Contrary

Paternity

2012-02-28T08:33:00.000-06:00

More and more men are demanding DNA tests to prove paternity and one organization wants state lawmakers to look into the issue of what they call paternity fraud.

Marcus Matthews was a teenager when he got the news that a girl he'd had sex with was pregnant.

"We dated, had sex [and] she got pregnant," he told Nashville's News 2. "She said I was the father of her child. I questioned it because I wore a condom the one time we had sex."

Matthews demanded a paternity test and the result was what he knew to be true, he wasn't the father.

He soon realized he wasn't alone and there were other men dealing with the same issue. He wrote the book "I Am Not the Father," that shares what he went through.

Matthew said, "I think in today's world, we're more and more reluctant to have children begin their life on an untruth."

Matthews knows this is not a subject that people don't like to discuss openly, but he believed it was time.

"Until we really hold this discussion openly and not be dismissive about it, it's not going to get any better," he said.

Tony Gottlieb is the president of DAD of Tennessee, Inc., an organization that fights for father's rights. He has come across several stories like Matthews.

"We don't let mothers leave the hospital with the wrong baby, why would we do it with fathers?" he asked.

More here

Sorry

2012-02-28T07:26:00.002-06:00

Climate change idiocy

2012-02-28T06:44:00.000-06:00

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is claimed to be THE greenhouse gas villain. Al Gore, and many others, including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), governments, industrial leaders and, of course, countless "NGOs" (Non Government Organizations) have proclaimed it for years.

Well, that proposition is becoming eroded even faster than your savings.

Ever since the 1980s or so, mainly under the auspices and guidance of the United Nations’ Program on Climate Change, the news about "Global Warming" (later on re-termed to "Climate Change") became more dire each year. Finally, in 2007, the main perpetrators of the claim, Al Gore (former Vice President of the USA), and the IPCC were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their important work in disseminating and publicizing this earth-shattering news.

And the news was anything but good—in fact, it was outright disastrous. Whole cities were going to be inundated by rising sea levels in a few years, entire island nations were going to be wiped off the earth, the Arctic and Antarctic ice masses were going to melt faster than the hot buns leaving a baker’s shelf, the polar bears were all going to drown in short order, and so forth. The proclaimed global warming menace, supposedly caused by CO2, was going to kill untold millions of people, as portrayed—almost overnight (or, at least by 2012).

...

The real truth behind the entire CO2 myth is a totally different one. As described eloquently by H. Bachmann in his book Die Lüge der Klimakatastrophe — der Auftrag des Weltklimarates, the CO2 hysteria and, in fact the entire global warming hysteria (pardon me, climate change hysteria) initially was a machination by powerful financial elites. Their goal was simply financial gain. And the UN aided and abetted that scam, and still does. Therefore, in order to keep it going, that goal morphed recently into an all-encompassing (now UN driven) goal of worldwide control and governance. That is also why "global warming" gave way to "climate change" which is now giving way to Agenda 21 and its prescriptions.

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Racism in China

2012-02-27T08:56:00.000-06:00

For at least 20 years, I have heard stories from Americans who speak Mandarin, have traveled to the Asian country and have tales about Chinese bigotry against black Americans and Africans.

Yet this reality is barely whispered in our diverse media circus.

I have no doubt there are thousands upon thousands of decent Chinese and Chinese-Americans who, having known the sting of prejudice themselves, harbor no ill will toward African-Americans. But let’s not deny a stubborn cultural problem when it is staring us in the face.

Here are examples of what I have been told.

One Irish-American friend fell in love with Chinese culture and learned Mandarin. Often in New York’s Chinatown, he heard this answer when Chinese New Yorkers were asked by those from the mainland what New York was like: "Fine. But too many black people."

A friend who does business in China and travels there at least six times a year was questioned by a Chinese cab driver who claimed that Chinese people were amazed that George W. Bush had chosen Condoleezza Rice to represent America to the world.

Why? "Because she is black, quite an embarrassment; it dishonors your country," was the cab driver’s answer.

Another frequent business traveler to China was recently in a Hong Kong bar with college-educated, upper class, very successful men who were supposedly well-educated.

After a few drinks, one said to him upon seeing a black person on the bar’s television, "They need to wash more. That is why people do not like them." When it was explained that black people are not that color because they are not clean, there was a nodding silence followed a bit later by, "I still think they need to wash more."

These are just stray anecdotes, you say? Well, I invite and hope to encounter some defenders of Chinese adherence to transcendent humanitarian beliefs.

I actually expect to hear nothing other than accusations of supposed black American paranoia.

More here

Last week's rain

2012-02-27T08:00:00.000-06:00

Oh, Canada

2012-02-27T07:13:00.000-06:00

Even in a country with gun laws as warped as Canada’s, the story of Jessie Sansone is still mindboggling.

Sansone, 26, is a father of three and Kitchener, Ont., resident. As a younger man, he admits getting into trouble with the law, but claims to have lived clean for years. He’s now a certified personal support worker, husband and father of three. He was even reportedly offered a job at the very same school where this bizarre story begins. On Wednesday, Sansone arrived at his children’s’ school to pick them up. He was asked to step inside and meet with the principal. In the principal’s office, Sansone was met by three Waterloo Regional Police officers and immediately arrested. He was taken to a nearby station, strip searched and locked in a cell. His wife was also summoned to the station, and their children taken by Family and Children’s Services. At no point were they told why this was happening. It was not until officers had told Sansone that he’d be held in custody overnight before a bail hearing in the morning that his lawyer was finally able to tell Sansone that he had been arrested for possession of a firearm.

After hours in custody, during which time Sansone understandably became alarmed, he was suddenly released, without charges or conditions. A detective with the Waterloo Regional Police service apologized to Sansone, and explained that the entire sequence of events had been set in motion because a teacher at the school became alarmed when his four-year-old daughter drew a gun and said the picture was of her father. The teacher then notified Family Services, who decided that the police needed to be involved, telling the police that they had reason to believe that there was a gun in Sansone’s home that his children had access to. That is what led Waterloo’s finest to bust Sansone in front of the entire school, strip him naked, confine him in a cell, bring his wife to a police station and take away their children.

That sounds bad, but it’s actually worse even than that. The drawing that set all this off was a drawing of Sansone being a good guy — according to what his daughter told her kindergarten teacher, the picture was of her daddy using a gun against "bad guys and monsters." Protecting her, in other words. It was essentially a comic strip with her father in the role of the hero. Good Lord! We’d better call in the SWAT team, quick!

More here

Contrast

2012-02-26T08:44:00.002-06:00

OBAMA: We’re not gonna win the race for new jobs and new businesses and middle class security if we’re responding to today’s challenges with the same old, tired worn out "you’re on your own" economics that hasn’t worked. What these other guys are peddling has not worked. It didn’t work in the decade before the Great Depression. It did not work in the decade before I became president. It will not work now.

RUSH: Do you believe this? The country has never worked. Capitalism has never worked. America was not great until the New Deal, and then America plunged into the abyss again, and only is on the path to reclaiming its greatness now that Obama is replicating the New Deal by a factor of ten. Has he ever heard of the Roaring Twenties? Has he ever heard of the boom in the fifties and the sixties and the seventies? Has he ever heard of what happened in the 1980s? It never worked? This is the second time he’s said this in such a prominent way. Last time was when he made his speech, I guess it was in December, might have been January, the days run together so quickly now, in Osawatomie, Kansas, where he said, America, as founded, hasn’t worked.

Sovereign citizens

2012-02-26T08:02:00.000-06:00

The "sovereign citizen" movement is getting a little bit of publicity...a group that has attracted little national media attention but which the FBI classifies as an "extremist antigovernment group." So-called sovereign citizens argue that they are not subject to local, state or federal laws, and some refuse to recognize the authority of courts or police. Story

Meanwhile...The President has deliberately sought to raise the price of energy throughout the economy via his cap-and-trade agenda. He is now getting his wish, albeit a little too overtly for political comfort. Mr. Obama has also spent three years blaming George W. Bush for every economic ill. If Mr. Obama now feels frustrated by economic events beyond his control, perhaps he should call Mr. Bush for consolation. Story

A 61-year-old New Hampshire man is facing felony charges for firing a warning shot into the ground before apprehending a burglar who had just ransacked his home. Story

The Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1964 has not only been a disaster for the nation as a whole, but it has also impacted negatively upon the very people it ostensibly protects — blacks and women. The CRA clearly states that race, religion and national origin are not to be used in employment practices. Instead, the Act was meant to encourage merit irrespective of a person’s color or any other secondary characteristic. In order to secure passage of the CRA, advocates such as Senator Hubert Humphrey specifically assured critics, "[T]here is nothing in it that will give any power…to require hiring, firing, or promotion of employees in order to meet a racial ‘quota’ or to achieve a certain racial balance." Story

Bradley Manning chose not to enter a plea at the start of his court martial last week. Bradley Manning should be Exhibit A in any proceeding as to the suitability of gays and women in the military. Sensitivity and touchy feely emotions should be left to other endeavors.

Best comment of the week..."'The old joke is that General Motors is just a health insurance company that makes cars on the side.' The current joke, and not a very funny one at that, is that most governmental agencies have devolved into entities whose primary concern seems to consist of taking care of their employees, and the duties and purposes for which they supposedly exist have become dim and distant priorities." Source

Pit bulls killed 22 out of 31 people killed in dog attacks in the USA last year. Rottweilers killed 4 and other breeds killed 5.

On Thursday, Texas Health and Human Services Commissioner Thomas Suehs signed a rule at the behest of lawmakers and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott that will formally ban Planned Parenthood affiliates and other abortion providers from participating in Texas’ Women’s Health Program. Story

Sarah Palin asked a very good question a day or two ago..."When does Karzai apologize for one of his troops killing two of our soldiers over the Koran burning?"

Now this is what a cafe should be like.

The Peter Gleick scandal gets curiouser and curiouser.

The Florida House has passed a bill intended to overhaul what some critics say is the state's antiquated alimony law. The Melbourne Republican said the measure will ensure alimony is fair to both ex-spouses. It would end "permanent" lifetime alimony in favor of "long-term" support that has a foreseeable end. But it also allows for retroactively changing alimony payments such that the ex-spouse getting the support could wind up owing money back. Source

In most (some would say all) cases, couples calling it quits benefit from legal representation. But legal representation can be pricey, so the Texas Supreme Court is considering fill-in-the-blank legal forms people can use in divorce cases instead of hiring lawyers. Texas divorce lawyers, naturally, are opposed to the plan. Story
A123 Systems, an electric car battery company once touted as a stimulus "success story" by former Gov. Jennifer Granhom, D-Mich., has laid off 125 employees since receiving $390 million in government subsidies -- but is still handing out big pay raises to company executives. "[T]he company has laid off 125 employees and had a net loss of $172 million through the first three quarters of 2011," the Mackinac Center for Public Policy reports, observing that the company's primary customer, Fisker Automotive, is also struggling financially. "Yet, this month A123’s Compensation Committee approved a $30,000 raise for [Chief Financial Officer David] Prystash just days after Fisker Automotive announced the U.S. Energy Department had cut off what was left of its $528.7 million loan it had previously received." Story

Hope your life is a little more sane....

Whitney

2012-02-26T06:56:00.002-06:00

Carter redux

2012-02-25T10:24:00.000-06:00

Here we are 33 years later, and . . . the economy is a mess, an election year is heating up, a liberal president is once again complaining about high gas prices beyond his control while promising a massive alternative-energy program; while seeking to mitigate radical Islamic anger through apology and to ease America into a new, less exceptional world role, as Iran threatens to destabilize the Persian Gulf, Russia seems increasingly bellicose, and Israel senses a U.S. tilt away from it.

All that is missing is the cardigan sweater, and another warning that "We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose."

Source

Sucks

2012-02-25T09:40:00.002-06:00

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: My biggest problems with Obama, I’d still have if I agreed with Him about every little observation, every little decision about what to do; He just plain sucks. He goes on vacations, plays a lot of golf, comes back, He raises funds for His political party, He appears now & then in some forum in which He can be assured the questions are purely softball. If He gets a question that’s the least bit hostile, or even unanticipated, He throws this kind of a hissy fit as if the problem all belongs to the person who asked the question that shouldn’t have been asked. Then He pops up somewhere else, drops some rehearsed speech full of meaningless tidbits like "millionaires and billionaires flying around on their corporate jets," then hauls His millionaire ass onto, uh, what could be called a corporate jet? — and disappears again to go play some golf.

Source

Canadian waiting lists

2012-02-25T08:42:00.000-06:00

Two Montreal cardiologists are facing disciplinary action over allegations they received hefty kickbacks to push patients to the top of the waiting list, the Quebec College of Physicians says.

The college's investigation uncovered at least two doctors who were allegedly taking envelopes of cash in exchange for providing faster service, Dr. Charles Bernard told CBC News.

"It's awful," said Bernard, who heads the college. "It's unacceptable … Usually, physicians have a good job, a good pay. It's very difficult for me to understand that."

The investigation was triggered 14 months ago, when a Montreal woman told the news media she had paid a $2,000 cash "incentive" to have her mother bumped to the top of a waiting list.

After the investigation, the college said two cardiologists from Montreal would face a disciplinary hearing later this year in connection with such incidents. Bernard would not discuss the details of the cases, as nothing yet has been proved.

More here

Banning food

2012-02-25T07:56:00.000-06:00

Today's regulatory climate of cruel intolerance towards raw milk, home-grown foods, and various other fruits of one's labor that exist outside the corporate food structure is eerily similar to the climate Native Americans faced when the Spanish Conquistadors first arrived on the shores of the "New World." Similar to what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently did to Pennsylvania Amish farmer Dan Allgyer as well as to many others, these Spanish Conquistadors banned highly-nutritious, native foods like quinoa and amaranth because they were fearful of superstition, and prohibited all people from consuming them.

Amaranth and quinoa are two of the most highly-nutritious and well-balanced foods in the world, which is why native Inca tribes and others often used them in religious ceremonies. The perfect balance of complete proteins and amino acids, these two grain-like crops have long been cherished by native cultures as superfoods, and are only today beginning to get renewed recognition and appreciation here in Western culture.

But long before they made their recent comeback, these two superfoods were strictly prohibited throughout the Americas, as the Spanish considered the grains to be blasphemous foods rooted in pagan religious practices. In fact, the "regulatory bodies" of the day threatened anyone who tried to grow either amaranth or quinoa with strict penalties, which in some cases even included death.

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European model

2012-02-24T10:40:00.002-06:00

With seemingly every day bringing more bad news from Europe, many are beginning to ask how much longer the United States has before our welfare state follows the European model into bankruptcy. The bad news is: It may already have.

This year, the fourth straight year that we borrowed more than $1 trillion to support the U.S. government, our budget deficit will top $1.3 trillion, 8.7 percent of our GDP. If you think that sounds bad, it’s because it is. In fact, only two European countries, Greece and Ireland, have larger budget deficits as a percentage of GDP. Things are only slightly better when you look at the size of our national debt, which now exceeds $15.3 trillion, 102 percent of GDP. Just four European countries have larger national debts than we do — Greece and Ireland again, plus Portugal and Italy. That means the U.S. government is actually less fiscally responsible than countries like France, Belgium, or Spain.

And as bad as things are right now, we are on an even worse course for the future. If one adds the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare to our official national debt, we really owe $72 trillion, by the Obama administration’s projections for future Medicare savings under Obamacare, and as much as $137 trillion if you use more realistic projections. Under the best-case scenario, then, this amounts to more than 480 percent of GDP. And, under more realistic projections, we owe an astounding 911 percent of GDP.

Meanwhile, counting both official debt and unfunded pension and health-care liabilities, the most indebted nation in Europe is Greece, which owes 875 percent of GDP. That’s right, the United States potentially owes more than Greece. France, the second most insolvent nation in Europe, owes just 549 percent of GDP. Even under the most optimistic scenario, we owe more than such fiscal basket cases as Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.

More here

Hating California

2012-02-24T09:20:00.000-06:00

Surf. Sun. Disneyland. What’s not to love about California?

Well, apparently, a lot of things. In a poll released Tuesday by the Public Policy Polling, California was the least popular state in the United States. Only 27 percent of Americans hold a favorable view of the Golden State compared to the 44 percent who view it unfavorably.

"There’s this arrogance about Californians," said Patrick Dorinson, a radio host in California who refers to himself as the Cowboy Libertarian. "Californians still think it’s this great star. It’s a tarnished star at this point."

The gap of 17 points puts California far behind Illinois (19 favorable, 29 not) and New Jersey (25 favorable, 32 not) as the least liked state in America.

"I’m actually quite surprised California fared so poorly," said Albert M. Camarillo, a professor of history at Stanford University. "I think the national public knows of our difficult budget situation, our higher than average unemployment rate, the still very expensive housing market."

The "Left Coast" is distinct in another way – more people have an opinion about California than any other state – only 28 percent of respondents couldn’t decide whether they liked the state or not.

"No one knows anything about Delaware. No one has a clue about Wyoming – but everyone knows California," said Dowell Myers, a professor of policy planning and demography at the University of Southern California. "Its visibility is really high."

There’s some good news for California — at least if you’re a female Democrat. Women were less likely than men to rate California as unfavorable, and there was a massive partisan gap. Democrats love California; Republicans can’t stand it. The opposite is true of Texas.

"I’m sure that for a lot of purple America the extra red Texas and blue California may seem a little far out there," said Roger Salazar, a political consultant in California.

