Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Why O Why?

Instapundit » Blog Archive » THOUGHTS ON RESPONSIBILITY: “It’s OK to be charitable with your own money. It’s not so virtuou…: "Why is OK for the President to announce a policy of higher taxation on the rich to finance higher handouts based on his view of what Jesus wants, but it is not OK for the Catholic Church to object to financing abortions based on their view of what Jesus wants?"
Because O Duce thinks he is God.

As do most Communists. Hence all the bloody slaughter in Communist countries.

But luckily for us, our President is only a Socialist.

Did I forget to mention that Lenin said the goal of Socialism is Communism?

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The Virtue O Impoverishment ...

Chu Lets the Cat Out of the Bag | Power Line: "Barack Obama came into office as an anti-petroleum crusader. He made no bones about the fact that he wanted gas prices to rise; likewise, his Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, explained that he wanted U.S. gas prices to rise to European levels. In those days, global warming alarmists were riding high, and the Obama administration accepted the idea that to prevent climate change, it should suppress production of domestic oil and gas, thereby raising the price of fossil fuel energy (gasoline, jet fuel, heating oil, coal-fired electricity, etc.) so that Americans would not be able to afford as much of it. This was, of course, a strategy for impoverishing the American people, but in those heady times, the administration considered that a minor inconvenience if not a positive virtue."
Good God are Americans brainwashed.

I guess they'll learn when they're starving in the dark and not before.

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Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Those D*mn Republicans

Instapundit » Blog Archive » HILLARY CLINTON: These Republicans are inflaming the situation in Afghanistan by criticizing Obama …: "HILLARY CLINTON: These Republicans are inflaming the situation in Afghanistan by criticizing Obama for apologizing. Allah comments: “I can see why she’s ‘somewhat troubled.’ If there’s one thing the Democratic Party stood for between 2003 and 2008, it’s the principle that the opposition party should tread lightly when criticizing the president lest it inflame opinion abroad.”

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 8:46 am"
Yes, the Demonrats tread ever, ever so lightly...

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Monday, February 27, 2012

Brutal, Apocalyptic Theocratic Dictatorship

Secret memo suggests White House ignored SOS from Iranian opposition | Washington Examiner: "Documents obtained by The Washington Examiner suggest the Obama administration missed at least one major opportunity to help opposition groups in Iran that has not previously been reported. In November 2009, leaders of the Green party, which had staged a revolt on the streets of Tehran in June of that year, sent a long memo through channels to the Obama administration that some analysts said was a clear call for help.

"So now, at this pivotal point in time, it is up to the countries of the free world to make up their mind," states the opposition memo dated Nov. 30, 2009. "Will they continue on the track of wishful thinking and push every decision to the future until it is too late, or will they reward the brave people of Iran and simultaneously advance the Western interests and world peace."

The eight-page memo describes the current regime under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a "brutal, apocalyptic theocratic dictatorship.""

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COTD: We Cannot Survive It For Much Longer

Belmont Club » A Comment About The Corruption of Culture: "I think the Death of God project is itself dying. By that I do not mean that the Christian God or some other idea will stride forth triumphant, only that the experiment of man living only under his own authority, without reference to external reality is over. “It Depends” has brought us Hitler, Stalin and Mao. We cannot survive it for much longer.

We are intellectually disarmed, reduced to madness almost, by this notion that we can make anything out of anything by the operation of human will. We cannot. The great sacrament of the Left is abortion for the same reason that Stavrogin’s was pedophilia. It’s a declaration of independence from God, or god, or nature, from all possibility of any restraint but our own whim.

The key insight is to realize that there is really no reason you can give, in the PC universe, as to why you should not abuse your daughter. No reason at all. It’s all arbitrary. And one day when they have finished sanctifying all the different kinds of marriages they want to sanctify, they will get to pedophilia."
Interesting when the COTD is a comment by the author on his own post. But RTWT and see if I'm not right.

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Crack Reportage

Absolutely no spin at all: how the AP reports Obama’s hostage crisis in Egypt « The Greenroom: "The administration has been calling for the case to be resolved for weeks in a manner that allows seven of the implicated Americans who have been barred from leaving to leave the country.
Please note that the words “hostages”, “crisis”, “Carter”, and “SCOAMF” were carefully omitted from the AP’s crack reportage.

Which is why Americans regard the Associated Press with roughly the same level of disdain as they had for Pravda during the Nikita Khrushchev era."
Or is that reportage while on crack?

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Sunday, February 26, 2012

Slave "Rights"

The Perversion of Rights - Mark Steyn - National Review Online: "The transformation of “human rights” from restraints upon state power into a pretext for state power is nicely encapsulated in the language of Article 14 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which states that everyone has the right “to receive free compulsory education.” Got that? You have the human right to be forced to do something by the government."
Controlled by one O Duce who seems to have accreted all your rights:
So maybe you’re not interested in philosophical notions of liberty vs. statism — like Danica Patrick, tens of millions of people are happy to “leave it up to the government to make good decisions.” Maybe you’re relatively relaxed about the less theoretical encroachments of Big Government — the diversion of so much American energy into “professional services,” all the lawyering and bookkeeping and paperwork shuffling necessary to keep you and your economic activity in full compliance with the Bureau of Compliance. But at some point no matter how painless the seductions of statism, you run up against the hard math: As those debt per capita numbers make plain, all this “free” stuff is doing is mortgaging your liberty and lining up a future of serfdom.

I used to think that the U.S. Constitution would prove more resilient than the less absolutist liberties of other Western nations. But the president has calculated that, with Obamacare, the First Amendment and much else will crumble before his will. And, given trends in U.S. jurisprudence, who’s to say he won’t get his way? That’s the point about all this “free” stuff: Ultimately, it’s not about your rights, but about his.

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Rearmament

Spanish revolt brews as national economic rearmament begins in Europe - Telegraph: "What is needed to save the South must endanger the North. Germany would overheat, pushing its inflation to 4pc or 5pc until Bild Zeitung erupts in Teutonic fury. It is impossible to reconcile the conflicting imperatives.

My guess is that Germany's refusal to countenance any form of EU subsidies, debt-pooling, or fiscal union -- other than policing the budgets of captive states -- has definitively broken the EMU spell. Latin nations by increasingly regard talk euro of solidarity as humbug. It has been a nasty shock. The era of national economic rearmament in Europe has begun."

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Abusing Koch

An open letter to the Obama campaign | Power Line: "If the President’s campaign has some principled disagreement with the arguments we are making publicly about the staggering debt the President and previous administrations have imposed on the country, the regulations that are stifling business growth and innovation, the increasing intrusion of government into nearly every aspect of American life, we would be eager to hear them. But it is an abuse of the President’s position and does a disservice to our nation for the President and his campaign to criticize private citizens simply for the act of engaging in their constitutional right of free speech about important matters of public policy. The implication in that sort of attack is obvious: dare to criticize the President’s policies and you will be singled out and personally maligned by the President and his campaign in an effort to chill free speech and squelch dissent."
Well, O Duce used to abuse coc(aine), why should we expect him to kick the habit?

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Saturday, February 25, 2012

Eugenic Jizya

Obama’s Apologies - By Mario Loyola - The Corner - National Review Online: "So the president refuses to apologize for forcing Catholics to violate their religious beliefs or pay a tax penalty.  

But he immediately apologizes because a few of our soldiers inadvertently violated Muslims religious beliefs by trying to dispose of already-desecrated Korans.

Well, despite his apology, hoardes of semi-barbarian Afghans went on a rampage, burned Obama in dog-head effigy, and killed several of our soldiers.

And if you think that’s bad, just imagine what they would do if Obama adopted a rule forcing Muslims to violate their religious beliefs or pay a tax penalty."
Ooof. I was't quite my usual self for a few weeks there and didn't put it together that O Duce is actually demanding that the Catholics pay eugenic jizya.

Wow.

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Pining For Ralph

Articles: Obama Skins the Cat: "Once it had become clear to Obama that there was no chance to pass legislation to force CO2 control, he vowed to find other ways to "skin the cat" (his words).  Three of these subterfuges are underway, disguised in various ways to hide their true purpose.

