How Education Unions Are Strangling Our Schools

Terry Moe has written a book which is so important and pivotal to the future of American education that it will never be reviewed by the New York Times in their Sunday Book Review Supplement:
Special Interest: Teachers Unions and American Public Schools is a book by by Terry M. Moe (Brookings Institution Press, 513 pp., $34.95) Here is the City Journal reviewer Marcus A. Winters' review:

Last fall, I took my wife—a well-informed, intelligent professional who unintentionally married into the contentious world of education reform—to see Davis Guggenheim’s documentary about the plight of America’s public schools, Waiting for Superman. She left the theater convinced that our schools face clear problems that have some clear solutions. But she was puzzled about why reforming the system was so difficult. She knew that the teachers’ unions had something to do with what was wrong with the schools, but just how they wielded so much power baffled her. How is it that the unions manage to protect preposterous arrangements like lifetime job security and seniority-based layoffs while forcing students to attend schools that everyone knows are failing? I’d guess that many people emerge from Guggenheim’s film asking similar questions.

In his new book, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, Stanford University political scientist Terry Moe provides the answers. Moe traces the sources of the unions’ power and explains why they behave as they do. In the process, he blows apart several pervasive myths that have been used for far too long to let teachers and their unions off the hook. The book is a must-read for anyone frustrated by the slow progress toward improving America’s public schools. Readers familiar with the education reform debate will not be surprised by the list of clearly harmful policies that the unions support and commonsense reforms that they work so hard to impede. But those new to the topic will be shocked at the lengths to which the unions will go to defend an indefensible system.

Moe is a distinguished Political Scientist who has done outstanding work on the American Presidency, so his take on something as humdrum, one would think, as education, would be a step down in the order of things. But Winters is impressed:

What separates Special Interest from other books is its sharp dissection of the union party line. Moe brings to the subject his skills as one of the nation’s leading political scientists (he’s better known in the academy for his work on the American presidency). What’s shocking and, frankly, embarrassing for those of us who write about schools, is that this is the first serious study of the most powerful force in education policy.

Education policy isn’t made in a vacuum. It is negotiated in the political system, where the unions enjoy several advantages and dominate the debate. The most important source of union influence is financial and human resources. Taken together, over the last two decades, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have been by far the nation’s leading political donors in federal elections, contributing about 30 percent more money than the second highest contributor, AT&T. Teachers’ unions are either the Number One or Number Two political contributor in 60 percent of U.S. states. The unions further shape the political process by providing countless volunteers to operate phone banks and knock on doors. Using these resources, they have essentially taken over the Democratic Party, which receives 99 percent of their political contributions.

Why are education unions unique, however. What is Winters [and Moe] making such a fuss about---the Dems are the quintessential party of special interests, many of which cancel out each other?

Teachers’ unions aren’t the only powerful lobbying group in America, of course. But there is no counterweight to the union position. Teachers are easy to organize and have clear common interests. Parents and students are unorganized, don’t share common problems, and worry about other issues beyond public schooling. It makes for a one-sided debate.

Most policies that govern public schools are made not by politicians at the state or federal level, but by locally elected school boards. The unions not only outspend their counterparts in these elections; they have also rigged the system to ensure that they can outvote their rivals. Thanks in part to union lobbying, most school-board elections occur during off-peak election cycles. Most voters simply don’t show up. But teachers, who have a direct stake in these elections, vote at high rates. Moe provides several examples. A representative case is the 1997 election in Charter Oak, California, when only 7 percent of registered voters turned out at the polls, but 46 percent of the teachers who lived in the district voted.

What’s especially pervasive about union influence on the political process is that the unions are essentially electing their negotiating partners. Elected officials sign off on union contracts and set the rules under which public schools operate each day. Officeholders supposedly represent their constituencies and protect the public purse. But when politicians are put into office by the teachers’ unions, they tend to be sympathetic to union demands.

Moe and Winters are especially impressed [or perhaps depressed] at the singleminded focus of the unions on achieving their goals without a really effective countervailing defense on the political playing field.

The unions aren’t shy about exerting their local muscle. At an academic conference last fall, I attended a panel made up of union heads and school-district superintendents who were supposedly doing things “right”—meaning that management and labor were coming to agreements without knock-down, drag-out fights. The secret to their “success,” it turned out, was that the unions had put in place superintendents who were on their side. One of the union leaders stated matter-of-factly that things ran so smoothly in their district because everyone even sniffing at a run for the school board knew that they couldn’t get elected without the union’s endorsement. One superintendent on the panel was a former union negotiator himself. It’s amazing how well negotiations go when you sit at both sides of the table!

Of course, sometimes the union fails to elect its preferred candidate. But even when dealing with an unsympathetic bargaining partner, unions can leverage the system’s checks and balances to thwart change. Moe shows that it’s far easier to maintain the system through the “politics of blocking” than it is to adopt new reforms. The stars must align perfectly to get any serious reform passed. All the unions have to do is hold up a reform at one of the branches of government and then wait for the next election, when all the cards get reshuffled. Reforming politicians come and go; the union stays forever.

Moe's book will either slide into oblivion because all the print lamestream MSM will allow it to pass unreviewed or it will receive a huge amount of negative publicity---look what happened to Scott Walker and the WI state house & senate when they dared to challenge the vicious goons of union ascendancy in education.

One can’t walk away from Moe’s arguments doubting union power. But must unions wield this power against change? Unions are stakeholders in the system and thus deserve a voice. We could finally remake the system if we could convince the union leadership to get behind reform. After all, teachers are primarily interested in their students’ success—right?

Unfortunately, no. Moe convincingly challenges the pillars of so-called “reform unionism.” The unions don’t support bad policies—like those that make it impossible to fire bad teachers, for example—because they think they’re good for kids. Nor are they mustache-twirling villains looking for ways to harm America’s children. Unions support such policies simply because they’re in the interests of their members. Likewise, their members support the unions because they want those interests represented. These basic facts are essential to understanding how the unions operate and why they can never be true partners in transforming the system.

Most writers—and I’ll include myself in this—are pretty quick to draw a line between teachers and their unions. Moe argues that we’re wrong. The unions do exactly what teachers want them to do.

So is a job in a public schools system a rite of passage to a position where one has absolute tenure, so that rubber rooms in NYC and total insouciance cannot result in a teacher being fired, no matter how slovenly, lazy, and somnolent the daily performance of these once-admired "schoolmarms" might be? I know that in my native state of Wisconsin, many of my relatives who spent the requisite years in a system teaching have more money than I, a retired oil executive, happen to make on my monthly insurance pension check:

On the surface, some survey evidence seems to suggest that the unions are out of step with their members. For instance, unions are allied closely with the Democratic Party and vocally support some policies outside education that their Republican members oppose. Moe points to a survey showing that 77 percent of all teachers, but only 66 percent of Republican teachers, say that they belong to the union because they “really want to,” rather than because they were pressured into doing so, which suggests some dissent within the ranks. But that result is deceiving. While more than a few teachers say that they would not voluntarily join the national (34 percent) or the state (20 percent) union, only 6 percent of all teachers (and 10 percent of Republican teachers) say that they wouldn’t voluntarily join their local union. It would seem that teachers disagree on many of the larger issues that national and state unions address, but they overwhelmingly value the bargaining power of the local affiliates that negotiate their contracts and work rules.

Perhaps the most glaring example of teachers being motivated by their own self-interest is their response to survey questions about tenure, the arcane system that essentially guarantees their jobs for life, regardless of performance. Teachers know that tenure protects their lower-performing colleagues: 55 percent of teachers surveyed said that tenure makes it tough to weed out mediocre and incompetent teachers. Clearly, such a policy isn’t good for students. Nonetheless, 77 percent of teachers surveyed said that they would oppose eliminating tenure. It would seem that this clearly harmful practice hasn’t been thrust upon teachers by their unions, but rather is entirely in line with what teachers want for themselves.

Finally, we have the battle lines drawn clearly. We already know from the international left's almost instantaneous and unanimous rallying to the flag of the unions behind the Wisconsin teachers' unions' battle to overthrow the decision by the newly-elected governor and the two houses of the legislature to overturn the bloated contracts of the teachers' unions, allowing them more than federal workers, but still making the kind of precedent that the RICO left regards as the camel's nose under the tent, as it were. The public, through its duly-elected representatives, weren't as important as union rights---according to the unions, Dem politicians who promptly fled the state to avoid a quorum and a bunch of appointed criminals in the judiciary branch in WI. A Supreme Court election retained the five-four conservative majority, but now agitators and cadres from around the country are polluting Madison with zombie parades at Special Olympics award ceremonies. Even the unionized police and fire officials demonstrated a preference for union solidarity over their official duties to protect the state from out-of-state criminals come to agitate for union pre-eminence. What happens when the foxes take over the chicken coop?

It’s precisely because the unions are acting in the direct interests of their members that they cannot be expected to change their behavior. When the unions do support changes to the system—for instance, when AFT president Randi Weingarten voices support for improving teacher evaluations—it is because they know that change is imminent. They want to be involved in order to ensure that the reform burdens their members as little as possible.

While the unions resist change, Moe argues that an accidental combination of factors inside and outside of education will soon lead to their demise. The first seed for change comes from within the policy world. More and more Democratic politicians—including President Obama—have finally had enough of the mediocrity in our public schools and recognize that it is union-imposed work rules that have helped create the current situation. The recent ubiquity of standardized test scores has provided new data on just how poorly some schools are performing—particularly schools filled with lower-income and minority students, whose parents make up an important Democratic voting base. Further, the dramatic success of some charter schools working outside union work rules in educating inner-city kids shows that these kids can learn.