But whatever the reason, most Californians took the news that their state was the least popular in stride.

"They’re just jealous," Salazar said.

Source

Separation

2012-02-24T08:03:00.001-06:00

Ever notice how no one brings up the "separation of church and state" when the Reverend Jesse Jackson or the Reverend Al Sharpton jump into a political debate?

Meanwhile, if you've been wondering what the brouhaha is all about in regards to the EU possibly collapsing just ponder this fact...After ten years with the Euro, Greek wages are up 80% while German wages have remained about the same. While Germans remain highly productive, Greek productivity has had almost no increase.

True or False?...Between 2002 and 2006, the number of Homeland Security contractors increased from nine to 33,890 companies.

Polio is on the rise in Pakistan after a radical muslim clergyman claimed that polio vaccines was an American ploy to sterilize Pakistani men and reduce the number of muslims.

The Stars and Stripes military newspaper reports that...The Army is ordering its hardened combat veterans to wear fake breasts and empathy bellies so they can better understand how pregnant soldiers feel during physical training. (It just gets better and better with political correctness)

Haha...Last week, an animal rights group launched a video-equipped helicopter drone to monitor a pigeon shooting range at Broxton Bridge Plantation in South Carolina. Within minutes, hunters blasted the drone out of the sky. Bravo.

And they say right wingers are nuts...An Ohio woman who compared animal-welfare work to the liberation of World War II concentration camps has been charged with soliciting a hit man to fatally shoot or slit the throat of a random fur-wearer, federal authorities said. Story

On Wednesday...The U.S. average gasoline price rose half a cent overnight 3.570 a gallon, according to AAA's daily survey of fuel retailers, conducted by Oil Price Information Service. In California, the average price was $4.042, up about a penny overnight.

Sailing stone in Death Valley. Photo

Beginning of a trend?...The first bill of the session passed by the Oklahoma Senate was an anti-abortion statement that life begins at the moment of conception, approved by senators Wednesday after two hours of debate. Source

Stray bullet from Mexico carjackers...El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen said the woman was a 48-year-old mother who was pushing a child in a stroller when she was shot in the upper right calf. Allen said the round went through her leg. Story

The Afghani protestors over the Koran burning at Bagram Air Base are calling Obama a "Black Dog."

A major article review published in The Lancet in 2010 revealed what many in the natural health profession have suspected for a long time. The review examined the results of over 41 randomized trials and over 2500 patients with tendon injuries. The reviewers found that cortisone injections did in fact provide fast and significant pain relief compared with doing nothing or partaking in physical therapy. However, cortisone shots did not heal the structural damage underlying the pain. Instead, they actually hindered the structural healing, and in one case caused tendon rupture. Story

A recent IRS report showing that current and retired federal employees owe more than $3.4 billion in income taxes is fueling a drive on Capitol Hill to fire -- and prohibit the hiring of -- tax delinquents on Uncle Sam's payroll. The report shows that about 98,000 federal civilian workers and postal employees -- or roughly 3% of the federal civilian and Postal Service workforce -- owed about $1 billion to Uncle Sam in 2010, including 684 congressional staffers who owed more than $10 million. Story

Naked models...even one that is pregnant. You're welcome.

Headline of the Day..."Tax revenue plunges in UK after 50% rate implemented."

Polls can be next to useless...In January 1980, the Gallup Poll showed Carter 63% over Reagan 32%.

Guy burns flag. Guy gets taped to flagpole. Story

Best comment seen today..."We would have built a barrier on our southern border forty years ago that rivals the Great Wall of China if most of the people slipping across the border were potential Republicans."

In Jewish tradition there is the idea that you were with God and living in eternity prior to your birth. Before descending into matter, God places his finger just below your nose, which causes the soul to "forget" its eternal nature -- which is where that little indentation under your nose came from. Think of it as your metaphysical belly button.

In Algeria, before the French "colonization," the Jews of Oran had to pay a tax on air, for the simple right to breathe. According to the rules of dhimmitude that considered non-Muslims as sub-human creatures, the Jew was situated somewhere between the pig and the dog (that was worth more). They were forced to wear special clothing, and were forbidden to ride a horse, to own property, etc...

From back in 2007..."Here in California the numbers are astronomical. Statewide, over one third of drivers lack insurance--about 33 percent, according the California Department of Insurance. The figures skyrocket in low-income and minority city neighborhoods: nearly 50%. In San Jose, California, 55% of all drivers on the road have no insurance. Statewide, the problem is worst in the Los Angeles, Imperial, San Diego and Alameda counties. With the exception of Alameda, the uninsured rates in those counties reaches a whopping 90 percent range. Alameda County's worst neighborhood, Oakland, is 63 percent uninsured. Just to put things in perspective: Statewide, every third car that goes by you - the driver has no insurance. In LA, one of the two cars involved in an accident, one has no insurance."

So, you're a fan of big American business, eh?...Hitler's tanks would not have been able to roll one inch without ball-bearings made in Philadelphia and Sweden. The Luftwaffe wouldn't have been able to lift a single plane off the runway without a particular additive needed for their aviation fuel, an additive quietly provided by Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Henry Ford built the German assembly lines that built Hitler's trucks. --Charles Higham, "Trading with the Enemy", 1983--

Some of the same people who support affirmative action when it is applied to the university admissions process don’t support it when it is applied to the athletics recruiting process. Story

Raising taxes on business

2012-02-23T10:09:00.000-06:00

President Obama's 2013 budget is the gift that keeps on giving—to government. One buried surprise is his proposal to triple the tax rate on corporate dividends, which believe it or not is higher than in his previous budgets.

Mr. Obama is proposing to raise the dividend tax rate to the higher personal income tax rate of 39.6% that will kick in next year. Add in the planned phase-out of deductions and exemptions, and the rate hits 41%. Then add the 3.8% investment tax surcharge in ObamaCare, and the new dividend tax rate in 2013 would be 44.8%—nearly three times today's 15% rate.

Keep in mind that dividends are paid to shareholders only after the corporation pays taxes on its profits. So assuming a maximum 35% corporate tax rate and a 44.8% dividend tax, the total tax on corporate earnings passed through as dividends would be 64.1%.

In previous budgets, Mr. Obama proposed an increase to 23.8% on both dividends and capital gains. That's roughly a 60% increase in the tax on investments, but at least it would maintain parity between taxes on capital gains and dividends, a principle established as part of George W. Bush's 2003 tax cut.

With the same rate on both forms of income, the tax code doesn't bias corporate decisions on whether to retain and reinvest profits (and allow the earnings to be capitalized into the stock price), or distribute the money as dividends at the time they are earned.

More here

Christians in Israel

2012-02-23T09:18:00.000-06:00

A day after it was discovered on the exterior walls of a Jerusalem Baptist church this week, graffiti declaring "Death to Christianity" had been cleaned up and a host of officials from the Israeli government had visited with apologies and expressions of concern.

But for the Christian community in Israel, the environment remains inhospitable.

A small but eclectic population of indigenous Palestinians, foreign clergy, messianic Jews, Russian immigrants and expatriates, Christians are free to practice their faith and only very rarely are victims of actual violence. But centuries of anti-Semitism have left many Israelis with a poor view of Christianity and that occasionally bubbles over into attacks on people and property, say Christian clergy and Israelis who work on interfaith ties.

"I don’t think a majority would engage in such a vandalistic act, but it is a manifestation of anti-Christian feeling in Israeli society," Hana Bendcowsky, program director for the Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations (JCJCR), told The Media Line. "The main problem is ignorance, a lot of stereotypes and the history of Jewish-Christian relationships in Europe that influence the attitude of Israelis toward local Christians."

With its array of Christian institutions and holy sites, Jerusalem puts the two faiths into very close proximity, but rarely do Jews and Christians have much personal contact. In a city of 770,000 people, only 14,500 are Christians, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics.

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Grandma

2012-02-23T08:19:00.002-06:00

Brick

2012-02-23T07:31:00.000-06:00

Tesla Motors' lineup of all-electric vehicles — its existing Roadster, almost certainly its impending Model S, and possibly its future Model X — apparently suffer from a severe limitation that can largely destroy the value of the vehicle. If the battery is ever totally discharged, the owner is left with what Tesla describes as a "brick": a completely immobile vehicle that cannot be started or even pushed down the street. The only known remedy is for the owner to pay Tesla approximately $40,000 to replace the entire battery. Unlike practically every other modern car problem, neither Tesla's warranty nor typical car insurance policies provide any protection from this major financial loss.

Story

Plastic

2012-02-22T09:53:00.002-06:00

Among the procedures which have been carried out at taxpayers' expense on teachers in Buffalo, New York, in recent years are nose jobs, liposuction, breast implants and Botox injections.

Last year, the town's 3,400 teachers spent $5.9 million (£3.74 million) of public money on enhancing their appearance, at a time when the school district is forecast to run a $42 million (£27 million) deficit.

The free treatment for public servants in Buffalo including police officers and firefighters began in the 1970s, as a way of covering the costs of caring for burn and gunshot victims at a time when plastic surgery was relatively uncommon.

By 2004, the bill had reached $1 million (£634,000), peaking at $9 million (£5.7 million) in 2009. Nine out of 10 procedures are now skin treatments such as Botox, and 100 per cent are described as elective, and therefore medically unnecessary.

Union officials say that teachers are willing to surrender the perk, but only as part of more a general renegotiation of their contracts.

More here

Sure, lady, whatever

2012-02-22T09:00:00.002-06:00

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Tuesday defended a deportation policy some criticize as a thinly veiled attempt to secure favor among Hispanic voters.

"Every law enforcement agency sets priorities... ," Napolitano said when asked about grumblings among some rank-and-file about selective enforcement of criminal over non-criminal immigrants who are here illegally.

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Canada's gun registry

2012-02-22T07:50:00.000-06:00

Before killing himself, the deranged 25-year-old son of an Algerian immigrant shot to death 14 women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989 as a gesture of personal revenge upon Feminism, which he blamed for ruining his life.

Canadian authorities might have deported all anti-feminist Muslims likely to produce defective offspring, but instead they blamed guns, passing Bill C-68 in 1995, which created a Canadian Firearms Registry.

Registering every firearm in Canada was marketed as a measure that would prevent crime, but in reality criminals don’t register guns and the ownership and specific identity of the weapon used in crimes is very rarely a meaningful issue.

Legislation creating the Firearm Registry was passed on the basis of estimates that promised that licensing fees would take care of nearly all its costs.

In reality, the gun registry cost $2.7 billion, 1350x the original estimate.

It was originally expected that the project needed only $2 million of investments while registration fees would cover the rest. In 1995, the Department of Justice reported to Parliament that the system would cost $119 million to implement, and that the income generated from licensing fees would be $117 million. This gave a net cost of $2 million.

At the time of the 2002 audit, the revised estimates from the Department of Justice revealed that the cost of the program would be more than $1 billion by 2004/05 and that the income from license fees in the same period would be $140 million. The annual operating costs of the program are reported to be $15 – $80 million.

Last Wednesday, the Canadian Parliament voted to end the Registry of long arms. $2.7 billion later, it was concluded that the Registry had never resulted in the solution of a single murder.

Source

Stupid and nasty

2012-02-21T10:11:00.000-06:00

While the mainstream media was granting sainthood to crackhead Whitney Houston you may have missed stories like these...

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is a real rocket scientist. He wants to set up a Reasonable Profits Board to oversee how much oil companies can make. His congressional bill however doesn't include any guidance as to how much a reasonable profit actually is. Who determines that?

Elsewhere, how's this for the state of American education...Young girl in random interview is asked to name a country beginning with a "U". She answers with a question..."Europe?"

Congressman Allen West of Florida says Democrats don't promote economic freedom because "they have an appetite for slavery".

The West is losing the heroin war in Afghanistan – ten years after Tony Blair pledged that wiping out the drug was one of the main reasons for invading the country. Despite spending £18billion and a conflict which has so far cost the lives of almost 400 British troops, production of the class-A drug by Afghan farmers rose between 2001 and 2011 from just 185 tons to a staggering 5,800 tons. Story

Great Britain is not so great anymore...British tanks to be sent to Germany for storage so army can sell land in UK. Up to 6,000 military vehicles could be transported overseas so prime site in Gloucestershire can be sold to raise funds. Story

Speaking of President Assad of Syria..."At the time he inherited the dictatorship, he was working as an ophthalmologist in London. I spoke to someone, actually, who worked with him in a hospital in Aleppo many years ago, and she said she thought he was a very pleasant person, and that he didn’t have his father’s appetite for blood. His father, Hafez, was a total butcher whom they remember to this day for the industrial scale slaughter. And what Baby, Junior Assad has demonstrated in the last couple of months is that he’s perfectly willing to kill on the scale of his father. And it is amazing to me that this has not been brought up at White House press conferences, it’s not on the news. This is a leader that Hillary Clinton described as a reformer just last year. This guy is a butcher, and he ought to be called on it on the evening news every single night." Source

Nice photo from the Cold War era here.

My old boss Loretta used to say it over and over until it was riveted into my brain. "Jeff" she would say, "It's easy dealing with stupid people, and it's easy dealing with nasty people, but I can't deal with people who are both stupid AND nasty. That is a deadly combination!" I can't help thinking when she said that, she was thinking about Maxine Waters and Sheila Jackson Lee. Each has Loretta's deadly combination plus, as and added benefit, have used public dollars to enrich themselves indirectly through their spouses. Story

"This contraception thing, my gosh it's so inexpensive. Back in my day they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives, the gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly." Ha.

Huey Long, back in 1935, compared Democrats and Republicans... "One skins you from the bottom up, and the other from the top down."

The combined net worth of Obama and his cabinet in 2010 was around 150 million dollars.

We hardly even notice anymore...A man from the Religion of Peace was arrested in Washington, D.C. on his way to set off a suicide bomb at the Capitol building. Yawn.

Latest totals for the GOP Delegate Tracker here.

While the US federal government expands its diktat power over American health care, the British are looking for ways to rescue themselves from their own government-run system. In an attempt to resolve access and provider issues, Prime Minister David Cameron and the Conservatives want to begin outsourcing work to private practitioners outside the NHS, a reversal of over six decades of public policy. Story

What a gig!...First Lady Michelle is off to Aspen for a skiing vacation. A little over a month ago she had a 17 day vacation in Hawaii. And in August she vacationed on Martha's Vineyard. This is her 16th vacation in three years.

Germany once prided itself on being the "photovoltaic world champion", doling out generous subsidies—totaling more than $130 billion, according to research from Germany’s Ruhr University—to citizens to invest in solar energy. But now the German government is vowing to cut the subsidies sooner than planned and to phase out support over the next five years. What went wrong? Story

Last week's news was dominated by jabberwocky about President Obama's proposed federal budget for 2013. As usual, a parade of Cabinet officials trooped up to Capitol Hill for hearings in which they dutifully defended the fourth spending blueprint submitted to Congress by the chief executive. For the most part, such hearings are dog-and-pony shows in which Democratic and Republican lawmakers ask predictable questions and the presidential appointees regurgitate talking points prepared for them by White House political maestros. Then everybody goes back to business as usual, which for too long has consisted of finding new ways to spend trillions of the taxpayers' hard-earned dollars. Story

A lot of animal lovers are disturbed by this photo. Big deal.

Does the Pill cause prostate cancer in men? Story

Political correctness alert...New name for poverty is "socially excluded." The word "chink" is also forbidden. Cracker, however, is still okay.

State of the Union in Greece...standard of living down, by as much as 30 per cent; bank deposits that have not been spirited out of the country are dwindling; almost 70,000 businesses folded in 2010 and bankruptcy is stalking more than 53,000 of the remaining 300,000; unemployment, 25 per cent – but youth joblessness is 47 per cent and rising; a quarter of the population living in poverty; homelessness, up 25 per cent, with well-educated youngsters accounting for much of the rise. Petty crime, doubled.

Is Bush still being blamed for high gasoline prices or what? No one seems to notice that Obama is now the president, and has been for three long years. Where's the critics?

Drug dealers, backstreet abortionists and a deadly femme fatale: Fascinating mugshots of women prisoners from 1920s Australia. Story

Santorum is the favorite in Texas by a large margin. Story

President Barack Obama's energy policy can be encapsulated thusly: When President Obama took office in January 2009, the average price of gasoline nationwide was $1.89 a gallon. Three years into the Obama presidency, the average is $3.47 a gallon. Story

Hugo Chavez "has thoroughly wrecked what was once Latin America’s richest country and who now presides over the highest inflation and murder rates in the Western Hemisphere, shortages of basic goods and power, and a drug-trafficking industry whose kingpins include the defense minister." Story

So this is news? All large cities are doing the same...The city of Houston has been papering over multimillion-dollar budget deficits for nine years by borrowing money, tapping its rainy day fund, selling buildings and just plain putting off bills to the future, according to city finance officials. Story

Truthiness

2012-02-21T08:22:00.000-06:00

Having initially named the first two ships HMS Daring and HMS Dauntless, the Naming Committee has, after intensive pressure from Brussels, renamed them HMS Cautious and HMS Prudence.

The next five ships are to be named HMS Empathy, HMS Circumspect, HMS Nervous, HMS Timid and HMS Apologist.

Costing £850 million each, they meet the needs of the 21st century and comply with the very latest employment, health and safety, and human rights laws.

The new user-friendly crow's nest comes equipped with wheelchair access.

Live ammunition has been replaced with paintballs to reduce the risk of anyone getting hurt and to cut down on the number of compensation claims.

