The Legacy of Racist Eugenics in North Carolina under the Democratic Party

Reading The Wall Street Journal this morning during a visit to an American friend, I came across an article by Valerie Bauerlein with the headline “North Carolina Atones For Its Sterilizations” (behind the paywall, so you likely won’t be able to read it unless you are a subscriber). The upshot of it is, while most states suspended their eugenics programs in the 1940s after the Nazis discredited the eugenics movement, North Carolina actually ramped up its forced sterilization program after WWII, and continued sterilizing citizens through the 1960s before finally ending the program in 1974. While blacks made up 25% of North Carolina’s population, over 60% of those sterilized were blacks.

So me being me, I announced to my wife and friend, “I’ll bet you North Carolina was run by Democrats”. Immediately, the friend, a political “moderate”, said “you don’t know that, I’ll bet you are wrong”, the pop culture propaganda pinning racist rule on Republicans being that strong. So, I headed to Google. And lo and behold, what did I find: North Carolina was run by Democrat governors from 1901 until 1973. Yes, in the first year of a Republican governor after 73 years of Democrat rule, the forced sterilization program of largely black citizens was ended.

“OK, that’s the governors. But the legislature really runs the state. Which party was in charge of the legislature?”

Google once again: the North Carolina legislature switched from Democrat to Republican control in 2011, after more than 100 years of Democrat rule.

Further proof that pop culture propaganda usually trumps truth, that monstrous anti-human policies almost always come from the left, and that the left has always found a welcome home in the Democratic party.

UPDATE: I have been informed by the husband of the friend, a Democrat, of the following: the Democrats used to be racists, but they switched to being the not-racists when the racist Republicans took over as the racist party. Oh, the tortured logic you’re forced to believe on the left!

“When Mitt Romney Came To Town” Film: Operation Inoculation

Mitt Romney knows he has one large electoral problem, and it’s his time spent as CEO of Bain Capital during the 1980s and 1990s. If there’s one thing the left and Obama know how to demagogue against (disingenuously, perhaps, but that’s for another day), it’s big-business “Wall Street Fat Cats”. But that specific line of attack only really hurts him with the left-wing Democrat base, which he need not worry about. It’s the Republican base he has to fear, even though it has traditionally resisted this attack, as “Wall Street Greed” has traditionally been seen by conservatives as an ugly but necessary part of free-market capitalism.

To that point, this 25-minute short film, “When Mitt Romney Came To Town”, is an intriguing case in what may be one of the most sophisticated Presidential campaign “black-ops” we have ever seen. The film tells the story of a few examples of Romney’s “creative destruction” at Bain Capital, through the eyes of blue-collar workers whose jobs were eliminated due to the “corporate raiding” of Mitt’s firm.  Watch for yourself, and you’ll see this takes a decidedly left-wing tone: it says, essentially, “Romney destroyed the lives of thousands of poor helpless blue-collar workers”. It’s a tone that, while dramatic, does not really resonate with the Republican base, which generally accepts the thesis that bankruptcy and “creative destruction” are a legitimate part of the free market. So the question is: why would Newt Gingrich be so foolish as to use this film to try to rally the conservative base against Romney? 

While countless conservative commentators have rightly chastised Gingrich and Rick Perry for promoting the left-wing populist angle used in this film to attack Romney (conservatives do not want their candidates to be seen as attacking capitalism), most have gone a step further and given Mitt Romney the ultimate weapon in securing the Republican nomination: they’ve told conservative voters to LAY OFF BAIN! Only Sarah Palin, in her numerous Fox News appearances in recent days, has refused to declare Bain “off-limits”, and has advised voters to take a close look at Mitt’s record – in particular, his claims of job creation, and his possible use of his corporate takeovers to attract government subsidies and bailouts. In fact, last night on Sean Hannity’s program, she used the key word that I think explains what’s going on here: inoculation.

Which gets me to my theory: this film was subversively created by the Romney campaign itself, in order to achieve this desired result of inoculation on Bain. The reason he needs to create the meme out there that “an attack on Bain is an attack on capitalism”, is because of the aforementioned Governor Palin, and her rallying the Republican base around the cause of Crony Capitalism. The Tea Party base of the party is now wise to the concept of statism, cronyism, corporatism, and corruption coming from the big-business side of the economy. The type of capitalism Romney engaged in with Bain is a problem with the Tea Party base not because he put people out of work (many types of capitalism involve the elimination of jobs), but because the businesses and jobs themselves were not a factor at all in the business decisions of Bain, just collateral damage that, on the aggregate, has been extremely harmful to America. Jobs, and the businesses themselves, were irrelevant to the partners at Bain. What Bain and other corporate raiders actually do is not “turn around failing companies. It’s the search for opportunities on balance sheets, stock prices, and regulatory environments, to exploit through political connections and complex financial instruments, to create paper profits, and damn the consequences.