1. Doubling mileage standards for automobiles by 2025 -- meant to reduce smog and other urban pollution, as well as the need for imported oil -- thereby improving national security.  But the EPA, which has already drastically tightened existing standards, is quite open about the real purpose -- to reduce CO2 emissions.  In essence, EPA has preempted the role of the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration), which has the statutory responsibility for setting CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards.  However, there is little chance that auto companies can produce reasonably priced cars that people will want to buy and -- note the irony -- are safe to drive.  (Oh, Ralph Nader, where are you when we need you?)"
When I start pining for Ralph Nader, you know we have a Marxist president. And this one is a RTWT that really puts O Duce into perspective.

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FollOw The Money

Instapundit » Blog Archive » I DUNNO — HAVE YOU LOOKED AT HIS DONORS LIST LATELY? Why did the Obama administration agree to a “…: "I DUNNO — HAVE YOU LOOKED AT HIS DONORS LIST LATELY? Why did the Obama administration agree to a “robo-signing” settlement that barely punishes the huge banks behind the foreclosure crisis?

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 8:29 am"
But don't worry, it's only the dumbo elephants that are corrupt. And he looks nice on TV so why shouldn't we trust him?

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Friday, February 24, 2012

Insufficient Graft

Instapundit » Blog Archive » HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Supersizing Higher Education Is Not The Answer: Wood demonstrate…: "What truly correlates with economic success is not how many people get college credentials, but the degree of economic freedom in a country. Hong Kong isn’t prosperous because a large percentage of its citizens get college degrees. It’s prosperous because the government doesn’t meddle in the economy. In the Index of Economic Freedom, Hong Kong has been No. 1 for a long time. In that same index, the U.S. has been falling for years, and is now No. 10.

Too bad that Obama isn’t determined to elevate the U.S. to No. 1 in that respect.
The trouble with economic freedom is that it yields insufficient graft.

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 6:21 pm"

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Au0.0732/bbl

Gasoline Prices Are Not Rising, the Dollar Is Falling - Forbes: "In terms of judging whether the price of WTI is high or low, here is the price that truly matters: 0.0602 ounces of gold per barrel (which can be written as Au0.0602/bbl). What this number means is that, right now, a barrel of WTI has the same market value as 0.0602 ounces of gold.

During the 493 months since January 1, 1971, the price of WTI has averaged Au0.0732/bbl. It has been higher than that during 225 of those months and lower than that during 268 of those months. Plotted as a graph, the line representing the price of a barrel of oil in terms of gold has crossed the horizontal line representing the long-term average price (Au0.0732/bbl) 29 times.

At Au0.0602/bbl, today’s WTI price is only 82% of its average over the past 41+ years. Assuming that gold prices remained at today’s $1,759.30/oz, WTI prices would have to rise by about 22%, to $128.86/bbl, in order to reach their long-term average in terms of gold."
Auggggh.

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Thursday, February 23, 2012

Perversity

Instapundit » Blog Archive » BILL QUICK: You Get What You Pay For: Look, it is relatively simple. Graduate from high school, …: "BILL QUICK: You Get What You Pay For:
Look, it is relatively simple. Graduate from high school, get a job, keep it, get married, and stay married. You won’t live a life of poverty and degradation.

Yet it is the very folks who claim to mean well who wreak the most destruction on the poor. Here’s a truth from the Copybook Headings: You get what you pay for.

Our society chooses to pay for bastards and wonders why the number of bastards increases. Our society refuses to support poor families with married fathers in residence, and wonders why the number of single mothers increases. Our society pays for single motherhood, and wonders why we get it. Our society gives stipends to unemployed and/or homeless males, and wonders why we get more and more of them.

Why on earth would any of the poor pay attention to “cultural signals” when the check that comes to them pays for exactly the opposite?
Incentives work, even when they’re perverse

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 6:03 pm"
Yup.

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Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Flaming Water-Skis

United States' economy: Over-regulated America | The Economist: "Every hour spent treating a patient in America creates at least 30 minutes of paperwork, and often a whole hour. Next year the number of federally mandated categories of illness and injury for which hospitals may claim reimbursement will rise from 18,000 to 140,000. There are nine codes relating to injuries caused by parrots, and three relating to burns from flaming water-skis."
This is a RTWT even though it washes out at the end.

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Skynet Swarms Spotted

A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors - YouTube: "Experiments performed with a team of nano quadrotors at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania. Vehicles developed by KMel Robotics. Special thanks to Professor Daniel Lee for his support."
And watch out in Zurich:

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Tuesday, February 21, 2012

A Duty Of National Security

Instapundit » Blog Archive » HAMMER AND TONGS: Newt Gingrich Goes After Obama….: "HAMMER AND TONGS: Newt Gingrich Goes After Obama.

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 6:05 pm"
Well, he's got that right.

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Unsettled

Concerned Scientists Reply on Global Warming - WSJ.com: "In summary, science progresses by testing predictions against real world data obtained from direct observations and rigorous experiments. The stakes in the global-warming debate are much too high to ignore this observational evidence and declare the science settled. Though there are many more scientists who are extremely well qualified and have reached the same conclusions we have, we stress again that science is not a democratic exercise and our conclusions must be based on observational evidence.

The computer-model predictions of alarming global warming have seriously exaggerated the warming by CO2 and have underestimated other causes. Since CO2 is not a pollutant but a substantial benefit to agriculture, and since its warming potential has been greatly exaggerated, it is time for the world to rethink its frenzied pursuit of decarbonization at any cost."
This is just the ending -- I strongly suggest you RTWT.

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Monday, February 20, 2012

Real Fake

Ace of Spades HQ: "$6 trillion worth of fake US bonds seized in Italy. The real ones won't be worth much more than the fakes before long."
Ain't that the truth...

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Nobody Home

Belmont Club » 702 Rue Vermont: "Those dancing fingers were given hundreds of thousands of dollars, but nobody knows where the money went. Why should anyone care? It all belongs to the Man anyway, right? Responsibility was in the Commons too.
The group would debate endlessly how to use the $700,000 it raised, and even when it would spend some of that money — on bail or food — it would be accused by some members of misappropriation.

A group of 20 actually controls the money but were constantly saying they weren’t the “leaders”.
And yet the public is told that more of the same will improve the state of the nation. That more Occupy means more for the 99%. Why? Because they mean well. Because their moral compass will allow the poor and downtrodden to navigate the arc of history. That is probably true, but to what end? Where does their arc, their Rainbow Bridge lead? Does it connect Asgaard and Earth, like the White House to 702 Rue Vermont? Or is it a bridge to nowhere that is nobody’s home and nobody home."

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Sunday, February 19, 2012

Banking Pandora

The ECB Has Opened Pandora’s Box | ZeroHedge: "
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. “
-Thomas Jefferson
I am not going to speculate about anything this morning. No guesses about what the Finance Ministers might do on Monday, no simple addition or subtraction that the data used to forecast Greece’s return to a 120% debt to GDP ratio is a falsification of the numbers, no mention that only nineteen cents of any bailout for Greece would actually go to the country; I am not going to discuss anything except what the European Central Bank has actually done and what we now know with a one hundred percent (100%) certainty and the horrifying implications of their actions."

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I'm Guessing The Praetorian Guard Kept This One Away From You...

The Woman Who (Partially) Silenced Chris Matthews | Power Line: "Over on NRO’s Corner Charles Cooke notes with delight that Chris Matthews has abruptly stopped his nightly plugs for his new hagiography of John F. Kennedy, most likely because of the obvious embarrassment of Mimi Alford’s new memoir Once Upon A Secret.  There’s nothing in Alford’s story that we didn’t already know in general outline about JFK’s priapism, though the bit about how JFK pimped her out to Dave Powers ought to leave a mark."

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Saturday, February 18, 2012

Inventing on Principle

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle on Vimeo: "Bio: Bret Victor invents tools that enable people to understand and create. He has designed experimental UI concepts at Apple"

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

Well worth your time if you're a programmer or wanna be. And even if you're at all creative...

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Cooking

The man who taught BHO to cook: "Food imagery is just one measure out of many that make the case for Ayers’ involvement. In fact, all measures make that case – the nautical imagery, the shared postmodern language, the identical educational philosophies, the three parallel stories, the four matching mistakes, the eye imagery, the remarkably similar Homeric openings and themes, the Andersen confirmation, the failure of Obama to write well in any other context.