Stress counsellors and lawyers will be on duty 24 hours a day and each ship will have its own industrial tribunal.

The crew ratio will be 50/50 men and women, balanced in accordance with the latest Home Office directives on race, gender, sexual preference and disability.

Sailors will have to work only a maximum of 37 hours a week in line with Brussels Health and Safety rules, even in wartime.

All the vessels will come equipped with a maternity ward and nursery, situated on the same deck as the Gay Disco.

More humor here

The One

2012-02-21T07:30:00.002-06:00

First they come for...

2012-02-20T10:25:00.000-06:00

Today it is contraception and the morning-after pill. Tomorrow it will be kosher slaughter, or matrilineal descent, or circumcision, or other matters of existential importance to Jewish observance. If the Obama administration gets away with forcing Catholic institutions to step across lines of life and death in the name of "health," the federal government will have a precedent to legislate Judaism out of existence–as several other countries have already tried to do.

Now the Obama administration has told Catholic institutions that they don’t have to dispense pills that kill babies. Instead, they can pay the insurance company, and the insurance company will dispense the pill for them. It is an accounting trick (as Paul Ryan called it) that the White House misrepresents as a compromise. The Catholic Bishops, of course, reject it. And only one Jewish organization, the haredi organization Agudath Israel, offered a sharp response. Its Washington director Abba Cohen stated:
Whether or not the White House’s new ‘compromise’ proposal adequately addresses the religious freedom concerns raised by the Catholic Church is for the Catholic Church to say, not us – and, frankly, not the White House, either. The important points here are that no religiously sponsored entity, and no religiously motivated individual, should be forced by government to violate its or his sincerely held religious principles; and that the determination of religious propriety must be left to the religious entity or individual, not to the government.
The Orthodox Union, according to press accounts, guardedly praised the "compromise," saying: "The president’s stated commitment is a positive first step forward, the details of implementation are crucial and we look forward to working with the administration to see that through." As a late-in-life returnee to Jewish observance, I habitually defer to the Orthodox Union leadership in such matters. Having had the misfortune to have spent half my life among the atheists and religion-haters, though, I know how embittered and unrelenting are the supposed disciples of science. They are in fact religious fanatics of the worst kind. You can’t make a deal with them. After they come for the Catholics, they will come for us. They already are coming for us all over the world.

More here

Universe is flat

2012-02-20T08:45:00.002-06:00

AT FIVE tonnes and 520 megapixels, it is the biggest digital camera ever built—which is fitting, because it is designed to tackle the biggest problem in the universe. On February 20th researchers at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (pictured), which sits 2,200 metres (7,200 feet) above sea level in the Atacama desert of northern Chile, will begin installing this behemoth on a telescope called Blanco. It is the centrepiece of the Dark Energy Survey (DES), the most ambitious attempt yet to understand a mystery as perplexing as any that faces physics: what is driving the universe to expand at an ever greater rate.

It has been known since the late 1920s that the universe is getting bigger. But it was thought that the expansion was slowing. When in 1998 two independent studies reached the opposite conclusion, cosmology was knocked head over heels. Since then, 5,000 papers have been written to try to explain (or explain away) this result. "That’s more than one a day," marvels Saul Perlmutter, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who led the Supernova Cosmology Project—one of the studies that was responsible for dropping the bombshell. Last October that work earned Dr Perlmutter the Nobel prize for physics, which he shared with Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess, who led the other study, the High-Z Supernova Search.

Many of those 5,000 papers deal with something that has come to be known as dark energy. One reason for its popularity is that, at one fell swoop, it explains another big cosmological find of recent years. In the early 1990s studies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), an all-pervading sea of microwaves which reveals what the universe looked like when it was just 380,000 years old, showed that the universe, then and now, was "flat". However big a triangle you draw on it—the corners could be billions of light years apart—the angles in it would add up to 180°, just as they do in a school exercise book.

That might not surprise people whose geometrical endeavours have never gone beyond such books. But it surprised many physicists. At some scales space is not at all flat: the power of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity lies in its interpretation of gravity in terms of curved space. Cosmologists were quite prepared for it to be curved at the grandest of scales, and intrigued to discover that it was not.

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Newton

2012-02-20T07:39:00.000-06:00

He laid the foundations of classical physics and is considered to be one of the greatest scientists of all time.

But Sir Isaac Newton was also deeply interested in the occult and applied a scientific approach to the study of scripture and Jewish mysticism.

Now Israel's national library, which contains a vast trove of Newton's esoteric writings, has digitised his occult collection and posted it online.

Among the yellowed texts is Newton's famous prediction of the apocalypse in 2060.

The quintessential scientist, Newton revolutionised the approach to physics, maths and astronomy in the 17th and 18th century.

He laid the foundations for most of classical mechanics, including the the principal of universal gravitation and the three laws of motion which bear his name.

However, the curator of Israel's national library's humanities collection said Newton was also a devout Christian who believed that scripture provided a 'code' to the natural world.

'Today, we tend to make a distinction between science and faith, but to Newton it was all part of the same world,' said Milka Levy-Rubin.

'He believed that careful study of holy texts was a type of science, that if analysed correctly could predict what was to come.'

To further his understanding, Newton learned Hebrew and delved into the study of esoteric Jewish philosophy, the mysticism of Kabbala and the Talmud.

More here

Acting white

2012-02-18T09:36:00.000-06:00

Whitney Houston died at the age of 48. Most articles about her death said something like, "Houston struggled with drug and alcohol problems for years ..."

But Houston also struggled with something else that black Republicans and black non-Democrats can understand: ridicule and ostracism for "selling out," or "acting white," or not being "black enough."

Ebony, the black monthly magazine, wrote about the then-27-year-old: "Black disc jockeys have chided her for 'not having soul' and being 'too white.' ... She was booed at the Soul Train Music Awards. ... It's enough to drive a good Christian girl to drink, drugs or at least to cursing. But not Whitney. Though it hurts her deeply, she handles it all with aplomb."

Did she?

After Houston's marriage to Bobby Brown, and after years of Houston's erratic behavior and rumors of drug abuse, I spoke to singer-actress Della Reese, a longtime Houston family friend. Reese and I were in the greenroom of a television studio, and we talked about Reese's career. I told her that my mother remembered having seen a young Reese at a Washington, D.C., nightclub called either "The Cave" or "The Cove."

She laughed and said, "The Cave."

We talked about then-current Whitney Houston/Bobby Brown headlines. "I have a theory about Whitney Houston," I said. "I've been called 'Uncle Tom,' and I know how that feels. I think Whitney was so hurt by being called a 'sellout' and 'acting white' -- and crap like that -- she wanted to change her image. What better way to do that than to marry a bad boy? And the drug abuse makes her a flawed person fighting to overcome her demons. Makes her relatable."

More here

All cultures are equal?

2012-02-18T08:34:00.001-06:00

Shakila, 8 at the time, was drifting off to sleep when a group of men carrying AK-47s barged in through the door. She recalls that they complained, as they dragged her off into the darkness, about how their family had been dishonored and about how they had not been paid.

It turns out that Shakila, who was abducted along with her cousin as part of a traditional Afghan form of justice known as "baad," was the payment.

Although baad (also known as baadi) is illegal under Afghan and, most religious scholars say, Islamic law, the taking of girls as payment for misdeeds committed by their elders still appears to be flourishing. Shakila, because one of her uncles had run away with the wife of a district strongman, was taken and held for about a year. It was the district leader, furious at the dishonor that had been done to him, who sent his men to abduct her.

Shakila’s case is unusual both because she managed to escape and because she and her family agreed to share their plight with an outsider. The reaction of the girl’s father to the abduction also illustrates the difficulty in trying to change such a deeply rooted cultural practice: he expressed fury that she was abducted because, he said, he had already promised her in marriage to someone else.

"We did not know what was happening," said Shakila, now about 10, who spoke softly as she repeated over and over her memory of being dragged from her family home. "They put us in a dark room with stone walls; it was dirty and they kept beating us with sticks and saying, ‘Your uncle ran away with our wife and dishonored us, and we will beat you in retaliation.’ "

More here

Gasoline

2012-02-18T07:30:00.002-06:00

Unfit

2012-02-17T10:33:00.000-06:00

Sarah Palin recently said that Obama's actions are un-American and that he is unfit to hold his office. Thank you, Sarah.

Meanwhile...Somehow in the 1980s we redefined in our schools colonialism, slavery, and imperialism as exclusively European, rather than merely human pathologies — as if the Arab world did not match or trump the European slave trade, as if the Ottomans had no empire before the Europeans in the Mediterranean, as if Persians, Japanese, and Chinese had not sought to conquer, enslave, and exploit their weaker neighbors. Source

Mumtaz El Saeed, Egypt’s Finance Minister, says the country needs $11 billion to help it get through the next fiscal year, as well as help with economic reforms, according to a report in Al Ahram, a local newspaper. Write 'em a check, Barry, it's only money.

Over the weekend, the Greek parliament voted to accept Europe’s latest demands for spending cuts and tax rises and other reforms and retrenchments. The aim was to make it marginally less implausible that Greece will pay back the hundreds of billions of euros that its neighbours are lending it. The alternative, we were told, was that it would become "ground zero" for a new financial meltdown, with its exit from the euro leading to social chaos within the country and economic chaos outside. Story

Eastern Europe has been hit especially hard by cold weather and up to 15 feet of snow in places. Entire villages are isolated from the world because of blocked roads.

How does this work?...Lyndon Johnson spent almost his entire life as a public servant and died with a $15 million estate.

Ever notice that the Leftists preach love and tolerance yet condemn unceasingly with derogatory remarks those who disagree with them politically, those who are lumped together as fundamentalist Christians, and those who are lumped together as rural working class whites?

Michelle Malkin on Senator Orrin Hatch...The 36-year, six-term Hatch was first elected in 1976 on an anti-entrenched incumbent platform. Hatch's campaign line then against his opponent Frank Moss: "What do you call a Senator who's served in office for 18 years? You call him home." Now, Hatch is clinging to power after almost four decades in government—and vainly attempting to claim the tea party mantle to stave off Liljenquist's David vs. Goliath primary challenge.

In Japan, the MTV show "Jersey Shore" is called "Macaroni Rascals". Ha.

The Washington Post reported that nearly $4 Billion in green stimulus funds went to White House connected firms. Yawn.

The cold wave that has lingered in eastern Europe has now killed more than 600 people.

Talk show host Mark Levin says that in a functioning Constitutional republic, the House of Representatives would subpoena HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and draw up articles of impeachment for violating her oath to uphold the Constitution. He also wondered why the House is not doing anything in response to Obama's use of power that is not granted to him under the Constitution.

If you want a prototypical example of how climate science has ceased being true science and instead become little more than an ideological battleground, look no further than a study released yesterday showing that, contrary to earlier claims, global warming has had zero effect on the depth of the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Although the study received almost no media coverage (hmmmm, wonder why?), the San Francisco Chronicle did publish an article entitled Study: Sierra snowfall consistent over 130 years. But they covered the study not to give it wider publicity, but rather to give a platform to critics trying to discredit it. Story

Seeking to avoid a politically toxic vote, Congress has failed to pass a federal budget for three years. This year's new twist? Congress might not even try. On Monday, President Obama presented his proposed budget for fiscal year 2013. It's going nowhere on Capitol Hill, legislators and political analysts agree. What's more, Senate Democratic leaders show no intention of presenting their own budget proposals – or taking up any lobbed over from House Republicans. Story

Denzel Washington, 57, is one of Hollywood’s most well-known and vocal Christians. His religious views are well-documented, as the actor has been more than open about sharing his religious perspective with fans and media outlets, alike. But recently, Washington has caught some negative attention for comments that some say link atheists to sociopaths. Story

Gonorrhea, one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the United States, is increasingly showing resistance to one of the last known effective antibiotic treatments, leading researchers from the Centers for Disease Control to "sound the alarm" about potentially untreatable forms of the disease. Story (Thanks, Democrats)

A top official with the National Rifle Association said Friday that President Obama will move to "destroy" gun rights and "erase" the Second Amendment if he is re-elected in November. Story

Cancer

2012-02-17T08:52:00.000-06:00

Ever since Richard Nixon declared a war on cancer in 1971 through the signing of the National Cancer Act, over a hundred billion dollars has been spent by our government on research and drug development in an attempt to eradicate the disease, with trillions more spent by the cancer patients themselves, but with disappointing results. Even after four decades of waging full-scale conventional (surgery and chemo) and nuclear (radiotherapy) war against cancer, close to one in every four Americans will be diagnosed with the disease within their lifetimes. Could this colossal failure reflect how profoundly misunderstood the condition is, and misguided are our attempts to prevent and treat it?

The time has come to shift the conceptual framework away from the idea that cancer is something bad that happens to the body, to something the body does in order to survive vis-à-vis an increasingly toxic and nutrient-deprived environment. Only then we will begin to unravel the mystery behind the colossal failure of the conventional medical system and why the ‘war against cancer’ will only be successful when we embrace our enemy with greater compassion and understanding, instead of blasting it (and ourselves) into oblivion.

For the past half century, the "Mutational Theory" has provided the prevailing explanation for the cause of most cancers, where, as the story goes, accumulated mutations to the DNA within the nucleus of our cells lead some to "go berserk," their "insane" behavior a result of multiple destructive events to the intelligent code within the cell (DNA) that keep them acting in a ‘civilized’ manner relative to the larger bodily whole. In this view, these rogue cells clone themselves inordinately, spreading outward in a characteristically cancerous manner (cancer = Greek for "crab"), not unlike the characteristics of an infectious process within the host, eventually obstructing vital processes, resulting in morbidity and death. One paper summarizes this view as follows...

More here

Debt

2012-02-17T07:47:00.000-06:00

Demographic shift

2012-02-16T09:07:00.000-06:00

California is in the middle of a far-reaching demographic shift: Hispanics, who already constitute a majority of the state’s schoolchildren, will be a majority of its workforce and of its population in a few decades. This is an even more momentous development than it seems. Unless Hispanics’ upward mobility improves, the state risks becoming more polarized economically and more reliant on a large government safety net. And as California goes, so goes the nation, whose own Hispanic population shift is just a generation or two behind.

The scale and speed of the Golden State’s ethnic transformation are unprecedented. In the 1960s, Los Angeles was the most Anglo-Saxon of the nation’s ten largest cities; today, Latinos make up nearly half of the county’s residents and one-third of its voting-age population. A full 55 percent of Los Angeles County’s child population has immigrant parents. California’s schools have the nation’s largest concentration of "English learners," students from homes where a language other than English is regularly spoken. From 2000 to 2010, the state’s Hispanic population grew 28 percent, to reach 37.6 percent of all residents, almost equal to the shrinking white population’s 40 percent. Nearly half of all California births today are Hispanic. The signs of the change are everywhere—from the commercial strips throughout the state catering to Spanish-speaking customers, to the flea markets and illegal vendors in such areas as MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, to the growing reach of the Spanish-language media.

The poor Mexican immigrants who have fueled the transformation—84 percent of the state’s Hispanics have Mexican origins—bring an admirable work ethic and a respect for authority too often lacking in America’s native-born population. Many of their children and grandchildren have started thriving businesses and assumed positions of civic and economic leadership. But a sizable portion of Mexican, as well as Central American, immigrants, however hardworking, lack the social capital to inoculate their children reliably against America’s contagious underclass culture. The resulting dysfunction is holding them back and may hold California back as well.

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Electric cars not so green

2012-02-16T08:13:00.001-06:00

Electric cars have been heralded as environmentally friendly, but findings from University of Tennessee, Knoxville, researchers show that electric cars in China have an overall impact on pollution that could be more harmful to health than gasoline vehicles.

Chris Cherry, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering, and graduate student Shuguang Ji, analyzed the emissions and environmental health impacts of five vehicle technologies in 34 major Chinese cities, focusing on dangerous fine particles. What Cherry and his team found defies conventional logic: electric cars cause much more overall harmful particulate matter pollution than gasoline cars.

"An implicit assumption has been that air quality and health impacts are lower for electric vehicles than for conventional vehicles," Cherry said. "Our findings challenge that by comparing what is emitted by vehicle use to what people are actually exposed to. Prior studies have only examined environmental impacts by comparing emission factors or greenhouse gas emissions."

Particulate matter includes acids, organic chemicals, metals, and soil or dust particles. It is also generated through the combustion of fossil fuels.

For electric vehicles, combustion emissions occur where electricity is generated rather than where the vehicle is used. In China, 85 percent of electricity production is from fossil fuels, about 90 percent of that is from coal. The authors discovered that the power generated in China to operate electric vehicles emit fine particles at a much higher rate than gasoline vehicles. However, because the emissions related to the electric vehicles often come from power plants located away from population centers, people breathe in the emissions a lower rate than they do emissions from conventional vehicles.

Still, the rate isn’t low enough to level the playing field between the vehicles. In terms of air pollution impacts, electric cars are more harmful to public health per kilometer traveled in China than conventional vehicles.

More here

Throwing in the towel

2012-02-16T07:12:00.000-06:00

Even the people who thrust this man-caused global warming into the public’s face have given up beating that pony. That horse is deader than Secretariat. They even have retreated from climate change. The new threat to the world that requires more government is — sustainable development. That is an odd phrase that means no development. The IPCC report of 2007, which won the Nobel Prize for Peace, ironically is this crazy movement’s downfall. A laughable (in hindsight) claim that the Himalayas would be ice-free in 23 years showed that the report was thrown together and not vetted — much less properly peer-reviewed. Global warming charlatans such as Michael Mann and Phil Jones tried to hide their work from any scrutiny. Our gullible government kept the grants going as bureaucrats never questioned these frauds — and gullible reporters continued to carry water for them even after Climategate showed that this was a charade.