But Moe argues that such political turns are not enough on their own to produce systemwide change. The unions simply have too many resources. It is a factor outside of education that Moe believes is the real game-changer: the rapid expansion of information technology. Moe believes, as he and John Chubb argued recently in their 2009 book,Liberating Learning, that technology has the power to weaken the unions by fundamentally changing the way that schools operate. Schools are heavily dependent on human capital—that is, teachers. Technology is beginning to enter classrooms and perform some, though not all, of the tasks for which teachers have always been required. Interactive software can not only supplement, but eventually replace, a portion of teacher-based instruction. Over time, technology could make it so that schools require fewer teachers and thus fewer union members. Moe makes a bold prediction that someday soon, this is going to happen. Let’s hope he’s right. In the meantime, anyone concerned about the future of American education should read this important, imaginative book.

Featherbedding and all sorts of union legalized theft of the taxpayers' money will persist for a while, but sooner or later, the critical mass of human capital comprising the biomass for the criminal unions will be pared away, unless of course, evil does prevail in the form of suffocating union rules that suffocating criminal organizations like the NLRB persist in enforcing.

But who knows, in some brighter future, a company like Boeing might be able to build a plant in South Carolina. NLRB and crooked unions to the contrary notwithstanding...!

Sarah Palin Emails Released By Alaska Government (LIVE UPDATES)

I'd like to see any major media outlet conduct ANY kind of investigat­ion of Obama's state senate campaign funding records or records of revenues from other sources for this Manchurian Candidate to come from nowhere to prominence­. I met Sen. Kilpatrick of IL, a rich Republican who didn't run for another race because he said that IL politics are so putridly corrupt---­-an environmen­t where Obama thrived, but no one has bothered to investigat­e---at least in the lamestream media.

It'd also be appreciate­d if ANY of his college records at Columbia U, like his GPA or his "disappear­ed" senior thesis on nuke disarmamen­t between the US & USSR. And anything the Manchurian Candidate wrote about during his tenure as President of the Harvard Law Review [an honorary rather than substantiv­e position]. Looks like we have an honorary rather than a substantiv­e president because no one vetted this Manchurian Candidate.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Texas Creates 37% of all New Jobs

The WSJ has a piece on new jobs since the so-called "recovery" began:

Using Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, Dallas Fed economists looked at state-by-state employment changes since June 2009, when the recession ended. Texas added 265,300 net jobs, out of the 722,200 nationwide, and by far outpaced every other state. New York was second with 98,200, Pennsylvania added 93,000, and it falls off from there. Nine states created fewer than 10,000 jobs, while Maine, Hawaii, Delaware and Wyoming created fewer than 1,000. Eighteen states have lost jobs since the recovery began.

The data are even more notable because they're calculated on a "sum of states" basis, which the BLS does not use because they can have sampling errors. Using straight nonfarm payroll employment, Texas accounts for 45% of net U.S. job creation. Modesty is not typically considered a Texas virtue, but the results speak for themselves.

Texas is also among the few states that are home to more jobs than when the recession began in December 2007. The others are North Dakota, Alaska and the District of Columbia. If that last one sounds like an outlier at first, remember the government boom of the Obama era, which has helped loft D.C. payrolls 18,000 jobs above the pre-crisis status quo. Even so, Texas is up 30,800.

Why? Richard Fisher of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank explains:

What explains this Lone Star success? Texas is a big state, but its population of 24.7 million isn't that much bigger than the Empire State, about 19.5 million. California is a large state too—36.9 million—and yet it's down 11,400 jobs. Mr. Fisher argues that Texas is doing so well relative to other states precisely because it has rejected the economic model that now prevails in Washington, and we'll second that notion.

Mr. Fisher notes that all states labor under the same Fed monetary policy and interest rates and federal regulation, but all states have not performed equally well. Texas stands out for its free market and business-friendly climate.

Capital—both human and investment—is highly mobile, and it migrates all the time to the places where the opportunities are larger and the burdens are lower. Texas has no state income tax. Its regulatory conditions are contained and flexible. It is fiscally responsible and government is small. Its right-to-work law doesn't impose unions on businesses or employees. It is open to global trade and competition: Houston, San Antonio and El Paso are entrepôts for commerce, especially in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Another reason: Rather than killing all the lawyers, Texas has instituted tort reform, which holds down humongous lawsuits:

Based on his conversations with CEOs and other business leaders, Mr. Fisher says one of Texas's huge competitive advantages is its ongoing reform of the tort system, which has driven litigation costs to record lows. He also cited a rule in place since 1998 in the backwash of the S&L debacle that limits mortgage borrowing to 80% of the appraised value of a home. Like a minimum down payment, this reduces overleveraging and means Texas wasn't hurt as badly by the housing crash as other states.

Texan construction employment has contracted by 2.3% since the end of the recession, along with manufacturing (a 1.8% decline) and information (-8.4%). But growth in other areas has surpassed these losses. Professional and business services accounted for 22.9% of the total jobs added, health care for 30.5% and trade and energy for 10.6%.

The Texas economy has grown on average by 3.3% a year over the last two decades, compared with 2.6% for the U.S. overall. Yet the core impulse of Obamanomics is to make America less like Texas and more like California, with more government, more unions, more central planning, higher taxes. That the former added 37% of new U.S. jobs suggests what an historic mistake this has been.

Remember that GOP candidate Herman Cain was head of the Kansas City Fed, and presumably shares Mr. Fisher's sentiments. As does, I presume, Texas Governor Rick Perry, who would do a much better job as POTUS than Obungler, and is not a RINO like Romney.

NYT's Newsroom Not Talking to its Blogsite

What happened to my moratorium on Sarah Palin, dudes?

The NYT has egg all over its Gray Lady visage:

The New York Times originally denied making an open call for readers to help “investigate” e-mails from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, which are set to be released on Friday.

“The New York Times has not asked for readers to help with an investigation,” NYT spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha said in an e-mail to The Daily Caller, pointing TheDC to a specific news story about the Palin e-mails’ release.

But the joke was on the appropriately named Ms. Ha [Ha ha ha]:

Rhoades Ha appeared to have missed a story her own newspaper published on its website, titled, “Help Us Review the Sarah Palin E-mail Records.” The two paragraph story, published on the Times’s Caucus blog, reads:

“On Friday, the State of Alaska will release more than 24,000 of Sarah Palin’s e-mails covering much of her tenure as governor of Alaska. Times reporters will be in Juneau, the state capital, to begin the process of reviewing the e-mails, which we will be posting on nytimes.com starting on Friday afternoon E.S.T.

“We’re asking readers to help us identify interesting and newsworthy e-mails, people and events that we may want to highlight. Interested users can fill out a simple form to describe the nature of the e-mail, and provide a name and e-mail address so we’ll know who should get the credit. Join us here on Friday afternoon and into the weekend to participate.”

Besides being funny, Ms. Ha was a bit daffy:

When TheDC e-mailed Rhoades Ha back with a link to the NYT’s own story appealing to readers to help the paper “investigate” the Palin e-mails, Rhoades Ha then responded saying that her earlier e-mail had been a misstatement and confirmed that the NYT had published this call to action.

“The New York Times will post the emails in a searchable database on nytimes.com and invite readers to do their own search of the documents,” Rhoades Ha said. “The Times has reporters in Alaska to process the 24,000 documents as well as reporters in New York who will review the materials. If readers draw our attention to something interesting, our reporters will review the information before publishing it on our website or the paper.”

The Daily Caller had more than a little fun exposing the looney & hilarious incompetence of Madamoiselle Ha:

Oh, that! When informed of this public announcement by the very company she's supposed to be representing, Rhoades Ha followed up with Boyle, saying, "The New York Times will post the emails in a searchable database on nytimes.com and invite readers to do their own search of the documents. The Times has reporters in Alaska to process the 24,000 documents as well as reporters in New York who will review the materials. If readers draw our attention to something interesting, our reporters will review the information before publishing it on our website or the paper.” And if not, they'll just find some other muck to fling at Palin.

Not to be shown up by the NYT in the mindless stupidity and venal banal dumbgasm department,

The Washington Post has also requested readers help it “investigate” the Palin e-mails, and their ombudsman did not return TheDC’s requests for comment.

Remember when the dude in a hunting cap & ear muffs named Dana Milbank called for a moratorium on even mentioning Sarah Palin in any lamestream media outlet?

Turns out a lamer-stream dude named Cilizza out dumbgasmed the dummie Milbank and now Sarah is splattered all over the WaPo's lamest of the lamestreamer's dead-tree daily joke.

Politico Doesn't Like the Right Correct POV

Seems that the submission to the left-wing hacks on Politico wasn't deemed down to their dimwit standards and was returned to me as not having been down to their libtard standards:

"If Obungler isn't worried about the economy, he should at least be worried about Romney's catching him in the polls. Seems the folks in Flyover Country and other commonsensical municipalities uninfested with the academicide and legacy lamestream media maniacs have compared a half-term senator from nowhere that the lamest lamestreamers can even locate with a businessman who rescued a bankrupt Winter Olympics and specializes in turning around businesses in trouble. The business currently in trouble is USA, Inc., which the socialists in Obama's party deny exists. Happily, less than 20% of the US registered voters called themselves libtards, and 42% now consider themselves "conservative." How long can 1% of the academiciders and lamestreamers call themselves a majority? Not for long, if the polls on Romney continue to hold."