In researching the food imagery, I was reminded how thoroughly Ayers took over this book project and how much work it required on his part.

At CPAC Breitbart noted that Obama “met a bunch of silver pony tails” in the 1980s, like Ayers and Dohrn, and they started grooming him then for the presidency. “Dreams” was clearly part of the launch.

“This election we are going to vet [Obama],” Breitbart promised. A good place to start is with “Dreams.” We know that Ayers largely wrote it. Now we need to know why."

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Saturday Steyn

Contraception Misdirection - Mark Steyn - National Review Online: "The U.S. economy shuts down in 2027? Had you heard about that? It’s like the ultimate Presidents’ Day sale: Everything must go — literally! At such a moment, it may seem odd to find the political class embroiled in a bitter argument about the Obama administration’s determination to force Catholic institutions (and, indeed, my company and your company, if you’re foolish enough still to be in business in the United States) to provide free prophylactics to their employees. The received wisdom among media cynics is that Obama has engaged in an ingenious bit of misdirection by seizing on a pop-culture caricature of Republicans and inviting them to live up to it: Those uptight squares with the hang-ups about fornication have decided to force you to lead the same cheerless sex lives as them. I notice that in their coverage NPR and the evening news shows generally refer to the controversy as being about “contraception,” discreetly avoiding mention of sterilization and pharmacological abortion, as if the GOP have finally jumped the shark in order to prevent you jumping anything at all."
A RTWT as always...

OK, you can't miss this bit either:
In 2009 Nancy Pelosi called for free contraceptives as a form of economic stimulus. Ten thousand Americans retire every day, and leave insufficient progeny to pick up the slack. In effect, Nancy has rolled a giant condom over the entire American economy.

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Friday, February 17, 2012

Before The End...

Belmont Club » Packet Collisions: "Undoubtedly the Liberals will say that the only problem with Dodd-Frank was that it was only 23 times longer than Glass-Seagall, clearly inadequate. Like the stimulus it has to be as big as a bazooka to work. Why not make it 230 times longer? Or 2,300 times longer — if that’s what it takes.

But at some point the diminishing returns kick in. Just how many hours will an attorney charge just to see if you are in basic compliance? And will it guarantee no more loopholes?

It’s a game you can’t win. And sooner or later, as night follows day, the system will complexify itself to death. There isn’t enough free energy on earth to regulate everything to the degree that statists think they should be regulated. But they’re going to try. Before the end, they are sure going to try."
As used to be well known, the road to h*ll is paved with good intentions.

Alternately, you can look at it through Upton Sinclair's lens as quoted by Daniel Hannan recently:
"It is remarkably difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

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Vichy Catholics


. . . With Both Hands: Father Bob Barron Exposes Obama's War on Catholics: "The secularist state recognizes that its principle enemy is the Church Catholic. Accordingly, it wants Catholicism off the public stage and relegated to a private realm where it cannot interfere with secularism's totalitarian agenda. I realize that in using that particular term, I'm dropping a rhetorical bomb, but I am not doing so casually.

There is a modality of secular liberalism that is not aggressive toward religion, but rather recognizes that religion makes an indispensable contribution to civil society. This more tolerant liberalism allows, not only for freedom of worship, but also for real freedom of religion, which is to say, the expression of religious values in the public square and the free play of religious ideas in the public conversation. Most of our founding fathers advocated just this type of liberalism.

But there is another modality of secularism -- sadly on display in the current administration -- that is actively aggressive toward religion, precisely because it sees religion as its primary rival in the public arena. Appreciating certain moral convictions as disvalues-think here especially of Catholic teachings concerning sexuality -- it seeks to eliminate religion or at the very least to privatize and hence marginalize it. In doing so, it indeed reveals itself as totalitarian, for it allows no room in the public space for anything but itself.

The reason that the Bill of Rights is so important is that it holds off the tendency, inherent in any government, toward totalitarianism, even if that means the totalitarianism of the majority. The very first amendment, of course, guarantees the free exercise of religion in our country. Our founders obviously feared that even a democratic system, predicated upon a repudiation of tyranny, could become so tyrannical itself that it would seek to intrude upon the sacred realm of the religious conscience."
Not time for the ovens yet ... but you never know when... it's time to shut them up for good.

It's good to be Lord and King.

RTWT.

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Wednesday, February 15, 2012

ChigagO On The Potomac

Making Sure Corruption Remains "Made In America" - Forbes: "Add it all up and had we accepted the proposal, a million dollar earmark would have cost somewhere north of $200,000 to buy, all financed by the U.S. taxpayer. Do you think Avon paid Chinese officials that high a percentage of their profits for permission to peddle lipstick and skin cream? And, dare I ask, how much did this cost you and me?

How enlightened we are, smug in the knowledge that our method for feeding at the public trough is morally superior to the benighted practices of corrupt foreigners. And more flexible too, since the same legal process of running campaign “fundraisers” can be used if you want to block, say, a politically controversial oil pipeline or dodge a boneheaded regulation. And just think of the possibilities if you are trying to raise money for an unfinanceable solar cell, windmill, electric car, biofuel, or battery company! But please don’t ever allege that campaign donors receive quid-pro-quos. Civilized people know that all they are buying is “access.”"
Or as Mike Church calls it, "Mordor on the Potomac". Or is that "PotOmac"?

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Corzine And The Band O Real Extremists

Keiser Report: FBI vs Gold Standard Extremists (E248) - YouTube: "In this episode, Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, discuss the gold standard extremism and how your dollar got to be worth just 3.8 cents. In the second half of the show, Max talks to Francine McKenna of reTheAuditors.com about the crimes and illegitimate activity of the MF Global collapse."
Including some great analysis and charts of how and when the dollar became 3.6 cents.

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What Democracy?

Farage On Greek Chaos: "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" | ZeroHedge: "Outspoken and oracular MEP Nigel Farage bombards his fellow unelected officials with 'you can't handle the truth' comments as he points out the total contradiction that is the European Parliament's (and 'Puppet Papademos') view of how things are going in their democracy relative to the reality of a TROIKA-ordered coup forced on the man in the street. Greece is being driven further and further into chaos and as he implores his peers: "If they don't get the Drachma back, you will be responsible for something truly truly horrible!"."
Can we draft Nigel for president? Please?

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The Death O America


Many Of You Will Not Believe Some Of The Things Americans Are Doing Just To Survive: "The article that I wrote the other day about the decline of Detroit really struck a nerve.  All over America, people can see similar things happening to their own neighborhoods.  People are scared and they want some answers.

Well, the truth is that we should have never allowed tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of our national wealth to be shipped out of the country.

Just check out this stunning photo which compares the decline of Detroit to the rise of Shanghai, China.

Do you think that it is just a coincidence that Detroit is falling apart and that cities in China look sparkly and new?

No, the truth is that it is a natural consequence of our foolish economic policies."

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Taxing Sanity

Instapundit » Blog Archive » CAN’T KEEP THEIR STORY STRAIGHT: The DOJ is wrong when it claims the ObamaCare mandate is a tax, sa…: "CAN’T KEEP THEIR STORY STRAIGHT: The DOJ is wrong when it claims the ObamaCare mandate is a tax, says … Obama’s OMB chief. “For political reasons, O doesn’t want to be accused of having slapped a brand new tax on the middle class before the election, but he’s on much firmer ground constitutionally if he can argue that the mandate is an exercise of Congress’s taxing power. So we get this pitiful spectacle, in which he and his team insist to any reporter within earshot that the mandate’s not a tax while the DOJ turns around and tells the Supreme Court that it most assuredly is.”

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 10:34 pm"

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Stopped Clock Watch 2/15/12

Paul Ryan Tees Off on Obama’s Fraudulent Budget | Power Line: "With the departure of Mr. Lew from OMB just last month, we understand that you are testifying on short notice, and we recognize the difficulty of that.

And unfortunately, your job is even more difficult than usual – you are in the position of having to defend a budget that essentially dodges the most difficult challenges our country faces.

The New York Times has reported that this budget is, quote, “more a platform for the president’s re-election campaign than a legislative proposal.” After a careful review, it’s hard to disagree.