It’s a complex discussion that can take volumes to fully explain. But what Romney’s campaign has discovered it needs to hide is the fact that the profits at Bain usually could not occur without the exploitation of political contacts, regulatory loopholes, and questionable complex financial tactics. So while Newt and Perry were foolish enough to take the bait on this film’s apparent attack on capitalism itself, Palin will continue to try to drag them back from the edge of self-destruction by rescuing the narrative. Romney’s problem is a Crony Capitalism problem, and he knows it. That’s why it’s no coincidence, this film was produced by Jason Killian Meath, a former business associate and 2008 campaign leader for Mitt Romney himself. Romney’s team, consisting undoubtedly of many brilliant and experienced tactical political operators, is loving the effect this film is having. Mission accomplished? We’ll see how successful the savviest political minds, including Governor Palin, are at rescuing the narrative.

Canada’s Death Panels In Action: Nationalized Health Care Exposed

When Sarah Palin used rhetorical flourish to warn Americans of “Obama’s Death Panel” back in August of 2009, she was mocked and derided by liberals, and sniped at by jealous establishment conservatives. Well, fast-forward to March 2011 in Canada – land of Obama’s dream of nationalized health care – and the debate over the use of the drug Herceptin in the treatment of breast cancer in young women. When 34-year-old mother of two Jill Anzarut went to the press and Facebook to advocate for the drug, which is being denied to her by the Ontario Ministry of Health, our (Liberal) Health Minister chose to respond with jaw-dropping honesty:

“We cannot have a health system where the stories that land on the front page of the paper determine our health-care policy. It would be unfair to those who do not get their stories on the front page if we were to give priority to those who do.”

With these 49 words, Deb Matthews exposes what Palin was so presciently warning about: that nationalized health care ends up becoming about turf-protection, central control, dehumanization of individuals, and a monopoly on health service rationing to a clique of “masters of the universe” who end up thinking their number-crunching degrees in epidemiology give them moral license to determine who deserves to live and die.

Not convinced? Want to give Matthews benefit of the doubt, or deny the truth of what she said? OK, don’t take her word for it. Let’s go straight to the words of Diane McArthur, Assistant Deputy Minister and executive officer, Ontario Public Drug Programs, Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, as published in her own words as a letter to the editor in today’s National Post:

“I would like to clarify the Ontario Public Drug Program review process in response to Matt Gurney’s recent article. The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s process for evaluating new and expensive cancer drugs is based on the best scientific evidence. The Ontario Public Drug Program relies on a thorough assessment of scientific data and clinical evidence by its expert advisory committee, the Committee to Evaluate Drugs (CED) and the CED/Cancer Care Ontario sub-committee, which includes cancer experts, to develop funding recommendations for all cancer drugs.
As a result, the Ontario Public Drug program is one of the most generous drug benefit programs in Canada.
Ontario’s Compassionate Access Program component of the Exceptional Access Program provides an opportunity for me, as the executive officer of the Ontario Public Drug Program, to consider requests for drugs or indications where the Committee to Evaluate Drugs has not reviewed a drug or where there are rare clinical circumstances in immediately life-, limb-or organ-threatening conditions. This program is not a mechanism to provide an exemption from the evidencebased criteria. The Exceptional Access Program Compassionate Review Policy is available on the Ministry’s website.
The ministry will continue to make funding decisions on drug products based on the advice of experts. We regularly review our criteria as new evidence is brought forward and/or standards of practice change. It is our responsibility to ensure that in addition to providing the best coverage we can, all funding decisions are made on the best available clinical and scientific evidence.”

Trying to put a positive spin on the government monopoly on drug rationing, MacArthur confirms what Palin, and the Health Minister herself, made clear:

1) Initial decisions on drug coverage are made by an “expert advisory committee”. 

2) Ontario’s committee is a smiley-happy-face-committee that is most generous to the little peoples!!!

3) If you’re not satisfied that Ontario’s committee is smiley and happy and generous to the little peoples, you can apply to another smiley happy committee – the committee of ME!!! DIANE MACARTHUR!!! BEARER OF GOVERNMENT GIFTS!!! And my SUPERPOWERS as head of the EXCEPTIONAL ACCESS PROGRAM!!!!