I'll resubmit it tomorrow and see if I can get it by an intern-on-duty who may be a bit less retarded.

Callista Gingrich Drives Seven Senior Campaign Staffers to Quit

Fred Barnes says out loud what everyone in DC has been whispering for a while. Here's Fred's Blog in The Weekly Standard:

The euphemism offered by departing staffers was they disagreed with Gingrich’s “strategy” for the campaign. Indeed, they did disagree. But it was a strategy – a part-time campaign, in effect – that Gingrich’s wife favored.

Several aides, including campaign manager Rob Johnson, met with Gingrich on Thursday morning and told him of the senior staff’s unanimous decision to quit. Gingrich later put out a statement saying he was staying in the race.

The last straw for the campaign staff was Gingrich’s decision to go on a two-week cruise in the Mediterranean, from which he returned on Tuesday. His advisers urged him not to go and take so much time from a campaign that was already in trouble. But his wife wanted him to go and she won the argument.

As a result, the morale of the Gingrich staff fell sharply. And fundraising declined as well with Gingrich absent from the day-to-day media coverage of the campaign.

While Gingrich was away, his aides talked among themselves about the course of the campaign. They wanted him to commit to seeking the Republican nomination on a full-time basis, including time spent in personal fundraising by Gingrich himself. Gingrich balked at this. His wife wanted him to pursue the presidency at less strenuous clip.

“The professional team came to the realization that the direction of the campaign they sought and Newt’s vision for the campaign were incompatible,” strategist David Carney told Jonathan Martin of Politico. The advisers believed Gingrich could not win the nomination without campaigning full-tilt.

Callista Gingrich gradually emerged as Gingrich’s most influential adviser this year, supplanting longtime aides like Rick Tyler, his press secretary and aide-de-camp, and Sam Dawson, who was a major adviser for more than three decades. That Tyler and Dawson would join four others in quitting was a particular blow to the Gingrich campaign.

The others who resigned are: campaign manager Rob Johnson, Carney, and consultants Craig Schoenfeld in Iowa and Katon Dawson in South Carolina. Besides the entire senior staff, ten other campaign aides also quit.

The Gingrich campaign was reeling even before the exodus of top advisers. The announcement of his candidacy was handled clumsily. Then he touched off a firestorm of protest by conservatives after he assailed the Medicare reform program in the House Republican budget drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan.

Another embarrassment was the disclosure that he and his wife had a $250,000 to $500,000 line of credit at Tiffany, the posh jewelry store.

In his statement, Gingrich said: “I am committed to running the substantive, solutions-oriented campaign I set out to run earlier in the campaign.” He is scheduled to take part in a Republican presidential debate on Monday in New Hampshire.

Newt is simply an egotistical train wreck [I once saw him get out of a huge limo in Amman Jordan while Dick Gephardt followed in a tiny VW bug a few minutes later---Newt was the Speaker of the House, you see, and he'd just been dissed by Clinton who had Newt leave via the back door of Air Force One a few months before. He keeps talking about a "campaign of ideas" when it is becoming painfully obvious that Newt will NEVER submit to discipline, his own self's or others, or rein in his massive ego or stop talking after he has already inserted his foot to above his kneecap in his constantly yammering mouth. And his wife, an upstate WI kewpie doll who has kachina looks and a bizarre persona, may continue to contribute to his political downfall until even the denial-prone Gingrich might recognize that he's making a fool of himself.

In the meantime, we can only gaze in wonderment over what a silly little man Newt seems to be.

Texas Gov Perry Calls for Statewide Day of Prayer

Rick Perry may be preparing a run as two of his intimate advisors quit the snakebit Gingrich campaign yesterday and his call for a day of prayer generates a tempest in a teacup over separation of Church and State.

Though he continues to deny it publicly, close associates of Governor Rick Perry reportedly say that he’s considering a White House bid. How could his run be impacted by his plans for a statewide day of prayer in Texas? Perry’s seeking God’s guidance in solving the nation’s problems, but critics have called it a blatant violation of the separation of church and state.
Tony Perkins, the President of the Family Research Council, spoke to Gretchen about whether this shows a favoritism toward Christianity that will hurt Perry politically. Perkins says that over 80% of Americans identify themselves as Christian, and “To say that we’re going to have prayer, that’s not out of the mainstream, that is the mainstream.”

Immediately after the paragraphs above, a vote questionnaire asks on Fox Insider whether Perry's move "crossed the line" and unsurprisingly 96% of the readers voted, NO PROBLEM!!!

Gendercide in India and Cbina

Horrific statistics demonstrate just how far the two Asian giants have before they attain some egress out of the Third World in the humanity department. Infant survival statistics tell the story, as well as the elevation of infant mortality in India---almost African in its sheer barbaric carelessness:

China and North India should be ashamed of not valuing daughters. An article last year in the Economist popularized the term gendercide to describe the widespread practice in China and a few Indian states of sex selective abortions targetting girls. The 2010 Chinese census reports an imbalance of 118 boys for every 100 girls among newborns. That's not as bad as the mid-decade high in China of 124 boys for every girls among the 1-4 age group. In India only Haryana and Punjab have gender imbalances that are comparable to the Chinese national average (but not compared to the highest Chinese provincial averages which are astonishing).

I wish to point out a part of the culture of gendercide that gets little presstime. Although gender selected abortions is the primary mechanism of eliminating girls in these parts of the world, there is a disturbing practice of inflicting death by neglect in both countries. Here are statistics collected from the CIA World Factbook.

The US like much of the world has a typical disparity in infant mortality rates (number of deaths of one year old infants or younger per 1000). The male rate is higher:

male: 6.94 deaths/1,000 live births
female: 5.55 deaths/1,000 live births

Another country, Taiwan conforms to the typical global disparity of a higher male infant mortality rate:

male: 5.64 deaths/1,000 live births
female: 5.04 deaths/1,000 live births

But in China and India, the female infant mortality rates are higher:

China | male: 18.87 deaths/1,000 live births; female: 21.77 deaths/1,000 live births
India | male: 46.18 deaths/1,000 live births; female: 49.14 deaths/1,000 live births

The higher female infant mortality rates reveal that in China and a few Indian states, parents discriminate against daughters by depriving them of nutrition and health care so their demise will give room for sons.

The elimination of so many girls by neglect is the gravest human rights crisis in China and I'm extremely disappointed in the Western media for not giving it prominence. This is an issue in which greater attention and humiliation piled on China will be effective in spurring a solution rather than backlash and defiance. If the plight of infant girls is better known, the emerging leisure activist class in developed coastal China will demand the government protect girls in backwards China.

In India where there is much greater public discussion of the implications of the growing gender imbalance, I wish opinion leaders will devote attention to this ugly aspect of the problem.

India Growth Rate Set to Surpass Chinese Rate?

I'm reading "Maximum City" which served as the impetus for the movie Slumdog Millionaire and depicts Bombay/Mumbai in all its tattered and glitzy contradictions. India remains the most fascinating country I have visited, having been there a half-dozen times in my three-score-and-ten [minus two] thus far. Here is the report in Bloomberg last August which remains valid to this day, as far as I can discern:

India may overtake China as the world’s fastest growing major economy by 2015, as the South Asian nation doubles infrastructure investment and adds six-fold more workers than its northern neighbor, Morgan Stanley said.
India’s growth may accelerate to 9.5 percent between 2011 to 2015, Morgan Stanley economist Chetan Ahya said in an interview from Singapore today. India’s gross domestic product has expanded at an average 7.1 percent over the decade through the third quarter of 2009, compared with 9.1 percent in China, which surpassed Japan as the second-largest economy last quarter.

China's dependence on brown coal and India's continued reliance on an ageing rail infrastructure are among the many contingent variables in the complex picture of long-term growth. I can remember in the fifties/sixties of the last century reading an avalanche of optimistic predictions about the coming birth of an advanced economic engine in Latin America, which didn't foresee the stupidity of the indigenous population and its addiction to a victim-mentality and aversion to discipline.

Peru Goes Commie, Resentment Trumps Economic Success

Latin Americans way way back in the day were going to be the first area outside Europe and North America to achieve First World status.

Sadly, the childhood diseases of national political and economic development keep smacking down any signs of progress. I have a photo of myself and President Carlos Andres Peres back in front of the Miranda Palace in Caracas around 1990. My first assignment at Amoco as a Risk Assessment analyst was to investigate a coup attempt by a disaffected Venz army officer named Chavez in Feb., 1991. ["Venz" is what oil people call the little failed democracy to the east of Colombia].

Now Peru, growing faster than any Latin economy at a rate over 7%, suddenly finds a large portion, 51% dubbed the resentidos, voting in a mindless class warfare candidate because of the childish jealousy of losers and double-digit IQ creeps with a ballot.

Latin America will always be swinging back and forth like a pendulum, as when the "Boys from Chicago" applying Friedmanesque economics in the '90s morphed into the stupid leftist libtard trash "democracies" of the oughts.