The Associated Press has reported – accurately in my view – that this budget, quote, “[takes] a pass on reining in government growth.”

Instead, it leaves the drivers of our debt – namely, the unsustainable growth of entitlement spending – quote, “largely unchecked.”"
It must be all forked up for the praetorian guard to tell the truth. Maybe they're realizing they need to run Hillary?

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Fork It Over

Barack Obama: Fantasist or Stick-Up Artist? | Power Line: "Who are the ultimate screwees of Obama’s fiscal policies? Our children and grandchildren, of course. Another $9 or $10 trillion in debt? No problem! Steal it from Junior:"
Or should that be "all forked up"?

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Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Untreatable?

When STDs Are Untreatable - Megan McArdle - Health - The Atlantic: "Less than a century after we conquered syphilis and gonorrhea, the CDC warns that 100 percent antibiotic resistance is on its way:
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.
That's serious stuff.  Untreated gonorrhea is extremely unpleasant, and can have awful long-term side effects like infertility, ectopic pregnancy, and bladder cancer (in men)."
There are choices and there are consequences. Looks like the consequences are about to up the ante.

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Monday, February 13, 2012

Old Fashioned

It’s Old Fashioned But… - By Yuval Levin - The Corner - National Review Online: "There is some discussion on the Hill these days about exactly what kind of legislative approach should be taken to overturn the almost indescribably odious HHS mandate requiring religious employers to provide abortive and contraceptive drugs to their employees. There is so very much wrong with the rule that it can be hard to know quite where to start.
 
I would propose a simple, short bill that read simply: “Congress shall make no law, and the Executive Branch shall make no rule, respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” 
 
That should cover it, and it ought to have a pretty easy time passing constitutional muster too, unlike the HHS rule."
Actually, no. Given the chance, no doubt by this court it would be ruled unconstitutional because of the penumbras of the spermicides of birth control. Or something.

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Pulsating Leviathan

The Libertine Police State - George Weigel - National Review Online: "There, as the Senior Vatican Official told the story, a somewhat scruffy Dutch activist got up and announced to all and sundry, “Let’s stop fooling around here. What we’re talking about is our right to f*** whoever we want, however we want, whenever we want.”

The Dutchman’s formulation may have lacked elegance, but it certainly didn’t lack precision. For that was precisely what was at issue 18 years ago, and it is precisely what is at issue today: Will the sexual revolution, which reduced sex to a recreational activity of no moral consequence, be protected, advanced, and indeed mandated by the coercive powers of the modern state?

There is irony in the fire here, of course. What began as a movement to liberate sexuality from the constraints of moral reason, custom, and law has become a movement determined to use the instruments of law to impose its deconstruction of human sexuality and its moral relativism on all of society."
Next up: Mandatory rights for farm animals to f*** whatever humans they like. They're oppressed you know.

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Coffee Shops

In the future, everything will be a coffee shop - Boston.com: "As the debt required to get an education rises, students and their families face a question: What’s the advantage of a good job if the salary difference is lost to student debt?

Online universities are starting to change this equation. MIT, a pioneer in making course materials available online for free, announced in December that it will begin to offer a credential for completion of online courses through a new program called MITx. The program is intended to offer MIT’s teaching materials to a wide range of students. Though it will carry some costs for students, the university’s press office has stated, “The aim is to make credentialing highly affordable.”

Now, imagine a personnel manager at a mid-sized corporation who’s looking for an employee with some particular knowledge. There are two candidates: one with an appropriate college degree from the local state school, a second with relevant MITx certificates. Let’s say all other things between the candidates are equal. Which should the manager choose?"
RTWT to understand the title...

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Sunday, February 12, 2012

Oops

PJ Media » Blowing Away the Windmill Lies: "Windfall is that rare documentary that casts a skeptical gaze on claims made by the left, though in this case the environmental lobby’s interests line up neatly with those of the Wall Street investment banks that bankroll this supposed miracle cure to our alleged greenhouse-gas problem.

It turns out that the wind turbines are 400 feet tall — the height of a good-sized Manhattan skyscraper placed incongruously in the sprawling countryside. A single blade weighs seven tons. The diameter of the cement base of the windmills can be 250 feet. Once erected, they spoil the natural beauty of the nearby mountains, they cast giant shadows, they throw off dangerous quantities of ice. People living under them complain of health problems, difficulty sleeping, and strange pressure in their ears, and the low, intense thudding noises of the turbines are compared to the effect of living next door to a disco that never closes, or being under a plane that never lands. Another citizen says that living near a windmill is like having “your vacuum cleaner running beside your bed all night.”

Oops. It would appear that there is more to clean and renewable energy production than we have been led to believe. Moreover, due to the intermittent nature of wind energy, nearby fossil-fuel power plants still have to be kept running in order to cover for the down times. Any overall reduction in carbon emissions is minimal."
Of course the extinction of bats may be a good thing. But little else about this disaster is.

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Zweepless

iowahawk: A Fistful of Rebates: "You're seeing the results in innovative new cars like this pink Fiat 500 J-Lo Edition. Maybe it's not a Gran Torino, but it's made in Torino. Or Ontario, or something. The important point is this: you buy one of these Italian-Canadian babies, and you'll be getting Chrysler the cash it needs to pay back the loans to the government that pays the bills for everybody in this whole city. 

And, what’s true about Detroit is true about all of us. This country can’t be knocked out with one punch. We get back up, slip again, and send the video to our personal injury lawyer. And when we do - the world is going to hear the roar of our engines.

Well, maybe not 'roar.' What sound does a solar electric engine make? Zweep or something, I guess. Anyway, they'll hear something like that."
Perfect. Go wince through the whole thing.

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The Cascading Disaster Of ZIRP

RealClearMarkets - Having Wrecked the Banks, the Feds Target Money Funds: "All of which brings us to the SEC's proposed regulatory plan that would require companies in the money market space to set aside holdings so that they're ready and able to handle redemptions should another financial crisis occur. Translated, having bailed the money market sector out in 2008, the federal government now seeks to weaken it on the way to market irrelevance.

As it is, money market firms continue to suffer wildly distorted rates of interest on short-term credit that make the provision of any kind of yield for customers difficult to achieve. Basically the government that wrecked money market returns through its naïve policies of near zero rates now wants to make it even more difficult for them to achieve any kind of yield on the funds invested with them."

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You Weren't Invited

Facebook already went public, you weren't invited - The Term Sheet: Fortune's deals blog Term Sheet: "FORTUNE -- On February 1, Facebook at long last filed its official S-1 document with the SEC, the first step toward an initial public offering (IPO) the company expects to do in the second quarter of this year. Despite the fact that it was widely anticipated, the financial media went absolutely bananas. Facebook was the only subject on television, the radio, the web and in the paper. For a week.

But lost in all of this saliva-covered enthusiasm was the fact that Facebook's de facto IPO had already occurred a long time ago. Yes, Facebook already went public, you just weren't invited."

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Shambolic

Belmont Club » Sacrificial Spokesman: "What is different about Davis’ accusation is that is not an argument that “the war is unwinnable” as much as that “the war was never intended to be won”.

It suggests that the key corruption is not that taking place within the Afghan government, though there is plenty enough of that, but in the moral corruption within the Pentagon, the Capitol and the White House.  Even the admission of that corruption would be preferable to the explanation of malice; that the politicians have quit working for the American people and are now only employed on their own personal behalf and whoever is willing to pay them. If so, then Washington is a problem which has to be solved if the war — and any war fought in the national defense — is to be won or even undertaken, except in a purely shambolic sense."

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Liberalism Is The Real Disease

Instapundit » Blog Archive » THE CRISIS OF ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE: Bacteria are finally overrunning our last defenses. Can we sto…: "THE CRISIS OF ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE: Bacteria are finally overrunning our last defenses. Can we stop them? We need newer and better antibacterial drugs. Also new antivirals. But in the interim, we need to up sanitation and disease controls methods of the sort that were a keystone of public health back during the pre-antibiotic era.

Unfortunately, it seems as though most “public health” people these days would rather talk about gun control or climate change than, you know, actual diseases.