4) But if I, DIANE MARCARTHUR, BEARER OF GOVERNMENT GIFTS decide to quell the PR nightmare my administration is experiencing by granting you, suffering nameless victim who doesn’t fit into the expert panel’s number-crunching criteria yet insists on advocating for your own life, the drug that you want, I’ll find a way to cover my ass with another expert report (commissioned by me to give me the answer I need to provide cover to make it look like our system consists of something other than the government exercising a monopoly on the arbitrary rationing of health care services.)

Put it in your pipe and smoke it, Palin-haters of the right and left! (And you too, brainwashed Canucks…)

UPDATE: The bureaucrats announce, to no one’s surprise, that they will fund the patient’s treatment after all. The death panel comes through for Ms. Anzarut, and the minister announces what a wonderful world it is!

Words of Wisdom in an Age of Stimulus: Milton Friedman on Spending

With an extremely busy and challenging few months ahead with my business, and a home life that includes raising two energetic little boys aged 1 and 3, I’m putting Flaggman’s Canada on hiatus until Summer 2009. I apologize to my loyal readers, and I look forward to returning later in the year. In the meantime, in this age of “Stimulus Spending”, read the timeless wisdom of the late, great Milton Friedman, and commit it to memory:

There are four ways in which you can spend money.

1) You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.

2) You can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.

3) I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!

4) Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government.

A blow to liberal fascism in Canada: Moon recommends repeal of 13

November 25, 2008 was a momentous day for opponents of Canada’s creeping march towards liberal fascism. A week after administrators at one of our most prestigious post-secondary institutions, Queens University, sent a gang of thought police out to campus cafeterias and lounges to eavesdrop on private conversations, the long-awaited Moon Report on the future of the Canada Human Rights Commission was released to the public (read the full report here). Despite the fact that the Commission’s own leader hand-picked the report’s left-leaning law professor writer, and paid him handsomely with Commission funds, Prof. Richard Moon made explicit in no uncertain terms in his report: the now world-famous Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act must be repealed! (More details in op-eds from Ezra Levant and the National Post Editorial Board).

Amazingly, the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s chairwoman Jennifer Lynch, seems ready to throw the report down the memory hole, and start again in her attempt to whitewash the fascism of Section 13 and preserve the legal activist community’s make-work racket. In this context, it’s not hard to understand why Canada’s “official Jews” (a term coined by Levant that I have gratefully adopted) continue to wage battle against those who wish to strip the Human Rights Act of its most heavy-handed powers of summary execution. Here’s the official response of Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress – an organization that clearly has the interests of lawyers and leftists, rather than Jews as a whole, at heart. Typical response of liberals to failure – double-down on the rejected policy, and blame the problems on “poor implementation” (reminiscent of Barack Obama’s upcoming return to the New Deal in America).

Farber may be the most egregious proponent of Section 13, but he’s not alone. Leo Adler, head of the Canadian branch of Rabbi Marvin Hier’s excellent L.A.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, has tarnished his organization through vocal support. The B’nai Brith, a Jewish community and charitable organization to which I belong, has also supported the draconian speech code law. I’ll be following Levant, and doing what I can to hit these organizations in the pocketbook. I will be doing my best to participate in his “Jews against book burning” campaign, and ensure that no donated funds of mine will go to the CJC or Friends of Simon Wiesenthal (who is probably turning in his grave at Adler’s antics) until their policies change.

In the meantime, I look forward to the law’s repeal in Parliament. Get it on the agenda, Mr. Harper!

“What Just Happened?” – 90 Seconds on the US Financial Meltdown

UPDATE: Don’t believe me? How about one of America’s leading economists, who happens to also be African-American, Thomas Sowell: “Do Facts Matter?”

If you want to cut to the chase, and understand the root problem of the current US financial meltdown, watch this 90-second video:

As the sharp drop in US consumer confidence takes its toll on my own business, I’ve had a chance to read quite a bit about what has happened. Here’s my take, in layman’s terms:

Democrat social engineers in US elected office – starting with Jimmy Carter and his Community Reinvestment Act, and Bill Clinton’s radical expansion of government-mandated sub-prime loans through Fannie & Freddie in the late 1990s – created a real-estate bubble fuelled by irresponsible people receiving credit they could never repay unless home prices continued to rise forever. But as the Clinton-era rules created positive fiscal and political incentives to keep the bad loans going, the risks were ignored by the issuing banks. The issuing banks, and their enablers at Fannie & Freddie, assumed that, in the case of a meltdown, they would be bailed out. 

