozone finance ministers have reached a compromise which requires Germany and France to give a political commitment to bring their budgets in line. Ministers also laid out budget cutting targets for both countries but these are below the cuts the Commission had wanted in place.
As the masters do, so do the servants.
Last week, the European Court of Auditors in Luxembourg released a 400-page report that found “systematic problems, over-estimations, faulty transactions, significant errors and other shortcomings” in the EU’s budget. EU’s auditors could only vouch for 10 percent of the $120 billion the EU spent in 2002. It was also the ninth successive year the auditors were unable to certify the budget as a whole.
Europeans are yet to face such “serious underlying issues,” Klaus said, because “they are still in the dream world of welfare, long vacations, guaranteed high pensions, and cradle-to-grave social security, and which obviates the imperative need to face” reality.
The biggest challenge for the Czech republic, Klaus said, is how to avoid falling into the trap of “a new form of collectivism.” Asked whether he meant a new form of neo-Marxism, he said, “absolutely not, but I see other sectors endangering free societies.”
“The enemies of free societies today are those who want to burden us down again with layer upon layer of regulations,” president Klaus explained. “We had that in Communist times. But now if you look at all the new rules and regulations of EU membership, layered bureaucracy is staging a comeback.” The EU’s 30,000 bureaucrats have produced some 80,000 pages of regulations that the Czech republic and the other European applicants for EU membership would have to adopt.
The EU is making sure that 10% of the budget is actually spent on what it’s supposed to be spent on. That’s about that same as the Soviets, isn’t it?