Now the jig is up. A very cold winter in Europe is now offered as proof of this cockamamie scheme.

From the Independent:

"The bitterly cold weather sweeping Britain and the rest of Europe has been linked by scientists with the ice-free seas of the Arctic, where global warming is exerting its greatest influence. A dramatic loss of sea ice covering the Barents and Kara Seas above northern Russia could explain why a chill Arctic wind has engulfed much of Europe and killed 221 people over the past week. The death toll from Arctic blast has been particularly severe in the Ukraine, where many of the dead have been people sleeping on the streets. Heating and food tents have been set up to ease their hardship. In Romania 24 people are known to have died and 17 in Poland. A growing number of experts believe complex wind patterns are being changed because melting Arctic sea ice has exposed huge swaths of normally frozen ocean to the atmosphere above."

A growing number? Name them. Otherwise, no one believes the explanations for cold weather any more.

While sleazebags like Michael Mann and Phil Jones steal tax money and still are praised, skeptics may finally be getting their due.

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Invasion

2012-02-15T09:22:00.000-06:00

A brief filed today with the U.S. Supreme Court argues that Arizona’s contested state law allowing law-enforcement officers to ask about the legal status of people they encounter is justified because of the virtual "invasion" of the state by outsiders. "As provided in the Constitution, the power to repel against invasions was … granted to both the federal and the state governments," stated the brief filed by Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch. Story

Obama has created a new government bureaucracy because we don't have enough big government as it is. He's creating a so-called "Public Advocate" who will be charged with listening to (illegal) immigrants' concerns about law enforcement policies. Suck it up, taxpayers.

Harry Reid has been out of the spotlight lately. But he briefly emerged from under his rock somewhere in the Nevada desert and proclaimed that Republicans want to put arsenic and mercury into our nation's water. Sure, Harry, tell us another one. How about all the puppies and kittens we want to maim and kill?

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio told WND today his office has scheduled a news conference in Phoenix for March 1 to release findings of the Cold Case Posse that has been investigating Barack Obama's birth certificate and eligibility to be president. Story

Headline of the Day..."Barack Obama to America’s Catholics – I Am Your God Now…" Story

Much of the street talk last week when I was traveling in the Persian Gulf revolved around the current—and very underreported—unrest in the largely Shi’ite Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. While twitter, press access and, for the sake of international journalists also an English-speaking opposition, has propelled Bahraini unrest into the international headlines, eastern Saudi Arabia is boiling. Bahraini authorities may use tear gas and rubber bullets; Saudi police use live ammunition against unarmed protesters. Eventually, the Arab Spring will come to Saudi Arabia. Grievances in Saudi Arabia are huge. When it does, it will make Syria look like a Quaker meeting. Source

Tired of your job and want to get fired? Just do what this guy did..."Who do you think you all are?" the coach said in the recording. "Highfalutin' heifers. You can just come and go as you please. Fire me!" Story

Caterpillar Inc. will not be building its new North American plant anywhere in the state of Illinois, officials with the company told local leaders Tuesday, with part of the reason being continued concerns about the business climate in the state. The company will instead focus on a location closer to its division headquarters in Cary, N.C. Story

Movieguide identified 91 movies in 2011 that scored high in "conservative/moral categories"; these earned an average of $59 million apiece. On the other hand, it identified 105 movies that scored high in "liberal/leftist categories"; each of those titles earned an average of just $11 million. Source

53% of self-identified liberal Democrats - and 67% of moderate or conservative Democrats - support keeping Guantanamo Bay open. And 77% of liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones. Source

Steve Jobs is reported to have had a 2.65 grade point average for his short time at college.

Republicans never learn...The House passed a sweeping new ethics bill that bans lawmakers from using insider information for personal gain, but Republican leaders came under criticism for softening the legislation in a way that some view as beneficial to Wall Street investors. Story

United We Sit on the Couch. The United States today is more at odds with itself than any time in its history, including 1861-1865. Story

Rick Perry says he'll run again because even Ronald Reagan "wasn't successful the first time he ran."

The ultimate result of Leftists running universities and their multiculturism nonsense....Dickinson State University awarded hundreds of degrees to foreign students who didn't earn them, signed up students who couldn't speak English and enrolled a handful without qualifying grades, according to an audit report of the North Dakota school. Story

When your record sucks, you try other things...The Obama campaign is to "educate" and deploy what it describes as "truth teams" to ensure that any attacks on the president’s record are feverishly countered in the run up to the general election.

Insanity of political correctness...A radical Islamic preacher who has been under detention for most of the last six and a half years but never formally charged with an offense was released from jail Monday amid public criticism over why he is being allowed to remain in Britain. Story

Solar industry nearing sunset, are you surprised?...In the latest setback for the solar energy industry, Auburn Hills-based Energy Conversion Devices said today that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and intends to sell its assets, including its main subsidiary United Solar Ovonic. Story

Should we be surprised?...The BBC will today apologise to an estimated 74 million people around the world for a news fixing scandal, exposed by The Independent, in which it broadcast documentaries made by a London TV company that was earning millions of pounds from PR clients which it featured in its programming. Story

Pediatricians fed up with parents who refuse to vaccinate their children out of concern it can cause autism or other problems increasingly are "firing" such families from their practices, raising questions about a doctor's responsibility to these patients. Medical associations don't recommend such patient bans, but the practice appears to be growing, according to vaccine researchers. Story

Europe in decline...The Moody’s agency has cut the debt ratings of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Malta, and has issued a warning to France, Britain and Austria, saying that the outlook for all nine countries was unfavorable, due to the Eurozone debt crisis.

Samuel L. Jackson, the actor, was in the news recently. He said, "I voted for Obama because he's black." Imagine saying, "I voted for McCain because he's white." Huge shit storm would follow.

Factoid...144 U.S. military women have died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Decline

2012-02-15T07:00:00.000-06:00

...the failure of the EU, slow motion train-wreck as it is, ought to caution (but it won’t) the American elites. Importing tens of millions of Mexicans, and expecting them to act like sober, middle class White Americans, is a fantasy of Eurozone proportions. Mexicans like being Mexican, its what they know. They have no intention of turning themselves into high-IQ knowledge worker cubicle drones. And would not do so even if they could. A few can and will become engineers, or scientists. The number will probably only slightly exceed the number of Asian guys playing in the NBA. The rest will continue to live and work and conduct themselves here as they did in Mexico. Meaning American income, educational achievements, technology, and everything else will inevitably decline to Mexican levels. Don’t expect anything out of a Silicon Valley surrounded by Mexico. Carlos Slim did not create Apple Computer, nor drive the development of the Ipad. Mostly, he played crony capitalist and extorted monopoly rates from Mexicans forced to use his companies to make phone calls by either land-lines or cell phones. That’s good for Carlos Slim, bad for most Mexicans. And that is the culture and people our vote-harvesting elites have imported.

...

You might argue that the biggest clown show in the world is in America. Where SWPL yuppies in a never ending battle against "the wrong sort of White people" have imported a mass of vote-mercenaries who will assuredly kill their hipster paradises of Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, and Ann Arbor, dead, dead, dead! Not too many working guys from Michoacan or their descendants are big into irony, feminism, gay rights, or saving the planet. Mostly, they throw trash out the window (as Victor Davis Hanson attests) and stage pit-bull and cockfights. People from Michoacan don’t ironically drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and get designated drivers, they drive drunk without a license and run over lots of kids, elderly, and each other. The folks from Juarez don’t earnestly send money to Greenpeace to save the Gay Whales, they mostly hang headless bodies from bridges, or roll grenades into discos, or become the victims of the same.

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Cutting spending

2012-02-14T09:19:00.000-06:00

Remember late last summer, when intransigent lawmakers refused to allow America to pay its bills so they could make a point about cutting spending? Remember how Congress averted a crisis of its own making by adopting a "compromise" that included $2.1 billion in cuts? And remember how even then, lawmakers couldn’t live up to that compromise, so they allowed "mandatory" spending cuts to take effect?

Well, all that political theater did nothing to actually cut spending. President Obama proposed a $3.8 billion budget, the biggest in American history, despite all the mandatory spending cuts that were enacted as part of the debt ceiling debacle. While the proposed budget includes some tax increases to offset higher spending, the overall level of federal spending continues to rise.

Of course, everyone knew it would. Republicans were quick to decry the budget proposal with the politically obvious characterization that it’s a "campaign document," and then proceeded to engage in a little campaigning of their own. You’ll note that among the half dozen local elected officials (five Republicans and one Democrat) who oppose the budget, not one outlines how they would cut spending more. They complain about the debt, the deficit, the spending and the threat it poses for our nation’s future, but none are saying what specific programs they would add to the president’s cuts or what additional tax increases they would include.

Even if all of Obama’s proposed cuts were rescinded, and all his tax increases left in place, it wouldn’t make a meaningful dent in the deficit.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison criticized cuts to NASA, implying that the space agency should actually be immune to budget austerity. Rep. Gene Green, the Democrat in the group, said the budget "cuts funding to programs that are essential to the Houston economy." That implies he would like to see them put back in — a spending increase.

The point here isn’t that those programs aren’t worthwhile. I happen to agree with Hutchison that cutting NASA’s budget by 40 percent is short-sighted. But the budget exercise — and let’s face it, Obama’s budget is little more than a wish list — underscores how unwilling lawmakers are to actually address the deficit.

Serious deficit reduction requires much deeper cuts and much bigger tax increases than anything Obama or his Republican opponents have proposed.

Source

Troubled

2012-02-14T08:26:00.002-06:00

Affordable Care

2012-02-14T07:07:00.000-06:00

The political furor over President Obama's birth-control mandate continues to grow, even among those for whom contraception poses no moral qualms, and one needn't be a theologian to understand why. The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate pluralism and liberty.

In late January the Health and Human Services Department required almost all insurance plans to cover contraceptive and sterilization methods, including the morning-after pill. The decision came after passionate lobbying by religious groups and liberals from the likes of Planned Parenthood, amid government promises of compromise.

In the end, Planned Parenthood won. HHS chose to draw the rule's conscience exceptions for "religious employers" so narrowly that they will not be extended to religious charities, universities, schools, hospitals, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and other institutions that oppose contraception as a matter of religious belief.

The Affordable Care Act itself is ambiguous about what counts as a religious organization that deserves conscience protection. Like so much else in the rushed bill, this was left to administrative discretion. What the law does cement is the principle that the government will decide for everyone what "health care" must mean. The entire thrust of ObamaCare is to standardize benefits and how they must be paid for and provided, regardless of individual choices or ethical convictions.

To take a small example: The HHS rule prohibits out-of-pocket costs for birth control, simply because Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's regulators believe no woman should have to pay anything for it. To take a larger example: The Obama Administration's legal defense of the mandate to buy insurance or else pay a penalty is that the mere fact of being alive gives the government the right to regulate all Americans at every point in their lives.

Practicing this kind of compulsion is routine and noncontroversial within Ms. Sebelius's ministry. That may explain why her staff didn't notice that the birth-control rule abridges the First Amendment's protections for religious freedom. Then again, maybe HHS thought the public had become inured to such edicts, which have arrived every few weeks since the Affordable Care Act passed.

More here

Austin

2012-02-14T07:05:00.001-06:00

Had a long weekend in Austin. The city continues to grow and expand.

Saw license plates from as far east as Vermont and as far west as California. Lots of California plates. Are they deserting California, or what?

The northwest side of Austin is beyond belief. New apartments everywhere. Lots and lots of 3 story townhouses and condos. Traffic is horrendous, even on the weekends.

I'm happy to be back here in the woods of southeast Texas.

38KKK

2012-02-10T10:35:00.000-06:00

Bust size of 38KKK

Go ahead and look. Your wife won't know.

Click here

Greed

2012-02-10T10:05:00.002-06:00

Ann Coulter's latest column concludes with....

"It's not an accident that Democrats oppose a tax on wealth, which they have boatloads of, but strongly support taxes on income, something they typically do not have. Democrats don't hate the rich; they are the rich, luxuriating in fortunes acquired by inheritance or marriage, fleecing the taxpayer, trial lawyer hucksterism or disreputable money manipulation. Their contempt is reserved for those who engage in honest work for a living, whom they accuse of "greed" for wanting to pay the government a little less."

California crazy

2012-02-10T09:22:00.000-06:00

The Ice Cream Bar opened Jan. 21 in the Cole Valley neighborhood — an homage to the classic parlors of the 1930s, complete with vintage soda fountain and lunch counter seating. It has become an immediate sensation, packed with both families and the foodie crowd, savoring upscale house-made ice creams and exotic sodas (flavorings include pink peppercorn and tobacco). The shop also employs 14 full- and part-time workers.

But getting it opened wasn’t easy.

"Many times it almost didn’t happen," said Juliet Pries, the owner, with a cheerful laugh.

Ms. Pries said it took two years to open the restaurant, due largely to the city’s morass of permits, procedures and approvals required to start a small business. While waiting for permission to operate, she still had to pay rent and other costs, going deeper into debt each passing month without knowing for sure if she would ever be allowed to open.

"It’s just a huge risk," she said, noting that the financing came from family and friends, not a bank. "At several points you wonder if you should just walk away and take the loss."

Ms. Pries said she had to endure months of runaround and pay a lawyer to determine whether her location (a former grocery, vacant for years) was eligible to become a restaurant. There were permit fees of $20,000; a demand that she create a detailed map of all existing area businesses (the city didn’t have one); and an $11,000 charge just to turn on the water.

The ice cream shop’s travails are at odds with the frequent promises made by the mayor and many supervisors that small businesses and job creation are top priorities.

More here

Peace making

2012-02-10T08:12:00.000-06:00

Uncle Sam has now spent a decade running around the Hindu Kush building grade schools and shoveling taxpayer-funded Viagra to every elderly village headman with one too many child brides. According to the World Bank, the Western military/aid presence accounts for 97 percent of Afghanistan's GDP. And, within a week of the West's departure, it will be as if that 97 percent had never been there, and all that remains will be the same old 3 percent tribal dump of mullahs, warlords, poppy barons, and pederasts, all as charmingly unspoiled as if the U.S. and its allies had quit 48 hours after toppling the Taliban in 2001.

It is two-thirds of a century since the alleged hyperpower last unambiguously won a war, and that ought to prompt a little serious consideration of the matter. Instead, we have Ron Paul, who says all would be well if we stopped "endlessly bombing" "these countries." To which penetrating insight his fans respond with: "Bring them home! Bring them home!" For some reason, I attract a lot of correspondence from Paulites arguing that, if I truly mean what I wrote in the paragraph above, then Ron's my man. A retired U.S. Army officer writes from South Carolina:
The US Military is a Peace-Making force, not a Peace-keeping Nation Building one. I am sure Dr. Paul would cut out the district military pork of Congress (whom 80% have NEVER served unlike him!), the $600 toilet seats, and $80 hammers, etc ad infinitum, ad nauseam. . . . Quit playing whack a mole and other stupid social games, either utterly vanquish like against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan or DO NOT GO IN! They are for MacArthur: nuke the Chicoms if needed. . . . Send in Seal Team 6 to take out Bin Ladens, etc. None of this PC stuff, otherwise we would not have won WW1 and WW2!
More here

Earmarks

2012-02-09T10:57:00.000-06:00

A U.S. senator from Alabama directed more than $100 million in federal earmarks to renovate downtown Tuscaloosa near his own commercial office building.

A congressman from Georgia secured $6.3 million in taxpayer funds to replenish the beach about 900 feet from his island vacation cottage.

A representative from Michigan earmarked $486,000 to add a bike lane to a bridge within walking distance of her home.

Thirty-three members of Congress have directed more than $300 million in earmarks and other spending provisions to dozens of public projects that are next to or within about two miles of the lawmakers’ own property, according to a Washington Post investigation.

Story

Political template

2012-02-09T10:20:00.000-06:00

Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, an officer who "served in Operation Desert Storm, in Afghanistan in 2005-06 and in Iraq in 2008-09″ and "legislative correspondent for defense and foreign affairs for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas", recently concluded, after spending a year in Afghanistan gathering data for a report on equipment, that the whole operation had become a fraud.

He echoed the assessment of Anthony Cordesman’s conclusion that the war was being reported to fit a political template, while in the meantime doing little or nothing to achieve any tangible goal. Cordesman wrote, "Since June 2010, the unclassified reporting the U.S. does provide has steadily shrunk in content, effectively ‘spinning’ the road to victory by eliminating content that illustrates the full scale of the challenges ahead. They also, however, were driven by political decisions to ignore or understate Taliban and insurgent gains from 2002 to 2009, to ignore the problems caused by weak and corrupt Afghan governance, to understate the risks posed by sanctuaries in Pakistan, and to ‘spin’ the value of tactical ISAF victories while ignoring the steady growth of Taliban influence and control."

The reason why the Army gone along, according to Davis, is to defend its turf and programs. In other words, it has kept quiet to get money.

...

A combination of military compliance and corrupt politics has led to a situation in which the Taliban are captured only to be released, an Afghan Army which pretends of fight and American lives and treasure wasted in strategies and efforts that are known to be useless.