You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
UPDATE: Maxim Jacobs has this to say about the Peruvian bombshell & the neighborhood that it dropped into:

It looks like another country in South America has gone to the dark side. First it was Venezuela, when it elected Chavez in 1998, then Bolivia, when it elected Evo Morales in 2005, followed by Ecuador, which elected Rafael Correa in 2006. Now it's Peru's term, as they elected Ollanta Humala as President, sending the Peruvian market down 12.5% (the equivalent of 1,500 points on the Dow!). How bad is Humala? Only time will tell, this time around he campaigned as a benign socialist like the Silva from Brazil, despite the fact that he embraced (and was embraced by) Chavez and Morales in the last Presidential election 2006. Also, it is not clear how "benign" he is as he wants to increase the corporate tax rate from 30-45% and enact a windfall tax on mining companies. He also comes from batsh*t crazy roots. His mother said in 2006 that all homosexuals should be shot and his father was a communist and an ideological leader in the Movimiento Etnocacerista, a group that wanted massive nationalizations, legalization of coca farming and the destruction of Chile, apparently the sworn enemy of Peru.

Luckily for Peruvians, he won't be able to govern as a dictator (yet) as his party only has 36% of the seats in the parliament and Humala himself only received 30% of the vote in the first round of voting (he won with 51% in the second round, thanks in part to the hatred of the family of his challenger, Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the ex-President Alberto Fujimori. Let's hope he over-reaches and self-destructs before he can consolidate his power like Chavez and Morales.

I am wondering though whether our State Department and intelligence agencies have been asleep at the wheel when it comes to South America. How did things get so bad? It seems that the only states we can probably count on at his point are Colombia and Chile. The left is in control of almost all of the rest, ranging from relatively democratic socialists in Brazil and Argentina (though Argentina's seizing of private pensions makes you wonder how much they actually value private property) to outright enemies like Bolivia and Venezuela (Venezuela has become a base for just about all our enemies, including Hezbollah and Iran). Don't you think there would have been something we could have done to stop at least the Chavez and Morales takeovers? And in the case of Chavez, why didn't W support the military coup against him in 2002. It's not likely that his replacement would have been worse and probably much better. While I realize he was busy trying to bring democracy to the Arab world, maybe he should have spent more time defending and reinforcing democracy in the Americas. It really is amazing how complacent we have been.

VERY Bad News For the Heat

Sports Illustrated has an excellent article on how the 2011 Finals are shaping up to be a replay of the 1984 Finals when Larry Bird's Celtics stole TWO marches on the seemingly impregnable LA Lakers, while then Coach Pat Riley presided over the Gotterdaemmerung.

Now Heat executive chief Riley is watching the Heat blow TWO games on a familiar site---THE FREE THROW LINE!!!

I put this in caps-bold because not one commentator has commented on this abysmal showing of the Heat at the line. Last night, besides the pivotal miss with 30 seconds left by Wade [after his first bounced in apparently by hocus-pocus], Wade missed two in a row once as did Bosh and if memeory serves, King James himself TWICE double-muffed free throws. And yet NOT ONE comment on free throws, not even by Coach Spoelstra after the game.

Is somebody playing games or is mentioning missed free throws---the Mavs made a much higher pct than the Heat----somehow not Politically Correct?

Romney/Obama Tied in Latest WaPo Poll

Time Went Through a Lot of Photos to Catch Me looking askance like this! Lamestreamers!

The lamestream MSM may have to shift into overdrive to slow the momentum of Mitt Romney, whose sane and sober business background and lack of oratorical phoniness may have finally struck a chord in the American voter.

I for one always say "Romney among those who are running" when asked who I'm for in 2012. Actually, Paul Ryan would inject a good dose of credibility into the race because of the ObamaCare nuttiness, but if Paul doesn't move soon, that train may leave the station without him.

Anthony Weiner's Survival Chances Deemed Slim By Insiders, Experts

Thank God for Breitbart for exposing this impostor for who he is. And for getting the cockroache­s at ACORN off the government dole for filing false voter registrati­on forms.



I think that even Pelosi and the Dem leadership now understand that this guy is an unguided missile whose issues are way too transparen­t to allow him to continue in politics even as the gadfly pain in the tush that he was before Breitbart outed him as a freak.



Chris Lee resigned and manned up after getting outed for being stupid online. Doesn't a smarmy little voyeur have to consider doing the same thing. And Chris Lee actually looked okay, compared to this little verbal impresario who took pics of his own schlong and then sent them to [at least] six different females.



Gerry Studds used to harass my brother-in­-law who was on his personal staff during "field trips" to Maritime Committee places of interest. Late at night Gerry would knock on my b-in-law's door "by mistake" and would have to be corralled by Studd's AA who was used to the perv's paraphilia­.



Wonder why Saudi wife Huma Abedin didn't show up for the big presser yesterday. Maybe they don't have spousal attendance at Saudi kiss-and-t­ell conference­s? Ask stiff-dick moron Eliot SPRITZER, the ex-governo­r of New York, a state where sexual deviance seems to be a pattern [remember that dude Massa?]
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Adam Hasner For Senate

Ken Blackwell endorsed Hasner who served as my local district state representative here in South Florida. Hasner is a brainiac frequently published in The American Thinker. Hope Rush Limbaugh gives him a verbal boost too, Adam would make a much better Senator than the ex-astronaut DNC dodo we have now. He'd pair off well with Marco Rubio, also a refugee from the Florida State House of Representatives [like my next-door neighbor, Bill Andrews, who moved here after serving four terms in a district north of Delray Beach].

Ted Cruz in Texas, Another Cuban in the Senate?

Ted Cruz is an Ivy League Tea Partier with a cum laude degree from Princeton & a Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law who is Texas's Solicitor General and endorsed by Tea Party Platforms as well as Mark Levin, the best radio show host---with some anger issues---on the air.

Cruz has received endorsements from FreedomWorks, Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, Red State and the Club for Growth — as well as the affirmation of conservative heavyweight and radio talk show host Mark Levin.

“Ted is one of our nation’s leading defenders of the Tenth Amendment. He is a champion for limiting the power, size, and spending of the federal government,” said Lee, a recently elected senator considered close to the Tea Party movement. “Ted and I share much in common. We’re both proven conservatives who clerked for strong conservative Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, and we both believe passionately in limited government and the U.S. Constitution.”

Cruz is one of four candidates in the GOP primary to succeed Kay Bailey Hutchinson in Texas for her Senate seat.

Looks like another Marco Rubio as the chldren of victims of oppression come back to greatness in the USA from Cuba, still a political hellhole.

British Home Sec'y Talks about Getting Tough with Campus Radicals

Theresa May indicates that in the UK, just like Margaret Thatcher, the women still have grown a larger set than men, at least in politics.

She .... criticised the Federation of Student Islamic Societies for not challenging extremism sufficiently.
“They need to be prepared to stand up and say that organisations that are extreme or support extremism or have extremist speakers should not be part of their grouping,” Mrs May said.
Her remarks follow comments made by Nicola Dandridge, the head of Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, claiming there was no evidence that extremist speakers at university encouraged violence.
As part of the Prevent strategy, the Government will define as extremists anyone who “does not subscribe to human rights, equality before the law, democracy and full participation in society”, including those who “promote or implicitly tolerate the killing of British soldiers”.
Mrs May said: “We are looking at a set of values we believe we have here in the UK and those people opposed to those values are people who the Government won’t be funding or engaging with.”
It is understood that the strategy will also name 25 boroughs that are most at risk from Islamist extremism, including areas of London, Birmingham, Leeds, Bradford and Manchester.
There will also be a move to limit access to extremist websites from public buildings, particularly schools and public libraries.
Details of partnerships with YouTube and AOL to try to tackle extremism online, using lessons learned from anti-paedophile policing will be made public.
As well as fighting violent extremism, the Government will tackle extremist philosophies in general, including groups that can act as a “stepping stone” to terrorism.
“There’s an ideology out there that we need to challenge and when we first came in as a government one of the things we were very clear about here at the Home Office was we needed to look at extremism, not just violent extremism,” Mrs May said.
As a result of Prevent’s review of government support, about 20 out of 1,800 organisations that received funding over the past three years, will have their cash withdrawn.
“It’s a result of a close look at the values of the organisations themselves,” Mrs May said. “There’s more that we will be doing because it is very clear that we are going to be much more focused on effective monitoring and the effectiveness of groups and making sure that they are having an outcome.
“This isn’t just about giving money to groups and the number of people they deal with, it’s about a proper outcome.”
The strategy will also seek to counter radical Right-wing terrorists following a rise in the threat from such extremists.
“We should not just look at one particular type of terrorism but look at violent extremism and terrorism more widely as well,” Mrs May said.
The Home Secretary said the Prime Minister gave “a very clear message” in a speech in Munich in February when he spoke of the failure of multiculturalism. “We are putting into play what comes out of that Munich speech,” she said.
The Government will produce two strategies, with the second “integration strategy” to be published by the Department for Communities and Local Government later in the year.
“In the past the brand of Prevent has become slightly tainted and we want to separate those strands of community cohesion,” Mrs May said.
Prevent has been criticised in some quarters as a means to spy on the Muslim community, but Mrs May said: “I don’t see anything wrong with identifying people who are vulnerable to being taken down a certain route, who could become a threat to members of the public.
“We need to encourage people to be willing to identify vulnerable individuals. Most people recognise the value of using all the tools available to prevent terrorist activity and encourage people to actively talk to the police.
“Everyone who has an interest in being part of British society should recognise that we are all in this together.”
The strategy will also incorporate the Prime Minister’s pet project, the Big Society, promoting the idea of mobilising the “silent majority” of Muslims.
“Sending clear messages about our values is part of the information we want to put out,” said Mrs May.