In order to hide the extreme risk of this mass of bad loans, the Mortgage industry conspired with Wall Street investment bankers to hide these loans amongst a variety of better-quality assets in Asset-Backed Commercial Paper, spreading the risk throughout the world.

When the Bush White House, and certain Republican congressional leaders, raised the alarm about this powderkeg of a problem starting in 2001, they were thwarted time-and-again by dissembling, corrupted Freddie & Fanny-connected Democrats (as shown in the video), and possibly some connected Republicans as well, although I’ve never seen names. Said politicians knew the whole ponzi scheme would eventually blow up; but Plan B was always in their back pocket: BAILOUT at the hands of taxpayers.

The bottom line: every penny of this nearly-trillion-dollar bailout is essentially a socialist transfer of wealth, from hard-working American taxpayers and international investors, to irresponsible non-working fools who will continue to be propped up in homes they never should have owned in the first place.

In other words: a massive back-door welfare scheme, who’s bill has finally come due.

The Stanley Cup of the Canadian Blogosphere: Mohammed Elmasry vs. Maclean’s

As I watch Stanley Cup Game 5 work its way through double-overtime, I thought I’d help spread the word about the Stanley Cup Finals of the Canadian blogosphere, so to speak – this week’s BC Human Rights Tribunal hearing in the case of Mohammed Elmasry vs. Maclean’s magazine. An update, in a nutshell, for the previously uninformed:

• Maclean’s Magazine, Canada’s Time, prints an excerpt from columnist Mark Steyn’s New York Times #1 best-seller, America Alone, in October 2006.
• The head of the Canadian Islamic Congress, Mohammed “Every Israeli Jew is a Target” Elmasry, decides that Maclean’s must be dhimmified. Three “sock puppet” law students with ties to Elmasry and his lawyer, Faisal Joseph, try to shake down Maclean’s publisher for both an unedited “response”, and for financial donations to Muslim groups. Maclean’s shows the students the door, probably too politely for my taste.
• Elmasry’s sock puppet students take their case to the media, and shop it to Canada’s kangaroo court alternative (in)justice system – the Human Rights tribunals. Cases are filed in Ontario (the province where the magazine, and the complainants, are located), British Columbia (a province many thousands of kilometres away, that has no connection to the individals involved, but has the country’s most notoriously far-left-activist human rights tribunal), and at the federal level (the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal). The Ontario complaint was thrown out due to jurisdictional issues, but not without a most outrageous “you’re guilty anyway” press release accompanying the dismissal.
• At least one of the sock puppets, Khurrum Awan, magically gets a lawyerin’ job at Mr. Kutty’s firm.
• Dozens of bloggers, interested citizens, and journalists from around North America, have decended on a tiny windowless room in Vancouver this week to hear a panel of three non-judges, freed from the rules of evidence, procedure, fairness, and common sense, expose themselves and their fellow star chamber wizards as the banal faces of fascist evil that Hannah Arendt so famously warned us about.

Live-blogging the proceedings on their blackberries are Maclean’s Andrew Coyne and the great Ezra Levant. All the info you’d ever want (and more) can be found linked at Free Mark Steyn. Look for other great commentary at Steyn’s own blog, my friend Blazing Catfur’s blog, and at Kathy Shaidle’s Five Feet of Fury, which was unexpectedly dragged into the opening day of the farcical proceedings.

Why is this so important? Because it so neatly shines light on two of the biggest issues facing Canada in the current epoch: the unrelenting attack on Western values by Islamic jihadists, and the unrelenting attack on freedom of expression by arrogant leftist university-trained activist grievance mongerers throughout a country that generally rejects concepts like freedom of speech and checks-and-balances for no other reason than “they’re American.” Put them together, and what do you get? One of my favorite topics, the Islamist-Leftist Alliance. And no matter what you think of the issues – it’s damn fine theatre (of the absurd)!

(Good news – the Conservative government is starting to exercise some conservative muscle. Led by St. Catharines MP Rick Dykstra, Delta-Richmond East MP John Cummins, and Minister of Justice Rob Nicholson, a Parliamentary review of the entire Human Rights Commission structure is in the works.)

The Nightmare of Socialist Medicine: Sex Changes Now! Cancer, Autism, Brain Surgery Later

Ontario’s Minister of Health proudly announces Thursday: Sex Change surgery will once again be covered by the province’s socialist health care monopoly.