More here

PAC man

2012-02-09T08:58:00.002-06:00

Head Start fail

2012-02-09T08:02:00.000-06:00

It is finally dawning on liberals that Head Start, America's 50-year experiment with early childhood education, is a failure.

Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the federal agency housing Head Start, announced that for the first time, its lowest-performing centers will be forced to compete for funding.

This decision follows Joe Klein's recent confession in Time that since we no longer have money to spend on programs that do not create benefits, we should "ax" the $7.3-billion-a-year effort, which mainly supplies part-time care and education to impoverished three- to four-year-olds.

Putting aside Klein's odd implication that there was once a time when we had enough money to spend on things that don't work and how negligible the new federal policy will likely prove, let's give credit where it is due: even mildly critiquing or tinkering with Head Start, a longtime sacred cow of the American left, takes guts.

The HHS-sponsored study that converted Klein was released in January 2010 to relatively little notice, but the report's findings are startling: the positive effects Head Start has on children (which are mild to begin with) simply vanish by the children's first year of school. Head Start kids are no better off than those not in the program, but taxpayers are billions poorer.

To grasp the scope of this program's profligacy, compare the federal government's attempts at early-childhood education to its efforts to send men to the moon: Head Start has actually cost more ($170 billion to $145 billion) than the Apollo program.

...

Some insight can be gleaned from an anonymous "senior Obama administration official," who admitted to Klein that Head Start is more "a jobs program" than an educational or antipoverty one. This is an often-unrecognized characteristic of many social programs, which provide work for teachers and caregivers and administrators in areas where employment is often low, and, especially in the current economy, political leaders are reluctant to cut people loose.

More here

Santorum

2012-02-08T10:12:00.000-06:00

Rick Santorum is on a roll...He moved past Gingrich and Ron Paul in the total delegate race...The former Pennsylvania senator came out on top in the voting in all three contests Tuesday night, including an unexpected five-point victory in Colorado's caucuses. Santorum also won the Minnesota caucuses, by an 18-point margin, and he won by 30 points in the Missouri primary.

Yahoo News says...Santorum is a candidate with a post office box as a national headquarters. He's using volunteers to handle his scheduling. And he has virtually no staff to help turn momentum into votes in the critical Super Tuesday contests that are now four weeks away.

Rick Santorum had a pretty good week. He finished a distant fourth in the Nevada caucuses, but the turnout was so low--down nearly 25 percent from 2008--that the event became yet another indictment of the front-runner. A Rasmussen poll showed Santorum as the only Republican in the field beating Obama in a head-to-head matchup. Story

Fifteen term Republican Congressman Dan Burton from Indiana has decided to retire. Wikipedia has this odd story on its site..."In July 2011, Burton was revealed by an FBI investigation to have received tainted election funds ultimately traced to the military intelligence services of Pakistan, apparently as a quid pro quo for "supporting to Pakistan's position on Kashmir". These funds were routed via the so-called Kashmiri American Council, run by Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, later revealed to be a front for the Pakistani Military. Subsequently, Burton's office donated the funds to charity. Burton had long been portrayed as a "good friend of Pakistan" and, over the course of many years, regularly issued pro-Pakistan and anti-India statements, both of which which ceased following the revelations regarding the funds from Pakistan. The FBI did not charge Burton with having been aware of the source of the funds received via the Kashmiri American Council."

A renewed focus on Europe's banking and debt crisis may quickly sap the nascent optimism about global economic prospects that followed a remarkably solid U.S. January employment report. While the U.S. jobless rate fell to the lowest level in nearly three years, euro zone unemployment has climbed to 10.4 percent, its highest since before the adoption of the euro. Story

The Iranian parliament's official website has published an article calling on the government to attack Israel before the end of the year. According to Israeli TV Channel 2's veteran Middle East expert, Ehud Yaari, the article cites three reasons for the call. Story

Europe and the Muslim world seem to be on a collision course that could have major political, economic and ideological ramifications. January 23, 2012, may well come to be remembered as the crucial date when Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis, which many of us believed discredited beyond repair, was reaffirmed. Political scientist Huntington wrote in 1993 that cultural divisions preclude a defining global civilization, and the West and the Muslim world would never share the same values. Story

North Korean accordian students here.

Two American brothers of a Mexican casino magnate who fled drug and fraud charges in the United States and has been seeking a pardon enabling him to return have emerged as major fund-raisers and donors for President Obama's re-election campaign. Story

Thy name is hypocrisy...When the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that private organizations, including corporations and unions, could spend unlimited amounts of money on political speech, President Obama decried the decision, warning that it amounted to a "threat to our democracy." Two years later, the Obama campaign has announced that with the president's blessing, it will support a pro-Obama super PAC--a creation of that very ruling--to received unlimited donations from individuals, corporations and unions for the 2012 presidential campaign. Story

Kansas lawmakers have been given six days to consider one of the most sweeping state anti-abortion bills to be introduced. A Kansas House committee is scheduled to take up a bill Wednesday that would exempt doctors from malpractice suits if they withheld medical information to prevent an abortion. The measure would also take away tax credits for abortion providers, remove tax deductions for the purchase of abortion-related insurance coverage and require women to hear the fetal heartbeat. The bill includes several provisions, which passed in other states and now face federal lawsuits. The bill would also require women be told about potential breast cancer risks from abortions, even though medical experts discount such a connection. Story

In November of last year, Clint Eastwood had this to say..."We shouldn't be bailing out the banks and car companies. If a CEO can't figure out how to make his company profitable, then he shouldn't be the CEO."

Chinese experts brought down the drone in Iran?...After establishing the cause of the crash of the unmanned American spy drone, the stealth RQ-170, over Iran on Dec. 4, 2011, the US is continuing to use that type of UAV, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz said on Jan. 13. Without disclosing the results of the investigation, he said, "The key thing is that it’s an ISR system that we use to provide capabilities to the combatant commanders and we’ll continue to do so." Story

It was early November when tensions between Keith Olbermann and Al Gore escalated into a crisis at Current TV. There had been a short honeymoon after Gore, the channel’s co-owner, had handed the notoriously temperamental anchor a reported $10 million salary and equity stake in February of last year, but the relationship soured quickly. Now, just five months after Olbermann’s show Countdown had resurfaced on Current, it looked as if he might walk away. Story

Wow, I'm never going to mess with women from Wisconsin.

Did Chinese cyber spying cause the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s cost spikes and production delays? That’s the question Pentagon budget officials are asking according to Aviation Week. Chinese spies apparently hacked into secure conference calls and listened to meetings discussing the classified technologies aboard the jets. In particular, China may have stolen info about the F-35’s secure communications and antenna systems; leading to costly software rewrites and other redesigns to compromised parts of the plane. Story

Eurotrash

2012-02-08T08:23:00.000-06:00

Animal sex abuse is on the rise in Germany, with bestiality brothels being set up across the country, according to a state animal protection officer demanding stronger laws to protect mankind's furry and feathered friends.

Madeleine Martin, the animal protection official for Hessian state government, said the law needed to be changed to make sex abuse of animals – known as zoophilia – a crime.

"It is punishable to distribute animal pornography, but the act itself is not," she told the Frankfurter Rundschau daily paper on Friday.

"There are even animal brothels in Germany," she said. Sex with animals was being increasingly seen as a lifestyle choice, and thus more acceptable.

"The abuse seems to be increasingly rapidly, and the internet offers an additional distribution platform," she said.

She said the justice authorities had found it exceptionally difficult to convict a man from Hesse, who had offered pictures and instructions for animal sex abuse over the internet.

"Zoophilia must be completely banned in the reformed animal protection law," said Martin, referring to the governments plan to rework that section of the law.

Sex with animals was banned until 1969, when the animal protection law was introduced, but failed to include a specific ban on zoophilia, the Frankfurter Rundschau said.

Martin said the current legal situation makes it too difficult for authorities to intervene – an animal has to be shown to have massive injuries before the animal protection laws prescribe action.

Source

not fade away

2012-02-07T11:40:00.000-06:00

Gov. Rick Perry came out swinging Monday in his first speech since dropping out of the presidential race, attacking President Barack Obama for "misguided socialist policies" and vowing to remain in the public fray. "I'm not slipping off into the sunset," Perry told a friendly GOP audience. "We've got plenty of work to do right here in the state of Texas. ... And I've got plenty of fighting left in this old 61-year-old body."

Story

Illiberalism

2012-02-07T10:55:00.000-06:00

As Sen. Obama said during the 2008 campaign, words matter. Modern "liberalism" is strikingly illiberal; the high priests of "tolerance" are increasingly intolerant of even the mildest dissent; and those who profess to "celebrate diversity" coerce ever more ruthlessly a narrow homogeneity. Thus, the Obama administration's insistence that Catholic institutions must be compelled to provide free contraception, sterilization and abortifacients. This has less to do with any utilitarian benefit a condomless janitor at a Catholic school might derive from Obamacare, and more to do with the liberal muscle of Big Tolerance enforcing one-size-fits-all diversity.

The bigger the Big Government, the smaller everything else: In Sweden, expressing a moral objection to homosexuality is illegal, even on religious grounds, even in church, and a pastor minded to cite the more robust verses of Leviticus would risk four years in jail. In Canada, the courts rule that Catholic schools must allow gay students to take their same-sex dates to the prom. The secular state's Bureau of Compliance is merciless to apostates to a degree even your fire-breathing imams might marvel at.

More here

Naked apes

2012-02-07T09:32:00.000-06:00

The Modern Age has given us wealth and liberty undreamed by our ancestors. It would be wrong to be ungrateful for these blessings. Science has opened creation like a vast treasure hoard of wonders, and, unlike earthly treasure, this grows ever greater the deeper we go. Medicine has abolished countless forms of suffering. The slave trade has been abolished world wide.

But those who say that it was not Christendom that did these things tell lies. Where Christian virtues fail, the liberty turns into license and licentiousness: pornographers admired as men of business. Wealth promotes an industry of envy, as a lawyers, bureaucrats and politicians make it their daily business to loot what others produce. Medicine turns to infanticide, and the Hippocratic Oath languishes. Science goes mad, and says the universe is nothing but a carousel of atoms, and your brain a defective calculation machine that merely hallucinates self-awareness and free will.

These are not inevitable. There is nothing in modernity which make these evils necessary evils, and no rule of history which decrees that liberty must evolve into tyranny, capitalism to socialism, virtue to vice, chastity to all-permissive hedonism. These things are not the goods whose price tag demands we abandon Judeochristian virtues, values, traditions, goals and goods. Indeed, this wealth and virtue and goodness are the outcome and by-product of the Christian world-view.

There is a reason why other great civilizations in South America, India and China stagnated before their discovery by the West, and why only the civilization of the Mediterranean produced modern science: that reason is Christianity.

It is not a trade-off and not a zero-sum game. When the Roman Empire converted, it gave up slavery, gladiatorial games, abortion, infanticide, divorce, sodomy, pornography, temple prostitution, and other inhuman practices. Nothing good in the pagan world was lost, and must pagan virtue and learning preserved through the Christian era.

Then, as the Modern Era devolved into the Postmodern, one after another, the Old Ways came back, and the rate of Progress slowed. The traditions we were told were the obstacles standing in the path of progress, the faith of our fathers, was nothing other than the engine of progress. As is the coachman shot the horses to prevent them from blocking the career of the coach, and then wondered why the coach ground slowly to a halt.

Have you ever wondered where your Flying Car is, now that you live in the Age of the Jetson’s, dead reader? Answer: you sold it for a mess of pottage. When civilization abandoned institutional Christianity for liberalism, then abandoned Christian notions of decency and individualism for socialism, and then abandoned Christian notions of chivalry and truth for political correctness, and then abandoned Christian notions of the objectivity of truth, beauty and virtue for the roaring abyss of nihilism, civilization lost the engine and motive of its progress.

When you stopped calling yourself sons of God and started calling yourself naked apes, you stopped climbing Jacob’s Ladder toward the angels, and slumped instead toward the jungle where Nature red in tooth and claw holds reign.

Source

in the future

2012-02-07T08:48:00.002-06:00

Second term

2012-02-06T11:30:00.000-06:00

President ~~Carter~~ Obama said Sunday that he deserves a second term despite suggesting in a similar interview three years ago that if he didn’t turn around the economy in three years, his presidency was going to be a "one-term proposition." Story

Meanwhile...Another Democrat congressman has decided not to seek reelection. North Carolina's Heath Shuler is retiring. Can we have a few more, please?

The photo of an Israeli soldier with his boot on a little girl's chest is fake. Photo was actually taken in Bahrain during a street theater event. Story

The mainstream media is making a lot of noise about the 8.3% unemployment rate. What they don't tell you is that those who are not even looking for a job have been eliminated from the statistics. If you count all those who are actually unemployed the rate is closer to 15%.

Roseanne Barr is going to run for president for the Green Party. Hopefully she'll suck up some of the votes that Obama would normally get...like the ultra leftist crazies, for instance. Go Roseanne.

Here in the U.S. we have Mexican women who come to give birth to their children, known as anchor babies. Hong Kong has a similar problem. The Chinese citizens who come to Hong Kong are called "locusts." Story

Federal prosecutors closed their nearly two-year criminal probe of alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs by Lance Armstrong without charging the former pro cyclist or other members of his former team. (He's either very, very sneaky or the victim of jealousy from other riders)

Record low temperatures across Europe have resulted in over 200 deaths. Some areas have seen temperatures drop to forty degrees below zero.

A local Florida station invented an unprecedented way to check for voter fraud: jury excusal forms. NBC2 compiled a list of jury excusals based on not being a citizen of the United States and compared it to a list of registered voters in two counties. They discovered almost 100 illegally registered voters, many of whom had voted multiple times. "I vote every year," one woman told NBC2, despite the fact that she is not a US citizen. The woman had told the court that she couldn't serve on a jury because she wasn't a US citizen, but she doesn't seem to have a problem voting like one. Source

The Taliban and other insurgent groups were responsible for nearly 80 percent of the civilian deaths in the war in Afghanistan last year, said a U.N. report released Saturday. The report said the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan documented 3,021 civilian deaths in the conflict in 2011 - up 8 percent from 2010, which saw 2,790 deaths, and an increase of 25 percent from 2009, when 2,412 civilians were killed. Story

On HBO's Real Time, host Bill Maher surprisingly said of the protesters, "As I watch them on the news now I find myself almost agreeing with Newt Gingrich. Like, you know what - get a job...Now it's just a bunch of [d-bags] who think throwing a chair through the Starbucks window is going to bring on the revolution." Source

"Since pit bull-type breeds often are linked to a majority of the catastrophic bite cases, laws have sprouted across the country to more strictly regulate them. But Texas does not allow breed-specific laws. Cities such as Denver and Miami have banned the ownership of pit bull-types, and San Francisco requires mandatory sterilization of the animals." Source

Interesting story on Blacks and how they see themselves here.

Lunation

After the Nevada primary, Romney now has 97 delegates...Gingrich 30...Santorum 16...Ron Paul 7...Huntsman 2. Source

Quote by Newt Gingrich..."The Obama Administration has declared war on the religious freedom in this country and people need to understand that."

Headline of the Day..."Occupy DC Raided: Police Remove Tents, Vermin"

The Stock Market says Obama is going to lose in November. Story

Afghanistan fail

2012-02-06T09:24:00.000-06:00

Afghan soldiers are selling their weapons and vehicles to the Taliban, sharing intelligence with them and signing covert ceasefires as they pre-pare for NATO forces to with-draw, according to a classified military report.

Despite billions of dollars spent by western allies on training and equipping Afghanistan's security forces, they are ceding territory without a fight or even joining forces with the insurgents in some cases.

The report is based on the interrogation of thousands of captured Taliban. It makes depressing reading for coalition forces more than a decade after the start of the conflict.

According to the NATO study, Taliban fighters believe they have overcome the American troop surge, that their return to power is "inevitable" and that they can easily sub-due President Hamid Karzai's forces once the Afghan army and police take charge of security in 2014.

It also says that the Pakistani government remains "intimately involved" with the insurgent group, despite U.S. efforts to threaten or cajole it to cut off support. Taliban prisoners claim that Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency is "thoroughly aware of Taliban activities and the whereabouts of all senior Taliban personnel."

In a further setback Wednesday, the Afghan Taliban said that no peace negotiation process had been agreed with the international community, "particularly the Americans."

More here

Wasting money

2012-02-06T08:35:00.000-06:00

Government-funded training for so-called green jobs has come to a near standstill in Snohomish County, having produced lackluster results.

Over the past few years, about 500 residents in the county attended short-term training programs with the hope of landing one of 25,000 or more green jobs expected to be needed in the state by 2020.

So far, 95 of those 500 students have found jobs.

WorkForce Development Council of Snohomish County, which oversees training under the federal Workforce Investment Act of 1998, recently put a hold on sending more people through the training program, which had a job placement rate of about 20 percent.

That's still a higher placement rate for green-job training programs than the national rate, which is about 10 percent, according to a recent U.S. Department of Labor audit.

Nationwide, about $500 million in Recovery Act funds were allocated to train nearly 125,000 people for green careers. Nearly a year and a half later, the audit found, only 52,762 people had been trained and 8,035 had found jobs.

More here

Gag reflex

2012-02-04T09:38:00.000-06:00

Obama at prayer breakfast...

"I have fallen on my knees with great regularity"

Story

About time...

2012-02-04T08:38:00.000-06:00

The Wall Street Journal reports that...