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 2:29 pm"

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Agency

Wow:

Video: Mia Love, the next conservative superstar? « Hot Air: "She’s been compared with Marco Rubio and called “the next big thing in conservative politics.” Meet Mia Love, a wife, mother, mayor and runner who is, er, running for Congress in Utah’s newly-created fourth congressional district. Here, she introduces herself in a video that makes it easy to see why she’s attracted such positive attention among conservatives and why elaborate praise of her does not appear to be overblown:"
Watch the video and you'll understand my title.

Have you donated yet? I did.

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Some Real Hope Instead Of Hopium

Instapundit » Blog Archive » FASTER, PLEASE: Cancer Drug Reverses Alzheimer’s In Mice. A widely available cancer drug has sho…: "A widely available cancer drug has shown remarkable success in reversing Alzheimer’s disease in mice, raising hope of a breakthrough against incurable dementia in humans, US researchers said Thursday.

Mice treated with the drug, known as bexarotene, became rapidly smarter and the plaque in their brains that was causing their Alzheimer’s started to disappear within hours, said the research in the journal Science."

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Buried Assumptions

Instapundit » Blog Archive » OCCUPY KINDERGARTEN? The greatest predictor of a child’s academic success, even more than economi…: "The buried assumption here, however, is that this could be changed with money. But it’s just as likely that the higher incomes are the result of a better genetic endowment — higher intelligence, more self-discipline, ability to defer gratification, etc. — that is likely to be passed on to kids. This seems particularly likely in light of Bryan Caplan’s conclusion that parental “investment” doesn’t make as big a difference as people think.

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 6:43 pm"

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Groundhog Day

Actor Bill Murray to CNBC: 'I think we ought to be personally responsible' - The Hill's Floor Action: "Actor Bill Murray on Friday said he believes Americans need to be more personally responsible for their well-being.

"I think we ought to be personally responsible," he said on CNBC's "Squawk Box" Friday morning. "I think if you can take care of yourself, and then maybe try to take care of someone else, that's sort of how you're supposed to live.

"It's not a question of asking other people for help or being rescued or anything like that," he continued. "I think we've sort of gotten used to someone looking out for us, and I don't think any other person is necessarily going to be counted on to look out for us.

"I think there's only so many people that can take care of themselves, and can take care of other people. And the rest of the people … they're useful in terms of compost for the whole planet, you know."

Murray said the United States is a "pioneer country," but that many seen to forget the discipline early Americans needed to have just to survive.

"Occasionally, it seeps in that they came in wagons from Illinois to Oregon or whatever. That they came in wagons and the wheels broke.""
Well there's an interesting coincidence. I had just recently listened to Brian Pretti suggest that the business cycle had been turned into "Groundhog Day" and then this pops up from Bill Murray.

Here's the interview which turns out to be a short but excellent insight into the latest disaster that is our "free economy":

Financial Sense Interview with Brian Pretti (MP3)

The more financially clueless you are -- and you are if you watch CNBC except for Rick Santelli -- the more you need to listen.

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Back In The USSA

Shyness, grieving soon to be classified as mental illness | Fox News: "Millions of healthy people - including shy or defiant children, grieving relatives and people with fetishes - may be wrongly labeled mentally ill by a new international diagnostic manual, specialists said on Thursday.

In a damning analysis of an upcoming revision of the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychologists, psychiatrists and mental health experts said its new categories and "tick-box" diagnosis systems were at best "silly" and at worst "worrying and dangerous."

Some diagnoses - for conditions like "oppositional defiant disorder" and "apathy syndrome" - risk devaluing the seriousness of mental illness and medicalising behaviors most people would consider normal or just mildly eccentric, the experts said.

At the other end of the spectrum, the new DSM, due out next year, could give medical diagnoses for serial rapists and sex abusers - under labels like "paraphilic coercive disorder" - and may allow offenders to escape prison by providing what could be seen as an excuse for their behavior, they added."
And how will they decide you need to be kept in a barrier? Now we know.

I will agree though that there is a category that needs to be added to the DSM: Socialists. Unfortunately, the fox is in charge of the hen house.

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Ameritopia

Levin on Hannity: "“Unhelpful” and “puristy” as always."
You need to read the book but this gives you a taste.

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Roads To Corruption

davidwarrenonline.com - NEWSPAPER COLUMNS: "And it was partly from reaction to the corruption, that governments took over the highway-building business - typically solving a problem by enhancing it.

Those roads were built for everyone to use, or more precisely, everyone with a car, bus, or truck. By today we have reached the point where money is impounded, by tax and otherwise, to provide infrastructure directly to capitalist developments, for the sake of generating jobs and raising more tax revenue.

Notice the progression. The robber barons at least had to build the roads for their carriages. The auto barons could expect the government to provide this service, at general taxpayer expense. And now the mall barons expect the government to run infrastructure right to the entrances of their vast parking lots - the very size of these lots stipulated in turn by planning and zoning formulae. It is one big, integrated, public-private monster, in which the risks attendant on all human enterprise have been bureaucratically diffused."
RTWT.

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Jeff G. Was Singing Yesterday

The Song of the Useful Idiots (verse 2): "Privacy is a right! Freedom of choice! KEEP THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF OUR BEDROOMS!

(Unless it’s a committed Catholic’s bedroom, in which case the Papist’s hostility toward contraception is just crazy and irrational, and so has no justifiable claim to privacy, it being a crime against reason itself, and so can’t in good SCIENTIFIC and MEDICAL conscience be allowed to stand in the way of women’s health. In other words, the complaints of a few nutjobs that their privacy is being invaded cannot be permitted to trump a person’s right to fuck using other people’s money as a sperm barrier, or, if that fails, an egg beater.)

Now. Who wants to go tell the military what kinds of foods soldiers must eat?

Posted by Jeff G. @ 12:39 pm"
Hoo-ahh-ha-ha-ha.

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Entitled To Dependency

Instapundit » Blog Archive » TOM MAGUIRE ON THE NEW YORK TIMES’ CAREFUL BLURRING OF ENTITLEMENTS: “Wait – Medicare is now a ‘saf…: "TOM MAGUIRE ON THE NEW YORK TIMES’ CAREFUL BLURRING OF ENTITLEMENTS: “Wait – Medicare is now a ‘safety net’ program? I thought that, like Social Security, it was an earned benefit – we all paid our taxes, and we are all eligible. Medicaid is means-tested; Medicare is not.”

Plus, from the comments: “If you’re paying for the pizza, you might as well take a slice. That’s the other part of the big government agenda. One is to create a permanent class of non-paying clients while the other is to make sure everyone else takes advantage of entitlements they’re paying for.” Yeah, you don’t want people to question the whole redistribution scheme, so you displace alternative approaches then call anyone who uses it a hypocrite if they complain. It’s political genius, until you run out of other people’s money.

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 10:22 am"
And the money is about to run out. And even a temporary hyperinflation can't stop that. Because it's actually not money that's about to run out -- it's the ability to follow through on promises not backed up with resources. And why is that? Because the investments that would have been required to deliver were never made and were instead squandered on political favors and corruption. And of course no amount of non-squandered investment would build a beanstalk to the sky anyway.

But I'm "anti-government" because I'm against the corrupt, lying jack*sses that populate our political class overlords? Maybe you'll get it when they start building the new, new "anti-fascist protection barrier" -- look it up. You might not like the direction the barbed wire will be facing.

Welcome to Al Gore's real "lock box".

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Saturday, February 11, 2012

"Anti-government"?

Instapundit » Blog Archive » TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: WHY IS IT THAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING that the lesson of Enron is that we …: "TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: WHY IS IT THAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING that the lesson of Enron is that we need more regulation? Seems to me, the lesson is that regulators are corrupt or incompetent. Or both. And by “regulators,” I include the press.

Also this: “It has always amazed me that the people who want the government to do a few important things, and to do them well, are called ‘anti-government,’ while those who want the government to do many things, all of them badly, are not.”

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 11:11 pm"
Yup.