The Daily Telegraph followed up with an editorial, linked at the top of the page. Among the tidbits:

Multiculturalism is more than a failed ideology: it threatens our safety. Several former students at British colleges have already been caught planning murder: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, ex-president of UCL’s Islamic Society, tried to blow up a plane in 2009.

So the Crotch Bomber over Detroit was "president" of the UCL [University College of London, I believe] Islamic Society. What a fine and "prestigious" organization that human sewer must be....!!!

NBC News Houseboy Lester Holt Follows Syrian Diversionary Move

Lester Holt on the Evening News Sunday showed pictures of the Syrian border attacks on Israel after a news byte on Yemen and one on Libya:

Sunday’s riots were an attempt "to divert attention away from the massacre in Syria,” one official charged. "The Syrians will be held accountable for these events.”

Supposedly the Syrian youth were promised $1000 for charging the border fences and $10,000 to the family of anyone who died in the attempt by the Syrian authorities. In the meantime, the Syrian government has a complete news blackout on murders after the June 4th Friday prayersin Hama where over 80 were killed by government sharpshooters.

OBTW, the stepin'fetchit Holt had NOTHING about Syrian protests, so the Israeli authorities were right that the border infraction, highly photographed by international news organizations, diverted attention from bloody murderous Syrian atrocities in Hama and Rastan.

Pelosi, Reid Most Unfavorable in Congress

Rasmussen has a recent poll that gives Pelosi a 45% Very Unfavorable. POTUS golf partner Boehner has an 18% Very Unfavorable and much higher favorable numbers vis-a-vis Pelosi, who is the MOST UNPOPULAR SPEAKER in poll terms in US history.

Sen. Harry Reid of NV has his numbers very low:

Reid now earns favorable marks from only 21% of voters, the lowest level measured since February 2009. Fifty percent (50%) have an unfavorable opinion of him. These findings include five percent (5%) who see the Nevada Democrat Very Favorably and 35% who regard him Very Unfavorably. But 29% have no opinion of the longtime legislator.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, remains the least-known top congressional leader, with 40% who express no opinion of him. McConnell’s favorables add up to 27%, including just five percent with a Very Favorable view of him. Thirty-three percent (33%) share an unfavorable assessment of the Kentucky Republican, with 15% Very Unfavorable.
Voters not affiliated with either of the major parties remain slightly more critical of the Democratic leaders than of those who head the GOP in Congress.

Note that Independents, the single most important election variable, favor GOP members in Congress. Rasmussen is more dependable as a polling source because it polls only likely voters, even more dependable than "registered" voters as a source of political data.

Larry Eagleburger Dies at 80

Bernard Gwertzman writes a long and sympathetic bio of Larry Eagleburger, the only FSO ever to receive the baton of Secretary of State. For myself as an FSO native of Milwaukee like Eagleburger [and the distinguished dean of US diplomats in postwar America, George Kennan, whom I met in Princeton a few years before his death], the long career of Eagleburger has a special meaning.

My first tour in Vietnam was with a fellow named Dick Aherne, who was already a protege of Larry Eagleburger, and Dick fixed up my assignment to Lyon, France, with Peter Tarnoff, who in turn was part of the Lake, Holbrooke, Wisner crowd who served in Saigon a few years before my service in S. Vietnam. Strangely enough, it turned out that Marlene Heinemann's parents, his second wife from Milwaukee who was a secretary in the State Department, had been on my Milwaukee Sentinel paper route a few blocks from my home in suburban Wauwatosa! When I was Political Military Officer in Saudi Arabia, I often had long conversations over drinks with Ambassador Bill Porter, who served with Eagleburger in the Department when Porter was Undersecretary for Political Affairs under Kissinger, and Bill mentioned Larry from time to time. So I followed his career long before he became somewhat of a household name. I never had a chance to cross paths with him, however.

I happened to get to know Bernie Gwertzman and David Sanger, two reporters who wrote this excellent NYT obit, during my sojourn in DC and serendipitously reintroduced Bernie to Elizabeth Stein Farquhar, a friend of my wife's who had dated Bernie when he was a student at Harvard and she a student at Radcliffe back in the late '50's. I was at the dinner party when the two got back together again to remininisce, late in the eighties in DC. Sanger consulted me for some odds and ends on a book he wrote in the late eighties on the Arab/Israeli problem.

I often wish I'd had a chance to meet Eagleburger, but somehow the stars never were in the right alignment. His curmudgeonly persona one saw on TV was more of the Milwaukee-type Spencer Tracy [who went to my high school] than, say, the sophisticated George Keller, who allowed me to sit on his patio in Princeton drinking cocktails in a tete-a-tete in the late seventies while he expatiated on his career. When I asked Kennan about bein an FSO [I'd already told him his Memoirs had inspired me to join the Foreign Service], he responded that one had to treat the Dept. "like an old whore," maybe not the most felicitous phrase, but one indicating the lofty regions he had attained back in the day when he was Ambassador to Russia [and Stalin personally ordered him to be declared persona non grata], necessitating his recall to DC in 1950.

I did get a chance to meet the redoubtable Kissinger himself, in Saudi Arabia, where I was his case officer in Saudi Arabia during one of his many shuttle stops in the mid-seventies, but the guy was a rude POS, IMHO. Wouldn't even shake my outstretched hand?!

To end this orgy of name-dropping, another person on my Milwaukee Sentinel route was Red Schoendienst, now in the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, who has his own statue outside Busch Stadium in St. Louis, where he starred for the Cardinals for a long time before being traded to the Milwaukee Braves. Hammering Hank Aaron and, later, Kareem Abdul Jabar both lived just across the Menominee River just a few blocks from the Mangan residence.

Sadly, Schoendienst was a pre-pay, so I never got to meet him at his home digs.

Coulda Woulda Shouda of Obama's Lunacy: Americans Support Israel

Barry Rubin has the following pair of pieces on how badly Obama messed up on his stupid Middle East declaration:

According to a new CNN Poll Americans sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians by 67 to 16%. Sympathy with Israel is up from 60% in 2009. While 65% says the U.S. should not take either side in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, 35% say the U.S. should take Israel's side while just 1% favors backing the Palestinians.

I read the second question as people's desire not to become directly involved or their understanding that as would-be mediator should appear to be balanced. This shows how Obama policy is totally unrepresentative of American views.

What proportion of the public debate is taken up by that one percent? Say, 30 percent of the mass media and 80 percent of views publicly expressed by faculty and students on campus?

But in the battle between the President Barack Obama, much of the mass media, and the overwhelming majority of campus activists and professors VERSUS reality, reality seems to be winning.

Despite what the failed golfer in the Oval Office may have thought, supporting a coalition containing terrorists didn't go over well with the American people. It didn't even go over well with "liberal" self-hating Jews.

Here's the situation and what might be done, or have been done, to apply triage:
...the UK, France, Germany, and Italy have already made clear that they won’t support unilateral independence.

In a real sense this issue has illustrated Obama’s incompetence and the mess created by his world view. What would a “real” president have done?

First, get an early start. The moment the PA announced it was considering this scheme, he would have coordinated with European allies to get a joint statement that this was unacceptable and that there would be negative consequences for the PA in pursuing it and refusing to negotiate with Israel. What’s being done in May should (and could) have been done in January. Why is Obama trying to get a joint stand with Europe now when the issue has been discussed for months?

Second, lobby hard in the Third World. American diplomats should be limousining into the offices of presidents, prime ministers, and foreign ministers all over the world to make it clear that the United States wants them to oppose this initiative. Favors should be called in; gentle warnings made. Yet as Latin American countries—a traditional area of U.S. influence--unilaterally recognized a Palestinian state, Obama stood by and did nothing.

Third, make the consequences clear to the PA. The PA has done many things to sabotage Obama’s prized peace process. Here’s a partial list:

--Went back on its promise to him not to push the Goldstone Report, which even its principal author now disowns, at the UN.

--Sabotaged his September 2009 initiative for a Camp David-style summit to be held in December, after he publicly announced it at the UN.

--Refused to negotiate seriously with Israel when Israel accepted and implemented a nine-month-long freeze of construction on settlements and then even added Jerusalem to it. The PA waited a few days before the expiration, held a couple of formal chats, and then demanded that the freeze be renewed!

--Made a deal with Hamas that obviously runs counter to U.S. policy and puts a big hole in the side of the already sinking peace process.

--Going to the UN in this time-wasting, negotiations’ killing maneuver.

Rubin notes that the reason that the Palestinians remain intransigent is that the UN doesn't hold them accountable AT ALL:

Ironically, the Palestinians are almost universally portrayed as the world’s leading victims. Yet in a very real sense, they are the world’s most spoiled political grouping. Decades of refusal to negotiate, intransigence, and terrorism are rewarded while massive subsidies continue ignoring political behavior, incitement, violation of commitments, terrorism, and corruption.

Maybe that’s the real problem making this conflict persist.

Fourth, Obama has not put any sanctions on the PA, refused to threaten it, and has barely criticized it in public. Indeed, the money and diplomatic support continues no matter what the PA does. Obama’s level of backing for Israel does not go up in response to PA behavior either. So he has taught the PA that sabotaging American policy pays because it makes him (and the world) criticize Israel, widens the U.S.-Israel rift, and even brings more U.S. concessions for the Palestinians in a desperate effort to make peace, even if the Palestinian leadership cares less about that achievement than the United States, EU, and UN.