After years of delay, Congress took a big step toward approving new rules to ban lawmakers from trading stocks based on information they pick up in the halls of Capitol Hill—a move aimed in part at helping repair the institution's low approval ratings. The Senate voted overwhelmingly, 96-3, to pass the legislation, called the Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge Act, or Stock Act. The bill now moves to the House, where Republican leaders said they would vote on it next week.

Waterless urinals

2012-02-04T06:19:00.000-06:00

Students at a high school in Boca Raton, Florida, must step over rivers of urine and endure the stench of rancid waste after a plan to bring 'green' waterless urinals into bathrooms backfired.

School officials at Spanish River High School thought they had found an environmentally-friendly, cost-saving solution for their bathrooms when they installed Falcon Waterfree urinals in their boys bathrooms.

But with no water moving through the school's copper pipes to flush the urine into the sewer system, the waste produced noxious gases that ate through the metal, leaving leaky pipes that allowed urine to drip into walls and flow onto floors.

'It was pretty disgusting,' school board chairman Frank Barbieri told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

'The girls had to step over a river of urine. I could smell it as soon as I walked into the hallway.'

Now, the school district, which was hoping to save $100 a year in water costs for each waterless urinal, must pay $500,000 to repair the damage and replace the appliances with the traditional flush variety in four high schools.

Neither the school, nor Falcon Waterfree Technologies, the Los Angeles-based maker of the urinals, thought to check the pipes before installing the new urinals.

More here

Pants on fire

2012-02-03T10:50:00.000-06:00

Democrat fail

2012-02-03T09:47:00.000-06:00

Democrats have lost their solid political party affiliation advantage in 18 states since 2008, while Republicans have gained a solid advantage in 6 states. A total of 17 states were either solidly Republican or leaning Republican in their residents' party affiliation in 2011, up from 10 in 2010 and 5 in 2008. Meanwhile, 19 states including the District of Columbia showed a solid or leaning Democratic orientation, down from 23 in 2010 and 36 in 2008. The remaining 15 states were relatively balanced politically, with neither party having a clear advantage. Story

Only two non-presidents are on American paper currency...Franklin and Hamilton. There was a story on Yahoo News that says there is rising sentiment to replace Hamilton's image on the $10 bill with Ronald Reagan or Martin Luther King. I would bet that Obama's name has been tossed around too.

CDR Salamander's blog has a nice letter from a midshipman who doesn't like the idea of women in the military. He wants to be a wolf and not a chihuahua. Well said.

In a Republican primary season overloaded with second-tier candidates and gaffes, lots of people seem to be watching the never-ending debates with an ear for the next laugh line. After last Monday’s Florida debate, they seized on Mitt Romney’s suggestion that his immigration policy, rather than rounding up illegals, would have people "self-deport. Story

Michelle Malkin has endorsed Rick Santorum for president.

Texas is enjoying a very mild winter. But in Circle Hot Springs, Alaska the high on Sunday was 49 degrees below zero. Brrrrr. Their low Sunday night was 58 degrees below zero.

Quote of the Day..."No tyrant looks in a mirror and sees an oppressor."

Most people who say conservatives can't win elections forget this...Ronald Reagan carried 44 states in his 1980 landslide over Jimmy Carter. In 1984, Reagan was re-elected, carrying 49 states and coming within a few thousand votes of carrying the 50th -- opponent Walter Mondale's home state of Minnesota.

Pinch me, I must be dreaming. Someone honored Bush...Estonia is set to bestow former President George W. Bush with the country's highest civil award given to a foreigner for supporting its bid to join NATO in 2004. President Toomas Hendrik Ilves on Wednesday said Bush will be decorated with the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana for being "a friend and supporter" of Estonia's foreign and security policy during his term in office. Story

Trash tossed by thousands of illegal immigrants as they chase the American Dream has been a persistent problem for years in the rugged Arizona borderlands that lie on a main migration and smuggling route from Mexico. Story and photos here

After the Florida primary Romney now has the lead with 85 delegates committed to his nomination. Gingrich has 26, Santorum has 14, Ron Paul has 4, and Huntsman has 2.

Mark Steyn says this would have been his State of the Union address..."The State of our Union is broke, heading for bankrupt, and total collapse shortly thereafter. Thank you and goodnight! You've been a terrific crowd!" More

Food prices in Cuba shot up by nearly 20 percent last year as the cash-strapped government cut subsidies and imports and agricultural reforms failed to crank up domestic production, according to a new government report. Story

Obama approval above 50% in only ten states. Story

El Centro, California has the highest unemployment rate in the U.S. Currently it is 26.8%.

Huge loss for Obama is predicted. Graph here

Chevy Volt watch...only 603 were sold in January.

Sun Ra (born Herman Blount) was a Black musician with very eclectic taste in music. Near the end of his life, he said, "I couldn't approach black people with the truth because they like lies. They live lies … At one time I felt that white people were to blame for everything, but then I found out that they were just puppets and pawns of some greater force, which has been using them … Some force is having a good time [manipulating black and white people] and looking, enjoying itself up in a reserved seat, wondering, "I wonder when they're going to wake up."

Governor Jindal of Louisiana also says Obama is thin-skinned. Story

Boohoo, cry me a river...The New York Times Company suffered a net loss of almost $40 million in 2011, with its fourth quarter profits falling by 12.2 per cent compared to the same period in 2010. Story (Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people)

Preppers

2012-02-03T08:42:00.000-06:00

As the U.S. economy falls apart and as the world becomes increasingly unstable, more Americans than ever are becoming "preppers". It is estimated that there are at least two million preppers in the United States today, but nobody really knows. The truth is that it is hard to take a poll because a lot of preppers simply do not talk about their preparations. Your neighbor could be storing up food in the garage or in an extra bedroom and you might never even know it. An increasing number of Americans are convinced that we are on the verge of some really bad things happening. But will just storing up some extra food and supplies be enough? What is going to happen if we see widespread rioting in major U.S. cities like George Soros is predicting? What is going to happen if the economy totally falls to pieces and our city centers descend into anarchy like we saw in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? In some major U.S. cities such as Detroit, looting is already rampant. There are some sections of Detroit where entire blocks of houses are being slowly dismantled by thieves and stripped of anything valuable. Sadly, the economy is going to get a lot worse than it is at the moment. So is now the time to move away from major U.S. cities? Should preppers be seeking safer locations for themselves and their families? Those are legitimate questions.

According to a recent Gallup poll, satisfaction with the government is now at an all-time low. Americans are rapidly losing faith in virtually every major institution in society.

Anger and frustration are rising to very dangerous levels, and we are rapidly approaching a boiling point.

When people feel as though they have lost everything, they get desperate.

And desperate people do desperate things.

More here

Worker's paradise

2012-02-02T10:14:00.000-06:00

Havana, a once-glorious architectural gem, is falling down — literally. Much of the central city is crumbling and building collapses are common because there is no maintenance. Many people live without running water, and roosters can be heard crowing a block from the nation’s capitol, which is shuttered for "renovations."

The sight of American cars from before 1959 plying the streets is charming but an indication of chronic stagnation. Going to the rural areas is like boarding a time machine to the 19th century. Farmers plow by walking behind two oxen, and horses provide basic transportation. Public "buses" consist of horse-drawn wagons.

Fidel Castro’s "revolución," now in its 54th year, as spray-painted slogans constantly remind you, is running out of other people’s money. First the Soviet Union propped up the Communist takeover, and after its collapse, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela came to Castro’s rescue.

It’s a devil’s bargain. Castro barters young Cuban professionals for oil, with Chavez delivering a reported 100,000 barrels a day. In exchange, Cuban doctors and teachers are sent to Venezuela. Chavez went to Cuba for cancer treatment last year.

Castro himself almost died in 2006, although of what remains a mystery. He still heads the Communist Party, but is rarely seen and there are rumors he suffers from dementia. His brother, Raul, runs the government, though it’s not clear he could survive Fidel’s death.

The brothers’ scramble to keep 11 million Cubans sullen but not mutinous is leading to a patchwork of liberalizations. Tourism is growing, bringing in foreign investment and the dreaded C-word — capitalism. Large collective farms are being divided, with farmers getting plots to use for 10 years and permits to sell their produce.

Some houses can be bought and sold, though the rules are subject to bureaucratic whim. Except for the prerevolution Chevies and Cadillacs, "ownership" remains an elusive concept. The state holds all power, and harassment by the police and military is a reminder that any freedom can be canceled without notice.

More here

dump Holder

2012-02-02T09:28:00.000-06:00

For incompetence alone, Attorney General Eric Holder should resign in the wake of the illegal "Fast and Furious" gunrunning scandal. But fresh news that he knew of it and is covering it up warrants impeachment.

In the latest Friday night document dump — news released as to minimize its scandalous impact on the White House — congressional investigators learned that Attorney General Holder knew all along that a gun his Justice Department intentionally let fall into the hands of Mexico's cartels was used to murder U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry on Dec. 15, 2010.

Holder must have known right away because his Deputy Chief of Staff Monty Wilkinson received an email from then-Arizona U.S. Attorney General Dennis Burke telling him just that: "The guns found in the desert near the murder(ed) BP officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about — they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store."

According to the Daily Caller, the emails also showed that Wilkinson then "alerted" Holder about the killing of the U.S. agent.

Since then, Wilkinson has taken the Fifth in congressional testimony and told investigators, "I don't recall," while the Justice Department on Monday declined to give any answer to the press about what Holder knew and when he knew it.

This is classic coverup behavior — late-night document dumps, officials taking the Fifth, "I don't recall" excuses — the likes of which we haven't seen since the Nixon and Clinton years.

Along with the false testimony that Holder gave last year to congressional investigators including Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, this never-ending case can only get worse as the damning evidence piles up.

More here

Texas Pig War

2012-02-02T08:43:00.000-06:00

The Pig War was not actually an honest-to-pete real shooting war. But it did involve a pair of international powers; the Republic of Texas, and the constitutional monarchy of France. And thereby hangs the story of a neighborhood squabble between a frontier innkeeper and a gentleman-dandy named Jean Pierre Isidore Dubois de Saligny who called himself the Comte de Saligny. He was the charge d’affaires, the representative of France to the Republic of Texas, arriving from a previous assignment the French Legation in Washington D.C. He had been instrumental in recommending that France extend diplomatic recognition to the Republic of Texas, but one might be forgiven for thinking that some kind of 19th Century Peter Principle was at play . . . for Dubois turned out to be terribly undiplomatic.

Perhaps it was just the shock of arriving in the new capitol city of Austin, a ramble of hastily built frame shacks and log cabins scattered along a series of muddy streets along the scenic and wooded shores of the upper Colorado River; a city planned with great hopes and nothing but insane optimism to base them on. Dubois arrived with two French servants, including a chef, a very fine collection of wines, elegant furniture and household goods. Here was a man of culture and refinement, perhaps acclimated to America, but ill-unprepared for the raw crudities of the Texas frontier.

Initially, Dubois took rooms at the only hotel in town, a crude inn of roughly-finished logs owned by Richard Bullock, located at the present intersection of 6th and Capitol. In the days before cattle was king, pork was much more favored; Richard Bullock kept a herd of pigs – pigs which were allowed to roam freely, and eat what they could scavenge, along the muddy streets and in back of the frame buildings and log cabins set up to do the business of the Republic. Undaunted, Dubois, rented a small building nearby to use as an office and residence while a fine new legation was being built. He entertained in fine style – but was most especially plagued by Bullock’s pigs, which constantly broke through the fence around his garden, and helped themselves to the corn intended for his horses. The pigs even broke into the house, and consumed a quantity of bedclothes and papers.

That was the last straw: Dubois instructed one of his servants to kill any pigs found on the property that he had rented, which was done. Richard Bullock, outraged, demanded payment for his loss, which was indignantly refused on the grounds of diplomatic immunity. The matter escalated when Bullock encountered Dubois’ swine-killing servant one day in the street and thrashed him. An official protest was filed, and a hearing ordered by the Texas Secretary of State – but citing international law, Dubois refused to attend or allow his servant to testify. Richard Bullock was freed on bail – and when Dubois complained bitterly to Republic authorities he was told that he could collect his passport and depart at any time.

He left in a huff, and stayed away for a year – never having had the chance to actually live in the elegant residence which he had commissioned to become the official legation; a white frame house on a hill which is presently the only remaining structure from those early days. Richard Bullock became the toast of the town, and his pigs were celebrities, for of course the story got around. The fracas also put an end to a generous loan from France, and plans to bring 8,000 French settlers to settle on Texas lands – as well as a military alliance that would allow stationing of French garrisons in Texas to protect them.

What would Texas have been like, one wonders – if Richard Bullock hadn’t let his pigs roam and the French Legate had thought to hire someone to build a better fence?

Source

Reelect Captain Obama

2012-02-01T09:38:00.002-06:00

Pakistan assisting Taliban

2012-02-01T09:11:00.000-06:00

The Taliban in Afghanistan are being directly assisted by Pakistani security services, according to a secret Nato report seen by the BBC.

The leaked report, derived from thousands of interrogations, claims the Taliban remain defiant and have wide support among the Afghan people.

It alleges that Pakistan knows the locations of senior Taliban leaders.

A BBC correspondent says the report is painful reading for international forces and the Afghan government.

Pakistan has strenuously denied any links with the Taliban on previous occasions.

"We have long been concerned about ties between elements of the ISI and some extremist networks," said US Pentagon spokesman Captain John Kirby, adding that the US Defence Department had not seen the report.

The BBC's Quentin Sommerville in Kabul says the report - on the state of the Taliban - fully exposes for the first time the relationship between the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) and the Taliban.

The report is based on material from 27,000 interrogations with more than 4,000 captured Taliban, al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters and civilians.

It notes: "Pakistan's manipulation of the Taliban senior leadership continues unabatedly". It says that Pakistan is aware of the locations of senior Taliban leaders.

More here

Mountain Meadows massacre

2012-02-01T08:19:00.000-06:00

In early 1857, several groups of emigrants from the northwestern Arkansas region started their trek to California, joining up on the way to form a group known as the Baker-Fancher party. The groups were mostly from Marion; Crawford; Carroll; and Johnson counties in Arkansas, and had assembled into a wagon train at Beller's Stand, south of Harrison, Arkansas, to emigrate to southern California. This group was initially referred to as both the Baker train and the Perkins train, but after being joined by other Arkansas trains and making its way west, was soon called the Baker–Fancher train (or party) after "Colonel" Alexander Fancher who, having already made the journey to California twice before, had become its main leader. By contemporary standards the Baker-Fancher party was prosperous, carefully organized, and well-equipped for the journey. They were subsequently joined along the way by families and individuals from other states, including Missouri. This group was relatively wealthy, and planned to restock its supplies in Salt Lake City, as did most wagon trains at the time. The party reached Salt Lake City with about 120 members.

More here

Mexico fail

2012-02-01T07:23:00.000-06:00

The Mexican economy is "hemorrhaging" billions of dollars annually because of money laundering, tax evasion and other forms of corruption, a new study has found.

Mexico lost $872 billion between 1970 and 2010, the Washington-based advocacy organization Global Financial Integrity said in an 80-page report released Monday. That averages a whopping 5.2% of gross domestic product, the group said.

"This is an enormously damaging reality for emerging markets and developing countries ... an enormously damaging drainage of resources," the group's director, Raymond W. Baker, said at a news conference.

It is money that could have been used to invest in education, to build roads or to fight the drug cartels, he noted, in a country with one of the largest gaps between rich and poor. "The negative ramifications are huge for everyday Mexicans," he said.

One of the most common ways for money to flow illegally out of Mexico is trade manipulation or incorrect pricing, Baker said, when companies or individuals falsify invoices and undervalue or overvalue exports or imports. The Times recently reported that "trade-based" money laundering was fast becoming a favored method of powerful drug cartels.

More here

Pussyfoot

2012-01-31T09:32:00.000-06:00

Congressman Alan West of Florida doesn't pussyfoot around...

"We need to let President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and my dear friend the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain’t on the table. Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America."

Offshore charade

2012-01-31T08:05:00.000-06:00

The Obama administration announced today that the Department of Interior will hold a consolidated lease sale for the Central Gulf of Mexico region, thus concluding the lease sales scheduled in 2007 and required by law. The timing of the announcement and the high profile the administration is giving it appears designed to make the American public think that President Obama is fulfilling his State of the Union pledge to "open up more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources." The facts, however, tell a different story. Consider the following:

1. The Obama administration claims that this sale is a component of the President’s desire to "promote safe and responsible domestic oil and gas production as a part of a comprehensive energy strategy."

FACT: President Obama imposed a job-killing moratorium on offshore energy development in the Gulf of Mexico that cost America at least 12,000 jobs and more than $2 billion over the course of the first six months of the moratorium. The only reason the Administration is holding a new lease sale for the Central Gulf of Mexico is because the sale is required as a part of the Congressionally-sanctioned 2007-2012 Five Year Plan, according to the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1978 (OCSLA). If the administration did not hold this sale before June 30, 2011, it would not be fulfilling the intent of the law.

2. The Obama administration claims that this lease sale will open up new offshore lands for energy development.

FACT: Today’s announced lease sale does not open any lands for exploration that were not already scheduled two years before President Obama took office. The 2007-2012 Five Year OCS Lease Plan included 16 sales in 6 offshore areas. Of these 16 sales, the Obama administration cancelled or delayed a number of them. Of the 2 that remain in the Central Gulf, the administration has scheduled them for simultaneous sale, which means that only one sale will actually occur. The Obama administration also cancelled a lease sale for areas off the coast of Virginia, and permanently removed 5 sales off the coast of Alaska. In 2010, the Obama administration did not hold a single lease sale, the first time this has happened in many years.