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Keystone O The Apocalypse

The Politics of Keystone, Take 2 - NYTimes.com: "The second argument is that the tar sands oil won’t help the United States because it is all headed for export. This is perhaps the silliest argument of all. Right now, most of the big refineries on the Gulf Coast export around 20 percent of their refined product. Why? Because every barrel of crude oil is converted partly to diesel and partly to gasoline — and the rest of the world is far more reliant on diesel fuel than we are. The gasoline remains in the United States. Keystone wouldn’t change that equation one bit. Normally, one wouldn’t have to point out that exporting high-value products is good for the country. But, of course, improving our trade balance is irrelevant when you’re facing the apocalypse."
Du'O.

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What You Don't Pay Attention To Will Make You A Pauper

From "10 Things That Every American Should Know About The Federal Reserve":

10 Things That Every American Should Know About The Federal Reserve: "#1 The Federal Reserve System Is A Privately Owned Banking Cartel

The Federal Reserve is not a government agency.

The truth is that it is a privately owned central bank.  It is owned by the banks that are members of the Federal Reserve system.  We do not know how much of the system each bank owns, because that has never been disclosed to the American people.

The Federal Reserve openly admits that it is privately owned. When it was defending itself against a Bloomberg request for information under the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Reserve stated unequivocally in court that it was "not an agency" of the federal government and therefore not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

In fact, if you want to find out that the Federal Reserve system is owned by the member banks, all you have to do is go to the Federal Reserve website....

The twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, which were established by Congress as the operating arms of the nation's central banking system, are organized much like private corporations--possibly leading to some confusion about "ownership." For example, the Reserve Banks issue shares of stock to member banks."
You keep calling me stupid and ignorant at your own peril. It's not me that will have you starving in the dark.

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Friday, February 10, 2012

WHY WE SUCK

Instapundit » Blog Archive » WHY WE SUCK: A New Firewall From Bill Whittle. …: "WHY WE SUCK: A New Firewall From Bill Whittle."
And why don't we have anyone like Bill running for President? Because the country sucks.

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Wednesday, February 8, 2012

The "Iconoclasts"

Literary Review - Nick Cohen's February Pulpit: "The grand posture of writers in liberal democracies is that they are the moral equivalents of dissidents in repressive regimes. Loud-mouthed newspaper columnists claim to 'speak truth to power'. Novelists, artists, playwrights and comedians announce their willingness to transgress boundaries. Their publishers look for controversy like boozers look for brawls because they know that few marketing strategies beat the claim that a courageous iconoclast is challenging establishments and shattering taboos.

To maintain the illusion that they are part of some kind of radical underground, intellectuals must practise a deceit. They can never admit to their audience that fear of violent reprisals, ostracism or crippling financial penalties keeps them away from subjects that ought to concern them - and their fellow citizens.

Although it is impossible to count the books authors have abandoned, radical Islam is probably the greatest cause of self-censorship in the West today."
Are sheep.

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Corrupt From Stem To Stern

Instapundit » Blog Archive » MORE SUPPORT FOR MY REVOLVING DOOR TAX on former government officials: “The New York Times reports …: "It also says, “Holland & Knight is pleased to announce that former U.S. Representative Ron Klein (D-FL) has joined the firm’s Public Policy & Regulation Group as a partner. Klein will play a major role providing strategic counsel to clients in the area of government regulation and compliance in the financial services, healthcare and energy sectors.”

This is a textbook example of how the revolving door works. The congressmen pass these pieces of legislation that are so complicated and burdensome that one of the only rational ways for businesses to respond is to hire one of the people who wrote it to advise them on how to either comply with it or legally get around it."
These people are shameless.

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Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Shattering Pieces In The New Reich

Never mind the Greek implosion and the new German demands for transforming the EU's southern slackers into the new frontier of a reconstituted Reich. The new Fuehrers have no reliable source of energy -- just like the last time around!

Germany in skeptical turmoil on both Climate and Solar/Windfarms | Watts Up With That?: "Dr. Guenter Keil’s report focusses in detail on the amazing absurdities of Germany’s Renewable Energy Feed-In Act and the country’s utopian Energy Transformation. The government, through intrusive meddling and ballooning bureaucracy, has maneuvered Germany’s energy supply system into a vicious death spiral: the more the government intervenes, the greater the mess becomes. And the greater the mess becomes, the more the government intervenes! Dr. Keil concludes:

Germany’s energy transformation has already failed. For Germans, the outlook is bleak. …the planned mismanagement is heavily damaging the economy and will fail spectacularly some years later because its economic and social costs will have become unbearable. The question remaining open is how many billions of euros will have to be destroyed before a new energy policy (a new energy transformation?) picks up the shattered pieces.”"
Just wow.

And "crosspatch" in the comments has the COTD:
Activist groups have long since organized and are effectively blocking their approval and construction.
When is it going to dawn on people that these are not “environmental” activists, they are economic sabotage activists. Their root mission is to destroy the economy. They demand that renewable sources be mandated but block any connecting those power sources to the demand. They do the same with nuclear. They prevent recycling of fuel, demand that no new plants be built until the disposal problem can be solved, and then block the disposal site.

These people are NOT “environmental activists”, these people are economic saboteurs. That is their root goal and once it is understood that their real objective is the destruction of “developed” economies, everything else becomes much clearer.
Any questions?

Oh, yes. Ayn Rand had this figured out a long time ago:
“One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.”
Du'O.

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Monday, February 6, 2012

Fair?

Stephen Moore: A Fairness Quiz for the President - WSJ.com: "President Obama has frequently justified his policies—and judged their outcomes—in terms of equity, justice and fairness. That raises an obvious question: How does our existing system—and his own policy record—stack up according to those criteria?

Is it fair that the richest 1% of Americans pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes, and the richest 10% pay two-thirds of the tax?

Is it fair that the richest 10% of Americans shoulder a higher share of their country's income-tax burden than do the richest 10% in every other industrialized nation, including socialist Sweden?

Is it fair that American corporations pay the highest statutory corporate tax rate of all other industrialized nations but Japan, which cuts its rate on April 1?

Is it fair that President Obama sends his two daughters to elite private schools that are safer, better-run, and produce higher test scores than public schools in Washington, D.C.—but millions of other families across America are denied that free choice and forced to send their kids to rotten schools?"
This is excellent. Drop everything and RTWT. And then print a copy and carry it with you to use the next time a lib starts blathering about O Duce's Stone Age Trinity.

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I Am Them

Instapundit » Blog Archive » VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Are You “Them?” Until the appearance of Barack Obama on the national scene,…: "Until the appearance of Barack Obama on the national scene, I knew of “them” only from an old sci-fi movie in which huge ants (“Them!”) ate people.

But there are new monsters in America, and I am starting to wonder whether I am to be considered among them: those of the uninvolved and uninformed lives, the bar-raisers, the downright mean ones, the never deserving of respect ones, the Vegas junketeers, the Super Bowl jet setters, the tuition stealers, the faux-Christians who do not pay higher taxes, the too much income makers, the tormenters of autistic children, the polluters, the enemies deserving of punishment, the targets to bring a gun against, the faces to get in front of, the limb-loppers, the tonsil pullers, the fat cats, the corporate jet owners, the one-percenters, the stupidly acting, the not paying their fair sharers, the discriminators on the “way you look”, the alligator raisers and moat builders, the vote deniers, the clingers, the typical something persons, the hunters of kids at ice cream parlors, the stereotypers and profilers, the cowards, the lazy and soft, the non-spreaders of money, the not my people people, the Tea party racists, the not been perfect and mistake makers, the disengaged and the dictating, the not the time to profiteers, the ones who did not know when to quit making money, and on and on.

My God, man, how did Barack Obama & Co. conjure up so many demons?


Because they don’t stand a chance in November if people think about what they’ve actually done."

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Sunday, February 5, 2012

Innumeracy Thy Name Is Watermelon

Huhne is no loss | Watts Up With That?: "When I visited the House of Lords’ minister, Lord Marland, at the Climate Change Department a couple of years ago, I asked him and the Department’s chief number-cruncher, Professor David Mackay (neither a climate scientist nor an economist, of course) to show me the Department’s calculations detailing just how much “global warming” that might otherwise occur this century would be prevented by the $30 billion per year that the Department was committed to spend between 2011 and 2050 – $1.2 trillion in all.

There was a horrified silence. The birds stopped singing. The Minister adjusted his tie. The Permanent Secretary looked at his watch. Professor Mackay looked as though he wished the plush sofa into which he was disappearing would swallow him up entirely.