It is an amazing example of Obama’s exaltation of weakness that even a deal between the PA and Hamas has barely brought a squeak from him, after a period of saying “we’ll see what happens.” The administration’s great defense is that maybe the deal will collapse of its own weight. We’re also told that Congress will declare U.S. aid to the PA illegal and stop it because of this alliance with a terrorist group.

Yet what kind of president let’s something happen that would lead to Congress forcibly terminating one of his priority policy initiatives? This is not leadership and, of course, if it happens that will be a major embarrassment for the White House. The obvious criticism is: Why didn’t you do anything?

Fifth, the president should have explained very clearly why he is opposed to this maneuver. The problem is that he cannot really do so without blaming the PA.

Let us remember that in the year 2000—that’s eleven years ago! How time flies when you’re fantasizing about an unworkable peace process—the Palestinian leadership rejected peace. (Note: So did the Syrian leadership and the U.S. government is still treating that regime as a friend!) President Bill Clinton denounced the PA rulers. Then President George W. Bush discovered that PA leader Yasir Arafat was lying to him and trying to import Iranian weapons to launch a full-scale war on Israel. He, too, got angry.

Obama, however, has not caught on and probably never will. The PA does not want to make a compromise peace resulting in a two-state solution. Going to the UN to circumvent talks and allying with Hamas are two major ways that the PA is violating the Oslo agreement, the very basis of its existence. In fact, by rejecting peace and instead launching a terrorist war on Israel they violated it eleven years ago. And, as far as Western diplomacy goes, they never pay the price.

It will pull the rug out from under the United States every time and make its president look foolish. And that’s sure what’s happening with the PA’s unilateral independence bid.

In short, this is a huge mess. And while the PA is responsible for it, the president is, too. The PA is showing by how it behaves that it doesn’t want peace. Still, the West just doesn’t want to recognize this fact. It’s far easier and cost-free to blame Israel.

But what’s the point in Obama coming up with a new peace plan when it should be clear that it isn’t going anywhere, and why it isn’t going anywhere. People talk of a “cycle of violence.” Well what about the cycle of diplomacy? Here’s how that works:

U.S. and Europe propose plan, demand is made for both sides to make concessions, Israel makes concessions, PA doesn’t implement its part; plan fails; Israel blamed; new cycle begins.

Of course, sometimes Israel refuses also or only makes partial concessions. Yet every time the PA’s score is zero. At least Israel is always willing to talk. The PA has now refused serious talks for 2.5 years and there’s no doubt it will get to the three-year-mark.

The fact that Israel has caught onto this game and refuses to play anymore has provoked astonishment in Europe and America. Don’t those Israelis realize that it’s for their own good? No, they realize it is against their interests and also realize that these countries either haven’t been paying attention or don’t care.

But to return to the PA’s UN maneuver. The Obama Administration has botched it. In the end, the unilateral independence gimmick will be defeated but at the cost of at least one year wasted diplomacy and an increasingly reckless PA strategy. This time, though, the U.S. government will have to stick its neck out and (very possibly) do a unilateral veto.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton explained how a previous president dealt with a previous such situation. Secretary of State James Baker, someone personally unfriendly to Israel by the way, made it clear in 1989 that if the UN were to take such a step the United States would cut off all of its financial donations to that institution. The problem immediately disappeared.

That's called using power, unapologetically taking leadership, and getting your way. It's a concept totally alien to the Obama Administration. But not to America's enemies.

And so Obama tries to triangulate, much as Bill Clinton did before Yassir Arafat chickened out and blew lunch all over the Clinton/Barak offer. Then the terrorist dwarf started the Second Intifada and thousands more Palestinians died.

For which genocidal crime, the UN somehow holds ISRAEL RESPONSIBLE.

The United Nations should be evicted from New York City and sent packing to Geneva, where the Swiss would have to put up with the Third World Imbeciles who run the General Assembly.

Mark Steyn on WeinerGate

Mark Steyn is a younger and righter version of the Christopher Hitchens I got to know well before he became a household name. Just after he fetched up in DC after leaving Blighty back in the early '80s, I met him through my wife, who knew his [then] wife, a ca-raaaazy Cypriot woman, through mutual friends. But Steyn's better than Hitch in one respect---Hitchens never quite abandoned the Middlebrow sort of Vanity Fair knowing aside that said "You and I are better than all these silly people I'm talking about." Here's Mark's take on WeinerGate:

After the tumult of the First World War, noted Winston Churchill, only the intractability of the Irish Question had emerged unscathed:
"Great Empires have been overturned. The whole map of Europe has been changed," he told the House of Commons. "But as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again."

And so it goes after another tumultuous week in American politics. Nearly a third of homeowners are "underwater" – that's to say, they owe more on their mortgages than the property is worth. Private-sector job growth has all but vanished. The House of Representatives voted not to raise the debt ceiling.
But as the debt ceiling subsides – or, at any rate, stays put – we see the dreary steeple of Anthony Weiner emerging from his Twitpic crotch shot.
For the benefit of the few remaining American coeds Rep. Weiner isn't following on Twitter, the congressman's initial position when his groin Tweet went viral was that his Twitter had been hacked.

Could happen to anyone. From last Thursday's edition of The Daily Telegraph:
"British intelligence has hacked into an al-Qaida online magazine and replaced bomb making instructions with a recipe for cupcakes."
True. If MI6 can break into a Yemeni website run by Anwar al-Awlaki and infect it with home-baking favorites from "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," I don't doubt that the same spooks could easily hack into Anthony Weiner's computer and Tweet his cupcake to that poor college girl in Seattle.

But Congressman Weiner then retreated from the sinister hacking line, and protested that all this fuss about a mere "prank" involving a "randy photo" (his words) was an "unfortunate distraction" from real issues like raising the debt ceiling. Like Bill Clinton in the Nineties, Rep. Weiner needs to "get back to work for the American people."
It's the political class doing all this relentless "work for the American people" that's turned this country into the brokest nation in the history of the planet, killed the American Dream and left the American people headed for a future poised somewhere between the Weimar Republic and Mad Max. So, if it's a choice between politicians getting back to work for the American people or Tweeting their privates round the planet, I say, Tweet on, MacDuff. Tough on our young college ladies. But, as Queen Victoria advised her daughter on her wedding night, lie back and think of England. Download and think of America.

Congressman Weiner's next move was to tell NBC News that he "can't say with certitude" whether the Tweeted crotch is his. "I don't know what photographs are out there in the world of me," he told CNN. He seems to be saying that this could be one of his, but, until an appraiser from Sotheby's can establish the provenance, it might just be a doppelganger. Saddam Hussein had a lot of lookalikes on the payroll to confuse his enemies, and it wouldn't be a surprise to discover our Congressional princelings were trending in the same direction.
So we're drifting from outrageous cybercrime to "prank" to "Hey, who doesn't have snaps of his genitalia out there in the world?" To revive another Clintonian line: Everybody does it. "Everyone lies about Twitter-flirting," wrote the blogger Little Miss Attila, "and everyone knows that everyone lies about Twitter-flirting." "Flirting"? Why, yes: I'm assured by correspondents more au courant in "social media" that there's nothing unusual about Tweeting your nether regions to people you've never met in distant time zones. Get with the beat, daddy-o, it's a widely accepted courtship ritual of the 21st century: the flower of American maidenhood wants to see a prospective swain straining his BVDs at what I believe the lads at the TSA call Code Orange alert before they'll agree to meet him for a chocolate malt at the soda fountain.
To each her own. In my day it was "A White Sport Coat And A Pink Carnation," as Marty Robbins sang (Billboard Country & Western Number One, 1957). But apparently these days that leaves the ladies cold, and the pink carnation can prompt titters, unless it's artistically positioned across one's crown jewels, and you'd probably need to get in a professional photographer and some double-sided Scotch tape.
According to Christopher Hitchens, politics is show business for ugly people. If Anthony Weiner is anything to go by, it seems more like high school for ugly people. As the story evolves, the logic seems to favor the blogger Ann Althouse's explanation – that Weiner's cavalcade of daily Tweets are too droll to be written by him. He favors cute hashtags: For the Republican presidential field, "#TargetRichEnvironment"; for Newt Gingrich, upon entering the race, "#TallestPygymy." "So terribly clever and edgy," writes Professor Althouse. "Why does a Congressman have time for that?" Her conclusion is that Weiner has a ghost-Tweeter, and the ghost-Tweeter uploaded the crotch shot, but that, because the "terribly clever and edgy" Tweets are essential to Weiner's sense of his own indispensability, he cannot admit that he's lip-synching. It would be like Charlie Sheen confessing that it was a body-double under the bevy of hookers and suitcase of coke.