3. The Obama administration claims that this sale is a part of its strategy to "increase responsible domestic production and reduce dependence on foreign oil."

FACT: Even once the remaining 2007-2012 sales are complete, the administration has shown little interest in reducing America’s oil imports. The reductions in imports that have occurred in recent years owe more to the sluggish economy and reduced demand from American consumers than administration energy policy. Moreover, in recent weeks, the president single-handedly denied the Keystone XL pipeline permit, which would have made up to 830,000 barrels of North American oil available daily to U.S. markets.

4. The Obama administration claims that the terms of this sale will "ensure that taxpayers receive a fair market value for offshore resources."

FACT: U.S. taxpayers received 258 times less revenue from offshore lease sales last year than they did under the last year of the Bush administration. Revenue from offshore lease sales has plummeted from nearly $9.5 billion in FY2008 to paltry $36.7 million in FY2011.

5. The Obama administration claims that it is developing a new Five Year Plan for 2012-2017 that will "make more than 75 percent of undiscovered technically recoverable oil and gas estimated on the OCS available for development."

FACT: The United States currently has leased a mere 2.2% of available lands on the Outer Continental Shelf. The amount of un-leased lands that are not currently leased for energy development is equal to ten times the acreage of the entire State of Texas. Currently, limits on offshore production keep annual production to only 588 million barrels of oil — or less than 1/10th of our annual demand — even though the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement estimates that the U.S. has about 86 billion barrels of undiscovered oil in the Outer Continental Shelf. Nevertheless, the Obama administration continues to block exploration of the vast majority of America’s offshore resources.

Furthermore, the current Five Year Plan expires on June 30, 2012. The law mandates that the administration to present to Congress a new Five Year Plan, which requires a 60-day review period before final authorization. This means that the Obama administration must present the new Five Year Plan to Congress before May 1, 2012. If the administration does not produce a plan before then, the United States runs the risk of having no legal framework to develop the Outer Continental Shelf for the first time since the passage of OCSLA in 1978.

Source

Throw 'em all out

2012-01-30T10:37:00.000-06:00

Fifty-six percent of registered voters say they would vote out every member of Congress if there were a place on the ballot to do so. That’s the highest response in favor of the question since it was first asked in March 2010. Story

Elsewhere, here's a photo essay on dismantling a grounded ship on a beach in France.

Egypt is in dire straits...they import half of its caloric consumption...nearly half of its citizens are functionally illiterate...nine tenths of adult women have suffered genital mutilation...almost a third of Egyptians marry first or second cousins...about half live on less than $2 a day...and the Muslim Brotherhood recently won the majority of elections...and investors are fleeing the economy.

U-2 spy planes are still in use and will not be replaced by drones anytime soon. Story

434 Iraqis have been killed since U.S. left. Story

So, did Ron Paul edit those flaky newsletters after all? Story

Three European countries have banned the burka...France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

True or False?...Mitt has all the things people look for in a president: better hair, better body and height.

A Knoxville man is suspected of threatening an Arizona sheriff who is investigating claims that President Obama was not born in the United States. Story

George Soros is referred to as the "Spooky Dude" by Glenn Beck. Ha.

You aren't tough, these guys are.

President Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday underwhelmed by one significant measure: with 37.8 million television viewers, it was the least watched of the three he has delivered since 2010. And according to a new analysis of viewing patterns during the speech, interest was on the decline from the beginning. More than a quarter of the people who started watching on network television at 9 p.m. Eastern tuned out within the first five minutes — before the president even began speaking. Story

The Global Warming meme has fallen so miserably off the scale that I can't even recall any mention of it by Republicans or Democrats in at least six months or so.

More than a quarter (28%) of Italians between 16 and 24 are unemployed. Others are struggling to get by on unpaid internships or poorly paid jobs with little security....It's not just Italy, of course. Eurozone unemployment is at a record. According to Eurostat, the EU's statistical office, 16.3 million people are out of work in the 17 countries that joined the euro. The story of a lost generation is becoming the scandal of a continent. In Spain, 51.4% of those aged 16-24 are jobless. In Greece, the figure is 43%. Story

The temperature at Fairbanks International Airport hit 50 below zero Saturday morning for the first time since 2006, while a low of 57 below was reported in nearby North Pole.

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years. The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century. Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997. Story

Americans see the War of 1812 as a second war for independence from England. Canadians see it as a victory over American encroachment. Story

Okay, Democrats sometimes show a little bit of humor...After hearing of Arizona Governor Brewer's remark that she felt treatened by Obama's attitude at the airport, a NAACP official asked..."Did she think he was going to steal her purse?"

New York's finest?...Deemed a danger to kids, the typing teacher with a $10 million real estate portfolio hasn’t been allowed in a classroom for more than a decade, but still collects $100,049 a year in city salary — plus health benefits, a growing pension nest egg, vacation and sick pay. Story

As a rising young Chicago politician in 1995, no one campaigned more actively than Mr Obama for an amendment to the US Community Reinvestment Act, legally requiring banks to lend huge sums to millions of poor, mainly black Americans, guaranteed by the two giant mortgage associations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It was this Act, above all, which let the US housing bubble blow up, far beyond the point where it was obvious that hundreds of thousands of homeowners would be likely to default. Yet, in 2005, no one more actively opposed moves to halt these reckless guarantees than Senator Obama, who received more donations from Fannie Mae than any other US politician (although Senator Hillary Clinton ran him close). Story

Banality of evil...A Canadian jury has found an Afghani-Canadian father, mother, and son guilty of murdering three daughters and the father's second wife. Honor killing with so little honor.

Defense spending

2012-01-30T09:35:00.002-06:00

Stimulus

2012-01-30T08:51:00.000-06:00

The stimulus was supposed to work like this: First, a flood of money in tax cuts, food stamps and unemployment checks would get consumers spending. A deluge of education and health-care money would stanch the bleeding in state budgets.

Then, a wave of "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects would kick in, creating new jobs repaving roads and making homes more energy efficient. As the economy got churning again, new investments in wind farms, solar panel factories, electric cars, broadband and high-speed rail would lead America out of the recession and into a 21st century economy competitive with the rest of the world.

But it didn’t happen like that. The White House’s economists, like nearly every forecaster, misread the recession. The state assistance wasn’t enough to plug the budget holes and, in many cases, the school aid merely delayed rather than prevented teacher layoffs. Infrastructure projects took months longer to break ground than the public had been led to believe.

More here

Texas sues DOJ

2012-01-30T07:51:00.000-06:00

Texas is suing the Department of Justice (DOJ) in federal court for blocking the implementation of a state voter identification law—passed to deter and detect election fraud—the Obama Administration claims discriminates against minorities.

The Texas Legislature passed the measure in 2011 and six months ago it was submitted to the DOJ for approval. More than a dozen states—including Kansas, Indiana, Tennessee and Wisconsin—have similar laws that require voters to show government-issued photo identification at the polls and the Obama Administration has launched a campaign to challenge them all.

Liberals claim the laws are discriminatory because many minorities are too poor or too ignorant to get a valid identification—provided free in most states that have passed voter ID laws—that proves they are who they say they are. In fact, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida congresswoman who chairs the Democratic National Committee, says voter ID laws are a "full-scale-assault" on minority voters designed to "rig" elections for Republicans.

With that said, the administration is utilizing the DOJ as a political tool to challenge voter ID measures like one already upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) in 2008. In that case SCOTUS upheld Indiana’s voter ID law, ruling that the state’s interest in protecting the integrity of the voting process outweighed the insufficiently proven burdens the law may impose on voters. "There is no question about the legitimacy or importance of the State’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters," the nation’s highest court said in its decision.

This hasn’t deterred the DOJ’s mission to eliminate voter ID laws. In the Texas case, the agency must approve the measure because the Federal Voting Rights Act prohibits changes to election laws in certain states without federal clearance. The Texas Secretary of State’s Office has been waiting for the DOJ preclearance since last July, but the feds continue stalling, essentially blocking the law’s implementation.

More here

Conservatives are ignorant and racist

2012-01-28T09:35:00.000-06:00

It's been a year or so since the last story like this from the mainstream media...

Children with low intelligence are more likely to grow up to be social conservatives and racists, researchers found in a study published out of the U.K. The study, which appeared in the journal Psychological Science and was written up by Life Science, built upon previous research linking low education with prejudice, using data from two studies testing IQ and then political beliefs.

Story

Best comment by a reader..."What a brilliant article. And since blacks score the lowest on intelligence tests we can conclude that they therefore are the most racist. Right libs? And they also must be more attracted to conservative istitutions also. What? Is that racist to say? As racist as that picture of Larry the Cable Guy?"

Mother of all bombs

2012-01-28T09:06:00.000-06:00

Pentagon war planners have concluded that their largest conventional bomb isn't yet capable of destroying Iran's most heavily fortified underground facilities, and are stepping up efforts to make it more powerful, according to U.S. officials briefed on the plan.

The 30,000-pound "bunker-buster" bomb, known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, was specifically designed to take out the hardened fortifications built by Iran and North Korea to cloak their nuclear programs.

A crew loaded a 'bunker buster' at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in 2007; the military hopes to make the bomb more powerful.

But initial tests indicated that the bomb, as currently configured, wouldn't be capable of destroying some of Iran's facilities, either because of their depth or because Tehran has added new fortifications to protect them.

Doubts about the MOP's effectiveness prompted the Pentagon this month to secretly submit a request to Congress for funding to enhance the bomb's ability to penetrate deeper into rock, concrete and steel before exploding, the officials said.

The push to boost the power of the MOP is part of stepped-up contingency planning for a possible strike against Iran's nuclear program, say U.S. officials.

The Defense Department has spent about $330 million so far to develop about 20 of the bombs, which are built by Boeing Co. The Pentagon is seeking about $82 million more to make the bomb more effective, according to government officials briefed on the plan.

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Trust funds

2012-01-28T07:48:00.002-06:00

Electric car fail

2012-01-28T07:25:00.000-06:00

For electric vehicle enthusiasts with the "if you build it, they will come" mentality, who endorse endless taxpayer subsidies for plug-in automobiles and infrastructure to charge them, there’s bad news this week.

The Daily Mail reported that sales of electric cars in the United Kingdom have fallen so sharply that there are now more charging stations than there are vehicles. If you thought the flaccid U.S. sales of the Chevy Volt (7,671 units) and Nissan Leaf (9,674 units) were a letdown – despite significant government funding for research and development, batteries, charging systems, and a $7,500 tax credit for buyers – the signs from Europe won’t lift spirits.

"Just 2,149 electric cars have been sold since 2006, despite a government scheme last year offering customers up to £5,000 (about $7,700 U.S. dollars) towards the cost of a vehicle," the U.K. newspaper reported. "The Department for Transport says that around 2,500 charging points have been installed, although their precise location is not known."

That’s just 430 cars sold per year. In addition, Britain has spent £30 million on charging points for public and business locations, and EV buyers have taken advantage of only £3.9 million of the £300 million in government grants made available for EV purchases, according to The Daily Mail.

Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn has predicted that Leaf sales in the U.S. will double in 2012, and he believes electric cars will make up 10 percent of all vehicles sold by 2020. Meanwhile at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit last week, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood defended the Obama administration’s $7,500 tax credit for EV buyers in the U.S., despite the fact that mostly wealthy buyers have received the incentive. The secretary said the taxpayer subsidy "is real money and people have utilized it." EV advocates crowed that the Volt outsold the Leaf in December – its best month – and cited it as an sign of positive momentum for sales in 2012.

But parallel indicators to the U.K. experience foretell potential disinterest. In Tennessee an aggressive test program for EVs is being rolled out with a $2,500 tax rebate from the state (in addition to the $7,500 federal tax credit); a $1.4 billion U.S. Department of Energy loan to Nissan to retrofit its Smyna plant to build Leafs; and part of a $115 million grant from DOE going to Ecotality to establish a network of charging stations, many at Cracker Barrel restaurants alongside Tennessee Interstates. But so far only 228 Leafs were sold in the Volunteer State, using up only 20 percent of the tax rebate fund that’s available.

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SOTU

2012-01-27T10:14:00.000-06:00

Wasn't Obama's ~~campaign~~ State of the Union speech a doozy? He wants "a return to American values of fairness for all, and responsibility from all." Good luck, Barry. Responsibility is not a virtue in certain grievance communities, and fairness is often expected of everyone but themselves.

So, did Newt Gingrich really "resign in disgrace" from the House of Representatives back in the 90's? Story

Fidel Castro has lambasted the Republican presidential race as the greatest competition of "idiocy and ignorance" the world has ever seen, and also criticised the news media and foreign governments for seizing on the death of a Cuban prisoner to demand greater respect for human rights. Story (Castro is the last person on Earth who should be using "idiocy and ignorance" in a sentence)

Rumor has it that the mole on the left side of Obama's nose get's a little bigger with each lie he tells.

A pet serial killer is on the loose in the Houston area. Seven dogs were found dead, six of them pit bulls, over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. Three of those pit bulls were fatally shot, while the other four dogs suffered blunt trauma to the head. Story

So how much does Warren Buffet's secretary make? Story Rush Limbaugh points out that if she was paid in stocks, she'd have the same Capital Gains tax rate as Buffet and Romney.

Former congressman Tom DeLay is not a Gingrich fan..."He’s not really a conservative. I mean, he’ll tell you what you want to hear. He has an uncanny ability, sort of like Clinton, to feel your pain and know his audience and speak to his audience and fire them up. But when he was speaker, he was erratic, undisciplined."

Gov. Rick Perry's ill-fated presidential campaign left a sour taste with many Texans and damaged his standing with Republican voters, according to a new poll commissioned by the American-Statesman and other state newspapers. Story

Two decades after evicting U.S. forces from their biggest base in the Pacific, the Philippines is in talks with the Obama administration about expanding the American military presence in the island nation, the latest in a series of strategic moves aimed at China. (good news for the ladies in Olongapo)

According to NBC News, Newt Gingrich is the face of "resentment, racism, and angry white male rage."

Edith Starr Miller wrote in 1932..."Today, most of the good people are afraid to be good. They strive to be broadminded and tolerant. It is fashionable to be tolerant -- but mostly tolerant of evil -- and this new code has reached the proportions of demanding intolerance of good."

Sometimes I can't figure out if something is good or bad...must be the gray area the liberals are always talking about.

Governor Jan Brewer says Obama is thin skinned. Well, duh, aren't all narcissists thin skinned? It goes with the territory.

Score one for the geriatric crowd...A 65-year-old man shot one teenager dead and wounded another after they pushed him off his bicycle and tried to rob him in Pennsylvania, police said. Story

Georgia to keep Obama off the ballot in 2012? Story

Oops, here's another one...After months of financial turmoil, an Energy Department-backed lithium ion battery company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company, Ener1, received a $118 million grant from DOE in 2010 as part of the president’s stimulus package. The money, which went to Ener1 subsidiary EnerDel, aimed to promote renewable energy storage battery technology for electrical grid use. Story

Dozens of the same business and residential addresses were used repeatedly by people to obtain driver's licenses in New Mexico in a pattern that suggests fraud by immigrants trying to game the system, an Associated Press investigation has found. Story

Shaun Casey, the religious affairs adviser to presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008, said at a discussion on Tuesday about "God and Politics" that the demise of religious society in the United States is a good thing. "I, frankly, am glad American civil religion is dying," said Casey, who is an associate professor of Christian Ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. Story

Democrat Governor Bev Perdue of North Carolina has decided not to seek reelection in 2012. She's the one who said the 2012 elections should be canceled because of the huge losses the Democrats suffered in the 2010 midterm elections. Good riddance.

In a country sharply divided on almost every issue, most Americans agree on one thing: they don’t like Congress, and they would vote to replace every single member -- even their own -- if they had the option. Hear, hear.

Dumbing down

2012-01-27T08:53:00.000-06:00

President Obama's 2012 State of the Union address again rated at an 8th grade comprehension level on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test — the third lowest score of any State of the Union address since 1934.

The University of Minnesota's Smart Politics conducted an analysis on the last 70 State of the Union addresses and found that President Obama's three addresses have the lowest grade average of any modern president. "Obama's average grade-level score of 8.4 is more than two grades lower than the 10.7 grade average for the other 67 addresses written by his 12 predecessors," they conclude.

"The Flesch-Kincaid test is designed to assess the readability level of written text, with a formula that translates the score to a U.S. grade level. Longer sentences and sentences utilizing words with more syllables produce higher scores. Shorter sentences and sentences incorporating more monosyllabic words yield lower scores," the University of Minnesota's Eric Ostermeier explains.

Obama's use of simple language is in part a reflection of his audience: the American voter in an election year. And it's part of a larger trend in simpler State of the Union language as the speech as transitioned from a simple address to Congress into a prime-time televised event.

Source

Alabama

2012-01-27T07:40:00.000-06:00

Alabama’s unemployment rate continues to drop amid state-wide enforcement of a new immigration law, despite Democratic efforts to block and stigmatize the popular reform.

December’s unemployment rate fell to 8.1 percent, down from 8.7 percent in November and 9.8 percent in September.

"In the last three months alone, we’ve seen an unprecedented drop of 1.7 percentage points," noted Alabama Republican Gov. Robert Bentley in a Jan. 20 statement.

"Our rate is once again below the national average, and over 41,000 more Alabamians are employed now than at the beginning of the year… but we still have work to do," said Bentley.