Amazing! The province must be swimming in funds! All problems in the health care system must have been solved, if we can now provide the resources for sadly pathetic, psychologically disturbed adults to have their bananas turned to peaches.

Perhaps we should call Sylvia de Vries, who would be dead by now if not for the good fortune of living across the river from Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital, and tell her the good news. And while we’re at it, call Stephan Marinoiu, nearing bankruptcy to pay for his son’s autism therapy, to let him know. Hey, see if Lindsay McCreith wants in on the celebration:

(An aside: for an idea of the state of conservatism in Ontario today, here’s the Tory PC’s reaction to the story: “The Progressive Conservatives declined to comment on the issue, saying they wanted to wait and hear something more from the government than Smitherman’s musings to reporters.”

AUDIO CLIP: Ezra Levant on Laura Ingraham Radio Show, 2008-02-12

Conservative free speech and anti-Islamofascist crusader Ezra Levant made what was likely his biggest, most important media appearance to date this morning, appearing on The Laura Ingraham Show, a syndicated U.S. talk radio program with an average of nearly 1,000,000 listeners a day across more than 300 local stations. The first segment was a simple introduction to Ezra and his battle; the clip posted here is the second segment, which begins with a barely-audible segment of Ezra’s videotaped AHRC appearance, and continues with a very sympathetic interview by the host. (Pump up the volume; my recording level was a bit too low…):

VIDEO: Ezra Levant vs. Alberta Human Rights Commissioner Shirlene McGovern

Update: new video clips will be added here as soon as they are available. One more was added on Saturday night, and two more Sunday morning, bringing the total to six. **ONE MORE, MONDAY MORNING** **CLOSING ARGUMENT ADDED MONDAY NIGHT** **ADDITIONAL CLIP ADDED FRIDAY, TOTAL NOW AT NINE**

As promised yesterday, Ezra Levant (against the wishes of the bureaucrats) has posted to YouTube video of his hearing before the Alberta Human Rights Commission on Friday, January 11, 2008. The commissioner, Shirlene McGovern, clearly believes that what she is doing is right and just, and simply can’t understand why Ezra is protesting so. As Levant says in his own blog entry, this is Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” in a nutshell.

All of these clips are well worth a watch, for a rare (if not completely unique) look inside a Human Rights Commission hearing. For those who understand that freedoms of speech, expression, and the press cannot be compromised in a free, democratic society, Levant’s eloquence and passion will inspire you.

First, it’s Ezra’s opening statement. Note Ms. McGovern’s constant eye-rolling:

Next, it’s Ezra’s blistering response to McGovern’s question, “What was your intent in publishing the cartoons.”

Then, see Ezra destroy McGovern’s contention that Muslims are exposed to hatred and violence in a Post-9/11 world:

Next, it’s indignant Ezra at his best. Just wait for this line: “She’s a thug, you’re a thug, your whole company’s a thug.”:

Here, Ezra accepts appropriate limits to free speech (fraud, defamation, incitement to murder, etc.), but explains that there is no appropriate limit to political speech. “Unlimited political speech is the antidote to political violence.” And near the end, he utters this quote of impassioned brilliance: “I’ll rot in hell before I use my mouth to say that fascist’s words with you as an instrument to compel me to do so.” Then, he lays down his line in the sand: “Canada’s Human Rights Commissions have, if you can believe it,  issued lifetime bans on people uttering comments. I simply won’t comply.”

And this nugget shows McGovern giving him a dismissive “you’re entitled to your opinions”, with Ezra replying with a rhetorical flourish:

This next clip exhibits the absolute arbitrariness of the standards used by the Alberta Human Rights Commission when determining if a complaint has merit. Ms. McGovern says the standard of whether something is discriminatory or not is very high; when Ezra cites the low bar used by the AHRC in a decision written recently by McGovern’s colleague, Lori Andreachuk, she simply says, “well, that was her decision; when it goes to panel, anything can happen.”

And here is Ezra’s closing statement, in which he BEGS for his case to go to the full tribunal, BEGS to be heard in front of the “most fascistic” commissioner, and BEGS to be convicted, so he can take his case to the real courts:

One more – here’s Ezra demonstrating his theory that Soharwardy’s complaint stems more from his frustration at having his “clock cleaned” in a CBC Radio debate the morning of the cartoons publication, than it did from any offense taken about said cartoons themselves:

Amazing work, Ezra!