Between Occam's Razor (it's Weiner's junk, and he Tweeted it) and Occam's Lip-Syncher (the ghost-Tweeter did it) lies a third possibility – that the Tweets aren't by Weiner but the Twitpic crotch shot to the cute co-ed is. The republic's "citizen-legislators" do hardly anything for themselves these days, starting with reading the thousand-page legislation they cheerily pass, but if they can't even perform their own sex scandals there really is no point to them. For the last quarter of 2010, Weiner listed 19 staffers, a few with highly specific job descriptions ("Deputy Director of Immigration Affairs") but most with the kind of blandly nebulous titles ("Staff Assistant") that could cover almost anything, including in-house ghost-Tweeting. For the sake of argument, let us take it as read that American men are emailing their genitals across the fruited plain all day long, and that in the nature of these things one or two attachments go awry and wind up in the in-box of the elderly spinster who runs the quilting bee and you have to make a rather sheepish apology. Congressmen are among the few in this land who, in such a situation, can breezily say, as Weiner did to CNN's Dana Bash, "You have statements that my office has put out... ." Herein lies the full horror of American politics in the death throes of the republic: A Congressman has nothing better to do of an evening than Tweet his crotch to coeds, but he requires an "office" with "staffers" to "put out" "statements" on the subject.
When Weiners have staffers, it's very difficult to have limited government: You cannot have a small state run by big Weiners. If you require an "office" to issue "statements" about your Tweets, it's hardly surprising you're indifferent to statist bloat elsewhere.
In the end, the Congressman was not so "distracted" that he wasn't able to vote to raise the debt limit. Confronted by his Twitpic, one is tempted to channel Mae West: Is that a debt-ceiling increase in your Fruit of the Looms or are you just pleased to see me? Alas for America, it's both.

Bravissimo, Mark, and hope you keep brightening up Rush Limbaugh's show when he's on golf dates!

Pollster Stan Greenberg Warns Democrats To Face 'The Real Economy'

Democrats claim to be democratic­, but they are manipulati­ve cynics and will try to keep their captive lamestream MSM outlets yammering about the economic "recovery" until the Nov. 2012 elections. Lotsa luck, let's see how many suckers and half-wits you can persuade. If we don't get rid of Obama, the US will become a larger version of Greece and Portugal.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Savannah Guthrie's D.C. Farewell (VIDEO)

Upchuck Todd is a real specimen of unprofessi­onal one-sided commentary and Guthrie was the only note of fairness and balance [sorry] in that not-so-dyn­amic duo. She'll be missed and he'll be more unwatched than before.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Another Turn of the Cosmic Wheel of Fortune Occurring?

Dorothy Rabinowitz seems to sense a sort of movement in the loins of the Zeitgeist. Could this be Yeats' Sphinx and a Revolution in the cogs of the Age of Aquarius, in some astral Weltanschauung only the ponderous German language can encapsulate in one word?

Thinking about all this, a physician friend recalls a lesson that experienced doctors learn: A patient comes in with symptoms—is it angina? Will it lead to a heart attack? Patients whose doctors show deliberation and care in the choice of their treatment, he observes, tend to have increased faith both in the treatment and the doctor. That is a point of some relevance to politicians.

The Republican who wants to win would avoid talk of the costs that our spendthrift ways, particularly benefits like Social Security, are supposedly heaping on future generations. He would especially avoid painting images of the pain Americans feel at burdening their children and grandchildren. This high-minded talk, rooted in fantasy, isn't going to warm the hearts of voters of mature age—and they are legion—who feel no such pain. None. And they don't like being told that they do, or that they should feel it, or that they're stealing from the young. They've spent their working lives paying in to Social Security, their investment. Adjustments have to be made to the system, as they now know. Which makes it even more unlikely they'll welcome handwringing about the plight of future generations.

The Republican who wins will have to know, and show that he knows, that most Americans aren't sitting around worried to death about big government—they're worried about jobs and what they have in savings.

Watching the incredible RICO crime spree being committed on the American nation by Obama's cohorts of unions and lawyers and other parasitic growths on the body politic puts me personally in the mood to blow a fuse. But Rabinowitz believes that anger can motivate only a small number of morally committed and historically aware Americans. Most Americans nowadays just don't give a hoot. Except for their pocketbook and personal situation. Like making their mortgage payments.

The Republican candidate would have to make clear just how far removed from reality, how alien to the consciousness of most Americans, is this reflexive view of the nation as morally suspect, ever obliged to prove its respectability to a watching world. The attorney general still refuses to drop charges against two CIA employees accused of using enhanced interrogation techniques to extract information from terrorists—notwithstanding the recommendations of investigators looking into the case that the charges merited no prosecution.

The candidate will have to speak clearly on foreign policy—and begin, above all, by showing he actually has one. The near silence on the subject among Republicans consumed by domestic policy battles has been notable. Not till President Obama delivered his speech relegating Israel to pre-1967 borders did outraged Republicans come to roaring life—as Democrats, too, largely did—about a foreign policy issue.

The Republican candidate might bear in mind, for use on the campaign trail, the grand irony in the spectacle of candidate Obama holding forth on the stump about our friends and allies whom the United States had so alienated under George W. Bush—allies who would have to be won back. Fast forward to September 2009, when the Obama administration virtually overnight cancelled the planned missile defense system that was to be established in Poland and the Czech Republic—a shock to both allies but a gift to the Russians. The Kremlin was indeed grateful.

In March 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton let it be known that the United States no longer supported the British in the matter of the Falkland Islands, which have been British territory since 1833, and that "negotiations" with Argentina were in order. P.J. Crowley, then the State Department's spokesman, expressed the new neutral stance of the U.S. by referring to the Falklands and then adding, with his usual ostentation, "or the Malvinas"—the Argentinian name—"depending on how you look at it."

This view of the nation as a cynosure of moral iniquity seems to be growing old, very old.
The Republican who wins the presidency will have to have more than a command of the reasons the Obama administration must g

o. He will have to have a vision of this nation, and its place in the world, that voters recognize, that speaks to a sense of America they can see and take pride in. He can look at the film of the crowds, mostly of young people, who gathered at the White House to wave the flag of the United States when bin Laden was captured and killed. Faces of blacks, whites, Asians—of every ethnic group.

At Louisiana State University not long after that, a student who planned to burn an American flag had to be rushed from the campus for his safety, much to his shock. Students by the hundreds had descended on him in rage, waving their own banners and roaring "USA! USA!" at the top of their lungs. It was a shout that spoke for more than they could say.

After all the years of instruction, all the textbooks on U.S. rapacity and greed, all the college lectures on the evil and injustice the U.S. had supposedly visited on the world, something inside these young rose up to tell them they were Americans. That something lies in the hearts of Americans across the land and it is those hearts to which the candidate will have to speak.

Harvard brings back ROTC, LSU threatens to lynch a flag-burner. Each in good time at its own pace. Unless Obama can pull some sort of rabbit out of his hat on the economy [the Labor Dept unemployment stats are coming out in about five hours from now], he's going to be rowing upstream.

Remember Clinton in '92 when the Cuomos and other moguls of the DNC deferred to GHWB's overwhelming popularity after the First Gulf War? I'm hoping a Paul Ryan can be fetched out of his happy hollow in Congress to give the nation a new sense of its essential rectitude---the Great Awakening of spiritual greatness that might pull us out of this Slough of Despond and send blood back into our heart and limbs with enthusiasm and hopefulness.

Not Hope and Change, which has the electorate hoping to find some change in the furniture to meet their mounting bills. Real return to greatness---such as the Terrible Vengeance of Seal Team Six achieved to get some payback against our REAL enemies.
UPDATE Paul Ryan actually moved a smidgeon from his adamant refusal to consider running---the dropping out by Mitch Daniels and the failure of his Republican colleagues to craft a sales pitch equal to his excellent health plan ideas.

Ryan might also see a policy incentive -- not just a political one -- to contemplating a run. His plan to cut federal spending by trillions of dollars and overhaul Medicare has taken a beating from Democrats in recent weeks, and Republicans have failed to mount an effective counter response.

Recent polling on public attitudes about the plan has been dismal -- though conservatives have said polling questions have been slanted -- and a Democratic candidate is credited with winning a special congressional election in New York last week in part because of her Republican opponent's support for the Ryan plan.

Ryan said in the Fox interview that "within a handful of months" he believes the country will rally to his side. But he may need a louder megaphone.

There have been other indications that Ryan’s resistance to a presidential run -- which is based in large part on his reluctance to be away from his wife and three young children -- is softening.

Sources close to Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus –- who is also from Wisconsin and is encouraging Ryan to run -– say that it is not just unilateral pressure from Priebus that is sparking rumors. They say Ryan is himself considering making a move.

Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol has been pushing a Ryan presidential campaign for many months, and wrote last week that an appearance on Fox by the congressman showed that he was opening the door.

Ryan said at the time that he was being encouraged to run "quite a bit," but said that "right now where I am at this moment, I need to focus on this budget fight we're in."

Kristol wrote that "it would be a great and fitting irony if the victory of Democratic scare tactics in [congressional district] NY-26 spooks other Republicans into backing off from bold deficit reform and reduction plans, which in turn forces Ryan into the presidential race -- ultimately the Democrats' worst nightmare."

Leave it to the libtard Demonrats to overdo it so obnoxiously that they force the only viable anti-Obama candidate into the race.

Soros Empire Funds Nearly 30 Media Operations to Destroy FoxNews

I nearly killed the Pound---Now I'm After the Greenback-a-Dollar. I'll Get You, My Pretty Green Ones...!

Memeorandum has a sort of JournoLista posse or mafia of blogospheric support blogs whenever a Demonrat ukase comes out from the DNC promoting another socialist nostrum or opposing a GOP plan to revert to capitalism. This echo chamber serves as a multiplier for ideas which just a couple of years ago weren't really standard debating points in the Marketplace of Ideas, simply because they were considered "fringe." Now, creatures from the fringe are quickly assimilated and granted street cred by an invisible network of "gatekeepers," unappointed and unelected guardians of the socialist one-world flame of statist domination of the US economy. Creepy nobodies from nowhere suddenly are ALL OVER the blogosphere. A fellow named Glenn Greenwald is one prime example---he's still a REAL NOWHERE MAN, but he's everywhere spewing his nowhere BS.