Eventually, in a very small voice, the Professor said, “Er, ah, mphm, that is, oof, arghh, we’ve never done any such calculation.” ...

The UK policy’s mitigation cost-effectiveness – the cost of abating just 1 Kelvin of warming if every nation pursued the UK’s policy with the same cost-ineffectiveness – works out at $108 trillion per Kelvin abated."
Good God. These watermelon people must be insensate. Or manipulative stinking liars of course. My money's on the latter.

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(Lord of) The Flies

Glenn has an excellent column up today:

It's takers versus makers and these days the takers are winning | Glenn Harlan Reynolds | Columnists | Washington Examiner: "In a world of bailouts and crony capitalism - which is to say, in the world we live in today - a rational businessperson has to compare the return on investment between improving a product or service, or lobbying the government for goodies.

Frequently, the latter looks better:  If you spend $1 million on lobbying, and get a $1 billion subsidy from the government, that’s a thousand-fold return on your money.

It’s hard to do one-hundredth as well through actual capitalism.  So why bother to improve your products at all?  Just hire more lobbyists."
Which brings us to where Madison had it wrong in Federalist #10 when he said:
The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.
Clearly Madison's hopes for the limitation of the spread of bad ideas by the impediment of scale have been negated by the rise of the two party (tweedle-dee-jackass/ tweedle-dumbo) system which Washington warned about in his farewell address.

And ironically, the improvements in communication and transportation technologies that the Framer's couldn't have foreseen have worked to the advantage of operating large organizations -- including political parties.

And notice that all the things that Madison hoped would be forestalled have come true in spades.

Paper money? Check.

Bailouts? Check.

Redistribution of wealth? Check.

Sigh.

Glenn puts it in today's terms:
When the crisis comes, and it will, we should relearn the lesson that the Framers of our Constitution knew and tried to embody: The bigger and more powerful the national government is, the more prone it is to corruption and interest-group domination.

A federal government that actually operated within the limits intended by the Framers would be much smaller, much less capable of creating economic distortion, and much less attractive to moochers and the politicians they enable. The bigger the pot of honey, the more flies it attracts.
Humans as a swarm of flies on the long decaying corpse of the republic? Check.

I'm always amazed by the liberal progressive collectivist's professed belief that business monopolies are bad but yet somehow the biggest monopolies of them all -- governments that have slaughtered on an unimaginable scale -- are good because they will (though pixie dust?) be somehow finally stocked with the "new man" freed of his base "selfish" nature.

In other words, we can take a world full of big, bad business monopolies stocked with bad, bad (did I mention racist?) people and and move all those people into the government monopoly and all will be transformed. Just like the Soviet Union and North Korea ... no wait!

To put it charitably: What a crock.

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Saturday, February 4, 2012

Helping O Duce


"I've stopped looking for work, which, I believe, helps the economic numbers." - New Yorker Cartoon Poster Print by Leo Cullum at condenaststore.com: ""I've stopped looking for work, which, I believe, helps the economic numbers." - New Yorker Cartoon"

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pOpe-a-dOpe

Ramirez on the American pontiff « Hot Air: "Michael Ramirez’ work at Investors Business Daily is always brilliant, but yesterday’s editorial cartoon may be one of his best ever.  The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner takes on the Church of Government, as my friend John Hinderaker calls it at Power Line, and skewers Barack Obama’s pretensions of being a faith leader while shredding the Constitution — in the cartoon, literally.  Do not miss the details of this work, one of Ramirez’ most richly illustrated entries ever.  Click on the image if you need a closer look:"
Perfect.

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Mental Illness Today

Iran's Supreme Leader Threatens Israel, U.S. - Middle East - News - Israel National News: "Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, threatened Israel on Friday, saying the Islamic Republic will help any nation or group that confronts the Jewish State, The Associated Press reported.

In remarks to worshippers during Friday prayers in Tehran which were broadcast on state TV, Khamenei said Iran would continue its nuclear program and warned that any military strike by the U.S. would only make Iran stronger.

He affirmed that Iran had provided assistance to terror groups Hizbullah and Hamas, AP reported.

“We have intervened in anti-Israel matters, and it brought victory in the 33-day war by Hizbullah against Israel in 2006, and in the 22-day war” between Hamas and Israel in Gaza, Khamenei was quoted as having said.

He added, “From now on, in any place, if any nation or any group confronts the Zionist regime, we will endorse and we will help. We have no fear expressing this.”

Khamenei said Israel was a “cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut,” and added that the U.S. would suffer defeat and lose standing in the region if it decides to use military force to stop the country’s nuclear program."
Liberals (and Ron Paul) appear to be in favor of nutbags like this acquiring nukes. They're just like you and me don't you know? (Well maybe like the untethered mind of a liberal.)

The great irony is that by hating conservatives -- and all 7 of us rational conservative libertarians -- so much and laughing at the Biblical stories of the apocalypse they turn out to be doing their utmost to make the apocalypse happen.

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Friday, February 3, 2012

Poor And Poorer


Earning Less - Why The Poor Get Poorer: "Working more and earning less. That struggle is faced by the average American today as each dollar buys less than it did before. Statistically, the economy may be recovering. However, for the average American, the reality is far more depressing. Capacity utilization still remains much weaker than at the peak of the last economic cycle and employment relative to the total working age population remains mired at lows. These components all feed back into the mental and financial state of the consumer, which, in turn, impacts businesses' future investment and hiring decisions - or lack thereof.

The economy continues to roll off indications that the future quarters ahead will most likely be substantially weaker than those of the recent past. However, the real story here is that there is little hope for an already struggling middle class to gain any ground in an economic climate that continues to stack the cards against them."
Du'O. Let's see, I can get a tax break hiring machines instead of people. And the demonrat veliciraptor attack machine won't come after me if I make a mistake and the machines sit idle. But if I lay off the people I may get sued if not just feel like sh*t telling them I can't afford them any more.

Oh, and then there's the huge number of young kids from the "self esteem/ entitlement" generation who think everything is owed to them and don't have the tenacity or knowledge to work themselves out of a brown paper bag. And that aren't worth the minimum wage but have been brainwashed into thinking you're the velociraptor for not praising them for just showing up.

I dunno, why do you think the Obureaucracy is working like demonrats making up ways to make it seem that d*mn near the whole country hasn't gone on the dole?

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Mark Steyn Nails O Duce To His Own Self Righteous Fake Cross

Mark Steyn | Barack Obama | Brother's Keeper | The Daily Caller: "“Oh give me a break,” Steyn said on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on Thursday night. “For a start, when he says, ‘I am my brother’s keeper,’ his brother is back in Kenya living on $12 a year. That’s what he was living on at the time of the 2008 election. So all the president has to do in terms of shared responsibility is put a $10 bill in an envelope and mail it to Nairobi or Mombasa or wherever and he will double his brother’s salary.”"
RTWT. (HT Hot Air)

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Thursday, February 2, 2012

Long Lost COTD: Civilizational Suicide On The Installment Plan

Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Pessimistic anarchism: ">Democratic socialism -- civilizational suicide on the installment plan!

Such a refined form of cannibalism. You consume most of your children before they’re conceived. Then you crush the few that make it out of a vagina under the debt burden inherited from the previous generation of the oh-so-generous political class. As autogenocidally effective as communism, only without all the tacky barbed wire and striped-jersey Spetsnaz heavies."
Well, *before* they're conceived isn't quite right is it? But we know what he means...

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Stuff It

Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Junk science double fail: "This new result is another turn of the screw. Because now it turns out that while you can raise childrens’ measured IQ with all the usual nostrums (better family circumstances, intensive schooling, etc) the effects of such interventions vanish in the adults that the children become. A particularly strong finding is that while adoptive children tend towards the IQ distribution of their foster families, the adults they become revert to the IQ distribution of their biological families.

This matters because poverty is correlated with and often caused by low intelligence. This is even more true today than it used to be, because we have a whole meritocratic apparatus aimed at scooping up poor-but-bright kids and tracking them into good schools and good jobs so they don’t stay poor. (And, as cynical as I sound in the rest of this post, be in no doubt that I think this meritocratic apparatus is a good thing and among the proudest achievements of our civilization.)