The drop began after a bipartisan 2011 law toughened the state’s immigration enforcement policies.

The reform prompted many low-skilled illegal immigrants to leave the state, and was slammed by advocates for illegal immigrants, including Tom Perez, the chief of the Justice Department’s civil regulation division.

Many established media outlets have highlighted the departing illegals and controversial portions of the law — which forced schools to verify the immigration status of students, while downplaying the employment gains and the law’s popularity.

Source

Dodd-Frank

2012-01-26T08:58:00.002-06:00

Tuesday's GOP debate moderator was shocked by the front-runners' broadside against Dodd-Frank banking rules. He seemed to think they were hyping their damage. They weren't.

The media elite are under the assumption that all government regulations are good. So when both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich took shots at Dodd-Frank, NBC News anchor Brian Williams was flabbergasted. He expressed skepticism that its new rules posed any problem.

Gingrich straightened him out, arguing the media and the public don't know how "bad" the Democrats' law is.

"If you could repeal Dodd-Frank tomorrow morning, you would see the economy start to improve overnight," Gingrich asserted. "It is crushing independent banks" by clamping down on lending for both housing and small businesses.

Indeed, the American Bankers Association predicts the law will shutter 1,000 banks by 2020.

"The Dodd-Frank Act and the related burdens are threatening not just our industry but our very banks," outgoing ABA chair Stephen Wilson last year wrote to FDIC chief Sheila Bair. "The most conservative estimates that we have seen predict that by the end of the decade there will be 1,000 fewer banks in the United States than there are today."

Williams wasn't buying it. "Do you really think the financial system is overregulated?" he pressed. "That's the second mention of Dodd-Frank tonight."

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Gingrich is doomed

2012-01-26T07:55:00.001-06:00

Just two years after the Tea Party exploded onto the national stage and one year after Republicans won back the House, conservatism finds itself in the midst of an existential crisis.

At the risk of sounding maudlin or apocalyptic, the conservative movement is poised to become irrelevant or simply extinct. If the next few weeks go the way the last one did, conservatism may as well hang up a sign that says "Closed for Business (apologies to Ronald Reagan)."

Like many in the Tea Party, I first felt this nagging anxiety concerning fiscal conservatism, when, in 2008, a Republican administration enacted the Troubled Asset Relief Program and started bailing out banks. I felt it again on social issues, when I saw that nearly 56% of the Catholic vote inexplicably went to Barack Obama. And now, as one particular Republican candidate for President continues to gain momentum, the feeling has only metastasized.

Newt Gingrich, according to South Carolina conservatives and many national polls, appears to be a serious contender for the GOP nomination. That tells me, first, that conservatives don’t really want to win the White House. It also tells me that they don’t care much about down-ballot races, either. And it tells me that our conservative values — limited government being foremost — are easily discarded to satisfy a momentary lust for entertainment.

In short, conservatives are in dire need of a come-to-Jesus-moment, the likes of which even Tim Tebow cannot inspire.

Let’s take this first as a matter of strategy: Nominating Gingrich is tantamount to reelecting President Obama. He simply cannot win a general election. According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, Obama beats Gingrich by a whopping 53% to 38%.

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Wednesday

2012-01-25T07:51:00.000-06:00

Gabrielle Giffords has finally resigned...In case you’re wondering about the timing of her resignation, and why she might have waited so long to resign a job for which she was completely incapable of doing…well…she might be an incredible survivor, but she’s still a Democrat at heart. She had to be in office for at least 5 years to get the lifetime pension of $139,200 per year plus COLA, along with the Congress’s health policy. Since she didn’t take office until January, 2007, she had to serve until January, 2012 to meet the lifetime benefits package benchmark. Source

America is not a Center-Right nation. That ceased being true at the end of Reagan's second term. America is a place where Gays serve openly in the military, gay marriage is the law of the land in most places, Whites have no Civil Rights (according to the first Black Attorney General), Black Panthers can run voter intimidation campaigns with impunity, illegal aliens can vote in many places, and get preferential admission and tuition rates, along with college financial aid. That's not a Center-Right nation. That's not a Center nation. That's not even a Left Nation. That's a Hard Left Nation. And that's America. Today's America celebrates non-Whites, views White guys as inherently "racist" (unless they are a dominant, Alpha A-hole hottie) and engages in regular PC jihads. Source

On Friday, you could buy a barrel of light, sweet crude oil produced in North Dakota for less than $81. On that same day, oil refiners in Port Arthur on the coast of Texas were paying around $110 to import a similar grade of oil produced in Nigeria. That's $30 worth of incentive to you to try to figure out a way to transport oil from North Dakota to Port Arthur in order to replace a barrel of imported Nigerian oil with Williston sweet. As a nation, if we could divert some of the resources we are currently devoting to pay for oil imported from Nigeria, and use them instead to enable the Port Arthur refinery to get its oil from North Dakota, we will become richer. Story

Victor Davis Hanson on Obama...What a strange fellow: damning the 1% only to hire three-in-a-row multimillionaire "fat-cat" ex-Wall-streeters as his chiefs-of-staff, while he lives a life indistinguishable from those he caricatures. Obama brags of killing bin Laden, without the slightest concession that he employed protocols to do it that he once smeared, or that he got the troops home for Christmas, without a peep that he followed the Bush-Petraeus plan and not his own that once called for complete flight by March 2008. Poor conservatives: should they praise him for get-real flip-flops or damn him for his hypocrisy and the damage he once did as a critic of what kept us safe? He is a figure right out Aristophanes, a polypragmon scoundrel, a demagogic genius, who can bomb Libya without congressional authority, claim it was not military action — and all the while keep the Michael Moore left silent if not proud of their guy’s duplicity, while begging the right to dare argue that Libya is not better off without the nightmare of Gaddafi.

Ozone hole above the Arctic has actually been caused by COLD weather, say scientists after high-altitude aircraft survey. Story

Tom Brady's new house...The mansion, which is 22,000-square feet and boasts eight bedrooms, has a six-car garage, a lagoon-shaped swimming pool with spa, a weight room forn Tom to train in and a wine cellar. Story

Ever wonder what climatologists really think about global warming when they think they are talking among themselves and let their hair down? Well, Tom Nelson has plowed through the latest pile of Climategate e-mails released late last year, and reading them shows that the scientific consensus on global warming is that it is a cash cow and whatever you do, don’t risk it by casting any doubt whatsoever. Story

15 Questions The Mainstream Media Would Ask Barack Obama If He Were A Republican. Story

The standing ovation for Newt’s remarks were not an endorsement of his behavior — many conservatives are troubled by Gingrich’s past and character does matter to them, while other conservatives are remembering their own sins and falling back on what they know of mercy, for the time being. No, that ovation was an endorsement of Gingrich’s disdain for the mainstream media, which they share, and a declaration to that same media that their playbook is played-out. Source

Bill Maher supports Ron Paul. And he says his audience are brainwashed liberals. Good example of the pot calling the kettle black.

The blogger, Robert Godwin, doesn't like atheists...That Darwinism can satisfy the cramped and barren intellect of contemporary timedwellers and ideobots is a statement about their desiccated intellect, not about Truth. At the very least, these spiritual ungreats have no idea what religion has done for them, because it has all been done collectively and subliminally through a kind of cultural and historical osmosis. But to be unaware of the extraordinary spiritual sacrifices others have made in order to make your otherwise insignificant life possible is to live as a barbarian. Your whole miserable life is lived in borrowed -- no, stolen -- Light, which you cannot even acknowledge.

Moody’s recently downgraded Illinois state debt to A2 from A1, the lowest among the 50 states. That’s worse even than California.

Demi Moore gets no sympathy by readers of this story.

Enemies list

2012-01-25T06:44:00.002-06:00

Education fail

2012-01-25T06:00:00.000-06:00

The Department of Education spends about $200 million a year on research intended to improve educational practice. No evidence exists that these expenditures have done any significant good.

As far as I can determine, the Department of Education has no track record of positive accomplishment—nothing in the national numbers on educational achievement, nothing in the improvement of educational outcomes for the disadvantaged, nothing in the advancement of educational practice. It just spends a lot of money. This brings us to the practical question: If the Department of Education disappeared from next year’s budget, would anyone notice? The only reason that anyone would notice is the money. The nation’s public schools have developed a dependence on the federal infusion of funds. As a practical matter, actually doing away with the Department of Education would involve creating block grants so that school district budgets throughout the nation wouldn’t crater.

Sadly, even that isn’t practical. The education lobby will prevent any serious inroads on the Department of Education for the foreseeable future. But the answer to the question posed in the title of this talk—"Do we need the Department of Education?"—is to me unambiguous: No.

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Donkey Whisperer

2012-01-24T10:41:00.002-06:00

Here

Budget fail

2012-01-24T10:25:00.000-06:00

The last time the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate passed a budget was April 29, 2009 — 1,000 days ago. It's no mystery why: They don't want taxpayers to know about the trillions they're wasting.

A published budget would be an election-year death warrant for Senate Democrats, because Republican Senate candidates would stuff its highlights into every mailbox they could.

As Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., points out, going budget-less for so long has devastated our economy as Democrats have spent "$9.4 trillion and added $4.1 trillion to the national debt," plus over $1 trillion in deficits.

Is insisting on a budget just Republican carping? Back on April, 29, 2009, in his 15th week as president, Barack Obama expressed "how gratified I am that the House and the Senate passed a budget resolution today that will serve as an economic blueprint for this nation's future."

He made it a point to "thank Leader Reid, Speaker (Nancy) Pelosi, all the members of Congress who worked so quickly and effectively to make this blueprint a reality."

A budget, according to the president 1,000 days ago, is necessary "to lay a new foundation for growth." He praised Reid's 2009 budget for its massive new spending, like "new investments in renewable energy that will create millions of jobs and new industries, new investments in health care that will cut costs for families and businesses, and new savings that will bring down our deficit."

Since Obama gave those assurances, the jobs haven't materialized, health insurance premiums have risen significantly in expectation of ObamaCare and the deficit has skyrocketed.

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Best Buy fail?

2012-01-24T09:13:00.000-06:00

In case you aren’t aware, Best Buy made a point a few years ago to start celebrating Muslim holidays while simultaneously removing Christmas from its December advertising — replacing it with "Seasons Greetings" or "The Holidays".

As a company, Best Buy also decided Thanksgiving wasn't going to be featured in its ads either as of 2009 — but they’d make a big deal about celebrating something called Eid al-Adha instead.

2009 was the last year I ever bought so much as a soda pop or stick of gum at Best Buy.

I hope you don’t shop there either.

But, if you do, you won’t have much longer to celebrate Ramadan or "Mutilate Young Girls With Female Circumcision Day" (however Best Buy phrases that in Arabic on its in-store promotions) because FORBES analysts have realized that Best Buy is in the beginning states of bankruptcy and closure.

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Newt

2012-01-24T08:25:00.000-06:00

Newt Gingrich’s rise has a lot to do with Newt Gingrich’s debate performance. But it has just as much to do with a party base in revolt against its thought and party leaders in Washington, DC. The base is revolting because they swept the GOP back into relevance in Washington just under two years ago and they have been thanked with contempt ever since.

Adding insult to injury, the party and thought leaders now try to foist on the base a milquetoast moderate from Massachusetts. Newt Gingrich can thank Mitt Romney and more for the second look he is getting. Base hostility will now be exacerbated by Mitt Romney’s backers now undoubtedly making a conscious effort to prop up Rick Santorum to shut down Newt Gingrich.

Source

Destroying inventory and other outrages

2012-01-23T09:53:00.000-06:00

The head of a House Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee investigating the collapse of solar panel maker Solyndra said Friday that tapes showing company workers destroying inventory were "an outrage." "First we learn of the ridiculous request for $500,000 in Solyndra bonuses. Now we find out that these employees are apparently destroying millions of dollars worth of equipment," said Rep. Cliff Stearns, Florida Republican and chairman of the committee’s investigations panel. Story

Elsewhere...For years, the Left has asked why the Obama administration hasn’t pursued prosecutions against lenders who arguably engaged in fraud when foreclosing on mortgages in the wake of the housing-bubble collapse. It turns out that these lenders had friends in high places in the Department of Justice. Reuters reports that both Attorney General Eric Holder and his lieutenant Lanny Breuer, who ran the DoJ’s criminal division, were partners in a law firm that worked on behalf of those very same firms. Story

The Wall Street Journal reports...France suspended its training and combat-support operations in Afghanistan and threatened to pull its troops from the country after an Afghan soldier opened fire on a group of French service members, killing four and seriously wounding eight. "The French army isn't in Afghanistan to be shot at by Afghan soldiers," President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a speech to diplomats in Paris. (unintended comedy from surrender monkeys)

And speaking of Sarkozy...French leader Nicolas Sarkozy faces a battle to avoid a shock first round exit in April presidential elections, a poll showed on Thursday, after far-right candidate Marine Le Pen closed to within two points of the incumbent.

Rush Limbaugh on the past week's events..."We haven't had a week like this since the salad days of the Clinton Administration. We've had everything. We've had class envy, charges of adultery, adultery, people defending adultery. It's no wonder the soap operas are going off the air. They can't compete with American politics! They have no hope."

The mere possession of an eagle feather by a non-Indian can result in fines and imprisonment, even if the feather came from a bird butchered by a wind turbine: up to $100,000, a year in prison or both for a first offense. Poisoning or otherwise killing common bats that have nested in one’s attic can cost homeowners thousands of dollars in fines. Wind turbine companies, officers and employees, however, are immune from prosecution, fines or imprisonment, regardless of how many rare, threatened, endangered or migratory birds and bats they kill. In fact, FWS data show that wind turbines slaughter some 400,000 birds every year. If "helter-skelter" applies to any energy source, it is wind turbines, reflecting their Charles Manson effect on birds. Story

Barack Obama’s 2008 Iowa New Media Director was arrested Friday for attempting to use the identities of Secretary of State Matt Schultz, and/or his brother Thomas, with the intent to falsely implicate the Secretary Schultz in illegal or unethical behavior. Zach Edwards, 29, of Des Moines, currently works for Link Strategies, a Democrat-affiliated organization with ties to Iowa Senator Tom Harkin. Edwards is the Director of New Media for Link Strategies. Story

A judge has ordered President Barack Obama to appear in court in Atlanta for a hearing on a complaint that says Obama isn't a natural-born citizen and can't be president. It's one of many such lawsuits that have been filed across the country, so far without success. A Georgia resident made the complaint, which is intended to keep Obama's name off the state's ballot in the March presidential primary. Story

Obama's new reelection slogan is..."Change Is". Yes, that's it, Change Is. But I suppose it depends on the definition of "is" whether change is or is not, right?

Headline of the week..."New York Times Writer Goes to Israel, Declares His Ambivalence About Judaism, Visits a Few Churches, Gets Drunk, Leaves" Story

So how's the Republican race for delegates adding up so far? GOP delegate tracker here.

She blasted her ex-husband for cheating on their vows, but Marianne Gingrich reportedly carried on a prolonged affair of her own with a married man with three kids. Story

Newt Gringrich's Quote of the Week..."I want America to become so energy independent that no American president ever again bows to the Saudi king."

The cruise ship, Costa Corcordia, decks were named after the 13 EU nations. According to this story the sinking may be an omen for the collapse of the EU.

South Carolina's Attorney General, Alan Wilson has notified the U.S. Justice Department of potential voter fraud. Wilson says an analysis found 953 ballots cast by voters were people who are listed as dead. He has asked the State Law Enforcement Division to investigate. Source

Iraq reverting back to authoritarianism? Come on, really? Who would have guessed? Story

Digital simulation of Costa Concordia's path. Here

Nine myths about the Tuskegee Airmen.

Wikileaker

2012-01-23T07:38:00.000-06:00

Assange sits on a tattered couch, wearing a wool sweater, dark pants and an electronic manacle around his right ankle, visible only when he crosses his legs. At 40, the WikiLeaks founder comes across more like an embattled rebel commander than a hacker or journalist. He's become better at handling the media – more willing to answer questions than he used to be, less likely to storm off during interviews – but the protracted legal battle has left him isolated, broke and vulnerable. Assange recently spoke to someone he calls a Western "intelligence source," and he asked the official about his fate. Will he ever be a free man again, allowed to return to his native Australia, to come and go as he pleases? "He told me I was fucked," Assange says.

More here

Education spending

2012-01-23T07:06:00.000-06:00

Fed takes Fifth

2012-01-21T09:56:00.000-06:00

The chief of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona is refusing to testify before Congress regarding Operation Fast and Furious, the federal gun-running scandal that sent U.S. weapons to Mexico.

Patrick J. Cunningham informed the House Oversight Committee late Thursday through his attorney that he will use the Fifth Amendment protection.

Cunningham was ordered Wednesday to appear before Chairman Darrell Issa and the House Oversight Committee regarding his role in the operation that sent more than 2,000 guns to the Sinaloa Cartel. Guns from the failed operation were found at the murder scene of Border Agent Brian Terry.

The letter from Cunningham's Washington DC attorney stunned congressional staff. Last week, Cunningham, the second highest ranking U.S. Attorney in Arizona, was scheduled to appear before Issa‘s committee voluntarily. Then, he declined and Issa issued a subpoena.

Cunningham is represented by Tobin Romero of Williams and Connolly who is a specialist in white collar crime. In the letter, he suggests witnesses from the Department of Justice in Washington, who have spoken in support of Attorney General Eric Holder, are wrong or lying.

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