When Fox finally deigns to retaliate to the ancient Man of the Mountain sending out his media assassins to bushwhack them at every turn, the reaction is predictable:

When Soros was criticized by Fox, multiple pieces of the Soros Empire responded. In one case, Jonathan Schell, a fellow at The Nation Institute, another part of the Media Consortium, made Fox News out to be anti-Semitic for criticizing Soros. An opinion piece titled, "The Protocols of Rupert Murdoch," a reference to the infamous anti-Semitic "Protocols of The Elders of Zion," blasted Glenn Beck.

Schell claimed Beck's criticism of 'the financier and philanthropist George Soros' in effect "recycles, almost in carbon copy, the tropes of the most virulent anti-Semitic ideologues." The column was distributed by another Soros-funded entity, Project Syndicate, which reaches "462 leading newspapers in 150 countries," with a monthly circulation of 72,815,528.

It's that sort of cooperation that makes the Soros-funded "echo chamber" successful. Go on AlterNet and find articles from The Nation, a rant by Robert Greenwald or an interview by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! Or go on New America Media's site and find an article from Color Lines.

The content from the 180 media sites that Soros helps support can be linked, cited or reposted, adding to the sense that there is strong interest in any particular "progressive idea." It's just one more way George Soros influences the media.

Dan Gainor has a series of articles he's running on the Soros Empire. Recently, I was deluged with a torrent of pleading requests from The American Spectator run by a fellow name R. Emmett Tyrrell, whose goal was to raise $50K by June 1st. After what seemed two months of e-mails in my inbox, Mr. Tyrrell started his last begging message "Dagnabbit...." and virtually cried "Uncle" after raising only a little over $24K in the span of his fund-raising campaign.

For the Soros crowd, that is walking-around money. This is Saul Alinsky on industrial-strength steroids. Gainor says:

Think Progress, the heavily Soros-funded blog for the Center for American Progress, slammed Fox more than 30 times in six months. AlterNet, an especially unhinged liberal outlet, went after the network at least 18 times in those months. It is one of 45 organizations aided by Soros' support of the Media Consortium - "a network of the country's leading, progressive, independent media outlets."

These outlets are all part of Soros' web of media organizations that mirror his view of Fox as their enemy. That's the way he describes it in the new book, "The Philanthropy of George Soros." "Those in charge of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, have done well in identifying me as their adversary," he wrote. "They have done less well in the methods they used to attack me: Their lies shall not stand and their techniques shall not endure."

The tentacles of the Soros Octopus reach everywhere, and the piteous bleating of Mr. Tyrrell must be music to the ears of this arbitrage cat-burglar whose monetary and financial manipulations made him a billion pounds in 1990, giving Mr. Soros the wherewithal to spread his media cancer to metasthetize over a wide range of media operations:

That anti-Fox agenda is reflected in plans by another group in Soros' pocket to target the network specifically. Media Matters founder David Brock said his Soros-funded operation ($1.1 million) will "focus on [News Corp. CEO Rupert] Murdoch and trying to disrupt his commercial interests."

This information is part of an upcoming report by the Media Research Center's Business & Media Institute, which has been looking into George Soros and his influence on the media.

The left hating Fox isn't new. But the efforts of the different groups take on an amazing similarity. Take the University of Maryland study that seemed so critical of Fox News. The study itself included this nugget: "This suggests that misinformation cannot simply be attributed to news sources, but are part of the larger information environment that includes statements by candidates, political ads and so on." That didn't stop any of the groups from using it against Fox News. AlterNet, Washington Monthly, Think Progress and The Nation. It quickly moved into the mainstream media from there.

That's just part of Soros' influence. He denies having a media empire, despite spending easily more than $48 million on that empire and having top journalists from more than 30 major news organizations serving on the boards of groups he funds. It reaches at least 180 media organizations, and many other groups he funds include a media component in what they do.

Thankfully, the good sense of the American people is so far holding up against this virtual barrage of disinformation, double-think, creeping socialism, and classic marxist class warfare koans. The paid circulation of Fox News flagship Wall Street Journal has climbed past that of USAToday's and continues to grow.

On the other hand, the flagship of liberal lies, its "Deathstar" command-and-control center called The New York Times, has had to get newer and more PC leadership to its masthead, adding the First Female Managing Editor, Jill Abramson, and a cast-off from the LA Times, Dean Bacquet, to its bridge, while tossing an increasingly obstreperous Cap'n Bill Keller overboard to feed the fishes. Or perhaps he walked the plank, metaphorically speaking, as his wraith will still be seen haunting the newsroom as a Staff Writer until he completely dissolves from the national disinformation projection room.

The NYT has been flailing in the paid circ department, as its free-lunch economic policies have literally been subsumed by its readership, which has availed itself of so many free online versions of the Jewish Gospel [including the one calling for the Destruction of Israel], that its paid circ is barely north of 800,000 daily dead-tree participants. Carlos Slim of the Mexican Cement fortune had to come in last year [after long and serious begging] to temporarily refinance the NYT's near-bankrupt treasury.

Maybe we should remember that old book by the author of Manchild in the Promised Land, the prophetic James Baldwin, who foresaw a Manchurian puppet POTUS long ago, the other book promising hell and brimstone for the party unfaithful, The Fire Next Time.

Wouldn't it be fitting that the living fossil NYT become a casualty of the Digital Age just like the little conservative mag, The American Spectator?

Pope Abramson Gets Nod, King Kong Keller Sent Back to Minors

But It's Okay, Jill Hates Israel

James Taranto outlines the series of mental and moral crimes that the New York Times has committed in the last year under the tutelage of a whack-job named Keller. Taranto demonstrates clearly how the Times agenda of lies and slander aim to trivialize and demean it opposition, by squandering what USED TO BE its moral authority in pointless and silly attacks:

The barren skag Abramson said that as a born-and-raised New Yorker, she considered being named editor of The Times to be like "ascending to Valhalla."
"In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion," she said. "If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth."

Taranto points out:

The Times has of late acted a great deal like a corrupt religious institution. This column has chronicled its often vicious and dishonest attempts--both on the editorial page and in the news sections, which Abramson will head--to shore up its own authority by trying to tear down its competitors. Examples:

• In January, the Times responded to the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords by instigating a witch hunt against "Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media," as an editorial put it--even though by the time the editorial was published, it was clear that suspect Jared Lochner was not motivated by politics.
• Also in January, a Times news story suggested that Fox News Channel Glenn Beck was advocating violence against an innocent '78-year-old liberal academic," Frances Fox Piven. In fact, Beck was merely criticizing Piven for advocating political violence.
• In March, Keller " 'snarled' that 'I think if you're a regular viewer of Fox News, you're among the most cynical people on planet Earth,' and that 'I cannot think of a more cynical slogan than 'Fair and Balanced.' " Earlier he had ducked a question about The Wall Street Journal's competitive challenge to the Times by denouncing its corporate cousin: "I think the effect of Fox News on American public life has been to create a level of cynicism about the news in general. It has contributed to the sense that they are all just out there with a political agenda, but Fox is just more overt about it. And I think that's unhealthy."

After the Times propagated the blood libel that conservative media figures were behind the murders in Tucson, we wrote that this campaign of vilification "is really about competition in the media industry--not commercial competition but competition for authority." Abramson's quote confirms that we were precisely on target in assessing the Times's view of its own authority.

"If the Times said it, it was the absolute truth." No. A newspaper is not a substitute for religion, and a lie is still a lie even if the New York Times says otherwise.

CIVILITY? Esquire asked the over-the-hill Keller this revealing question:

So you've got a baseball bat in your hands and one free swing--and Jayson Blair, Judy Miller, and Rupert Murdoch are lined up for you. Which one do you skull?
Keller: I think I've answered enough questions that I'm entitled to say "No comment" to that one.

Taranto instructs us:

In case you need a refresher, Blair is a former Times reporter whose fabrication and plagiarism helped discredit Keller's predecessor, Howell Raines, making Keller's ascension possible; Miller is a former Times reporter who went to jail to protect a source in a bogus "leak" investigation that the Times editorial page egged on out of antipathy for the Bush administration; and Murdoch is chairman of News Corp., a rival news organization (whose properties include this website).

In January, Keller said this: "It is true that the national discourse is more polarized and strident than it has been in the past, and to some extent, I would lay that at the feet of Rupert Murdoch." Yet as far as we know, Murdoch has never entertained questions about whether he would like to commit violent acts against Keller or other New York Times Co. executives.

To a greater extent, I would lay the fact that the national discourse is more polarized and strident.... at the feet of Keller and his barren crone acolytes Abramson and Bacquet, two PC excuses for keeping a rag that slanders and writes inflammatory editorials going slowly into a death spiral. Can't wait to see it crash and burn...!

Hollyweird Libtard Sickos Hate Conservatives!

Duh, Who woudda thunkit? The collection of commie commissars currently infesting Tinseltown is mildly outed by the Hollywood Reporter.

UPDATEAnthony Weiner doesn't feature in this THR follow-up, but now we know why I hate America's Funniest Videos and the creepy announcer who puts on the program. Vin di Bona who created the show is a certified traitor.