But: Our political class is heavily invested in the ideology that all the factors driving poverty are environmental. Because that means we can social-engineer our way to an egalitarian utopia by methods which – surprise! justify raising taxes and increasing central control of the economy. It’s bad news for them that adult IQ is genetically heritable and intractable to the sorts of interventions that employ thousands upon thousands of bureaucrats and busybodies.

To be fair, neither the prospect of a cooling earth nor the intractability of IQ are good news for the rest of us either. It would be nicer, in many ways, if we really lived in the political class’s fantasy world – the place where all our troubles are self-created, there’s always someone to blame, and always a political fix.

But at least, since we don’t live in that fantasy world, we can tell the political class to stuff its coercive utopianism up its own ass and demand our liberty back."
Richard Feynman was not only one of the greatest scientists ever, but one of the greatest gurus of explaining what science itself is... or was?! And his penultimate formulation of "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts" is a perfect dagger into the heart of the integral liberal shibboleths Eric's two items today also skewer.

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The Counterfeiters

charles hugh smith-Counterfeit Money, Counterfeit Policy: "What is the difference between printing money and counterfeiting? There is none.

Counterfeiting is illegal because it is the false creation of value. The counterfeiter takes low-value paper and turns it into high-value money, which is fundamentally a claim on the real productive value of the economy that issues the currency and recognizes it as a proxy means of exchanging that productive value.

Counterfeiting is illegal because the counterfeiter creates no additional value--he creates only the proxy for value. Creating real value--adding meaningful goods or services to the economy--is tedious, hard work. How much easier to simply transform near-worthless paper into a claim on actual goods and services.

If this is illegal, then would somebody please arrest the Board of the Federal Reserve for counterfeiting? The Fed has blatantly printed money without creating any real value to back up their added claims on productive value. Hence they are counterfeiting, pure and simple. A government based on rule of law would arrest these fraudsters and cons at the earliest possible convenience. ...

When corporations and the State are one, we call it fascism. In the U.S., it has taken the form of financial fascism, and the Federal Reserve and Federal agencies (Treasury, Freddie Mac, FHA, etc.) are the handlers and enablers of this kleptocratic financial fascism. They add no value, they only steal value from those who create it. "

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Ousted

Former MF Global Chief Risk Officer Sacked For Doing His Job, Disagreeing With Corzine | ZeroHedge: "Yesterday we noted how a CBO analyst may have been terminated for her conflicting views on model assumptions, especially when they veered away from the Wall Street-defined norm. Today, we find that the same approach to dissent may have been the reason why MF Global ended up taking inordinate risk, and ultimately blowing up, leaving over a billion in client money transitioning from liquid to gas phase overnight. According to Reuters, "The former chief risk officer at MF Global who raised red flags about the firm's aggressive trading bets told lawmakers that his warnings contributed to the firm's decision to let him go in early 2011. Michael Roseman, who was ousted in January 2011 from the now-bankrupt futures brokerage, said he rang alarm bells about the firm's exposure to European sovereign debt a year before the firm collapsed in late October of 2011." Roseman's statement on whether his skepticism to Corzine's get rich quick scheme was the reason for his termination? ""My views on risk certainly played a factor in that decision,""
Did I forget to mention that Corzine should already be in prison? With a roommate named Tiny?

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Leadership From Behind

Belmont Club » A Reversal of Fortune: "But quite the contrary, Egypt’s plight ties the administration’s hands. For the mismanagement can only mean — in the language of diplomacy and ‘engagement’ — that it is even more important than ever to support Egypt: to flood it with money, fill it with hope, to take the moral high ground so that the Muslim Brotherhood won’t extend its influence. If America uses food as a weapon it would marginalize the moderates and ruin the President’s leadership from behind in the Middle East.

Anyone who disbelieves this has only to look at North Korea. Guess who Pyongyang’s biggest food aid donor is?"

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The dOpe

Ace of Spades HQ: "You know the Strawman Extremes Gambit Obama always cons the public with? "Some say we should murder all people making more than $250,000 per year, some say we should hand over to them the entire American GDP; I choose a middle path." That one?

Yeah. Obama's aides are running the same con on him and he's too dopey to see through it.
I’m sure Obama is smarter than this. He can’t be an executive who spends his days checking boxes, accepting the choices presented by his aides, never reaching outside them through unconventional channels or reaching unconventional thinkers, never throwing over the framework with which he is presented.

I’m sure of it, but I can’t find much evidence for it in Lizza’s piece. The aides who leaked him the memos didn’t do Obama any favors.
Why are you sure he's smarter than this?"
Of course, "Good God" was in contention again for the title.

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Good God (Part O)

Instapundit » Blog Archive » THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, CHRISTIANISTS WOULD CONTROL THE GOVERNMENT. AND THEY WERE …: "THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, CHRISTIANISTS WOULD CONTROL THE GOVERNMENT. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Obama: I Pushed Dodd-Frank And Health Care Reform Because Of Christ. “The president said he often falls to his knees in prayer, and emphasized the role of his religious values in determining where to lead the country.”

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 1:57 pm"
I'm just going to keep my fingers tied down on this one for fear of what's about to be pecked out on my keyboard... Let's just go with the title to give you an idea.

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A Pandemic Pestilence O PoliticOs

GK To the Rescue | Power Line: "I’ve been meaning for a while now to start another occasional series, like my previous ones recalling Hayek and James Burnham, to recycle some timeless gems from G.K. Chesterton.  Via the Chesterton page on Facebook, here’s a Chesterton meditation perfect for our election season, from a 1921 interview with the Cleveland Press:
The men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It’s terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hung today."
Which not only reminds me about John Adam's quote about lawyers, it also reminds me of one of my favorite jokes:

Q: What do you call 1000 lawyers on the bottom of the ocean.

A: A good start.

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Gulf O Credibility


The Gulf in the Gulf: Fact and Fiction on Offshore Drilling | Power Line: "As Ken Green rightly says, “Regardless of the Obama administration’s claims that they aren’t hindering oil exploration and development in the Gulf, a few minutes of looking at their own data tells the real story: they’re both cutting it down, and stretching it out.”"

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Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Reckoning The Vermin

Eric Holder's 'Fast and Furious' woe - CNN.com: "But any personal instinct toward some common "executive branch" empathy for Holder is muted not only by the dubious character of Fast and Furious, but by some of the attorney general's other actions, as well. While out of office, for example, he famously called for a "reckoning" for CIA officers and other officials who authorized and conducted operations that were edgy and risky and intended to deal with difficult circumstances.

Once in office, he launched a "reckoning" of CIA renditions, detentions and interrogations of terrorists by directing the Justice Department to reopen investigations closed years before by career prosecutors. This decision was opposed by then-CIA Director Leon Panetta and seven of his predecessors, and Holder reportedly made the decision without reading detailed memos prepared by those career prosecutors declining to pursue further proceedings."
RTWT. Perhaps there will be a scintilla of justice in this world after all. (HT Powerline)

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Conspiracies

Chicago Daily Observer » Blog Archive » Wired for Silence: Patrick Fitzgerald’s Rezko Watchers: "Were Bernard T. Barton, Jr. (AKA: John Thomas), Dan Mahru and Dan Frawley used by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to keep tabs on Tony Rezko’s associations with senior Chicagoland politicians, rather than help build a criminal case against Tony?

Considering they weren’t called as witnesses in any trial, considering how long – a decade – it took for Barton to be sentenced, how long it’s taking for Mahru and Frawley to be sentenced, plus how no evidence, from any transcript, of any recorded conversation, involving any of the three, ever made it to a trial – it makes you wonder: Just what were they assigned to do in Rezko’s presence?"
Which brings us to those who are supposed to also be watching who they were watching ... and are also as corrupt as the day is long:
A U.S. Justice Department source has told The Daily Caller that at least two DOJ prosecutors accepted cash bribes from allegedly corrupt finance executives who were indicted under court seal within the past 13 months, but never arrested or prosecuted.

The sitting governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, his attorney general and an unspecified number of Virgin Islands legislators also accepted bribes, the source said, adding that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is aware prosecutors and elected officials were bribed and otherwise compromised, but has not held anyone accountable.
Disgusting vermin.

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